ALL OF THEM WERE SHOUTING OATHS AND VIOLENT ABUSE.
I fell back to a safe distance. On the opposite side of the street I saw a gentleman carrying a heavy portmanteau. He was well past the beat of the organized ring about the station. In an instant I was beside him, and was offering to carry his load. He seemed disinclined to pay any heed at first, but he stopped in a moment with the remark:
“I’ll give you a quarter to carry this bag to my hotel.”
I assented joyfully. I swung the bag to my shoulder, and passed on ahead, while the traveller walked close behind me in the crowd, and directed me to his hotel in Wabash Avenue, where, together with what I already had, I was soon fifty-five cents to the good.
That afternoon yielded nothing more either in prospect of a steady job or in the fruit of chance employment, and at dusk I stood again in South Water Street anxiously awaiting Clark’s return. It was dark when he came at last, and as he approached me in the fierce light of the electric arc which gleamed from the top of the high iron post near by, I could see that he was paler and more careworn, and deeply dejected. We sat down for a few moments upon a doorstep. The street was nearly deserted, and the lights shone dismally through its blackened length. Clark began to tell me of his afternoon. No chance of work had been revealed beyond the vague suggestion of one boss that he might need an extra man in a week or two. Moreover Clark had found the shops so far away that he had been obliged, both in his going and return, to take a Lincoln Avenue cable-car, and so was out a fruitless ten cents in fare. He said very little beyond the bare statement of his afternoon’s experience. He was sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, with his hands clasped, and his flaxen head bowed almost to his arms. I knew that he was struggling with thoughts and feelings which he could not analyze, nor in the least express, and I waited in silence beside him.
The whole experience was new to him. He had been out of work before, but he had had a home, and in its shelter he could tide over the depression which had cost him his job. Now his home was gone, and he was adrift without support. But he was young and strong and accustomed to work, and all that he sought was a chance to win his way. And yet his very struggles for a footing seemed to sink him into deeper difficulty. The conditions which he was forced to face seemed to conspire against the possibility of his success.
It was the feeling inspired by this seeming truth, a dim, dull feeling vaguely realized, yet awful, that bore hard upon him, and that loomed portentous as with remorseless fate. He was struggling with it in an agony of helpless discouragement, and presently he found utterance for it in concrete form.
“One boss I struck for a job, I thought he was going to give it to me sure,” he said. “He asked me where I’d worked before, and why I’d quit, and how long I’d been at the trade. And just then I felt something crawling on my neck. It was a crumb, —— it! The boss seen it, too. He got mad, —— him! and he chewed a rag, and he said if he had twenty jobs, he wouldn’t give one to a lousy hobo like me.” Clark was growing increasingly vehement in his recital. He rose to his feet and bent over me, while the hot words came hissing between his teeth:
“I ain’t never been like this in my life before, and, great God Almighty! I’d be clean if I could!” After a moment he added, in a hard, clear tone:
“We’ve got some money, partner, let’s go and get a drink.”