Burke, looking shocked, moved determinedly toward Hale. "Take this! You're not leaving the house without it!"
"Please don't excite me," Hale gasped, retreating. "I can't take it. It would make me unhappy."
His agitation persuaded Mrs. Burke to call off her husband. His goggling horror of being forced to take the money was real enough to have convinced anyone.
Burke regretfully put the bill away. They stood around awkwardly. Hale, for all his peculiarities, lacked the consummate heartlessness to dash away abruptly, much as he wanted to be off.
"What about your luggage?" Mrs. Burke asked huskily.
"Why ... you're going to keep them, of course. I haven't paid my rent —"
Burke snapped his mouth closed. For several seconds he looked quite fierce, glowering with wounded pride at Hale. In the end, naturally, he was forced to open his mouth again to breathe. "None of that, now," he threatened.
"But it's your right to hold them," Hale protested.
"I don't care if it is. I won't."
Hale thought quickly. Perhaps the idea of getting sick hadn't been so good. It raised too many unforeseen problems, like this one. He had counted on having the superintendent of whatever rooming house he landed in confiscate his belongings.
"Well," he said hopefully, "how about keeping them until I can redeem them?"
"Not a chance!"
"Then until I call for them," Hale amended despairingly. "I'm not strong enough to carry them around."
Suspecting a trap, the Burkes hesitated, but at last agreed. "But no nonsense now!" said Mrs. Burke. "When you need anything, you come right here and get it."
"Certainly. You bet. It's awfully nice of you —" He moved toward the door.
Burke said, "You can't go looking for a job like that." He took Hale's feeble arm and guided him to the tiny square of mirror hanging over the unsteady chest of drawers. "It's like hell, you look. See?"
Hale had to smile triumphantly. His face was even better than he had hoped: thin, haggard cheeks; feverishly bright dark eyes; the skin of his high forehead stretched tautly over his skull; his large broken nose jutting out of a tangle of black whiskers; his dry, thin hair standing up. He nodded at the reflection. Excellent, he thought.
"You can use my razor," Burke offered.
Hale winced involuntarily. His stubble of beard was something to be observed at all costs. "No, thanks," he choked out.
He couldn't risk more offers of help by waiting around. Mrs. Burke's mouth was trembling with some suggestion. Before it could come out, Hale squeezed Burke's shoulder, kissed Mrs. Burke's large cheek, and fled.
On the street, he could feel really successful. The bitter wind slashed at him; he had only seventy-six cents and no place to sleep. He was getting somewhere!
Chapter II
Hale didn't stand indecisively on the cold street. It was not yet noon, and before nightfall he had a fairly rigid course of action to follow.
His brown sport shoes felt like ton weights, he had been out of them for so long; and his overcoat dragged his shoulders down. He knew his temperature was over a hundred, but it did not affect his sharp reasoning. He felt the sheathed hunter's knife and the pistol in his overcoat pockets, and he smiled with amused anticipation.
They were important. At the start of his campaign he had selected them with care. But they would not be useful for several days, and then only to prove a point that might be debated.
He walked over to Sixth Avenue and turned downtown. At Fifty-ninth Street he met the first cluster of men. He squeezed in among them.
"I don't feel despondent enough," he thought analytically. "I don't have the look of defeat."
Not all the men in front of the employment agency were shabby. Some had been thrust down only recently. They glanced almost furtively at the job notices, as if they were merely curious. But there were others, whom Hale studied like an actor learning a role. They were the habitual prowlers of the agencies, ragged, filthy, too close to starvation to be hungry, shuffling mechanically from hopelessness to indifference. Hale coveted that attitude. He thoughtfully set out to make himself despondent.
How long would his seventy-six cents keep him? A dime for breakfast, fifteen cents for lunch, a quarter for supper — fifty cents for one day. A quarter for a cheap hotel cot. He could live for one day and have a penny left over. Then what? He had to eat and sleep, and one night on the subway would turn his deep-seated cold into pneumonia. A surge of desperation, which he stealthily enjoyed, gripped him.
He elbowed through the circle of men, and his eyes jumped from one job to another.
Nothing. Industrial jobs: third engineers, Diesel men, oilers, little-way stitchers, plant and factory jobs. He shuffled wearily to the next agency. Restaurant help: countermen, $18. Too high. Dishwashers, colored, $10. Soda dispensers, exp., $18-22.50.
He climbed the narrow, dark stairs to the huge bare room with its hard, shaky benches around three walls and its stench of wet rot and stale smoke. Nothing could fight down that combination. He felt the remnant of his cheeriness strangle.
Timidly, he approached the girl behind the railing.
"What job?" she asked casually.
"The dishwasher."
She glanced at the list. "Colored?"
"N-no. But I can wash just as well as —"
"Sorry. They want colored washers." And she turned away.
"I can make sodas," he blurted hoarsely. "I'm not so good, but —"
"Sorry," she said, her voice remote. "All filled."
He buttoned his coat, left, and trudged down to the next agency.
White chalk on a black slate. Each one, unseen, a block away, was the job, the means of feeding and sheltering himself. But it never was.
There was the application that he made out for a night porter, $12. The girl read it.
"Six dollars in advance, please," she said, quite businesslike.
Hale stopped breathing. "Six dollars! What for?"
"Half our fee. You pay the other half when you get your salary."
"But," he protested, "I haven't got six dollars —"
Without glancing at him, she tossed his application into the basket and turned to the next client. He clung to the railing, stunned. The other unemployed looked disinterestedly at him. Didn't they understand, damn them, that he could work and pay his way, six dollars or no six dollars? Why didn't they smash —
But, of course, he said nothing. No one ever does. You stand for a moment while they ignore you; then you trudge slowly out without feeling, unconscious of the stairs under your feet and the employment-agency smell — as Hale did.
In the afternoon, Hale did wangle a try-out at an eight-dollar-a-week job as an upholsterer's apprentice from an agency without the advance payment. The upholsterer was far from enthusiastic when he learned Hale's age — thirty-one — and his lack of experience at manual work. He watched with suppressed exasperation Hale's bungling efforts to adapt his stiff muscles to the unaccustomed craft. When Hale tried to borrow five dollars, he turned him down cold.
Hale quit. There was nothing else he could do. The agency would get his first week's salary. To keep alive for the first two weeks would require at least twelve dollars, and he had seventy-one cents. The upholsterer shrugged. "Maybe it's best this way. You wouldn't learn so fast. Not your fault — just too old."
HALE decided that he had gone about far enough. He'd finish off with a night in a Bowery flophouse. He could have had a quarter bed around Sixth Avenue, but the flophouse sounded more dramatic.