________________________________________________
_ SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.
DEAR CHING-FOO: To continue--the two women became reconciled to each
other again through the common bond of interest and sympathy created
between them by pounding me in partnership, and when they had finished me
they fell to embracing each other again and swearing more eternal
affection like that which had subsisted between them all the evening,
barring occasional interruptions. They agreed to swear the finger-biting
on the Greaser in open court, and get him sent to the penitentiary for
the crime of mayhem.
Another of our company was a boy of fourteen who had been watched for
some time by officers and teachers, and repeatedly detected in enticing
young girls from the public schools to the lodgings of gentlemen down
town. He had been furnished with lures in the form of pictures and
books of a peculiar kind, and these he had distributed among his clients.
There were likenesses of fifteen of these young girls on exhibition (only
to prominent citizens and persons in authority, it was said, though most
people came to get a sight) at the police headquarters, but no punishment
at all was to be inflicted on the poor little misses. The boy was
afterward sent into captivity at the House of Correction for some months,
and there was a strong disposition to punish the gentlemen who had
employed the boy to entice the girls, but as that could not be done
without making public the names of those gentlemen and thus injuring them
socially, the idea was finally given up.
There was also in our cell that night a photographer (a kind of artist
who makes likenesses of people with a machine), who had been for some
time patching the pictured heads of well-known and respectable young
ladies to the nude, pictured bodies of another class of women; then from
this patched creation he would make photographs and sell them privately
at high prices to rowdies and blackguards, averring that these, the best
young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their likenesses in that
unclad condition. What a lecture the police judge read that photographer
when he was convicted! He told him his crime was little less than an
outrage. He abused that photographer till he almost made him sink
through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred dollars. And he told
him he might consider himself lucky that he didn't fine him a hundred and
twenty-five dollars. They are awfully severe on crime here.
About two or two and a half hours after midnight, of that first
experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as were dozing were
awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a little
while a man was pushed into our den with a "There, d---n you, soak there
a spell!"--and then the gate was closed and the officers went away again.
The man who was thrust among us fell limp and helpless by the grating,
but as nobody could reach him with a kick without the trouble of hitching
along toward him or getting fairly up to deliver it, our people only
grumbled at him, and cursed him, and called him insulting names--for
misery and hardship do not make their victims gentle or charitable toward
each other. But as he neither tried humbly to conciliate our people nor
swore back at them, his unnatural conduct created surprise, and several
of the party crawled to him where he lay in the dim light that came
through the grating, and examined into his case. His head was very
bloody and his wits were gone. After about an hour, he sat up and stared
around; then his eyes grew more natural and he began to tell how that he
was going along with a bag on his shoulder and a brace of policemen
ordered him to stop, which he did not do--was chased and caught, beaten
ferociously about the head on the way to the prison and after arrival
there, and finally I thrown into our den like a dog.
And in a few seconds he sank down again and grew flighty of speech. One
of our people was at last penetrated with something vaguely akin to
compassion, may be, for he looked out through the gratings at the
guardian officer, pacing to and fro, and said:
"Say, Mickey, this shrimp's goin' to die."
"Stop your noise!" was all the answer he got. But presently our man
tried it again. He drew himself to the gratings, grasping them with his
hands, and looking out through them, sat waiting till the officer was
passing once more, and then said:
"Sweetness, you'd better mind your eye, now, because you beats have
killed this cuss. You've busted his head and he'll pass in his checks
before sun-up. You better go for a doctor, now, you bet you had."
The officer delivered a sudden rap on our man's knuckles with his club,
that sent him scampering and howling among the sleeping forms on the
flag-stones, and an answering burst of laughter came from the half dozen
policemen idling about the railed desk in the middle of the dungeon.
But there was a putting of heads together out there presently, and a
conversing in low voices, which seemed to show that our man's talk had
made an impression; and presently an officer went away in a hurry, and
shortly came back with a person who entered our cell and felt the bruised
man's pulse and threw the glare of a lantern on his drawn face, striped
with blood, and his glassy eyes, fixed and vacant. The doctor examined
the man's broken head also, and presently said:
"If you'd called me an hour ago I might have saved this man, may be too
late now."
Then he walked out into the dungeon and the officers surrounded him, and
they kept up a low and earnest buzzing of conversation for fifteen
minutes, I should think, and then the doctor took his departure from the
prison. Several of the officers now came in and worked a little with the
wounded man, but toward daylight he died.
It was the longest, longest night! And when the daylight came filtering
reluctantly into the dungeon at last, it was the grayest, dreariest,
saddest daylight! And yet, when an officer by and by turned off the
sickly yellow gas flame, and immediately the gray of dawn became fresh
and white, there was a lifting of my spirits that acknowledged and
believed that the night was gone, and straightway I fell to stretching my
sore limbs, and looking about me with a grateful sense of relief and a
returning interest in life. About me lay the evidences that what seemed
now a feverish dream and a nightmare was the memory of a reality instead.
For on the boards lay four frowsy, ragged, bearded vagabonds, snoring--
one turned end-for-end and resting an unclean foot, in a ruined
stocking, on the hairy breast of a neighbour; the young boy was uneasy,
and lay moaning in his sleep; other forms lay half revealed and half
concealed about the floor; in the furthest corner the gray light fell
upon a sheet, whose elevations and depressions indicated the places of
the dead man's face and feet and folded hands; and through the dividing
bars one could discern the almost nude forms of the two exiles from the
county jail twined together in a drunken embrace, and sodden with sleep.
By and by all the animals in all the cages awoke, and stretched
themselves, and exchanged a few cuffs and curses, and then began to
clamour for breakfast. Breakfast was brought in at last--bread and
beefsteak on tin plates, and black coffee in tin cups, and no grabbing
allowed. And after several dreary hours of waiting, after this, we were
all marched out into the dungeon and joined there by all manner of
vagrants and vagabonds, of all shades and colours and nationalities, from
the other cells and cages of the place; and pretty soon our whole
menagerie was marched up-stairs and locked fast behind a high railing in
a dirty room with a dirty audience in it. And this audience stared at
us, and at a man seated on high behind what they call a pulpit in this
country, and at some clerks and other officials seated below him--and
waited. This was the police court.
The court opened. Pretty soon I was compelled to notice that a culprit's
nationality made for or against him in this court. Overwhelming proofs
were necessary to convict an Irishman of crime, and even then his
punishment amounted to little; Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians had
strict and unprejudiced justice meted out to them, in exact accordance
with the evidence; negroes were promptly punished, when there was the
slightest preponderance of testimony against them; but Chinamen were
punished always, apparently. Now this gave me some uneasiness, I
confess. I knew that this state of things must of necessity be
accidental, because in this country all men were free and equal, and one
person could not take to himself an advantage not accorded to all other
individuals. I knew that, and yet in spite of it I was uneasy.
And I grew still more uneasy, when I found that any succored and
befriended refugee from Ireland or elsewhere could stand up before that
judge and swear, away the life or liberty or character of a refugee from
China; but that by the law of the land the Chinaman could not testify
against the Irishman. I was really and truly uneasy, but still my faith
in the universal liberty that America accords and defends, and my deep
veneration for the land that offered all distressed outcasts a home and
protection, was strong within me, and I said to myself that it would all
come out right yet.
AH SONG HI. _
Read next: LETTER VII
Read previous: LETTER V
Table of content of Goldsmiths Friend Abroad Again
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
