Ray carried his bag himself when he left the elevated road, and resisted
the offer of the small Italian dodging about his elbow, and proposing to
take it, after he had failed to get Ray to let him black his boots. The
young man rather prided himself on his thrift in denying the boy, whose
naked foot came half through one of his shoes; he saw his tatters and
nakedness with the indifference of inexperience, and with his country
breeding he considered his frugality a virtue. His senses were not
offended by the foulness of the streets he passed through, or hurt by
their sordid uproar; his strong young nerves were equal to all the
assaults that the city could make; and his heart was lifted in a dream
of hope. He was going to a hotel that Sanderson had told him of, where
you could get a room, on the European plan, for seventy-five cents, and
then eat wherever you pleased; he had gone to an American hotel when he
was in New York before, and he thought he could make a saving by trying
Sanderson’s. It had a certain gayety of lamps before it, but the
splendor diminished within, and Ray’s pride was further hurt by the
clerk’s exacting advance payment for his room from him. The clerk said
he could not give him an outside room that night, but he would try to
change him in the morning; and Ray had either to take the one assigned
him or go somewhere else. But he had ordered his trunk sent to this
hotel by the express, and he did not know how he should manage about
that if he left; so he staid, and had himself shown to his room. It
seemed to be a large cupboard in the wall of the corridor; but it had a
window near the bed, and the usual equipment of stand and bureau, and
Ray did not see why he should not sleep very well there. Still, he was
glad that his friends at Midland could none of them see him in that
room, and he resolved to leave the hotel as soon as he could the next
day. It did not seem the place for a person who had left Midland with
the highest social honors that could be paid a young man. He hurried
through the hotel office when he came out, so as not to be seen by any
other Midlander that might happen to be there, and he went down to the
basement, where the clerk said the restaurant was, and got his supper.
When he had finished his oyster stew he started towards the street-door,
but was overtaken at the threshold by a young man who seemed to have run
after him, and who said, “You didn’t pay for your supper.”
Ray said, “Oh, I forgot it,” and he went back to his table and got his
check, and paid at the counter, where he tried in vain to impress the
man who took his money with a sense of his probity by his profuse
apologies. Apparently they were too used to such tricks at that
restaurant. The man said nothing, but he looked as if he did not believe
him, and Ray was so abashed that he stole back to his room, and tried
to forget what had happened in revising the manuscript of his story. He
was always polishing it; he had written it several times over, and at
every moment he got he reconstructed sentences in it, and tried to bring
the style up to his ideal of style; he wavered a little between the
style of Thackeray and the style of Hawthorne, as an ideal. It made him
homesick, now, to go over the familiar pages: they put him so strongly
in mind of Midland, and the people of the kindly city. The pages smelt a
little of Sanderson’s cigar smoke; he wished that Sanderson would come
to New York; he perceived that they had also a fainter reminiscence of
the perfume he associated with that girl who had found him out in his
story; and then he thought how he had been in the best society at
Midland, and it seemed a great descent from the drawing-rooms where he
used to call on all those nice girls to this closet in a fourth-rate New
York hotel. His story appeared to share his downfall; he thought it
cheap and poor; he did not believe now that he should ever get a
publisher for it. He cowered to think how scornfully he had thought the
night before of his engagement with the Hanks Brothers to write letters
for the Midland _Echo_; he was very glad he had so good a basis; he
wondered how far he could make five dollars a week go toward supporting
him in New York; he could not bear to encroach upon his savings, and yet
he probably must. In Midland, you could get very good board for five
dollars a week.
He determined to begin a letter to the _Echo_ at once; and he went to
open the window to give himself some air in the close room; but he found
that it would not open. He pulled down the transom over his door to keep
from stifling in the heat of his gas-burner, and some voices that had
been merely a dull rumbling before now made themselves heard in talk
which Ray could not help listening to.
Two men were talking together, one very hopelessly, and the other in a
vain attempt to cheer him from time to time. The comforter had a deep
base voice, and was often unintelligible; but the disheartened man spoke
nervously, in a high key of plangent quality, like that of an unhappy
bell.
“No,” he said; “I’d better fail, Bill. It’s no use trying to keep along.
I can get pretty good terms from the folks at home, there; they all know
me, and they know I done my best. I can pay about fifty cents on the
dollar, I guess, and that’s more than most business men could, if they
stopped; and if I ever get goin’ again, I’ll pay dollar for dollar; they
know that.”
The man with the deep voice said something that Ray did not catch. The
disheartened man seemed not to have caught it either; he said, “What
say?” and when the other repeated his words, he said: “Oh yes! I know.
But I been dancing round in a quart cup all my life there; and now it’s
turning into a pint cup, and I guess I better get out. The place did
grow for a while, and we got all ready to be a city as soon as the
railroad come along. But when the road come, it didn’t do all we
expected of it. We could get out into the world a good deal easier than
we could before, and we had all the facilities of transportation that we
could ask for. But we could get away so easy that most of our people
went to the big towns to do their trading, and the facilities for
transportation carried off most of our local industries. The luck was
against us. We bet high on what the road would do for us, and we lost.
We paid out nearly our last dollar to get the road to come our way, and
it came, and killed us. We subscribed to the stock, and we’ve got it
yet; there ain’t any fight for it anywhere else; we’d let it go without
a fight. We tried one while for the car shops, but they located them
further up the line, and since that we ha’n’t even wiggled. What say?
Yes; but, you see, I’m part of the place. I’ve worked hard all my life,
and I’ve held out a good many times when ruin stared me in the face, but
I guess I sha’n’t hold out this time. What’s the use? Most every
business man I know has failed some time or other; some of ’em three or
four times over, and scrambled up and gone on again, and I guess I got
to do the same. Had a kind of pride about it, m’ wife and me; but I
guess we got to come to it. It does seem, sometimes, as if the very
mischief was in it. I lost pretty heavy, for a small dealer, on
Fashion’s Pansy, alone--got left with a big lot of ’em. What say? It was
a bustle. Women kept askin’ for Fashion’s Pansy, till you’d ’a’ thought
every last one of ’em was going to live and be buried in it. Then all
at once none of ’em wanted it--wouldn’t touch it. That and butter begun
it. You know how a country merchant’s got to take all the butter the
women bring him, and he’s got to pay for sweet butter, and sell it for
grease half the time. You can tell a woman she’d better keep an eye on
her daughter, but if you say she don’t make good butter, that’s the last
of that woman’s custom. But what’s finally knocked me out is this drop
in bric-à-brac. If it hadn’t been for that, I guess I could have pulled
through. Then there was such a rush for Japanese goods, and it lasted so
long, that I loaded up all I could with ’em last time I was in New York,
and now nobody wants ’em; couldn’t give ’em away. Well, it’s all a game,
and you don’t know any more how it’s comin’ out--you can’t bet on it
with any more certainty--than you can on a trottin’ match. My! I wish I
was dead.”
The deep-voiced man murmured something again, and the high-voiced man
again retorted:
“What say? Oh, it’s all well enough to preach; and I’ve heard about the
law of demand and supply before. There’s about as much of a law to it as
there is to three-card monte. If it wasn’t for my poor wife, I’d let ’em
take me back on ice. I would that.”
The deep-voiced man now seemed to have risen; there was a shuffling of
feet, and presently a parley at the open door about commonplace matters;
and then the two men exchanged adieux, and the door shut again, and all
was silent in the room opposite Ray’s. He felt sorry for the unhappy
man shut in there; but he perceived no special significance in what he
had overheard. He had no great curiosity about the matter; it was one of
those things that happened every day, and for tragedy was in no wise
comparable to a disappointment in first love, such as he had carefully
studied for his novel from his own dark experience. Still it did suggest
something to Ray; it suggested a picturesque opening for his first New
York letter for the Midland _Echo_, and he used it in illustration of
the immensity of New York, and the strange associations and
juxtapositions of life there. He treated the impending failure of the
country storekeeper from an overstock of Japanese goods rather
humorously: it was not like a real trouble, a trouble of the heart; and
the cause seemed to him rather grotesquely disproportionate to the
effect. In describing the incident as something he had overheard in a
hotel, he threw in some touches that were intended to give the notion of
a greater splendor than belonged to the place.
He made a very good start on his letter, and when he went to bed the
broken hairs that pierced his sheet from the thin mattress did not keep
him from falling asleep, and they did prove that it was a horse-hair
mattress.