The Road | Page 3

at
my impudence, I shall never know.
"I'll not waste words on you," he roared. "Get out of here, you
ungrateful whelp!"
I scraped my feet to advertise my intention of going, and queried: --
"And I don't get anything to eat?"
He arose suddenly to his feet. He was a large man. I was a stranger in a
strange land, and John Law was looking for me. I went away hurriedly.
"But why ungrateful?" I asked myself as I slammed his gate. "What in
the dickens did he give me to be ungrateful about?" I looked back. I
could still see him through the window. He had returned to his pie.
By this time I had lost heart. I passed many houses by without
venturing up to them. All houses looked alike, and none looked "good."
After walking half a dozen blocks I shook off my despondency and
gathered my "nerve." This begging for food was all a game, and if I
didn't like the cards, I could always call for a new deal. I made up my
mind to tackle the next house. I approached it in the deepening twilight,
going around to the kitchen door.
I knocked softly, and when I saw the kind face of the middle-aged
woman who answered, as by inspiration came to me the "story" I was
to tell. For know that upon his ability to tell a good story depends the
success of the beggar. First of all, and on the instant, the beggar must
"size up" his victim. After that, he must tell a story that will appeal to

the peculiar personality and temperament of that particular victim. And
right here arises the great difficulty: in the instant that he is sizing up
the victim he must begin his story. Not a minute is allowed for
preparation. As in a lightning flash he must divine the nature of the
victim and conceive a tale that will hit home. The successful hobo must
be an artist. He must create spontaneously and instantaneously -- and
not upon a theme selected from the plenitude of his own imagination,
but upon the theme he reads in the face of the person who opens the
door, be it man, woman, or child, sweet or crabbed, generous or miserly,
good natured or cantankerous, Jew or Gentile, black or white,
race-prejudiced or brotherly, provincial or universal, or whatever else it
may be. I have often thought that to this training Of my tramp days is
due much of my success as a story-writer. In order to get the food
whereby I lived, I was compelled to tell tales that rang true. At the back
door, out of inexorable necessity, is developed the convincingness and
sincerity laid down by all authorities on the art of the short-story. Also,
I quite believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out of
me. Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the kitchen
door for grub.
After all, art is only consummate artfulness, and artfulness saves many
a "story." I remember lying in a police station at Winnipeg, Manitoba. I
was bound west over the Canadian Pacific. Of course, the police
wanted my story, and I gave it to them -- the spur of the moment. They
were landlubbers, in the heart of the continent, and what better story for
them than a sea story? They could never trip me up on that. And so I
told a tearful tale of my life on the hell-ship Glenmore. (I had once seen
the Glenmore lying at anchor in San Francisco Bay.)
I was an English apprentice, I said. And they said that I didn't talk like
an English boy. It was up to me to create on the instant. I had been born
and reared in the United States. On the death of my parents, I had been
sent to England to my grandparents. It was they who had apprenticed
me on the Glenmore. I hope the captain of the Glenmore will forgive
me, for I gave him a character that night in the Winnipeg police station.
Such cruelty! Such brutality! Such diabolical ingenuity of torture! It
explained why I had deserted the Glenmore at Montreal.

But why was I in the middle of Canada going west, when my
grandparents lived in England? Promptly I created a married sister who
lived in California. She would take care of me. I developed at length
her loving nature. But they were not done with me, those hard-hearted
policemen. I had joined the Glenmore in England; in the two years that
had elapsed before my desertion at Montreal, what had the Glenmore
done and where had she been? And thereat I took those landlubbers
around the world with me. Buffeted by pounding seas and stung