It was at the juncture of Dearborn and Madison Streets that we parted. Not far from there I found a restaurant whose placards in the windows offered tempting dishes at astonishingly cheap rates. “Roast beef and baked potato, fifteen cents,” was printed on the one that lured me most. I walked inside and sat down at a small round table, spread with a cloth which was faultlessly clean. A long line of such tables reached down the centre of the deep room in inviting whiteness, and was flanked on each side by a row of others, oblong in shape, pressed close in against the walls. To a height of several feet above these tables the walls were wainscoted with mirrors, and the white ceiling was gay with paper festoons. Customers were streaming in, for it was about noon. Most of these were evidently men from neighboring business houses, but there were workmen, too, some of them in blue jeans; and the first fear that I felt at entering, the fear of having come to a place too respectable to accept me as a guest, vanished completely, and gave place to a feeling of security and comfort.
A corps of colored waiters were hurrying through the narrow passages between the tables, bearing aloft tin trays heaped with dishes; to the noisy clatter and hum of the diners, they added a babel of discordant sound as they shouted in unintelligible phrase their varying orders into the dim regions at the rear, whence answered a muffled echo to each call.
My order came in a deep dinner-plate, a slice of roast beef, generous and juicy, shading from brown to the rich, raw red of the centre that oozed with a strengthening flow. With it was a large baked potato, piping hot, and when I broke it upon the table with a blow of my fist, the fragrant steam rose in a cloud to my face.
At the end of a fast of thirty-six hours, which had been relieved only by a few swallows of coffee and a little bread, I knew enough to eat slowly. But I was unprepared for the difficulty which this precaution involved. As when one swallows cautiously in quenching a consuming thirst, and checks by sheer force the muscles which would drink with choking draughts, so it was only by a sustained restraint that I ate carefully, in small morsels, until the brutish hunger was appeased. And when all the beef and potato, and an amazing quantity of the bread, with which the table was abundantly supplied, were gone, I could not forego the expenditure of five cents more for a cup of coffee, by the aid of which another deep inroad upon the bread was soon accomplished.
At the desk where I paid the amount stamped upon a check which the waiter had left at my place, I inquired for the manager. When I received his assurance that he could give me no work as a dishwasher, nor, in fact, in any capacity in his restaurant, and that he knew of no opening for me anywhere, I walked out into the streets once more and found my way to the public reading-room of the Young Men’s Christian Association. There I looked through the advertising columns of the morning newspapers. Of applications for positions there was an almost countless number, but of openings offered there were few, and not one of these was promising to a man whose only resource was unskilled labor. Reading on somewhat aimlessly through the day’s news I presently fell asleep, and was soon awakened by a young secretary, who was shaking me vigorously by the shoulder.
“Wake up, my man, wake up!” he was saying. “You can’t sleep in here. You must keep awake, or go out.”
I went out. It was easier to keep awake in the streets than in that warm room, and besides, I must not slacken the search for work.
By the time that I had fully recovered possession of my senses I found that an aimless walk had taken me near to the railway station, at whose fountain Clark and I had drunk in the morning. A crowd of newly arrived passengers was issuing into Van Buren Street, many of them carrying hand-luggage. With a flash of association there came to my mind the recollection of the boys and men who follow you persistently on Cortlandt Street between the Pennsylvania station and the elevated railway, with importunate offers to carry your bag for a dime. I wondered that this industry had not occurred to me before as a resource in my present need.
In a moment I was plying it with high hope of success, but in the next I stood agape at a fierce onslaught of street Arabs and men. One or two had picked up stones with which they menaced me. All of them were shouting oaths and violent abuse, and one half-grown boy, who was the first to reach me, held a clenched fist to my face, as he screamed hoarsely profane threats, and his keen dark eyes blazed with anger, and his lean face worked convulsively in the strength of violent passion. It appeared that I had trespassed upon a field which was pre-empted by a “ring” well-organized for its possession and cultivation, and for the further purpose of excluding competition.
