Kabanata Kabanata 18 · Chapter XVIII

. Chapter XVIII

Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to the

washer.

“I say,” he began.

“Don’t talk to me,” Martin snarled.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” he said at noon, when they knocked off for dinner.

Tears came into the other’s eyes.

“That’s all right, old man,” he said. “We’re in hell, an’ we can’t help

ourselves. An’, you know, I kind of like you a whole lot. That’s what

made it—hurt. I cottoned to you from the first.”

Martin shook his hand.

“Let’s quit,” Joe suggested. “Let’s chuck it, an’ go hoboin’. I ain’t

never tried it, but it must be dead easy. An’ nothin’ to do. Just think

of it, nothin’ to do. I was sick once, typhoid, in the hospital, an’ it

was beautiful. I wish I’d get sick again.”

The week dragged on. The hotel was full, and extra “fancy starch”

poured in upon them. They performed prodigies of valor. They fought

late each night under the electric lights, bolted their meals, and even

got in a half hour’s work before breakfast. Martin no longer took his

cold baths. Every moment was drive, drive, drive, and Joe was the

masterful shepherd of moments, herding them carefully, never losing

one, counting them over like a miser counting gold, working on in a

frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish machine, aided ably by that other machine

that thought of itself as once having been one Martin Eden, a man.

But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think. The

house of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its

shadowy caretaker. He was a shadow. Joe was right. They were both

shadows, and this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a dream?

Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the heavy irons

back and forth over the white garments, it came to him that it was a

dream. In a short while, or maybe after a thousand years or so, he

would awake, in his little room with the ink-stained table, and take up

his writing where he had left off the day before. Or maybe that was a

dream, too, and the awakening would be the changing of the watches,

when he would drop down out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and

go up on deck, under the tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the

cool tradewind blowing through his flesh.

Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o’clock.

“Guess I’ll go down an’ get a glass of beer,” Joe said, in the queer,

monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.

Martin seemed suddenly to wake up. He opened the kit bag and oiled his

wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the bearings. Joe

was halfway down to the saloon when Martin passed by, bending low over

the handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-six gear with rhythmic

strength, his face set for seventy miles of road and grade and dust. He

slept in Oakland that night, and on Sunday covered the seventy miles

back. And on Monday morning, weary, he began the new week’s work, but

he had kept sober.

A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled as a

machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a glimmering

bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to scorch off the

hundred and forty miles. But this was not rest. It was

super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering bit of

soul that was all that was left him from former life. At the end of the

seventh week, without intending it, too weak to resist, he drifted down

to the village with Joe and drowned life and found life until Monday

morning.

Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty miles,

obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the numbness of

still greater exertion. At the end of three months he went down a third

time to the village with Joe. He forgot, and lived again, and, living,

he saw, in clear illumination, the beast he was making of himself—not

by the drink, but by the work. The drink was an effect, not a cause. It

followed inevitably upon the work, as the night follows upon the day.

Not by becoming a toil-beast could he win to the heights, was the

message the whiskey whispered to him, and he nodded approbation. The

whiskey was wise. It told secrets on itself.

He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and while

they drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and scribbled.

“A telegram, Joe,” he said. “Read it.”

Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what he read seemed to

sober him. He looked at the other reproachfully, tears oozing into his

eyes and down his cheeks.

“You ain’t goin’ back on me, Mart?” he queried hopelessly.

Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the

message to the telegraph office.

“Hold on,” Joe muttered thickly. “Lemme think.”

He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin’s arm around

him and supporting him, while he thought.

“Make that two laundrymen,” he said abruptly. “Here, lemme fix it.”

“What are you quitting for?” Martin demanded.

“Same reason as you.”

“But I’m going to sea. You can’t do that.”

“Nope,” was the answer, “but I can hobo all right, all right.”

Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-

“By God, I think you’re right! Better a hobo than a beast of toil. Why,

man, you’ll live. And that’s more than you ever did before.”

“I was in hospital, once,” Joe corrected. “It was beautiful.

Typhoid—did I tell you?”

While Martin changed the telegram to “two laundrymen,” Joe went on:-

“I never wanted to drink when I was in hospital. Funny, ain’t it? But

when I’ve ben workin’ like a slave all week, I just got to bowl up.

Ever noticed that cooks drink like hell?—an’ bakers, too? It’s the

work. They’ve sure got to. Here, lemme pay half of that telegram.”

“I’ll shake you for it,” Martin offered.

“Come on, everybody drink,” Joe called, as they rattled the dice and

rolled them out on the damp bar.

Monday morning Joe was wild with anticipation. He did not mind his

aching head, nor did he take interest in his work. Whole herds of

moments stole away and were lost while their careless shepherd gazed

out of the window at the sunshine and the trees.

“Just look at it!” he cried. “An’ it’s all mine! It’s free. I can lie

down under them trees an’ sleep for a thousan’ years if I want to. Aw,

come on, Mart, let’s chuck it. What’s the good of waitin’ another

moment. That’s the land of nothin’ to do out there, an’ I got a ticket

for it—an’ it ain’t no return ticket, b’gosh!”

A few minutes later, filling the truck with soiled clothes for the

washer, Joe spied the hotel manager’s shirt. He knew its mark, and with

a sudden glorious consciousness of freedom he threw it on the floor and

stamped on it.

“I wish you was in it, you pig-headed Dutchman!” he shouted. “In it,

an’ right there where I’ve got you! Take that! an’ that! an’ that! damn

you! Hold me back, somebody! Hold me back!”

Martin laughed and held him to his work. On Tuesday night the new

laundrymen arrived, and the rest of the week was spent breaking them

into the routine. Joe sat around and explained his system, but he did

no more work.

“Not a tap,” he announced. “Not a tap. They can fire me if they want

to, but if they do, I’ll quit. No more work in mine, thank you kindly.

Me for the freight cars an’ the shade under the trees. Go to it, you

slaves! That’s right. Slave an’ sweat! Slave an’ sweat! An’ when you’re

dead, you’ll rot the same as me, an’ what’s it matter how you live?—eh?

Tell me that—what’s it matter in the long run?”

On Saturday they drew their pay and came to the parting of the ways.

“They ain’t no use in me askin’ you to change your mind an’ hit the

road with me?” Joe asked hopelessly:

Martin shook his head. He was standing by his wheel, ready to start.

They shook hands, and Joe held on to his for a moment, as he said:-

“I’m goin’ to see you again, Mart, before you an’ me die. That’s

straight dope. I feel it in my bones. Good-by, Mart, an’ be good. I

like you like hell, you know.”

He stood, a forlorn figure, in the middle of the road, watching until

Martin turned a bend and was gone from sight.

“He’s a good Indian, that boy,” he muttered. “A good Indian.”

Then he plodded down the road himself, to the water tank, where half a

dozen empties lay on a side-track waiting for the up freight.