Don-A-Dreams/Part 3/Chapter 3
III
Don found no work that he could do. Conroy, obviously, was no longer even looking for any. And when Pittsey at last sold a "special" to a Saturday "supplement," the sight of his $8 cheque—received in the morning mail and produced triumphantly at the breakfast table—was like the first nugget to a camp of despairing prospectors. "Money!" he gloated. "Eight of them! Hully Gee, look at it, boys! The real thing! Would you cash it or have it framed? The 'Nassau National.' Do you suppose they're good for it?"
The others were smiling doubtfully, between pleasure in his success and envy of it. He understood the expression. "There's millions where that came from," he said, "and all you need is a pen to dig out some. Why don't you get after it? Why don't you write up the adventures of a poor but honest young man looking for a job in a great, big city, eh?"
There was no reason why they did not—except, perhaps, that they could not.
"Give ovah!" Pittsey retorted. "Any man can write 'if he only abandons his mind to it.' Get a pad of fresh white paper and let yourself go. You might as well be doing something while you're not refusing applications for your valuable services down town. Try it."
They tried it. Conroy gave it up after a morning spent biting the end of his pen-handle, his face as blank as his paper; he was, apparently, too home-sick and dispirited to have a thought of anything else. Don persisted, tutored by Pittsey, who groaned in private over the stilted English and the philosophic stodginess of his pupil's work. "Put some ginger into it," he counselled. "This is as tame as if you'd written it for old Cotton. A newspaper doesn't want a 'not-only-but-also' thesis on the subject. It wants some facts. If you haven't any make some up. You might have written this without ever seeing New York or an employment agency. Aren't some of them fakes—some of these agencies?"
Don said he did not know. He objected that he did not wish to write himself up—his own experiences.
"Why not?"
"I don't know."
The fact was—as Pittsey slowly learned—Don had an obstinate delicacy that shrank from putting any of his own emotions into print. He could not look into his heart and write, as the poet directed. He wrote, as he would talk to a stranger, in generalities, "in twaddle" as Pittsey complained, with a masculine reticence in all things that concerned himself.
"Well, go ahead," Pittsey said, at last. "Do it your own way."
He went ahead for three weeks, without a glimmer of encouragement and really without a chance of success. And then he confessed, blushing: "Anyway, I don't see the use of writing stuff like this. I don't see why anyone should care to read it. It doesn't really mean anything to anybody, does it?"
"It's one way of earning a living," Pittsey countered.
"I know, but—well, if a man's really working, if he's only sawing wood or cleaning the streets or driving a waggon, he's doing something that has to be done. He's helping things along—the world, you know—civilization. He's"
Pittsey interrupted him with high laughter. "Well, you are a joke! You're the funniest ever! Let the world get along any way it pleases. It's your getting along that concerns you."
"Yes, I know," Don mumbled, "but—I don't care. It doesn't seem worth while to me."
"Don't do it, then!"
"Well, perhaps I would, if I could. I don't know . . . I can't, anyway."
"Have you found anything better?"
Don shook his head. "What's Con doing? Does he ever tell you?"
Pittsey made a significant movement of his hand to his lips, throwing back his head.
Don whispered, aghast: "Drinking?"
Pittsey nodded, with a tolerant smile for Don's blindness. "Don't tell him I told you. He's lost his nerve."
It was late that evening. Pittsey had gone to gather material for an article on "Amateur's Night" in a Bowery theatre. Conroy had been sitting beside the dining-table for hours, smoking sourly, his feet on a chair before him and his eyes fixed on the toes of his shoes. Don had been preparing to speak to him, covering his irresolution by pretending to write a letter while he was trying to make up his mind how to begin.
He had asked: "Found anything to do, Con?" Conroy had grunted: "Not a d thing." And there was no more to be said of that matter.
Ten minutes later, he had asked: "Heard anything from home?" And Conroy had answered, in the same tone as before: "Not a d word."
Don scratched perfunctorily at the letter—which, he knew, he would have to destroy. "Have you written to them?" he asked.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Why should I?"
"Don't you think they'd like to hear from you?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Conroy did not answer.
Don put down his pen, too nervous to hold it. "You know," he said, "Uncle John asked me to look after you here. He'd like to know how you're getting on."
"Write and tell him then," Conroy replied bitterly. "He ought to be glad to hear."
"What'll I tell him?"
"Tell him what you blame well please."
Don swallowed. "That you're drinking still?"
His voice went dry on the last word. The silence stood staring at him, holding its breath.
Conroy's head turned slowly, his jaws shut on his pipe. His eyes caught the glow from the lamp and glistened with two danger signals of light in his white face. "What do you mean by that?"
It was too late to draw back. Don arranged his sheets of note-paper with a hand that in some way reminded him of his father's. Then he said, in a tense steadiness: "He blamed me for not writing him, at college, about you. I promised him I'd write here. He let you come, on that condition—that I'd look after you, and let him know how you were getting on."
Conroy flamed up: "You mind your own business."
"That's my business."
"No, it isn't! It isn't yours and it isn't his! He threw me off—without a cent—to starve if I liked—down here. What do I care about him?"
"No, he didn't. He said he wanted to give you your chance—not to take you home like a 'whipped cur'"
"Who's a whipped cur?" he shouted.
Don shouted back at him: "He said he didn't want you to be a whipped cur! I told him those fellows at college had led you into it—the trouble. You said so yourself. Now, here you are, doing the same thing again."
"You're a liar!"
"Well, I'm not going to lie to him. I'm not going to be responsible for you if you drink."
"You sneak! It's the money, is it? You want to get rid of me to save the miserable dollar a week you've been doling out to me. If it hadn't been for me, you'd never have had it to lend."
Don, his anger exhausted, felt himself oppressed with a great weariness, buffeted in this ignoble quarrel. He put his hands up to his temples, his elbows on the table, gone dumb.
Conroy went on crazily: "You needn't be afraid. I'll pay you back some way. If I don't, you can make out your bill and collect it from mother."
Don did not reply.
"Who said I was drinking? What concern is it of yours—or his—if I am? Why doesn't he do something to help me along, if he's so blamed anxious about me? If you'd been chucked out, without a cent, in a place where you couldn't get a thing to do, you'd want something too, to—to keep yourself up."
"You're not without a cent. I'll give you all the money you want, if you'll promise not to spend it that way."
Conroy checked his fury, to cry, contemptuously: "Where'll you get it?"
"Oh, I'll get it. . . . All he wanted was to give you your chance. You wouldn't have gone back to Coulton. You were coming to New York, yourself. Now that he let you come, this is the way you behave!"
"Is he sending you money for me?"
"I'll not tell you."
"Why didn't you tell me before? Why did you pretend you were lending it to me?"
"I didn't. I told you it was as much yours as mine."
"He is sending it."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself. When everyone's trying to help you to—to You ought to be ashamed."
Conroy flung out: "I don't see that you're doing such a lot. You haven't earned a cent yourself."
"No, but I've tried to."
"Well, haven't I? Haven't I?"
"You're not trying to—lately."
"Ah!" Conroy threw out his hands with a snarl of despair. "What's the use? I'm down and everyone kicks me! They won't give me anything to do. Why should they? I don't know how to do anything. I've made a mess of my life." He choked up, boyishly.
"You're not any worse off than I am," Don said, "and I haven't given up. Not by a good deal! I'll stick to it if it comes to selling lead pencils on the street corner. . . . Besides, you can go home at Christmas, to your father's office, if you wish to. You have him behind you, now, if you'll only show him that you Heavens!" He looked out at his own future that was yet to be made out of nothing, with his own hands. "If I only had your chance!"
They were silent. Conroy smoked with a vehemence that subsided to a more thoughtful puffing of his pipe as he calmed down to reason. Don gloomed over the squares and circles which he was drawing on his blotter in a bitter idleness of mind. He recalled his father's phrase "the charity of relatives"; Conroy had brought the meaning of it home to him. Heretofore, he had had no thought of the money; he had been working to make himself a place in the world that would be fit to ask her to share with him; and he had accepted these "loans" from his aunt and his uncle as he would have accepted their good wishes. Now he faced the need of paying them back, of freeing himself from Conroy's reproach, of earning, immediately, enough to make himself independent.
Conroy interrupted, in contrition: "Say, Don, don't write to him that I've been I'll start out to-morrow morning, and find something if—if I have to beg for it."
Don did not reply. He had himself arrived at the same resolve.