Part 9

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.

It is only a few steps from the station-house to the heart of the business section of the city. I passed through it now, as I often did, for the sake of the feeling that it gives one of the reach and strength of the industrial forces which are centred there. Here is no sense of failure or of loss, but of energy and skill trained to high efficiency in the co-operation of productive powers. Men are there producing for all mankind, and in spite of the present waste of human life, I cannot doubt that, with the problems of production so widely solved, the genius of the race is turning surely to the subtler questions of a fairer distribution.

● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).