The first case called, after Jarvis's entrance, was that of the keeper of a disorderly house. She was horrible. He felt she ought to be branded in some way, so that she and her vile trade would be known wherever she went. A man went her bail, and she flounced out in a cloud of patchouli.
Two coloured girls were brought in, and sent up for thirty days. Then several old women, the kind of human travesties Jarvis had seen sleeping on the benches, were marched before the judge, who called them all by name.
"Well, Annie," he said to one of them, "you haven't been here for some weeks. How did it happen this time?"
"I've been a-walkin' all day, your honour. I guess I fell asleep in the doorway."
"You've been pretty good lately. I'll let you off easy. Fine, one dollar."
"Oh, thanks, your honour." She was led off, and Jarvis sickened at the sight.
A series of young girls followed, cheaply modish, with their willow plumes and their vanity bags. Some cheerful, some cynical, some defiant. One slip of a thing heard her sentence, looked up in the judge's face, and laughed. Jarvis knew that never, while he lived, would he forget that girl's laugh. It was into the face of our whole hideous Society that she hurled that bitter laugh.
Then his girl was brought in. He saw her clearly for the first time. A thin, wizened little face, framed in curly red hair, with bright, birdlike eyes. Her thin, flat child's figure was outlined in a tight, black satin dress, with a red collar and sash. Her quick glance darted to him, and she smiled. The policeman made his charge. The judge glanced at her.
"Anything to say for yourself?"
She shook her head wearily. Jarvis was out of his seat before he thought.
"I have something to say for her. I am the man she was supposed to have approached."
"Silence in the courtroom," said the judge, sternly.
"She didn't say one word to me, except 'Good evening,'" shouted Jarvis.
"Is that the man?" the judge asked the officer.
"Yes. He's made a lot of trouble, too, trying to make me arrest him."
"If you have any evidence to give in this case, come to the front and be sworn in."
Jarvis jumped the railing and stood before him. The oath was administered.
"Now, tell me, briefly, what the girl said to you."
"She said, 'Hello, kid!'"
A titter went over the courtroom. The clerk rapped for order.
"Then what happened?"
"This officer arrested her. I told him what had passed between us, and insisted on being arrested, too. We said the same thing, the girl and I."
"The girl has been here before. She has a record."
"Where are the men she made the record with?" demanded Jarvis.
"We do not deal with that feature of it," replied the judge, turning to the officer.
"And why not?" demanded Jarvis. "It takes a solicitor and the solicited to make a crime. What kind of laws are these which hound women into the trade and hound them for following it?"
"It is neither the time nor the place to discuss that. The case is dismissed. This court has no time to waste, Flynn, in cases where there's no evidence," he added, sternly, to the detective.
The girl nodded to Jarvis and beckoned him, but instead of following her he went back to his seat. He would follow this ghastly puppet show to its end.
At a word from the judge a tall, handsome, gray-haired woman approached the bench. She wore no hat, and Jarvis marked her broad brow and pleasant smile and the wise, philosophic eyes. Her face looked cheerful and normal in this place of abnormalities.
"Who is that woman?" Jarvis asked his neighbour.
"Probation officer," came the answer.
Jarvis watched her with passionate interest. He noted her low-voiced answers to the judge's questions about the girl in hand. The curiosity seekers in the audience could not hear, no matter how they craned their necks. He watched her calm smile as she turned to take the girl off into her own office. He made up his mind to talk with her before the night was over.
Case followed case as the night wore on. It seemed to Jarvis that this bedraggled line had neither beginning nor end. He saw it winding through this place night after night, year after year, the old-timers and the new recruits. Uptown reputable citizens slept peacefully in their beds; this was no concern of theirs. He was no better than the rest, with his precious preaching about the brotherhood of man. What the body politic needed was a surgeon to cut away this abscess, eating its youth and strength.
The screams of a girl who had just been given a sentence to Bedford startled him out of his thoughts. She pleaded and cried, she tried to throw herself at the judge's feet, but the policeman dragged her out, the crowd craning forward with avid interest. She was the last case before the court adjourned. Jarvis leaned across the rail and asked the probation officer if he might speak to her.
"Perhaps you will walk along with me toward my home?" she suggested. He gladly assented. In a few moments she came out, hatted and ready for the street. She looked keenly at this tall, serious youth who had so unexpectedly arraigned the court.
"My name is Jarvis Jocelyn," he began. "There are so many things I want to ask you about."
"I shall be glad to tell you what I can," she said quietly.
"Have you been in this work long?"
"Eleven years."
"Good God! how can you be so calm? How can you look so hopeful?"
"Because I am hopeful. In all the thousands of cases I have known I have never once lost hope. When I do, my work is over."
"You're wonderful!" he exclaimed.
"No, I am reasonable. I don't expect the impossible. I am glad of every inch of ground gained. I don't demand an acre. If one girl is rescued out of twenty----"
"But why does it need to be at all?" Jarvis interrupted her.
"Why does disease need to be? Why does unhappiness need to be, or war, or the money-lust that will one day wreck us? We only know that these things are. Our business is to set about doing what we can."
"One girl out of twenty," he repeated. "What becomes of the other nineteen?"
"I said I was glad of one girl in twenty. Sometimes several of the nineteen come out all right. Bedford helps a great many. They marry, they keep straight, or--they die very soon."
"Tell me about Bedford."
She outlined the work done in that farm home, which is such a credit to New York. She told him of the honour system, and all the modern methods employed there.
"Can you get opportunities for girls who want the chance?"
"Plenty of them. I have only to ask. When I need money, it comes. Lots of my girls are employed in uptown shops, leading good, hard-working lives."
"Where does this money come from?"
"Private donations. That is one of my hope signs--the widespread interest in rescue work."
"The old ones--those aged women?"
She sighed. "Yes, I know, they are terrible! There is a mighty army of them in New York. We grind them in and out of our courts, month after month. The institutions are all full. There is so much grafting that the poor-farm has been delayed, year after year, so there is no place to send them."
"Where do they go?"
"Into East River, most of them, in the end."
"Do you mean to say that we pay the machinery of the law to put these cases through the courts, over and over again, and then provide no place to harbour the derelicts?"
"That's about the case," she replied.
"How can we live and endure such things?" Jarvis demanded passionately.
"I used to feel that way about it. I used to be sick through and through with it, but I have grown to see that there is improvement, that there is a new social sense growing among us. Uptown women of leisure come to our night courts, take part in our working-girls' strikes, and women, mind you, are always slowest to feel and react to new forces. Don't be discouraged," she smiled at him, stopping at the door.
"May I come and see you, some time? Are you ever free, or would that be asking too much?"
"No. Come! Come in Sunday afternoon if you like."
She held out her hand, and he grasped it warmly.
"You're great," he said boyishly, at which she laughed.
"We need you young enthusiasts," she said.
As he walked uptown to his lodgings Jarvis faced the fact that up to this present moment he had been on the wrong track. He had tried to pull from the top. That was all right, if only he also tried to push from the bottom. The world needed idealists, but not the old brand, blind to the actual, teaching out of a great ignorance. This probation officer woman, she was the modern idealist, as modern as Jesus Christ, who worked in the same spirit.
He would finish his vision-plays, as he called them, because he believed in them. But, in the meantime, he would learn something of the real issues of men and women as they live in great cities, so that he could write a play which would be so true, so vital, that it would be like watching the beating of the hot heart of life. That night was the beginning of a new era for Jarvis.
XVII
Bambina Parkhurst was a young woman not much given to wrath, but as she read the two letters from New York she grew thoroughly enraged at Jarvis. Evidently, he had been exceedingly rude to Mr. Strong, and evidently Mr. Strong had been exceedingly annoyed. She was so furious at him that when she sat down to her desk to write her daily chapters no ideas came. Her mind just went over and over the situation of kind Mr. Strong putting himself out to be polite for her sake--Jarvis, stiff and ill-mannered, repulsing him. She determined to omit the daily letter to the offender until she cooled off. She gave up work for the morning and descended upon Ardelia.