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

We are walking south along the west side of State Street.

There is a swift social decline here, for every door we pass is that of a saloon, and above us hang frequent transparencies which advertise lodgings at ten and fifteen cents, while across the way are the flaring lights of a cheap theatre.

“We can get warm in here,” says Clark, abruptly, and he turns into a doorway which opens on the street.

I follow him down a narrow passage whose faint light enters through a stained-glass partition, which hems it in along the inner side-wall of the building.

Through a door at the end of the passage we enter a large room brilliantly lighted, and I follow Clark to an iron stove at one side in which a coal fire burns furiously.

In the corner near us are three men, slouching, listless, weary specimens of their kind, who are playing “Comrades” with a gusto curiously out of keeping with their looks of bored fatigue.

One has a harp, another a violin, and the third drums ceaselessly upon a piano of harsh, metallic tone.

[Illustration: IN THE CORNER NEAR US ARE THREE MEN, SLOUCHING, LISTLESS, WEARY SPECIMENS OF THEIR KIND, WHO ARE PLAYING “COMRADES.

”] There are a dozen round tables in the room, and at these are seated small groups of men and women drinking beer.

Some of the men are workmen, but most are loafers, not of the tramp but of the rough civic type.

The women are young, most of them very young, and there is little trace of beauty and almost none of hard brutality in any face among them.

They are simply commonplace.

As a company the women lack the hale robustness of the men.

They are mostly little women, of slight figures, and some add to this a transparency of skin and a feverish brightness of eye which clearly mark the sure burning of consumption.

A few are cast in sturdier mould, and, with faces flushed with drink, they look strong and healthy.

All seem warmly dressed in cheap, worn garments suited to the season, and there are many touches of finery and some even of taste in their shabby winter hats.

Each carries a leather purse in her hand, or allows it to lie on the table before her with her gloves.

The hands of nearly all of them are bare, and you see at once that they are large and coarse and very dirty.

Suddenly you note that the social atmosphere is one of strangest, completest camaraderie.

The conversation is the blasphemous, obscenest gossip of degraded men that keeps the deal level of the ordinary unrelieved by anger or by mirth, and varying only with the indifferent interchange of men’s and women’s voices.

The naturalness and untrammelled social ease have blinded you for a time to what you really see, and then the black reality reveals itself in human degradation below which there is no depth--as though lost, sexless souls were already met upon a common plane of deepest knowledge of all evil.

And yet in very truth they are living fellow men and women, in whom have centred the strength of natural love and hope, and centres still the constraining love of a Heavenly Father.

Clark is whispering in my ear: “I guess we’d better get out of this.

That waiter has his eye on us.

In a minute he’ll ask us for our orders.

” We pass again through the garish lights that flood the pavements before saloons from whose inner chambers come the tinkling, brassy notes of cheap music.

“Are they all like that place we’ve been in?

” I ask.

“These dives, you mean?

” “Yes.

” “They are all the same.

There are hundreds like them in this town,” he answers.

Near the centre of what appears to be the chief business section of the street Clark turns into a dark entry.

“Come up here,” he says to me over his shoulder.

“What is this?

” I call after him from the threshold.

“Here’s where I slept last night,” he replies.

I follow up a flight of filthy wooden steps.

Under the light of a single gas-jet which burns faintly over the first landing, we turn to a door at the right.

Within is a sustained volume of men’s voices at conversation pitch, and we enter at once upon a company of thirty or forty men seated on wooden benches around a base-burner, or standing in groups within the compass of its grateful warmth.

The unmoving air is thick with tobacco-smoke, and dense with pollution beyond all but the suggesting power of words.

An electric arc gleams from the centre-ceiling, and sputters and hisses above the noise of mingled speech.

In the ghastly light the floor and walls are covered with black shadows, sharply articulated, and revealing clearly through their restless movements the ragged, unkempt condition of the men.

In one corner is an office quite like a ticket-booth at an athletic field, and behind the narrow window stands a man with an open book before him.

His eyes wander ceaselessly over the company, and presently he steps out into the open room.

He is making straight for Clark and me; his grease-stained, worn, black suit hanging loose about his wasted figure, a something not unlike a small decanter-stopper glistening on the bosom of his soiled, collarless, white shirt, his singularly repulsive face growing clearer as he comes, the receding forehead and small, weak, close-set piercing eyes, the high cheek-bones and bristling black mustache over a drooping mouth stained with tobacco.

He walks straight up to Clark.

“You was here last night?

” he asks with rising inflection and a German accent.

“Yes,” says Clark.

“I come up to-night to see a fellow I know,” he adds of his own initiative.

“Do you see him?

” says the clerk.

“No. ” “Was you and your pal going to take beds?

” “No. ” And in the awkward situation thus created, Clark and I go out once more from the luxury of warmth and shelter.

The pavements are now in possession of crowds returning from the theatres, and at certain crossings is a rush for cable-cars going south.

We turn down Quincy Street.

It is still almost an hour before midnight.

Simultaneously we notice a deep, wide entry of a business house, so deep that its inner corners are quite dry, and one of them is fairly shielded from the wind.

With a mutual impulse we turn in, and crouch close together on the paved floor in the shade of the sheltered corner.

We sit in perfect silence for a time.

Our teeth have begun again to chatter, and it is difficult to speak.

Besides, we have nothing to say beyond the wish that we were fed and warmed and sheltered, and this is such a deepening longing to us both that we have begun to keep a reverent silence about it.

Not half a score of people pass us as we crouch there through a quarter of an hour or more, and none of them sees us, which is fortunate;

for one of the number is a policeman, who walks down the other side, swinging his club in easy rhythm to his sauntering steps.

But now once more we feel the tension of anxious waiting, for again we hear the sound of footsteps fast approaching.

A lifted umbrella first appears, and under it a woman’s dark skirt, all wet about the hem, and clinging to her ankles as she walks and vainly tries to hold it free from the sloppy pavement.

Her eyes are on the ground, and she is humming softly to herself, and we think that she is safely past, when both of us start suddenly to a little cry, an exclamation of surprise: “Oh-h-h!

what in h-- are you boys doing there?

” And the question has in it a note of light-hearted merriment, as though the words had come upon a wave of rippling laughter.

She is facing us near at hand, her head framed in the dark umbrella which rests upon her shoulder, and her face in the full side-light of a neighboring window.

Out of large dark eyes she is looking straight at us, and I mark at once the clean-cut pencilling of her eyebrows against a skin of natural pallor, and the backward sweep of black hair from a low forehead and about her ears.

She is no beauty, but her mouth is one of almost faultless drawing, large and sensitive and firm, with a dimple at each corner, and her chin of perfect moulding fades into the graceful lines of a well-rounded throat.

[Illustration: SHE IS FACING US NEAR AT HAND, HER HEAD FRAMED IN THE DARK UMBRELLA WHICH RESTS UPON HER SHOULDER.

] I am struck dumb for the moment, but Clark is disturbed in no wise by the situation, and is answering her in perfect calmness that we have taken shelter there, and “won’t you go on,” he asks, “for you may attract to us the notice of a cop.

” “He’s not coming this way yet awhile,” she retorted; “I met him just now at the corner.

” They fall into easy, natural dialogue, and the girl soon learns that we are newly come to Chicago seeking work, and hungry and shelterless we are waiting for the right hour in which to go to the station-house.

“And why did you ever come to this God-condemned town?

” she asks.

“There’s thousands of boys like you here, and no jobs for none of you.

” There is quick resentment in Clark’s sharp rejoinder: “And why in h-- did _you_ come?

” But the girl’s good-nature is unruffled; you simply feel an instinctive tightening of her grip upon herself as her figure straightens slightly to the reply: “I come to hustle, sonny, and I guess this is as good a place to hustle in as any.

I’m in ---- hard luck to-night, for I ain’t made a cent, and I met that cop on ---- Street.

He’s spotted me.

I had to go down into my stocking and give him my last dollar to fix him, or else he’d have run me in, and I’ve been up three times this week.

The judge told me he’d send me to the Bridewell next time.

” She is a girl of eighteen, or, perhaps, of twenty years.

In another moment I see her lift her young, unfaltering eyes to a passing stranger, and in them, unashamed, is the nameless questioning which takes surest hold on hell.

And now she has turned again, and one soiled, gloveless hand is outstretched to us.

“I’m going, boys,” she says.

“Good-night.

You are in harder luck than me, for I ain’t hungry and I’ve got a place to sleep, so you take this.

It ain’t much, but it’s all I’ve got.

Good luck to you.

Good-night.

” Men who have felt it never speak lightly of fear, nor are they ashamed to own to it--the fear that is fear, when unprepared you face a sudden danger whose measure you cannot know; when the scalp tightens with a creeping movement and the hair lifts itself on end, and each muscle stiffens in the cold of swift paralysis, while your brain throbs with the sudden rush of hot blood.

But there is a feeling beyond that--“when the nerves prick and tingle and the heart is sick,” and the soul in ineffable agony of doubt and fear cries through a black and Godless void for some answer to the mystery of life.

A silver coin is glistening in Clark’s open palm.

“There’s two beers in this, partner, and a free lunch for both of us,” he is saying.

“Let’s go to a saloon.

” Five minutes later he leaves me in high indignation, with a “Stay, then, and be damned!

” and I feel some uncertainty about his coming back.

Soon I fall into the dreamless torpor which comes to relieve the too-heavy hearted.

But from out its stupor I waken sharply to quickest sensibility.

Quivering darts of pain are shooting swiftly through my body from a burning centre in my thigh.

A night watchman stands over me, holding a dark lantern to my face.

He has roused me with a brutal kick.

In my heart black murder reigns alone for a moment, and then I remember what I am, and I limp into the street speechless under the watchman’s curses.

I had misjudged Clark.

I have not waited long when I see him walking toward me.

He is warmed and fed, and has soon forgot his earlier wrath in eagerness to “do” the night watchman.

From this, however, it is not difficult to dissuade him on the ground of the weakness of our legal status as compared with his.

We walk now toward Harrison Street, and as we enter it, there shines high from out the darkness an illumined face of a clock with its hands pointing to a few minutes past the hour of twelve.

A freight-train is drawing slowly into the station-yard, creaking and jolting with the varying tug of a locomotive that pants deeply to a steady pull, and then puffs hard in sudden spurts which send its wheels “racing” on the icy rails.

The train stands still with a sound of communicated bumping which loses itself far down the yard, and then there come swarming from the cars a score or two of tramps who have beaten their way into the city.

They know their ground, for silent and stooping in the wet they make straight, as with a common impulse, to the station-house on the corner.

“We’ll leave them go in first,” says Clark, “it’s all the better for us,” and then we walk up and down before the plain brick building, with the lights streaming from its basement and first-floor windows.

By a short flight of steps we finally enter a small passage which opens into a large, square room.

A few police officers and reporters are standing about in casual conversation.

One officer, with unerring judgment of our need, beckons us his way, and, without a word, he points us down the steps into the basement.

A locked door of iron grating blocks the way at the foot of the steps, and we stand there for some minutes while a newly arrived prisoner is being registered and searched.

Behind a high desk sits a typical, robust officer who asks questions and notes the answers in his book, and beside him, near at hand, a matronly woman is sewing with an air of domesticity and entire oblivion to her unusual surroundings, while near the prisoner before the desk, stand two policemen who have “run him in.

” All these are in a wide corridor which extends east and west through the depth of the building.

In its south wall are some half dozen doors of iron grating, each opening into a small passage at right angles to the main corridor, and the cells range along the sides of these.

The prisoner has soon been disposed of.

The officer on duty then unlocks the door behind which we stand, and admits us before the desk.

The registrar looks up, an expression of irritation in his face.

“More men to spend the night?

” he asks.

“Well, turn in,” he adds, with a jerk of his head to the left.

“I’ve got no more room for names.

I guess I’ve entered two hundred lodgers and more already to-night.

” Clark and I need no further directions.

Overflowing through the open door of the farthest passage upon the floor of the main corridor are the sprawling figures of men asleep.

We walk in among them.

[Illustration: OVERFLOWING THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF THE FARTHEST PASSAGE UPON THE FLOOR OF THE MAIN CORRIDOR ARE THE SPRAWLING FIGURES OF MEN ASLEEP.

] “If we ain’t never had ’em, I guess we’ll catch ’em to-night,” says Clark, softly in my ear, and the words take on a sickening significance as we enter an unventilated atmosphere of foulest pollution, and we see more clearly the frowzy, ragged garments of unclean men, and have glimpses here and there of caking filth upon a naked limb.

The wisdom of a late hour of retiring is at once apparent when we have sight of the inner passage.

Not a square foot of the dark, concrete floor is visible.

The space is packed with men all lying on their right sides with their legs drawn up, and each man’s legs pressed close in behind those of the man in front.

Clark draws from an inside pocket a roll of old newspapers, and hands me one.

We spread them on the pavement as a Mohammedan unrolls his mat for prayers, and then we take off our boots and coats.

Our soaked, pulpy boots we fold in our jackets and use them as pillows, and we soften our bed by spreading over the newspapers our outer coats, which thus have a chance to dry in the warmth of the room and in that which comes from our bodies.

We need no covering in the steaming heat in which we lie, and I can see at a glance that Clark and I are more fortunate than most of the other men, for few of them have outer coats, and in their threadbare, filthy garments they lie with nothing but paper between them and the floor, their heads pillowed on their arms.

By no means are all of them asleep.

In the thick air above their reclining figures there is an unceasing murmur of low, gruff voices.

What words can fit the hellish quality of that strange converse?

It is not human, though it comes from living men; it has no humor though it touches life most intimately; it knows hot hate and craving need and blank indifference, but all these feelings speak alike a tongue of utter blasphemy; and it is not prurient even, though it reeks with coarse obscenity.

And in the men themselves, how widely severed from all things human is the prevailing type!

--Their bloated, unwashed flesh and unkempt hair; their hideous ugliness of face, unreclaimed by marks of inner strength and force, but revealing rather, in the relaxation of sleep, a deepening of the lines of weakness, until you read in plainest characters the paralysis of the will.

And then there are the stealthy, restless eyes of those who are awake, eyes set in faces which lack utterly the strength of honest labor and even that of criminal wit.

But there are marked exceptions to the prevailing type, men like Clark, sound and strong in flesh, and having about them the signs of habitual decency, and their faces stamped with the open frankness which comes of earning a living by honest work.

Some of these are young immigrants, newly come, most evidently, and I picture their rude awakenings from golden dreams of a land of plenty.

Clark is fast asleep beside me, but I cannot sleep for gnawing hunger and the dull pain of lying bruised and sore upon the hard, paved floor.

There is sudden, nervous movement near me.

Looking up I see a man seated straight, tugging frantically at his shirt, and swearing viciously the while in muffled tones.

In a moment he has torn the garment off, and his crooked, bony fingers are passing swiftly over the shrivelled skin of his old, lean body in search of his tormentors, and his oaths come lisping from his toothless mouth.

The men about him are ordering him, with deepening curses, to lie down and keep still.

The former quiet soon returns, and in it I lie thinking of another world I know, a world of men and women whose plane of life is removed from this by all the distance of the infinite.

Faith and love and high resolve are there, the inspirers of true living, and courage spurs to unflinching effort, and hope lights the way of unsuccess and gives vision through the vale of sorrow and of death.

And the common intercourse is the perfect freedom which is bred of high allegiance to inborn courtesy and honor.

What living link is there that joins these worlds together, and gives vital meaning to the confirmation of brotherhood spoken in the divine words of the Apostle: “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and everyone members one of another?

” Pondering this mystery I fall asleep, and so ends my first day in the army of the unemployed.

CHAPTER II