BUT I wander from my subject to leap into the future, to become a
prophet, and I have no prophet’s beard. In reality I am thinking of a
certain young man who once came rushing, full of vitality and health,
into a mechanical age and of what happened to him and to the men among
whom he worked.
There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Ford
type of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futile
outpouring of men’s lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was at
work. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian. In old Rabelais
there was the salt of infinite wit and I have no doubt the Rabelaisian
flashes that came from our own Lincoln, Washington and the others had
point and a flare to them.
But in the factories and in army camps!
Into my own consciousness, as I, a young man wishing vaguely to mature,
walked in a factory street wishing childishly for a golden smile and a
wicked left to cross over to the chin of some defender of the new age
there was burned the memory of the last place in which I had worked
before I had come to the warehouse to roll the kegs of nails.
It was a bicycle factory where I was employed as an assembler. With
some ten or twelve other men I worked at a bench in a long room facing
a row of windows. We assembled the parts that were brought to us
by boys from other departments of the factory and put the bicycles
together. There was such and such a screw to go into such and such
a screw hole, such and such a nut to go on such and such a bolt. As
always in the modern factory nothing ever varied and within a week any
intelligent quick-handed man could have done the work with his eyes
closed. One turned certain screws, tightened certain bolts, whirled a
wheel, fastened on certain foot pedals and passed the work on to the
next man. Outside the window I faced there was a railroad track lined
on one side by factory walls and the other by what had started to be a
stone quarry. The stone of this quarry had not, I presume, turned out
to be satisfactory and the hole was being filled with rubbish carted
from various parts of the city and all day carts arrived, dumped their
loads--making each time a little cloud of dust--and over the dump
wandered certain individuals, men and women who were looking among the
rubbish for bits of treasure, bottles I fancy and bits of cloth and
iron that could later be sold to junk men.
For three months I had worked at the place and listened to the talk
of my companions and then I had fled. The men seemed everlastingly
anxious to assert their manhood, to make it clear to their fellows
that they were potent men able to do great deeds in the realms of the
flesh and all day I stood beside a little stand-like bench, on which
the frame of the bicycle was stuck upside down, tightening nuts and
screws and listening to the men, the while I looked from their faces
out the window to the factory walls and the rubbish heap. An unmarried
man had been on the evening before to a certain house in a certain
street and there had happened between himself and a woman what he now
wished to talk about and to describe with infinite care in putting in
all the details. What an undignified stallion he made of himself! He
had his moment, was allowed his moment by the others and then another,
a married man, took up the theme, also boastfully. There were days as I
worked in that place when I became physically ill and other days when
I cursed all the gods of my age that had made men--who in another age
might have been farmers, shepherds or craftsmen--these futile fellows,
ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they felt the
age of impotency asserting itself in their bodies.
In the bicycle factory I had repeatedly told the other men that I was
subject to sick headaches and I used to go often to a window, throw
it open and lean out, closing my eyes and trying to create in fancy a
world in which men lived under bright skies, drank wine, loved women
and with their hands created something of lasting value and beauty and
seeing me thus, white and with trembling hands, the men dropped the
talk that so sickened me. Like kind children they came and did my work
or, after the noon hour, brought me little packages of remedies they
had bought at the drug store or had carried to me from their homes.
I had worked the sick headache racket to the limit and then, feeling it
had become wornout, had quit my job and had gone to the place where I
worked with the young athlete I now wanted to beat with my fists.
And on a certain day I tried. I had now convinced myself that the
feint, the cross and the golden smile were all in good working
condition and that no man, least of all the young athlete who could
not stand up to his drink, could stand up against me.
For weeks I had been as nasty as I could be to my fellow-workman. There
was a trick I had learned. I gave one of the kegs I was rolling down
the incline just a little sudden turn with my foot so that it struck
him on the legs as he came into the house through a door. I hit him on
the shins and when he howled with pain expressed the greatest regret
and then as soon as I could, without arousing too much suspicion, I did
it again.
We ceased speaking and only glared at each other. Even the dull-witted
teamsters knew there was a fight brewing. I waited and watched, making
my lips do the nearest thing possible to a golden smile, and at night
in my room and even sometimes when I was walking with Nora and had come
into a quiet dark street I practiced the feint and the cross. “What in
Heaven’s name are you doing?” Nora asked, but I did not tell her but
talked instead of my dreams, of brave men in rich clothes walking with
lovely women in a strange land I was always trying to create in a world
of my fancy and that was always being knocked galley-west by the facts
of my life. Regarding the queer sudden little movements I was always
making with my shoulders and hands I tried to be very mysterious and
once I remember, when we had been sitting on a bench in a little park,
I left her and went behind a bush. She thought I had gone there out of
a natural necessity but it was not true. I had remembered how Harry
Walters and Billy McCarthy, when they were preparing for a fight, did
a good deal of what is called shadow boxing. One imagines an opponent
before oneself and advances and recedes, feints and crosses, whirls
suddenly around and gives ground before a rushing opponent only to come
back at him with terrific straight rights and lefts, just as his attack
has exhausted itself.
I wanted, I fancy, to have Nora grow tired of waiting for me and to
come look around the bush and to discover my secret--that I was not as
she thought, a rather foolish but smart-talking fellow inclined to be
something of a cloud man. Ah, I thought, as I danced about on a bit of
grass back of the bush, she will come to peek and see me here in my
true light. She will take me for some famous fighter, a young Corbett
or that famous middleweight of the day called “The Nonpareil.” What I
hoped was that she would come to some such conclusion without asking
questions and would go back to the bench to wait for my coming filled
with a new wonder. A famous young prizefighter traveling incognito, not
wanting public applause, a young Henry Adams of Boston with the punch
of a Bob Fitzsimmons, a Ralph Waldo Emerson with the physical assurance
of a railway brakeman--what painter, literary man or scholar has not
had moments of indulging in some such dream? A burly landlord has
been crude enough to demand instant pay for the room in which one is
living, or some taxi driver, who has all but run one down at a corner,
jerked out of his seat and given a thorough beating in the face of an
entire street. “Did you see him pummel that fellow? And he such a pale
intellectual looking chap, too! You can never tell how far a dog can
jump by the length of his tail.” Etc., etc.
Men lost in admiration going off along a street talking of one’s
physical prowess. Oneself flecking the dust off one’s hands and
lighting a cigarette, while one looks with calm indifference at a
red-faced taxi driver lying pale and quite defeated and hopeless in a
gutter.
It was something of that sort of admiration I wanted from Nora but I
did not get it. Once when I was walking in a street with her and had
just gone through with my exercises she looked at me with scorn in her
eyes. “You’re a nice fellow but you’re bughouse all right,” she said
and that was all I ever succeeded in getting out of her.
But I got something else at the warehouse.
The fight came off on a Wednesday at about three in the afternoon and
the athlete and myself had two teamsters as witnesses to the affair.
All day I had been bedeviling him--being just as downright ugly and
nasty as I could, clipping him on the shins with several flying kegs,
making my apologies as insolently as possible and when he started
telling one of his endless nasty tales to the teamsters starting a loud
conversation on some other subject just as he was about to come to the
nub of his story. The teamsters felt the fight brewing and wanted to
encourage it. They purposely listened to me and did not hear the nub.
He thought, I dare say, that I would never be foolish enough to fight
him and I must have taken his scorn of me for timidity for I suddenly
grew very bold. He was coming in at the door of the house just as I was
on my way out behind one of the kegs and I suddenly stopped it, looked
him squarely in the eyes and then, with an attempt at the golden smile
on my lips, sent the keg flying directly at him.
He leaped over the keg and came toward me in silence and I prepared to
bring my technique into play. Really I had, at the moment, a great deal
of confidence in myself and began at once rocking my head, making queer
little shifting movements with my feet and trying to establish a kind
of cross rhythm in my shoulders and head that would, I felt, confuse
him.
He looked at me lost in astonishment and I decided to lead. Had I been
content to hit him in the belly with my right, putting all my strength
back of the blow and then had I begun kicking, biting and pummeling
furiously, I might have come out all right. He was so astonished--no
doubt, like Nora, he thought me quite bughouse--that the right would
surely have landed, but that, you see, was not the technique of the
situation.
The thing was to feint for the belly and then “pull one’s punch” as it
were, and immediately afterwards whip over the powerful left to the
jaw. But my left was not powerful and anyway it did not land.
He knocked me down and when I got up and started my gymnastics again he
knocked me down a second time and a third and a fourth. He knocked me
down perhaps a dozen times and the two teamsters came to the door to
watch and all the time there was the most foolish look on his face and
on their faces. It was a look a bulldog attacked by a hen might have
assumed--no doubt by my bullyragging I had convinced them, as I had
myself, I could fight--but presently both my eyes were so swollen and
my nose and mouth so bruised and cut that I could not see and so I got
to my feet and walked away, going out of the warehouse in the midst of
an intense silence on the part of all three of the spectators.
And so along a street I went to my room, followed by two or three
curious children who perhaps thought I had been hit by a freight train
and succeeded in also getting my door bolted against any sudden descent
of Nora. My eyes were very evidently going to be badly discolored, my
nose bled and my lips were badly cut, and so, after bathing my face in
cold water, I put a wet towel over it and went and threw myself on the
bed.
It was one of those moments that come, I presume, into every man’s
life. I was lying on my bed in my room, in the condition already
described, the door was bolted, Nora was not directly about and I was
out from under the eyes of my fellowmen.