“Yes—come on!” he shouted. “You don’t need to sneak away to drink. We’ll drink together. We’ll go to hell together.”
And he kept his word. At the end of the year he was dismissed from the World for drunkenness. She went back to the stage and supported them both—she was a periodic drunkard, while he kept steadily at it. She left him, returned to him, loved him, fled from him, divorced him, after an absence of nearly a year returned to make another effort to undo the crime she felt she had committed. As she came into the squalid room in a wretched furnished-room house in East Fifth Street where he had found a momentary refuge, he glared at her with bleared, bloodshot eyes and uttered a curse. She had a bundle in her arms.
“Look,” she said, in a low tone, stooping beside the bed on which he lay in his rags.
He was staring stupidly into the face of a baby, copper-coloured, homely, with puffy cheeks and watery, empty eyes. He fell back upon the bed and covered his head.
Soon he started up in a fury. “It ought to have been strangled,” he said.
“No! No!” she exclaimed, pressing the bundle tightly against her bosom.
He rose and went toward her. His expression was reassuring. He looked long into the child’s face.
“Where are you living?” he asked at last. “Don’t be afraid to tell me. I’ll not come until”—He paused, then went on: “The road ought to lead upward from here.” His glance went round the squalid room with roaches scuttling along its baseboard. He looked down at his grimed tatters, his gaping shoes, his dirty hands and black and broken nails.
“It certainly can’t lead downward,” he muttered. For the first time in months he felt ashamed. “Leave me alone,” he said.
That night he wrote his mother for the loan of a hundred dollars—the first money from home since, at the end of his last long vacation, he left for New York and a career. In a week he was a civilised man again. Marlowe got him a place as reporter on the Democrat. It was immediately apparent that the road did indeed lead upward.