Ottumwa tri-weekly courier. [volume] (Ottumwa, Iowa) 1903-1916, 1908-06-02

", J.
It. takes some little time and a
great many hard knocks to make
young man, who has been brought up
to regard life as a playground, real
ize that it is a battlefield Fabian
Dare, VINO was good natured, easy
going idealist, though at first there
must be some mistake about it all;
that the men who snaringly refused his
application for work were out of sorts
and would think better of it next day.
He did not realize that his refined
good looks and pleasant, easy smile,
advertised him as one who did not be-
long to the drudge class and no man.
ager cares to manufacture drudges-
there are lots of them born every
day When his clothes got shabby and
his face pinched, he couldn't even get
interviews-the Office boy did the re-
fusing. Then he gave up the idea of
working with his brain and offered
the product of his muscles for sale.
Once he succeeded in getting job
on a building, but was turned off be-
cause he didn't belong to union. He
found he wolsld have to serve some
years as an apprentice before he
could join that union
He was rather glad to find that he
couldn't get manual labor, for the
idea of suicide had begun to take hold
of him; but he didn't feel that he had
any right to carry it out as long as
there was reasonable chance of
supporting himself; and the dirt and
saualor of the laboring class, while
no punishment to those born among
it, was a horror to this sensitive,
highly strung youth.
He wasn't bitter about it at all and
he blamed no one. He saw it was a
game at which only few could win,
and live off the sweat of the brows of
the losers, and that an equal division
of everything no prizes and no pen
alties- would make life even less
worth living.
OF course, the idea of suicide had
been very repugnant to him at first,
tbs cold plunge over the edge of
the known, without any guarantee Of
extinction in the unknown waters be-
low. Perhaps only change from the
dream to the nightmare. Dare's vivid
Imagination could hint at dreadful
possibilities. He had already expert
enced the horrors of living in an en-
vironment for which he was not fit
ted and that seemed the most prob
able form which future punishment
would take if there was anything log
ical or automatic in the universe. He
felt that 1t was all wonderfully logical
wonderfully automatic, and suicide
might call for some automatic re-
yenge. The fear of death, not the love
Of life, keeps, perhaps, as much as
half the world alive; but the fear of
life had at last come to overshadow
the fear of death in the mind of Fa-
bian Dare.
His left leg was curled under the
seat, his right thrust forward to sup.
port his elbow, for his chin rested
on his halfclosed right hand, the
knuckles of which consealed his
mouth. His gaze was now focused on
the far-away, for he had been sitting
a long time in the Square. The fin
gers of his left hand drummed an if
resolute solo on his other knee.
During all the hour which Dare had
spent trying life at the bar of his ex-
perience of it, the other man had
watched the progress of the trial with
the intensity of a surgeon at an impor-
tant vivisection. He had taken in the
externals-his Oxford cricket cap Che
had raised twopence on his bowler)
down the relics of good tweed suit
to his fragmentary boots. He had
watched the young mans gaze rise
gradually from those boots to the
level of the life thronging by, till it
passed beyond that, into the regions
where it could not be followed Then
the man nodded his head with the sat
tsfaction of a surgeon gratified by his
experience. And at that moment Dare
had passed the death sentence on life
In the end it was the vision of the
gaudy, frowsy barmaid which decided
him; he realized that something like