sincerity in his manner: “You know I think you could write the play,
Tommy. But unless you get to work on some of your ideas pretty soon, and
buckle down to them in earnest, other people will continue to write your
plays--and you will continue to josh them and yourself, and your friends
will continue to think that you could write better plays if you would
only do it. People aren't going to take you seriously, Tommy, till you
begin to take yourself a little seriously. Why, you poor, futile, silly,
misguided, dear old mutt, you! You don't even have sense enough--you
don't have the moral continuity, if you follow me--to stay sore at a man
that does you dirt! Now, do you?”
“Oh, I don't know about that,” said Tommy a little more seriously.
“Well now, do you?” persisted his friend. “I don't say it's good
Christian doctrine not to forgive people. It isn't. But I've seen people
put things across on you, Tommy, and seen you laugh it off and let 'em
be friends with you again inside of six weeks. I couldn't do it, and
nine-tenths of the fellows we know couldn't do it; and in the way you
do it it shouldn't be done. You should at least remember, even if you do
forgive; remember well enough not to get bit by the same dog again. With
you, old kid, it's all a part of your being a butterfly and a bubble.
It's no particular virtue in you. I wouldn't talk to you like a Dutch
uncle if I didn't think you had it in you to make good. But you've got
to be prodded.”
“There's one fellow that did me dirt,” said Tommy musingly, “that I've
never taken to my bosom again.”
“What did you do to him?” asked his friend. “Beat him to death with
a butterfly's wing, Tommy, or blow him out of existence with a soap
bubble?”
“I've never done anything to him,” said Tommy soberly. “And I don't
think I ever would do anything to him. I just remember, that's all. If
he ever gets his come-uppance, as they say in the rural districts, it
won't be through any act of mine. Let life take revenge for me. I never
will.”
“I suppose you're right,” said Dobson. “But who was this guy? And what
did he do to you?”
IV
“He was--and is--my uncle,” said Tommy, “and he did about everything
to me. Listen! You think I do nothing but flitter, flutter, frivol and
flivver! And you may be right, and maybe I never will do anything else.
Maybe I never will be anything but a kid.
“I was young when I was born. No, that's not one of my silly lines,
Jack. I mean it seriously. I was young when I was born. I was born with
a jolly disposition. But this uncle of mine took it out of me. I'll say
he did! The reason I'm such a kid now, Jack, is because I had to grow up
when I was about five years old, and I stayed grown up until I was
seventeen or eighteen. I never had a chance to be a boy. If I showed any
desire to be it was knocked out of me on the spot. And if I live two
hundred years, and stay nineteen years old all that time, Jack, I won't
any more than make up for the childhood I missed--that was stolen from
me. Frivol? I could frivol a thousand years and not dull my appetite. I
want froth, Jack: froth and bubbles!
“This old uncle of mine--he wasn't so old in years when I first knew
him, but in his soul he was as old as the overseers who whipped the
slaves that built Cheops' pyramid, and as sandy and as flinty--hated me
as soon as he saw me. He hated me before he saw me. He would have hated
me if he had never seen me, because I was young and happy and careless.
“I was that, when I went to live with him--young and happy and careless.
I was five years old. He was my father's brother, Uncle Ezra was, and he
beat my father out of money in his dirty, underhanded way. Oh, nothing
illegal! At least, I suppose not. Uncle Ezra was too cautious to do
anything that might be found out on him. There was nothing that my
mother could prove, at any rate, and my father had been careless and had
trusted him. When my father died my mother was ill. He gave us a home,
Uncle Ezra did. She had to live somewhere; she had to have a roof over
her head and attention of some sort. She had no near relations, and I
had to be looked after.
“So she and I went into his house to live. It was to be temporary. We
were to move as soon as she got better. But she did not live long. I
don't remember her definitely as she was before we went to live with
Uncle Ezra. I can only see her as she lay on a bed in a dark room before
she died. It was a large wooden bed, with wooden slats and a straw
mattress. I can see myself sitting on a chair by the head of the bed and
talking to her. My feet did not reach to the floor by any means; they
only reached to the chair rungs. I can't remember what she said or what
I said. All I remember of her is that she had very bright eyes and that
her arms were thin. I remember her arms, but not her face, except the
eyes. I suppose she used to reach her arms out to me. I think she
must have been jolly at one time, too. There is a vague feeling, a
remembrance, that before we went to Uncle Ezra's she was jolly, and
that she and I laughed and played together in some place where there was
red-clover bloom.
“One day when I was siting on the chair, the door opened and Uncle Ezra
came in. There was some man with him that was, I suppose, a doctor.
I can recall Uncle Ezra's false grin and the way he put his hand on my
head--to impress the doctor, I suppose--and the way I pulled away from
him. For I felt that he disliked me, and I feared and hated him.
“Yes, Uncle Ezra gave us a home. I don't know how much you know about
the rural districts, Jack. But when an Uncle Ezra in a country town
gives some one a home he acquires merit. This was a little town in
Pennsylvania that Pm talking about, and Uncle Ezra was a prominent
citizen--deacon in the church and all that sort of thing. Truly rural
drama stuff, Jack, but I can't help that--it's true. Uncle Ezra had a
reputation for being stingy and mean. Giving us a home was a good card
for him to play. My mother had a little money, and he stole that, too,
when she died.
“I suppose he stole it legally. I don't know. It wasn't much. No one had
any particular interest in looking out for me, and nobody would want to
start anything in opposition to Uncle Ezra in that town if it could be
helped anyhow. He didn't have the whole village and the whole of the
farming country round about sewed up, all by himself, but he was one
of the little group that did. There's a gang like that in every country
town, I imagine. He was one of four or five big ducks in that little
puddle--lent money, took mortgages and all that kind of thing you read
about. I don't know how much he is worth now, counting what he has
been stealing all his life. But it can't be a staggering sum. He's too
cowardly to plunge or take a long chance. He steals and saves and grinds
in a little way. He is too mean and small and blind and limited in his
intelligence to be a big, really successful crook, such as you will find
in New York City.
“When my mother died, of course, I stayed with Uncle Ezra. I suppose
everybody said how good it was of him to keep me, and that it showed a
soft and kindly spot in his nature after all, and that he couldn't be so
hard as he had the name of being. But I don't see what else could have
been done with me, unless he had taken me out and dropped me in the mill
pond like a blind cat. Sometimes I used to wish he had done that.
“It isn't hard to put a five-year-old kid in the wrong, so as to make it
appear--even to the child himself--that he is bad and disobedient. Uncle
Ezra began that way with me. I'm not going into details. This isn't a
howl; it's merely an explanation. But he persecuted me in every way. He
put me to work before I should have known what work was--work too hard
for me. He deviled me and he beat me, he clothed me like a beggar and he
fed me like a dog, he robbed me of childhood and of boyhood. I won't go
over the whole thing.
“I never had decent shoes, or a hat that wasn't a rag, and I never went
to kid parties or anything, or even owned so much as an air rifle of my
own. The only pair of skates I ever had, Jack, I made for myself out of
two old files, with the help of the village blacksmith--and I got licked
for that. Uncle Ezra said I had stolen the files and the straps. They
belonged to him.
“But there's one thing I remember with more of anger than any other. He
used to make me kneel down and pray every night before I went to bed,
in his presence; and sometimes he would pray with me. He was a deacon in
the church. There are plenty of them on the square--likely most of them
are. But this one was the kind you used to see in the old-fashioned
melodramas. Truly rural stuff, Jack. He used to be quite a shark at
prayer himself, Uncle Ezra did. I can remember how he looked when he
prayed, with his eyes shut and his Adam's apple bobbing up and down and
the sound whining through his nose.
“The only person that was ever human to me was a woman I called Aunt
Lizzie. I don't know really what relation she wras to me; a distant
cousin of Uncle Ezra's, I think. She was half blind and she was deaf,
and he bullied her and made her do all the housework. She was bent
nearly double with drudgery. He had given her a home, too. She didn't
dare be very good to me. He might find it out, and then we both would
catch it. She baked me some apple dumplings once on one of my birthdays.
I was nine years old. And he said she had stolen the apples and flour
from him; that he had not ordered her to make any apple dumplings,
and it was theft; and he made me pray for her, and made her pray for
herself, and he prayed for both of us in family prayers every day for a
week.
“I was nearly eighteen when I ran away. I might have done it sooner, but
I was small for my age, and I was cowed. I didn't dare to call my soul
my own, and I had a reputation for being queer, too. For I used to grin
and laugh at things no one else thought were funny--when Uncle Ezra
wasn't round. I suppose people in that town thought it was odd that I
could laugh at all. No one could understand how I had a laugh left in
me. But when I was alone I used to laugh. I used to laugh at myself
sometimes because I was so little and so queer. When I was seventeen I
wasn't much bigger than a thirteen-year-old kid should be. I packed a
lot of growing into the years between seventeen and twenty-one.
“When I ran away Aunt Lizzie gave me eighty-seven cents, all in nickels
and pennies, and there were two or three of those old-fashioned two-cent
pieces in it, too, that she had had for God knows how long. It was
all she had. I don't suppose he ever paid her anything at all, and the
wonder was she had that much. I told her that when I got out into the
world and made good I would come and get her, but she shivered all over
with fright at the idea of daring to leave. I have sent her things from
time to time in the last ten years--money, and dresses I have bought
for her, and little things I thought she would like. But I don't know
whether he let her have them or not I never got any letter from her at
all. I don't even know whether she can write, to tell the truth, and she
wouldn't dare get one of the neighbors to write for her. But if I ever
make any real money, Jack, I am going to go and get her, whether she
dares to come away or not.
“Well, when I left, the thing I wanted to do was go to school. Uncle
Ezra hadn't given me time to go to school much. But I tramped to a
town where there was a little fresh-water college that had its own prep
school attached, and I did the whole seven years of prep school and
college in five years. You see, I had a lot of bounce in me. The minute
I got away from Uncle Ezra the whole world brightened up for me. The
clouds rolled by and life looked like one grand long joke, and I turned
into a kid. I romped through that prep school and that college, and made
my own living while I was doing it, and laughed all the time and loved
the world and everything in it, and it came as easy to me as water comes
to a duck. I came on down here to New York and was lucky enough to get a
chance as a reporter, and I've been romping ever since.
“I don't want to do anything but romp. Of course, I want to write some
good stuff some day, but I want to keep romping while I write it, and I
want it to be stuff that has a romp in it, too. You say I romp so much
I'm never serious. Well, I do have some serious moments, too. I have
a dream that keeps coming to me. I dream that I'm back in that little
town, and that I'm Uncle Ezra's slave again, and that I can't get away.
“Sometimes the dream takes the form of Uncle Ezra coming here to New
York to get me, and I know that I've got to go back with him to that
place, and I wake up sweating and crying like an eight-year-old kid. If
he ever really came it would put a crimp into me, Jack.
“You say I'm a butterfly. And I say, yes, Jack, thank God I am! I used
to be a grubworm, and now I'm a butterfly, praise heaven!
“Well, that's the guy I hold the grudge against, and that's why I'm fool
enough to rush into every pleasure I can find. I don't know that I'll
ever change. And as for the man, I don't ever want to see him. I don't
know that I'd ever do anything to him if I did--beat him to death with
a butterfly's wing, or blow him up with a soap bubble, as you suggested.
Let him alone. He'll punish himself. He is punished by being what he is.
I wouldn't put a breath into the scale one way or the other--not even a
puff of cigarette smoke.”
He blew a breath of cigarette smoke luxuriously out of his nose as he
finished, and then he remarked, “Let's go somewhere and dance.”
“Nazimova is doing Ibsen uptown,” suggested Jack, “and I have a couple
of tickets. Let's go and see Ibsen lb a little.”
“Nope,” said Tommy. “Ibsen's got too much sense. I want something silly.
Me for a cabaret, or some kind of a hop garden.”
V
But sometimes in this ironical world it happens that we have already
beaten a man to death with a butterfly's wing, slain him with a bubble,
sent him whirling into the hereafter on a puff of smoke, even as we are
saying that such a thing is foreign to our thoughts.
The old party in the room next to Tommy's at the hotel had arrived the
day before, with an umbrella, a straw suitcase and a worried eye on
either side his long, white, chalkish, pitted nose. He seemed chilly
in spite of his large plum-colored overcoat, of a cut that has survived
only in the rural districts. He wore a salient, assertive beard, that
had once been sandy and was now almost white, but it was the only
assertive thing about him. His manner was far from aggressive.
An hour after he had been shown to his room he appeared at the desk
again and inquired timidly of the clerk, “There's a fire near here?”
“Little blaze in the next block. Doesn't amount to anything,” said the
clerk.
“I heard the--the engines,” said the guest apologetically.
“Doesn't amount to anything,” said the clerk again. And then, “Nervous
about fire?”
The old party seemed startled.
“Who? Me? Why should I be nervous about fire? No! No! No!” He beat a
sudden retreat. “I was just asking--just asking,” he threw back over his
shoulder.
“Old duck's scared of fire and ashamed to own it,” mused the clerk,
watching him out of the lobby.
The old party went back to his room, and there one of the first
things he saw was a copy of the Bible lying on the bureau. There is an
organization which professes for its object the placing of a Bible in
every hotel room in the land. The old party had his own Bible with him.
As if reminded of it by the one on the bureau, he took it out of
his suitcase and sat down and began to turn the leaves like a person
familiar with the book--and like a person in need of comfort, as indeed
he was.
There was a text in Matthew that he sought--where was it? Somewhere in
the first part of Matthew's gospel--ah, here it is: The twelfth chapter
and the thirty-first verse:
“All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men....”
There is a terrible reservation in the same verse. He kept his eyes from
it, and read the first part over and over, forming the syllables with
his lips, but not speaking aloud.
“All manner of sin--all manner of sin-------”
And then, as if no longer able to avoid it, he yielded his consciousness
to the latter clause of the verse:
“But the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto
men.”
What was blasphemy against the Holy Ghost? Could what he had done be
construed as that? Probably if one lied to God in his prayers, that was
blasphemy against the Holy Ghost--one form of it. And had he been lying
to God these last two weeks when he had said over and over again in his
prayers that it was all a mistake? It hadn't been all a mistake, but the
worst part of it had been a mistake.
He went out for his dinner that evening, but he was in again before ten
o'clock. He could not have slept well. At two o'clock in the morning he
appeared in front of the desk.
He had heard fire engines again.
“See here,” said the night clerk, appraising him, as the day clerk had
done, as a rube who had been seldom to the city and was nervous about
fire, “you don't need to be worried. If anything should happen near here
we'd get all the guests out in a jiffy.”
The old party returned to his room. He was up early the next morning and
down to breakfast before the dining room was open.
He did not look as if he had had much rest. The morning hours he devoted
to reading his Bible in his room. Perhaps he found comfort in it. At
noon he seemed a bit more cheerful. He asked the clerk the way to the
Eden Musee, and was surprised to learn that that place of amusement had
been closed for a year or two. The clerk recommended a moving-picture
house round the corner. But it had begun to rain and snow and sleet
all together; the sky was dark and the wind was rising; the old party
elected not to go out after all.
He went back to his room once more, and his black fear and melancholy
descended upon him again, and the old debate began to weave through his
brain anew. For two weeks he had been fleeing from the debate and from
himself. He had come to New York to get away from it, but it was no
good. Just when he had made up his mind that God had forgiven him, and
was experiencing a momentary respite, some new doubt would assail him
and the agony would begin again.
The old debate--he had burned the store, with the living quarters over
it, to get the insurance money, after having removed a part of the
insured goods, but he did not regard that as an overwhelming sin. It
wasn't right, of course, in one way. And yet in another way it was
merely sharp business practice, so he told himself. For a year before
that, when one of his buildings had burned through accident, he had been
forced to accept from the same insurance company less than was actually
due him as a matter of equity. Therefore, to make money out of that
company by a shrewd trick was in a way merely to get back his own again.
It wasn't the sort of thing that a deacon in the church would care to
have found out on him, of course. It was wrong in a sense. But it was
the wrong that it had led to that worried him.
It was the old woman's death that worried him. He hadn't meant to burn
her to death, God knows! He hadn't known she was in the building.
He had sent her on a week's visit to another town, to see a surprised
cousin of his own, and it had been distinctly understood that she was
not to return until Saturday. But some time on Friday evening she must
have crept back home and gone to bed in her room. He had not known she
was there.
“I didn't know! I didn't know!”
There were times when he gibbered the words to himself by the hour.
It was at midnight that he had set fire to the place. The old woman was
deaf. Even when the flames began to crackle she could not have heard
them. She had had no more chance than a rat in a trap. The old fool! It
was her own fault! Why had she not obeyed him? Why had she come creeping
back, like a deaf old half-blind tabby cat, to die in the flames? It
was her own fault! When he thought of the way she had returned to kill
herself there were moments when he cursed and hated her.
But had she killed herself? Back and forth swung the inner argument. At
times he saw clearly enough that this incident joined on without a break
to the texture of his whole miserable life; when he recognized that,
though it might be an accident in a strictly literal sense that the old
woman was dead, yet it was the sort of accident for which his previous
existence had been a preparation. Even while he fiercely denied
his guilt, or talked of it in a seizure of whining prayer that was
essentially a lying denial, he knew that guilt there was.
Would he be forgiven? There were comforting passages in the Bible. He
switched on the rather insufficient electric light, which was all the
old hotel provided, for the day was too dark to read without that help,
and turned the pages of the New Testament through and through again.
At three o'clock in the afternoon he was sitting on the edge of his bed,
with the book open in front of him and his head bowed, almost dozing.
His pipe, with which he had filled the room with the fumes of tobacco,
had fallen to the floor. Perhaps it was weariness, but for a brief
period his sharper sense of fear had been somewhat stilled again. Maybe
it was going to be like this--a gradual easing off of the strain in
answer to his prayers. He had asked God for an answer as to whether
he should be forgiven, and God was answering in this way, so he told
himself. God was going to let him get some sleep, and maybe when he woke
everything would be all right again--bearable at least.
So he mused, half asleep.
And then all at once he sprang wide awake again, and his terror wakened
with him. For suddenly in front of his half-shut eyes, coming from
nowhere in particular, there passed a puff of smoke!
What could it mean? He had asked God for an answer. He had been lulled
for a moment almost into something like peace, and--now--this puff of
smoke! Was it a sign? Was it God's answer?
He sat up on the edge of the bed, rigid, in a cold, still agony of
superstitious fright. He dared not move or turn his head. He was afraid
that he would see--something--if he looked behind him. He was afraid
that he would in another moment hear something--a voice!
He closed his eyes. He prayed. He prayed aloud. His eyes once closed,
he scarcely dared open them again. After seme minutes he began to tell
himself that perhaps he had been mistaken; perhaps he had not seen smoke
at all. Perhaps even if he had seen smoke it was due to some explicable
cause, and not meant for him.
He greatly dared. He opened his eyes. And drifting lazily above the
white pillow at the head of the bed was another puff of smoke.
He rocked back and forth upon the bed, with his arms up as if to shield
his head from a physical blow, and then he passed in a moment from the
quakings of fear to a kind of still certainty of doom. God was angry at
him. God was telling him so. God would send the devil for him. There
was no further doubt. He would go to hell--to hell! To burn forever!
Forever--even as the old woman had burned for a quarter of an hour. He
began to search through the pages of the Bible again, not for words of
comfort this time, but in a morbid ecstasy of despair, for phrases about
hell, for verses that mentioned fire and flames.
He did not need the concordance. He knew his Bible well, and his fear
helped him. Consciousness and subconsciousness joined to guide his
fingers and eyes in the quest.
“Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming,” he
read in Isaiah, and he took it to himself.
“Yea, I will gather you, and blow upon you in the fire of my wrath, and
ye shall be melted in the midst thereof,” he read in Ezekiel.
He had a literal imagination, and he had a literal belief, and at every
repetition of the word “fire” the flesh cringed and crawled on his
bones. God! To burn! How it must hurt!
“And the God that answereth by fire, let Him be God,” met his eyes in
the first book of Kings.
And it all meant him. Now and then over his shoulder would float another
little puff of smoke; and once, lifting his head suddenly from poring
over the book, he thought he saw something that moved and glinted like a
traveling spark, and was gone.
He began to feel himself in hell already. This was the foretaste, that
was all. Would he begin to burn even before he died? Did this smoke
presage something of that kind? Would flames physically seize upon him,
and would he burn, even as the old woman had burned?
Suddenly in his hysteria there came a revulsion--a revolt. Having
reached the nethermost depths of despair, he began to move upward a
little. His soul stirred and took a step and tried to climb. He began to
pray once more. After all, the Good Book did promise mercy! He began to
dare to pray again. And he prayed in a whisper that now and then broke
into a whine--a strange prayer, characteristic of the man.