He shook his head. “I have betterr workmen waiting at my door,” said he, “far betterr workmen.”
“You used to think something of my work, sir,” I pleaded.
“Somesing, somesing—yés!” he cried; “énough for a son of a reech man—not énough for an orphan. Besides, I sought you might learn to be an artist; I did not sink you might learn to be a workman.”
On a certain bench on the outer boulevard, not far from the tomb of Napoleon—a bench shaded at that date by a shabby tree, and commanding a view of muddy roadway and blank wall—I sat down to wrestle with my misery. The weather was cheerless and dark; in three days I had eaten but once; I had no tobacco; my shoes were soaked, my trousers horrid with mire; my humour and all the circumstances of the time and place lugubriously attuned. Here were two men who had both spoken fairly of my work while I was rich and wanted nothing; now that I was poor and lacked all: “No genius,” said the one; “not enough for an orphan,” the other; and the first offered me my passage like a pauper immigrant, and the second refused me a day’s wage as a hewer of stone—plain dealing for an empty belly. They had not been insincere in the past; they were not insincere to-day: change of circumstance had introduced a new criterion, that was all.
But if I acquitted my two Job’s comforters of insincerity, I was yet far from admitting them infallible. Artists had been contemned before, and had lived to turn the laugh on their contemners. How old was Corot before he struck the vein of his own precious metal? When had a young man been more derided (or more justly so) than the god of my admiration, Balzac? Or, if I required a bolder inspiration, what had I to do but turn my head to where the gold dome of the Invalides glittered against inky squalls, and recall the tale of him sleeping there: from the day when a young artillery-sub could be giggled at and nicknamed Puss-in-Boots by frisky misses, on to the days of so many crowns and so many victories, and so many hundred mouths of cannon, and so many thousand warhoofs trampling the roadways of astonished Europe eighty miles in front of the grand army? To go back, to give up, to proclaim myself a failure, an ambitious failure—first a rocket, then a stick! I, Loudon Dodd, who had refused all other livelihoods with scorn, and been advertised in the St. Joseph Sunday Herald as a patriot and an artist, to be returned upon my native Muskegon like damaged goods, and go the circuit of my father’s acquaintance, cap in hand, and begging to sweep offices! No, by Napoleon! I would die at my chosen trade; and the two who had that day flouted me should live to envy my success, or to weep tears of unavailing penitence behind my pauper coffin.
Meantime, if my courage was still undiminished, I was none the nearer to a meal. At no great distance my cabman’s eating-house stood, at the tail of a muddy cab-rank, on the shores of a wide thoroughfare of mud, offering (to fancy) a lace of ambiguous invitation. I might be received, I might once more fill my belly there; on the other hand, it was perhaps this day the bolt was destined to fall, and I might be expelled instead, with vulgar hubbub. It was policy to make the attempt, and I knew it was policy; but I had already, in the course of that one morning, endured too many affronts, and I felt I could rather starve than face another. I had courage and to spare for the future, none left for that day; courage for the main campaign, but not a spark of it for that preliminary skirmish of the cabman’s restaurant. I continued accordingly to sit upon my bench, not far from the ashes of Napoleon, now drowsy, now light-headed, now in complete mental obstruction, or only conscious of an animal pleasure in quiescence; and now thinking, planning, and remembering with unexampled clearness, telling myself tales of sudden wealth, and gustfully ordering and greedily consuming imaginary meals, in the course of which I must have dropped to sleep.
It was towards dark that I was suddenly recalled to famine by a cold souse of rain, and sprang shivering to my feet. For a moment I stood bewildered; the whole train of my reasoning and dreaming passed afresh through my mind; I was again tempted, drawn as if with cords, by the image of the cabman’s eating-house, and again recoiled from the possibility of insult. “Qui dort dîne,” thought I to myself; and took my homeward way with wavering footsteps, through rainy streets in which the lamps and the shop-windows now began to gleam, still marshalling imaginary dinners as I went.
“Ah, Monsieur Dodd,” said the porter, “there has been a registered letter for you. The facteur will bring it again to-morrow.”
A registered letter for me, who had been so long without one? Of what it could possibly contain I had no vestige of a guess, nor did I delay myself guessing; far less form any conscious plan of dishonesty: the lies flowed from me like a natural secretion.
“Oh,” said I, “my remittance at last! What a bother I should have missed it! Can you lend me a hundred francs until to-morrow?”