She went to her room and I across the deserted courtyard and up to mine. But there was no sleep. It was that night that I first realized that I also must. I had seen so much I could never forget. It was something from which there was no escape. No matter how glorious the open fields, there would always be the remembered stink of the tenements in my nostrils. The vision of a sunken cheeked, tuberculosis ridden pauper would always rise between me and the beauty of the sunset. A crowd of hurrying ghosts—the ghosts of the slaughtered babies—would follow me everywhere, crying, "Coward," if I ran away. The slums had taken me captive.
As I sat there alone with my pipe, the groans of the district's uneasy sleep in my ears, I realized more strongly than I can write it now the appalling unity of life. I sensed the myriad intricate filaments which bind us into an indivisible whole. I saw the bloody rack-rents of the tenements circulating through all business—tainting it—going even into the collection plates of our churches. I saw the pay drawn by the lyric poet, trailing back through the editorial bank account to the pockets of various subscribers who speculated in the necessities of life, who waxed fat off the hunger of the multitude. My own clothes were sweat-shop made.
I could not put out the great fire of injustice. I could at least bind up the sores of some of my brothers who had fallen in—who were less lucky than I. My old prep. school ethics came back to me. "I want to live so that when I die, the greatest number of people will be glad I did live." In a way it did not seem to matter so much whether I could accomplish any lasting good. I must do what I could. Such effort seemed to me the only escape from the awful shame of complaisancy.
Wandering in and out of the lives of the people of our neighborhood, I looked about for a field of activity. There were so many things to be done. I sought for the place where the need was greatest. It did not take me long to decide—a conclusion I have not changed—that the worst evils of our civilization come to a head in "The Tombs."
The official name for that pile of stone and brick is "The Criminal Courts Building." But the people persist in calling it "The Tombs." The prison dated from the middle of the century and a hodge-podge of official architecture had been added, decade by decade, as the political bosses needed money. It housed the district attorney's office, the "police court," "special sessions" for misdemeanants, and "general sessions" for felons. One could study our whole penal practice in that building.
I was first led into its grim shadow by a woman who came to the settlement. Her son, a boy of sixteen, had been arrested two months before and had been waiting trial in an unventilated cell, originally designed for a single occupant, with two others. His cell-mates had changed a dozen times. I recall that one had been an old forger, who was waiting an appeal, another was the keeper of a disorderly house and a third had been a high church curate, who had embezzled the foreign mission fund to buy flowers for a chorus girl. The lad was patently innocent. And this was the very reason he was held so long. The district attorney was anxious to make a high record of convictions. His term was just expiring and he was not calling to trial the men he thought innocent, these "technically" bad cases he was shoving over on his successor. At last, with the help of a charitable lawyer, named Maynard, of whom I will write more later, we forced the case on the calendar and the boy was promptly acquitted.
In talking over this case with Benson, I found that he was already interested in the problems of Criminology. He was one of the trustees of "The Prisoner's Aid Society." The interview in the newspaper, which Ann had read to me at the hospital, had been an effort of his to draw attention to the subject and to infuse some life into the society.
"They're a bunch of fossils," he said. "Think they're a 'société savante.' They read books by foreign penologists and couldn't tell a crook from a carpet sweeper. We need somebody to study American crime. Not a dilettante—someone who will go into it solid."
I told him I had thought a good deal about it and was ready to tackle the job if the ways and means could be arranged.
"I imagine I could get the society to pay you a living salary. But they are dead ones. If you did anything that wasn't in the books, it would scare them. I'll think it over."