Once as low as the rail of the Night Court – a girl seldom escaped from the slime into which she had dragged herself. And yet had she dragged herself there? Was she to blame? Was she to pay the consequences in the last Reckoning of Accounts?
This thought came to Officer Bobbie Burke as he watched the horrible drama drag monotonously through its brief succession of sordid scenes.
The expression of the magistrate, the same look of sympathetic misery on the face of the matron, and even on many of the detectives, automatons who had chanted this same official requiem of dead souls, years of nights … not a sombre tone of the gruesome picture was lost to Burke's keen eyes.
"Some one has to pay; some one has to pay! I wonder who?" muttered Officer 4434 under his breath.
There were cases of a different caliber. Yet Burke could see in them what Balzac called "social coördination."
Now a middle-aged woman, with hair unkempt, and hat awry, maudlin tears in her swollen eyes, and swaying as she held the rail, looked shiftily up into the magistrate's immobile face.
"You've been drunk again, Mrs. Rafferty? This is twice during the last fortnight that I've had you here."
"Yis, yer honor, an me wid two foine girls left home. Oh, Saint Mary protect me, an' oi'm a (hic) bad woman. Yer honor, it's the fault of me old man, Pat. (Hic) Oi'm not a bad woman, yer honor."
The magistrate was kind as he spoke.
"And what does Pat do?"
"He beats me, yer honor (hic), until Oi sneak out to the family intrance at the corner fer a quiet nip ter fergit it. An' the girls, they've been supportin' me (hic), an' payin the rint, an' buyin' the vittles, an' (hic) it's a dog's life they lead, wid all their work. When they go out wid dacint young min (hic), Pat cusses the young min, an' beats the girls whin they come home (hic)."
Here the woman broke down, sobbing, while the attendant kept her from swaying and falling.
"There, there, Mrs. Rafferty. I'll suspend sentence this time. But don't let it happen another time. You have Pat arrested and I'll teach him something about treating you right."
"My God, yer honor (hic), the worst of it is it's me two girls – they ain't got no home, but a drunken din, the next thing I knows they'll be arristed (hic) and brought up before ye like these other poor divvels. Yer honor, it's drunken Pats and min like him that's bringin' these poor girls here – it ain't the cops an' the sports (hic), yer honor."
The woman staggered as the magistrate quietly signaled the attendant to lead her through the gate, and up the aisle of the court to the outer door.
As she passed by the spectators, two or three richly dressed young women giggled and nudged the dapper youths with whom they were sitting.
"Silence!" cried the magistrate tersely. "This is not a cabaret show. I don't want any seeing-New-York parties here. Sergeant, put those people out of the court."
The officer walked up the aisle and ordered the society buds and their escorts to leave.
"Why, we're studying sociology," murmured one girl. "It's a very stupid thing, however, down here."
"So vulgar, my dear," acquiesced her friend. "There's nothing interesting anyway. Just the same old story."
They noisily arose, and walked out, while Officer Burke could hear one of the gilded youths exclaim in a loud voice as they reached the outer corridor:
"Come on, let's go up to Rector's for a little tango, and see some real life…"
The magistrate who had heard it tapped his pen on the desk, and looked quizzically at the matron.
"They are doubtless preparing some reform legislation for the suffrage platform, Mrs. Grey, and I have inadvertently delayed the millennium. Ah, a pity!"
Burke was impatient for the calling of his own case. He was tired. He would have been hungry had he not been so nauseated by the sickening environment. He longed for the fresh air; even the snowstorm was better than this.
But his turn had not come. The next to be called was another answer to his mental question.
A young woman with a blackened eye and a bleeding cheek was brought in by a fat, jolly officer, who led a burly, sodden man with him.
The charge was quarreling and destroying the furniture of a neighbor in whose flat the fight had taken place.
"Who started it?" asked the magistrate.
"She did, your honor. She ain't never home when I wants my vittles cooked, and she blows my money so there ain't nothing in the house to eat for meself. She's always startin' things, and she did this time when I tells her to come on home…"
"Just a minute," interrupted the magistrate. "What is the cause of this, little woman? Who struck you on the eye?"
The woman's lips trembled, and she glanced at the big fellow beside her. He glowered down at her with a threatening twist of his mouth.
"Why, your honor, you see, the baby was sick, and Joe, he went out with the boys pay night, and we didn't have a cent in the flat, and I had to…"
"Shut up, or I'll bust you when I get you alone!" muttered Joe, until the judge pounded on the table with his gavel.
"You won't be where you can bust her!" sharply exclaimed the magistrate. "Go on, little woman. When did he hit you?"
The wife trembled and hesitated. The magistrate nodded encouragingly.
"Why weren't you home?" he asked softly.
"My neighbor, Mrs. Goldberg, likes the baby, and she was showing me how to make some syrup for its croup, your honor, sir. We haven't got any light – it's a quarter gas meter, and there wasn't anything to cook with, and I had the baby in her flat, and Joe he just got home – he hadn't been there … since … Saturday night … I didn't have anything to eat – since then, myself."
Joe whirled about threateningly, but the officer caught his uplifted arm.
"She lies. She ain't straight, that's what it is. Hanging around them Sheenies, and sayin' it's the baby. She lies!"
The little woman's face paled, and she staggered back, her tremulous fingers clutching at the empty air as her great eyes opened with horror at his words.
"I'm not straight? Oh, oh, Joe! You're killing me!"
She moaned as though the man had beat her again.
"Six months!" rasped out the magistrate between his teeth. "And I'm going to put you under a peace bond when you get out. Little woman, you're dismissed."
Joe was roughly jostled out into the detention room again by the rosy-cheeked policeman, whose face was neither so jolly nor rosy now. The woman sobbed, and leaned across the rail, her outstretched arms held pleadingly toward the magistrate.
"Oh, judge, sir … don't send him up for six months. How can the baby and I live? We have no one, not one soul to care for us, and I'm expecting…"
Mercifully her nerves gave way, and she fainted. The gruff old court attendant, now as gentle as a nurse, caught her, and with the gateman, carried her at the judge's direction, toward his own private office, whither hurried Mrs. Grey, the matron.
The magistrate blew his nose, rubbed his glasses, and irritably looked at the next paper.
"Jimmie Olinski. Officer Burke. Hurry up, I want to call recess!" he exclaimed.
Burke, in a daze of thoughts, pulled himself together, and then took the arm of Jimmie the Monk, who advanced with manner docile and obsequious. He was not a stranger to the path to the rail. Another officer led Annie forward. Burke took the chair.
"Don't waste my time," snapped the magistrate. "What's this? Another fight?"
Officer 4434 explained the situation.
"Do you want to complain, woman?" asked the magistrate.
"Complain,