“And you have no regular occupation?”
“No; nothing regular, unless——” he laughed at a thought that occurred to him. “You see, I’ve a pack of awfully good friends who have money and homes and all that sort of thing. When I get hard up—as I am just now; I’ve only five dollars to my name—I pay them a visit. I go only to places where they understand me and let me alone. So I suppose I might call myself—uh—a professional guest. I pay visits for my board and keep.”
“You’re not a sick man?”
“Lord, no! I’m terribly healthy. I’ve played football, rowed in a crew, polo, and I can swim a dozen miles. I’m so strong I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Then why don’t you work?”
“I wonder what you mean by work?” he asked mildly. He had long ago ceased to resent this inevitable question. Here was a man without funds who got along with the least amount of “work.” He explained. “By work I suppose you mean making something to sell. I’ve no objection to that, for those who can do it and like it. The mass of people are working in that sense. Of course it’s necessary, but the most of them look pretty down-trodden and driven, don’t you think? It’s a slave’s life for most earth dwellers. Some of them never see sunlight: they drive away at some monotonous task under gas-jets or arc-lights; they burrow in wet mines; they count up endless figures with green shades over their eyes; they shovel endless tons of coal, mix endless puddles of mortar or teach endless classes of somebody else’s endless children. I can’t do any of those things. For me it would be imprisonment, stifling, maddening. I must follow my will and, unfortunately or fortunately, my will does not lead on to fortune. Happiness is my goal, personal happiness; and in a very large measure I get it. Work? All my work is play and I play hard. You don’t know what hours it took me to get enough information together to read that Assyrian brick! I lived for weeks on bread and tea and an occasional chop cooked on Father Maloney’s cook-stove over in the West Side.”
“But somebody had to pay for the chop and the bread and the tea.”
“Oh, yes; that’s true,” he seemed to recollect that his story did not fit together. “Oh, I work, too, in your sense, to get enough funds together to do my own kind of work. I’ve wired houses, fixed up leaky roofs, cut grass on the big lawns—I’ve never had the least trouble in selling my muscles—but my real job when I get down and out and don’t feel quite like playing up my professional guest business—I had almost forgotten my best money-maker!—I’m an assistant widow.”
“What?”
“Isn’t that good! Assistant widow, and you don’t know the business at all, do you? Oh, it’s profitable—I make several hundred dollars in a few weeks—it’s terrible drudgery, but it’s short and swift and soon over. At Harvard college a ‘widow’ is a professional tutor,” he explained. “There’s a famous one at Cambridge whose business it is to put fellows through examinations with the least amount of effort on the part of the student. Not a bad idea, eh? It’s a rather sorry trade, I must admit, but it is very humanitarian. Old ‘Widow’ Knowells always has work for me whenever I want it at the time of the hour examinations and at midyears and at finals. He gives me careful notes of all the professor has done during the term, synopses of outside reading, etc., and I’m an expert in bottling it up. I can almost guarantee to put a fellow through, if he has enough memory to last him over night! Philosophy’s my stunt. I boil it down—from Thales to William James—and make it palatable for the unphilosophic mind. I’ve had as many as two hundred men in one group for a three-night cram before the exam. Rather horrid; isn’t it? But Knowells charged ’em five dollars apiece, and he generously gave me three. That was my banner group. I made $600, enough to keep me a year and save something towards this trip. But it took me a month to get the taste of the thing out of my mouth. Work? Ugh!”