“Come on, let’s go,” he said, and the two walked out of the saloon, Carl taking care to stroll in a reluctant fashion and steeling himself for the angry shout that might come.
As Carl walked down the street he felt a twinge of regret at having stolen the money of a stumbling, minor puppet. He told himself that this petty gesture had been forced upon him by an innately vicious contortion known as life, but his emotions cringed as they arranged an appropriate explanation.
“This man whom I have robbed will curse the treacherous unfairness of life and his eyes, dilated with bitterness, will see more clearly his relation to the things around him. In this way I have really befriended him. The railroad-detective, who once struck me on the head with the butt of a pistol, when I was offering no resistance, was trying to obtain revenge—revenge upon the people who had made him their snarling slave—and he blindly reached out for the object nearest to him, which happened to be my head. But there was no desire for vengeance in my own gesture. I steal from men in order to prevent life from stealing an occasional refuge for my thoughts and emotions. A purely practical device.”
He left Petersen at the next street-corner and boarded a crowded street-car, reflecting on his engagement to meet the “quiet an’ thin Lucy” as he stood wearily clinging to the leather strap. Petersen’s attitude toward women was a familiar joke. Dressed in its little array of fixed and confident variations it had pursued Carl in the past without repulsing or flattering him. To him it was an elaborately pitiful delusion of dominance made by hosts of men, who felt the craving to inject a dramatic variety and assurance into the frightened monotones of their lives. In an aching effort to dignify their barren days these men adopted the roles of hunters and masters among women. They entered, with infinite coarseness and precision, a glamorous realm of lies, jealousies, cruelties, and haloes, and in this wildly fantastic land they managed to forget the flatly submissive attitudes of another world. Carl was telling himself that he had been waiting for a woman who could bring him something more than the crudely veiled undulation of flesh but he fashioned the starving little romance with great deliberateness.
“Women have excited my flesh and it has often yielded to them, but that is simply a necessary triviality,” he said to himself. “I, too, must seek to evade the monotonies and restrictions of my life, lest I become mad, but at least I am quite conscious of the joke. The cheap little drug-store does not witness any hoodwinked swaggers on my part! So on to quiet Lucy, with her stiff stupidities and elastic curves.”
Once more he had to pass the garrulous sentries at the gate—the neighbors around the doorstep. They eyed the dirt upon his clothes and face with an amazed contempt—Carrie Felman’s son a common laborer!—and lost in their scrutiny they gave him monosyllabic greetings.
“Well, judging from the dirt all over you you’ve found a job,” said his mother in tones of blunt resignation.
“Yes, I’m working as a lineman’s helper for the telephone company,” he answered in an expressionless voice.
After he had washed his parents pelted him with amiable questions—the details of his work, wages, and companions—a dash of solicitude swinging with their desire to entertain the dull aftermath of a hot summer day. He answered their questions patiently and they were glad that their son seemed ready to plunge his “wildness” into the soothing currents of an average life. Their affection for him was only able to dominate their hearts when he failed to challenge the peaceful assumptions and bargains of their lives, for otherwise it verged into hatred because it was confronted by a stabbing mystery which it could not understand.
After the evening meal he sat in an easy chair upholstered with violent green plush and usually occupied at such times by his father, but donated to him in honor of his first evening of submission. He sprawled in the chair, trifling with the headlines of a newspaper and throwing them aside. A warm and not unpleasant stupor began to descend upon his thoughts and emotions and they fluttered spasmodically, like circles of drugged butterflies. He closed his eyes. His legs and arms held a heaviness which he enjoyed because he was not forced to raise it.