THE CONSTANT SINNER

I BABE GORDON

BABE GORDON leaned against the crumbling red brick wall of the Marathon Athletic Club in Harlem, at 135th Street off Fifth Avenue, and pulled at a cigarette. The Saturday night fight crowd picked its way under the glaring arc lamp in front of the main entrance like a slow moving black beetle. Babe scanned the humans with an eye to business. Babe was eighteen and a prize-fighters’ tart, picking up her living on their hard-earned winnings. Her acquaintances numbered trollops, murderers, bootleggers and gambling den keepers. Two well-modeled bare legs were crossed at the ankles; her waist pressed to the wall rose to voluptuous breasts that almost protruded from the negligible neck of her black dress. Babe waited for Cokey Jenny.

Cokey Jenny had led Babe to her first drink in an apartment speakeasy in Harlem, where a colored woman sold corn whiskey to black and white girls and their gentlemen friends, and where coke peddler and sniffer made their “connection” in safety. As Babe watched the mob push into the fight enclosure, she wondered what the hell was keeping Cokey. A few months ago they had had a run-in with each other. Jenny wanted Babe to get her “hype” customers, and when Babe told her she was a louse to peddle dope, Jenny drew a knife on her in Toni’s. They had a fight in which Jenny fled into the ladies’ toilet and locked the door, but Babe waited till Jenny came out and blacked her eye. They had made it up again. They were useful to each other in keeping up their supply of men. Jenny knew all the sporting roughs who had to have their women and who would spend when their rackets were spinning jack. Jenny knew such men as Eddie Brown, a gangster who specialized in shooting up night clubs that ran in opposition to his Boss’s interests; she knew Wop Russo, who cooked liquor for most of the Harlem dives; the proprietors of the gin mills; the hangers-on of the gambling dens, who came to see the fights and pick a girl for their Sunday drunk. It was Jenny’s dive associations that Babe prospered on.

Babe could pluck a hard-boiled racketeer or gambler for every cent he had on him. They shelled out without her having to ask them. The Harlem magdalens knew she could bring down big money in the high class hook-shops without having to sit around in dark gutter basements all night guzzling cheap drinks while coaxing some lost sailor into a two dollar assignation.

Cokey Jenny drew along. A soiled green dress, a flaming red felt hat and dusty satin slippers were the total wardrobe her rambling body carried. She struck a sporty note with a flashy black oilcloth purse. Jenny’s gin voice was a scraping rasp. Her eyes resembled steel-headed prison bolts as the cruel purple mouth opened into a witch-laughing salute to Babe. Babe nailed her with a cross-examining eye, and stabbed her with slow words of pain that touched Jenny’s pride.

“You walkin’ gin house. What the hell’s the meanin’ of bein’ late like this? I had three tumbles the time I’ve been waitin’ for you.”

“What a’ ya talkin’ about? I ain’t touched no gin since last night.”

“Damn liar! Bet you wouldn’t be here now, if Toni hadn’t pulled the bottle out of your hand and put you out.”

“I was up at Nigger Gert’s. A guy up there busted Sing Sing, an’ he sent me word he wanted a fixup of coke with his liquor. Jackass is goin’ to pull another job. Look, here’s the dough. Five bucks he give me for a couple of powders. I didn’t even take a drink from Gert. Who’s been blowin’ around tonight?”

“Saw Tiger Williams,” said Babe, “breeze in with the manager of the Black and Tan Revue. I’m not so particular tonight. I’m tellin’ you I ain’t passin’ up anything that looks like a lousy buck. I got to give that landlady somethin’ besides a bye and bye smile tomorrow. Ought to be some class, though, in this bunch tonight. Maybe a bank roll.”

A classy dinge passed them by and gave Babe the eye.

“Oh, did you see that?” cried Babe. “Kinder Spanish lookin’.”

“Do you know him?” asked Jenny.

“Looks like one of them light-colored musicians at the Bamboo Inn.”

“How about him? Thought you was willin’ to make a dollar tonight.”

“Shut up! I tell you, handsome niggers is lookin’ for white women to live on. Hell! get some education while you're in Harlem.”

“You must of had that kind.”

“Maybe that’s how I know.”

“Sure wish somethin’ rotten would turn up now. There’s Wop Russo goin’ in with a high yella. Sure a classy mulatto jane. I ain’t seen him up here for months. Here comes Charlie Yates, and I’ll bet he spits right in your eye, too,” Jenny ended.

“Come on,” said Babe. “Let’s look ’em over from inside and do our stuff.”

Babe and Jenny showed their tickets and passed into the packed fight arena. They could solicit here without running the danger they faced on the streets, of being picked up by the cops. The sides of the arena were four black mountain slopes of human life sprinkled with white dots like a stretched curtain. The canvas of the square roped ring glistened white under a dozen overhead X-ray lamps. The restless spectators were howling and stamping for the bouts to begin. Babe and Jenny, among the last to enter, had aisle seats down front and were instantly recognized by the old-timers of the fight club. Babe gave them all the glad eye and they hailed back with a chorus of familiar whistling and good-natured guying. They knew that the two molls were there for no good reason; that they had plowed in all the extraordinary lusts that bestial men, who love prize-fighting, subjected their paid women to. As they took their chairs, the girls were bombarded with an avalanche of reek.

“Hello there, Babe! You’re lookin’ good, kid, even if you don’t get out of bed much.”

“Hot shot! Here’s the hot-point sisters again!”

The big crowd enjoyed the beltline comedy. The girls were suddenly the center of curious attention and the target of wise-cracks.

“Who are the dames?”

“Couple of overtime mammas doin’ piece work!”

Babe and Jenny passed through the brute barrage of ridicule with accustomed indifference. All the jeering excited them no more than if ice water ran in their veins. In fact, they liked it. Babe was an amazing contrast to the gawky-limbed, criminal-featured, dumb-minded companion at her side—Cokey Jenny. Jenny was a natural stone in the cesspool of that arena.

Babe calmly looked about and studied the faces. There were a half-dozen she recognized as former business acquaintances. There was a face now beaming at her. When had she been with him? Oh, yes, Saturday night. He was the fighter that had won a bout last week and spent his winnings on her. His face was healed now. That’s why she hadn’t immediately recognized him. Babe seldom forgot the faces of her income.

Jenny seemed quiet and drowsy for a short time and Babe knew that this was the result of a pipe of opium she had smoked up at Gert’s. Jenny only lived for the dreams she got out of poppy seed. Babe didn’t go in for that sort of thing . . . yet. She got too many kicks out of life in other ways. Jenny didn’t care for the boys as Babe did. Jenny only tolerated men because they went with dope and money. Babe was the type that thrived on men. She needed them. She enjoyed them and had to have them. Without them she was cold and alone. Nature creates different kinds of females and makes them perplexingly contrary to a moral law that assumes all female flesh to be the same. As a matter of fact, there are women so constituted that physically and mentally they have no desire for men and therefore become old maids, or enter nunneries. There are women who live a normal, conventional sex life and enter into marriage and motherhood. And then there are women so formed in body and mind that they are predestined to be daughters of joy. These women whom the French call “femmes amoureuses” are found not alone among women of the streets, but in every stratum of society. History’s pages reveal the power of these women that thrive on love, whose lives are centered on men.

Babe was born a femme amoureuse. Her idea was that if a man can have as many women as he wants, there is no reason why a woman should not do the same thing. She was one of those women who were put on this earth for men—not one man but many men. If a man didn’t go for her, she’d wonder what was the matter,—she would think she wasn’t appreciated. Not that everyone who tried for her would succeed, for she did all the picking.

Babe was non-moral. If she had tried to rationalize her attitude, she would have said that the whole world is selling something: goods, ability, personality. Just as a salesman would sell his goods with every ounce of energy and then sit back and enjoy his success, so Babe would enjoy selling herself and her personality. The manner in which she would walk by a crowd of men, or even one man, the toss of her head, the flash of her eye, the light of her smile, all were calculated to win patronage and the consumer’s dollar.

Every man she looked at she sized up as a fighter would an opponent. How would she handle him, outsmart him, outpoint him? It wasn’t hard circumstances—it wasn’t a background of disappointment—that made Babe what she was. She was just made for men.

With Jenny it was a different story. After a disappointing love affair, because of her natural weakness she took to drugs and then the easiest way. She was really not as bad as she was weak. She would have been satisfied with one man, but the man she loved she could not have, and this was the easiest way to forget.

The announcer stepped into the ring to introduce the boys for the first bout: a good looking French light-middleweight and an Italian. Luts of wops fought at the Club, and Babe had tried them a-plenty, but a Frenchman was somewhat of a novelty. She had heard they were unusual in matters of love. They had a superior knowledge of the grand passion, just as educated guys understood algebra where most people were only wise to plain arithmetic. It made her think of that wise-crack, “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” She’d watch this boy. She could get an idea, from the way a fighter handled himself in the ring, of the way he treated women. If he was awkward in fighting, he’d be awkward in love. She’d see what his style suggested. If it promised something different—a new kick—she’d go out for him. Babe always picked her men. She was favorite moll around the Marathon Fight Club, and she chose her boy friends with the care a debutante used in selecting gowns.

The gong sounded. It was a bloody affair of clinches. The fighting was terrific. The Frenchman was flashy and graceful. He was knocked out in the second round. Babe knew she might as well look elsewhere for that night. She nudged Jenny.

“Well, that let’s him out as far as I’m concerned.”

Jenny replied without enthusiasm: “Give me a healthy spaghetti twister any time.”

“I don’t mind a healthy Wop myself, now and then, but I was thinkin’ just for a change. You know, if I never made a Frenchman, I’d feel that my education would be sadly neglected.”

The bell sounded again. A Jap and a Catholic boy, who first crossed himself, tore into each other. The Jap pulverized the white boy, and the yellow heads of the Japs at the ringside popped out of the black slopes like blooming dandelions. The mix was stopped before the round was over, the Jap being declared the winner.

Next Alessandro Rosa and Honey Boy Adams, a Cuban black and a Harlem Negro, bantam-weights, whipped around the ring like chocolate cake batter. The Cuban scored a win. Clyde Jackson and Spike McCarthy, heavyweights, knocked into each other like rolling beer casks for four rounds to a draw. Walter Erickson and Oscar Peters, lightweights, hung onto each other like two drunks trying to tell each other a story.

“Same old ham card tonight, Jenny,” Babe commented.

“Yeah. Guess it’s a gin can for us after the next juggling bout.” She grinned in anticipation. Then, “Look, Babe.” Jenny pointed to a corner upstairs where a door opened. “There’s Charlie Yates comin’ out of the dressin’ room. He’s got a new fighter, I hear. What d’ya know about that. Maybe he’s breakin’ him in here tonight. Sure, he is! There he comes down the stairs!”

Babe turned to Pat Flannigan, a fireman she knew from the 145th Street station house, who knew Charlie Yates well.

“Yates got somethin’ on here tonight?”

“The main bout,” Flannigan said. “Comin’ on now.”

“What kind of a socker is he?”

“A middleweight. Charlie says he’s the best looking pug he’s ever bumped into. Certainly does look like class, too.”

“You know him?”

“Charlie introduced me to him. I was watching him work out a few times at the 125th Street gym.”

“Where’d Charlie get him?”

“You’d laugh. Picked him off a truck.”

“Oh, a truck-driver. How lovely! I could care for that. What’s his name?”

“Bearcat Delaney.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Sure, he’s doin’ six rounds with Blacksmith Cooper. Ought to be a swell battle.”

Jenny grabbed Babe’s arm. “Charlie’s lamped us.”

“Well, that’s goin’ to spoil his whole evening.” Babe laughed.

“Now don’t do no low-crackin’ with him. Here he comes.”

Charlie Yates, dapper little manager of several promising white fighters, was turning into the aisle, where Babe and Jenny sat, a toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth and his keen blue eyes snapping confidently out of his thin serious face. Charlie stepped down the aisle toward the ring. Just as he neared Babe, she flung a leg nonchalantly over her knee into his path. Charlie had to side-step her and his lips twisted into a forced grin.

“Hello, Charlie. What’ve you got tonight?”

“Nothin’ for you,” Charlie cut back at her.

Babe yelled back at him.

“Well, I’ll look it over anyway.”

Charlie took a seat at the ringside. Blacksmith Cooper with his seconds climbed through the ropes at the front corner of the ring. He was big-chested and powerfully developed through the shoulders; arms like the legs of a meat block and a cannonball head. He was wrapped in a purple padded robe with yellow lapels, his name in yellow letters across the back of the robe. Limbering up on the ropes he resembled a jungle ape. The referee and announcer waited for the other fighter coming down the aisle toward the vacant corner. Bearcat Delaney swung himself easily through the ropes of the upper ring. A cream-colored bathrobe, left unfastened, revealed the healthy tan of outdoor training, and the firm muscles that moved like oiled springs as he stepped to his corner. His seconds followed him. The crowd looked at this young pugilist with respectful admiration. Handclapping broke out over the arena.

The announcer walked down to the center of the ring and shot up his hand for silence. Jerking his thumb at the blacksmith in the left corner, he barked:

“Blacksmith Cooper, East Side, weight 164,” then jerked his right thumb swiftly at the other corner: “Bearcat Delaney, Jersey City, weight 160.”

A wide grin broke over the Bearcat’s face. The crowd was curious about the newcomer. Shouts went up as the two men met in the center of the ring and clasped gloves.

“Where’d ya get the Bearcat, Charlie?”

Charlie passed the word that Bearcat was off a truck. It was bait for the crowd.

White silk trunks covered the middle of Bearcat’s body. Dark brown wavy hair smoothed back from a triangle point on his well-shaped forehead set off a square-jawed face. A medium-sized nose that had been broken emphasized the strength of a well-formed mouth. Gray-green eyes studied everything with a smiling calm. Babe saw instantly that he was something, and then some.

“Who you for?” Jenny asked.

“You’d be surprised,” Babe drawled, and leaned forward. The gong sounded!

“Come on, Blacksmith!”

“Come on, Bearcat! Do your stuff!”

With a cat-like movement, and arms moving like a piston, the Bearcat forged a ring around the solar plexus of the Blacksmith.

“Look at that, Babe. He’s got the horseshoe dizzy already. It’s goin’ to be a knockout. Charlie’s got a champ this time sure. Look at him dance and sock.” Babe’s eye sneaked over to Charlie, who was watching his boy with satisfied pride. A great shout rose. The Bearcat had tripped but was fighting back from his knees and laughing and hammering blows all over the Blacksmith as the bell rang for the end of the round. A great roar went up.

“You're all right, Bearcat.”

“Yo’ sure can go, white boy!”

“You’d better not step between them headlights, Blacksmith !”

“Watch out. That truck-driver’s gonna run you down, Blacksmith!”

Around the slopes, silver and bills flashed out and were staked on the number of rounds the fight would go—what the decision would be. Bets were made that the Bearcat would slip over a K.O., by the third round. Jenny grabbed Babe excitedly. Babe sat in a daze watching the Bearcat smile as the seconds sponged him with water. Jenny rattled on.

“He’s goin’ to be hard to make, Babe. I told you not to crack with Charlie. You know you ain’t got a chance now. And look what we’re missin’ if this truck-driver lands in the dough. Hell’s a matter with you anyway? Don’t you hear me?”

“Don’t bother me!”

The bell sounded again. Five more rounds to go. Four of them contained sensational fighting with the Bearcat defending himself brilliantly against the veteran blacksmith. The crowd gave the Bearcat a great hand as he finished the fifth round with one more to go.

“What an engine that truck has!”

“Cool off his motor there, seconds!”

“Yes, sir, he’s steamin’ now!”

“Give him those sledgehammers of yours, Blacksmith!”

“What a chassis you got, Bearcat!”

“You should of brought one of your horseshoes along, Blacksmith. You’d sure knock him out.”

“Hit him with that steering-gear, Bearcat!”

“Give him a little oil!”

A little fellow in the balcony arose and recited:

“‘Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands.’”

The crowd howled with glee.

The gong sounded for the last round.

II THE WINNER

BLACKSMITH COOPER, saving his surprise tactics for the last round, beat upon the body of Bearcat with all his anvil strength. All at once iron sledgehammers seemed to be crushing mercilessly against a white pillar there in the ring. In another minute it would be smashed to pieces.

The crowd sat tense and breathless, watching the pitiless gloves like a hail of shells exploding about the white column that was Bearcat. In another second it would come crashing down. It would be blasted, wiped out by the dynamite charge laid against it.

Then, suddenly, from the ring there came a sound like a loud hand-clap. Babe looked up and saw the Blacksmith go flying against the ropes as if shot from a cannon. In an instant Bearcat was at him, driving vicious rights and lefts into a body that was too hurt to protect itself. Blacksmith sagged; his face turned up hideously contorted, his eyes rolling back till only the whites showed. He slumped to the floor on his face and moved no more till the referee counted him out and Bearcat helped carry him to his corner.

The crowd was delirious with excitement, as the announcer shot his hand to the Bearcat’s corner declaring him the winner, by a knockout.

Streaming with perspiration, bruised and happy, the Bearcat was muffled in his bathrobe and congratulated by his seconds and trainer. Then an enthusiastic delegation of drivers from the American Railway Express Company swept down on him and it took the combined efforts of ringside attendants and police to rescue him from his friends.

“Good boy,” shouted Charlie. “I knew you’d do it.”

The crowd, curious for a close-up of the Bearcat, was hemmed tightly about the new idol who was making progress back to the dressing room very slowly. Only after the cops were able to break up the mob did Bearcat get elbow room.

Joe Malone, a fighter who had once made Babe and who occasionally smoked hop with Jenny, was pushing his way to mit the Bearcat who had finally reached the stair-landing. His mouth was bloody and swollen.

“Swell kid!” Joe Malone shouted.

Bearcat waved. Babe fixed her eyes greedily on him.

“I’ll be up in a minute,” Malone called and turned to look into Babe’s eyes.

“Oh, hello, Joe,” she greeted him.

“Well, if it ain’t the Babe, and Jen, too,” he said. “Swell mix, ’at las’ one, eh?”

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