The Chances of the Street

By Don Marquis

Merriwether Buck had lost all his money. Also his sisters’, and his cousins’, and his aunts’.

“At two o’clock sharp I will shoot myself,” said Merriwether Buck.

He caressed a ten-shot automatic pistol in the right-hand pocket of his coat as he loitered up Broadway. He was light-headed. He had had nothing to eat for forty-eight hours.

“How I hate you!” said Merriwether Buck, comprehensively to the city in general. “If nine pistol shots would blot you out, I’d do it!”

Very melodramatic language, this, for a well-brought-up young man; and thus indicating that he was light-headed, indeed. And as for the city, it continued to roar and rattle and honk and rumble and squeak and bawl and shuffle and thunder and grate in the same old way—supreme in its confidence that nine pistol shots could not, by any possibility, blot it out. That is one of the most disconcerting things about a city; you become enraged at it, and the city doesn’t even know it. Unless you happen to be Nero it is very difficult to blot them out satisfactorily.

It was one o’clock. Merriwether Buck crossed the street at Herald Square and went over and stood in front of the big newspaper office. A portly young fellow with leaden eyes came out of the building and stood meditatively on the curb with his hands in the pockets of clothing that clamored shrilly of expense.

“Excuse me,” said Merriwether Buck, approaching him, “but are you, by any chance, a reporter?”

“Uh,” grunted the young man, frigidly affirmative.

“I can put you in the way of a good story,” said Merriwether Buck, obeying an impulse: We may live anonymously but most of us like to feel that it will make a little stir when we die.

“Huh,” remarked the reporter.

“At two o’clock,” persisted Merriwether Buck, “I am going to shoot myself.”

The reporter looked bored; his specialty was politics.

“Are you anybody in particular?” he asked, discouragingly.

“No,” confessed Merriwether Buck. It didn’t seem to be worth while to mention that he was one of the Bucks of Bucktown, Merriwether County, Georgia.

“I thought,” said the reporter, with an air of rebuke, “that you said it was a good story.”

“I am, at least, a human being,” said Merriwether Buck, on the defensive.

“They’re cheap, hereabout,” returned the other, in the manner of a person who has estimated a good many assorted lots.

“You are callous,” said Merriwether Buck. “Callous to the soul! What are you, but—but—Why, you are New York incarnate! That is what you are! And I think I will shoot you first!”

“I don’t want to be a spoil sport,” said the reporter, “but I’m afraid I can’t allow it. I have a rather important assignment.”

Merriwether played with the little automatic pistol in his pocket. It was not any regard for the consequences that deterred him from shooting the portly young man. But in his somewhat dizzy brain a fancy was taking shape; a whim worked in him. He drew his hand empty from the pocket, and that reporter came up out of the grave.

“I am hungry,” said Merriwether Buck, in obedience to the whim.

“Now that you remind me of it,” said the other, his lack-luster eyes lighting up a little, “so am I!” And he crossed the street and disappeared through the swinging doors of a café.

Callous, leaden-eyed young man! epitome of this hard town! So cried the spirit of Merriwether Buck; and then he spoke aloud, formulating his idea:

“New York, you are on trial. You are in the balances. I give you an hour. If I’m asked to lunch by two o’clock, all right. If not, I will kill myself, first carefully shooting down the most prosperous citizens, and as many of ‘em as I can reach. New York, it’s up to you!”

The idea of playing it out that way tickled him to the heart; he had always loved games of chance. One man or woman out of all the prosperous thousands in the streets might save another prosperous half-dozen; might save as many as he could otherwise reach with nine shots from his pistol, for he would reserve the tenth for himself. Otherwise, there should be a sacrifice; he would offer up a blood atonement for the pagan city’s selfishness. Giddy and feverish, and drunk with the sense of his power to slay, he beheld himself as a kind of grotesque priest—and he threw back his head and laughed at the maniac conceit.

A woman who was passing turned at the sound, and their eyes met. She smiled. Merriwether Buck was good to look at. So was she. She was of that type of which men are certain at once, without quite knowing why; while women are often puzzled, saying to themselves: “After all, it may be only her rings.”

“Pardon me,” said Merriwether Buck, overtaking her, “but you and I are to lunch together, aren’t we?”

“I like your nerve!” said she. And she laughed. It was evident that she did like it. “Where?” she asked briefly, falling into step beside him.

“Wherever you like,” said Merriwether. “I leave that to you, as I’m depending on you to pay the check.”

She began a doubtful laugh, and then, seeing that it wasn’t a joke, repeated:

“I like your nerve!” And it was now evident that she didn’t like it.

“See here,” he said, speaking rapidly, “my clothes look all right yet, but I’m broke. I’m hungry. I haven’t had anything to eat since day before yesterday. I’m not kidding you; it’s true. You looked like a good fellow to me, and I took a chance. Hunger” (as he spoke it he seemed to remember having heard the remark before), “hunger makes one a judge of faces; I gambled on yours.”

She wasn’t complimented; she regarded him with a manner in which scorn and incredulity were blended; Merriwether Buck perceived that, for some reason or other, she was insulted.

“Don’t,” she said, “don’t pull any of that sentimental stuff on me. I thought you was a gentleman!”

And she turned away from him. He took a step in pursuit and started to renew his plea; for he was determined to play his game square and give the directing deities of the city a fair chance to soften whatsoever random heart they would.

“Beat it!” she shrilled, “beat it, you cheap grafter, or I’ll call a cop!”

And Merriwether beat it; nor’ by nor’west he beat it, as the street beats it; as the tides beat. The clock on the Times building marked 1.20 as he paused by the subway station there. In forty minutes—just the time it takes to hook your wife’s dress or put a girdle round the world—Merri-wether Buck would be beating it toward eternity, shooing before him a flock of astonished ghosts of his own making. Twenty minutes had gone by and whatever gods they be that rule New York had made no sign; perhaps said gods were out at lunch or gone to Coney Island. Twice twenty minutes more, and——

But no. It is all over now. It must be. There emerges from the subway station one who is unmistakably a preacher. The creases of his face attest a smiling habit; no doubt long years of doing good have given it that stamp; the puffs of white hair above the temples add distinction to benignity.

“I beg your pardon,” said Merriwether Buck, “but are you a minister?”

“Eh?” said the reverend gentleman, adjusting a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses. “Yes,” he said pleasantly, “I am,” and he removed the glasses and put them back on once again, as he spoke. Somehow, the way he did it was a benediction.

“I am hungry,” said Merriwether.

“Dear me!” said the reverend gentleman. “I shouldn’t have thought it.”

“Will you ask me to lunch?”

“Eh?” It was an embarrassing question; but the gentleman was all good nature. His air indicated that he did not intend to let his own embarrassment embarrass Merriwether too much. “My dear man, you know—really——” He placed a shapely hand upon Merriwether’s shoulder, rallyingly, almost affectionately, and completed the sentence with a laugh.

“It’s charity I’m asking for,” said Merriwether.

“Oh!” For some reason he seemed vastly relieved. “Have you been—but, dear me, are you sure you aren’t joking?”

“Yes; sure.”

“And have you—ahem!—have you sought aid from any institution; any charitable organization, you know?”

“But no,” said Merriwether, who had instinctively eliminated charitable organizations, free lunches and police stations from the terms of his wager, “I thought——”

“My, my, my,” hummed the reverend gentleman, interrupting him. He produced his card case and took a card therefrom. “I am going,” he said, writing on the card with a pencil, “to give you my card to the secretary of the Combined Charities. Excellent system they have there. You’ll be investigated, you know,” he said brightly, as if that were an especial boon he was conferring, “your record looked into—character and antecedents and all that sort of thing!”

“And fed?” asked Merriwether.

“Oh, indeed!” And he handed over the card as if he were giving Merriwether the keys to the city—but not too gross and material a city either; Merriwether felt almost as if he were being baptized.

“But,” said Merriwether Buck, “I wanted you to feed me!”

“Oh, my dear man!” smiled the minister, “I am doing it, you know. I’m a subscriber—do all my charitable work this way. Saves time. Well, good-by.” And he nodded cheerily.

“But,” said Merriwether Buck, “aren’t you interested in me personally? Don’t you want to hear my story?”

“Story? Story?” hummed the other. “Indeed, but they’ll learn your story there! They have the most excellent system there; card system; cases and case numbers, you know—Stories, bless you! Hundreds and hundreds of stories! Big file cases! You’ll be number so-and-so. Really,” he said, with a beaming enthusiasm, “they have a wonderful system. Well, good-by!” There was a touch of finality in his pleasant tone, but Merriwether caught him by the sleeve.

“See here,” he said, “haven’t you even got any curiosity about me? Don’t you even want to know why I’m hungry? Can’t you find time yourself to listen to the tale?”

“Time,” said the reverend gentleman, “time is just what I feel the lack of—feel it sadly, at moments like these, sadly.” He sighed, but it was an optimistic, good-humored sort of sigh. “But I tell you what you do.” He drew forth another card and scribbled on it. “If you want to tell me your story so very badly—(dear me, what remarkable situations the clerical life lets one in for!)—so very badly, take this card to my study about 3.30. You’ll find my stenographer there and you can dictate it to her; she’ll type it out. Yes, indeed, she’ll type it out! Well, good-by!”

And with a bright backward nod he was off.

It was 1.25. There were thirty-five minutes more of life. Merriwether Buck gave the reverend gentleman’s cards to a seedy individual who begged from him, with the injunction to go and get himself charitably Bertilloned like a gentleman and stop whining, and turned eastward on Forty-second Street. If you have but thirty-five minutes of life, why not spend them on Fifth Avenue, where sightly things abound?—indeed if you happen to be a homicidal maniac of some hours standing, like Merriwether Buck, Fifth Avenue should be good hunting ground; the very place to mark the fat and greasy citizens of your sacrifice.

Time, the only patrician, will not step lively for the pert subway guards of human need, nor yet slacken pace for any bawling traffic cop of man’s desire; he comes of an old family too proud to rush, too proud to wait; a fine old fellow with a sense of his own value. Time walked with Merriwether Buck as he loitered up Fifth Avenue, for the old gentleman loves to assist personally at these little comedies, sometimes; with Death a hang-dog third. Not even a fly-cop took note of the trio, although several, if they robbed a jewelry store or anything like that, would tell the reporters later that they had noticed something suspicious at the time. And the patron deities of New York City might have been over in Hoboken playing pinochle for all the heed they took.

Which brings us to Sixty-fifth Street and 1.58 o’clock and the presence of the great man, all at once.

When Merriwether Buck first saw him, Meriwether Buck gasped. He couldn’t believe it. And, indeed, it was a thing that might not happen again this year or next year or in five years—J. Dupont Evans, minus bulwark or attendant, even minus his habitual grouch, walking leisurely toward him like any approachable and common mortal. Merriwether Buck might well be incredulous. But it was he; the presentment of that remarkable face has been printed a hundred thousand times; it is as well known to the world at large as Uncle Pete Watson’s cork leg is on the streets of Prairie Centre, Ill.; it is unmistakable.

To have J. Dupont Evans at the point of a pistol might almost intoxicate some sane and well-fed men, and Merriwether Buck was neither. J. Dupont Evans—the wealth of Croesus would be just one cracked white chip in the game he plays. But at this moment his power and his importance had been extraordinarily multiplied by circumstances. The chances of the street had tumbled down a half dozen banks—(well did Merriwether Buck know that, since it had ruined him)—and financial panic was in the air; an epochal and staggering disaster threatened; and at this juncture a president in no wise humble had publicly confessed his own impotence and put it up to J. Dupont Evans to avert, to save, to reassure.

Merriwether Buck had not dreamed of this; in the crook of his trigger finger lay, not merely the life of a man, but the immediate destiny of a nation.

He grasped the pistol in his pocket, and aimed it through the cloth.

“Do you know what time it is?” he asked J. Dupont Evans, politely enough.

It was only a second before the man answered. But in that second Merriwether Buck, crazily exalted, and avid of the sensation he was about to create, had a swift vision. He saw bank after bank come crashing down; great railroad systems ruined; factories closed and markets stagnant; mines shut and crops ungathered in the fields; ships idle at the wharves; pandemonium and ruin everywhere.

“Huh?” said J. Dupont Evans, gruffly, removing an unlighted cigar from his mouth. He looked at Merriwether Buck suspiciously, and made as if to move on. But he thought better of it the next instant, evidently, for he pulled out a plain silver watch and said grudgingly: “Two minutes of two.” And then, in a tone less unpleasant, he asked: “Have you got a match, young man?”

Merriwether fumbled in his vest pocket. In a minute and a half he would perfunctorily ask this man for lunch, and then he would kill him. But he would give him a match first—for Merriwether Buck was a well-brought-up young man. As he fumbled he picked out the exact spot on the other’s waistcoat where he would plant the bullet. But the idea of a man on the edge of the grave lighting a cigar tickled him so that he laughed aloud as he held out the matches.

“What can I do with these?” snorted J. Dupont Evans. “They are the sort that light only on their own box.” From his glance one might have gained the impression that he thought Merriwether Buck a fool.

“Great principle that,” said Merriwether Buck, cackling with hysteria. It was so funny that a dead man should want to smoke a cigar! He would let him play he was alive for fifty seconds longer.

“Principle?” said Evans. “Principle? What Principle?”

“Well,” said Merriwether, with the random argumentativeness of insanity, “it is a great principle. Apply that principle to some high explosive, for instance, and you have no more battleship flare-backs—no premature mine blasts——”

“Say,” the other suddenly interrupted, “are you an inventor?”

“Yes,” lied Merriwether Buck, glibly, although he had never given five seconds’ thought to the subject of high explosives in his life. “That’s how I know. I’ve invented an explosive more powerful than dynamite. But it won’t explode by contact with fire, like powder. Won’t explode with a jar, like dynamite. Won’t freeze, like dynamite. Only one way to explode it—you’ve got to bring it into contact with a certain other chemical the same as scratching one of these matches on its own box.”

“The deuce, young man!” said the other. “There’s a fortune in it! Is it on the market at all?”

“No,” said Merriwether Buck, raising his pistol hand slightly and thrusting it a bit forward, under the mask of his coat pocket, “no money to start it going.”

“Hum,” mused the other. “I tell you what you do, young man. You come along to lunch with me and we’ll talk the thing over—money and all.”

And the directing deities of New York struck twice on all the city clocks, and striking, winked.