I did not hear anything more of him for some weeks, when suddenly one day, in that wretched section of St. Louis beloved of Dick and Peter as a source of literary material, I was halted by a figure which I assumed to be one of the lowest of the low. A short, matted, dirty black beard concealed a face that bore no resemblance to Clark. A hat that looked as though it might have been lifted out of an ash-barrel was pulled slouchily and defiantly over long uncombed black hair. His face was filthy, as were his clothes and shoes, slimy even. An old brown coat (how come by, I wonder?) was marked by a greenish slime across the back and shoulders, slime that could only have come from a gutter.
“Don’t you know me, Dreiser?” he queried in a deep, rasping voice, a voice so rusty that it sounded as though it had not been used for years “—Clark, Clark of the _Republic_. You know me——” and then when I stared in amazement he added shrewdly: “I’ve been sick and in a hospital. You haven’t a dollar about you, have you? I have to rest a little and get myself in shape again before I can go to work.”
“Well, of all things!” I exclaimed in amazement, and then: “I’ll be damned!” I could not help laughing: he looked so queer, impossible almost. A stage tramp could scarcely have done better. I gave him the dollar. “What in the world are you doing—drinking?” and then, overawed by the memory of his past efficiency and force I could not go on. It was too astonishing.
“Yes, I’ve been drinking,” he admitted, a little defiantly, I thought, “but I’ve been sick too, just getting out now. I got pneumonia there in the summer and couldn’t work. I’ll be all right after a while. What’s news at the _Republic_?”
He mumbled something about having played in bad luck, that he would soon be all right again, then ambled up the wretched rickety street and disappeared.
I hustled out of that vicinity as fast as I could. I was so startled and upset by this that I hurried back to the lobby of the Southern Hotel (my favorite cure for all despondent days), where all was brisk, comfortable, gay. Here I purchased a newspaper and sat down in a rocking-chair. Here at least was no sign of poverty or want. In order to be rid of that sense of failure and degradation which had crept over me I took a drink or two myself. That any one as capable as Clark could fall so low in so short a time was quite beyond me. The still strongly puritan and moralistic streak in me was shocked beyond measure, and for days I could do little but contrast the figure of the man I had seen about the _Republic_ office with that I had met in that street of degraded gin-mills and tumbledown tenements. Could people really vary so greatly and in so short a time? What must be the nature of their minds if they could do that? Was mine like that? Would it become so? For days thereafter I was wandering about in spirit with this man from gin-mill to gin-mill and lodging-house to lodging-house, seeing him drink at scummy bars and lying down at night on a straw pallet in some wretched hole.