The Bomb | Page 9

of the first month, though no
doubt with a German accent. I had already read a good many novels,
too, of Thackeray and others, and half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays.
Week after week slipped past; my little stock of dollar bills dwindled
away; at length I was at the end of my poor capital, and as far from
work as ever. I shall never be able to give an idea of what I suffered in
disappointment and sheer misery. Fortunately for my reason the
humiliations filled me with rage, and this rage and fear fermented in me
into bitterness which bred all-hating thoughts. When I saw rich men
entering a restaurant, or driving in Central Park, I grew murderous.
They wasted in a minute as much as I asked for a week's work. The
most galling reflection was that no one wanted me or my labour. "Even
the horses are all employed," I said to myself, "and thousands of men
who are much better working animals than any horse are left utterly
unused. What waste!" One conclusion settled itself in me; there was
something rotten in a society which left good brains and willing hands
without work.
I made up my mind to pawn a silver watch my father had given me
when we parted, and with what I got for the watch I paid my week's
board. The week passed, and still I had no work, and now I had nothing

to pawn. I knew from having talked to the boardinghouse keeper that
credit was not to be looked for. "Pay or get out" was the motto always
on his lips. Pay! Would they take blood?
I was getting desperate. Hate and rage seethed in me. I was ready for
anything. This is the way, I said to myself, society makes criminals.
But I did not even know how to commit a crime, nor where to turn, and
when Henschel came home I asked him if I could get a job as waiter.
"But you are not a waiter."
"Can't anybody be a waiter?" I asked in amazement.
"No, indeed," he replied quite indignantly. "If you had a table of six
people, and each of them ordered a different soup, and three of them
ordered one sort of fish, and the three others, three different sorts of
fish, and so on, you would not remember what had been ordered, and
could not transmit the order to the kitchen. Believe me, it takes a good
deal of practice and memory to wait well. One must have brains to be a
waiter. Do you think you could carry six soup plates full of soup, on a
tray, into a room, high above your head, with other waiters running
against you, without spilling a drop?"
The argument was unanswerable: "One must have brains to be a
waiter!"
"But couldn't I be an assistant?" I persisted.
"Then you would only get seven or eight dollars a week," he replied;
"and even an assistant, as a rule, knows the waiter's work, though he
perhaps doesn't know American."
The cloud of depression deepened; every avenue seemed closed to me.
Yet I must do something, I had no money, not a dollar. What could I do?
I must borrow from Henschel. My cheeks burned. I had always looked
on him, good fellow though he was, as an inferior, and now--yet it had
to be done. There was no other way. I resented having to do it. In spite
of myself, I bore a certain ill-will to Henschel and his superior position,

as if he had been responsible for my humiliation. What brutes we men
are. I only asked him for five dollars, just enough to pay my week's
board. He lent them willingly enough; but he did not like being asked, I
thought. It may have been my wounded sensibility; but I grew hot with
shame at having to take his money. I determined that next day I would
get work, work of any kind, and I would go into the streets to get it. I
scarcely slept an hour that long hot night; rage shook me again and
again, and I got up and paced my den like a beast.
In the morning I put on my worst clothes, and went down to the docks
and asked for work. Strange to say, my accent passed unnoticed, and
stranger still, I found here some of the sympathy and kindness which I
had looked for in vain before. The rough laborers at the
docks--Irishmen, or Norwegians, or coloured men--were willing to give
me any assistance they could. They showed me where to go and ask for
work; told me what the boss was like, the best time and way to
approach him. On every hand now I found