Quality and Others - John Galsworthy (bts books to read .TXT) 📗

this worthless note. In her rather guttural but pleasant voice she answered all our questions—not very far from tears, I think, but saved by native stolidity, and perhaps a little by the fear that purifiers of Society might not be the proper audience for emotion. When she had left us we recalled the detective, and still, as it were, touching the delicate matter with the tips of our tongues, so as not, being men of the world, to seem biassed against anything, we definitely elicited from him her profession and these words: “If she’s speaking the truth, gentlemen; but, as you know, these women, they don’t always, specially the foreign ones!” When he, too, had gone, we looked at each other in unwonted silence. None of us quite liked, it seemed, to be first to speak. Then our foreman said: “There’s no doubt, I think, that he gave her the note—mean trick, of course, but we can’t have him on that alone—bit too irregular—no consideration in law, I take it.”

He smiled a little at our smiles, and then went on: “The question, gentlemen, really seems to be, are we to take her word that she actually gave him change?” Again, for quite half a minute; we were silent, and then, the fattest one of us said, suddenly: “Very dangerous—goin’ on the word of these women.”

And at once, as if he had released something in our souls, we all (save two or three) broke out. It wouldn’t do! It wasn’t safe! Seeing what these women were! It was exactly as if, without word said, we had each been swearing the other to some secret compact to protect Society. As if we had been whispering to each other something like this: “These women—of course, we need them, but for all that we can’t possibly recognise them as within the Law; we can’t do that without endangering the safety of every one of us. In this matter we are trustees for all men—indeed, even for ourselves, for who knows at what moment we might not ourselves require their services, and it would be exceedingly awkward if their word were considered the equal of our own!” Not one of us, certainly said anything so crude as this; none the less did many of us feel it. Then the foreman, looking slowly round the table, said: “Well, gentlemen, I think we are all agreed to throw out this bill”; and all, except the painter, the Jew, and one other, murmured: “Yes.” And, as though, in throwing out this bill we had cast some trouble off our minds, we went on with the greater speed, bringing in true bills. About two o’clock we finished, and trooped down to the Court to be released. On the stairway the Jew came close, and, having examined me a little sharply with his velvety slits of eyes, as if to see that he was not making a mistake, said: “Ith fonny—we bring in eighty thix bills true, and one we throw out, and the one we throw out we know it to be true, and the dirtieth job of the whole lot. Ith fonny!” “Yes,” I answered him, “our sense of respectability does seem excessive.” But just then we reached the Court, where, in his red robe and grey wig, with his clear-cut, handsome face, the judge seemed to shine and radiate, like sun through gloom. “I thank you, gentlemen,” he said, in a voice courteous and a little mocking, as though he had somewhere seen us before: “I thank you for the way in which you have performed your duties. I have not the pleasure of assigning to you anything for your services except the privilege of going over a prison, where you will be able to see what sort of existence awaits many of those to whose cases you have devoted so much of your valuable time. You are released, gentlemen.”

Looking at each, other a little hurriedly, and not taking too much farewell, for fear of having to meet again, we separated.

I was, then, free—free of the injunction of that piece of paper reposing in my pocket. Yet its influence was still upon me. I did not hurry away, but lingered in the courts, fascinated by the notion that the fate of each prisoner had first passed through my hands. At last I made an effort, and went out into the corridor. There I passed a woman whose figure seemed familiar. She was sitting with her hands in her lap looking straight before her, pale-faced and not uncomely, with thickish mouth and nose—the woman whose bill we had thrown out. Why was she sitting there? Had she not then realised that we had quashed her claim; or was she, like myself, kept here by mere attraction of the Law? Following I know not what impulse, I said: “Your case was dismissed, wasn’t it?” She looked up at me stolidly, and a tear, which had evidently been long gathering, dropped at the movement. “I do nod know; I waid to see,” she said in her thick voice; “I tink there has been mistake.” My face, no doubt, betrayed something of my sentiments about her case, for the thick tears began rolling fast down her pasty cheeks, and her pent-up feeling suddenly flowed forth in words: “I work ‘ard; Gott! how I work hard! And there gomes dis liddle beastly man, and rob me. And they say: ‘Ah! yes; but you are a bad woman, we don’ trust you—you speak lie.’ But I speak druth, I am nod a bad woman—I gome from Hamburg.” “Yes, yes,” I murmured; “yes, yes.” “I do not know this country well, sir. I speak bad English. Is that why they do not drust my word?” She was silent for a moment, searching my face, then broke out again: “It is all ‘ard work in my profession, I make very liddle, I cannot afford to be rob. Without the men I cannod make my living, I must drust them—and they rob me like this, it is too ‘ard.” And the slow tears rolled faster and faster from her eyes on to her hands and her black lap. Then quietly, and looking for a moment singularly like a big, unhappy child, she asked: “Will you blease dell me, sir, why they will not give me the law of that dirty little man?”

I knew—and too well; but I could not tell her.

“You see,” I said, “it’s just a case of your word against his.” “Oh! no; but,” she said eagerly, “he give me the note—I would not have taken it if I ‘ad not thought it good, would I? That is sure, isn’t it? But five pounds it is not my price. It must that I give ‘im change! Those gentlemen that heard my case, they are men of business, they must know that it is not my price. If I could tell the judge—I think he is a man of business too he would know that too, for sure. I am not so young. I am not so veree beautiful as all that; he must see, mustn’t he, sir?”

At my wits’ end how to answer that most strange question, I stammered out: “But, you know, your profession is outside the law.”

At that a slow anger dyed her face. She looked down; then, suddenly lifting one of her dirty, ungloved hands, she laid it on her breast with the gesture of one baring to me the truth in her heart. “I am not a bad woman,” she said: “Dat beastly little man, he do the same as me—I am free-woman, I am not a slave bound to do the same to-morrow night, no more than he. Such like him make me what I am; he have all the pleasure, I have all the work. He give me noding—he rob my poor money, and he make me seem to strangers a bad woman. Oh, dear! I am not happy!”

The impulse I had been having to press on her the money, died within me; I felt suddenly it would be another insult. From the movement of her fingers about her heart I could not but see that this grief of hers was not about the money. It was the inarticulate outburst of a bitter sense of deep injustice; of all the dumb wondering at her own fate that went about with her behind that broad stolid face and bosom. This loss of the money was but a symbol of the furtive, hopeless insecurity she lived with day and night, now forced into the light, for herself and all the world to see. She felt it suddenly a bitter, unfair thing. This beastly little man did not share her insecurity. None of us shared it—none of us, who had brought her down to this. And, quite unable to explain to her how natural and proper it all was, I only murmured: “I am sorry, awfully sorry,” and fled away.

 

PANEL II

It was just a week later when, having for passport my Grand Jury summons, I presented myself at that prison where we had the privilege of seeing the existence to which we had assisted so many of the eighty-six.

“I’m afraid,” I said to the guardian of the gate, “that I am rather late in availing myself—the others, no doubt–-?”

“Not at all, sir,” he said, smiling. “You’re the first, and if you’ll excuse me, I think you’ll be the last. Will you wait in here while I send for the chief warder to take you over?”

He showed me then to what he called the Warder’s Library—an iron-barred room, more bare and brown than any I had seen since I left school. While I stood there waiting and staring out into the prison courtyard, there came, rolling and rumbling in, a Black Maria. It drew up with a clatter, and I saw through the barred door the single prisoner—a young girl of perhaps eighteen—dressed in rusty black. She was resting her forehead against a bar and looking out, her quick, narrow dark eyes taking in her new surroundings with a sort of sharp, restless indifference; and her pale, thin-upped, oval face quite expressionless. Behind those bars she seemed to me for all the world like a little animal of the cat tribe being brought in to her Zoo. Me she did not see, but if she had I felt she would not shrink- -only give me the same sharp, indifferent look she was giving all else. The policeman on the step behind had disappeared at once, and the driver now got down from his perch and, coming round, began to gossip with her. I saw her slink her eyes and smile at him, and he smiled back; a large man; not unkindly. Then he returned to his horses, and she stayed as before, with her forehead against the bars, just staring out. Watching her like that, unseen, I seemed to be able to see right through that tight-lipped, lynx-eyed mask. I seemed to know that little creature through and through, as one knows anything that one surprises off its guard, sunk in its most private moods. I seemed to see her little restless, furtive, utterly unmoral soul, so stripped of all defence, as if she had taken it from her heart and handed it out to me. I saw that she was one of those whose hands slip as indifferently into others’ pockets as into their own; incapable of fidelity, and incapable of trusting; quick as cats, and as devoid of application; ready to scratch, ready to purr, ready to scratch again; quick to change, and secretly as unchangeable as a little pebble. And I thought: “Here we are, taking her to the Zoo (by no means for the first time, if demeanour be any guide), and we shall put her in a cage, and make her sew,