Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 4 - Part II - A Hand-Truckman in a Factory

Mrs. Schulz’s boarders had soon reassembled, this time in her kitchen.

Everything was in readiness for us.

A row of tin basins stood in a long sink which extended under the rear windows nearly the length of the room; buckets of hot water were convenient, and at the pump at one end of the sink we could temper the water in the basins to our liking.

Finally, there were cakes of soap cut from large bars, and the usual coarse towels hanging from rollers on the walls.

With sleeves rolled up and our shirts wide open at the neck, we took our turns at the basins.

It was interesting to watch the faces of the mechanics emerge from the washing in frequent changes of water to their natural flesh-color, in which the features could be clearly distinguished.

The few minutes during which we had to wait before the call to supper were spent in the front room, which was the sitting-room for the boarders and answered to the lobby in the logging-camp.

Two windows looked out upon the street and commanded a farther view of the factory yard and buildings.

The room was heated by a cylindrical iron stove, standing near the inner wall upon a disc of zinc, that served to protect a well-worn carpet with which the floor was covered.

From a square wooden table in the centre a large oil-lamp flooded the room with light and brought out in startling vividness the pink rose-buds which in monotonous identity of design streaked the walls in long diagonal lines, broken only by an occasional chromo or a picture cut from an illustrated print.

There was an abundant supply of wooden chairs, on which the men were seated, for the most part about the stove, and there was one large arm-chair on rockers, where sat Mr. Schulz with the next to the youngest child in his arms, an infant of between two and three.

A girl of perhaps seven years, and a boy of nearly five, were playing together on the floor, and there was yet another child, for while we were washing in the kitchen I had heard the fretful cry of a baby from a dark chamber opening from that room.

Two of the men were intent upon the girl who lay in her father’s lap.

They were rivals for her favor, and both were trying to coax her away.

When she at last put out her arms to one of them, he tossed her toward the ceiling with a shout of glee at his triumph over the other man.

After supper we all regathered in the sitting-room.

None of the men, so far as I could see, went out for the evening.

Some of them read the newspapers of the day, and four had presently started a game of “High, Low, Jack,” at the table, with the result that most of the others were soon gathered about the players in excited interest, watching the varying fortunes of the game and giving vent to their feelings in boisterous outbursts.

I sat beside the fire talking to Mr. Schulz.

There was inexpressible satisfaction in the feeling of _raison d’être_ which one had in being a worker with a steady job once more and a decent place in which to live.

A boarding-house is not a synonym for home, and yet it may stir the domestic instincts deeply in the contrasts which it offers with the homeless life of the streets.

The unquestioning hospitality with which I had been accepted as a guest was in keeping with the best of my experience so far.

There was no suggestion of my paying anything in advance, though I had no security to offer beyond the fact that I was regularly employed in the factory and my promise to pay promptly out of the first instalment of my wages.

Mrs. Schulz had offered me board and lodging at four dollars a week, or at four dollars and a quarter if I wished a room to myself.

It was the last bargain with which I closed when I was shown the only vacant room.

It opened from the passage near the head of the landing and was perhaps seven feet by six.

A single bed filled most of its area, and the rest was crowded with a chair and a small stand which supported an oil-lamp under a mirror on the wall.

Some nails driven into the door and along the wall beside it, served the purpose of a closet.

Light and air entered by a window which opened only a foot or two from a side-wall of the next building.

Cheerless as the room was and far from clean, it yet had about it all the essentials of privacy, and at a little past eight o’clock I went to bed with almost the sense of luxury after a fortnight’s experience of station-houses and cheap lodgings.

At six in the morning we were called by Mrs. Schulz, who had already been up for an hour or more preparing our breakfast, with the help of a hired girl.

The men turned out sleepy and half-dressed into the kitchen to wash themselves, and then we sat down to a breakfast of “mush,” meat and potatoes, coffee and bread.

The factory-bell was ringing by the time that we had finished, and there was a rush to get within the gate before the last taps marked the advent of seven o’clock.

The routine of factory work does not lend itself to varied narrative, and yet Barry’s work and mine was far from the monotony of much of the labor which we saw about us.

There was a growing supply of tongues in the paint-shop, sufficient to keep us busy for several days, and while the work of loading and carting and stacking them was not hard in itself, ten hours of it daily was enough to send a man very hungry to his meals and thoroughly tired to his bed.

I was soon transferred from Crist’s department to one of the packing-rooms, where, through the remaining weeks of my service, I worked as a general utility man under the orders of a short, muscular foreman of singularly mild manner, who appeared to have scruples against swearing, but who was none the less vigilant and effective in his management.

Most of the work of his department, as in all the departments of the factory, came under the piece-work system, and I was simply one of the two or three common laborers who, under his commands, attended to the odds and ends of jobs.

In one corner a man was packing boxes with the subordinate parts of mowers--a very interesting process, for the boxes were of such a size as to exactly hold all the loose parts when packed in a certain relation to one another, and the untiring swiftness with which the packer drew his supplies from their various bins and adjusted them in the box and nailed the lid upon them was fascinating in itself.

I was sometimes employed in carting these boxes on a hand-truck, through a long run-way, to a warehouse and storing them there.

There were mowers to be shipped to foreign markets, and these had all to be done up in boxes.

Three or four of us would be employed for days together in bringing the mowers up the run-way from the warehouse and further separating them into their parts and packing them in large boxes and nailing down the covers, upon which afterward appeared directions to distant ports, some to Russia, and others as far off even as Australian and New Zealand towns.

A paint-shop was also connected with this department of the factory, where painting was done in the wholesale fashion employed for the binders, and from it I often carted the portions of the machines which were ready for the warehouse.

Some of the jobs held steadily for days together, and the foreman was never without work to give me.

I could but feel a growing liking for him, for, although I was far from being an efficient workman, he was patient with my awkward efforts, and he accepted my mere dogged perseverance as evidence of a willingness on my part which reconciled him to me as a hand.

A like consideration had been shown me by the men at the boarding-house.

They accepted me unhesitatingly as a workingman, but still I felt that I had my way to make among them, and very justly, for they were piece-workers all of them, earning fifteen dollars a week at the very least, some of them much more, while I was merely a common laborer at a dollar and a half a day.

Their superiority to me was only the more apparent when there came among us, a few days after my arrival, a young Englishman from Jamaica, who had secured a job at common labor in the factory; for he, too, was far ahead of me, and it was not long before he was promoted to piece-work in one of the better-paid departments.

There was no discrimination against me.

The men were perfectly friendly, but for the most part they had been associated for some time in their work and in their life in the boarding-house, and I was simply not of their set.

The barriers which prevented entire freedom of intercourse were my own limitations and were never of their making, for they made the most generous advances when we had lived together for a time, and no doubt I could eventually have risen to be one of them on equal terms.

They were nearly all young Americans.

Clarence and Albert were representative of the lot.

Ned, the hunchback operative, was older than most of us, but he, too, was a native, of public-school education and decent antecedents, and he made a very good wage as a piece-worker in some department of the factory.

Nothing that I saw among the men charmed me more than their treatment of Ned.

He had an ungovernable temper and a crabbed, sullen disposition, which had been fostered by much suffering and an intense mortification due to his deformity, which he rarely forgot, apparently.

At times he was as exasperating as a spoiled, petulant child, but the men endured him always with an evenness of buoyant good-humor so genuine that it never chafed him, and it sometimes transported him, in spite of himself, to a mood in sympathy with their own, in which he could be one of the best fellows of the lot.

It was not long before I knew that the man who was held in highest regard by the others was Dennis.

The reasons for this did not appear at first.

Dennis was of about the average age among us, a man of between twenty-five and thirty, an Irish-American of good appearance and a gentlemanlike reserve.

The men looked up to him and paid a certain deference to his views in a way which puzzled me, for he never played the rôle of leader, being far less outspoken than some of the others, and moving among them always in a quiet, unassuming manner which laid no claim to distinction.

By chance I learned that he was the best-paid operative in the house, having a position of some importance in a machine-shop of the factory, and I noticed that he spent much of his leisure in the study of mechanical problems.

He did not hold himself aloof from the evening game of cards, but he would quit it early and would soon be absorbed in his book in one corner of the room, where the noise seemed never to disturb him.

Moreover, I came to realize that in certain important social matters Dennis was an authority.

He would leave his work as black as the blackest man from the shops, but on Saturday afternoon, when we got off at five o’clock, half an hour earlier than usual, he would come out after supper ready for the evening’s gayety, dressed in what was unhesitatingly accepted as the height of the fashion.

Saturday evenings were always devoted to pleasure, and none of the men was better informed than was Dennis as to the public balls which were available and which performance at the theatres (always spoken of as a “show”) was best worth a visit.

As a workman of high grade and as a man of fashion and a social mentor with much occult knowledge of social form, he was yielded the first place.

There was, moreover, a certain punctiliousness about him which only served to heighten his standing.

It mattered not how late he had been out on Saturday night, I always found Dennis at his place for a seven o’clock breakfast on Sunday morning, and saw him start promptly for mass.

He was very evidently a favorite with Mrs. Schulz, and with small wonder, for he was always most considerately kind to her and to her children; but I thought that her liking for him grew quite as much out of her admiration for his strict regard to his church duties.

She went to early mass herself, but she never failed to have breakfast ready for Dennis at exactly seven o’clock.

Mr. Schulz and she were devout Catholics, only I could but admire her devotion the more.

It seemed to me to be put to so crucial a test.

With but a raw Swedish girl to help her, she had the care of her five children besides all the cooking and other housework for a dozen boarders whose meals must be served on the minute.

I am sure that I never saw her lose her temper, and I think that I never heard her complain, which is the greater wonder when one takes into account the fact that she was the sole bread-winner of the family.

Mr. Schulz had had a job as a night watchman, but had lost it, and was now looking for work--not too conscientiously, I fear, for he impressed me as a weak man who found his wife’s support a welcome escape from a personal struggle for existence.

He had, at least, the negative virtue of sobriety, and the positive one of loyalty to church duty, and in the house he perhaps could not have served his wife to better purpose than by taking care of the children as he did.

He was certainly very proud of Mrs. Schulz.

One day he confided to me the fact that she was a cook when he married her, and that in her day she had served in some of the palaces on Michigan Avenue.

Such an experience explained the admirable cooking of the simple fare which she gave us, and the homelike management of her house; and her knowledge and skill in these domestic matters bore no small relation, I thought, to the spirit of contentment among the men, which held them to their quiet evenings in her sitting-room against the allurements of the town.

Her sheer physical endurance was a marvel.

It was the unflinching courage of a brave soul, for she had little strength besides.

Very tall and slight, emaciated almost to gauntness, she had a long, thin face with sunken cheeks and a dark complexion and jet-black hair, and round, soft, innocent eyes, which, matched with her indomitable spirit, were eloquent of the love which is “comrade to the lesser faith that sees the course of human things,” and seeing finds life worth living and is willing to endure.

The absence of self-consciousness from the members of this household lent a peculiar attractiveness to the life there.

There was nothing morbid in their attitude to themselves nor in their relation to one another.

Life was so obviously their master, and they so implicitly obedient to its control.

You could lose in a measure the thought of self-directed effort to be something or do something, in the sense that you got of nearness to the spontaneity of primal force.

Mrs. Schulz, for example, never impressed one as trying to exercise a certain influence in obedience to a volition formed upon a preconceived plan, but rather as being what she was as the expression of a life within and exercising an influence which was dominant by reason of its native virtue.

And the men were never awkward and constrained in their courteous manner toward her, as they would have been had this been prompted by a sense of formal politeness, instead of being, as it was, their spontaneous tribute to her gentle ladyhood.