The security that pervades the street is an illusion. Force can knock it out. A strange force that lies in the masses who live in this street.
The audience moves away. The intelligentsia will discuss the possibility of a sudden uprising of the proletaire and gradually they will grow cynical about it and say, "Well, he was a good talker."
The orator finally emerges from the building. He is surrounded by friends, questioners. For two blocks he has company. Then he is alone. He stands waiting for a street car. Some of the audience pass by without recognizing him.
The street car comes and the orator gets on. He finds a seat. His head drops against the window and his eyes close. And the car sweeps away, taking with it its load of sleepy men and women who have stayed up too late—including a messiah of the proletaire who dreams of leading the masses out of bondage.
THE MAN FROM YESTERDAY
"You'll not use my name," he said, "because my family would be exceedingly grieved over the notoriety the thing would bring them."
Fifty or sixty or seventy—it was hard to tell how old he was. He looked like a panhandler and talked like a scholar. Life had knocked him out and walked over him. There was no money in his pocket, no food in his stomach, no hope in his heart. He was asking for a job—some kind of writing job. His hands were trembling and his face twitched. Despair underlay his words, but he kept it under. Hunger made his body jerked and his eyes shine with an unmannerly eagerness. But his words remained suave. He removed a pair of cracked nose-glasses and held them between his thumb and forefinger and gestured politely with them. Hungry, dirty, hopeless, his linen gone, his shoes torn, something inside his beaten frame remained still intact. There was no future. But he had a past to live up to.
He was asking for a job. What kind of job he didn't know. But he could write. He had been around the world. He was a cosmopolite and a rhymester and a press agent and a journalist. He pulled himself together and his eyes struggled hard to forget the hunger of his stomach.
"In the old days," he said, enunciating in the oracular manner of a day gone by—"ah, I was talking with Jack London about it before he died. Dear Jack! A great soul. A marvelous spirit. We were in the south seas together. Yes, the old days were different. Erudition counted for something. I was Buffalo Bill's first press agent. Also I worked for dear P. T. Barnum. I was his publicity man.
"Doesn't the world seem to have changed, to you?" he asked. "I was talking to George Ade about this very thing. Strange, isn't it? George and I are old friends. Who? Dickie Davis of the Sun? Certainly—a charming fellow. Stephen Crane? Genius, my friend, genius was his. That was the day when O. Henry was in New York. There was quite a crowd of us. We used to foregather in some comfortable grog shop and discuss. Ah, life and letters were talked about a great deal in those days."