When I got home that night, I was several years younger.
IV
Having conquered my fears and tasted adventure, I was hungry now for more. My wife felt the change in me when I saw her that evening in Brooklyn. In fact, she has always declared that it was the influence which I brought into the house that night-the feeling of new vigor and of new hope-that made George take a turn for the better and get well.
As usual, on my Brooklyn subway trip, I read the want advertisements in the evening papers. An office over in a small New Jersey town was advertising for a printer! I read it two or three times. But if I had not taken that Central Park adventure trip, I don’t believe I should have answered this advertisement. I had never thought of going to New Jersey to look for a job. I felt all the self-centred New Yorker’s prejudices against New Jersey. But I did go. I was up and on my way early the next morning.
And that was how I happened to meet Ben Hutchins and find my life’s big opportunity.
The first time I saw Ben Hutchins, I laughed. I knew at once that he was a crank. He was an old-school printer, like myself. For years he had run this little job office and published a weekly newspaper. Afterwards, I learned that he had plenty of money-was, in fact, rich-and that the only reason he kept on publishing his paper was that he didn’t quite know how to get out of the habit.
His little old one-story building stood off by itself, in the business section of this small New Jersey town. To get to it, you had to cross a bridge and follow a narrow dirt path. The path this morning was muddy, after a short flurry of wet snow. The paint was worn off the building. One of the old-fashioned shutters was loose and flapped in the November wind. On the roof was a rooster weather-vane that looked as if it might have been crowing into the teeth of a half-century of storms.
I opened the door and went in. It was one large room-a typical, old-fashioned, country-newspaper office. Its assortment of junk looked as if it might have been accumulating there since the American Revolution. An antiquated roll-topped desk stood in the corner, by one of the front windows. A tipsy old swivel-chair stood in front of it. Near it, a lop-sided old waste-basket spilled its overload of newspapers on the floor. In the centre of the room a rusty base-burner stove glowed with a red-hot coal fire.
Ben Hutchins, in his shirt-sleeves, and wearing a printer’s dirty apron, stood in front of one of the cases, setting type. He was a stockily built man of about seventy, with a belligerent shock of gray hair that stood up straight on his head.
When I entered, he waited to space out a line before recognizing my presence. Then he turned and glowered at me over his glasses, which hung on the tip of his bulbous nose.