“Who swoon in sleep and awake wearier.”
As he woke up, Lester Knapp heard the words in the air as he so often
heard poetry,
“... and awake wearier!”
He was tired to the bone. He would have given anything in the world to
turn over, bury his face in the pillow and swoon to sleep again.
And never wake up!
But the alarm-clock had rung, and Evangeline had risen instantly. He
heard her splashing in the bathroom now.
With an effort as though he were struggling out of smothering black
depths, he sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed. Gosh!
How little good he seemed to get from his sleep. He was tireder when he
woke up than when he went to bed.
On the cot opposite little Stephen lay sleeping as vigorously as he did
everything, one tightly clenched small fist flung up on his pillow.
What a strong, handsome kid he was. Whatever could be the matter with
him to make him act so like the devil? Strange to see a _little_ kid
like that, so hateful, seem to take such a satisfaction in raising
hell.
Well, there was the furnace fire to fix. He thrust his feet into
slippers, put his dressing-gown over his pyjamas and shuffled
downstairs, hearing behind him the firm, regular step of Evangeline as
she went from the bathroom to the bedroom. On the way down he woke up
enough to realize what made life look so specially intolerable that
morning; the return of Jerome Willing and his own definite failure to
make good in the new organization of the store. The significance of
that and all that it foretold stood out more harshly than ever in the
pale, dawn-gray of the cold empty kitchen. Oh, hell!
He flung open the cellar door and ran downstairs to run away from the
thought. But it was waiting for him, blackly in the coal-bin, luridly
in the firebox.
“It looks just about like the jumping-off place for me,” he thought,
rattling the furnace-shaker gloomily; “only I can’t jump. Where to?”
Well, anyhow, in the few minutes before breakfast, while his
stomach was empty, he was free from that dull leaden mass of misery
turning over and over inside him at intervals, which was the usual
accompaniment of his every waking hour. That was _some_thing to be
thankful for.
He strained his lean arms to throw the coal from his shovel well back
into the firebox, and leveled it evenly with the long poker. Evangeline
always found time to go down to see if he had done it right before he
got away after breakfast.
Then he stood for a moment, struck as he often was, by the leaping
many-tongued fury of the little pale-blue pointed flames. He looked
at them, fascinated by the baleful lustfulness of their attack on the
helpless lumps of coal thrown into their inferno.
“The seat of desolation, void of light
Save what the glimmering of those livid flames
Casts, pale and dreadful. Yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible,
Serves only to discover sights of woe.”
He heard the words crackle in the flames. He said to himself gravely:
“Sights of woe it surely is.”
He heard Evangeline begin to rattle the shaker of the kitchen stove and
started from his hypnotized stare at the flames. It was time for him
to beat it back upstairs if he didn’t want to be late. How he loathed
his life-long slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative
opposed to every spontaneous impulse. “It’s the clock that is the
nay-sayer to life,” he thought, as he climbed the cellar stairs. He
hurried upstairs, dressed and began to shave.
In the midst of this last operation he heard lagging, soft little
footsteps come into the bathroom behind him, and beyond his own
lathered face in the glass he saw Stephen enter. Unconscious of
observation, the little boy was gazing absently out of the window
at the snow-covered branches of the maple tree. His father was so
much surprised by the expression of that round baby face and so much
interested in it that he stopped shaving, his razor in the air, peering
at his little son through the glass darkly. Stephen was looking
_wistful_! Yes, he was! Wistful and appealing! Wasn’t his lower lip
quivering a little as though....
Stephen caught his father’s eye on him and started in surprise at being
seen by somebody whose back was towards him.
“Hello there, Stevie,” said his father in an inviting tone. “How’s the
old man to-day?”
Yes, Stephen’s lower lip _was_ quivering! He came closer now and stood
looking up earnestly into the soapy face of his father. “Say, Father,”
he began, “you know my Teddy-bear--you _know_ how....”
From below came a clear, restrained voice stating dispassionately,
“Lester, you have only twelve minutes before it’s time to leave the
house.” And then rebukingly, “Stephen, you _must_n’t bother Father in
the mornings when he has to hurry so. Either go back to bed this minute
and keep warm or get dressed at once. You’ll take cold standing around
in your pyjamas.”
The tone was reasonable. The logic unanswerable. But unlike Henry,
Stephen did not shrink to smaller proportions under the reason and
the logic. With the first sound of his mother’s voice, his usual
square-jawed, pugnacious little mask had dropped over his face. “I’ll
get dwessed when I get a-good-a-weady!” he announced loudly and
belligerently, refreshed by his night’s sleep and instantly ready to
raise an issue and fight it out.
“_Stephen!_” came from below in awful tones. Stephen sauntered away
back into the bedroom with ostentatious leisureliness, his face black
and scowling. Mother had once more stolen Teddy away from him during
the night.
Lester finished shaving in three or four swipes of his razor, put on
his collar at top speed and tied his necktie as he ran downstairs,
cursing the clock and all its works under his breath. Stephen had been
on the point of _saying_ something to him, something human, Stephen who
never asked a question or made an advance towards any one, Stephen who
lived in a state of moral siege, making sorties from his stronghold
only to harry the enemy. And the accursed matter of punctuality
had once more frozen out a human relationship. He never had _time_
to know his children, to stalk and catch that exquisitely elusive
bird-of-paradise, their confidence. Lester had long ago given up any
hope of having time enough to do other things that seemed worth while,
to read the books he liked, to meditate, to try to understand anything.
But it did seem that in the matter of his own children....
“I didn’t think you’d need your overshoes this morning, Lester. I
didn’t get them out. But if you think you would better....”
“Oh, no, no, dear, I won’t. I hate them anyhow.”
His breakfast, perfectly cooked and served, steamed on the white
tablecloth. What a wonder of competence Eva was! Only it was a pity she
let the children get on her nerves so. Lester never doubted that his
wife loved her children with all the passion of her fiery heart, but
there were times when it occurred to him that she did not like them
very well--not for long at a time, anyhow. But, like everything else,
that was probably his fault, because she had all the drudgery of the
care of them, because she never had a rest from them, because he had
not been able to make money enough. Everything came back to that.
He gulped down his hot, clear coffee and tore at his well-made toast,
thinking that he was just about a dead loss anyway you looked at it.
Not only had he no money to give his children, but no health either.
That was another reason why Eva was so worn and took life so hard. He
had given her sickly children--all but Stephen. And Stephen had other
ways of wearing on his mother. Poor little Henry! How sick he had been
last night! It was damnable that the poor kid should have inherited
from his good-for-nothing father the curse of a weak digestion, which
made life not worth living--that and many other things.
He snatched his watch, relentless inquisitor, from the table beside his
plate, thrust it into his pocket and jumped up to put on his overcoat
and hat.
“Here are your gloves,” said his wife, holding them out to him. “There
was a hole in the finger. I’ve just mended it.”
“Oh, that’s awfully good of you, Evie,” said Lester, kissing her cheek
and feeling another ton of never-to-be-redeemed indebtedness flung on
his shoulders. He felt them bend weakly under it like a candle in an
over-heated room.
“Don’t forget your soda-mints,” said Evangeline.
Gee! it wasn’t likely he would forget them, with that hideous demon of
dull discomfort getting to work the instant he swallowed food.
Henry and Helen, half-dressed, came hurrying down the stairs to see him
before he disappeared for the day. His heart yearned over them, their
impressionable, delicate faces, their shadowed eyes, the shrinking
carriage of their slim little bodies.
“Good-by, Father,” they said, lifting their sweet children’s lips to
his. The poor kids! What business had he to pass on the curse of
existence to other human beings, too sensitive and frail to find it
anything but a doom. He tried to say, “Good-by there, young ones,” as
he kissed them, but the words could not pass the knot in his throat.
He saw Eva start up the stairs and, knowing that she was going to
have it out with Stephen, crammed his hat on his head and ran. But
not fast enough. As he fled down the porch steps he heard a combative
angry roar. Helen and Henry would eat their breakfast to a cheerful
tune! And then another scream, more furious, on a higher note. Hell
and damnation! There must be something wrong with the way that kid
was treated to make life one perpetual warfare. But his father was as
helpless to intervene as if he were bound and gagged.
Well, he _was_ bound and gagged to complete helplessness about
everything in his life and his children’s lives, bound and gagged by
his inability to make money. Only men who made money had any right to
say how things should go in their homes. A man who couldn’t make money
had no rights of any kind which a white man was bound to respect--nor a
white woman either. Especially a white woman. The opinion of a man who
couldn’t make money was of no value, on any subject, in anybody’s eyes.
The dignity of a man who could not make money--but why talk about
non-existent abstractions? He had about as much dignity left him as a
zero with the rim off.
His after-breakfast dyspepsia began to roll crushingly over his
personality as it always did for a couple of hours after each meal. His
vitality began to ebb. He felt the familiar, terrible draining out of
his will-to-live. At the thought of enduring this demoralizing torment
that morning, and that afternoon, and the day after that and the day
after that, he felt like flinging himself on the ground rolling and
shrieking. Instead he pulled out his watch with the employee’s nervous
gesture and quickened his pace. He was just then passing Dr. Merritt’s
office. If only there was something the doctor could do to help him.
But he’d tried everything. And anyhow, he understood perfectly that a
man who doesn’t make money has no right to complain of dyspepsia--of
anything. Illness only adds to his guilt.
He put a soda-mint in his mouth, turned a corner and saw, down the
street, the four-story brick front of Willing’s Emporium. Was it
possible that a human being could hate anything as he hated that sight
and not drop dead of it? Before this new phase it had been bad enough,
all those years when it had been a stagnant pool of sour, slow intrigue
and backbiting, carried on by sour, slow, small-minded people, all
playing in their different ways on the small-minded, sick old man at
the head of it. Lester had always felt that he would rather die than
either join in those intrigues or combat them. This aloofness, added to
his real incapacity for business, had left him still nailed to the same
high stool in the same office which had received him the day he had
first gone in. That first day when, vibrant with the excitement of his
engagement to that flame-like girl, he had left his University classes
and all his plans for the future and rushed out to find work, any work
that would enable him to marry! Well, he had married. That had been
only thirteen years ago! The time before it seemed to Lester as remote
as the age of Rameses.
He had hated the slow régime of the sick, small-minded old man, but
he hated still more this new régime which was anything but slow. He
detested the very energy and forcefulness with which Jerome Willing
was realizing his ideals, because he detested those ideals. Lester
felt that he knew what those ideals were, what lay behind those “pep”
talks to the employees. Jerome Willing’s notion of being a good
business-man was to stalk the women of his region, as a hunter stalks
unsuspecting game, to learn how to catch them unawares, and how to
play for his own purposes on a weakness of theirs only too tragically
exaggerated already, their love for buying things. Jerome Willing’s
business ideal, as Lester saw it, was to seize on one of the lower
human instincts, the desire for material possessions, to feed it,
to inflame it, to stimulate it till it should take on the monstrous
proportions of a universal monomania. A city full of women whose daily
occupation would be buying things, and things, and more things yet
(the things Jerome Willing had to sell, be it understood): that was
Jerome Willing’s vision of good business. And to realize this vision
he joyfully and zestfully bent all the very considerable powers of his
well-developed personality. Lester Knapp, the barely tolerated clerk,
hurrying humbly down the street to take up his small drudging task,
gazed at that life-purpose as he had gazed at the lurid baleful energy
of the coal-flames half an hour before.
Lester did not so much mind the way this subtly injected poison ate
into the fibers of childless women. They might, for all he cared, let
their insane hankering for a cloak with the “new sleeves” force them to
put blood-money into buying it, and allow their drugged desire for such
imbecile things to wall them in from the bright world of impersonal
lasting satisfactions. They hurt nobody but themselves. If the Jerome
Willings of the world were smart enough to make fools of them, so much
the worse for them. Although the spectacle was hardly an enlivening
one for a dyspeptic man forced to pass his life in contact with it.
But what sickened Lester was the unscrupulous exploitation of the
home-making necessity, the adroit perversion of the home-making
instinct. Jerome Willing wanted to make it appear, hammering in the
idea with all the ingenious variations of his advertising copy,
that home-making had its beginning and end in good furniture, fine
table linen, expensive rugs.... God! how about keeping alive some
intellectual or spiritual passion in the home? How about the children?
Did anybody suggest to women that they give to understanding their
children a tenth part of the time and real intelligence and real
purposefulness they put into getting the right clothes for them? A
tenth? A hundredth! The living, miraculous, infinitely fragile fabric
of the little human souls they lived with--did they treat that with the
care and deft-handed patience they gave to their filet-ornamented table
linen? No, they wrung it out hard and hung it up to dry as they did
their dishcloths.
And of course what Jerome Willing wanted of every employee was to
join with all his heart in this conspiracy to force women still more
helplessly into this slavery to possessions. Any one who could trick a
hapless woman into buying one more thing she had not dreamed of taking,
he was the hero of the new régime! That was what Jerome Willing meant
when he talked about “making good.” Making good what? Not good human
beings! That was the last thing anybody was to think of. And as to
trying to draw out from children any greatness of soul that might lie
hidden under their immaturity....
“You’re late again, Mr. Knapp,” said Harvey Bronson’s voice, rejoicing
in the accusation.
Lester Knapp acknowledged his three-minute crime by a nervous start of
astonishment and then by a fatigued nod of his head. All the swelling
fabric of his thoughts fell in a sodden heap, amounting to nothing at
all, as usual. He hung up his coat and hat and sat down on the same
old stool. He was no good; that was the matter with him--the whole
matter. He was just no good at all--for anything. What right had he to
criticize anybody at all, when anybody at all amounted to more than he!
He was a man who couldn’t get on in business, who couldn’t even get to
his work on time. He must have been standing on the sidewalk outside,
not knowing where he was, lost in that hot sympathy with childhood.
But nine o’clock is not the time to feel sympathy with anything. Nine
o’clock is sacred to the manipulation of a card catalogue of customers’
bills.
The spiked ball within him gave another lurch and tore at his vitals.
Lord, how sick of life that dyspepsia made you! It took the very heart
out of you so that, like a man on the rack, you were willing to admit
anything your accusers asserted. He admitted thus what everybody
tacitly asserted, that the trouble was all with him, with his weakness,
with his feeble vitality, with his futile disgusts at the organization
of the world he lived in, with his unmanly failure to seize other men
by the throat and force out of them the things his family needed.
Sympathy for childhood nothing! If he felt any real sympathy for his
own children, he’d somehow get more money to give them. What were
fathers for, if not for that? If he were a “man among men,” he would
do as other manly men did: use his wits to force the mothers of other
children to spend more money than they ought on material possessions
and thus have that money to spend in giving more material possessions
to his own.
And even the bitter way he phrased his surrender--yes, he knew that
everybody would say that it was a weak man’s sour-grapes denunciation
of what he was not strong enough to get. And they would be right. It
was.
He bent his long, lean, sallow face over the desk, looking disdainful
and bad-tempered as he always did when he was especially wretched and
unhappy.
Harvey Bronson glanced at him and thought, “What a lemon to have
around! He’d sour the milk by looking at it!”
Presently, as often happened to Lester, a lovely thing bloomed
there, silent, unseen. Through the crazy, rhythmless chatter of the
typewriters in the office, through the endless items on the endless
bills, he heard it coming, as from a great distance, on radiant feet.
It was only rhythm at first, divine, ordered rhythm, putting to flight
the senseless confusion of what lay about him.
And then there glowed before him the glory of the words, the
breath-taking upward lift of the first one, the sonorous cadences of
the lines that followed, the majestic march of the end.
“Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank
The army of unalterable law.”
Lester Knapp’s heart swelled, shone bright, escaped out of its misery,
felt itself one with the greatness of the whole.
The words kept singing themselves in his ear ... “... he looked, and
sank.” “... marched, rank on rank.” “The army of unalterable law.”
The weighty, iron clang of the one-syllabled word at the end gave
him a sensation of an ultimate strength somewhere. He leaned on that
strength and drew a long free breath.
His lean sallow face was lighted from within, and shone. He leaned far
over his desk to hide this. He tried to think of something else, to
put away from him this unmerited beauty and greatness. A man who is a
failure in a business-office ought not for an instant to forget his
failure. The least he can do is to be conscious of his humiliation at
all times.
But in spite of himself, his lips were curved in a sweet, happy smile.
* * * * *
Harvey Bronson glanced at him and felt irritated and aggrieved by his
expression. “What call has a dead loss like Lester Knapp got to be
looking so doggone satisfied with himself!” he thought.