Don-A-Dreams/Part 3/Chapter 1
I
PITTSEY "knew the ropes," as he expressed it. He knew where to find cheap lodgings in New York, and he knew enough not to remain in them. "We don't board," he said. "Oh, no! Not in New York! We camp. Wait till I show you. We rent a flat at twenty dollars a month. We furnish it for twenty dollars more. We do our own cooking on a gas stove that goes with the flat. Wait till I show you! I haven't been camp cook for nothing. Porridge and boiled eggs and coffee for breakfast. Delicatessen and stewed prunes for luncheon. Beefsteak and boiled potatoes and tea for dinner. Wait till I show you! I've been here before, many's the time, many's the time. As Napoleon didn't say: 'The man who storms New York, conquers on his commissariat!' Leave it to me."
They left it to him. He foraged for them at the stations on their way down, refusing to let them pay dining-car prices for their meals. He conducted them across the New Jersey ferry, pointing out the high buildings that loomed mountainously above the New York shore, under a sky that was pale with the reflected glare of hidden street lights. He led them to a fly-blown restaurant and fed them on corned-beef hash "browned in the pan," coffee and "wheats." He found them a cheap hotel where they left their valises, in a bedroom that smelled like the inside of a rusty stove. Good enough," he said. "The proprietor says it 'ain't been slep' in' since his wife died in it.") He piloted them across town to the lights of "the Rialto," and went through the crowds with his hat on the back of his head, laughing and talking like a city boy taking his gaping country cousins around the "fair." And he gave to the expedition an air of adventurous dare-devilry, of youthful self-sufficiency and hope, that kept Don and Conroy in a continual flutter of excitement despite the bewilderment of their strange surroundings, that would, otherwise, have disheartened them.
To Donald, indeed, the day had been like one of those wild dreams in which disconnected scenes without locality and incidents without consequence follow past in an untiring vividness, each snapshotted by itself with the distinctness of an isolated experience, and each snatched away to give place, in a flash, to the next. And this was true not only of the railway journey—with its fields and houses, fences and roads, whipping past his window, like the telegraph poles, in kaleidoscopic monotony; it was true also of the city which he approached across a Dantesque black water in which the lights of the ferry-boat reeled weirdly on the swells that rose out of a darkness and engulfed them—a medieval city, apparently built on a hill, window above blazing window, its edge supported in the water on slimed piles and its towers mysteriously dark against a wan sky without a star.
He went to bed, that night, amid uneasy millions of strange peoples, on a continent of crowded houses and stone streets that was barren of grass and trees or the soil in which they could take root or the natural light to grow them. He saw Margaret and the University and the life he had lived, as far from him as Penelope and Ithaca were from the Grecian wanderer of the school books when he looked back at the memory of his home from the lurid half-light of Hades. He fell asleep, construing to the clackety-clack of the car-wheels of his railway ride: "Then answering him—prosphē polumētis Odusseus—O King Alcinous—pantōn arideikete laōn—truly it is a beautiful thing—truly it is a beautiful thing" Dexter barked. He looked up from his book to see a girl coming toward him through the trees.
He woke to a sunshine which made him feel that, at least, he was still in the old familiar world, though in such a bewilderingly new part of it; and he woke to find Pittsey already planning their housekeeping with an almost "bridal enthusiasm," as he himself said.
That enthusiasm carried them through the remainder of the week undepressed by the size of the city which they had undertaken to carry by assault. It found them three rooms on the top floor of an old brown-stone house that had once been a family residence, in one of those streets leading into Fifth Avenue which have long since been overtaken by the encroachments of the business district. A barber had the basement. A publisher of cheap music occupied the ground floor. Modistes and milliners crowded the second story. At the rear of the top floor there were two rooms, lit with skylights—and a dark kitchen the size of a pantry—to be had for $24 a month. These had once been studios, but the whole house had fallen into disrepair, its artistic tenants had abandoned it, and the owner was holding it and its neighbours for sale to any speculator who might wish to pull it down and put a modern office building on the site. He let the boys have the "top floor rear" on condition that they agree to accept two weeks' notice to leave at any moment. "Three times eight are twenty-four," Pittsey calculated. "It suits us to the fraction of a cent."
"The rooms are not very large," Conroy said doubtfully.
"They're not large enough for exercise, that's certain" Pittsey replied. "But they build them small in New York to leave more room for exercise out of doors." And the joke served to carry them over a doleful examination of their poverty-stricken apartment.
The stairs, as they went down, were bare as far as the next landing. Below, they were slippery with a worn linoleum. The last flight was more prosperously covered with a new cocoa matting. "It looks like the gradual reappearance of vegetation in a descent of the Alps," Pittsey laughed. They had to laugh with him.
They swept up the plaster of a fallen ceiling in the rear room, mopped the uneven floor, and scraped the dirt from the windows until Pittsey stopped them. ("Be economical," he said. "If you take that stuff off, we'll have to buy blinds.") They shopped together in department stores and the "emporiums" of second-hand furniture, buying three camp-cots for $1.87 each, a dining-room table for $3.00, four kitchen chairs—"one for company"—at 75 cents each, cotton blankets, excelsior mattresses, cotton-batting comfortables, blue china dishes, knives and forks with wooden handles, kitchen utensils of tin, some hanging shelves for their library and a blank book for keeping accounts "on a basis of three." They celebrated their house-warming with a dinner of potatoes boiled in their "jackets," steak served in the pan in which it had been fried, fresh bread and a pat of butter in the grocer's wooden dish. They ate from a spread of newspapers in lieu of a tablecloth. And they laughed so heartily at Pittsey's foolery that he had to warn them to be careful. ("Don't raise the roof. More of that ceiling will be coming down on us.")
It was not until Conroy lit his pipe that the subject in the background of all their thoughts was brought out into the conversation. "Well," he said, "to-morrow we start to look for work. What are you going to do, Pitt?"
"Me? I'm going to start a newspaper article for a Saturday 'supplement' on Camping Out in New York City. How about you?"
Conroy reddened. "I think I know enough about the governor's business to be able to get something all right. What are you going to do, Don?"
Don answered truthfully: "I don't know. I haven't decided yet."
The fact of the matter was that his knowledge the working world was so vague and his qualifications for any position in it so uncertain that a decision was impossible. There was plenty of work to be had; that was evident from the number of advertisements of "Help Wanted—Male" in the morning papers. He had made secret notes of several possibilities: a business "concern" needed a man to manage a shop, "experience unnecessary," salary "to begin" $20 a week; a large wholesale firm needed a man of education to act as secretary, salary $25 a week; a dozen employment agencies on Sixth Avenue advertised, in chalk, on blackboards beside their doors, for household servants, clerks and stenographers, hotel help and private secretaries. He shrank from the personal servitude which most of these vacancies required; he hoped to find some man of large affairs, like his uncle, who needed an honest and faithful young deputy to attend to the minor details of business management which the head of the house might be unable to oversee personally. He was assured of one thing: no matter what his need, he would accept no position in which Margaret could be ashamed to find him.
All his thoughts of her had some such tinge of defensive bitterness. He would work out his own salvation, unassisted by the encouragement which he had hoped to have from her. He would see to it that she should have no cause to be glad of her desertion of him. He would work for her and wait for her, but he would never tell her so again.
"Well," Pittsey said, "let's see where we stand." He cleared a place on the table for the account book and added up their expenditures. Their furnishing had cost them $12 each; the supply of food in their larder, $3.10; their month's rent, $8 each; their deposit to the gas company, $5; tips and sundries, $1.25. "There you are! For less than twenty-five dollars each, we're set up for life—rent paid for a month and money out at interest with the gas company. And unless we get gold-bricked we can live now for $3 a week each . . . eh?' he crowed. "How's yon for management?"
Don was making a rapid calculation that he had enough money of his own to keep him for six months at least. Conroy had laid a ten-dollar bill beside his plate and was searching his pockets for more. "What the dickens," he muttered in his pipe. "I must have lost"
Pittsey enjoyed the situation. "I know! I know the feeling. Where did it go, eh? Where did it go? Refrain: 'But what has become of last year's snow?' I'll write a ballad for one of the weekly comics on it." He made a note on the back of an envelope from his pocket.
"That's all right, Con," Donald put in. "I'll carry your proportion until you get things going."
They repaid Pittsey what he had expended for them. He accepted it jocularly. "Now, I'm the chef, you know," he said, "but you two have to wash up. Get to work. We're going out to see the sights of a great city as soon as you've finished."
"You go, Don," Conroy said. "I'll clean up here." They looked at him, surprised. He had an expression of nervous despondence. "I'm tired," he explained hastily. "I'd sooner go to bed early."
And Don understood that the fear of the city, against which he himself had been fighting, had found Conroy the weaker in spite of his greater physical strength.
Don went out alone in the morning—Conroy excusing himself with the plea that he had some letters to write—and he proceeded first to the address of a mining company that had advertised for an educated young man to do desk work. It was a glorious May morning, warm with sunlight and cool with a light breeze; and the crowded pavements were noisy with a joyful activity that seemed to move to the gay tunes of street pianos, as inspiringly as an army on the march. That immense jocundity, which sparkles in the clean air of Manhattan on such days, inspired Don as it inspired the facetious truck-drivers and cabmen abusing each other in a jam of traffic, the good-natured policeman who separated them, the smiling pedestrians who dodged under the horses' heads, the loiterers who paused on the curb to grin and comment, the shrill street gamin, the eager men and women hurrying by on the walks with side glances of amusement—all the bustling life of that thronged island which seems to catch from its sea breezes some of the recklessness that makes sailors so irresponsible, so apparently care-free, so good-natured, in spite of their obscure toil and the uncertainty of their fates.
Don walked with a light step, watching the busy activities of which he felt himself a part, as pleased as a recruit enrolled among veterans and willing to accept the hardships of the campaigns of labour as gaily as they. After all, this was life; this was the work-field of civilization, where labour sowed and sweated; this was the place for a man to be—not back there, among the college loiterers of culture, discussing the crops. He swung into Broadway with his head high, looking for the number of the office building where he was to begin his service. It was good to be a useful member of society; it gave a man dignity and assurance. Whatever the object and meaning of life might be—whatever the port to which all this bustle was hastening—it was a man's duty to pull on his oar with his fellows below on the benches, not to loaf on deck vainly studying the impenetrable mists that surrounded him.
He mounted the stone steps of his building and passed between red granite pillars into a hall of tiles and mosaics. A semicircle of elevators sucked in and poured out two trickling streams of passengers coming and going. A young man in a braided blue uniform gave them the word to start, with a curt "Three! . . . Go on, Seven! . . . One!"
Don asked him: "What floor is the Phœnix Company on?"
He dismissed another car before he replied: "There's about 'steen hundred of you fellahs up there already, all after one job. You couldn't get out of the cage if you went up. You might 's well go an' chase yourself around the block for an hour or two till they kill a few million of them off. Go ahead, Nine!"
Don hesitated—said meekly, "Thanks"—and went out.
The roar of traffic greeted him with a new note of busy indifference. He stood on the lowest step of the entrance undecided which way to turn, until a messenger boy bumped him from behind, mischievously, and sent him into the current of passers-by. He was carried down the street to an eddy at the corner. There he took out his notes of "Help Wanted," oblivious to the "Pulish, sir? Pulish?" of a boot-black whose chairs were under the shelter of an awning beside him. He found the address of the business "concern" that needed a man to manage its shop; and having inquired the way of the insistent polisher, he set out again more soberly.
The business "concern" proved to be the basement workshop of a little foreigner, in varnish-stained apron and soiled shirt-sleeves, who renovated furniture and sold "antiques." He explained eagerly that he had invented and patented a new process of "tufting" upholstery, and he needed a man to push the patent for him while he was busy in the shop. He expatiated, in a confused but animated dialect, on the money-making possibilities of his machine, puffing out his cheeks and waving his hands. Of course, he would have to have a guarantee. . . . When Don, at last, understood that the needed "manager" was expected to put "fife hundered " dollars into the patent, he merely shook his head and left the man gesticulating.
The sun was hot. His heels were sore with the jarring of the flagstone sidewalks. He went despondently back, through interminable and noisy streets, to the next address in his notes; and he was glad to sit in an outer office there, among a score of other applicants for the vacancy, until his turn should come to enter to the manager. Some of his rivals were as young as he, but dressed with a cheap smartness, their trousers turned up at the ankles stylishly, their collars high above "puff" ties that concealed the absence of a starched shirt-front. Some were older men pitiably meek and patient in their expressions and their attitudes, neat with the neatness of poverty that tries to maintain a good appearance in clothes brushed threadbare. Some were stolid youths, in bagged and wrinkled trousers, in shoes wore down at the heel, frankly poor and indifferent to it. One was a consumptive with an echoing cough which he tried to cover, mechanically, behind the long fingers of his clerk's hand, his eyes fixed on the blank wall that faced him, apparently unconscious of the hollow uproar which burst from him with an irritating frequency on the silence.
The manager appeared suddenly at the door, over the shoulders of a rejected applicant, and announced with exasperation: "Now, there's no use your waiting here if you haven't had experience. We want an experienced man. I told you that before. And you must have references. I'll not take anyone without good references."
Don took up his hat and withdrew apologetically. He went back to the rooms for luncheon, dragging his steps. A street piano tried to cheer him; he saw the perspiration on the face of the lean Italian woman who strained at the crank.