All I can say is that I remember how the boy who, on that evening long ago, went slowly away from the barn through the mud of the barnyard, turned his back on the new house, and stopped for a moment on the bridge leading to the old house, sad and frightened. Before him lay a life of adventures (imagined if not actually experienced), but at the moment he went not toward the future but toward the past. In the older house there was, to be sure, a meal to be had without labor—in this case a meal prepared at the hands of a kindly faced woman—and there was also a warm bed into which the boy could crawl to indulge all night long undisturbed in his dreams; but there was something else. A sense of security? It may be, after all, just the sense of security, or assurance of warmth, food, and leisure—most of all leisure—the boy wanted on that evening, that, for some reason I cannot explain, marked the end of boyhood for him.
BOOK TWO
NOTE I
I WAS rolling kegs of nails out of a great sheet-iron warehouse and onto a long platform, from where they were to be carted by trucks, down a short street, out to a wharf and aboard a ship. The kegs were heavy but they were not large, and as they were rolled down a slight incline to the platform the rolling could be done with the foot. Like practically all modern workmen my body had plenty to do but my mind was idle. There was no planning of the work, no scheming to make the day’s work fit the plan. The truckmen, four heavy and good-natured Swedes, loaded the trucks, and that also required no skill. The kegs were so heavy that a few of them only could be put on a truck at one time and the trucks did not have to be loaded skillfully.
As for the nails themselves, they came pouring out of machines somewhere back in the factory at the edge of which the warehouse stood.
The warehouse had two platforms, one at which cars were loaded and our own for the loading of trucks, and I could hear voices on the other platform—an oath, a broken laugh—but never did I see the men employed there.
On our side we had a little life of our own. My single fellow-workman, who all day long ran in and out of the warehouse with me, was a short, stocky young man who on Saturday afternoons played baseball and, in the winter, hockey. He continually boasted of his prowess in games and when the warehouse foreman was not about—he seldom appeared on our platform—the athlete stopped work to tell one of the teamsters a story.
The stories all concerned one impulse in life, and as I had grown unspeakably weary of hearing them and indeed doubted the man’s potency, he was so insistent about it, I did not stop working but rolled kegs busily. The teamster laughed heavily. “There was a fat woman, hanging out clothes, on a line. Two stray dogs came along,” etc. The story-teller himself laughed as he told his tale and sometimes glared at me because I did not stop to listen. “You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” he asked, but I did not answer. The horses hitched to the trucks were quiet beasts with broad flanks, and as he talked, telling his tales, they switched their tails slowly back and forth, driving flies away. Then they turned their heads to look at me, running out of the warehouse and down the incline behind one of the flying kegs. “Don’t be in a hurry. You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” they also seemed to be saying.
My legs and arms, my body had enough to do but my mind was idle. During the year before I had been with race horses, going with them about Ohio to the fairs and race meetings, and then I had given up that life, although I loved it well, because I wanted something from men I did not think I could find at the tracks. The life of the sporting fraternity had color and the horses themselves, beautiful temperamental things, fascinated me, but I hungered for something of my own. At the tracks one received a succession of thrills and was kept on the alert but the emotions aroused were all vicarious.
“No Wonder,” a gray pacer, was on the track for his morning workout and I, being unoccupied at the moment, leaned over a wooden fence to watch. He had been jogged slowly around the track and now his driver was about to do what we called “setting him down.” His flanks flattened and he seemed to spring into his stride, and what a stride it was! He fairly flew over the ground and the boy by the fence, half asleep but a moment before, was now all attention. He leaned far over the fence to watch and wait. Now the gray was making the upper turn and soon he would be headed directly down the home stretch. By leaning far forward the boy could see just the play of the muscles over the powerful breast. Oh, the flying legs, the distended nostrils, the sobbing whistle of the wind in and out of the great lungs!