A Good Samaritan
After such a disheartening experience in a community where I had had the help and countenance of a just and charitable head of the police department, I went back to the smaller places. Merely because it seemed foolish to take the time to learn a new trade when I already had one, I still sought office work. There was little difficulty in finding such employment—at humble wages; the unattainable thing was the keeping of it. Though I could never succeed in running it down and bringing it to bay, a pitiless Nemesis seemed to dog me from town to town. Gossiping marshals there may have been, now and then, to spread my story; but I had twice been given proof that another agency must be at work—a mysterious persecution that I could neither fight nor outwit, nor account for upon any reasonable hypothesis.
So the hopeless and one-sided battle went on as I fled from post to pillar up and down and back and forth in the "permitted" area, doing a bit of extra bookkeeping here and another there. The result was always the same. Work of that kind necessarily carried more or less responsibility, and in consequence I was never retained more than a few days at a time.
It was borne in upon me more and more that I must sink lower, into some walk in life in which no questions were asked. This conviction impressed itself upon me with greater emphasis at each succeeding failure, and the decision to drop into the ranks of the unidentified was finally reached in a small city in the agricultural section of the State where I had been employed for a few days in a hardware and implement store as shipping clerk. Once more I was discharged, peremptorily, and with a reproachful reprimand for having thrust myself, unplacarded, upon well-behaved people.
"I don't admit your right to say such things to me, Mr. Haddon," I protested, after the reproach had been well rubbed in. "I have given you good service for small pay, and there was no reason why I should have furnished you with an autobiography when you didn't ask it. In the circumstances it seems that I am the one to be aggrieved, but I'll waive the right to defend myself if you'll tell me where you got your information."
The implement dealer was a thin, ascetic person, with cold gray eyes and two distinct sets of manners; one for his customers and another for his employees; and the look he gave me was meant to be withering.
"I don't recognize your right to question me, at all," he objected, with the air of one who brushes an annoying insect from his coat-sleeve. "It is enough to say that my source of information is entirely reliable. By your own act you have placed yourself outside of the pale. If you break a natural law, Nature exacts the just penalty. It is the same in the moral field."
"But if any penalty were due from me I have paid it," I retorted.
"No; you have paid only a part of it—the law's part. Society still has its claims and they must be met; recognized and satisfied to the final jot and tittle."
Though this man was a church member, and a rather prominent one in Springville—we may call the small city Springville because that isn't its real name—I did not accuse him, even mentally, of conscious hypocrisy. What I said, upon leaving him, was that I hoped he'd never have to pay any of the penalties himself. I did not know then—what I learned later—that he was a very whited sepulchre; a man who was growing rich by a systematic process of robbing his farmer customers on time sales.