He had become a man very early in life.At seven, when he drew his first wages, began his adolescence.A certain feeling of independence crept up in him, and the relationship between him and his mother changed.Somehow, as an earner and breadwinner, doing his own work in the world, he was more like an equal with her.Manhood, full-blown manhood, had come when he was eleven, at which time he had gone to work on the night shift for six months.No child works on the night shift and remains a child.
There had been several great events in his life.One of these had been when his mother bought some California prunes.Two others had been the two times when she cooked custard.Those had been events.He remembered them kindly.And at that time his mother had told him of a blissful dish she would sometime make--"floating island," she had called it, "better than custard." For years he had looked forward to the day when he would sit down to the table with floating island before him, until at last he had relegated the idea of it to the limbo of unattainable ideals.
Once he found a silver quarter lying on the sidewalk.That, also, was a great event in his life, withal a tragic one.He knew his duty on the instant the silver flashed on his eyes, before even he had picked it up.
At home, as usual, there was not enough to eat, and home he should have taken it as he did his wages every Saturday night.Right conduct in this case was obvious; but he never had any spending of his money, and he was suffering from candy hunger.He was ravenous for the sweets that only on red-letter days he had ever tasted in his life.
He did not attempt to deceive himself.He knew it was sin, and deliberately he sinned when he went on a fifteen-cent candy debauch.Ten cents he saved for a future orgy; but not being accustomed to the carrying of money, he lost the ten cents.This occurred at the time when he was suffering all the torments of conscience, and it was to him an act of divine retribution.He had a frightened sense of the closeness of an awful and wrathful God.God had seen, and God had been swift to punish, denying him even the full wages of sin.
In memory he always looked back upon that as the one great criminal deed of his life, and at the recollection his conscience always awoke and gave him another twinge.It was the one skeleton in his closet.Also, being so made, and circumstanced, he looked back upon the deed with regret.He was dissatisfied with the manner in which he had spent the quarter.He could have invested it better, and, out of his later knowledge of the quickness of God, he would have beaten God out by spending the whole quarter at one fell swoop.In retrospect he spent the quarter a thousand times, and each time to better advantage.
There was one other memory of the past, dim and faded, but stamped into his soul everlasting by the savage feet of his father.It was more like a nightmare than a remembered vision of a concrete thing--more like the race-memory of man that makes him fall in his sleep and that goes back to his arboreal ancestry.
This particular memory never came to Johnny in broad daylight when he was wide awake.It came at night, in bed, at the moment that his consciousness was sinking down and losing itself in sleep.It always aroused him to frightened wakefulness, and for the moment, in the first sickening start, it seemed to him that he lay crosswise on the foot of the bed.In the bed were the vague forms of his father and mother.He never saw what his father looked like.He had but one impression of his father, and that was that he had savage and pitiless feet.
His earlier memories lingered with him, but he had no late memories.All days were alike.Yesterday or last year were the same as a thousand years--or a minute.Nothing ever happened.There were no events to mark the march of time.Time did not march.It stood always still.It was only the whirling machines that moved, and they moved nowhere--in spite of the fact that they moved faster.
When he was fourteen, he went to work on the starcher.It was a colossal event.Something had at last happened that could be remembered beyond a night's sleep or a week's pay-day.It marked an era.It was a machine Olympiad, a thing to date from."When I went to work on the starcher," or, "after," or "before I went to work on the starcher," were sentences often on his lips.
He celebrated his sixteenth birthday by going into the loom room and taking a loom.Here was an incentive again, for it was piece-work.And he excelled, because the clay of him had been moulded by the mills into the perfect machine.At the end of three months he was running two looms, and, later, three and four.
At the end of his second year at the looms he was turning out more yards than any other weaver, and more than twice as much as some of the less skilful ones.And at home things began to prosper as he approached the full stature of his earning power.Not, however, that his increased earnings were in excess of need.The children were growing up.They ate more.And they were going to school, and school-books cost money.And somehow, the faster he worked, the faster climbed the prices of things.
Even the rent went up, though the house had fallen from bad to worse disrepair.
He had grown taller; but with his increased height he seemed leaner than ever.Also, he was more nervous.With the nervousness increased his peevishness and irritability.The children had learned by many bitter lessons to fight shy of him.His mother respected him for his earning power, but somehow her respect was tinctured with fear.
