Local Color

Irvin S. Cobb

Local Color

CHAPTER I

LOCAL COLOR

Felix Looms, the well-known author, disappeared – or, rather, he went away – on or about June fifteenth, four years ago. He told his friends, his landlady and his publisher – he had no immediate family – he felt run down and debilitated and he meant to go away for a good long stay. He might try the Orient; then again perhaps he would go to the South Seas. When he came back, which might be in a year or two years or even three, he expected to bring with him the material for a longer and better book than any he had written. Meantime he wanted to cut loose, as he put it, from everything. He intended, he said, to write no letters while he was gone and he expected to receive none.

He gave a power of attorney to a lawyer with whom he had occasional dealings, left in bank a modest balance to meet any small forgotten bills that might turn up after his departure, surrendered his bachelor apartments in the Rubens Studio Building, paid off his housekeeper, said good-bye to a few persons, wrote explanatory notes to a few more; and then quietly – as he did everything in this life – he vanished.

Nobody particularly missed him, for he was not a famous author or even a popular one; he was merely well known as a writer of tales dealing in the main with crime and criminals and criminology. People that liked his writings said he was a realist, who gave promise of bigger things. People that did not like his writings said he was a half-baked socialist. One somewhat overcritical reviewer, who had a bad liver and a bitter pen, once compared him to an ambitious but immature hen pullet, laying many eggs but all soft-shelled and all of them deficient in yolk.

Personally Felix Looms was a short, slender, dark man, approaching forty, who wore thick glasses and coats that invariably were too long in the sleeves. In company he was self-effacing; in a crowd he was entirely lost, if you know what I mean. He did not know many people and was intimate with none of those he did know. Quite naturally his departure for parts unknown left his own little literary puddle unrippled.

Looms went away and he did not come back. His publisher never heard from him again; nor did his lawyer nor the manager of the warehouse where he had stored his heavier belongings. When three years had passed, and still no word came from him, his acquaintances thought – such of them as gave him a thought – that he must have died somewhere out in one of the back corners of the East. He did die too; but it was not in the East. He died within a block and a half of the club of his lawyer and not more than a quarter of a mile from the town house of his publisher. However, that detail, which is inconsequential, will come up later.

At about seven-forty-five on the evening of June seventeenth, four years ago, Patrolman Matthew Clabby was on duty – fixed post duty – at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. According to the report made by him at the time to his immediate superior and subsequently repeated by him under oath before the grand jury and still later at the trial, his attention was attracted – to use the common formula – by a disturbance occurring on a crosstown trolley car, eastward bound, which had halted just west of the corner.

Patrolman Clabby boarded the car to find a small, shabby man endeavouring to break away from a larger and better-dressed man, who held him fast by the collar. In reply to the officer’s questions the large man stated that he had detected the small one in the act of picking his pocket. He had waited, he said, until the other lifted his watch and chain and then had seized him and held him fast and called for help. At least three citizens, passengers on the car, confirmed the main points of the accuser’s story. For added proof there were the watch and chain. They were in the thief’s side coat pocket. With his own large firm hands Patrolman Clabby fished them out from there and confiscated them for purposes of evidence. As for the prisoner, he said nothing at all.

The policeman totted down in his little book the names and addresses of the eyewitnesses. This done, he took the small man and led him off afoot to the East Thirty-fifth Street Station, the owner of the watch going along to make a formal charge. Before the desk in the station house this latter person said he was named Hartigan – Charles Edward Hartigan, a private detective by occupation; and he repeated his account of the robbery, with amplifications. The pickpocket gave his name as James Williams and his age as thirty-eight, but declined to tell where he lived, what occupation he followed, or what excuse he had for angling after other people’s personal property on a crosstown car.

At this juncture Clabby grabbed one of his prisoner’s hands and ran a finger over its inner surface, seeking for callosities of the palm; then he nodded meaningly to the desk lieutenant.

“I guess he’s a dip all right, Loot,” said Clabby; “the inside of his hand is as soft as a baby’s.”

“Take him back!” said the lieutenant briefly.

Before obeying, Clabby faced the man about and searched him, the search revealing a small amount of money but no objects that might serve for the prisoner’s better identification. So, handling James Williams as casually and impersonally as though he were merely a rather unwieldy parcel, Clabby propelled him rearward along a passageway and turned him over to a turnkey, who turned him into a cell and left him there – though not very long. Within an hour he was taken in a patrol wagon to the night court, sitting at Jefferson Market, where an irritable magistrate held him, on the strength of a short affidavit by Clabby, to await the action of the grand jury.

Thereafter for a period James Williams, so far as the processes of justice were concerned, ceased to be a regular human being and became a small and inconspicuous grain in the whirring hopper of the law. He was as one pepper-corn in a crowded bin – one atom among a multitude of similar atoms. Yet the law from time to time took due cognisance of this mote’s existence.

For example, on the morning of the eighteenth a closed van conveyed him to the Tombs. For further example, an assistant district attorney, in about a month, introduced Clabby and Hartigan before the July grand jury. It took the grand jury something less than five minutes to vote an indictment charging James Williams with grand larceny; and ten days later it took a judge of General Sessions something less than three-quarters of an hour to try the said Williams.

The proceedings in this regard were entirely perfunctory. The defendant at the bar had no attorney. Accordingly the judge assigned to the task of representing him a fledgling graduate of the law school. Hartigan testified; Clabby testified; two eyewitnesses, a bricklayer and a bookkeeper, testified – all for the state. The prisoner could produce no witnesses in his own behalf and he declined to take the stand himself, which considerably simplified matters.

Red and stuttering with stage fright, the downy young law-school graduate made a brief plea for his client on the ground that no proof had been offered to show his client had a previous criminal record. Perfunctorily the young assistant district attorney summed up. In a perfunctory way the judge charged the jury; and the jury filed out, and – presumably in a perfunctory fashion also – took a ballot and were back in less than no time at all with a verdict of guilty.

James Williams, being ordered to stand up, stood up; being ordered to furnish his pedigree for the record, he refused to do so; being regarded, therefore, as a person who undoubtedly had a great deal to conceal, he was denied the measure of mercy that frequently is bestowed on first offenders. His Honour gave him an indeterminate sentence of not less than three years at hard labour in state prison, and one of the evening newspapers gave him three lines in the appropriate ratio of one line for each year. In three days more James Williams was at Sing Sing, wearing among other things a plain grey suit, a close hair-cut and a number, learning how to make shoes.

Now then, the task for me is to go back and begin this story where properly it should begin. Felix Looms, the well-known writer who went away on or about June fifteenth, and James Williams, who went to jail June seventeenth for picking a pocket, were one and the same person; or perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that James Williams was Felix Looms.

Lest my meaning be misunderstood let me add that this is no tale of a reversion to type. It has nothing whatever to do with any suddenly awakened hereditary impulse. In the blend of Felix Looms’ breed no criminal strain persisted. His father was a Congregational preacher from Massachusetts and his mother a district school-teacher from Northern New York. His grandsires, on both sides, were good, clean-strain American stock. So far as we know, never a bad skeleton had rattled its bones in his family’s closet. He himself was a product of strict training in a Christian home, a Yale education and much book reading. The transition from Felix Looms, bookworm, author and sociologist, to James Williams, common rogue and convict, was accomplished deliberately, and, as it were, with malice aforethought.

Here was how the thing came about. Secretly, through a period of years, Felix Looms had nursed an ambition to write a great novel of prison life. It is true he had written a number of short stories and at least one novelette dealing with prison life, and, what was more to the point, had sold them after writing them; but they lacked sincerity. There was neither sureness nor assurance about them. He felt this lack; his publishers felt it; and in a way his readers no doubt felt it too, without knowing exactly why they felt it.

It is one of the inexplicable mysteries of the trade of writing that no man, however well he handles the tools of that trade, can write convincingly of things about which he personally does not know. A man might aspire, let us say, to write a story with scenes laid in Northern Africa. In preparation for this task he might read a hundred volumes about Northern Africa, its soil, its climate, its natives, its characteristics. He might fairly saturate himself in literature pertaining to Northern Africa; then sit him down and write his story. Concede him to be a good craftsman; concede that the story was well done; that his descriptions were strong, his phrasing graphic, his technic correct – nevertheless, it would lack that quality they call plausibility. Somehow the reader would sense that this man had never seen Northern Africa with his own eyes or breathed its air with his own nostrils.

To this rule there are two exceptions: A writer may write of things that happened in a past generation, after the last man of that generation is dead – therefore historical novelists are common; or, provided his imagination be sufficiently plastic, he may write of things that are supposed to happen in the future – he may even describe the inhabitants of the planet Mars and their scheme of existence. None will gainsay him, seeing that no contemporary of his has been to Mars or knows more of the conditions that will prevail a year or a century hence than he knows. But where he deals with the actualities of his own day and time he must know those actualities at first hand, else his best efforts fall to the ground and are of no avail. He simply cannot get away with it. Hearsay evidence always was poor evidence.

Felix Looms knew this. In his own case he knew it better than his readers knew it – or even his publisher. Critical analysis of his work had revealed its flaws to him until in his own soul he was ashamed and humiliated, feeling himself to be a counterfeiter uttering a most spurious coinage. So one day he said to himself:

“The worst thing in our modern civilisation is a prison. It is wrong and we know it is wrong; and yet we have devised nothing to take its place. A prison is crime’s chemical laboratory; it is a great retort where virulent poisons are distilled. Civilisation maintains it in the hope of checking certain gross evils; yet in it and by it evils as great are born and fostered. And the truth about it has never been told in the form of fiction, which is the most convincing form of telling the truth. Always the trouble has been that the people who have been in prison could not write about it and the people who could write about it have not been in prison.

“I know I could write about it, and so I am going to prison. I shall go to prison for one year, perhaps two or possibly three years; and when I come out I shall write a novel about prison life that will make my name live after me, for I shall know my facts at first hand – I shall have the local colour of a prison in my grip as no other man has ever had it who had my powers as a writer. I am going to gamble with this thing – the prison. I will give it a slice out of my life for the sake of the great work I shall do afterward.”

Mind you, I am not saying he put his big idea – for surely it was an idea and a big one – in exactly those words; but that was his thought. And when he came to work out the plan he was astonished to find how easy it was to devise and to accomplish. Thanks to his mode of life, his practical isolation in the midst of five million other beings, he needed to confide in but one person; and in Hartigan he found that person. Hartigan, a veteran of the detective business, who knew and kept almost as many intimate secrets as a father confessor, showed surprise just twice – first when Looms confided to him his purpose and again when he learned how generously Looms was willing to pay for his co-operation.

Besides, as Looms at their first meeting pointed out and as Hartigan saw for himself, there was no obligation upon him to do anything that was actually wrong. Aboard that crosstown car Looms did really take a watch from Hartigan’s pocket. Whatever the motive behind the act, the act spoke for itself. All that Hartigan told under oath on the witness stand was straight enough. It was what he did not tell that mortised the fabric of their plot together and made the thing dovetail, whole truth with half truth.

At the very worst they had merely conspired – he as accessory and Looms as principal – to cheat the state of New York out of sundry years of free board and freedomless lodgings at an establishment wherein probably no other man since it was built had ever schemed of his own free will to abide.

So Hartigan, the private detective, having first got his fee, eventually got his watch back and now disappears from this narrative. So Felix Looms, the seeker after local colour, gave up his bachelor apartments in the Rubens Studio Building and went away, leaving no forwarding address behind him. So James Williams, the petty felon, with no known address except the size number in his hat, went up the river to serve an indeterminate sentence of not less than three years.

From the hour he entered the Tombs on that morning of the eighteenth of June, Felix Looms began to store up material against the day when he should transmute it into the written word. Speaking exactly, he began storing it up even sooner than that. The thrill and excitement of the arrest, the arraignment before the cross magistrate in the night court, the night in the station-house cell – all these things provided him with startlingly new and tremendously vivid sensations. Indeed, at the moment his probing fingers closed on Hartigan’s watch the mind pictures began to form and multiply inside his head.

Naturally, the Tombs had been most prolific of impressions; the local colour fairly swarmed and spawned there. He had visited the Tombs once before in his life, but he knew now that he had not seen it then. Behind a mask of bars and bolts it had hidden its real organism from him who had come in the capacity of a sightseer; but now, as an inmate, guarded and watched and tended in his cell like a wild beast in a show, he got under the skin of it. With the air he breathed – and it was most remarkably bad air – he took in and absorbed the flavour of the place.

He sensed it all – the sordid small intrigues; the playing of favourites by the turnkeys; the smuggling; the noises; the smells; the gossip that ran from tier to tier; the efforts of each man confined there to beat the law, against which each of them presumably had offended. It was as though he could see a small stream of mingled hope and fear pouring from beneath the patterned grill of each cell door to unite in a great flood that roared unendingly off and away to the courts beyond.

Mentally Felix Looms sought to put himself in the attitude of the men and women about him – these bona fide thieves and murderers and swindlers and bigamists who through every waking hour plotted and planned for freedom. That was the hardest part of his job. He could sense how they felt without personally being able to feel what they felt. As yet he took no notes, knowing that when he reached Sing Sing he would be stripped skin-bare and searched; but his brain was like a classified card index, in which he stored and filed a thousand and one thoughts. Hourly he gave thanks for a systematic and tenacious memory. And so day by day his copy and his local colour accumulated and the first chapters of his novel took on shape and substance in his mind.

Lying on the hard bed in his cell he felt the creative impulse stirring him, quickening his imagination until all his senses fairly throbbed to its big, deep harmonies. The present discomforts of his position, the greater discomforts that surely awaited him, filmed away to nothingness in the vision of the great thing he meant to accomplish. He told himself he was merely about to barter a bit out of his life for that for which a writer lives – the fame that endures; and he counted it a good bargain and an easy one.

In the period between his arrest and his conviction Felix Looms had one fear, and one only – that at his trial he might be recognised. He allowed his beard to grow, and on the day the summons came for him to go to court he laid aside his glasses. As it happened, no person was at the trial who knew him; though had such a person been there it is highly probable that he would not have recognised Felix Looms, the smugly dressed, spectacled, close-shaved man of letters, in this shabby, squinting, whiskered malefactor who had picked a citizen’s pocket before the eyes of other citizens.

With him to Sing Sing for confinement went four others – a Chinese Tong fighter bound for the death house and the death chair; an Italian wife-murderer under a life sentence; a young German convicted of forgery; and a negro loft robber – five felons all told, with deputies to herd them. Except the negro, Looms was the only native-born man of the five. The Chinaman, an inoffensive-looking little saffron-hided man, was manacled between two deputies. Seeing that the state would presently be at some pains to kill him, the state meantime was taking the very best of care of him. The remaining four were hitched in pairs, right wrist of one to left wrist of the other. A deputy marched with each coupled pair and a deputy marched behind. Looms’ fetter-mate was the Italian, who knew no English – or, at least, spoke none during the journey.

A prison van carried them from the Tombs to the Grand Central Station. It was barred and boarded like a circus cage – the van was – and like a circus cage it had small grated vents at each end, high up. A local train carried them from the station to Sing Sing. From start to finish, including the van ride, the journey took a little less than three hours. Three hours to get there, and three years to get back! Felix Looms made a mental note of this circumstance as he sat in his seat next the car window, with the wife-murderer beside him. He liked the line. It would make a good chapter heading.

The town of Ossining, where Sing Sing is, is a hilly town, the railroad station being at the foot of a hill, with the town mounting up uneven terraces on one side and the prison squatting flat on the river bank on the other. Arriving at Ossining, special and distinguishing honours were paid to the little yellow Chinaman. In a ramshackle village hack, with his two guards, he rode up a winding street, across a bridge spanning the railroad tracks, and then along a ridge commanding a view of the Hudson to the prison.

The four lesser criminals followed the same route, but afoot. They scuffled along through the dust their feet kicked up, and before their walk was done grew very sweaty and hot. The townspeople they met barely turned their heads to watch the little procession as it passed; for to them this was an every-day occurrence – as common a sight as a bread wagon or a postman.

It was not a long walk for the four. Quite soon they came to their destination. An iron door opened for them and in they went, two by two. Felix Looms saw how the German forger, who was ahead of him, flinched up against the negro as the door crashed behind them; but to Looms the sound the door made was a welcome sound. Secretly a high exaltation possessed him.

For a fact, this man who meant to learn about prison life at first hand went to the right place when he went to Sing Sing; for Sing Sing, the main part of it, was built in 1825-28, nearly a hundred years ago, when the punishment of imprisonment meant the punishment of soul and body and mind. In 1825 the man who for his misdeeds forfeited his liberty and his civil rights forfeited also the right to be considered in any wise a human being. As an animal he was regarded and as an animal he was treated, and as an animal he became. The institution made a beast not only of him but of the man who was set to keep him. Also, in such by-products as disease and degeneracy the plant was especially prolific.

The cell house, the dominating structure within the prison close, must look to-day very much as it looked along toward the end of the third decade of last century. Straight-walled, angular, homely beyond conception, it rises high above the stone stockade that surrounds it. Once its interior was lighted and aired only by narrow windows. You could hardly call them windows – they were like slits; they were like seams. About twenty years ago large inlets were cut into the walls. These inlets admit much air and some light.

As the cell house is the core of Sing Sing, so the cell structure is its core. In the exact centre of the building, steel within stone, six levels of cells rise, one level on another, climbing up almost to the roof, from which many hooded, round ventilators stare down like watchful eyes that never sleep. In each tier are two hundred cells, built back to back, each row of cells being faced by narrow iron balconies and reached by narrow wooden stairways. The person who climbs one of those flights of stairs and walks along one of those balconies passes a succession of flat-banded, narrow iron doors. Each door has set into it an iron grill so closely barred that the spaces between the patterns are no larger than the squares of a checkerboard.

Not a single cell has a window in it. Even at high noon the interior is wrapped in a sourish, ill-savoured gloom as though the good daylight had addled and turned sour as soon as it got inside this place. The lowermost cells are always damp. Moisture forms on the walls, sweating through the pores of the stone like an exhalation, so that, with his finger for a pen, a man may write his name in the trickling ooze.

A cell measures in width three feet four inches; in length, six feet six inches; in height, seven feet and no inches. It has a cubic capacity of about one hundred and fifty feet, which is considerably less than half the cubic space provided by our Government for each individual in army barracks in time of war. It contains for furniture a bunk, which folds back against the wall when not in use, or two bunks, swung one above the other; sometimes a chair; sometimes a stool; sometimes a shelf, and always a bucket.

For further details of the sanitary arrangements see occasional grand-jury reports and semioccasional reports by special investigating committees. These bodies investigate and then report; and their reports are received by the proper authorities and printed in the newspapers. Coincidentally the newspapers comment bitterly on the conditions existing at Sing Sing and call on public opinion to rouse itself. Public opinion remaining unroused, the sanitary arrangements remain unchanged.