"Well, I gathered from the fact that you wired
me to come home that you wanted my advice."
A second time Spaulding gestured with his eyebrows, for once fairly
surprised out of his pose. "_Your_ advice!..."
"Yes," said Duncan evenly: "as to whether you ought to give up your
customers on my route or send them a man who could sell goods."
"Well...." Spaulding admitted.
"Oh, don't think I'm boasting of my acuteness: anybody could have
guessed as much from the great number of heavy orders I have not been
sending you."
"You've had bad luck...."
"You mean you have, Mr. Spaulding. It was good luck for me to be
drawing down my weekly cheques, bad luck to you not to have a man who
could earn them."
His desperate honesty touched Spaulding a trifle; at the risk of not
seeming a business man to himself he inclined dubiously to relent, to
give Duncan another chance. The fellow was likeable enough, his
employer considered; he had good humour and even in dejection,
distinction; whatever he was not, he was a man of birth and breeding.
His face might be rusty with a day-old stubble, as it was; his
shirt-cuffs frayed, his shoes down at the heel, his baggy clothing
weirdly ready-made, as they were: there remained his air. You'd think
he might amount to something, to somewhat more than a mere something,
given half a chance in the right direction. Then what?... Spaulding
sought from Duncan elucidation of this riddle.
"Duncan," he said, "what's the trouble?"
"I thought you knew that; I thought that was
why you called me in with my route half-covered."
"You mean--?"
"I mean I can't sell your line."
"Why?"
"God only knows. I want to, badly enough. It's just general
incompetence, I presume."
"What makes you think that?"
Duncan smiled bitterly. "Experience," he said.
"You've tried--what else?"
"A little of everything--all the jobs open to a man with a knowledge of
Latin and Greek and the higher mathematics: shipping clerk,
time-keeper, cashier--all of 'em."
"And yet Kellogg believes in you."
Duncan nodded dolefully. "Harry's a good friend. We roomed together at
college. That's why he stands for me."
"He says you only need the right opening--."
"And nobody knows where that is, except my unfortunate employers: it's
the back door going out, for mine every time.... Oh, Harry's been a
prince to me. He's found me four or five jobs with friends of his--like
yourself. But I don't seem to last. You see I was brought up to be
ornamental and irregular rather than useful; to blow about in motor
cars and keep a valet busy sixteen hours a day--and all that sort of
thing. My father's failure--you know about that?"
Spaulding nodded. Duncan went on gloomily, talking a great deal more
freely than he would at any other time--suffering, in fact, from that
species of auto hypnosis induced by the sound of his own voice
recounting his misfortunes, which seems especially to affect a man down
on his luck.
"That smash came when I was five years out of college--I'd never
thought of turning my hand to anything in all that time. I'd always had
more coin than I could spend--never had to consider the worth of money
or how hard it is to earn: my father saw to all that. He seemed not to
want me to work: not that I hold that against him; he'd an idea I'd
turn out a genius of some sort or other, I believe.... Well, he failed
and died all in a week, and I found myself left with an extensive
wardrobe, expensive tastes, an impractical education--and not so much
of that that you'd notice it--and not a cent.... I was too proud to
look to my friends for help in those days--and perhaps that was as
well; I sought jobs on my own.... Did you ever keep books in a
fish-market?"
"No." Spaulding's eyes twinkled behind his large, shiny glasses.
"But what's the use of my boring you?" Duncan made as if to rise,
suddenly remembering himself.
"You're not. Go on."
"I didn't mean to; mostly, I presume, I've been blundering round an
explanation of Kellogg's kindness to me, in my usual ineffectual
way--felt somehow an explanation was due you, as the latest to suffer
through his misplaced interest in me."
"Perhaps," said Spaulding, "I am beginning to understand. Go on: I'm
interested. About the fish-market?"
"Oh, I just happened to think of it as a sample experience--and the
last of that particular brand. I got nine dollars a week and earned
every cent of it inhaling the atmosphere. My board cost me six and the
other three afforded me a chance to demonstrate myself a captain of
finance--paying laundry bills and clothing myself, besides buying
lunches and such-like small matters. I did the whole thing, you
know--one schooner of beer a day and made my own cigarettes: never
could make up my mind which was the worst. The hours were easy, too:
didn't have to get to work until five in the morning.... I lasted five
weeks at that job, before I was taken sick: shows what a great
constitution I've got."
He laughed uncertainly and paused, thoughtful, his eyes vacant, fixed
upon the retrospect that was a grim prospect of the imminent future.
"And then--?"
"Oh--?" Duncan roused. "Why, then I fell in with Kellogg again; he
found me trying the open-air cure on a bench in Washington Square.
Since then he's been finding me one berth after another. He's a
sure-enough optimist."
Spaulding shifted uneasily in his chair, stirred by an impulse whose
unwisdom he could not doubt. Duncan had assuredly done his case no good
by painting his shortcomings in colours so vivid; yet, somehow
strangely, Spaulding liked him the better for his open-hearted
confession.
"Well...." Spaulding stumbled awkwardly.
"Yes; of course," said Duncan promptly, rising. "Sorry if I tired you."
"What do you mean by: 'Yes, of course'?"
"That you called me in to fire me--and so that's over with. Only I'd be
sorry to have you sore on Kellogg for saddling me on you. You see, he
believed I'd make good, and so did I in a way: at least, I hoped to."
"Oh, that's all right," said Spaulding uncomfortably. "The trouble is,
you see, we've nothing else open just now. But if you'd really like
another chance on the road, I--I'll be glad to speak to Mr. Atwater
about it."
"Don't you do it!" Duncan counselled him sharply, aghast. "He might say
yes. And I simply couldn't accept; it wouldn't be fair to you, Kellogg,
or myself. It'd be charity--for I've proved I can't earn my wages; and
I haven't come to that yet. No!" he concluded with determination, and
picked up his hat.
"Just a minute." Spaulding held him with a gesture. "You're forgetting
something: at least I am. There's a month's pay coming to you; the
cashier will hand you the cheque as you go out."
"A month's pay?" Duncan said blankly. "How's that? I've drawn up to the
end of this week already, if you didn't know it."
"Of course I knew it. But we never let our men go without a month's
notice or its equivalent, and--"
"No," Duncan interrupted firmly. "No; but thank you just the same. I
couldn't. I really couldn't. It's good of you, but ... Now," he broke
off abruptly, "I've left my accounts--what there is of them--with the
book-keeping department, and the checks for my sample trunks. There'll
be a few dollars coming to me on my expense account, and I'll send you
my address as soon as I get one."
"But look here--" Spaulding got to his feet, frowning.
"No," reiterated Duncan positively. "There's no use. I'm grateful to
you for your toleration of me--and all that. But we can't do anything
better now than call it all off. Good-bye, Mr. Spaulding."
Spaulding nodded, accepting defeat with the better grace because of an
innate conviction that it was just as well, after all. And,
furthermore, he admired Duncan's stand. So he offered his hand: an
unusual condescension. "You'll make good somewhere yet," he asserted.
"I wish I could believe it." Duncan's grasp was firm since he felt more
assured of some humanity latent in his late employer. "However ...
Good-bye."
"Good luck to you," rang in his ears as the door put a period to the
interview. He stopped and took up the battered suitcase and rusty
overcoat which he had left outside the junior partner's office, then
went on, shaking his head. "Much obliged," he said huskily to himself.
"But what's the good of that. There's no room anywhere for a
professional failure. And that's what I am; just a ne'er-do-well. I
never realised what that meant, really, before, and it's certainly
taken me a damn' long time to find out. But I know now, all right...."
Outside, on the steps of the building, he paused a moment, fascinated
by the brisk spectacle afforded by lower Broadway at the hour when the
cave-like offices in its cliff-like walls begin to empty themselves,
when the overlords and their lieutenants close their desks and turn
their faces homewards, leaving the details of the day's routine to be
wound up by underlings. In the clear light of the late spring afternoon
a stream of humanity was high and fluent upon the sidewalks. Duncan had
glimpses of keen-faced men, bright-faced women, eager boys, quickened
all by that manner of efficiency and intelligence which seems so
integrally American. A well-dressed throng, well-fed, amiable and
animated, looking ever forward, the resistless tide of affairs that
gave it being bore it onward; it passed the onlooker as a strong
current passes flotsam in a back-eddy, with no pause, no turning aside.
Acutely he felt his aloofness from it, who had no part in its interests
and scarcely any comprehension of them. The sunken look, the leanness
of his young face, seemed suddenly accentuated; the gloom in his
discontented eyes deepened; his slight habitual stoop became more
noticeable. And a second time he nodded acquiescence to his unspoken
thought.
"There," said he, singling out a passer-by upon whose complacent
features prosperity had set its smug hall-mark--"there, but for the
grace of God, goes Nat Duncan!" He rolled the paraphrase upon his
tongue and found it bitter--not, however, with a tonic bitterness.
"Lord, what a worthless critter I am! No good to myself--nor to anybody
else. Even on Harry I'm a drag--a regular old man of the mountains!"
Despondently he went down to the sidewalk and merged himself with the
crowd, moving with it though a thousand miles apart from it, and
presently diverging, struck across-town toward the Worth Street subway
station.
"And the worst of it is, he's too sharp not to find it out--if he
hasn't by this time--and too damn' decent by far to let me know if he
has! ... It can't go on this way with us: I can't let him ... Got to
break with him somehow--now--to-day. I won't let him think me ... what
I've been all along to him.... Bless his foolish heart!..."
This resolution coloured his reverie throughout the uptown journey. And
he strengthened himself with it, deriving a sort of acrid comfort from
the knowledge that henceforth none should know the burden of his
misfortunes save himself. There was no deprecation of Kellogg's
goodness in his mood, simply determination no longer to be a charge
upon it. To contemplate the sum total of the benefits he had received
at Kellogg's hands, since the day when the latter had found him ill and
half-starved, friendless as a stray pup, on the bench in Washington
Square, staggered his imagination. He could never repay it, he told
himself, save inadequately, little by little--mostly by gratitude and
such consideration as he purposed now to exhibit by removing himself
and his distresses from the other's ken. Here was an end to comfort for
him, an end to living in Kellogg's rooms, eating his food, busying his
servants, spending his money--not so much borrowed as pressed upon him.
He stood at the cross-roads, but in no doubt as to which way he should
most honourably take, though it took him straight back to that from
which Kellogg had rescued him.
There crawled in his mind a clammy memory of the sort of housing he had
known in those evil days, and he shuddered inwardly, smelling again the
effluvia of dank oilcloth and musty carpets, of fish-balls and fried
ham, of old-style plumbing and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in the
unwashen raw--the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to which
his lack of means had introduced him. He could see again, and with a
painful vividness of mental vision, the degenerate "brownstone fronts"
that mask those haunts of wretchedness, with their flights of crumbling
brownstone steps leading up to oaken portals haggard with flaking
paint, flanked by squares of soiled note-paper upon which inexpert
hands had traced the warning, not: "Abandon hope all ye who enter
here," but: "Furnished rooms to let with board." And pursuing this grim
trail of memory, whether he would or no--again he climbed, wearily at
the end of a wearing day, a darksome well of a staircase up and up to
an eyrie under the eaves, denominated in the terminology of landladies
a "top hall back"--a cramped refuge haunted by pitiful ghosts of the
hopes and despairs of its former tenants. And he remembered with
reminiscently aching muscles the comfort of such a "single bed" as is
peculiar (one hopes) to top hall backs, and with a qualm what it was to
cook a surreptitious meal on a metal heater clamped to the gas-bracket
(with ears keen to catch the scuffle of the landlady's feet as she
skulked in the hall, jealous of her gas bill).
And to this he must return, to that treadmill round of blighted days
and joyless nights must set his face....
Alighting at the Grand Central Station he packed the double weight of
his luggage and his cares a few blocks northward on Madison Avenue ere
turning west toward the bachelor rooms which Kellogg had established in
the roaring Forties, just the other side of _the_ Avenue--Fifth
Avenue, on a corner of which Duncan presently was held up for a time by
a press of traffic. He lingered indifferently, waiting for the mounted
policeman to clear a way across, watching the while with lack-lustre
eyes the interminable procession of cabs and landaus, taxis and
town-cars that romped by hazardously, crowding the street from curb to
curb.
The day was of young June, though grey and a little chill with the
discouraged spirit of a retarded season. Though the hegira of the
well-to-do to their summer homes had long since set in, still there
remained in the city sufficient of their class to keep the Avenue
populous from Twenty-third Street north to the Plaza in the evening
hours. The suggestion of wealth, or luxury, of money's illimitable
power, pervaded the atmosphere intensely, an ineluctable influence, to
an independent man heady, to Duncan maddening. He surveyed the parade
with mutiny in his heart. All this he had known, a part of it had
been--upon a time. Now ... the shafts of his roving eyes here and there
detected faces recognisable, of men and women whose acquaintance he had
once owned. None recognised him who stood there worn, shabby and tired.
He even caught the direct glance of a girl who once had thought him
worth winning, who had set herself to stir his heart and--had been
successful. To-day she looked him straight in the eyes, apparently,
with undisturbed serenity, then as calmly looked over and through and
beyond him. Her limousine hurried her on, enthroned impregnably above
the envious herd.
He sped her transit with a mirthless chuckle. "You're right," he said,
"dead right. You simply don't know me any more, my dear--you musn't;
you can't afford to any more than I could afford to know you."
None the less the fugitive incident seemed to brim his disconsolate
cup. In complete dejection of mind and spirit he pushed on to Kellogg's
quarters, buoyed by a single hope--that Kellogg might be out of town or
delayed at his office.
In that event Duncan might have a chance to gather up his belongings
and escape unhandicapped by the immediate necessity of justifying his
course. At another time, surely, the explanation was inevitable; say
to-morrow; he was not cur enough to leave his friend without a word.
But to-night he would willingly be spared. He apprehended unhappily the
interview with Kellogg; he was in no temper for argumentation, felt
scarcely strong enough to hold his own against the fire of objections
with which Kellogg would undoubtedly seek to shake his stand. Kellogg
could talk, Heaven alone knew how winningly he could talk! with all the
sound logic of a close reasoner, all the enthusiasm of youth and
self-confidence, all the persuasiveness of profound conviction singular
to successful men. Duncan had been wont to say of him that Kellogg
could talk the hind-leg off of a mule. He recalled this now with a sour
grin: "That means me..."
The elevator boy, knowing him of old, neglected to announce his
arrival, and Duncan had his own key to the door of Kellogg's apartment.
He let himself in with futile stealth: as was quite right and proper,
Kellogg's man Robbins was in attendance--a stupefied Robbins,
thunderstruck by the unexpected return of his master's friend and
guest. "Good Lord!" he cried at sight of Duncan. "Beg your pardon, sir,
but--but it can't be you!"
"Your mistake, Robbins. Unfortunately it is." Duncan surrendered his
luggage. "Mr. Kellogg in?"
"No, sir. But I'm expecting him any minute. He'll be surprised to see
you back."
"Think so?" said Duncan dully. "He doesn't know me, if he is."
"You see, sir, we thought you was out West."
"So you did." Duncan moved toward the door of his own bedroom, Robbins
following.
"It was only yesterday I posted a letter to you for Mr. Kellogg, sir,
and the address was Omaha."
"I didn't get that far. Fetch along that suitcase, will you please? I
want to put some clean things in it."
"Then you're not staying in town over night, Mr. Duncan?"
"I don't know. I'm not staying here, anyway." Duncan switched on the
lights in his room. "Put it on the bed, Robbins. I'll pack as quickly
as I can. I'm in a hurry."
"Yes, sir, but--I hope there's nothing wrong?"
"Then you lose," returned Duncan grimly: "everything's wrong." He
jerked viciously at an obstinate bureau drawer, and when it yielded
unexpectedly with the well-known impishness of the inanimate, dumped
upon the floor a tangled miscellany of shirts, socks, gloves, collars
and ties.
"Didn't you like the business, sir?"
"No, I didn't like the business--and it didn't like me. It's the same
old story, Robbins. I've lost my job again--that's all."
"I'm very sorry, sir."
"Thank you--but that's all right. I'm used to it."
"And you're going to leave, sir?"
"I am, Robbins."
"I--may I take the liberty of hoping it's to take another position?"
"You may, but you lose a second time. I've just made up my mind I'm not
going to hang round here any longer. That's all."
"But," Robbins ventured, hovering about with exasperating
solicitude--"but Mr. Kellogg'd never permit you to leave in this way,
sir."
"Wrong again, Robbins," said Duncan curtly, annoyed.
"Yes, sir. Very good, sir." With the instinct of the well-trained
servant, Robbins started to leave, but hesitated. He was really very
much disturbed by Duncan's manner, which showed a phase of his
character new in Robbins' experience of him. Ordinarily reverses such
as this had seemed merely to serve to put Duncan on his mettle, to
infuse him with a determination to try again and win out, whatever the
odds; and at such times he was accustomed to exhibit a mad
irresponsibility of wit and a gaiety of spirit (whether it were a mask
or no) that only outrivalled his high good humour when things
ostensibly were going well with him.
Intermittently, between his spasms of employment, he had been Kellogg's
guest for several years, not infrequently for months at a time; and so
Robbins had come to feel a sort of proprietary interest in the young
man, second only to the regard which he had for his employer. Like most
people with whom Duncan came in contact, Robbins admired him from a
respectful distance, and liked him very well withal. He would have been
much distressed to have harm happen to him, and he was very much
concerned and alarmed to see him so candidly discouraged and sick at
heart. Perhaps too quick to draw an inference, Robbins mistrusted his
intentions; his dour habit boded ill in the servant's understanding:
men in such moods were apt to act unwisely. But if only he might
contrive to delay Duncan until Kellogg's return, he thought the former
might yet be saved from the consequences of folly of some insensate
sort. And casting about for an excuse, he grasped at the most sovereign
solace he knew of.
"Beg pardon, sir," he advanced, hesitant, "but perhaps you're just
feeling a bit blue. Won't you let me bring you a drop of something?"
"Of course I will," said Duncan emphatically over his shoulder. "And
get it now, will you, while I'm packing.... And, Robbins!"
"Sir?"
"Only put a little in it."
"A little what, sir?"
"Seltzer, of course."