Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  A crowd had gathered about them, and was following Lemuel and his captor, but they fell back when they reached the steps of the police-station, and Lemuel was pulled up alone, and pushed in at the door. He was pushed through another door, and found himself in a kind of office. A stout man in his shirt-sleeves was sitting behind a desk within a railing, and a large book lay open on the desk. This man, whose blue waistcoat with brass buttons marked him for some sort of officer, looked impersonally at Lemuel and then at the officer, while he chewed a quill toothpick, rolling it in his lips. “What have you got there?” he asked.

  “Assaulting a girl down here, and grabbing her satchel,” said the officer who had arrested Lemuel, releasing his collar and going to the door, whence he called, “You come in here, lady,” and a young girl, her face red with weeping and her hair disordered, came back with him. She held a crumpled straw hat with the brim torn loose, and in spite of her disordered looks she was very pretty, with blue eyes flung very wide open, and rough brown hair, wavy and cut short, almost like a boy’s. This Lemuel saw in the frightened glance they exchanged.

  “This the fellow that assaulted you?” asked the man at the desk, nodding his head toward Lemuel, who tried to speak; but it was like a nightmare; he could not make any sound.

  “There were three of them,” said the girl with hysterical volubility. “One of them pulled my hat down over my eyes and tore it, and one of them held me by the elbows behind, and they grabbed my satchel away that had a book in it that I had just got out of the library. I hadn’t got it more than — —”

  “What name?” asked the man at the desk.

  “A Young Man’s Darling,” said the girl, after a bashful hesitation. Lemuel had read that book just before he left home; he had not thought it was much of a book.

  “The captain wants to know your name,” said the officer in charge of Lemuel.

  “Oh,” said the girl, with mortification. “Statira Dudley.”

  “What age?” asked the captain.

  “Nineteen last June,” replied the girl with eager promptness, that must have come from shame from the blunder she had made. Lemuel was twenty, the 4th of July.

  “Weight?” pursued the captain.

  “Well, I hain’t been weighed very lately,” answered the girl, with increasing interest. “I don’t know as I been weighed since I left home.”

  The captain looked at her judicially.

  “That so? Well, you look pretty solid. Guess I’ll put you down at a hundred and twenty.”

  “Well, I guess it’s full as much as that,” said the girl, with a flattered laugh.

  “Dunno how high you are?” suggested the captain, glancing at her again.

  “Well, yes, I do. I am just five feet two inches and a half.”

  “You don’t look it,” said the captain critically.

  “Well, I am,” insisted the girl, with a returning gaiety.

  The captain apparently checked himself and put on a professional severity.

  “What business — occupation?”

  “Sales-lady,” said the girl.

  “Residence?”

  “No. 2334 Pleasant Avenue.”

  The captain leaned back in his arm-chair, and turned his toothpick between his lips, as he stared hard at the girl.

  “Well, now,” he said, after a moment, “you know you’ve got to come into court and testify to-morrow morning.”

  “Yes,” said the girl, rather falteringly, with a sidelong glance at Lemuel.

  “You’ve got to promise to do it, or else it will be my duty to have you locked up overnight.”

  “Have me locked up?” gasped the girl, her wide blue eyes filling with astonishment.

  “Detain you as a witness,” the captain explained. “Of course, we shouldn’t put you in a cell; we should give you a good room, and if you ain’t sure you’ll appear in the morning — —”

  The girl was not of the sort whose tongues are paralysed by terror. “Oh, I’ll be sure to appear, captain! Indeed I will, captain! You needn’t lock me up, captain! Lock me up!” she broke off indignantly. “It would be a pretty idea if I was first to be robbed of my satchel and then put in prison for it overnight! A great kind of law that would be! Why, I never heard of such a thing! I think it’s a perfect shame! I want to know if that’s the way you do with poor things that you don’t know about?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” said the captain, permitting himself a smile, in which the officer joined.

  “Well, it’s a shame!” cried the girl, now carried far beyond her personal interest in the matter.

  The captain laughed outright. “It is pretty rough. But what you going to do?”

  “Do? Why, I’d — —” But here she stopped for want of science, and added from emotion, “I’d do anything before I’d do that.”

  “Well,” said the captain, “then I understand you’ll come round to the police court and give your testimony in the morning?”

  “Yes,” said the girl, with a vague, compassionate glance at Lemuel, who had stood there dumb throughout the colloquy.

  “If you don’t, I shall have to send for you,” said the captain.

  “Oh, I’ll come,” replied the girl, in a sort of disgust, and her eyes still dwelt upon Lemuel.

  “That’s all,” returned the captain, and the girl, accepting her dismissal, went out.

  Now that it was too late, Lemuel could break from his nightmare. “Oh, don’t let her go! I ain’t the one! I was running after a fellow that passed off a counterfeit ten-dollar bill on me in the Common yesterday. I never touched her satchel. I never saw her before — —”

  “What’s that?” demanded the captain sharply.

  “You’ve got the wrong one!” cried Lemuel. “I never did anything to the girl.”

  “Why, you fool!” retorted the captain angrily; “why didn’t you say that when she was here, instead of standing there like a dumb animal? Heigh?”

  Lemuel’s sudden flow of speech was stopped at its source again. His lips were locked; he could not answer a word.

  The captain went on angrily. “If you’d spoke up in time, may be I might ‘a’ let you go. I don’t want to do a man any harm if I can’t do him some good. Next time, if you’ve got a tongue in your head, use it. I can’t do anything for you now. I got to commit you.”

  He paused between his sentences, as if to let Lemuel speak, but the boy said nothing. The captain pulled his book impatiently toward him, and took up his pen.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lemuel Barker.”

  “I thought may be there was a mistake all the while,” said the captain to the officer, while he wrote down Lemuel’s name. “But if a man hain’t got sense enough to speak for himself, I can’t put the words in his mouth. Age?” he demanded savagely of Lemuel.

  “Twenty.”

  “Weight?”

  “A hundred and thirty.”

  “I could see with half an eye that the girl wan’t very sanguine about it. But what’s the use? I couldn’t tell her she was mistaken. Height?”

  “Five feet six.”

  “Occupation?”

  “I help mother carry on the farm.”

  “Just as I expected!” cried the captain. “Slow as a yoke of oxen. Residence?”

  “Willoughby Pastures.”

  The captain could not contain himself. “Well, Willoughby Pastures, — or whatever your name is, — you’ll get yourself into the papers this time, sure. And I must say it serves you right. If you can’t speak for yourself, who’s going to speak for you, do you suppose? Might send round to the girl’s house —— No, she wouldn’t be there, ten to one. You’ve got to go through now. Next time don’t be such an infernal fool.”

  The captain blotted his book and shut it.

  “We’ll have to lock him up here to-night,” he said to the policeman. “Last batch has gone round. Better go through him.” But Lemuel had been gone through before, and the officer’s search of his po
ckets only revealed their emptiness. The captain struck a bell on his desk. “If it ain’t all right, you can make it right with the judge in the morning,” he added to Lemuel.

  Lemuel looked up at the policeman who had arrested him. He was an elderly man, with a kindly face, squarely fringed with a chin-beard. The boy tried to speak, but he could only repeat, “I never saw her before. I never touched her.”

  The policeman looked at him and then at the captain.

  “Too late now,” said the latter. “Got to go through the mill this time. But if it ain’t right, you can make it right.”

  Another officer had answered the bell, and the captain indicated with a comprehensive roll of his head that he was to take Lemuel away and lock him up.

  “Oh, my!” moaned the boy. As they passed the door of a small room opening on an inner corridor, a smell of coffee gushed out of it; the officer stopped, and Lemuel caught sight of two gentlemen in the room with a policeman, who was saying ——

  “Get a cup of coffee here when we want it. Try one?” he suggested hospitably.

  “No, thank you,” said one of the gentlemen, with the bland respectfulness of people being shown about an institution. “How many of you are attached to this station?”

  “Eighty-one,” said the officer. “Largest station in town. Gang goes on at one in the morning, and another at eight, and another at six P.M.” He looked inquiringly at the officer in charge of Lemuel.

  “Any matches?” asked this officer.

  “Everything but money,” said the other, taking some matches out of his waistcoat pocket.

  Lemuel’s officer went ahead, lighting the gas along the corridor, and the boy followed, while the other officer brought up the rear with the visitor whom he was lecturing. They passed some neat rooms, each with two beds in it, and he answered some question: “Tramps? Not much! Give them a board when they’re drunk; send ’em round to the Wayfarers’ Lodge when they’re sober. These officers’ rooms.”

  Lemuel followed his officer downstairs into a basement, where on either side of a white-walled, brilliantly lighted, specklessly clean corridor, there were numbers of cells, very clean, and smelling of fresh whitewash. Each had a broad low shelf in it, and a bench opposite, a little wider than a man’s body. Lemuel suddenly felt himself pushed into one of them, and then a railed door of iron was locked upon him. He stood motionless in the breadth of light and lines of shade which the gas-light cast upon him through the door, and knew the gentlemen were looking at him as their guide talked.

  “Well, fill up pretty well, Sunday nights. Most the arrests for drunkenness. But all the arrests before seven o’clock sent to the City Prison. Only keep them that come in afterwards.”

  One of the gentlemen looked into the cell opposite Lemuel’s. “There seems to be only one bunk. Do you ever put more into a cell?”

  “Well, hardly ever, if they’re men. Lot o’ women brought in ‘most always ask to be locked up together for company.”

  “I don’t see where they sleep,” said the visitor. “Do they lie on the floor?”

  The officer laughed. “Sleep? They don’t want to sleep. What they want to do is to set up all night, and talk it over.”

  Both of the visitors laughed.

  “Some of the cells,” resumed the officer, “have two bunks, but we hardly ever put more than one in a cell.”

  The visitors noticed that a section of the rail was removed in each door near the floor.

  “That’s to put a dipper of water through, or anything,” explained the officer. “There!” he continued, showing them Lemuel’s door; “see how the rails are bent there? You wouldn’t think a man could squeeze through there, but we found a fellow half out o’ that one night — backwards. Captain came down with a rattan and made it hot for him.”

  The visitors laughed, and Lemuel, in his cell, shuddered.

  “I never saw anything so astonishingly clean,” said one of the gentlemen. “And do you keep the gas burning here all night?”

  “Yes; calculate to give ’em plenty of light,” said the officer, with comfortable satisfaction in the visitor’s complimentary tone.

  “And the sanitary arrangements seem to be perfect, doctor,” said the other visitor.

  “Oh, perfect.”

  “Yes,” said the officer, “we do the best we can for ‘em.”

  The visitors made a murmur of approbation. Their steps moved away; Lemuel heard the guide saying, “Dunno what that fellow’s in for. Find out in the captain’s room.”

  “He didn’t look like a very abandoned ruffian,” said one of the visitors, with both pity and amusement in his voice.

  VI.

  Lemuel stood and leaned his head against the wall of his cell. The tears that had come to his relief in the morning when he found that he was robbed would not come now. He was trembling with famine and weakness, but he could not lie down; it would be like accepting his fate, and every fibre of his body joined his soul in rebellion against that. The hunger gnawed him incessantly, mixed with an awful sickness.

  After a long time a policeman passed his door with another prisoner, a drunken woman, whom he locked into a cell at the end of the corridor. When he came back, Lemuel could endure it no longer. “Say!” he called huskily through his door. “Won’t you give me a cup of that coffee upstairs? I haven’t had anything but an apple to eat for nearly two days. I don’t want you to give me the coffee. You can take my clasp button — —”

  The officer went by a few steps, then he came back, and peered in through the door at Lemuel’s face. “Oh! that’s you?” he said: he was the officer who had arrested Lemuel.

  “Yes. Please get me the coffee. I’m afraid I shall have a fit of sickness if I go much longer.”

  “Well,” said the officer, “I guess I can get you something.” He went away, and came back, after Lemuel had given up the hope of his return, with a saucerless cup of coffee, and a slice of buttered bread laid on the top of it. He passed it in through the opening at the bottom of the door.

  “Oh, my!” gasped the starving boy. He thought he should drop the cup, his hand shook so when he took it. He gulped the coffee, and swallowed the bread in a frenzy.

  “Here — here’s the button,” he said, as he passed the empty cup out to the officer.

  “I don’t want your button,” answered the policeman. He hesitated a moment. “I shall be round at the court in the morning, and I guess if it ain’t right we can make it so.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Lemuel, humbly grateful.

  “You lay down now,” said the officer. “We shan’t put anybody in on you to-night.”

  “I guess I better,” said Lemuel. He crept in upon the lower shelf, and stretched himself out in his clothes, with his arm under his head for a pillow. The drunken woman at the end of the corridor was clamouring to get out. She wished to get out just half a minute, she said, and settle with that hussy; then she would come back willingly. Sometimes she sang, sometimes she swore; but with the coffee still sensibly hot in his stomach, and the comfort of it in every vein, her uproar turned into an agreeable fantastic medley for Lemuel, and he thought it was the folks singing in church at Willoughby Pastures, and they were all asking him who the new girl in the choir was, and he was saying Statira Dudley; and then it all slipped off into a smooth, yellow nothingness, and he heard some one calling him to get up.

  When he woke in the morning he started up so suddenly that he struck his head against the shelf above him, and lay staring stupidly at the iron-work of his door.

  He heard the order to turn out repeated at other cells along the corridor, and he crept out of his shelf, and then sat down upon it, waiting for his door to be unlocked. He was very hungry again, and he trembled with faintness. He wondered how he should get his breakfast, and he dreaded the trial in court less than the thought of going through another day with nothing to eat. He heard the stir of the other prisoners in the cells along the corridors, the low groans and sighs with which people pull them
selves together after a bad night; and he heard the voice of the drunken woman, now sober, poured out in voluble remorse, and in voluble promise of amendment for the future, to every one who passed, if they would let her off easy. She said aisy, of course, and it was in her native accent that she bewailed the fate of the little ones whom her arrest had left motherless at home. No one seemed to answer her, but presently she broke into a cry of joy and blessing, and from her cell at the other end of the corridor came the clink of crockery. Steps approached with several pauses, and at last they paused at Lemuel’s door, and a man outside stooped and pushed in, through the opening at the bottom, a big bowl of baked beans, a quarter of a loaf of bread, and a tin cup full of coffee. “Coffee’s extra,” he said jocosely. “Comes from the officers. You’re in luck, young feller.”

  “I ha’n’t got anything to pay for it with,” faltered Lemuel.

  “Guess they’ll trust you,” said the man. “Any-rate, I got orders to leave it.” He passed on, and Lemuel gathered up his breakfast, and arranged it on the shelf where he had slept; then he knelt down before it, and ate.

  An hour later an officer came and unbolted his door from the outside. “Hurry up,” he said; “Maria’s waiting.”

  “Maria?” repeated Lemuel innocently.

  “Yes,” returned the officer. “Other name’s Black. She don’t like to wait. Come out of here.”

  Lemuel found himself in the corridor with four or five other prisoners, whom some officers took in charge and conducted upstairs to the door of the station. He saw no woman, but a sort of omnibus without windows was drawn up at the curbstone.

  “I thought,” he said to an officer, “that there was a lady waiting to see me. Maria Black,” he added, seeing that the officer did not understand.

  The policeman roared, and could not help putting his head in at the office door to tell the joke.

  “Well, you must introduce him,” called a voice from within.

  “Guess you ha’n’t got the name exactly straight, young man,” said the policeman to Lemuel, as he guarded him down the steps. “It’s Black Maria you’re looking for. There she is,” he continued, pointing to the omnibus, “and don’t you forget it. She’s particular to have folks recognise her. She’s blacker ‘n she’s painted.”