When there followed a journeyman-tailor who had wasted his opportunity in drink, and was impelled by repentance and family needs to beg pitifully to be taken on again, Max's politeness went like a bang. He snubbed the tailor-man for his ingratitude, and abruptly closed the poor fool's pleadings with a turn of his back.
There were so many other starvelings to take that wretch's place.
In the course of the morning Max showed himself shrewd, petty, fawning, arrogant, determined, stupid, vulgar, and cruel. Ernie Jenkins, who copied his manner as well as he was able to, lived in mortal terror of him. To Ernie, Max Oldstein was a mean necessity, his bread and butter, his all. To lose that hateful, pitiful employment would be to cut off every one of his private luxuries--his evening glass of bitter, with its opportunity for badinage with a barmaid, the Woodbine cigarettes, the weekly visit to a music-hall, the Sunday walk with Emily. So he went on, like a hundred thousand others of his kind--selling his life for a pittance, swallowing infinite insults, cringing and mean. Poor Ernie! What is to be done with such humans as he?
At one o'clock Max hurried to the "Haversack" for a large meal of stout and boiled beef with carrots, and, while eating, read with sniggerings a weekly pink paper, which gave oracular advice on race-horses, interspersed with funny paragraphs about lodgers. Also there was talk, in which barmaids, customers and waiters joined familiarly--of the X street murder, the betting prices, and the divorce case of the day with its pretty details.
Then Captain Crowe, whom the folk of his world knew as "Charlie," came in, and Max was pleased to speculate a shilling on a hundred up with him, which the young man lost with a very bad grace, till the Captain, who really had once upon a time held a subaltern's commission in a disbanded battalion, having borrowed half-a-crown from a casual customer, who knew him but indifferently well, restored his opponent's good temper with the gift of a soda and whisky and some flowers of speech, so leading the way to another game of billiards and another defeat for Max.
June was awed by all she saw, and puzzled how to win back to Fairyland--this! She sat amongst used tumblers on the mantelpiece, below the marker's board, patiently watching and wondering. What could she do to mend things? How difficult it was! Were human beings worth saving? Was not Oberon in his ruling right, and she wickedly wrong? These creatures--so mean and sordid--were worse than ever they had been painted to her by their most candid critic in Fairyland.
Then she remembered Sally, and the sweated women in their evil home, and decided to persevere.
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" she said thoughtfully, unconsciously plagiarizing.
The whisky ended, and the business of recreation done, Max Oldstein paid his score unwillingly, and returned to headquarters. Ernie met him at the door-step.
"Guvnor's come. Been waiting an hour," he warned him.