He still had those stirrings of altruism, a ready sympathy, an instinct to help. Only he saw very clearly that he could not be of any benefit to even a limited circle of his fellow men when at every turn of his hand economic pressure bore so hard upon him as an individual. He began to see that getting on in the world called for complete concentration of his efforts upon his own well-being. A pauper cannot be a philanthropist. One cannot take nothing from nothing and make something. To be of use to others he must first grasp what he required for himself.
Once he was settled and familiar enough with San Francisco to get from the Ferry Building to the Mission and from the Marina to China Basin without the use of a map he began to cast about for an opening. To make an apprentice beginning in any of the professions required education. He had that, he considered. It did not occur to him by what devious routes men arrived at distinction in the professions. He thought of studying for the law until the reception he got in various offices where he went seeking for information discouraged him in that field. Law students were a drug on the market.
"My dear young man," one kindly, gray-haired attorney told him, "you'd be wasting your time. The law means a tremendous amount of intellectual drudgery, and a slim chance of any great success unless you are gifted with a special aptitude for certain branches of it. All the great opportunities for a young man nowadays lie in business and salesmanship."
Business and salesmanship being two things of which Thompson knew himself to be profoundly ignorant, he made little headway. A successful business operation, so far as he could observe, called for capital which he did not possess. Salesmanship, when he delved into the method of getting his foot on that rung of the ladder, required special training, knowledge of a technical sort. That is, really successful salesmanship. The other kind consisted of selling goods over a counter for ten dollars per—with an excellent chance of continuing in that unenviable situation until old age overtook him. This was an age of specialists—and he had no specialty. Moreover, every avenue that he investigated seemed to be jammed full of young men clamoring for a chance. The skilled trades had their unions, their fixed hours of labor, fixed rates of pay. The big men, the industrial managers, the men who stood out in the professions, they had their own orbit into which he could not come until he had made good. There were the two forces, the top and the bottom of the workaday world. And he was in between, like a fish out of water.
Wherefore Thompson continued looking about for a number of weeks. He looked for work, without finding it save in street gangs and at labor that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe. A man had to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at the bottom of a ditch. He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the North had done for him—fixed him firmly in the resolve that if he had to sweat for a pittance it would not be within four walls, behind dusty windows. He could always go back to the woods. Sometimes he thought he would better do that out of hand, instead of wasting his time and money seeking in a city for the goose that was to lay him golden eggs.
When he was not hard on the trail of some definite opening sheer loneliness drove him out on the streets. His room was a cheerless place, a shelter for him when he slept and nothing more. Many a time, lacking any real objective, he covered miles of San Francisco's streets. He sought out parks, beaches, public buildings. At night he would drift, a silent, lonely spirit, among the crowds that ebbed and flowed in the downtown district that was a blaze of light.
That restless wandering brought him by chance one evening along a certain avenue which shall be nameless, because it is no longer the haunt of the soap-boxer. This curious thoroughfare lay upon the borderline between the smart shopping district and San Francisco's Chinatown. For a matter of two or three blocks the street was given over to an impromptu form of public assembly, a poor man's debating ground, an open forum where any citizen with a grievance, a theory, or even merely the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure of an audience. In the evening there was always a crowd. Street fakirs plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap, suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes and quarters from the crowd.
But the street fakirs were in the minority. The percentage of gullible ones was small. Mostly it was a place of oratory, the haunt of propagandists. Thompson listened to Social Democrats, Social Laborites, syndicalists, radicals, revolutionaries, philosophical anarchists, men with social and economic theories of the extremist type. But they talked well. They had a grasp of their subject. They had on tap tremendous quantities of all sorts of knowledge. The very extent of their vocabulary amazed Thompson. He heard scientific and historical authorities quoted and disputed, listened to arguments waged on every sort of ground—from biological complexities which he could not understand to agricultural statistics which he understood still less. A lot of it perplexed and irritated him, because the terminology was over his head. And the fact that he could not follow these men in full intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those things for himself. He got an inkling of the economic problems that afflict society. He found himself assenting offhand to the reasonable theorem that a man who produced wealth was entitled to what he produced. He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation. There was thus revived in him some of those troublesome perplexities which Sam and Sophie Carr had first aroused.
In the end, lacking profitable employment and growing dubious of obtaining it during the slack industrial season which then hovered over California, he turned to the serried shelves of the city library. Once started along this road he became an habitué, spending in a particular chair at a certain table anywhere from three to six hours a day, deep in a book, not to be deterred therefrom by the usual series of mental shocks which a man, full-fed all his life on conventions and dogmas and superficial thinking, gets when he first goes seriously and critically into the fields of scientific conclusions.
He was seated at a reading table one afternoon, nursing his chin in one hand, deep in a volume of Huxley's "Lectures and Essays" which was making a profound impression upon him through its twin merits of simple, concise language and breadth of vision. There was in it a rational explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious, the inexplicable. Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books. He began to perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was something more than a name in geology. And he was so immersed in what he read, in the printed page and the inevitable speculations that arose in his mind as he conned it, that he was only subconsciously aware of a woman passing his seat.