“But,” said he, “I have got this other one.” He was as picturesque as a wolf.
“Why arrest her, either?” said the reluctant witness.
“For soliciting those two men.”
“But she didn’t solicit those two men.”
“Say,” said the officer, turning, “do you know this woman?”
The chorus girl had it in mind to lie then for the purpose of saving this woman easily and simply from the palpable wrong she seemed to be about to experience. “Yes; I know her”—“I have seen her two or three times”—“Yes; I have met her before——” But the reluctant witness said at once that he knew nothing whatever of the girl.
“Well,” said the officer, “she’s a common prostitute.”
There was a short silence then, but the reluctant witness presently said: “Are you arresting her as a common prostitute? She has been perfectly respectable since she has been with us. She hasn’t done anything wrong since she has been in our company.”
“I am arresting her for soliciting those two men,” answered the officer, “and if you people don’t want to get pinched, too, you had better not be seen with her.”
Then began a parade to the station house—the officer and his prisoner ahead and two simpletons following.
At the station house the officer said to the sergeant behind the desk that he had seen the woman come from the resort on Broadway alone, and on the way to the corner of Thirty-first street solicit two men, and that immediately afterward she had met a man and a woman—meaning the chorus girl and the reluctant witness—on the said corner, and was in conversation with them when he arrested her. He did not mention to the sergeant at this time the arrest and release of the chorus girl.
At the conclusion of the officer’s story the sergeant said, shortly: “Take her back.” This did not mean to take the woman back to the corner of Thirty-first street and Broadway. It meant to take her back to the cells, and she was accordingly led away.
The chorus girl had undoubtedly intended to be an intrepid champion; she had avowedly come to the station house for that purpose, but her entire time had been devoted to sobbing in the wildest form of hysteria. The reluctant witness was obliged to devote his entire time to an attempt to keep her from making an uproar of some kind. This paroxysm of terror, of indignation, and the extreme mental anguish caused by her unconventional and strange situation, was so violent that the reluctant witness could not take time from her to give any testimony to the sergeant.
After the woman was sent to the cell the reluctant witness reflected a moment in silence; then he said:
“Well, we might as well go.”
On the way out of Thirtieth street the chorus girl continued to sob. “If you don’t go to court and speak for that girl you are no man!” she cried. The arrested woman had, by the way, screamed out a request to appear in her behalf before the Magistrate.
“By George! I cannot,” said the reluctant witness. “I can’t afford to do that sort of thing. I—I——”
After he had left this girl safely, he continued to reflect: “Now this arrest I firmly believe to be wrong. This girl may be a courtesan, for anything that I know at all to the contrary. The sergeant at the station house seemed to know her as well as he knew the Madison square tower. She is then, in all probability, a courtesan. She is arrested, however, for soliciting those two men. If I have ever had a conviction in my life, I am convinced that she did not solicit those two men. Now, if these affairs occur from time to time, they must be witnessed occasionally by men of character. Do these reputable citizens interfere? No, they go home and thank God that they can still attend piously to their own affairs. Suppose I were a clerk and I interfered in this sort of a case. When it became known to my employers they would say to me: ‘We are sorry, but we cannot have men in our employ who stay out until 2:30 in the morning in the company of chorus girls.’
“Suppose, for instance, I had a wife and seven children in Harlem. As soon as my wife read the papers she would say: ‘Ha! You told me you had a business engagement! Half-past two in the morning with questionable company!’
“Suppose, for instance, I were engaged to the beautiful Countess of Kalamazoo. If she were to hear it, she would write: ‘All is over between us. My future husband cannot rescue prostitutes at 2:30 in the morning.’
“These, then, must be three small general illustrations of why men of character say nothing if they happen to witness some possible affair of this sort, and perhaps these illustrations could be multiplied to infinity. I possess nothing so tangible as a clerkship, as a wife and seven children in Harlem, as an engagement to the beautiful Countess of Kalamazoo; but all that I value may be chanced in this affair. Shall I take this risk for the benefit of a girl of the streets?
“But this girl, be she prostitute or whatever, was at this time manifestly in my escort, and—Heaven save the blasphemous philosophy—a wrong done to a prostitute must be as purely a wrong as a wrong done to a queen,” said the reluctant witness—this blockhead.
“Moreover, I believe that this officer has dishonored his obligation as a public servant. Have I a duty as a citizen, or do citizens have duty, as a citizen, or do citizens have no duties? Is it a mere myth that there was at one time a man who possessed a consciousness of civic responsibility, or has it become a distinction of our municipal civilization that men of this character shall be licensed to depredate in such a manner upon those who are completely at their mercy?”
He returned to the sergeant at the police station, and, after asking if he could send anything to the girl to make her more comfortable for the night, he told the sergeant the story of the arrest, as he knew it.
“Well,” said the sergeant, “that may be all true. I don’t defend the officer. I do not say that he was right, or that he was wrong, but it seems to me that I have seen you somewhere before and know you vaguely as a man of good repute; so why interfere in this thing? As for this girl, I know her to be a common prostitute. That’s why I sent her back.”
“But she was not arrested as a common prostitute. She was arrested for soliciting two men, and I know that she didn’t solicit the two men.”
“Well,” said the sergeant, “that, too, may all be true, but I give you the plain advice of a man who has been behind this desk for years, and knows how these things go, and I advise you simply to stay home. If you monkey with this case, you are pretty sure to come out with mud all over you.”
“I suppose so,” said the reluctant witness. “I haven’t a doubt of it. But I don’t see how I can, in honesty, stay away from court in the morning.”
“Well, do it anyhow,” said the sergeant.
“But I don’t see how I can do it.”
The sergeant was bored. “Oh, I tell you, the girl is nothing but a common prostitute,” he said, wearily.
The reluctant witness on reaching his room set the alarm clock for the proper hour.
In the court at 8:30 he met a reporter acquaintance. “Go home,” said the reporter, when he had heard the story. “Go home; your own participation in the affair doesn’t look very respectable. Go home.”
“But it is a wrong,” said the reluctant witness.
“Oh, it is only a temporary wrong,” said the reporter. The definition of a temporary wrong did not appear at that time to the reluctant witness, but the reporter was too much in earnest to consider terms. “Go home,” said he.
Thus—if the girl was wronged—it is to be seen that all circumstances, all forces, all opinions, all men were combined to militate against her. Apparently the united wisdom of the world declared that no man should do anything but throw his sense of justice to the winds in an affair of this description. “Let a man have a conscience for the daytime,” said wisdom. “Let him have a conscience for the daytime, but it is idiocy for a man to have a conscience at 2:30 in the morning, in the case of an arrested prostitute.”
The officer who had made the arrest told a story of the occurrence. The girl at the bar to
ld a story of the occurrence. And the girl’s story as to this affair was, to the reluctant witness, perfectly true. Nevertheless, her word could not be accounted of any value. It was impossible that any one in the courtroom could suppose that she was telling the truth, save the reluctant witness and the reporter to whom he had told the tale.
The reluctant witness recited what he believed to be a true accounting, and the Magistrate discharged the prisoner.
The reluctant witness has told this story merely because it is a story which the public of New York should know for once.
NOTE ON THE TEXT
This edition of Stephen Crane’s New York writings includes Crane’s “Bowery Tales,” Maggie and George’s Mother, along with other tales and sketches written by Crane while a journalist in New York in the 1890s. The first published editions of Maggie (1893, self-published by Crane), and George’s Mother (1896) are generally regarded to be truest to Crane’s intentions; these editions are reproduced here. For the remaining New York writings, this edition follows the authoritative Works of Stephen Crane, Volume VIII ed. Fredson Bowers (University Press of Virginia), with kind permission of the publisher.
COMMENTARY
HAMLIN GARLAND
STEPHEN CRANE
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
HAMLIN GARLAND
[“Maggie”] is a work of astonishingly good style. It deals with poverty and vice and crime also, but it does so, not out of curiosity, not out of salaciousness, but because of a distinct art impulse, the desire to utter in truthful phrase a certain rebellious cry. It is the voice of the slums. It is not written by a dilettante; it is written by one who has lived the life. The young author, Stephen Crane, is a native of the city, and has grown up in the very scenes he describes. His book is the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read, fragment though it is. It is pictorial, graphic, terrible in its directness. It has no conventional phrases. It gives the dialect of the slums as I have never before seen it written—crisp, direct, terse. It is another locality finding voice.
It is important because it voices the blind rebellion of Rum Alley and Devil’s Row. It creates the atmosphere of the jungles, where vice festers and crime passes gloomily by, where outlawed human nature rebels against God and man.
The story fails of rounded completeness. It is only a fragment. It is typical only of the worst elements of the alley. The author should delineate the families living on the next street, who live lives of heroic purity and hopeless hardship.
The dictum is amazingly simple and fine for so young a writer. Some of the works illuminate like flashes of light. Mr. Crane is only twenty-one years of age, and yet he has met and grappled with the actualities of the street in almost unequalled grace and strength. With such a technique already at command, with life mainly before him, Stephen Crane is to be henceforth reckoned with. “Maggie” should be put beside “Van Bibber” to see the extremes of New York as stated by two young men. Mr. Crane need not fear comparisons so far as technique goes, and Mr. Davis will need to step forward right briskly or he may be overtaken by a man who impresses the reader with a sense of almost unlimited resource.
From The Arena, June 1893
STEPHEN CRANE
As far as myself and my own meagre success are concerned, I began the battle of life with no talent, no equipment, but with an ardent admiration and desire. I did little work at school, but confined my abilities, such as they were, to the diamond. Not that I disliked books, but the cut-and-dried curriculum of the college did not appeal to me. Humanity was a much more interesting study. When I ought to have been at recitations I was studying faces on the streets, and when I ought to have been studying my next day’s lessons I was watching the trains roll in and out of the Central Station. So, you see, I had, first of all, to recover from college. I had to build up, so to speak. And my chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand. That to my mind is good writing. There is a great deal of labor connected with literature. I think that is the hardest thing about it. There is nothing to respect in art save one’s own opinion of it.…
The only thing that deeply pleases me in my literary life—brief and inglorious as it is—is the fact that men of sense believe me to be sincere. “Maggie,” published in paper covers, made me the friendship of Hamlin Garland and W. D. Howells, and the one thing that makes my life worth living in the midst of all this abuse and ridicule is the consciousness that never for an instant have those friendships at all diminished. Personally I am aware that my work does not amount to a string of dried beans—I always calmly admit it. But I also know that I do the best that is in me, without regard to cheers or damnation. When I was the mark for every humorist in the country I went ahead, and now, when I am the mark for only 50 per cent of the humorists of the country, I go ahead, for I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition. There is a sublime egotism in talking of honesty. I, however, do not say that I am honest. I merely say that I am as nearly honest as a weak mental machinery will allow. This aim in life struck me as being the only thing worth while. A man is sure to fail at it, but there is something in the failure.
From a letter to John Northern Hilliard, January 1896(?), reprinted in Stephen Crane: Letters, 1960
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
It is a long time since I have seen the once famous A Glance at New York, but I distinctly recall through the misty substance of some forty-five very faded years the heroic figures of the volunteer fireman and his friends, who were the chief persons of the piece. I do not remember the others at all, but I remember Mose, and Sikesy, and Lize. Good and once precious fragments of literature linger in my memory, as: “ ‘Mose,’ says he, ’git off o’ dem hose, or I’ll swat you over der head wid de trumpet.’ And I didn’t get off o’ der hose, and he did swat me over der head wid der trumpet.” Other things have gone, but these golden words remain with me.
I
It is interesting to note that the first successful attempt to represent the life of our streets was in dramatic form. Some actor saw and heard things spoken with the peculiar swagger and whopperjaw utterance of the b’hoy of those dreadful old days, when the blood-tubs and the plug-uglies reigned over us, and Tammany was still almost purely American, and he put them on the stage and spread the poison of them all over the land, so that there was hardly anywhere a little blackguard boy who did not wish to act and talk like Mose.
The whole piece was painted with the large brush and the vivid pigments of romanticism, and yet the features many long years later when Mr. Harrigan came to the study of our low life in his delightful series of plays. He studied it in the heyday of Irish supremacy, when Tammany had become almost purely Celtic, and he naturally made his heroes and heroines Irish. The old American b’hoy lingered among them in the accent and twist of an occasional barkeeper, but the brogue prevailed, and the highshouldered sidelong carriage of the Americanized bouncer of Hibernian blood.
The treatment, however, was still romanticistic, though Mr. Harrigan is too much of a humorist not to return suddenly to nature, at times from the most exalted regions of “imagination.” He loves laughing and making laugh, and that always saved him when he was in danger of becoming too grand, or fine, or heroic. He had moments when he was exactly true, but he allowed himself a good many friendly freedoms with the fact, and the effect was not always that of reality.
It seemed to me that so far as I could get the drift of a local drama in German which flourished at one of the East Side theatres a winter ago, that the author kept no more faithfully to life than Mr. Harrigan, and had not his sublime moments of absolute fidelity. In fact, the stage is almost as slow as criticism to perceive that there is no other standard for the arts but life, and it keeps on with the conventional in motive even when the matte
r is honest, apparently in the hope that by doing the stale falsehood often enough it will finally affect the witness like a fresh verity. It is to the honor of the stage, however, that it was first to recognize the value of our New York low life as material; and I shall always say that Mr. Harrigan, when he was not over-powered by a tradition or a theory, was exquisitely artistic in his treatment of it. He was then true, and, as Tolstoi has lately told us, to be true is to be moral.
II
The fiction meant to be read, as distinguishable from the fiction meant to be represented, has been much later in dealing with the same material, and it is only just beginning to deal with it in the spirit of the great modern masters. I cannot find that such clever and amusing writers as Mr. Townsend, or Mr. Ralph, or Mr. Ford have had it on their consciences to report in the regions of the imagination the very effect of the life which they all seem at times to have seen so clearly. There is apparently nothing but the will that is wanting in either of them, but perhaps the want of the will is the want of an essential factor, though I should like very much to have them try for a constant reality in their studies; and I am far from wishing to count them out in an estimate of what has been done in that direction. It is only just to Mr. Stephen Crane, however, to say that he was first in the field where they made themselves known earlier. His story of Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, which has been recently published by the Appletons, was in the hands of a few in an edition which the author could not even give away three years ago; and I think it is two years, now, since I saw George’s Mother, which Edward Arnold has brought out, in the manuscript.
Their present publication is imaginably due to the success of the Red Badge of Courage, but I do not think that they will owe their critical acceptance to the obstreperous favor which that has won. As pieces of art they are altogether superior to it, and as representations of life their greater fidelity cannot be questioned. In The Red Badge of Courage there is a good deal of floundering, it seems to me. The narration repeats itself; the effort to imagine, to divine, and then to express ends often in a huddled and confused effect; there is no repose, such as agony itself assumes in the finest art, and there is no forward movement. But in these other books the advance is relentless; the atmosphere is transparent; the texture is a continuous web where all the facts are wrought with the unerring mastery of absolute knowledge. I should say that The Red Badge of Courage owed its excellence to the training the author had given himself in setting forth the life he knew in these earlier books of later publication. He learned to imagine vividly from seeing clearly.