one!” cried Mrs. Hinkley. “You all got 'em! Every last one of you! Don't
you try to come none of your sweet innocence dodges over me. I know
you, and the whole tribe of you! I ain't kept lodgers for thirty years
without knowing the kind of people they be! 'Gas plate! Gas plate!' says
you, as innocent as if you didn't know what a gas plate was! You got it
hid here somewheres, and I ain't going to stir from this room until I
get my hands on it and squash it under my feet! Come across with it, Mr.
Gooley, come across with it!”
“But I _haven't_ one,” said Mr. Gooley, very ill and very weary. “You
can look, if you want to.”
And he lay back upon the bed. The cockroach slyly withdrew himself from
the ceiling, came down the wall, and crawled to the foot of the bed
again. If Mrs. Hinkley noticed him, she said nothing; perhaps it was not
a part of her professional policy to draw attention to cockroaches on
the premises. She stood and regarded Mr. Gooley for some moments, while
he turned his head away from her in apathy. Her first anger seemed to
have spent itself. But finally, with a new resolution, she said: “And
look I will! You got one, or else that blondined party in the next room
has lied.”
She went into the closet and he heard her opening his trunk. She pulled
it into the bedroom and examined the interior. It didn't take long. She
dived under the bed and drew out his battered suitcase, so dilapidated
that he had not been able to get a quarter for it at the pawnshop, but
no more dilapidated than his trunk.
She seemed struck, for the first time since her entrance, with the utter
bareness of the room. Outside of the bed, one chair, the bureau, and
Mr. Cooley's broken shoes at the foot of the bed, there was absolutely
nothing in it.
She sat down in the chair beside the bed. “Mr. Gooley,” she said, “you
_ain't_ got any gas plate.”
“No,” he said.
“Mr. Gooley,” she said, “you got _nothing at all._
“No,” he said, “nothing.”
“You had a passel of books and an overcoat five or six weeks ago,” she
said, “when you come here. It was seein' them books, and knowing what
you was four or five years ago, when you lived here once before, that
made me sure you was a gentleman.”
Mr. Gooley made no reply. The cockroach on the foot of the bed also
seemed to be listening to see if Mrs. Hinkley had anything more to say,
and suspending judgment.
“Mr. Gooley,” said the landlady, “I beg your pardon. You was lied on by
one that has a gas plate herself, and when I taxed her with it, and took
it away from her, and got rid of her, she had the impudence to say she
thought it was _allowed_, and that everybody done it, and named you as
one that did.”
Mrs. Hinkley paused, but neither Mr. Gooley nor the cockroach had
anything to contribute to the conversation.
“Gas,” continued Mrs. Hinkley, “is gas. And gas costs money. I hadn't
orter jumped on you the way I did, Mr. Gooley, but gas plates has got
to be what you might call corns on my brain, Mr. Gooley. They're my
sensitive spot, Mr. Gooley. If I was to tell you the half of what I have
had to suffer from gas plates during the last thirty years, Mr. Gooley,
you wouldn't believe it! There's them that will cheat you one way and
there's them that will cheat you another, but the best of them will
cheat you with gas plates, Mr. Gooley. With the exception of yourself,
Mr. Gooley, I ain't had a lodger in thirty years that wouldn't rob me
on the gas. Some don't think it's stealin', Mr. Gooley, when they steal
gas. And some of 'em don't care if it is. But there ain't none of 'em
ever thinks what a _landlady_ goes through with, year in and year out.”
She paused for a moment, and then, overcome with self-pity, she began to
sniffle.
“And my rent's been raised on me again, Mr. Gooley! And I'm a month
behind! And if I ain't come across with the two months, the old month
and the new, by day after to-morrow, out I goes; and it means the
poorhouse as fur as I can see, because I don't know anything else but
keeping lodgers, and I got no place to go!”
She gathered her apron up and wiped her eyes and nose with it. The
cockroach on the footboard wiped his front set of feet across his face
sympathetically.
“I got it all ready but fifteen dollars,” continued Mrs. Hinkley, “and
then in comes the gas bill this morning with _arrears_ onto it. It is
them _arrears_, Mr. Gooley, that always knocks me out! If it wasn't for
them arrears, I could get along. And now I got to pay out part of the
rent money onto the gas bill, with them arrears on it, or the gas will
be shut off this afternoon.”
The pain in Mr. Gooley's head was getting worse. He wished she would go.
He hated hearing her troubles. But she continued:
“It's the way them arrears come onto the bill, Mr. Gooley, that has got
me sore. About a week before you come here again to live, Mr. Gooley,
there was a fellow stole fifteen dollars worth of my gas all at once. He
went and killed himself, Mr. Gooley, and he used my gas to do it with.
It leaked out of two jets for forty-eight hours up on the top floor,
before the door was busted in and the body was found, and it came
to fifteen dollars, and all on account of that man's cussedness, Mr.
Gooley, I will likely get turned out into the street, and me sixty years
old and no place to turn.”
Mr. Gooley sat up in bed feebly and looked at her. She _was_ in real
trouble--in about as much trouble as he was. The cockroach walked
meditatively up and down the footboard, as if thinking it over very
seriously.
Mrs. Hinkley finally rose.
“Mr. Gooley,” she said, regarding him sharply, “you look kind o' done
up!”
“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Gooley.
She lingered in the room for a few seconds more, irresolutely, and then
departed.
Mr. Gooley thought. Gas was barred to him now. He couldn't bring himself
to do it with gas. There was still a chance that the old woman might
get hold of the gas money and the rent money, too, and go on for a few
years, but if he selfishly stole twelve or fifteen dollars' worth of gas
from her this afternoon it might be just the thing that would plunge her
into immediate destitution. At any rate, it was, as she had said, like
stealing money from her pocketbook. He thought of what her life as a
rooming-house keeper must have been, and pitied her. He had known many
rooming houses. The down-and-outers know how to gauge the reality and
poignancy of the troubles of the down-and-out. No, he simply could not
do it with gas.
He must think of some other method. He was on the fourth floor. He might
throw himself out of the window onto the brick walk at the back of the
building, and die. He shuddered as he thought of it. To jump from a
twentieth story, or from the top of the Woolworth Tower, to a certain
death is one thing. To contemplate a fall of three or four stories that
may maim you without killing you, is another.
Nevertheless, he would do it. He pulled the paper out of the crevice
between the window sashes, opened the window and looked down. He saw the
back stoop and there was a dirty mop beside it; there was an ash can,
and there were two garbage cans there. And there was a starved cat that
sat and looked up at him. He had a tremor and drew back and covered his
face with his hands as he thought of that cat--that knowing cat, that
loathsome, that obscene cat.
He sat down on the edge of the bed to collect his strength and summon
his resolution. The cockroach had crawled to the head of the bed and
seemed to wish to partake of his thoughts.
“Damn you, Old Archibald Hammil!” he cried. And he scooped the cockroach
into his hand with a sudden sweep and flung it out of the window. The
insect fell without perceptible discomfort, and at once began to climb
up the outside wall again, making for the window.
The door opened and Mrs. Hinkley entered, her face cleft with a grin,
and a tray in her hands.
“Mr. Gooley,” she said, setting it on the wash-stand, “I'll bet you
ain't had nothing to eat today!”
On the tray was a bowl of soup, a half loaf of bread with a long keen
bread knife, a pat of butter, a boiled egg and a cup of coffee.
“No, nor yesterday, either,” said Mr. Gooley, and he looked at the soup
and at the long keen bread knife.
“Here's something else I want to show you, Mr. Gooley,” said the
landlady, dodging out of the door and back in again instantly. She bore
in her hands this time a surprising length of flexible gas tubing, and a
small nickel-plated pearl-handled revolver.
“You see that there gas tubing?” she said.
“That is what that blondined party in the next room had on to her gas
plate--the nerve of her! Strung from the gas jet clear across the room
to the window sill. And when I throwed her out, Mr. Gooley, she wouldn't
pay her rent, and I took this here revolver to part pay it. What kind of
a woman is it, Mr. Gooley, that has a revolver in her room, and a loaded
one, too?”
Just then the doorbell rang in the dim lower regions, and she left the
room to answer it.
And Mr. Gooley sat and looked at the knife, with which he might so
easily stab himself, and at the gas cord, with which he might so easily
hang himself, and at the loaded revolver, with which he might so easily
shoot himself.
He looked also at the bowl of soup.
He had the strength to reflect--a meal is a meal. But _after_ that meal,
what? Penniless, broken in health, friendless, a failure--why prolong it
for another twenty-four hours? A meal would prolong it, but that was
all a meal _would_ do--and after that would come the suffering and the
despair and the end to be faced all over again.
Was he man enough to take the pistol and do it now?
Or did true manhood lie the other way? Was he man enough to drink the
soup, and dare to live and hope?
Just then the cockroach, which had climbed into the window and upon the
washstand, made for the bowl of soup.
“Here!” cried Mr. Gooley, grabbing the bowl in both hands, “Old Man
Hammil! Get away from that soup!”
And the bowl being in his hands, he drank.
“What do you mean by Old Man Hammil?”
It was Mrs. Hinkley who spoke. She stood again in the doorway, with a
letter in her hands and a look of wonder on her face.
Mr. Gooley set down the soup bowl. By an effort of the will he had
only drunk half the liquid. He had heard somewhere that those who are
suffering from starvation had better go slow at first when they get hold
of food again. And he already felt better, warmed and resurrected, from
the first gulp.
“What,” demanded the landlady, “do you mean by yelling out about Old Man
Hammil?”
“Why,” said Mr. Gooley, feeling foolish, and looking it, “I was talking
to that cockroach there. He looks sort of like some one I knew when I
was a kid, by the name of Hammil--Archibald Hammil.”
“_Where_ was you a kid?” asked Mrs. Hinkley.
“In a place called Mapletown--Mapletown, Illinois,” said Mr. Gooley.
“There's where I knew Old Man Hammil.”
“Well,” said the landlady, “when you go back there you won't see him.
He's dead. He died a week ago. This letter tells it. I was his niece.
And the old man went and left me his hardware store. I never expected
it. But all his kids is dead--it seems he outlived 'em all, and he was
nearly ninety when he passed away.”
“Well,” said Mr. Gooley, “I don't remember you.”
“You wouldn't,” said the landlady. “You must have been in short pants
when I ran away from home and married the hardware drummer. But I'll bet
you the old-timers in that burg still remembers it against me!”
“The kids will be coming into that store about now to get their skates
sharpened,” said Mr. Gooley, looking at the boiled egg.
“Uh-huh!” said Mrs. Hinkley. “Don't you want to go back home and help
sharpen 'em? I'm goin' back and run that there store, and I'll need a
clerk, I suppose.”
“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Gooley, breaking the eggshell.
The cockroach, busy with a crumb on the floor, waved his three starboard
legs genially at Mr. Gooley and Mrs. Hinkley--as if, in fact, he were
winking with his feet.
IV.--McDermott
|McDermott had gone over with a cargo of mules. The animals were
disembarked at a Channel port, received by officers of that grand
organization which guesses right so frequently, the Quartermaster Corps,
and started in a southerly direction, in carload lots, toward the Toul
sector of the Western Front. McDermott went with one of the carloads
in an unofficial capacity. He had no business in the war zone. But the
Quartermaster Corps, or that part of it in charge of his particular car,
was in no mood to be harsh toward any one who seemed to understand the
wants and humors of mules and who was willing to associate with them.
And so, with his blue overalls and his red beard, McDermott went along.
“I'll have a look at the war,” said McDermott, “and if I like it, I'll
jine it.”
“And if you don't like it,” said the teamster to whom he confided his
intention, “I reckon you'll stop it?”
“I dunno,” replied McDermott, “as I would be justified in stoppin' a
good war. The McDermotts has niver been great hands f'r stoppin' wars.
The McDermotts is always more like to be startin' wars.”
McDermott got a look at the war sooner than any one, including the high
command of the Entente Allies, would have thought likely--or, rather,
the war got a look at McDermott. The carload of mules, separated from
its right and proper train, got too far eastward at just the time
the Germans got too far westward. It was in April, 1918, that, having
entered Hazebrouck from the north, McDermott and his mules left it
again, bound eastward. They passed through a turmoil of guns and
lorries, Scotchmen and ambulances, Englishmen, tanks and ammunition
wagons, Irishmen, colonials and field kitchens, all moving slowly
eastward, and came to a halt at a little village where they should not
have been at all, halfway between the northern rim of the forest of
Nieppe and Bailleul.
The mules did not stay there long.
“I'll stretch me legs a bit,” said McDermott, climbing off the car
and strolling toward a Grande Place surrounded by sixteenth-century
architecture. And just then something passed over the Renaissance roofs
with the scream of one of Dante's devils, struck McDermott's car of
mules with a great noise and a burst of flame, and straightway created a
situation in which there was neither car nor mules.
For a minute it seemed to McDermott that possibly there was no
McDermott, either. When McDermott regained consciousness of McDermott,
he was sitting on the ground, and he sat there and felt of himself for
many seconds before he spoke or rose. Great guns he had been hearing for
hours, and a rattle and roll of small-arms fire had been getting nearer
all that day; but it seemed to McDermott that there was something quite
vicious and personal about the big shell that had separated him forever
from his mules. Not that he had loved the mules, but he loved McDermott.
“Mules,” said he, still sitting on the ground, but trying to get his
philosophy of life on to its legs again, “is here wan minute an' gawn
the nixt. Mules is fickle an' untrustworthy animals. Here was thim
mules, wigglin' their long ears and arsk-in' f'r Gawd's sake c'u'd they
have a dhrink of wather, an' promisin' a lifelong friendship--but where
is thim mules now?”
He scratched his red head as he spoke, feeling-of an old scar under the
thick thatch of hair. The wound had been made some years previously
with a bung starter, and whenever McDermott was agitated he caressed it
tenderly.
He got up, turned about and regarded the extraordinary Grande Place.
There had once been several pretty little shops about it, he could see,
with pleasant courtyards, where the April sun was trying to bring green
things into life again, but now some of these were in newly made and
smoking ruins. The shell that had stricken McDermott's mules from the
roster of existence had not been the only one to fall into the village
recently.
But it was neither old ruins nor new ruins that interested McDermott
chiefly. It was the humanity that flowed through the Grande Place in a
feeble trickle westward, and the humanity that stayed there.
Women and old men went by with household treasures slung in bundles or
pushed before them in carts and perambulators, and they were wearing
their best clothes, as if they were going to some village fête, instead
of into desolation and homelessness; the children whom they carried, or
who straggled after them, were also in their holiday best. Here was an
ancient peasant with a coop of skinny chickens on a barrow; there was a
girl in a silk gown carrying something in a bed quilt; yonder was a boy
of twelve on a bicycle, and two things were tied to the handlebars--a
loaf of bread and a soldier's bayonet. Perhaps it had been his father's
bayonet. Quietly they went westward; their lips were dumb and their
faces showed their souls were dumb, too. A long time they had heard the
battle growling to the eastward; and now the war was upon them. It was
upon them, indeed; for as McDermott gazed, another shell struck full
upon a bell-shaped tower that stood at the north side of the Grande
Place and it leaped up in flames and fell in dust and ruin, all gone but
one irregular point of masonry that still stuck out like a snaggle tooth
from a trampled skull.
These were the ones that were going, and almost the last of the
dreary pageant disappeared as McDermott watched. But those who stayed
astonished him even more by their strange actions and uncouth postures.
“Don't tell me,” mumbled McDermott, rubbing his scar, “that all thim
sojers is aslape!”
But asleep they were. To the east and to the north the world was one rip
and rat-a-tat of rifle and machine-gun fire--how near, McDermott could
not guess--and over the village whined and droned the shells, of
great or lesser caliber; here was one gate to a hell of noise, and the
buildings stirred and the budding vines in the courtyards moved and
the dust itself was agitated with the breath and blast of far and near
concussions; but yet the big open Place itself was held in the grip of a
grotesque and incredible slumber.
Sprawled in the gutters, collapsed across the doorsills, leaning against
the walls, slept that portion of the British army; slept strangely,
without snoring. In the middle of the Grande Place there was a young
lieutenant bending forward across the wreck of a motor car; he had tried
to pluck forth a basket from the tonneau and sleep had touched him with
his fingers on the handle. And from the eastern fringes of the village
there entered the square, as actors enter upon a stage, a group of
a dozen men, with their arms linked together, swaying and dazed and
stumbling. At first McDermott thought that wounded were being helped
from the field. But these men were not wounded; they were walking in
their sleep, and the group fell apart, as McDermott looked at them, and
sank severally to the cobblestones. Scotchmen, Canadians, English, torn
and battered remnants of many different commands, they had striven with
their guns and bodies for more than a week to dam the vast, rising wave
of the German attack--day melting into night and night burning into day
again, till there was no such thing as time to them any longer; there
were but two things in the world, battle and weariness, weariness and
battle.
McDermott moved across the square unchallenged. He had eaten and slept
but little for two days himself, and he made instinctively for the open
door of an empty inn, to search for food. In the doorway he stumbled
across a lad who roused and spoke to him.
“Jack,” said the boy, looking at him with red eyes out of an old, worn
face, “have you got the makin's?”
He was in a ragged and muddied Canadian uniform, but McDermott guessed
that he was an American.
“I have that,” said McDermott, producing papers and tobacco. But the boy
had lapsed into slumber again. McDermott rolled the cigarette for him,
placed it between his lips, waked him and lighted it for him.
The boy took a puff or two, and then said dreamily: “And what the hell
are you doin' here with them blue overalls on?”
“I come to look at the war,” said McDermott.
The soldier glanced around the Grande Place, and a gleam of deviltry
flashed through his utter exhaustion. “So you come to see the war, huh?
Well, don't you wake it now. It's restin'. But if you'll take a chair
and set down, I'll have it--called--for--you--in--in--in 'n 'our--or
so------”
His voice tailed off into sleep once more; he mangled the cigarette, the
tobacco mingling with the scraggly beard about his drawn mouth; his head
fell forward upon his chest. McDermott stepped past him into the Hôtel
Faucon, as the inn had called itself. He found no food, but he found
liquor there.
“Frinch booze,” said McDermott, getting the cork out of a bottle of
brandy and sniffing it; “but booze is booze!”
And more booze is more booze, especially upon an empty stomach. It was
after the fourth drink that McDermott pulled his chair up to one of the
open windows of the inn and sat down, with the brandy beside him.
“I'm neglictin' that war I come all this way to see,” said McDermott.
The Grande Place, still shaken by the tremendous and unceasing
pulsations of battle, far and near, was beginning to wake up. A fresh,
or, at least, a fresher, battalion was arriving over the spur line of
railroad along which McDermott's mules had been so mistakenly shunted,
and was moving eastward through the town to the firing line. The men
whom McDermott had seen asleep were rising at the word of command;
taking their weapons, falling in, and staggering back to the
interminable battle once more.
“I dunno,” mused McDermott, as the tired men straggled past, “whether I
want to be afther j'inin' that war or not. It makes all thim lads that
slapey! I dunno phwat the devil it is, the Frinch booze bein' so close
to me, inside, or that war so close to me, outside, but I'm gittin'
slapey m'silf.”
It was, likely, the brandy. There had not been a great deal of French
brandy in McDermott's previous experience, and he did not stint himself.
It was somewhere between the ninth and the fifteenth swallows of it that
McDermott remarked to himself, rubbing the scar on his head:
“I w'u'd jine that war now, if I c'u'd be sure which way it had wint!”
And then he slid gently out of his chair and went to sleep on the floor
just inside the open window of the Hôtel Fauçon.
The war crept closer and took another look at McDermott. As the warm
golden afternoon waned, the British troops, fighting like fiends for
every inch of ground, exacting a ghastly toll of lives from the Germans,
were forced back into the eastern outskirts of the town. There, with
rifle and machine gun, from walls, trees, courtyards, roofs and ruins,
they held the advancing Germans for an hour. But they were pushed back
again, doggedly establishing themselves in the houses of the Grande
Place. Neither British nor Germans were dropping shells into that
village now, each side fearful of damaging its own men.
A British subaltern with a machine gun and two private soldiers entered
the inn and were setting the gun up at McDermott's window when a
German bullet struck the officer and he fell dead across the slumbering
McDermott. Nevertheless, the gun was manned and fought for half an hour
above McDermott, who stirred now and then, but did not waken. Just at
dusk an Irish battalion struck the Germans on the right flank of their
assaulting force, a half mile to the north of the village, rolled them
back temporarily, and cleared the village of them. This counter attack
took the firing line a good thousand yards eastward once more.
McDermott roused, crawled from beneath the body of the British officer,
and viewed it with surprise. “That war has been here ag'in an' me
aslape,” said McDermott. “I might jine that war if I c'u'd ketch up wid
it--but 'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gawn ag'in! An' how c'u'd I jine it
wid no weapons, not even a good thick club to m' hands?”
He foraged and found a piece of sausage that he had overlooked in his
former search, ate it greedily and then stood in the doorway, listening
to the sound of the firing. It was getting dark and northward toward
Messines and Wytschaete and southward for more miles than he could guess
the lightning of big guns flickered along the sky.
“Anny way I w'u'd go,” mused McDermott, “I w'u'd run into that war if I
was thryin' to dodge ut. And anny wray I w'u'd go, I w'u'd miss that war
if I was thryin' to come up wid ut. An' till I make up me mind which wan
I want to do, here will I sthay.”