"But what about the fifty dollars I owe the bank?" he asked.
"I suppose you'll have to put it up," said Charon, studying the expression of the face before him.
"But there is three months' salary coming to me, according to the Rules and Regulations," replied Evan.
The accountant did not have to scratch his head; apparently he was prepared to act deliberately.
"Well," he said, "since they haven't said anything about the silver you had better say nothing. We are paying you two weeks in advance; let it go at that."
For a moment Evan figured. There is no crisis where a bankclerk can't figure. Three months' salary would be $90. That was coming to him. But he owed the bank $50, and they had paid him $15 more than was due, leaving only $25 due him. It would not pay to fight them for so small an amount. In fact, he did not know how to fight; besides, the vim was knocked out of him and he only wanted to get away from that wretched office. A strong revulsion possessed him; he turned away from the accountant without answering, and his eyes wandered about the dark, bad-smelling office. He suddenly discovered that he hated every desk, every book, and the brazen-faced fixtures.
But coming to his own desk he found the work piling up, and mechanically he lifted a pen to straighten things up a bit before leaving. A good bankman, under any circumstances whatever, cannot endure to see things in a mess. Evan had scarcely taken up his pen to make an entry in the "bank book" when Alfred Castle glided toward him and said in a high-pitched, authoritative tone:
"Never mind that, Nelson; you're through here and we want you to quit."
The fired clerk was too badly wounded, for the moment, to be angry. Later, he wondered why Fate should have been so spiteful as to send Castle, above all others, on that humiliating errand. He suddenly remembered the way Alfred had greeted him on his arrival in Toronto, and came to the conclusion that from the first he had been under suspicion with that respectable nephew of the "Big Eye's."
Evan went down to the basement for his hat, not quite expecting to find it there; in truth, he would not have been much surprised to find the basement itself gone. Certainly, the foundation had disappeared from under a structure mightier and stronger, as he viewed it, than piles of stone and mortar. He had frequently criticized the office slavery of the bank, but he had never lost faith in the institution's magnitude and imperishability. It was the solidity of it that he had banked on and clung to, in spite of blinding work; but now the golden god had crumbled, like the smitten image of Daniel's dream—so far as Evan was concerned. The idol still stood for idolaters, of course, like that other image in the Prophet's time; but to the enlightened, the awakened, it had perished. And, to carry the analogy further, Evan, like Daniel, saw before he understood. He must have his vision interpreted for him. Time would accomplish that. Just now he gazed and wondered. Clearly he saw a ruin, but as yet it was inseparable debris, and the sight of it put his head in a muddle.... While he washed his hands in the basement he stared at the wall, and looking away from that his eyes met those of Bill Watson.