As I lay with my face turned toward the west I got none of its first glories. Even on a cloudy morning, with a spattering of rain, I knew there must be splendors in the east, if no more than gray and lusterless splendors. Light to a gray world is as magical as hope to a gray heart; and as I watched the lamps on the New Jersey heights grow wan, while the river unbared its bosom to the day, that thing came to me which makes disgrace and shame and humiliation and every other ingredient of remorse a remedy rather than a poison.
I myself was hardly aware of the fact till Lovey and I had crept out of our cubby-hole, because all round us men were going to work. Sleepers in the open generally rise with daylight, but we had kept longer than usual to our refuge because we didn’t want to fare forth into the rain. As sooner or later it would come to a choice between going out and being kicked out, we decided to move of our own accord.
I must leave to your imagination the curious sensation of the down and out in having nothing to do but to get up, shake themselves, and walk away. On waking after each of these homeless nights it had seemed to me that the necessity for undressing to go to bed and dressing when one got up in the morning was the primary distinction between being a man and being a mere animal. Not to have to undress just to dress again reduced one to the level of the horse. Stray dogs got up and went off to their vague leisure just as Lovey and I were doing. Not to wash, not to go to breakfast, not to have a duty when washing and breakfasting were done—knocked out from under one all the props that civilization had built up and deprived one of the right to call oneself a man.
I think it was this last consideration that had most weight with me as Lovey and I stood gazing at the multifarious activities of the scene. There were men in sight, busy with all kinds of occupations. They were like ants; they were like bees. They came and went and pulled and hauled and hammered and climbed and dug, and every man’s eyes seemed bent on his task as if it were the only one in the world.
“It means two or three dollars a day to ’em if they ain’t,” Lovey grunted, when I had pointed this fact out to him. “Don’t suppose they’d work if they didn’t ’ave to, do ye?”
“I dare say they wouldn’t. But my point is that they do work. It’s Emerson who says that every man is as lazy as he dares to be, isn’t it?”
“Oh, anybody could say that.”
“And in spite of the fact that they’d rather be lazy, they’re all doing something. Look at them. Look at them in every direction to which your eyes can turn—droves of them, swarms of them, armies of them—every one bent on something into which he is putting a piece of himself!”
“Well, they’ve got ’omes or boardin’-’ouses. It’s easy enough to git a job when ye can give an address. But when ye carn’t—”
We were to test that within a minute or two. Fifteen or twenty brownies were digging in a ditch. Of all the forms of work in sight it seemed that which demanded the least in the way of special training.