Teddy's first night in a cell was more tolerable than it might have been
for the reason that his faculties seemed to have stopped working. As
nearly as possible he had become an inanimate thing, to be struck,
pulled, hustled, and chucked wherever they chose. Not only had he no
volition, but little or no sensation. A dead body or a sack of flour
could hardly have been more lost to a sense of rebellion or indignity.
It was not that he didn't suffer, but that suffering had reached the
extreme beyond which it makes no further impression. Nothing registered
any more--no horror, no brutalities, no curses or kicks. As far as he
could take account of himself, the Teddy Follett even of the shack had
been left behind in some vanished world, while the thing that had hands
and feet was a clod unable to resent the oaths and blows and flingings
to and fro which were all it deserved.
Once he had heard that shout, "I see him!" in the road, he had been like
an insect paralyzed by terror that doesn't dare to move. He had lain
there till they came and got him. It was not fear alone that pinned him
to the spot; his bodily strength had given out. For forty-eight hours he
had eaten but little and drunk only the two glasses of water in the
pastry shop. Though he had slept the first night, the second had been
passed in a fevered, intermittent doze. Furthermore, the agony of
approaching suicide had drained his natural forces.
So he lay still while the hue and cry of the man hunters quickened and
waxed behind him. Escape was out of the question, since, even if he had
the strength to drag himself a few yards farther, they would run him
down in the end. Resistance, too, would be hopeless, with, as he judged,
some twenty or thirty in the posse.
He could feel their fury growing as they slipped and slithered through
the grasses. Oaths, obscenities, and laughter accompanied every
grotesque accident, as one man fell with the weedy tangle about his
feet, or another went knee-deep into the swamp. The very fear of "a dose
of lead" intensified their excitement till, as they caught sight of him,
a helpless thing with face hidden in the mud, they gave vent to a yell
of satisfaction.
They didn't let him rise; they didn't so much as pull him to his feet.
They dragged him by his collar, by his hair, by his arms, by his legs,
by anything they could seize, kicking, beating, and cursing him. He made
no outcry; he didn't speak a word. For aught they knew, he might be
drunk or insane or dead. Only once, when a man kicked him in the face,
was he powerless to suppress a groan. Otherwise, he was just a sodden
lump of flesh as, now head first, now feet first, now with face upward,
now with face downward he was tugged and tumbled and hurtled and rolled
over the five hundred yards of slime between the spot where they had
caught him and the road.
There he had a new experience. He learned what it was not only to be
outside the human race, but to be held as its foe. Already, while still
far out on the marsh, he had heard the yells: "Kill him! Kill him! Kick
the damn skunk to death!" But when actually surrounded by these howling,
screaming, outraged citizens, with their teams and motor cars banked in
the roadway, he tasted the peculiar astonishment of the man who has
always been liked when assailed by a storm of hatred. While the three or
four police who by this time had appeared did their best to defend him,
men fought with one another to get at him. A well-dressed girl of not
more than eighteen reached over the shoulder of one of the police and
struck him on the head with her sunshade. An elderly woman squeezed
herself near him and spat in his face.
"Ah, say, people," one of the police called out, "give the young guy a
chanst. Can't you see he's only a kid?"
"'Kid' be damned!" came the response. "Say, fellows, here's the
telegraph pole! Let's lynch him!"
"Lynch him! Lynch him! String him up!"
"No! Let's make a bonfire and burn him alive!"
"Chuck the cops into the Hackensack, and then we can do as we like."
"Lynch him! Lynch him! Lynch him!"
Teddy didn't care whether they lynched him or not. In as far as he could
form a wish he wished they would; but then he was past forming wishes.
They could string him up to the telegraph pole or burn him alive just as
they felt inclined; for he had traveled beyond fear.
Just then the crowd parted, the police van drove up, and his protectors
dragged him to its shelter. Even then there was a new sensation in store
for him. The parting of the crowd showed Flynn lying by the roadside,
also waiting for the van. He was on his back, his knees drawn up, his
mouth dropped open. Waistcoat and shirt had been torn apart, and Teddy
saw a red spot.
He started back. Except for the groan when he had been kicked in the
face, it was the only time he opened his lips.
"I didn't do that!" he cried, so loud that a jeer broke from the crowd.
A policeman shook him by the arm.
"Say, sonny, you didn't do that?"
Appalled by the sight of the dead man, Teddy could do no more than
stupidly shake his head.
"Then who in hell did? Tell us that."
But the boy collapsed, his head sagging, his knees giving way under him.
When he returned to consciousness he was lying in the dark, jolting,
jolting, jolting, on the floor of the police van.
At the station he was pulled out again. He could stand now, and walk,
though not very well. Hands supported him as he stumbled up the steps
and into a room where a man in uniform sat behind a desk, while three or
four police and half a dozen unexplained hangers-on stood about idly.
"A live one," the policeman who led Teddy called out, jocosely, as they
approached the desk.
"Looks like a dead one," the man behind the desk replied, with the same
sense of humor. "Looks like he'd been dead and buried and dug up again."
The allusion to Teddy's hatless, mud-caked appearance raised a laugh.
The man behind the desk dipped his pen in the ink bottle and drew up a
big ledger.
"Name?"
Teddy could just articulate. "Edward Scarborough Follett."
"Gee, whiz! Guess you'll have to spell it out."
Teddy spelled slowly, as if the letters were new to him. Having done
this, he was asked no more questions. Explanations came from the officer
who had "run him in" and who produced the automatic pistol picked up on
the floor of the shack. When it was stated in addition that Teddy was
charged with shooting and killing Peter Flynn, whom all of them knew and
to whom they were bound by ties of professional solidarity, the boy felt
the half-friendly indifference with which the spectators had seen him
come in change to sullen hostility.
The formulas fulfilled, he was seized more roughly than before, to be
half led, half pushed, along a dim hall and down a dimmer flight of
steps to a worn, stone-flagged basement pervaded by dankness and a smell
of disinfectants. The corridor into which they turned was long and
straight and narrow like a knife-cut through a cheese. On the left a
blank stone wall was the blanker for its whitewash; on the right, a row
of little doors diminished down the vista to the size of pigeonholes.
Pressed close to the square foot of grating inset in each door was a
human face eager to see who was coming next, while the officer was
greeted with howls of rage or whining petitions or strings of ugly
words.
They stopped at the first open door, and after one glance within Teddy
started back.
"Don't put me in there, for Jesus' sake!"
The cry was involuntary, since he knew he would be put in there in any
case.
"Ah, go in wid you!"
A shove sent him over the threshold with such force that he fell on the
wooden bunk which was all the dog hole contained, while the door clanged
behind him.
All that night he lay in a stupor induced by misery. No one came near
him; no food or drink was offered him. Thirst made him slightly
delirious, which was a relief. Now and then, when his real consciousness
partially returned he muttered, half aloud:
"I didn't do it. My hand might have done it--but that wasn't me."
The crepuscular light of morning was not very different from the
darkness of night, but it brought his senses back to him sluggishly.
Bruised as he was in body, he was still more bruised in mind, and could
render to himself no more than a vague account of what had happened
yesterday. When a tin of water and a hunk of bread were mysteriously
pushed into the cell, he consumed them like an animal, lying down again
on the bunk. Without water for a wash, his face and hair were still
caked with the mud which also stiffened his clothing.
"My God! what's that?"
Not having seen him before, the guard who summoned him to court was
startled by the apparition that crawled to the threshold of the cell
when the door was unlocked. The semblance to a boy was little more exact
than that of a snow man to a man.
"Ah! my God! my God! Sure you can't go into court like that. They
wouldn't know you was a human bein', let alone a prisoner. Wait a bit,
and I'll get you somethin' to wash up in."
There followed a little rough kindliness, scouring and brushing and
combing the lad into something less like a monstrosity. Teddy submitted
as a child does and with a child's indifference to cleanliness.
So, too, he submitted in court, hardly knowing where he was or the
significance of these formalities. Apart from the relief he got from his
own reiterations, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it," the proceedings were
a blur to him. When he was led out again down more steps, along more
corridors, and cast into another stale and disinfected cell, he took it
with the same brutish insensibility. He didn't know that the new cell
was in that part of the House of Detention known as Murderers' Row, nor
did he heed the hoarse questions whispered through the next-door
grating, and which he could barely catch as they stole along the wall.
"Say, who'd ye do in? Did he croak right off? My guy didn't croak till
three weeks after I give him the lead, and now they can't send me to the
chair nohow. In luck, ain't I?"
To Teddy, this uncanny recitation was no more than the other sounds
which smote the auditory nerve but hardly penetrated to the brain. They
were all abnormal sounds, sprung of abnormal conditions, breaking in on
a silence which was otherwise that of the sepulcher. Footsteps
clanked--and then all was still; a door banged--and then all was still;
a raucous voice shouted out a curse--and then all was still. The
stillness was as ghostly as the sound, only that, as far as Teddy was
concerned, so little reached his massacred perceptions.
The rattle of keys and the clanging of the door! He looked up from the
bunk on the edge of which he was sitting listlessly.
"Lady to see you!"
This guard was young, smart, debonair, with a twinkle in his eye, and
the first who didn't treat a comrade's murderer with instinctive
animosity. Teddy got up and followed him in the stupefied bewilderment
with which he had done everything else that day. Lady to see him! The
words seemed to refer to something so far back in his history that he
could hardly recall what it was. Once upon a time there had been a
mother, a Jennie, a Gussie, and a Gladys; but they were now remote and
shadowy.
Along corridors, up steps, and then along more corridors he tramped,
till they stopped at an open door--and there he saw Jennie. In a room
unspeakably bare and forbidding in spite of a table and half a dozen
chairs she waited for him with a smile. He, too, did his best to smile,
but his lower lip, swollen with the kick that had caught him in the
mouth, made the effort nothing but a rictus.
For this, Jennie had been prepared by the snapshot in the paper. All the
while she had been on the way to him she had been saying to herself that
she must show no sign of horror or surprise. Even though she would
follow the cue of her poor demented mother and pretend that he was in
prison as a martyr, she would take no pitying or tragic note. She went
forward, therefore, and threw her arms about him with the same offhand,
unsentimental pleasure which she would have shown in meeting him after a
brief absence at any time.
"You darling Ted! We're so glad to have found you. I thought I'd just
run down and bring you some clean clothes."
It was better done than she thought she had the strength for, perhaps
because his need was greater than she had supposed possible. Could she
have dreamt beforehand that Teddy would ever look like this, she would
have screamed from fright. But now that he did, she rose to the fact,
seemingly taking it for granted, actually taking it for granted, through
some hitherto unsuspected histrionic force. Within a minute of his
arrival they were seated near each other, in a curious make-believe that
the conditions were not terrible.
With this familiar presence beside him, Teddy's mind resumed
functioning, possibly to his regret. Home was close to him again, while
the loved faces came back to life.
"How's ma?"
The question was indistinct because, now that it came to making
conversation, he found that his tongue was thickened in addition to his
swollen lip. Jennie replied that their mother's health was never better.
"I suppose"--he balked a little but forced himself onward--"I suppose
she feels pretty bad--over me."
"No, she doesn't. She told me to tell you so." She was determined to
speak truthfully in this respect, so that if their mother's dementia
could do him any good, he shouldn't fail of it. "She told me to say that
you were not to be sorry for anything you'd done, no matter how they
punished you."
"Does she--does she know what I've done?"
She threw it off, as if casually.
"She knows all that's been in the papers; and I don't believe they've
left anything out, not judging by the things they've said."
"How's Gussie? How's Gladys?"
Having answered these questions to the best of her ability, Jennie
raised the subject of what she could bring him to eat. The guard who had
remained in the room informed her that she could bring him anything, at
which she promised to return next day. For the minute she was at the end
of her forces. If she went on much longer they would snap.
"I'll run away now, Ted," she said, rising. "It's splendid to see you so
bucked up. I'll be here again about this time to-morrow, and bring you
something nice. Momma's busy already making you a fruit cake." She
added, as she held him by the hand, "I suppose you'll have to have a
lawyer."
A memory came to him like that of something heard while under an
anæsthetic.
"I think the judge said this morning that he'd appoint some one to--to
defend me."
"Oh, we'll do better than that," she smiled, cheerily. "I've got some
money. We'll have a lawyer of our own."
The journey home was the hardest thing Jennie had ever had to face.
Teddy! Teddy! Teddy brought to this! It was all she could say to
herself. The bare fact dwarfed all its causes, immediate or remote.
Eager for privacy in which to sob, she was speeding along Indiana Avenue
when, happening to glance in the direction of her home, she saw Gladys
standing on the sidewalk. Gladys, having at the same minute perceived
her, started with a violent bound in her direction. She, too, had a
newspaper in her hand, leading Jennie to expect a repetition of Gussie's
episode that morning.
It was such a repetition, and it was not. It was, to the extent that
Gladys had been informed of Teddy's drama much as her elder sister at
Corinne's, though later in the day. At a minute when trade was slack and
Gladys ruminantly chewing gum, Miss Hattie Belweather, a cash girl in
the gloves, slipped up to her to say:
"Oh, Gladys Follett, if you knew what Sunshine Bright's been saying
about you, _you'd_ never speak to her again!" Hattie Belweather, who had
the blank, innocent expression of a sheep, having paused for the natural
inquiry, went on breathlessly. "She says your brother Teddy robbed a
bank and killed a man and is in jail over at Ellenbrook and--"
Such foolish calumny Gladys could so far contemn as to say with quiet
force:
"You tell Sunshine Bright that the next time I go by the notions I'll
stop and break her neck. See?"
Hattie Belweather, having sped away to carry this challenge, Gladys
found herself confronted by Miss Flossie Grimm, a saleslady in the
stockings, to which department Gladys herself in a minor capacity was
also attached. Feeling that the Follett child was ignorant of facts of
which she should be in possession, Miss Grimm said, reprovingly:
"You've got a chunk of gall! Look at that!"
_That_ was one of the papers giving the story of Teddy's downfall, so
that Gladys, too, was soon making her way homeward. But she was not a
cash girl for nothing, while the instincts of the city _gamine_ endowed
her with alertness of mind beyond either of her sisters. She remembered
that the paper she had seen was a morning one, and that by this hour
those of the afternoon would be on the news stands. They would not only
give further details, but might possibly tell her that the whole story
was untrue. Somewhere she had heard that among the New York evening
papers one was renowned for solemnity and exactitude. Veracity costing a
cent more than she usually spent for the evening news, when she spent
anything, which was rare, she felt the occasion worth the extravagance.
In these pages, Teddy's case was condensed into so small a paragraph
that she had difficulty in finding it; but during the search she lighted
on something else. It was something so extraordinary, so unbelievable,
so impossible to assimilate, as to thrust even Teddy's situation well
into the second place.
After that, all the known methods of locomotion were slow to Gladys in
her efforts to reach home; but before she could enter the house she had
seen Jennie advancing up the avenue, and so ran back to meet her.
"Oh, Jen! Look!"
It was all she had breath to say, so that Jennie naturally did as she
was bidden. But she, too, found the paragraph thrust beneath her eyes
extraordinary, unbelievable, and impossible to assimilate, though for
other reasons than those that swayed her sister.
_Collingham-Follett._ On May 11th, at St. Titus's Rectory,
Madison Avenue, by the Rev. Larned Goodbody, Robert Bradley
Collingham, Jr., of Marillo Park, N. Y., to Jane Scarborough
Follett, of Pemberton Heights, N. J.
Of the many things Jennie didn't comprehend, she comprehended this
paragraph least of all. Who had put it in the paper, and what did it
mean? She walked on dreamily, Gladys trotting beside her, a living
interrogation point.
"Oh, Jen, what's it all about? Are you married to him really?"
Jennie answered as best she knew how.
"Not--not exactly."
But here Gladys was too quick for her.
"If you're married to him at all, it's got to be exactly, hasn't it?"
"I--I did go through--through the ceremony."
"Well then, you've got the law on him," Gladys declared, earnestly.
"He'll have to pay you alimony anyhow."
"I--I don't want him to pay me anything."
"Not pay you anything, and him with a wad as big as a haystack? Oh, Jen,
you're not going dippy like poor momma, are you?"
Jennie wondered if she was. It seemed to her as if she could stand
little more in the line of revolution without her mind giving way.
And yet within a few minutes she received another shock. It came through
Gussie, who ran to meet them at the door.
"For mercy's sake, Jen, what's all this about?"
She fluttered a yellow envelope, on which the address was typewritten.
_Mrs. Bradley Collingham, Jr._
Care _Mrs. Follett_
_11 Indiana Avenue_
_Pemberton Heights, N. J._
"I told the boy it didn't belong here--" Gussie was beginning to explain
when Gladys interrupted.
"Yes, it does. Read that."
Gussie read and read again.
"Well, of all--" She stopped only because she lacked the words with
which to continue.
In the meanwhile Jennie had opened her telegram and read:
Have asked father to engage best counsel in New York to defend
boy. Sailing to-morrow on _Venezuela_, and will take all
responsibilities off your hands. Placed two thousand dollars to
your account at Pemberton National Bank. See manager. Devoted
love. Your husband, _Bob_.
Jennie let the yellow slip flutter to the entry floor while she stood
gazing into the air. Gussie having picked it up, the two younger sisters
read it together.
"Some class!" Gladys commented, dryly.
But Gussie could only stare at Jennie awesomely, as if a miracle had
transformed her.