considerably reduced by my purchases in Chatham Square. He called my
attention that morning to a big German who was drinking beer at the
hotel bar after delivering several baskets filled with bread, rolls,
and pies, and said that he was a rich and stingy baker, whose wagon,
standing in front of the hotel, needed painting badly. I saw that
the lettering needed speedy restoration. I assured my chum that my
experience as assistant to the sailor painters on the Hoboken docks,
in addition to my natural skill in free-hand drawing, qualified me
for the job of restoring the lettering; Christian chuckled and made a
bee-line for the stingy German baker. I got the contract to restore the
lettering for five dollars and my meals, he to pay for the paints and
the brushes, which were to remain my property. Christian formulated
the contract and specified its terms very clearly; he was my business
manager, and he enjoyed it hugely. The next day I lunched with the
baker’s family, according to the terms of the contract, and after
luncheon, as soon as the wagon had returned from its daily route, I
started the work, interrupted by the supper only, and at nine o’clock
in the evening the job was finished to the full satisfaction of the
party of the first part. That evening found me richer by five dollars,
several paint pots and brushes, a huge home-made apple pie, and a new
and encouraging experience. Christian, for some reason unknown to me
at that time, seemed to look upon the whole affair as a joke, but
nevertheless he paid many compliments to my success as an artist. The
next day we left bright and early for his father’s house in Hoboken,
where in accordance with a plan conceived by Christian we were to spend
some time in painting and papering several of the rooms. Profiting by
the instructions which we received in sundry places, and after making
several unsuccessful attempts, we managed to master the art and to
finish the rooms to the full satisfaction of Christian’s father, who
confessed that no Hoboken expert could have done better. “This painting
is much better than that which you did on the baker’s wagon,” he said,
“because you added some dryer to the paint.” “Right you are,” said
Christian, “but I am to blame, because I purposely avoided telling
Michael to use some dryer on the baker’s wagon. I wanted to make two
jobs out of one.” “There will be several jobs, I am afraid,” said
Christian’s father, “because on the day after the lettering was done
the baker’s wagon was caught in a shower and all the fresh paint has
been washed off, and the wagon looks like a show.” Christian roared
with laughter, but seeing that I looked worried he whispered in my ear:
“Don’t worry, it serves him right; he wanted a twenty-dollar job done
for five dollars, because he took you for a greenhorn.” Christian made
a new arrangement for the relettering of the wagon and I earned another
five dollars, but no home-made apple pie. The German baker in Goerck
Street was neither as cordial nor as hospitable as he was before.
Christian encouraged me in the belief that I was a painter and
paper-hanger, and I felt that I had a trade; that feeling gave me much
confidence. Christian’s mental attitude was a revelation to me. He
actually believed that a boy can learn anything quickly and well enough
to earn a living, if he will only try. He certainly could do anything,
I thought, as I watched him in his little carpenter-shop in Hoboken.
He also had a lathe and was quite expert in wood and metal turning,
although he never served apprenticeship, as they do in Europe, in order
to learn these things. When I told Christian that, according to my
information on the immigrant ship, I was doomed to serve in America my
apprenticeship as a greenhorn, he said that a European greenhorn must
have told me that, and added, in an offhand manner, that I would be a
greenhorn as long only as I thought that I was one. My description of
a European apprenticeship amused him much, and he called it worse than
the slavery which was abolished here by the Civil War only a few years
prior to that date. When I asked him where he got all those strange
notions, he told me that these notions were not strange but genuine
American notions, and that he first got them from his mother, who was
a native American. His father and his father’s German friends, he
admitted, had the same notions as that greenhorn on the immigrant ship.
Christian certainly looked like a Friesland German, but his thoughts,
his words, and his manner of doing things were entirely different from
anything I ever saw in Europe. He was my first glimpse of an American
boy, just as the Vila on the Delaware farm was my first vision of an
American girl, and her mother my first ideal of a noble American woman.
They were the first to raise that mysterious curtain which prevents
the foreign-born from seeing the soul of America, and when I caught a
glimpse of it I loved it. It reminded me of the soul of my good people
in Idvor, and I felt much more at home. The idea of being a greenhorn
lost many of its horrifying features.
Christian left New York during that autumn to go into a shop in
Cleveland. Without him, West Street had no attractions for me. I
moved to the East Side of New York, so as to be near Cooper Union and
its hospitable library. I spent many hours in it after my days of
labor, or after my numerous unsuccessful daily trips in search of
employment. It was my spiritual refuge when things looked black and
hopeless. As winter approached, jobs grew alarmingly scarce, and my
money was rapidly approaching the zero level. My hall-room in Norfolk
Street was cheerless and cold, worse even than my little attic in
Prague. Neither the room nor its neighborhood attracted me in daytime;
I preferred to walk along the endless avenues. This exercise kept me
warm and gave me a chance to make frequent inquiries for a job at
painters’ and paper-hangers’ shops. When the prospects for work of
this kind appeared hopeless, I struck a new idea. Instead of walking
more or less aimlessly, in order to keep myself warm and familiarize
myself with the ways of the great city, I followed coal-carts, and
when they dropped the coal on the sidewalk I rang the bell and offered
my services to transfer the coal from sidewalk to cellar. I often got
the job, which sometimes was a stepping-stone to other less humble and
more remunerative employment. After placing the coal in the cellar and
getting my pay, I would often suggest to the owner that his cellar and
basement needed painting badly; most cellars and basements do. The
owner on being informed that I was a painter out of work, a victim of
the economic crisis, often yielded. The idea of a young and ambitious
painter being compelled to carry coal from sidewalk to cellar at fifty
cents a ton made a strong plea, stronger than any eloquence could make.
The scheme worked well; it did not lead to affluence, but my room-rent
was always paid on time, and I never starved. Often and often, however,
I had to keep my appetite in check. I always had enough to buy my bowl
of hot coffee and a brace of crullers for breakfast in a restaurant on
wheels, stationed near Cooper Union, where Third Avenue car-drivers
took their coffee on cold winter mornings.
During periods of financial stringency my lunches were a bowl of bean
soup and a chunk of brown bread, which the Bowery Mission supplied
for five cents. It was a splendid meal on those cold winter days. But
the Bowery Mission supplied a prayer-meeting with red-hot speeches as
dessert; some of these addresses I really enjoyed; there were speakers,
however, who offended me, because they confessed that they were
reformed drunkards and godless men, and they assured their hearers,
victims of the economic crisis just like myself, that they would
prosper if they would only sign the pledge and vow to return to Jesus.
I neither drank nor had I ever deserted Jesus; the reformed drunkard’s
views of human life depressed me and drove me away from the Bowery
Mission and from the Bowery.
Carrying coal from sidewalks to cellars and shovelling snow from
sidewalks during that memorable winter were healthful jobs and cheerful
enough, but not very remunerative; painting cellars and basements on
Lexington Avenue was more remunerative, but fearfully depressing. To
spend one’s time day after day in dark cellars and basements and pass
the night in a cheerless hall-room in Norfolk Street, surrounded by
neighbors who were mostly foreign-born of the most unattractive type,
was too much for a Serbian youth who knew the beautiful world as one
sees it from the pasture-lands of his native village and from the
banks of golden Delaware. The reading-room of the Cooper Union library
relieved somewhat my mental depression, although it was packed with
sad-looking victims of the economic crisis, who found their way from
the Bowery to the reading-room in order to keep warm. I longed to see
God’s world of the country again.
The opportunity came, and about the middle of April of that year, 1875,
I was on a farm in Dayton, New Jersey. My employer’s family consisted
of his wife and an elderly daughter, and I was the only farm-hand on
the place. They were apparently pleased with my work, and the ladies
took much interest in my personal welfare. But the farmer, call
him Mr. Brown, took it into his head that a youth who had lived one
whole winter in Norfolk Street, New York, near the ungodly Bowery,
needed spiritual regeneration. He was a very pious Baptist, and I
soon discovered that in his everlasting professions of omissions and
commissions he was even worse than that reformed drunkard whose sermons
had driven me away from the Bowery Mission and its vigorous bean soup.
Every Sunday his family took me to church twice and made me sit between
the female members of the family. I felt that the congregation imagined
that Mr. Brown and his family were trying their best to convert a
godless foreign youth and make a good Baptist out of him. Mr. Brown
seemed to be in a great hurry about it, because every evening he made
me listen for an hour at least to his reading of the Bible, and before
we parted for the night he would offer a loud and fervent prayer that
the Lord might kindle his light in the souls of those who had been
wandering in darkness. I know now that he had in mind the words of St.
Luke, “To give light to them that sit in darkness,” but at that time I
fancied that he referred to my painting operations in the cellars and
basements of Lexington Avenue, and interpreted his prayers as having a
special reference to me.
The joy of life which during the day I inhaled in the fresh fields of
the early spring was smothered in the evening by Mr. Brown’s views of
religion, which were views of a decrepit old man who thought of heaven
only because he had no terrestrial problems to solve. He did his best
to strip religion of every vestige of its poetic beauty, and of its
soul-stirring spiritual force, and to make it appear like a mummy of a
long-departed Egyptian corpse. A Serbian youth who looks to St. Sava,
the educator, and to the Serbian national ballads for an interpretation
of the Holy Scriptures, could not be expected to warm up for the
religion which farmer Brown preached. I thought of Vila and her mother
on the banks of the golden Delaware, and of the glorious opportunities
which they pointed out ahead of me, and I wondered whether farmer
Brown was one of these opportunities; if so, then there were some
opportunities in America from which I wished to run away.
[Illustration: NASSAU HALL, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY]
One Sunday evening, after the church service, farmer Brown introduced
me to some of his friends, informing them that I was a Serbian youth
who had not enjoyed all the opportunities of American religious
training, but that I was making wonderful progress, and that some day
I might even become an active member of their congregation. The vision
of my orthodox mother, of the little church in Idvor, of the Patriarch
in Karlovci, and of St. Sava, shot before my eyes like a flash, and
I vowed to furnish a speedy proof that farmer Brown was wrong. The
next day I was up long before sunrise, having spent a restless night
formulating a definite plan of deliverance from the intolerable boredom
inflicted upon me by a hopeless religious crank. The eastern sky was
like a veil of gold and it promised the arrival of a glorious April
day. The fields, the birds, the distant woods, and the friendly country
road all seemed to join in a melodious hymn of praise to the beauties
of the wanderer’s freedom. I bade good-by to the hospitable home of
farmer Brown and made a bee-line for the distant woods. There the merry
birds, the awakening buds on the blushing twigs, and the little wild
flowers of the early spring seemed to long for the appearance of the
glorious sun in the eastern sky. I did not, because I was anxious to
put as much distance as possible between farmer Brown and myself before
he knew that I had departed. When the sun was high in the heavens I
made a halt and rested at the edge of woods on the side of a hill. A
meadow was at my feet, and I, recalling the words of poet Nyegosh,
watched for “the bright-eyed dewdrops to glide along the sunbeams to
the heavens above.” The distant view as seen from the elevation of my
resting-place disclosed, near the horizon, the silhouette of a town
with towers and high roofs looking like roofs of churches. After some
three additional hours of wandering, I crossed a bridge over a canal
and found the distant town. There seemed to be one street only where
business was done; the rest of the town appeared to me like so many
beautiful convents. The tramp of many miles through woods and meadows
without any breakfast had made me ravenously hungry and somewhat tired.
The peaceful aspect of the monastic-looking town invited me to sit
down and rest and enjoy some food. I bought a shining loaf of bread
and, selecting a seat under an elm near a building which looked like
the residence of the Archbishop of Prague, I started my breakfast.
It consisted of bread only, and I enjoyed it as I had never enjoyed
breakfast before. Many boys, looking like students, passed by on
their way to the ecclesiastical-looking building; one of them watched
my appetite as if he envied it, and inquired whether I should like
some Italian cheese with my bread. He evidently thought that I was
an Italian, being misled by my ruddy cheeks and dark-brown hair. I
answered that Serbian cheese would suit me better. He laughed and said
that Serbia and Serbian cheese were unknown at Princeton. I answered
that some day perhaps Princeton might hear from Serbia. It is a curious
fact that, in 1914, I was the first man who was invited to Princeton to
give an address on the subject of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. The
late Moses Taylor Pyne was my host, and I pointed out to him the elm
in front of Nassau Hall where I had breakfasted some forty years prior
to that time. The students received my address very enthusiastically;
Dernburg addressed them two weeks later, and their heckling broke up
the meeting.
After finishing the loaf, I basked in the warm rays of the mellow
April sun, and fell asleep and dreamed that in the building where the
students went there was a large assembly of people who had gathered
there for the purpose of conferring some academic honor upon me. When
I woke up, I thought of the letter which I had written to my mother
from Hamburg, a year before, promising that I would soon return rich
in learning and in distinguished honors. The dream reminded me that my
promise was carefully recorded in the mechanism which controlled my
consciousness.
Princeton was unlike anything that I had ever seen up to that time.
I had read about Hilendar, the famous monastery on Mount Athos, on
the Ægean Sea, founded by St. Sava in the twelfth century. I had seen
pictures of its buildings, where monks lived the life of solitude and
study. Princeton, with its many monastic-looking buildings, I imagined
was such a place, where young men were given every opportunity to
study and become learned men so as to be able to devote their lives
effectively to such work as St. Sava did. As I walked slowly and
thoughtfully toward the railroad-station, a student met me and engaged
me in conversation. He was a little older than myself; kindness and
intelligence beamed from every feature of his handsome face. He knew a
great deal about Serbia, and even about the Serbs of Austria-Hungary,
and when I told him that I had come to America in search of knowledge,
he expressed the hope that he might some day see me enrolled as a
student in Princeton. A student at Princeton! With fellow students and
friends like this divinely handsome and gentle youth who accompanied
me to the station! Impossible! thought I, as I looked through the
car-window and saw the academic halls of Princeton gradually disappear
in the distance and realized at the same time that the train was
taking me back to the Bowery. Eight years later I read the letter
which I wrote to my mother describing Princeton, in which, in order
to encourage her, I had expressed a strong hope that some day I might
write to her and sign myself a student at Princeton.
I may add here that my good friend Henry Fairfield Osborn, the
distinguished scientist, was a sophomore at Princeton during that year.
He might have looked just like that gentle youth who showed me the way
to the railroad-station. President Wilson entered Princeton in the
autumn of that year.
III
THE END OF THE APPRENTICESHIP AS GREENHORN
The visions of Princeton persisted in my mind like after effects of
strong light upon the retina. That gentle youth’s suggestion that he
might some day see me enrolled as a student at Princeton kept ringing
in my ears, and sounded like mockery. A peasant boy from a Serb
village who a little over two years previously was wearing a peasant’s
sheepskin coat and cap to become a fellow student of those youths who
looked like young aristocrats seemed impossible. A European aristocrat
would never have suggested such a thing, and that puzzled me. I saw
an endless chain of difficult things between me and my enrolment
as a student at Princeton, the home for gentle American youth.
Social unpreparedness, I felt, was a much more serious difficulty
than unpreparedness in things which one can learn from books. This
difficulty could not be overcome by associating with people east of the
Bowery, and I was heading that way. The nearer the train approached New
York the less anxious I was to return to it. From Nassau Hall to the
Bowery was too abrupt a change, and from the Bowery to Nassau Hall the
change would have been even more abrupt. I compromised and looked up
Christian’s home on West Street.
Christian was still in Cleveland, but his father received me with open
arms and promised to find me a job. In less than a week he found me one
in a famous cracker factory on Cortlandt Street. An acquaintance of his
with the name Eilers, a Frieslander and distant relative of a famous
German writer of that name, was employed there; he steered me during
my first experiences in the factory. A place was given me in a squad of
boys and girls who punched the firm’s name upon a particular kind of
biscuit. The job was easy from the point of view of physical strength,
but it required much manual dexterity. In spite of my ambition to
advance to a high place in the squad I progressed very slowly. I soon
discovered that in manual dexterity the American boys and girls stood
very high; my hands moved fairly rapidly after some practice, but
theirs vibrated. I made up my mind that America was not a field in
which I should gather many laurels by efforts requiring much manual
dexterity. That idea had occurred to me before, when I first observed
Christian handling his lathe. One day I was at the delivery desk of the
Cooper Union Library, showing my library check to a youth behind the
desk who countersigned it before a book was delivered to me. I noticed
that he wrote rapidly, using sometimes his right hand and sometimes his
left with equal ease and with much skill. “How can I ever compete with
American boys,” said I, “when they can write with either hand better
than I can write with my right hand!”
There never was a doubt in my mind that American adaptability which
I observed on every occasion was in a great measure due to manual
training which young people used to get here. Christian’s suggestion,
mentioned above, that “a boy can learn anything quickly and well
enough to earn a living if he will only try,” I saw in a new light,
when I watched the work of those boys and girls in the factory. Yes,
American boys can, but not European, thought I. Lack of early manual
training was a handicap which I felt on every step during my early
progress in America. My whole experience confirmed me in the belief
that manual training of the youth gives them a discipline which
school-books alone can never give. I discovered later that three of
the greatest characters in American history, Franklin, Jefferson, and
Lincoln, excelled in practical arts requiring dexterity, and that the
constructive genius of the American nation can, in part, be traced to
the discipline which one gets from early manual training.
[Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of Cooper Union_
AN EARLY VIEW OF COOPER UNION]
The great opportunities which, according to my good friends on the
Delaware farm, awaited me in this country were certainly not in the
direction of arts requiring great manual dexterity. The country of
baseball offered, I thought, very few opportunities in this direction
to a foreign-born boy. I was convinced of that every time I made a
comparison between myself and the other boys who were doing the same
manual work in the factory that I did. They were my superiors. In one
thing, however, I thought I was their superior. They did not know
much about the latest things described in the _Scientific American_,
nor in the scientific supplements of the Sunday _Sun_, which I read
assiduously with the aid of a pocket dictionary. The educational
opportunities in the factory also escaped them. Jim, the boiler-room
engineer and fireman of the factory, became interested in my scientific
reading and encouraged me by paying several compliments to my interest
in these things. He once suggested that some day, perhaps, I might
become his scientific assistant in the boiler-room, if I did not mind
shovelling coal and attending to the busy fires. He was joking, but I
took him seriously. Every morning before the factory started I was with
Jim, who was getting the steam up and preparing to blow the whistle
and start the wheels going. I volunteered to assist him “shovelling
coal and attending to the busy fires,” and after a time I understood
the manipulations in the boiler-room quite well, according to Jim.
The steam-engine excited my liveliest interest. It was the first
opportunity that I had ever had to study at close range the operations
of a steam-engine, and I made the most of it, thanks to Jim’s patient
interest in my thirst for new information. He was my first professor in
engineering.
One exceptionally hot afternoon during that summer found Jim prostrated
by heat and I volunteered to run the boiler-room until he got well.
I did it during the rest of that afternoon, much to the surprise of
everybody, but was not allowed to continue, because a fireman’s license
was required for that. When Jim returned I urged him to help me get
a license, but he answered that an intelligent boy, eager to learn,
should not cross the Atlantic for the purpose of becoming a fireman.
“You must aim higher, my lad,” said Jim, and he added that if I
continued to make good use of my pocket dictionary and of my scientific
reading I should soon outgrow the opportunities offered by the New
England Cracker Factory in Cortlandt Street. He never missed a chance
to encourage me and to promise new successes for new efforts. In that
respect he reminded me much of my mother.
Jim was a humble fireman and boiler-room engineer; his early education
was scanty, so that he was not much on books; but he stood in awe in
the presence of books. Referring to my habit of carrying a pocket
dictionary in my hip pocket and looking up in it the meaning and the
pronunciation of every word which was new to me, he would exclaim,
jokingly, “Look in the book,” whenever some obscure points arose in our
boiler-room discussions. His admiration for books was much increased
when I related to him the story of James Watt and his experiments with
the steam-engine, a story which I had dug out in an old encyclopædia in
the Cooper Union Library. When I told him that James Watt had perfected
his steam-engine and thus started the development of the modern
steam-engine several years before the Declaration of Independence,
he dropped a remark which I never forgot. He said: “The English made
us write the Declaration of Independence, and they also gave us the
steam-engine with which we made our independence good.” Jim was not
much on learning but he was brimful of native practical philosophy.