Our own relationship is a little hard to explain. When I came from the warehouse and climbed the stairs to my room I found her there at work, making my bed, which had been allowed to air all day, or changing the sheets. The sheets were changed almost daily and her mother constantly scolded about the matter. “If he wants clean sheets every day let him pay for them,” the mother said, but the daughter paid no attention, and indeed I was no doubt responsible for more than one quarrel between mother and daughter. Among laboring people a girl engaged is taboo and the other men in the house thought I was doing an unfair thing to her absent lover. Whether or not he knew what was going on I never found out.
What was going on? I came into the house, climbed the stairs and found her at work in my room. At the foot of the stairs I had met her mother, who had scowled at me, and now the other workers, trooping in, attempted to tease. She kept on working and did not look at me and I went to stand by a window that looked down into the street. “Which one is she going to marry?—that’s what I want to know,” one of the workers on the floor below called to another. She looked up at me and something I saw in her eyes made me bold. “Don’t mind them,” I said. “What makes you think I do?” she replied. I was glad none of the men who worked at our warehouse roomed at the house. “They would be shouting, laughing and going on about it all day,” I thought.
The young woman—her name was Nora—talked to me in whispers as she did the work in the room, or she listened and I talked. The minutes passed and we stayed on together, looking at each other, whispering, laughing at each other. In the house all, including the mother, were convinced I was working to bring about Nora’s ruin and the mother wanted to order me out of the house but did not dare. Once as I stood in the hallway outside my door late at night I had overheard the two women talking in the kitchen of the house. “If you mention the matter again I shall walk out of the house and never come back.”
Occasionally in the evening Nora and I walked along the street, past the warehouse where I was employed, and out upon the docks, where we sat together looking into the darkness and once—but I will not tell you what happened upon that occasion.
First of all I will tell you of how the relationship of Nora and myself began. It may be that the bond between us was brought into existence by the beer I drank at the warehouse in the late afternoons. One evening, when I had first come to the house, I came home, after drinking heavily, and it was then Nora and I had our first intimate conversation.
I had come into the house and climbed the three flights of stairs to my room, thinking of the vacant lot covered with the soft glowing carpet and of the beautiful men and women walking thereon, and when I got to my room it seemed unspeakably shabby. No doubt I was drunk. In any event there was Nora at work and it was my opportunity. For what? I did not quite know, but there was something I knew I wanted from Nora and the beer drinking had made me bold. I had a sudden conviction that my boldness would overawe her.
And there was something else too. Although I was but a young man I had already worked in factories in several cities and had lived in too many shabby rooms in shabby houses in factory streets. The outer surface of my life was too violently uncouth, too persistently uncouth. Well enough for Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and others to sing of the strength and fineness of laboring men, making heroes of them, but already the democratic dream had faded and laborers were not my heroes. I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness. The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all struck me as men who had no sense of life at all. They were so likely to be dry intellectual sterile men. Already I had begun asking myself the questions I have been asking myself ever since. “Does no man love another man? Why does not some man arise who wants the man working next to him to work in the midst of order? Can a man and a woman love each other when they live in an ugly house in an ugly street? Why do working men and women so often seem perversely unclean and disorderly in their houses? Why do not factory owners realize that, although they build large, well-lighted factories, they will accomplish nothing until they realize the need of order and cleanliness in thinking and feeling also?” I had come into the midst of men with a clean strong body, my mother had been one who would have fought to the death for order and cleanliness about her and her sons. Was it not apparent that something had already happened to the democracy on which Whitman had counted so much? (I had not heard of Whitman then. My thoughts were my own. Perhaps I had better be more simple in speaking of them.)
I had come out of a messy workplace along a messy street to a messy room and did not like it and within me was the beer that made me bold.
And there were the visions I had seen in the vacant lot. It may be that I thought then that all my fellows lived as I did, having quite conscious and separate inner and outer lives going on in the same body that they were trying to bring into accord. As for myself I saw visions, had from boyhood been seeing visions. Moments of extreme exaltation were followed by times of terrible depression. Were all people really like that? The visions were sometimes stronger than the reality of life about me. Might it not be that they were the reality, that they existed rather than myself—that is to say, rather than my physical self and the physical fact of the men and women among whom I then worked and lived, rather than the physical fact of the ugly rooms in ugly houses in ugly streets?
Was there a consciousness of something wrong, a consciousness we all had and were ashamed of?