A CHANGE.
A big stone fell suddenly into the smooth pool of Walter’s conditions. A
letter from his father brought the news that the bank where he had
deposited his savings had proved but a swollen mushroom. He had lost
all.
“Indeed, my son,” wrote the sorrowful Richard, “I do not see how with
honesty to send you a shilling more! If you have exhausted the proceeds
of my last check, and can not earn a sufficiency, come home. Thank God,
the land yet remains!--so long as I can pay the rent.”
In the heart of Walter woke a new impulse. He drew himself up for combat
and endurance. I am afraid he did not feel much trouble for his father’s
trouble, but he would have scorned adding to it. He wrote at once that
he must not think of him in the affair; he would do very well. It was
not a comforting letter exactly, but it showed courage, and his father
was glad.
He set himself to find employment in some one of the mechanical
departments of literature--the only region in which he could think to do
anything. When the architect comes to necessity, it is well if stones
are near, and the mason’s hammer: if he be not the better mason that he
is an architect, alas for his architecture! Walter was nothing yet,
however, neither architect nor mason, when the stern hand of necessity
laid hold of him. But it is a fine thing for any man to be compelled to
work. It is the first divine decree, issuing from love and help. How
would it have been with Adam and Eve had they been left to plenty and
idleness, the voice of God no more heard in the cool of the day?
But the search for work was a difficult and disheartening task. He who
has encountered it, however, has had an experience whose value far more
than equals its unpleasantness. A man out of work needs the God that
cares for the sparrows, as much as the man whose heart is torn with
ingratitude, or crushed under a secret crime. Walter went hither and
thither, communicated his quest to each of his few acquaintances,
procured introductions, and even without any applied to some who might
have employment to bestow, putting so much pride in his pockets that,
had it been a solid, they must have bulged in unsightly fashion, and
walked till worn with weariness, giving good proof that he was no fool,
but had the right stuff in him. He neither yielded to false
fastidiousness, nor relaxed effort because of disappointment--not even
when disappointment became the very atmosphere of his consciousness. To
the father it would have been the worst of his loss to see his son
wiping the sweat and dust from the forehead his mother had been so
motherly proud of, and hear the heavy sigh with which he would sink in
the not too easy chair that was all his haven after the tossing of the
day’s weary groundswell. He did not rise quite above self-pity; he
thought he was hardly dealt with; but so long as he did not respond to
the foolish and weakening sentiment by relaxation of effort, it could
not do him much harm; he would soon grow out of it, and learn to despise
it. What one man has borne, why should not another bear? Why should it
be unfit for him any more than the other? Certainly he who has never
borne has yet to bear. The new experience is awaiting every member of
the Dives clan. Walter wore out his shoes, and could not buy another
pair; his clothes grew shabby, and he must wear them: it was no small
part of his suffering, to have to show himself in a guise which made him
so unlike the Walter he felt. But he did not let his father know even a
small part of what he confronted.
He had never drawn close to his father; they had come to no spiritual
contact. Walter, the gentleman, saw in Richard the farmer. He knew him
an honorable man, and in a way honored him; but he would have been
dissatisfied with him in such society to which he considered himself
belonging. It is a sore thing for a father, when he has shoved his son
up a craggy steep, to see him walk away without looking behind. Walter
felt a difference between them.
He had to give up his lodgings. Sullivan took him into his, and shared
his bed with him--doing all he could in return for his father’s
kindness.
Where now was Walter’s poetry? Naturally, vanished. He was man enough to
work, but not man enough to continue a poet._ His_ poetry!--how could
such a jade stand the spur!
But to bestir himself was better than to make verses; and indeed of all
the labors for a livelihood in which a man may cultivate verse, that of
literature is the last he should choose. Compare the literary efforts of
Burns with the songs he wrote when home from his plow!
Walter’s hope had begun to faint outright, when Sullivan came in one
evening as he lay on the floor, and told him that the editor of a new
periodical, whom he had met at a friend’s house, would make a place for
him. The remuneration could suffice only to a grinding economy, but it
was bread!--more, it was work, and an opening to possibilities! Walter
felt himself equal to any endurance short of incapacitating hunger, and
gladly accepted the offer. His duty was the merest agglomeration; but
even in that he might show faculty, and who could tell what might
follow! It was wearisome but not arduous, and above all, it left him
time!