Then the wearying, heart-breaking search for work began anew. That he had found one situation made him think he might find another, but at the end of a week he had met with nothing but failure. He still kept on the march, but the spirit was gone out of him. The search for work became purely an affair of the muscles: his legs carried him from office to office, at each his lips repeated their request. Muscle, that was all—muscle whipped to action by the fear of starvation.
But though his spirit was worn weak, his resentment was not. He raged—at times frantically. Why did the world refuse work to the poor beings the prisons sent back to it? Some of them were inspired by good resolutions; to them life was dear; they were worth saving. How did the world expect them to live and be honest, if it refused them means of life and of honesty? He could find but one answer to his questions: the world was selfish, heartless. He cursed the world, and he cursed the God that made it.
And he cursed himself, his foolishness that had brought him here; and he cursed Morton and St. Christopher's. At times he burned with the desire to clear his name, come what might to the people of the Mission. It is so hard for one, unfed, cold, hopeless, to be heroic. But his judgment told him that the truth from him would go unbelieved; and the great resolution behind his bargain, the long habit of silence, also restrained his declaration of innocence.
But even amid these gloomy weeks there were gentler periods. He often slipped at night into the neighbourhood of St. Christopher's, and stealthily gazed at the club-house, its windows aglow with friendliness to all but himself; at the chapel, with the Morton memorial window sending its warm inspiration into the streets—as it did, so he had learned, throughout the night. He told himself, when he thus stood with his work before his eyes, that he should be content. His struggles were hard—yes; his suffering was great. But that his suffering, the suffering of one man, should hold these hundreds a little nearer to the plain decencies of life, to truth and purity and honour, a little nearer to God—this was worth while. Yes, the bargain was a great bargain.
And every Wednesday evening he looked forth from the shadow of a doorway upon Helen Chambers as she left the Mission. And at the moment she passed his door he each time felt the same supreme pang. Three feet away!—as far away as the stars!
CHAPTER IV
AN UNINVITED GUEST
Black day followed black day, and grudged penny followed grudged penny, till at length there came a day when it seemed the blackness could become no blacker and when his remaining pennies were less than his fingers. On this day he sat long at his window, his wasted, despair-tightened face looking out upon the patched undergarments swinging from lines and upon the boxes and barrels and bottles and papers and rags that littered the deep bottom of the yard, grimly thinking over the prophecy of Kate Morgan. One of the two months she had given his honesty was gone. By the time the second had passed——? He shiveringly wondered.
This day he ate no evening meal. For a week now one meal had been his daily ration, and that meal pitiably poor and pitiably small. He sat about his room till his nickel clock—which Kate Morgan had brought in one day and deposited upon the wash-stand with her undebatable air of finality—reported quarter past nine, when he rose and walked down into the street. It had been one of those warm days that sometimes come in mid-November—benign messages of remembrance, as it were, from departed summer—and now the people of the tenements filled the streets, for on the packed East Side the street, on warm days, is parlor to the parent and the lover, and nursery to the child.