New York Stories Page 6

  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 told 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.

  * * *

  1 The New York Sun. September 17, 1896. Cited in Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino’s The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871–1900. New York: G. K. Hall and Company, 1995. 207.

  THE OTHER TWO (1904)

  Edith Wharton

  Edith Wharton (1862–1937) hit her stride as an author of fiction in her early forties. “The qualities that make Wharton a great writer,” observes that great biographer Hermione Lee, “her mixture of harshly detached, meticulously perceptive, disabused realism, with a language of poignant feeling and deep passion, and her setting of the most
confined of private lives in a thick, complex network of social forces—were the product of years of observation, reading, practice and refinement.”2* In the quietly comic “The Other Two,” a wealthy Wall Street man marries a twice-divorced mother, the flighty Alice. “He had known when he married that his wife’s former husbands were both living,” writes Wharton, sympathetically but wryly, “and that amid the multiplied contacts of modern existence there were a thousand chances to one that he would run against one or the other . . .” He didn’t know, however, that he would figure in a short story called “The Other Two,” where the chances would be considerably higher. Two of Wharton’s classic novels, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), are set in New York City.

  I

  WAYTHORN, ON THE drawing-room hearth, waited for his wife to come down to dinner.

  It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised at his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not so old, to be sure—his glass gave him little more than the five-and-thirty years to which his wife confessed—but he had fancied himself already in the temperate zone; yet here he was listening for her step with a tender sense of all it symbolized, with some old trail of verse about the garlanded nuptial doorposts floating through his enjoyment of the pleasant room and the good dinner just beyond it.

  They had been hastily recalled from their honeymoon by the illness of Lily Haskett, the child of Mrs. Waythorn’s first marriage. The little girl, at Waythorn’s desire, had been transferred to his house on the day of her mother’s wedding, and the doctor, on their arrival, broke the news that she was ill with typhoid, but declared that all the symptoms were favorable. Lily could show twelve years of unblemished health, and the case promised to be a light one. The nurse spoke as reassuringly, and after a moment of alarm Mrs. Waythorn had adjusted herself to the situation. She was very fond of Lily—her affection for the child had perhaps been her decisive charm in Waythorn’s eyes—but she had the perfectly balanced nerves which her little girl had inherited, and no woman ever wasted less tissue in unproductive worry. Waythorn was therefore quite prepared to see her come in presently a little late because of a last look at Lily, but as serene and well-appointed as if her goodnight kiss had been laid on the brow of health. Her composure was restful to him; it acted as ballast to his somewhat unstable sensibilities. As he pictured her bending over the child’s bed he thought how soothing her presence must be in illness: her very step would prognosticate recovery.

  His own life had been a gray one, from temperament rather than circumstance, and he had been drawn to her by the unperturbed gaiety which kept her fresh and elastic at an age when most women’s activities are growing either slack or febrile. He knew what was said about her; for, popular as she was, there had always been a faint undercurrent of detraction. When she had appeared in New York, nine or ten years earlier, as the pretty Mrs. Haskett whom Gus Varick had unearthed somewhere—was it in Pittsburgh or Utica?—society, while promptly accepting her, had reserved the right to cast a doubt on its own indiscrimination. Inquiry, however, established her undoubted connection with a socially reigning family, and explained her recent divorce as the natural result of a runaway match at seventeen; and as nothing was known of Mr. Haskett it was easy to believe the worst of him.

  Alice Haskett’s remarriage with Gus Varick was a passport to the set whose recognition she coveted, and for a few years the Varicks were the most popular couple in town. Unfortunately the alliance was brief and stormy, and this time the husband had his champions. Still, even Varick’s stanchest supporters admitted that he was not meant for matrimony, and Mrs.Varick’s grievances were of a nature to bear the inspection of the New York courts. A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue, and in the semiwidowhood of this second separation Mrs. Varick took on an air of sanctity, and was allowed to confide her wrongs to some of the most scrupulous ears in town. But when it was known that she was to marry Waythorn there was a momentary reaction. Her best friends would have preferred to see her remain in the role of the injured wife, which was as becoming to her as crepe to a rosy complexion. True, a decent time had elapsed, and it was not even suggested that Waythorn had supplanted his predecessor. People shook their heads over him, however, and one grudging friend, to whom he affirmed that he took the step with his eyes open, replied oracularly: “Yes—and with your ears shut.”

  Waythorn could afford to smile at these innuendoes. In the Wall Street phrase, he had “discounted” them. He knew that society has not yet adapted itself to the consequences of divorce, and that till the adaptation takes place every woman who uses the freedom the law accords her must be her own social justification. Waythorn had an amused confidence in his wife’s ability to justify herself. His expectations were fulfilled, and before the wedding took place Alice Varick’s group had rallied openly to her support. She took it all imperturbably: she had a way of surmounting obstacles without seeming to be aware of them, and Waythorn looked back with wonder at the trivialities over which he had worn his nerves thin. He had the sense of having found refuge in a richer, warmer nature than his own, and his satisfaction, at the moment, was humorously summed up in the thought that his wife, when she had done all she could for Lily, would not be ashamed to come down and enjoy a good dinner.

  The anticipation of such enjoyment was not, however, the sentiment expressed by Mrs. Waythorn’s charming face when she presently joined him. Though she had put on her most engaging tea gown she had neglected to assume the smile that went with it, and Waythorn thought he had never seen her look so nearly worried.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Is anything wrong with Lily?”

  “No; I’ve just been in and she’s still sleeping.” Mrs. Waythorn hesitated. “But something tiresome has happened.”

  He had taken her two hands, and now perceived that he was crushing a paper between them. “This letter?”

  “Yes—Mr. Haskett has written—I mean his lawyer has written.”

  Waythorn felt himself flush uncomfortably. He dropped his wife’s hands.

  “What about?”

  “About seeing Lily. You know the courts—”

  “Yes, yes,” he interrupted nervously.

  Nothing was known about Haskett in New York. He was vaguely supposed to have remained in the outer darkness from which his wife had been rescued, and Waythorn was one of the few who were aware that he had given up his business in Utica and followed her to New York in order to be near his little girl. In the days of his wooing, Waythorn had often met Lily on the doorstep, rosy and smiling, on her way “to see papa.”

  “I am so sorry,” Mrs. Waythorn murmured.

  He roused himself. “What does he want?”

  “He wants to see her. You know she goes to him once a week.”

  “Well—he doesn’t expect her to go to him now, does he?”

  “No—he has heard of her illness; but he expects to come here.”

  “Here?”

  Mrs. Waythorn reddened under his gaze. They looked away from each other.

  “I’m afraid he has the right . . . You’ll see. . . .” She made a proffer of the letter.

  Waythorn moved away with a gesture of refusal. He stood staring about the softly-lighted room, which a moment before had seemed so full of bridal intimacy.

  “I’m so sorry,” she repeated. “If Lily could have been moved—”

  “That’s out of the question,” he returned impatiently.

  “I suppose so.”

  Her lip was beginning to tremble, and he felt himself a brute.

  “He must come, of course,” he said. “When is—his day?”

  “I’m afraid—tomorrow.”

  “Very well. Send a note in the morning.”

  The butler entered to announce dinner.

  Waythorn turned to his wife. “Come—you must be tired. It’s beastly, but try to forget about it,” he said, drawing her hand through his arm.

  “You’re so good, dear. I’ll try,” she whispered
back.

  Her face cleared at once, and as she looked at him across the flowers, between the rosy candleshades, he saw her lips waver back into a smile.

  “How pretty everything is!” she sighed luxuriously.

  He turned to the butler. “The champagne at once, please. Mrs. Waythorn is tired.”

  In a moment or two their eyes met above the sparkling glasses. Her own were quite clear and untroubled: he saw that she had obeyed his injunction and forgotten.

  II

  Waythorn, the next morning, went downtown earlier than usual. Haskett was not likely to come till the afternoon, but the instinct of flight drove him forth. He meant to stay away all day—he had thoughts of dining at his club. As his door closed behind him he reflected that before he opened it again it would have admitted another man who had as much right to enter it as himself, and the thought filled him with a physical repugnance.

  He caught the elevated at the employees’ hour, and found himself crushed between two layers of pendulous humanity. At Eighth Street the man facing him wriggled out, and another took his place. Waythorn glanced up and saw that it was Gus Varick. The men were so close together that it was impossible to ignore the smile of recognition on Varick’s handsome overblown face. And after all—why not? They had always been on good terms, and Varick had been divorced before Waythorn’s attentions to his wife began. The two exchanged a word on the perennial grievance of the congested trains, and when a seat at their side was miraculously left empty the instinct of self-preservation made Waythorn slip into it after Varick.

  The latter drew the stout man’s breath of relief. “Lord—I was beginning to feel like a pressed flower.” He leaned back, looking unconcernedly at Waythorn. “Sorry to hear that Sellers is knocked out again.”

  “Sellers?” echoed Waythorn, starting at his partner’s name.

  Varick looked surprised. “You didn’t know he was laid up with the gout?”