by Henry Miller
Matt Reardon broke in: “You wouldn’t like a carriage to take you around in, would you, Luther?”
“Honest, friend, I want to work, only . . .”
“Here,” said Moloch, slipping a half-dollar into the man’s hand. “Take that and get a haircut tonight. See me tomorrow morning. Take a bath, too, if you have time, and leave your overcoat home.” He was about to turn away. “And say, friend,” he added as an afterthought, “tell me—have you got a home?” It was the first indication he gave that he was talking to a human being.
Luther answered ruefully: “I had one once, but the judge he . . .”
Moloch interrupted him. “Mr. Lawson,” he called, “will you give this man a couple of dollars for me? I’ll return it to you Saturday.” He whispered the last.
Luther seemed to lose interest in the job and walked over to get the money. When he had gone Moloch slipped over to Lawson. “Don’t let him in again, savvy?”
“Sure,” said Lawson. His head moved eloquently. He had a way of being at once profound and lugubrious. “I knew the minute I laid eyes on him that you’d want to say a few words to him. I don’t let them all in, you know. Only the choice ones.”
Moloch grinned. “That’s the idea, Lawson—only the choice ones.”
Returning to his desk, he found Prigozi capering about like Silenus and bleating a babble of strange words—synapses, parathyroids, involutional melancholia, euphorias . . . whatnot. The man behaved like an automaton that had been wound up and would go on muttering outlandish jargon until the spring ran down. He was bending hysterically over Matt, his cheeks hot and flushed, tears welling up, his lips slavering.
“What I say”—he slammed the desk with his clammy fist— “what I say,” he repeated vociferously, “is this: you ought to hang that poor bugger up to dry . . . hang him up in the toilet, he won’t know the difference. Or say, I tell you what—send him up to Dr. Nussbaum in the morning. I’ll tip the old codger off. Cripes, we haven’t had a decent case for the last two weeks. Nothing but paranoids . . . and cretins.”
Restive because Moloch was paying no attention to him, he threw the remains of a voice to the ceiling.
“Gonna doll that guy up in a uniform tomorrow, eh? You ought to make a wardrobe attendant out of him.”
Moloch appeared to be absorbed in his papers.
“I say, Mister Moloch! Feelin’ pretty good now . . . satisfied with the world, heh? Jesus, but you like to play the good Samaritan!”
Prigozi was now fairly launched on his pet theme: playing the good Samaritan. It was his favorite instrument of torture, for Moloch could stand most any other gaff but being dubbed a little Jesus. He was inclined to look upon his charitable impulses as a weakness. Prigozi understood this thoroughly. What he wanted was to see Moloch reduced to a soft, pulpy, Christian mass of flesh and principles. In the ordinary Gentile he saw no hope of resuscitating the Christ spirit. Moloch he recognized as a Christian “sport,” a case of religious atavism, one might say. This callous shell in which Moloch encased his tender spirit could not deceive Prigozi. Oh, no. He knew a real Christian when he met one. And the flesh of a real Christian was ever so much more succulent than a priest’s or a pope’s.
Moloch listened to Prigozi’s tirades for a while with mild amusement. That irritated Prigozi, took the wind out of his sails, as it were. Finally Moloch turned to Matt:
“Look here, Matt, do me a favor, will you? Chase this dirty Grand Street savant out of here. Send him home to his wife and guinea pigs.”
“There you go!” Prigozi exclaimed, rubbing his hands like Lady Macbeth. “Now that’s what I call a normal reaction. You’re not psychotic—yet, Mister Moloch.” He chuckled as though he had made a quick sale.
“No,” said the other, “I suppose my behavior is indicative of nothing more than a mild neuroticism. Take yourself now . . . you’re a healthy specimen of the ‘normal.’ How about it, Matt?”
“Slightly tainted,” responded Matt.
“Gwan, gwan!” ranted Prigozi, waving his hands excitedly as if he were shooing away a swarm of horseflies. “Someday I’m gonna submit my plan to Twilliger, and then you guys better watch out or you’ll be losing your jobs.”
This eternal question of normality versus abnormality was intimately linked with the messenger problem. Prigozi had certain unique theories about the status of the messenger boy with which Moloch entirely disagreed. In order to give Prigozi material with which to formulate his theories, Moloch had permitted him to don the uniform for a few months as a part-time messenger. Prigozi found the experience thrilling. His solution to the problem could be boiled down to one word: Revolution.
Matt Reardon found Prigozi’s ideas stimulating and entertaining. He hadn’t an ounce of faith in them, but he made it a principle to encourage Prigozi in order to take some of the conceit out of Moloch. At the same time he utilized this ceaseless strife to enlarge his afternoon’s recreation. He commenced usually by twitting Prigozi about his various schemes.
“That plan of yours,” he said, “what plan is that? You don’t mean the idea of substituting pigeons for messengers, do you?”
“Get out of here!” Prigozi snarled. “Where do you get that stuff? I know the guy who invented that pigeon stunt . . . that crazy manager of yours up in the third district, that guy with the big belly, looks like a eunuch. What’s his name again, Dion?” He snapped his fingers to jog his memory.
“You mean Boylan?”
“Yeah, that’s the bloke. He was going to buy up those religious paintings your friend Dun brought over from Europe.”
As Prigozi’s ebullience rose his ideas became more dissociated, and what slight command he held over the English language threatened to relax and disintegrate entirely. However, he lost none of his picturesque qualities. In fact, Moloch and the others derived the utmost enjoyment from these explosions. As a daily ritual, however, it was apt to become monotonous. In an hour or so Prigozi would quiet down, become earnest in a rather dignified way (if one could ever believe this possible of him—dignity!), and converse reasonably and charmingly about the vegetation in the Arctic regions, or the scientific means of determining the weight of the earth. But first, it seemed, he had to work off his grosser indulgences, those mad, lyric extravagances which he brought with him from somewhere—from the ghetto, possibly. About his past Prigozi was awkwardly reticent, and out of a feeling of sympathy and delicacy Moloch, despite the intimacy that existed between them, never alluded to the subject. Several times Prigozi had been on the verge of unbosoming, but Moloch’s attitude of complete indifference nettled him and forced him to shrink back.
Prigozi soon forgot about Boylan and his pigeons in the pursuit of his own chimeras. “If you fellows are serious,” he went on, “I’m going to tell you about this plan of mine . . . and I mean it when I say that I’m going to present it to Twilliger someday.” He cleared his throat and looked about for a cuspidor. “That jackass on the thirteenth floor—” referring to Vice-President Twilliger— “he wants to raise the standard of the messenger force, don’t he?”
Moloch nodded.
“Well, then, he’s got to recognize this fact,” and Prigozi embarked on a flood of ideas which, when the excitement abated, would land him in a telegraphic Utopia.
Moloch never refused an opportunity to listen to these panaceas. No matter how crack-brained the idea, there were always crumbs of information which he found valuable and practicable. It was an admitted fact that the: one problem which all the telegraph companies had never adequately met was the business of providing a reliable, intelligent, and steady corps of messengers. Much energy and invention, not to speak of enormous sums, had been spent for the perfection of mechanical and electrical devices, but the messenger problem remained unsolved, almost untouched. It was more acute now than it had ever been in the past.
In the three years that he had been at his desk, Moloch had been given the opportunity to become acquainted with most of the disturbing factors invol
ved; and, if he had not solved the problem for the company, he had at least effected a radical improvement. The chief obstacle in his path, for he had plans up his sleeve to improve the situation further, was that jackass, as Prigozi called him, on the thirteenth floor. Twilliger, who had been a messenger in his youth, believed that the only solutions of any value were those of his own making, or those which his so-called efficiency experts presented to him for approval. He saw no violation of logic in spending a fortune to reduce the transmission time to San Francisco only to have the message lie at the receiving office for a few hours because of a shortage of messengers. If, for instance, you received a message from California, a sticker informed you pompously that it took less than forty-five minutes to speed this greeting across the continent. Yet that same message might be brought you by a half-wit who had stopped on his way for three-quarters of an hour to watch a ball game—we will say nothing of those messages thrown down the sewer daily by aggrieved youngsters who had discovered that it was impossible to earn the twenty or twenty-five dollars a week on a piecework basis which the newspaper advertisements promised.
When Moloch took over the reins he found that it was customary to hire ten thousand messengers a year in order to preserve a working force of a thousand. Two months ago he had succeeded in reducing this extravagant turnover to almost fifty percent. And there were indications that it might be further reduced.
Then along came Twilliger with a mandate to slash wages. “There is such a thing as a healthy turnover!” That was Twilliger’s dictum. The very next month they were obliged to hire over two thousand raw recruits. Even this staggering influx was insufficient to keep the gaps plugged. It was like a dam bursting. There was scarcely a veteran left. That was the very devil of it! Twilliger’s tactics were such that there wasn’t even a substantial nucleus on which to build up a mobile, skeleton force. The very bottom had dropped out. Ads appeared like mushrooms—not only in the metropolitan papers, but in suburban papers, weeklies, church papers, foreign papers, school papers, college magazines. Twilliger would have advertised in Purgatory had he not been a Unitarian.
In conjunction with this frantic newspaper activity, roundup squads were inducted to canvass the schoolyards, playgrounds, lots, pool parlors, movie houses—any place and every place that a boy was likely to be encountered, buttonholed, and appealed to.
But none of these expedients relieved the deplorable mess. The hard labor of three years, the effective welfare and educational work that Moloch had introduced, the confidence in the integrity of the organization which he had gradually instilled—all this evaporated overnight. The Great American Telegraph Company became a good joke. You couldn’t pay the ordinary boy to work for it.
Naturally he was interested in any program of amelioration. But he was skeptical, too. “Can anyone supply that jackass up there in his swivel chair with a new set of brains?” That was the thought which shot through his head as he listened to Prigozi. That seemed the only solution of any moment now. As for Prigozi, tethered as he was to a skein of psychoanalytical theories, what was he to expect from him? Some Freudian-Marx solution, no doubt, which required a categorical affirmative, a stout libido, and a box of Seidlitz powders.
The “revolution” which Prigozi broached with sound and fury turned out upon analysis to be about as radical as the constitution which the Czar Alexander threw to his groveling moujiks. His plan consisted of a string of half-baked ideas which, assuming their feasibility, required at least fifteen years to work out. His campaign of reform had for its object the education of the general public. His goal was the visionary hope of wiping out the stigma attached to the uniform. Even Matt had to smile as he took in Prigozi’s involved explanation for the origin of “these civilized taboos.”
“We’ve heard that junk before,” Matt started to say.
“Leave him be,” urged Moloch. “We’ll give Osawatomie ten more minutes to conclude.” Even Dave chuckled at this.
Prigozi appeared crestfallen. “There’s no sense in going on if that’s the way you feel. I’ll draw it up on paper and submit it to you. . . ”
“Don’t submit it to me,” said Moloch caustically. “Take it up to Twilliger. Maybe he’ll make room for you on his staff.”
“Rub a little insect powder on it first,” jeered Matt. “By the way,” he added maliciously, “what’s that white stuff on your coat collar?”
Without giving Prigozi a chance to explode, Moloch declared: “I’m serious about that suggestion. I think your plan’s cockeyed, but that doesn’t make any difference. Go ahead and show it to Twilliger! Tell him I sent you. ...”
“Raspberries! You want him to give me a kick in the slats.”
Moloch suavely assured the latter that this was a highly fantastic idea. Twilliger had never been known to kick anybody downstairs. “On the contrary,” he said, “Twilliger may even consider the plan brilliant. You go ahead and present it. Anyway, I believe in letting every man be his own Jesus.”
“G’wan, you bastards! G‘wan!” Prigozi was recovering his verve.
At this moment the telephone rang. Matt answered it gruffly, but changed his tone immediately. With his hand on the mouthpiece, he handed the instrument to Moloch, whispering as he did so: “It’s the old man—Houghton himself. There’s a strike brewing.”
Moloch listened respectfully but with a growing irritation. He punctuated his silences with a subdued, resentful “Yes, sir. Yes sir!” Toward the end, realizing that his protests were ineffectual, he grew red and stammered a bit. He was trying desperately to control his anger. “Very well,” he said finally, “if you insist. But I think it’s a great mistake.” He slammed the receiver down with a growl.
“What’s the trouble?” asked Prigozi immediately.
Moloch looked perplexed, harassed.
“A fine muddle we’re in now,” he said gloomily. At which Prigozi became positively morose.
“What’s up?” piped Matt. Everytime Houghton rang up he thought it meant his job. Moloch was too damned stiff-necked to get along with a gang of polite crooks. He didn’t know how to play the game, that was Matt’s idea. They’d both be out in the street before long.
“We’ve got to fire the niggers—that’s what!” said Moloch.
“Niggers?” Matt repeated.
“Oh, the Hindus ... the Egyptians, the whole flock of Oriental students we put on lately.”
Matt gave a long low whistle and screwed his face up like a gargoyle.
“I’d like to take Twilliger and hack his guts out!”
“Easy, Mister Moloch, easy now!” cried Prigozi, no longer alarmed over the situation, now that it proved to be nothing more than the dismissal of a few Hindus ... “black buggers,” as he called them.
“What started the rumpus?” said Matt.
“It was that long-haired gazook in Chinatown. Seems he muffed a couple of death messages. Twilliger must have raised hell with the old man. He was screeching mad. ‘I want every one of them out,’ he says. ‘Every damned shine you’ve got on the force.’ There was no telling him anything. Twilliger’s got the Indian sign on him. God, though, if I were in Houghton’s place I’d show a little fight. It’s indecent to back down that way. . . . The worst of it is, the old man’s in such a fury he won’t let me do a thing for the poor dubs. I haven’t got the heart to let them out like a lot of cattle.”
“I wouldn’t weep about it, if I were you,” Prigozi spoke up.
“They won’t starve to death. Let Providence take care of ‘em. These black bastards are a lot of crybabies—that’s what I think!”
There was more than a grain of truth in Prigozi’s indictment. The only ones who showed any guts were the Chinese students. The others were merely children for whom Moloch acted as a wet nurse.
Matt broke in suddenly. “Didn’t old man Houghton say something about a strike?”
“Christ, yes! I almost forgot about the strike. Grab your hat, Matt, and rush uptown to Carducci’s office—that’s whe
re the trouble lies.”
Matt bolted to the door in a jiffy.
“Hold on a minute,” shouted Moloch. “The old man says . . .”
“Says what?” yelled Matt.
“You’re not to talk too much—get that?”
“Tell the old man to go crucify himself!” Matt dashed out.
“There’s a loyal servant,” sneered Prigozi. “He acts first and thinks about it later.”
At this juncture, the squat little figure at the switchboard got up and approached Moloch with mingled deference and humility.
“I’m going home now,” he said. He had been saying this every day for the last ten years at five o’clock sharp. His tone never varied. It was like a servant announcing “Dinner is ready, sir!”
“Did you take your cathartic pill?” asked Moloch.
Dave’s face lit up like a Halloween pumpkin. He enjoyed this five-o’clock raillery. For the best part of the day he was glued to the switchboard, calling up the hundred or more offices in the city, throwing out reserve messengers which he called “waybills” after an old custom, and raising hell in general with the clerks and managers for their tardiness in telephoning the absentee and vacancy reports. Dave always kept a worksheet before him, on which he practiced the art of calligraphy. These sheets formed a chronological register of the daily happenings in the messenger department. In the upper right-hand corner of the worksheet he ruled off a little box wherein he made a faithful report of the weather. The inclusion of this meteorological report was no mere idiosyncrasy of Dave’s. It was the grand alibi of the messenger department.… Dave preserved these sheets with the same fervor that a lama cherishes his prayer wheel.
Another curious habit of Dave’s was his custom upon arriving in the morning of sharpening his lead pencils. No matter how many calls came in over the wire, Dave had to sharpen his pencils first. His contention was that if he were to postpone this important task the pencils would never be sharpened. And in Dave’s mind it was a matter of the utmost importance to inscribe his characters in a delicate, legible, ornate hand. That was his proud contribution to the messenger service, the record which would remain after he had gone and testify in golden symbols to his industry and thoroughness.