“I do not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual
information to account,” I told him. “Unlike most men equipped with
similar knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is—”
“Is sufficiently—er—journalese?” he interrupted suavely.
“Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny.”
But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
dismissed the subject.
“I have tried it. It does not pay.”
“It was paid for and published,” he added, after a pause. “And I was
also honored with sixty days in the Hobo.”
“The Hobo?” I ventured.
“The Hobo—” He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles
while he cast his definition. “The Hobo, my dear fellow, is the name for
that particular place of detention in city and county jails wherein are
assembled tramps, drunks, beggars, and the riff-raff of petty offenders.
The word itself is a pretty one, and it has a history. Hautbois—there’s
the French of it. Haut, meaning high, and bois, wood. In English
it becomes hautboy, a wooden musical instrument of two-foot tone, I
believe, played with a double reed, an oboe, in fact. You remember in
‘Henry IV’—
“‘The case of a treble hautboy
Was a mansion for him, a court.’
“From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English
used the terms interchangeably. But—and mark you, the leap paralyzes
one—crossing the Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy,
becomes the name by which the night-scavenger is known. In a way one
understands its being born of the contempt for wandering players and
musical fellows. But see the beauty of it! the burn and the brand!
The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable, the despised, the man
without caste! And in its next incarnation, consistently and logically,
it attaches itself to the American outcast, namely, the tramp. Then,
as others have mutilated its sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and
ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo. Wherefore, the large stone and brick
cells, lined with double and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is
wont to incarcerate him, he calls the Hobo. Interesting, isn’t it?”
And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded man,
this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at home in
my den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table, outshone me
with his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending money, smoked my
best cigars, and selected from my ties and studs with a cultivated and
discriminating eye.
He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria’s “Economic
Foundation of Society.”
“I like to talk with you,” he remarked. “You are not indifferently
schooled. You’ve read the books, and your economic interpretation of
history, as you choose to call it” (this with a sneer), “eminently fits
you for an intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic judgments
are vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge. Now I, who know the
books, pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life, too. I have lived
it, naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted it,
the flesh and the blood of it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have
been biased by neither passion nor prejudice. All of which is necessary
for clear concepts, and all of which you lack. Ah! a really clever
passage. Listen!”
And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text
with a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved and
lumbering periods, casting side and cross lights upon the subject,
introducing points the author had blundered past and objections he had
ignored, catching up lost ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox
and reducing it to a coherent and succinctly stated truth—in short,
flashing his luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile
dull and heavy and lifeless.
It is long since that Leith Clay-Randolph (note the hyphenated surname)
knocked at the back door of Idlewild and melted the heart of Gunda. Now
Gunda was cold as her Norway hills, though in her least frigid moods she
was capable of permitting especially nice-looking tramps to sit on the
back stoop and devour lone crusts and forlorn and forsaken chops. But
that a tatterdemalion out of the night should invade the sanctity of her
kitchen-kingdom and delay dinner while she set a place for him in the
warmest corner, was a matter of such moment that the Sunflower went
to see. Ah, the Sunflower, of the soft heart and swift sympathy! Leith
Clay-Randolph threw his glamour over her for fifteen long minutes,
whilst I brooded with my cigar, and then she fluttered back with vague
words and the suggestion of a cast-off suit I would never miss.
“Surely I shall never miss it,” I said, and I had in mind the dark gray
suit with the pockets draggled from the freightage of many books—books
that had spoiled more than one day’s fishing sport.
“I should advise you, however,” I added, “to mend the pockets first.”
But the Sunflower’s face clouded. “N—o,” she said, “the black one.”
“The black one!” This explosively, incredulously. “I wear it quite
often. I—I intended wearing it to-night.”
“You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear,” the
Sunflower hurried on. “Besides, it’s shiny—”
“Shiny!”
“It—it soon will be, which is just the same, and the man is really
estimable. He is nice and refined, and I am sure he—”
“Has seen better days.”
“Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are
threadbare. And you have many suits—”
“Five,” I corrected, “counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
draggled pockets.”
“And he has none, no home, nothing—”
“Not even a Sunflower,”—putting my arm around her,—“wherefore he is
deserving of all things. Give him the black suit, dear—nay, the best
one, the very best one. Under high heaven for such lack there must be
compensation!”
“You ARE a dear!” And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
alluringly. “You are a PERFECT dear.”
And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
and apologetic.
“I—I gave him one of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid cotton
thing, and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were so
slipshod, I let him have a pair of yours, the old ones with the narrow
caps—”
“Old ones!”
“Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did.”
It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.
And so Leith Clay-Randolph came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did
not dream. Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an
erratic comet. Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk
who were his friends as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn,
he would creep up the brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And
without a word, when his wanderlust gripped him, he was off and away
into that great mysterious underworld he called “The Road.”
“I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the
open hand and heart,” he said, on the night he donned my good black
suit.
And I confess I was startled when I glanced over the top of my paper and
saw a lofty-browed and eminently respectable-looking gentleman, boldly
and carelessly at ease. The Sunflower was right. He must have known
better days for the black suit and white shirt to have effected such a
transformation. Involuntarily I rose to my feet, prompted to meet him on
equal ground. And then it was that the Clay-Randolph glamour descended
upon me. He slept at Idlewild that night, and the next night, and for
many nights. And he was a man to love. The Son of Anak, otherwise Rufus
the Blue-Eyed, and also plebeianly known as Tots, rioted with him from
brier-rose path to farthest orchard, scalped him in the haymow with
barbaric yells, and once, with pharisaic zeal, was near to crucifying
him under the attic roof beams. The Sunflower would have loved him
for the Son of Anak’s sake, had she not loved him for his own. As for
myself, let the Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone,
of how often I wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the
Lovable. Yet he was a man of whom we knew nothing. Beyond the fact that
he was Kentucky-born, his past was a blank. He never spoke of it. And
he was a man who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from
emotion. To him the world spelled itself out in problems. I charged him
once with being guilty of emotion when roaring round the den with
the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so, he held. Could he not cuddle a
sense-delight for the problem’s sake?
He was elusive. A man who intermingled nameless argot with polysyllabic
and technical terms, he would seem sometimes the veriest criminal, in
speech, face, expression, everything; at other times the cultured and
polished gentleman, and again, the philosopher and scientist. But
there was something glimmering; there which I never caught—flashes
of sincerity, of real feeling, I imagined, which were sped ere I could
grasp; echoes of the man he once was, possibly, or hints of the man
behind the mask. But the mask he never lifted, and the real man we never
knew.
“But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?” I
asked. “Never mind Loria. Tell me.”
“Well, if I must.” He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.
“In a town that shall be nameless,” he began, “in fact, a city of fifty
thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave for dollars and
women for dress, an idea came to me. My front was prepossessing, as
fronts go, and my pockets empty. I had in recollection a thought I once
entertained of writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer. Not that
they are reconcilable, of course, but the room offered for scientific
satire—”