"In your present condition of abnormal self-consciousness and apperceptive egotism, I really shouldn't like to say."
When the voyage was ended Mr. Lummox went to see Mary Bike at her house, and his father—whom he had not seen for ten years—at HIS house. With a refined absence of natural affection he contented himself with inquiring of the servants as to his father's habits, and if he still wore dress clothes at dinner. The information thus elicited forced him to the conclusion that the old gentleman's circumstances were reduced, and that it was possible that he, John Lummox, might be actually compelled to earn his own living. He communicated that suspicion to his father at dinner, and over the last bottle of "Mouton," a circumstance which also had determined him in his resolution. "You might," said his father thoughtfully, "offer yourself to some rising American novelist as a study for the new hero,—one absolutely without ambition, capacity, or energy; willing, however, to be whatever the novelist chooses to make him, so long as he hasn't to choose for himself. If your inordinate self-consciousness is still in your way, I could give him a few points about you, myself."
"I had thought," said John, hesitatingly, "of going into your office and becoming your partner in the business. You could always look after me, you know."
A shudder passed over the old man. Then he tremblingly muttered to himself:
"Thank heaven! There is one way it may still be averted!" Retiring to his room he calmly committed suicide, thoughtfully leaving the empty poison bottle in the fender.
And this is how John Lummox came to offer himself as a clerk to Dan'l Borem. The ways of Providence are indeed strange, yet those of the novelist are only occasionally novel.
III
John K. Lummox lived for a week at the Turkey Buzzard Hotel exclusively on doughnuts and innuendoes. He was informed by Mr. Borem's clerk—whose place he was to fill—that he wouldn't be able to stand it, and thus received the character of his employer from his last employee.
"I suppose," said Dan'l Borem, chuckling, "that he said I was a old skinflint, good only at a hoss trade, uneddicated, ignorant, and unable to keep accounts, and an oppressor o' the widder and orphan. Allowed that my cute sayin's was a kind o' ten-cent parody o' them proverbs in Poor Richard's Almanack!"
"Omitting a few expletives, he certainly did," returned Lummox with great delicacy.