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For perhaps two weeks after the Carters' visit they pretended that the tea-room was open, and they did have six or seven customers. But late in September Father got his courage up, took out the family pen and bottle of ink, the tablet of ruled stationery and a stamped-envelope, and wrote to Mr. J. Pilkings that he wanted his shoe-store job back. When he had mailed the letter he told Mother.
For a minute more he stroked Mother's hair. If the Carters would only go from this place they had desecrated, and take their damned money with them! But he had been trained by years of dealing with self-satisfied people in a shoe-store at least to make an effort to conceal his feelings. He dragged himself into the tea-room, kept himself waiting with expressionless face till Mrs.
This held for an instant, then expanded suddenly into a great luminous square and through a trapdoor, opened wide now, a man's head appeared. Jimmie Dale's eyes, fixed through the space between the piles of cases, narrowed there was, indeed, little doubt but that the shoe-store proprietor below was an accomplice!
The deacon hurried off to the shoe-store. As usual, the only occupant of the shop was Sam. "Where's Larry, Sam?" asked the deacon, briskly. "I don't know, sir," said Sam, "but I'm afraid he's at Weitz's beer-shop."
He began with two hundred and fifty dollars' worth of rubbish and a monkey wrench four years ago, and has pottered and tinkered and traded and progressed until he now owns a last year's model, staggering under labor-saving devices. Our oculist, who does business in a tiny corner in a shoe-store and never overcharged any one in his life, was our pioneer automobile owner.
But first I must go to the shoe-store to get a box of polish for my russet shoes. Unexpectedly I found it for sale there. I strike the storekeeper in an ungracious mood. He objects to being bothered about business just when he is shutting up shop. "There," he says, handing me the desired box. "Only one more left; I shall presently have to send for more.
The result, it must be owned, has been very different in their cases and mine, they being all respectable men and well settled in life; the eldest as the successor to his father's pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a partner in a wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better prospects than either of them, have run the course which this volume will describe.
Father tinkered away at a broken lamp-shade till suddenly, without warning, he declared that Mother scolded him merely to conceal her faith in his ability to do anything. She sniffed, but she knew that he was right. For years Mother had continued to believe in the cleverness of Seth Appleby, who, in his youth, had promised to become manager of the shoe-store, and gave the same promise to-day.
Father was blaming himself for having brought her to this.... "But I did try to get a job first," he insisted, and remembered how he had once begged the owner of a filthy shoe-store on Third Avenue for a place as porter, shoeblack, anything. Their road led them by a clump of woods. "We'll have a fire here and camp!" cried Father.
He might, of course, have had it done in a shoe-store with a boot stretcher, but after all it cost him nothing this way, and what is half an hour? After he had got his undershirt on, Jiggins used to hitch himself up like a dog in harness and do Sandow exercises. He did them forwards, backwards, and hind-side up. He could have got a job as a dog anywhere.
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