Theodore Dreiser

“ It must be the horn!
"Well," shouted Culhane finally, as a stop-gap to all this, "isn't any one going to blow that thing? Do you mean to tell me that I'm hauling all of you around, with not a man among you able to blow a dinky little horn? What's the use of my keeping a lot of fancy vehicles in my barn when all I have to deal with is a lot of shoe salesmen and floorwalkers? Hell! Any child can blow it. It's as easy as a fish-horn. If I hadn't these horses to attend to I'd blow it myself. Come on—come on! Kerrigan, what's the matter with you blowing it?" ”

“ I for one pulled my horse cautiously back, as he cracked a great whip, and, charging savagely through us, drove on. Culhane, having made his unkind comments, gave orders for our orderly formation once more and calmly led us away.
Perhaps the most amusing phase of him was his opposition to and contempt for inefficiency of any kind. If he asked you to do anything, no matter what, and you didn't at once leap to the task ready and willing and able so to do, he scarcely had words enough with which to express himself. ”

“ Now a minister enters the sanitarium, broken down by his habits of life, and this same Culhane is able to penetrate him, to see that his dogmatic and dictatorial mental habits are the cause of his ailment, and he has the moral courage to shock him, to drag him by apparently brutal processes out of his rut. He reads the man accurately, he knows him better than he knows himself, and he effects a cure. ”

“ If you work and make money and have any plumbing to do you have to support 'em—Right by fours! Guide right! Forward!" and off we trotted, breaking into a headlong gallop a little farther on as if he wished to outrun the mood which was holding him at the moment.
The plumber and his assistant, fully awake now to the import of what had occurred, stared after us. The journeyman plumber, who was short and fat, sat and blinked. At last he recovered his wits sufficiently to cry, "Aw, go to hell, you —— —— ——!" but by that time we were well along the road and I am not sure that Culhane even heard. ”

“ Thomas Culhane belongs to that class of society which the preachers and the world's army of conventional merchants, lawyers, judges and reputable citizens generally are presumably, if one may judge by the moral and religious literature of the day, trying to reach and reform. Yet here at his sanitarium are gathered representatives of those same orders, the so-called better element. And here we see them suddenly dominated, mind and soul, by this being whom they, theoretically at least, look upon as a brand to be snatched from the burning. ”

“ If there's one class of men that needs to be improved in this country, it's lawyers. I don't know why it is, but there's something in the very nature of the work of a lawyer which appears to make him cynical and to want to wear a know-it-all look. Most lawyers are little more than sharper crooks than the crooks they have to deal with. They're always trying to get in on some case or other where they have to outwit the law, save some one from getting what he justly deserves, and then they are supposed to be honest and high-minded! ”

“ Can't you get your leg that high? Here's a man who for twenty-five years has been running a cloak-and-suit business and employing five hundred people, but he can't get on a horse! Imagine! Five hundred people dependent on that for their living!" (At this point, say, Itzky succeeds in mounting.) "Well, he's actually on! Now see if you can stick while we ride a block or two. You'll find the right stirrup, Itzky, just a little forward of your horse's belly on the right side—see? A fine bunch this is to lead out through a gentleman's country! ”

“ A lot of sissies and mamma's boys and pet heirs, whose fathers haven't got enough brains to cut 'em off and make 'em get out and work, come up here, sneak in cigarettes or get the servants to, and then hide out behind the barn or a tree down in the lot and sneak and smoke like a lot of cheap schoolboys. God, it makes me sick! What's the use of a man working out a fact during a lifetime and letting other people have the benefit of it—not because he needs their money, but that they need his help—if all the time he is going to have such cattle to deal with? ”

“ What about the horn? Can't you do something with it? Have you quit for the day?"
Up went the horn once more, and a most noble and encouraging "Ta-ra-ta-ta" was begun, but just at the critical point, and when we were all most prayerfully hoping against hope, as it were, that this time he would round the dangerous curves of it gracefully and come to a grand finish, there was a most disconcerting and disheartening squeak. It was pathetic, ghastly. As one man we wilted. What would Culhane say to that? ”

“ Men are not influenced at arm's length. It would be interesting to know if some day a preacher or judge, who, offended by Mr. Culhane's profanity and brutality, will be able to reach the gladiator and convert him to his views as readily as the gladiator is able to rid him of his ailment."
In justice to the preachers, moralists, et cetera, I should now like to add that it is probably not any of the virtues or perfections represented by a man like Culhane with which they are quarreling, but the vices of many who are in no wise like him and do not stand for the things he stands for. ”

“ If he's an American he'll buckle down to that little business and work night and day, sweat blood and make every one else connected with him sweat it, underpay his employees, swindle his friends, half-starve himself and his family, in order to get a few thousand dollars and seem as good as some one else who has a few thousand. ”

“ Most of them had already seen so much of life in a libertine way that there was little left to enjoy. They sniffed at almost everything, Culhane included, and yet they were obviously drawn to him. I tried to explain this to myself on the ground that there is some iron power in some people which literally compels this, whether one will or no; or that they were in the main so tired of life and so truly selfish and egotistic that it required some such different iron or caviar mood plus such a threatening regimen to make them really take an interest. ”

“ Culhane, leaving his place at the head of the column, returned to the center nearest the plumber and his helper and pointing at them and addressing us in a very clear voice, said:
"There you have it. There's American labor for you, at its best—union labor, the poor, downtrodden workingman. Look at him." We all looked. "This poor hard-working plumber here," and at that the latter stirred and sat up, scarcely even now grasping what it was all about, so suddenly had we descended upon him, "earns or demands sixty cents an hour, and this poor sweating little helper here has to have forty. ”

“ Thus in regard to merchants:
"The average man who has a little business of some kind, a factory or a wholesale or brokerage house or a hotel or a restaurant, usually has a distinctly middle-class mind." At this all the merchants and manufacturers were likely to give a very sharp ear. "As a rule, you'll find that they know just the one little line with which they're connected, and nothing more. One man knows all about cloaks and suits" (this may have been a slap at poor Itzky) "or he knows a little something about leather goods or shoes or lamps or furniture, and that's all he knows. ”

“ In New York he'd do seventeen miles in a night running from barroom to barroom or one lobster palace to another—that's a good name for them, by the way—and never say a word. But out here in the country, with plenty of fresh air and a night's rest and a good breakfast, he can't even do four miles in fifty minutes! Think of it! And he probably thinks of himself as a man—boasts before his friends, or his wife, anyhow. ”

“ If he could just make his guests feel the pressure of necessity in connection with their work he was happy. To this end he would employ the most contemptuous and grilling comment. Thus to Mr. Itzky he was most unkind. He would look over all most cynically, examining the saddles and bridles, and then say, "Oh, I see you haven't learned how to tighten a belly-band yet," or "I do believe you have your saddle hind-side to. You would if you could, that's one thing sure. How do you expect a horse to be sensible or quiet when he knows that he isn't saddled right? ”

“ He does what he thinks he's called upon to do.
"But you take a man—more especially a gentleman—one of these fellows who is always very pointed in emphasizing that he is a gentleman" (which Blake never did) . "Let him inherit eight or ten millions, give him a college education, let him be socially well connected, and what does he do? Not a damned thing if he can help it except contract vices—run from one saloon to another, one gambling house to another, one girl to another, one meal to another. ”

“ You'd think a man like that who had been trained at West Point and seen service in the Philippines would have sense enough to keep himself in condition. Not at all. As soon as they get a little way up in their profession they want to sit around hotel grills or society ballrooms and show off, tell how wonderful they are. Here's a man, an army officer, in such rotten shape that if I sent a good horse after him now it's ten to one he couldn't get on him. I'll have to send a truck or some such thing."
He subsided. About an hour later the major did appear, much the worse for wear. ”

“ Gathering all the reins in his hands and perching himself in the high seat above, with perhaps one of his guests beside him, all the rest crowded willy-nilly on the seats within and on top, he would carry us off, careening about the countryside most madly, several of his hostlers acting as liveried footmen or outriders and one of them perched up behind on the little seat, the technical name of which I have forgotten, waving and blowing the long silver trumpet, the regulation blasts on which had to be exactly as made and provided for such occasions. ”

“ Culhane began, apropos of nothing at all, "when I say that the word man ought to be modified or changed in some way so that when we use it we would mean something more definite than we mean now. That thing you see sitting up on that wagon-seat there—call that a man? ”

“ Contact with a rough and ready and all-too-revealing world teaches them much. The world's customary pretensions and delusions are in the main ripped away. They are bruised by rough facts. Often the men gathered in some such café and whom preachers and moralists are most ready to condemn have a clearer perception of preachers, church organizations and reformers and their relative importance in the multitudinous life of the world than the preachers, church congregations and reformers have of those in the café or the world outside to which they belong. ”

“ During my stay it had been the privilege and custom among those who knew much of this institution to drive through the grounds and past the very doors of the "repair shop," even to stop if Culhane chanced to be visible and talking to or at least greeting him, in some cases. A custom of Culhane's was, in the summer time, to have erected on the lawn a large green-and-white striped marquee tent, a very handsome thing indeed, in which was placed a field-officer's table and several camp chairs, and some books and papers. Here of a hot day, when he was not busy with us, he would sit and read. ”

“ So often it was the shock to one's dignity more than anything else which hurt so, to be called an old poke when one was perhaps a grave and reverent senior, or to be told that one was made of bone when one was a famous doctor or merchant. ”

“ Those who are successful gamblers, pugilists, pickpockets, saloon-keepers, book-makers, jockeys and the like are so by reason of their intelligence, their innate mental acumen and perception. It is a fact that in the sporting world and among the unconventional men-about-town you will often find as good if not better judges of human nature than elsewhere. ”

“ One of the rules of the repair shop was that you were to eat what was put before you, especially when it differed from what your table companion received. Thus a fat man at a table with a lean one might receive a small portion of lean meat, no potatoes and no bread or one little roll, whereas his lean acquaintance opposite would be receiving a large portion of fat meat, a baked or boiled potato, plenty of bread and butter, and possibly a side dish of some kind. ”

“ While they are consciously eager to better the world, they are so wrapped up in themselves and their theories, so hampered by their arbitrary and limited conceptions of good and evil, that the great majority of men move about them unseen, except in a far-away and superficial manner. ”

“ He ran and began receiving and tossing as swiftly as he could, but as with the others so it was his turn now to be given such a grilling and tongue-lashing as falls to few of us in this world, let alone among the successful in the realm of the footlights. "Say, you're not an actor—you're a woman! ”