WORKING AND WANDERING
Winter came quickly up by the northern lakes, but it had no terror
for me. For once I had shelter and enough to eat. It found me
felling trees on Swede Hill, where a considerable settlement of
Scandinavians was growing up. I had tried my hand at making cradles
in a furniture-shop, but at two dollars and forty cents per dozen
there was not much profit in it. So I took to the woods and learned
to swing an axe in the American fashion that had charmed me so at
Brady's Bend. I liked it much better, anyway, than being in the
house winter and summer. It is well that we are fashioned that
way, some for indoors and some for outdoors, for so the work of the
world is all done; but it has always seemed to me that the indoor
folk take too big a share of credit to themselves, as though there
were special virtue in that, though I think that the reverse is
the case. At least it seems more natural to want to be out in the
open where the sun shines and the winds blow. When I was not chopping
wood I was helping with the ice harvest on the lake or repairing
the steamer that ran in summer between Jamestown and Mayville.
My home was in Dexterville, a mile or so out of town, where there
lived a Danish family, the Romers, at whose home I was made welcome.
The friendship which grew up between us has endured through life
and been to me a treasure. Gentler and truer hearts than those of
Nicholas and John Romer there are not many.
I shared my room with another countryman, Anthony Ronne, a young
axe-maker, who, like myself, was in hard luck. The axe-factory had
burned down, and, with no work in sight, the outlook for him was
not exactly bright. He had not my way of laughing it off, but was
rather disposed to see the serious side of it. Probably that was the
reason we took to each other; the balance was restored so. Maybe
he sobered me down somewhat. If any one assumes that in my role
of unhappy lover I went about glooming and glowering on mankind,
he makes a big mistake. Besides, I had not the least notion of
accepting that role as permanent. I was out to twist the wheel of
fortune my way when I could get my hands upon it. I never doubted
that I should do that sooner or later, if only I kept doing things.
That Elizabeth should ever marry anybody but me was preposterously
impossible, no matter what she or anybody said.
Was this madness? They half thought so at home when they caught
a glimpse of it in my letters. Not at all. It was conviction--the
conviction that shapes events and the world to its ends. I know
what I am talking about. If any one doubts it, and thinks his a
worse case than mine, let him try my plan. If he cannot muster up
courage to do it, it is the best proof in the world that she was
right in refusing him.
To return to my chum; he, on his part, rose to the height even of
"going out," but not with me. There was a physical obstacle to
that. We had but one coat between us, a turned black kersey, worn
very smooth and shiny also on the wrong side, which I had bought
of a second-hand dealer in Philadelphia for a dollar. It was our
full-dress, and we took turns arraying ourselves in it for the
Dexterville weekly parties. These gatherings interested me chiefly
as outbreaks of the peculiar American humor that was very taking to
me, in and out of the newspapers. Dancing being tabooed as immoral
and contaminating, the young people had recourse to particularly
energetic kissing games, which more than made up for their deprivation
on the other score. It was all very harmless and very funny, and
the winter wore away pleasantly enough in spite of hard luck and
hard work when there was any.
With the early thaw came change. My friends moved away to Buffalo,
and I was left for two months the sole occupant of the Romer
homestead. My last job gave out about that time, and a wheelbarrow
express which I established between Dexter-ville and the steamboat
landing on the lake refused to prosper. The idea was good enough,
but I was ahead of my time: travel on the lake had not yet begun.
With my field thus narrowed down, I fell back on my gun and some old
rat-traps I found in the woodshed. I became a hunter and trapper.
Right below me was the glen through which the creek ran on its
way to the sawmills and furniture-shops of Jamestown. It was full
of musk-rats that burrowed in its banks between the roots of dead
hemlocks and pines. There I set my traps and baited them with carrots
and turnips. The manner of it was simple enough. I set the trap
on the bottom of the creek and hung the bait on a stick projecting
from the bank over it, so that to get at it the rat had to step on
the trap. I caught lots of them. Their skins brought twenty cents
apiece in the town, so that I was really quite independent. I
made often as much as a dollar overnight with my traps, and then
had the whole day to myself in the hills, where I waylaid many a
fat rabbit or squirrel and an occasional bird.
[Illustration: "There I set my traps"]
The one thing that marred my enjoyment of this life of freedom
was my vain struggle to master the art of cookery in its elements.
To properly get the hang of that, and of housekeeping in general,
two heads are needed, as I have found out since--one of them with
curls and long eyelashes. Then it is fine fun; but it is not good
for man to tackle that job alone. Goodness knows I tried hard
enough. I remember the first omelet I made. I was bound to get it
good. So I made a muster-roll of all the good things Mrs. Romer
had left in the house, and put them all in. Eggs and strawberry
jam and raisins and apple-sauce, and some sliced bacon--the way I
had seen mother do with "egg pancakes." But though I seasoned it
liberally with baking-powder to make it rise, it did not rise. It
was dreadfully heavy and discouraging, and not even the strawberry
jam had power to redeem it. To tell the truth, it was not a
good omelet. It was hardly fit to eat. The jam came out to better
advantage in the sago I boiled, but there was too much of it. It
was only a fruit-jar full, but I never saw anything swell so. It
boiled out of the pot and into another and another, while I kept
pouring on water until nearly every jar in the house was full
of sago that stood around until moss grew on it with age. There
is much contrariness in cooking. When I tapped my maples with the
rest--there were two big trees in front of the house--and tried
to make sugar, I was prepared to see the sap boil away; but when
I had labored a whole day and burned half a cord of wood, and had
for my trouble half a tea-cupful of sugar, which made me sick into
the bargain, I concluded that that game was not worth the candle,
and gave up my plans of becoming a sugar-planter on a larger scale.
It was at this time that I made my first appearance on the lecture
platform. There was a Scandinavian society in Jamestown, composed
chiefly of workingmen whose fight with life had left them little
enough time for schooling. They were anxious to learn, however, and
as I was set on teaching where I saw the chance, the thing came of
itself. I had been mightily interested in the Frenchman Figuier's
account of the formation and development of the earth, and took
that for my topic. Twice a week, when I had set my traps in the
glen, I went to town and talked astronomy and geology to interested
audiences that gazed terror stricken at the loathsome saurians and
the damnable pterodactyl which I sketched on the blackboard. Well
they might. I spared them no gruesome detail, and I never could
draw, anyhow. However, I rescued them from those beasts in season,
and together we hauled the earth through age-long showers of molten
metal into the sunlight of our day. I sometimes carried home as
much as two or three dollars, after paying for gas and hall, with
the tickets ten cents apiece, and I saw wealth and fame ahead of
me, when sudden wreck came to my hopes and my career as a lecturer.
It was all because, having got the earth properly constructed and set
up, as it were, I undertook to explain about latitude and longitude.
Figures came in there, and I was never strong at mathematics.
My education in that branch had run into a snag about the middle
of the little multiplication table. A boy from the "plebs" school
challenged me to fight, as I was making my way to recitation,
trying to learn the table by heart. I broke off in the middle of
the sixes to wallop him, and never got any farther. The class went
on that day without me, and I never overtook it. I made but little
effort. In the Latin School, which rather prided itself upon being
free from the commercial taint, mathematics was held to be in the
nature of an intrusion, and it was a sort of good mark for a boy
that he did not take to it, if at the same time he showed aptitude
for language. So I was left to deplore with Marjorie Fleming to
the end of my days the inherent viciousness of sevens and eights,
as "more than human nature can endure." It is one of the ironies
of life that I should have had to take up work into which the study
of statistics enters largely. But the powers that set me the task
provided a fitter back than mine for that burden. As I explained
years ago in the preface to "How the Other Half Lives," the patient
friendship of Dr. Roger S. Tracy, the learned statistician of
the Health Department, has smoothed the rebellious kinks out of
death-rates and population statistics, as of so many other knotty
problems which we have worked out together.
But I am getting out of my longitude, as I did then. When I had
groped about long enough trying to make my audience understand
what I only half understood myself, an old sea-captain arose in
his place and said that any man who would make a mess of so simple
a thing as latitude and longitude evidently knew nothing at all.
It happened to be the one thing he knew about. Popular favor is
a fickle thing. The audience that had but now been applauding my
efforts to organize the earth took his word for it without waiting
for an explanation and went out in a body, scouting even the
ichthyosaurus as a prehistoric fake.
I made a valiant effort to stem the tide, but came to worse grief
than before. My only listener was a Swedish blacksmith who had attended
the creation and development of the earth from the beginning with
unshaken faith, though he was a member of the Lutheran church, with
the pastor and deacons of which I had waged a bitter newspaper war
over the "sin" of dancing. But when I said, on the authority of
Figuier, that an English man-of-war had once during an earthquake
been thrown into the city of Callao and through the roof of a
church, between the walls of which it remained standing upright on
its keel, he got up and went too. He circulated the story in town
with various embellishments. The deacons aforesaid seized upon it
as welcome ammunition, construing it into an insult to the church,
and there was an end to my lecturing.
The warm spring weather, together with these disappointments, bred
in me the desire to roam. I packed away my traps and started for
Buffalo with my grip, walking along the lake. It set in with a
drizzling rain, and I was soon wet to the skin. Where the Chautauqua
summer school grounds are now I surprised a flock of wild ducks
near the shore, and was lucky enough to wound one with my revolver.
But the wind carried it out of my reach, and I trudged on supperless,
through Mayville, where the lights were beginning to shine in the
windows. Not one of them was for me. All my money had gone to pay
back debts to my Dexterville landlady. The Danes had a good name
in Jamestown, and we were all very jealous of it. We would have
starved, every one of us, rather than leave unpaid debts behind.
As Mrs. Ben Wah many years after put it to me, "it is no disgrace
to be poor, but it is sometimes very inconvenient." I found it
so when, worn out with walking, I crawled into an abandoned barn
halfway to Westfield and dug down in the hay, wet through and
hungry as a bear. It stormed and rained all night, and a rat or a
squirrel fell from the roof on my face. It felt like a big sprawling
hand, and woke me up in a great fright.
The sun was shining upon a peaceful Sabbath when I crawled out of
my hole and saw to my dismay that I had been sleeping in a pile
of old hay seed that had worked through and through my wet clothes
until I was a sight. An hour's patient plucking and a bath in a
near-by pond restored me to something like human shape, and I held
my entry into Westfield. The people were going to church in their
holiday clothes, and eyed the uncouth stranger askance. I travelled
the whole length of the town thinking what to do next. My stomach
decided for me. There was a house standing in a pretty garden with
two little cast-iron negro boys for hitching-posts at the steps. I
rang the bell, and to an old lady who opened the door I offered to
chop wood, fetch water, or do anything there was to do in exchange
for breakfast. She went in and brought out her husband, who looked
me over and said that if I was willing to do his chores I need go
no farther. I was tired and famished, and the place was so restful
that I said yes at once. In ten minutes I was eating my breakfast
in the kitchen, duly installed as Dr. Spencer's hired man.
I think of the month I spent in the doctor's house with mingled
feelings of exasperation and amusement. If I had not learned to
milk a cow there, probably Octavia Ely would never have come into
my life, horrid nightmare that she was. Octavia Ely was a Jersey
cow with a brass tag in her ear, whose attacks upon the domestic
peace of my house in after years even now fill me with rage. In
the twelve months of her sojourn with us she had fifteen different
kinds of disease, every one of which advertised itself by the
stopping of her milk, When she had none, she never once gave down
the milk without grudging it. With three of us to hold her legs
and tail lest she step in the pail or switch our ears, she would
reach back and eat the vest off my back where I sat milking her.
But she does not belong in this story, thank goodness! If she had
never belonged to me or mine, I should be a better man to-day; she
provoked me so. However, I cannot reasonably lay the blame for her
on the doctor. His cow was friendly enough. It was Sport, the old
dog, that made the heaviest and at the same time a most ludicrous
item in my duties as hired man. Long past the age of sport of any
kind, he spent his decadent years in a state of abject fear of
thunder and lightning. If only a cloud darkened the sun, Sport kept
up a ceaseless pilgrimage between his corner and the kitchen door
to observe the sky, sighing most grievously at the outlook. At
the first distant rumble--this was in the month of May, when it
thundered almost every day--he became perfectly rigid with terror.
It was my duty then to carry him down into the cellar and shut him
in the wood-box, where he was out of the way of it all. Poor Sport
laid his head against my shoulder and wept great tears that wrung
peals of laughter from me and from the boys who always hung around
to see the show.
One of these was just beginning the struggle with his Homer, which
I knew by heart almost, and it may have been the discovery that I
was able to steer him through it between chores, as well as to teach
him some tricks of fencing, that helped make the doctor anxious that
I should promise to stay with him always. He would make me rich,
he said. But other ambitions than to milk cows and plant garden
truck were stirring in me. To be rich was never among them. I had
begun to write essays for the magazines, choosing for my topic, for
want of any other, the maltreatment of Denmark by Prussia, which
rankled fresh in my memory, and the duty of all Scandinavians
to rise up and avenge it. The Scandinavians would not listen when
I wrote in Danish, and my English outpourings never reached the
publishers. I discovered that I lacked words--they didn't pour;
at which, in general discontentment with myself and all things, I
pulled up stakes and went to Buffalo. Only, this time I rode in a
railway train, with money in my pocket.
For all that, Buffalo received me with no more circumstance than
it had done when I came there penniless, on the way to the war,
the year before. I piled boards in a lumber-yard until I picked a
quarrel with a tyrant foreman on behalf of a lot of green Germans
whom he maltreated most shamefully. Then I was put out. A
cabinet-maker in the "Beehive," a factory building out in Niagara
Street, hired me next to make bedsteads, and took me to board with
him. In the top story of the factory we fitted up a bedroom that
was just large enough for one sitting and two standing, so long
as the door was not opened; then one of the two had to get out.
It mattered little, for the only visitor I had was a half-elderly
countryman of mine whom they had worked so hard in his childhood
that he had never had a chance to go to school. We two labored
together by my little lamp, and it was great fun to see him who had
never known how to read and write his own Danish make long strides
in the strange tongue he spoke so singularly well. When we were
both tired out, we would climb up on the roof and lie there and
look out over the lake and the city where the myriad lights were
shining, and talk of the old home and old times.
Sometimes the new would crowd them out in spite of all. I remember
that Fourth of July when the salute from Fort Porter woke me up at
sunrise and fired me with sudden patriotic ardor. I jumped out of
bed and grabbed my revolver. There was a pile of packing-boxes in
the yard below, and, knowing that there was no one around whom I
could hurt, I made it my target and fired away all my ammunition
at it. It made a fine racket, and I was happy. A couple of days
later, when I was down in the yard, it occurred to me to look
at the boxes to ascertain what kind of a score I had made. A very
good one. All the bullets had hit. The boxes looked like so many
sieves. Incidentally I found out that they were not empty, as I
had supposed, but filled with glass fruit-jars.
I had eventually to give that job up also, because my boss was "bad
pay." He was pretty much all bad, I guess. I do think his house was
the most disorderly one I have ever come across. Seven ill-favored
children clamored about the table, fighting with their even more
ill-favored mother. She used to single out the one she wished to
address by slamming a handful of string-beans, or whatever greens
might be at hand, across the table at him. The youngster would
fire it back, and so they were _en rapport_ with each other. The
father was seldom sober at meals. When he "felt funny," he would
stealthily pour a glass of water down the nearest child's back and
then sit and chuckle over the havoc he had wrought. There followed
a long and woful wail and an instant explosion from the mother in
this wise. I can hear her now. It was always the same:--
"Gott-himmel-donnerwetter-noch-emal-ich-will-de-
mal-hole-du-spitzbub-eselskerl-wart'-nur-ich-schlag-
de-noch-todt-potz-sacrement!"
Whereupon, from sheer exhaustion all round, there was peace for at
least five minutes.
Which reminds me of meeting Adler, my chum from Brady's Bend, in
Buffalo. He had come up to get a $1500 place, as he informed me.
That would about satisfy him. That such jobs were waiting by the
score for an educated German in this barbarous land he never doubted
for a moment. In the end he went to work in a rolling-mill at a
dollar a day. Adler was ever a stickler for etiquette. In Brady's
Bend we had very little of it. At mealtimes a flock of chickens used
to come into the summer kitchen where we ate, and forage around,
to Adler's great disgust. One day they deliberately flew up on the
table, and fell to fighting with the boarders for the food. A big
Shanghai rooster trod in the butter and tracked it over the table.
At the sight Adler's rage knew no bounds. Seizing a half-loaf of
bread, he aimed it at the rooster and felled him in his tracks. The
flock of fowl flew squawking out of the door. The women screamed,
and the men howled with laughter. Adler flourished another loaf
and vowed vengeance upon bird or beast that did not let the butter
alone.
I have been often enough out of patience with the ways of the labor
men which seem to me to be the greatest hindrance to the success of
their cause; but I am not in danger of forgetting the other side
which makes that cause--if for no other reason, because of an
experience I had in Buffalo that year. In a planing-mill in which
I had found employment I contracted with the boss to plane doors,
sandpaper them, and plug knot-holes at fifteen cents a door. It
was his own offer, and I did the work well, better than it had been
done before, so he said himself. But when he found at the end of
the week that I had made $15 where my slow-coach predecessor had
made only ten, he cut the price down to twelve cents. I objected,
but in the end swallowed my anger and, by putting on extra steam
and working overtime, made $16 the next week. The boss examined
the work very carefully, said it was good, paid my wages, and cut
down the price to ten cents. He did not want his men to make over
$10 a week, he said; it was not good for them. I quit then, after
giving him my opinion of him and of the chances of his shop. I do
not know where he may be now, but wherever he is, I will warrant
that my prediction came true. There is in Danish an old proverb,
"Falsk slaar sin egen Herre paa Hals," which is to say that chickens
come home to roost, and that right in the end does prevail over
might. The Lord Chief Justice over all is not to be tricked. If
the labor men will only remember that, and devote, let us say, as
much time to their duties as to fighting for their rights, they
will get them sooner. Which is not saying that there is not a time
to strike. Witness my experience with the planing-mill man.
I struck not only against him, but against the whole city of
Buffalo. I shook the dust of it from my feet and went out to work
with a gang on a new railroad then being built through Cattaraugus
County--the Buffalo and Washington, I think. Near a village called
Coonville our job was cut out for us. We were twenty in the gang,
and we were to build the line across an old dry river-bed at that
point. In the middle of the river there had once been a forest-clad
island. This we attacked with pickaxe and spade and carried it away
piecemeal in our wheelbarrows. It fell in with the hottest weather
of the year. Down in the hollow where no wind blew it was utterly
unbearable. I had never done such work before, and was not built
for it. I did my best to keep up with the gang, but my chest heaved
and my heart beat as though it would burst. There were nineteen
Irishmen in the gang--big, rough fellows who had picked me out, as
the only "Dutchman," as the butt for their coarse jokes; but when
they saw that the work was plainly too much for me, the other side
of this curiously contradictory, mischief-loving, and big-hearted
people came out. They invented a thousand excuses to get me out of
the line. Water was certainly not their daily diet, but they fell
victims, one and all, to the most ravening thirst, which required
the despatching of me every hour to the spring a quarter of a mile
away to fill the pail. If they could not empty it quickly enough,
they managed to upset it, and, to cover up the fraud, cursed each
other roundly for their clumsiness. Between whiles they worried me
as ever with their horseplay; but I had seen the real man behind
it, and they might have called me Bismarck, had they chosen, without
offence.
The heat, the work, and the slave-driver of a foreman were too much
for them even, and before the end of a week the gang was broken
and scattered wide. I was on the road again looking for work on a
farm. It was not to be had. Perhaps I did not try very hard. Sunday
morning found me spending my last quarter for breakfast in an inn
at Lime Lake. When I had eaten, I went out in the fields and sat
with my back against a tree, and listened to the church-bells that
were ringing also, I knew, in my home four thousand miles away. I
saw the venerable Domkirke, my father's gray head in his pew, and
Her, young and innocent, in the women's seats across the aisle.
I heard the old pastor's voice in the solemn calm, and my tears
fell upon her picture that had called up the vision. It was as if
a voice spoke to me and said to get up and be a man; that if I wanted
to win Elizabeth, to work for her was the way, and not idling my
days away on the road. And I got right up, and, setting my face
toward Buffalo, went by the shortest cut back to my work.
[Illustration: Our Old Pastor.]
I walked day and night, pursued in the dark by a hundred skulking
curs that lurked behind trees until I came abreast of them and
then sallied out to challenge my progress. I stoned them and went
on. Monday's setting sun saw me outside Buffalo, tired, but with a
new purpose. I had walked fifty miles without stopping or eating.
I slept under a shed that night, and the very next day found work
at good wages on some steamers the Erie Railroad was then building
for the Lake Superior trade. With intervals of other employment
when for any reason work in the ship-yard was slack, I kept that up
all winter, and became quite opulent, even to the extent of buying
a new suit of clothes, the first I had had since I landed. I paid
off all my debts, and quarrelled with all my friends about religion.
I never had any patience with a person who says "there is no God."
The man is a fool, and therefore cannot be reasoned with. But in
those days I was set on converting him, as my viking forefathers
did when from heathen they became Christians--by fire and sword if
need be. I smote the infidels about me hip and thigh, but there
were a good many of them, and they kept springing up, to my great
amazement. Probably the constant warfare imparted a tinge of
fierceness to that whole period of my life, for I remember that
one of my employers, a Roman Catholic builder, discharged me for
disagreeing with him about the saints, telling me that I was "too
blamed independent, anyhow." I suspect I must have been a rather
unlovely customer, take it all together. Still, every once in a
while it boils up in me yet against the discretion that has come
with the years, and I want to slam in after the old fashion. Seems
to me we are in danger of growing stale with all our soft speeches
nowadays.
Things enough happened to take down my self-esteem a good many pegs.
It was about this time I made up my mind to go into the newspaper
business. It seemed to me that a reporter's was the highest and
noblest of all callings; no one could sift wrong from right as he,
and punish the wrong. In that I was right. I have not changed my
opinion on that point one whit, and I am sure I never shall. The
power of fact is the mightiest lever of this or of any day. The
reporter has his hand upon it, and it is his grievous fault if he
does not use it well. I thought I would make a good reporter. My
father had edited our local newspaper, and such little help as
I had been of to him had given me a taste for the business. Being
of that mind, I went to the _Courier_ office one morning and asked
for the editor. He was not in. Apparently nobody was. I wandered
through room after room, all empty, till at last I came to one in
which sat a man with a paste-pot and a pair of long shears. This
must be the editor; he had the implements of his trade. I told him
my errand while he clipped away.
[Figure: When I worked in the Buffalo Ship-yard. ]
"What is it you want?" he asked, when I had ceased speaking and
waited for an answer.
"Work," I said.
"Work!" said he, waving me haughtily away with the shears; "we
don't work here. This is a newspaper office."
I went, abashed. I tried the Express next. This time I had the
editor pointed out to me. He was just coming through the business
office. At the door I stopped him and preferred my request. He
looked me over, a lad fresh from the shipyard, with horny hands
and a rough coat, and asked:--
"What are you?"
"A carpenter," I said.
The man turned upon his heel with a loud, rasping laugh and shut the
door in my face. For a moment I stood there stunned. His ascending
steps on the stairs brought back my senses. I ran to the door,
and flung it open. "You laugh!" I shouted, shaking my fist at him,
standing halfway up the stairs, "you laugh now, but wait--" And
then I got the grip of my temper and slammed the door in my turn.
All the same, in that hour it was settled that I was to be a
reporter. I knew it as I went out into the street.