I have had a new and strange experience--droll in one way, grotesque in
another and when everything is said, tragic: at least an adventure.
Harriet looks at me accusingly, and I have had to preserve the air of
one deeply contrite now for two days (no easy accomplishment for me!),
even though in secret I have smiled and pondered.
How our life has been warped by books! We are not contented with
realities: we crave conclusions. With what ardour our minds respond to
real events with literary deductions. Upon a train of incidents, as
unconnected as life itself, we are wont to clap a booky ending. An
instinctive desire for completeness animates the human mind (a struggle
to circumscribe the infinite). We would like to have life "turn
out"--but it doesn't--it doesn't. Each event is the beginning of a whole
new genealogy of events. In boyhood I remember asking after every story
I heard: "What happened next?" for no conclusion ever quite satisfied
me--even when the hero died in his own gore. I always knew there was
something yet remaining to be told. The only sure conclusion we can
reach is this: Life changes. And what is more enthralling to the human
mind than this splendid, boundless, coloured mutability!--life in the
making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take
such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true
explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within
our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidification
means loss of interest; and loss of interest, not years, is old age.
So I have mused since my tramp came in for a moment out of the Mystery
(as we all do) and went away again into the Mystery (in our way, too).
There are strange things in this world!
* * * * *
As I came around the corner I saw sitting there on my steps the very
personification of Ruin, a tumble-down, dilapidated wreck of manhood. He
gave one the impression of having been dropped where he sat, all in a
heap. My first instinctive feeling was not one of recoil or even of
hostility, but rather a sudden desire to pick him up and put him where
he belonged, the instinct, I should say, of the normal man who hangs his
axe always on the same nail. When he saw me he gathered himself together
with reluctance and stood fully revealed. It was a curious attitude of
mingled effrontery and apology. "Hit me if you dare," blustered his
outward personality. "For God's sake, don't hit me," cried the innate
fear in his eyes. I stopped and looked at him sharply, His eyes dropped,
his look slid away, so that I experienced a sense of shame, as though I
had trampled upon him. A damp rag of humanity! I confess that my first
impulse, and a strong one, was to kick him for the good of the human
race. No man has a right to be like that.
And then, quite suddenly, I had a great revulsion of feeling. What was I
that I should judge without knowledge? Perhaps, after all, here was one
bearing treasure. So I said:
"You are the man I have been expecting."
He did not reply, only flashed his eyes up at me, wherein fear deepened.
"I have been saving up a coat for you," I said, "and a pair of shoes.
They are not much worn," I said, "but a little too small for me. I think
they will fit you."
He looked at me again, not sharply, but with a sort of weak cunning. So
far he had not said a word.
"I think our supper is nearly ready," I said: "let us go in."
"No, mister," he mumbled, "a bite out here--no, mister"--and then, as
though the sound of his own voice inspired him, he grew declamatory.
"I'm a respectable man, mister, plumber by trade, but----"
"But," I interrupted, "you can't get any work, you're cold and you
haven't had anything to eat for two days, so you are walking out here in
the country where we farmers have no plumbing to do. At home you have a
starving wife and three small children----"
"Six, mister----"
"Well, six--And now we will go in to supper."
I led him into the entry way and poured for him a big basin of hot
water. As I stepped out again with a comb he was slinking toward the
doorway.
"Here," I said, "is a comb; we are having supper now in a few minutes."
I wish I could picture Harriet's face when I brought him into her
immaculate kitchen. But I gave her a look, one of the commanding sort
that I can put on in times of great emergency, and she silently laid
another place at the table.
When I came to look at our Ruin by the full lamplight I was surprised to
see what a change a little warm water and a comb had wrought in him. He
came to the table uncertain, blinking, apologetic. His forehead, I saw,
was really impressive--high, narrow and thin-skinned. His face gave one
somehow the impression of a carving once full of significant lines, now
blurred and worn as though Time, having first marked it with the lines
of character, had grown discouraged and brushed the hand of
forgetfulness over her work. He had peculiar thin, silky hair of no
particular colour, with a certain almost childish pathetic waviness
around the ears and at the back of the neck. Something, after all, about
the man aroused one's compassion.
I don't know that he looked dissipated, and surely he was not as dirty
as I had at first supposed. Something remained that suggested a care for
himself in the past. It was not dissipation, I decided; it was rather an
indefinable looseness and weakness, that gave one alternately the
feeling I had first experienced, that of anger, succeeded by the
compassion that one feels for a child. To Harriet, when she had once
seen him, he was all child, and she all compassion.
We disturbed him with no questions. Harriet's fundamental quality is
homeliness, comfortableness. Her tea-kettle seems always singing; an
indefinable tabbiness, as of feather cushions, lurks in her
dining-room, a right warmth of table and chairs, indescribably
comfortable at the end of a chilly day. A busy good-smelling steam
arises from all her dishes at once, and the light in the middle of the
table is of a redness that enthralls the human soul. As for Harriet
herself, she is the personification of comfort, airy, clean, warm,
inexpressibly wholesome. And never in the world is she so engaging as
when she ministers to a man's hunger. Truthfully, sometimes, when she
comes to me out of the dimmer light of the kitchen to the radiance of
the table with a plate of muffins, it is as though she and the muffins
were a part of each other, and that she is really offering some of
herself. And down in my heart I know she is doing just that!
Well, it was wonderful to see our Ruin expand in the warmth of Harriet's
presence. He had been doubtful of me; of Harriet, I could see, he was
absolutely sure. And how he did eat, saying nothing at all, while
Harriet plied him with food and talked to me of the most disarming
commonplaces. I think it did her heart good to see the way he ate: as
though he had had nothing before in days. As he buttered his muffin,
not without some refinement, I could see that his hand was long, a
curious, lean, ineffectual hand, with a curving little finger. With the
drinking of the hot coffee colour began to steal up into his face, and
when Harriet brought out a quarter of pie saved over from our dinner and
placed it before him--a fine brown pie with small hieroglyphics in the
top from whence rose sugary bubbles--he seemed almost to escape himself.
And Harriet fairly purred with hospitality.
The more he ate the more of a man he became. His manners improved, his
back straightened up, he acquired a not unimpressive poise of the head.
Such is the miraculous power of hot muffins and pie!
"As you came down," I asked finally, "did you happen to see old man
Masterson's threshing machine?"
"A big red one, with a yellow blow-off?"
"That's the one," I said.
"Well, it was just turning into a field about two miles above here," he
replied.
"Big gray, banked barn?" I asked.
"Yes, and a little unpainted house," said our friend.
"That's Parsons'," put in Harriet, with a mellow laugh. "I wonder if he
ever _will_ paint that house. He builds bigger barns every year and
doesn't touch the house. Poor Mrs. Parsons----"
And so we talked of barns and threshing machines in the way we farmers
love to do and I lured our friend slowly into talking about himself. At
first he was non-committal enough and what he said seemed curiously made
to order; he used certain set phrases with which to explain simply what
was not easy to explain--a device not uncommon to all of us. I was
fearful of not getting within this outward armouring, but gradually as
we talked and Harriet poured him a third cup of hot coffee he dropped
into a more familiar tone. He told with some sprightliness of having
seen threshings in Mexico, how the grain was beaten out with flails in
the patios, and afterwards thrown up in the wind to winnow out.
"You must have seen a good deal of life," remarked Harriet
sympathetically.
At this remark I saw one of our Ruin's long hands draw up and clinch. He
turned his head toward Harriet. His face was partly in the shadow, but
there was something striking and strange in the way he looked at her,
and a deepness in his voice when he spoke:
"Too much! I've seen too much of life." He threw out one arm and brought
it back with a shudder.
"You see what it has left me," he said, "I am an example of too much
life."
In response to Harriet's melting compassion he had spoken with
unfathomable bitterness. Suddenly he leaned forward toward me with a
piercing gaze as though he would look into my soul. His face had changed
completely; from the loose and vacant mask of the early evening it had
taken on the utmost tensity of emotion.
"You do not know," he said, "what it is to live too much--and to be
afraid."
"Live too much?" I asked.
"Yes, live too much, that is what I do--and I am afraid."
He paused a moment and then broke out in a higher key:
"You think I am a tramp. Yes--you do. I know--a worthless fellow, lying,
begging, stealing when he can't beg. You have taken me in and fed me.
You have said the first kind words I have heard, it seems to me, in
years. I don't know who you are. I shall never see you again."
I cannot well describe the intensity of the passion with which he spoke,
his face shaking with emotion, his hands trembling.
"Oh, yes," I said easily, "we are comfortable people here--and it is a
good place to live."
"No no," he returned. "I know, I've got my call--" Then leaning forward
he said in a lower, even more intense voice--"I live everything
beforehand."
I was startled by the look of his eyes: the abject terror of it: and I
thought to myself, "The man is not right in his mind." And yet I longed
to know of the life within this strange husk of manhood.
"I know," he said, as if reading my thought, "you think"--and he tapped
his forehead with one finger--"but I'm not. I'm as sane as you are."
It was a strange story he told. It seems almost unbelievable to me as I
set it down here, until I reflect how little any one of us knows of the
deep life within his nearest neighbour--what stories there are, what
tragedies enacted under a calm exterior! What a drama there _may_ be in
this commonplace man buying ten pounds of sugar at the grocery store, or
this other one driving his two old horses in the town road! We do not
know. And how rarely are the men of inner adventure articulate!
Therefore I treasure the curious story the tramp told me. I do not
question its truth. It came as all truth does, through a clouded and
unclean medium: and any judgment of the story itself must be based upon
a knowledge of the personal equation of the Ruin who told it.
"I am no tramp," he said, "in reality, I am no tramp. I began as well as
anyone--It doesn't matter now, only I won't have any of the sympathy
that people give to the man who has seen better days. I hate sentiment.
_I hate it_----"
I cannot attempt to set down the story in his own words. It was broken
with exclamations and involved with wandering sophistries and diatribes
of self-blame. His mind had trampled upon itself in throes of
introspection until it was often difficult to say which way the paths of
the narrative really led. He had thought so much and acted so little
that he travelled in a veritable bog of indecision. And yet, withal,
some ideas, by constant attrition, had acquired a really striking form.
"I am afraid before life," he said. "It makes me dizzy with thought."
At another time he said, "If I am a tramp at all, I am a mental tramp. I
have an unanchored mind."
It seems that he came to a realisation that there was something peculiar
about him at a very early age. He said they would look at him and
whisper to one another and that his sayings were much repeated, often in
his hearing. He knew that he was considered an extraordinary child: they
baited him with questions that they might laugh at his quaint replies.
He said that as early as he could remember he used to plan situations so
that he might say things that were strange and even shocking in a
child. His father was a small professor in a small college--a "worm" he
called him bitterly--"one of those worms that bores in books and finally
dries up and blows off." But his mother--he said she was an angel. I
recall his exact expression about her eyes that "when she looked at one
it made him better." He spoke of her with a softening of the voice,
looking often at Harriet. He talked a good deal about his mother, trying
to account for himself through her. She was not strong, he said, and
very sensitive to the contact of either friends or enemies--evidently a
nervous, high-strung woman.
"You have known such people," he said, "everything hurt her."
He said she "starved to death." She starved for affection and
understanding.
One of the first things he recalled of his boyhood was his passionate
love for his mother.
"I can remember," he said, "lying awake in my bed and thinking how I
would love her and serve her--and I could see myself in all sorts of
impossible places saving her from danger. When she came to my room to
bid me good night, I imagined how I should look--for I have always been
able to see myself doing things--when I threw my arms around her neck to
kiss her."
Here he reached a strange part of his story. I had been watching Harriet
out of the corner of my eye. At first her face was tearful with
compassion, but as the Ruin proceeded it became a study in wonder and
finally in outright alarm. He said that when his mother came in to bid
him good night he saw himself so plainly beforehand ("more vividly than
I see you at this moment") and felt his emotion so keenly that when his
mother actually stooped to kiss him, somehow he could not respond, he
could not throw his arms around her neck. He said he often lay quiet, in
waiting, trembling all over until she had gone, not only suffering
himself but pitying her, because he understood how she must feel. Then
he would follow her, he said, in imagination through the long hall,
seeing himself stealing behind her, just touching her hand, wistfully
hoping that she might turn to him again--and yet fearing. He said no one
knew the agonies he suffered at seeing his mother's disappointment over
his apparent coldness and unresponsiveness.
"I think," he said, "it hastened her death." He would not go to the
funeral; he did not dare, he said. He cried and fought when they came to
take him away, and when the house was silent he ran up to her room and
buried his head in her pillows and ran in swift imagination to her
funeral. He said he could see himself in the country road, hurrying in
the cold rain--for it seemed raining--he said he could actually feel the
stones and ruts, although he could not tell how it was possible that he
should have seen himself at a distance and _felt_ in his own feet the
stones of the road. He said he saw the box taken from the wagon--_saw_
it--and that he heard the sound of the clods thrown in, and it made him
shriek until they came running and held him.
As he grew older he said he came to live everything beforehand, and that
the event as imagined was so far more vivid and affecting that he had no
heart for the reality itself.
"It seems strange to you," he said, "but I am telling you exactly what
my experience was."
It was curious, he said, when his father told him he must not do a
thing, how he went on and imagined in how many different ways he could
do it--and how, afterward, he imagined he was punished by that "worm,"
his father, whom he seemed to hate bitterly. Of those early days, in
which he suffered acutely--in idleness, apparently--and perhaps that was
one of the causes of his disorder--he told us at length, but many of the
incidents were so evidently worn by the constant handling of his mind
that they gave no clear impression.
Finally, he ran away from home, he said. At first he found that a wholly
new place and new people took him out of himself ("surprised me," he
said, "so that I could not live everything beforehand"). Thus he fled.
The slang he used, "chased himself all over the country," seemed
peculiarly expressive. He had been in foreign countries; he had herded
sheep in Australia (so he said), and certainly from his knowledge of the
country he had wandered with the gamboleros of South America; he had
gone for gold to Alaska, and worked in the lumber camps of the Pacific
Northwest. But he could not escape, he said. In a short time he was no
longer "surprised." His account of his travels, while fragmentary, had a
peculiar vividness. He _saw_ what he described, and he saw it so plainly
that his mind ran off into curious details that made his words strike
sometimes like flashes of lightning. A strange and wonderful
mind--uncontrolled. How that man needed the discipline of common work!
I have rarely listened to a story with such rapt interest. It was not
only what he said, nor how he said it, but how he let me see the strange
workings of his mind. It was continuously a story of a story. When his
voice finally died down I drew a long breath and was astonished to
perceive that it was nearly midnight--and Harriet speechless with her
emotions. For a moment he sat quiet and then burst out:
"I cannot get away: I cannot escape," and the veritable look of some
trapped creature came into his eyes, fear so abject that I reached over
and laid my hand on his arm:
"Friend," I said, "stop here. We have a good country. You have travelled
far enough. I know from experience what a cornfield will do for a man."
"I have lived all sorts of life," he continued as if he had not heard a
word I said, "and I have lived it all twice, and I am afraid."
"Face it," I said, gripping his arm, longing for some power to "blow
grit into him."
"Face it!" he exclaimed, "don't you suppose I have tried. If I could do
a thing--anything--a few times without thinking--_once_ would be
enough--I might be all right. I should be all right."
He brought his fist down on the table, and there was a note of
resolution in his voice. I moved my chair nearer to him, feeling as
though I were saving an immortal soul from destruction. I told him of
our life, how the quiet and the work of it would solve his problems. I
sketched with enthusiasm my own experience and I planned swiftly how he
could live, absorbed in simple work--and in books.
"Try it," I said eagerly.
"I will," he said, rising from the table, and grasping my hand. "I'll
stay here."
I had a peculiar thrill of exultation and triumph. I know how the priest
must feel, having won a soul from torment!
He was trembling with excitement and pale with emotion and weariness.
One must begin the quiet life with rest. So I got him off to bed, first
pouring him a bathtub of warm water. I laid out clean clothes by his
bedside and took away his old ones, talking to him cheerfully all the
time about common things. When I finally left him and came downstairs I
found Harriet standing with frightened eyes in the middle of the
kitchen.
"I'm afraid to have him sleep in this house," she said.
But I reassured her. "You do not understand," I said.
Owing to the excitement of the evening I spent a restless night. Before
daylight, while I was dreaming a strange dream of two men running, the
one who pursued being the exact counterpart of the one who fled, I heard
my name called aloud:
"David, David!"