BOOK TWO
NOTE I
I WAS rolling kegs of nails out of a great sheet-iron warehouse and onto a long platform, from where they were to be carted by trucks, down a short street, out to a wharf and aboard a ship. The kegs were heavy but they were not large, and as they were rolled down a slight incline to the platform the rolling could be done with the foot. Like practically all modern workmen my body had plenty to do but my mind was idle. There was no planning of the work, no scheming to make the day’s work fit the plan. The truckmen, four heavy and good-natured Swedes, loaded the trucks, and that also required no skill. The kegs were so heavy that a few of them only could be put on a truck at one time and the trucks did not have to be loaded skillfully.
As for the nails themselves, they came pouring out of machines somewhere back in the factory at the edge of which the warehouse stood.
The warehouse had two platforms, one at which cars were loaded and our own for the loading of trucks, and I could hear voices on the other platform—an oath, a broken laugh—but never did I see the men employed there.
On our side we had a little life of our own. My single fellow-workman, who all day long ran in and out of the warehouse with me, was a short, stocky young man who on Saturday afternoons played baseball and, inthe winter, hockey. He continually boasted of his prowess in games and when the warehouse foreman was not about—he seldom appeared on our platform—the athlete stopped work to tell one of the teamsters a story.
The stories all concerned one impulse in life, and as I had grown unspeakably weary of hearing them and indeed doubted the man’s potency, he was so insistent about it, I did not stop working but rolled kegs busily. The teamster laughed heavily. “There was a fat woman, hanging out clothes, on a line. Two stray dogs came along,” etc. The story-teller himself laughed as he told his tale and sometimes glared at me because I did not stop to listen. “You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” he asked, but I did not answer. The horses hitched to the trucks were quiet beasts with broad flanks, and as he talked, telling his tales, they switched their tails slowly back and forth, driving flies away. Then they turned their heads to look at me, running out of the warehouse and down the incline behind one of the flying kegs. “Don’t be in a hurry. You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” they also seemed to be saying.
My legs and arms, my body had enough to do but my mind was idle. During the year before I had been with race horses, going with them about Ohio to the fairs and race meetings, and then I had given up that life, although I loved it well, because I wanted something from men I did not think I could find at the tracks. The life of the sporting fraternity had color and the horses themselves, beautiful temperamental things, fascinated me, but I hungered for something of my own. At the tracks one received a succession of thrills and was kept on the alert but theemotions aroused were all vicarious.
“No Wonder,” a gray pacer, was on the track for his morning workout and I, being unoccupied at the moment, leaned over a wooden fence to watch. He had been jogged slowly around the track and now his driver was about to do what we called “setting him down.” His flanks flattened and he seemed to spring into his stride, and what a stride it was! He fairly flew over the ground and the boy by the fence, half asleep but a moment before, was now all attention. He leaned far over the fence to watch and wait. Now the gray was making the upper turn and soon he would be headed directly down the home stretch. By leaning far forward the boy could see just the play of the muscles over the powerful breast. Oh, the flying legs, the distended nostrils, the sobbing whistle of the wind in and out of the great lungs!
But all vicarious after all, all something outside myself. I rubbed the legs of the horses and later walked them slowly for miles, cooling them out after a race or after a workout. Plenty of time to think. Could I, in time, become a Geers, a Snapper Garrison, a Bradley, a Walter Cox, a Murphy? Something whispered to me that I could not. There was required of a successful horseman something I did not have. Either the trotting or the running tracks required a calm, a seemingly indifferent exterior I could not achieve. A track negro with whom I worked had spoken discouraging words. “You’re too excitable, too flighty,” he said. “A horse, that wanted to, would know how to bluff you. You ain’t made to get all they is outen a horse.”
Restlessness had taken hold of me and I had left the tracks to go visit certain cities.
The work, I found, did not tire me and after the longest and hardest day I went to my room, bathed, took off my sweaty clothes and was a new man, quite refreshed and ready for adventure.
At the warehouse a kind of understanding between myself and the Swedish teamsters, had already been achieved. When they returned with the empty trucks along the short street between our warehouse and the wharf they stopped at a saloon to have filled the tin pails for beer they carried on the trucks, and the athlete and myself had also provided ourselves with pails which they had filled for us. Aha! the athlete might boast of his prowess on the baseball field or at playing hockey in the winter, but I could outdrink him and in the eyes of the teamsters that made me the better man. How foolish the athlete! Had he declined to have anything to do with drink all might have been well with him, but as the ability to “carry your liquor” was an accepted standard among us he foolishly accepted it. On hot days and in the late afternoon the pails were sent frequently to the saloon and the athlete became worried. “Ah, let’s cut it out,” he said to me coaxingly and the teamsters laughed. “Why, Eddie, we haven’t had any at all yet,” they said; but he insisted, was compelled to insist. Already he staggered a little as he rolled the kegs out of the warehouse and now it was my turn to loiter with the teamsters while he worked. No more story-telling now. “I have a kind of headache to-day,” he said, while the teamsters and I drank six, eight, sometimes ten or twelve of the generous portions of strong beer, flauntingly. As the beer was paidfor from a fund collected from all, we were drinking, in part at least, at the athlete’s expense. I drank and drank, enjoying the discomfiture of my fellow-worker, and something happened inside my head. My legs remained steady and I could roll the kegs more rapidly and accurately than ever—they became like corks and I fairly whirled them along the warehouse floor and down the incline and to the trucks—but at the same time all reality became strangely colored and overlaid with unreality inside myself. Beyond the roadway, in which the trucks stood, there was a vacant lot and this now became the centre of my attention. The vacant lot was in reality filled with rubbish, rusty tin cans, piles of dirt, broken wagon wheels and wornout household utensils, and among all this foul stuff dirty-faced children played and screamed; but now all this unsightliness was wiped off the surface of my vision. I talked to the teamsters and together we laughed at Eddie who kept scolding and saying apologetically that the beer we had been drinking was rotten stuff and gave him a headache, while all the time the most marvelous things took place in the vacant lot before my eyes.
First of all an army of soldiers appeared and marched back and forth directed by a man on a magnificent horse. He was many years older but at the same time looked strangely like myself and wore a long, flowing purple mantle. And also he had a golden helmet on his head while his soldiers, who obeyed his slightest wish, were also richly dressed. First there came a file of men dressed in light green and with bright yellow plumes flying from their helmets, and these were followed byothers dressed in blue, in flaming red and in uniforms combining all these colors.
The men marched for what seemed a long time in the vacant lot while I dreamed of becoming a great general, a world conqueror perhaps, but continued meanwhile sending the kegs whirling down the incline. Eddie and I had a race to see who could roll kegs most accurately and rapidly—an hour before he could have beaten me easily, but now I could roll six to his five and land them just so, standing upright on the platform below—while at the same time there was this other life, outside myself, going on before my eyes.
I raised my eyes and looked at the vacant lot and the soldiers went through quick and accurate manœuvres. Then they marched away along a near-by street and the place became a great canvas over which colors played. The surface was brown, a soft velvety glowing brown, now other colors appeared, reds, golden yellows, deep purples. The colors stole swiftly out across the open place and designs were formed. I will be a great painter, I decided; but now the vacant lot had become a carpet on which walked beautiful men and women. They smiled at me, beckoned to me, and then they paid me no more attention and became absorbed in each other. “Very well; if you prefer to roll kegs, go your own way,” they seemed to be saying, and when they laughed there was something derisive in their laughter.
Was I a little insane? Had I been born a little insane? I rolled the kegs of nails, drank innumerable pails of beer, the sweat rolled from my body and soaked my clothes and presently quitting time cameand I returned along a street with hundreds of other workers—all smelling equally vile—to a rooming house where I lived with many other laborers, Hungarians, Swedes, a few Irish, several Italians and, oddly enough, one English Jew.
The house was run by a worried-looking woman of forty who had one daughter, a young woman of nineteen, who had taken a kind of fancy to me. Her father, a laborer like myself, had deserted her mother when the child was but four or five years old and had never been seen again. As for the daughter, she had a strong body, clear blue eyes, thick lips and a large nose, and like myself she had Italian blood in her veins, her father having been an Italian.
Toward her mother she was loyal, staying in the house and doing the work of a chambermaid for very little pay when she might have made a great deal more money at something else; but her loyalty was tempered by a sturdy kind of independence that nothing could shake. During the spring, before I came to live at the house, she had become engaged to marry a young sailor, an engineer’s assistant on a lake boat, but, although later I spoke to her of the danger, she did not let the fact of her engagement to another interfere with her relationship with me.
Our own relationship is a little hard to explain. When I came from the warehouse and climbed the stairs to my room I found her there at work, making my bed, which had been allowed to air all day, or changing the sheets. The sheets were changed almost daily and her mother constantly scolded about the matter. “If he wants clean sheets every day let him pay for them,” the mother said, but the daughter paid no attention,and indeed I was no doubt responsible for more than one quarrel between mother and daughter. Among laboring people a girl engaged is taboo and the other men in the house thought I was doing an unfair thing to her absent lover. Whether or not he knew what was going on I never found out.
What was going on? I came into the house, climbed the stairs and found her at work in my room. At the foot of the stairs I had met her mother, who had scowled at me, and now the other workers, trooping in, attempted to tease. She kept on working and did not look at me and I went to stand by a window that looked down into the street. “Which one is she going to marry?—that’s what I want to know,” one of the workers on the floor below called to another. She looked up at me and something I saw in her eyes made me bold. “Don’t mind them,” I said. “What makes you think I do?” she replied. I was glad none of the men who worked at our warehouse roomed at the house. “They would be shouting, laughing and going on about it all day,” I thought.
The young woman—her name was Nora—talked to me in whispers as she did the work in the room, or she listened and I talked. The minutes passed and we stayed on together, looking at each other, whispering, laughing at each other. In the house all, including the mother, were convinced I was working to bring about Nora’s ruin and the mother wanted to order me out of the house but did not dare. Once as I stood in the hallway outside my door late at night I had overheard the two women talking in the kitchen of the house. “If you mention the matter again I shallwalk out of the house and never come back.”
Occasionally in the evening Nora and I walked along the street, past the warehouse where I was employed, and out upon the docks, where we sat together looking into the darkness and once—but I will not tell you what happened upon that occasion.
First of all I will tell you of how the relationship of Nora and myself began. It may be that the bond between us was brought into existence by the beer I drank at the warehouse in the late afternoons. One evening, when I had first come to the house, I came home, after drinking heavily, and it was then Nora and I had our first intimate conversation.
I had come into the house and climbed the three flights of stairs to my room, thinking of the vacant lot covered with the soft glowing carpet and of the beautiful men and women walking thereon, and when I got to my room it seemed unspeakably shabby. No doubt I was drunk. In any event there was Nora at work and it was my opportunity. For what? I did not quite know, but there was something I knew I wanted from Nora and the beer drinking had made me bold. I had a sudden conviction that my boldness would overawe her.
And there was something else too. Although I was but a young man I had already worked in factories in several cities and had lived in too many shabby rooms in shabby houses in factory streets. The outer surface of my life was too violently uncouth, too persistently uncouth. Well enough for Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and others to sing of the strength and fineness of laboring men, making heroes of them, but already the democratic dream had faded and laborers were not myheroes. I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness. The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all struck me as men who had no sense of life at all. They were so likely to be dry intellectual sterile men. Already I had begun asking myself the questions I have been asking myself ever since. “Does no man love another man? Why does not some man arise who wants the man working next to him to work in the midst of order? Can a man and a woman love each other when they live in an ugly house in an ugly street? Why do working men and women so often seem perversely unclean and disorderly in their houses? Why do not factory owners realize that, although they build large, well-lighted factories, they will accomplish nothing until they realize the need of order and cleanliness in thinking and feeling also?” I had come into the midst of men with a clean strong body, my mother had been one who would have fought to the death for order and cleanliness about her and her sons. Was it not apparent that something had already happened to the democracy on which Whitman had counted so much? (I had not heard of Whitman then. My thoughts were my own. Perhaps I had better be more simple in speaking of them.)
I had come out of a messy workplace along a messy street to a messy room and did not like it and within me was the beer that made me bold.
And there were the visions I had seen in the vacant lot. It may be that I thought then that all my fellows lived as I did, having quiteconscious and separate inner and outer lives going on in the same body that they were trying to bring into accord. As for myself I saw visions, had from boyhood been seeing visions. Moments of extreme exaltation were followed by times of terrible depression. Were all people really like that? The visions were sometimes stronger than the reality of life about me. Might it not be that they were the reality, that they existed rather than myself—that is to say, rather than my physical self and the physical fact of the men and women among whom I then worked and lived, rather than the physical fact of the ugly rooms in ugly houses in ugly streets?
Was there a consciousness of something wrong, a consciousness we all had and were ashamed of?
There was the vacant lot in which an hour before I had seen the marching soldiers and the beautifully gowned men and women walking about. Why might that not exist as really as the half-drunken teamsters, myself, the irritated athlete and the piles of unsightly rubbish?
Perhaps it did exist in all of us. Perhaps the others saw what I saw. At that time I had a great deal of faith in a belief of my own that there existed a kind of secret and well-nigh universal conspiracy to insist on ugliness. “It’s just a kind of boyish trick we’re up to, myself and the others,” I sometimes told myself, and there were times when I became almost convinced that if I just went suddenly up behind any man or any woman and said “boo” he or she would come out of it and I would come out of it, and we would march off arm in arm laughing at ourselves and everyone else and having really quite a wonderful time.
I had decided to try to say “boo” to Nora, I fancy. There I was in the room with her (I had been in the house about three days and had only seen her and heard her name spoken once before, when she was sweeping out the hallway by my door), and now she was throwing the covers back over the soiled sheets on my bed and there was dust on the window panes and streaks along the wall paper, while the floor of the room had been given but two or three careless whisks with a broom. Nora was making the bed and back of her head, as she leaned over to do the job, there was a picture on the wall, a picture of five or six water lilies lying on a table. There was a streak of dust down across the white face of the lilies and at that moment a cloud of dust, stirred up by the heavy trucks now going homeward along the street, floated just outside the window.
“Well, Miss Nora,” I suddenly said after I had been standing in the room for a moment, silently and boldly staring at her. I began advancing toward her and no doubt my eyes were shining with enthusiasm. I dare say I was pretty drunk but I am sure I walked steadily. “Well,” I cried in a loud voice, “what are you up to there?”
She turned to stare at me and I went on, still speaking rapidly, with a kind of hurried nervous stuttering manner brought on by the liquor and a fear that if I stopped speaking I should not be able to start again. “I refer to the bed,” I said, going up close to her and pointing at it. “You see, don’t you, that the sheets you are putting on the bed are soiled?” I pounded on my own chest, much in the manner of the primitive hero in Mr. Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape”; and no doubt had Iat that time seen the play I might at that moment have begun saying in hoarse, throaty tones: “I belong. I belong.”
I did not say anything of the sort because I am not primitive and had not then seen the play, nor did I whine or complain because of the soiled sheets on the bed. I talked, I am afraid, rather like a Napoleon or a Tamerlane to poor Nora who was already appalled by my sudden descent upon her.
Pounding on my chest and descending upon her I made a speech something in the following manner: “My dear Nora, you are a woman and no doubt a virgin, but you may not always be one. Have hopes. Some day a man will come along who will admire your person and will ask your hand in marriage.” I looked at her somewhat critically. “You will not refuse him,” I declared, with the air of a soothsayer delivering himself of a prophecy. “You will accept the marriage state, Nora, partly because you are bored, partly because you will look upon the opportunity as a means of escape from your present way of life, and partly because you will find within yourself an instinct telling you that any kind of marriage will bring you something you want.”
“But we will not discuss you. We will discuss myself,” I declared. I continued pounding myself on the chest and so great was my momentary enthusiasm that later my breast was somewhat sore. “Nora, woman,” I said, “look at me! You cannot see my body and I dare say if I did not have on these soiled clothes your maidenly modesty would compel you to run out of this room. But do not run. I do not intend to take off my clothes.”
“Very well, we will not speak any more of my body,” I said in a loud voice, wishing to reassure her since I could see she was becoming a little alarmed. No doubt she thought me insane. She had grown slightly pale and had stepped away from me so that her back was against the wall and the soiled water lilies were just above her head. “I am not speaking of my own body in relation to your body, do not get that entirely feminine notion into your head,” I explained. “I am speaking of my body in relation to yonder soiled sheets.”
And now I pointed toward the bed and stopped pounding my own chest which was becoming sore. Stepping quite close to her, so close in fact that my face was within a few inches of her own, I put one hand against the wall and tried to quiet my own loud, blustering tones, and to assume a tone of great ease, or rather, of nonchalance. I took a cigarette from my pocket and succeeded in lighting it without burning my fingers, a feat requiring a good deal of concentration under the circumstances. The truth is, that I had bethought myself that in a moment more Nora would either hit me with the broom, that stood close at her hand, or would run out of the room thinking me insane.
As I had a notion I wanted to put over to her while I could and while my beer-born courage lasted I now tried to be more at my ease. A little smile began to play about the corners of my mouth and I thought of myself at the moment as a diplomat—not an American or an English diplomat, let me say, but an Italian diplomat of, we will suppose, the sixteenth century.
In as light and bantering a tone as I could assume under thecircumstances—my task was the more difficult because a workman, hearing my speech from a neighboring room, had come along the hallway and was now standing at the door with a look of astonishment on his face—assuming, I say, a light bantering tone, I now rapidly explained to Nora the notion that had been in my head when I interrupted her bed-making. She had been about to reach for the broom and with it to drive me from the room, but now the words streaming from my lips caught and held her attention. With a fluency in words that never comes to me when I am writing and that only comes to my lips when I am slightly under the influence of strong drink I explained myself. To the astonished young woman I compared the bed she had been making to a suit of clothes I might be about to put on my body after I had bathed the aforesaid body. Talking rapidly and enunciating my words very distinctly so she should lose nothing of my discourse (and I might here explain to you, my readers, that in ordinary conversation I am rather given to the slovenly dragging of words so common to the people of the Middle West. We, you must know, do not say “feah,” as a New Englander might, nor “fear,” as an Italian-American might, that is to say, pronouncing distinctly the “r,” but “feehr”), going on very clearly and distinctly I told Nora she was not to judge me by the smell that came from my clothes, that under my clothes lived a body I was about to wash clean as soon as she had finished her work in the room and had gone away. Leaving both her and the workman outside the door standing and staring at me I walked to the window and threw it up. “The cloud of dust you see floating up from the street below,” I explained,“does not represent all the elements of the atmosphere even in an American industrial city.” I then tried, as best I could, to explain to my limited audience that air, normally, might be a clean thing to be cleanly breathed into the lungs and that a man like myself, although he might wear dirty, soiled clothes in order to earn money to keep his body alive might also at the same time have a certain feeling of pride and joy in his body and want clean sheets to put it between when he laid it down to sleep at night.
To Nora, standing there and staring at me, half in wonder, half in anger, I tried to explain a little my habit of having visions and sketched for her, as rapidly and briefly as I could, the marvelous sights I had in fancy seen in the vacant lot near the warehouse in the late afternoon, and also I preached her a kind of sermon, not, I assure you, with the object of changing her own character but rather to carry out the plan that had formed in my rather befuddled brain, a plan for bullying her—that is to say of bending her to my own purpose if possible.
Being by nature a rather shrewd man, however, I did not put the case to her directly but pursuing the method common to preachers who always try to conceal their own wants under the mask of the common good, so that a man who is apparently always trying to get others into Heaven is really only afraid he will not manage to get there himself, pursuing valiantly this method, I pointed to the soiled water lilies above Nora’s head. An inspiration seized me. At that time, you must remember, I did know that Nora was engaged to be married to an engineer’s assistant on alake steamer. I chanced at that moment to see the picture of the water lilies and thought of the little quiet back waters of Sandusky Bay where as a boy I had sometimes gone fishing with a certain charming old country doctor who for a time had employed me, ostensibly as a stable boy but really as a companion on long country drives. The old doctor had been a talkative soul and loved to speculate on life and its purposes and we often went fishing on summer afternoons and evenings, not so much for the purpose of catching fish as to give the doctor the opportunity to sit in a boat on the bank of some stream and pour wisdom into my willing young ears.
And so there I was, in the presence of Nora and that wondering workman, standing with one arm raised and pointing at the cheap chromo on the wall and being as much the actor as I could. Even though my brain was somewhat befuddled I was watching Nora, waiting and hoping that something I might say would really arrest her attention, and now I thought, as I have said, of quiet sweet back waters of bays and rivers, of suns going down in clean evening skies, of my own white bare feet dangling in warm pellucid waters.
To Nora I said the following words, quite without definite thought, as they came flowing from my lips: “I do not know you, young woman, and have never until this moment thought of you and your life but I’ll tell you this: the time will come when you will marry a man who now sails on the seas. Even at this moment he is standing on the deck of a boat and thinking of you, and the air about him is not like this air you and I for our sins are compelled to breathe.”
“Ah ha!” I cried, seeing by a look in Nora’s eyes that my chance shot had hit home and shrewdly following up the advantage that gave me. “Ah ha!” I cried; “let us think and speak of the life of a sailor. He is in the presence of the clean sea. God has made clean the scene upon which his eyes rest. At night he lies down in a clean bunk. Nothing about him is as it is about us. There is no foul air, no dirty streaks on wall paper, no unclean sheets, no unclean beds.”
“Your young sailor lies in bed at night and his body is clean, as I dare say also is his mind. He thinks of his sweetheart on shore and of necessity, do you see, all about him is so clean, he must think of her as one who in her soul is clean.”
And now to my readers I must stop a moment to explain that I speak at length in this way of my conversation with Nora, my triumph with her, as I may I think legitimately call it, because it was a purely literary feat and I am writing, as you know, of the life of a literary man. I had never, when all this occurred, been at sea nor had I ever been aboard a ship, but I had, to be sure, read books and stories regarding ships and the conduct of sailors aboard ships, and in my boyhood I had known a man who was once mate on a river boat on the Mississippi River. He to be sure had spoken more often of the gaudiness rather than the cleanliness of the boats on which he had worked but, as I have said, I was being as literary as I could.
And realizing now that I had by good fortune stumbled upon the right note I went on elaborating the romantic side of the life of the sailor aboard ship, touching upon the hopes and dreams of such a man andpointing out to Nora that it was a great mistake on her part not to have one room in the great house of so many rooms, upon the care of which she could pour some of the natural housewifely qualities with which her nature was, I was certain, so richly endowed.
I saw, you understand, that I had her but was careful not to press my advantage too far. And then, too, I had begun to like her, as all literary men like inordinately those who take seriously their outpourings.
And so I now quickly drove a bargain with Nora. Like herself, I explained, I was lonely and wanting companionship. Strange thoughts and fancies came to me that I would like to tell to another. “We will have a friendship,” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “In the evenings we will walk about together. I will tell you of the strange notions that come into my head and of the marvelous adventures that sometimes occur to me in the life of my fancy. I will do that and you—well, you see, you will take extra good care of my room. You will lavish upon it some of the affection natural to your nature, thinking as you do so, not of me but of your sailor man at sea, and of the time to come when you may make a clean warm nest for him ashore.”
“Poor man,” I said, “you must remember that he is buffeted often by storms, often his life is in danger and often too he is in strange ports where but for his constancy to the thoughts of you, he might get into almost any kind of a muddle with some other woman.”
I had succeeded, you see, by a purely literary trick, in getting myself into Nora’s consciousness as in some way connected with her absent lover.
“But I must not press the matter too far,” I thought, and, steppingback, stood smiling at her as genially as I could.
And then another thought came. “There will be a kind of wrath in her soul at this moment and I must direct it quickly toward someone other than myself.” The workman who, attracted by my loud words at the beginning of my discourse, had come along the hallway and who now stood at the door of my room looking in, did not speak English very well and I was sure had not understood much of my long speech.
Going to the open window I now said, over my shoulder: “I am silly saying all these things to you, Nora, but I have been lonesome and to tell the truth I am a little drunk. Forgive me. You know yourself that the other men in this house are stupid fellows and do not care at all in what shape their rooms are kept. They work like dogs and sleep like dogs and do not have thoughts and dreams as you do and as I and your sailor man do.”
“There is that man listening to our little conversation, there now, by the door,” I said straightening up and pointing; but my speech got no further. As I had conjectured within myself, Nora had for some minutes been anxious to hit someone with the broom that stood close at hand and she now, suddenly and quite unreasonably, decided to hit the workman. Grabbing the broom in her hand she flew at him screaming with wrath. “Can’t we have a little talk, my friend and I, without your sticking in your nose?” she cried, and the workman fled down the hallway with Nora at his heels, striking vigorously at him with the broom.