Comrade Yetta Part 19

It would have been very hard for Yetta to tell any one--even Mabel--what that quarter of an hour meant to her. She was not exactly afraid. In a way she was prepared for it. She had heard Pick-Axe talk before. The girls had told her that the worst thing they had suffered during their imprisonment was what they had had to listen to, insults and obscenity and the mad ravings of the "drunks."

Although Yetta was not afraid nor surprised, her whole being shuddered under it. Her flesh seemed to contract in an effort to escape the contagion of such loathsomeness. For years she would turn suddenly pale at the barest memory of that torrent of abuse. Once Pick-Axe came close as if he was going to strike her, but the detective pulled him away.

Yetta was almost sorry. It would have been a relief if he had struck her with his hand.

And yet it was very little for herself that Yetta suffered. She was being sacrificed for a great host. What they did to her mattered very little, but in her they were striking at all the myriad "people of the process"--the women of her trade, the cloth weavers, the wool-growers, those who grew wheat for their bread, who made beds for them to sleep in. She felt herself a delicate instrument for the transmission of sound. Those stinging, cruel words were going out to the remotest corners of the land, were bringing shame on all the lowly people of the earth, just as his kick, crashing into Mrs. Muscovitz' side, had made them all gasp with pain. Once she looked up, she wanted to ask him what they paid him that made it worth his while to treat her people so. But she knew it was useless to ask--he would not have understood.

Then echoing down the corridor, she heard a warden bawling her name.

From the point of view of Braun's intended defence, Yetta's arrest had come at a fortunate time of day. By noon the morning calendar is disposed of, and he could have her arraigned for hearing at once. The least delay meant the possibility of the prosecution finding some witness who had seen Yetta strike Pick-Axe.

Yetta had wanted to tell the judge the truth. It was only because Braun insisted that it would endanger the success of the strike that she had consented to lie. But when she was led into the court-room, her scruples left her.

Telling the truth is like a quarrel--there must be two parties to it.

Nicolas Gay, the Russian painter, has a canvas called, "What is Truth?"

It portrays Pontius Pilate, putting this question to the Christ. And you realize at once why the Prisoner could not answer. Truth is not the enunciation of certain words. Nothing which the scorned and scourged and thorn-crowned Jesus might have said about His Truth could have penetrated the thick skull of the gross and pride-filled Roman proconsul.

Yetta, in a somewhat similar situation, understood at once that this dingy court-room was not an Abode of Truth. Magistrate Cornett, before whom she was led, although a young man, was quite bald. He sat hunched up in his great chair, and the folds of his heavy black robe made him look deformed. His finger nails were manicured. His skin was carefully groomed, but the flesh under it was flabby. His face and hands were those of a gourmand.

The clerk read the complaint. It charged Yetta with a.s.sault in all its degrees in that on that very day she had with felonious intent struck one Michael Brennan on the head with a dangerous weapon, to wit a blackjack.

"Guilty or not guilty?"

"Not guilty," Braun replied.

The plain-clothes man deposed that he knew nothing about the case except that he had served the warrant as directed by the court. He had found the defendant in the strike headquarters of the vest-makers.

The man who had helped Brennan get up was a clerk in a neighboring wholesale house. He had been sent out with a telegram, and in the rain-swept, deserted street he had seen no one but the prostrate detective, who was just regaining consciousness as he came up. He helped the stricken man to his feet, and that was all he knew.

Then Michael Brennan, alias Pick-Axe, took the stand. Ordinarily he made a fairly good appearance in court. He felt himself among friends, felt a rea.s.suring kinship with the policemen, the clerks, and even with the judge. To be sure they all knew he was a perjurer, and very few of them would shake hands with him. But still he was a necessary part in the great machine for preserving social order, by which they all were paid.

But this day he was not at his ease. In the first place his head ached horribly. In the second, he was so infuriated that he could scarcely control his tongue. And thirdly, he knew that he was in for a grilling from Braun. And he was more than usually afraid of this ordeal because he was not sure what had happened. He remembered kicking Mrs. Muscovitz, he had a vague conviction that Yetta had rushed at him--and then he remembered coming to and being helped to his feet.

"Yer Honor," he began, "I was in front of the Crown Vest Company this morning doing duty as usual. There wasn't n.o.body around except this here Rayefsky girl and a woman she's brought as a witness. Well, Yer Honor, I went into the hallway to light my pipe and just at that minute a scab comes along--"

"Your Honor," Braun interrupted, "some of my clients have been sent to prison for using that term. This court has held it to be insulting and abusive."

"It was a slip of my tongue, Yer Honor," Pick-Axe said with confusion.

"Clerk," the Judge instructed, "strike out that word, and you be more careful, Brennan."

"Yes, Yer Honor. I was saying a respectable woman came along looking for work--she wasn't really a woman, just a young girl. I didn't see her because I was in the hallway lighting my pipe, as I told Yer Honor, but I heard her holler and, rushing out, I seen this other woman a-laying into her, beating her up something awful--"

Mrs. Muscovitz tried to protest from the benches, but Longman, at a signal from Braun, hushed her.

"Well, Yer Honor, I runs up and tries to arrest the woman, and the other one--this Rayefsky girl--jumps on me with a blackjack and lays me out, Yer Honor. The first thing I knows I come to, with this gentleman a-helping me up. How long I laid there senseless, Yer Honor, I don't know. I came right over here and got the warrant, and Officer Sheehan and me, we got her at the strike headquarters, like he told Yer Honor."

"Do you wish to question the witness, Mr. Braun?"

"Brennan," he began, "did you see a blackjack in the defendant's hand?"

"No, sir! If I'd a knowed she had a blackjack would I have let her sneak up behind me? No. I'd have run her in before."

"What makes you think it was a blackjack?"

"The b.u.mp on my head." He leaned over the bench so the judge could examine it. "She couldn't have made that with her hand, Yer Honor."

"It certainly looks like a blackjack," the judge said.

"Are you sure, Brennan, it wasn't a piece of stone?"

"No. It wasn't no stone--I'd have seen her pick it up. It was a blackjack," he insisted doggedly.

"How do you know it wasn't a piece of gas-pipe?"

"What's the use of such questions?" the judge asked impatiently. "The crime would be no less serious if the blow had been struck with a piece of gas-pipe."

"Your Honor," Braun replied, "it is a serious question. Brennan does not know what hit him and I do. In two more questions I think I can convince the Court that he does not know. Brennan," he turned to the witness, "you say that you had gone into the hallway to light your pipe. When you rushed out to attack the picket, did you see this gentleman coming down the street? Professor Longman, will you please rise? Brennan, did you see this gentleman coming down the street with that cane in his hand?"

Brennan had been wondering why Longman had come to the court. He looked at him suspiciously.

"No," he said. "I never saw that man till I got to the strike headquarters."

"Well, Brennan, are you quite sure, are you prepared to swear that when you were kicking Mrs. Muscovitz about this gentleman did not knock you down as you deserved--as any real man would have done?"

"I didn't kick the woman," Brennan said.

"That's not the question. Are you sure it wasn't Professor Longman who laid you out?"

For a moment Brennan hesitated. It was hard for him to believe that Yetta had knocked him senseless. He knew that Braun was trying to catch him in a perjury. And he had a guilty conscience.

"If it was him that hit me," he roared, "I'll have him sent up. I was doing my duty."

"Officer," the judge said, "see that this man does not leave the room."

"It is a useless precaution, Your Honor," Braun said. "Professor Longman was nowhere in the neighborhood. But I think it is quite clear that Brennan does not know who or what hit him."

The reporter who had come with them, not being regularly detailed to the court, was not afraid to laugh out loud.

"I have no other questions to ask," Braun went on. "Will the Court have the defendant's account of what happened?"

The oath was administered to Yetta and she told the story, which Braun had taught her, more calmly and simply than most people tell the truth.

The judge did not believe that a person who had just committed a murderous a.s.sault could be so cool under the charge. He knew Brennan, and that he was probably lying now. He himself had slipped on the wet pavement that morning, his motor had skidded on the way downtown. He believed Yetta. He had generally believed the strikers against whom Brennan and the other "private detectives" had testified, but, knowing just what was expected of him by those on whom he depended for advancement, he had sent the other girls to jail. He twirled his pencil a moment, asking her a few inconsequential questions, and regretfully came to the conclusion that he could not possibly hold her on the a.s.sault charge.

"Are there any other witnesses?" he asked.

"Mrs. Muscovitz, who was picketing with the defendant, is here," Braun said. "She tells me exactly the same story. She will tell it to the Court if Your Honor so directs. But it seems rather a waste of time.

There is no case against my client. Brennan has shown the Court that he doesn't know what hit him. Look at the two of them, Your Honor. If you think that any twelve men on earth will believe that this slip of a girl a.s.saulted the complainant, you can of course hold her for the Grand Jury. But I ask the Court to discharge the defendant."

"Not so fast, Mr. Braun," the judge snapped. "Even admitting the truth of her improbable story--which I very much question--admitting there is insufficient evidence to hold her on the a.s.sault charge, she confesses to disorderly conduct in interfering with an officer who was making an arrest. Clerk, make out a charge of disorderly conduct. I suppose you'll swear to the complaint, Brennan."

While this detail was being attended to at the clerk's desk, the judge delivered himself of an informal philippic against the strikers. He aimed a good deal of his discourse at Mrs. Muscovitz: it was only the extreme leniency of the Court, he said, which kept him from ordering her arrest;--as a matter of fact it was past his lunch time. His tirade, which he seemed to enjoy immensely, as he saw the reporter taking notes, was interrupted by the Clerk handing him the new papers.