A Girl of the Streets
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Stephen Crane >> A Girl of the Streets
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 dat! 'Deh hell,' I says. See? 'Don' make no
trouble,' I says. Like dat. 'Don' make no trouble.' See? Den
deh mug he squared off an' said he was fine as silk wid his dukes
(See?) an' he wanned a drink damnquick. Dat's what he said. See?"
"Sure," repeated Jimmie.
Pete continued. "Say, I jes' jumped deh bar an' deh way I
plunked dat blokie was great. See? Dat's right! In deh jaw!
See? Hully gee, he t'rowed a spittoon true deh front windee. Say,
I taut I'd drop dead. But deh boss, he comes in after an' he says,
'Pete, yehs done jes' right! Yeh've gota keep order an' it's all
right.' See? 'It's all right,' he says. Dat's what he said."
The two held a technical discussion.
"Dat bloke was a dandy," said Pete, in conclusion, "but he
hadn' oughta made no trouble. Dat's what I says teh dem: 'Don'
come in here an' make no trouble,' I says, like dat. 'Don' make no
trouble.' See?"
As Jimmie and his friend exchanged tales descriptive of their
prowess, Maggie leaned back in the shadow. Her eyes dwelt
wonderingly and rather wistfully upon Pete's face. The broken
furniture, grimey walls, and general disorder and dirt of her home
of a sudden appeared before her and began to take a
potential aspect. Pete's aristocratic person looked as if it might
soil. She looked keenly at him, occasionally, wondering if he was
feeling contempt. But Pete seemed to be enveloped in reminiscence.
"Hully gee," said he, "dose mugs can't phase me. Dey knows I
kin wipe up deh street wid any t'ree of dem."
When he said, "Ah, what deh hell," his voice was burdened with
disdain for the inevitable and contempt for anything that fate
might compel him to endure.
Maggie perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man. Her
dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God
says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the
trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.
Chapter VI
Pete took note of Maggie.
"Say, Mag, I'm stuck on yer shape. It's outa sight," he said,
parenthetically, with an affable grin.
As he became aware that she was listening closely, he grew
still more eloquent in his descriptions of various happenings in
his career. It appeared that he was invincible in fights.
"Why," he said, referring to a man with whom he had had a
misunderstanding, "dat mug scrapped like a damn dago. Dat's right.
He was dead easy. See? He tau't he was a scrapper. But he foun'
out diff'ent! Hully gee."
He walked to and fro in the small room, which seemed then to
grow even smaller and unfit to hold his dignity, the attribute of
a supreme warrior. That swing of the shoulders that had frozen the
timid when he was but a lad had increased with his growth and
education at the ratio of ten to one. It, combined with the sneer
upon his mouth, told mankind that there was nothing in space which
could appall him. Maggie marvelled at him and surrounded him with
greatness. She vaguely tried to calculate the altitude of the
pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her.
"I met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city," he said. "I
was goin' teh see a frien' of mine. When I was a-crossin' deh
street deh chump runned plump inteh me, an' den he turns aroun' an'
says, 'Yer insolen' ruffin,' he says, like dat. 'Oh, gee,' I says,
'oh, gee, go teh hell and git off deh eart',' I says, like dat.
See? 'Go teh hell an' git off deh eart',' like dat. Den deh
blokie he got wild. He says I was a contempt'ble scoun'el,
er somet'ing like dat, an' he says I was doom' teh everlastin'
pe'dition an' all like dat. 'Gee,' I says, 'gee! Deh hell I am,'
I says. 'Deh hell I am,' like dat. An' den I slugged 'im. See?"
With Jimmie in his company, Pete departed in a sort of a blaze
of glory from the Johnson home. Maggie, leaning from the window,
watched him as he walked down the street.
Here was a formidable man who disdained the strength of a
world full of fists. Here was one who had contempt for brass-
clothed power; one whose knuckles could defiantly ring against the
granite of law. He was a knight.
The two men went from under the glimmering street-lamp and
passed into shadows.
Turning, Maggie contemplated the dark, dust-stained walls, and
the scant and crude furniture of her home. A clock, in a
splintered and battered oblong box of varnished wood, she suddenly
regarded as an abomination. She noted that it ticked raspingly.
The almost vanished flowers in the carpet-pattern, she conceived to
be newly hideous. Some faint attempts she had made with blue
ribbon, to freshen the appearance of a dingy curtain, she now saw
to be piteous.
She wondered what Pete dined on.
She reflected upon the collar and cuff factory. It began to
appear to her mind as a dreary place of endless grinding. Pete's
elegant occupation brought him, no doubt, into contact with people
who had money and manners. it was probable that he had a large
acquaintance of pretty girls. He must have great sums of money to
spend.
To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults. She
felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it. She
thought that if the grim angel of death should clutch his heart,
Pete would shrug his shoulders and say: "Oh, ev'ryt'ing goes."
She anticipated that he would come again shortly. She spent
some of her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a
lambrequin. She made it with infinite care and hung it to the
slightly-careening mantel, over the stove, in the kitchen. She
studied it with painful anxiety from different points in the room.
She wanted it to look well on Sunday night when, perhaps, Jimmie's
friend would come. On Sunday night, however, Pete did not appear.
Afterward the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation.
She was now convinced that Pete was superior to admiration for
lambrequins.
A few evenings later Pete entered with fascinating innovations
in his apparel. As she had seen him twice and he had different
suits on each time, Maggie had a dim impression that his
wardrobe was prodigiously extensive.
"Say, Mag," he said, "put on yer bes' duds Friday night an'
I'll take yehs teh deh show. See?"
He spent a few moments in flourishing his clothes and then
vanished, without having glanced at the lambrequin.
Over the eternal collars and cuffs in the factory Maggie spent
the most of three days in making imaginary sketches of Pete and his
daily environment. She imagined some half dozen women in love with
him and thought he must lean dangerously toward an indefinite one,
whom she pictured with great charms of person, but with an
altogether contemptible disposition.
She thought he must live in a blare of pleasure. He had friends,
and people who were afraid of him.
She saw the golden glitter of the place where Pete was to take
her. An entertainment of many hues and many melodies where she was
afraid she might appear small and mouse-colored.
Her mother drank whiskey all Friday morning. With lurid face
and tossing hair she cursed and destroyed furniture all Friday
afternoon. When Maggie came home at half-past six her mother lay
asleep amidst the wreck of chairs and a table. Fragments of
various household utensils were scattered about the floor.
She had vented some phase of drunken fury upon the lambrequin.
It lay in a bedraggled heap in the corner.
"Hah," she snorted, sitting up suddenly, "where deh hell yeh
been? Why deh hell don' yeh come home earlier? Been loafin'
'round deh streets. Yer gettin' teh be a reg'lar devil."
When Pete arrived Maggie, in a worn black dress, was waiting
for him in the midst of a floor strewn with wreckage. The curtain
at the window had been pulled by a heavy hand and hung by one tack,
dangling to and fro in the draft through the cracks at the sash.
The knots of blue ribbons appeared like violated flowers. The fire
in the stove had gone out. The displaced lids and open doors
showed heaps of sullen grey ashes. The remnants of a meal,
ghastly, like dead flesh, lay in a corner. Maggie's red mother,
stretched on the floor, blasphemed and gave her daughter a bad name.
Chapter VII
An orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men on an
elevated stage near the centre of a great green-hued hall, played
a popular waltz. The place was crowded with people grouped
about little tables. A battalion of waiters slid among the throng,
carrying trays of beer glasses and making change from the
inexhaustible vaults of their trousers pockets. Little boys, in
the costumes of French chefs, paraded up and down the irregular
aisles vending fancy cakes. There was a low rumble of conversation
and a subdued clinking of glasses. Clouds of tobacco smoke rolled
and wavered high in air about the dull gilt of the chandeliers.
The vast crowd had an air throughout of having just quitted
labor. Men with calloused hands and attired in garments that
showed the wear of an endless trudge for a living, smoked their
pipes contentedly and spent five, ten, or perhaps fifteen cents for
beer. There was a mere sprinkling of kid-gloved men who smoked
cigars purchased elsewhere. The great body of the crowd was
composed of people who showed that all day they strove with their
hands. Quiet Germans, with maybe their wives and two or three
children, sat listening to the music, with the expressions of happy
cows. An occasional party of sailors from a war-ship, their faces
pictures of sturdy health, spent the earlier hours of the evening
at the small round tables. Very infrequent tipsy men, swollen with
the value of their opinions, engaged their companions in earnest
and confidential conversation. In the balcony, and here and there
below, shone the impassive faces of women. The nationalities of
the Bowery beamed upon the stage from all directions.
Pete aggressively walked up a side aisle and took seats with
Maggie at a table beneath the balcony.
"Two beehs!"
Leaning back he regarded with eyes of superiority the scene
before them. This attitude affected Maggie strongly. A man who
could regard such a sight with indifference must be accustomed to
very great things.
It was obvious that Pete had been to this place many times
before, and was very familiar with it. A knowledge of this fact
made Maggie feel little and new.
He was extremely gracious and attentive. He displayed the
consideration of a cultured gentleman who knew what was due.
"Say, what deh hell? Bring deh lady a big glass! What deh
hell use is dat pony?"
"Don't be fresh, now," said the waiter, with some warmth, as
he departed.
"Ah, git off deh eart'," said Pete, after the other's
retreating form.
Maggie perceived that Pete brought forth all his elegance and
all his knowledge of high-class customs for her benefit. Her heart
warmed as she reflected upon his condescension.
The orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men gave
vent to a few bars of anticipatory music and a girl, in a pink
dress with short skirts, galloped upon the stage. She smiled upon
the throng as if in acknowledgment of a warm welcome, and began to
walk to and fro, making profuse gesticulations and singing, in
brazen soprano tones, a song, the words of which were inaudible.
When she broke into the swift rattling measures of a chorus some
half-tipsy men near the stage joined in the rollicking refrain and
glasses were pounded rhythmically upon the tables. People leaned
forward to watch her and to try to catch the words of the song.
When she vanished there were long rollings of applause.
Obedient to more anticipatory bars, she reappeared amidst the
half-suppressed cheering of the tipsy men. The orchestra plunged
into dance music and the laces of the dancer fluttered and flew in
the glare 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.