A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days. Walter A. Wyckoff
unutterable, that came as from out a boundless sea into the range of his strange awakening. And this new life was centred in her, as though she were its source. He lived for her, and worked and thought for her and tried to be worthy of her, and between his former and his present life was a gulf which by some miracle she had created.
It came upon him with the suddenness of a pistol-shot one evening late in March when they stood talking for a moment before saying good-night at her father’s door. Thundering down the steps from the living-rooms over the shop rushed the grocer, a large, florid Irishman. In a moment he was upon them, hot in the newly acquired knowledge that Farrell was “keeping steady company” with his daughter. His ire was up, and his Irish tongue was loosed, and Farrell got the sting of it. It lashed him for a beggarly factory laborer of doubtful birth, and, gaining vehemence, it lashed him for a hobo predestined to destruction, and finally, with strong admonition, it charged him never to speak to the girl and never to enter her home again.
If only he could have known, if only there had been a voice to tell him convincingly that now there had come a crucial test in his life between character and circumstance, a voice “to lift him through the fight”! But all his past was against him. In another hour he was dead drunk and he went drunk to work in the morning, and was discharged.
The pleading of his landlady was of no avail. He thought that he had lost the girl. Nothing remained but the road, and back to the road he would go, and soon, with his savings in his pocket, he was “beating his way” to Chicago. There he could live on beer and free lunches, and, at dives and brothels, he would “blow in” the savings of ten months and try to forget how sacred the sum had seemed to him, when, little by little, he added to it, while planning for the future. Its very sacredness gave a hellish zest to utter abandonment to vice while the money lasted; then he took again to begging on the streets with “a hard-luck story,” until, in the warm April days, he felt the old drawing to the open country and began once more to “beat his way” up and down the familiar railway lines and to beg his bread from the kind-hearted folk, who, in feeding him, were fast completing his ruin.
We were entering Seneca now, and another thunder-storm was upon us, but, as it broke in a deluge of rain, we ran for shelter under the eaves of the railway station. A west-bound passenger-train drew in as we stood there.
“That’s the way to travel,” I heard Farrell say, half to himself. It was the sheltered comfort of the passengers that he envied, I supposed. But not at all.
“See that hobo?” he continued, and, following the line of his outstretched finger, I saw a ragged wretch dripping like a drowned rat as he walked slowly up and down beside the panting locomotive.
“Yes,” I answered.
“The train’s got a blind baggage-car on,” he continued. “That’s a car that ain’t got no door in the end that’s next the engine. You can get on the front platform when the train starts, and the brakemen can’t reach you till she stops, but then you’re off before they are and on again when she starts up. The fireman can reach you all right, and if he’s ugly, he’ll heave coal at you, and sometimes he’ll kick you off when the train’s going full speed; but generally he lets you be. That hobo come in two hours from Chicago and he’s got a snap for as long as he wants to ride,” he concluded.
Nevertheless, I was glad to see the train go without Farrell’s saying anything about joining our adventurous brother on the fore-platform of the “blind baggage-car.”
In the seething sunlight that followed the storm we left the station and walked along the village street which lay parallel with the railway. At a mineral spring we stopped to drink, while a group of school-children who were loitering homeward stood watching us, the fascination in their eyes which all children feel in the mystery which surrounds the lives of vagabonds and gypsies.
On the outskirts of the village, when we were about to resume the railway, Farrell suggested that he should go foraging. He was hungry, for he had eaten nothing since early morning, while I had bought food at Morris. I promised to wait for him and very gladly sat down on the curbstone in the shade.
Two bare-foot urchins, their trousers rolled up to their knees, who had evidently been watching us from behind a picket-fence, stole stealthily out of the gate when Farrell turned the corner. Creeping as near as they dared, they gathered a handful of small, sun-baked clods and began to throw them at me as a target. It was rare sport for a time, but I was beyond their range and much absorbed in Farrell’s story. Disappointed at not having the excitement of being chased back to the shelter of their yard, they gave up the game and seated themselves on the curb, with their naked, brown feet bathed in the pool which had formed in the gutter. I had become quite unconscious of them, when I suddenly realized that they were in warm discussion. It was about me, I found, for I heard one of them raise his voice in stem insistence.
“Naw,” he said, “that ain’t the same bum, that’s another bum!”
Farrell returned empty-handed and a trifle dejected, I thought. His mind was evidently on food. A little farther down the line he pointed out a farm-house to the right and suggested our trying there. Along the edge of a soft meadow, where the damp grass stood high, nearly ready for mowing, we walked to a muddy lane which led to the barn-yard. A lank youth in overalls tucked into top-boots and a gingham shirt and a wide-brimmed straw hat stood in the open doorway of the barn, calmly staring at us as we approached.
Farrell greeted him familiarly and was answered civilly. Then, without further parley, he explained that we were come for something to eat.
“Go up to the house and ask the boss,” said the hired man.
The farmer was plainly well-to-do. His house was a large, square, white-painted, wooden structure topped with a cupola, and with well-kept grounds about it, while the farm buildings wore a prosperous air of plenitude. Just then a well-grown watch-dog of the collie type came walking toward us across the lawn, a menacing inquiry in his face.
“Won’t you go?” suggested Farrell.
The hired man had caught sight of the dog, and there was a twinkle in his eye as he answered, airily,
“Oh, no, thank you.”
“Does the dog bite?” Farrell ventured, cautiously.
“Yes,” came sententiously from the hired man.
“We’d better get back to the road,” Farrell said to me, and we could feel amused eyes upon us as we retraced our steps to the track.
Once more Farrell tried his luck; this time at a meagre, wooden, drab cottage that faced a country lane, a hundred yards from the railway. I watched him from the line and noticed that he talked for some time with the woman who answered his knock and stood framed in the door.
When he returned he had two large slices of bread in his hand and some cold meat.
“I didn’t like to take it,” he remarked. “Her husband’s a carpenter and ain’t had no work for six weeks. But she says she couldn’t have me go away hungry. That’s the kind that always helps you, the kind that’s in hard luck themselves, and knows what it is.”
He was for sharing the forage and, hungry as he was, he had not eaten a morsel of it when he rejoined me. That I would take none seemed to him at first a personal slight, but he understood it better when I explained that I had had food at Morris.
There was a cloudless sunset that evening, the sun sinking in a crimson glow that foretold another day of great heat. The stars came slowly out over a firmament of slaty blue, and shone obscurely through the humid air. Farrell and I were silent for some time. Both of us had walked about thirty-six miles that day, and were intent on a resting-place. At last we began to catch the glitter of street-lights in Ottawa, and, at sight of them, Farrell’s spirits rose. He was like one returning home after long absence. The sound of a church-bell came faintly to us. Farrell held me by the arm.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s the Methodist church bell.”
I