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.