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"I can't eat any eggs and toast," he objected, rising. "I can't."
"Then wait till I can bring you something else."
"No," he said, irritably. "I won't do it! I don't want any dang food! And look here"--he spoke sharply to stop
her, as she went toward the telephone --"I don't want any dang taxi, either! You look after your mother when
she wakes up. I got to be at WORK!"
And though she followed him to the front door, entreating, he could not be stayed or hindered. He went
through the quiet morning streets at a rickety, rapid gait, swinging his old straw hat in his hands, and
whispering angrily to himself as he went. His grizzled hair, not trimmed for a month, blew back from his
damp forehead in the warm breeze; his reddened eyes stared hard at nothing from under blinking lids; and one
side of his face twitched startlingly from time to time;--children might have run from him, or mocked him.
When he had come into that fallen quarter his industry had partly revived and wholly made odorous, a negro
woman, leaning upon her whitewashed gate, gazed after him and chuckled for the benefit of a gossiping friend
in the next tiny yard. "Oh, good Satan! Wha'ssa matter that ole glue man?"
"Who? Him?" the neighbour inquired. "What he do now?"
"Talkin' to his ole se'f!" the first explained, joyously. "Look like gone distracted--ole glue man!"
Adams's legs had grown more uncertain with his hard walk, and he stumbled heavily as he crossed the baked
mud of his broad lot, but cared little for that, was almost unaware of it, in fact. Thus his eyes saw as little as
his body felt, and so he failed to observe something that would have given him additional light upon an old
phrase that already meant quite enough for him.
CHAPTER XXIII 157
There are in the wide world people who have never learned its meaning; but most are either young or
beautifully unobservant who remain wholly unaware of the inner poignancies the words convey: "a rain of
misfortunes." It is a boiling rain, seemingly whimsical in its choice of spots whereon to fall; and, so far as
mortal eye can tell, neither the just nor the unjust may hope to avoid it, or need worry themselves by expecting
it. It had selected the Adams family for its scaldings; no question.
The glue-works foreman, standing in the doorway of the brick shed, observed his employer's eccentric
approach, and doubtfully stroked a whiskered chin.
"Well, they ain't no putticular use gettin' so upset over it," he said, as Adams came up. "When a thing
happens, why, it happens, and that's all there is to it. When a thing's so, why, it's so. All you can do about it is
think if there's anything you CAN do; and that's what you better be doin' with this case."
Adams halted, and seemed to gape at him. "What --case?" he said, with difficulty. "Was it in the morning
papers, too?"
"No, it ain't in no morning papers. My land! It don't need to be in no papers; look at the SIZE of it!"
"The size of what?"
"Why, great God!" the foreman exclaimed. "He ain't even seen it.
Look! Look yonder!"
Adams stared vaguely at the man's outstretched hand and pointing forefinger, then turned and saw a great sign
upon the facade of the big factory building across the street. The letters were large enough to be read two
blocks away.
"AFTER THE FIFTEENTH OF NEXT MONTH THIS BUILDING WILL BE OCCUPIED BY THE J. A.
LAMB LIQUID GLUE CO. INC."
A gray touring-car had just come to rest before the principal entrance of the building, and J. A. Lamb himself
descended from it. He glanced over toward the humble rival of his projected great industry, saw his old clerk,
and immediately walked across the street and the lot to speak to him.
"Well, Adams," he said, in his husky, cheerful voice, "how's your glue-works?"
Adams uttered an inarticulate sound, and lifted the hand that held his hat as if to make a protective gesture, but
failed to carry it out; and his arm sank limp at his side. The foreman, however, seemed to feel that something
ought to be said.
"Our glue-works, hell!" he remarked. "I guess we won't HAVE no glue-works over here not very long, if we
got to compete with the sized thing you got over there!"
Lamb chuckled. "I kind of had some such notion," he said. "You see, Virgil, I couldn't exactly let you walk off
with it like swallering a pat o' butter, now, could I? It didn't look exactly reasonable to expect me to let go like
that, now, did it?"
Adams found a half-choked voice somewhere in his throat. "Do you--would you step into my office a minute,
Mr. Lamb?"
"Why, certainly I'm willing to have a little talk with you," the old gentleman said, as he followed his former
CHAPTER XXIII 158
employee indoors, and he added, "I feel a lot more like it than I did before I got THAT up, over yonder,
Virgil!"
Adams threw open the door of the rough room he called his office, having as justification for this title little
more than the fact that he had a telephone there and a deal table that served as a desk. "Just step into the
office, please," he said.
Lamb glanced at the desk, at the kitchen chair before it, at the telephone, and at the partition walls built of old
boards, some covered with ancient paint and some merely weatherbeaten, the salvage of a house-wrecker; and
he smiled broadly. "So these are your offices, are they?" he asked. "You expect to do quite a business here, I
guess, don't you, Virgil?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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