- Chapter II.
Of all the luxuries of town life on this globe, there is no luxury greater than a rattling walk down Broadway on a cold winter’s morning.
So John Brightly thought as he strode along on that day before Christmas.
It was early, but the shops had all opened their eyes wide, and put on their most seductive smiles in honor of the season. Everything that the brain of man has fancied and the hands of man have contrived, had taken its stand at the windows to persuade passengers to stop and admire, and then to enter and buy. Even the mourning shops had hidden their gloomy merchandise under the counter for this day only, and displayed nothing but coquettish articles of half-mourning and the subdued purples of departing grief and awakening joy. The toy-shop windows chuckled and grinned with jolly toys. The print-shops had taken down their battle-scenes and death-bed scenes, and, instead of blood and tears, nothing but comedy and sentiment was to be seen. The photographers exhibited their smuggest men and smirkiest women. Nothing could be gayer or brighter or more party-colored than the confectioners’ show-cases, where, under bowers of cornucopias, the tempting wares were arrayed, as if there was somewhere in fairy-land a planet all pink and white and blue and yellow sugar from centre to pole, and this was a geological cabinet of its specimens.
John Brightly ran this amicable gantlet at a great pace, conscious of its love-taps, but proof, as if he were a Princess Pari Banou, to its attempts to arrest him.
Once he felt a little pang as he rattled along, electrified by the keen air. A sharp sunbeam, reflected from a pair of skates, struck him in the eye. He though of his drowned son, drowned last summer, and for an instant fancied him skimming along on the ice, as the father had taught him. But Brightly, though greatly softened by this sorrow, was not a man to let it rankle in his heart and enfeeble him.
“I am very happy,” said he to himself, “that Mary has so easily consented to this scheme of mine. I have long seen that her patient grief was wearing her away. Now, perhaps, if I can provide her a new object of interest, and love, she will recover tone. Man can work; but woman is in danger of brooding.”
And so, with his busy brain full of schemes for his wife’s happiness, full of schemes for comforting , and helping all the people he knew who needed help and comfort, full of schemes for bringing the great powers and untiring energies he was conscious of to bear, to ease, speed, and better the world. Brightly hastened down Broadway.
The early clerks, seeing him pass, a knot an hour faster than they were travelling, nudged each other and said: “Hallo, there’s Brightly! Early bird! No wonder he’s making his fortune quicker than any man in Wall Street, lucky fellow!”
As everybody is aware, one end of Wall Street drowns itself in a river lately from Hellgate, the other end terminates in a church, and runs up a spire into heaven. Or it might be said that Wall Street, like many a man’s career, begins with the sign of the cross up in the pure sky, tumbles down away from the church as fast as it can, and then rushes up hill and down, with Mammon on both sides of the way, until it suddenly finds itself plumped into a tide that is making full speed for Hellgate.
That ornate and flowery plant, the spire of Trinity, with its tap-root in a graveyard and its long radicles in the vaults of a dozen banks, besides its spiritual office of monitor, has a temporal office of time-keeper to perform. It certainly keeps the time of Wall Street; probably it keeps that Via Mala’s conscience also, since kept in the street it evidently is not.
The clock of Trinity marked a quarter before nine, when Brightly could see its dial through the branches of the mean trees stunted by the unwholesome diet they found in the churchyard.
“I have beat Broke this morning by fifteen minutes,” said he, and turned down the street.
A block before he arrived at his corner, he saw that a regiment of boys had collected in answer to his advertisement. “Wanted immediately, an office-boy, by John Brightly, Wall Street,” — this notice had called out from their holes and caves fifty or sixty chaps of all sizes, shapes, tints, and toggery.
Brightly’s office was on a corner, three steps below the level of the street. The throng of aspirants completely blockaded the door and filled the sidewalk. Brightly passed around them and took his stand on the high steps to the first floor of the building. From this vantage point he could inspect the troop he had evoked, and reduce it to manageable proportions, by mental subtractions.
It was an amusing sight, as all crowds are, unless the looker-on turns up his nose so much at vulgarity as to obstruct his vision.
It was a compact little crowd, well snugged together to keep warm. Plenty of good-natured hustle was going on in it. The hustle might have been ill-natured scuffle except for that spontaneous police which always keeps the peace and looks after fair-play in crowds that are not mobs. The brutal boys who would have pounded the weakly boys, and rendered them ineligible by black eyes and bloody noses, neutralized each other. Besides, emulation among so many could not develop into hostility. Every boy knew that he had only one fiftieth of one chance of success, and that each boy within reach had only a fiftieth. The natural dislike of competitors, subdivided into fractions with such a denominator, lost intensity, and expended itself in nudges of the elbows and shoves with the hips, instead of running down into the hands and electrifying them into pugilistic fists, or filling the boots with the idea, kick. It is not until two or three of a field distance the others, and are neck and neck within a dozen leaps of the winning-post, that hatred begins to expand in their souls, if they are hateful.
As Brightly had one boy to choose, and no time to spare to be philanthropic, he began to decimate the throng with his eye.
First, he rejected all who disdained or neglected the primal use of the pocket-handkerchief.
Second, he set aside all the irreclaimable ragamuffins.
Third, he counted out those who would be constitutionally unsavory.
Fourth, all who would fill their desks with pies, peanut-shells, and story-books to match.
Fifth, several who would drop in nonchalantly at irregular hours, and regard the office only as an agreeable lounging-place, which their presence honored.
Sixth, the sons or scholars of thieves.
Seventh, chronic upsetters of inkstands.
Eighth, a mean, stunted man of twenty-five, shaved close and disguised in jacket and turn-over collar, with forger and picklock in his face.
Ninth, a boy with a pipe, a boy with a “dorg,” and a boy whistling as if his lungs could take breath only in the form of music.
By these successive expurgations, made rapidly by Brightly from his post on the steps, the number of applicants to be noticed was reduced to five or six, all decent, earnest little fellows, and clustered near the door as if they had come early.
One of these was seated against the door, with his head leaning upon the knob. For all the cold, he had dropped asleep in this position. His next neighbor was faithfully defending him from the pokes and pinches of the others.
“One or t’ other of that pair will probably be the man,” thought Brightly, descending the steps and elbowing his way toward the basement door.
The boys at once perceived that this gentleman, whom they had seen surveying them from above, was the advertiser. All felt a little detected. All made quick attempts to reform their manners and appearance. The inky boys doubled their inky thumbs under their fingers. The boy with a pipe pocketed it and bore the bum like a Spartan. The boy with a “dorg” obscured his bandy-legged comrade. The whistler shut his lips hard together, and breathed stertorously through his nose.
There were symptoms of a rush as Brightly unlocked his door. He repelled it, however, selected the most promising subjects for further examination, and dismissed the others. Most of them, conscious of demerit, abandoned the field at once. A few, with feeble pertinacity, remained sitting on the cold steps and hoping for another chance. The curious ones stayed about the windows peering in to watch who might be the successful candidate, and with a view, no doubt, of learning what was his peculiar charm. Two or three truculent urchins amused themselves with shaking their fists at the insiders, and ferociously threatening them, if they were preferred. The “dorg” boy, finding that he was a failure in his capacity of boy, presented himself as “dorg” merchant, and withdrew indignant when he learnt that dog spelt with an “r” was unsalable thereabouts.
Meantime Brightly had conducted his selection within, and after a question or two to each, had taken two of them into his inner office for closer examination. This was the pair who had been nearest the door.
The sleeper was now wide awake, and looking about observingly. No face could be honester or more freckled than his. Indeed, it seems to be a biological fact that the very red-haired and freckled tend to honesty. Nature compensates them by the gift of Worth for the want of Beauty. The brown splashes arranged themselves on this little chap’s face as if each was a little muddy puddle to water the roots of a future hair of his future beard, and a series of them fell away from the bridge of his nose very dark and precisely drawn, and suggesting that his moustache, when it came, would come there instead of under his uplifted nostrils. A merry, trusty, busy fellow he was, and to see him was to like him.
“What is your name, my lad?” asked Brightly.
“Doak, sir. Bevel Doak.”
“And yours,” continued the banker, turning to the other.
“Bozes, sir.”
“Bozes?” repeated Brightly.
“I didn’t say, Bozes, sir. I said Bozes, — Bozes.”
“O Moses! Well, Moses what?”
“Dot Bozes Watt. By dabe is Shacob.”
“Moses Jacob?” says Brightly.
“Shacob Bozes, sir,” replied the boy.
His speech bewrayed him. His name bewrayed him. His nose, his ruddy brown skin, his coarse black hair, his beady black eyes, his glass breast-pin, all bewrayed him.
“A Jew,” thought Brightly, “and a shrewd one. A fellow with such a nose as that must open his way.”
It was a droll nose. Side view or front view, his face seemed all nose. It was a nose well buttressed. His cheeks began at the ridge of it., and filled up the hollows on each side so that a straight-edge would have touched everywhere. This feature had absorbed the whole countenance. It was not large; not a beak nor a snub, — in fact, not a classifiable nose; its nostrils did not expand so as to promise a stereoscopic vision of its owner’s brains. Indeed, taken per se, it was not unlike some other noses in Jewry or even in Christendom. But it refused to be taken per se. There was no isolating it. Every part of his face tended to nose. You could not say where it began, any more than you can say where Mount Etna begins on the landward side.
“Haven’t I seen you before?” said Brightly, trying to analyze the boy’s chief feature as the last sentence has done.
“Yes,” replied Moses. “I sold you thad dubbrella.”
“And you propose to try a new business?”
“Yes, sir. Gades is all out of fashion.”
“What are ‘gades’?”
“I didn’t say gades; I said gades, — gades.”
“O, canes! they are out of fashion, eh? But how about umbrellas?”
“The soft ads has put dowd the ubbrellas. Besides bed is gidding bore badly dow and doesn’t bind weddings.”
“‘Men are more manly,’ — that is good news. But if they are, I should think they would mind their weddings all the more.”
“I didn’t mean weddings with wives; I meant weddings with wader. But adyhow, tibes is dull, and bein’ you wanted a boy, I thought I would like to go into business with you.”
The boy’s perfect simplicity, perfect self-possession, and an air of entire honesty and courage, greatly amused and pleased Brightly. He saw he had found a character.
“So you think you would like to go into business with me,” he said.
“If agreeable.”
“I cannot pay a boy much salary, you know.”
“Id isn’t the zalary; id’s the coddection.”
“You flatter me,” said Brightly, his sense of humor more and more tickled with the other’s seriousness.
“I speag the drooth. There’s dot mady med in the sdreet I’d drust. I’ve sold ’em all gades ad dubbrellas, ad I know ’em all.”
“But you look pretty prosperous now, Moses. Why change?”
“I have to dress well od aggout of the hodels.”
He was attired to suit the hotel taste, in Chatham Street’s most attractive styles. “Very neat,” “Very chaste,” and “Le bon ton,” or some similar label, inscribed in gold on a handsome white card, had not long since decked each article of his raiment.
“But this bredspid,” continued he, touching it, “isn’t diabod, — dode think id; it’s glass, ad the chaids is pitchback.”
Bevel Doak had been feeling his own hopes of employment dwindle while the pedler was stating his case. Poor Bevel had been greatly appalled by the fine jewel that glittered on the other’s breast. What person of either sex could resist the gleam of that mountain of light, surrounded by knobs of light and secured in the flamboyant scarf of Mr. Bozes by a chain to the right, a chain to the left, and a chain aloft? Bevel brightened greatly as the breastpin under its wearer’s avowal began to grow dim, — the diamonds dowsing their glim, and the mainstay, forestay, and bobstay transmuting themselves from gold to pinchbeck.
Brightly now thought it time to give the other the floor; so he said, “Well, Doak, Mr. Moses has told us the object of this call. How is it with you? Have you a fancy, too, for changing your business?”
“I want to make a little for mother and the children.”
“You have no father?”
“No, sir. He was the carpenter that the other carpenter fell on from the top of the house in Trinity Place last summer.”
“I saw ’em,” Moses interjected. “Both was sbashed.”
“I remember,” said Brightly. “And how many children are there. Bevel?”
“There’s me, sir, Bevel, — father gave us names out of the carpenter’s trade, — and Plane and Dove; — Dovetail was his name; but we took off the tail. And then there’s the two girls. Five, sir, besides mother.”
“Are the girls named out of the carpenter’s trade, too?”
“No, sir. Mary and Jelling is their names.”
“And you want to make a little money to help them?”
“If mother wasn’t sick and the children wasn’t hungry, I should stick to my trade,” replied Bevel, with an independent air. “I can handle tools already pretty well, for a boy. But times is dull, and ’prentices can’t make money; so last night, Mrs. Sassiger —”
“I’be aggquainded with her,” says Mr. Moses. “She zells the faddest durkeys in the Washington Market.”
“That’s her,” rejoins Doak. “Well, Mrs. Sassiger showed mother the advertisement of ‘Boy Wanted’; and says Mrs. Sassiger, ‘Mrs. Doak, my eyes was drawed to that Wanted.’ ‘How?’ says mother. ‘By the name, Brightly,’ says Mrs. Sassiger. ‘A wide-awake kind of a name,’ says mother. ‘What you state is correct,’ says Mrs. Sassiger; ‘but it’s suthin’ else that drawed my eyes to that name. Do you remember the day Mr. Doak was fell on?’ Mother, bein’ weakly, couldn’t speak for crying, so says I, ‘Yes, Mrs. Sassiger, she does remember it, and will remember it so long as she’s under the canopy.’ ‘Well’ says Mrs. Sassiger, ‘the day Mr. Doak was fell on, I got uneasy in my mind about the ways of Providence in puttin’ so many burdings on one family. I felt as if things wasn’t equal, the way they ought to be. I don’t say it was right, mind you,’ says she, ‘but that feelin’ had got into my head. So, to see that the Doaks wasn’t the only people in affliction in the world, I took the paper and read about the great fire and loss of life, and about twelve persons killed or mutilated by the explosion of the steam-boat Torpedo, and about the awful calamities and sudden deaths. By and by I come,’ says she, ‘to a teching tale how two children of Mr. John Brightly, up the North River, was drowned together, — the boy tryin’ to save the girl. I cried a great deal over that,’ says Mrs. Sassiger, ‘and somehow it made me feel softer, and not so much of a rebel again’ the Lord. Now, Mrs. Doak,’ says she, ‘my eyes has been drawed to this call, “A boy wanted by John Brightly,” and I motion that Bevel, not havin’ any payin’ work to do, and writin’ a good hand, and a hard winter comin’, — I motion,’ says Mrs. Sassiger, ‘that Bevel be the first boy at that John Brightly’s door to-morrow morning.’ That motion was kerried quite unanimous, and here I was, sir, at sunrise, and about three minutes before Moses, — Mr. Moses. That’s a long story, sir,” Bevel perorated, a little abashed at himself; “but I got going, and couldn’t stop.”
Brightly looked very kindly at the earnest little chap; then, turning to the other, who was listening with a critical ear, he asked: “Well, Moses, what do you think of Doak’s application?”
“I reside,” replied Moses.
“You resign!”
“I reside,” repeated the umbrella-merchant, with composure. “The sbashed father is dothing. Like as dot by father was sbashed. The sick bother is dothing. By bother is dead — if I ever had ady. The boys can take gare of theirselves. I’ve toog care of byself. If there was only one girl, I bight insist. But there’s two. How old is Bary, Bister Doak!”
“Thirteen and a half.”
“Thirteen ad a half. Just the age for the orridge and apple business. I could set her up byself, if gapital is wanted. Id’s daggerous business for the borals; but the borals of good girls takes gare of theirselves. I couldn’t reside od Bary’s aggout. But there’s Jelling. How old is she?”
“Eight,” replied Bevel.
“Eight is just the age for the batch business; ad id reguires very liddle gapidal, though the profids is small. Batches without sulphur is dow id deband. But the batch business is low and ibboral. I dever dew a girl in the batch business who got into good society, ad into the brown stode Wards. Jelling had better be kepd ad hobe. I reside id her favor.”
“What do you propose to do?” asked Brightly, keeping his gravity as well as he could. “Have you definitely abandoned the cane and umbrella business?”
“I have offered all my stock to my glerk. I shall spegulate around generally. I can always bake boney. I could go into Chaddam Sdreet, into the ready-made line. I’b thought to have a hadsome taste in gents’ clothing.”
Mr. Moses glanced at his own habiliments. They were, as was before suggested, somewhat more showy than our grave and colorless civilization approves. His race still retains much of the Oriental love for what we name barbaric splendors.
“Or,” continued he, “I could do a good thing id watches and chewelry. Young bed of good badders are always wanted to attract young ladies.”
“How old are you?” asked Brightly, all the while amazed and amused at the calm, precocious youth.
“By barber thinks I bust be about sixteed by the dowd od my chid. I’b probised a beard by dext winter.”
“Now, Doak,” said Brightly, “what do you think of Jacob’s resignation in your favor for Jelling’s sake, subject to my approval, — for I must be allowed a voice in the matter?”
“It’s very generous, sir.”
“It is gederous!” said Moses, loftily. “I abaddon, dot the chadce of baking by fortune, — thad is a drifle. I cad bake fortunes without drubble. Bud social bosition is whad I abe at, ad Bister Brightly’s office-boy has a social bosition whidg all the ready-made id Chaddam Sdreet ad all the chewelry of the origidal Zhacobs caddot cobbad.”
All these speeches of the young Jew were delivered with entire self-possession, seriousness, and good-faith.