After such a disheartening experience in a community where I had had
the help and countenance of a just and charitable head of the police
department, I went back to the smaller places. Merely because it
seemed foolish to take the time to learn a new trade when I already had
one, I still sought office work. There was little difficulty in
finding such employment--at humble wages; the unattainable thing was
the keeping of it. Though I could never succeed in running it down and
bringing it to bay, a pitiless Nemesis seemed to dog me from town to
town. Gossiping marshals there may have been, now and then, to spread
my story; but I had twice been given proof that another agency must be
at work--a mysterious persecution that I could neither fight nor
outwit, nor account for upon any reasonable hypothesis.
So the hopeless and one-sided battle went on as I fled from post to
pillar up and down and back and forth in the "permitted" area, doing a
bit of extra bookkeeping here and another there. The result was always
the same. Work of that kind necessarily carried more or less
responsibility, and in consequence I was never retained more than a few
days at a time.
It was borne in upon me more and more that I must sink lower, into some
walk in life in which no questions were asked. This conviction
impressed itself upon me with greater emphasis at each succeeding
failure, and the decision to drop into the ranks of the unidentified
was finally reached in a small city in the agricultural section of the
State where I had been employed for a few days in a hardware and
implement store as shipping clerk. Once more I was discharged,
peremptorily, and with a reproachful reprimand for having thrust
myself, unplacarded, upon well-behaved people.
"I don't admit your right to say such things to me, Mr. Haddon," I
protested, after the reproach had been well rubbed in. "I have given
you good service for small pay, and there was no reason why I should
have furnished you with an autobiography when you didn't ask it. In
the circumstances it seems that I am the one to be aggrieved, but I'll
waive the right to defend myself if you'll tell me where you got your
information."
The implement dealer was a thin, ascetic person, with cold gray eyes
and two distinct sets of manners; one for his customers and another for
his employees; and the look he gave me was meant to be withering.
"I don't recognize your right to question me, at all," he objected,
with the air of one who brushes an annoying insect from his
coat-sleeve. "It is enough to say that my source of information is
entirely reliable. By your own act you have placed yourself outside of
the pale. If you break a natural law, Nature exacts the just penalty.
It is the same in the moral field."
"But if any penalty were due from me I have paid it," I retorted.
"No; you have paid only a part of it--the law's part. Society still
has its claims and they must be met; recognized and satisfied to the
final jot and tittle."
Though this man was a church member, and a rather prominent one in
Springville--we may call the small city Springville because that isn't
its real name--I did not accuse him, even mentally, of conscious
hypocrisy. What I said, upon leaving him, was that I hoped he'd never
have to pay any of the penalties himself. I did not know then--what I
learned later--that he was a very whited sepulchre; a man who was
growing rich by a systematic process of robbing his farmer customers on
time sales.
Turned out once again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do
what I had done so many times before--take the first train and vanish.
But a small incident delayed the vanishing--for the moment, at least.
On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time
in my native State than it is now, I am glad to be able to say; a
young, farmer-looking fellow overcome by liquor, reeling and stumbling
and finding the sidewalk far too narrow. He was coming toward me, and
I yielded to the impulse which prompts most of us at such times; the
disposition to give the inebriate all the room he wants--to pass by,
like the priest and the Levite, on the other side.
Just as I was stepping into the roadway, the drunken man collided
heavily with a telephone pole, caught clumsily at it to save himself,
and fell, striking his head on the curbstone and rolling into the
gutter. It was a case for the Good Samaritan, and, as it happened,
that time-honored personage was at hand. Before I could edge away, as
I confess I was trying to do, a clean-cut young man in the fatigue
uniform of the Church militant came striding across the street.
"Here, you!" he snapped briskly to me. "Don't turn your back that way
on a man needing help! That fellow's hurt!"
We got the pole-bombarder up, between us, and truly he was hurt. There
was a cut over one eye where he had butted into one of the
climbing-steps on the pole, and either that, or the knock on the
curbstone, had made him take the count. Since Springville wasn't
citified enough to have a hospital or an ambulance, I supposed we would
carry the wounded man to the nearest drug store. But my Good Samaritan
wasn't built that way. Hastily commandeering a passing dray, he made
me help him load the unconscious man into it, and the three of us were
trundled swiftly through a couple of cross streets to a--to a church, I
was going to say, but it was to a small house beside the church.
Here, with the help of the driver, we got the John Barleycorn victim
into the house and spread him out on a clean white bed, muddy boots,
sodden clothes, bloody head and all. I asked if I should go for a
doctor, but the Samaritan shook his head. "No," he said; "you and I
can do all that is necessary." Then he paid the dray driver and we
fell to work.
It was worth something to see that handsome, well-built young
theologue--it didn't seem as if he could have been more than a boy
freshly out of the seminary--strip off his coat and roll up his sleeves
and go to it like a veteran surgeon. In a few minutes, with such help
as I could render, he had the cut cleaned and bandaged, the red face
sponged off, and the worst of the street dirt brushed from the man's
clothing.
"That is about all we can do--until he gets over the double effects of
the hurt and the whiskey," he said, when the job was finished; and
then, with a sort of search-warrant look at me: "Are you very busy?"