VI
A taxicab stood in the narrow street near Rosina’s home, its driver ready at the wheel, its engine purring. Behind the drawn blinds, sat Guisseppi, aflame with excitement, peering eagerly through the curtains from time to time.
Guisseppi was desperate. There was no place for the dead among the living. He had learned that clearly. As a “living dead man,” all his experiences had been tragic. He regretted his resuscitation. He longed for the peace of the grave.
His old friends had fallen away from him. Many believed him a spirit damned, who, by some strange dispensation, was spared to life for yet a little while to make more exquisite the final agony reserved for him. Others were intelligent enough to know the truth, but even these were repelled by a certain unwholesomeness, a savor of the sepulchre, that seemed to cling about him.
The girls he had known in his old, gay days would have nothing to do with him. As handsome as ever, as romantic, with a voice as musical and appealing, he was in their imagination enveloped in an atmosphere of the charnel-house, and the curse of hell was branded on his brow.
His relatives held aloof. Between him and even his mother and father he was conscious that a thin shadow had gradually crept, and the tenderness of their love had been cooled by a ghostly fear of this eerie son who had been down among the dead and read with dead eyes the mysteries beyond the tomb.
He had been unable to find employment. It was as if every business house had up a sign, “No dead men need apply.”
In despair and desperation, he fell into his old ways of banditry. He soon had placed to his record a long series of bold robberies. For several of his first lawless exploits, the police arrested him. But invariably the judges before whom he was arraigned set him at liberty.
So after a while the police refused to arrest him. What was the use? This ghost-man would only be set free again.
... While Guisseppi sat hidden from view behind the curtains of his taxicab, ruminating upon the bitterness of his fate, Rosina emerged from her home. Trim and dainty with pink cheeks and sparkling eyes, the young beauty was subtly suggestive of flowers and fragrance as she tripped along the street in the warm sunshine.
As she came abreast of the taxicab, Guisseppi stepped out, caught her in his arms, and swung her into the car. The girl’s wild screams shrilled through the slumberous stillness of the quarter and filled the streets with excited throngs as the cab plunged madly forward, dashed around a corner and was soon lost to sight. In a distant part of the city, the car halted before a weather-stained building. Within the dingy doorway Guisseppi disappeared, bearing the kidnapped maiden in his arms.
A little later, Guisseppi appeared before the marriage license clerk in the city hall.
“I’m sorry,” said the clerk, “but I can not give you a marriage license.”
“Why not?”
“You are dead. You can not marry.”
“But I’m going to marry!” shouted Guisseppi defiantly.
“Impossible. If I went through the formality of filling out a license for you, no minister or priest would perform the wedding service. The marriage altar, orange blossoms, the happiness of domestic love are not for the dead.”
“But I’m alive! I am only legally dead.”
The clerk smiled tolerantly. With a pencil he drew a circle on a sheet of paper.
“Here,” said he, “is a cipher. It is the symbol of nothing, but, as a circular pencil mark, it is still something.”
He erased every trace of the pencil and exhibited the blank piece of paper.
“This,” he explained, “illustrates your status. In human affairs, you are a cipher with the rim rubbed out. A man legally dead is less than nothing.”