That afternoon I saw Murphy and hired of him the top tenement of his new house. It was in the Italian quarter of the city and my flat consisted of four rooms. The rent was three dollars a week. Murphy looked surprised enough at the change in my affairs and I made him promise not to gossip to the neighbors about where I'd gone.
"Faith, sor," he said, "and they wouldn't believe it if I told them."
This wasn't all I accomplished that day. I bought a pair of overalls and presented myself at the office of a contractor's agent. I didn't have any trouble in getting in there and I didn't feel like a beggar as I took my place in line with about a dozen foreigners. I looked them over with a certain amount of self-confidence. Most of them were undersized men with sagging shoulders and primitive faces. With their big eyes they made me think of shaggy Shetland ponies. Lined up man for man with my late associates they certainly looked like an inferior lot. I studied them with curiosity; there must be more in them than showed on the surface to bring them over here—there must be something that wasn't in the rest of us for them to make good the way they did. In the next six months I meant to find out what that was. In the meantime just sitting there among them I felt as though I had more elbow room than I had had since I was eighteen. Before me as before them a continent stretched its great length and breadth. They laughed and joked among themselves and stared about at everything with eager, curious eyes. They were ready for anything, and everything was ready for them—the ditch, the mines, the railroads, the wheat fields. Wherever things were growing and needed men to help them grow, they would play their part. They say there's plenty of room at the top, but there's plenty of room at the bottom, too. It's in the middle that men get pinched.
I worked my way up to the window where a sallow, pale-faced clerk sat in front of a big book. He gave me a start, he was such a contrast to the others. In my new enthusiasm I wanted to ask him why he didn't come out and get in line the other side of the window. He yawned as he wrote down my name. I didn't have to answer more than half a dozen questions before he told me to report for work Monday at such and such a place. I asked him what the work was and he looked up.
"Subway," he answered.
I asked him how much the pay was. He looked me over at this. I don't know what he thought I was.
"Dollar and a half—nine hours."
"All right," I answered.
He gave me a slip of paper and I hurried out. It hadn't taken ten minutes. And a dollar and a half a day was nine dollars a week! It was almost twice as much as I had started on with the United; it was over a third of what I had been getting after my first ten years of hard work with them. It seemed too good to be true. Taking out the rent, this left me six dollars for food. That was as much as it had cost Ruth and me the first year we were married. There was no need of going hungry on that.
I came back home jubilant. Ruth at first took the prospect of my digging in a ditch a bit hard, but that was only because she contrasted it with my former genteel employment.