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Empty Sack

<h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2> Teddy's first night in a cell was more tolerable than it might have been for the reason that his faculties seemed to have stopped working. As nearly as possible he had become an inanimate thing, to be struck, pulled, hustled, and chucked wherever they chose. Not only had he no volition, but little or no sensation. A dead body or a sack of flour could hardly have been more lost to a sense of rebellion or indignity. It was not that he didn't suffer, but that suffering had reached the extreme beyond which it makes no further impression. Nothing registered any more—no horror, no brutalities, no curses or kicks. As far as he could take account of himself, the Teddy Follett even of the shack had been left behind in some vanished world, while the thing that had hands and feet was a clod unable to resent the oaths and blows and flingings to and fro which were all it deserved. Once he had heard that shout, "I see him!" in the road, he had been like an insect paralyzed by terror that doesn't dare to move. He had lain there till they came and got him. It was not fear alone that pinned him to the spot; his bodily strength had given out. For forty-eight hours he had eaten but little and drunk only the two glasses of water in the pastry shop. Though he had slept the first night, the second had been passed in a fevered, intermittent doze. Furthermore, the agony of approaching suicide had drained his natural forces. So he lay still while the hue and cry of the man hunters quickened and waxed behind him. Escape was out of the question, since, even if he had the strength to drag himself a few yards farther, they would run him down in the end. Resistance, too, would be hopeless, with, as he judged, some twenty or thirty in the posse. He could feel their fury growing as they slipped and slithered through the grasses. Oaths, obscenities, and laughter accompanied every grotesque accident, as one man fell with the weedy tangle about his feet, or another went knee-deep into the swamp. The very fear of "a dose of lead" intensified their excitement till, as they caught sight of him, a helpless thing with face hidden in the mud, they gave vent to a yell of satisfaction. They didn't let him rise; they didn't so much as pull him to his feet. They dragged him by his collar, by his hair, by his arms, by his legs, by anything they could seize, kicking, beating, and cursing him. He made no outcry; he didn't speak a word. For aught they knew, he might be drunk or insane or dead. Only once, when a man kicked him in the face, was he powerless to suppress a groan. Otherwise, he was just a sodden lump of flesh as, now head first, now feet first, now with face upward, now with face downward he was tugged and tumbled and hurtled and rolled over the five hundred yards of slime between the spot where they had caught him and the road. There he had a new experience. He learned what it was not only to be outside the human race, but to be held as its foe. Already, while still far out on the marsh, he had heard the yells: "Kill him! Kill him! Kick the damn skunk to death!" But when actually surrounded by these howling, screaming, outraged citizens, with their teams and motor cars banked in the roadway, he tasted the peculiar astonishment of the man who has always been liked when assailed by a storm of hatred. While the three or four police who by this time had appeared did their best to defend him, men fought with one another to get at him. A well-dressed girl of not more than eighteen reached over the shoulder of one of the police and struck him on the head with her sunshade. An elderly woman squeezed herself near him and spat in his face. "Ah, say, people," one of the police called out, "give the young guy a chanst. Can't you see he's only a kid?" "'Kid' be damned!" came the response. "Say, fellows, here's the telegraph pole! Let's lynch him!" "Lynch him! Lynch him! String him up!" "No! Let's make a bonfire and burn him alive!" "Chuck the cops into the Hackensack, and then we can do as we like." "Lynch him! Lynch him! Lynch him!" Teddy didn't care whether they lynched him or not. In as far as he could form a wish he wished they would; but then he was past forming wishes. They could string him up to the telegraph pole or burn him alive just as they felt inclined; for he had traveled beyond fear. Just then the crowd parted, the police van drove up, and his protectors dragged him to its shelter. Even then there was a new sensation in store for him. The parting of the crowd showed Flynn lying by the roadside, also waiting for the van. He was on his back, his knees drawn up, his mouth dropped open. Waistcoat and shirt had been torn apart, and Teddy saw a red spot. He started back. Except for the groan when he had been kicked in the face, it was the only time he opened his lips. "I didn't do that!" he cried, so loud that a jeer broke from the crowd. A policeman shook him by the arm. "Say, sonny, you didn't do that?" Appalled by the sight of the dead man, Teddy could do no more than stupidly shake his head. "Then who in hell did? Tell us that." But the boy collapsed, his head sagging, his knees giving way under him. When he returned to consciousness he was lying in the dark, jolting, jolting, jolting, on the floor of the police van. At the station he was pulled out again. He could stand now, and walk, though not very well. Hands supported him as he stumbled up the steps and into a room where a man in uniform sat behind a desk, while three or four police and half a dozen unexplained hangers-on stood about idly. "A live one," the policeman who led Teddy called out, jocosely, as they approached the desk. "Looks like a dead one," the man behind the desk replied, with the same sense of humor. "Looks like he'd been dead and buried and dug up again." The allusion to Teddy's hatless, mud-caked appearance raised a laugh. The man behind the desk dipped his pen in the ink bottle and drew up a big ledger. "Name?" Teddy could just articulate. "Edward Scarborough Follett." "Gee, whiz! Guess you'll have to spell it out." Teddy spelled slowly, as if the letters were new to him. Having done this, he was asked no more questions. Explanations came from the officer who had "run him in" and who produced the automatic pistol picked up on the floor of the shack. When it was stated in addition that Teddy was charged with shooting and killing Peter Flynn, whom all of them knew and to whom they were bound by ties of professional solidarity, the boy felt the half-friendly indifference with which the spectators had seen him come in change to sullen hostility. The formulas fulfilled, he was seized more roughly than before, to be half led, half pushed, along a dim hall and down a dimmer flight of steps to a worn, stone-flagged basement pervaded by dankness and a smell of disinfectants. The corridor into which they turned was long and straight and narrow like a knife-cut through a cheese. On the left a blank stone wall was the blanker for its whitewash; on the right, a row of little doors diminished down the vista to the size of pigeonholes. Pressed close to the square foot of grating inset in each door was a human face eager to see who was coming next, while the officer was greeted with howls of rage or whining petitions or strings of ugly words. They stopped at the first open door, and after one glance within Teddy started back. "Don't put me in there, for Jesus' sake!" The cry was involuntary, since he knew he would be put in there in any case. "Ah, go in wid you!" A shove sent him over the threshold with such force that he fell on the wooden bunk which was all the dog hole contained, while the door clanged behind him. All that night he lay in a stupor induced by misery. No one came near him; no food or drink was offered him. Thirst made him slightly delirious, which was a relief. Now and then, when his real consciousness partially returned he muttered, half aloud: "I didn't do it. My hand might have done it—but that wasn't me." The crepuscular light of morning was not very different from the darkness of night, but it brought his senses back to him sluggishly. Bruised as he was in body, he was still more bruised in mind, and could render to himself no more than a vague account of what had happened yesterday. When a tin of water and a hunk of bread were mysteriously pushed into the cell, he consumed them like an animal, lying down again on the bunk. Without water for a wash, his face and hair were still caked with the mud which also stiffened his clothing. "My God! what's that?" Not having seen him before, the guard who summoned him to court was startled by the apparition that crawled to the threshold of the cell when the door was unlocked. The semblance to a boy was little more exact than that of a snow man to a man. "Ah! my God! my God! Sure you can't go into court like that. They wouldn't know you was a human bein', let alone a prisoner. Wait a bit, and I'll get you somethin' to wash up in." There followed a little rough kindliness, scouring and brushing and combing the lad into something less like a monstrosity. Teddy submitted as a child does and with a child's indifference to cleanliness. So, too, he submitted in court, hardly knowing where he was or the significance of these formalities. Apart from the relief he got from his own reiterations, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it," the proceedings were a blur to him. When he was led out again down more steps, along more corridors, and cast into another stale and disinfected cell, he took it with the same brutish insensibility. He didn't know that the new cell was in that part of the House of Detention known as Murderers' Row, nor did he heed the hoarse questions whispered through the next-door grating, and which he could barely catch as they stole along the wall. "Say, who'd ye do in? Did he croak right off? My guy didn't croak till three weeks after I give him the lead, and now they can't send me to the chair nohow. In luck, ain't I?" To Teddy, this uncanny recitation was no more than the other sounds which smote the auditory nerve but hardly penetrated to the brain. They were all abnormal sounds, sprung of abnormal conditions, breaking in on a silence which was otherwise that of the sepulcher. Footsteps clanked—and then all was still; a door banged—and then all was still; a raucous voice shouted out a curse—and then all was still. The stillness was as ghostly as the sound, only that, as far as Teddy was concerned, so little reached his massacred perceptions. The rattle of keys and the clanging of the door! He looked up from the bunk on the edge of which he was sitting listlessly. "Lady to see you!" This guard was young, smart, debonair, with a twinkle in his eye, and the first who didn't treat a comrade's murderer with instinctive animosity. Teddy got up and followed him in the stupefied bewilderment with which he had done everything else that day. Lady to see him! The words seemed to refer to something so far back in his history that he could hardly recall what it was. Once upon a time there had been a mother, a Jennie, a Gussie, and a Gladys; but they were now remote and shadowy. Along corridors, up steps, and then along more corridors he tramped, till they stopped at an open door—and there he saw Jennie. In a room unspeakably bare and forbidding in spite of a table and half a dozen chairs she waited for him with a smile. He, too, did his best to smile, but his lower lip, swollen with the kick that had caught him in the mouth, made the effort nothing but a rictus. For this, Jennie had been prepared by the snapshot in the paper. All the while she had been on the way to him she had been saying to herself that she must show no sign of horror or surprise. Even though she would follow the cue of her poor demented mother and pretend that he was in prison as a martyr, she would take no pitying or tragic note. She went forward, therefore, and threw her arms about him with the same offhand, unsentimental pleasure which she would have shown in meeting him after a brief absence at any time. "You darling Ted! We're so glad to have found you. I thought I'd just run down and bring you some clean clothes." It was better done than she thought she had the strength for, perhaps because his need was greater than she had supposed possible. Could she have dreamt beforehand that Teddy would ever look like this, she would have screamed from fright. But now that he did, she rose to the fact, seemingly taking it for granted, actually taking it for granted, through some hitherto unsuspected histrionic force. Within a minute of his arrival they were seated near each other, in a curious make-believe that the conditions were not terrible. With this familiar presence beside him, Teddy's mind resumed functioning, possibly to his regret. Home was close to him again, while the loved faces came back to life. "How's ma?" The question was indistinct because, now that it came to making conversation, he found that his tongue was thickened in addition to his swollen lip. Jennie replied that their mother's health was never better. "I suppose"—he balked a little but forced himself onward—"I suppose she feels pretty bad—over me." "No, she doesn't. She told me to tell you so." She was determined to speak truthfully in this respect, so that if their mother's dementia could do him any good, he shouldn't fail of it. "She told me to say that you were not to be sorry for anything you'd done, no matter how they punished you." "Does she—does she know what I've done?" She threw it off, as if casually. "She knows all that's been in the papers; and I don't believe they've left anything out, not judging by the things they've said." "How's Gussie? How's Gladys?" Having answered these questions to the best of her ability, Jennie raised the subject of what she could bring him to eat. The guard who had remained in the room informed her that she could bring him anything, at which she promised to return next day. For the minute she was at the end of her forces. If she went on much longer they would snap. "I'll run away now, Ted," she said, rising. "It's splendid to see you so bucked up. I'll be here again about this time to-morrow, and bring you something nice. Momma's busy already making you a fruit cake." She added, as she held him by the hand, "I suppose you'll have to have a lawyer." A memory came to him like that of something heard while under an anæsthetic. "I think the judge said this morning that he'd appoint some one to—to defend me." "Oh, we'll do better than that," she smiled, cheerily. "I've got some money. We'll have a lawyer of our own." The journey home was the hardest thing Jennie had ever had to face. Teddy! Teddy! Teddy brought to this! It was all she could say to herself. The bare fact dwarfed all its causes, immediate or remote. Eager for privacy in which to sob, she was speeding along Indiana Avenue when, happening to glance in the direction of her home, she saw Gladys standing on the sidewalk. Gladys, having at the same minute perceived her, started with a violent bound in her direction. She, too, had a newspaper in her hand, leading Jennie to expect a repetition of Gussie's episode that morning. It was such a repetition, and it was not. It was, to the extent that Gladys had been informed of Teddy's drama much as her elder sister at Corinne's, though later in the day. At a minute when trade was slack and Gladys ruminantly chewing gum, Miss Hattie Belweather, a cash girl in the gloves, slipped up to her to say: "Oh, Gladys Follett, if you knew what Sunshine Bright's been saying about you, you'd never speak to her again!" Hattie Belweather, who had the blank, innocent expression of a sheep, having paused for the natural inquiry, went on breathlessly. "She says your brother Teddy robbed a bank and killed a man and is in jail over at Ellenbrook and—" Such foolish calumny Gladys could so far contemn as to say with quiet force: "You tell Sunshine Bright that the next time I go by the notions I'll stop and break her neck. See?" Hattie Belweather, having sped away to carry this challenge, Gladys found herself confronted by Miss Flossie Grimm, a saleslady in the stockings, to which department Gladys herself in a minor capacity was also attached. Feeling that the Follett child was ignorant of facts of which she should be in possession, Miss Grimm said, reprovingly: "You've got a chunk of gall! Look at that!" That was one of the papers giving the story of Teddy's downfall, so that Gladys, too, was soon making her way homeward. But she was not a cash girl for nothing, while the instincts of the city gamine endowed her with alertness of mind beyond either of her sisters. She remembered that the paper she had seen was a morning one, and that by this hour those of the afternoon would be on the news stands. They would not only give further details, but might possibly tell her that the whole story was untrue. Somewhere she had heard that among the New York evening papers one was renowned for solemnity and exactitude. Veracity costing a cent more than she usually spent for the evening news, when she spent anything, which was rare, she felt the occasion worth the extravagance. In these pages, Teddy's case was condensed into so small a paragraph that she had difficulty in finding it; but during the search she lighted on something else. It was something so extraordinary, so unbelievable, so impossible to assimilate, as to thrust even Teddy's situation well into the second place. After that, all the known methods of locomotion were slow to Gladys in her efforts to reach home; but before she could enter the house she had seen Jennie advancing up the avenue, and so ran back to meet her. "Oh, Jen! Look!" It was all she had breath to say, so that Jennie naturally did as she was bidden. But she, too, found the paragraph thrust beneath her eyes extraordinary, unbelievable, and impossible to assimilate, though for other reasons than those that swayed her sister. <blockquote><div> Collingham-Follett. On May 11th, at St. Titus's Rectory, Madison Avenue, by the Rev. Larned Goodbody, Robert Bradley Collingham, Jr., of Marillo Park, N. Y., to Jane Scarborough Follett, of Pemberton Heights, N. J. </div> </blockquote> Of the many things Jennie didn't comprehend, she comprehended this paragraph least of all. Who had put it in the paper, and what did it mean? She walked on dreamily, Gladys trotting beside her, a living interrogation point. "Oh, Jen, what's it all about? Are you married to him really?" Jennie answered as best she knew how. "Not—not exactly." But here Gladys was too quick for her. "If you're married to him at all, it's got to be exactly, hasn't it?" "I—I did go through—through the ceremony." "Well then, you've got the law on him," Gladys declared, earnestly. "He'll have to pay you alimony anyhow." "I—I don't want him to pay me anything." "Not pay you anything, and him with a wad as big as a haystack? Oh, Jen, you're not going dippy like poor momma, are you?" Jennie wondered if she was. It seemed to her as if she could stand little more in the line of revolution without her mind giving way. And yet within a few minutes she received another shock. It came through Gussie, who ran to meet them at the door. "For mercy's sake, Jen, what's all this about?" She fluttered a yellow envelope, on which the address was typewritten. <blockquote><div> <div class="line-block outermost"> <div class="line">Mrs. Bradley Collingham, Jr.</div> <div class="inner line-block"> <div class="line">Care Mrs. Follett</div> <div class="inner line-block"> <div class="line">11 Indiana Avenue</div> <div class="inner line-block"> <div class="line">Pemberton Heights, N. J.</div> </div></div> </div></div> </div></blockquote> "I told the boy it didn't belong here—" Gussie was beginning to explain when Gladys interrupted. "Yes, it does. Read that." Gussie read and read again. "Well, of all—" She stopped only because she lacked the words with which to continue. In the meanwhile Jennie had opened her telegram and read: <blockquote><div> Have asked father to engage best counsel in New York to defend boy. Sailing to-morrow on Venezuela, and will take all responsibilities off your hands. Placed two thousand dollars to your account at Pemberton National Bank. See manager. Devoted love. Your husband, Bob. </div> </blockquote> Jennie let the yellow slip flutter to the entry floor while she stood gazing into the air. Gussie having picked it up, the two younger sisters read it together. "Some class!" Gladys commented, dryly. But Gussie could only stare at Jennie awesomely, as if a miracle had transformed her. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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