Читать книгу The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West - Walter A. Wyckoff - Страница 5

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No. — Blue Island Avenue, Chicago,

Saturday, December 19, 1891.

When life is lived in its simplest terms, one is brought to marvellous intimacy with vital processes. And through this intimacy no disclosure is more wonderful than that of nature’s quick response. Exhausted by hard labor, until your muscles quiver in impotent loss of energy, you sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to the play of a physical revival wherein you are renewed by the mystery of intussusception, and your responsive mood quickens to the tension of the involution whence life’s energies flow new and fresh again. Another hour may bring as great a change, and the full tide of your rising spirits may set swiftly back. It is as though you were a little child once more, and your moods obedient to little things.

When living is a daily struggle with the problems of what you shall eat and what you shall drink, and wherewithal you shall be clothed, you take no anxious thought for the morrow, quite content to let the morrow take thought for the things of itself, for sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Your heart will leap with hope at any brightening of your lot, and will sink in deep despair when the way grows dark. The road of your salvation is by the strait gate and the narrow way of courage and persistent effort and provident foresight, and whence are these to come to you whose courage is born of warmth and a square meal, and whose despair comes with returning hunger? A world all bright with hope can be had on the terms of heat and food, and the sense of these can be induced for a nickel in a “barrel-house.”

When Clark and I awakened in the early morning, after our first night in the station, the dull gray dawn was dimming the gas, and in the lurid light we could see a writhing movement in the prostrate coiling mass of reeking humanity about us. We had lost the feeling of hunger, but a feverish thirst was burning to the roots of our tongues. We could scarcely move for the pain of sore and stiffened muscles, and I thought at first that my right leg was paralyzed from the night watchman’s kick. Only a few hours before, we had entered the station-house from the streets in eager willingness for any escape from their cold exposure, and now with intensified desire we longed for the outer air at any cost of hardship.

But we were not free to go out at once. The officer on duty brusquely ordered us back among the men when we approached him with a request to be allowed to leave. We were greeted with a burst of mocking glee as we walked back to our places, and among the comments was a call to me: “What have you pinched, whiskers?”

The reason for the delay was soon apparent, for in a few moments we were all marched down the main corridor and into the passage which opened nearest to the registrar’s desk. There we waited, closely huddled, the iron door locked upon us, while an examination was made as to whether any of the prisoners had been robbed. When all was reported right, the door was unlocked and we were allowed to file slowly out past the entrance of the kitchen. There stood the cook with an assistant, and he gave to each man as he passed a bowl of steaming coffee and a piece of bread. We drank the coffee at a gulp, and each man was eating bread with wolfish bites as he climbed the steps and walked out into the street.

THE POLICE-STATION BREAKFAST.

Every succeeding breath in the outer air seemed to carry its cleansing coolness farther down into our lungs. It was like the feeling of cold water to a parched throat. The sky was overcast, but the storm had ceased, and the temperature had fallen to several degrees of frost, and this gave a freshness and vigor to the air which brightened the world for us amazingly.

We could walk dry-shod in the measure that we could walk at all. Clark was rather stiff at the start, and I could make scarcely any progress alone, but Clark generously lent me a shoulder, and his arm was frequently around me at the street crossings. All this was most naturally done. The thought of deserting me because I had gone lame seemed never to occur to him. He must have known that his own good chances were seriously lessened by his having me upon his hands, but he accepted this as though it were inevitable. There was no mawkish sympathy in his manner; he was in for practical helpfulness only, and now and again he would withdraw his support, and, standing off, would watch me execute his command: “Now take a brace, partner, and let’s see you go it alone.”

At Van Buren Street we turned, to the Rock Island Railway station, and in the waiting-room we quenched our thirst as best we could at the drinking-fountain. Many of the men had taken the direction of South Clark Street. I asked Clark why.

“There’s barrel-houses down there,” he explained.

The word had come upon me repeatedly in the last day, with only a dim suggestion of its meaning, and so I owned to my ignorance.

“A barrel-house?” said Clark. “That’s a dive where they keep cheap whiskey on tap; you can get a pint for a nickel. It’s about the size of the whiskey you want for the thirst you get in a station-house, I’m thinking,” he added. And then more to himself than to me: “I’m damned if I don’t wish I had some now to wash that air out of my mouth.”

His face was very wry, and there was returning to it the expression of hopelessness which it had worn while we crouched for shelter in the doorway on the night before. It cut you to the quick. His light-blue eyes, which had drawn me from the first by the honest directness of their gaze, now began to lose their human, speaking quality and to take on the dumb, beseeching look of a hunted beast.

The bread and coffee and clean air had revived us both. I dreaded a swift relapse, and so I urged a wash, in the hope of its bracing effect. But where could we achieve this simple need? Certainly not in the wash-room of the station, for we had trespassed dangerously far in drinking at the fountain, and the eye of more than one employee was already upon us. There was no hotel into whose public lavatory we could pass unchallenged, and not so much upon Clark’s account as upon mine. There remained the open lake; so we walked up Van Buren Street and across the Lake Park and the railway tracks to the edge of the outer harbor. Here we knelt among the broken fragments of ice and bathed our faces and hands. It was vigorous exercise to rub them dry before they chapped in the winter wind. It warmed us, and the feeling of relative cleanness was enheartening. And then I sat down and dipped up water in one hand and applied it, until I had a cold saturated cushion against the bruise on my leg. This wrought wonderful relief until the wet cloth froze, and then it chafed the bruise badly for a time.

But I could walk alone and fairly well now. We turned up Michigan Avenue and followed it to the river, discussing, as we went, a plan of action. Clark was for going at once to the far North Side in search of employment at various iron-works and foundries there, of whose existence he had learned. I longed for the means of early relief from the reviving pangs of hunger through some chance job which I hoped that we might obtain. This was a new idea to Clark. He was a raw recruit in the army of the unemployed. That he might look for other work than that which was in the line of his trade had not yet presented itself to him as a possibility. He shrank from it with the instinctive dislike of a conservative for a new way. And all our early essays confirmed him in his aversion. We went from door to door of the great wholesale business houses at the head of Michigan Avenue. Large delivery trucks stood lined up along the curb on both sides, and there was the bustle across the pavement of much loading and unloading of wares. Workmen in leather aprons were handling packed boxes with the swiftness and dexterity of long practice. At half a score of houses we sought out an overseer or a superintendent and asked to be set to work; but, without a moment’s hesitation in a single case, we were told, with varying degrees of emphasis, that we were not needed, not even for some chance, exceptional demand.

It is difficult to describe the discouragement which results from such an experience. All about you is the tumultuous industry of a great city. You feel something of the splendid power of its ceaseless productivity; you guess at its vast consuming; and in the din of its noisy traffic you watch the swift shuttles which weave the varied fabric of its business. Its complexities and interdependencies bear down upon you with an inspiring sense of the volume of human life spent in ministering to life. Its multitudes throng you upon the streets, and you read in countless faces the story of unending struggle to keep abreast with pressing duty. Work? Everywhere about you there is work, stupendous, appalling, cumulative in its volume and intensity with the increasing momentum of a world-wide trade, which is driven by the natural forces of demand and supply and keenest competition. Men everywhere are staggering under burdens too grievous to be borne. And here are you idle, yet counting it the greatest boon if you might but add your strength to the mighty struggle.

Is there then no demand for labor? There is most importunate, insatiable demand for all work of finer skilfulness, for all men who can assume responsibility and give new efficiency to productive forces, or direct them into channels for the development of new wealth. But in the presence of this demand Clark and I stood asking hire for the potential physical energies of two hungry human bodies, and, standing so, we were but two units in a like multitude of unemployed.

When we reached the river I had difficulty in dissuading Clark from his confirmed resolve to pass on to the North Side in pursuit of his earlier plan. He had no thought of leaving me behind. He urged that a chance job was as probable along his route as any other. But he consented at last to another hour of search in the immediate vicinity.

We were in South Water Street; we walked west until we had crossed State and had come to the corner of Dearborn Street. Walking became increasingly difficult, for the pavements were piled high with boxes and barrels and crates full of all manner of fruits and vegetables, and wooden coops packed with live game and poultry. A narrow passage remained between the piles. Through this we picked our way, carefully avoiding empty boxes and hand-trucks and stray measures that lay strewn about. On each side of the street buildings of brick or stone, fairly uniform in height, rose four-storied and many windowed, with the monotony of their straight lines relieved by the curves of arched windows, each bearing a protruding keystone. Over the wide fronts of the shops sagged awnings in various stages of faded color and unrepair, their iron frames lying uncovered and unsightly against the fluted canvas. Along both curbs were backed continuous rows of drays and trucks and market-wagons. The two lines of horses stood blanketed in the cold, facing each other across a narrow opening down the stone-paved street, and more than anything else they resembled lines of picketed cavalry.

We soon felt the friction of the crowd as it steered its devious course along the littered pavement, brushing against groups of purchasers who stood examining sample wares, and against idlers leaning to the doorposts with hands in their trousers’ pockets, and through the cross currents of drivers and shopmen who busily took on or discharged the loads.

The very confusion and hurry of the scene, while they suggested the chance of work, were really an added embarrassment to our search. More than under other circumstances we shrank from asking employment from men hard driven by the “instant need of things.” And this instinctive feeling was fully justified in the course of the actual quest. Of common hands there was an abundance, and ours, held out for sale, were of the nature of a provocation to men cumbered by complex care. Occasionally we could not get access to an employer; and when we did, we sometimes received a civil “no,” but commonly an emphatic one in a vent of evil temper.

At one moment an old gentleman was looking up at us over the tops of his spectacles as we stood at the foot of his desk. There was much shrewdness in his eye, and his face was deeply lined, but his speech revealed the frankness of a courteous nature.

“No, I’m sorry,” he was saying, “I’m sorry that I can give you nothing to do. The fact is, I’ve got to lay off three men at the end of the week. My business don’t warrant my keeping them. I hope you’ll be more fortunate elsewhere.”

A minute later we were standing waiting for the attention of a square-shouldered, thick-necked dealer who was in angry dispute with a subordinate. His face was still distorted when he turned upon us, and his dilating eyes sought mine with an expression of growing impatience.

“We are looking for a job, sir,” I began. “Can you give us a chance to work?”

“No, I can’t, —— you! Out you go, now!” And then to a man near the door: “—— your soul, Kelly, I’ve told you to keep these bums out of here. If you let in another one I’ll fire you, as sure as hell.”

“OUT YOU GO, NOW.”

The hour was nearly up, and there was apparently nothing for it but to start north in accordance with Clark’s plan and in hope of better fortune. I felt as though I could not go. I was fairly faint with hunger, and a curious light-headedness had possessed me. The sights and sounds about us took on a strange unreality, and I could not rid myself of the feeling of moving and speaking in a dream. Again and again I was conscious of a repetition of identical experience, recalling the same circumstances in some faintly remembered past, and even before I spoke at times, I had an eerie sense of having uttered the coming sentences before under precisely similar conditions. The one fact to which consciousness held with unshaken certainty was the strong craving for food. And this was not so much a positive pain, as it was a sickening, benumbing influence. My hand would all but go out in reach for fruit that lay exposed about me, and the thought that the act would be wrong, and would get me into trouble, followed the impulse afar, and was forced into action as a checking conviction by a distinct effort of the will.

We turned into one shop more. The pavement in front was heaped with crates packed with oranges, and bound around the centre and the ends with iron bands. Three high they stood on end, and four and five in a row along the curb, while backed up against them were two empty trucks with slats sloping capaciously at the sides.

There was confusion within the shop. A dealer and two drivers were swearing loudly, each on a line of independent grievance. Two or three shopmen were bustling about in zealous execution of orders. Men who may have been customers were waiting impatiently for attention, and clerks added to the confusion as with papers in hand they passed quickly in and out of offices at the rear. It appeared the most unpromising place for us that we had entered, and we were prepared for a refusal more than commonly emphatic, when to our almost overwhelming surprise the dealer hailed us:

“Say, you men, do you want a job? Go out and load them oranges, and I’ll give you fifty cents apiece.”

We did not stagger nor clasp each other’s hands in an ecstasy of relief; we simply turned without a word, and hurrying to the street, we began to lift the heavy crates into the box of an empty truck.

Clark was the first to speak.

“Fifty cents, partner, fifty cents!” he kept repeating in an awed undertone. He seemed to be trying to get firm hold of the fact of our almost incredible good fortune, and then, in a voice that was thick with a heaving sob, he said:

“We’ll feed, partner, we’ll feed!”

“WE’LL FEED, PARTNER, WE’LL FEED.”

But we did not “feed” at once when the money was actually in our possession. The first load had gone fairly well, for the certain prospect of food nerved us to such a degree that, weakened though we were, we scarcely felt the effort of loading, and we were quite unaware that our bare hands were being scratched by the sharp ends of iron bands about the boxes until we felt the flow of blood. But before the second load was half on, our nerve began to fail us. Each succeeding crate went on board with a greater effort. And the task itself grew harder, as the tiers of boxes rose higher in the truck. It seemed as though the driver would never be satisfied with the load; but at last he called a halt, and, mounting his seat, drove off in the direction in which the other truck had gone.

We were paid at once, Clark a half-dollar coin and I two silver quarters. We held our money with the grip of drowning men upon a saving support. We sat down upon a doorstep to rest. We were panting hard, and the circles under Clark’s eyes had grown darker, and his thin bloodless lips were quivering as with cold. But his spirits were rising, and his eyes grew brighter every moment, and his pale face, already flushed with exercise, glowed again with the pleasure of anticipating the sure breaking of our fast.

When we set off, Clark was in the full swing of a provident plan.

“There’s lots of saloons,” he said, “where you can get a free lunch with a glass of beer.” And he began to point them out to me along our route. Large signs in front competed for the drifting trade. On one was painted a huge schooner brimming over with frothing beer, and it bore the legend: “The largest glass of beer for five cents in Chicago.” Another sign claimed for its shop, “The best free lunch in the city,” and others told of hot sausages with every drink, or a certain number of oysters in any style, or hot stews at choice, and bread and cold meats and cheese in unstinted abundance.

All this so exactly met our needs. And there were warmth and shelter and companionship within the saloons, and having drunk at the bar and eaten at the free-lunch counter, we should be free to sit at ease about the fire. And how cheap it all was! For fifteen cents, Clark was saying, we could get three fair meals a day, and even ten cents would save us from the actual pain of hunger. There was no other chance that compared with this. The utmost that five cents would buy in the cheapest eating-houses was a cup of coffee and two small rolls. There were ten-cent meals to be had, but they were not the equals of a free lunch and a glass of beer. To get their equivalent in a restaurant you must spend fifteen cents at least.

My objections were wholly unintelligible to Clark. From these he would bring the argument back to the question of wise management, and there he had me. Presently he lost his temper, and told me that I was a “damn fool,” and that I might go “to a restaurant, or to hell,” as I chose, but that for his part he was going in for a free lunch and a glass of beer. But before we separated he was so far pacified that he agreed to meet me in the early evening in front of the shop where we had earned our money.

It was at the juncture of Dearborn and Madison Streets that we parted. Not far from there I found a restaurant whose placards in the windows offered tempting dishes at astonishingly cheap rates. “Roast beef and baked potato, fifteen cents,” was printed on the one that lured me most. I walked inside and sat down at a small round table, spread with a cloth which was faultlessly clean. A long line of such tables reached down the centre of the deep room in inviting whiteness, and was flanked on each side by a row of others, oblong in shape, pressed close in against the walls. To a height of several feet above these tables the walls were wainscoted with mirrors, and the white ceiling was gay with paper festoons. Customers were streaming in, for it was about noon. Most of these were evidently men from neighboring business houses, but there were workmen, too, some of them in blue jeans; and the first fear that I felt at entering, the fear of having come to a place too respectable to accept me as a guest, vanished completely, and gave place to a feeling of security and comfort.

A corps of colored waiters were hurrying through the narrow passages between the tables, bearing aloft tin trays heaped with dishes; to the noisy clatter and hum of the diners, they added a babel of discordant sound as they shouted in unintelligible phrase their varying orders into the dim regions at the rear, whence answered a muffled echo to each call.

My order came in a deep dinner-plate, a slice of roast beef, generous and juicy, shading from brown to the rich, raw red of the centre that oozed with a strengthening flow. With it was a large baked potato, piping hot, and when I broke it upon the table with a blow of my fist, the fragrant steam rose in a cloud to my face.

At the end of a fast of thirty-six hours, which had been relieved only by a few swallows of coffee and a little bread, I knew enough to eat slowly. But I was unprepared for the difficulty which this precaution involved. As when one swallows cautiously in quenching a consuming thirst, and checks by sheer force the muscles which would drink with choking draughts, so it was only by a sustained restraint that I ate carefully, in small morsels, until the brutish hunger was appeased. And when all the beef and potato, and an amazing quantity of the bread, with which the table was abundantly supplied, were gone, I could not forego the expenditure of five cents more for a cup of coffee, by the aid of which another deep inroad upon the bread was soon accomplished.

At the desk where I paid the amount stamped upon a check which the waiter had left at my place, I inquired for the manager. When I received his assurance that he could give me no work as a dishwasher, nor, in fact, in any capacity in his restaurant, and that he knew of no opening for me anywhere, I walked out into the streets once more and found my way to the public reading-room of the Young Men’s Christian Association. There I looked through the advertising columns of the morning newspapers. Of applications for positions there was an almost countless number, but of openings offered there were few, and not one of these was promising to a man whose only resource was unskilled labor. Reading on somewhat aimlessly through the day’s news I presently fell asleep, and was soon awakened by a young secretary, who was shaking me vigorously by the shoulder.

“Wake up, my man, wake up!” he was saying. “You can’t sleep in here. You must keep awake, or go out.”

I went out. It was easier to keep awake in the streets than in that warm room, and besides, I must not slacken the search for work.

By the time that I had fully recovered possession of my senses I found that an aimless walk had taken me near to the railway station, at whose fountain Clark and I had drunk in the morning. A crowd of newly arrived passengers was issuing into Van Buren Street, many of them carrying hand-luggage. With a flash of association there came to my mind the recollection of the boys and men who follow you persistently on Cortlandt Street between the Pennsylvania station and the elevated railway, with importunate offers to carry your bag for a dime. I wondered that this industry had not occurred to me before as a resource in my present need.

In a moment I was plying it with high hope of success, but in the next I stood agape at a fierce onslaught of street Arabs and men. One or two had picked up stones with which they menaced me. All of them were shouting oaths and violent abuse, and one half-grown boy, who was the first to reach me, held a clenched fist to my face, as he screamed hoarsely profane threats, and his keen dark eyes blazed with anger, and his lean face worked convulsively in the strength of violent passion. It appeared that I had trespassed upon a field which was pre-empted by a “ring” well-organized for its possession and cultivation, and for the further purpose of excluding competition.

ALL OF THEM WERE SHOUTING OATHS AND VIOLENT ABUSE.

I fell back to a safe distance. On the opposite side of the street I saw a gentleman carrying a heavy portmanteau. He was well past the beat of the organized ring about the station. In an instant I was beside him, and was offering to carry his load. He seemed disinclined to pay any heed at first, but he stopped in a moment with the remark:

“I’ll give you a quarter to carry this bag to my hotel.”

I assented joyfully. I swung the bag to my shoulder, and passed on ahead, while the traveller walked close behind me in the crowd, and directed me to his hotel in Wabash Avenue, where, together with what I already had, I was soon fifty-five cents to the good.

That afternoon yielded nothing more either in prospect of a steady job or in the fruit of chance employment, and at dusk I stood again in South Water Street anxiously awaiting Clark’s return. It was dark when he came at last, and as he approached me in the fierce light of the electric arc which gleamed from the top of the high iron post near by, I could see that he was paler and more careworn, and deeply dejected. We sat down for a few moments upon a doorstep. The street was nearly deserted, and the lights shone dismally through its blackened length. Clark began to tell me of his afternoon. No chance of work had been revealed beyond the vague suggestion of one boss that he might need an extra man in a week or two. Moreover Clark had found the shops so far away that he had been obliged, both in his going and return, to take a Lincoln Avenue cable-car, and so was out a fruitless ten cents in fare. He said very little beyond the bare statement of his afternoon’s experience. He was sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, with his hands clasped, and his flaxen head bowed almost to his arms. I knew that he was struggling with thoughts and feelings which he could not analyze, nor in the least express, and I waited in silence beside him.

The whole experience was new to him. He had been out of work before, but he had had a home, and in its shelter he could tide over the depression which had cost him his job. Now his home was gone, and he was adrift without support. But he was young and strong and accustomed to work, and all that he sought was a chance to win his way. And yet his very struggles for a footing seemed to sink him into deeper difficulty. The conditions which he was forced to face seemed to conspire against the possibility of his success.

It was the feeling inspired by this seeming truth, a dim, dull feeling vaguely realized, yet awful, that bore hard upon him, and that loomed portentous as with remorseless fate. He was struggling with it in an agony of helpless discouragement, and presently he found utterance for it in concrete form.

“One boss I struck for a job, I thought he was going to give it to me sure,” he said. “He asked me where I’d worked before, and why I’d quit, and how long I’d been at the trade. And just then I felt something crawling on my neck. It was a crumb, —— it! The boss seen it, too. He got mad, —— him! and he chewed a rag, and he said if he had twenty jobs, he wouldn’t give one to a lousy hobo like me.” Clark was growing increasingly vehement in his recital. He rose to his feet and bent over me, while the hot words came hissing between his teeth:

“I ain’t never been like this in my life before, and, great God Almighty! I’d be clean if I could!” After a moment he added, in a hard, clear tone:

“We’ve got some money, partner, let’s go and get a drink.”

My extra quarter flashed into my mind as a hopeful resource. I held out the two quarters and a nickel on the palm of my hand where the street light would strike them. I told Clark of my windfall, and of the possible chance of many another such to help us out in the future.

“I earned this in ten minutes,” I said, holding out a quarter, “and I know where twenty cents of it will buy us each a hot stew and all the bread that we can eat. And then I’ve found a lodging-house in South Clark Street where we can each get a wash and a fairly decent bed in good air for fifteen cents, and we’ll have enough left to keep us in food to-morrow.”

Clark hesitated. I enlarged on the attractiveness of the restaurant and the comfort of eating at leisure at one of its clean tables, and the long, unbroken rest that we should have at the lodgings. Clark was tired to the bone, and he yielded. It was my turn now to give him a shoulder as we walked to our evening meal.

We were soon seated opposite each other at one of the side tables of the restaurant. The lights were reproduced in myriad reflections in the mirrors, and we seemed to be sitting near the centre of a vast dining-hall with multitudes at its countless tables and its farther portions fading in the perspective of dim distance. The Irish stew and bread were indescribably good, and in the company of other diners we felt that we were among our fellow-men and of them, and we were free for the time from the torment of that haunting isolation which keeps one unspeakably lonely even in the thronging crowd.

Light-hearted and full of hope again we walked to the lodging-house, and after a wash we were soon fast asleep, each on a rough cot in a wooden closet, the electric lights streaming in upon us through the wire netting which was spread over the tops of long lines of such sleeping booths, that stood separated by thin board partitions like the bath-houses at the sea.

Friday and Saturday came and passed with the same vain search for work, and with varying fortune in odd jobs. We took separate routes through the day, but always agreed at parting upon an hour and place of meeting. The Young Men’s Christian Association rooms became our rendezvous. When we met there on Friday evening I had a quarter and Clark was high-spirited and opulent with forty-five cents to his credit. He was full of his good fortune. In the middle of the forenoon he had chanced upon the job of shifting coal in the cellar of a private house. The work having been finished he was allowed to wash himself in the kitchen with an abundance of hot water and soap and the luxury of a towel. And then he sat down at the kitchen-table to a dinner of hot turkey and cranberry-sauce, and any number of vegetables, and all the bread and coffee he wanted, and finally a towering saucer of plum-pudding. Fifty cents was added to the dinner in payment for his work, and, as he had had a dime left in his pocket after breakfast, he did not hesitate at an expenditure of fifteen cents in car-fare to facilitate his search for work.

My quarter had come, as on the day before, by way of a porter’s service—only this time from a woman. I caught sight of her as she was crossing the Lake Front from the station of the Illinois Central Railroad at the head of Randolph Street. Under her left arm were parcels of various shapes and sizes, and with some apparent effort she carried a bag in her right hand. The parcels were troublesome, for now and again she was obliged to rest the bag upon the pavement until she had adjusted her arm to a surer hold upon them. She was a woman nearing middle life, well dressed in warm, comfortable, winter garments which bore the general marks of the prevailing mode.

So completely had the present way of living possessed me that I fear that my first impulse at sight of her was born of the hope of a porter’s fee and not of the thought of helpfulness. But I grew more interested as I neared her, and increasingly embarrassed. There was a touch of beautiful coloring in her round, full face, and about the mouth was an expression of rare sweetness, while her dark-blue eyes looked out through gold-rimmed spectacles with preternatural seriousness. But my eye was drawn most by the hair that appeared beneath her bonnet; a heavy mass it was, and tawny red like that of Titian’s “Magdalene” in the Pitti. She might have been a shopkeeper’s wife come to the city from the suburbs or from some provincial village, and she was nervous in the noisy atmosphere of the unfamiliar. I had not yet offered my services to a woman in this new capacity of street porter, and I found myself puzzled as to how I should approach her. But the actual situation solved the difficulty, for when we were but a few steps apart, her bundles fell again into a state of irritating insecurity under her arm and she was again obliged to adjust them.

Instantly I was beside her, bowing, hat in hand:

“I beg your pardon, madam; won’t you let me help you?”

She drew back and looked at me perplexed, and I could see the gathering alarm in her wide, innocent, serious eyes.

SHE DREW BACK AND LOOKED AT ME PERPLEXED.

“Oh, no, thanks!” she said, and I knew that all that she had ever heard of bunco-steerers and of the wily crafts of the town was mingling in terrifying confusion in her mind with thoughts of possible escape.

My distress was as great as her own. I had forgotten for the moment how dismaying to a woman must be an unexpected offer of service from a sudden apparition of full grown, masculine, street poverty. I felt guilty as though I had wantonly frightened a child. A parcel had fallen to the ground. I picked it up, and returned it to her with an apology most spontaneous and sincere. But as I turned away in haste to escape from the embarrassment of the situation, I found myself checked to my great surprise by a timid question: “Perhaps you can tell me the shortest way to number — La Salle Street?” she said.

My hat was off at once.

“It will give me great pleasure to show you the way,” I replied, and not waiting for a refusal, I set off with, “Won’t you follow me, pray?” over my shoulder.

At the curb of the first crossing I waited for her.

“Keep close to me,” I said, “and I’ll see you safe across the street.” But I ignored the parcels, which were once more awry. On the opposite pavement she stopped.

“Would you mind holding my bag,” she asked, “while I get a better grip on these bundles?” I accepted the bag with an assurance of the pleasure that it gave me. It was soon followed by a parcel, the largest and most unwieldy of the lot. She finished adjusting the others, and then extended her free hand for the remaining parcel.

“We’ll carry this between us,” I said, “and I’ll walk with you to the place.”

Without a word of demur she took firm hold of the stout twine with which the parcel was tied, and thus linked we set off together down Randolph Street to La Salle. Conversation was nearly impossible, for we were edging our way for the most part along crowded pavements.

When we stood for a few moments at a crossing, waiting for a check in the tide of traffic, she confided to me that she had come to Chicago from “——ville” to see a lawyer.

“You are often in the city,” I suggested, delighted to talk on the pleasant, easy terms which were springing up between us.

“Oh, no! I ain’t,” she said, and then she was innocently superior to the compliment implied in my feigned surprise, and she began to question me about myself.

“What do you do for a living, young man?”

“I am out of work, and I am looking for a job,” I said, evasively.

“What is your line of work?” she continued; for the bucolic mind was bent on a sure footing from which to launch out into further inquiry.

“I shall be glad of any work that I can get,” I said. “Any work at all,” I reiterated, thinking that she might put me in the way of a job.

“Where do you live when you’re to home?” and the question indicated a new tack in the quest for certitude.

“I came out here from the East” I answered; “I have no home here.”

“I guess you ain’t been doing just right, or else you wouldn’t be ashamed to tell,” she said, while a graver look came into her sober eyes.

The situation was so keenly delightful that I lacked the moral strength to do aught but prolong it.

“Ah, madam, if you but knew!” I said, and I fear that my tone conveyed to her a tacit confession of deep depravity.

We had reached the required number in La Salle Street. I led the way to the elevator, and found the door of the lawyer’s office. The woman stood for a few moments in the passage; I was evidently on her conscience.

“Haven’t you got any family or friends?” she continued, in a voice tender with sympathy.

“I had both,” I replied.

“Then, young man, you take my advice, and just go back to your family, and tell them you’re sorry that you done wrong, and you mean to do better. They’ll be good to you and help you.” Her words were swift with the energy of conviction.

“I am sure that you are right,” I agreed.

And now a well-filled open purse was in her hand, and I saw her fingers hesitating among some loose coins. Presently she held out a quarter.

“You’ve been real nice to me,” she said, “and I want to ask you not to make a wrong use of this money. You’ll not buy liquor with it, will you?”

“Indeed I will not,” I assured her. “I have little temptation to do that, for I can quench my thirst for nothing; it is food that I find it hard to get. And, madam,” I continued, “I am deeply grateful to you for your good advice.”

She smiled upon me, her pretty mouth and dimpled cheeks and dark blue eyes all playing their part in the friendly salutation.

“You will go back to your friends, won’t you?” she said, persuasively.

“I will indeed,” I replied. “Already I look forward to that with keenest pleasure.”

Then richer by a quarter and all aglow with the sense of human sympathy I returned to the streets, and to the exhausting, dreary round of place-hunting.

That this in itself should be such hard work is largely due, I fancy, to the double strain, both on your strength and on your sensibilities. Certainly it is strangely enervating. Even when you are not weakened by the want of food, you find yourself at the far end of a fruitless search worn out beyond the exhaustion of a hard day’s work. And then the actual ground covered by your most persistent effort is always so sadly disappointing. You may begin the day’s hunt rested and fed and full of energy and resolve; you may have planned the search with care, taking pains to find out the various forms of unskilled labor which are employed within the chosen area; with utmost regard to systematic, time-saving expenditure of energy, you may go carefully over the ground, leaving no stone unturned; and yet, at the day’s end, you have not covered half the area of your careful plan, and your whole body aches with weariness, and your heart is heavy and sore within you. Nor does the task grow easier with long practice. You acquire a certain facility in search; you come, by practical acquaintance, to some knowledge of the ins and outs of the labor market; but you must begin each day’s quest with a greater draft upon your courage and resolution. For the actual barriers grow greater, as the outward marks of your mode of life become clearer upon you, and you feel yourself borne upon a tide that you cannot stem, out from the haven of a man’s work, where you would be, to the barren wastes, where drift to certain wreck the lives of the destitute idle who have lost all hold upon a “sure intent.”

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.”