For three months I had worked at the place and listened to the talk of my companions and then I had fled. The men seemed everlastingly anxious to assert their manhood, to make it clear to their fellows that they were potent men able to do great deeds in the realms of the flesh and all day I stood beside a little stand-like bench, on which the frame of the bicycle was stuck upside down, tightening nuts and screws and listening to the men, the while I looked from their faces out the window to the factory walls and the rubbish heap. An unmarried man had been on the evening before to a certain house in a certain street and there had happened between himself and a woman what he now wished to talk about and to describe with infinite care in putting in all the details. What an undignified stallion he made of himself! He had his moment, was allowed his moment by the others and then another, a married man, took up the theme, also boastfully. There were days as I worked in that place when I became physically ill and other days when I cursed all the gods of my age that had made men—who in another age might have been farmers, shepherds or craftsmen—these futile fellows, ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they felt the age of impotency asserting itself in their bodies.
In the bicycle factory I had repeatedly told the other men that I was subject to sick headaches and I used to go often to a window, throw it open and lean out, closing my eyes and trying to create in fancy a world in which men lived under bright skies, drank wine, loved women and with their hands created something of lasting value and beauty and seeing me thus, white and with trembling hands, the men dropped the talk that so sickened me. Like kind children they came and did my work or, after the noon hour, brought me little packages of remedies they had bought at the drug store or had carried to me from their homes.
I had worked the sick headache racket to the limit and then, feeling it had become wornout, had quit my job and had gone to the place where I worked with the young athlete I now wanted to beat with my fists.
And on a certain day I tried. I had now convinced myself that the feint, the cross and the golden smile were all in good working condition and that no man, least of all the young athlete who could not stand up to his drink, could stand up against me.
For weeks I had been as nasty as I could be to my fellow-workman. There was a trick I had learned. I gave one of the kegs I was rolling down the incline just a little sudden turn with my foot so that it struck him on the legs as he came into the house through a door. I hit him on the shins and when he howled with pain expressed the greatest regret and then as soon as I could, without arousing too much suspicion, I did it again.
We ceased speaking and only glared at each other. Even the dull-witted teamsters knew there was a fight brewing. I waited and watched, making my lips do the nearest thing possible to a golden smile, and at night in my room and even sometimes when I was walking with Nora and had come into a quiet dark street I practiced the feint and the cross. “What in Heaven’s name are you doing?” Nora asked, but I did not tell her but talked instead of my dreams, of brave men in rich clothes walking with lovely women in a strange land I was always trying to create in a world of my fancy and that was always being knocked galley-west by the facts of my life. Regarding the queer sudden little movements I was always making with my shoulders and hands I tried to be very mysterious and once I remember, when we had been sitting on a bench in a little park, I left her and went behind a bush. She thought I had gone there out of a natural necessity but it was not true. I had remembered how Harry Walters and Billy McCarthy, when they were preparing for a fight, did a good deal of what is called shadow boxing. One imagines an opponent before oneself and advances and recedes, feints and crosses, whirls suddenly around and gives ground before a rushing opponent only to come back at him with terrific straight rights and lefts, just as his attack has exhausted itself.
I wanted, I fancy, to have Nora grow tired of waiting for me and to come look around the bush and to discover my secret—that I was not as she thought, a rather foolish but smart-talking fellow inclined to be something of a cloud man. Ah, I thought, as I danced about on a bit of grass back of the bush, she will come to peek and see me here in my true light. She will take me for some famous fighter, a young Corbett or that famous middleweight of the day called “The Nonpareil.” What I hoped was that she would come to some such conclusion without asking questions and would go back to the bench to wait for my coming filled with a new wonder. A famous young prizefighter traveling incognito, not wanting public applause, a young Henry Adams of Boston with the punch of a Bob Fitzsimmons, a Ralph Waldo Emerson with the physical assurance of a railway brakeman—what painter, literary man or scholar has not had moments of indulging in some such dream? A burly landlord has been crude enough to demand instant pay for the room in which one is living, or some taxi driver, who has all but run one down at a corner, jerked out of his seat and given a thorough beating in the face of an entire street. “Did you see him pummel that fellow? And he such a pale intellectual looking chap, too! You can never tell how far a dog can jump by the length of his tail.” Etc., etc.
Men lost in admiration going off along a street talking of one’s physical prowess. Oneself flecking the dust off one’s hands and lighting a cigarette, while one looks with calm indifference at a red-faced taxi driver lying pale and quite defeated and hopeless in a gutter.
It was something of that sort of admiration I wanted from Nora but I did not get it. Once when I was walking in a street with her and had just gone through with my exercises she looked at me with scorn in her eyes. “You’re a nice fellow but you’re bughouse all right,” she said and that was all I ever succeeded in getting out of her.
But I got something else at the warehouse.