The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

From that day, Emil began to live a particular and intensely nervous life.

He was now one of a large army, consisting of press men, lithographers, zinc men, clerks, artists, stenographers, bookkeepers. The majority of these men did their work methodically and as a matter of duty. When they quitted the factory at night, they forgot the labour that had occupied them during the day. With Emil, however, it was otherwise.

In a tiny room, reeking with heat and dust and clamorous with the rumble of the presses, he worked, scarcely taking note of the passing of one day and the birth of another. Often he sought the factory at night. The general manager, a man with a forceful presence and a shrewd eye, scornfully shrugged his shoulders. He distrusted such enthusiasm; but the owners were more hopeful. At night they had a door left open for the erratic inventor.

Unconscious that he was observed, Emil hurried through the streets and bounded up the steps to his den. Then how he caressed his invention, how he stared straight before him with eyes that saw nothing, while his brain drew from the surrounding ether a crowd of images wonderful for their reality and vigour. Sometimes in these nights of limpid contemplation, he became as beautiful as an angel. At other times, inspiration was capricious and the particular idea that he sought must be pursued. At such times he would crack his fingers at the joints, wave backward and forward like a tree in a storm, rock like a ship on an angry sea. Somehow, he would wrest his idea from the vast Unknown. And when he had succeeded in fixing it, smiling peacefully, he would go to sleep like a child; go to sleep and dream of some far land where invention was not torture. Before his work-bench, exhausted, he was often discovered in the early dawn by Ding Dong when he came to sweep out.

Half-witted, deaf and dumb, with a face so hideous that caricature could not exaggerate it, Ding Dong had received his nick-name from some bookish artist or other. With a fat tongue useless in his wide mouth and ears like sails, though they served to convey no sound to his meagre brain, Ding Dong ate habitually of the food thrown away by saloons, drank the dregs left in whiskey glasses, and, with the agility of a little cat, accepted the stumps of cigarettes which the clerks good naturedly threw him.

Between him and Emil, existed a peculiar friendship, and many were the novel breakfast parties held in the little workroom at the hour when New York was just waking to life.

Ding Dong procured rolls and made coffee; then three partook of the meal, for there were always three, the inventor, Ding Dong and, to furnish the feminine element, Lulu, a tiny South American monkey. Pinched and sad Lulu seemingly was not devoid of coquetry, for she wrapped herself in a bit of bright flannel which she held together beneath her chin with one small black hand, while she peeped out from between the folds with her little mournful eyes.

Of all the prisoners in the great building, none was more miserable than this little monkey. A present to the wife of one of the partners, who detested her, she had been brought down to the factory where she led a truly miserable life. In order to be out of reach of the furnace man, who had once treated her cruelly, she ran up among the asbestos-covered pipes, and there remained, save when she suffered herself to be lured down by Ding Dong. It was as if these two touching creatures, the one so nearly bestial and the other so nearly human, strove to lessen each other's profound loneliness.

As Emil pulled at his long pipe, resting after his exertions of the night, something of his serenity stole over his companions and wrapped in the same mood of abstracted dreaminess, they watched the dawn together.

When the department overseer appeared, a shudder ran through the building. The presses rumbled and boys began to feed them with great sheets of paper. The band of pale, dispirited youths in the art department etched their designs. With dust, sweat, oaths, grinding muscles, shriek and thunder of machinery,—the day began. Hour after hour the passionate clamour increased to a poem, a hymn, a pæan to the God of Work.