From the Bottom Up Part 5

Having purchased my discharge by the payment of 20 I was at liberty to leave at my pleasure; I was offered a lucrative position in the officers' mess which was one of the best in the British Army. This I accepted and held for a year.

My furlough, after a short visit to Ireland, I spent in Oxford. The University and its colleges and the town had a wonderful fascination for me, but I think, as I look back at it and try to sum up its influence upon me, that the personality of the "Master of Balliol"--Benjamin Jowett--was the greatest and the most permanent thing I received.

I had been striving for years to slough off from my tongue a thick Irish brogue, and had not succeeded very well. The elegance and the chasteness of Jowett's English did more for me in this respect than my years of pruning. I have never heard such English, and behind this master language of a master mind, there was a man, a gentleman! I wrote Dr. Jowett a note one day, asking for an interview. It may have been the execrable handwriting that interested him; but I had a most polite note in return, stating the hour at which he would be glad to see me. I remember attempting in a very awkward, childish way to explain to him something of my ambition to make progress in my studies, and how poorly prepared I was and how handicapped in various ways. He rose from his seat, took down a book from a shelf, consulted it and put it back, and then he told me in a few words of a Spanish soldier who had entered the University of Paris at the age of thirty-three and became an influence that was world-wide. This, by way of encouragement. The model held up had very little effect upon me, but this personal interview, this close touch with the man who himself was a model, was a great inspiration to me, and remains with me one of the most pleasant memories of my life.

My first lecture was given in the town hall at my home town in Ireland during the first week of my after-campaign furlough. The townspeople filled the hall, more out of curiosity than to hear the lecture, for when the cobbler's son had left the town a few years before he couldn't read his own name.

The Vicar presided. Ministers of other denominations were present. The Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation was very much in evidence at the lecture. School teachers of the Sunday School where I taught, were present. The cla.s.s of little boys I had gathered off the streets was there; but personally I had gone after the newsboys of the town, and I had arranged that they should sit in a row of front seats. Indeed, I bribed some of them to be present.

My lecture was on Gordon and Khartoum. I described our life on the desert and told something of the war-game as I had seen it played. At the close of the lecture, the usual perfunctory vote of thanks was moved, and several prominent men of the town made the seconding of the vote an excuse for a speech. Curiously enough, I had had an experience with one of these men when I was a newsboy, and in my reply to this vote of thanks I told the story:

"One winter's night when I was selling papers on these streets--I think I was about twelve years of age--I knocked at a man's door and asked if he wanted a paper. The streets were covered with snow and slush, and I was shoeless and very cold. The man of the house opened the door himself, and something must have disturbed him mentally, for when he saw it was a newsboy, he took me by the collar and threw me into the gutter. My papers were spoiled and my rags soaked with slush and water.

"I picked myself up and came back to the window through which I saw a bright fire on an open hearth, and around it the man's family. I don't think I said any bad words, nor do I think I was very angry; but I certainly was sad and I made up my mind at the window that that man would some day be sorry for an unnecessary act of cruelty. I am glad that the gentleman is present to-night"--a deep silence and breathlessness pervaded the audience--"for I am sure that he is sorry.

But here are the newsboys of the town. They are my invited guests to-night. I want to say to the townspeople that the only kindly hand ever laid on my head was the Vicar's. It is too late now to help me--I am beyond your reach: but these boys are here, and they are serving you with papers and earning a few pennies to appease hunger or to clothe their bodies, and I want you to be kind to them."

After the lecture the man who had thrown me in the gutter came to me.

Of course, he had forgotten it. He had not the slightest idea he was the man, but he said:

"What a dastardly shame!"

I gripped him by the hands, and said, "You, my brother, are the man who did it." I tightened my grip, and said, "And I forgive you as fully and freely as I possibly can. You are sorry, and I am satisfied."

I studied in the military schools for a first-cla.s.s military certification of education, and got my promotion; but no sooner had the studies ceased and promotion come than the disgust with military life and its restrictions increased with such force that it became unbearable. So I left the service.

CHAPTER VI

BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW WORLD

I came to the United States in September, 1888. I came as a steerage pa.s.senger. My first lodging on American soil was with one of the earth's saints, a little old Irish woman who lived on East 106th Street, New York City. I had served in Egypt with her son, and I was her guest.

I had come here with the usual idea that coming was the only problem--that everybody had work; that there were no poor people in this country, that there was no problem of the unemployed. I was disillusioned in the first few weeks, for I tramped the streets night and day. I ran the gamut of the employment agencies and the "Help Wanted" columns of the papers. It was while looking for work that I first became acquainted with the Bowery. It was in the current of the unemployed that I was swept there first. It was there that I first discovered the dimensions of the problem of the unemployed, and my first great surprise in the country was to find thousands of men in what I supposed to be the most wonderful Eldorado on earth, workless, and many of them homeless.

An advertis.e.m.e.nt in the morning paper calling for a "bed-hand"--whatever that might mean--led me to a big lodging-house on the Bowery. They wanted a man to wash the floors and make the beds up, and the pay was one dollar a day. I got in line with the applicants. I was about the forty-fifth man. Many a time I have wished that I could understand what was pa.s.sing in the clerk's mind when he dismissed me with a wave of the hand. I thought, perhaps, that my dismissal meant that he had engaged a man, but that was not the case. A man two or three files behind me got the job.

My next attempt led me to a public school on Greenwich Avenue. The janitor wanted an a.s.sistant. I was so weary with my inactivity, that any kind of a job at any kind of pay would have been acceptable. The janitor showed me over the school, told me what his work was. Finally, he took me to the cellar where he had piled up in a corner about twenty lots of ashes. That, of course, was the first thing to be done, and though the pile looked rather discouraging, I stripped to the work, and went at it. My task was to get the ashes outside ready for carting away. I was about six hours on the job, when I accidently overheard the janitor say to his wife: "Shut your mouth, I have just got a sucker of a greenhorn to get them out." That was enough. I got my coat and hat, went over to the janitor's door, but before I could open my mouth, his wife said: "What's up?"

"Oh, the job's all right," I replied, "but what I object to is the way you do your whispering!"

The lowest in the scale of all human employments is the art of canva.s.sing for a sewing machine company. I did it for two weeks. My teacher taught me how to canva.s.s a tenement. The janitor is the traditional arch enemy of the canva.s.ser. My teaching consisted largely in how to avoid him, circ.u.mvent him, or exploit him. A Mrs. Smith--a mythical Mrs. Smith--always lived on the top floor. I was taught to interview her first; then I canva.s.sed from the top down.

My district was on the East Side from Fourteenth to Forty-Second Street. I encountered some rough work with janitors and janitresses in this region--so rough, indeed, that I considered it a splendid missionary field; and when I found, crushed in the heart of that tenement region, a small Methodist Church, I became interested in its work. I copied its "bill-of-fare" from the board outside the door, and began, as time permitted, to attend its services. As an offset to the discouragements I had experienced, I met in this small church two big men--big, mentally and morally. They were brothers, and during my twenty-one years in the United States, I have not met their superiors.

They were Lincoln and Frank Moss, both of them leaders in the church, and although they had moved with the population northward, they remembered the struggles of their childhood, and gave to it some of their best manhood.

Selling sewing machines was a failure, but out of it came the discovery of this splendid field for social and religious activity. I was directed to the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A. There, day after day, I inquired at the Employment Department until the secretary seemed tired of the sight of me.

I got ashamed to look at him. One night I sat in a corner, the picture of dejection and despair, when a big, broad-shouldered man sat down beside me.

"You look as if you thought G.o.d was dead!" he said, smiling.

"He appears to be," I replied.

He put his big hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and drew out of me my story. I forget what he said, it was brief and perhaps commonplace, but I went out to walk the streets that night, full of hope and courage. Before leaving that night I approached the little man at the employment desk.

"Did you see that big fellow in a gray suit?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Who is he?"

"Mr. McBurney."

"The man whose name is on your letterhead?"

"The same."

"Great guns! and to think that I've been monkeying all these weeks with a man like you--pardon me, brother!"

Robert R. McBurney was my friend to the day of his death. Many a time, when out of the pit, I reminded him of the incident. It was from the little man at the employment desk of the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A.

that I got my real introduction to business life--if the vocation of a porter can be called "business."

I became an under-porter in a wholesale house on Broadway at five dollars a week, and spent a winter at the job. The head of the house was a leader of national reputation in his particular denomination. I was sitting on the radiator one winter's morning before the store was opened when the chief clerk came in. It was a Monday morning, and his first words were:

"Well, what did you do yesterday?"

"I taught a Bible Cla.s.s, led a people's meeting, and preached once,"

was my reply. He looked dumbfounded.

"Do you do that often?" he asked.

"As often as I get a chance," I answered.

An abiding friendship began that morning between us. This man might have been a member of the firm and a rich man by this time, but he had a conscience, and it would not permit him to dishonestly keep books, which his employers wanted him to do, and he quit.

My next job was running an elevator in an office building on West Twenty-third Street. It was one of the old-fashioned, ice-wagon variety, jerked up and down by a wire cable. It gave me a good opportunity for study. In the side of the cage I had an arrangement for my Greek grammar. This of course, could not escape the notice of the business men, and if I was a few seconds late in answering their bell, they always looked like a thunder-cloud in the direction of my grammar. One of my pa.s.sengers on that elevator was sympathetic. His name was Bruce Price, an architect; a tall, fine, powerfully built man, who had a kindly word for me every morning, and the only pa.s.senger who ever deigned to shake hands with me as if I were a human being.

After that, I mounted a milk-wagon and served milk in the region of West Fifty-seventh Street. This drop into the cellars of the well-to-do gave me contact from another angle with janitors, janitresses, and servants. I started at four o'clock each morning. I did not finish until late in the afternoon, but I had all of Sunday off. I found my way by the touch of the hand, and very soon I seemed to have the eyesight of a cat to find shafts, dumb-waiters, circuitous turnings in the sub-cellars of large apartment houses.

The life of a milkman is a busy one, but I found time to mumble my Greek roots as I trotted in and out of the cellars. My grammar, when weather permitted, was tied open to a bottle in the cart.

From the milk-wagon I went to a publishing house. They had advertised for a man with some literary ability, and I had the effrontery to apply. I drove the milk-cart in front of the publishing-house door, and, with my working clothes bespattered with milk and grease, I applied personally for the job.

"What are your qualifications?" the manager asked.

"What kind of work do you want done?" I asked in reply. I found that they were going to make a new dictionary of the English language, but their method of making it obviated the necessity for scholarship. They had an 1859 edition of Webster and a lot of the newer dictionaries, and Webster was to be the basis of the new one, and we were to crib and transcribe from all the rest. I was the third man employed on the work.