The Day of Days | Page 2

blue eyes and mobile lips suggested Irish lineage;
and his hands which, though thin and clouded with smears of ink, were
strong and graceful (like the slender feet in his shabby shoes) bore out
the suggestion with an added hint of gentle blood.
But whatever his antecedents, the fact is indisputable that P. Sybarite,
just then, was most miserable, and not without cause; for the Genius of
the Place held his soul in Its melancholy bondage.
The Place was the counting-room in the warehouse of Messrs.
Whigham & Wimper, _Hides & Skins_; and the Genius of it was the
reek of hides both raw and dressed--an effluvium incomparable, a

passionate individualist of an odour, as rich as the imagination of an
editor of Sunday supplements, as rare as a reticent author, as friendly as
a stray puppy.
For ten endless years the body and soul of P. Sybarite had been thrall to
that Smell; for a complete decade he had inhaled it continuously nine
hours each day, six days each week--and had felt lonesome without it
on every seventh day.
But to-day all his being was in revolt, bitterly, hopelessly mutinous
against this evil and overbearing Genius....
The warehouse--impregnable lair of the Smell, from which it leered
smug defiance at the sea-sweet atmosphere of the lower city--occupied
a walled-in arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, fronting on Frankfort Street,
in that part of Town still known to elder inhabitants as "the Swamp."
Above rumbled the everlasting inter-borough traffic; to the right, on
rising ground, were haunts of roaring type-mills grinding an endless
grist of news; to the left, through a sudden dip and down a long decline,
a world of sober-sided warehouses, degenerating into slums,
circumscribed by sleepy South Street; all, this afternoon, warm and
languorous in the lazy breeze of a sunny April Saturday.
The counting-room was a cubicle contrived by enclosing a corner of the
ground-floor with two walls and a ceiling of match-boarding. Into this
constricted space were huddled two imposing roll-top desks, P.
Sybarite's high counter, and the small flat desk of the shipping clerk,
with an iron safe, a Remington typewriter, a copy-press, sundry chairs
and spittoons, a small gas-heater, and many tottering columns of dusty
letter-files. The window-panes, encrusted with perennial deposits of
Atmosphere, were less transparent than translucent, and so little the
latter that electric bulbs burned all day long whenever the skies were
overcast. Also, the windows were fixed and set against the outer
air--impregnable to any form of assault less impulsive than a stone cast
by an irresponsible hand. A door, set craftily in the most inconvenient
spot imaginable, afforded both ventilation and access to an aisle which
led tortuously between bales of hides to doors opening upon a
waist-high stage, where trucks backed up to receive and to deliver.
Immured in this retreat, P. Sybarite was very much shut away from all
joy of living--alone with his job (which at present nothing pressed)
with Giant Despair and its interlocutor Ennui, and with that blatant,

brutish, implacable Smell of Smells....
To all of these, abruptly and with ceremony, Mr. George Bross,
shipping clerk, introduced himself: a brawny young man in
shirt-sleeves, wearing a visorless cap of soiled linen, an apron of striped
ticking, pencils behind both angular red ears, and a smudge of
marking-ink together with a broad irritating smile upon a clownish
countenance.
Although in receipt of a smaller wage than P. Sybarite (who earned
fifteen dollars per week) George squandered fifteen cents on
newspapers every Sunday morning for sheer delight in the illuminated
"funny sheets."
In one hand he held an envelope.
Draping himself elegantly over Mr. Wimper's desk, George regarded P.
Sybarite with an indulgent and compassionate smile and wagged a
doggish head at him. From these symptoms inferring that his
fellow-employee was in the throes of a witticism, P. Sybarite cocked an
apprehensive eye and tightened his thin-lipped, sensitive mouth.
"O you--!" said George; and checked to enjoy a rude giggle.
At this particular moment a mind-reader would have been justified in
regarding P. Sybarite with suspicion. But beyond taking the pen from
between his teeth he didn't move; and he said nothing at all.
The shipping clerk presently controlled his mirth sufficiently to permit
unctuous enunciation of the following cryptic exclamation:
"O you Perceval!"
P. Sybarite turned pale.
"You little rascal!" continued George, brandishing the envelope.
"You've been cunning, you have; but I've found you out at last....
_Per_-ce-val!"
Over the cheeks of P. Sybarite crept a delicate tint of pink. His eyes
wavered and fell. He looked, and was, acutely unhappy.
"You're a sly one, you are," George gloated--"always signin' your name
'P. Sybarite' and pretendin' your maiden monaker was 'Peter'! But now
we know you! Take off them whiskers--Perceval!"
A really wise mind-reader would have called a