Part 28
"Who?"--Mrs. Denbigh's eyes grew stern again.--"Who? You needn't say no more than that still! I ought to have knowed when I seen you. Nobody could look at you yet and not know. Why, you're--you're _old_! Your things are worn out. You----" her tone increased to loud accusations. "Where did you get them clothes?"
Mary's lips faltered.
"I bought 'em," she said.
"Did anybody see you come in here?"
"I don't know.--No, nobody did."
"Thank God for that!" Mrs. Denbigh pointed a long, gnarled finger at her daughter. She pointed it at the bedraggled hat, still bearing traces of a finery too pronounced for that small town. She pointed to the waist and to the skirt. "It's true, then!" she cried. "It's true, then! You've been a bad woman!"
In the doorway Mary swayed. She leaned heavily against the wall. She was too tired to lie.
"Yes," she whispered.
"Yes," her mother echoed; "yes--an' you own up to it! The whole town said it; your pop said it; they all told me yet--an' I stood up fer you; I showed 'em your letter; I says you was married; I kep' on believin' you'd write; I stuck to it--an' now you come here to shame me. You come here when you're worn out--when no one else'll have you--you come here, brazen, not carin' still, a bad woman--_a bad woman_--an' I guess you think I'll take you in!"
Her poor face writhed. Her dim eyes shot fire. Her withered breasts rose and fell in a spasm of indignation and wounded pride.
Mary, still leaning against the kitchen wall, put out her hands as if to ward away a blow.
"Don't, mom," she said. "Please don't."
"I will! I've a mind to beat you. I'd like to know what possessed you to flaunt yourself in this place. You can't stay here. You can't stay in this house that you've shamed still, an' you can't stay in this town."
"Mom!"
"You can't stay in this town. Do you hear that? If you do, if you try to stay here and mock me, a decent woman, I'll have you arrested; I'll have you sent to the lock-up; I'll----"
"Mom," interrupted Mary. "I won't hurt you. I didn't mean to hurt nobody. I didn't come here to do no harm."
"How kin you come here yet without doin' harm? Ain't you done enough without comin' back here to shame your own folks?"
"But, mom," Mary pleaded, "I won't shame nobody; I'll do whatever you say."
Little Mrs. Denbigh collapsed upon a kitchen chair. She rocked from side to side. She fanned herself with her checkered apron; grief conquered anger; and long dried tears came at last to her old eyes and coursed, unrestrained, down her hard cheeks.
"What did I ever do fer to deserve this?" she moaned. "What did I ever do to receive this judgment? A child o' mine! A child o' mine! An' her the baby that she was! Didn't her pop an' me bring her up the best we could? Ain't I always lived accordin' to the Lord's word? What have I done to deserve this?"
Mary stepped to the weeping woman's side. She put her fingers to the gray hair and stroked it, timidly.
"Go away!" cried the mother. "Don't you dare to touch me! Don't you dare yet to pollute me! Oh! A child o' mine to do this!"
She fell into another paroxysm of grief, and Mary sank to her knees and took one of the gnarled hands between her own hands.
"Listen, mom," she said; "I'll tell you all about it, an' then you'll know."
She did tell her, as much as she dared; but Mrs. Denbigh only half understood. The elder woman's life had been cast in a mold; it had long since hardened into a destined shape, and no sympathy on her own part, no explanations on the part of another, could alter her. Dire necessity she had often known, but she had not known it amid surroundings where the sufferer's only course was that which alone had been possible for Mary. If she softened, it was not because she comprehended, but because Mary was her child.
"Don't tell me no more," she said at last. "You could 'a' gone to work."
"I tried that, an' nobody'd have me."
"You could 'a' gone to some church-folk."
"I did, but they couldn't get me a job."
"You could 'a' gone to some institution a'ready."
"How'd I have lived after I come out?"
"Well, you shouldn't 'a' run away in the first place. Didn't we treat you right?"
To have answered that question in the negative would not have been to be altogether true, and Mary did not even yet see enough clearly to discern that the conditions which had driven her from home were economic forces that made parents and child equally blameless.
"Can't I stay here?" she appealed. "Can't I please stay here an' work for you?"
Mrs. Denbigh shook her head.
"I'd work hard. I'd help you. I wouldn't never complain. All I want is just to be quiet. I'd work hard. Nobody'd never know."
"It'd be all over town by evenin' still."
"No, it wouldn't. I'd say I was a widow. I'd say----"
"Think o' your pop," sobbed Mrs. Denbigh. "Why, he'd--he'd kill you, Mary!" The mother shivered as she considered the wrath of the giant, whom hard work had hardened past the touch of all the tenderer emotions. "He'd just beat you up an' throw you into the street for everybody to see!" She half rose in a new anxiety. "Why, he's on the early shift, an' he might come here 'most any minute. Etta might come in, an' Sallie'll be back from school soon."
"But, mom," Mary blindly persisted. "I'd work so hard! I wouldn't never be cross. I'd help you. I'd do all the housework, an' you could teach me to cook the way you do."
"We got to think o' Sallie yet," continued Mrs. Denbigh. "Every time she gets mad now she says she'll run away like you done. We got to think o' her. She's a growin' girl, an' what'd it be to have you around her?"
"But, mom, I won't hurt her. Can't I just stay an' work, an' wash dishes, an' such things? I wouldn't mind washin' dishes"--Mary smiled wanly--"like I once did."
"An' then there's Etta," said the mother, still busied in her own confusion. "She's got a baby----"
"A baby!" Mary's heart leaped.
"Such a lovely baby girl----"
"Can't I----? Oh, mom, can't I just get a peep at it?"
"How could you?--An' we have to think what it'd be for her if you was here an' she growed up."
The prodigal choked with tears.
"Mom, mom!" she pleaded. "How'd I hurt 'em? You don't think I'd----?"
"The town'd think so, an' the town'd tell 'em so, too. An' anyways, Mary, we're poor, we're dreadful poor. The mill was shut down all summer an' fall. It's only just started a'ready, an' it's only workin' half-time now. We ain't had money fer months still, an' now it all goes fer old bills. We couldn't do it, even if we wanted to."
For half an hour more Mary begged, but she begged in vain; and though the mother ended by another attack of tears, and though the two wept together in each other's arms, they knew that they were together for the last time.
"Your clothes are so thin!" quavered Mrs. Denbigh, with a pathetic endeavor to sink her grief in practical anxiety. "You ain't got no coat, an' your feet are near on the ground still."
Mrs. Denbigh had no money; there was literally not a cent in the house; but she unearthed from an old trunk, and pressed, for pawning, upon Mary, a heavy, old-fashioned gold bracelet, which had been a wedding-present; and, though the daughter protested that she had money enough to buy some clothes, the mother got her own coat upon the daughter's shoulders.
They were still standing in the kitchen, as women awaiting the summons of death, when first one steam-whistle and then another began to call across the town. It was noon, and the moment of puddler Denbigh's return.
Without a word they walked, hand in hand, across the short back-yard, for Mary, it was tacitly agreed, must not risk an appearance upon the street in the neighborhood of her father's house. Without a word, Mrs. Denbigh's knotted fingers opened the latch of the white-washed gate. Without a word mother and daughter flung themselves into each other's arms again, and then, still in silence, Mary trudged away.
She did not look back until she came to the first corner, and, when she got there, she saw her mother's shrunken body still at the gate, the old hand waving, the aproned figure shaking with sobs. It was still there when Mary reached the second corner; but when she turned at the third, it was gone.
Her pain was no longer poignant. Grief had reached the mark whence it passes to stupefaction; and Mary pursued her way as if her actions were those suggested to a subject of hypnotic control. In order to avoid the crowd at the station, she walked on up the alley, until the alley ended in an intersecting turnpike along which ran the trolley line to the county-town. She waited there, stolidly, for a car, mounted that, descended at the end of the road, and, after another delay, climbed upon a train that would take her without change to Jersey City. For nearly twenty-four hours she had eaten nothing; but she bought another small flask at the terminus, and, as the ferry-boat glided between the creaking slips into the tossing water, she took a deep draught of whiskey.
She walked to the stern and looked over the side. It was night. Here gleamed the railway signs under which the boat had just passed--the signs of those roads that, she had now discovered, ended as fatally for her freedom as if they had ended in an insurmountable wall. Ahead towered the other walls, the black walls of that living prison--that vast, malevolent, conscious jail--into which she had once gone with such a store of hopes whereof not one had ever been fulfilled, of anticipated pleasures whereof not one had ever been tasted, and to which she must now, to serve out a life-sentence, return.
Must she return?
She looked up and down the dismal river, crowded with trafficking craft, and she remembered that other river at home as she had seen it on the spring afternoon when she had played the truant from school. She remembered the swirling eddies across which the nearer hills had been changing from brown to green; she remembered the descending Donegal Valley, fresh with germinating life, the flowering shrubs, and the sap-wet trees along the shore, the scent of a warm April, and the music of the Susquehanna. These things she remembered, and then she looked again at the nearing city.
Must she return?
She touched the rail. Over that lay certain escape. The deck was deserted; the movement would be quick; the plunge----
She leaned forward, she saw the leaping, greedy, icy waves, and, with a loud sob, staggered back to the bench that ran along the exterior of the upper saloon.
She could not do it. With nothing but suffering and horrors to live for, she could not put an end to life. She was afraid of the cold; she was afraid of the struggle; she was afraid of the pang; she was afraid of Death. It was a new thing--Death; she had been afraid of it ever since that morning of her awakening when the thought of seeking it had first occurred to her. Since her first crossing of this water, her experiences had been a procession of new things, each more terrible than the last; she had come to dread the new, and this novelty of death she dreaded lest it should be the most terrible of all. Life, which had robbed her of everything else, had, at this last, robbed her of the courage to quit it.
Youth, hope, purity, strength, beauty, the ability to work, even lust and hate--all these were dead within her, dead beyond possibility of resurrection. If Max had only given her a child! If he, or anyone of the others, had only killed her! But they had murdered Love, and the only thing that lived in her was the fear of death.
Out of the bitterness of her own heart, out of the abysses of her own knowledge of things as they are, she saw much of the truth. A rare good fortune had favored Katie Flanagan; but Mary, her parents, Rose and her girls, Carrie, Policeman Riley and Magistrate Dyker, even Angel and Max--not one of them, well regarded, could be unequivocally condemned. They were all, preying or preyed upon, an inevitable result. They were but the types of millions everywhere. New York itself, with all its women-slaves and men-slaves, must be but an illustration of what the other cities of the world are and have been. No rescue of a slave could put an end to the slavery. Something was wrong; but what that something was, or how it was ever to be made right, she could not guess. She knew only that, down the years, wherever walked the great god Poverty, that great god led Prostitution by the hand.
Finally comprehending, if unable to formulate, these things, at ten o'clock that night Mary Denbigh, remembering what Philip Beekman had told her, rang the doorbell of a familiar house and faced what she would once have feared more than death--she faced complacent, untroubled, prosperous, and protected Rose Légère.
The woman, still the good-natured woman of the brewery-calendar, cut short Mary's flow of apologies.
"Ferget it," she said. "It don't matter what you did. You didn't know any better. Here: just take this ten dollars and tell me what else I can do for you."
And Mary pushed the money away.
"I don't want that," she said. "I want--oh, Miss Rose, won't you please take me back?"
But Rose, surveying the human ruin before her, shook, very positively, her masses of yellow hair.
"No," she answered, "I'm sorry, but I can't do that. It wouldn't be good business. You see, the life's got you, Violet: you're all in."
_EDITOR'S NOTE_
_The facts presented in the "House of Bondage" are so startling as to seem incredible. They are, however, well known to those who have become familiar with the problem of the social evil, and can be duplicated indefinitely from court records, the findings of various investigating bodies, such as the Congressional Commission, whose report on this subject is known as Senate Document No. 196, Importing Women for Immoral Purposes, being a partial report from the Immigration Commission on the Importation and Harboring of Women for Immoral Purposes, published December 10, 1909, a book entitled "Panders and Their White Slaves," by Clifford G. Roe, in which the author gives in detail many cases successfully prosecuted by him in Chicago in the last year or two; and from the sworn testimony taken before the special Grand Jury appointed in New York in January, 1910, to investigate the so-called White Slave Traffic, the full report of which investigation follows._
WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC
_Presentment of the Additional Grand Jury for the January Term of the Court of General Sessions in the County of New York, in the matter of the investigation as to the alleged existence in the County of New York of an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes._
_Filed June 29, 1910_
COURT OF GENERAL SESSIONS IN AND FOR THE CITY AND COUNTY OF NEW YORK.
_In the matter of the investigation as to the alleged existence in the County of New York of an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes._
To the Hon. THOMAS C. O'SULLIVAN, Judge of the Court of General Sessions.
Sir:
We, the members of the Additional Grand Jury for the January term, 1910, respectfully present as follows:
In the charge delivered to us by Your Honor on the 3rd day of January, 1910, Your Honor said:
"There have been spread broadcast in the public prints statements that the City of New York is a center or clearing house for an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes, or what has come to be known as the 'white slave' traffic. Some of these statements may have been published with ulterior motive and may have been mere sensationalism, but some are said to be based upon official investigation and charges made by persons who profess to have knowledge of the fact.
* * * * * * *
"This traffic in women, it is charged, follows two main objects: First, the procuring of women of previous chaste character, who through force, duress, or deceit are finally made to live lives of prostitution; second, the procuring of women who are already prostitutes and placing them with their consent in houses where they may ply their trade.
* * * * * * * *
"But the main object, gentlemen, which I desire you to keep in mind throughout your investigation is the uncovering not alone of isolated offenses, but of an organization, if any such exists, for a traffic in the bodies of women.
"You should make your investigation sufficiently broad to cover not only present conditions, but also conditions existing in the past within the statute of limitations.
"I charge you that it is your duty to pursue this inquiry into every channel open to you and to present to the court the facts found by you."
Pursuant to Your Honor's instructions, we have made an investigation into the matters referred to in Your Honor's charge. We have called before our body every person whom we could find who we had reason to believe might have information on the subject. Among others were the following: a member of the National Immigration Commission assigned to investigate conditions relating to importing, seducing, and dealing in women in the City of New York; the author of an article which appeared in _McClure's Magazine_ for November, 1909, entitled "The Daughters of the Poor"; a former under sheriff in the County of Essex, New Jersey; the President of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; the author of a pamphlet entitled "The White Slave Traffic"; a member of the New York State Immigration Commission appointed by Governor Hughes in 1908; a former Police Commissioner of the City of New York; detectives and other agents especially employed in connection with this investigation; members and ex-members of the New York Independent Benevolent Association; witnesses in the specific cases presented to this Grand Jury, as well as a number of other citizens. In addition, the foreman, the District Attorney and his Assistants, have interviewed representatives of the following organizations:
The Committee of Fourteen; its Research Committee;
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children;
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice;
The Charity Organization Society;
The Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor;
The Committee on Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls;
The Society for Social and Moral Prophylaxis;
The Florence Crittenden Mission;
The New York Probation Association;
The Headworkers of various Social Settlements;
The Women's Municipal League;
The Society for the Prevention of Crime;
The Bureau of Municipal Research.
We also published in the daily press of this city on the 6th day of May the following:
"The Additional Grand Jury, sworn in in January by Judge O'Sullivan of the Court of General Sessions, was charged with the investigation of the truth or falsity of certain statements which had been publicly made during the past few months to the effect that the City of New York is a center or clearing house for an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes, or what has come to be known as the 'white-slave traffic.'
"Pursuant to this charge the Grand Jury has been seeking legal evidence on this subject from all available sources. The information which many citizens have volunteered to give has proved in most cases to be general rather than specific.
"Before closing its investigation the Grand Jury desires to announce publicly that it will be glad to receive definite, specific information as to the existence in this county of any traffic in women for immoral purposes from any citizen or official or other individual who has such information. Those who are willing to assist the Grand Jury in its investigation are asked to call at the office of James B. Reynolds, Assistant District Attorney, Criminal Court Building (within the next week). It will save the time of many individuals and of Mr. Reynolds if only those appear who are willing and able to present facts regarding the specific matter above stated.
"On behalf of the Additional January Grand Jury.
"JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR., "Foreman."
As a part of this investigation evidence has been presented to us and we have found 54 indictments:
22 for rape;
16 for abduction;
10 for maintaining disorderly houses, 7 of which were Raines-Law Hotels;
6 for the violation of Section 2460 of the Penal Law, entitled "Compulsory Prostitution of Women."
We have found no evidence of the existence in the County of New York of any organization or organizations, incorporated or otherwise, engaged as such in the traffic in women for immoral purposes, nor have we found evidence of an organized traffic in women for immoral purposes.
It appears, on the other hand, from indictments found by us and from the testimony of witnesses that a trafficking in the bodies of women does exist and is carried on by individuals acting for their own individual benefit, and that these persons are known to each other and are more or less informally associated.
We have also found that associations and clubs, composed mainly or wholly of those profiting from vice, have existed, and that one such association still exists. These associations and clubs are analogous to commercial bodies in other fields, which, while not directly engaged in commerce, are composed of individuals all of whom as individuals are so engaged.
The "incorporated syndicates" and "international bands" referred to in published statements, we find to be such informal relations as have just been spoken of, while the "international headquarters," "clearing houses" and "pretentious clubhouses" mentioned are cafés or other so-called "hang-outs" where people interested in the various branches of the business resort. These and the houses of prostitution are also referred to as "markets."
The "dealers" and "operators" are the so-called "pimps" and "procurers," the "pimp" being referred to as the "retailer" and the manager of houses as the "wholesaler."
The only association composed mainly or wholly of those profiting from vice, of the present existence of which we have evidence, is the New York Independent Benevolent Association, organized in this city in 1894 and incorporated in 1896. This association has had an average membership of about 100. Its alleged purpose is to assist its members in case of illness, to give aid in case of death, and to assure proper burial rites.
After an exhaustive investigation into the activities of the association and of its members we find no evidence that the association as such does now or has ever trafficked in women, but that such traffic is being or has been carried on by various members as individuals. We find that the members of this association are scattered in many cities throughout the United States. From the testimony adduced it appears probable that the social relations of the members and the opportunity thereby afforded of communicating with one another in various cities have facilitated the conduct of their individual business.
On one occasion where a member was convicted of maintaining a disorderly house and a fine of $l,000 was imposed upon him in the City of Newark, New Jersey, the association voted $500 for his aid. On another occasion in the City of Newark, New Jersey, where several of the members of the association were arrested on the charge of keeping and maintaining disorderly houses, and one member was in prison, the then President went to Newark, declared to the Under Sheriff that he was the President of the New York Independent Benevolent Association, and entered into negotiations with the authorities in Newark on behalf of the members who had been arrested. We have, however, no evidence of any such instance in the County of New York.