Читать книгу Dr. Sevier - Cable George Washington - Страница 17

Richling had a dollar in his pocket. A man touched him on the shoulder.

But let us see. On the day that John and Mary had sold their only bedstead, Mrs. Riley, watching them, had proposed the joint home. The offer had been accepted with an eagerness that showed itself in nervous laughter. Mrs. Riley then took quarters in Prieur street, where John and Mary, for a due consideration, were given a single neatly furnished back room. The bedstead had brought seven dollars. Richling, on the day after the removal, was in the commercial quarter, looking, as usual, for employment.

The young man whom Dr. Sevier had first seen, in the previous October, moving with a springing step and alert, inquiring glances from number to number in Carondelet street was slightly changed. His step was firm, but something less elastic, and not quite so hurried. His face was more thoughtful, and his glance wanting in a certain dancing freshness that had been extremely pleasant. He was walking in Poydras street toward the river.

As he came near to a certain man who sat in the entrance of a store with the freshly whittled corner of a chair between his knees, his look and bow were grave, but amiable, quietly hearty, deferential, and also self-respectful – and uncommercial: so palpably uncommercial that the sitter did not rise or even shut his knife.

He slightly stared. Richling, in a low, private tone, was asking him for employment.

“What?” turning his ear up and frowning downward.

The application was repeated, the first words with a slightly resentful ring, but the rest more quietly.

The store-keeper stared again, and shook his head slowly.

“No, sir,” he said, in a barely audible tone. Richling moved on, not stopping at the next place, or the next, or the next; for he felt the man’s stare all over his back until he turned the corner and found himself in Tchoupitoulas street. Nor did he stop at the first place around the corner. It smelt of deteriorating potatoes and up-river cabbages, and there were open barrels of onions set ornamentally aslant at the entrance. He had a fatal conviction that his services would not be wanted in malodorous places.

“Now, isn’t that a shame?” asked the chair-whittler, as Richling passed out of sight. “Such a gentleman as that, to be beggin’ for work from door to door!”

“He’s not beggin’ f’om do’ to do’,” said a second, with a Creole accent on his tongue, and a match stuck behind his ear like a pen. “Beside, he’s too much of a gennlemun.”

“That’s where you and him differs,” said the first. He frowned upon the victim of his delicate repartee with make-believe defiance. Number Two drew from an outside coat-pocket a wad of common brown wrapping-paper, tore from it a small, neat parallelogram, dove into an opposite pocket for some loose smoking-tobacco, laid a pinch of it in the paper, and, with a single dexterous turn of the fingers, thumbs above, the rest beneath, – it looks simple, but ’tis an amazing art, – made a cigarette. Then he took down his match, struck it under his short coat-skirt, lighted his cigarette, drew an inhalation through it that consumed a third of its length, and sat there, with his eyes half-closed, and all that smoke somewhere inside of him.

“That young man,” remarked a third, wiping a toothpick on his thigh and putting it in his vest-pocket, as he stepped to the front, “don’t know how to look fur work. There’s one way fur a day-laborer to look fur work, and there’s another way fur a gentleman to look fur work, and there’s another way fur a – a – a man with money to look fur somethin’ to put his money into. It’s just like fishing!” He threw both hands outward and downward, and made way for a porter’s truck with a load of green meat. The smoke began to fall from Number Two’s nostrils in two slender blue streams. Number Three continued: —

“You’ve got to know what kind o’ hooks you want, and what kind o’ bait you want, and then, after that, you’ve” —

Numbers One and Two did not let him finish.

“ – Got to know how to fish,” they said; “that’s so!” The smoke continued to leak slowly from Number Two’s nostrils and teeth, though he had not lifted his cigarette the second time.

“Yes, you’ve got to know how to fish,” reaffirmed the third. “If you don’t know how to fish, it’s as like as not that nobody can tell you what’s the matter; an’ yet, all the same, you aint goin’ to ketch no fish.”

“Well, now,” said the first man, with an unconvinced swing of his chin, “spunk ’ll sometimes pull a man through; and you can’t say he aint spunky.” Number Three admitted the corollary. Number Two looked up: his chance had come.

“He’d a w’ipped you faw a dime,” said he to Number One, took a comforting draw from his cigarette, and felt a great peace.

“I take notice he’s a little deaf,” said Number Three, still alluding to Richling.

“That’d spoil him for me,” said Number One.

Number Three asked why.

“Oh, I just wouldn’t have him about me. Didn’t you ever notice that a deaf man always seems like a sort o’ stranger? I can’t bear ’em.”

Richling meanwhile moved on. His critics were right. He was not wanting in courage; but no man from the moon could have been more an alien on those sidewalks. He was naturally diligent, active, quick-witted, and of good, though maybe a little too scholarly address; quick of temper, it is true, and uniting his quickness of temper with a certain bashfulness, – an unlucky combination, since, as a consequence, nobody had to get out of its way; but he was generous in fact and in speech, and never held malice a moment. But, besides the heavy odds which his small secret seemed to be against him, stopping him from accepting such valuable friendships as might otherwise have come to him, and besides his slight deafness, he was by nature a recluse, or, at least, a dreamer. Every day that he set foot on Tchoupitoulas, or Carondelet, or Magazine, or Fulton, or Poydras street he came from a realm of thought, seeking service in an empire of matter.

There is a street in New Orleans called Triton Walk. That is what all the ways of commerce and finance and daily bread-getting were to Richling. He was a merman – ashore. It was the feeling rather than the knowledge of this that prompted him to this daily, aimless trudging after mere employment. He had a proper pride; once in a while a little too much; nor did he clearly see his deficiencies; and yet the unrecognized consciousness that he had not the commercial instinct made him willing – as Number Three would have said – to “cut bait” for any fisherman who would let him do it.