Part 15

Price and I had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and very little then. Meanwhile we had been working hard in keen mountain air, and I was so hungry by the time that we got back to the cow, now dead beside the trail, that I proposed our eating some of her. Price quickly put an end to the plan, however, not on hygienic grounds, but by explaining that the cattlemen, if they found her mutilated, would conclude that she had been killed, and would make matters lively for us in consequence, hanging being the not uncommon penalty for this offence.

One does not keep close count of days in wandering over a frontier, and it was only an aggravation of our plight to remember that it was not Sunday merely but Christmas-day as well. But if Christmas heightened the sense of hardship, it furnished an admirable setting to its end. By trusting his instinct for a short cut, Price brought us out in the middle of the afternoon upon open hills, from which we not only saw a section of Young’s Valley, but, rising clear from the middle of it, a column of blue smoke from the chimney of a ranchman’s cabin. We wasted no time in covering the intervening miles and then we lifted, light-heartedly, the latch of the road-gate and, with the easy assurance of the frontier, drove our animals into the yard beside the corral. For some reason we had not been seen from the cabin, so Price walked on to the door, while I mounted guard over the burros. From a seat in the sun on an old hen-coop I could watch them as they nibbled the short grass, while from the cabin came peals of laughter, denoting that Price had fallen among friends who were keeping Christmas festival.

I was willing enough to rest outside, knowing that we had reached a hospitable roof and that a dinner was assured. Sitting there for some time, I presently began to question what was keeping Price, when the cabin-door opened and two women appeared. As they walked down the footpath to the gate, I gathered that they were neighbors returning from a Christmas call. But this was the least interesting inference, and I was totally at a loss for others. The wonder grew as they came nearer. They were young and faultlessly dressed, and one of them was beautiful. Their dress was of the kind that charms with its perfect simplicity and the air of natural distinction with which it is worn. They rested frank eyes on me for a moment as they passed and nodded pleasantly, speaking their thanks with sweet voices, as I stood holding open the gate. Who they were remained a mystery, and I was content to have it so, for they left me not without a sense of Christmas visitation, which stirred again the memories of my own “God’s country.”

The ranchman was a Virginian, tall, fair-eyed, and soft of speech, and when he and Price came out together they were stanch friends on the strength of an earlier acquaintance, and we had the freedom of the ranch. We unpacked and corralled the animals and then made ready for dinner. Not for two days had we tasted food, and now we were seated with our host and hostess and their two sons at a table which groaned under sweet potatoes and roast corn and piles of bread and great dishes full of steaming “hog and hominy,” and with it all, the best of Christmas cheer. For two days we stayed at the Virginian’s ranch and then, having purchased from him a fresh store of food, we resumed the march by way of the Tonto Basin and Fort McDowell to Phœnix.

On New-year’s-day we were camped at Fort McDowell; and, when we set out early on the next morning, there remained but about thirty miles to Phœnix, so we resolved to cover it in a single march. Night found us still some miles from the city, but the night was clear and flooded with moonlight. The moon made plain the way, yet played fantastically over the face of the country. Long reaches of white sand were converted into Arabian deserts, with pilgrim caravans moving across them; the irrigated ranches were transformed into tropical gardens, whose luxuriance was heightened by the exquisite softness of the night, and then there were stretches of uncompromising Arizona desert, dusty and cactus-grown and redolent of alkali.

It was nearing midnight when we entered the town. Price directed the way to a corral where he was known, and where we left the animals feasting on fresh alfalfa, while we fared forth to see his friends. It was precisely as though Price had invited me around to his club. He led the way to a saloon, and as we entered it, I saw at once its typical character. At the left of the entrance was a bar, gorgeous with mirrors and cut glass, while down the deep recesses of the room were faro and roulette tables and tables for poker. The groups about them were formed of “cow-punchers,” and prospectors and “Greasers” and Chinamen, and even Indians, all mingling and intermingling with a freedom that suggested that in gambling there is a touch of nature that makes the whole world kin.

But more immediately interesting to us was a group which stood beside the bar. It was made up, as I found, of politicians, high in territorial office, all of whom knew Price and hailed him cordially while asking after his luck. For some time we stood talking with them, then one of their number, himself not a politician but a business man, proposed our joining him at supper. We accepted, I the more delightedly because he, of all the group, had most attracted me. Tall and very handsome, he had the bearing of a gentleman, and what he told me of himself confirmed my own impression of a richly varied past. Far into the night we talked, and I could well believe him when he said that the fascination of the life which he had led on the frontier had so far grown upon him that, while he was glad to go back at times to his former home in New York, he could no longer remain contented there, hearing as he always did after a few months, at most, the call back to the wild freedom of the plains. It was under the spell of what he said, enforced by my little experience as a “burro-puncher,” that I went to sleep that night on a bed of alfalfa in the corral; and when I wakened in the morning and found letters urging my return to the East, I was conscious of an indifference to the idea which was wholly new to my experience.

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INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS

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INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS

If anything is wanting to darken the picture of life in city slums, it is a sense of the needlessness of much of the suffering. And this is the sense which I cannot escape in looking back upon a winter in Chicago, from the vantage point of nearly a year of walking and working through regions west of that city. I left Chicago in May of 1892, and entered San Francisco in February of the following year, having gone on foot, in the meantime, through Illinois and southern Minnesota and western Iowa, and almost from end to end of Nebraska and Colorado and through some of New Mexico and much of Arizona and California. It was not in the character of a tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the journey; and the only notable fact about it was that I not only never lacked for labor, but I almost never had to ask for it, having scores of opportunities of work pressed upon me by employers hard up for hands. I am well aware of the abnormal in my experiment and of its little worth apart from the value of experience to myself, and I know how slight a connection with the deeper causes which give rise to congestion in labor centres the fact of ready employment in the country may have. Yet, as one result of personal contact, I cannot help seeing much of the misery of the mass in the light of individuals suffering wretchedly for want of knowledge of a better chance.

We speak in old-fashioned phrase of a city’s slums as though they were a local evil in the town, quite remote in connection with the rest of the corporate whole, while in truth we know, in our haunting, new-found knowledge of social solidarity, that they form a sore which denotes disease in every part of the body politic. The conviction grows upon us that it is often at the cost of much suffering to our kind that we have food to eat and raiment to put on, and the immunity from personal responsibility which once we felt in paying high prices for our wares is fast being undermined by increased acquaintance with the ramifications of the “sweating system.” Indeed, we seem to see that, from the very frame of things, if one enjoys, another suffers, and that the unwitting oppressors of the poor are often the poor themselves, while the destruction of the poor is their poverty. Men tell us that things were growing worse, and that hope lies that way, because it points to ultimate dissolution and a new order. I find it impossible to share this form of optimism, and I cannot see that things are really getting worse, but rather incomparably better as measured, for example, by the standard of the last century of industrial progress. And so far from seeing hope in a belief that matters are getting worse, I find it rather in the view that much that is worst in modern life is fast becoming intolerable in a society which grows increasingly conscious of vital interdependence and relationship. Meanwhile the concrete facts remain, and here is a glimpse of some of them as they appear in a partial record of fragments of two days’ experience in Chicago.

I was working as a hand-truckman in a factory far out on Blue Island Avenue. My wages were $1.50 a day, and I was paying for board and lodging, in a tenement across the way, $4.25 a week. As one result, I was saving money and would soon be able to leave the job and write up my notes, while widening my acquaintance with the town before looking for other work. Already I had a little knowledge of the city. For two weeks after entering it I had been among its unemployed and had suffered some and had seen the real suffering among others of my class, before I found occupation in a West-side factory.

It was during those two weeks that I came to know a widow, with whom this tale is first concerned. I met her early in December; it was now nearing the end of January, and we factory hands were marking with delight the lengthening of the days, for we were beginning to have a little daylight left when work was over. At last one afternoon the setting sun came pouring through the kitchen window while we were washing up for supper at Mrs. Schultz’s boarding-house. That was because it was Saturday, and we had quit at five o’clock, being given, as was the custom in the factory, a half hour on Saturday afternoons.

The usual week’s end excitement was running high among the men. Gibes and louder talk than common were rife, as black hands and faces came white from soap and successive basins of hot water. Some of the men were going in the evening to a “show,” others to a “fancy-dress ball,” and a few were saying nothing. We scattered widely after supper, leaving the house to the family, which must have been a welcome change to them, for generally, through the week, we all foregathered in the sitting-room at night and romped with the children and played cards until bed-time.

Mrs. Stone will serve as the widow’s name, and my first errand that evening took me to her home, which was in the basement of a building on Boston Avenue. We were both concerned in pressing a claim which she had upon her husband’s people, a highly just claim, I thought; for he had deserted her some time before his death, leaving her alone in the support of herself and their two children. Why she had ever come to the city, I could never make clearly out, beyond what had seemed to be to her a strong appeal to her reason that, if she must make her own living and the children’s, she could hope to do it better in town than in the country where she was born and bred. And the marvel was that she had succeeded in keeping them all alive. The city had, of course, furnished an awful disillusionment. The children proved an insuperable barrier to employment at domestic service, and, failing to find any other labor, she was rescued finally from starvation by getting a job from a “sweater.” She deserved success, for she was an heroic creature. To hear her describe the struggle, you would gather that hers had been the best of luck. She merely wanted a chance to work, so that they might live; and had she not found it, just when she thought, for lack of it, that they must starve?

From the sweater’s shop she would carry the goods two miles to her home, walking both ways, for she could not afford car-fare. Then all day and through much of the night she made the garments. They were boys’ waists, and the materials, ready cut, besides the necessary thread and buttons, were furnished her. There was left for her to do all the remaining work, down to sewing on the buttons and making the button-holes, and she was paid for the finished waists at the rate of thirty-five cents a dozen.

It was hard, she did admit, to feed and clothe her family and pay the rent on a wage-rate like that, and she was near to going under when another and a crowning stroke of fortune fell. In answer to a notice tacked on her door, two women, who worked in a neighboring book-bindery, applied for board, and each agreed to pay two dollars a week. The five then lived together in the basement-room, whose furniture consisted chiefly of dry-goods boxes, but the boarders took kindly to the home and the children, and things had gone comfortably ever since. Gradually the children, a boy of nine and a girl two years younger, were learning to help at some of the simpler forms of sewing and in the housework.

This, I beg to interpolate, was the small beginning of Mrs. Stone’s success. Haying shrewdness as well as energy, she soon discovered that keeping boarders was more profitable than making waists, and so she developed that side of her enterprise. When I saw her last, in the following May, she was mistress of a well-appointed mechanics’ boarding-house on Milwaukee Avenue, but her troubles had taken new form, for the contamination of the slums had begun to appear in her son, who was fast developing into an incorrigible, and she had sent for me in order to consult about a plan of placing him in a reformatory.

But to return to the February evening, on which I called to talk with Mrs. Stone about a claim upon her husband’s people: I found her at home. One ran little risk of failing to find Mrs. Stone at home, her engagements abroad being confined to trips to the sweater’s shop for materials. I heard the swift clatter of her sewing-machine as I walked down the steps from the filthy pavement to the door of the basement where she lived. The room had always to me an effect of being brilliantly lighted. It was due to the illumination of two large lamps which were kept faultlessly clean and were burning often in the day as well as night, and in part to the general cleanliness of the room, not to mention the cheerfulness which radiated from Mrs. Stone. She turned from her machine as I drew up an empty soap-box and sat down in front of her, and one would have thought, from the contagion of her manner, that she never knew any mood but one of hopeful courage. But she had no time to spare, and when our talk was ended, she turned again to work, while I went over to another corner and chatted with the children and the boarders.

I was waiting for my friend Kovnitz, whom I had asked to meet me there. Kovnitz was himself employed in the same trade as Mrs. Stone, although in quite another branch of it. He was a coatmaker, and had been brought up to work under the sweating system. Much of the value of his acquaintance, apart from my personal liking for him, lay for me in his thorough knowledge of the trade. He was a socialist, and a very ardent one; but his efforts for reform were directed mainly toward effecting organization among the workers of his kind, and with this I warmly sympathized. We were to go together in the evening to a gathering of the cloak-makers, and, when he appeared at Mrs. Stone’s, we lost no time in starting for the meeting-place on the South-side.

One was never at a loss for conversation with Kovnitz, but it was always conversation which had to do with the condition of his class. That was uppermost and foremost in his mind. Other things interested him only as they were related to that. Although a collectivist, he wasted little thought upon a future socialistic state, and he cared little for present concerted political action in his party. The one supreme necessity, in his view, was that all wage-earners should be led to act together as a class, until their predominance in an industrial age is recognized. When once wage-workers are known to be the most powerful as a class, then social institutions will change in accordance with their interests. It was curious to see how this, the central principle of his creed, absorbed him. It was the criterion of all his judgments, and it gave color and meaning to everything he saw. Generally he noticed little of what was about him. The inferno of those city streets at night seemed not to impress him as we passed. All the varied play of life upon them did not divert him from preoccupation in what he was telling me of the work of organization among wage-earners. Once only his attention was drawn off, and even then his habitual cast of thought moulded the new impression. In glancing up, his eyes had fallen upon a building newly occupied as a department store. It was Saturday evening, and, for some reason, the place was still open. Streams of shoppers were entering the doors and pouring from them. More even than by day, the store gave at night an impression of a bee-hive in full activity. The swarming of the crowds within, the lights from a hundred windows, and the brave array of goods formed the outer picture. But Kovnitz said nothing of that.

“There are two men in that store who are as different in general character as men can be,” he remarked to me, as we stood at the curb. “One of them,” he went on, “is a man of scholarly instincts. He is a disciple of Kant, and knows the Kantian philosophy well. Just now he is giving his leisure to reading Goethe. He is an enthusiast in philosophy and literature, and a man of really fine sensibilities. The other chap is a human brute, and looks it. Nothing interests him beyond his business and his dissipations. Both of these men are at the head of departments of ready-made garments in the store, and I know that they both draw salaries of $4,000 a year. They have good business heads, and manage their departments well, but what makes them specially valuable to their employers is the fact that they know thoroughly the sweating system. They keep carefully informed on the condition of the labor market, and the demand for work; and, when the competition is keenest among the sub-contractors and the workers, they know how to pit the bidders against one another, until the tasks are finally let out at the lowest possible figures. Mrs. Stone is making boys’ waists for thirty-five cents a dozen, and there are more than 20,000 sweatshops in Chicago where similar prices prevail, and Chicago is but one of a score of cities in this country where sweating is in vogue.”

Late that night, after the labor meeting, I was passing the store again. I was alone, for Kovnitz had gone home another way. The street lay quiet, and almost deserted through its length, and I could hear the echo of my tread under the glare of electrics. The sound of jangling music came faintly from a long line of almost continuous saloons. There was some movement in front of them which contrasted sharply with the general desertion of the street.

One is rarely at a loss to trace the antecedents of a sharp impression, and I can remember clearly that I was conscious of a man and woman who stood talking in low tones as I passed, and who disappeared that moment into an open passage. The next instant I was keenly alive to them, for I heard the woman scream as though in mortal fear, and turning, I saw the man dragging her violently out upon the pavement. Events followed one another then in quick succession. I was near enough to watch them at close range, and I had the sense of interpreting them as they moved. I saw the instant flash of anger in the face of a young mechanic who stood near, and the first quick thrust of his arm which sent the man reeling from the girl, then the swift onslaught of the two men, and I heard the rain of blows and oaths, and the loud asseverations of the one attacked that he was an officer, while the crowd thickened about them, and the girl pleaded piteously to be loosed from the grasp of someone who held her.

Two officers in uniform came down upon us from opposite quarters, and the fighting gave way to noisy explanations. It developed then that the attack had been made upon an officer in citizens’ clothes who was doing detective duty against street-walkers. But he was wholly to blame for the disturbance, I thought; for he had handled his prisoner with needless violence, and the blow from the mechanic was so obviously the instinctive, chivalrous act of a man who sees a woman ill-treated. Technically, however, he was guilty of “resisting an officer while in the discharge of his duty,” and he must answer for it, so that the group which started for the Harrison Street Station-house was made up of the three officers, the girl, the mechanic, and four or five stragglers, of whom I was one.

It was easy to learn at the station what course the case had taken. Both prisoners were admitted to bail, and bondsmen having been found, they went free that night under a charge to appear before the court on a certain morning of the following week. When the morning came I was on hand too, for by that time I had given up my job in the factory.