My Monks of Vagabondia

“Doesn’t she look pretty,” said the admiring mother.

“She looks like Jeffries at the end of the fifth,” was Jim’s reply.

A few moments later I heard him as he walked, singing music of his own improvising to the words of Wilde’s prison poem:

"With slouch and swing around the ring,
We trod the Fools’ Parade!
We did not care; we knew we were
The Devil’s Own Brigade;
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade."

III

The Winter was nearly over when “Slippery Jim” came to me and expressed a wish to return to the World again. If his father would only accept him once more!

My observation of a father’s attitude towards his prodigal son is that the moment the son desires to live as he ought, not only do closed doors open, but the father stands ready with outstretched arms to receive him. This supposedly harsh father, when he was convinced that his Jim had worked faithfully at the Colony for several months, was anxious that his son return home. Even the boy’s old employer expressed sympathy and offered a position to him.

When this good news came I did not have to tell the boy anything about its being one’s duty to be cheerful. He wanted to dance a clog on the table in the men’s reading room.

Early the next morning he left us, not waiting to thank us, which was quite unnecessary; nor hardly stopping to say good-bye to us. But a few days afterward he wrote to me, saying that after four years he was back with his father and mother, brother and sisters, in his own room, sleeping in his own bed. The family had arranged it just the same as it had been before he left them for those sad years in prison. His father had purchased him a new suit for Easter. The next day he was to start to work.

Nearly a year later he visited me. His work had taken him out of town. "When I first met you," he said. “I didn’t have a home. Now it is a question which one to visit first, but I thought I would come out to see you, and then go this evening and see my other father.”

OUR FRIEND, THE ANARCHIST

As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

    – Bible.

Our Friend, The Anarchist

He said that he came from Germany, but he didn’t look it, for Germany is a beautiful country, and he was far removed from even a suggestion of beauty. Had he said he had just arrived from “No Man’s Land,” it would have been easily accredited. For a German, even his accent and grammatical construction were unsatisfactory. He did not begin his sentences in the middle and talk both ways at once, after the well established custom of Americanized Teutons. In the stress of his excitement he expressed himself concisely and clearly.

He was seated in the Charity House awaiting the investigation of the social workers. He held his head in his hands, while his body convulsed frequently, and tears were in his eyes.

To see a man with unkempt whiskers indulging in a crying spell like a delicate woman, is almost as humorous as it is pathetic, unless one knows what the man is crying about. Then, too, the Germans, unlike the Irish, take their trouble seriously, so that their despair often creates for them the hell they fear.

Surely it wasn’t a German who in the old Bible days sent hired mourners to go about the street; it was undoubtedly an Irishman whose genius conceived the idea of paying other men to do his weeping for him.

“Where are you from?” I asked the German.

He surveyed me suspiciously from head to foot, then replied politely enough: “I am of German parentage and have lived the greater part of my life in Heidelberg, where my father and grandfather were instructors in the University.”

“When did you arrive in America?” I asked him.

“A few days ago,” he answered. "I came from Paris, where I met with heavy – heavy for me – financial reverses. I attempted to conduct a business similar to your brokers, who loan money on personal property, but being unfamiliar with French law, I found I could not legally enforce payments of the loans I made to the Frenchmen. My entire life savings – small, it is true – were lost. In disgust I came to America, and my condition now is worse than ever. I am desperate."

He did not raise his voice, speaking quietly, but his hands were nervous, and his eyes reminded me of Svengali – fascinating, but dangerous. My impression was that I had seen safer men locked in darkened cells and allowed only wooden spoons with which to eat.

“Has the charity association decided to help you?” I asked.

“I fear not,” he replied. “They wish me to tell them my father’s address in Germany, as they inform me that they always make thorough investigations. Several times they asked me my home address, but I turned them from the point, as I have no intention of adding my burdens to the burdens my father and mother already have… Does it seem quite generous of your social workers to be so insistent?.. But, pardon me, have you not a saying that ‘Beggars must not be choosers?’”

I did not reply to his question, as I was thinking what my Reception Committee – made up of the boys of the Colony – would say to me if I invited this much-bewhiskered individual to join our Family. For the instant I forgot the German’s troubles in the thought of the troubles which I was about to take upon myself. I smiled at my approaching embarrassment. “It is all very well,” the boys had cautioned me, “to hold us responsible for the newly-arrived members, to make certain that no criminal nor fraud obtains admission to the Family, but you might be a little more discriminating in your selections, could you not?”

The German was quick to avail himself of my offer to join the Colony; he would go to Hoboken and get his luggage and join me as soon as possible. His luggage – he met me an hour later – consisted of a wooden box too small to be called a trunk, too large to be called a valise.

As we approached the Colony House we passed several of the boys who had evidently seen us at a distance, for they appeared deeply interested in the setting sun, their faces turned from us. Finally one fellow who, like a good Pullman porter, can laugh at you without changing his facial expression, only if you watch closely you may note that the muscles at the back of the neck dance in uncontrolled merriment – came forward and said to us: “A beautiful sunset.”

He should have been reprimanded for his impudence, but I simply asked, “Where?”

“In the west,” he explained. Then the boys turned and laughed without restraint.

“An ordinary sunset and a most ordinary joke,” I said, rather icily. But they continued to laugh, first looking at my companion and then at me.

“Not so ordinary,” said another boy. “If you could see it from where we are you could understand.”

“I understand you only too well,” I answered.

Then the two boys who were on the Reception Committee came over to us and took my German friend in hand. There were no more remarks until we reached the house and the man himself was quite out of hearing.

“Why did you bring out a man like that?” the cook questioned me soon after I reached the house, and every one looked up from the evening paper he was reading anxious to have his little laugh.

But years have taught me somewhat of the ways of men. Did not Moses, when the children of Israel attempted to entangle him in argument, make his contention invulnerable by stating, “God spake unto Moses, saying, – ”

After that there wasn’t much chance for argument. The best thing they could do at such a time was to quietly line up in the ranks. And there is an answer that will always check the hilarity of homeless men and make them as sympathetic as children.

“Why did you bring him out with you?” the cook repeated.

“Why?” I said, simply, “the man is hungry.”

Each boy frowned at the cook and turned back to his reading. And the cook made no answer, except he served the new-comer with double portions.

That night the German slept with his bed between the two beds of the Reception Committee, and I heard nothing from him until they came to report to me in the morning.

“Father,” said one of the committee, “I don’t like that old party you brought out with you yesterday. All night long in his sleep he was muttering: ‘Down with the millionaire; curse the capitalist’ – that man is an anarchist.”

A moment later the second member of the committee came in.

“Mr. Floyd, you know that wooden box that ‘Whiskers’ brought with him?” he asked, nervously; “I put my ear down to it and listened. I could hear something inside going tick, tick, tick, as plain as day.”

“You are excited,” I said. “After breakfast send the man to me.”

In my room the German and myself talked a long time.

I asked him about the University of Heidelberg, the influence of the student in German politics and of the world-wide socialistic movement – had he ever read the works of Karl Marx, the great Socialist?