Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 1 - Part II - The Army of the Unemployed

“I guess you are the fiftieth man that has asked me for a job to-day,” said one boss, more communicative than the others.

“I’m sorry for you poor devils,” he added, with a searching look into my face, “but there’s too many of you.

” My walk has carried me now through the coming Midway Plaisance and past the grounds of the new Chicago University to the outskirts of a park.

I enter there with a feeling of relief, for I am soon out of the atmosphere of infinite employment where there is no work for me.

Here there are open lawns, with snow crystals clinging to the tender turf, and trees of bewildering variety whose boughs are outstretched in graceful benediction over winding walks and drives and the curving, mossy banks of lakes.

When I emerge from this touch of nature and high art it is upon a stately boulevard of double drives and quadruple rows of sturdy elms which line the bridle-paths and wide pavements.

Mile after mile I walk, tired and hungry and wet, and quite lost in wonder.

Is there in the wide world a city street to match with this?

Rising in a paradise of landscape gardening it stretches its majestic length like the broad sweep of another _Champs Elysees_, flanked by palaces of uncounted cost and unimagined horror of architecture, opening here to a stretch of wide prairie, and closing there to the front of a “block” of houses of uncompromising Philistinism and decorations of “unchastened splendor,” and reaching, at times, its native dignity in a setting of buildings which tell the final truth of the elegance of simplicity.

It has grown dark when I enter Michigan Avenue, and again my way stretches far before me, this time under converging lines of lights that seem to meet at an almost infinite distance.

The sense of infinity is heightened by the floating mist, in which the nearer lights play with an effect of orange halo about them, and the farther lamps shine in an ever vaguer distance behind their clinging veils of fog.

Scarcely a soul is in the street.

It is a residence quarter of much wealth, and like all else that I have seen so far, of strangest incongruities.

Houses of lavish cost and shabbiest economy of taste, so gorgeous that you can scarcely believe them private homes, give way, at times, to lines of brown fronts precisely like those which in unvarying uniformity of basement and “stoop” and four-storied façade, flank miles of dreary side-streets in New York.

These yield in turn to churches and apartment-houses and hotels and clubs--all creating an atmosphere of wealth and of social refinement, while almost interspersed with them are homes of apparent poverty and certainly of gentility on the ravelled edge of things.

And bursting now through all this medley is the clanging, rumbling rush of railway traffic.

I can scarcely believe my eyes at first, but under the frowning walls of a towering armory I am held up by the downward sweep of the gates of a railway crossing, on the dead level of the avenue, and am kept there until a freight-train has crawled past its creaking length.

It all seems a meaningless chaos at the first, but soon I feel the pulse of the life within it, a young life of glorious vigor and of indomitable resolve to attain what it so strongly feels though vaguely knows.

And here and there I can see the promise of its fair fruition in lines of strength and power and beauty, where the hand of some true master has wrought a home for the abiding of good taste.

Soon there is an abrupt end of buildings on my right, and the land fades away into an open plain, and from out the sleet-swept darkness beyond comes faintly the sound of “crisping ripples on the beach.

” I know that I am at my journey’s end, for I have begun to catch glimpses of Ossa-piled-on-Pelion structures which rise in graceless lines into the black night.

I come up all standing before one of these, a veritable Palazzo Vecchio, huge, impenetrable, vast, bringing into this New-World city something of the sense of time and density of the Piazza della Signoria.

Here, too, the avenue is almost deserted, and I turn sharply under the massive battlements of this Florentine palace, to where the glare of many lights and the counter-currents of street-crowds attract me.

Across Wabash Avenue I pass on to State Street.

My eye has just begun to note the novelties of the scene when it falls upon the figure of a young man.

He stands in the middle of the pavement at the corner, and swiftly hands printed slips of white paper among the moving crowd.

Many persons pass unheeding, but a few accept the proffered notice.

I

take one, and I stop for a moment on the curb to read it.

Its purport as an invitation to attend a Gospel meeting has become clear to me, when I find the young man at my side.

He wears a heavy winter ulster that reaches to his boot-tops, and its rolling collar is turned up snugly about his ears.

On his hands are dog-skin gloves, and the rays of street-lights glisten in the myriad drops of half-frozen mist that cling like heavy dew to the rough, woollen surface of his coat.

I

must cut a figure standing there, wet and travel-stained, my teeth chattering audibly in the cold night-air, and it is plainly my evident fitness as a field for Christian work that has drawn to me the notice of this young evangelist.

“That meeting is not far,” he is saying, “and it’s warm there.

Won’t you go?

” [Illustration: “THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING, “AND IT’S WARM THERE.

WON’T YOU GO?

”] “Thank you, I will,” is my ready reply, and then he politely points the way down a side street on the left where, he says, a large transparency over the door marks the entrance to the meeting-hall.

The place is crowded with men--workingmen many of them--and many are plainly of that blear-eyed, bedraggled, cowering type which one soon learns to distinguish from the workers.

Men pass freely in and out with no disturbance to the meeting, and watching my chance I soon slip into a vacant seat near the great stove that burns red-hot half way up the room.

Ah, the luxury of the warmth and the undisputed right to sit in restful comfort!

Again and again, in the afternoon I had sat down on the steps of some public building, but from every passing eye had come a shot of questioning suspicion, and once a patrolling officer ordered me to move on with a sharp reminder that “the step of a church was no loafing-place.

” Deeper and deeper I sink into my seat.

A warm, seductive ease enfolds me.

I dare not fall asleep for fear of being turned into the street.

And yet the very hint of going out again into the shelterless night comes over me in the dim sense of fading consciousness as a thought so grotesquely impossible that I nearly laugh aloud.

Out from this warmth and light and cover into the pitiless inhospitality of the open town?

Oh, no, that is beyond conceiving!

And all the while I know--such is the subtlety of our instinctive thinking--that it is the awful fear of this that conquers now the overmastering sleep which woos me.

The men are singing lustily under inspiring leadership and to the accompaniment of a cornet and harmonium.

Short prayers are offered, and fervent exhortations, interspersed with hymns, are made, and finally the men are urged to “testify.

” I follow in vague anxiety the change of exercise, but, no clear idea reaches me; for in full possession of my mind is the haunting fear of a benediction which will send us out again.

But while the men are speaking in quick succession there begins to pierce to the benumbed seat of thought a sense of something very living.

Their speech, in simplest, homeliest phrase, is of things most intimate and real.

They speak of life--their own--sunk to deepest degradation.

They tell the story of growing drunkenness and vice, of hope fast fading out of life, of faith and honor and self-respect all gone, and at last the outer dark wherein men live to feed their passions and blaspheme until they dare to die, or death anticipates the courage of despair.

And then the purport of it all shines clear in what they have to tell of a Divine hand reached out to them, of trembling hope and love reborn, of desire after righteousness breathing anew in a prayer for help.

Now I am all vividly alive and keen, for standing straight not far from where I sit, is a grand figure of a man.

He is bronzed, deep-chested, lithe, and in the setting of his shoulders there is splendid strength, which shows again in the broad, clean-cut hands that quiver in their grip upon the seat in front.

He has the modest bearing of a gentleman, and his unfaltering voice vibrates with a compelling sense of deep sincerity.

“I haven’t any story different from what you’ve heard to-night, but I, too, want to tell what God has done for me.

When I got my growth I went West, and turned cow-puncher.

I was young, and I liked the life and the men, and I went over pretty much all the western country, and there ain’t any kind of devilment that cowboys get into that I didn’t have a hand in.

I never thought of God nor of my soul.

I never cared.

I despised religion.

I thought that I was strong and master of myself.

I drank and swore and gambled, and did worse, and it never troubled me a bit.

But a time came when I found that I wasn’t master.

There was something in me stronger than me, and that was the love of drink.

And, friends, that was the beginning of the end.

I began to lose my self-respect, and the end of it was that there ain’t a poor devil in this town that is sunk any lower than what I was.

You know what that means.

One night, a year and a half ago, I was walking through Harrison Street.

I was half-drunk on barrel-house whiskey, and all I was thinking of was how I could get up pluck enough to kill myself.

But I stopped in a crowd around some Salvation Army people.

A man older than me was telling how he was helped by the power of God out of a life like mine and made a man of again.

I liked the way he had, for he seemed straight.

I waited for him, and he told me, all to myself, the story of Christ’s power to save lost men, and how He lived and died to save us.

It seemed too good to be true.

I’d known it in a way, but I never knew it was meant for me.

And right away when I began to see that there was hope for me yet, that I could get back my self-respect, and be master of myself, not in my own strength, which had failed me, but in His strength, why, friends, my heart went right out to the Saviour in a prayer for help.

And what I want to say most of all is this, that in all the hard fight that I’ve had since, in all the ups and downs of it, He hasn’t failed me once.

He’s made my life new to me, and I love Him from my heart, and I know that in His strength I will gain the victory at last.

Friends, what the Bible tells us about His ‘saving us from our sins’ is true.

” He sits down, and a hymn is given out and sung, but the truth which has found lodgement in our hearts is the living truth of a human life reclaimed.

We have listened to the story of the prodigal from his own lips.

We have heard again the cosmic parable of wandering and return;

the mystery of creation, and fall, and re-creation by a power divine;

the great, irrefutable witness to the Truth in the history of a lost soul come to itself and returning to the Father’s house.

In the midst of the singing the leader walks quietly down the aisle to the rear.

Two ladies are there struggling in a vain effort to quiet an old man.

They have come to help in the conduct of the service, and the old man has increasingly claimed their care, for he is drunk and is growing violent.

I have noticed him in his restless movements.

Upon his stooping figure he wears an old army coat and cape that are dripping with the rain.

His gray mustache and beard are long and matted, and stained all round his mouth with the deep brown of tobacco-juice.

His unkempt hair falls in frowsy masses about his ears, and his lustreless eyes, inflamed and expressionless, bulge from their swollen sockets.

In an instant the leader’s strong hand is upon him, and with no commotion above the sound of song the old man is soon without the hall, and the leader back in his place again singing as heartily as ever.

When the meeting ends the crowd moves slowly and listlessly toward the door, as though its prevailing mood were aimless beyond the dull necessity of passing the time.

The fine rain and melting snow are still falling through the mist.

The men drift away singly or in groups of twos and threes, under the flickering lights, their heads bent slightly forward and their bare hands thrust into the side-pockets of their trousers.

In the crush about the foot of the aisle a young man speaks to me: “You are pretty wet, aren’t you?

” he says, quietly, as the jam presses him against me.

I see at a glance that he is far more respectable than I, and my first mental attitude is one of hospitality to further evangelizing effort.

But I shift at once, for without waiting for a reply from me, he adds: “It’s d---- tough to go out into that,” as he turns up the collar of his light covert coat in the blast of piercing dampness which strikes our faces through the open door.

“It is tough,” I agree, as I study his face.

He is about thirty, I should say, and almost six feet high, but of rather slender figure.

He is smooth-shaven, and an effect of pallor is heightened by yellow hair and pale blue eyes, with dark arcs beneath them and a bluish tinge about his mouth.

Plainly he has been little exposed to the outer air, but he is an habitual workman, as his hands attest unmistakably when he lifts them to adjust his coat-collar.

“Ain’t you got no place to go to?

” he asks.

“No. ” “No more have I,” he adds, laconically.

And then, after a pause: “When did you strike this town?

” “This evening.

” “Looking for a job?

” “Yes.

” “Same as me.

What kind of a job?

” “Any kind that I can get.

” “Ain’t you got a trade?

” “No. ” “Well, I don’t believe you are any worse off for that here.

I struck the place yesterday and I ain’t never seen so many idle men and hoboes in my life before.

When the iron-works in Cleveland closed down, that laid me off.

I couldn’t get no job there, and so I beat my way here.

I had fifty cents in my clothes and that got me something to eat yesterday and a bed last night, but I spent my last cent for grub this noon.

I’ve been to most every foundry in Chicago, I guess, but I ain’t found any sign of a job yet.

Where are you going to put in the night?

” “I don’t know, for I haven’t any money either.

” “I am going to the Harrison Street station and I’ll show you the way, partner, if you like.

My name is Clark, Thomas L. Clark,” he adds, with a particularity which is another proof of his belonging to a higher order of workingmen than I. I tell him my name, but he evidently considers it not a serviceable one, for he ignores it from the first, and consistently makes use of “partner.

” We walk together in the direction of State Street, and Clark explains to me that we must not go to the station until after midnight, a fact which he had learned, and the reasons for it, from an acquaintance in a cheap lodging-house where he had spent the night before.

At the corner I hold Clark for a moment until my eyes have caught the character of the street.

It is wide, with broad pavements on each side, and is lined with great business houses of retail trade, the “department store” the prevailing type.

The shop-windows are ablaze with electric lights, and gorgeous as to displays which are taking on a holiday character.

Whole fronts of some of the buildings are fairly covered with temporary signs, painted in gigantic letters on canvas stretched on wooden frames, and vying fiercely in strident announcements of “sweeping reductions” and “moving,” and “bankrupt,” and “fire sales.

” There is little noise upon the street aside from the almost constant swishing rush of cable-cars and the irritating clangor of their gongs.

The crowds had wholly disappeared.

There are a few pedestrians, who hold their umbrellas close above their heads, and step briskly in evident haste to get in out of the stormy night, and we pass men of our own type who are drifting aimlessly, and now and then a stalwart officer, well-booted and snug under his waterproof, with his arms folded and his club held tight in the pressure of an armpit.