"Now, some young men—well, to put it plainly, if there's liquor we just have to ask them to look for another room. Tobacco, with gentlemen, one can't be too severe on. We overlook it, and try not to complain too much. And, of course, only gentlemen visitors—"
With my assurance that I should do my utmost to live within their regulations, they were good enough to leave me to my single chair and the fungi. Dropping into the one and staring at the other, it seemed to me that I had reached the uttermost edge of the forlorn. I could bear the extreme modesty of this lodging, seeing that it gave me a shelter from the storm; I could bear being hungry, cold, and wet; I could bear the wall of darkness and blankness that hemmed in not only my future, but my past; what I found intolerable was the sense of being useless. The blows of Fate I could take with some equanimity, but, not to be able to "make good" or to earn a living cut me to the quick in my self-esteem.
And yet it was not that which in the end beat me to my knees beside the bed, to bury my head against the counterpane of imitation crochet-work. That was a more primal craving, a need as primal as thirst or the desire for sleep. It was the longing for some sort of human companionship—for the gay toleration of Lydia Blair, or Drinkwater's cheerfulness, or Mildred Averill's....
CHAPTER III
But in the end I found work, so why tell of the paroxysm of loneliness which shook me that night like a madness? Never before had I known anything like it, and nothing like it has seized me since. I must have remained on my knees for an hour or more, largely for the reason that there was nothing to get up for. Though I had had no dinner, I didn't want to eat, and what else was there to do? To eat and sleep, to sleep and eat, that apparently would be my fate till my seventeen dollars gave out. If the miracle didn't happen before then—but the miracle began to happen not long after that, and this is how it came to pass:
I got up and crept supperless to bed. There I slept with the merciful soundness of fatigue, wakened by the crashing past my window of an Elevated train to a keen sunny morning, with snow on the ground and the zest of new life.
As I washed, I could hear my neighbor washing on the other side of the partition. The partition was, in fact, so thin that I had heard all his movements since he got out of bed. The making of one man's toilet taking about the same amount of time as that of another man in similar conditions, we met at the doors of our respective rooms as we emerged to go down-stairs.
I looked at him; he looked at me. With what he saw I am concerned; I saw a stocky, broad-shouldered individual, with smooth black hair, solemn black eyes, bushy black eyebrows, a clean-shaven skin so dark that shaving could not obliterate the trace of hair, and a general air of friendliness. Putting on the good-mixer voice, which was not natural to me but which I could assume for a brief spurt, I said:
"Say, I wonder it you could advise a fellow where to get a breakfast? Only breezed in last night—"
Between working-people there is always that camaraderie I had already noticed in Drinkwater and Lydia Blair, and which springs from the knowledge that where there is nothing to lose there is nothing to be afraid of. While I cannot say that my companion viewed me with the spontaneous recognition he would have accorded to a man of his own class, he saw enough to warrant him in giving me his sympathy. The man of superior station down on his luck is not granted the full rights of the stratum to which he has descended; but even when an object of suspicion he is not one of hostility. Between moral bad luck and sheer fortuitous calamity the line is not strictly drawn; and wherever there is need there is a free inclination to meet it.