But all I mean is that by imperceptible degrees I felt myself one of them. After the first lady had turned me down, I began to adapt myself to their views of the employer. After the second lady had repeated the action of the first, I began to experience that feeling of dull hostility toward the class in which I had been born that marked all my companions in the coop. It was what I have already called it, hostility without personal malevolence—hostility to a system rather than to individuals. For a pittance barely sufficient to keep body and soul together, leaving no margin for the higher or more beautiful things in life, we were expected to drudge like Roman slaves, and not only feel no resentment, but be contented with the lot to which we were ordained. The clearest thing in the world to all of us was that between us and those who would have us work for them some great humanizing element was lacking—an element which would have made life acceptable—and that so long as it was not there each one of us would, as a revolutionary bookkeeper put it, "go to bed with a grouch." To me, as to them, the grouch was growing intimate—and so was hunger.
By the end of a fortnight I was down to one meal a day, the breakfast I continued to take with Pelly, my Cornish friend, and over which he told me his most intimate experiences, with an absence of reserve to which conversation in the pen had accustomed me. Looking for some such return on my part, he was not only disappointed, but a little mystified. I got his mental drift, however, when he asked me on one occasion if I had ever "hit the pipe," and on another if I had ever been "sent away." Had these misfortunes happened to himself he would have told me frankly, and it would have made no difference in his sympathy for me had I confessed to them or to any other delinquency. What puzzled him was that I should confess to nothing, a form of reserve which to him was not only novel, but abnormal.
Nevertheless, when through the thin partition I announced one morning that I wasn't going to breakfast, giving lack of appetite as a plea, he came solemnly into my room.
"See here, Soames; if a fiver'd be of any use to you—or ten—or any think—"
When I declined he did not insist further; but on my return that evening I found a five-dollar bill thrust under my door in an envelope.
I didn't thank him when I heard him come in; I pretended to be asleep. As a matter of fact, I thought it hardly worth while to say anything. It was highly possible that the next day would say all, for I had reached the point where it seemed to me the Gordian knot must be cut. One quick stroke of some sort—and Pelly would get his five dollars back untouched.
A cup of chocolate had been all my food that day. Though I had still a few pennies, less than a dollar, it would probably be all my food on the next day. On the day after that my rent would be due, and I couldn't ask the two good women who had been kind to me for credit. What would be the use? A new week would bring me no more than the past weeks, so why not end it once and for all?
Next morning, therefore, I gave Pelly back his bill, bluffing him by going out to our usual breakfast, on which I spent all I had in the world but a nickel and a dime. I must get something to do that day, or else—
Left alone, I tossed one of the two coins to decide whether or not I should go back to "the Intelligence." Going back had not been easy for the last few days, for I had noticed cold looks on the part of Miss Bryne and Miss Gladfoot, with a tendency to take me for a hoodoo. Even the young lady at the desk had ceased to say "Nothing yet," as I passed by, or as much as to glance at me. But as this was to be the last time, I obeyed the falling of the coin and went.
I went—to receive a little shock. Miss Bryne was waiting for me near the door, with a bit of paper in her hand.