THE WAYFARERS

CHAPTER ONE

There is no sight more uninspiring than a ferry-boat crowded with human beings at a quarter of six o’clock in the evening, when the great homeward rush from the offices and commercial houses sets in. At that time, although there are some returning shoppers and women type-writers and clerks, the larger number of the passengers are men, sitting in slanting rows to catch the light on the evening paper, or wedged in an upright mass at the forward end of the boat. It is noticeable that, with a few exceptions, those who have gone forth in the morning distinct individuals, well dressed, freshly shaven, with clean linen, an animated manner, a brisk step, and an eager-eyed disposition toward the labors of the day, seem, as they return at night, to be only component parts of a shabby crowd in indistinguishable apparel, and worn to a uniform dullness not only of appearance but of attitude and expression. The hard day’s work is over, but the rest is not yet attained. We all know that between the darkness and the dawn comes the period when vitality is at its lowest ebb, and in all transition periods there is a subtle withdrawing of the old force before the new fills its place. In that temporary collapse in the daily adjustment between two lives, the business and the domestic, many a man with overwrought brain and tired body feels that what he has been looking forward to as a happy rest appears to him now momentarily as an unavoidable and wearying need for further effort. The demand upon him varies in kind, but it is still there.

Men in a mass are neither beautiful nor impressive to look at in the modern black or sad-colored raiment of every-day custom, and it is difficult, as the eyes rest on the faces in these commonplace rows, to realize the space which love inevitably fills in these lives, so far apart from romance do they seem, forgetful as we are of the worn truth that romance is a flowering weed which grows in any soil. For three fourths of these men some woman waits. Those dull eyes can gleam, those set lips can kiss; these be heroes, handsome men, arbiters of destiny! There is positive grotesqueness in the idea, seen in this obliterating haze of fatigue that so maliciously dwarfs and slurs. That man over there with the long upper lip and closed lids has an episode in his middle-aged existence to match any in the annals of fiction. That other beside him, short, fat, with kind eyes and a stubby brown beard, is the sum of all that is good and beautiful to the wife for whom his homecoming continues to be the poignant event of the day. This man with the long, thin face is a modern martyr working himself to death for his family; this one was in the newspapers last week in a connection best not remembered. This one—you would pick him out at once from among the rest—is to be married to-morrow. This man, and this, and this, while presently unconscious of the great law, are still living under it. Not only to youth is the promise given; it becomes a larger and more vital thing as the opportunities of life increase, further spreading in its fostering of good or evil—a thread so deeply interwoven on the under side of the fabric that we forget to look for it.

In every case is a character to be made or marred, not only by the large molding, but by the infinitesimal touches of that love whose influence we conventionally limit to young and unmarried persons—while knowing, whether we acknowledge it or not, that it is the one eternally powerful element in life.

Even in a far-off reflex action, this is shown on the ferry-boat in the fact that when one of this blended concourse of men meets a woman he instantly regains an individuality; he pulls himself together, his eyes become bright, his manner concentrated, his clothes set well on him. He is no