The Wolf's Long Howl, Stanley Waterloo [best pdf ebook reader TXT] 📗

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