The traveling men on the veranda craned their necks to watch her out of sight
From the night of the charivari when Red Martin handed the boys twenty dollars—the largest sum ever contributed to a similar purpose in the town's history—he and the Princess began to slump. The sloughing off of the veneer of civilisation was not rapid, but it was sure. The first pair of shoes that Red bought after his wedding were not patent leather, and, though the porter of his gambling place blacked them every morning, still they were common leather, and the boy noticed it. Likewise, the Princess had her hat retrimmed with her old plumes the fall after her wedding, bought no new clothes, and wore her giddy spring jacket, thin as it was, all winter, and after the second baby came no human being ever saw her in anything but a wrapper, except when she was on Main Street.
The neighbours said she wore a wrapper so that she could have free use of her lungs, for when Red and the Princess opened a family debate, the neighbours had to shut the doors and windows and call in the children. Notwithstanding all the names that she called him in their lung-testing events, there was no question about her love for the man. For, after the first year of her marriage, though she lost interest in her clothes and ceased calling for the "fashion leaf" at the dress-goods counter in the White Front, and let her hair go stringy, we around our office knew that the Princess was only a child, who some way had lost interest in her old toys. When God gives babies to children, the children forget their other dolls, and the Princess, when the babies came, put away her other dolls, and played with the toys that came alive. And she spanked them and fondled them and scolded them with the same empty-headed vanity that she used to devote to her clothes.
Red Martin was one of the Princess's dearest dolls, and she and the babies were his toys; but, being a boy, he did not care for them so much with the paint rubbed off, yet he did not neglect them. Instead, he neglected himself. When the babies began to put grease spots on his clothes, he did not clean them, and about the time his wife quit powdering, when she came to Main Street, he stopped wearing collars. She grew fat and frowsy, and her chief interest in life seemed to be to over-dress her children, and sometimes Red Martin encouraged her by bringing home the most extravagant suits for the boys, and sometimes he abused her when the bills came in for things which she had bought for the children, and asked why she did not buy something half-way respectable-looking to wear herself. After each of their furious quarrels she would go over the neighbourhood the next day and tell the neighbours that her mother had married her to a gambler, and ask them what a gambler's wife could expect. If any neighbour woman agreed with Mrs. Martin about her husband or her position Mrs. Martin would become angry and flounce out of the house, but if the women spoke kindly of her husband she would berate him and weep, and assure them that she had refused the banker, or the proprietor of the Bee Hive, or anyone else who seemed to make her story possible.
By the time that the third baby was old enough to carry his baby sister and the fifth baby was in the crib, Red Martin's face had begun to grow purple. He lost the gambling-room which was once his pride; it was operated by a youth with a curly black moustache, whose clothes recalled the days of Red's triumph. Red was only a dealer, and his trousers were frayed at the bottom and he shaved but once a week. Then the Princess used to come slinking up Main Street at night carrying a pistol under her coat to use if she found the woman with him. Who the woman was the neighbours never knew, but the Princess gave them to understand that they would be surprised if she told them. It was her vanity to pretend that the woman was a society leader, as she called her, but the boys around the poker-dive knew that Red Martin's days as a heart-breaker were gone. For what whisky and cocaine and absinthe could do for Red to hurry his end they were doing, but a man is a strong beast, and it takes many years to kill him. Also, the Lord saves men like Red for horrible examples, letting them live long that He may not have to waste others; but women seem to have God's pity and He takes them out of their misery more quickly than He takes men. With the coming of the seventh baby the Princess died. When the news came to the office that she was gone we were not sorry, for life had held little for her. Her looks were gone; her health was gone; her dreams were smudged out—pitiful and wretched and sordid as they were, even at the best. Yet for all that George Kirwin took down to the funeral a wreath which the office force bought for her.
To know George Kirwin casually one would say he never saw anything but the types and machinery in the back room of our office. When he went among strangers he seemed to be looking always at his hands or studying his knees, and his responses to those whom he did not know were "yea, yea," and "nay, nay"; but that night he told us more about the funeral of the Princess than all the reporters on the paper would have learned. He told us how the pitiful little parlour with its advertising chromos and its soap-prize lamp was filled with the women who always come to funerals in our town—funerals being their only diversion; how they sat in the undertaker's chairs with their handkerchiefs carefully folded and in their hands during the first part of the service, waiting for Brother Hopper to tell about his mother's death, which he never fails to do at funerals, though the elders have spoken to him about it, as all the town knows; how Red Martin, shaved for the occasion, and, in a borrowed suit of clothes, stood out by the well and did not come into the house during the services; how only the elder children sat in the front room with the other mourners, and how the prattle of the little ones in the kitchen ran through the parson's prayer with heart-breaking insistence.
George seemed to think that the poverty-stricken little makeshifts to bring beauty into the miserable home and keep up the appearance of a kind of gentility—perhaps for the children—was the best thing he ever knew about the Princess, and he said that he was glad that he went to the funeral for the geraniums in the crêpe paper covered tomato cans, the cheap lace curtains at the windows, and the hair-wreath inheritance from the Swaneys, made him think that the best of the Princess might have survived all the rack and calamity of the years.
When the funeral left the house the neighbour women came and put it in order, and there was a better supper waiting for the father and the children than they had eaten for many years. And then, after the dishes were put away, the neighbours left; and for what he tried to do and be for the motherless brood just that one night, God will put down a good mark for Eli Martin—even though the man failed most sadly.
When he went back to the gambling-room the next night, where he was porter; men tried not to swear while he was in earshot, and the next day they swore only mild oaths around him, out of respect for his grief, but the day after they forgot their compunctions, and, within a week, Red Martin seemed to have forgotten, too. In time, the family was scattered over the earth—divided among kin, and adopted out, and as the town grew older its conscience quickened and the gambling-room was closed, whereupon Red Martin went to Huddleston's livery stable, where he worked for enough to keep him in whisky and laudanum, and ate only when someone gave him food.
He grew dirty, unkempt, and dull-witted. Disease bent and twisted him hideously. When he was too sick to work, he went to the poor-house, and came back weak and pale to sit much in the sun on the south side of the building like a sick dog. When he is lying about the street drunk, little boys poke sticks at him and flee with terror before him when he wakes to blind rage and stumbles after them. It is hard to realise that this disgusting, inhuman-looking creature is the Red Martin of twenty years ago, who, in his long grey frock coat, patent leather shoes, white hat and black tie, walked serenely up the steps of the bank the day it failed, tapped on the door-pane with his revolver barrel, and, when a man came to answer, made him open, and backed out with his revolver in one hand and his diamonds and money in the other. He does not recall in any vague way the Red Martin who gave the town a month's smile when he said, after losing all his money on election, that he had learned never to bet on anything that could talk, or had less than four legs. That Red Martin has been dead these many years; perhaps he was no more worthy than this one who hangs on to life, and bears the name and the disgrace that his dead youth made inevitable.
How strange it is that a man should wreck himself, and blight those of his own blood as this man has done! He knew what we all know about life and its rules. He had been told, as we all are told in a thousand ways, that bad conduct brings sorrow to the world, and that pain and wretchedness are the only rewards of that behaviour which men call sin. And yet there he is, sitting on his hunkers near the stable, with God's stamp of failure all over his broken, battered body—put there by Red Martin's own hands. But George Kirwin, who often thinks with a kindlier spirit than others, says we are Red Martin's partners in iniquity, for we all lived here with him, maintaining a town that tolerated gambling and debauchery, and that, in some way, we shall each of us suffer as Red has suffered, insomuch as each has had his share in a neighbour's shame.
We tell George that he is getting old, though he is still on the bright side of forty, because he likes to come down town of evenings and hold a parliament with Henry Larmy and Dan Gregg and Colonel Morrison. Sometimes they hold it in the office and settle important affairs. A month ago they settled the immortality of the soul, and the other night, returning to their former subject, the question came up: "What will become of Red Martin when he goes to Heaven?" Dan contended that the poor fellow is carrying around his own little blowpipe hell as he goes through life. George Kirwin maintained that Red Martin will enter the next world with the soul that died when his body began to live in wickedness; that there must have been some imperishable good in him as a boy, and that Heaven, or whatever we decide to call the next world, must be full of men and women like Red Martin—some more respectable than he—whose hell will be the unmasking of their real selves in the world where we "shall know as we are known." While we were sitting in judgment on poor Red Martin, in toddled Simon Mehronay, who is visiting in town from New York in the company of the vestal virgin who had, as he expressed it, snatched him as a brand from the burning. Mehronay has been gone from town nearly twenty years, and until they told him he did not know how Red Martin had fallen. When he heard it, Mehronay sighed and tears came into his dear old eyes, as he put his hand on Colonel Morrison's arm and said:
"Poor Red! Poor Red! A decent, brave, big-hearted chap! Why, he's taken whisky away from me a dozen times! He's won my money from me to keep it over Saturday night. Why, I'm no better than he is! Only they've caught Red, and they haven't caught me. And when we stand before the judgment-seat, I can tell a damnsight more good things about Red than he can about me. I'm going out to find him and get him a square meal."
And so, while we were debating, Mehronay went down the Jericho road looking for the man who was lying there, beaten and bruised and waiting for the Samaritan.