“Squeeze,” he shouted.
The boss squeezed. His face grew pallid and he let go suddenly. He tried to speak through his dry mouth, but Hugo had turned his back. At the brick gate post he paused and drew a breath.
His words resounded like the crack of doom. “So long!”
XVIII
In the next four weeks Hugo knew the pangs of hunger frequently. He found odd jobs, but none of them lasted. Once he helped to remove a late snowstorm from the streets. He worked for five days on a subway excavation. His clothes became shabby, he began to carry his razor in his overcoat pocket and to sleep in hotels that demanded only twenty-five cents for a night’s lodging. When he considered the tens of thousands of men in his predicament, he was not surprised at or ashamed of himself. When, however, he dwelt on his own peculiar capacities, he was both astonished and ashamed to meander along the dreary pavements.
Hunger did curious things to him. He had moments of fury, of imagined violence, and other moments of fantasy when he dreamed of a rich and noble life. Sometimes he meditated the wisdom of devouring one prodigious meal and fleeing through the dead of night to the warm south. Occasionally he considered going back to his family in Colorado. His most bitter hours were spent in thinking of Mr. Shayne and of accepting a position in one of Mr. Shayne’s banks.
In his maculate, threadbare clothes, with his dark, aquiline face matured by the war he was a sharp contrast of facts and possibilities. It never occurred to him that he was young, that his dissatisfaction, his idealism, his Weltschmertz were integral to the life-cycle of every man.
At the end of four weeks, with hunger gnawing so avidly at his core that he could not pass a restaurant without twitching muscles and quivering nerves, he turned abruptly from the street into a cigar store and telephoned to Mr. Shayne. The banker was full of sound counsel and ready charity. Hugo regretted the call as soon as he heard Mr. Shayne’s voice; he regretted it when he was ravishing a luxurious dinner at Mr. Shayne’s expense. It was the weakest thing he had done in his life.
Nevertheless he accepted the position offered by Mr. Shayne. That same evening he rented a small apartment, and, lying on his bed, a clean bed, he wondered if he really cared about anything or about anyone. In the morning he took a shower and stood for a long time in front of the mirror on the bathroom door, staring at his nude body as if it were a rune he might learn to read, an enigma he might solve by concentration. Then he went to work. His affiliation with the Down Town Savings Bank lasted into the spring and was terminated by one of the oddest incidents of his career.
Until the day of that incident his incumbency was in no way unusual. He was one of the bank’s young men, receiving fifty dollars weekly to learn the banking business. They moved him from department to department, giving him mentally menial tasks which afforded him in each case a glimpse of a new facet of financial technique. It was fairly interesting. He made no friends and he worked diligently.
One day in April when he had returned from lunch and a stroll in the environs of the Battery—returned to a list of securities and a strip from an adding machine, which he checked item by item—he was conscious of a stirring in his vicinity. A woman employee on the opposite side of a wire wicket was talking shrilly. A vice-president rose from his desk and hastened down the corridor, his usually composed face suddenly white and disconcerted. The tension was cumulative. Work stopped and clusters of people began to chatter. Hugo joined one of them.
“Yeah,” a boy was saying, “it’s happened before. A couple o’ times.”
“How do they know he’s there?”
“They got a telephone goin’ inside and they’re talkin’ to him.”
“I’ll be damned.”
The boy nodded rapidly. “Yeah—some talk! Tellin’ him what to try next.”
“Poor devil!”
“What’s the matter?” Hugo asked.
The boy was glad of a new and uninformed listener. “Aw, some dumb vault clerk got himself locked in, an’ the locks jammed an’ they can’t get him out.”
“Which vault? The big one?”
“Naw. The big one’s got pipes for that kinda trouble. The little one they moved from the old building.”
“It’s not so darn little at that,” someone said.
Another person, a man, chuckled. “Not so darn. But there isn’t air in there to last three hours. Caughlin said so.”
“Honest to God?”
“Honest. An’ he’s been there more than an hour already.”
“Jeest!” There was a pregnant, pictorial silence. Someone looked at Hugo.
“What’s eatin’ you, Danner? Scared?”
His face was tense and his hands were opening and closing convulsively. “No,” he answered. “Guess I’ll go down and have a look.”
He rang for an elevator in the corridor and was carried to the basement. In the small room on which the vault opened were five or six people, among them a woman who seemed to command the situation. The men were all smoking; their attitudes were relaxed, their voices hushed.
One repeated nervously: “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.”
“That won’t help, Mr. Quail. I’ve sent for the expert and he will probably have the safe open in a short time.”
“Blowtorches?” the swearing man asked abruptly.
“Absurd. He would cook before he was out. And three feet of steel and then two feet more.”
“Nitroglycerin?”
“And make jelly out of him?” The woman tapped her fingernails with her glasses.
Another arrival, who carried a small satchel, talked with her in an undertone and then took off his coat. He went first to a
