Made a Thief by Bad Company
[The following moralizing story which Mrs. Blake (Annie Laurie) contributes to the Examiner of San Francisco has a lesson which is worthy of passing on. Its principles are broader than the circumstances out of which the writer has developed them. — ED. S. OF T.] SHE sat before me the other day — the wife of the Thief. She had come to ask mercy for her husband, who had been caught stealing. She was young and she was pretty, and her black eyes shone from under a hat of late design, and she wore a coat of fine cloth, and the shoes on her small feet were good, and the gloves on her little hands were not cheap. “You see,” said the wife of the Thief, “it’s this way: I was away, and he got lonesome, and wanted me to come home; and he was out of work, and he got into bad company, and he is not strong-minded, and they made him think it was all right. And that’s how he got into trouble — bad company — that’s the whole thing. I hope you won’t prosecute him.” “What was your husband’s business?” said I to the wife of the Thief. “What does he get a month?” “Fifty dollars,” said the Thief’s wife. “You make your own clothes?” The Thief’s wife swept her modish dress with the tail of her dark eye, and laughed a little, like a mischievous child. “Who? Me?” she said. “I can’t sew.” “You do your own washing, then?” The Thief’s wife looked down at her little white, useless hands. She looked as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or frown. She chose to laugh. “Why, no,” she said. “I never did that kind of work.” “How do you get on with the cooking? You do that, of course.” The Thief’s wife smiled this time, and what a dimple she had, to be sure! “That ain’t so hard,” she said. “There’s a delicatessen store, and I get everything, or almost everything, from there. I don’t know how to cook.” Fifty dollars a month the Thief made, and his wife does not cook, can’t sew, and would not wash for anything, and she says he is in trouble because he got into bad company. I didn’t say a word to the Thief’s wife about the company. I went in to see the Thief. He was locked up — as a thief should be. He sat on the edge of his cot, and he looked as if he had been crying, and he told me about the trouble. “I lost my job,” said the Thief, “and my wife went home on a visit. I had to give up the flat, and I couldn’t pay my room rent, and I owed the laundry people, and the delicatessen man was after me, and I went into this flat you’ve heard about, and took what I could see.” “How did you lose your job?” “I don’t know,” said the Thief. “They just let me out, that’s all.” “Do you know who took your place?” “Yes. A fellow that lives in the same house where our flat was.” The new bookkeeper’s wife wasn’t at all like the Thief’s wife. I went to see her, and found out. She isn’t as good-looking as the Thief’s wife, but she is sweet-faced and rosy, and her eyes are bright and true and loving, her hair is pretty, and her neat little house dress was well made and hung right. She made it herself, she told me; makes all her own clothes — O, yes, indeed! She could not afford to hire them made. Her hats, too, she trims; and the laundry — well, the collars, she sends them, but the rest she does herself. The delicatessen shop — is there one nearby? She didn’t know. She does all her own cooking. It is cheaper so, and better, and her husband does not like ready-cooked things. Picture shows? O, yes, once in a while; but they are paying for the home things now, and there’s a lot they want to get — so much down and so much a month — so they don’t go very often. I went to see the man who pays the bookkeeper’s salary. “Yes, we let him out,” said he. “No, nothing definite against him, you might say; but he and his wife were picture show fiends — went every night; and once I saw them there, and the wife was dressed better than my wife. I can’t see where he got the money for that hat. He handled money for me sometimes, and I didn’t think it was fair to put him under such a strain, so I got a different sort of man.” “A different sort of man?” “Well, no, not exactly. I mean a man with a different sort of wife. It amounts to the same thing. Don’t you think so?” Bad company — that’s what got the poor, weak-chinned Thief into trouble. There’s no doubt about that — the worst kind of company, a silly, vain, selfish, lazy, wasteful wife. The foolish girl, who marries a poor man and then will not wash, will not iron, will not cook, and will not sew! Bad company, indeed! Poor, silly Thief! Bad company, indeed! He is out of jail now, is the Thief. We asked the judge to be lenient with him, as it is a first offense. I wonder if it will be his last.