THE WORLD IS SMALL
For reasons of economy Thompson put himself up at a cheap rooming-house
well out Market Street. His window looked out upon that thoroughfare
which is to San Francisco what the aorta is to the arterial system.
Gazing down from a height of four stories he could see a never-ending
stir, hear the roar of vehicular traffic which swelled from a midnight
murmur to a deep-mouthed roar in the daylight hours. And on either side
the traffic lane there swept a stream of people like the current of the
Stikine River.
He was not a stranger to cities, no rustic gazing open-mouthed at
throngs and tall buildings. His native city of Toronto was a fair-sized
place as American and Canadian cities go. But it was not a seaport. It
was insular rather than cosmopolitan; it took its character from its
locale rather than from a population gathered from the four quarters of
the globe. San Francisco--is San Francisco--a melting-pot of peoples,
blown through with airs from far countries, not wholly rid of the aura
of Drake and the conquistadores of Spain even in these latter days of
commercial expansion. And all of San Francisco's greatness and color and
wealth is crowded upon a peninsula, built upon rolling hills. What the
city lacks of spaciousness is compensated by action. Life goes at a
great pace.
It made a profound impression on Thompson, since he had reached the
stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any
source whatever. Those hurrying multitudes, that unending stir, the
kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly
lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel
when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that
environment, so he felt--as he had not at first felt in the North--that
in time, with effort, he would become an integral part of this. Here the
big game was played. It was the antithesis of the North inasmuch as all
this activity had a purely human source and was therefore in some
measure akin to himself. The barriers to be overcome and the problems to
be solved were social and monetary. It was less a case of adapting
himself by painful degrees to a hostile primitive environment than a
forthright competitive struggle to make himself a master in this sort of
environment.
How he should go about it he had no definite idea. He would have to be
an opportunist, he foresaw. He had no illusions about his funds in hand
being a prime lever to success. That four hundred dollars would not last
forever, nor would it be replenished by any effort save his own. It
afforded him a breathing spell, a chance to look about, to discover
where and how he should begin at the task of proving himself upon the
world.
He had no misgivings about making a living. He could always fall back
on common labor. But a common laborer is socially of little worth,
financially of still less value. Thompson had to make money--using the
phrase in its commonly accepted sense. He subscribed to that doctrine,
because he was beginning to see that in a world where purchasing power
is the prime requisite a man without money is the slave of every
untoward circumstance. Money loomed before Thompson as the key to
freedom, decent surroundings, a chance to pursue knowledge, to so shape
his life that he could lend a hand or a dollar to the less fortunate.
He still had those stirrings of altruism, a ready sympathy, an instinct
to help. Only he saw very clearly that he could not be of any benefit to
even a limited circle of his fellow men when at every turn of his hand
economic pressure bore so hard upon him as an individual. He began to
see that getting on in the world called for complete concentration of
his efforts upon his own well-being. A pauper cannot be a
philanthropist. One cannot take nothing from nothing and make something.
To be of use to others he must first grasp what he required for himself.
Once he was settled and familiar enough with San Francisco to get from
the Ferry Building to the Mission and from the Marina to China Basin
without the use of a map he began to cast about for an opening. To make
an apprentice beginning in any of the professions required education. He
had that, he considered. It did not occur to him by what devious routes
men arrived at distinction in the professions. He thought of studying
for the law until the reception he got in various offices where he went
seeking for information discouraged him in that field. Law students were
a drug on the market.
"My dear young man," one kindly, gray-haired attorney told him, "you'd
be wasting your time. The law means a tremendous amount of intellectual
drudgery, and a slim chance of any great success unless you are gifted
with a special aptitude for certain branches of it. All the great
opportunities for a young man nowadays lie in business and
salesmanship."
Business and salesmanship being two things of which Thompson knew
himself to be profoundly ignorant, he made little headway. A successful
business operation, so far as he could observe, called for capital which
he did not possess. Salesmanship, when he delved into the method of
getting his foot on that rung of the ladder, required special training,
knowledge of a technical sort. That is, really successful salesmanship.
The other kind consisted of selling goods over a counter for ten dollars
per--with an excellent chance of continuing in that unenviable situation
until old age overtook him. This was an age of specialists--and he had
no specialty. Moreover, every avenue that he investigated seemed to be
jammed full of young men clamoring for a chance. The skilled trades had
their unions, their fixed hours of labor, fixed rates of pay. The big
men, the industrial managers, the men who stood out in the professions,
they had their own orbit into which he could not come until he had made
good. There were the two forces, the top and the bottom of the workaday
world. And he was in between, like a fish out of water.
Wherefore Thompson continued looking about for a number of weeks. He
looked for work, without finding it save in street gangs and at labor
that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe. A man had
to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at
the bottom of a ditch. He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as
he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and
ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the
North had done for him--fixed him firmly in the resolve that if he had
to sweat for a pittance it would not be within four walls, behind dusty
windows. He could always go back to the woods. Sometimes he thought he
would better do that out of hand, instead of wasting his time and money
seeking in a city for the goose that was to lay him golden eggs.
When he was not hard on the trail of some definite opening sheer
loneliness drove him out on the streets. His room was a cheerless place,
a shelter for him when he slept and nothing more. Many a time, lacking
any real objective, he covered miles of San Francisco's streets. He
sought out parks, beaches, public buildings. At night he would drift, a
silent, lonely spirit, among the crowds that ebbed and flowed in the
downtown district that was a blaze of light.
That restless wandering brought him by chance one evening along a
certain avenue which shall be nameless, because it is no longer the
haunt of the soap-boxer. This curious thoroughfare lay upon the
borderline between the smart shopping district and San Francisco's
Chinatown. For a matter of two or three blocks the street was given
over to an impromptu form of public assembly, a poor man's debating
ground, an open forum where any citizen with a grievance, a theory, or
even merely the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure
of an audience. In the evening there was always a crowd. Street fakirs
plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with
a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap,
suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes
and quarters from the crowd.
But the street fakirs were in the minority. The percentage of gullible
ones was small. Mostly it was a place of oratory, the haunt of
propagandists. Thompson listened to Social Democrats, Social Laborites,
syndicalists, radicals, revolutionaries, philosophical anarchists, men
with social and economic theories of the extremist type. But they talked
well. They had a grasp of their subject. They had on tap tremendous
quantities of all sorts of knowledge. The very extent of their
vocabulary amazed Thompson. He heard scientific and historical
authorities quoted and disputed, listened to arguments waged on every
sort of ground--from biological complexities which he could not
understand to agricultural statistics which he understood still less. A
lot of it perplexed and irritated him, because the terminology was over
his head. And the fact that he could not follow these men in full
intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those
things for himself. He got an inkling of the economic problems that
afflict society. He found himself assenting offhand to the reasonable
theorem that a man who produced wealth was entitled to what he
produced. He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of
evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation. There was thus revived
in him some of those troublesome perplexities which Sam and Sophie Carr
had first aroused.
In the end, lacking profitable employment and growing dubious of
obtaining it during the slack industrial season which then hovered over
California, he turned to the serried shelves of the city library. Once
started along this road he became an habitué, spending in a particular
chair at a certain table anywhere from three to six hours a day, deep in
a book, not to be deterred therefrom by the usual series of mental
shocks which a man, full-fed all his life on conventions and dogmas and
superficial thinking, gets when he first goes seriously and critically
into the fields of scientific conclusions.
He was seated at a reading table one afternoon, nursing his chin in one
hand, deep in a volume of Huxley's "Lectures and Essays" which was
making a profound impression upon him through its twin merits of simple,
concise language and breadth of vision. There was in it a rational
explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never
been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious,
the inexplicable. Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind
which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books. He began to
perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural
phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was
something more than a name in geology. And he was so immersed in what
he read, in the printed page and the inevitable speculations that arose
in his mind as he conned it, that he was only subconsciously aware of a
woman passing his seat.
Slowly, as a man roused from deep sleep looks about him for the cause of
dimly heard noises, so now Thompson's eyes lifted from his book, and,
with his mind still half upon the last sentence read, his gaze followed
the girl now some forty feet distant in the long, quiet room.
There was no valid reason why the rustle of a woman's skirt in passing,
the faint suggestion of some delicate perfume, should have focussed his
attention. He saw scores of women and girls in the library every day. He
passed thousands on the streets. This one, now, upon whom he gazed with
a detached interest, was like many others, a girl of medium height,
slender, well-dressed.
That was all--until she paused at a desk to have speech with a library
assistant. She turned then so that her face was in profile, so that a
gleam of hair showed under a wide leghorn hat. And Thompson thought
there could scarcely be two women in the world with quite so marvellous
a similarity of face and figure and coloring, nor with quite the same
contour of chin and cheek, nor the same thick hair, yellow like the
husks of ripe corn or a willow leaf in the autumn. He was just as sure
that by some strange chance Sophie Carr stood at that desk as he was
sure of himself sitting in an oak chair at a reading table. And he rose
impulsively to go to her.
She turned away in the same instant and walked quickly down a passage
between the rows of shelved books. Thompson could not drive himself to
hurry, nor to call. He was sure--yet not too sure. He hated to make
himself appear ridiculous. Nor was he overconfident that if it were
indeed Sophie Carr she would be either pleased or willing to renew their
old intimacy. And so, lagging faint-heartedly, he lost her in the maze
of books.
But he did not quite give up. He was on the second floor. The windows on
a certain side overlooked the main entrance. He surmised that she would
be leaving. So he crossed to a window that gave on the library entrance
and waited for an eternity it seemed, but in reality a scant five
minutes, before he caught sight of a mauve suit on the broad steps.
Looking from above he could be less sure than when she stood at the
desk. But the girl halted at the foot of the steps and standing by a red
roadster turned to look up at the library building. The sun fell full
upon her upturned face. The distance was one easily to be spanned by
eyes as keen as his. Thompson was no longer uncertain. He was suddenly,
acutely unhappy. The old ghosts which he had thought well laid were
walking, rattling their dry bones forlornly in his ears.
Sophie got into the machine. The red roadster slid off with gears
singing their metallic song as she shifted through to high. Thompson
watched it turn a corner, and went back to his table with a mind past
all possibility of concentrating upon anything between the covers of a
book. He put the volume back on its shelf at last and went out to walk
the streets in aimless, restless fashion, full of vivid, painful
memories, troubled by a sudden flaring up of emotions which had lain so
long dormant he had supposed them dead.
Here in San Francisco he had not expected to behold Sophie in the
enjoyment of her good fortune. Yet there was no reason why she should
not be here. Thompson damned under his breath the blind chance which had
set him aboard the wrong steamer at Wrangel.
But, he said to himself after a time, what did it matter? In a city of
half a million they were as far apart as if he were still at Lone Moose
and she God only knew where. That powerful roadster, the sort of clothes
she wore, the general air of well-being which he had begun to recognize
as a characteristic of people whose social and financial position is
impregnable--these things served to intensify the gulf between them
which their radical differences of outlook had originally opened. No,
Sophie Carr's presence in San Francisco could not possibly make any
difference to him. He repeated this emphatically--with rather more
emphasis than seemed necessary.