With twenty-seven dollars as capital, and a bundle of garments of rather
uncertain style as baggage, and the pawn-ticket for a rather good
suit-case as insurance, Mr. and Mrs. Seth Appleby established themselves
in a "furnished housekeeping room" on Avenue B, and prepared to
reconquer New York. It was youth's hopeful sally. They had everything to
gain. Yet they were irretrievably past sixty.
You may for many years have been a New-Yorker, yet not know Avenue B,
where Jewish apartment-houses and bakeries are sullenly held back by the
gas-house district and three-story houses of muddy halls and furtive
people who have lost ambition. The genus "furnished housekeeping room"
is a filthy box with a stove, a table, a bed, a few seats, many
cockroaches, and from one to twenty people, all thrown in and shaken up,
like a grab-bag. Here in this world of tired and beaten slinkers the
Innocents, with their fresh faces and kindly eyes, excitedly made
themselves another home.
With carbolic acid and soap Mother cleaned away much of the smell of
former inhabitants, while Father propped up the rusty stove with a
couple of bricks, and covered the drably patternless wall-paper with
pictures cut from old magazines, which he bought at two for five cents
on Fourteenth Street. One of them was a chromo of a child playing with
kittens, which reminded him of the picture they had had in more
prosperous days. Mother furiously polished the battered knives and
forks, and arranged the chipped china on shelves covered with fresh pink
scalloped paper. When she was away Father secretly pursued the vulgar
but socially conscious sport of killing cockroaches with a slipper.
As the Applebys passed along the hopeless streets, past shops lighted
with single gas-jets, or through halls where suspicious women in frowsy
wrappers peered at them, they were silent. But in their one room they
were hopeful again, and they celebrated its redecoration with music
energetically performed by Father on the mouth-organ. Also they ventured
to go out to dinner, in a real restaurant of the great city, their
city. On Fourteenth Street was a noble inn where the menu was printed in
English and Hungarian, where for thirty-five cents each they had soup
and goulash and coffee and pudding in three colors, chloroformed beets
and vast, pale, uneasy-looking pickles, electric lights in red globes
and a tinseled ceiling hung with artificial flowers, the music of a
violin and the sight of eager city faces.
"I'm as excited as a boy with his first pair of red-top boots," declared
Father. "Pretty fine to see people again, heh? And pretty soon we'll be
dining at the Wal-dorf-As-torya, heh?"
"How you do run on!" said Mother, mechanically, placid dreaminess in her
face as she listened to the violin that like a river bore the flotsam of
Hungarian and Jewish voices.
Alone, jobless, yet they were so recklessly happy that they went to a
ten-cent movie and watched the extreme heroism of a young district
attorney with the motionless eager credulity of the simple-hearted.
As soon as they had installed themselves, Father edged shyly into his
old haunt, the shoe-store of Pilkings & Son.
He found Son brusquely directing the cleaning out of an old stock of
hunting-boots which Pilkings, _pere_, had always believed would sell.
Pilkings, _fils_, was bald, and narrow between the eyes. He looked at
Father and nodded as though it hurt him.
"I-- Is your father around, Mr. Edward?" Father inquired. "I didn't hear
from you again--been waiting--thought maybe I'd get a letter--I hope he
has recovered--I know how bad the grippe--"
While he was talking he realized that Edward Pilkings was in mourning.
Young Pilkings looked shallowly grieved and muttered, "The old gentleman
passed beyond, a week ago Thursday."
"Oh, Mr. Edward, I can't tell you-- It's a blow to me, a very great
blow. I was with your father for so many, many years."
"Yes--uh-- Yes."
"Is there-- I wonder if I couldn't send a letter or some flowers or
something to your mother?"
"Why, yes, I guess there's nothing to prevent.... Boy, you be careful of
those boxes! What the deuce do you think you're trying to do? There,
that's a little better. Try to show some sense about your work, even if
you ain't got any." Edward Pilkings's voice crackled like wood in a
fireplace.
Desperately Father tried again. "Fact is, Mr. Edward, I've given up my
tea-room on Cape Cod. Didn't go so very well. I guess my forty, like the
fellow says, is sticking to selling shoes. Mrs. Appleby and I have just
got back to town and got settled down and-- Fact is, I'd be glad to go
back to work."
His hesitant manner invited refusal. It was evident that Mr. Edward
Pilkings was not interested.
Shyly Father added, "You know your father promised to keep a place open
for me."
"Well, now, I'll tell you, Appleby; it ain't that you aren't a good
salesman, but just _now_ I'm--well, kind of reorganizing the business. I
sort of feel the establishment ought to have a little more pep in it,
and so-- You see-- But you leave your address and as soon as anything
turns up I'll be mighty glad to let you know."
For years Father had pityingly heard applicants for jobs disposed of
with the request to "leave their addresses."
"No," he said; "no, maybe I'll come in and see you again some day. Good
day. Good luck to you, Mr. Edward."
He greeted his old acquaintances among the clerks. They were cordial,
but they kept an eye on Mr. Edward Pilkings.
He shivered as he walked out. It was warm and busy in the shoe-store,
but outside it was rather chilly for a man with no overcoat--or job. It
seemed incredible that he should have found his one place of refuge
closed to him.
He walked from shoe-store to shoe-store, hopelessly. "Old-fashioned
place," the shoe-men said when he mentioned his experience with Pilkings
& Son's. "Be glad to do what we can for you, Mr. Appleby, but just
now--"
He had reached the department-store section. Already the holiday rush
had begun. Holly was in the windows; Salvation Army solicitors tinkled
irritating bells on every corner.
Department stores had always rather bewildered this man of small
business, but he inquired for the help-employment bureau in the largest
of them, and his shyness disappeared as he found a long line of
applicants filling out blanks. Here he did not have to plead with some
one man for the chance to work. He was handled quickly and efficiently.
On a blank he gave his age, his experience, how much he expected; and a
brisk, impersonal clerk told him to return next day.
On that next day the world became wonderful for Father, wonderful and
young again, for some one did actually want him. He had a temporary
holiday-help job in the leather-goods department, at eight dollars a
week.
* * * * *
Father's first day of work in the leather-goods department was the most
difficult he had ever known. His knowledge of shoes and leather had
become purely mechanical; a few glances at new stock and at trade
journals had kept him aware of changing styles. Now he had suddenly to
become omniscient in regard to hand-bags, portfolios, writing-cases,
music-rolls; learn leathers which he had never handled--cobra-seal,
walrus, ecrase, monkey-skin. He had to appear placidly official, almost
pontifical, when vague ladies appeared, poked clippings from holiday
magazines at him, and demanded, "I want something like that." "That"
usually depicted articles of whose use he had the most indefinite
notions. Other ladies, ponderous ladies, who wanted vast quantities of
free advice before purchasing Christmas presents, desired encyclopedic
information about sewing-cases, picnic-sets, traveling pillow-cases,
telephone-pads, guest-books, and "a cover for my Social Register, and I
want you to be sure it's the very latest thing."
He was defenseless. He could not dodge them. Anybody could come up and
ask him anything--and did. And while he could learn something about the
new leathers, still it was difficult for him to remember the Long Island
Railroad time-table well enough to reply instantly when an irate shopper
snapped at him, "Do you know what's the next train for Hempstead?"
The most _difficile_ woman in a shoe-store has at least a definite,
tangible foot to fit. But the holiday crowd were buying presents for
persons of whom Father knew nothing--though the shoppers expected him to
know everything, from the sizes of their wrists to their tastes in
bill-folds. They haggled and pushed and crowded; they wanted it to be
less expensive, as well as more blessed, to give than to receive. He
spent twenty minutes in showing the entire line of diaries to one woman.
She apparently desired to make sure that they were all of them moral or
something of the sort. At the end of the time she sighed, "Oh dear, it
isn't time for the matinee even yet. Shopping is so hard." And oozed
away into the crowd.
Father had started his first day with a superior manner of knowing all
about leather and the ways of cranky customers. He ended it with a
depressed feeling that he knew nothing about anything, that he couldn't
keep up the holiday pace of the younger clerks--and that the assistant
buyer of the department had been watching him. He walked home with
strained, weary shoulders, but as he turned into the gloomy hallway
leading to their room he artificially brightened his expression, that he
might bring joy home to Mother, who would have been lonely and anxious
and waiting all day.
He pictured her as sitting there, hunched up, depressed. He would bounce
in with news of a good day. He tried the door carefully. Mother stood in
the middle of the floor, in a dream. In the dimness of the room the coal
fire shone through the front draught of the stove, and threw a faint
rose on her crossed hands. Taller she seemed, and more commanding. Her
head was back, her eyes sparkling. She was clean-cut and strong against
the unkempt walls.
"Why, Mother! You look so happy! What is it?"
"I'm going to help! I'm not going to be a lazybones. I've got a job,
too! In the toy-department at Regalberg's. And they are going to pay me
nine dollars a week. How's that for your stupid old woman?"
"Why--why--you don't need-- I don't know as I like--" began the
conventional old Father to whom woman's place was in the home whether or
not there was a home in which to have a place. Then the new Father, the
adventurer, declared, "I think it's mighty fine, Mother. Mighty fine. If
it won't be too hard on you."
"I'm going to take you to dinner to-night, instead of you taking me.
That is, if you'll lend me a dollar!"
Laughing till they nearly cried, with Father shamelessly squeezing her
arm on public thoroughfares, they again plunged into the Roman pleasures
of the little tinsel restaurant. And like two lovers, like the
telephone-girl in your office and the clerk next door, they made an
engagement to meet at noon, next day, in a restaurant half-way between
Regalberg's and Father's store.
When she came breathlessly into that beef-stew and paper-napkin
restaurant at noon, Mother already had something of the busy,
unself-conscious look of the woman who can compete with men. Her cheeks
were flushed with walking. Her eyes were young. She glanced about the
room, found Father, smiled quickly, and proceeded to order her own lunch
in a business-like way.
"They told me to be back in half an hour," she said, "but I don't mind a
bit. It's been nice all morning. This is the first time in my life I
ever did have all the children to talk to that I wanted. And the sweet
toys! Think of me gadding around like this, and enjoying it! I swear to
goodness I don't know myself. And what do you think I'm going to do if
either of us gets a raise? I'm going to buy you an overcoat!"
Father felt that he didn't know her, either. She did most of the talking
at lunch, and hurried cheerfully back to her job, while Father plodded
wearily away, speculating as to whether he could keep bustling on tired,
stinging feet till six, like the younger holiday help with whom he was
in competition.
He couldn't seem to please the assistant buyer of the department at all,
that afternoon, though in his eager way he tried to be the perfect
salesman.
On Saturday morning there was a little note for him in which the
superintendent was obsequiously Father's servant, and humbly informed
Father that his services wouldn't be needed after that day. Would he, if
it was quite convenient, call for his pay the following Tuesday, and not
fail to turn in his locker-key before leaving the establishment?
The assistant buyer came around and unhappily told Father that they were
letting him go because the department was overstocked with younger,
liver men. "I'm mighty sorry, and I wish you good luck," he said, with
flash of the real man under the smooth, steely exterior.
Father scarcely heard him, though he smiled faintly. He read the note
many times as he stumbled home. But he couldn't get himself to show it
to Mother till Sunday afternoon, so proud was she of helping him and
proving herself a business woman--succeeding in a nine-dollar job while
Father, who had once been worth twenty-two good dollars a week, hadn't
been able to keep an eight-dollar job. Being quite human, Father felt a
scornful envy of her for a minute, when she repeated all the pleasant
things that had been said to her. But she was so frank, so touchingly
happy, that he could not long harden his heart.
When he told her of his ill-fortune she put her hand to her breast and
looked desperately afraid. It was only with a dry gasp that she could
say: "Never mind, Seth, you'll find something else. I'm glad you don't
have to handle all those silly card-cases and all. And so--so--oh, I do
hope you find something."
"You won't think I'm entirely a failure?"
"I won't have you use that word! Don't I know--haven't I seen you for
years? Why, I depend on you like--it sounds like a honeymoon, but you're
just about my religion, Seth."
But she went to bed very early, to be absolutely certain of being on
time at Regalberg's Monday morning.
* * * * *
So began for Seth Appleby the haunted days when, drifting through the
gray and ghostly city of winter, he scarce knew whether he was a real
man or a ghost. Down prison corridors that the city calls streets, among
Jewish and Italian firms of which he had never heard, he wandered
aimlessly, asking with more and more diffidence for work, any kind of
work. His shoes were ground down at the heel, now, and cracked open on
one side. In such footgear he dared not enter a shoe-store, his own
realm, to ask for work that he really could do. As his December drifted
toward Christmas like a rudderless steamer in a fog, the cold permitted
him to seek for work only an hour or two a day, for he had no overcoat
and his coat was very thin. Seth Appleby didn't think of himself as one
of the rank of paupers, but rather as a man who didn't have an overcoat.
He had the grippe, and for a week he never left the house. While Mother
proudly carried on the money-earning he tried to do the house-work. With
unskilled hands he swept--leaving snags of dirt in the corners; he
washed--breaking a dish now and then; he even got down on protesting
sore knees and sloshed around in an attempt at scrubbing the knotty,
splintery floor. He tried to cook dinner and breakfast, but his
repertoire consisted of frying--fried eggs, fried bacon, fried bread,
fried pork chops, which Mother pretended to like, though they gave her
spasms of indigestion. In the richest city in the world he haggled with
abusive push-cart peddlers over five cents' worth of cabbage. He was
patient, but wrinkled with hopelessness.
With two warm days in succession, and the grippe gone, Father found work
as a noontime waiter in a piggery on Third Avenue, where contractors'
workmen devoured stew and sour coffee, and the waiters rushed gaspingly
about in filthy white aprons. After the lunch hour he washed dishes in
soapy water that quickly changed from white to grease-filmed black. For
this he received fifty cents a day and his lunch. He hid the depressing
fact of such employment from Mother, but religiously saved the daily
fifty cents to give to her at Christmas. He even walked for an hour
after each lunch, to get the smell of grease out of his clothes, lest
she suspect.... A patient, quiet, anxious, courteous, little aging man,
in a lunch-room that was noisy as a subway, nasty as a sewer excavation.
Without admitting it to himself, he had practically given up the search
for work. After Christmas--something would happen, he didn't know what.
Anyway, they wouldn't go back to their daughter's prison-place unless
Mother became ill.
He discovered the life of idle men in New York--not the clubmen, but
those others. Shabby, shuffling, his coat-collar turned up and secured
with a safety-pin, he poked through Tompkins Square, on sunny days, or
talked for hours to hoboes who scorned him as a man without experience
of brake-beam and rods, of hoboes' hangouts and the Municipal Lodging
House.
When it was too cold to sit in the park, he tried to make himself
respectable of aspect, by turning down his coat-collar and straightening
his streaky tie, before he stalked into the Tompkins Square branch of
the public library, where for hours he turned over the pages of
magazines on whose text he could concentrate less each day that he was
an outcast accepting his fate. When he came out, the cold took him like
the pain of neuralgia, and through streets that were a smear of snow and
dust and blackened remains of small boys' bonfires he shuffled off with
timorous rapidity, eying shop windows full of cheap bread, cheap cakes,
cheap overcoats, cheap novels on the joy of being poor, all too
expensive for him.
Clean and upright and longing to be merry in a dour world, he sank down
among the spotted, the shiftless, the worthless. But perhaps when he
struck bottom--
He was not quite beaten. He never varied in the wistful welcome he gave
to Mother when she dragged herself home from work. But with an
increasing humbleness he accepted her as the master of the house, and
she unconsciously took the role. She petted him and comforted him and
worked for him. She announced, with the gaiety that one uses with a
dependent small boy, that they would have a wonderful party on Christmas
Eve, and with the animation of a dependent child he begged her to tell
him about it.