When we were at our wits’ end for pennies to buy food, the little girl came. The only thing we had not pawned was a gold locket that had never been off her neck because it was wished on by her mother and had always kept her from harm, as she said. She took it off and put it on the baby’s neck and tears came to my eyes—the first in thirty-five years.
“We will call her Mary,” I said, choking with happiness.
Four hours later I was on a wharf, crawling around on my hands and knees in the madness of alcohol, with a New York policeman and a gang of longshoremen roaring with laughter at my predicament. It was on that occasion that, as my brain cleared, I saw what I had done. I had sworn a thousand times never to do it. And now it had come about. I had become responsible for another living human thing with the blood of my veins coursing in its own! I had committed the crime of all crimes!
To describe the horror of this thought is impossible. It never left me. I began to devise a means to undo this dreadful work of mine. I prayed for days—savagely and breaking out into curses—that the little laughing, mocking thing should die.
“She has your eyes,” said Mary, looking up at me with a smile on her gaunt, starved face.
I rushed from the dirty lodgings like a man with a fiend in pursuit; the words followed me. I roared out in my pain.
“I will do it!” I said over and over again. “I will kill the child. I will kill it.”
I believed I was right. I believed the best of me and not the worst of me had spoken. I believed I must atone for my crime by another. I believed I should begin to prepare the way.
“Suppose she should die,” I said to my wife.
“Then grief would kill me, too,” she said.