“Save your breath! Save your breath! Tell your spiel to the judge. Maybe he’ll listen. I’m through.”
They were almost at the doors of the squat and ugly building which the Tenderloin calls Jeff Market when he noticed that her left hand was clutched against her breast. He remembered then she had held that hand so when she first spoke to him; except during her flight and the little struggle after he ran her down, she must have been holding it so all this time.
“What’s that you’ve got in your hand?” he demanded suspiciously, and with a practiced flip of the nipper handles swung her round so that she faced him.
“It is my own, m’sieur. It is——”
“Nix, nix with that. I gotta see. Open up them fingers.”
She opened her hand slowly, reluctantly. The two of them were in the shadow of the [79] elevated structure then, close up alongside a pillar, and he had to peer close to see what the object might be. Having seen he did not offer to touch it, but he considered his prisoner closely, taking her in from her head to her feet, before he led her on across the roadway and the pavement and in at one of the doors of that odoursome clearing house of vice and misery, mercy and justice, where the night court sits seven nights a week.
First, though, he untwisted the disciplinary little steel chain from about her wrist. The doorway by which they entered gave upon the Tenth Street face of the building and admitted them into a maze of smelly dim corridors and cross-halls in the old jail wing directly beneath the hideous and aborted tower, which in a neighbourhood of stark architectural offences makes of Jefferson Market courthouse a shrieking crime against good looks and good taste.
The inspector’s man escorted the French girl the length of a short passage. At a desk which stood just inside the courtroom door he detained her while a uniformed attendant entered her name and her age, which she gave as twenty-one, and her house number, in a big book which before now has been Doomsday Book for many a poor smutted butterfly of the sidewalks. The detective, standing by, took special note of the name and the address and, for his own purposes, wrote them both down on a scrap of card. This formality being finished, the pair crossed the [80] half-filled courtroom, he guiding by a hand on her elbow, she obeying with a numbed and passive docility, to where there is a barred-in space like an oversized training den for wild animals. This cage or coop, whichever you might choose to call it, has a whited cement wall for its back, and rows of close-set rounded iron bars for its front and sides, and wooden benches for its plenishings. The bars run straight up, like slender black shadows caught and frozen into solidity, to the soiled ceiling above; they are braced across with iron horizontals, which makes the pen strong enough to hold a rhino. Its twin stands alongside it, filling the remaining space at the far side of the big room. In the old days one pen was meant for male delinquents and one for female. But now the night court for men holds its sessions in a different part of town and only women delinquents are brought to this place. It may or may not be a reflection upon our happy civilisation—I leave that point for the sociologists to settle—but it is a fact that ninety per cent of them are brought here charged with the same thing.
The first coop held perhaps a dozen women and girls. One of them was quietly weeping. The others, looking, as they sat on one of the benches in their more or less draggled finery, like a row of dishevelled cage birds of gay plumage, maintained attitudes which ranged from the highly indifferent to the excessively defiant. [81] The detective unlatched the door, which was of iron wattles too, and put his prisoner inside.
“You’ll have to stay here awhile,” he bade her. His tone was altered from that which he had employed toward her at any time before. “Just set down there and be comfortable.”