The Thread of Flame

Chapter 4

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 isif you look at it in the right way."

"I don't have to look at it any way."

"Yes, you do, when it'swhen it's only common sense."

"What's only common sense?"

"My beingbeing useful to you."

"Oh, but you're useful to me throughthrough your very kindness."

"That's not enough. Surely youyou 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 thoughtI thought you were just experimenting"

"And how do you know I'm not?"

"I know it from what you said yourselfthat 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'reyou'retragicto 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 peoplewho 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'reyou'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"

"II 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 thatthat I believe in you, in your power ofof 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 bethe 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.

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 manhe was about my own agecould 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 jobandand II 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 moneybut 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 inin 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.