CHAPTER XV
e had been a jolly mechanic again, in denim overalls and jumper and a defiant black skull-cap with long, shiny vizor; the tender of the motor-boat fleet at an Ontario summer hotel. One day he had looked up, sweating and greasy, to see Howard Griffin, of Plato, parading past in white flannels. He had muttered: "I don't want Them to know I've just been bumming around. I'll go some place else. And I'll do something worth while." Now he was on the train for New York, meditating impersonally on his uselessness, considering how free of moss his rolling had kept him. He could think of no particularly masterful plan for accumulating moss. If he had not bought a ticket through to New York he would have turned back, to seek a position in one of the great automobile factories that now, this early autumn of 1906, were beginning to distinguish Detroit. Well, he had enough money to last for one week in New York. He would work in an automobile agency there; later he would go to Detroit, and within a few years be president of a motor company, rich enough to experiment with motor-boats and to laugh at Howard Griffin or any other Platonian.
So he sketched his conquering entrance into New York. Unfortunately it was in the evening, and, having fallen asleep at Poughkeepsie, he did not awake till a brakeman shook his shoulder at the Grand Central Station. He had heard of the old Grand Union Hotel, and drowsily, with the stuffy nose and sandy eyes and unclean feeling about the teeth that overpower one who sleeps in a smoking-car, he staggered across to the hotel and spent his first conquering night in filling a dollar room with vulgar sounds of over-weary slumber.
But in the morning, when he stared along Forty-second Street; when he breakfasted at a Childs' restaurant, like a gigantic tiled bath-room, and realized that the buckwheat cakes were New York buckwheats; when he sighted the noble Times Building and struck out for Broadway (the magic name that promised marble palaces, even if it provided two-story shacks); when he bustled into a carburetor agency and demanded a job—then he found the gateway of wonder.
But he did not find a job.
Eight nights after his arrival he quietly paid his bill at the hotel; tipped a curly-headed bell-boy; checked his baggage, which consisted of a shirt, a razor, and an illustrated catalogue of automobile accessories; put his tooth-brush in his pocket; bought an evening paper in order to feel luxurious; and walked down to the Charity Organization Society, with ten cents in his pocket.
In the Joint Application Bureau, filled with desks and filing-cabinets, where poor men cease to be men and become Cases, Carl waited on a long bench till it was his turn to tell his troubles to a keen, kindly, gray-bearded man behind a roll-top desk. He asked for work. Work was, it seemed, the one thing the society could not give. He received a ticket to the Municipal Lodging House.
This was not the hygienic hostelry of to-day, but a barracks on First Avenue. Carl had a chunk of bread with too much soda in it, and coffee with too little coffee in it, from a contemptuous personage in a white jacket, who, though his cuffs were grimy, showed plainly that he was too good to wait on bums. Carl leaned his elbows on the long scrubbed table and chewed the bread of charity sullenly, resolving to catch a freight next day and get out of town.
He slept in a narrow bunk near a man with consumption. The room reeked of disinfectants and charity.