"It ain't too late," I says, "to pull out of this nigger scheme yet and get into something more honest.""I don't know," he says thoughtful. "I think perhaps it IS too late." And he sets there looking like a man that is going over a good many years of life in his mind. Purty soon he says:
"As far as honesty goes--it isn't that so much, O Daniel-come-to-judgment! It's about as honest as most medicine games. It's--" He stopped and frowned agin.
"What is it?"
"It's their being NIGGERS," he says.
That made the difference fur me, too. I dunno how, nor why.
"I've tried nearly everything but blackmail,"he says, "and I'll probably be trying that by this time next year, if this scheme fails. But there's something about their being niggers that makes me sick of this thing already--just as the time has come to make the start. And I don't know WHY it should, either." He slipped another big slug of whiskey into him, and purty soon he asts me:
"Do you know what's the matter with me?"
I asts him what.
"I'm too decent to be a crook," he says, "and too crooked to be decent. You've got to be one thing or the other steady to make it pay."Then he says:
"Did you ever hear of the descent to Avernus, Danny?""I might," I tells him, "and then agin I mightn't, but if I ever did, I don't remember what she is.
What is she?"
"It's the chute to the infernal regions," he says.
"They say it's greased. But it isn't. It's really no easier sliding down than it is climbing back."Well, I seen this nigger scheme of our'n wasn't the only thing that was troubling Doctor Kirby that night. It was thinking of all the schemes like it in the years past he had went into, and how he had went into 'em light-hearted and more'n half fur fun when he was a young man, and now he wasn't fitten fur nothing else but them kind of schemes, and he knowed it. He was seeing himself how he had been changing, like another person could of seen it. That's the main trouble with drinking to fergit yourself. You fergit the wrong part of yourself.
I left him purty soon, and went along to bed.
My room was next to his'n, and they was a door between, so the two could be rented together if wanted, I suppose. I went to sleep and woke up agin with a start out of a dream that had in it millions and millions and millions of niggers, every way you looked, and their mouths was all open red and their eyes walled white, fit to scare you out of your shoes.
I hearn Doctor Kirby moving around in his room. But purty soon he sets down and begins to talk to himself. Everything else was quiet.
I was kind of worried about him, he had taken so much, and hoped he wouldn't get a notion to go downtown that time o' night. So I thinks I will see how he is acting, and steps over to the door be-tween the rooms.
The key happened to be on my side, and I un-locked it. But she only opens a little ways, fur his wash stand was near to the hinge end of the door.
I looked through. He is setting by the table, looking at a woman's picture that is propped up on it, and talking to himself. He has never hearn me open the door, he is so interested. But somehow, he don't look drunk. He looks like he had fought his way up out of it, somehow--his forehead was sweaty, and they was one intoxicated lock of hair sticking to it; but that was the only un-sober-looking thing about him. I guess his legs would of been unsteady if he had of tried to walk, but his intellects was uncomfortable and sober.
He is still keeping up that same old argument with himself, or with the picture.
"It isn't any use," I hearn him say, looking at the picture.
Then he listened like he hearn it answering him.
"Yes, you always say just that--just that," he says. "And I don't know why I keep on listening to you."The way he talked, and harkened fur an answer, when they was nothing there to answer, give me the creeps.
"You don't help me," he goes on, "you don't help me at all. You only make it harder. Yes, this thing is worse than the others. I know that.
But I want money--and fool things like this HAVEsometimes made it. No, I won't give it up. No, there's no use making any more promises now.
I know myself now. And you ought to know me by this time, too. Why can't you let me alone altogether? I should think, when you see what Iam, you'd let me be.
"God help you! if you'd only stay away it wouldn't be so hard to go to hell!"
