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, in
the 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 the
emotions 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 paid
for 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 by
others 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 came
and 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 shall
walk 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 my
heroes. 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 quite
conscious 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 I
at 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 the
circumstances--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 a
lake 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 and
pointing 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, stepping
back, 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.