THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED
"I am very tired to-night," Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later.
"I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all
the leading firms, but--here I am, still without a place. I thought I
might get a place in one of them where I could finish my law studies,
and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had dreams of working into the
firm in time, but they were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone
glimmering. The men who are employed in the law offices are already
admitted to the bar; most of them are young fellows, but some are old
and gray-headed, and the sight of them gave me the blues.
"I did not get to see many of the firm members themselves; their offices
are formidable places. There is no office in Macochee like them; they
have big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks and there is a
boy at a desk who makes you tell your business before you can get in to
see any of the lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big, important
fellows. Most of them would not see me at all; several said they had no
place for me and dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one man,
when I asked him if he thought there was an opening, said he supposed
there ought to be, as one lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only
the day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I shall never forget,
took pains to sit down and talk with me a long time, but he was no more
encouraging than the others. He said the profession was terribly
overcrowded, 'that is,' he corrected himself with a tired smile, 'if you
can call it a profession any longer. It is more of a business nowadays
and the only ones who get ahead are those who have big corporations for
clients. How they all live is a mystery to me!' He thought I had better
not undertake it and advised me to go into some business. But then most
of them did that.
"But I must tell you of my visit to Judge Johnson. You will remember my
telling you of him; he was Wade Powell's chum in the law school in
Cincinnati, and Mr. Powell had given me a letter to him. I had a hard
time seeing him; the hardest of all. When I went into the big stone
government building he was holding court, and a lawyer was making an
argument before him. I waited till they were all done, and then when the
crier had adjourned court--he said 'Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,' instead of the
'Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye' we have in Ohio; it sounded so old and
quaint, even if he did say 'Oh yes,' for 'Oyez!' It comes from the old
Norman-French, you know; ask your father about it, he'll explain it--I
tried to get in to him. I succeeded at last, but it was hard work. He
didn't seem glad to see me; he looked at me coldly, and made me feel as
if I ought to hurry up and state my business promptly and get away. When
I gave him Wade Powell's letter he put on his gold glasses and read it;
but--what do you think?--I don't believe he remembered Wade Powell at
all! At least he seemed not to. Of course he may have been putting it
on. Wouldn't it make Wade Powell mad to know that? I'd give a
dollar--and I haven't any to spare either--to see him when he hears that
his old friend, Judge Johnson of the United States Circuit Court,
couldn't remember him! Well, the judge didn't let me detain him long, he
looked at his watch a moment, and then he advised me not to try it in
Chicago; he said there were too many lawyers here anyhow, and that he
thought a young man made a mistake in coming to a city at all.
"'Why don't you stay in a small town?' he asked, looking at me sternly
over his glasses. 'Living is cheaper there, and life is much more simple
than it is in the cities. I've often wished I had stayed in a little
town.'
"I came away, as you can imagine, feeling pretty much cast down and
humbled in spirit. There are four thousand lawyers in Chicago; just
think of it, almost as many lawyers as there are people in Macochee! As
I walked through the crowded streets with men and women rushing along, I
wondered how they all lived. What do they do? Where are they all going,
and how do they get a place to stand on? As I came across the bridge
over to the North Side I felt that there was no place for me here in
this great, dirty, ugly city, just as there is no place for me back in
peaceful Macochee, where every minute of the day I long to be. Anyway, I
am sure that there is no place for me here in the law, and I shall have
to look for something else. I see so much wretchedness and poverty and
squalor; it is in the street everywhere--pale, gaunt men, who look at
you out of sick, appealing eyes.
"This morning I saw a sight down-town that filled me with horror; it was
noon, and a great crowd of ragged men were waiting in front of the
_Daily News_ office in Fifth Avenue. They were all standing idly and yet
expectantly about; I stood and watched them. Presently, as at some
signal, they all rushed for the office door, and then all at once they
seemed to be enveloped in a white, rustling cloud. Each one had a
newspaper, and they all turned to one page and began to read rapidly;
sometimes two or three men bent over the same paper; in another moment
they had scattered, going in all directions. Then it flashed upon me:
they had been waiting for the noon edition of the paper and the page
they had all turned to was the page with the 'want ads' on it; they were
all looking for jobs! It made me inexpressibly sad. I do not wish to
inflict my own sorrow upon you, dear heart, but it made me shudder; what
if I--but no, the thought is too horrible to mention. And yet I, too,
belong to this great army of the unemployed.
"As I write the clock in the steeple of a church a block away chimes the
hour of midnight; so you see that I've retained my nocturnal habits.
When the poets of a coming generation sing of me (as they doubtless
will, after my death) their songs will be called Nocturnes."
That same day Doctor Marley received a letter from his son which Mrs.
Marley, though her husband passed it over to her to read, did not show
to Lavinia. It ran:
"It's rather expensive living here, I find; especially for one who
belongs to the great army of the unemployed. My contract with my
basiliscine landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at night--also
for three-fifty per week in payment of said two meals and bed. My
lunches I get down-town; that is, I did get them down-town; for two days
I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid landlady looks
reproachfully at me at night when she sees me laying in an extra supply
of dinner. I don't mind the lack of the lunches, even if she does, but
I'll have to pay her in a day or so now. I'm in poor spirits to-night,
so can't write well; cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty
cents in the world between me, my landlady and ultimate starvation. It's
funny how much hungrier a fellow gets as the food supply gets low. A
word to the wise, etc.
"What do you think? I met Charlie Davis on the street this morning. He
is living here now, working in some big department store. My, it was
good to see some one from Macochee! How small the world is, after all!
"How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith Johnson still clap his hands
at his dog every evening as he comes home, and does the dog run out to
meet him as joyously as of yore? And does Hank Delphy still go down-town
in his shirt-sleeves? And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the Square
lately? And, father, has mother got a girl yet? Give her an ocean of
love and tell her not to work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for
themselves a while. They haven't any trusts to monopolize the jobs as
yet, and they ought to be able to get along. Oh, how I'd like to see you
all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous ones to you. I don't
remember now what all of them were, but I know they were all momentous
and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual and physical, not to
say financial. And see that the moss doesn't get too thickly overlaid on
my memory."
Marley's new life in Chicago, as somewhat vaguely reflected in his
letters, impressed those who had a sense of having been left behind in
Macochee, as but a continuation of the life he had led there, that is,
it was presented to them as one long, hopeless search for employment. He
told of his daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful
applications for work in every place where the boon of work might be
bestowed, and of the unvarying refusals of those in whose hands had been
intrusted, by some inscrutable decree of the providence of economics,
the right to control the opportunity of labor. It was as if the primal
curse of earning his bread were in a fair way to be taken from man, had
not the primal necessity of eating his bread continued unabated.
The routine through which he went each day had begun to weary Marley,
and it might have begun to weary his readers in Macochee, had they not
all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up with his. He apologized in
his nightly letters for the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it
might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal of his life that he
could give. He tried at times to give his letters a lighter tone by
describing, with a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents
that attracted him in a city whose life was all so new and strange to
him; he could not help a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia
was probably unconscious of the change, his letters were now less
concerned with the things of the life he had left in Macochee, and more
and more with the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago; as
on a palimpsest, the old impressions were erased to make way for new
ones.
But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer that was far from
expressing his own spirit, he could not save them from the despair that
was laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated itself in
the declaration that it was now no longer with him a question of
selecting employment.
"I must take," he wrote, "whatever I can get, and that will probably be
some kind of manual, if not menial, work. Sometimes," so he let himself
go on, "I feel as if I would give up and go back to Macochee, defeated
and done for. But I can not come to that yet, though I would like to;
oh, how I would like to! But I don't dare, my pride won't let me act the
part of a coward, though I know I am one at heart. One thing keeps me up
and that is the thought of you; I see your face ever before me, and your
sweet eyes ever smiling at me--"
Lavinia's eyes were not smiling as she read this; and she poured out her
own grief and sympathy in a long letter that she promptly tore up, to
pen in its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten him in the
struggle which, as she proudly assured him, he was making for her.
Marley's description of his straits partly prepared Lavinia for the
shock of the letter in which he said he had found a job at last, but she
was hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far from her
conception of what was due him as a job trucking freight for a railroad.
The mockery he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper and
overalls could not console her, and she kept the truth from every one,
except her mother; she preferred rather that they number Marley still
with the army of the unemployed than to count him among those who toiled
so desperately with the muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to
conceal in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of which she felt she
should be ashamed, and she tried to show her appreciation of his droll
sarcasms about the preparation his four years of college had given him
for the task of trundling barrels of sugar and heaving pianos down from
box-cars.
"I'm sure it's honest work," she wrote, "but do be careful, dear, not to
hurt yourself in lifting such heavy loads." It was a comfort to remind
him that he was not intended to do such work.
There was a relief, however, that she did not dare admit, when he told
her three days later that he had lost his job.
"I realize for the first time my importance in the great scheme of
things," he wrote. "I was fired because I do not belong to the freight
handlers' union. It took them three days to find this out, and then they
threatened to strike if the railroad company did not immediately
discharge me. The railroad company, after due consideration, decided to
let me out, and--I'm out. It makes me tremble to think of the
consequences that would have followed had they decided otherwise. Think
of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill and the commerce
of the nation paralyzed, and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is
really encouraging to know that my presence on the earth is actually
known to my fellow-mortals; it has at least been discovered that I am
alive and in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by Freight
Handlers' Union No. 63. And now," he concluded, "as Kipling says, it's
'back to the army again, Sergeant, back to the army again'--the army of
the unemployed."
Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later when on opening her letter
she met the announcement that he had been offered a job with another
railroad as a freight handler.
"But you need not be alarmed," she was reassured to read--though it was
not until she thought it all over afterward that she began to wonder how
he had divined her dislike of his being in such work--"I haughtily
declined, and turned them down. You see this road is just now in the
throes of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out.
Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do the work of the
strikers. They take anybody--that's why they were ready to take me. But
as I said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to take a place
away from a union man."
Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley's declination of the position
for a satisfaction in the nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation
she related the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley had declined
such an employment she felt safe in doing this. But her father did not
see it in her light, or at least in Marley's light.
"Humph!" he sneered; "so he sympathizes with unionism, does he? Well,
those unions will own the whole earth if they keep on."
"But he says he thought of the wives and children of the union men--"
"Well, but why doesn't he think of the wives and children of the scabs,
as he calls them? They have as much right to live and work as the union
men."
Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself, could not answer this
argument, though she felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before she
could proceed in his defense, her father, strangely enraged at the mere
mention of the policies of the unions, hurried on:
"The union didn't show any consideration for him when it took his other
job away from him."
Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother, who did not see it
because she was shooting a glance more than reproachful at her husband,
and it had the effect of silencing and humbling the judge, as all of
Lavinia's arguments, or all of the arguments known to the propaganda of
union labor, could not have done.