“No; but let me tell you about my house,” he answered. “Just now it’s to be a rather simple affair of, say, ten rooms; a low, rambling house of the English type, with plaster walls showing the trowel marks; or I may have it of field stone, with a beamed ceiling in the living room and——”
“But why are you going to build it, Appleby?”
He looked solemn.
“Because of my philosophy of life,” he said.
“I don’t see——”
“This is what I mean,” he explained: “I came out of college about as well prepared for life as a snake is prepared to ride a bicycle. I’d no idea what I wanted to do. First, I thought I’d like to be a painter; I lived on art and sausages for five months; then I ran out of paint and sausages. So I went to work in an advertising agency. I’m not just sure now why I did. I think I ran into some fellow who said advertising was a young giant still in its infancy and advised me to get in on the ground floor; I remember the metaphor, if not the fellow. I did get in on the ground floor and I stayed there for four months. Then I lost interest in the superlative merits of the hair restorer my company advertised, and left the young giant still in its infancy.”
The coffee came; he absent-mindedly, drank some.
“I entered finance,” he went on. “That is to say, I trekked all over town trying to find someone feeble-minded enough to buy a bond from me. Not finding anyone, I entered foreign trade; meaning, I sat at a desk and tried to sell dolls in gross lots to Peruvian importers. I did this for some endless months. One day I found myself looking out of my ninth-story window and wondering why I didn’t jump. ‘Why,’ I found myself asking myself, ‘do I continue to live? Do I care a snap about dolls in gross lots? I do not! Do I like Peruvians? Not at all! In fact, they both bore me. Life,’ I said to myself, ‘is as empty as a used cantaloupe.’ What had I to live for?”
Appleby sipped his coffee, and I said I didn’t know.
“Nothing,” he said; “nothing. What was my life? Same routine. Get up in the morning; miserable business, getting up. Shave myself; always painful; tender skin, you know. Breakfast; same old coffee, same old cereal, same old eggs. Jostle down to the office. Same dolls; same Peruvians. Lunch with earnest young exporters; same oatmeal crackers and milk; same talk about profits and markets. Back to the office; ‘Miss Gurry, take a letter: “Yours of the fourteenth received, and in reply would say in re shipment of 325 gross of best India-rubber dolls, style 7BB—squeaking—am shipping same f.o.b., Wappingers Falls, N. Y., at once.” ’ Oh, you know the line. Home to my apartment, the size of a police patrol. Read the papers. Same old bunk. ‘Strike Situation Serious.’ ‘International Situation Serious.’ ‘Pugilistic Situation Serious.’ Everything serious, everybody serious. Dinner; that’s serious too. Same old question: What shall I do to kill the evening? Read a book? The usual bunk; either romance about people who are too happy, or realism about people who are not happy enough. Go to a show? The old plots, the old lines, the old girls. Same banalities; same strutting hams spouting moss-covered buckets of bunk. Call on a girl? Ghastly bore. Same old ‘Have you seen this or have you read that? Isn’t it shocking about the Warps getting a divorce, or nice about the Woofs getting married? Do you believe a man and a girl can really be friends in the strictest sense of the word, and how is your golf game getting on?’ Home to bed, wind the alarm clock; same old dreams, and then—br-r-ring—7:30 same thing all over again. I was slaving at work I hated, and what was I getting out of it? What was it all leading to?”