Talks With a Devil

His intention was very definite and the decision final. All in all, it was a very common occurrence in the life of a big city, something encountered repeatedly; in fact, to be frank, I have had to arrange similar events thousands and tens of thousands of times. However, this time such a common beginning had a quite uncommon sequel and a most uncommon result.

Nevertheless before turning to the outcome of the day, I must tell you in detail all that led up to it.

Hugh was a born inventor. From early childhood, when walking with his mother in the park or playing with other children, or simply sitting quietly in a comer building with bricks or drawing monsters, he invented incessantly, constructing in his mind a variety of extraordinary contrivances, improvements for everything in the world.

He derived a special satisfaction from inventing improvements and adaptations for his aunt. He would draw her with a chimney, or on wheels. For one drawing, in which this not young maiden was portrayed with six legs and other variations, the little Hugh was severely punished. It was one of his first memories.

Not long after this Hugh learned first to design and then to make models of his inventions. By this time he had learnt that live people cannot be improved upon. Nevertheless his inventions were, of course, all pure fantasy: when he was fourteen, he nearly drowned himself trying out home-made water skis of his own design.

At the time my story begins, he was about twenty-six years old.

He had been married for several years and worked as a draughtsman in a large engineering factory; he lived in a flat of three minute rooms, the size of ship’s cabins, in an enormous and ugly brick building in one of the suburbs of New York. He was very dissatisfied with his life.

The slaves who toil in our offices and factories are invariably barely conscious of their enslavement. If they have any dreams they are merely of ways of improving their slavery: having a good time on a Sunday; going to a dance in the evening; dressing up like a gentleman; and getting more money. Even if they are dissatisfied with their life, they think only of shortening the hours of work, or increasing their salaries and holidays—in a nutshell, all the trappings of the Socialist Utopia. They could never, even mentally, bring themselves to revolt against work itself. It is their God, and they do not dare oppose him even in thought. But Hugh was made of other stuff. He hated slavery. He always said that being a slave to work was the wrath of God. The very fibres of his being stirred with an awareness of this octopus, penetrating him with its tightening stranglehold. Quite apart from this, the thought of embellishing his slavery would never have occurred to him, nor was he the sort to delude himself with cheap distractions.

His mother died when he was sixteen, and he was forced to leave school and become an apprentice in the drawing office of a factory at a salary of five dollars a week.

This was the beginning of his career. Outwardly he differed little from the other apprentices in the drawing office. He copied drawings of machines, prepared paper and colours, sharpened pencils, and ran errands among the various departments of the factory. But at heart he did not for a moment accept this life.

Hugh’s background was different from that of the majority of those surrounding him, and it played an important part in forming his attitudes. His companions were the children of toil and want, sons of factory workers like themselves and recent immigrants come to America to escape from hunger and cold, the greed of landlords and from unemployment. Their world was small, limited, narrow, and dominated by the ever present struggle against hunger and want.

Quite different voices spoke within Hugh. He belonged to an old American family, descended from pioneers who had seen the virgin forest land of big lakes and rivers and who had fought the Indians.

Amongst his ancestors were members of Congress, generals in the War of Independence and rich plantation owners of the Southern States.

His father had lost the last of the family fortune during the Civil War, in which he had fought as an officer in the army of the South.

He had been wounded and taken prisoner, but had escaped to Canada, where he married a young French Canadian girl, and died a few years later. During his childhood, Hugh’s mother had told him of her own sea-captain ancestors and of his father’s—of the splendour of life on the plantations which she herself had never seen; of Hugh’s great-grandfather who had been Governor of South Carolina; of the Mexican War; of expeditions to the far West. Hugh grew up with these tales and they constituted a part of his being. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the style of life conceived by his fellow workers should be too narrow for him. In truth, from the bottom of his heart he despised the factory workers and factory life with all that it could give him.

The factory itself, however, and the machines in it interested him deeply. He would spend hours in front of some machine, trying to understand it, to get to the heart of it. He collected the various catalogues and price lists which gave descriptions of machines; studied diagrams, drawings, photographs; spent whole nights with books on mechanics and mechanical engineering, whatever he could lay his hands on. And all the time new combinations of valves, wheels, levers—new inventions, each more amazing than the last—floated through his head.

Not for a second, though, did he stop hating and resenting his slavery. Often at night, when the need to get up at six in the morning forced him to abandon his precious books for sleep, he would make grim resolutions, swearing he would rather die than surrender to the fate of such a life. He was not deluding himself and was well aware of the obstacles which stood in his way. To escape his bondage it was necessary to snatch time away from it, yet always the iron hand of compulsory labour pressed on his shoulder. Now and then this need let up for a few hours (on rare occasions for several days) only to clamp down on him more strongly later. Hugh resented this, and fought for every hour.