XIV
Archie Koerner and Spud Healy and the others of the gang lay in prison for a week; each morning they were taken with other prisoners to the bull-pen, and there they would stand–for an hour, two hours, three hours–and look through the heavy wire screen at officers, lawyers, court attachés, witnesses and prosecutors who passed and repassed, peering at them as at caged animals, some curiously, some in hatred and revenge, some with fear, now and then one with pity. The session would end, they would be taken downstairs again–the police were not yet ready. But finally, one Saturday morning, they were taken into the court-room and arraigned. Bostwick, the judge, heard a part of the evidence; it was nearly noon, and court never sat on Saturday afternoons. Bostwick and the prosecutor both were very anxious to get away for their half-holiday. The session had been long and trying, the morning was sultry, a summer day had fallen unexpectedly in the midst of the spring. Bostwick was uncomfortable in his heavy clothes. He hurried the hearing and sent them all to the workhouse for thirty days, and fined them the costs. Marriott had realized the hopelessness of the case from the first; even he was glad the hearing was over, glad to have Archie off his mind.
The little trial was but a trivial incident in the life of the city; Bostwick and the prosecutor, to whom it was but a part of the day's work, forgot it in the zest of ordering a luncheon; the police forgot it, excepting Kouka, who boasted to the reporters and felt important for a day. Frisby, a little lawyer with a catarrhal voice, thought of it long enough to be thankful that he had demanded his fee in advance from the mother of the boy he had defended–it took her last cent and made her go hungry over Sunday. Back on the Flats, in the shadow of the beautiful spire of St. Francis, there were cries, Gaelic lamentations, keening, counting of beads and prayers to the Virgin. The reporters made paragraphs for their newspapers, writing in the flippant spirit with which they had been taught to treat the daily tragedies of the police court. Some people scanned the paragraphs, and life passed by on the other side; the crowds of the city surged and swayed, and Sunday dawned with the church-bells ringing peacefully.
The Koerner family had the news that evening from Jerry Crowley, the policeman who had recently been assigned to that beat, his predecessor, Miller, having been suspended for drunkenness. Crowley had had a hard time of it ever since he came on the beat. The vicinity was German and he was Irish, and race hatred pursued him daily with sneers, and jibes, and insults, now and then with stones and clods. The children took their cue from the gang at Nussbaum's; the gang made his life miserable. Yet Crowley was a kindly Irishman, with many a jest and joke, and a pleasant word for every one. Almost anybody he arrested could get Crowley to let him go by begging hard enough. On the warm evenings Koerner would sit on the stoop, and Crowley, coming by, would stop for a dish of gossip.
"Oh, come now, Mr. Koerner," he said that Saturday night, after he had crudely told the old German of his son's fate, "I wouldn't take it that hard; shure an' maybe it's good 'twill be doin' the lad an' him needin' it the way he does."
Officer Crowley was interrupted in his comforting by a racket at the corner–the warm, soft nights were bringing the gang out, and he went away to wage his hopeless battle with it. When he returned, old man Koerner had gone indoors.
Gusta shared all her father's humiliation and all her mother's grief at Archie's imprisonment. She felt that she should visit her brother in prison, but it was a whole week before she could get away, and then on a brilliant Sunday afternoon she went to the workhouse. The hideous prison buildings were surrounded by a high fence, ugly in its dull red paint; the office and the adjoining quarters where the superintendent lived had a grass plot in which some truckling trusty had made flower-beds to please the superintendent's wife. In the office an old clerk, in a long black coat, received Gusta solemnly. He was sitting, from the habit of many years, on the high stool at the desk where he worked; ordinarily he crouched over his books in the fear that political changes would take his job from him; now a Sunday paper, which the superintendent and his family had read and discarded, replaced the sad records, but he bent over this none the less timidly. After a long while an ill-natured guard, whose face had grown particularly sinister and vicious in the business, ordered Gusta to follow him, and led her back into the building. Reluctantly he unlocked doors and locked them behind her, and Gusta grew alarmed. Once, waiting for him to unlock what proved to be a final door, he waited while a line of women, fourteen or fifteen of them, in uniform of striped gingham, went clattering up a spiral iron stairway; two or three of the women were negresses. They had been down to the services some Christian people had been holding for the inmates, preaching to them that if they believed on Jesus they would find release, and peace, and happiness. These people, of course, did not mean release from the workhouse, and the peace and happiness, it seemed, could not come until the inmates died. So long as they lived, their only prospect seemed to be unpaid work by day, bread and molasses to eat, and a cell to sleep in at night, with iron bars locking them in and armed men to watch them. However, the inmates enjoyed the services because they were allowed to sing.
After the women disappeared, Gusta stood fearfully before a barred door and looked down into a cell-house. The walls were three stories high, and sheer from the floor upward, with narrow windows at the top. Inside this shell of brick the cells were banked tier on tier, with dizzy galleries along each tier. Though Gusta could see no one, she could hear a multitude of low voices, like the humming of a bee-hive–the prisoners, locked two in each little cell, were permitted to talk during this hour. The place was clean, but had, of course, the institutional odor. The guard called another guard, and between them they unlocked several locks and threw several levers; finally a cell-door opened–and Gusta saw Archie come forth. He wore a soiled ill-fitting suit of gray flannel with wide horizontal stripes, and his hair had been clipped close to his head. The sight so confused and appalled Gusta that she could not speak, and the guard, standing suspiciously by her side to hear all that was said, made it impossible for her to talk. The feeling was worse than that she had had at the police station when an iron door had thus similarly separated her from her brother.
Archie came close and took hold of the bars with both his hands and peered at her; he asked her a few questions about things at home, and charged her with a few unimportant messages and errands. But she could only stand there with the tears streaming down her face. Presently the guard ordered Archie back to his cell, and he went away, turning back wistfully and repeating his messages in a kind of desperate wish to connect himself with the world.
When Gusta got outside again, she determined that she would not go home, for there the long shadow of the prison lay. She did not know where to go or what to do, but while she was trying to decide she heard from afar the music of a band–surely there would be distraction. So she walked in the direction of the music. About the workhouse, as about all prisons, were the ramshackles of squalid poverty and worse; but little Flint Street, along which she took her way, began to pick up, and she passed cottages, painted and prim, where workmen lived, and the people she saw, and their many children playing in the street, were well dressed and happy. It seemed strange to Gusta that any one should be happy then. When suddenly she came into Eastend Avenue, she knew at last where she was and whence the music came; she remembered that Miami Park was not far away. The avenue was crowded with vehicles, not the stylish kind she had been accustomed to on Claybourne Avenue, but buggies from livery-stables, in which men drove to the road-houses up the river, surreys with whole families crowded in them, now and then some grocer's or butcher's delivery wagon furnished with seats and filled with women and children. The long yellow trolley-cars that went sliding by with incessant clangor of gongs were loaded; the only signs of the aristocracy Gusta once had known were the occasional automobiles, bound, like the Sunday afternoon buggy-riders, up the smooth white river road.
Eastend Avenue ran through the park, and just before it reached that playground of the people it was lined with all kinds of amusement pavilions, little vaudeville shows, merry-go-rounds, tintype studios, shooting galleries, pop-corn and lemonade stands, public dance halls where men and girls were whirling in the waltz. On one side was a beer-garden. All these places were going noisily, with men shouting out the attractions inside, hand-organs and drums making a wild, barbaric din, and in the beer-garden a German band braying out its meretricious tunes. But at the beginning of the park a dead-line was invisibly drawn–beyond that the city would not allow the catch-penny amusements to go. On one side of the avenue the park sloped down to the river, on the other it stretched into a deep grove. The glass roof of a botanical house gleamed in the sun, and beyond, hidden among the trees, were the zoölogical gardens, where a deer park, a bear-pit, a monkey house, and a yard in which foxes skulked and racoons slept, strove with their mild-mannered exhibits for the beginnings of a menagerie. And everywhere were people strolling along the walks, lounging under the trees, hundreds of them, thousands of them, dressed evidently in their best clothes, seeking relief from the constant toil that kept their lives on a monotonous level.
Gusta stood a while and gazed on the river. On the farther shore its green banks rose high and rolled away with the imagination into woods and fields and farms. Here and there little cat-boats moved swiftly along, their sails white in the sun; some couples were out in rowboats. But as Gusta looked she suddenly became self-conscious; she saw that, of all the hundreds, she was the only one alone. Girls moved about, or stood and talked and giggled in groups, and every girl seemed to have some fellow with her. Gusta felt strange and out of place, and a little bitterness rose in her heart. The band swelled into a livelier, more strident strain, and Gusta resented this sudden burst of joyousness. She turned to go away, but just then she saw that a young man had stopped and was looking at her. He was a well-built young fellow, as strong as Archie; he had dark hair and a small mustache curled upward at the corners in a foreign way. His cheeks were ruddy; he carried a light cane and smoked a cigar. When he saw that Gusta had noticed him he smiled and Gusta blushed. Then he came up to her and took off his hat.
"Are you taking a walk?" he asked.
"I was going home," Gusta replied. She wondered how she could get away without hurting the young man's feelings, for he seemed to be pleasant, harmless and well meaning.
"It's a fine day," he said. "There's lots o' people out."
"Yes," said Gusta.
"Where 'bouts do you live?"
"On Bolt Street."
"Oh, I live out that way myself!" said the young man. "It's quite a ways from here. Been out to see some friends?"
"Yes." Gusta hesitated. "I had an errand to do out this way."
"Don't you want to go in the park and see the zoo? There's lots of funny animals back there." The young man pointed with his little cane down one of the gravel walks that wound among the trees. Gusta looked, and saw the people–young couples, women with children, and groups of young men, sauntering that way. Then she looked at the street-cars, loaded heavily, with passengers clinging to the running-boards; she was tempted to go, but it was growing late.
"No, thanks," she said, "I must be going home now."
"Are you going to walk or take the car?" asked the young man.
"I'll walk, I guess," she said; and then, lest he think she had no car fare, she added: "the cars are so crowded."
She started then, and was surprised when the young man naturally walked along by her side, swinging his cane and talking idly to her. At first she was at a loss whether to let him walk with her or not; she had a natural fear, a modesty, the feminine instinct, but she did not know just how to dismiss him. She kept her face averted and her eyes downcast; but finally, when her fears had subsided a little, she glanced at him occasionally; she saw that he was good-looking, and she considered him very well dressed. He had a gold watch chain, and when she asked him what time it was he promptly drew out a watch. Their conversation, from being at the first quite general, soon became personal, and before they had gone far Gusta learned that the young man's name was Charlie Peltzer, that he was a plumber, and that sometimes he made as much as twenty dollars a week. By the time they parted at the corner near Gusta's home they felt very well acquainted and had agreed to meet again.
After that they met frequently. In the evening after supper Gusta would steal out, Peltzer would be waiting for her at the corner, and they would stroll under the trees that were rapidly filling with leaves. Once, passing Policeman Crowley, Gusta saw him looking at them narrowly. There was a little triangular park not far from Gusta's home, and there the two would sit all the evening. The moon was full, the nights were soft and mild and warm. On Sundays they went to the park where they had met, and now and then they danced in the public pavilion. But Gusta never danced with any of the other men there, nor did Peltzer dance with any of the other girls; they danced always together, looking into each other's eyes. Now she could endure the monotony and the drudgery at home, the children's peevishness, her mother's melancholy, her father's querulousness. Even Archie's predicament lost its horror and its sadness for her. She had not yet, however, told Peltzer, and she felt ashamed of Archie, as if, in creating the possibility of compromising her, he had done her a wrong. She went about in a dream, thinking of Peltzer all the time, and of the wonderful thing that had brought all this happiness into her life.
Gusta had not, however, as yet allowed Peltzer to go home with her; he went within half a block of the house, and there, in the shadow, they took their long farewell. But Peltzer was growing more masterful; each night he insisted on going a little nearer, and at last one night he clung to her, bending over her, looking into her blue eyes, his lips almost on hers, and before they were aware they were at her door. Gusta was aroused by Crowley's voice. Crowley was there with her father, telling him again the one incident in all his official career that had distinguished him for a place in the columns of the newspapers. He was just at the climax of the thrilling incident, and they heard his voice ring out:
"An' I kept right on toowards him, an' him shootin' at me breasht four toimes–"
He had got up, in the excitement he so often evoked in living over that dramatic moment again, to illustrate the action, and he saw Gusta and Charlie. Peltzer stopped, withdrew his arm hurriedly from Gusta's waist, and then Crowley, forgetting his story, called out:
"Oh-ho, me foine bucko!"
Then Koerner saw Gusta, and, forgetting for a moment, tried to rise to his feet, then dropped back again.
"Who's dot feller mit you, huh? Who's dot now?" he demanded.
"Aw, tut, tut, man," said Crowley. "Shure an' the girl manes no harm at all–an' the laad, he's a likely wan. Shure now, Misther Koerner, don't ye be haard on them–they're that young now! An' 'tis the spring, do ye moind–and it's well I can see the phite flower on the thorn tra in me ould home these days!"
Gusta's heart and Peltzer's heart warmed to Crowley, but old Koerner said:
"In mit you!"
And she slipped hurriedly indoors.
But nothing could harm her now, for the world had changed.
XV
Archie Koerner served his thirty days in the workhouse, then, because he was in debt to the State for the costs and had no money with which to pay the debt, he was kept in prison ten days longer, although it was against the constitution of that State to imprison a man for debt. Forty days had seemed a short time to Bostwick when he pronounced sentence; had he chosen, he might have given Archie a sentence, in fine and imprisonment, that would have kept him in the workhouse for two years; he frequently did this with thieves. These forty days, too, had been brief to Marriott, and to Eades, and they had been brief to Elizabeth, who had found new happiness in the fact that Mr. Amos Hunter had given Dick a position in the banking department of his Title and Trust Company. These forty days, in fact, had passed swiftly for nearly every one in the city, because they were spring days, filled with warm sunshine by day, and soft and musical showers by night. The trees were pluming themselves in new green, the birds were singing, and people were happy in their release from winter; they were busied about new clothes, with riding and driving, with plans for summer vacations and schemes for the future; they were all imbued with the spirit of hope the spring had brought to the world again. To Gusta, too, in her love, these days had passed swiftly, like a hazy, golden dream.
But to Archie these forty days had not been forty days at all, but a time of infinite duration. He counted each day as it dragged by; he counted it when he came from his bunk in the morning; he counted it every hour during the long day's work over the hideous bricks he could find no joy in making; he counted it again at evening, and the last thing before he fell asleep. It seemed that forty days would never roll around.
They did pass finally, and a morning came when he could leave the comrades of his misery. He felt some regret in doing this; many of them had been kind to him, and friendships had been developed by means of whispers and signs, but more by the silent influence of a common suffering. He had quarreled and almost fought with some of them, for the imprisonment had developed the beast that was in them, and had made many of them morose, ugly, suspicious, dangerous, filling them with a kind of moral insanity. But he forgot all these enmities in the joy of his release, and he bade his friends good-by and wished them luck. In the superintendent's office they gave him back his clothes, and he went out again into the world.
It was strange to be at liberty again. His first unconscious impulse was to take up his life where he had left it off, but he did not know how to do this. For behind him stretched an unknown time, a blank, a break in his existence, which refused to adjust itself to the rest of his life; it bore no relation to that existence which was himself, his being, and yet it was there. The world that knew no such blank or break had gone on meanwhile and left him behind, and he could not catch up now. He was like a man who had been unconscious and had awakened with a blurred conception of things; it was as if he had come out of a profound anæsthesia, to find that he had been irrevocably maimed by some unnecessary operation in surgery.
Archie did not, of course, realize all this clearly; had he been able to do so, he might have avoided some of the consequences. But he had a troubled sense of change, and he was to learn it and realize it fully only by a slow, torturing process, a bit at a time. He had the first sensation of this change in the peculiar gleam that came into the eye of a policeman he passed in Market Place, and he felt it, too, when, half fearfully, he presented himself at the back door of his home. His father's fury had long since abated, but he showed that he could not look on Archie as he once had done, and Gusta showed it, too. Bostwick may have thought he had sentenced Archie to forty days in prison, but he had really sentenced him to a lifetime in prison; for the influences of those forty days could never leave Archie now; the shadows of that prison were ever lengthening, and they were for evermore to creep with him wherever he went, keeping him always within their shades. He was thereafter to be but an umbra at the feast of life.
Archie could not think of the whole matter very clearly; of the theft of which he had been convicted he scarcely thought at all. The change that came in the world's attitude toward him did not seem to be concerned with that act; it was never mentioned or even suggested to him at home or elsewhere. The thing that marked him was not the fact that he had been a thief, but that he had been a prisoner. When he did think of the theft, he told himself that he had paid for that; the score had been wiped out; the world had taken its revenge on him. This revenge was expressed by the smile that lit up the face of the grocer whose herrings had been stolen; it had been shown in the satisfaction of the prosecutor when the judge announced his finding; it had been expressed by the harshness of the superintendent and the guards at the workhouse; it was shown even by the glance of that policeman he met in the Market. The world had wreaked its vengeance on him, and Archie felt that it should be satisfied now.
There was but one place now where the atmosphere lacked the element of suspicion and distrust, but one place where he was not made to feel the barrier that separated him from other men, and that was with the gang. The gang welcomed him with a frank heartiness; they showed almost the same eagerness and pleasure in him that they showed in welcoming Spud and the others. There was balm in their welcome; they asked no questions, they drew no distinctions; to them he was the same old Archie, only grown nearer because now he could unite with them in experience–they all had those same gaps in their lives.
That afternoon they celebrated with cans of beer in the shade of a lumber pile, and that night the gang went down the line. Having some money, they were welcome in all the little saloons, and the girls in short dresses, who stood about the bars rolling cigarettes constantly, were glad to see them. And Archie found that no questions were asked here, that no distinctions were made even when respected, if not respectable, men appeared, even when the prosecutor of the police court came along with a companion, and spent a portion of the salary these people contributed so heavily to pay, even when the detectives came and received the tribute money. And it dawned on Archie that here was a little quarter of the world where he was wanted, where he was made to feel at home, where that gap in his life made no difference. It was a small quarter, covering scarcely more than a dozen blocks. It was filled with miserable buildings, painted garishly and blazing with light; there was ever the music of pianos and orchestras, and in the saloons that were half theaters, bands blared out rapid tunes. And here was swarming life; here, in the midst of death. But it was an important quarter of the town; in rents and dividends and fines it contributed largely of the money it made at such risk and sacrifice of body and of soul, to all that was accounted good and great in the city. It helped to pay the salaries of the mayor and the judges and the prosecutors and the clerks and the detectives and the policemen; some of its money went to support in idleness and luxury many dainty and exclusive women in Claybourne Avenue, to build enormous churches, to pay for stained-glass windows with pictures of Christ and the Magdalene, pictures that in soft artistic hues lent a gentle religious and satisfying melancholy to the ladies and gentlemen who sat in their pews on Sundays; it even helped to send missionaries to far countries like Japan and China and India and Africa, in order that the heathen who lived there might receive the light of the Cross.
While in the workhouse Archie had occupied the same cell with a man called Joseph Mason, which was not his name. The prison was crowded, and it was necessary for the prisoners to double up. The cells were narrow and had two bunks, one above and the other below–there was as much room as there is in a section of a sleeping-car. In these cells the men slept and ate and lived, spending all the time they did not pass at labor in the brick-yard. During those forty days Archie became well acquainted with Mason; they sat on their little stools all day Sunday and talked, and when they climbed into their bunks at night they whispered. They shared with each other their surreptitious matches and tobacco–all they had.
This man Mason was nearly fifty years old. His close-cropped hair and his close-shaven beard gave his head and cheeks and lips a uniform color of dark blue; his lips were thin and compressed from a habit of taciturnity, his eyes were small, bright and alert; at any sound he would turn quickly and glance behind him. He had spent twenty years in prison–ten years in Dannemora, five in Columbus, three in Allegheny and two in Joliet. This, however, did not include the time he had been shut up in police stations, calabooses, county jails and workhouses. In the present instance he had been arrested for pocket-picking, and had agreed to plead guilty if the offense were reduced to petit larceny; the authorities had accepted his proposal, and he had been sentenced to six months in the workhouse. He had served four and a half months of his sentence when Archie went into the workhouse.
The only time when Mason showed any marked sense of humor was when he told Archie of his having confessed to pocket-picking. The truth was that he was totally innocent of this crime, and if the police had been wise they would have known this. Mason was a Johnny Yegg, that is, an itinerant safe-blower. As a yegg man, of course, he never had picked a pocket, and could not have done so had he wished, for he did not know how; and if he had known how, still he would not have done so, for the yeggs held such crimes as picking pockets in contempt. All of the terms he had served in states' prisons had been for blowing safes, and all of the safes had been in rural post-offices. The technical charge was burglary, though he was not a burglar, either, in the sense of entering dwellings by night; this was a class of thieving left to prowlers. The preceding fall, however, a safe had been blown in a country post-office near the city, and Mason knew that the United States inspectors would suspect him if they found him, and while he had been innocent of that particular crime, he knew that this would make no difference to the inspectors; they would willingly "job" him, as he expressed it, justifying the act to any one who might question it–they would not need to justify it to themselves–by arguing that if he had not blown that particular safe he had blown others, so that the balance would be dressed in the end. Consequently, when the police arrested him for pocket-picking, he hailed it as a stroke of good fortune and looked on the workhouse as an asylum. He had been a model prisoner, and had given the authorities no trouble. He did this partly because he was a philosophical fellow, patient and uncomplaining, partly because he did not wish to attract attention to himself. His picture and his measurements, taken according to the Bertillon system, were in every police station in the land.
Mason told Archie many interesting stories of his life, of cooking over a fire in the woods, riding on freight trains, of hang-outs in sand-houses, and so on, and he told circumstantially of numerous crimes, though never did he identify himself as concerned in any of them excepting those of which he had been convicted, and in these he did not give the names of his accomplices. Before their companionship ended he had taught Archie the distinctions between yegg men and peter men and gay cats, guns of various kinds, prowlers, and sure-thing men, and the other unidentified horde of criminals who belong to none of these classes.
He had taught Archie also many little tricks whereby a convict's lot may be lightened–as, for instance, how to split with a pin one match into four matches, how to pass little things from one cell to another by a "trolley" or piece of string, how to lie on a board, and so on. But, above all, he had set Archie the example of a patient man who took things as they came, without question or complaint.
Archie missed Mason. He could see him sitting in the gloom of their little cell, upright and almost never moving, talking in a low tone, his lips, which had a streak of tobacco always on them, moving slowly, shutting tightly after each sentence, until he had swallowed, then deliberately he would go on. Mason's view of life interested Archie, who, up to that time, had never thought at all, had never made any distinctions, and so had no view of life at all. Many of Mason's views were striking in their insight, many were childish in their lack of it; they were curiously straightforward at times, at others astonishingly oblique. He had a great hatred of sham and pretense, and he considered all so-called respectable people as hypocrites. He had about the same contempt for them that he had for the guns, who were sneaks, he said, afraid to take chances. He had a high admiration for boldness and courage, and a great love of adventure, and he thought that all these qualities were best exemplified in yegg men. For the courts he had no respect at all; his contempt was so deep-rooted that he never once considered the possibility of their doing justice, and spoke as if it were axiomatic that they could not do justice if they tried. He had the same contempt for the church, although he seemed to know much about the life of Jesus and had respect for His teachings. He called the people who came to pray and sing on Sundays "mission stiffs"; he treated them respectfully enough, but he told Archie that those prisoners who took an interest in the services did so that they might secure favors and perhaps pardons. He had known many convicts to secure their liberty in that way, and while he gave them credit for cleverness and was not disposed to blame them, still he did not respect them. Such convicts he called "false alarms."