Atop an Underwood (27 page)

One night, returning from work in the casual, squalid atmosphere of railroad yards, warehouses, switch towers, idle boxcars, and one lonely little lunchcart across the tracks, as I was approaching the rail crossing near the old depot that we have in my home town, I had to lean against a sagging fence (black with soot-years) for fully ten minutes while a mighty locomotive went by freighting ninety-six cars: coal cars, oil tanks, wooden boxcars, all types of commercial rolling stock. While I loafed there with a cigarette, watching each car rumble past and checking the cargoes, a thought came to me with swift and lucid impact, with the same jolt of common sense and disbelief in the scantiness of my own intelligence that I had felt when first I understood the workings of a mathematical equation. “Why,” I asked myself, “does not this rich cargo, these cars, that terrific locomotive belong to me? ... and to my fellow men? Why are they not, like my trousers, my property; and why are they not, like the trousers of my fellow men, their property? Who covets these great things so that myself and my fellow men are not heir to their full use?” Then I asked myself, “Are we not all men living alone together on a single earth?”

Then I gazed at the old depot, its aged brownstone turrets lost in clouds of steam—(steam, I thought, strangely rational puffs of steam, marks of industrial necessity each with a reason and justice behind their inception, fashioned by the common Genius of just and reasonable working men, all for sure and strong and everlastingly sound purposes)—and I wondered why the depot did not belong to my fellow men and I as well.

When the caboose finally went by, bringing up the rear of the freight train with a little glow of red light, I watched the railroad employee as he leaned on the rail of the caboose with pipe in mouth and wondered why he wasn't working for himself and for his fellow men rather than for the Boston & Maine Railroad Corporation (its wealth as a corporation, I pondered, is measured in shares: the bulk of these scraps of paper are in the hands of a few great men of wealth, “railroad magnates” with cigars protruding from their mouths, men who are so busy others make way for them when they approach to pass .... and yet, I wondered, if they were the men who “ran the railroads,” then where were they tonight? Where?)

I allowed my mind to imagine—I knew I was not idly speculating: I saw one of these great “railroad kings”; he was seated in the rear of a long black car, holding onto a leather window strap while his chauffeur shot the purring car like a sleek, silent cat through the streets. The car was rolling (almost floating) through the streets of West End New York, uptown along Ninth Avenue. From his plush seat, the “railroad king” saw fruit stands in the hot summer evening, peddlers pushing carts and chanting their wares, shawled women shuffling along the dirty sidewalks, unwashed children scattering suddenly from dark alleys across the street cobbles, old men seated wearily on stoops, shabby young lovers strolling, and here and there, a drunkard vomiting in his dark corner. The “railroad king” saw all this, surely, and yet he did not: he was not detached .... No! He was only abstracted, other things were on his mind, he was on his way to a dinner party. Who would be there, that was the question, who would be there at the dinner party? And what year champagne? Would the dinner be as exquisite as that one last night in Pittsburgh? The “railroad king‘s” subconscious mind was a stream of shimmering, smooth things .... gowns of silk, long cool drinks, natty white dinner jackets, hearty laughter beneath cigar smoke, music stealing in from concealed sources, the great head of a moose exposed dumbly and mutely above a marble wainscoting, the eyes of a woman that know; and the voices, the voices: as smooth as oil the voices will soothe confidentially, behind a cigar, the sly voices, the secret, confidential mirth, the smooth power of the clan. Yes! the smell of new things, deep-grained, walnut things, new leather, new silk, the fragrance of rich, new things. This Ninth Avenue—all in passing, something “on the way” to the dinner party, not permanent, not solid! Yes, to the “railroad king's” mind this Ninth Avenue meant only something old and corrosive and—well, to be frank—a bit on the loathsome side.

Yes! all this while the old man who controlled the wooden guards across the street from where I stood that night pulled the lever that lofted the zebra-striped guards and then went back to his little shack to resume his reading of a Hearst tabloid by the light of a sooty oil lamp. All this ... and Ninth Avenue, New York City. Was it evident, then, that this “railroad magnate” had no conscience, despite all that was before him to see? Could he ride through the filthy streets where the masses abounded in their rank legions and pass it off as “something on the way?” Are beasts and plants the only forms of living without a moral conscience?

It was then that I realized conclusively that this must not go on, that this must surely and would surely end, that it could not be otherwise, that the system of the world since the conquest of the last savage races by barbarians was a tumor which had somehow set in. I compared the system to a tubercle which had become inflamed by a horde of bacilli more rotten than any to be found in nature at its lush worst, and that the nature of these bacilli was powermad greed: then I knew that the inflammation would develop until the prodigy cell of society would collapse. How should this horrid tumor be eliminated? I did not know for certain. But I knew what society would be like once the corruption would be dug out. It was at once and always the most beautiful and casual revelation I have ever felt.

I saw the same freight train, the same ancestral depot with its homely turrets, the same switch towers, the same expanse of steel rail, the same old man in the shack. I, with my cigarette and shabby trousers, walked across the track and thought: “How is our railroad running tonight?” “Fine,” was the answer in my thought, “the brothers are running it right, because it is our railroad. Why should it be otherwise? See, two of the brothers have stopped to chat by a switch; see the glow of their pipes in the summer darkness, see the hands that hold the lantern (look! the veinous power of their lanky hands!) Ask them how things are coming along, and they will certainly tell you. ‘Brother,' they will tell you in the quiet darkness, ‘our railroad is coming along fine ... just now, a large trainload went by on its way to Boston.' ‘Is that so!' I will say to them in quiet amaze, not quite able to remain calm about such a large and beautiful fact. ‘Certainly,' they will answer, ‘The cargo will be unloaded by our brothers in Boston to be distributed among the people ... food from our farms, clothing and necessities and gadgets and things from our factories, oil from our wells, toys and books and little things ... Oh! all manner of things, there is no end to it!' ‘Sure,' I will say to them, smiling, ‘it has always been like this.' ‘And why not!' they will answer in unison. Then we all laugh, and I walk away, and there is nothing to say.”

What a plain and simple fact this dream was, and is! I walked home and looked at the rich, nodding stars in the sky and it was as plain as that. When I stopped to contemplate the tree in my backyard it was as simple as that. I could not understand what had gone wrong, and where, and at what time ..... it was a mystery that needed explanation. Sternly, but with a puzzled frown, I wanted an explanation.

[...]

Wesley went to the window and glanced down the street; way off in the distance, the clustered pile of New York's Medical Center stood, a grave healer surrounded at its hem by smaller buildings where the healed returned. From Broadway, a steady din of horns, trolley bells, grinding gears, and screeching trolley wheels surmounted the deeper, vaster hum from the high noon thoroughfare. It was very warm by now; a crazy haze danced toward the sun while a few of the more ambitious birds chittered in sleepy protest from the green. Wesley took off his coat and slouched into an easy chair by the window. When he was almost asleep, Everhart was talking to him: “... Well, the old man leaves me my choice. All I have to do now is speak to my brother-in-law and to the Dean. You wait here, Wes, I'll call the jerk up ... he's in his radio repair shop ...”

Everhart was gone again. Wesley dozed off; once he heard a boy's voice speaking from the door: “Geez! Wha's dat!” Later, Everhart was back, bustling through the confusion of papers and books on his desk.

“Where the hell? ...”

Wesley preferred to keep his eyes closed; for the first time in two weeks, since he had signed off the last freighter, he felt content and at peace with himself. A fly lit on his nose, but he was too lazy to shoo it off; it left a moist little feeling when he twitched it away.

“Here it is!” muttered Everhart triumphantly, and he was off again.

Wesley felt a thrill of anticipation as he sat there dozing: in a few days, back on a ship, the sleepy thrum of the propeller churning in the water below, the soothing rise and fall of the ship, the sea stretching around the horizon, the rich, clean sound of the bow splitting water .... And the long hours lounging on deck in the sun, watching the play of the clouds, ravished by the full, moist breeze. A simple life! A serious life! To make the sea your own, to watch over it, to brood your very soul into it, to accept it and love it as though only it mattered and existed! “A.B. Martin!” they called him. “He's a quiet good enough seaman, good worker,” they would say of him. Hah! Did they know he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour; did they suspect this profound duty of his, this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound altar-bound religion?

Sea! Sea! Wesley opened his eyes, but closed them rapidly. He wanted to see the ocean as he had often seen it from his foc'sle porthole, a heaving world pitching high above the port, then dropping below to give a glimpse of the seasky—as wild and beautiful as the sea—and then the sea surging up again. Yes, he used to lay there in his bunk with a cigarette and a magazine, and for hours he would gaze at the porthole, and there was the surging sea, the receding sky. But now he could not see it; the image of Everhart's bedroom was etched there, clouding the clean, green sea.