The gray and bony walls of that institution starkly dominated one of
the barest and most unprepossessing regions of the city. Its northern
façade fronted a stone-yard, beyond which were the rocks of the racing
Sound and a lighthouse. To the east, rocks and the river, a gray
expanse in winter picked over by gulls, mourned over by the horns of
endless craft. To the south, bare coal-yards, wagon-yards, tenements.
Twice weekly, sentenced delinquents of various ages—the “children,” of
whom Madeleine was one; the “girls,” ranging from eighteen to thirty;
the “women,” ranging from thirty to fifty; and the old people, ranging
from fifty until the last years of life—were brought here in an all
but air-tight cage, boxed like a great circus van, and with only small
barred air-holes at the top. Inside the van were bare, hard benches,
one against either wall. A representative of the probation and control
system of the city, a gaunt female of many years, sat within; also
an officer of such prodigious proportions that the mere sight of him
might well raise the inquiry of why so much unnecessary luggage. For
amusement in dull hours he smoothed his broad mouth with the back of
his red, hairy hand, and dreamed of bygone days.
The institution itself was operated by a Mother Superior and thirty
nuns, all of the order mentioned, all expert in their separate ways in
cooking, housekeeping, laundering, buying, lace-making, teaching, and a
half dozen other practical or applied arts.
Within the institution were separate wings or sections for each of the
four groups before mentioned, sections in which each had its separate
working, eating, sleeping and playing rooms. Only one thing was shared
in common: the daily, and often twice or thrice daily, religious
ceremonies in the great chapel, a lofty, magi-decorated and be-altared
and be-candled chamber, whose tall, thin spire surmounted with a cross
might easily be seen from many of the chambers in which the different
groups worked. There were masses in the mornings, vespers and late
prayers in the afternoons, often late prayers at night or on holidays,
when additional services of one kind and another were held. To the
religious-minded these were of course consoling. To the contrary-minded
they became at times a strain.
Always, and over all the work and all the routine relaxations or
pleasures of the institution, there hung the grim insistence of the
law, its executive arm, upon order, seemliness, and, if not penance,
at least a servility of mind which was the equivalent thereof. Let
the voices of the nuns be never so soft, their footfalls light, their
manners courteous, their ways gentle, persuasive, sympathetic, their
mood tender; back of it all lay the shadow of the force which could
forthwith return any or all to the rough hands of the police, the stern
and not-to-be-evaded dictum of the courts.
This, much more than any look of disappointment or displeasure, if such
were ever necessary, spoke to these delinquents or victims, whatever
their mood, and quieted them in their most rebellious hours. Try as
they would, they could not but remember that it was the law that had
placed them here and now detained them. That there reigned here peace,
order, sweetness and harmony, was well enough, comforting in cases, yet
and always the life here had obviously a two-fold base: one the power
of the law itself, the other the gentle, appealing, beautiful suasion
of the nuns.
But to so inexperienced and as yet unreasoning a child as Madeleine
all of this savored at this time of but one thing: the sharp, crude,
inconsiderate and uninquiring forces of law or life, which seemed never
to stop and inquire how or why, but only to order how, and that without
mercy. Like some frightened animal faced by a terrifying enemy, she had
thus far been able to think only of some darksome corner into which she
might slip and hide, a secret place so inconspicuous and minute that
the great savage world without would not trouble or care to follow.
And well enough the majority of the Sisterhood, especially those in
immediate authority over her, understood the probable direction and
ramifications of her present thoughts.
They knew her mood, for had they not during years past dealt with
many such? And stern as was the law, they were not unmindful of her
welfare. So long as she was willing and obedient there was but one
thing more: that somehow her troubled or resentful or congealed and
probably cruelly injured mind should be wooed from its blind belief in
the essential injustice of life, to be made to feel, as they themselves
were ready to believe, that all paths were not closed, all forces not
essentially dark or evil.
For them there was hope of sorts for all, a way out, and many—even
she—might find ways and means of facing life, better possibly than any
she had ever known.
V
Sister St. Agnes, for instance, who controlled the spotlessly clean but
barnlike and bleak room in which were a hundred machines for the sewing
of shirtwaists, was a creature of none too fortunate a history herself.
Returning at the age of eighteen and at the death of her father from
a convent in which she had been placed by him in order to escape the
atmosphere of a home which he himself had found unsatisfactory, she
had found a fashionable mother leading a life of which she could
scarcely conceive, let alone accept. The taint, the subterfuge, the
self-indulgent waste, had as soon sickened her as had the streets
Madeleine.
Disappointed, she felt herself after a time incapable of enduring it
and had fled, seeking first to make her way in a world which offered
only meagre wages and a barren life to those incapable of enduring its
rugged and often shameless devices; later, again wearied of her own
trials, she had returned to the convent in which she had been trained
and asked to be schooled for service there. Finding the life too simple
for a nature grown more rugged, she had asked to be, and had been,
transferred to the House of the Good Shepherd, finding there for the
first time, in this institution, duties and opportunities which somehow
matched her ideals.
And by the same token the Mother Superior of this same institution,
Mother St. Bertha, who often came through and inquired into the story
of each one, was of a history and of an order of mind which was not
unlike that of Sister St. Agnes, only it had even more of genuine
pathos and suffering in it. The daughter of a shoe manufacturer, she
had seen her father fail, her mother die of consumption, a favorite
brother drink and carouse until he finally fell under the blight of
disease and died. The subsequent death of her father, to whom she had
devoted her years, and the failing of her own dreams of a personal
love, had saddened her, and she sought out and was admitted to this
order in the hope that she, too, might still make especial use of a
life that promised all too little in the world outside.
Her great comfort was in having some one or something to love, the
satisfaction of feeling that lives which otherwise might have come to
nothing had by some service of hers been lifted to a better state.
And in that thought she worked here daily, going about among those
incarcerated in different quarters, seeing to it that their tasks were
not too severe, their comforts and hopes, where hope still remained, in
nowise betrayed.
But to Madeleine at first the solemn habits of the nuns, as well as
the gray gingham apron she had to don, the grayer woolen dress, the
severe manner in which she had to dress her hair, her very plain shoes,
the fact that she had to rise at six-thirty, attend mass and then
breakfast at eight, work from eight-thirty to twelve-thirty, and again
from one-thirty to four; lunch regularly at twelve-thirty and sup at
six, attend a form of prayer service at four-thirty, play at simple
games with her new companions between five and six and again between
seven and nine, and then promptly retire to a huge sleeping-ward set
with small white iron beds in long rows, and lit, after the retiring
bell had sounded, by small oil cups or candles burning faintly before
various images, all smacked of penance, the more disturbing because it
was strange, a form of personal control which she had not sought and
could not at once accept.
Nor could she help thinking that some severer form of punishment was
yet to be meted out to her, or might ensue by reason of one unavoidable
error or another. Life had always been so with her. But, once here a
time, things proved not so bad.
The large workroom with its hundred machines and its tall windows,
which afforded a stark view of the coal-pockets to the south, and the
river with its boats and gulls, proved not unpleasing. The clean,
bright windows, polished floors and walls—washed and cleaned by the
inmates themselves, the nuns not disdaining to do their share—and the
habits of the Sisters, their white-fringed hoods, black robes and
clinking beads and their silent tread and low speech, impressed her
greatly.
The fact that there was no severe reproof for any failure to comprehend
at first, but only slow and patient explanations of simple things, not
difficult in themselves to do; that aside from the routine duties, the
marching in line with hands crossed over breast and head up, as well
as genuflections at mass, prayers before and after meals, at rising
and on retiring and at the peal of the Angelus, morning, noon and
night, there was no real oppression, finally caused her to like it.
The girls who were here with her, shy or silent or cold or indifferent
at first, and each with her world of past experiences, contacts and
relationships locked in her heart, were still, placed as they were
elbow to elbow at work, at meals, at prayer, at retiring, incapable of
not achieving some kind of remote fellowship which eventually led to
speech and confidences.
Thus the young girl who sat next at her right in the sewing-room—Viola
Patters by name, a brave, blonde, cheerful little thing—although she
had endured much that might be called ill-fortune, was still intensely
interested in life.
By degrees and as they worked the two reached an understanding. Viola
confessed that her father, who was a non-union painter by trade, had
always worked well enough when he could get work, but that he managed
badly and could not always get it. Her mother was sickly and they were
very poor and there were many children.
Viola had first worked in a box-factory, where she had been able to
earn only three dollars or less at piece work—“pasting corners,” as
she described it—and once she had been sworn at and even thrown away
from a table at which she had been working because she didn’t do it
right, and then she quit. Then her father in turn swearing at her for
her “uppishness,” she had got work in a five-and-ten-cent store, where
she had received three dollars a week and a commission of one per cent
on her sales, which were not sufficient to yield more than a dollar
more. Then she had secured a better place in a department store at five
dollars a week, and there it was that she had come by the handsome boy
who had caused her so much trouble.
He was a taxi-driver, who always had a car at his disposal when he
worked, only it was very seldom that he cared to work. Although he
married her swiftly enough and took her away from her family, still he
had not supported her very well, and shortly after they were married
he was arrested and accused with two others of stealing a machine
and selling it, and after months and months of jail life he had been
sentenced to three years in the penitentiary.
In the meantime he had called upon her to aid him, pressed her to raise
sums of which she had never previously dreamed—and by ways of which
she had never previously dreamed—was pleaded with, all but ordered—and
still she loved him. And then in executing the “how” of it she had been
picked up by the police and sent here, as had Madeleine, only she never
told, not even to Madeleine, what the police had never discovered—that
at the suggestion of her first love she had included robbery among her
arts.
“But I don’t care,” she had whispered finally as they worked. “He was
good to me, anyhow, when he had work. He was crazy about me, and he
liked to go places and dance and eat and see shows when he had money,
and he always took me. Gee, the times we’ve had! And if he wants me to
stick to him when he gets out, I will. He ain’t half as bad as some.
Gee, you oughta hear some of the girls talk!”
And so it was finally that Madeleine was induced to tell her story.
There were other girls here who, once this bond of sympathy was struck,
were keen enough to tell their tales—sad, unfortunate, harried lives
all—and somehow the mere telling of them restored to Madeleine some of
her earlier faint confidence or interest in life. It was “bad,” but
it was vivid. For in spite of their unfortunate beginnings, the slime
in which primarily and without any willing of their own they had been
embedded and from which nearly all were seeking to crawl upwards, and
bravely enough, they had heart for and faith in life.
In all cases, apparently, love was their star as well as their bane.
They thought chiefly of the joy that might be had in joining their
lives with some man or being out in the free world, working again
possibly, at least in touch in some feeble way with the beauty and
gayety of life, as beauty and gayety manifested themselves to them.
And so by degrees, the crash of her own original hopes echoing less
and less loudly in the distance, the pain of her great shame and rude
awakening passed farther and farther from her. The smoothness and
regularity of this austere life, indifferent as it seemed at times,
consoled her by its very security and remoteness from the world. It was
lean and spare, to be sure, but it offered safety and rest to the mind
and heart. Now, rising in her dim, silent ward of a morning, repeating
her instructed prayers, marching in silence to chapel, to breakfast,
to work, hearing only the soft hum of the machines, marching again to
chapel, playing each day, but not too noisily, and finally retiring in
the same ordered and silent way to her tiny bed, she was soothed and
healed.
And yet, or perhaps because of this, she could not help thinking of the
clangor and crash of the world without. It had been grim and painful to
her, but in its rude, brutal way it had been alive. The lighted streets
at night! The cars! That dancing pavilion in which once she had been
taught to dance by the great blue sea! The vanished touches of her
faithless lover’s hands—his kisses—brief, so soon over! Where was he
now in the great strange world outside? With whom? What was she like?
And would he tire of her as quickly? Treat her as badly? Where was
Tina? Frank? Her mother? What had happened to her mother? Not a word
had she heard.
To Sister St. Agnes, after a time, sensing her to be generous,
faithful, patient, she had confided all concerning herself and her
mother, crying on her shoulder, and the Sister had promised to learn
what she could. But the investigation proving that her mother had
been sent to the workhouse, she deemed it best to say nothing for the
present. Madeleine would find her quickly enough on returning to the
world. Why cloud the new budding life with so shameful a memory?