“Mon Dieu!” Scripps said.
“I was terribly frightened,” the waitress went on, “and rang the bell for the management. The concierge came up, and I demanded to know where my mother was.
“ ‘But, mademoiselle,’ the concierge explained, ‘we know nothing about your mother. You came here with General So-and-so’—I cannot remember the general’s name.”
“Call him General Joffre,” Scripps suggested.
“It was a name very like that,” the waitress said. “I was fearfully frightened and sent for the police, and demanded to see the guest-register. ‘You’ll find there that I am registered with my mother,’ I said. The police came and the concierge brought up the register. ‘See, madame,’ he said. ‘You are registered with the general with whom you came to our hotel last night.’
“I was desperate. Finally, I remembered where the coiffeur’s shop was. The police sent for the coiffeur. An agent of police brought him in.
“ ‘I stopped at your shop with my mother,’ I said to the coiffeur, ‘and my mother bought a bottle of aromatic salts.’
“ ‘I remember mademoiselle perfectly,’ the coiffeur said. ‘But you were not with your mother. You were with an elderly French general. He purchased, I believe, a pair of mustache tongs. My books, at any rate, will show the purchase.’
“I was in despair. In the meantime the police had brought in the cab driver who had brought us from the gare to the hotel. He swore that I had never been with my mother. Tell me, does this story bore you?”
“Go on,” said Scripps. “If you had ever been as hard up for plots as I have been!”
“Well,” the waitress said. “That’s all there is to the tale. I never saw my mother again. I communicated with the embassy, but they could do nothing. It was finally established by them that I had crossed the channel with my mother, but they could do nothing beyond that.” Tears came into the elderly waitress’s eyes. “I never saw Mummy again. Never again. Not even once.”
“What about the general?”
“He finally loaned me one hundred francs—not a great sum even in those days—and I came to America and became a waitress. That’s all there is to the story.”
“There’s more than that,” Scripps said. “I’d stake my life there’s more than that.”
“Sometimes, you know, I feel there is,” the waitress said. “I feel there must be more than that. Somewhere, somehow, there must be an explanation. I don’t know what brought the subject into my mind this morning.”
“It was a good thing to get it off your mind,” Scripps said.
“Yes,” the waitress smiled, the lines in her face not quite so deep now. “I feel better now.”
“Tell me,” Scripps asked the waitress. “Is there any work in this town for me and my bird?”
“Honest work?” asked the waitress. “I only know of honest work.”
“Yes, honest work,” Scripps said.
“They do say they’re hiring hands at the new pump-factory,” the waitress said. Why shouldn’t he work with his hands? Rodin had done it. Cézanne had been a butcher. Renoir a carpenter. Picasso had worked in a cigarette-factory in his boyhood. Gilbert Stuart, who painted those famous portraits of Washington that are reproduced all over this America of ours and hang in every schoolroom—Gilbert Stuart had been a blacksmith. Then there was Emerson. Emerson had been a hod-carrier. James Russell Lowell had been, he had heard, a telegraph operator in his youth. Like that chap down at the station. Perhaps even now that telegrapher at the station was working on his “Thanatopsis” or his “To a Waterfowl.” Why shouldn’t he, Scripps O’Neil, work in a pump-factory?
“You’ll come back again?” the waitress asked.
“If I may,” Scripps said.
“And bring your bird.”
“Yes,” Scripps said. “The little chap’s rather tired now. After all, it was a hard night for him.”
“I should say it was,” agreed the waitress.
Scripps went out again into the town. He felt clear-headed and ready to face life. A pump-factory would be interesting. Pumps were big things now. Fortunes were made and lost in pumps every day in New York in Wall Street. He knew of a chap who’d cleaned up a cool half-million on pumps in less than half an hour. They knew what they were about, these big Wall Street operators.
Outside on the street he looked up at the sign. Best by Test, he read. They had the dope all right, he said. Was it true, though, that there had been a Negro cook? Just once, just for one moment, when the wicket went up, he thought he had caught a glimpse of something black. Perhaps the chap was only sooty from the stove.
PART TWO
The Struggle for Life
And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse any one; for though everything is copied from the book of nature, and scarce a character or action produced which I have not taken from my own observations or experience; yet I have used the utmost care to obscure the persons by such different circumstances, degrees, and colors, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any degree of certainty; and if it ever happens otherwise, it is only where the failure characterized is so minute, that it is a foible only which the party himself may laugh at as well as any other.
HENRY FIELDING
CHAPTER SIX
Scripps O’Neil was looking for employment. It would be good to work with his hands. He walked down the street away from the beanery and past McCarthy’s barber shop. He did not go into the barber shop. It looked as inviting as ever, but it was employment Scripps wanted. He turned sharply around the corner of the barber shop and onto the Main Street of Petoskey. It was a handsome, broad street, lined on either side with brick and pressed-stone buildings. Scripps walked along it toward the part of town where the pump-factory stood.
At the door of the pump-factory he was embarrassed. Could this really be the pump-factory? True, a stream of pumps were being carried out and set up in the snow, and workmen were throwing pails of water over them to encase them in a coating of ice that would protect them from the winter winds as well as any paint would. But were they really pumps? It might all be a trick. These pump men were clever fellows.
“I say!” Scripps beckoned to one of the workmen who was sloshing water over a new, raw-looking pump that had just been carried out and stood protestingly in the snow. “Are they pumps?”
“They will be in time,” the workman said.
Scripps knew it was the factory. They weren’t going to fool him on that. He walked up to the door. There was a sign on it:
KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU
Can that mean me? Scripps wondered. He knocked on the door and went in.
“I’d like to speak to the manager,” he said, standing quietly in the half-light.
Workmen were passing him, carrying the new raw pumps on their shoulders. They hummed snatches of songs as they passed. The handles of the pumps flopped stiffly in dumb protest. Some pumps had no handles. They perhaps, after all, are the lucky ones, Scripps thought. A little man came up to him. He was well-built, short, with wide shoulders and a grim face.
“You were asking for the manager?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m the foreman here. What I say goes.”
“Can you hire and fire?” Scripps asked.
“I can do one as easily as the other,” the foreman said.
“I want a job.”
“Any experience?”
“Not in pumps.”
“All right,” the foreman said. “We’ll put you on piece-work. Here, Yogi,” he called to one of the men, who was standing looking out of the window of the factory, “show this new chum where to stow his swag and how to find his way around these diggings.” The foreman looked Scripps up and down. “I’m an Australian,” he said. “Hope you’ll like the lay here.” He walked off.
The man called Yogi Johnson came over from the window. “Glad to meet you,” he said. He was a chunky, well-built fellow. One of the sort you see around almost anywhere. He looked as though he had been through things.
“Your foreman’s the first Australian I’ve ever met,” Scripps said.
“Oh, he’s not an Australian,” Yogi said. “He was just with the Australians once during the war, and it made a big impression on him.”
“Were you in the war?” Scripps asked.
“Yes,” Yogi Johnson said. “I was the first man to go from Cadillac.”
“It must have been quite an experience.”
“It’s meant a lot to me,” Yogi answered. “Come on and I’ll show you around the works.”
Scripps followed this man, who showed him through the pump-factory. It was dark but warm inside the pump-factory. Men naked to the waist took the pumps in huge tongs as they came trundling by on an endless chain, culling out the misfits and placing the perfect pumps on another endless chain that carried them up into the cooling room. Other men, Indians for the most part, wearing only breech-clouts, broke up the misfit pumps with huge hammers and adzes and rapidly recast them into axe heads, wagon springs, trombone slides, bullet moulds, all the by-products of a big pump-factory. There was nothing wasted, Yogi pointed out. A group of Indian boys, humming to themselves one of the old tribal chanties, squatted in a corner of the big forging room shaping the little fragments that were chipped from the pumps in casting, into safety razor blades.
“They work naked,” Yogi said. “They’re searched as they go out. Sometimes they try and conceal the razor blades and take them out with them to
