George Henry Harrison, though without living near kinfolk, had never
considered himself alone in the world. Up to the time when he became
thirty years of age he had always thought himself, when he thought of
the matter at all, as fortunate in the extent of his friendships. He was
acquainted with a great many people; he had a recognized social
standing, was somewhat cleverer than the average man, and his instincts,
while refined by education and experience, were decidedly gregarious and
toward hearty companionship. He should have been a happy man, and had
been one, in fact, up to the time when this trustworthy account begins;
but just now, despite his natural buoyancy of spirit, he did not count
himself among the blessed.
George Henry wanted to be at peace with all the world, and now there
were obstacles in the way. He did not delight in aggressiveness, yet
certain people were aggressive. In his club--which he felt he must soon
abandon--he received from all save a minority of the members a hearty
reception, and in his club he rather enjoyed himself for the hour,
forgetting that conditions were different outside. On the streets he met
men who bowed to him somewhat stiffly, and met others who recognized him
plainly enough, but who did not bow. The postman brought daily a bunch
of letters, addressed in various forms of stern commercial handwriting
to George Henry Harrison, but these often lay unopened and neglected on
his desk.
To tell the plain and unpleasant truth, George Henry Harrison had just
become a poor man, a desperately poor man, and already realized that it
was worse for a young man than an old one to rank among those who have
"seen better days." Even after his money had disappeared in what had
promised to be a good investment, he had for a time maintained his
place, because, unfortunately for all concerned, he had been enabled to
get credit; but there is an end to that sort of thing, and now, with his
credit gone after his money, he felt his particular world slipping from
him. He felt a change in himself, a certain on-creeping paralysis of his
social backbone. When practicable he avoided certain of his old friends,
for he could see too plainly written on their faces the fear that he was
about to request a trifling loan, though already his sense of honor,
when he considered his prospects, had forced him to cease asking favors
of the sort. There were faces which he had loved well which he could not
bear to see with the look of mingled commiseration and annoyance he
inspired.
And so it came that at this time George Henry Harrison was acquainted
chiefly with grief--with the wolf at his door. His mail, once blossoming
with messages of good-will and friendliness, became a desert of duns.
"Why is it," George Henry would occasionally ask himself--there was no
one else for him to talk to--"why is it that when a man is sure of his
meals every day he has endless invitations to dine out, but that when
those events are matters of uncertainty he gets not a bidding to the
feast?" This question, not a new one, baffling in its mystery and
chilling to the marrow, George Henry classed with another he had heard
somewhere: "Who is more happy: the hungry man who can get nothing to
eat, or the rich man with an overladen table who can eat nothing?" The
two problems ran together in his mind, like a couple of hounds in leash,
during many a long night when he could not shut out from his ears the
howling of the wolf. He often wondered, jeering the while at his own
grotesque fancy, how his neighbors could sleep with those mournful yet
sinister howlings burdening the air, but he became convinced at last
that no one heard the melancholy solo but himself.
"'The wolf's long howl on Oonalaska's shore' is not in it with that of
mine," said George Henry--for since his coat had become threadbare his
language had deteriorated, and he too frequently used slang--"but I'm
thankful that I alone hear my own. How different the case from what it
is when one's dog barks o' nights! Then the owner is the only one who
sleeps within a radius of blocks. The beasts are decidedly unlike."
Not suddenly had come all this tribulation to the man, though the final
disappearance of all he was worth, save some valueless remnants, had
been preceded by two or three heavy losses. Optimistic in his ventures,
he was not naturally a fool. Ill fortune had come to him without
apparent provocation, as it comes to many another man of intelligence,
and had followed him persistently and ruthlessly when others less
deserving were prospering all about him. It was not astonishing that he
had become a trifle misanthropic. He found it difficult to recover from
the daze of the moment when he first realized his situation.
The comprehension of where he stood first came to George Henry when he
had a note to meet, a note for a sum that would not in the past have
seemed large to him, but one at that time assuming dimensions of
importance. He thought when he had given the note that he could meet it
handily; he had twice succeeded in renewing it, and now had come to the
time when he must raise a certain sum or be counted among the wreckage.
He had been hopeful, but found himself on the day of payment without
money and without resources. How many thousands of men who have engaged
in our tigerish dollar struggle have felt the sinking at heart which
came to him then! But he was a man, and he went to work. Talk about
climbing the Alps or charging a battery! The man who has hurried about
all day with reputation to be sustained, even at the sacrifice of pride,
has suffered more, dared more and knows more of life's terrors than any
reckless mountain-climber or any veteran soldier in existence. George
Henry failed at last. He could not meet his bills.
Reason to himself as he might, the man was unable to endure his new
condition placidly. He tried to be philosophical. He would stalk about
his room humming from "The Mahogany Tree":
"Care, like a dun, stands at the gate.
Let the dog wait!"
and seek to get himself into the spirit of the words, but his efforts in
such direction met with less than moderate success. "The dog does wait,"
he would mutter. "He's there all the time. Besides, he isn't a dog: he's
a wolf. What did Thackeray know about wolves!" And so George Henry
brooded, and was, in consequence, not quite as fit for the fray as he
had been in the past.
To make matters worse, there was a woman in the case; not that women
always make matters worse when a man is in trouble, but in this instance
the fact that a certain one existed really caused the circumstances to
be more trying. There was a charming young woman in whom George Henry
had taken more than a casual interest. There was reason to suppose that
the interest was not all his, either, but there had been no definite
engagement. At the time when financial disaster came to the man, there
had grown up between him and Sylvia Hartley that sort of understanding
which cannot be described, but which is recognized clearly enough, and
which is to the effect that flowers bring fruit. Now he felt glad, for
her sake, that only the flower season had been reached. They were yet
unpledged. Since he could not support a wife, he must give up his love.
That was a matter of honor.
The woman was quite worthy of a man's love. She was clever and good. She
had dark hair and a wonderfully white skin, and dark, bright eyes, and
when he explained to her that he was a wreck financially, and said that
in consequence he didn't feel justified in demanding so much of her
attention, she exhibited in a gentle way a warmth of temperament which
endeared her to him more than ever, while she argued with him and tried
to laugh him out of his fears. He was tempted sorely, but he loved her
in a sufficiently unselfish way to resist. He even sought to conceal his
depth of feeling under a disguise of lightness. He admitted that in his
present frame of mind he ought to be with her as much as possible, as
then, if ever, he stood in need of a sure antidote for the blues, and
with a half-hearted jest he closed the conversation, and after that call
merely kept away from her. It was hard for him, and as hard for her; but
if he had honor, she had pride. So they drifted apart, each suffering.
Who shall describe with a just portrayal of its agony the inner life of
the reasonably strong man who feels that he is somehow going down hill
in the world, who becomes convinced that he is a failure, and who
struggles almost hopelessly! George Henry went down hill, though setting
his heels as deeply as he could. His later plans failed, and there came
a time when his strait was sore indeed--the time when he had not even
the money with which to meet the current expenses of a modest life. To
one vulgar or dishonest this is bad; to one cultivated and honorable it
is far worse. George Henry chanced to come under the latter
classification, and so it was that to him poverty assumed a phase
especially acute, and affected him both physically and mentally.
His first experience was bitter. He had never been an extravagant man,
but he liked to be well dressed, and had remained so for a time after
his business plans had failed. He was not a gormand, but he had
continued to live well. Now, with almost nothing left to live upon, he
must go shabby, and cease to tickle his too fastidious palate. He must
buy nothing new to wear, and must live at the cheapest of the
restaurants. He felt a sort of Spartan satisfaction when this resolve
had been fairly reached, but no enthusiasm. It required great resolution
on his part when, for the first time, he entered a restaurant the sign
in front of which bore the more or less alluring legend, "Meals fifteen
cents."
George Henry loved cleanliness, and the round table at which he found a
seat bore a cloth dappled in various ways. His sense of smell was
delicate, and here came to him from the kitchen, separated from the
dining-room by only a thin partition, a combination of odors, partly
vegetable, partly flesh and fish, which gave him a new sensation. A
faintness came upon him, and he envied those eating at other tables.
They had no qualms; upon their faces was the hue of health, and they
were eating as heartily as the creatures of the field or forest do, and
with as little prejudice against surroundings. George Henry tried to
philosophize again and to be like these people, but he failed. He noted
before him on the table a jar of that abject stuff called carelessly
either "French" or "German" mustard, stale and crusted, and remembered
that once at a dinner he had declared that the best test of a gentleman,
of one who knew how to live, was to learn whether he used pure,
wholesome English mustard or one of these mixed abominations. His ears
felt pounding into them a whirlwind of street talk larded with slang. He
ordered sparingly. He did not like it when the waiter, with a yell,
translated his modest order of fried eggs and coffee into "Fried,
turned," and "Draw one," and he liked it less when the food came and he
found the eggs limed and the coffee muddy. He ate little, and left the
place depressed. "I can't stand this," he muttered, "that's as sure as
God made little apples."
His own half-breathed utterance of this expression startled the man. The
simile he had used was a repetition of what he had just heard in a
conversation between men at an adjoining table in the restaurant. He had
often heard the expression before, but had certainly never utilized it
personally. "The food must be affecting me already," he said bitterly,
and then wandered off unconsciously into an analysis of the metaphor. It
puzzled him. He could not understand why the production of little apples
by the Deity had seemed to the person who at some time in the past had
first used this expression as an illustration of a circumstance more
assured than the production of big apples by the same power, or of the
evolution of potatoes or any other fruit or vegetable, big or little.
His foolish fancies in this direction gave him the mental relief he
needed. When he awoke to himself again the restaurant was a memory, and
he, having recovered something of his tone, resolved to do what could be
done that day to better his fortunes.
Then came work--hard and exceedingly fruitless work--in looking for
something to do. Then Nature began paying attention to George Henry
Harrison personally, in a manner which, however flattering in a general
way, did not impress him pleasantly. His breakfast had been a failure,
and now he was as hungry as the leaner of the two bears of Palestine
which tore forty-two children who made faces at Elisha. He thought first
of a free-lunch saloon, but he had an objection to using the fork just
laid down by another man. He became less squeamish later. He was
resolved to feast, and that the banquet should be great. He entered a
popular down-town place and squandered twenty-five cents on a single
meal. The restaurant was scrupulously clean, the steak was good, the
potatoes were mealy, the coffee wasn't bad, and there were hot biscuits
and butter. How the man ate! The difference between fifteen and
twenty-five cents is vast when purchasing a meal in a great city. George
Henry was reasonably content when he rose from the table. He decided
that his self-imposed task was at least endurable. He had counted on
every contingency. Instinctively, after paying for his food, he strolled
toward the cigar-stand. Half-way there he checked himself, appalled.
Cigars had not been included in the estimate of his daily needs. Cigars
he recognized as a luxury. He left the place, determined but physically
unhappy. The real test was to come.
The smoking habit affects different men in different ways. To some
tobacco is a stimulant, to others a narcotic. The first class can
abandon tobacco more easily than can the second. The man to whom
tobacco is a stimulant becomes sleepy and dull when he ceases its use,
and days ensue before he brightens up on a normal plane. To the one who
finds it a narcotic, the abandonment of tobacco means inviting the
height of all nervousness. To George Henry tobacco had been a narcotic,
and now his nerves were set on edge. He had pluck, though, and irritable
and suffering, endured as well as he could. At length came, as will come
eventually in the case of every healthy man persisting in self-denial,
surcease of much sorrow over tobacco, but in the interval George Henry
had a residence in purgatory, rent free.
And so--these incidents are but illustrative--the man forced himself
into a more or less philosophical acceptance of the new life to which
necessity had driven him. If he did not learn to like it, he at least
learned to accept its deprivations without a constant grimace.
But more than mere physical self-denial is demanded of the man on the
down grade. The plans of his intellect a failure, he turns finally to
the selling of the labor of his body. This selling of labor may seem an
easy thing, but it is not so to the man with neither training nor skill
in manual labor of any sort. George Henry soon learned this lesson, and
his heart sank within him. He had reached the end of things. He had
tried to borrow what he needed, and failed. His economies had but
extended his lease of tolerable life.
Shabby and hungry, he sought a "job" at anything, avoiding all
acquaintances, for his pride would not allow him to make this sort of an
appeal to them. Daily he looked among strangers for work. He found none.
It was a time of business and industrial depression, and laborers were
idle by thousands. He envied the men working on the streets relaying the
pavements. They had at least a pittance, and something to do to distract
their minds.
Weeks and months went by. George Henry now lived and slept in his little
office, the rent of which he had paid some months in advance before the
storms of poverty began to beat upon him. Here, when not making
spasmodic excursions in search of work, he dreamed and brooded. He
wondered why men came into the feverish, uncertain life of great cities,
anyhow. He thought of the peace of the country, where he was born; of
the hollyhocks and humming-birds, of the brightness and freedom from
care which was the lot of human beings there. They had few luxuries or
keen enjoyments, but as a reward for labor--the labor always at
hand--they had at least a certainty of food and shelter. There came upon
him a great craving to get into the world of nature and out of all that
was cankering about him, but with the longing came also the remembrance
that even in the blessed home of his youth there was no place now for
him.
One day, after what seemed ages of this kind of life, a wild fancy took
hold of George Henry's mind. Out of the wreckage of all his unprofitable
investments one thing remained to him. He was still a landed proprietor,
and he laughed somewhat bitterly at the thought. He was the owner of a
large tract of gaunt poplar forest, sixteen hundred acres, in a desolate
region of Michigan, his possessions stretching along the shores of the
lake. An uncle had bought the land for fifty cents an acre, and had
turned it over to George Henry in settlement of a loan made in his
nephew's more prosperous days. George Henry had paid the insignificant
taxes regularly, and as his troubles thickened had tried to sell the
vaguely valued property at any price, but no one wanted it. This land,
while it would not bring him a meal, was his own at least, and he
reasoned that if he could get to it and build a little cabin upon it, he
could live after a fashion.
The queer thought somehow inspirited him. He would make a desperate
effort. He would get a barrel of pork and a barrel or two of flour and
some potatoes, a gun and an axe; he knew a lake captain, an old friend,
who would readily take him on his schooner on its next trip and land him
on his possessions. But the pork and the flour and the other necessaries
would cost money; how was he to get it? The difficulty did not
discourage him. The plan gave him something definite to do. He resolved
to swallow all pride, and make a last appeal for a loan from some of
those he dreaded to meet again. Surely he could raise among his friends
the small sum he needed, and then he would go into the woods. Maybe his
head and heart would clear there, and he would some day return to the
world like the conventional giant refreshed with new wine.
It is astonishing how a fixed resolution, however grotesque, helps a
man. The very fact that in his own mind the die was cast brought a new
recklessness to George Henry. He could look at things objectively again.
He slept well for the first time in many weeks.
The next morning, when George Henry awoke, he had abated not one jot of
his resolve nor of his increased courage. The sun seemed brighter than
it had been the day before, and the air had more oxygen to the cubic
foot. He looked at the heap of unopened letters on his desk--letters he
had lacked, for weeks, the moral courage to open--and laughed at his
fear of duns. Let the wolf howl! He would interest himself in the music.
He would be a hero of heroes, and unflinchingly open his letters, each
one a horror in itself to his imagination; but with all his newly found
courage, it required still an effort for George Henry to approach his
desk.
Alone, with set teeth and drooping eyes, George Henry began his task. It
was the old, old story. Bills of long standing, threats of suits,
letters from collecting agencies, red papers, blue, cream and
straw-colored--how he hated them all! Suddenly he came upon a new
letter, a square, thick, well addressed letter of unmistakable
respectability.
"Can it be an invitation?" said George Henry, his heart beating. He
opened the sturdy envelope and read the words it had enclosed. Then he
leaned back, very still, in his chair, with his eyes shut. His heart
bled over what he had suffered. "Had" suffered--yes, that was right, for
it was all a thing of the past. The letter made it clear that he was
comparatively a rich man. That was all.
It was the despised--but not altogether despised, since he had thought
of making it his home--poplar land in Michigan. The poplar supply is
limited, and paper-mills have capacious maws. Prices of raw material had
gone up, and the poplar hunters had found George Henry's land the most
valuable to them in the region. A syndicate offered him one hundred
dollars an acre for the tract.
Joy failed to kill George Henry Harrison. It stunned him somewhat, but
he showed wonderful recuperative powers. As he ate a free-lunch after a
five-cent expenditure that morning, there was something in his air which
would have prevented the most obtuse barkeeper in the world from
commenting upon the quantity consumed. He was not particularly depressed
because his hat was old and his coat gray at the seams and his shoes
cracked. His demeanor when he called upon an attorney, a former friend,
was quite that of an American gentleman perfectly at his ease.
Within a few days George Henry Harrison had deposited to his credit in
bank the sum of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, minus the slight
cost of certain immediate personal requirements. Then one morning he
stalked over to his little office, now clean and natty. He leaned back
in his chair again and devoted himself to thinking, the persons on whom
his mind dwelt being his creditors.
The proper title for the brief account which follows should be The Feast
of the Paying of Bills. Here was a man who had suffered, here was a man
who had come to doubt himself, and who had now become suddenly and
arrogantly independent. His creditors, he knew, were hopeless. That he
had so few lawsuits to meet was only because those to whom he owed money
had reasoned that the cost of collection would more than offset the sum
gained in the end from this man, who had, they thought, no real property
behind him. Their attitude had become contemptuous. Now he stood forth
defiant and jaunty.
There is a time in a man's failing fortunes when he borrows and gives
his note blithely. He is certain that he can repay it. He runs up bills
as cheerfully, sure that they will easily be met at the end of thirty
days. With George Henry this now long past period had left its
souvenirs, and the torture they had inflicted upon him has been partly
told.
Now came the sweet and glorious hour of his relief.
It was a wonderful sensation to him. He marveled that he had so
respectfully thought of the creditors who had dogged him. They were
people, he now said, of whom he should not have thought at all. He
became a magnificently objective reasoner. But there was work to be
done.
George Henry decided that, since there were certain people to whom he
must write, each letter being accompanied by a check for a certain sum
of money, each letter should appropriately indicate to its recipient the
calm and final opinion of the writer regarding the general character and
reputation of the person or firm addressed. The human nature of George
Henry asserted itself very strongly just here. He set forth paper and
ink, took up his pen, and poised his mind for a feast of reason and flow
of soul which should be after the desire of his innermost heart.
First, George Henry carefully arranged in the order of their date of
incurring a list of all his debts, great and small--not that he intended
to pay them in that order, but where a creditor had waited long he
decided that his delay in paying should be regarded as in some degree
extenuating and excusing the fierceness of the assaults made upon a
luckless debtor. The creditors chanced to have had no choice in the
matter, but that did not count. Age hallowed a debt to a certain slight
extent.
This arrangement made, George Henry took up his list of creditors, one
hundred and twenty in all, and made a study of them, as to character,
habits and customs. He knew them very well indeed. In their intercourse
with him, each, he decided, had laid his soul bare, and each should be
treated according to the revelations so made. There was one man who had
loaned him quite a large sum, and this was the oldest debt of all,
incurred when George Henry first saw the faint signs of approaching
calamity, but understood them not. This man, a friend, recognizing the
nature of George Henry's struggle, had never sought payment--had, in
fact, when the debtor had gone to him, apologetically and explaining,
objected to the intrusion and objurgated the caller in violent language
of the lovingly profane sort. He would have no talk of payment, as
things stood. This claim, not only the oldest but the least annoying,
should, George Henry decided, have the honor of being "No. 1"--that is,
it should be paid first of all. So the list was extended, a careful
analysis being made of the mental and moral qualities of each creditor
as exposed in his monetary relations with George Henry Harrison. There
were some who had been generous and thoughtful, some who had been
vicious and insulting; and in his examination George Henry made the
discovery that those who had probably least needed the money due them
had been by no means the most considerate. It seemed almost as if the
reverse rule had obtained. There was one man in particular, who had
practically forced a small loan upon him when George Henry was still
thought to be well-to-do, who had developed an ingenuity and insolence
in dunning which gave him easy altitude for meanness and harshness among
the lot. He went down as "No. 120," the last on the list.
There were others. There were the petty tradesmen who in former years
had prospered through George Henry's patronage, whose large bills had
been paid with unquestioning promptness until came the slip of his cog
in the money-distributing machine. They had not hesitated a moment. As
the peccaries of Mexico and Central America pursue blindly their prey,
so these small yelpers, Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, of the trade
world, had bitten at his heels persistently from the beginning of his
weakness up to the present moment. Toward these he had no malice. He
counted them but as he had counted his hunting dogs in better days. They
were narrow, but they were reckoned as men; they transacted business and
married the females of their kind, and bred children--prodigally--and
after all, against them he had no particular grievance. They were as
they were made and must be. He gathered a bunch of their bills
together, and decided that they should be classed together, not quite at
the end of the list.
The grade of each individual creditor fixed, the list was carefully
divided into five parts, twenty in each, of which twenty should receive
their letters and checks one day, twenty the next, and so on. Then the
literature of the occasion began.
The thoughtful debtor who has had somewhat continuous relations with a
creditor can, supposing he has even a moderate gift, write a very neat,
compact and thought-compelling little letter to that creditor when he
finally settles with him, if, as in the case of George Henry, the debtor
will have balance enough left after all settlements to make him easy and
independent. George Henry felt the strength of this proposition as he
wrote. In casual, easily written conversation with his meanest creditors
he rather excelled himself. Of course he sent abundant interest to
everybody, though apologizing to the gentlemen among the lot for doing
so, but telling them frankly that it would relieve him if they accepted
the proper sum for the use of the money, saying nothing about it; while
of the mean ones he demanded prompt receipts in full. That was the
general tenor of the notes, but there were certain moderate
extravagances in either direction, if there be such a thing as a
"moderate extravagance."
To the worst, the most irritating of his creditors, George Henry
indicted his masterpiece. He admitted his obligation, he expressed his
satisfaction at paying an interest which made it a good investment for
the creditor, and then he entered into a little disquisition as to the
creditor's manner and scale of thought and existence, followed by
certain mild suggestions as to improvements which might be made in the
character under observation. He pledged himself to return at any time
the favor extended him, and promised also never to mention it after it
had been extended. He apologized for the lack of further and more
adequate treatment of the subject, expressing his conviction that the
more delicate shades of meaning which might be employed after a more
extended study would not be comprehended by the person addressed.
George Henry--it is with regret that it is admitted--had a wild hope
that this creditor would become enraged to the point of making a
personal assault on him from this simple summing up of affairs, because
he had an imbedded desire to lick, or anyway try to lick, this
particular person, could he be provoked into an encounter. It is as well
to say here that his dream was never gratified. The nagging man is never
a fighting man.
And so the Feast of the Paying of Bills went on to its conclusion. It
was a season of intense enjoyment for George Henry. When it was ended,
having money, having also a notable gift as a shot, he fled to the
northern woods, where grouse and deer fell plentifully before him, and
then after a month he returned to enjoy life at ease.
It was upon his return home that George Henry Harrison, well-to-do and
content, learned something which for a time made him think this probably
the hollowest of all the worlds which swing around the sun. He came
back, vigorous and hopeful of spirit, with the strength of the woods and
of nature in him, and with open heart and hand ready to greet his
fellow-beings, glad to be one with them. The thing which smote him was
odd. It was that he found himself a stranger among the fellow-beings he
had come to meet. He found himself still a Selkirk of the world of trade
and traffic and transfer of thought and well-wishing and strong-doing
and of all social life. He was like a strange bird, like an albatross
blown into unaccustomed seas, alighting upon an island where albatrosses
were unknown.
He found his office as bright and attractive as urgently and sternly
directed servitude could make it. There were no letters upon his desk,
however, the desk so overburdened in the past. The desk spoke of
loneliness. The new carpet, without a worn white strip leading from the
doorway, said loneliness. All was loneliness. He could not understand
it.
There was the abomination of clean and cold desolation in and all about
his belongings. He sat down in the easy-chair before his desk, and was
far, very far, from happy. He leaned back--the chair worked beautifully
upon its well-oiled springs--and wondered. He shut his eyes, and tried
to place himself in his position of a month before, and failed. Why had
there been no callers? His own branch of business was in a laggard way,
but of that he made no account. He thought of Oonalaska, and decided
that there were worse places in the world than on that shore, even with
the drawback of the howlings. He seemed to be in space.
To sum up all in an explanatory way, George Henry, having largely lost
his grip upon the world, had voluntarily, being too sensitive, severed
all connections save those he had to maintain with that portion of the
community interested in the paying of his bills. Now, since he had met
all material obligations, he thought the world would come to him again
unsought. It did not come.
Every one seemed to have gone away with the wolf. George Henry began
trying to determine what it was that was wrong. The letter-carrier, a
fine fellow, who had called upon him daily in the past, now never
crossed his threshold. Even book agents and peddlers avoided the place,
from long experience of rebuff. The bill-collectors came no more, of
course; and as George Henry looked back over the past months of
humiliation and agony he suddenly realized that to these same collectors
he had been solely indebted toward the last of his time of trial for
what human companionship had come to him. His friends, how easily they
had given him up! He thought of poor old Rip Van Winkle's plaint, "How
soon we are forgotten when we are gone!" and sarcastically amended it to
"How soon we are forgotten when we are here!" A few invitations
declined, the ordinary social calls left for some other time, and he was
apparently forgotten. He could not much blame himself that he had
voluntarily severed the ties. A man cannot dine in comfort with
comfortable friends when his heart is sore over his general
inconsequence in the real world. Play is not play when zest is not given
to it by work and duties. Even his social evenings with old and true
friends he had given up early in the struggle. He could not overcome the
bitterness of his lot sufficiently to sit easily among those he most
cared for. It is not difficult sometimes to drop out of life while yet
alive. Yet George Henry realized that possibly he had been an extended
error--had been too sensitive. He thought of his neglect of friends and
his generally stupid performances while under the spell of the wolf, but
he thought also of the excuse he had, and conscience was half appeased.
So he was alone, the same old Selkirk or Robinson Crusoe, without a man
Friday, without even a parrot and goats; alone in his once familiar
hotel and his office, in a city where he was distinctly of the native
sort, where he had seen, it seemed to him, every one of the great
"sky-scraping" buildings rise from foundation-stone to turret, where he
should be one whose passage along the street would be a series of
greetings. He yearned for companionship. His pulse quickened when he met
one of his lately persecuting bill-collectors on the street and received
from him a friendly recognition of his bow and smile. He became affable
with elevator-men and policemen. But he was lonely, very lonely.
The days drifted into long weeks, when one day the mail-carrier, once so
regular in his calls, now almost a stranger, appeared and cast upon
George Henry's desk a letter returned uncalled for. The recipient
examined it with interest. It did not require much to excite his
interest now.
The returned letter was one which he had sent enclosing a check to a Dr.
Hartley, to whom he had become indebted for professional services at one
time. He had never received a bill, but had sent the check at a venture.
Its return, with the postoffice comment, "Moved, left no address,"
startled him. Dr. Hartley was Her father. George Henry pondered. Was it
a dream or reality, that a few months ago, while he was almost submerged
in his sea of difficulties, he had read or heard of Dr. Hartley's death?
He had known the doctor but slightly, well as he had known his daughter
Sylvia, of the dark eyes, but it seemed impossible that in any state of
mind such a thing as Dr. Hartley's reported death should have made no
impression upon him. He was aroused now, almost for the first time, and
was really himself again. The benumbing influence of his face-to-face
fight with poverty and inactivity disappeared. Sylvia lived again,
fresh, vital and strong in her hold upon him. He was renewed by the
purpose in life which he had allowed to lapse in his desperate days of
defeat. He would find Sylvia. She might be in sorrow, in trouble; he
could not wait, but leaped out of his office and ran down the long
stairways, too hurried and restless to wait for the lagging elevator of
the great building where he had suffered so much. The search was longer
and more difficult than the seeker had anticipated. It required but
little effort to learn that Dr. Hartley had been dead for months, and
that his family had gone away from the roomy house where their home had
been for many years. To learn more was for a time impossible. He had
known little of the family kinship and connections, and it seemed as if
an adverse fate pursued his attempts to find the hidden links which bind
together the people of a great city. But George Henry persisted, and his
heart grew warm within him. He hummed an old tune as he walked quickly
along the crowded streets, smiling to himself when he found himself
singing under his breath the old, old song:
Who is Silvia? What is she
That all swains commend her?
In another quarter of the city, far removed from her former home and
neighbors, George Henry at last found Sylvia, her mother and a younger
brother, living quietly with the mother's widowed sister. During his
search for her the image of the woman he had once hoped might be his
wife had grown larger and dearer in his mind and heart. He wondered how
he had ever given her up, and how he had lived through so much
suffering, and then through relief from suffering, without the past and
present joy of his life. He wondered if he should find her changed. He
need have had no fears. He found, when at last he met her, that she had
not changed, unless, it may be, to have become even more lovable in his
eyes. In the moment when he first saw her now he knew he had found the
world again, that he was no longer a stranger in it, that he was living
in it and a part of it. A sweetheart has been a tonic since long before
knights wore the gloves of ladies on their crests. Within a week,
through Sylvia, he had almost forgotten that one can get lost, even as a
lost child, in this great, grinding world of ours, and within a year he
and Mrs. George Henry Harrison were "at home" to their friends.
After a time, when George Henry Harrison had settled down into steady
and appreciative happiness, and had begun to indulge his fancies in
matters apart from the honeymoon, there appeared upon the wall over the
fireplace in his library a picture which unfailingly attracted the
attention and curiosity of visitors to that hospitable hearth. The
scene represented was but that upon an island in the Bering Sea, and
there was in the aspect of it something more than the traditional
abomination of desolation, for there was a touch of bloodthirsty and
hungry life. Up away from the sea arose a stretch of dreary sand, and in
the far distance were hills covered with snow and dotted with stunted
pine, and bleak and forbidding, though not tenantless. In the
foreground, close to the turbid waters which washed this frozen almost
solitude, a great, gaunt wolf sat with his head uplifted to the lowering
skies, and so well had the artist caught the creature's attitude, that
looking upon it one could almost seem to hear the mournful but murderous
howl and gathering cry.
This was only a fancy which George Henry had--that the wolf should hang
above the fireplace--and perhaps it needed no such reminder to make of
him the man he proved in helping those whom he knew the wolf was
hunting. His eye was kindly keen upon his friends, and he was quick to
perceive when one among them had begun to hear the howlings which had
once tormented him so sorely; he fancied that there was upon the faces
of those who listened often to that mournful music an expression
peculiar to such suffering. And he found such ways as he could to cheer
and comfort those unfortunate during their days of trial. He was a
helpful man. It is good for a man to have had bad times.