The Girl from Farris's. Edgar Rice Burroughs

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СКАЧАТЬ held up the newspaper toward his assistant, who read, in type half an inch high:

      ''PURSEN PILLORIES POLICE.''

      "The ointment surrounding the fly, as it were," suggested the assistant. Mr. Pursen looked quickly at the young man, but discovering no sign of levity in his expression, handed the paper across the table to him and resumed his attack upon the cantaloup. A moment later the telephone-bell sounded from the extension at Mr. Pursen's elbow.

      "Yes?" inquired Mr. Pursen.

      "Hello. Dr. Pursen?"

      "Yes."

      "This is Doarty."

      "Oh, yes; good morning, officer," greeted Mr. Pursen.

      Mr. Doarty came right to the point. He knew when to beat about the bush and when not to.

      "You been tryin' to close up Farris's place for six months; but you ain't never been able to get the goods on him. I got 'em for you, now."

      "Good," exclaimed Mr. Pursen. " Tell me about it."

      Mr. Doarty unburdened himself.

      "The girl will be in court this morning to appear against Farris," he concluded. "You'd better get to her quick, before they do, and stick until she's called. She'll need bolstering."

      "I'll come down right away," replied Mr. Pursen. "Good-by, and thank you."

      "And say," said Doarty, "you can give it out that you tipped me off to the whole thing--I'd just as soon not appear in it any more than I can help."

      "Just so," replied Mr. Pursen, and hung up the receiver.

      As he turned back his assistant eyed him questioningly.

      "My friend Mr. Doarty has started something which be is experiencing difficulty in terminating," guessed Mr. Pursen shrewdly.

      At a quarter before ten the clergyman entered the court-room. He had no difficulty in locating the girl he sought, though the room was well filled with witnesses, friends, and relatives of the various prisoners who were to have their preliminary hearings, and the idle curious.

      "I am the Rev. Mr. Pursen," he said with smiling lips as he took her hand.

      The girl looked him squarely in the eyes.

      "I come as a friend," continued Mr. Pursen. "I wish to help you. Tell me your story and we will see what can be done."

      There were three young men with the clergyman. They had met him, by appointment, at the entrance to the courtroom. The girl eyed them.

      "Reporters?" she asked.

      "Representatives of the three largest papers," replied Mr. Pursen. "You will be quite famous by to-morrow morning," be added playfully.

      When Mr. Pursen had introduced himself a great hope had sprung momentarily into the girl's heart--a longing that three months at Farris's had all but stifled. Vain regrets seldom annoyed her now. She had attained a degree of stoicism that three months earlier would have seemed impossible; but with contact with one from that other world which circumstances had forbidden her ever again to hope to enter--with the voicing of a kind word--with the play of a smile that was neither carnal nor condescending came a sudden welling of the desire she had thought quite dead--the desire to put behind her forever the life that she had been living.

      For an instant a little girl had looked into the eyes of the Rev. Mr. Pursen, prepared to do and be whatever Mr. Pursen, out of the fulness of brotherly love, should counsel and guide her to do and be; but Mr. Pursen saw only a woman of the town, and to such were his words addressed with an argument which he imagined would appeal strongly to her kind. And it was a woman of the town who answered him with a hard laugh.

      "Nothing doing," she said.

      Mr. Pursen was surprised. He was pained. He had come to her as a friend in need. He had offered to help her, and she would not even confide in him.

      "I had hoped that you might wish to lead a better life," he said, "and I came prepared to offer you every assistance in securing a position where you might earn a respectable living. I can find a home for you until such a position is forthcoming. Can you not see the horrors of the life you have chosen? Can you not realize the awful depths of degradation to which you have come, and the still blacker abyss that yawns before you if you continue along the downward path? Your beauty will fade quickly--its lifeblood sapped by the gnawing canker of vice and shame, and then what will the world hold for you? Naught but a few horrible years of premature and hideous old age."

      "And the way to start a new and better life," replied the girl in a level voice, "is to advertise my shame upon the front pages of three great daily newspapers--that's your idea, eh?"

      Mr. Pursen flushed, very faintly.

      "You misunderstand me entirely," he said. "I abhor as much as any human being can the necessity which compels so much publicity in these matters; but it is for the greatest good of the greatest numbers that I labor--that all of us should labor. If the public does not know of the terrible conditions which prevail under their very noses, how can we expect it to rouse itself and take action against these conditions?

      "No great reform is ever accomplished except upon the clamorous demand of the people. The police--in fact all city officials--know of these conditions; but they will do nothing until they are forced to do it. Only the people who elect them and whose money pays them can force them. We must keep the horrors of the underworld constantly before the voters and tax-payers until they rise and demand that the festering sore in the very heart of their magnificent city be cured forever.

      "What are my personal feelings, or yours, compared with the great good to the whole community that will result from the successful fruition of the hopes of those of us who are fighting this great battle against the devil and his minions? You should rather joyfully embrace this opportunity to cast off the bonds of hell, and by enlisting with the legion of righteousness atone for all your sinful past by a self-sacrificing act in the interest of your fellow man."

      The girl laughed, a rather unpleasant, mirthless laugh.

      "My 'fellow man'!" She mimicked the preacher's oratorical style. "It was my fellow man who made me what I am; it was my fellow man who has kept me so! it is my fellow man who wished me to blazon my degradation to the world as a price for aid."

      As she spoke, the vernacular of the underworld with its coarse slang and vile English slipped from her speech like a shabby disguise that has been discarded, and she spoke again as she had spoken in her other life, before constant association with beasts and criminals had left their mark upon her speech as upon her mind and morals; but as the first flush of indignation passed she slipped again into the now accustomed rut.

      "To hell with you and your fellow men," she said. " Now beat it."

      Mr. Pursen's dignity bad suffered a most severe shock. He glanced at the three young men. They were grinning openly. He realized the humiliating stories they would write for their respective papers. Not at all the kind of stories he had been picturing to himself, in which the Rev. Mr. Pursen would shine as a noble Christian reformer laboring for the salvation of the sinner and the uplift of the community. They would make horrid jokes of the occurrence, and people would laugh at the Rev. Mr. Pursen.

      A stinging rebuke СКАЧАТЬ