Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (8 page)

When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested. Before he reached a great age, he had a fair record.

He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck and fight with other drivers. He had been in quite a number of miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had become known to the police. Once he had been arrested for assaulting a Chinaman. Two women in different parts of the city, and entirely unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by breaking forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings about marriage and support and infants.

Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: “Deh moon looks like hell, don’t it?”
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THE GIRL, MAGGIE, BLOSSOMED in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.

None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins. The philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over it.

When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the street, dirt disguised her. Attired in tatters and grime, she went unseen.

There came a time, however, when the young men of the vicinity, said: “Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker.” About this period her brother remarked to her: “Mag, I’ll tell yeh dis!
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See? Yeh’ve edder got teh go teh hell or go teh work!” Whereupon she went to work, having the feminine aversion of going to hell.

By a chance, she got a position in an establishment where they made collars and cuffs. She received a stool and a machine in a room where sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent. She perched on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars, the name of whose brand could be noted for its irrelevancy to anything in connection with collars. At night she returned home to her mother.

Jimmie grew large enough to take the vague position of head of the family. As incumbent of that office, he stumbled up-stairs late at night, as his father had done before him. He reeled about the room, swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor.

The mother had gradually arisen to that degree of fame that she could bandy words with her acquaintances among the police-justices. Court-officials called her by her first name. When she appeared they pursued a course which had been theirs for months. They invariably grinned and cried out: “Hello, Mary, you here again?” Her grey head wagged in many a court. She always besieged the bench with voluble excuses, explanations, apologies and prayers. Her flaming face and rolling eyes were a sort of familiar sight on the island. She measured time by means of sprees, and was eternally swollen and dishevelled.

One day the young man, Pete, who as a lad had smitten the Devil’s Row urchin in the back of the head and put to flight the antagonists of his friend, Jimmie, strutted upon the scene. He met Jimmie one day on the street, promised to take him to a boxing match in Williamsburg,
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and called for him in the evening.

Maggie observed Pete.

He sat on a table in the Johnson home and dangled his checked legs with an enticing nonchalance. His hair was curled down over his forehead in an oiled bang. His rather pugged nose seemed to revolt from contact with a bristling moustache of short, wire-like hairs. His blue double-breasted coat, edged with black braid, buttoned close to a red puff tie, and his patent-leather shoes, looked like murder-fitted weapons.

His mannerisms stamped him as a man who had a correct sense of his personal superiority. There was valor and contempt for circumstances in the glance of his eye. He waved his hands like a man of the world, who dismisses religion and philosophy, and says “Fudge.”
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He had certainly seen everything and with each curl of his lip, he declared that it amounted to nothing. Maggie thought he must be a very elegant and graceful bartender.

He was telling tales to Jimmie.

Maggie watched him furtively, with half-closed eyes, lit with a vague interest.

“Hully gee! Dey makes me tired,” he said. “Mos’ e’ry day some farmer
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comes in an’ tries teh run deh shop. See? But deh gits t’rowed right out! I jolt dem right out in deh street before dey knows where dey is! See?”

“Sure,” said Jimmie.

“Dere was a mug come in deh place deh odder day wid an idear he wus goin’ teh own deh place! Hully gee, he wus goin’ teh own deh place! I see he had a still on an’ I didn’ wanna giv ‘im no stuff, so I says: ‘Git deh hell outa here an’ don’ make no trouble,’ I says like dat! See? ‘Git deh hell outa here an’ don’ make no trouble;’ like dat. ‘Git deh hell outa here,’ I says. See?”

Jimmie nodded understandingly Over his features played an eager desire to state the amount of his valor in a similar crisis, but the narrator proceeded.

“Well, deh blokie he says: ‘T’hell wid it! I ain’ lookin’ for no scrap,’ he says (See?) ‘but’ he says, ‘I’m spectable cit’zen an’ I wanna drink an’ purtydamnsoon, too.’ See? ‘Deh hell,.’ I says. Like dat! ‘Deh hell,’ I says. See? ‘Don’t make no trouble,’ I says. Like dat. ‘Don’ make no trouble,’ See? Den deh mug he squared off an’ said he was fine as silk wid his dukes (See?) an’ he wanned a drink damnquick. Dat’s what he said. See?”

“Sure,” repeated Jimmie.

Pete continued. “Say, I jes’ jumped deh bar an’ deh way I plunked dat blokie was great. See? Dat’s right! In deh jaw! See? Hully gee, he t‘rowed a spittoon true deh front windee. Say, I taut I’d drop dead. But deh boss, he comes in after an’ he says, ‘Pete, yehs done jes’ right! Yeh’ve gota keep order an’ it’s all right.’ See? ‘It’s all right,’ he says. Dat’s what he said.”

The two held a technical discussion.

“Dat bloke was a dandy,” said Pete, in conclusion, “but he had‘n’ oughta made no trouble. Dat’s what I says teh dem: ‘Don’ come in here an’ make no trouble,‘ I says, like dat. ‘Don’ make no trouble.’ See?”

As Jimmie and his friend exchanged tales descriptive of their prowess, Maggie leaned back in the shadow. Her eyes dwelt wonderingly and rather wistfully upon Pete’s face. The broken furniture, grimey walls, and general disorder and dirt of her home of a sudden appeared before her and began to take a potential aspect. Pete’s aristocratic person looked as if it might soil. She looked keenly at him, occasionally, wondering if he was feeling contempt. But Pete seemed to be enveloped in reminiscence.

“Hully gee,” said he, “dose mugs can’t phase me. Dey knows I kin wipe up deh street wid any tree of dem.”

When he said, “Ah, what deh hell,” his voice was burdened with disdain for the inevitable and contempt for anything that fate might compel him to endure.

Maggie perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man. Her dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.

PETE TOOK NOTE OF Maggie.

“Say, Mag, I’m stuck on yer shape. It’s outa sight,” he said, parenthetically, with an affable grin.

As he became aware that she was listening closely, he grew still more eloquent in his descriptions of various happenings in his career. It appeared that he was invincible in fights.

“Why,” he said, referring to a man with whom he had had a misunderstanding, “dat mug scrapped like a damn dago.
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Dat’s right. He was dead easy. See? He tau’t he was a scrapper! But he foun’ out diff ’ent! Hully gee.”

He walked to and fro in the small room, which seemed then to grow even smaller and unfit to hold his dignity, the attribute of a supreme warrior. That swing of the shoulders that had frozen the timid when he was but a lad had increased with his growth and education at the ratio of ten to one. It, combined with the sneer upon his mouth, told mankind that there was nothing in space which could appall him. Maggie marvelled at him and surrounded him with greatness. She vaguely tried to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her.

“I met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city,” he said. “I was goin’ teh see a frien’ of mine. When I was a-crossin’ deh street deh chump runned plump inteh me, an’ den he turns aroun’ an’ says, ‘Yer insolen’ ruffin,’ he says, like dat. ‘Oh, gee,’ I says, ‘oh, gee, go teh hell and git off deh eart’,’ I says, like dat. See? ‘Go teh hell an’ git off deh eart‘,’ like dat. Den deh blokie he got wild. He says I was a contempt’ ble scoun‘el, er something like dat, an’ he says I was doom’ teh everlastin’ pe’dition an’ all like dat. ‘Gee,’ I says, ‘gee! Deh hell I am,’ I says. ‘Deh hell I am,’ like dat. An’ den I slugged ’im. See?”

With Jimmie in his company, Pete departed in a sort of blaze of glory from the Johnson home. Maggie, leaning from the window, watched him as he walked down the street.

Here was a formidable man who disdained the strength of a world full of fists. Here was one who had contempt for brass-clothed power; one whose knuckles could defiantly ring against the granite of law. He was a knight.

The two men went from under the glimmering street-lamp and passed into shadows.

Turning, Maggie contemplated the dark, dust-stained walls, and the scant and crude furniture of her home. A clock, in a splintered and battered oblong box of varnished wood, she suddenly regarded as an abomination. She noted that it ticked raspingly. The almost vanished flowers in the carpet-pattern, she conceived to be newly hideous. Some faint attempts she had made with blue ribbon, to freshen the appearance of a dingy curtain, she now saw to be piteous.

She wondered what Pete dined on.

She reflected upon the collar and cuff factory. It began to appear to her mind as a dreary place of endless grinding. Pete’s elegant occupation brought him, no doubt, into contact with people who had money and manners. It was probable that he had a large acquaintance of pretty girls. He must have great sums of money to spend.