“One of the men out in the yard said that you might have a pair of gloves you would lend me for to-day. I’m piling lumber and it’s tearing my hands. I forgot to get a pair.”
“Sure,” said Joseph genially waving his hand to the driver to stop. “They’re over here in my locker. I know what that is. I been there. When I come here they rubbed it into me jist as they’re doin’ to you. Doncher mind. You’ll come out all right. Up here for your health, are you? It ain’t always like that. Somedays there ain’t most nothin’ to do here. Then somedays ag’in there’s a whole lot. Well, it’s good healthy work, I can say that. I ain’t most never sick. Nice fresh air we git here and all that.”
He rambled on, fumbling under his bagging apron for his keys, unlocking his locker and producing a great pair of old yellow lumber gloves. He gave them to Eugene cheerfully and the latter thanked him. He liked Eugene at once and Eugene liked him. “A nice fellow that,” he said, as he went back to his car. “Think of how genially he gave me these. Lovely! If only all men were as genial and kindly disposed as this boy, how nice the world would be.” He put on the gloves and found his work instantly easier for he could grasp the joists firmly and without pain. He worked on until noon when the whistle blew and he ate a dreary lunch sitting by himself on one side, pondering. After one he was called to carry shavings, one basket after another back through the blacksmith shop to the engine room in the rear where was a big shaving bin. By four o’clock he had seen almost all the characters he was going to associate with for the time that he stayed there. Harry Fornes, the blacksmith or “the village smith,” as Eugene came to call him later on, Jimmy Sudds, the blacksmith’s helper or “maid-of-all-work” as he promptly named him; John Peters, the engineer, Malachi Dempsey, the driver of the great plane, Joseph Mews and, in addition, carpenters, tin-smiths, plumbers, painters, and those few exceptional cabinet makers who passed through the lower floor now and then, men who were about the place from time to time and away from it at others all of whom took note of Eugene at first as a curiosity.
Eugene was himself intensely interested in the men. Harry Fornes and Jimmy Sudds attracted him especially. The former was an undersized American of distant Irish extraction who was so broad chested, swollen armed, square-jawed and generally self-reliant and forceful as to seem a minor Titan. He was remarkably industrious, turning out a great deal of work and beating a piece of iron with a resounding lick which could be heard all about the hills and hollows outside. Jimmy Sudds, his assistant, was like his master equally undersized, dirty, gnarled, twisted, his teeth showing like a row of yellow snags, his ears standing out like small fans, his eye askew, but nevertheless with so genial a look in his face as to disarm criticism at once. Every body liked Jimmy Sudds because he was honest, single-minded and free of malicious intent. His coat was three and his trousers two times too large for him, and his shoes were obviously bought at a second-hand store, but he had the vast merit of being a picture. Eugene was fascinated with him. He learned shortly that Jimmy Sudds truly believed that buffaloes were to be shot around Buffalo, New York.
John Peters, the engineer, was another character who fixed his attention. John was almost helplessly fat and was known for this reason as “Big John.” He was a veritable whale of a man. Six feet tall, weighing over three hundred pounds and standing these summer days in his hot engine room, his shirt off, his suspenders down, his great welts of fat showing through his thin cotton undershirt, he looked as though he might be suffering, but he was not. John, as Eugene soon found out, did not take life emotionally. He stood mostly in his engine room door when the shade was there staring out on the glistening water of the river, occasionally wishing that he didn’t need to work but could lie and sleep indefinitely instead.
“Wouldja think them fellers would feel purty good sittin’ out there on the poop deck of them there yachts smokin’ their perfectos?” he once asked Eugene, apropos of the magnificent private vessels that passed up and down the river.
“I certainly would,” laughed Eugene.
“Aw! Haw! That’s the life fer yer uncle Dudley. I could do that there with any of ’em. Aw! Haw!”
Eugene laughed joyously.
“Yes, that’s the life,” he said. “We all could stand our share.”
Malachi Dempsey, the driver of the great plane, was dull, tight-mouthed, silent, more from lack of ideas than anything else, though oyster-wise he had learned to recede from all manner of harm by closing his shell tightly. He knew no way to avoid earthly harm save by being preternaturally silent, and Eugene saw this quickly. He used to stare at him for long periods at a time, marvelling at the curiosity his attitude presented. Eugene himself, though, was a curiosity to the others, even more so than they to him. He did not look like a workingman and could not be made to do so. His spirit was too high, his eye too flashing and incisive. He smiled at himself carrying basketful after basketful of shavings from the planing room, where it rained shavings and from which, because of the lack of a shaving blower, they had to be removed back to the hot engine room where Big John presided. The latter took a great fancy to Eugene, but something after the fashion of a dog for a master. He did not have a single idea above his engine, his garden at home, his wife, his children and his pipe. These and sleep—lots of it—were his joys, his recreations, the totality of his world.
Chapter 21
There were many days now, three months all told, in which Eugene obtained insight into the workaday world such as he had not previously had. It is true he had worked before in somewhat this fashion, but his Chicago experience was without the broad philosophic insight which had come to him since. Formerly the hierarchies of power in the universe and on earth were inexplicable to him—all out of order; but here, where he saw by degrees ignorant, almost animal intelligence, being directed by greater, shrewder, and at times it seemed to him possibly malicious intelligences—he was not quite sure about that—who were so strong that the weaker ones must obey them, he began to imagine that in a rough way life might possibly be ordered to the best advantage even under this system. It was true that men quarreled here with each other as to who should be allowed to lead. There was here as elsewhere great seeking for the privileges and honors of direction and leadership in such petty things as the proper piling of lumber, the planing of boards, the making of desks and chairs, and men were grimly jealous of their talents and abilities in these respects, but in the main it was the jealousy that makes for ordered, intelligent control. All were striving to do the work of intelligence, not of unintelligence. Their pride, however ignorant it might be, was in the superior, not the inferior. They might complain of their work, snarl at each other, snarl at their bosses, but after all it was because they were not able or permitted to do the higher work and carry out the orders of the higher mind. All were striving to do something in a better way, a superior way, and to obtain the honors and emoluments that come from doing anything in a superior way. If they were not rewarded according to their estimate of their work there was wrath and opposition and complaint and self-pity, but the work of the superior intelligence was the thing which each in his blind, self-seeking way was apparently trying to do.
Because he was not so far out of his troubles that he could be forgetful of them, and because he was not at all certain that his talent to paint was ever coming back to him, he was not as cheerful at times as he might have been; but he managed to conceal it pretty well. This one thought with its attendant ills of probable poverty and obscurity were terrible to him. Time was slipping away and youth. But when he was not thinking of this he was cheerful enough. Besides he had the ability to simulate cheerfulness even when he did not feel it. Because he did not permanently belong to this world of day labor and because his position which had been given him as a favor was moderately secure, he felt superior to everything about him. He did not wish to show this feeling in any way—was very anxious as a matter of fact to conceal it, but his sense of superiority and ultimate indifference to all these petty details was an abiding thought with him. He went to and fro carrying a basket of shavings, jesting with “the village smith,” making friends with “Big John,” the engineer, with Joseph, Malachi Dempsey, little Jimmy Sudds, in fact anyone and everyone who came near him who would be friends. He took a pencil one day at the noon hour and made a sketch of Harry Fornes, the blacksmith, his arm upraised at the anvil, his helper, Jimmy Sudds, standing behind him, the fire glowing in the forge. Fornes, who was standing beside him, looking over his shoulder, could scarcely believe his eyes.