FIELD OF HONOR
This war, which started with the assassination of an archduke and his
archduchess--a thing we are apt to forget about in the face of a tragedy
a billion-fold greater--this war, which started thus and so, already has
touched or is touching or yet will touch, at some angle and in some
fashion, every one of us in every corner of the world. Some it has
touched indirectly, by the oblique. Upon others, who are as numberless
now as the sands on the shore, it has come with such brutal emphasis
that it must seem to them--such of them as survive--that the whole
incredible business was devised and set afoot for the one and the sole
purpose of levelling them, their lives and their own small personal
affairs in the bloodied red mire of this thing.
For example, let us take the case of Paul Gaston Michel Misereux, his
orphaned sister Marie and his orphaned half-sister Helene. In the summer
of 1914 they lived in a three-room flat in a five-story tenement house
in East Thirteenth Street in New York, not far from the East River.
New York seemed a long, long way then from the town of Sarajevo wherein
the egg of war was hatching. Indeed, to the three I have just named New
York seemed a long way from most of the things which to their uncomplex
natures stood for what was comfortable and domestic and satisfying. They
were desperately homesick very often for the Paris where they had been
born and reared, and from where they had emigrated two years before
after the death of their father.
But that summer the homesickness was wearing off a little. The city,
which at the moment of seeing its notched and fangy skyline as they came
up the bay had appeared to them not as a gateway into a promised land
but as a great sabre-toothed shark of a city lying in wait to grind them
up between its jaws, and which for the first few months of their life
here had been so cold, so inhospitable, so strange in all its ways, so
terribly intent upon its own matters and so terribly disregardful of
theirs, was beginning to be something more than a mere abiding place to
them. To them it was beginning to be home. The lonesomeness was losing
some of its smart. In another year or two more France would be the old
country and America would be their country.
Paul fancied himself half an American already. He had taken out his
first papers, which, as he figured it, made him part way a citizen.
Before very long he would be all a citizen. Likewise, by the practice of
a thousand petty economies common among the first generation of
foreigners who settle here and most remarkably uncommon among their
descendants, they were starting in a small frugal way to prosper. If New
York had given them a stone when they came into it asking for bread, it
was giving them now the bread, and the butter to go on the bread.
Paul Misereux was a pastry cook. He worked as assistant to a chief
pastry cook in a basement kitchen under a big, medium-priced restaurant
near Union Square. He was small and dumpy and unhandsome, with the
dead-white face of a man cook. His skin, seen by daylight, had a queer
glaze on it, like the surface of a well-fluxed, well-baked crockery.
Once it had been a blistery red; that though was in the days of his
apprenticeship to this trade. The constant heat of it had acted upon him
as alcohol does upon the complexion of a man who gets drunk quickly--it
made him deathly white at the last, but before that it made him red.
He was the chief breadwinner. Marie had a place as trimmer and
saleswoman in a small millinery shop on lower Sixth Avenue. Helene, the
half sister and youngest of the three, was the housekeeper. She was
inclined to be frail and she had a persistent cough. She was not in the
least pretty. For the matter of that, none of them had any provable
claim upon beauty.
So far as looks went Marie was the pick of the lot. At least she had
fine eyes and a trim round figure that showed to its best advantage in
the close-fitting, smooth-fronted uniform of her employment--a black
frock with white collar and cuffs.
That June, there was a balance showing on the happy side of their
partnership ledger. Paul had his mind set upon some day owning a
business of his own--a bakeshop, perhaps even a small café. For her part
Marie meant to be a fashionable milliner in her own right. When Paul was
the proprietor of the biggest restaurant on Broadway she would be
Madame, the mistress and the owner of the smartest hat-shop along Fifth
Avenue. Helene was content to go on keeping house for the other two. The
limit of her present ambitions was to be rid of her cough. To marrying
and to the rearing of families none of them gave thought yet; there
would be time for such things in due season, after affluence had come.
Meanwhile, they would dwell together and save and save and save.
Deposited to their joint account in the savings bank, the nest-egg of
their hopes grew at the rate of a few dollars each week, drawing
interest besides; and there was meat in the pot when they felt the need
of meat to stay them.
Over yonder in Sarajevo a stumpy Serbian man, with twisted ideas
regarding his patriotic duties, loaded up an automatic pistol and waited
for a certain carriage of state to pass a given point. The carriage did
pass, and presently the man and the woman who rode in it were both of
them dead--the first to fall in the war which as to date claimed so rich
a toll of the manhood of this planet, and which, being the unslakable
glutton that it is, continues to claim more and more with every day that
passes. The echoes of those pistol shots ran round the world and round
again.
A monarch on a throne in Germany exchanged telegrams with his beloved
cousin in Russia, and with another revered and venerated cousin in
England, and with a dear but distant kinsman of his in Belgium, and with
a respected friend, not related to him by ties of blood or marriage, who
chanced for the moment to be the president of a republic in France. A
family quarrel started up. The quarrel having progressed to a point
where the correspondents lost their affection for one another, they
severally called upon the people who suffered them to be what they were
to go out and settle the grudge according to a fashion which originated
when Cain clouted Abel in the first trade-war of which there is record.
Because every other war from that day to this has been a trade-war, too,
the plan of settlement has remained the same that was employed by Cain
when he made carrion of his brother. The tools of this fashionable
industry have been altered and greatly improved, and for that
civilisation is to be thanked; but the results do not in the least
differ from the original forms.
The people obeyed their rulers' calls. Looking back on it now it seems
to us, who are onlookers, that there was no good and sufficient reason
why they should have done this, but we know that obedience in such
contingencies is a habit which has come down to them--and to us--from
our remotest common ancestors, and it runs in our blood with the
corpuscles of our blood. It is like a contagious miasma, which, being
breathed into the body, afflicts all its victims with the same symptoms.
So they put on the liveries designed for them by their lords against the
coming of just such an occasion--shoddy-wools, or khakis, or
red-and-blue fustians, as the case might be--and they went out, these
men and these boys who were not yet men, to adjudicate the
misunderstanding which had arisen as between the occupants of sundry
palaces in sundry capital cities.
The tide of war--such being the pretty phrase coined by those who would
further popularise the institution--lapped one shore after another. It
went from hemisphere to continent, from continent to archipelago, from
archipelago to scattered islands in seas suddenly grown barren of
commerce. It flooded jungles in South Africa; it inundated the back
corners of Australia; it picked up and carried away on its backwash men
of every colour and of every creed and of every breed. It crossed the
Atlantic Ocean to New York, and having crossed, it reached into a
basement near Union Square for Paul Misereux. And the way of that was
this:
France called out her reserves. Paul Misereux, although half an
American, as has been stated, was likewise a French reservist. So at
length the call came to him. Although he was French he was not
excitable. He accepted the summons very calmly and as a matter of
course. He had been expecting that it would come, sooner or later. That
same day he visited the office of the French consul where certain
formalities were speedily concluded. Then he went home and to his sister
and his half-sister he very quietly broke the news of what had happened
and what he had done; and very quietly they took it. For they were not
outwardly emotional either.
For six days life in the three-room flat went on very much as it had
gone on before, except that the sisters went daily now to early mass,
and on the first morning following the brother did not shave himself
when he got up. French soldiers mainly wear beards, and he meant his
beard should be well sprouted when he reported for service. At the end
of those six days, on the seventh day, a new assistant pastry cook began
serving in the restaurant cellar and a steamer drew out of her New York
dock with flags flying, being bound--God and the submarines willing--for
foreign parts. On the deck set apart for the second-class passengers,
close up against the rail that was next the shore, Paul Misereux stood,
a most dumpy and unheroic figure of a man, with patches of woolly beard
showing on his pale chops, waving his hand, and with many others singing
the Marseillaise Hymn.
When the steamer was gone from sight down the river toward open water
the sisters left the pierhead where they had been standing and went
away, Marie to her job in the millinery place on Sixth Avenue and Helene
to hers in the small flat.
Except that Paul was gone, life for the remaining two continued for a
while after this to be materially unaltered. Beyond a single long letter
written on the voyage across and posted upon his arrival at Bordeaux,
they had no word of him. For this, though, he was not to blame. A thing
so systematic it had no aspect of being of human devisement and subject
to human control had caught him. This system took him in hand in the
same hour that his feet touched dry land. It gave him a number, it
clothed him in a uniform, put a gun in his hands, strapped upon his back
and about his waist and on his flanks all the other tools needful for
the prosecution of the highly specialised modern trade of manslaughter,
and set him aboard a train and started him north. Thereafter the north
swallowed him up and concerning him no news whatsoever came back. He was
an atom in a world event, and the atoms do not count even though they
contribute to the progress of the event itself.
While these sisters of his waited, hoping each day the postman would
bring them a letter with a French stamp and a French postmark on it, but
sorely dreading what the portent of that letter might be, a stroke of
bad fortune befell them. The man who owned the place where Marie worked
professed to deal in French wares exclusively; but he had a German name
and he spoke with a German accent. Perhaps he felt deeply the things
some people said to him and about him and about his Fatherland. Perhaps
he found it hard to be neutral in his words and all his acts when so
many about him were so passionately unneutral in their words and their
acts. Perhaps in those papers which avowedly were pro-German, and in
those which avowedly were anti-German, he read editorials that changed
his views on certain subjects. You see, the tide of war had searched him
out too.
Or perhaps after all he merely realised the need, in a time when
business conditions were so unsettled, of economising. At any rate one
Saturday, without prior warning, he dismissed from his employ three of
his women workers--an outspoken Irish girl, a silent Russian Jewess,
whose brothers wore the uniform of a government which oppressed them,
and a French girl, this last being Marie Misereux.
Monday morning early Marie was abroad, trying to find for herself a new
job. She was deft enough with her fingers, but there were handicaps
which denied her opportunity of proving to any interested person just
how deft those fingers of hers were. For one thing, millinery shops, big
and little, were retrenching in their expenses or trying to. For
another, she was ignorant of the town and of the ways of the millinery
trade--her first job had been her only one. Finally, she had only a
faulty knowledge of English, and that in some lines is yet a bar against
the applicant for work even in the polyglot, more-than-half-foreign city
of New York.
The week which began with that Monday morning went by; other Mondays and
other weeks went by, and Marie, walking the soles off her shoes upon the
pavements uptown and downtown, earned nothing at all. The account in the
savings bank, which always before Paul went away had grown steadily and
which for the first month or so after he went had grown in a lesser
degree, was dwindling and dwindling. Now when Helene coughed she pressed
her hand against her side. There was no news of their brother. Except
for a few distant cousins three thousand miles away, they had no
kinspeople. And in this country they had no friends.
Along the crest of a low hill, like a seam, ran a succession of
shattered tree trunks, hemming earthline to skyline with ragged and
irregular stitches. Once upon a time, not so very long before, a fine
little grove of half-grown poplars had crowned that small eminence. But
the cannon and the spouting volleys from the rapid-fire guns had mowed
down every tree, leaving only the mutilated and homely boles.
Upon one slope of the hill--the slope that was nearer the city--a
triangular-shaped patch of woodland projected its point like a
promontory well up toward the hilltop. The shells had wrought most
grievously here, too, but, being protected somewhat by the dip in the
land, the forest, as they call such a stretch of park timber in Europe,
had not suffered in the same proportionate extent that the comb of
saplings higher up suffered. The twistified masses of shot-down boughs
made good cover for the French sharpshooters.
Just under the far shoulder of the rise, zig-zagging this way and that
after the fashion of a worm that has stiff joints, was a German
trench--the foremost German trench of all the myriad trenches and
cross-trenches that formed the sector of the investments at this
particular point. Behind the Germans as they squatted in this trench was
the village of Brimont. It had been a village once. Now it was a
flattened huddle of broken masonry and shattered woodwork, from which
arose constantly a sour stench of rotting things. Back of the site of
the village, where a little valley made out between more hills, was a
sunken road winding off to the north. Upon either side of the road were
fields gouged by misaimed shells until the mangled earth looked as
though a thousand swine had rooted there for mast.
That was what the Germans saw when they looked over their shoulders.
What they saw when they looked straight ahead was, first, the patch of
woodland sheltering their foes and beyond that, three miles away, the
old French city of Rheims, with the damaged towers of the great
cathedral rising above lesser buildings, and on beyond, melting away
into blue reaches of space, the fields of Champagne. That is to say,
they could see so much when the weather was clear, which generally it
wasn't. Nine days in ten, this time of the year, it rained--the cold,
constant, searching rain of mid-October. It was raining on this
particular day, and up on this saucer-rim of land, which ringed the
plain in, the wind blew steadily with a raw bite to it.
Firing back and forth between defenders and besiegers went on
intermittently. At this spot there was no hard fighting; there had been
none for weeks. Farther way, right and left, along the battle line which
stretched from Switzerland to the sea, the big guns roared like bulls.
But here the men lay in their shelters and nibbled at their foes like
mice.
On second thought I beg to withdraw the latter simile. These men were
not so much like mice as they were like moles. For they grubbed in the
earth, as moles do, eating and sleeping, living and dying down in their
mud burrows. Only, moles keep their fur tidied and fine, while these men
were coated and clogged with the tough clayey substance in which they
wallowed. It was as much as they could do to keep their rifles in
cleansed working order.
Over in the German trench a slim Saxon youth was squatted, ankle-deep in
cold yellow water. At intervals he climbed into a small scarp in the
wall of the trench, a kind of niche just large enough to hold his body,
and kneeling there, with his head tucked down and his shoulders drawn
in, he swapped shots with a Frenchman in the woods slightly beneath and
directly in front of him. Neither of them ever saw the other. Each in
his firing was guided by the smack of his enemy's gun and the tiny puff
of white smoke which marked its discharge; each knowing in a general way
only the approximate location of the man he coveted to kill, for after
an exchange of shots both would shift, the German to another scarp, the
Frenchman to another tangle of felled boughs. There was nothing
particularly personal, nothing especially hateful or passionate in the
present ambition of either. It was merely the job in hand.
As between these two--the Frenchman and the German--there was, excusing
the differences of language and religion, no great amount of
distinction to be drawn. Temperamentally they were of much the same
cast. Each in his separate small sphere of endeavour had been a
reasonably law-abiding, reasonably industrious, fairly useful
individual, until somebody else, sitting in a high place, had willed it
for him that he should put by whatsoever task he might be concerned with
and engage in this business of gunning for his fellow-man.
Their uniforms, to be sure, differed in cut and colour, or had so
differed until the mud of Champagne had made them of a pattern together.
The German soldier's helmet had a sharp spike set in it; the Frenchman's
cap had a flattened top. Also the German carried his name and number in
a small leather pouch which hung on a thong about his neck and lay
snugly against the chilled skin of his breast under his shirt, whereas
the Frenchman wore his name and his number on a small brass token that
was made fast to a slender wire bracelet riveted about his left wrist.
Concerning these methods of marking men there had been argument from
time to time, the German authorities contending that their system is the
better of the two. For proof of the claim they point out that in the
case of a Frenchman an arm may be torn away, bodily carrying the
bracelet and the tag with it, whereas as regards a German, he may be
shot in two and yet retain his identification label since it is not so
very often that the head is entirely dissevered from the trunk. Here
again, as in many other details, they contend German efficiency
maintains its superiority over all. On both sides the matter is
discussed dispassionately, just as the toxic properties of various makes
of poisonous gases are discussed, or the rending powers of shrapnel upon
human flesh.
About four o'clock in the afternoon the German climbed up into his
favourite scarp once more. Hoping to draw his opponent's fire, he jerked
his head up into sight for half a second, then jerked it down again. The
trick worked; the Frenchman fired, but fired high. The German shoved his
gun barrel out between two clods, shut both eyes--for he was by no means
a clever marksman--and pumped a shot back in reply. The bullet from his
rifle, which was a long, sharp-nosed, steel-jacketed bullet, devised in
accordance with the most scientific experiments, found its billet. It
struck the Frenchman as he lay belly downward on the earth with his
gunstock against his cheek. It removed two fingers of the Frenchman's
right hand, three fingers of his left hand, tore away his lower jaw,
beard and all, and passed out at the back of his neck, taking splintered
fragments of his spinal processes with it. He turned over on his back,
flapping with his arms and legs, threshing about in the wet leaves and
in the mud, making grotesque bubbling sounds down in his throat.
Pretty soon after that twilight came on and the rifle firing slackened.
The Saxon youth, never knowing he had killed his enemy, called it a day
and knocked off. He hunkered down in the slime to eat a tallowy stew of
bull meat and barley from a metal pannikin. It was nourishing enough,
this mess was, but it had the aspect of swill. Having eaten, he
immediately thereafter crawled, in his wet clothes and soaked boots,
into a sort of dugout hollowed in the wall of his trench, and slept
there with four of his comrades on a bed of mouldy, damp rye straw.
While they slept the vermin travelled from one to another of them,
making discriminative choice of which body to bite.
Down in the little forest below, the Frenchman presently quit flapping
and quietly bled to death. During the night a burial party of his own
people came and found him and shovelled him underground where he lay.
But first the sergeant in command of the squad removed the bangle from
his wrist. In due course of time, therefore, word was carried back and
back by succeeding stages to headquarters, and from there on to Paris,
and from Paris on to New York, so that within a month's time or a little
less it became the painful duty of a consular clerk in New York to
transmit by mail to the deceased's next of kin, a sister, the
intelligence, as conveyed in the official notification, that her
brother, Paul Gaston Michel Misereux, was heroically dead on the Field
of Honour.
For the repose of their brother's spirit they had a mass said at the
little French Catholic Church where they worshipped, and in his memory
candles burned upon the altar. Out of a length of cheap sleazy stuff
they made a mourning frock for Helene. Wearing it, her face seemed
whiter than ever and the two red spots in her cheeks seemed redder.
Marie had the black frock, with the white collars and cuffs, which had
been her uniform as a saleswoman in the place on lower Sixth Avenue; she
wore that as she hunted for work. Regardless of their sorrow, the hunt
must go on. It went on, and was a vain quest. From much weeping her eyes
were swollen and puffy and her face was drawn out of all comeliness.
Even though through merciful forbearance each forbore to tell her so,
none of those to whom she applied for work cared to hire so homely
appearing a serving woman. In another week, or at most two, they would
be scraping the bottom of their savings account.
Before this they had lived on scanty rations, wasting never a crumb. Now
they trimmed the food allowance still finer. It may have been the lack
of sufficient nourishment that caused Helene to drop down in a faint on
the floor of the tiny kitchen one evening in the middle of the second
week following the receipt of the news from the consul's office. As
Marie bent to raise her head in her arms, a little stream of blood began
to run from one corner of Helene's mouth. For some time after she
recovered consciousness and had opened her eyes the little trickle of
blood continued, and Marie, sitting beside her, wiped it away as fast as
it oozed out between her lips. The younger girl appeared to suffer no
pain, but was very weak. Marie got her undressed and into her bed in the
small middle room. Then she ran downstairs to the basement to find out
from the caretaker where the nearest doctor was to be found.
It seemed there was one only two doors away. He came presently, a testy
man of sixty who was lame. One of his legs was inches shorter than its
mate. He lived in a tenement himself and his practice was among tenement
dwellers, and he was underpaid and overworked and had trouble enough
sometimes to make both ends meet. He grew shorter of breath and of
disposition at every step as he wallowed up the stairs, Marie going
ahead to show him the way to the rear flat at the top of the house.
Wheezing until the sound of his breathing filled the room, he sat down
alongside Helene, and while he held one of her pipe-stem wrists in his
hand he asked Marie certain questions. Then he told Marie to go into the
front room and wait for him there.
In ten minutes or less he limped in to her where she sat with her hands
clenched between her knees and her eyes big and rounded with
apprehension. He thought he closed the intervening door behind him, but
the latch failed to catch in the slot and it swung ajar for a space of
two or three inches. Neither of them took note of this.
"She's quiet now," he said: "the hemorrhage is checked. I took a sample
of her blood. I'll make a blood test to-morrow morning. How long has
this been going on--this cough?"
A good long time, Marie told him--several months. She went on, in her
broken English, to explain: "We thought it was but a bad cold, that soon
she would be well----"
He broke in on her impatiently:
"That's what you said before. That's no excuse." He looked about him.
"How many are there of you living here--just you two?"
"We are quite alone," she told him. "We had also a brother, but--but he
now is dead."
It did not occur to her to tell him how the brother had died, or when.
"What's your business?" he demanded. Then as she seemed not to get his
intent, he added:
"Can't you understand plain English? What do you do for a living?"
"Your pardon, doctor; I am a milliner."
"And this other girl--your sister--she's been staying at home and doing
the housekeeping, you said?"
She nodded. For a moment there was silence, she still seated, he before
her balancing himself on the longer leg of the two and on his heavy
cane. "I'll make a blood test in the morning," he said at length,
repeating what he had said a moment before.
"Doctor," said Marie, "tell me, please, the truth. My sister--is she
then so ill?"
"Ill?" he burst out at her irritably. "Ill? I should say she is ill.
She's got tuberculosis, if you know what that means--consumption."
She sucked her breath in sharply. Her next question came slowly: "What
is there then to do?"
"Well, she couldn't last long here--that's dead certain. You've got to
get her away from here. You've got to get her up into the North Woods,
in the mountains--Saranac or some place like that--in a sanitarium or an
invalids' camp where she can have the right kind of treatment. Then
she'll have a chance."
By a chance he meant that with proper care the sick girl might live for
three months or for four, or at the outside for six. The case was as
good as hopeless now; he knew that. Still his duty was to see that his
patients' lives were prolonged--if possible.
"These mountains, I do not know them. We are strangers in this country."
"I'll find out about a place where you can get her in," he volunteered.
"I'll bring you the information in the morning--names and addresses and
everything. Somebody'll have to go up there with her--you, I guess--and
get her settled. She's in no shape to be travelling alone. Then you can
leave her there and arrange to send up so much a week to pay for her
keep and the treatment and all. Oh, yes--and until we get her away from
here you'll have to lay off from your work and stay with her, or else
hire somebody to stay with her. She mustn't be left alone for long at
a time--she's too sick for that. Something might happen. Understand?"
"And all this--it will cost much money perhaps?"
The cripple misread the note in her voice as she asked him this. This
flat now, it was infinitely cleaner than the abodes of nine-tenths of
those among whom he was called to minister. To his man's eyes the
furnishings, considering the neighbourhood, appeared almost luxurious.
That bed yonder against the wall was very much whiter and looked very
much softer than the one upon which he slept. And the woman herself was
well clad. He had no patience with these scrimping, stingy
foreigners--thank God he was himself native-born--these cheap, penurious
aliens who would haggle over pennies when a life was the stake. And
there was no patience in his uplifted, rumbling voice as he answered
her:
"Say, you don't want your sister to be a pauper patient, do you? If you
do, just say so and I'll notify the department and they'll put her in a
charity institution. She'd last just about a week there. Is that your
idea?--if it is, say so!"
"No, no, no," she said, "not charity--not for my sister."
"I thought as much," he said, a little mollified. "All right then, I'll
write a letter to the sanitarium people; they ought to make you a
special rate. Oh, it'll cost you twenty-five dollars a week maybe--say,
at the outside, thirty dollars a week. And that'll be cheap enough,
figuring in the food she'll have to have and the care and the nursing
and all. Then, of course, there'll be your railroad tickets on top of
that. You'd better have some ready money on hand so we can get her
shipped out of here before it's too--Well, before many days anyhow."
She nodded.
"I shall have the money," she promised.
"All right," he said; "then you'd better hand me two dollars now. That's
the price of my call. I don't figure on charging you for making the
blood test. And the information about the sanitarium and the letter I'm
going to write--I'll throw all that in too."
She paid him his fee from a small handbag. At the hall door he paused on
his stumping way out.
"I think she'll be all right for to-night--I gave her something," he
said with a jerk of his thumb toward the middle room. "If you just let
her stay quiet that'll be the best thing for her. But you'd better run
in my place the first thing in the morning and tell me how she passed
the night. Good night."
"Good night, doctor--and we thank you!"
He went clumping down the steps, cursing the darkness of the stairwell
and the steep pitch of the stairs. Before the sound of his fumbling feet
had quite died away Marie, left alone, had made up her mind as to a
certain course. In so short a time as that had the definite resolution
come to her. And as she still sat there, in an attitude of listening,
Helene, in the middle room, dragged herself up from her knees where she
had been crouched at the slitted door between. She had heard all or
nearly all the gruff lame doctor said. Indeed, she had sensed the truth
for herself before she heard him speak it. What he told her sister was
no news to the eavesdropper; merely it was confirmation of a thing she
already knew. Once up on her bare feet, she got across the floor and
into her bed, and put her head on the pillow and closed her eyes,
counterfeiting sleep. In her mind, too, a plan had formed.
It was only a minute or two after this that Marie came silently to the
door and peered in, looking and listening. She heard the regular sound
of the sick girl's breathing. By the light of the gas that was turned
down low she saw, or thought she saw, that Helene was asleep. She closed
the door very softly. She freshened her frock with a crisp collarband
and with crisp wristbands. She clasped about her neck a small gold chain
and she put on her head her small, neat black hat. And then this girl,
who meant to defile her body, knelt alongside her bed and prayed the
Blessed Virgin to keep her soul clean.
With her handbag on her arm she passed out into the hall. Across the
hall a Jewish family lived--by name, the Levinski family--consisting of
a father who was a push-cart peddler, a gross and slattern mother who
was continually occupied with the duties of being a mother, and any
number of small Levinskis. In answer to her knock at their door, Mrs.
Levinski came, a shapeless, vast shape in her night dress, bringing with
her across the threshold strong smells of stale garlic, soiled flannel
and cold fried carp. Marie had a nodding acquaintance with this
neighbour of hers and no more.
"My sister, she is sick," she told Mrs. Levinski. "And I must go out.
Please, will you listen? If she should awake and call out for me, you
will please to tell her I am gone but soon will be back again. If you
please?"
Mrs. Levinski said she would, and to show she meant it opened wide her
door before she returned to her household duties.
For November the weather was warm, but it was damp and would be damper.
A fine drizzle was falling as Marie Misereux came to the lower hallway
entrance and looked out into the night; and East Thirteenth Street,
which is never entirely empty, was almost empty. She hesitated a moment,
with her left hand clenched tight against her breast, and then stepped
out, heading westward. At the first avenue crossing she came upon a
man, a fairly well-dressed man, who stood below the stoop of a private
house that had been converted into some sort of club, as if undecided in
his own mind whether to go in or to stay out. She walked straight up to
him.
"Will you go with me, m'sieur?" she said.
He peered at her from under his hatbrim. Almost over them was a street
lamp. By its light he saw that her face was dead white; that neither her
lips nor her cheeks were daubed with cosmetics, and that her lips were
not twisted into the pitiable, painted smile of the streetwalker.
Against the smooth fulness of her dress her knotted left hand made a
hard, white clump. Her breasts, he saw, heaved up and down as though she
had been running and her breath came out between her teeth with a
whistling sound. Altogether she seemed most oddly dressed and most oddly
mannered for the part she played.
"You want me to go with you?" he asked, half incredulously, half
suspiciously, still staring hard.
"If--if you will be so good."
"Do you need the money that bad?"
"Assuredly, m'sieur," she said with a simple, desperate directness. "Why
else would I ask you?"
"Say," he said almost roughly, "you better go on home. I don't believe
you belong on the streets. Here!"
He drew something that was small and crumply from a waistcoat pocket,
and drawing a step nearer to her he shoved it between two of the fingers
of her right hand.
"Now, then," he said, "you take that and hustle on back home."
He laughed, then, shamefacedly and in a forced sort of way, as though
embarrassed by his own generosity, and then he turned and went quickly
up the steps and into the club house.
She looked at what he had given her. It was a folded dollar bill. As
though it had been nasty to the touch, she dropped it and rubbed her
hand upon her frock, as if to cleanse it of a stain. Then, in the same
instant nearly, she stooped down and picked up the bill from the dirty
pavement and kissed it and opened her black handbag. Except for a few
cents in change, the bag was empty. Except for those few cents and a sum
of less than ten dollars yet remaining in the savings bank, the two
dollars she had given the lame doctor was all the money she had in the
world. She tucked the bill up in still smaller compass and put it in the
bag. She had made the start for the fund she meant to have. It was not
charity. In the sweat of her agonized soul she had earned it.
She crossed over the first bisecting avenue to the westward, and the
second; she passed a few pedestrians, among them being a policeman
trying door latches, a drunken man whose body swayed and whose legs
wove queer patterns as he walked, and half a dozen pale, bearded men who
spoke Yiddish and gestured volubly with their hands as they went by in
a group. At Third Avenue she turned north, finding the pavements more
thickly populated, and just after she came to where Fourteenth Street
crosses she saw a heavily built, well-dressed man in a light overcoat,
coming toward her at a deliberative, dawdling gait. She put herself
directly in his path. He checked his pace to avoid a collision and
looked at her speculatively, with one hand fingering his moustache.
"Will you go with me?" she said, repeating the invitation she had used
before.
"Where to?" he said, showing interest.
"Where you please," she said in her halting speech.
"You're on," he said. He fell in alongside her, facing her about and
slipping a hand well inside the crook of her right arm.
"You--you will go with me?" she asked. Suddenly her body was in a
tremble.
"No, sister," he stated grimly, "I ain't goin' with you but you're sure
goin' with me." And as he said it he tightened his grip upon her
forearm.
He had need to say no more. She knew what had happened. She had not
spent two years and better in a New York tenement without learning that
there were men of the police--detectives they called them in
English--who wore no uniforms but went about their work apparelled as
ordinary citizens. She was arrested, that was plain enough, and she
understood full well for what she had been arrested. She made no outcry,
offered no defence, broke forth into no plea for release. Indeed her
thought for the moment was all for her half-sister and not for herself.
So she said nothing as he steered her swiftly along.
At a street light where a patrol telephone box of iron was bolted to the
iron post the plain-clothes man slowed up. Then he changed his mind.
"Guess I won't call the wagon," he said. "I happen to know it's out. It
ain't far. You and me'll walk and take the air." He turned with her
westward through the cross street. Then, struck by her silence, he asked
a question:
"A Frenchy, ain't you?"
"Yes," she told him. "I am French. Where--where are you taking me,
m'sieur? Is it to the prison--the station house?"
"Quit your kiddin'," he said mockingly. "I s'pose you don't know where
we're headin'? Night court for yours--Jefferson Market. Right over here
across town."
"They will not keep me there long? They will permit me to go if I pay
a fine, eh? A small fine, eh? That is all they will do to me, is it not
so?"
He grunted derisively. "Playin' ignorant, huh? I s'pose you're goin' to
tell me now you ain't never been up in the night court before?"
"No, no, m'sieur, never--I swear it to you. Never have I been--been like
this before."
"That's what they all say. Well, if you can prove it--if you ain't got
any record of previous complaints standin' agin' you, and your finger
prints don't give you away--you'll get off pretty light, maybe, but not
with a fine. I guess the magistrate'll give you a bit over on the
Island--maybe thirty days, maybe sixty. Depends on how he's feelin'
to-night."
"The Island?"
"Sure, Blackwell's Island. A month over there won't do you no harm."
"I cannot--you must not take me," she broke out passionately now. "For
thirty days? Oh, no, no, m'sieur!"
"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" He was mimicking her tone. "I guess you can stand
doin' your thirty days if the rest of these cruisers can. If you should
turn out to be an old offender it'd likely be six months----"
He did not finish the sentence. With a quick, hard jerk she broke away
from him and turned and ran back the way she had come. She dropped her
handbag and her foot spurned it into the gutter. She ran straight, her
head down, like a hunted thing sorely pressed. Her snug skirt hampered
her though. With long strides the detective overtook her. She fought him
off silently, desperately, with both hands, with all her strength. He
had to be rough with her--but no rougher than the emergency warranted.
He pressed her flat up against a building and, holding her fast there
with the pressure of his left arm across her throat, he got his nippers
out of his pocket. Another second or two more of confused movement and
he had her helpless. The little steel curb was twined tight about her
right wrist below the rumpled white cuff. By a twist of the handles
which he held gripped in his palm he could break the skin. Two twists
would dislocate the wrist bone. A strong man doesn't fight long after
the links of the nippers start biting into his flesh.
"Now, then," he grunted triumphantly, jerking her out alongside him, "I
guess you'll trot along without balkin'. I was goin' to treat you nice
but you wouldn't behave, would you? Come on now and be good."
He glanced backward over his shoulder. Three or four men and boys,
witnesses to the flight and to the recapture, were tagging along behind
them.
"Beat it, you," he ordered. Then as they hesitated: "Beat it now, or
I'll be runnin' somebody else in." They fell back, following at a safer
distance.
He had led his prisoner along for almost a block before he was moved to
address her again:
"And you thought you could make your getaway from me? Not a chance! Say,
what do you want to act that way for, makin' it harder for both of us?
Say, on the level now, ain't you never been pinched before?"
She thought he meant the pressure of the steel links on her wrist.
"It is not that," she said, bending the curbed hand upward. "That I do
not think of. It is of my sister, my sister Helene, that I think." Her
voice for the first time broke and shivered.
"What about your sister?" There was something of curiosity but more of
incredulity in his question.
"She is ill, m'sieur, very ill, and she is alone. There is no one but me
now. My brother--he is dead. It is for her that I have done--this--this
thing to-night. If I do not return to her--if you do not let me go
back--she will die, m'sieur. I tell you she will die."
If she was acting it was good acting. Half convinced against his will of
her sincerity, and half doubtfully, he came to a standstill.
"Where do you live--is it far from here?"
"It is in this street, m'sieur. It is not far." He could feel her arm
quivering in the grip of his nippers.
"Maybe I'm makin' a sucker of myself," he said dubiously, defining the
diagnosis as much to himself as to her. "But if it ain't far I might
walk you back there and give this here sister of yours the once-over.
And then if you ain't lyin' we'll see----"
"Must I go so?" She lifted her hand up, indicating her meaning.
"You bet your life you're goin' that way or not at all. I'm takin' no
more chances with you."
"But it would kill her--she would die to see me so. She must not know
I have done this thing, m'sieur. She must not see this----" The little
chain rattled.
"Come on," he ordered in a tone of finality. "I thought that sick sister
gag was old stuff, but I was goin' to give you a show to make good----"
"But I swear----"
"Save your breath! Save your breath! Tell your spiel to the judge. Maybe
he'll listen. I'm through."
They were almost at the doors of the squat and ugly building which the
Tenderloin calls Jeff Market when he noticed that her left hand was
clutched against her breast. He remembered then she had held that hand
so when she first spoke to him; except during her flight and the little
struggle after he ran her down, she must have been holding it so all
this time.
"What's that you've got in your hand?" he demanded suspiciously, and
with a practiced flip of the nipper handles swung her round so that she
faced him.
"It is my own, m'sieur. It is----"
"Nix, nix with that. I gotta see. Open up them fingers."
She opened her hand slowly, reluctantly. The two of them were in the
shadow of the elevated structure then, close up alongside a pillar, and
he had to peer close to see what the object might be. Having seen he did
not offer to touch it, but he considered his prisoner closely, taking
her in from her head to her feet, before he led her on across the
roadway and the pavement and in at one of the doors of that odoursome
clearing house of vice and misery, mercy and justice, where the night
court sits seven nights a week.
First, though, he untwisted the disciplinary little steel chain from
about her wrist. The doorway by which they entered gave upon the Tenth
Street face of the building and admitted them into a maze of smelly dim
corridors and cross-halls in the old jail wing directly beneath the
hideous and aborted tower, which in a neighbourhood of stark
architectural offences makes of Jefferson Market courthouse a shrieking
crime against good looks and good taste.
The inspector's man escorted the French girl the length of a short
passage. At a desk which stood just inside the courtroom door he
detained her while a uniformed attendant entered her name and her age,
which she gave as twenty-one, and her house number, in a big book which
before now has been Doomsday Book for many a poor smutted butterfly of
the sidewalks. The detective, standing by, took special note of the name
and the address and, for his own purposes, wrote them both down on a
scrap of card. This formality being finished, the pair crossed the
half-filled courtroom, he guiding by a hand on her elbow, she obeying
with a numbed and passive docility, to where there is a barred-in space
like an oversized training den for wild animals. This cage or coop,
whichever you might choose to call it, has a whited cement wall for its
back, and rows of close-set rounded iron bars for its front and sides,
and wooden benches for its plenishings. The bars run straight up, like
slender black shadows caught and frozen into solidity, to the soiled
ceiling above; they are braced across with iron horizontals, which makes
the pen strong enough to hold a rhino. Its twin stands alongside it,
filling the remaining space at the far side of the big room. In the old
days one pen was meant for male delinquents and one for female. But now
the night court for men holds its sessions in a different part of town
and only women delinquents are brought to this place. It may or may not
be a reflection upon our happy civilisation--I leave that point for the
sociologists to settle--but it is a fact that ninety per cent of them
are brought here charged with the same thing.
The first coop held perhaps a dozen women and girls. One of them was
quietly weeping. The others, looking, as they sat on one of the benches
in their more or less draggled finery, like a row of dishevelled cage
birds of gay plumage, maintained attitudes which ranged from the highly
indifferent to the excessively defiant. The detective unlatched the
door, which was of iron wattles too, and put his prisoner inside.
"You'll have to stay here awhile," he bade her. His tone was altered
from that which he had employed toward her at any time before. "Just set
down there and be comfortable."
But she did not sit. She drew herself close up into a space where wall
and wall, meeting at right angles, made a corner. Her cellmates eyed
her. Being inclined to believe from her garb that she probably was a
shopgirl caught pilfering, none of them offered to hail her; all of them
continued, though, to watch her curiously. As he closed and bolted the
door and moved away the plain-clothes man, glancing back, caught a fair
look at her face behind the iron uprights. Her big, staring eyes
reminded him of something, some creature, he had seen somewhere. Later
he remembered. He had seen that same look out of the staring eyes of
animals, lying with legs bound on the floor of a slaughterhouse.
Following this, the ordinary procedure for him would have been to call
up the East Twenty-second Street station house by telephone and report
that, having made an arrest, he had seen fit to bring his prisoner
direct to court; then visit the complaint clerk's office in a little
cubby-hole of a room, and there swear to a short affidavit setting forth
the accusation in due form; finally, file the affidavit with the
magistrate's clerk and stand by to await the calling of that particular
case. Strangely enough, he did none of these things.
Instead, he made his way direct to the magistrate's desk inside the
railing which cut the room across from side to side. The pent, close
smell of the place was fit to sicken men unused to it. It commingled
those odours which seem always to go with a police court--of unwashed
human bodies, of iodoform, of stale fumes of alcohol, of cheap rank
perfumery. Petty crime exhales an atmosphere which is peculiarly its
own. This man was used to this smell. Smelling it was to him a part of
the day's work--the night's work rather.
The magistrate upon the bench was a young magistrate, newly appointed by
the mayor to this post. Because he belonged to an old family and because
his sister had married a rich man the papers loved to refer to him as
the society judge. As the detective came up he was finishing a hearing
which had lasted less than three minutes.
"Any previous record as shown by the finger prints and the card
indexes?" he was asking of the officer complainant.
"Three, Your Honour," answered the man glibly. "Suspended sentence
oncet, thirty days oncet, thirty days oncet again. Probation officer's
report shows that this here young woman----"
"Never mind that," said the magistrate; "six months."
The officer and the woman who had been sentenced to six months fell
back, and the detective shoved forward, putting his arms on the top of
the edge of the desk to bring his head closer to the magistrate.
"Your Honour," he began, speaking in a sort of confidential undertone,
"could I have a word with you?"
"Go ahead, Schwartzmann," said the magistrate, bending forward to hear.
"Well, Judge, a minute ago I brought a girl in here; picked her up at
Fourteenth Street and Thoid Avenue for solicitin'. So far as that goes
it's a dead-open-and-shut case. She come up to me on the street and
braced me. She wasn't dressed like most of these Thoid-Avenue cruisers
dress and she's sort of acted as if she'd never been pinched
before--tried to give me an argument on the way over. Well, that didn't
get her anywheres with me. You can't never tell when one of them dames
will turn out in a new make-up, but somethin' that happened when we was
right here outside the door--somethin' I seen about her--sort of----" He
broke off the sentence in the middle and started again. "Well, anyhow,
Your Honour, I may be makin' a sucker of myself, but I didn't swear out
no affidavit and I ain't called up the station house even. I stuck her
over there in the bull-pen and then I come straight to you."
The magistrate's eyes narrowed. Thus early in his experience as a police
judge he had learned--and with abundant cause--to distrust the motives
of plain-clothes men grown suddenly philanthropic. Besides, in the first
place, this night court was created to circumvent the unholy partnership
of the bail-bond shark and the police pilot fish.
"Now look here, Schwartzmann," he said sharply, "you know the law--you
know the routine that has to be followed."
"Yes, sir, I do," agreed Schwartzmann; "and if I've made a break I'm
willin' to stand the gaff. Maybe I'm makin' a sucker of myself, too,
just like I said. But, Judge, there ain't no great harm done yet. She's
there in that pen and you know she's there and I know she's there."
"Well, what's the favour you want to ask of me?" demanded His Honour.
"It's like this: I want to slip over to the address she gave me and see
if she's been handin' me the right steer about certain things. It ain't
so far." He glanced down at the scribbled card he held in his hand. "I
can get over there and get back in half an hour at the outside. And then
if she's been tryin' to con me I'll go through with it--I'll press the
charge all right." His jaw locked grimly on the thought that his
professional sagacity was on test.
"Well, what is her story?" asked the magistrate.
"Judge, to tell you the truth it ain't her story so much as it's
somethin' I seen. And if I'm makin' a sucker of myself I'd rather not
say too much about that yet."
"Oh, go ahead," assented the magistrate, whose name was Voris. "There's
no danger of the case being called while you're gone, because, as I
understand you, there isn't any case to call. Go ahead, but remember
this while you're gone--I don't like all this mystery. I'm going to want
to know all the facts before I'm done."
"Thank you, sir," said Schwartzmann, getting himself outside the railed
inclosure. "I'll be back in less'n no time, Your Honour."
He wasn't, though. Nearly an hour passed before an attendant brought
Magistrate Voris word that Officer Schwartzmann craved the privilege of
seeing His Honour alone for a minute or two in His Honour's private
chamber. The magistrate left the bench, suspending the business of the
night temporarily, and went; on the way he was mentally fortifying
himself to be severe enough if he caught a plain-clothes man trying to
trifle with him.
"Well, Schwartzmann?" he said shortly as he entered the room.
"Judge," said the detective, "the woman wasn't lyin'. She told me her
sister was sick alone in their flat without nobody to look after her and
that her brother was dead. I don't know about the brother--at least I
ain't sure about him--but the sister was sick. Only she ain't sick no
more--she's dead."
"Dead? What did she die of?"
"She didn't die of nothin'--she killed herself with gas. She turned the
gas on in the room where she was sick in bed. The body was still warm
when I got there. I gave her first aid, but she was gone all right. She
wasn't nothin' more than a shell anyhow--had some wastin' disease from
the looks of her; and I judge it didn't take but a few whiffs to finish
her off. I called in the officer on post, name of Riordan, and I
notified the coroner's office myself over the telephone, and they're
goin' to send a man up there inside of an hour or so to take charge of
the case.
"And so, after that, feelin' a sort of personal interest in the whole
thing, as you might say, I broke the rules some more. When I found this
here girl dead she had two pieces of paper in her hand; she'd died
holdin' to 'em. One of 'em was a letter that she'd wrote herself, I
guess, and the other must 'a' been a letter from somebody else--kind of
an official-lookin' letter. Both of 'em was in French. I don't know
exactly why I done it, unless it was I wanted to prove somethin' to
myself, but I brought off them two letters with me and here they are,
sir. I'm hopin' to get your court interpreter to translate 'em for me,
and then I aim to rush 'em back over there before the coroner's
physician gets in, and put 'em back on that bed where I found 'em."
"I read French--a little," said the young magistrate. "Suppose you let
me have a look at them first."
Schwartzmann surrendered them and the magistrate read them through.
First he read the pitiably short, pitiably direct farewell lines the
suicide had written to her half-sister before she turned on the gas, and
then he read the briefly regretful letter of set terms of condolence,
which a clerk in a consular office had in duty bound transcribed. Having
read them through, this magistrate, who had read in the newspapers of
Liège and Louvain, of Mons and Charlevois, of Ypres and Rheims, of the
Masurien Lakes and Poland and Eastern Prussia and Western Flanders and
Northern France; who had read also the casualty reports emanating at
frequent intervals from half a dozen war offices, reading the one as
matters of news and the other, until now, as lists of steadily mounting
figures--he raised his head and in his heart he silently cursed war and
all its fruits. And next day he went and joined a league for national
preparedness.
"Schwartzmann," he said as he laid the papers on his desk, "I guess
probably your prisoner was telling the whole truth. She did have a
brother and he is dead. He was a French soldier and he died about a
month or six weeks ago--on the Field of Honour, the letter says. And
this note that the girl left, I'll tell you what it says. It says that
she heard what the doctor said about her--there must have been a doctor
in to see her some time this evening--and that she knows she can never
get well, and that they are about out of money, and that she is afraid
Marie--Marie is the sister who's in yonder now, I suppose--will do
something desperate to get money, so rather than be a burden on her
sister she is going to commit a mortal sin. So she asks God to forgive
her and let her be with her brother Paul--he's the dead brother, no
doubt--when she has paid for her sin. And that is all she says except
good-bye."
He paused a moment, clearing his throat, and when he went on he spoke
aloud, but it was to himself that he spoke rather than to the detective:
"Field of Honour? Not one but two out of that family dead on the Field
of Honour, by my way of thinking. Yes, and though it's a new name for
it, I guess you might call Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue a Field of
Honour, too, and not be so very far wrong for this once. What a hellish
thing it all is!"
"How's that, sir?" asked Schwartzmann. "I didn't quite get you." He had
taken the two papers back in his own hands and was shuffling them
absently.
"Nothing," said the magistrate. And then almost harshly: "Well, what do
you want me to do about the woman in the pen yonder?"
"Well, sir," said the other slowly, "I was thinkin' that probably you
wouldn't care to tell her what's just come off in the flat--at least not
in court. And I know I don't want to have to tell her. I thought maybe
if you could stretch the rules so's I could get her out of here without
havin' to make a regular charge against her and without me havin' to
arraign her in the regular way----"
"Damn the rules!" snapped Voris petulantly. "I'll fix them. You needn't
worry about that part of it. Go on!"
"Well, sir, I was thinkin' maybe that after I found somebody to take
these letters back where they belong, I could take her on home with
me--I live right down here in Greenwich Village--and keep her there for
the night, or anyhow till the coroner's physician is through with what
he's got to do, and I'd ask my wife to break the news to her and tell
her about it. A woman can do them things sometimes better'n a man can.
So that's my idea, sir."
"You're willing to take a woman into your home that you picked up for
streetwalking?"
"I'll take the chance. You see, Your Honour, I seen somethin'
else--somethin' I ain't mentioned--somethin' I don't care to mention if
you don't mind."
"Suit yourself," said the other. "I suppose you'll be looking up the
newspaper men before you go. This will make what they call a great
heart-interest story."
"I don't figure on tellin' the reporters neither," mumbled Schwartzmann,
as though ashamed of his own forbearance.
The magistrate found the detective's right hand and started to shake
it. Then he dropped it. You might have thought from the haste with which
he dropped it that he also was ashamed.
"I'll see you don't get into any trouble with the inspector," he said.
Then he added: "You know of course that this brother was a French
soldier?"
"Sure I know it--you told me so."
"You're German, aren't you?" asked Voris. "German descent, I mean?"
"I don't figure as that's got anythin' to do with the case," said the
plain-clothes man, bristling.
"I don't either, Schwartzmann," said the magistrate. "Now you go ahead
and get that woman out of this hole."
Schwartzmann went. She was where he had left her; she was huddled up,
shrinking in, against the bars, and as he unlatched the iron door and
swung it in and beckoned to her to come out from behind it, he saw, as
she came, that her eyes looked at him with a dumb, questioning misery
and that her left hand was still gripped in a hard knot against her
breast. He knew what that hand held. It held a little, cheap, carved
white crucifix.
* * * * *
I see by the papers that those popularly reputed to be anointed of God,
who are principally in charge of this war, are graciously pleased to
ordain that the same shall go on for quite some time yet.