Maggie | Page 6

other room. She crept to him across the floor.
The father had not moved, but lay in the same death-like sleep. The
mother writhed in uneasy slumber, her chest wheezing as if she were in
the agonies of strangulation. Out at the window a florid moon was
peering over dark roofs, and in the distance the waters of a river
glimmered pallidly.

The small frame of the ragged girl was quivering. Her features were
haggard from weeping, and her eyes gleamed from fear. She grasped
the urchin's arm in her little trembling hands and they huddled in a
corner. The eyes of both were drawn, by some force, to stare at the
woman's face, for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends
would come from below.
They crouched until the ghost-mists of dawn appeared at the window,
drawing close to the panes, and looking in at the prostrate, heaving
body of the mother.
Chapter IV
The babe, Tommie, died. He went away in a white, insignificant coffin,
his small waxen hand clutching a flower that the girl, Maggie, had
stolen from an Italian.
She and Jimmie lived.
The inexperienced fibres of the boy's eyes were hardened at an early
age. He became a young man of leather. He lived some red years
without laboring. During that time his sneer became chronic. He
studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than he
thought he had reason to believe it. He never conceived a respect for
the world, because he had begun with no idols that it had smashed.
He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in at a
mission church where a man composed his sermons of "yous." While
they got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where he calculated
they stood with the Lord. Many of the sinners were impatient over the
pictured depths of their degradation. They were waiting for
soup-tickets.
A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see the
portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and his
hearers.
"You are damned," said the preacher. And the reader of sounds might

have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people: "Where's our
soup?"
Jimmie and a companion sat in a rear seat and commented upon the
things that didn't concern them, with all the freedom of English
gentlemen. When they grew thirsty and went out their minds confused
the speaker with Christ.
Momentarily, Jimmie was sullen with thoughts of a hopeless altitude
where grew fruit. His companion said that if he should ever meet God
he would ask for a million dollars and a bottle of beer.
Jimmie's occupation for a long time was to stand on streetcorners and
watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of
pretty women. He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets.
On the corners he was in life and of life. The world was going on and
he was there to perceive it.
He maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men. To
him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered
faint hearts. He and his order were kings, to a certain extent, over the
men of untarnished clothes, because these latter dreaded, perhaps, to be
either killed or laughed at.
Above all things he despised obvious Christians and ciphers with the
chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their button-holes. He considered
himself above both of these classes. He was afraid of neither the devil
nor the leader of society.
When he had a dollar in his pocket his satisfaction with existence was
the greatest thing in the world. So, eventually, he felt obliged to work.
His father died and his mother's years were divided up into periods of
thirty days.
He became a truck driver. He was given the charge of a painstaking
pair of horses and a large rattling truck. He invaded the turmoil and
tumble of the down-town streets and learned to breathe maledictory

defiance at the police who occasionally used to climb up, drag him
from his perch and beat him.
In the lower part of the city he daily involved himself in hideous
tangles. If he and his team chanced to be in the rear he preserved a
demeanor of serenity, crossing his legs and bursting forth into yells
when foot passengers took dangerous dives beneath the noses of his
champing horses. He smoked his pipe calmly for he knew that his pay
was marching on.
If in the front and the key-truck of chaos, he entered terrifically into the
quarrel that was raging to and fro among the drivers on their high seats,
and sometimes roared oaths and violently got himself arrested.
After a time his sneer grew so that