The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1931-04-17
GILBERT
WAS NOT A
FAILURE
g e
By FANNIE HURST
AISAEvAIvAEvALSALv ALVAEVAEAEV A INV
90 by Mcclure Newspaper Syndicate.l
CWNU Service.i

CWNU Service,
~HBERT was at least twenty
" six before he first began TO
~ realize that some of tho noun
tain tops toward which he had
directed his footsteps were not going
to be SO accessible as he had dreamed.
Gilbert had come from an achieving
family. His father, up TO the week of
his death, had been one of the most
important barristers in town. His
mother had practiced law in a highly
successful way up to the last year of
her life. His brother, at thirty, was
already surgeon of more than local
importance. His sister. college grad
uate herself, had married one of the
outstanding bio-chemists of the world.
So it was by background, environ
ment, example and possibly inner
itance that Gilbert, even Lefore he
was finished with college, should turn
his footsteps resolutely toward aeon
plishment.
1t is true that the subject of law
had never particularly interested him.
He had not a systematic mind. The
conception of ideas interested him
more than their execution, and if he
had any preference at all. it was for
lying for large part of the day be-
fore a good fire, or a sun-kissed
meadow, and reaC;ng.
But man cannot foster such in
clinations if he hopes to get ahead in
this world. Gilbert knew that. Unless
you had a marked talent of one sort
or another, the safest road to achieve
ment lay along lines of one of the
substantial, remunerative professions.
Medicine. Law.
With his slender talent for writing,
the best he could probably hope for
would be a journalistic or editorial
career.
And so it was that Gilbert turned
to law. 1t was not that he did not
bring a fairly average equipment TO
this work. He lad a good mind, even
an unusual endowment of intelligence.
and every law c""e of the city was
open to the son of his father.
The secret of his failure to progress,
along about the time he was twenty
six, was subtle yet fundar entail
one. His heart -yas not in his work
Intellectually. he wanted to be a
successful lawyer. Emotionally, he
yearned for the blue days at Capri.
where he had been taken as a young
boy on his first trip abroad. He
hn Of
that kind of life, with perhaps a pad
and pencil at his beck and call. so
that he could write as a dilettante
writes, from impulse rather than am
bition or necessity.
The instinct TO struggle was not in
Gilbert, and yet, surrounded as he
was by the examples of successful
people, he had not the courage to let
go. And so for four years after these
first realiZatiOns began to dawn dis
quietingly upon him, he struggled
ahead at profession that was flavor
less to him. 1t was impossible to
plead a case with fervOr about which
you felt so dispassionately.
The claims of one set of human
beings against another could not, did
not, interest him. The cunning, devil
Gus, shrewd phraseology of the con-
tract, so fascinating 70 some types
of mind, elected no real interest from
Gilbert. The ramificatiOns of the law.
it. interpretations and its practice.
aroused in him nothing more than
WEAKNESS for the rather purposeless
struggles of mankind against man.
kind.
At thirty, on an impulse he was
nor the amount of courage that
went with it-Gilbert resigned his po-
sition as Junior partner in a WELL
known law firm, left superficial ex-
planatOry notes to few of the men,
hers of his family and his friends,
drew out a saving account of some
several hundred dollars and took
ship going Mediterranean way.
That was the beginning of fifteen
years of wandering over the hOary
face of the hoary earth. Lingering,
when necessary, in one city, in one
port, in one village or another, long
enough to lay up. by simple manual
labor, sufficient money to sustain him
for brief period of the future. Those
of his friends who happened to en-
counter him in their travels, described
him sadly as ale, draggled fellow
wandering aimlessly across the face
of the earth.
In way, that was how Gilbert re-
garded himself. While the new life
was far, far preferable to the old,
and not regret lurked in his heart.
at the same time there was also
futility, an aimlessness, a seeking
after he knew not what. Gray began
TO come out in his hair and stOop
was upon his back. Even the variety