Local Color

It did not occur to her to tell him how the brother had died, or when.

“What’s your business?” he demanded. Then as she seemed not to get his intent, he added:

“Can’t you understand plain English? What do you do for a living?”

“Your pardon, doctor; I am a milliner.”

“And this other girl – your sister – she’s been staying at home and doing the housekeeping, you said?”

She nodded. For a moment there was silence, she still seated, he before her balancing himself on the longer leg of the two and on his heavy cane. “I’ll make a blood test in the morning,” he said at length, repeating what he had said a moment before.

“Doctor,” said Marie, “tell me, please, the truth. My sister – is she then so ill?”

“Ill?” he burst out at her irritably. “Ill? I should say she is ill. She’s got tuberculosis, if you know what that means – consumption.”

She sucked her breath in sharply. Her next question came slowly: “What is there then to do?”

“Well, she couldn’t last long here – that’s dead certain. You’ve got to get her away from here. You’ve got to get her up into the North Woods, in the mountains – Saranac or some place like that – in a sanitarium or an invalids’ camp where she can have the right kind of treatment. Then she’ll have a chance.”

By a chance he meant that with proper care the sick girl might live for three months or for four, or at the outside for six. The case was as good as hopeless now; he knew that. Still his duty was to see that his patients’ lives were prolonged – if possible.

“These mountains, I do not know them. We are strangers in this country.”

“I’ll find out about a place where you can get her in,” he volunteered. “I’ll bring you the information in the morning – names and addresses and everything. Somebody’ll have to go up there with her – you, I guess – and get her settled. She’s in no shape to be travelling alone. Then you can leave her there and arrange to send up so much a week to pay for her keep and the treatment and all. Oh, yes – and until we get her away from here you’ll have to lay off from your work and stay with her, or else hire somebody to stay with her. She mustn’t be left alone for long at a time – she’s too sick for that. Something might happen. Understand?”

“And all this – it will cost much money perhaps?”

The cripple misread the note in her voice as she asked him this. This flat now, it was infinitely cleaner than the abodes of nine-tenths of those among whom he was called to minister. To his man’s eyes the furnishings, considering the neighbourhood, appeared almost luxurious. That bed yonder against the wall was very much whiter and looked very much softer than the one upon which he slept. And the woman herself was well clad. He had no patience with these scrimping, stingy foreigners – thank God he was himself native-born – these cheap, penurious aliens who would haggle over pennies when a life was the stake. And there was no patience in his uplifted, rumbling voice as he answered her:

“Say, you don’t want your sister to be a pauper patient, do you? If you do, just say so and I’ll notify the department and they’ll put her in a charity institution. She’d last just about a week there. Is that your idea? – if it is, say so!”

“No, no, no,” she said, “not charity – not for my sister.”

“I thought as much,” he said, a little mollified. “All right then, I’ll write a letter to the sanitarium people; they ought to make you a special rate. Oh, it’ll cost you twenty-five dollars a week maybe – say, at the outside, thirty dollars a week. And that’ll be cheap enough, figuring in the food she’ll have to have and the care and the nursing and all. Then, of course, there’ll be your railroad tickets on top of that. You’d better have some ready money on hand so we can get her shipped out of here before it’s too – Well, before many days anyhow.”

She nodded.

“I shall have the money,” she promised.

“All right,” he said; “then you’d better hand me two dollars now. That’s the price of my call. I don’t figure on charging you for making the blood test. And the information about the sanitarium and the letter I’m going to write – I’ll throw all that in too.”

She paid him his fee from a small handbag. At the hall door he paused on his stumping way out.

“I think she’ll be all right for to-night – I gave her something,” he said with a jerk of his thumb toward the middle room. “If you just let her stay quiet that’ll be the best thing for her. But you’d better run in my place the first thing in the morning and tell me how she passed the night. Good night.”

“Good night, doctor – and we thank you!”

He went clumping down the steps, cursing the darkness of the stairwell and the steep pitch of the stairs. Before the sound of his fumbling feet had quite died away Marie, left alone, had made up her mind as to a certain course. In so short a time as that had the definite resolution come to her. And as she still sat there, in an attitude of listening, Helene, in the middle room, dragged herself up from her knees where she had been crouched at the slitted door between. She had heard all or nearly all the gruff lame doctor said. Indeed, she had sensed the truth for herself before she heard him speak it. What he told her sister was no news to the eavesdropper; merely it was confirmation of a thing she already knew. Once up on her bare feet, she got across the floor and into her bed, and put her head on the pillow and closed her eyes, counterfeiting sleep. In her mind, too, a plan had formed.

It was only a minute or two after this that Marie came silently to the door and peered in, looking and listening. She heard the regular sound of the sick girl’s breathing. By the light of the gas that was turned down low she saw, or thought she saw, that Helene was asleep. She closed the door very softly. She freshened her frock with a crisp collarband and with crisp wristbands. She clasped about her neck a small gold chain and she put on her head her small, neat black hat. And then this girl, who meant to defile her body, knelt alongside her bed and prayed the Blessed Virgin to keep her soul clean.

With her handbag on her arm she passed out into the hall. Across the hall a Jewish family lived – by name, the Levinski family – consisting of a father who was a push-cart peddler, a gross and slattern mother who was continually occupied with the duties of being a mother, and any number of small Levinskis. In answer to her knock at their door, Mrs. Levinski came, a shapeless, vast shape in her night dress, bringing with her across the threshold strong smells of stale garlic, soiled flannel and cold fried carp. Marie had a nodding acquaintance with this neighbour of hers and no more.

“My sister, she is sick,” she told Mrs. Levinski. “And I must go out. Please, will you listen? If she should awake and call out for me, you will please to tell her I am gone but soon will be back again. If you please?”

Mrs. Levinski said she would, and to show she meant it opened wide her door before she returned to her household duties.

For November the weather was warm, but it was damp and would be damper. A fine drizzle was falling as Marie Misereux came to the lower hallway entrance and looked out into the night; and East Thirteenth Street, which is never entirely empty, was almost empty. She hesitated a moment, with her left hand clenched tight against her breast, and then stepped out, heading westward. At the first avenue crossing she came upon a man, a fairly well-dressed man, who stood below the stoop of a private house that had been converted into some sort of club, as if undecided in his own mind whether to go in or to stay out. She walked straight up to him.

“Will you go with me, m’sieur?” she said.

He peered at her from under his hatbrim. Almost over them was a street lamp. By its light he saw that her face was dead white; that neither her lips nor her cheeks were daubed with cosmetics, and that her lips were not twisted into the pitiable, painted smile of the streetwalker. Against the smooth fulness of her dress her knotted left hand made a hard, white clump. Her breasts, he saw, heaved up and down as though she had been running and her breath came out between her teeth with a whistling sound. Altogether she seemed most oddly dressed and most oddly mannered for the part she played.

“You want me to go with you?” he asked, half incredulously, half suspiciously, still staring hard.

“If – if you will be so good.”

“Do you need the money that bad?”

“Assuredly, m’sieur,” she said with a simple, desperate directness. “Why else would I ask you?”

“Say,” he said almost roughly, “you better go on home. I don’t believe you belong on the streets. Here!”

He drew something that was small and crumply from a waistcoat pocket, and drawing a step nearer to her he shoved it between two of the fingers of her right hand.

“Now, then,” he said, “you take that and hustle on back home.”

He laughed, then, shamefacedly and in a forced sort of way, as though embarrassed by his own generosity, and then he turned and went quickly up the steps and into the club house.

She looked at what he had given her. It was a folded dollar bill. As though it had been nasty to the touch, she dropped it and rubbed her hand upon her frock, as if to cleanse it of a stain. Then, in the same instant nearly, she stooped down and picked up the bill from the dirty pavement and kissed it and opened her black handbag. Except for a few cents in change, the bag was empty. Except for those few cents and a sum of less than ten dollars yet remaining in the savings bank, the two dollars she had given the lame doctor was all the money she had in the world. She tucked the bill up in still smaller compass and put it in the bag. She had made the start for the fund she meant to have. It was not charity. In the sweat of her agonized soul she had earned it.

She crossed over the first bisecting avenue to the westward, and the second; she passed a few pedestrians, among them being a policeman trying door latches, a drunken man whose body swayed and whose legs wove queer patterns as he walked, and half a dozen pale, bearded men who spoke Yiddish and gestured volubly with their hands as they went by in a group. At Third Avenue she turned north, finding the pavements more thickly populated, and just after she came to where Fourteenth Street crosses she saw a heavily built, well-dressed man in a light overcoat, coming toward her at a deliberative, dawdling gait. She put herself directly in his path. He checked his pace to avoid a collision and looked at her speculatively, with one hand fingering his moustache.

“Will you go with me?” she said, repeating the invitation she had used before.

“Where to?” he said, showing interest.

“Where you please,” she said in her halting speech.

“You’re on,” he said. He fell in alongside her, facing her about and slipping a hand well inside the crook of her right arm.

“You – you will go with me?” she asked. Suddenly her body was in a tremble.

“No, sister,” he stated grimly, “I ain’t goin’ with you but you’re sure goin’ with me.” And as he said it he tightened his grip upon her forearm.

He had need to say no more. She knew what had happened. She had not spent two years and better in a New York tenement without learning that there were men of the police – detectives they called them in English – who wore no uniforms but went about their work apparelled as ordinary citizens. She was arrested, that was plain enough, and she understood full well for what she had been arrested. She made no outcry, offered no defence, broke forth into no plea for release. Indeed her thought for the moment was all for her half-sister and not for herself. So she said nothing as he steered her swiftly along.

At a street light where a patrol telephone box of iron was bolted to the iron post the plain-clothes man slowed up. Then he changed his mind.

“Guess I won’t call the wagon,” he said. “I happen to know it’s out. It ain’t far. You and me’ll walk and take the air.” He turned with her westward through the cross street. Then, struck by her silence, he asked a question:

“A Frenchy, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” she told him. “I am French. Where – where are you taking me, m’sieur? Is it to the prison – the station house?”

“Quit your kiddin’,” he said mockingly. “I s’pose you don’t know where we’re headin’? Night court for yours – Jefferson Market. Right over here across town.”

“They will not keep me there long? They will permit me to go if I pay a fine, eh? A small fine, eh? That is all they will do to me, is it not so?”

He grunted derisively. “Playin’ ignorant, huh? I s’pose you’re goin’ to tell me now you ain’t never been up in the night court before?”

“No, no, m’sieur, never – I swear it to you. Never have I been – been like this before.”

“That’s what they all say. Well, if you can prove it – if you ain’t got any record of previous complaints standin’ agin’ you, and your finger prints don’t give you away – you’ll get off pretty light, maybe, but not with a fine. I guess the magistrate’ll give you a bit over on the Island – maybe thirty days, maybe sixty. Depends on how he’s feelin’ to-night.”

“The Island?”

“Sure, Blackwell’s Island. A month over there won’t do you no harm.”

“I cannot – you must not take me,” she broke out passionately now. “For thirty days? Oh, no, no, m’sieur!”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” He was mimicking her tone. “I guess you can stand doin’ your thirty days if the rest of these cruisers can. If you should turn out to be an old offender it’d likely be six months – ”

He did not finish the sentence. With a quick, hard jerk she broke away from him and turned and ran back the way she had come. She dropped her handbag and her foot spurned it into the gutter. She ran straight, her head down, like a hunted thing sorely pressed. Her snug skirt hampered her though. With long strides the detective overtook her. She fought him off silently, desperately, with both hands, with all her strength. He had to be rough with her – but no rougher than the emergency warranted. He pressed her flat up against a building and, holding her fast there with the pressure of his left arm across her throat, he got his nippers out of his pocket. Another second or two more of confused movement and he had her helpless. The little steel curb was twined tight about her right wrist below the rumpled white cuff. By a twist of the handles which he held gripped in his palm he could break the skin. Two twists would dislocate the wrist bone. A strong man doesn’t fight long after the links of the nippers start biting into his flesh.

“Now, then,” he grunted triumphantly, jerking her out alongside him, “I guess you’ll trot along without balkin’. I was goin’ to treat you nice but you wouldn’t behave, would you? Come on now and be good.”

He glanced backward over his shoulder. Three or four men and boys, witnesses to the flight and to the recapture, were tagging along behind them.

“Beat it, you,” he ordered. Then as they hesitated: “Beat it now, or I’ll be runnin’ somebody else in.” They fell back, following at a safer distance.

He had led his prisoner along for almost a block before he was moved to address her again:

“And you thought you could make your getaway from me? Not a chance! Say, what do you want to act that way for, makin’ it harder for both of us? Say, on the level now, ain’t you never been pinched before?”

She thought he meant the pressure of the steel links on her wrist.

“It is not that,” she said, bending the curbed hand upward. “That I do not think of. It is of my sister, my sister Helene, that I think.” Her voice for the first time broke and shivered.

“What about your sister?” There was something of curiosity but more of incredulity in his question.

“She is ill, m’sieur, very ill, and she is alone. There is no one but me now. My brother – he is dead. It is for her that I have done – this – this thing to-night. If I do not return to her – if you do not let me go back – she will die, m’sieur. I tell you she will die.”

If she was acting it was good acting. Half convinced against his will of her sincerity, and half doubtfully, he came to a standstill.

“Where do you live – is it far from here?”

“It is in this street, m’sieur. It is not far.” He could feel her arm quivering in the grip of his nippers.

“Maybe I’m makin’ a sucker of myself,” he said dubiously, defining the diagnosis as much to himself as to her. “But if it ain’t far I might walk you back there and give this here sister of yours the once-over. And then if you ain’t lyin’ we’ll see – ”

“Must I go so?” She lifted her hand up, indicating her meaning.

“You bet your life you’re goin’ that way or not at all. I’m takin’ no more chances with you.”

“But it would kill her – she would die to see me so. She must not know I have done this thing, m’sieur. She must not see this – ” The little chain rattled.

“Come on,” he ordered in a tone of finality. “I thought that sick sister gag was old stuff, but I was goin’ to give you a show to make good – ”

“But I swear – ”

“Save your breath! Save your breath! Tell your spiel to the judge. Maybe he’ll listen. I’m through.”

They were almost at the doors of the squat and ugly building which the Tenderloin calls Jeff Market when he noticed that her left hand was clutched against her breast. He remembered then she had held that hand so when she first spoke to him; except during her flight and the little struggle after he ran her down, she must have been holding it so all this time.

“What’s that you’ve got in your hand?” he demanded suspiciously, and with a practiced flip of the nipper handles swung her round so that she faced him.

“It is my own, m’sieur. It is – ”

“Nix, nix with that. I gotta see. Open up them fingers.”

She opened her hand slowly, reluctantly. The two of them were in the shadow of the elevated structure then, close up alongside a pillar, and he had to peer close to see what the object might be. Having seen he did not offer to touch it, but he considered his prisoner closely, taking her in from her head to her feet, before he led her on across the roadway and the pavement and in at one of the doors of that odoursome clearing house of vice and misery, mercy and justice, where the night court sits seven nights a week.

First, though, he untwisted the disciplinary little steel chain from about her wrist. The doorway by which they entered gave upon the Tenth Street face of the building and admitted them into a maze of smelly dim corridors and cross-halls in the old jail wing directly beneath the hideous and aborted tower, which in a neighbourhood of stark architectural offences makes of Jefferson Market courthouse a shrieking crime against good looks and good taste.

The inspector’s man escorted the French girl the length of a short passage. At a desk which stood just inside the courtroom door he detained her while a uniformed attendant entered her name and her age, which she gave as twenty-one, and her house number, in a big book which before now has been Doomsday Book for many a poor smutted butterfly of the sidewalks. The detective, standing by, took special note of the name and the address and, for his own purposes, wrote them both down on a scrap of card. This formality being finished, the pair crossed the half-filled courtroom, he guiding by a hand on her elbow, she obeying with a numbed and passive docility, to where there is a barred-in space like an oversized training den for wild animals. This cage or coop, whichever you might choose to call it, has a whited cement wall for its back, and rows of close-set rounded iron bars for its front and sides, and wooden benches for its plenishings. The bars run straight up, like slender black shadows caught and frozen into solidity, to the soiled ceiling above; they are braced across with iron horizontals, which makes the pen strong enough to hold a rhino. Its twin stands alongside it, filling the remaining space at the far side of the big room. In the old days one pen was meant for male delinquents and one for female. But now the night court for men holds its sessions in a different part of town and only women delinquents are brought to this place. It may or may not be a reflection upon our happy civilisation – I leave that point for the sociologists to settle – but it is a fact that ninety per cent of them are brought here charged with the same thing.

The first coop held perhaps a dozen women and girls. One of them was quietly weeping. The others, looking, as they sat on one of the benches in their more or less draggled finery, like a row of dishevelled cage birds of gay plumage, maintained attitudes which ranged from the highly indifferent to the excessively defiant. The detective unlatched the door, which was of iron wattles too, and put his prisoner inside.

“You’ll have to stay here awhile,” he bade her. His tone was altered from that which he had employed toward her at any time before. “Just set down there and be comfortable.”

But she did not sit. She drew herself close up into a space where wall and wall, meeting at right angles, made a corner. Her cellmates eyed her. Being inclined to believe from her garb that she probably was a shopgirl caught pilfering, none of them offered to hail her; all of them continued, though, to watch her curiously. As he closed and bolted the door and moved away the plain-clothes man, glancing back, caught a fair look at her face behind the iron uprights. Her big, staring eyes reminded him of something, some creature, he had seen somewhere. Later he remembered. He had seen that same look out of the staring eyes of animals, lying with legs bound on the floor of a slaughterhouse.

Following this, the ordinary procedure for him would have been to call up the East Twenty-second Street station house by telephone and report that, having made an arrest, he had seen fit to bring his prisoner direct to court; then visit the complaint clerk’s office in a little cubby-hole of a room, and there swear to a short affidavit setting forth the accusation in due form; finally, file the affidavit with the magistrate’s clerk and stand by to await the calling of that particular case. Strangely enough, he did none of these things.

Instead, he made his way direct to the magistrate’s desk inside the railing which cut the room across from side to side. The pent, close smell of the place was fit to sicken men unused to it. It commingled those odours which seem always to go with a police court – of unwashed human bodies, of iodoform, of stale fumes of alcohol, of cheap rank perfumery. Petty crime exhales an atmosphere which is peculiarly its own. This man was used to this smell. Smelling it was to him a part of the day’s work – the night’s work rather.

The magistrate upon the bench was a young magistrate, newly appointed by the mayor to this post. Because he belonged to an old family and because his sister had married a rich man the papers loved to refer to him as the society judge. As the detective came up he was finishing a hearing which had lasted less than three minutes.

“Any previous record as shown by the finger prints and the card indexes?” he was asking of the officer complainant.

“Three, Your Honour,” answered the man glibly. “Suspended sentence oncet, thirty days oncet, thirty days oncet again. Probation officer’s report shows that this here young woman – ”

“Never mind that,” said the magistrate; “six months.”

The officer and the woman who had been sentenced to six months fell back, and the detective shoved forward, putting his arms on the top of the edge of the desk to bring his head closer to the magistrate.

“Your Honour,” he began, speaking in a sort of confidential undertone, “could I have a word with you?”

“Go ahead, Schwartzmann,” said the magistrate, bending forward to hear.

“Well, Judge, a minute ago I brought a girl in here; picked her up at Fourteenth Street and Thoid Avenue for solicitin’. So far as that goes it’s a dead-open-and-shut case. She come up to me on the street and braced me. She wasn’t dressed like most of these Thoid-Avenue cruisers dress and she’s sort of acted as if she’d never been pinched before – tried to give me an argument on the way over. Well, that didn’t get her anywheres with me. You can’t never tell when one of them dames will turn out in a new make-up, but somethin’ that happened when we was right here outside the door – somethin’ I seen about her – sort of – ” He broke off the sentence in the middle and started again. “Well, anyhow, Your Honour, I may be makin’ a sucker of myself, but I didn’t swear out no affidavit and I ain’t called up the station house even. I stuck her over there in the bull-pen and then I come straight to you.”