A RUGGED LOST SHEEP.
The journal of Marie Bashkirtseff is a great revelation of the hopes
and imaginings and sufferings of a girl just entering that period of
life when woman's world begins. Many upon two continents have been
affected by the depths and sadness of it, yet it is but a primer, the
mere record of a kindergarten experience, in comparison with what would
be the picture showing as plainly a heart of some man of the city. Did
you ever read the diary, unearthed after his death, and printed in part
but recently, of Ellsworth, the young Zouave colonel, who was slain in
Alexandria, and avenged on the moment, at the very beginning of the
great civil war? That is a diary worth the reading. There is told the
story of not alone vain hopes and ungratified ambitions, but of an
empty stomach and dizzy head to supplement the mental agony and make
its ruthlessness complete. There were, too, the high courage which was
sorely tested--and an empty stomach is a dreadful shackle--and the
bulldog pertinacity which ever does things. That was a diary of real
life, with little room for dreams, and much blood upon the pen.
It befell Grant Harlson to learn how helpless in the great city is the
man as yet unlearned in all its heartlessness and devious ways and lack
of regard for strangers, and the story of Ellsworth was very nearly his.
It was well enough at first. He had some money, and had occupation at
a pittance, intended only by the law firm with whom he was a student to
serve for his car or cab-hire when on service outside the office. His
privilege of studying with the firm was counted remuneration for his
services, and he was, so far as this went, but in the position of other
young men of his age and value under such circumstances, but, unlike
others, he had relied upon the law of chance to aid him.
One hundred dollars does not last long when one is healthy and has a
mighty appetite, and, that gone, two dollars and fifty cents a week,
and hard work for it, is very little to live on, and Harlson found it
so. Not for all the comforts of the world would he have written home
for aid in the town. It seemed there was nothing for him to do. It
had become mid-winter, and the winter was a cold one. Gaunt men
followed the coal wagons or visited the places where charity is
bunglingly dispensed by the sort of people who drift into smug
officials at such agencies as naturally as some birds fly to
worm-besprinkled furrows for their gleanings.
Harlson saw much of this, and knew his fate was not the worst among so
many, and it aided him in his philosophy, but he had a mighty appetite.
He was a great creature, of much bone and brawn, and being hungry was
something he could not endure. He thought--how far back it seemed--of
the farmers' dinners, and the turkey and ruffed grouse and woodcock.
Woodcock! Why, his whole two dollars and fifty cents would not feed
him for a single time upon that glorious bird! He looked through the
fine restaurant windows, and it amused him. His own meals were taken
in restaurants of a poorer class. With thirty-five cents and a
fraction to live upon for a day, one does not care for game.
Harlson's dress became of the shabby genteel order. The binding upon
coat and vest had begun to show that little wound which is not wide nor
deep, but is past the healing, and the shininess at knees and elbows
reflected the light that never was on land or sea, or, at least, ought
not to be. He felt a degradation with it all, though it was with him
the result of folly, not of fault, and he made a struggle for reform in
his finances. He abandoned the cheap room in which he lived, and slept
upon the office floor at night, the place in decent weather being
moderately warm.
The individual from China and the individual from more than one other
land, who comes to live with us, can exist on thirty-five cents a day
and think his provender the fat of the land. But he is not a great
meat-eater. The fiber of him is not our own. His style of tissue was
not fixed in northern bay and fjord and English and Norman forests, and
his ancestors transmitted to him a self-denying stomach. He can live
in the city upon thirty-five cents a day, and clasp his hands across
his abdomen and say, with the thankful, "I have dined." Not so the man
of Harlson's type, and of his size. The sum of two dollars and fifty
cents, the young man found, would not feed and clothe him for a week.
He was a boy still, in the freshness of his appetite, yet his demands
in quantity were manly, to a certainty. Six feet of maul-swinging
humanity had eaten much, even in midsummer. That same six feet
required more now, when the temperature was low and the system needed
carbon. Perhaps he got all that was good for him; it is well to train
down a little occasionally; but Harlson wandered about sometimes with a
feeling of sympathy for the wolf of the forest, the hawk of the air,
and the pickerel of the waters, all hungry ever and all refusing to
live by bread alone.
As time passed this condition of things wore upon the man. His
fancies, if not morbid, became a trifle ugly. He worked feverishly,
but he chafed at his own ignorance of city ways, such that he could not
increase his income. He sought manual labor which could be done at
night, but failed even in this, for at that time he lacked utterly the
way about him which fits the city, and persuades the man of business
when there is little labor to be done. It was almost a time of panic.
He would wander about the streets at night like a lost spirit.
Sometimes he would meet old college friends. He had classmates in the
city, some of them well-to-do and well established, and they were glad
to meet him, the man who had done a little to give the class its
record, and he was invited to swell dinners and to parties. He would
but feign excuses, and to none of them told bluntly, as he should have
done, just what his situation was, and how a trifling aid would make
his future different. He was very proud, this arrogant product of the
old Briton blending and the new world's new northwest, and he lacked
the sense which comes with experience in the bearings of a life all
novel, and so he remained silent, and, incidentally, hungry.
It was at this period of his career that Harlson was in closest
sympathy with the sad-eyed Hindoo king. He was not doing anything out
of the way; he was working hard, with clean ambitions, yet he was
hungry. He could not understand it. No doubt an empty stomach
inclines a man to much logic and the splitting of straws. There comes
with an empty stomach less of grossness and more of abstract reason,
and an exaltation which may be all impractical, but which is recklessly
acute.
"I want to do things, I want to help others--I don't know why, but I
do--I have ambitions, but I try to make them good. I am doing the best
I can with the brains I have. I get up in the morning from the office
floor and do my utmost all day, and try to do better when I get out,
but nothing helps me! Where is the God who, it is said, at worst,
helps those who help themselves.
"'You say that we have a meaning;
So has dung, and its meaning is flowers.'
"The Hindoo king must be right. I am, we all are but like horses, or
trees, or mushrooms; and it is only some sort of accident which makes
each thing with life successful or unsuccessful, happy or unhappy, as
the case may be."
So, at this time, Grant Harlson reasoned, blindly, yet in his heart
there was something which protested against his own deductions and kept
him in the path which was straightforward, and from staking all the
future on the morrow. So drifted away the days, and this strong-limbed
young fellow became hungrier and hungrier, and more shiny at knees and
elbows, and more lapsided of foot-gear, and more thoroughly puzzled at,
and disgusted with, the city world.
Sometimes the young man would resolve that in the morning he would
abandon all his plans, and seek the country again, and there, where he
could hold his own and more, live and die apart from all the
feverishness and chances of another way of living. And he would awake
and sniff in the morning air, and say to himself that he was a cur last
night, and that he would stay and hold his own, and, in the end, win
somehow. The bulldog strain asserted itself, and he was his own again.
At night, after a fruitless day, he might become again depressed, but
the morning restrung the bow. Sometimes--these were his weaker
days--he would abandon all effort, and seek the free public library,
and there plunge into books and find, for the passing time,
forgetfulness. These were his only draughts of absolute nepenthe, for
at night he dreamed of the yesterday or of the morrow, and it marred
his rest. The library gave him, for the time, another world, though it
had harsh suggestions. He would stop his reading to wonder how
Chatterton felt when starving, or if Hood had as miserable a time of it
as alleged, or if Goldsmith was jolly when, penniless, he argued his
way through Europe, or if even Shakespeare went without a meal. But
the library, on the whole, was a solace and a tonic. It rested him,
since it made him, for a time, forget.
It was but characteristic of Harlson that, in the midst of all this
test of endurance of a certain sort, he should do what deprived him of
all chance of greater ease and greater vantage-ground with time
expended out of the line he had established. One of his old college
friends, guessing, perhaps, his real condition, came to him with an
offer of what was more than a fair income, if he would teach one of the
city's high-schools. The hungry fellow only laughed, and said that was
not on his programme. He still went hungry and grew more shabby in
appearance, and then came to him what was, perhaps, a sear upon his
life--perhaps what broadened, educated, and made him wiser.