Part 11

It was blocked by what appeared to be a long cylindrical bar, some two or three feet in diameter. Covered with burlap, it ran from a motor truck, in which one end still rested, toward the entrance to that part of Creed & Creed's establishment that lay slightly lower than the pavement. It was a wide entrance, after which came two or three broad, shallow steps, and then a cavern which was evidently a storehouse. Two men were tugging at the long object, the one big, dark, brawny, clad in overalls, and equal to the work, the other a little elf of an old man, nattily dressed for the street, wearing a high soft felt hat, possibly in the hope of making himself look taller. A gray mustache that sprang outward in a semi-circle did not conceal a truculent mouth, though it smothered his wrathful expletives. That he had once been agile I could easily guess, but now his poor old joints were stiff from age or disuse. It was also clear that he was lending a hand to an irksome task because of a shortage of labor.

While the younger man--he was about my own age--could manage his end easily enough, the old one tugged desperately at his, finally letting it drop.

"Gr-r-r-r!"

The growl was that of an irascible man too angry to be articulate. If the thread of flame ever led me, it was then. Without a minute's hesitation, I picked up the dropped end of the cylinder, with no explanation beyond the words, "Let me have a try," and presently I was finding my way down the steps and into the cavern.

"Chuck it there, on top o' thim," my companion ordered, and our cylinder lay as one of a pile of similar cylinders, which I could see from the labels to have been shipped from India.

"There's eight or tin more of thim things," the big fellow was beginning.

"Is that the Floater?" I asked in a hurried undertone, as the little man hobbled down the steps and made his way toward us in the semi-darkness.

"He sure is, and some damn light floater at that."

Before I could analyze this reply the Floater himself stood in front of me.

"Who are you?" he demanded, sharply.

"Do you mean my name?"

"I don't care a damn about your name. What business had you to pick up that rug?"

"Only the business of wanting to help. I could see it wasn't a gentleman's job--and--and I--I thought you might take me on."

He danced with indignation.

"Take you on? Take you on? What do you mean by that?"

"You see, sir, it was this way. I've just run up from the Intelligence where I heard a fellow gassing about"--I varied the story from that which I had heard at Miss Bryne's--"about being kicked out of here."

"Was he a gabby sort of a guy?" my big colleague inquired.

"That would describe him exactly; and so I thought if I could reach here in time, before you'd had a chance to get any one else--"

"Chance to get any one else?" the little man snarled. "I can go out into the street and shovel 'em in by the cartload. Dirt, I call 'em!"

"Yes, sir; but you haven't done it. That's all I mean. I thought if I got here first--"

It was easy to size him up as a vain little terrier, and my respectful manner softened him. He stood back for a minute to examine me.

"You don't look like a fellow that 'd be after this sort of a job. Does he, Bridget?"

Bridget's answer, though non-committal, was in my favor:

"Sure I've seen ivery kind o' man lookin' for a job at one time or another. It's not his looks that 'll tell in handling rugs; it's his boiceps."

He tapped his own strong biceps to emphasize his observation, while I endeavored to explain.

"You're quite right, sir. You'd see that when lots of other men wouldn't. As a matter of tact, this job or any other job would be new to me. I had some money--but the war's got me stone-broke. I lived in France till just lately.

"If you lived in France, why ain't you fightin'?"

Not having the same dread of inventing a tale as with Boyd Averill, I said, boldly:

"I did fight, till they discharged me. Got a blow on the head, and wasn't any good after that. I was with the French army because my people lived over there. When I got out of it, there was no provision made for me, of course. My father and mother had died, my father's business had been smashed to pieces--"

"What was he?"

Luckily my imagination didn't fail me.

"An artist. He was just beginning to make a hit. I was to have been"--I sought for the most credible possibility--"an architect. I was to have studied at the Beaux Arts, that's the big school for architects in Paris; but of course all that was knocked on the head when my father died, and so I sailed for New York."

"Haven't you got no relations here?"

I remembered that Lydia Blair thought she might have seen me in Salt Lake City, but I was afraid of the Mormon connotation. "My family used to live in--in California; but they're all scattered, and we'd been in Europe for so many years--"

"Amur'cans should live in God's country--"

"Yes, sir; so I've found out. If we had, I shouldn't be asking for a job in order to get a meal. I'm down to that," I confessed, showing him the nickel and the dime.

He took a minute or two to reflect on the situation, saying, finally, with a little relenting in his tone:

"There's nine more rugs out in that lorry. If you help this man to lug them in you'll get fifty cents."

If it was not the miracle, it was a sign and a wonder none the less. Fifty cents would tide me over the night. I should have sixty-five cents in all, and it would be my own. I should not have cadged it from a woman, whatever the motive of her generosity. It was that motive which made me tremble. If it was what it might have been, if I was not a mere fatuous fool, then there was no hole so deep that I had better not hide in it, no distance so great that I had better not put it between her and me. It would wound her if I did, but on every count that would be preferable....

The Floater went off to regions where I couldn't follow him, and Bridget spoke in non-committal but not unkindly tone.

"Better take off that topcoat and hang it in Clancy's locker. Clancy was the gabby chap you heard at Lizzie's. That's Lizzie Bryne. Sure I moind her when her mother kep' a little notion store down by Grime Street, and now the airs she gives herself! Ah, well, there's no law ag'in' it! Come awn now. We'll get these other bits in, because Daly, that's the driver, 'll have to be after goin' back to the station for the Bokharas."

"Will that be more to unload?" I asked, eagerly.

"Sure it 'll be more to unload. Dee ye think they'll walk off the truck by theirselves?"

Vaguely afraid of something hostile or supercilious on Bridget's part, I was pleasantly surprised to find him not merely good-natured, but helpful and patient, showing me the small tricks of unloading long burlap cylinders from a motor lorry, which proved to be as much an art in its simple way as anything else, and enlivening the work by anecdote. All that he knew of Creed & Creed I learned in the course of that half-hour, though it turned out to be little more than I knew myself, except as it concerned the minor personnel. Of the heads of the firm and the managers he could tell me only as much as the peasants in the vale of Olympus could have recounted of the gods on the mountain-top. To Bridget they were celestial, shadowy beings, seen as they passed in and out of the office, or stopped to look at some new consignment from the Far East; but he barely knew their names.

The highest flight of his information was up to the Floater; beyond him he seemed to consider it useless to ascend. Of the gods on the summit, the Floater was the high priest, and in that capacity he, alone, was of moment to those on the lower plane. He administered the favors and meted out the punishments. "He's It," was Bridget's laconic phrase, and in the sentence, as far as he was concerned, or I was concerned, or any salesman or porter was concerned, Creed & Creed's was summed up.

Of the Floater's anomalous position in the establishment, the explanation commonly accepted by the porters, the "luggers" they called themselves, was that he was in possession of dark secrets, which it would have been perilous to tempt him to divulge, concerning the firm's prosperity. A mysterious blood-relationship with "Old Man Creed," who had founded the house some sixty years before, was also a current speculation. Certain it was that his connection with the business antedated that of any one among either partners or employees, a fact that gave him an authority which no one disputed and all subordinates feared.

The job finished, Bridget and I sat on the pile, while he shared his lunch with me, and I waited for the Floater to bring me my fifty cents. When he appeared at last, I stood to attention, though Bridget nonchalantly kept his seat. I learned that if the little man was treated as an equal in the office he was treated as an equal in the basement. This circumstance gave to my politeness in standing up and saying "sir" a value to which he was susceptible, though too crusty to admit it.

"There's another load coming, sir, isn't there?" I asked, humbly, after I had been paid.

"What's it to you if there is?"

"Only that I might earn another fifty cents."

"Earn another fifty cents! Why, fifty cents would pay you for two such jobs as the one you've done."

"Then I'd like to work off what you've paid me by unloading the other lot for nothing."

He lifted a warning finger as he turned to go up-stairs. "See here, young feller! You beat it. If I find you here when I come down again--"

"You stay jist where y'are," Bridget warned me. "They're awful short-handed above, and customers comin' in by the shovelful. They've got to have four luggers to pull the stuff out for the salesmen to show, and there's only six of us in all. When Clancy put the skids under hisself last night I could see how it 'd be to-day. It was a godsend to the little ould man when you blew in; but he always wants ye to think he can beat the game right out of his own hand."

Thus encouraged I stood my ground, and when the next load came I had the privilege of helping Bridget to handle it. By the end of the day I had not only earned a dollar and a half but had been ordered by the Floater to turn up again next morning.

"Ye're all right now," Bridget said, complacently. "Ye've got the job so long as ye can hould it down. I'll give ye the dope about that, and wan thing is always to trate him the way ye've trated him to-day. It's what he wants of us other guys, and we've not got the trick o' handin' it out. Men like us, that's used to a free country, don't pass up no soft talk to no one. What's your name?"

I said it was Jasper Soames.

"Sure that's a hell of a name," he commented, simply. "The byes 'd never get round the like o' that. Yer name 'll be Brogan. Brogan was what we called the guy that was here before Clancy, and it done very well. All right, then, Brogan. Ye'll have Clancy's locker; and moind ye don't punch the clock a minute later than siven in the mornin', or that little ould divil 'll be dancin' round to fire ye."

So Brogan I was at Messrs. Creed & Creed's all through the next two years.

*CHAPTER V*

No lighter-hearted man than I trod the streets of New York that evening. I had breakfasted in the morning; I had shared Bridget's cold meat and bread at midday; I could "blow myself in" to something to eat now, and then go happily to bed.

There was but one flaw in this bliss, and that was the thought of Mildred Averill. Whether she would be glad or sorry that for the minute I was landing on my feet, I could not forecast. And yet when I called her up she pretended to be glad. I say she pretended, only because in her first words there was a note of disappointment, perhaps of dismay, though she recovered herself quickly.

"But I can be easy in my mind about you?" she asked, after I had declined to tell her what my new occupation was.

"Quite easy; only I want you to know how grateful I am."

"Oh, please don't. If I could have done more!"

"Fortunately that wasn't needed."

"But if it should be needed in the future--"

"I hope it won't be."

"But if it should be?"

"Oh, then we'd--we'd see."

"So that for now it's--" that note stole into her voice again, and with a wistful question in the intonation--"for now it's--it's good-by?"

"Only for now."

She seemed to grasp at something. "What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, just that--that the future--"

"I hate the future."

It was one of her sudden outbursts, and the receiver was hung up.

After all, this abrupt termination to an unsatisfactory mode of speech was the wisest method for us both. We couldn't go on sparring and there was nothing to do but spar. Knowing that I couldn't speak plainly she had ceased to expect me to do so, and yet...

When I say that this was a relief to me, you must understand it only in the sense that my situation was too difficult to allow of my inviting further complications. Had I been free--but I wasn't free. The conviction that somewhere in the world I had permanent ties began to be as strong as the belief that at some time in my life love had been the dominating factor. There had been a woman. Lydia Blair had seen her. Her flaming eyes haunted me from a darkness in which they were the only thing living. The fact that I couldn't construct the rest of the portrait no more permitted me to doubt the original than you can doubt the existence of a plant after you have seen a leaf from it. The best I could hope for now was the privilege of living and working in some simple, elemental way that would give me the atmosphere in which to re-collect myself, _recueillement_, the French graphically name the process, and grow unconsciously back into the facts that effort would not restore to me.

For that simple, elemental work and life the opportunity came to me at last. I see now that it was opportunity, though I should not have said so at the time. At the time it was only hard necessity, though hard necessity with those products of shelter and food which in themselves meant peace. I had peace, therefore, of a kind, and to it I am able now to attribute that growth and progress backward, if I may so express myself, which led to the miracle.

My work next day lay in peeling off the burlap from the newly arrived consignment, stripping the rolls of the sheepskins in which they were wrapped inside, spreading the rugs flat, and sweeping them with a stiff, strong broom. After that we laid them in assorted piles, preparatory to carrying them up-stairs. They were Khorassans, Kirmanshahs, Bokharas, and Sarouks, with a superb lot of blue and gold Chinese reproduced on the company's looms in India.

The good-natured Peter Bridget taking his turn up-stairs, my colleague that day was an American of Finnish extraction, whose natural sunniness of disposition had been soured by the thwarting of a strong ambition to "get on." Combining the broad features of the Lapp with Scandinavian hair and complexion, his expression reminded you of a bright summer day over which a storm was beginning to lower. The son of one large family and the father of another, he was at war with the world in which his earning capacity had come to have its limitations fixed at eighteen dollars a week.

He was not conversational; he only grunted remarks out of a slow-moving bitterness of spirit.

"What's the good of always layin' the pipe and never gettin' no oil along it? That's what I want to know. Went to work when I was fourteen, and now I'm forty-two, and in exactly the same spot."

"You're not in exactly the same spot," I said, "because you've got your wife and children."

"And the money I've spent on that woman and them kids!"

"But you're fond of them, aren't you?"

"No better wife no guy never had, and no nicer little fam'ly."

"Well, then, that's so much to the good. Those are assets, aren't they? They'll mean more to you than if you had money in the savings bank and didn't have _them_."

"I can't eddicate 'em proper, or send 'em to high-school, let alone college, or give 'em nothin' like what they ought to have. All I can leave 'em when I die is what my father left me, the right not to be able to get nowhere--and yet you'll hear a lot of gabbers jazzin' away about this bein' the best country for a working-man."

During the lunch-hour we drifted into Fifth Avenue, joining the throng of those who for sixty minutes were like souls enjoying a respite from limbo. Limbo, I ask you to notice, is not hell; but it is far from paradise. The dictionary defines the word as a borderland, a place of restraint, and it was in both those senses, I think, that the shop and the factory struck the imaginations of these churning minds. The shop and the factory formed a borderland, neither one thing nor another, a nowhere; but a place of restraint none the less. More than the physical restraint involved in the necessity for working was implied by this; it was restraint of the spirit, restraint of the part of a man that soars, restraint of the impulse to seize the good things of life in a world where they seemed to be free.

Though I could understand little of the conversation around me--Yiddish, Polish, Armenian, Czech--I knew they were talking of jobs and bosses in relation to politics and the big things of life.

"What's the matter with them guys at Albany and Washington that they don't come across with laws--?"

That was the question and that was the complaint. It was one of the two main blends in the current of dissatisfaction. The other blend was the conviction that if those who had the power didn't right self-evident wrongs, the wronged would somehow have to right themselves. There was no speechmaking, no stump oratory, after the manner of a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon crowd; all was smothered, sullen, burning, secretive, and intense.

On our way back to the cavern the Finn remarked:

"No man doesn't mind work. He'd rather work than loaf, even if he was paid for loafin'. What he can't stick is not havin' room to grow in, bein' squeezed into undersize, like a Chinese woman's foot."

After all, I reflected, this might be the real limbo, not only of the working-man, but of all the dissatisfied in all ranks throughout the world--the denials of the liberty to expand. Mildred Averill was rebelling against it in her way as much as the Finn in his, as much as any Jew or Pole or Italian in all the crowd surging back at that minute to the dens from which they had come out. Discontent was not confined to any one class or to any one set of needs. Custom, convention, and greed had clamped our energies round and round as with iron hoops, till all but the few among us had lost the right to grow. It wasn't a question of pay; it wasn't primarily a question of money at all, though the question of money was involved in it. More than anything else, it was one of a new orientation toward everything, with a shifting of basic principles. The first must become last and the last must become first--not in the detail of precedence but in that of the laws by which we live--before men, as men, could get out of the prison-houses, into which civilization had thrust them, to the broad, free air to which they were born. The struggle between labor and capital was a mere duel between blind men. It was bluff on the surface by those on both sides who were afraid to put the ax to the root of the tree. No symbol was so eloquent to me of the bondage into which the human elements in Church and State had chained the spirit of man as the Finn's comparison of the Chinese woman's foot.

When the Floater paid me another dollar and a half that night he told me that if I worked like a dog, was as meek as a mouse, and "didn't get no labor rot into my nut" I could have Clancy's job as a regular thing. But by this time I was beginning to understand him. I have already called him a terrier, and a terrier he was, with a terrier's bark, but with a terrier's fundamental friendliness. If you patted him, he wagged his tail. True, he wagged it unwillingly, ungraciously, and with a fond belief that you didn't know he was wagging it at all; but the fact that he did wag it was enough for me.

It was enough for us all. There was not a man among the "luggers" who didn't understand him, nor among the salesmen either, as I came to understand.

"Dee ye know how to take that little scalpeen? He's like wan of thim Graaks or Eytalians that's got a quare talk of their own, but you know you can put it into our talk and make it mane somethin'. Wance I was at a circus where a monkey what looked like a little ould man talked his kind o' talk, and it made sinse. Well, that's like the Floater. He's like the monkey what can't talk nothin' but monkey-talk; but glory be to God! he manes the same thing as a man. Don't ye moind him, Brogan. When he talks his talk, you talk it to yerself in yer own talk, and ye'll kape yer timper and get everything straight."

This kindly advice was given me by Denis Gallivan, the oldest of the porters, and a sort of dean of our corps. Small, wiry, as strong as a horse, with a wizened, leathery face that looked as if it had been dried and tanned in a hot sunshine, there was a yearning in his blue-black eyes like that which some of the old Italian masters put into the eyes of saints. Denis, Bridget, and the Finn composed what I may call the permanent staff, the two others, excluding myself, being invariably restless chaps who, like Clancy, came for a few weeks and went off again. With the three workers named I made a fourth, henceforth helping to carry the responsibility of the house on my shoulders.

It was a good place, with pleasant work. Two or three times I could have had promotion and a raise in pay, but I had reasons of my own for staying where I was.

My duties being simple, I enjoyed the sheer physical exertion I was obliged to make. Arriving about seven in the morning I helped to sweep the floors, with a special sweeping of the rugs, druggets, and mattings that had lain out overnight. If there was anything to be carried from the basement to the upper floor I helped in that. Then, having "cleaned" myself, as the phrase went, I took my place in the shop, ready to pull out the goods which the salesmen panted to display to customers, and to put them back again.

For this there were always four of us in the spacious, well-lighted shop, which must have been sixty feet long by thirty wide, and I liked the dignity and quiet of all the regulation tasks. As a rule, we were on the floor by nine, though it was generally after ten before we saw a customer. During that hour of spare time we porters hung together at the farther end, exchanging in low tones the gossip of the day, confiding personal experiences, or discussing the war and the reconstruction of society. Now and then one of the four or five salesmen would condescendingly join with us, but for the most part the salesmen kept to themselves, treating the same topics from a higher point of view. The gods of Olympus did little more than enter by the main door from Fifth Avenue, cross to their offices, after which we scarcely saw them. Only the Floater moved at will between us and them, with a little dog's freedom to be equally at home in the stable and the drawing-room.

A flicker of interest always woke with the arrival of customers. They entered with diffidence, confused by the subdued brilliance of the Persian and Chinese colors hanging on our walls, by the wide empty spaces, and their own ignorance of what they came in search of.