MAN AND THE SLUG
MAN is a human chameleon. Environment plays strange pranks with what
he had imagined was the settled order of his life. He owes his mental
development to his gregariousness. Aeons ago when the hairy cavemen
formed clans the first step was taken toward organized society as we
know it to-day.
Transport a man of the street from Broadway and set him down among
the Eskimos, and not many years will have elapsed before he will be
thinking and fighting and loving and longing as do the brown little
people of the North. His ego will clamor for recognition. He cannot
endure social ostracism. So as the Eskimos cannot interest themselves
in his Broadway, cannot think his Broadway, cannot see his Broadway,
the Broadway within him flickers out so that his soul-hunger for
companionship may be appeased. You may set him back on Broadway after
a lapse of years and in a day none will know that he has ever left
it; but so long as he lives in the Frozen North so long will he be
an Eskimo. There will of course be memories and unvoiced regrets to
torture him through recurring moods of reminiscence, but these will be
brief and will occur of lonely nights. Throughout the days he will be
an Eskimo. And sometimes he will not care to return to Broadway. Men
even deliberately return to penitentiaries where they have spent great
portions of their lives.
Man is a human chameleon; it is beyond dispute. His soul craves
intercourse with his fellows and without it shrivels to a rattling
pod. And if he be associated day by day with only tramps he will either
become a tramp or a morbid Pariah--and from the last he shrinks in
horror.
This was taking place in the heart of Joshua Cole. By gradual degrees
he was growing to think and see and look at life through the eyes of
the nomad men about him. Spring was manifest. There seemed to be a
subtle incense in the air that drugged him and contorted his views.
He was living close to Mother Earth. Creature comforts were all that
he craved. There was a sort of strange fascination about living
from hand to mouth. The ingenuity required to live on nothing--the
resourcefulness demanded--made strong appeal to some primitive
satisfaction within him. He took a sort of pride in the comfort of a
full belly when it was the result of luck or primitive cunning. To get
something for nothing seems always to be the ambition of the race, no
matter how warningly reason may rebel. To cover a hundred miles of
country without paying a cent for transportation gave him the same
amount of pride or satisfaction or gloating. It all made appeal to his
sense of individuality. He was parasitically living and moving and
having his being as does some wild thing in the woods--some flower of
the fields. Trifling achievements caused his mentality to strut. He was
as contented over discovering an unexpected warm place to creep into
out of the rain as a merchant is in making an unexpectedly large sale
of goods at the close of the day’s business. If he outwitted a train
crew and made a longer jump than he had imagined possible, his vanity
was tickled, even as might be tickled the vanity of a lawyer who has
engineered a coup in court and brought about the admiration of the jury
and his client, and the discomfiture of opposing counsel. He rejoiced
as the caveman rejoiced over insignificant developments; but to him and
the caveman they were not insignificant. They meant food and warmth
and shelter. On Broadway similar developments might mean more expensive
apartments, a new sedan, a trip to Europe, a diamond tiara.
Subtle Spring had borne on her soft wings the pollen of a strange
philosophy. After all, what was life but the constant and inherent
struggle to live? What mattered it how one lived?--or where? Was not
coffee as delectable boiled in a blackened can over a campfire as in a
silver-mounted electric percolator? Why did man wear clothes? To keep
his body warm, or to turn his acquaintances green with envy? Was there
more warmth and comfort in a hundred-dollar custom-made creation than
in the whole though unpresentable suit that clothed Joshua Cole? Was
his old home in Hathaway any warmer than a Southern Pacific sand-house?
Did millionaires travel faster in their private cars than he could
travel on top of one of them?
After all, what was the use in being anything but a vagabond? What
men called progress brought nothing but aches and pains and shortened
lives. Civilization was all pretense and cosmetics. Months had passed
since the theft of the telescope, and Joshua, racing wildly here and
there, risking his life a dozen times to catch fast trains, had failed
to find The Whimperer. He laughed bitterly now as he sat in his camp
alone, in Southern Colorado.
For five days he had eaten nothing, and was no longer hungry.
Starvation brings weird imaginings to the mind of man. Strange fancies
come to him--dreams that are like the dreams of addicts to some potent
narcotic. He saw Civilization in all its pretense, in all of its hollow
shams, in all of its aimless flounderings toward nothing. Science--bah!
What could he ever hope to learn of science? Almost from birth he had
been the victim of a cruel Fate. Well, he was through--absolutely
through! Fate had ordained that he be a tramp. Why kick against the
pricks? He would be a tramp.
Then suddenly he saw something on the ground that whisked his mind back
over the years to another day in spring, when he and his brother Lester
and two other boys had watched a slug lower itself from a chip by a
string of mucus. And what he saw was another slug, of the same species,
_Limax Campestris_, blind, wriggling helplessly along, bound nowhere.
Man was like this poor creature, condemned to a short space of endless
wriggling about merely because life was in it.
Man the slug! A million million years from now this slug might have a
brain and be trying to telegraph to Mars! Wouldn’t he look odd in a
limousine, in which he would proudly ride until rheumatism confined him
to his chair at the age of fifty and indigestion made him growl at his
slug attendant. Poor thing! God help him then. Better were it had he
remained a slug wriggling along through slime, with man’s foot forever
threatening to end his stupid life!
Then Joshua saw another one--a snail with a wonderful shell upon
his back. He blinked his gray-blue eyes and smiled. Why, here was
progress--a closed car, by George! His speed was no greater--it
required as long for him to travel from leaf to leaf as it did his more
unfortunate brother; but surely the shell spelled progress.
Long and tremulously he laughed at his whimsicality. Was he going
crazy? No, no! He was right, eternally right. In the end, what would
it matter if he became a great astronomer and won fame and favor? Fame
was a hollow thing. Men would forget him two days after he had died.
Millions could not keep him any warmer than he had been last night in
the sand-house. He could eat only so much, and after he had eaten what
recked it whether he had partaken of caviar on toast or cornbread?
Did he wish to travel? Before him stretched lines of steel. In ports
lay vessels riding at anchor, awaiting his coming as a stoker or a
roustabout or a stowaway. Did he crave knowledge, news, entertainment?
Great libraries were open to him in every consequential town. Did he
need new clothes? There were institutions galore to supply them for a
little trifling toil. Did he crave friendship? His world was filled
with men who would not hold themselves aloof were he to make advances.
Then why not become a tramp? Why not be original--unique? Save Beaver
Clegg, among all the men and women he had known there was not one
original mind--not one fearless heart--not one soul that was not
clutched and clamped by the prosaic, by the ever-haunting fear that
its possessor was not thinking and acting and living just as other men
and women were. Why, they actually abhorred the original! Deliberately
they stultified such original thoughts as now and then beseechingly
presented themselves. Sheep, all of them--bleating, crowding sheep,
shouldering one another aside in an effort to gain the protection of
the middle of the flock, where no one might single them out and accuse
them of being anything but sheep! Could he, Joshua Cole, a man now,
hope to become the bellwether of this wriggling, woolly mass? No,
because he would not stoop to setting a pace that their newspaper,
moving-picture minds would follow. Pitiable worms slathering in the
slime of up-to-dateness! Afraid of their own minds, afraid of their
neighbors’ minds, afraid of life itself!
He would become a tramp--a unique tramp--king of the tramps! At least
he would be an object of wonder, though an outcast. Better a kingpin
among tramps than a huddling lamb in a flock of trembling sheep, all
just like him!
Joshua maneuvered a stick until the slug was upon it, and as on that
other spring day repeated the experiment that had been the actual
beginning of his vagabondage.
“How now, old-timer?” he croakingly chuckled. “You’re on an island
of wood, and the earth is twenty times your length below you. What
will you do? You’ve reached a momentous period in your career. Blind,
brainless, inefficient, pitiably helpless, yet Nature has provided you
with the means of overcoming a catastrophe like this. And does that
mean that there is hope for the race of man?”
Then as the pitiable creature completed its travels over the stick and
began lowering itself to the ground, Joshua put down the stick and
burst into a fit of nervous weeping, the result of strain and hunger.
Like a repentant blasphemer Joshua Cole threw himself on the grass,
sobbing piteously.
“O God!” he prayed passionately, “at last I have learned life’s
greatest lesson! Mankind is in the hollow of Thy hand. Not a sparrow
falls unheeded. Not a worm is cloven in vain. Somewhere there is a goal
worth striving for, and toward it man is always floundering. In him
lies the means of his own salvation. Some day in the unseen future he
will learn his own humanity; for within him Thou hast planted the power
to return to the image of God in which he was created. I will keep on
traveling West--and--and find another telescope--and Madge.”
Joshua Cole had fought his first great battle--and won.