Lester did not so much mind the way this subtly injected poison ate into the fibers of childless women. They might, for all he cared, let their insane hankering for a cloak with the “new sleeves” force them to put blood-money into buying it, and allow their drugged desire for such imbecile things to wall them in from the bright world of impersonal lasting satisfactions. They hurt nobody but themselves. If the Jerome Willings of the world were smart enough to make fools of them, so much the worse for them. Although the spectacle was hardly an enlivening one for a dyspeptic man forced to pass his life in contact with it.
But what sickened Lester was the unscrupulous exploitation of the homemaking necessity, the adroit perversion of the homemaking instinct. Jerome Willing wanted to make it appear, hammering in the idea with all the ingenious variations of his advertising copy, that homemaking had its beginning and end in good furniture, fine table linen, expensive rugs. … God! how about keeping alive some intellectual or spiritual passion in the home? How about the children? Did anybody suggest to women that they give to understanding their children a tenth part of the time and real intelligence and real purposefulness they put into getting the right clothes for them? A tenth? A hundredth! The living, miraculous, infinitely fragile fabric of the little human souls they lived with—did they treat that with the care and deft-handed patience they gave to their filet-ornamented table linen? No, they wrung it out hard and hung it up to dry as they did their dishcloths.
And of course what Jerome Willing wanted of every employee was to join with all his heart in this conspiracy to force women still more helplessly into this slavery to possessions. Anyone who could trick a hapless woman into buying one more thing she had not dreamed of taking, he was the hero of the new regime! That was what Jerome Willing meant when he talked about “making good.” Making good what? Not good human beings! That was the last thing anybody was to think of. And as to trying to draw out from children any greatness of soul that might lie hidden under their immaturity. …
“You’re late again, Mr. Knapp,” said Harvey Bronson’s voice, rejoicing in the accusation.
Lester Knapp acknowledged his three-minute crime by a nervous start of astonishment and then by a fatigued nod of his head. All the swelling fabric of his thoughts fell in a sodden heap, amounting to nothing at all, as usual. He hung up his coat and hat and sat down on the same old stool. He was no good; that was the matter with him—the whole matter. He was just no good at all—for anything. What right had he to criticize anybody at all, when anybody at all amounted to more than he! He was a man who couldn’t get on in business, who couldn’t even get to his work on time. He must have been standing on the sidewalk outside, not knowing where he was, lost in that hot sympathy with childhood. But nine o’clock is not the time to feel sympathy with anything. Nine o’clock is sacred to the manipulation of a card catalogue of customers’ bills.
The spiked ball within him gave another lurch and tore at his vitals. Lord, how sick of life that dyspepsia made you! It took the very heart out of you so that, like a man on the rack, you were willing to admit anything your accusers asserted. He admitted thus what everybody tacitly asserted, that the trouble was all with him, with his weakness, with his feeble vitality, with his futile disgusts at the organization of the world he lived in, with his unmanly failure to seize other men by the throat and force out of them the things his family needed.
Sympathy for childhood nothing! If he felt any real sympathy for his own children, he’d somehow get more money to give them. What were fathers for, if not for that? If he were a “man among men,” he would do as other manly men did: use his wits to force the mothers of other children to spend more money than they ought on material possessions and thus have that money to spend in giving more material possessions to his own.
And even the bitter way he phrased his surrender—yes, he knew that everybody would say that it was a weak man’s sour-grapes denunciation of what he was not strong enough to get. And they would be right. It was.
He bent his long, lean, sallow face over the desk, looking disdainful and bad-tempered as he always did when he was especially wretched and unhappy.
Harvey Bronson glanced at him and thought, “What a lemon to have around! He’d sour the milk by
