The Homemaker · Part I · Chapter 4 (2/2)

Lester Knapp acknowledged his three-minute crime by a nervous start of astonishment and then by a fatigued nod of his head. All the swelling fabric of his thoughts fell in a sodden heap, amounting to nothing at all, as usual. He hung up his coat and hat and sat down on the same old stool. He was no good; that was the matter with him⁠—the whole matter. He was just no good at all⁠—for anything. What right had he to criticize anybody at all, when anybody at all amounted to more than he! He was a man who couldn’t get on in business, who couldn’t even get to his work on time. He must have been standing on the sidewalk outside, not knowing where he was, lost in that hot sympathy with childhood. But nine o’clock is not the time to feel sympathy with anything. Nine o’clock is sacred to the manipulation of a card catalogue of customers’ bills.

The spiked ball within him gave another lurch and tore at his vitals. Lord, how sick of life that dyspepsia made you! It took the very heart out of you so that, like a man on the rack, you were willing to admit anything your accusers asserted. He admitted thus what everybody tacitly asserted, that the trouble was all with him, with his weakness, with his feeble vitality, with his futile disgusts at the organization of the world he lived in, with his unmanly failure to seize other men by the throat and force out of them the things his family needed.

Sympathy for childhood nothing! If he felt any real sympathy for his own children, he’d somehow get more money to give them. What were fathers for, if not for that? If he were a “man among men,” he would do as other manly men did: use his wits to force the mothers of other children to spend more money than they ought on material possessions and thus have that money to spend in giving more material possessions to his own.

And even the bitter way he phrased his surrender⁠—yes, he knew that everybody would say that it was a weak man’s sour-grapes denunciation of what he was not strong enough to get. And they would be right. It was.

He bent his long, lean, sallow face over the desk, looking disdainful and bad-tempered as he always did when he was especially wretched and unhappy.

Harvey Bronson glanced at him and thought, “What a lemon to have around! He’d sour the milk by looking at it!”

Presently, as often happened to Lester, a lovely thing bloomed there, silent, unseen. Through the crazy, rhythmless chatter of the typewriters in the office, through the endless items on the endless bills, he heard it coming, as from a great distance, on radiant feet. It was only rhythm at first, divine, ordered rhythm, putting to flight the senseless confusion of what lay about him.

And then there glowed before him the glory of the words, the breathtaking upward lift of the first one, the sonorous cadences of the lines that followed, the majestic march of the end.

“Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars

With memory of the old revolt from awe,

He reached a middle height, and at the stars

Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank

The army of unalterable law.”

Lester Knapp’s heart swelled, shone bright, escaped out of its misery, felt itself one with the greatness of the whole.

The words kept singing themselves in his ear⁠ ⁠… “… he looked, and sank.” “… marched, rank on rank.” “The army of unalterable law.”

The weighty, iron clang of the one-syllabled word at the end gave him a sensation of an ultimate strength somewhere. He leaned on that strength and drew a long free breath.

His lean sallow face was lighted from within, and shone. He leaned far over his desk to hide this. He tried to think of something else, to put away from him this unmerited beauty and greatness. A man who is a failure in a business-office ought not for an instant to forget his failure. The least he can do is to be conscious of his humiliation at all times.

But in spite of himself, his lips were curved in a sweet, happy smile.

Harvey Bronson glanced at him and felt irritated and aggrieved by his expression. “What call has a dead loss like Lester Knapp got to be looking so doggone satisfied with himself!” he thought.