The Man Who Could Not Lose — Background and Themes

.” He first thought he would like to be an assistant editor of a magazine. But he found editors of magazines anxious to employ new and untried assistants, especially in June, were very few. On the contrary, they explained they were retrenching and cutting down expenses--they meant they had discharged all office boys who received more than three dollars a week. They further “retrenched,” by taking a mean advantage of Carter’s having called upon them in person, by handing him three or four of his stories--but by this he saved his postage-stamps.

Each day, when he returned to the flat, Dolly, who always expected each editor would hastily dust off his chair and offer it to her brilliant husband, would smile excitedly and gasp, “Well?” and Carter would throw the rejected manuscripts on the table and say: “At least, I have not returned empty-handed.” Then they would discover a magazine that neither they nor any one else knew existed, and they would hurriedly readdress the manuscripts to that periodical, and run to post them at the letter-box on the corner.

“Any one of them, if ACCEPTED,” Carter would point out, “might bring us in twenty-five dollars. A story of mine once sold for forty; so to-night we can afford to dine at a restaurant where wine is NOT ‘included.’”

Fortunately, they never lost their sense of humor. Otherwise the narrow confines of the flat, the evil smells that rose from the baked streets, the greasy food of Italian and Hungarian restaurants, and the ever-haunting need of money might have crushed their youthful spirits. But in time even they found that one, still less two, cannot exist exclusively on love and the power to see the bright side of things--especially when there is no bright side. They had come to the point where they must borrow money from their friends, and that, though there were many who would have opened their safes to them, they had agreed was the one thing they would not do, or they must starve. The alternative was equally distasteful.

Carter had struggled earnestly to find a job. But his inexperience and the season of the year were against him. No newspaper wanted a dramatic critic when the only shows in town had been running three months, and on roof gardens; nor did they want a “cub” reporter when veterans were being “laid off” by the dozens. Nor were his services desired as a private secretary, a taxicab driver, an agent to sell real estate or automobiles or stocks. As no one gave him a chance to prove his unfitness for any of these callings, the fact that he knew nothing of any of them did not greatly matter. At these rebuffs Dolly was distinctly pleased. She argued they proved he was intended to pursue his natural career as an author.

That their friends might know they were poor did not affect her, but she did not want them to think by his taking up any outside “job” that they were poor because as a literary genius he was a failure. She believed in his stories. She wanted every one else to believe in them. Meanwhile, she assisted him in so far as she could by pawning the contents of five of the seven trunks, by learning to cook on a “Kitchenette,” and to laundry her handkerchiefs and iron them on the looking-glass.

They faced each other across the breakfast-table. It was only nine o’clock, but the sun beat into the flat with the breath of a furnace, and the air was foul and humid.

“I tell you,” Carter was saying fiercely, “you look ill. You are ill. You must go to the sea-shore. You must visit some of your proud friends at East Hampton or Newport. Then I’ll know you’re happy and I won’t worry, and I’ll find a job. I don’t mind the heat--and I’ll write you love letters”--he was talking very fast and not looking at Dolly--“like those I used to write you, before----”

Dolly raised her hand. “Listen!” she said. “Suppose I leave you. What will happen? I’ll wake up in a cool, beautiful brass bed, won’t I--with cretonne window-curtains, and salt air blowing them about, and a maid to bring me coffee. And instead of a bathroom like yours, next to an elevator shaft and a fire-escape, I’ll have one as big as a church, and the whole blue ocean to swim in. And I’ll sit on the rocks in the sunshine and watch the waves and the yachts--”

“And grow well again!” cried Carter. “But you’ll write to me,” he added wistfully, “every day, won’t you?”