CHAPTER II.
AN EFFORT TO OBTAIN EMPLOYMENT.
What a common occurrence it is for people to do foolish things. How often we see a man of education and broad influence—a hard headed man of sense, who has made his own way against stubborn opposition, and accumulated great wealth—how often, I say, we see such a man exhibit a degree of simplicity in money making or some other matter that would seem weak in an untutored boy. When he already has more money than he knows what to do with, he will perhaps hazard all on some wild cat speculation, and in a very little while find himself penniless and unable to furnish support for his family. Again he becomes the victim of a confidence game, and only learns how he has been played with when he has lost perhaps fifty thousand dollars by the unscrupulous sharpers with whom he has been dealing.
Such exhibitions of weakness in men to whom the community looks for an example are always surprising, always painful; but they teach us the important fact that human nature is easily influenced, easily molded, easily led this way or that when the proper influences are brought to bear upon it.
It is not so strange, then, that young Herbert Randolph, fresh from the country and as ignorant of the city as a native African, should have become dazzled by the flattering prospects spread out before him. What a busy city New York seemed to him when he landed from the boat in the early morning! Everything was bustle and activity. People were hurrying along the streets as he had never seen them move in his quiet country town. No idlers were about. Men and boys alike were full of business—they showed it in their faces, their every movement. These facts impressed the young country lad far more than the tall buildings and fine streets. His own active nature bounded with admiration at the life and dash on every hand. He had been reared among sleepy people—people in a rut, whose blood flowed as slowly as the sluggish current upon which they floated towards their final destiny.
But young Randolph was not of their class. He had inherited an active mind, and an ambition that made him chafe at his inharmonious surroundings at home. The very atmosphere, therefore, of this great city, laden with the hum of activity, was stimulating and even intoxicating to his boundless ambition. He had been a great reader. Biography had been his favorite pastime. He knew the struggles and triumphs of many of our most conspicuous merchant princes. Not a few familiar names, displayed on great buildings which towered over the tops of their smaller neighbors, greeted his eyes as he approached the city by boat, and passed through the streets after landing. These sights were food for his imagination. He compared himself, his qualifications, his poverty, and his opportunities for advancement in this world of activity with the advent into New York of the men he had taken as models for his own career. There was in a general way a striking likeness between the two pictures as he viewed them. Their struggles had been so long and fierce that it seemed to him they must have been made of iron to finally win the fight.
Yet these very difficulties lent attractiveness to the picture. They made heroes of his models, whose example he burned with enthusiasm to follow. Thus it will be seen that in the early morning he expected to meet bitter discouragements, to encounter poverty in its most depressing form, and to meet rebuffs on the right hand and on the left. He expected all this. He rather craved it from the sentimental, heroic standpoint, because the men he had chosen to follow had been compelled to force their way through a similar opposition.
From this view of the boy it is plain that he was sincere in thanking young Bob Hunter, a little later, for the newsboy’s generous offer to take him into the paper trade. But a little later still, when he enters the post office and becomes intoxicated with the sudden, the unexpected, the overwhelming opportunities displayed before him—the urgent demands, even, for his services in helping to push forward the commerce of this vast city, he presents himself in an entirely new light. His head has been turned. He has lost sight of the early struggles of his heroes, and now revels in the brilliant pictures drawn by his imagination. How flattering to himself are these airy, short lived fabrics, and how sweet to his young ambition!
Had young Randolph been an ordinary boy of slow intellect, he would never have indulged in these beautiful dreams, which to the stupid mind would seem silly and absurd, but to him were living realities—creations to beckon him on, to encourage him in the hours of danger and to sustain him in the stern battle before him.
memories of country life—the
greeting by the way.
Did he then waste his time in what would seem wild imagination, when a more practically minded boy would have been applying for work? Yes, in the smaller sense, he idled his time away; but in the broader, he builded better than he knew. To be sure, he had lost the opportunity of securing a situation on that day—and he needed work urgently—but he had fixed upon an ideal—a standard of his own, to be the goal of all his efforts and struggles. And such an ideal was priceless to him. It would prove priceless to any boy, for without lofty aims no young man can ever hope to occupy a high position in life.
Of course he appears foolish in forgetting what he had anticipated, namely the difficulties he would in all probability experience in finding a situation, but the fact that five thousand positions were offered to him who knew nothing of the tremendous demand for such situations entirely deluded him. Once forgetting this important point, his mind ran on and on, growing bolder and bolder as thought sped forward unrestrained in wild, hilarious delight.
What pleasure in that half hour’s thought—sweet, pure, intoxicating pleasure, finer and more delicate than any real scene in life can ever afford.
But everything has a price, and that price must many times be paid in advance. Those delightful moments passed in thinking out for himself a grand career cost young Randolph far more than he felt he could afford to pay. They cost him the opportunity of securing a position on that day, and made him sick at his own ignorance and folly. He felt ashamed of himself and disgusted at his stupidity, as he walked block after block with tired feet and heavy heart, after being coldly turned away from dozens of business houses with no encouragement whatever. He went from banking to mercantile pursuits, then to insurance, to manufacturing, and so on down, grade after grade, till he would have been glad to get any sort of position at honest labor. But none was offered to him and he found no opening of any sort.
Night was coming on. He was tired and hungry. His spirits ran low. In the post office in the early part of the day they soared to unusual height, and now they were correspondingly depressed. What should he do next? Where should he spend the night? These questions pressed him for an answer. He thought of Bob Hunter, and his cheeks flushed with shame. He would not have the newsboy know how foolish he had been to waste his time in silly speculation. He knew the young New Yorker would question him, and he would have to hide the real cause of his failure, should he join his friend. He was fast nearing Bob’s place of business, and he decided to stop for a few moments’ reflection, and to rest his weary limbs as well. Accordingly he stepped to the inner side of the flagging and rested against the massive stone base of the Astor House.
Looking to his right Broadway extended down to the Battery, and to his left it stretched far away northward. Up this famous thoroughfare a mighty stream of humanity flowed homeward. Young Randolph watched the scene with much interest, forgetting for a time his own heavy heart. Soon, however, the question what to do with himself pressed him again for an answer. How entirely alone he felt! Of all the thousands of people passing by him, not one with a familiar face. Every one seemed absorbed in himself, and took no more notice of our country lad than if he had been a portion of the cold inanimate granite against which he stood. Herbert felt this keenly, for in the country it was so different. There every one had a kind look or a pleasant word for a fellow man to cheer him on his way.