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Page 2
He shook his head impatiently and clawed the impregnated atmosphere
with a tragic hand.
"_Stench!_" he perorated in a voice tremulous with emotion.
Even that comprehensive monosyllable was far from satisfactory.
"Oh, what's the use?" P. Sybarite despaired.
Alliteration could no more; his mother-tongue itself seemed
poverty-stricken, his native wit inadequate. With decent meekness he
owned himself unfit for the task to which he had set himself.
"I'm only a dub," he groaned--"a poor, God-forsaken, prematurely aged
and indigent dub!"
For ten interminable years the aspiration to do justice to the Genius
of the Place had smouldered in his humble bosom; to-day for the first
time he had attempted to formulate a meet apostrophe to that God of
his Forlorn Destiny; and now he chewed the bitter cud of realisation
that all his eloquence had proved hopelessly poor and lame and
halting.
Perched on the polished seat of a very tall stool, his slender legs
fraternising with its legs in apparently inextricable intimacy; sharp
elbows digging into the nicked and ink-stained bed of a counting-house
desk; chin some six inches above the pages of a huge leather-covered
ledger, hair rumpled and fretful, mouth doleful, eyes disconsolate--he
gloomed...
On this the eve of his thirty-second birthday and likewise the tenth
anniversary of his servitude, the appearance of P. Sybarite was
elaborately normal--varying, as it did, but slightly from one
year's-end to the other.
His occupation had fitted his head and shoulders with a deceptive but
none the less perennial stoop. His means had endowed him with a single
outworn suit of ready-made clothing which, shrinking sensitively on
each successive application of the tailor's sizzling goose, had come
to disclose his person with disconcerting candour--sleeves too short,
trousers at once too short and too narrow, waistcoat buttons straining
over his chest, coat buttons refusing to recognise a buttonhole save
that at the waist. Circumstances these that added measurably to his
apparent age, lending him the semblance of maturity attained while
still in the shell of youth.
The ruddy brown hair thatching his well-modelled head, his sanguine
colouring, friendly blue eyes and mobile lips suggested Irish lineage;
and his hands which, though thin and clouded with smears of ink, were
strong and graceful (like the slender feet in his shabby shoes) bore
out the suggestion with an added hint of gentle blood.
But whatever his antecedents, the fact is indisputable that P.
Sybarite, just then, was most miserable, and not without cause; for
the Genius of the Place held his soul in Its melancholy bondage.
The Place was the counting-room in the warehouse of Messrs. Whigham &
Wimper, _Hides & Skins_; and the Genius of it was the reek of hides
both raw and dressed--an effluvium incomparable, a passionate
individualist of an odour, as rich as the imagination of an editor of
Sunday supplements, as rare as a reticent author, as friendly as a
stray puppy.
For ten endless years the body and soul of P. Sybarite had been thrall
to that Smell; for a complete decade he had inhaled it continuously
nine hours each day, six days each week--and had felt lonesome without
it on every seventh day.
But to-day all his being was in revolt, bitterly, hopelessly mutinous
against this evil and overbearing Genius....
The warehouse--impregnable lair of the Smell, from which it leered
smug defiance at the sea-sweet atmosphere of the lower city--occupied
a walled-in arch of the Brooklyn Bridge, fronting on Frankfort Street,
in that part of Town still known to elder inhabitants as "the Swamp."
Above rumbled the everlasting inter-borough traffic; to the right, on
rising ground, were haunts of roaring type-mills grinding an endless
grist of news; to the left, through a sudden dip and down a long
decline, a world of sober-sided warehouses, degenerating into slums,
circumscribed by sleepy South Street; all, this afternoon, warm and
languorous in the lazy breeze of a sunny April Saturday.
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