In the basement I throned myself on one block while I chopped kindling
on another. Before me, piled to the first story, was a cellarful
of wood, the record of my predecessors in toil. I gathered that the
corporal’s guard of the unemployed who stayed at the mission that
night, and had been there two or three days, had finished their day’s
assignment of splitting. They completely surrounded me, questioned me
with the greatest curiosity, and put me down as a terrific liar, for I
answered every question with simple truth.
As soon as the melodramatic workingman-boss went up stairs, one of them
said, “Don’t work so fast. It’s only a matter of form this late at
night. They want to see if you are willing, that’s all.”
I chopped a little faster for this advice. Not that I was out of humor
with the advisers,--though I should have been, for they were box-car
tramps.
One of them, having an evil and a witty eye, said, “If I was goin’ west
like you, I’d start about ten o’clock to-night and be near Buffalo
before morning.”
Another, a mild nobody, professed himself a miller. He told what a
wonderful trick it was to say, “Leddy, I’m too tired to work till I
eat,” and after eating, to walk away.
The next, a carriage painter of battered gentility, told endless
stories of the sprees that had destroyed him. Another, a white frog
with a bald head and gray mustache, quite won my heart. He said, “Wait
till you get a nice warm bath after service. Then you’ll sleep good.”
To my weary and addled brain the mission was like one of those
beautiful resting-places in Pilgrim’s Progress. It became my religion,
just to split kindling. I failed to apprehend what infinitesimal
nobodies these fellows around me were. I should have disliked them more.
The modern tramp is not a tramp, he is a speed-maniac. Being unable
to afford luxuries, he must still be near something mechanical and
hasty, so he uses a dirty box-car to whirl from one railroad-yard to
another. He has no destination but the cinder-pile by the water-tank.
The landscape hurrying by in one indistinguishable mass and the roaring
of the car-wheels in his ears are the ends of life to him. He is no
back-to-nature crank. He is a most highly specialized modern man. All
to keep going, he risks disease from these religious missions, from
foul box-cars, and foul comrades. He risks accident every hour. He is
always liable to the cruelty of conductor or brakeman and to murder by
companions.
He runs fewer risks in the country, yet his aversion to the country
is profound. He knows all that I know about country hospitality, that
it can be purchased by the merest grain of courtesy. Yet most of the
farm-people that entertained me had not seen a tramp for months.
To account for some of the happenings of this tale I will only add that
a speed-maniac at either end of the social scale is not necessarily a
hustler, personally. But in one way or another he is sure to be shallow
and artificial, the grotesque, nervous victim of machinery. And a
“Mission,” an institution built by speed-maniacs who use automobiles
for speed-maniacs who use box-cars, is bound to be absurd beyond words
to tell it.