CHAPTER I

THE WORKERS

[Illustration: THE SENSE OF INFINITY IS HEIGHTENED BY THE FLOATING MIST.]

THE WORKERS

AN

EXPERIMENT IN REALITY

BY

WALTER A. WYCKOFF

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

_THE WEST_

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1909

COPYRIGHT, 1898 BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I

THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED 1

CHAPTER II

LIVING BY ODD JOBS 40

CHAPTER III

FINDING STEADY WORK 86

CHAPTER IV

A HAND-TRUCKMAN IN A FACTORY 147

CHAPTER V

AMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES 190

CHAPTER VI

A ROAD BUILDER ON THE WORLD’S FAIR GROUNDS 247

CHAPTER VII

FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER 288

CHAPTER VIII

FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC 338

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE SENSE OF INFINITY IS HEIGHTENED BY THE FLOATING MIST Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

“THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING,

“AND IT’S WARM THERE. WON’T YOU GO?” 16

IN THE CORNER NEAR US ARE THREE MEN, SLOUCHING, LISTLESS, WEARY

SPECIMENS OF THEIR KIND, WHO ARE PLAYING “COMRADES” 24

SHE IS FACING US NEAR AT HAND, HER HEAD FRAMED IN THE DARK

UMBRELLA WHICH RESTS UPON HER SHOULDER 30

OVERFLOWING THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF THE FARTHEST PASSAGE UPON THE

FLOOR OF THE MAIN CORRIDOR ARE THE SPRAWLING FIGURES OF MEN ASLEEP 36

THE POLICE-STATION BREAKFAST 42

“OUT YOU GO, NOW” 50

“WE’LL FEED, PARTNER, WE’LL FEED” 54

ALL OF THEM WERE SHOUTING OATHS AND VIOLENT ABUSE 60

SHE DREW BACK AND LOOKED AT ME PERPLEXED 66

HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING THEIR

NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR MOTIVES

IN COMING TO CHICAGO 88

I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US 94

IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE

RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET 106

“DON’T YOU TOUCH IT,” SHE SAID, FIERCELY 114

“WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF

SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET.

“RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT” 118

WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES 130

I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR BLOOD 136

LOADING THE BOX-CARS UNDER CRIST’S GUIDANCE 150

IN THE FACTORY 154

CROWDS OF MEN STREAMING FROM EVERY DOOR AND PRESSING SWIFTLY

THROUGH THE GATE 160

THE NOON HOUR 164

MRS. SCHULZ’S BOARDING-HOUSE 168

NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING 196

HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY 214

THE SOCIALIST MEETING 222

THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST

THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY 232

AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION 236

RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS 240

“DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE;

IT’S _BREAD_ WE’RE AFTER, _BREAD_!” 246

IT WAS A WELL-FED CROWD WHICH SAT SMOKING FOR A QUARTER OF AN

HOUR OR MORE ON THE ROUGH EMBANKMENTS, OVERLOOKING THE

AGRICULTURAL BUILDING BEFORE GOING BACK TO WORK 256

THE FOURTH OF JULY--“TWO TOWNSHIPS WERE TO PLAY EACH OTHER” 318

PRICE COULD SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE,

AND NOW AND THEN ONE JOINED US IN CAMP 370

THE WORKERS

CHAPTER I

THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED

ROOMS OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL.

Saturday Evening, December 5, 1891.

A new phase of my experiment is begun. Hitherto I have been in the open

country, and have found work with surprising readiness. Now I am in the

heart of a congested labor market, and I am learning, by experience,

what it is to look for work and fail to find it; to renew the search

under the spur of hunger and cold, and of the animal instinct of

self-preservation until any employment, no matter how low in the scale

of work, that would yield food and shelter, appears to you the very

Kingdom of Heaven; and if it could suffer violence, it would seem as

though the strength of your desire must take that kingdom by force.

But it remains impregnable to your attack, and, baffled and weakened,

you are thrust back upon yourself and held down remorselessly to the

cold, naked fact that you, who in all the universe are of supremest

importance to yourself, are yet of no importance to the universe. You

are a superfluous human being. For you there is no part in the play of

the world’s activity. There remains for you simply this alternative:

Have you the physical and moral qualities which fit you to survive, and

which will place you at last within the working of the large scheme of

things, or, lacking these qualities, does there await you inevitable

wreck under the onward rush of the world’s great moving life?

That, at all events, is pretty much as it appears to-night to Tom Clark

and me. Clark is my “partner,” and we are not in good luck nor in high

spirits. We each had a ten-cent breakfast this morning, but neither has

tasted food since, and to-night, after an exhausting search for work,

we must sleep in the station-house.

We are doing our best to pass the time in warmth and comfort until

midnight. We know better than to go to the station-house earlier than

that hour. Clark is in the corner at my side pretending to read a

newspaper, but really trying to disguise the fact that he is asleep.

An official who walks periodically through the reading-room, recalling

nodding figures to their senses, has twice caught Clark asleep, and has

threatened to put him out.

I shall be on the alert, and shall warn Clark of his next approach, for

after this place is closed we shall have long enough to wait in the

naked street before we can be sure of places in the larger corridor of

the station, where the crowding is less close and the air a degree less

foul than in the inner passage, where men are tightly packed over every

square foot of the paved floor.

We are tired and very hungry, and not a little discouraged; we should

be almost desperate but for one redeeming fact. The silver lining of

our cloud has appeared to-night in the form of falling snow. From the

murky clouds which all day have hung threateningly over the city,

a quiet, steady snow-fall has begun, and we shall be singularly

unfortunate in the morning if we can find no pavements to clean.

In the growing threat of snow we have encouraged each other with the

brightening prospect of a little work, and for quite half an hour

after nightfall we stood alternately before the windows of two cheap

restaurants in Madison Street, studying the square placards in the

windows on which the bills of fare are printed, and telling each other,

with nice discriminations between bulk and strengthening power of

food, what we shall choose to-morrow.

It is a little strange, when I think of it, the closeness of the

intimacy between Clark and me. We never saw each other until last

Wednesday evening, and we know little of each other’s past. But I

feel as though the ties that bound me to him had their roots far back

in our histories. Perhaps men come to know one another quickest and

best on a plane of life, where in the fellowship of destitution they

struggle for the primal needs and feel the keen sympathies which attest

the basal kinship of our common humanity. Ours are not intellectual

affinities--at least they are not consciously these--but we feel

shrewdly the community of hunger and cold and isolation, and we have

drawn strangely near to each other in this baffling struggle for a

social footing, and have tempered in our comradeship the biting cold

of the loneliness that haunts us on the outskirts of a crowded working

world.

* * * * *

Early on last Wednesday morning, in the gray light of a cloudy day, I

began the last stage of the march to Chicago. A walk of something less

than thirty miles would take me to the heart of the city.

There is an unfailing inspiration in these early renewals of the

journey. Solid food and a night of unfathomable sleep have restored the

waste of tissue. I set out in the morning with a sense of boundless

freedom, with an opening day and the whole wide world before me, with

my heart leaping in the joy of living and in high expectancy of what

the day may hold of experience and of insight into the lives of my

fellow-men.

On this particular morning there is added fulness and freshness in that

inbreathing which gives the zest of life. Long had Chicago loomed large

to my imagination, and now it stood before me, its volumes of black

smoke mingling with the leaden sky in the northern horizon.

How much it had come to mean to me, this huge metropolis of the

shifting centre of our population! The unemployed were there, and I had

not seen them yet; hundreds lived there who are fiercely at war with

the existing state of things, and their speech was an unknown tongue to

me, and my conventional imagination could not compass the meaning of

their imaginings; and then the poor were there, the really destitute,

who always feel first and last of all the pressure upon the limits of

subsistence, and who in the grim clutch of starvation underbid one

another for the work of the sweaters, until the brain reels at the

knowledge of the incredible toil by which body and soul are kept

together. All this awaited me, the very core of the social problem

whose conditions I had set out to learn in the terms of concrete

experience.

Nor was I insensible to the charm of other novelties. I have been

pressing westward through a land unknown to me. Gradually I am

beginning to see the essential provinciality of a mind which knows the

Eastern seaboard, and has some measure of acquaintance with countries

and cities and with men from Ireland to Italy, but which is densely

ignorant of our own vast domain, and shrinks from all that lies beyond

Philadelphia as belonging to “the West,” which sums up the totality

of a frontier, where man and nature share a sympathetic wildness, and

sometimes vie in outbursts of lawless force. I have not yet reached

“the West” in any essential departure from the social and industrial

structure of the East. And from the new point of view, “the West”

recedes ever farther from my sight, until impatient desire sometimes

spurs me to a quicker journey, in the fear that the real West may have

faded from our map before I reach it, and I may miss the delight of

vital contact with the untamed frontier.

Moreover, I could but feel a student’s kindling interest in the larger

vision of this great centre of industrial life.--Its renaissance with

augmented vigor from the ashes of its earlier history.--The swelling

tide of its swarming people until the fifteen hundred thousand mark

is reached and passed, and the mounting waves of population roll in,

each with the strength of an army of fighting men.--The vastness of

its productive enterprises, where all the shrewd economies of modern

commerce reveal themselves, and where skill and organizing power and

the genius of initiative win their quick recognition and rewards, and

men of parts pass swiftly from the lowest to the highest places in the

scale of productive usefulness and power.--And then the splendid vigor

of its nobler living, its churches and public schools and libraries and

wise philanthropies, and its impatient hunger after art, which impels

it to lay eager, unrelenting hands upon the products of a score of

centuries, and, in a single day, to call them “mine.”

But I was fast nearing the goal of my desire, and the claims of

pressing needs were crowding out the visions of the morning. I had

passed through the wilderness by which the Pittsburg & Fort Wayne

Railroad enters the outskirts of Chicago. As far as the eye could reach

had stretched a dreary plain broken by the ridges of sand-dunes, among

which stood dwarfed oaks, and gnarled and stunted pines, and the

slender, graceful stems of white-barked birches, on whose twigs the

last brown leaves of autumn rustled in the winter wind. Upon my right I

saw at last the broad bosom of the lake, gleaming like burnished steel

under the threatening sky, and breaking into a line of inky blackness

where it lapped the pebbles on the beach.

Presently I learn that I am in South Chicago, and I note the converging

lines of railways that cross the streets on the level at every possible

angle, and the surface cable-cars, and the long line of blast-furnaces

by the lake, and elevators here and there, and huge factories, and the

myriad homes of workingmen. It is all a blackened chaos to my eyes,

rude and crude and raw, and I wonder that orderly commerce can flow

through channels so confused.

But the streets are soon more regular, and for some time I have

been checking off, by their decreasing numerals, the approach to my

journey’s end. I am in the midst of a seemingly endless suburban

region. There are wide stretches of open prairie, cut through by city

streets; there are city buildings of brick and stone standing alone,

or in groups of twos and threes, stark and appealing in their lonely

waiting for flanking neighbors; and there are comfortable wooden

cottages set with an air of rural seclusion among trees, and having

lawns and garden areas about them; and then there are whole squares

built up like the _nuclei_ of new communities with conventional

three-storied dwellings, and the varied shops of local retail trade,

and abundant saloons.

Early in the afternoon I stop to rest on the platform of the Woodlawn

station of the Illinois Central Railway. For some time I have had

glimpses within a highly boarded enclosure of towering iron frames,

with their graceful, sweeping arches meeting at dizzy heights, and

appearing like the fragmentary skeletons of mammoths mounted in an open

paleontological museum.

The suburban trains are rushing in and out of the station with nearly

the frequency of elevated trains in New York, and not far away are

lines of cable-cars, where a five-cent fare would take me, in a few

minutes, over the weary miles which intervene to the business portion

of the town. But I have not one cent, and much less five, and if I had

so much as that it would go for food, for I am tired, it is true, but I

am much hungrier than tired.

There is a hopeful prospect in the air of immense activity in this

neighborhood. I have easily recognized the vast enclosure beyond as

Jackson Park, and the steel skeletons as the frames of the exposition

buildings. Thousands of men are at work there, and the growing volume

of the enterprise may furnish a ready chance of employment. I am but a

few steps from the Sixty-third Street entrance, and, in my ignorance, I

am soon pressing through, when a gate-keeper challenges me, civilly:

“Let me see your ticket.”

“I have no ticket,” I reply.

He is roused in an instant, and he steps threateningly toward me, his

voice deepening in anger.

“Get out of this, then, you d---- hobo, or I’ll put you out!”

At the gate I stand my ground in the right of a citizen and explain

that I am looking for work, and am hopeful of a job from one of the

bosses.

“This ain’t no time to see a boss,” is his retort; “they’re all busy.

If we let you fellows in here we’d be lousy with hoboes in an hour.

Come at seven in the morning, if you like, and take your chances with

the others. Only my private tip to you is that you ain’t got no chance,

not yet.”

Not far away there are many new buildings going up, huge, unlovely

shells of brick that even at this stage tell plainly their struggles

with the purely utilitarian problem of a maximum of room accommodation

at a minimum of cost. I walk toward the nearest one, pondering,

the while, the meaning of the word _hobo_, new to me, and having an

uncomfortable feeling that, for the first time, I have been taken, not

for an unemployed laborer in honest search of work, but for one of the

professionally idle.

It has begun to rain, a dreary, sopping drizzle, half mist, half

melting snow, heavy with the soot of the upper air, and it clings

tenaciously, until my threadbare outer coat is twice its normal weight,

and my leaking boots pump the slimy pavement water at every step.

For two hours or more I go from one contractor to another, among the

new buildings, asking work. The interviews are short and decisive.

The typical boss is he who is moving anxious-eyed among his men with

attention fixed upon some detail. He hears without heeding my request,

and he shouts an order before he turns to me with an imperative “No, I

don’t want you!” and sometimes an added curse.

“I guess you are the fiftieth man that has asked me for a job to-day,”

said one boss, more communicative than the others. “I’m sorry for

you poor devils,” he added, with a searching look into my face, “but

there’s too many of you.”

My walk has carried me now through the coming Midway Plaisance and

past the grounds of the new Chicago University to the outskirts of

a park. I enter there with a feeling of relief, for I am soon out of

the atmosphere of infinite employment where there is no work for me.

Here there are open lawns, with snow crystals clinging to the tender

turf, and trees of bewildering variety whose boughs are outstretched

in graceful benediction over winding walks and drives and the curving,

mossy banks of lakes.

When I emerge from this touch of nature and high art it is upon a

stately boulevard of double drives and quadruple rows of sturdy elms

which line the bridle-paths and wide pavements. Mile after mile I walk,

tired and hungry and wet, and quite lost in wonder. Is there in the

wide world a city street to match with this? Rising in a paradise of

landscape gardening it stretches its majestic length like the broad

sweep of another _Champs Elysees_, flanked by palaces of uncounted cost

and unimagined horror of architecture, opening here to a stretch of

wide prairie, and closing there to the front of a “block” of houses of

uncompromising Philistinism and decorations of “unchastened splendor,”

and reaching, at times, its native dignity in a setting of buildings

which tell the final truth of the elegance of simplicity.

It has grown dark when I enter Michigan Avenue, and again my way

stretches far before me, this time under converging lines of lights

that seem to meet at an almost infinite distance. The sense of infinity

is heightened by the floating mist, in which the nearer lights play

with an effect of orange halo about them, and the farther lamps shine

in an ever vaguer distance behind their clinging veils of fog.

Scarcely a soul is in the street. It is a residence quarter of much

wealth, and like all else that I have seen so far, of strangest

incongruities. Houses of lavish cost and shabbiest economy of taste, so

gorgeous that you can scarcely believe them private homes, give way, at

times, to lines of brown fronts precisely like those which in unvarying

uniformity of basement and “stoop” and four-storied façade, flank miles

of dreary side-streets in New York. These yield in turn to churches

and apartment-houses and hotels and clubs--all creating an atmosphere

of wealth and of social refinement, while almost interspersed with

them are homes of apparent poverty and certainly of gentility on the

ravelled edge of things. And bursting now through all this medley

is the clanging, rumbling rush of railway traffic. I can scarcely

believe my eyes at first, but under the frowning walls of a towering

armory I am held up by the downward sweep of the gates of a railway

crossing, on the dead level of the avenue, and am kept there until a

freight-train has crawled past its creaking length.

It all seems a meaningless chaos at the first, but soon I feel the

pulse of the life within it, a young life of glorious vigor and of

indomitable resolve to attain what it so strongly feels though vaguely

knows. And here and there I can see the promise of its fair fruition

in lines of strength and power and beauty, where the hand of some true

master has wrought a home for the abiding of good taste.

Soon there is an abrupt end of buildings on my right, and the land

fades away into an open plain, and from out the sleet-swept darkness

beyond comes faintly the sound of “crisping ripples on the beach.” I

know that I am at my journey’s end, for I have begun to catch glimpses

of Ossa-piled-on-Pelion structures which rise in graceless lines

into the black night. I come up all standing before one of these, a

veritable Palazzo Vecchio, huge, impenetrable, vast, bringing into this

New-World city something of the sense of time and density of the Piazza

della Signoria.

Here, too, the avenue is almost deserted, and I turn sharply under

the massive battlements of this Florentine palace, to where the glare

of many lights and the counter-currents of street-crowds attract me.

Across Wabash Avenue I pass on to State Street. My eye has just begun

to note the novelties of the scene when it falls upon the figure of a

young man. He stands in the middle of the pavement at the corner, and

swiftly hands printed slips of white paper among the moving crowd.

Many persons pass unheeding, but a few accept the proffered notice. I

take one, and I stop for a moment on the curb to read it. Its purport

as an invitation to attend a Gospel meeting has become clear to me,

when I find the young man at my side. He wears a heavy winter ulster

that reaches to his boot-tops, and its rolling collar is turned up

snugly about his ears. On his hands are dog-skin gloves, and the rays

of street-lights glisten in the myriad drops of half-frozen mist that

cling like heavy dew to the rough, woollen surface of his coat. I

must cut a figure standing there, wet and travel-stained, my teeth

chattering audibly in the cold night-air, and it is plainly my evident

fitness as a field for Christian work that has drawn to me the notice

of this young evangelist.

“That meeting is not far,” he is saying, “and it’s warm there. Won’t

you go?”

[Illustration: “THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING,

“AND IT’S WARM THERE. WON’T YOU GO?”]

“Thank you, I will,” is my ready reply, and then he politely points

the way down a side street on the left where, he says, a large

transparency over the door marks the entrance to the meeting-hall.

The place is crowded with men--workingmen many of them--and many are

plainly of that blear-eyed, bedraggled, cowering type which one soon

learns to distinguish from the workers. Men pass freely in and out with

no disturbance to the meeting, and watching my chance I soon slip into

a vacant seat near the great stove that burns red-hot half way up the

room. Ah, the luxury of the warmth and the undisputed right to sit in

restful comfort! Again and again, in the afternoon I had sat down on

the steps of some public building, but from every passing eye had come

a shot of questioning suspicion, and once a patrolling officer ordered

me to move on with a sharp reminder that “the step of a church was no

loafing-place.”

Deeper and deeper I sink into my seat. A warm, seductive ease enfolds

me. I dare not fall asleep for fear of being turned into the street.

And yet the very hint of going out again into the shelterless night

comes over me in the dim sense of fading consciousness as a thought so

grotesquely impossible that I nearly laugh aloud. Out from this warmth

and light and cover into the pitiless inhospitality of the open town?

Oh, no, that is beyond conceiving! And all the while I know--such is

the subtlety of our instinctive thinking--that it is the awful fear of

this that conquers now the overmastering sleep which woos me.

The men are singing lustily under inspiring leadership and to the

accompaniment of a cornet and harmonium. Short prayers are offered, and

fervent exhortations, interspersed with hymns, are made, and finally

the men are urged to “testify.”

I follow in vague anxiety the change of exercise, but, no clear idea

reaches me; for in full possession of my mind is the haunting fear

of a benediction which will send us out again. But while the men are

speaking in quick succession there begins to pierce to the benumbed

seat of thought a sense of something very living. Their speech, in

simplest, homeliest phrase, is of things most intimate and real. They

speak of life--their own--sunk to deepest degradation. They tell the

story of growing drunkenness and vice, of hope fast fading out of life,

of faith and honor and self-respect all gone, and at last the outer

dark wherein men live to feed their passions and blaspheme until they

dare to die, or death anticipates the courage of despair. And then the

purport of it all shines clear in what they have to tell of a Divine

hand reached out to them, of trembling hope and love reborn, of desire

after righteousness breathing anew in a prayer for help.

Now I am all vividly alive and keen, for standing straight not far from

where I sit, is a grand figure of a man. He is bronzed, deep-chested,

lithe, and in the setting of his shoulders there is splendid strength,

which shows again in the broad, clean-cut hands that quiver in their

grip upon the seat in front. He has the modest bearing of a gentleman,

and his unfaltering voice vibrates with a compelling sense of deep

sincerity.

“I haven’t any story different from what you’ve heard to-night, but

I, too, want to tell what God has done for me. When I got my growth I

went West, and turned cow-puncher. I was young, and I liked the life

and the men, and I went over pretty much all the western country, and

there ain’t any kind of devilment that cowboys get into that I didn’t

have a hand in. I never thought of God nor of my soul. I never cared.

I despised religion. I thought that I was strong and master of myself.

I drank and swore and gambled, and did worse, and it never troubled

me a bit. But a time came when I found that I wasn’t master. There

was something in me stronger than me, and that was the love of drink.

And, friends, that was the beginning of the end. I began to lose my

self-respect, and the end of it was that there ain’t a poor devil in

this town that is sunk any lower than what I was. You know what that

means. One night, a year and a half ago, I was walking through Harrison

Street. I was half-drunk on barrel-house whiskey, and all I was

thinking of was how I could get up pluck enough to kill myself. But I

stopped in a crowd around some Salvation Army people. A man older than

me was telling how he was helped by the power of God out of a life like

mine and made a man of again. I liked the way he had, for he seemed

straight. I waited for him, and he told me, all to myself, the story

of Christ’s power to save lost men, and how He lived and died to save

us. It seemed too good to be true. I’d known it in a way, but I never

knew it was meant for me. And right away when I began to see that there

was hope for me yet, that I could get back my self-respect, and be

master of myself, not in my own strength, which had failed me, but in

His strength, why, friends, my heart went right out to the Saviour in

a prayer for help. And what I want to say most of all is this, that in

all the hard fight that I’ve had since, in all the ups and downs of it,

He hasn’t failed me once. He’s made my life new to me, and I love Him

from my heart, and I know that in His strength I will gain the victory

at last. Friends, what the Bible tells us about His ‘saving us from our

sins’ is true.”

He sits down, and a hymn is given out and sung, but the truth which

has found lodgement in our hearts is the living truth of a human life

reclaimed. We have listened to the story of the prodigal from his own

lips. We have heard again the cosmic parable of wandering and return;

the mystery of creation, and fall, and re-creation by a power divine;

the great, irrefutable witness to the Truth in the history of a lost

soul come to itself and returning to the Father’s house.

In the midst of the singing the leader walks quietly down the aisle to

the rear. Two ladies are there struggling in a vain effort to quiet an

old man. They have come to help in the conduct of the service, and the

old man has increasingly claimed their care, for he is drunk and is

growing violent. I have noticed him in his restless movements. Upon his

stooping figure he wears an old army coat and cape that are dripping

with the rain. His gray mustache and beard are long and matted, and

stained all round his mouth with the deep brown of tobacco-juice. His

unkempt hair falls in frowsy masses about his ears, and his lustreless

eyes, inflamed and expressionless, bulge from their swollen sockets.

In an instant the leader’s strong hand is upon him, and with no

commotion above the sound of song the old man is soon without the hall,

and the leader back in his place again singing as heartily as ever.

When the meeting ends the crowd moves slowly and listlessly toward

the door, as though its prevailing mood were aimless beyond the dull

necessity of passing the time. The fine rain and melting snow are still

falling through the mist. The men drift away singly or in groups of

twos and threes, under the flickering lights, their heads bent slightly

forward and their bare hands thrust into the side-pockets of their

trousers.

In the crush about the foot of the aisle a young man speaks to me:

“You are pretty wet, aren’t you?” he says, quietly, as the jam presses

him against me.

I see at a glance that he is far more respectable than I, and my first

mental attitude is one of hospitality to further evangelizing effort.

But I shift at once, for without waiting for a reply from me, he adds:

“It’s d---- tough to go out into that,” as he turns up the collar of

his light covert coat in the blast of piercing dampness which strikes

our faces through the open door.

“It is tough,” I agree, as I study his face. He is about thirty, I

should say, and almost six feet high, but of rather slender figure.

He is smooth-shaven, and an effect of pallor is heightened by yellow

hair and pale blue eyes, with dark arcs beneath them and a bluish tinge

about his mouth. Plainly he has been little exposed to the outer air,

but he is an habitual workman, as his hands attest unmistakably when he

lifts them to adjust his coat-collar.

“Ain’t you got no place to go to?” he asks.

“No.”

“No more have I,” he adds, laconically. And then, after a pause:

“When did you strike this town?”

“This evening.”

“Looking for a job?”

“Yes.”

“Same as me. What kind of a job?”

“Any kind that I can get.”

“Ain’t you got a trade?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t believe you are any worse off for that here. I struck

the place yesterday and I ain’t never seen so many idle men and hoboes

in my life before. When the iron-works in Cleveland closed down,

that laid me off. I couldn’t get no job there, and so I beat my way

here. I had fifty cents in my clothes and that got me something to eat

yesterday and a bed last night, but I spent my last cent for grub this

noon. I’ve been to most every foundry in Chicago, I guess, but I ain’t

found any sign of a job yet. Where are you going to put in the night?”

“I don’t know, for I haven’t any money either.”

“I am going to the Harrison Street station and I’ll show you the way,

partner, if you like. My name is Clark, Thomas L. Clark,” he adds, with

a particularity which is another proof of his belonging to a higher

order of workingmen than I.

I tell him my name, but he evidently considers it not a serviceable

one, for he ignores it from the first, and consistently makes use of

“partner.”

We walk together in the direction of State Street, and Clark explains

to me that we must not go to the station until after midnight, a fact

which he had learned, and the reasons for it, from an acquaintance in a

cheap lodging-house where he had spent the night before.

At the corner I hold Clark for a moment until my eyes have caught the

character of the street. It is wide, with broad pavements on each

side, and is lined with great business houses of retail trade, the

“department store” the prevailing type. The shop-windows are ablaze

with electric lights, and gorgeous as to displays which are taking

on a holiday character. Whole fronts of some of the buildings are

fairly covered with temporary signs, painted in gigantic letters on

canvas stretched on wooden frames, and vying fiercely in strident

announcements of “sweeping reductions” and “moving,” and “bankrupt,”

and “fire sales.”

There is little noise upon the street aside from the almost constant

swishing rush of cable-cars and the irritating clangor of their gongs.

The crowds had wholly disappeared. There are a few pedestrians, who

hold their umbrellas close above their heads, and step briskly in

evident haste to get in out of the stormy night, and we pass men of

our own type who are drifting aimlessly, and now and then a stalwart

officer, well-booted and snug under his waterproof, with his arms

folded and his club held tight in the pressure of an armpit.

We are walking south along the west side of State Street. There is a

swift social decline here, for every door we pass is that of a saloon,

and above us hang frequent transparencies which advertise lodgings

at ten and fifteen cents, while across the way are the flaring lights

of a cheap theatre.

“We can get warm in here,” says Clark, abruptly, and he turns into a

doorway which opens on the street.

I follow him down a narrow passage whose faint light enters through a

stained-glass partition, which hems it in along the inner side-wall of

the building. Through a door at the end of the passage we enter a large

room brilliantly lighted, and I follow Clark to an iron stove at one

side in which a coal fire burns furiously. In the corner near us are

three men, slouching, listless, weary specimens of their kind, who are

playing “Comrades” with a gusto curiously out of keeping with their

looks of bored fatigue. One has a harp, another a violin, and the third

drums ceaselessly upon a piano of harsh, metallic tone.

[Illustration: IN THE CORNER NEAR US ARE THREE MEN, SLOUCHING,

LISTLESS, WEARY SPECIMENS OF THEIR KIND, WHO ARE PLAYING “COMRADES.”]

There are a dozen round tables in the room, and at these are seated

small groups of men and women drinking beer. Some of the men are

workmen, but most are loafers, not of the tramp but of the rough civic

type.

The women are young, most of them very young, and there is little

trace of beauty and almost none of hard brutality in any face among

them. They are simply commonplace. As a company the women lack the

hale robustness of the men. They are mostly little women, of slight

figures, and some add to this a transparency of skin and a feverish

brightness of eye which clearly mark the sure burning of consumption.

A few are cast in sturdier mould, and, with faces flushed with drink,

they look strong and healthy. All seem warmly dressed in cheap, worn

garments suited to the season, and there are many touches of finery and

some even of taste in their shabby winter hats. Each carries a leather

purse in her hand, or allows it to lie on the table before her with her

gloves. The hands of nearly all of them are bare, and you see at once

that they are large and coarse and very dirty.

Suddenly you note that the social atmosphere is one of strangest,

completest camaraderie. The conversation is the blasphemous, obscenest

gossip of degraded men that keeps the deal level of the ordinary

unrelieved by anger or by mirth, and varying only with the indifferent

interchange of men’s and women’s voices.

The naturalness and untrammelled social ease have blinded you for

a time to what you really see, and then the black reality reveals

itself in human degradation below which there is no depth--as though

lost, sexless souls were already met upon a common plane of deepest

knowledge of all evil. And yet in very truth they are living fellow

men and women, in whom have centred the strength of natural love and

hope, and centres still the constraining love of a Heavenly Father.

Clark is whispering in my ear:

“I guess we’d better get out of this. That waiter has his eye on us. In

a minute he’ll ask us for our orders.”

We pass again through the garish lights that flood the pavements before

saloons from whose inner chambers come the tinkling, brassy notes of

cheap music.

“Are they all like that place we’ve been in?” I ask.

“These dives, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“They are all the same. There are hundreds like them in this town,” he

answers.

Near the centre of what appears to be the chief business section of the

street Clark turns into a dark entry.

“Come up here,” he says to me over his shoulder.

“What is this?” I call after him from the threshold.

“Here’s where I slept last night,” he replies.

I follow up a flight of filthy wooden steps. Under the light of a

single gas-jet which burns faintly over the first landing, we turn to

a door at the right. Within is a sustained volume of men’s voices at

conversation pitch, and we enter at once upon a company of thirty or

forty men seated on wooden benches around a base-burner, or standing

in groups within the compass of its grateful warmth. The unmoving

air is thick with tobacco-smoke, and dense with pollution beyond all

but the suggesting power of words. An electric arc gleams from the

centre-ceiling, and sputters and hisses above the noise of mingled

speech. In the ghastly light the floor and walls are covered with black

shadows, sharply articulated, and revealing clearly through their

restless movements the ragged, unkempt condition of the men.

In one corner is an office quite like a ticket-booth at an athletic

field, and behind the narrow window stands a man with an open book

before him. His eyes wander ceaselessly over the company, and presently

he steps out into the open room. He is making straight for Clark and

me; his grease-stained, worn, black suit hanging loose about his wasted

figure, a something not unlike a small decanter-stopper glistening

on the bosom of his soiled, collarless, white shirt, his singularly

repulsive face growing clearer as he comes, the receding forehead

and small, weak, close-set piercing eyes, the high cheek-bones and

bristling black mustache over a drooping mouth stained with tobacco. He

walks straight up to Clark.

“You was here last night?” he asks with rising inflection and a German

accent.

“Yes,” says Clark. “I come up to-night to see a fellow I know,” he adds

of his own initiative.

“Do you see him?” says the clerk.

“No.”

“Was you and your pal going to take beds?”

“No.”

And in the awkward situation thus created, Clark and I go out once more

from the luxury of warmth and shelter.

The pavements are now in possession of crowds returning from the

theatres, and at certain crossings is a rush for cable-cars going

south. We turn down Quincy Street. It is still almost an hour before

midnight. Simultaneously we notice a deep, wide entry of a business

house, so deep that its inner corners are quite dry, and one of them is

fairly shielded from the wind. With a mutual impulse we turn in, and

crouch close together on the paved floor in the shade of the sheltered

corner.

We sit in perfect silence for a time. Our teeth have begun again to

chatter, and it is difficult to speak. Besides, we have nothing to say

beyond the wish that we were fed and warmed and sheltered, and this

is such a deepening longing to us both that we have begun to keep a

reverent silence about it.

Not half a score of people pass us as we crouch there through a quarter

of an hour or more, and none of them sees us, which is fortunate;

for one of the number is a policeman, who walks down the other side,

swinging his club in easy rhythm to his sauntering steps.

But now once more we feel the tension of anxious waiting, for again we

hear the sound of footsteps fast approaching. A lifted umbrella first

appears, and under it a woman’s dark skirt, all wet about the hem,

and clinging to her ankles as she walks and vainly tries to hold it

free from the sloppy pavement. Her eyes are on the ground, and she is

humming softly to herself, and we think that she is safely past, when

both of us start suddenly to a little cry, an exclamation of surprise:

“Oh-h-h! what in h-- are you boys doing there?” And the question has

in it a note of light-hearted merriment, as though the words had come

upon a wave of rippling laughter.

She is facing us near at hand, her head framed in the dark umbrella

which rests upon her shoulder, and her face in the full side-light

of a neighboring window. Out of large dark eyes she is looking straight

at us, and I mark at once the clean-cut pencilling of her eyebrows

against a skin of natural pallor, and the backward sweep of black hair

from a low forehead and about her ears. She is no beauty, but her mouth

is one of almost faultless drawing, large and sensitive and firm, with

a dimple at each corner, and her chin of perfect moulding fades into

the graceful lines of a well-rounded throat.

[Illustration: SHE IS FACING US NEAR AT HAND, HER HEAD FRAMED IN THE

DARK UMBRELLA WHICH RESTS UPON HER SHOULDER.]

I am struck dumb for the moment, but Clark is disturbed in no wise by

the situation, and is answering her in perfect calmness that we have

taken shelter there, and “won’t you go on,” he asks, “for you may

attract to us the notice of a cop.”

“He’s not coming this way yet awhile,” she retorted; “I met him just

now at the corner.”

They fall into easy, natural dialogue, and the girl soon learns that we

are newly come to Chicago seeking work, and hungry and shelterless we

are waiting for the right hour in which to go to the station-house.

“And why did you ever come to this God-condemned town?” she asks.

“There’s thousands of boys like you here, and no jobs for none of you.”

There is quick resentment in Clark’s sharp rejoinder:

“And why in h-- did _you_ come?” But the girl’s good-nature is

unruffled; you simply feel an instinctive tightening of her grip upon

herself as her figure straightens slightly to the reply:

“I come to hustle, sonny, and I guess this is as good a place to hustle

in as any. I’m in ---- hard luck to-night, for I ain’t made a cent, and

I met that cop on ---- Street. He’s spotted me. I had to go down into

my stocking and give him my last dollar to fix him, or else he’d have

run me in, and I’ve been up three times this week. The judge told me

he’d send me to the Bridewell next time.” She is a girl of eighteen,

or, perhaps, of twenty years.

In another moment I see her lift her young, unfaltering eyes to a

passing stranger, and in them, unashamed, is the nameless questioning

which takes surest hold on hell.

And now she has turned again, and one soiled, gloveless hand is

outstretched to us.

“I’m going, boys,” she says. “Good-night. You are in harder luck than

me, for I ain’t hungry and I’ve got a place to sleep, so you take this.

It ain’t much, but it’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you. Good-night.”

Men who have felt it never speak lightly of fear, nor are they ashamed

to own to it--the fear that is fear, when unprepared you face a sudden

danger whose measure you cannot know; when the scalp tightens with a

creeping movement and the hair lifts itself on end, and each muscle

stiffens in the cold of swift paralysis, while your brain throbs with

the sudden rush of hot blood. But there is a feeling beyond that--“when

the nerves prick and tingle and the heart is sick,” and the soul in

ineffable agony of doubt and fear cries through a black and Godless

void for some answer to the mystery of life.

A silver coin is glistening in Clark’s open palm.

“There’s two beers in this, partner, and a free lunch for both of us,”

he is saying. “Let’s go to a saloon.”

Five minutes later he leaves me in high indignation, with a “Stay,

then, and be damned!” and I feel some uncertainty about his coming back.

Soon I fall into the dreamless torpor which comes to relieve the

too-heavy hearted. But from out its stupor I waken sharply to quickest

sensibility. Quivering darts of pain are shooting swiftly through my

body from a burning centre in my thigh. A night watchman stands over

me, holding a dark lantern to my face. He has roused me with a brutal

kick. In my heart black murder reigns alone for a moment, and then I

remember what I am, and I limp into the street speechless under the

watchman’s curses.

I had misjudged Clark. I have not waited long when I see him walking

toward me. He is warmed and fed, and has soon forgot his earlier wrath

in eagerness to “do” the night watchman. From this, however, it is not

difficult to dissuade him on the ground of the weakness of our legal

status as compared with his.

We walk now toward Harrison Street, and as we enter it, there shines

high from out the darkness an illumined face of a clock with its hands

pointing to a few minutes past the hour of twelve. A freight-train is

drawing slowly into the station-yard, creaking and jolting with the

varying tug of a locomotive that pants deeply to a steady pull, and

then puffs hard in sudden spurts which send its wheels “racing” on the

icy rails. The train stands still with a sound of communicated bumping

which loses itself far down the yard, and then there come swarming from

the cars a score or two of tramps who have beaten their way into the

city. They know their ground, for silent and stooping in the wet they

make straight, as with a common impulse, to the station-house on the

corner.

“We’ll leave them go in first,” says Clark, “it’s all the better for

us,” and then we walk up and down before the plain brick building, with

the lights streaming from its basement and first-floor windows.

By a short flight of steps we finally enter a small passage which

opens into a large, square room. A few police officers and reporters

are standing about in casual conversation. One officer, with unerring

judgment of our need, beckons us his way, and, without a word, he

points us down the steps into the basement. A locked door of iron

grating blocks the way at the foot of the steps, and we stand there for

some minutes while a newly arrived prisoner is being registered and

searched. Behind a high desk sits a typical, robust officer who asks

questions and notes the answers in his book, and beside him, near at

hand, a matronly woman is sewing with an air of domesticity and entire

oblivion to her unusual surroundings, while near the prisoner before

the desk, stand two policemen who have “run him in.”

All these are in a wide corridor which extends east and west through

the depth of the building. In its south wall are some half dozen doors

of iron grating, each opening into a small passage at right angles to

the main corridor, and the cells range along the sides of these.

The prisoner has soon been disposed of. The officer on duty then

unlocks the door behind which we stand, and admits us before the desk.

The registrar looks up, an expression of irritation in his face.

“More men to spend the night?” he asks.

“Well, turn in,” he adds, with a jerk of his head to the left. “I’ve

got no more room for names. I guess I’ve entered two hundred lodgers

and more already to-night.”

Clark and I need no further directions. Overflowing through the open

door of the farthest passage upon the floor of the main corridor are

the sprawling figures of men asleep. We walk in among them.

[Illustration: OVERFLOWING THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF THE FARTHEST

PASSAGE UPON THE FLOOR OF THE MAIN CORRIDOR ARE THE SPRAWLING FIGURES

OF MEN ASLEEP.]

“If we ain’t never had ’em, I guess we’ll catch ’em to-night,” says

Clark, softly in my ear, and the words take on a sickening significance

as we enter an unventilated atmosphere of foulest pollution, and we

see more clearly the frowzy, ragged garments of unclean men, and have

glimpses here and there of caking filth upon a naked limb.

The wisdom of a late hour of retiring is at once apparent when we have

sight of the inner passage. Not a square foot of the dark, concrete

floor is visible. The space is packed with men all lying on their

right sides with their legs drawn up, and each man’s legs pressed close

in behind those of the man in front.

Clark draws from an inside pocket a roll of old newspapers, and hands

me one. We spread them on the pavement as a Mohammedan unrolls his mat

for prayers, and then we take off our boots and coats. Our soaked,

pulpy boots we fold in our jackets and use them as pillows, and we

soften our bed by spreading over the newspapers our outer coats, which

thus have a chance to dry in the warmth of the room and in that which

comes from our bodies. We need no covering in the steaming heat in

which we lie, and I can see at a glance that Clark and I are more

fortunate than most of the other men, for few of them have outer coats,

and in their threadbare, filthy garments they lie with nothing but

paper between them and the floor, their heads pillowed on their arms.

By no means are all of them asleep. In the thick air above their

reclining figures there is an unceasing murmur of low, gruff voices.

What words can fit the hellish quality of that strange converse? It

is not human, though it comes from living men; it has no humor though

it touches life most intimately; it knows hot hate and craving need

and blank indifference, but all these feelings speak alike a tongue

of utter blasphemy; and it is not prurient even, though it reeks with

coarse obscenity.

And in the men themselves, how widely severed from all things human

is the prevailing type!--Their bloated, unwashed flesh and unkempt

hair; their hideous ugliness of face, unreclaimed by marks of inner

strength and force, but revealing rather, in the relaxation of sleep,

a deepening of the lines of weakness, until you read in plainest

characters the paralysis of the will. And then there are the stealthy,

restless eyes of those who are awake, eyes set in faces which lack

utterly the strength of honest labor and even that of criminal wit.

But there are marked exceptions to the prevailing type, men like Clark,

sound and strong in flesh, and having about them the signs of habitual

decency, and their faces stamped with the open frankness which comes of

earning a living by honest work. Some of these are young immigrants,

newly come, most evidently, and I picture their rude awakenings from

golden dreams of a land of plenty.

Clark is fast asleep beside me, but I cannot sleep for gnawing hunger

and the dull pain of lying bruised and sore upon the hard, paved floor.

There is sudden, nervous movement near me. Looking up I see a man

seated straight, tugging frantically at his shirt, and swearing

viciously the while in muffled tones. In a moment he has torn the

garment off, and his crooked, bony fingers are passing swiftly over the

shrivelled skin of his old, lean body in search of his tormentors, and

his oaths come lisping from his toothless mouth. The men about him are

ordering him, with deepening curses, to lie down and keep still.

The former quiet soon returns, and in it I lie thinking of another

world I know, a world of men and women whose plane of life is removed

from this by all the distance of the infinite. Faith and love and

high resolve are there, the inspirers of true living, and courage

spurs to unflinching effort, and hope lights the way of unsuccess and

gives vision through the vale of sorrow and of death. And the common

intercourse is the perfect freedom which is bred of high allegiance to

inborn courtesy and honor.

What living link is there that joins these worlds together, and gives

vital meaning to the confirmation of brotherhood spoken in the divine

words of the Apostle: “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and

everyone members one of another?”

Pondering this mystery I fall asleep, and so ends my first day in the

army of the unemployed.