Men gathered outside. A fence is visible behind them with a wide building visible behind the fence.WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES.
WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES.
WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES.
The sudden on-rush of factory-hands was almost a miracle. Men seemed to rise as by magic from the soil. They streamed from neighboring tenements, and along the wooden sidewalks, and from out the horse-cars which came down the streets loaded to the couplers. They had grown to the number of an army, and in rough, uneven, changing ranks they walked briskly, five, six, nine men abreast, while the bell tapped off nervously the swift approach of seven o’clock. Two men seated in a buggy drove their horse slowly into the thick of the crowd, which deflected at the gate to let them pass, and then closed in behind with increased momentum. The superintendent of the factory stepped down from the buggy and climbed the staircase to his office.
The converging lines of workmen made denser the mass that pressed quickly through the gate. There was little speech among them, and the noise they made was the shuffling, broken step of an unorganized crowd. But there was not wanting the inspiration of a moving throng of men. Some of them were old and much bent with pain and labor, and there were boys in the crowd who could be but little beyond their first decade of life, but the great body of the hands were young men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. One could trace upon these faces all the stages of life’s handicraft, in distorting human countenances into grotesque variations from all normal types of beauty, and bringing out upon them, in infinite variety, individual expressions of aggressive power and the strength which comes of long endurance. Ah, the hideous ugliness of the race to which we belong, and yet the more than beauty of it in the strong lines it bears of honest work faithfully done and of pain and sorrow bravely borne!
With the last sharp ringing of the bell there was a sudden rush of the living stream of workers, and then it abruptly ceased, and we, the unemployed, stood at both sides along the high board fence, like so much useless foam tossed off by the swift current which had poured through the narrow gate. The keeper began a monotonous march up and down the opening before his sentry-box. He was a muscular, blue-eyed Irishman of fifty-five or sixty, and he was in no wise ignorant of his business. There was nothing to indicate that he was aware of the presence of the crowd of expectant men, until some of us pressed too near to the gate in our anxiety to catch sight of a foreman in search of extra hands, and then he ordered us back with a violence which showed that we were one of the pests of his existence.
From some unseen quarter of the factory yard a closely covered wagon suddenly appeared. The paymaster presently descended from the superintendent’s office, and entering the wagon, he was driven to the gate, where a halt was made while two loaded revolvers were handed to him by the porter, in full view of the idle men, and then he was driven rapidly up the avenue toward the city.
It was the usual heterogeneous crowd that lingered there about the gate. Most of them were Irishmen, I think, and there were certainly Italians and Scandinavians and some Welshmen, and even a few Polish Jews, while Clark and I, so far as I could judge, were the only native born. Not all of them could have been in the homeless plight in which we were, and there was scarcely a case of insufficient clothing among them, while many seemed to be habitual workmen who knew the decencies of home and of some home comfort. But there were not wanting men who, like us, were evidently upon the streets, and not only in dress, but in face, they suggested those who, if not already of that class, are swiftly approximating to professional tramps.
There was wonderful stillness in the crowd, which now had broken into small groups. A conscious tension possessed us, as of nervous watching for an uncertain event. Men spoke to one another in low tones scarcely above a whisper. An hour passed with nothing to break the monotony of its long anxiety. We were fairly shielded from the wind, and the sun had risen high and had begun to lend a generous aid to our efforts at keeping warm in the frost-bit air. The pale crescent of the waning moon had almost faded into the clear blue of the western sky. We soon were aware of the relaxing of tension, and then the men began to drift away toward other factories, or, disappointed, to their homes, or back to the aimless living of the streets.
Just then a young Hungarian came among us—a man of twenty-five, perhaps, short and erect and stocky, with an appearance of great muscular strength and a nervous quickness of step which was in full keeping with the wide-eyed inquisitiveness of his round, swarthy face. He was looking inquiringly at the clusters of loitering men and the open gate and the stolid porter in apparently heedless guard before it. I saw his eye sweep the crowd in seeking for a fellow-countryman, for it was written plain upon him that he was an immigrant and innocent of any language but his own. One could fairly see his mental process, it was all so clear: “I am looking for a job in this wide land of freedom to workingmen. Here is a great factory, and the open gate invites me. Why waste the time outside? For my part I shall go in at once and see the boss, and then go quickly on with no loss of time, if I should not be wanted here.” One foot was just over the steel rail upon which the sliding gate moves, when, with the swiftness of the spring of a panther which has been crouching for its prey, the heavy hands of the seemingly careless watchman were upon his shoulders, and the man was held, amazed and paralyzed, in a vice-like grip.
“What are you after?” roared the porter in his face.
There was a murmured attempt at speech, and then the laborer was faced about with a suddenness and force that set his teeth to rattling in his head, and the porter turned him loose with successive parting kicks, which seemed to lift the fellow from the ground.
He was tingling with pain as he slunk in among us, but the expression which he wore was one of strong, appealing bewilderment at the meaning of it all.
It was over in a moment, and then the cold, cowering, hungry mass of unhuman humanity at the gate broke into a low, gruff laugh.
It must have been this laugh that stung me to hot fury, for in an instant I had lost all sense of cold and weariness and hunger, and I was strong and warm in the wild joy of the lust for blood. With one hand gripping his hairy throat I was pounding the porter’s eyes with my right fist in blows whose frequency and precision surprised me into greater joy. But there was a sudden end of clear memory when, with a full-armed swing of his huge fist the keeper struck me in the face and knocked me, limp and almost senseless, upon the planks, where I lay choking down gulps of blood which flowed from a cut against my teeth.
Two men are fighting out of doors while several other men watch on. They are all shabbily dressed.I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR BLOOD.
I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR BLOOD.
I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR BLOOD.
Clark was bending over me.
“What in — did you hit him for, you — fool?” he hissed at me.
“I had a jolly good time doing it,” I explained; and I was sufficiently recovered to laugh a little at the momentary sport which I had had in making a fool of myself.
Clark helped me to my feet, and we walked off together, only I could not walk very far at a stretch. He did not desert me, and he would not leave the subject of my folly. But he changed his point of view at length, and acknowledged, finally, that he was “glad that I had got in a few licks on the porter’s eye,” an emotion which I warmly shared.
That day was chiefly memorable because of Clark’s final success in finding work. It came from a most unexpected quarter. We were walking together through Adams Street when a man touched Clark upon the shoulder and withdrew to the doorway of a shop. Clark recognized him at once as a foundry superintendent with whom he had been importunate for work, and his face lighted up with a hopefulness which made the moment almost tragic. I stood at the doorstep and listened.
“Ain’t you found a job yet?” began the superintendent.
“No.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about your case,” he continued. “We ain’t got a job for you at the foundry,” he hastened to explain, “but I’ve heard from a friend of mine in Milwaukee, and they’re short of men in your line. Could you go up there?”
“I could walk,” said Clark.
“Well, that ain’t necessary. I—I’m good for a ticket,” added the superintendent, with a look of embarrassment.
And he was as good as his word, for he went with Clark to the station, where he added to the ticket a dollar, both of which were accepted as a loan.
Clark was nearly mad with suppressed delight when he met me in the entrance of the post-office, where he had asked me to await his return. With his usual generosity he shared his good fortune with me, and, before we went to the railway station together we had a farewell dinner on beefsteak and onions and unlimited coffee and bread.
My own success followed Clark’s by only a few days, when I was taken on as a hand-truckman in a factory on the West Side; but there is one intervening experience which belongs distinctively to this part of the general experiment.
I found, one early morning, among a lot of “fake” advertisements, which I had come to recognize with ease, one notice of “a man wanted” which rang with genuineness. Applicants were told to report at a certain shop just without the Stock-yards at twelve o’clock that day. In ample time I crossed over to Halsted Street and walked in a leisurely way down that marvellous thoroughfare. It was not new to me, and I was missing Clark sorely and was experiencing a new phase of the loneliness of being “left behind.” And yet I could but mark again with fresh interest the wonders of this great artery of the West Side in the five miles of its length through which I walked to the appointed number. It is essentially a cheap street: cheap buildings line it, in which tenants rent cheap lodgings and shop-keepers employ cheap labor and sell cheap wares of every kind to those of the poor “whose destruction is their poverty.” Every sort of structural flimsiness looks down upon you as you pass: ghastly imitations in stone of real, substantial buildings; the unblinking fronts of glaring red-brick shells, whose shoddiness is the more apparent in gaudy shops and in “all the modern improvements” and in the heavy cotton-lace at the upper windows. And there are wooden shanties with “false fronts,” after the manner of frontier “cities,” and wooden hovels with sloping roofs which are far along in process of decay, and here and there a substantial house which was built upon the open prairie, and which looks with amazement upon the fungus growth about it, while struggling pitifully to maintain its dignity in the uncongenial company which it is forced to keep.
Down miles of such a street I went on sidewalks which were chiefly rotting planks, with black mire, as of a pig-sty, straining through the cracks under the pressure of passing feet. The street itself is paved with cylindrical blocks of wood, ill laid at the beginning, and having now closely pounded filth between them, while the whole surface presents an infinite variety of concavities, in which, especially along the gutters, lay garbage in frozen, shallow cesspools.
A saloon stood on almost every corner, and sometimes I counted seven pawnbrokers’ signs within the limits of a square. It was interesting to watch the run of “loan agencies,” and “collateral banks,” and other euphemisms under which the business was disguised.
Large quantities of provisions lay heaped in baskets and measures along the pavements in front of grocers’ shops, catching the soot and the floating dust of the open street. Cheap ready-made and second-hand garments hung flapping like scare-crows overhead, or clothed grotesque wooden dummies which stood chained to the shop doors or to the wood-work below the show-windows. Scores of idle men, with the unvarying leaden eye and soggy droop of their kind, loungingly exchanged the comfort of a mutual support with doorposts, chiefly of saloons. Little children in every stage of condition, from decent warmth to utter rags, and from wholesome cleanliness to dirt grown clean in unconsciousness of itself, played about the pavements and in the gutters, or ran screaming with delight across the street-car lines, along which the trams moved slowly, drawn by horses with bells tinkling from the harness.
The first sight of my destination was very reassuring. It was evidently a shop of the first class. A second glance was disheartening, for already there were fully thirty men before me, and the number was increasing. From one of the men employed in the shop I learned that a man from the packing-house of the firm would be out to see us at the appointed hour. The appointed hour came and passed, and we waited on, our numbers grown now to nearly fifty. It was not far from two o’clock when the man appeared who had been commissioned to see us.
There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a hireling who is puffed up with momentary authority but who knows nothing of responsibility. The man who finally came among us was a clerical subordinate, sleek, clean-shaven, overfed; a man of thirty, dressed as any like Johnnie of the town, and, except for his slender hold upon the means of livelihood, no better than most of the men who now hung breathless upon his words.
He swaggered in among us with a leer and a call across the shop to a fellow-employee.
“Say, Jim, how’s this for a collection of freaks, all out for a fifteen-dollar job?”
Jim was silent; he did not see the joke any better than did we, who now crowded about the clerk.
“Stand off,” he ordered us, with a gesture of impatience and an oath. “Don’t you fellows come so near. I guess most of you need water more than you need a job.”
There followed some minutes of such banter, while the clerk looked us over and examined hastily some letters of recommendation which were held out to him. Then abruptly, with the air of a busy man chafing at the useless waste of his valuable time, he withdrew a step or two from the crowd, and from this coign of vantage he arbitrarily singled out four men. Having called them aside he ordered them to report at ten o’clock on the next morning at the packing-house, where a member of the firm would see them and select one of them for the place, which was that of general utility man about a private house, at a wage of board and lodging and fifteen dollars a month.
I was not one of the number. In a few moments the men had all gone their several ways, but I waited behind, and seeing a chance of speaking to the clerk alone, I went up to him.
“Would you mind looking at these references?” I asked, and handed out two, one from the proprietor of the “—— House,” where I had served as porter, and another from Mr. Hill, the farmer.
“Certainly not,” he said, good-naturedly; and when he had read them he handed them back to me with the remark that I, too, might call with the others at ten o’clock.
Under the stone arch which spans the entrance to the Union Stock-yards I passed unchallenged the next morning. A wooden sidewalk led me along a miry road which seemed to pierce the centre of the yards. Men of widely varying ages passed and repassed me, mounted upon branded mustangs. They were riders who cared nothing for appearance in either kit or form, but rode with the free grace of cowboys. On every side were scores of acres of open pens enclosed by stout wooden fences six palings high, with water and fodder troughs along the sides. From them came the deep, far lowing of a thousand herds of cattle which stood crowded in the pens or thinned to a few remaining, all of them patiently awaiting death. From great covered sheds you could hear the ceaseless bleating of countless flocks of sheep. From long covered passages overhead, each an awful bridge of sighs, there came the sharp clatter of cloven hoofs on wooden planks, along which droves of cattle were being driven to slaughter. In the distance beyond all this loomed high the unsightly packing-houses, where, with scientific efficiency and carefulest economy of materials, daily hecatombs are offered up for human life.
I soon found my way to the desired office. It was ten o’clock exactly, and to my great surprise I alone of the five selected men was on hand. I was told to wait, and a corner near a high desk was indicated as a place where I might stand. It was in a wide passage along which ranged inner offices enclosed by ground-glass partitions. Clerks were passing constantly from one office to another and meeting the requirements of business errands as they came in. Presently one of them spoke to me, and learning that I had received no reply from the clerk to whom I had first made my purpose known, he politely volunteered his services, and soon brought back word that Mr. —— would see me in a few minutes.
The few minutes had grown to thirty, when one of the other five men appeared. He was a fair-haired Swede of five-and-twenty, rather stout in frame, and dressed all in black, his coat, of the “Prince Albert” type, falling short of his knees, and disclosing about his neck and wrists the white of neat linen. With his hair brushed smooth, and one black-gloved hand grasping a fat umbrella and the other a soft felt hat, he might have been a divinity student.
We nodded to each other as he took up his stand in another out-of-the-way quarter of the hall and joined me in waiting for a summons. Among the passing clerks there presently appeared the one who had met us on the day before. He was not in bantering mood now, so he asserted his superiority by ignoring us. The one who had already spoken to me lost no opportunity as he passed of saying an encouraging word, assuring us that Mr. —— would certainly see us before long.
It was a little after twelve when I was finally called into the private office of Mr. ——. I was rather faint from hunger and stiff from standing still so long after a long walk.
Mr. —— sat with his back to a window, in whose full light I stood, hat in hand.
“You’re after this job I advertised, I understand,” he began.
“Yes.”
“Well, it ain’t no great job; it’s just doin’ chores round the house, and I can’t afford to pay much for it. Have you ever done work like that?”
“I have been a porter at a hotel.”
“Have you any recommends?” he asked, sharply. I handed to him the two already mentioned, and as he read them I watched him with close interest. Young, alert, intensely energetic, at the head, or near it, of a prominent house, the controller, in part at least, of an enormous enterprise, and a considerable personage, no doubt, in his own social circle, yet his wholesale butchery of swine could scarcely be a ghastlier slaughter than was his treatment of his mother-tongue.
He looked up at me.
“Say, young fellow, is them all the recommends you have? You was a very short time at both of them places.”
This fatal defect in my references had never occurred to me, and I began to stammer explanations which only served to get me into deeper water. Mr. —— interrupted me, and handing back my letters, he said:
“You’ll have to bring me something more satisfactory than them,” and went on with his work.
The young Swede followed me out of the passage.
“Did you get the job?” he asked, in good English.
“No,” I said, “not yet. You have a good chance; you would better wait until the boss sends for you.”
“I guess not to-day,” he answered, and he stolidly refused my advice, and I saw him disappear by another way from the Stock-yards.