I'm gonna hold you to it! I'm gonna hold you to it! It's down there in
black and white, your own words, God, and I'm gonna hold you to it! It's
a contract, God, and you ain't the kind of a man, God, to go back on a
contract that's down in black and white!”
Thus he prayed, with a naïve, unconscious blasphemy. And after long
minutes of this sort of thing his soul dared take another step. A
faint, far glimmering of hope came to him where he groveled. For he was
groveling on the bed now, with the covers pulled up to his head and his
hand upon the open Bible. He found the courage to peer from beneath the
covers at intervals as he prayed and muttered, and minutes passed with
no more smoke. Had the smoke ceased? The sound of his own murmuring
voice began to reassure him. The smoke had certainly ceased! It had been
twenty minutes since he had seen it--half an hour!
What could it mean? That God was hearkening to his prayer?
An hour went by, and still there was no more sign of smoke. He prayed
feverishly, he gabbled, as if by the rapidity of his utterance and the
repeated strokes of his words he were beating back and holding at bay
the smoke that was God's warning and the symbol of his displeasure. And
the smoke had ceased to come! He was to be forgiven! He was winning! His
prayers were winning for him! At least God was listening!
Yes, that must be it. God was listening now. The smoke had come as a
warning; and he had, upon receiving this warning, repented. God had not
meant, after all, that he was doomed irrevocably. God had meant that,
to be forgiven, his repentance must be genuine, must be thorough--and
it was thorough now. Now it was genuine! And the smoke had ceased! The
smoke had been a sign, and he had heeded the sign, and now if he kept up
his prayers and lived a good life in the future he was to be forgiven.
He would not have to burn in hell after all.
The minutes passed, and he prayed steadily, and every minute that went
by and brought no further sign of the smoke built up in him a little
more hope, another grain of confidence.
An hour and a quarter, and he almost dared be sure that he was
forgiven--but he was not quite sure. If he could only be quite sure! He
wallowed on the bed, and his hand turned idly the pages of the Bible,
lying outside on the coverlet.
More than an hour had gone by. Could he accept it as an indication that
God had indeed heard him? He shifted himself upon the bed, and stared
up at the ceiling through a chink in the covers as if through and beyond
the ceiling he were interrogating heaven.
And lying so, there came a damp touch upon his hand, soft and chill and
silent, as if it were delicately and ironically brushed by the kiss of
Death. A sudden agony numbed his hand and arm. With the compulsion of
hysteria, not to be resisted, his head lifted and he sat up and looked.
Over the Bible and his hand that lay upon the open page there floated
again a puff of smoke, and faintly staining his Angers and the paper
itself was something moist and red. It stained his Angers and it marked
with red for his straining sight this passage of Isaiah:
“The earth also shall disclose her blood.”
It was then he cried out, “Oh, God! God! Again! You meant it, then, God!
You meant it.”
It was nearly midnight when Tommy and his friend Dobson returned to the
hotel. “Your paper's been trying to get you for an hour, Mr. Hawkins,”
said the night clerk when they came in. “Story right in the next room to
yours. Old party in there hanged himself.”
“So?” said Tommy. “Ungrateful old guy, he is! I put in the afternoon
trying to cheer him up a little.”
“Did you know him?” asked the clerk.
“Nope,” said Tommy, moving toward the elevator.
But a few moments later, confronted with the grotesque spectacle in the
room upstairs, he said, “Yes--I--I know him. Jack! Jack! Get me out of
here, Jack! It's Uncle Ezra, Jack! He's--he's come for me!”
As has been remarked before, sometimes even a bubble may be a mordant
weapon.
VIII.--The Chances of the Street
|Merriwether Buck had lost all his money. Also his sisters', and his
cousins', and his aunts'.
“At two o'clock sharp I will shoot myself,” said Merriwether Buck.
He caressed a ten-shot automatic pistol in the right-hand pocket of his
coat as he loitered up Broadway. He was light-headed. He had had nothing
to eat for forty-eight hours.
“How I hate you!” said Merriwether Buck, comprehensively to the city in
general. “If nine pistol shots would blot you out, I'd do it!”
Very melodramatic language, this, for a well-brought-up young man; and
thus indicating that he was light-headed, indeed. And as for the city,
it continued to roar and rattle and honk and rumble and squeak and bawl
and shuffle and thunder and grate in the same old way--supreme in its
confidence that nine pistol shots could not, by any possibility, blot
it out. That is one of the most disconcerting things about a city; you
become enraged at it, and the city doesn't even know it. Unless you
happen to be Nero it is very difficult to blot them out satisfactorily.
It was one o'clock. Merriwether Buck crossed the street at Herald Square
and went over and stood in front of the big newspaper office. A portly
young fellow with leaden eyes came out of the building and stood
meditatively on the curb with his hands in the pockets of clothing that
clamored shrilly of expense.
“Excuse me,” said Merriwether Buck, approaching him, “but are you, by
any chance, a reporter?”
“Uh,” grunted the young man, frigidly affirmative.
“I can put you in the way of a good story,” said Merriwether Buck,
obeying an impulse: We may live anonymously but most of us like to feel
that it will make a little stir when we die.
“Huh,” remarked the reporter.
“At two o'clock,” persisted Merriwether Buck, “I am going to shoot
myself.”
The reporter looked bored; his specialty was politics.
“Are you anybody in particular?” he asked, discouragingly.
“No,” confessed Merriwether Buck. It didn't seem to be worth while to
mention that he was one of the Bucks of Bucktown, Merriwether County,
Georgia.
“I thought,” said the reporter, with an air of rebuke, “that you said it
was a _good_ story.”
“I am, at least, a human being,” said Merriwether Buck, on the
defensive.
“They're cheap, hereabout,” returned the other, in the manner of a
person who has estimated a good many assorted lots.
“You are callous,” said Merriwether Buck. “Callous to the soul! What are
you, but--but--Why, you are New York incarnate! That is what you are!
And I think I will shoot you first!”
“I don't want to be a spoil sport,” said the reporter, “but I'm afraid I
can't allow it. I have a rather important assignment.”
Merriwether played with the little automatic pistol in his pocket. It
was not any regard for the consequences that deterred him from shooting
the portly young man. But in his somewhat dizzy brain a fancy was taking
shape; a whim worked in him. He drew his hand empty from the pocket, and
that reporter came up out of the grave.
“I am hungry,” said Merriwether Buck, in obedience to the whim.
“Now that you remind me of it,” said the other, his lack-luster
eyes lighting up a little, “so am I!” And he crossed the street and
disappeared through the swinging doors of a café.
Callous, leaden-eyed young man! epitome of this hard town! So cried the
spirit of Merriwether Buck; and then he spoke aloud, formulating his
idea:
“New York, you are on trial. You are in the balances. I give you an
hour. If I'm asked to lunch by two o'clock, all right. If not, I will
kill myself, first carefully shooting down the most prosperous citizens,
and as many of 'em as I can reach. New York, it's up to you!”
The idea of playing it out that way tickled him to the heart; he had
always loved games of chance. One man or woman out of all the prosperous
thousands in the streets might save another prosperous half-dozen;
might save as many as he could otherwise reach with nine shots from his
pistol, for he would reserve the tenth for himself. Otherwise, there
should be a sacrifice; he would offer up a blood atonement for the pagan
city's selfishness. Giddy and feverish, and drunk with the sense of his
power to slay, he beheld himself as a kind of grotesque priest--and he
threw back his head and laughed at the maniac conceit.
A woman who was passing turned at the sound, and their eyes met. She
smiled. Merriwether Buck was good to look at. So was she. She was of
that type of which men are certain at once, without quite knowing why;
while women are often puzzled, saying to themselves: “After all, it may
be only her rings.”
“Pardon me,” said Merriwether Buck, overtaking her, “but you and I are
to lunch together, aren't we?”
“I like your nerve!” said she. And she laughed. It was evident that she
did like it. “Where?” she asked briefly, falling into step beside him.
“Wherever you like,” said Merriwether. “I leave that to you, as I'm
depending on you to pay the check.”
She began a doubtful laugh, and then, seeing that it wasn't a joke,
repeated:
“I like your nerve!” And it was now evident that she didn't like it.
“See here,” he said, speaking rapidly, “my clothes look all right yet,
but I'm broke. I'm hungry. I haven't had anything to eat since day
before yesterday. I'm not kidding you; it's true. You looked like a good
fellow to me, and I took a chance. Hunger” (as he spoke it he seemed to
remember having heard the remark before), “hunger makes one a judge of
faces; I gambled on yours.”
She wasn't complimented; she regarded him with a manner in which scorn
and incredulity were blended; Merriwether Buck perceived that, for some
reason or other, she was insulted.
“Don't,” she said, “don't pull any of that sentimental stuff on me. I
thought you was a gentleman!”
And she turned away from him. He took a step in pursuit and started to
renew his plea; for he was determined to play his game square and give
the directing deities of the city a fair chance to soften whatsoever
random heart they would.
“Beat it!” she shrilled, “beat it, you cheap grafter, or I'll call a
cop!”
And Merriwether beat it; nor' by nor'west he beat it, as the street
beats it; as the tides beat. The clock on the Times building marked 1.20
as he paused by the subway station there. In forty minutes--just the
time it takes to hook your wife's dress or put a girdle round the
world--Merri-wether Buck would be beating it toward eternity, shooing
before him a flock of astonished ghosts of his own making. Twenty
minutes had gone by and whatever gods they be that rule New York had
made no sign; perhaps said gods were out at lunch or gone to Coney
Island. Twice twenty minutes more, and----
But no. It is all over now. It must be. There emerges from the subway
station one who is unmistakably a preacher. The creases of his face
attest a smiling habit; no doubt long years of doing good have given it
that stamp; the puffs of white hair above the temples add distinction to
benignity.
“I beg your pardon,” said Merriwether Buck, “but are you a minister?”
“Eh?” said the reverend gentleman, adjusting a pair of gold-rimmed
eyeglasses. “Yes,” he said pleasantly, “I am,” and he removed the
glasses and put them back on once again, as he spoke. Somehow, the way
he did it was a benediction.
“I am hungry,” said Merriwether.
“Dear me!” said the reverend gentleman. “I shouldn't have thought it.”
“Will you ask me to lunch?”
“Eh?” It was an embarrassing question; but the gentleman was all
good nature. His air indicated that he did not intend to let his
own embarrassment embarrass Merriwether too much. “My dear man, you
know--really----” He placed a shapely hand upon Merriwether's shoulder,
rallyingly, almost affectionately, and completed the sentence with a
laugh.
“It's charity I'm asking for,” said Merriwether.
“Oh!” For some reason he seemed vastly relieved. “Have you been--but,
dear me, are you sure you aren't joking?”
“Yes; sure.”
“And have you--ahem!--have you sought aid from any institution; any
charitable organization, you know?”
“But no,” said Merriwether, who had instinctively eliminated charitable
organizations, free lunches and police stations from the terms of his
wager, “I thought----”
“My, my, my,” hummed the reverend gentleman, interrupting him. He
produced his card case and took a card therefrom. “I am going,” he said,
writing on the card with a pencil, “to give you my card to the secretary
of the Combined Charities. Excellent system they have there. You'll be
investigated, you know,” he said brightly, as if that were an especial
boon he was conferring, “your record looked into--character and
antecedents and all that sort of thing!”
“And fed?” asked Merriwether.
“Oh, indeed!” And he handed over the card as if he were giving
Merriwether the keys to the city--but not too gross and material a city
either; Merriwether felt almost as if he were being baptized.
“But,” said Merriwether Buck, “I wanted _you_ to feed me!”
“Oh, my dear man!” smiled the minister, “I _am_ doing it, you know. I'm
a subscriber--do _all_ my charitable work this way. Saves time. Well,
good-by.” And he nodded cheerily.
“But,” said Merriwether Buck, “aren't you interested in me personally?
Don't you want to hear my story?”
“Story? Story?” hummed the other. “Indeed, but they'll learn your story
there! They have the most excellent system there; card system; cases
and case numbers, you know--Stories, bless you! Hundreds and hundreds of
stories! Big file cases! You'll be number so-and-so. Really,” he said,
with a beaming enthusiasm, “they have a _wonderful_ system. Well,
good-by!” There was a touch of finality in his pleasant tone, but
Merriwether caught him by the sleeve.
“See here,” he said, “haven't you even got any _curiosity_ about
me? Don't you even want to know why I'm hungry? Can't you find time
_yourself_ to listen to the tale?”
“Time,” said the reverend gentleman, “_time_ is just what I feel the
lack of--feel it sadly, at moments like these, sadly.” He sighed, but it
was an optimistic, good-humored sort of sigh. “But I tell you what you
do.” He drew forth another card and scribbled on it. “If you want to
tell me your story so very badly--(dear me, what remarkable situations
the clerical life lets one in for!)--so _very_ badly, take this card
to my study about 3.30. You'll find my stenographer there and you can
dictate it to her; she'll type it out. Yes, indeed, she'll type it out!
Well, _good_-by!”
And with a bright backward nod he was off.
It was 1.25. There were thirty-five minutes more of life. Merriwether
Buck gave the reverend gentleman's cards to a seedy individual who
begged from him, with the injunction to go and get himself charitably
Bertilloned like a gentleman and stop whining, and turned eastward on
Forty-second Street. If you have but thirty-five minutes of life, why
not spend them on Fifth Avenue, where sightly things abound?--indeed
if you happen to be a homicidal maniac of some hours standing, like
Merriwether Buck, Fifth Avenue should be good hunting ground; the very
place to mark the fat and greasy citizens of your sacrifice.
Time, the only patrician, will not step lively for the pert subway
guards of human need, nor yet slacken pace for any bawling traffic cop
of man's desire; he comes of an old family too proud to rush, too proud
to wait; a fine old fellow with a sense of his own value. Time walked
with Merriwether Buck as he loitered up Fifth Avenue, for the old
gentleman loves to assist personally at these little comedies,
sometimes; with Death a hang-dog third. Not even a fly-cop took note of
the trio, although several, if they robbed a jewelry store or anything
like that, would tell the reporters later that they had noticed
something suspicious at the time. And the patron deities of New York
City might have been over in Hoboken playing pinochle for all the heed
_they_ took.
Which brings us to Sixty-fifth Street and 1.58 o'clock and the presence
of the great man, all at once.
When Merriwether Buck first saw him, Meriwether Buck gasped. He couldn't
believe it. And, indeed, it was a thing that might not happen again this
year or next year or in five years--J. Dupont Evans, minus bulwark or
attendant, even minus his habitual grouch, walking leisurely toward him
like any approachable and common mortal. Merriwether Buck might well be
incredulous. But it was he; the presentment of that remarkable face has
been printed a hundred thousand times; it is as well known to the world
at large as Uncle Pete Watson's cork leg is on the streets of Prairie
Centre, Ill.; it is unmistakable.
To have J. Dupont Evans at the point of a pistol might almost intoxicate
some sane and well-fed men, and Merriwether Buck was neither. J. Dupont
Evans--the wealth of Croesus would be just one cracked white chip in the
game he plays. But at this moment his power and his importance had been
extraordinarily multiplied by circumstances. The chances of the street
had tumbled down a half dozen banks--(well did Merriwether Buck know
that, since it had ruined him)--and financial panic was in the air;
an epochal and staggering disaster threatened; and at this juncture a
president in no wise humble had publicly confessed his own impotence and
put it up to J. Dupont Evans to avert, to save, to reassure.
Merriwether Buck had not dreamed of this; in the crook of his trigger
finger lay, not merely the life of a man, but the immediate destiny of a
nation.
He grasped the pistol in his pocket, and aimed it through the cloth.
“Do you know what time it is?” he asked J. Dupont Evans, politely
enough.
It was only a second before the man answered. But in that second
Merriwether Buck, crazily exalted, and avid of the sensation he was
about to create, had a swift vision. He saw bank after bank come
crashing down; great railroad systems ruined; factories closed and
markets stagnant; mines shut and crops ungathered in the fields; ships
idle at the wharves; pandemonium and ruin everywhere.
“Huh?” said J. Dupont Evans, gruffly, removing an unlighted cigar from
his mouth. He looked at Merriwether Buck suspiciously, and made as if to
move on. But he thought better of it the next instant, evidently, for
he pulled out a plain silver watch and said grudgingly: “Two minutes
of two.” And then, in a tone less unpleasant, he asked: “Have you got a
match, young man?”
Merriwether fumbled in his vest pocket. In a minute and a half he would
perfunctorily ask this man for lunch, and then he would kill him. But he
would give him a match first--for Merriwether Buck was a well-brought-up
young man. As he fumbled he picked out the exact spot on the other's
waistcoat where he would plant the bullet. But the idea of a man on the
edge of the grave lighting a cigar tickled him so that he laughed aloud
as he held out the matches.
“What can I do with these?” snorted J. Dupont Evans. “They are the sort
that light only on their own box.” From his glance one might have gained
the impression that he thought Merriwether Buck a fool.
“Great principle that,” said Merriwether Buck, cackling with hysteria.
It was so funny that a dead man should want to smoke a cigar! He would
let him play he was alive for fifty seconds longer.
“Principle?” said Evans. “Principle? What Principle?”
“Well,” said Merriwether, with the random argumentativeness of insanity,
“it _is_ a great principle. Apply that principle to some high explosive,
for instance, and you have no more battleship flare-backs--no premature
mine blasts----”
“Say,” the other suddenly interrupted, “are you an inventor?”
“Yes,” lied Merriwether Buck, glibly, although he had never given five
seconds' thought to the subject of high explosives in his life. “That's
how I know. I've invented an explosive more powerful than dynamite. But
it won't explode by contact with fire, like powder. Won't explode with a
jar, like dynamite. Won't freeze, like dynamite. Only one way to explode
it--you've got to bring it into contact with a certain other chemical
the same as scratching one of these matches on its own box.”
“The deuce, young man!” said the other. “There's a fortune in it! Is it
on the market at all?”
“No,” said Merriwether Buck, raising his pistol hand slightly and
thrusting it a bit forward, under the mask of his coat pocket, “no money
to start it going.”
“Hum,” mused the other. “I tell you what you do, young man. You come
along to lunch with me and we'll talk the thing over--money and all.”
And the directing deities of New York struck twice on all the city
clocks, and striking, winked.
IX.--The Professor's Awakening
|How I ever come to hit such a swell-looking house for a handout I never
knew. Not that there was anything so gaudy about it, neither, as far as
putting up a bluff at being a millionaire's mansion went, which I found
out afterwards it was, or pretty near that at any rate. But it was just
about the biggest house in that Illinois town, and it's mostly that kind
o' place with them naked iron heathens in the front yard and a brick
stable behind that it ain't no use to go up against unless you're
looking for a lemon. If you need real food and need it sudden and ain't
prospecting around town for no other kind of an opening you better make
for the nearest public works like a canal being dug, or a railroad gang.
Hit the little tin dinner buckets, men that does the unskilled labor
on jobs like that, except Swedes and Dagos, knowing what it is to be
up against it themselves now and then and not inclined to ask no fool
questions.
Well, I went around to the back door, and Biddy Malone she lets me in. I
found out that was her name afterwards, but as soon as I seen her face
I guessed if her name wasn't Bridget it was Nora. It's all in the
first look they give you after they open the door. If that look's right
they're coming across and you'll get some kind of a surprise for your
digestive ornaments and you don't need to make no fool breaks about
sawing wood neither. I makes my little talk and Biddy she says come in;
and into the kitchen I went.
“It's Minnesota you're working towards,” says Biddy, pouring me out a
cup of coffee.
She was thinking of the wheat harvest where there's thousands makes for
every fall. But not for me, I never did like to work for none of them
Scandiluvian Swedes and Norwegians that gets into the field before
daylight and stays at it so long the hired men got to milk the cows by
moonlight. They got no sense of proportion, them Gusses and Oles ain't.
“I been across the river into I'way,” I says, “working at my trade, and
I'm going back to Chicago to work at it some more.”
“And what may your trade be?” says Biddy, sizing me up careful. I seen I
made a hit somehow or she wouldn't of asked me in the first place was
I going to the wheat harvest, but would of just supposed I was a hobo,
which I ain't. I got a lot of trades when I want to use one, and as a
regular thing I rather work at one of them for a while, too, but can't
stand it very long on account of not feeling right to stay in one place
too long, especially in the summer. When I seen I made a hit with Biddy
I thinks I'll hand her a good one she never heard tell of before.
“I'm an agnostic by trade,” I says. I spotted that one in a Carnegie
library one time and that was the first chance I ever had to spring it.
“I see,” says Biddy. And she opened her eyes and mouth to once. I seen
she didn't see, but I didn't help her none. She would of rather killed
herself than let on she didn't see. Most of the Irish is like that
whether they is kitchen mechanics or what. After a while she says,
pouring me out some more coffee and handing me a little glass jar full
of watermelon rinds boiled in with molasses and things, she says:
“And ain't that the dangerous thing to work at, though!”
“It is,” I says, and says nothing further.
She sets down and folds her arms like she was thinking about it,
watching my hands all the time as if she was looking for scars where
something slipped when I done that agnostic work. Finally she says with
a sigh:
“Sure, and it's dangerous! Me brother Patrick was kilt at it in the old
country. He was the most vinturesome lad of thim all!”
She was putting up a stiff front, and for a minute I don't know whether
she's stringing me or I'm stringing her. The Irish is like that. So
being through eating I says:
“Did it fly up and hit him?”
She looks at me scornful and tosses her chin up and says:
“No. He fell off of it. And I'm thinking you don't know what one of them
is, after!”