Moloch: Or, This Gentile World Read Free Page A

finishing school at Montreal, but knowing little of the world, and less of Hungary, she was uncertain of the status of her taste. She therefore contented herself with practicing Liszt etudes on a clavier at home.
    The assassin who hurled the bomb at the Archduke of Austria also brought these two creatures together. It was left to Providence to unite them.
    One morning, when Moloch lay slumbering peacefully, oblivious of the rumble on the Western Front, or all the fronts put together, his mother (for some unknown reason) became unduly incensed by his torpor. Perhaps she had been stirred the night before by some unusual tale of atrocity. At any rate, she had been thinking thus—”If he won’t enlist he can at least get a job.” The more she thought the more irate she became. Finally, actuated by a sudden blind impulse she hastened to the sink and filled a pail of water. A moment later and she had dashed the chill contents over him.
    “Now get up!” she screamed. “You lazy good-for-nothing, you waster … you bum! ”
    The last epithet required the complete abdication of her maternal affection.
    It would be idle and tortuous to recount the successive steps by which, starting from this simple dramatic scene, our hero finally became enmeshed in the ophidian toils of matrimony. That Rabelaisian escapade forms another volume by itself. Suffice it to relate that immediately upon arising Dion Moloch packed his duds and wiped his feet on the paternal rug for the last time.
    Nor does it seem fair to dwell on the fact, though it forms a somewhat colorful note—a leitmotif, as it were, throughout his future marital career—that on the morning of his hurried wedding he was obliged to borrow the price of a haircut and shave. The bride, as you may suspect, paid the marriage fee, a fact which was never entirely forgotten by her throughout their turbulent wedlock.
    What seems of great importance, looking back upon his sclerotic past, is that this event, premature though it was, made it necessary for Dion Moloch to find a job.
    When we first encounter him among the “apparitions” on the Bowery he has already given three years of his life to a great corporation.
    What errand has brought him to this dismal thoroughfare— the Bowery? Is it to get his soul repaired, amid the rataplan of traffic? Or is it the free lunch that has attracted him?
    He has just come from the home of a lunatic—one of those self-imposed missions which his position occasionally created and which he found not entirely disagreeable. Intent upon making his way back to the office his attention has been suddenly arrested by a notice suspended over a flight of stairs leading to a gloomy cellar. The notice, printed in huge ocher letters, read:
    DEATH ON BUGS
    Below these sulphurous words was a canvas whose colors affected the retina as pleasantly as fried eggs. The painter had endeavored, evidently, to reproduce a situation which undoubtedly had poignancy for the denizens of this locality. A recumbent nude with flaxen tresses and flowing hips was shown busily engaged in scratching the tenderer portions of her anatomy. The bed seemed rather to float in the middle air than to rest firmly on the planked flooring. Her consort was depicted stealing about the premises with a squirt-gun. The imbecilic glee he displayed was apparently evoked by the sight of a filthy mattress from which an interminable file of bedbugs issued. (The bedbug is known to scientists as Cimex lectularius : a cosmopolitan blood-sucking wingless depressed bug of reddish brown color and vile odor, infesting houses and especially beds. The cockroach is the natural enemy of the bedbug.) Even the counterpane on which the assassin’s saffron paramour reclined, after the now classic manner of Olympe , was diapered with these cosmopolitan bloodsucking wingless depressed bugs of reddish brown color and vile odor.
    At this point a number of things might have happened. Nothing is further from the truth than