Martin Eden Page 16

  “This is hell, ain’t it?” Joe remarked once.

  Martin nodded, but felt a rasp of irritation. The statement had been obvious and unnecessary. They did not talk while they worked. Conversation threw them out of their stride, as it did this time, compelling Martin to miss a stroke of his iron and to make two extra motions before he caught his stride again.

  On Friday morning the washer ran. Twice a week they had to put through hotel linen, – the sheets, pillow-slips, spreads, table-cloths, and napkins. This finished, they buckled down to “fancy starch.” It was slow work, fastidious and delicate, and Martin did not learn it so readily. Besides, he could not take chances. Mistakes were disastrous.

  “See that,” Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover that he could have crumpled from view in one hand. “Scorch that an’ it’s twenty dollars out of your wages.”

  So Martin did not scorch that, and eased down on his muscular tension, though nervous tension rose higher than ever, and he listened sympathetically to the other’s blasphemies as he toiled and suffered over the beautiful things that women wear when they do not have to do their own laundrying. “Fancy starch” was Martin’s nightmare, and it was Joe’s, too. It was “fancy starch” that robbed them of their hard-won minutes. They toiled at it all day. At seven in the evening they broke off to run the hotel linen through the mangle. At ten o’clock, while the hotel guests slept, the two laundrymen sweated on at “fancy starch” till midnight, till one, till two. At half-past two they knocked off.

  Saturday morning it was “fancy starch,” and odds and ends, and at three in the afternoon the week’s work was done.

  “You ain’t a-goin’ to ride them seventy miles into Oakland on top of this?” Joe demanded, as they sat on the stairs and took a triumphant smoke.

  “Got to,” was the answer.

  “What are you goin’ for? – a girl?”

  “No; to save two and a half on the railroad ticket. I want to renew some books at the library.”

  “Why don’t you send ’em down an’ up by express? That’ll cost only a quarter each way.”

  Martin considered it.

  “An’ take a rest to-morrow,” the other urged. “You need it. I know I do. I’m plumb tuckered out.”

  He looked it. Indomitable, never resting, fighting for seconds and minutes all week, circumventing delays and crushing down obstacles, a fount of resistless energy, a high-driven human motor, a demon for work, now that he had accomplished the week’s task he was in a state of collapse. He was worn and haggard, and his handsome face drooped in lean exhaustion. He pulled his cigarette spiritlessly, and his voice was peculiarly dead and monotonous. All the snap and fire had gone out of him. His triumph seemed a sorry one.

  “An’ next week we got to do it all over again,” he said sadly. “An’ what’s the good of it all, hey? Sometimes I wish I was a hobo. They don’t work, an’ they get their livin’. Gee! I wish I had a glass of beer; but I can’t get up the gumption to go down to the village an’ get it. You’ll stay over, an’ send your books dawn by express, or else you’re a damn fool.”

  “But what can I do here all day Sunday?” Martin asked.

  “Rest. You don’t know how tired you are. Why, I’m that tired Sunday I can’t even read the papers. I was sick once-typhoid. In the hospital two months an’ a half. Didn’t do a tap of work all that time. It was beautiful.”

  “It was beautiful,” he repeated dreamily, a minute later.

  Martin took a bath, after which he found that the head laundryman had disappeared. Most likely he had gone for a glass of beer Martin decided, but the half-mile walk down to the village to find out seemed a long journey to him. He lay on his bed with his shoes off, trying to make up his mind. He did not reach out for a book. He was too tired to feel sleepy, and he lay, scarcely thinking, in a semi-stupor of weariness, until it was time for supper. Joe did not appear for that function, and when Martin heard the gardener remark that most likely he was ripping the slats off the bar, Martin understood. He went to bed immediately afterward, and in the morning decided that he was greatly rested. Joe being still absent, Martin procured a Sunday paper and lay down in a shady nook under the trees. The morning passed, he knew not how. He did not sleep, nobody disturbed him, and he did not finish the paper. He came back to it in the afternoon, after dinner, and fell asleep over it.

  So passed Sunday, and Monday morning he was hard at work, sorting clothes, while Joe, a towel bound tightly around his head, with groans and blasphemies, was running the washer and mixing soft-soap.

  “I simply can’t help it,” he explained. “I got to drink when Saturday night comes around.”

  Another week passed, a great battle that continued under the electric lights each night and that culminated on Saturday afternoon at three o’clock, when Joe tasted his moment of wilted triumph and then drifted down to the village to forget. Martin’s Sunday was the same as before. He slept in the shade of the trees, toiled aimlessly through the newspaper, and spent long hours lying on his back, doing nothing, thinking nothing. He was too dazed to think, though he was aware that he did not like himself. He was self-repelled, as though he had undergone some degradation or was intrinsically foul. All that was god-like in him was blotted out. The spur of ambition was blunted; he had no vitality with which to feel the prod of it. He was dead. His soul seemed dead. He was a beast, a work-beast. He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting down through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky whisper as of old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets trembling to disclosure. Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste was bad in his mouth. A black screen was drawn across his mirror of inner vision, and fancy lay in a darkened sick-room where entered no ray of light. He envied Joe, down in the village, rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with maggots, exulting in maudlin ways over maudlin things, fantastically and gloriously drunk and forgetful of Monday morning and the week of deadening toil to come.

  A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and loathed life. He was oppressed by a sense of failure. There was reason for the editors refusing his stuff. He could see that clearly now, and laugh at himself and the dreams he had dreamed. Ruth returned his “Sea Lyrics” by mail. He read her letter apathetically. She did her best to say how much she liked them and that they were beautiful. But she could not lie, and she could not disguise the truth from herself. She knew they were failures, and he read her disapproval in every perfunctory and unenthusiastic line of her letter. And she was right. He was firmly convinced of it as he read the poems over. Beauty and wonder had departed from him, and as he read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what he had had in mind when he wrote them. His audacities of phrase struck him as grotesque, his felicities of expression were monstrosities, and everything was absurd, unreal, and impossible. He would have burned the “Sea Lyrics” on the spot, had his will been strong enough to set them aflame. There was the engine-room, but the exertion of carrying them to the furnace was not worth while. All his exertion was used in washing other persons’ clothes. He did not have any left for private affairs.

  He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull himself together and answer Ruth’s letter. But Saturday afternoon, after work was finished and he had taken a bath, the desire to forget overpowered him. “I guess I’ll go down and see how Joe’s getting on,” was the way he put it to himself; and in the same moment he knew that he lied. But he did not have the energy to consider the lie. If he had had the energy, he would have refused to consider the lie, because he wanted to forget. He started for the village slowly and casually, increasing his pace in spite of himself as he neared the saloon.

  “I thought you was on the water-wagon,” was Joe’s greeting.

  Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for whiskey, filling his own glass brimming before he passed the bottle.

  “Don’t take all night about it,” he said roughly.

  The other was dawdling with the bottle, and M
artin refused to wait for him, tossing the glass off in a gulp and refilling it.

  “Now, I can wait for you,” he said grimly; “but hurry up.”

  Joe hurried, and they drank together.

  “The work did it, eh?” Joe queried.

  Martin refused to discuss the matter.

  “It’s fair hell, I know,” the other went on, “but I kind of hate to see you come off the wagon, Mart. Well, here’s how!”

  Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and invitations and awing the barkeeper, an effeminate country youngster with watery blue eyes and hair parted in the middle.

  “It’s something scandalous the way they work us poor devils,” Joe was remarking. “If I didn’t bowl up, I’d break loose an’ burn down the shebang. My bowlin’ up is all that saves ’em, I can tell you that.”

  But Martin made no answer. A few more drinks, and in his brain he felt the maggots of intoxication beginning to crawl. Ah, it was living, the first breath of life he had breathed in three weeks. His dreams came back to him. Fancy came out of the darkened room and lured him on, a thing of flaming brightness. His mirror of vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of imagery. Wonder and beauty walked with him, hand in hand, and all power was his. He tried to tell it to Joe, but Joe had visions of his own, infallible schemes whereby he would escape the slavery of laundry-work and become himself the owner of a great steam laundry.

  “I tell yeh, Mart, they won’t be no kids workin’ in my laundry-not on yer life. An’ they won’t be no workin’ a livin’ soul after six P.M. You hear me talk! They’ll be machinery enough an’ hands enough to do it all in decent workin’ hours, an’ Mart, s’help me, I’ll make yeh superintendent of the shebang-the whole of it, all of it. Now here’s the scheme. I get on the water-wagon an’ save my money for two years-save an’ then-”

  But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the barkeeper, until that worthy was called away to furnish drinks to two farmers who, coming in, accepted Martin’s invitation. Martin dispensed royal largess, inviting everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and the gardener’s assistant from the hotel, the barkeeper, and the furtive hobo who slid in like a shadow and like a shadow hovered at the end of the bar.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to the washer.

  “I say,” he began.

  “Don’t talk to me,” Martin snarled.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” he said at noon, when they knocked off for dinner.

  Tears came into the other’s eyes.

  “That’s all right, old man,” he said. “We’re in hell, an’ we can’t help ourselves. An’, you know, I kind of like you a whole lot. That’s what made it-hurt. I cottoned to you from the first.”

  Martin shook his hand.

  “Let’s quit,” Joe suggested. “Let’s chuck it, an’ go hoboin’. I ain’t never tried it, but it must be dead easy. An’ nothin’ to do. Just think of it, nothin’ to do. I was sick once, typhoid, in the hospital, an’ it was beautiful. I wish I’d get sick again.”

  The week dragged on. The hotel was full, and extra “fancy starch” poured in upon them. They performed prodigies of valor. They fought late each night under the electric lights, bolted their meals, and even got in a half hour’s work before breakfast. Martin no longer took his cold baths. Every moment was drive, drive, drive, and Joe was the masterful shepherd of moments, herding them carefully, never losing one, counting them over like a miser counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish machine, aided ably by that other machine that thought of itself as once having been one Martin Eden, a man.

  But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think. The house of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its shadowy caretaker. He was a shadow. Joe was right. They were both shadows, and this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a dream? Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the heavy irons back and forth over the white garments, it came to him that it was a dream. In a short while, or maybe after a thousand years or so, he would awake, in his little room with the ink-stained table, and take up his writing where he had left off the day before. Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the awakening would be the changing of the watches, when he would drop down out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck, under the tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind blowing through his flesh.

  Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o’clock.

  “Guess I’ll go down an’ get a glass of beer,” Joe said, in the queer, monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.

  Martin seemed suddenly to wake up. He opened the kit bag and oiled his wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the bearings. Joe was halfway down to the saloon when Martin passed by, bending low over the handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-six gear with rhythmic strength, his face set for seventy miles of road and grade and dust. He slept in Oakland that night, and on Sunday covered the seventy miles back. And on Monday morning, weary, he began the new week’s work, but he had kept sober.

  A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled as a machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a glimmering bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to scorch off the hundred and forty miles. But this was not rest. It was super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering bit of soul that was all that was left him from former life. At the end of the seventh week, without intending it, too weak to resist, he drifted down to the village with Joe and drowned life and found life until Monday morning.

  Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty miles, obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the numbness of still greater exertion. At the end of three months he went down a third time to the village with Joe. He forgot, and lived again, and, living, he saw, in clear illumination, the beast he was making of himself-not by the drink, but by the work. The drink was an effect, not a cause. It followed inevitably upon the work, as the night follows upon the day. Not by becoming a toil-beast could he win to the heights, was the message the whiskey whispered to him, and he nodded approbation. The whiskey was wise. It told secrets on itself.

  He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and while they drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and scribbled.

  “A telegram, Joe,” he said. “Read it.”

  Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what he read seemed to sober him. He looked at the other reproachfully, tears oozing into his eyes and down his cheeks.

  “You ain’t goin’ back on me, Mart?” he queried hopelessly.

  Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the message to the telegraph office.

  “Hold on,” Joe muttered thickly. “Lemme think.”

  He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin’s arm around him and supporting him, while he thought.

  “Make that two laundrymen,” he said abruptly. “Here, lemme fix it.”

  “What are you quitting for?” Martin demanded.

  “Same reason as you.”

  “But I’m going to sea. You can’t do that.”

  “Nope,” was the answer, “but I can hobo all right, all right.”

  Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-

  “By God, I think you’re right! Better a hobo than a beast of toil. Why, man, you’ll live. And that’s more than you ever did before.”

  “I was in hospital, once,” Joe corrected. “It was beautiful. Typhoid-did I tell you?”

  While Martin changed the telegram to “two laundrymen,” Joe went on:-

  “I never wanted to drink when I was in hospital. Funny, ain’t it? But when I’ve ben workin’ like a slave all week, I just got to bowl up. Ever noticed that cooks drink like hell? – an’ bakers, too? It’s the work. They’ve sure got to. Here, lemme pay half of that telegram.”

  �
�I’ll shake you for it,” Martin offered.

  “Come on, everybody drink,” Joe called, as they rattled the dice and rolled them out on the damp bar.

  Monday morning Joe was wild with anticipation. He did not mind his aching head, nor did he take interest in his work. Whole herds of moments stole away and were lost while their careless shepherd gazed out of the window at the sunshine and the trees.

  “Just look at it!” he cried. “An’ it’s all mine! It’s free. I can lie down under them trees an’ sleep for a thousan’ years if I want to. Aw, come on, Mart, let’s chuck it. What’s the good of waitin’ another moment. That’s the land of nothin’ to do out there, an’ I got a ticket for it-an’ it ain’t no return ticket, b’gosh!”

  A few minutes later, filling the truck with soiled clothes for the washer, Joe spied the hotel manager’s shirt. He knew its mark, and with a sudden glorious consciousness of freedom he threw it on the floor and stamped on it.

  “I wish you was in it, you pig-headed Dutchman!” he shouted. “In it, an’ right there where I’ve got you! Take that! an’ that! an’ that! damn you! Hold me back, somebody! Hold me back!”

  Martin laughed and held him to his work. On Tuesday night the new laundrymen arrived, and the rest of the week was spent breaking them into the routine. Joe sat around and explained his system, but he did no more work.

  “Not a tap,” he announced. “Not a tap. They can fire me if they want to, but if they do, I’ll quit. No more work in mine, thank you kindly. Me for the freight cars an’ the shade under the trees. Go to it, you slaves! That’s right. Slave an’ sweat! Slave an’ sweat! An’ when you’re dead, you’ll rot the same as me, an’ what’s it matter how you live? – eh? Tell me that-what’s it matter in the long run?”