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But instead of walking along in his usual way, greeting people and passing a few words with them, he found himself bursting into speech. The minute anybody asked him how he was this morning he began in a most uncharacteristic, even shameful way to blurt out his woes, and like the waitress, these people had business to attend to and they nodded and shuffled and made excuses to get away. The morning didn’t seem to be warming up in the way foggy fall mornings usually did; his jacket wasn’t warm enough, so he sought the comfort of the shops.
People who had known him the longest were the most dismayed. He had never been anything but reticent-the well-ma
“That’s no good, that’s no good,” he said. “How can you get blood from a stone?”
He went into the Shoe Repair shop and greeted Herman Shultz.
“Do you remember those boots you resoled for me, the ones I got in England? You resoled them four or five years ago.”
The shop was like a cave, with shaded bulbs hanging down over various workplaces. It was abominably ventilated, but its manly smells-of glue and leather and shoe-blacking and fresh-cut felt soles and rotted old ones-were comfortable to Mr. McCauley. Here his neighbor Herman Shultz, a sallow, expert, spectacled workman, bent-shouldered, was occupied in all seasons-driving in iron nails and clinch nails and, with a wicked hooked knife, cutting the desired shapes out of leather. The felt was cut by something like a miniature circular saw. The buffers made a scuffing noise and the sandpaper wheel made a rasp and the emery stone on a tool’s edge sang high like a mechanical insect and the sewing machine punched the leather in an earnest industrial rhythm. All the sounds and smells and precise activities of the place had been familiar to Mr. McCauley for years but never identified or reflected upon before. Now Herman, in his blackened leather apron with a boot on one hand, straightened up, smiled, nodded, and Mr. McCauley saw the man’s whole life in this cave. He wished to express sympathy or admiration or something more that he didn’t understand.
“Yes, I do,” Herman said. “They were nice boots.”
“Fine boots. You know I got them on my wedding trip. I got them in England. I can’t remember now where, but it wasn’t in London.”
“I remember you telling me.”
“You did a fine job on them. They’re still doing well. Fine job, Herman. You do a good job here. You do honest work.”
“That’s good.” Herman took a quick look at the boot on his hand. Mr. McCauley knew that the man wanted to get back to his work, but he couldn’t let him.
“I’ve just had an eye-opener. A shock.”
“Have you?”
The old man pulled out the letter and began to read bits of it aloud, with interjections of dismal laughter.
“Bronchitis. He says he’s sick with bronchitis. He doesn’t know where to turn. I don’t know who to turn to. Well he always knows who to turn to. When he’s run through everything else, turn to me. A few hundred just till I get on my feet. Begging and pleading with me and all the time he’s co
“I knew he wasn’t to be trusted the first time I met him. That’s the extraordinary thing. I knew it and I let him rook me all the same. There are people like that. You take pity on them just for being the crooks they are. I got him his insurance job out there, I had some co
“You’re right about that.”
Mrs. Shultz was not in the store that day. Usually she was the one at the counter, taking in the shoes and showing them to her husband and reporting back what he said, making out the slips, and taking the payment when the restored shoes were handed back. Mr. McCauley remembered that she had had some kind of operation during the summer.
“Your wife isn’t in today? Is she well?”
“She thought she’d better take it easy today. I’ve got my girl in.”
Herman Shultz nodded towards the shelves to the right of the counter, where the finished shoes were displayed. Mr. McCauley turned his head and saw Edith, the daughter, whom he hadn’t noticed when he came in. A childishly thin girl with straight black hair, who kept her back to him, rearranging the shoes. That was just the way she had seemed to slide in and out of sight when she came to his house as Sabitha’s friend. You never got a good look at her face.
“You’re going to help your father out now?” Mr. McCauley said. “You’re through with school?”
“It’s Saturday,” said Edith, half turning, faintly smiling.
“So it is. Well, it’s a good thing to help your father, anyway. You must take care of your parents. They’ve worked hard and they’re good people.” With a slight air of apology, as if he knew he was being sententious, Mr. McCauley said, “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the-”
Edith said something not for him to hear. She said, “Shoe Repair shop.”
“I’m taking up your time, I’m imposing on you,” said Mr. McCauley sadly. “You have work to do.”
“There’s no need for you to be sarcastic,” said Edith’s father when the old man had gone.
He told Edith’s mother all about Mr. McCauley at supper. “He’s not himself,” he said. “Something’s come over him.” “Maybe a little stroke,” she said. Since her own operation-for gallstones-she spoke knowledgeably and with a placid satisfaction about the afflictions of other people.
Now that Sabitha had gone, vanished into another sort of life that had, it seemed, always been waiting for her, Edith had reverted to being the person she had been before Sabitha came here. “Old for her age,” diligent, critical. After three weeks at high school she knew that she was going to be very good at all the new subjects-Latin, Algebra, English Literature. She believed that her cleverness was going to be recognized and acclaimed and an important future would open out for her. The past year’s silliness with Sabitha was slipping out of sight.
Yet when she thought about Joha
As soon as she had finished washing the dishes she went off to her room with the book they had been assigned for literature class. David Copperfield.
She was a child who had never received more than tepid reproofs from her parents-old parents to have a child of her age, which was said to account for her being the way she was-but she felt in perfect accord with David in his unhappy situation. She felt that she was one like him, one who might as well have been an orphan, because she would probably have to run away, go into hiding, fend for herself, when the truth became known and her past shut off her future.