The Eighth Day (30 page)

“Hello, Herb.”

“Y'know him?”

“Yes,” said Roger. “First name's Nick. Night watchman in the Fletcher Building.”

He had come to know Nick well, having served and washed him for weeks. If there was anything in the Great Ladder idea, Nick was high up, high up. Roger had never seen a patient who so made himself at home—so to speak—in the hospital and in his pain. Though dependent upon others for humiliating aid, though his bed stood among those of noisy, foul-mouthed, furious sufferers, he gazed tranquilly at the ceiling. A stag would die so. He asked for nothing. When Roger offered to write a letter for him, he dictated some words to his daughter in Boston, requesting only that the letter be mailed a week after his burial. He told her that his Mormon brothers would put his body under the ground when he was freed of it. Roger turned his chair and sat with his back to Old Nick. Nick would not wish a friend to witness his animal struggles; they were not important. And suddenly it came to Roger that his father, too, was high, high up. Throughout that long trial in Coaltown—the “Hyena trial”—his father had conducted himself just so: out of reach of curiosity and malice and to all appearances at home in the courtroom and his extremity.

Roger went out of the door and out of the building. He stood in the sunlight at the hospital's rear entrance, shivering in his white suit. He had no questions to put to his father. He had no wish to sit down at a table and talk with him; but Roger would have given much of the little he possessed to see him pass along the street. He would have followed him for blocks simply to rest his eyes on someone who was so high up.

He wanted to watch him closely too, because someday he—Roger—would have children of his own. He would leave them behind him. He would die.

He was being drawn to the human community by thoughts of the dying, the banished, and the unborn.

It was from another aspect of his family's slowness to mature that Roger suffered crushingly from homesickness. A glimpse of a woman in the distance would evoke his mother; an object, a girl's voice, a smell would recall “The Elms.” Everything would go dark before his eyes. He would be obliged to put out his hand to a lamp-post or a wall and to wait until the pain subsided. From time to time, in order to suffer more intensely—that is to embrace “The Elms” more passionately—he went to the railway station from which trains departed for Coaltown. The station was near the lake. He had never seen a body of standing water larger than a pond. The view of those innumerable waves calmed him. “When you think of all the people in the world and all the thousands of years that have gone by, I bet there must have been a lot of fellows my age who had to leave their homes for one reason or another—like going to war, for instance.”

Questions, the torment of questions.

There is no true education save in answer to urgent questioning. Unease and deprivation awaken the young mind to inquiry. Roger did not realize that he and his sisters had acquired that habit of mind in their earliest years: they had struggled to survive. Like plants in a parched soil, they had sent down deep roots. From infancy they had groped hither and thither, asking “What?” and “why?” and “how?” Beata Ashley was an admirable mother; she gave her children much; she gave them everything except the essential. As we have seen (and as a result of a starvation in her own childhood) she must love only one human being. John Ashley could give his children the essential—and much besides—but he was late-maturing; the flowering of his imagination was still to come. The children did not turn in on themselves. They were saved from fruitless introspection by their father's joy in them. Lily became the princess sleeping in the cave; Sophia entered into her ministry to animals. Constance—knowing no mother—prepared herself for that extraordinary life in which she would see herself as the mother of millions, more than half of them older than herself. Roger barely escaped some obscure shipwreck. A puzzling event took place in the summer of 1891. He was six and a half. He was well known in Coaltown as a model boy—so bright, so well behaved. His parents were out of the house. Seizing his youngest sister's chair he broke five windows in the living room. He then ran away from home, weeping as from some unfathomable abandonment. He stopped only to pick up Sophia's kitten to comfort him on his long walk to China. His parents tendered scarcely one word of rebuke. Roger never gave vent to his frustration again. A change came over him. The small adventurer and babbler became taciturn. He became a listener (“what?” “why?”). The expression on his face varied little. He became the school's best student and athlete. He was liked by everyone in town and ignored their liking. He had one friend, Porky. He accepted one person's love, Sophia's. He was strengthened by confidence in his father and isolated by his passionate love for his mother.

Questions. Questions. Now—like his father, thousands of miles away—he had no vocabulary and no grammar for reflection. What unity could be found in the increasing diversity of his existence: the catastrophe in Coaltown; his mother walking beside him imperturbedly to the courthouse; the mystery of his father's rescue; the noontime crowd on LaSalle Street; the deaths he was witnessing daily; God's responsibility for the suffering of children, horses, dogs, and cats; Eugene V. Debs in prison scarcely a mile away; his happiness when he looked at the waves and the stars; his fellow orderlies' views on women; his resolve to achieve a great lifework? And the working world—injustice everywhere: employers cheated the workers; workers cheated the employers and one another? He'd done some cheating himself.

One day he stopped by Old Clem's cell.

“Clem, those books you're reading—do students study them in college?”

“Yes, some of them.”

“Did you go to college?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What does a college education do for you?”

“It ties together the things you see.”

Roger drew back as though he had been struck.

“Can a person educate himself, Clem?”

“One in a million, maybe.”

“Does most of an education come out of books?”

“A man who tried to understand anything without knowing
THOSE BOOKS
would just be a feathered kangaroo. Like Pete Bogardus. You're wasting my time.”

“Thank you, Clem.”

He had no wish to go to any of those colleges, or—for a time, at least—to read any of those famous books. He had walked the streets of Chicago at all hours. He had listened to scores of life stories. Man is cruel to man and even those who are kind to those nearest them are inhuman to others. It's not kindness that's important but justice. Kindness is the stammering apology of the unjust.
The whole world's wrong
, he saw. There's something wrong at the heart of the world and he would track it down. Many of those books and colleges had been around for hundreds of years—with very little effect.

The few serious books he had looked into seemed windy, slow-moving, filled with padding—like political addresses and sermons. Like all Ashleys, he wanted no help. We shall see later how his father “invented” marriage and paternity. Roger wanted to invent the explanation for existence and the rules whereby men could live rationally side by side—to be the first philosopher, the first planner of the just community. Independence of mind (most men boast of possessing it) cannot rest. Roger had already entered on this great task. His head was full of notions and he was driven to write them down. At the Carr-Bingham Hotel he had collected wastepaper. During the long nights there, and later at the hospital, he wrote thousands and thousands of words on the backs of old account books, bills, announcements, and calendars—notions. He had never had a friend of his own age, except Porky, even more taciturn than himself. He had never, like other young men, built and unbuilt God, society, morals
in conversation.
He now drew up an explanation of the nature of things; he derived ethics from the order in the cosmos; he designed the constitution of an ideal state. One day his feverish resort to writing came to an end as abruptly as it had begun. He carried the armfuls of scrap paper to the incinerator. He had come to a dead end, not in discouragement but as the result of an insight: he discovered that he knew nothing and that he was ill equipped to learn, but that learning was possible. He was ripe for reading. We shall see how he entered reading by the back door.

After three months of hospital life Roger returned to the Carr-Bingham Hotel, promoted to day clerk. He was anxious to make more money and he had arrived at a conclusion about medicine. He had become aware of that never-ending line—from the beginning of time to the end of time—of patients waiting at the door. No bed was empty for longer than three hours. To his eyes medicine appeared to be a business of patch and shore and bolster—the temporary repair of unsalvageable vessels. He was an ignorant country boy; he had no idea that medicine could take a different view of itself.

Back at the hotel Roger came into closer contact with a group of newspaper reporters who shared a row of cubicle-like rooms on the top floor near his own. This corridor had long since lost its institutional uniformity. Most of the doors had been shattered in rage or horseplay and removed. The management had prudently replaced the chairs with benches and packing cases. For men without women a cave is sufficient.

A smell of gin, lemon peel, mash, cubebs, and medication filled the air. The men seldom ate, slept, washed, or fell silent. They were ill paid and only intermittently ambitious, but they were convinced that they belonged to the greatest profession in the world. They knew everything; all men except themselves were the dupes of appearances. They were privy to corruption in public office, the farce of philanthropy, the hypocrisy of the clergy, the wolves' raids of big business—especially of the railroads and of the stockyards. They were rich in all the knowledge they were not permitted to print. Knowledge, like courage and virtue, isolates a man; they were thrown back on one another's company. Barred from publishing what they knew, they were driven to seek out some other mode of expression: they were conversationalists. Conversation was their brightly lighted stage and their battlefield. There they knew their triumphs and their massacres. Day by day and night by night they strove for the palm of the unparalleled jest, the supreme verbal acrobacy. Under the guise of comradeship they flayed one another. They rifled the dictionaries for words and images of intoxicating precision; they demanded ever stronger accents from blasphemy and obscenity. They were untalented reporters because their ambitions lay elsewhere; they were conversationalists. Roger listened. They were quick-witted; they had a wide if heterogeneous field of information. Above all they had a point of view: the abject condition of man and the futility of his efforts to improve himself. Any confrontation with fortitude, heroism, piety, or even dignity rendered them uncomfortable. They prided themselves on being impressed by nothing. Any impulse toward admiration or compassion they promptly converted into ribaldry and persiflage. Several of these reporters had been present at the Coaltown trial and recognized the hotel clerk. They handled him roughly about it for a while, then forgot it. They could not take him seriously. He was a country yokel, a rube. He was still wet behind the ears.

Roger had two qualities, however, that recommended him to them. He was an attentive though unsmiling listener and he was reliable. Virtuosi stand in need of fresh audiences. “Old Trent listens with his eyes and ears and nose—damn it, he listens with his chin.” Dissipated men need one trustworthy friend. He became their banker and their message center. “Keep this money for me until tomorrow, Trent. I don't know what will be happening to me tonight.” “Tell Herb to keep out of sight. Gretchen's looking for him.” “Tell Spider the caucus is at ten o'clock in St. Stephen's Hall.”

If journalism was the greatest profession in the world Roger resolved to look into it. He could not understand why reporters held all action and all human beings, except themselves, in contempt. He could not understand why, seeing corruption everywhere, they were not moved to report the whole of it. One afternoon Spider, returning to the hotel, laid a large envelope before Roger. It contained scores of stories and editorials about the Ashley-Lansing case. During the trial the Ashleys read no papers. He now read these pages several times. He was astonished to see how accurately they reported the proceedings in the courthouse and yet how feeble and unfocused the editorial comment was, even when it inveighed against the verdict and the conduct of the trial. During a solemn midnight walk beside Lake Michigan Roger resolved to become a newspaperman.

Years later Roger was able to acknowledge the extent of his indebtedness to the group of reporters on the top floor of the Carr-Bingham: his introduction to journalism, to opera, to one of those devil's advocates that are so important in any education—that is, to the conversation of T. G. Speidel—and to reading.

The reporters were readers, as time permitted. There were many books to be found on the top floor of the Carr-Bingham Hotel—under the beds, over the wardrobes, in the toilet and broom cupboard, beside the mousetrap. Most of them were pocket size—a child's pocket size. Their covers were of spongy blue paper or of imitation leather. They bore such titles as
The Wit and Wisdom of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, Great Thoughts from Plato, The Best Pages of Casanova, Nietzsche on Superstition, Tolstoy on Art, Nuggets from Goethe, Nuggets from Voltaire, Confucius on The Center.
Roger read them. He entered reading by the back door. He paid a visit to the Public Library, but was displeased with it. He began to haunt second-hand bookstores. Reading became for him a great adventure. He told no one of his rewards and of his defeats.

Even before he arrived at his decision to become a journalist Roger learned that the profession enjoys an inestimable privilege: newspapermen can occasionally obtain free admission to the theatre. One evening a reporter gave him a ticket to the opera. He attended a performance of
Fidelio.
It was an overwhelming experience.