Pondering this mystery I fall asleep, and so ends my first day in the army of the unemployed.
CHAPTER II
LIVING BY ODD JOBS
No. — Blue Island Avenue, Chicago,
Saturday, December 19, 1891.
When life is lived in its simplest terms, one is brought to marvellous intimacy with vital processes. And through this intimacy no disclosure is more wonderful than that of nature’s quick response. Exhausted by hard labor, until your muscles quiver in impotent loss of energy, you sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to the play of a physical revival wherein you are renewed by the mystery of intussusception, and your responsive mood quickens to the tension of the involution whence life’s energies flow new and fresh again. Another hour may bring as great a change, and the full tide of your rising spirits may set swiftly back. It is as though you were a little child once more, and your moods obedient to little things.
When living is a daily struggle with the problems of what you shall eat and what you shall drink, and wherewithal you shall be clothed, you take no anxious thought for the morrow, quite content to let the morrow take thought for the things of itself, for sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Your heart will leap with hope at any brightening of your lot, and will sink in deep despair when the way grows dark. The road of your salvation is by the strait gate and the narrow way of courage and persistent effort and provident foresight, and whence are these to come to you whose courage is born of warmth and a square meal, and whose despair comes with returning hunger? A world all bright with hope can be had on the terms of heat and food, and the sense of these can be induced for a nickel in a “barrel-house.”
When Clark and I awakened in the early morning, after our first night in the station, the dull gray dawn was dimming the gas, and in the lurid light we could see a writhing movement in the prostrate coiling mass of reeking humanity about us. We had lost the feeling of hunger, but a feverish thirst was burning to the roots of our tongues. We could scarcely move for the pain of sore and stiffened muscles, and I thought at first that my right leg was paralyzed from the night watchman’s kick. Only a few hours before, we had entered the station-house from the streets in eager willingness for any escape from their cold exposure, and now with intensified desire we longed for the outer air at any cost of hardship.
But we were not free to go out at once. The officer on duty brusquely ordered us back among the men when we approached him with a request to be allowed to leave. We were greeted with a burst of mocking glee as we walked back to our places, and among the comments was a call to me: “What have you pinched, whiskers?”
The reason for the delay was soon apparent, for in a few moments we were all marched down the main corridor and into the passage which opened nearest to the registrar’s desk. There we waited, closely huddled, the iron door locked upon us, while an examination was made as to whether any of the prisoners had been robbed. When all was reported right, the door was unlocked and we were allowed to file slowly out past the entrance of the kitchen. There stood the cook with an assistant, and he gave to each man as he passed a bowl of steaming coffee and a piece of bread. We drank the coffee at a gulp, and each man was eating bread with wolfish bites as he climbed the steps and walked out into the street.