MRS1 The Under Dogs (3 page)

McDaniels had finally come up with her, he said, in a flat on Avenue A, where she was living with a young man called George Mullen, whom she had recently married. The proceeds of the robbery had partly gone to furnish the flat. This Mullen was a hard-working young fellow, unknown to the police. Apparently he was unaware of his wife's criminal activities. When he had learned of it, he had repudiated her. Upon being arrested, Melanie had admitted her guilt, but subsequently denied it.

These dry statements of McDaniels caused me to look at the girl with a new and extraordinary interest. I am a spinster, and no less sentimental, I suppose, than others. A bride! Ah, the poor young thing! The fact that she was a thief was not to say she was not capable of feeling all the tremulous happiness of a bride. And her honeymoon had been broken up by the brutal intrusion of McDaniels! And her young husband had turned from her! What a poor stick he must have been. Yet you couldn't blame him, either, if he had supposed her virtuous. It was a pitiful situation all round. Melanie sat listening with half a sneer on her comely face. God knows what pain that sneer conceals, I thought.

Shryock's cross-examination of McDaniels was merely perfunctory. No facts favourable to the girl were brought out.

To make a long story short, the jury returned a verdict of guilty without leaving their seats. Only one of the twelve betrayed any concern for the girl; an insignificant little man in the upper corner of the jury box, who looked at Melanie with compassionate eyes. But he had not force of character enough to make a stand against the other eleven. Mrs. Cranstoun, in her expensive clothes, with the pearls (real or phony) around her neck, openly exulted. Melanie herself gave no sign, except that the painful curl in her lip became emphasised.

Before sentencing her Recorder Teague hesitated. I had seen that Shryock's cynical attitude towards his client had made the worthy man uneasy during the trial. He was a political judge, and had to consider his re-election; he dared not openly rebuke the powerful lawyer, but I am sure he would have liked to do something for the girl. He began to question her with a view to bringing out something favourable to her.

"Have you anything to say?"

"What's the use?" said Melanie, sneering.

"Is your husband in the court-room?"

"No."

"If you went straight, would not your husband return to you?"

Melanie's dark eyes flashed at him. "I wouldn't go back to him," she said. "He's yellow."

The judge bit his lip, and tried again. "Are your parents living?"

"That's neither here nor there," said Melanie. "They have nothing to do with this."

"Have you no desire to lead a respectable life?"

"A-ah! sentence me! sentence me!" cried Melanie with harsh effrontery. "It's bad enough to be tried without having to listen to a moral lecture!"

What could anybody do for a girl like that?

The Recorder flushed, and took her at her word. Not less than five years, and not more than ten at Woburn Prison. This sentence to begin when she had finished serving her unexpired term there.

She was guilty and unrepentant; nevertheless, it caused my breast the sharpest twinge of pain. It was the thought of youth and beauty locked up useless in a narrow cell. All too clearly I could picture her as she would come out in ten years, or whenever it might be, faded, hard and desperate; quite spoiled.

Melanie stood up with a hard smile. Evidently she intended to carry the thing through with the same reckless bravado. "Thanks, Judge," she drawled, hand on hip. And to the jury: "Much obliged for your consideration, gentlemen. Come and see me some time. You know my address."

One could hear the spectators catch their breaths in horrified delight at the girl's impudence.

But her feelings were getting the best of her. Her sneering assurance broke up. I saw her press her teeth into her lower lip, while her breast heaved irregularly. I felt it in my own breast. Hysteria. Suddenly she cried out in a high unnatural voice.

"You all think pretty well of yourselves, don't you? You, who come here to try me; and you who come to see me tried...." This, with a violent sweeping gesture. "Well, here I am! Look! Look! And to hell with you! Now you can go home and gorge yourselves, and snore in your beds. It's a grand thing not to be found out, isn't it? I'm thankful I'm not respectable. I'm a crook, and I'm proud of it. In my cell there'll be no strings on me. I don't have to lie to butter my bread. But you ... but you! You're rotten, all of you. You respectable people work together to make the world a mean and dirty place. I despise you...!"

The rest was incoherent. It was curious to see how the hearers in the court-room revealed their natures. Either like Jim Shryock or Mrs. Cranstoun, they grinned with a hideous pleasure; or, like John McDaniels, they were stolidly indifferent. Recorder Teague flushed deeply with anger, and rapped smartly with his gavel.

"Remove that woman!" he commanded.

Melanie was hustled out, shrieking insensately.

I made my way out of the court-room along with the other spectators. Most of them seemed to be curiously elated by the sensational conclusion of the trial, and even strangers discussed it with each other animatedly. But I felt a little sick at heart.

I would like to draw a complete, full-length portrait of my mistress, Mme. Storey, but it is beyond my powers. The best I can do is to portray her in action, and leave it to my readers to form their own conclusions. At this time I had been with her as her secretary for over two years; and it was true, as she said, that there were few people who knew her as well as I did. But that is not to say that I knew her completely; there was a high quality in her nature that escaped my comprehension. She was the only disinterested woman I ever knew. Imagine a woman whose judgment was never swayed by her feelings! In this respect I am no more than an average woman myself, consequently the manifestation of her disinterestedness always astonished me.

Like other great-souled people, she found but few souls to commune with on this dusty sphere. On the other hand, living in the full glare of publicity, she was much at the mercy of fools. In order to protect herself, she had gradually built up the Mme. Storey of the popular imagination; the tall, exotic, unmoved beauty, to whom, without any necessity of exerting herself, everything was revealed. She seemed to exist in an atmosphere miles above that of ordinary people. Mme. Storey was she who could not be deceived. A thousand stories were told of her extraordinary insight as well as her personal foibles; her amazing clothes; her cigarettes; the objects of art with which she surrounded herself; her array of rare perfumes; the fantastically dressed black ape who sat upon her arm. She had become almost a legendary figure.

She had deliberately cultivated this faculty of inspiring people with awe of her. It was good for business, and it kept fools at arm's length. Well do I remember how terrified I was when she first swam into my ken. But it was not the real Mme. Storey. From very old people, or from children, or from any soul in trouble, she made no pretence of hiding her kind heart. After two years daily association I knew her better than anybody. When we were alone together, she threw off her public manner with relief; and emerged keen, human, lovable and full of laughter. But there was always a suggestion of that awe-inspiring quality behind; something about her one could not quite reach.

She was one of the most beautiful women in New York, but the fame of her beauty was far overshadowed by that of her mind. Men marvelled at the sang-froid with which she pointed to the solution of the most baffling problems. At a single phrase of Mme. Storey's, whole vast structures of evasions and circumlocutions and false reasoning would collapse like a house of cards, revealing the simple truth. Somebody said, after the famous smoke-bandit case: "The cleverest man in town is a woman;" but that conveys a false idea. Mme. Storey's wonderful mind was wholly feminine; her success was due to the fact that she refused to force it into masculine channels of thought. She worked by intuition, that swifter and surer process of reasoning. Unfortunately, in a man-ruled world, intuition is at a discount, and Mme. Storey was obliged to spend a good three-fourths of her time proving to judges, juries, and other men, that her unerring intuitions were true according to their cumbrous rules of logic and reason.

Our offices are on the parlour floor of a splendid old dwelling on Gramercy Park, which has been sub-divided. We do not hang out a shingle, for the whole town knows its way there. Mme. Storey describes herself as a "practical psychologist," to which she sometimes adds, with a twinkle in her eye, "specialising in the feminine." The style and the location of the rooms makes them equally well adapted for either business or social activities. Sometimes Mme. Storey gives parties in the beautiful long room, where the famous treasures of the Italian renaissance are displayed. Only her ultimate friends know the inside of the delightful little house on East Sixty-third street, that she shares with Mrs. Lysaght. Those rooms are decorated in a very different style; less glorious, but more inviting.

On the day that I spent in attendance at the Soupert trial, we left a boy in charge of the office, and Mme. Storey remained working at home. She was busy with the well-remembered case of Admiral Van der Venter, who was subject to such curious lapses of personality. I went to her there, and was shown into that enchanting living-room, so quaintly furnished in the style of 1850. The windows faced south, and overlooked a tiny formal garden in the rear of the house. The invaluable Grace served us tea and little chocolate cakes, and any one who had seen my mistress
en négligée
, munching chocolate cakes, could not have thought her otherwise than purely feminine.

She listened with close attention to my account of the trial.

"What do you make of it?" she asked, when I had done.

"I was sorry for the girl," I said. "But I think we ought to keep in mind the possibility that there may be nothing in it, beyond what appears on the surface. She's a thorough egoist, and it may be she thinks there is something deep, dark, and mysterious about her case, just because it is her case. When she lost control of herself, and became hysterical, surely if there was anything behind it all, it must have come out then."

Mme. Storey shook her head. "Not badly argued," she said, "but I feel you are wrong. There is one false assumption in your reasoning. I have not found that women tell the truth in their hysterical outbursts, or that they give away anything they don't want to have known. Hysteria is largely a self-induced state, and a woman who can bring it on can make it work for her."

"But if she wanted help...?"

Mme. Storey lit a cigarette, and thoughtfully puffed at it. "Bella," she said, "most of us only face the truth about our situation once or twice in a lifetime—some of us never. Suppose it came to this poor girl in the night, lying sleepless on the hard bunk of her cell, and she got up and wrote that letter to me on the spur of the moment. As soon as she sent it out, she would regret it. She'd rather die now than confess she was the girl who had written it."

"But how can we do anything for her without her co-operation?"

"I admit it will be difficult. But, perhaps, we can bring her back to a more amenable frame of mind.... The case interests me. It smells of mystery. The inwardness of it was not revealed at the trial. The suggestion that she committed all these thefts single-handed will not hold water. Of course she did the actual lifting of the jewels, but she could not dispose of them without assistance. That business is too highly organised.

"Then there is this young man she was married to, who shook her so precipitately. That is unusual. Young people generally cleave to each other at such a time. An accusation of theft is nothing to a lover. It seems incredible that the young man should not even feel concern enough to attend her trial.... We will have this George Mullen looked for.

"Finally, there is Shryock's extraordinary attitude," Mme. Storey went on, more like one thinking aloud. "There's a subtle, astute scoundrel! His connection with the case interests me more than anything else. He was the real prosecutor of the girl. He turned his thumbs down, and she was railroaded.... I've long had my eye on Shryock. I consider him the most sinister and hateful figure on the local scene. I have longed to be able to open up the underground ramifications of his power. It would be odd, wouldn't it, if I was able to get him at last, through the means of an anonymous letter from one of his humblest victims? ... We've made a good bit of money the last year or two, Bella. We can afford to do a piece of work gratis for the good of the community. Oh, decidedly, as long as Shryock is mixed up in this case, I shall not drop it."

"What is the next move?" I asked.

"Katherine Couteau Cloke, the well-known prison reformer, is a friend of mine," said Mme. Storey. "She's a sort of unofficial inspector of all the prisons, and makes frequent trips to Woburn. I'll get her to arrange an interview for me with the girl."

"But if you visited Woburn Prison it would immediately become known," I said. "Even if you went in disguise. Those places are full of spies, Shryock would certainly be informed of your interest in the girl."

"Oh, Bella, you're so confoundedly prudent!" said Mme. Storey, with pretended impatience. "However, I suppose you're right. You'll have to see the girl, then, and persuade her that we are her friends." She reached for the telephone. "Let us see if we can get hold of Miss Cloke now."

By great good fortune we caught that busy woman at a loose end, and a few minutes later she was seated beside us in the mellow, inviting living-room; a middle-aged woman, with a plain, strong, good, harassed face. Grace brought her fresh tea, but she refused the chocolate cakes.

"Ah, what a haven of rest!" she murmured, glancing around the room, and visibly relaxing.

"You should not wait until you are sent for," said Mme. Storey, smiling.

Evidently they were tried friends; they looked at each other with eyes of affection. No two women could have been more dissimilar. Miss Cloke was one of the dowdy, plain-spoken sort, that men affect to sneer at, but who accomplish a deal of good in the world. Certainly the prisoners of this state have a lot to thank her for.