The Fortune Hunter | Page 4

overcoat which he had left outside the junior partner's office, then went
on, shaking his head. "Much obliged," he said huskily to himself. "But
what's the good of that. There's no room anywhere for a professional
failure. And that's what I am; just a ne'er-do-well. I never realised what
that meant, really, before, and it's certainly taken me a damn' long time
to find out. But I know now, all right...."
Outside, on the steps of the building, he paused a moment, fascinated
by the brisk spectacle afforded by lower Broadway at the hour when
the cave-like offices in its cliff-like walls begin to empty themselves,
when the overlords and their lieutenants close their desks and turn their
faces homewards, leaving the details of the day's routine to be wound
up by underlings. In the clear light of the late spring afternoon a stream
of humanity was high and fluent upon the sidewalks. Duncan had
glimpses of keen-faced men, bright-faced women, eager boys,
quickened all by that manner of efficiency and intelligence which

seems so integrally American. A well-dressed throng, well-fed, amiable
and animated, looking ever forward, the resistless tide of affairs that
gave it being bore it onward; it passed the onlooker as a strong current
passes flotsam in a back-eddy, with no pause, no turning aside. Acutely
he felt his aloofness from it, who had no part in its interests and
scarcely any comprehension of them. The sunken look, the leanness of
his young face, seemed suddenly accentuated; the gloom in his
discontented eyes deepened; his slight habitual stoop became more
noticeable. And a second time he nodded acquiescence to his unspoken
thought.
"There," said he, singling out a passer-by upon whose complacent
features prosperity had set its smug hall-mark--"there, but for the grace
of God, goes Nat Duncan!" He rolled the paraphrase upon his tongue
and found it bitter--not, however, with a tonic bitterness. "Lord, what a
worthless critter I am! No good to myself--nor to anybody else. Even
on Harry I'm a drag--a regular old man of the mountains!"
Despondently he went down to the sidewalk and merged himself with
the crowd, moving with it though a thousand miles apart from it, and
presently diverging, struck across-town toward the Worth Street
subway station.
"And the worst of it is, he's too sharp not to find it out--if he hasn't by
this time--and too damn' decent by far to let me know if he has! ... It
can't go on this way with us: I can't let him ... Got to break with him
somehow--now--to-day. I won't let him think me ... what I've been all
along to him.... Bless his foolish heart!..."
This resolution coloured his reverie throughout the uptown journey.
And he strengthened himself with it, deriving a sort of acrid comfort
from the knowledge that henceforth none should know the burden of
his misfortunes save himself. There was no deprecation of Kellogg's
goodness in his mood, simply determination no longer to be a charge
upon it. To contemplate the sum total of the benefits he had received at
Kellogg's hands, since the day when the latter had found him ill and
half-starved, friendless as a stray pup, on the bench in Washington
Square, staggered his imagination. He could never repay it, he told
himself, save inadequately, little by little--mostly by gratitude and such
consideration as he purposed now to exhibit by removing himself and
his distresses from the other's ken. Here was an end to comfort for him,

an end to living in Kellogg's rooms, eating his food, busying his
servants, spending his money--not so much borrowed as pressed upon
him. He stood at the cross-roads, but in no doubt as to which way he
should most honourably take, though it took him straight back to that
from which Kellogg had rescued him.
There crawled in his mind a clammy memory of the sort of housing he
had known in those evil days, and he shuddered inwardly, smelling
again the effluvia of dank oilcloth and musty carpets, of fish-balls and
fried ham, of old-style plumbing and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in
the unwashen raw--the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to
which his lack of means had introduced him. He could see again, and
with a painful vividness of mental vision, the degenerate "brownstone
fronts" that mask those haunts of wretchedness, with their flights of
crumbling brownstone steps leading up to oaken portals haggard with
flaking paint, flanked by squares of soiled note-paper upon which
inexpert hands had traced the warning, not: "Abandon hope all ye who
enter here," but: "Furnished rooms to let with board." And pursuing this
grim trail of memory, whether he would or no--again he climbed,
wearily at the end of a wearing day, a darksome well of a staircase up
and