The Empty Sack

by Basil King

The compensation is largely in the way of air and panorama. Both have a tendency to take away your breath. You would hardly believe that so much of New York could be visible all at once. The gigantic profile of Manhattan is sketched in here with a single stroke, while the river is thronged like a busy street seen from the top of a tower. City smoke rolls up and ocean mist rolls in while you are looking on. Sunrise, moonrise; moonset, sunset; stars in the heaven and lights along the darkened waterway, afford to the not-very-well-to-do, cooped up all day in kitchens, offices, and factories, a morning and evening glimpse into the ecstatic.

Number Eleven was somewhat withdrawn from all this toward the middle of the plateau. Built at a period when an architect's ambition was chiefly to do something singular, it had a great deal of sloping roof, with windows where you would not expect them. Pemberton Heights being held up bravely to rain and snow, the color of the house was a weatherbeaten brown. Two hydrangea trees, shaped like open umbrellas, and covered now with white blossoms fading to rose, stood one on each side of the front door in the center of two tiny grassplots. There was a piazza, of course, where most of the family leisure was passed, and in the yard behind the house there stood a cherry tree. All up and down the street for the length of about half a mile were similar little houses, each with its piazza and its architectural oddity, homes of the not-very-well-to-do, content with their relative poverty. Among themselves they formed a society as distinct and as active as that of Marillo Park, and out of it they got as much pleasure as the Sidebottoms and Collinghams from their more exclusive forgatherings.

In this soil, the Folletts had taken root with the ease of transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon race. Drawn to Pemberton Heights by the presence there of other Canadians, Josiah had bought the little house for seven thousand dollars. On this he had paid four, raising the other three on a mortgage which it was his ruling desire to pay off. The mild, tenacious optimism of his nature convinced him he should be able to do this, in spite of the danger of being "fired" hanging over him for two years. The fact that, though the months kept passing, that sword didn't fall inspired the belief that it never would. He had grown so sure of this that with regard to the warning issued by Collingham he had never taken his wife into his confidence. For one thing, it was useless to alarm her when it might be without cause, and for another....

But that was the secret tragedy of Josiah's life. He had not made good the promise he gave when Lizzie Scarborough married him, and the falling of the sword would be the final proof of it. It would mean that his whole patient, painstaking life had fitted him for nothing better than the scrap heap. That he should come to such an end he couldn't believe possible. That after nearly fifty years of uncomplaining drudgery he should be flung aside as useless to man in general and worse than useless to his family was not, he argued, in keeping with the will of God. It was to the will of God he trusted more than to the mercy of Bradley Collingham, though he trusted to them both.

When he married Lizzie in the little town of Lisgar, Nova Scotia, he had been a bank clerk. A bank clerk in Canada is a kind of young nobleman at the beginning of what may be a striking career, after the manner of a fledgling in diplomacy. The banking institutions being few and large, the employees are moved from post to post, much like attachés or army officers. As moves bring promotion, the clerk becomes a teller and the teller a cashier and the cashier a branch manager and the branch manager a wealthy man in touch with world-wide issues. It was the kind of progress Josiah expected when he married Lizzie Scarborough, the kind of future they dreamed of and talked about, and which never came.

Josiah lacked something. You couldn't put your finger on the flaw in his energy, but you knew it was there. He was moved about, of course, but with little or no promotion. Other men got that, but he was ignored. Harum-scarum young fellows whose ignorance of bookkeeping was a scandal were lifted over his head, while he and Lizzie stared at each other in perplexity.

Hardest of all for him was that, as years went by, Lizzie herself lost belief in him. More tender with him for his failure, she nevertheless saw that he was not the man she had supposed in the gay young days at Lisgar, and he saw that she saw. She gave up the hope of promotion before he did. The best to which they came to aspire was a "raise."

It was bitter for Lizzie because, as she was fond of saying to herself, and now and then to the children, she had been born a lady. This was no more than the truth. Whatever the meaning given to the word, Lizzie fulfilled it, though her claims were more than moral ones. The Scarboroughs had been great people in Massachusetts before the Revolution. The old Scarborough mansion, still standing in Cambridge, bears witness to the generous scale on which they lived. But they left it as it stood, with its pictures, its silver, its furniture, its stores, rather than break their tie with England. Scorned by the country from which they fled, and ignored by that to which they remained true, their history on Nova-Scotian soil was chiefly one of descent. A few of them prospered; a few reached high positions in the adopted land, but most of them lacked opportunity as well as the will to create it. True, Lizzie's father was a clergyman; but her sisters married poorly, her brothers dropped into any chance jobs that came their way, while she herself got only such fulfillment of her dreams as she found at Pemberton Heights. Even the move to New York which Josiah had made when convinced that the Bank of the Maritime Provinces held no further hope for him had not greatly prospered them. Five years of drifting between one bank and another were followed by five steady years with Collingham & Law; but even that peaceful time was now at an end.

While the Collinghams were drinking tea on the flagged terrace, and Jennie was on the ferryboat, and Teddy dressing and skylarking after his plunge at the gym, and Follett nearing home, Lizzie was on her knees pinning up the draperies she was "making over" for Gussie. Pansy, the daughter of a bulldog and a Boston terrier, whose pansy-face had in it a more than human yearning, stood looking on, with forelegs wide apart.

Gussie was fifteen, pretty, pert, and impatient.