The Debtor: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

Then the man turned, and his half-scared, half-defiant face fronted Carroll. He growled an inarticulate inquiry.

“Come back here!” repeated Carroll.

The tramp came slowly, suspiciously, one hand slyly lifted as one sees a wary animal with a paw ready for possible attack.

“Wait here,” said Carroll, indicating the stoop with a gesture, “and I will see if I can find something for you to eat.”

The man reached the door and paused, and remained standing, still with that wary lift of hand and foot in readiness for defence or flight, while Carroll rummaged in the pantry, which was a lean larder. At last he emerged with half a pie and a piece of cake. He extended them to the tramp, who viewed them critically and mumbled something about meat.

“Take these and clear out, or leave them and clear out!” shouted Carroll, and again the sense of exhilaration was over him.

The man took the proffered food and slunk rapidly out of the yard.

Carroll laughed, and closed and bolted the kitchen door, which Marie had left unlocked. Then he returned to the den and sat down with the morning paper and a cigar. He skimmed over the contents, the rumors of wars, and cruelties, the Wall Street items, the burglaries, the fires, the defalcations, the suicides, the stresses of the world, creation old, enduring in their fluctuations and recurrences like the sea, beating with the same force upon the hearts of every new generation. Carroll, as he sat there idly smoking, fell to thinking abstractedly in that vein. He had a conception of a possible ocean of elemental emotion, of joy and passion, of crime and agony and greed, ever swelling and ebbing upon the shores of humanity. He had a mind of psychological cast, although it had been turned of a necessity into other channels. Finally he turned wholly to himself and his own difficulties, which had reached possibly the worst crisis of his life. He had never been in such a hard place as this. He had heretofore seen a loop-hole out, into another labyrinth in the end, it is true, still a way out. Now he saw none except one; that was into a fiery torture, and whether it was or was not the torture of beneficial sacrifice he could not tell.

As he sat there his face grew older with the laboring of his mind over the track of his failures and over the certain difficulties of the future. He sat there all the morning. Noon came, but he did not think of food, although he had eaten little that morning. He lit another cigar and took up the paper again, and read an account of the suicide of a bank defaulter by shooting himself through the brain. He fell to thinking of suicide in his own case, as a means of egress from his own difficulties, but he thought idly, rather as a means of amusement, and not with the slightest seriousness. He had a well-balanced brain naturally, and maintained the balance even in the midst of misfortune. However, a balance, however perfect, indicates by its very name something which may be disturbed. He thought over, idly, various means of unlawful exit from the world, and applied them to his own case. He decided against the means employed by the desperate bank cashier; he decided against the fiery draught of acid swallowed by a love-distracted girl; he decided against the leap from a ferry-boat taken by an unknown man, whose body lay unidentified in the morgue; he decided against illuminating gas, which had released from the woes of life a man and his three children; he thought rather favorably of charcoal; he thought also rather favorably of morphine; he thought more favorably still of the opening of a vein, employed by fastidious old Romans who had enough of feast and gladiators and life generally and wished for a chance to leave the entertainment. All this was the merest idleness of suggestion, a species of rather ghastly amusement, it is true, but none the less amusement, of an unemployed and melancholy mind. But suddenly, something new and hitherto unexperienced was over him, a mood which he had never imagined, a possibility which he had never grasped. His brain, tried to the extreme by genuine misery, tried in addition by dangerous suggestion, lost its perfect poise for the time. A mighty hunger and thirst—a more than hunger and thirst—a ravening appetite, a passion beyond all passions which he had ever known, was upon him, had him in its clutches. He knew for the first time the most monstrous and irresistible passion of the race, the passion for release from mortal existence, the passion for death. At that moment he felt, and probably felt truly, that had he been in dire peril, he would not have lifted a finger in self-preservation. He turned his eyes inward upon himself with greed for his own life, for his own blood, and back of that was the ravening thirst for release from the world and the flesh and the miseries which appertained to them, as one suffocating might thirst for air. He realized suddenly himself, stifling and agonizing, behind a window which he had no need to wait for an overruling Providence to open, which was not too heavy for his own mortal strength, which he could open himself. He realized that whatever lay outside was outside; it was air outside this air, misery outside this particular phase which was driving him mad. His imagination dwelling upon the different means of suicide, now became judicial. He thought seriously upon the drawbacks to one, the advantages of another. Then since the man was essentially unselfish and fond of his own flesh and blood, he began to reflect upon the horror of a confessed suicide to them. He began to study the feasibility of a suicide forever undiscovered. He began to plan how the thing might distress his family as little as possible. His cigar went out as he sat and studied. The furnace fire was low and the room grew cold. He never noticed it. He studied and studied the best means of suicide, the best means of concealing it, and all the time the greed for it was increasing until his veins seemed to run with a liquid fire of monstrous passion, the passion of a mortal man for his own immolation upon fate, and all the time that sense of intolerable suffocation by existence itself, by the air of the world, increased.

He had now arrived at a state of mind where every new phase was produced by suggestion. He was, in a sense, hypnotized. Everything served to swing him this way or that, up or down. The sight of a little perfume-bottle on the table, a dainty glass thing traced over with silver, set him thinking eagerly of another little bottle, of glass with a silver stopper, his wife's vinaigrette which she was fond of using when her head ached. From that, the contemplation of inhaling aromatic salts, he went naturally enough to the inhaling of more potent things which assuage pain, and could assuage, if taken in sufficient quantities, the pain of life itself. He remembered the exaltation which he had experienced once when given chloroform for a slight operation. Directly the idea of repeating that blissful sensation seized upon him he was mad for it. To go out of life like that, to take that way of opening the window into eternity, into another phase of existence or into oblivion, what ecstasy! He remembered that when under the chloroform, a wonderful certainty, a comprehension, seemingly, of the true import of life and death and of the hereafter, had seized him. He remembered a tremendous assurance which he had received under the influence of the drug, of the ultimate joy beyond this present existence, of the ultimate end in bliss of all misery, of the tending of death to the fulness of life. He remembered a rapture beyond words, an enthusiasm of gratitude for such an immortal delight for the power which he had sometimes rebelled against and reviled for placing him in the scale of existence. He remembered how all his past troubles seemed as only stepping-stones to supernal heights, how he could have kissed them for thankfulness that he had been forced by an all-wise Providence over the agony of the ascent to such rapture. Immediately his thoughts centred upon chloroform. He looked across at the divan with its heaped-up pillows, and his mind, acting always from suggestion, became filled with the picture of his peaceful bed up-stairs, and himself lying thereon, oblivious to all his miserable cares and worries, passing out of reach of them on an ecstatic flight propelled by the force of the winged drug. He began to consider the possibility of obtaining chloroform. At once the instinct of secrecy asserted itself. He decided that he could not, under the circumstances, go into the drug-store in Banbridge and ask for a quantity of the drug sufficient for his purposes. He realized that to do so would be to incur suspicion. He doubted if he could maintain a perfectly unmoved countenance while asking for it. He felt that his face would bear evidence to his wild greed. He heard, as he sat there, the whistle, then the rumble of a heavy freight-train a quarter of a mile distant, and at once he thought of the feasibility of going to New York for the chloroform. He looked at his watch and reflected that he had lost the noon train. He also reflected as to the possible suspicion which he might awaken of going to join his family, and making his final exodus from the town and his creditors. He placed his watch in his pocket, and his eyes fell on the electric-light fixture, with a red silk shade over the bulb, and at once his mind conceived the idea of his going somewhere on the trolley-cars. He thought of going to New Sanderson; then dismissed that as not feasible. He knew too many people in that place, and had too many creditors. Then he thought of going to Port Willis, which was also connected with Banbridge by a trolley-line, and was about the same distance. Again he looked at his watch. It was nearly two o'clock. He wondered absently where the day had gone, that it was so late. He had not the least idea as to the times and seasons of the Port Willis trolley-cars, but he directly arose to make ready. As he did so he heard a distressful mew, and the black kitten which Marie had essayed to carry with her that morning made a leap to the window-sill. The little animal looked in, fixed his golden, jewel-like eyes on the man, and again uttered an appealing, accusatory wail. Then she rubbed her head with a pretty, caressing motion against the window-glass. She had evidently escaped from the Hungarian and sped home. Carroll opened the window, and the cat arched her back and purred, hesitating. Carroll waited patiently. Finally she stepped across the sill, and he closed the window. Then he called the cat into the kitchen, but he could find no milk for her, nothing except a tiny scrap of beefsteak. The cat followed him around the kitchen, slinking with her furry stomach sweeping the floor, and mewed loudly, with alert eyes of watchful fear, exactly as if she were in a strange place. The strangeness in the house intimidated her. She missed the wonted element of the human, and the very corners of her familiar kitchen looked strange to her. She would not even eat her meat, but ran under the table and wailed loudly, with wild eyes of terror on Carroll. He went out, shutting the door behind him, and her loud inquiring wail floated after him.