Chapter XIV: Tragedy

Upon returning to New York, I found that my imagination hadn’t pictured the situation any worse than I found it. Practically everything I possessed had been swept away.

When I went to California I had enough put away to have kept me comfortably the remainder of my life and to insure the future of all who were near and dear to me. I came back to find myself worse than beggared, with only my newspaper salary left and uncertainty as to how long that might last if my tangled financial condition became known. There were many debts and but little to pay them with and I realized that as soon as it became known that I was back in town there would be a swarm of hungry creditors at my heels. I sold my yacht and automobile and used the proceeds in settling the most pressing obligations.

Worst of all was that I didn’t have the courage to take anyone into my confidence. I believed that if it became known to others that I was in financial difficulties my newspaper position would be jeopardized and my creditors would get me by the throat and prevent me from doing anything to rehabilitate myself. My only chance of salvation, I reasoned, was to hold creditors in check as long as possible and devote all of my energies to building up anew.

Isn’t it the perversity of fate how lucky one sometimes is when he least needs it and how unlucky when he is face to face with disaster?

There had been many times in recent years when speculative ventures yielded astonishing result with almost no effort or wisdom on my part, but now that I had reached the brink of a precipice and knew that it would take but a little push to send me over, luck forsook me. No matter how I speculated or how sure seemed the tips given to me by my friends, I almost invariably was on the wrong side. If I bought stocks, they went down; if I sold, they went up. The more I sought to lift myself from the mire, the more hopelessly involved I became.

Time was rapidly nearing when I could no longer keep my secret. It wasn’t debt alone that tormented me by day and night. I perhaps could have survived that by arranging with creditors to pay them in instalments from my newspaper earnings, but I was menaced by something far worse, for unless I could raise a substantial sum within a period of time that was swiftly coming to an end, there would be dishonor and inevitable arrest and imprisonment. It was this impending ignominy that upset my mental balance and caused me to do the crazy things that followed.

I mentioned in the preceding chapter that at the time I was hurried away to California I sought to safeguard the account with my brokers by depositing with them all of the securities I possessed, together with securities that were not mine, but of which I was legal custodian. The latter represented an investment of eight thousand dollars I had made in behalf of a minor relative as guardian. There was no one to question or criticize what I did with these bonds so long as I produced them in court when called upon to make final settlement of my trusteeship. A bonding company must make good if I defaulted. The hideous specter that was ever before me was whether I would be able to replace the lost bonds.

Several times I was almost within reach of them, but each time the market turned against me and as often I would be brought to the verge of prostration by despair. I grew disheartened over repeated failure. Fear took possession of me and fairly choked me into submission.

Then came days and nights of abject terror. The ring of my telephone would often startle me so that my heart would almost stop beating and the mere sight of a policeman in the street would cause me to tremble and hasten my pace and perhaps dodge around a corner or into some hallway. Often when I went to the _World_ office in the early morning I felt certain that the policeman near the entrance was waiting for me with a warrant, and my heart would thump wildly against my ribs until I had passed him and was at my desk. If a card of some unknown caller was brought to me in the office, I have caught myself asking if it were a policeman. I got so I couldn’t sleep.

All I could think of was what would surely happen to me when the day for settlement came and I couldn’t produce the bonds. I couldn’t take refuge in the plea that I had intended no wrong, that I hadn’t the least intention of converting the bonds to my own use or of speculating with them. The law, I knew, would take into account what I had actually done, not what my intentions were, so in reality I would be adjudged as guilty as if I had actually stolen the bonds and squandered them or gambled them away.

I recall going to a movie and seeing a picture of a lad who stole the pennies from his sister’s toy savings bank and spent them for candy and apples. After he had eaten the candy all of the people in the street were suddenly transformed into policemen and he fled from them in terror, but they surrounded him on all sides and beat him down with their clubs. It turned out to be a dream, but I likened my own state of mind to that of the conscience-stricken boy who robbed his sister’s bank, and I realized more than I ever had before that “conscience makes cowards of us all.”

The day I long had dreaded was finally at hand and I didn’t have the bonds. I staved off disaster for a brief respite by sending a telegram that I was detained by business, thus obtaining an extension. I knew that I was at the end of my rope and rather than suffer disgrace and imprisonment, I resolved to do the only thing that was left me. It was cowardly, but all the courage I ever had was gone and I felt myself crushed and beaten.

Suicide, the last resort of a moral coward, I decided was preferable to never-ending disgrace, so I set about preparing for it. Police Commissioner Waldo was my friend and I telephoned to him for a revolver. Winnie Sheehan, his secretary, replied that if I would call at the commissioner’s office there would be a weapon waiting for me. I got it within an hour, a wicked looking thing, and found it fully loaded. A police officer taught me how to use it.

That evening I destroyed all of my personal papers at the office and left a note to the effect that I was unexpectedly called out of town and might be absent for several days. At midnight I left for Washington, accompanied by my wife, who knew nothing of my difficulties or of what had been in my mind ever since our return from Colorado. I told her that I was going to Washington on business and she gladly consented to accompany me.

On the train that night I tore up my bank books and all private papers that were in my pockets. I never would see New York again, for I was going away to die, to die like a coward and leave her to bear all the poverty and disgrace that was sure to follow, leave her in this way after a lifetime of affectionate devotion. I cried all night, sickened with the thought of it.

I caught a cold in the sleeper and the next day I was down with the grippe. The fever lasted for two weeks and all that time I was planning self-destruction. The first day I was able to get about I went to the cemetery where my mother was buried and bought the plot adjoining hers, arranging at the same time to have it resodded and beautified with plants and shrubs.

Up to this time I thought only of putting an end to myself. My wife, I supposed, would be cared for by my relatives. I asked them about it and the reply was so evasive and unassuring that my plans were completely upset. The problem now confronting me was what was to become of her. She was so fragile and delicate it was impossible that she could ever do for herself. She had no relatives to turn to. She had scores of loving friends but there were none to give her more than temporary shelter when I abandoned her.

I went away into the woods for a day and sat silently thinking. When I returned I had made up my mind to do the most dreadful deed that my distorted brain could conceive. It was hideous, but there was no other way.

The following morning I went to a tombstone maker and selected a large block of granite, giving directions to have my name and my wife’s name carved on it and to have the stone immediately set up on my cemetery plot. I wanted to see that everything was done as I planned, and I arranged to go to the cemetery as soon as the tombstone maker should notify me that his work was completed.

The interval was spent in pleasure seeking. I took my wife and my relatives for long automobile rides in the daytime and to the theaters in the evenings and we celebrated the anniversary of our wedding with a sumptuous dinner at the New Willard. The day after that dinner was to be our last day on earth. Could anything be more horrible?

The morning of that last day I was with Harry Dunlop, at that time Washington correspondent of the _World_. I had gone to his office to write farewell letters. When I finished my task he asked me to accompany him to the White House, where President Wilson was to receive all of the correspondents in a body and talk to them of the threatening situation along the Mexican border.

I was reluctant to go but finally yielded. When we were assembled in the President’s office, some two hundred or more, Joe Tumulty slipped around to my side and asked me to linger after the others had been dismissed and be presented to Mr. Wilson. I couldn’t get out of it. One may imagine the thoughts that were flashing through my mind while for fifteen minutes I stood with the President and chatted with him about matters of national importance. I felt grateful that he could not read my thoughts or know that the hand he clasped so cordially would soon press the trigger of the revolver that was concealed in my pocket.

As I was leaving the White House, a secret service agent informed me that Chief Flynn had telephoned that he would like me to come to his office. I had known Flynn when he was a deputy police commissioner in New York and we were friends. I called in response to his invitation and he took me over to the New Willard to luncheon. He didn’t suspect what was in my mind any more than President Wilson had, but when I left him I went to a writing table in the hotel and wrote him a brief note of explanation, to be delivered with the others I had written, after my body should be found.

That night the strangest, most inexplicable phenomenon prevented me from doing the dreadful deed I had planned.

We all went to the theater in the evening to see Ziegfeld’s Follies and it was nearly midnight when we retired. My wife and I were occupying the room that had been my mother’s and were sleeping in the bed in which she died. After I had turned out the lights I hid my revolver beneath my pillow and then lay still for a long time, trembling with horror and dreading the monstrous thing I had to do.

At last the deep breathing of that dear little woman by my side told me that she was fast asleep. I had waited for that time to come that she might never know.

I drew the revolver from under the pillow and as I raised myself on my elbow I saw something that stopped me. It was my dead mother.

She stood in the room but a few feet from the bed, not the white-haired old woman, wasted with disease, that I had come to see a few days before she died, but the beautiful mother I had idolized when I was a child. She looked at me with the same sweet smile and gently shook her head, just as she had done in childhood days when reproving me for something I shouldn’t have done. Then she faded away.

I have thought of it often since and have wondered if it really was my mother’s spirit I saw, or if my fevered brain imagined it. I know it all seemed very real at the time and that what I saw or imagined I saw caused me to thrust the revolver under the mattress and to take my sleeping wife in my arms and kiss her, at the same time breathing a silent prayer of gratitude that she was still alive.

In the morning I received a telegram, peremptorily demanding that I appear in court without further delay and render a final accounting of my trusteeship. It was accompanied by a threat to forfeit the bond. I knew I could no longer delay the execution of what I had determined to do, but after what had happened the night before I resolved not to do it in our family house.

That evening my wife and I sailed down the Potomac and the next morning we were at Old Point Comfort. We found the Chamberlain so crowded that we were unable to secure more than one small bedroom. I declined the poor accommodations offered me and the next train carried us on to Richmond.

If my wife thought I acted strangely she probably attributed it to the weakened condition the grippe had left me in. I know that she never suspected that I was in trouble and more than half-crazed. She was accustomed to leaving everything to me and to believing that what I did was always the best thing to do, and I had always trained myself to mask my thoughts and to present an untroubled exterior, no matter how great my worries might be. It is the worst thing a husband can do and brutally unfair to the wife, but I had always gone on the principle that the husband should bear all the burdens and that he owed it to his wife to share with her only his joys and pleasures.

What blind idiots some of us are.

There was a delightful suite of rooms awaiting us when we arrived in Richmond, a fitting place for the gruesome tragedy that was so imminent, and I resolved that it should be done that night.

We spent an enjoyable afternoon, or at least my wife did, driving about the historic city, visiting the site where Libby Prison had stood and in which her brother had been a prisoner of war, and on out to the historic battlefields.

After dinner I went alone to write a brief letter of directions to the hotel people and the coroner. When I rejoined my wife I found her chatting vivaciously with an old friend of mine I hadn’t seen for many years and who had noticed our names in the evening paper and had called to renew a friendship that was broken off long ago. I was so glad to see him that we visited until far into the night and when he went away I had no heart to go ahead with what I had come to do.

The next day we returned to Washington. There I found another telegram in reply to one I had sent, giving me an extension of one week to make my appearance in court. Two days of the week were already gone. I suggested a visit to Baltimore and to Baltimore we went, and again I selected a suitable suite of rooms that had no connecting doors. It was in this city that the head office of the surety company that had furnished the bond for my trusteeship was located. I have never been able to explain to myself why I went there. I recall seeing the gilt lettering on the windows of the surety company as we drove by on our way from the railway station to the hotel.

All the blood in me rushed into my heart as I realized that they must soon make good the bonds I had lost in speculation. I wondered if they had yet become alarmed and if they might not be trying to trace me. In a newspaper I glanced at while we were at dinner was a notice that George Cohan was playing _Broadway Jones_ at one of the theaters that evening and my wife suggested that we go. I don’t remember enjoying a play so much in all my life. The comedy of it caused me to forget myself completely and the horror that was suspended above my head. After the play we went to supper and continued to laugh over what we had seen and heard. Broadway Jones had been in almost as deep trouble as I was and had pulled out of it.

There was no tragedy in our apartment that night.

The following morning, when we started for a walk, two men with slouched hats drawn over their eyes, went out of the hotel when we did, crossed the street and stood on the corner for a minute as if watching to see which direction we would take. When we started up the street they followed on the opposite side and I was certain that they kept glancing in our direction from the corner of their eyes. I began to shake so I could scarcely walk. They disappeared in a building and came out as we passed and again followed. I led my wife into a small park and we sat on a bench. The men passed us and I imagined they looked sharply at me, though neither spoke. They went on through the park and I lost sight of them as they disappeared around a bend of the walk. I believed they were hiding behind a clump of shrubbery. I was in agony.

“Those two men who just passed us are detectives and they will arrest me,” I said to my wife.

“Arrest you! Arrest you for what?”

I told her the whole miserable story, of my losses through speculation and what had happened to the other bonds; of my determination to put an end to myself. I said nothing of the more monstrous part of my plan. She listened to me in silence and without once interrupting. I don’t think she even stirred or that the expression of her face changed during the recital. When I had finished she took my hand in hers and said:

“My dear husband, I know better than you can tell me that there was nothing intentionally dishonest in what you have done. I know you are incapable of that. I think, too, that you have worried so much over it that you have magnified your troubles and lost control. Try to pull yourself together. Those men you saw were not detectives, nor is it likely that anyone is concerned about you or your movements. Let us return to New York. You have scores of friends who will gladly aid you. I am sure there will be some way out of it if you will only collect your scattered wits.”

We went to New York that evening. The following day I told my troubles to a lawyer friend. He gave me good counsel. If there were no way of replacing the bonds, he suggested that I go direct to the bonding company, make a clean breast of everything and propose to them that they settle with the courts, which they would be required to do if I defaulted, and accept from me monthly payments from my salary until their claim was fully satisfied. What he told me gave me hope. That night I awoke from a sound sleep and the name of a friend was fixed in my mind. I called to my wife, who was asleep in an adjoining room, and told her I would try and see that friend as early in the morning as I could. I did see him. When I started to tell him of the trouble I was in, he checked me.

“I don’t care how you got into trouble, just tell me what I have got to do to get you out of it,” he said.

And when I did, he directed me to go to his bankers and the bonds would be waiting for me. In less than an hour after I got them they were on their way to court, together with my accounting, and my bondsmen and myself were released from further liability. Only my wife, the lawyer who counseled me, and the friend who aided me, ever knew of the peril I was in. That legal friend is now a judge in the New York courts. I put him there.

Unlike the burned child who dreads the fire, I didn’t keep away from the flames that scorched and almost consumed me. One would naturally suppose that after all I had gone through I would have learned a lesson and would never again be drawn into the whirlpool of stock speculation. But the microbe that had fastened in my mind wasn’t easily uprooted.

Speculation sometimes becomes a mania that should be classed with insanity. The mischief is done when the speculator begins luckily. If his first ventures were disastrous he could be easily cured, but when his initial investment has been followed by an almost uninterrupted string of profits, he begins to imagine himself a wizard and no matter how much or how often luck turns against him he seldom stops until he is ruined. There isn’t a broker’s office in the financial district that isn’t haunted by white-faced, careworn men who were ruined by speculation. Many of them were once millionaires. Worst of it is they never give up hope of some day making a “killing.”

I stayed away for awhile, but a friend came to me with a sure thing tip one day and I plunged on it with every dollar I could borrow. And I won.

The check that came to me was so munificent that I almost felt rich. Part of it went to creditors, but the greater share into another speculative investment. Again I won and I kept on winning until one day the stock market was thrown into a wild panic by news that Germany had declared war. The bottom dropped out of everything and the Stock Exchange was compelled to close.

That was the last time I ever speculated. I never again had an opportunity. The ruin that came to me was even more disastrous than the first. Everything I had was swept away, leaving me broke and twenty thousand dollars in debt. It was the finish.

The next four years I was in hell. Creditors harassed me day and night and there was no way of satisfying them. They got my salary as fast as I could earn it and sometimes much faster. I borrowed from every friend who would lend to me, from Peter to pay Paul and from Tom to pay Peter, but the strain was more than I could stand and I cracked under it.

There came a time when something snapped in my brain.

I knew that I was breaking down and I felt that it wouldn’t be long before I lost my mind. Came long nights of sleeplessness, nights of mental torment, nights when I would awake to hear “insanity and death” shouted in my ears. I lived again the torture I went through that time I was in Washington.

Thoughts of suicide were always hammering into my brain. All that restrained me was what it would mean to my wife. If I were to carry out what was ever present in my mind she would be a beggar. Worse than that there would be nothing left for her to do but follow after me and in the same way. It was maddening, for I loved my wife.

Once I went alone to Maine ostensibly to fish, but with a determined purpose not to return. I had been there the summer before and had been nearly upset in a storm on the lake. The thought came to me that I could get caught out in another storm and that my upturned boat would enable me to end my life without scandal, for it would at least have the appearance of accident. No one could possibly know that it was premeditated.

Again I cleared out my desk at the office and destroyed all of my private papers. I fished every day for a week. Then came the opportunity I was waiting for, a stormy day. People at the house where I was stopping advised me not to venture on the lake, but I laughed at their fears, and went, intending not to return. I had figured that my life insurance would be sufficient to maintain my wife for the few years she might survive me.

I went out on the lake and not until I was struggling with the waves did it suddenly dawn on me that I had come away from New York without paying the premiums on two of my accident policies. I had carried the insurance for twenty years and had suffered the policies to lapse only ten days before. How I could have forgotten so important a matter is incomprehensible. I knew the companies would reinstate my policies as soon as they received the premiums, but it was too late then for the urgent purpose that was in my mind, for if I attempted to send checks from Maine and in a few days was “accidentally drowned,” the companies were certain to contest payment.

All of this flashed through my mind while I was out on the lake. I pulled the boat back to shore. I went back to New York that night. I paid the delinquent premiums and waited for sufficient time to elapse.

Two months went by and there was scarcely a waking hour that I wasn’t planning self-effacement, taxing my ingenuity to find a way that would make it appear to have been an accident. The more I thought about it the less plausible it seemed. If I were drowned while bathing, it might at first be reported as accidental, but my experience with such matters convinced me that my plan was impossible, for the insurance investigators would be certain to find out how hopelessly involved I was and there would be sufficient grounds to contest payment of my policies. Creditors grew more and more importunate. I had exhausted every expedient I could think of and knew that I could no longer stave off legal proceedings. Lawsuits and exposure meant the loss of my position. I was against a stone wall.

The climax came in the middle of September, 1918. A bank refused to renew my note, another bank notified me that I had overdrawn my account, two creditors sent word that my checks had been returned to them unpaid, and other creditors served notice that they would immediately take action to garnishee my salary. All this in a single day.

The following day was Sunday. It meant a respite of twenty-four hours. After that, abysmal ruin. Nothing could save me.

If I were alive on Monday morning there would be a pack of sheriff’s officers and process servers waiting at my office. I would be turned out of my hotel and all of my belongings would be seized. Probably I would be arrested for overdrawing my account. I lay awake all night thinking about it. What a wretched end!

Early Sunday morning my wife and I started for the seashore. A block from our hotel a little old woman in a faded black dress, her face pinched with suffering and privation, stretched out a trembling hand and I dropped a coin in it.

“Oh, God! I wonder if I will ever come to that,” my wife said.

I don’t suppose she meant it. She knew nothing of the predicament I was in, though she may have intuitively suspected that I was worried about money matters.

But what she said cut into my heart like a knife stab. I knew that within a few hours she would be almost as friendless and helpless as that poor creature.

On the beach at Brighton all that afternoon I could think of nothing but the little old beggar woman. Her face would fade from the picture and my wife’s face would come and, I would see her, sick and trembling and wan and feeble, stretching out her hand to a chance passer-by. It burned into my brain like fire.

There was only one way I could save her from such a fate.