A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Her profile was toward me, and I saw a faint smile play for a moment on the clear lines of her face.

“Your honor,” she replied, “it is a little late now, but when I began to earn my living I wanted nothing so much as the chance to be decent.”

Meanwhile, two reporters were quickly sketching her where she stood—a singularly well-poised figure—while others were noting the salient facts of the case; for it was a good “story,” having already attracted attention. With wide notoriety as a thief, she went to prison that day, and, when she came out, a not too hospitable world was the more on its guard against her. An officer accompanied her from the room, but she did not forget to nod to me and smile as she passed out.

Engrossed as I had been in Minnie, I had not noticed the coming of the mechanic and the girl whose case had drawn me there. I saw them now when I looked around. The sight of the girl was perplexing at first, for she sat with another woman at the end of a neighboring form, and they looked so much alike that I could not distinguish the one who was there on trial. Crossing the passage, I asked leave to sit beside them. They drew up at once to make room for me, and I saw then that, the girl next me was the prisoner. The other was a twin sister, as she frankly told me, and the resemblance fully sustained her. I explained that I had come to the station-house because I happened to see the affair of a few nights before, and was anxious to find what course it would take in court. The girl agreed with me that the mechanic was in no way to blame.

“He never know’d that it was an officer that was draggin’ me down the steps, and out into the street. I never know’d it neither till I see his star under his coat. I thought he was crazy, and was goin’ to kill me like ‘Jack the Ripper.’” She was a girl in age, and obviously one of the most helpless of her order.

There is a common impression that such women are attracted to their ruin by vanity and a love of dress. You lose that idea among the wrecks who walk the city streets at night. Anything to flatter their vanity or to gratify their taste is the least likely of all possible experiences to most of them. It is a matter of keeping soul and body together. Some are dexterous pick-pockets, who make large hauls at times—not always, however, for themselves; most are ill-fed, ill-dressed slaves, who, when their tributes are paid, are penniless. Any degree of viciousness may be found among them, and you may find as well a high degree of the innocence of the unmoral, the sense of morality completely lost in the instinct of self-preservation.

The girl beside me was like fragile porcelain, her thin lips and nostrils and delicate skin all marred by a pasty, white unwholesomeness. There was a hectic flush in her sister’s face and her eyes were ablaze with disease. We were talking about the case and drifted naturally into further talk about themselves. They were orphans and had long supported themselves by working in a tobacco factory, but there their health had failed, and when they were well enough to work again, they found employment in a laundry. To supplement the “sweating” wages, they had taken to street-walking, and then their end was near. But they spoke as frankly of this last as a “business” as of the earlier occupations, and you saw that, to their thinking, it was only a degree more complete a sale of soul and body.

“But business is poor,” the ill sister was saying, presently, “and I ain’t very well, which I wouldn’t mind, but there’s my baby, and, if anything happens to me, who’s goin’ to take care of him? You don’t think I’ve got consumption, do you?” And she turned upon me a face with the cheeks sunk to the bone and the eyes dilating with the fire which was burning out her life.

When our case came up, it went through without a hitch. The officer told his story with a pompousness that was due to wounded pride and he dwelt over-much upon his efforts to make his assailant understand from the first that he himself was a member of the force. The girl was simplicity and frankness itself; not an effort to conceal her character, but a straightforwardness about the officer’s brutal roughness which threw it into strong relief. But the young mechanic was the best. He was new to courts as he abundantly proved, and when his turn came to testify, he stood licking his dry lips like one with stage-fright. Speech came haltingly from him at the first, while his face flushed, but the sense of injustice urged him on to a perfectly clear statement of how, while “doing the town,” he had seen this girl ill-treated and had struck the man without knowing that he was an officer.

I knew that all was well, for I saw a smile pass vaguely now and then over the magistrate’s face, and when he spoke, the girl was dismissed with a fine and the young mechanic with a friendly warning against “doing the town,” while the officer was held up in open court for reproof and told that, if he knew no better how to handle his prisoners, he was ignorant of the first principles of the special service to which he had been assigned.