When he had warned himself, a month ago, that to be a penniless Negro in this Christian land would be difficult, that just to get through one day of the threat and actuality of snubs would be hard, he had not quite known that it would be hell in the cold, hell in the employers’ insults, hell in the pocketbook so flat that you took coffee or soup at your grubby lunch, hell in the screaming tendons of the lame, jarring leg he had almost lost in defending the freedom of white Americans to refuse jobs to black Americans.

Even if some day the Government should give him a vastly larger allowance for having been wounded, he did not think that he could endure settling down as an idle pensioner, with all life a dreary poor-farm, and Vestal and Biddy a cautious meagerness beside an ambitionless loafer.

He asked himself, “Would I have been so brash and announced myself as a Negro if I had known how hard it would be to get a job without concealing my race?”

The doubt made him stubbornly angry.

“I couldn’t do anything else. I had to come out. Job-hunt. I had to come out. Job-hunt. I had to… This leg hurts so, and I am so cold!”

But with it all, whenever he had to fill out an application blank with the query “Race?” he put down “colored.”

* * * * *

He had, inevitably, asked for work at Wargate’s, but he would not bother Lucian Firelock, and the stranger in the employment office had nothing for him but a place as timekeeper at twenty-six dollars a week—an old man’s post.

The stories that Vestal’s friend, Mrs. Timberlane, had told about Fliegend, the toy-maker, sent Neil there, and the old man welcomed him, but there seemed to be nothing in the toy-factory that he could do. He realized that though he had been assuming that he was a well-trained and valuable member of society, he had no skills outside of camping and organizing golf-tournaments and working in a bank. Even in the bank, he had no knowledge outside of routine tasks, and he had been an ornament in the Second National chiefly because he had a smile and was the son-in-law of Morton Beehouse and was so unquestionably conservative and Gentile and white.

He could, he considered, steer a canoe, but not so well as any Indian; he could handle a car, but not so well as any taxi-driver; and while his technique in cooking muskalonge steaks on an open fire was sound, it was not commercial.