Carl got down most of his beef stew, attacked and gave up a chunk of hard boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced out of the dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big, leisurely policeman, was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty, rosy-cheeked, smart of hat, impeccable of gloves, with fluffy white furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of a life bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman, she shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of winter, and skipped away.
"Bet she'd be a peach to know.... Fat chance I'd have to meet her, wrapping up baby-carriages for the North Shore commuters all day! All day!... Well, guess I'm going to honorably discharge myself!"
He left the job that afternoon.
His satiny Norse cheeks shone as he raced home through a rising blizzard, after dinner at the Florida Lunch Room, where he had allowed himself a ten-cent dessert for celebration.
But when he lolled in his hall bedroom, with his eyes attracted, as usual, to the three cracks in the blue-painted ceiling which made a rough map of Africa, when he visioned lands where there were lions and desert instead of department-store packages, his happiness wilted in face of the fact that he had only $10.42, with $8.00 due him from the store the following Tuesday. Several times he subtracted the $3.00 he owed the landlady from $18.42, but the result persisted in being only $15.42. He could not make $15.42 appear a reasonable sum with which to start life anew.
He had to search for a new job that evening. Only-he was so tired; it 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 café. 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.