Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (38 page)

On the way out of Thirtieth street the chorus girl continued to sob. “If you don’t go to court and speak for that girl you are no man!” she cried. The arrested woman had, by the way, screamed out a request to appear in her behalf before the Magistrate.

“By George! I cannot,” said the reluctant witness. “I can’t afford to do that sort of thing. I—I—”

After he had left this girl safely, he continued to reflect: “Now this arrest I firmly believe to be wrong. This girl may be a courtesan, for anything that I know at all to the contrary. The sergeant at the station house seemed to know her as well as he knew the Madison square tower. She is then, in all probability, a courtesan. She is arrested, however, for soliciting those two men. If I have ever had a conviction in my life, I am convinced that she did not solicit those two men. Now, if these affairs occur from time to time, they must be witnessed occasionally by men of character. Do these reputable citizens interfere ? No, they go home and thank God that they can still attend piously to their own affairs. Suppose I were a clerk and I interfered in this sort of a case. When it became known to my employers they would say to me: ‘We are sorry, but we cannot have men in our employ who stay out until 2:30 in the morning in the company of chorus girls.’

“Suppose, for instance, I had a wife and seven children in Harlem. As soon as my wife read the papers she would say: ‘Ha! You told me you had a business engagement! Half-past two in the morning with questionable company!’

“Suppose, for instance, I were engaged to the beautiful Countess of Kalamazoo. If she were to hear it, she could write: ‘All is over between us. My future husband cannot rescue prostitutes at 2:30 in the morning.’

“These, then, must be three small general illustrations of why men of character say nothing if they happen to witness some possible affair of this sort, and perhaps these illustrations could be multiplied to infinity. I possess nothing so tangible as a clerkship, as a wife and seven children in Harlem, as an engagement to the beautiful Countess of Kalamazoo; but all that I value may be chanced in this affair. Shall I take this risk for the benefit of a girl of the streets?

“But this girl, be she prostitute or whatever, was at this time manifestly in my escort, and—Heaven save the blasphemous philosophy—a wrong done to a prostitute must be as purely a wrong as a wrong done to a queen,” said the reluctant witness—this blockhead.

“Moreover, I believe that this officer has dishonored his obligation as a public servant. Have I a duty as a citizen, or do citizens have duty, as a citizen, or do citizens have no duties? Is it a mere myth that there was at one time a man who possessed a consciousness of civic responsibility, or has it become a distinction of our municipal civilization that men of this character shall be licensed to depredate in such a manner upon those who are completely at their mercy?”

He returned to the sergeant at the police station, and, after asking if he could send anything to the girl to make her more comfortable for the night, he told the sergeant the story of the arrest, as he knew it.

“Well,” said the sergeant, “that may be all true. I don’t defend the officer. I do not say that he was right, or that he was wrong, but it seems to me that I have seen you somewhere before and know you vaguely as a man of good repute; so why interfere in this thing? As for this girl, I know her to be a common prostitute. That’s why I sent her back.”

“But she was not arrested as a common prostitute. She was arrested for soliciting two men, and I know that she didn’t solicit the two men.”

“Well,” said the sergeant, “that, too, may all be true, but I give you the plain advice of a man who has been behind this desk for years, and knows how these things go, and I advise you simply to stay home. If you monkey with this case, you are pretty sure to come out with mud all over you.”

“I suppose so,” said the reluctant witness. “I haven’t a doubt of it. But don’t see how I can, in honesty, stay away from court in the morning.”

“Well, do it anyhow,” said the sergeant.

“But I don’t see how I can do it.”

The sergeant was bored. “Oh, I tell you, the girl is nothing but a common prostitute,” he said, wearily.

The reluctant witness on reaching his room set the alarm clock for the proper hour.

In the court at 8:30 he met a reporter acquaintance. “Go home,” said the reporter, when he had heard the story. “Go home; your own participation in the affair doesn’t look very respectable. Go home.”

“But it is a wrong,” said the reluctant witness.

“Oh, it is only a temporary wrong,” said the reporter. The definition of a temporary wrong did not appear at that time to the reluctant witness, but the reporter was too much in earnest to consider terms. “Go home,” said he.

Thus—if the girl was wronged—it is to be seen that all circumstances, all forces, all opinions, all men were combined to militate against her. Apparently the united wisdom of the world declared that no man should do anything but throw his sense of justice to the winds in an affair of this description. “Let a man have a conscience for the daytime,” said wisdom. “Let him have a conscience for the daytime, but it is idiocy for a man to have a conscience at 2:30 in the morning, in the case of an arrested prostitute.”

A DUEL BETWEEN AN ALARM CLOCK AND A SUICIDAL PURPOSE.

 

EVERYBODY KNOWS ALL ABOUT the Tenderloin district of New York.

There is no man that has the slightest claim to citizenship that does not know all there is to know concerning the Tenderloin. It is wonderful—this amount of truth which the world’s clergy and police forces have collected concerning the Tenderloin. My friends from the stars obtain all this information, if possible, and then go into this wilderness and apply it. Upon observing you, certain spirits of the jungle will term you a wise guy, but there is no gentle humor in the Tenderloin, so you need not fear that this remark is anything but a tribute to your knowledge.

Once upon a time there was fought in the Tenderloin a duel between an Alarm Clock and a Suicidal Purpose. That such a duel was fought is a matter of no consequence, but it may be worth a telling, because it may be the single Tenderloin incident about which every man in the world has not exhaustive information.

It seems that Swift Doyer and his girl quarreled. Swift was jealous in the strange and devious way of his kind, and at midnight, his voice burdened with admonition, grief and deadly menace, roared through the little flat and conveyed news of the strife up the air-shaft and down the air-shaft.

“Lied to me, didn’t you?” he cried. “Told me a lie and thought I wouldn’t get unto you. Lied to me! There’s where I get crazy. If you hadn’t lied to me in one thing, and I hadn’t collared you flat in it, I might believe all the rest, but now—how do I know you ever tell the truth? How do I know I ain’t always getting a game? Hey? How do I know?”

To the indifferent people whose windows opened on the air-shaft there came the sound of a girl’s low sobbing, while into it at times burst wildly the hoarse bitterness and rage of the man’s tone. A grim thing is a Tenderloin air-shaft.

Swift arose and paused his harangue for a moment while he lit a cigarette. He puffed at it vehemently and scowled, black as a storm-god, in the direction of the sobbing.

“Come! Get up out of that,” he said, with ferocity “Get up and look at me and let me see you lie!”

There was a flurry of white in the darkness, which was no more definite to the man than the ice-floes which your reeling ship passes in the night. Then, when the gas glared out suddenly, the girl stood before him. She was a wondrous white figure in her vestal-like robe. She resembled the priestess in paintings of long-gone Mediterranean religions. Her hair fell wildly on her shoulder. She threw out her arms and cried to Swift in a woe that seemed almost as real as the woe of good people.

“Oh, oh, my heart is broken! My heart is broken!”

But Swift knew as well as the rest of mankind that these girls have no hearts to be broken, and this acting filled him with a new rage. He grabbed an alarm clock from the dresser and banged her heroically on the head with it.

She fell and quivered for a moment. Then she arose, and, calm and dry-eyed, walked to the mirror. Swift thought she was taking an account of the bruises, but when he resumed his cyclonic tirade, she said: “I’ve taken morphine, Swift.”

Swift leaped at a little red pill box. It was empty. Eight quarter-grain pills make two grains. The Suicidal Purpose was distinctly ahead of the Alarm Clock. With great presence of mind Swift now took the empty pill box and flung it through the window.

At this time a great battle was begun in the dining-room of the little flat. Swift dragged the girl to the sideboard, and in forcing her to drink whisky he almost stuffed the bottle down her throat. When the girl still sank to the depths of an infinite drowsiness, sliding limply in her chair like a cloth figure, he dealt her furious blows, and our decorous philosophy knows little of the love and despair that was in those caresses. With his voice he called the light into her eyes, called her from the sinister slumber which her senses welcomed, called her soul back from the verge.

He propped the girl in a chair and ran to the kitchen to make coffee. His fingers might have been from a dead man’s hands, and his senses confused the coffee, the water, the coffee-pot, the gas stove, but by some fortune he managed to arrange them correctly. When he lifted the girlish figure and carried her to the kitchen, he was as wild, haggard, gibbering, as a man of midnight murders, and it is only because he was not engaged in the respectable and literary assassination of a royal duke that almost any sensible writer would be ashamed of this story. Let it suffice, then, that when the steel-blue dawn came and distant chimneys were black against a rose sky, the girl sat at the dining-room table chattering insanely and gesturing. Swift, with his hands pressed to his temples, watched her from the other side of the table, with all his mind in his eyes, for each gesture was still a reminiscence, and each tone of her voice a ballad to him. And yet he could not half measure his misery. The tragedy was made of homeliest details. He had to repeat to himself that he, worn-out, stupefied from his struggle, was sitting there awaiting the moment when the unseen hand should whirl this soul into the abyss, and that then he should be alone.

The girl saw a fly alight on a picture. “Oh,” she said, “there’s a little fly.” She arose and thrust out her finger. “Hello, little fly,” she said, and touched the fly. The insect was perhaps too cold to be alert, for it fell at the touch of her finger. The girl gave a cry of remorse, and, sinking to her knees, searched the floor, meanwhile uttering apologies.

At last she found the fly, and, taking it, [in] her palm went to the gas-jet which still burned weirdly in the dawning. She held her hand close to the flame. “Poor little fly,” she said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything. There now—p’r’aps when you get warm you can fly away again. Did I crush the poor little bit of fly? I’m awful sorry—honest. I am. Poor little thing! Why I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, poor little fly—”

Swift was woefully pale and so nerve-weak that his whole body felt a singular coolness. Strange things invariably come into a man’s head at the wrong time, and Swift was aware that this scene was defying his preconceptions. His instruction had been that people when dying behaved in a certain manner. Why did this girl occupy herself with an accursed fly? Why in the name of the gods of the drama did she not refer to her past? Why, by the shelves of the saints of literature, did she not clutch her brow and say: “Ah, once I was an innocent girl?” What was wrong with this death scene? At one time he thought that his sense of propriety was so scandalized that he was upon the point of interrupting the girl’s babble.

But here a new thought struck him. The girl was not going to die. How could she under these circumstances? The form was not correct.

All this was not relevant to the man’s love and despair, but, behold, my friend, at the tragic, the terrible point in life there comes an irrelevancy to the human heart direct from the Wise God. And this is why Swift Doyer thought those peculiar thoughts.

The girl chattered to the fly minute after minute, and Swift’s anxiety grew dim and more dim until his head fell forward on the table and he slept as a man who has moved mountains, altered rivers, caused snow to come because he wished it to come, and done his duty.

For an hour the girl talked to the fly, the gas-jet, the walls, the distant chimneys. Finally she sat opposite the slumbering Swift and talked softly to herself

When broad day came they were both asleep, and the girl’s fingers had gone across the table until they had found the locks on the man’s forehead. They were asleep, and this after all is a human action, which may safely be done by characters in the fiction of our time.

BY STEPHEN CRANE. THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF STRIKING SKETCHES OF NEW YORK LIFE BY THE FAMOUS NOVELIST.

 

MANY REQUIEMS HAVE BEEN sung over the corpse of the Tenderloin. Dissipated gentlemen with convivial records burn candles to its memory each day at the corner of Twenty-eighth street and Broadway. On the great thoroughfare there are 4,000,000 men who at all times recite loud anecdotes of the luminous past.

They say: “Oh, if you had only come around when the old Haymarket was running!” They relate the wonders of this prehistoric time and fill the mind of youth with poignant regret. Everybody on earth must have attended regularly at this infernal Haymarket. The old gentlemen with convivial records do nothing but relate the glories of this place. To be sure, they tell of many other resorts, but the old gentlemen really do their conjuring with this one simple name—“the old Haymarket.”

The Haymarket is really responsible for half the tales that are in the collections of these gay old boys of the silurian period. Some time a man will advertise “The Haymarket Restored,” and score a clamoring, popular success. The interest in a reincarnation of a vanished Athens must pale before the excitement caused by “The Haymarket Restored.”