Chapter VII: Part 7

I will not say, however, that it is an unrelieved hardship for men to work so. “The Lord tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb” is an old proverb and unquestionably a true one. Indubitably these men do not feel as keenly about these things as some of the more exalted intellectual types in life, and it is entirely possible that a conception of what we know as “atmosphere” may never have found lodgment in their brains. Nevertheless, it is true that their physical health is affected to a certain extent, and it is also true that the home life to which they return is what it is, whether this be due to low intelligence or low wages, or both. The one complements the other, of course. If any attempt were made to better their condition physically or mentally, it might well be looked upon by them as meddling. At the same time it is true that up to this time nothing has been done to improve their condition. Doing anything more for them than paying them wages is not thought of.

A long trough, for instance, a single low wooden tub, in a small boarded-off space, in the boss teamsters’ shanty, with neither soap nor towels and only the light that comes from a low door, is all the provision made for the host of “still-cleaners,” the men who are engaged in the removal of the filthy refuse--tar, acids, and vile residuums from the stills and agitators. In connection with the boiler-room, where over three hundred men congregate at noontime and at night, there is to be found nothing better. You may see rows of grimy men congregate at noontime and at night, to eat their lunch or dinner, there is to be found nothing better. You may see rows of grimy men in various departments attempting to clean themselves under such circumstances, and still others walking away without any attempt at cleaning themselves before leaving. It takes too long. The idea of furnishing a clean dining-room in which to eat or a place to hang coats has never occurred to any one. They bring their food in buckets.

However, that vast problem, the ethics of employment, is not up for discussion in this instance: only the picture which this industry presents. On a gray day or a stormy one, if you have a taste for the somber, you have here all the elements of a gloomy labor picture which may not long endure, so steadily is the world changing. On the one hand, masters of great force and wealth, penurious to a degree, on the other the victims of this same penuriousness and indifference, dumbly accepting it, and over all this smoke and gas and these foul odors about all these miserable chambers. Truly, I doubt if one could wish a better hell for one’s enemies than some of the wretched chambers here, where men rove about like troubled spirits in a purgatory of man’s devising; nor any mental state worse than that in which most of these victims of Mother Nature find themselves. At the bottom nothing but darkness and thickness of wit, and dullness of feeling, let us say, and at the top the great brilliant blooms known to the world as the palaces and the office buildings and the private cars and the art collections of the principal owners of the stock of this concern. For those at the top, the brilliancy of the mansions of Fifth Avenue, the gorgeousness of the resorts of Newport and Palm Beach, the delights of intelligence and freedom; for those beneath, the dark chamber, the hanging smoke, pallor, foul odors, wretched homes. Yet who shall say that this is not the foreordained order of life? Can it be changed? Will it ever be, permanently? Who is to say?

THE BOWERY MISSION

In the lower stretches of the Bowery, in New York, that street once famous for a tawdry sprightliness but now run to humdrum and commonplace, stands the Bowery Mission. It is really a pretentious affair of its kind, the most showy and successful of any religious effort directed toward reclaiming the bum, the sot, the crook and the failure. As a matter of fact, the three former, and not always the latter, are not easily reclaimed by religion or anything else. It is only when the three former degenerate into the latter that the thought of religion seems at all enticing, and then only on the side that leans toward help for themselves. The Bowery Mission as an institution gathers its full quota of these failures, and its double row of stately old English benches, paid for by earnest Christians who have heard of it through much newspaper heralding of its services, are nightly filled and overflowing.

The spirit of this organization is peculiar. It really does not ask anything of its adherents or attendants, or whatever they might be called, except that they come in. No dues are collected, no services exacted. There is even a free lunchroom and an employment bureau run in connection with it, where the hungry can get a cup of coffee and a roll at midnight and the jobless can sometimes hear of something to their advantage during the day. The whole spirit of the place is one of helpfulness, though the task is of necessity dispiriting and in some of its aspects gruesome.

For these individuals who frequent this place of worship are surely, of all the flotsam of the city, the most helpless and woebegone. There is something about the type of soul which turns to religion _in extremis_ which is not pleasing. It appears to turn to religion about as a drowning man turns to a raft. There is the taint of personal advantage about it and not a little of the cant and whine of one who would curry favor with life or the Lord. Granting this, yet here they are, and here they come, out of the Bowery and the side streets of the Bowery, that wonderful ganglia of lodging houses; and in this place, and I presume others of its stripe, listen to presumably inspiring sermons. In all fairness, the speakers seem to realize that they have a difficult task to perform in awakening these men to a consciousness of their condition. They know that there is, if not cant, at least mental and physical lethargy to overcome. These bodies are poisoned by their own inactivity and sense of defeat. When one looks at them collectively the idea instinctively forces itself forward: “What is there to save?”

And yet, shabby and depressing as are these facts, there is a collective, coherent charm and color about the effort itself which to one who views it entirely disinterestedly is not to be scoffed at. The hall itself, a long deep store turned to a semblance of Gothic beauty by a series of colored windows set in the store-front facing the Bowery, and by a gallery of high-backed benches of Gothic design at the back, and by mottoes and traceries in dark blue and gold which harmonize fittingly with the walnut stain of the woodwork, is inviting. Even the shabby greenish-brown and dusty gray coats of the audience blend well with the woodwork, and even the pale colorless faces of gray or ivory hue somehow add to what is unquestionably an artistic and ornamental effect.

The gospel of God the All-Forgiving is the only doctrine here thoroughly insisted upon. It is, in a way, a doctrine of inspiration. That it is really never too late to change, to come back and begin all over, is the basic idea. God, once appealed to, can do anything to restore the contrite heart to power and efficiency. Believe in God, believe that He really loves you, believe that He desires to make you all you should be, and you will be. Your fortunes will change. You will come into peace and decency and be respected once more. God will help you.

It is interesting to watch the effect of this inspirational doctrine, driven home as it is by imaginative address, oratorical fire, and sometimes physical vehemence. The speakers, the ordinary religionists of an inspirational and moral turn, not infrequently possess real magnetism, the power to attract and sway their hearers. These dismal wanderers, living largely in doubt and despair, can actually be seen to take on a pseudo-courage as they listen. You can see them stir and shift, the idea that possibly something can be done for them if only they can get this belief into their minds, actually influencing their bodies. And now and then some one who has got a soft job, a place, through the ministrations of the mission workers, or who has been pulled out of a state of absolute despair--or at least claims to have been--will arise and testify that such has been the case. His long wanderings in the dark will actually fascinate him by contrast and he will expatiate with shabby eloquence upon his present decency and comfort as contrasted with what he was. I remember one night hearing an old man tell what a curse he had been to a kind-hearted sister, and how he wanted but one thing, now that he was coming out of his dream of evil, and that was to let her see some day that he had really reformed. It was a pathetic wish, so little to hope for, but the wish was seemingly sincere and the speaker fairly recovered.

And they claim to recover a percentage, small though it is, to actual service and usefulness. The service may not be great, the usefulness not very important, but such as it is, there it is. And if one could but believe them, so dubious is all so-called reformation of this sort, there is something pleasing in the thought that out of the muck and waste of the slough of despond some of these might actually be brought to health and decency, a worthwhile living, say. Yet are they? Dirty, grimy, like flies immersed in glue, can they be--have they ever been--dragged to safety and set on their feet again, clean, hopeful, or even weakly so?

I remember listening one night to the story of the son of the man who founded the mission. It appears that the father was rich and the boy indulgently fostered, until at last he turned out to be a drunkard, rake and what not--all the nouns usually applied to those who do evil. His father had tried to retain a responsible position for him among his affairs but was finally compelled to cut him off. He ordered him out of his house, his business, had his will remade, cutting him off without a dollar, and declared vehemently and determinedly that he would never look upon him again.

The boy disappeared. Some five years later a thin, shabby, down-hearted wastrel strolled into the mission and sat down, contenting himself with occupying a far corner and listening wearily to what was being said. After the services were over he came to the director in charge and confessed that he was the son of the man who had founded the mission, that he was actually at the end of his rope, hungry, and with no place to sleep--your prodigal son. The director, of course, at once took him in charge, gave him a meal and a bed, and set about considering whether anything could be done for him.

It appears that the youth, like his prototype of the parable, had actually had his fill of the husks, but in addition he was sick and dispirited and willing to die. The director encouraged him to hope. He was young yet. There was still a chance for him. He first gave him odd jobs about the mission, then secured him a place as waiter in a small restaurant, and finally, figuring out a notable idea, took him to the foreman of the father’s own printing establishment and asked a place for him as a printer’s devil. The character of the mission director was sufficient guarantee and the place was given, though no one knew who the rundown assistant really was. Finally, after over eleven months of service, the director went to the owner of the business and said: “Would you like to know where your boy is?”

“No,” the father replied sharply, “I would not.”

“If you knew he had reformed and had been working for at least a year and a half steadily in one place--wouldn’t that make any difference?”

“Well,” he replied, looking at him quizzically, “it might. Where is he?”

“Right here in your own establishment.”

The old man got up. “What’s he doing? Let me look at him.”

The two traversed the halls of a great business establishment and finally came to the department where the youth was working. The father, eager but cautious, scanned the room and saw his son, himself unnoticed. He was sticking type, a green shade over his eyes.

For a moment the parent hesitated, then went over.

“Harry,” he called.

The boy jumped.

“Father!” he cried.

It was described as a moment of intense emotion. The boy broke down and wept and the father shed tears over him. Finally he sobered himself and said: “Now you come with me. I guess you’re all right enough to be my son again. You can set more type to-morrow.” And he led him away.

Truth? Or Romance? I do not know.

The final answer to this form of service, however, is in the mission itself. Nightly you may see them rise and hear them testify. One night the speaker, pouring forth a fiery description of God’s power, stopped in the midst of his address and said: “Is that you, Tommy Wilson, up there in the gallery?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tommy, I’m glad to see you. Won’t you get up and sing ‘My Lord and I’? I know there isn’t any one here who wouldn’t rather hear you sing than me preach any time. Will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Up in the gallery, three rows back, there arose a shabby little man, his dusty suit showing the well-worn marks of age. He was clean and docile, however, and seemed to be some one whom the mission had reclaimed in times past. In fact, the speaker made it clear that Tommy was a great card, for out of the gutter he had come to contribute a beautiful voice to the mission, a voice that was now missing because he had a job in a faraway part of the city.

Tommy sang. He put his hands in his coat pockets, stood perfectly erect, and with his head thrown back gave vent to such a sweet, clear melody that it moved every heart. It was not a strong voice, not showy, but pure and lovely, like a limpid stream. The song he sang was this:

I have a Friend so precious,
So very dear to me;
He loves me with such tender love,
He loves me faithfully.
I could not live apart from Him,
I love to feel Him nigh;
And so we dwell together,
My Lord and I.

Sometimes I’m faint and weary,
He knows that I am weak,
And as He bids me lean on Him
His help I gladly seek;
He leads me in the paths of light,
Beneath a sunny sky;
And so we walk together,
My Lord and I.

I tell Him all my sorrows,
I tell Him all my joys,
I tell Him all that pleases me,
I tell Him what annoys;
He tells me what I ought to do,
He tells me how to try;
And so we walk together,
My Lord and I.

He knows how I’m longing
Some weary soul to win,
And so He bids me go and speak
The loving word for Him;
He bids me tell His wondrous love,
And why He came to die;
And so we work together
My Lord and I.

As he sang I could not help thinking of this imaginatively personified Lord of the Universe in all His power and wisdom taking note of this singing, shabby ant--of the faith that it required to believe that He would. Then I thought of the vast forces that shift and turn in their mighty inscrutability. I thought of suns and planets that die, not knowing why they are born. Of the vast machinery, the vast chemistry, of things dark, ruthless, brutal, and then of love, and mercy and tenderness that is somehow present along with cruelty and savagery. And then I thought of this little, shabby reclaimed water-rat, this scraping of the mud crawled to the bank, who yet could stand there in his shabby coat and sing! What if, after all, as the Christian Scientists believe, the Lord was not distant from things but here, now, everywhere, divine goodness speaking in and through matter and man. What if evil and weakness and failure were dreams only, evil dreams, from which we wake to something different, better--Omnipotence, to essential unity with life and love? For a moment, so mysterious a thing is emotion and romance, the thought carried me with the singer, and I sang with him:

“And so we walk together,
My Lord and I.”

But outside in the cold, hard street, with its trucks and cars, I knew the informing spirit is not quite like that, neither so kind nor helpful--at least not to all.

THE WONDER OF THE WATER

I cross, each morning, a bridge that spans a river of running water. It is not a wide river, but one populous with boats and teeming with all the mercantile life of a great city. Its current is swift, its bottom deep; it carries on its glassy bosom the freight of a thousand--of ten thousand merchants. Only the conception of something supernally wonderful haunts me as I cross it, and I gaze at the picture of its boats and barges, its spars and sails, spellbound by their beauty.

The boats on this little river--the Harlem--traverse the seven seas. You may stand and see them go by: vessels loaded with brick and stone, with lumber and cement, with coal, iron, lime, oil--a great gamut of serviceable things which the world needs and which is here forever being delivered or carried away. These boats come from the Hudson and the Chesapeake, from Maine, Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, Europe, Asia, Africa and the rest of the world. They tie up to these small docks in friendly rows and nose the banks in silence, while human beings, honored only by being allowed to guide and direct their stately proportions, clamber over them.

It is not so much these boats, however, as it is the water which curls under them, which sips and eddies about the docks and posts, and circles away in spinning rings, which takes my fancy. This water, which flows here so swiftly, comes from so far. It has been washing about the world, lo, these many centuries--for how long the imagination of man cannot conceive. And here it is running pleasantly at my feet, the light of the morning sun warming it with amethystine beams and giving it a luster which the deeps of the sea cannot have.

This water, as it comes before me now, gives me the impression of having been a hundred and a thousand things, maybe--the torrent from the height, bounding ecstatically downward into the depths of some cavern, rolling in gloom under the immensity of the volume of the sea, or a tiny cloudlet hanging like a little red island in the sky, a dark thundercloud pouring its fury and wrath upon a luckless multitude. It may have been a cup of water, a glass of wine, a tear, a gush of blood--anything in the whole gamut of human experience, or out of it--and yet here for this hour at least it lies darkling and purling, murmuring cheerfully about these docks and piers. When you think of the steam that is made of it by heat, floating over our whole civilization like plumes; the frost of the windowpanes spread in such tropical luxury of a winter morning; the snow, in its forms of stars and flowers; the rich rains of summer, falling with such rhythmic persistence; and then the ice, the fog, the very atmosphere we breathe, infiltrated by this wonderful medium and were ourselves almost entirely composed of it, you see how almost mystic it becomes. We owe all our forms to it; the beauty of the flowers, the stateliness of the trees, the shape and grandeur of the mountains, all, in fact--our minds and bodies, so much water and so little substance.

And here it is under our bridge, hurrying away. It may be that it has mind, that in its fluid depths lie all the religions and philosophies of the world. Sweep us away, and out of it might rise new shapes and forms, more glorious, more radiant. We may not even guess the alpha of its powers.

I do not know what this green fluid is that runs between green banks and past docks and factories and the habitations of men. It has a life quality, and mayhap a soul quality, which I cannot fathom, but with each turn of its ripples and each gurgle of its tide the heart of me leaps like a voice in song. I can reason no more. It is too colorful, too rhythmic, too silent, not to call forth that which is deemed exaltation by the world, and I stand spellbound, longing for I know not what, nor why.

THE MAN ON THE BENCH

It is nine o’clock of a summer’s night. The great city all about is still astir, active, interested, apparently comfortable. Lights gleam out from stores lazily. The cars go rumbling by only partially filled, as is usual at this time of night. People stroll in parks in a score of places throughout the city, enjoying the cool of the night, such as it is.

In any one of these, as the evening wanes, may be witnessed one of the characteristic spectacles of the town: the gathering of the “benchers.” Here, while one strolls about for an hour’s amusement or sits on a bench, may be seen the man whom the city has beaten, seeking a place to sleep.

What a motley company! What a port of missing men! This young one who slips by me in shabby, clay-colored clothes and a worn, dirty straw hat, is only temporarily down on his luck, for he has youth. It may be a puling youth, half-witted, with ill-conceived understanding of things as they are, but it is youth, with some muscle and some activity, and as such it is salable. Some one will buy it for something for a little while.

But this other thing that comes shambling toward me, dirty, dust in its ears, dust in its eyes, dust in its hair, a meager recollection of a hat, dull, hopeless, doglike eyes--what has it to offer life? Nothing? Practically so. An appetite which life will not satisfy, a racked and thin-blooded body which life cannot use, a rusty, cracked and battered piece of machinery which is fit only for the scrap-heap. And yet it lingers on, clings on, hoping for what? And this third thing--a woman, if you please, in rags and tatters, a gray cape for a shawl, a queer, flat, shapeless thing which she wears on her head for a hat, shoes that are not shoes but cracked strips of leather, a skirt that is a bag only, hands, face, skin wrinkled and dirty, yet who seeks to rest or sleep here the night through. And now she is stuffing old newspapers between her dress and her breast to keep warm. And enveloping her hands in her rag of a shawl!

Yet she and those others make but three of many, so grim, so strange, so shabby a company. What, in God’s name, has life done to them that they are so cracked and bruised and worthless?

No heart, or not a good one perhaps, in any of these bodies; no stomach, or a mere bundle of distorted viscera; no liver or kidneys worthy the name, but only botched or ill-working organs of these names in their place; eyes poor; hearing possibly defective; hair fading; skin clammy. Merciful God! is it to this condition that we come, you and I, if life be not merciful?

I am not morbid. I know that men must make good. I know that to be useful to the world they must have a spark of divine fire. But who is to provide the fire? Who did, in the first place? Where is it now? What blew it out? The individual himself? Not always. Man is not really responsible for his actions. Society? Society is not really responsible for itself or for its individuals. Nature? God? Very likely, although there is room for much discussion and much illumination here.

But before we point the finger of scorn or shrug the shoulder of indifference, one word: Life does provide the divine fire, and that free and unasked, to many. It does provide a fine constitution, and that free and unasked, to many. It does provide beauty--aye it pours it into the lap of some. Life works in the clay of its interests, fashioning, fashioning. With some handfuls it fashions lovingly, joyously, radiantly. It gives one girl, for instance, a passion for art, an ear for music, a throat for singing, a joy in humor and beauty, which grows and becomes marvelous and is irresistible. Into the seed of a boy it puts strength, suppleness, facility of thought, facility of expression, desire. It not infrequently puts a wild surging determination to do and be in his brain which carries him like powder a bullet, straight to the mark.

But what or who provided the charge of powder behind that bullet? Who fashioned the chorded throat? Who worked over this face of flowerlike expression, until men burn with wild passion and lay kingdoms and hierarchies and powers at its feet? We palaver so much of personal effort. We say of this one and that: He did not try. I ask you this: had he tried, what of it? How far would his little impulse have carried him? What would it have overcome? Would it have placed him above the level of a coal-stoker or a sand-hog? Would it have fitted him to contend with even these? Would it have matched his ideas, or his ideas have matched it? Who? What? How? Dark thoughts!

“Ah!” but I hear you say, “that is not the question. Effort is the question, not where his effort will carry him.” True. Who gave him his fitness for effort, or his unfitness? Who took away his courage? Why could it be taken? Dark thought, and still more dark the deeps behind it.

Here they are, though, pale anæmic weeds or broken flowers, slipping about looking for a bench to sleep on in our park. They are wondering where the next meal is coming from, the next job, the next bed. They are wondering whither they are going to go, what they are going to do, who is going to say something to them. Or maybe they are past wondering, past dreaming, past thinking over lost battles and lost life. Oh, nature! where now in your laboratory of dark forces, you plan and weave, be merciful. For these, after all, are of you, your clay; they need not be destroyed.

Yet meantime the city sings of its happiness, the lights burn, the autos honk; there are great restaurants agleam with lights and merriment. See, that is where strength is!

I like this fact of the man on the bench, as sad as it is. It is the evidence of the grimness of life, its subtlety, its indifference. Men pass them by. The world is elsewhere. And yet I know that below all this awaits after all the unescapable chemistry of things. They are not out of nature. They cannot escape it really. They are of it--an integral part of the great mystery and beauty--even they. They fare ill here, now, perhaps--very. Yet it is entirely possible that they need only wait, and life will eventually come round to them. They cannot escape it; it must use them. The potter has but so much clay. He cannot but mold it again and again. And as for the fire, He cannot ultimately prevent it. It goes, somewhat wild or mild, into all He does.

THE MEN IN THE DARK

It is not really dark in the accepted sense of the word, for a great, yellow, electric lamp sputtering overhead casts a wide circle of gold, but it is one-fifteen of a cold January morning, and this light is all the immediate light there is. The offices of the great newspaper center, the sidewalk in front of one of which constitutes the stage of this scene, are dark and silent. The great presses in every newspaper building hereabouts are getting ready to whir mightily, and if only the passers-by would cease their shuffling you could hear the noises of preparation. A little later, when they are actually in motion, you can hear them, a sound of rushing, dim and muffled, but audible--the cataract of news which the world waits for, its daily mental stimulus, not unlike the bread that is left at your door for your body.

But who are these peculiar individuals who seem to be gathering here at this time in the morning? You did not notice any one a few minutes ago, but now there are three or four over there discussing the reasons for the present hard times, and here in the shadow of this great arch of a door are three or four more. And now you look about you and they are coming from all directions, slipping in out of the shadow toward this light, where sits a fat old Irish woman beside an empty news-stand waiting to tend it, for as yet there is nothing on it. They all seem at first to be men of one type, small and underweight and gaunt. But a little later you realize that they are not so much alike in height and weight as you first thought, and of differing nationalities. But they are all cold, though, that is certain, and a little impatient. They are constantly shifting and turning and looking at the City Hall clock, where its yellow face shows the hour, or looking down the street, and sometimes murmuring, but not much. There is very little said.

“What is all the trouble?” you ask of some available bystander, who ought to be fairly _en rapport_ with the situation, since he has been standing here for some time.

“Nothin’,” he retorts. “They’re waitin’ for the mornin’ papers. They’re lookin’ to see which can git to a job first.”

“Oh!” you exclaim, a great light breaking. “So they’re here to get a good start. They wait all night, eh? That’s pretty tough, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They’re mostly Swedes and Germans.” This last as though these two nationalities, and no doubt some others, were beyond the need of human consideration. “They’re waiters and cooks and order men and dishwashers. There’s some other kinds, too, but they’re mostly waiters.”

“Would you say that that old man over there--that fellow with a white beard--was a waiter?”

“Aw, naw! He ain’t no waiter. I don’t know what he is--pan-handler, maybe. They wouldn’t have the likes of him. It’s these other fellows that are waiters, these young ones.”

You look, and they are young in a way, lean, with thin lips and narrow chests and sallow faces, a little shabby, all of them, and each has a roll of something wrapped up in a newspaper or a brown paper and tucked under his arm--an apron, maybe.

You begin speculating for yourself, and, with the aid of your friend to supply occasional points, you piece the whole thing together. This is really a very great, hard, cold city, and these men are creatures at the bottom of the ladder, temporarily, anyhow. And these columns of ads in the successful morning papers attract them as a chance. And they come here thus early in the cold in order to get a good start on a given job before any one else can get ahead of them. First come, first served.

And while you are waiting, speculating, another creature edges near you. He is not quite so prosperous looking as the last one you talked to; he seems thinner, more emaciated.

“Take a look at that, boss,” he says, opening his palm and shoving something bright toward you. It looks like gold.

“No,” you answer nervously. (You have been held up before.) “No, I don’t want to look at it.”

“Take a look at it,” he insists.

“No,” you retort irritably, but you do it in a half-hearted, objecting way and see that it is a gold ring with an initial carved in the seal plate.

He closes his thin hand and puts it back in his pocket. He is inclined to go away, and then another idea strikes him.

“Are you lookin’ fer a job?” he asks.

“No.”

“Ain’t you a cook?”

“No.”

“Gee! I thought you was some swell chef--they come here now and then.”

It is a doubtful compliment but better than nothing. You soften a little.

“I’m a waiter,” he confides, now that he has your momentary interest. “I am, I mean, when I’m in good health. I’m run down some now. The best I can get is dishwashing now. But I am a waiter, and I’ve been an order clerk. There’s nothin’ much to say of this bunch, though. They all work for the cheap joints. Saturday nights they gits drunk mostly, and if they’re not there on the dot Sunday they’re gone. The boss gits a new one. Then they come here Sunday night or Monday.”

You are inclined to agree that this description fits in pretty well with your observation of a number of them, but what of these others who look like family men, who look worried and harried?

“Sure, there’s lots others,” prompts your adviser. “There’s three columns every day callin’ for painters. There’s a column most every day of printers. People paints houses all the year round. There’s general help wanted. There’s carpenters. It gits some. Cooks and waiters and dishwashers in the big pull, though.”

You have been wondering if this is really true, but it sounds plausible enough. These men are obviously, in a great many cases, cooks and waiters. Their search calls for an early start, for the restaurants and hotels usually keep open all night. It may be.

And all the time you have been wondering why the papers do not come. It seems a shame that these men should have to stand here so long. There’s a great crowd now, between two and three hundred. A policeman is tramping up and down, keeping an open passageway. He is not in any friendly mood.

“Stand back,” he orders angrily. “I’m tellin’ ye fer the last time, now!”

A great passageway opens.

Now of a sudden comes a boy running with a great bundle of the most successful morning paper, a most staggering load. Actually the crowd looks as though it would seize him and tear his bundle away from him, but instead it only closes in quickly behind. When he reaches the Irish woman’s stand there is a great struggling, grabbing circle formed. “The ----,” is the cry. “Gimme a ----,” and for the space of a half-dozen minutes a thriving, exciting business is done in morning papers. Then these men run with their papers like dogs run with a bone. They hurry, each to some neighboring light, and glance up and down the columns. Sometimes they mark something, and then you see them hurry on again. They have picked their prospect.

It is a pitiful spectacle from one point of view, a decidedly grim one from another. Your dishwasher (or ex-waiter) confides that most of these positions, apart from tips, pay only five dollars a week and board. And he admits that the board is vile. While you are talking you recognize some gentlemanly newspaper man, well-salaried, taking his belated way home. What a contrast! What a far cry!

“And say,” says your dishwasher friend, “I thought I’d git a job to-night. I thought somebody’d buy this ring. It’ll bring $1.75 in the pawnshop in the mornin’. I ain’t got carfare or I wouldn’t mention it. I usually soaks it early in the week and gits it out Saturday. I’ll soak it to-morrow, and git another chance to-morrow night.”

What a story! What a predicament!

You go down in your pocket and produce a quarter. You buy him a paper. “On your way,” you say cheerily--but the misery! The depths! To think that any one of us should come to this!

As he goes you watch the others going, and then the silence settles down and the night. There is no sense of traffic here now, no great need of light. The old Irish woman sinks to the dismal task of waiting, for morning, I presume. Now and then some passing pedestrian will buy a paper, but not often. But these others--they have gone in the direction of the four winds of heaven; they are applying at the shabby doors of restaurants, in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, Hoboken, Staten Island; they are sitting on stoops, holding their own at shop doors. They have the right to ask first, the right to be first, because they are first--noble privilege.

And you and I--well, we turn in our dreams and rest. The great world wags on. Our allotted portion is not this. We are not of these men in the dark.

THE MEN IN THE STORM

It is a winter evening. Already, at four o’clock, the somber hues of night are over all. A heavy snow is falling, a fine, picking, whipping snow, borne forward by a swift wind in long, thin lines. The street is bedded with it, six inches of cold, soft carpet, churned brown by the crush of teams and the feet of men. Along the Bowery men slouch through it with collars up and hats pulled over their ears.

Before a dirty, four-story building gathers a crowd of men. It begins with the approach of two or three, who hang about the closed wooden door and beat their feet to keep them warm. They make no effort to go in, but shift ruefully about, digging their hands deep in their pockets and leering at the crowd and the increasing lamps. There are old men with grizzled beards and sunken eyes; men who are comparatively young but shrunken by disease; men who are middle-aged.

With the growth of the crowd about the door comes a murmur. It is not conversation, but a running comment directed at any one. It contains oaths and slang phrases.

“I wisht they’d hurry up.”

“Look at the cop watchin’.”

“Maybe it ain’t winter, nuther.”

“I wisht I was with Peary.”

Now a sharper lash of wind cuts down, and they huddle closer. There is no anger, no threatening words. It is all sullen endurance, unlightened by either wit or good fellowship.

An automobile goes jingling by with some reclining figure in it. One of the members nearest the door sees it.

“Look at the bloke ridin’!”

“He ain’t so cold.”

“Eh! eh! eh!” yells another, the automobile having long since passed out of hearing.

Little by little the night creeps on. Along the walk a crowd hurries on its way home. Still the men hang around the door, unwavering.

“Ain’t they ever goin’ to open up?” queries a hoarse voice suggestively.

This seems to renew general interest in the closed door, and many gaze in that direction. They look at it as dumb brutes look, as dogs paw and whine and study the knob. They shift and blink and mutter, now a curse, now a comment. Still they wait, and still the snow whirls and cuts them.

A glimmer appears through the transom overhead, where some one is lighting the light. It sends a thrill of possibility through the watchers. On the old hats and peaked shoulders snow is piling. It gathers in little heaps and curves, and no one brushes it off. In the center of the crowd the warmth and steam melt it and water trickles off hat-rims and down noses, which the owners cannot reach to scratch. On the outer rim the piles remain unmelted. Those who cannot get in the center, lower their heads to the weather and bend their forms.

At last the bars grate inside, and the crowd pricks up its ears. There is some one who calls: “Slow up there, now!” and then the door opens. It is push and jam for a minute, with grim, beast silence to prove its quality, and then the crowd lessens. It melts inward, like logs floating, and disappears. There are wet hats and shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass pouring in between bleak walls. It is just six o’clock, and there is supper in every hurrying pedestrian’s face.

“Do you sell anything to eat here?” one questions of the grizzled old carpet-slippers who opens the door.

“No, nuthin but beds.”

The waiting throng had been housed for the night.

THE MEN IN THE SNOW

Winter days in a great city bring some peculiar sights. If it snows, the streets are at once a slushy mess, and the transaction of business is, to a certain extent, a hardship. In its first flakes it is picturesque; the air is filled with flying feathers and the sky lowery with somber clouds. Later comes the slush and dirt, and not infrequently bitter cold. The city rings with the grind and squeak of cold-bitten vehicles, and men and women, the vast tide of humanity which fills its streets, hurry to and fro so as to be through with the work or need that keeps them out of doors.

In certain sections of the city at a period like this may be found groups of men who are constituted by nature and conditions to be an integral part of every storm. They are like the gulls that follow the schools of fish at sea. Poverty is the bond which makes them kin and gives them, after a fashion, a class distinction. They are not only always poor in body, but poor in mind also, and as for earthly belongings, of course they have not any.

These men, like the gulls and their fish, pick a little something from the storm. They follow the fortunes of the contractors who make arrangements with the city for the removal of the snow, and about the wagon-barns where the implements of snow removal are kept, and where daily cards of employment are issued they may be seen waiting by hundreds, and not at such hours and under such conditions as are at all pleasant to contemplate, either. In the early hours of the morning, when the work of the day is first being doled out, they may be seen, cold, overcoatless, often with bare hands and necks, no collar, or, if so, only a rag of a thing, and hats too battered and timeworn to be honestly dignified by the name of hat at all.

The city usually pays at the rate of two dollars a day for what shoveling these men can do. They are not wanted even at that rate by the contractors, for stray, healthy laborers are usually preferred; but the pressure under which the contractors are put by the city and the public makes a showing necessary. So thousands are admitted to temporary labor who would not otherwise be considered, and these are they.

So in this cold, raw, strenuous weather they stand like so many sheep waiting at the entrance to a fold. There is no particular zeal in this effort which they are making to live. Hunger for life they have, but it is a rundown hunger, dispirited by lack of encouragement. They have been kicked and pushed about the world in an effort to live until, as a rule, they are comparatively heartbroken and courage-broken. This storm, which spells comfort and indoor seclusion and amusement for many, spells a rough opportunity for them--a gutter crust, to be sure, but a crust.

And so they are here early in the morning, in the dark. They stand in a long file outside the contractors’ stable door, waiting for that consideration which his present need may show. A man at a little glass window cut in a door receives them. He is a hearty, material, practical soul who has very little to suggest in the way of mentality but much in the spirit of acquisitiveness. He is not interested in the condition of the individuals before him. It does not concern him that in most cases this is a last despairing grasp at a straw. Will this fellow work? Will he be satisfied to take $1.75 in place of the $2.00 which the city pays? He does not ask them that so clearly; it is done in another way.

“Got a shovel?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it’ll cost you a quarter to get one.”

“I ain’t got no quarter.”

“Well, that’s all right. We’ll take it out o’ your pay.”

Not for to-day only, mind you, but for every day in which work is done, the quarter comes out for the shovel. It is suggested in some sections that the shovel is sometimes stolen, but there are gang foremen, and no money is paid without a foreman’s O. K., and he is responsible for the shovels.... Hence----

But these men are a bit of dramatic color in the city’s life, whatever their sufferings. To see them following in droves through the bitter winter streets the great wagons which haul the snow away is fascinating, at times pitiful. I have seen old men with white beards and uncut snowy hair shoveling snow into a truck. I have seen lean, unfed strips of boys without overcoats and with long, lean, red hands protruding from undersized coat sleeves, doing the same thing. I have seen anæmic benchers and consumptives following along illy clad but shoveling weakly in the snow and cold.

It is a sad mix-up at best, this business of living. Fortune deals so haphazardly at birth and at death that it is hard to criticize. It so indifferently smashes the dreams of kings and beggars, dealing the golden sequins to the sleeping man, taking from the earnest plodder the little which he has gained, that one becomes, at last, confused. It is easy for many to criticize, for one reason and another, and justly mayhap, but at the same time it is so easy to see how it all may have come about. Wit has not always been present, but sickness, a perverted moral point of view, an error in honesty, and the climbing of years is over; the struggling toad has fallen back into the well. There is now nothing but struggle and crumb-picking at the bottom. And these are they.

And so these storms, like the bread-line, like the Bowery Lodging, offer them something; not much. A few days, and the snow will be over. A few days, and the sun of a warm day will end all opportunity for work. They will go back again into the gloomy adventuring whence they emerged. Only now they are visible collectively, here in the cold and the snow, shoveling.

I like to think of them best and worst, though, as I have seen them time and time again waiting outside the wagon barns at night, the labor of the day over. It is something even to be a “down-and-out” and stand waiting for a pittance which one has really earned. You can see something of the satisfaction of this even in this gloomy line. In the early dark of a winter evening, the street’s lamps lighted, these men are shuffling their feet to keep warm. They are waiting to be paid, as they are at the end of each work day, but in their hearts is a faint response to the thought of gain--one dollar and seventy-five cents for the long day in the cold. The quarter is yielded gladly. The contractor finds a fat profit in the many quarters he can so easily garner. But these? To them it is a satisfaction to get the wherewithal to face another day. It is something to have the money wherewith to obtain a lodging and a meal for a night. That one-seventy-five--how really large it must look, like fifty or a hundred or a thousand to some. Satisfactions and joys are all so relative. But they have really earned one dollar and seventy-five cents and can hurry away to that marvelous table of satisfaction which one dollar and seventy-five cents will provide.

THE FRESHNESS OF THE UNIVERSE

The freshness of the world’s original forces is one of the wonders which binds me in perpetual fascination. My own strength is a little thing. I am sometimes sick and sometimes well; some days I am bounding with enthusiastic life, at other times I am drooping with weariness and ill feeling. But these things, the great currents of original power which make the world, are fresh and forever renewing themselves.

Every morning I rise from my sleep restored and go out of doors, and there they are. At the foot of my garden is a river which has been running all night long, a swift and never-resting stream. It has been running so every day and every night for centuries and centuries--and thousands of centuries, for all I know--and yet here it runs. People have come and gone; nations have risen and fallen; all sorts of puny strengths have had their day and have perished; but this thing has never weakened nor modified itself nor changed,--at least not very much. Its life is so long and so strong.

And another thing that strikes me is the force and persistency of the winds. How sweet they are, how refreshing to the wearied body! I rise with sluggishness, and a sense of disgust with the world, mayhap, and yet here are the winds, fresh as in the beginning, to run me through and cool my face and hands and fill my breast with pure air and make me think the world is good again. I step out of my doorway, and here they are, blowing across the garden, shaking the leaves of the trees, rustling in the grass, fluttering at my coat-sleeves and my hair; and I am no whit the wiser as to what they are. Only I know that they are old, old, and yet as strong and invigorating as they ever were, and will be when my little strength is wasted and I am no more.

And here is the sun, bright, golden thing of the sky, which I may not even look at directly but which makes my day just the same. It is so invigorating, so healing, so beautiful. I know it is a commonplace, the thing that must have been before I could be, and yet it is so novel and fresh and new, even now. I rise, and this old sunlight is the newest thing in the world. Beside this day, which it makes, all things are old--my little house, which after all has stood only a few years; my possessions, dusty with standing a little while, and fading; myself, who am less young and strong by a day, getting older. And yet here it is, new after a million years--and a billion years, for aught I know--pouring this golden flood into my garden and making it what I wish it to be, new. The wonder of this force is appealing to me. It touches the innermost strangeness of my being.

And then there is the earth upon which I stand, strange chemic dust, here covered with grass but elsewhere covered with trees and flowers and hard habitations of men, yielding its perennial toll of beauty. We cannot understand the ground, but its newness, the perennial force with which it produces our food and beauty, this is so patent to all. I look at the ground beneath my feet, and lo, the agedness of it does not occur to me, only its freshness. The good ground! The new earth! This thing which is old, old--old as Time itself--must always have been and must always be. Where was it before it was here? What stars did it make, and moons? What ancient lives have trod this earth, this ground beneath my feet, and now make it? And yet how comes it that I who am so young find it so new to me and myself old as compared with its tremendous age! That is the wonder of this original force to me.