_King of To-day_
Donaldson pressed his way along the lighted streets, clutching the vial
in his pocket with the thrill of a man holding the key to fretting
shackles. One week of life with the future eliminated; one week with no
reckoning to be made at the end; one week with every human fetter struck
off; one week in which to ignore every curbing law of futurity and
abandon himself to the joy of the present! The future--even the narrow
bounds of an earthly future--holds men prisoners. A few careless dogs,
to be sure, live their day, blind to the years to come, but that is brute
stupidity. A few brave souls swagger through their prime with some
bravado, knowing the final cost, but willing to pay it by installments
through the dribbling years which follow; but the usury of time makes
that folly. The wise choke such gypsy impulses--admit the mortgage of
the Present to the Future--and surrender the brisk liberty of youth to
the limping freedom of old age. But Donaldson was too thoughtful a man
to belong to either the first or second class and yet of too lusty stuff
to join the third.
There were now just two doubtful points which checked him in his first
impulse to swallow the deadly elixir at once,--two questions needing
further thought before he would have a clear conscience about it; he must
convince himself a trifle more clearly that he shifted nothing to the
load of those he left behind, and he must make sure that no element of
fear entered into his act. That phrase of Barstow's, "It's quitting not
to stay," smarted a bit.
In spite of these vital problems, Donaldson was keenly conscious, even
with his wild freedom still nothing but a conception, of sharpened senses
which responded keenly to the lights and sounds about him. This bottle
which he held made him feel like some old time king's messenger who
carried a warrant making him exempt from local laws. He moved among
people whose perplexed thoughts wandered restlessly down the everlasting
vista of the days ahead, and he alone of them all knew the secret of
being untroubled beyond the week. The world had not for ten years
appeared so gay to him. He felt the exhilarating sting of life as he had
when it first surged in upon him at twenty. The very fact that he held
even a temporary solution to his barren days was enough. In the joy of
his almost august scorn of circumstance he forgot the minor difficulties
which still lay before him.
He turned aside from the direct course to his room into Broadway. It was
the last of May and early evening. The month revealed itself in the warm
night sky and the buoyant spirits of those below its velvet richness.
Spring was in the air--a stimulation as of etherialized champagne. The
spirit of adventure, the spirit of renaissance, the spirit of creation
was abroad once more. Not a cranny in even this sprawling section of
denaturalized earth but thrilled for the time being with budding hopes,
sap-swollen courage, and bright, colorful dreams. Walking beneath the
spitting glare of the arc-lights, through the golden mist flooding from
the store windows, Donaldson hazily saw again the careless unburdened
world of his early youth. He caught the spirit of Broadway and all
Broadway means in the spring. It was a marionette world where
marionettes dance their gayest. Yesterday this would have been to him
nothing but a dead bioscope picture; now, though he still sat an onlooker
in the pit, it was a living human drama at which he gazed.
Two dark-haired grisettes passed him, their cheeks aglow and their eyes
dancing. They appeared so full of life, so very gay, that he turned to
glance back at them. He found the eyes of the prettier one upon him; she
had turned to look at him. It was long since even so trifling an
intrigue as this had quickened his life.
As a matter of fact Donaldson always attracted more interest in feminine
eyes than, in his self engrossment, he was ever aware. Even in his shiny
blue serge suit, baggy at the knees and sagging at the shoulders, even in
his shabby hat, he carried himself with an air. Two things about his
person were always as fine and immaculate as though he were a gentleman
of some fortune, his linen and his shoes. But in addition to such slight
externals Donaldson, although not a large man, had good shoulders, a
well-poised head, and walked with an Indian stride from the hips that
made him noticeable among the flat-footed native New Yorkers. He might
have been mistaken for an ambitious actor of the younger school; even for
a forceful young cleric, save for the fact that he smoked his cigarette
with evident satisfaction.
He followed an aimless course--but a course fairly prickling with new
sensations--until he stood before one of the popular cafés, now
effervescing with sprightly life. He paused here a moment to listen to
the music. A group of well-groomed men and women laughingly clambered
out of a big touring car and passed in before the obsequious attendants.
He watched them with some envy. Music, good food, good wines, laughter,
and bright eyes--the flimsiest vanities of life to be sure--and yet there
was something in his hungry heart that craved them all. Well, ten years
from now perhaps,--his hand fell upon the vial. No. Not ten years from
now, but to-morrow, even tomorrow, he might claim these luxuries!
He jumped on a car and in thirty minutes stood in the lean, quiet street
into which for three years he had stared from his third floor room.
These quarters seemed now more than ever a parody on home. This row of
genteel structures which had degenerated into boarding houses for the
indigent and struggling younger generation, and the wrecks of the past,
embodied, in even the blank stare of their exteriors, stupid mediocrity.
He fumbled nervously in his pocket for his latch-key, and opening the
door climbed the three stale flights to his room. He lighted both
gas-jets, but even then the gloom remained. He craved more light--the
dazzling light of arc-lamps, the glare reflected from polished mirrors.
Better absolute darkness than this. He turned out the gas and throwing
open his window leaned far out over the sill. Then he concentrated his
thoughts upon the issue confronting him.
At the end of other colorless days, when he had come back here only to be
tortured by the stretch of gray road before him, he had considered as a
possibility that which now was almost a reality. He had always been
checked by this desire to have first his taste of life and by the
troublesome conviction that there was something unfair about seizing it
in this way. Furthermore, though he could, without Barstow's discovery,
have lived his week and closed it by any one of a dozen effective means,
he realized that he could not trust even himself to fulfill at the
end--no matter how binding the oath--so fearful a decree. A few deep
draughts of joyous life might turn his head. It was as dangerous an
experiment as taking the first smoke of opium, as tampering with the
first injection of morphine, upon the promise of stopping there. No,
before beginning he must set at work some power outside himself which
should be operative even against his will; which should be as final as
death itself. Until to-night this had seemed an impossibility. Now,
with that chief obstruction removed, he had but to consider the ethics of
the question.
In arguing with Barstow he had been sincere. He believed as he had said
that a man had the right to end the contract so long as he cheated no one
by so doing. All his life he had paid his way like a man, done his duty
like a good citizen, given a fair return for everything he took. He did
not feel himself indebted to his country, his state, his city, nor to any
living man or woman. In one form and another, he had paid. Few men
could claim this as sincerely as Donaldson. He had lived
conscientiously, so very conscientiously in fact that it was as much
rebellion against self-imposed fetters which now drove him on to an
opposite extreme as any bitterness against that society which had spurned
his idealism. He had refused to compromise and learned that the world
uses only as martyrs those who so refuse. The limitations of his nature
were defined by the fact that he withdrew from so self sacrificing an end
as that. But now if he demanded nothing more--if he was tired of this
give and take--why should he not balance accounts?
Chiefly because there would still be one week to account for--that last
week in which he should demand most. Like an inspiration came the
solution to this, the final difficulty; economically he was wasting a
life; very well, but if he could find a way of not wasting it, of giving
his life to another, then he would have paid even this last bill. In the
excitement of this new idea, he paced his room. If he could give his
life for another! But supposing this were impossible, supposing no
opportunity should offer, it would be something if he held himself open,
offered himself a free instrument of Fate. He could promise--and he knew
he could keep so sacred a promise as this with death approaching in so
inevitable a form,--he could promise to offer himself upon the slightest
pretext, recklessly and without fear, instantly and without thought, to
the first chance which might come to him to give his life for another.
That was the bond he would give to Fate--the same Fate which had produced
him--his life for the life of another. Let society use him so if such
use could be found for him. He would stand ready, would live up to the
spirit and the letter of the bond unhesitatingly. For one week he would
live his life in the present upon that condition--one week with the
eighth day a blank, one week with the whole world his plaything.
He stared with new eyes from his window to the jumble of houses below, to
the jumble of stars above. The whole world expanded and vibrated before
the intensity of his passion. He was to condense a possible thirty or
forty years into seven days. To-day was the twenty-third of May. By
to-morrow noon he could adjust all his affairs. With nothing to demand
of them in the future it would be an easy matter to cut them off. On
Friday, May twenty-fourth, then, he could begin. This would bring the
end on the thirty-first.
He considered a moment; was it better to die at noon or at night? An odd
thing for a man to decide, but such details as this might as well be
fixed now as later. It took but a moment's deliberation; he elected to
go out at high noon. There would be dark enough afterwards--possibly an
eternity of dark. He would face the sun with his last gaze; he would
have the mad riot of men and women at midday ringing last in his ears.
As he drew in deep breaths it was as if he inhaled the whole world. He
felt as though, if he but stepped out sturdily enough, he could foot the
darkness. His head was light; his brain teemed with wild fancies. Then
pressing through this medley he saw for a moment the young woman who had
come to Barstow's laboratory. The effect was to steady him. He
remembered the sweet girlishness of her face, the freshness of it which
was like the freshness of a garden in the early morning. He realized
that she stood for one thing that he could never know. What was it that
he saw now in those strange eyes that left him a bit wistful at thought
of this? There was not a detail of her features, of her dress, of her
speech, that he could not see now as vividly as though she were still
standing before him. That was odd, too. He was not ordinarily so
impressionable. It occurred to him that he would not like her to know
what he was about to do. Bah, he was getting maudlin!
Late as it was, he left his room and went downtown to his office. He
worked here until daylight, falling asleep in his chair from four to
seven. He awoke fresh, and even more eager than the night before to
undertake his venture.
There remained still a few men to be seen. He transacted his business
with a brilliant dispatch and swift decision that startled them. He
disposed of all his office furniture, his books, destroyed all his
letters, made a will leaving instructions for the disposal of his body,
and concluded every other detail of his affairs before eleven o'clock.
When he left his office to go back to his room, he had in his pocket
every cent he possessed in the world in crisp new bank notes. It
amounted to twenty-eight hundred and forty-seven dollars. Not much to
scatter over a long life,--not much as capital. Invested it might yield
some seventy dollars a year. But as ready cash, it really stood for a
fortune. It was the annual income at four per cent on over seventy
thousand dollars, the monthly income on eight hundred and forty thousand
dollars, the weekly income on over three million. For seven days then he
could squander the revenue of a princely estate.
As a matter of fact his position was even more remarkable; he was as
wealthy--so far as his own capacity for pleasure went--as though the
possessor of thirty million. This because of his limitations; he was
barred from travel; barred from the purchase of future holdings; barred
from everything by this time restriction save what he could absorb within
seven days through his five senses. Being an intelligent man of decent
morals and no bad habits, he was also restrained from license and the
gross extravagance accompanying it. But within his own world, there was
not a desire which need remain unsatisfied.
Back again in his room he summoned his landlady.
"I am going away," he informed her briefly. "I sha'n't leave any address
and I 'm going to take with me only the few things I can pack into a
dress-suit case. I 'll give you the rest."
The woman--she had become rather fond of the quiet, gentle third story
front--looked up sympathetically.
"Have you had bad news?"
"Bad news? No," he smiled. "Very good news. I 'm going to take a sort
of vacation."
"Then perhaps you 'll come back."
"So, I 'm quite sure I shall never come back."
She watched him at his packing, still puzzled by his behavior. She
noticed that he took nothing but a few trinkets, a handful of linen, and
a book or two. He glanced at his watch.
"Madame," he announced, offering her his hand, "it is now eleven thirty.
My vacation begins in half an hour. I must hurry. The remainder of
these things I bequeath to you."
In twenty minutes he was at the Waldorf. He asked for and was allotted
one of the best rooms in the house, for which he paid the suspicious
clerk in advance. When at length he was left alone in his luxurious
apartments, it was still a few minutes before twelve. He drew the vial
from his pocket without fear, without hesitation. He placed his watch
upon the table before him. Then he sat down and wrote out the following
oath:
"I, Peter Donaldson, swear by all that I hold most sacred that I will
offer my life freely and without question for the protection of any human
being needing it during these next seven days in which I shall live."
He signed this in a bold scrawling hand. It was as simply and earnestly
expressed as he knew how to make it.
He uncorked the vial and poured the liquid into a glass without a quaver
of his hand. He mixed a little water with it and raised it to his lips.
There he paused, for once again he seemed to see the big, calm eyes of
the girl now staring at him as though in surprise. But this time he
smiled, and with a little lift of the glass towards her swallowed the
liquid at a gulp.