One Way Out Part 17

Such things cannot be calculated.

That first year was, of course, the important year--the big year. It proved what could be done, and nothing remained now but time in which to do it. It established the evident fact that if a raw, uneducated foreigner can come to this country and succeed, a native-born with experience plus intelligence ought to do the same thing more rapidly.

But it had taught me that what the native-born must do is to simplify his standard of living, take advantage of the same opportunities, toil with the same spirit, and free himself from the burdensome bonds of caste. The advantage is all with the pioneer, the adventurer, the emigrant. These are the real children of the republic--here in the East, at any rate. Every landing dock is Plymouth Rock to them. They are the real forefathers of the coming century, because they possess all the rugged strength of settlers. They are making their own colonial history.

CHAPTER XVI

d.i.c.k FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO

When school closed in June, d.i.c.k came to me and said:

"Dad, I don't want to loaf all summer."

"No need of it," I said. "Take another course in the summer school."

"I want to earn some money," he said, "I want to go to work."

If the boy had come to me a year ago with that suggestion I should have felt hurt. I would have thought it a reflection upon my ability to support my family. We salaried men used to expect our children to be dependent on us until they completed their educations. For a boy to work during his summer vacation was almost as bad form as for the wife to work for money at any time. It had to be explained that the boy was a prodigy with unusual business ability or that he was merely seeking experience. But d.i.c.k did not fall into any of these cla.s.ses. This was what made his proposal the more remarkable to me. It meant that he was willing to take just a plain every-day plugging job.

And underlying this willingness was the spirit that was resurrecting us all. Instead of acting on the defensive, d.i.c.k was now eager to play the aggressive game. I hadn't looked for this spirit to show in him so soon, in his life outside of school. I was mighty well pleased.

"All right," I said, "what do you think you can do?"

"I've talked with some of the fellows," he said, "and the surest thing seems to be selling papers."

I gave a gasp at that. I hadn't yet lost the feeling that a newsboy was a sort of cross between an orphan and a beggar. He was to me purely an object of pity. Of course I'd formed this notion like a good many others from the story books and the daily paper. I connected a newsboy with blind fathers and sick mothers if he had any parents at all.

"I guess you can get something better than that to do," I said.

"What's the matter with selling papers?" he asked.

When I stopped to think of the work in that way--as just the buying and selling of papers--I _couldn't_ see anything the matter with it.

Why wasn't it like buying and selling anything? You were selling a product in which millions of money was invested, a product which everyone wanted, a product where you gave your customers their money's worth. The only objection I could think of at the moment was that there was so little in it.

"It will keep you on the streets five or six hours a day," I said, "and I don't suppose you can make more than a dollar a week."

"A dollar a week!" he said. "Do you know what one fellow in our cla.s.s makes right through the year?"

"How much?" I asked.

"He makes between six and eight dollars a week," said d.i.c.k.

"That doesn't sound possible," I said.

"He told me he made that. And another fellow he knows about did as well as this even while he was in college. He pretty nearly paid his own way."

"What do you make on a paper?" I asked.

"About half a cent on the one cent papers, and a cent on the two cent papers."

"Then these boys have to sell over two hundred papers a day."

"They have about a hundred regular customers," said d.i.c.k, "and they sell another hundred papers besides."

It seemed to me the boys must have exaggerated because eight dollars a week was pretty nearly the pay of an able-bodied man. It didn't seem possible that these youngsters whom I'd pitied all my life could earn such an income. However if they didn't earn half as much, it wasn't a bad proposition for a lad.

I talked the matter over with Ruth and I found she had the same prejudices I had had. She, too, thought selling papers was a branch of begging. I repeated what d.i.c.k told me and she shook her head doubtfully.

"It doesn't seem as though I could let the boy do that," she said.

If there was one thing down here the little woman always worried about deep in her heart, it was lest the boy and myself might get coa.r.s.ened.

She thought, I think, without ever exactly saying so to herself that in our ambition to forge ahead we might lose some of the finer standards of life. She was bucking against that tendency all the time. That's why she made me shave every morning, that's why she made me keep my shoes blacked, that's why she made us both dress up on Sunday whether we went to church or not. She for her part kept herself looking even more trig than when she had the fear that Mrs. Grover might drop in at any time. And every night at dinner she presided with as much form as though she were entertaining a dinner party. I guess she thought we might learn to eat with our knives if she didn't.

"Well," I said, "your word is final. But let's look at this first as a straight business proposition."

So I went over the scheme just as I had to myself.

"These boys aren't beggars," I said. "They are little business men.

And as a matter of fact most of them are earning as much as their fathers. The trouble is that they've been given a black eye by well-meaning sympathizers who haven't taken the trouble to find out just what the actual facts are. A group of big-hearted women who see their own chickens safely rounded up at six every night, find the newsboys on the street as they themselves are on their way to the opera and conclude it's a great hardship and that the lads must be homeless and suffering. Maybe they even find a case or two which justifies this theory. But on the whole they are simply comparing the outside of these boys' lives with the lives of their own sheltered boys. They don't stop to consider that these lads are toughened and that they'd probably be on the street anyway. And they don't figure out how much they earn or what that amount stands for down here."

Ruth listened and then she said:

"But isn't it a pity that the boys _are_ toughened, Billy?"

"No," I said, "it would be a pity if they weren't. They wouldn't last a year. We have to have some seasoned fighters in the world."

"But d.i.c.k--"

"d.i.c.k has found his feet now. The suggestion was his own. Personally I believe in letting him try it."

"All right, Billy," she said.

But she said it in such a sad sort of way that I said:

"If you're going to worry about him, this ends it. But I'd like to see the boy so well seasoned that you won't have to worry about him no matter where he is, no matter what he's doing."

"You're right," she said, "I want to see him like you. I never worry about you, Billy."

It pleased me to have her say that. I know a lot of men who wouldn't believe their wives loved them unless they fretted about them all the time. I think a good many fellows even make up things just to see the women worry. I remember that Stevens always used to come home either with a sick headache or a tale of how he thought he might lose his job or something of the sort and poor Dolly Stevens would stay awake half the night comforting him. She'd tell Ruth about it the next day. I may have had a touch of that disease myself before I came down here but I know that ever since then I've tried to lift the worrying load off the wife's shoulders. I've done my best to make Ruth feel I'm strong enough to take care of myself. I've wanted her to trust me so that she'd know I act always just as though she was by my side. Of course I've never been able to do away altogether with her fear of sickness and sudden death, but so far as my own conduct is concerned I've tried to make her feel secure in me.

When I stop to think about it, Ruth has really lived three lives. She has lived her own and she has lived it hard. She not only has done her daily tasks as well as she knew how but she has tried to make herself a little better every day. That has been a waste of time because she was just naturally as good as they make them but you couldn't ever make her see that. I don't suppose there's been a day when at night she hasn't thought she might have done something a little better and lain awake to tell me so.

Then Ruth has lived my life and done over again every single thing I've done except the actual physical labor. Why every evening when I came back from work she wanted me to begin with seven-thirty A.M. and tell her everything that happened after that. And when I came back from school at night, she'd wake up out of a sound sleep if she had gone to bed and ask me to tell her just what I'd learned. Though she never held a trowel in her hand I'll bet she could go out to-day and build a true brick wall. And though she has never seen half the men I've met, she knows them as well as I do myself. Some of them she knows better and has proved to me time and again that she does. I've often told her about some man I'd just met and about whom I was enthusiastic for the moment and she'd say:

"Tell me what he looks like, Billy."