The Romance of a Plain Man. Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
a dime, will you quit bothering me?"
"I'd rather you'd give me a start, sir, as you promised."
"Good Lord! There you are again! Do you know the meaning of n-u-i-s-a-n-c-e, boy?"
"No, sir."
"Well, ask your teacher the next time you go to school."
"I don't go to school. I work."
"You work, eh? Well, look here, let's see. What do you want of me?"
"I thought you might tell me how to begin. I don't want to stay common."
For a moment his attention seemed fixed on a gold pencil which he had taken from his waistcoat pocket. Then opening his card-case he scribbled a line on a card and handed it to me. "If you choose you may take that to Bob Brackett at the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, on Twenty-fifth Street, near the river," he said, not unkindly. "If he happens to want a boy, he may give you a job; but remember, I don't promise you that he will want one, – and if he does, it isn't likely he'd make you president on the spot," he concluded, with a chuckle.
Waving a gesture of dismissal he started off at a hobble; then catching the eye of a lady in a passing carriage, he straightened himself, bowed with a gallant flourish of his wide-brimmed hat, and went on with a look of agony but a jaunty pace. As I turned, a minute later, to discover who could have wrought this startling change in the behaviour of the General, an open surrey, the bottom filled with a pink cloud of wild azaleas, stopped at the curbing before the grey house, and the faces of Miss Mitty and Sally shone upon me over the blossoms. The child was coloured like a flower from the sun and wind, and there was a soft dewy look about her flushed cheeks, and her very full red lips. At the corner of her mouth, near her square little chin, a tiny white scar showed like a dimple, giving to her lower lip when she laughed an expression of charming archness. I remember these things now – at the moment there was no room for them in my whirling thoughts.
"Oh!" cried the little girl in a burst of happiness, "there's my boy!"
The next minute she had leaped out of the carriage and was bounding across the pavement. Her arms were filled with azalea, and loosened petals fluttered like a swarm of pink and white moths around her.
"What are you doing, boy?" she asked. "Where is your basket?"
"It's at the market. I'm selling papers."
"Come, Sally," commanded Miss Mitty, stepping out of the surrey with the rest of the flowers. "You must not stop in the street to talk to people you don't know."
"But I do know him, Aunt Mitty, he brings our marketing."
"Well, come in anyway. You are breaking the flowers."
The strong, heady perfume filled my nostrils, though when I remember it now it changes to the scent of wallflowers, which clings always about my memory of the old grey house, with its delicate lace curtains draped back from the small square window-panes as if a face looked out on the crooked pavement.
"Please, Aunt Mitty, let me buy a paper," begged the child.
"A paper, Sally! What on earth would you do with a paper?"
"Couldn't I roll up my hair in it, Auntie?"
"You don't roll up your hair in newspapers. Here, come in. I can't wait any longer."
Lingering an instant, Sally leaned toward me over the pink cloud of azalea. "I'd just love to play with you and Samuel," she said with the sparkling animation I remembered from our first meeting, "but dear Aunt Mitty has so much pride, you know."
She bent still lower, gave Samuel an impassioned hug with her free arm, and then turning quickly away ran up the short flight of steps and disappeared into the house. The next instant the door closed sharply after her, and only the small rosy petals fluttering in the wind were left to prove to me that I was really awake and it was not a dream.
CHAPTER VIII
IN WHICH MY EDUCATION BEGINS
There was no lingering at kitchen doorways with scolding white-turbaned cooks next morning, for as soon as I had delivered the marketing, I returned the basket to John Chitling, and set out down Twenty-fifth Street in the direction of the river. As I went on, a dry, pungent odour seemed to escape from the pavement beneath and invade the air. The earth was drenched with it, the crumbling bricks, the negro hovels, the few sickly ailantus trees, exuded the sharp scent, and even the wind brought stray wafts, as from a giant's pipe, when it blew in gusts up from the river-bottom. Overhead the sky appeared to hang flat and low as if seen through a thin brown veil, and the ancient warehouses, sloping toward the river, rose like sombre prisons out of the murky air. It was still before the introduction of modern machinery into the factories, and as I approached the rotting wooden steps which led into the largest building, loose leaves of tobacco, scattered in the unloading, rustled with a sharp, crackling noise under my feet.
Inside, a clerk on a high stool, with a massive ledger before him, looked up at my entrance, and stuck his pen behind his ear with a sigh of relief.
"A gentleman told me you might want a boy, sir," I began.
He got down from his stool, and sauntering across the room, took a long drink from a bucket of water that stood by the door.
"What gentleman?" he enquired, as he flirted a few drops on the steps outside, and returned the tin dipper to the rusty nail over the bucket.
I drew out the card, which I had kept carefully wrapped in a piece of brown paper in my trousers' pocket. When I handed it to him, he looked at it with a low whistle and stood twirling it in his fingers.
"The gentleman owns about nine-tenths of the business," he remarked for my information. Then turning his head he called over his shoulder to some one hidden behind the massive ledgers on the desk. "I say, Bob, here's a boy the General's sent along. What'll you do with him?"
Bob, a big, blowzy man, who appeared to be upon terms of intimacy with every clerk in the office, came leisurely out into the room, and looked me over with what I felt to be a shrewd and yet not unkindly glance. "It's the second he's sent down in two weeks," he observed, "but this one seems sprightly enough. What's your name, boy?"
"Ben Starr."
"Well, Ben, what're you good for?"
"'Most anything, sir."
"'Most anything, eh? Well, come along, and I'll put you at 'most anything."
He spoke in a pleasant, jovial tone, which made me adore him on the spot; and as he led me across a dark hall and up a sagging flight of steps, he enquired good-humouredly how I had met General Bolingbroke and why he had given me his card.
"He's a great man, is the General!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "When you met him, my boy, you met the biggest man in the South to-day."
Immediately the crimson face, the white-trousered legs, the round stomach, and even the gouty toe, were surrounded in my imagination with a romantic halo. "What's he done to make him so big?" I asked.
"Done? Why, he's done everything. He's opened the South, he's restored trade, he's made an honest fortune out of the carpet-baggers. It's something to own nine-tenths of the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, and to be vice-president of the Bonfield Trust Company, but it's a long sight better to be president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. If you happen to know of a bigger job than that, I wish you'd point it out."
I couldn't point it out, and so I told him, at which he gave a friendly guffaw and led the way in silence up the sagging staircase. At that moment all that had been mere formless ambition in my mind was concentrated into a single burning desire; and I swore to myself, as I followed Bob, the manager, up the dark staircase to the leaf department, that I, too, would become before I died the biggest man in the South and the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. The idea which was to possess me utterly for thirty years dropped into my brain and took root on that morning in the heavy atmosphere of the Old Dominion Tobacco Works. From that hour I walked not aimlessly, but toward a definite end. I might start in life, I told myself, with a market basket, but I would start also with the resolution that out of the market basket the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad should arise. The vow