CARTER, AND OTHER PEOPLE
By Don Marquis
D. Appleton and Co.
1921
FOREWORD
|I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the editors of several
magazines for permission to reprint the following stories in book form.
“Carter” was originally published in _Harpers Monthly Magazine_ under
the title “The Mulatto.”
“Death and Old Man Murtrie” was printed in The New _Republic_; others
were first brought out in _Everybody's Magazine, Short Stories, Putnam's
Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post_. “The Penitent” was originally
printed in _The Pictorial Review_, with the title “The Healer and
the Penitent.” The plot of this story is taken from two poems, one by
Browning and one by Owen Meredith. Happening to read these two poems,
one after the other, I was struck by the fact that Owen Meredith had
unwittingly written what was in effect a continuation of a situation
invented by Browning; the plot of the one poem, telescoped into the plot
of the other, made in effect a complete short story. I pasted the two
situations together, so to speak, inventing an ending of my own, and had
a short story which neither Browning nor Owen Meredith could claim as
his-and which I scarcely have the nerve to claim as mine. And yet this
story, taken piecemeal from the two poets, gave me more trouble than
anything else I ever tried to write; it was all there, apparently; but
to transpose the story into a modern American setting was a difficult
job. It is my only essay in conscious plagiarism-I hate to call it
plagiarism, but what else could one call it?--and I give you my word
that it is easier to invent than to plagiarize.
The one-act play, “Words and Thoughts,” was written ten years ago-in
1911-and has been offered to every theatrical manager in America, and
refused by them all. I still believe in it as a thing that could be
acted with effect, and I am determined to get it read, even if I
cannot get it produced. The fact that it has been going the rounds of
theatrical managers for ten years is no indication that it has ever been
read.
Don Marquis
New York
I.-Carter
|Carter was not exactly a negro, but he was a “nigger.” Seven drops of
his blood out of every eight were Caucasian. The eighth, being African,
classified him. The white part of him despised and pitied the black
part. The black part hated the white part. Consequently, wherever Carter
went he carried his own hell along inside of him.
Carter began to learn that he was a nigger very early in life. Nigger
children are not left long in doubt anywhere, and especially in the
South. Carter first saw the light--and the shadows--of day in Atlanta.
The color line itself, about which one hears so much talk, seemed to run
along one end of the alley in which he was born. It was an alley with a
gutter and a great deal of mud in it. At the corner, where it gave into
a little narrow street not much better than an alley itself, the mud was
the thickest, deepest, and best adapted to sculptural purposes. But in
the little street lived a number of white families. They were most
of them mill hands, and a numerous spawn of skinny children, little
“crackers,” with faces white and sad even from babyhood, disputed the
mud with the nigger children. Nigger babies of five, four, three, and
even two, understood quite well that this most desirable mud, even
though it was in the nigger alley, was claimed by the white babies as
_their_ mud. It was in every way a more attractive sort of mud than
any in the little street proper; and juvenile race riots were of almost
hourly occurrence--skirmishes in which the very dogs took part. For the
dogs grasped the situation as clearly as did the children; a “nigger”
dog, even though he may have started in life as a white man's dog, soon
gets a certain look about him.
So there was no chance for Carter to escape the knowledge that he was
a nigger. But it was with a thrill that he perceived in his youthful
excursions from the home alley, that he was sometimes mistaken for a
white child. He was so white in color that one could not tell he was a
nigger at a casual glance.
As he grew up, he made another discovery that elated and embittered him
still more. He found out who his father was--or rather, who his father
had been, since he never saw that gentleman. The white blood in Carter's
veins was no common ichor. Because white people seldom speak of these
things it does not follow that they are not known pretty generally among
the negroes. They are, in fact, discussed.
Carter went to school; he made the further discovery that he had
brains--“white man's brains” is the way he put it to himself. Given the
opportunity, he told himself, he could go as far as the average white
man--perhaps further than the average. The white man's standard, nigger
though he was, was still the standard by which he must measure himself.
But the opportunity! Even as the youth prepared himself for it he
perceived, hopelessly, that it would be denied him.
As he matured he began to feel a strange, secret pride in that
white family whose blood he shared. He familiarized himself with its
genealogy. There is many a courtier who cannot trace his ancestry as
far back as Carter could. One of his forebears had signed Magna Charta;
several had fought in the Revolutionary War. There had been a United
States Senator in the family, and a Confederate General. At times,
feeling the vigorous impulse of hereditary instinct and ambitions,
Carter looked upon himself as all white man, but never for long, nor to
any purpose. The consciousness of his negro blood pulled him down again.
But, as he grew up, he ceased to herd with black negroes; he scorned
them. He crept about the world cursing it and himself--an unfortunate
and bitter creature that had no place; unfortunate and bitter, cursed
with an intellect, denied that mitigation that might have come with a
full share of the negro jovialty of disposition, forever unreconciled.
There was one member of that white family from which he drew so much of
his blood whom Carter particularly admired. Willoughby Howard was about
Carter's own age, and he was Carter's half-brother. Howard did not
distinguish Carter from any other mulatto; probably did not know of his
existence. But as Howard reached manhood, and, through virtue of his
wealth and standing and parts, began to attain an excellent place in
the world, his rise was watched by Carter with a strange intensity of
emotion. Carter in some occult way identified himself with the career of
Willoughby Howard--sometimes he almost worshiped Willoughby Howard,
and then he hated him; he envied him and raged over him with the same
breath.
But mostly, as the isolation of his own condition, ate into his soul,
he raged over himself; he pitied himself; he hated himself. Out of the
turmoil of his spirit arose the one despairing cry, Oh, to be white,
white, _white!_
Many a night he lay awake until daybreak, measuring the slow minutes
with the ceaseless iteration of that useless prayer: Only to be white! O
God, for _one little year of being white!_
Fruitless hours of prayers and curses!
Carter went North. He went to New York. But the North, which affects to
promise so much to the negro, in a large, loose, general way, does not
perform in the same degree. There was only one thing which Carter would
have thanked any one for performing; it was the one thing that could
never be performed--he wanted to be made white. Sometimes, indeed, from
the depths of his despair, he cried out that he wanted to be altogether
black; but in his soul he did not really want that.
Nevertheless, at several different periods he yielded to temptation
and “went over to the whites.” In the South he could not have done
this without discovery, in spite of the color of his skin. But in the
Northern cities, with their enormous numbers of aliens, all more or less
strange to the American eye, Carter found no great difficulty in passing
as white. He “looked a little foreign” to the casual glance; that was
all.
But if there was no great difficulty in it, there was no great
satisfaction in it, either. In fact, it only made him the more bitter.
Others might think him a white man, but he knew that he was a nigger.
The incident which sent him back South, resolved to be a nigger, and to
live and die among the niggers, might not have affected another in his
condition just as it did Carter. But to him it showed conclusively that
his destiny was not a matter of environment so much as a question of
himself.
He fell in love. The girl was a waitress in a cheap restaurant near the
barber shop where Carter worked. She was herself a product of the
East Side, struggling upward from the slums; partly Italian, with some
Oriental strain in her that had given the least perceptible obliqueness
to her eyes--one of those rare hybrid products which give the thinker
pause and make him wonder what the word “American” will signify a
century from now; a creature with very red lips and very black eyebrows;
she seemed to know more than she really did; she had a kind of naïve
charm, a sort of allurement, without actual beauty; and her name had
been Anglicized into Mary.
And she loved Carter. This being, doomed from the cradle to despair, had
his moment of romance. But even in his intoxication there was no hope;
his elation was embittered and perplexed. He was tempted not to tell the
girl that he was a nigger. But if he married her, and did not tell her,
perhaps the first child would tell her. It might look more of a nigger
than he did.
But if he told her, would she marry a nigger? He decided he would tell
her. Perhaps his conscience had less to do with this decision than the
fatalism of his temperament.
So he made his revelation one Sunday evening, as they walked along the
boardwalk from Coney Island to Brighton. To him, it was a tremendous
moment. For days he had been revolving in his mind the phrases he
would use; he had been rehearsing his plea; in his imagination he saw
something spectacular, something histrionic, in his confession.
“Mary,” he said, as they sat down on a bench on the beach, “there is
something I think I ought to tell you before we get married.”
The girl turned toward him her big, sleepy, dark eyes, which always
seemed to see and understand so much more than they really did, and
looked away again.
“I ought to tell you,” he said--and as he said it, staring out to sea,
he was so imposed upon by the importance of the moment to himself that
he almost felt as if the sea listened and the waves paused--“I ought to
tell you that I have negro blood in my veins.”
She was silent. There was a moment before he dared look at her; he could
not bear to read his doom in her eyes. But finally he did muster up
courage enough to turn his head.
The girl was placidly chewing gum and gazing at an excursion vessel that
was making a landing at one of the piers.
He thought she had not heard. “Mary,” he repeated, “I have negro blood
in my veins.”
“Uh-huh,” said she. “I gotcha the first time, Steve! Say, I wonder if we
couldn't take the boat back to town? Huh? Whatcha say?”
He looked at her almost incredulous. She had understood, and yet she
had not shrunk away from him! He examined her with a new interest; his
personal drama, in which she, perforce, must share, seemed to have made
no impression upon her whatsoever.
“Do you mean,” he said, hesitatingly, “that it will--that it won't make
any difference to you? That you can marry me, that you _will_ marry me,
in spite of--of--in spite of what I am?”
“Gee! but ain't you the solemn one!” said the girl, taking hold of her
gum and “stringing” it out from her lips. “Whatcha s'pose I care for a
little thing like that?”
He had looked for a sort of dramatic “situation”; and, behold, there was
none! There was none simply because the girl had no vantage point from
which to look at his life and hers. He had negro blood in his veins--and
she simply did not care one way or the other!
He felt no elation, no exultation; he believed that she _should_ have
cared; whether her love was great enough to pardon that in him or not,
she should have felt it as a thing that _needed_ pardon.
As he stared at the girl, and she continued to chew her gum, he swiftly
and subtly revised his estimate of her; and in his new appraisement
there was more than a tinge of disgust. And for a moment he became
altogether a white man in his judgment of the thing that was happening;
he looked at the situation as a patrician of the South might have looked
at it; the seven eighths of his blood which was white spoke:
“By God!” he said, suddenly leaping to his feet and flinging aside the
startled hand which the girl put out toward him, “I can't have anything
to do with a woman who'd marry a nigger!”
So Carter went back to Atlanta. And, curiously enough, he stepped from
the train almost into the midst of a strange and terrible conflict of
which the struggle in his individual breast was, in a sense, the type
and the symbol.
It was a Saturday night in September, an evening on which there began
a memorable and sanguinary massacre of negroes; an event which has been
variously explained and analyzed, but of which, perhaps, the underlying
causes will never be completely understood.
There was riot in the streets, a whirlwind of passion which lashed the
town and lifted up the trivial souls of men and spun them round and
round, and passed and left the stains of blood behind. White men were
making innocent negroes suffer for the brutal crimes of guilty negroes.
It had been a hot summer; scarcely a day had passed during July and
August without bringing to the newspapers from somewhere in Georgia
a report of a negro assault upon some white woman. A blind,
undiscriminating anger against the whole negro race had been growing and
growing. And when, on that Saturday afternoon, the newspapers reported
four more crimes, in rapid succession, all in or near Atlanta, the
cumulative rage burst into a storm.
There was no danger for Carter in the streets; more than a hasty glance
was necessary to spy out his negro taint. He stood in a doorway, in the
heart of the business district of the town, and watched the wild work
that went on in a large, irregular plaza, where five streets come
together and all the car lines in the place converge. From this roughly
triangular plaza leads Decatur Street, at one time notorious throughout
the South for its negro dives and gambling-dens.
Now and then Carter could hear the crack of a pistol, close at hand
or far away; and again some fleeing negro would start from a place of
temporary concealment, at the approach of a mob that beat its way along
a street, and make a wild dash for safety, as a rabbit startled from the
sedge-grass scurries to the brush. There was not one mob, but several;
the different bands united, split up, and reunited, as the shifting
winds of madness blew. The plaza, with arc lights all about it, was
the brilliantly illuminated stage on which more than one scene of that
disgusting melodrama was played out; from some dim hell of gloom and
clamor to the north or east would rush a shouting group that whirled
and swayed beneath the lights, dancing like flecks of soot in their
brightness, to disappear in the gloom again, shouting, cursing, and
gesticulating, down one of the thoroughfares to the west or south. And
to Carter, in whose heart there waxed a fearful turmoil of emotions,
even as the two races clashed along the echoing streets, there was a
strange element of unreality about it all; or, rather, the night was
dreadful with that superior reality which makes so much more vivid than
waking life the intense experience of dreams. Carter thrilled; he shook;
he was torn with terror and pity and horror and hatred.
No white man felt all that Carter felt that night; nor yet any negro.
For he was both, and he was neither; and he beheld that conflict which
was forever active in his own nature dramatized by fate and staged with
a thousand actors in the lighted proscenium at his feet.
This thought struck Carter himself, and he turned toward another man who
had paused in the doorway, with no clear intention, but perhaps with the
vague impulse of addressing him, as a point of solid contact and relief
from the sense of hurrying nightmare that possessed both the streets and
his own spirit.
Startled, he saw that the other man was Willoughby Howard. Carter
hesitated, and then advanced a step. But whatever he had to say was
interrupted by a crowd that swept past them from Decatur Street in
pursuit of a panting negro. The fleeing colored man was struck a dozen
times; he fell at the street corner near them, and the mob surged
on again into the darkness beyond, already in full chase of another
quarry--all but one man, who left the mob and ran back as if to assure
himself that the prostrate negro was really dead.
This was a short man, a very short man, a dwarf with a big head too
heavy for him, and little bandy legs--legs so inadequate that he wabbled
like an overfed poodle when he ran. Carter had seen him twice before
that night, dodging in and out among the feet of the rioters like an
excited cur, stumbling, falling, trodden upon; a being with bloodshot
eyes and matted hair, hoarse voice and menacing fist, drunken and
staggering with blood lust; the very Gnome of Riot himself come up from
some foul cave and howling in the streets. “Kill them! Kill them!”
he would cry, and then shake with cackling laughter. But he was only
valiant when there was; no danger. As he approached the negro who lay
upon the ground, and bent over him, Willoughby Howard stepped down
from the doorway and aimed a blow at the creature with a cane. The blow
missed, but the dwarf ran shrieking down Decatur Street.
Howard bent over the negro. The negro stirred; he was not dead. Howard
turned toward Carter and said:
“He's alive! Help me get him out of the street.”
Together they lifted the wounded man, moving him toward the curbstone.
He groaned and twisted, and they laid him down. Howard poured whisky
into him from a pocket flask, and a little later he managed to struggle
to a sitting posture on the curb, looking up at them with dazed eyes and
a bloody face.
Howard took his slow gaze from the negro and covered his face with his
hands.
Carter watched him.
Of all men in the world this was the one whom Carter most honored and
most loved--honored and loved, while he envied; he was the only man,
perhaps, that could have touched Carter through his crust of bitterness.
Carter listened with strained attention for what Howard would say, as if
with some premonition that the words would be the cue for the most vital
action of his life.
“My God! My God!” said Willoughby Howard, “will this thing never stop?”
And then he straightened himself and turned toward the shadow into which
Carter had retired, and there was the glow and glory of a large idea on
his face; the thought of a line of men never lacking, when once aroused,
in the courage to do and die for a principle or a human need. “There is
one way,” he cried, stretching out his hands impulsively to Carter, and
not knowing to whom or to what manner of man he spoke--“there is one way
to make them pause and think! If two of us white men of the better class
offer our lives for these poor devils--die in their defense!--the mob
will halt; the crowd will think; we can end it! Will you do it, with me?
Will you do it?”
Two of us white men of the better class! Willoughby Howard had taken him
for a white man!
It was like an accolade. A light blazed through the haunted caverns of
his soul; he swelled with a vast exultation.
Willoughby Howard had taken him for a white man! Then, by God, he would
be one! Since he was nothing in this life, he could at least die--and in
his death he would be a white man! Nay, more:--he would die shoulder to
shoulder with one of that family whose blood he shared. He would show
that he, too, could shed that blood for an idea or a principle! For
humanity! At the thought he could feel it singing in his veins. Oh, to
be white, white, white! The dreams and the despairs of all his miserable
and hampered life passed before him in a whirl, and now the cry was
answered!
“Yes,” he said, lifting his head, and rising at that instant into a
larger thing than he had ever been, “I will stand by you. I will die
with you.” And under his breath he added--“my brother.”
They had not long to wait. In the confused horror of that night things
happened quickly. Even as Carter spoke the wounded negro struggled to
his feet with a scarce articulate cry of alarm, for around the corner
swept a mob, and the dwarf with matted hair was in the lead. He had come
back with help to make sure of his job.
With the negro cowering behind them, the white man and the mulatto
stepped forth to face the mob. Their attitude made their intention
obvious.
“Don't be a damned fool, Willoughby Howard,” said a voice from the
crowd, “or you may get hurt yourself.” And with the words there was a
rush, and the three were in the midst of the clamoring madness, the mob
dragging the negro from his two defenders.
“Be careful--don't hurt Willoughby Howard!” said the same voice again.
Willoughby turned, and, recognizing the speaker as an acquaintance, with
a sudden access of scorn and fury and disgust, struck him across the
mouth. The next moment his arms were pinioned, and he was lifted and
flung away from the negro he had been fighting to protect by half a
dozen men.
“You fools! You fools!” he raged, struggling toward the center of
the crowd again, “you're killing a white man there. An innocent white
man------ Do you stop at nothing? You're killing a _white man_, I say!”
“White man?” said the person whom he had struck, and who appeared to
bear him little resentment for the blow. “Who's a white man? Not Jerry
Carter here! He wasn't any white man. I've known him since he was a
kid--he was just one of those yaller niggers.”
And Carter heard it as he died.
II--Old Man Murtrie
|Old Man Murtrie never got any fresh air at all, except on Sundays on
his way to and from church. He lived, slept, cooked and ate back of the
prescription case in his little dismal drug store in one of the most
depressing quarters of Brooklyn. The store was dimly lighted by gas and
it was always damp and suggested a tomb. Drifting feebly about in the
pale and cold and faintly greenish radiance reflected from bottles and
show cases, Old Man Murtrie with his bloodless face and dead white hair
and wisps of whisker was like a ghost that has not managed to get free
from the neighborhood of a sepulcher where its body lies disintegrating.
People said that Old Man Murtrie was nearly a hundred years old,
but this was not true; he was only getting along towards ninety. The
neighborhood, however, seemed a little impatient with him for not dying.
Some persons suggested that perhaps he really had been dead for a long
time, and did not know it. If so, they thought, it might be kind to tell
him about it.
But Old Man Murtrie was not dead, any more than he was alive. And Death
himself, who has his moments of impatience, began to get worried about
Old Man Murtrie. It was time, Death thought, that he was dead, since he
looked so dead; and Death had said so, both to God and to the Devil.
“But I don't want to garner him, naturally,” Death would say, “till
I know which one of you is to have him. He's got to go somewhere, you
know.”
God and Death and the Devil used to sit on the prescription counter in
a row, now and then, and watch Old Man Murtrie as he slept in his humble
little cot back there, and discuss him.
God would look at Old Man Murtrie's pale little Adam's Apple sticking up
in the faint gaslight, and moving as he snored--moving feebly, for even
his snores were feeble--and say, with a certain distaste:
“I don't want him. He can't get into Heaven.”
And the Devil would look at his large, weak, characterless nose;--a
nose so big that it might have suggested force on any one but Old Man
Murtrie--and think what a sham it was, and how effectually all its
contemptible effort to be a real nose was exposed in Old Man Murtrie's
sleep. And the Devil would say:
“I don't want him. He can't get into Hell.”
And then Death would say, querulously: “But he can't go on living
forever. My reputation is suffering.”
“You should take him,” the Devil would say to God. “He goes to church
on Sunday, and he is the most meek and pious and humble and prayerful
person in all Brooklyn, and perhaps in all the world.”
“But he takes drugs,” God would say. “You should take him, because he is
a drug fiend.”
“He takes drugs,” the Devil would admit, “but that doesn't make him a
_fiend_. You have to do something besides take drugs to be a fiend. You
will permit me to have my own notions, I am sure, on what constitutes a
fiend.”
“You ought to forgive him the drugs for the sake of his piety,” the
Devil would say. “And taking drugs is his only vice. He doesn't drink,
or smoke tobacco, or use profane language, or gamble. And he doesn't run
after women.”
“You ought to forgive him the piety for the sake of the drugs,” God
would tell the Devil.
“I never saw such a pair as you two,” Death would say querulously.
“Quibble, quibble, quibble!--while Old Man Murtrie goes on and on
living! He's lived so long that he is affecting death rates and
insurance tables, all by himself, and you know what that does to my
reputation.”
And Death would stoop over and run his finger caressingly across Old Man
Murtrie's throat, as the Old Man slept. Whereupon Old Man Murtrie would
roll over on his back and moan in his sleep and gurgle.
“He has wanted to be a cheat all his life,” God would say to the Devil.
“He has always had the impulse to give short weight and substitute
inferior drugs in his prescriptions and overcharge children who were
sent on errands to his store. If that isn't sin I don't know what sin
is. You should take him.”
“I admit he has had those impulses,” the Devil would say to God. “But
he has never yielded to them. In my opinion having those impulses and
conquering them makes him a great deal more virtuous than if he'd never
had 'em. No one who is as virtuous as all that can get into Hell.”
“I never saw such a pair,” Death would grumble. “Can't you agree with
each other about anything?”
“He didn't abstain from his vices because of any courage,” God would
say. “He abstained simply because he was afraid. It wasn't virtue in
him; it was cowardice.”
“The fear of the Lord,” murmured the Devil, dreamily, “is the beginning
of all wisdom.”
“But not necessarily the end of it,” God would remark.
“Argue, argue, argue,” Death would say, “and here's Old Man Murtrie
still alive! I'm criticized about the way I do my work, but no one has
any idea of the vacillation and inefficiency I have to contend with! I
never saw such a pair as you two to vacillate!”
Sometimes Old Man Murtrie would wake up and turn over on his couch and
see God and Death and the Devil sitting in a row on the prescription
counter, looking at him. But he always persuaded himself that it was
a sort of dream, induced by the “medicine” he took; and he would take
another dose of his “medicine” and go back to sleep again. He never
spoke to them when he waked, but just lay on his cot and stared at them;
and if they spoke to him he would pretend to himself that they had not
spoken. For it was absurd to think that God and Death and the Devil
could really be sitting there, in the dim greenish gaslight, among all
the faintly radiant bottles, talking to each other and looking at him;
and so Old Man Murtrie would not believe it.
When he first began taking his “medicine” Old Man Murtrie took it in the
form of a certain patent preparation which was full of opium. He wanted
the opium more and more after he started, but he pretended to himself
that he did not know there was much opium in that medicine. Then, when a
federal law banished that kind of medicine from the markets, he took to
making it for his own use. He would not take opium outright, for that
would be to acknowledge to himself that he was an opium eater; he
thought eating opium was a sin, and he thought of himself as sinless.
But to make the medicine with the exact formula that its manufacturers
had used, before they had been compelled to shut up shop, and use it,
did not seem to him to be the same thing at all as being an opium eater.
And yet, after the law was passed, abolishing the medicine, he would not
sell to any one else what he made for himself; his conscience would not
allow him to do so. Therefore, he must have known that he was eating
opium at the same time he tried to fool himself about it.
God and the Devil used to discuss the ethics of this attitude towards
the “medicine,” and Old Man Murtrie would sometimes pretend to be asleep
and would listen to them.
“He knows it is opium all right,” God would say. “He is just lying to
himself about it. He ought to go to Hell. No one that lies to himself
that way can get into Heaven.”
“He's pretending for the sake of society in general and for the sake of
religion,” the Devil would say. “If he admitted to himself that it was
opium and if he let the world know that he took opium, it might bring
discredit on the church that he loves so well. He might become a
stumbling block to others who are seeking salvation, and who seek it
through the church. He is willing to sacrifice himself so as not to
hamper others in their religious life. For my part, I think it is highly
honorable of him, and highly virtuous. No person as moral as that in his
instincts can get into Hell.”
“Talk, talk, talk!” Death would say. “The trouble with you two is that
neither one of you wants Old Man Murtrie around where you will have to
look at him through all eternity, and each of you is trying to put it on
moral grounds.”
And Old Man Murtrie kept on living and praying and being pious and
wanting to be bad and not daring to and taking his medicine and being
generally as ineffectual in the world either for good or evil as a
butterfly in a hurricane.
But things took a turn. There was a faded-looking blonde woman with
stringy hair by the name of Mable who assisted Old Man Murtrie in the
store, keeping his books and waiting on customers, and so forth. She was
unmarried, and one day she announced to him that she was going to have a
child.
Old Man Murtrie had often looked at her with a recollection, a dim and
faint remembrance, of the lusts of his youth and of his middle age.
In his youth and middle age he had lusted after many women, but he had
never let any of them know it, because he was afraid, and he had called
his fears virtue, and had really believed that he was virtuous.
“Whom do you suspect?” asked Old Man Murtrie, leering at Mable like a
wraith blown down the ages from the dead adulteries of ruined Babylon.
“Who?” cried Mable, an unlessoned person, but with a cruel, instinctive
humor. “Who but you!”
She had expected Old Man Murtrie to be outraged at her ridiculous joke,
and, because she was unhappy herself, had anticipated enjoying his
astounded protests. But it was she who was astounded. Old Man Murtrie's
face was blank and his eyes were big for a moment, and then he chuckled;
a queer little cackling chuckle. And when she went out he opened the
door for her and cocked his head and cackled again.
It gave Mable an idea. She reflected that he took so much opium that he
might possibly be led to believe the incredible, and she might get some
money out of him. So the next evening she brought her mother and her
brother to the store and accused him.
Old Man Murtrie chuckled and... _and admitted it!_ Whether he believed
that it could be true or not, Mable and her people were unable to
determine. But they made the tactical error of giving him his choice
between marriage and money, and he chose matrimony.
And then Old Man Murtrie was suddenly seized with a mania for
confession. God and Death and the Devil used to listen to him nights,
and they wondered over him, and began to change their minds about him, a
little. He confessed to the officials of his church. He confessed to all
the people whom he knew. He insisted on making a confession, a public
confession, in the church itself and asking for the prayers of the
preacher and congregation for his sin, and telling them that he was
going to atone by matrimony, and asking for a blessing on the wedding.
And one night, full of opium, while he-was babbling about it in his
sleep, God and Death and the Devil sat on the prescription counter again
and looked at him and listened to his ravings and speculated.
“I'm going to have him,” said the Devil. “Any one who displays such
conspicuous bad taste that he goes around confessing that he has ruined
a woman ought to go to Hell.”
“You don't want him for that reason,” said God. “And you know you don't.
You want him because you admire the idea of adultery, and think that now
he is worthy of a place in Hell. You are rather entertained by Old Man
Murtrie, and want him around now.”
“Well,” said the Devil, “suppose I admit that is true! Have you any
counter claim?”
“Yes,” said God. “I am going to take Old Man Murtrie into Heaven. He
knows he is not the father of the child that is going to be born, but he
has deliberately assumed the responsibility lest it be born fatherless,
and I think that is a noble act.”
“Rubbish!” said the Devil. “That isn't the reason you want him. You want
him because of the paternal instinct he displays. It flatters you!”
“Well,” said God, “why not? The paternal instinct is another name for
the great creative force of the universe. I have been known by many
names in many countries... they called me Osiris, the All-Father, in
Egypt, and they called me Jehovah in Palestine, and they called me
Zeus and Brahm... but always they recognized me as the Father. And this
instinct for fatherliness appeals to me. Old Man Murtrie shall come to
Heaven.”
“Such a pair as you two,” said Death, gloomily, “I never did see!
Discuss and discuss, but never get anywhere! And all the time Old Man
Murtrie goes on living.”
And then Death added:
“Why not settle this matter once and for all, right now? Why not wake
Old Man Murtrie up and let him decide?”
“Decide?” asked the Devil.
“Yes,--whether he wants to go to Hell or to Heaven.”
“I imagine,” said God, “that if we do that there can be no question as
to which place he would rather go to.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said the Devil. “Some people come to Hell quite
willingly. I've been to Heaven myself, you know, and I can quite
understand why. Are you afraid to have Old Man Murtrie make the choice?”
“Wake him up, Death, wake him up,” said God. “It's unusual to allow
people to know that they are making their own decision--though all of
them, in a sense, do make it--but wake him up, Death, and we'll see.”
So Death prodded Old Man Murtrie in the ribs, and they asked him. For a
long time he thought it was only opium, but when he finally understood
that it was really God and Death and the Devil who were there, and that
it was really they who had often been there before, he was very much
frightened. He was so frightened he couldn't choose.
“I'll leave it to you, I'll leave it to you,” said Old Man Murtrie. “Who
am I that I should set myself up to decide?”
“Well,” said God, getting a little angry, perhaps, “if you don't want to
go to Heaven, Murtrie, you don't have to. But you've been, praying to go
to Heaven, and all that sort of thing, for seventy or eighty years, and
I naturally thought you were in earnest. But I'm through with you... you
can go to Hell.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” moaned Old Man Murtrie.
“No,” said the Devil, “I've changed my mind, too. My distaste for
Murtrie has returned to me. I don't want him around. I won't have him in
Hell.”
“See here, now!” cried Death. “You two are starting it all over again.
I won't have it, so I won't! You aren't fair to Murtrie, and you aren't
fair to me! This matter has got to be settled, and settled to-night!”
“Well, then,” said God, “settle it. I've ceased to care one way or
another.”
“I will not,” said Death, “I know my job, and I stick to my job. One of
you two has got to settle it.”
“Toss a coin,” suggested the Devil, indifferently.
Death looked around for one.
“There's a qu-qu-quarter in m-m-my t-t-trousers' p-p-pocket,” stammered
Old Man Murtrie, and then stuck his head under the bedclothes and
shivered as if he had the ague.
Death picked up Murtrie's poor little weazened trousers from the floor
at the foot of the cot, where they lay sprawled untidily, and shook them
till the quarter dropped out.
He picked it up.
“Heads, he goes to Heaven. Tails, he goes to Hell,” said Death, and
tossed the coin to the ceiling. Murtrie heard it hit the ceiling, and
started. He heard it hit the floor, and bounce, and jingle and spin and
roll and come to rest. And he thrust his head deeper under the covers
and lay there quaking. He did not dare look.
“Look at it, Murtrie,” said Death.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” groaned Murtrie, shaking the cot.
But Death reached over and caught him by the neck and turned his face so
that he could not help seeing. And Old Man Murtrie looked and saw that
the coin had fallen with the side up that sent him to----
But, really, why should I tell you? Go and worry about your own soul,
and let Old Man Murtrie's alone.
III.--Never Say Die
|There seemed nothing left but suicide.
But how? In what manner? By what method? Mr. Gooley lay on his bed and
thought--or tried to think. The pain in his head, which had been there
ever since the day after he had last eaten, prevented easy and coherent
thought.
It had been three days ago that the pain left his stomach and went into
his head. Hunger had become a cerebral thing, he told himself. His body
had felt hunger so long that it refused to feel it any longer; it had
shifted the burden to his brain.
“It has passed the buck to my mind, my stomach has,” murmured Mr. Gooley
feebly. And the mind, less by the process of coherent and connected
thought than by a sudden impulsive pounce, had grasped the idea of
suicide.
“Not with a knife,” considered Mr. Gooley. He had no knife. He had no
money to buy a knife. He had no strength to go down the three flights
of stairs in the cheap Brooklyn lodging house where he lay, and borrow a
knife from the landlady who came and went vaguely in the nether regions,
dim and damp and dismal.
“Not with a knife,” repeated Mr. Gooley. And a large cockroach, which
had been crawling along the footpiece of the old-fashioned wooden bed,
stopped crawling at the words as if it understood, and turned about and
looked at him.
Mr. Gooley wondered painfully, for it was a pain even to wonder about
anything, why this cockroach should remind him of somebody who was
somehow connected with a knife, and not unpleasantly connected with a
knife. The cockroach stood up on the hindmost pair of his six legs, and
seemed to put his head on one side and motion with his front legs at Mr.
Gooley.
“I get you,” said Mr. Gooley, conscious that his mind was wandering from
the point, and willing to let it wander. “I know who you are! You were
Old Man Archibald Hammil, the hardware merchant back in Mapletown, where
I was a kid, before you dried up and turned into a cockroach.” And Mr.
Gooley wept a few weak tears. For old Archibald Hammil, the village
hardware merchant, had sold him the first knife he had ever owned.
His father had taken him into Hammil's store to buy it on his seventh
birthday, for a present, and it had had a buckhorn handle and two
blades. Again he saw Old Man Hammil in his dingy brown clothes, looking
at him, with his head on one side, as this cockroach was doing. Again
he felt his father pat him on the head, and heard him say always to
remember to whittle _away_ from himself, never _toward_ himself. And he
saw himself, shy and flushed and eager, a freckle-faced boy as good and
as bad as most boys, looking up at his father and wriggling and wanting
to thank him, and not knowing how. That was nearly forty years ago--and
here he was, a failure and starving and------
_Why_ had he wanted a knife? Yes, he remembered now! To kill himself
with.
“It's none of your damned business, Old Man Hammil,” he said to the
cockroach, which was crawling back and forth on the footboard, and
pausing every now and then to look at him with disapproval.
Old Man Hammil had had ropes in his store, too, and guns and pistols,
he remembered. He hadn't thought of Old Man Hammi's store in many years;
but now he saw it, and the village street outside it, and the place
where the stores left off on the street and the residences began, and
berry bushes, and orchards, and clover in the grass--the random bloom,
the little creek that bounded the town, and beyond the creek the open
country with its waving fields of oats and rye and com. His head hurt
him worse. He would go right back into Old Man Hammil's store and get a
rope or a gun and end that pain.
But _that_ was foolish, too. There wasn't any store. There was only Old
Man Hammil here, shrunk to the size of a cockroach, in his rusty brown
suit, looking at him from the footboard of the bed and telling him in
pantomime not to kill himself.
“I will too!” cried Mr. Gooley to Old Man Hammil. And he repeated, “It's
none of _your_ damned business!”
But how? Not with a knife. He had none. Not with a gun. He had none. Not
with a rope. He had none. He thought of his suspenders. But they would
never hold him.
“Too weak, even for me,” muttered Mr. Gooley. “I have shrunk so I
don't weigh much more than Old Man Hammil there, but even at that those
suspenders would never do the business.”
How did people kill themselves? He must squeeze his head till the pain
let up a little, so he could think. Poison! That was it--yes, poison!
And then he cackled out a small, dry, throaty laugh, his Adam's apple
fluttering in his weazened throat under his sandy beard. Poison! He
_hadn't_ any poison. He hadn't any money with which to buy poison.
And then began a long, broken and miserable debate within himself. If he
had money enough with which to buy poison, would he go and buy poison?
Or go and buy a bowl of soup? It was some moments before Mr. Gooley
decided.
“I'd be game,” he said. “I'd buy the soup. I'd give myself that one more
chance. I must remember while I'm killing myself, that I'm not killing
myself because I _want_ to. I'm just doing it because I've _got_ to. I'm
not romantic. I'm just all in. It's the end; that's all.”
Old Man Hammil, on the footboard of the bed, permitted himself a series
of gestures which Mr. Gooley construed as applause of this resolution.
They angered Mr. Gooley, those gestures.
“You shut up!” he told the cockroach, although that insect had not
spoken, but only made signs. “This is none of your damned business, Old
Man Hammil!”
Old Man Hammil, he remembered, had always been a meddlesome old
party--one of the village gossips, in fact. And that set him to thinking
of Mapletown again.
The mill pond near the schoolhouse would soon be freezing over, and
the boys would be skating on it--it was getting into December. And they
would be going into Old Man Hammil's store for skates and straps and
heel plates and files. And he remembered his first pair of skates, and
how his father had taught him the proper way to keep them sharp with a
file. He and the old dad had always been pretty good pals, and----
Good God! Why _should_ he be coming back to that? And to Old Man
Hammil's store? It was that confounded cockroach there, reminding him of
Old Man Hammil, that had done it. He wanted to die decently and quietly,
and as quickly as might be, without thinking of all these things.
He didn't want to lie there and die of starvation, he wanted to kill
himself and be done with it without further misery--and it was a part
of the ridiculous futility of his life, his baffled and broken and
insignificant life, that he couldn't even kill himself competently--that
he lay there suffering and ineffectual and full of self-pity, a prey to
memories and harassing visions of the past, all mingled with youth and
innocence and love, without the means of a quick escape. It was that
damned cockroach, looking like Old Man Hammil, the village hardware
merchant, that had brought back the village and his youth to him, and
all those intolerable recollections.
He took his dirty pillow and feebly menaced the cockroach. Feeble as the
gesture was, the insect took alarm. It disappeared from the footboard
of the bed. A minute later, however, he saw it climbing the wall. It
reached the ceiling, and crawled to the center of the room. Mr. Goo-ley
watched it. He felt as if he, too, could crawl along the ceiling. He had
the crazy notion of trying. After all, he told himself light-headedly,
Old Cockroach Hammil up there on the ceiling had been friendly--the only
friendly thing, human or otherwise, that had made overtures to him in
many, many months. And he had scared Cockroach Hammil away! He shed some
more maudlin tears.
What was the thing doing now? He watched as the insect climbed on to
the gas pipe that came down from the ceiling. It descended the rod and
perched itself on the gas jet. From this point of vantage it began once
more to regard Mr. Gooley with a singular intentness.
Ah! Gas! That was it! What a fool he had been not to think of it sooner!
That was the way people killed themselves! Gas!
Mr. Gooley got himself weakly out of bed. He would get the thing over as
quickly as possible now. It would be damnably unpleasant before he lost
consciousness, no doubt, and painful. But likely not more unpleasant and
painful than his present state. And he simply could not bear any more of
those recollections, any more visions.
He turned his back on the cockroach, which was watching him from the
gas jet, and went methodically to work. The window rattled; between the
upper and lower sashes there was a crevice a quarter of an inch wide. He
plugged it with paper. There was a break in the wall of his closet; the
plaster had fallen away, and a chink allowed the cockroaches from his
room easy access to the closet of the adjoining room. He plugged that
also, and was about to turn his attention to the keyhole, when there
came a knock on his door.
Mr. Gooley's first thought was: “What can any one want with a dead man?”
For he looked upon himself as already dead. There came a second knock,
more peremptory than the first, and he said mechanically, “Come in!” It
would have to be postponed a few minutes, that was all.
The door opened, and in walked his landlady. She was a tall and bulky
and worried-looking woman, who wore a faded blond wig that was always
askew, and Mr. Gooley was afraid of her. Her wig was more askew than
usual when she entered, and he gathered from this that she was angry
about something--why the devil must she intrude her trivial mundane
anger upon himself, a doomed man? It was not seemly.
“Mr. Gooley,” she began severely, without preamble, “I have always
looked on you as a gentleman.”
“Yes?” he murmured dully.
“But you ain't,” she continued. “You ain't no better than a cheat.”
He shrugged his shoulders patiently. He supposed that she was right
about it. He owed her three weeks' room rent, and he was going to die
and beat her out of it. But he couldn't help it.
“It ain't the room rent,” she went on, as if vaguely cognizant of the
general trend of his thoughts. “It ain't the room rent alone. You either
pay me that or you don't pay me that, and if you don't, out you go. But
while you are here, you must conduct yourself as a gentleman should!”
“Well,” murmured Mr. Gooley, “haven't I?”
And the cockroach, perched on the gas jet above the landlady's head, and
apparently listening to this conversation, moved several of his legs, as
if in surprise.
“You have not!” said the landlady, straightening her wig.
“What have I done, Mrs. Hinkley?” asked Mr. Gooley humbly. And Old
Cockroach Hammil from his perch also made signs of inquiry.
“What have you done! What have you done!” cried Mrs. Hinkley. “As if the
man didn't know what he had done I You've been stealin' my gas, that's
what you have been doin'--stealin', I say, and there's no other word for
it!”
Mr. Gooley started guiltily. He had not been stealing her gas, but it
came over him with a shock for the first time that that was what he
had, in effect, been planning to do. The cockroach, as if it also felt
convicted of sin, gave the gas jet a glance of horror and moved up the
rod to the ceiling, where it continued to listen.
“Stealin'!” repeated Mrs. Hinkley. “That's what it is, nothin' else
but stealin'. You don't ever stop to think when you use one of them gas
plates to cook in your room, Mr. Gooley--which it is expressly forbid
and agreed on that no cooking shall be done in these rooms when they're
rented to you--that it's my gas you're using, and that I have to pay for
it, and that it's just as much stealin' as if you was to put your hand
into my pocket-book and take my money!”