CHAPTER XIV
MAN AND THE SLUG
MAN is a human chameleon. Environment plays strange pranks with what he had imagined was the settled order of his life. He owes his mental development to his gregariousness. Aeons ago when the hairy cavemen formed clans the first step was taken toward organized society as we know it to-day.
Transport a man of the street from Broadway and set him down among the Eskimos, and not many years will have elapsed before he will be thinking and fighting and loving and longing as do the brown little people of the North. His ego will clamor for recognition. He cannot endure social ostracism. So as the Eskimos cannot interest themselves in his Broadway, cannot think his Broadway, cannot see his Broadway, the Broadway within him flickers out so that his soul-hunger for companionship may be appeased. You may set him back on Broadway after a lapse of years and in a day none will know that he has ever left it; but so long as he lives in the Frozen North so long will he be an Eskimo. There will of course be memories and unvoiced regrets to torture him through recurring moods of reminiscence, but these will be brief and will occur of lonely nights. Throughout the days he will be an Eskimo. And sometimes he will not care to return to Broadway. Men even deliberately return to penitentiaries where they have spent great portions of their lives.
Man is a human chameleon; it is beyond dispute. His soul craves intercourse with his fellows and without it shrivels to a rattling pod. And if he be associated day by day with only tramps he will either become a tramp or a morbid Pariah—and from the last he shrinks in horror.
This was taking place in the heart of Joshua Cole. By gradual degrees he was growing to think and see and look at life through the eyes of the nomad men about him. Spring was manifest. There seemed to be a subtle incense in the air that drugged him and contorted his views. He was living close to Mother Earth. Creature comforts were all that he craved. There was a sort of strange fascination about living from hand to mouth. The ingenuity required to live on nothing—the resourcefulness demanded—made strong appeal to some primitive satisfaction within him. He took a sort of pride in the comfort of a full belly when it was the result of luck or primitive cunning. To get something for nothing seems always to be the ambition of the race, no matter how warningly reason may rebel. To cover a hundred miles of country without paying a cent for transportation gave him the same amount of pride or satisfaction or gloating. It all made appeal to his sense of individuality. He was parasitically living and moving and having his being as does some wild thing in the woods—some flower of the fields. Trifling achievements caused his mentality to strut. He was as contented over discovering an unexpected warm place to creep into out of the rain as a merchant is in making an unexpectedly large sale of goods at the close of the day’s business. If he outwitted a train crew and made a longer jump than he had imagined possible, his vanity was tickled, even as might be tickled the vanity of a lawyer who has engineered a coup in court and brought about the admiration of the jury and his client, and the discomfiture of opposing counsel. He rejoiced as the caveman rejoiced over insignificant developments; but to him and the caveman they were not insignificant. They meant food and warmth and shelter. On Broadway similar developments might mean more expensive apartments, a new sedan, a trip to Europe, a diamond tiara.
Subtle Spring had borne on her soft wings the pollen of a strange philosophy. After all, what was life but the constant and inherent struggle to live? What mattered it how one lived?—or where? Was not coffee as delectable boiled in a blackened can over a campfire as in a silver-mounted electric percolator? Why did man wear clothes? To keep his body warm, or to turn his acquaintances green with envy? Was there more warmth and comfort in a hundred-dollar custom-made creation than in the whole though unpresentable suit that clothed Joshua Cole? Was his old home in Hathaway any warmer than a Southern Pacific sand-house? Did millionaires travel faster in their private cars than he could travel on top of one of them?
After all, what was the use in being anything but a vagabond? What men called progress brought nothing but aches and pains and shortened lives. Civilization was all pretense and cosmetics. Months had passed since the theft of the telescope, and Joshua, racing wildly here and there, risking his life a dozen times to catch fast trains, had failed to find The Whimperer. He laughed bitterly now as he sat in his camp alone, in Southern Colorado.
For five days he had eaten nothing, and was no longer hungry. Starvation brings weird imaginings to the mind of man. Strange fancies come to him—dreams that are like the dreams of addicts to some potent narcotic. He saw Civilization in all its pretense, in all of its hollow shams, in all of its aimless flounderings toward nothing. Science—bah! What could he ever hope to learn of science? Almost from birth he had been the victim of a cruel Fate. Well, he was through—absolutely through! Fate had ordained that he be a tramp. Why kick against the pricks? He would be a tramp.
Then suddenly he saw something on the ground that whisked his mind back over the years to another day in spring, when he and his brother Lester and two other boys had watched a slug lower itself from a chip by a string of mucus. And what he saw was another slug, of the same species, Limax Campestris, blind, wriggling helplessly along, bound nowhere.
Man was like this poor creature, condemned to a short space of endless wriggling about merely because life was in it.