Part 10

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."

I endeavored to smile. "That's very plain talk, isn't it?"

"Of course it's plain talk, because it's a perfectly plain situation. It isn't a new thing to me to see people who've been going without food. At the Settlement--"

I still kept up the effort to smile. "If I'd been going without food there are a dozen places--"

"Where they'd give you a meal, after they'd satisfied themselves that you hadn't been drinking. I know all about that. But would you go? Would you rather drop dead of starvation first? And what good would it do you in the end, just one meal, or two meals, when everything else is lacking? It's the whole thing--"

"But how would you tackle that, the whole thing? It seems to me that if I can't do it myself no one else--"

"I'll tell you as straightforwardly as you ask the question. I should give you, lend you, as much money as you wanted, so that you should have time to reorganize your life."

"And suppose I couldn't, that I spent your money and was just where I was before?"

"Then my conscience would be clear."

"But your conscience must be clear in any case."

"It isn't. When all you ask for is to help--"

"But you can help other people--who need it more."

"Oh, don't keep that up. I _know_ what you need. I've told you already I've seen starvation before. Don't be offended! And when it's you, some one we've all known, and liked-- Boyd liked you from the first."

"But not from the last."

"He thinks you're--you're strange, naturally. We all think so. I think so. But that doesn't make any difference when you don't get enough to eat."

"And suppose I turned out to be only an adventurer?"

She shrugged her shoulders, after a habit she had. "That would be your responsibility. Don't you see? I'm not thinking so much about you as I am about myself. It's nothing to me what you are, not any more than what Lydia is, or a dozen others I could name to you. I think it highly probable that Lydia Blair will take the road we call going to the bad--"

"Oh, surely not!"

This invitation to digression she also swept aside. "She won't do it with her eyes shut, never fear! She'll know all about it, and take her own way because it's hers. Don't pity her. If I were half so free--"

"Well?"

"Well, for one thing, you'd have another chance. If you didn't use it that would be your own affair."

"Why do you speak of another chance? Do you think--?"

"Oh, don't ask me what I think. I take it for granted that--"

"Yes? Please tell me. What is it that you take for granted?"

"What good would it do for me to tell you?"

"It would do the good that I should know."

"Well, then, I take it for granted, since you insist, that you've done something, somewhere--"

"And still you'd lend me as much money as I asked for?"

"What difference does it make to me? I want you to have another chance. I shouldn't want it if you didn't need it; and you wouldn't need it unless there was something wrong with you. There! Is that plain enough? But because there is something wrong with you I want to come in and help you put it right. I don't care who you are or what you've done, so long as those are the facts."

"But I'm obliged to care, don't you see? If I were to take advantage of your generosity--"

"Tell me truthfully now. Would you do it if I were a man, a friend, who insisted on helping you to start again?"

I tried to gain time. "It would depend on the motive."

"We'll assume the motive to be nothing but pure friendship, just the desire that you should have every opportunity to make good again, and nothing else. _Absolutely nothing else_! Do you understand? Would you take it from him then? Please tell me as frankly as if--"

"I--I might."

"And because I'm not a man but a woman, you can't."

"It isn't the same thing."

"Which is just what we women complain of, just what we fight against, the stupid conventions that force us into being useless in a world--"

"Oh, but there are other ways of being useful."

"No other way of being useful compensates for the one which seems to you paramount, above all others, and from which you are debarred."

"But why should it? You and I never met till--"

"You can't argue that way. You can't reason about the thing at all. I'm not reasoning, further than to say that--that I believe in you, in your power of--of coming back. That's the phrase, isn't it? And as, apparently, I'm the only one in a position to go to your aid--"

She threw out her hands with a gesture she sometimes used which implied that all had been said.

And in the end we compromised. That is, I told her I had one more possibility. If that failed, I would let her know. This she informed me I could do by telephone, as Boyd's name was in the book. If it didn't fail ... But as to that she forgot to exact a promise, just as she forgot to tell me her new address. Like most shy people who dash out of their shyness for some adventure too bold for the audacious, she retreated as suddenly. Springing into her motor as soon as we had arrived at a temporary decision, she drove away, leaving me still at a loss as to whether or not I was Malvolio.

Dumfounded and distressed by this unexpected meeting, and the still more unexpected offer made in it, my thoughts began to run wild. It was in my power to live, to eat, to pay my way for a little longer. Of the money at her disposal I need accept no more than a few hundred dollars, a trifle to her, but to me everything in the world. Even if it did me no more than a passing good, it would do me that. If I had in the end to "get out," as I phrased it, I would rather get out in a month's time than do it that very day. In the mean while there might be--the miracle.

It was the mad prospect of all this that sent me out of Fifth Avenue to crawl along the side of Creed & Creed's establishment, which flanked the cross-street, without noticing the way I took. For the minute I had forgotten the errand that brought me to this particular spot in New York. It had been crowded out of my memory by the fact that, after all, it might not matter whether I found work or not. I could live, anyhow. All I had to do was to take a telephone list, call up Boyd Averill's number, say that I had changed my mind....

It was a temptation. For you to understand how fierce a temptation it was you would have to remember that for a month I had been insufficiently fed, and that for a week I had not really been fed at all. Moreover, I could see before me no hope of being fed in the immediate future. I was asking myself whether it would be common sense on the part of a drowning man to refuse a rope because a woman in whom there might be a whole confusion of complex motives had thrown it, when I suddenly found my passage along the pavement blocked.