A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

She smiled wearily at that, regarding me with eyes which asked whether I knew how young I was and how dreary that sort of thing made her feel. I was afraid that I had cut short the conversation and was delighted when she continued, quite simply:

“I’m up for shop-lifting. It was at Walker’s, and it was the hardest luck, for I had everything well concealed. But they suspected me, and, when they brought me here, the matron searched me and soon found the goods. And there I was, red-handed! Now I’m trying to think up some story, but the judge knows me and he warned me well last time.”

It was charming then, for we fell to talking as though we had known each other long. Her small gray eyes that looked straight into mine were as frank and innocent as a child’s. There was little beauty but an entire composure in the lines of her face, heightened by a natural pallor very becoming to her. Her features betrayed no nervousness, and one saw the change of feeling only in her eyes and in a subtle quality in her smile which was expressive and sometimes sweet.

We were two children, who had met by chance, and, sitting there in the dingy light of a station-house court-room, we were presently unaware of anything but the fact that we had a great deal to tell each other. I told her of the mechanic and the girl, and she half believed me, and, in turn, began to tell me of herself. There was no system in her story, only a simple sequence of spontaneity that charmed me. I had but to listen and watch her inscrutable face and ask questions where my dull intuitions were at fault. In the foreground was the incident of shop-lifting, and running from that was a chain of events which led back inevitably into the distant perspective of memory. She had never an air of giving me her confidence, rather of speaking freely as man to man.

It was bad to be caught at shop-lifting, and the more annoying because she had so often carried it off with success. At the best, shop-lifting was a wretched business, entailing much anxiety both in getting and disposing of the goods. But there was the stubborn fact that one must live. Of course she had worked as a shop-girl earning $3.50 a week. And here she began to count up on her fingers the items of bare subsistence with their cost, and the smile with which she concluded was touched with the question, “When you have spent your all upon mere living, what have you left to live on?” There had been something of this idea in her protest to her employer, and he met her frankly with the assurance that, if she found it impossible to live on her wages, it would give him pleasure to introduce her to a “gentleman friend.” Other employments which were open to her were no better in point of wages; some of them were not so good, but they were all alike in offering relief by the way suggested at the department store.

“I’m not what you’d call a ‘good girl,’” she said, “only, you know, I’d so much rather die than do that.”

And the revulsion of the child’s nature against what to her was this infinite terror led her to tell me of her bringing up. Her memory did not go back to the beginning of her stay in a convent near Dublin, where her parents placed her to be taught. Life had begun for her in the peaceful routine of the sisterhood. All her deepest impressions were got there, and, when as a child of twelve, she came out to emigrate with her people to America, she was instantly in a new world on leaving the convent walls. It had been an almost overwhelming discovery to her to find that the standards of goodness and purity which prevailed within were apparently almost unknown outside the convent. It staggered her intelligence as a child, and, during a long experience of earning her living as a girl, she had slowly constructed a philosophy of life which was drawn from the facts of hard struggle with a world which seemed bent upon compassing her ruin.

She spoke reverently of the teachings of the sisters, and of the influence of their devoted work, “But you know,” she added, “I cannot believe any longer that only those are Christians who are members of the Catholic Church, and that all others will be lost. The world would be too horrible, if that were true. To be a Christian must be simply to follow Christ.”

It was from this revery that we were roused by the loud calling of her name. I watched her walk to the bar and stand there with perfect composure, while the clerk read the indictment, and the witnesses were mechanically sworn, and the girl was heard, and the magistrate gave his verdict.

“Minnie,” he said, in closing, “I told you, when you were here last, that the next time you came up, you should go to the Bridewell, and now to the Bridewell you shall go. Minnie, why can’t a smart girl like you be decent?”