threshold, espies you and takes you to be a hungry lion pawing the
road and seeking whom you may devour. She calls to her husband and he
peereth at you. Perchance she fetcheth down the ancient blunderbuss
from the wall; but when you come closer and hail her in English she
says to herself with relief, even with pleasure, 'It is a man,' one of
the attractive male species. You ask for bread and milk,--oh yes she
has it, and with a scared look still on her face, though transfigured
with a mild gladness, she fetcheth you bread and milk and eggs;
and then if you can pay her market price the scared look goes away
entirely; and out of the goodness of her heart and the abundance of
her pantry she addeth cookies and apple butter, and for these you pay
nought--they are her favour. Don't ask her, however, to put you up for
the night."
The tramp always has a hard time to get a night's lodging. A poor,
weak, bedraggled Jew, whom I met shortly after the forty-eight hours'
rain, told me that he had been all one night in the wet--his pedlar's
pack had got ruined, he was suffering from pneumonia, and had thought
that such weather meant sure death to him. He had tried every house in
five towns and had been refused at every one. It was a sad comment on
modern life.
In the Middle Ages, and in the days when Christianity meant more
than it does now, the refusal of shelter was almost unheard of.
And in peasant Russia to-day it would be considered a sin. An old
pilgrim-tramp once said to me, "When we leave this world to get to
Heaven we all have to go on tramp, and those find shelter there who
sheltered wanderers here." But Americans will not be judged by that
standard. The early Christians received strangers and often entertained
angels unawares, but the modern American is afraid that in taking in a
strange tramp he may be sheltering an outcast spirit. Once tramps were
angels; now they are rebel-angels.
IX
OVER THE ALLEGHANIES
Both the weather and the country improved before I reached
Williamsport. On the height of the road to Hughesville I had a grand
view of the mountains and of the sky above them, saw displayed green
hills and forested mountains, and great stretches of ploughed upland
all dotted over with white heaps of fertiliser. And the sky above was
a battle-scene, the sun and his angels having given battle and the
clouds taking ranks like an army. Glad was I to see to eastward whole
battalions in retreat.
I passed through fine forested land with great hemlocks, maples, and
hickories. A brawling stream poured along through the dark wood, and
as I walked beside it a sudden gleam of sunshine pierced the gloom of
foliage, and lit up boles and wet banks and wet rocks and the crystal
freshets of the stream. Of all weathers I like best convalescent
weather, the getting sunny after much rain. On the Sunday on which I
reached the city the open road was swept by fresh winds, all the birds
were singing, every blade of grass was conscious of rain taken in and
of the sun bringing out.
Williamsport I found to be a peaceful, provincial town, well kept in
itself and surrounded by beautiful scenery. It was looking its best in
the freshness and radiance of a May morning. On its many hundred bright
green lawns that run down so graciously from pleasant urban villas to
the roadway there was much white linen airing. Williamsport is an old
lumbering town on a branch of the Susquehanna, and though that business
has gone away, prosperity and happiness seem to have remained behind.
There was a feeling of calmness that I had not experienced in other
American cities, and I felt it would be pleasant to live there for a
season.
I tramped down to Jersey Shore, and the night after my halcyon day at
Williamsport a thunderstorm overtook me, shaking the old barn in which
I slept and tearing away rafters and doors. I witnessed Lockhaven under
depressing circumstances, but in any weather it must be an inferior
town to Williamsport, though it is also an old point for lumbering on
the Susquehanna.
The weather remained very rainy, and I was obliged to forsake the
atrociously clayey high-road for the cinder track of the railway. In
doing this I passed up into a fine hilly country along the valley of
the Beech Creek. I came to Mapes (to rhyme with Shapes), but found it
a name and no more. A shooting and fishing resort with one house in
it. The Beech Creek was a fine sight, running along the base of the
embankment of the railway, carrying pine logs on its flood and racing
the trains with them, roaring and rushing, the logs pointing, racing,
turning, rolling, toppling, colliding, but always going forward,
willy-nilly getting clear of every obstacle and galloping out of sight.
With one wet match I lighted a grand fire by the side of the line, and
boiled my kettle and dried myself and chuckled. It might be going to
rain more. I might be going to have a queer night, but for the time
being I was having a splendid tea. It was a matter for consolation in
the future that on the wettest possible day it was not difficult to
light a fire with one match. The secret lies in having plenty of dry
paper in your wallet; and I had a copy of a New York Sunday paper,
which lasted me to light my fire all the way to Elkhart, Indiana, at
least five hundred miles' tramping.
The district of Mapes is one of the most beauteous in the Alleghanies,
or it was so this quiet evening. The summits of the mountains were
obscured by mists, but up from the profound valleys the woods climbed,
and the lovely tops of trees seemed like so many stepping-stones from
the land up to cloudy heaven.
By the time I came to Monument it was dark. But a great glowing
brick-kiln looked out into the night, and there were houses with many
lighted windows. I was directed to a workmen's boarding-house, and
spent a night among miners, railway men, and brick-workers. The keeper
of the establishment was doubtful whether he would have me, but thought
there was "one feller on the third floor gone."
"What will be your charge?" I asked.
"Well," said he, "a won't charge ye anything for the bed, but the
breakfast to-morrow morning will be twenty-five cents."
"My!" I thought, "here's something choice coming along in the shape of
a bed."
It turned out to be four in a room and two in a bed, all sleeping in
their clothes. There was even some doubt as to whether there was not a
fifth coming.
One man was in bed already; I chose the unoccupied bed, and laid myself
upon it in full tramping attire. You can imagine the state of sheets
and quilts in a bed that brickmakers and soft-coal miners sleep in
their clothes.
The man in bed was an Anglo-Saxon American. When I said I was from
England he asked me if I had walked it all.
"I came by steamer of course to New York."
"How many days?"
"Eight."
"Weren't you afraid?" said he. "Quite out of sight of land no doubt?
You wouldn't get me to go, not for many thousand dollars. That
_Titanic_ was an affair, wasn't it. Fifteen hundred--straight to the
bottom! I'd have shot myself had I been there."
"What do you work at here?"
"Brick-making."
"Lot of men?"
"Plenty of work. Two truck-loads of extra men coming to-morrow."
"Foreigners?"
"Italians."
I told him the story of a storm at sea with the exaggeration to which
one is too prone when addressing simple souls. I rather harrowed him
with an account of cook's enamel ware and kitchen things rolling about
and jangling when every one was saying his prayers.
Presently I remarked irrelevantly, "My goodness! What a noise the frogs
make here!"
"That's no noise," said he; "I'm going to sleep."
After a while his bedfellow came in and he, before turning in, got
down on his knees in the narrow passage between the beds and prayed--I
should say, a whole half-hour, talking half to himself, half-aloud.
Whilst he was doing so my bedfellow came in, a tall, heavy, tired Pole,
who looked neither to right nor left, but just clambered over me and
lay down with his face to the wall and slept and snored.
It rained heavily all night, and next morning it still poured.
After a disreputably bad breakfast I sat on a chair at the door of
the establishment and watched the thresh of the rain on two great
pools beside a road of coal-dust, looked out at the lank grass, the
tomato-can dump, the sodden refuse of the boarding-house, and away to
the square red chimney of the brick factory belching forth black smoke.
"Say, stranger," said mine host, "I'm going to wade into that cave and
hand out potatoes; will you take them from me?" This was the first time
I had been called stranger in America, and it sounded pleasant in my
ears.
About eleven o'clock in the morning the rain ceased, and I went on to
the next point on the railway. The track climbed higher and higher, and
I learned that on the morrow I should reach the top of the Alleghany
Mountains--Snow Shoe Creek.
It was a fine walk to Orviston under the heavily clouded sky. The
mountain sides were all a-leak with springs and trickling streams and
cascades. There was an accompanying music of the racing Beech Creek
on the one hand, and of the gushing rivulets on the other; but this
would be swallowed up and lost every now and then in the uproar of the
oncoming and passing freight train of coal; the appalling, hammering,
affrighting freight train passing within two feet of me, taking my
breath away with the thought of its power. How pleasant it was, though,
to listen to the rebirth of the music of the waters coming to the ear
in the wind of the last trucks as they passed.
[Illustration: "SLOVAKS WORKING ON THE LINE WITH PICK AND SHOVEL."]
Orviston prides itself on its fire-bricks. The whole village is made of
them, and the pavement as well, and every brick is stamped "Orviston,"
and is both a commodity and an advertisement.
After I had visited the village store for provisions I re-entered the
railway enclosure, and read as I did so the following notice typical of
America: "Cultivate the safety habit--if you see anything wrong report
it to the man with the button."
I met the man with the button after I had walked a mile along the
way; he was a Slovak, working on the line with pick and shovel, a
tall, brawny Slav, and with him a rather tubby little chap of the same
nationality.
"You haf no räit on these läins," said the Slovak. "You go off. You are
no railway man. What are you? Slavish?"
I replied in English, but on second thoughts went on in Russian. He
understood, and was mollified at once. He was in America for the second
time, they neither of them liked the old country. I photographed them
as they stood--John Kresica and Paul Cipriela. They were unmarried men,
and lived in a "boarding-house" in Orviston. They worked in a gang.
Would I please send them a copy of the photograph? I agreed to do so;
then, when I moved to go off the lines, the man with the button cried
out, smiling:
"Hi! All-right, go ahead!"
I went on blithely. There was a change of weather in the afternoon. At
one o'clock the sun lifted his arms and pulled apart the mist curtains
at the zenith and disclosed himself--a miraculous apparition. The whole
sky was cloudy, but the sun was shining. An apparition, the ghost of
a sun, and then a reality--hot, light-pouring, cloud-dispersing. By
two it was a hot summer day, at three there was not a cloud in the
sky. What a change! It was clear that summer had progressed during
the rain; insects of bright hues were on the wing, huge yellow-winged
butterflies, crimson-thighed grasshoppers, green sun-beetles. A
new-born butterfly settled three times on my sleeve; the fourth time I
just caught him. I held him delicately between two fingers and let him
go.
During a most exhilarating evening I tramped past houseless Panther and
got to Cato at nightfall. Cato was a railway station of no pretensions;
a broken-down shed with no door, no ticket offices, no porter.
Passengers who wished to take a train had to wave a flag and trust to
the eyesight of the engine-driver. For village, all that I could make
out was a coal-bank, a shaft, and some heaps of old iron.
It was an extremely cold night, so I slept in the railway shed on a
plank form that ran along the three sides of the building. I lay and
looked out at the bright night shining over the mountains, dozed,
waked, dozed again. Shortly after midnight I had a strange visitor. I
was lying half-asleep, looking at a misshapen star which was resting on
the mountains opposite me, which became a silver thumb pointing upward,
which became at last the young crescent moon just rising. I was in that
somnolent state when you ask, as you see the moon rising behind dark
branches of the forest, Is it the moon in eclipse? is it a comet?--when
a portly man with shovel hat came out of the night, stood in front of
the shed, leaned on a thick cudgel, and looked in.
"Hallo!" said I.
"Haffing sum sleep?" queried the visitor.
"Yes, trying to; but it's a cold night."
"Ah, you haf bed pretty goot!"
"Who are you,--the night watchman?"
"Naw. You don't see a näit wawtchman without 'is lantern."
The old chap came close up to me, bent down, and whispered, "I'm in the
same box as yourself."
"Walking all night?" I asked.
"The only vay to keep varm," said the old man ruefully. He took out a
shining watch from his waistcoat.
"Three o'clock," said he. "In an hour it will be daylight. Oh, I think
I'll try and sleep here an hour. Say, is there to eat along the road?"
I wasn't quite sure what he meant.
"Not much," I hazarded.
"Wot are you--you don't speak the langwage very goot," said the tramp.
"English."
"I am a Cherman."
The old man lay down on the plank form, resting his head on my feet,
and using them for a pillow.
"How old are ye?" he went on.... "Hoh, I can give you forty years. If I
were in Germany now I should be getting an army pension."
"Are you going back?" said I.
"Naw, naw. I could never give up this country."
We composed ourselves to sleep, but with his head resting on my feet I
was too uncomfortable. "Presently I'll make a fire," said I, "and we'll
have hot tea and some bread and butter." And after about twenty minutes
I got up, put my boots on, and wandered out to find wood to make a
fire. It was about half an hour before dawn. There was a hoar frost,
and everything was cold and rimy to the touch. But I made up a bundle
of last year's weeds, now sodden straws, and laid them on a half-sheet
of my Sunday newspaper. That made a fine blaze, and with twigs and
sticks and bits of old plank, I soon had a fine bonfire going. The old
German came out and watched me incredulously. He didn't think it was
possible to make a fire on such a morning. But he was soon convinced,
and went about picking up chunks of wood desultorily, alleging the
while that he couldn't have lit such a fire in three hours; evidently I
knew how to do it.
"Shall I make tea or coffee?" I asked.
"Cawfee," said the old chap, his mouth watering. The word tea did not
represent to him anything good.
"After a cup of hot cawfee I can go a long way. Hot cawfee, mind yer.
Varm cawfee 'salright for lunch, but in the morning it must be hot. The
only thing better than a cup of cawfee is a pint of whisky.... Say,
you've enough fire here now to roast a chicken."
"Wish I had one, we'd roast it."
I emptied the last of my sugar into the pot, and seven or eight
spoonfuls of coffee. It was to be "Turkish." The old tramp sat down on
the stump of a tree, took out a curly German pipe, and then put a red
coal on it. He had matches, but was economical in the matter of lights.
"Say," he said to me later, pointing to the ground, "you've dropped a
good match." I picked it up.
The coffee was "real good." The old fellow drank it through his thick
moustache, and dipping his bread into his cup, munched great mouthfuls.
I had offered him butter with his bread, but he refused. "Booter" was
nothing to him. He liked apple-"booter."
"Say, you've got on a powerful pair of boots!"
"I need them, tramping to Chicago."
"Chicago's not a bad town if you know where to go. Say, presently
you'll come to Snow Shoe. Don't go past it. You'll get something there."
The old man stopped a minute in his talk, and stared at me knowingly,
didactically.
"Rich miners," he went on. "You need only ask. See this packet of
tobacco, they gave it to me at the Company store. That's the thing I
can't get on without, must have it. If a man asks me for a smoke and I
haf it to give I must give him also. Where've you come from yesterday,
Orviston?"
"No. Monument."
"Is there anything there?" he whispered mysteriously.
"Not much to be had," said I. "But there's a good deal of work, and
they're bringing in a big gang of Italians. You can't get much of
anything at the farms."
"Where Guineas are, I don't go. I don't like the Eyetaylians."
"D'you like the Jews?"
"They're a good people," said he. "Don't say anything against the Jews.
I know a Jew who gives free boots to tramps. Last year I went into his
store, and one of the shopmen came up to me and said, 'I know what you
want, you'll get it. I'll tell the boss when he comes out.' And he
gave me a powerful pair of boots, and sent me across the road to the
Quick-lunch with a letter to the boss there, to give me a good dinner.
So I never say anything against the Jews."
"Do you know Cleveland?" said I.
"You bet. Lived there ten years ago, had a job on a Lake steamer. I
worked one summer on a boat."
The old tramp stared at me as if he had confessed a sin. "Worked like a
mule," he added sententiously, and stared again. "I had a home there,
and lived just like a married man. But when I wanted to move on to
Pittsburg my girl wouldn't go."
"I expect you're the sort of man who has run away from a wife in
Germany," said I.
"Naw, naw. Never married."
Then he began to talk of his loves and conquests. At his age you'd have
thought his mind would not have been filled with such vanities. He
evidently earned money now and then, and went on "sprees." He averred
that he had not a dime now, and was altogether "on the nail." I had
an idea, however, that he had hidden on him, somewhere, passage-money
to take him to Germany, to get that army pension. The Germans are a
cautious people. They are cautious and cogitative, yet I wonder what
the old man thought of me as he stumped away, leaning on his heavy
walking-stick. He had been twenty-seven years on the road, and was very
shrewd and experienced in many ways. Perhaps for a moment he took me
for a gentleman burglar. He was immensely curious to see what was in
my sack, but he probably reflected--"Here is good hot, coffee, a fire,
and a pleasant young man; make the most of it, and ask no inconvenient
questions."
I put the fire out, shouldered my pack, and resumed the journey to Snow
Shoe. The sun had risen, but his warmth was as yet shut away behind the
wall of the mountains. The hoar-frost of night had not melted yet, and
it was necessary to walk briskly to keep warm. It was so cold that I
got to Snow Shoe before ten o'clock.
A feature of this tramping along the rails was the danger in crossing
bridges. It was a single line, and as there were some twenty bridges
over the flood of the river, there were twenty ordeals of trusting that
no train would suddenly appear from a corner of the winding track and
run me down. If a train had come whilst I was half-way across a bridge
there was no refuge but the river, and I was always prepared to jump.
For several nights after this bit of tramping I dreamed of crossing
bridges, running on the sleepers and just passing the last beams as
engines swept down on me. But it was pleasant climbing up so high, and
feeling that within an hour or so Snow Shoe would be achieved. I had
lived in the rumour of Snow Shoe for two days, and the name had come
to correspond to something very beautiful in my mind. The sound of the
name is pleasant to the ear, and every now and then, as I hurried
along, I asked, "Snow Shoe, Snow Shoe, what shall I find there?" I
imagined the pioneers who first came up this beautiful valley and
gave to an Indian settlement the dainty name--through what virginal
loveliness they had passed! Then I thought of the reporter-poet
of Scranton who objected to the beauty of Nature because it was
independent of man.
[Illustration: THE SLAV CHILDREN OF SNOW-SHOE CREEK.]
Then, man came along, the engine-man with his endless, empty freight
train and his bellowing, steaming engine howling through the valley.
One after another eight freight trains, each about a quarter of a mile
long, came grinding past me, going up to the collieries to take their
daily loads of carbon. Somehow I did not object; it was new America,
the America of to-day careering over the America of 1492, and had to be
accepted.
But Snow Shoe gave me pause. When I arrived at the little slate-roofed
mining settlement I found there was considerable excitement among the
children there. A cow had just been cut to pieces by the last freight
train. The driver had driven his train over the beast and on without a
word of remark or a hesitation, and a farmer was complaining bitterly,
but the children--young Americans, Russians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, the
ones who have in their keeping the America of to-morrow--were sitting
round the remains, helling and God-damning and asking me facetious
questions. And that was the answer to what I had asked myself--What
shall I see at Snow Shoe? What am I walking so far and so high for to
see?
Snow Shoe was the dreariest possible mining settlement, and its
inhabitants slouched about its coaly ways and in and out of the
saloons. Scarcely any one could speak English, and the mines were
worked almost exclusively by Poles and Slovaks. The highest point in
the Alleghanies, a hand of earth stretched up to heaven, perhaps a
maledictory hand.
X
DECORATION DAY
America celebrates no "Whit-Monday," but has Decoration Day instead;
a great national festival, when medals are pinned on to veterans, the
soldiers of the War of North against South are remembered, and the
graves of heroes are decorated with flags and flowers. On Decoration
Day, and again later, on Independence Day, the whole populace ceases
work in the name of America, and flocks the streets, sings national
songs and hymns, goes on procession, fires salutes, listens to
speeches. We British are just wildly glad to get free from toil when
Whit-Monday and August Bank Holiday come round. We have no national
or religious fervour on these days. We have even been known to flock
happily to Hampstead and Epping Forest to the strains of "England's
going down the Hill." Upon occasion the British can be clamorously
patriotic, but only upon occasion. But the American citizen is, to use
his own phrase, "crazy about America" all the while. The "days-off"
that we get are not only off work, but off everything serious. The
American still nurses the hope with which he came across the ocean,
and he is enthusiastically attached to the republic he has made and the
principles of that republic.
I spent Decoration Day at Clearfield, a little mining and agricultural
town on the other side of the Alleghanies. I put up at a hotel for two
or three days, and just gave myself to the town for the time. Early on
the festival day I was out to see how the workaday world was taking
things. All the shops were closed except the ice-cream soda bars and
the fruiterers. There were flags on the banks and loungers on the
streets. Young men were walking about with flags in their hat ribbons.
The cycles and automobiles on the roadway had their wheels swathed
with the stars and stripes. There were negroes and negresses standing
_endimanche's_ at street corners. Now and then a girl in white dress
and white boots would trip from a house to a shop and back again. There
was an air best expressed by the words of the song:
Go along and get yer ready,
Get yer glad rags on,
For there's going to be a meeting
In the good old town.
Every town in America is a good old town, and on such occasions as
Decoration Day you may always hear the worthies of the place giving
their reminiscences in the lounge of a hotel. I sat and listened to
many.
We had a very quiet morning, and it seemed to me there was considerable
boredom in the town. There was a fire in the Opera House about eleven,
and I ran behind the scenes with a crowd of others and stared at the
smoking walls. There was a sort of disappointment that the firemen put
it out so promptly.