It is nine o’clock of a summer’s night. The great city all about is still astir, active, interested, apparently comfortable. Lights gleam out from stores lazily. The cars go rumbling by only partially filled, as is usual at this time of night. People stroll in parks in a score of places throughout the city, enjoying the cool of the night, such as it is. In any one of these, as the evening wanes, may be witnessed one of the characteristic spectacles of the town: the gathering of the “benchers.” Here, while one strolls about for an hour’s amusement or sits on a bench, may be seen the man whom the city has beaten, seeking a place to sleep.
What a motley company! What a port of missing men! This young one who slips by me in shabby, clay-colored clothes and a worn, dirty straw hat, is only temporarily down on his luck, for he has youth. It may be a puling youth, half-witted, with ill-conceived understanding of things as they are, but it is youth, with some muscle and some activity, and as such it is salable. Some one will buy it for something for a little while.
But this other thing that comes shambling toward me, dirty, dust in its ears, dust in its eyes, dust in its hair, a meager recollection of a hat, dull, hopeless, doglike eyes—what has it to offer life? Nothing?220 Practically so. An appetite which life will not satisfy, a racked and thin-blooded body which life cannot use, a rusty, cracked and battered piece of machinery which is fit only for the scrap-heap. And yet it lingers on, clings on, hoping for what? And this third thing—a woman, if you please, in rags and tatters, a gray cape for a shawl, a queer, flat, shapeless thing which she wears on her head for a hat, shoes that are not shoes but cracked strips of leather, a skirt that is a bag only, hands, face, skin wrinkled and dirty, yet who seeks to rest or sleep here the night through. And now she is stuffing old newspapers between her dress and her breast to keep warm. And enveloping her hands in her rag of a shawl!
Yet she and those others make but three of many, so grim, so strange, so shabby a company. What, in God’s name, has life done to them that they are so cracked and bruised and worthless?
No heart, or not a good one perhaps, in any of these bodies; no stomach, or a mere bundle of distorted viscera; no liver or kidneys worthy the name, but only botched or ill-working organs of these names in their place; eyes poor; hearing possibly defective; hair fading; skin clammy. Merciful God! is it to this condition that we come, you and I, if life be not merciful?
I am not morbid. I know that men must make good. I know that to be useful to the world they must have a spark of divine fire. But who is to provide the fire? Who did, in the first place? Where is it now? What blew it out? The individual himself? Not always. Man is not really responsible for his actions. Society?221 Society is not really responsible for itself or for its individuals. Nature? God? Very likely, although there is room for much discussion and much illumination here.
 
The Man on the Bench
But before we point the finger of scorn or shrug the shoulder of indifference, one word: Life does provide ............