The Cop and the Anthem

When a dead leaf landed in Soapy's lap one evening at the end of November, he took it as a notice from winter that the time had come to make his arrangements. Soapy slept on a bench in Madison Square, and he had no wish to spend the coming months shivering under newspapers. His ambition was modest: to be arrested, to be sent to the prison on Blackwell's Island for three months, and to enjoy a warm bed, regular meals and pleasant company until spring. Charity, he felt, came with too many questions and too much humiliation. The law, at least, asked nothing of a man but his presence.

His first plan was to dine magnificently at an expensive restaurant on Broadway and then, having eaten his fill, to announce that he could not pay. From the waist up, he looked respectable enough, but the moment he stepped through the door, the head waiter's eye fell on his frayed trousers and ruined shoes. Seconds later, Soapy found himself back on the pavement without having tasted so much as a bread roll.

Undeterred, he picked up a stone and threw it through a shop window. A crowd gathered, and a policeman came running. "Where's the man who did that?" he demanded. "Don't you think I might have had something to do with it?" asked Soapy, in the friendliest of tones. The policeman refused even to consider the idea, since a man who breaks a window does not usually stay to chat about it, and set off down the street after an innocent gentleman who was running to catch a streetcar.

Soapy went on to eat an enormous meal in a cheap restaurant and then confessed that he hadn't a cent. Instead of calling the police, two waiters threw him out onto the pavement. He pretended to be drunk and disorderly, shouting and dancing in the street, but the policeman on the corner assumed he was a college student celebrating a football victory and ignored him. Finally, he walked out of a shop with another man's silk umbrella. The owner, far from objecting, apologised nervously and admitted that he had picked it up by mistake that morning himself.

Defeated, Soapy wandered towards the square, until he stopped outside an old church on a quiet street. Through the windows came the sound of an organ, playing an anthem that he had known well many years before, when his life had contained such things as a mother, roses and ambitions. The music went straight to his heart. Standing there in the moonlight, he saw how low he had fallen, and he made up his mind to change. Tomorrow he would go downtown and look for work. A fur importer had once offered him a job driving a delivery wagon, and he would find the man and accept it. He would be somebody in the world again.

At that moment, he felt a hand on his arm. It belonged to a policeman. "What are you doing here?" the officer asked. "Nothing," said Soapy. "Then come along," said the policeman.

The next morning, the magistrate in the police court did not take long. "Three months on the Island," he said.