Lemuel stood and leaned his head against the wall of his cell. The tears
that had come to his relief in the morning when he found that he was
robbed would not come now. He was trembling with famine and weakness,
but he could not lie down; it would be like accepting his fate, and
every fibre of his body joined his soul in rebellion against that. The
hunger gnawed him incessantly, mixed with an awful sickness.
After a long time a policeman passed his door with another prisoner, a
drunken woman, whom he locked into a cell at the end of the corridor.
When he came back, Lemuel could endure it no longer. “Say!” he called
huskily through his door. “Won't you give me a cup of that coffee
upstairs? I haven't had anything but an apple to eat for nearly two
days. I don't want you to _give_ me the coffee. You can take my clasp
button----”
The officer went by a few steps, then he came back, and peered in
through the door at Lemuel's face. “Oh! that's you?” he said: he was the
officer who had arrested Lemuel.
“Yes. Please get me the coffee. I'm afraid I shall have a fit of
sickness if I go much longer.”
“Well,” said the officer, “I guess I can get you something.” He went
away, and came back, after Lemuel had given up the hope of his return,
with a saucerless cup of coffee, and a slice of buttered bread laid on
the top of it. He passed it in through the opening at the bottom of the
door.
“Oh, my!” gasped the starving boy. He thought he should drop the cup,
his hand shook so when he took it. He gulped the coffee, and swallowed
the bread in a frenzy.
“Here--here's the button,” he said, as he passed the empty cup out to
the officer.
“I don't want your button,” answered the policeman. He hesitated a
moment. “I shall be round at the court in the morning, and I guess if it
ain't right we can make it so.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Lemuel, humbly grateful.
“You lay down now,” said the officer. “We shan't put anybody in on you
to-night.”
“I guess I better,” said Lemuel. He crept in upon the lower shelf, and
stretched himself out in his clothes, with his arm under his head for a
pillow. The drunken woman at the end of the corridor was clamouring to
get out. She wished to get out just half a minute, she said, and settle
with that hussy; then she would come back willingly. Sometimes she
sang, sometimes she swore; but with the coffee still sensibly hot in his
stomach, and the comfort of it in every vein, her uproar turned into an
agreeable fantastic medley for Lemuel, and he thought it was the folks
singing in church at Willoughby Pastures, and they were all asking him
who the new girl in the choir was, and he was saying Statira Dudley; and
then it all slipped off into a smooth, yellow nothingness, and he heard
some one calling him to get up.
When he woke in the morning he started up so suddenly that he struck
his head against the shelf above him, and lay staring stupidly at the
iron-work of his door.
He heard the order to turn out repeated at other cells along the
corridor, and he crept out of his shelf, and then sat down upon it,
waiting for his door to be unlocked. He was very hungry again, and he
trembled with faintness. He wondered how he should get his breakfast,
and he dreaded the trial in court less than the thought of going
through another day with nothing to eat. He heard the stir of the other
prisoners in the cells along the corridors, the low groans and sighs
with which people pull themselves together after a bad night; and he
heard the voice of the drunken woman, now sober, poured out in voluble
remorse, and in voluble promise of amendment for the future, to every
one who passed, if they would let her off easy. She said aisy, of
course, and it was in her native accent that she bewailed the fate of
the little ones whom her arrest had left motherless at home. No one
seemed to answer her, but presently she broke into a cry of joy and
blessing, and from her cell at the other end of the corridor came the
clink of crockery. Steps approached with several pauses, and at last
they paused at Lemuel's door, and a man outside stooped and pushed in,
through the opening at the bottom, a big bowl of baked beans, a quarter
of a loaf of bread, and a tin cup full of coffee. “Coffee's extra,” he
said jocosely. “Comes from the officers. You're in luck, young feller.”
“I ha'n't got anything to pay for it with,” faltered Lemuel.
“Guess they'll trust you,” said the man. “Any-rate, I got orders to
leave it.” He passed on, and Lemuel gathered up his breakfast, and
arranged it on the shelf where he had slept; then he knelt down before
it, and ate.
An hour later an officer came and unbolted his door from the outside.
“Hurry up,” he said; “Maria's waiting.”
“Maria?” repeated Lemuel innocently.
“Yes,” returned the officer. “Other name's Black. She don't like to
wait. Come out of here.”
Lemuel found himself in the corridor with four or five other prisoners,
whom some officers took in charge and conducted upstairs to the door of
the station. He saw no woman, but a sort of omnibus without windows was
drawn up at the curbstone.
“I thought,” he said to an officer, “that there was a lady waiting
to see me. Maria Black,” he added, seeing that the officer did not
understand.
The policeman roared, and could not help putting his head in at the
office door to tell the joke.
“Well, you must introduce him,” called a voice from within.
“Guess you ha'n't got the name exactly straight, young man,” said the
policeman to Lemuel, as he guarded him down the steps. “It's Black
Maria you're looking for. There she is,” he continued, pointing to
the omnibus, “and don't you forget it. She's particular to have folks
recognise her. She's blacker 'n she's painted.”
The omnibus was, in fact, a sort of aesthetic drab, relieved with
salmon, as Lemuel had time to notice before he was hustled into it with
the other prisoners, and locked in.
There were already several there, and as Lemuel's eyes accustomed
themselves to the light that came in through the little panes at the
sides of the roof, he could see that they were women; and by and by he
saw that two of them were the saucy girls who had driven him from his
seat in the Common that day, and laughed so at him. They knew him too,
and one of them set up a shrill laugh. “Hello, Johnny! That you? You
don't say so? What you up for _this_ time? Going down to the Island?
Well, give us a call there! Do be sociable! Ward 11's the address.” The
other one laughed, and then swore at the first for trying to push her
off the seat.
Lemuel broke out involuntarily in all the severity that was native to
him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
This convulsed the bold things with laughter. When they could get their
breath, one of them said, “Pshaw! I know what he's up for: preaching on
the Common. Say, young feller! don't you want to hold a prayer-meetin'
here?”
They burst into another shriek of laughter, so wild and shrill that the
driver rapped on the roof, and called down, “Dry up in there!”
“Oh, you mind your horses, and we'll look after the passengers. Go and
set on his knee, Jen, and cheer him up a little.”
Lemuel sat in a quiver of abhorrence. The girl appealed to remained
giggling beside her companion.
“I--I pity ye!” said Lemuel.
The Irishwoman had not stopped bewailing herself, and imploring right
and left an easy doom. She now addressed herself wholly to Lemuel, whose
personal dignity seemed to clothe him with authority in her eyes. She
told him about her children, left alone with no one to look after them;
the two little girls, the boy only three years old. When the van stopped
at a station to take in more passengers, she tried to get out--to tell
the gentlemen at the office about it, she said.
After several of these halts they stopped at the basement of a large
stone building, that had a wide flight of steps in front, and columns,
like the church at Willoughby Pastures, only the church steps were wood,
and the columns painted pine. Here more officers took charge of them,
and put them in a room where there were already twenty-five or thirty
other prisoners, the harvest of the night before; and presently another
van-load was brought in.
There were many women among them, but here there was no laughing or
joking as there had been in the van. Scarcely any one spoke, except the
Irishwoman, who crept up to an officer at the door from time to time,
and begged him to tell the judge to let her have it easy this time.
Lemuel could not help seeing that she and most of the others were
familiar with the place. Those two saucy jades who had mocked him were
silent, and had lost their bold looks.
After waiting what seemed a long time, the door was opened, and they
were driven up a flight of stairs into a railed enclosure at the corner
of a large room, where they remained huddled together, while a man at
a long desk rattled over something that ended with “God bless the
commonwealth of Massachusetts.” On a platform behind the speaker sat
a grey-haired man in spectacles, and Lemuel knew that he was in the
court-room, and that this must be the judge. He could not see much of
the room over the top of the railing, but there was a buzz of voices and
a stir of feet beyond, that made him think the place was full. But full
or empty, it was the same to him; his shame could not be greater or
less. He waited apathetically while the clerk read off the charges
against the vastly greater number of his fellow-prisoners arrested for
drunkenness. When these were disposed of, he read from the back of a
paper, which he took from a fresh pile, “Bridget Gallagher, complained
of for habitual drunkenness. Guilty or not guilty?”
“Not guilty, your honour,” answered the Irishwoman who had come from
Lemuel's station. “But make it aisy for me this time, judge, and ye'll
never catch me in it again. I've three helpless childer at home, your
honour, starvin' and cryin' for their mother. Holy Mary, make it aisy,
judge!”
A laugh went round the room, which a stern voice checked with “Silence,
there!” but which renewed itself when the old woman took the stand at
the end of the clerk's long desk, while a policeman mounted a similar
platform outside the rail, and gave his testimony against her. It was
very conclusive, and it was not affected by the denials with which the
poor woman gave herself away more and more. She had nothing to say
when invited to do so except to beg for mercy; the judge made a few
inquiries, apparently casual, of the policeman; then after a moment's
silence, in which he sat rubbing his chin, he leaned forward and said
quietly to the clerk,
“Give her three months.”
The woman gave a wild Irish cry, “O my poor childer!” and amidst the
amusement of the spectators, which the constables could not check at
once, was led wailing below.
Before Lemuel could get his breath those bold girls, one after the
other, were put upon the stand. The charge against them was not made
the subject of public investigation; the judge and some other elderly
gentleman talked it over together; and the girls, who had each wept in
pleading guilty, were put on probation, as Lemuel understood it, and,
weeping still and bridling a little, were left in charge of this elderly
gentleman, and Lemuel saw them no more.
One case followed another, and Lemuel listened with the fascination of
terror; the sentences seemed terribly severe, and out of all proportion
to the offences. Suddenly his own name was called. His name had been
called in public places before: at the school exhibitions, where he had
taken prizes in elocution and composition; in church, once, when the
minister had mentioned him for peculiar efficiency and zeal among other
Sabbath-school teachers. It was sacred to him for his father's sake,
who fell in the war, and who was recorded in it on the ugly, pathetic
monument on the village green; and hitherto he had made it respected and
even honoured, and had tried all the harder to keep it so because his
family was poor, and his mother had such queer ways and dressed so. He
dragged himself to the stand which he knew he must mount, and stole from
under his eyelashes a glance at the court-room, which took it all in.
There were some people, whom he did not know for reporters, busy with
their pencils next the railings; and there was a semicircular table in
the middle of the room at which a large number of policemen sat, and
they had their straw helmets piled upon it, with the hats of the lawyers
who sat among them. Beyond, the seats which covered the floor were
filled with the sodden loafers whom the law offers every morning the
best dramatic amusement in the city. Presently, among the stupid eyes
fixed upon him, Lemuel was aware of the eyes of that fellow who had
passed the counterfeit money on him; and when this scamp got up and
coolly sauntered out of the room, Lemuel was held in such a spell that
he did not hear the charge read against him, or the clerk's repeated
demand, “Guilty or not guilty?”
He was recalled to himself by the voice of the judge. “Young man, do
you understand? Are you guilty of assaulting this lady and taking her
satchel, or not?”
“Not guilty,” said Lemuel huskily; and he looked, not at the judge, but
at the pretty girl, who confronted him from a stand at the other end of
the clerk's desk, blushing to find herself there up to her wide-flung
blue eyes. Lemuel blushed too, and dropped his eyes; and it seemed to
him in a crazy kind of way that it was impolite to have pleaded not
guilty against her accusation. He stood waiting for the testimony which
the judge had to prompt her to offer.
“State the facts in regard to the assault,” he said gravely.
“I don't know as I can do it, very well,” began the girl.
“We shall be satisfied if you do your best,” said the judge, with
the glimmer of a smile, which spread to a laugh among the spectators,
unrebuked by the constables, since the judge had invited it.
In this atmosphere of sympathy the girl found her tongue, and with a
confiding twist, of her pretty head began again: “Well, now, I'll tell
you just how it was. I'd just got my book out of the Public Library, and
I was going down Neponset Street on my way home, hurrying along, because
I see it was beginning to be pretty late, and the first thing I know
somebody pulled my hat down over my eyes, and tore the brim half off, so
I don't suppose I can ever wear it again, it's such a lookin' thing; any
rate it ain't the one I've got on, though it's some like it; and then
the next thing, somebody grabbed away the satchel I'd got on my arm; and
as soon as I could get my eyes clear again, I see two fellows chasin' up
the street, and I told the officer somebody'd got my book; and I knew it
was one of those fellows runnin' away, and I said, 'There they go now,'
and the officer caught the hind one, and I guess the other one got away;
and the officer told me to follow along to the station-house, and when
we got there they took my name, and where I roomed, and my age----”
“Do you recognise this young man as one of the persons who robbed you?”
interrupted the judge, nodding his head toward Lemuel, who now lifted
his head and looked his accuser fearlessly in her pretty eyes.
“Why, no!” she promptly replied. “The first thing I knew, he'd pulled my
hat over my eyes.”
“But you recognise him as one of those you saw running away?”
“Oh yes, he's one of _them_,” said the girl.
“What made you think he had robbed you?”
“Why, because my satchel was gone!” returned the girl, with logic that
apparently amused the gentlemen of the bar.
“But why did you think _he_ had taken it?”
“Because I see him running away.”
“You couldn't swear that he was the one who took your satchel?”
“Why, of course not! I didn't _see_ him till I saw him running. And I
don't know as he was the one, now,” added the girl, in a sudden burst of
generosity.
“And if it was to do over again, I should say as much to the officers at
the station. But I got confused when they commenced askin' me who I
was, and how much I weighed, and what my height was; and _he_ didn't say
anything; and I got to thinkin' may be it _was_; and when they told me
that if I didn't promise to appear at court in the morning they'd have
to lock me up, I was only too glad to get away alive.”
By this time all the blackguard audience were sharing, unchecked, the
amusement of the bar. The judge put up his hand to hide a laugh. Then he
said to Lemuel, “Do you wish to question the plaintiff?”
The two young things looked at each other, and both blushed. “No,” said
Lemuel.
The girl looked at the judge for permission, and at a nod from him left
the stand and sat down.
The officer who had arrested Lemuel took the stand on the other side
of the rail from him, and corroborated the girl's story; but he had not
seen the assault or robbery, and could not swear to either. Then Lemuel
was invited to speak, and told his story with the sort of nervous
courage that came to him in extremity. He told it from the beginning,
and his adventure with the two beats in the Common made the audience
laugh again. Even then, Lemuel could not see the fun of it; he stopped,
and the stout ushers in blue flannel sacks commanded silence. Then
Lemuel related how he had twice seen one of the beats since that time,
but he was ashamed to say how he had let him escape out of that very
room half an hour before. He told how he had found the beat in the crowd
before the saloon, and how he was chasing him up the street when he
heard the young lady hollo out, “There they go now!” and then the
officer arrested him.
The judge sat a moment in thought; then said quietly, “The charge is
dismissed;” and before Lemuel well knew what it meant, a gate was opened
at the stand, and he was invited to pass out. He was free. The officer
who had arrested him shook his hand in congratulation and excuse, and
the lawyers and the other policemen gave him a friendly glance. The
loafers and beats of the audience did not seem to notice him. They were
already intent upon a case of coloured assault and battery which had
been called, and which opened with the promise of uncommon richness,
both of the parties being women.
Lemuel saw that girl who had accused him passing down the aisle on the
other side of the room. She was with another girl, who looked older.
Lemuel walked fast, to get out of their way; he did not know why, but he
did not want to speak to the girl. They walked fast too, and when he got
down the stairs on to the ground floor of the courthouse they overtook
him.
“Say?” said the older girl, “I want to speak to _you_. I think it's a
down shame, the way that you've been treated; and Statira, she feels
jus' 's I do about it; and I tell her she's got to say so. It's the
least she can do, I tell her, after what she got you _in_ for. My name's
'Manda Grier; I room 'th S'tira; 'n' I come 'th her this mornin' t' help
keep her up; b't I _didn't_ know 't was goin' to be s'ch a _perfect_
flat-out!”
As the young woman rattled on she grew more and more glib; she was what
they call whopper-jawed, and spoke a language almost purely consonantal,
cutting and clipping her words with a rapid play of her whopper-jaw till
there was nothing but the bare bones left of them. Statira was crying,
and Lemuel could not bear to see her cry. He tried to say something to
comfort her, but all he could think of was, “I hope you'll get your book
back,” and 'Manda Grier answered for her----
“Oh, I guess 't ain't the book 't she cares for. S' far forth 's the
book goes, I guess she can afford to buy another book, well enough. B't
I tell her she's done 'n awful thing, and a thing 't she'll carry to her
grave 'th her, 'n't she'll remember to her dyin' day. That's what _I_
tell her.”
“She ha'n't got any call to feel bad about it,” said Lemuel clumsily.
“It was just a mistake.” Then, not knowing what more to say, he said,
being come to the outer door by this time, “Well, I wish you good
morning.”
“Well, good morning,” said 'Manda Grier, and she thrust her elbow
sharply into Statira Dudley's side, so that she also said faintly--
“Well, good morning!” She was fluent enough on the witness-stand and in
the police station, but now she could not find a word to say.
The three stood together on the threshold of the court-house, not
knowing how to get away from one another.
'Manda Grier put out her hand to Lemuel. He took it, and, “Well, good
morning,” he said again.
“Well, good morning,” repeated 'Manda Grier.
Then Statira put out her hand, and she and Lemuel shook hands, and said
together, “Well, good morning,” and on these terms of high civility they
parted. He went one way and they another. He did not look back, but the
two girls, marching off with locked arms and flying tongues, when they
came to the corner, turned to look back. They both turned inward, and so
bumped their heads together.
“Why, you--coot!” cried 'Manda Grier, and they broke out laughing.
Lemuel heard their laugh, and he knew they were laughing at him; but he
did not care. He wandered on, he did not know whither, and presently he
came to the only place he could remember.