CHAPTER II
For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his pocket he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his bag went on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught up with it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes upon the streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the rough clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like them, with a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of heavy boots lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for a rather well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.
During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among all men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away upon his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking until he found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the country through which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores, the merchants with worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers, brutalised by toil, dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming of night, and told himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides of him it wore itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side currents, that nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving point to the tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in the world. He thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking to men, and thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a teacher, but as one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled with longing and inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would get out of bed, not now to stand in Miller’s pasture watching the rain on the surface of the water, but to walk endless miles through the darkness getting the blessed relief of fatigue into his body and often paying for and occupying two beds in one night.
Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would be held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his mind. He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical exertion as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to restore his body to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew with all of his native restlessness and energy; but he was determined that he would not again pour himself out in work that would react upon him as had his money making, his dream of beautiful children, and this last half-formed dream of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois town.
The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind that runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking to Jake, and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of stars, he had looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had seen a city built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong, and free, but a glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a socialist trembling before a name had dispelled the vision. After his return from hearing the socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by complicated influences, and in those November days when he walked south through Illinois, seeing the late glory of the trees and breathing the fine air, he laughed at himself for having had the vision. It was not that the red-haired man had sold him out, it was not the beating given him by Ed’s sullen-faced son or the blows across the face at the hands of his vigorous wife—it was just that at bottom he did not believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a ten per cent raise in wages. The public mind was a thing too big, too complicated and inert for a vision or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader, no reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a work to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the man who loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with Bill or the timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a political reformer and builder.
Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself. “The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me,” he thought. “They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has happened has been good medicine for me.”
Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states, through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of life and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue, of his boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair and talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or some garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster, Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in his bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
“The damned old coward,” he shouted into the darkness of his room or into the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible. It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent, so completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.