The Guilty Party

Edition and rights: Complete original English text from Project Gutenberg ebook #3707. This edition is identified as public domain in the USA; the original author died in 1910, satisfying the ordinary Pakistan copyright term. This is the original work, not an AI retelling.

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“THE GUILTY PARTY”


A red-haired, unshaven, untidy man sat in a rocking chair by a window.
He had just lighted a pipe, and was puffing blue clouds with great
satisfaction. He had removed his shoes and donned a pair of blue, faded
carpet-slippers. With the morbid thirst of the confirmed daily news
drinker, he awkwardly folded back the pages of an evening paper,
eagerly gulping down the strong, black headlines, to be followed as a
chaser by the milder details of the smaller type.

In an adjoining room a woman was cooking supper. Odors from strong
bacon and boiling coffee contended against the cut-plug fumes from the
vespertine pipe.

Outside was one of those crowded streets of the east side, in which, as
twilight falls, Satan sets up his recruiting office. A mighty host of
children danced and ran and played in the street. Some in rags, some in
clean white and beribboned, some wild and restless as young hawks, some
gentle-faced and shrinking, some shrieking rude and sinful words, some
listening, awed, but soon, grown familiar, to embrace—here were the
children playing in the corridors of the House of Sin. Above the
playground forever hovered a great bird. The bird was known to
humorists as the stork. But the people of Chrystie street were better
ornithologists. They called it a vulture.

A little girl of twelve came up timidly to the man reading and resting
by the window, and said:

“Papa, won’t you play a game of checkers with me if you aren’t too
tired?”

The red-haired, unshaven, untidy man sitting shoeless by the window
answered, with a frown.

“Checkers. No, I won’t. Can’t a man who works hard all day have a
little rest when he comes home? Why don’t you go out and play with the
other kids on the sidewalk?”

The woman who was cooking came to the door.

“John,” she said, “I don’t like for Lizzie to play in the street. They
learn too much there that ain’t good for ’em. She’s been in the house
all day long. It seems that you might give up a little of your time to
amuse her when you come home.”

“Let her go out and play like the rest of ’em if she wants to be
amused,” said the red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, “and don’t bother
me.”


“You’re on,” said Kid Mullaly. “Fifty dollars to $25 I take Annie to
the dance. Put up.”

The Kid’s black eyes were snapping with the fire of the baited and
challenged. He drew out his “roll” and slapped five tens upon the bar.
The three or four young fellows who were thus “taken” more slowly
produced their stake. The bartender, ex-officio stakeholder, took the
money, laboriously wrapped it, recorded the bet with an inch-long
pencil and stuffed the whole into a corner of the cash register.

“And, oh, what’ll be done to you’ll be a plenty,” said a bettor, with
anticipatory glee.

“That’s my lookout,” said the “Kid,” sternly. “Fill ’em up all around,
Mike.”

After the round Burke, the “Kid’s” sponge, sponge-holder, pal, Mentor
and Grand Vizier, drew him out to the bootblack stand at the saloon
corner where all the official and important matters of the Small Hours
Social Club were settled. As Tony polished the light tan shoes of the
club’s President and Secretary for the fifth time that day, Burke spake
words of wisdom to his chief.

“Cut that blond out, ‘Kid,’” was his advice, “or there’ll be trouble.
What do you want to throw down that girl of yours for? You’ll never
find one that’ll freeze to you like Liz has. She’s worth a hallful of
Annies.”

“I’m no Annie admirer!” said the “Kid,” dropping a cigarette ash on his
polished toe, and wiping it off on Tony’s shoulder. “But I want to
teach Liz a lesson. She thinks I belong to her. She’s been bragging
that I daren’t speak to another girl. Liz is all right—in some ways.
She’s drinking a little too much lately. And she uses language that a
lady oughtn’t.”

“You’re engaged, ain’t you?” asked Burke.

“Sure. We’ll get married next year, maybe.”

“I saw you make her drink her first glass of beer,” said Burke. “That
was two years ago, when she used to come down to the corner of Chrystie
bare-headed to meet you after supper. She was a quiet sort of a kid
then, and couldn’t speak without blushing.”

“She’s a little spitfire, sometimes, now,” said the Kid. “I hate
jealousy. That’s why I’m going to the dance with Annie. It’ll teach her
some sense.”

“Well, you better look a little out,” were Burke’s last words. “If Liz
was my girl and I was to sneak out to a dance coupled up with an Annie,
I’d want a suit of chain armor on under my gladsome rags, all right.”

Through the land of the stork-vulture wandered Liz. Her black eyes
searched the passing crowds fierily but vaguely. Now and then she
hummed bars of foolish little songs. Between times she set her small,
white teeth together, and spake crisp words that the east side has
added to language.

Liz’s skirt was green silk. Her waist was a large brown-and-pink plaid,
well-fitting and not without style. She wore a cluster ring of huge
imitation rubies, and a locket that banged her knees at the bottom of a
silver chain. Her shoes were run down over twisted high heels, and were
strangers to polish. Her hat would scarcely have passed into a flour
barrel.

The “Family Entrance” of the Blue Jay Café received her. At a table she
sat, and punched the button with the air of milady ringing for her
carriage. The waiter came with his large-chinned, low-voiced manner of
respectful familiarity. Liz smoothed her silken skirt with a satisfied
wriggle. She made the most of it. Here she could order and be waited
upon. It was all that her world offered her of the prerogative of
woman.

“Whiskey, Tommy,” she said as her sisters further uptown murmur,
“Champagne, James.”

“Sure, Miss Lizzie. What’ll the chaser be?”

“Seltzer. And say, Tommy, has the Kid been around to-day?”

“Why, no, Miss Lizzie, I haven’t saw him to-day.”

Fluently came the “Miss Lizzie,” for the Kid was known to be one who
required rigid upholdment of the dignity of his fiancee.

“I’m lookin’ for ’m,” said Liz, after the chaser had sputtered under
her nose. “It’s got to me that he says he’ll take Annie Karlson to the
dance. Let him. The pink-eyed white rat! I’m lookin’ for ’m. You know
me, Tommy. Two years me and the Kid’s been engaged. Look at that ring.
Five hundred, he said it cost. Let him take her to the dance. What’ll I
do? I’ll cut his heart out. Another whiskey, Tommy.”

“I wouldn’t listen to no such reports, Miss Lizzie,” said the waiter
smoothly, from the narrow opening above his chin. “Kid Mullaly’s not
the guy to throw a lady like you down. Seltzer on the side?”

“Two years,” repeated Liz, softening a little to sentiment under the
magic of the distiller’s art. “I always used to play out on the street
of evenin’s ’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 wasn’t for
peroxide the chloroform limit would have put her out long ago. Oh, I’m
lookin’ for ’m. You tell the Kid if he comes in. Me? I’ll 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 cat’s-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 o’clock the President, Kid Mullaly, paced upon the floor with a
lady on his arm. As the Loreley’s 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 Kid’s 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 city’s 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.


It’s 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 don’t 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 Jeffries’s 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, 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 fiance 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.”

The court officer opened the door and stepped out.

“Poor girl,” said Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones, with
a tear in his eye. “It was one of the saddest cases that I ever met
with. Of course she was”—

“Discharged,” said the court officer. “Come here, Jonesy. First thing
you know you’ll be switched to the pot-pie squad. How would you like to
be on the missionary force in the South Sea Islands—hey? Now, you quit
making these false arrests, or you’ll be transferred—see? The guilty
party you’ve got to look for in this case is a red-haired, unshaven,
untidy man, sitting by the window reading, in his stocking feet, while
his children play in the streets. Get a move on you.”

Now, wasn’t that a silly dream?