The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
was so pleasant to lie there with his sore feet cooling against the
wall, picturing a hunt in Africa, with native servants bringing him
things to eat: juicy steaks and French-fried potatoes and gallons of
ale (a repast which he may have been ignorant in assigning to the
African jungles, but which seemed peculiarly well chosen, after a
lunch-room dinner of watery corned-beef hash, burnt German-fried
potatoes, and indigestible hot mince-pie). His thoughts drifted off to
Plato. But Carl had a certain resoluteness even in these loose days.
He considered the manoeuvers for a new job. He desired one which
would permit him to go to theaters with the girl in white furs whom he
had seen that noon--the unknown fairy of his discontent.
It may be noted that he took this life quite seriously. Though he did
not suppose that he was going to continue dwelling in a hall bedroom,
yet never did he regard himself as a collegian Haroun-al-Raschid on an
amusing masquerade, pretending to be no better than the men with whom
he worked. Carl was no romantic hero incog. He was a workman, and he
knew it. Was not his father a carpenter? his father's best friend a
tailor? Had he not been a waiter at Plato?
But not always a workman. Carl had no conception of world-wide
class-consciousness; he had no pride in being a proletarian. Though
from Bone's musings and Frazer's lectures he had drawn a vague
optimism about a world-syndicate of nations, he took it for granted
that he was going to be rich as soon as he could.
Job. He had to have a job. He got stiffly up from the iron bed,
painfully drew on his shoes, after inspecting the hole in the sole of
the left shoe and the ripped seam at the back of the right. He pulled
tight the paper-thin overcoat which he had bought at a second-hand
dealer's shop, and dared a Chicago blizzard, with needles of snow
thundering by on a sixty-mile gale. Through a street of unutterably
drab stores and saloons he plowed to the Unallied Taxicab Company's
garage. He felt lonely, cold, but he observed with ceaseless interest
the new people, different people, who sloped by him in the dun web of
the blizzard. The American marveled at a recently immigrated Slav's
astrachan cap.
He had hung about the Unallied garage on evenings when he was too poor
to go to vaudeville. He had become decidedly friendly with the night
washer, a youngster from Minneapolis. Trotting up to the washer, who
was digging caked snow from the shoes of a car, he blurted:
"Say, Coogan, I've beat my job at ----'s. How's chances for getting a
taxi to drive? You know I know the game."
"You? Driving a taxi?" stammered the washer. "Why, say, there was a
guy that was a road-tester for the Blix Company and he's got a cousin
that knows Bathhouse John, and that guy with all his pull has been
trying to get on drivin' here for the last six months and ain't landed
it, so you see about how much chance you got!"
"Gosh! it don't look much like I had much chance, for a fact."
"Tell you what I'll do, though. Why don't you get on at some
automobile factory, and then you could ring in as a chauffeur, soon 's
you got some recommends you could take to the Y. M. C. A. employment
bureau." The washer gouged at a clot of ice with his heel, swore
profusely, and went on: "Here. You go over to the Lodestar Motor
Company's office, over on La Salle, Monday, and ask for Bill Coogan,
on the sales end. He's me cousin, and you tell him to give you a card
to the foreman out at the works, and I guess maybe you'll get a job,
all right."
Tuesday morning, after a severe questioning by the foreman, Carl was
given a week's try-out without pay at the Lodestar factory. He proved
to be one of those much-sought freaks in the world of mechanics, a
natural filer. The uninspired filer, unaware of the niceties of the
art, saws up and down, whereas the instinctive filer, like Carl, draws
his file evenly across the metal, and the result fits its socket
truly. So he was given welcome, paid twenty-five cents an hour, and
made full member of exactly such a gang as he had known at Plato,
after he had laughed away the straw boss who tried to make him go ask
for a left-handed monkey-wrench. He roomed at a machinists'
boarding-house, and enjoyed the furious discussions over religion and
the question of air _versus_ water cooling far more than he had ever
enjoyed the polite jesting at Mrs. Henkel's.
He became friendly with the foreman of the repair-shop, and was
promised a "chance." While the driver who made the road-tests of the
cars was ill Carl was called on as a substitute. The older workmen
warned him that no one could begin road-testing so early and hold the
job. But Carl happened to drive the vice-president of the firm. He
discussed bass-fishing in Minnesota with the vice-president, and he
was retained as road-tester, getting his chauffeur's license. Two
months later, when he was helping in the overhauling of a car in the
repair-shop, he heard a full-bodied man with a smart English overcoat
and a supercilious red face ask curtly of the shop foreman where he
could get a "crack shuffer, right away, one that can give the traffic
cops something to do for their money."
The foreman always stopped to scratch his chin when he had to think.
This process gave Carl time to look up from his repairs and blandly
remark: "That's me. Want to try me?"
Half an hour later Carl was engaged at twenty-five dollars a week as
the Ruddy One's driver. Before Monday noon he had convinced the Ruddy
One that he was no servant, but a mechanical expert. He drove the
Ruddy One to his Investments and Securities office in the morning, and
back at five; to restaurants in the evening. Not infrequently, with
the wind whooping about corners, he slept peacefully in the car till
two in the morning, outside a cafe. And he was perfectly happy. He was
at last seeing the Great World. As he manoeuvered along State Street
he rejoiced in the complications of the traffic and tooted his horn
unnecessarily. As he waited before tall buildings, at noon, he gazed
up at them with a superior air of boredom--because he was so boyishly
proud of being a part of all this titanic life that he was afraid he
might show it. He gloried in every new road, in driving along the Lake
Shore, where the horizon was bounded not by unimaginative land, but by
restless water.
Then the Ruddy One's favorite roads began to be familiar to Carl, too
familiar, and he so hated his sot of an employer that he caught
himself muttering, while driving, "Thank the Lord I sit in front and
don't have to see that chunk of raw beefsteak he calls a neck."
While he waited for the fifth time before a certain expensive but not
exclusive roadhouse, with the bouncing giggles of girls inside
spoiling the spring night, he studied the background as once he had
studied his father's woodshed. He was not, unfortunately, shocked by
wine and women. But he was bored by box-trees. There was a smugly
clipped box-tree on either side of the carriage entrance, the leaves
like cheap green lacquer in the glare of the arc-light, which brought
out all the artificiality of the gray-and-black cinder drive. He felt
that five pilgrimages to even the best of box-trees were enough. It
would be perfectly unreasonable for a free man to come here to stare
at box-trees a sixth time. "All right," he growled. "I guess
my-wandering-boy-to-night is going to beat it again."
While he drove to the garage he pondered: "Is it worth twenty-five
plunks to me to be able to beat it to-night instead of waiting four
days till pay-day? Nope. I'm a poor man."
But at 5 A.M. he was hanging about the railroad-yards at Hammond,
recalling the lessons of youth in "flipping trains"; and at seven he
was standing on the bumpers between two freight-cars, clinging to the
brake-rod, looking out to the open meadows of Indiana, laughing to see
farm-houses ringed with apple-blossoms and sweet with April morning.
The cinders stormed by him. As he swung with the cars, on curves, he
saw the treacherous wheels grinding beneath him. But to the
chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck of the trucks he hummed,
"Never turn back, never tur' back, never tur' back."
CHAPTER XIV
A young hobo named Carl Ericson crawled from the rods of an N. & W.
freight-car at Roanoke, Virginia, on a May day, with spring at full
tide and the Judas-trees a singing pink on the slopes of the Blue
Ridge.
"Hm!" grunted the young hobo. "I like these mountains. Guess I'll stay
here awhile.... Virginia! Plantations and Civil War history and
Richmond and everything, and me here!"
A frowzy old hobo poked a somnolent head up from a pile of lumber near
the tracks and yawned welcome to the recruit. "Hello, Slim. How's
tricks?"
"Pretty good. What's the best section to batter for a poke-out,
Billy?"
"To the right, over that way, and straight out."
"Much 'bliged," said Slim--erstwhile Ericson. "Say, j' know of any
jobs in this----"
"Any _whats_?"
"Jobs."
"Jobs? You looking for----Say, you beat it. Gwan. Chase yourself. Gwan
now; don't stand there. You ain't no decent 'bo. You're another of
those Unfortunate Workmen that's spoiling the profesh." The veteran
stared at Carl reprovingly, yet with a little sadness, too, at the
thought of how bitterly he had been deceived in this young comrade,
and his uncombed head slowly vanished amid the lumber.
Carl grinned and started up-town. He walked into four restaurants. At
noon, in white jacket, he was bustling about as waiter in the
dining-room of the Waskahominie Hotel, which had "white service" as a
feature.
Within two days he was boon companion of a guest of the
Waskahominie--Parker Heye, an actor famous from Cape Charles to
Shockeysville, now playing heavies at Roanoke in the Great Riley Tent
Show, Presenting a Popular Repertoire of Famous Melodramas under
Canvas, Rain or Shine, Admittance Twenty-five Cents, Section Reserved
for Colored People, the Best Show under Canvas, This Week Only.
When Parker Heye returned from the theater Carl sat with him in a room
which had calico-like wall-paper, a sunken bed with a comforter out of
which oozed a bit of its soiled cotton entrails, a cracked
water-pitcher on a staggering wash-stand, and a beautiful new cuspidor
of white china hand-painted with pink moss-roses tied with narrow blue
ribbon.
Carl listened credulously to Heye's confidences as to how jealous was
Riley, the actor-manager, of Heye's art, how Heye had "knocked them
all down" in a stock company at Newport News, and what E. H. Sothern
had said to him when they met in Richmond as guests of the Seven Pines
Club.
"Say," rasped Heye, "you're a smart young fellow, good-looking,
ejucated. Why don't you try to get an engagement? I'll knock you down
to Riley. The second juvenile 's going to leave on Saturday, and there
ain't hardly time to get anybody from Norfolk."
"Golly! that 'd be great!" cried Carl, who, like every human being
since Eden, with the possible exceptions of Calvin and Richard
Mansfield, had a secret belief that he could be a powerful actor.
"Well, I'll see what I can do for you," said Heye, at parting,
alternately snapping his suspenders and scratching his head. Though he
was in his stocking-feet and coat-less, though the back of his neck
was a scraggle of hair, Parker Heye was preferable to the three Swiss
waiters snoring in the hot room under the eaves, with its door half
open, opposite the half-open door of the room where negro chambermaids
tumbled and snorted in uncouth slumber. Carl's nose wrinkled with
bitter fastidiousness as he pulled off his clothes, sticky with heat,
and glared at the swathed forms of the waiters. He was the aristocrat
among proletarians, going back to His Own People--of the Great Riley
Tent Show.