The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of LifeLewis, Sinclair
General
The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
Lewis, Sinclair
City and town life -- Fiction; Minnesota -- Fiction
So he sketched his conquering entrance into New York. Unfortunately it
was in the evening, and, having fallen asleep at Poughkeepsie, he did
not awake till a brakeman shook his shoulder at the Grand Central
Station. He had heard of the old Grand Union Hotel, and drowsily, with
the stuffy nose and sandy eyes and unclean feeling about the teeth
that overpower one who sleeps in a smoking-car, he staggered across
to the hotel and spent his first conquering night in filling a dollar
room with vulgar sounds of over-weary slumber.
But in the morning, when he stared along Forty-second Street; when he
breakfasted at a Childs' restaurant, like a gigantic tiled bath-room,
and realized that the buckwheat cakes were New York buckwheats; when
he sighted the noble _Times_ Building and struck out for Broadway (the
magic name that promised marble palaces, even if it provided two-story
shacks); when he bustled into a carburetor agency and demanded a
job--then he found the gateway of wonder.
But he did not find a job.
Eight nights after his arrival he quietly paid his bill at the hotel;
tipped a curly-headed bell-boy; checked his baggage, which consisted
of a shirt, a razor, and an illustrated catalogue of automobile
accessories; put his tooth-brush in his pocket; bought an evening
paper in order to feel luxurious; and walked down to the Charity
Organization Society, with ten cents in his pocket.
In the Joint Application Bureau, filled with desks and
filing-cabinets, where poor men cease to be men and become Cases, Carl
waited on a long bench till it was his turn to tell his troubles to a
keen, kindly, gray-bearded man behind a roll-top desk. He asked for
work. Work was, it seemed, the one thing the society could not give.
He received a ticket to the Municipal Lodging House.
This was not the hygienic hostelry of to-day, but a barracks on First
Avenue. Carl had a chunk of bread with too much soda in it, and coffee
with too little coffee in it, from a contemptuous personage in a white
jacket, who, though his cuffs were grimy, showed plainly that he was
too good to wait on bums. Carl leaned his elbows on the long scrubbed
table and chewed the bread of charity sullenly, resolving to catch a
freight next day and get out of town.
He slept in a narrow bunk near a man with consumption. The room reeked
of disinfectants and charity.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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