Read Online The Genius by Theodore Dreiser - Free Book Online

can put
you to work at fourteen dollars. I want you to come to see me a
week from Monday."
    Eugene thanked him. He decided, on Mr. Mitchly's advice, to give
his laundry manager a full week's notice. He told Margaret that he
was leaving and she was apparently glad for his sake. The
management was slightly sorry, for Eugene was a good driver. During
his last week he helped break in a new man in his place, and on
Monday appeared before Mr. Mitchly.
    Mr. Mitchly was glad to have him, for he had seen him as a young
man of energy and force. He explained the simple nature of the
work, which was to take bills for clocks, silverware, rugs,
anything which the company sold, and go over the various routes
collecting the money due,—which would average from seventy five to
a hundred and twenty-five dollars a day. "Most companies in our
line require a bond," he explained, "but we haven't come to that
yet. I think I know honest young men when I see them. Anyhow we
have a system of inspection. If a man's inclined to be dishonest he
can't get very far with us."
    Eugene had never thought of this question of honesty very much.
He had been raised where he did not need to worry about the matter
of a little pocket change, and he had made enough at the
Appeal
to supply his immediate wants. Besides, among the
people he had always associated with it was considered a very right
and necessary thing to be honest. Men were arrested for not being.
He remembered one very sad case of a boy he knew being arrested at
Alexandria for breaking into a store at night. That seemed a
terrible thing to him at the time. Since then he had been
speculating a great deal, in a vague way as to what honesty was,
but he had not yet decided. He knew that it was expected of him to
account for the last penny of anything that was placed in his
keeping and he was perfectly willing to do so. The money he earned
seemed enough if he had to live on it. There was no need for him to
aid in supporting anyone else. So he slipped along rather easily
and practically untested.
    Eugene took the first day's package of bills as laid out for
him, and carefully went from door to door. In some places money was
paid him for which he gave a receipt, in others he was put off or
refused because of previous difficulties with the company. In a
number of places people had moved, leaving no trace of themselves,
and packing the unpaid for goods with them. It was his business, as
Mr. Mitchly explained, to try to get track of them from the
neighbors.
    Eugene saw at once that he was going to like the work. The fresh
air, the out-door life, the walking, the quickness with which his
task was accomplished, all pleased him. His routes took him into
strange and new parts of the city, where he had never been before,
and introduced him to types he had never met. His laundry work,
taking him from door to door, had been a freshening influence, and
this was another. He saw scenes that he felt sure he could, when he
had learned to draw a little better, make great things of,—dark,
towering factory-sites, great stretches of railroad yards laid out
like a puzzle in rain, snow, or bright sunlight; great smoke-stacks
throwing their black heights athwart morning or evening skies. He
liked them best in the late afternoon when they stood out in a glow
of red or fading purple. "Wonderful," he used to exclaim to
himself, and think how the world would marvel if he could ever come
to do great pictures like those of Doré. He admired the man's
tremendous imagination. He never thought of himself as doing
anything in oils or water colors or chalk—only pen and ink, and
that in great, rude splotches of black and white. That was the way.
That was the way force was had.
    But he could not do them. He could only think them.
    One of his chief joys was the Chicago river, its black, mucky
water churned by puffing tugs and its banks lined by great red
grain elevators and black coal chutes and yellow lumber yards. Here
was real color and