And Carter heard it as he died.
II—Old Man Murtrie
Old Man Murtrie never got any fresh air at all, except on Sundays on his way to and from church. He lived, slept, cooked and ate back of the prescription case in his little dismal drug store in one of the most depressing quarters of Brooklyn. The store was dimly lighted by gas and it was always damp and suggested a tomb. Drifting feebly about in the pale and cold and faintly greenish radiance reflected from bottles and show cases, Old Man Murtrie with his bloodless face and dead white hair and wisps of whisker was like a ghost that has not managed to get free from the neighborhood of a sepulcher where its body lies disintegrating.
People said that Old Man Murtrie was nearly a hundred years old, but this was not true; he was only getting along towards ninety. The neighborhood, however, seemed a little impatient with him for not dying. Some persons suggested that perhaps he really had been dead for a long time, and did not know it. If so, they thought, it might be kind to tell him about it.
But Old Man Murtrie was not dead, any more than he was alive. And Death himself, who has his moments of impatience, began to get worried about Old Man Murtrie. It was time, Death thought, that he was dead, since he looked so dead; and Death had said so, both to God and to the Devil.
“But I don't want to garner him, naturally,” Death would say, “till I know which one of you is to have him. He's got to go somewhere, you know.”
God and Death and the Devil used to sit on the prescription counter in a row, now and then, and watch Old Man Murtrie as he slept in his humble little cot back there, and discuss him.
God would look at Old Man Murtrie's pale little Adam's Apple sticking up in the faint gaslight, and moving as he snored—moving feebly, for even his snores were feeble—and say, with a certain distaste: