The Workers: an Experiment in Reality. the East

CHAPTER VII. In a Logging Camp (_concluded_), 225

IN A LOGGING CAMP (Concluded), 225

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

WE BREATHE THE HOT AIR, HEAVY WITH THE SMELL OF FRESH SOIL, AND THE SWEAT DRIPS FROM OUR FACES UPON THE DAMP CLAY, Frontispiece

FACING PAGE I EASILY PASSED UNNOTICED IN THE CROWD, 24

A WEIRD PROCESSION, THIS FRAGMENT OF A COMPANY IN THE RANKS OF LABOR, 48

I HELD MY PEACE, AND RESPECTFULLY TOUCHED MY CAP, INWARDLY CALLING HER THE BEAUTY THAT SHE WAS, 94

THE MEN WERE RISING FROM THEIR SEATS, AND THE AIR WAS FULL OF WELCOME, 216

THE WORKERS

CHAPTER I. The Adjustment

THE ADJUSTMENT

HIGHLAND FALLS, N. Y., Monday, July 27, 1891.

The boss at the work on the old Academic building in West Point gave me a job this morning, and ordered me to come to work to-morrow at seven o'clock. A gang of laborers is fast removing the old building, which is to give place to a new one. From one of the workmen I learned that the men live in Highland Falls, a mile down the river, and so I came here in search of a boarding-house. There was some difficulty in finding quarters, for the place is crowded with workingmen attracted here by the new buildings at the Post and work on the railway.

Mrs. Flaherty has taken me in as a boarder. That is not her name, but it sufficiently indicates her. She came to the door with the odor of soap-suds and boiling cabbage strong upon her, and told me at first that she guessed that she couldn't take me. She relented when I explained that I had work at the Post; and, having admitted me as a member of her household, she gave play to her natural hospitality. When I was shown to a little carpetless room under the roof, with two double beds in it, I spoke of needing water, and she showed me where I could get a plentiful supply. I said that I should like to write, and she at once invited me from the torrid heat of the attic to a place at her dining-room table.

Here then, in the temporary security of a boarding-house, and as an assigned member of the industrial army, I can review the first week of enlisted service.

I am vastly ignorant of the labor problem, and am trying to learn by experience; but I am so far familiar with Socialistic writings as to know that, from their point of view, I have not gone from one economic class into another. I belong to the proletariat, and from being one of the intellectual proletarians, I am simply become a manual proletaire. In other words, I no longer stand in the market ready to sell what mental ability I have, I now bring to the market instead my physical capacity for work; and I sell that at its market price. Expressed in every-day language, the change is simply this: from earning a living as a teacher, I have begun to earn it as an unskilled laborer.

But, nevertheless, the change has in it elements of real contrast. One week ago I shared the frictionless life of a country-seat. Frictionless, I mean, in the movement of an elaborate system which ministers luxuriously to the physical needs of life. Frictionless, perhaps, only to those to whom it ministers. Now I am out of all that, and am sharing instead the life of the humblest form of labor upon which that superstructure rests.

This is not a frictionless life in its adjustment to daily needs--very much the reverse. And whatever may be its compensations, they are not of the nature of easy physical existence.

The actual step from the one manner of life to the other was sure of its own interest. It was painful to say good-by on the last evening, and there was enough of uncertainty in the prospect to account for a shrinking from the first encounter with a strange life; but there was promise of adventure, and almost a certainty of solid gain in experience.

At sunrise on the next morning I was ready to set out. I descended quietly to the hall. The butler stood there, politely urging some pretended necessity as excuse for so early an appearance, and he invited me to breakfast.

Often had he seen me off for a day's fishing or shooting in the old suit which I wore, but I could feel his eye fixed upon me now with perplexed interest. He had heard my expedition discussed at the table, and in some vague way he took in that I meant to earn my living as a workman. With his wonted dignity, he helped me adjust my pack and strap it; and then he stood under the porte cochère, and watched me hurry across the lawn in the direction of the highway.

Two hours' walk carried me beyond the point of my acquaintance with the country roads; but this presented no real difficulty, for I had but to keep a steadily westward course. Other details of my expedition were not so simple, and I began to have an uncomfortable sense of unsuspected difficulty. I look back from the vantage-point of a week's experience, with a feeling of amused tolerance, upon my naïve preconceptions. It is like a retrospect of years. My notion of earning a living by manual labor was the securing of an odd job whenever I should need a meal or a night's lodging. Much advice had come my way before I set out. As a means of access to people, I was told to take with me a book or magazine, and to invite subscriptions. I adopted this plan; and a copy of a magazine was under my arm as I walked on through the dust and heat of the country road, wondering how long it would take me to reach the Hudson, and how I should earn my first meal.

There was nothing at all adventurous or exciting in a dusty walk. My pack was taking on increments of weight with each mile of the journey. I was beginning to feel conscious of change in unexpected ways. There was no money in my pocket, and a most subtle and unmanning insecurity laid hold of me as a result of that. The world had curiously changed in its attitude, or rather I saw it at a new angle, and I felt the change most keenly in the bearing of people. My good-morning was not infrequently met by a vacant stare, and if I stopped to ask the way, the conviction was forced upon me that, as a pack-pedler, I was a suspicious character, with no claim upon common consideration.

In the shade of his porch sat the keeper of a country store, at a fork of the road. His chair was tilted against the outer wall, and his feet rested upon the balustrade. My question as to the course of the two roads before me was responded to by the merchant, first with a look, and then a spurt of tobacco-juice, which stirred the dust between my feet, and, finally, a caustic sentence to the effect that he 'did not much know, and did not care a damn,' while his blue eyes swept the horizon, and rested finally on the Sound, gleaming golden in the morning sun, and the purple line of the Long Island shore.

The new-born self-consciousness which I found asserting itself was like a wound on the hand, exposed to constant injury. I had walked several miles before I summoned courage to speak to anyone else. Finally, very hot and thirsty, I knocked at the door of an unpainted cottage which stood on the road. The door opened to the touch of an old woman, who bent toward me in the emaciated angularity of a decrepit figure which must once have been strikingly tall and vigorous.

I asked leave to show her the magazine, and she invited me into the cool of her home. The middle floor was covered with a yellow oil-cloth, on which there stood a table. A large cooking-stove occupied one side of the room. A few wooden-bottom chairs were ranged around the walls. An old kitchen clock rested on the mantel-shelf; and on either side of it hung a faded photograph, each in an oval wooden frame.

The old woman asked me to draw up a chair to the table, and she sat beside me, looking with the excited interest of a child at the pictures which I showed her, but paying little heed, I thought, to what I was saying. Presently, without warning, she veered mentally with the facility of childhood, and now she was looking at me intently between the eyes, while one long skeleton hand lay on the open page before her.

"Be you a pedler?" she asked, and her eyes dilated to the measure of the protruding sockets over which the yellow skin was tightly drawn.

"I am trying to get subscribers for this magazine," I told her.

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