“I am tired,” wrote Matthew in August, “but I am singularly strong. I think I never knew before what weariness was. At the day’s end I am often dead on my feet, drugged and staggering. I can scarcely keep awake to eat, and I fall to bed and die until sudden dawn comes like crashing resurrection. Yet I have a certain new clearness of head and keenness of vision. Dreams and fancies, pictures and thoughts, dance within my head as I work. But I half fear them. They seem to want to drag me away from this physical emancipation. I try to drown and forget them, They are in the way. They may betray and subdue me.
“Where is the fulcrum to uplift our world and roll it forward? More and more I am convinced that it lies in intelligent digging; the building of subways by architects; the planning of subways and skyscrapers and states by workingmen.
“Curiously enough, as it is now, we do not need brains here. Yes, here in a work which at bottom is Thought and Method and Logic, most of us are required not to think or reason. Only the machines may think. I wrote of the machines as our Slaves of the Lamp, but I was wrong. We are the slaves. We must obey the machines or suffer. Our life is simply lifting. We are lifting the world and moving it. But only the machines know what we are doing. We are blindfolded. If only they did not blindfold us! If we could see the Plan and understand; if we could know and thrust and trace in our mind’s eye this little hole in the ground that writhes under Chicago; how the thrill of this Odyssey would nerve and hearten us! But no, of the end of what we are doing we can only guess vaguely. The only thing we really know is this shovelful of dirt. Or if we dream of the millions of men this hole will shoot in and out, up and down, back and forth—why will it shoot them and to whom and from what into what Great End, whither, whither?
“I could not finish this, and three days have gone. Yesterday I arose with the dawn before work and began reading. It was a revelation of joy. I was fresh and rested and the morning was bright and young. I read Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I am sure now that I never have read it before. I told people quite confidently that I had. I looked particularly intelligent when Hamlet was discussed or alluded to. But if this was the truth, I must have read Hamlet with tired mind and weary brain; mechanically, half comprehendingly. This morning I read as angels read, swooping with the thought, keen and happy with the inner spirit of the thing. Hamlet lived, and he and I suffered together with an all too easily comprehended hesitation at life. I shall do much reading like this. I know now what reading is. I am going to master a hundred books. Nothing common or cheap or trashy, but a hundred master thoughts. I do not believe the world holds more. These are the days of my purification that I may rise out of selfishness and hesitation and unbelief and depths of mental debauchery to the high and spiritual purity of love.
“Now I must go. I shall walk down to the morning sunlight which is soft and sweet before its midday dust and heat; others gradually will join me as I walk on. On some few faces I shall catch an answering gleam of morning, some anticipation of a great day’s work; but on most faces there will be but sodden grayness, a sort of ingrained weariness which no sleep will ever last long enough to drive away—save one sleep, and that the last.
“These faces frighten me. What is it that carves them? What makes my fellow men who work with their hands so sick of life? What ails the world of work? In itself, it is surely good; it is real; it is better than polo, baseball, or golf. It is the Thing Itself. There is beauty in its movement and in the sun shine, storm, and rain that walk beside it. Here is art. An art singularly deep and satisfying. Who does not glow at the touch of this imprisoned lightning that lies inert above the hole? We touch a bit of metal: the sullen rock gives up its soul and flies to a thousand fragments. And yet this glorious thunder of the world strikes on deaf ears and eyes that see nothing. At morning most of us are simply grim; at noon, we are dull; at night, we are automata. Even I cannot entirely escape it. I was free and joyous this morning. Tonight I shall be too tired to think or feel or plan. And after five, ten, fifteen years of this—what?
“I am trying to think through some solution. I see the Plan—our Plan, the great Emancipation—as clearly and truly as ever. I even know what we must aim at, but now the question is where to begin. It’s like trying to climb a great mountain. It takes so long to get to the foothills.
“This problem of lifting physical work to its natural level puzzles me. If only I could work and work wildly, unstintingly, hilariously for six full, long hours; after that, while I lie in a warm bath, I should like to hear Tschaikowsky’s Fourth Symphony. You know the lilt and cry of it. There must be much other music like it. Then I would like to have clean, soft clothes and fair, fresh food daintily prepared on a shining table. Afterward, a ride in green pastures and beside still waters; a film, a play, a novel, and always you. You, and long, deep arguments of the intricate, beautiful, winding ways of the world; and at last sleep, deep sleep within your arms. Then morning and the fray.
“I would welcome with loud Hosannas the dirt, the strain, the heat, the cold. But as it is, from the high sun of morning I rush, lurch, and crumple to a leaden night. The food in my little, dirty restaurant is rotten and is flung to me by a slatternly waitress who is as tired as I am. My bed is dirty. I’m sorry, dear, but it seems impossible to keep it clean and smooth. And then over all my neighborhood there hangs a great, thick sheet of noise; harsh, continuous, raucous noise like a breath of hell. It seems never to stop. It is there when I go to sleep; it rumbles in my deepest unconsciousness, and thunders in my dreams; it begins with dawn, rising to a shrill crescendo as I awake. There is no beauty in this world about me—no beauty. Or if these people see beauty, they cannot know it. They are not to blame, poor beeves; we are, we are!
“I grow half dead with physical weakness and sleep like death, but my body waxes hard and strong. I refused a clerk’s job today, but I have been made a sort of gang foreman. I know the men. There are Finns and Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and Negroes. We do not understand each other’s tongues; we have our hates and fancies. But we are one in interest: we are all robbed by the contractors. We know it and we are trying to organize and fight back. I do not know just what I should do in this matter. I never before realized that a labor union means bread, sleep, and shelter. Can we build one of this helpless, ignorant stuff? I do not know. But this at least I do know: Work is God.”
Matthew wrote no more. He was alone, but he was trying to think things out. What could really be done? If the task of the workers were cut in half, would they all work correspondingly harder? Of course they would not. Some would; he would. Most of them would sit around, dull-eyed, and loaf. Profits would dwindle and disappear. There might even be huge deficits. And could one get the men who knew and thought and planned all this to guide and to lead without the price of profit?
Oh, yes, some could be got for the sheer joy of fine effort. They would work gladly for board, clothes, and creation. Some men would do it because they love the game. But the kind of men who were spending profits today on the North Shore, on Fifth Avenue, Regent Street, and the Rue de la Paix—no! It would call for a kind of man different from them, with a different scheme of values. Yes, to work without money profit would demand a different scheme of values in a different kind of man; and to do full work on halftime in the ditch would need a different kind of man, with a new dream of living: perhaps there lay the world’s solution: in men who were—different.
He sat alone and tried to think it all out; but he could think no further because he was too lonely. He needed the rubbing of a kindred soul—the answering flash of another pole. His loneliness was not merely physical; his soul was alone. Kautilya was not answering his letters, and she had been gone two great months. Far down within him he was sick at heart. He could not quite understand why it had seemed to Kautilya so inevitable that they must part. He kept coming back to the question as to whether the excuse she gave was real and complete.
Could it be possible that she must sacrifice herself to a strange and unloved husband for reasons of state? What after all was little lost Bwodpur in the great emancipation of races? What difference whether she ruled as Princess or worked as worker? What was “royal blood,” after all?
And then, too, why this illogical solicitude for Sara’s right to him, after that supreme and utter betrayal and denial of all right? Was it not possible, more than possible, that he had disappointed Kautilya, just as he had disappointed himself and his mother and his people and perhaps some far-off immutable God?
Kautilya had built a high ideal of manhood and crowned it with his likeness, and yet when she had seen it face to face, perhaps it had seemed to crash before her eyes.
Perhaps—and his mind writhed, hesitated; and yet he pushed it forward to full view—perhaps, after all, there was unconsciously in Kautilya some borrowed, strained, and seeping prejudice from the dead white world, that made her in her inner soul and at the touch, shrink from intimate contact with a man of his race; and perhaps without quite realizing it, they had faced the end and she had seen life and love and dreams die; then softly but firmly she had put him by and gone away.
Thus Matthew’s dull and tired brain dropped down to clouds of weariness. But he did not surrender. The old desolation and despair seemed underlaid now by harsher iron built on sheer physical strength. He did not even rise and undress lest the ghosts of doubt grip him as he walked and moved. He slept all night dressed and sitting at his empty deal table, his head upon his hands. And he dreamed that God was Work.