TRAGEDY
Upon returning to New York, I found that my imagination hadn’t pictured
the situation any worse than I found it. Practically everything I
possessed had been swept away.
When I went to California I had enough put away to have kept me
comfortably the remainder of my life and to insure the future of all
who were near and dear to me. I came back to find myself worse than
beggared, with only my newspaper salary left and uncertainty as to how
long that might last if my tangled financial condition became known.
There were many debts and but little to pay them with and I realized
that as soon as it became known that I was back in town there would be
a swarm of hungry creditors at my heels. I sold my yacht and automobile
and used the proceeds in settling the most pressing obligations.
Worst of all was that I didn’t have the courage to take anyone into my
confidence. I believed that if it became known to others that I was
in financial difficulties my newspaper position would be jeopardized
and my creditors would get me by the throat and prevent me from doing
anything to rehabilitate myself. My only chance of salvation, I
reasoned, was to hold creditors in check as long as possible and devote
all of my energies to building up anew.
Isn’t it the perversity of fate how lucky one sometimes is when he
least needs it and how unlucky when he is face to face with disaster?
There had been many times in recent years when speculative ventures
yielded astonishing result with almost no effort or wisdom on my part,
but now that I had reached the brink of a precipice and knew that it
would take but a little push to send me over, luck forsook me. No
matter how I speculated or how sure seemed the tips given to me by my
friends, I almost invariably was on the wrong side. If I bought stocks,
they went down; if I sold, they went up. The more I sought to lift
myself from the mire, the more hopelessly involved I became.
Time was rapidly nearing when I could no longer keep my secret. It
wasn’t debt alone that tormented me by day and night. I perhaps
could have survived that by arranging with creditors to pay them in
instalments from my newspaper earnings, but I was menaced by something
far worse, for unless I could raise a substantial sum within a period
of time that was swiftly coming to an end, there would be dishonor and
inevitable arrest and imprisonment. It was this impending ignominy
that upset my mental balance and caused me to do the crazy things that
followed.
I mentioned in the preceding chapter that at the time I was hurried
away to California I sought to safeguard the account with my brokers by
depositing with them all of the securities I possessed, together with
securities that were not mine, but of which I was legal custodian. The
latter represented an investment of eight thousand dollars I had made
in behalf of a minor relative as guardian. There was no one to question
or criticize what I did with these bonds so long as I produced them
in court when called upon to make final settlement of my trusteeship.
A bonding company must make good if I defaulted. The hideous specter
that was ever before me was whether I would be able to replace the lost
bonds.
Several times I was almost within reach of them, but each time the
market turned against me and as often I would be brought to the verge
of prostration by despair. I grew disheartened over repeated failure.
Fear took possession of me and fairly choked me into submission.
Then came days and nights of abject terror. The ring of my telephone
would often startle me so that my heart would almost stop beating and
the mere sight of a policeman in the street would cause me to tremble
and hasten my pace and perhaps dodge around a corner or into some
hallway. Often when I went to the _World_ office in the early
morning I felt certain that the policeman near the entrance was waiting
for me with a warrant, and my heart would thump wildly against my ribs
until I had passed him and was at my desk. If a card of some unknown
caller was brought to me in the office, I have caught myself asking if
it were a policeman. I got so I couldn’t sleep.
All I could think of was what would surely happen to me when the day
for settlement came and I couldn’t produce the bonds. I couldn’t take
refuge in the plea that I had intended no wrong, that I hadn’t the
least intention of converting the bonds to my own use or of speculating
with them. The law, I knew, would take into account what I had actually
done, not what my intentions were, so in reality I would be adjudged
as guilty as if I had actually stolen the bonds and squandered them or
gambled them away.
I recall going to a movie and seeing a picture of a lad who stole the
pennies from his sister’s toy savings bank and spent them for candy
and apples. After he had eaten the candy all of the people in the
street were suddenly transformed into policemen and he fled from them
in terror, but they surrounded him on all sides and beat him down with
their clubs. It turned out to be a dream, but I likened my own state
of mind to that of the conscience-stricken boy who robbed his sister’s
bank, and I realized more than I ever had before that “conscience makes
cowards of us all.”
The day I long had dreaded was finally at hand and I didn’t have the
bonds. I staved off disaster for a brief respite by sending a telegram
that I was detained by business, thus obtaining an extension. I knew
that I was at the end of my rope and rather than suffer disgrace and
imprisonment, I resolved to do the only thing that was left me. It was
cowardly, but all the courage I ever had was gone and I felt myself
crushed and beaten.
Suicide, the last resort of a moral coward, I decided was preferable
to never-ending disgrace, so I set about preparing for it. Police
Commissioner Waldo was my friend and I telephoned to him for a
revolver. Winnie Sheehan, his secretary, replied that if I would call
at the commissioner’s office there would be a weapon waiting for me.
I got it within an hour, a wicked looking thing, and found it fully
loaded. A police officer taught me how to use it.
That evening I destroyed all of my personal papers at the office
and left a note to the effect that I was unexpectedly called out of
town and might be absent for several days. At midnight I left for
Washington, accompanied by my wife, who knew nothing of my difficulties
or of what had been in my mind ever since our return from Colorado.
I told her that I was going to Washington on business and she gladly
consented to accompany me.
On the train that night I tore up my bank books and all private papers
that were in my pockets. I never would see New York again, for I was
going away to die, to die like a coward and leave her to bear all the
poverty and disgrace that was sure to follow, leave her in this way
after a lifetime of affectionate devotion. I cried all night, sickened
with the thought of it.
I caught a cold in the sleeper and the next day I was down with
the grippe. The fever lasted for two weeks and all that time I was
planning self-destruction. The first day I was able to get about I
went to the cemetery where my mother was buried and bought the plot
adjoining hers, arranging at the same time to have it resodded and
beautified with plants and shrubs.
Up to this time I thought only of putting an end to myself. My wife, I
supposed, would be cared for by my relatives. I asked them about it and
the reply was so evasive and unassuring that my plans were completely
upset. The problem now confronting me was what was to become of her.
She was so fragile and delicate it was impossible that she could ever
do for herself. She had no relatives to turn to. She had scores of
loving friends but there were none to give her more than temporary
shelter when I abandoned her.
I went away into the woods for a day and sat silently thinking. When
I returned I had made up my mind to do the most dreadful deed that my
distorted brain could conceive. It was hideous, but there was no other
way.
The following morning I went to a tombstone maker and selected a large
block of granite, giving directions to have my name and my wife’s name
carved on it and to have the stone immediately set up on my cemetery
plot. I wanted to see that everything was done as I planned, and I
arranged to go to the cemetery as soon as the tombstone maker should
notify me that his work was completed.
The interval was spent in pleasure seeking. I took my wife and my
relatives for long automobile rides in the daytime and to the theaters
in the evenings and we celebrated the anniversary of our wedding with a
sumptuous dinner at the New Willard. The day after that dinner was to
be our last day on earth. Could anything be more horrible?
The morning of that last day I was with Harry Dunlop, at that time
Washington correspondent of the _World_. I had gone to his office
to write farewell letters. When I finished my task he asked me to
accompany him to the White House, where President Wilson was to receive
all of the correspondents in a body and talk to them of the threatening
situation along the Mexican border.
I was reluctant to go but finally yielded. When we were assembled in
the President’s office, some two hundred or more, Joe Tumulty slipped
around to my side and asked me to linger after the others had been
dismissed and be presented to Mr. Wilson. I couldn’t get out of it. One
may imagine the thoughts that were flashing through my mind while for
fifteen minutes I stood with the President and chatted with him about
matters of national importance. I felt grateful that he could not read
my thoughts or know that the hand he clasped so cordially would soon
press the trigger of the revolver that was concealed in my pocket.
As I was leaving the White House, a secret service agent informed me
that Chief Flynn had telephoned that he would like me to come to his
office. I had known Flynn when he was a deputy police commissioner in
New York and we were friends. I called in response to his invitation
and he took me over to the New Willard to luncheon. He didn’t suspect
what was in my mind any more than President Wilson had, but when I left
him I went to a writing table in the hotel and wrote him a brief note
of explanation, to be delivered with the others I had written, after my
body should be found.
That night the strangest, most inexplicable phenomenon prevented me
from doing the dreadful deed I had planned.
We all went to the theater in the evening to see Ziegfeld’s Follies and
it was nearly midnight when we retired. My wife and I were occupying
the room that had been my mother’s and were sleeping in the bed in
which she died. After I had turned out the lights I hid my revolver
beneath my pillow and then lay still for a long time, trembling with
horror and dreading the monstrous thing I had to do.
At last the deep breathing of that dear little woman by my side told me
that she was fast asleep. I had waited for that time to come that she
might never know.
I drew the revolver from under the pillow and as I raised myself on my
elbow I saw something that stopped me. It was my dead mother.
She stood in the room but a few feet from the bed, not the
white-haired old woman, wasted with disease, that I had come to see a
few days before she died, but the beautiful mother I had idolized when
I was a child. She looked at me with the same sweet smile and gently
shook her head, just as she had done in childhood days when reproving
me for something I shouldn’t have done. Then she faded away.
I have thought of it often since and have wondered if it really was
my mother’s spirit I saw, or if my fevered brain imagined it. I know
it all seemed very real at the time and that what I saw or imagined I
saw caused me to thrust the revolver under the mattress and to take my
sleeping wife in my arms and kiss her, at the same time breathing a
silent prayer of gratitude that she was still alive.
In the morning I received a telegram, peremptorily demanding that I
appear in court without further delay and render a final accounting of
my trusteeship. It was accompanied by a threat to forfeit the bond. I
knew I could no longer delay the execution of what I had determined to
do, but after what had happened the night before I resolved not to do
it in our family house.
That evening my wife and I sailed down the Potomac and the next morning
we were at Old Point Comfort. We found the Chamberlain so crowded that
we were unable to secure more than one small bedroom. I declined the
poor accommodations offered me and the next train carried us on to
Richmond.
If my wife thought I acted strangely she probably attributed it to the
weakened condition the grippe had left me in. I know that she never
suspected that I was in trouble and more than half-crazed. She was
accustomed to leaving everything to me and to believing that what I
did was always the best thing to do, and I had always trained myself
to mask my thoughts and to present an untroubled exterior, no matter
how great my worries might be. It is the worst thing a husband can do
and brutally unfair to the wife, but I had always gone on the principle
that the husband should bear all the burdens and that he owed it to his
wife to share with her only his joys and pleasures.
What blind idiots some of us are.
There was a delightful suite of rooms awaiting us when we arrived
in Richmond, a fitting place for the gruesome tragedy that was so
imminent, and I resolved that it should be done that night.
We spent an enjoyable afternoon, or at least my wife did, driving about
the historic city, visiting the site where Libby Prison had stood and
in which her brother had been a prisoner of war, and on out to the
historic battlefields.
After dinner I went alone to write a brief letter of directions to
the hotel people and the coroner. When I rejoined my wife I found her
chatting vivaciously with an old friend of mine I hadn’t seen for many
years and who had noticed our names in the evening paper and had called
to renew a friendship that was broken off long ago. I was so glad to
see him that we visited until far into the night and when he went away
I had no heart to go ahead with what I had come to do.
The next day we returned to Washington. There I found another telegram
in reply to one I had sent, giving me an extension of one week to
make my appearance in court. Two days of the week were already gone.
I suggested a visit to Baltimore and to Baltimore we went, and again
I selected a suitable suite of rooms that had no connecting doors. It
was in this city that the head office of the surety company that had
furnished the bond for my trusteeship was located. I have never been
able to explain to myself why I went there. I recall seeing the gilt
lettering on the windows of the surety company as we drove by on our
way from the railway station to the hotel.
All the blood in me rushed into my heart as I realized that they must
soon make good the bonds I had lost in speculation. I wondered if they
had yet become alarmed and if they might not be trying to trace me.
In a newspaper I glanced at while we were at dinner was a notice that
George Cohan was playing _Broadway Jones_ at one of the theaters
that evening and my wife suggested that we go. I don’t remember
enjoying a play so much in all my life. The comedy of it caused me to
forget myself completely and the horror that was suspended above my
head. After the play we went to supper and continued to laugh over
what we had seen and heard. Broadway Jones had been in almost as deep
trouble as I was and had pulled out of it.
There was no tragedy in our apartment that night.
The following morning, when we started for a walk, two men with
slouched hats drawn over their eyes, went out of the hotel when we did,
crossed the street and stood on the corner for a minute as if watching
to see which direction we would take. When we started up the street
they followed on the opposite side and I was certain that they kept
glancing in our direction from the corner of their eyes. I began to
shake so I could scarcely walk. They disappeared in a building and came
out as we passed and again followed. I led my wife into a small park
and we sat on a bench. The men passed us and I imagined they looked
sharply at me, though neither spoke. They went on through the park and
I lost sight of them as they disappeared around a bend of the walk. I
believed they were hiding behind a clump of shrubbery. I was in agony.
“Those two men who just passed us are detectives and they will arrest
me,” I said to my wife.
“Arrest you! Arrest you for what?”
I told her the whole miserable story, of my losses through speculation
and what had happened to the other bonds; of my determination to put an
end to myself. I said nothing of the more monstrous part of my plan.
She listened to me in silence and without once interrupting. I don’t
think she even stirred or that the expression of her face changed
during the recital. When I had finished she took my hand in hers and
said:
“My dear husband, I know better than you can tell me that there was
nothing intentionally dishonest in what you have done. I know you are
incapable of that. I think, too, that you have worried so much over it
that you have magnified your troubles and lost control. Try to pull
yourself together. Those men you saw were not detectives, nor is it
likely that anyone is concerned about you or your movements. Let us
return to New York. You have scores of friends who will gladly aid you.
I am sure there will be some way out of it if you will only collect
your scattered wits.”
We went to New York that evening. The following day I told my troubles
to a lawyer friend. He gave me good counsel. If there were no way of
replacing the bonds, he suggested that I go direct to the bonding
company, make a clean breast of everything and propose to them that
they settle with the courts, which they would be required to do if I
defaulted, and accept from me monthly payments from my salary until
their claim was fully satisfied. What he told me gave me hope. That
night I awoke from a sound sleep and the name of a friend was fixed in
my mind. I called to my wife, who was asleep in an adjoining room, and
told her I would try and see that friend as early in the morning as I
could. I did see him. When I started to tell him of the trouble I was
in, he checked me.
“I don’t care how you got into trouble, just tell me what I have got to
do to get you out of it,” he said.
And when I did, he directed me to go to his bankers and the bonds would
be waiting for me. In less than an hour after I got them they were on
their way to court, together with my accounting, and my bondsmen and
myself were released from further liability. Only my wife, the lawyer
who counseled me, and the friend who aided me, ever knew of the peril I
was in. That legal friend is now a judge in the New York courts. I put
him there.
Unlike the burned child who dreads the fire, I didn’t keep away from
the flames that scorched and almost consumed me. One would naturally
suppose that after all I had gone through I would have learned a lesson
and would never again be drawn into the whirlpool of stock speculation.
But the microbe that had fastened in my mind wasn’t easily uprooted.
Speculation sometimes becomes a mania that should be classed with
insanity. The mischief is done when the speculator begins luckily. If
his first ventures were disastrous he could be easily cured, but when
his initial investment has been followed by an almost uninterrupted
string of profits, he begins to imagine himself a wizard and no matter
how much or how often luck turns against him he seldom stops until he
is ruined. There isn’t a broker’s office in the financial district
that isn’t haunted by white-faced, careworn men who were ruined by
speculation. Many of them were once millionaires. Worst of it is they
never give up hope of some day making a “killing.”
I stayed away for awhile, but a friend came to me with a sure thing tip
one day and I plunged on it with every dollar I could borrow. And I won.
The check that came to me was so munificent that I almost felt rich.
Part of it went to creditors, but the greater share into another
speculative investment. Again I won and I kept on winning until one
day the stock market was thrown into a wild panic by news that Germany
had declared war. The bottom dropped out of everything and the Stock
Exchange was compelled to close.
That was the last time I ever speculated. I never again had an
opportunity. The ruin that came to me was even more disastrous than
the first. Everything I had was swept away, leaving me broke and twenty
thousand dollars in debt. It was the finish.
The next four years I was in hell. Creditors harassed me day and night
and there was no way of satisfying them. They got my salary as fast as
I could earn it and sometimes much faster. I borrowed from every friend
who would lend to me, from Peter to pay Paul and from Tom to pay Peter,
but the strain was more than I could stand and I cracked under it.
There came a time when something snapped in my brain.
I knew that I was breaking down and I felt that it wouldn’t be long
before I lost my mind. Came long nights of sleeplessness, nights of
mental torment, nights when I would awake to hear “insanity and death”
shouted in my ears. I lived again the torture I went through that time
I was in Washington.
Thoughts of suicide were always hammering into my brain. All that
restrained me was what it would mean to my wife. If I were to carry out
what was ever present in my mind she would be a beggar. Worse than
that there would be nothing left for her to do but follow after me and
in the same way. It was maddening, for I loved my wife.
Once I went alone to Maine ostensibly to fish, but with a determined
purpose not to return. I had been there the summer before and had been
nearly upset in a storm on the lake. The thought came to me that I
could get caught out in another storm and that my upturned boat would
enable me to end my life without scandal, for it would at least have
the appearance of accident. No one could possibly know that it was
premeditated.
Again I cleared out my desk at the office and destroyed all of
my private papers. I fished every day for a week. Then came the
opportunity I was waiting for, a stormy day. People at the house where
I was stopping advised me not to venture on the lake, but I laughed
at their fears, and went, intending not to return. I had figured that
my life insurance would be sufficient to maintain my wife for the few
years she might survive me.
I went out on the lake and not until I was struggling with the waves
did it suddenly dawn on me that I had come away from New York without
paying the premiums on two of my accident policies. I had carried the
insurance for twenty years and had suffered the policies to lapse only
ten days before. How I could have forgotten so important a matter is
incomprehensible. I knew the companies would reinstate my policies as
soon as they received the premiums, but it was too late then for the
urgent purpose that was in my mind, for if I attempted to send checks
from Maine and in a few days was “accidentally drowned,” the companies
were certain to contest payment.
All of this flashed through my mind while I was out on the lake. I
pulled the boat back to shore. I went back to New York that night. I
paid the delinquent premiums and waited for sufficient time to elapse.
Two months went by and there was scarcely a waking hour that I wasn’t
planning self-effacement, taxing my ingenuity to find a way that would
make it appear to have been an accident. The more I thought about it
the less plausible it seemed. If I were drowned while bathing, it
might at first be reported as accidental, but my experience with such
matters convinced me that my plan was impossible, for the insurance
investigators would be certain to find out how hopelessly involved I
was and there would be sufficient grounds to contest payment of my
policies. Creditors grew more and more importunate. I had exhausted
every expedient I could think of and knew that I could no longer stave
off legal proceedings. Lawsuits and exposure meant the loss of my
position. I was against a stone wall.
The climax came in the middle of September, 1918. A bank refused
to renew my note, another bank notified me that I had overdrawn my
account, two creditors sent word that my checks had been returned
to them unpaid, and other creditors served notice that they would
immediately take action to garnishee my salary. All this in a single
day.
The following day was Sunday. It meant a respite of twenty-four hours.
After that, abysmal ruin. Nothing could save me.
If I were alive on Monday morning there would be a pack of sheriff’s
officers and process servers waiting at my office. I would be turned
out of my hotel and all of my belongings would be seized. Probably I
would be arrested for overdrawing my account. I lay awake all night
thinking about it. What a wretched end!
Early Sunday morning my wife and I started for the seashore. A block
from our hotel a little old woman in a faded black dress, her face
pinched with suffering and privation, stretched out a trembling hand
and I dropped a coin in it.
“Oh, God! I wonder if I will ever come to that,” my wife said.
I don’t suppose she meant it. She knew nothing of the predicament I was
in, though she may have intuitively suspected that I was worried about
money matters.
But what she said cut into my heart like a knife stab. I knew that
within a few hours she would be almost as friendless and helpless as
that poor creature.
On the beach at Brighton all that afternoon I could think of nothing
but the little old beggar woman. Her face would fade from the picture
and my wife’s face would come and, I would see her, sick and trembling
and wan and feeble, stretching out her hand to a chance passer-by. It
burned into my brain like fire.
There was only one way I could save her from such a fate.