FIRST VOICE. “There is a man in New York makes car wheels out of paper. It is ground, I suppose, and made into a kind of mush and then is subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. The wheels look like iron.”
SECOND VOICE. “Do you suppose he paints them black like iron?”
FIRST VOICE. “It’s a great age we live in. You can’t down machinery. I read a book by Mark Twain. He knocked theories cold, I’ll tell you what. He made out all life was just a great machine.”
* * * * *
Where am I? Am I dreaming or am I awake? It seems to me that I am somewhere in a great empty place. I shall have one of my terrible fits of depression if I am not careful now. Sometimes I walk gayly along the streets and talk to men and women gayly but there are other times when I am so depressed that all the muscles of my body ache. I am like one on whose back a great beast sits. Now it seems to me I am in a huge empty place. Has the roof of a factory in which I was at work at night fallen in? There is a long shaft of yellow light falling down a beam of wood or marble.
Thoughts flitting, an effort to awaken out of dreams, voices heard, voices talking somewhere in the distance, the figures of men and women I have known flashing in and out of darkness. There is a tiny faint voice speaking: “The money-makers will grow weary and disgusted with their own money-making and labor shall have lost all faith, all sense of the cunning of the hand. The factory hands shall rule. What a mess it will be!”
* * * * *
Where am I? I am in a bed somewhere in a room in a workers’ rooming house. Two young mechanics live in the next room and now they are getting out of bed and are talking cheerfully. Once on cold nights monks awoke in cold cells in monasteries and muttered prayers to God. Now in a cold room two young mechanics proclaim their faith in new gods.
Words in a brain trying to come into consciousness out of heavy sleep. “Service! They make a point of service,” says one of the young men’s voices. My brain, a voice in my own brain, chattering: “The woman who had been taken in adultery came to wash with her hands the tired feet of the Christ. She wiped his feet with her long hair and poured precious ointment upon them.” A distorted thought born of the effort to awaken from a heavy dream: “Many men and women are going along a street. They all have long hair and bear vessels of precious ointment. They are going to wash the feet of a Rockefeller, of ‘Bet a million’ Gates, of a Henry Ford or the son of a Henry Ford, the gods of the new day.”
And now the dream again. Again the great empty place. I cannot breathe. There is a great black bell without a tongue, swinging silently in darkness. It swings and swings, making a great arch and I await silent and frightened. Now it stops and descends slowly. I am terrified. Can nothing stop the great descending iron bell? It stops and hangs for a moment and now it drops suddenly and I am a prisoner under the great iron bell.