The day book. [volume], July 29, 1913, Image 2

About The day book. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1911-1917

Image provided by: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Urbana, IL

                
He told her he loved her. She came to love him. They talked and
dreamed of marriage, of a home, of children, of happiness.
But marriage seemed so far away. The boy's wages were so small, ,
and they did not grow bigger as the months passed.
So they entered upon matrimony without benefit of clergy.
And one day the girl went to the boy and laid her head on his shoulder
and told him that soon there would be three of them.
White-lipped the boy fought out the battle between honor and disgrace,
between responsibility and married poverty and the way of the coward.
And he was only a boy.
So he chose the way of the coward and fled from the girl and from
the child.
The baby was borri to a weeping mother in a miserable attic room,
ushered into the world by a hard-lipped landlady who talked about the
reputation of her house and overdue
roomrent.
People ' were already .pointing the
finger of shame at the girl, and the
store where she had worked waB
closed to her.
There were days of horror and
hunger, days of loneliness and heart
ache. And then the girl fled, too, leaving
behind her a little bundle of human
ity, pinched and half starved and piti
ful. The girl fled to the Pacific coast
She had heard the boy was there. She
longed with all the fierce longing of
betrayed motherhood to find the
mate who had deserted her.
In San Francisco the girl tried to
find work. She could not find any.
One day, hungry and hopeless, she
decided to enter the underworld.
But when she made that resolu
tion she made another to make the
buyers of her flesh pay dearly for it
She did not play the game as the
other girls of the tenderloin played
it She did not squander her money
in dissipation, nor for barbaric jew
elry, nor costumes of oriental allure.
She hoarded her wages of shame
more closely than a miser.
One day she bought the house in
which she worked, and that was the
beginning of her reign of' power in
the tenderloin.
She became queen of that city of
the night, ruling it with an iron hand,
throwing its political influence where
she listed, increasing her power over
it with the passing of each red night
of shame.
She became so powerful that she
decided city elections.
She personally conducted the most
splendid palace of shame in all Cali
fornia. The good women of California
some years demanded that certain
laws which would wipe out every ten- .
derloin in the state be passed. It
seemed as if the laws would pass.
Cherry St. Maurice, Queen of the
daughters of Eahab, went to the exe
cutive offices of the Governor of Cali
fornia and told him the laws must
not pass.
"If you allow these laws to pass,"
she told the governor, "you will make
an end of the daughters of Rahab.
in California, you will banish from
the state all the women of my sister
hood. "You dare not do that! We are an
economic necessity! You cannot ex
terminate us!"
The laws were not passed.
But the end of Cherry St. Maurice '
was as red as her life.
They found her one morning last
week.
She was lying just inside the door
of her bedroom, that was fitted up in
oriental splendor.
Her face was blue, horribly blue.
The eyes protruded. The body was
naked, and about the neck was
wound tightly the woman's night
dress. :