第 八 章 · BOOK I CHAPTER VIII

Los Angeles will always be written in golden letters in the archives of

my memory. Crawling, sore and sullen, from the clutch of toil, I

revelled in a lotus life of ease and idleness. There was infinite

sunshine, and the quiet of a public library through whose open windows

came the fragrance of magnolias. Living was incredibly cheap. For

seventy-five cents a week I had a little sunlit attic, and for ten cents

I could dine abundantly. There was soup, fish, meat, vegetables, salad,

pudding and a bottle of wine. So reading, dreaming and roaming the

streets, I spent my days in a state of beatitude.

But even five dollars will not last for ever, and the time came when

once more the grim face of toil confronted me. I must own that I had now

little stomach for hard labour, yet I made several efforts to obtain it.

However, I had a bad manner, being both proud and shy, and one rebuff in

a day always was enough. I lacked that self-confidence that readily

finds employment, and again I found myself mixing with the spineless

residuum of the employment bureau.

At last the morning came when twenty-five cents was all that remained to

me in the world. I had just been seeking a position as a dish-washer,

and had been rather sourly rejected. Sitting solitary on the bench in

that dreary place, I soliloquized:

"And so it has come to this, that I, Athol Meldrum, of gentle birth and

Highland breeding, must sue in vain to understudy a scullion in a

third-rate hash joint. I am, indeed, fallen. What mad folly is this that

sets me lower than a menial? Here I might be snug in the Northwest

raising my own fat sheep. A letter home would bring me instant help. Yet

what would it mean? To own defeat; to lose my self-esteem; to call

myself a failure. No, I won't. Come what may, I will play the game."

At that moment the clerk wrote:--

"Man Wanted to Carry Banner."

"How much do you want for that job?" I asked.

"Oh, two bits will hold you," he said carelessly.

"Any experience required?" I asked again.

"No, I guess even you'll do for that," he answered cuttingly.

So I parted with my last quarter and was sent to a Sheeny store in

Broadway. Here I was given a vociferous banner announcing:

"Great retiring sale," and so forth.

With this hoisted I sallied forth, at first very conscious and not a

little ashamed. Yet by and by this feeling wore off, and I wandered up

and down with no sense of my employment, which, after all, was one

adapted to philosophic thought. I might have gone through the day in

this blissful coma of indifference had not a casual glance at my banner

thrilled me with horror. There it was in hideous, naked letters of red:

"Retireing Sale."

I reeled under the shock. I did not mind packing a banner, but a

misspelt one....

I hurried back to the store, resolved to throw up my position. Luckily

the day was well advanced, and as I had served my purpose I was given a

silver dollar.

On this dollar I lived for a month. Not every one has done that, yet it

is easy to do. This is how I managed.

In the first place I told the old lady who rented me my room that I

could not pay her until I got work, and I gave her my blankets as

security. There remained only the problem of food. This I solved by

buying every day or so five cents' worth of stale bread, which I ate in

my room, washing it down with pure spring water. A little imagination

and lo! my bread was beef, my water wine. Thus breakfast and dinner. For

supper there was the Pacific Gospel Hall, where we gathered nightly one

hundred strong, bawled hymns, listened to sundry good people and

presently were given mugs of coffee and chunks of bread. How good the

fragrant coffee tasted and how sweet the fresh bread!

At the end of the third week I got work as an orange-picker. It was a

matter of swinging long ladders into fruit-flaunting trees, of sunshiny

days and fluttering leaves, of golden branches plundered, and boxes

filled from sagging sacks. There is no more ideal occupation. I revelled

in it. The others were Mexicans; I was "El Gringo." But on an average I

only made fifty cents a day. On one day, when the fruit was unusually

large, I made seventy cents.

Possibly I would have gone on, contentedly enough, perched on a ladder,

high up in the sunlit sway of treetops, had not the work come to an end.

I had been something of a financier on a picayune scale, and when I

counted my savings and found that I had four hundred and ninety-five

cents, such a feeling of affluence came over me that I resolved to

gratify my taste for travel. Accordingly I purchased a ticket for San

Diego, and once more found myself southward bound.