Some of the fugitives have established themselves on sundry minute planetoids which are scattered here and there along the outer fringes of the Pleiades. These tiny worlds rise like green atolls in the everlasting blue. Here the deserters build their sorry shacks, and subsist on a little desultory soul-fishing. They live like beachcombers, growing fatter and lazier every year, and they compare themselves to the mutineers of the Bounty.
When they want a bit of change, they take a swim in the azure ether, and sometimes go as far as the cliffs of Heaven, just to take a look at the girls, who, naturally enough, are as beautiful as angels.
The cliffs of Heaven, you may be sure, are studded with summer resorts and well-supervised bathing beaches. There are also some quiet creeks and unfrequented bays where the ether washes in sapphire waves upon golden rocks, and over sands of a quality to make any honest digger call for spade and pail. Here, where no lifeguard stands with unfolded pinions, bathing is strictly prohibited. This is because of the occasional presence of one of those lurking, sharkish, runaway devils, and whoever goes in in defiance of the regulations must be prepared to face the consequences. But in spite of the risk, or because of it, some of the younger set of Heaven take a huge delight in breaking the rules, as the younger set do everywhere.
Thus a certain delightful young she-angel came down one morning into one of these forbidden caves. The weather was heavenly and her heart was as vibrant as one of her own harpstrings. She felt that her blissful existence might blossom into something even more blissful at any moment She sat a long while on an overhanging rock, and sang as gaily as the lark of the morning. Then she stood up, made a pose or two, she hardly knew why, and finally she took off with a swan-dive into the exhilarating ether.
An elderly, fat, and most unprepossessing devil had been hanging off-shore in the shallows for no other purpose than to play the Peeping Tom. The sight of this lovely creature aroused a ticklish and insistent longing in the old reprobate; it rose up in his black heart like a belch in a tar caldron. He swung in and seized her as a shark might seize on a bathing beauty, and he swept her swooning off to his little verdant planet, and on to the rickety porch of his cabin, which jutted out from the rocks for all the world like one of those fishing shacks that are to be found on any island in the tropics.
She came to herself with a gasp, and looked with horror at her repulsive captor, whose paunch sagged over his greasy belt, and whose tattered jeans scarcely sufficed to conceal his devilishness. He, with a rusty pair of shears, was already at work clipping her wings, and, gathering up the feathers: "These," said he, "will clean my pipe out to perfection. I like to smoke while I fish. Here is my favourite line; it is stronger and longer than it looks. With this I can dabble deep into the dormitories of the Y.M.C.A. For bait I use some pleasant little dreams I've had at one time and another. I keep 'em in this bucket over here, and you can take one right now and put it on the hook."
"The nasty, wriggly, slimy things!" cried she, shrinking away from the sight. "I wouldn't touch them for anything."
"You'd better," said he, "if ever you want to taste the heart and sweetbreads of a tender young divinity student"
"I'll feed myself," said she, with a curl of her lip. "I eat nothing but honey and flowers, and sometimes the egg of a hummingbird, when I'm extra hungry."
"Very uppish!" said he. "Very snooty! If you think you're here to play the fine lady, you'd better think again. Soft, silly, and good-hearted-that's old Tom Truncheontail if you stroke his fur the right way! But cross me up, and I can be rough, I can be tough, and I can be quarrelsome. You'll bait my hooks when I tell you, and you'll scrub and you'll scour and you'll sweep, and you'll cook the dinner and tend the still and make the bed. . ."
"The beds?" said she. "I'll make my own bed. As to yours . . . !"
"Do one without doing the other," said he, "and you shall ride me back to Heaven with a bridle of daisies. I said bed. If a singular, that is, and it'd be a lot more singular if it were plural." With that he laughed fit to split his sides.
The angel thought it a very poor joke. "I know I broke the rules," said she. "And I know you can make me work and slave for you. But what I did wasn't a real sin, so you can't make me suffer a fate worse than death."
"Worse than death, eh?" said the devil, his vanity wounded. "That shows how much you know about it."
"If I wished to know more," she replied, "I wouldn't choose you for my master."
"Not if I made you a sparkling necklace," said he, "out of the tears of innocent chorus girls?"
"Thank you!" said she. "Keep your trumpery jewelry, and I'll keep my virtue."
"Trumpery!" said he indignantly. "It's clear you don't know what's what in the jewelry line, or in the virtue line either. All right, my dear, there are more ways than one of taming an absolute little spitfire!"
The old sensualist, however, reckoned without his host. In the days that followed, he tried this and he tried that, but neither tyranny nor cajolery availed him in the very least against her snowy virtue and his own sooty complexion. When he frowned she feared him, but when he smiled she hated him worse than ever devil has been hated before.
"I can," said he, "put you into a whisky bottle, from which you will have to emerge when a cloak-and-suit buyer draws the cork."
"Do so," said she. "He can be no uglier than you, and no more of a nuisance."
"Perhaps not," said he. "Though I imagine you have very little experience of cloak-and-suit buyers. I can feed you to an oyster, from which you'll come out imprisoned in a pearl, and find yourself traded, in the most embarrassing circumstances, for a whole wagon-load of the chastity you hold so dear."
"I shall scream 'culture,'" said she, very coolly. "And the victim will reach for her .22, and thus we shall both be saved."
"Very neat," said he. "But I can send you to earth as a young girl of nineteen or twenty. That's the age when temptations are thickest, and resistance is very low. And the first time you sin, your body, soul, virtue and all is mine at seven years' purchase. And that," said he, with an oath, "is what I'll do. I was a fool not to have hit on it before."
No sooner said than done. He took her by the ankles, and heaved her far out into the seas of space. He saw her body descending, turning, glimmering, and he dived after it like a schoolboy after a silver coin flung into a swimming bath.
Some ordinary people, going home very late over Brooklyn Bridge, pointed out to each other what they took to be a falling star, and a little later a drunken poet, returning from an all-night party, was inspired by what he thought was the rosy dawn, glimmering through the skimpy shrubbery of Central Park. This, however, was not the dawn, but our beautiful young she-angel, who had arrived on earth as a young girl who had lost both her clothes and her memory, as sometimes young girls do, and who was wandering about under the trees in a state of perfect innocence.
It is impossible to say how long this would have continued, had she not been found by three kindly old ladies, who always were the first to enter the Park in the morning, for the purpose of taking crumbs to their friends the birds. Had our young angel remained there till lunchtime, anything might have happened, for she retained all her original beauty, and was pinker and more pearly than any dawn. She was round, she was supple, she was more luscious than peaches; there was a something about her that was irresistibly appealing.