The Shoulders of Atlas

The Shoulders of Atlas

Project Gutenberg's The Shoulders of Atlas, by Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Shoulders of Atlas A Novel
Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Release Date: January 21, 2006 [EBook #17566]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
SHOULDERS OF ATLAS ***

Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly

The Shoulders of Atlas
A Novel
By Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Author of "By the Light of the Soul" "The Debtor" "Jerome" "A New

England Nun" etc.
New York and London Harper & Brothers Publishers MCMVIII
Copyright, 1908, by the New York Herald Co. All rights reserved.
Published June, 1908.
Chapter I
Henry Whitman was walking home from the shop in the April
afternoon. The spring was very early that year. The meadows were
quite green, and in the damp hollows the green assumed a violet
tinge--sometimes from violets themselves, sometimes from the
shadows. The trees already showed shadows as of a multitude of bird
wings; the peach-trees stood aloof in rosy nimbuses, and the
cherry-trees were faintly a-flutter with white through an intense gloss
of gold-green.
Henry realized all the glory of it, but it filled him with a renewal of the
sad and bitter resentment, which was his usual mood, instead of joy. He
was past middle-age. He worked in a shoe-shop. He had worked in a
shoe-shop since he was a young man. There was nothing else in store
for him until he was turned out because of old age. Then the future
looked like a lurid sunset of misery. He earned reasonably good wages
for a man of his years, but prices were so high that he was not able to
save a cent. There had been unusual expenses during the past ten years,
too. His wife Sylvia had not been well, and once he himself had been
laid up six weeks with rheumatism. The doctor charged two dollars for
every visit, and the bill was not quite settled yet.
Then the little house which had come to him from his father,
encumbered with a mortgage as is usual, had all at once seemed to need
repairs at every point. The roof had leaked like a sieve, two windows
had been blown in, the paint had turned a gray-black, the gutters had
been out of order. He had not quite settled the bill for these repairs. He
realized it always as an actual physical incubus upon his slender,
bowed shoulders. He came of a race who were impatient of debt, and
who regarded with proud disdain all gratuitous benefits from their

fellow-men. Henry always walked a long route from the shop in order
to avoid passing the houses of the doctor and the carpenter whom he
owed.
Once he had saved a little money; that was twenty-odd years before;
but he had invested it foolishly, and lost every cent. That transaction he
regarded with hatred, both of himself and of the people who had
advised him to risk and lose his hard-earned dollars. The small sum
which he had lost had come to assume colossal proportions in his mind.
He used, in his bitterest moments, to reckon up on a scrap of paper
what it might have amounted to, if it had been put out at interest, by
this time. He always came out a rich man, by his calculations, if it had
not been for that unwise investment. He often told his wife Sylvia that
they might have been rich people if it had not been for that; that he
would not have been tied to a shoe-shop, nor she have been obliged to
work so hard.
Sylvia took a boarder--the high-school principal, Horace Allen--and she
also made jellies and cakes, and baked bread for those in East Westland
who could afford to pay for such instead of doing the work themselves.
She was a delicate woman, and Henry knew that she worked beyond
her strength, and the knowledge filled him with impotent fury. Since
the union had come into play he did not have to work so many hours in
the shop, and he got the same pay, but he worked as hard, because he
himself cultivated his bit of land. He raised vegetables for the table. He
also made the place gay with flowers to please Sylvia and himself. He
had a stunted thirst for beauty.
In the winter he found plenty to do in the extra hours. He sawed wood
in his shed by the light of a