II
He received a letter from Margaret that afternoon, and he read it standing in the portico of the General Post Office, where the traffic of Park Row meets the traffic of Broadway, in a brawling of cross-currents over worn paving stones, at the bottom of a canyon of high buildings; and with that noise in his ears, pressing upon him the sense of the struggle in which he was engaged, he read her accusations, her defence and her apology blankly, word after word, feeling that it was all an old matter of which he had lost the emotion. He took, with relief, the news that she was going abroad for the summer, with her mother; it would give him time to "find his feet" in New York. He missed a hint that Mrs. Richardson's investments had been ill-advised and unprofitable, and that the cheaper living in Germany—where the study of music might be continued—would be welcome to her. He put the letter in an outer pocket, with his newspaper, and tore open an envelope from his father.
Mr. Gregg informed him, briefly, that his action had been a cause of great grief to his mother; that it was unreasonable, without excuse, and rash; that his home was waiting for him whenever he wished to return to it, but that he should have no assistance if he remained away. "I can scarcely believe," he wrote, "that a son of mine will prefer to live on the charity of relatives. A good position can be obtained for you in Coulton. If, at any time, you desire to come back to it, and have not funds, write to me and I shall be glad to forward you your railroad ticket."
Don tore up the letter and tossed it into the gutter as he crossed the street. No! He was launched. Coulton and the past had already dropped below the horizon behind him. And he could not hope to have Margaret with him again until he reached that shore of his destiny which was still so distant, so uncertain, so far beyond sight of fancy even. He knew that the voyage was not going to be plain sailing in a fair wind; there would be calms and storms and all the delays and accidents of life. But some day, of course, he would arrive; and then (he thought), looking back at the hardships and the despairs, how sorry he should be that they were done with, and how proud that he had weathered them, and how amused to remember that he had almost given up hope under them, that it had seemed impossible they could ever come to an end, that he had longed for this peaceful conclusion which was now so tame a day compared with the adventurous struggles that had brought him to it.
In that mood he continued his unsuccessful search for employment. Learning the need of "references," he wrote to his uncle and to the Dean of the University, and received the conventional replies. But these were of no avail to introduce him to work for which he had no particular qualifications, in a city of which he had had no experience, over rivals who had none of his shamefacedness and who elbowed him out of the way with a pushing self-assertion that made him blush for them. He answered every likely advertisement and registered with three different employment agencies that accepted his $2 fee one day and appeared to have forgotten him on the morrow; and he clung to his hopes with a doggedness that would not admit discouragement. But he became sore with a sort of sulky pride, refusing to unbend to the degrading necessities of his situation; and he made his applications for work as haughtily as a shop-girl who has been asked to show samples and who answers all her customer's inquiries laconically, with a studied indifference.
Meanwhile, Conroy had become morosely apathetic. He sat in their rooms smoking at a window that looked out on dead walls. He wrote letters to which he never seemed to get any replies. He went out silently, and- after being on the streets for hours he came back to his meals tired but without any appetite; and in conversation with Pittsey, he betrayed an idler's acquaintance with the sights of the water-front and the Ghetto. He accepted money from Don unhappily, unable to meet his cousin's eyes; and he tried to make himself useful by doing more than his share of the housework, by washing the dishes when the other boys were out, and by bringing Italian cheeses and Chinese preserves back with him from his long absences. Once he bought a bottle of liquid polish and blackened the gas stove.
In spite of Pittsey's efforts to keep up a cheerful spirit in the apartment, their meals became "lugubrious feeds," as he complained. "What's wrong with you two?" he remonstrated. "Here you are, seeing New York inexpensively, with all the comforts of home! And you're down in the mouth because a Wall Street millionaire hasn't offered you a partnership and a private yacht. What do you expect? Look at me. If I went to Newspaper Row asking for work, I'd never get past the office-boys at the doors. But if I send in an article through the mail, and an editor likes it, I get a little cheque. If I do it again, I have an introduction to Mr. Editor. I keep it up. In six months I begin to ask for a place on the staff. You two start by asking for the place first, and give up hope when the office-boy says 'Nothin' doin'.' What do you expect? Miracles? Don't be so blamed unreasonable. You're not the heroes of a novel, you know; impossibilities aren't going to happen to you just to help out the plot!"
He was rolling out cracker crumbs with a milk bottle preparatory to baking a dish of what he called "tomato slush." Conroy was cleaning smelts with a penknife. Don was laying the table.
Conroy said: "Oh, you're all right. You have something to sell. I have nothing and I'm in debt."
"You needn't worry about that," Don put in. "The money's as much yours as mine."
"How? . . . How is it?"
"Well—I've saved it out of what I borrowed from Aunt Jane, this winter."
"Yes, but it's yours. You borrowed it." He tossed a smelt into the pan, with a resigned bitterness. "They refuse to lend me a cent."
Don, his ears tingling, pretended to be silently absorbed in the setting of the table; he foresaw some of the difficulties that would develop out of this situation in which his uncle had placed him, and he disliked the double part which he would have to play. His life seemed to him to be becoming confusingly complex, with this duplicity in his relation with Conroy and with the difficulty of obtaining work by a straightforward application for it. Pittsey's insidious pursuit of a place on a newspaper seemed to him too patiently crafty. There was something degrading in such a crawling policy.
This was of a piece with the Quixotism which had kept him going, day after day, to old Mr. Vandever, the philanthropic agent of an anonymous millionaire, who was in need of a private secretary—according to Mr. Vandever—and who had commissioned Mr. Vandever, among other things, to find a suitable young man for the position. Don had watched a score of other applicants for the place file from the waiting-room into Mr. Vandever's office, not to reappear; but when he followed, in his turn, he was received by that benevolent old gentleman with a quick smile of relief that was an unspoken acceptance of him as the single likely applicant among all these impossible ones. When he had given up his $3 registration fee—"which was unfortunately necessary in order to pay office rent"—he went out a side door warmed by the mild kindliness of Mr. Vandever's manner, touched by the charming tenderness of his old smile, and hopeful with the assurance that his application would be successful without doubt—without reasonable doubt." Mr. Vandever would write to him. When no letter came, and two subsequent calls failed to carry him past the girl who had her desk beside the outer door—but showed him the office still crowded in response to the advertisement which still stood in the morning papers—he refused to credit the suspicion which he could not help but feel. For if an old man, genial, educated, fine-mannered, sweet-faced, and silvery-haired, could be a thief and a hypocrite, then the whole world could be a gigantic swindle, there could be no faith in anyone, and the sunlight on the streets would be a gilding of depravity to make the heart sick. Don could not believe it; or, rather, instinctively, he would not. He preferred to keep his faith in his kind. When his last call found Mr. Vandever's office to let, he went away without asking any questions, for fear that he might hear something shameful.
"Besides," Pittsey went on—dipping the smelts in milk and rolling them in flour—"this is the beginning of the summer, the dull season. Every firm in town is laying off men. You should get your hooks into something now, and be ready to land it in the fall. . . . Here, Donald MacDonald, get to work and make us some toast. Do you know which side of the bread to brown?"
"No," Don answered simply.
"Both sides." Pittsey laughed. "You're the poorest pair of kitchen apprentices I ever saw." He bustled around, with the deftness of a restaurant waiter, adding forgotten dishes to the table, watching the "tomato slush" browning in the oven, or turning his smelts in the sputtering frying-pan. "Cut your bread thicker," he directed Don. "Your toast will be as dry as cinders. . . . Go out and buy us the squeeze of a lemon," he ordered Conroy. "Three for five, they should be. I'd make you a fish sauce if I had a recipe. . . . When I graduate out of newspaper work into literature, the first book I write will be a cook book. 'Butter the size of an egg.'" He dropped a slice of it into his frying-pan. "That's how the common cook books put it. And you're supposed to know it was a hen and not an ostrich that laid the egg! I'll change all that. . . . Not on the top, you clam! Your toast will taste like a gasometer. Do it in the lower oven, on the broiler. Put it up close to the flame."
The walls of the shabby dining-room had been covered with posters, gathered by the enterprising Pittsey from news-stands and book-shops. Between the windows—where a leaking roof had discoloured the plaster—he had tacked up a collection of printed "letters of rejection" which had come to him, with returned manuscripts, from newspaper offices and the editors of magazines. Don's student lamp lit the table, with its "print table-cloth" (as Pittsey called the spread of newspapers), its sugar in a tobacco tin, its milk in a bottle, its "poorhouse" dishes and its unpainted kitchen chairs. But the place had come to have a home-like and familiar look to Don; and it had, for him, a tone of youthful defiance of adversity that was loudest in Pittsey's contemptuous display of the editor's regrets that they had not found his contributions "available."
Having put his bread in the oven, Don stood before these letters with the smile which they always encouraged in him. He wished that he might add to them similar letters from all the offices at which he had applied for work; they would fill the wall! When Pittsey became famous—as he would, of course, some day—what a comment on editorial incapacity this collection would be!
Pittsey put his head in at the door. "Excuse me for intruding. King Alfred," he said, "but I thought you might like to know that your toast's in flames."