Part 9

Miss Flowerdew's setting my only standard as to "Rooms," I had imagined myself as walking into something of the kind, though possibly more cheerful. It is hardly necessary to say that in this I was disappointed. Drifting in and out of houses through most of that afternoon, I saw women and conditions that almost shattered such faith as I had left in human nature. The first to answer my ring at a doorbell was a virago. An enormous creature, bigger if not taller than myself, and clad in a loose pink-flannel wrapper that added to her bulk, she challenged me to find a fault with the room I declined after having seen it. "Better men than you have slept in that bed," she called after me as I clattered down the stairs, "and any one who says different 'll lie." The next was a poor, leering thing who smiled in a way that would have been horrible if it had not been so sickeningly imbecile. The next was a slattern, pawing her face and wiping it with her apron while she showed me the doghole for which I was to pay seven dollars a week. There were others of whom it is useless to attempt a catalogue further than to say that they left me appalled. When the lights were being lit I was still in the streets with my two bags, and the snow falling faster.

I was about to go back to the Barcelona for the night when something happened which I tell to you just as it occurred.

That morning I had read in a paper the account given by a young Canadian officer of his escape from a German prison, of his beating his way to the Rhine, and of his final swim across the river to Switzerland. But the point that remained in my memory was his picture of himself as he lay like a lizard with his nose to the stream and his feet in the underbrush as the bank rose behind him. Listening to the current, he could guess how strong it was; putting his hand in the water, he could feel it cold. For over two hours he lay there in the darkness, resting, wondering, and thinking of a little cemetery not far from Basel where lay the bodies of the prisoners who had tried to make this swim.

Then, as the minute approached at which he must give himself to these difficult waters, he prayed. His account of the act was simple and straightforward. He asked God to have him in His keeping while he made this attempt, and to comfort those at home if he failed. With that he slipped into the stream and struck outward.

Well, standing somewhere in the neighborhood of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue I turned this over in my mind, considering its advisability. I was not what would be called a praying man. As to that, I had not prayed in years. I had sometimes told myself that I didn't know what prayer was, that its appeal seemed to me illogical. Illogical it seemed to me now, in the sense of imploring God to do what He wouldn't do of His own accord.

So, although I didn't pray, something passed through my mind that might have been prayer's equivalent. As far as I can transcribe it into the words which I did not use at the time it ran like this:

"I know there is a God. I know that His will is the supreme law for all of us. I know that that law is just and beneficent. It is not just and beneficent for me to be standing here in the snow and the slush, chilled, hungry, with wet feet, workless, and homeless. Consequently, this is not His will. Consequently, I must give myself to discovering that will as the first principle of safety. When I have got into touch with that first principle of safety I shall find a home and work."

Of this the immediate result was that I did not return to the Barcelona. Something like a voice, the voice of another, told me that the thread of flame led onward. Onward I drifted, then, hardly noticing the way I went, hypnotized by the physical process of being on the move. It was just on and on, through the slanting snowfall, through the patches of blurred light, with feet soggy and heart soggier, a derelict amid these hundreds of vehicles, these thousands of pedestrians, all bound from somewhere to somewhere, and knowing the road they were taking. I didn't know the road I was taking and in a sense I didn't care. Having given up from sheer impotence the attempt to steer my ship, I was being borne along blindly.

When I lifted my head to look about me again I was in a part of New York not only new to me, but almost refreshing to the eye. I mean that it was one of those old-fashioned down-town regions where the streets hadn't yet learned the short and easy cut to beauty of running only at right angles. Two or three thoroughfares focused in an irregular open space, which I saw by the signboard to bear the name of Meeting-House Green. There was no meeting-house in the neighborhood now, and probably nothing green even in spring. If it was like the rest of New York it would be dirty in winter and fetid in summer, but after the monotonous ground plan of the uptown regions its quaintness relieved the perceptions to a degree which the thunder of the near-by Elevated couldn't do away with. Just now all was blanketed in white, through which drays plunged heavily and pedestrians slipped like ghosts.

As I stared about me my eye was once more arrested by the magic notice "Rooms," though this time with the qualifying phrase, "for gentlemen." Rooms for gentlemen! The limitation seemed to fit my needs. It implied selection and a social standard.

The house, too, was that oasis in New York, an old-time dwelling in gray-painted brick which progress has not yet swept away. Standing where Wapping Street and Theodora Place ran together at a sharp angle, it was shaped like a sadiron or a ship's prow. The tip of the ground floor was given over to a provision dealer, while a barber occupied the long slit in the rear. Between the two shops a door on the level of the pavement of Theodora Place gave on a little inset flight of steps which led up to the actual entrance. The vestibule was shabby, but, moved by my experience in the early part of the afternoon, I observed that it was clean.

The woman who answered my ring was not only clean, but neatly dressed in what I suppose was a print stuff, and not only neatly dressed, but marked with a faded prettiness. What I chiefly noticed for the minute was a pair of those enormous doll-blue eyes on a level with the face, as the French say, _a fluer de fete_, which make the expression sweet and vacuous. In her case it was resignedly mournful, as if mournfulness was a part of her aim in life. A single gas-jet flickered behind her, showing part of a hallway in which the same walnut furniture must have stood for so many years that it was now groggy on its feet. To my question about a room she replied with a sweet, sad, "Won't you step in?" which was tantamount to a welcome.

The floor of the hallway was covered with an oilcloth or linoleum which had once simulated a terra-cotta tiling, and was now but one remove from dust. On a mud-brown wall a steel-engraving of a scow, with Age at the helm, and Youth peering off at the bow, sagged at an angle which produced a cubist effect in its relation to the groggy-footed hat-rack. The doors on the left of the hall were closed; on the right a graceful stairway, lighted by a tall window looking out on Theodora Place, curved upward to the floor above.

At the sound of voices in the hall one of the closed doors opened, and a second woman, a replica of the first, except for being older, came out and looked inquiringly. She, too, was fadedly pretty; she, too, was mournful; she, too, was saucer-eyed; she, too, was neatly dressed in a print stuff.

"This gentleman is looking for a room," was the explanation, sadly given, of my presence.

The ladies withdrew to the foot of the stairway for a whispered conference. This finished, the elder came back to where I stood on the door-mat.

"We generally ask for references--" she began, with a glance at my sodden appearance.

"If that's essential," I broke in, "I'm afraid it must end matters. I've only recently come over from France, and I'm a total stranger in New York. I rang the bell because I saw the notice and I liked the look of the house."

As it happened, the last was the most tactful thing I could have said, going to the hearts of my hostesses. Something, too, in my voice and choice of words must have appealed to their sense of gentility.

"It's a nice old house," the elder lady smiled, with her brave air of having to overcome agony before being able to speak at all. "It's old-fashioned, of course, and horribly in the wrong part of the city nowadays; but my sister and I love it. We've always lived here, and our dear father before us. He was Doctor Smith, quite a famous oculist in his day; you may have heard of him?"

"I've heard the name," I admitted, politely.

"We've two good rooms vacant at present; but if you can't give references"--a wan smile deprecated the unladylike suggestion--"I'm afraid we should have to ask you for a week's rent in advance. I shouldn't speak of it if it was not our rule."

When I had agreed to this she led the way over the frayed cocoanut matting of the staircase to an upper hallway, also carpeted in pulverized oilcloth. With one sister ahead of me, and the other shepherding me behind, I was ushered into a large prow-shaped room immediately over the provision dealer, and smelling faintly of raw meat. I could have borne the odor if the rent had not been six a week.

"We've another room just over this," the spokeswoman informed me, "but it's only half this size."

"If it's only half this rent--"

"It's just half this rent."

So, marshaled as before, I mounted another stairway in cocoanut matting to a slit of a room shaped like half a ship's prow, with its single window placed squintwise. As the smell of raw meat was less noticeable here, the squint of the window out into Meeting-House Green, and the rent so low, I made my bargain promptly.

In the days of the famous oculist the room must have been a maid's. It was still furnished like a maid's in a house of the second order. A rickety iron bedstead supported a sagging mattress covered with a cotton counterpane in imitated crochet-work. A table, a washstand, a chair, and a chest of drawers were perhaps drearier than they might have been, because of the sick light of the gas-jet. On a drab wooden mantelpiece, which enshrined a board covered with a piece of cretonne where once had been a fireplace, stood the only decoration in the room, three large fungi, painted with landscapes. The fungi were of the triangular sort which grow about the trunks of trees. There was a big one in the middle of the mantelpiece, and smaller ones at each end, giving glimpses of rivers and bays, with castles on headlands, to one tired of the prospect of Meeting-House Green. Taking the initiatory three dollars from my purse, I bent to study these objects of art.

Once more the act was ingratiating to my hostesses.

"That's my work," said the little woman who had admitted me to the house. Her tone was one of shy pride, of a kind of fluttered boastfulness.

"My sister's an artist," the elder explained, taking my three one-dollar bills as if their number didn't matter, but making conversation in order to count them surreptitiously. "She's a widow, too, Mrs. Leeming. I'm Miss Smith. We've had great sorrows. We try not to complain too much, but--"

A long-drawn sigh with a quiver in it said the rest, while Mrs. Leeming's eyes spilled tears with the readiness of a pair of fountain cups.

To escape the emotional I returned to my inspection of the landscapes, at which I was destined to gaze for another two years.

"Are these studies of--of Italy?" I asked, for the sake of showing appreciation.

Mrs. Leeming recovered herself sufficiently to be faintly indignant.

"Oh no! I never copy. I work only from imagination. Landscapes just come to me--and all different."

Before they left me Miss Smith managed to convey a few of the principles on which they conducted their house.

"We've three very refined gentlemen at present, two salesmen and a Turkish-bath attendant. One has to be so careful. We almost never take gentlemen who don't bring reference; but in your case, Mr. Soames--well, one can see." Her wan, suffering smile flickered up for a minute and died down. "There's a sort of free-masonry, isn't there? We _have_ taken gentlemen on that, and they've never disappointed us."

I hoped I should not disappoint them, either.

"Now, some young men--well, to put it plainly, if there's liquor we just have to ask them to look for another room. Tobacco, with gentlemen, one can't be too severe on. We overlook it, and try not to complain too much. And, of course, only gentlemen visitors--"

With my assurance that I should do my utmost to live within their regulations, they were good enough to leave me to my single chair and the fungi. Dropping into the one and staring at the other, it seemed to me that I had reached the uttermost edge of the forlorn. I could bear the extreme modesty of this lodging, seeing that it gave me a shelter from the storm; I could bear being hungry, cold, and wet; I could bear the wall of darkness and blankness that hemmed in not only my future, but my past; what I found intolerable was the sense of being useless. The blows of Fate I could take with some equanimity, but, not to be able to "make good" or to earn a living cut me to the quick in my self-esteem.

And yet it was not that which in the end beat me to my knees beside the bed, to bury my head against the counterpane of imitation crochet-work. That was a more primal craving, a need as primal as thirst or the desire for sleep. It was the longing for some sort of human companionship--for the gay toleration of Lydia Blair, or Drinkwater's cheerfulness, or Mildred Averill's....

*CHAPTER III*

But in the end I found work, so why tell of the paroxysm of loneliness which shook me that night like a madness? Never before had I known anything like it, and nothing like it has seized me since. I must have remained on my knees for an hour or more, largely for the reason that there was nothing to get up for. Though I had had no dinner, I didn't want to eat, and what else was there to do? To eat and sleep, to sleep and eat, that apparently would be my fate till my seventeen dollars gave out. If the miracle didn't happen before then--but the miracle began to happen not long after that, and this is how it came to pass:

I got up and crept supperless to bed. There I slept with the merciful soundness of fatigue, wakened by the crashing past my window of an Elevated train to a keen sunny morning, with snow on the ground and the zest of new life.

As I washed, I could hear my neighbor washing on the other side of the partition. The partition was, in fact, so thin that I had heard all his movements since he got out of bed. The making of one man's toilet taking about the same amount of time as that of another man in similar conditions, we met at the doors of our respective rooms as we emerged to go down-stairs.

I looked at him; he looked at me. With what he saw I am concerned; I saw a stocky, broad-shouldered individual, with smooth black hair, solemn black eyes, bushy black eyebrows, a clean-shaven skin so dark that shaving could not obliterate the trace of hair, and a general air of friendliness. Putting on the good-mixer voice, which was not natural to me but which I could assume for a brief spurt, I said:

"Say, I wonder it you could advise a fellow where to get a breakfast? Only breezed in last night--"

Between working-people there is always that camaraderie I had already noticed in Drinkwater and Lydia Blair, and which springs from the knowledge that where there is nothing to lose there is nothing to be afraid of. While I cannot say that my companion viewed me with the spontaneous recognition he would have accorded to a man of his own class, he saw enough to warrant him in giving me his sympathy. The man of superior station down on his luck is not granted the full rights of the stratum to which he has descended; but even when an object of suspicion he is not one of hostility. Between moral bad luck and sheer fortuitous calamity the line is not strictly drawn; and wherever there is need there is a free inclination to meet it.

"I'm on my way to my breakfast now," my neighbor said, after sizing me up with a second glance. "Why don't you come along? It's not much of a place to look at," he continued, as I followed him down-stairs, "but the grub isn't bad. Most of the places round here is punk."

Within ten minutes' time I found myself in a little eating-place that must once have been the cellar kitchen of a dwelling-house, sitting at a bare deal table, opposite a man I had never seen till that morning.

"Don't take bacon," he advised, when I had ordered bacon and eggs; "it 'll be punk. Take ham. Coffee 'll be punk, too. Better stick to tea."

Having given me these counsels, he proceeded with those short and simple annals of his history which I had already found to be the usual form of self-introduction. An Englishman, a Cornishman, he had been twenty years in America. He was married and had a family, but preferred to live in New York while he maintained his household in Chicago.

"Married life is punk," was his summing up. "Got the best little wife in the state of Illinois, and three fine kids, a boy and two girls--but I couldn't come it."

"Couldn't come what?"

"Oh, the whole bloomin' business--toein' the line like, bein' home at night, and the least little smell of anythink on your breath--"

A wave of his fork sketched a world of domestic embarrassment from which he had freed himself only by a somber insouciance. A somber insouciance might be called his key-note. Outwardly serious, ponderous, hard-working, and responsible, he was actually light-hearted and inconsequent. During the progress of the meal he recited the escapades of a Don Juan with the gravity of a Bunyan.

Still with my good-mixer air I asked:

"How does a guy like me get a job in New York?"

"Ever work in a Turkish bath?" He answered this question before I could do it myself. "Sure you didn't--not a chap of your cut. It isn't a bad sort of thing for a"--he hesitated, but decided to use the epithet--"for a--gentleman. Only a good class of people take Turkish baths. Hardly ever get in with a rough lot. A few drunks, but what of that? Could have got you a place at the Gramercy if you'd ha' turned up last week; but a Swede has it now and it's too late."

By the end of breakfast, however, he had made a suggestion.

"Why don't you try the Intelligence? They'll often get you a berth when everything else has stumped you."

I said I was willing to try the Intelligence if I knew what it was, discovering it to be the Bureau of Domestic and Business Intelligence conducted by Miss Bryne. You presented yourself, gave your name and address, indicated your choice of work, told your qualifications for the job, and Miss Bryne did the rest, taking as her commission a percentage of your first week's pay.

"But I don't know any qualifications," I declared, with some confusion.

"Oh, that's nothing. Say clerical work. That covers a lot. Somethink 'll turn up."

"But if they ask me if I can do certain things--?"

"Say you can do 'em. That's the way to pull it off. Look at me. Never was in a Turkish bath in my life till I went to an employment-office in Chicago. When the old girl in charge asked me if I had been, I said I'd been born in one. Got the job right off, and watched what the other guys did till I'd learned the trick. There's always some nice chap that 'll show you the ropes. Gee! The worst they can do is to bounce you. All employers is punk. Treat 'em like punk and you'll get on."

With a view to this procedure I was at the Bureau of Domestic and Business Intelligence by half past nine, entering, unfortunately, with the downcast air of the employer who is punk, instead of the perky self-assertion which I soon began to notice as the proper attitude of those in search of work. Miss Bryne's establishment occupied a floor in one of the older office-buildings a little to the south of Washington Square. Having ascended in the lift, you found yourself, just inside the narrow doorway, face to face with a young lady seated at a desk, whose duty it was to ask the first questions and take the first notes. She was a pretty young lady, bright-eyed, blond, with a habit of cocking her head in a birdlike way as she composed her lips to a receptive smile.

She so composed them, and so cocked her head, as I appeared on the threshold, awkward and terrified.

"Such as--?"

I knew what she meant by the questioning look and the encouraging smile of the bright eyes.

"I'm--I'm hoping to find a job," I stammered to her obvious astonishment.

"Oh!" It was a surprised little crow. "To find one!"

"Yes, miss; to find one."

"Of--of what sort?"

"Clerical work," I said, boldly.

She bent her head over her note-book. "Your name?"

"Jasper Soames."

"Age?"

"Thirty-one."

"Occupation?"

"I've told you. Any kind of clerical work. I suppose that that means writing--and--and copying--and that sort of thing, doesn't it?"

She glanced up from her writing. "Is that what you've done?"

I nodded.

"Where? Have you any references?"

I confessed my lack of references, stating that I had just come over from France, where I had worked with a firm whose name would not carry weight in America.

"What did they do--the firm?"

I answered, wildly, "Carpets."

Another young lady was passing, tall, graceful, distinguished, _air de duchesse_, carrying a notebook and pencil.

"Miss Gladfoot," my interlocutrice murmured, "won't you ask Miss Bryne to step here?"

Miss Bryne having stepped there, I found myself face to face with a competent woman of fifty or so, short, square, square-faced, and astute. She also had a pencil and note-book in her hand, and, seeing me, looked receptive, too, though remaining practical and business-like.

While the young lady at the desk explained me as far as she had been able to understand my object, delicacy urged me out of earshot. I had, therefore, not heard what passed when Miss Bryne came forward to take charge of the situation.

"What you are is a kind of educated handyman. Wouldn't that be it?"

Delighted at this discriminating view of my capacities, I faltered that it would be.

"Well, we don't often have a call for your kind of specialty, and yet we do have them sometimes. There might be one to-day, and then again there mightn't be for another six months. Now you can either go in and wait on the chance, or you can leave your address and we'll 'phone you if anything should turn up that we think would suit."

Encouraged by this kindly treatment and the possibility of a call that day, I opted for going in to wait.

"Then come this way."

Following the Napoleonic figure down the narrow passageway, I was shown into a little room, where five other men sat with the dismayed, melancholy faces of dogs at a dog-show at minutes when they are not barking. Dismayed and melancholy on my side, I took the seat nearest the door, feeling like a prisoner in the dock or the cell, and wondering what would happen next.

Nothing happened next so far as I was concerned, but I had a gratifying leisure in which to look about me.