I shall have the money, she promised.
All right, he said; then youd better hand me two dollars now. Thats the price of my call. I dont figure on charging you for making the blood test. And the information about the sanitarium and the letter Im going to write Ill 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 shell 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 thatll be the best thing for her. But youd 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 girls 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, msieur? 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, msieur, she said with a simple, desperate directness. Why else would I ask you?
Say, he said almost roughly, you better go on home. I dont 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.
Youre 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 aint goin with you but youre 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 wont call the wagon, he said. I happen to know its out. It aint far. You and mell 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, aint you?
Yes, she told him. I am French. Where where are you taking me, msieur? Is it to the prison the station house?
Quit your kiddin, he said mockingly. I spose you dont know where were 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 spose youre goin to tell me now you aint never been up in the night court before?
No, no, msieur, never I swear it to you. Never have I been been like this before.
Thats what they all say. Well, if you can prove it if you aint got any record of previous complaints standin agin you, and your finger prints dont give you away youll get off pretty light, maybe, but not with a fine. I guess the magistratell give you a bit over on the Island maybe thirty days, maybe sixty. Depends on how hes feelin to-night.
The Island?
Sure, Blackwells Island. A month over there wont do you no harm.
I cannot you must not take me, she broke out passionately now. For thirty days? Oh, no, no, msieur!
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 itd 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 doesnt 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 youll trot along without balkin. I was goin to treat you nice but you wouldnt 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 Ill 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, aint 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, msieur, 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, msieur. 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, msieur. It is not far. He could feel her arm quivering in the grip of his nippers.
Maybe Im makin a sucker of myself, he said dubiously, defining the diagnosis as much to himself as to her. But if it aint far I might walk you back there and give this here sister of yours the once-over. And then if you aint lyin well see
Must I go so? She lifted her hand up, indicating her meaning.
You bet your life youre goin that way or not at all. Im 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, msieur. 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 hell listen. Im 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.
Whats that youve 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, msieur. 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 inspectors 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.