Beggars of Life (18 page)

T
HERE
followed several years of wanderlust of which I eventually was cured. I lived in many a brothel where the dregs of life found shelter. I fraternized with human wrecks whose hands shook as if with palsy, with weaklings who cringed and whined at life, with degenerates and perverts, greasy and lousy, with dope fiends who would shoot needles of water into their arms to relieve the wild aching for an earthly Heaven. I learned the secrets of traitors and crawlers and other fakers.

Some of them were not even ambitious enough to beg, but would whimper at those who did. Fortunately for me, there had always been some chemical in my nature that had kept my mind active so that I was not allowed to rot in hives of congested humanity.

Tramping in wild and windy places, without money, food, or shelter, was better for me than supinely bowing to any conventional decree of fate.

The road gave me one jewel beyond price, the leisure to read and dream. If it made me old and wearily wise at twenty, it gave me for companions the great minds of all the ages, who talked to me with royal words.

When whipt of life and snubbed of prudes I could talk to old Sam Johnson with his strange blending of the naïve and the philosopher. I could still love Goldsmith. I could hear Chatterton saying—“I'm a poet, sir.” I walked with him through the streets of London, I cried when he took the poison. I could stroll down an English lane with Coleridge and meet John Keats. I could stop while Keats turned and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having held your hand.” And I could hear Coleridge say afterward, “There's death in that hand.”

I stole books from libraries. I stole them whenever I could. I would often carry two or three of them with me and hide them. It would not be wise for a bum to be caught with a library book. He would have to explain. Bums have so much to explain. It would be rather embarrassing.

I stole
The Story of an African Farm
from the library of the Newsboys' Home in Pittsburgh. I kept the book with me on the road for two weeks, tramping by slow stages to Chicago while reading it. The three children on that South African farm, Waldo, Lyndall and Emily, will remain with me, precious memories until the day I die. I once stole Dostoievsky's
Crime and Punishment
in a Colorado city. It was in two volumes, a fact I did not know at the time of the theft. Upon the discovery I was terribly mortified, and was forced to go back for the other volume. This incident exasperated me so much that I was very careful to steal complete volumes in the future.

Becoming dazed with the magnificent psychology of the epileptic Russian, I did not care whether I travelled or not, but stayed about the city and slept in a box car until I had finished that appalling book.

I was so grateful for the discovery of the book that I returned to the library and carried Dostoievsky's
House of the Dead
away with me. I carried the book with me for days. It was with me when I decided to work a few days as a dishwasher at a camp near Leadville.

To my horror one morning I discovered a mucker tearing a page from the book to use as shaving paper. I threw a cup at him, and battled him about the camp. No one could use a book of mine in such a manner.

I stole Boswell's
Johnson
and Gorky's
Creatures That Once Were Men
from an Alabama library. The Gorky book was shelf worn though the pages had never been cut. I still have the Boswell book and if the library will communicate with me and enclose postage I will be glad to return it to them.

I became very much interested in Chambers
Encyclopedia of English Literature
during an Indiana journey. It was in five large volumes. I thought it was no use for such books to remain in Indiana as there was a possibility of their never being read. For many days I considered the matter. I finally compromised with what was left of my conscience by deciding not to take them. They were so terribly large anyhow, and I had read a great deal of their contents while debating the best way of stealing them.

I once stole a beautifully bound small leather Bible from a preacher's house in New Haven, Connecticut. He had called me into his library after I had dined. The good man wore a ‘come to Jesus' collar, a shoe string black tie and a Uriah Heep expression. But he was a very decent fellow for all of that. He talked long and earnestly to me and explained in detail that the wages of sin were death and that all the ways of the flesh were but hollow sounds and tinkling cymbals, that God took care of the weary and the worn. He asked me my parentage and I told him that my father had studied for the Methodist ministry but had died early of brain fever. His heart was touched, and I saw the great look of pity in his face and touched him for a silver dollar.

The Bible was lying on the living room centre table among many other books. The good man excused himself for a moment and I appropriated it.

Upon the minister's return we talked a little more about the wages of sin, and I took my departure, promising to be a better boy and write to him of my success.

Stealing that Bible was the luckiest thing I ever did. I journeyed on to Boston where all the policemen are religious, and was arrested for vagrancy. The policeman searched me and discovered the Bible. Right away he became interested, and I had to think fast. The blue coat talked with an Irish brogue. I told him that my uncle had been a priest in Ohio and had only been dead two months and that his death had given me the blues and I had gone on the road.

“Ay—what did he die of?” was the cop's question.

I told him that he had contracted typhoid fever and leprosy while nursing a man whom everyone had been afraid to go near.

“The holy man,” said the policeman.

“Yes, he was holy—there was no one like him,” I ventured.

The policeman lead me to the street curbing.

“You're a Catholic, ain't you, Kid?”

Hoping to God I was guessing right I replied, “You bet your life, I wouldn't be nothin' else, none o' them other religions are any good.”

I hesitated for a second, hoping against hope that my capturer was not from the north of Ireland. He pulled his red and brown moustache and deliberated.

“Fine talk me lad,” he said, “Come wit' me, I'll take you to the missus.” He led me to a small brown house about two blocks away.

His wife was large and happy, and with a zest for life. She had a picture of Pope Leo XIII over the mantelpiece.

Her husband told my story for me while the good woman listened tearfully.

“Ay an' he carries a Bible wit' him does he … the poor, dear blessed childer. How glad I am ye found him Dan instead o' some o' thim Protestant booms on the force. Indade they'd make quick work of a lad like him.

“So your poor uncle died nursin' a sick man Sonny. Glory be to him. He's in Heaven now watchin' over you and how glad he is you still rade his Bible.”

I touched the book quickly in my pocket as an alarming thought came to me… . It was a Protestant Bible… . Right away the answer came … my uncle wanted me to read both the Protestant and Catholic Bibles so I could discover for myself how beautiful the latter was… . But the question never came up. A Bible was a Bible in their opinion, and it never occurred to them to question me.

The policeman returned to his duty of protecting Boston from the Cabots and the Lodges while I remained and told lie after lie to his all trusting wife.

After talking for some time I left with a gift of money and a promise to write to her regularly.

That night I laughed over the incident with a fellow rover whom I met in a joint on Tremont Street.

The imaginative young vagabond quickly loses the social instincts that help to make life bearable for other men. Always he hears voices calling in the night from far-away places where blue waters lap strange shores. He hears birds singing and crickets chirping a luring roundelay. He sees the moon, yellow ghost of a dead planet, haunting the earth.

Travelling a brutal road, his moral code becomes heavy, and he often throws it away. Civilization never quite restores all of it to him, which, of course, may not be as tragic as it sounds.

Gorky, the brilliant ex-tramp, returned to the road again, for a year. Few people understood the reason. I did.

It was the caged eagle returning to the mountains of its youth for a last look at the carefree life it had known. It remained a year, and found that the vast and lonely places were the same, but the blood had slowed around the eagle heart, and it flew back to the valley again, wearier than before—the last illusion gone.

There are those who have solutions for all the ills of humanity. There are people who love the mob in the abstract, but keep away from the scum of life themselves.

I have never known a great idealist who had a profound knowledge of life. There is a blessed something that blurs their eyes when they look at the viciousness of it all. They turn away from it and blubber platitudes, like blind men in a forest listening to birds and hearing not the reptiles underneath.

They cannot see life around them, their eyes being fastened on the great dream ahead, a few million years after they are rotten. Some idealists are selfish as individuals, but lovers of the mob. And who can really love a mob!

Evolution helps the mob. One can only help the individual.

And wise men learn to expect gratitude in Heaven. It is too delicate a flower for the winds of this earth.

All hoboes know these things. Petty men themselves, they expect pettiness from others, and find it, as they deserve. The vast crowd of them are liars, ingrates, and thieves. They prey on the false sentiments of women like popular novelists. They chortle sad tales to the unsophisticated brooders of pauper children.

A famous writer of tramp life said that the poor always give to the poor. Writers should not make definite rules about humanity. They are always wrong.

Some of the poor give to hoboes, others do not. If I were to choose a sure means of eating, my past experience as a young vagabond would incline me toward the women of the underworld. I have begged every poverty-stricken house in a block, and have had sore knuckles for my pains. Again, I have begged in other poverty-stricken blocks, and have been well rewarded with food. Some races seem more kindly than others toward the beggar, but that, too, is a mooted question among the tramps themselves, though the German women are favored.

A clever young tramp, if he has that indefinable something called personality, can always beg money on the street with success. He must have a knowledge of human nature, however, and be able to distinguish one class of citizens from another. In the argot of the road a “good” bum is one who is always successful as a beggar. All in all, though, the most resourceful and energetic tramp gets the most food and money. It is possible that these qualities discount personality, as few tramps have anything pertaining to the latter after they are twenty years old. The road writes with heavy hand its lines of degeneracy, brutality, and all-around wretchedness on their faces and bodies.

All of the philosophical stuff written about tramps should be taken lightly. The non-producers of the nation are tramps in one sense or another. The prattling parasitic club woman, the obese gambler in bonds, the minister in a fashionable church, all are tramps who happen to have beds and bath, and the economic security that men go mad to obtain.

In fact, the tramp is merely a parasite who has not been admitted to society.

Many of the younger tramps can fight with fury. A hobo camp is not a Y. M. C. A. when trouble starts. Some great pugilists have been developed on the road. Jack Dempsey, Kid McCoy, and Stanley Ketchell, three of the greatest bruisers that ever lived, were youthful hoboes for several years.

Neither am I interested in sociology among tramps. All the writers of such drivel have not contributed one iota to the solution of the problem. There would be fewer men in penitentiaries if we could drive greed from our social system. A vast army of the men in hoboland and jails are recruited from orphanages and reform schools. Perhaps a few more Judge Lindseys with understanding hearts would help a great deal. A thousand Judge Lindseys in America—but one may as well ask for a thousand Christs. Perhaps we need fewer mothers who know nothing of motherhood, and more women like Jane Addams.

My own opinion is that the greatest man of any era has made no dint at all in the armor-plate of his time. Some one may say that Christ did. Analyze the churches with an open mind, and the ravages of pseudo-Christianity.

But then, I am no reformer, but a weary writer who has been living in the memory of adventure.

My pity of life's wastrels is akin to love—my contempt is akin to hate—for they are, each and all, the beaten accidents of childhood. So always in kindlier moods, I agree with Masefield, sad vagabond of genius,

THE END