Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
they stood with the Lord. Many of the sinners were impatient over the
pictured depths of their degradation. They were waiting for
soup-tickets.
A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see the
portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and his
hearers.
"You are damned," said the preacher. And the reader of sounds might
have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people: "Where's our soup?"
Jimmie and a companion sat in a rear seat and commented upon the things
that didn't concern them, with all the freedom of English gentlemen.
When they grew thirsty and went out their minds confused the speaker
with Christ.
Momentarily, Jimmie was sullen with thoughts of a hopeless altitude
where grew fruit. His companion said that if he should ever meet God
he would ask for a million dollars and a bottle of beer.
Jimmie's occupation for a long time was to stand on streetcorners and
watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of
pretty women. He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets.
On the corners he was in life and of life. The world was going on and
he was there to perceive it.
He maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men. To
him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered
faint hearts. He and his order were kings, to a certain extent, over
the men of untarnished clothes, because these latter dreaded, perhaps,
to be either killed or laughed at.
Above all things he despised obvious Christians and ciphers with the
chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their button-holes. He considered
himself above both of these classes. He was afraid of neither the
devil nor the leader of society.
When he had a dollar in his pocket his satisfaction with existence was
the greatest thing in the world. So, eventually, he felt obliged to
work. His father died and his mother's years were divided up into
periods of thirty days.
He became a truck driver. He was given the charge of a painstaking
pair of horses and a large rattling truck. He invaded the turmoil and
tumble of the down-town streets and learned to breathe maledictory
defiance at the police who occasionally used to climb up, drag him from
his perch and beat him.
In the lower part of the city he daily involved himself in hideous
tangles. If he and his team chanced to be in the rear he preserved a
demeanor of serenity, crossing his legs and bursting forth into yells
when foot passengers took dangerous dives beneath the noses of his
champing horses. He smoked his pipe calmly for he knew that his pay
was marching on.
If in the front and the key-truck of chaos, he entered terrifically
into the quarrel that was raging to and fro among the drivers on their
high seats, and sometimes roared oaths and violently got himself
arrested.
After a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare upon all
things. He became so sharp that he believed in nothing. To him the
police were always actuated by malignant impulses and the rest of the
world was composed, for the most part, of despicable creatures who were
all trying to take advantage of him and with whom, in defense, he was
obliged to quarrel on all possible occasions. He himself occupied a
down-trodden position that had a private but distinct element of
grandeur in its isolation.
The most complete cases of aggravated idiocy were, to his mind, rampant
upon the front platforms of all the street cars. At first his tongue
strove with these beings, but he eventually was superior. He became
immured like an African cow. In him grew a majestic contempt for those
strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs.
He fell into the habit, when starting on a long journey, of fixing his
eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horses to begin, and
then going into a sort of a trance of observation. Multitudes of
drivers might howl in his rear, and passengers might load him with
opprobrium, he would not awaken until some blue policeman turned red
and began to frenziedly tear bridles and beat the soft noses of the
responsible horses.
When he paused to contemplate the attitude of the police toward himself
and his fellows, he believed that they were the only men in the city
who had no rights. When driving about, he felt that he was held liable
by the police for anything that might occur in the streets, and was the
common prey of all energetic officials. In revenge, he resolved never
to move out of the way of anything, until formidable circumstances, or
a much larger man than himself forced him to it.
Foot-passengers were mere pestering flies with an insane disregard for
their legs and his convenience. He could not conceive their maniacal
desires to cross the streets. Their madness smote him with eternal
amazement. He was continually storming at them from his throne. He
sat aloft and denounced their frantic leaps, plunges, dives and
straddles.
When they would thrust at, or parry, the noses of his champing horses,
making them swing their heads and move their feet, disturbing a solid
dreamy repose, he swore at the men as fools, for he himself could
perceive that Providence had caused it clearly to be written, that he
and his team had the unalienable right to stand in the proper path of
the sun chariot, and if they so minded, obstruct its mission or take a
wheel off.
And, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable desire to step
down, put up his flame-colored fists and manfully dispute the right of
way, he would have probably been immediately opposed by a scowling
mortal with two sets of very hard knuckles.
It is possible, perhaps, that this young man would have derided, in an
axle-wide alley, the approach of a flying ferry boat. Yet he achieved
a respect for a fire engine. As one charged toward his truck, he would
drive fearfully upon a sidewalk, threatening untold people with
annihilation. When an engine would strike a mass of blocked trucks,
splitting it into fragments, as a blow annihilates a cake of ice,
Jimmie's team could usually be observed high and safe, with whole
wheels, on the sidewalk. The fearful coming of the engine could break
up the most intricate muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had
been swearing for the half of an hour.
A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he
loved with a distant dog-like devotion. They had been known to
overturn street-cars. Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the
cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired.
The clang of the gong pierced his breast like a noise of remembered war.
When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested. Before he
reached a great age, he had a fair record.
He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck and
fight with other drivers. He had been in quite a number of
miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had become
known to the police. Once he had been arrested for assaulting a
Chinaman. Two women in different parts of the city, and entirely
unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by breaking
forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings about
marriage and support and infants.
Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly
and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?"
Chapter V
The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most
rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.
None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins. The
philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and on the same floor, puzzled over
it.
When a child, playing and fighting with gamins in the street, dirt
disguised her. Attired in tatters and grime, she went unseen.
There came a time, however, when the young men of the vicinity said:
"Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker." About this period her
brother remarked to her: "Mag, I'll tell yeh dis! See? Yeh've edder
got teh go teh hell or go teh work!" Whereupon she went to work,
having the feminine aversion of going to hell.
By a chance, she got a position in an establishment where they made
collars and cuffs. She received a stool and a machine in a room where
sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent. She perched
on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars,
the name of whose brand could be noted for its irrelevancy to anything
in connection with collars. At night she returned home to her mother.
Jimmie grew large enough to take the vague position of head of the
family. As incumbent of that office, he stumbled up-stairs late at
night, as his father had done before him. He reeled about the room,
swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor.
The mother had gradually arisen to that degree of fame that she could
bandy words with her acquaintances among the police-justices.
Court-officials called her by her first name. When she appeared they
pursued a course which had been theirs for months. They invariably
grinned and cried out: "Hello, Mary, you here again?" Her grey head
wagged in many a court. She always besieged the bench with voluble
excuses, explanations, apologies and prayers. Her flaming face and
rolling eyes were a sort of familiar sight on the island. She measured
time by means of sprees, and was eternally swollen and dishevelled.
One day the young man, Pete, who as a lad had smitten the Devil's Row
urchin in the back of the head and put to flight the antagonists of his
friend, Jimmie, strutted upon the scene. He met Jimmie one day on the
street, promised to take him to a boxing match in Williamsburg, and
called for him in the evening.
Maggie observed Pete.
He sat on a table in the Johnson home and dangled his checked legs with
an enticing nonchalance. His hair was curled down over his forehead in
an oiled bang. His rather pugged nose seemed to revolt from contact
with a bristling moustache of short, wire-like hairs. His blue
double-breasted coat, edged with black braid, buttoned close to a red
puff tie, and his patent-leather shoes looked like murder-fitted
weapons.
His mannerisms stamped him as a man who had a correct sense of his
personal superiority. There was valor and contempt for circumstances
in the glance of his eye. He waved his hands like a man of the world,
who dismisses religion and philosophy, and says "Fudge." He had
certainly seen everything and with each curl of his lip, he declared
that it amounted to nothing. Maggie thought he must be a very elegant
and graceful bartender.
He was telling tales to Jimmie.
Maggie watched him furtively, with half-closed eyes, lit with a vague
interest.
"Hully gee! Dey makes me tired," he said. "Mos' e'ry day some farmer
comes in an' tries teh run deh shop. See? But dey gits t'rowed right
out! I jolt dem right out in deh street before dey knows where dey is!
See?"
"Sure," said Jimmie.
"Dere was a mug come in deh place deh odder day wid an idear he wus
goin' teh own deh place! Hully gee, he wus goin' teh own deh place! I
see he had a still on an' I didn' wanna giv 'im no stuff, so I says:
'Git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble,' I says like dat!
See? 'Git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble'; like dat.
'Git deh hell outa here,' I says. See?"
Jimmie nodded understandingly. Over his features played an eager
desire to state the amount of his valor in a similar crisis, but the
narrator proceeded.
"Well, deh blokie he says: 'T'hell wid it! I ain' lookin' for no
scrap,' he says (See?), 'but' he says, 'I'm 'spectable cit'zen an' I
wanna drink an' purtydamnsoon, too.' See? 'Deh hell,' I says. Like