A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago Part 29

"I been on this line for six years. Always on the owl car," he says. "I like it better than the day s.h.i.+ft. I was married, but my wife died and I don't find much to do with my evenings, anyway.

"No, I don't know any of these people, except there's a couple of workingmen who I take home on the next trip. Mostly they're always strangers. They've been out having a good time, I suppose. It's funny about them. I always feel sorry for 'em. Yes, sir, you can't help it.

"There's some that's been out drinking or hanging around with women and when they get on the car they sort of slide down in their seats and you feel like there was nothing much to what they'd been doing. Pessimistic?

No, I ain't pessimistic. If you was ridin' this car like I you'd see what I mean.

"It's like watchin' people afterwards. I mean after they've done things.

They always seem worse off then. I suppose it's because they're all sleepy. But standin' here of nights I feel that it's more than that.

They're tired sure enough but they're also feeling that things ain't what they're cracked up to be.

"I seldom put anybody off. The drunks are pretty sad and I feel sorry for them. They just flop over and I wake them up when it comes their time.

Sometimes there's girls and they look pretty sad. And sometimes something really interestin' comes off. Once there was a lady who was cryin' and holdin' a baby. On the third run it was. I could see she'd up and left her house all of a sudden on account of a quarrel with her husband, because she was only half b.u.t.toned together.

"And once there was a man whose pictures I see in the papers the next day as having committed suicide. I remembered him in a minute. Well, no, he didn't look like he was going to commit suicide. He looked just about like all the other pa.s.sengers--tired and sleepy and sort of down."

The mild-faced conductor helped one of his pa.s.sengers off.

"Don't you ever wonder what keeps these people out or where they're going at this time of night?" the newspaper man pursued as the car started up again.

"Well," said the conductor, "not exactly. I've got it figured out there's nothing much to that and that they're all kind of alike. They've been to parties or callin' on their girls or just got restless or somethin'.

What's the difference? All I can say about 'em is that you get so after years you feel sorry for 'em all. And they're all alike--people as ride on the night run cars are just more tired than the people I remember used to ride on the day run cars I was on before my wife died."

The clock in a candy store window says "Three-twelve." A few windows down, another clock says "Three-five." The newspaper man walks to his home studying the clocks. They all disagree as before. And yet their faces are all identical--as identical as the faces of the owl car pa.s.sengers seem to the conductor. And here is a clock that has stopped. It says "Twenty after four." And the newspaper man thinks of the picture the conductor identified in the papers the next morning. The picture said something like "Twenty after four" at the wrong time. It's all a bit mixed up.

CONFESSIONS

The rain mutters in the night and the pavements like dark mirrors are alive with impressionistic cartoons of the city. The little, silent street with its darkened store windows and rain-veiled arc lamps is as lonely as a far-away train whistle.

Over the darkened stores are stone and wooden flat buildings. Here, too, the lights have gone out. People sleep. The rain falls. The gleaming pavements amuse themselves with reflections.

I have an hour to wait. From the musty smelling hallway where I stand the scene is like an old print--an old London print--that I have always meant to buy and put in a frame but have never found.

Writing about people when one is alone under an electric lamp, and thinking about people when one stands watching the rain in the dark streets, are two different diversions. When one writes under an electric lamp one pompously marshals ideas; one remembers the things people say and do and believe in, and slowly these things replace people in one's mind.

One thinks (in the calm of one's study): "So-and-so is a Puritan ... he is viciously afraid of anything which will disturb the idealized version of himself in which he believes--and wants other people to believe...." Yes, one thinks So-and-so is this and So-and-so is that. And it all seems very simple. People focus into clearly outlined ideas--definitions. And one can sit back and belabor them, hamstring them, pull their noses, expose their absurdities and derive a deal of satisfaction from the process. Iconoclasm is easy and warming under an electric light in one's study.

But in the rain at night, in the dark street staring at darkened windows, watching the curious reflections in the pavements--it is different in the rain. The night mutters and whispers.

"People," one thinks, "tired, silent people sleeping in the dark."

Ideas do not come so easily or so clearly. The enn.o.bling angers which are the emotion of superiority in the iconoclast do not rise so spontaneously.

And one does not say "People are this and people are that...." No, one pauses and stares at the dark chatter of the rain and a curious silence saddens one's mind.

Life is apart from ideas. And the things that people say and believe in and for which they die and in behalf of which they invent laws and codes--these have nothing to do with the insides of people. Puritan, hypocrite, criminal, dolt--these are paper-thin masks. It is diverting to rip them in the calm of one's study.

Life that warms the trees into green in the summer, that sends birds circling through the air, that spreads a tender, pa.s.sionate glow over even the most barren wastes--people are but one of its almost too many children. The dark, the rain, the lights, people asleep in bed, the wind, the snow that will fall tomorrow, the ice, flowers, sunlight, country roads, pavements and stars--all these are the same. Through all of them life sends its intimate and sacred breath.

One becomes aware of such curious facts in the rain at night and one's iconoclasm, like a broken umbrella, hangs useless from one's hand.

Tomorrow these people who are now asleep will be stirring, giving vent to outrageous ideas, championing incredulous ba.n.a.lities, prostrating themselves before imbecile superst.i.tions. Tomorrow they will rise and begin forthwith to lie, quibble, cheat, steal, fourflush and kill, each and all inspired by the solacing monomania that every one of their words and gestures is a credible variant of perfection. Yes, tomorrow they will be as they were yesterday.

But in this rain at night they rest from their perfections, they lay aside for a few hours their paper masks. And one can contemplate them with a curious absence of indignation or criticism. There is something warm and intimate about the vision of many people sleeping in the beds above the darkened store fronts of this little street. Their bodies have been in the world so long--almost as long as the stones out of which their houses are made. So many things have happened to them, so many debacles and monsters and horrors have swept them off their feet ... and always they have kept on--persisting through floods, volcanic eruptions, plagues and wars.

Heroic and incredible people. Endlessly belaboring themselves with ideas, G.o.ds, taboos, and philosophies. Yet here they are, still in this silent little street. The world has grown old. Trees have decayed and races died out. But here above the darkened store fronts lies the perpetual miracle.... People in whom life streams as nave and intimate as ever.

Yes, it is to life and not people one makes one's obeisance. Toward life no iconoclasm is possible, for even that which is in opposition to its beauty and horror must of necessity be a part of them.

It rains. The arc lamps gleam through the monotonous downpour. One can only stand and dream ... how charming people are since they are alive ...

how charming the rain is and the night.... And how foolish arguments are ... how ba.n.a.l are these cerebral monsters who pose as iconoclasts and devote themselves grandiloquently and inanely to disturbing the paper masks....

I walk away from the musty smelling hallway. A dog steps tranquilly out of the shadows nearby. He surveys the street and the rain with a proprietary calm.

It would be amusing to walk in the rain with a strange dog. I whistle softly and rea.s.suringly to him. He pauses and turns his head toward me, surveying me with an air of vague discomfort. What do I want of him? ...

he thinks ... who am I? ... have I any authority? ... what will happen to him if he doesn't obey the whistle?

Thus he stands hest.i.tating. Perhaps, too, I will give him shelter, a kindness never to be despised. A moment ago, before I whistled, this dog was tranquil and happy in the rain. Now he has changed. He turns fully around and approaches me, a slight cringe in his walk. The tranquillity has left him. At the sound of my whistle he has grown suddenly tired and lonely and the night and rain no longer lure him. He has found another companions.h.i.+p.

And so together we walk for a distance, this dog and I, wondering about each other....

AN IOWA HUMORESQUE

In a room at the Auditorium Hotel a group of men and women connected with the opera were having tea. As they drank out of the fragile cups and nibbled at the little cakes they boasted to each other of their love affairs.

"And I had the devil of a time getting rid of her," was the motif of the men's conversation. The women said, "And I just couldn't shake him. It was awful."

There was one--an American prima donna--who grew pensive as the amorous boasting increased. An opulent woman past 35, dark-haired, great-eyed; a robust enchantress with a sweep to her manner. Her beauty was an exaggeration. Exaggerated contours, colors, features that needed perspective to set them off. Diluted by distance and bathed by the footlights she focused prettily into a Manon, a Thas, an Isolde. But in the room drinking tea she had the effect of a too startling close-up--a rococo siren cramped for s.p.a.ce.

The barytone leaned unctuously across the small table and said to her with a preposterous archness of manner:

"And how does it happen, my dear, that you have nothing to tell us?"

"Because she has too much," said one of the orchestra men, laughingly.

The prima donna smiled.

"Oh, I can tell a story as well as anybody," she said. "In fact, I was just thinking of one. You know I was in Iowa last month. And I visited the town where I was born and lived as a girl--until I was nineteen. It's funny."

Again the pensive stare out of the window at the chill-looking autumn sky and the sharp outlines of the city roofs.