Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The East — Chapter 1 - Part I - The Adjustment

THE ADJUSTMENT

HIGHLAND FALLS, N.

Y.

, Monday, July 27, 1891. The boss at the work on the old Academic building in West Point gave me a job this morning, and ordered me to come to work to-morrow at seven o'clock.

A gang of laborers is fast removing the old building, which is to give place to a new one.

From one of the workmen I learned that the men live in Highland Falls, a mile down the river, and so I came here in search of a boarding-house.

There was some difficulty in finding quarters, for the place is crowded with workingmen attracted here by the new buildings at the Post and work on the railway.

Mrs. Flaherty has taken me in as a boarder.

That is not her name, but it sufficiently indicates her.

She came to the door with the odor of soap-suds and boiling cabbage strong upon her, and told me at first that she guessed that she couldn't take me.

She relented when I explained that I had work at the Post; and, having admitted me as a member of her household, she gave play to her natural hospitality.

When I was shown to a little carpetless room under the roof, with two double beds in it, I spoke of needing water, and she showed me where I could get a plentiful supply.

I said that I should like to write, and she at once invited me from the torrid heat of the attic to a place at her dining-room table.

Here then, in the temporary security of a boarding-house, and as an assigned member of the industrial army, I can review the first week of enlisted service.

I am vastly ignorant of the labor problem, and am trying to learn by experience; but I am so far familiar with Socialistic writings as to know that, from their point of view, I have not gone from one economic class into another.

I belong to the proletariat, and from being one of the intellectual proletarians, I am simply become a manual proletaire.

In other words, I no longer stand in the market ready to sell what mental ability I have, I now bring to the market instead my physical capacity for work; and I sell that at its market price.

Expressed in every-day language, the change is simply this: from earning a living as a teacher, I have begun to earn it as an unskilled laborer.

But, nevertheless, the change has in it elements of real contrast.

One week ago I shared the frictionless life of a country-seat.

Frictionless, I mean, in the movement of an elaborate system which ministers luxuriously to the physical needs of life.

Frictionless, perhaps, only to those to whom it ministers.

Now I am out of all that, and am sharing instead the life of the humblest form of labor upon which that superstructure rests.

This is not a frictionless life in its adjustment to daily needs--very much the reverse.

And whatever may be its compensations, they are not of the nature of easy physical existence.

The actual step from the one manner of life to the other was sure of its own interest.

It was painful to say good-by on the last evening, and there was enough of uncertainty in the prospect to account for a shrinking from the first encounter with a strange life; but there was promise of adventure, and almost a certainty of solid gain in experience.

At sunrise on the next morning I was ready to set out.

I descended quietly to the hall.

The butler stood there, politely urging some pretended necessity as excuse for so early an appearance, and he invited me to breakfast.

Often had he seen me off for a day's fishing or shooting in the old suit which I wore, but I could feel his eye fixed upon me now with perplexed interest.

He had heard my expedition discussed at the table, and in some vague way he took in that I meant to earn my living as a workman.

With his wonted dignity, he helped me adjust my pack and strap it; and then he stood under the _porte cochère_, and watched me hurry across the lawn in the direction of the highway.

Two hours' walk carried me beyond the point of my acquaintance with the country roads; but this presented no real difficulty, for I had but to keep a steadily westward course.

Other details of my expedition were not so simple, and I began to have an uncomfortable sense of unsuspected difficulty.

I look back from the vantage-point of a week's experience, with a feeling of amused tolerance, upon my naïve preconceptions.

It is like a retrospect of years.

My notion of earning a living by manual labor was the securing of an odd job whenever I should need a meal or a night's lodging.

Much advice had come my way before I set out.

As a means of access to people, I was told to take with me a book or magazine, and to invite subscriptions.

I adopted this plan; and a copy of a magazine was under my arm as I walked on through the dust and heat of the country road, wondering how long it would take me to reach the Hudson, and how I should earn my first meal.

There was nothing at all adventurous or exciting in a dusty walk.

My pack was taking on increments of weight with each mile of the journey.

I was beginning to feel conscious of change in unexpected ways.

There was no money in my pocket, and a most subtle and unmanning insecurity laid hold of me as a result of that.

The world had curiously changed in its attitude, or rather I saw it at a new angle, and I felt the change most keenly in the bearing of people.

My good-morning was not infrequently met by a vacant stare, and if I stopped to ask the way, the conviction was forced upon me that, as a pack-pedler, I was a suspicious character, with no claim upon common consideration.

In the shade of his porch sat the keeper of a country store, at a fork of the road.

His chair was tilted against the outer wall, and his feet rested upon the balustrade.

My question as to the course of the two roads before me was responded to by the merchant, first with a look, and then a spurt of tobacco-juice, which stirred the dust between my feet, and, finally, a caustic sentence to the effect that he 'did not much know, and did not care a damn,' while his blue eyes swept the horizon, and rested finally on the Sound, gleaming golden in the morning sun, and the purple line of the Long Island shore.

The new-born self-consciousness which I found asserting itself was like a wound on the hand, exposed to constant injury.

I had walked several miles before I summoned courage to speak to anyone else.

Finally, very hot and thirsty, I knocked at the door of an unpainted cottage which stood on the road.

The door opened to the touch of an old woman, who bent toward me in the emaciated angularity of a decrepit figure which must once have been strikingly tall and vigorous.

I asked leave to show her the magazine, and she invited me into the cool of her home.

The middle floor was covered with a yellow oil-cloth, on which there stood a table.

A large cooking-stove occupied one side of the room.

A few wooden-bottom chairs were ranged around the walls.

An old kitchen clock rested on the mantel-shelf; and on either side of it hung a faded photograph, each in an oval wooden frame.

The old woman asked me to draw up a chair to the table, and she sat beside me, looking with the excited interest of a child at the pictures which I showed her, but paying little heed, I thought, to what I was saying.

Presently, without warning, she veered mentally with the facility of childhood, and now she was looking at me intently between the eyes, while one long skeleton hand lay on the open page before her.

"Be you a pedler?"

she asked, and her eyes dilated to the measure of the protruding sockets over which the yellow skin was tightly drawn.

"I am trying to get subscribers for this magazine," I told her.

"Was you raised in these parts?"

My negative gave her the opening for which she was unconsciously feeling.

She was born and "raised" on that spot, and had lived there for nearly eighty years, and she hastened to tell me so.

There was nothing voluble in the recital of her history, only a directness and simplicity of speech and a certain quiet reserve which rendered the narrative absorbing to us both.

Some bond of sympathy began to make itself felt, for she was dwelling on the losses of her life, and, quite unconsciously, she wept as she told me of the death of one and another, until not one of all her family or kindred was left to her, except her grandson, with whom she now lived.

She said no word of complaint; and, in the presence of her human sorrows, she had no memory of poverty, and of the bitter struggle against want which life had plainly been for her.

She was sobbing softly, with her head bent upon the table, when she ceased speaking, and no comfort that I could offer her was comparable to the relief that she felt in telling her story.

When I arose to go, she was breathing deeply, like a comforted child.

For a stretch of several miles of country road I spurred myself to knock at every door to which I came.

My reception was curiously uniform.

I never got beyond the request for leave to show the magazine.

The reply was invariably a negative; sometimes polite, but always emphatic.

Once I did not get so far as that.

A portly negress saw me approaching her cottage from the road, and, standing strident on guard before her door, she shouted to me across the meadow that nothing was wanted there, and that I might save myself the walk.

It was nearing noon, and I was very hungry.

The question of earning a meal was no longer an interesting speculation, but a pressing necessity.

I turned all my attention to that.

A large iron gateway leading into a cemetery attracted me.

Several ragged, tow-headed children were playing about the lodge.

One of them told me that his father was inside, and he indicated the general direction of the tomb-stones.

I found the digger sweating freely in a half-finished grave, and instantly offered my help as a means of earning a dinner.

The grave-digger was an Irishman.

He leaned at ease upon his spade, and soberly looked me over, and then declined my offer.

He was polite, but not at all communicative, and he met my advances with the one remark that his "old woman" was not at home.

A little farther on, I saw three women in pursuit of a hen.

I eagerly volunteered my help, and asked for a dinner in payment.

They quit the chase, and stood confronting me with serious faces, while I eloquently pleaded my readiness to help them.

Nothing in the situation seemed to strike them as strange or irregular, but they touched upon it with short, grave speech, until I had the feeling of something momentous, and I accepted their refusal with a sense of relief.

At last, in the outskirts of the village of Westport, I found a man mowing his lawn, and he was willing to give me a dinner for completing the work.

My final success in getting an odd job was a splendid stimulus.

I urged the mower over the lawn with a vigor that surprised me, and the dinner which I ate in the dim corner of an immaculate kitchen was a liberal return for the labor.

All that long summer afternoon I went from house to house, asking subscriptions for the magazine.

The rack would have been easier upon my feelings, but I was eager to discover some ready way of approaching people.

Not even the loafers at the station were in the least inclined to share their company with me.

At nightfall I earned, by sawing wood for an hour, a supper and the right to sleep in an unused barn.

When I awoke, in the early morning, I looked with bewilderment at the dull gray light that shone between the parted boards and through the rifts among the shingles.

I came to myself with homesickness in full possession of me, and my back aching from the pressure of that intolerable pack.

At the pump in the barn-yard I washed myself, and sat down to eat a slice of cold meat and some pieces of bread which I had saved from supper.

An unfriendly collie watched me, and growled threateningly until I won him over with a share of the breakfast.

The village was muffled in a heavy, clinging fog.

The buoyancy of the previous morning was gone.

It was with some difficulty that I found the road which had been pointed out to me as the shortest cut across country to the Hudson.

I could not shake off the feeling of homelessness and isolation; and, under its influence, the lot of the farmers' boys, whom I met driving their carts to early market, appeared infinitely to be desired.

A life of any honest work which accounts for one, and includes some human fellowship, and a reasonable certainty of food and shelter, began to take on undreamed-of attractiveness, in contrast with vagrancy.

I felt outside of the true order of things, and as having no contact with any vital current of the world.

Perhaps it was in some measure the Philistine in me asserting himself, in the absence of his customary bath and hot coffee; for, as the fog lifted and the sun appeared, I came upon a brook which I had only to follow a hundred yards or more to a well-shaded pool, where the bath was soon achieved, and I emerged feeling that a vagrant life, with some purpose in it, was, after all, rather desirable.

The morning was only fairly begun when I reached the village of Wilton, eight miles from Westport.

Already I was tired, and certain muscles of the shoulders and back were in violent revolt.

I left my pack at the post-office.

Passing up a street, which runs at right angles to the one by which I entered the village, I presently knocked at the last of a row of comfortable cottages.

When the door opened I knew instinctively that the gentleman who stood framed in it was the village pastor.

I said that I was looking for work.

He asked me inside.

I thought this a curious change of subject, but willingly followed him into a dim sitting-room, fragrant of perfect cleanliness.

I explained that I was on my way to West Point in search of work, but was without money, and so obliged to earn my living by the way, and that I would gladly do anything that offered in payment for bread and board.

He questioned me closely, with an evident purpose of drawing me out further, and then he abruptly offered me work on his wood-pile, and appeared surprised at my instant agreement.

The wood was green, and the saw, with which it had first to be cut into proper lengths, was not sharp, and it was certainly not skilfully handled.

The work was hard, but at noon there was ready for me in the shed, a dinner of beef, and potatoes, and slices of bread, which for lightness and color were like flakes of snow, held by a band of crisp brown crust.

In the afternoon the minister interrupted my work with the request that I would join him in the house, and he indicated where I could first wash in the wood-shed.

I steeled myself for a lecture on the evils of vagrancy, with incidental references to drunkenness as its probable cause in my case.

Instead, I found the family seated for an early "tea," and myself invited to a place at the table.

I am bound to say that I was rattled.

I had expected a meal in the kitchen, and a bed in common with the preacher's horse.

Not the least curious position in which I have so far been placed, was that which I occupied at the minister's board.

His family, I shrewdly suspect, did not share his hospitable feelings toward me, and I could venture a guess that it was under protest from them that I took a seat next to the minister's daughter.

She was a pale, delicate girl, of seventeen, perhaps.

Her short, brown hair curled close to her head, and her dark eyes looked dimly at you through huge spectacles.

The light, crisp stuff in which she was dressed seemed to create about her an atmosphere some degrees cooler than that of the rest of the room.

By way of beginning, I offered some fatuous commonplace about the surrounding country.

Instantly I realized that I was not to venture upon a conversation that implied terms of social equality.

The child bristled with outraged dignity, and let fall in reply a sharp monosyllable.

Further conversation with her would have been highly diverting, but not very considerate, and so I turned to my host, who maintained through the meal the air of one who is on the defensive, but who is sustained by the conviction of doing his duty.

My sympathies were all with the girl.

Her feeling was very natural--so natural as to suggest the rather disturbing ideas with which Count Tolstoi is again confronting us.

It was a very practical application of the teaching of brotherhood, that of asking a chance workman to a seat at one's family table.

But if ministering to Him is really, in part, in such recognitions of the least of His brethren, the instinctive shrinking of the girl brought up in a Christian home in the country was a commentary on our drift from the simplicities of the Gospel.

In the evening I went with the minister to a prayer-meeting in his church.

A handful of people sat at solemn intervals in the audience-room.

I was plainly the only common laborer among them.

The men appeared to be comfortable farmers, and there was a village shopkeeper or two, while the women were clearly their wives and daughters.

In one of the agitating silences which fell upon the company after the minister had declared the meeting open, I rose and took part; and at the door, when the benediction had dismissed us, several of the men spoke to me cordially.

There was entire kindliness in their manner, and they, perhaps, were not conscious of showing surprise in welcoming a laborer to their meeting.

That night the minister insisted upon my taking a bed in his house.

I

pleaded an early start.

He, too, was to be up early, and in the morning I found him in the kitchen before me.

On the table were bread and milk;

and as I ate I parried the somewhat searching questions of my host.

My course from Wilton lay through Ridgefield and Salem and Golden's Bridge, and then, crossing the line between Connecticut and New York, it made directly for the Hudson River.

This was no great distance; but in the early stages of the march I was much delayed by rains.

Driven to shelter, I found it usually in a barn, or a shed under which were housed the farming implements.

Here is an example: From a sudden downpour of rain I ran to an open barn.

A farmer, whom I found there unhitching his horses, eyed me suspiciously, and gave a halting assent to my request for shelter.

He soon left me alone.

I tried to read, and could not.

The dull day was deeply depressing.

Like the burden of a haunting sorrow the trial of separation weighed upon me.

It was not homesickness alone, but added to that a feeling of isolation.

Poverty, I had thought, would at once bring me into vital contact with the very poor.

Instead, it had made me an object of unfailing distrust.

The very poor I found in an occasional cottage of a farm laborer, or some grotesquely dilapidated hovel, swarming with negro life.

But they were no more hospitable to my approach than were the well-to-do farmers, and I met not a single vagrant like myself in the course of my walk to the Hudson.

I was lonely with the loneliness of a castaway, and I climbed into the hay-loft and fell asleep.

Here, at least, was comfort; the deep, dreamless sleep, to which I had long been a stranger, was making gracious advances.

When I awoke, the rain was past for the time, and I resumed my journey, with a leaden sky overhead, and soft, clinging mud under foot; but I was strangely refreshed, and walked on quite enheartened.

The intermittent rains interfered with my progress, and increased the difficulty of finding chance work.

Repeatedly I was offered a meal, but denied the privilege of working for it.

For twenty-four hours I went hungry, and spent much of that time asleep in a hole which I burrowed into a hay-stack.

But under a brightening sky on Friday, I was given some wood to chop, and the promise of a dinner in payment.

The work was soon done, and to the dinner there was given an added pleasure in the company of one of the two old women for whom I chopped the wood.

She sat at the table and talked to me.

Perhaps she was solicitous for her spoons.

Certainly she was very entertaining.

Her dark calico dress fitted closely her thin figure; and she sat very straight in her chair, with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes bright with gentle benignity.