Bubbles

Bubbles

By Don Marquis

I

Tommy Hawkins was not so sober that you could tell it on him. Certainly his friend Jack Dobson, calling on him one dreary winter evening—an evening of that winter before John Barleycorn cried maudlin tears into his glass and kissed America good-by—would never have guessed it from Tommy’s occupation. Presenting himself at Tommy’s door and finding it unlocked, Jack had gone on in. A languid splashing guided him to the bathroom. In the tub sat Tommy with the water up to his shoulders, blowing soap bubbles.

“You darned old fool!” said Jack. “Aren’t you ever going to grow up, Tommy?”

“Nope,” said Tommy placidly. “What for?” Sitting on a chair close by the bathtub was a shallow silver dish with a cake of soap and some reddish-colored suds in it. Tommy had bought the dish to give some one for a wedding present, and then had forgotten to send it.

“What makes the suds red?” asked Jack.

“I poured a lot of that nose-and-throat spray stuff into it,” explained Tommy. “It makes them prettier. Look!”

As a pipe he was using a piece of hollow brass curtain rod six or eight inches long and of about the diameter of a fat lead pencil. He soused this thing in the reddish suds and manufactured a bubble with elaborate care. With a graceful gesture of his wet arm he gently waved the rod until the bubble detached itself. It floated in the air for a moment, and the thin, reddish integument caught the light from the electric globe and gave forth a brief answering flash as of fire. Then the bubble suddenly and whimsically dashed itself against the wall and was no more, leaving a faint, damp, reddish trace upon the white plaster.

“Air current caught it,” elucidated Tommy with the air of a circus proprietor showing off pet elephants. In his most facetious moments Tommy was wont to hide his childish soul beneath an exterior of serious dignity. “This old dump is full of air currents. They come in round the windows, come in round the doors, come right in through the walls. Damned annoying, too, for a scientist making experiments with bubbles—starts a bubble and never knows which way it’s going to jump. I’m gonna complain to the management of this hotel.”

“You’re going to come out of that bathtub and get into your duds,” said Jack. “That water’s getting cool now, and between cold water and air currents you’ll have pneumonia the first thing you know—you poor silly fish, you.”

“Speaking of fish,” said Tommy elliptically, “there’s a bottle of cocktails on the mantel in the room there. Forgot it for a moment. Don’t want to be inhospitable, but don’t drink all of it.”

“It’s all gone,” said Dobson a moment later.

“So?” said Tommy in surprise. “That’s the way with cocktails. Here one minute and gone the next—like bubbles. Bubbles! Life’s like that, Jack!” He made another bubble with great solemnity, watched it float and dart and burst. “Pouf!” he said. “Bubbles! Bubbles! Life’s like that!”

“You’re an original philosopher, you are,” said Jack, seizing him by the shoulders. “You’re about as original as a valentine. Douse yourself with cold water and rub yourself down and dress. Come out of it, kid, or you’ll be sick.”

“If I get sick,” said Tommy, obeying, nevertheless, “I won’t have to go to work to-morrow.”

“Why aren’t you working to-day?” asked his friend, working on him with a coarse towel.

“Day off,” said Tommy.

“Day off!” rejoined Dobson. “Since when has the Morning Despatch been giving two days off a week to its reporters? You had your day off Tuesday, and this is Thursday.”

“Is it?” said Tommy. “I always get Tuesday and Thursday mixed. Both begin with a T. Hey, Jack, how’s that? Both begin with a T! End with a tea party! Good line, hey, Jack? Tuesday and Thursday both begin with a T and end with a tea party. I’m gonna write a play round that, Jack. Broadway success! Letters a foot high! Royalties for both of us! I won’t forget you, Jack! You suggested the idea for the plot, Jack. Drag you out in front of the curtain with me when I make my speech. ‘Author! Author!’ yells the crowd. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ says I, ‘here is the obscure and humble person who set in motion the train of thought that led to my writing this masterpiece. Such as he is, I introduce him to you.’”

“Shut up!” said Jack, and continued to lacerate Tommy’s hide with the rough towel. “Hold still! Now go and get into your clothes.” And as Tommy began to dress he regarded that person darkly. “You’re a brilliant wag, you are! It’s a shame the way the copy readers down on the Despatch keep your best things out of print, you splattering supermudhen of journalism, you! You’ll wake up some morning without any more job than a kaiser.” And as Tommy threaded himself into the mystic maze of his garments Mr. Dobson continued to look at him and mutter disgustedly, “Bubbles!”

Not that he was afraid that Tommy would actually lose his job. If it had been possible for Tommy to lose his job that must have happened years before. But Tommy wrote a certain joyous type of story better than any other person in New York, and his facetiousness got him out of as many scrapes as it got him into. He was thirty years old. At ninety he would still be experimenting with the visible world in a spirit of random eagerness, joshing everything in it, including himself. He looked exactly like the young gentleman pictured in a widely disseminated collar advertisement. He enjoyed looking that way, and occasionally he enjoyed talking as if he were exactly that kind of person. He loved to turn his ironic levity against the character he seemed to be, much as the mad wags who grace the column of F. P. A. delight in getting their sayings across accompanied by a gentle satirical fillip at all mad waggery.

“Speaking of bubbles,” he suddenly chuckled as he carefully adjusted his tie in the collar that looked exactly like the one in the advertisement, “there’s an old party in the next room that takes ‘em more seriously than you do, Jack.”

The old downtown hotel in which Tommy lived had once been a known and noted hostelry, and persons from Plumville, Pennsylvania, Griffin, Georgia, and Galva, Illinois, still stopped there when in New York, because their fathers and mothers had stopped there on their wedding journeys perhaps. It was not such a very long way from the Eden Musee, when there was an Eden Musee. Tommy’s room had once formed part of a suite. The bathroom which adjoined it had belonged jointly to another room in the suite. But now these two rooms were always let separately. Still, however, the bathroom was a joint affair. When Tommy wished to bathe he must first insure privacy by hooking on the inside the door that led into the bathroom from the chamber beyond.

“Old party in the next room?” questioned Jack.

“Uh-huh,” said Tommy, who had benefited by his cold sluicing and his rubdown. “I gave him a few bubbles for his very own—through the keyhole into his room, you know. Poked that brass rod through and blew the bubble in his room. Detached it with a little jerk and let it float. Seemed more sociable, you know, to let him in on the fun. Never be stingy with your pleasures, Jack. Shows a mean spirit—a mean soul. Why not cheer the old party up with soap bubbles? Cost little, bubbles do. More than likely he’s a stranger in New York. Unfriendly city, he thinks. Big city. Nobody thinks of him. Nobody cares for him. Away from home. Winter day. Melancholy. Well, I say, give him a bubble now and then. Shows some one is thinking of him. Shows the world isn’t so thoughtless and gloomy after all. Neighborly sort of thing to do, Jack. Makes him think of his youth—home—mother’s knee—all that kind of thing, Jack. Cheers him up. Sat in the tub there and got to thinking of him. Almost cried, Jack, when I thought how lonely the old man must be—got one of these old man’s voices. Whiskers. Whiskers deduced from the voice. So I climbed out of the tub every ten or fifteen minutes all afternoon and gave the old man a bubble. Rain outside—fog, sleet. Dark indoors. Old man sits and thinks nobody loves him. Along comes a bubble. Old man gets happy. Laughs. Remembers his infancy. Skies clear. You think I’m a selfish person, Jack? I’m not. I’m a Samaritan. Where will we eat?”

“You are a darned fool,” said Jack. “You say he took them seriously? What do you mean? Did he like ‘em?”

“Couldn’t quite make out,” said Tommy. “But they moved him. Gasped every now and then. Think he prayed. Emotion, Jack. Probably made him think of boyhood’s happy days down on the farm. Heard him talking to himself. Think he cried. Went to bed anyhow with his clothes on and pulled the covers over his head. Looked through the keyhole and saw that. Gray whiskers sticking up, and that’s all. Deduced the whiskers from the voice, Jack. Let’s give the old party a couple more bubbles and then go eat. It’s been an hour since he’s had one. Thinks I’m forgetting him, no doubt.”

So they gave the old man a couple of bubbles, poking the brass rod through the keyhole of the door.

The result was startling and unexpected. First there came a gasp from the other room, a sort of whistling release of the breath, and an instant later a high, whining, nasal voice.

“Oh, God! God! Again! You meant it, then, God! You meant it!”

The two young men started back and looked at each other in wonderment. There was such a quivering agony, such an utter groveling terror in this voice from the room beyond that they were daunted.

“What’s eating him?” asked Dobson, instinctively dropping his tones to a whisper.

“I don’t know,” said Tommy, temporarily subdued. “Sounds like that last one shell-shocked him when it exploded, doesn’t it?”

But Tommy was subdued only for a moment.

As they went out into the corridor he giggled and remarked, “Told you he took ‘em seriously, Jack.”

II

“Seriously” was a word scarcely strong enough for the way in which the old party in the room beyond had taken it, though he had not, in fact, seen the bubble. He had only seen a puff of smoke coming apparently from nowhere, originating in the air itself, as it seemed to him, manifesting itself, materializing itself out of nothing, and floating in front of the one eye which was peeping fearfully out of the huddled bedclothing which he had drawn over himself. He had lain quaking on the bed, waiting for this puff of smoke for an hour or more, hoping against hope that it would not come, praying and muttering, knotting his bony hands in the whiskers that Tommy had seen sticking up from the coverings, twisting convulsively.

Tommy had whimsically filled the bubble, as he blew it, with smoke from his cigarette. He had in like manner, throughout the afternoon and early-evening, filled all the bubbles that he had given the old man with cigarette or pipe smoke. The old party had not been bowled over by anything in Tommy’s tobacco. He had not noticed that the smoke was tobacco smoke, for he had been smoking a pipe himself the greater part of the day, and had not aired out the room. It was neither bubbles nor tobacco that had flicked a raw spot on his soul. It was smoke.

III

Bubbles! They seemed to be in Tommy’s brain. Perhaps it was the association of ideas that made him think of champagne. At any rate he declared that he must have some, and vetoed his friend’s suggestion that they dine—as they frequently did—at one of the little Italian table d’hote places in Greenwich Village.

“You’re a bubble and I’m a bubble and the world is a bubble,” Tommy was saying a little later as he watched the gas stirring in his golden drink.

They had gone to the genial old Brevoort, which was—but why tell persons who missed the Brevoort in its mellower days what they missed, and why cause anguished yearnings in the bosoms of those who knew it well?

“Tommy,” said his friend, “don’t, if you love me, hand out any more of your jejune poeticism or musical-comedy philosophy. I’ll agree with you that the world is a bubble for the sake of argument, if you’ll change the record. I want to eat, and nothing interferes with my pleasure in a meal so much as this line of pseudocerebration that you seem to have adopted lately.”

“Bubbles seem trivial things, Jack,” went on Tommy, altogether unperturbed. “But I have a theory that there aren’t any trivial things. I like to think of the world balancing itself on a trivial thing. Look at the Kaiser, for instance. A madman. Well, let’s say there’s been a blood clot in his brain for years—a little trivial thing the size of a pin point, Jack. It hooks up with the wrong brain cell; it gets into the wrong channel, and—pouf! The world goes to war. A thousand million people are affected by it—by that one little clot of blood no bigger than a pin point that gets into the wrong channel. An atom! A planet balanced on an atom! A star pivoting on a molecule!”

“Have some soup,” said his friend.

“Bubbles! Bubbles and butterflies!” continued Tommy. “Some day, Jack, I’m going to write a play in which a butterfly’s wing brushes over an empire.”

“No, you’re not,” said Jack. “You’re just going to talk about it and think you’re writing it and peddle the idea round to everybody you know, and then finally some wise guy is going to grab it off and really write it. You’ve been going to write a play ever since I knew you.”

“Yes, I am; I’m really going to write that play.”

“Well, Tommy,” said Jack, looking round the chattering dining room, “this is a hell of a place to do it in!”

“Meaning, of course,” said Tommy serenely, “that it takes more than a butterfly to write a play about a butterfly.”

“You get me,” said his friend. And then after a pause he went on with sincerity in his manner: “You know I think you could write the play, Tommy. But unless you get to work on some of your ideas pretty soon, and buckle down to them in earnest, other people will continue to write your plays—and you will continue to josh them and yourself, and your friends will continue to think that you could write better plays if you would only do it. People aren’t going to take you seriously, Tommy, till you begin to take yourself a little seriously. Why, you poor, futile, silly, misguided, dear old mutt, you! You don’t even have sense enough—you don’t have the moral continuity, if you follow me—to stay sore at a man that does you dirt! Now, do you?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Tommy a little more seriously.

“Well now, do you?” persisted his friend. “I don’t say it’s good Christian doctrine not to forgive people. It isn’t. But I’ve seen people put things across on you, Tommy, and seen you laugh it off and let ‘em be friends with you again inside of six weeks. I couldn’t do it, and nine-tenths of the fellows we know couldn’t do it; and in the way you do it it shouldn’t be done. You should at least remember, even if you do forgive; remember well enough not to get bit by the same dog again. With you, old kid, it’s all a part of your being a butterfly and a bubble. It’s no particular virtue in you. I wouldn’t talk to you like a Dutch uncle if I didn’t think you had it in you to make good. But you’ve got to be prodded.”

“There’s one fellow that did me dirt,” said Tommy musingly, “that I’ve never taken to my bosom again.”

“What did you do to him?” asked his friend. “Beat him to death with a butterfly’s wing, Tommy, or blow him out of existence with a soap bubble?”

“I’ve never done anything to him,” said Tommy soberly. “And I don’t think I ever would do anything to him. I just remember, that’s all. If he ever gets his come-uppance, as they say in the rural districts, it won’t be through any act of mine. Let life take revenge for me. I never will.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Dobson. “But who was this guy? And what did he do to you?”

IV

“He was—and is—my uncle,” said Tommy, “and he did about everything to me. Listen! You think I do nothing but flitter, flutter, frivol and flivver! And you may be right, and maybe I never will do anything else. Maybe I never will be anything but a kid.

“I was young when I was born. No, that’s not one of my silly lines, Jack. I mean it seriously. I was young when I was born. I was born with a jolly disposition. But this uncle of mine took it out of me. I’ll say he did! The reason I’m such a kid now, Jack, is because I had to grow up when I was about five years old, and I stayed grown up until I was seventeen or eighteen. I never had a chance to be a boy. If I showed any desire to be it was knocked out of me on the spot. And if I live two hundred years, and stay nineteen years old all that time, Jack, I won’t any more than make up for the childhood I missed—that was stolen from me. Frivol? I could frivol a thousand years and not dull my appetite. I want froth, Jack: froth and bubbles!

“This old uncle of mine—he wasn’t so old in years when I first knew him, but in his soul he was as old as the overseers who whipped the slaves that built Cheops’ pyramid, and as sandy and as flinty—hated me as soon as he saw me. He hated me before he saw me. He would have hated me if he had never seen me, because I was young and happy and careless.

“I was that, when I went to live with him—young and happy and careless. I was five years old. He was my father’s brother, Uncle Ezra was, and he beat my father out of money in his dirty, underhanded way. Oh, nothing illegal! At least, I suppose not. Uncle Ezra was too cautious to do anything that might be found out on him. There was nothing that my mother could prove, at any rate, and my father had been careless and had trusted him. When my father died my mother was ill. He gave us a home, Uncle Ezra did. She had to live somewhere; she had to have a roof over her head and attention of some sort. She had no near relations, and I had to be looked after.

“So she and I went into his house to live. It was to be temporary. We were to move as soon as she got better. But she did not live long. I don’t remember her definitely as she was before we went to live with Uncle Ezra. I can only see her as she lay on a bed in a dark room before she died. It was a large wooden bed, with wooden slats and a straw mattress. I can see myself sitting on a chair by the head of the bed and talking to her. My feet did not reach to the floor by any means; they only reached to the chair rungs. I can’t remember what she said or what I said. All I remember of her is that she had very bright eyes and that her arms were thin. I remember her arms, but not her face, except the eyes. I suppose she used to reach her arms out to me. I think she must have been jolly at one time, too. There is a vague feeling, a remembrance, that before we went to Uncle Ezra’s she was jolly, and that she and I laughed and played together in some place where there was red-clover bloom.

“One day when I was siting on the chair, the door opened and Uncle Ezra came in. There was some man with him that was, I suppose, a doctor. I can recall Uncle Ezra’s false grin and the way he put his hand on my head—to impress the doctor, I suppose—and the way I pulled away from him. For I felt that he disliked me, and I feared and hated him.

“Yes, Uncle Ezra gave us a home. I don’t know how much you know about the rural districts, Jack. But when an Uncle Ezra in a country town gives some one a home he acquires merit. This was a little town in Pennsylvania that Pm talking about, and Uncle Ezra was a prominent citizen—deacon in the church and all that sort of thing. Truly rural drama stuff, Jack, but I can’t help that—it’s true. Uncle Ezra had a reputation for being stingy and mean. Giving us a home was a good card for him to play. My mother had a little money, and he stole that, too, when she died.

“I suppose he stole it legally. I don’t know. It wasn’t much. No one had any particular interest in looking out for me, and nobody would want to start anything in opposition to Uncle Ezra in that town if it could be helped anyhow. He didn’t have the whole village and the whole of the farming country round about sewed up, all by himself, but he was one of the little group that did. There’s a gang like that in every country town, I imagine. He was one of four or five big ducks in that little puddle—lent money, took mortgages and all that kind of thing you read about. I don’t know how much he is worth now, counting what he has been stealing all his life. But it can’t be a staggering sum. He’s too cowardly to plunge or take a long chance. He steals and saves and grinds in a little way. He is too mean and small and blind and limited in his intelligence to be a big, really successful crook, such as you will find in New York City.

“When my mother died, of course, I stayed with Uncle Ezra. I suppose everybody said how good it was of him to keep me, and that it showed a soft and kindly spot in his nature after all, and that he couldn’t be so hard as he had the name of being. But I don’t see what else could have been done with me, unless he had taken me out and dropped me in the mill pond like a blind cat. Sometimes I used to wish he had done that.

“It isn’t hard to put a five-year-old kid in the wrong, so as to make it appear—even to the child himself—that he is bad and disobedient. Uncle Ezra began that way with me. I’m not going into details. This isn’t a howl; it’s merely an explanation. But he persecuted me in every way. He put me to work before I should have known what work was—work too hard for me. He deviled me and he beat me, he clothed me like a beggar and he fed me like a dog, he robbed me of childhood and of boyhood. I won’t go over the whole thing.

“I never had decent shoes, or a hat that wasn’t a rag, and I never went to kid parties or anything, or even owned so much as an air rifle of my own. The only pair of skates I ever had, Jack, I made for myself out of two old files, with the help of the village blacksmith—and I got licked for that. Uncle Ezra said I had stolen the files and the straps. They belonged to him.

“But there’s one thing I remember with more of anger than any other. He used to make me kneel down and pray every night before I went to bed, in his presence; and sometimes he would pray with me. He was a deacon in the church. There are plenty of them on the square—likely most of them are. But this one was the kind you used to see in the old-fashioned melodramas. Truly rural stuff, Jack. He used to be quite a shark at prayer himself, Uncle Ezra did. I can remember how he looked when he prayed, with his eyes shut and his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and the sound whining through his nose.

“The only person that was ever human to me was a woman I called Aunt Lizzie. I don’t know really what relation she wras to me; a distant cousin of Uncle Ezra’s, I think. She was half blind and she was deaf, and he bullied her and made her do all the housework. She was bent nearly double with drudgery. He had given her a home, too. She didn’t dare be very good to me. He might find it out, and then we both would catch it. She baked me some apple dumplings once on one of my birthdays. I was nine years old. And he said she had stolen the apples and flour from him; that he had not ordered her to make any apple dumplings, and it was theft; and he made me pray for her, and made her pray for herself, and he prayed for both of us in family prayers every day for a week.

“I was nearly eighteen when I ran away. I might have done it sooner, but I was small for my age, and I was cowed. I didn’t dare to call my soul my own, and I had a reputation for being queer, too. For I used to grin and laugh at things no one else thought were funny—when Uncle Ezra wasn’t round. I suppose people in that town thought it was odd that I could laugh at all. No one could understand how I had a laugh left in me. But when I was alone I used to laugh. I used to laugh at myself sometimes because I was so little and so queer. When I was seventeen I wasn’t much bigger than a thirteen-year-old kid should be. I packed a lot of growing into the years between seventeen and twenty-one.

“When I ran away Aunt Lizzie gave me eighty-seven cents, all in nickels and pennies, and there were two or three of those old-fashioned two-cent pieces in it, too, that she had had for God knows how long. It was all she had. I don’t suppose he ever paid her anything at all, and the wonder was she had that much. I told her that when I got out into the world and made good I would come and get her, but she shivered all over with fright at the idea of daring to leave. I have sent her things from time to time in the last ten years—money, and dresses I have bought for her, and little things I thought she would like. But I don’t know whether he let her have them or not I never got any letter from her at all. I don’t even know whether she can write, to tell the truth, and she wouldn’t dare get one of the neighbors to write for her. But if I ever make any real money, Jack, I am going to go and get her, whether she dares to come away or not.

“Well, when I left, the thing I wanted to do was go to school. Uncle Ezra hadn’t given me time to go to school much. But I tramped to a town where there was a little fresh-water college that had its own prep school attached, and I did the whole seven years of prep school and college in five years. You see, I had a lot of bounce in me. The minute I got away from Uncle Ezra the whole world brightened up for me. The clouds rolled by and life looked like one grand long joke, and I turned into a kid. I romped through that prep school and that college, and made my own living while I was doing it, and laughed all the time and loved the world and everything in it, and it came as easy to me as water comes to a duck. I came on down here to New York and was lucky enough to get a chance as a reporter, and I’ve been romping ever since.

“I don’t want to do anything but romp. Of course, I want to write some good stuff some day, but I want to keep romping while I write it, and I want it to be stuff that has a romp in it, too. You say I romp so much I’m never serious. Well, I do have some serious moments, too. I have a dream that keeps coming to me. I dream that I’m back in that little town, and that I’m Uncle Ezra’s slave again, and that I can’t get away.

“Sometimes the dream takes the form of Uncle Ezra coming here to New York to get me, and I know that I’ve got to go back with him to that place, and I wake up sweating and crying like an eight-year-old kid. If he ever really came it would put a crimp into me, Jack.

“You say I’m a butterfly. And I say, yes, Jack, thank God I am! I used to be a grubworm, and now I’m a butterfly, praise heaven!

“Well, that’s the guy I hold the grudge against, and that’s why I’m fool enough to rush into every pleasure I can find. I don’t know that I’ll ever change. And as for the man, I don’t ever want to see him. I don’t know that I’d ever do anything to him if I did—beat him to death with a butterfly’s wing, or blow him up with a soap bubble, as you suggested. Let him alone. He’ll punish himself. He is punished by being what he is. I wouldn’t put a breath into the scale one way or the other—not even a puff of cigarette smoke.”

He blew a breath of cigarette smoke luxuriously out of his nose as he finished, and then he remarked, “Let’s go somewhere and dance.”

“Nazimova is doing Ibsen uptown,” suggested Jack, “and I have a couple of tickets. Let’s go and see Ibsen lb a little.”

“Nope,” said Tommy. “Ibsen’s got too much sense. I want something silly. Me for a cabaret, or some kind of a hop garden.”

V

But sometimes in this ironical world it happens that we have already beaten a man to death with a butterfly’s wing, slain him with a bubble, sent him whirling into the hereafter on a puff of smoke, even as we are saying that such a thing is foreign to our thoughts.

The old party in the room next to Tommy’s at the hotel had arrived the day before, with an umbrella, a straw suitcase and a worried eye on either side his long, white, chalkish, pitted nose. He seemed chilly in spite of his large plum-colored overcoat, of a cut that has survived only in the rural districts. He wore a salient, assertive beard, that had once been sandy and was now almost white, but it was the only assertive thing about him. His manner was far from aggressive.

An hour after he had been shown to his room he appeared at the desk again and inquired timidly of the clerk, “There’s a fire near here?”

“Little blaze in the next block. Doesn’t amount to anything,” said the clerk.

“I heard the—the engines,” said the guest apologetically.

“Doesn’t amount to anything,” said the clerk again. And then, “Nervous about fire?”

The old party seemed startled.

“Who? Me? Why should I be nervous about fire? No! No! No!” He beat a sudden retreat. “I was just asking—just asking,” he threw back over his shoulder.

“Old duck’s scared of fire and ashamed to own it,” mused the clerk, watching him out of the lobby.

The old party went back to his room, and there one of the first things he saw was a copy of the Bible lying on the bureau. There is an organization which professes for its object the placing of a Bible in every hotel room in the land. The old party had his own Bible with him. As if reminded of it by the one on the bureau, he took it out of his suitcase and sat down and began to turn the leaves like a person familiar with the book—and like a person in need of comfort, as indeed he was.

There was a text in Matthew that he sought—where was it? Somewhere in the first part of Matthew’s gospel—ah, here it is: The twelfth chapter and the thirty-first verse:

“All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men….”

There is a terrible reservation in the same verse. He kept his eyes from it, and read the first part over and over, forming the syllables with his lips, but not speaking aloud.

“All manner of sin—all manner of sin———-”

And then, as if no longer able to avoid it, he yielded his consciousness to the latter clause of the verse:

“But the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”

What was blasphemy against the Holy Ghost? Could what he had done be construed as that? Probably if one lied to God in his prayers, that was blasphemy against the Holy Ghost—one form of it. And had he been lying to God these last two weeks when he had said over and over again in his prayers that it was all a mistake? It hadn’t been all a mistake, but the worst part of it had been a mistake.

He went out for his dinner that evening, but he was in again before ten o’clock. He could not have slept well. At two o’clock in the morning he appeared in front of the desk.

He had heard fire engines again.

“See here,” said the night clerk, appraising him, as the day clerk had done, as a rube who had been seldom to the city and was nervous about fire, “you don’t need to be worried. If anything should happen near here we’d get all the guests out in a jiffy.”

The old party returned to his room. He was up early the next morning and down to breakfast before the dining room was open.

He did not look as if he had had much rest. The morning hours he devoted to reading his Bible in his room. Perhaps he found comfort in it. At noon he seemed a bit more cheerful. He asked the clerk the way to the Eden Musee, and was surprised to learn that that place of amusement had been closed for a year or two. The clerk recommended a moving-picture house round the corner. But it had begun to rain and snow and sleet all together; the sky was dark and the wind was rising; the old party elected not to go out after all.

He went back to his room once more, and his black fear and melancholy descended upon him again, and the old debate began to weave through his brain anew. For two weeks he had been fleeing from the debate and from himself. He had come to New York to get away from it, but it was no good. Just when he had made up his mind that God had forgiven him, and was experiencing a momentary respite, some new doubt would assail him and the agony would begin again.

The old debate—he had burned the store, with the living quarters over it, to get the insurance money, after having removed a part of the insured goods, but he did not regard that as an overwhelming sin. It wasn’t right, of course, in one way. And yet in another way it was merely sharp business practice, so he told himself. For a year before that, when one of his buildings had burned through accident, he had been forced to accept from the same insurance company less than was actually due him as a matter of equity. Therefore, to make money out of that company by a shrewd trick was in a way merely to get back his own again. It wasn’t the sort of thing that a deacon in the church would care to have found out on him, of course. It was wrong in a sense. But it was the wrong that it had led to that worried him.

It was the old woman’s death that worried him. He hadn’t meant to burn her to death, God knows! He hadn’t known she was in the building.

He had sent her on a week’s visit to another town, to see a surprised cousin of his own, and it had been distinctly understood that she was not to return until Saturday. But some time on Friday evening she must have crept back home and gone to bed in her room. He had not known she was there.

“I didn’t know! I didn’t know!”

There were times when he gibbered the words to himself by the hour.

It was at midnight that he had set fire to the place. The old woman was deaf. Even when the flames began to crackle she could not have heard them. She had had no more chance than a rat in a trap. The old fool! It was her own fault! Why had she not obeyed him? Why had she come creeping back, like a deaf old half-blind tabby cat, to die in the flames? It was her own fault! When he thought of the way she had returned to kill herself there were moments when he cursed and hated her.

But had she killed herself? Back and forth swung the inner argument. At times he saw clearly enough that this incident joined on without a break to the texture of his whole miserable life; when he recognized that, though it might be an accident in a strictly literal sense that the old woman was dead, yet it was the sort of accident for which his previous existence had been a preparation. Even while he fiercely denied his guilt, or talked of it in a seizure of whining prayer that was essentially a lying denial, he knew that guilt there was.

Would he be forgiven? There were comforting passages in the Bible. He switched on the rather insufficient electric light, which was all the old hotel provided, for the day was too dark to read without that help, and turned the pages of the New Testament through and through again.

At three o’clock in the afternoon he was sitting on the edge of his bed, with the book open in front of him and his head bowed, almost dozing. His pipe, with which he had filled the room with the fumes of tobacco, had fallen to the floor. Perhaps it was weariness, but for a brief period his sharper sense of fear had been somewhat stilled again. Maybe it was going to be like this—a gradual easing off of the strain in answer to his prayers. He had asked God for an answer as to whether he should be forgiven, and God was answering in this way, so he told himself. God was going to let him get some sleep, and maybe when he woke everything would be all right again—bearable at least.

So he mused, half asleep.

And then all at once he sprang wide awake again, and his terror wakened with him. For suddenly in front of his half-shut eyes, coming from nowhere in particular, there passed a puff of smoke!

What could it mean? He had asked God for an answer. He had been lulled for a moment almost into something like peace, and—now—this puff of smoke! Was it a sign? Was it God’s answer?

He sat up on the edge of the bed, rigid, in a cold, still agony of superstitious fright. He dared not move or turn his head. He was afraid that he would see—something—if he looked behind him. He was afraid that he would in another moment hear something—a voice!

He closed his eyes. He prayed. He prayed aloud. His eyes once closed, he scarcely dared open them again. After seme minutes he began to tell himself that perhaps he had been mistaken; perhaps he had not seen smoke at all. Perhaps even if he had seen smoke it was due to some explicable cause, and not meant for him.

He greatly dared. He opened his eyes. And drifting lazily above the white pillow at the head of the bed was another puff of smoke.

He rocked back and forth upon the bed, with his arms up as if to shield his head from a physical blow, and then he passed in a moment from the quakings of fear to a kind of still certainty of doom. God was angry at him. God was telling him so. God would send the devil for him. There was no further doubt. He would go to hell—to hell! To burn forever! Forever—even as the old woman had burned for a quarter of an hour. He began to search through the pages of the Bible again, not for words of comfort this time, but in a morbid ecstasy of despair, for phrases about hell, for verses that mentioned fire and flames.

He did not need the concordance. He knew his Bible well, and his fear helped him. Consciousness and subconsciousness joined to guide his fingers and eyes in the quest.

“Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming,” he read in Isaiah, and he took it to himself.

“Yea, I will gather you, and blow upon you in the fire of my wrath, and ye shall be melted in the midst thereof,” he read in Ezekiel.

He had a literal imagination, and he had a literal belief, and at every repetition of the word “fire” the flesh cringed and crawled on his bones. God! To burn! How it must hurt!

“And the God that answereth by fire, let Him be God,” met his eyes in the first book of Kings.

And it all meant him. Now and then over his shoulder would float another little puff of smoke; and once, lifting his head suddenly from poring over the book, he thought he saw something that moved and glinted like a traveling spark, and was gone.

He began to feel himself in hell already. This was the foretaste, that was all. Would he begin to burn even before he died? Did this smoke presage something of that kind? Would flames physically seize upon him, and would he burn, even as the old woman had burned?

Suddenly in his hysteria there came a revulsion—a revolt. Having reached the nethermost depths of despair, he began to move upward a little. His soul stirred and took a step and tried to climb. He began to pray once more. After all, the Good Book did promise mercy! He began to dare to pray again. And he prayed in a whisper that now and then broke into a whine—a strange prayer, characteristic of the man.

“Oh, God,” he cried, “you promise forgiveness in that book there, and I’m gonna hold you to it! I’m gonna hold you to it! It’s down there in black and white, your own words, God, and I’m gonna hold you to it! It’s a contract, God, and you ain’t the kind of a man, God, to go back on a contract that’s down in black and white!”

Thus he prayed, with a naïve, unconscious blasphemy. And after long minutes of this sort of thing his soul dared take another step. A faint, far glimmering of hope came to him where he groveled. For he was groveling on the bed now, with the covers pulled up to his head and his hand upon the open Bible. He found the courage to peer from beneath the covers at intervals as he prayed and muttered, and minutes passed with no more smoke. Had the smoke ceased? The sound of his own murmuring voice began to reassure him. The smoke had certainly ceased! It had been twenty minutes since he had seen it—half an hour!

What could it mean? That God was hearkening to his prayer?

An hour went by, and still there was no more sign of smoke. He prayed feverishly, he gabbled, as if by the rapidity of his utterance and the repeated strokes of his words he were beating back and holding at bay the smoke that was God’s warning and the symbol of his displeasure. And the smoke had ceased to come! He was to be forgiven! He was winning! His prayers were winning for him! At least God was listening!

Yes, that must be it. God was listening now. The smoke had come as a warning; and he had, upon receiving this warning, repented. God had not meant, after all, that he was doomed irrevocably. God had meant that, to be forgiven, his repentance must be genuine, must be thorough—and it was thorough now. Now it was genuine! And the smoke had ceased! The smoke had been a sign, and he had heeded the sign, and now if he kept up his prayers and lived a good life in the future he was to be forgiven. He would not have to burn in hell after all.

The minutes passed, and he prayed steadily, and every minute that went by and brought no further sign of the smoke built up in him a little more hope, another grain of confidence.

An hour and a quarter, and he almost dared be sure that he was forgiven—but he was not quite sure. If he could only be quite sure! He wallowed on the bed, and his hand turned idly the pages of the Bible, lying outside on the coverlet.

More than an hour had gone by. Could he accept it as an indication that God had indeed heard him? He shifted himself upon the bed, and stared up at the ceiling through a chink in the covers as if through and beyond the ceiling he were interrogating heaven.

And lying so, there came a damp touch upon his hand, soft and chill and silent, as if it were delicately and ironically brushed by the kiss of Death. A sudden agony numbed his hand and arm. With the compulsion of hysteria, not to be resisted, his head lifted and he sat up and looked. Over the Bible and his hand that lay upon the open page there floated again a puff of smoke, and faintly staining his Angers and the paper itself was something moist and red. It stained his Angers and it marked with red for his straining sight this passage of Isaiah:

“The earth also shall disclose her blood.”

It was then he cried out, “Oh, God! God! Again! You meant it, then, God! You meant it.”

It was nearly midnight when Tommy and his friend Dobson returned to the hotel. “Your paper’s been trying to get you for an hour, Mr. Hawkins,” said the night clerk when they came in. “Story right in the next room to yours. Old party in there hanged himself.”

“So?” said Tommy. “Ungrateful old guy, he is! I put in the afternoon trying to cheer him up a little.”

“Did you know him?” asked the clerk.

“Nope,” said Tommy, moving toward the elevator.

But a few moments later, confronted with the grotesque spectacle in the room upstairs, he said, “Yes—I—I know him. Jack! Jack! Get me out of here, Jack! It’s Uncle Ezra, Jack! He’s—he’s come for me!”

As has been remarked before, sometimes even a bubble may be a mordant weapon.