Next morning Mr. Hanson informed him coldly of the necessity of
punching the time-clock at seven every morning, and delivered
him for instruction into the hands of a fellow worker, one
Charley Moore.
Charley was twenty-six, with that faint musk of weakness hanging
about him that is often mistaken for the scent of evil. It took
no psychological examiner to decide that he had drifted into
indulgence and laziness as casually as he had drifted into life,
and was to drift out. He was pale and his clothes stank of
smoke; he enjoyed burlesque shows, billiards, and Robert
Service, and was always looking back upon his last intrigue or
forward to his next one. In his youth his taste had run to loud
ties, but now it seemed to have faded, like his vitality, and
was expressed in pale-lilac four-in-hands and indeterminate
gray collars. Charley was listlessly struggling that losing
struggle against mental, moral, and physical anaemia that takes
place ceaselessly on the lower fringe of the middle classes.
The first morning he stretched himself on a row of cereal
cartons and carefully went over the limitations of the Theron
G. Macy Company.
"It's a piker organization. My Gosh! Lookit what they give me.
I'm quittin' in a coupla months. Hell! Me stay with this bunch!"
The Charley Moores are always going to change jobs next month.
They do, once or twice in their careers, after which they sit
around comparing their last job with the present one, to the
infinite disparagement of the latter.
"What do you get?" asked Dalyrimple curiously.
"Me? I get sixty." This rather defiantly.
"Did you start at sixty?"
"Me? No, I started at thirty-five. He told me he'd put me on the
road after I learned the stock. That's what he tells 'em all."
"How long've you been here?" asked Dalyrimple with a sinking
sensation.
"Me? Four years. My last year, too, you bet your boots."
Dalyrimple rather resented the presence of the store detective
as he resented the time-clock, and he came into contact with him
almost immediately through the rule against smoking. This rule
was a thorn in his side. He was accustomed to his three or four
cigarettes in a morning, and after three days without it he
followed Charley Moore by a circuitous route up a flight of back
stairs to a little balcony where they indulged in peace. But
this was not for long. One day in his second week the detective
met him in a nook of the stairs, on his descent, and told him
sternly that next time he'd be reported to Mr. Macy. Dalyrimple
felt like an errant schoolboy.
Unpleasant facts came to his knowledge. There were "cave-
dwellers" in the basement who had worked there for ten or
fifteen years at sixty dollars a month, rolling barrels and
carrying boxes through damp, cement-walled corridors, lost in
that echoing half-darkness between seven and five-thirty and,
like himself, compelled several times a month to work until nine
at night.
At the end of a month he stood in line and received forty
dollars. He pawned a cigarette-case and a pair of field-glasses
and managed to live--to eat, sleep, and smoke. It was, however,
a narrow scrape; as the ways and means of economy were a closed
book to him and the second month brought no increase, he voiced
his alarm.
"If you've got a drag with old Macy, maybe he'll raise you," was
Charley's disheartening reply. "But he didn't raise ME till I'd
been here nearly two years."
"I've got to live," said Dalyrimple simply. "I could get more
pay as a laborer on the railroad but, Golly, I want to feel I'm
where there's a chance to get ahead."
Charles shook his head sceptically and Mr. Macy's answer next
day was equally unsatisfactory.
Dalyrimple had gone to the office just before closing time.
"Mr. Macy, I'd like to speak to you."
"Why--yes." The unhumorous smile appeared. The voice vas faintly
resentful.
"I want to speak to you in regard to more salary."
Mr. Macy nodded.
"Well," he said doubtfully, "I don't know exactly what you're
doing. I'll speak to Mr. Hanson."
He knew exactly what Dalyrimple was doing, and Dalyrimple knew
he knew.
"I'm in the stock-room--and, sir, while I'm here I'd like to
ask you how much longer I'll have to stay there."
"Why--I'm not sure exactly. Of course it takes some time to
learn the stock."
"You told me two months when I started."
"Yes. Well, I'll speak to Mr. Hanson."
Dalyrimple paused irresolute.
"Thank you, sir."
Two days later he again appeared in the office with the result
of a count that had been asked for by Mr. Hesse, the bookkeeper.
Mr. Hesse was engaged and Dalyrimple, waiting, began idly
fingering in a ledger on the stenographer's desk.
Half unconsciously he turned a page--he caught sight of his name
--it was a salary list:
Dalyrimple
Demming
Donahoe
Everett
His eyes stopped--
Everett.........................$60
So Tom Everett, Macy's weak-chinned nephew, had started at sixty
--and in three weeks he had been out of the packing-room and
into the office.
So that was it! He was to sit and see man after man pushed over
him: sons, cousins, sons of friends, irrespective of their
capabilities, while HE was cast for a pawn, with "going on the
road" dangled before his eyes--put of with the stock remark:
I'll see; I'll look into it." At forty, perhaps, he would be a
bookkeeper like old Hesse, tired, listless Hesse with a dull
routine for his stint and a dull background of boarding-house
conversation.
This was a moment when a genii should have pressed into his
hand the book for disillusioned young men. But the book has
not been written.
A great protest swelling into revolt surged up in him. Ideas
half forgotten, chaoticly perceived and assimilated, filled his
mind. Get on--that was the rule of life--and that was all. How
he did it, didn't matter--but to be Hesse or Charley Moore.
"I won't!" he cried aloud.
The bookkeeper and the stenographers looked up in surprise.
"What?"
For a second Dalyrimple stared--then walked up to the desk.
"Here's that data," he said brusquely. "I can't wait any longer."
Mr. Hesse's face expressed surprise.
It didn't matter what he did--just so he got out
of this rut. In a dream he stepped from the elevator into the
stock-room, and walking to an unused aisle, sat down on a box,
covering his face with his hands.
His brain was whirring with the frightful jar of discovering a
platitude for himself.
"I've got to get out of this," he said aloud and then repeated,
"I've got to get out"--and he didn't mean only out of Macy's
wholesale house.
When he left at five-thirty it was pouring rain, but he struck
off in the opposite direction from his boarding-house, feeling,
in the first cool moisture that oozed soggily through his old
suit, an odd exultation and freshness. He wanted a world that
was like walking through rain, even though he could not see far
ahead of him, but fate had put him in the world of Mr. Macy's
fetid storerooms and corridors. At first merely the overwhelming
need of change took him, then half-plans began to formulate in
his imagination.
"I'll go East--to a big city--meet people--bigger people--people
who'll help me. Interesting work somewhere. My God, there MUST
be."
With sickening truth it occurred to him that his facility for
meeting people was limited. Of all places it was here in his own
town that he should be known, was known--famous--before the water
of oblivion had rolled over him.
You had to cut corners, that was all. Pull--relationship--wealthy
marriages---
For several miles the continued reiteration of this preoccupied
him and then he perceived that the rain had become thicker and
more opaque in the heavy gray of twilight and that the houses
were falling away. The district of full blocks, then of big
houses, then of scattering little ones, passed and great sweeps
of misty country opened out on both sides. It was hard walking
here. The sidewalk had given place to a dirt road, streaked with
furious brown rivulets that splashed and squashed around his
shoes.
Cutting corners--the words began to fall apart, forming curious
phrasings--little illuminated pieces of themselves. They
resolved into sentences, each of which had a strangely familiar
ring.
Cutting corners meant rejecting the old childhood principles
that success came from faithfulness to duty, that evil was
necessarily punished or virtue necessarily rewarded--that honest
poverty was happier than corrupt riches.
It meant being hard.
This phrase appealed to him and he repeated it over and over.
It had to do somehow with Mr. Macy and Charley Moore--the
attitudes, the methods of each of them.
He stopped and felt his clothes. He was drenched to the skin. He
looked about him and, selecting a place in the fence where a
tree sheltered it, perched himself there.
In my credulous years--he thought--they told me that evil was a
sort of dirty hue, just as definite as a soiled collar, but it
seems to me that evil is only a manner of hard luck, or
heredity-and-environment, or "being found out." It hides in the
vacillations of dubs like Charley Moore as certainly as it does
in the intolerance of Macy, and if it ever gets much more
tangible it becomes merely an arbitrary label to paste on the
unpleasant things in other people's lives.
In fact--he concluded--it isn't worth worrying over what's evil
and what isn't. Good and evil aren't any standard to me--and
they can be a devil of a bad hindrance when I want something.
When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go
and take it--and not get caught.
And then suddenly Dalyrimple knew what he wanted first. He
wanted fifteen dollars to pay his overdue board bill.
With a furious energy he jumped from the fence, whipped off his
coat, and from its black lining cut with his knife a piece about
five inches square. He made two holes near its edge and then
fixed it on his face, pulling his hat down to hold it in place.
It flapped grotesquely and then dampened and clung clung to his
forehead and cheeks.
Now . . . The twilight had merged to dripping dusk . . . black
as pitch. He began to walk quickly back toward town, not waiting
to remove the mask but watching the road with difficulty through
the jagged eye-holes. He was not conscious of any nervousness
. . . the only tension was caused by a desire to do the thing as
soon as possible.
He reached the first sidewalk, continued on until he saw a hedge
far from any lamp-post, and turned in behind it. Within a minute
he heard several series of footsteps--he waited--it was a woman
and he held his breath until she passed . . . and then a man,
a laborer. The next passer, he felt, would be what he wanted
. . . the laborer's footfalls died far up the drenched street
. . . other steps grew nears grew suddenly louder.
Dalyrimple braced himself.
"Put up your hands!"
The man stopped, uttered an absurd little grunt, and thrust
pudgy arms skyward.
Dalyrimple went through the waistcoat.
"Now, you shrimp," he said, setting his hand suggestively to
his own hip pocket, "you run, and stamp--loud! If I hear your
feet stop I'll put a shot after you!"
Then he stood there in sudden uncontrollable laughter as
audibly frightened footsteps scurried away into the night.
After a moment he thrust the roll of bills into his pocket,
snatched of his mask, and running quickly across the street,
darted down an alley.
Read next: Dalyrimple Goes Wrong#Chapter IV
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