I hadn’t very much money but did not mind. My room was small and cost little and I lived on fruit and on stacks of wheatcakes that could be had at ten cents the stack at a near-by workingmen’s eating place. When I was broke I told myself I could always go again to some place where laborers were wanted. I was young and my body was strong. “If I cannot get work in the city I can get on a freight train at night and go away to the country and work on a farm,” I thought. Sometimes I had qualms of conscience because I had not already started on the great career as an industrial magnate I had half-heartedly mapped out for myself but I managed to put my sins of omission aside. There was plenty of time I told myself and in any event I planned eventually to do the thing with a grand rush.
In the meantime I lay for long hours on the little bed in my room reading the last book I had got from the library or walked in a near-by park under the trees. Time ceased to exist and the days became night while the nights became days. Often I came back to my room at two in the morning, washed my shirt, underwear and socks at a washbowl in a corner, hung them out at my window facing the court to dry and lying down naked on my bed read by a gaslight until daylight had come.
Marvelous days! Now I was marching with the conqueror Julius Cæsar over the vast domains of the mighty Roman Empire. What a life and how proud Julius and I were of his conquests and how often we spoke together of the doings of Cicero, Pompey, Cato and the others in Rome. Indeed Cæsar and I had become for the nonce the most intimate of friends and often enough we discussed the unworthiness of some of the other Romans, particularly of that Cicero. The man was no better than a dog, a literary hack, when all was said and done, and such fellows are never to be trusted. Often enough Cicero had talked with Cæsar and pretended to be Cæsar’s friend but, as Julius often pointed out to me, such fellows were wont to veer about with every wind that blew, “Writers are the greatest cowards in the world and my own greatest weakness is that I have a kind of hankering that way myself. Let a man but get into power and he will always find such scribbling fellows willing and anxious to sing his praises. They are the greatest cur dogs in the world,” he declared vehemently.
And so I had become in fancy the friend of Cæsar and all day I marched beside him and at evening went with him and his men into their camp.
The days and weeks passed. I sat by the window looking into the little brick-paved court and there were many other windows. As it was summer they were all open. Evening came, after a day of walking in dreams, and I had come into my room and taking off my coat had thrown myself down on my bed. When darkness came I did not light a light but lay quietly listening.
I had stepped now out of the past and into the present and all about me were the voices of living people. The men and women in the rooms along the court did not laugh or sing often and indeed in the many times, during my life, I have lived, as I did then, lying like a little worm in the middle of the apple of modern life, I have never found that American men and women, except only the Negroes, laugh or sing much in their homes or at their work.
It was evening and a street-car conductor had come home to his wife. They were silent in each other’s presence for a time, then they began to quarrel. Sometimes they fought and after that they made love. The love-making of the couples along the court aroused my own passions and I had bad dreams at night.
What a strange thing love-making had become among modern factory hands, street-car conductors and all such fellows! Almost always it was preceded by a quarrel, often blows were struck, there were tears, repentance and then embraces. Did the tired nerves of the men and women need the stimulation of the fights and quarrels?
A red-faced man who stumbled as he walked along the hallways to his small apartment had secured a small flat stick which he kept behind a door. His wife was young and fat. When he had come home from work and had in silence eaten his evening meal he sat by the window facing the court and read a newspaper while his wife washed the dishes. Suddenly, when the dishes were washed, he jumped to his feet and ran to get the stick. “Don’t, John, don’t,” his wife pleaded half-heartedly, as he began to pursue her about the narrow room. Chairs were knocked over and tables upset. He kept hitting her with the flat stick upon the nether cheeks and she kept laughing and protesting. Sometimes he struck her too hard and she grew angry and, turning upon him, scratched his face with her finger nails. Then he swore and wrestled with her. Their period of more intense love-making had now come and silence reigned over the little home for the rest of the night.
I lay on my bed in the darkness and closed my eyes. Once more I was in the camp of Cæsar and we were in Gaul. The great captain had been writing at a small table near the door of his tent but now a man had come to speak with him. I lay in silence upon a kind of thick warm cloth spread on the ground beside the tent.