The Debtor: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

She had the front chamber completely refurnished when she fell asleep, and besides had some exciting and entirely victorious feminine tilts with sundry women friends who had ventured to intimate that her son had made an odd matrimonial choice. It was quite a cold night, and she wondered if that child had sufficient clothing on her bed. She was in reality, in her own way, as much in love with the girl as her son.

Chapter XXXVI

Carroll, in the ensuing weeks, living alone with Charlotte, endured a species of mental and spiritual torture which might have been compared with the rack and wheel of the Inquisition. It seemed to Arthur Carroll in those days as if torture was as truly one of the elements incumbent upon man's existence as fire, water, or air. He got an uncanny fancy that if it ceased he would cease. He had all his life, except in violent stresses, that happy, contented-with-the-sweet-of-the-moment temperament popularly supposed to be a characteristic of the butterfly over the rose. But deprive the butterfly of the rose and he might easily become a more tragic thing than any in existence. Now Carroll was deprived of his rose, he could get absolutely none of the sweets out of existence from whence his own individuality manufactured its honey. Even Charlotte's presence became an additional torment to him, dearly as he loved her and as thoroughly as he realized what her coming back had done for him, from what it had saved him. She had given him the impetus which placed him back in his normal condition, but, back there, he suffered even more, as a man will suffer less under a surgical operation than when the influence of the anesthetics has ceased. There was absolutely no ready money in the house during those weeks except the sum which Charlotte's aunt had sent her, which was fast diminishing, and a few scattering dollars, or rather, pennies, which Carroll picked up in ways which almost unhinged his brain when he reflected upon them afterwards. Whatever he had done before, the man tried in those days every means to obtain an honest livelihood, except the one which he knew was always open, and from which he shrank with such repugnance that it seemed he could not even contemplate it and his mind retain his balance. In his uneasy sleep at night he often had a dream of that experience which had yielded him money, which might yield him money again. He saw before him the sea of faces, of the commonest American type, of the type whose praise and applause mean always a certain disparagement. He saw his own face, his proud, white face with the skin and lineaments of a proud family, stained into the likeness of a despised race; he heard his own tongue forsaking the pure English of his fathers for the soft thickness of the negro, roaring the absurd sentimental songs; he saw his own stately limbs contorted in the rollicking, barbaric dance—and awoke with a cold sweat over him. He knew all the time that that was all was left to him, but he snatched at everything. He could not obtain the floor-walker position of which he had spoken to Anderson. He thought that possibly his fine presence and urbane manner might recommend him for a place of that sort, but it was already filled. He went to several of the great department stores and inquired if there was a vacancy. He felt that the superintendents to whom he applied regarded his good points as he might have regarded the good points of a horse. One of them told him that if he would give his address, he would be given the preference whenever a vacancy occurred. Carroll knew that he was mentally appraised as a promising person to direct ladies to ribbon and muslin counters. He looked at another floor-walker strutting up and down the aisle, and felt sure that he could do better, and all this amused contempt for himself deepened and bored its way into his very soul. He always asked himself, with the demand of an unpitying judge, if he could not have done better for himself if he had begun at once; if he had not at the first failure drifted with no resistance, with the pleasant, easy, devil-may-careness which was in his nature along with the sterner stuff which was now upheaving and asserting itself, and taken what he could, how he could. He had not, after all, had an absolutely unhappy home, although it had been founded on the sands, and although that iron of hatred of the man who had done him the wrong had been always in his soul. The life he had led had been not one of active and voluntary preying upon his fellow-men; it had been only the life of one who must have the sweets of existence for himself and those he loved, and he had gotten them, even if the flowers and the fruit hung over the garden-walls of others. Now it suddenly seemed to him that he could no longer do it, as he had done, even if the owners of the fruit and flowers should be still unawares. Curiously enough, the old Pilgrim's Progress which he had read as a child was very forcibly in his mind in these days. He remembered the child that ate the fruit that hung over the wall, and how the gripes, in consequence, seized him. Something very like the conviction of sin was over the man, or, rather, a complete consciousness of himself and his deeds, which is, maybe, after all, the true meaning of the term. It was true that the self-knowledge had seemed to come, perforce, because it was temporarily out of his power to transgress farther; in other words, because he was completely found out; but all the same, the knowledge was there. He saw himself just as he was, had been—a great man goaded on always by the small, never-ceasing prick of hatred, with the sense of injury always stinging his soul, living as he chose, having all that he could procure, utterly careless whether at the expense and suffering of others or not. Now, for the first time, he began to adjust himself in the place of others, and the adjusting produced torment from the realization of their miseries, and worse torment from realization of his own contemptibility. It really seemed as if all positions which might have been in some keeping with the man and his antecedents were absolutely out of his reach. Not a night but he read the advertising columns until he was blind and dizzy. Every morning he went to New York and hunted. The first morning he had taken the train, he had actually to assure some of his watchful creditors that he was going to return. Then all day he wandered about the streets, making one of long lines of applicants for the vacant positions. One morning he found himself in the line with William Allbright. He recognized unmistakably the meek, bent back of the old clerk three ahead of him in the line. A book-keeper had been advertised for in a large wholesale house, and there were perhaps forty applicants all awaiting their turn. His first impulse, when he caught sight of his old clerk, was to leave the line himself; then the nobility which was struggling for life within him asserted itself and made him ashamed of his shame. He stood still with his head a little higher, and moved on with the slowly moving line of men which crawled towards the desk like a caterpillar. He saw Allbright turn away rejected with a feeling of pity; the old man looked dejected. Carroll reflected with a sensation of pride that at least he did not owe him. He himself was rejected promptly after he had owned to his age. The man four behind him was chosen. He was a very young man, scarcely more than a boy, unless his looks belied him. He was distinctly handsome, with the boy-doll style of beauty—curly, dark hair, rosy cheeks, and a small, very carefully tended mustache. He wore a very long and fashionable coat, and was evidently pleasantly conscious of its flop around his ankles. His handsome face wore an expression of pert triumph as he passed on into the inner office.... Carroll, who had lingered with an idle curiosity to ascertain who was the successful applicant, heard a voice so near his ear that it whistled. The voice was exceedingly bitter, even malignant.

“That's the way it goes, these times; that's the way it always goes,” said the voice.

Carroll turned and gazed at the speaker, a man probably older than himself; if not, he looked older, since his hair was quite white and his carriage not so good.

“The employers nowadays are a pack of fools, a pack of fools!” said the man. His long, rather handsome face, a face which should have been mild in its natural state was twisted into a thousand sardonic wrinkles. “A pack of fools!” he repeated. “Here they'll go and hire a little whippersnapper like that every time, instead of a man who has had experience and knows how to do the work, just because he's young. Young! What's that? You'd think what they wanted was a man to keep their books straight. I can keep books if I do say so, and that young snip can't. Lord! He was in Avin & Mann's with me. Why, I tell you he can't add up a column of figures three inches long straight, to save his neck. The books will be in a pretty state. I'll give him just ten days before they'll have to get an expert in to straighten out things. Hope they will; serve 'em right. Here I am, can't get a job to save my life, because my hair has turned and I've got a few more years over my head, and I can keep books better than I ever could in my life. Good Lord! You'd think it was what was inside a man's head they'd be after, instead of the outside.” He looked at Carroll. “Guess I've got a little the advantage of you in age,” he said, “but I suppose that's the matter why you were given the cold shoulder.”

“I shouldn't be surprised if you were right, sir,” replied Carroll, rather apathetically. He was going through all this without the slightest hope, but only for the sake of feeling that he had done his utmost before he took up with the alternative which so dismayed his very soul. He himself looked old that morning. He had retained his youthful appearance much longer than men usually do, but as he had viewed his reflection in the glass that morning he had said to himself that he at last was showing his years. His hair had turned visibly gray in the last few weeks; lines had deepened; and not only that, but the youthful fire had given place to the apathy and weary resignation of age.

“But you look as if you could do more and better work in an hour than that young bob-squirt could in a month,” said the man at his side.

“Very likely,” replied Carroll, indifferently.

“You don't seem to care much about it,” the other man said. The two had gone out of the building, and were walking slowly down the street.