He gulped down his hot, clear coffee and tore at his well-made toast, thinking that he was just about a dead loss anyway you looked at it. Not only had he no money to give his children, but no health either. That was another reason why Eva was so worn and took life so hard. He had given her sickly children—all but Stephen. And Stephen had other ways of wearing on his mother. Poor little Henry! How sick he had been last night! It was damnable that the poor kid should have inherited from his good-for-nothing father the curse of a weak digestion, which made life not worth living—that and many other things.
He snatched his watch, relentless inquisitor, from the table beside his plate, thrust it into his pocket and jumped up to put on his overcoat and hat.
“Here are your gloves,” said his wife, holding them out to him. “There was a hole in the finger. I’ve just mended it.”
“Oh, that’s awfully good of you, Evie,” said Lester, kissing her cheek and feeling another ton of never-to-be-redeemed indebtedness flung on his shoulders. He felt them bend weakly under it like a candle in an overheated room.
“Don’t forget your soda-mints,” said Evangeline.
Gee! it wasn’t likely he would forget them, with that hideous demon of dull discomfort getting to work the instant he swallowed food.
Henry and Helen, half-dressed, came hurrying down the stairs to see him before he disappeared for the day. His heart yearned over them, their impressionable, delicate faces, their shadowed eyes, the shrinking carriage of their slim little bodies.
“Goodbye, Father,” they said, lifting their sweet children’s lips to his. The poor kids! What business had he to pass on the curse of existence to other human beings, too sensitive and frail to find it anything but a doom. He tried to say, “Goodbye there, young ones,” as he kissed them, but the words could not pass the knot in his throat.
He saw Eva start up the stairs and, knowing that she was going to have it out with Stephen, crammed his hat on his head and ran. But not fast enough. As he fled down the porch steps he heard a combative angry roar. Helen and Henry would eat their breakfast to a cheerful tune! And then another scream, more furious, on a higher note. Hell and damnation! There must be something wrong with the way that kid was treated to make life one perpetual warfare. But his father was as helpless to intervene as if he were bound and gagged.
Well, he was bound and gagged to complete helplessness about everything in his life and his children’s lives, bound and gagged by his inability to make money. Only men who made money had any right to say how things should go in their homes. A man who couldn’t make money had no rights of any kind which a white man was bound to respect—nor a white woman either. Especially a white woman. The opinion of a man who couldn’t make money was of no value, on any subject, in anybody’s eyes. The dignity of a man who could not make money—but why talk about nonexistent abstractions? He had about as much dignity left him as a zero with the rim off.
His after-breakfast dyspepsia began to roll crushingly over his personality as it always did for a couple of hours after each meal. His vitality began to ebb. He felt the familiar, terrible draining out of his will-to-live. At the thought of enduring this demoralizing torment that morning, and that afternoon, and the day after that and the day after that, he felt like flinging himself on the ground rolling and shrieking. Instead he pulled out his watch with the employee’s nervous gesture and quickened his pace. He was just then passing Dr. Merritt’s office. If only there was something the doctor could do to help him. But he’d tried everything. And anyhow, he understood perfectly that a man who doesn’t make money has no right to complain of dyspepsia—of anything. Illness only adds to his guilt.
He put a soda-mint in his mouth, turned a corner and saw, down the street, the four-story brick front of Willing’s Emporium. Was it possible that a human being could hate anything as he hated that sight and not drop dead of it? Before this new phase it had been bad enough, all those years when it had been a stagnant pool of sour, slow intrigue and backbiting, carried on by sour, slow, small-minded people, all playing in their different ways on the small-minded, sick old man at the head of it. Lester had always felt that he would rather die than either join in those intrigues or combat them. This aloofness, added to his real incapacity for business, had left him still nailed to the same high stool in the same office which had received him the day he had first gone in. That first day when, vibrant with the excitement of his engagement to that flame-like girl, he had left his University classes and all his plans for the future and rushed out to find work, any work that would enable him to marry! Well, he had married. That had been only thirteen years ago! The time before it seemed to Lester as remote as the age of Rameses.
He had hated the slow regime of the sick, small-minded old man, but he hated still more this new regime which was anything but slow. He detested the very energy and forcefulness with which Jerome Willing was realizing his ideals, because he detested those ideals. Lester felt that he knew what
