“None needed.”
“Or Spain? I just want to get any kind of a job at first. Peeling potatoes or—It don’t make any difference—”
“None needed, I said, my man.” The porter examined the hall clock extensively.
Bill Wrenn suddenly popped into being and demanded: “Look here, you; I want to see somebody in authority. I want to know what I can ship as.”
The porter turned round and started. All his faith in mankind was destroyed by the shock of finding the fellow still there. “Nothing, I told you. No one needed.”
“Look here; can I see somebody in authority or not?”
The porter was privately esteemed a wit at his motherin-law’s. Waddling away, he answered, “Or not.”
Mr. Wrenn drooped out of the corridor. He had planned to see the Tate Gallery, but now he hadn’t the courage to face the difficulties of enjoying pictures. He zig-zagged home, mourning: “What’s the use. And I’ll be hung if I’ll try any other offices, either. The icy mitt, that’s what they hand you here. Some day I’ll go down to the docks and try to ship there. Prob’ly. Gee! I feel rotten!”
Out of all this fog of unfriendliness appeared the waitress at the St. Brasten Cocoa House; first, as a human being to whom he could talk, second, as a woman. She was ignorant and vulgar; she misused English cruelly; she wore greasy cotton garments, planted her large feet on the floor with firm clumsiness, and always laughed at the wrong cue in his diffident jests. But she did laugh; she did listen while he stammered his ideas of meat-pies and St. Paul’s and aeroplanes and Shelley and fog and tan shoes. In fact, she supposed him to be a gentleman and scholar, not an American.
He went to the cocoa-house daily.