Chapter VIII: Part 8

He swung aboard the train and waved his hand to me. The news meant that he was not afraid of Nina's heredity. That he had not told me until there was no chance of discussing it, gave me a sudden pang of jealousy. Without my noticing it, a new element had come into my friend's life, which was too holy for him to talk over with me. It made me feel very lonely for awhile.

In the months which were left to her time, Nina went about the Teepee--singing. The wonder grew in her eyes, as did also the certainty of her high calling. To me--an outsider--there was something uncomfortable in the sight of their happiness those last weeks before the baby came. I felt like a trespasser, a profaner of some high mystery. But Norman begged me not to leave.

*BOOK VI*

*I*

Of course Ann was immensely interested in Nina's adventure. From the first she was sure it would turn out well. Ignoring the shell, as she always did, the kernel of the matter did not seem at all strange to her. She went much further than the Professor in "Sartor Resartus," who thought of people without clothes. She stripped them of their vocations as well. For her there existed no such categories as "street car conductors," "actresses," "bank presidents," "seamstresses." She saw only men and women. The way they earned their living was as unimportant to her as the _mode_ of their garments. It was not what people did, but the way they did it, which mattered. A man, who had chosen cooking as a career and cooked passionately, threw all his energy into soups and _souffles_ ranked higher with her than a listless, perfunctory poet. The doing heartily of any job whatsoever would sanctify it in her eyes. Of course she knew that working at the match trade or with white lead poisons a person, that some of the "dusty trades" ruin the lungs. But it would have been hard to get her to admit that pleasant, stimulating work might make a person more moral or that a vile job can damn a man. Nina's success in her new role, seemed to Ann, to depend entirely upon the intensity with which she entered it. It mattered not at all whether she had been previously a street walker or a queen. This point of view--utterly different from mine--I found very common among the people I met at Cromley.

Sooner or later I made the acquaintance of most of the leading anarchists of this country and many from abroad. They were sure of a welcome from the Bartons, sure of a meal and of any bed or sofa in the house which chanced to be vacant. They were an interesting and in many ways an attractive group. Like Ann, they were little interested in the outward accidents of a person's life, but very intense in regard to a rather indefinite inner life. They were, of course, vehemently opposed to the police. But I was accepted without question. I remember old Herr Most said, one time, his long gaunt forefinger tapping my badge.

"It's not that which makes a policeman. It's not the symbol we're fighting but the habit of mind."

The anarchists are beginning to take the place in our fiction which was formerly held by the gypsy. Half a dozen novels of the last few years have had such types as their heroes. It is hard to resist the romantic charm of a person who is utterly unattached. The vagabond who, in a land of conventional dwelling houses, sleeps out under the stars, casts a spell over us. These anarchists are intellectual nomads. In order that they may be free to wander according to their fancy in the realm of thought, to stroll at will in the pleasant valleys of poesy, to climb at times up onto the great white peaks of dreams, that in the winter days they may trek south to meet their friend, the sun, they have foresworn the clumsier impedimenta of our traditional ideas. As the Beduoin and the tramp despise the "Cit" who is kept at home by his business engagements, by the cares of his family and of his lands and goods, so these anarchists look down on us who are held stationary in the world of thought.

I remember a young Russian exile, who spoke English so faultlessly, after the manner of Macaulay's Essays, that it seemed queer, saying that he was "a cynic of the material." It struck me as a wonderfully apt phrase to distinguish their way of thinking from the more usual. Of all the "kitchenside of life,"--the meals we eat, the clothes we wear, the beds we sleep in, bankbooks, and property deeds, of vested rights and established institutions, of the applause and approbation of the mob--which most of us consider important, they were cynical. I, for instance, must admit to a certain unreasoning respect for clean linen. It is hard for me, even in the face of ocular demonstration, to separate it from clean straight thinking. But this group which gathered at Mrs. Barton's was certainly indifferent in the matter. Ann's bacteriological training had made her a fervent apostle of cleanliness. "Germs," she would say, "are only filth." But as often as not, some of the guests were evidently unafraid of microbes. Some of the dirtiest of them were the cleanest, straightest thinkers.

I have never met any other group of people who so sympathetically understood how I felt about life. In one way or another they had come to see life as I did--as I believe anyone, having the energy to avoid hardening, would see it, if they worked long in the Tombs. Try it yourself. Go into the Tombs--there is one in every town--if you have any love of justice and rectitude in your being you will come out in violent revolt against the smug complacency of our social machine. You will find anarchists pleasant people to talk with.

But when they tried to convert me, I was cold. I could go with them all the way in their criticism of and contempt for things as they are. Much of what they said and wrote seemed to me platitudes--I had seen it also keenly myself. I knew the things of which our civilization can boast, its universities, and culture, its music and painting, the triumphs of its sciences, its marvelous subjugation of nature, its telegraphs and transcontinental trains, and all this seemed very small return for the frightful price we pay. For years I had been living in the slums. I knew the debit side of the ledger also--the tuberculosis laden tenements, the sweat-shops, the children who never grow up, the poverty, the crime. The time they spent in trying to convince me that society was bankrupt, was wasted. And the dream of communism they offered in its place was enticing. I do not see how anyone can object to the ideals of anarchism, unless they are of the turn of mind which enjoys the kind of arrangements we now have--where one can steal and murder and still be respectable. Of course a scamp would have a pretty bad time in a communist society. But the means by which they hoped to realize their dream--well--that was a different affair.

It is possible to believe in all the miracles of Jesus--from his birth to his resurrection--but it takes "faith." It is possible to believe that, if by some miracle we were all made free we would be very much better than we are. The anarchists hold that our vices come from our manifold slavery. That is their creed. But it also takes "faith." I have not been able to believe anything in that way, since I was sixteen.

But I was quite ready to agree with them that much work such as mine was pitifully futile.

*II*

There were two incidents in my work which grew to great proportions in my mind. They happened close together, when I had been about seven years in the Tombs.

Walking one day along a corridor of the prison, past the cells, my attention was caught by an old man. He sat on a low stool, close to the grated door, his face pressed against the bars. On it was written appalling, abject despair.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

He glared at me sullenly. It was some time before he replied.

"They've got me wrong," he said.

The date on the door of his cell gave the history of the case. His name was Jerry Barnes. Arrested three weeks ago, without bail, he had pled guilty the day before to burglary in the third degree, and was awaiting sentence before Justice Ryan.

"What did you plead guilty for?" I asked, "if they had you wrong?"

"Wot's the use? You won't believe me."

With a little urging his story came in a rush. He was an old-timer, had done three bits in state prison, but coming out four years before he had decided to "square it." He wanted to die "on the outside." He had no trade, but had wrung out a meagre living, stuffing straw into mattresses. In the rush season he earned much as a dollar a day. Sometimes only twenty cents. And sometimes there was no work at all. He slept in a ten-cent lodging house, ate ten cent meals--forty cents a day, plus twenty cents a week for tobacco. What was left went into the Bowery Savings Bank. He wanted to have enough so he would not be buried in the Potters' Field. It had been a barren life. But the fear of prison--the fear which only an old-timer, who wants to die outside, knows--had held him to it.

Coming home from work one night he had stopped to watch a fire. As the crowd broke up he saw on the sidewalk several bags of tobacco and some boxes of cigarettes. He picked them up and almost immediately was grabbed by two detectives.

While the crowd had been watching the fire, someone had broken into a tobacco store and looted it. The detectives led Jerry to Central Office, identified him by the Bertillon records, and charged him with burglary in the second degree, for which the maximum sentence is ten years.

Jerry said that he knew nothing of the burglary. When he had been brought into court the district attorney had told him that if he would consent to plead guilty of burglary in the third degree, for which the maximum is only five years, he would intercede with the judge and ask for a light sentence.

Jerry had been hopeless of proving his innocence in the face of his previous record and the fact that some of the proceeds of the burglary had been found on his person. He had no friends. He did not believe that a poor man had any chance in court. So he had pled guilty in the hopes of a short sentence.

His story rang true, but I took great pains to verify it.

The police believed that Jerry was one of three or four who committed the burglary. One hundred dollars in money and twice as much stock had been taken. They had no evidence against Jerry except the packages of tobacco found in his pockets, and his record.

Mr. Kaufman, his employer, spoke highly of him. Jerry had been a regular applicant for work, and a preferred employee. If there was any work at all it was given to him. And sometimes in slack seasons, he had been employed out of charity. Kaufman said he would be glad to come to court and testify to Jerry's regular habits during the last three years. The lodging house keeper was also willing to appear on his behalf. Jerry had earned a definite reputation for quietness and sobriety. He had kept very much to himself and certainly had not been associating with professional criminals.

I took the whole story to Judge Ryan. He always placed great reliance on my judgment in such matters, and I was convinced of Jerry's innocence. Ryan said he would allow him to withdraw his plea of guilty and stand trial. I had a harder time persuading Jerry to do so. He was inclined to take his medicine--let well enough alone. He might live through a couple of years in prison and die outside, but he was afraid to take a chance on a long term. But finally I argued him into doing it.

When at last the case came up for trial, Ryan was off on his vacation, and it was set down before O'Neil, with whom I had less than no influence. Mr. Kaufman had been called out of town by the death of his father. No one appeared to speak for Jerry except the lodging house keeper, who made a poor showing, being mightily frightened under the cross-examination. The district attorney produced a handful of Rogues' Gallery photographs of Jerry. The police expanded their memory to the point of swearing that they had seen Jerry in the rifled premises. The jury convicted him without leaving the room, of burglary in the second degree. And the judge gave him eight years....

I sneaked out of the court room and locked myself in my office. It is not a pleasant thing to think about or write down even now.... I am sure he was innocent. If I had not meddled--he had not asked me to--he would have gotten off light. And eight years was the same as "life" for him.

The next two days when duty took me into the prison, I kept as far as might be from Jerry's cell. What could I say to him?

But on the afternoon of the second day, I met him by accident face to face. He was one of a line of ten men, old and young, chained together--just starting up the river. He jumped at me so hard, it threw the entire line off their feet. His slow, desperate curses as they led them out to the prison-van still haunt me, sometimes, at night.

Now that Jerry is dead--he died during the fourth year--I, more than ever before, wish I could believe in a life beyond death. I cannot imagine another life in which we would not understand and forgive the wrongs done us in this. And I cannot think of anything I would rather have than Jerry's forgiveness.

About the same time, I had taken up the work of supervising the men "on parole" from the reformatory. It was very hard to find satisfactory employment for these boys. I wrote an article which was translated and printed in one of the Yiddish dailies. I described the reformatory, told of the conditions on which the inmates were paroled and the civic duty of encouraging them to make good. And I appealed to the Jews to help me find work for the sons of their race. Many offers of employment came as a result of this article.

One day a fine old Russian Jew, named Lipinsky, came to my office on this business. He was a fur merchant on Second Avenue. He and his son, about nineteen, worked together, and he could use an assistant who would accept apprentice wages and live in the family. I liked the old man; he was a sturdy type, had worked up through endless hardships and reverses to the point where he was beginning to make a surplus and win respect in his trade. He was ambitious for his son, on whom all his hopes centered.

It seemed to me an unusually fine opening, the home conditions I felt sure would be good, and the first Jewish boy who came down--his name was Levine--I sent to Lipinsky. I called two or three times and everything seemed to be going well. But after about three months the crash came. Levine and young Lipinsky were arrested in the act of burglary in a large fur warehouse. They had several hundred dollars' worth of choice ermine skins in their bags. Young Lipinsky went to pieces under the "third degree" and confessed everything. They had been at it for more than a month. It had been a strong combination--his knowledge of furs and Levine's skill with the "jimmy." In an apartment on Fifteenth Street, where they had been keeping two girls, the police recovered large quantities of expensive furs.

Levine got seven years in state prison, and young Lipinsky, because he had turned state's evidence and because of my influence, got off with a sentence to the reformatory.

Old Lipinsky was utterly ruined. His rivals accused him of complicity. The detectives raided his store. They found nothing, but it was enough to ruin his credit. He peddles shoe-strings now on Hester Street.

But greater than this material loss was the blow to his heart--his hope in his only son shattered. He knocks at the door to my office now and then to ask news of his boy. It is sad news I have to tell him. His son is now doing his second term in state prison, a confirmed crook.

Old Lipinsky does not curse me as Jerry did--he relies on me to pay his rent and coal bills. He weeps.

I tried to look at these discouraging incidents, with reason. I tried to tell myself that my intentions had been good, and that intentions counted more than results. I tried to recall the very many families to whom I had brought a blessing. It is not a matter to boast of--nor to be modest about. The work I had chosen gave me daily opportunity to bring help to those in awful need. But try as I would to preserve what seemed to my reason proper proportions, the curses of Jerry, the wailing of old Lipinsky, drowned out all else. It obsessed me.

Looking back over those years it is hard for me to decide whether Norman was the determining element in my thinking, or whether from different angles, by different processes of mind, we reached the same conclusions. Certain it is that many times a conversation with him would precipitate fluid-vague feelings of mine into the definite crystals of intellectual convictions. A talk on this subject--of intentions and results--stands out as clear in my mind as any memory I have of him.

It started, I believe, by some jovial effort of his to lift me out of my profound discouragement. We had lit our pipes, Guiseppe was clearing the supper litter from the table. Nina was dividing her attention between a pile of to-be-darned stockings in her lap and Marie, who was safe in her cradle and needed no attention at all. Nina was a constant factor in all our arguments in those days. She was always silent. Much of our talk must have been far above her comprehension, but she would sit on the divan, her feet tucked up under her, and listen for hours on end. Her presence in some subtle way contributed to our discussions. The ancient Egyptians brought a skeleton to their feasts to remind them of death. Nina was to us a symbol of life--a silent chorus of actuality. Some word or look of mine that night showed Norman how desperately serious was my discouragement, and he dropped his flippant tone.

"After all intentions don't justify anything. We must demand results. But what results? When I see a chap, whose efforts I know to be good, get discouraged, I'm sure he's looking for the wrong kind of results. Of course, our unseen, unintentional influence is much greater than the influence we consciously exert. Some little of it we know about, the greater part we ignore. You're worried because some of your well-intentioned efforts have gone wrong, because our fight for a reformatory ended in a fizzle. These two cases, you speak of--Jerry and Lipinsky--are on your mind. There are probably dozens of others, just as bad, which you don't know about. Are they the kind of results on which you have a right to judge your work? I think not.

"The one real result of human activity is knowledge. Zola makes a character in 'Travail' say that science is the only true revolutionist. And if science is something more than dead laboratory data, if it's live workable human knowledge, a real aid to straight thinking, he is right.

"That must be the test of your activity--the judging result. What does it matter to the race that Jerry is beating his head against the walls of Sing Sing? In all the black history of the race, in all the long up-struggle, which rubbed off most of our hair, what does a little added injustice signify? Nothing. Unless--and this is the great chance--unless you can make the race realize the stupidity of such injustice. If you could make Jerry's tragedy bite into us like Uncle Tom's--well--then you and he would have earned the right to wrap the draperies of your couch about you and all that.

"It's the same with good results. They are insignificant! In terms of the race, they matter as little as the half hundred slaves Mrs. Stowe helped to escape via the underground railroad. Take Tony--this wreck you've dragged into dry-dock and repaired. It's important to him that you came along at the right time. But what does it matter to all the other immigrant craft that are trying to find safe anchorage on this side of the world? There's a new Tony launched every minute.

"Seven years you've been in the Tombs--had your nose in the cesspool. What have you learned--not just subjective acquisition of information, but what has it taught you for the race? Sooner or later, you'll begin to teach. You can't help it. It's too big for you--it will force an outlet.

"Prisons are a stupidity. Why do we cling to them? Natural viciousness? Innate cruelty? You don't believe that. It's ignorance! Dense black ignorance! Sodden ways of thinking. You've seen, you know. Well--that's footless--unless you can make the rest of us see and know. One man can't add much to this great racial mind. But if you can do the little, the very little, that Beccaria did, that John Howard and Charles Reade did--one lightning gleam--these little results you are worrying about now will sink into insignificance.

"You won't solve the problem of crime. That's too much to expect. What you teach about reform--reforms of judicial procedure, reforms of police and prisons--won't interest me much. I know these things seem big to you, but it will be mostly out of date before it's off the press. What I will look for is some help in understanding the problem. That will be your contribution--the judging result of your living. Perhaps some youngster, one of the generation to come, will read your book and go into the Tombs, see it for himself and in two years understand all it has taken you ten years to learn. That's human progress!

"We must saturate ourselves with the idea of evolution. Think of ourselves, our little lives, as tiny steps in that profound procession. Knowledge is the progressive element in life, just as nerve cells are the only progressive tissue in our bodies. We won't develop any more legs as we evolve through the ages ahead of us--the change will be in our brains."

The conversation rambled off into some by-paths which I forget. But it was this same night, I think, that he struck the main road of his philosophy, mapped out before me his idea of the country the race has yet to explore.

"The impediment to progress," he said, "is our fool idea of finality. It's funny how humanity has always been looking for an absolute, final court of appeal. The king can do no wrong. The pope is infallible. God is omniscient! Now we have the age of reason. The old gods have been driven from Olympus. And in place of Jehovah and Zeus our college professors have made a god of truth, the absolute, the final! Sooner or later we've got to learn that progress--growth of any kind--is in exact antithesis to this idea of finality.

"A large part of the scientific world and, I suppose, ninety-nine per cent of what is called "the enlightened public," believe that Darwinism is the last work in natural science. There are a thousand question marks strewn about the theory of natural selection. Only those biologists, who have sense enough not to accept the finality of anything, are trying to answer these questions.

"Socialism is a spectacular example. What did Karl Marx do? He stumbled along through the life which was given him, doing kind things and mean things by the way, all of which is, or ought to be, forgotten. The real thing he did--his contribution--was to keep his eyes open, to look at life without blinders. In the long process of thinking, this is the most important, the fundamental thing. And what he saw he pondered over, sweated over, prayed atheistical prayers over--and then he spoke out fearlessly. The people about him were hypnotized by the wonderfully growing industrialism of the day. It was going to solve all the ills of the race. No one had any responsibility any more. _Laissez faire_! Virtue and happiness and the next generation were automatic. The praise of the machine became an enthusiasm, a gospel. Marx had looked at it harder than the rest, had seen through its surface a glitter. And like Cassandra he shouted out his forebodings, careless of whether the world listened or not. 'It's a sham,' he said, 'this industrialism of yours is fundamentally immoral. It bears within itself death germs. They are already at work. This thing in which you put your trust is already putrid.' I don't know anything more amazing in the history of the human mind than Marx prophecies. Wrong in some details of course. He didn't claim any divine inspiration. But those three volumes in German are stupendous. And the secret of it is that he turned his penetrating eyes on the life about him. He looked!

"But the socialists of today--are they following his example? No. Marx did not believe in finalities; they make a finality of him. He sought new knowledge. They are defending what is already old, and like everything old, some of it is wrong now. Marx was a revolutionist--one of the greatest. The Marxists are conservatives. Think of it. Not an American socialist has tried to analyze Wall Street! Instead of scrutinizing the life about them, they spend their time arguing over his agrarian theory. No country in the world offers such glaring examples of industrial injustice as these United States and the books they circulate are translations from German. Some day they'll wake up--then I'll join them.

"The trouble comes from thinking there are finalities in life--ultimate truths. We've got to get it into our heads that truth itself evolves.

"It's coming to me stronger and stronger that the point of attack ought to be on our ideals of education. My God! You quit college at the end of your freshman year and wasted exactly three years less than I did. I feel so sure that this is the real issue that I'm losing interest in everything else.

"A system of education which wakes up the human mind instead of putting it to sleep! Education which begins where it ought to! At the beginning! the process of seeing, of looking at life with our own eyes--instead of through some professor's spectacles. If we could only teach the trick of original observation!

"The trouble isn't so much that we think incorrectly. We don't see straight. I remember our professor used to tell us that logic is a coffee-mill. If we put coffee in at the top it will come out at the bottom in a more usable form. But if we put in dirt--it stays dirt, no matter how fine we grind it. And then he switched off to train our coffee-mills--a lot of rigamarole about syllogisms, the thirteen fallacious ones--perhaps it was fourteen. But not a single word about how to distinguish dirt from coffee. It's the original assumptions that need questioning. I don't believe Darwin was a better logician than Saint Augustine. But he went out into the world and looked. He used observed facts for his coffee-mill. Saint Augustine ground up a lot of incoherent beliefs and dirty assumptions. Anyone can learn the laws of logic in a three months college course, or in as many weeks from a text-book. But I don't know of any place where they even try to teach original observation.

"Education, everybody says, is the bulwark of democracy. And we Americans really want democracy in a way the most radical European never dreamed of. Yet we are content with our schools! Nobody really worries about improving them. We assume that our system is the best in the world, perfect. Final! Damn finality! I'm not sure that our system isn't the worst. We consistently kill all originality. The minute the kids strike school the process begins. 'This, my child, is what you must believe,' you say. 'This block,' the kindergarten teacher says 'is red.' Of course what she should say is, 'What color is this block?' The college professor says to his senior seminar, 'Goethe is the greatest German poet; if you prefer Heine, you are a barbarian. Milton's epics are the pride of English letters; if you prefer L'Allegro, you show your lack of culture. Shelley was undoubtedly a great poet, but, I regret to say, an incendiary. Of course you must read The Ode to the West Wind and the Clouds, but I warn you against the Revolt of Islam.' From grammar school to university it is all this business of predigested tablets.

"Just look at the effect this sort of business has had on our politics! We Americans are dead. New ideas, discussion of fundamental political principles are fomenting everywhere but here. A Paris cab-driver thinks more about the theory of government than our congressman. We Americans sit back--our feet on the table--puff out our chests and say 'complete and absolute liberty for all time was decreed by the fathers in 1789.' How many men do you know who ever seriously questioned that proposition? How many Americans really believe that it takes 'eternal vigilance' to be free? No. Our Constitution is the most glorious document penned by man. It's final--it's stagnant and stinking!

"If we don't revolutionize our education, we'll rot or give up democracy. It's a clear choice. A national Tammany Hall and dizzy Roman decadence or Neo-aristocracy with restricted suffrage and hare-brained experiments in human stock breeding. If we don't learn to educate in a truer way, if we don't manage to kill this folly of finality, it's a choice between physiological decay and eugenics.

"I'm getting out of everything else--can't see anything but education. No more personal charity, no more checks to shoddy philanthropies. All the money I can lay my hands on goes into a trust fund to finance an educational insurrection. It's the only revolution I'm interested in.

"I tried to write about it. But--hell--people won't take me seriously. I knew somebody would giggle if I talked, so I ground out an article. I found a man in the club laughing over it--said it was 'clever.' Well--I've put what I think about it in my will. Perhaps they won't laugh when they read that."

As I said I am not sure whether Norman gave me my ideas, or whether he voiced conclusions which were forming already in my mind. At least I owe him their concrete shape.

My work in the Tombs took on a new visage. I began to think of it as something to communicate. I went about it with the feeling of a showman or a guide. There was always someone at my shoulder, to whom I tried to explain the essentials back of the details. The routine which had begun to be mechanical was revivified. I began thinking out my book. What I wanted to do was to draw a picture of the complex phenomena of crime and to contrast with it the dead and formal simplicity of our Penal Code, to show its hopeless inadequacy. I began work on a section devoted to "Theft." From my notes and my daily experience, I tried to show the kind of people who steal, the motives which drive them to it, the means they develop towards their end, petty sneak thieves, swindle promoters, bank robbers, pickpockets, fraudulent beggars, defaulting cashiers. The reality of theft is an infinitely more tangled thing than one would suppose from reading the meagre paragraphs in our statutes which deal with "Larceny." The book grew slowly. I felt no hurry. Now and then I published sections in the magazines--"Stories of Real Criminals."

*III*

It was when I was getting close to thirty-five that I first saw the name: Suzanne Trevier Martin--attorney and counsellor at law. We had heard rumors of women lawyers from the civil courts. But I think she was the first to invade the Tombs. It was Tim Leery, the doorman, of Part I, who called my attention to her.

"Say," he greeted me one morning about noon, "There's a fee-male lawyer here today--looking for you. And say--she's a peach!"

I do not know why I thought he was joking. I suppose I shared the comic paper idea that most professional women were pop-eyed and short-haired. Anyhow it was a definite surprise when I caught sight of her. Leery was pointing me out to her.

Yes. I am sure surprise was the chiefest element in the impression she made on me. Everything about her was different from what I expected of women. She was the most matter-of-fact looking person I have ever seen--and the most beautiful. I cannot describe her way of dressing, all that sticks in my mind is the crisp, white collar she wore. Somehow one's attention centered on that clean, orderly bit of linen. There was no suggestion of aping man-fashion about her, nor were there any frivolous tweedledees nor tweedledums. It was all as straightforward as that collar.

She had a mass of Titian red hair. A complexion so delicate that the sun had freckled it already in early spring. The lines of her face were altogether beautiful. Her mouth was firm and immobile. Her shifts of mood showed only in her eyes. They were always changing color, from deep tones of brown to a glowing chestnut almost as red as her hair. The way her head balanced on her neck, made me want to cheer. It seemed a victory for the race, that she--one of us--could carry her head so fearlessly.

"Here is an introduction," she said.

It was a letter from a young lawyer. The junior member of his firm, he was sometimes sent into the Tombs to defend the servants of their rich clients. I had often given him pointers on the practice of our courts, which differs materially from that of the civil courts. He asked the same courtesies for his friend, Miss Martin.

I felt with some embarrassment the amused stares of the crowded corridors.

"This isn't a very convenient place to talk," I said. "Let's go round to Philippe's and lunch."

As we walked downstairs, I sized her up as about twenty-five. I noted that the grace of her neck extended down her spine. I have never seen a straighter back. There was something definitely boyish in the way she walked, in her stride and the swing of her shoulders. This impression of boyishness was always coming and interfering with realization that she was a beautiful woman.

We found a quiet table at Philippe's and she explained her case. She was counsel for the Button-Hole Makers' Union. They were on strike and one of the girls had been arrested on the charge of assaulting a private policeman. The question at issue invoked the legality of picketing. If the girl had been within her rights in standing where she did, the watchman, who tried to drive her away, was guilty of assault. It was a case to fight out in the higher courts. The unions demanded a definite decision. Miss Martin wanted to have her client convicted, and still have grounds to take it up on appeal. It was simple and I had given her the necessary points before we had finished our coffee.

The very first sight of her in the Tombs had stirred me, as the first sight of no other woman had ever done. It was not so much a desire for personal possession as a vague feeling that the man to whom she gave her love would be happy above other men. In the back of my brain, as I sat talking to her, was a continual questioning. She had said she was a socialist. I saw that she had the fearless, open attitude to life, which is the hallmark of the revolutionists. I wondered if she had a lover. Was the friend, who had given her the introduction, the lucky man? What were her theories in such matters?

But if she made a more direct sensuous appeal to me than other women, to an even greater degree she seemed to ignore the possibility of such ideas being in my mind. I have never known even an ugly woman who was less coquettish. She was strangely aloof. She made the purely business side of our meeting dominate, did not seem to realize there might be a personal aspect. The way in which she made it quite impossible for me to suggest paying for her lunch was typical. She shook hands with me firmly, frankly, as a boy would with a man who had given him some slight help, and strode up the street to her office. I was surprised.

In and out of the Tombs, she walked for the next few weeks. Judge Ryan, before whom she tried her case, and who believed that all women should marry and keep indoors as soon after eighteen as a man would have them, was mightily exercised over her invasion.

"Damn her soul, Whitman," he said, "she isn't a woman--she's just brain and voice. She sits there before the court opens and looks like a woman--good-looking woman at that--then she gets up on her hind legs and talks. Hell! I forget she is a woman--forget she wears skirts. And, so help me God, there aren't a dozen men in the building who know as much law as she does. She's got the goods. That's the devil of it. You can't snub her. You can't treat her the way she deserves. You want to call her unwomanly and she won't let you remember she's a woman."

She had made Ryan, facing her from the bench, feel the same aloofness, she had impressed on me across the table at Philippe's. But if the judge found it impossible to snub her, it was just as impossible, I found, to be friendly with her. We had frequent encounters in the corridors. I frankly sought them, and she did so as frankly--when she wanted some information. Away from her, I thought of her as a desirable woman. Face to face, she forced me to consider her as a serious minded socialist.

Aside from the details of her case, we had only one talk. The second day she was at court she cross-questioned me on my politics. I had none. "Why not?" she demanded. She had all the narrow-minded prejudice which most socialists have towards the mere reformer, the believer in palliatives, the spreaders on of salve. Did I not realize the futility of such work as mine? I was more keenly aware of it than she. Well, why did not I go to the root of the matter? Why not attack the basic causes? I was not sure what they were. She was. Although she had not been in the Tombs as many days as I had years, she knew all about it. The whole problem of crime sprang from economic maladjustment. Socialism would cure it. It was all so beautifully simple! I have unspeakable admiration for such faith. It is the most wonderful thing in the world. But all I can do is to envy it. I cannot believe.

Her aloofness increased noticeably after she had sounded the depth of my unbelief. When the case was finished, she sought me out to thank me for the very real service I had rendered. Despite my intentions in the matter, her hand slipped out of mine quicker than I wished. I hoped to see her again. She was uncertain how soon, if ever, her work would bring her back to the Tombs. I suggested that I might call on her. She seemed really surprised.

"Why," she exclaimed; "thank you. But you know I'm very busy. I have five or six regular engagements a week--committees and all that. And this strike takes what time is left. I am too busy for the social game. I'm sorry. But we'll run into each other again some time. Goodbye. No end obliged."

It was the snub direct. Her friendship was only for those who saw the light. She had no time for outsiders, for "mere reformers."

She filled more of my mind after she was gone than in the few days of our intercourse. For the first time in my life romance laid hold on my imaginings. I am not sure whether it was real love or simply wounded _amour propre_. But I dreamed of all sorts of extravagant ways of winning her esteem and love--generally at the cost of my life. I was not nearly unhappy enough to want to die, but I got a keen, if somewhat lugubrious delight in picturing her kneeling at my bedside, realizing at last the mistake she had made in snubbing me--repenting it always through a barren, loveless life.

The memory I held of her was altogether admirable--the straight line of her back, the glorious poise of her head, the rich brown of eyes, her frank and boyish manner. But pride held me back from seeking her out. I knew a snub would be the result.

Once, a month or so later, I passed a street corner crowd, under a socialist banner. She was just getting up to speak. I walked a block out of my way for fear she would see me and think I was trying to renew our acquaintance. But I also was busy. Too busy to waste time over a phantom, gradually she sank back into a vaguer and vaguer might-have-been. A year later I ran across her name in the paper in connection with some strike. For a day or two her memory flared up again. That sentimental spasm I thought was the last of her. I was deep in proof-reading.

*IV*

That my book brought recognition from professional penologists was a surprise to me. I had written it with the intent of interesting laymen. But a German psychological journal gave it a long review. It was quickly translated into French and Italian. I was made contributing editor of "La revue penologique." Last of all the American Prison Society took notice of me and chose me as a delegate to the International Congress at Rome.

Europe never attracted me, and I doubt if I would have gone, except for the urgings of Norman and Ann. I was sea-sick for five days, and bored beyond words the rest of the way over. It rained so hard the day I spent in Naples that I got no good view of Vesuvius.

Arrived in Rome, I found that they had put down my name for the first day's program, and I spent the time, till the congress opened, in my room writing up my paper. I had chosen for my subject: "The Need of a New Terminology in the Study of Crime." More and more this reform seems imperative to me. The effort to express the modern attitude towards crime in the old phraseology is like putting new wine in old skins. Just as we no longer say that a man is "possessed of the devil," but use such newer words as "paranoia," "paresis" and so forth, we must give up such terms as "burglary in the second degree." It is a remnant of mediaeval scholasticism and means nothing today. It is a dead concept of an act and gives no account of the live human being who is supposed to have committed it. "Murder," the code implies, "is always murder, just as oxygen is always oxygen." But while one atom of oxygen is exactly like every other, no two murderers are at all alike. Crime is infinitely complex. "Larceny"--a fixed and formal term--cannot describe the intricate reactions from the varied stimuli of environment, which lead a particular bunch of nerve cells to steal. We must turn our back on the abstract words of the ancient law books and develop a vocabulary which expresses actualities.

That first day of the congress, seemed to me the very apotheosis of absurd futility. Half a hundred delegates from all corners of the world assembled in one of the court rooms of the palace of justice. We were supposed to be serious, practical men, come together to devise means of improving the methods of combating crime. We sat for an hour and a half through tiresome, bombastic exchanges of international greetings. The election of a chairman, of honorary presidents and vice-presidents, of a real secretary and a host of honorary secretaries took up the rest of the morning. A nation's parliament could have organized in less time and we had only come together to exchange ideas, we had no power.

When we convened after lunch, I was called on. There were three delegates from England, one from Canada and another from the United States. The rest had only a long-distance knowledge of English. I have rarely felt more uncomfortably foolish than I did, reading my paper to that uncomprehending audience.

The first two to discuss my thesis were Germans. Neither had completely understood my argument, they attacked me with acrimony. The third speaker was an Italian, who shook his fist at me. I have not the faintest idea what he was talking about. Then one of the English delegation, a bishop, got up and said that it was well to have a note of humanism in our discussion, after all criminals were--or at least had been--men like us. As Archbishop Somebody had said on seeing a prisoner led out to execution--"There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Then a Frenchman, with carefully groomed beard and equally carefully groomed cynicism, said I was a sentimentalist. He told us that he was a "positivist." He referred frequently to Auguste Compte--a philosopher whom I had up till that moment always regarded very highly. My mawkishness he felt was a most regrettable incident in a scientific assembly. Criminology unless it could be reduced to an exact science like mineralogy or mathematics was no science at all. He ended up by telling us that he was glad to report that the sentimental objections to corporal punishment were rapidly dying out in France and that there was every prospect of the cat-o'-nine-tails being reintroduced into their prisons in the near future. What that had to do with my subject I could not see.

How to reply to such critics? It was not only the difficulty of language. Somehow I was oppressed with loneliness. I was a barbarian, an outlandish person among them. In their thoughts they were "officials," they were "pillars of society"--what Norman scornfully called "the best people." It was a stupid mistake which had brought me before them. They knew nothing about crime, except a jumble of words. They never would.

And so--being weary of soul--I said, that as far as I had understood, they were all against me except the gentleman from England. I wanted as far as possible to repudiate his attitude. I protested against the blasphemy of his archbishop. I was no churchman, but I could not find heart to blame the Deity for our outrageous human injustice. I was sorry that he believed in a God so immoral as to exercise special acts of grace to keep him and me out of prison. I felt that a better motto for prison reform would be--"There but for pure luck, go we."

This was taken as a witty sally by everyone but the English delegates who understood what I said and we adjourned to a state reception at the Quirinal; there was a dinner afterwards given by the Italian prison society. The congress reconvened the next day at two in the afternoon. The subject was "Prison Ventilation." I sneaked out and found my way to The Forum. There I encountered a congenial soul--a youthful guide who had learned to speak English in New York. We sat down on a piece of ancient Rome and he told me about his adventures in the new world.

"Ever arrested?" I asked.

"Twict."

"In the Tombs?"

"Sure," he said with a broad grin. "Fer a fight."

I engaged him for the rest of my stay in Rome. He led me to a little restaurant near-by and after supper we sat in the very top gallery of the Coliseum and talked about Mulberry Square. So I missed the dinner tendered us by the municipality.

The next day the great Lombroso was to discuss head measurements. Antonio and I visited the Vatican. He was an anti-clericalist and the indecent stories he told me about the dead popes, as he showed me their tombs in Saint Peter's were much more vivid than the sing-song guide book phrases he used in commenting on the wonder and the beauty of the place. He took me to supper with his family in a tenement district of Rome. So the "sights" I saw were not so much the pictures and the ruins as the souls of the down-trodden peasant folk bitter against church and state. I lost a chance--undoubtedly--to increase my meagre store of "culture," but I do not regret it.

My fellow delegate from America was shocked at my desertion of the congress. He thought I was in a pet over the reception given my paper and said it was not decent to stay away. So I went the next day and listened to a discussion on the advisability of introducing drugs into prison diet to reduce unpleasant nervous disorders among the inmates. Everyone seemed in favor of the proposition, the only opposition came from a realization of the expense involved. The chairman expressed the hope that some drug might yet be discovered which would be effective, and at the same time cheap.

When the congress was finished the delegates were taken as guests of the government to visit a model prison, recently opened in North Italy. Our inspection consisted of a hurried stroll through the cell-blocks and a banquet in the warden's palatial apartments. We drank several toasts to members of the royal family and then, someone proposed a bumper to the International Prison Congress. I noticed by chance that the bottle, from which a convict waiter filled my glass, was labelled, "_Lacrimae Christi_."

"Tears of Christ!" I said to my next neighbor. "It would be more fitting to drink this toast of the water in which Pilate washed his hands."

My neighbor was a Frenchman with a loud laugh--so the thoughtless jibe had to be repeated. The English delegate seized the opportunity to return my accusation of blasphemy. There was considerable angry comment. It was a regrettable incident, as it did no good.

The Hungarian government had also invited us to visit some of their blue-ribbon prisons. But in the railroad station at Milan, where we were waiting to take train for Trieste and Budapest, I heard the _Chef de Gare_ call the Paris express. It came over me with a rush. I could get home a week earlier. Why waste more time with these barren old gentlemen? I bolted, had just time to rescue my baggage.

Arrived in Paris in the early morning, I drove at once to Cook's and reserved passage on the first boat home. As I was turning away from the steamship desk, I had to walk past the window where mail is distributed. I do not think I was consciously looking at the crowd of men and women who were waiting for letters, in fact I remember quite well that I was losing my temper over an effort to put a too large envelope into my pocket, but suddenly I saw Suzanne Martin's back. It was impossible to mistake it, or the glorious pile of hair above her slender neck.

I walked on, intending to hurry away. But I stopped at the door. I picked up one of those highly colored tourist pamphlets--I think it was an advertisement of a "Tour to Versailles in motor cars"--and over the top of it I watched Suzanne gradually approach the window, get her handful of letters, and sit down in one of the easy chairs to read them.

At last she finished with them and started towards the door. I wished that I had not waited, but was ashamed to let her see me run away. I became deeply interested in the little book. She would have to walk right past me but if she did not care to recognize well---she should not know that I had seen her.

*V*

"Why--hello--Mr. Whitman."