Leroy Scott - To Him That Hath

She closed the door and was gone.

On the third morning of the new week, as David left the elevated station to walk the few blocks to the store, he noticed that a policeman's eyes were on him. David thought he recognised the officer as one who had been present at his trial, and hurried uneasily away. A block further on he glanced over his shoulder; the policeman was following. The uneasiness became apprehension, and the apprehension would have become consternation had he, a little after entering the store, seen the officer also come in.

A few minutes after he had begun to dust his tinware, he was summoned to the office. The proprietor's little pig-eyes were gleaming, his great pig-jowl flushing. He sprang to his full height, which was near David's shoulder. "You dirty, lying, cut-throat of a convict!" he roared. "Get out o' my store!"

"What's that?" gasped David.

The proprietor shook a fat fist at David's face. "Get out o' here! You came to me as an honest man! I hired you as an honest man! You deceived me. You're nothing but a dirty, sneaking jail-bird! You came in here just to get a chance to rob me! You'd have done it, too, if a policeman hadn't give me a tip as to what you are! Get out o' here, or I'll have you kicked out!"

David grew afire with wrath. It was useless to plead for his place; but there was a dollar and seventy cents due him. For that he choked his anger down. "Very well, I'll go," he said, as calmly as he could. "But first pay me for my two days."

"Not one red cent!" David's two days' pay was one of the kind of atoms of which his success was composed. "Not a cent!" he roared. "You say another word about pay, and I'll have you arrested for the things you've already stolen from me. Now clear out! – you low, thieving jail-bird you!"

A wild rage, the eruptive sum of long insults and suffering, burst forth in David. He took one step forward, and his open hand smacked explosively upon the flesh-padded cheek of the proprietor. The proprietor tottered, sputteringly recovered his balance – and again the hand smacked with a sharp report.

When the proprietor gained his balance a second time, it was to find David towering over him, face inflamed, fists clenched.

"My money, or by God I'll smash your head off!" David cried furiously.

The proprietor blanched, trembled. A fear-impelled hand drew silver from his pocket and gave David the amount. David glanced at it, and obeying an impulse that he was to regret again and again, flung the hard coins straight into the man's face. Then he walked out of the office, secured his hat from the cloak-room near by, and marched through the store. At the door the frantic proprietor, who had rushed ahead to call for the police, tried to block David's way, but David bore down upon him with so menacing a look that he stepped aside.

Fortunately the street was filled with people, and the next instant David was lost among them. For half an hour he aimlessly walked the streets with his wrath. Then the realisation of his situation began to cool him. However unjust had been his discharge, and however brutish its manner, the great fact was not thereby changed. He was discharged, and he had in his pocket less than a dollar.

Then the wearying, heart-breaking search for work began anew. That he had found one situation made him think he might find another, but at the end of a week he had met with nothing but failure. He still kept on the march, but the spirit was gone out of him. The search for work became purely an affair of the muscles: his legs carried him from office to office, at each his lips repeated their request. Muscle, that was all – muscle whipped to action by the fear of starvation.

But though his spirit was worn weak, his resentment was not. He raged – at times frantically. Why did the world refuse work to the poor beings the prisons sent back to it? Some of them were inspired by good resolutions; to them life was dear; they were worth saving. How did the world expect them to live and be honest, if it refused them means of life and of honesty? He could find but one answer to his questions: the world was selfish, heartless. He cursed the world, and he cursed the God that made it.

And he cursed himself, his foolishness that had brought him here; and he cursed Morton and St. Christopher's. At times he burned with the desire to clear his name, come what might to the people of the Mission. It is so hard for one, unfed, cold, hopeless, to be heroic. But his judgment told him that the truth from him would go unbelieved; and the great resolution behind his bargain, the long habit of silence, also restrained his declaration of innocence.

But even amid these gloomy weeks there were gentler periods. He often slipped at night into the neighbourhood of St. Christopher's, and stealthily gazed at the club-house, its windows aglow with friendliness to all but himself; at the chapel, with the Morton memorial window sending its warm inspiration into the streets – as it did, so he had learned, throughout the night. He told himself, when he thus stood with his work before his eyes, that he should be content. His struggles were hard – yes; his suffering was great. But that his suffering, the suffering of one man, should hold these hundreds a little nearer to the plain decencies of life, to truth and purity and honour, a little nearer to God – this was worth while. Yes, the bargain was a great bargain.

And every Wednesday evening he looked forth from the shadow of a doorway upon Helen Chambers as she left the Mission. And at the moment she passed his door he each time felt the same supreme pang. Three feet away! – as far away as the stars!

Black day followed black day, and grudged penny followed grudged penny, till at length there came a day when it seemed the blackness could become no blacker and when his remaining pennies were less than his fingers. On this day he sat long at his window, his wasted, despair-tightened face looking out upon the patched undergarments swinging from lines and upon the boxes and barrels and bottles and papers and rags that littered the deep bottom of the yard, grimly thinking over the prophecy of Kate Morgan. One of the two months she had given his honesty was gone. By the time the second had passed – ? He shiveringly wondered.

This day he ate no evening meal. For a week now one meal had been his daily ration, and that meal pitiably poor and pitiably small. He sat about his room till his nickel clock – which Kate Morgan had brought in one day and deposited upon the wash-stand with her undebatable air of finality – reported quarter past nine, when he rose and walked down into the street. It had been one of those warm days that sometimes come in mid-November – benign messages of remembrance, as it were, from departed summer – and now the people of the tenements filled the streets, for on the packed East Side the street, on warm days, is parlor to the parent and the lover, and nursery to the child.

As David stepped forth he did not notice that he was watched by a pair of keen, boyish eyes from under the rim of a battered slouch hat, and had he noticed he would not have been aware that these same eyes had watched him before. It was a Wednesday evening and David, entangled among the people, like a vessel in a sargasso sea, pursued a slow course toward the Mission, never observing that a boy in a battered hat followed him a way then turned back.

He took his place in the shadowed doorway and waited for Helen Chambers to appear. In a few minutes she came out, Dr. Franklin with her as usual. There was also a second man, gray-haired and slightly stooped, whom David recognised as an older brother of Mr. Chambers, and whom he remembered as a clear-visioned, gentle old philosopher greatly loved by his niece. As they passed, David leaned from the shadow to follow her with his eyes, and the light from the street lamp fell across his face. Dr. Franklin, chancing this instant to look in David's direction, excused himself to Helen and her uncle, who moved forward a few paces, and stepped to the doorway. David pressed frantically back into the shadow.