LIVING BY ODD JOBS
No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO,
Saturday, December 19, 1891.
When life is lived in its simplest terms, one is brought to marvellous
intimacy with vital processes. And through this intimacy no disclosure
is more wonderful than that of nature’s quick response. Exhausted by
hard labor, until your muscles quiver in impotent loss of energy,
you sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to the play of a physical
revival wherein you are renewed by the mystery of intussusception,
and your responsive mood quickens to the tension of the involution
whence life’s energies flow new and fresh again. Another hour may bring
as great a change, and the full tide of your rising spirits may set
swiftly back. It is as though you were a little child once more, and
your moods obedient to little things.
When living is a daily struggle with the problems of what you shall eat
and what you shall drink, and wherewithal you shall be clothed, you
take no anxious thought for the morrow, quite content to let the morrow
take thought for the things of itself, for sufficient unto the day is
the evil thereof. Your heart will leap with hope at any brightening
of your lot, and will sink in deep despair when the way grows dark.
The road of your salvation is by the strait gate and the narrow way of
courage and persistent effort and provident foresight, and whence are
these to come to you whose courage is born of warmth and a square meal,
and whose despair comes with returning hunger? A world all bright with
hope can be had on the terms of heat and food, and the sense of these
can be induced for a nickel in a “barrel-house.”
When Clark and I awakened in the early morning, after our first night
in the station, the dull gray dawn was dimming the gas, and in the
lurid light we could see a writhing movement in the prostrate coiling
mass of reeking humanity about us. We had lost the feeling of hunger,
but a feverish thirst was burning to the roots of our tongues. We could
scarcely move for the pain of sore and stiffened muscles, and I thought
at first that my right leg was paralyzed from the night watchman’s
kick. Only a few hours before, we had entered the station-house from
the streets in eager willingness for any escape from their cold
exposure, and now with intensified desire we longed for the outer air
at any cost of hardship.
But we were not free to go out at once. The officer on duty brusquely
ordered us back among the men when we approached him with a request to
be allowed to leave. We were greeted with a burst of mocking glee as
we walked back to our places, and among the comments was a call to me:
“What have you pinched, whiskers?”
The reason for the delay was soon apparent, for in a few moments we
were all marched down the main corridor and into the passage which
opened nearest to the registrar’s desk. There we waited, closely
huddled, the iron door locked upon us, while an examination was made
as to whether any of the prisoners had been robbed. When all was
reported right, the door was unlocked and we were allowed to file
slowly out past the entrance of the kitchen. There stood the cook with
an assistant, and he gave to each man as he passed a bowl of steaming
coffee and a piece of bread. We drank the coffee at a gulp, and each
man was eating bread with wolfish bites as he climbed the steps and
walked out into the street.
[Illustration: THE POLICE-STATION BREAKFAST.]
Every succeeding breath in the outer air seemed to carry its cleansing
coolness farther down into our lungs. It was like the feeling of
cold water to a parched throat. The sky was overcast, but the storm had
ceased, and the temperature had fallen to several degrees of frost, and
this gave a freshness and vigor to the air which brightened the world
for us amazingly.
We could walk dry-shod in the measure that we could walk at all.
Clark was rather stiff at the start, and I could make scarcely any
progress alone, but Clark generously lent me a shoulder, and his arm
was frequently around me at the street crossings. All this was most
naturally done. The thought of deserting me because I had gone lame
seemed never to occur to him. He must have known that his own good
chances were seriously lessened by his having me upon his hands, but
he accepted this as though it were inevitable. There was no mawkish
sympathy in his manner; he was in for practical helpfulness only, and
now and again he would withdraw his support, and, standing off, would
watch me execute his command: “Now take a brace, partner, and let’s see
you go it alone.”
At Van Buren Street we turned, to the Rock Island Railway station, and
in the waiting-room we quenched our thirst as best we could at the
drinking-fountain. Many of the men had taken the direction of South
Clark Street. I asked Clark why.
“There’s barrel-houses down there,” he explained.
The word had come upon me repeatedly in the last day, with only a dim
suggestion of its meaning, and so I owned to my ignorance.
“A barrel-house?” said Clark. “That’s a dive where they keep cheap
whiskey on tap; you can get a pint for a nickel. It’s about the size
of the whiskey you want for the thirst you get in a station-house, I’m
thinking,” he added. And then more to himself than to me: “I’m damned
if I don’t wish I had some now to wash that air out of my mouth.”
His face was very wry, and there was returning to it the expression of
hopelessness which it had worn while we crouched for shelter in the
doorway on the night before. It cut you to the quick. His light-blue
eyes, which had drawn me from the first by the honest directness of
their gaze, now began to lose their human, speaking quality and to take
on the dumb, beseeching look of a hunted beast.
The bread and coffee and clean air had revived us both. I dreaded
a swift relapse, and so I urged a wash, in the hope of its bracing
effect. But where could we achieve this simple need? Certainly not in
the wash-room of the station, for we had trespassed dangerously far in
drinking at the fountain, and the eye of more than one employee was
already upon us. There was no hotel into whose public lavatory we could
pass unchallenged, and not so much upon Clark’s account as upon mine.
There remained the open lake; so we walked up Van Buren Street and
across the Lake Park and the railway tracks to the edge of the outer
harbor. Here we knelt among the broken fragments of ice and bathed our
faces and hands. It was vigorous exercise to rub them dry before they
chapped in the winter wind. It warmed us, and the feeling of relative
cleanness was enheartening. And then I sat down and dipped up water in
one hand and applied it, until I had a cold saturated cushion against
the bruise on my leg. This wrought wonderful relief until the wet cloth
froze, and then it chafed the bruise badly for a time.
But I could walk alone and fairly well now. We turned up Michigan
Avenue and followed it to the river, discussing, as we went, a plan of
action. Clark was for going at once to the far North Side in search
of employment at various iron-works and foundries there, of whose
existence he had learned. I longed for the means of early relief from
the reviving pangs of hunger through some chance job which I hoped that
we might obtain. This was a new idea to Clark. He was a raw recruit
in the army of the unemployed. That he might look for other work than
that which was in the line of his trade had not yet presented itself to
him as a possibility. He shrank from it with the instinctive dislike
of a conservative for a new way. And all our early essays confirmed
him in his aversion. We went from door to door of the great wholesale
business houses at the head of Michigan Avenue. Large delivery trucks
stood lined up along the curb on both sides, and there was the bustle
across the pavement of much loading and unloading of wares. Workmen
in leather aprons were handling packed boxes with the swiftness and
dexterity of long practice. At half a score of houses we sought out an
overseer or a superintendent and asked to be set to work; but, without
a moment’s hesitation in a single case, we were told, with varying
degrees of emphasis, that we were not needed, not even for some chance,
exceptional demand.
It is difficult to describe the discouragement which results from
such an experience. All about you is the tumultuous industry of a
great city. You feel something of the splendid power of its ceaseless
productivity; you guess at its vast consuming; and in the din of its
noisy traffic you watch the swift shuttles which weave the varied
fabric of its business. Its complexities and interdependencies bear
down upon you with an inspiring sense of the volume of human life spent
in ministering to life. Its multitudes throng you upon the streets,
and you read in countless faces the story of unending struggle to
keep abreast with pressing duty. Work? Everywhere about you there is
work, stupendous, appalling, cumulative in its volume and intensity
with the increasing momentum of a world-wide trade, which is driven by
the natural forces of demand and supply and keenest competition. Men
everywhere are staggering under burdens too grievous to be borne. And
here are you idle, yet counting it the greatest boon if you might but
add your strength to the mighty struggle.
Is there then no demand for labor? There is most importunate,
insatiable demand for all work of finer skilfulness, for all men who
can assume responsibility and give new efficiency to productive forces,
or direct them into channels for the development of new wealth. But
in the presence of this demand Clark and I stood asking hire for the
potential physical energies of two hungry human bodies, and, standing
so, we were but two units in a like multitude of unemployed.
When we reached the river I had difficulty in dissuading Clark from
his confirmed resolve to pass on to the North Side in pursuit of his
earlier plan. He had no thought of leaving me behind. He urged that
a chance job was as probable along his route as any other. But he
consented at last to another hour of search in the immediate vicinity.
We were in South Water Street; we walked west until we had crossed
State and had come to the corner of Dearborn Street. Walking became
increasingly difficult, for the pavements were piled high with boxes
and barrels and crates full of all manner of fruits and vegetables,
and wooden coops packed with live game and poultry. A narrow passage
remained between the piles. Through this we picked our way, carefully
avoiding empty boxes and hand-trucks and stray measures that lay
strewn about. On each side of the street buildings of brick or stone,
fairly uniform in height, rose four-storied and many windowed, with
the monotony of their straight lines relieved by the curves of arched
windows, each bearing a protruding keystone. Over the wide fronts
of the shops sagged awnings in various stages of faded color and
unrepair, their iron frames lying uncovered and unsightly against the
fluted canvas. Along both curbs were backed continuous rows of drays
and trucks and market-wagons. The two lines of horses stood blanketed
in the cold, facing each other across a narrow opening down the
stone-paved street, and more than anything else they resembled lines of
picketed cavalry.
We soon felt the friction of the crowd as it steered its devious course
along the littered pavement, brushing against groups of purchasers
who stood examining sample wares, and against idlers leaning to the
doorposts with hands in their trousers’ pockets, and through the cross
currents of drivers and shopmen who busily took on or discharged the
loads.
The very confusion and hurry of the scene, while they suggested the
chance of work, were really an added embarrassment to our search. More
than under other circumstances we shrank from asking employment from
men hard driven by the “instant need of things.” And this instinctive
feeling was fully justified in the course of the actual quest. Of
common hands there was an abundance, and ours, held out for sale,
were of the nature of a provocation to men cumbered by complex care.
Occasionally we could not get access to an employer; and when we did,
we sometimes received a civil “no,” but commonly an emphatic one in a
vent of evil temper.
At one moment an old gentleman was looking up at us over the tops of
his spectacles as we stood at the foot of his desk. There was much
shrewdness in his eye, and his face was deeply lined, but his speech
revealed the frankness of a courteous nature.
“No, I’m sorry,” he was saying, “I’m sorry that I can give you nothing
to do. The fact is, I’ve got to lay off three men at the end of the
week. My business don’t warrant my keeping them. I hope you’ll be more
fortunate elsewhere.”
A minute later we were standing waiting for the attention of a
square-shouldered, thick-necked dealer who was in angry dispute with a
subordinate. His face was still distorted when he turned upon us, and
his dilating eyes sought mine with an expression of growing impatience.
“We are looking for a job, sir,” I began. “Can you give us a chance to
work?”
“No, I can’t, ---- you! Out you go, now!” And then to a man near the
door: “---- your soul, Kelly, I’ve told you to keep these bums out of
here. If you let in another one I’ll fire you, as sure as hell.”
[Illustration: “OUT YOU GO, NOW.”]
The hour was nearly up, and there was apparently nothing for it but
to start north in accordance with Clark’s plan and in hope of better
fortune. I felt as though I could not go. I was fairly faint with
hunger, and a curious light-headedness had possessed me. The sights and
sounds about us took on a strange unreality, and I could not rid myself
of the feeling of moving and speaking in a dream. Again and again I was
conscious of a repetition of identical experience, recalling the same
circumstances in some faintly remembered past, and even before I spoke
at times, I had an eerie sense of having uttered the coming sentences
before under precisely similar conditions. The one fact to which
consciousness held with unshaken certainty was the strong craving for
food. And this was not so much a positive pain, as it was a sickening,
benumbing influence. My hand would all but go out in reach for fruit
that lay exposed about me, and the thought that the act would be wrong,
and would get me into trouble, followed the impulse afar, and was
forced into action as a checking conviction by a distinct effort of the
will.
We turned into one shop more. The pavement in front was heaped with
crates packed with oranges, and bound around the centre and the ends
with iron bands. Three high they stood on end, and four and five in a
row along the curb, while backed up against them were two empty trucks
with slats sloping capaciously at the sides.
There was confusion within the shop. A dealer and two drivers were
swearing loudly, each on a line of independent grievance. Two or three
shopmen were bustling about in zealous execution of orders. Men who may
have been customers were waiting impatiently for attention, and clerks
added to the confusion as with papers in hand they passed quickly in
and out of offices at the rear. It appeared the most unpromising place
for us that we had entered, and we were prepared for a refusal more
than commonly emphatic, when to our almost overwhelming surprise the
dealer hailed us:
“Say, you men, do you want a job? Go out and load them oranges, and
I’ll give you fifty cents apiece.”
We did not stagger nor clasp each other’s hands in an ecstasy of
relief; we simply turned without a word, and hurrying to the street, we
began to lift the heavy crates into the box of an empty truck.
Clark was the first to speak.
“Fifty cents, partner, fifty cents!” he kept repeating in an awed
undertone. He seemed to be trying to get firm hold of the fact of our
almost incredible good fortune, and then, in a voice that was thick
with a heaving sob, he said:
“We’ll feed, partner, we’ll feed!”
[Illustration: “WE’LL FEED, PARTNER, WE’LL FEED.”]
But we did not “feed” at once when the money was actually in our
possession. The first load had gone fairly well, for the certain
prospect of food nerved us to such a degree that, weakened though we
were, we scarcely felt the effort of loading, and we were quite unaware
that our bare hands were being scratched by the sharp ends of iron
bands about the boxes until we felt the flow of blood. But before the
second load was half on, our nerve began to fail us. Each succeeding
crate went on board with a greater effort. And the task itself grew
harder, as the tiers of boxes rose higher in the truck. It seemed as
though the driver would never be satisfied with the load; but at last
he called a halt, and, mounting his seat, drove off in the direction in
which the other truck had gone.
We were paid at once, Clark a half-dollar coin and I two silver
quarters. We held our money with the grip of drowning men upon a saving
support. We sat down upon a doorstep to rest. We were panting hard, and
the circles under Clark’s eyes had grown darker, and his thin bloodless
lips were quivering as with cold. But his spirits were rising, and his
eyes grew brighter every moment, and his pale face, already flushed
with exercise, glowed again with the pleasure of anticipating the sure
breaking of our fast.
When we set off, Clark was in the full swing of a provident plan.
“There’s lots of saloons,” he said, “where you can get a free lunch
with a glass of beer.” And he began to point them out to me along our
route. Large signs in front competed for the drifting trade. On one
was painted a huge schooner brimming over with frothing beer, and it
bore the legend: “The largest glass of beer for five cents in Chicago.”
Another sign claimed for its shop, “The best free lunch in the city,”
and others told of hot sausages with every drink, or a certain number
of oysters in any style, or hot stews at choice, and bread and cold
meats and cheese in unstinted abundance.
All this so exactly met our needs. And there were warmth and shelter
and companionship within the saloons, and having drunk at the bar and
eaten at the free-lunch counter, we should be free to sit at ease
about the fire. And how cheap it all was! For fifteen cents, Clark was
saying, we could get three fair meals a day, and even ten cents would
save us from the actual pain of hunger. There was no other chance
that compared with this. The utmost that five cents would buy in the
cheapest eating-houses was a cup of coffee and two small rolls. There
were ten-cent meals to be had, but they were not the equals of a
free lunch and a glass of beer. To get their equivalent in a restaurant
you must spend fifteen cents at least.
My objections were wholly unintelligible to Clark. From these he would
bring the argument back to the question of wise management, and there
he had me. Presently he lost his temper, and told me that I was a “damn
fool,” and that I might go “to a restaurant, or to hell,” as I chose,
but that for his part he was going in for a free lunch and a glass of
beer. But before we separated he was so far pacified that he agreed to
meet me in the early evening in front of the shop where we had earned
our money.
It was at the juncture of Dearborn and Madison Streets that we parted.
Not far from there I found a restaurant whose placards in the windows
offered tempting dishes at astonishingly cheap rates. “Roast beef and
baked potato, fifteen cents,” was printed on the one that lured me
most. I walked inside and sat down at a small round table, spread with
a cloth which was faultlessly clean. A long line of such tables reached
down the centre of the deep room in inviting whiteness, and was flanked
on each side by a row of others, oblong in shape, pressed close in
against the walls. To a height of several feet above these tables the
walls were wainscoted with mirrors, and the white ceiling was gay with
paper festoons. Customers were streaming in, for it was about noon.
Most of these were evidently men from neighboring business houses, but
there were workmen, too, some of them in blue jeans; and the first
fear that I felt at entering, the fear of having come to a place too
respectable to accept me as a guest, vanished completely, and gave
place to a feeling of security and comfort.
A corps of colored waiters were hurrying through the narrow passages
between the tables, bearing aloft tin trays heaped with dishes; to the
noisy clatter and hum of the diners, they added a babel of discordant
sound as they shouted in unintelligible phrase their varying orders
into the dim regions at the rear, whence answered a muffled echo to
each call.
My order came in a deep dinner-plate, a slice of roast beef, generous
and juicy, shading from brown to the rich, raw red of the centre that
oozed with a strengthening flow. With it was a large baked potato,
piping hot, and when I broke it upon the table with a blow of my fist,
the fragrant steam rose in a cloud to my face.
At the end of a fast of thirty-six hours, which had been relieved only
by a few swallows of coffee and a little bread, I knew enough to eat
slowly. But I was unprepared for the difficulty which this precaution
involved. As when one swallows cautiously in quenching a consuming
thirst, and checks by sheer force the muscles which would drink with
choking draughts, so it was only by a sustained restraint that I ate
carefully, in small morsels, until the brutish hunger was appeased. And
when all the beef and potato, and an amazing quantity of the bread,
with which the table was abundantly supplied, were gone, I could not
forego the expenditure of five cents more for a cup of coffee, by the
aid of which another deep inroad upon the bread was soon accomplished.
At the desk where I paid the amount stamped upon a check which the
waiter had left at my place, I inquired for the manager. When I
received his assurance that he could give me no work as a dishwasher,
nor, in fact, in any capacity in his restaurant, and that he knew
of no opening for me anywhere, I walked out into the streets once
more and found my way to the public reading-room of the Young Men’s
Christian Association. There I looked through the advertising columns
of the morning newspapers. Of applications for positions there was
an almost countless number, but of openings offered there were few,
and not one of these was promising to a man whose only resource was
unskilled labor. Reading on somewhat aimlessly through the day’s news
I presently fell asleep, and was soon awakened by a young secretary,
who was shaking me vigorously by the shoulder.
“Wake up, my man, wake up!” he was saying. “You can’t sleep in here.
You must keep awake, or go out.”
I went out. It was easier to keep awake in the streets than in that
warm room, and besides, I must not slacken the search for work.
By the time that I had fully recovered possession of my senses I found
that an aimless walk had taken me near to the railway station, at
whose fountain Clark and I had drunk in the morning. A crowd of newly
arrived passengers was issuing into Van Buren Street, many of them
carrying hand-luggage. With a flash of association there came to my
mind the recollection of the boys and men who follow you persistently
on Cortlandt Street between the Pennsylvania station and the elevated
railway, with importunate offers to carry your bag for a dime. I
wondered that this industry had not occurred to me before as a resource
in my present need.
In a moment I was plying it with high hope of success, but in the next
I stood agape at a fierce onslaught of street Arabs and men. One or
two had picked up stones with which they menaced me. All of them were
shouting oaths and violent abuse, and one half-grown boy, who was the
first to reach me, held a clenched fist to my face, as he screamed
hoarsely profane threats, and his keen dark eyes blazed with anger, and
his lean face worked convulsively in the strength of violent passion.
It appeared that I had trespassed upon a field which was pre-empted by
a “ring” well-organized for its possession and cultivation, and for the
further purpose of excluding competition.
[Illustration: ALL OF THEM WERE SHOUTING OATHS AND VIOLENT ABUSE.]
I fell back to a safe distance. On the opposite side of the street I
saw a gentleman carrying a heavy portmanteau. He was well past the beat
of the organized ring about the station. In an instant I was beside
him, and was offering to carry his load. He seemed disinclined to pay
any heed at first, but he stopped in a moment with the remark:
“I’ll give you a quarter to carry this bag to my hotel.”
I assented joyfully. I swung the bag to my shoulder, and passed on
ahead, while the traveller walked close behind me in the crowd, and
directed me to his hotel in Wabash Avenue, where, together with what I
already had, I was soon fifty-five cents to the good.
That afternoon yielded nothing more either in prospect of a steady job
or in the fruit of chance employment, and at dusk I stood again in
South Water Street anxiously awaiting Clark’s return. It was dark when
he came at last, and as he approached me in the fierce light of the
electric arc which gleamed from the top of the high iron post near by,
I could see that he was paler and more careworn, and deeply dejected.
We sat down for a few moments upon a doorstep. The street was nearly
deserted, and the lights shone dismally through its blackened length.
Clark began to tell me of his afternoon. No chance of work had been
revealed beyond the vague suggestion of one boss that he might need an
extra man in a week or two. Moreover Clark had found the shops so far
away that he had been obliged, both in his going and return, to take
a Lincoln Avenue cable-car, and so was out a fruitless ten cents in
fare. He said very little beyond the bare statement of his afternoon’s
experience. He was sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, with
his hands clasped, and his flaxen head bowed almost to his arms. I knew
that he was struggling with thoughts and feelings which he could not
analyze, nor in the least express, and I waited in silence beside him.
The whole experience was new to him. He had been out of work before,
but he had had a home, and in its shelter he could tide over the
depression which had cost him his job. Now his home was gone,
and he was adrift without support. But he was young and strong and
accustomed to work, and all that he sought was a chance to win his
way. And yet his very struggles for a footing seemed to sink him into
deeper difficulty. The conditions which he was forced to face seemed to
conspire against the possibility of his success.
It was the feeling inspired by this seeming truth, a dim, dull feeling
vaguely realized, yet awful, that bore hard upon him, and that loomed
portentous as with remorseless fate. He was struggling with it in an
agony of helpless discouragement, and presently he found utterance for
it in concrete form.
“One boss I struck for a job, I thought he was going to give it to me
sure,” he said. “He asked me where I’d worked before, and why I’d quit,
and how long I’d been at the trade. And just then I felt something
crawling on my neck. It was a crumb, ---- it! The boss seen it, too. He
got mad, ---- him! and he chewed a rag, and he said if he had twenty
jobs, he wouldn’t give one to a lousy hobo like me.” Clark was growing
increasingly vehement in his recital. He rose to his feet and bent over
me, while the hot words came hissing between his teeth:
“I ain’t never been like this in my life before, and, great God
Almighty! I’d be clean if I could!” After a moment he added, in a hard,
clear tone:
“We’ve got some money, partner, let’s go and get a drink.”
My extra quarter flashed into my mind as a hopeful resource. I held
out the two quarters and a nickel on the palm of my hand where the
street light would strike them. I told Clark of my windfall, and of the
possible chance of many another such to help us out in the future.
“I earned this in ten minutes,” I said, holding out a quarter, “and I
know where twenty cents of it will buy us each a hot stew and all the
bread that we can eat. And then I’ve found a lodging-house in South
Clark Street where we can each get a wash and a fairly decent bed in
good air for fifteen cents, and we’ll have enough left to keep us in
food to-morrow.”
Clark hesitated. I enlarged on the attractiveness of the restaurant
and the comfort of eating at leisure at one of its clean tables, and
the long, unbroken rest that we should have at the lodgings. Clark was
tired to the bone, and he yielded. It was my turn now to give him a
shoulder as we walked to our evening meal.
We were soon seated opposite each other at one of the side tables of
the restaurant. The lights were reproduced in myriad reflections in
the mirrors, and we seemed to be sitting near the centre of a vast
dining-hall with multitudes at its countless tables and its farther
portions fading in the perspective of dim distance. The Irish stew and
bread were indescribably good, and in the company of other diners we
felt that we were among our fellow-men and of them, and we were free
for the time from the torment of that haunting isolation which keeps
one unspeakably lonely even in the thronging crowd.
Light-hearted and full of hope again we walked to the lodging-house,
and after a wash we were soon fast asleep, each on a rough cot in a
wooden closet, the electric lights streaming in upon us through the
wire netting which was spread over the tops of long lines of such
sleeping booths, that stood separated by thin board partitions like the
bath-houses at the sea.
Friday and Saturday came and passed with the same vain search for
work, and with varying fortune in odd jobs. We took separate routes
through the day, but always agreed at parting upon an hour and place
of meeting. The Young Men’s Christian Association rooms became our
rendezvous. When we met there on Friday evening I had a quarter and
Clark was high-spirited and opulent with forty-five cents to his
credit. He was full of his good fortune. In the middle of the forenoon
he had chanced upon the job of shifting coal in the cellar of a private
house. The work having been finished he was allowed to wash himself
in the kitchen with an abundance of hot water and soap and the luxury
of a towel. And then he sat down at the kitchen-table to a dinner of
hot turkey and cranberry-sauce, and any number of vegetables, and
all the bread and coffee he wanted, and finally a towering saucer of
plum-pudding. Fifty cents was added to the dinner in payment for his
work, and, as he had had a dime left in his pocket after breakfast,
he did not hesitate at an expenditure of fifteen cents in car-fare to
facilitate his search for work.
My quarter had come, as on the day before, by way of a porter’s
service--only this time from a woman. I caught sight of her as she
was crossing the Lake Front from the station of the Illinois Central
Railroad at the head of Randolph Street. Under her left arm were
parcels of various shapes and sizes, and with some apparent effort she
carried a bag in her right hand. The parcels were troublesome, for now
and again she was obliged to rest the bag upon the pavement until she
had adjusted her arm to a surer hold upon them. She was a woman nearing
middle life, well dressed in warm, comfortable, winter garments which
bore the general marks of the prevailing mode.
So completely had the present way of living possessed me that I fear
that my first impulse at sight of her was born of the hope of a
porter’s fee and not of the thought of helpfulness. But I grew more
interested as I neared her, and increasingly embarrassed. There was
a touch of beautiful coloring in her round, full face, and about
the mouth was an expression of rare sweetness, while her dark-blue
eyes looked out through gold-rimmed spectacles with preternatural
seriousness. But my eye was drawn most by the hair that appeared
beneath her bonnet; a heavy mass it was, and tawny red like that of
Titian’s “Magdalene” in the Pitti. She might have been a shopkeeper’s
wife come to the city from the suburbs or from some provincial village,
and she was nervous in the noisy atmosphere of the unfamiliar. I had
not yet offered my services to a woman in this new capacity of street
porter, and I found myself puzzled as to how I should approach her.
But the actual situation solved the difficulty, for when we were but
a few steps apart, her bundles fell again into a state of irritating
insecurity under her arm and she was again obliged to adjust them.
Instantly I was beside her, bowing, hat in hand:
“I beg your pardon, madam; won’t you let me help you?”
She drew back and looked at me perplexed, and I could see the gathering
alarm in her wide, innocent, serious eyes.
[Illustration: SHE DREW BACK AND LOOKED AT ME PERPLEXED.]
“Oh, no, thanks!” she said, and I knew that all that she had ever heard
of bunco-steerers and of the wily crafts of the town was mingling in
terrifying confusion in her mind with thoughts of possible escape.
My distress was as great as her own. I had forgotten for the moment
how dismaying to a woman must be an unexpected offer of service from
a sudden apparition of full grown, masculine, street poverty. I felt
guilty as though I had wantonly frightened a child. A parcel had fallen
to the ground. I picked it up, and returned it to her with an apology
most spontaneous and sincere. But as I turned away in haste to escape
from the embarrassment of the situation, I found myself checked to
my great surprise by a timid question: “Perhaps you can tell me the
shortest way to number -- La Salle Street?” she said.
My hat was off at once.
“It will give me great pleasure to show you the way,” I replied, and
not waiting for a refusal, I set off with, “Won’t you follow me,
pray?” over my shoulder.
At the curb of the first crossing I waited for her.
“Keep close to me,” I said, “and I’ll see you safe across the street.”
But I ignored the parcels, which were once more awry. On the opposite
pavement she stopped.
“Would you mind holding my bag,” she asked, “while I get a better grip
on these bundles?” I accepted the bag with an assurance of the pleasure
that it gave me. It was soon followed by a parcel, the largest and
most unwieldy of the lot. She finished adjusting the others, and then
extended her free hand for the remaining parcel.
“We’ll carry this between us,” I said, “and I’ll walk with you to the
place.”
Without a word of demur she took firm hold of the stout twine with
which the parcel was tied, and thus linked we set off together down
Randolph Street to La Salle. Conversation was nearly impossible, for we
were edging our way for the most part along crowded pavements.
When we stood for a few moments at a crossing, waiting for a check in
the tide of traffic, she confided to me that she had come to Chicago
from “----ville” to see a lawyer.
“You are often in the city,” I suggested, delighted to talk on the
pleasant, easy terms which were springing up between us.
“Oh, no! I ain’t,” she said, and then she was innocently superior
to the compliment implied in my feigned surprise, and she began to
question me about myself.
“What do you do for a living, young man?”
“I am out of work, and I am looking for a job,” I said, evasively.
“What is your line of work?” she continued; for the bucolic mind was
bent on a sure footing from which to launch out into further inquiry.
“I shall be glad of any work that I can get,” I said. “Any work at
all,” I reiterated, thinking that she might put me in the way of a job.
“Where do you live when you’re to home?” and the question indicated a
new tack in the quest for certitude.
“I came out here from the East” I answered; “I have no home here.”
“I guess you ain’t been doing just right, or else you wouldn’t be
ashamed to tell,” she said, while a graver look came into her sober
eyes.
The situation was so keenly delightful that I lacked the moral strength
to do aught but prolong it.
“Ah, madam, if you but knew!” I said, and I fear that my tone conveyed
to her a tacit confession of deep depravity.
We had reached the required number in La Salle Street. I led the
way to the elevator, and found the door of the lawyer’s office. The
woman stood for a few moments in the passage; I was evidently on her
conscience.
“Haven’t you got any family or friends?” she continued, in a voice
tender with sympathy.
“I had both,” I replied.
“Then, young man, you take my advice, and just go back to your family,
and tell them you’re sorry that you done wrong, and you mean to do
better. They’ll be good to you and help you.” Her words were swift with
the energy of conviction.
“I am sure that you are right,” I agreed.
And now a well-filled open purse was in her hand, and I saw her fingers
hesitating among some loose coins. Presently she held out a quarter.
“You’ve been real nice to me,” she said, “and I want to ask you not to
make a wrong use of this money. You’ll not buy liquor with it, will
you?”
“Indeed I will not,” I assured her. “I have little temptation to do
that, for I can quench my thirst for nothing; it is food that I find it
hard to get. And, madam,” I continued, “I am deeply grateful to you for
your good advice.”
She smiled upon me, her pretty mouth and dimpled cheeks and dark blue
eyes all playing their part in the friendly salutation.
“You will go back to your friends, won’t you?” she said, persuasively.
“I will indeed,” I replied. “Already I look forward to that with
keenest pleasure.”
Then richer by a quarter and all aglow with the sense of human sympathy
I returned to the streets, and to the exhausting, dreary round of
place-hunting.
That this in itself should be such hard work is largely due, I fancy,
to the double strain, both on your strength and on your sensibilities.
Certainly it is strangely enervating. Even when you are not weakened
by the want of food, you find yourself at the far end of a fruitless
search worn out beyond the exhaustion of a hard day’s work. And then
the actual ground covered by your most persistent effort is always so
sadly disappointing. You may begin the day’s hunt rested and fed and
full of energy and resolve; you may have planned the search with care,
taking pains to find out the various forms of unskilled labor which
are employed within the chosen area; with utmost regard to systematic,
time-saving expenditure of energy, you may go carefully over the
ground, leaving no stone unturned; and yet, at the day’s end, you have
not covered half the area of your careful plan, and your whole body
aches with weariness, and your heart is heavy and sore within you. Nor
does the task grow easier with long practice. You acquire a certain
facility in search; you come, by practical acquaintance, to some
knowledge of the ins and outs of the labor market; but you must begin
each day’s quest with a greater draft upon your courage and resolution.
For the actual barriers grow greater, as the outward marks of your mode
of life become clearer upon you, and you feel yourself borne upon a
tide that you cannot stem, out from the haven of a man’s work, where
you would be, to the barren wastes, where drift to certain wreck the
lives of the destitute idle who have lost all hold upon a “sure intent.”
All the days of this vagrant living were not equally hard. Some were
harder than others. Saturday was a case in point. After an early
frugal breakfast, for which Clark paid his last penny, we separated
with an agreement to meet again at six o’clock in the evening in the
reading-room of the Young Men’s Christian Association. We were bent on
different quests. Clark was determined to find work at his trade if he
could, and I had no choice apart from unskilled labor. For odd jobs
we were each to have out an eye, and our acquaintance thus far with
such a course made us fairly confident of at least the means of bare
subsistence.
But nothing is less predictable than the outcome of this fortuitous
living. The days vary with the variability which belongs to existence.
Things “come your way” at times, and then again they have another
destination which your widest and closest search fails to reveal.
It was hard, but it was not impossible through that Saturday morning
to keep one’s purpose fairly firm. From the ebb of the city’s traffic
in the darkness before the dawn I felt it flowing to its full tide.
However destitute a man may be he cannot fail to share the quickening
to waking life of a great city. The mystery of deepest night enfolds
the place, and from out its veiling darkness the vague conformations
of streets and buildings gradually emerge to the sharp outlines of
the day’s reality. An occasional delivery wagon from the market, or
a milkman’s cart goes rattling down a street, awaking echoes as of a
deserted town, or a heavy truck laden with great rolls of white paper
for the printing-press passes slowly, drawn by gigantic horses whose
flat, hairy hoofs patiently pound the cobbles in their plodding pace,
while whiffs of white vapor puff from their nostrils with their deep,
regular breathing. The driver’s oath can be heard a square away.
Standing at the curb along an open space in front of a public building
are a few “night hawks.” The horses are heavily blanketed and their
noses buried in eating-bags. The cabmen have drawn together in social
community on the pavement, where, as they gossip in the cold, they
alternately stamp the flagging with their feet and clasp themselves
in hard, sweeping embraces of the arms to stir the sluggish blood to
swifter movement. An empty cable-car goes tearing round a “loop” with
noise to awake the dead, and sets off again to some outermost portion
of the town with a sleepy policeman on board and a newsboy, his bundle,
damp from the press, upon his lap, who is bent on being first with news
to that suburban region. The cars fill first with workingmen who are
bound for distant factories and workshops and their posts along the
lines of railways.
The streets are echoing now to the sounds of increasing traffic and
to the steps of the vanguard of workers. These are the wage-earners,
men for the most part, but there are women, too, and children. Here is
humanity in the raw, hard-handed and roughly wrought for the Atlasian
task of sustaining, by sheer physical strength and manual skill, the
towering, delicate, intricate structure of progressive civilization.
The first of the salaried workers follow these, and youth swarms
upon the streets moving with swift steps to the great co-educational
schools of practical business. There are countless “cash” children in
the throng, and office boys, and saleswomen and men, and clerks, and
secretaries, and fledgling lawyers. There are marks of poverty on the
faces and in the garments of the children, but most of the older ones
are dressed in all the warmth and comfort of the well-to-do, while
the young women who form so large a portion of the crowd step briskly
in dainty boots carrying themselves with figures erect and graceful,
clothed with the style and _chic_ which are theirs as a national trait.
Many of the men are, in contrast, markedly careless and unkempt.
All these are at work by eight o’clock, the wage-earners having been at
it an hour already. Then come, mingling in the miscellaneous concourse
of business streets which have taken on the full day’s complexity, the
superintendents and managers, and the heads of business houses and of
legal firms, and bankers, and brokers, and all the company of rare
men, whose native gifts of creative power or organizing capacity or
executive ability, joined to great energy and resolution, have placed
them in command of their co-workers, and made them responsible, as
only the few can be responsible, for the lives and well-being of their
fellows.
I recognize an eminent lawyer in the moving crowd, who, in democratic
fashion, is walking to his office. He is a nobleman by every gift of
nature, and his sensitive, expressive face, responsive to the grace of
passing thought, is an unconscious appeal to my flagging courage, and
to that, perhaps, of many another man in the pressing throng.
I see in a jolting omnibus a noted merchant, his head bowed over a
morning paper as he rides to his business house. He holds a foremost
place in business, yet it is fully equalled by his standing as a
Christian gentleman and as a wise and most efficient philanthropist.
Almost touching elbows we pass each other on the street, a
fellow-alumnus of my college and I, he an inheritor of great wealth
and of a vast enterprise far-reaching in its scope to distant portions
of the earth. And yet, so unmarred has he remained under the lavish
gifts of fortune that his is already the dominant genius in the
administration of immense productive power, and his influence is
increasingly felt as a helpful and guiding force in great educational
institutions of the land.
But this resurgence of the city’s life, while it quickens the pulses
for the time, is not an inspiration to last one through a day of
disappointing search. By noon I had been turned many times away, and
a sharp refusal to a polite request to be given a chance to work cuts
deeper than men know who have never felt its wound. You try to ignore
it at the first, and you bring greater energy to bear upon the hunt,
but your wounds are there; and, in each succeeding advance, it is a
sterner self-compulsion that forces you to lay bare again the shrinking
quick of your quivering sensibilities. How often have I loitered about
a door, passing and repassing it again and yet again before I could
summon courage for the ordeal of a simple request for work!
Early in my experience I learned never to ask after a possible vacancy.
Employers have no vacancies to be filled by such an inquirer. I simply
said that I was looking for a job, and should be glad of any work that
I could do; and that, if I could be given a chance to work, I would do
my best to earn a place.
This request in practically the same terms produced often the most
opposite effects. One man would answer with a kindliness so genuine
and a regret so evidently sincere that it was with an utmost effort at
times that I could control myself And but a few minutes later another
man might answer, if not with oaths and threats of violence, yet with a
cynical sharpness which would leave a sorer rankling.
Despondency had almost conquered hope at last, and well-nigh worn
one’s courage out, and all but brought your drooping spirits to the
brink of that abyss, where men think that they can give the struggle
up. It is marvellous how the external aspect of all things changes to
you here. The very stones beneath your feet are the hard paving of
your prison-house; the threatening winter sky above you is the vaulted
ceiling of your dungeon; the buildings towering to nearly twenty
stories about you are your prison walls, and, as by a keen refinement
of cruelty, they swarm with hiving industry, as if to mock you in your
bitter plight.
Suddenly there dawns upon you an undreamed-of significance in the
machinery of social restraint. The policeman on the crossing in his
slouching uniform bespattered with the oozing slime of the miry streets
where he controls the streams of traffic, even as the Fellaheen direct
the water of the Nile through the net-work of their irrigation ditches,
is the outstretched hand of the law ready to lay hold on you, should
you violate in your despair the rules of social order. Behind him you
see the patrol wagon and the station-house and the courts of law and
the State’s prison and enforced labor, the whole elaborate process
by means of which society would reassimilate you, an excrement, a
non-social being as a transgressor of the law, into the body politic
once more, and set you to fulfilling a functional activity as a part of
the social organism.
This result, with the means of living which it implies and the link
that it gives you to your kind, even if it be the relation of a
criminal to society, may become the object of a desire so strong that
the shame and punishment involved may lose their deterring force for
you.
There are simple means of setting all this process in motion in
your behalf. Men break shop-windows in full view of the police, or
voluntarily hold out to them hands weighted with the spoils of theft.
Perhaps it is in the moving crowds upon the pavements that one, in
such a mood, feels most of all this change in external aspect. The
loneliness, the sense of being a thing apart in the presence of your
working kind, a thing unvitalized by real contact with the streams of
life, is the seat of your worst suffering, and the pain is augmented by
what seems an actual antagonism to you as to something beyond the range
of human sympathy.
By the middle of that Saturday afternoon I had fairly given up the
search for work, and I found myself on State Street, wandering
aimlessly in the hope of an odd job. Hunger and utter weariness
were playing their part, as well as the loneliness and the sense of
imprisonment. One had the feeling that, if he could but sit down
somewhere and rest, all other troubles would vanish for the time at
least. And there were, I knew, many public rooms to which I could go in
unquestioned right or privilege, but once within their warmth, I was
well aware that to keep awake would tax all my power of will, and that,
as a sleeping lounger, I should soon be turned adrift again.
The street was coated with a murky mire, kneaded by hoofs and wheels
to the consistency of paste, and tracked by countless feet upon the
pavements, where it lay as thick almost as on the cobbles. The skyline
on both sides was a ragged _sierra_, mounting from three to five and
seven stories, then leaping suddenly on the right to the appalling
height of the Masonic Temple, and grotesque in all its length with
rearing signs and flagstaffs that pierced the smoky vapor of the upper
air, while the sagging halyards fluttered like fine threads in the icy
gusts from off the lake. Whole fronts of flamboyant architecture were
almost concealed behind huge bombastic signs, while other advertising
devices hung suspended overhead, watches three feet in diameter, and
boots and hats of a giant race.
The shop windows were draped with the scalloped fringes of idle
awnings, and merely a glance at their displays was enough to disclose a
commercial difference separated by only the width of the thoroughfare,
a difference like that between Twenty-third Street and the Bowery.
From Polk Street and State I drifted northward to the river. No longer
was there any stimulus in contact with the intermingling crowds. All
that was hard and sordid in one’s lot seemed to have blinded one to
all but the hard and sordid in the world about. Beneath its structural
veiling you could not see the warm heart of life, tender and strong
and true. Multitudes of human faces passed you, deeply marked with
the lines of baser care. Human eyes looked out of them full of the
unconscious tragic pathos of the blind, blind to all vision but the
light of common day; eyes of the money grubbers, sharpened to a
needle’s point yet incapable of deeper insight than the prospect of
gain; eyes of the haunted poor, furtive in the fear of things, and
seeing only the incalculable, threatening hand of fateful poverty;
eyes of ragged children who were selling papers on the streets, their
eyes old with the age of the ages, as though there gazed through them
the unnumbered generations of the poor who have endured “long labor
unto aged breath;” eyes of the rich, hardened by a subtler misery
in the artificial lives they lead in sternest bondage to powers in
whom all faith is gone, but whom they serve in utter fear, scourged
by convention to the acting of an unmeaning part in life, seeking
above all things escape from self in the fantastic _stimuli_ of
fashion, yet feeling ever, in the dark, the remorseless closing in of
the contracting prison walls of self-indulgence narrowing daily the
scope of self, and threatening life with its grimmest tragedy, in the
hopeless, faithless, purposeless _ennui_ of existence.
And now there passed me in the street two sisters of charity walking
side by side. Their sweet, placid faces, framed in white, reflected the
limpid purity of unselfish useful living, and their eyes, deep-seeing
into human misery and evil, were yet serene in the all-conquering
strength of goodness.
It was in some saner thought inspired by this vision that I walked on
across the river to the comparative quiet of the North Side. I needed
all the sanity that I could summon. The setting sun had broken for
a moment through snow-laden clouds, and it shone in blazing shafts
of blood-red light through the hazy lengths of westward streets. Its
rays fell warmly upon a wide, deep window as I passed, and the rich
reflection caught my eye. For some time I stood still, a prey to
conflicting feelings. Just within the window with the shades undrawn,
sat a friend in lounging ease before an open fire, absorbed in his
evening paper. There flashed before me the scene of our last encounter.
We stood at parting on a wharf in the balmy warmth of late winter in
the far South. Behind my friend was the brilliant carpeting of open
lawns and blooming beds of flowers, and beyond lay the deep olive green
of forests of live-oak with palmettos growing in dense underbrush,
and the white “shell road” gleaming in the varied play of lights and
shadows until it lost itself, in its course to the beach, in the
deepening gloom of overdrooping boughs weighted with hanging moss in an
effect of tropical luxuriance. And from out that vivid mental picture
there came again, almost articulate in its reality, the graceful urging
of my friend that I should visit him in his Western home.
It was so short a step by which I could emerge from the submerged, and
the temptation to take it was so strong and inviting. The want and
hardship and hideous squalor were bad enough, but these things could
be endured for the sake of the end in view. It was the longing for
fellowship that had grown to almost overmastering desire, the sight
of a familiar face, the sound of a familiar voice, the healing touch
of cultivated speech to feelings all raw under the brutalities of the
street vernacular.
And after all, what real purpose was my experiment to serve? I had set
out to learn and in the hope of gaining from what I learned something
worth the while of a careful investigation. I had discovered much
that was new to me, but nothing that was new to science, and the
experience of a single individual could never furnish data for a valid
generalization, and all that I had learned or could learn was already
set forth in tabulated, statistical accuracy in blue books and economic
treatises. Moreover it was impossible for me to rightly interpret even
the human conditions in which I found myself, for between me and the
actual workers was the infinite difference of necessity in relation to
any lot in which I was. How could I, who at any moment could change
my status if I chose, enter really into the life and feelings of the
destitute poor who are bound to their lot by the hardest facts of stern
reality? It was all futile and inadequate and absurd. I had learned
something, and as for further inquiry of this kind, I would better
give it up, and return to a life that was normal to me.
The sense of futility was strong upon me. Never before had the
temptation to abandon the attempt assailed me with such force. It
was no clean-cut, definite resolution that won in favor of continued
effort. Not at all. I think that when I turned away I was more than
half-resolved to give over the experiment. But even as a man, who,
contemplating suicide, allows himself to be borne upon the aimless
stream of common events past the point of many an early resolution to
the deed, so I found myself gradually awaking to the thought, “Ah,
well, I will try it a little longer.”
It was in this mood that I went to find Clark at our rendezvous. Our
eyes met in quick inquiry, and before either of us spoke, we knew
each the other’s story. But Clark wished the confirmation of actual
confession.
“Ain’t you had no luck too?” he whispered, his eyes close to mine, and
contracting with a sense of the incredibility of such a result, which
might be altered, if one would only insist strongly enough upon its
being other than it actually was.
“No,” I said, “I’ve had no luck, nor anything to eat since morning.”
We were speaking in the low tones which were permitted in the
reading-room. “Well, I’ll be ----.” And Clark’s drawling oath seemed
exactly suited to the absurdity of the situation. We both laughed
softly over our coincident dilemma, and by a mutual impulse we
walked out into the street, where we spent an agreeable half-hour in
discussing the placards in the windows of two restaurants.
There was an especial attraction for us in the lower window where there
stood a _chef_ all white from his spotless cap to where his white
garments were lost to view behind a gas-stove of ingenious contrivance,
on whose clean, polished upper surface he was turning well-browned
griddle-cakes. I do not know what the association was, and it was in
entire good-humor that Clark suddenly turned to me with the remark:
“Say, partner, we’d get all we want to eat, if we’d heave a rock
through this window.”