None But Lucifer

Chapter II

Hale didn't stand indecisively on the cold street. It was not yet noon, and before nightfall he had a fairly rigid course of action to follow.

His brown sport shoes felt like ton weights, he had been out of them for so long; and his overcoat dragged his shoulders down. He knew his temperature was over a hundred, but it did not affect his sharp reasoning. He felt the sheathed hunter's knife and the pistol in his overcoat pockets, and he smiled with amused anticipation.

They were important. At the start of his campaign he had selected them with care. But they would not be useful for several days, and then only to prove a point that might be debated.

He walked over to Sixth Avenue and turned downtown. At Fifty-ninth Street he met the first cluster of men. He squeezed in among them.

"I don't feel despondent enough," he thought analytically. "I don't have the look of defeat."

Not all the men in front of the employment agency were shabby. Some had been thrust down only recently. They glanced almost furtively at the job notices, as if they were merely curious. But there were others, whom Hale studied like an actor learning a role. They were the habitual prowlers of the agencies, ragged, filthy, too close to starvation to be hungry, shuffling mechanically from hopelessness to indifference. Hale coveted that attitude. He thoughtfully set out to make himself despondent.

How long would his seventy-six cents keep him? A dime for breakfast, fifteen cents for lunch, a quarter for supper — fifty cents for one day. A quarter for a cheap hotel cot. He could live for one day and have a penny left over. Then what? He had to eat and sleep, and one night on the subway would turn his deep-seated cold into pneumonia. A surge of desperation, which he stealthily enjoyed, gripped him.

He elbowed through the circle of men, and his eyes jumped from one job to another.

Nothing. Industrial jobs: third engineers, Diesel men, oilers, little-way stitchers, plant and factory jobs. He shuffled wearily to the next agency. Restaurant help: countermen, $18. Too high. Dishwashers, colored, $10. Soda dispensers, exp., $18-22.50.

He climbed the narrow, dark stairs to the huge bare room with its hard, shaky benches around three walls and its stench of wet rot and stale smoke. Nothing could fight down that combination. He felt the remnant of his cheeriness strangle.

Timidly, he approached the girl behind the railing.

"What job?" she asked casually.

"The dishwasher."

She glanced at the list. "Colored?"

"N-no. But I can wash just as well as —"

"Sorry. They want colored washers." And she turned away.

"I can make sodas," he blurted hoarsely. "I'm not so good, but —"

"Sorry," she said, her voice remote. "All filled."

He buttoned his coat, left, and trudged down to the next agency.

White chalk on a black slate. Each one, unseen, a block away, was the job, the means of feeding and sheltering himself. But it never was.

There was the application that he made out for a night porter, $12. The girl read it.

"Six dollars in advance, please," she said, quite businesslike.

Hale stopped breathing. "Six dollars! What for?"

"Half our fee. You pay the other half when you get your salary."

"But," he protested, "I haven't got six dollars —"

Without glancing at him, she tossed his application into the basket and turned to the next client. He clung to the railing, stunned. The other unemployed looked disinterestedly at him. Didn't they understand, damn them, that he could work and pay his way, six dollars or no six dollars? Why didn't they smash —

But, of course, he said nothing. No one ever does. You stand for a moment while they ignore you; then you trudge slowly out without feeling, unconscious of the stairs under your feet and the employment-agency smell — as Hale did.

In the afternoon, Hale did wangle a try-out at an eight-dollar-a-week job as an upholsterer's apprentice from an agency without the advance payment. The upholsterer was far from enthusiastic when he learned Hale's age — thirty-one — and his lack of experience at manual work. He watched with suppressed exasperation Hale's bungling efforts to adapt his stiff muscles to the unaccustomed craft. When Hale tried to borrow five dollars, he turned him down cold.

Hale quit. There was nothing else he could do. The agency would get his first week's salary. To keep alive for the first two weeks would require at least twelve dollars, and he had seventy-one cents. The upholsterer shrugged. "Maybe it's best this way. You wouldn't learn so fast. Not your fault — just too old."

HALE decided that he had gone about far enough. He'd finish off with a night in a Bowery flophouse. He could have had a quarter bed around Sixth Avenue, but the flophouse sounded more dramatic.

He chose a hammock instead of a cot. Squalor was an essential part of his plan, but vermin weren't. He stripped the case off the pillow, which made it only slightly cleaner, and threw the blankets on the floor under the hammock. They were slick and faintly stiff with grease, and had a gamy smell. If Washington had used those blankets, they hadn't been aired out since.

That allowed him to sleep in his clothes, shoes and all. He was dissatisfied with the way his tweeds had retained the remnant of a crease.

He woke late, exhausted and stiff. Most of the men had already left. Hale wondered whether he should immediately go on with his plan. He decided against it, mainly because he still had forty-six cents. Spending it all on meals that day would be too obvious. He must seem to be trying to make it last.

He soaked his head under the single cold-water faucet. He forebore using the large block of cheap soap; it would have been like lathering himself with a cornerstone. And when he put out his hand for one of the five loathsome towels that had been provided for at least sixty men, he drew back, preferring to let himself dry by evaporation.

He washed three glasses and a porcelain bowl, filled them with water, and sprawled out on a bare cot all day, sopping up as much water as he could.

At noon the clerk demanded another dime. At nightfall, still another. When it grew black the men shuffled in. By that time Hale was asleep with the deep unconsciousness of a faint.