Part 2

And the Devil would look at his large, weak, characterless nose;--a nose so big that it might have suggested force on any one but Old Man Murtrie--and think what a sham it was, and how effectually all its contemptible effort to be a real nose was exposed in Old Man Murtrie's sleep. And the Devil would say:

“I don't want him. He can't get into Hell.”

And then Death would say, querulously: “But he can't go on living forever. My reputation is suffering.”

“You should take him,” the Devil would say to God. “He goes to church on Sunday, and he is the most meek and pious and humble and prayerful person in all Brooklyn, and perhaps in all the world.”

“But he takes drugs,” God would say. “You should take him, because he is a drug fiend.”

“He takes drugs,” the Devil would admit, “but that doesn't make him a _fiend_. You have to do something besides take drugs to be a fiend. You will permit me to have my own notions, I am sure, on what constitutes a fiend.”

“You ought to forgive him the drugs for the sake of his piety,” the Devil would say. “And taking drugs is his only vice. He doesn't drink, or smoke tobacco, or use profane language, or gamble. And he doesn't run after women.”

“You ought to forgive him the piety for the sake of the drugs,” God would tell the Devil.

“I never saw such a pair as you two,” Death would say querulously. “Quibble, quibble, quibble!--while Old Man Murtrie goes on and on living! He's lived so long that he is affecting death rates and insurance tables, all by himself, and you know what that does to my reputation.”

And Death would stoop over and run his finger caressingly across Old Man Murtrie's throat, as the Old Man slept. Whereupon Old Man Murtrie would roll over on his back and moan in his sleep and gurgle.

“He has wanted to be a cheat all his life,” God would say to the Devil. “He has always had the impulse to give short weight and substitute inferior drugs in his prescriptions and overcharge children who were sent on errands to his store. If that isn't sin I don't know what sin is. You should take him.”

“I admit he has had those impulses,” the Devil would say to God. “But he has never yielded to them. In my opinion having those impulses and conquering them makes him a great deal more virtuous than if he'd never had 'em. No one who is as virtuous as all that can get into Hell.”

“I never saw such a pair,” Death would grumble. “Can't you agree with each other about anything?”

“He didn't abstain from his vices because of any courage,” God would say. “He abstained simply because he was afraid. It wasn't virtue in him; it was cowardice.”

“The fear of the Lord,” murmured the Devil, dreamily, “is the beginning of all wisdom.”

“But not necessarily the end of it,” God would remark.

“Argue, argue, argue,” Death would say, “and here's Old Man Murtrie still alive! I'm criticized about the way I do my work, but no one has any idea of the vacillation and inefficiency I have to contend with! I never saw such a pair as you two to vacillate!”

Sometimes Old Man Murtrie would wake up and turn over on his couch and see God and Death and the Devil sitting in a row on the prescription counter, looking at him. But he always persuaded himself that it was a sort of dream, induced by the “medicine” he took; and he would take another dose of his “medicine” and go back to sleep again. He never spoke to them when he waked, but just lay on his cot and stared at them; and if they spoke to him he would pretend to himself that they had not spoken. For it was absurd to think that God and Death and the Devil could really be sitting there, in the dim greenish gaslight, among all the faintly radiant bottles, talking to each other and looking at him; and so Old Man Murtrie would not believe it.

When he first began taking his “medicine” Old Man Murtrie took it in the form of a certain patent preparation which was full of opium. He wanted the opium more and more after he started, but he pretended to himself that he did not know there was much opium in that medicine. Then, when a federal law banished that kind of medicine from the markets, he took to making it for his own use. He would not take opium outright, for that would be to acknowledge to himself that he was an opium eater; he thought eating opium was a sin, and he thought of himself as sinless. But to make the medicine with the exact formula that its manufacturers had used, before they had been compelled to shut up shop, and use it, did not seem to him to be the same thing at all as being an opium eater. And yet, after the law was passed, abolishing the medicine, he would not sell to any one else what he made for himself; his conscience would not allow him to do so. Therefore, he must have known that he was eating opium at the same time he tried to fool himself about it.

God and the Devil used to discuss the ethics of this attitude towards the “medicine,” and Old Man Murtrie would sometimes pretend to be asleep and would listen to them.

“He knows it is opium all right,” God would say. “He is just lying to himself about it. He ought to go to Hell. No one that lies to himself that way can get into Heaven.”

“He's pretending for the sake of society in general and for the sake of religion,” the Devil would say. “If he admitted to himself that it was opium and if he let the world know that he took opium, it might bring discredit on the church that he loves so well. He might become a stumbling block to others who are seeking salvation, and who seek it through the church. He is willing to sacrifice himself so as not to hamper others in their religious life. For my part, I think it is highly honorable of him, and highly virtuous. No person as moral as that in his instincts can get into Hell.”

“Talk, talk, talk!” Death would say. “The trouble with you two is that neither one of you wants Old Man Murtrie around where you will have to look at him through all eternity, and each of you is trying to put it on moral grounds.”

And Old Man Murtrie kept on living and praying and being pious and wanting to be bad and not daring to and taking his medicine and being generally as ineffectual in the world either for good or evil as a butterfly in a hurricane.

But things took a turn. There was a faded-looking blonde woman with stringy hair by the name of Mable who assisted Old Man Murtrie in the store, keeping his books and waiting on customers, and so forth. She was unmarried, and one day she announced to him that she was going to have a child.

Old Man Murtrie had often looked at her with a recollection, a dim and faint remembrance, of the lusts of his youth and of his middle age. In his youth and middle age he had lusted after many women, but he had never let any of them know it, because he was afraid, and he had called his fears virtue, and had really believed that he was virtuous.

“Whom do you suspect?” asked Old Man Murtrie, leering at Mable like a wraith blown down the ages from the dead adulteries of ruined Babylon.

“Who?” cried Mable, an unlessoned person, but with a cruel, instinctive humor. “Who but you!”

She had expected Old Man Murtrie to be outraged at her ridiculous joke, and, because she was unhappy herself, had anticipated enjoying his astounded protests. But it was she who was astounded. Old Man Murtrie's face was blank and his eyes were big for a moment, and then he chuckled; a queer little cackling chuckle. And when she went out he opened the door for her and cocked his head and cackled again.

It gave Mable an idea. She reflected that he took so much opium that he might possibly be led to believe the incredible, and she might get some money out of him. So the next evening she brought her mother and her brother to the store and accused him.

Old Man Murtrie chuckled and... _and admitted it!_ Whether he believed that it could be true or not, Mable and her people were unable to determine. But they made the tactical error of giving him his choice between marriage and money, and he chose matrimony.

And then Old Man Murtrie was suddenly seized with a mania for confession. God and Death and the Devil used to listen to him nights, and they wondered over him, and began to change their minds about him, a little. He confessed to the officials of his church. He confessed to all the people whom he knew. He insisted on making a confession, a public confession, in the church itself and asking for the prayers of the preacher and congregation for his sin, and telling them that he was going to atone by matrimony, and asking for a blessing on the wedding.

And one night, full of opium, while he-was babbling about it in his sleep, God and Death and the Devil sat on the prescription counter again and looked at him and listened to his ravings and speculated.

“I'm going to have him,” said the Devil. “Any one who displays such conspicuous bad taste that he goes around confessing that he has ruined a woman ought to go to Hell.”

“You don't want him for that reason,” said God. “And you know you don't. You want him because you admire the idea of adultery, and think that now he is worthy of a place in Hell. You are rather entertained by Old Man Murtrie, and want him around now.”

“Well,” said the Devil, “suppose I admit that is true! Have you any counter claim?”

“Yes,” said God. “I am going to take Old Man Murtrie into Heaven. He knows he is not the father of the child that is going to be born, but he has deliberately assumed the responsibility lest it be born fatherless, and I think that is a noble act.”

“Rubbish!” said the Devil. “That isn't the reason you want him. You want him because of the paternal instinct he displays. It flatters you!”

“Well,” said God, “why not? The paternal instinct is another name for the great creative force of the universe. I have been known by many names in many countries... they called me Osiris, the All-Father, in Egypt, and they called me Jehovah in Palestine, and they called me Zeus and Brahm... but always they recognized me as the Father. And this instinct for fatherliness appeals to me. Old Man Murtrie shall come to Heaven.”

“Such a pair as you two,” said Death, gloomily, “I never did see! Discuss and discuss, but never get anywhere! And all the time Old Man Murtrie goes on living.”

And then Death added:

“Why not settle this matter once and for all, right now? Why not wake Old Man Murtrie up and let him decide?”

“Decide?” asked the Devil.

“Yes,--whether he wants to go to Hell or to Heaven.”

“I imagine,” said God, “that if we do that there can be no question as to which place he would rather go to.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said the Devil. “Some people come to Hell quite willingly. I've been to Heaven myself, you know, and I can quite understand why. Are you afraid to have Old Man Murtrie make the choice?”

“Wake him up, Death, wake him up,” said God. “It's unusual to allow people to know that they are making their own decision--though all of them, in a sense, do make it--but wake him up, Death, and we'll see.”

So Death prodded Old Man Murtrie in the ribs, and they asked him. For a long time he thought it was only opium, but when he finally understood that it was really God and Death and the Devil who were there, and that it was really they who had often been there before, he was very much frightened. He was so frightened he couldn't choose.

“I'll leave it to you, I'll leave it to you,” said Old Man Murtrie. “Who am I that I should set myself up to decide?”

“Well,” said God, getting a little angry, perhaps, “if you don't want to go to Heaven, Murtrie, you don't have to. But you've been, praying to go to Heaven, and all that sort of thing, for seventy or eighty years, and I naturally thought you were in earnest. But I'm through with you... you can go to Hell.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” moaned Old Man Murtrie.

“No,” said the Devil, “I've changed my mind, too. My distaste for Murtrie has returned to me. I don't want him around. I won't have him in Hell.”

“See here, now!” cried Death. “You two are starting it all over again. I won't have it, so I won't! You aren't fair to Murtrie, and you aren't fair to me! This matter has got to be settled, and settled to-night!”

“Well, then,” said God, “settle it. I've ceased to care one way or another.”

“I will not,” said Death, “I know my job, and I stick to my job. One of you two has got to settle it.”

“Toss a coin,” suggested the Devil, indifferently.

Death looked around for one.

“There's a qu-qu-quarter in m-m-my t-t-trousers' p-p-pocket,” stammered Old Man Murtrie, and then stuck his head under the bedclothes and shivered as if he had the ague.

Death picked up Murtrie's poor little weazened trousers from the floor at the foot of the cot, where they lay sprawled untidily, and shook them till the quarter dropped out.

He picked it up.

“Heads, he goes to Heaven. Tails, he goes to Hell,” said Death, and tossed the coin to the ceiling. Murtrie heard it hit the ceiling, and started. He heard it hit the floor, and bounce, and jingle and spin and roll and come to rest. And he thrust his head deeper under the covers and lay there quaking. He did not dare look.

“Look at it, Murtrie,” said Death.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” groaned Murtrie, shaking the cot.

But Death reached over and caught him by the neck and turned his face so that he could not help seeing. And Old Man Murtrie looked and saw that the coin had fallen with the side up that sent him to----

But, really, why should I tell you? Go and worry about your own soul, and let Old Man Murtrie's alone.

III.--Never Say Die

|There seemed nothing left but suicide.

But how? In what manner? By what method? Mr. Gooley lay on his bed and thought--or tried to think. The pain in his head, which had been there ever since the day after he had last eaten, prevented easy and coherent thought.

It had been three days ago that the pain left his stomach and went into his head. Hunger had become a cerebral thing, he told himself. His body had felt hunger so long that it refused to feel it any longer; it had shifted the burden to his brain.

“It has passed the buck to my mind, my stomach has,” murmured Mr. Gooley feebly. And the mind, less by the process of coherent and connected thought than by a sudden impulsive pounce, had grasped the idea of suicide.

“Not with a knife,” considered Mr. Gooley. He had no knife. He had no money to buy a knife. He had no strength to go down the three flights of stairs in the cheap Brooklyn lodging house where he lay, and borrow a knife from the landlady who came and went vaguely in the nether regions, dim and damp and dismal.

“Not with a knife,” repeated Mr. Gooley. And a large cockroach, which had been crawling along the footpiece of the old-fashioned wooden bed, stopped crawling at the words as if it understood, and turned about and looked at him.

Mr. Gooley wondered painfully, for it was a pain even to wonder about anything, why this cockroach should remind him of somebody who was somehow connected with a knife, and not unpleasantly connected with a knife. The cockroach stood up on the hindmost pair of his six legs, and seemed to put his head on one side and motion with his front legs at Mr. Gooley.

“I get you,” said Mr. Gooley, conscious that his mind was wandering from the point, and willing to let it wander. “I know who you are! You were Old Man Archibald Hammil, the hardware merchant back in Mapletown, where I was a kid, before you dried up and turned into a cockroach.” And Mr. Gooley wept a few weak tears. For old Archibald Hammil, the village hardware merchant, had sold him the first knife he had ever owned. His father had taken him into Hammil's store to buy it on his seventh birthday, for a present, and it had had a buckhorn handle and two blades. Again he saw Old Man Hammil in his dingy brown clothes, looking at him, with his head on one side, as this cockroach was doing. Again he felt his father pat him on the head, and heard him say always to remember to whittle _away_ from himself, never _toward_ himself. And he saw himself, shy and flushed and eager, a freckle-faced boy as good and as bad as most boys, looking up at his father and wriggling and wanting to thank him, and not knowing how. That was nearly forty years ago--and here he was, a failure and starving and------

_Why_ had he wanted a knife? Yes, he remembered now! To kill himself with.

“It's none of your damned business, Old Man Hammil,” he said to the cockroach, which was crawling back and forth on the footboard, and pausing every now and then to look at him with disapproval.

Old Man Hammil had had ropes in his store, too, and guns and pistols, he remembered. He hadn't thought of Old Man Hammi's store in many years; but now he saw it, and the village street outside it, and the place where the stores left off on the street and the residences began, and berry bushes, and orchards, and clover in the grass--the random bloom, the little creek that bounded the town, and beyond the creek the open country with its waving fields of oats and rye and com. His head hurt him worse. He would go right back into Old Man Hammil's store and get a rope or a gun and end that pain.

But _that_ was foolish, too. There wasn't any store. There was only Old Man Hammil here, shrunk to the size of a cockroach, in his rusty brown suit, looking at him from the footboard of the bed and telling him in pantomime not to kill himself.

“I will too!” cried Mr. Gooley to Old Man Hammil. And he repeated, “It's none of _your_ damned business!”

But how? Not with a knife. He had none. Not with a gun. He had none. Not with a rope. He had none. He thought of his suspenders. But they would never hold him.

“Too weak, even for me,” muttered Mr. Gooley. “I have shrunk so I don't weigh much more than Old Man Hammil there, but even at that those suspenders would never do the business.”

How did people kill themselves? He must squeeze his head till the pain let up a little, so he could think. Poison! That was it--yes, poison! And then he cackled out a small, dry, throaty laugh, his Adam's apple fluttering in his weazened throat under his sandy beard. Poison! He _hadn't_ any poison. He hadn't any money with which to buy poison.

And then began a long, broken and miserable debate within himself. If he had money enough with which to buy poison, would he go and buy poison? Or go and buy a bowl of soup? It was some moments before Mr. Gooley decided.

“I'd be game,” he said. “I'd buy the soup. I'd give myself that one more chance. I must remember while I'm killing myself, that I'm not killing myself because I _want_ to. I'm just doing it because I've _got_ to. I'm not romantic. I'm just all in. It's the end; that's all.”

Old Man Hammil, on the footboard of the bed, permitted himself a series of gestures which Mr. Gooley construed as applause of this resolution. They angered Mr. Gooley, those gestures.

“You shut up!” he told the cockroach, although that insect had not spoken, but only made signs. “This is none of your damned business, Old Man Hammil!”

Old Man Hammil, he remembered, had always been a meddlesome old party--one of the village gossips, in fact. And that set him to thinking of Mapletown again.

The mill pond near the schoolhouse would soon be freezing over, and the boys would be skating on it--it was getting into December. And they would be going into Old Man Hammil's store for skates and straps and heel plates and files. And he remembered his first pair of skates, and how his father had taught him the proper way to keep them sharp with a file. He and the old dad had always been pretty good pals, and----

Good God! Why _should_ he be coming back to that? And to Old Man Hammil's store? It was that confounded cockroach there, reminding him of Old Man Hammil, that had done it. He wanted to die decently and quietly, and as quickly as might be, without thinking of all these things. He didn't want to lie there and die of starvation, he wanted to kill himself and be done with it without further misery--and it was a part of the ridiculous futility of his life, his baffled and broken and insignificant life, that he couldn't even kill himself competently--that he lay there suffering and ineffectual and full of self-pity, a prey to memories and harassing visions of the past, all mingled with youth and innocence and love, without the means of a quick escape. It was that damned cockroach, looking like Old Man Hammil, the village hardware merchant, that had brought back the village and his youth to him, and all those intolerable recollections.

He took his dirty pillow and feebly menaced the cockroach. Feeble as the gesture was, the insect took alarm. It disappeared from the footboard of the bed. A minute later, however, he saw it climbing the wall. It reached the ceiling, and crawled to the center of the room. Mr. Goo-ley watched it. He felt as if he, too, could crawl along the ceiling. He had the crazy notion of trying. After all, he told himself light-headedly, Old Cockroach Hammil up there on the ceiling had been friendly--the only friendly thing, human or otherwise, that had made overtures to him in many, many months. And he had scared Cockroach Hammil away! He shed some more maudlin tears.

What was the thing doing now? He watched as the insect climbed on to the gas pipe that came down from the ceiling. It descended the rod and perched itself on the gas jet. From this point of vantage it began once more to regard Mr. Gooley with a singular intentness.

Ah! Gas! That was it! What a fool he had been not to think of it sooner! That was the way people killed themselves! Gas!

Mr. Gooley got himself weakly out of bed. He would get the thing over as quickly as possible now. It would be damnably unpleasant before he lost consciousness, no doubt, and painful. But likely not more unpleasant and painful than his present state. And he simply could not bear any more of those recollections, any more visions.

He turned his back on the cockroach, which was watching him from the gas jet, and went methodically to work. The window rattled; between the upper and lower sashes there was a crevice a quarter of an inch wide. He plugged it with paper. There was a break in the wall of his closet; the plaster had fallen away, and a chink allowed the cockroaches from his room easy access to the closet of the adjoining room. He plugged that also, and was about to turn his attention to the keyhole, when there came a knock on his door.

Mr. Gooley's first thought was: “What can any one want with a dead man?” For he looked upon himself as already dead. There came a second knock, more peremptory than the first, and he said mechanically, “Come in!” It would have to be postponed a few minutes, that was all.

The door opened, and in walked his landlady. She was a tall and bulky and worried-looking woman, who wore a faded blond wig that was always askew, and Mr. Gooley was afraid of her. Her wig was more askew than usual when she entered, and he gathered from this that she was angry about something--why the devil must she intrude her trivial mundane anger upon himself, a doomed man? It was not seemly.

“Mr. Gooley,” she began severely, without preamble, “I have always looked on you as a gentleman.”

“Yes?” he murmured dully.

“But you ain't,” she continued. “You ain't no better than a cheat.”

He shrugged his shoulders patiently. He supposed that she was right about it. He owed her three weeks' room rent, and he was going to die and beat her out of it. But he couldn't help it.

“It ain't the room rent,” she went on, as if vaguely cognizant of the general trend of his thoughts. “It ain't the room rent alone. You either pay me that or you don't pay me that, and if you don't, out you go. But while you are here, you must conduct yourself as a gentleman should!”

“Well,” murmured Mr. Gooley, “haven't I?”

And the cockroach, perched on the gas jet above the landlady's head, and apparently listening to this conversation, moved several of his legs, as if in surprise.