A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

He said very little of her, but it was not at all difficult to catch the ampler meaning of his words. Sunday began to hold a new interest, quite apart from Sunday clothes. He found himself looking forward through the week to a glimpse of her at church, but the week was far too long, and in the autumn evenings he would dress himself in his best, regardless of the jeers of the other men, and would walk past her father’s corner grocery. Sometimes he saw her on the pavement in front of the shop, or helping her father to wait on customers within.

All this was very disturbing; a new world had opened to him with a steady job. It was unfolding itself with quite wonderful revelations in the home-life of his boarding-house, and the friendship of the matron, and the companionship of other workingmen, and the responsibility which was beginning to replace his former recklessness. Moreover, he was getting on in the tile factory. He was strong and active, and the chances of being transferred to piece-work was a spur to do his best at his present unskilled labor. Utterly unforeseen in its train of consequences had come into this budding consciousness, the vision of a girl. He had merely seen her at church, then seen her again, then found himself looking forward to sight of her, and unable to wait patiently for Sunday. The very thought of her carried with it a feeling of contempt for his former life, and a distressing sense of difference in their present stations, which developed, sometimes, into the temptation to go back to the road and forget. That was the temptation that was always in the background, and always coming to the fore when the craving for drink was strongest, or when the monotony of ten hours’ daily labor grew more than commonly burdensome. For four months and more he had resisted now, and, as a reward, he had become just man enough to know feebly that he could not easily forget, even on the road.

How he plucked up courage to meet her I do not know, for he did not tell me, and not for treasure would I have asked him at this point of the story. He did meet her, however, and the wonder of it was upon him still, as he told me modestly, in quaint speech, that she smiled upon him.

Oh, ineffable mystery of life, that he, a hobo of a few months before, should be reading now in a good girl’s eyes an answering liking to his own! He was little more than a lad, and she but a slip of a girl, and I do not know what it may have meant to her, but to him it was life from the dead. Very swiftly the winter sped and very hard he worked until he earned a job at piecework in the factory, and then harder than ever until he was making good wages. He could see little of her, for she had an instinctive knowledge of her father’s probable displeasure, but there grew up a tacit understanding between them that kept his hope and ambition fired.

Nothing in experience could have been more wonderful than those winter months, when he felt himself getting a man’s grip of things unutterable, that came as from out a boundless sea into the range of his strange awakening. And this new life was centred in her, as though she were its source. He lived for her, and worked and thought for her and tried to be worthy of her, and between his former and his present life was a gulf which by some miracle she had created.

It came upon him with the suddenness of a pistol-shot one evening late in March when they stood talking for a moment before saying good-night at her father’s door. Thundering down the steps from the living-rooms over the shop rushed the grocer, a large, florid Irishman. In a moment he was upon them, hot in the newly acquired knowledge that Farrell was “keeping steady company” with his daughter. His ire was up, and his Irish tongue was loosed, and Farrell got the sting of it. It lashed him for a beggarly factory laborer of doubtful birth, and, gaining vehemence, it lashed him for a hobo predestined to destruction, and finally, with strong admonition, it charged him never to speak to the girl and never to enter her home again.

If only he could have known, if only there had been a voice to tell him convincingly that now there had come a crucial test in his life between character and circumstance, a voice “to lift him through the fight”! But all his past was against him. In another hour he was dead drunk and he went drunk to work in the morning, and was discharged.

The pleading of his landlady was of no avail. He thought that he had lost the girl. Nothing remained but the road, and back to the road he would go, and soon, with his savings in his pocket, he was “beating his way” to Chicago. There he could live on beer and free lunches, and, at dives and brothels, he would “blow in” the savings of ten months and try to forget how sacred the sum had seemed to him, when, little by little, he added to it, while planning for the future. Its very sacredness gave a hellish zest to utter abandonment to vice while the money lasted; then he took again to begging on the streets with “a hard-luck story,” until, in the warm April days, he felt the old drawing to the open country and began once more to “beat his way” up and down the familiar railway lines and to beg his bread from the kind-hearted folk, who, in feeding him, were fast completing his ruin.

We were entering Seneca now, and another thunder-storm was upon us, but, as it broke in a deluge of rain, we ran for shelter under the eaves of the railway station. A west-bound passenger-train drew in as we stood there.

“That’s the way to travel,” I heard Farrell say, half to himself. It was the sheltered comfort of the passengers that he envied, I supposed. But not at all.