Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The East — Chapter 6 - Part I - In a Logging Camp

FITZ-ADAMS'S CAMP, ENGLISH CENTRE, LYCOMING

COUNTY, PA.

, Tuesday, October 27, 1891. In spite of the fast-falling rain, Fitz-Adams, the boss, ordered us up at half-past four, as usual, this morning; but when breakfast was over, the rain was too heavy to admit of our going to work.

Some of the woodsmen are gone back to bed, and some are mending their clothes in the loft, and the rest of the gang are loafing in the "lobby," smoking, and playing what they call "High, low, Jack and the game," except Mike, a superb young Irishman, who, seated on a bench, with his back braced against the window-sill, is reading a worn paper copy of one of the Duchess's novels, which is the only book that I have so far seen in the camp.

Jennie, the head-cook and housekeeper, has given me leave to write at one of the long tables where the gang is fed.

It is a relief sometimes to get away from the men.

There may be _ennui_ that is more soul-destroying, but I have never known any that caused such evidently acute suffering as the form which seizes upon workingmen of my class in hours of enforced idleness.

When the day's work is done, they take their rest as a matter of course, and enjoy it.

But a day like this, which lays them off from work, and shuts them within doors, furnishes awful evidence of the poverty of their lives.

Most of the men here can read, but not to one of them is reading a resource.

The men at play are in blasphemous ill-temper over the cards, and are, apparently, on the brink of blows, while Mike is laboriously spelling his way through a page, and nervously squirming in an effort to find a comfortable seat.

And I know, from the experience of Sundays, in what humor the men will come down to dinner from the loft, to face an afternoon of eternal length to them, which, in some way, must be lived through.

I note the contrast with their normal selves the more, because, as a body of workmen, this is much the most wholesomely happy company which I have so far fallen in with.

We are about twenty in number, a curiously assorted crew, all bred to the roughest life.

Far up in the mountains, miles from any settlement, we live the healthful life of a lumber camp, working from starlight to starlight; breathing the mountain air, keen with the frosty vigor of autumn, and fragrant of pine and hemlock; eating ravenously the plain, well-cooked food which is served to us, now in the camp and now on the mountain-side, where we sit among the newly stripped logs; sleeping deeply at night in closely crowded beds in the cabin-loft, where the wind sweeps freely from end to end through the gaping chinks between the logs, and where, on rising, we sometimes slip out of bed upon a carpeting of snow.

This is the life which these men know and which half-unconsciously they love, breaking from it at times, in a passion of discontent, and spending the earnings of months in a short, wild _abandon_ of debauch, but always coming back again, remorseful, ashamed to meet the faces of the other men, yet reviving as by miracle under the touch of their native life.

They charm you with their freedom of spirit, and their rude sturdiness of character, until you find your heart warming to them with a real affection, and feeling for them the intimate pain of personal sorrow at sight of their cruel limitations.

Away from their work, their one notion of the necessary accompaniment to leisure is money; and possessed of time and treasure, their first instinctive reach is after liquor and lust.

Even now as Fitz-Adams and his brother, in yellow oil-cloth coats and wide tarpaulins, set out through the pouring rain in an open rig for English Centre, there is a chorus of voices from the door and windows of the cabin, shouting to them to bring back whiskey and plenty of it.

If they do, and the rain continues, only God knows what the camp will be to-night.

* * * * * * * * It is sixty miles, I should judge, from Pleasant Hill to Williamsport, and it proved a two days' march.

Although the distance covered must have been about the same on both days, the difference that they each presented in actual experience of the journey was of the kind-of contrast which a wayfarer must expect.

Monday was a faultless autumn day.

The air was quick, and the roads were in good condition, and I was feeling fit, and was "passing rich" with three dollars and seventy-five cents, the wages of five days on the farm.

The region through which I walked was typical of the open country of the Middle States.

Over its rolling surface was the varied arrangement of wood and field and pasture-land, with the farmers' houses and barns attesting separate possession.

There were frequent brooks and narrow winding country roads; roads lined with zigzag rail fences and loose stone walls, along which dwarfed birches grew, and elderberry bushes, and sumach, with wild grape-vines and clematis creeping on the walls;

while in the coarse turf on the banks, there blossomed immortelles, and purple aster, and golden-rod.

Mr. Hill had given me clear directions.

At the post-office of Irish Lane I turned sharply toward Marshall's Hollow, and passed on the way a camp-meeting ground, where deep in the shadows of a grove stood numbers of rough wooden huts; grouped in chance community, and little suggesting in the weird stillness of desertion, the sounds of revival worship, with which they are made to ring through a part of every summer.

At Harveyville I turned abruptly up the hillside in the direction of Cambra.

It was high noon when I reached that village, and I was but a few miles beyond it, on the way to Benton, when I stopped to get something to eat.

It was the evident poverty of the house where I stopped that interested me.

I knew that there was no hope of earning a meal at such a place, but I could pay for what I ate, and I was sure of being less of an annoyance there than at some well-to-do farmer's house.

The cottage was an unpainted wooden shell, and, like it, the corn-crib and pig-pen and little barn beyond seemed tottering to a fall.

Faded leaves of a woodbine, that climbed upon the cottage, were thick about the door-way, and lay strewn by the wind upon the bare floor within.

There was but one room on the ground floor, and a stove and a sewing-machine and a small wooden chest were all its furniture.

I

knocked at the open door.

Through an opposite one, communicating with a lean-to, a woman appeared.

She was large and muscular, but in her face was the sickly pallor of ill-nourishment, and her hair was dishevelled, and the loose, ragged dress which she wore was covered with dark, greasy stains.

I asked for bread and milk; she explained that the family had just finished dinner, but that she could give me something, if I would wait, and she invited me to a seat on the chest.

I drew from my pack an unfinished newspaper, and as I read I could feel innumerable eyes upon me.

Through the cracks in the door, and the ragged breaks in the plaster, came the inquisitive gaze of children's eyes, and I could hear their eager whispers as a swarm of children crowded one another for possession of the best peep-holes.

Their mother asked me in, and set before me, on a table littered with remnants of dinner, a pitcher of fresh milk and some huge slices of coarse bread, a large yellow bowl, and a pewter tablespoon.

The children stared at me as I ate, and I tried to form an accurate estimate of their number, but despaired when, after I thought that I had distinguished eight, I found my estimate upset by sudden apparitions of faces hitherto unrecognized.

The oldest child seemed not more than twelve, and the youngest lay asleep in a cradle near the stove, where its mother could rock it as she worked.

They all were as ragged and dirty as the children of the slums, but they had nothing of the vivacity of these, nor of the quick adjustment to changing circumstances which gives to children, bred upon the street, their first hold upon your interest.

Stolid and wide-eyed they stood about the room, intently watching me, moving here and there for new points of view; until their mother, who had showed no wish to talk as she washed the dishes, now broke the silence with a sounding cuff upon the ear of a little boy, as, with a loud command, she sent him sobbing into the back yard to fetch her wood.

The children scattered instantly, except a little girl with flaxen hair and grotesquely dirty face, who clung to her mother's skirts, and seemed to hamper her immeasurably; the more so as the baby had wakened in the noise, and had begun to cry.

I grew sick with fear of what was coming next, but the mother's mood had changed; for catching the crying baby in her arms, she almost smothered it with kisses, and sitting down she fondled it, and gently stroked the head of the child beside her.

It was a veritable country slum, with nearly all the barren squalor of a crowded tenement.

You thought of life in it as some hard necessity, from which all choice and spontaneity are gone.

And so in great part it must have been, and the wonder was the stronger at sight of the instinct of mother love, springing like a living fountain in an arid plain.

The village of Benton wore a preoccupied air when I entered it.

I soon found the cause in an auction sale of horses in the stable-yard of the tavern.

The horses huddled close, as if for common protection, in an angle formed by the buildings.

They were watched by a mounted rider, whose duty it was to prevent any from breaking loose.

A small crowd of farmers and village men, all of them coatless and in their working clothes, formed a semicircle about the animals.

The surrounding doors and windows were full of women's faces, alive with interest in the progress of events; and children perched upon the fences, or dodged in and out among the groups of men.

A fat and ruddy auctioneer walked back and forth excitedly before the crowd, loudly repeating a call for bids;

or having caught one, running it rapidly through changes of inflection and intonation, until a fresh bid started him anew on his flight of varying tones, which ended at last in the dying cadences of "Going!

going!

gone!"

Presently I found a man who was so far unoccupied by the sale as to have leisure to direct me on my way.

Taking his advice I started for Union Church and Unityville.

In the outskirts of Benton, as I left the village, an urchin sat upon the door-step of a cottage, idly beating about him with a stick, consoling himself apparently as best he could for not having been allowed to go to the sale.

The sight of a tramp with a pack upon his back diverted him; and far as the sound could carry there came following me, as I climbed the hill beyond the village, his shouts of "Git there, Eli!"

The contrast with Monday's march appeared at once on Tuesday morning.

The clouds which were threatening when I made an early start grew more threatening while I walked on, and they broke in torrents of rain as I entered Lairdsville, with Williamsport still twenty-four miles away.

A tavern gave me shelter, but presently the rain slackened and I made up my mind to push on to Williamsport in spite of the storm, for my letters were there; and once on the road with your mail definitely in view, you grow highly impatient of delays.

An hour's rain had worked great changes in the roads.

Hard and dusty when I set out in the early morning, they were quagmires now and were running with muddy streams.

The rain pelted my face and dripped through my ragged hat, and trickled down my back and washed into my boots.

I

was a dangerous-looking vagrant when I reached Hughesville at noon.

I

walked rapidly through the village street in some fear of arrest, but the storm had passed, and I soon learned the road to Williamsport by way of Hall's Landing.

Splashing wearily along the heavy roads with that awful load chafing my back, I knew vaguely that I was passing through an exceedingly rich and beautiful farming region, but my interest was all in the surest footing to be found, and it was with glad relief that late in the afternoon I stepped upon the solid pavements of the town.

I had been told, on the road, of a laborer's cottage in Church Street where cheap board and lodging could be had.

From the post-office I readily found my way to this cottage, and was soon propped up in bed reading my letters, while the laborer's wife hung up my clothes to dry in the kitchen and put my boots under the stove.

In the morning all the brilliance of the clear, cold autumn had returned.

It was such a day as seems to emerge renewed with fresh and ample vigor from the cleansing of a storm.

The streets presented a really singular picture.

The town itself is the conventional American, provincial, manufacturing centre, with its business portion built up in "brick blocks," which are innocent of any attraction but utility.

From this quarter it shades gradually, in one direction, into the workshops and cottages of the region of the proletariat, and in another into the wide, well-shaded avenues where are the somewhat ostentatious homes and churches of the well-to-do.

Long lines of booths now crowded the curves about the central public square and reached far down the communicating streets.

In these booths the farming people of the surrounding country sold their fruits and garden vegetables, and butter and eggs and poultry; and white-aproned butchers spread their meats in tempting array.

It was an Oriental bazaar in all but color and the highly pitched jabber of Eastern bargaining.

But still more perfect as a reproduction of foreign scenes were the groups of women who, with colored shawls tied round their heads and falling about their shoulders, sat on the steps of public buildings with baskets of provisions about them and talked among themselves, and came to terms with customers in their oddly mixed vernacular.

It recalled at once the Platz of a German city thronged by peasant women on market days, only here, too, was a lack of color.

The women were unmistakably Teutonic.

All had the generous contour of countenance which approaches to a family likeness in a whole race of peasantry, but the red of the old country complexion had faded to our prevailing pallor.

In spite of a large foreign element, or in virtue of it, I do not know which, the town itself is aggressively American.

The fact that some hundreds of million feet of lumber come each year from its mills gives to it great importance as a lumber centre.

And the good fortune of this form of industry the city certainly shows in its freedom from the usual begriming effects of manufacture on a large scale.

In one of the morning papers of the town I found the spirit of the place expressed in a reported speech of a local celebrity, an ex-member of Congress.

The chief burden of it was the note of congratulation to the people of the town on their progress and prosperity, as indicated in their electric lights and rapid transit system, and in their growing industries and increasing numbers, which, he declared, "had passed the stopping-point."

But I must hurry on.

Early on Friday afternoon, October 9th, I set out from Williamsport, with Oil City as my next objective point.

I had no money, but this did not disturb me, for I was entering the open country and felt sure of finding work.

The road lay along the fertile river bottom and then began to climb the range of hills which walls in the valley on the north.

The lasting impression here is of a region of most uncommon natural wealth.

Many square miles of farms come into the range of vision; the soil looks like a deep, rich loam.

And a like impression comes to you from the opposite bank of the river, where the land lies flat to the foot of the southern range of hills.

From such a vantage ground you see at a glance how the river, shut in by these barriers, could have risen to so great a height in the flood of 1889 and have worked such appalling disaster.

There are constant references to "the flood" among the inhabitants of the valley, and it plainly holds for them the place of a chronological mark not unlike that held farther East by the "blizzard" of 1888, only it sounds not a little odd at first to hear common reference to antediluvian events.

Presently I came to a road which forked at Linden to the right, and made in the direction of a gap in the hills.

Its general course seemed westward, and so I followed it.

An hour or two later it had led me into a forest, where the sunlight was fast fading.

I was intent on the question of finding work before nightfall, when I heard the rumble of wheels behind me, and a voice singing a German song.

I looked up as the wagon came alongside.

The horses were walking slowly up the hill, and a young man lounged at leisure on the seat.

His legs were crossed, and the reins lay loosely in one hand.

A light, wide-brimmed felt hat was pushed back on his crown, and from under the rim the yellow hair rested on his forehead.

He was singing from sheer lightness of heart; and young and strong and handsome as he was, he made you think of Alvary in his part of _Siegfried_.

"Have a ride?"

he called to me, and there was no trace of foreign accent in his speech.

"Thank you," I said; and in another moment my pack was in the bottom of the wagon and I on the seat beside the driver.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm looking for a job."

"You want work on a farm?"

"Yes, that or any other kind of work that I can get."

"Well, there ain't much doing on the farms now.

I don't know nobody that's looking for a hired man.

There's Abe Potter, I heard him say as how he wanted to hire a man to work for him all winter; but Miss' Potter, she told my wife last night that he'd got Jim Hale's boy, Al, to live out to him.

Say, did you ever work in the woods?"

"No." "Well, there's plenty of work in the woods.

It's a rough life, but it ain't so bad when you're used to it.

I worked in the woods before I was married.

I could go out to the woods now, and earn two dollars a day and my keep; but my wife wouldn't let me.

And it's a pretty rough life, only I come to like it.

But I've got my farm now, and my wife and children; and her old folks lives with us, and I've got to stay to home, and take care of things.

Say, where are you going to-night?"

"I don't know.

I'll try to find some place to stay where I can help with the work to pay for my keep; and then to-morrow I'll go to the woods, and try to get a job."

"I tell you, stranger, you stay at my house to-night, and in the morning you can go to English Centre.

I guess you'll get a job on one of the camps."

My thanks could have expressed but little of the gratitude I felt.

I shared his light-hearted mood at once, and was a very interested and attentive listener to the narrative of his early life; his disagreements with his father, and how he had inherited the farm from him burdened with debt, but had almost paid the mortgages, and had his eye now upon a neighbor's farm with a view to purchasing that.

He was singing again as we drove up the lane toward his home, and was plainly expectant.

The cause was clear when two children, a girl and boy of about six and four, came running toward the wagon, with excited cries of welcome.

They drew up sharply at sight of a stranger, and their father loudly greeted them with a medley of affectionate diminutives in English and German, until they lost their fear, and began to talk rapidly with him in the quaintest German, which sounded as though it might be one with the strange dialects which you see in _Fliegende Blätter_.

I helped to unhitch the horses, and then asked whether there was more that I could do.

There were apples to be picked up from under the trees in the orchard, and I worked at this task until dark, when there came the call to supper.

After that meal the children were put to bed, and the rest of us gathered in the kitchen, where a large open fire burned, and an oil-lamp lent its light.

An "apple-butter making" was to be the feature of the next day's work, and we spent the evening in getting ready for it.

We sat in a semicircle in front of the fire, first the farmer's wife, and then the patriarchal grandfather, who was almost deaf, and was known to all the household by the not euphonious name of "Gross-pap," and next to him the grandmother, and last the guest.

The farmer himself sat at a table near us, briskly working an apple-peeler, while the rest of us removed the cores, and cut the apples into small sections.

It was a very comfortable place which I seemed to have found in the household.

I was taken in with natural hospitality, and the family life moved on unhampered by my presence, while I, a welcome guest, could sit and watch it at my ease.

The old man had every excuse for silence, and he and his wife spoke rarely, and always in their native tongue, but they evidently understood English perfectly.

The farmer and his wife spoke English to each other, and spoke it as though born to its use, but they used that quaint German dialect in talking with the old people and the children.

The wife was a plain woman, inclined to fretfulness, I thought, and she had a certain air with her husband, which is not uncommon to plain women whose husbands are distinctly handsome.

She had little to say, but she listened attentively to the farmer's talk.

He was entertainment for us all.

Good-looking, high-spirited, manly fellow--in perfect unconsciousness of self, he talked on with the genial freedom of a true man of the world.

His trip to Williamsport was a fruitful theme, and no least event of the journey was without its interest.

He told us of the neighbors whom he met on the road, and all of his conjectures regarding their probable errands.

He had taken a load of vegetables to town, and now recounted every sale and purchase, for he had been charged with many commissions.

One was the purchase of braid for his wife's new dress.

He was full of good-humor at each fresh departure in his tale; but, for some reason, the story of this last commission pleased him most.

With high regard for circumstantial detail, he told it to us at least five times, and ended every narrative with a beaming smile, and the unvarying remark that "I'd have got it wider if I'd only known," to which his wife replied each time with unfaltering insistence upon the last word: "But you might have known."