CHAPTER IV.
At an early hour on the following morning she hurried Carl to the business section of the city so that the neighboring women, who slept late after getting breakfast for their men, would not see him from their windows, and at a department store she purchased a cheap suit of clothes for him. He dressed behind a small screen in the store, feeling like a small, eccentric lamb who was being glossed for the market. She left him at an elevated railroad station, extracting a dollar from her pocketbook with an air of intensely solemn and reflective importance.
“Don’t waste it now; I know your tricks,” she said. “Be sure and get the afternoon paper and look through the want ads. Take anything at the start—don’t be high-toned.”
Carl gave her the necessary monosyllables of assent and walked down the street, his mind busy with many insinuations.
“Perhaps I’d better stop stealing for a while,” he said to himself. “If I keep it up without an intermission it’s going to land me in jail again and I’m not anxious for that circumscribed travesty to happen. That term of three months in Texas gave me a great deal of time in which to write, but the little animals in that place intruded with a bite that was both wistful and inadequate. It’s a little difficult to write about beauty and scratch your skin simultaneously—the proud stare of the former does not like to sit in the prison of a small irritation. It is an intricately adjusted equilibrium and the lunge of a finger nail can desecrate this subtly balanced aloofness. There is little difference between the bars of mind and actual iron rods, but when you are still partly inarticulate, physical motion can become a necessary recompense. No, for the time being I had better strain my hands in prayer against the tiny implements with which men felicitate their stupidity. Back and forth—but what else can I do?”
It was his habit to think only in metaphors and similes, and in this way he evaded the realities that would otherwise have crushed him. He walked down the street, practicing an emotion of stolid submission, and this surface humility played pranks with his blonde-topped head and made his thin lips loosely unrelated to the rest of his face. As he strode through the business district of the city, with its sun-steeped frenzies of men and vehicles, the scene pressed upon him and yet was remote at the same time. It was as though he were studying a feverishly capering unreality and vainly striving to persuade himself that he formed a significant part of it.
The unrelenting roar of automobiles, wagons and cars became the laughable and inarticulate attempt of a dream to convince him that it held a power over his mind and body. Men and women darted past him with a rapidity that made them appear to be the mere figments of a magic trick. Here he caught the thick tension of lips, and there the abstracted flash of eyes, but they were gone before he could believe that they had interfered with his vision. He paused beside a dark green news-stand squeezed under the iron slant of an elevated-railroad stairway and strove to pin the scene to his mind and fix his relation to the people who were jesting with his eyes. Young and old, dressed in complications of timidly colored cloth, each seemed to be running an exquisitely senseless race in the effort to gain a nonsensical foot on the other person. The masked rush of their bodies deprived them of a divided sexual appearance and lure—men and women, touching elbows without emotion, were swept into one lustreless sex which darted in pursuit of a treacherously invisible reward. The entire structure around them—buildings, signs, and iron slabs—stood like a house of cards carefully supported by an essence that rose from the rushing people, and Carl felt that if these men and women were to become silent and motionless, in unison, the house of cards would instantly lose its meaning and tumble down.
“What are they gliding and stumbling toward?” he asked himself—the old, poignantly futile first question of youth. “Each man, with an ingenious treason, is trying to forget his inability at self-expression and soiling the void with an increasing burden that will prevent him from complaining too much. At some time in their lives all of these people felt, dimly or strongly, for a moment or for years, the ludicrous ache of a desire to stand out clearly against their scene, but the loaded momentum of past lives—the choked influence of past futilities—pushed them along with a force which they could not withstand. It is really a stream of adroitly dead men and women that is fleeing down this street—surreptitiously dead people living in the bodies of a present reality and perpetuating the defeated essence of their past lives.”
As he stood and watched the crowd he found it necessary to ask himself the words: “What gave its slyly amused signal for this plaintive race through the centuries?”
He also found it necessary to answer: “A languid idiot, much in need of consolation, refuses to abandon his dream.”
Here and there, apart from the main lunge of the crowd, were men and women, standing still, as though motion had betrayed them, or loitering in a carelessly placid fashion. Vacancy and indecision tampered with most of their faces.
“How many minor poets have stood upon these street corners, making arrangements for a gradual and unnoticed death?” he asked himself, with the sentimental self-importance of youth.
But the stage hands clamored that he was neglecting the play—a habit falsely known as laziness—and that, with appropriate cunning, they had erected this city scene so that he and hordes of others should find it difficult to forget their tamely borrowed lines. With an uncomplaining wrench he returned to his surface role of a youth sent out in weakly gruesome clothes to look for some task that would begin to answer the flatly strident requests of an average life. The humble stupor fell back upon his shoulders and he walked to a bench in a public square, seated himself, and read the “want-ad” section of a newspaper. He spied, with a prostrate frown, the barren jest of: “Wanted—Young man for clerical work; must be neat, industrious, wide-awake, sober, well educated, reliable, good at details, ambitious, honest, painstaking; salary twelve dollars a week.” He muttered certain useless words to himself. “The illusion of a reluctant penny for fresh vigor. If the applicant is morbidly patient and reasonably deft at following orders he may after many years attain the virtue of writing the same trivially unfair appeal to other men. And even that exquisite victory is uncertain.”
He saw that as usual his only choice rested between an office-boy’s task, dignified by the title of junior clerk to make it more enticing, and unskilled manual labor.
“Now, how will you become tired—mentally or physically?” he asked himself with great formality.
Abruptly, and in that conscious and secret plot which men insist upon calling subconscious, he peered at the picture of a black man and a white man throwing a wilted rose back and forth to each other and catching it without a trace of emotion. The little, ridiculous rose lost a petal after each catch, but in spite of its smallness the number of petals seemed to be inexhaustible. At a distance the black and white man exactly resembled each other, but on approaching closer it could be seen that the black man held the face of an incredibly stolid ruffian, while the white man’s face was engraved with the patience of a cowed child. Not being acquainted with psychoanalysis—that blind exaggeration of sexual routines—Carl did not believe, after he returned to the touch of the park bench, that this picture had slyly veiled the direction of his physical desires. He knew that a fantastic whim had slipped from his mind and induced him to probe his choice between two equally drab kinds of labor, striving to make this choice endurable for a moment.
He selected three advertisements, all of them asking for manual laborers, walked from the park, and boarded a street car. The first place that he visited was a box factory—a slate-colored crate of a building, bearing that flatly unexpectant tone that expresses the year-long mating of smoke and dirt. As he ascended the gloomy stairway an endless drone and clatter battled with his ears. It seemed a senseless blasphemy directed at nothing in particular—the complaint of a dull-witted, harnessed giant who was being driven on without knowing why. Carl entered a huge room disheveled with sawdust and shavings and cluttered with black belts and wheels. Men with swarthy, motionless faces and feverish arms leaned over the wheels and saws. As he stood near the doorway, feeling dwarfed and uncertain, a man came toward him. Sturdy and short, the man looked like a magnified and absent-minded gnome, too busy to realize that civilization had played an obscene trick on him by stealing his fairy disguise and substituting the colorless inanities of overalls and a black shirt. The large and heavily twisted features on his face were partially hidden by a brown stubble of beard, and like all men who work forever in factories, he had an ageless air in which youth, middle age and old age were pounded into one dull evasion.
“What d’ya want?” he asked, the words jumbled to a bark.
“I’m looking for work. Saw your ad in the paper.”
He examined the region between Carl’s toes and cap, measuring the unimportance of flesh.
“We want good strong men to load boxes and carry lumber,” he said. “You don’t look like a man for the job, bo. You’re dressed like a travelin’ salesman an’ we want men who ain’t afraid to get dirt on their clothes. Get me?”
“Don’t mind this suit of mine,” said Carl. “I have a much dirtier one at home and I’ll be only too glad to wear it here. You see, I always feel more peaceful in dirty clothes, but someone played a joke on me and made me wear this suit.”
“Well, you ought to come ready for work, if you’re lookin’ for it”—the man peered again at Carl.
“Nope. Nope. You ain’t got the build for heavy work. We’re after big, husky men. Sorry, Jack, but there’s nothin’ doin’.”
“Say, be reasonable,” said Carl. “I’ve done hard work off and on for the last four years and I’m much stronger than I look. Come on, give me a chance.”
The man shook his head as his eyes received Carl’s slender arms and narrow shoulders, and he did not know that this weak aspect concealed an inhuman amount of endurance. After another useless expostulation Carl walked out, grinning forlornly as he strode down the street. Cheated out of the phantom opiate of a beautiful box-piling job because of a deceptive physical appearance and a twenty-dollar suit, reduced to nineteen through the expert pleading of his mother! He looked down with delicate aversion at the grey, neatly-pressed cloth which concealed his material humility with lines of dreamless confidence, and felt a sudden impulse to tear it off and go nakedly cavorting down the street, taking the cries of onlookers as a suitable reward, but that sleek caution born from rough faces and rougher hands chided him back to sanity. After calling at another factory and receiving the same refusal, he decided to wait until the morrow, when he could don his old, dirty clothes and avert suspicion.
The city turmoil was slackening, like a huge, human top beginning to spin weakly. The warm hardness of a summer evening between city streets tried a little laughter in an unpracticed voice, and revolving streams of men and women hid the pavements—a satiated army returning from an unsettled conflict. The scene was a mixed metaphor trying to straighten itself out. Feeling forlornly alert and useless in the midst of all this important exhaustion, Carl made his way home.
A group of neighbors sat with a clean and well-brushed peace around the doorstep. In the heat of the summer evening they seemed mere figures of slightly animated flesh, with their thoughts and emotions reduced to placidly contented wraiths. Three middle-aged Jewish women sat in rocking chairs and knitted with an effortless incision, unaware of the spiritual prominence that is usually discovered in their race. Their bulky bodies censured the lightness of evening air and their deeply-marked brown faces were those of self-assured, thoughtless queens issuing orders to a tiny domain, with palmetto fans for scepters and rhinestone combs for crowns. Incessantly they chatted about the personal details of their daily lives, splitting these details into even smaller atoms and fondling the minute particles with a lazy relish. Children romped at their feet or brought some tiny request to their laps—children that seemed to be dreams of cherubic hilarity, released from the busy sleep of the middle-aged women and reproving it. Behind them, sitting on the stone steps, a middle-aged Jewish man glued his depressed weariness to a newspaper. The orderly sleekness of his clothes had met with the familiarity of a summer day and the rim of his once stiff collar, drenched with perspiration, made a pathetic curve around his fat, brown neck. His eyes were like flat discs of metal placed on each side of an enormous, confident nose. Noses express the spirit of people far better than lips and eyes, for they cannot be moved and changed to suit the fears and desires of a person, but stand with an outline of uncompromising revealment. Their still silence is often the only sincerity upon a human face, and the nose of this man showed a strident green that was contradicted a bit by the drooping little indentations just above the nostrils, indicating that the man had his moments of self-doubt, but refused to yield to them.
It seemed incredible to Carl that these people were housing hearts and minds, for he could see them only as so many sterile lumps of flesh that were using every desperate trick to minimize the crawling shadow of their unimportant graves. Two of the women knew him and greeted him with an insincere and inquisitive cordiality.
“Wh-y-y, Mister Felman, when did you get back?” said Mrs. Rosenthal, the fattest of the group.
“I returned yesterday,” answered Carl, injecting a great solemnity into his voice.
“Yesterday? Well, well. And did you have a nice time in the army? I’ve been told that it’s really marvelous for a man—makes him so strong and healthy. And then all the traveling about, you know, must be so interesting.”
“Oh, ye-e-es, it’s a wonderful place,” said Carl, gravely mimicking her drawling voice. “Bands, and uniforms, and parades. It’s really quite fascinating.”
“Well, I’m so glad you liked it,” said Mrs. Benjamin, another woman in the group, who felt that it was time to advance a well-placed sentence. “I want you to meet my husband. Mo, this is Mister Felman, who’s just come back from the army.”
“Glad t’ meet yuh,” said the man on the doorstep, blurring the words in a swiftly mechanical fashion, but looking very closely at Carl.
Carl returned the salutation in the same fashion, taking a shade of amusement from his parrot-like impulse. These hollow creatures—what else could one do save to imitate their mannerisms and ideas, for self-protection, and rob and defraud them at every opportunity, thus giving them a mild apology for existence? After another round of wary commonplaces he managed to break away. His mother met him at the door and he said “Hello” and was about to pass her when her sharp voice halted him.
“You haven’t got an ounce of affection in you! A nice way to greet your mother! Hello, and he walks right by like I was some boy he met on the street.”
For a moment Carl stood without answering. This woman who had given birth to him—an incomprehensible chuckle of an incident—was almost non-existent to his emotions—a mere shadow that held an incongruously raucous voice and guarded one of the gates of his surface prison. As he stood in the hallway, doubting the reality of her shrill voice, he asked himself: “Am I an inhuman monster, unfit to touch this woman’s dress, or am I a poet standing with candid erectness in an alien situation?”
Suddenly the question became unimportant to him and he felt that he had merely offered his inevitable self the choice between an imaginary halo and an equally fantastic strait-jacket. If his mother actually longed for an affection which he did not hold, it would be inexpensive to toss her the counterfeit coins of gestures and words. When she finished her staccato diatribe, he bowed deeply to her, with the palm of one hand lightly interrogating the buttons of his coat, raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it at great length.
“Na-a, go away with your silliness,” she said. “I know you don’t mean it.”
Her narrow face loosened for a moment and a shimmer of compensation found her eyes. This queer son of hers might be faintly realizing, after all, the unselfish intensity of her efforts to give him a position of honor and respectability in the world. Perhaps he was only wild and young, and would finally press his shoulders against the admired harness of material success. It could not be possible that one who had struggled from her flesh would remain a remote idiot and ignore the warm shrewdness within her that life had somehow swindled.
The elder Felman was reading his paper in the dining-room. He greeted Carl with a somnolent imitation of interest, but the heat, aided by a day spent in pungent saloons, had cheated him of most of his mental consciousness. He had become so thoroughly accustomed to drink that an artificial buoyancy scarcely ever invaded the dull ending of his days.
“We-e-ell, where did you go to-day?” he asked, feeling some slight craving for sound and trying to rouse his material anticipations.
He abandoned his seductive newspaper, with its melodrama that was pleasant because it murdered at a distance, and questioned Carl with his sleepy eyes.
“Went to a couple of factories, but the foremen were disgusted with the cut of my clothes,” said Carl. “They felt that the wearing of a new and unwrinkled suit revealed an intelligence which should not be possessed by an applicant for manual labor. I tried to convince them that the semblance was false in my case, but they refused to be persuaded.”
“Always trying to joke. That won’t get you anything. The main thing is—did you get work, or didn’t you?”
“No, I did not. I applied for manual labor, but I forgot to put on overalls.”
Mrs. Felman stood in the doorway and lifted a skillet in simple wrath.
“Factories he goes to!” she cried, in a voice that was not unlike the previous rattling of the skillet. “I bought him a new suit and shoes this morning so he could look for common, dirty work! It’s terrible. Here we sent him to high-school for four years and his only ambition is to work as a common laborer.”
The father smiled dubiously at her explosion.
“Now, Carrie, don’t let all the neighbors know your business,” he said. “Your holler is enough to drive anyone crazy. There’s no harm in honest work, Carrie, and besides he’ll soon get tired of sweating in factories and look for something decent. Don’t worry.”
“I guess anything will be better than that silly scribbling that’s ruined his life so far,” said Mrs. Felman, her anger dwindling to a guttural sulkiness. Carl, who had been sitting with a suffering grin on his face, gave them soothing words and once more held them at arm’s length.