Never Say Die

Never Say Die

By Don Marquis

|There seemed nothing left but suicide.

But how? In what manner? By what method? Mr. Gooley lay on his bed and thought—or tried to think. The pain in his head, which had been there ever since the day after he had last eaten, prevented easy and coherent thought.

It had been three days ago that the pain left his stomach and went into his head. Hunger had become a cerebral thing, he told himself. His body had felt hunger so long that it refused to feel it any longer; it had shifted the burden to his brain.

“It has passed the buck to my mind, my stomach has,” murmured Mr. Gooley feebly. And the mind, less by the process of coherent and connected thought than by a sudden impulsive pounce, had grasped the idea of suicide.

“Not with a knife,” considered Mr. Gooley. He had no knife. He had no money to buy a knife. He had no strength to go down the three flights of stairs in the cheap Brooklyn lodging house where he lay, and borrow a knife from the landlady who came and went vaguely in the nether regions, dim and damp and dismal.

“Not with a knife,” repeated Mr. Gooley. And a large cockroach, which had been crawling along the footpiece of the old-fashioned wooden bed, stopped crawling at the words as if it understood, and turned about and looked at him.

Mr. Gooley wondered painfully, for it was a pain even to wonder about anything, why this cockroach should remind him of somebody who was somehow connected with a knife, and not unpleasantly connected with a knife. The cockroach stood up on the hindmost pair of his six legs, and seemed to put his head on one side and motion with his front legs at Mr. Gooley.

“I get you,” said Mr. Gooley, conscious that his mind was wandering from the point, and willing to let it wander. “I know who you are! You were Old Man Archibald Hammil, the hardware merchant back in Mapletown, where I was a kid, before you dried up and turned into a cockroach.” And Mr. Gooley wept a few weak tears. For old Archibald Hammil, the village hardware merchant, had sold him the first knife he had ever owned. His father had taken him into Hammil’s store to buy it on his seventh birthday, for a present, and it had had a buckhorn handle and two blades. Again he saw Old Man Hammil in his dingy brown clothes, looking at him, with his head on one side, as this cockroach was doing. Again he felt his father pat him on the head, and heard him say always to remember to whittle away from himself, never toward himself. And he saw himself, shy and flushed and eager, a freckle-faced boy as good and as bad as most boys, looking up at his father and wriggling and wanting to thank him, and not knowing how. That was nearly forty years ago—and here he was, a failure and starving and———

Why had he wanted a knife? Yes, he remembered now! To kill himself with.

“It’s none of your damned business, Old Man Hammil,” he said to the cockroach, which was crawling back and forth on the footboard, and pausing every now and then to look at him with disapproval.

Old Man Hammil had had ropes in his store, too, and guns and pistols, he remembered. He hadn’t thought of Old Man Hammi’s store in many years; but now he saw it, and the village street outside it, and the place where the stores left off on the street and the residences began, and berry bushes, and orchards, and clover in the grass—the random bloom, the little creek that bounded the town, and beyond the creek the open country with its waving fields of oats and rye and com. His head hurt him worse. He would go right back into Old Man Hammil’s store and get a rope or a gun and end that pain.

But that was foolish, too. There wasn’t any store. There was only Old Man Hammil here, shrunk to the size of a cockroach, in his rusty brown suit, looking at him from the footboard of the bed and telling him in pantomime not to kill himself.

“I will too!” cried Mr. Gooley to Old Man Hammil. And he repeated, “It’s none of your damned business!”

But how? Not with a knife. He had none. Not with a gun. He had none. Not with a rope. He had none. He thought of his suspenders. But they would never hold him.

“Too weak, even for me,” muttered Mr. Gooley. “I have shrunk so I don’t weigh much more than Old Man Hammil there, but even at that those suspenders would never do the business.”

How did people kill themselves? He must squeeze his head till the pain let up a little, so he could think. Poison! That was it—yes, poison! And then he cackled out a small, dry, throaty laugh, his Adam’s apple fluttering in his weazened throat under his sandy beard. Poison! He hadn’t any poison. He hadn’t any money with which to buy poison.

And then began a long, broken and miserable debate within himself. If he had money enough with which to buy poison, would he go and buy poison? Or go and buy a bowl of soup? It was some moments before Mr. Gooley decided.

“I’d be game,” he said. “I’d buy the soup. I’d give myself that one more chance. I must remember while I’m killing myself, that I’m not killing myself because I want to. I’m just doing it because I’ve got to. I’m not romantic. I’m just all in. It’s the end; that’s all.”

Old Man Hammil, on the footboard of the bed, permitted himself a series of gestures which Mr. Gooley construed as applause of this resolution. They angered Mr. Gooley, those gestures.

“You shut up!” he told the cockroach, although that insect had not spoken, but only made signs. “This is none of your damned business, Old Man Hammil!”

Old Man Hammil, he remembered, had always been a meddlesome old party—one of the village gossips, in fact. And that set him to thinking of Mapletown again.

The mill pond near the schoolhouse would soon be freezing over, and the boys would be skating on it—it was getting into December. And they would be going into Old Man Hammil’s store for skates and straps and heel plates and files. And he remembered his first pair of skates, and how his father had taught him the proper way to keep them sharp with a file. He and the old dad had always been pretty good pals, and——

Good God! Why should he be coming back to that? And to Old Man Hammil’s store? It was that confounded cockroach there, reminding him of Old Man Hammil, that had done it. He wanted to die decently and quietly, and as quickly as might be, without thinking of all these things. He didn’t want to lie there and die of starvation, he wanted to kill himself and be done with it without further misery—and it was a part of the ridiculous futility of his life, his baffled and broken and insignificant life, that he couldn’t even kill himself competently—that he lay there suffering and ineffectual and full of self-pity, a prey to memories and harassing visions of the past, all mingled with youth and innocence and love, without the means of a quick escape. It was that damned cockroach, looking like Old Man Hammil, the village hardware merchant, that had brought back the village and his youth to him, and all those intolerable recollections.

He took his dirty pillow and feebly menaced the cockroach. Feeble as the gesture was, the insect took alarm. It disappeared from the footboard of the bed. A minute later, however, he saw it climbing the wall. It reached the ceiling, and crawled to the center of the room. Mr. Goo-ley watched it. He felt as if he, too, could crawl along the ceiling. He had the crazy notion of trying. After all, he told himself light-headedly, Old Cockroach Hammil up there on the ceiling had been friendly—the only friendly thing, human or otherwise, that had made overtures to him in many, many months. And he had scared Cockroach Hammil away! He shed some more maudlin tears.

What was the thing doing now? He watched as the insect climbed on to the gas pipe that came down from the ceiling. It descended the rod and perched itself on the gas jet. From this point of vantage it began once more to regard Mr. Gooley with a singular intentness.

Ah! Gas! That was it! What a fool he had been not to think of it sooner! That was the way people killed themselves! Gas!

Mr. Gooley got himself weakly out of bed. He would get the thing over as quickly as possible now. It would be damnably unpleasant before he lost consciousness, no doubt, and painful. But likely not more unpleasant and painful than his present state. And he simply could not bear any more of those recollections, any more visions.

He turned his back on the cockroach, which was watching him from the gas jet, and went methodically to work. The window rattled; between the upper and lower sashes there was a crevice a quarter of an inch wide. He plugged it with paper. There was a break in the wall of his closet; the plaster had fallen away, and a chink allowed the cockroaches from his room easy access to the closet of the adjoining room. He plugged that also, and was about to turn his attention to the keyhole, when there came a knock on his door.

Mr. Gooley’s first thought was: “What can any one want with a dead man?” For he looked upon himself as already dead. There came a second knock, more peremptory than the first, and he said mechanically, “Come in!” It would have to be postponed a few minutes, that was all.

The door opened, and in walked his landlady. She was a tall and bulky and worried-looking woman, who wore a faded blond wig that was always askew, and Mr. Gooley was afraid of her. Her wig was more askew than usual when she entered, and he gathered from this that she was angry about something—why the devil must she intrude her trivial mundane anger upon himself, a doomed man? It was not seemly.

“Mr. Gooley,” she began severely, without preamble, “I have always looked on you as a gentleman.”

“Yes?” he murmured dully.

“But you ain’t,” she continued. “You ain’t no better than a cheat.”

He shrugged his shoulders patiently. He supposed that she was right about it. He owed her three weeks’ room rent, and he was going to die and beat her out of it. But he couldn’t help it.

“It ain’t the room rent,” she went on, as if vaguely cognizant of the general trend of his thoughts. “It ain’t the room rent alone. You either pay me that or you don’t pay me that, and if you don’t, out you go. But while you are here, you must conduct yourself as a gentleman should!”

“Well,” murmured Mr. Gooley, “haven’t I?”

And the cockroach, perched on the gas jet above the landlady’s head, and apparently listening to this conversation, moved several of his legs, as if in surprise.

“You have not!” said the landlady, straightening her wig.

“What have I done, Mrs. Hinkley?” asked Mr. Gooley humbly. And Old Cockroach Hammil from his perch also made signs of inquiry.

“What have you done! What have you done!” cried Mrs. Hinkley. “As if the man didn’t know what he had done I You’ve been stealin’ my gas, that’s what you have been doin’—stealin’, I say, and there’s no other word for it!”

Mr. Gooley started guiltily. He had not been stealing her gas, but it came over him with a shock for the first time that that was what he had, in effect, been planning to do. The cockroach, as if it also felt convicted of sin, gave the gas jet a glance of horror and moved up the rod to the ceiling, where it continued to listen.

“Stealin’!” repeated Mrs. Hinkley. “That’s what it is, nothin’ else but stealin’. You don’t ever stop to think when you use one of them gas plates to cook in your room, Mr. Gooley—which it is expressly forbid and agreed on that no cooking shall be done in these rooms when they’re rented to you—that it’s my gas you’re using, and that I have to pay for it, and that it’s just as much stealin’ as if you was to put your hand into my pocket-book and take my money!”

“Cooking? Gas plate?” muttered Mr. Gooley. “Don’t say you ain’t got one!” cried Mrs. Hinkley. “You all got ‘em! Every last one of you! Don’t you try to come none of your sweet innocence dodges over me. I know you, and the whole tribe of you! I ain’t kept lodgers for thirty years without knowing the kind of people they be! ‘Gas plate! Gas plate!’ says you, as innocent as if you didn’t know what a gas plate was! You got it hid here somewheres, and I ain’t going to stir from this room until I get my hands on it and squash it under my feet! Come across with it, Mr. Gooley, come across with it!”

“But I haven’t one,” said Mr. Gooley, very ill and very weary. “You can look, if you want to.”

And he lay back upon the bed. The cockroach slyly withdrew himself from the ceiling, came down the wall, and crawled to the foot of the bed again. If Mrs. Hinkley noticed him, she said nothing; perhaps it was not a part of her professional policy to draw attention to cockroaches on the premises. She stood and regarded Mr. Gooley for some moments, while he turned his head away from her in apathy. Her first anger seemed to have spent itself. But finally, with a new resolution, she said: “And look I will! You got one, or else that blondined party in the next room has lied.”

She went into the closet and he heard her opening his trunk. She pulled it into the bedroom and examined the interior. It didn’t take long. She dived under the bed and drew out his battered suitcase, so dilapidated that he had not been able to get a quarter for it at the pawnshop, but no more dilapidated than his trunk.

She seemed struck, for the first time since her entrance, with the utter bareness of the room. Outside of the bed, one chair, the bureau, and Mr. Cooley’s broken shoes at the foot of the bed, there was absolutely nothing in it.

She sat down in the chair beside the bed. “Mr. Gooley,” she said, “you ain’t got any gas plate.”

“No,” he said.

“Mr. Gooley,” she said, “you got nothing at all.

“No,” he said, “nothing.”

“You had a passel of books and an overcoat five or six weeks ago,” she said, “when you come here. It was seein’ them books, and knowing what you was four or five years ago, when you lived here once before, that made me sure you was a gentleman.”

Mr. Gooley made no reply. The cockroach on the foot of the bed also seemed to be listening to see if Mrs. Hinkley had anything more to say, and suspending judgment.

“Mr. Gooley,” said the landlady, “I beg your pardon. You was lied on by one that has a gas plate herself, and when I taxed her with it, and took it away from her, and got rid of her, she had the impudence to say she thought it was allowed, and that everybody done it, and named you as one that did.”

Mrs. Hinkley paused, but neither Mr. Gooley nor the cockroach had anything to contribute to the conversation.

“Gas,” continued Mrs. Hinkley, “is gas. And gas costs money. I hadn’t orter jumped on you the way I did, Mr. Gooley, but gas plates has got to be what you might call corns on my brain, Mr. Gooley. They’re my sensitive spot, Mr. Gooley. If I was to tell you the half of what I have had to suffer from gas plates during the last thirty years, Mr. Gooley, you wouldn’t believe it! There’s them that will cheat you one way and there’s them that will cheat you another, but the best of them will cheat you with gas plates, Mr. Gooley. With the exception of yourself, Mr. Gooley, I ain’t had a lodger in thirty years that wouldn’t rob me on the gas. Some don’t think it’s stealin’, Mr. Gooley, when they steal gas. And some of ‘em don’t care if it is. But there ain’t none of ‘em ever thinks what a landlady goes through with, year in and year out.”

She paused for a moment, and then, overcome with self-pity, she began to sniffle.

“And my rent’s been raised on me again, Mr. Gooley! And I’m a month behind! And if I ain’t come across with the two months, the old month and the new, by day after to-morrow, out I goes; and it means the poorhouse as fur as I can see, because I don’t know anything else but keeping lodgers, and I got no place to go!”

She gathered her apron up and wiped her eyes and nose with it. The cockroach on the footboard wiped his front set of feet across his face sympathetically.

“I got it all ready but fifteen dollars,” continued Mrs. Hinkley, “and then in comes the gas bill this morning with arrears onto it. It is them arrears, Mr. Gooley, that always knocks me out! If it wasn’t for them arrears, I could get along. And now I got to pay out part of the rent money onto the gas bill, with them arrears on it, or the gas will be shut off this afternoon.”

The pain in Mr. Gooley’s head was getting worse. He wished she would go. He hated hearing her troubles. But she continued:

“It’s the way them arrears come onto the bill, Mr. Gooley, that has got me sore. About a week before you come here again to live, Mr. Gooley, there was a fellow stole fifteen dollars worth of my gas all at once. He went and killed himself, Mr. Gooley, and he used my gas to do it with. It leaked out of two jets for forty-eight hours up on the top floor, before the door was busted in and the body was found, and it came to fifteen dollars, and all on account of that man’s cussedness, Mr. Gooley, I will likely get turned out into the street, and me sixty years old and no place to turn.”

Mr. Gooley sat up in bed feebly and looked at her. She was in real trouble—in about as much trouble as he was. The cockroach walked meditatively up and down the footboard, as if thinking it over very seriously.

Mrs. Hinkley finally rose.

“Mr. Gooley,” she said, regarding him sharply, “you look kind o’ done up!”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Gooley.

She lingered in the room for a few seconds more, irresolutely, and then departed.

Mr. Gooley thought. Gas was barred to him now. He couldn’t bring himself to do it with gas. There was still a chance that the old woman might get hold of the gas money and the rent money, too, and go on for a few years, but if he selfishly stole twelve or fifteen dollars’ worth of gas from her this afternoon it might be just the thing that would plunge her into immediate destitution. At any rate, it was, as she had said, like stealing money from her pocketbook. He thought of what her life as a rooming-house keeper must have been, and pitied her. He had known many rooming houses. The down-and-outers know how to gauge the reality and poignancy of the troubles of the down-and-out. No, he simply could not do it with gas.

He must think of some other method. He was on the fourth floor. He might throw himself out of the window onto the brick walk at the back of the building, and die. He shuddered as he thought of it. To jump from a twentieth story, or from the top of the Woolworth Tower, to a certain death is one thing. To contemplate a fall of three or four stories that may maim you without killing you, is another.

Nevertheless, he would do it. He pulled the paper out of the crevice between the window sashes, opened the window and looked down. He saw the back stoop and there was a dirty mop beside it; there was an ash can, and there were two garbage cans there. And there was a starved cat that sat and looked up at him. He had a tremor and drew back and covered his face with his hands as he thought of that cat—that knowing cat, that loathsome, that obscene cat.

He sat down on the edge of the bed to collect his strength and summon his resolution. The cockroach had crawled to the head of the bed and seemed to wish to partake of his thoughts.

“Damn you, Old Archibald Hammil!” he cried. And he scooped the cockroach into his hand with a sudden sweep and flung it out of the window. The insect fell without perceptible discomfort, and at once began to climb up the outside wall again, making for the window.

The door opened and Mrs. Hinkley entered, her face cleft with a grin, and a tray in her hands.

“Mr. Gooley,” she said, setting it on the wash-stand, “I’ll bet you ain’t had nothing to eat today!”

On the tray was a bowl of soup, a half loaf of bread with a long keen bread knife, a pat of butter, a boiled egg and a cup of coffee.

“No, nor yesterday, either,” said Mr. Gooley, and he looked at the soup and at the long keen bread knife.

“Here’s something else I want to show you, Mr. Gooley,” said the landlady, dodging out of the door and back in again instantly. She bore in her hands this time a surprising length of flexible gas tubing, and a small nickel-plated pearl-handled revolver.

“You see that there gas tubing?” she said.

“That is what that blondined party in the next room had on to her gas plate—the nerve of her! Strung from the gas jet clear across the room to the window sill. And when I throwed her out, Mr. Gooley, she wouldn’t pay her rent, and I took this here revolver to part pay it. What kind of a woman is it, Mr. Gooley, that has a revolver in her room, and a loaded one, too?”

Just then the doorbell rang in the dim lower regions, and she left the room to answer it.

And Mr. Gooley sat and looked at the knife, with which he might so easily stab himself, and at the gas cord, with which he might so easily hang himself, and at the loaded revolver, with which he might so easily shoot himself.

He looked also at the bowl of soup.

He had the strength to reflect—a meal is a meal. But after that meal, what? Penniless, broken in health, friendless, a failure—why prolong it for another twenty-four hours? A meal would prolong it, but that was all a meal would do—and after that would come the suffering and the despair and the end to be faced all over again.

Was he man enough to take the pistol and do it now?

Or did true manhood lie the other way? Was he man enough to drink the soup, and dare to live and hope?

Just then the cockroach, which had climbed into the window and upon the washstand, made for the bowl of soup.

“Here!” cried Mr. Gooley, grabbing the bowl in both hands, “Old Man Hammil! Get away from that soup!”

And the bowl being in his hands, he drank.

“What do you mean by Old Man Hammil?”

It was Mrs. Hinkley who spoke. She stood again in the doorway, with a letter in her hands and a look of wonder on her face.

Mr. Gooley set down the soup bowl. By an effort of the will he had only drunk half the liquid. He had heard somewhere that those who are suffering from starvation had better go slow at first when they get hold of food again. And he already felt better, warmed and resurrected, from the first gulp.

“What,” demanded the landlady, “do you mean by yelling out about Old Man Hammil?”

“Why,” said Mr. Gooley, feeling foolish, and looking it, “I was talking to that cockroach there. He looks sort of like some one I knew when I was a kid, by the name of Hammil—Archibald Hammil.”

“Where was you a kid?” asked Mrs. Hinkley.

“In a place called Mapletown—Mapletown, Illinois,” said Mr. Gooley. “There’s where I knew Old Man Hammil.”

“Well,” said the landlady, “when you go back there you won’t see him. He’s dead. He died a week ago. This letter tells it. I was his niece. And the old man went and left me his hardware store. I never expected it. But all his kids is dead—it seems he outlived ‘em all, and he was nearly ninety when he passed away.”

“Well,” said Mr. Gooley, “I don’t remember you.”

“You wouldn’t,” said the landlady. “You must have been in short pants when I ran away from home and married the hardware drummer. But I’ll bet you the old-timers in that burg still remembers it against me!”

“The kids will be coming into that store about now to get their skates sharpened,” said Mr. Gooley, looking at the boiled egg.

“Uh-huh!” said Mrs. Hinkley. “Don’t you want to go back home and help sharpen ‘em? I’m goin’ back and run that there store, and I’ll need a clerk, I suppose.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Gooley, breaking the eggshell.

The cockroach, busy with a crumb on the floor, waved his three starboard legs genially at Mr. Gooley and Mrs. Hinkley—as if, in fact, he were winking with his feet.