As he stood and watched the crowd he found it necessary to ask himself the words: “What gave its slyly amused signal for this plaintive race through the centuries?”
He also found it necessary to answer: “A languid idiot, much in need of consolation, refuses to abandon his dream.”
Here and there, apart from the main lunge of the crowd, were men and women, standing still, as though motion had betrayed them, or loitering in a carelessly placid fashion. Vacancy and indecision tampered with most of their faces.
“How many minor poets have stood upon these street corners, making arrangements for a gradual and unnoticed death?” he asked himself, with the sentimental self-importance of youth.
But the stage hands clamored that he was neglecting the play—a habit falsely known as laziness—and that, with appropriate cunning, they had erected this city scene so that he and hordes of others should find it difficult to forget their tamely borrowed lines. With an uncomplaining wrench he returned to his surface role of a youth sent out in weakly gruesome clothes to look for some task that would begin to answer the flatly strident requests of an average life. The humble stupor fell back upon his shoulders and he walked to a bench in a public square, seated himself, and read the “want-ad” section of a newspaper. He spied, with a prostrate frown, the barren jest of: “Wanted—Young man for clerical work; must be neat, industrious, wide-awake, sober, well educated, reliable, good at details, ambitious, honest, painstaking; salary twelve dollars a week.” He muttered certain useless words to himself. “The illusion of a reluctant penny for fresh vigor. If the applicant is morbidly patient and reasonably deft at following orders he may after many years attain the virtue of writing the same trivially unfair appeal to other men. And even that exquisite victory is uncertain.”
He saw that as usual his only choice rested between an office-boy’s task, dignified by the title of junior clerk to make it more enticing, and unskilled manual labor.
“Now, how will you become tired—mentally or physically?” he asked himself with great formality.
Abruptly, and in that conscious and secret plot which men insist upon calling subconscious, he peered at the picture of a black man and a white man throwing a wilted rose back and forth to each other and catching it without a trace of emotion. The little, ridiculous rose lost a petal after each catch, but in spite of its smallness the number of petals seemed to be inexhaustible. At a distance the black and white man exactly resembled each other, but on approaching closer it could be seen that the black man held the face of an incredibly stolid ruffian, while the white man’s face was engraved with the patience of a cowed child. Not being acquainted with psychoanalysis—that blind exaggeration of sexual routines—Carl did not believe, after he returned to the touch of the park bench, that this picture had slyly veiled the direction of his physical desires. He knew that a fantastic whim had slipped from his mind and induced him to probe his choice between two equally drab kinds of labor, striving to make this choice endurable for a moment.
He selected three advertisements, all of them asking for manual laborers, walked from the park, and boarded a street car. The first place that he visited was a box factory—a slate-colored crate of a building, bearing that flatly unexpectant tone that expresses the year-long mating of smoke and dirt. As he ascended the gloomy stairway an endless drone and clatter battled with his ears. It seemed a senseless blasphemy directed at nothing in particular—the complaint of a dull-witted, harnessed giant who was being driven on without knowing why. Carl entered a huge room disheveled with sawdust and shavings and cluttered with black belts and wheels. Men with swarthy, motionless faces and feverish arms leaned over the wheels and saws. As he stood near the doorway, feeling dwarfed and uncertain, a man came toward him. Sturdy and short, the man looked like a magnified and absent-minded gnome, too busy to realize that civilization had played an obscene trick on him by stealing his fairy disguise and substituting the colorless inanities of overalls and a black shirt. The large and heavily twisted features on his face were partially hidden by a brown stubble of beard, and like all men who work forever in factories, he had an ageless air in which youth, middle age and old age were pounded into one dull evasion.
“What d’ya want?” he asked, the words jumbled to a bark.