VIII
Marriott had attended to all of Archie’s commissions, save one—that of telling Gusta to go to him. He had not done this because he did not know where to find her. But Gusta went herself, just as she seemed to do most things in life, because she could not help doing them, because something impelled, forced her to do them,—some power that made sport of her, using a dozen agencies, forces hereditary, economic, social, moral, all sorts—driving her this way and that. She had read of the murder, and then, with horror, of Archie’s arrest. She did not know he was out of prison until she heard that he was in prison again. She began to calculate the time that had flowed by so swiftly, making such changes in her life. Her first impulse was to go to him, but now she feared the police. She recalled her former visits, that first Sunday at the workhouse, on which she had thought herself so sad, whereas she had not begun to learn what sorrow was. She recalled the day in the police station a year before, and remembered the policeman who had held her arm so suggestively. She read the newspapers eagerly, absorbed every detail, her heart sinking lower than it had ever gone before. When she read that Marriott was to defend Archie, she allowed herself to hope. The next day she read an account of the identification of Archie by the surviving Flanagan sister, and then, when hope was gone, she could resist no longer the impulse to go to him.
She paused again at the door of the sergeant’s room, her heart beating painfully with the fear that showed itself in little white spots on each side of her nostrils; then the timid parleying with the officers, the delay, the suspicion, the opposition, the reluctance, until an officer in uniform took her in charge, led her down the iron stairway to the basement, and had the turnkey open the prison doors. Archie came to the bars, and peered purblindly into the gloom. And Gusta went close now, closer than she had ever gone before; the bars had no longer the old meaning for her, they had no longer their old repulsion, and she looked at Archie no more with the old feeling of reproach and moral superiority. In fact, she judged no more; sin had healed her of such faults as self-satisfaction and moral complacency; it had softened and instructed her, and in its great kindness revealed to her her own relation to all who sin, so that she came now with nothing but compassion, sympathy and love. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“Oh, Archie!” she said. “Oh, Archie!”
Archie looked at her and at the officers. Gusta was oblivious; she put her face to the greasy bars, and pressed her lips mutely between them. Archie, who did not like to cry before an officer and before the other prisoners, struggled hard. Then he kissed her, coldly.
“Oh, Archie, Archie!” was all she could say, putting all her anguish, her distress, her sorrow, her impotent desire to help into the varying inflections of her tone.
“Oh, Archie! Archie! Archie!”
She spoke his name this last time as if she must find relief by wringing her whole soul into it. Then she stood, biting her lip as if to stop its quivering. Archie, on his part, looked at her a moment, then at the floor.
“Say you didn’t do it, Archie.”
“Do what?”
“You know—”
“You mean Kouka?”
“Oh, no,” she said, impatient with the question.
“That Flanagan job?”
She nodded rapidly.
“Of course not; you ought to know that. Every one knows that—even the coppers.” His sentence ended with a sneer cast in the officer’s direction. And Gusta sighed.
“I’m so glad!” she said, her bosom rising and falling in relief. “They all said—”
“Oh, that’s just the frame-up,” said Archie. “They’d job me for it quick enough.” He was sneering again at the officer, as incarnating the whole police system, and his face was darkened by a look of all hatred and malignity. The officer smiled calmly.
“I’m so glad,” Gusta was smiling now. “But—” she began. Her lip quivered; the tears started afresh. “What about the other?”
“That was self-defense; he agitated me to it. But don’t let’s talk before that copper there—” He could not avert his look of hatred from the officer, whose face was darkening, as he plucked nervously at his mustache.
“He’d say anything—that’s his business,” Archie went on, unable to restrain himself.
“Sh! Don’t, Archie!” Gusta said. “Don’t!”
Archie drew in full breaths, inflating his white chest. The officer returned his look of hatred, his bronzed face had taken on a shade of green; the two men struggled silently, then controlled themselves. Gusta was trying again to choke down her sobs.
“How’s father?” Archie asked, after a silence, striving for a commonplace tone.
“He’s well,—I guess.”
“He knows, does he?”
“I—don’t know.”
“What! Why—can’t you tell him? He could get down here, couldn’t he? He had a crutch when I was there.”
She was silent, her head drooped, the flowers in her hat brushed the bars at Archie’s face. She thrust the toe of a patent-leather boot between the bars at the bottom of the door. The tips of her gloved fingers touched the bars lightly; there was a slight odor of perfume in the entry-way.
“You see,” she said, “I—I can’t go out there—any more.” Her tears were falling on the cement floor, falling beside the iron bucket in which was kept the water for the prisoners to drink.
“Oh!” said Archie coldly.
She looked up suddenly, read the meaning of his changed expression, and then she pressed her face against the bars tightly, and cried out:
“Oh, Archie! Don’t! Don’t!”
He was hard with her.
“By God!” he said. “I don’t know why you should have—oh, hell!”
He whirled on his heel, as if he would go away.
She clung to the bars, pressing her face against them, trying, as it were, to thrust her lips through them.
“Oh, Archie!” she said. “Archie! Don’t do that—don’t go that way! Listen—listen—listen to your sister! I’m the same old Gus—honest, honest, Archie! Listen! Look at me!”
He had thrust his hands into his pockets and walked to the end of the corridor. He paused there a moment, then turned and came back.
“Say, Gus,” he said, “I wish you’d go tell Mr. Marriott I want to see him again. And say, if you go out to the house, see if you can’t find that shirt of mine with the white and pink stripes—you know. I guess mother knows where it is. Do that now. And—”
“Time’s up,” said the officer. “I’ve got to go.”
“And come down to-morrow, Gus,” said Archie. She scarcely heard him as she turned to go.
“Hold on!” he called, pressing his face to the bars. “Say! Gus! Come here a minute.”
She returned. She lifted her face, and he kissed her through the bars. And she went away, with sobs that racked her whole form.
As she started out by the convenient side door into the alley, the officer laid a hand on her shoulder.
“This way, young woman.”
She looked at him a moment.
“You’d better go out the other door,” he said.
She climbed the steps behind him, wondering why one door would not do as well as another. She had always gone out that side door before. When they were up-stairs, passing the sergeant’s room, he touched her again.
“Hold on,” he said.
“What do you want?” she asked in surprise,
“I guess you’d better stay here.”
“Why?” she exclaimed. Her surprise had become a great fear. He made no reply, and pushed her into the sergeant’s room. Then he whistled into a tube—some one answered. “Come down,” he commanded. Presently a woman appeared, a woman with gray hair, in a blue gingham gown something like a nurse’s uniform, with a metal badge on her full breast.
“Matron,” said the officer, “take this girl in charge.”
“Why! What do you mean?” Gusta exclaimed, her eyes wide, her lips parted. “What do you mean? What have I done? What do you—am I—arrested?”
“That’s what they call it,” said the officer.
“But what for?”
“You’ll find out in time. Take her up-stairs, Matron.”
Gusta looked at the officer, then at the matron. Her face was perfectly white.
The matron drew near, put her arm about her, and said:
“Come with me.”
Gusta swayed uncertainly, tottered, then dragged herself off, leaning against the matron, walking as if in a daze.