WITH a frantic effort I am awake, I am in my laborers’ rooming house
and Nora, who is my friend, has been trying to clean the wall paper in
my room. She takes bits of bread dough and rubs the walls. The paper
on the walls was originally yellow but time and coal soot have made it
almost black. Light is struggling in through a window, wiped clean by
Nora but yesterday, but already nearly black again. The morning sun is
playing on the wall.
Nora’s lover does not come home although he writes whenever his ship
comes to port. The ship carries ore from Duluth to Chicago and one may
be quite sure he does not sleep much of the time in a clean berth nor
smell in his nostrils the clean sea air, as I represented things to
Nora when I wanted her to take better care of my room. Nora has tried.
That idea of mine was a purely literary one but it has made Nora and
myself friends.
She fancies the notion of having someone to care for, to do things for,
and so do I. It is a literary triumph for me and I instinctively like
literary triumphs. We are much together and as the time is a black
one for me she makes life livable. Nora is a true modern, not fussy,
not making a great brag and bluster about it as did so many of the
“moderns” in the arts I was to see later in New York. In my day I was
to see a time when if a man wrote ten honest paragraphs or painted
three honest paintings he immediately set himself up as a persecuted
saint and wept if Mr. Sumner of New York or the Watch and Ward Club of
Boston did not descend upon him. Most “moderns” of the arts I was later
to see regretted the day of the passing of the Inquisition. They did
not hanker to be burned at the stake but would have loved having it
done to them, as in the moving picture, with some sort of mechanical
cold flame. As for Nora she wanted to know all I thought, all I felt.
She was not afraid I would “ruin” her. She knew how to look out for
herself.
In the evenings we went out to walk together, sometimes going to the
docks and sitting together while the moon came up over the waters of
the lake and sometimes going to what was called the better part of town
to walk under trees in a park or along a residence street.
There was no love-making for Nora’s mind was turned toward her
sailorman and I was ill. My body was well and strong most of the time,
but there was an illness within.
My mind dwelt too much of the time in darkness. I had already worked
in a dozen factories and much of the time it had been with me as
it was with Judge Turner when he was a boy in an Ohio town. Nature
had compelled him to go into a vile shed on the walls of which were
scrawled sentences that revolted his soul and the necessity of keeping
my body going--a necessity I myself did not understand but that was
there, in me--had compelled me, time and again, to go into the door of
a factory as an employee.
I talked constantly to Nora of the thoughts in my mind. There was a
kind of understanding between us. I did not try to come between her
and her sailorman and I had the privilege of saying to her what I
pleased.
What a mixed-up affair! I was always pretending to Nora that I loved
men and was a great mixer with men while at the same time I was
dreaming of having a fight with my fists with the athlete at the
warehouse.
In the late afternoon I went along a street homeward bound, filled with
beer and imagining a scene. In my wanderings I had known personally two
fighters, Bill McCarthy, a lightweight, and Harry Walters, a heavy.
Once I was second for Harry Walters in a fight with a Negro in a barn
near Toledo, Ohio. Sports came out from the city to the barn near a
river and when Harry began to lose I was shrewd enough to spread the
alarm that the police were coming so that everyone fled and Harry was
saved a beating at the hands of the black.
I remembered the blows Harry had struck and that the black had struck
and the blows I had seen Billy McCarthy strike. The black had a feint
and a cross that confused Harry and that landed the black’s left every
time full on Harry’s chin. Each time it landed Harry became a little
more groggy but he could not avoid the blow. And I remembered how the
black smiled each time as it landed. He had two rows of gold-covered
teeth and his smile was like Jack Johnson’s golden smile.
I went along factory streets fancying myself the great black,
possessing the knowledge of the black’s feint and cross and with the
athlete of the warehouse standing before me.
Aha! There is a slight rocking movement of the body, just so. The head
moves slowly and rhythmically like the head of a snake when it is about
to strike. Oh, for a long row of yellow gold-crowned teeth to glisten
in the mouth when one smiles the golden smile in factory streets, in
factories themselves or, most of all, when in a fight, when about to
knock an athlete who works with one on a certain platform, “for a
goal,” as we used to say among us fighters--an athlete on a platform
and with three or four large heavy Swede teamsters standing looking on
and smiling also their own slow smiles.
Patience now! One gets the body and the head moving just so, in
opposite directions, with opposing rhythm--a sort of counterpoint, as
it were--and then the golden smile comes and, quickly, shiftily, the
feint with the right for the belly followed with lightning quickness by
the left, crossed to the chin.
Oh, for a powerful left! “I would give freely and willingly all the
chances I possess of being buried with great pomp in a marble sepulchre
on a hillside above a magnificent city for a powerful left,” I think
each evening as I go home from work.
And all the time pretending to Nora and myself that I am one who loves
mankind! Love indeed! Nora who wished to make happy the one man she
understood and with whom she was to live was the lover, not I.
For me the athlete, poor innocent one, has become a symbol.