So now I saw that it was not my good salesmanship at all! My sales talk had in no way convinced Lawyer Norton. He had bought Universal Education in the handsomest binding, just out of charity. Perhaps he bought one of that kind every year. I realized that Mr. Lively had sent me out to beg for his company. This seemed little better than selling bad fountain pens. Already I had “lost faith in the goods.”
4
I kept up selling all that week, before college opened. (I knew by now that I was really going to college. A half-scholarship had been secured—the kind that gave the applicant $250, but out of that he must pay a $300 tuition fee, leaving him $50 in debt to the college.) My success in selling was very uneven. Outside of Mrs. Norton’s list I was not able to sell at all, though I walked all day and stopped at every door. Mrs. Norton’s list was soon exhausted. Even my success there was not always in the nature of sales.
Once I went to solicit a certain Mrs. Ward. She was very very wealthy. Even with Mrs. Norton’s name, I had to get through about ten secretaries. She was an amazing-looking woman with dyed red hair and masculine dress. Six or seven bird dogs were moving about in that room.
“Well, what do you want?” Mrs. Ward greeted me, her hand on the head of one of those dogs.
For an answer I began on Mr. Lively’s prepared sales talk.
“Bosh!” snapped Mrs. Ward. “I’m not interested in hearing that. Let’s talk about horses.”
We talked on for some time, but whenever I tried to get back to Universal Education, she cut me off, saying she was bored too much. At last I said I would have to be going.
“Wait. How much is your commission on that thing?”
I stammered something. “Oh, not much.”
“Well? Five dollars? Ten dollars? Will ten dollars cover it?”
I told her how much the commission was, but the check she handed me was far more than that, even when I sold the most expensive binding.
“Take it and cash it quick. Before I change my mind. But don’t put me down for a customer. I won’t accept.”
She saw the hesitation in my face.
“You’re afraid I’ll call up the bank and countermand the check, when I get to thinking it over? All right, young man, if you’d rather have the cash. Give me the check. I’ll cash it for you. I always write checks even to myself. It’s the only way I can keep track of where the money goes. No, don’t hesitate. I like you. And I give you my word, I can afford it.”
After classes started, I became even more discouraged about bookselling. There was nothing certain about it as a means of livelihood, it took up an enormous amount of time, and a good deal of carfare. I felt that I could never make the minimum requirement to give me that free scholarship my contract spoke of, even if I stopped college and devoted all my time to it. I envied now the boys who had some simple menial job like washing dishes.
5
I had craved a more cosmopolitan environment than Green Grove and Maritime, and I had found it. I was lost among a host of students ranging from extreme wealth to penury such as mine, and of all classes and all nationalities. Those in my Monday morning class on Greek and Roman civilization (I had promptly scrapped the Greek verbs of Maritime for some thing more general) seemed to be mostly native Americans, so far as I could judge. But just behind me was sitting a neat, short, well-dressed Oriental, with a very dark complexion. I could not place him. The professor had not yet entered. I turned around eagerly in my chair and accosted the other Oriental. “Where are you from?”
“Boston,” he said frigidly.
I thought one of my neighbors was about to explode. He was a tall, good-looking American boy with ruddy face, blue eyes and thick dark hair parted on the side. All during the first short meeting, he kept poking me in the ribs and grinning, with sly looks at the Bostonian behind who had snubbed me. We left the classroom together, and went into the Square Cafeteria. Charles Evans—for so he introduced himself—was still chuckling.
“Your friend is really from Siam,” he volunteered. “I know him. He’s a friend of the Siamese prince.”
I was charmed with my companion and he seemed to have taken an immediate liking for me. I was soon telling all about myself, and he about himself. Over the porcelain arms of our cafeteria chairs, we swapped stories of our financial difficulties. Of course he was not so hard up as I. He had a scholarship but it was a better kind than mine. And his family lived in a nearby town so that he could go home for week-ends, and recuperate from the midweek starvation. He too had tried selling books, but only during the summer. He did not think it was practicable for the winter, while going to college. He tried to think of various things to help me out. On the advice of Charles Evans, I decided to let my contract with Universal Education lapse for a while. The Korean businessman who was a friend to George said he knew the steward of a big hotel in Boston, and he was in need of an extra boy there. We went around for an interview. The job was that of standing in the pantry and cleaning off the plates, handing out supplies to the waiters, and things like that. I engaged it at once.
Only a small number of Koreans were in Boston that year. None were in any of my classes. They were mostly taking engineering or medicine. All—with the exception of the theological students who rated a soft berth—were having a hard time. There were a number of Chinese students and these were all kinds, rich and poor. Some of the rich received enormous allowances from home, which in spite of the rate of exchange enabled them to fool around and take their education as they pleased. So it was often noticed, rich Chinese boys were seldom very serious.
But of all the Orientals the Siamese were the most well off. There were four of them in Boston at this time. All were wealthy, all friends of the prince, they lived in style. The prince was such a publicity stunt man that some doubted if he really was a prince. Always reporters were hanging around him, and my, how he adored that! He was always dressing up to have his picture taken. The reporters took him, playing golf and tennis, and also on the ballroom floor. One reason the Siamese were so prosperous was their country did not need to spend money on armaments, and by the political accident of location was free from all international worries such as the other countries had. It made them rather soft though. Only one of the four had much stuff. Now Vidol, the Siamese in my Greek class, was particularly stupid. Never, never, never would he grasp any sense of the West—so I used to think. But then the professor was not very elastic either. He was an old hard-up bachelor with long, slightly graying hair standing up all over his head, and scholarly untidy clothes. Nothing existed in the world for him but Greek civilization. He had a dry sense of humor which used to crackle about the head of Vidol. But soon the professor would grow genuinely angry—sarcasm became inadequate. Some painful scenes were staged between them in that class. For Vidol would never admit that he had not read an assignment. Others said as a matter of course, “Today we have not read”—or “We read so far and no farther” . . . and that was all there was to it, the professor would pass on. Vidol preferred to provoke fires of cross-examination. The professor would bait him, would raise his answer to a moral issue between them. And even then, with the fact shamelessly apparent, Vidol would not admit that he lied.
“Yes, I read, but I do not remember.”
“Vidol, you are lying!”
“No, I read. . . .”
With dark unyielding dignity Vidol stared back at the professor. And before such alien falsehood, the professor lost all control; he would grow white and shake with fury. It was an obsession with him to break down Vidol, to force him to confess he was not telling the truth. A drama of East and West was staged before us. . . . “Never the twain shall meet,” one might say after seeing it—providing each was as stubborn and inelastic as these two. A crazy battle of wills, the unconquerable water of Vidol’s will insisting softly, “Yes, Professor, I read . . .” saving face by some obscure logic of his own, and the professor’s savage rage
, seeking to smash that self-possession by his moral hate, to make Vidol own up in the name of truth. We never knew who won, whether Vidol couldn’t stand it any more and dropped out, or whether the Greek professor told him he had to leave. Anyway, he died out, too near the beginning of the term to have flunked naturally. Charles missed him very much. He used to call him the “scholar from Boston.”
Yes, Vidol always “read” everything in that professor’s class, whose assignments were prodigious, unreasonably hard. Even Charles, one of the best students there, could not cover them from day to day. Charles would have to go somewhere and laugh after each class.
“Why does he lie? I can’t understand. He knows he’s not getting away with anything.”
“Of course, the East does not put the same emphasis upon the words of fact as the West,” I tried to explain. “A gentleman says what is respectable and decent to say. No doubt Vidol really means ‘I ought to have read.’ He may be very humble. In the Orient a teacher would know that he had not read, from his answers, and would not seek to humiliate him like that. There would be no loss of face, either way. Vidol would not be forced to say that he had neglected his duties and his proper obedience to a teacher, and the teacher would not be forced to say that Vidol lied.”
This interested Charles very much. We had a great deal to talk about. I had much to tell him, he much to tell me. And we were able to talk—with real communication and understanding, I mean. Certainly in Charles I found all I had missed in Maritime University. We held discussions on just when the truth of the fact became so important in the West. (This of course was long before the coming of science, although science has done much to sharpen that factual sincerity known to the West as truth.) Perhaps with Socrates.
“Of course,” I said to Charles, “there is the saying of Confucius, ‘A man without truth—I know not how that can be,’ but we in the Far East had Confucius instead of Socrates. As thinkers, they were somewhat different.”
“Yes, and Confucius I suppose was a stickler for form,” suggested Charles.
“Yes, indeed!”
6
My first winter in Boston comes back in feverish kaleidoscope. A thousand bits of existence I seemed to lead without connection. One moment I would be sitting in Doctor Campbell’s class, in a utopian world of the spirit where nothing mattered but high thoughts and the integrity of the mind. . . .
He was perhaps my favorite professor. I admired his teaching methods exceedingly. He always attacked his class with a fiery rush. If he failed to inspire them and make their eyes shine, he considered that day a failure. Alexander Campbell was a born actor. The stage would be set for his entrance. Rushing into the classroom, his tall, lean body darting like a rapier, he would always arrive ten or fifteen minutes late, the half of a cigar in his mouth. “Oh, I must leave this outside of the classroom, mustn’t I?” he would remember at the last moment. “Just a minute,” and flicking away the fire, he would drop the cigar gracefully into his pocket. “Now we will say our ‘grace.’” And walking like an actor strutting his lines, up and down, with long leaping stride, he would quote some favorite lines from Shakespeare, Carlyle, some old Chaucerian quatrain, or Browning stanza, with vibrating voice, magnetic personality, rolling and savoring the words in his mouth. Then he would have the class stand up and repeat after him his chosen grace for the day. This they would do, many purposefully trying to imitate the thunderous roll of Doctor Campbell’s famous voice with smiles and smirks. These “graces,” when we had repeated them many mornings after Doctor Campbell, were bound to stick, and as soon as we had mastered one, he gave us another. At the end of his course, one couldn’t help knowing some of Doctor Campbell’s pet quotations, whether one went to the trouble of memorizing them outside the classroom or not.
After Doctor Campbell’s class, I would sink down in the Boston Library, in a kind of spell, but I had hardly begun to finger some of the pages in his long, rich assignments than one of my other existences would begin calling, and I must rush to my bread line, to drudge in the New Hotel. From Doctor Campbell to the grossest world of Harpies’ feet and soiled mountains of plates. My mind would be torn back from a platonic world of pure and radiant ideas of food and the curious sanitary methods of the West. . . .
Coming in at the back door of the New Hotel I would report to a fat man sitting by the punch clock. I was admitted to the supply room, where I struggled into a white coat. (The hotel was very proud of its sanitation and always invited inspection.) Long before the business for the evening started up, I would be surrounded by tables of butter, sugar, salt, celery, olives, cherries to be put into grapefruits, grapefruits to be cut, and pyramid on pyramid of cans. I handed things out to the waiters dressed up in their tuxedo coats, and took in return each man’s number, for no article went out of the storeroom without being signed for. At the creation of dinners, every hair was numbered, every robin was counted; how different from the aftermath and judgment day of plates! But all proceeded with high-class business efficiency and the most modern sanitary methods.
I was on duty from four in the afternoon until around eleven at night. My wages were fifteen cents an hour and a free meal in the helper’s kitchen. There was plenty to eat there, but the meat was tainted, the fish smelly, and the helpers’ kitchen used no materials fit to be served upstairs to the guests. It didn’t matter much, for all the helpers were eating perpetually, just to relieve the monotony of the work. The chief steward never appeared among us without chewing something he had found in the special dining room upstairs, or between bites, smoking a big cigar. It seemed to agree with him. He, too, was fat. Everybody working here was fat. This was the kingdom of food, like the kingdom of the Drunk Land immortalized by Chinese poets. The chief steward, who had engaged me, was always kind and easy and in a teasing mood. But I had little to do with the chief steward. The man directly over me was Belcher, just out of business college. He was not so good-natured as the head steward and held his employees strictly to account in matters of time. Neither was he so fat, since he had not been in the hotel business long, but he was fattening fast as he, too, wandered from kitchen to kitchen picking up bites. There was another helper, a boy about twenty, who was always chasing to and from the refrigerators a girl who worked in another department. At the refrigerators, he would get to hug the girl and could also snatch a bite of white chicken or cold meat. Even the kissing here, I thought, had to be done in the presence of lobster and mayonnaise! In my department, too, where there was not much chance for anything substantial, one did a fair amount of nibbling. In cutting grapefruits a good deal of juice could be caught in a cup and you always had the centers to suck. Cherries went on the grapefruits, and a lot of cherries I ate. As for melons, they provided much without giving cost to anybody, for what was left from fixing those generous portions had to be thrown out anyhow.
Every once in a while at the hotel there would be a banquet. A banquet it was indeed, even for those lined up at the back door, the extra helps. Sometimes as many as twenty additional hands were called in. I noticed that at a banquet—behind the scenes at least—nobody seemed to get tired of eating, ever. At the beginning we were idle for a few minutes sometimes. Then each contrived to get a handful of nuts or a swallow of coffee . . . taking out last course first. I could see why the extra helpers ate. They all looked so thin and underfed. I think they had no other job. Day after day just waiting for banquets. Maybe they called at all the big hotels. Maybe they hunted garbage, I don’t know. Sometimes, of course, there would be two or even three banquets a week during the height of the season. But then there would come long stretches of vacant days. Nothing doing. I know they made calls every day at the New Hotel where I served, to find if by any chance banquets were going on. Still, even when the great occasion came, Belcher had to turn many away. A great many more extras always applied than there was any need for.
We worked by the service door to receive the plates before passing them on t
o the dishwashing machines. Sometimes the dishes came out from the banquet with whole half-chickens and big pieces of steak or legs of duck intact. By rights these must pass in steady stream into the garbage can. Oh, how that garbage can was buttered! Butter on practically everything, even on fat steak or creamy vegetables. How rich and juicy and luxurious the French cook had made all these to feed the garbage can! Not that the hotel wanted them for the garbage can—but they had been paid for, and the management was proud of its A-grade class and its fine system of sanitation. So the foreman would shout out for stealing the hotel’s paid time if any snatched at the left-overs. You should have seen how those extras watched out of the corner of the eye! The rule was against stealing time, not food, and it was still possible to grab a piece of that chicken on the march to the garbage can if it could go in the mouth all at once. (No rule there about chewing while on the job!) Or sometimes, with lightning speed, half-a-chicken with only the breast taken off is slipped into the coat pocket to wait for the leisured moment.
Now come the ice-cream plates, half-untouched, still semi-solid. These cannot go into the pocket . . . for all would be melted away in a few minutes! Sorrow! But some clever helpers were able to pick up ice-cream, even ice-cream already watery, and whisk it by the fingers quickly into the mouth. Even if cigarette ashes were sprinkled there, who would mind? If your only chance for ice-cream, month in, month out, is at a banquet, you must seize it.
Back-door banquets impressed me deeply, and I could never cease wondering. All that food passing along through hungry hands to feed the garbage pail . . . it was so wasteful, so fantastic, so American! . . . Food that would never be the same again . . . and just at that moment looking so savory. The hungry applicants for the banquet, turned away (who perhaps waited outside to lift up stealthily the banquet garbage lid), would find by that time the chicken legs had been all mixed up with broken dishes and salad refuse. Once in the garbage pail, the food was hardly fit even for the pigs. . . . I always felt unusually depressed after a banquet. Not because I had to stay up until three or four in the morning. I was glad of that, because then I received extra pay. But there seemed some hitch in American business methods. Why, you could feed more people with the waste food than those who had already been fed!
East Goes West Page 23