Ben is persuaded by these words and gives the singing waiter a five
and tells him to try and lighten the gloom with a few crimes of violence
or something. The New Yorker continued to set stiff in his chair, one
hand on his watch and one on the pocket where his change purse was that
he'd tried to pay his share of the taxicabs out of.
The gloom-stricken piano player now rattled off some ragtime and the
depraved denizens about us got sadly up and danced to it. Say, it was
the most formal and sedate dancing you ever see, with these gun men
holding their guilty partners off at arm's length and their faces all
drawn down in lines of misery. They looked like they might be a bunch of
strict Presbyterians that had resolved to throw all moral teaching to
the winds for one purple moment let come what might. I want to tell you
these depraved creatures of the underworld was darned near as depressing
as that play had been. Even the second round of drinks didn't liven us
up none because the waiter threw down his cigarette and sung another
tearful song. This one was about a travelling man going into a gilded
cabaret and ordering a port wine and a fair young girl come out to sing
in short skirts that he recognized to be his boyhood's sweetheart Nell;
so he sent a waiter to ask her if she had forgot the song she once did
sing at her dear old mother's knee, or knees, and she hadn't forgot it
and proved she hadn't, because the chorus was "Nearer My God to Thee"
sung to ragtime; then the travelling man said she must be good and pure,
so come on let's leave this place and they'd be wed.
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