IH HUGO AND RUTH UGO had the weakest face of any of the men who came to me from prison. He had a receding chin and forehead and pug nose. He had served a three years' sentence for passing counterfeit money. His wife came with him and did most of the talking. She was young, not more than twenty, and quite pretty. Hugo, she said, was a fairly good musician, and if he could get a trombone and join the musicians' union, he would be able to make a living for them. Lowrie had acquired a small fund to be used for this purpose, and together we started Hugo on the way to making his own living. His weak face, however, prevented me from having much faith in his making good. I never saw Hugo again, but learned through Lowrie that he was not doing well. More than a year afterward, a young, over-dressed woman called on me. Her face was painted, and diamonds worth several thousand dollars glittered on her fingers. The brand of the underworld was on her. "You don't remember me," she said. "My husband and I called on you more than a year ago. He was the one you bought the musical instrument for." With difficulty, I recalled her. She had completely changed. "What has happened?" I asked. "I have gone into a sporting house," she said. "My husband left me to starve. I stood by him all the time he was in prison. I worked in Oakland as a waitress, earning very little. I went over to the prison every visitors' day all the time he was there. I was as faithful to him as a wife could be. When he came out, I brought him to you, but even with the help you gave him, he could not make a go of it. He took to drink, left me at home frequently without food. Finally he disappeared altogether. I was so disheartened that I didn't much care what became of me. I am now in an uptown house and doing very well. I have $1300 in the bank and $3000 worth of diamonds. I'm all right now, I guess." Ruth mentioned the name of the house she was living in. I had just been reading a wonderful life story written by a young woman of the underworld. She was known in the world in which she lived as Babe. While the story of Alice Smith was running in the Bulletin, I had received a most remarkable letter from a woman who had signed herself "From A. to Z." While the writer was evidently illiterate, there was a Zoalesque realism in her description of the horrors of the life she was living. Later I learned that Babe had written the letter. Babe became so much interested in the subject that she wrote her entire life story, beginning with her early childhood. She was one of several children. Her father died when she was 4 years old. Her mother was poor, and when Babe was 12 she went out to work. It was the old struggle. Scant wages, no pretty clothes, no schooling; only long hours of hard, grinding work. At 17, Babe chose the course that forever shut her out of the respectable world. Once under way she went rapidly. In her story she did not spare herself. She told the truth, all of it. In the course of her narrative, she gave a vivid picture of the horrors of her life in the house in which Ruth was living. "Let me read you a chapter out of a story I have here," I said to Ruth. I took the manuscript from a drawer and began reading aloud. Before I had finished, Ruth leaped to her feet and shrieked: "Stop! Stop! I can't hear any more. It's all so horrible. I never dreamed it was as bad as that." Sobbing and almost hysterical, she left the room. A few days later, Ruth called me on the telephone and asked for an appointment. Her voice betrayed excitement. I told her I would see her at once. She came rushing into my office, out of breath. "The story you read me the other day has haunted me. I have made up my mind to quit the life forever. Thinking perhaps I had some dramatic talent, I went immediately to a school for acting and I am studying for the stage. The manager tells me I have real ability and is very much interested in me. He is going to cast me for a leading role in a comedy. He wanted to know my address. Of course. I couldn't tell him. I am still in that house. I told him I lived in Oakland. He asked me who I knew in San Francisco and I gave him your name. He says he is going to ring you up. I gave him my name as Ruth Maynard. I was afraid he would call you before I could see you, and you would say you didn't know me." Ruth made rapid progress, and in two weeks the play in which she was cast for the leading part was put on at the naval station in a big hall with fifteen hundred young men as an audience. Our little group accompanied Ruth to the island. Donald Lowrie, Bessie Beatty, Sophie Treadwell, John D. Barry and myself made up the party. The audience liked the performance, and while Ruth was crude and amateurish, still she did well enough to warrant our giving her a favorable notice in the Bulletin. That night Ruth left the house, took an apartment by herself. We all hoped she would succeed. At about this time, Pantages was planning to put on a new one act play. I succeeded in having Ruth employed in it to play a minor part. She did well in rehearsal, the manager was satisfied, and her new career began. The play ran two weeks at Pantages and then went on the circuit for several months. I heard nothing from Ruth in the meantime. When the play was dropped, she returned to the city and called on me. I noticed her lips were scarred. I asked her the cause. "I took carbolic acid several weeks ago," she said. "They thought I would die. I was saved by a young physician who attended me. He said my recovery was a miracle." I couldn't believe her. She told the story lightly and laughingly. She seemed happy enough. "Why did you do it, Ruth?" "Oh, I slipped once. I became intoxicated. It discouraged me and I wanted to die. But I am all right now. I have a little play of my own. There are three of us in it, and Pantages is going to put it on. I am to be the star. You'll see Ruth Maynard up in the electric lights, Sunday night." I couldn't reconcile her manner as she sat talking to me of her future with the attempt she had made on her life only a short time before. I decided to disbelieve the story. When her engagement at Pantages was ended, she took the play and the little company to New York. It was an ambitious venture and ended in failure. The money she had saved melted and the diamonds went to the pawn shop. She had been educating her 12 year old brother and caring for a younger married sister whose husband was unable to support her. She wrote me from New York that her play was a failure and that she was leaving for New Orleans to be with her sister, who had typhoid fever. When the sister recovered, she brought her and her little girl to California with her. She left them in Pasadena and came alone to San Francisco. She called on me to tell me that she had gone back into the old life, and into the same house which she had left in such horror only a year before. "Why did you do it, Ruth? You have talent enough to make a living on the stage. You could have got a position. Why didn't you ask me to help you? I am sure I could have found a place for you." "I was out of money. I had to have $50 a month for my brother, and my sister is on my hands. I was desperate for money. I won't stay there long. As soon as I get a little money ahead, I'll go back to the stage." I did not hear from her again for three months. I came into my office one day and found a note on my desk, saying, "Ruth Maynard called up. She is dangerously ill. She wants to see you." TWO TRAGEDIES CALLED at the address Ruth had given in her telephone message. It was a large apartment house in an uptown street. I assumed that it was the sporting house to which she returned after her failure in New York. I took the elevator and asked for apartment 64. I pressed the button at the door. A pretty, little 4 year old girl opened it. I was shocked to find a child in such a place. A woman appeared. I asked for Ruth. "She is very ill in bed," she said. The woman took me to Ruth's room. She was propped up on pillows. Her face was thin and pale and her eyes seemed large and unnatural. "This is a strange place for a little child," I said. Ruth laughingly asked me if I thought I was in a sporting house. "Yes, I had thought so," I said. "Well, you are not. You are in a perfectly respectable apartment house. This is my sister's apartment, the little girl you met is her child, and it was my sister you saw when you came in." Ruth said she was better. In fact, she was getting well. She had been ill, dangerously so, for a month. "I had a nervous breakdown," she said. "To deaden the remorse I felt for having returned to the life, I commenced taking morphine and cocaine. I had always felt that I had too much sense to fall for the habit. But I saw other girls around me taking it. It did not show in their manner, or, so far as I could see, in their health. Finally, I decided to try it. It braced me up for a time, and I daily increased the doses, until I completely collapsed. The doctor thought I would die, but I am too wicked to die, I guess.' I tried to cheer her by urging her to keep away from the drug, and when she was well enough, I would try to get her a place in a theatrical company that was then playing at one of the local theaters. She agreed to make another effort, and before I left she had again become quite interested in life and expressed a hope that she might yet succeed as an actress, and break away from the life that brought her so near to death. In a day or two I telephoned her that if she were well enough she could commence rehearsing for a small part on the |