He couldn't seem to please the assistant buyer of the department at all, that afternoon, though in his eager way he tried to be the perfect salesman.
On Saturday morning there was a little note for him in which the superintendent was obsequiously Father's servant, and humbly informed Father that his services wouldn't be needed after that day. Would he, if it was quite convenient, call for his pay the following Tuesday, and not fail to turn in his locker-key before leaving the establishment?
The assistant buyer came around and unhappily told Father that they were letting him go because the department was overstocked with younger, liver men. "I'm mighty sorry, and I wish you good luck," he said, with flash of the real man under the smooth, steely exterior.
Father scarcely heard him, though he smiled faintly. He read the note many times as he stumbled home. But he couldn't get himself to show it to Mother till Sunday afternoon, so proud was she of helping him and proving herself a business woman-succeeding in a nine-dollar job while Father, who had once been worth twenty-two good dollars a week, hadn't been able to keep an eight-dollar job. Being quite human, Father felt a scornful envy of her for a minute, when she repeated all the pleasant things that had been said to her. But she was so frank, so touchingly happy, that he could not long harden his heart.
When he told her of his ill-fortune she put her hand to her breast and looked desperately afraid. It was only with a dry gasp that she could say: "Never mind, Seth, you'll find something else. I'm glad you don't have to handle all those silly card-cases and all. And so-so-oh, I do hope you find something."
"You won't think I'm entirely a failure?"
"I won't have you use that word! Don't I know-haven't I seen you for years? Why, I depend on you like-it sounds like a honeymoon, but you're just about my religion, Seth."
But she went to bed very early, to be absolutely certain of being on time at Regalberg's Monday morning.
* * * * *
So began for Seth Appleby the haunted days when, drifting through the gray and ghostly city of winter, he scarce knew whether he was a real man or a ghost. Down prison corridors that the city calls streets, among Jewish and Italian firms of which he had never heard, he wandered aimlessly, asking with more and more diffidence for work, any kind of work. His shoes were ground down at the heel, now, and cracked open on one side. In such footgear he dared not enter a shoe-store, his own realm, to ask for work that he really could do. As his December drifted toward Christmas like a rudderless steamer in a fog, the cold permitted him to seek for work only an hour or two a day, for he had no overcoat and his coat was very thin. Seth Appleby didn't think of himself as one of the rank of paupers, but rather as a man who didn't have an overcoat.
He had the grippe, and for a week he never left the house. While Mother proudly carried on the money-earning he tried to do the house-work. With unskilled hands he swept-leaving snags of dirt in the corners; he washed-breaking a dish now and then; he even got down on protesting sore knees and sloshed around in an attempt at scrubbing the knotty, splintery floor. He tried to cook dinner and breakfast, but his repertoire consisted of frying-fried eggs, fried bacon, fried bread, fried pork chops, which Mother pretended to like, though they gave her spasms of indigestion. In the richest city in the world he haggled with abusive push-cart peddlers over five cents' worth of cabbage. He was patient, but wrinkled with hopelessness.
With two warm days in succession, and the grippe gone, Father found work as a noontime waiter in a piggery on Third Avenue, where contractors' workmen devoured stew and sour coffee, and the waiters rushed gaspingly about in filthy white aprons. After the lunch hour he washed dishes in soapy water that quickly changed from white to grease-filmed black. For this he received fifty cents a day and his lunch. He hid the depressing fact of such employment from Mother, but religiously saved the daily fifty cents to give to her at Christmas. He even walked for an hour after each lunch, to get the smell of grease out of his clothes, lest she suspect.... A patient, quiet, anxious, courteous, little aging man, in a lunch-room that was noisy as a subway, nasty as a sewer excavation.
Without admitting it to himself, he had practically given up the search for work. After Christmas-something would happen, he didn't know what. Anyway, they wouldn't go back to their daughter's prison-place unless Mother became ill.
He discovered the life of idle men in New York-not the clubmen, but those others. Shabby, shuffling, his coat-collar turned up and secured with a safety-pin, he poked through Tompkins Square, on sunny days, or talked for hours to hoboes who scorned him as a man without experience of brake-beam and rods, of hoboes' hangouts and the Municipal Lodging House.
When it was too cold to sit in the park, he tried to make himself respectable of aspect, by turning down his coat-collar and straightening his streaky tie, before he stalked into the Tompkins Square branch of the public library, where for hours he turned over the pages of magazines on whose text he could concentrate less each day that he was an outcast accepting his fate. When he came out, the cold took him like the pain of neuralgia, and through streets that were a smear of snow and dust and blackened remains of small boys' bonfires he shuffled off with timorous rapidity, eying shop windows full of cheap bread, cheap cakes, cheap overcoats, cheap novels on the joy of being poor, all too expensive for him.
Clean and upright and longing to be merry in a dour world, he sank down among the spotted, the shiftless, the worthless. But perhaps when he struck bottom-
He was not quite beaten. He never varied in the wistful welcome he gave to Mother when she dragged herself home from work. But with an increasing humbleness he accepted her as the master of the house, and she unconsciously took the rôle. She petted him and comforted him and worked for him. She announced, with the gaiety that one uses with a dependent small boy, that they would have a wonderful party on Christmas Eve, and with the animation of a dependent child he begged her to tell him about it.
CHAPTER XI
The day before Christmas-an anxious day in Regalberg's department store, where the "extra help" were wondering which of them would be kept on. Most of them were given dismissals with their pay-envelopes. Mother's fate was not decided. She was told to report on the following Monday; the toy-department would be reduced, but possibly they would find a place for her in the children's dresses department, for the January white sale.... At the very least, they would be glad to give her an excellent recommendation, the buyer told her. More distraught than one stunned by utter hopelessness and ruin, she came home and, as Father had once been wont to do for her, she made her face bright to deceive him.
Under her arm she carried a wonderful surprise, a very large bundle. Father was agitated about it when she plumped gaily into their housekeeping room. At last she let him open it. He found an overcoat, a great, warm, high-collared overcoat.
He had an overcoat-an overcoat! He could put it on, any time, and go about the streets without the pinned coat-collar which is the sign of the hobo. He could walk all day, looking for a job-warm and prosperous. He could find work and support Mother. He had an overcoat! He was a gentleman again!
With tears, he kissed her, lingeringly, then produced his own present, which he had meant to keep till Christmas Day itself. It was seven dollars, which he had earned as waiter at the piggery.
"And we're going out and have dinner on it, too," he insisted.
"Yes, yes; we will. We've been economizing-so much!"