The Debtor Part 74

"But you look as if you could do more and better work in an hour than that young bob-squirt could in a month," said the man at his side.

"Very likely," replied Carroll, indifferently.

"You don't seem to care much about it," the other man said. The two had gone out of the building, and were walking slowly down the street.

"If they want young men, they do, I suppose," Carroll said.

"Been trying long?"

"Quite a time."

"Well, the employers are a set of G. D. fools!" said the other man.

An oath sounded horribly incongruous coming from his long, thin, benevolent mouth.

"I don't see what you are going to do about it if they are," Carroll replied, still with that odd patience. It seemed to him as if he was getting a sort of fellow-feeling and intense personal knowledge of his fellow-beings, which united him to them with ties stronger than those of love. He felt as if he more than loved this rebellious wretch beside him, as if he were one with him, only possessed of that patience which gave him a certain power to aid him. "I suppose men have the right to employ whom they choose," said Carroll. "If they prefer young men who don't know how to do the work, to old men who do, I suppose they have a right to engage them. And they may have some show of reason for it. I don't see what can be done, anyway."

"I'll tell you what has got to be done, sir, and how we can help ourselves," returned the other, with a ranting voice which made people turn and stare at him. "I'll tell you. We've got to form a union. There are unions for everything else. We have got to have a union of older men qualified to work, who are shouldered out of it by boys. Once that is done, we are all right. To-day in this country a man can't hire whom he pleases in most things. The unions have put it out of his power. The people have risen. We belong to a part of the people who haven't risen. Now we must rise. Let us form a union, I say. If they engage young men before us, there are ways of making them smart for it, the employers as well as the employes. I tell you that has got to be done."

Suddenly the men heard a laugh behind them. It was a woman's laugh, shrill and not altogether pleasant--not the laugh of a young woman, but the woman who came up with and immediately began to speak looked quite young. She was undeniably pretty. Her blond pompadour drooped coquettishly over one eye, her cheeks were pink, her face smooth, her figure was really superb, and she was very well dressed, in a tailor-made gown, smart furs, and a hat evidently of the English-tailor make.

"Excuse me," she said, with perfect a.s.surance, and yet with nothing of offensive boldness, rather with an air of _camaraderie_, "but I heard you talking, you two, and I thought I would give you a few points. I don't know whether you know it or not, but I have recently secured the position of cas.h.i.+er there, in Adkins & Somers's." She motioned with one nicely gloved hand back towards the place they had just left. "I got it in preference to about a dozen young girls, too," she said, with triumph, "but I shouldn't have if--" She hesitated a minute. The color on her cheeks deepened under the floating veil, and there was, in consequence, a curious effect of two shades of rose on her cheeks. "See here," she said, walking along with them, "I don't know you two men from Adam, and I needn't take the trouble, and if you don't like it you can lump it, but I'm going to say something. I know I look young. I ain't fis.h.i.+ng for a compliment. I know it. I've got a looking-gla.s.s in a good light, and I've got my eyes in my head, and, what's more, I'm s.p.u.n.ky enough to own it to myself if I don't look young; but I ain't young. I ain't going to say how old I am, but I will say this much, I ain't young.

I've been married twice and I've had three children. My first husband died, the second went off and left me. I've got a daughter fourteen years old I'm keeping in school. She ain't going into a department store, if I work my fingers to the bone." She said the last with a fierce air that made her for a second really look younger. "Well,"

she went on. "I'll tell you, too. I had a good place for a number of years, but the man died in September, and the man that took the business put his sister in my place. Then I was out of a job. I hadn't saved a cent, and I didn't know what I was going to do.

Mildred--that's my daughter--is big of her age and good-looking, and she wanted to leave school and go to work, but I wouldn't let her.

Well, I studied up all the advertis.e.m.e.nts and I tried, and I couldn't do a thing. Then I set my wits to work. I ain't one to give up in a hurry; I never was. As I said before, I didn't have much money, but I hire our little flat of a woman, and she's a good sort, and she's willing to wait, and a month ago I took every cent I could raise and I went through a course of treatment with a beauty-doctor. I had my hair (it was turned some) dyed, and I was ma.s.saged until I felt like a currant-bun, but I always had a good skin, and there was something to work on, and I took my figure in hand; that wasn't very bad, anyway, but I got new corsets, awful expensive ones, and had a tailor suit made. I had to raise some money on a little jewelry I had, but I made up my mind it was neck or nothing, and, sir, a month ago I got that place in Adkins & Somers's at a thousand a year. They are good men, too. You needn't think there's anything wrong." She looked at them with an expression as if she was ready to spring at the slightest intimation of distrust on their part. "It is only just that people think they want young help and they are going to have it. I've got the place and I'm in clover, and it's worth something looking so much better, though it don't make much difference to me. All I care about nowadays is my daughter."

The two men looked at the woman, Carroll with a courteous sympathy, and the interest of an observer of human nature. She was of a p.r.o.nounced American type, coa.r.s.e, vulgar, strident-voiced, smart, with a shrewdly working brain and of an unimpeachable heart. She was generosity and honesty itself, as she looked at the two men in a similar strait to the one from which she had extricated herself.

The other man, who had a bitter, possibly a dangerous strain developed by his misfortunes, laughed sardonically. "How long do you think you can keep it up?" said he. "Hm?" Had he been less worn and weary, and apparently even starved, his laugh and question would have evoked a sharper response. As it was, the woman replied with the utmost good-nature.

"Any old time," said she. "Lord! I ain't setting up for a kid. I ain't fool enough to put on short skirts and pigtails, but I am setting up for a young lady, and I can keep it up, anyhow. Lord! I ain't so very old, anyhow. If I didn't look the way I do now, I couldn't get a position, because they'd put me down for a back-number; but I had something left for that beauty-doctor to work on." Then she gazed critically at the two men. "It wouldn't take much to make you into a regular dude," said she to Carroll. "You are dressed to beat the band as it is. Say!" She gave him a confidential wink.

"Well?" said Carroll.

"You are dressed most too well. It's all very well to look stylish, to look as if you had been earning twenty-five hundred a year, but, Lord! you look as if you had been getting ten! The bosses might be a little afraid of you. They might say they didn't see how a man could have dressed like you do, unless he had helped himself to some of the firm's cash. See? I don't mean any offence. You look to me like a real gentleman."

"Thank you," replied Carroll.

"If I was you I'd put on a pair of pants not quite so nicely creased, and I'd sell that overcoat and get a good-style ready-made one. Your chances would be a heap better--honest."

"Thank you," said Carroll, again. He was conscious of amus.e.m.e.nt and a curious sense of a mental tonic from this loud-voiced, eagerly helpful female.

"I'm right, you bet," said she. "But otherwise it wouldn't take much.

You go and have a little something put on your hair, and have your face ma.s.saged a little, and if I was you I'd buy a red tie. You can get a dandy red tie at Steele & Esterbrook's for a quarter. That one you have on makes you look kinder pale. Then a red tie is younger.

Say, I'll tell you, if you would only have your mustache trimmed, and wax the ends, it would make no end of difference."

"What are you going to do when you are asked how old you are? Lie?"

inquired the other man, in his bitter, sardonic voice.

This time the woman regarded him with slight indignation. "Say," said she, "you'll never get a place if you don't act pleasanter. Places ain't to be got that way, I can tell you. You've got to act as if you'd eat nothin' but b.u.t.ter an' honey for a fortnight. If you feel mad, you'd better keep it in your insides." Then she answered his questions. "No, I ain't goin' to lie, and I ain't goin' to tell anybody else to lie," said she. "Lying ain't my style. But it ain't anybody's business how old you are, anyhow. I don't know what right a man that I go to get a place from has got to ask how old I be. All he has any right to know is whether I ain't too old to do my work. I don't lie; no, siree. All I say is, and kinder laugh, 'Well, call it twenty-five,' or you might call it thirty, and with some, again, you might call it thirty-two or three. That ain't lyin' if I know what lyin' is." As the woman spoke her face a.s.sumed precisely the mischievous, challenging smile with which she had replied to similar questions. Carroll laughed, and the other man also, although grudgingly.

"Well," he said, "there's different ways of looking at a lie."

"It wouldn't be any manner of use for you to say you wouldn't see twenty-eight again, no matter how much you got fixed up," the woman retorted. "But I guess you can get something, if it ain't quite so good. I have a gentleman friend who is over fifty and who said he was thirty-seven, and he got a dandy place last week. But I tell you you'll have to hustle more'n this other gentleman. You're bald, ain't you?"

"I don't know what that has got to do with it," growled the man, and he tried to quicken his pace; but she kept up with him.

"It's got a good deal to do with it," said she. "I know a place on Sixth Avenue where you can get an elegant front-piece that n.o.body could ever tell, for three dollars and forty-nine cents. Another gentleman friend of mine--he's a sort of relation of mine; my sister was his first wife--got one there. Yes, sir, you'll have to get one, and you'll have to get your face ma.s.saged and your eyebrows blacked, and, Lord! you'll have to have that beard shaved off and have a mustache, if you get anything at all. Lord! you look as if you'd come right out of the Old Testament. I don't see why you're wasting your time hanging around offices for, without you see to that, first of all. I should think your wife would tell you, but I suppose she's the same sort. Now as for you," she added, turning again to Carroll, "if you just get polished up a little bit--say, here's the card of my beauty-doctor" (she produced a card from an ornate wrist-bag)--"you'll look dandy."

Suddenly the woman, with a quick good-bye, turned to cross Broadway, but her good-nature and sympathy had something fine and inexhaustible, for even then she turned back to look encouragingly upon the older, soured, bitter, ungrateful man with Carroll, and she said: "You go 'long with him, and I guess you'll get a place, too.

Good-bye."

With that she was gone, pa.s.sing as straight as if she owned an una.s.sailable right of way through the press of vehicles. Just as she gained the opposite sidewalk a fire-engine thundered up.

"She had a close call from that," Carroll said. His face had altered.

He still looked amused.

"That woman couldn't get run over if she tried," said the other man.

"There ain't nothing made in the country that can run over her. It's women like her that's keeping men out of the places that belong to them by right."

"I am afraid there was some truth in her theory and her advice,"

Carroll said, laughing, and looking after the second engine clanging through the scattering crowd.

"Well, I guess when I go to buying women's frizzes to wear to get a place, she'll know it," said the other man. "Good lord! if it's the outside of the head they want, why don't they get dummies and done with it? I tell you what is needed is a new union."

Just at that moment they reached a restaurant from which came an odor of soup. Carroll turned to his companion. "I am going in here to get some lunch," he said. "I don't know what kind of a place it is, but if you will go with me, I shall take pleasure in--"

But the man turned upon him fiercely. "I 'ain't got quite so low yet that I have to eat at another man's expense," he said. "You needn't think, because you wear a better coat than I do, that--" The man stopped and nodded his head, speechless, and went on, and was out of sight, but Carroll had seen tears in the angry eyes.

He went into the restaurant, took a seat at a table, and ordered a bowl of tomato-soup. As he was sipping it he heard a voice p.r.o.nounce his name, and, glancing up, saw two pretty girls and a young man at a near-by table. He recognized the young man as the one who had been lately in his employ. About the girls he was not so sure, but he thought they were the same who had come to Banbridge to plead for their payment. They all bowed to him, and he returned the salutation.

They all had a severe and, at the same time, curious expression. One of the girls whispered to the other, and although the words were not audible, the sharp hiss reached Carroll's ears.

"Wonder what he's doing in this place," she said.

The other girl, the elder, craned her neck and observed what Carroll was eating. "He hasn't got anything but a bowl of tomato-soup," she replied.

"S'pose he's goin' through the whole bill," said the young man. The three were themselves lunching frugally. One of the girls had also a bowl of tomato-soup, the other a large piece of squash-pie. The young man had a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee. Smoking was allowed in the place, and the atmosphere was thick with cigarette smoke, and a warm, greasy scent of boiling and frying. Carroll continued to eat his soup. The three at the other table had nearly finished their luncheons when he entered. Presently they rose and pa.s.sed him. The young man stopped. He paled a little. His old awe of Carroll was over him. In spite of himself, the wors.h.i.+pful admiration he had had for the man still influenced him. The poor young fellow, whose very pertness and braggadocio were simple and childlike, really felt towards the older man who had been his employer much as a faithful retainer towards a feudal baron. His feeling towards him was something between love and an enormous mental wors.h.i.+p. His little, ordinary soul seemed to flatten itself like an Oriental before his emperor when he spoke to Carroll sipping his bowl of tomato-soup in the cheap restaurant. He had, after all, that n.o.bility of soul which altered circ.u.mstances could not affect. He was just as deferential as if Carroll had been seated at a table in Delmonico's, but the fact remained that he was about to ask him again for his money. He was horribly pressed. He had obtained another position in one of the department stores, which paid him very little, and he was in debt, while his clothes were in such a degree of shabbiness that they were fairly precarious. The very night before he had sat up until midnight mending a rent in his trousers, which he afterwards inked; and as for his overcoat, he always removed that with a sleight-of-hand lest its ragged lining become evident, and when ladies were about he put it on in an agony lest his arms catch in the rents. He had even meditated cutting out the lining altogether, although he had a cold. He was so in debt that he had stopped eating breakfast; and the leaving off of breakfast for other than hygienic reasons, and when it has not been preceded by a heavy dinner the night before, is not conducive to comfort. So he bent low over Carroll and asked him in a small voice of the most delicate consideration, if he could let him have a little on account.

Carroll had turned quite white when he approached him, but his regard of him was unswerving. "It is impossible for me to-day, Mr. Day," he replied, "but I a.s.sure you that you shall have every cent in the end."

The tears actually sprang into the young fellow's nervously winking eyes. "It would be a great accommodation," he said, in the same low tone.

"You shall have every cent as soon as I can possibly manage it,"

Carroll repeated.

"I have a position, but it does not pay me very much yet," said the young fellow, "and--and--I am owing considerable, and--I need some things."