At the family entrance to Harry's place, and just around the corner from the main entrance of knee-high swinging doors and a broadside of frosted plate-glass front, a bead of gas burned sullenly through a red globe, winking, so to speak, at all who would enter there under cover of its murk.
Women with faces the fatty white of jade, and lips that might have kissed blood, slipped from the dark tide of the side street into the entrance. Furtive couples rose out of the night: the men, lean as laths, collars turned up and caps drawn down; girls, some with red lights and some with no lights in their eyes, and most of them with too red lips of too few curves, and all of them with chalk-colored powder laid on over the golden pollen of youth.
Within Harry's place, Christmas found little enough berth except that above the great soaped-over mirror at the far end of the room a holly wreath dangled from the tarnished gilt frame and against the clouded-over glass a forefinger had etched a careless Merry Christmas.
At tables set so close that waiters side-stepped between them, the habitués of Harry's place dined—wined, too, but mostly out of uncovered steins or two-inch stemless glasses. And here and there at smaller tables a solitary figure with a seer's light in his eyes sipped his greenish milk!
An electric piano, its shallow tones undigested by the crowded room, played in response to whomsoever slipped a coin into its maw. Kicked-up sawdust lay in the air like flakes.
From her table near the door Miss Marjorie Clark pushed from her a litter of half-tasted dishes and sent her dark glance out over the room. A few pairs of too sinuous dancers circled a small clearing around the electric piano. Waiters with fans of foam-drifting steins clutched between fingers jostled them in passing. At a small table adjoining, a girl slept in her arms. Two more entered, elbow in elbow, and directly a youth in a wide-striped wool sweater muffled high to his teeth, and features that in spite of himself would twitch and twitch again.
"Hi, Blink," he said in passing.
"Hi."
Reader, your heart lifted up and glowing with Yuletide and good-will toward men, turn not in warranted nausea from the reek of Harry's place. Mere plants can love the light and turn to it, but have not the beautiful mercy to share their loveliness with foul places. The human heart is a finer work. It can, if it will, turn its white light upon darkness, so that out of it even a single seed may take heart and grow. A fastidious olfactory nerve has no right to dominion over the quality of mercy. The heart should keep its thousand doors all open, each heart-string a latch-string, and each latch-string out.
Marjorie Clark met her companion's eyes above the rim of his stein. "Looks more like hell on a busy day down here than like Christmas Eve, don't it?"