The Fortune Hunter | Page 4

their desks and turn their faces homewards, leaving the details of the day's routine to be wound up by underlings. In the clear light of the late spring afternoon a stream of humanity was high and fluent upon the sidewalks. Duncan had glimpses of keen-faced men, bright-faced women, eager boys, quickened all by that manner of efficiency and intelligence which seems so integrally American. A well-dressed throng, well-fed, amiable and animated, looking ever forward, the resistless tide of affairs that gave it being bore it onward; it passed the onlooker as a strong current passes flotsam in a back-eddy, with no pause, no turning aside. Acutely he felt his aloofness from it, who had no part in its interests and scarcely any comprehension of them. The sunken look, the leanness of his young face, seemed suddenly accentuated; the gloom in his discontented eyes deepened; his slight habitual stoop became more noticeable. And a second time he nodded acquiescence to his unspoken thought.
"There," said he, singling out a passer-by upon whose complacent features prosperity had set its smug hall-mark--"there, but for the grace of God, goes Nat Duncan!" He rolled the paraphrase upon his tongue and found it bitter--not, however, with a tonic bitterness. "Lord, what a worthless critter I am! No good to myself--nor to anybody else. Even on Harry I'm a drag--a regular old man of the mountains!"
Despondently he went down to the sidewalk and merged himself with the crowd, moving with it though a thousand miles apart from it, and presently diverging, struck across-town toward the Worth Street subway station.
"And the worst of it is, he's too sharp not to find it out--if he hasn't by this time--and too damn' decent by far to let me know if he has! ... It can't go on this way with us: I can't let him ... Got to break with him somehow--now--to-day. I won't let him think me ... what I've been all along to him.... Bless his foolish heart!..."
This resolution coloured his reverie throughout the uptown journey. And he strengthened himself with it, deriving a sort of acrid comfort from the knowledge that henceforth none should know the burden of his misfortunes save himself. There was no deprecation of Kellogg's goodness in his mood, simply determination no longer to be a charge upon it. To contemplate the sum total of the benefits he had received at Kellogg's hands, since the day when the latter had found him ill and half-starved, friendless as a stray pup, on the bench in Washington Square, staggered his imagination. He could never repay it, he told himself, save inadequately, little by little--mostly by gratitude and such consideration as he purposed now to exhibit by removing himself and his distresses from the other's ken. Here was an end to comfort for him, an end to living in Kellogg's rooms, eating his food, busying his servants, spending his money--not so much borrowed as pressed upon him. He stood at the cross-roads, but in no doubt as to which way he should most honourably take, though it took him straight back to that from which Kellogg had rescued him.
There crawled in his mind a clammy memory of the sort of housing he had known in those evil days, and he shuddered inwardly, smelling again the effluvia of dank oilcloth and musty carpets, of fish-balls and fried ham, of old-style plumbing and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in the unwashen raw--the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to which his lack of means had introduced him. He could see again, and with a painful vividness of mental vision, the degenerate "brownstone fronts" that mask those haunts of wretchedness, with their flights of crumbling brownstone steps leading up to oaken portals haggard with flaking paint, flanked by squares of soiled note-paper upon which inexpert hands had traced the warning, not: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," but: "Furnished rooms to let with board." And pursuing this grim trail of memory, whether he would or no--again he climbed, wearily at the end of a wearing day, a darksome well of a staircase up and up to an eyrie under the eaves, denominated in the terminology of landladies a "top hall back"--a cramped refuge haunted by pitiful ghosts of the hopes and despairs of its former tenants. And he remembered with reminiscently aching muscles the comfort of such a "single bed" as is peculiar (one hopes) to top hall backs, and with a qualm what it was to cook a surreptitious meal on a metal heater clamped to the gas-bracket (with ears keen to catch the scuffle of the landlady's feet as she skulked in the hall, jealous of her gas bill).
And to this he must return, to that treadmill round of blighted days and joyless nights must set his face....
Alighting