Thrifty Stock, and Other Stories

by Ben Ames Williams

II

Bob could not afford to be fired. He had been a newspaper reporter all his life, and always would be. His salary had always been small, and always would be. His savings were spasmodic, disappearing like snow patches on a sunny day before the occasional emergencies of life, and emergencies insisted on arising. Emergencies do arise, when a man has a family. Just now, for example, his wife was only two days out of hospital, and the bill unpaid.... No, he could not afford the luxury of being fired.

So fear scourged and shook him. It was physical; there were certain muscular and nervous reactions that went with it. His heels, tucked under his chair, felt naked and chilled by the little currents of air that circulated along the floor. His bowels were sick within him, as though there were an actual, ponderable weight in his mid-section. His ears, attuned to what went on in the room behind him, seemed unnaturally enlarged, and there were pricklings in his scalp.

He had known fear before. Such dull periods come to every newspaper office. But Bob had always pulled through, escaped discharge. He had worked at this same desk for a dozen years.... Had come here from the Journal, feeling a little proudly that he was taking an upward step, beginning at last to climb. It had meant more money. Thirty-five dollars a week. He was getting forty, now. So little, yet enough to make a man a coward.

Bob had never been fired from any job. The process of discharge was cloaked, in his thoughts, with an awful mystery. Sometimes men found a note, in a blue envelope, in their mail boxes; sometimes Dade called them to him, spoke to them, explained the necessity which forced him to let them go. They took it variously; defiantly, calmly, humbly, as their natures dictated. But it had never happened to Bob....

He was afraid, these days, to go to his box for mail lest the dreaded note be there; and when Dade stopped at his desk or called him across the room he cringed to his very soul with dread. He was, no doubt of it at all, an arrant and an utter coward.

So he sat, this morning, and wrote, over, and over again:

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. Now is the....” Or shifted, and tapped off: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” He was still thus occupied when Dade called from his broad desk by the window:

“Bob!”

The little old man looked fearfully around, and Dade beckoned. Bob’s heart dropped into his boots; he was fairly white with fear. Perhaps Boswell had told Dade to let him go....