ERMAN Pupick first met Cutie on the corner of State and Madison streets. Our little home wrecker had slipped and fallen and a large crowd of first nighters had gathered to watch Officer Murphy, the traffic dictator, extract a splinter out of Cutie’s knee.
At this point Herman’s one good eye bulged out of his head like a ripe mushroom. One peek at Cutie’s injured fox trotter filled him with a nameless rage.
“How dare you!” he cried, addressing Officer Murphy. “How dare you take advantage of this maiden’s mishap and expose her person to the lewd eyes of this crowd? Unhand her!”
Officer Murphy dropped the hem of Cutie’s dress and a great sigh went up from the cock-eyed multitude.
“Come with me,” Herman spoke, a ring of authority in his voice, and seizing Cutie’s arm he escorted her to the new Methodist Book Store in the Temple Building, for our hero was a great reader.
“Now,” said Herman, mopping his brow, “you are safe. Be not afraid.”
“Say, bozo,” Cutie said, handing him an O. O., which would have discouraged Former Attorney General Daugherty, “what kind of a racket is this? I am just an honest little kiddie trying to get along.”
From which it can be seen that our heroine thought it was a pinch.
Still trembling with rage, Herman handed her one of his blackmailing cards.
“Here,” he said, “is my name and vocation.”
“Oh, Herman Pupick, Censor and Reformer,” Cutie read out loud. “My Gawd, the Arsenic Kid. Oh, Papa’s lost his teeth. Send for the monkey gland wagon. So you are a reformer?”
“Yes,” said Herman.
“What kind of reforming do you specialize in?” continued Cutie. “Maybe I can be a great help to you.”
“Sin,” answered Herman, “any kind of sin. Wherever I find things which incite to lewdness and debauchery, there my duty lies.”
“Amen, brother, mine too,” cried Cutie. And lifting up her dress she eyed her knee with concern. “I take it,” she murmured, “that splinters are not in your line.”
Herman Pupick closed his glass eye. For a moment he stood his ground. Then he fainted.
“Where am I?” he muttered five minutes later when his stricken senses returned.
“I’ll bite, where are you?” echoed Cutie. “When last seen you were counting moth balls in a Swedish restaurant.”
“Ah, it all comes back to me now,” gurgled our woozy smut hound. “God drew a veil before my eyes to shut out that evil spectacle.”
And lifting his fanny off the floor Herman pointed his forefinger at our heroine.
“You spawn of Hell,” he cried, “you painted Jezebel, don’t try to work your sinful wiles on me. I know you for what you are, a cigarette smoking, rum guzzling creature of the underworld. Begone to your devil’s lair. You soul wrecker luring innocent men to their doom with your corruptions.”
“Say,” Cutie broke in, “you poor kidney-footed clown, you one-eyed leftover, how do you get that way? What Lost Manhood advertisement have you been reading? Go on, get back into your manhole before some enterprising undertaker lays a lamp on you.”
“Me trying to lure you,” Cutie continued, having taken a fresh breath. “I would just as soon get amorous with a blue-nosed Mandril. A gimp like you takes my appetite away for a week. Come on, beat it, poison ivy, before I start calling you any hard names.”
At this point, Herman Pupick turned on his heel and walked out of the bookstore, leaving his vis-a-vis flat.
But when our hero reached his dove cote that evening, he felt strangely disturbed.
“Emmaline,” he said to his fellow sufferer, “have you ever had a splinter in your knee?”
“Herman! How dare you!” cried Mrs. Pupick, blushing violently. “Do you think that sort of talk is fit for the home?”
“No,” said Herman, a wave of shame covering him like a pail of dishwater. An hour later Herman and the dementia praecox case were kneeling beside their sleeping bags requesting God all over again to keep them pure.
But Herman couldn’t sleep. Every ten minutes he would wake up and say “Splinters.” Finally our hero, first crossing himself three times, peeled back the bed covers from his sleeping consort. Madam Pupick was partial to the kind of night shirts they bury sailors in who have died at sea.
For a moment Herman was almost discouraged. But a strange impulse had mastered him. Gingerly he lifted up the night dress until he had exposed Madam Pupick’s knee. At this point, the kippered herring at his side opened one of its glims and sensing danger, let out a terrible squawk.
“Herman! What are you doing,” she shrieked.
“I dreamed you had a splinter in your knee,” Herman mumbled with a guilty start, “and I was going to take it out.”
Madam Pupick stared at him with watery eyes and yanked the bed covers into their proper position. She was a daughter of Eve, but her father was a mackerel.
Thus was the first thread woven in the maelstrom of passion which was to trip our hero and singe his wings. For all that night he tossed on his bed like a Mexican jumping bean.
He dreamed he was kneeling before a beautiful window and watching a windmill made of splinters turning around outside and on top of the windmill was a large snake. Then slowly in his dream the windmill and the snake did a fadeout and he found himself looking at Cutie’s knee just as he had seen it in the Methodist Book Store.
In the middle of the night Herman woke up with a yell. He had kicked all the covers off and was standing in the middle of the bedroom. As his senses returned our hero felt that something had happened. And he remembered all of a sudden that he had forgotten his hat in the book store.
Falling to his knees, Herman put the tips of his fingers together and, his eyes rolling, raised his voice in a grim unfaltering song.
“Onward Christian soldiers, Marching as to War....
With the Cross of Jesus——”
And at just this moment in another part of the great city Cutie with vine leaves in her hair was gathering asphodels in the groves of Kypris while the cuckoo clock on the rubber mantlepiece struck three and the ukeleles danced in the wind.