Old Man Murtrie
By Don Marquis
Old Man Murtrie never got any fresh air at all, except on Sundays on his way to and from church. He lived, slept, cooked and ate back of the prescription case in his little dismal drug store in one of the most depressing quarters of Brooklyn. The store was dimly lighted by gas and it was always damp and suggested a tomb. Drifting feebly about in the pale and cold and faintly greenish radiance reflected from bottles and show cases, Old Man Murtrie with his bloodless face and dead white hair and wisps of whisker was like a ghost that has not managed to get free from the neighborhood of a sepulcher where its body lies disintegrating.
People said that Old Man Murtrie was nearly a hundred years old, but this was not true; he was only getting along towards ninety. The neighborhood, however, seemed a little impatient with him for not dying. Some persons suggested that perhaps he really had been dead for a long time, and did not know it. If so, they thought, it might be kind to tell him about it.
But Old Man Murtrie was not dead, any more than he was alive. And Death himself, who has his moments of impatience, began to get worried about Old Man Murtrie. It was time, Death thought, that he was dead, since he looked so dead; and Death had said so, both to God and to the Devil.
“But I don’t want to garner him, naturally,” Death would say, “till I know which one of you is to have him. He’s got to go somewhere, you know.”
God and Death and the Devil used to sit on the prescription counter in a row, now and then, and watch Old Man Murtrie as he slept in his humble little cot back there, and discuss him.
God would look at Old Man Murtrie’s pale little Adam’s Apple sticking up in the faint gaslight, and moving as he snored—moving feebly, for even his snores were feeble—and say, with a certain distaste:
“I don’t want him. He can’t get into Heaven.”
And the Devil would look at his large, weak, characterless nose;—a nose so big that it might have suggested force on any one but Old Man Murtrie—and think what a sham it was, and how effectually all its contemptible effort to be a real nose was exposed in Old Man Murtrie’s sleep. And the Devil would say:
“I don’t want him. He can’t get into Hell.”
And then Death would say, querulously: “But he can’t go on living forever. My reputation is suffering.”
“You should take him,” the Devil would say to God. “He goes to church on Sunday, and he is the most meek and pious and humble and prayerful person in all Brooklyn, and perhaps in all the world.”
“But he takes drugs,” God would say. “You should take him, because he is a drug fiend.”
“He takes drugs,” the Devil would admit, “but that doesn’t make him a fiend. You have to do something besides take drugs to be a fiend. You will permit me to have my own notions, I am sure, on what constitutes a fiend.”
“You ought to forgive him the drugs for the sake of his piety,” the Devil would say. “And taking drugs is his only vice. He doesn’t drink, or smoke tobacco, or use profane language, or gamble. And he doesn’t run after women.”
“You ought to forgive him the piety for the sake of the drugs,” God would tell the Devil.
“I never saw such a pair as you two,” Death would say querulously. “Quibble, quibble, quibble!—while Old Man Murtrie goes on and on living! He’s lived so long that he is affecting death rates and insurance tables, all by himself, and you know what that does to my reputation.”
And Death would stoop over and run his finger caressingly across Old Man Murtrie’s throat, as the Old Man slept. Whereupon Old Man Murtrie would roll over on his back and moan in his sleep and gurgle.
“He has wanted to be a cheat all his life,” God would say to the Devil. “He has always had the impulse to give short weight and substitute inferior drugs in his prescriptions and overcharge children who were sent on errands to his store. If that isn’t sin I don’t know what sin is. You should take him.”
“I admit he has had those impulses,” the Devil would say to God. “But he has never yielded to them. In my opinion having those impulses and conquering them makes him a great deal more virtuous than if he’d never had ‘em. No one who is as virtuous as all that can get into Hell.”
“I never saw such a pair,” Death would grumble. “Can’t you agree with each other about anything?”
“He didn’t abstain from his vices because of any courage,” God would say. “He abstained simply because he was afraid. It wasn’t virtue in him; it was cowardice.”
“The fear of the Lord,” murmured the Devil, dreamily, “is the beginning of all wisdom.”
“But not necessarily the end of it,” God would remark.
“Argue, argue, argue,” Death would say, “and here’s Old Man Murtrie still alive! I’m criticized about the way I do my work, but no one has any idea of the vacillation and inefficiency I have to contend with! I never saw such a pair as you two to vacillate!”
Sometimes Old Man Murtrie would wake up and turn over on his couch and see God and Death and the Devil sitting in a row on the prescription counter, looking at him. But he always persuaded himself that it was a sort of dream, induced by the “medicine” he took; and he would take another dose of his “medicine” and go back to sleep again. He never spoke to them when he waked, but just lay on his cot and stared at them; and if they spoke to him he would pretend to himself that they had not spoken. For it was absurd to think that God and Death and the Devil could really be sitting there, in the dim greenish gaslight, among all the faintly radiant bottles, talking to each other and looking at him; and so Old Man Murtrie would not believe it.
When he first began taking his “medicine” Old Man Murtrie took it in the form of a certain patent preparation which was full of opium. He wanted the opium more and more after he started, but he pretended to himself that he did not know there was much opium in that medicine. Then, when a federal law banished that kind of medicine from the markets, he took to making it for his own use. He would not take opium outright, for that would be to acknowledge to himself that he was an opium eater; he thought eating opium was a sin, and he thought of himself as sinless. But to make the medicine with the exact formula that its manufacturers had used, before they had been compelled to shut up shop, and use it, did not seem to him to be the same thing at all as being an opium eater. And yet, after the law was passed, abolishing the medicine, he would not sell to any one else what he made for himself; his conscience would not allow him to do so. Therefore, he must have known that he was eating opium at the same time he tried to fool himself about it.
God and the Devil used to discuss the ethics of this attitude towards the “medicine,” and Old Man Murtrie would sometimes pretend to be asleep and would listen to them.
“He knows it is opium all right,” God would say. “He is just lying to himself about it. He ought to go to Hell. No one that lies to himself that way can get into Heaven.”
“He’s pretending for the sake of society in general and for the sake of religion,” the Devil would say. “If he admitted to himself that it was opium and if he let the world know that he took opium, it might bring discredit on the church that he loves so well. He might become a stumbling block to others who are seeking salvation, and who seek it through the church. He is willing to sacrifice himself so as not to hamper others in their religious life. For my part, I think it is highly honorable of him, and highly virtuous. No person as moral as that in his instincts can get into Hell.”
“Talk, talk, talk!” Death would say. “The trouble with you two is that neither one of you wants Old Man Murtrie around where you will have to look at him through all eternity, and each of you is trying to put it on moral grounds.”
And Old Man Murtrie kept on living and praying and being pious and wanting to be bad and not daring to and taking his medicine and being generally as ineffectual in the world either for good or evil as a butterfly in a hurricane.
But things took a turn. There was a faded-looking blonde woman with stringy hair by the name of Mable who assisted Old Man Murtrie in the store, keeping his books and waiting on customers, and so forth. She was unmarried, and one day she announced to him that she was going to have a child.
Old Man Murtrie had often looked at her with a recollection, a dim and faint remembrance, of the lusts of his youth and of his middle age. In his youth and middle age he had lusted after many women, but he had never let any of them know it, because he was afraid, and he had called his fears virtue, and had really believed that he was virtuous.
“Whom do you suspect?” asked Old Man Murtrie, leering at Mable like a wraith blown down the ages from the dead adulteries of ruined Babylon.
“Who?” cried Mable, an unlessoned person, but with a cruel, instinctive humor. “Who but you!”
She had expected Old Man Murtrie to be outraged at her ridiculous joke, and, because she was unhappy herself, had anticipated enjoying his astounded protests. But it was she who was astounded. Old Man Murtrie’s face was blank and his eyes were big for a moment, and then he chuckled; a queer little cackling chuckle. And when she went out he opened the door for her and cocked his head and cackled again.
It gave Mable an idea. She reflected that he took so much opium that he might possibly be led to believe the incredible, and she might get some money out of him. So the next evening she brought her mother and her brother to the store and accused him.
Old Man Murtrie chuckled and… and admitted it! Whether he believed that it could be true or not, Mable and her people were unable to determine. But they made the tactical error of giving him his choice between marriage and money, and he chose matrimony.
And then Old Man Murtrie was suddenly seized with a mania for confession. God and Death and the Devil used to listen to him nights, and they wondered over him, and began to change their minds about him, a little. He confessed to the officials of his church. He confessed to all the people whom he knew. He insisted on making a confession, a public confession, in the church itself and asking for the prayers of the preacher and congregation for his sin, and telling them that he was going to atone by matrimony, and asking for a blessing on the wedding.
And one night, full of opium, while he-was babbling about it in his sleep, God and Death and the Devil sat on the prescription counter again and looked at him and listened to his ravings and speculated.
“I’m going to have him,” said the Devil. “Any one who displays such conspicuous bad taste that he goes around confessing that he has ruined a woman ought to go to Hell.”
“You don’t want him for that reason,” said God. “And you know you don’t. You want him because you admire the idea of adultery, and think that now he is worthy of a place in Hell. You are rather entertained by Old Man Murtrie, and want him around now.”
“Well,” said the Devil, “suppose I admit that is true! Have you any counter claim?”
“Yes,” said God. “I am going to take Old Man Murtrie into Heaven. He knows he is not the father of the child that is going to be born, but he has deliberately assumed the responsibility lest it be born fatherless, and I think that is a noble act.”
“Rubbish!” said the Devil. “That isn’t the reason you want him. You want him because of the paternal instinct he displays. It flatters you!”
“Well,” said God, “why not? The paternal instinct is another name for the great creative force of the universe. I have been known by many names in many countries… they called me Osiris, the All-Father, in Egypt, and they called me Jehovah in Palestine, and they called me Zeus and Brahm… but always they recognized me as the Father. And this instinct for fatherliness appeals to me. Old Man Murtrie shall come to Heaven.”
“Such a pair as you two,” said Death, gloomily, “I never did see! Discuss and discuss, but never get anywhere! And all the time Old Man Murtrie goes on living.”
And then Death added:
“Why not settle this matter once and for all, right now? Why not wake Old Man Murtrie up and let him decide?”
“Decide?” asked the Devil.
“Yes,—whether he wants to go to Hell or to Heaven.”
“I imagine,” said God, “that if we do that there can be no question as to which place he would rather go to.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Devil. “Some people come to Hell quite willingly. I’ve been to Heaven myself, you know, and I can quite understand why. Are you afraid to have Old Man Murtrie make the choice?”
“Wake him up, Death, wake him up,” said God. “It’s unusual to allow people to know that they are making their own decision—though all of them, in a sense, do make it—but wake him up, Death, and we’ll see.”
So Death prodded Old Man Murtrie in the ribs, and they asked him. For a long time he thought it was only opium, but when he finally understood that it was really God and Death and the Devil who were there, and that it was really they who had often been there before, he was very much frightened. He was so frightened he couldn’t choose.
“I’ll leave it to you, I’ll leave it to you,” said Old Man Murtrie. “Who am I that I should set myself up to decide?”
“Well,” said God, getting a little angry, perhaps, “if you don’t want to go to Heaven, Murtrie, you don’t have to. But you’ve been, praying to go to Heaven, and all that sort of thing, for seventy or eighty years, and I naturally thought you were in earnest. But I’m through with you… you can go to Hell.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” moaned Old Man Murtrie.
“No,” said the Devil, “I’ve changed my mind, too. My distaste for Murtrie has returned to me. I don’t want him around. I won’t have him in Hell.”
“See here, now!” cried Death. “You two are starting it all over again. I won’t have it, so I won’t! You aren’t fair to Murtrie, and you aren’t fair to me! This matter has got to be settled, and settled to-night!”
“Well, then,” said God, “settle it. I’ve ceased to care one way or another.”
“I will not,” said Death, “I know my job, and I stick to my job. One of you two has got to settle it.”
“Toss a coin,” suggested the Devil, indifferently.
Death looked around for one.
“There’s a qu-qu-quarter in m-m-my t-t-trousers’ p-p-pocket,” stammered Old Man Murtrie, and then stuck his head under the bedclothes and shivered as if he had the ague.
Death picked up Murtrie’s poor little weazened trousers from the floor at the foot of the cot, where they lay sprawled untidily, and shook them till the quarter dropped out.
He picked it up.
“Heads, he goes to Heaven. Tails, he goes to Hell,” said Death, and tossed the coin to the ceiling. Murtrie heard it hit the ceiling, and started. He heard it hit the floor, and bounce, and jingle and spin and roll and come to rest. And he thrust his head deeper under the covers and lay there quaking. He did not dare look.
“Look at it, Murtrie,” said Death.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” groaned Murtrie, shaking the cot.
But Death reached over and caught him by the neck and turned his face so that he could not help seeing. And Old Man Murtrie looked and saw that the coin had fallen with the side up that sent him to——
But, really, why should I tell you? Go and worry about your own soul, and let Old Man Murtrie’s alone.
