Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 3 - Part III - Finding Steady Work

At the corner near my lodging-house I stood still for a few moments watching the deft movements of two young children who were busy near the curb.

The long, wide street lay a field of glistening diamonds where the blue-white electric light was reflected from the snow.

A

drunken man reeled past me, tracking the untrodden snow at the sides of the beaten path along the centre of the pavement.

A dim alley at my right lost itself in almost impenetrable darkness, on the verge of which a small wooden house appeared tottering to ruin and as though the weight of the falling snow were hastening its end.

From out the alley came the figures of three young women who were laughing gayly as they crossed the street in company and walked on toward the post-office.

The street was very still and lonely for that quarter, and the two little girls worked diligently, talking to each other, but oblivious apparently to everything but their task.

I drew nearer to see what they were doing.

A street-light shone strong and clear above them, and they were in the path of a broad stream of yellow glare that poured from the windows of a cheap chop-house.

They were at work about a barrel which stood on the curb.

I could see that it was full of the refuse of the eating-house.

Scraps of meat and half-eaten fragments of bread and of vegetables lay mixed with bones and egg-shells and vegetable skins in a pulpy ooze, rising to the barrel rim and overflowing upon the pavement and in the gutter.

An old wicker basket, with paper covering its ragged holes, rested between the children, and into this they dropped selected morsels of food.

The larger girl was tall enough to see over the top of the barrel, and so she worked there, and I saw her little hands dive into the soft, glutinous mass after new treasures.

The smaller one could only crouch upon the pavement and gather thence and from the gutter what edible fragments she could find.

I watched them closely.

The older child was dressed in thin, ragged cotton, black with filth, and her matted, stringy hair fell from her uncovered head about a lean, peaked face that was as dirty almost as her dress.

She wore both shoes and stockings, but the shoes were far too large for her, and through their gaping holes the cold and wet entered freely.

Her sister was more interesting to me.

She was a child of four or five.

The snow was falling upon her bare brown curls and upon the soft white flesh of her neck, and over the damp, clinging, threadbare dress, through which I could trace the delicate outlines of an infant’s figure.

Her warm breath passed hissing through chattering teeth in the intervals between outbursts of a deep, hoarse cough which shook her frame.

Through the streaking dirt upon her hands appeared in childish movement the dimples above the knuckles, and the dainty fingers, red and cold and washed clean at their tips in the melting snow, had in them all the power and mystery of the waxen baby touch.

With the quick illusion of childhood they had turned their task into a game, and they would break into exclamations of delight as they held up to each other’s view some discovered morsel which the finder claimed to be the best.

“What are you going to do with these scraps?

” I asked of the older child.

Her bloodless lips were trembling with the cold, and her small, dark eyes appeared among the shreds of tangled hair with an expression in them of a starved pariah whose cherished bone is threatened.

She clasped the basket with both hands and half covered it with her little body.

“Don’t you touch it!

” she said, fiercely, while her anxious eyes searched the street in hope of succor.

[Illustration: “DON’T YOU TOUCH IT!

” SHE SAID, FIERCELY.

] It was easy to reassure her, and then she spoke freely.

“Ma sent us to get some grub for supper,” she explained.

“Ma’s got three boarders, only two of ’em ain’t paid nothing for a month, and pa, he’s drunk.

He ain’t got no job, but he went out to shovel snow to-day, and ma thought he’d bring her some money, but he came home drunk.

She’s mindin’ the baby, and she sent us for grub.

She’d lick us if we didn’t find none; but I guess she won’t lick us now, will she?

That’s where we live,” and one little chapped finger pointed down the alley to the crumbling hovel in the dark.

The children were ready to go home, and I lifted the younger girl into my arms.

Her sister walked beside us with the basket in her hand.

The little one lay soft and warm against me.

After the first moment of surprise, she had relaxed with the gentle yielding of a little child, and I could feel her nestle close to me with the trustful ease which thrills one’s inmost heart with feeling for which there are no words.

We opened the shanty door.

It was difficult at first to make out the room’s interior.

Dense banks of tobacco-smoke drifted lazily through foul air in the cheerful light of a small oil-lamp.

Shreds of old wall-paper hung from dark, greasy plaster, which was crumbling from the walls and ceiling and which lay in accumulations of lime-dust upon a rotting wooden floor.

A baby of pallid, putty flesh was crying fretfully in the arms of a haggard, slatternly woman of less than thirty years, who sat in a broken chair, rocking the baby in her arms beside a dirty wooden table, on which were strewn fragments of broken pottery and unwashed forks and spoons and knives.

A rough workman, stripped to his shirt and trousers, sat smoking a clay pipe, his bare feet resting in the oven of a rusty cooking-stove in which a fire was smouldering.

Upon a heap of rags in one corner lay a drunken man asleep.

“We’ve got some grub, ma!

” cried the older child, in a tone of success, as she ran up to her mother with the basket.

“Riley’s barrel was full to-night.

” [Illustration: “WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!

” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET.

“RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT.

”] * * * * * In the continued search for work through the succeeding day it was natural to drift early into the employment bureaus.

Clark and I made a careful round of these, he in search of employment at his trade and I of any job that offered.

Here, too, however, we were but units in the great number of seekers.

Some of the agencies offered for a small fee and a nominal price of transportation to ship us to the farther West or to the Northwest and insure us employment with gangs of day-laborers, but of work in Chicago they could promise none.

In the course of a day last week, as I was going about alone, I was attracted by the prominent sign of an employment bureau, on the West Side, which we had not visited so far.

It was the conventional bureau, much like the office of a steamship company.

It occupied the floor above the basement, reached by a flight of steps from the pavement; a row of wooden chairs stood along the outer wall; a wooden partition extended down the centre of the room, with a door and two windows in it.

The hour was noon and the office was deserted but for a comparatively young man of florid face and close-set, light-brown eyes, thin hair, and a bristling mustache clipped close above his mouth.

He was at work upon his books behind one of the windows.

With a direct, matter-of-fact glance he looked me over, and then his eye sought the place on the open page held by his finger.

“What can I do for you?

” he asked.

“I am looking for work,” I said.

“Have you any employment to offer?

” “What kind of work?

” “I am a day-laborer,” I replied.

“Nothing,” he said, laconically, and his eye followed the finger as it moved across the open page.

I waited for a moment, thinking that he might say more, but he remained silent at his work.

“If not in Chicago, perhaps you can put me in the way of work near here,” I ventured.

“Young man,” he said, and his clear, cold eyes were looking straight into mine, “Young man, we can’t get enough of you fellows in the spring and summer time; we have to go to you and beg you to go to work.

You’re mighty independent then, and you don’t give a damn for us.

But it’s our turn now.

You can do some begging now and see how you like it.

It’s good enough for you.

No, there ain’t a job that I know of in Chicago that you can get, unless it is in the sewers, and you ain’t fit for that.

” “But give me a chance at it,” I urged.

“I wouldn’t take the responsibility,” he answered.

“It would kill a man of your build in a week, and you couldn’t pass the first inspection, anyway.

” And so ended my efforts through the employment agencies.

The newspapers are always an unfailing resort, as a hopeful source of information of any demand for labor.

A newspaper in the very early morning, before the city is astir, is a treasure, for any clew to work can then be promptly followed up with some chance of one’s being the first to apply.

Papers are to be had in abundance later in the day in public reading-rooms and about railway stations and hotel-corridors.

It is, however, the newspaper damp from press that is most valuable to us, and between us and its possession is often the insuperable barrier of its price.

The journals which early post their issues upon bulletin-boards are public benefactors, and about these boards in the early dawn often there are groups of men who study closely the “want columns.

” A very little experience was enough to disclose the fact that there is a wide difference in the character of these notices in different newspapers.

In some issues the want-column is very short, but the statements bear every mark of genuineness; in others it is promisingly long, but, when carefully analyzed, it proves to be chiefly a collection of decoys for the unwary.

The city seems to be full of men and women seeking employment.

Not only are there the penniless common workmen of my class, whose number must be reckoned in many thousands, and among whom the professionally idle form, of course, a large percentage, but there are multitudes of mechanics and skilled workers, of whom Clark is a type.

And beyond these is an army of seekers after salaried posts like those of clerks and bookkeepers and the various subordinate positions of business and professional life.

Not all were penniless when they began their search for work there.

Hundreds of them had a little store of money when their last employment gave out, or they brought with them when they came their savings, which they hopefully counted upon to last until a new place had been found.

How large a body of sharpers live by preying upon the credulity of these classes it would be difficult to discover, as it also would be difficult to discover all the tricks of their trade.

The craft of the bunco-steerers is certainly well known, and yet it perennially finds its victims, and largely, no doubt, among the classes of whom I am speaking.

But there are other snares, less sudden but quite as disastrous as those of the bunco-steerers, and far more insidious, since they have about them the apparent sanction of legitimate business.

It is these that make most open use of the want-columns of certain of the newspapers.

Agencies are advertised, and in them, after the payment of a small fee and the purchase of the needed outfit, large earnings are guaranteed as the result of putting some product upon the market.

Opportunities are offered for the investment of a little capital--sums as low as five and ten dollars are solicited--and immense returns are promised.

Requests for men are made in urgent terms: “Wanted--three--five--seven men at once.

Steady employment guaranteed;

good pay.

No previous experience necessary.

Apply at No. -- ---- Street, second floor front.

” One morning I marked a dozen or more of these notices in one newspaper, and carefully made the rounds of the addresses given.

In every case I found an establishment which purported to do business at coloring photographs.

I was offered employment in each instance.

The conditions were as uniform as those governing a regular market.

Two dollars was the invariable fee for being taught the secret of the process.

One dollar would purchase the needed materials.

There was always a strong demand, enough to insure abundant work until spring.

“Our agents are sending in large orders all the time,” was the conventional explanation.

“You can soon learn to color ten or twelve photographs in a day, and we will pay you at the rate of three dollars a dozen for them.

” The discovery that I had no money invariably brought the interview abruptly to an end in an atmosphere which cooled suddenly.

I met many actual victims of these devices; one will serve as a type.

We both had been sitting for some time on a crowded bench in the lobby of a lodging-house.

Each was absorbed in his own “bitterness,” and oblivious to the presence of other men and to the tumult of the room.

My companion was cheerfully responsive when I spoke to him, and we both accepted gladly the relief of an interchange of confidence.

He was three days beyond the end of his resources.

So far he had been fortunate in securing the cost of food and the price of a ten-cent lodging, and had not yet been forced to the station-house.

But on that evening, for the first time, he had learned of the station lodging.

It loomed for him as the logic of events, and he dreaded it.

It was of this that he was thinking gloomily when I spoke to him.

Born and bred in the country, he had grown up in ignorance, not of hard, honest work, nor altogether of books, but of the world.

He had lived at home and worked on his father’s farm and attended the winter sessions of the district school until he was sixteen, when his father and mother died, and the farm and all of their possessions were sold to pay the mortgage, and he was left penniless.

Then he worked for other farmers for two years, and studied as best he could.

Finally he secured a “second-grade certificate” to teach school, and he had taught in the winter sessions for two years, working as a farm-hand through the summers.

His coming to Chicago was a stroke of ambition.

A post as a salesman or a bookkeeper could be got, he had felt sure, if he was persistent enough in his search, and this, he thought, would serve him as a starting-point to a business career.

He had counted upon a long, hard search for place, and so he had come forearmed with his savings, which, when he reached Chicago, more than two months before this evening, amounted to a little over fifty dollars when he found himself in lodgings in a decent flat on Division Street.

He paid at first two dollars a week for a room which contained a bed and bureau and a wash-stand, and which was warmed by a small oil-stove.

There was a strip of carpet on the floor, and a shade at the window which looked out upon an alley and the blank brick wall of a house opposite.

The bed-linen was changed once in two weeks.

In addition to that outlay he was spending, on an average, fifty cents a day for food and an occasional dime in car-fare.

All this was luxury.

His last lodging, before he was forced upon the street, was a seventy-five-cent closet in a house on Meridian Street, on the West Side.

The room contained a cot with an old mattress and some blankets, and there was a soap-box on end which would hold a lamp.

He was obliged to wash himself at the sink in the public passage.

There had been an analogous change in the range of employment sought.

All idea of a mercantile post had been at last abandoned, and he was in for any honest living to which his hands could help him.

It was when he had broken his last five-dollar note that he made once more the rounds of the doubtful offices which offer work.

A

photograph-coloring establishment was his final choice.

He paid the fee of two dollars, received the instructions, which were very simple, purchased for a dollar a box of materials, accepted half a dozen photographs to begin upon, and then went to his room with his mind made up to succeed at the work if there was any success in it.

With utmost patience and care he practised upon the pictures.

Difficulties in the process arose against which he had not been warned.

He went for further instructions and was given them willingly.

After nearly three days of almost constant industry he finished the six photographs.

These were to yield him a dollar and a half, and he took them with a sense of achievement to the office.

His employer examined them and good-naturedly pointed out certain defects which he was asked to remedy.

The remedy seemed simple, but he saw at a glance that, in reality, it would require his undoing practically all his work and performing it over again, at a great risk of ruining the photographs in the attempt.

He thought that he saw an escape from that, so he proposed to his employer that the alterations should be made at the establishment;

that he himself should be paid nothing for the first work, but that he should be given a second lot of pictures to color.

The man agreed instantly, and handed to him a fresh package containing half a dozen photographs.

These he carried back to his room.

When he undid the wrapper he found that he had been given a job which would require at least a week to finish.

Each photograph was unlike the others.

Besides one or two more or less difficult human figures in each, there were elaborate backgrounds of draperies and rustic benches and potted plants.

He took the package back and asked for something simpler--more within his power as a beginner.

His employer explained to him cheerfully that he had nothing else just then, but that he was sure of easier work for him by the time that he had finished this.

The poor fellow walked out into the street knowing that he had been swindled out of three dollars and three days’ hard work, and that penniless now, he must take up the search again, and that there was no redress for him.

Several times after this I saw him and I pressed upon him each time the plan of returning to his former home in northern Indiana, or striking out anywhere into the open country, where his intelligence and his former experience would stand him in good stead, and where he would probably not have to look long for a job.

This was keenly distasteful to him, for it would be a tacit acknowledgment of defeat, and the man was not without courage and pluck.

I met him last one early morning after his first night as a lodger in a station-house.

His eyes were starting from his head, and he wore the wild, hunted look which I had watched with alarm in Clark.

He would scarcely stop to talk.

He was off for the open country and his former home.

* * * * * Before many days had passed Clark and I began to lose the sense of being recruits in the army of the unemployed.

We soon acquired the feeling of veterans, and with it a certain naturalness as of long habit.

It is not a little strange how swift this adjustment is.

We fell into some of the ways of the other men with an ease which seemed to imply a long antecedent wont.

This was after Clark had despaired of work in a foundry, and had reached the level of willingness to sweep a crossing for a living, if only he could get the job.

One of the habits which came most readily to us was to join the crowds which stand in the early morning about the gates of large productive institutions.

Sometimes a superintendent finds himself short-handed of common labor in a permanent department of the work or for an emergency, and he sends a foreman out to the gates to secure the needed men.

This happens very rarely, if I may judge from our experience; and yet, upon so slender a chance as this, hundreds of men stand each day in the market-places for labor, waiting hopefully for some husbandman in want of workers.

Clark and I soon made a considerable round.

One morning we were at the gates of the Exposition grounds, another at the Stock-yards, and then at various factory gates on the West Side.

We were up at five one clear, cold morning near the middle of December, in order to try our luck at the gates of a factory which lies four miles or more from the heart of the city.

It was no great hardship to set off without a breakfast, for we had supped heartily on the night before, and had gladly spent our remaining cash for beds in preference to sleeping in the station-house.

Out of a cloudless sky blew a strong, dry, northwest wind across the snowless prairies, and it cut sharply, at right angles, through the long diagonal street which we followed to the far southwest.

We did not loiter, for it took our fastest gait to keep us warm.

The buildings shielded us in part, but around the corners the wind caught us with its unchecked force, and enveloped us often in clouds of driven dust which rose from the surface of the frozen streets.

There was exhilaration in the walk; when we reached the centre of the viaduct which carries Blue Island Avenue across the various lines of railway which enter the city between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, we were in the full, unimpeded gale, and looking back we could see across the dark city the first slender shafts of light dimming the eastern stars.

It was still dark when we reached the factory gates, for the better part of an hour remained before the sun would be well up, and it was almost half an hour before the beginning of the day’s work.

We were not the first to be on hand.

Already there were groups of men who stood before the fast-closed gate, or stamped slowly up and down on the sleepers of the railway which enters the factory yard, or gathered for shelter behind the walls of neighboring buildings.

The number of these men was growing fast.

I thought at first that many of them were employees waiting for the morning opening of the factory.

But when the heavy gate moved down its groove in answer to the keeper’s push, disclosing the open area of the factory yard and the long platforms flanking the warehouses, this company of waiting men, grown now to eighty or a hundred strong, stood against the high board fence and along the edges of a great stream of workingmen, which began to pour with increasing volume through the narrow way.

A bell sounded from the factory tower, and you could hear the first slow movements of the piston-rods, and the answering stir among the fly-wheels as they warmed to swifter motion, and the straps and pulleys tuning up to the canticle of the working-day.