The Thread of Flame

Chapter 3

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 thenbut 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 girlsbut I couldn't come it."

"Couldn't come what?"

"Oh, the whole bloomin' businesstoein' 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'tnot a chap of your cut. It isn't a bad sort of thing for a"he hesitated, but decided to use the epithet"for agentleman. 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 c*****g her head in a birdlike way as she composed her lips to a receptive smile.

She so composed them, and so c****d 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'mI'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."

"Ofof 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 writingandand copyingand 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 dothe 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.

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 n***o 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 Caon of Arizonadownward 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 malevolencehostility 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 lackingan element which would have made life acceptableand 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 intimateand 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 youor tenor 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 sortand 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 wentto 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 windowsand 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!"