FINDING STEADY WORK
No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO, ILL.,
December 22, 1891.
That night when Clark and I reached the head of the staircase which
descends to the basement of the station-house we found the way blocked
by men. We thought at first that a prisoner was being booked, but a
second glance revealed the fact that the door of iron grating was wide
open. With his back against it stood an officer. The lodgers were
passing him in slow order, and, as they filed by, the policeman held
each in sharp examination for a moment. Soon I could see him clearly.
He stood, obstructing the exit from the stairs, a straight, massive
figure well on to two hundred and fifty pounds. A side-view was toward
us, and I took delight in the clean-shaven face with the well-chiselled
Grecian profile, the eye deep-set and widening to the upward lift of
the lashes, and the dark, abundant hair rising in short, crisp curls
from under the pressure of his cap-rim.
He was putting the men through a catechism respecting their
nationalities, their homes and occupations, and their motives in coming
to Chicago. Beside him stood two men, the elder a man past middle
life, of sober, dignified appearance, and with an air of philosophical
interest in what he saw. The younger was a callow youth, just grown
to manhood, and he may have been the other’s son. They were out
“slumming,” evidently, and the officer had been detailed as their
guide. Their purpose may have been a good one, but the boy’s face, as
I watched it, seemed to me to show plainly the marks of an unwholesome
curiosity. And certainly as they stood there in well-dressed, well-fed
comfort, eying at leisure, as though it were exhibited for their
diversion, this company of homeless, ragged, needful men, there was to
my mind a deliberate insult in the attitude sharper than the sting of a
blow in the face. I thought at first that I might be alone in feeling
this, until I heard a man behind me say, as the cause of the delay
became clear to him:
[Illustration: HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING
THEIR NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR
MOTIVES IN COMING TO CHICAGO.]
“Who is them jays, and what business have they inspectin’ us?”
On the step below me was as good a vagrant type as the slowly moving
line on the staircase disclosed. I could not see his face, but I
could guess at its effect from the dark, bristling, unkempt beard that
sprouted in tangled, wiry masses from his cheeks and throat, and the
heavy, cohering hair that lay long and thick about his ears and on his
neck. There was an unnatural corpulence about the figure, the reality
of which was belied by the lean, sharp lines that appeared beneath a
bulging collar and in the emaciated arms that were red, and raw, and
almost bare below the elbows, where the ragged sleeves hung in fraying
ribbons.
The obesity was purely artificial. The tramp had on three flannel
shirts, at least, besides several heavy waistcoats and two pairs of
trousers and as many coats, with a possibility of there being three.
The outer garments were quaint mosaics of patches, positively ingenious
in their interlacing adherence to one another and in their rude
preservation of original outlines of dress. From him came the pungent
reek of bad whiskey and stale tobacco.
It was as though the man stood clothed in outward and visible signs of
unseen realities, enveloped in the rigid habit of his own wrong-doing,
draped in the mystery of inherited tendencies, and cloaked in the stern
facts of a hard environment. And yet, as beneath the filthy outer
covering there was a human being, so under these veiling, unseen
vestures was a man, a living soul created by the Almighty.
I could hear him muttering gruffly to himself as he slowly descended to
his turn at the foot of the steps.
“Well, Weary, where are you from? A hobo from Hoboville, I guess,” and
the officer’s voice rang strong and clear up the staircase to the dim
landing, where stood the waiting line of men.
The two slummers laughed aloud.
“From Maine,” said the tramp. The voice came hoarse and thin and
broken-winded from a throat eaten out by disease.
“Well, you’re a rare one, if you’re a Yankee. But what brought you to
Chicago?”
“Lookin’ for work at the World’s Fair.”
“You lie, you lazy loafer. The last thing you’re looking for is work.
You all tell that World’s Fair lie. There’s been as many of you in
Chicago every winter for the last ten years as there is this winter.”
The man was stung.
“I’ve as good a right here as you,” he said.
“You have, have you!” cried the officer in quick rejoinder, but with
no loss of temper. “Look at me, you filthy hobo,” he added, drawing
himself to his full, imposing height. “I’m a police officer. I’ve held
my job for eleven years, and got my promotions. I’m earning eighty
dollars a month, do you see? Now go down there where you belong,” and
he pointed imperiously to the far end of the corridor.
My turn came next.
“Here’s another whiskers,” announced the officer in explanation to his
charges; “same kind, only younger and newer to the business.” And then
to me, “Where are you from?” he said.
I replied with some inanity in mock German. “Oh, he’s a Dutchman. We
get a few of them. But they’re mostly older men, and kind of moody, and
they tramp alone a good bit. Can’t you talk English?”
I said something in very bad French.
“Oh, I guess he’s a Frenchy. That’s very uncommon----”
I interrupted his information with a line from Virgil, spoken with an
inflection of inquiry.
“He may be a Dago, or a--ah----” he hesitated.
I broke in with a sentence in Greek.
“Or a Russian,” concluded the officer.
I thought that I could mystify him finally, and so I pronounced a verse
from Genesis in Hebrew. But he was equal to the emergence.
“I’ve got it,” he exclaimed, with a note of exultation; “he’s a
Sheeny!” And free to go I walked down the corridor, feeling that I had
come rather badly out of that encounter.
None of us, I think, resented much the action of the officer. The
policemen understand us perfectly, and in a certain broad, human sense
we know them for our friends. I have been much impressed with this
quality of natural _bonhomie_ in the relation of the police officers
to the vagrant and criminal classes. It seems to be the outcome of
sturdy common sense and genuine knowledge and human sympathy. It would
be difficult, I fancy, seriously to deceive an average officer of good
experience. He may not know his man personally in every case, but he
knows his type, and he takes his measure with admirable accuracy. He
is not far misled by either his virtue or his vice. He knows him for a
human being, even if he be a vagrant or a criminal, and he has come by
practical experience to a fair acquaintance with human limitations in
these spheres of life.
The sympathy of which I have spoken is conspicuously innocent of
sentimentality. It comes from a saner source, and is of a hardier
fibre. Unfortunately it lays open a way of corruption to corrupt men
on the force, but it is the basis, too, of high practical efficiency
in the difficult task of locating crime and keeping it within control.
And it has another value little suspected, perhaps. I have met more
than one workingman at work who owed his job to the friendly aid of a
policeman, who had singled him out from the ranks of the unemployed as
being worthy of his help. And this sort of timely succor is bounded,
I judge, only by the limits of opportunity. Certainly I shall never
forget the kindness of an officer who had evidently grown familiar with
me on the streets, and who to my great surprise stopped me suddenly one
day with the question:
“Ain’t yous got a job yet?”
“No,” I said, as I stood looking up in deep admiration of his height
and breadth and ruddy, wholesome face and generous Irish brogue.
“Well, that is hard luck,” he went on. “There isn’t many jobs ever at
this season of the year, but just yous come around this way now and
again, and I’ll tell yous, if I hears of anything.”
That was only a day or two before I found work, and when I had a chance
to tell him of my success, his pleasure seemed as genuine as my own.
* * * * *
Sunday morning was all that Clark and I could wish. To the pallor of
the earliest dawn was added a soft, white muffling of snow. It lay
almost untracked over the filthy streets and upon the pavements, and in
dainty cones it capped the fence-palings, and roofed in pure white the
sheds and flat-cars in the railway station yard.
Clark and I walked rapidly across Wabash Avenue, then south to
Twentieth Street, and then east again across Michigan and Indiana
to Prairie Avenue. Here we were in the midst of a wealthy residence
quarter. Most hopefully we wandered about in anxious waiting for some
signs of life. From the first house at which we could apply we were
turned away with the assurance that there was a man on the place whose
duties included the cleaning of the pavements, and that, therefore, our
services were not needed. We had expected this to be the case in the
majority of instances; it was of the possible exception that we were
in search. Soon we began to fear that there were no exceptions. Our
spirits had fallen low under repeated refusals, when suddenly they rose
with a bound, when we finally got a pavement to clean, and twenty-five
cents each in payment.
The temptation to quit at once and get something to eat was strong, for
the swallow of coffee and piece of bread at the station-house had not
gone far toward satisfying an appetite which was of twenty-four hours’
growth. But then in another hour or two all further chance of work
like this would be gone, and so we stuck at it. Our reward was almost
instant.
Not only were we given a job at sweeping snow, and paid another quarter
each for it, but we were asked whether we had breakfasted, and were
invited to a meal in the kitchen. I think that the cook thoroughly
enjoyed feeding us, we did such ample justice to her fare. After two
large bowls of steaming porridge, we began on omelettes and beefsteak
and crisp potatoes and fresh bread, drinking the while great quantities
of coffee, not the flat, bitter, diluted wash of the cheap restaurants,
but the hot, creamy, fragrant beverage which tones one for the day.
[Illustration: I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US.]
We had little time to talk, and very selfishly I left our end of the
conversation wholly to Clark. The cook drew from him some of the facts
of our position, and the further fact of our having been so long
without food. This made her very indignant, not at us, but at the
existing order of things.
“There should be a law,” she said, emphatically, “a law to give a job
to every decent man that’s out of work.” Then, with the sweet facility
of feminine remedy, “And another law,” she added, “to keep all them
I-talians from comin’ in and takin’ the bread out of the mouths of
honest people. They ain’t no better than heathens anyway, and they
do tell me that they’ll work for what a Christian dog wouldn’t live on.
Why, there’s me own cousin as come over from County Down a month ago
last Tuesday, and he ain’t got a job yet, and I be obliged to support
him, and all on account of them unclean I-talians.”
There seemed to be no end to our good luck that morning. After a right
royal breakfast we got still another belated pavement to clean, and
when we had finished that our joint earnings made the sumptuous total
of one dollar and fifty cents, and we were not hungry.
It was a delightful walk back to the familiar lodging-house, where we
paid for a night’s lodging in advance, and so secured immediate access
to the washing and cleaning facilities of the establishment.
When we set forth again Clark looked fairly trim. His clothes were
well brushed and his boots were clean. He had been shaven, and his
face glowed with healthful exercise and the effects of nourishing,
sustaining food. We had been in conversation on the subject of going to
church. Clark opposed it warmly; besides, he had another plan. There
were certain foremen whom he was bent on seeing in the unoccupied quiet
of Sunday, in relation to the matter of a possible job.
“And I don’t take no stock in church, anyway,” he explained. “Fellows
like us ain’t expected there, and we ain’t wanted. If you ain’t dressed
in the style, you’re different from everybody else that’s there,
and there ain’t no fun in that. And if you do go, what do you hear?
Sometimes a preacher talks sense, and makes things reasonable to you,
but most of them talks rot, that you don’t believe nor they either.
I’d sooner read Tom Paine than hear all the preachers in this town. He
talks to you straight, in a way you can understand.”
I pleaded my knowledge of a preacher who would talk to us as “straight”
as Tom Paine, but to no purpose, for there remained the question
of dress. Then I urged our going to mass, where we should not be
embarrassed by our singularity; but this plea met with no favor at all,
and I was obliged to go alone to church, and did not see Clark again
until we met late in the evening at the lodging-house.
It was snowing fast at the end of the service-hour, giving high
promise of abundant work in the morning. On the strength of it I ate
a fifteen-cent dinner with a twofold feeling of satisfaction. Then I
began a diligent search for the place of meeting of the Socialists.
Sunday afternoon, I had learned, was their time of meeting. A
knowledge of the place was wanting, but only because it had not
occurred to me to look for an announcement of it in the newspapers of
the day before. And this was wholly indicative of my general frame of
mind in the connection. My preconceptions were strong. I had vision
of a bare, dimly lighted room in the far recess of an unfrequented
building, a room reached by dusty stairs and long, dark corridors,
closely guarded by sentries, whose duty was to demand the countersign
from those who entered and to give warning of danger in an emergency,
so that the inmates might escape by secret passages to the street.
I had made frequent inquiries of the men whom I met, and it was from
one of these that I learned that the time was Sunday afternoon; but
none of them knew the place nor seemed to take the smallest interest
in the matter. I thought that a policeman might be able to put me on
the track of the meeting, if he chose, but then I feared that there
were even chances that he would “run me in” as a revolutionary, upon
hearing my request. I concluded that if I should be so fortunate as
to find the place, it would be by some happy chance; and that if I
gained admission, it would be by a happier one, due largely to my
rough appearance.
I pictured this rude hall thronged with men, grizzled, bearded men,
with eyes aflame and hair dishevelled, listening in high excitement to
leaders whose inflammatory speeches lashed them into fury against all
established order. Curiosity kindled to liveliest interest under the
free play of imagination. In my eagerness I grew bolder. Repeatedly I
stopped workingmen upon the street, and asked to be directed. No one
knew, until I chanced upon a man who had a vague suspicion that the
Socialists met in a hall over a saloon somewhere in West Lake Street.
I crossed the river and passed under the dark-steel framework of the
elevated railway. The snow was falling through the still, sooty air
in heavy flakes, which clung to every exposed surface, and turned the
street-slime into a dark, granular slush. It seemed to be a region of
warehouses and cheap shops, but chiefly of saloons; scarcely a soul
was to be seen on the pavements; and brooding over the long, deserted
street was the decorous quiet of Sunday.
I quickened my pace to overtake three men in front of me. Before I
caught up with them they disappeared through a door which opened on
the pavement. It was that of a saloon. The shades were drawn, and
the place, like all the others of its kind, had every appearance
of being closed for the day. I tried the door, and, finding it
unlocked, followed the men inside. They had already mingled in a group
of workingmen who sat about a large stove in the far corner of the
bar-room, drinking beer and talking quietly.
They did not notice me until the one of whom I inquired appealed to
the others for some knowledge of the question. Then there was a moment
of passing the inquiry from one to another, until a good-looking young
workman spoke up.
“Why, I know,” he said; “I’ve just come from there. It’s over in
Waverley Hall, corner of Lake and Clark.”
“Will you help me to get into the meeting?” I asked. “I am a stranger
here, and I should very much like to go.”
“There ain’t no trouble,” he responded; “you just go up two flights of
steps from the street, and walk right in.”
It was even as he said. At the level of the first landing was a
restaurant, with a strikingly fine portrait of Burns near the entrance.
My curiosity was at a high pitch when I reached the second landing. It
was ill-lighted, and it opened first into an almost dark store-room,
in whose deep recesses were great stacks of chairs. But a single step
to the right brought one to the wide-open door of Waverley Hall and a
company of Socialists in full session. A man sat beside the door with
a small table before him, on which in neat array were some attractive
paper editions for sale. My eye fell in passing upon “The Fabian
Essays,” and Thorold Rogers’s “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” and an
English version of Schäffle’s “Quintessence of Socialism.”
“May I go in?” I asked of the man.
“Oh, certainly,” he replied. “Walk right in, and take any vacant seat
you choose.”
I thanked him, and walked up a central aisle with rows of seats on
either side, where sat from two or three hundred men and a few women.
By the time that I had found a seat half way to the daïs, at the far
end of the hall, where sat the chairman of the meeting, I was already
deeply interested in the speech of a man who stood facing the company
from the side, with his back against the wall. Slender and of medium
height, with sandy hair slightly touched with gray, with an expression
of ready alertness on his intelligent face, he was speaking fluently in
good, well articulated English, and with deep conviction his evident
inspiration.
“What we want is education,” he was saying; “an education which will
enlighten the capitalistic class as well as our own. We serve no useful
end in denouncing the capitalists. They, like us, are simply a product
of the competitive system, and individually many of them are good and
generous men. But we shall be furthering the cause of Socialism in
trying to show them their share of the evils under which we all live.
How that, for example, owing to the present organization of society, in
spite of all the safeguards which entrench private property, not even a
capitalist can feel assured that his children or grandchildren may not
be beggars upon the streets.”
Such views, it seemed to me, at least suggested some catholicity of
mind in “the Peddler,” as the speaker afterward declared himself to
be. When he took his seat several men were on their feet at once,
appealing to the chair, and I saw that the meeting was well in hand,
for the chairman instantly singled out one for the privilege of the
floor, addressing him politely by name, prefixing, however, the title
“Comrade,” much as “Citizen” was used in the French Revolution and
after.
The well-grown muscular, intelligent workingman was the dominant type
among them, but the general average in point of respectability was so
high that it gave to the company rather the appearance of a gathering
of the _bourgeoisie_ than of proletarians. Had the proportion between
men and women been reversed, without change of average status, I might
have been in a prayer-meeting. But the prayer-meeting in sustaining the
resemblance would have been one of marked vitality.
Speeches were following one another in quick succession. Some were
good and some were vapid; some were in broken English, and others were
in English more than broken; but all were surcharged with the kind of
earnestness which captivates attention. Irresistibly at times one was
reminded of the propaganda of a new faith. Much was said the meaning of
which I could not catch, but the spirit of it all was not far to seek.
Here there was no cant; there was room for none. These men believed
that they had hold of a truth which is regenerating society. In the
face of a world deep-rooted in an individualistic organization of
industry and of social order, they preached a gospel of collectivism,
with unbounded belief in its ultimate triumph.
At times there was a malignant animus in what they said, when argument
was enforced from sources of personal experience; for men would speak
with the intensity of feeling of those who know what hunger is and what
it is to hear their children cry for bread, while within their sight
is the wasteful luxury of the rich. But a certain earnest moderateness
of speech was far more common, and it sometimes revealed a breadth of
view and an acquaintance with economics which to me were astonishing.
Yet, after all, it was the personal note that they touched most
effectively in what they said. Strong, sturdy men, with every mark
upon them of workmanlike efficiency, spoke feelingly of the relation,
which they said, was growing up between what they called “the two great
classes of society,” the employing and the employed. They declared the
wage-earner essentially a “wage-slave” under present conditions, and
they contrasted his lot unfavorably with that of an actual bondsman.
The chattel-slave, they said, his master buys outright, and having
made him thus a part of his invested capital, he shields him, out of a
purely selfish motive, it is true, yet shields him, from bodily harm.
But not the body of an industrial slave, merely his capacity for work,
his employer buys, and he may drive him to the exhaustion of his last
power of endurance, knowing perfectly well that, should he wreck him
physically, the labor market would instantly supply a hundred men eager
to take the vacant place on the same terms. And it is little relief
to the feelings of the wage-slave, they added, to be assured that he
is not sold, but is free to sell his labor in the open market, when
he recalls the hard necessity that conditions that freedom. It was
interesting to find them paraphrasing, as Old Pete had done in the
logging camp, the dictum of Carlyle--
“Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the
liberty to die by starvation, is not so divine.”
Then, as an expression of the belief of the gathering, a member
introduced a resolution which pronounced it to be a truth in the
relation of the individual to society, that “in case a man, acting upon
the theory that society owes him a living, should refuse to work, and
should steal, _he_ would be a criminal, and ought to be deprived of his
personal liberty and be forced to work. But in case a man, acting upon
the theory that society owes him a chance to earn a living, should find
no opportunity, and should, therefore, be forced to steal, _society_
would be the criminal, and ought to furnish the remedy.”
The resolution was passed unanimously and with much show of approval.
But I was more interested in its introducer. He was a curious departure
from the prevailing type; short and straight and slender, with a small,
thin face whose skin was like old, exquisite, wrinkled parchment.
His bright eyes, set close together, moved ceaselessly as though
sensitive to a certain mental restlessness; a thin aquiline nose
curved delicately in the nostrils above a gray mustache which half
concealed a thin-lipped mouth of uncertain drawing. Over all was a
really fine, dome-like brow, quite bald and polished, while from the
sides and back of his head there grew a mass of iron-gray hair which
fell curling to his shoulders. I shall take the liberty of calling
him “the Poet.” There was a nervous grace in his movements, and a
thorough self-possession in his manner, and a quality of cultivation
and refinement in his voice and speech, which were clearly indicative
of breeding and education and of native talent. Yet his position
among the Socialists seemed not at all that of a distinctive leader;
he was simply one of the company, on terms of perfect equality, and
he addressed the others and was himself addressed with the fraternal
“Comrade” in all the intimacy of primitive Christianity. It was with
instant anticipation of the pleasure of it that I learned from the
announcements that the Poet would read, in an early meeting, a paper on
the burning question of the opening of the World’s Fair on Sundays.
A woman sat near the front. I had seen her in frequent whispered
consultation with the chairman, whom I shall call “the Leader,” and
with the Poet and the Peddler and other members who sat about her, and
I judged that she was high in the councils of the Socialists, and I
shall name her “the Citizeness.”
In the midst of the applause which marked the passage of the
resolution, she was on her feet--a dark, portly woman of middle
age, dressed very simply in black, bearing herself with an air of
accustomedness which showed that she was by no means a novice on the
floor, and speaking, when quiet was restored, with a directness and
an unaffected ease which had in them no loss of femininity. But you
had only to watch closely in order to see nature avenge herself in a
certain self-assertation which the Citizeness felt forced at times
to assume, for the sake of emphasis, and in a certain very feminine
straining after the sarcastic.
[Illustration: IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF
THE RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET.]
She held a newspaper in her hand, and from it, she said, she wished to
read a fragment of a speech made by Mr. ---- to a large gathering of
his subordinates in the administration of a railway system of which he
is the president.
It was a short paragraph, in the characteristic, oratorical English of
that genial railway president when he becomes serious, and its purport
was simply a charge to those who bear to workingmen the relation of
authoritative direction to treat them with the utmost consideration.
“These are anxious times,” he said, substantially, “and there are grave
indications which go to show that workingmen are increasingly regarding
themselves as a class apart and their interests as being antagonized
by those of their employers. All employers and directors of labor in
all personal contact with their men should, therefore, exercise the
greatest care in their treatment of them, to the end that these men may
not be made to feel unnecessarily what is distasteful to them in their
condition of subordination.”
“That,” said the Citizeness, “is a significant sign of the times. I
have rarely seen words which indicate more clearly the growing frame of
mind of the capitalists. They are beginning to wake up to the fact of
danger. Oh, yes, when it begins to be a question of self-preservation
they show signs of some knowledge of the actual situation! But just
see how foxy they are. Mr. ---- does not tell his fellow-employers to
treat their men well because they ought to, and he doesn’t talk any
foolishness about the interests of labor and capital being identical.
He knows better than that. He knows perfectly well that the men in the
employ of his corporation are wage-slaves. He knows it a good deal
better than most of the men themselves know it. And what he is telling
his fellow-capitalists, who are beginning to feel alarm over the
situation, is this, that in all their treatment of their men they must
make a point of disguising from them their real condition of servitude.
Keep them in servitude, of course, but by all possible means keep them
in ignorance of it, for the greatest danger to the existing order of
things lies in an awakening of workingmen, and already there are signs
of such an awakening, and ‘the times’ are, therefore, ‘anxious.’”
Tumultuous applause followed this sally. It expressed the prevalent
thought as no word of the afternoon had done. “Capital conspiring to
maintain the existing bondage of labor--growing anxious at symptoms
of dawning intelligence among its slaves, and disclosing, in a moment
of unguarded anxiety, its real spirit through a feigned one!” “What
clearer proof of the truth could be asked?” men seemed to say, as they
looked eagerly into one another’s faces, and kept on applauding.
Before the noise subsided the Peddler again had gained the floor. He
harked back to his original theme of “education,” and was showing its
applicability to the situation from the new point of view.
“The greatest obstacle to Socialism,” he exclaimed, with
some vehemence, “is the brute ignorance among ourselves, the
working-classes. And the greatest bulwark of the cruel, crushing,
competitive anarchy under which we suffer and die is this same
ignorance of the workers. It is not organized capital that blocks the
way of Socialism, for organized capital is unconsciously hastening
the day when all capital will be organized under the common ownership
of all the people. It is the dead weight of poor, blinded, befooled
wage-slaves which hangs like an incubus about the neck of Socialism.
It is through this that the truth must make its way, and will make its
way, until workingmen at last awake to an acceptance of that which so
long has been striving with them to get itself accepted.
“But alas! alas! how slow the process is! And through what density of
ignorance and indifference and prejudice must the light shine!
“Sitting in the street-car beside me, as I rode down this afternoon,
was a workingman whom I know well. I invited him to come to this
meeting with me. I told him that we were going to talk about matters
which concerned him deeply. And what did he say? Why, he laughed in
my face, and said that he did not see much sense in talking about
such things, and that he preferred putting in his Sunday afternoon
at the ‘mat-in-ee,’ and having a good laugh. Poor, miserable wretch!
working like a galley-slave through the week, and caring for nothing
on his day of rest but an extra allowance of sleep, and then further
forgetfulness of his daily lot in the crowds and the lights and the
illusions and heart-breaking fun of the cheap theatres. All that
remains for him then is to go home drunk, and get up the next morning
to the twofold hell of his common life.”
It was growing dark within the hall, and the meeting was quietly
adjourned until the next Sunday. But the members were slow in leaving.
They formed into small groups, and went on discussing earnestly the
topics of the afternoon, as they stood among the benches, or moved
slowly toward the door.
The street-lights were burning with flickering, dancing effect through
the falling snow, and under them great crowds of working-people came
streaming through the wide-open doors of the theatres, swarming upon
the pavements and in the street-cars, well-dressed, and quiet in the
pre-occupation of pleasure-seekers homeward bound, and not a little
impatient for early transportation.
I walked alone in the direction of the lodging-house. Deep is the
spell of real conviction, and the thoughts of these working-people,
all alive with belief, were passing warm and glowing through my mind.
That there are multitudes of workers who are looking earnestly for a
better social order, and who intelligently and firmly believe in its
possibility, I had known, but never before had I felt the inspiration
of actual contact with them.
And the fascination of their point of view! “A world full of want
and misery and cruelty, by reason, most of all, of the wasteful war
of competition between man and his brother man in the wilderness of
anarchical production in which the people blindly wander; while over
against them, awaiting their occupation, is a promised land of peace
and plenty, where poverty and want, and their attendant miseries and
tendencies to moral evil, will be unknown, if men can but be induced to
cross the Jordan which separates lawless competition from intelligent
and provident co-operation.”
How quick and sure is such an appeal to the human heart! It is the
world-old charm, charming men anew. A royal road at last, a wide gate
and a broad way leading unto life! The way of salvation made easy! It
is the Patriarchs again trusting to their sacrifices; the old Jews
to circumcision and the blood of Abraham; the spiritually blinded
Christians to their outward symbols; and all of them deaf to that
truest word of all philosophy, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
It is so easy to conceive of some change in outward conditions, some
“remedy,” some “solution” for the ills from which we suffer, and
which, having been accepted, would lift life to a plane of harmonious
and frictionless movement, and set us free henceforth to follow our
own wills and purposes and desires. And it is so supremely difficult
to realize that the way of life lies not that way at all, not in the
pursuit of happiness nor in the fulfilment of our own wills, but in
realizing that the universe is governed by laws of right and justice
and truth, and in bringing our wills into subjection to those laws and
our actions into harmony with them.
One of these laws, I take it, is the law “the universal brotherhood of
man.” And it is by the practical denial of this law in the dealing of
men with their fellow-men that much of the world’s cruelest misery has
been caused, and much of the seed of terrible retribution has been sown.
It was their firm belief in the truth of brotherhood which gave to
the words of the Socialists their greatest strength and charm. It was
plainly fundamental to all their views. Ignorance and prejudice and
unphilosophical thinking warped their expressed ideas and made their
speeches very human, but yet in them all was this saving hold on
truth, a living belief in the solidarity of the human race and in the
responsibilities which grow out of the bond of universal kinship.
At the corner near my lodging-house I stood still for a few moments
watching the deft movements of two young children who were busy near
the curb. The long, wide street lay a field of glistening diamonds
where the blue-white electric light was reflected from the snow. A
drunken man reeled past me, tracking the untrodden snow at the sides
of the beaten path along the centre of the pavement. A dim alley at
my right lost itself in almost impenetrable darkness, on the verge of
which a small wooden house appeared tottering to ruin and as though the
weight of the falling snow were hastening its end. From out the alley
came the figures of three young women who were laughing gayly as they
crossed the street in company and walked on toward the post-office.
The street was very still and lonely for that quarter, and the two
little girls worked diligently, talking to each other, but oblivious
apparently to everything but their task. I drew nearer to see what they
were doing. A street-light shone strong and clear above them, and they
were in the path of a broad stream of yellow glare that poured from the
windows of a cheap chop-house. They were at work about a barrel which
stood on the curb. I could see that it was full of the refuse of the
eating-house. Scraps of meat and half-eaten fragments of bread and of
vegetables lay mixed with bones and egg-shells and vegetable skins in a
pulpy ooze, rising to the barrel rim and overflowing upon the pavement
and in the gutter. An old wicker basket, with paper covering its ragged
holes, rested between the children, and into this they dropped selected
morsels of food. The larger girl was tall enough to see over the top
of the barrel, and so she worked there, and I saw her little hands
dive into the soft, glutinous mass after new treasures. The smaller
one could only crouch upon the pavement and gather thence and from the
gutter what edible fragments she could find. I watched them closely.
The older child was dressed in thin, ragged cotton, black with filth,
and her matted, stringy hair fell from her uncovered head about a lean,
peaked face that was as dirty almost as her dress. She wore both shoes
and stockings, but the shoes were far too large for her, and through
their gaping holes the cold and wet entered freely. Her sister was
more interesting to me. She was a child of four or five. The snow was
falling upon her bare brown curls and upon the soft white flesh of her
neck, and over the damp, clinging, threadbare dress, through which
I could trace the delicate outlines of an infant’s figure. Her warm
breath passed hissing through chattering teeth in the intervals between
outbursts of a deep, hoarse cough which shook her frame. Through the
streaking dirt upon her hands appeared in childish movement the dimples
above the knuckles, and the dainty fingers, red and cold and washed
clean at their tips in the melting snow, had in them all the power and
mystery of the waxen baby touch.
With the quick illusion of childhood they had turned their task into a
game, and they would break into exclamations of delight as they held up
to each other’s view some discovered morsel which the finder claimed to
be the best.
“What are you going to do with these scraps?” I asked of the older
child.
Her bloodless lips were trembling with the cold, and her small, dark
eyes appeared among the shreds of tangled hair with an expression
in them of a starved pariah whose cherished bone is threatened. She
clasped the basket with both hands and half covered it with her little
body.
“Don’t you touch it!” she said, fiercely, while her anxious eyes
searched the street in hope of succor.
[Illustration: “DON’T YOU TOUCH IT!” SHE SAID, FIERCELY.]
It was easy to reassure her, and then she spoke freely.
“Ma sent us to get some grub for supper,” she explained. “Ma’s got
three boarders, only two of ’em ain’t paid nothing for a month, and pa,
he’s drunk. He ain’t got no job, but he went out to shovel snow to-day,
and ma thought he’d bring her some money, but he came home drunk. She’s
mindin’ the baby, and she sent us for grub. She’d lick us if we didn’t
find none; but I guess she won’t lick us now, will she? That’s where
we live,” and one little chapped finger pointed down the alley to the
crumbling hovel in the dark.
The children were ready to go home, and I lifted the younger girl into
my arms. Her sister walked beside us with the basket in her hand. The
little one lay soft and warm against me. After the first moment of
surprise, she had relaxed with the gentle yielding of a little child,
and I could feel her nestle close to me with the trustful ease which
thrills one’s inmost heart with feeling for which there are no words.
We opened the shanty door. It was difficult at first to make out the
room’s interior. Dense banks of tobacco-smoke drifted lazily through
foul air in the cheerful light of a small oil-lamp. Shreds of old
wall-paper hung from dark, greasy plaster, which was crumbling from
the walls and ceiling and which lay in accumulations of lime-dust
upon a rotting wooden floor. A baby of pallid, putty flesh was crying
fretfully in the arms of a haggard, slatternly woman of less than
thirty years, who sat in a broken chair, rocking the baby in her arms
beside a dirty wooden table, on which were strewn fragments of broken
pottery and unwashed forks and spoons and knives. A rough workman,
stripped to his shirt and trousers, sat smoking a clay pipe, his bare
feet resting in the oven of a rusty cooking-stove in which a fire was
smouldering. Upon a heap of rags in one corner lay a drunken man asleep.
“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.”
[Illustration: “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.”]
* * * * *
In the continued search for work through the succeeding day it was
natural to drift early into the employment bureaus. Clark and I made
a careful round of these, he in search of employment at his trade and
I of any job that offered. Here, too, however, we were but units in
the great number of seekers. Some of the agencies offered for a small
fee and a nominal price of transportation to ship us to the farther
West or to the Northwest and insure us employment with gangs of
day-laborers, but of work in Chicago they could promise none.
In the course of a day last week, as I was going about alone, I was
attracted by the prominent sign of an employment bureau, on the
West Side, which we had not visited so far. It was the conventional
bureau, much like the office of a steamship company. It occupied
the floor above the basement, reached by a flight of steps from the
pavement; a row of wooden chairs stood along the outer wall; a wooden
partition extended down the centre of the room, with a door and two
windows in it. The hour was noon and the office was deserted but for a
comparatively young man of florid face and close-set, light-brown eyes,
thin hair, and a bristling mustache clipped close above his mouth. He
was at work upon his books behind one of the windows. With a direct,
matter-of-fact glance he looked me over, and then his eye sought the
place on the open page held by his finger.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I am looking for work,” I said. “Have you any employment to offer?”
“What kind of work?”
“I am a day-laborer,” I replied.
“Nothing,” he said, laconically, and his eye followed the finger as
it moved across the open page.
I waited for a moment, thinking that he might say more, but he remained
silent at his work.
“If not in Chicago, perhaps you can put me in the way of work near
here,” I ventured.
“Young man,” he said, and his clear, cold eyes were looking straight
into mine, “Young man, we can’t get enough of you fellows in the spring
and summer time; we have to go to you and beg you to go to work. You’re
mighty independent then, and you don’t give a damn for us. But it’s our
turn now. You can do some begging now and see how you like it. It’s
good enough for you. No, there ain’t a job that I know of in Chicago
that you can get, unless it is in the sewers, and you ain’t fit for
that.”
“But give me a chance at it,” I urged.
“I wouldn’t take the responsibility,” he answered. “It would kill a man
of your build in a week, and you couldn’t pass the first inspection,
anyway.” And so ended my efforts through the employment agencies.
The newspapers are always an unfailing resort, as a hopeful source of
information of any demand for labor. A newspaper in the very early
morning, before the city is astir, is a treasure, for any clew to work
can then be promptly followed up with some chance of one’s being the
first to apply. Papers are to be had in abundance later in the day in
public reading-rooms and about railway stations and hotel-corridors.
It is, however, the newspaper damp from press that is most valuable
to us, and between us and its possession is often the insuperable
barrier of its price. The journals which early post their issues upon
bulletin-boards are public benefactors, and about these boards in the
early dawn often there are groups of men who study closely the “want
columns.”
A very little experience was enough to disclose the fact that there
is a wide difference in the character of these notices in different
newspapers. In some issues the want-column is very short, but the
statements bear every mark of genuineness; in others it is promisingly
long, but, when carefully analyzed, it proves to be chiefly a
collection of decoys for the unwary. The city seems to be full of men
and women seeking employment. Not only are there the penniless common
workmen of my class, whose number must be reckoned in many thousands,
and among whom the professionally idle form, of course, a large
percentage, but there are multitudes of mechanics and skilled workers,
of whom Clark is a type. And beyond these is an army of seekers after
salaried posts like those of clerks and bookkeepers and the various
subordinate positions of business and professional life. Not all were
penniless when they began their search for work there. Hundreds of
them had a little store of money when their last employment gave out,
or they brought with them when they came their savings, which they
hopefully counted upon to last until a new place had been found.
How large a body of sharpers live by preying upon the credulity of
these classes it would be difficult to discover, as it also would be
difficult to discover all the tricks of their trade. The craft of
the bunco-steerers is certainly well known, and yet it perennially
finds its victims, and largely, no doubt, among the classes of whom
I am speaking. But there are other snares, less sudden but quite as
disastrous as those of the bunco-steerers, and far more insidious,
since they have about them the apparent sanction of legitimate
business. It is these that make most open use of the want-columns of
certain of the newspapers. Agencies are advertised, and in them, after
the payment of a small fee and the purchase of the needed outfit, large
earnings are guaranteed as the result of putting some product upon
the market. Opportunities are offered for the investment of a little
capital--sums as low as five and ten dollars are solicited--and immense
returns are promised. Requests for men are made in urgent terms:
“Wanted--three--five--seven men at once. Steady employment guaranteed;
good pay. No previous experience necessary. Apply at No. -- ----
Street, second floor front.”
One morning I marked a dozen or more of these notices in one newspaper,
and carefully made the rounds of the addresses given. In every case
I found an establishment which purported to do business at coloring
photographs. I was offered employment in each instance. The conditions
were as uniform as those governing a regular market. Two dollars was
the invariable fee for being taught the secret of the process. One
dollar would purchase the needed materials.
There was always a strong demand, enough to insure abundant work until
spring. “Our agents are sending in large orders all the time,” was
the conventional explanation. “You can soon learn to color ten or
twelve photographs in a day, and we will pay you at the rate of three
dollars a dozen for them.” The discovery that I had no money invariably
brought the interview abruptly to an end in an atmosphere which cooled
suddenly. I met many actual victims of these devices; one will serve as
a type.
We both had been sitting for some time on a crowded bench in the lobby
of a lodging-house. Each was absorbed in his own “bitterness,” and
oblivious to the presence of other men and to the tumult of the room.
My companion was cheerfully responsive when I spoke to him, and we
both accepted gladly the relief of an interchange of confidence. He
was three days beyond the end of his resources. So far he had been
fortunate in securing the cost of food and the price of a ten-cent
lodging, and had not yet been forced to the station-house. But on that
evening, for the first time, he had learned of the station lodging. It
loomed for him as the logic of events, and he dreaded it. It was of
this that he was thinking gloomily when I spoke to him.
Born and bred in the country, he had grown up in ignorance, not of
hard, honest work, nor altogether of books, but of the world. He had
lived at home and worked on his father’s farm and attended the winter
sessions of the district school until he was sixteen, when his father
and mother died, and the farm and all of their possessions were sold to
pay the mortgage, and he was left penniless. Then he worked for other
farmers for two years, and studied as best he could. Finally he secured
a “second-grade certificate” to teach school, and he had taught in
the winter sessions for two years, working as a farm-hand through the
summers.
His coming to Chicago was a stroke of ambition. A post as a salesman
or a bookkeeper could be got, he had felt sure, if he was persistent
enough in his search, and this, he thought, would serve him as a
starting-point to a business career. He had counted upon a long, hard
search for place, and so he had come forearmed with his savings, which,
when he reached Chicago, more than two months before this evening,
amounted to a little over fifty dollars when he found himself in
lodgings in a decent flat on Division Street.
He paid at first two dollars a week for a room which contained a bed
and bureau and a wash-stand, and which was warmed by a small oil-stove.
There was a strip of carpet on the floor, and a shade at the window
which looked out upon an alley and the blank brick wall of a house
opposite. The bed-linen was changed once in two weeks. In addition
to that outlay he was spending, on an average, fifty cents a day for
food and an occasional dime in car-fare. All this was luxury. His last
lodging, before he was forced upon the street, was a seventy-five-cent
closet in a house on Meridian Street, on the West Side. The room
contained a cot with an old mattress and some blankets, and there was a
soap-box on end which would hold a lamp. He was obliged to wash himself
at the sink in the public passage.
There had been an analogous change in the range of employment sought.
All idea of a mercantile post had been at last abandoned, and he was in
for any honest living to which his hands could help him.
It was when he had broken his last five-dollar note that he made
once more the rounds of the doubtful offices which offer work. A
photograph-coloring establishment was his final choice. He paid the
fee of two dollars, received the instructions, which were very simple,
purchased for a dollar a box of materials, accepted half a dozen
photographs to begin upon, and then went to his room with his mind made
up to succeed at the work if there was any success in it.
With utmost patience and care he practised upon the pictures.
Difficulties in the process arose against which he had not been warned.
He went for further instructions and was given them willingly. After
nearly three days of almost constant industry he finished the six
photographs. These were to yield him a dollar and a half, and he took
them with a sense of achievement to the office. His employer examined
them and good-naturedly pointed out certain defects which he was asked
to remedy. The remedy seemed simple, but he saw at a glance that, in
reality, it would require his undoing practically all his work and
performing it over again, at a great risk of ruining the photographs in
the attempt.
He thought that he saw an escape from that, so he proposed to his
employer that the alterations should be made at the establishment;
that he himself should be paid nothing for the first work, but that
he should be given a second lot of pictures to color. The man agreed
instantly, and handed to him a fresh package containing half a dozen
photographs. These he carried back to his room. When he undid the
wrapper he found that he had been given a job which would require at
least a week to finish. Each photograph was unlike the others. Besides
one or two more or less difficult human figures in each, there were
elaborate backgrounds of draperies and rustic benches and potted
plants. He took the package back and asked for something simpler--more
within his power as a beginner. His employer explained to him
cheerfully that he had nothing else just then, but that he was sure of
easier work for him by the time that he had finished this.
The poor fellow walked out into the street knowing that he had been
swindled out of three dollars and three days’ hard work, and that
penniless now, he must take up the search again, and that there was no
redress for him.
Several times after this I saw him and I pressed upon him each time
the plan of returning to his former home in northern Indiana, or
striking out anywhere into the open country, where his intelligence and
his former experience would stand him in good stead, and where he would
probably not have to look long for a job. This was keenly distasteful
to him, for it would be a tacit acknowledgment of defeat, and the man
was not without courage and pluck. I met him last one early morning
after his first night as a lodger in a station-house. His eyes were
starting from his head, and he wore the wild, hunted look which I had
watched with alarm in Clark. He would scarcely stop to talk. He was off
for the open country and his former home.
* * * * *
Before many days had passed Clark and I began to lose the sense of
being recruits in the army of the unemployed. We soon acquired the
feeling of veterans, and with it a certain naturalness as of long
habit. It is not a little strange how swift this adjustment is. We
fell into some of the ways of the other men with an ease which seemed
to imply a long antecedent wont. This was after Clark had despaired of
work in a foundry, and had reached the level of willingness to sweep a
crossing for a living, if only he could get the job.
One of the habits which came most readily to us was to join the crowds
which stand in the early morning about the gates of large productive
institutions. Sometimes a superintendent finds himself short-handed of
common labor in a permanent department of the work or for an emergency,
and he sends a foreman out to the gates to secure the needed men. This
happens very rarely, if I may judge from our experience; and yet, upon
so slender a chance as this, hundreds of men stand each day in the
market-places for labor, waiting hopefully for some husbandman in want
of workers.
Clark and I soon made a considerable round. One morning we were at the
gates of the Exposition grounds, another at the Stock-yards, and then
at various factory gates on the West Side.
We were up at five one clear, cold morning near the middle of December,
in order to try our luck at the gates of a factory which lies four
miles or more from the heart of the city. It was no great hardship to
set off without a breakfast, for we had supped heartily on the night
before, and had gladly spent our remaining cash for beds in preference
to sleeping in the station-house.
Out of a cloudless sky blew a strong, dry, northwest wind across the
snowless prairies, and it cut sharply, at right angles, through the
long diagonal street which we followed to the far southwest. We did
not loiter, for it took our fastest gait to keep us warm. The buildings
shielded us in part, but around the corners the wind caught us with its
unchecked force, and enveloped us often in clouds of driven dust which
rose from the surface of the frozen streets. There was exhilaration in
the walk; when we reached the centre of the viaduct which carries Blue
Island Avenue across the various lines of railway which enter the city
between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, we were in the full, unimpeded
gale, and looking back we could see across the dark city the first
slender shafts of light dimming the eastern stars.
It was still dark when we reached the factory gates, for the better
part of an hour remained before the sun would be well up, and it was
almost half an hour before the beginning of the day’s work. We were
not the first to be on hand. Already there were groups of men who
stood before the fast-closed gate, or stamped slowly up and down on
the sleepers of the railway which enters the factory yard, or gathered
for shelter behind the walls of neighboring buildings. The number of
these men was growing fast. I thought at first that many of them were
employees waiting for the morning opening of the factory. But when
the heavy gate moved down its groove in answer to the keeper’s push,
disclosing the open area of the factory yard and the long platforms
flanking the warehouses, this company of waiting men, grown now to
eighty or a hundred strong, stood against the high board fence and
along the edges of a great stream of workingmen, which began to pour
with increasing volume through the narrow way. A bell sounded from
the factory tower, and you could hear the first slow movements of the
piston-rods, and the answering stir among the fly-wheels as they warmed
to swifter motion, and the straps and pulleys tuning up to the canticle
of the working-day.
[Illustration: WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES.]
The sudden on-rush of factory-hands was almost a miracle. Men seemed
to rise as by magic from the soil. They streamed from neighboring
tenements, and along the wooden sidewalks, and from out the horse-cars
which came down the streets loaded to the couplers. They had grown
to the number of an army, and in rough, uneven, changing ranks they
walked briskly, five, six, nine men abreast, while the bell tapped
off nervously the swift approach of seven o’clock. Two men seated in
a buggy drove their horse slowly into the thick of the crowd, which
deflected at the gate to let them pass, and then closed in behind with
increased momentum. The superintendent of the factory stepped down
from the buggy and climbed the staircase to his office.
The converging lines of workmen made denser the mass that pressed
quickly through the gate. There was little speech among them, and the
noise they made was the shuffling, broken step of an unorganized crowd.
But there was not wanting the inspiration of a moving throng of men.
Some of them were old and much bent with pain and labor, and there were
boys in the crowd who could be but little beyond their first decade
of life, but the great body of the hands were young men between the
ages of twenty and thirty-five. One could trace upon these faces all
the stages of life’s handicraft, in distorting human countenances into
grotesque variations from all normal types of beauty, and bringing out
upon them, in infinite variety, individual expressions of aggressive
power and the strength which comes of long endurance. Ah, the hideous
ugliness of the race to which we belong, and yet the more than beauty
of it in the strong lines it bears of honest work faithfully done and
of pain and sorrow bravely borne!
With the last sharp ringing of the bell there was a sudden rush of
the living stream of workers, and then it abruptly ceased, and we,
the unemployed, stood at both sides along the high board fence, like
so much useless foam tossed off by the swift current which had poured
through the narrow gate. The keeper began a monotonous march up and
down the opening before his sentry-box. He was a muscular, blue-eyed
Irishman of fifty-five or sixty, and he was in no wise ignorant of
his business. There was nothing to indicate that he was aware of the
presence of the crowd of expectant men, until some of us pressed too
near to the gate in our anxiety to catch sight of a foreman in search
of extra hands, and then he ordered us back with a violence which
showed that we were one of the pests of his existence.
From some unseen quarter of the factory yard a closely covered
wagon suddenly appeared. The paymaster presently descended from the
superintendent’s office, and entering the wagon, he was driven to the
gate, where a halt was made while two loaded revolvers were handed to
him by the porter, in full view of the idle men, and then he was driven
rapidly up the avenue toward the city.
It was the usual heterogeneous crowd that lingered there about the
gate. Most of them were Irishmen, I think, and there were certainly
Italians and Scandinavians and some Welshmen, and even a few Polish
Jews, while Clark and I, so far as I could judge, were the only native
born. Not all of them could have been in the homeless plight in which
we were, and there was scarcely a case of insufficient clothing among
them, while many seemed to be habitual workmen who knew the decencies
of home and of some home comfort. But there were not wanting men who,
like us, were evidently upon the streets, and not only in dress, but
in face, they suggested those who, if not already of that class, are
swiftly approximating to professional tramps.
There was wonderful stillness in the crowd, which now had broken into
small groups. A conscious tension possessed us, as of nervous watching
for an uncertain event. Men spoke to one another in low tones scarcely
above a whisper. An hour passed with nothing to break the monotony of
its long anxiety. We were fairly shielded from the wind, and the sun
had risen high and had begun to lend a generous aid to our efforts at
keeping warm in the frost-bit air. The pale crescent of the waning moon
had almost faded into the clear blue of the western sky. We soon were
aware of the relaxing of tension, and then the men began to drift away
toward other factories, or, disappointed, to their homes, or back to
the aimless living of the streets.
Just then a young Hungarian came among us--a man of twenty-five,
perhaps, short and erect and stocky, with an appearance of great
muscular strength and a nervous quickness of step which was in full
keeping with the wide-eyed inquisitiveness of his round, swarthy face.
He was looking inquiringly at the clusters of loitering men and the
open gate and the stolid porter in apparently heedless guard before it.
I saw his eye sweep the crowd in seeking for a fellow-countryman, for
it was written plain upon him that he was an immigrant and innocent of
any language but his own. One could fairly see his mental process, it
was all so clear: “I am looking for a job in this wide land of freedom
to workingmen. Here is a great factory, and the open gate invites me.
Why waste the time outside? For my part I shall go in at once and see
the boss, and then go quickly on with no loss of time, if I should not
be wanted here.” One foot was just over the steel rail upon which the
sliding gate moves, when, with the swiftness of the spring of a panther
which has been crouching for its prey, the heavy hands of the seemingly
careless watchman were upon his shoulders, and the man was held, amazed
and paralyzed, in a vice-like grip.
“What are you after?” roared the porter in his face.
There was a murmured attempt at speech, and then the laborer was faced
about with a suddenness and force that set his teeth to rattling in
his head, and the porter turned him loose with successive parting
kicks, which seemed to lift the fellow from the ground.
He was tingling with pain as he slunk in among us, but the expression
which he wore was one of strong, appealing bewilderment at the meaning
of it all.
It was over in a moment, and then the cold, cowering, hungry mass of
unhuman humanity at the gate broke into a low, gruff laugh.
It must have been this laugh that stung me to hot fury, for in an
instant I had lost all sense of cold and weariness and hunger, and I
was strong and warm in the wild joy of the lust for blood. With one
hand gripping his hairy throat I was pounding the porter’s eyes with
my right fist in blows whose frequency and precision surprised me into
greater joy. But there was a sudden end of clear memory when, with a
full-armed swing of his huge fist the keeper struck me in the face and
knocked me, limp and almost senseless, upon the planks, where I lay
choking down gulps of blood which flowed from a cut against my teeth.
[Illustration: I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR
BLOOD.]
Clark was bending over me.
“What in -- did you hit him for, you -- fool?” he hissed at me.
“I had a jolly good time doing it,” I explained; and I was sufficiently
recovered to laugh a little at the momentary sport which I had had in
making a fool of myself.
Clark helped me to my feet, and we walked off together, only I could
not walk very far at a stretch. He did not desert me, and he would not
leave the subject of my folly. But he changed his point of view at
length, and acknowledged, finally, that he was “glad that I had got in
a few licks on the porter’s eye,” an emotion which I warmly shared.
That day was chiefly memorable because of Clark’s final success in
finding work. It came from a most unexpected quarter. We were walking
together through Adams Street when a man touched Clark upon the
shoulder and withdrew to the doorway of a shop. Clark recognized him at
once as a foundry superintendent with whom he had been importunate for
work, and his face lighted up with a hopefulness which made the moment
almost tragic. I stood at the doorstep and listened.
“Ain’t you found a job yet?” began the superintendent.
“No.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about your case,” he continued. “We ain’t got
a job for you at the foundry,” he hastened to explain, “but I’ve heard
from a friend of mine in Milwaukee, and they’re short of men in your
line. Could you go up there?”
“I could walk,” said Clark.
“Well, that ain’t necessary. I--I’m good for a ticket,” added the
superintendent, with a look of embarrassment.
And he was as good as his word, for he went with Clark to the station,
where he added to the ticket a dollar, both of which were accepted as a
loan.
Clark was nearly mad with suppressed delight when he met me in the
entrance of the post-office, where he had asked me to await his return.
With his usual generosity he shared his good fortune with me, and,
before we went to the railway station together we had a farewell dinner
on beefsteak and onions and unlimited coffee and bread.
My own success followed Clark’s by only a few days, when I was taken
on as a hand-truckman in a factory on the West Side; but there is one
intervening experience which belongs distinctively to this part of the
general experiment.
I found, one early morning, among a lot of “fake” advertisements, which
I had come to recognize with ease, one notice of “a man wanted” which
rang with genuineness. Applicants were told to report at a certain shop
just without the Stock-yards at twelve o’clock that day. In ample time
I crossed over to Halsted Street and walked in a leisurely way down
that marvellous thoroughfare. It was not new to me, and I was missing
Clark sorely and was experiencing a new phase of the loneliness of
being “left behind.” And yet I could but mark again with fresh interest
the wonders of this great artery of the West Side in the five miles
of its length through which I walked to the appointed number. It is
essentially a cheap street: cheap buildings line it, in which tenants
rent cheap lodgings and shop-keepers employ cheap labor and sell cheap
wares of every kind to those of the poor “whose destruction is their
poverty.” Every sort of structural flimsiness looks down upon you as
you pass: ghastly imitations in stone of real, substantial buildings;
the unblinking fronts of glaring red-brick shells, whose shoddiness is
the more apparent in gaudy shops and in “all the modern improvements”
and in the heavy cotton-lace at the upper windows. And there are wooden
shanties with “false fronts,” after the manner of frontier “cities,”
and wooden hovels with sloping roofs which are far along in process of
decay, and here and there a substantial house which was built upon the
open prairie, and which looks with amazement upon the fungus growth
about it, while struggling pitifully to maintain its dignity in the
uncongenial company which it is forced to keep.
Down miles of such a street I went on sidewalks which were chiefly
rotting planks, with black mire, as of a pig-sty, straining through
the cracks under the pressure of passing feet. The street itself is
paved with cylindrical blocks of wood, ill laid at the beginning, and
having now closely pounded filth between them, while the whole surface
presents an infinite variety of concavities, in which, especially along
the gutters, lay garbage in frozen, shallow cesspools.
A saloon stood on almost every corner, and sometimes I counted seven
pawnbrokers’ signs within the limits of a square. It was interesting
to watch the run of “loan agencies,” and “collateral banks,” and other
euphemisms under which the business was disguised.
Large quantities of provisions lay heaped in baskets and measures
along the pavements in front of grocers’ shops, catching the soot
and the floating dust of the open street. Cheap ready-made and
second-hand garments hung flapping like scare-crows overhead, or
clothed grotesque wooden dummies which stood chained to the shop doors
or to the wood-work below the show-windows. Scores of idle men, with
the unvarying leaden eye and soggy droop of their kind, loungingly
exchanged the comfort of a mutual support with doorposts, chiefly of
saloons. Little children in every stage of condition, from decent
warmth to utter rags, and from wholesome cleanliness to dirt grown
clean in unconsciousness of itself, played about the pavements and in
the gutters, or ran screaming with delight across the street-car lines,
along which the trams moved slowly, drawn by horses with bells tinkling
from the harness.
The first sight of my destination was very reassuring. It was evidently
a shop of the first class. A second glance was disheartening, for
already there were fully thirty men before me, and the number was
increasing. From one of the men employed in the shop I learned that a
man from the packing-house of the firm would be out to see us at the
appointed hour. The appointed hour came and passed, and we waited on,
our numbers grown now to nearly fifty. It was not far from two o’clock
when the man appeared who had been commissioned to see us.
There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a hireling who is puffed up
with momentary authority but who knows nothing of responsibility.
The man who finally came among us was a clerical subordinate, sleek,
clean-shaven, overfed; a man of thirty, dressed as any like Johnnie
of the town, and, except for his slender hold upon the means of
livelihood, no better than most of the men who now hung breathless upon
his words.
He swaggered in among us with a leer and a call across the shop to a
fellow-employee.
“Say, Jim, how’s this for a collection of freaks, all out for a
fifteen-dollar job?”
Jim was silent; he did not see the joke any better than did we, who now
crowded about the clerk.
“Stand off,” he ordered us, with a gesture of impatience and an oath.
“Don’t you fellows come so near. I guess most of you need water more
than you need a job.”
There followed some minutes of such banter, while the clerk looked us
over and examined hastily some letters of recommendation which were
held out to him. Then abruptly, with the air of a busy man chafing at
the useless waste of his valuable time, he withdrew a step or two from
the crowd, and from this coign of vantage he arbitrarily singled out
four men. Having called them aside he ordered them to report at ten
o’clock on the next morning at the packing-house, where a member of the
firm would see them and select one of them for the place, which was
that of general utility man about a private house, at a wage of board
and lodging and fifteen dollars a month.
I was not one of the number. In a few moments the men had all gone
their several ways, but I waited behind, and seeing a chance of
speaking to the clerk alone, I went up to him.
“Would you mind looking at these references?” I asked, and handed out
two, one from the proprietor of the “---- House,” where I had served as
porter, and another from Mr. Hill, the farmer.
“Certainly not,” he said, good-naturedly; and when he had read them he
handed them back to me with the remark that I, too, might call with the
others at ten o’clock.
Under the stone arch which spans the entrance to the Union Stock-yards
I passed unchallenged the next morning. A wooden sidewalk led me
along a miry road which seemed to pierce the centre of the yards. Men
of widely varying ages passed and repassed me, mounted upon branded
mustangs. They were riders who cared nothing for appearance in either
kit or form, but rode with the free grace of cowboys. On every side
were scores of acres of open pens enclosed by stout wooden fences six
palings high, with water and fodder troughs along the sides. From
them came the deep, far lowing of a thousand herds of cattle which
stood crowded in the pens or thinned to a few remaining, all of them
patiently awaiting death. From great covered sheds you could hear the
ceaseless bleating of countless flocks of sheep. From long covered
passages overhead, each an awful bridge of sighs, there came the sharp
clatter of cloven hoofs on wooden planks, along which droves of cattle
were being driven to slaughter. In the distance beyond all this loomed
high the unsightly packing-houses, where, with scientific efficiency
and carefulest economy of materials, daily hecatombs are offered up for
human life.
I soon found my way to the desired office. It was ten o’clock exactly,
and to my great surprise I alone of the five selected men was on hand.
I was told to wait, and a corner near a high desk was indicated as a
place where I might stand. It was in a wide passage along which ranged
inner offices enclosed by ground-glass partitions. Clerks were passing
constantly from one office to another and meeting the requirements of
business errands as they came in. Presently one of them spoke to me,
and learning that I had received no reply from the clerk to whom I had
first made my purpose known, he politely volunteered his services, and
soon brought back word that Mr. ---- would see me in a few minutes.
The few minutes had grown to thirty, when one of the other five men
appeared. He was a fair-haired Swede of five-and-twenty, rather stout
in frame, and dressed all in black, his coat, of the “Prince Albert”
type, falling short of his knees, and disclosing about his neck and
wrists the white of neat linen. With his hair brushed smooth, and one
black-gloved hand grasping a fat umbrella and the other a soft felt
hat, he might have been a divinity student.
We nodded to each other as he took up his stand in another
out-of-the-way quarter of the hall and joined me in waiting for a
summons. Among the passing clerks there presently appeared the one who
had met us on the day before. He was not in bantering mood now, so he
asserted his superiority by ignoring us. The one who had already spoken
to me lost no opportunity as he passed of saying an encouraging word,
assuring us that Mr. ---- would certainly see us before long.
It was a little after twelve when I was finally called into the private
office of Mr. ----. I was rather faint from hunger and stiff from
standing still so long after a long walk.
Mr. ---- sat with his back to a window, in whose full light I stood,
hat in hand.
“You’re after this job I advertised, I understand,” he began.
“Yes.”
“Well, it ain’t no great job; it’s just doin’ chores round the house,
and I can’t afford to pay much for it. Have you ever done work like
that?”
“I have been a porter at a hotel.”
“Have you any recommends?” he asked, sharply. I handed to him the
two already mentioned, and as he read them I watched him with close
interest. Young, alert, intensely energetic, at the head, or near it,
of a prominent house, the controller, in part at least, of an enormous
enterprise, and a considerable personage, no doubt, in his own social
circle, yet his wholesale butchery of swine could scarcely be a
ghastlier slaughter than was his treatment of his mother-tongue.
He looked up at me.
“Say, young fellow, is them all the recommends you have? You was a very
short time at both of them places.”
This fatal defect in my references had never occurred to me, and I
began to stammer explanations which only served to get me into deeper
water. Mr. ---- interrupted me, and handing back my letters, he said:
“You’ll have to bring me something more satisfactory than them,” and
went on with his work.
The young Swede followed me out of the passage.
“Did you get the job?” he asked, in good English.
“No,” I said, “not yet. You have a good chance; you would better wait
until the boss sends for you.”
“I guess not to-day,” he answered, and he stolidly refused my advice,
and I saw him disappear by another way from the Stock-yards.