Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
of gas jets. She divulged the fact that she was attired in some half
dozen skirts. It was patent that any one of them would have proved
adequate for the purpose for which skirts are intended. An occasional
man bent forward, intent upon the pink stockings. Maggie wondered at
the splendor of the costume and lost herself in calculations of the
cost of the silks and laces.
The dancer's smile of stereotyped enthusiasm was turned for ten minutes
upon the faces of her audience. In the finale she fell into some of
those grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the
dancers in the theatres up-town, giving to the Bowery public the
phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates.
"Say, Pete," said Maggie, leaning forward, "dis is great."
"Sure," said Pete, with proper complacence.
A ventriloquist followed the dancer. He held two fantastic dolls on
his knees. He made them sing mournful ditties and say funny things
about geography and Ireland.
"Do dose little men talk?" asked Maggie.
"Naw," said Pete, "it's some damn fake. See?"
Two girls, on the bills as sisters, came forth and sang a duet that is
heard occasionally at concerts given under church auspices. They
supplemented it with a dance which of course can never be seen at
concerts given under church auspices.
After the duettists had retired, a woman of debatable age sang a negro
melody. The chorus necessitated some grotesque waddlings supposed to
be an imitation of a plantation darkey, under the influence, probably,
of music and the moon. The audience was just enthusiastic enough over
it to have her return and sing a sorrowful lay, whose lines told of a
mother's love and a sweetheart who waited and a young man who was lost
at sea under the most harrowing circumstances. From the faces of a
score or so in the crowd, the self-contained look faded. Many heads
were bent forward with eagerness and sympathy. As the last distressing
sentiment of the piece was brought forth, it was greeted by that kind
of applause which rings as sincere.
As a final effort, the singer rendered some verses which described a
vision of Britain being annihilated by America, and Ireland bursting
her bonds. A carefully prepared crisis was reached in the last line of
the last verse, where the singer threw out her arms and cried, "The
star-spangled banner." Instantly a great cheer swelled from the
throats of the assemblage of the masses. There was a heavy rumble of
booted feet thumping the floor. Eyes gleamed with sudden fire, and
calloused hands waved frantically in the air.
After a few moments' rest, the orchestra played crashingly, and a small
fat man burst out upon the stage. He began to roar a song and stamp
back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat
and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast. He made his face into
fantastic grimaces until he looked like a pictured devil on a Japanese
kite. The crowd laughed gleefully. His short, fat legs were never
still a moment. He shouted and roared and bobbed his shock of red wig
until the audience broke out in excited applause.
Pete did not pay much attention to the progress of events upon the
stage. He was drinking beer and watching Maggie.
Her cheeks were blushing with excitement and her eyes were glistening.
She drew deep breaths of pleasure. No thoughts of the atmosphere of
the collar and cuff factory came to her.
When the orchestra crashed finally, they jostled their way to the
sidewalk with the crowd. Pete took Maggie's arm and pushed a way for
her, offering to fight with a man or two.
They reached Maggie's home at a late hour and stood for a moment in
front of the gruesome doorway.
"Say, Mag," said Pete, "give us a kiss for takin' yeh teh deh show,
will yer?"
Maggie laughed, as if startled, and drew away from him.
"Naw, Pete," she said, "dat wasn't in it."
"Ah, what deh hell?" urged Pete.
The girl retreated nervously.
"Ah, what deh hell?" repeated he.
Maggie darted into the hall, and up the stairs. She turned and smiled
at him, then disappeared.
Pete walked slowly down the street. He had something of an astonished
expression upon his features. He paused under a lamp-post and breathed
a low breath of surprise.
"Gawd," he said, "I wonner if I've been played fer a duffer."
Chapter VIII
As thoughts of Pete came to Maggie's mind, she began to have an intense
dislike for all of her dresses.
"What deh hell ails yeh? What makes yeh be allus fixin' and fussin'?
Good Gawd," her mother would frequently roar at her.
She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women she met
on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. She craved those
adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving
them to be allies of vast importance to women.
Studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls she chanced to
meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherished and watched over
by those they loved.
The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her. She knew
she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot, stuffy room. The
begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the passing of elevated
trains. The place was filled with a whirl of noises and odors.
She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room,
mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads
bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness,
past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages. She speculated how
long her youth would endure. She began to see the bloom upon her
cheeks as valuable.
She imagined herself, in an exasperating future, as a scrawny woman
with an eternal grievance. Too, she thought Pete to be a very
fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.
She felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingers in the
oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment. He was a
detestable creature. He wore white socks with low shoes.
He sat all day delivering orations, in the depths of a cushioned chair.
His pocketbook deprived them of the power to retort.
"What een hell do you sink I pie fife dolla a week for? Play? No, py
damn!" Maggie was anxious for a friend to whom she could talk about
Pete. She would have liked to discuss his admirable mannerisms with a
reliable mutual friend. At home, she found her mother often drunk and
always raving. It seems that the world had treated this woman very
badly, and she took a deep revenge upon such portions of it as came
within her reach. She broke furniture as if she were at last getting her
rights. She swelled with virtuous indignation as she carried the lighter
articles of household use, one by one under the shadows of the three
gilt balls, where Hebrews chained them with chains of interest.
Jimmie came when he was obliged to by circumstances over which he had no
control. His well-trained legs brought him staggering home and put him
to bed some nights when he would rather have gone elsewhere.
Swaggering Pete loomed like a golden sun to Maggie. He took her to a
dime museum where rows of meek freaks astonished her. She contemplated
their deformities with awe and thought them a sort of chosen tribe.
Pete, raking his brains for amusement, discovered the Central Park
Menagerie and the Museum of Arts. Sunday afternoons would sometimes find
them at these places. Pete did not appear to be particularly interested
in what he saw. He stood around looking heavy, while Maggie giggled in
glee.
Once at the Menagerie he went into a trance of admiration before the
spectacle of a very small monkey threatening to thrash a cageful because
one of them had pulled his tail and he had not wheeled about quickly
enough to discover who did it. Ever after Pete knew that monkey by sight
and winked at him, trying to induce hime to fight with other and larger
monkeys. At the Museum, Maggie said, "Dis is outa sight."
"Oh hell," said Pete, "wait 'till next summer an' I'll take yehs to a
picnic."
While the girl wandered in the vaulted rooms, Pete occupied himself in
returning stony stare for stony stare, the appalling scrutiny of the
watch-dogs of the treasures. Occasionally he would remark in loud tones:
"Dat jay has got glass eyes," and sentences of the sort. When he tired
of this amusement he would go to the mummies and moralize over them.
Usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he had to go
through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment.
"What deh hell," he demanded once. "Look at all dese little jugs!
Hundred jugs in a row! Ten rows in a case an' 'bout a t'ousand cases!
What deh blazes use is dem?"
Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the
brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her
guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the
beautiful sentiments. The latter spent most of his time out at soak in
pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing
aged strangers from villains.
Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow
storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir within singing
"Joy to the World." To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was
transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, like the actor,
inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic
pity of their imagined or real condition.
The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate
of the play was very accurately drawn. She echoed the maledictions
that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his
lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness.
Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of
the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue.
Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for
virtue.
The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the
oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered
the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. When
anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned. They
sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.
In the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth
and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies that
he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which applauded his
generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches of his
opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks. Those actors
who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every turn by
the gallery. If one of them rendered lines containing the most subtile
distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was immediately aware
if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him accordingly.
The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the
representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his
pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical purposes,
imperturbable amid suffering.
Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places of
the melodrama. She rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous
eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked. The theatre made her
think. She wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen
imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be
acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt
factory.
Chapter IX
A group of urchins were intent upon the side door of a saloon.
Expectancy gleamed from their eyes. They were twisting their fingers
in excitement.
"Here she comes," yelled one of them suddenly.