Crusoe in New York, and other tales

by Edward Everett Hale

"Why should I not be conductor? If you laugh any more, I shall offer myself to the company to-morrow, and I will wear a crimson satin frock, and a hat with an ostrich feather. Then we will see which car is the fullest. Cannot I hand a gentleman in quite as well as this assiduous squinting man who hands me in? Can't I make change as fast as that man who gave you a fifteen-cent bill for a quarter? I will not be laughed at, though I am a woman."

So Max stopped laughing for a minute. But he had laughed so much that they discussed no more details that day. Any allusion to fares or platforms or the rail was enough to make his face redden, and to compel him to crowd his handkerchief into his mouth. And Bertha would not encourage him by laughing when he did.

CHAPTER III.

A LODGMENT MADE.

All the same a lodgment had been made. The idea had been suggested to Max, and the little seed Bertha had planted did not die. Poor fellow! his name was on the lists of all the railway companies, and so were the names of five thousand other fellows out of work. His name was also on the postmaster's list of applicants for the next vacancy among clerks or carriers. The postmaster was amazingly civil; asked Max to write the name himself, so that there need be no mistake. So Max observed that his name came at the bottom of the seventh long column of K's, there being so many men whose name began with K who needed employment. He calculated roughly, from the size of the book, that about seven thousand men had applied before him. Then he went to the mayor to see if he could not be a policeman, or a messenger at the City Hall. He had first-rate introductions. The mayor's clerk was very civil, but he said that they had about eight thousand people waiting there. So Max's chances of serving the public seemed but poor.

And thus it was that he haunted the paint-shop more and more. At first he had no thought, of course, of anything so absurd as Bertha's plan; still, all the same, it would do no harm to think it over, and the thinking part he did, and he did it carefully and well. He went through all the experiences of driver and of conductor in his imagination. He made it his duty to ride on the front platform always as he went to town or returned, that he might catch the trick of the brakes, and be sure of the grades. Nay, he learned the price of cars, and found from what factories the Cosmopolitan was supplied.

When a man thus plans out a course of life, though he thinks he does it only for fun, it becomes all the more easy to step into it. If he has learned the part, he is much more likely to play it than he would be if he had it still to learn. And as times grew harder and harder, when at last Max had to make a second hole in his bank deposit, and a pretty large one too, tired with enforced idleness, as he had never been by cheerful work, Max took one of those steps which cannot be retraced. He wrote, what he used to call afterward "the fatal letter," on which all this story hangs.

But this was not till he had had a careful and loving talk with Bertha. He loved her more than ever, and he valued her more than ever, after this year and a half of married life. And Bertha could have said the like of Max. There was nothing she would not do for him, and she knew that there was nothing he would not do for her.

Max told her at last that he felt discouraged. Everybody said, "Go West": but what could he do at the West? He did not know how to plough, and she did not know how to make cheese. No. He said he had laughed at her plan of the street-car at first, but he believed there was "money in it." They would have to spend most of their little capital in the outfit. A span of horses and a car could not be had for nothing. But once bought, they were property. He did not think they had better try to run all day. That would tire Bertha, and the horses could not stand it. But if she were serious, he would try. He would write to Newcastle, to a firm of builders whom the Cosmopolitan had sometimes employed. He would look out for a span of horses and proper harness. If she would have her dress ready, they could at least try when the car arrived. If she did not like it, he would make some appeal to the builders to take the car off his hands. But, in short, he said, if she did not really, in her heart, favor the plan, he would never speak of it nor think of it again.