The Eleventh Virgin · Part II · Chapter 2 3 (4/4)

For Sunday was the one day in the entire week that they caught a glimpse of a man. There were two services held during the day, and both times, the two balconies on either side of the auditorium were filled. Hundreds joined in the melancholy hymns. The men and women were separated by the width of the little hall, but during the two hours of worship they sat there casting hungry eyes at each other. June saw sex and felt it at its crudest and was stirred by it, yet somehow disgusted that the excitement should affect her.

And that night the dances of the colored girls were wilder than usual and they quarreled more viciously than ever, before the three tiers of cells were finally silent.

The days passed, each one like the other. Billy drew pictures of the colored girls dancing in their shifts, and June as she appeared when descending from her upper bunk in the morning. June read Fortitude by Walpole and somehow regained the personal consciousness which she had lost at the workhouse. Life ceased to seem so futile and all endeavor regained a semblance of nobility.

“I begin to feel as though it were about time I did something,” she told Billy.

“What do you mean ‘do something’?” Billy asked, looking up from the free verse poem she was writing to a former lover. It was her twelfth and she said she was going to write a book of them.

“Sitting in the solitary confinement cell for five days has made me think⁠—made me want to perform some useful labor instead of frittering away my time as I have been doing. I want to really and honestly work.” (June had a feeling that split infinitives were emphatic and used them as writers do italics.)

“I should say you have been working,” her friend assured her. “Goodness, I’ve never held down a regular job in my whole life and I can’t really consider my drawing useful in the world of art.”

“Very few people we know do anything useful except those who write good books and they are few. I can’t think of more than two or three artists who are serious in their work and as for newspaper reporters, they are the most useless creatures in the world. They get a lot of fun out of life, but they don’t advance themselves or develop much.

“I’d feel as though I were of some use in the world if I believed in socialism or if I thought by working for the birth control league or suffragists I could benefit the world in some way. But I don’t feel that any of these things are solutions and if I worked among these people with their single-track minds, I’d go crazy. I’m ignorant and I feel that all these people with their causes are one-sided. I either want to retire from the world and study for the sake of acquiring wisdom or else I want to do something simple and useful.”

“I shall throw myself screaming against the bars unless you stop talking of the simple and useful life,” Billy complained and June shut up.

But some yeast of revolt was in her and it continued to work, even after Winkham, the warden, came into their midst on the sixteenth day and waved a release in their faces.

“A pardon signed by the president,” he cried joyfully. “Now you’ll all be home to eat Thanksgiving dinners,” for he was a jolly soul.

“But we don’t wish a pardon,” Miss Drummond said stonily. “We have committed no crime to be pardoned for.”

“Just the same, out you go,” and the little fat man almost danced in his glee. “If you don’t go out, I’ll have you all put out, so better pack up your things.”

That was how the jail experience ended and when it was over June and Billy hastened to the best restaurant in town and resumed smoking cigarettes which somehow had the flavor of meringue.

“I can’t feel that I have done a very useful thing by going to jail for sixteen days,” she complained. “And when suffrage comes I won’t feel as though I had been instrumental in making it come. We are bound to have it sooner or later and how the government is going to be anything more than irritated by the disturbance of the militant party when it has an impressive war on its hands is more than I can see.”

“At any rate this is the best roast duck I have ever tasted,” Billy comforted her, “and we leave tonight for New York.”