I
CARPER did not recall that he had ever noticed the ugly details of the
courtroom before,--the high, soiled ceiling, the rows of benches, worn,
broken, empty as a fool's heart, the clerk's desk, and the presumptuous
bench of the judge; the long tables, too, for the attorneys, heaped with
papers, books, and dusty covers, a farrago of disorder--how ugly they
were!
Carper looked up at the judge. The man's black silk robe fell away in
sharp straight folds; he sat erect like a bronze cast, his face turned
half toward the window in order that he might better read the paper
before him. How power had changed this face! Carper remembered idly
that, years before, the face of this man had been sweet, tender, lit
with kindness. Now it was as hard as white ivory.
The attorneys at the table were talking in subdued whispers; Carper did
not hear; he was wondering vaguely if the long slim fingers of the judge
ever ached as his head was aching. The conjecture was unique.
It was difficult for Carper to realize his position. His clothing was
certainly better than that of any other man in the court-room, He was
quite certain that his face was the same powerful, clean-cut, immobile
mask that it had been always. The world did not know, it did not even
suspect. If one had asked the clerk yonder for a financial rating on
Russell Carper, the clerk would have shrugged his shoulder and written
six figures on the margin of his record.. Yet this was the end,--the
end.
Over by the window stood a prisoner in the custody of the marshal.
The man was poor, miserably poor; his clothes were clean, threadbare,
ancient as the law. Carper knew the story. The man was a little
shopkeeper; his wife was ill,--dying, the deputy said. There were
children, too, hungry, naked, absurdly miserable, and the crime,--some
petty revenue infraction. He would be presently required to pay his
fine, and, failing that, would be locked up in a cell. It was the law,
heartless as an image. Yet Carper wondered listlessly if one from beyond
the world's rim on the quest of the good would not take this man, and
leave the others, leave all the others--the judge with his blue-veined
patriciate face, the clerks with their lank jaws, the attorneys, with
their expression of abominable indifference, and himself. Well, the
machinery of human justice was awry. Then he wondered at the condition
that bred this surmise. How was it possible to reflect so indolently
upon the condition of another when his own was perilous. Still, such
speculations obtained with men, it is said, in great crises, and at the
grave's edge.
Presently the judge laid down his papers and began to speak. Carper
heard him as one speaking a long distance away. At first the words
seemed indistinct and without meaning; then he caught them full, as one
waking suddenly catches and understands the conversation of his fellow.
“Our commissioner's report,” the judge was saying, “shows that this
receiver has now in his custody three hundred and seventeen thousand
dollars belonging to the stockholders of the Massachusetts Iron Company.
At a former term of this court an order was entered directing the
receiver to distribute this fund in accordance with a previous decree.
At that term this order was resisted upon the ground that the decree
was not sufficiently explicit; which objection the court, upon
consideration, overruled. Later, the payment was sought to be held back
upon the ground that this order was improvidently awarded, and a motion
made to revoke, which was also overruled. And still later innumerable
technical objections have been offered by the attorney for the receiver,
all of which this court considers insufficient and trivial.”
At this point one of the attorneys for Carper arose. “If your honor
please,” he said, “we ask to be heard in defense of our client. We think
that it can yet be shown that this order should not be enforced.” Then
he sat down.
The blue veins in the face of the jurist grew darker. “Gentlemen,” he
continued, “cannot now be heard. The time of this court has already been
much consumed by unprofitable argument. On yesterday the stockholders
of the Massachusetts Iron Company applied for a rule, requiring Russell
Carper, receiver, to appear and make answer, if any he has, why he
should not be attached and punished for contempt in disobeying the
orders of this court. The rule I have ordered to issue returnable
tomorrow morning at ten o'clock.”
The judge handed the paper down to the clerk, and directed the next case
to be called. Then he leaned back in his chair with the huge unconcern
of one well removed from the grip of his fellows.
It was the end. But to Carper it was all as unreal as the yesterday. He
seemed to be out of the scene, and, for that, out of himself, an idle
spectator. His attorneys were whispering gravely. They were telling him
that the game was now played out. There was nothing more to do. He must
direct his banker to pay over the money. Even these hired fighters
did not suspect; they presumed the delay was favorable to some deal in
stocks. The truth--only he, Carper, knew the truth. There was grim humor
in the huge deception.
On the way out of the court-room Carper stopped and handed the clerk the
only bill in his pockets. It would pay the fine of the shopkeeper. The
whole thing was an immensely clever little comedy, and he wanted to see
the sunshine come back into the shopkeeper's face.
CARPER had been given the long afternoon to arrange some scheme, to
plan some way out, but he allowed it to slip by like any leisure day.
His mind was indolent, absurdly indolent. In all the other crises of his
life, it had been restless as a blown wave. This day it was sluggish.
Realizing the end, it had folded its arms. It was difficult to
appreciate that his career was ripped off like a rotten seam. That
afternoon his broker had talked confidentially of a certain railroad
venture. Men from the West had begged the use of his name in the
organization of a trust embracing the copper mines of a State. He had
been asked to contribute to a great charity. This night, the last night,
in his library there was yet no sign of that ruin which sat by the
hearthstone. The fire was warm; the surroundings wore luxurious; the
shelves were filled with books; from the walls the stern faces of his
forbears looked down, haughty, relentless as their lives had shown.
It was difficult to realize that he was an embezzler and a bankrupt,
suspended above a vacuous abyss by a line that the to-morrow would cut
short.
For five years he had been the receiver of the Massachusetts Iron
Company. In those five years he had bought and sold on the street with
the abandon of a master. He had used the funds of this company as a
workman would use a tool left lying in his shop. He had won great sums,
and he had lost until the very earth seemed slipping away beneath him.
Then the slump in the stocks of a great railroad system caught him, and
he had put in every dollar of this trust fund and watched it vanish like
a vapor. Still, no one knew. Carper's reputation stood on the street
flawless, perfect in outline, an empty shell--but no one knew.
When the stockholders of the Massachusetts Iron Company finally demanded
a reorganization, he had employed the best legal talent and thrust in
every delay of the law. The fight had gone on year after year, from
court to court. Orders had been entered and dissolved; decrees had been
made and reversed; hearings had been granted by superior courts, and
rehearings, but the end, long delayed, came finally.
The stockholders had applied for a rule. It was the most summary
proceeding known to the law. To-morrow he must pay the money, or go to
prison a felon. The end loomed like the ragged outlines of a cliff.
To Carper this end seemed atrociously unjust. He had worked so hard, so
hard: the best that was in him; the good days of his life had been given
up to this labor It had been his boyhood dream to be a factor in great
affairs,--the bitter labor of his youth, and, in part, the realization
of his middle life. He had cut every other thing away with a hand that
never once had trembled. It was his right to win, if there was any
justice anywhere. But to-morrow was the end. To-morrow the court would
strip him naked as a bone.
He had heard many a sleek pastor discourse glibly upon the eternal
justice of Providence. Then he believed it cant with a smattering of
truth. Now it was entirely clear that it was cant--but false; a pleasant
lie like the housewife tale of fairies.
Carper took the cigar from between his teeth and dropped it on the
hearth. The game of life was an ugly game. He confessed that he had lost
interest in its play. Now that the thought suggested he saw that he had
been losing interest all along. It was inertia he had been fighting--the
plague of inertia, and for no gain at all. It was a world where, if one
sat still, one wasted with monotony; and if one labored, it was only for
the purpose of building ships to fly in the air, which, when they were
all completed, sat stupidly on the earth or by hap toppled heavily upon
the builder, crushing out his heart. He could not understand why men had
sometimes said that life was good.
Carper had looked, he believed, into not a few chambers of the temple.
The same hooded shape sat in each. If fame was given, the skull was
pretty generally crushed with the crown. If wealth was given, the back
was broken with the weight. If love was given,--yes, the heart was
usually broken with it,--love!
Carper arose and went over to a cabinet in the wall, unlocked the door
and took out a big photograph, which he brought over to the fire. It was
the picture of a woman, young, beautiful, quivering with the power of
life; the mass of dark hair was caught back from her forehead; the eyes
were wide, clear, transparent; the nose was straight as the edges of a
die, and the throat round, full, marvellously moulded. In the set of the
head there was pride of lineage, and the relentless rigor of purity.
It was a fine face looking out from a blameless life, strong, innocent,
exacting as a child.
The man placed the picture on the mantelshelf, and sat down by the
fire. That day was now seven years gone,--seven years! Yesterday was no
farther back. Every detail was clear. The shock had stamped them on the
lining of his heart. He had loved this woman as a man loves just one
time. He was trusting his very life to her keeping; he was going to her
for everything that woman could give; all of sweet fellowship, all of
tender sympathy, all of love. She was the only woman in the world. The
expression is a platitude, but the fact was as real to Carper as the
green trees and the sunlight. One could no more have convinced this man
that other women held some of the charms of life, than one could have
convinced him that light was a liquid. His love had gained the power of
a religion; it had gone, farther---it had gained the majesty of a law.
Then the blow came. Carper had gone to this woman with a case of jewels,
the profit of a venture. He remembered how happy she had been: how the
light of trustfulness danced in her eyes; how she had carried the jewels
to the window in order to see the great rubies change to blood-drops,
then she had turned with a playful smile and asked him how he had made
so great a sum, and he, like a miserable fool, had blurted out that it
was a part of his gains in a deal on the street,--a deal in which he
had ruined a little banking house by seizing the vantage of its ignorant
mistake. It was the master blunder.
Carper remembered how the blood faded from this woman's face, leaving it
ashen gray; how the dull ache of pain gathered in her eyes; how she had
come over to him and dropped the jewels slowly into their case, and,
without a word, had gone back and sat down by the window. And he knew
that the woman of his love was gone out beyond the reach of his fingers.
The leash of his love had slipped off and snapped back in his hands.
He remembered the effect upon himself as something entirely foreign to
that which writers attribute to men under similar conditions. There
was no benumbing horror; no desire to make any violent demonstration of
feeling. There was merely a vague loss of strength, as though the
bottom of the fountain of vital force had dropped out, and then he grew
sick--physically sick. The material man was hurt first, and collapsed,
much as it would have done if shot through the stomach with a shell. He
felt none of that exaggerated emotion affected by the play-actor.
It was the commonplace sickness of a frightful physical blow.
When the nausea had passed, he had gone over to her and begged to know
what it all meant, although he knew quite as well as she. The woman had
looked at him with her wide eyes deadened with pain, and said that she
had believed him ah honorable man, and had loved him for it, but that
now she knew the truth, and she would never be wife to a dishonest man.
He had made his argument then, and it was good. The venture was
perfectly legitimate, so recognized and treated by the business men
of the land,--nay, more, it was so regarded by the law. These were the
standards; there was no other. The customs of business and the law were
the rules of right in the marketplaces. Their wisdom was unquestioned.
It was the result of all the experience of the race, the conclusion of
wise men, laboring with conditions as they were. Had she a right to say
that these standards were wrong? He appealed to her sense of fairness.
Was she better able to pass upon the right of this transaction than all
the merchants learned in the customs of trade,--than all the jurists
learned in the wisdom of the law? Was she better able?
Carper pointed out that she lived in an atmosphere of purity high above
the din of the fight for life; a land of refined right, refined justice,
refined honor, magnificent, but not the world. The world had no perfect
code; it was no perfect place; it was not intended to be so, else it
would have been so made. It was an indifferent place, governed by the
inexorable law of the survival of the fittest, wherein men struggled for
footing and the comforts of life. One must conform to conditions as they
were, or go to the wall. It was folly, it was idiocy, it was madness to
do otherwise.
Trade was like nature--pitiless. There was no measure of consideration
for the weakling or the fool. The fight was bitter, remorseless, subject
to dangerous shifts. If one was caught and broken, the blame was with
the sorry scheme of things, and this a Divine Intelligence maintained,
and men could not question that Divine Intelligence. This condition of
the world might not be purest or happiest, but it was the condition of
the world. It was God's way. Was it wise to call it evil?
Then he shifted. He bade her remember that she had promised to go
through life with him. It was a contract she had no right to break.
The position she was taking was a frightful contradiction. She was
reprehending the customs of trade, and yet there was not a merchant in
the market-place who would repudiate his contract. She was charging the
law with failure to appreciate the highest shades of right, and yet
she was about to do what the law, even in its grossness, recognized and
punished as a wrong. She could not stand upon this ground, and do as
she was doing. Even if he had done wrong, was she to punish him by doing
wrong also? The vice of her position cried out. Her promise had
been given. It was immutable. It was her affair to know her mind, to
determine what she wanted to do. She had known him for years. In those
years there had been ample time to investigate, to conclude, to decide.
No one had abridged the freedom of her agency. She had finally become
a party to this contract. Could she repudiate it now, like the common
rogue in whom principle was wanting?
He bade her remember the gravity of this contract. It involved her life,
his life, mayhap the lives of others. He had been shaping everything to
this end. Had she the right to ruthlessly destroy all? What would she
think of one who having contracted to accompany another into an unknown
land should suddenly abandon him on the purlieus of the country? What
would she think of one who had contracted to go with another into
an unknown sea, and should, when that other had made his ship ready,
abandon him at the water's edge? Was she doing better than these?
The woman had not answered at all; dark circles had gathered around her
eyes, and the full muscles of her throat relaxed and sank.
Then Carper remembered how he had knelt down beside her and taken her
hand in his own,---her hand, limp, cold, a dead thing.
Besides, he had gone on, he loved her; she was the only woman in his
heart. There could never be another. Day and night, and every day and
night, his heart cried for her like a tortured child! There was nothing
else in all the wide world to live for, to strive for. He had grown to
associate her with every hope, every emotion, every ambition, of his
life. How should he live on without her! What should he do with his
empty days! Pride might carry him crippled through a few, but, there was
a limit to the endurance of a man, and what then--what of his empty days
then?
If he had been doing wrong, God could find some way to punish him
outside of her love. Besides, if he was doing wrong, he needed her the
more. He needed her to round out his life, to add honor and purity and
right. God had sent her to do this work of good. Was she going to refuse
merely because the world was not the sort of place which she believed it
to be? Master of Life! the world would be abominably empty without her.
He would go anywhere she wished; do anything, be anything, she wished.
It was not the applause of men that he wanted in this life, nor the
multitude of things. It was her hand on his own; her voice in his ears;
her image in his heart forever. He could never get back again to his
view-point.
She had loosed the mouth of something in his bosom that clamored for
her. It would be content with no other. It would hush for no other. His
heart was aching now with the cry. What a place of torture it would be
tomorrow, and the next year, and the next.
The tears had rained down this woman's face, but she had shaken her
head.
That day was now seven years gone--seven years! Yesterday was no farther
back. Well, well! He had been only partly right. The woman's face in his
heart he had walled up. The cry for her he had silenced with the opiates
of greed. Still they were both there and alive. To-night the wall had
slipped away and the anaesthetics were powerless. It was no matter.
After all, had she done well? She had lived on, spotless, pure, alone;
and he had lived on--to this. Had she done well? That question it was no
right of his to answer.
Carper got up from his chair, took the picture from the mantel, broke
it across the face and dropped the pieces into the fire. It was not
necessary for the marshal's deputy to speculate about this picture.
Then he went over to the cabinet and took out a pack of letters, old,
yellow, tied with a faded ribbon, and, selecting one at random, sat down
in his chair to read it through. “Dear Heart,” it ran at the beginning,
and at the end “I am unutterably lonely, and I love you.” Yes, he
recalled the circumstances of its writing well. Then he replaced it
with the others and laid them all gently on the fire. They should not be
pleasant reading for the marshal.
He had come down into the world, with his heart shredded and every shred
aching like a nerve, and from that day he had flown the black flag of
piracy. Among all the buccaneers of the street, the hand of none had
been heavier, and the brain of none had been keener than his own. From
that day every man who had passed up a prisoner on to the deck of his
galleon, had walked the plank. The muscles of his face grew tense with
the thought.
Somewhere in the house a clock struck ten. Carper arose and walked
backward and forward across the room. The spirit of fierce resistance
was beginning to awaken. He would not be stripped like a weakling. He
would fight, fight--but how? It was hopeless to dream of raising the
money. That plan had been discarded long ago. Vain vaporing! There was
no way remaining but Brutus's way--the road out into the vastness of
eternity was open! The exit was easy. Why should he lag back? Surely he
must go later on. For years the world had been a good place to get out
of--for seven years.
The man opened a drawer at the bottom of the book-case and took out a
weapon--an ancient duelling pistol of his grandfather. He carried the
weapon to the table, wiped it carefully, and began to load it. When he
had finished, he went over to close the door. On the threshold lay one
of the evening papers of the city. Carper picked it up and brought it
with him to the light. The headlines caught his attention. It was the
story of a great bank defaulter who had gone free by reason of some
defect in the law shrewdly pointed out by a lawyer, Randolph Mason.
He remembered the man as a remarkable legal misanthrope. He had heard of
him in the Federal courts. Somewhere he had this man's address, jotted
down one morning when the administrator of an estate walked out of the
Federal court a confessed gigantic thief, but, by this man's counsel,
beyond the reach of the law.
Carper looked through one of the files on his table--yes, here was
the residence number. The man leaned over and rested his arm on the
mantel-shelf. One might not do ill to go; there was time ample. One
could come back to the thing of steel later on.
Carper turned suddenly, put on his coat and hat, and passed out into the
street, closing the door and locking it carefully behind him. Then he
called a cab, gave the number to the driver, and leaned back heavily
against the cushion.