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

Up hill and down dale my road led me, where substantial farm-houses, and enormous barns, and fields of standing corn, and herds of cattle in the pasture-lands, all indicated the necessaries and even the comforts of life in rich abundance, and emphasized the wonder that from such surroundings should come the recruits who ceaselessly throng our crowded towns.

A few miles farther on the whole topography of the country changed.

I had passed through the village of Otisville and was walking in the direction of Huguenot when my way carried me to a hillside from which I could see the long stretch of a valley, reaching far to the westward, and lined on both sides, with almost artificial regularity, by ranges of hills, which rose sharply from the plain below.

Through a break at the north the Delaware flows, and, crossing the plain-like valley, disappears among the southern hills, while the valley itself, in almost unbroken symmetry, reaches on to the west.

At the foot of the northern range, and on the eastern bank of the river, is the town of Port Jervis.

Its outer streets are the light, airy thoroughfares of the usual American town, faced by small wooden cottages, each with its plot of ground devoted in front to a few square yards of turf, and carefully economized behind the house for the purpose of supporting fruit-trees and providing a vegetable garden.

The great number of these individual homes, as indicating the manner of life of multitudes of the working classes in provincial towns, seemed to me to mark a conspicuous absence of crowded tenement living; and on its positive side to indicate at least the possibility of wholesome family life and of much home comfort.

Certainly my experience at Highland Falls and at Middletown confirms this impression.

In each of those cases the people with whom I stayed owned their home and the plot of land about it, which contributed thriftily toward the family support.

The houses were ephemeral wooden cottages, done in the degrading ugliness inspired by the Queen Anne revival, and furnished in a taste even more florid, and they were not overclean.

And yet they were comfortable homes, in which we fared handsomely, eating meat three times a day, and varieties of vegetables and admirable home-made bread, and knew no stint of sugar or butter, and slept in good beds in not too crowded rooms in an upper story.

All about me here, and reaching down the long vistas of communicating streets, were the same external conditions, until I entered the closely built up "brick blocks" of the business quarter of the town.

I could but think how characteristic of our smaller cities is this separate individual home-life of the wage-earning classes, and how increasingly are the improved means of transportation rendering like surroundings possible for the workmen of the larger towns.

Having crossed the Delaware River, about four o'clock I began a walk through a region no less beautiful than that through which I had passed in the morning.

My way lay in the valley, directly under the steep hills that wall it in on the north.

Their densely wooded sides cast deep shadows obliquely across the road, and in this grateful shade I walked on, listening to the songs of birds and the murmur of mountain-streams, and the cooling sound of spray splashing from ledge to ledge of moss-grown rocks.

At sunset I entered the village of Milford, which nestles securely at the foot of the mountains of Pike County, a beautiful village of wide, well-shaded streets, where there was little to mar the elegant simplicity of dignified country homes, untouched by harrowing attempts at the fantastic.

By eight o'clock I was fast asleep in a workmen's boarding-house, and at sunrise on the next morning I was on the road which turns sharply up the mountain-side.

A dense mist lay upon the valley, but my way soon led me up to the freer air, until, upon the summit of a ridge, I reached the clear sunshine, and could see the emerging ranges of hills to the east and south and the white mist resting motionless on the valley below.

Up and up I climbed into higher altitudes.

Each elevation appeared, as I approached it, the topmost crest of the mountain, and yet I gained it only to find another rough steep beyond.

There could scarcely have been a sharper contrast with the journey of the previous day.

The graceful undulations of rich farm-lands and the broad plain of the Huguenot flats, checkered with field and forest and pasture, and traversed by well-kept roads, and dotted over with the buildings of prosperous farms and thriving villages, had given place, in the panorama of my journey, to rugged mountains, steep and densely wooded, except where, on some less hopeless site at the very margin of cultivation, a settler had cleared the land and begun a conflict with the stony soil in an almost desperate struggle for a living.

Here were mountain-roads that went from bad to worse, until, before I had crossed the range, my way degenerated into a narrow, rocky trail, overgrown with weeds, and along which I walked for a stretch of six or eight miles without passing a dwelling.

That was in the afternoon.

At a little before twelve o'clock I had come to Shohola Falls.

There, in a "hollow" on the bank of a mountain-stream, stood a saw-mill, surrounded by piles of bleaching boards and a few rough, unpainted cottages.

Through the open door of a shop I caught sight of an old carpenter bending over his bench.

He entered very readily into directions about the way and told me that I had but to follow a direct road to Kimble, and from there there was no difficulty in the way to Tafton, which, he said, was as far as I could get that day.

Then, with an eye on my pack, he asked pointedly what I was peddling.

The forgotten magazines recurred to me and I opened my pack and handed him a copy.

The frequent change of subject and the variety of illustration fixed for a time his excited attention.

Half a score of young children now crowded about the door, and edged cautiously into the shop, fixing upon me eyes wide open with the hunger of curiosity.

They were all barefooted and ragged, and not one of them was clean, and at a single glance you saw that, mountain-bred and young as they were, there was no wholesome color in their faces, and that the very beauty of childhood was already fading before a persistent diet from the frying-pan.

The old carpenter presently turned upon me with the air of one who was master of the situation.

"Would you like to sell some of them books around here?"

he asked.

I told him that I should.

"Well, you're a stranger here, ain't you?"

"Yes."

"Then don't you try it.

A young fellow done this place out of more'n fifty dollars last spring, and we're kind o' careful of strangers now."

I sat on the door-step to rest, and invited the children to look at the pictures, which they did, hesitatingly at first, with timid advances, in which curiosity struggled with their fear of the unfamiliar.

But they grew bolder as I invented stories to match the illustrations, and presently they were all nestling about me in the ease of absorbed attention.

One little girl of four or five, who had eyed me at first with an anxious look of alarm, now stood leaning over my shoulder with an arm about my neck, and her soft brown hair, escaped from her sun-bonnet, touching my face, while she looked down upon the pictures, and I could feel her breath quickening as the story neared its climax.

I pressed on presently, and the children ran by my side, asking for yet one story more, and finally calling their good-byes and waving their hands to me as I disappeared around a curve in the road.

A few miles farther on I came to a lonely farm-house, where I knocked in quest of a dinner.

The open door revealed a woman's face, so sad and worn, so full of care and of weary years of slavish drudgery, that quite instinctively I began to apologize, and to conceal my real purpose in aimless inquiry about the way.

"I do not know," she said; "but won't you come in?

The boys will soon be at home for dinner, and they can tell you."

Her voice was soft and sweet, and her manner so reassuring that I gladly followed her into the sitting-room, where she introduced me to her daughter, a slender, dark young woman, who sat sewing by an open window.

I hastened to make myself known as a workman on my way to Wilkesbarre, where I hoped to get employment, and I told them of my encounter with the carpenter at the Falls.

They smiled as though the flavor of his humor was not lost to them, and they spoke of other characters at the settlement quite as odd as he.

Both women were dressed in the plainest calico, and without a touch of ornament, and the house was poor; poor to the verge of poverty; but the walls were free from chromoes and worsted mottoes, and showed, instead, a few good engravings, and the rag-carpet on the floor blent in accordant colors, and curtains hung neatly at the windows.

Dinner was waiting, and presently the mother said that we would delay it no longer for the boys.

We sat down at a table in a rough shed which opened from the sitting-room.

A spotless cloth covered the board, and the service was simple and tasteful, and there was the uncommon luxury of napkins.

The dinner moved with unembarrassed ease.

We talked of the surrounding country, and its resemblance to other regions, and of the political situation.

The mother led the talk, and tactfully guarded it from any approach to silence or to topics too intimate.

Once, however, she touched lightly upon a former home in a prosperous corner of another State, and instantly I felt the hint of some family tragedy.

And now her two sons came shuffling in, rough and ruddy from their work, clean-cut, well-bred young fellows, far too young I thought to be "hauling logs," and I could read an agony of anxiety in their mother's face as she watched them wearily take their seat on the vacant bench by the table.

They had been left in the care of the work in the absence of their father, who had gone some miles to a neighboring settlement, "on business," their mother added, blushing deeply, while the boys looked hard at their plates.

The afternoon's tramp lay through the wildest part of that wild region.

From Shohola Falls to Kimble the direct road is one which leads straight across the mountain, and is almost unbroken, and seldom used.

In all its course I passed but two or three farms; and these revealed a pitiful poverty, in the wretched hovels which did service as farm-houses and barns, and, more plainly, if possible, in the squalor of little children who gaped at me from among high weeds behind tottering fences.

On I went for miles, over a road so lonely that it recalled the loneliness of the sea, and, like the sea, the sweep of heaving mountains seemed unbroken in a boundless monotony.

And then the landscape had in it the beauty and the majesty of the sea, and the whispering of the wind over vast fields of stunted pines and scrub oaks answered to the wash of waves, and bore a fragrance and freshness to match with ocean breezes.

Late in the afternoon my way descended abruptly by a more frequented road in the direction of Kimble.

Presently I could see a railway and a canal, and I felt a little, I fancied, as an explorer must upon emerging, once more, into the region of the explored.

I wished to know the distance and the way to Tafton, and so I inquired of the first person whom I met.

She was a milkmaid, and so picturesque a figure, that I felt a pleasurable excitement in the chance of a word with her.

Her calico skirt was tucked up a little at one side.

Under one bare arm she carried a milking-stool, and a bucket in the other hand.

Her sun-bonnet had fallen from her head, and hung like a scholar's hood on her back.

The sunlight was playing in glory about her face and in her abundant auburn hair.

My excitement suddenly took another form; for, as I lifted my hat in apologetic inquiry, there fell about me a shower of oak-leaves, which I had placed in the crown for the sake of added coolness.

The milkmaid had met me with a clear, frank look between the eyes;

but she shrank a little now, and could not resist a startled glance, full of questioning, as to what further my hat might contain, and she answered me more with the purpose, I fancy, of being quickly rid of a wanderer of such doubtful mind, than of adding to his information.

The walk from Kimble to Tafton, I presently found, could be shortened by taking a path through the forest; and I was soon panting up the hillside, grateful for the long twilight which promised to see me safe, before the darkness, to my destination.

On the way I fell in with a young quarryman, whose home was near Tafton, and who willingly became my guide.

He was only sixteen, but already he had worked for four years at his trade.

His gaunt, angular body showed plainly the marks of arrested development, when the growth of the boy had hardened prematurely into an almost deformed figure of a confirmed laborer.

He lunged clumsily beside me, and was inclined to be taciturn at first;

but he warmed presently to readier speech, and talked frankly of his work and manner of life.

At twelve he had been taken from school and sent to the quarry to help his father support a growing family.

And then his days had settled into a ceaseless round of hard work, from which there was no escape for him until he should be twenty-one, an age which appeared to his perception at an almost infinite distance.

His attitude to his present circumstances was not a resentful one.

He seemed to think it most natural that he should help in the family support; or, rather, no other possibility seemed to occur to him.

It was soon apparent, too, that his chiefest hope and ambition, with reference to his ultimate freedom from that necessity, were centred in a possible return to school advantages.

He spoke of his efforts to study after work hours, and of the hardness of such a course, and owned to the fear of insurmountable difficulties in the future.

His reticence was gone now, and he was speaking with hearty freedom, and with his eyes all alight with the dream of his life.

I told him something of the increased opportunities of education for men who must make their own way, and of how many men I had known who had supported themselves through college.

We parted at the edge of the forest, where we reached his home, a frail shell of a shanty, standing upon stumps of felled trees, and he was welcomed by the sight of his mother, chopping wood at the roadside, and a troop of ragged children playing about the open door.

At nightfall, on the next evening, I entered Wilkesbarre, but I got so far only by virtue of a long lift in a farmer's cart, which carried me, by a stroke of great good fortune, over much the longest part of the day's journey.

So far my plan had been carried out.

It was Friday evening, and I was safe in Wilkesbarre, somewhat worn by the walk of rather over eighty miles, and with an increased dislike for my burdensome pack, but with every prospect of being fit for work so soon as I should find it.

My success in that direction had been so uniform, that instead of sleeping in the open, as I had done on the night before, I allowed myself the luxury of a bed in a cheap boarding-house, and a supper and a breakfast at its table, before beginning my search.

Further good fortune awaited me, for Saturday morning lent itself with cheerful brightness to the enterprise.

At an early hour I stepped out into a busy street of the city, sore and stiff with walking, but high of hope, and not without a certain elevation of spirit, which might have warned me of a fall.

Work on the city sewers was being carried through the public square.

I found the contractor, and applied for work as a digger.

Very courteously he took the pains to explain to me that he was obliged to keep on hand, and pay for full time, a force of men far larger than was demanded, except by certain exigencies, and that he could not increase their number.

Not far from the square another gang of workmen were laying the curbstones and repairing the street, but here I was again refused.

I lifted my eyes to the site of a stone building that was nearing completion, and there, too, no added hands were needed.

By this time I had neared the post-office, and I found letters awaiting me there which claimed the next half hour.

But even more embarrassing, as a check to further search, was a free reading-room, which now invited me to files of New York newspapers, in which I knew that I should find details of recent interesting political developments at Rochester and Saratoga, not to mention possible fresh complications in the more exciting game of politics abroad.

I went in, and like Charles Kingsley's young monk, Philemon, who, wandering one day farther than ever before from the monastery in the desert, chanced upon the ruins of an old Egyptian temple; and mindful of a warning against such seduction, yet guiltily charmed by the rare beauty of the frescoes, prayed aloud, "Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity," but looked, nevertheless--I looked, too, and I read on until mounting remorse robbed the reading of all pleasure and drove me to my task again.

But I had fallen once; and, by a sad fatality, scarcely had I renewed the search, with weakened power of resistance, when I stumbled upon a fiercer temptation in the form of a library, which announced in plain letters its freedom to the public until the hour of nine in the evening.

Forgetful of my character as a workman; miserably callous to the claim of duty to find employment, if possible; and in any case, to live honestly the life which I had assumed, I entered the wide-open, hospitable doors, and was soon lost to other thought, and even to the sense of shame, in the absorbing interest of favorite books.

In the lonely tramp across the mountains of Pike County I walked sometimes for miles with no opportunity of quenching a growing thirst, when suddenly I came upon a mountain-spring that trickled from the solid rock, and formed a little pool in its shade, where I threw myself on the ground, and, with a glorious sense of relief, drank deeply of its cold water.

The analogy is a weak one, for the physical relief and the momentary pleasure but faintly suggest the prolonged intellectual delight, after two months of unslackened thirst.

Here was an inexhaustible supply, and there were polite librarians who responded cheerfully to your slightest wish; and, best of all, there was an inner door which disclosed a reading-room, where perfect quiet reigned, and comfortable chairs invited you to grateful ease, and shelves on shelves of books were free to your eager hand.

To pass from one writer to another, among the volumes that lay on the table, lingering over long-loved passages, or dipping lightly here and there, absorbing pleasure from the very touch of the book and the sight of the well-printed page, held by the charm of some characteristic phrase, and finally to sink into the folds of an easy-chair with a store of books within ready reach--what delight can equal such satisfaction of a craving sense?

There through the livelong day I sit, and through the early evening, until I am roused by the sound of slamming shutters which is the janitor's signal for nine o'clock, the hour of closing for the night.

Taking my hat and stick I walk out into the gas-lit street, and into our modern world, with its artificialities and its social and labor problems; and I remember that I am a proletaire out of a job, and that with shameless neglect of duty I have been idling through priceless hours.

Crestfallen, I hurry to my boarding-house, longing, like any conscious-stricken inebriate, to lose remorse in sleep.

As I walk to my lodgings a certain fellow-feeling warms me with fresh sympathy for my kind.

I have met with my first reverse, not a serious one, but still the search for work for the first time in my experience has been fruitless through most of a morning.

Instead of persevering industriously, I yield weakly to the desire to forget my present lot, and the duty it entails, in the intoxication that beckons to me from free books.

That happens to be my temptation, and I fall.

Another workman of my class, in precisely my position, encounters, not one chance temptation which he might escape by taking another street, but at every corner open doors which invite him to the companionship of other men, who will help him to forget his discouragements so long as his savings last.

And as we are both turned into the street at night, in What do we differ as regards our moral strength?

He yielded to his temptation, and I to mine.

CHAPTER V A FARM HAND