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THE WORKERS
[Illustration: WE BREATHE THE HOT AIR, HEAVY WITH THE SMELL OF FRESH
SOIL. AND THE SWEAT DRIPS FROM OUR FACES UPON THE DAMP CLAY.]
THE WORKERS
An Experiment in Reality
by
WALTER A. WYCKOFF
Assistant Professor of Political Economy in
Princeton University
THE EAST
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1899
Copyright, 1897, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
Trow Directory
Printing and Bookbinding Company
New York
TO
CHANNING F. MEEK, ESQ.
PREFACE
The preface to a narrative like this must itself be of the nature of a
story which will account for the expedition here described, and make
clear the point of view from which the experiment was tried.
Enough of the actual setting of the tale is implied in a passing
reference to a charming country-seat on Long Island Sound, and the
presence there of a fellow-guest, Mr. Channing F. Meek--a chance
acquaintance to me then. His wide knowledge of the West, his intimate
familiarity with practical affairs, and his catholic sympathy with
human nature, made him a man wholly new and interesting to me. And
in our talk, which drifted early into channels of social questions,
I could but feel increasingly the difference between my slender,
book-learned lore and his vital knowledge of men and the principles by
which they live and work.
One radiant Sunday morning in midsummer there came to me from his
talk so strong a suggestion of the means of acquiring the practical
knowledge that I lacked, and in a way that gave promise of an
experiment so interesting, and of such high possibility of successful
treatment, that in that hour I knew that I was pledged to its
undertaking.
No further disclosure of my _animus_ is needed than has already been
hinted at in the fact of a new, unoccupied, inviting field and the
fair prospect which its development offered to a student eager for a
place among original investigators. I cannot, however, sufficiently
acknowledge my indebtedness to the friends whose generous sympathy has
followed me throughout the enterprise--especially that friend already
mentioned. To him I owe the first idea of the plan and a large measure
of what success has attended its execution.
The narrative form into which I have cast the results of my
investigation depends for its value solely upon careful adherence to
the truth of actual experience. This account is strictly accurate even
to details; apart from confessed changes in the names of the persons
introduced, no element of fiction has intentionally been allowed to
intrude.
It only remains to say with reference to my attitude in the experiment
itself, that I entered upon it with no theories to establish and no
conscious preconceptions to maintain. As sincerely as I could, I
wished my mind to be _tabula rasa_ to new facts, and sensitive to the
impressions of actual experience.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, October 27, 1897.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE ADJUSTMENT, 1
CHAPTER II
A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT, 33
CHAPTER III
A HOTEL PORTER, 78
CHAPTER IV
A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM, 108
CHAPTER V
A FARM HAND, 144
CHAPTER VI
IN A LOGGING CAMP, 179
CHAPTER VII
IN A LOGGING CAMP (_Concluded_), 225
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
WE BREATHE THE HOT AIR, HEAVY WITH THE
SMELL OF FRESH SOIL, AND THE SWEAT
DRIPS FROM OUR FACES UPON THE DAMP
CLAY, _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
I EASILY PASSED UNNOTICED IN THE CROWD, 24
A WEIRD PROCESSION, THIS FRAGMENT OF A
COMPANY IN THE RANKS OF LABOR, 48
I HELD MY PEACE, AND RESPECTFULLY
TOUCHED MY CAP, INWARDLY CALLING HER
THE BEAUTY THAT SHE WAS, 94
THE MEN WERE RISING FROM THEIR SEATS,
AND THE AIR WAS FULL OF WELCOME, 216
THE WORKERS
CHAPTER I
THE ADJUSTMENT
HIGHLAND FALLS, N. Y.,
Monday, July 27, 1891.
The boss at the work on the old Academic building in West Point gave me
a job this morning, and ordered me to come to work to-morrow at seven
o'clock. A gang of laborers is fast removing the old building, which is
to give place to a new one. From one of the workmen I learned that the
men live in Highland Falls, a mile down the river, and so I came here
in search of a boarding-house. There was some difficulty in finding
quarters, for the place is crowded with workingmen attracted here by
the new buildings at the Post and work on the railway.
Mrs. Flaherty has taken me in as a boarder. That is not her name, but
it sufficiently indicates her. She came to the door with the odor
of soap-suds and boiling cabbage strong upon her, and told me at
first that she guessed that she couldn't take me. She relented when I
explained that I had work at the Post; and, having admitted me as a
member of her household, she gave play to her natural hospitality. When
I was shown to a little carpetless room under the roof, with two double
beds in it, I spoke of needing water, and she showed me where I could
get a plentiful supply. I said that I should like to write, and she at
once invited me from the torrid heat of the attic to a place at her
dining-room table.
Here then, in the temporary security of a boarding-house, and as an
assigned member of the industrial army, I can review the first week of
enlisted service.
I am vastly ignorant of the labor problem, and am trying to learn by
experience; but I am so far familiar with Socialistic writings as to
know that, from their point of view, I have not gone from one economic
class into another. I belong to the proletariat, and from being one of
the intellectual proletarians, I am simply become a manual proletaire.
In other words, I no longer stand in the market ready to sell what
mental ability I have, I now bring to the market instead my physical
capacity for work; and I sell that at its market price. Expressed in
every-day language, the change is simply this: from earning a living as
a teacher, I have begun to earn it as an unskilled laborer.
But, nevertheless, the change has in it elements of real contrast.
One week ago I shared the frictionless life of a country-seat.
Frictionless, I mean, in the movement of an elaborate system which
ministers luxuriously to the physical needs of life. Frictionless,
perhaps, only to those to whom it ministers. Now I am out of all that,
and am sharing instead the life of the humblest form of labor upon
which that superstructure rests.
This is not a frictionless life in its adjustment to daily needs--very
much the reverse. And whatever may be its compensations, they are not
of the nature of easy physical existence.
The actual step from the one manner of life to the other was sure of
its own interest. It was painful to say good-by on the last evening,
and there was enough of uncertainty in the prospect to account for
a shrinking from the first encounter with a strange life; but there
was promise of adventure, and almost a certainty of solid gain in
experience.
At sunrise on the next morning I was ready to set out. I descended
quietly to the hall. The butler stood there, politely urging some
pretended necessity as excuse for so early an appearance, and he
invited me to breakfast.
Often had he seen me off for a day's fishing or shooting in the old
suit which I wore, but I could feel his eye fixed upon me now with
perplexed interest. He had heard my expedition discussed at the table,
and in some vague way he took in that I meant to earn my living as a
workman. With his wonted dignity, he helped me adjust my pack and strap
it; and then he stood under the _porte cochère_, and watched me hurry
across the lawn in the direction of the highway.
Two hours' walk carried me beyond the point of my acquaintance with
the country roads; but this presented no real difficulty, for I had
but to keep a steadily westward course. Other details of my expedition
were not so simple, and I began to have an uncomfortable sense of
unsuspected difficulty. I look back from the vantage-point of a
week's experience, with a feeling of amused tolerance, upon my naïve
preconceptions. It is like a retrospect of years. My notion of earning
a living by manual labor was the securing of an odd job whenever I
should need a meal or a night's lodging. Much advice had come my way
before I set out. As a means of access to people, I was told to take
with me a book or magazine, and to invite subscriptions. I adopted
this plan; and a copy of a magazine was under my arm as I walked on
through the dust and heat of the country road, wondering how long it
would take me to reach the Hudson, and how I should earn my first meal.
There was nothing at all adventurous or exciting in a dusty walk. My
pack was taking on increments of weight with each mile of the journey.
I was beginning to feel conscious of change in unexpected ways. There
was no money in my pocket, and a most subtle and unmanning insecurity
laid hold of me as a result of that. The world had curiously changed
in its attitude, or rather I saw it at a new angle, and I felt the
change most keenly in the bearing of people. My good-morning was not
infrequently met by a vacant stare, and if I stopped to ask the way,
the conviction was forced upon me that, as a pack-pedler, I was a
suspicious character, with no claim upon common consideration.
In the shade of his porch sat the keeper of a country store, at a fork
of the road. His chair was tilted against the outer wall, and his feet
rested upon the balustrade. My question as to the course of the two
roads before me was responded to by the merchant, first with a look,
and then a spurt of tobacco-juice, which stirred the dust between my
feet, and, finally, a caustic sentence to the effect that he 'did
not much know, and did not care a damn,' while his blue eyes swept
the horizon, and rested finally on the Sound, gleaming golden in the
morning sun, and the purple line of the Long Island shore.
The new-born self-consciousness which I found asserting itself was like
a wound on the hand, exposed to constant injury. I had walked several
miles before I summoned courage to speak to anyone else. Finally, very
hot and thirsty, I knocked at the door of an unpainted cottage which
stood on the road. The door opened to the touch of an old woman, who
bent toward me in the emaciated angularity of a decrepit figure which
must once have been strikingly tall and vigorous.
I asked leave to show her the magazine, and she invited me into the
cool of her home. The middle floor was covered with a yellow oil-cloth,
on which there stood a table. A large cooking-stove occupied one side
of the room. A few wooden-bottom chairs were ranged around the walls.
An old kitchen clock rested on the mantel-shelf; and on either side of
it hung a faded photograph, each in an oval wooden frame.
The old woman asked me to draw up a chair to the table, and she sat
beside me, looking with the excited interest of a child at the pictures
which I showed her, but paying little heed, I thought, to what I was
saying. Presently, without warning, she veered mentally with the
facility of childhood, and now she was looking at me intently between
the eyes, while one long skeleton hand lay on the open page before her.
"Be you a pedler?" she asked, and her eyes dilated to the measure of
the protruding sockets over which the yellow skin was tightly drawn.
"I am trying to get subscribers for this magazine," I told her.
"Was you raised in these parts?"
My negative gave her the opening for which she was unconsciously
feeling. She was born and "raised" on that spot, and had lived there
for nearly eighty years, and she hastened to tell me so. There was
nothing voluble in the recital of her history, only a directness and
simplicity of speech and a certain quiet reserve which rendered the
narrative absorbing to us both. Some bond of sympathy began to make
itself felt, for she was dwelling on the losses of her life, and, quite
unconsciously, she wept as she told me of the death of one and another,
until not one of all her family or kindred was left to her, except her
grandson, with whom she now lived. She said no word of complaint; and,
in the presence of her human sorrows, she had no memory of poverty,
and of the bitter struggle against want which life had plainly been
for her. She was sobbing softly, with her head bent upon the table,
when she ceased speaking, and no comfort that I could offer her was
comparable to the relief that she felt in telling her story. When I
arose to go, she was breathing deeply, like a comforted child.
For a stretch of several miles of country road I spurred myself to
knock at every door to which I came. My reception was curiously
uniform. I never got beyond the request for leave to show the magazine.
The reply was invariably a negative; sometimes polite, but always
emphatic. Once I did not get so far as that. A portly negress saw me
approaching her cottage from the road, and, standing strident on guard
before her door, she shouted to me across the meadow that nothing was
wanted there, and that I might save myself the walk.
It was nearing noon, and I was very hungry. The question of earning
a meal was no longer an interesting speculation, but a pressing
necessity. I turned all my attention to that. A large iron gateway
leading into a cemetery attracted me. Several ragged, tow-headed
children were playing about the lodge. One of them told me that his
father was inside, and he indicated the general direction of the
tomb-stones. I found the digger sweating freely in a half-finished
grave, and instantly offered my help as a means of earning a dinner.
The grave-digger was an Irishman. He leaned at ease upon his spade, and
soberly looked me over, and then declined my offer. He was polite, but
not at all communicative, and he met my advances with the one remark
that his "old woman" was not at home.
A little farther on, I saw three women in pursuit of a hen. I eagerly
volunteered my help, and asked for a dinner in payment. They quit the
chase, and stood confronting me with serious faces, while I eloquently
pleaded my readiness to help them. Nothing in the situation seemed to
strike them as strange or irregular, but they touched upon it with
short, grave speech, until I had the feeling of something momentous,
and I accepted their refusal with a sense of relief.
At last, in the outskirts of the village of Westport, I found a man
mowing his lawn, and he was willing to give me a dinner for completing
the work. My final success in getting an odd job was a splendid
stimulus. I urged the mower over the lawn with a vigor that surprised
me, and the dinner which I ate in the dim corner of an immaculate
kitchen was a liberal return for the labor.
All that long summer afternoon I went from house to house, asking
subscriptions for the magazine. The rack would have been easier upon
my feelings, but I was eager to discover some ready way of approaching
people. Not even the loafers at the station were in the least inclined
to share their company with me. At nightfall I earned, by sawing wood
for an hour, a supper and the right to sleep in an unused barn.
When I awoke, in the early morning, I looked with bewilderment at
the dull gray light that shone between the parted boards and through
the rifts among the shingles. I came to myself with homesickness in
full possession of me, and my back aching from the pressure of that
intolerable pack. At the pump in the barn-yard I washed myself, and
sat down to eat a slice of cold meat and some pieces of bread which I
had saved from supper. An unfriendly collie watched me, and growled
threateningly until I won him over with a share of the breakfast.
The village was muffled in a heavy, clinging fog. The buoyancy of
the previous morning was gone. It was with some difficulty that I
found the road which had been pointed out to me as the shortest cut
across country to the Hudson. I could not shake off the feeling of
homelessness and isolation; and, under its influence, the lot of the
farmers' boys, whom I met driving their carts to early market, appeared
infinitely to be desired. A life of any honest work which accounts for
one, and includes some human fellowship, and a reasonable certainty
of food and shelter, began to take on undreamed-of attractiveness, in
contrast with vagrancy. I felt outside of the true order of things,
and as having no contact with any vital current of the world. Perhaps
it was in some measure the Philistine in me asserting himself, in the
absence of his customary bath and hot coffee; for, as the fog lifted
and the sun appeared, I came upon a brook which I had only to follow a
hundred yards or more to a well-shaded pool, where the bath was soon
achieved, and I emerged feeling that a vagrant life, with some purpose
in it, was, after all, rather desirable.
The morning was only fairly begun when I reached the village of Wilton,
eight miles from Westport. Already I was tired, and certain muscles of
the shoulders and back were in violent revolt. I left my pack at the
post-office. Passing up a street, which runs at right angles to the
one by which I entered the village, I presently knocked at the last of
a row of comfortable cottages.
When the door opened I knew instinctively that the gentleman who stood
framed in it was the village pastor. I said that I was looking for
work. He asked me inside. I thought this a curious change of subject,
but willingly followed him into a dim sitting-room, fragrant of perfect
cleanliness. I explained that I was on my way to West Point in search
of work, but was without money, and so obliged to earn my living by
the way, and that I would gladly do anything that offered in payment
for bread and board. He questioned me closely, with an evident purpose
of drawing me out further, and then he abruptly offered me work on his
wood-pile, and appeared surprised at my instant agreement.
The wood was green, and the saw, with which it had first to be cut
into proper lengths, was not sharp, and it was certainly not skilfully
handled. The work was hard, but at noon there was ready for me in the
shed, a dinner of beef, and potatoes, and slices of bread, which for
lightness and color were like flakes of snow, held by a band of crisp
brown crust.
In the afternoon the minister interrupted my work with the request that
I would join him in the house, and he indicated where I could first
wash in the wood-shed. I steeled myself for a lecture on the evils of
vagrancy, with incidental references to drunkenness as its probable
cause in my case. Instead, I found the family seated for an early
"tea," and myself invited to a place at the table. I am bound to say
that I was rattled. I had expected a meal in the kitchen, and a bed in
common with the preacher's horse.
Not the least curious position in which I have so far been placed, was
that which I occupied at the minister's board. His family, I shrewdly
suspect, did not share his hospitable feelings toward me, and I could
venture a guess that it was under protest from them that I took a seat
next to the minister's daughter.
She was a pale, delicate girl, of seventeen, perhaps. Her short, brown
hair curled close to her head, and her dark eyes looked dimly at you
through huge spectacles. The light, crisp stuff in which she was
dressed seemed to create about her an atmosphere some degrees cooler
than that of the rest of the room.
By way of beginning, I offered some fatuous commonplace about the
surrounding country. Instantly I realized that I was not to venture
upon a conversation that implied terms of social equality. The child
bristled with outraged dignity, and let fall in reply a sharp
monosyllable. Further conversation with her would have been highly
diverting, but not very considerate, and so I turned to my host, who
maintained through the meal the air of one who is on the defensive, but
who is sustained by the conviction of doing his duty.
My sympathies were all with the girl. Her feeling was very natural--so
natural as to suggest the rather disturbing ideas with which Count
Tolstoi is again confronting us. It was a very practical application of
the teaching of brotherhood, that of asking a chance workman to a seat
at one's family table. But if ministering to Him is really, in part,
in such recognitions of the least of His brethren, the instinctive
shrinking of the girl brought up in a Christian home in the country was
a commentary on our drift from the simplicities of the Gospel.
In the evening I went with the minister to a prayer-meeting in
his church. A handful of people sat at solemn intervals in the
audience-room. I was plainly the only common laborer among them.
The men appeared to be comfortable farmers, and there was a village
shopkeeper or two, while the women were clearly their wives and
daughters.
In one of the agitating silences which fell upon the company after
the minister had declared the meeting open, I rose and took part; and
at the door, when the benediction had dismissed us, several of the men
spoke to me cordially. There was entire kindliness in their manner, and
they, perhaps, were not conscious of showing surprise in welcoming a
laborer to their meeting.
That night the minister insisted upon my taking a bed in his house. I
pleaded an early start. He, too, was to be up early, and in the morning
I found him in the kitchen before me. On the table were bread and milk;
and as I ate I parried the somewhat searching questions of my host.
My course from Wilton lay through Ridgefield and Salem and Golden's
Bridge, and then, crossing the line between Connecticut and New York,
it made directly for the Hudson River.
This was no great distance; but in the early stages of the march I
was much delayed by rains. Driven to shelter, I found it usually in
a barn, or a shed under which were housed the farming implements.
Here is an example: From a sudden downpour of rain I ran to an open
barn. A farmer, whom I found there unhitching his horses, eyed me
suspiciously, and gave a halting assent to my request for shelter.
He soon left me alone. I tried to read, and could not. The dull day
was deeply depressing. Like the burden of a haunting sorrow the trial
of separation weighed upon me. It was not homesickness alone, but
added to that a feeling of isolation. Poverty, I had thought, would
at once bring me into vital contact with the very poor. Instead, it
had made me an object of unfailing distrust. The very poor I found
in an occasional cottage of a farm laborer, or some grotesquely
dilapidated hovel, swarming with negro life. But they were no more
hospitable to my approach than were the well-to-do farmers, and I
met not a single vagrant like myself in the course of my walk to the
Hudson. I was lonely with the loneliness of a castaway, and I climbed
into the hay-loft and fell asleep. Here, at least, was comfort; the
deep, dreamless sleep, to which I had long been a stranger, was making
gracious advances. When I awoke, the rain was past for the time, and
I resumed my journey, with a leaden sky overhead, and soft, clinging
mud under foot; but I was strangely refreshed, and walked on quite
enheartened.
The intermittent rains interfered with my progress, and increased the
difficulty of finding chance work. Repeatedly I was offered a meal, but
denied the privilege of working for it. For twenty-four hours I went
hungry, and spent much of that time asleep in a hole which I burrowed
into a hay-stack.
But under a brightening sky on Friday, I was given some wood to chop,
and the promise of a dinner in payment.
The work was soon done, and to the dinner there was given an added
pleasure in the company of one of the two old women for whom I chopped
the wood. She sat at the table and talked to me. Perhaps she was
solicitous for her spoons. Certainly she was very entertaining. Her
dark calico dress fitted closely her thin figure; and she sat very
straight in her chair, with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes
bright with gentle benignity.
In all the farming region through which I have passed on my way to the
Hudson, I have been much impressed by an unlooked-for quality in the
intelligence of the people. The books, of which I now and then caught
glimpses in their homes, were often of a surprising range. On the
sitting-room table of one farm-house I noticed a Milton, and several
volumes of Emerson, and a copy of Stevenson's Essays, besides much
current literature. Not infrequently the conversation of these people
had in it a curious suggestion of cultivation, curious only because
a dainty choice of words, and the graceful turn of a phrase were
accompanied by habitual inaccuracies of speech. They have, for example,
their own forms of the verb "to be." "I be" and "You be" are invariable
in their common usage. I wondered whether the conventional forms which
they find in their reading did not strike them as oddly foreign.
The prim little lady who sat near me through my dinner proved charming.
She showed no curiosity about my history, nor the least anxiety to
tell me hers. With an air of quiet self-possession she followed the
conversation into its natural channels, and sometimes followed it far;
for at one time she was describing for me, with admirable vividness,
the methods of irrigation in use in Colorado. But she consistently
made _done_ do duty for _did_, and she used, in some of her sentences,
negatives enough to satisfy the needs of negation in the purest of
Attic speech.
One more incident of the tramp to the Hudson: Late on Friday afternoon
I was nearing Golden's Bridge, a village on the Harlem division of the
New York Central Railroad. My road lay over the hills of a rolling
farm-region. The fields of corn were radiant with sunlight reflected
from great drops of rain which rested on the nodding blades. In the
meadows was the rich sheen of the after-growth. Golden-rod and sumach
grew thick on the roadside, and half concealed the rails of the zigzag
fences. From the forest there came a breath of fragrant coolness.
After sundown the twilight soon faded into dark. My efforts to secure
further work had been unsuccessful. Once I was nearing the ruin of a
little wooden cottage, on the porch of which sat a woman enjoying the
cool of the evening. Upon seeing me enter the gate she fled within, and
slammed the door; and I heard the key turn in the lock. I was growing
tired. The actual journey had not carried me far, but the long fast of
the previous day and the toilsome walking over soft roads had resulted
in exhaustion. Scarcely physical strength remained with which to move
farther, and I was ready to throw myself down, with infinite relief,
under any chance shelter, when I caught sight of the village lights not
a quarter of a mile beyond.
I knocked at the first door on the street. A farmer's wife appeared,
and kindly offered to consult her husband on the subject of work. She
soon returned with a favorable reply, and invited me to follow her into
the kitchen. Carpetless as it was, and stained as to walls and ceiling,
and low, and dimly lighted, the shelter of that room was like softest
luxury. A pitcher of milk and some slices of bread were placed on the
table, and I ate ravenously.
At one end of the table sat the farmer in his shirt-sleeves, with a
newspaper spread before him. He was in the midst of his haying, he
said, and had plenty of work, and was willing enough that I should join
the other men in the hay-field. The shed for the hands was full, so I
offered to go to the barn, and was soon fast asleep on the loose hay in
a stall.
As the farmer and I walked to the barn, I had taken occasion to fortify
myself in the agreement regarding work. He was an old man, very hale
and hearty and genial, and he walked with a curiously stiff movement
of the legs, and with his feet nearly at right angles to the line of
progress. He set my mind at rest with the assurance that there would be
plenty of work for me, if the morning proved good.
The morning was all that could be desired. I got up early, and went
to the kitchen, where an Irish maid-of-all-work gave me a bit of soap
and some water in a tin basin, with which to finish my preparation for
breakfast. She was a beautiful girl, large and awkward and ill-groomed;
but her features were strikingly handsome, and her clear, rich
complexion would of itself have constituted a claim to beauty, while
sprays of golden hair fell in effective curls about her forehead, and
heightened the charm of her deep-set Celtic blue eyes. I was drying
my face and hands on a coarse towel which hung on a roller near the
kitchen-door, and which was used in common by all of the hired men.
She watched me curiously. Presently she ventured an inquiry as to
whether "the boss" had given me "a job." I said that he had. "Her eyes
were homes" of deep concern, and in her voice was that note of pity so
effective in the Celtic accent. She was saying that my hands did not
look as though I was used to work. I was blushingly conscious that my
hands were against me, but she tactfully tried to relieve the situation
by supposing that I was a "tradesman." Then had to come the damaging
confession that I was not. But the other hired men now began to enter,
and we sat down to breakfast.
A breakfast on a farm is not always the appetizing reality that the
inexperienced imagination paints. The cloth, in this case, was ragged,
and showed signs of long use since its last washing, and there were
no napkins. The service was repulsive in its hideous tastelessness.
Flies swarmed in the room, and crowded one another into our food. The
men were in their working clothes, coatless, sleeves rolled up, and
their begrimed shirts open at the neck. When our coffee was poured
out and handed to us, each used his own spoon in dipping sugar from a
bowl which was passed from hand to hand. The butter, in a half-melting
condition, and dark with imprisoned flies, was within reach of us all,
and each helped himself with his knife, and then used it in conveying
food to his mouth. This last feat I did not try. There was in it a
suggestion of necromancy, and I had doubts of my success. We ate in
silence, as though the gravity of the occasion was beyond speech. The
farmer did not appear until we had finished breakfast, and I waited at
the kitchen-door for orders from him.
He came at last, kind and cordial as ever, but quite changed in purpose
regarding my going to work. He urged my confessed inexperience, and the
danger of exposure to the sun. I protested my willingness to assume
the risks, and begged to be allowed at least to work for what had been
given me. But he would not listen, and appeared to think that he set
matters right by assuring me repeatedly that to what I had received I
was "perfectly welcome." His wife gave me, at parting, some tracts, and
a religious newspaper, and in these I found presented, in somewhat
lurid light, the evil consequences of insobriety.
Knowing that I was within walking distance of Garrisons-on-Hudson,
I resolved to reach that point before night. My letters had been
forwarded there, and my eagerness to get them was of a kind
unexperienced before. It was Saturday, and, late in the afternoon, I
reached Garrisons after a hard day's march. The heat was intense, and
although I walked but a little more than twenty miles, the effort of
carrying my pack was thoroughly exhausting. The woman in charge at the
post-office was in evident doubt about the safety of giving me so large
a packet of letters, but yielded at sight of others which I showed her,
and readily agreed to look after my pack until I should call for it.
Between the station and the river was a tavern, and there I meant to
apply for work. As I neared the station platform, a train from New
York drew in. Something familiar in one of the passengers who alighted
put me on my guard. In a moment I recognized a fellow-guest at a
dinner-party of a few evenings before, and I remembered, with an odd
sense of another existence, that, over our coffee, on a broad veranda,
overlooking a harbor, bright with the night-lights of a squadron of
yachts, he had given me the benefit of an amazing familiarity with the
details of the recent baccarat scandal. My anxiety was needless, for I
easily passed unnoticed in the crowd.
[Illustration: I EASILY PASSED UNNOTICED IN THE CROWD.]
I walked on to the tavern. Its keeper was busy behind the bar when I
asked him for a job. He surprised me immensely with a ready promise of
work, and he asked me to wait until he could arrange matters. I went
into an adjoining room, and took out my letters.
It was the pool-room, and the walls were hung with colored prints of
prize-fighters, with arms folded on their bare chests in a way that put
their biceps much in evidence. And there were pictures of race-horses
which had won distinction. An old, much-battered pool-table occupied
the middle of the room. Around the walls ran a rough wooden bench.
Dirt was everywhere conspicuous. The ceiling and walls were filthy.
The floor was bare and unswept, and there were accumulations of dust
about the table-legs and in the corners under the benches, which could
be accounted for only by a liberal allowance of time. The two small
windows, through which one could see the dismal tavern yard, apparently
had never been washed.
I sat on a bench, and opened the letters. The dim past of my
"respectable" life began to brighten with increasing vividness. Quite
lost to present surroundings, I was suddenly recalled to them by the
appearance of the boss, who came with a cloth in hand, with which he
aimlessly dusted the table while he questioned me. I was so absorbed
in letters that, for a moment, I could not place myself, nor in the
least account for the situation. The keeper was asking me what I could
do. This was a natural question under the circumstances; but it took
me by surprise, and it staggered me. I covered my confusion with a
profession of willingness to be useful, and of a desire to work. The
boss, a coarse, blear-eyed, sensuous-looking man, eyed me doubtfully,
and suddenly concluded that he had no work for me.
But I was wide awake now. I knew that the nearest farms were some miles
back in the country, and that, except at the tavern, I had slender
chance of food or shelter. I said that if there was work to be done, I
was eager to do it, and that if, after a trial, he found me incapable,
he could dismiss me at any moment.
I fancied that I had gained my point, for he told me to follow him, as
he led the way into the kitchen. There we found the cook bending over a
range, in which the fire refused to burn.
"Mrs. Murphy," said the boss, "here's a man I've hired to help Sam,"
and then he turned sharply upon me with a "Damn you now, work! if you
know how to work!"
My opportunity lay in the smouldering fire, so I hastened to the
wood-pile, and presently returned with an armful of fine wood which
insured a fire for dinner.
Mrs. Murphy was a little, old, emaciated Irish woman, with her
thin white hair parted in the middle, smoothed back, and twisted
into a careless knot on her crown. Her face was wrinkled almost to
grotesqueness, and she had the passive air of one to whom can come no
surprises of joy or sorrow, as though the capacity for sensation were
gone, and life had reduced itself to mere existence. I watched for
opportunities of helping her, and she accepted the services as though
she had been accustomed to them always.
She began to interest me deeply. I learned from her that Sam, whom I
was hired to help, was a scullion and stable boy. When she had nothing
further for me to do in the kitchen, I returned to the wood-pile,
and chopped industriously, hoping to give evidence of my fitness for
the place. In an hour or more the proprietor called me, intending, I
supposed, to give me a change of work; but, instead, he gave me a
quarter, and told me, not unkindly, but firmly, that he did not want me.
The situation was discouraging. I had tramped some twenty miles through
dust and heat over a hilly country, and since the early morning I had
had nothing but a few apples to eat. Besides, it was fast growing dark,
and so too late to look for work on the farms back in the country.
The immediate neighborhood is largely taken up with country-seats,
and I made repeated efforts to get work at the hands of a gardener. I
soon discovered that I was in a community where special provision is
made against my class. At the carriage gates I not infrequently found
a notice which warned me of the presence of dogs, and although the
dogs gave me no trouble, a lodge-keeper, or footman, or gardener, upon
learning my errand, was invariably seized with fervent anxiety for
getting me unnoticed out of the grounds.
At nightfall I walked back to the tavern, and asked the proprietor
if I might sleep in his stables. To my surprise, he was exceedingly
friendly. He readily agreed to that, and, of his own accord, he invited
me to remain at the tavern over Sunday, and to take my meals in the
kitchen; and he added that, on Monday morning, he would give me some
work to do as compensation.
Already I had made a friend of the cook, and she now received me
warmly. Perhaps it was her habitual good-nature, for she had the same
kindly manner toward the other men, Sam and the three Irish section
hands from the railway, who took their meals with her. More than ever I
was attracted to her. She cordially greeted the workmen as they entered
her hot, reeking, ill-lit kitchen, addressing them by affectionate
diminutives of their first names, as Johnnie and Jimmie and the like.
They clearly had a warm regard for her, and they respectfully lowered
their voices and said "ma'am" in addressing her. To be sure they swore
viciously in her presence; but then she swore, too, not ill-naturedly,
but simply as an habitual means of emphasizing her usual language.
I watched her for some sign of ill-temper. In stifling quarters and
under exasperating inconveniences she toiled on at work far beyond her
strength, not patiently merely, but with the cheerfulness which is
always thoughtful of the comfort of others.
In spite of fatigue, that night in the stable was not a restful one.
The air lay heavy and hot in the unventilated loft, and through the
night the horses, tortured by flies, stamped ceaselessly in their
stalls. About midnight two men came into the barn. I soon knew them
for bedless wanderers like myself, and I awaited them in the hay with
an interest that was lively. They did not climb to the loft, but lay
down in a wagon; and for an hour or more I heard their gruff voices in
antiphonal sentences replete with strange oaths. They were speaking in
low tones and not excitedly, but their speech seemed little else than
profanity.
The heat and darkness intensified the quiet of the night. The
breathless stillness was broken only by the hoarse blasphemies below,
and the nervous stamping of the pestered brutes. I tried to shut out
the sounds, and at last fell asleep.
In the early morning I awoke to a beautiful mid-summer Sunday, the
first of my vagrant life. Sam was whistling at his work in the stables
and the tramps were gone. I found a path behind the barn leading to a
point on the river-bank where I could bathe.
The military cadets were out on Sunday parade, and the music of their
band was the summer morning itself, vocal in notes other than the songs
of birds, and the soft murmur of the river. The tents of the camp shone
spotlessly white on the bluffs above the water. Some of the buildings
were visible among the trees. The sheer approach to the Post and its
dark background of well-wooded highlands threw into strong relief its
commanding position. Among the hills to the north the river appears.
The immediate section of it might be a lake, girt with steep hills,
that are dense with infinite shades of green. About the Post the river
sweeps in a magnificent curve, and disappears among the hills to the
south.
The few books that my pack contained made generous amends, on this
day of rest, for the weight which they had added to my load. After
breakfast I took one of them to a shaded corner of the church-yard, and
read there until the service hour, and then I slipped into a seat half
hidden by the baptismal font.
In his sermon the rector contrasted the emasculated ideas of the
present with reference to God's judgment of sin, with the virile
thinking of the Middle Ages, expressed in such works of art as Dante's
Inferno, and Angelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Earnestly
and eloquently he pleaded the reality of spiritual things to the minds
of men in those ages of belief, and then he solemnly urged a return to
the plain truths of inspiration, and to the teaching of the Church,
that "God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance," and
that the punishment of unrepented evil is "eternal death."
The church was well filled, and I looked it over with a quickened
interest. The sexton and I, so far as I could see, were the only
representatives of the poor. Outside were a number of coachmen and
grooms and nurse-maids; but these, it is likely, were of another
persuasion. Certainly they would have looked curiously out of place
to our Protestant eyes among that well-dressed, prosperous company.
I knew this body of worshippers at a glance; some of them I knew
personally. It was easy to follow them all in imagination to country
houses where the afternoon would be spent in what escape there offered
from the heat. On the next day would be begun again the round of
wholesome recreation and of social intercourse, relieved from the
formality of town life, which makes up the summer rest, and which
implies the leisure which is rendered possible only by the continuous
work of a multitude of the poor, who constitute the parts of intricate
social and domestic machinery. I seem to be dwelling upon a costly
immunity from physical labor. It was not this that appealed to me.
These worshippers had leisure, but they were far from being idle. My
personal acquaintance went far enough to recognize among them persons
whose lives are full of strenuous activity in channels of splendid
usefulness. It was the social cleavage which yawned to my vision from
the new point of view. The rich were there in the house of God, but not
the poor; and the very atmosphere of the place seemed to preclude the
presence of the poor.
I had asked Sam to go to church with me. Sam had been watering the
horses, and now had an empty bucket in each hand and some tobacco in
his mouth. He stood still for a moment, regarding me intently, and
shifting the tobacco from one cheek to the other. Then he asked me with
much directness if I took him for a "dude." I said that I should then
go alone. "That way?" asked Sam, with an eye to my gear. "It is the
best that I can do," I explained. "Then go, and be fired for a bum," he
replied, as he moved on toward the pump.