CHAPTER V.
In the dirty clothes that he had worn upon his arrival, qualified by a clean shirt, he went forth on the next morning and found work as a lineman’s helper for a telephone company. He was required to climb up the wooden poles; hand tools to the lineman; unwind huge spools of wire; make simple repairs under the lineman’s guidance. As he labored from pole to pole, down a suburban street, taking the impersonal whip of the sun and winning the pricks of insects on his sweat-dappled face, he felt dully grateful toward the physical orders that were crudely obliterating the confused demands of his heart and mind. As he toiled on, this dull feeling gradually rose to a self-lacerating joy. He revelled in the cheap vexations brought by his tasks—the unpleasant scraping of shins against iron rungs and the sting of dust in his eyes—and his self-hatred stood apart, delightedly watching the slavish antics of the physical mannikin.
Then, when this emotion paused to catch its breath it was replaced by a calmer one, and his insignificance receded a bit, beneath the substantial lure of arms and legs that were moving toward a fixed purpose. “I am doing something definite now and that is at least a shade better than the indefinite uselessness of my thoughts,” he mumbled to himself as he lurched from pole to pole. The slowly mounting ache of his muscles became a bitter hint of approaching peace and he looked forward to the moment when he would quit his labors and enjoy the returning independence of his body, as though it were a god’s condescension. He worked quickly and breathlessly, as one who hurries to a distant lover’s arms. Filled with a doggedly naive hatred for his own deficiencies, he welcomed this chance to insult them with disagreeable and infinitely humble postures, and he gladly punished himself underneath the violence of the sun. It was, indeed, a spiritual sadism deigning to make use of the flesh.
“Hey, Jack, take it a little easier,” the lineman called down to him once. “Don’t kill yourself at this job. It’s too damned hot to work hard.”
Carl gave him a beaten grin and moved his arms even faster while the lineman bewilderedly meditated upon this imbecility. The lineman was a burly young Swede with a broadly upturned nose and thickly wide lips. His face suggested poorly carved wood. The blankness of his mind held few skirmishes with thought on this rasping afternoon and his mental images were confined to tools, stray glasses of beer, yielding pillows, and feminine contours—the flitting promises that held him to his day of toil. He possessed no human significance to Carl—he was a drably accidental automaton who shouted down the blessed orders that gave Carl little time for definite thoughts and emotions: an unconscious helper in the flogging of mind and soul.
As they walked down the street after the day’s work Carl looked closely at him for the first time. Sweat and dirt were violating the youthful outlines of his face, and his small blue eyes were contracted and deeply sunk as though still directing the movements of his arms. The blunt strength of his body sagged beneath the colorlessness of clothes and his head was wearily bent forward—the grey frenzies of a civilization had exacted their daily tribute and it is possible that he was not aware of the glory and impressiveness which certain poets find in his cringing role. For a time Carl looked at him with an exhausted friendliness and felt tied to him by the intimate bonds of confessing sweat and conquered toil, and this illusion did not vanish until he spoke.
“Me for beer and somethin’ to eat,” he said, with heavy anticipation. “A day shust like this’ll take the guts outa any man. Come along, Jack, I’ll stand treat for the suds.... An’ say, lemme give ya a tip—don’t overwork yourself out on this job. It don’t pay. You won’t get a cent more at the end of the week. Do whatcha gotta do but take it kinda easy. Kinda easy. The boss is too busy most of the time to notice who’s doin’ the most work an’ unless you loaf on the job you can get by without killin’ yourself.”
The complacent roughness of his voice, divided by the shallow wisdoms of the underdog, destroyed the feeling of tired communion which Carl had been sheltering, and his exhaustion began to creep apart from the man, like a tottering aristocrat. He was once more a proudly baffled creator, shuffling along after a day of useless movements, and his hatred for human beings awoke from its short sleep and brandished a sneer on his loose and dirt-streaked face.
He walked into a corner saloon with Petersen and gulped down a glass of beer. Its cool interior kiss aroused a bit of vigor within him and he looked around at the men who were amiably fighting to place their elbows on the imitation mahogany bar. Their faces were relaxed and soiled, heavily betraying the aftermath of a day of toil, and an expression of brief elation teased their faces as they swallowed the beer and whiskey and licked their lips. After each drink they stood with blustering indecision, like generals striving to forget a menial dream and regain their command of an army, or quietly tried to erase the blunders and supplications of a day, seeking nothing save the solace of lazy conversation and weakly clownish arguments. The strained, corrupt clamor of voices debating over women, prize-fighters, and money swayed back and forth and was timidly disputed by the whir of electric-fans and the clink of glasses. A wave of sleepy carelessness stormed Carl as he watched these men. Inevitably thrown in with them, as a sacrifice to a dubious reality, he felt inclined to copy their actions and inanely insult his actual self, since at this moment all words and gestures seemed equally futile to him.
“What essential difference is there between a poet, boasting of his reputation, and a workman bragging about the women who have allowed him to molest their bodies?” he asked himself, forcing the question out of the drained limpness of his mind. “The poet has taught better manners to his vanity, with many an inquisitive artifice, while the other man is more natural and clumsy.”
Petersen’s voice interrupted the soliloquy.
“Come on, have another.”
“Make it whiskey this time,” said Carl to the bartender. “I’ll pay for this one, Petersen.”
“Keep your money, keep it,” answered Petersen, warmed by his beers to an insistent generosity. “I got plenty of it. But say, I’ll be a little shorter in kale tuhnight when Katie gets through with me. There’s no way of spendin’ money that that dame don’t know, but I guess all women are like that. They make you fly some to get ’em. Gonna meet her at eight tonight.”
“Who’s Katie?” asked Carl, drowsily amused after his whiskey.
“She’s a little brunette I’m goin’ with. I’m blonde myself so I like ’em dark an’ well-built. Fine-lookin’ girl she is. Some curve! She ain’t a fast dame by no means but I give her money so’s she can look decent. You know the wages they pay at them damn department-stores! I don’t wanna be ashamed of her when I take her out so I get her the best of everythin’—silk stockings, nice hat, swell shoes.”
“Don’t she feel kinda small about a man paying for her clothes?” asked Carl, slipping into Petersen’s language.
“Well, she said no at first but I told her that she didn’t have to give me nothin’ except what she wanted to,” said Petersen. “I’m a straight guy with women, I am.”
“Do you love her?” asked Carl, wondering how Petersen would take the question.
He looked at Carl with a heavy disapproval.
“Say, cut out the kiddin’,” he answered. “D’ya lo-o-ove her”—he mimicked the words with astonished derision—“none of that soft stuff for me. She’s a good-lookin’, wise girl, and if I don’t see anyone I like better I’ll prob’ly marry her, but she ain’t got no ropes tied to me. You bet not! There’s plenty of fish in the pond, Jack.”
“Yes, if you’ve got the right kind of bait,” answered Carl, deliberately falling into the other man’s verbal stride, “but be sure that someone else isn’t fishing for you at the same time. Hooked from above, while not watching, you know.”
“You’re a regular kidder, ain’t ya,” said Petersen, who dimly felt that Carl was masking the sly wisdom of sexual pursuits and respected him for it. “But say, Katie’s got a nice friend—Lucy’s her name. She’s a little thin, not much curve to her, but some men like ’em that way. An’ she’s kinda quiet too, don’t talk much, but I don’t care for them when they’re always laughin’ and cuttin’ up. Then they’re usually tryin’ to get on your good side an’ work you for somethin.’ Would ya like to meet this dame? I don’t know just how far she’ll go but she might come across if you work her right.”
“Sure, lead me to her,” said Carl, inaudibly laughing to himself.
“Alright, I’ll make it for eight tuhmorrow night. The four of us’ll go somewhere.... Well, one more an’ we’ll beat it, Jack.”
Glancing swiftly ahead, Carl saw that this engagement would demand a certain sum of money and he wondered how he could obtain it since he would not be paid for his present work until the end of the week. While he stood, grasping this little perplexity, he noticed that a man at his left had placed a ten-dollar bill on the bar, in payment for a drink, and that the man was immersed in a violent argument with a friend, with his back turned to the bar. The bartender was at the other end of the counter, and after a glance at Petersen, who stood dully peering into his empty glass, Carl whisked the bill into one of his coat pockets. Then he quickly prodded Petersen’s shoulder.
“Come on, let’s go,” he said, and the two walked out of the saloon, Carl taking care to stroll in a reluctant fashion and steeling himself for the angry shout that might come.
As Carl walked down the street he felt a twinge of regret at having stolen the money of a stumbling, minor puppet. He told himself that this petty gesture had been forced upon him by an innately vicious contortion known as life, but his emotions cringed as they arranged an appropriate explanation.
“This man whom I have robbed will curse the treacherous unfairness of life and his eyes, dilated with bitterness, will see more clearly his relation to the things around him. In this way I have really befriended him. The railroad-detective, who once struck me on the head with the butt of a pistol, when I was offering no resistance, was trying to obtain revenge—revenge upon the people who had made him their snarling slave—and he blindly reached out for the object nearest to him, which happened to be my head. But there was no desire for vengeance in my own gesture. I steal from men in order to prevent life from stealing an occasional refuge for my thoughts and emotions. A purely practical device.”
He left Petersen at the next street-corner and boarded a crowded street-car, reflecting on his engagement to meet the “quiet an’ thin Lucy” as he stood wearily clinging to the leather strap. Petersen’s attitude toward women was a familiar joke. Dressed in its little array of fixed and confident variations it had pursued Carl in the past without repulsing or flattering him. To him it was an elaborately pitiful delusion of dominance made by hosts of men, who felt the craving to inject a dramatic variety and assurance into the frightened monotones of their lives. In an aching effort to dignify their barren days these men adopted the roles of hunters and masters among women. They entered, with infinite coarseness and precision, a glamorous realm of lies, jealousies, cruelties, and haloes, and in this wildly fantastic land they managed to forget the flatly submissive attitudes of another world. Carl was telling himself that he had been waiting for a woman who could bring him something more than the crudely veiled undulation of flesh but he fashioned the starving little romance with great deliberateness.
“Women have excited my flesh and it has often yielded to them, but that is simply a necessary triviality,” he said to himself. “I, too, must seek to evade the monotonies and restrictions of my life, lest I become mad, but at least I am quite conscious of the joke. The cheap little drug-store does not witness any hoodwinked swaggers on my part! So on to quiet Lucy, with her stiff stupidities and elastic curves.”
Once more he had to pass the garrulous sentries at the gate—the neighbors around the doorstep. They eyed the dirt upon his clothes and face with an amazed contempt—Carrie Felman’s son a common laborer!—and lost in their scrutiny they gave him monosyllabic greetings.
“Well, judging from the dirt all over you you’ve found a job,” said his mother in tones of blunt resignation.
“Yes, I’m working as a lineman’s helper for the telephone company,” he answered in an expressionless voice.
After he had washed his parents pelted him with amiable questions—the details of his work, wages, and companions—a dash of solicitude swinging with their desire to entertain the dull aftermath of a hot summer day. He answered their questions patiently and they were glad that their son seemed ready to plunge his “wildness” into the soothing currents of an average life. Their affection for him was only able to dominate their hearts when he failed to challenge the peaceful assumptions and bargains of their lives, for otherwise it verged into hatred because it was confronted by a stabbing mystery which it could not understand.
After the evening meal he sat in an easy chair upholstered with violent green plush and usually occupied at such times by his father, but donated to him in honor of his first evening of submission. He sprawled in the chair, trifling with the headlines of a newspaper and throwing them aside. A warm and not unpleasant stupor began to descend upon his thoughts and emotions and they fluttered spasmodically, like circles of drugged butterflies. He closed his eyes. His legs and arms held a heaviness which he enjoyed because he was not forced to raise it.
“Will this be my end—a swinging of arms and legs during the daytime and then different shades of sleep or sensual bravado at night?” he asked himself drowsily—a well-remembered sentence that needed little consciousness.
Suddenly, an emotional revolt within him tore against his physical lethargy, like lightnings from some unguessed depth of his soul, and he was astonished to find himself sitting upright in the chair. He saluted the victory joyously.
“By God, I won’t give in as easily as this,” he whispered to the purple grapes on the tan wall-paper, addressing them because their ugliness was at least helplessly inert. “You’re concrete symbols, if nothing else, and you don’t stumble amidst unconquered clouds. I’ll go to the park and try to write a poem.”
Agreeably amazed at the returning vestige of strength in his legs he walked to the public-park and sat down upon a bench. Ignoring the people who were strolling or romping around him he bent over his paper-pad and tugged at the smooth insolence of rhyme and meter, but the fight was an uneven one since his mind and emotions were still brittle and dazed from their day of hurried subjection. After crumbling sheets of paper for two hours he wrote:
TO A SAND-PIPER
One blast—a mildly frightened little hostOf liquid sprites, each holding one high note,Aroused from some repentance in the throatOf this grey-yellow bird who skims the coast—And silence. Far off I can somehow feelThe drooping-winged sprites back to covert steal.
One blast—a mildly frightened little hostOf liquid sprites, each holding one high note,Aroused from some repentance in the throatOf this grey-yellow bird who skims the coast—And silence. Far off I can somehow feelThe drooping-winged sprites back to covert steal.
One blast—a mildly frightened little hostOf liquid sprites, each holding one high note,Aroused from some repentance in the throatOf this grey-yellow bird who skims the coast—And silence. Far off I can somehow feelThe drooping-winged sprites back to covert steal.
One blast—a mildly frightened little host
Of liquid sprites, each holding one high note,
Aroused from some repentance in the throat
Of this grey-yellow bird who skims the coast—
And silence. Far off I can somehow feel
The drooping-winged sprites back to covert steal.
The poem did not satisfy him, and in a measure he felt like a sleepwalker who was imitating gestures that had lost their meaning to him, but he dared not substitute his actual thoughts and emotions in place of the tenuous or stilted fancies which he believed were all that poetry was allowed to achieve. All that he wanted to say, and all that he did say in conversation with himself, muttered unhappily within him as he sat on the bench and strained to capture the pretty suggestions of a mystical rapture, but he was slave to the belief that poetry was a thinly aristocratic experience in which thoughts and emotions, serene, noble, and ludicrously artificial, disdained the lunges of thought and the turmoils of an actual world—pale, washed-out princes contending among themselves for trinket-devices known as rhymes and meters.
He rose from the bench, impoverished by the effort that he had made to counteract a day of toil, and trudged homeward.