The Thread of Flame

Chapter 5

No lighter-hearted man than I trod the streets of New York that evening. I had breakfasted in the morning; I had shared Bridget's cold meat and bread at midday; I could "blow myself in" to something to eat now, and then go happily to bed.

There was but one flaw in this bliss, and that was the thought of Mildred Averill. Whether she would be glad or sorry that for the minute I was landing on my feet, I could not forecast. And yet when I called her up she pretended to be glad. I say she pretended, only because in her first words there was a note of disappointment, perhaps of dismay, though she recovered herself quickly.

"But I can be easy in my mind about you?" she asked, after I had declined to tell her what my new occupation was.

"Quite easy; only I want you to know how grateful I am."

"Oh, please don't. If I could have done more!"

"Fortunately that wasn't needed."

"But if it should be needed in the future"

"I hope it won't be."

"But if it should be?"

"Oh, then we'dwe'd see."

"So that for now it's" that note stole into her voice again, and with a wistful question in the intonation"for now it'sit's good-by?"

"Only for now."

She seemed to grasp at something. "What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, just thatthat the future"

"I hate the future."

It was one of her sudden outbursts, and the receiver was hung up.

After all, this abrupt termination to an unsatisfactory mode of speech was the wisest method for us both. We couldn't go on sparring and there was nothing to do but spar. Knowing that I couldn't speak plainly she had ceased to expect me to do so, and yet...

When I say that this was a relief to me, you must understand it only in the sense that my situation was too difficult to allow of my inviting further complications. Had I been freebut I wasn't free. The conviction that somewhere in the world I had permanent ties began to be as strong as the belief that at some time in my life love had been the dominating factor. There had been a woman. Lydia Blair had seen her. Her flaming eyes haunted me from a darkness in which they were the only thing living. The fact that I couldn't construct the rest of the portrait no more permitted me to doubt the original than you can doubt the existence of a plant after you have seen a leaf from it. The best I could hope for now was the privilege of living and working in some simple, elemental way that would give me the atmosphere in which to re-collect myself, recueillement, the French graphically name the process, and grow unconsciously back into the facts that effort would not restore to me.

For that simple, elemental work and life the opportunity came to me at last. I see now that it was opportunity, though I should not have said so at the time. At the time it was only hard necessity, though hard necessity with those products of shelter and food which in themselves meant peace. I had peace, therefore, of a kind, and to it I am able now to attribute that growth and progress backward, if I may so express myself, which led to the miracle.

My work next day lay in peeling off the burlap from the newly arrived consignment, stripping the rolls of the sheepskins in which they were wrapped inside, spreading the rugs flat, and sweeping them with a stiff, strong broom. After that we laid them in assorted piles, preparatory to carrying them up-stairs. They were Khorassans, Kirmanshahs, Bokharas, and Sarouks, with a superb lot of blue and gold Chinese reproduced on the company's looms in India.

The good-natured Peter Bridget taking his turn up-stairs, my colleague that day was an American of Finnish extraction, whose natural sunniness of disposition had been soured by the thwarting of a strong ambition to "get on." Combining the broad features of the Lapp with Scandinavian hair and complexion, his expression reminded you of a bright summer day over which a storm was beginning to lower. The son of one large family and the father of another, he was at war with the world in which his earning capacity had come to have its limitations fixed at eighteen dollars a week.

He was not conversational; he only grunted remarks out of a slow-moving bitterness of spirit.

"What's the good of always layin' the pipe and never gettin' no oil along it? That's what I want to know. Went to work when I was fourteen, and now I'm forty-two, and in exactly the same spot."

"You're not in exactly the same spot," I said, "because you've got your wife and children."

"And the money I've spent on that woman and them kids!"

"But you're fond of them, aren't you?"

"No better wife no guy never had, and no nicer little fam'ly."

"Well, then, that's so much to the good. Those are assets, aren't they? They'll mean more to you than if you had money in the savings bank and didn't have them."

"I can't eddicate 'em proper, or send 'em to high-school, let alone college, or give 'em nothin' like what they ought to have. All I can leave 'em when I die is what my father left me, the right not to be able to get nowhereand yet you'll hear a lot of gabbers jazzin' away about this bein' the best country for a working-man."

During the lunch-hour we drifted into Fifth Avenue, joining the throng of those who for sixty minutes were like souls enjoying a respite from limbo. Limbo, I ask you to notice, is not hell; but it is far from paradise. The dictionary defines the word as a borderland, a place of restraint, and it was in both those senses, I think, that the shop and the factory struck the imaginations of these churning minds. The shop and the factory formed a borderland, neither one thing nor another, a nowhere; but a place of restraint none the less. More than the physical restraint involved in the necessity for working was implied by this; it was restraint of the spirit, restraint of the part of a man that soars, restraint of the impulse to seize the good things of life in a world where they seemed to be free.

Though I could understand little of the conversation around meYiddish, Polish, Armenian, CzechI knew they were talking of jobs and bosses in relation to politics and the big things of life.

"What's the matter with them guys at Albany and Washington that they don't come across with laws?"

That was the question and that was the complaint. It was one of the two main blends in the current of dissatisfaction. The other blend was the conviction that if those who had the power didn't right self-evident wrongs, the wronged would somehow have to right themselves. There was no speechmaking, no stump oratory, after the manner of a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon crowd; all was smothered, sullen, burning, secretive, and intense.

On our way back to the cavern the Finn remarked:

"No man doesn't mind work. He'd rather work than loaf, even if he was paid for loafin'. What he can't stick is not havin' room to grow in, bein' squeezed into undersize, like a Chinese woman's foot."

After all, I reflected, this might be the real limbo, not only of the working-man, but of all the dissatisfied in all ranks throughout the worldthe denials of the liberty to expand. Mildred Averill was rebelling against it in her way as much as the Finn in his, as much as any Jew or Pole or Italian in all the crowd surging back at that minute to the dens from which they had come out. Discontent was not confined to any one class or to any one set of needs. Custom, convention, and greed had clamped our energies round and round as with iron hoops, till all but the few among us had lost the right to grow. It wasn't a question of pay; it wasn't primarily a question of money at all, though the question of money was involved in it. More than anything else, it was one of a new orientation toward everything, with a shifting of basic principles. The first must become last and the last must become firstnot in the detail of precedence but in that of the laws by which we livebefore men, as men, could get out of the prison-houses, into which civilization had thrust them, to the broad, free air to which they were born. The struggle between labor and capital was a mere duel between blind men. It was bluff on the surface by those on both sides who were afraid to put the ax to the root of the tree. No symbol was so eloquent to me of the bondage into which the human elements in Church and State had chained the spirit of man as the Finn's comparison of the Chinese woman's foot.

When the Floater paid me another dollar and a half that night he told me that if I worked like a dog, was as meek as a mouse, and "didn't get no labor rot into my nut" I could have Clancy's job as a regular thing. But by this time I was beginning to understand him. I have already called him a terrier, and a terrier he was, with a terrier's bark, but with a terrier's fundamental friendliness. If you patted him, he wagged his tail. True, he wagged it unwillingly, ungraciously, and with a fond belief that you didn't know he was wagging it at all; but the fact that he did wag it was enough for me.

It was enough for us all. There was not a man among the "luggers" who didn't understand him, nor among the salesmen either, as I came to understand.

"Dee ye know how to take that little scalpeen? He's like wan of thim Graaks or Eytalians that's got a quare talk of their own, but you know you can put it into our talk and make it mane somethin'. Wance I was at a circus where a monkey what looked like a little ould man talked his kind o' talk, and it made sinse. Well, that's like the Floater. He's like the monkey what can't talk nothin' but monkey-talk; but glory be to God! he manes the same thing as a man. Don't ye moind him, Brogan. When he talks his talk, you talk it to yerself in yer own talk, and ye'll kape yer timper and get everything straight."

This kindly advice was given me by Denis Gallivan, the oldest of the porters, and a sort of dean of our corps. Small, wiry, as strong as a horse, with a wizened, leathery face that looked as if it had been dried and tanned in a hot sunshine, there was a yearning in his blue-black eyes like that which some of the old Italian masters put into the eyes of saints. Denis, Bridget, and the Finn composed what I may call the permanent staff, the two others, excluding myself, being invariably restless chaps who, like Clancy, came for a few weeks and went off again. With the three workers named I made a fourth, henceforth helping to carry the responsibility of the house on my shoulders.

It was a good place, with pleasant work. Two or three times I could have had promotion and a raise in pay, but I had reasons of my own for staying where I was.

My duties being simple, I enjoyed the sheer physical exertion I was obliged to make. Arriving about seven in the morning I helped to sweep the floors, with a special sweeping of the rugs, druggets, and mattings that had lain out overnight. If there was anything to be carried from the basement to the upper floor I helped in that. Then, having "cleaned" myself, as the phrase went, I took my place in the shop, ready to pull out the goods which the salesmen panted to display to customers, and to put them back again.

For this there were always four of us in the spacious, well-lighted shop, which must have been sixty feet long by thirty wide, and I liked the dignity and quiet of all the regulation tasks. As a rule, we were on the floor by nine, though it was generally after ten before we saw a customer. During that hour of spare time we porters hung together at the farther end, exchanging in low tones the gossip of the day, confiding personal experiences, or discussing the war and the reconstruction of society. Now and then one of the four or five salesmen would condescendingly join with us, but for the most part the salesmen kept to themselves, treating the same topics from a higher point of view. The gods of Olympus did little more than enter by the main door from Fifth Avenue, cross to their offices, after which we scarcely saw them. Only the Floater moved at will between us and them, with a little dog's freedom to be equally at home in the stable and the drawing-room.

A flicker of interest always woke with the arrival of customers. They entered with diffidence, confused by the subdued brilliance of the Persian and Chinese colors hanging on our walls, by the wide empty spaces, and their own ignorance of what they came in search of.

"There's not tin women in New York 'll know the difference betwane a Kirmanshah and an Anatolia," Denis said to me one day, "and it'd make ye sorry for thim when they comes to furnishin'. Glory be to God, they'll walk in here knowin' no more than that they want rugs, and it's all wan to thim what ye puts before thim so long as it's the color they like and it lays on the ground. If this wasn't the honestest house that the Lord ever made there'd be chatin' till we was all in danger o' hell fire."

But in spite of this ignorance, we received our visitors courteously, a salesman going forward to meet all newcomers and conducting them to the row of reproduced Louis Seize cane-bottomed chairs placed for their convenience. Then it would be, "Bridget, bring that Khorassan3246, you know, that fine specimen." And Bridget would know, and call the Finn to help him lay it out. Or it would be, "Brogan, can you find the Meshed that came in yesterday2947? I think madam would like to see it." On this Denis and I would haul out the big carpet, stretch it at the lady's feet, listen to comments which, as Denis put it, had the value of a milliner's criticism of the make of a "floyin'-machine," and eventually carry it back to the pile whence we had taken it. I may say here that for customers we had little respect, except from the point of view of their purchasing power.

"Did ye ever see wan o' thim that could tell a Sehna knot from a Giordes?" Denis asked, scornfully. "Did ye ever see wan o' thim that knowed which rug had a woolen warp and which a cotton, or which rug 'd wear, or which 'd all go up in flock? If a woman was to boy a shimmy that 'll be in rags before it's been six toimes to the wash with as little sinse as she'll boy a rug that ought to last for a hunderd years her husband 'd be in jail for dit."

But for me, customers had one predominant interest. Among them there might be some one I could recognize, or some one who would recognize me. As to the last, I had one fear and many hopes. My one fear was that Mildred Averill or Lulu Averill might one day wander in; but as time went on and they didn't, I ceased to dread the mischance. As it also proved in the end it was the same way with my hopes. No one turned up whom I could hail as an acquaintance; no one ever glanced at me with an old friend's curiosity.

So I settled down to the routine which, though I didn't know it then, was the mental rest that, according to Doctor Scattlethwaite, I needed for my recovery. The days were so much alike that I could no more differentiate between them than can a man in prison. On eighteen dollars a week I contrived to live with that humble satisfaction of humble needs which I learned to be all that a man requires. Little by little I accommodated myself to the outlook of my surroundings, and if I never thought exactly like my companions I found myself able to listen to their views complacently. With all three of my more important co-workersDenis, Bridget, and the Finnmy relations were cordial, a fact due largely to their courteous respect for my private history, into which none of them ever pried. Like Lydia, Drinkwater, and every one else, they took it for granted that there was something I wanted to hide, and allowed me to hide it.

In this way I passed the end of the year 1916, the whole of 1917, and all of 1918 up to the beginning of December. Though the country had in the mean time gone to war it made little difference to us. Denis was too old to be drafted; Bridget and the Finn were exempted as fathers of large families; I was examined, and, for reasons I do not yet understand, rejected. I should have made a very good fighting man; but I think I was looked upon as of weak or uncertain mentality.

During all those months I courted the obscurity so easy to find. Between Creed & Creed's and my squint-eyed room with the fungi on the mantelpiece I went by what you might call the back ways, in order to risk no meeting with Mildred Averill or her family. Since they frequented the neighboring book store, one of the best known in New York, they might at some time see me going in or out, and so I kept to the direction of Sixth Avenue. Though I often drifted out into the midday throng of which I have spoken already there was little danger in that, because I was swallowed in the crowd. In company for the most part with Sam Pelly, I took my meals in places so modest that Lydia Blair was unlikely to run across me; and I had no one else to be afraid of.

Peace therefore stole into my racked soul, though it was the peace of death. While I had recurrences of the hope that my lost sense of identity would one day be restored to me, I dropped into the habit of not thinking much about it. I ate and drank; I had shelter and clothes. The narrow margin on which other working-people lived came to seem enough for me. Toward the great accidents of life, illness or incapacity, I learned to take the same philosophic attitude as they, trusting to luck, or to something too subtle and spiritual to put easily into words, to take care of me. If I developed any deep, strong principle of living it was along the lines of the wish that on a snowy December afternoon had led me to Meeting-House Green. I knew that the universe was filled with a great Will and tried to let myself glide along on it in simplicity, and harmony.