The impeachment was not to be denied,for the classics were hateful to me.Naturally I was afraid to make such a damning admission.My father had succeeded in presenting my ambition as the height of absurdity and presumption,and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs,Bohn's Standard Library!Nor did it occur to him or to me that one might be great in literature without having read so much as a gritty page of them....
He finished his argument by reminding me that worthless persons sought to enter the arts in the search for a fool's paradise,and in order to satisfy a reprehensible craving for notoriety.The implication was clear,that imaginative production could not be classed as hard work.
And he assured me that literature was a profession in which no one could afford to be second class.A Longfellow,a Harriet Beecher Stowe,or nothing.This was a practical age and a practical country.We had indeed produced Irvings and Hawthornes,but the future of American letters was,to say the least,problematical.We were a utilitarian people who would never create a great literature,and he reminded me that the days of the romantic and the picturesque had passed.He gathered that I desired to be a novelist.Well,novelists,with certain exceptions,were fantastic fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who had no morals.In the face of such a philosophy as his I was mute.
The world appeared a dreary place of musty offices and smoky steel-works,of coal dust,of labour without a spark of inspiration.And that other,the world of my dreams,simply did not exist.
Incidentally my father had condemned Cousin Robert's wholesale grocery business as a refuge of the lesser of intellect that could not achieve the professions,--an inference not calculated to stir my ambition and liking for it at the start.
I began my business career on the following Monday morning.At breakfast,held earlier than usual on my account,my mother's sympathy was the more eloquent for being unspoken,while my father wore an air of unwonted cheerfulness;charging me,when I departed,to give his kindest remembrances to my Cousin Robert Breck.With a sense of martyrdom somehow deepened by this attitude of my parents I boarded a horse-car and went down town.Early though it was,the narrow streets of the wholesale district reverberated with the rattle of trucks and echoed with the shouts of drivers.The day promised to be scorching.At the door of the warehouse of Breck and Company I was greeted by the ineffable smell of groceries in which the suggestion of parched coffee prevailed.This is the sharpest remembrance of all,and even to-day that odour affects me somewhat in the manner that the interior of a ship affects a person prone to seasickness.My Cousin Robert,in his well-worn alpaca coat,was already seated at his desk behind the clouded glass partition next the alley at the back of the store,and as I entered he gazed at me over his steel-rimmed spectacles with that same disturbing look of clairvoyance Ihave already mentioned as one of his characteristics.The grey eyes were quizzical,and yet seemed to express a little commiseration.
"Well,Hugh,you've decided to honour us,have you?"he asked.
"I'm much obliged for giving me the place,Cousin Robert,"I replied.
But he had no use for that sort of politeness,and he saw through me,as always.
"So you're not too tony for the grocery business,eh?""Oh,no,sir.""It was good enough for old Benjamin Breck,"he said."Well,I'll give you a fair trial,my boy,and no favouritism on account of relationship,any more than to Willie."His strong voice resounded through the store,and presently my cousin Willie appeared in answer to his summons,the same Willie who used to lead me,on mischief bent,through the barns and woods and fields of Claremore.He was barefoot no longer,though freckled still,grown lanky and tall;he wore a coarse blue apron that fell below his knees,and a pencil was stuck behind his ear.
"Get an apron for Hugh,"said his father.
Willie's grin grew wider.
"I'll fit him out,"he said.
"Start him in the shipping department,"directed Cousin Robert,and turned to his letters.
I was forthwith provided with an apron,and introduced to the slim and anaemic but cheerful Johnny Hedges,the shipping clerk,hard at work in the alley.Secretly I looked down on my fellow-clerks,as one destined for a higher mission,made out of better stuff,--finer stuff.Despite my attempt to hide this sense of superiority they were swift to discover it;and perhaps it is to my credit as well as theirs that they did not resent it.Curiously enough,they seemed to acknowledge it.Before the week was out I had earned the nickname of Beau Brummel.
"Say,Beau,"Johnny Hedges would ask,when I appeared of a morning,"what happened in the great world last night?"I had an affection for them,these fellow-clerks,and I often wondered at their contentment with the drab lives they led,at their self-congratulation for "having a job"at Breck and Company's.
"You don't mean to say you like this kind of work?"I exclaimed one day to Johnny Hedges,as we sat on barrels of XXXX flour looking out at the hot sunlight in the alley.
