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 world—the 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 first—not in the detail of precedence but in that of the laws by which we live—before 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."