Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

Or perhaps after all he merely realised the need, in a time when business conditions were so unsettled, of economising. At any rate one Saturday, without prior warning, he dismissed from his employ three of his women workers – an outspoken Irish girl, a silent Russian Jewess, whose brothers wore the uniform of a government which oppressed them, and a French girl, this last being Marie Misereux.

Monday morning early Marie was abroad, trying to find for herself a new job. She was deft enough with her fingers, but there were handicaps which denied her opportunity of proving to any interested person just how deft those fingers of hers were. For one thing, millinery shops, big and little, were retrenching in their expenses or trying to. For another, she was ignorant of the town and of the ways of the millinery trade – her first job had been her only one. Finally, she had only a faulty knowledge of English, and that in some lines is yet a bar against the applicant for work even in the polyglot, more-than-half-foreign city of New York.

The week which began with that Monday morning went by; other Mondays and other weeks went by, and Marie, walking the soles off her shoes upon the pavements uptown and downtown, earned nothing at all. The account in the savings bank, which always before Paul went away had grown steadily and which for the first month or so after he went had grown in a lesser degree, was dwindling and dwindling. Now when Helene coughed she pressed her hand against her side. There was no news of their brother. Except for a few distant cousins three thousand miles away, they had no kinspeople. And in this country they had no friends.

Along the crest of a low hill, like a seam, ran a succession of shattered tree trunks, hemming earthline to skyline with ragged and irregular stitches. Once upon a time, not so very long before, a fine little grove of half-grown poplars had crowned that small eminence. But the cannon and the spouting volleys from the rapid-fire guns had mowed down every tree, leaving only the mutilated and homely boles.

Upon one slope of the hill – the slope that was nearer the city – a triangular-shaped patch of woodland projected its point like a promontory well up toward the hilltop. The shells had wrought most grievously here, too, but, being protected somewhat by the dip in the land, the forest, as they call such a stretch of park timber in Europe, had not suffered in the same proportionate extent that the comb of saplings higher up suffered. The twistified masses of shot-down boughs made good cover for the French sharpshooters.

Just under the far shoulder of the rise, zig-zagging this way and that after the fashion of a worm that has stiff joints, was a German trench – the foremost German trench of all the myriad trenches and cross-trenches that formed the sector of the investments at this particular point. Behind the Germans as they squatted in this trench was the village of Brimont. It had been a village once. Now it was a flattened huddle of broken masonry and shattered woodwork, from which arose constantly a sour stench of rotting things. Back of the site of the village, where a little valley made out between more hills, was a sunken road winding off to the north. Upon either side of the road were fields gouged by misaimed shells until the mangled earth looked as though a thousand swine had rooted there for mast.

That was what the Germans saw when they looked over their shoulders. What they saw when they looked straight ahead was, first, the patch of woodland sheltering their foes and beyond that, three miles away, the old French city of Rheims, with the damaged towers of the great cathedral rising above lesser buildings, and on beyond, melting away into blue reaches of space, the fields of Champagne. That is to say, they could see so much when the weather was clear, which generally it wasn’t. Nine days in ten, this time of the year, it rained – the cold, constant, searching rain of mid-October. It was raining on this particular day, and up on this saucer-rim of land, which ringed the plain in, the wind blew steadily with a raw bite to it.

Firing back and forth between defenders and besiegers went on intermittently. At this spot there was no hard fighting; there had been none for weeks. Farther way, right and left, along the battle line which stretched from Switzerland to the sea, the big guns roared like bulls. But here the men lay in their shelters and nibbled at their foes like mice.

On second thought I beg to withdraw the latter simile. These men were not so much like mice as they were like moles. For they grubbed in the earth, as moles do, eating and sleeping, living and dying down in their mud burrows. Only, moles keep their fur tidied and fine, while these men were coated and clogged with the tough clayey substance in which they wallowed. It was as much as they could do to keep their rifles in cleansed working order.

Over in the German trench a slim Saxon youth was squatted, ankle-deep in cold yellow water. At intervals he climbed into a small scarp in the wall of the trench, a kind of niche just large enough to hold his body, and kneeling there, with his head tucked down and his shoulders drawn in, he swapped shots with a Frenchman in the woods slightly beneath and directly in front of him. Neither of them ever saw the other. Each in his firing was guided by the smack of his enemy’s gun and the tiny puff of white smoke which marked its discharge; each knowing in a general way only the approximate location of the man he coveted to kill, for after an exchange of shots both would shift, the German to another scarp, the Frenchman to another tangle of felled boughs. There was nothing particularly personal, nothing especially hateful or passionate in the present ambition of either. It was merely the job in hand.

As between these two – the Frenchman and the German – there was, excusing the differences of language and religion, no great amount of distinction to be drawn. Temperamentally they were of much the same cast. Each in his separate small sphere of endeavour had been a reasonably law-abiding, reasonably industrious, fairly useful individual, until somebody else, sitting in a high place, had willed it for him that he should put by whatsoever task he might be concerned with and engage in this business of gunning for his fellow-man.

Their uniforms, to be sure, differed in cut and colour, or had so differed until the mud of Champagne had made them of a pattern together. The German soldier’s helmet had a sharp spike set in it; the Frenchman’s cap had a flattened top. Also the German carried his name and number in a small leather pouch which hung on a thong about his neck and lay snugly against the chilled skin of his breast under his shirt, whereas the Frenchman wore his name and his number on a small brass token that was made fast to a slender wire bracelet riveted about his left wrist.

Concerning these methods of marking men there had been argument from time to time, the German authorities contending that their system is the better of the two. For proof of the claim they point out that in the case of a Frenchman an arm may be torn away, bodily carrying the bracelet and the tag with it, whereas as regards a German, he may be shot in two and yet retain his identification label since it is not so very often that the head is entirely dissevered from the trunk. Here again, as in many other details, they contend German efficiency maintains its superiority over all. On both sides the matter is discussed dispassionately, just as the toxic properties of various makes of poisonous gases are discussed, or the rending powers of shrapnel upon human flesh.

About four o’clock in the afternoon the German climbed up into his favourite scarp once more. Hoping to draw his opponent’s fire, he jerked his head up into sight for half a second, then jerked it down again. The trick worked; the Frenchman fired, but fired high. The German shoved his gun barrel out between two clods, shut both eyes – for he was by no means a clever marksman – and pumped a shot back in reply. The bullet from his rifle, which was a long, sharp-nosed, steel-jacketed bullet, devised in accordance with the most scientific experiments, found its billet. It struck the Frenchman as he lay belly downward on the earth with his gunstock against his cheek. It removed two fingers of the Frenchman’s right hand, three fingers of his left hand, tore away his lower jaw, beard and all, and passed out at the back of his neck, taking splintered fragments of his spinal processes with it. He turned over on his back, flapping with his arms and legs, threshing about in the wet leaves and in the mud, making grotesque bubbling sounds down in his throat.

Pretty soon after that twilight came on and the rifle firing slackened. The Saxon youth, never knowing he had killed his enemy, called it a day and knocked off. He hunkered down in the slime to eat a tallowy stew of bull meat and barley from a metal pannikin. It was nourishing enough, this mess was, but it had the aspect of swill. Having eaten, he immediately thereafter crawled, in his wet clothes and soaked boots, into a sort of dugout hollowed in the wall of his trench, and slept there with four of his comrades on a bed of mouldy, damp rye straw. While they slept the vermin travelled from one to another of them, making discriminative choice of which body to bite.

Down in the little forest below, the Frenchman presently quit flapping and quietly bled to death. During the night a burial party of his own people came and found him and shovelled him underground where he lay. But first the sergeant in command of the squad removed the bangle from his wrist. In due course of time, therefore, word was carried back and back by succeeding stages to headquarters, and from there on to Paris, and from Paris on to New York, so that within a month’s time or a little less it became the painful duty of a consular clerk in New York to transmit by mail to the deceased’s next of kin, a sister, the intelligence, as conveyed in the official notification, that her brother, Paul Gaston Michel Misereux, was heroically dead on the Field of Honour.

For the repose of their brother’s spirit they had a mass said at the little French Catholic Church where they worshipped, and in his memory candles burned upon the altar. Out of a length of cheap sleazy stuff they made a mourning frock for Helene. Wearing it, her face seemed whiter than ever and the two red spots in her cheeks seemed redder. Marie had the black frock, with the white collars and cuffs, which had been her uniform as a saleswoman in the place on lower Sixth Avenue; she wore that as she hunted for work. Regardless of their sorrow, the hunt must go on. It went on, and was a vain quest. From much weeping her eyes were swollen and puffy and her face was drawn out of all comeliness. Even though through merciful forbearance each forbore to tell her so, none of those to whom she applied for work cared to hire so homely appearing a serving woman. In another week, or at most two, they would be scraping the bottom of their savings account.

Before this they had lived on scanty rations, wasting never a crumb. Now they trimmed the food allowance still finer. It may have been the lack of sufficient nourishment that caused Helene to drop down in a faint on the floor of the tiny kitchen one evening in the middle of the second week following the receipt of the news from the consul’s office. As Marie bent to raise her head in her arms, a little stream of blood began to run from one corner of Helene’s mouth. For some time after she recovered consciousness and had opened her eyes the little trickle of blood continued, and Marie, sitting beside her, wiped it away as fast as it oozed out between her lips. The younger girl appeared to suffer no pain, but was very weak. Marie got her undressed and into her bed in the small middle room. Then she ran downstairs to the basement to find out from the caretaker where the nearest doctor was to be found.

It seemed there was one only two doors away. He came presently, a testy man of sixty who was lame. One of his legs was inches shorter than its mate. He lived in a tenement himself and his practice was among tenement dwellers, and he was underpaid and overworked and had trouble enough sometimes to make both ends meet. He grew shorter of breath and of disposition at every step as he wallowed up the stairs, Marie going ahead to show him the way to the rear flat at the top of the house. Wheezing until the sound of his breathing filled the room, he sat down alongside Helene, and while he held one of her pipe-stem wrists in his hand he asked Marie certain questions. Then he told Marie to go into the front room and wait for him there.

In ten minutes or less he limped in to her where she sat with her hands clenched between her knees and her eyes big and rounded with apprehension. He thought he closed the intervening door behind him, but the latch failed to catch in the slot and it swung ajar for a space of two or three inches. Neither of them took note of this.

“She’s quiet now,” he said: “the hemorrhage is checked. I took a sample of her blood. I’ll make a blood test to-morrow morning. How long has this been going on – this cough?”

A good long time, Marie told him – several months. She went on, in her broken English, to explain: “We thought it was but a bad cold, that soon she would be well – ”

He broke in on her impatiently:

“That’s what you said before. That’s no excuse.” He looked about him. “How many are there of you living here – just you two?”

“We are quite alone,” she told him. “We had also a brother, but – but he now is dead.”

It did not occur to her to tell him how the brother had died, or when.

“What’s your business?” he demanded. Then as she seemed not to get his intent, he added:

“Can’t you understand plain English? What do you do for a living?”

“Your pardon, doctor; I am a milliner.”

“And this other girl – your sister – she’s been staying at home and doing the housekeeping, you said?”

She nodded. For a moment there was silence, she still seated, he before her balancing himself on the longer leg of the two and on his heavy cane. “I’ll make a blood test in the morning,” he said at length, repeating what he had said a moment before.

“Doctor,” said Marie, “tell me, please, the truth. My sister – is she then so ill?”

“Ill?” he burst out at her irritably. “Ill? I should say she is ill. She’s got tuberculosis, if you know what that means – consumption.”

She sucked her breath in sharply. Her next question came slowly: “What is there then to do?”

“Well, she couldn’t last long here – that’s dead certain. You’ve got to get her away from here. You’ve got to get her up into the North Woods, in the mountains – Saranac or some place like that – in a sanitarium or an invalids’ camp where she can have the right kind of treatment. Then she’ll have a chance.”

By a chance he meant that with proper care the sick girl might live for three months or for four, or at the outside for six. The case was as good as hopeless now; he knew that. Still his duty was to see that his patients’ lives were prolonged – if possible.

“These mountains, I do not know them. We are strangers in this country.”

“I’ll find out about a place where you can get her in,” he volunteered. “I’ll bring you the information in the morning – names and addresses and everything. Somebody’ll have to go up there with her – you, I guess – and get her settled. She’s in no shape to be travelling alone. Then you can leave her there and arrange to send up so much a week to pay for her keep and the treatment and all. Oh, yes – and until we get her away from here you’ll have to lay off from your work and stay with her, or else hire somebody to stay with her. She mustn’t be left alone for long at a time – she’s too sick for that. Something might happen. Understand?”

“And all this – it will cost much money perhaps?”

The cripple misread the note in her voice as she asked him this. This flat now, it was infinitely cleaner than the abodes of nine-tenths of those among whom he was called to minister. To his man’s eyes the furnishings, considering the neighbourhood, appeared almost luxurious. That bed yonder against the wall was very much whiter and looked very much softer than the one upon which he slept. And the woman herself was well clad. He had no patience with these scrimping, stingy foreigners – thank God he was himself native-born – these cheap, penurious aliens who would haggle over pennies when a life was the stake. And there was no patience in his uplifted, rumbling voice as he answered her:

“Say, you don’t want your sister to be a pauper patient, do you? If you do, just say so and I’ll notify the department and they’ll put her in a charity institution. She’d last just about a week there. Is that your idea? – if it is, say so!”

“No, no, no,” she said, “not charity – not for my sister.”

“I thought as much,” he said, a little mollified. “All right then, I’ll write a letter to the sanitarium people; they ought to make you a special rate. Oh, it’ll cost you twenty-five dollars a week maybe – say, at the outside, thirty dollars a week. And that’ll be cheap enough, figuring in the food she’ll have to have and the care and the nursing and all. Then, of course, there’ll be your railroad tickets on top of that. You’d better have some ready money on hand so we can get her shipped out of here before it’s too – Well, before many days anyhow.”

She nodded.

“I shall have the money,” she promised.

“All right,” he said; “then you’d better hand me two dollars now. That’s the price of my call. I don’t figure on charging you for making the blood test. And the information about the sanitarium and the letter I’m going to write – I’ll throw all that in too.”

She paid him his fee from a small handbag. At the hall door he paused on his stumping way out.

“I think she’ll be all right for to-night – I gave her something,” he said with a jerk of his thumb toward the middle room. “If you just let her stay quiet that’ll be the best thing for her. But you’d better run in my place the first thing in the morning and tell me how she passed the night. Good night.”

“Good night, doctor – and we thank you!”

He went clumping down the steps, cursing the darkness of the stairwell and the steep pitch of the stairs. Before the sound of his fumbling feet had quite died away Marie, left alone, had made up her mind as to a certain course. In so short a time as that had the definite resolution come to her. And as she still sat there, in an attitude of listening, Helene, in the middle room, dragged herself up from her knees where she had been crouched at the slitted door between. She had heard all or nearly all the gruff lame doctor said. Indeed, she had sensed the truth for herself before she heard him speak it. What he told her sister was no news to the eavesdropper; merely it was confirmation of a thing she already knew. Once up on her bare feet, she got across the floor and into her bed, and put her head on the pillow and closed her eyes, counterfeiting sleep. In her mind, too, a plan had formed.

It was only a minute or two after this that Marie came silently to the door and peered in, looking and listening. She heard the regular sound of the sick girl’s breathing. By the light of the gas that was turned down low she saw, or thought she saw, that Helene was asleep. She closed the door very softly. She freshened her frock with a crisp collarband and with crisp wristbands. She clasped about her neck a small gold chain and she put on her head her small, neat black hat. And then this girl, who meant to defile her body, knelt alongside her bed and prayed the Blessed Virgin to keep her soul clean.

With her handbag on her arm she passed out into the hall. Across the hall a Jewish family lived – by name, the Levinski family – consisting of a father who was a push-cart peddler, a gross and slattern mother who was continually occupied with the duties of being a mother, and any number of small Levinskis. In answer to her knock at their door, Mrs. Levinski came, a shapeless, vast shape in her night dress, bringing with her across the threshold strong smells of stale garlic, soiled flannel and cold fried carp. Marie had a nodding acquaintance with this neighbour of hers and no more.

“My sister, she is sick,” she told Mrs. Levinski. “And I must go out. Please, will you listen? If she should awake and call out for me, you will please to tell her I am gone but soon will be back again. If you please?”

Mrs. Levinski said she would, and to show she meant it opened wide her door before she returned to her household duties.

For November the weather was warm, but it was damp and would be damper. A fine drizzle was falling as Marie Misereux came to the lower hallway entrance and looked out into the night; and East Thirteenth Street, which is never entirely empty, was almost empty. She hesitated a moment, with her left hand clenched tight against her breast, and then stepped out, heading westward. At the first avenue crossing she came upon a man, a fairly well-dressed man, who stood below the stoop of a private house that had been converted into some sort of club, as if undecided in his own mind whether to go in or to stay out. She walked straight up to him.

“Will you go with me, m’sieur?” she said.

He peered at her from under his hatbrim. Almost over them was a street lamp. By its light he saw that her face was dead white; that neither her lips nor her cheeks were daubed with cosmetics, and that her lips were not twisted into the pitiable, painted smile of the streetwalker. Against the smooth fulness of her dress her knotted left hand made a hard, white clump. Her breasts, he saw, heaved up and down as though she had been running and her breath came out between her teeth with a whistling sound. Altogether she seemed most oddly dressed and most oddly mannered for the part she played.

“You want me to go with you?” he asked, half incredulously, half suspiciously, still staring hard.

“If – if you will be so good.”

“Do you need the money that bad?”

“Assuredly, m’sieur,” she said with a simple, desperate directness. “Why else would I ask you?”

“Say,” he said almost roughly, “you better go on home. I don’t believe you belong on the streets. Here!”

He drew something that was small and crumply from a waistcoat pocket, and drawing a step nearer to her he shoved it between two of the fingers of her right hand.

“Now, then,” he said, “you take that and hustle on back home.”

He laughed, then, shamefacedly and in a forced sort of way, as though embarrassed by his own generosity, and then he turned and went quickly up the steps and into the club house.

She looked at what he had given her. It was a folded dollar bill. As though it had been nasty to the touch, she dropped it and rubbed her hand upon her frock, as if to cleanse it of a stain. Then, in the same instant nearly, she stooped down and picked up the bill from the dirty pavement and kissed it and opened her black handbag. Except for a few cents in change, the bag was empty. Except for those few cents and a sum of less than ten dollars yet remaining in the savings bank, the two dollars she had given the lame doctor was all the money she had in the world. She tucked the bill up in still smaller compass and put it in the bag. She had made the start for the fund she meant to have. It was not charity. In the sweat of her agonized soul she had earned it.

She crossed over the first bisecting avenue to the westward, and the second; she passed a few pedestrians, among them being a policeman trying door latches, a drunken man whose body swayed and whose legs wove queer patterns as he walked, and half a dozen pale, bearded men who spoke Yiddish and gestured volubly with their hands as they went by in a group. At Third Avenue she turned north, finding the pavements more thickly populated, and just after she came to where Fourteenth Street crosses she saw a heavily built, well-dressed man in a light overcoat, coming toward her at a deliberative, dawdling gait. She put herself directly in his path. He checked his pace to avoid a collision and looked at her speculatively, with one hand fingering his moustache.

“Will you go with me?” she said, repeating the invitation she had used before.

“Where to?” he said, showing interest.

“Where you please,” she said in her halting speech.

“You’re on,” he said. He fell in alongside her, facing her about and slipping a hand well inside the crook of her right arm.

“You – you will go with me?” she asked. Suddenly her body was in a tremble.

“No, sister,” he stated grimly, “I ain’t goin’ with you but you’re sure goin’ with me.” And as he said it he tightened his grip upon her forearm.

He had need to say no more. She knew what had happened. She had not spent two years and better in a New York tenement without learning that there were men of the police – detectives they called them in English – who wore no uniforms but went about their work apparelled as ordinary citizens. She was arrested, that was plain enough, and she understood full well for what she had been arrested. She made no outcry, offered no defence, broke forth into no plea for release. Indeed her thought for the moment was all for her half-sister and not for herself. So she said nothing as he steered her swiftly along.

At a street light where a patrol telephone box of iron was bolted to the iron post the plain-clothes man slowed up. Then he changed his mind.

“Guess I won’t call the wagon,” he said. “I happen to know it’s out. It ain’t far. You and me’ll walk and take the air.” He turned with her westward through the cross street. Then, struck by her silence, he asked a question:

“A Frenchy, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” she told him. “I am French. Where – where are you taking me, m’sieur? Is it to the prison – the station house?”

“Quit your kiddin’,” he said mockingly. “I s’pose you don’t know where we’re headin’? Night court for yours – Jefferson Market. Right over here across town.”

“They will not keep me there long? They will permit me to go if I pay a fine, eh? A small fine, eh? That is all they will do to me, is it not so?”

He grunted derisively. “Playin’ ignorant, huh? I s’pose you’re goin’ to tell me now you ain’t never been up in the night court before?”

“No, no, m’sieur, never – I swear it to you. Never have I been – been like this before.”

“That’s what they all say. Well, if you can prove it – if you ain’t got any record of previous complaints standin’ agin’ you, and your finger prints don’t give you away – you’ll get off pretty light, maybe, but not with a fine. I guess the magistrate’ll give you a bit over on the Island – maybe thirty days, maybe sixty. Depends on how he’s feelin’ to-night.”

“The Island?”

“Sure, Blackwell’s Island. A month over there won’t do you no harm.”

“I cannot – you must not take me,” she broke out passionately now. “For thirty days? Oh, no, no, m’sieur!”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” He was mimicking her tone. “I guess you can stand doin’ your thirty days if the rest of these cruisers can. If you should turn out to be an old offender it’d likely be six months – ”

He did not finish the sentence. With a quick, hard jerk she broke away from him and turned and ran back the way she had come. She dropped her handbag and her foot spurned it into the gutter. She ran straight, her head down, like a hunted thing sorely pressed. Her snug skirt hampered her though. With long strides the detective overtook her. She fought him off silently, desperately, with both hands, with all her strength. He had to be rough with her – but no rougher than the emergency warranted. He pressed her flat up against a building and, holding her fast there with the pressure of his left arm across her throat, he got his nippers out of his pocket. Another second or two more of confused movement and he had her helpless. The little steel curb was twined tight about her right wrist below the rumpled white cuff. By a twist of the handles which he held gripped in his palm he could break the skin. Two twists would dislocate the wrist bone. A strong man doesn’t fight long after the links of the nippers start biting into his flesh.

“Now, then,” he grunted triumphantly, jerking her out alongside him, “I guess you’ll trot along without balkin’. I was goin’ to treat you nice but you wouldn’t behave, would you? Come on now and be good.”

He glanced backward over his shoulder. Three or four men and boys, witnesses to the flight and to the recapture, were tagging along behind them.

“Beat it, you,” he ordered. Then as they hesitated: “Beat it now, or I’ll be runnin’ somebody else in.” They fell back, following at a safer distance.

He had led his prisoner along for almost a block before he was moved to address her again:

“And you thought you could make your getaway from me? Not a chance! Say, what do you want to act that way for, makin’ it harder for both of us? Say, on the level now, ain’t you never been pinched before?”

She thought he meant the pressure of the steel links on her wrist.

“It is not that,” she said, bending the curbed hand upward. “That I do not think of. It is of my sister, my sister Helene, that I think.” Her voice for the first time broke and shivered.

“What about your sister?” There was something of curiosity but more of incredulity in his question.

“She is ill, m’sieur, very ill, and she is alone. There is no one but me now. My brother – he is dead. It is for her that I have done – this – this thing to-night. If I do not return to her – if you do not let me go back – she will die, m’sieur. I tell you she will die.”

If she was acting it was good acting. Half convinced against his will of her sincerity, and half doubtfully, he came to a standstill.

“Where do you live – is it far from here?”

“It is in this street, m’sieur. It is not far.” He could feel her arm quivering in the grip of his nippers.