Experiment in Vagrancy
His face was not a vagrant’s face. But then, it was a very large city, and the ants scurrying and scrambling along the mid-July pavements all had their eyes either closed or turned to the ground. He was handsome, if handsomeness consists in having the conventional number of features. If the dust on his shoes and his two days’ beard were drab, his walk and expression were anything but that. The glazed and distracted eye of one of the ants would not have revealed that the next day was the stranger’s birthday, that he had expected to be home (some 1,000 miles away now) for the occasion, that he was eagerly expected (by a green parrot as well as some other people), that some trouble with his machine had delayed him for two days in this same large city. It was annoying, very annoying; but these circumstances had not crushed his spirit, for he was of a reflective turn of mind.
What had a few hours ago been light, with dark outlines against it, was now dark, and strange coloured outlines had flashed out like strange nightmares. He walked into the hotel. His expensive goggles, no longer new, failed to compensate for the rather unprepossessing effect of the oil stained trench coat and once-white helmet. The fact that he wore blue shorts, that the blue rucksack on his back was coated with dust, that his fawn-coloured socks were spattered with black, had not altered his outlook in the slightest. It was a great adventure. “It is absurd to think that the outward appearance of a man can affect the essence of the inner self,” he thought.
The manager could not tell that this strange looking person was the son of the Dean of a Cathedral, that he had plenty of money in his pocket, and that he was making an experiment. Those grimy hands certainly did not look as though they were passionately fond of playing the piano. “It was that damned clutch –” thought the stranger. But hotel managers are singularly downright and materialistic breed of men; for them the criterion is wealth or the appearance of wealth. But then they, poor pedestrian fools that they are, have not the blood of adventure coursing in their slowly hardening arteries. So the hotel manager said “Yes, bad weather for that sort of luck. No, I'm sorry, sir, we’re all booked up for to-night.” And there was a great deal more irony in his “sir” than he realized.
“I scorn your hovel. There is a stink to it. I shall play the tramp, then. It is far more comfortable sleeping on the ground than in one of your filthy beds.” That is what the stranger thought; but he merely smiled “I understand.” But the hotel manager did not understand. The stranger stalked out, a trifle wearily, and the manager thought the blue rucksack drooped from those shoulders in sympathy with the heaviness of the bearer’s spirit. But he was wrong.
An hour later the dark was more dark and the stranger was a thing of ghostly appearance – an apparition, one moment of livid red, the next a ghastly green, and then for some seconds a part of the darkness; for there were weird crackling tubes of glass of man’s making which struggled incessantly with the night. But if he appeared incorporeal and trifle diaphanous, he thought, as he shortened his pace, that his two feet were probably the most real things in the universe. As he came to the door of the police station he was wondering whether his experiment were not more senseless than thrilling – now. It was a big city. He felt an emptiness, a horrible aching loneliness, in spite of the myriads of ants scurrying and scrambling past him. “No,” he thought, “the experiment is a success; a glorious success:” and then added “a complete and bitter success.” The sergeant on duty looked up from his dingy records of dingy crimes, a little surprised at the difference between the voice and the man.
Naw! Ya can’t sleep here. Wadda ya think this is? The bloody Ritz? Ya can try No. 1 Station on Ste. Antoine des Trois Chiens. They got beds there. Naw. Only ‘bout a half hour’s walk. Ya go down two blocks, then right, till ya come to – –”
“Right. Thanks. I'll try there,” said the other; but he did not mean it. There were two centres of the universe shrieking loudly that in half an hour they could cover an imponderable infinity of space. “Yes,” he thought, “a great and bitter success.” And he passed out of the dim station light which seemed oddly indicative, he thought, of the narrow sphere of feeble human endeavour and kindness. Then he began to think of the ants.
“The king’s face, and the cur’s face, and the face of the stuffed swine ...”
There was a church standing back from the bustling, grovelling street. It was a large church – and it only took a moment to jump over the fence when nobody was looking. On a patch of sickly grass, which the street lamps shining through the palings seemed to make impossibly bright, he spread his oily trench coat and was asleep.
Beyond the palings there was only an occasional car passing when he awoke. It seemed so bright on the grass that surely, he thought, he must have been seen – and he felt like a hunted man. He certainly cannot have looked his best as he blinked at the light in the doorway of a small café. A clock face was leering at him. He brought his eyes into focus with it. 3.15! The beard, now lengthened into two and half days, did not impress the proprietor particularly – he lived, like a bat, in the night-time, and he had learned that it was safer not to be surprised. But the fellow was not like the usual run. “He is a queer one,” he reflected; “he isn't drunk – leastways, not at the moment; he talks like a dude (he pronounced it ‘dood’) but be damned if he doesn’t look like a cross between a grease-monkey and a stevedore.” The queer one drank his tea glumly, because his eyes were heavy, and he felt intolerably dirty. Shortly after that he was spreading his coat under a white thorn in the garden of one of the ‘Seats of the Mighty, (“mighty rich,” he mused because he was too sleepy to think of anything better) but his bad pun did not keep him awake for long.
It was broad daylight. He was out on the sidewalk with pack and coat, rubbing his eyes, before he suddenly realized that he was awake and that the ants had started to scurry and scramble again.
About four miles later he was ringing at one of the doors of an unimposing suburban terrace. A woman appeared: “Time? About fifteen after eight,” “Thank you,” he said. Fifteen minutes had passed before he rang the same bell again, but there was no answer this time. “This success is almost insufferably bitter,” he thought; for he felt, rather cynically, that he had a foreboding of what would happen next. A few minutes later he tried again and this time an angry face mouthed words through the lace that shrouded the glass-panelled door. “Go away!” said the face. Then a car drew up and a man “bloated with self-importance”, thought the cynical youth, approached him.
Threateningly: “Here you! What are you doing here?”
Interested: “Mildewing.”
“None o’ that! Where d'ya come from?”
Wearily: “Does it really matter?”
“Well, where ya goin’, then?”
Savagely: “Hell! Coming?”
This last remark produced the rather valuable information that the bloated gentleman was an “officer of the Law.” He blustered and fumed and would not leave until he had written down all the wrong answers to his fatuous questions.
The door-bell was ringing again. The angry face, the appearance of disembodiment being even more alarming than before, was thrust through the lace and “Go away!” it mouthed; and there was fear in the eyes.
“I wanted to say that I am sorry I frightened you. You needn't have called the police. I merely wanted to use the telephone. You see, I . . . .”
“I know all about that. Go away, or I'll call the police again.”
The face disappeared. “Faut etre philosophe,” he said resignedly to prevent himself from shouting in no uncertain tone what he really felt.
“Here I come to your door, ring, speak respectfully, without offence – and you gibber with fear and send for the police. Just because my clothes are a little odd – just because my hands are black with grease, my pack dusty, my hair towzled – just because I haven’t shaved for three days – does that change my essence? Is my inner self any different?”
These brave new thoughts filled him with fire, and he turned and walked away. He had not gone a hundred yards along the street where the waggons were noisily striving to drown the chatter of the ants, when he stopped and his eyes gazed directly in front of him and there was no sight in them. “Does that make my inner self any different? he thought, turning the words over in his mind again and again until they became a part of his reverie. With his question still unanswered he awoke and walked on again. He had not gone far when suddenly, as though with a flash of inspiration, as though he had found something for which he had been looking a long time, he said aloud “By Jove! I’m not so sure about that!”
And then the army of ants engulfed him.