“Factories he goes to!” she cried, in a voice that was not unlike the previous rattling of the skillet. “I bought him a new suit and shoes this morning so he could look for common, dirty work! It’s terrible. Here we sent him to high-school for four years and his only ambition is to work as a common laborer.”
The father smiled dubiously at her explosion.
“Now, Carrie, don’t let all the neighbors know your business,” he said. “Your holler is enough to drive anyone crazy. There’s no harm in honest work, Carrie, and besides he’ll soon get tired of sweating in factories and look for something decent. Don’t worry.”
“I guess anything will be better than that silly scribbling that’s ruined his life so far,” said Mrs. Felman, her anger dwindling to a guttural sulkiness. Carl, who had been sitting with a suffering grin on his face, gave them soothing words and once more held them at arm’s length.
CHAPTER V.
In the dirty clothes that he had worn upon his arrival, qualified by a clean shirt, he went forth on the next morning and found work as a lineman’s helper for a telephone company. He was required to climb up the wooden poles; hand tools to the lineman; unwind huge spools of wire; make simple repairs under the lineman’s guidance. As he labored from pole to pole, down a suburban street, taking the impersonal whip of the sun and winning the pricks of insects on his sweat-dappled face, he felt dully grateful toward the physical orders that were crudely obliterating the confused demands of his heart and mind. As he toiled on, this dull feeling gradually rose to a self-lacerating joy. He revelled in the cheap vexations brought by his tasks—the unpleasant scraping of shins against iron rungs and the sting of dust in his eyes—and his self-hatred stood apart, delightedly watching the slavish antics of the physical mannikin.
Then, when this emotion paused to catch its breath it was replaced by a calmer one, and his insignificance receded a bit, beneath the substantial lure of arms and legs that were moving toward a fixed purpose. “I am doing something definite now and that is at least a shade better than the indefinite uselessness of my thoughts,” he mumbled to himself as he lurched from pole to pole. The slowly mounting ache of his muscles became a bitter hint of approaching peace and he looked forward to the moment when he would quit his labors and enjoy the returning independence of his body, as though it were a god’s condescension. He worked quickly and breathlessly, as one who hurries to a distant lover’s arms. Filled with a doggedly naive hatred for his own deficiencies, he welcomed this chance to insult them with disagreeable and infinitely humble postures, and he gladly punished himself underneath the violence of the sun. It was, indeed, a spiritual sadism deigning to make use of the flesh.
“Hey, Jack, take it a little easier,” the lineman called down to him once. “Don’t kill yourself at this job. It’s too damned hot to work hard.”
Carl gave him a beaten grin and moved his arms even faster while the lineman bewilderedly meditated upon this imbecility. The lineman was a burly young Swede with a broadly upturned nose and thickly wide lips. His face suggested poorly carved wood. The blankness of his mind held few skirmishes with thought on this rasping afternoon and his mental images were confined to tools, stray glasses of beer, yielding pillows, and feminine contours—the flitting promises that held him to his day of toil. He possessed no human significance to Carl—he was a drably accidental automaton who shouted down the blessed orders that gave Carl little time for definite thoughts and emotions: an unconscious helper in the flogging of mind and soul.
As they walked down the street after the day’s work Carl looked closely at him for the first time. Sweat and dirt were violating the youthful outlines of his face, and his small blue eyes were contracted and deeply sunk as though still directing the movements of his arms. The blunt strength of his body sagged beneath the colorlessness of clothes and his head was wearily bent forward—the grey frenzies of a civilization had exacted their daily tribute and it is possible that he was not aware of the glory and impressiveness which certain poets find in his cringing role. For a time Carl looked at him with an exhausted friendliness and felt tied to him by the intimate bonds of confessing sweat and conquered toil, and this illusion did not vanish until he spoke.