Every night when he staggered from the comparatively clean air of the street into the fetid chill of his room he asked himself why he—son of Northern tamaracks and quiet books—went on with this horrible imitation of living; and each time answered himself that, whether there was any real reason or not, he was going to make good on one job at least, and that the one he held. And admonished himself that he was very well paid for a saloon porter.
If Carl had never stood in the bread-line, if he had never been compelled to clean a saloon gutter artistically, in order to keep from standing in that bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the commonplaceness for which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did not at the time feel that he was debased. He lived twenty-four hours a day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself was so much less desirable than driving a car or wandering through the moonlight with Eve L'Ewysse in days wonderful and lost that, to endure it, to conquer it, he had to develop a control over temper and speech and body which was to stay with him in windy mornings of daring.
Within three months Carl had become assistant bar-keeper, and now he could save eight dollars a week. He bought a couple of motor magazines and went to one vaudeville show and kept his sub-landlord's daughter from running off with a cadet, wondering how soon she would do it in any case, and receiving a depressing insight into the efficiency of society for keeping in the mire most of the people born there.
Three months later, at the end of winter, he was ready to start for Panama.
He was going to Panama because he had read in a Sunday newspaper of the Canal's marvels of engineering and jungle.
He had avoided making friends. There was no one to give him farewell when he emerged from the muck. But he had one task to perform—to settle with the Saloon Snob.
Petey McGuff was the name of this creature. He was an oldish and wicked man, born on the Bowery. He had been a heavy-weight prize-fighter in the days of John L. Sullivan; then he had met John, and been, ever since, an honest crook who made an excellent living by conducting a boxing-school in which the real work was done by assistants. He resembled a hound with a neat black bow tie, and he drooled tobacco-juice down his big, raw-looking, moist, bristly, too-masculine chin. Every evening from eleven to midnight Petey McGuff sat at the round table in the mildewed corner at the end of the bar, drinking old-fashioned whisky cocktails made with Bourbon, playing Canfield, staring at the nude models pasted on the milky surface of an old mirror, and teasing Carl.
"Here, boy, come 'ere an' wipe off de whisky you spilled.... Come on, you tissy-cat. Get on de job.... You look like Sunday-school Harry. Mamma's little rosy-cheeked boy.... Some day I'm going to bust your beezer. Gawd! it makes me sick to sit here and look at dose goily-goily cheeks.... Come 'ere, Lizzie, an' wipe dis table again. On de jump, daughter."
Carl held himself in. Hundreds of times he snarled to himself: "I won't hit him! I will make good on this job, anyway." He created a grin which he could affix easily.
Now he was leaving. He had proven that he could hold a job; had answered the unspoken criticisms from Plato, from Chicago garages, from the Great Riley Show. For the first time since he had deserted college he had been able to write to his father, to answer the grim carpenter's unspoken criticisms of the son who had given up his chance for an "education." And proudly he had sent to his father a little check. He had a beautiful new fifteen-dollar suit of blue serge at home. In his pocket was his ticket—steerage by the P. R. R. line to Colon—and he would be off for bluewater next noon. His feet danced behind the bar as he filled schooners of beer and scraped off their foam with a celluloid ruler. He saw himself in Panama, with a clean man's job, talking to cosmopolitan engineers against a background of green-and-scarlet jungle. And, oh yes, he was going to beat Petey McGuff that evening, and get back much of the belligerent self-respect which he had been drawing off into schooners with the beer.