Traffic in Souls: A Novel of Crime and Its Cure. Ball Eustace Hale

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СКАЧАТЬ about this, officer?" the judge would ask. "Where did you see this woman, what did you say, what did she say, and what happened?"

      The detective, in a voice and manner as mechanical as that of the judge, would mumble his oft repeated story, giving the exact minute of his observations, the actions of the woman in accosting different pedestrians and in her final approach to him.

      "How many times before have you been arrested, girl?" the magistrate would growl.

      Sometimes the girls would admit the times; in most cases their memories were defective, until the accusing officer would cite past history. This girl had been arrested and paroled once before; that one had been sent to "the Island" for thirty days; the next one was an habitual offender. It was a tragic monotony. Sometimes the magistrate would summon the sweet-faced matron to have a talk with some young girl, evidently a "green one" for whom there might be hope. There was more kindliness and effort to reform the prisoners behind those piercing eyes of the judge than one might have supposed to hear him drone out his judgment: "Thirty days, Molly"; "Ten dollars, Aggie – the Island next time, sure"; "Five dollars for you, Sadie," and so on. There was a weary, hopeless look in the magistrate's eyes, had you studied him close at hand. He knew, better than the reformers, of the horrors of the social evil, at the very bottom of the cup of sin. Better than they could he understand the futility of garrulous legislation at the State Capitol, to be offset by ignorance, avarice, weakness and disease in the congestion of the big, unwieldy city. When he fined the girls he knew that it meant only a hungry day, one less silk garment or perhaps a beating from an angry and disappointed "lover." When he sent them to the workhouse their activities were merely discontinued for a while to learn more vileness from companions in their imprisonment; to make for greater industry – busier vice and quicker disease upon their return to the streets. The occasional cases in which there was some chance for regeneration were more welcome to him, even, than to the weak and sobbing girls, hopeless with the misery of their early defeats. Yet, the magistrate knew only too well the miserable minimum of cases which ever resulted in real rescue and removal from the sordid existence.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ