Kovnitz was himself employed in the same trade as Mrs. Stone, although
in quite another branch of it. He was a coatmaker, and had been brought
up to work under the sweating system. Much of the value of his
acquaintance, apart from my personal liking for him, lay for me in his
thorough knowledge of the trade. He was a socialist, and a very ardent
one; but his efforts for reform were directed mainly toward effecting
organization among the workers of his kind, and with this I warmly
sympathized. We were to go together in the evening to a gathering of the
cloak-makers, and, when he appeared at Mrs. Stone’s, we lost no time in
starting for the meeting-place on the South-side.
One was never at a loss for conversation with Kovnitz, but it was always
conversation which had to do with the condition of his class. That was
uppermost and foremost in his mind. Other things interested him only as
they were related to that. Although a collectivist, he wasted little
thought upon a future socialistic state, and he cared little for present
concerted political action in his party. The one supreme necessity, in
his view, was that all wage-earners should be led to act together as a
class, until their predominance in an industrial age is recognized. When
once wage-workers are known to be the most powerful as a class, then
social institutions will change in accordance with their interests. It
was curious to see how this, the central principle of his creed,
absorbed him. It was the criterion of all his judgments, and it gave
color and meaning to everything he saw. Generally he noticed little of
what was about him. The inferno of those city streets at night seemed
not to impress him as we passed. All the varied play of life upon them
did not divert him from preoccupation in what he was telling me of the
work of organization among wage-earners. Once only his attention was
drawn off, and even then his habitual cast of thought moulded the new
impression. In glancing up, his eyes had fallen upon a building newly
occupied as a department store. It was Saturday evening, and, for some
reason, the place was still open. Streams of shoppers were entering the
doors and pouring from them. More even than by day, the store gave at
night an impression of a bee-hive in full activity. The swarming of the
crowds within, the lights from a hundred windows, and the brave array of
goods formed the outer picture. But Kovnitz said nothing of that.
“There are two men in that store who are as different in general
character as men can be,” he remarked to me, as we stood at the curb.
“One of them,” he went on, “is a man of scholarly instincts. He is a
disciple of Kant, and knows the Kantian philosophy well. Just now he is
giving his leisure to reading Goethe. He is an enthusiast in philosophy
and literature, and a man of really fine sensibilities. The other chap
is a human brute, and looks it. Nothing interests him beyond his
business and his dissipations. Both of these men are at the head of
departments of ready-made garments in the store, and I know that they
both draw salaries of $4,000 a year. They have good business heads, and
manage their departments well, but what makes them specially valuable to
their employers is the fact that they know thoroughly the sweating
system. They keep carefully informed on the condition of the labor
market, and the demand for work; and, when the competition is keenest
among the sub-contractors and the workers, they know how to pit the
bidders against one another, until the tasks are finally let out at the
lowest possible figures. Mrs. Stone is making boys’ waists for
thirty-five cents a dozen, and there are more than 20,000 sweatshops in
Chicago where similar prices prevail, and Chicago is but one of a score
of cities in this country where sweating is in vogue.”
Late that night, after the labor meeting, I was passing the store again.
I was alone, for Kovnitz had gone home another way. The street lay
quiet, and almost deserted through its length, and I could hear the echo
of my tread under the glare of electrics. The sound of jangling music
came faintly from a long line of almost continuous saloons. There was
some movement in front of them which contrasted sharply with the general
desertion of the street.
One is rarely at a loss to trace the antecedents of a sharp impression,
and I can remember clearly that I was conscious of a man and woman who
stood talking in low tones as I passed, and who disappeared that moment
into an open passage. The next instant I was keenly alive to them, for I
heard the woman scream as though in mortal fear, and turning, I saw the
man dragging her violently out upon the pavement. Events followed one
another then in quick succession. I was near enough to watch them at
close range, and I had the sense of interpreting them as they moved. I
saw the instant flash of anger in the face of a young mechanic who stood
near, and the first quick thrust of his arm which sent the man reeling
from the girl, then the swift onslaught of the two men, and I heard the
rain of blows and oaths, and the loud asseverations of the one attacked
that he was an officer, while the crowd thickened about them, and the
girl pleaded piteously to be loosed from the grasp of someone who held
her.
Two officers in uniform came down upon us from opposite quarters, and
the fighting gave way to noisy explanations. It developed then that the
attack had been made upon an officer in citizens’ clothes who was doing
detective duty against street-walkers. But he was wholly to blame for
the disturbance, I thought; for he had handled his prisoner with
needless violence, and the blow from the mechanic was so obviously the
instinctive, chivalrous act of a man who sees a woman ill-treated.
Technically, however, he was guilty of “resisting an officer while in
the discharge of his duty,” and he must answer for it, so that the group
which started for the Harrison Street Station-house was made up of the
three officers, the girl, the mechanic, and four or five stragglers, of
whom I was one.
It was easy to learn at the station what course the case had taken. Both
prisoners were admitted to bail, and bondsmen having been found, they
went free that night under a charge to appear before the court on a
certain morning of the following week. When the morning came I was on
hand too, for by that time I had given up my job in the factory.
I went early, not knowing at what hour the case might come up, and;
although there were already many persons seated on the wooden forms, I
looked carefully through both of the court-rooms without seeing those in
whom my interest lay. Finding a vacant seat in the inner room, I sat
there, watching intently the changing groups at the bar. They were made
up of the commonest criminals of the town, and it was rare that a novice
appeared to disturb the atmosphere of perfect naturalness. Law-breakers
they were without question; the magistrate knew them as well as the
police, and frequently he spoke to them by familiar names, reminding
them of earlier warnings and threatening them with severer penalties for
the future. It was a sort of clearing-house, where a certain residuum of
habitual criminals was dealt with by a doctrine of averages in an effort
to regulate and control the crime inevitable in a great city.
Sitting beside me on the form was a young girl, plainly dressed, with an
air of perfect neatness. Her gloved hands lay folded in her lap and in
one of them she held a purse. Her mackintosh of dark material was
unbuttoned and thrown open, with the cape falling loosely over her arms.
It was the trimness of her hair and a certain trig simplicity in her hat
which struck me first, and, when she spoke, the tone and manner were in
keeping with her quietness of dress.
“Will you tell me, please, what time it is?” she asked, and, having
learned the hour, “What are _you_ up for?” she continued, abruptly.
There was nothing about her which had in the least prepared me for the
question, and I floundered about in an explanation that I was there
merely out of interest in a case which I expected to come up in the
course of the morning.
She smiled wearily at that, regarding me with eyes which asked whether I
knew how young I was and how dreary that sort of thing made her feel. I
was afraid that I had cut short the conversation and was delighted when
she continued, quite simply:
“_I’m_ up for shop-lifting. It was at Walker’s, and it was the hardest
luck, for I had everything well concealed. But they suspected me, and,
when they brought me here, the matron searched me and soon found the
goods. And there I was, red-handed! Now I’m trying to think up some
story, but the judge knows me and he warned me well last time.”
It was charming then, for we fell to talking as though we had known each
other long. Her small gray eyes that looked straight into mine were as
frank and innocent as a child’s. There was little beauty but an entire
composure in the lines of her face, heightened by a natural pallor very
becoming to her. Her features betrayed no nervousness, and one saw the
change of feeling only in her eyes and in a subtle quality in her smile
which was expressive and sometimes sweet.
We were two children, who had met by chance, and, sitting there in the
dingy light of a station-house court-room, we were presently unaware of
anything but the fact that we had a great deal to tell each other. I
told her of the mechanic and the girl, and she half believed me, and, in
turn, began to tell me of herself. There was no system in her story,
only a simple sequence of spontaneity that charmed me. I had but to
listen and watch her inscrutable face and ask questions where my dull
intuitions were at fault. In the foreground was the incident of
shop-lifting, and running from that was a chain of events which led back
inevitably into the distant perspective of memory. She had never an air
of giving me her confidence, rather of speaking freely as man to man.
It was bad to be caught at shop-lifting, and the more annoying because
she had so often carried it off with success. At the best, shop-lifting
was a wretched business, entailing much anxiety both in getting and
disposing of the goods. But there was the stubborn fact that one must
live. Of course she had worked as a shop-girl earning $3.50 a week. And
here she began to count up on her fingers the items of bare subsistence
with their cost, and the smile with which she concluded was touched with
the question, “When you have spent your all upon mere living, what have
you left to live on?” There had been something of this idea in her
protest to her employer, and he met her frankly with the assurance that,
if she found it impossible to live on her wages, it would give him
pleasure to introduce her to a “gentleman friend.” Other employments
which were open to her were no better in point of wages; some of them
were not so good, but they were all alike in offering relief by the way
suggested at the department store.
“I’m not what you’d call a ‘good girl,’” she said, “only, you know, I’d
so much rather die than do that.”
And the revulsion of the child’s nature against what to her was this
infinite terror led her to tell me of her bringing up. Her memory did
not go back to the beginning of her stay in a convent near Dublin, where
her parents placed her to be taught. Life had begun for her in the
peaceful routine of the sisterhood. All her deepest impressions were got
there, and, when as a child of twelve, she came out to emigrate with her
people to America, she was instantly in a new world on leaving the
convent walls. It had been an almost overwhelming discovery to her to
find that the standards of goodness and purity which prevailed within
were apparently almost unknown outside the convent. It staggered her
intelligence as a child, and, during a long experience of earning her
living as a girl, she had slowly constructed a philosophy of life which
was drawn from the facts of hard struggle with a world which seemed bent
upon compassing her ruin.
She spoke reverently of the teachings of the sisters, and of the
influence of their devoted work, “But you know,” she added, “I cannot
believe any longer that only those are Christians who are members of the
Catholic Church, and that all others will be lost. The world would be
too horrible, if that were true. To be a Christian must be simply to
follow Christ.”
It was from this revery that we were roused by the loud calling of her
name. I watched her walk to the bar and stand there with perfect
composure, while the clerk read the indictment, and the witnesses were
mechanically sworn, and the girl was heard, and the magistrate gave his
verdict.
“Minnie,” he said, in closing, “I told you, when you were here last,
that the next time you came up, you should go to the Bridewell, and now
to the Bridewell you shall go. Minnie, why can’t a smart girl like you
be decent?”
Her profile was toward me, and I saw a faint smile play for a moment on
the clear lines of her face.
“Your honor,” she replied, “it is a little late now, but when I began to
earn my living I wanted nothing so much as the chance to be decent.”
Meanwhile, two reporters were quickly sketching her where she stood—a
singularly well-poised figure—while others were noting the salient facts
of the case; for it was a good “story,” having already attracted
attention. With wide notoriety as a thief, she went to prison that day,
and, when she came out, a not too hospitable world was the more on its
guard against her. An officer accompanied her from the room, but she did
not forget to nod to me and smile as she passed out.
Engrossed as I had been in Minnie, I had not noticed the coming of the
mechanic and the girl whose case had drawn me there. I saw them now when
I looked around. The sight of the girl was perplexing at first, for she
sat with another woman at the end of a neighboring form, and they looked
so much alike that I could not distinguish the one who was there on
trial. Crossing the passage, I asked leave to sit beside them. They drew
up at once to make room for me, and I saw then that, the girl next me
was the prisoner. The other was a twin sister, as she frankly told me,
and the resemblance fully sustained her. I explained that I had come to
the station-house because I happened to see the affair of a few nights
before, and was anxious to find what course it would take in court. The
girl agreed with me that the mechanic was in no way to blame.
“He never know’d that it was an officer that was draggin’ me down the
steps, and out into the street. I never know’d it neither till I see his
star under his coat. I thought he was crazy, and was goin’ to kill me
like ‘Jack the Ripper.’” She was a girl in age, and obviously one of the
most helpless of her order.
There is a common impression that such women are attracted to their ruin
by vanity and a love of dress. You lose that idea among the wrecks who
walk the city streets at night. Anything to flatter their vanity or to
gratify their taste is the least likely of all possible experiences to
most of them. It is a matter of keeping soul and body together. Some are
dexterous pick-pockets, who make large hauls at times—not always,
however, for themselves; most are ill-fed, ill-dressed slaves, who, when
their tributes are paid, are penniless. Any degree of viciousness may be
found among them, and you may find as well a high degree of the
innocence of the unmoral, the sense of morality completely lost in the
instinct of self-preservation.
The girl beside me was like fragile porcelain, her thin lips and
nostrils and delicate skin all marred by a pasty, white unwholesomeness.
There was a hectic flush in her sister’s face and her eyes were ablaze
with disease. We were talking about the case and drifted naturally into
further talk about themselves. They were orphans and had long supported
themselves by working in a tobacco factory, but there their health had
failed, and when they were well enough to work again, they found
employment in a laundry. To supplement the “sweating” wages, they had
taken to street-walking, and then their end was near. But they spoke as
frankly of this last as a “business” as of the earlier occupations, and
you saw that, to their thinking, it was only a degree more complete a
sale of soul and body.
“But business is poor,” the ill sister was saying, presently, “and I
ain’t very well, which I wouldn’t mind, but there’s my baby, and, if
anything happens to me, who’s goin’ to take care of him? You don’t think
I’ve got consumption, do you?” And she turned upon me a face with the
cheeks sunk to the bone and the eyes dilating with the fire which was
burning out her life.
When our case came up, it went through without a hitch. The officer told
his story with a pompousness that was due to wounded pride and he dwelt
over-much upon his efforts to make his assailant understand from the
first that he himself was a member of the force. The girl was simplicity
and frankness itself; not an effort to conceal her character, but a
straightforwardness about the officer’s brutal roughness which threw it
into strong relief. But the young mechanic was the best. He was new to
courts as he abundantly proved, and when his turn came to testify, he
stood licking his dry lips like one with stage-fright. Speech came
haltingly from him at the first, while his face flushed, but the sense
of injustice urged him on to a perfectly clear statement of how, while
“doing the town,” he had seen this girl ill-treated and had struck the
man without knowing that he was an officer.
I knew that all was well, for I saw a smile pass vaguely now and then
over the magistrate’s face, and when he spoke, the girl was dismissed
with a fine and the young mechanic with a friendly warning against
“doing the town,” while the officer was held up in open court for
reproof and told that, if he knew no better how to handle his prisoners,
he was ignorant of the first principles of the special service to which
he had been assigned.
It is only a few steps from the station-house to the heart of the
business section of the city. I passed through it now, as I often did,
for the sake of the feeling that it gives one of the reach and strength
of the industrial forces which are centred there. Here is no sense of
failure or of loss, but of energy and skill trained to high efficiency
in the co-operation of productive powers. Men are there producing for
all mankind, and in spite of the present waste of human life, I cannot
doubt that, with the problems of production so widely solved, the genius
of the race is turning surely to the subtler questions of a fairer
distribution.
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).