The following day I set out soon after breakfast, wearing both my cloak and furs over my coat suit. Recalling that I had seen one or more pawn-shops on Sixth Avenue in the vicinity of West Fourteenth Street, I went there. In the first I was told brusquely that they did not accept wearing apparel of any sort.
On leaving the second pawn-shop I held twenty dollars in my hand and was without my furs. Twenty dollars was ample provision for three weeks. Long before that time I would be able to get a good job now that work was so plentiful and so well paid.
Spending the rest of the day on a bench in Washington Square with a library book in my hand convinced me that I must find some other way of occupying my time if I was to gain strength. The afternoon paper solved that problem.
The U. S. Employment Bureau on East Twenty-second Street was in need of volunteer workers. On calling the next morning shortly after nine I found the street in front of the Bureau crowded by men. When finally, having wormed my way in and up the stairs, I made myself known and offered my services I was quickly placed—given a chair at a long make-shift table, planks on top of saw-horses, and told to register applicants willing to take work in shipyards.
That was a motley crowd—men holding jobs paying as high as five hundred dollars a month offered themselves for positions paying one-fifth that amount, and men who had no work at all refused jobs, the only ones they were fitted for, at three dollars a day.
One dear old Frenchman I shall never forget. He had passed down the long line of registrars struggling to make himself understood when he reached me. Though he had lived in New York more than twenty years he could neither speak nor understand the American language.
He was a highly paid cabinetmaker. Up to the outbreak of the World War his family comprised himself, his wife, five sons, and little Hortense. When he reached me, a bright day when winter’s smile seems spring, his little circle had dwindled within two years to himself and little Hortense. His five sons were under the poppies somewhere in France, his wife had died of a broken heart.
He acknowledged his age, past sixty, but insisted he still had strength enough to work for America and France. He would take any job, at any wage. I gave him a card and sent him to an employer who had specially stipulated that he would take no man over forty.