A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

One was never at a loss for conversation with Kovnitz, but it was always conversation which had to do with the condition of his class. That was uppermost and foremost in his mind. Other things interested him only as they were related to that. Although a collectivist, he wasted little thought upon a future socialistic state, and he cared little for present concerted political action in his party. The one supreme necessity, in his view, was that all wage-earners should be led to act together as a class, until their predominance in an industrial age is recognized. When once wage-workers are known to be the most powerful as a class, then social institutions will change in accordance with their interests. It was curious to see how this, the central principle of his creed, absorbed him. It was the criterion of all his judgments, and it gave color and meaning to everything he saw. Generally he noticed little of what was about him. The inferno of those city streets at night seemed not to impress him as we passed. All the varied play of life upon them did not divert him from preoccupation in what he was telling me of the work of organization among wage-earners. Once only his attention was drawn off, and even then his habitual cast of thought moulded the new impression. In glancing up, his eyes had fallen upon a building newly occupied as a department store. It was Saturday evening, and, for some reason, the place was still open. Streams of shoppers were entering the doors and pouring from them. More even than by day, the store gave at night an impression of a bee-hive in full activity. The swarming of the crowds within, the lights from a hundred windows, and the brave array of goods formed the outer picture. But Kovnitz said nothing of that.

“There are two men in that store who are as different in general character as men can be,” he remarked to me, as we stood at the curb. “One of them,” he went on, “is a man of scholarly instincts. He is a disciple of Kant, and knows the Kantian philosophy well. Just now he is giving his leisure to reading Goethe. He is an enthusiast in philosophy and literature, and a man of really fine sensibilities. The other chap is a human brute, and looks it. Nothing interests him beyond his business and his dissipations. Both of these men are at the head of departments of ready-made garments in the store, and I know that they both draw salaries of $4,000 a year. They have good business heads, and manage their departments well, but what makes them specially valuable to their employers is the fact that they know thoroughly the sweating system. They keep carefully informed on the condition of the labor market, and the demand for work; and, when the competition is keenest among the sub-contractors and the workers, they know how to pit the bidders against one another, until the tasks are finally let out at the lowest possible figures. Mrs. Stone is making boys’ waists for thirty-five cents a dozen, and there are more than 20,000 sweatshops in Chicago where similar prices prevail, and Chicago is but one of a score of cities in this country where sweating is in vogue.”

Late that night, after the labor meeting, I was passing the store again. I was alone, for Kovnitz had gone home another way. The street lay quiet, and almost deserted through its length, and I could hear the echo of my tread under the glare of electrics. The sound of jangling music came faintly from a long line of almost continuous saloons. There was some movement in front of them which contrasted sharply with the general desertion of the street.

One is rarely at a loss to trace the antecedents of a sharp impression, and I can remember clearly that I was conscious of a man and woman who stood talking in low tones as I passed, and who disappeared that moment into an open passage. The next instant I was keenly alive to them, for I heard the woman scream as though in mortal fear, and turning, I saw the man dragging her violently out upon the pavement. Events followed one another then in quick succession. I was near enough to watch them at close range, and I had the sense of interpreting them as they moved. I saw the instant flash of anger in the face of a young mechanic who stood near, and the first quick thrust of his arm which sent the man reeling from the girl, then the swift onslaught of the two men, and I heard the rain of blows and oaths, and the loud asseverations of the one attacked that he was an officer, while the crowd thickened about them, and the girl pleaded piteously to be loosed from the grasp of someone who held her.

Two officers in uniform came down upon us from opposite quarters, and the fighting gave way to noisy explanations. It developed then that the attack had been made upon an officer in citizens’ clothes who was doing detective duty against street-walkers. But he was wholly to blame for the disturbance, I thought; for he had handled his prisoner with needless violence, and the blow from the mechanic was so obviously the instinctive, chivalrous act of a man who sees a woman ill-treated. Technically, however, he was guilty of “resisting an officer while in the discharge of his duty,” and he must answer for it, so that the group which started for the Harrison Street Station-house was made up of the three officers, the girl, the mechanic, and four or five stragglers, of whom I was one.

It was easy to learn at the station what course the case had taken. Both prisoners were admitted to bail, and bondsmen having been found, they went free that night under a charge to appear before the court on a certain morning of the following week. When the morning came I was on hand too, for by that time I had given up my job in the factory.

I went early, not knowing at what hour the case might come up, and; although there were already many persons seated on the wooden forms, I looked carefully through both of the court-rooms without seeing those in whom my interest lay. Finding a vacant seat in the inner room, I sat there, watching intently the changing groups at the bar. They were made up of the commonest criminals of the town, and it was rare that a novice appeared to disturb the atmosphere of perfect naturalness. Law-breakers they were without question; the magistrate knew them as well as the police, and frequently he spoke to them by familiar names, reminding them of earlier warnings and threatening them with severer penalties for the future. It was a sort of clearing-house, where a certain residuum of habitual criminals was dealt with by a doctrine of averages in an effort to regulate and control the crime inevitable in a great city.

Sitting beside me on the form was a young girl, plainly dressed, with an air of perfect neatness. Her gloved hands lay folded in her lap and in one of them she held a purse. Her mackintosh of dark material was unbuttoned and thrown open, with the cape falling loosely over her arms. It was the trimness of her hair and a certain trig simplicity in her hat which struck me first, and, when she spoke, the tone and manner were in keeping with her quietness of dress.

“Will you tell me, please, what time it is?” she asked, and, having learned the hour, “What are you up for?” she continued, abruptly.

There was nothing about her which had in the least prepared me for the question, and I floundered about in an explanation that I was there merely out of interest in a case which I expected to come up in the course of the morning.