Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 2 - Part III - Living by Odd Jobs

All the days of this vagrant living were not equally hard.

Some were harder than others.

Saturday was a case in point.

After an early frugal breakfast, for which Clark paid his last penny, we separated with an agreement to meet again at six o’clock in the evening in the reading-room of the Young Men’s Christian Association.

We were bent on different quests.

Clark was determined to find work at his trade if he could, and I had no choice apart from unskilled labor.

For odd jobs we were each to have out an eye, and our acquaintance thus far with such a course made us fairly confident of at least the means of bare subsistence.

But nothing is less predictable than the outcome of this fortuitous living.

The days vary with the variability which belongs to existence.

Things “come your way” at times, and then again they have another destination which your widest and closest search fails to reveal.

It was hard, but it was not impossible through that Saturday morning to keep one’s purpose fairly firm.

From the ebb of the city’s traffic in the darkness before the dawn I felt it flowing to its full tide.

However destitute a man may be he cannot fail to share the quickening to waking life of a great city.

The mystery of deepest night enfolds the place, and from out its veiling darkness the vague conformations of streets and buildings gradually emerge to the sharp outlines of the day’s reality.

An occasional delivery wagon from the market, or a milkman’s cart goes rattling down a street, awaking echoes as of a deserted town, or a heavy truck laden with great rolls of white paper for the printing-press passes slowly, drawn by gigantic horses whose flat, hairy hoofs patiently pound the cobbles in their plodding pace, while whiffs of white vapor puff from their nostrils with their deep, regular breathing.

The driver’s oath can be heard a square away.

Standing at the curb along an open space in front of a public building are a few “night hawks.

” The horses are heavily blanketed and their noses buried in eating-bags.

The cabmen have drawn together in social community on the pavement, where, as they gossip in the cold, they alternately stamp the flagging with their feet and clasp themselves in hard, sweeping embraces of the arms to stir the sluggish blood to swifter movement.

An empty cable-car goes tearing round a “loop” with noise to awake the dead, and sets off again to some outermost portion of the town with a sleepy policeman on board and a newsboy, his bundle, damp from the press, upon his lap, who is bent on being first with news to that suburban region.

The cars fill first with workingmen who are bound for distant factories and workshops and their posts along the lines of railways.

The streets are echoing now to the sounds of increasing traffic and to the steps of the vanguard of workers.

These are the wage-earners, men for the most part, but there are women, too, and children.

Here is humanity in the raw, hard-handed and roughly wrought for the Atlasian task of sustaining, by sheer physical strength and manual skill, the towering, delicate, intricate structure of progressive civilization.

The first of the salaried workers follow these, and youth swarms upon the streets moving with swift steps to the great co-educational schools of practical business.

There are countless “cash” children in the throng, and office boys, and saleswomen and men, and clerks, and secretaries, and fledgling lawyers.

There are marks of poverty on the faces and in the garments of the children, but most of the older ones are dressed in all the warmth and comfort of the well-to-do, while the young women who form so large a portion of the crowd step briskly in dainty boots carrying themselves with figures erect and graceful, clothed with the style and _chic_ which are theirs as a national trait.

Many of the men are, in contrast, markedly careless and unkempt.

All these are at work by eight o’clock, the wage-earners having been at it an hour already.

Then come, mingling in the miscellaneous concourse of business streets which have taken on the full day’s complexity, the superintendents and managers, and the heads of business houses and of legal firms, and bankers, and brokers, and all the company of rare men, whose native gifts of creative power or organizing capacity or executive ability, joined to great energy and resolution, have placed them in command of their co-workers, and made them responsible, as only the few can be responsible, for the lives and well-being of their fellows.

I recognize an eminent lawyer in the moving crowd, who, in democratic fashion, is walking to his office.

He is a nobleman by every gift of nature, and his sensitive, expressive face, responsive to the grace of passing thought, is an unconscious appeal to my flagging courage, and to that, perhaps, of many another man in the pressing throng.

I see in a jolting omnibus a noted merchant, his head bowed over a morning paper as he rides to his business house.

He holds a foremost place in business, yet it is fully equalled by his standing as a Christian gentleman and as a wise and most efficient philanthropist.

Almost touching elbows we pass each other on the street, a fellow-alumnus of my college and I, he an inheritor of great wealth and of a vast enterprise far-reaching in its scope to distant portions of the earth.

And yet, so unmarred has he remained under the lavish gifts of fortune that his is already the dominant genius in the administration of immense productive power, and his influence is increasingly felt as a helpful and guiding force in great educational institutions of the land.

But this resurgence of the city’s life, while it quickens the pulses for the time, is not an inspiration to last one through a day of disappointing search.

By noon I had been turned many times away, and a sharp refusal to a polite request to be given a chance to work cuts deeper than men know who have never felt its wound.

You try to ignore it at the first, and you bring greater energy to bear upon the hunt, but your wounds are there; and, in each succeeding advance, it is a sterner self-compulsion that forces you to lay bare again the shrinking quick of your quivering sensibilities.

How often have I loitered about a door, passing and repassing it again and yet again before I could summon courage for the ordeal of a simple request for work!

Early in my experience I learned never to ask after a possible vacancy.

Employers have no vacancies to be filled by such an inquirer.

I simply said that I was looking for a job, and should be glad of any work that I could do; and that, if I could be given a chance to work, I would do my best to earn a place.

This request in practically the same terms produced often the most opposite effects.

One man would answer with a kindliness so genuine and a regret so evidently sincere that it was with an utmost effort at times that I could control myself And but a few minutes later another man might answer, if not with oaths and threats of violence, yet with a cynical sharpness which would leave a sorer rankling.

Despondency had almost conquered hope at last, and well-nigh worn one’s courage out, and all but brought your drooping spirits to the brink of that abyss, where men think that they can give the struggle up.

It is marvellous how the external aspect of all things changes to you here.

The very stones beneath your feet are the hard paving of your prison-house; the threatening winter sky above you is the vaulted ceiling of your dungeon; the buildings towering to nearly twenty stories about you are your prison walls, and, as by a keen refinement of cruelty, they swarm with hiving industry, as if to mock you in your bitter plight.

Suddenly there dawns upon you an undreamed-of significance in the machinery of social restraint.

The policeman on the crossing in his slouching uniform bespattered with the oozing slime of the miry streets where he controls the streams of traffic, even as the Fellaheen direct the water of the Nile through the net-work of their irrigation ditches, is the outstretched hand of the law ready to lay hold on you, should you violate in your despair the rules of social order.

Behind him you see the patrol wagon and the station-house and the courts of law and the State’s prison and enforced labor, the whole elaborate process by means of which society would reassimilate you, an excrement, a non-social being as a transgressor of the law, into the body politic once more, and set you to fulfilling a functional activity as a part of the social organism.

This result, with the means of living which it implies and the link that it gives you to your kind, even if it be the relation of a criminal to society, may become the object of a desire so strong that the shame and punishment involved may lose their deterring force for you.

There are simple means of setting all this process in motion in your behalf.

Men break shop-windows in full view of the police, or voluntarily hold out to them hands weighted with the spoils of theft.

Perhaps it is in the moving crowds upon the pavements that one, in such a mood, feels most of all this change in external aspect.

The loneliness, the sense of being a thing apart in the presence of your working kind, a thing unvitalized by real contact with the streams of life, is the seat of your worst suffering, and the pain is augmented by what seems an actual antagonism to you as to something beyond the range of human sympathy.

By the middle of that Saturday afternoon I had fairly given up the search for work, and I found myself on State Street, wandering aimlessly in the hope of an odd job.

Hunger and utter weariness were playing their part, as well as the loneliness and the sense of imprisonment.

One had the feeling that, if he could but sit down somewhere and rest, all other troubles would vanish for the time at least.

And there were, I knew, many public rooms to which I could go in unquestioned right or privilege, but once within their warmth, I was well aware that to keep awake would tax all my power of will, and that, as a sleeping lounger, I should soon be turned adrift again.

The street was coated with a murky mire, kneaded by hoofs and wheels to the consistency of paste, and tracked by countless feet upon the pavements, where it lay as thick almost as on the cobbles.

The skyline on both sides was a ragged _sierra_, mounting from three to five and seven stories, then leaping suddenly on the right to the appalling height of the Masonic Temple, and grotesque in all its length with rearing signs and flagstaffs that pierced the smoky vapor of the upper air, while the sagging halyards fluttered like fine threads in the icy gusts from off the lake.

Whole fronts of flamboyant architecture were almost concealed behind huge bombastic signs, while other advertising devices hung suspended overhead, watches three feet in diameter, and boots and hats of a giant race.

The shop windows were draped with the scalloped fringes of idle awnings, and merely a glance at their displays was enough to disclose a commercial difference separated by only the width of the thoroughfare, a difference like that between Twenty-third Street and the Bowery.

From Polk Street and State I drifted northward to the river.

No longer was there any stimulus in contact with the intermingling crowds.

All that was hard and sordid in one’s lot seemed to have blinded one to all but the hard and sordid in the world about.

Beneath its structural veiling you could not see the warm heart of life, tender and strong and true.

Multitudes of human faces passed you, deeply marked with the lines of baser care.

Human eyes looked out of them full of the unconscious tragic pathos of the blind, blind to all vision but the light of common day; eyes of the money grubbers, sharpened to a needle’s point yet incapable of deeper insight than the prospect of gain; eyes of the haunted poor, furtive in the fear of things, and seeing only the incalculable, threatening hand of fateful poverty;

eyes of ragged children who were selling papers on the streets, their eyes old with the age of the ages, as though there gazed through them the unnumbered generations of the poor who have endured “long labor unto aged breath;” eyes of the rich, hardened by a subtler misery in the artificial lives they lead in sternest bondage to powers in whom all faith is gone, but whom they serve in utter fear, scourged by convention to the acting of an unmeaning part in life, seeking above all things escape from self in the fantastic _stimuli_ of fashion, yet feeling ever, in the dark, the remorseless closing in of the contracting prison walls of self-indulgence narrowing daily the scope of self, and threatening life with its grimmest tragedy, in the hopeless, faithless, purposeless _ennui_ of existence.

And now there passed me in the street two sisters of charity walking side by side.

Their sweet, placid faces, framed in white, reflected the limpid purity of unselfish useful living, and their eyes, deep-seeing into human misery and evil, were yet serene in the all-conquering strength of goodness.

It was in some saner thought inspired by this vision that I walked on across the river to the comparative quiet of the North Side.

I needed all the sanity that I could summon.

The setting sun had broken for a moment through snow-laden clouds, and it shone in blazing shafts of blood-red light through the hazy lengths of westward streets.

Its rays fell warmly upon a wide, deep window as I passed, and the rich reflection caught my eye.

For some time I stood still, a prey to conflicting feelings.

Just within the window with the shades undrawn, sat a friend in lounging ease before an open fire, absorbed in his evening paper.

There flashed before me the scene of our last encounter.

We stood at parting on a wharf in the balmy warmth of late winter in the far South.

Behind my friend was the brilliant carpeting of open lawns and blooming beds of flowers, and beyond lay the deep olive green of forests of live-oak with palmettos growing in dense underbrush, and the white “shell road” gleaming in the varied play of lights and shadows until it lost itself, in its course to the beach, in the deepening gloom of overdrooping boughs weighted with hanging moss in an effect of tropical luxuriance.

And from out that vivid mental picture there came again, almost articulate in its reality, the graceful urging of my friend that I should visit him in his Western home.

It was so short a step by which I could emerge from the submerged, and the temptation to take it was so strong and inviting.

The want and hardship and hideous squalor were bad enough, but these things could be endured for the sake of the end in view.

It was the longing for fellowship that had grown to almost overmastering desire, the sight of a familiar face, the sound of a familiar voice, the healing touch of cultivated speech to feelings all raw under the brutalities of the street vernacular.

And after all, what real purpose was my experiment to serve?

I had set out to learn and in the hope of gaining from what I learned something worth the while of a careful investigation.

I had discovered much that was new to me, but nothing that was new to science, and the experience of a single individual could never furnish data for a valid generalization, and all that I had learned or could learn was already set forth in tabulated, statistical accuracy in blue books and economic treatises.

Moreover it was impossible for me to rightly interpret even the human conditions in which I found myself, for between me and the actual workers was the infinite difference of necessity in relation to any lot in which I was.

How could I, who at any moment could change my status if I chose, enter really into the life and feelings of the destitute poor who are bound to their lot by the hardest facts of stern reality?

It was all futile and inadequate and absurd.

I had learned something, and as for further inquiry of this kind, I would better give it up, and return to a life that was normal to me.

The sense of futility was strong upon me.

Never before had the temptation to abandon the attempt assailed me with such force.

It was no clean-cut, definite resolution that won in favor of continued effort.

Not at all.

I think that when I turned away I was more than half-resolved to give over the experiment.

But even as a man, who, contemplating suicide, allows himself to be borne upon the aimless stream of common events past the point of many an early resolution to the deed, so I found myself gradually awaking to the thought, “Ah, well, I will try it a little longer.

” It was in this mood that I went to find Clark at our rendezvous.

Our eyes met in quick inquiry, and before either of us spoke, we knew each the other’s story.

But Clark wished the confirmation of actual confession.

“Ain’t you had no luck too?

” he whispered, his eyes close to mine, and contracting with a sense of the incredibility of such a result, which might be altered, if one would only insist strongly enough upon its being other than it actually was.

“No,” I said, “I’ve had no luck, nor anything to eat since morning.

” We were speaking in the low tones which were permitted in the reading-room.

“Well, I’ll be ----.

” And Clark’s drawling oath seemed exactly suited to the absurdity of the situation.

We both laughed softly over our coincident dilemma, and by a mutual impulse we walked out into the street, where we spent an agreeable half-hour in discussing the placards in the windows of two restaurants.

There was an especial attraction for us in the lower window where there stood a _chef_ all white from his spotless cap to where his white garments were lost to view behind a gas-stove of ingenious contrivance, on whose clean, polished upper surface he was turning well-browned griddle-cakes.

I do not know what the association was, and it was in entire good-humor that Clark suddenly turned to me with the remark: “Say, partner, we’d get all we want to eat, if we’d heave a rock through this window.

” CHAPTER III FINDING STEADY WORK