Two years, repeated Liz, softening a little to sentiment under the magic of the distillers art. I always used to play out on the street of evenins cause there was nothin doin for me at home. For a long time I just sat on doorsteps and looked at the lights and the people goin by. And then the Kid came along one evenin and sized me up, and I was mashed on the spot for fair. The first drink he made me take I cried all night at home, and got a lickin for makin a noise. And now say, Tommy, you ever see this Annie Karlson? If it wasnt for peroxide the chloroform limit would have put her out long ago. Oh, Im lookin for m. You tell the Kid if he comes in. Me? Ill cut his heart out. Leave it to me. Another whiskey, Tommy.
A little unsteadily, but with watchful and brilliant eyes, Liz walked up the avenue. On the doorstep of a brick tenement a curly-haired child sat, puzzling over the convolutions of a tangled string. Liz flopped down beside her, with a crooked, shifting smile on her flushed face. But her eyes had grown clear and artless of a sudden.
Let me show you how to make a cats-cradle, kid, she said, tucking her green silk skirt under her rusty shoes.
And while they sat there the lights were being turned on for the dance in the hall of the Small Hours Social Club. It was the bi-monthly dance, a dress affair in which the members took great pride and bestirred themselves huskily to further and adorn.
At 9 oclock the President, Kid Mullaly, paced upon the floor with a lady on his arm. As the Loreleys was her hair golden. Her yes was softened to a yah, but its quality of assent was patent to the most Milesian ears. She stepped upon her own train and blushed, and she smiled into the eyes of Kid Mullaly.
And then, as the two stood in the middle of the waxed floor, the thing happened to prevent which many lamps are burning nightly in many studies and libraries.
Out from the circle of spectators in the hall leaped Fate in a green silk skirt, under the nom de guerre of Liz. Her eyes were hard and blacker than jet. She did not scream or waver. Most unwomanly, she cried out one oath the Kids own favorite oath and in his own deep voice; and then while the Small Hours Social Club went frantically to pieces, she made good her boast to Tommy, the waiter made good as far as the length of her knife blade and the strength of her arm permitted.
And next came the primal instinct of self-preservation or was it self-annihilation, the instinct that society has grafted on the natural branch?
Liz ran out and down the street swift and true as a woodcock flying through a grove of saplings at dusk.
And then followed the big citys biggest shame, its most ancient and rotten surviving canker, its pollution and disgrace, its blight and perversion, its forever infamy and guilt, fostered, unreproved and cherished, handed down from a long-ago century of the basest barbarity the Hue and Cry. Nowhere but in the big cities does it survive, and here most of all, where the ultimate perfection of culture, citizenship and alleged superiority joins, bawling, in the chase.
They pursued a shrieking mob of fathers, mothers, lovers and maidens howling, yelling, calling, whistling, crying for blood. Well may the wolf in the big city stand outside the door. Well may his heart, the gentler, falter at the siege.
Knowing her way, and hungry for her surcease, she darted down the familiar ways until at last her feet struck the dull solidity of the rotting pier. And then it was but a few more panting steps and good mother East River took Liz to her bosom, soothed her muddily but quickly, and settled in five minutes the problem that keeps lights burning o nights in thousands of pastorates and colleges.
* * *Its mighty funny what kind of dreams one has sometimes. Poets call them visions, but a vision is only a dream in blank verse. I dreamed the rest of this story.
I thought I was in the next world. I dont know how I got there; I suppose I had been riding on the Ninth avenue elevated or taking patent medicine or trying to pull Jim Jeffriess nose, or doing some such little injudicious stunt. But, anyhow, there I was, and there was a great crowd of us outside the courtroom where the judgments were going on. And every now and then a very beautiful and imposing court-officer angel would come outside the door and call another case.
While I was considering my own worldly sins and wondering whether there would be any use of my trying to prove an alibI by claiming that I lived in New Jersey[200], the bailiff angel came to the door and sang out:
Case No. 99,852,743.
Up stepped a plain-clothes man there were lots of em there, dressed exactly like preachers and hustling us spirits around just like cops do on earth and by the arm he dragged whom, do you think? Why, Liz!
The court officer took her inside and closed the door. I went up to Mr. Fly-Cop and inquired about the case.
A very sad one, says he, laying the points of his manicured fingers together. An utterly incorrigible girl. I am Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones. The case was assigned to me. The girl murdered her fiancé and committed suicide. She had no defense. My report to the court relates the facts in detail, all of which are substantiated by reliable witnesses. The wages of sin is death. Praise the Lord.