The children, having prospered and grown during the winter, are in need of new summer wardrobes, which I have ordered bought. If it is to be disaster, then shabbiness shall not betray us. Like the man who donned evening clothes in which to sink with the Titanic, I have always entertained a stubborn faith in the policy of good clothes. Policy, policy—the trail of policy is over me like a fetid odor—and how clean and unsmirched I have always felt in my stupid transparency! Gertrude, if she knew it, would now rejoice that she had thrown me over.
I envy our clerks and typists who banish all cares at five in the afternoon and do not resume them until the following morning. What a gay life is theirs—if they but knew it. They jest and fool and hurl picturesque slang at one another and draw their pay on Saturdays, unconscious of how near to perdition we totter. If we go to the wall they will soon find other places. But I—shall find the wall. I wish I knew what the emotions of Fred are as, rucking his forehead heavily, he strides about our rugs. I only know, however, that mine are emotions of doom.
The black doom is upon us.
After days of haggling and lying and shuffling and paltering we have, as a firm, expired.
Our vain and concentrated efforts to sell something that we had not the necessary means and connections to sell led us to neglect the things we could have done.
I shall not soon forget the vile outburst of the heavy-jowled Sampson when as by a Sultan's firman, he imperiously summoned us to his office and told us in his language what he thought of us.
"People like you don't belong in the Street—they belong in jail. Assign!" he snarled, "Better assign at once and clear out!"
And not the least of the bitterness of that moment was the acrid realization that I could not charge him with having flattered and hounded Fred into the vanity of the enterprise, because at that moment Fred and I were one—with this distinction: What Fred was suffering would roll from his back like water from a rhinoceros, whereas I would remain obscenely branded by his words forevermore.
It was useless to argue, futile to protest. There was no time or place for extenuating circumstances. I was too full of shame and humiliation to offer any conciliatory suggestions, and I still had enough of mulish pride not to truckle to that fish-eyed bully. We walked out of that man's office bankrupts.
I still marvel how I found my way back to our own office through the lurid darkness that encompassed me. The world about me—the palpitating, pressing eager world, of which in a measure I had been a part—was suddenly strange and phantasmal and alien, the ghostly city of a dream. The people were shadows and their hurrying steps and errands as mysterious and as unrelated to my life as those of a colony of ants. The only actuality I did not envisage in that dark moment which was coextensive with eternity, was that I was the anemic ghost stalking at noonday and the others were the reality.