After that they met frequently. In the evening after supper Gusta would steal out, Peltzer would be waiting for her at the corner, and they would stroll under the trees that were rapidly filling with leaves.
Once, passing Policeman Crowley, Gusta saw him looking at them narrowly.
There was a little triangular park not far from Gusta's home, and there the two would sit all the evening. The moon was full, the nights were soft and mild and warm. On Sundays they went to the park where they had met, and now and then they danced in the public pavilion. But Gusta never danced with any of the other men there, nor did Peltzer dance with any of the other girls; they danced always together, looking into each other's eyes. Now she could endure the monotony and the drudgery at home, the children's peevishness, her mother's melancholy, her father's querulousness. Even Archie's predicament lost its horror and its sadness for her. She had not yet, however, told Peltzer, and she felt ashamed of Archie, as if, in creating the possibility of compromising her, he had done her a wrong. She went about in a dream, thinking of Peltzer all the time, and of the wonderful thing that had brought all this happiness into her life.
Gusta had not, however, as yet allowed Peltzer to go home with her; he went within half a block of the house, and there, in the shadow, they took their long farewell. But Peltzer was growing more masterful; each night he insisted on going a little nearer, and at last one night he clung to her, bending over her, looking into her blue eyes, his lips almost on hers, and before they were aware they were at her door. Gusta was aroused by Crowley's voice. Crowley was there with her father, telling him again the one incident in all his official career that had distinguished him for a place in the columns of the newspapers. He was just at the climax of the thrilling incident, and they heard his voice ring out:
"An' I kept right on toowards him, an' him shootin' at me breasht four toimes--"
He had got up, in the excitement he so often evoked in living over that dramatic moment again, to illustrate the action, and he saw Gusta and Charlie. Peltzer stopped, withdrew his arm hurriedly from Gusta's waist, and then Crowley, forgetting his story, called out:
"Oh-ho, me foine bucko!"
Then Koerner saw Gusta, and, forgetting for a moment, tried to rise to his feet, then dropped back again.
"Who's dot feller mit you, huh? Who's dot now?" he demanded.
"Aw, tut, tut, man," said Crowley. "Shure an' the girl manes no harm at all--an' the laad, he's a likely wan. Shure now, Misther Koerner, don't ye be haard on them--they're that young now! An' 'tis the spring, do ye moind--and it's well I can see the phite flower on the thorn tra in me ould home these days!"
Gusta's heart and Peltzer's heart warmed to Crowley, but old Koerner said:
"In mit you!"
And she slipped hurriedly indoors.
But nothing could harm her now, for the world had changed.
XV
Archie Koerner served his thirty days in the workhouse, then, because he was in debt to the State for the costs and had no money with which to pay the debt, he was kept in prison ten days longer, although it was against the constitution of that State to imprison a man for debt.
Forty days had seemed a short time to Bostwick when he pronounced sentence; had he chosen, he might have given Archie a sentence, in fine and imprisonment, that would have kept him in the workhouse for two years; he frequently did this with thieves. These forty days, too, had been brief to Marriott, and to Eades, and they had been brief to Elizabeth, who had found new happiness in the fact that Mr. Amos Hunter had given Dick a position in the banking department of his Title and Trust Company. These forty days, in fact, had passed swiftly for nearly every one in the city, because they were spring days, filled with warm sunshine by day, and soft and musical showers by night. The trees were pluming themselves in new green, the birds were singing, and people were happy in their release from winter; they were busied about new clothes, with riding and driving, with plans for summer vacations and schemes for the future; they were all imbued with the spirit of hope the spring had brought to the world again. To Gusta, too, in her love, these days had passed swiftly, like a hazy, golden dream.
But to Archie these forty days had not been forty days at all, but a time of infinite duration. He counted each day as it dragged by; he counted it when he came from his bunk in the morning; he counted it every hour during the long day's work over the hideous bricks he could find no joy in making; he counted it again at evening, and the last thing before he fell asleep. It seemed that forty days would never roll around.
They did pass finally, and a morning came when he could leave the comrades of his misery. He felt some regret in doing this; many of them had been kind to him, and friendships had been developed by means of whispers and signs, but more by the silent influence of a common suffering. He had quarreled and almost fought with some of them, for the imprisonment had developed the beast that was in them, and had made many of them morose, ugly, suspicious, dangerous, filling them with a kind of moral insanity. But he forgot all these enmities in the joy of his release, and he bade his friends good-by and wished them luck. In the superintendent's office they gave him back his clothes, and he went out again into the world.
It was strange to be at liberty again. His first unconscious impulse was to take up his life where he had left it off, but he did not know how to do this. For behind him stretched an unknown time, a blank, a break in his existence, which refused to adjust itself to the rest of his life; it bore no relation to that existence which was himself, his being, and yet it was there. The world that knew no such blank or break had gone on meanwhile and left him behind, and he could not catch up now. He was like a man who had been unconscious and had awakened with a blurred conception of things; it was as if he had come out of a profound anaesthesia, to find that he had been irrevocably maimed by some unnecessary operation in surgery.
Archie did not, of course, realize all this clearly; had he been able to do so, he might have avoided some of the consequences. But he had a troubled sense of change, and he was to learn it and realize it fully only by a slow, torturing process, a bit at a time. He had the first sensation of this change in the peculiar gleam that came into the eye of a policeman he passed in Market Place, and he felt it, too, when, half fearfully, he presented himself at the back door of his home. His father's fury had long since abated, but he showed that he could not look on Archie as he once had done, and Gusta showed it, too. Bostwick may have thought he had sentenced Archie to forty days in prison, but he had really sentenced him to a lifetime in prison; for the influences of those forty days could never leave Archie now; the shadows of that prison were ever lengthening, and they were for evermore to creep with him wherever he went, keeping him always within their shades. He was thereafter to be but an umbra at the feast of life.
Archie could not think of the whole matter very clearly; of the theft of which he had been convicted he scarcely thought at all. The change that came in the world's attitude toward him did not seem to be concerned with that act; it was never mentioned or even suggested to him at home or elsewhere. The thing that marked him was not the fact that he had been a thief, but that he had been a prisoner. When he did think of the theft, he told himself that he had paid for that; the score had been wiped out; the world had taken its revenge on him. This revenge was expressed by the smile that lit up the face of the grocer whose herrings had been stolen; it had been shown in the satisfaction of the prosecutor when the judge announced his finding; it had been expressed by the harshness of the superintendent and the guards at the workhouse; it was shown even by the glance of that policeman he met in the Market. The world had wreaked its vengeance on him, and Archie felt that it should be satisfied now.
There was but one place now where the atmosphere lacked the element of suspicion and distrust, but one place where he was not made to feel the barrier that separated him from other men, and that was with the gang.
The gang welcomed him with a frank heartiness; they showed almost the same eagerness and pleasure in him that they showed in welcoming Spud and the others. There was balm in their welcome; they asked no questions, they drew no distinctions; to them he was the same old Archie, only grown nearer because now he could unite with them in experience--they all had those same gaps in their lives.
That afternoon they celebrated with cans of beer in the shade of a lumber pile, and that night the gang went down the line. Having some money, they were welcome in all the little saloons, and the girls in short dresses, who stood about the bars rolling cigarettes constantly, were glad to see them. And Archie found that no questions were asked here, that no distinctions were made even when respected, if not respectable, men appeared, even when the prosecutor of the police court came along with a companion, and spent a portion of the salary these people contributed so heavily to pay, even when the detectives came and received the tribute money. And it dawned on Archie that here was a little quarter of the world where he was wanted, where he was made to feel at home, where that gap in his life made no difference. It was a small quarter, covering scarcely more than a dozen blocks. It was filled with miserable buildings, painted garishly and blazing with light; there was ever the music of pianos and orchestras, and in the saloons that were half theaters, bands blared out rapid tunes. And here was swarming life; here, in the midst of death. But it was an important quarter of the town; in rents and dividends and fines it contributed largely of the money it made at such risk and sacrifice of body and of soul, to all that was accounted good and great in the city. It helped to pay the salaries of the mayor and the judges and the prosecutors and the clerks and the detectives and the policemen; some of its money went to support in idleness and luxury many dainty and exclusive women in Claybourne Avenue, to build enormous churches, to pay for stained-glass windows with pictures of Christ and the Magdalene, pictures that in soft artistic hues lent a gentle religious and satisfying melancholy to the ladies and gentlemen who sat in their pews on Sundays; it even helped to send missionaries to far countries like Japan and China and India and Africa, in order that the heathen who lived there might receive the light of the Cross.
While in the workhouse Archie had occupied the same cell with a man called Joseph Mason, which was not his name. The prison was crowded, and it was necessary for the prisoners to double up. The cells were narrow and had two bunks, one above and the other below--there was as much room as there is in a section of a sleeping-car. In these cells the men slept and ate and lived, spending all the time they did not pass at labor in the brick-yard. During those forty days Archie became well acquainted with Mason; they sat on their little stools all day Sunday and talked, and when they climbed into their bunks at night they whispered. They shared with each other their surreptitious matches and tobacco--all they had.
This man Mason was nearly fifty years old. His close-cropped hair and his close-shaven beard gave his head and cheeks and lips a uniform color of dark blue; his lips were thin and compressed from a habit of taciturnity, his eyes were small, bright and alert; at any sound he would turn quickly and glance behind him. He had spent twenty years in prison--ten years in Dannemora, five in Columbus, three in Allegheny and two in Joliet. This, however, did not include the time he had been shut up in police stations, calabooses, county jails and workhouses. In the present instance he had been arrested for pocket-picking, and had agreed to plead guilty if the offense were reduced to petit larceny; the authorities had accepted his proposal, and he had been sentenced to six months in the workhouse. He had served four and a half months of his sentence when Archie went into the workhouse.
The only time when Mason showed any marked sense of humor was when he told Archie of his having confessed to pocket-picking. The truth was that he was totally innocent of this crime, and if the police had been wise they would have known this. Mason was a Johnny Yegg, that is, an itinerant safe-blower. As a yegg man, of course, he never had picked a pocket, and could not have done so had he wished, for he did not know how; and if he had known how, still he would not have done so, for the yeggs held such crimes as picking pockets in contempt. All of the terms he had served in states' prisons had been for blowing safes, and all of the safes had been in rural post-offices. The technical charge was burglary, though he was not a burglar, either, in the sense of entering dwellings by night; this was a class of thieving left to prowlers. The preceding fall, however, a safe had been blown in a country post-office near the city, and Mason knew that the United States inspectors would suspect him if they found him, and while he had been innocent of that particular crime, he knew that this would make no difference to the inspectors; they would willingly "job" him, as he expressed it, justifying the act to any one who might question it--they would not need to justify it to themselves--by arguing that if he had not blown that particular safe he had blown others, so that the balance would be dressed in the end. Consequently, when the police arrested him for pocket-picking, he hailed it as a stroke of good fortune and looked on the workhouse as an asylum. He had been a model prisoner, and had given the authorities no trouble. He did this partly because he was a philosophical fellow, patient and uncomplaining, partly because he did not wish to attract attention to himself. His picture and his measurements, taken according to the Bertillon system, were in every police station in the land.
Mason told Archie many interesting stories of his life, of cooking over a fire in the woods, riding on freight trains, of hang-outs in sand-houses, and so on, and he told circumstantially of numerous crimes, though never did he identify himself as concerned in any of them excepting those of which he had been convicted, and in these he did not give the names of his accomplices. Before their companionship ended he had taught Archie the distinctions between yegg men and peter men and gay cats, guns of various kinds, prowlers, and sure-thing men, and the other unidentified horde of criminals who belong to none of these classes.
He had taught Archie also many little tricks whereby a convict's lot may be lightened--as, for instance, how to split with a pin one match into four matches, how to pass little things from one cell to another by a "trolley" or piece of string, how to lie on a board, and so on. But, above all, he had set Archie the example of a patient man who took things as they came, without question or complaint.
Archie missed Mason. He could see him sitting in the gloom of their little cell, upright and almost never moving, talking in a low tone, his lips, which had a streak of tobacco always on them, moving slowly, shutting tightly after each sentence, until he had swallowed, then deliberately he would go on. Mason's view of life interested Archie, who, up to that time, had never thought at all, had never made any distinctions, and so had no view of life at all. Many of Mason's views were striking in their insight, many were childish in their lack of it; they were curiously straightforward at times, at others astonishingly oblique. He had a great hatred of sham and pretense, and he considered all so-called respectable people as hypocrites. He had about the same contempt for them that he had for the guns, who were sneaks, he said, afraid to take chances. He had a high admiration for boldness and courage, and a great love of adventure, and he thought that all these qualities were best exemplified in yegg men. For the courts he had no respect at all; his contempt was so deep-rooted that he never once considered the possibility of their doing justice, and spoke as if it were axiomatic that they could not do justice if they tried. He had the same contempt for the church, although he seemed to know much about the life of Jesus and had respect for His teachings. He called the people who came to pray and sing on Sundays "mission stiffs"; he treated them respectfully enough, but he told Archie that those prisoners who took an interest in the services did so that they might secure favors and perhaps pardons. He had known many convicts to secure their liberty in that way, and while he gave them credit for cleverness and was not disposed to blame them, still he did not respect them. Such convicts he called "false alarms."
There were one or two judges before whom he had been tried that he admired and thought to be good men. He did not blame them for the sentences they had given him, but explained to Archie that they had to do this as an incident of their business, and he spoke as if they might have shared his own regret in the cruel necessity. Of all prosecutors, however, he had a hatred; especially of Eades, of whom he seemed to have heard much. He told Archie that as a result of Eades's severity the thieves some day would "rip" the town.
He looked on his own occupation and spoke of it as any man might look on his own occupation; it simply happened that that was his business. He seemed to consider it as honest as, or at least no more dishonest than, any other business. He had certain standards, and these he maintained.
On the whole, however, he concluded that his business hardly paid, though it had its compensations in its adventure and in its free life.
XVI
Archie was loitering along Market Place, not sure of what he would do that evening, but ready for any sensation chance might offer. Men were brushing through the flapping green doors of the small saloons, talking loudly, and swearing, many of them already drunk. Pianos were going, and above all the din he heard the grating of a phonograph grinding out the song some minstrel once had sung to a banjo; the banjo notes were realistic, but the voice of the singer floated above the babel of voices like the mere ghost of a voice, inhuman and not alive, as perhaps the singer might not then have been alive. Archie, wondering where the gang was, suddenly met Mason. The sight gave him real pleasure.
"Hello, Joe!" he cried as he seized Mason's hand.
Mason smiled faintly, but Archie's joy made him happy.
"Je's," said Archie, "I'm glad to see you--it makes me feel better.
When 'd you get out?"
"This morning," Mason replied. "Which way?"
"Oh, anywhere," said Archie. "Where you goin'?"
"Up to Gibbs's. Want to go 'long?"
Archie's heart gave a little start; to go to Danny Gibbs's under Mason's patronage would be a distinction. The evening opened all at once with sparkling possibilities.
"An old friend o' mine's there," Mason explained as they walked along up Kentucky Street. "He's just got out of a shooting scrape; he croaked that fellow Benny Moon. Remember?"
Gibbs's place was scarcely more than a block away; it displayed no sign; a three-story building of brick, a side door, and a plate-glass window in front; a curtain hiding half the window, a light above--that was all.
Mason entered with an assurance that impressed Archie, who had never before felt the need of assurance in entering a saloon. He looked about; it was like any other saloon, a long bar and a heavy mirror that reflected the glasses and the bottles of green and yellow liqueurs arranged before it. At one table sat a tattered wreck of a man, his head bowed on his forearms crossed on the table, fast asleep--one of the many broken lives that found with Danny Gibbs a refuge. Over the mirror behind the bar hung an opium pipe, long since disused, serving as a relic now, the dreams with which it had once relieved the squalor and remorse of a wasted life long since broken.
At Mason's step, however, there was a stir in the room behind the bar-room, and a woman entered. She walked heavily, as if her years and her flesh were burdensome; her face was heavy, tired and expressionless.
She was plainly making for the bar, as if to keep alive the pretense of a saloon, but when she saw Mason she stopped, her face lighted up, becoming all at once matronly and pleasant, and she smiled as she came forward, holding out a hand.