Essay（s） by Robert Cortes Holliday
A Human Cash Register
Robert Cortes Holliday
下载：Essay（s） by Robert Cortes Holliday.txt
Across the table from a lodger sits Mr. Fife. Mr. Fife is a clerk. This statement comprises, not inadequately, his memoirs.
When a man speaks to you of the useful piece of mechanism called a cash register, you comprehend him perfectly. You know what a cash register is, for what purpose it was designed, how it looks, how much approximately it is worth, what it will perform, and what it will remain--a cash register. A cash register could not have been born a toy balloon, spent its youth as a bicycle, been educated as a pulpit, have imprudently married a footlight, been forced to obtain employment as a cash register, but cherishes a secret ambition to be a typewriter and solace itself in turn as a violin, a mug of ale, and a tobacco pipe. A lodger does not say that Mr. Fife is no better in any way than a cash register. A mother nursed him at her breast, watched him as he slept; he was somebody's baby. A grown man was strangely moved, probably, when he was born. He played somewhere as a child. Dirty little brothers and sisters, perhaps, were his. He was spanked and had diseases and suffered and was frightened and rejoiced. Hearts have been glad when he was near. One or two little girls, no doubt, have admired him very much. Some woman, probably somewhere, admires him still. A lodger does not say that Mr. Fife has no inner life. He does not say that the forces of existence constantly, ceaselessly beating in on this man (or rather clerk) are not here slowly, inevitably shaping a moral character, this way or that. But as this human life sits here at Mrs. Wigger's board a clerk is here, with his past and his future.
Mr. Fife has a "furnished room" somewhere around on the next street, and only takes his meals at Mrs. Wigger's.
[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Human Cash Register