Читать книгу The Turn of the Balance - Brand Whitlock - Страница 16

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.