Read Ebook: To Him That Hath by Scott Leroy

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Ebook has 1508 lines and 85197 words, and 31 pages

"Not for several years."

She was getting too close. "I'm a very stupid subject for talk," he said quickly. "Now you--you must have had some very interesting experiences in the homes of the rich. You saw the rich from the inside. Tell me about them."

She was not swerved an instant from her point. "You're very interesting. The first minute I saw you I spotted you for a queer one to be living in a place like this. What've you been doing since you were in New York before?"

David could not hold back a flush; no evasive reply was waiting at his lips. Several seconds passed. "Pardon me, but don't you think you're a little too curious?" he said with an effort.

Her penetrating eyes had not left him. Now understanding flashed into her face. She emitted a low whistle.

"So that's it, is it!" she exclaimed, her voice softer than it had been. "So you've been sent away, and just got out. And you're starting in to try the honesty game."

There was no foiling her quick penetration. He nodded his head.

He had wondered how the world would receive him. She was the first member of the free world he had met who had learned his prison record, and he waited, chokingly, her action. He expected her face to harden accusingly--expected her to rise, speak despisingly and march coldly out.

"Well, you are up against it good and hard," she said slowly. There was sympathy in her voice.

The sympathy startled him; he warmed to her. But straightway it entered his mind that she would hasten to spread her discovery, and to live in the house might then be to live amid insult.

"You have committed burglary on my mind--you have stolen my secret," he said sharply.

"Oh, but I'll never tell," she quickly returned. And David, looking at her clear face, found himself believing her.

She tried with quick questions to break into his past, but he blocked her with silence. After a time she glanced at a watch upon her breast, rose and reached for the door-knob. But David sprang quickly forward. "Allow me," he said, and opened the door for her.

The courtesy did not go unnoticed. "You must have been a real 'gun,' a regular high-flyer, in your good days," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Oh, your kind of manners don't grow on cheap crooks."

She held out her hand. "Well, I wish you luck. Come over and see me sometime. Good night."

When he had closed the door David sat down and fell to musing over his visitor. She was dressed rather too showily, but she was not coarse. She was bold, but not brazen; hers seemed the boldness, the directness, of a child or a savage. Perhaps, in this quality, she was not grown up, or not yet civilised. He wondered how a maid or a nurse girl could support a father on her earnings, as he inferred she did. He wondered how she had so quickly divined that he was fresh from prison. He remembered a yellow stain near the ends of the first two fingers of her left hand; cigarettes; and the stain made him wonder, too. And he wondered at her manner--sharp, no whit of coquetry, a touch of frank good fellow-ship at the last.

WHITTIER CLUB--Members aged 17 to 20. Meets Wednesday evenings. Leader, Miss Helen Chambers.

This was Wednesday evening. David put on his hat, and ten minutes later, his coat collar turned up, his slouch hat pulled down, he was standing in the dark doorway of a tenement, his eyes fastened on the club-house entrance twenty yards down the street.

After what seemed an endless time, she appeared. Dr. Franklin was with her, evidently to escort her to her car. David gazed at her, as they came toward his doorway, with all the intensity of his great love. She was tall, almost as tall as Dr. Franklin; and she had that grace of carriage, that firm poise of bearing, which express a noble, healthy womanhood under perfect self-control. David had not seen her face last night; and he now kept his eyes upon it, waiting till it should come within the white circle of the street lamp near the doorway.

When the lamp lifted the shadows from her face, a great thrill ran through him. Ah, how beautiful it was!--beauty of contour and colour, yes, but here the fleshly beauty, which so often is merely flesh for flesh's sake, was the beautiful expression of a beautiful soul. There was a high dignity in the face, and understanding, and womanly tenderness. It was a face that for seven years had to him summed up the richest, rarest womanhood.

She passed so close that he could have touched her, but he flattened himself within the doorway's shadow. After she had gone by he leaned out and followed her with his hungry eyes.

Could he ever, ever win her respect?

THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN

David did not look forward into this career with resignation. There was nothing of the willing martyr in him. The life he must follow was not going to be easy; it would demand his all of courage and endurance. He longed to stand before the world a clean man, and the longing was at times a fierce rebellion. He had bought a great good, but he was paying therefor a bitter price, and every day of his life he must pay the price anew. Yet he faced the future with determination, if not with happiness. He believed that earnest work and earnest living would regain the world's respect--would slowly force the world to yield him place.

He tried to forbid himself thinking of Helen Chambers as having the slightest part in his future. She was a thousand times farther removed than four years before, when his name had been fair, and then the space of the universe had stretched between them. And yet the desire some day to appear well in her eyes was after all the strongest motive, stronger even than the instinct of self-preservation, that urged him upon the long, uphill struggle.

David had determined first to seek work on a newspaper. Some of the things he had written in that far-away time beyond the prison, came back to him. They were not bad--they were really good! If he could get on one of the papers, and could manage to hold his place for a few months without his story being learned, perhaps by then he would have so proved his worth that he would be retained despite his prison record. He would do his best! Who knew?--life might have a very endurable place for him somewhere in the years ahead. He grew almost excited as he gazed at the dimly-seen success.

Before starting out upon his first try at fortune, he gazed into the mirror above his wash-stand and for a long time studied his face, wondering if the men he was going to meet would read his record there. The forehead was broad, and about the grey eyes and the wide mouth were the little puckering wrinkles that announce the dreamer. The chin was the chin of the man of will. In health the face would have suggested a rare combination of idealism and will-power; but now there brooded over it that hesitancy, that blanched gloom, which come from living within the dark shadows of prison. No one looking at his thin, slightly stooping figure would have ever guessed that here was Dave Aldrich, the great half-back of '95.

After filling the forenoon by writing for his belongings, which his New Jersey landlady had promised to keep till he should send for them, and by dreaming of the future, David set out for the hurly-burly that seethes within and without the sky-supporting buildings of Park Row. At the entrance to the first newspaper office, his courage suddenly all flowed from him. Would he be recognised as a jail-bird? His ill-fitting prison-made suit, that clothed him in reproach, that burned him--was it not an announcement of his record? He turned away in panic.

But he had to go in, and fiercely mastering his throbbing agitation, he returned to the office and entered. The city editor, a sharp-faced young man, after hearing that David had no newspaper experience, snapped out in a quick voice, "Sorry, for I need a man--but I've got no time to break in a green hand," and the following instant was shouting to a "copy" boy for proofs.

At the next place the slip on which David had been required to write his business, came back to him with the two added words, "Nothing doing." At the third place the returned slip bore the statement, "Got all the men I need." The fourth editor, whom he saw, gave him a short negative. The fifth editor sent word by mouth of the office boy that his staff was full. It required all David's determination to mount to the sixth office, that of an able and aggressively respectable paper.

The boy who took in his request to the city editor returned at once and led David across a large dingy room, with littered floor, and grime-streaked windows. Young men, coatless, high-geared, sat at desks scribbling with pencils and clicking typewriters; boys, answering the quick cries of "copy!" scurried about through the heavy tobacco smoke. The room was a rectangular solid of bustling intensity.

The city editor, who occupied a corner of the room, waved David to a chair. Again David repeated the formula of his desire, and again he was asked his experience.

"I've had no experience on a paper," he replied, "but I've done a lot of writing in a private way."

"You're practically a new man, then." The editor thought for a moment, and David eagerly watched his face. It was business-like, but kindly. "Why, I guess I might take the trouble to lick a man into shape--if he seemed to have the right stuff in him. Anyhow, I might give you a trial. But you're not very young to be just beginning the game. What've you been working at?"

David felt the guilty colour warming his cheeks. "Writing."

"All the time?"

He tried to speak naturally. "The last few years I have been trying to do some--manual work."

"Here in the city?"

"No. Out of town."

The editor could not but notice David's flushed face and its strained look. He eyed David narrowly, and his brow wrinkled in thought. David strove to force a natural look upon his face. "Aldrich," the editor said to himself, "Aldrich--David Aldrich you said. That sounds familiar. Where have I heard that in the last few days?"

"I don't know," said David, his lips dry; but he thought of a paragraph he had read on the ride from prison announcing his discharge.

"O-o-h!" said the editor, and his eyes sharpened. David understood. The editor had also remembered the paragraph.

The editor's gaze dropped to his desk, as though embarrassed. "I'm very sorry--but I'm afraid I can't use you after all. I really don't need any men. But I hope you'll find something without trouble."

The blow was gently delivered, but it was still a blow--one that, as he walked dazedly from the office, made his courage totter. He told himself that he had counted upon just such experiences as this, that he had planned for a month of rebuffs--and gradually, as the evening wore away, he preached spirit back into himself. However, he would make no further attempts to find newspaper work. Even should he be so lucky as to secure a place, some one of the score or two score fellow-workers would be certain to connect him with the newly-liberated convict, as the editor had done, and then--discharge. For the present, it would be better to seek a position among the large business houses.

At dawn the next morning David was reading the "Help Wanted" columns of a newspaper, and two hours later he was sitting in the office of the superintendent of the shipping department of a wholesale dress-goods house that had advertised for a shipping clerk. The superintendent scrutinised David's face, making David feel that the prison mark was appearing, like an image on a developing plate, and then demanded: "Why do you want a job like this? This ain't your class."

"Because I need it."

"Had any experience as a shipping clerk?"

"No. But I'm mighty willing to learn."

"Well, let's see your letters from previous employers."

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