A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago Part 8

Here is one with a red, battered face and a curiously practical air about him. He is putting his fish in a basket and counting them. Two dozen perch.

"Want to sell them?"

He shakes his head.

"What are you going to do with them?"

He looks up and grins slowly. Then he points to his lips with his fingers and makes signs. This means he is dumb. He places his hand over his stomach and grins again. He is going to eat them. It is time to go home and do this, so he puts up his fishpole and packs his primitive paraphernalia--a tin can, a rusty spike, a bamboo pole.

Here is one, then, who, in the heart of the steel forest called civilization, still seeks out long forgotten ways of keeping life in his body. He hunts for fish.

The sun slides down the sky. The fishermen begin to pack up. They walk with their heads down and bent forward like number 7s. They raise their eyes occasionally to the piles of stone and steel that mark the city front. Back to their troubles and their cinder patch, but--and this is a curious fact--their eyes gleam with hope and curiosity.

THE Sn.o.b

We happen to be on the same street car. A drizzle softens the windows. She sits with her pasty face and her dull, little eyes looking out at the dripping street. Her cotton suit curls at the lapels. The ends of her shoes curl like a pair of burlesque Oriental slippers. She holds her hands in her lap. Red, thick fingers that whisper tiredly, "We have worked," lie in her lap.

A slavey on her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off and she goes riding into the country on a street car.

She will get off and slosh with her heavy feet through wet gra.s.s. She will walk down the muddied roads and drink in the odor of fields and trees once more. These are romantic conjectures. The car jolts along. It is going west. The rain continues. It runs diagonal dots across the window.

Everybody out. This is the end of the line. I have gone farther than necessary. But there is the slavey. We have been talking. At least I talked. She listened, her doltish face opening its mouth, her little eyes blinking. She has pimples, her skin is muddied. A distressful-looking creature. Yet there is something. This is her day off--a day free from the sweat of labor--and she goes on a street car into the country. So it would seem that under this blinking, frowzy exterior desire spreads its wings. She has memories, this blousy one. She has dreams.

The drizzle flies softly through the air. The city has disappeared. We walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky a.s.serts itself. I look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, is the sky," I think; "it becomes romantic for the moment because to you it is the symbol of lost dreams, or happy hours in fields. To me it is nothing but a sky. I have no interest in skies. But I am looking at it for you and enjoying it through your romantic eyes."

But her romantic eyes are oblivious. They consult the rain-washed pavement before her and nothing else. Very well, there are other and nicer skies in her heart that she contemplates. This is an inferior sky overhead. We walk on.

You see, I have been wrong. It is not green fields that lured the heavy feet of this slavey. She is not a peasant Cinderella. Grief, yes, hidden sorrow, has led her here. This is a cemetery.

It rains over the cemetery. There is silence. The white stones glisten.

They stand like beggars asking alms of the winding paths. And this blousy one has come to be close to one of the white stones. Under one of them lies somebody whose image still lives in her heart.

She will kneel in the wet gra.s.s and her pasty little face will blink its dull eyes over a grave. Like a little clown in her curling cotton suit, her lumpy shoes, her idiotic hat, she will offer her tears to the pitiless silence of trees, wind, rain and white stones.

"Do you like them there?" She asks. She points to a cl.u.s.ter of fancy headstones.

"Do you?" I ask.

She smiles.

"Oh yes," she says. And she stops. She is admiring the tombstones. We walk on.

It is incredible. This blousy one, this dull-eyed one has come to the cemetery on her day off--to admire the tombstones. Ah, here is drama of a poignant kind. Let us pray G.o.d there is nothing pathologic here and that this is an idyl of despair, that the lumpish little slavey sits on the rain-washed bench dreaming of fine tombstones as a flapper might dream of fine dresses.

Yes, at last we are on the track. We talk. These are very pretty, she says. Life is dull. The days are drab. The place where she works is like an oven. There is nothing pretty to look at--even in mirrors there is nothing cool and pretty. Clothes grow lumpy when she puts them on. Boys giggle and call names when she goes out. And so, outcast, she comes here to the cemetery to dream of a day when something cool and pretty will belong to her. A headstone, perhaps a stately one with a figure above it.

It will stand over her. She will be dead then and unable to enjoy it. But now she is alive. Now she can think of how pretty the stone will look and thus enjoy it in advance. This, after all, is the technique of all dreams.

We grow confidential. I have asked what sort she likes best, what sort it pleases her most to think about as standing over her grave when she dies.

And she has pointed some out. It rains. The trees shake water and the wind hurries past the white stones.

"I will tell you something," she says. "Here, look at this." From one of her curled pockets she removes a piece of paper. It is crumpled. I open it and read:

"In Case of Accident please notify Misses Burbley,--Sheridan Road, and have body removed to Home of Parents who are residants of Corliss Wisconsin where they have resided for twenty Years and the diseased is a only Daughter named Clara. Age nineteen and educated in Corliss public Schools where she Graduated as a girl but came to Chicago in serch of employment and in case of accident funeral was held from Home of the Parents, many Frends attending and please Omit flours...."

"I got lot of them writ out," said Clara, blinking. "You wanna read more?

Why I write them out? Oh, because, you can't tell, maybe you get run over and in accident and how they going to know who you are or what to do with the diseased if they don't find something?"

Her thick red hands grew excited. She produced further obituaries. From her pocketbook, from her bosom, from her pockets and one from under her hat. I read them. They were all alike, couched in vaguely bombastic terms.

We sat in the rain and I thought:

"Alas, Clara is a bounder. A sn.o.b. She writes her own obituaries. Alive she can think of herself only as Clara, the slavey at whom the boys giggle and call names. But dead, she is the 'deseased'--the stately corpse commanding unprecedented attention. The prospect stirs a certain sn.o.bbishness in her. And she sits and writes her death notices out--using language she tries to remember from reading the funeral accounts of rich and powerful people."

Clara, her hat awry, her doltish body sagging in the rain--shuffled down the dirt road once more. Her outing is over. Cinderella returns to the ashes of life.

THE WAY HOME

He shuffles around in front of the Clinton Street employment agency. The signs say: "Pick men wanted, section hands wanted, farm laborers wanted."

A Mexican stands woodenly against the window front. His eyes are open but asleep. He has the air of one come from a far country who lives upon memories.

There are others--roughly dressed exiles. Their eyes occasionally study the signs, deciphering with difficulty the crudely chalked words on the bulletin boards. Slav, Swede, Pole, Italian, Greek--they read in a language foreign to them that men are wanted on the farms in the Dakotas, in the lumber camps, on the roadbeds in Montana. Hard-handed men with dull, seamed faces and glittering eyes--the spike-haired proletaire from a dozen lands looking for jobs.

But this one who shuffles about in a tattered mackinaw, huge baggy trousers frayed at the feet, this one whose giant's body swings loosely back and forth under the signs, is a more curious exile. His Mexican brother leaning woodenly against the window has a slow dream in his eyes.

Life is simple to his thought. It was hard for him in Mexico. And adventure and avarice sent him northward in quest of easier ways and more numerous comforts. Now he hunts a job on a chilly spring morning. When the proper job is chalked up on the bulletin board he will go in and ask for it. He stands and waits and thinks how happy he was in the country he abandoned and what a fool he was to leave the white dust of its roads, its hills and blazing suns. And some day, he thinks, he will go back, although there is nothing to go back for. Yet it is pleasant to stand and dream of a place one has known and whither one may return.

But this one who shuffles, this giant in a tattered mackinaw who slouches along under the bulletin signs asking for section hands and laborers, there is no dream of remembered places in his eyes. Dull, blue eyes that peer bewilderedly out of a powerful and empty face. The forehead is puckered as if in thought. The heavy jaws protrude with a hint of ferocity in their set. There is a reddish cast to his hair and face and the backs of his great hands, hanging limply almost to his knees, are covered with red hair.

The nose of this shuffling one is larger than the noses in the city streets. His fingers are larger, his neck is larger. There is a curious earthy look to this shuffling one seldom to be seen about men in streets.

He is a huge creature with great thighs and Laoc.o.o.n sinews and he towers a head above his brothers in front of the employment office. He is of a different mold from the men in the street. Strength ripples under his tattered mackinaw and his stiff looking hands could break the heads of two men against each other like eggsh.e.l.ls while they rained puny blows on his dull face.

And yet of all the men moving about on the pavement in front of the Clinton Street bulletin boards it is this shuffling one who is the most impotent seeming. His figure is the most helpless. It slouches as under a final defeat. His eyes are the dullest.

He stops at the corner and stands waiting, his head lowered, his shoulders hunched in and he looks like a man weighed down by a harness.

A curious exile from whose blood has vanished all memory of the country to which he belongs. A faraway land, ages beyond the sun-warmed roads of which his Mexican brother dreams as he stands under the bulletin boards. A land which the ingenuity of the world has left forever behind. This is a land that once reached over all the seas.

For it was like this that men once looked in an age before the myths of the Persians and Hindus began to fertilize the animal soul of the race. In the forests north of the earliest cities of Greece, along the wild coasts tapering from the Tatar lands to the peninsula of the Basques, men like this shuffling one once ranged alone and in tribes. Huge, powerful men whose foreheads sloped back and whose jaws sloped forward and whose stiff hands reached an inch nearer their knees than today.

This giant in the tattered mackinaw is an exile from this land and there is no dream of it left in his blood. The body of his fathers has returned to him. Their long, loose arms, their thick muscles and heavy pounding veins are his, but their voices are buried too deep to rise again in him.

The mutterings of warrior councils, the shouts of terrible hunts are lost somewhere in him and he shuffles along, his sloping forehead in a pucker of thought as if he were trying to remember. But no memories come. Instead a bewilderment. The swarming streets bewilder him. The towering buildings, the noises of traffic and people dull his eyes and bring his shoulders together like the shoulders of some helpless captive.