I have tried to tell his story as my father felt it, at the times when
it took him out of himself and made him forget himself and me. But there
were other times when he remembered himself and me, and those were the
times that hurt the most. For in that new humility in his eyes and in
his voice I could feel him then preparing us both--me to see why it was
that he could not do for me what _she_ had wished; himself to hold on
grimly, to find a new job for his old age, to keep from becoming a
burden--on me.
At last we were coming to the end--to that last figure in dollars and
cents. I caught his suspense and we talked little now. I knew the price
at which he was selling, and toward that figure I watched the debts
creep slowly up. I saw them creep over, and knew that we had not a
dollar left to live on. And still the debts kept mounting. How small
they were, these last ones, a coil of rope, two kegs of paint--the irony
of it compared to the bigness of his life. Still these little figures
climbed. At last he handed me his balance. He was in debt four thousand,
one hundred and forty-six dollars and seventeen cents.
He had risen from his old office chair:
"Well, son, I guess that ends our work."
"Yes, sir."
He went out of the office.
I sat there dully for some time. Then I remember there came a harsh
scream from a freight engine close outside. And I looked out of the
window.
The harbor of big companies, uglier than I had ever seen it, no longer
dotted with white sails, but clouded with the smoke and soot of an age
of steam, and iron, lay sprawled out there like a thing alive. Always
changing, always growing, it had crushed the life out of my father and
mother, and now it was ready for Sue and me.
"I've got to stay here and make money."
Good-by to the Beautiful City of Grays. A clock in an outer room struck
five. In Paris it was ten o'clock, and those friends of mine from all
countries were crowding into "The Dirty Spoon." I could see them
sauntering one by one on that summer's night down the gay old Boulevard
Saint Michel and dropping into their seats at the table in the corner.
"How am I to make money? By writing?"
I thought of De Maupassant and the rest, and the two years I had spent
in trying to make vivid and real the life I had seen. In these last
anxious weeks I had sent some of my Paris sketches to magazine offices
in New York. They had all been returned with printed slips of rejection,
except in one case where the editor wrote, "This is a good piece of
writing, but the subject is too remote. Why not try something nearer
home?"
"All right," I thought, "what's near me here? Let's see. There's a cloud
of yellow smoke I can do, with a brand-new tug below it dragging a
string of good big barges. What are they loaded with? Standard Oil. Wait
till they get closer and I can even describe the smell! No," I concluded
savagely. "Let's keep my writing clean out of this hole and get the
money some other way!"
Then suddenly I forgot myself and thought of my stern brave old dad.
What under the sun was he going to do?
That week he mortgaged our house on the Heights for five thousand
dollars. With this he paid off all his debts and put the balance in the
bank. Then from the big dock company he got a job in his own warehouse
at a hundred dollars a month.
"Kind of 'em," he said gruffly. He was sixty-five years old. They were
even kind enough to add to that a job for me. I sat at the desk next to
his and I was paid ten dollars a week.
Sue let the servants go, hired one green German girl and said she knew
she could run the house on a hundred and twenty dollars a month. But the
August bills went over that, so we drew money out of the bank. My father
had bronchitis that week. We managed to keep him in bed for three days,
but then he struggled up and dressed and went back to his desk in the
warehouse.
"Keep your eye on him down there," said Sue. "He's so terribly feeble."
"This can't go on," I told her.
I must make more than ten dollars a week. Again I sent out some of my
sketches, again the magazines sent them back. I went to a newspaper
office, but there an ironical office boy, with the aid of the city
editor, made me feel that reporting was not in my line. What other work
could I find to do? How much time did I have? How long was my father
going to last? I watched his face and our bank account. I studied the
"want ads" in the press. But the more I studied the smaller I felt, for
this was one of the years of depression. "Two Hundred Thousand In New
York Idle," I read in a headline. Here was literature that gripped!
"I guess I'll stay right where I am. It's safer," I thought anxiously.
"Perhaps if I work hard enough they'll give me a raise at Christmas.
When Dad was my age he kept two sets of books, one by day and the other
at night. How can I make my evenings pay?"
I took long walks in Brooklyn and picked up night work here and there.
It was monotonous clerical work, and being slow at figures I was often
at it till midnight. Very late one evening, while making out bills in a
hardware store, I suddenly came to a customer whose initials were J. K.
It started me thinking of Joe Kramer and our last long talk--about hay.
"So this is hay," I told myself. "How long will it take me to get a hay
mind, back here by this damned harbor?"