The whole home, however, began to have atmosphere—personality. There was something open, hospitable, warm about it—something comfortable and livable.
Among the first things Joe did was to procure two assistants. One was the bookkeeper, Nathan Slate, a lean and dangling individual, who collapsed over his high desk in the corner like a many-bladed penknife. He was thin and cadaverous, and spoke in a meek and melancholy voice, studied and slow. He dressed in black and tried to suppress his thin height by stooping low and hanging his head. The other addition was Billy, the office-boy, a sharp, bright youth with red hair and brilliant blue eyes.
There was much else to do. For instance, there were the money affairs to get in shape. Joe secured a five-per-cent mortgage with his capital. Marty Briggs paid down two thousand cash and was to pay two thousand a year and interest. So Joe could figure his income at somewhat over six thousand dollars, and, as he hoped that he and his mother would use not more than fifteen hundred a year, or, at the most, two thousand, he felt he had plenty to throw into his enterprise.
Among the first things that Joe discovered was a gift of his own temperament. He was a born crowd-man, a "mixer." He found he could instantly assume the level of the man he talked with, and that his tongue knew no hindrance. Thought flowed easily into speech. This gave him a freedom among men, a sense of belonging anywhere, and singled him out from the rest. It gave him, too, the joy of expression—the joy of throwing out his thought and getting its immediate reaction in other lives. Yet he understood perfectly the man who seemed shy and recluse, who was choked-off before strangers, and who yet burned to be a democrat, to give and take, to share alien lives, to be of the moving throng of life. Such a man was the victim either of a wrong education, an education of repression that discouraged any personal display, or he had a twist in his temperament. Joe, who began to be well aware of his gift, used it without stint and found that it had a contagious quality—it loosened other people up; it unfolded their shy and secret petals like sun heat on a bud; it made the desert of personality blossom like the rose. He warmed the life about him because he could express himself.
So it was not hard for Joe to shift to this new neighborhood and become absorbed in its existence. Tradespeople, idlers, roomers and landlady in the house accepted him at once and felt as if they had known him all their lives. By a power almost of intuition he probed their obscure histories and entered into their destinies.
However, in spite of these activities and all the bustle and stir of fresh beginnings, Joe, that sunny morning, was suffering a sharp reaction. In the presence of Nathan Slate and Billy he was pretending to work, but his brain was as dry as a soda-cracker. It was that natural revulsion of the idealist following the first glow. Here he was, up against a reality, and yet with no definite plan, not even a name for his paper, and he had not even begun to penetrate the life about him. The throbbing moment had arrived when he must set his theories into motion, drive them out into the lives of the people, and get reactions. But how? In what way? His brain refused to think, and he felt nothing save a misery and poverty of the spirit that were unendurable.
It seemed to him suddenly as if he had hastily embarked on a search for the fountain of eternal youth—a voyage that followed mirages, and was hollow and illusory. Beginnings, after the first flush, always have this quality of fake, and Joe was standing in the shadow-land between two lives. The old life was receding in the past; the new life had not yet appeared. Without training, without experience, without definite knowledge of the need to be met, with only a strong desire and a mixed ideal, and almost without his own volition, he found himself now sitting at a desk in West Tenth Street, with two employees, and nothing to do. How out of this emptiness was he to create something vital?
This naturally brought a pang he might have anticipated. He had a sudden powerful hankering for the old life. That at least was man-size—his job had been man's work. He looked back at those fruitful laborious days, with their rich interest and absorbing details, their human companionships, and had an almost irrepressible desire to rush out, take the elevated train, go down East Eighty-first Street, ascend the elevator, ring the bell, and enter his dominion of trembling, thundering presses. He could smell the old smells, he could see the presses and the men, he could hear the noise. That was where he belonged. Voluntarily he had exiled himself from happiness and use. He wanted to go back—wanted it hard, almost groaned with homesickness.
Such struggles are death throes or birth throes. They are as real as two men wrestling. Joe could sit still no longer, could mask no longer the combat within him. So he rose hastily and went out and wandered about the shabby, unfriendly neighborhood. He had a mad desire, almost realized, to take the car straight to Eighty-first Street, and only the thought of Marty Briggs in actual possession held him back. Finally he went back and took lunch, and again tried the vain task of pretending to work.
It was three o'clock when he surrendered. He strode in to his mother.