"THE LEAST OF THESE"
A week later, in a lamp-lighted street, Mary and Carrie met. Each
girl was too conscious of her own business to remark that it was the
business of her acquaintance, and each tried to avoid the other; but
before recognition was complete they were face to face. Silence was
confession. Mary spoke.
"Hello," she said, "it's a long time since I seen you. How are you,
anyways?"
Carrie, though still a homely girl, wore a close-fitting coat that
made the best of her figure. Her hat was wide and new and, as she
answered, she turned from the light.
"Pretty well," she said, and paused short.
"I guess," said Mary, "you thought it was queer, my never comin' to
see you; but I haven't had a single chance. I'll come soon, honest I
will. How's Katie?"
"I don't know," Carrie slowly answered, "I'm not living with her any
more."
"You ain't? Since when ain't you?"
"Oh, I don't know--a couple of weeks."
"You two didn't scrap?"
"No. I had to go away." And then, to divert the fire, Carrie added:
"Are you still working at that place the Settlement-people got for
you?"
"No, I left that long ago. Have you gone back to the
shirtwaist-factory?"
"I couldn't: the strike was never settled, and, anyhow, they wouldn't
have taken me back if I'd been willing to go."
Mary looked at the long coat and the gray hat.
"But, say," she began, "you don't look----"
Her eyes dropped to Carrie's and, suddenly, she knew. Her voice
softened.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I had to do it, too."
Silently they touched hands. The Lithuanian's breast rose and fell
quickly.
"I couldn't do anything else," said Carrie, but only in explanation,
not in extenuation or excuse. "There was no other work I could do."
"I know," said Mary.
"And everywhere I went," continued Carrie, "he followed me. He was
always just behind me when I walked, always just around the corner
when I stood still. When I was dizzy and hungry, he always looked
well fed and always had the money in his hand. He waited, waited,
waited."
"You mean your fellow?" Mary asked.
Carrie assented. "If you can call him that," she said. "He has two
or three others working for him, or he'd be across the street now.
I'm different from them--freer. I'm not afraid of him, and so he is
a little afraid of me."
Mary took the girl's arm.
"They won't let us stop this way on the pavement," she said. "Come
in here and have a drink."
They went into the women's room of one of the quieter saloons. Mary,
mindful of the doctor's directions, took only carbonated water, but
Carrie ordered whiskey.
Mary, with her stomach crying out for the alcohol, and, in that
wrenching desire, nearly seizing her companion's liquor, sipped the
water.
"I've quit it," she averred. "It don't pay."
"Most of the men make you take it," said Carrie.
"Yes," Mary admitted, "but you can chuck it on the floor if you're
fly." She took another sip of the water, and then asked: "Why don't
you shake this man if you're not scared of him. You can come with
me, you know."
"It wouldn't be good business," Carrie declared. "I need somebody
with influence to look after me in case I'm arrested."
Mary was silent for a minute, thinking.
"Perhaps you're right," she granted; "there's one of 'em I'd like to
find."
"Who is it?"
"I'll tell you sometime.--Look here: I don't feel like workin'
Broadway to-night, an' I've got some money. Let's do a dance-hall."
They "did" several. At the first a mask-ball was in progress; the
bachanalian guests had rented extravagant costumes; confetti was
tossed by the onlookers, and swiftly shifting lights of red and blue,
of green and purple, played upon the dancers, whose whirling shadows,
monstrously magnified, were thrown upon sheeted walls. At another,
there was an explosion of obscene epithets followed by a fight, which
made retreat advisable; and at a third, the dances were so short and
the intervals provided for the solicitations of the waiters were so
long that both girls wearied of the scene.
On Tenth Avenue they at last found, however, a place more to their
liking. It was the usual type of room, enlarged by tearing out the
thin partitions that had once divided it into several tenements. The
lights shone sick through the clouding smoke, and the air was heavy
with the odors of dust, tobacco, alcohol, and sweat. But the music
was lively, the floor crowded, and the little tables along the walls
were surrounded by laughing groups of drinking men and women. Of the
former, though most were hollow-chested, pale-cheeked, hawk-nosed,
some showed clearly that they came to plunder; and if the majority of
the latter were gum-chewing working-girls still in their earliest
teens, many were of the variety to which the two newcomers now
belonged.
Mary and her companion sat down at a table near the door. They
nodded to the burly, cigar-smoking "Boss," who moved energetically
about, urging bloodless lads to find partners, and now and then
himself taking a turn with a neglected girl. They exchanged familiar
greetings, though they had never before seen her, with the
false-jeweled woman whose business it was to assist the boss in
stimulating the dancers by precept and example. And they watched the
scene with a gaze grave and calculating.
Here a child of thirteen, with closed eyes and her peach-tinted cheek
against her pimpled partner's, undulated to the music, scarcely
moving her feet. Nearby there whirled, like a dervish, a girl to
whose consumptive face the revolutions brought a glow that mimicked
health. Now and then a woman would leap from one of the tables,
embrace an unembarrassed man about the neck and so waltz off with
him, at once passionate and mocking, both of them deaf to the
plaudits of their spectators. From time to time the lights were
suddenly extinguished, and the dance went on in the darkness amid a
chorus of kisses, cries, and giggling. Most of the boys and men, and
nearly all of the little girls, were drunk.
Among the dancers, doubtless plying his trade, Mary saw Rafael
Angelelli, sleek and radiant in a new suit of pale buff. He detected
her a little later and, disposing of a pure-faced child, who had been
in his arms, made a skillful way to his old acquaintance. He shook
Mary's reluctant hand and, nodding to Carrie as if she were a
familiar friend, sat down between the two women.
"Where you been?" he affably inquired of Mary.
"Out of town," said Mary, coldly.
Angel shrugged his shoulders. He knew she lied, but he rarely
contradicted a lady.
"Meester Dyk' been lookin' all over theesa town for you, Violet," he
said.
Mary did not like the news. She was still afraid that she might be
wanted in connection with her contradictory affidavits.
Angel, however, readily reassured her. Just what Dyker wanted he did
not, he said, know; but he was certain that it was something for her
benefit. The magistrate had commissioned him to find her, and Angel
had been searching, sporadically, for several weeks, even tracing her
course back to the employment-agency and to that Mrs. Turner's where
she had first worked.
"Theesa woman say you steal," said the Italian.
"She's a liar," answered Mary, hotly.
"She say she tol' you so."
"She tried to make out I took a cake of soap."
"But she say after you leave she meess two dollar an' some silka
stockin'."
"That woman never wore no silk stockin's in her life, an' there
wasn't two dollars in the house."
Again the Italian shrugged his shoulders. He gave Mary to understand
that, in his opinion, any woman who could steal and did not was a
fool, and that any woman who stole and acknowledged it was a worse
fool. But what, plainly, most interested him was the execution of
his commission from Dyker. He talked so earnestly about it that he
failed entirely to lay Mary's fears. She refused to give him her
address, and as soon as he had left the table she endeavored to quit
the hall.
The entrance of an acquaintance detained her. There were words that
had to be said and drinks that had to be bought. Half an hour
passed, and then, as she started with Carrie for the door, Mary saw
Wesley Dyker standing outside. He was wrapped in a heavy overcoat
with its military collar turned up about his chin and his black derby
pulled far over his eyes; but Mary feared him too much to fail of
recognition.
"There he is!" she whispered, catching her companion's arm. "The
Dago telephoned him. I was afraid of that."
Escape was hopeless. She sent Carrie back to the dancers, and, going
out, met Dyker, her head erect.
"I heard you was lookin' for me," she said.
Wesley raised his hat.
"Yes," he said dryly; "walk a block or two with me."
They went for some time in silence, Mary too much upon the defensive
to risk beginning a conversation, and Dyker trying in vain to command
the anger that had been growing with every day since he had learned
how she had betrayed him to Marian. At the first dark street into
which he turned her, his resentment burst its guard.
"What in hell do you mean by telling everybody all you know about
me?" he demanded.
Mary shrank away.
"No, you don't!" he said, and seized her hand. "Didn't I do you the
best turn that was ever done you?"
"Yes," the woman quavered. "An' I wouldn't pay you back the way you
say I done. I never talked about you to nobody."
"Don't lie. You know you did."
Mary remembered, but she shook her head determinedly.
"I've never once spoke your name," she said.
"I tell you to stop lying!" rejoined Dyker. "You told it once at the
Settlement on Rivington Street. I know it. I learned it there
myself."
"What did I tell?" asked Mary. Her tone was defiant, but her
endeavor was to draw his fire.
They walked forward.
"You said I hung out at Rose's," he protested. "You said I was her
lover and yours."
"I never said I had nothing to do with you, Mr. Dyker. I don't care
who told you I did; I never said no such thing."
"You said I went to Rose's. I know you did."
She confessed to that, for she was truly sorry for it.
"But I didn't mean to, Mr. Dyker," she added; "honest, I didn't. It
just slipped out. I didn't know Miss Marian knowed you. Why, she
told me she didn't know you, an' how'd I ever think she'd lie?"
That was a question which, ignorant of Miss Lennox's precise method
of evasion, Wesley did not, even to himself, attempt to answer.
"It didn't matter whether she knew me or not," he said; "you had no
right to tell it."
"I know that. It just slipped out. But it won't never happen again.
I wasn't so wise as I am now."
"I hope not," he said, a trifle mollified by the sincerity in her
tone. "But you've done me a big amount of harm there, Violet, and
you have got to undo it."
Her first sensation had been one of relief in finding that her false
affidavit was not held against her; her next had been fright at his
anger; but now she was all penitence for the ill she had wrought him.
Dyker was the one man in New York that had done her a kindness, and
she held that kindness as the greatest possible.
"What do you want?" she asked. "I'd do most anything for you, Mr.
Dyker: you know that."
They were under the uncertain light of a crossing. He eyed her
narrowly, mistrustingly.
"I want you," he replied, "to come to my office to-morrow evening at
six. Here's my card. Will you do it?"
She took the card and thrust it through the opening of her shirtwaist.
"What do you want with me when you get me there?" she wondered.
"I want you to come with me to Miss Lennox, and deny the story that
you told her about me."
Mary's heart sank. She could not bear the thought of facing Marian.
"What's the use o' that?" she pleaded.
"What's the use? Why, how else are you going to put me right with
her?"
"But I couldn't."
"You must."
"I couldn't, Mr. Dyker. Honest, I couldn't. She'd know I was lyin'
to her."
"You leave that to me."
"What excuse'd I give her?"
"We'll fix that up to-morrow."
"Please don't make me do it, Mr. Dyker!"
"I've got to. What else can I do?--It's all your own fault. What's
your address?"
She gave it to him tremulously.
"All right," he said. "I'll have a cab there for you to-morrow at
five-thirty."
Her body shook with frightened sobs.
"Oh, Mr. Dyker," she repeated, "please don't make me do this! I'd do
anythin', 'most, under the sun for you; but I can't face Miss
Marian--honest to God, I can't."
What he should have done was to play upon her gratitude, but what he
did do was again to allow his mistrust and anger to have their rein.
"I won't have any nonsense about this, Violet," he said. "If you
don't come to my office to-morrow at six, I'll have you arrested--and
I'll see to it that you won't escape with a mere fine, either."
"It won't----" She could not grasp it. "What do you mean?" she
asked.
"I mean I'll have you arrested on a big charge."
Her lips stiffened with that common terror of the law, about the only
terror that the law ever succeeds nowadays in creating: the
unreasoning terror that seldom serves as a deterrent.
"I ain't done nothin' but this," she said, in the full knowledge that
what she had or had not done would be no factor in the problem.
"You'll find out about that when the time comes," he answered. "What
I want to know is whether you'll do me this favor or not."
He had stopped and confronted her. Even in the semi-darkness her
anxious eyes managed to read his pale, determined face, but even in
the daylight they could have found there no relenting.
She gave him a despairing smile.
"I guess I've got to," she said.
"Yes, you'll have to."
"All right."
"You'll do it?"
"I'll do it, all right."
"No bluff?"
"No."
"Remember: if you don't, I'll fix you."
Mary turned away.
"I'll not forget," she said.
"If you don't," he called after her, "you won't be sorry."
"I won't forget," she repeated.
And yet, even as she walked away from him, the sickness of indecision
was upon her. Like all narrow experiences, her narrow experience
made her afraid of everything beyond its own limits. Her habit of
life was the habit of the weakened bird of prey that attacks only the
defenseless and flies before the strong. She had become a moral
coward, and the progress of her physical disease directly accentuated
the insidious encroachments of her moral illness. She could not
openly face Marian; she did not dare openly to defy Dyker. She
wanted only to run away.
By four o'clock the next afternoon she had run away. The night had
been a wearisome journey backward and forward between the decision to
obey the magistrate and the decision to evade him. She thought that
she owed him much, but she knew that she could not successfully face
Marian and lie. She was tremblingly afraid of Wesley's vengeance,
but she was more afraid of Marian's honest eyes. All day she lay
upon her bed, dizzy from this circling process of thought, but at
last, in an attack of dread of the lie more severe than any that had
preceded it, she flung her clothes into a little trunk, which she had
recently purchased, and, calling a cab, drove to a new lodging-house.
She did not go out that evening, but the next she had to go, and she
had not been on Broadway for two hours before a plain-clothes man
touched her arm.
"I'm sorry, kid," he said, "but you've got to come along with me."
Instinctively she recoiled, but the detective's fingers had slipped
to her wrist and tightened on it. The sword had fallen.
"Where to?" she asked.
She knew the man. She had given him money, and more than money, yet
she expected no mercy, expected nothing but an explanation.
"Jefferson Market," said her captor. "But if you've got anybody
handy who'll go your bail, I'll take you to see him first, before we
go down to Ninth Street."
Mary shook her head. Helpless horror had her for its own.
"No use," she answered.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Certain sure," she said, and then, a little wistfully: "I guess
there ain't no good in tryin' to talk business to you?"
The detective was a big, black-mustached man. His face was not
unkindly, but he was helpless.
"No," he said; "this here's orders from the front. If you haven't
got some fellow to be ready with bail, I guess we'd better hurry up."
They crossed to Sixth Avenue and walked down that noisy thoroughfare
to the towering brick fortress that stands like a castle to guard the
gateway of old Greenwich Village.
By day that somber building seems to hide behind the grim planks of
the elevated railroad; it is ugly, neglected, innocent; under its
protecting wings are the stalls of white-aproned butchers and the
open establishments of green-grocers and hucksters plying their
several occupations. But no sooner does the darkness drop its
curtain over the webbed streets, the dirty courts, and the foul
alleys that surround the place, than Jefferson Market ceases to be a
building for the dispensation of food and becomes a court for the
dispensation of the commodity that we carelessly label Justice. The
hands of the large clock in the high tower are hurried toward the
hour of twelve; long rays of sinister light are shot from windows
narrow and barred; and under a vaulted entrance-way there pours, from
year's end to year's end, an unending army of those women of the
street who have lost, for one reason or another, their ability any
longer to purchase the protection of the Law.
It is not often that what the statutes designate as crime comes to
the Night Court: Crime may wait for the morning. It is the drunkard,
the vagrant, the licenseless pedlar, and, above all, unfriended Maria
Peripatetica, the human being that humanity has spoiled in the
making, who is taken there. Above all, the Marias Peripateticæ that
have, once fostered by the Law, quarreled with it, failed to bribe
it, or openly rebelled against it. Black and white, short-skirted
and gray-haired, besilked and bedraggled, from nine in the evening
until early morning, five thousand in a twelvemonth, they are brought
to the Jefferson Market Court for judgment from the power that has
made them what they are.
And judgment is what they receive. The law is a mill that was made
to grind out one thing, and can grind no other; the courts were
constituted to make criminals and to punish them, not to prevent or
to cure; our present justice is not mercy; it is formulæ, not
sentiment. There is one woman that has some small authority in this
tribunal, one woman that sees an occasional girl with some promise in
her face and takes her away to Waverley House for observation and to
be given, if all goes well, a chance at other employment; but
Waverley House is small, it is poor, and there is small chance for
her that has been twice stricken. One woman cannot do much against
the grinding mill, and the grinding mill, between January and
December, sends only seventeen girls to a semi-sane reformatory as
compared to three thousand that it sends to the university of crime
which is known as "The Island."
Mary was hurried up a short flight of stone steps and into a small
hallway. A metal gate was opened for her and snapped shut as she
passed it. A stocky man took her name and address and got, from her
conductor, in a voice that she could not hear, the charge on which
she had been arrested, and then, after one turn to the left and
another to the right, she was shoved through a door and into a
brightly-lighted, heavily-barred detention-pen.
Dazedly, she looked about. Beside her, upon one side, sat a
gray-haired woman of sixty, too old any longer to earn that tribute
which would have secured her immunity for the prosecution of the
trade she must recently have adopted. Nearby was a girl of thirteen,
who, temporarily neglected by her owner, had been arrested for the
same offense. On the bench sat a fat negress who informed all
listeners that she was falsely charged with picking the pocket of a
bald-headed white man that she had solicited. Over them all streamed
the pitiless light of strong lamps, upon them all were soon to feast
the eyes of the crowd in the near court-room.
The newcomer bowed her head. She did not know that a court-retainer
had been waiting her arrival. She did not know that, as soon as she
had entered, this retainer had hurried to a telephone. She did not
know that, in answer to this call, Rafael Angelelli had hurried to
the door that she had just passed, and there presented a note bearing
a potent signature. She did not even know that these things were of
common enough occurrence, and she was aware of only her misery until
she heard the Italian's low voice and saw him beckoning her to the
bars.
She almost ran toward him. The other prisoners gathered about her,
but the officer that accompanied Angel waved them away, and himself
drew back. Mary clutched the bars as if they had been a tangible
hope.
"Angel!" she whispered.
But Angelelli fronted her, scowling. He shook a tight fist under her
shrinking eyes.
"You are a dam' fool!" he answered.
Mary could not articulate. Her lips involuntarily found an unthought
query, but her voice was dumb.
"Why you not leesten to theesa Wesley Dyk'?" pursued Rafael. "Now
maybe you go to the Island. You know what that mean? Theesa jailers
cut off your hair, beat you up every mornin', every evenin' regular.
No meals; only bread an' water; no wheeskey. An' when you come out
every cop hava you' peecture an' you get arrest' each time an' senta
back again to jail!"
She believed him. She would have believed anything that was said to
her by someone she had previously known. With a flow of ready tears
that blinded her sunken eyes, she begged him to tell her of some way
of escape.
Angel was ready with his answer. It seemed that he still represented
Wesley Dyker and that Mr. Dyker was not disposed to be so hard on her
as impartial justice demanded that he should be. In the back-room of
a nearby saloon there were a lawyer and a notary in waiting. If Mary
would promise to swear to and sign before them a prepared paper
denying the accusations she had made to Marian, Angel would now, by
means of a second note, see that the sitting magistrate did but fine
her, and would hand her at once the amount of that fine.
She had supposed that her arrest had been on the charge of larceny
from Mrs. Turner's boarding-house; she had not known that she was
accused of no more than the practice of her trade, and she could
scarcely credit news so good as this which Angel brought her.
"An' I won't have to go to Miss Marian?" she asked.
"No. Meest' Dyk' want thees paper for hees girl--jus' to square
heemself witha hees girl--no more. You go where you want."
"An' the judge'll let me off?"
"Right away."
She promised, and a moment later was led into the court-room.
She saw the gaping, leering crowd, which filled half of that
apartment beyond the low grating. She saw the stolid policemen
herding their charges as stockyard hands herd cattle for the
slaughter. She saw the stealthy slavers buzzing in and out, bent
upon nefarious rescue; the waiting lawyers on the outer bench and the
laughing lawyers inside, joking together or making mirth before the
desk at which, in his black robe, sat the weary, cynical, indifferent
magistrate, his face as expressionless as that of a Chinese Joss.
She heard, between the roars of elevated trains, the unintelligible
oaths, administered, as she now understood that the average oath is
administered, with a rapidity that robbed them of all dignity and
most effect; the drone of testimony constantly interrupted to the
point of confusion and always curtailed to the exclusion of essential
truth; the mechanical pronouncement of sentence that ended, as if the
two things were on phrase, in the summoning of the succeeding case.
All this she saw and heard and disregarded. She had been struck
down, trapped, held fast in the grip of the invisible enemy that she
thought of as the City. She had been conscious of nothing but the
living Fear, and now, Angel had told her, some portion of relief was
at hand.
Her arraignment, the payment of her fine, her meeting with the
waiting Italian, her progress to the nearby saloon where the lawyer
and the notary were ready for her--all this passed like a vision of
the night. She signed without reading it--though she would not have
understood it if she had read it--the formal denial to which her
affirmation was immediately affixed. She was too dazed to think
until, leaving the three smiling men behind her, she had turned again
into free Sixth Avenue.
It was then that she saw coming toward her a young man--a young man
that might have been anywhere from nineteen to thirty-two--with hair
that was dark and curly, sorely-shaven olive cheeks just showing the
defeated tokens of a blue-black beard; a dapper, prosperous young
man, with thick lips and hard eyes and a smartly cut overcoat, from
one pocket of which flashed a brilliant-bordered handkerchief.
In the instant Mary's exhaustion dropped from her brain and
shoulders. She forgot her fright of the earlier evening; she
remembered only the sufferings from which it had arisen. Her waiting
had not, after all, been vain. She was calm, she was resourceful,
she was resolved.
"Hello, Max," she said.