Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The East — Chapter 2 - Part II - A Day Laborer at West Point

[Illustration: A WEIRD PROCESSION, THIS FRAGMENT OF A COMPANY IN THE RANKS OF LABOR]

As a physical exertion, walking was not hard after our day's labor.

It was a change and a rest, and we must all have felt the soothing refreshment in the breath of cool air which was moving down the river, and in the soft light of the early evening, which brought out in new loveliness the curves of the opposite hills and deepened the shades of blue and green.

My own appreciation of all this and more would have been livelier but for two overpowering appetites, which were asserting themselves with unsuspected strength.

I was hungry, not with the hunger which comes from a day's shooting, and which whets your appetite to the point of nice discriminations in an epicure's dinner, but with a ravenous hunger which fits you to fight like a beast for your food, and to eat it raw in brutal haste for gratification.

But more than hungry, I was thirsty.

Cold water had been in abundant supply at the works, and we drank as often and as freely as we chose.

But water had long since ceased to satisfy.

My mouth and throat were burning with the action of the lime-dust, and the physical craving for something to quench that strange thirst was an almost overmastering passion.

I knew of no drink quite strong enough.

I have never tasted gin, but I remembered in one of Froude's essays a reference to it as much in use among working-men, and as being seasoned to their taste by a dash of vitriol, and eagerly I longed for that.

Half-way down the road we met some young women in smart dog-carts driving to the sunset parade at the post.

In the delicate fabric and color of summer dress they seemed to us the embodiment of the cool of the evening.

Suddenly I looked with a keener interest.

With her fingers outstretched she was shading her eyes from the horizontal rays of the setting sun, and she did not see us, rather saw through us, as through something transparent, the familiar objects on the roadside.

I had seen her last in town at a wedding at St. Thomas's, and fate unkindly sent her up the aisle on the arm of another usher.

I laughed aloud, a short, harsh laugh, that escaped me before I was aware, and that had in it so odd a quality that it gave me an uncomfortable feeling of unacquaintance with myself.

The two old Irishmen turned inquiring glances at me, and appeared disturbed at my serious look.

My room, when I reached it, was, in spite of wide-opened windows, like Nero's bath at Baiæ.

The ceiling and walls glowed with stored-up heat.

Jim was there making ready for supper, and I could hear Jerry and Pete in their room in similar preparation.

When I put my hands into the cold water, I could scarcely feel them;

but the pain of cleansing grew sharp, and yet, when I had thoroughly washed them, although the fingers felt double their normal size, they were really less swollen, and were far on the way to comfort.

The reaction had set in now, and I could feel it in great, cooling waves of physical well-being.

The table was heaped with supper, huge slices of juicy sirloin, and dishes of boiled potatoes and cabbage and beans, from which the steam rose in fragrant clouds.

By each plate was a large cup of tea, so strong and hot that it bit like lye, and it soon washed away the burning lime-dust.

We sat down with our coats and waistcoats off.

The men were in the best of good-humor, and the conversation ran into friendly talk.

They asked me how I liked my job.

I thought much better of it by this time, and I tried to wear the air of critical content.

They may have had their own notions about my previous experience of manual labor, but certainly they did not obtrude these with any show of suspicion.

They accepted me as a working-man on perfectly natural terms.

Until Wilson came I was the only unskilled laborer among them, but my different grade was no barrier to our intercourse, and we met and talked with the freedom of men whose experience is innocent of conventional restraints.

Long after supper we sat on the porch, smoking in the twilight.

A deep physical comfortableness possessed us.

Each mouthful of meat and drink had wrought miraculous healing, and had restored wasted energy in measures that could be felt.

My muscles were sore, but the very pain turned to pleasure in the ease of relaxation.

The men were town artisans, skilled laborers, attracted here by the abundance of work.

Jerry was a plasterer, and Pete a bricklayer, and Jim a stone-mason.

A short, slender figure, a smooth-shaven face with small, sharp, regular features, black hair, and gray eyes, is a sufficient outline of Jerry's personality.

His air was that of a cynic, and there was a cynical flavor in his speech, but the sting of it was gone at the sight of his soft gray eyes, full of generous reserve of human kindness.

Pete was a well-set-up young fellow, of twenty-five, perhaps, plainly of German parentage.

Like Jerry, he was smooth-shaven, and there was a striking contrast between his dark hair and his singularly fair skin and blue eyes.

He was a bricklayer, and ambitious of promotion.

He spoke hopefully of an appointment in the Navy Yard as a result of a recent examination.

Jim was the only married man among us.

His wife and three children were in Brooklyn, and Jim went home every Saturday night, and spent Sunday with them.

He was a handsome young Scotsman, with curling brown hair, and brown eyes, and a well-formed mustache, and a round face with full features.

In the casual flow of our talk, Jim spoke of Burns, and quoted him with a ready familiarity.

It was easy to catch the drift of his liking.

Its set was steadily toward passages which sing the wrongs and oppression of the poor.

Jim had none of the tricks of a declaimer;

but with jerks of unstudied emphasis he repeated familiar lines until you were conscious of new meaning and strength.

He was sitting with his chair tilted against the wall, and his heels resting on a round, and his hands clasped about his knees.

His eyes were fixed upon the evening gloom as he recited: Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn.

The verses seemed exactly to fit his mood, for he repeated them again and again, with lingering liking for their sense and alliteration.

Jerry broke in abruptly here with sudden, unmeasured condemnation of the dulness of evenings in a country town in the absence of the theatre, pronounced theátre.

The drama had fired his imagination for the moment, for he broke through his wonted reserve and waxed fluent as he expressed his views: "When I go to the theátre, I go to laugh.

I want to see pretty girls and lots of them, and I want to see them dance.

I want songs as I can understand the words of, and lots of jokes, and horse-play.

You don't get me to the theátre to see no show got up by Shakespeare, nor any of them fellows as lived two thousand years ago.

What did they know about us fellows as is living now?

Pete, you mind that Tim Healy in the union, him that's full of wind in the meetings?

Onct he give me a book to read, and he says it's a theátre piece wrote by Shakespeare, and the best there was.

I read more'n an hour on that piece, and I'm damned if there was a joke into it, nor any sense neither."

We were presently yawning under the stars, and I was more than glad when the men spoke of bed.

Almost in the next moment, to my consciousness, Mrs. Flaherty was knocking on the door, bidding us wake and not to go to sleep again, for it was six o'clock.

Of the five, this second day was the hardest.

My body was sore in every part when I began to work, and the help of hardening muscles I did not gain until the third day.

Mrs. Flaherty had skilfully bound up the slight wounds on my fingers.

The merciful rain came twice to our relief, once in the morning and again in the afternoon.

But this was not an unmixed blessing, for in the minutes of delay we could but calculate the growing loss in wages, and watch the sure vanishing of any surplus above actual living expenses.

I remember making an estimate on my way to my lodgings that evening, and it was with much sinking of heart that I discovered that my earnings made a total rather less than the cost of the day's living.

There has been difficulty in the way of intercourse with the men.

I

speak no Italian, nor any of the Scandinavian tongues, so that my acquaintance has been confined to my own countrymen, who are few in number in the gang, and to the Irishmen and negroes, and an occasional Hungarian who understands my stammering German.

And within the English-speaking circle, in the absence of this, there have been other barriers.

There is wanting that social freedom that is most natural in Mrs. Flaherty's home.

There is much of it among the foreigners.

They hang together at their work, and sit in separate groups through the noon hour, and one commonly hears, especially among the Italians, that picturesque volubility which sets you wondering as to the subject of such fluent debate.

Among the English-speaking men, the Irish and negroes are as Jews and Samaritans; but aside from this, the general attitude is one of sullen suspiciousness.

Few appear to know the others, and not even their wretchedness draws them to the relief of companionship.

Sometimes we hear warm greetings among acquaintances, or see some show of friendliness, but this is markedly out of keeping with the general tone of things.

The usual intercourse is an exchange of experiences, an account of the circumstances which brought them to their present lot, among men who happen to be working side by side or sitting in company at the noon hour.

Quite as commonly one hears only muttered curses against the boss.

You would gather from their own accounts that many of the men are unused to unskilled labor.

There is a singular uniformity in their histories.

Nearly all have seen better days, and are now but tiding over a dull season in their trades, or are earning enough to take them to some other part of the country, where there is a quickening in the demand for their labor.

I found myself growing doubtful of these unvarying tales.

The mechanism became too apparent.

"I am really an efficient and energetic workman," each seemed to say; "you see me now in a strait of circumstances.

You should see me at my trade, in which I am an adept.

I am out of that employment now because of depression in the business, but when business revives, or when I can reach Chicago or St. Louis or Minneapolis, my labor will be in strong demand."

Irresistibly one is led to the belief that most of these men probably have no trade, or, at the best, are inefficient workmen, who, unable to keep a job long, habitually pick up a living at work like this, in the careless makeshift of a shiftless life.

It is refreshing to meet others who are frankly laborers.

All their lives they have been bred to unskilled labor, and they make no pretence of anything different.

They are hard men who look out upon a world that is hard to them at every point of contact; but they are true men, by virtue of their honesty and directness, and one likes them accordingly.

Some of them are old, and it is pitiful to see them tottering under the burden of years, and staying off actual want by forcing their rheumatic limbs through the drudgery of this rude toil.

I had noticed the absence of one of this coterie for a day or two when, in the middle of a morning's work, he appeared among the ruins.

He was an old Irishman.

His face was swollen from toothache, and was bound up in a cotton bandanna.

His hands were clasped on his stooping back, and he moved with the painful motion that suggests acute rheumatism.

For a time he stood watching us at our work and exchanging words with some of the men about his complaints, when suddenly he burst into tears.

The men jeered him, and angrily told him to be gone.

I had a sickening feeling of cruelty as I saw him go sobbing down the road; but when I spoke of him at the noon hour the men explained that it was a disgrace to have him crying there, but that they would see that his wants were provided for.

There was a revelation in the discovery of the degree to which profanity is ingrained in the vernacular of these men, as representatives of the laboring poor.

They swear with the readiness of instinct, not merely in anger, when their language mounts to a torrent of abuse unspeakably awful in its horrid blasphemies, but in commonest intercourse, when their oaths are as meaningless as casual interjections.

And almost never is the rude hardness of their speech softened by the amenities which seem so natural a part of language.

The imperative, more than any other mood, is rudely thrust into common use.

They are even punctilious in its employment.

A single instance will serve to point the nature of this graceless speech.

Two boys of ten or twelve are employed in carrying water to the men at their work.

One carries his bucket through the building to those engaged in the upper stories; and the other, a flaxen-haired, delicate child whose thin legs bend under his burden, serves those of us who are at work on the heaps below.

Through all the day, and especially in its greatest heat, the boys run busily from the works to a neighboring pump, and return with bucketfuls of water, which are at once surrounded by thirsty workmen and emptied in a few minutes.

Regardless of the prevailing custom, I always thanked the little fellow for my drink.

Soon I noticed that even this instinctive acknowledgment seemed to embarrass him.

In an interval of rest he came up to me, after receiving my thanks.

"You shouldn't thank me," he said.

"And why not?"

I begged to know.

"Because, you see, I'm _paid_ to do this," was his conscientious answer.

A mere child, naturally gentle, and yet so bred to rougher usage that a simple "Thank you" jarred upon his sense of right!

A few minutes later I saw the two boys in a rough-and-ready fight, and their language lacked none of the horror of that of their elders.