The World Of Chance. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ before now made themselves heard in talk which Ray could not help listening to.

      Two men were talking together, one very hopelessly, and the other in a vain attempt to cheer him from time to time. The comforter had a deep base voice, and was often unintelligible; but the disheartened man spoke nervously, in a high key of plangent quality, like that of an unhappy bell.

      " No," he said; " I'd better fall, Bill. It's no use trying to keep along. I can get pretty good terms from the folks at home, there; they all know me, and they know I done my best. I can pay about fifty cents on the dollar, I guess, and that's more than most businessmen could, if they stopped; and if I ever get goin' again, I'll pay dollar for dollar; they know that."

      The man with the deep voice said something that Ray did not catch. The disheartened man seemed not to have caught it either; he said, " What say? " and , when the other repeated his words, he said: " Oh yes! I know. But I been dancing round in a quart cup all my life there; and now it's turning into a pint cup, and I guess I better get out The place did grow for a while, and we got all ready to be a city as soon as the railroad come along. But when the road come, it didn't do all we expected of it. We could get out into the world a good deal easier than we could before, and we had all the facilities of transportation that we could ask for. But we could get away so easy that most of our people went to the big towns to do their trading, and the facilities for transportation carried off most of our local industries. The luck was against us. We bet high on what the road would do for us, and we lost. We paid out nearly our last dollar to get the road to come our way, and it came, and killed us. We subscribed to the stock, and we've got it yet; there ain't any fight for it anywhere else; we'd let it go without a fight We tried one while for the car shops, but they located them further up the line, and since that we ha'n't even wiggled. What say? Yes; but, you see, I'm part of the place. I've worked hard all my life, and I've held out a good many times when ruin stared me in the face, but I guess I sha'n't hold out this time. What's the use? Most every businessman I know has failed some time or other; some of 'em three or four times over, and scrambled up and gone on again, and I guess I got to do the same. Had a kind of pride about it, m' wife and me; but I guess we got to come to it. It does seem, sometimes, as if the very mischief was in it. I lost pretty heavy, for a small dealer, on Fashion's Pansy, alone — got left with a big lot of 'em. What say? It was a bustle. Women kept askin' for Fashion's Pansy, till you'd 'a' thought every last one of 'em was going to live and be buried in it. Then all at once none of 'em wanted it — wouldn't touch it. That and butter begun it You know how a country merchant's got to take all the butter the women bring him, and he's got to pay for sweet butter, and sell it for grease half the time. You can tell a woman she'd better keep an eye on her daughter, but if you say she don't make good butter, that's the last of that woman's custom. But what's finally knocked me out is this drop in bric-à-brac. If it hadn't been for that, I guess I could have pulled through. Then there was such a rush for Japanese goods, and it lasted so long, that I loaded up all I could with 'em last time I was in New York, and now nobody wants 'em; couldn't give 'em away. Well, it's all a game, and you don't know any more how it's comin' out — you can't bet on it with any more certainty — than you can on a trottin' match. My! I wish I was dead."

      The deep-voiced man murmured something again, and the high-voiced man again retorted:

      "What say? Oh, it's all well enough to preach; and I've heard about the law of demand and supply before. There's about as much of a law to it as there is to three-card monte. If it wasn't for my poor wife, I'd let 'em take me back on ice. I would that."

      The deep-voiced man now seemed to have risen; there was a shuffling of feet, and presently a parley at the open door about commonplace matters; and then the two men exchanged adieux, and the door shut again, and all was silent in the room opposite Ray's.

      He felt sorry for the unhappy man shut in there; but he perceived no special significance in what he had overheard. He had no great curiosity about the matter; it was one of those things that happened every day, and for tragedy was in no wise comparable to a disappointment in first love, such as he had carefully studied for his novel from his own dark experience. Still it did suggest something to Ray; it suggested a picturesque opening for his first New York letter for the Midland Echo, and he used it in illustration of the immensity of New York, and the strange associations and juxtapositions of life there. He treated the impending failure of the country storekeeper from an overstock of Japanese goods rather humorously: it was not like a real trouble, a trouble of the heart; and the cause seemed to him rather grotesquely disproportionate to the effect. In describing the incident as something he had overheard in a hotel, he threw in some touches that were intended to give the notion of a greater splendor than belonged to the place.

      He made a very good start on his letter, and when he went to bed the broken hairs that pierced his sheet from the thin mattress did not keep him from falling asleep, and they did prove that it was a horse-hair mattress.

      V.

      In the morning, Ray determined that he would not breakfast at the restaurant under the hotel, partly because he was ashamed to meet the people who, he knew, suspected him of trying to beat them out of the price of his supper, and partly because he had decided that it was patronized chiefly by the country merchants who frequented the hotel, and he wanted something that was more like New York. He had heard of those foreign eating-houses where you got a meal served in courses at a fixed price, and he wandered about looking for one. He meant to venture into the first he found, and on a side street he came on a hotel with a French name, and over the door in an arch of gilt letters the inscription. Restaurant Français. There was a large tub on each side of the door, with a small evergreen tree in it; some strings or wires ran from these tubs to the door-posts and sustained a trailing vine that formed a little bower on either hand; a Maltese cat in the attitude of a sphinx dozed in the thicket of foliage, and Ray's heart glowed with a sense of the foreignness of the whole effect. He had never been abroad, but he had read of such things, and he found himself at home in an environment long familiar to his fancy.

      The difference of things was the source of his romance, as it is with all of us, and he looked in at the window of this French restaurant with the feelings he would have had in the presence of such a restaurant in Paris, and he began to imagine gay, light-minded pictures about it At the same time, while he was figuring inside at one of the small tables, vis-à-vis with a pretty actress whom he invented for the purpose, he was halting on the sidewalk outside, wondering whether he could get breakfast there so early as eight o'clock, and doubtful whether he should not betray his strangeness to New York hours if he tried. When he went in there was nobody there but one white-aproned waiter, who was taking down some chairs from the middle table where they had been stacked with their legs in the air while he was sweeping. But he did not disdain to come directly to Ray, where he had sat down, with a plate and napkin and knife and fork, and exchange a good morning with him in arranging them before him. Then he brought half a yard of French bread and a tenuous, translucent pat of American butter; and asked Ray whether he would have chops or beefsteak with his coffee. The steak came with a sprig of water-cress on it, and the coffee in a pot; and the waiter, who had one eye that looked at Ray, and another of uncertain focus, poured out the coffee for him, and stood near, with a friendly countenance, and a cordial interest in the young fellow's appetite. By this time a neat dame de comptoir, whom Ray knew for a dame de comptoir at once, though he had never seen one before, took her place behind a little desk on the comer, and the day had begun for the Restaurant Français.

      Ray felt that it was life, and he prolonged his meal to the last drop of the second cup of coffee that his pot held, and he wished that he could have Sanderson with him to show him what life really was in New York. Sanderson had taken all his meals in the basement of that seventy-five cent hotel, which Ray meant to leave at once. Where he was he would not have been ashamed to have any of the men who had given him that farewell dinner see him. He was properly placed, as a young New York literary man; he was already a citizen of that great СКАЧАТЬ