THE SUICIDARIUM
Tom Ratler had been almost a week at the Kohinoor, and as yet no
intimation had come to him that he was wanted in the vast gregarious
city, that grew to him more and more monstrous, and rapidly put
on the form and functions of a maelstrom; a maelstrom where life,
property, reputation, were engulfed, again momentarily to reappear,
as if the regurgitation of the whirlpool shot its human victims back
to the surface, to enjoy a new glimpse of respectability before
they finally were sucked under, forever carried away in underground
sluices to the merciful and impersonal ocean of oblivion.
Or else at other instants the city seemed to him a kaleidoscope with
its human occupants, its myriad fancies of design and architecture,
its dissipations, its gluttonies, even its piety and all the agencies
of its philanthropic life thrown round in a spinning circle,
confusedly glimmering and changing color, from which too arose an
accompanying roar of voices, not unfrequently punctured with cries of
pain, not always without passages of music.
Tom had made friends cautiously, from a sense of danger, and with
some agitated memories of what he had read in books. At first
the number of social advances to him were suspiciously numerous,
and he somewhat indiscriminately classed them as a concerted
conspiracy upon his pocket book. That indispensable support had
already considerably shrunken, vanquished into a sort of querulous
obedience to the gestures of necessity in the glittering Kohinoor
and to the no less unavoidable gestures of its dazzling occupants.
He later recognized that his own personality, with a good face and
the evidences of a trained and equipped body, had much to do with
these social advances. Among the friends or acquaintances whom
he, by a companionable sense of mere liking, had chosen as more
exactly intimates was a young man, who confided to him at a moment
of especial expansion, that he was connected, in a business way,
with the most extraordinary of the many features of the multivarious
city. It was nothing less than a _suicidarium_ of which Tom had heard
something from the Mayor’s secretary, and which he knew was one
of the forbidden extravagances in New York. The information given
to him by his young friend, was to the effect, that enough people
who wished to die for diverse reasons, connected with all sorts of
experiences could be found in the City to assure the maintenance
of this grewsome institution. The young man was himself engaged in
the work of making a peculiar heavy and lethal gas or vapor, which
was used in accomplishing the appalling end. Tom naturally recoiled
from the horrible idea of ending life, and could hardly believe the
story of his friend that these outfits variously designed, and of
varying degrees of elegance and size, had proven to be profitable
enterprises, because of the exorbitant prices paid for so abhorrent
and hideous a purpose. It required considerable persuasion on the
man’s part to bring Tom to an acceptance of an invitation to visit
the scene of this unnatural conduct.
He went with some misgivings, but he went at last actually fascinated
by the incredible weirdness of thought, so unspeakable and strange.
His friend—Edward Links, or Ned—took him by the subway far up to the
end of the Island of Manhattan, at the old Kingsbridge, where the
place, disguised as a shabby tenement on the outside, was situated.
And as Tom approached it, somewhat separated from the other houses
around it, and on the edge of the Spuyten Duyvil creek—offering,
as Ned explained, a convenient way for the conveyance of the dead
to their sepulture, or to the cremator—on the opposite bank—it
unmistakably presented the familiar aspects of a dilapidated and
almost abandoned tenement. It was a little too long, and some of its
dilapidation looked made up for the occasion; displaced clapboards,
perforations and disfiguring splashes of mud applied to its sides,
the forcibly wrenched doors, the broken windows, broken beyond any
possible reconcilement with their human uses, all gave it a rather
contrived appearance. This might not have been obtruded upon the
casual passer-by, though men and women were moving in and out of it,
but it was detected by Tom quite quickly, and he asked his friend
if people couldn’t see it was a “blind,” especially the trained and
unsympathetic optics of the police.
“Well yes and no! You see it’s this way. There is a good deal of
swagger in the business, and joining the majority this way means
a clean spill of a thousand, or anyhow five hundred spielers. Now
you wouldn’t believe it, but the applications are thicker than they
can accommodate, sometimes. It all depends. Epidemics, failures,
panics, love-matters, all work in spells, and when they happen to
come together why they just run over each other to get the quietus
they talk about in the playhouse. Not here. Oh no. The game is on the
Q. T., and the proposals and assignments come in at the office down
town. Well as I was saying it pays, and it pays the police to have a
kind of blind eye for the hock shop; that’s the name for the outfit
here, though it goes among the squad as The Oblivion, a pretty name,
but nothing to the point.
“I don’t so much care for the job, but it pays good, and I don’t have
to see things, but just switch on gas and wait. It’s risky. Every
mother’s son of us would be pinched and run to jail, if they nabbed
us. What helps the whole affair is a kind of talk that goes on now
in certain papers and journals about the emptiness of life, and a
funny fancy that they all come back and get better places. It isn’t
a bit bad how they do it. You’ll see, and I guess that some kinds
of men and women, who have just about squeezed all they know how to
get out of life, get a sort of faint heartedness and sickness, and
kinder fetch up here with a jerk, bunch it together, and let ’er go.
Horrible ain’t it? But it’s slick, slicker than a wet rat. You just
see. It’s a kind of a dream.”
They came to the piazza that extended along the front of the
slovenly domicile, its floor rent and gaping, and some of the
pillars supporting its roof weakened by decay, while the windows and
blinds broken, torn, and dismantled completed the rather overwrought
imitation of poverty and disorder. As Ned Links approached the place,
his companion noticed his nervous inspection of the neighborhood, and
when with a whistle he turned to the tenement, and stepped within one
of its open hallways, Tom saw to his astonishment a slight unevenness
in its floor move upward, exposing a trap door, and beneath it
descending steps. Tom felt indeed he had embarked upon an adventure
appropriately theatrical and strange, enough so to satisfy his
romantic fancies, and even the mingled odors reaching his nostrils
from the aperture, in which a kind of fragrance was not unnoticed,
added a peculiar zest of danger.
Ned caught the door of the opening and held it up as he motioned
to Tom to descend. Tom, with no misgivings of danger, but with a
slightly sickened heart obeyed, and observed a female figure rather
carelessly dressed, or less equivocally, rather immodestly undressed,
going before him. It was her hands that had lifted the door for their
entrance. The female did not turn her head but she held above it a
small glass lamp, which vouchsafed sufficient light to enable her
visitors to follow, and it was not too dim for Tom’s observation,
that the woman before him was comely and unabashed. Her occasional
backward glances were lighted by very becoming smiles, and Tom,
under their ravishment, failed to notice that they were treading
a very narrow and damp passage, and that it was leading downward
upon a rather steep grade. The opportunity for such observations
was suddenly checked by their reaching the end of the defile, and
stopping abruptly at a door. The door opened, and Tom, with Ned
upon his heels, and with some unmannerly pressure upon the giggling
maiden, whose dishevelment became more and more pronounced, shot into
a room or an enclosure before whose strange features at first dimly
descried, but in an instant later revealed in a dazzlement of light,
as the bacchante touched a button which sent an electric thrill into
thousands of little lamps, Tom fairly gasped in astonishment.
He seemed to have walked into a bower of shrubs, flowers, and
low trees, under whose protecting shade couches were carelessly
distributed, while everywhere a rosy light cast its softening
illumination, enchanting the eye with tinted fantasies as where he
saw a stream of water lisping among rocks, just perceptibly stained
with the pink sheen, or where a marble grotto, opening at the end of
a gravel walk, bordered with tulips, caught on its flaring white lips
the same delicate blush. Ned and the girl withdrew a little, while
they watched the bewildered stranger, turning with new wonder to the
points of this sunken garden, and Ned was not loth to intimate his
irrepressible satisfaction by facetious antics behind Tom’s back,
some of which could only be described as evidences of his personal
infatuation for his companion.
But Tom was not long intimidated by his strange surroundings, and
had already begun to walk forward over a yellow gravelled path that
wound through a sward magically gleaming with a light that appeared
to radiate from its innumerable blades of grass. He had hardly gone
four steps forward, when a blast of air struck him, and sent his hat
whirling off among the branches of a flowering almond tree, while his
discomfiture was hailed with hearty approval by the shouting Ned and
the indulgent and favoring maiden. Tom received another surprise. He
sprang to the flowering almond shrub that looked gracefully real,
and on whose crowded flowers the rosy light fell, imparting a fairy
glamour to its petals. His hat was caught in the slender limbs,
and Tom raised his hand to recover it, clasping the tree trunk for
that purpose. The tree trunk under the pressure of his body swayed
forward and broke, while Tom rolled over in the confusion of boughs,
and the tumbling counterfeit entrapped him in wire, strips of painted
linen, paper corollas, wax leaves, in short the paraphernalia of
a clever imitation, put up consummately, and only one part of the
wondrous mimicry about him. This last incident was greeted with
more boisterous shouts by Ned and the young woman, who not loth to
increase the stranger’s dismay pelted him with theatrical pebbles
picked up from the banks of the theatrical rivulet where indeed the
sibilant water belonged to nature, but where everything else was an
artful disguise of paper, plaster, and pigment.
Tom extricated himself and in great good humour rejoined his friends.
He realized now that he had entered a subterranean theatre which
as he gazed around him assumed the proportions of a beautiful
picture. Its deceptive nature disappeared in the sickly radiance,
while the artifice of invention had been exhausted in completing a
fascinating illusion. And the picture had been skillfully composed.
It represented a blending of features whose mixture, unified under
the strange purpose of arresting life, lulled the spirit, through the
senses, into a dreamy languor. By means of the hushed and crowded
visions thus summoned or inwardly created, the surrender of the will
was gently accomplished. The opiate of a luxurious feeling, swayed
ever so discretely into an anticipation of delights just dawning in
the Life to Come, dwelt with increasing pressure on the swooning
and dying clients of this strange hostelry. For the means and the
methods were ruthlessly explained to Tom by his new friend, and Tom
responding intuitively to the more poetic suggestions around him,
almost resented Ned’s commonplace coarseness, and rude matter-of-fact
indifference. To Ned the Suicidarium was a business episode, and the
awful ghastliness of its work, a detail of commercial manipulation,
so hardened had he become to its tragic consequences. To Tom’s
less sodden nature, while he shrank with healthy repulsion from its
meaning, yet as the scene grew into a congruous whole—artificial as
it was—the mystery of its work somehow reflected a wonderfulness upon
it all, as the exhalation of a perfume sometimes makes a poisoned air
salubrious.
The deep pit lay in the dolomitic limestone of the north end of
Manhattan Island, at a point not far removed from the splendid
encrustation of Carrara upon the Inwood Ridge. It had been deeply
dug, and its lateral extensions stretched far beyond the limits of
the sordid tenement that, like a rag upon a jewelled shawl, covered
its entrance from the upper streets. It combined the features of a
Japanese garden and a Grecian theatre, and it was enclosed by the
rising walls of stone, up which its numerous lamps sent streaks
and fluttering bands of light, lost at last somewhere above in a
canopying sky, wherein the implanted and clustering spots of light
simulated a waiting Heaven. The Japanese garden, with bridges,
dwarfed cedars, clambering wistarias, painted hedges, yellow walks,
and white buddhas perched upon iron trellises, was carefully
developed. Stone seats under overhanging peach and plum trees were
draped with a green gauze that invited the rueful guests to await
there their sepulchral summons, closing their eyes delightedly upon a
picture of shimmering loveliness. Further towards one side, the floor
of the apartment abruptly fell a few feet, and here was a marble
amphitheatre almost bare of vegetation, lustrous in its polished
whiteness, holding banks of gray stone seats, and descending to an
arena of colored pebbles, beyond which again a stage inclosed in
glass was seen, now empty and dark.
Tom and Ned, the latter encircling the lascive lass who leaned upon
him with an embracing arm about his neck, stood at the back of the
highest tier of seats, and here Ned poured out the torrent of his
explanations.
“You see Tom these quitters come here at night, and they have a
banquet just below there on those colored sands and they eat and
drink, about as they like, and a good many take the booze pretty
straight, and aren’t half more than all there when the gas hits ’em.
Others just sit around and listen to the music, and then the fans are
slowly turned on—that was a fan that blew your roof off—and the gas
flows in, and they get softened like, while the girls do the angel
act on that stage, there behind the winders,” and Ned took a more
convincing hold of the assenting lady, who presumably had something
to do with the “angel act,” though there was little in her generous
outlines that comported seriously with the conventional frail figures
of the disembodied; “the girls come in there, and swim around with
gauzy flippers on their shoulders, and there is a lot of singing,
and then colored lights, and the gas keeps on, and the people grow
delirious, just as though they had eaten hasheesh, and sing and talk
and dance, and then they fall down any where, and they ‘pass over’
just like that,” and Ned snapped his fingers, kissed the girl, and
jerked Tom to one side, and hurried him down a central corridor which
led through the stone steps of the amphitheatre, and all, just as a
heavy and sweetened bell slowly tolled the hour of six.
The girl ran before them and turned into the stage at a side door,
which she pushed open, while Ned with gestures of despair hurried Tom
away in another direction up a good copy of a ragged defile, leading
to the diminutive cliff that sheltered the ineffective grotto, from
which issued the rippling waters of the more effective brook. At the
top of this alpine ascent, Ned shoved Tom into a cavity which proved
to be a kind of trap door leading into a laboratory which was the
work shop of the chemist and where the lethal gas was made, whose
poisonous vapors inundated the spaces they had both passed through,
carrying its occupants away on the waves of a vision-making, sense
deadening ecstacy. For Ned explained as he moved between the big
bell-jars, and the stills, and the huge beakers, heaped to their
brims with green and yellow chemicals, that an obscure man had
dreamed long on the problem of manufacturing a gas that would be both
fatal to life when inhaled, and intoxicating to the senses. This
gloomy plodding man buried in his experiments and living upon almost
nothing, often an object of pity to his neighbors, who would force
him from his crucibles and furnaces to take nourishment, had at last
achieved the grand result. He had formed a new organic vapor which
had all these properties, and yielded a pleasant fragrance as well.
It soothed as a narcotic, it stimulated as an intoxicant, it killed
with unswerving certainty, and as its victims inhaled it it roused a
fierce hunger for its subtle influence. “And” concluded Ned, “this
hock-shop is not the only one in the city that uses it. It just cost
a million of dollars to get it from the old man. Funny. He dropped
his chemistry and lives like a lord on Fifth Avenue to-day. He ain’t
much to see, but he certainly has the boodle,” and the reflective
youth sighed with unconcealed envy.
He was loading the green and yellow chemicals from the beakers into
the stills and lighting the bunsen burners beneath them, which slowly
heating the mixture, evolved the colorless gas or vapor which was
then conducted into large chambers, where at first mixed with air
it entered the suicidarium, and was gradually increased in strength
by cutting off the air supply, until the unadulterated flood of its
flow filled the chamber, and the unfortunates who had become tired of
their lives, passed away, drowned in its invisible bath.
Tom asked Ned if the suicidarium was about to be used and Ned,
absorbed in his task, nodded his head affirmatively, and pointing
to a little recess at the end of the narrow and lengthened room, at
length spoke; “Yes it’s off to-night. You can see the whole shindig.
You won’t forget it in a hurry either. Come in back here, have a
snack, and then you just squeeze up in that corner, and flatten your
nose on the window pane and the whole show is yours.”
Tom shuddered at the idea of this abhorrent spectacle, but he felt
too the fascination of the unique experience, and at the moment
nothing would have induced him to relinquish the opportunity.
The snack proved to be a very substantial meal of steak, potatoes,
beer and pie, and when Tom and Ned had done full justice to it under
the repeated admonitions of the latter, that they would be there some
time, and Tom might need a little extra strength for the ordeal, they
both returned to the laboratory, where now one additional helper had
taken his place, and Tom was put at the small aperture covered with
glass, from which at a most advantageous height he commanded the
whole Garden of Death.
It was now about eight o’clock, just the time in the upper sun-lit
world, when, as Tom thought, the twilight was settling down over the
city, and the blaze of the electric arcs were spanning the streets,
and the crowds were pressing in eager haste to enjoy the dissipations
of the night, while his hotel, the magnificent Kohinoor, rose
towering on the sky like a colossal coruscation. As these reminders
chased through his mind he noticed the door at which a few hours ago
Ned and himself had entered the place, open, and a group of men and
women—the latter young and pleasing—came in. The men set about the
work of examining the garden, adjusting here and there disturbed
spots, repairing breaks, smoothing the scarfs over the benches,
testing the lights, opening and shutting the fan doors, until Tom
saw them come to the broken almond tree of his amusing surprise.
Here there was an obvious astonishment and disgust, and then their
movements quickened, and bringing in new material and working with
zeal, the reorganized almond tree again swayed life-like before the
breeze of the fan, and its pink petals again fell softly on the green
turf, or floated upon the ludicrous little brook. Somehow now too a
change in relation to the whole trick came over Tom’s mind, and the
prettiness of the scene changed into something hollow and horrible,
so that he almost was inclined to leave his place and escape if
he could. The confined and excavated garden which at first, under
the shock of discovery, had filled him with a childish delight,
and had actually, so adroitly were its characteristic proportions
arranged, given him an impression of size, now became shrunken,
almost contemptible in the light of its unnatural uses. It was a
scintillating painted harlequinade of deceits, a little theatre
of diseased emotions, in which the morbid emaciated victims of
self-inflicted despair sought a foolish and wicked relief.
He felt like rushing away, and moved back to ask Ned how he might get
out of the horrible hole. But Ned was there at his side. He opened a
window and told Tom to look out:
“The gas doesn’t go in yet. First they have a banquet. You can see
and hear them from here. Then when they have got through, the dances
of the angels begin on that stage, behind the glasses, and then the
gas creeps in; they get intoxicated, and slowly as it grows denser
and thicker they faint and die. They’re coming in now.”
Tom leaned out of the little casement, and as the light glowed again
in full power over the garden, from the pink shades, while all the
glinting lights within the garden shone, he noticed about ten people
passing down the gravel walk among the counterfeit trees and plants
towards the petty amphitheatre. They went down the steps of its
central corridor, and sat on the benches waiting for the banquet. A
table had been placed upon the colored pebbles, in the space before
the stage, and it was rapidly being covered with cold meats, fruits,
and wines. The decorations and service partook of the theatrical
bravado of the rest of the place. There were silver cornucopias,
spilling grapes, oranges, figs, and nuts; silver urns filled with
wine, silver goblets, platters carrying cold meats, savory pickles,
olives, cheeses, jellies and pastes and small tureens of cordials.
White bread was heaped upon silver bowls and flowers were thrown over
everything, covering even the floor upon which the table stood. The
chairs were placed, and the ten strange creatures, who thus prepared
their own doom, took them in silence. Tom could have almost screamed
in his desperation of horror, but he simply clutched Ned, and the two
young men, to whom life seemed so good and desirable, watched the
little group in a stupor of attention. There were indeed just ten.
Tom noted them very distinctly. First at one end of the table sat
a withered sickly old man who was helped to this place by a young
woman, on whose face Tom thought he detected a choreal twitching,
and a moody stare that betokened madness; next to this young woman
sat two masculine wrecks—both men of middle age, their anaemic faces
pallid beneath the lights, and their heads turning bald, and their
listless hands moving fitfully from their faces to their legs, as
they slapped and rubbed the latter, and grimacing between themselves
provoked each other to a dreary sort of smiling, by jokes that failed
to reach the two young men.
Beyond this precious pair who seemed hardly to belong to the grim
company, was a heavy browed, thick haired young man, who kept his
eyes down, his head resting on his hands, and who seemed buried
in his own somber thoughts. He showed a handsome face to his two
attentive watchers, at such times as he lifted his eyes from the
table and looked backward over the amphitheatre and the artificial
garden. Then he seemed to smile, and he turned to his neighbor at
the head of the table, opposite the sickly old man, and spoke, which
caused his acquaintance to rise, and scan the spot with a very
evident interest. This last guest at the feast was a shorter man with
a round head, almost deprived of hair except such persistent wisps
as remained over his ears, or formed a fringe above the nape of his
neck. He had a curiously soured and grim face, and he squinted and
seemed to feel sudden pains in his chest, if the pressure of that
part of his body with both hands might be interpreted as a confession
of suffering. On the opposite side of the table four more figures
completed the assemblage. Of these one was a woman who seemed
ludicrously misplaced in such a group. She was a fat, not uncomely
person, that under less sinister auspices would have been set down by
most people for a prosperous and happy mother of a family, typically
bourgeoise in looks, typically commonplace, contented and impersonal.
Yet there she was, and Tom shuddered to think of it. Next to her
was a rather stout hard faced man who noticed no one but the little
glum man at the head of the table and with whom he was evidently
exchanging remarks. The glum man was short, the hard faced man tall.
The two remaining members of this suicidal gathering were a couple
of young people apparently in love with each other, a young man and
a young woman, and whose desires to leave a world already beginning
to grant them felicity struck Tom as almost more intolerably shocking
than anything else in the dreadful picture.
Some of the young women who later would present their celestial
evolutions on the stage to these tired souls, simulating, Tom knew
not what, of the future states of spirits, were now engaged—arrayed
as nymphs and who did not hesitate to accept the kisses of the men
they plied with wines—in serving the table. The drinking was more
conspicuous than the eating, and some—the young woman and the heavy
browed young man—abstained from both. But the rest were insatiable,
and even as he felt the chill of repulsion over the approaching
tragedy Tom could not repress a shifting smile as he saw the fat
comely woman, the glum philosopher and the hard faced hypochondriac
eat and drink with a gluttonous avidity, that suggested the grotesque
fancy in their minds of feeding well for a long fast. At length
the spirits of the company brightened, and songs and loud talking
betokened their animated condition. Even the sickly old man waved his
arms and his falsetto ululations sounded a forlorn mockery of gayety.
The lovers embraced each other with rapturous excitement, the glum
man stood up and orated, and his broken adjurations were interrupted
by the hard faced man, who smote the table with his fists, and pushed
away the decanters, the goblets, and the vessels near him, in a vast
effort to expand some notion of science or philosophy. The fat woman
sighed, and continued to drink and the two anaemics alternately fell
upon each other’s necks, or struggled to catch the flitting coryphaei
as they passed about the table, adding new delicacies, or filling the
empty wine jars. Only the twitching young woman, and the deep browed
youth maintained any decorum, and it was the latter who at last rose,
and in a deep musical voice commanded silence. Whether he was known,
or whether something stirred the bacchanalian rout to think a moment,
before they plunged into the dark uncertainly of Death, or whether
it was the relapse of satiety and sleepiness, that caused it, the
company became still, and only the voice of the speaker, sounding
with a fullness, that gave to every word that escaped his lips, a
peculiar resonance, was heard.
[Illustration: “PAIN, PAIN, PAIN; NOTHING BUT PAIN.”
_Page 79._]
“My friends,” he began “do you realize that to-night we shall be
together for the last time in this world, and do you care to go out
of it without one word to your companions, on the same journey,
telling them why you leave the world at all in this suicidal way?
With your permission let me at least tell you why I have come here,
what motive stronger than life, places me here with you at this
wretched mockery of a banquet, waiting for the death gas which we
have heard kills while it intoxicates;” the voice became compellingly
sweet and urgent, and the crew before him had turned their eyes up to
his face, apparently really listening with interest.
The speaker continued: “To me at one time nothing seemed so shocking
as death, nothing so unnatural, so hideous. To me this minute nothing
seems more welcome. I hoped in success, in love, to win the bright
things of the earth, as the bright things of the earth go, and I
missed all. Then I turned to friendship, and my friends wounded and
deserted me. I fled to religion, no voice answered my prayers, the
eternal blankness of silence, of disappointment; and nightly around
my couch rose only the spectres of want and desire, unsatisfied
and unappeasable. The sky was as hard as brass, the earth an iron
floor, the air around me without sound, I myself a puzzle or better,
I think, a bubble. I could not endure the stupid drag of monotony,
the abject meanness of life, its tread-mill duties, its sickening
flatness, its vulgarity. I fainted at the thought of a life led in
these tiresome and dusty thoroughfares of commonness, with food
wrenched from the toil of the repeating days; a chain of identical
dumbness from the beginning of the year to the end of it, and then on
and on without alleviation, without interest, without meaning. I end
it, and I end it here to-night.”
He sat down. His example moved the rest, and one by one as far as
they were able or understood their purpose they told their separate
stories. The sickly old man at one end of the table staggered to his
feet, and by dint of support from the waiters, and incessant catching
at the cloth of the table, managed to remain upright while he half
screamed what he had to say: “Yes I want to go too. It’s all pain,
all pain to me; aches all over me; red hot irons go through me; my
feet are blazing with sores; my sides are racked with misery. I can’t
walk; I can’t breathe; I can’t think. Pain, pain, pain; nothing but
pain.” And he sank down doubled up, and almost dropped to the ground
with a shriek.
The glum short man jumped to his feet, and stared around him with
ominous scowls, that set the two anaemics off, roaring with drunken
laughter. But he was not disconcerted; no one so tipsy could have
been. He waved his hands, and then folded them, and stiffly leaning
over the table, began: “I am a philosopher;” this, brought out with
an unmistakable hiccough, gave immense amusement to the two wrecks.
He continued: “I was educated to be a philosopher,” more laughter
“and I know all there is to know about philosophy; but it’s a farce,
it’s a damn lie, the whole of it,” a whack on the table, and a shout
from the wrecks, “philosophy is a fraud, it tells nothing, it’s a
patch work of guesses. I want to know, and I _am_ going to know,
and the only way to know is to go and see. See! See! See!” and the
ruffled philosopher fell over on the loving couple beside him, and,
hotly rejected by the boy, gathered himself together, and stumbled
outward to the gray benches of the amphitheatre.
The turn came next to the hard faced man, who was less enfeebled
by his potations, being in that respect a man of some endurance;
he proclaimed that he was a scientific man, an explorer, an
experimentalist, that he was there in that capacity then, and that
he had a commission to find out the fact of another life; “For,” he
went on, “I am convinced that there is a conservation of forces in
the living matter of the world, just as there is in its energy, and
that if the energy of life is not wearing down, we must come back to
it to keep up the store of life force. That’s clear, and the chances
are that when a man or a woman find out they’re not well placed, the
only way to possibly improve, is to go back to the primal energy, and
be projected again in some other form or place, on this earth, or
anywhere else, where conditions are more acceptable. I have seen that
for a long time, and I am permitted now to give it a demonstration.
When I come back I announce it, and I shall be the one man—the one
man” he was shouting vociferously, “the one man who has carried an
experiment outside of this earth, and made a research in the world
beyond the grave.”
His excitement communicated itself to the group, and even the heavy
browed youth and the twitching woman accorded him a serious attention.
“That’s so, that’s so;” reiterated the anaemics, who roused
themselves from a sort of connubial collapse, and standing, sang in
quavering trebles a remnant of some song belonging to their most
convivial days on the earth.
The effort to sing taxed the nerves and the strength of the two
gilded ones, and their raucous wavering tones threw a vulgar
expression into the affair which had won a weird or mournful or
grotesque interest from the other participants. This contribution
made it all wearisomely coarse. Dreadful as its intention was,
somehow it took on to Tom a theatrical imbecility as if he were
looking at the acting of puppets, who were going through some
grewsome mimicry of a bad play. He had hardly thought so, when the
woman with the twitching face arose and spoke in a soft voice just
audible to Tom, for she turned round facing the cage where Tom and
Ned were concealed, and looked at the painted picture behind her.
“You have all known trouble or sadness, but have any of you been told
to die? I have. My father, dead these seven years, came to me last
week, and told me he wanted me. He came with the big eyes I knew
he had, and he came in my sleep, in a dream, and woke me, and as I
woke I saw him standing at the foot of my bed, and he said, ‘Come!
Come! You will be happier. The Other Side is a blissful sleep a long
never-ending joy. Leave the world _any way_, but COME!’” She stepped
forward and moved up the corridor of the amphitheatre into the garden
and sat wearily down, on one of the benches not far from the very
spot where Tom had lost his hat up the illusive almond bush.
Then there was silence, when the sickly old man poked the comely
fat woman and she struggled to her feet, and said: “Vell, I go to
my childer. Dot’s all.” The young couple that Tom watched with a
frightful feeling that here was some mistake, and that he ought to
stop it, were expected to finish this extemporaneous confession and
the others stared at them questioningly.
The man stood up and became instantly dramatic. Tom riveted his
eyes on him, and could scarcely believe his ears. He waved his
arms in gestures, turned around to the company with ease and
self-satisfaction, declaimed, postured, and ran through a cheap
rhodomontade about the emptiness of life, the folly of prolonging
the fight, the ease of dying under the new helps of science, and
the necessity of bringing the world to a standstill by leaving it.
His wife nodded her head with concurrence to all this astonishing
rhapsody. And then while the attendants waited impatiently to begin
the final act of this fantastic drama the egotist recited the Plaint
of the Captive; it was his own title.
The insipid and hollow verses—and Ned whispered to Tom that they
were taken out of a circular printed by the management of the
Suicidarium—were no sooner over, than the attendants rushed in,
seized the table, and removed it, preparatory to the final stage
of the sinister business. The occupants of the table walked away,
most of them remaining together in the amphitheatre, the heavy
browed youth and the spirit-visited woman entering the garden above
it alone. Then the lamps paled, music and singing apparently from
the side, from a concealed organ began to softly sweep through the
dimming spot, and as Ned nudged Tom in their eerie he muttered, “Pull
that window, seal it up, the gas comes now,” and disappeared.
Despite the horror of his feelings Tom moved even closer to the
little pane peering through to see more plainly. Suddenly the glass
fronted stage glowed, and then grew startlingly bright with a purple
radiance, and Tom discerned a shifting slowly emerging swarm of
ballet girls, with gauzy wings oscillating and hovering from top
to bottom of the scene. Among them, he felt quite certain, were a
number of dolls or puppets worked in some way into a semblance of
soaring angels. The picture made, with the lights thrown upon it, a
curious illusion. The motion soft, sinuous, and constant, blended
with the music as, in a way, its material or physical embodiment.
The swaying bodies, the winding lines, the ordered movements forward
and back, the clustering wings, brought into juxtaposition in
shimmering canopies, the dissolving figures, sudden crushes to the
front of the stage, and then precipitate flights in retreat, single
graceful forms gliding in and out, all through the set phrases of a
formal evolution yielded an ocular impression, that harmonized with
the swelling and pulsating melodies and harmonies. This, _as the
exhilarating gas began to fill the garden_, acted as a delicate and
irresistible narcotic, bringing on the drowsy sleep, the haunted
sense of coming bliss, the wild delirious, forecasts of eventful
happenings, a delectation and revelry of dreams.
Tom watched intently. He could see the people moving, jumping to
their feet, extending their arms, then relaxing and apparently
falling down; he thought he heard cries and songs, certainly he saw
the heavy browed young man, skipping absurdly along one of the gravel
paths, while the woman near him flung her arms about in a strange
excitement, and then rolled off, as if lifeless, in the little brook,
whose petty current was dammed thereby, and the water, rising, flowed
over the pasteboard scene, and trickled away to the amphitheatre.
Tom’s eyes were not the only ones that observed this accident, for
the water soon ceased to run, its very prosaic source in a croton
pipe being at some unseen point intercepted.
The others on the amphitheatre were not all so easily observed,
but it developed that the scientist—he who went to prove his
commission—and the philosopher—he who went to “_See_”—had embraced
each other and fallen, while the sickly old man sat in the comely
German woman’s lap, and the young couple had remained seated and in
each other’s arms. The lights faded, the gas rushed in with such
overpowering force that it penetrated the secret cell where Tom
stood, and the last flickering pulses of life in the suicides were
brought to a standstill, and the awful act was closed.
Ned told Tom that the gas would remain in the garden for an hour or
so more. Then the fans were turned on for the rest of the night, so
as to thoroughly ventilate the place. Towards morning the bodies were
taken away, across the creek, and there delivered to friends—if such
had been designated—or cremated or buried according to the direction
received beforehand by the suicidarium.
Tom and Ned got back to the upper earth by means of a ladder
stretched upward through a narrow shaft. They emerged not far from
the Kingsbridge road, and the first flutter of the balmy June air
upon their cheeks, the fresh floating odors of the flowers wafted
from the gardens of Carrara, the paling stars seen vaguely through
that polarized and mystic light that shone from the city, the glad
couples laughing with the gayety of the life that surged through all
things, the glowing lamps on the shaded slopes of Fort George, the
occasional sliding noiseless splendor of an illuminated automobile—at
that remote period the automobile becomes a spectacle of garlanded
electric lights—with the terraced mansions beyond the river on the
east, the smell of the earth, the swishing rattle of the subway
trains over their viaduct, all the many moods and signs of glorious
vitality, of aspiring and incessant joy, made Tom’s heart leap with
thankfulness.
The remembrance of the hidden hollow pageant he had just witnessed,
the distorted mental emotionalism and effrontery of its victims,
their gluttony, their last convulsions, and the sombre misery of the
picture of the dead bodies, distributed over the pink garden, and
along the gray benches of the white amphitheatre, in that recess of
abominations, nauseated him. He felt a secret distrust and repulsion
for his companion; he was silent, and while Ned, with eager garrulity
attempted to allay and avert what he felt was a rising antipathy, Tom
seemed sullen and brooding, hurrying on with ravenous strides, as if
running from a pestilence.
He did indeed hear Ned’s communications, and they were startling
enough to his corporeal vision yet hunting for the blossoms of
existence, and fully satisfied with the radiant panorama around
him. Ned told him of the growing apathy of men to the duties and
burdens of life, the rapid spread of a relentless scorn for
the promises of religion, and the propaganda of a remorseless
flouting cynicism for the realities of society. He made it very
clear that the impulses to suicide were increasing, and that over
the city the concealed establishments such as Tom had seen were
spreading; that it was commonly believed that the escape from
pain, sickness, poverty—although in such cases as they had just
witnessed the expenses were heavy—was legitimately sought in a
violent death; that the marvellous properties of the gas used
in these suicidariums—conveying to those inhaling it a sensuous
delirium, accompanied, it was said, by an exaltation strange and
transporting—had made suicide even a desirable indulgence. Things had
gone so far as that the difficulties of the labor markets had been
viewed as offering to labor the advantageous opportunity of settling
them by wholesale withdrawals, or at least a selected and progressive
system of immolation, by which the supply of workers might be kept
exactly regulated to their demand, so that good or extreme wages
might always be paid.
Tom listened to these revelations with an appalled attention,
though he still kept his mouth shut, and still covered the ground
with violent and angry steps. They had turned from the Kingsbridge
road eastward over Dyckman Street, and had ascended the Fort George
Hill, whence the whole expanse of Carrara was seen palpitating in
the velvet night with a dreamy phosphorescence, that hung over it
like an arching tapestry pendent from the electrified air above it.
Tom turned back and gazed at it with renewed wonder. It seemed so
incredible. He turned to Ned and spoke for the first time. “Where
does the electricity come from that fills that air?”
Ned scarcely moved his head to notice the marvellous glory of it, and
answered, “That comes from the pits in the earth.”
“Pits?” ejaculated Tom. “Yes, pits,” retorted his pleased companion,
“pits bored down in the earth for thousands of feet They draw on the
storage batteries of the earth for that, as I understand it. But I
can’t explain it to you.”
Tom rumimated for a time. He ran back over those memories of his
which were associated with the reading of the wonders of the wizards
of the past—Edison, Marconi, Tesla, Ramsay, Lord Kelvin, Perkins—and
later names, whose achievements had so often led him on to the
small hours of the night, reading in his little room at home, the
books, magazines, and papers, that came to his hand, and which had
contributed to make him so zestful to reach the outer world of
designs and marvels. There was silence between the two men while
their footsteps rang out on the pavements, and they approached the
dazzling arch of the Washington Bridge. Instinctively they turned
by one impulse, to the left and walked out upon the steel span from
which the city beyond and below them, and the defile of the Harlem
river, formed together a magical and almost bewildering picture.
They leaned over the railing at the side, and then Tom spoke:
“Perhaps it’s this way, I mean those pits. There is electricity
in the earth, great currents of it, and lesser streams, and it
disappears by becoming neutralized with itself, as it were. Now if
insulated wires or rods could be sunk for great depths, and these
rods and wires spread out in the earth in finer threads, these fine
threads would pick up a good many small unneutralized currents of
electricity, and they would run together like little streams of
water, and they would rise on the insulated rods just as accumulating
water rises in a hole or well, when it runs in it. That was done with
the electricity of the air. The currents run up to the receivers, and
when these are over-charged, they play out in the air. It seems queer
that nobody is hurt, or that there are not lightning flashes instead
of the quiet glow!”
Ravishingly strange was the scene before them from the bridge. The
walls of the Harlem River cañon were surmounted with lofty houses,
the edge of the stream was defined with an unbroken path of light,
the houses shone with interior lamps, the streets around them were
ablaze, and the nebulous crown of light added its ghostly glare. The
shadows were intense, and the picture was not unlike some deeply
bitten etching, with monstrous opacities in it, skillfully curtained
in high lights, that lent it an unearthly exaggeration.
The two young men stopped a long time, buried each in his own
thoughts, which with Ned had probably slight reference to lofty
feelings, but which with Tom, by the indefinable but very real
repulsion he experienced for the part he had played at the
suicidarium, moved pleasantly forward into deeper hopes for his
coming life and sterner resolves to make it worth living.
Finally Ned spoke: “Well, it’s getting late and perhaps we’d both be
the better for a good sleep.”
“True enough,” answered Tom, “I’m ready,” and they crossed to the
subway on Amsterdam Avenue as to-day, and quickly found themselves
at the resplendent porticoes of the Pillar of Light. Tom hastened to
his delightful little eerie, and found a letter pushed under his door
sill. He tore it open and a card dropped out. It read:
BENTON BRIGGS
Secretary to the Mayor, City Hall.
(and scribbled along the bottom) “Come to the Mayor’s Office
to-morrow at 11 A.M.” Tom felt in his bones that it meant occupation
for him, and his heart leaped with thankfulness. He would deserve it,
indeed he would, and so he fell asleep.