And so these storms, like the bread-line, like the Bowery Lodging, offer them something; not much. A few days, and the snow will be over. A few days, and the sun of a warm day will end all opportunity for work. They will go back again into the gloomy adventuring whence they emerged. Only now they are visible collectively, here in the cold and the snow, shoveling.
I like to think of them best and worst, though, as I have seen them time and time again waiting outside the wagon barns at night, the labor of the day over. It is something even to be a “down-and-out” and stand waiting for a pittance which one has really earned. You can see something of the satisfaction of this even in this gloomy line. In the early dark of a winter evening, the street’s lamps lighted, these men are shuffling their feet to keep warm. They are waiting to be paid, as they are at the end of each work day, but in their hearts is a faint response to the thought of gain—one dollar and seventy-five cents for the long day in the cold. The quarter is yielded gladly. The contractor finds a fat profit in the many quarters he can so easily garner. But these? To them it is a satisfaction to get the wherewithal to face another day. It is something to have the money wherewith to obtain a lodging and a meal for a night. That one-seventy-five—how really large it must look, like fifty or a hundred or a thousand to some. Satisfactions and joys are all so relative. But they have really earned one dollar and seventy-five cents and can hurry away to that marvelous table of satisfaction which one dollar and seventy-five cents will provide.
THE FRESHNESS OF THE UNIVERSE
The freshness of the world’s original forces is one of the wonders which binds me in perpetual fascination. My own strength is a little thing. I am sometimes sick and sometimes well; some days I am bounding with enthusiastic life, at other times I am drooping with weariness and ill feeling. But these things, the great currents of original power which make the world, are fresh and forever renewing themselves.
Every morning I rise from my sleep restored and go out of doors, and there they are. At the foot of my garden is a river which has been running all night long, a swift and never-resting stream. It has been running so every day and every night for centuries and centuries—and thousands of centuries, for all I know—and yet here it runs. People have come and gone; nations have risen and fallen; all sorts of puny strengths have had their day and have perished; but this thing has never weakened nor modified itself nor changed,—at least not very much. Its life is so long and so strong.
The Freshness of the Universe
And another thing that strikes me is the force and persistency of the winds. How sweet they are, how refreshing to the wearied body! I rise with sluggishness, and a sense of disgust with the world, mayhap, and yet here are the winds, fresh as in the beginning, to run me through and cool my face and hands and fill my breast with pure air and make me think the world is good again. I step out of my doorway, and here they are, blowing across the garden, shaking the leaves of the trees, rustling in the grass, fluttering at my coat-sleeves and my hair; and I am no whit the wiser as to what they are. Only I know that they are old, old, and yet as strong and invigorating as they ever were, and will be when my little strength is wasted and I am no more.
And here is the sun, bright, golden thing of the sky, which I may not even look at directly but which makes my day just the same. It is so invigorating, so healing, so beautiful. I know it is a commonplace, the thing that must have been before I could be, and yet it is so novel and fresh and new, even now. I rise, and this old sunlight is the newest thing in the world. Beside this day, which it makes, all things are old—my little house, which after all has stood only a few years; my possessions, dusty with standing a little while, and fading; myself, who am less young and strong by a day, getting older. And yet here it is, new after a million years—and a billion years, for aught I know—pouring this golden flood into my garden and making it what I wish it to be, new. The wonder of this force is appealing to me. It touches the innermost strangeness of my being.