When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father
was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud
of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled
through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And
after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I
grew talkative about my adventures, too.
I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so
very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not
averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work
under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was
three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut
from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips
to dry.
In the Composite Works I discovered a new world--the world of factory
life.
I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were
whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men
and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell
as of rubbed amber--the characteristic smell of composite when subjected
to friction....
And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making
horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social
unease do.
They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong,
sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts
... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.
Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding,
squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with
women.
They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness
and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they
were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick
were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it,
laughing grimly with the "boys."
Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a
greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all
gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men
seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to
themselves.
In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the
workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure
to be hit as you passed through.
The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards
around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of
some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company
could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of
America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on
week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the
pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each
man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But
many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness,
dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they
dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was
not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy
Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young
girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked,
jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that
had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the
eye-pits of a skull.
* * * * *
"Well, they don't _have_ to work in there unless they want to, do they?"
"Ah, they're only a lot of foreigners anyhow."
* * * * *
Three dollars a week was a lot of money for me ... a fortune, because I
had never owned anything higher than nickles and dimes before.
And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned,
to do with as I wished. Later on he made me save two dollars a week.
Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap,
second hand ones, at Breasted's book store.
Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in
my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.
My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume. It was the only book
he cared for, outside of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, together with, of
course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret
societies.
At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic
learning that drew me to Byron. I became enamoured of the Latin and
Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in _Hours of Idleness_,
and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the
lamp light. And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my
own.
Then I began to read--_Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus_--the
Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The
Prisoner of Chillon_.
The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie
and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his
neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my
shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my
hair in the Byronic style.
"I see you're discovering Byron," my father laughed.
Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had
evidently overlooked, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_. And he quoted me
the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he
reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.
From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through
Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was
beginning to devour my days.
I read and pondered, shaking with eagerness, the stories of Haidee, of
Antonia and Julia--the tale of the dream of Dudu. I dwelt in a
musk-scented room of imagination. Silver fountains played about me.
Light forms flowed and undulated in white draperies over mosaiced
pavements ... flashing dark eyes shone mysteriously and amorously,
starry through curtains and veils.
My every thought was alert with naïve, speculative curiosity concerning
the mystery of woman.
Through Byron I learned about Moore. I procured the latter's _Lalla
Rookh_, his odes of Anacreon.
From Byron and Moore I built up an adolescent ideal of
woman,--exquisitely sensual and sexual, and yet an angel, superior to
men: an ideal of a fellow creature who was both a living, breathing
mystery and a walking sweetmeat ... a white creation moved and actuated
by instinct and intuition--a perpetually inexplicable ecstasy and
madness to man.
I drew more and more apart to myself. Always looked upon as queer by the
good, bourgeois families that surrounded us, I was now considered madder
still.
* * * * *
How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side,
wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the
stars--or, maybe,--more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling
minstrel--in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching
great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world--to have come
to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in
the world, one who was innocent of what man meant. And together we would
learn the mystery of life, and live in mutual purity and innocence.
* * * * *
The strangeness of my physical person lured me. I marvelled at,
scrutinised intimately the wonder of myself. I was insatiable in my
curiosities.
* * * * *
My discovery of my body, and my books, held me in equal bondage. I
neglected my work in the drying room. My father was vexed. He'd hunt me
out of the obscure corners back of the hanging sheets of composite where
I hid, absorbed in myself and the book I held, and would run me back to
work.
* * * * *
One day, in the factory, two other boys on an errand from another
department, came back where I sat, in a hidden nook, reading Thompson's
_Seasons_. One of them spit over my shoulder, between the leaves. I
leaped to my feet, infuriated, and a fight began. The desecration of my
beloved poetry gave me such angry strength that I struck out lustily and
dropped both of them....
Rushing in on the uproar and blaming me for it, my father seized me by
the collar. He booted the other boys off, who were by this time on their
feet again, took me up into the water-tower, and beat me with one of the
heavy sticks, with metal clips on it, that was used for hanging the
composite on.
Still trembling with the fight, I shook with a superadded ague of fear.
My father's chastisement brought back to me with a chill the remembrance
of the beatings Uncle Landon had given me.
* * * * *
"By God, Johnnie, this is the only thing there's left to do with you."
He flung me aside. I lay there sobbing.
"Tell me, my boy, what _is_ the matter with you?" he asked, softening.
Unlike Landon, he was usually gentle with me. He seldom treated me
harshly.
"Father, I don't want to work any more."
"Don't want to work?... but you quit school just to _go_ to work, at
your own wish!"
"I want to go back to school!"
"Back to school?... you'll be behind the rest by now."
"I've been studying a lot by myself," I replied, forgetting the feel of
the stick already and absorbed in the new idea.
By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my
father's desk. He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his
mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as
composite). He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were
smoking.
"Look here, my son, what _is_ the matter with you ... won't you tell
your daddy?"
"Nothing's the matter with me, Pop!"
"You're getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?"
"No, Pop!"
"You're a queer little duck."
There was a long silence.
"You're always reading ... good books too ... yet you're no more good in
school than you are at work ... I can't make you out, by the living God,
I can't ... what is it you want to be?"
"I don't know, only I want to go back to school again."
"But what did you leave for?"
"I hated arithmetic."
"What do you want to study, then?"
"Languages."
"Would you like a special course in the high school?
"Principal Balling of the Keeley Heights High School might be able to
work you in. He is a brother Mason of mine."
"I know some Latin and Greek and Ancient History already. I have been
teaching myself."
"Well, you _are_ a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the
family, except your mother. She used to read and read, and read. And
once or twice she wrote a short story ... had one accepted, even, by the
_Youth's Companion_ once, but never printed."
* * * * *
Though it was some months off till the Fall term began, on the strength
of my desire to return to school my father let me throw up my job....
But we soon found out that, brother in the bond, or not, Principal
Balling could not get me into high school because I was not well enough
prepared. My studying and reading by myself, though it had been quite
wide, had also been too desultory. The principal advised a winter in the
night school where men and boys who had been delayed in their education
went to learn.
I ran about that summer, with a gang of fellow adolescents; our
headquarters, strange to say, being the front room and outside steps of
an undertaker's establishment. This was because our leader was the
undertaker's boy-of-all-work. Harry Mitchell was his name. Harry, a sort
of young tramp, fat and pimply-faced, had jaunted into our town one day
from New York, and had found work with the undertaker. Harry had watery
blue eyes and a round, moon face. He was a whirlwind fighter but he
never fought with us. It was only with the leaders of other gangs or
with strangers that he fought.
Harry continued our education in the secrets and mysteries of life, in
the stable-boy and gutter way,--by passing about among us books from a
sort of underground library ... vile things, fluently conceived and made
even more vivid and animal with obscene and unimaginable illustrations.
And our minds were trailed black with slime.
And whole afternoons we stood about on the sidewalk jeering and
fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and
hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to
seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our
observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to
them in falsetto voices.
* * * * *
As a child my play had been strenuous and absorbing, like work that one
is happy at, so that at night I fell asleep with all the pleasant
fatigue of a labourer.
It is the adolescent who loafs and dawdles on street corners. For the
cruel and fearful urge of sex stirs so powerfully in him, that he hardly
knows what to do, and all his days and nights he writhes in the grip of
terrible instincts.
* * * * *
Yet, in the midst of the turbidness of adolescence, I was still two
distinct personalities. With my underground library of filth hidden
away where my father could not find it, at the same time I kept and
read my other books. The first were for the moments of madness and
curious ecstasy I had learned how to induce.
But my better self periodically revolted. And I took oath that I would
never again spew a filthy expression from my mouth or do an ill thing. I
suffered all the agonies of the damned in hell. I believe hell to be the
invention of adolescence.
Always, inevitably, I returned to my wallow and the gang.
* * * * *
We were not always loafing in front of the undertaker's shop. Sometimes
we were quite active. Many windows and street lamps were smashed. And we
derived great joy from being pursued by the "cops"--especially by a
certain fat one, for whom we made life a continual burden.
Once we went in a body to the outskirts of the town and stoned a
greenhouse. Its owner chased us across ploughed fields. We flung stones
back at him. One hit him with a dull thud and made him cry out with
pain, and he left off pursuing us. It was so dark we could not be
identified.
One of our favourite diversions was to follow mature lovers as they
strolled a-field, hoping to catch them in the midst of intimate
endearments.
* * * * *
My father received a raise of a few dollars in salary. As it was they
paid him too little, because he was easy-going. The additional weekly
money warranted our leaving the Jenkinses and renting four rooms all our
own, over the main street. This meant that I was to have a whole room to
myself, and I was glad ... a whole room where I could stand a small
writing desk and set up my books in rows. With an extreme effort I
burned my underground books.
* * * * *
All the women liked my father. He dressed neatly and well. His trousers
were never without their fresh crease. He was very vain of his neat
appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole.
This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his
entirely bald head.
Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where
the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them. He, for this
reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the
collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of
just standing and talking with women.
Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him
say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in
good English, with few curses and oaths in it.
* * * * *
Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's
_Leaves of Grass_, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_.
Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of
elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.
The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I
knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought
out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life,
exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ became my Bible.
* * * * *
It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been
working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a
daily paper.
And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly
discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the
victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would
follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and
degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner
still. I fell into a hacking cough.
And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of
innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care
for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.
Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....
I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old
family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water,
that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.
In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled _The Female Form
Divine_. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my
pillow.
I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of
affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a
living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand
across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind
to me....
* * * * *
Again: my imagination grew to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns,
skeletons. How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die
like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so
enamoured of. The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he
had done, to stay up all night, night after night, studying....
* * * * *
After the surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist,
several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I
would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied
entity. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would
come rushing from my pen. I must hurry with them before my early death
overtook me.
* * * * *
There were two visions I saw continually in my sleep:
One was of myself walking with a proud step down a vast hall, the usual
wreath of fame on my head. I wore a sort of toga. And of course a great
concourse of people stood apart in silent reverence on either side,
gazing at me admiringly. With the thunder of their hand-clapping I would
wake.
The other dream was of being buried alive.
I lay there, smelling the dark earth, and not being able to stir so much
as the last joint of my little finger. Yet every nerve of me ached with
sentience.. and I woke gasping, my face bathed with tears and the
moisture of terror.
* * * * *
From head to foot hot flushes swept over me. And I was stung with the
pricking of a million needles, going in sharply at every pore!... was
bathed in cold sweats. And I hoped I was dying.
* * * * *
"Johnnie, what are you doing to yourself?" And my father fixed his eyes
on me.
"Nothing, Father!"
"If you weren't such a good boy, I'd--" and he halted, to continue,
"as it is, you're a clean boy, and I'm proud of you."
I struggled hard to speak with him, to make a confidant of him, but I
could not.
"I wonder," he added with alarm in his voice, "I wonder if you're
catching consumption, the disease your mother died of ... you must be
careful of yourself."