Burned Bridges

Wherefore Thompson continued looking about for a number of weeks. He

looked for work, without finding it save in street gangs and at labor

that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe. A man had

to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at

the bottom of a ditch. He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as

he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and

ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the

North had done for him--fixed him firmly in the resolve that if he had

to sweat for a pittance it would not be within four walls, behind dusty

windows. He could always go back to the woods. Sometimes he thought he

would better do that out of hand, instead of wasting his time and money

seeking in a city for the goose that was to lay him golden eggs.

When he was not hard on the trail of some definite opening sheer

loneliness drove him out on the streets. His room was a cheerless place,

a shelter for him when he slept and nothing more. Many a time, lacking

any real objective, he covered miles of San Francisco's streets. He

sought out parks, beaches, public buildings. At night he would drift, a

silent, lonely spirit, among the crowds that ebbed and flowed in the

downtown district that was a blaze of light.

That restless wandering brought him by chance one evening along a

certain avenue which shall be nameless, because it is no longer the

haunt of the soap-boxer. This curious thoroughfare lay upon the

borderline between the smart shopping district and San Francisco's

Chinatown. For a matter of two or three blocks the street was given

over to an impromptu form of public assembly, a poor man's debating

ground, an open forum where any citizen with a grievance, a theory, or

even merely the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure

of an audience. In the evening there was always a crowd. Street fakirs

plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with

a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap,

suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes

and quarters from the crowd.

But the street fakirs were in the minority. The percentage of gullible

ones was small. Mostly it was a place of oratory, the haunt of

propagandists. Thompson listened to Social Democrats, Social Laborites,

syndicalists, radicals, revolutionaries, philosophical anarchists, men

with social and economic theories of the extremist type. But they talked

well. They had a grasp of their subject. They had on tap tremendous

quantities of all sorts of knowledge. The very extent of their

vocabulary amazed Thompson. He heard scientific and historical

authorities quoted and disputed, listened to arguments waged on every

sort of ground--from biological complexities which he could not

understand to agricultural statistics which he understood still less. A

lot of it perplexed and irritated him, because the terminology was over

his head. And the fact that he could not follow these men in full

intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those

things for himself. He got an inkling of the economic problems that

afflict society. He found himself assenting offhand to the reasonable

theorem that a man who produced wealth was entitled to what he

produced. He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of

evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation. There was thus revived

in him some of those troublesome perplexities which Sam and Sophie Carr

had first aroused.