David walked the streets half the day before he could drive himself to try this plan. At length a superintendent consented to see him and listen to his story and appeal. "I appreciate your frankness," the superintendent replied, not unkindly. "But I am under strict orders on this point; I can take only men of the straightest records. But I hope you'll find something."
David was left without courage to try the plan again that afternoon. The next day he could find no one willing to hear him. In the evening Kate Morgan called again. Everything was in readiness for their venture of the following night, she told him. Once more he declared that he would have nothing to do with the affair. But to himself his words sounded only of the lips; and his indignation did not quicken the least trifle when Kate flung a dry laugh into his face.
The following morning, the last day of December, he spurred his spent courage on to another attempt. He at length found a wholesale notion store where a packer was wanted. The head of the packing department was large and powerful, with coarse, man-driving features; but, undeterred by this appearance, David recited his story.
The superintendent stared amazedly at David, and swore. "Well if you ain't got the nerve!" he roared. "You admit you're a crook, and yet you ask me for a job! What d'you think we're runnin' here?—a reform school? Not on your life! Now you see if you can't find the door out o' here—and quick!"
David had neither the strength nor the spirit to reply to this man as he had replied to the owner of the department store in One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. When he reached the open air he walked a few paces, then paused and leaned against the front of a building. He felt an utter exhaustion—there was not another effort in him. He was like a horse, driven to the last ounce of its strength, that lies down in its tracks to die; the whip can only make it quiver, cannot make it rise. He chanced to turn his head, and saw himself in the mirror that backed the show-window—a thin, stooping figure with a white line of a mouth and a gray, haggard face. He was so numb, so spiritually spent, that this spectre of himself stirred not a single emotion within him.
That evening he swept a saloon, and ate of the cheese and corn-beef sandwiches at the free-lunch counter till the bartender ordered him out. Then he wandered aimlessly through the night, which was balmy despite the month, with no desire to return to the dingy four walls of his unheated room. He remembered in a vague way that this was the night Kate Morgan had set for the robbery; and perhaps his staying from home was due to the unfelt guidance of his conscience. He had no definite thoughts or sensations; only a vast, stunning sense of absolute defeat.
A little after eleven o'clock he found himself wandering along the East River, and presently he turned upon a dock and walked toward the water between two rows of trucks, facing each other, their shafts raised supplicatingly to the stars. He seated himself at the end of the dock, and his chin in his two hands, looked out upon the river. Save for the reflection, like luminous, writhing arms, that the few lights of Brooklyn reached toward him on the water's surface, and save for the turbulent brilliance under the Williamsburg Bridge's great bow of arc lights, the river, which the tide was dragging wildly out to sea, was as black as blindness.
He gazed forth into the darkness, forth upon the swirling water—dully, without thought, in the flat stupor of unrising defeat.... Presently a bell began to send down the hour from a neighbouring steeple. Mechanically he counted the strokes. Twelve. The number at first had no significance, but after a moment its meaning thrilled him through. This was the New Year!... The New Year!... And how was he beginning it? Penniless—friendless—without work—with little strength—with no courage—without hope. A happy New Year, indeed!
Suddenly all the bitterness that had been gathering and smouldering within him these last four months, burst out volcanically. And his passion was not alone in his own behalf; it was in behalf of the thousands of others who had made a similar struggle, and to whom the world had similarly denied the privilege of honesty. Starved and hopeless! Why? Because he could not work?—because there was no work?—because the world had decided the moral development of such as he required further punishment? No. Because the rich, powerful world was afraid!—afraid of its dollars! Because, if he were taken in, given a chance to live honestly, he might steal a bolt of cloth, or a coat, or a vase, or a shawl! There was the reason—the only reason. A bolt of cloth against a human life, begging to live! A coat against a human soul, agonising to be honest! Cloths and coats mean dollars—mean carriages, and diamonds, and wines. Cloths and coats must be guarded.
But the human life? The human soul?