I GO TO WAR AT LAST AND SOW THE SEED OF FUTURE CAMPAIGNS
At sunset on the second day after my desertion of Pfeiffer I walked
across a footbridge into a city with many spires, in one of which
a chime of bells rang out a familiar tune. The city was New Brunswick.
I turned down a side street where two stone churches stood side by
side. A gate in the picket fence had been left open, and I went in
looking for a place to sleep. Back in the churchyard I found what
I sought in the brownstone slab covering the tomb of, I know now,
an old pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, who died full of wisdom
and grace. I am afraid that I was not overburdened with either,
or I might have gone to bed with a full stomach too, instead of
chewing the last of the windfall apples that had been my diet on
my two days' trip; but if he slept as peacefully under the slab
as I slept on it, he was doing well. I had for once a dry bed, and
brownstone keeps warm long after the sun has set. The night dews
and the snakes, and the dogs that kept sniffing and growling half
the night in the near distance, had made me tired of sleeping in
the fields. The dead were much better company. They minded their
own business, and let a fellow alone.
[Illustration: "The dead were much better company"]
Before sun-up I was on the tow-path looking for a job. Mules were
in demand there, not men. The drift caught me once more, and toward
evening cast me up at a country town then called Little Washington,
now South River. How I got there I do not now remember. My diary
from those days says nothing about it. Years after, I went back
over that road and accepted a "lift" from a farmer going my way. We
passed through a toll-gate, and I wondered how the keeper came to
collect uneven money. We were two men and two horses. When I came
back the day after, I found out. So many cents, read the weather-beaten
sign that swung from the gate, for team and driver, so many for
each additional beast. I had gone through as an additional beast.
A short walk from Little Washington I found work in Peftit's
brick-yard at $22 a month and board. That night, when I turned in
after a square meal, in an old wagon I had begged for a bed, I felt
like a capitalist. I took to the wagon because one look within the
barracks had shown them to be impossible. Whether it was that, or
the fact that most of the other hands were Germans, who felt in duty
bound to celebrate each victory over the French as it was reported
day by day, and so provoked me to wrath--from the first we didn't
get on. They made a point whenever they came back from their celebrations
in the village, of dragging my wagon, with me fast asleep in it,
down into the river, where by and by the tide rose and searched
me out. Then I had to swim for it. That was of less account. Our
costume was not elaborate,--a pair of overalls, a woollen shirt,
and a straw hat, that was all, and a wetting was rather welcome
than otherwise; but they dubbed me Bismarck, and that was not to
be borne. My passionate protest only made them laugh the louder.
Yet they were not an ill-natured lot, rather the reverse. Saturday
afternoon was our wash-day, when we all sported together in peace
and harmony in the river. When we came out, we spread our clothes
to dry on the roof of the barracks, while we burrowed each in a
hill of white sand, and smoked our pipes far into the night, with
only our heads and the hand that held the pipe sticking out. That
was for protection against mosquitoes. It must have been a sight,
one of those Saturday night confabs, but it was solid comfort after
the wreek's work.
Bricks are made literally while the sun shines. The day begins
with the first glimmer of light in the east, and is not over till
the "pits" are worked out. It was my task to cart clay in the
afternoon to fill them up again. It was an idle enough kind of job.
All I had to do was to walk alongside my horse, a big white beast
with no joints at all except where its legs were hinged to the
backbone, back it up to the pit, and dump the load. But, walking
so in the autumn sun; I fell a-dreaming. I forgot claybank and pit.
I was back in the old town--saw her play among the timber. I met
her again on the Long Bridge. I held her hands once more in that
last meeting--the while I was mechanically backing my load up to
the pit and making ready to dump it. Day-dreams are out of place in
a brickyard. I forgot to take out the tail-board. To my amazement,
I beheld the old horse skating around, making frantic efforts to
keep its grip on the soil, then slowly rise before my bewildered
gaze, clawing feebly at the air as it went up and over, backwards
into the pit, load, cart and all.
I wish for my own reputation that I could truly say I wept for
the poor beast. I am sure I felt for it, but the reproachful look
it gave me as it lay there on its back, its four feet pointing
skyward, was too much. I sat upon the edge of the pit and shouted
with laughter, feeling thoroughly ashamed of my levity. Mr. Pettit
himself checked it, running in with his boys and demanding to know
what I was doing. They had seen the accident from the office, and
at once set about getting the horse out. That was no easy matter.
It was not hurt at all, but it had fallen so as to bend one of the
shafts of the truck like a bow. It had to be sawed in two to get
the horse out. When that was done, the heavy ash stick, rebounding
suddenly, struck one of the boys, who stood by, a blow on the head
that laid him out senseless beside the cart.
It was no time for laughter then. We ran for water and restoratives,
and brought him to, white and weak. The horse by that time had
been lifted to his feet and stood trembling in every limb, ready
to drop. It was a sobered driver that climbed out of the pit at the
tail end of the procession which bore young Pettit home. I spent
a miserable hour hanging around the door of the house waiting for
news of him. In the end his father came out to comfort me with the
assurance that he would be all right. I was not even discharged,
though I was deposed from the wagon to the command of a truck of
which I was myself the horse. I "ran out" brick from the pit after
that in the morning.
More than twenty years after, addressing the students of Rutgers
College, I told them of my experience in the brick-yard which was
so near them. At the end of my address a gentleman came up to me
and said, with a twinkle in his eye:
"So that was you, was it? My name is Pettit, and I work the brick-yard
now. I helped my father get that horse out of the pit, and I have
cause to remember that knock on the head." He made me promise sometime
to tell him what happened to me since, and if he will attend now
he will have it all.
I had been six weeks in the brick-yard when one day I heard of a
company of real volunteers that was ready to sail for France, and
forthwith the war fever seized me again. That night I set out for
Little Washington, and the next morning's steamer bore me past
the brick-yard, where the German hands dropped their barrows and
cheered me on with a howl of laughter that was yet not all derision.
I had kept my end up with them and they knew it. They had lately
let my sleeping-car alone in the old barn. Their shouts rang in
my ears, nevertheless, when I reached New York and found that the
volunteers were gone, and that I was once more too late. I fell back
on the French Consul then, but was treated very cavalierly there.
I suppose I became a nuisance, for when I called the twelfth or
twentieth time at the office in Bowling Green, he waxed wroth with
sudden vehemence and tried to put me out.
Then ensued the only fight of the war in which I was destined to
have a part, and that on the wrong side. My gorge rose at these
continual insults. I grabbed the French Consul by the nose, and
in a moment we were rolling down the oval stairs together, clawing
and fighting for all we were worth. I know it was inexcusable,
but consider the provocation; after all I had sacrificed to serve
his people, to be put out the second time like a beggar and a tramp!
I had this one chance of getting even, and that I took it was only
human. The racket we made on the stairs roused the whole house.
All the clerks ran out and threw themselves upon me. They tore me
away from the sacred person of the Consul and thrust me out into
the street bleeding and with a swollen eye to rage there, comforted
only by the assurance that without a doubt both his were black. I
am a little ashamed--not very much--of the fact that it comforts
me even now to think of it. He really did me a favor, that Consul;
but he was no good. He certainly was not.
It is to be recorded to the credit of my resolution, if not of my
common sense, that even after that I made two attempts to get over
to France. The one was with the captain of a French man-of-war
that lay in the harbor. He would not listen to me at all. The other,
and the last, was more successful. I actually got a job as stoker
on a French steamer that was to sail for Havre that day in an hour. I
ran all the way down to Battery Place, where I had my valise in a
boarding-house, and all the way back, arriving at the pier breathless,
in time to see my steamer swing out in the stream beyond my reach.
It was the last straw. I sat on the stringpiece and wept with
mortification. When I arose and went my way, the war was over,
as far as I was concerned. It was that in fact, as it speedily
appeared. The country which to-day, after thirty years of trial and
bereavement, is still capable of the Dreyfus infamy, was not fit
to hold what was its own. I am glad now that I did not go, though
I cannot honestly say that I deserve any credit for it.
All my money was gone, and an effort I made to join a railroad gang
in the Spuyten Duyvil cut came to nothing. Again I reenforced my
credit with my revolver and the everlasting top-boots, but the two
or three dollars they brought at the pawnshop were soon gone, and
once more I was turned out in the street. It was now late in the
fall. The brick-making season was over. The city was full of idle
men. My last hope, a promise of employment in a human-hair factory,
failed, and, homeless and penniless, I joined the great army of
tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one
aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and
fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as
myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway. I
was too proud in all my misery to beg. I do not believe I ever did.
But I remember well a basement window at the down-town Delmonico's,
the silent appearance of my ravenous face at which, at a certain
hour in the evening, always evoked a generous supply of meat-bones
and rolls from a white-capped cook who spoke French. That was the
saving clause. I accepted his rolls as instalments of the debt his
country owed me, or ought to owe me, for my unavailing efforts in
its behalf.
It was under such auspices that I made the acquaintance of Mulberry
Bend, the Five Points, and the rest of the slum, with which there
was in the years to come to be a reckoning. For half a lifetime
afterward they were my haunts by day and by night, as a police
reporter, and I can fairly lay claim, it seems to me, to a personal
knowledge of the evil I attacked. I speak of this because, in a
batch of reviews of "A Ten Years' War" [Footnote: Now, "The Battle
with the Slum."] which came yesterday from my publishers to me there
is one which lays it all to "maudlin sensitiveness" on my part.
[Illustration: Lunching at Delmonico's.]
"The slum," says this writer, "is not at all so unspeakably vile,"
and measures for relief based on my arraignment "must be necessarily
abortive." Every once in a while I am asked why I became a newspaper
man. For one thing, because there were writers of such trash, who,
themselves comfortably lodged, have not red blood enough in their
veins to feel for those to whom everything is denied, and not sense
enough to make out the facts when they see them, or they would
not call playgrounds, schoolhouses, and better tenements "abortive
measures." Some one had to tell the facts; that is one reason why
I became a reporter. And I am going to stay one until the last of
that ilk has ceased to discourage men from trying to help their
fellows by the shortest cut they can find, whether it fits in a
theory or not. I don't care two pins for all the social theories
that were ever made unless they help to make better men and women
by bettering their lot. I have had cranks of that order, who rated
as sensible beings in the ordinary affairs of life, tell me that I
was doing harm rather than good by helping improve the lot of the
poor; it delayed the final day of justice we were waiting for. Not
I. I don't propose to wait an hour for it, if I can help bring it
on; and I know I can.
There! I don't believe I have read fifteen reviews of any of my
books. Life is too short; but I am glad I did not miss that one.
Those are the fellows for whom Roosevelt is not a good enough
reformer; who chill the enthusiasm of mankind with a deadly chill,
and miscall it method--science. The science of how not to do a
thing--yes! They make me tired.
There was until last winter a doorway in Chatham Square, that of
the old Barnum clothing store, which I could never pass without
recalling those nights of hopeless misery with the policeman's
periodic "Get up there! move on!" reenforced by a prod of his club
or the toe of his boot. I slept there, or tried to when crowded
out of the tenements in the Bend by their utter nastiness. Cold
and wet weather had set in, and a linen duster was all that covered
my back. There was a woollen blanket in my trunk which I had from
home--the one, my mother had told me, in which I was wrapped when
I was born; but the trunk was in the "hotel" as security for money
I owed for board, and I asked for it in vain. I was now too shabby
to get work, even if there had been any to get. I had letters still
to friends of my family in New York who might have helped me, but
hunger and want had not conquered my pride. I would come to them,
if at all, as their equal, and, lest I fall into temptation, I
destroyed the letters. So, having burned my bridges behind me, I was
finally and utterly alone in the city, with the winter approaching
and every shivering night in the streets reminding me that a time
was rapidly coming when such a life as I led could no longer be
endured.
Not in a thousand years would I be likely to forget the night when
it came. It had rained all day, a cold October storm, and night
found me, with the chill downpour unabated, down by the North River,
soaked through and through, with no chance for a supper, forlorn
and discouraged. I sat on the bulwark, listening to the falling
rain and the swish of the dark tide, and thinking of home. How far
it seemed, and how impassable the gulf now between the "castle"
with its refined ways, between her in her dainty girlhood and me
sitting there, numbed with the cold that was slowly stealing away my
senses with my courage. There was warmth and cheer where she was.
Here--An overpowering sense of desolation came upon me, I hitched a
little nearer the edge. What if--? Would they miss me much or long
at home if no word came from me? Perhaps they might never hear.
What was the use of keeping it up any longer with, God help us,
everything against and nothing to back a lonely lad?
And even then the help came. A wet and shivering body was pressed
against mine, and I felt rather than heard a piteous whine in my
ear. It was my companion in misery, a little outcast black-and-tan,
afflicted with fits, that had shared the shelter of a friendly
doorway with me one cold night and had clung to me ever since with
a loyal affection that was the one bright spot in my hard life. As
my hand stole mechanically down to caress it, it crept upon my knees
and licked my face, as if it meant to tell me that there was one
who understood; that I was not alone. And the love of the faithful
little beast thawed the icicles in my heart. I picked it up in my
arms and fled from the tempter; fled to where there were lights and
men moving, if they cared less for me than I for them--anywhere so
that I saw and heard the river no more.
In the midnight hour we walked into the Church Street police station
and asked for lodging. The rain was still pouring in torrents.
The sergeant spied the dog under my tattered coat and gruffly told
me to put it out, if I wanted to sleep there. I pleaded for it in
vain. There was no choice. To stay in the street was to perish.
So I left my dog out on the stoop, where it curled up to wait for
me. Poor little friend! It was its last watch. The lodging-room
was jammed with a foul and stewing crowd of tramps. A loud-mouthed
German was holding forth about the war in Europe, and crowding
me on my plank. Cold and hunger had not sufficed to put out the
patriotic spark within me. It was promptly fanned into flame, and
I told him what I thought of him and his crew. Some Irishmen cheered
and fomented trouble, and the doorman came in threatening to lock
us all up. I smothered my disgust at the place as well as I could,
and slept, wearied nearly to death.
In the middle of the night I awoke with a feeling that something
was wrong. Instinctively I felt for the little gold locket I wore
under my shirt, with a part of the precious curl in it that was
my last link with home. It was gone. I had felt it there the last
thing before I fell asleep. One of the tramp lodgers had cut the
string and stolen it. With angry tears I went up and complained
to the sergeant that I had been robbed. He scowled at me over the
blotter, called me a thief, and said that he had a good mind to
lock me up. How should I, a tramp boy, have come by a gold locket?
He had heard, he added, that I had said in the lodging-room that
I wished the French would win, and he would only be giving me what
I deserved if he sent me to the Island. I heard and understood.
He was himself a German. All my sufferings rose up before me, all
the bitterness of my soul poured itself out upon him. I do not know
what I said. I remember that he told the doorman to put me out. And
he seized me and threw me out of the door, coming after to kick me
down the stoop.
My dog had been waiting, never taking its eyes off the door, until
I should come out. When it saw me in the grasp of the doorman, it
fell upon him at once, fastening its teeth in his leg. He let go of
me with a yell of pain, seized the poor little beast by the legs,
and beat its brains out against the stone steps.
[Illustration: The Fight on the Police Station Steps]
At the sight a blind rage seized me. Raving like a madman, I stormed
the police station with paving-stones from the gutter. The fury of
my onset frightened even the sergeant, who saw, perhaps, that he
had gone too far, and he called two policemen to disarm and conduct
me out of the precinct anywhere so that he got rid of me. They
marched me to the nearest ferry and turned me loose. The ferry-master
halted me. I had no money, but I gave him a silk handkerchief,
the last thing about me that had any value, and for that he let me
cross to Jersey City. I shook the dust of New York from my feet,
vowing that I would never return, and, setting my face toward the
west, marched straight out the first railroad track I came to.
And now, right here, begins the part of my story that is my only
excuse for writing down these facts, though it will not appear for
a while yet. The outrage of that night became, in the providence
of God, the means of putting an end to one of the foulest abuses
that ever disgraced a Christian city, and a mainspring in the
battle with the slum as far as my share in it is concerned. My dog
did not die unavenged.
I walked all day, following the track, and in the afternoon crossed
the long trestlework of the Jersey Central Railroad over Newark
Bay, with my face set toward Philadelphia. I had friends there,
distant relatives, and had at last made up my mind to go to them
and ask them to start me afresh. On the road which I had chosen for
myself I had come to the jumping-off place. Before night I found
company in other tramps who had been over the road before and
knew just what towns to go around and which to walk through boldly.
Rahway, if I remember rightly, was one of those to be severely
shunned. I discovered presently that I was on the great tramps'
highway, with the column moving south on its autumn hegira to warmer
climes. I cannot say I fancied the company. Tramps never had any
attraction for me, as a sociological problem or otherwise. I was
compelled, more than once, to be of and with them, but I shook
their company as quickly as I could. As for the "problem" they are
supposed to represent, I think the workhouse and the police are
quite competent to deal with that, provided it is not a Tammany
police. It does not differ appreciably from the problem of human
laziness in any other shape or age. We got some light on that, which
ought to convince anybody, when under Mayor Strong's administration
we tried to deal intelligently with vagrancy. One-half of the
homeless applicants for night shelter were fat, well-nourished
young loafers who wouldn't work. That is not my statement, but
the report of the doctor who saw them stripped, taking their bath.
The bath and the investigation presently decreased their numbers,
until in a week scarcely anything was left of the "problem" that
had bothered us so.
Four days I was on the way to Philadelphia, living on apples and
an occasional meal earned by doing odd jobs. At night I slept in
lonely barns that nearly always had a board ripped out--the tramps'
door. I tried to avoid the gang, but I was not always successful.
I remember still with a shudder an instance of that kind. I was
burrowing in a haymow, thinking myself alone. In the night a big
storm came up. The thunder shook the old barn, and I sat up wondering
if it would be blown away. A fierce lightning-flash filled it with
a ghostly light, and showed me within arm's length a white and
scared face with eyes starting from their sockets at the sight of
me. The next moment all was black darkness again. My heart stood
still for what seemed the longest moment of my life. Then there
came out of the darkness a quaking voice asking, "Is anybody there?"
For once I was glad to have a live tramp about. I really thought
it was a ghost.
The last few miles to Camden I rode in a cattle-car, arriving there
at night, much the worse for the wear of it on my linen duster. In
the freight-yard I was picked up by a good-hearted police captain
who took me to his station, made me tell him my story, and gave me
a bed in an unused cell, the door of which he took the precaution
to lock on the outside. But I did not mind. Rather that a hundred
times than the pig-sty in the New York station-house. In the morning
he gave me breakfast and money to get my boots blacked and to pay
my fare across the Delaware. And so my homeless wanderings came,
for the time being, to an end. For in Philadelphia I found in
the Danish Consul, Ferdinand Myhlertz, and his dear wife, friends
indeed as in need. The City of Brotherly Love found heart and time
to welcome the wanderer, though at the time it was torn up by the
hottest kind of fight over the question whether or not to disfigure
the beautiful square at Broad and Market streets by putting the
new municipal building there.
When, after two weeks' rest with my friends, they sent me on my way
to an old schoolmate in Jamestown, N.Y., clothed and in my right
mind, I was none the worse for my first lesson in swimming against
the current, and quite sure that next time I should be able to
breast it. Hope springs eternal at twenty-one. I had many a weary
stretch ahead before I was to make port. But with youth and courage
as the equipment, one should win almost any fight.