Talks With a Devil

I will start at a tragic moment in the life of this young man, when he was travelling from one of the suburbs of New York to Manhattan, with the intention of buying a revolver and then shooting himself on a lonely shore on Long Island; in a spot which had remained in his memory from the times of boyhood excursions, when he and his playmates, pretending to be explorers, had discovered unknown countries around New York.

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.