The Bomb | Page 9

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 human sympathy; but for days and days no work. How far did I fall? That week I learned enough to know that I could pawn my Sunday suit. I got fifteen dollars on it; paid my bill, paid Henschel, too, and went straight to a workman's lodging-house, where I could board for three dollars a week. Henschel begged me to stay on with him, said he would help me; but the stomach of my pride would not stand his charity, so I gave him my address, in case he heard of anything to suit me, and went down--to the lowest level of decent working life.
The lodging-house at first seemed to me a foul place. It was a low tenement house