The band on the platform at the end of the big hall was booming out the popular melodies of the day for dear life and the piercing notes produced by the leather-lunged piccolo player were heard as far as the street.
“That guy up there has me deaf with that flute he’s blowing,” remarked Big Lizzie, “and while I don’t wish him any harm yet I hope he chokes.”
“That knocks this place,” remarked her pal. “Why, I had a John in here the other day and he was wanting to buy me a new dress, and I thought he was wanting to know where I lived, and I was writing my name and number down on a piece of paper and he got disgusted and went away. It drives ’em out, if you want to know what I think.”
But it was once a famous old place when Fourteenth street was really good, and the casual visitor to New York who didn’t drop in for an hour or so missed something.
It was one of the sights, and the great mechanical organ invented and built by a straight-laced Methodist is there still, although he has long ago ceased calling the attention of his friends to the fact. Its tunes to-day are sandwiched in with those of the band, and in the interval the trombone player gets a chance to recover his breath.
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Morning, noon and night men and women wander in, sit at the little round tables, drink queer decoctions made of liquor strong enough to eat into Harveyized steel, and then go forth to tear up the town. The police pass it by as though it were nothing more serious than an ice cream parlor or a peanut emporium, while the tide of upholstered and hand-painted mademoiselles sweep in on the flood and drift out on the ebb with business written in every line of their faces.
Their paths radiate like the sticks of a fan from this rendezvous of the social evil, and in their movements they show nearly all the characteristics of the honey-gathering bee.
The engaging and winsome smile of a girl not yet out of her teens had caught the eye of the man in this story, and against his will he had allowed her to lead him into this place where mirth was nothing more nor less than a mask behind which a skeleton face grinned, and where neither laughter nor anything else was sincere. Her black eyes had not yet taken on that hardness which the years to come would surely add to them, and her ways were to a certain extent ingenuous. Besides, she was distinctly pretty with her Yiddish style of beauty, which was unfortunately of the kind which matures at sixteen and is old at twenty-five. Either teaching or a subtle instinct had caused her to discard the gorgeous plumes and brilliant colors which had marked her debut on the street less than a year before, and in consequence she might have passed for anything but what she was.
She had been on the stage once on a tour, but got a rough deal and quit.
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He outclassed her by a hundred to one, and his source was as high as hers was low. There was no tinge of peasantry in his veins, but good successful American stock traceable back for five or six generations without a blot upon escutcheon—which, by the way, is rather rare in these days, consequently it’s worth boasting about. Lured into the maelstrom of music, he found himself at one of the tables with the girl beside him, still smiling.
Liquor has different effects on different men; it turns the mild man into a savage and makes a careful one reckless in the extreme. In this particular case caution went to the four winds and sympathy—which is apt to be dangerous at times—took its place. But let youth and inexperience excuse him.
“You haven’t told me your name,” he said. “What is it?”
“Brown,” she answered, “Jennie Brown.”
“I mean your right name.”
“Well, Jennie is my right name—I took the other one after I came out of the hospital. Some day, maybe, I’ll get married and then I’ll change it again, but not before.”
“What did you go to the hospital for—were you ill and did you have no one to take care of you?”
“Ill? You mean sick? No, I wasn’t sick; I was stabbed, and I got it good, too. I was cut from here to here,” and her right forefinger described across the front of her dress a line that went from her shoulder to the center of her breast bone. “At first I thought I was going to croak because I lost a lot of blood, but I’m pretty strong and I came out all right. You see, it was this way: A guy I knew got stuck on me and I
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 couldn’t shake him, and he followed me around like a shadow. I didn’t like him because he wasn’t in my class, and besides he had another girl and I never took a girl’s fellow away in my life. If they split up then that’s different, but as long as they’re together I keep out of it. Every time I’d talk to anybody or go anywhere he’d be there. One night he followed me and a fellow I had that wanted to buy wine into Sharkey’s and when he tried to start a fight with my friend one of the waiters threw him out. Of course that made him sore, and he said that he’d get even. He did, all right, for one night as I was going upstairs he was in the top hall waiting for me, and the first thing I knew he had the knife into me.
“‘If you won’t have me, take this,’ he said, and then I felt an awful pain and when I put my hand up the blood was coming through my dress.
“‘You killed me, Jimmy,’ I said, ‘and I never done anything to you.’ But there wasn’t any answer to that, for he was running down the stairs as fast as he could.
“I was afraid to go up to my room all alone with the blood running out all over me so I went down to the street to look for my pal, Annie. You don’t know her but she’s all right. It was two o’clock in the morning and there was no one around so I thought I’d walk over to Third avenue and see if I could find any of the girls there and get help. There was an electric light up on the corner and I hadn’t taken more than a few steps before it began to move up and down and I got afraid and began to run. When I got up to the avenue all the lights were going up and down as if they were
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 crazy and a man on the other side of the street looked as if he was upside down.
“Then I began to get frightened and I thought to myself that I’d sit down on a doorstep for a minute till I got over that queer feeling and that maybe Annie would come along. So I picked the first one I saw and flopped down. When I looked up it made me dizzy and so I looked down at the stone, an............