One Way Out Part 9

For one thing it suddenly occurred to me that though I had lived in this city over thirty years I had not yet seen such places of interest as always attracted visitors from out of town. My attention was brought to this first by the need of limiting ourselves to amus.e.m.e.nts that didn't cost anything, but chiefly by learning where the better element down here spent their Sundays. You have only to follow this crowd to find out where the objects of national pride are located. An old battle flag will attract twenty foreigners to one American. And incidentally I wish to confess it was they who made me ashamed of my ignorance of the country's history. Beyond a memory of the Revolution, the Civil War and a few names of men and battles connected therewith, I'd forgotten all I ever learned at school on this subject. But here the many patriotic celebrations arranged by the local schools in the endeavor to instill patriotism and the frequent visits of the boys to the museums, kept the subject fresh. Not only d.i.c.k but Ruth and myself soon turned to it as a vital part of our education. Inspired by the old trophies that ought to stand for so much to us of to-day we took from the library the first volume of Fiske's fine series and in the course of time read them all. As we traced the fortunes of those early adventurers who dreamed and sailed towards an unknown continent, pictured to ourselves the lives of the tribes who wandered about in the big tangle of forest growth between the Atlantic and the Pacific, as we landed on the bleak New England sh.o.r.es with the early Pilgrims, then fought with Washington, then studied the perilous internal struggle culminating with Lincoln and the Civil War, then the dangerous period of reconstruction with the breathless progress following--why it left us all better Americans than we had ever been in our lives. It gave new meaning to my present surroundings and helped me better to understand the new-comers. Somehow all those things of the past didn't seem to concern Grover and the rest of them in the trim little houses. They had no history and they were a part of no history. Perhaps that's because they were making no history themselves. As for myself, I know that I was just beginning to get acquainted with my ancestors--that for the first time in my life, I was really conscious of being a citizen of the United States of America.

But I soon discovered that not only the historic but the beautiful attracted these people. They introduced me to the Art Museum. In the winter following our first summer here, when the out of door attractions were considerably narrowed down, Ruth and I used to go there about every other Sunday with the boy. We came to feel as familiar with our favorite pictures as though they hung in our own house. The Museum ceased to be a public building; it was our own. We went in with a nod to the old doorkeeper who came to know us and felt as unconstrained there as at home. We had our favorite nooks, our favorite seats and we lounged about in the soft lights of the rooms for hours at a time. The more we looked at the beautiful paintings, the old tapestries, the treasures of stone and china, the more we enjoyed them. We were sure to meet some of our neighbors there and a young artist who lived on the second floor of our house and whom later I came to know very well, pointed out to us new beauties in the old masters. He was selling plaster casts at that time and studying art in the night school.

In the old life, an art museum had meant nothing to me more than that it seemed a necessary inst.i.tution in every city. It was a mark of good breeding in a town, like the library in a good many homes. But it had never occurred to me to visit it and I know it hadn't to any of my former a.s.sociates. The women occasionally went to a special exhibition that was likely to be discussed at the little dinners, but a week later they couldn't have told you what they had seen. Perhaps our neighborhood was the exception and a bit more ignorant than the average about such things, but I'll venture to say there isn't a middle-cla.s.s community in this country where the paintings play the part in the lives of the people that they do among the foreign-born. A cla.s.s better than they does the work; a cla.s.s lower enjoys it. Where the middle-cla.s.s comes in, I don't know.

After being gone all the afternoon we'd be glad to get home again and maybe we'd have a lunch of cold beans and biscuits or some of the pudding that was left over. Then during the summer months we'd go back to the roof for a restful evening. At night the view was as different from the day as you could imagine. Behind us the city proper was in a bluish haze made by the electric lights. Then we could see the yellow lights of the upper windows in all the neighboring houses and beyond these, over the roof tops which seemed now to huddle closer together, we saw the pa.s.sing red and green lights of moving vessels. Overhead were the same clean stars which were at the same time shining down upon the woods and the mountain tops. There was something about it that made me feel a man and a free man. There was twenty years of slavery back of me to make me appreciate this.

And Ruth reading my thoughts in my eyes used to nestle closer to me and the boy with his chin in his hands would stare out at sea and dream his own dreams.

CHAPTER IX

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

As I said, with that first dollar in the ginger jar representing the first actual saving I had ever effected in my whole life, my imagination became fired with new plans. I saw no reason why I myself should not become an employer. As in the next few weeks I enlarged my circle of acquaintances and pushed my inquiries in every possible direction I found this idea was in the air down here. The ambition of all these people was towards complete independence. Either they hoped to set up in business for themselves in this country or they looked forward to saving enough to return to the land of their birth and live there as small land owners. I speak more especially of the Italians because just now I was thrown more in contact with them than the others. In my city they, with the Irish, seemed peculiarly of real emigrant stuff. The Jews were so clannish that they were a problem in themselves; the Germans a.s.similated a little better and yet they too were like one large family. They did not get into the city life very much and even in their business stuck pretty closely to one line. For a good many years they remained essentially Germans. But the Irish were citizens from the time they landed and the Italians eventually became such if by a slower process.

The former went into everything. They are a tremendously adaptable people. But whatever they tackled they looked forward to independence and generally won it. Even a man of so humble an ambition as Murphy had accomplished this. The Italians either went into the fruit business for which they seem to have a knack or served as day laborers and saved. There was a man down here who was always ready to stake them to a cart and a supply of fruit, at an exorbitant price to be sure, but they pushed their carts patiently mile upon mile until in the end they saved enough to buy one of their own. The next step was a small fruit store. The laborers, once they had acquired a working capital, took up many things--a lot of them going into the country and buying deserted farms. It was wonderful what they did with this land upon which the old stock New Englander had not been able to live. But of course in part explanation of this, you must remember that these New England villages have long been drained of their best. In many cases only the maim, the halt, and the blind are left and these stand no more chance against the modern pioneer than they would against one of their own st.u.r.dy forefathers.

Another occupation which the Italians seemed to preempt was the boot-blacking business. It may seem odd to dignify so menial an employment as a business but there is many a head of such an establishment who could show a fatter bank account than two-thirds of his clients. The next time you go into a little nook containing say fifteen chairs, figure out for yourself how many nickels are left there in a day. The rent is often high--it is some proof of a business worth thought when you consider that they are able to pay for positions on the leading business streets--but the labor is cheap and the furnishings and cost of raw material slight. Pasquale had set me to thinking long before, when I learned that he was earning almost as much a week as I. It is no unusual thing for a man who owns his "emporium" to draw ten dollars a day in profits and not show himself until he empties the cash register at night.

But the fact that impressed me in these people--and this holds peculiarly true of the Jews--was that they all shied away from the salaried jobs. In making such generalizations I may be running a risk because I'm only giving the results of my own limited observation and experience. But I want it understood that from the beginning to the end of these recollections I'm trying to do nothing more. I'm not a student. I'm not a sociologist. The conditions which I observed may not hold elsewhere for all I know. From a different point of view, they might not to another seem to hold even in my own city. I won't argue with anyone about it. I set down what I myself saw and let it go at that.

Going back to the small group among whom I lived when I was with the United Woollen, it seems to me that every man clung to a salary as though it were his only possible hope. I know men among them who even refused to work on a commission basis although they were practically sure of earning in this way double what they were being paid by the year. They considered a salary as a form of insurance and once in the grip of this idea they had nothing to look forward to except an increase. I was no better myself. I didn't really expect to be head of the firm. Nor did the other men. We weren't working and holding on with any notion of winning independence along that line. The most we hoped for was a bigger salary. Some men didn't antic.i.p.ate more than twenty-five hundred like me, and others--the younger men--talked about five thousand and even ten thousand. I didn't hear them discuss what they were going to do when they were general managers or vice-presidents but always what they could enjoy when they drew the larger annuity. And save those who saw in professional work a way out, this was the career they were choosing for their sons. They wanted to get them into banks and the big companies where the a.s.surance of lazy routine advancement up to a certain point was the reward for industry, sobriety and honesty. A salary with an old, strongly established company seemed to them about as big a stroke of luck for a young man as a legacy. I myself had hoped to find a place for d.i.c.k with one of the big trust companies.

Of course down here these people did not have the same opportunities.

Most of the old firms preferred the "bright young American" and I guess they secured most of them. I pity the "bright young American"

but I can't help congratulating the bright young Italians and the bright young Irishmen. They are forced as a result to make business for themselves and they are given every opportunity in the world for doing it. And they _are_ doing it. And I, breathing in this atmosphere, made up my mind that I would do it, too.

With this in mind I outlined for myself a systematic course of procedure. It was evident that in this as in any other business I must master thoroughly the details before taking up the larger problems.

The details of this as of any other business lay at the bottom and so for these at least I was at present in the best possible position. The two most important factors to the success of a contractor seemed to me to be, roughly speaking, the securing and handling of men and the purchase and use of materials. Of the two, the former appeared to be the more important. Even in the few weeks I had been at work here I had observed a big difference in the amount of labor accomplished by different men individually. I could have picked out a half dozen that were worth more than all the others put together. And in the two foremen I had noticed another big difference in the varying capacity of a boss to get work out of the men collectively. In work where labor counted for so much in the final cost as here, it appeared as though this involved almost the whole question of profit and loss. With a hundred men employed at a dollar and a half a day, the saving of a single hour meant the saving of a good many dollars.

It may seem odd that so obvious a fact was not taken advantage of by the present contractors. Doubtless it was realized but my later experience showed me that the obvious is very often neglected. In this business as in many others, the details fall into a rut and often a newcomer with a fresh point of view will detect waste that has been going on unnoticed for years. I was almost forty years old, fairly intelligent, and I had everything at stake. So I was distinctly more alert than those who retained their positions merely by letting things run along as well as they always had been going. But however you may explain it, I knew that the foreman didn't get as much work out of me as he might have done. In spite of all the control I exercised over myself I often quit work realizing that half my strength during the day had gone for nothing. And though it may sound like boasting to say it, I think I worked both more conscientiously and intelligently than most of the men.

In the first place the foreman was a bully. He believed in driving his men. He swore at them and goaded them as an ignorant countryman often tries to drive oxen. The result was a good deal the same as it is with oxen--the men worked excitedly when under the sting and loafed the rest of the time. In a crisis the boss was able to spur them on to their best--though even then they wasted strength in frantic endeavor--but he could not keep them up to a consistent level of steady work. And that's what counts. As in a Marathon race the men who maintain a steady plugging pace from start to finish are the ones who accomplish.

The question may be asked how such a boss could keep his job. I myself did not understand that at first but later as I worked with different men and under different bosses I saw that it was because their methods were much alike and that the results were much alike. A certain standard had been established as to the amount of work that should be done by a hundred men and this was maintained. The boss had figured out loosely how much the men would work and the men had figured out to a minute how much they could loaf. Neither man nor boss took any special interest in the work itself. The men were allowed to waste just so much time in getting water, in filling their pipes, in spitting on their hands, in resting on their shovels, in lazy chatter, and so long as they did not exceed this nothing was said.

The trouble was that the standard was low and this was because the men had nothing to gain by steady conscientious work and also because the boss did not understand them nor distinguish between them. For instance the foreman ought to have got the work of two men out of me but he wouldn't have, if I hadn't chosen to give it. That held true also of Rafferty and one or two others.

Now my idea was this: that if a man made a study of these men who, in this city at any rate, were the key to the contractor's problem, and learned their little peculiarities, their standards of justice, their ambitions, their weakness and their strength, he ought to be able to increase their working capacity. Certainly an intelligent teamster does this with horses and it seemed as though it ought to be possible to accomplish still finer results with men. To go a little farther in my ambition, it also seemed possible to pick and select the best of these men instead of taking them at random. For instance in the present gang there were at least a half dozen who stood out as more intelligent and stronger physically than all the others. Why couldn't a man in time gather about him say a hundred such men and by better treatment, possibly better pay, possibly a guarantee of continuous work, make of them a loyal, hard working machine with a capacity for double the work of the ordinary gang? Such organization as this was going on in other lines of business, why not in this? With such a machine at his command, a man ought to make himself a formidable compet.i.tor with even the long established firms.

At any rate this was my theory and it gave a fresh inspiration to my work. Whether anything came of it or not it was something to hope for, something to toil for, something which raised this digging to the plane of the pioneer who joyfully clears his field of stumps and rocks. It swung me from the present into the future. It was a different future from that which had weighed me down when with the United Woollen. This was no waiting game. Neither your pioneer nor your true emigrant sits down and waits. Here was something which depended solely upon my own efforts for its success or failure. And I knew that it wasn't possible to fail so dismally but what the joy of the struggle would always be mine.

In the meanwhile I carried with me to my work a note book and during the noon hour I set down everything which I thought might be of any possible use to me. I missed no opportunity for learning even the most trivial details. A great deal of the information was superficial and a great deal of it was incorrect but down it went in the note book to be revised later when I became better informed.

I watched my fellow workmen as much as possible and plied them with questions. I wanted to know where the cement came from and in what proportion it was mixed with sand and gravel and stone for different work. I wanted to know where the sand and gravel and stone came from and how it was graded. Wherever it was possible I secured rough prices for different materials. I wanted to know where the lumber was bought and I wanted to know how the staging was built and why it was built.

Understand that I did not flatter myself that I was fast becoming a mason, a carpenter, an engineer and a contractor all in one and all at once. I knew that the most of my information was vague and loose. Half the men who were doing the work didn't know why they were doing it and a lot of them didn't know how they were doing it. They worked by instinct and habit. Then, too, they were a clannish lot and a jealous lot. They resented my questioning however delicately I might do it and often refused to answer me. But in spite of this I found myself surprised later with the fund of really valuable knowledge I acquired.

In addition to this I acquired _sources_ of information. I found out where to go for the real facts. I learned for instance who for this particular job was supplying for the contractor his cement and gravel and crushed stone--though as it happened this contractor himself either owned or controlled his own plant for the production of most of his material. However I learned something when I learned that. For a man who had apparently been in business all his life, I was densely ignorant of even the fundamentals of business. This idea of running the business back to the sources of the raw material was a new idea to me. I had not thought of the contractor as owning his own quarries and gravel pits, obvious as the advantage was. I wanted to know where the tools were bought and how much they cost--from the engines and hoisting cranes and carrying system down to pick-axes, crowbars and shovels. I made a note of the fact that many of the smaller implements were not cared for properly and even tried to estimate how with proper attention the life of a pick-axe could be prolonged. I joyed particularly in every such opportunity as this no matter how trivial it appeared later. It was just such details as these which gave reality to my dream.

I figured out how many cubic feet of earth per day per man was being handled here and how this varied under different bosses. I pried and listened and questioned and figured even when digging. I worked with my eyes and ears wide open. It was wonderful how quickly in this way the hours flew. A day now didn't seem more than four hours long. Many the time I've felt actually sorry when the signal to quit work was given at night and have hung around for half an hour while the engineer fixed his boiler for the night and the old man lighted his lanterns to string along the excavation. I don't know what they all thought of me, but I know some of them set me down for a college man doing the work for experience. This to say the least was flattering to my years.

As I say, a lot of this work was wasted energy in the sense that I acquired anything worth while, but none of it was wasted when I recall the joy of it. If I had actually been a college boy in the first flush of youthful enthusiasm I could not have gone at my work more enthusiastically or dreamed wilder or bigger dreams. Even after many of these bubbles were p.r.i.c.ked and had vanished, the mood which made them did not vanish. I have never forgotten and never can forget the sheer delight of those months. I was eighteen again with a lot besides that I didn't have at eighteen.

My work along another line was more practical and more successful.

What I learned about the men and the best way to handle them was genuine capital. In the first place I lost no opportunity to make myself as solid as possible with Dan Rafferty. This was not altogether from a purely selfish motive either. I liked the man. In a way I think he was the most lovable man I ever met, although that seems a lady-like term to apply to so rugged a fellow. But below his beef and brawn, below his aggressiveness, below his coa.r.s.eness, below even a peculiar moral bluntness about a good many things, there was a strain of something fine about Dan Rafferty. I had a glimpse of it when he preferred going back to the sewer gas rather than let a man like the old foreman force him into a position where the latter could fire him.

But that was only one side of him. He had a heart as big as a woman's and one as keen to respond to sympathy. This in its turn inspired in others a feeling towards him that to save my life I can only describe as love--love in its big sense. He'd swear like a pirate at the Dagoes and they'd only grin back at him where'd they'd feel like knifing any other man. And when Dan learned that Anton' had lost his boy he sent down to the house a wreath of flowers half as big as a cart wheel. There was scarcely a day when some old lady didn't manage to see Dan at the noon hour and draw him aside with a mumbled plea that always made him dig into his pockets. He caught me watching him one day and said in explanation, "She's me grandmither."

After I'd seen at least a dozen different ones approach him I asked him if they were all his grandmothers.

"Sure," he said. "Ivery ould woman in the ward is me grandmither."

Those same grandmothers stood him in good stead later in his life, for every single grandmother had some forty grandchildren and half of these had votes. But Dan wasn't looking that far ahead then. Two facts rather distinguished him at the start; he didn't either drink or smoke. He didn't have any opinions upon the subject but he was one of the rare Irishmen born that way. Now and then you'll find one and as likely as not he'll prove one of the good fellows you'd expect to see in the other crowd. However, beyond exciting my interest and leading me to score him some fifty points in my estimate of him as a good workman, I was indifferent to this side of his character. The thing that impressed me most was a quality of leadership he seemed to possess. There was nothing masterful about it. You didn't look to see him lead in any especially good or great cause, but you could see readily enough that whatever cause he chose, it would be possible for him to gather about him a large personal following. I was attracted to this side of him in considering him as having about all the good raw material for a great boss. Put twenty men on a rope with Dan at the head of them and just let him say, "Now, biys--altogither," and you'd see every man's neck grow taut with the strain. I know because I've been one of the twenty and felt as though I wanted to drag every muscle out of my body. And when it was over I'd ask myself why in the devil I pulled that way. When I told myself that it was because I was pulling with Dan Rafferty I said all I knew about it.

It seemed to me that any man who secured Dan as a boss would already have the backbone of his gang. I didn't ever expect to use him in this way but I wanted the man for a friend and I wanted to learn the secret of his power if I could. But I may as well confess right now that I never fully fathomed that.

In the meanwhile I had not neglected the other men. At every opportunity I talked with them. At the beginning I made it a point to learn their names and addresses which I jotted down in my book. I learned something from them of the padrone system and the unfair contracts into which they were trapped. I learned their likes and dislikes, their ambitions, and as much as possible about their families. It all came hard at first but little by little as I worked with them I found them trusting me more with their confidences.

In this way then the first summer pa.s.sed. Both Ruth and the boy in the meanwhile were just as busy about their respective tasks as I was. The latter took to the gymnasium work like a duck to water and in his enthusiasm for this tackled his lessons with renewed interest. He put on five pounds of weight and what with the daily ocean swim which we both enjoyed, his cheeks took on color and he became as brown as an Indian. If he had pa.s.sed the summer at the White Mountains he could not have looked any hardier. He made many friends at the Y.M.C.A. They were all ambitious boys and they woke him up wonderfully. I was careful to follow him closely in this new life and made it a point to see the boys myself and to make him tell me at the end of each day just what he had been about. d.i.c.k was a boy I could trust to tell me every detail. He was absolutely truthful and he wasn't afraid to open his heart to me with whatever new questions might be bothering him. As far as possible I tried to point out to him what to me seemed the good points in his new friends and to warn him against any little weaknesses among them which from time to time I might detect. Ruth did the rest. A father, however much a comrade he may be with his boy, can go only so far. There is always plenty left which belongs to the mother--if she is such a mother as Ruth.

As for Ruth herself I watched her anxiously in fear lest the new life might wear her down but honestly as far as the house was concerned she didn't seem to have as much to bother her as she had before. She was slowly getting the buying and the cooking down to a science. Many a week now our food bill went as low as a little over three dollars. We bought in larger quant.i.ties and this always effected a saving. We bought a barrel of flour and half a barrel of sugar for one thing.

Then as the new potatoes came into the market we bought half a barrel of those and half a barrel of apples. She did wonders with those apples and they added a big variety to our menus. Another saving was effected by buying suet which cost but a few cents a pound, trying this out and mixing it with the lard for shortening. As the weather became cooler we had baked beans twice a week instead of once. These made for us four and sometimes five or six meals. We figured out that we could bake a quart pot of beans, using half a pound of pork to a pot, for less than twenty cents. This gave the three of us two meals with some left over for lunch, making the cost per man about three cents. And they made a hearty meal, too. That was a trick she had learned in the country where baked beans are a staple article of diet.

I liked them cold for my lunch.

As for clothes neither Ruth nor myself needed much more than we had. I bought nothing but one pair of heavy boots which Ruth picked up at a bankrupt sale for two dollars. On herself she didn't spend a cent. She brought down here with her a winter and a summer street suit, several house dresses and three or four petticoats and a goodly supply of under things. She knew how to care for them and they lasted her. I brought down, in addition to my business suit, a Sunday suit of blue serge and a dress suit and a Prince Albert. I sold the last two to a second hand dealer for eleven dollars and this helped towards the boy's outfit in the fall. She bought for him a pair of three dollar shoes for a dollar and a half at this same "Sold Out" sale, a dollar's worth of stockings and about a dollar's worth of underclothes. He had a winter overcoat and hat, though I could have picked up these in either a p.a.w.nshop or second hand store for a couple of dollars. It was wonderful what you could get at these places, especially if anyone had the knack which Ruth had of making over things.

CHAPTER X

THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT

That fall the boy pa.s.sed his entrance examinations and entered the finest school in the state--the city high school. If he had been worth a million he couldn't have had better advantages. I was told that the graduates of this school entered college with a higher average than the graduates of most of the big preparatory schools. Certainly they had just as good instruction and if anything better discipline. There was more compet.i.tion here and a real compet.i.tion. Many of the pupils were foreign born and a much larger per cent of them children of foreign born. Their parents had been over here long enough to realize what an advantage an education was and the children went at their work with the feeling that their future depended upon their application here.

The boy's a.s.sociates might have been more carefully selected at some fashionable school but I was already beginning to realize that selected a.s.sociates aren't always select a.s.sociates and that even if they are this is more of a disadvantage than an advantage. The fact that the boy's fellows were all of a kind was what had disturbed me even in the little suburban grammar school. For that matter I can see now that even for Ruth and me this sameness was a handicap for both us and our neighbors. There was no clash. There was a dead level. I don't believe that's good for either boys or men or for women.

Supposing this open door policy did admit a few worthless youngsters into the school and supposing again that the private school didn't admit such of a different order (which I very much doubt)--along with these d.i.c.k was going to find here the men--the past had proved this and the present was proving it--who eventually would become our statesmen, our progressive business men, our lawyers and doctors--if not our conservative bankers. For one graduate of such a school as my former surroundings had made me think essential for the boy, I could count now a dozen graduates of this very high school who were distinguishing themselves in the city. The boy was going to meet here the same spirit I was getting in touch with among my emigrant friends--a zeal for life, a belief in the possibilities of life, an optimistic determination to use these possibilities, which somehow the blue-blooded Americans were losing. It seemed to me that life was getting stale for the fourth and fifth generation. I tried to make the boy see this point of view. I went back again with him to the pioneer idea.

"d.i.c.k," I said in substance, "your great-great-grandfather pulled up stakes and came over to this country when there was nothing here but trees, rocks and Indians. It was a hard fight but a good fight and he left a son to carry on the fight. So generation after generation they fought but somehow they grew a bit weaker as they fought. Now," I said, "you and I are going to try to recover that lost ground. Let's think of ourselves as like our great-great-grandfathers. We've just come over here. So have about a million others. The fight is a different fight to-day but it's no less a fight and we're going to win. We have a good many advantages that these newcomers haven't. You see them making good on every side of you but I'll bet they can't lick a good American--when he isn't asleep. You and I are going to make good too."

"You bet we are, Dad," he said, with his eyes grown bright.

"Then," I said, "you must work the way the newcomers work. I don't want you to think you're any better than they are. You aren't. But you're just as good and these two hundred years we've lived here ought to count for something."