Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The East — Chapter 4 - Part I - A Hired Man at an Asylum

WILKESBARRE, PENNSYLVANIA,

Saturday, September 19, 1891. I have a wide sweep of country to cover from the "---- House" in the Highlands above the Hudson, where I served as a porter, and received with my wages a reference to the effect that my work was done "faithfully and well," to the coal regions of Pennsylvania in the valley of the Susquehanna.

My spirits rise at every recollection of the journey.

For days I walked through the crisp autumn air, breathing its tingling freshness, and barely sensible of fatigue.

The way led me over the rich farm-lands of Orange County, and across the Delaware, and through the lonely wilderness of the Pennsylvania border, until I emerged upon the hills above the Susquehanna, and caught sight of the splendid valley, with its native beauty hideously marred by the blackened trails of forest fires and the monstrous heaps of culm that mark the mouth of the coal-pits.

So far work has not failed me, unless I mark as an exception the single case when I began a search, and brought it abruptly to an end by descending suddenly upon a camping party of friends.

Quietly and mysteriously, I fancy, to the other servants, I appeared among them at the "---- House," and with as little notice I tried to steal away.

Instead of going to the kitchen at five o'clock on that Wednesday morning for scrubbing-water, I took to the road with my pack, and left behind me the "---- House" awaking to life in the servants' quarters.

I had been a gang-laborer and a hotel porter, and now I wondered what my next rôle was to be.

But the feeling was simply a genial curiosity, and was free from the timid shrinking with which I set out from the minister's house in Wilton, and my lodgings at Highland Falls.

Then it was under the spur of self-compulsion that I launched afresh upon this fortuitous life.

With strong animal instinct I had clung to any haven where shelter and food were secure.

Now I warmly welcomed a freer courage born of experience.

Not too sure of newly gained powers, but like a boy learning to swim, I fancied that I felt the strength of some confidence in the novel element.

Light-hearted in spite of my pack, which gained weight with every step, I walked briskly along the country roads, charmed with everything I saw, and feeling sure that my wages would see me through to another job.

Was it a real acquisition, and had I learned to catch the strange pleasure of this fugitive life?

or did the difference lie in the bracing cool of the morning, and the beauty of the open country, and the sense of freedom after long restraint, and, most subtly of all, in that little, hoarded balance in my purse?

It was nightfall when I entered Middletown, and too late to look for work.

With my eye upon the rows of cottages which line the street by which I entered the town, I soon found a boarding-house for workmen.

A bed could be had for twenty cents.

At a bakery near by I got a loaf of bread and a quart of milk for a dime, and was thus supplied with a supper and breakfast.

Twelve hours of unbroken sleep fell to me that night, and in the cool of a threatening morning I set out to find work.

The scaffolding about a brick building in process of erection drew my attention, and I applied for a job as a hod-carrier, but found no demand there for further unskilled labor.

The boss in charge refused me with some show of petulance, as though annoyed by repeated appeals.

He was not more cheerful, but was politely communicative enough when I asked after the likelihood of my finding work in the town.

"There is no business doing," he said.

"The bottom has fallen out of this place.

There's two men looking for every job here, and my advice to you is to go somewhere else."

At the head of the street I came upon the foundation work of another building, which, I learned, was to be an armory.

Here the boss instantly offered me a job, if I could lay brick or do the work of a mason, but of unskilled labor he said that he had an abundant supply.

"But yonder," he added, "is the Asylum, and much work is in progress on the grounds, and there, surely, is your best chance of employment."

The Asylum was a State Homœopathic Institution for the Insane.

I could see the large brick buildings on the highest area of spacious grounds, which spread away in easy undulations, with their natural beauty heightened by the tasteful work of a landscape gardener.

Near the entrance to the grounds I came upon a large force of laborers digging a ditch for a water-main.

The boss refused me a place, but not without evident regret at the necessity, and he was at pains to explain to me that, already on that morning, he had been obliged to turn away half a dozen men.

It was with no great expectation of success at finding work there that I began walking somewhat aimlessly through the Asylum grounds.

The first person whom I met was an old Irish gardener.

He painfully stood erect as I questioned him as to whom I should apply for a job, and supported himself with one hand on my shoulder, while he told me of the medical superintendent, and the overseer, and the foreman, who are in charge of various departments of the work.

Presently, his face brightened with excitement as he pointed to a large man who was walking toward one of the buildings, and he pushed me in his direction with an eager injunction to apply to him, for he was the overseer of the grounds.

The overseer listened to my request and read in silence my reference from the "---- House," and looked me over for a moment, and then abruptly ordered me to report at seven o'clock on the next morning, adding, as he disappeared within the building, that he was paying his men a dollar and a half a day.

The old Irish gardener showed the heartiest pleasure at my success, and directed me to a boarding-house near the Asylum grounds, where I was soon settled, and where at noon I ate a memorable dinner, the first square meal for thirty-six hours, and the first one which had about it the elements of decent comfort since I left Mrs. Flaherty's table.

At seven o'clock on the next morning I was one of a gang of twenty laborers who were digging a sewer-ditch.

The ditch had passed the farther edge of a meadow, and must cut its way through the field to the Asylum buildings, two hundred yards beyond.

Its course was marked by a straight cut through the sod which was to furnish us a guide.

Some of the men took their former places in unfinished portions of the work, and the rest of us fell apart, leaving intervals of about three yards from man to man.

With the cut as a guide, and with the single instruction to keep the ditch two feet wide, we began to wield our picks and shovels.

A thick, unmoving fog lay damp upon the meadow, already saturated with dew.

The sun-rays, gathering penetrating power as they pierced the fog, were soon producing the effect of prickly heat.

This atmosphere, surcharged with moisture and lifeless in its sluggish weight, yet quick with stinging heat, was a medium in which the actual work done was out of proportion to its cost in potential energy.

In the forceful Irishism of one of the laborers: "It was a muggy morning, and a man must do his work twice over to get it done."

By dint of strenuous industry and careful imitation of the methods of the other men, I managed to keep pace with them.

I saw from the first that the work would be hard; and in point of severity it proved all that I expected, and more.

To ply a pick and urge a shovel for five continuous hours calls for endurance.

Down sweeps your pick with a mighty stroke upon what appears yielding, presentable earth, only to come into contact with a rock concealed just below the surface, a contact which sends a violent jar through all your frame, causing vibrations which end in the sensation of an electric shock at your finger-tips.

A few repetitions of this experience are distinctly disheartening in effect.

Besides, the sun has cleared the fog, and is shining full upon us through the still air.

The trench is well below the surface, now, and we work with the sun beating on our aching backs, and our heads buried in the ditch, where we breathed the hot air heavy with the smell of fresh soil, and the sweat drips from our faces upon the damp clay.

By nine o'clock what strength and courage I have left seem oozing from every pore.

The demoralization is complete, and I know that only "the shame of open shame" holds me to my work.

I dig mechanically on through another sluggish hour of torment; and then I come to, and find myself breathing deeply, with long regular breaths, in the miracle of "second wind," with fresh energy flowing like a stream of new life through my body.

Through all the working hours of the day the foreman sat upon a pile of tools silently watching us at the job.

Now and then he politely urged that the ditch be kept not less than two feet wide, and nothing could have been further from his manner and speech than any approach to abusing the men.

It was his evident purpose to treat us well, but the act of his oversight, under the conditions of our employment, involved a practical wasting of his day, and cast upon us the suspicion of dishonesty.

On the next morning, which was Saturday, the foreman sent me down the ditch, where the pipe was already laid, and ordered me, with two other men, to fill in the earth.

Like a line of earthworks lay the "stubborn glebe" above the trench.

The work of shovelling it back into place seemed easy at first, and was easy, as compared with the digging; but the wet, cohesive clay that lined the ditch's brink yielded only to the pressure of a compulsion very persistently applied.

We quit on that evening at five o'clock, with a full day's pay for nine hours' work.

The foreman met me on Monday morning with an order for yet another change.

At the barn I should find "Hunt," he said, and I was to report to him as his "help."

Hunt proved to be a good-looking, taciturn teamster, who had just hitched his horses to his "truck," and he told me to get aboard.

The "truck" was a heavy four-wheeled vehicle without a box, but with, instead, a stout platform suspended from the axle-trees, and resting but a few inches from the ground.

Standing upon this we drove all day from point to point about the grounds, attending to manifold needs.

We had first to cart the milk-cans from the dairy to the kitchen.

This errand took us to the rear of the Asylum buildings, where the entries open upon a series of quadrangular courts.

Then from entry to entry we drove, gathering up great bags of soiled clothes, which lay in heaps about the doors, and we carted these to the laundry.

Then back to the kitchen we went, and took on a load of huge cans filled with swill, and transferred them to a large pig-sty at the edge of the wood, below the meadow, and there emptied their contents into hogsheads, from which, at stated hours, the swill is baled out to the loud-squealing herd within.

Again we made the round of the entries, this time to gather up the waste barrels which stood full of ashes, and the results of the morning's sweeping; and having emptied these, we replaced them for a fresh supply.

Then we drove to the garden, and carted from that quarter to the kitchen several loads of vegetables.

The afternoon was consumed in supplying the demand for ice.

Embedded in a mass of hay in the ice-house, the ice must first be uncovered, and the cakes, frozen together, must be pried apart with a crowbar and then dragged over the melting surface to the door, and finally loaded upon the truck.

We first carted it to the barn-yard, where we washed it by playing water over it with a hose, and then to the kitchen wing, where we chopped it into smaller pieces and threw these into openings which communicated with the large refrigerators inside.

Again and again was this process repeated, until an adequate supply had been furnished, and then there remained before six o'clock time enough to cart to the pigs their evening meal from the kitchen.

With slight changes in detail, this remained the order of our work through the few days of my stay.

I held the job long enough to find myself ensconced at the Asylum, and then I told the foreman that I wished to go.

He looked at me in some surprise, and began to argue the point.

"You'd better stay by your job," he said.

"It is not the best work, but we'll find better for you before long."

I thanked him heartily, and told him I was interested to learn that, but that I felt obliged to go.

He shook hands with me, and cordially wished me luck, and told me to apply to him for work if I happened again in those parts, and added that I could get my wages by calling at the office on the next afternoon, which was the regular pay-day.

A free day was highly useful now, for my clothes and boots were seriously in need of repair.

The pack contained the means of much mending, and by dinner-time my coat and trousers were patched, and my stockings were stoutly darned.

But the boots were beyond me.

Already they had cost me dear, for a dollar, the earnings of four days as a porter, had gone for a pair of new soles, and now another outlay, enormous in its relation to my means, was an imperative necessity.

I had made an appointment with a cobbler for an early hour in the afternoon, precisely as one would with a dentist; for while he was at work on my only pair of boots, I had to sit by in my stocking feet.

Secretly I welcomed the necessity, in spite of its calamitous cost.

I could take a book with me, and read with a clear conscience.

The cobbler was smoking his after-dinner cigar when I entered his shop.

He was little inclined to talk; and when he had finished his smoke he picked up a boot, and bent over it with an air of absorption.

I was soon lost in my book.

The work was nearly done when some movement of his drew my attention to the cobbler.

I had been struck by his appearance, and now my interest deepened.

Away from his bench it would not have occurred to one to assign him to that calling.

He was an old man, whose muscular figure had acquired a stoop at the shoulders like that of some seasoned scholar.

His features were clean-cut and strong.

His blue eyes had a look of much shrewdness and force.

There were deep lines about his mouth and in his forehead, which spoke of masterful conflict in life.

Meeting him in the dress of a gentleman, you would have said that he was a public man of some distinction, and with close acquaintance with affairs.

In reality, he had sat for fifty years upon that bench.

He was growing communicative now; and from his personal history I tried to divert him to his views of life, thinking that I must have found a philosopher in a man whose opportunities for reflection had been so great.

But his talk was flowing freely, and would take its own course, careless of my promptings.

I settled myself to listen, and my interested attention seemed to fire him with new zest.

From personal narrative it was an easy step to events of our national history, and he warmed to these under the inspiration of the life of some great man connected with each.

General Scott was his first hero; and touching upon details of his history, which were wholly unknown to me, he pictured the inborn, warlike spirit of the man with amazing appreciation, and finally quoted the judgment of the Duke of Wellington, who, he said, had declared of Scott that, "as a general, he stood without a superior."

Here he paused for a moment to explain that the Duke of Wellington was a personage of exceptional military experience, whose judgments in such matters were entitled to the highest respect.

The Civil War and Mr. Lincoln as the chief figure of those troublous times next inspired him.

It was with no mean insight into the issues involved that he glowed with the thought of a constitutional question grown to sharp national conflict, and settled at infinite cost, and transmitted as a most sacred trust, to be guarded with eternal vigilance.

But the climax was reached when he turned back on his course, and began afresh, with the Father of his Country as his theme.

The incident of the cherry-tree was repeated with sublime faith, and with highly dramatic effect.

Encouraged by his success and my absorbed attention, he next recounted the events of that fateful June morning when the allied American and British forces were nearing Fort Duquesne.

With keenest appreciation of the fatal irony of it, he repeated again and again his own version of the reply made to the warning of young Washington by General Braddock: "You young buckskin!

you teach a British officer how to fight?"

A chivalric spirit led him now to speak of "Lady Washington."

This moved him most of all, and when he declared that he would repeat for me some lines composed by her, which he had learned by heart as a boy, his emotions were almost beyond control.

His job was finished now, and he drew himself up, and made a strong effort to modulate his voice, which was trembling with feeling.

The lines had an evident magic for him, and he repeated them with great throbs of emotion, while his eyes grew dim: Saw ye my hero?

Saw ye my hero?

I saw not your hero;

But I'm told he's in the van, When the battle just began, And he stays to take care of his men.

Oh ye gods!

I give you my charge To protect my hero, George, And return him safe home to my arms.

Then, bending toward me, he placed a trembling hand on my knee; and looking dimly into my eyes, he said, in husky tones: "And they did, didn't they?"

I assented earnestly, charmed by his sincerity and enthusiasm, only hopeful that there was some mistake in the unexpected glimpse of Lady Washington in the character of a poet, and like my friend struggling with feeling that I found it hard to suppress, and which expressed, would have been sadly out of harmony with the scriptural injunction to "weep with them that weep."

There was a charm in the old cobbler's harangue, which I felt for long.

Even his views of life seemed to appear in these crude enthusiasms upon general themes.

There was a note of optimism which one could not fail to catch, and to respect in a man who, for fifty years, had honestly earned his living on a cobbler's bench.

His sense of proprietorship in his country, and of natural right to high personal pride in her history, conveyed themselves to you as strong convictions, and you understood something of the power which dwells in a people who feel thus toward their country, and who share in her control.

An hour later I was at the Asylum on the errand of getting my pay.

I

had anticipated the appointed time by a few minutes, and was the first of the workmen in the office.

The clerk was in his place, however; and my appearance, hat in hand, furnished him with the signal for drawing from his desk the receipt-forms, upon which the men acknowledge the payments by their signatures.

In the bustle of the business just beginning, the clerk turned upon me and asked, somewhat brusquely, if I could write my name, or whether he should write it for me, and I affix my mark.

So unexpected was the question, that I was conscious at first of some bewilderment, and then of a rising resentment against the fact that such a question should be put to an American workman.

I said that I had acquired the habit of signing my own name when necessary;

but I might have spared myself that folly, for the clerk hastened to explain with the kindest consideration that, of all the laborers whom he habitually pays off, scarcely half can write; "although," he added, with an admirable touch of fairness, "a very small proportion of the illiterate are native-born Americans."

I am afraid that my resentment had its source in a grotesquely foolish feeling.

I have been mistaken for a drunkard, and a detective, and a disreputable double of myself, and have been made a bogey of to frighten children into obedience withal, but not once, so far as I know, have I been taken for a gentleman.

And if the truth must be told, I fear that the very success of my disguise is somewhat chagrinning at times.

There was no wrench on the next morning in parting with the family with whom I boarded, unless my landlady shared my regret at leaving.

She was a meek little woman who slaved heroically at household work to support her daughter, who studied stenography and typewriting, and her idle husband, who led the life of a professional invalid.

He had tried upon me highly colored tales of his career as a soldier, and of what he would have done in life but for his ill-health, tales which I soon learned to interrupt with small services to his wife, and he gave me up as hopelessly unsympathetic.

A baseball game on the Asylum grounds attracted a large crowd one afternoon; and as Hunt and I drove past on an errand, I caught sight of the ex-soldier, who, at his home, was too great a sufferer to contribute even a helping hand at the housework toward his own support, but who here was dancing in vigor of delight over a two-base hit.

It was clear that a rate of progress which had carried me not even so far as the border line of Pennsylvania, during nearly two months, would require a considerable portion of a lifetime in which to accomplish the three thousand miles before me.

I resolved upon more energetic tramping as a wiser policy for, at least, the immediate future.

A rough plan was soon formed.

I had saved nearly six dollars.

It was Wednesday morning.

I would give three days to uninterrupted walk, and by Friday evening I should reach Wilkesbarre.

The whole of Saturday, if so much time were needed, could then be given to a search for employment; and the rest of Sunday would put me in trim to begin on Monday morning the work which would provide in a few days for present needs, and furnish a balance with which to begin the tramp once more.

At an early hour I was upon the high-road which leads to Port Jervis.

The day was a perfect type of the best season of our northern climate, cloudless but for a fleecy embankment behind the purple hills to the north, flooded with a glorious light touched with grateful warmth, and which revealed with articulate distinctness every visible object in the crystal-clear air--an air so pure and cool that it spurred you to your quickest step, and sent bounding through you a glad delight in breath and life.

In all the landscape was the richness of color and the vividness of a transfigured world.

An early frost had touched the foliage; the leaves of the hickory-trees and elms were rustling crisply at their tips, and the sumach deepened into a crimson that matched the color of its clustered seeds, while the oaks and maples maintained the dark luxuriance of their summer leafage, boastful of a hardihood which would succumb only to the keener cold of the later autumn.