Читать книгу The Iron Man & The Tin Woman: A Book of Little Sketches of To-Day and To-Morrow - Стивен Ликок - Страница 14

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Note: The publication of the “Memoirs of an Iceman,” printed above, proved to be a mere fanning of the flame of public demand. It was found necessary to follow it up immediately with the “Memoirs of a Night Watchman,” as here related.

I have the honor to belong to a very old family connected for generations with the night. I have heard my father, who was a furnace man, say that his ancestors were highwaymen, and he would speak of the blessing that coal heating had brought to the world in opening up night occupations for men of adventurous character.

While I was still but a little boy, my father would take me with him on his rounds. I would sit and watch him stoke up the furnace in the homes of the rich, and after he had brought it to a glow, Father would fetch some eggs from the ice-box upstairs and fry them in the furnace; while we ate them, Father would talk to me about the night and why it was superior to the day.

As our clientele was a rich one, I became accustomed early in life to move in luxurious basements with cement floors and spacious coal rooms, which has given me ever since an ease of bearing and a quiet step that no doubt helped the success of my career. We fed well everywhere, for my father believed in a generous and varied diet; on the other hand, he drank but little—a pint or so of champagne, perhaps, or if the night were cold, possibly a touch of old French brandy. For me he would open, perhaps, a pint of claret, but we drank it always in the cellar.

My father was very old-fashioned and strict in his ideas, and made no use of the drawing-room nor even of the dining-room, except, perhaps, on some special occasion. In one or two houses, where the billiard room was in the basement, Father and I would knock up a hundred points after his work was over. But in all such matters he was strict; only in very, very cold weather, for example, have I seen him make use of a sealskin coat for his work at the furnace.

As a rule, we had the night to ourselves; there was no one moving in the houses. And after the furnace was well stoked up and burning nicely, Father would sit on a trestle in the cellar and talk to me of the principles of ventilation and of the question of clinkers and back-drafts, so that I learned a great deal in being with him.

We usually arrived home a little before daybreak, bringing home breakfast for my mother and my younger brother. Father would generally bring home a satchel of coal with him, and would give some also to any of our neighbors who lived in the same basement as we did; for, after all, as my father said, the coal cost only the trouble of carrying it. We generally got to bed right after breakfast, as we kept early hours.

On Sunday, Father and I went to church, or rather to several churches, where Father tended fires in the basements, from which we could hear the organ. My father had no religious prejudices, and told me that he would just as soon fire one church as another. But he was rather bitter, for so mild a man, against Quakers and others that refuse to have heat in their places of worship. My father regarded them as misguided.

Meantime, I attended night school regularly, as Father laid great stress on education. He would have wished me to go from night school to a night college, and if possible to take a degree. Father said he had known several college graduates in furnace work, and considered them fully equal to first-class men. He always spoke of Oxford with great respect, and recalled that when he was a young man in marine boiler work on night shift, they looked on Oxford men as better suited for that than anything else.

But I was young enough and ardent enough to view education with impatience. I wanted to get forward in life, and dreamed already of being a night orderly in a hospital or a night guard in a penitentiary. Father had some influential friends in the penitentiary, and he said that when they came out he would see what they could do. But the chance never came my way. We also talked of banking, and Father said that if you could once get a footing in a bank at night, there was no telling what it might lead to. He had a friend who was very high up in one of the banks; in fact he worked on the principal vault itself, but nothing came of that idea either. Sometimes, too, we talked of the sea, and of course Father, as I said, had been a sailor himself (in the stokehold), and my imagination was fired as that of any boy is with the romance of the sea. I loved to picture myself in the stokehold of some great ship, sifting ashes and raking out clinkers.

Among such day dreams, or rather night dreams, I grew gradually toward manhood. Meantime, I had tried out a few desultory occupations, but found none to my liking. For a while I held a post as night porter in a family hotel, my hours being from 1 a.m. to 7. But it was too disturbed. I found that I had hardly settled down to my morning newspaper, next morning’s, for an hour or so, when there might be a ring of a bell, or a casual arrival that necessitated my presence.

The surroundings were not congenial, for though the lounge room was fairly comfortable, the library was poorly selected and unsatisfactory. I worked also as night clerk in a fire station, which I found congenial and quiet, but in the second month of my work there was an outbreak of a fire in a neighboring part of the city and I left. Chance fate, however, decided where deliberate intention failed.

I returned home one day to find that my father had given up his job to accept a more or less permanent position in the county penitentiary. His removal there was not wholly of his own choice, but his duties were entirely congenial, as he found himself in charge of five night furnaces where his companions were men of education and culture, several of them college graduates. Indeed, his circumstances were such that at the expiration of his original contract, which I believe had been for three years—a matter of insistence on the part of the authorities—Father was invited to stay on as a salaried member of the staff. The change involved very little disadvantage, except that he lost his uniform and had to supply his own clothes.

Meantime, as a compensation for Father’s removal from his family—a matter on which his contract insisted—influential friends obtained for me the post of night watchman in a large downtown office building.

This position I have now held for fifty years, during which time I have every reason to believe that my career in and through the building has been a complete success. My hours are from midnight, when the last of the day staff leave, until 6 a.m., when the first of them come back. During this time it is my duty to visit all the doors of the offices and try the locks of the rooms, though, thus far, I have never been able to get into them. It is also necessary to punch a time clock on each floor of the building every half-hour. It is a crowded life, and in a way I shall not be sorry when some day the time for retirement comes.

I have found by experience that it is scarcely possible to do any serious reading, as it is interrupted every hour by duties. After the first twenty years I read less and less, and after the first thirty years I got into the way of contenting myself with reading the telephone book and the calendar. The necessity of keeping posted all the time as to which day of the month it is prevents intellectual stagnation.

Nor is it, as my reader might imagine, a life without incident. Every ten years or so something happens. I recall distinctly how, about twenty years ago, the burglar alarm rang, but I heard it in ample time to leave the building. On another occasion there was a great fire a few blocks away, which prevented all thought of sleep.

But yet I have begun to find that in the long run the position has a certain monotony, a kind of dullness about it. This feeling did not dawn on me at first, and often I forget it for five years, but it comes back. I ask myself, is this after all quite the work and quite the life for an active man? I asked myself this six years ago, and very soon I intend to ask it of myself again.

I am well aware that at my age, seventy, the time has hardly come to think of retiring. There is a man engaged in the next building on the street (I was talking to him only two years ago) who is nearly ten years older than I am. But without retiring from work altogether, I often think I may give up my present job and strike out into something more strenuous.

But no doubt many people think that.