Once every three months, with fair regularity, she was brought into the
Night Court, found guilty, and fined. She came in between eleven o'clock
and midnight, when the traffic of the court is as its heaviest, and it
would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called to the bar. When her
turn came she would rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners'
bench and confront the magistrate.
Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magistrate's desk. A
policeman in citizens' clothes would mount the witness stand, take oath
with a seriousness of mien which was surprising, in view of the
frequency with which he was called upon to repeat the formula, and
testify in an illiterate drone to a definite infraction of the law of
the State, committed in his presence and with his encouragement. While
he spoke the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she was called
upon to answer she defended herself with an obvious lie or two, while
the magistrate looked over her head. He would then condemn her to pay
the sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.
She came to look forward to her visits at the Night Court.
* * * * *
The Night Court is no longer a centre of general interest. During the
first few months after it was established, two or three years ago, it
was one of the great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it was a
rich source of human-interest stories. It replaced Chinatown in its
appeal to visitors from out of town. It stirred even the languid pulses
of the native inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the way
of "life." The sociologists, sincere and amateur, crowded the benches
and took notes.
To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers long ago abandoned the
Night Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their texts, and the tango
has taken its place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have
not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the
pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of
the court is without its little group of social investigators, among
whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women,
exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.
As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before
the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing
that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic
young women in the audience. She observed with extraordinary admiration
and delight those charming faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing,
the admirably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of dress,
which she compared with the best that the windows in Sixth Avenue could
show. She was amazed to find such gowns actually being worn instead of
remaining as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the shop
windows.
Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not supposed to stare at the
spectators. She had to steal a glance now and then. Her visits to the
Night Court had become so much a matter of routine that she would
venture a peep over the railing while the case immediately preceding her
own was being tried. Once or twice she was surprised by the clerk who
called her name. She stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as
Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness stand.
She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did not visualise him
either as a person or as a part of a system. He was merely an incident
of her trade. She had neither the training nor the imagination to look
behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy which has not the power
to suppress, nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate,
and so contents itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian
clothes to work up the evidence that defends society against her kind
through the imposition of a ten-dollar fine.
To some of the women on the visitors' benches the cruelty of the process
came home: this business of setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in
citizens' clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers,
interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dollar fine out of
a half-grown woman under an enormous imitation ostrich plume. The
professional sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost of
this process to the taxpayer, and they took notes on the proportion of
first offenders. Yet the Night Court is a remarkable advance in
civilisation. Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would pay
a commission to the professional purveyor of bail.
Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to the business, she would
be given a chance against Officer Smith. She would be called to the
witness chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the obvious
lies which constituted her usual defence. This would give her the
opportunity, between the magistrate's questions, of sweeping the
court-room with a full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a
time. She saw the women in the audience only, and their clothes. The
pity in their eyes did not move her, because she was not in the least
interested in what they thought, but in how they looked and what they
wore. They were part of a world which she would read about--she read
very little--in the society columns of the Sunday newspaper. They were
the women around whom headlines were written and whose pictures were
printed frequently on the first page.
She could study them with comparative leisure in the Night Court.
Outside in the course of her daily routine she might catch an occasional
glimpse of these same women, through the windows of a passing taxi, or
in the matinée crowds, or going in and out of the fashionable shops. But
her work took her seldom into the region of taxicabs and fashionable
shops. The nature of her occupation kept her to furtive corners and the
dark side of streets. Nor was she at such times in the mood for just
appreciation of the beautiful things in life. More than any other walk
of life, hers was of an exacting nature, calling for intense powers of
concentration both as regards the public and the police. It was
different in the Night Court. Here, having nothing to fear and nothing
out of the usual to hope for, she might give herself up to the æsthetic
contemplation of a beautiful world of which, at any other time, she
could catch mere fugitive aspects.
Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is only what they see and
hear, and not what they read of. Take the Night Court. The visitor
really sees nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thousand
times in his newspaper and had it described in greater detail and with
better-trained powers of observation than he can bring to bear in
person. What new phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a
dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there are several tens of
thousands in New York? They have been described by the human-interest
reporters, analysed by the statisticians, defended by the social
revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists. For that matter,
to the faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, what can
there be new in this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits
of the night prowler? Can the upper classes really acquire for
themselves, through slumming parties and visits to the Night Court,
anything like the knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish them?
Can the lower classes ever hope to obtain that complete view of the
Fifth Avenue set which the Sunday columns offer them? And yet there the
case stands: only by seeing and hearing for ourselves, however
imperfectly, do we get the sense of reality.
That is why our criminal courts are probably our most influential
schools of democracy. More than our settlement houses, more than our
subsidised dancing-schools for shop-girls, they encourage the
get-together process through which one-half the world learns how the
other half lives. On either side of the railing of the prisoners' cage
is an audience and a stage.
That is why she would look forward to her regular visits at the Night
Court. She saw life there.
V