Part II
THE ADVENTURE OF ADVENTURING
CHAPTER XIII
here are to-day in the mind of Carl Ericson many confused recollections of the purposeless wanderings which followed his leaving Plato College. For more than a year he went down, down in the social scale, down to dirt and poverty and association with the utterly tough and reckless. But day by day his young joy of wandering matured into an ease in dealing with whatever man or situation he might meet. He had missed the opportunity of becoming a respectable citizen which Plato offered. Now he did all the grubby things which Plato obviated that her sons might rise to a place in society, to eighteen hundred dollars a year and the possession of evening clothes and a knowledge of Greek. But the light danced more perversely in his eyes every day of his roving.
The following are the several jobs for which Carl first applied in Chicago, all the while frightened by the roar and creeping shadows of the city:
Tutoring the children of a millionaire brewer; keeping time on the Italian and Polack washers of a window-cleaning company; reporting on an Evanston newspaper; driving a taxicab, a motor-truck; keeping books for a suburban real-estate firm. He had it ground into him, as grit is ground into your face when you fall from a bicycle, that every one in a city of millions is too busy to talk to a stranger unless he sees a sound reason for talking. He changed the Joralemon Dynamite's phrase, "accept a position" to "get a job"—and he got a job, as packer in a department store big as the whole of Joralemon. Since the street throngs had already come to seem no more personal and separable than the bricks in the buildings, he was not so much impressed by the crowds in the store as by the number of things for women to hang upon themselves. He would ramble in at lunch-time to stare at them and marvel, "You can't beat it!"