Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Wisehouse Classics Edition). Stephen Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ retreated to the middle of the street, but the man did not pursue. He staggered toward the door.

      “I’ll club hell outa yeh when I ketch yeh,” he shouted, and disappeared.

      During the evening he had been standing against a bar drinking whiskies and declaring to all comers, confidentially: “My home reg’lar livin’ hell! Damndes’ place! Reg’lar hell! Why do I come an’ drin’ whisk’ here thish way? ‘Cause home reg’lar livin’ hell!”

      Jimmie waited a long time in the street and then crept warily up through the building. He passed with great caution the door of the gnarled woman, and finally stopped outside his home and listened.

      He could hear his mother moving heavily about among the furniture of the room. She was chanting in a mournful voice, occasionally interjecting bursts of volcanic wrath at the father, who, Jimmie judged, had sunk down on the floor or in a corner.

      “Why deh blazes don’ chere try teh keep Jim from fightin’? I’ll break her jaw,” she suddenly bellowed.

      The man mumbled with drunken indifference. “Ah, wha’ deh hell. W’a’s odds? Wha’ makes kick?”

      “Because he tears ‘is clothes, yeh damn fool,” cried the woman in supreme wrath.

      The husband seemed to become aroused. “Go teh hell,” he thundered fiercely in reply. There was a crash against the door and something broke into clattering fragments. Jimmie partially suppressed a howl and darted down the stairway. Below he paused and listened. He heard howls and curses, groans and shrieks, confusingly in chorus as if a battle were raging. With all was the crash of splintering furniture. The eyes of the urchin glared in fear that one of them would discover him.

      Curious faces appeared in doorways, and whispered comments passed to and fro. “Ol’ Johnson’s raisin’ hell agin.”

      Jimmie stood until the noises ceased and the other inhabitants of the tenement had all yawned and shut their doors. Then he crawled upstairs with the caution of an invader of a panther den. Sounds of labored breathing came through the broken door-panels. He pushed the door open and entered, quaking.

      A glow from the fire threw red hues over the bare floor, the cracked and soiled plastering, and the overturned and broken furniture.

      In the middle of the floor lay his mother asleep. In one corner of the room his father’s limp body hung across the seat of a chair.

      The urchin stole forward. He began to shiver in dread of awakening his parents. His mother’s great chest was heaving painfully. Jimmie paused and looked down at her. Her face was inflamed and swollen from drinking. Her yellow brows shaded eyelids that had brown blue. Her tangled hair tossed in waves over her forehead. Her mouth was set in the same lines of vindictive hatred that it had, perhaps, borne during the fight. Her bare, red arms were thrown out above her head in positions of exhaustion, something, mayhap, like those of a sated villain.

      The urchin bended over his mother. He was fearful lest she should open her eyes, and the dread within him was so strong, that he could not forbear to stare, but hung as if fascinated over the woman’s grim face.

      Suddenly her eyes opened. The urchin found himself looking straight into that expression, which, it would seem, had the power to change his blood to salt. He howled piercingly and fell backward.

      The woman floundered for a moment, tossed her arms about her head as if in combat, and again began to snore.

      Jimmie crawled back in the shadows and waited. A noise in the next room had followed his cry at the discovery that his mother was awake. He grovelled in the gloom, the eyes from out his drawn face riveted upon the intervening door.

      He heard it creak, and then the sound of a small voice came to him. “Jimmie! Jimmie! Are yehs dere?” it whispered. The urchin started. The thin, white face of his sister looked at him from the door-way of the other room. She crept to him across the floor.

      The father had not moved, but lay in the same death-like sleep. The mother writhed in uneasy slumber, her chest wheezing as if she were in the agonies of strangulation. Out at the window a florid moon was peering over dark roofs, and in the distance the waters of a river glimmered pallidly.

      The small frame of the ragged girl was quivering. Her features were haggard from weeping, and her eyes gleamed from fear. She grasped the urchin’s arm in her little trembling hands and they huddled in a corner. The eyes of both were drawn, by some force, to stare at the woman’s face, for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends would come from below.

      They crouched until the ghost-mists of dawn appeared at the window, drawing close to the panes, and looking in at the prostrate, heaving body of the mother.

Chapter IV

      THE BABE, TOMMIE, DIED. HE WENT AWAY IN A WHITE, INSIGNIFICANT COFFIN, his small waxen hand clutching a flower that the girl, Maggie, had stolen from an Italian.

      She and Jimmie lived.

      The inexperienced fibres of the boy’s eyes were hardened at an early age. He became a young man of leather. He lived some red years without laboring. During that time his sneer became chronic. He studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than he thought he had reason to believe it. He never conceived a respect for the world, because he had begun with no idols that it had smashed.

      He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in at a mission church where a man composed his sermons of “yous.” While they got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where he calculated they stood with the Lord. Many of the sinners were impatient over the pictured depths of their degradation. They were waiting for soup-tickets.

      A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see the portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and his hearers.

      “You are damned,” said the preacher. And the reader of sounds might have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people: “Where’s our soup?”

      Jimmie and a companion sat in a rear seat and commented upon the things that didn’t concern them, with all the freedom of English gentlemen. When they grew thirsty and went out their minds confused the speaker with Christ.

      Momentarily, Jimmie was sullen with thoughts of a hopeless altitude where grew fruit. His companion said that if he should ever meet God he would ask for a million dollars and a bottle of beer.

      Jimmie’s occupation for a long time was to stand on streetcorners and watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of pretty women. He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets.

      On the corners he was in life and of life. The world was going on and he was there to perceive it.

      He maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men. To him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered faint hearts. He and his order were kings, to a certain extent, over the men of untarnished clothes, because these latter dreaded, perhaps, to be either killed or laughed at.

      Above all things he despised obvious Christians and ciphers with the chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their button-holes. He considered himself above both of these classes. He was afraid of neither the devil nor the leader of society.

      When СКАЧАТЬ