A FOOTHOLD
The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began ecstatically:
"I've got a job at last! I'm now working for the C. C. and P. Railroad,
in their local freight office, and I'm not trucking freight either, but
I'm a clerk--a bill clerk, to be more exact. My duties consist in
sitting at a desk and writing out freight bills, for which by some
inscrutable design of Providence my study of common carriers and
contracts in the law was doubtless intended to prepare me.
"To-day I wrote out a bill for freight to Cook and Jennings, Macochee,
Ohio, and you can imagine my sensations. It made me homesick for a
while; I wished that by some necromancy I might conceal myself in the
bill and go to Macochee with it; I had a notion to write a little word
of greeting on the bill, but I didn't; it might have worried old man
Cook's brain and he couldn't stand much of a strain of that kind. But
I'm getting nearer Macochee every day now. I guess I'm to be a railroad
man after all, and some day you'll be proud to tell your friends that I
started at the bottom. 'Oh, yes,' you'll be boasting, 'Mr. Marley began
as a common freight trucker; and worked his way up to general manager.'
Then we'll go back to Macochee in my private car. I can see it standing
down by the depot, on the side track close to Market Street, baking in
the hot sun, and the little boys from across the tracks will be crowding
about it, gaping at the white-jacketed darky who'll be getting the
dinner ready. We'll have Jack and Mayme down to dine with us, and your
father and mother and Chad and Connie, and my folks, too, and maybe, if
you'll let me, Wade Powell. Then, of course, the Macochee people will
think better of me; they won't be saying that I'm no good, but instead
they'll stand around, in an easy, careless way, and say, 'Oh, yes, I
knew Glenn when he was a boy. I always said he'd get up in the world.'
"But, ah me, just now I'm a bill clerk at fifty dollars a month, thank
you, and glad of the chance to get it; so is my voluptuous landlady
glad; she'll get her board money a little more regularly now.
"I suppose you'll want to know something about my surroundings. They are
not elegant; the office is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks,
where we sit and write from eight in the morning until any hour at night
when it occurs to the boss to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten
o'clock before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us an hour in
which to run out to a restaurant for supper. The windows in the office
were washed, so tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus landed.
Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly so as to keep the noise
going. My boss, whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort of fool
of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious ass, but a poor,
unfortunate, deluded simpleton. He's one of those close-fisted reubs
whose chief care is the pennies, and whose only interest in life is the
C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his business his own personal affair and
the C. C. and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays twenty cents for
his lunch, never more, often fifteen. One of the first things he told me
was, now that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin to save
money. They have a young man in the office here, whose desk is next to
mine, who was born somewhere in Canada, and is always 'a-servin' of her
Majesty the Queen,' as Kipling says. He told me with much gusto how he
had hung out of the office window last New Year's a Canadian flag. He
seemed proud of having done so, and also told me, boasted to me, in
fact, that he was going to hang the same flag out of the same window on
the Fourth of July. 'Oh, yes, you are!' thinks I. So I got the flag and
ripped it into shreds and started it through the waste-basket on a
hurried trip to oblivion. _À bas_ the Canadian flag! He'll probably get
another one, but if I get hold of it, it'll meet the same fate as the
first one. Then I have something to think of that'll keep my mind off my
horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I smile in ghoulish glee
with a cynical leer overspreading my classic features, at the young
man's disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in the office
aren't much to boast of. They're a diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian
and Bill Hoffman the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it were
buried under seven hundred and thirty feet of Lake Michigan."
Marley's next letter to Lavinia opened thus:
"Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson,
Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the
C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20.
"'New man on desk next to mine; young, about
24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not
think he will last. Took me to lunch with him
this evening.'
"Now what do you think of that? The youth I described to you at such
length keeps a diary, and the foregoing is culled therefrom. He left it
by some mistake on top of his desk, and I picked it up innocently enough
to-night, to see what it was, and that was the first thing my eye lit
on. He is evidently an adept at coming to conclusions, apparently he can
sum one up in two whisks of a porter's broom. I was much surprised to
find myself so well done. Done on every side in those few words. I've
rather enjoyed it; strikes me as being uproariously funny. Maybe his
dictum is correct. You'll agree with me as to his richness. Tell every
one about it and see what they will think. Tell your mother and my
mother. Tell Jack and give him a chance to laugh. Tell Mayme Carter,
too."
Lavinia ran at once to her mother.
"Listen," she said. And she read it.
Mrs. Blair laughed.
"How funny!" she said, "and how well he writes! I should think he'd go
into literature."
Lavinia laid the letter down in her lap and looked at her mother as if
she had been startled by a striking coincidence.
"Why, do you know, I've thought of that very thing myself."
"But read on," urged Mrs. Blair.
Lavinia picked up the letter again and began:
"Well, de--"
"Oh," she exclaimed, blushing hotly, "I can't read you that. Let's
see--"
She leafed over the letter, one, two, three, four sheets. Mrs. Blair was
smiling.
"Aren't you leaving out the best parts?" she asked archly.
"Oh, there's nothing," Lavinia said, not looking up. "But--oh, well,
this is all. He says--
"'There is a good deal of unrest and uneasiness here just now, because
the first of May is coming. The road is anticipating trouble with the
freight handlers; they may go out on a strike that day.'
"Oh, dear," sighed Lavinia, "more strikes, and I suppose that means more
trouble for Glenn."
"Why, the strike of those men can't affect him," Mrs. Blair assured her.
"He's a clerk now."
"Yes, I know, but what if he gets the notion he ought to help them by
quitting too?"