As was said, the records of the Refuge showed that one inmate still
lingered in the sheltering arms of that institution during a part of
the month of November. That one was Sandy Graff.
Sandy Graff did not strictly belong to the great peregrinating leisure
class for whose benefit the Refuge had been more especially founded and
built. Those were strangers to the town, and came and went apparently
without cause for coming and going. Little or nothing was known of
such--of their name, of their life, of whence they came or whither their
footsteps led. But with Sandy Graff it was different; he belonged
identically to the place, and all the town knew him, the sinister
tragedy of his history, and all the why and wherefore that led to his
becoming the poor miserable drunken outcast--the town "bummer"--that he
was.
There is something bitterly enough pathetic in the profound abasement of
the common tramp--frouzy, unkempt, dirty, forlorn; without ambition
further than to fill his belly with the cold leavings from decent folks'
tables; without other pride than to clothe his dirty body with the
cast-off rags and tatters of respectability; without further motive of
life than to roam hither and yon--idle, useless, homeless, aimless. In
all this there is indeed enough of the pathetic, but Sandy Graff in his
utter and complete abasement was even more deeply, tragically sunken
than they. For them there was still some sheltering ægis of secrecy to
conceal some substratum in the uttermost depths of personal depravity;
but for Sandy--all the world knew the story of his life, his struggle,
his fall; all the world could see upon his blotched and bloated face the
outer sign of his inner lusts; and what deeper humiliation can there be
than for all one's world to know how brutish and obscene one may be in
the bottom of one's heart? What deeper shame may any man suffer than to
have his neighbors read upon his blasted front the stamp and seal of
all, all his heart's lust, set there not only as a warning and a lesson,
not only a visible proof how deep below the level of savagery it is
possible for a God-enlightened man to sink, but also for
self-gratulation of those righteous ones that they are not fallen from
God's grace as that man has fallen?
One time East Haven had been Sandy Graff's home, and it was now the
centre of his wanderings, which never extended further than the
immediately neighboring towns. At times he would disappear from East
Haven for weeks, maybe months; then suddenly he would appear again,
pottering aimlessly, harmlessly, around the streets or byways;
wretched, foul, boozed, and sodden with vile rum, which he had procured
no one knew how or where. Maybe at such times of reappearance he would
be seen hanging around some store or street corner, maundering with some
one who had known him in the days of his prosperity, or maybe he would
be found loitering around the kitchen or out-house of some pitying
Bay-Streeter, who also had known him in the days of his dignity and
cleanliness, waiting with helpless patience for scraps of cold victuals
or the dregs of the coffee-pot, for no one drove him away or treated him
with unkindness.
Sandy Graff's father had been a cobbler in Upper Main Street, and he
himself had in time followed the same trade in the same little,
old-fashioned, dingy, shingled, hip-roofed house. In time he had married
a good, sound-hearted, respectable farmer's daughter from a neck of land
across the bay, known as Pig Island, and had settled down to what
promised to be a decent, prosperous life.
So far as any one could see, looking from the outside, his life offered
all that a reasonable man could ask for; but suddenly, within a year
after he was married, his feet slipped from the beaten level pathway of
respectability. He began taking to drink.
Why it was that the foul fiend should have leaped astride of his neck,
no man can exactly tell. More than likely it was inheritance, for his
grandfather, who had been a ship-captain--some said a slave-trader--had
died of _mania a potu_, and it is one of those inscrutable rulings of
Divine Providence that the innocent ones of the third and fourth
generation shall suffer because of the sins of their forebears, who have
raised more than one devil to grapple with them, their children, and
children's children. Anyhow, Sandy fell from grace, and within three
years' time had become a confirmed drunkard.
Fortunately no children were born to the couple. But it was one of the
most sad, pitiful sights in the world to see Sandy's patient, sad-eyed
wife leading him home from the tavern, tottering, reeling, helpless,
sodden. Pitiful indeed! Pitiful even from the outside; but if one could
only have looked through that outer husk of visible life, and have
beheld the inner workings of that lost soul--the struggles, the
wrestling with the foul grinning devil that sat astride of him--how much
more would that have been pitiful! And then, if one could have seen and
have realized as the roots from which arose those inner workings, the
hopes, the longings for a better life that filled his heart during the
intervals of sobriety, if one could have sensed but one pang of that
hell-thirst that foreran the mortal struggle that followed, as that
again foreran the inevitable fall into his kennel of lust, and then,
last and greatest, if those righteous neighbors of his who never sinned
and never fell could only have seen the wakening, the bitter agony of
remorse, the groaning horror of self-abasement that ended the
debauchery--Ah! that, indeed, was something to pity beyond man's power
of pitying.
If Sandy's wife had only berated and abused him, if she had even cried
or made a sign of her heart-break, maybe his pangs of remorse might not
have been so deadly bitter and cruel; but her steadfast and unrelaxing
patience--it was that that damned him more than all else to his hell of
remorse.
At last came the end. One day Sandy went to New Harbor City to buy
leather for cobbling, and there his devil, for no apparent reason at
all, leaped upon him and flung him. For a week he saw or knew nothing
but a whirling vision of the world seen through rum-crazy eyes; then at
last he awoke to find himself hatless, coatless, filthy, unshaved,
blear-eyed, palsied. Not a cent of money was left, and so that day and
night, in spite of the deadly nausea that beset him and the trembling
weakness that hung like a leaden weight upon every limb, he walked all
the thirty-eight miles home again to East Haven. He reached there about
five o'clock, and in the still gray of the early dawning. Only a few
people were stirring in the streets, and as he slunk along close to the
houses, those whom he met turned and looked after him. No one spoke to
him or stopped him, as might possibly have been done had he come home at
a later hour. Every shred and filament of his poor remorseful heart and
soul longed for home and the comfort that his wife alone could give him,
and yet at the last corner he stopped for a quaking moment or so in the
face of the terror of her unreproachful patience. Then he turned the
corner--
Not a sign of his house was to be seen--nothing but an empty, gaping
blackness where it had stood before. _It had been burned to the ground!_
Why is it that God's curse rests very often and most heavily upon the
misfortunate? Why is it that He should crush the reeds that are bruised
beneath His heel? Why is it that He should seem so often to choose the
broken heart to grind to powder?
Sandy's wife had been burned to death in the fire!
From that moment Sandy Graff was lost, utterly and entirely lost. God,
for His terrible purposes, had taken away the one last thread that bound
the drowning soul to anything of decency and cleanliness. Now his devil
and he no longer struggled together; they walked hand in hand. He was
without love, without hope, without one iota that might bring a flicker
of light into the midnight gloom of his despairing soul.
After the first dreadful blast of his sorrow and despair had burned
itself out, he disappeared, no one knew whither. A little over a month
passed, and then he suddenly appeared again, drunken, maudlin, tearful.
Again he disappeared, again he reappeared, a little deeper sunken, a
little more abased, and henceforth that was his life. He became a part
of the town, and everybody, from the oldest to the youngest, knew him
and his story. He injured no one, he offended no one, and he never
failed, somehow or somewhere, to find food to eat, lodging for his
head, and clothing to cover his nakedness. He had been among the very
first to enter the Refuge, and now, in November, he was the last one
left within its walls. He was the only one of the guests who returned,
and perhaps he would not have done so had not his aching restlessness
driven him back to suffer an echo of agony in the place where his
damnation had been inflicted upon him.
Between Colonel Singelsby upon the one side, the wise, the pure, the
honored servant of God, and Sandy Graff upon the other side, the vile,
the filthy, the ugly, the debased, there yawned a gulf as immeasurably
wide and deep as that which gaps between heaven and hell.