PART III

Halliday was not a man to be discouraged easily, and for the next few weeks he kept up an unflagging search for work.  He found that there were more Feathertons and Stockards than he had ever looked to find.  Everywhere that he turned his face, anything but the most menial work was denied him.  He thought once of going away from Broughton, but would he find it any better anywhere else, he asked himself?  He determined to stay and fight it out there for two reasons.  First, because he held that it would be cowardice to run away, and secondly, because he felt that he was not fighting a local disease, but was bringing the force of his life to bear upon a national evil.  Broughton was as good a place to begin curative measures as elsewhere.

There was one refuge which was open to him, and which he fought against with all his might.  For years now, from as far back as he could remember, the colored graduates had “gone South to teach.”  This course was now recommended to him.  Indeed, his own family quite approved of it, and when he still stood out against the scheme, people began to say that Bertram Halliday did not want work; he wanted to be a gentleman.

But Halliday knew that the South had plenty of material, and year by year was raising and training her own teachers.  He knew that the time would come, if it were not present when it would be impossible to go South to teach, and he felt it to be essential that the North should be trained in a manner looking to the employment of her own negroes.  So he stayed.  But he was only human, and when the tide of talk anent his indolence began to ebb and flow about him, he availed himself of the only expedient that could arrest it.

When he went back to the great factory where he had seen and talked with Mr. Stockard, he went around to another door and this time asked for the head janitor.  This individual, a genial Irishman, took stock of Halliday at a glance.

“But what do ye want to be doin’ sich wurruk for, whin ye’ve been through school?” he asked.

“I am doing the only thing I can get to do,” was the answer.

“Well,” said the Irishman, “ye’ve got sinse, anyhow.”

Bert found himself employed as an under janitor at the factory at a wage of nine dollars a week.  At this, he could pay his share to keep the house going, and save a little for the period of study he still looked forward to.  The people who had accused him of laziness now made a martyr of him, and said what a pity it was for a man with such an education and with so much talent to be so employed menially.

He did not neglect his studies, but read at night, whenever the day’s work had not made both brain and body too weary for the task.