Another young lady was passing, tall, graceful, distinguished, _air de
duchesse_, carrying a notebook and pencil.
"Miss Gladfoot," my interlocutrice murmured, "won't you ask Miss Bryne
to step here?"
Miss Bryne having stepped there, I found myself face to face with a
competent woman of fifty or so, short, square, square-faced, and astute.
She also had a pencil and note-book in her hand, and, seeing me, looked
receptive, too, though remaining practical and business-like.
While the young lady at the desk explained me as far as she had been
able to understand my object, delicacy urged me out of earshot. I had,
therefore, not heard what passed when Miss Bryne came forward to take
charge of the situation.
"What you are is a kind of educated handyman. Wouldn't that be it?"
Delighted at this discriminating view of my capacities, I faltered that
it would be.
"Well, we don't often have a call for your kind of specialty, and yet we
do have them sometimes. There might be one to-day, and then again there
mightn't be for another six months. Now you can either go in and wait on
the chance, or you can leave your address and we'll 'phone you if
anything should turn up that we think would suit."
Encouraged by this kindly treatment and the possibility of a call that
day, I opted for going in to wait.
"Then come this way."
Following the Napoleonic figure down the narrow passageway, I was shown
into a little room, where five other men sat with the dismayed,
melancholy faces of dogs at a dog-show at minutes when they are not
barking. Dismayed and melancholy on my side, I took the seat nearest
the door, feeling like a prisoner in the dock or the cell, and wondering
what would happen next.
Nothing happened next so far as I was concerned, but I had a gratifying
leisure in which to look about me.
I was obliged to note at once that the Bureau of Domestic and Business
Intelligence was chiefly of Domestic. Women crowded the hall, the two
large rooms across the way, and the three small ones on our side, except
the coop in which we six men were segregated from the gay and chatty
throng. Gay and chatty were the words. The tone was that of what
French people call a _feeve o'clock_. Girls, for the most part pretty
and stylishly dressed, sat in the chairs, perched on the arms of them,
grouped themselves in corners, in seeming disregard of the purpose that
had brought them there. Unable at first to differentiate between
mistresses and maids, I soon learned to detect the former by their
careworn faces, shabbier clothes, apologetic arrival, and crestfallen
departure. Now and then I caught a few broken phrases, of which the
context and significance eluded me.
"I told her that before I'd be after washin' all thim dishes I'd--"
"Ah, thin, ye'll not shtay long in that plaace--"
"Says I, 'You've got a crust, Mrs. Johnson, to ask me to shtay in when
it's me night--'"
"With that I ups and walks away--"
All this animation and repartee contrasted oddly with the low, cowed
remarks of my companions in the coop, who ventured to exchange
observations only at intervals.
Where was your last? What did you get? How did you like your boss? Did
you leave or was you fired? Are you a single fella or a married fella?
Did you have long hours? Wouldn't he give you your raise? Did he kick
against the booze? These were mere starters of talk that invariably
died like seedlings in a wrong climate. Getting used to my mates, I made
them out to be a gardener, a chauffeur, a teamster, a decayed English
butler, and a negro boy who called himself a waiter. Talking about
their bosses, their tone on the whole was hostile without personal
malevolence. That is to say, there was little or no enmity to
individuals, though the tendency to curse the systems of civilized life
was general. I think they would have agreed with my Cornish friend that
"all employers is punk," and considered their feelings sufficiently
expressed at that.
But as I sat among them, day after day, I began, oddly enough, to
orientate my vision to their point of view. They were, of course, not
always the same men. The original five melted away into jobs within
three or four days; but five or six or seven was about the daily average
in our little pen. They came, were cowed, were selected, and went off.
Twice during the first week I was called out in response to applicants
for unusual grades of help, but my manner and speech seemed to overawe
the ladies who wanted to hire, and I was remanded to my cell. "She said
she didn't want that _kind_ of a man." "He wouldn't want to eat in the
kitchen," were the explanations given me by Miss Bryne. In vain I
protested that I would eat anywhere, so long as I ate. The other
servants wouldn't get used to me, and so no more was to be said.
But I was getting used to the other servants. That is my point.
Insensibly I was changing my whole social attitude. It was like the
difference in looking at the Grand Canon of Arizona--downward from El
Tovar, or upward from the brink of the Colorado. Little by little I
found myself staring upward from the bottom, through all sorts of ranks
above me. I didn't notice the change at once. For a time I thought I
still retained my sense of obscured superiority. I arrived in the
morning, heard from the lips of the birdlike young lady at the desk the
familiar "Nothing yet," passed on to the pen, nodded to those who were
assembled, some of whom I would have seen the day before, listened to
their timid scraps of talk, which hardly ever varied from a few worn
notes.
At first I felt apart from them, above them, disdainful of their
limitations. My impulse was to get away from them, as it had been to
cut loose from Lydia Blair and Drinkwater. It was only on seeing them
one by one called out of the pen, not to come back again, that I began
to envy them. Sooner or later, every one went but me. I became a kind
of friendly joke with them. "Some little sticker," was the phrase
commonly applied to me. It was used in a double sense, one of which was
not without commendation. "Ye carn't stick like wot you're doin', old
son," a footman said to me one day, "without somethin' turnin' up, wot?"
and from this I took a grim sort of encouragement.
But all I mean is that by imperceptible degrees I felt myself one of
them. After the first lady had turned me down, I began to adapt myself
to their views of the employer. After the second lady had repeated the
action of the first, I began to experience that feeling of dull
hostility toward the class in which I had been born that marked all my
companions in the coop. It was what I have already called it, hostility
without personal malevolence--hostility to a system rather than to
individuals. For a pittance barely sufficient to keep body and soul
together, leaving no margin for the higher or more beautiful things in
life, we were expected to drudge like Roman slaves, and not only feel no
resentment, but be contented with the lot to which we were ordained. The
clearest thing in the world to all of us was that between us and those
who would have us work for them some great humanizing element was
lacking--an element which would have made life acceptable--and that so
long as it was not there each one of us would, as a revolutionary
bookkeeper put it, "go to bed with a grouch." To me, as to them, the
grouch was growing intimate--and so was hunger.
By the end of a fortnight I was down to one meal a day, the breakfast I
continued to take with Pelly, my Cornish friend, and over which he told
me his most intimate experiences, with an absence of reserve to which
conversation in the pen had accustomed me. Looking for some such return
on my part, he was not only disappointed, but a little mystified. I got
his mental drift, however, when he asked me on one occasion if I had
ever "hit the pipe," and on another if I had ever been "sent away." Had
these misfortunes happened to himself he would have told me frankly, and
it would have made no difference in his sympathy for me had I confessed
to them or to any other delinquency. What puzzled him was that I should
confess to nothing, a form of reserve which to him was not only novel,
but abnormal.
Nevertheless, when through the thin partition I announced one morning
that I wasn't going to breakfast, giving lack of appetite as a plea, he
came solemnly into my room.
"See here, Soames; if a fiver'd be of any use to you--or ten--or any
think--"
When I declined he did not insist further; but on my return that evening
I found a five-dollar bill thrust under my door in an envelope.
I didn't thank him when I heard him come in; I pretended to be asleep.
As a matter of fact, I thought it hardly worth while to say anything. It
was highly possible that the next day would say all, for I had reached
the point where it seemed to me the Gordian knot must be cut. One quick
stroke of some sort--and Pelly would get his five dollars back
untouched.
A cup of chocolate had been all my food that day. Though I had still a
few pennies, less than a dollar, it would probably be all my food on the
next day. On the day after that my rent would be due, and I couldn't
ask the two good women who had been kind to me for credit. What would
be the use? A new week would bring me no more than the past weeks, so
why not end it once and for all?
Next morning, therefore, I gave Pelly back his bill, bluffing him by
going out to our usual breakfast, on which I spent all I had in the
world but a nickel and a dime. I must get something to do that day, or
else--
Left alone, I tossed one of the two coins to decide whether or not I
should go back to "the Intelligence." Going back had not been easy for
the last few days, for I had noticed cold looks on the part of Miss
Bryne and Miss Gladfoot, with a tendency to take me for a hoodoo. Even
the young lady at the desk had ceased to say "Nothing yet," as I passed
by, or as much as to glance at me. But as this was to be the last time,
I obeyed the falling of the coin and went.
I went--to receive a little shock. Miss Bryne was waiting for me near
the door, with a bit of paper in her hand.
"You must remember, Soames," she said, in her business-like way, "that
this is not the only employment-office in New York. Here's a list of
addresses, at any of which you may find what we haven't been able to
secure for you."
I took the paper, thanked her, and went on into the coop before the
significance of this act came to me. It was dismissal. It was not
merely dismissal from a place, it was dismissal from the possibility of
a dismissal. To have a place, even if only, as Pelly put it, to be
bounced from it, was something; but to be denied the chance of being
bounced...
I ought to have got up there and then and walked out; but I think I was
too stunned. The chatty groups were forming all over the place, and
early matrons looking for maids were being refused first by one spirited
damsel and then by another. In the coop there was the usual low,
intermittent murmur, accentuated now and then by ugly words, and now and
then by oaths. To me it was no more than the hum of activity in the
streets in the ears of a man who is dying.
Recovering from this state, which was almost that of coma, I began
feeling for my hat. I had to go out. I had to find a way to do the
only thing left for me to do. I had no idea of the means, and so must
think them over.
And just then I heard a young fellow speaking, with low gurgles of fun.
He was at the end of the pen and was narrating an experience of the
afternoon before.
"It was a whale of a rolled-up rug that must have weighed five hunderd
pounds. 'Carry that up-stairs,' says the Floater. 'Like hell I will,'
says I. He says, 'You'll carry that up or you'll get out o' here.' I
says, 'Well, Creed and Creed ain't the only house to work for in New
York.' 'You was damn glad to get here,' he says, madder 'n blazes. I
says, 'Not half so damn glad as I'll be to get somewhere else,' says I.
'You've had five men on this job in less than four weeks,' says I, 'and
now you'll have to get a sixth,' says I, 'if there's any one in the city
fool enough to take it. Carryin' rugs that 'd break a man's back,' I
says, 'is bad enough; but before I'd go on workin' under a blitherin'
old son of a gun like you--'"
I didn't wait to hear more. I knew the establishment of Creed & Creed,
not far away, in the lower part of Fifth Avenue. Many a time I had
stopped to admire the great rugs hung in its windows as a bait to people
living in palaces. Not twenty-four hours earlier a place had been
vacated there, a hard place, a humble place, and it was possible, barely
possible...
Up the street that led to Washington Square I ran; I ran through
Washington Square itself; for the two or three blocks of Fifth Avenue I
slackened my pace only in order not to arrive breathless.
There it was on a corner, the huge gray pile, with its huge bright
windows--and my heart almost stopped beating. Breathless now from
another cause than speed, I paused, nominally to gaze at an immense
Chinese rug, but really to compose my mind to what might easily prove
the last effort of my life. This rug, too, hanging with a graceful
curve in which yellow deepened to orange and orange to glints of
acorn-brown, might easily prove the last beautiful thing my eyes would
ever rest upon. I remembered saying to myself that beauty was the
thread of flame that would lead me home; but the thread of flame had
been treacherous. I could have given an expert's opinion on a work of
art like this; and yet I was begging for the privilege of handling it in
the most laborious manner possible, just that I might eat.
And as I stared at the thing, forming the words in which I should frame
my request for work, a soft voice, close beside me, said:
"Surely it must be possible for me to be of use to you!"
*CHAPTER IV*
As I recall the minute now my first thought was of my appearance. I had
noticed for some time past that it was running down, and had regarded
the change almost with satisfaction. The more out at elbow I became the
less would be the difference between me and any other young fellow
looking for employment. It hadn't escaped me that I grew shabby less
with the honorable rough-and-tumble of a working-man than with the
threadbare, poignant poverty of broken-down gentility; but I hoped that
no one but myself would perceive that. I had thus grown careless of
appearances, and during the past forty-eight hours more careless than I
had been hitherto. Feeling myself a lamentable object, I had more or
less dressed to suit the part.
I knew instantly that it was this that had inspired the words I had just
listened to. I knew, too, that I must bluff. Wretched as I looked, I
must carry the situation off, with however pitiful a bit of comedy.
Turning, I lifted my hat, with what I could command of the old dignity
of bearing.
"How early you are!" I smiled bravely. "I didn't know young ladies were
ever down-town by a little after ten."
She nodded toward the neighboring bookshop. "I've been in there buying
something for Lulu to read. She's bored." She threw these explanations
aside as irrelevant to anything we had to say, now that we had met.
"Where have you been all these weeks? Why didn't you let me know--?"
"How could I let you know? I called at your old house, and you were
gone."
"You could have easily found out. If you'd merely called up Central she
would have told you the new address of our number. It wasn't kind of
you."
"Sometimes we have things to do more pressing than just being kind."
"There's never anything more pressing than that."
"Not for people like you."
"Not for people like any one. Listen!" she hurried on, as if there was
not a minute to spare. "One of my trustees came to me yesterday. He
said I had nearly thirty thousand dollars of accumulated income that
there's nothing to do with but invest."
"Well? Don't you like to see your money invested?"
"I like it well enough when there's nothing else to do with it."
"Which you say that in this case there isn't."
"Oh, but there is--if you look at it in the right way."
"I don't have to look at it any way."
"Yes, you do, when it's--when it's only common sense."
"What's only common sense?"
"My being--being useful to you."
"Oh, but you're useful to me through--through your very kindness."
"That's not enough. Surely you--you see!"
I could say quite truthfully that I didn't see. "But suppose," I
continued, "that we don't talk of it."
"Yes," she answered, fiercely, "and leave everything where we left it
the last time. You see what's come of that."
"I see what's come, of course; but I don't know that it's come of that."
There were so few people in the neighborhood, and we were so plainly
examining the Chinese rug, that we could talk together without
attracting attention.
"Oh, what kind of people are we?" she exclaimed, tapping with one hand
the book she held in the other. "Here I am with more money than I know
what to do with; and here are you--"
"With all the money I want."
Her brown eyes swept me from head to foot. "That's not true," she
insisted. "When I first knew you I thought--I thought you were just
experimenting--"
"And how do you know I'm not?"
"I know it from what you said yourself--that last time."
"What did I say?"'
"That if it wasn't trouble it was misfortune."
"Oh, that!"
"Yes, that. Isn't it enough? And then I know it-- Well, can't I see?"
I tried to laugh this off. "Oh, I know I'm rather seedy-looking, but
then--"
"You're worse than seedy-looking; you're--you're--tragic--to me. Oh, I
know I haven't any right to say so; but that's what I complain of,
that's what I rebel against, that we've got our conventions so stupidly
organized that just because you're a man and I'm a woman I shouldn't be
allowed to help you when I can."
"You do help me, with your great sympathy."
She brushed this aside. "That's no help. It doesn't feed and clothe
you."