Down by the bayou throb the great arteries of the town, where all night long the puffing of steam and the click of piston rods keep its life streams moving; where men move like demons in the red glow of furnace fires; where snorting engines creep in and out among miles of laden freight cars, and lanterns dance and circle amid a wilderness of tracks and shifting trains like big eccentric fire-flies.
One can always see a few men perched on high stools at the all-night lunch counters. They are for the most part members of the night-working force, telegraph operators, night clerks, railroad men, messenger boys, streetcar conductors, reporters, cab drivers, printers and watchmen, who drop in to drink a cup of coffee or eat a sandwich.
The night clerk at the drug store sees much of the sadness and some of the badness of life. Customers stray into the store at all times of the night. The man with the disarranged attire and impatient manner is a frequent visitor. He has a doctor’s prescription for some sick member of his family, and thinks it a greater blessing that he finds a store open and a clerk ready to compound his medicine than to be obliged to tug at a night bell for half an hour to wake up a sleepy clerk, as in times gone by. Desperate-looking men sometimes come in to buy poison—generally morphine—and occasionally a hopeless, wretched woman with eyes big with hope deferred and an unpitying fate, will creep in and beg for something that will stay the pain forever. Often, in the darkest hour that they say comes before dawn, a man will enter in a hurry, buy a few pounds of prepared chalk and slip around the corner and drive away in a wagon containing two big bright tin cans full of pure, rich Jersey milk.
In the infirmaries and hospitals the nurses and genial-faced Sisters of Mercy bend over the beds of sufferers all through the dreary night, and bring to many an aching heart, as well as to pain-racked bodies, consolation and solace. The doctors, too, see much of the seamy side of night life. They are out by day and by night; the telephone rouses them from warm beds at all hours; whenever a knife flashes in a brawl, the doctor must be sent for; if a lady feels a nervous fluttering at the heart, out must come the carriage, and he must be sent for to feel her pulse in the middle of the night. Often he watches at the bedside of some stricken wife or child, while the husband is away roistering in evil company.
On a dry goods box sits a tramp, gently swinging his feet. It is 2 o’clock in the morning, and there he sits chewing a splinter with a frequent side glance toward the policeman on the next corner. What is he doing there? Nothing.
Has he any hopes, fears, dislikes, ambitions, hates, loves or desires? Very few. It may be that his is the true philosophy. John Davidson says of him in a poem:
I hang about the streets all day,
At night I hang about;
I sleep a little when I may,
But rise, betimes, the morning’s scout,
For through the year I always hear
Aloud, aloft, a ghostly shout.
My clothes are worn to threads and loops,
My skin shows here and there;
About my face, like seaweed, droops
My tangled beard, my tangled hair,
From cavernous and shaggy brows
My stony eyes untroubled stare.
I know no handicraft, no art,
But I have conquered fate;
For I have chosen the better part,
And neither hope, nor fear, nor hate;
With placid breath, on pain and death,
My certain alms, alone I wait.
And daily, nightly comes the call,
The pale unechoing note,
The faint “Aha” sent from the wall
Of Heaven, but from no ruddy throat
Of human breed or seraph’s seed,
A phantom voice that cries by rote.
This is a state closely bordering upon Nirvana. Tennyson struck another chord that sooner or later most people come to feel, when he said:
“For, not to desire or admire,
If a man could learn it, were more
Than to walk all day like a sultan
Of old in a garden of spice.”