The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

“The weak man,” Tom said, “stays in business and yet despises it. So that the one End of business—success—escapes him. Of course I am not now talking of the mediocre fool who respects business—as he is told to—and ekes out his pittance blacking the other fellow’s boots. You are beyond that, Davie. But there is another sort of fool—a more intelligent sort: the man who ‘sees through’ business, despises it and therefore muffs it. He is unreasonable also. If he can’t stand business, let him clear out! If he decides to stay in he is a fool not to win. One must of course despise business. One must know that it is the scramble of rather lowly-evolved and very greedy persons. One should be conscious of the gullibility and venality of bankers, of the wastefulness of manufacturers, of the opaqueness of middlemen. It should be clear to you that the elements that lift up the Rockefellers and the Morgans and the Hills are chiefly the singlemindedness of the stupid, the unimaginative and the dishonest. But what sort of a fool is it, David, who being aware of these inferior forces permits himself to be worsted by them? That seems to me an altogether illogical conclusion. It seems to me that just this knowledge should make the knower come out on top. In other words, the man who has brains enough to despise business should be the successful business man: not himself but the mediocrities should become the victims of his disgust. Therefore, David, through the very clarity of your vision into the nature of affairs, you must master them. God, man! would you be anywhere save on top of such a muck-heap?”

Tom had not failed to help make David’s vision clear. As he said:

“Law is pandar to all of business’s ugly lusts. I ought to know the system’s filthiness if any one.”

David took these tirades with a grain of salt. He was convinced of the Quixotic extravagance in Tom’s idealism. Yet, the essence of his teaching must be right. David believed he knew this, now. Business was indeed a scramble in life’s gutters for food: the unfortunate way men had of getting their bread. But what was one to do? There was the bread in the muddy gutter. Plenty of it, plenty to go round. Tom had assured him that the economists who said “No” were slaves of the scramblers. Let him just read Kropotkin. Production was in a state of wasteful anarchy. But men had somehow preferred to ship their fair food from the fields where it grew, and drop it in the filth of a million scurrying feet, in the gutters that were rutted and befouled by years of greedy commotion. Here they preferred to fight for it like pigs nosing to a trough: to expend their energies and debase their spirits for its hoarding and for the depriving of others. It must all have been in some way deeply needful, else why should this idiotic condition have arisen, why should the simpler way not have been found, by which all men might have what they needed to eat—expend the rest of their forces in higher works? This was the rule. David must scramble along.

“The one danger,” said Tom, “is not to understand. The one degradation is to exalt this pother, to make a noble thing out of the job of earning one’s living. The cult of Business. You see it everywhere. Men must worship: it is easier to worship low than high.”

All this was sound enough, thought David.

On his way down Wall Street, to and from his office, he saw a spectacle strangely near the gutter metaphor of Tom. David remembered how this sight had at first aroused him: how quickly it had become an unnoticed feature of that downtown world so that, if he had missed it, in rain or in snow, he should have known that a great dislocation had come upon the Temple.

It was the sight of the curb-brokers. There they stood crowding the broad street with their bodies, clamoring the air with their cries and their scurried gestures. David went close to watch them: for they were a thick knot on the street, they were like a swarm of bugs overrunning a lump of refuse in a road. To distinguish more than the blotch of their thronging and the low drone of their noise from which sharp voices pierced, one had to bring near one’s face. David saw, now, that they were mostly young men, rather shabbily dressed since they must be prepared for every weather and for any scrimmage, with sharp faces—very red or very pale—in constant motion. Their eyes darted, their mouths worked, they dashed notes in little books, thrust forth hands above the gesticulating mass and spun away to other knots of the buffet with hats over ears and upturned collars. They looked up at the high windows. There, perched half outwards in rows were other men, behind ranks of telephones that they perpetually shrilled in, and thrust from them. They leaned out, with contorted fingers signaled to their colleagues below. Hands jutted from the crowd, fingers twirled answering signals. They used the language of the deaf and dumb. If David had not heard the incessant burr of their voices above the shuffle of their feet, he might have taken them for deaf-mutes. A same something strained and unquickened about the muscles of their throats and jaws which he had noticed in deaf-mutes. He understood that only by signs and battle-calls could they in the street and the men perched in the windows carry on their communications. He admired their adroitness. The disturbance rose and fell: had its hours of thick frenzy and its streaks of deliquescence. But it was unending.

David had learned that the curb-brokers dealt in securities not listed in the new Exchange that stood like a Temple beyond the turmoil of the street. No other difference. So he knew these solemn walls were hypocrites. Within them, older men, better clad, better-paunched, buffeted and bid and bounced: at times—he was told—floored each other, blackened eyes, broke noses. All one: the naked and the canopied gutter: the scrimmage under sky and the scrimmage under marble. Buildings tiered and teemed, and in each cranny a fight. With polite tricks, men plotted and plundered, swung the whole of their vast might of concentrated work into the anarchy of Distribution. To the end of deflecting from its even channels the sap of Toil to their own bellies. Scrambling masters and myriad slaves who had not even the grace of scrambling for themselves.

David saw how he was in a Jungle. A high and splendid Jungle whose call to the hunt the minds of men had made complex and beautiful, but had by no jot lessened. On the high seas and in far countries they wrangled with fire and steel: in the curbs of the City they wrangled with their bodies: elsewhere they wrangled with sinuous thrusts of their brains, deceit of their mouths. But everywhere they were at a single, sterile Game. David had been willing to accept Tom’s symbol for it all: that black swarm of men, blotching the canyoned street—the brokers at the Curb. He knew it for what it was.