Chapter IV: Part 4

The ten and a half hours in the mill, with its humdrum rattle, its high-pitched hum, the regularity of its fixtures, the monotonousness of its routine, bullied my nerves into a tamed, cowed state. Day by day, day by day, day by day, at the appointed time, in the instructed way, with the same broom or the same-sized bunch of waste, to do the task! And there wanted to stir in me a schoolboy’s expression of vitality, a growing lad’s satisfaction in novelty! But all through the hours of light, from morning till evening, with the sun arising and departing, I had to listen to, and keep time with, the humming of wheels!

Consequently, when my feet felt the outside world at night or on Saturdays, at the first refreshing feel of the pure air which took that deep-lodged heat from my white cheeks, I always promised myself some exciting pleasure ere the day passed, to stimulate my cowed nerves and make me a boy again.

So I fell heart and soul into the scheme of a group of other boys who worked in the mill and lived near me. It was my first membership in a “gang.” It was presided over by a sturdy young Irishman, who, because he had lost a leg below the knee, was nicknamed, “Peter One-Leg-and-a-Half.” Peter worked in the mill, and examined cloth in the weave room. He thrilled our jaded nerves very successfully. We had ghost-play at night on the street, when he would spit fire, make phosphorescent writing on a tenement, lead a line of sheeted figures soberly in review through the night, and close the performance by hurling a battery of bad eggs at us, his admiring audience. Peter was King of the Night. He seemed to have the sight of a cat and the cunning of a fox. He led us at night over high board fences, on the other side of which, in the dark, we would almost choke ourselves against tight clotheslines. He taught us organized play, and, wise gang-leader which he unconsciously was, he changed our adventures and diversions so often that no complaints were made, and night time, with Peter in it, became the thrilling objective during my winter work.

For a short season, in the winter, the whole gang joined the club, which was kept for mill-boys and was supported by the corporation for which I worked. There were work-benches, checker-rooms, a poorly equipped gymnasium, seemingly always in the possession of the adults, and every now and then an entertainment occurred, when some imported entertainer with talent would be invited to come from his or her aristocratic home--with a group of “slummers,” usually and divert us. We thought most of them very tame, resented the manual training department because we thought ten hour’s work sufficient for one day, and got what pleasure we could from the entertainments. One man told us, among other things in a memorable address, to “whistle when you’re happy and whistle when you’re in danger of feeling mad. Whistling gives courage, like yells at a football game. Whistle, boys, whistle. It’s a sign that your courage is good!” That point impressed itself on Peter, too, for when we left the club that night at nine o’clock (to stay on the streets till ten), he lined us up like soldiers in review, and thus addressed us, “Company halt all ready, whistle!” We put our fingers in our mouths and produced a profusion of vibrant whistles, which indicated that we were the most courageous and happy lads in the world. Then Peter, stumping ahead, led us militantly up a street, stooping every now and then under a street lamp to call out, “All the happy ones whistle, you!”

_Chapter XI. Esthetic Adventures made possible by a Fifteen-Dollar Piano_

_Chapter XI. Esthetic Adventures made possible by a Fifteen-Dollar Piano_

It was late in that winter that the trading instinct cropped out in my uncle and aunt. They decided to open a candy-store in the tenement where we lived. For this purpose the landlord was persuaded to allow them to use the bow window for display purposes. The parlor was fitted with a small counter, a large store lamp, and a various assortment of sodas, confectionery and pastry.

That was a prohibition year in city politics, and the tenement thirst was pronounced to be “something awful!” Desperate men were compelled to go away on holidays and Saturdays to get what refreshment they could. The police were on keen watch for illegal selling. They were making daily raids in different parts of the city. Liquors had been found in cellars, hidden under the floors, in flasks buried in the bodies of huge codfish, water-pipes had been cut off from the main pipes and tapped to barrels of whisky and beer; every trick possible to the imagination seemed to have been uncovered, yet my aunt undertook to let some chosen throats in the neighborhood know that she planned to keep a supply of intoxicants on hand.

I was asked, at night, to take a pint of whiskey here and there to some shut-in woman like Old Burnt Jane, a cripple from a fire, who always let tears fall in the food she was cooking as she said: “Wait, wait, little boy, dearie. I’ll get my mon-ey when I’ve got this taste of cheese off; wait like a good little boy!”

Our customers, who came for a drink at any time, had a secret sign whereby they could ask for intoxicants without mentioning them by name. On Sundays, our kitchen would be filled with men and women having their thirsts quenched. My Aunt Millie rubbed her hands with satisfaction over the prosperous business she did.

But one Sunday afternoon there came three plain-clothes men to the shop. The alarm had been given, and Aunt Millie waited for the raid with no outward traces of fear. There were some people at the rear of the house, and they were engaged in a very busy, “manufactured” conversation about “Charley’s throat trouble” when the officers came in the back to investigate. If they sniffed the air for traces of whisky, they only got a superabundance of “mint” and “musk,” “lozengers” half thrown into the customers’ mouths by Aunt Millie. A “complete” investigation was made, covering the back-yard, the cellar, the kitchen, the counter, and the bedrooms, but no illegal wares were found, and the officers left the shop in chagrin. As they left, my Aunt Millie bent her fond gaze towards a row of black bottles that stood in a row in the display window, marked, “Ginger,” “Spruce,” and “Birch.”

“You dear creatures,” she cried, “what a salvation you are!” Whereat, she took one to the back room, uncorked it, and poured out a noggin of whiskey apiece for each of her customers, and the “throat trouble” gave way to a discussion of, “What tasty stuff it is, this whiskey!”

Shortly after this, my uncle was discharged for staying out from work one morning, after a night of intoxication, and he finally secured a new position in the South End. Rather than have the fuss of going to his work on the street-cars, he rented a house, and we removed. This house was a cottage, the first one we had lived in since coming to America. It stood on a street corner, near a wide square, where the thousands of cyclists came after supper for road races, “runs,” and a circle around the neck of land which jutted out into Buzzards Bay. Ours was the show place of that neighborhood; from the branches of the rotting cherry tree in the front yard, I could watch the crowds come and go, without the trouble of going away from the house. Directly opposite us, buried in a maze of maple branches, with a high-fenced yard back of it, stood an Orphan’s Home. The street-car line terminated in front of our door. It was, to me, a very aristocratic neighborhood indeed. I felt somewhat puffed up about it. There were several saloons within a few minute’s walk. My aunt regarded that as a feature not to be despised. She had explained to uncle: “You see we can get it in cans, and not have to go and sit away from home and all its comforts.”

This change of residence meant also a change of work for me. I left the spinning-room, left Curley, Mallet, Mary, Zippy, and the others, and went into the mule-room to learn back-boying with my uncle.

The mule-room is generally the most skilled section of a cotton-mill. Its machinery is more human in its action than is a loom, or a carding machine, or a ring-spinning frame. There are no women or girls in a mule-spinning room. Men spin the yarn, and boys attend to the wants of the machines as back-boys, tubers, and doffers.

One Saturday afternoon, shortly after we had settled in our new home, aunt and uncle went cityward, entered a music store, and said, “We want to look over a piano.”

The clerk immediately took them in the direction of the high-priced, latest models.

“No,” said aunt, “them’s not the ones we want to buy. Mister, you haven’t got something cheaper, have you?”

“How cheap?” asked the clerk.

“Well,” said my aunt, “I shouldn’t care to go very high. Say a second-hander.”

The clerk took them to the rear of the store, to a dim corner. Here he turned on the light, and showed a row of table-pianos. Aunt and uncle stopped before one of them, a scratched, faded veteran, of many concert-hall and ballroom experiences. Its keys were yellow, with black, gaps where some were missing. One of the pedal rods was broken off, while the other was fastened with thin wire. Uncle, with professional nonchalance, whirled a creaky stool to the desired height, sat down, turned back his cuffs, and struck a handful of chords, like a warhorse in battle again, with a vivid reminiscence of old English public-house days. There came from the depths of the aged lyre a tinkling, tinpannish strain of mixed flats.

“It’s real good,” smiled my aunt.

“It needs tuning,” commented the clerk.

“How much is it worth, tuned?” asked my uncle.

“Fifteen dollars,” announced the clerk.

“On time, how much?” asked aunt eagerly. “We can only put in three dollars on this at first,” she said.

“Fifteen dollars on credit, at your own terms,” said the clerk, after a brief consultation with the manager in the office. “We need the room, and will be glad to get it out of the way.” “It’s ours, then,” said my uncle. “Send it down as soon as you get it tuned,” he directed.

When they told me about the purchase, uncle announced, “It will keep me at home, I hope, and away from the saloons. It will be fine to get to playing again. I miss it so. I must be all out of practise.”

When the piano did come, and it was established in the front room, I spent a whole evening in fingering it. There was only one defect about it,--when uncle played a tune, one of the keys had a fault of sticking, so that he had to lift it bodily into place, and that somewhat broke in on the melody he was engaged on.

“But what can you expect for fifteen dollars,” he commented, philosophically. “When folks are singing with it, I can skip it, an’ it won’t be noticed much.”

The advent of the piano made my days in the mill lighter to bear. My uncle had proposed to teach me to play on it at night if I would practise faithfully. He took pains to elaborate the truth that great musicians, who had come to fame in the earth, had done so only at the cost of infinite pains in practise.

“Never mind,” I responded, “I’ll learn, sure enough, and I may give lessons some day.” So, during work-hours, I was given the scale to memorize.

“F,a,c,e, is the name of the spaces,” he taught. “Face, it spells; you can remember that.” Then he had me memorize the notes on the lines, and then he let me try it on the piano, a night of joy to me. Day after day I would plan for these practises, and in three regular lessons, of two weeks’ duration, I had the joy of grinding out my first real four-part tune. I had been practising laboriously, with a strict regard for exact time, the selection he had set before me, when he called from the kitchen, “Hurry up the tune a bit, Al!” I did, and I was bewildered to find that the chaotic tangle of notes resolved itself, when played faster, into the simple, universal melody, “Home, Sweet Home!”

But I found not enough patience, after being in the mill all day, to isolate myself every night in the house when there was fresh air to enjoy outside, so I told uncle that I had better give up taking lessons. I could not keep them up. I wanted the fresh air more.

But uncle was loath for me to do that. “I want you to do something else besides work in the mill,” he remonstrated. About this time, I became acquainted with Alf Martin, a back-boy, who was playing the piano. His father worked on the mules next to my uncle. The two men talked the matter over, and one day Alf told me that the woman he was taking lessons from, a Miss Flaffer, had said she would give me fifty-cent lessons for thirty-five cents! My uncle said he would pay half of the cost, and in spite of my previous abandonment of music, I succumbed to this scheme, secretly, in my heart, glad of the opportunity of taking lessons from so fine a lady as Alf told me Miss Flaffer was.

“When you pay for lessons,” said my uncle, “you’ll think more of them. I could only take you as far as vamping, and you want to do more than that.”

Previous to this, I had gotten as much joy, during the week’s work, from anticipations of cream puffs, pork pies, and such minor Saturday joys, but now I had a piano lesson, a real music-lesson, to engage my mind, and that was a very cheerful week spent behind the mules. Alf and I spent much time, when we could get away from the eyes of the bosses, talking over Miss Flaffer, and I came to understand that she was a fine woman indeed.

The following Saturday afternoon, then, I took my _Beginner’s Book_, tied it in a roll and fastened it with twine, and went on the street-car to a very aristocratic part of the city. It was the part where, on first landing in America, I had gone on summer days, asking at the back doors if I might pick the pears that had fallen to the lawns from the trees.

Miss Flaffer’s house was a very small cottage, with a small piazza at its front, and with a narrow lawn, edged by a low fence, running around it. It was altogether a very pretty place, with its new paint, its neat windows, and the flowers between the curtains. The front steps had evidently never been trodden on by foot of man, for why did they shine so with paint! There was not a scratch on the porch, nor a pencil mark. I looked at the number, at the engraved door-plate, and found that “S. T. Flaffer” did reside within. A great, cold perspiration dripped from me as I put a trembling finger on the push-button. I heard an answering bell somewhere in the depths of the house, and then wished that I might run away. It seemed so bold a thing for me, a mill-boy, to be intruding myself on such aristocratic premises. But I could not move, and then Miss Flaffer herself opened the door!

Oh, dream of neatness, sweetness, and womanly kindness! Miss Flaffer was that to me at the moment. She was a picture, that put away my aunt and all the tenement women who came into our house for beer-drinking, put them away from memory entirely. I thought that she would send me home, and tell me to look tidy before I knocked at her door, or that I had made a mistake, and that such a woman, with her white hands, could not be giving thirty-five cent piano lessons to Al Priddy, a mill-boy!

Oh, how awkward, self-conscious, and afraid I felt as I went across that threshold and looked on comforts that were luxuries to me! There was a soft, loose rug on a hardwood, polished floor, on which, at first, I went on a voyage halfway, when the crumpled rug half tripped me and I caught desperately at a fragile chair and half wrenched it from position to stay myself, yet Miss Flaffer did not scold me, nor did she seem to notice me. Then, as we went through a luxurious dining-room (where they did nothing but eat meals!), I found myself bringing my foot down on the train of Miss Flaffer’s dress. Yet, when the confusion was over, she never made a single reference to it, though I felt that I ought to ask her if I had torn it. She led me to a little studio, where, in a curtained alcove, stood a black upright piano polished like a mirror, and before it a stool, which did not squeak like ours when turned into position.

When the preliminary examination was over, and I was seated at the piano, Miss Flaffer asked me to play “Home, Sweet Home” as I had learned under my uncle’s instruction. I had been so used to the hard, mechanical working of uncle’s instrument that I naturally pounded unduly on Miss Flaffer’s, until she politely and graciously said, “Please do not raise your fingers so high,” and to that end, she placed two coppers on my hand, and told me to play the tune without letting them drop.

After the tune, and while Miss Flaffer had left the room to get her notebook, I noted with chagrin that my perspiring fingers had left marks on the snowy keyboard where they would surely be seen. I listened, and heard Miss Flaffer rummaging among some books, and then desperately spat on my coat cuff and rubbed the keyboard vigorously until I thought that I had obliterated the traces of my fingers. Then Miss Flaffer returned, and I tried to act unconcernedly by whistling, under my breath, “After the Ball.”

By the time the lesson was over, it was raining outside, and Miss Flaffer said, “I have to go to the corner of the next street, Albert. (Albert!) I want you to share my umbrella with me so that you will not get wet.”

I mumbled, “All right, I don’t care if I do,” and prepared to go. Before we had left the house I had put on my hat twice and opened and shut the door once in my extreme excitement. Then we went out, and there rushed to my mind, from my reading, the startling question, “How to act when walking on the street with a fine woman, and there is an umbrella?” I said, when we were on the sidewalk, “Please let me carry that,” and pointed to the umbrella. “Certainly,” she said, and handed it to me. Before we had attained the corner, I had managed to poke the ends of the umbrella ribs down on Miss Flaffer’s hat, and to knock it somewhat askew. I found, also, that I was shielding myself to such an extent as to leave Miss Flaffer exposed to the torrents of rain. On the street corner, she took the umbrella, and, as my car came into view, she said, “Good-by, Albert. You did very well to-day. Practise faithfully, and be sure to come next week.” I called, “So long,” and ran for the car.

I only took two other lessons from Miss Flaffer. I never had the manners to send her word that I could no longer afford them. I was afraid that she would offer to teach me free, and I could not stand the confinement to the house after a hard day in the mill. But I had learned something besides piano-playing with her. I had seen fine manners contrasted against my own uncouth ways. I had seen a dustless house contrasted against my own ill-kept home. I had been called Albert!

_Chapter XII. Machinery and Manhood_

_Chapter XII. Machinery and Manhood_

My work in the spinning-room, in comparison with my new work in the mule-room, had been mere child’s play. At last the terror of the mill began to blacken my life. The romance, the glamour, and the charm were gone by this only a daily dull, animal-like submission to hard tasks had hold of me now.

Five days of the week, at the outer edge of winter, I never stood out in the daylight. I was a human mole, going to work while the stars were out and returning home under the stars. I saw none of the world by daylight, except the staring walls, high picket-fences, and drab tenements of that immediate locality. The sun rose and set on the wide world outside, rose and set five times a week, but I might as well have been in a grave; there was no exploration abroad.

The mule-room atmosphere was kept at from eighty-five to ninety degrees of heat. The hardwood floor burned my bare feet. I had to gasp quick, short gasps to get air into my lungs at all. My face seemed swathed in continual fire. The tobacco chewers expectorated on the floor, and left little pools for me to wade through. Oil and hot grease dripped down behind the mules, sometimes falling on my scalp or making yellow splotches on my overalls or feet. Under the excessive heat my body was like a soft sponge in the fingers of a giant; perspiration oozed from me until it seemed inevitable that I should melt away at last. To open a window was a great crime, as the cotton fiber was so sensitive to wind that it would spoil. (Poor cotton fiber!) When the mill was working, the air in the mule-room was filled with a swirling, almost invisible cloud of lint, which settled on floor, machinery, and employees, as snow falls in winter. I breathed it down my nostrils ten and a half hours a day; it worked into my hair, and was gulped down my throat. This lint was laden with dust, dust of every conceivable sort, and not friendly at all to lungs.

There are few prison rules more stringent than the rules I worked under in that mule-room. There are few prisoners watched with sterner guards than were the bosses who watched and ordered me from this task to that.

There was a rule against looking out of a window. The cotton mills did not have opaque glass or whitewashed windows, then. There was a rule against reading during work-hours. There was a rule preventing us from talking to one another. There was a rule prohibiting us from leaving the mill during work-hours. We were not supposed to sit down, even though we had caught up with our work. We were never supposed to stop work, even when we could. There was a rule that anyone coming to work a minute late would lose his work. The outside watchman always closed the gate the instant the starting whistle sounded, so that anyone unfortunate enough to be outside had to go around to the office, lose time, and find a stranger on his job, with the prospect of being out of work for some time to come.

For the protection of minors like myself, two notices were posted in the room, and in every room of the mill. They were rules that represented what had been done in public agitation for the protection of such as I: rules which, if carried out, would have taken much of the danger and the despair from my mill life. They read:

“The cleaning of machinery while it is in motion is positively forbidden!”

“All Minors are hereby prohibited from working during the regular stopping hours!”

If I had insisted on keeping the first law, I should not have held my position in the mule-room more than two days. The mule-spinners were on piece work, and their wages depended upon their keeping the mules in motion, consequently the back-boy was _expected_, by a sort of unwritten understanding, to do all the cleaning he could, either while the machines were in motion or during the hours when they were stopped, as during the noon-hour or before the mill started in the morning. If a back-boy asked for the mules to be stopped while he did the cleaning, he was laughed at, and told to go to a very hot place along with his “nerve.” I should have been deemed incapable had I demanded that the machinery be stopped for me. The spinner would have merely said, “Wait till dinner time!”

Not choosing to work during the stopping hour, I should merely have been asked to quit work, for the spinner could have made it impossible for me to retain my position.

So I just adapted myself to conditions as they were, and broke the rules without compunction. I had to clean fallers, which, like teeth, chopped down on one’s hand, unless great speed and precautions were used. I stuck a hand-brush into swift-turning pulleys, and brushed the cotton off; I dodged past the mules and the iron posts they met, just in time to avoid being crushed. Alfred Skinner, a close friend of mine, had his body pinned and crushed badly. I also tried to clean the small wheels which ran on tracks while they were in motion, and, in doing so, I had to crawl under the frame and follow the carriage as it went slowly forward, and dodge back rapidly as the carriage came back on the jump. In cleaning these wheels, the cotton waste would lump, and in the mad scramble not to have the wheels run over it to lift the carriage and do great damage to the threads, I would risk my life and fingers to extract the waste in time. One day the wheel nipped off the end of my little finger, though that was nothing at all in comparison to what occurred to some of my back-boy friends in other mills. Jimmy Hendricks to-day is a dwarfed cripple from such an accident. Hern Hanscom has two fingers missing, Earl Rogers had his back broken horribly. Yet the notices always were posted, the company was never liable, and the back-boy had no one but himself to blame; yet he could not be a back-boy without taking the risk, which shows how much humanity there can be in law.

Legally I worked ten and a half hours, though actually the hours were very much longer. The machinery I could not clean while in motion, and which the spinner would not stop for me during work-hours, I had to leave until noon or early morning. Then, too, the spinner I worked for paid me to take over some of his work that could be done during the stopping hours, so that there was a premium on those valuable hours, and I got very little time out of doors or at rest. There were generally from three to four days in the week when I worked thirteen and thirteen hours and a half a day, in order to catch up with the amount of work that I had to do to retain my position.

In all, at this time I had five men over me who had the right to boss me. They were: two spinners, the overseer, second hand, and third hand. One of the spinners was a kindly man, very considerate of my strength and time, while the other was the most drunken and violent-tempered man in the room. He held his position only by virtue of having married the overseer’s sister. He was a stunted, bow-legged man, always in need of a shave. He wagged a profane tongue on the slightest provocation, and tied to me the most abusive epithets indecency ever conjured with. He always came to work on Monday mornings with a severe headache, a sullen mood, and filled himself with Jamaica ginger, which, on account of its percentage of alcohol, served him the same palatable, stimulating, and satisfying functions of whisky without making him unfit to walk up and down his alley between his dangerous mules.

By having to be in the mill when the machinery was stopped, I was forced to listen to the spinners as they held their lewd, immoral, and degenerate conversation. It was rarely that a decent subject was touched upon; there seemed to be few men there willing to exclude profligacy from the rote. This was because “Fatty” Dunding, a rounded knot of fat, with a little twisted brain and a black mouth, was the autocrat of the circle, and, withal, a man who delighted to talk openly of his amours and his dirty deeds. As there were no women or girls in the room, significant words and suggestive allusions were shouted back and forth over the mules, whisperings, not too low for a skulking, fascinated boy, hidden behind a wastebox, to drink in, were in order during the noon-hour. The brothel, the raid of a brothel, the selling of votes, and references to women, formed the burden of these conferences. Occasionally some spinner would “Hush” out loud, there would be a warning hand held up, but only occasionally.

God had not endowed me with any finer feelings than most of the lads I worked with, but outside the mill I put myself in closer touch with refining things than some of them: reading, occasional attendance on a Sunday-school and a mission, and in me there was always a never-to-be-downed ambition to get an education. That is why those conversations I was forced to hear were like mud streaks daubed with a calloused finger across a clear conscience. It was like hearkening to the licking of a pig in a sty after God in His purity has said sweet things. I felt every fine emotion toward womankind, and toward manhood, brutalized, impiously assaulted. I felt part of the guilt of it because I was linked in work with it all. That mule-room and its associations became repugnant. My spirit said, “I will not stand it.” My will said, “You’ll have to. What else can you do?”

That became the question which held the center of the state in my rebellion against the mill. “What else could I do?”

I wanted an education. I wanted to take my place among men who did more than run machines. I wanted to “make something of myself.”

The arousement of this ambitious spirit in me was curiously linked with the reading of a great number of five-cent novels which had to do with the “Adventures” of Frank Merriwell. This young hero was a manly man, who lived an ideal moral life among a group of unprincipled, unpopular, and even villainous students at Yale College. Frank had that Midas touch by which every character he touched, no matter how sodden, immediately became changed to pure gold. Frank himself was an intense success in everything he did or undertook. He preached temperance, purity of speech, decency, fairness, and honor. He had both feet on the topmost principle in the moral code. True, with romantic prodigality he did everything under any given conditions with epic success. If he went to a track-meet as a spectator, and the pole vaulter suddenly had a twisted tendon, Frank could pull off his coat, take the pole and at the first try, smash all existing records. A Shakesperian actor would be suddenly taken ill, and Frank would leap from a box, look up the stage manager, dress, and take the rôle so successfully that everybody would be amazed at his art. It was the same with all branches of sport, or study, of social adventure--he did everything in championship form. But back of it all were good habits, fair speech, heroic chivalry, and Christian manliness, and the reading of it did me good, aroused my romantic interest in college, made me eager to live as clean a life as Frank amidst such profligacy as I had to meet. That reading spoiled me ever after for the mill, even if there had been nothing else to spoil me. I, too, a poor mill lad, with little chance for getting money, with so sober a background as was against my life, wanted to make my mark in the world as the great figures in history had done. I immediately made a special study of the literature of ambition. I took the Success Magazine, read the first part of Beecher’s biography, where he made a tablecloth of an old coat, and fought through adverse circumstances. I fellowshipped with Lincoln as he sprawled on the hearth and made charcoal figures on the shovel. I felt that there must be something beyond the mill for me. But the question always came, “What else can you do?”

And the question had great, tragic force, too. I had not strength enough to make a success in the mule-room. I had an impoverished supply of muscle. My companions could outlift me, outwork me, and the strenuous, unhealthy work was weakening me. The long hours without fresh air made me faint and dizzy. One of the back-boys, himself a sturdy fellow, in fun, poked my chest, and when I gave back with pain, he laughed, and sneered “Chicken-breasted!” That humiliated me, and I might have been found thereafter gasping in the vitiated air, enthused by the hope that I could increase my chest expansion a few inches; and I also took small weights and worked them up and down with the intention of thickening my muscles!

“What else can you do?” That haunted me. It would not be long before I should have to give in: to tell my overseer that I had not strength enough to do the work. Yet, as if Fate had obsessed me with the idea, I could not bring myself to think that the world was open to exploration; that there were easier tasks. I was curiously under the power of the fatalistic, caste thought, that _once a mill-boy, always a mill-boy_. I could not conceive there was any other chance in another direction. That was part of the terror of the mill in those days.

So that dream, “to make something of myself,” with a college appended, only made my days in the mill harder to bear. When the sun is warm, and you, yourself are shut in a chilly room, the feeling is intensified tragedy.

But day after day I had to face the thousands of bobbins I had in charge and keep them moving. Thousands of things turning, turning, turning, emptying, emptying, emptying, and requiring quick fingers to keep moving. A fight with a machine is the most cunning torture man can face--when the odds are in favor of the machine. There are no mistaken calculations, no chances with a machine except a break now and then of no great consequence. A machine never tires, is never hungry, has no heart to make it suffer. It never sleeps, and has no ears to listen to that appeal for “mercy,” which is sent to it. A machine is like Fate. It is Fate, itself. On, on, on, on it clicks, relentlessly, insistently, to the end, in the set time, in the set way! It neither goes one grain too fast or too slow. Once started, it must go on, and on, and on, to the end of the task. Such was the machine against which I wrestled--in vain. It was feeding Cerebus, with its insatiable appetite. The frames were ever hungry; there was always a task ahead, yes, a dozen tasks ahead, even after I had worked, exerted myself to the uttermost. I never had the consolation of knowing that I had done my work. _The machine always won._

I did take a rest. I had to steal it, just as a slave would. I had to let the machine go on, and on, and on without me sometimes, while I took a rest and let the tasks multiply. That meant double effort after I got up, getting in the mill a little earlier on the morrow, a shorter time for dinner at noon. The tasks had to be done in the end, but I took some rest. I hid from the eyes of the overseer, the second hand, the third hand, and the spinners, behind waste boxes and posts, and had spare minutes with a book I had brought in and hidden under some cotton, or with dreaming about “making something of myself, some day.” If I let myself dream beyond the minute, a vile oath would seek me out, and I would hear my Jamaica-ginger-drinking-spinner sneering, “You filthy----! Get that oiling done!”

_Chapter XIII. How my Aunt and Uncle Entertained the Spinners_

_Chapter XIII. How my Aunt and Uncle Entertained the Spinners_

Meantime there was poor consolation in my home. Aunt and uncle were drinking every night. Aunt, with the advantage over my uncle, was drinking much during the day.

When our dinners came, carried by a neighbor’s boy, they were generally cold, cheerless combinations of canned tongue, store bread lavishly spread with butter, jelly roll, and a bottle of cold soda water, either strawberry or ginger flavor! We knew what that sort of dinner meant. Aunt Millie was drunk at home, too much intoxicated to make a warm dinner. We had to work through the afternoon, knowing that when we arrived home at night we should find her either at a saloon, in a back room at a neighbor’s, or at home, helpless, incoherent.

“Oh, Al,” sighed my uncle, “I don’t see what we’re coming to. What’s the use of you and me slaving here and she taking on so? Do you wonder, lad, that it’s hard for me to keep a pledge? It just drives me mad. Here we have to go on through the day, working ourselves to death, only to have the money go in that way! It’s torture, and always sets me off into drink, too!”

When we arrived home on such nights, uncle would have stored up an afternoon of wrath, and, on entering the house, would unload it on aunt. She would work herself into an hysterical paroxysm, screaming, shrieking, pawing, and frothing at the mouth, so that uncle would suddenly leave her to me and go off for the night to a saloon.

In the morning, when both were sober, would occur the real disheartening quarrel, when aunt would tell uncle he lied if he said she had been drunk; the words would get more and more heated until, in an unbearable fit of rage, insults would be exchanged and lead up to a struggle, a bloody struggle, that sometimes was on the threshold of murder.

That day there would be no dinner for us at all, and I would have to run out to the gates and buy something like an apple-roll or a pie. At night we would find aunt sitting down, perfectly sober, but silent, and with no supper ready.

“Get it yourself, you old fiend,” she would announce. Uncle would leave the house and get his meal in an eating-house, while aunt would make me a supper and scold me while I ate it, for she always considered me as one of her secret enemies, and linked my name with my uncle’s in almost every quarrel.

But there were few quarrels of long standing between my foster parents. They were generally patched up with a drink or two. Then the wheel would turn again and produce exactly the same conditions as before.

One day, uncle, in a noble-minded effort to get away from temptation, told us that he had decided to board in another place, where he could live in peace. But aunt visited all the boarding-houses that she knew, finally found her husband in one at the North End, and scolded him so unmercifully, and unloaded so much weight of family history, that he came back to the South End with her on the car, took a pail, and brought back a quart of beer, and things went on as before.

After we had established our piano, and when uncle had become well acquainted with the spinners, he proposed to invite some of them with their wives for a “house-warming.”

The event occurred on a Saturday night. “Fatty” Dunding came, and brought an unknown woman with him, whom he tickled under the chin in play quite often, and told her that she was a “stunner in that new piece of hair, even better looking than in t’other lighter shade!” Tom Fellows, a tall man with a poetic face, brought his wife and child, a baby of seven months. There was a bass-voiced spinner named Marvin present, and he brought a roll of music with him.

“What hast’ got in, Stanny?” asked “Fatty.” “Summat to warm cockles o’ t’ ’eart?”

Uncle told him that there was half a barrel of beer in the cellar: that there were several bottles of port wine in the pantry, and that there was a taste of whiskey and a few softer drinks on hand.

By eight o’clock the program began to shape itself. Marvin undid his roll, at the first request, placed before my uncle a copy of “White Wings,” and asked, as the Hadfield bassoes had in the former days in the parlors of the “Linnet’s Nest,” and the “Blue Sign,” “Can t’ play it?”

And uncle responded, “Hum it o’er!” Marvin bent down his head as if in the act of telling a secret, hummed it over for a few bars, when uncle, after fingering with his chords, struck the pitch, and began to vamp gloriously.

“Wait till I play t’ introduction,” he said, and he hunched back, and confidently “introduced” the air to the satisfaction of all. Marvin sang “White Wings,” and after he had dampened his pipe with a noggin of whiskey, he asked uncle if he knew “I am a Friar of Orders Grey?”

Uncle said, again, “Hum it o’er.” When the introduction had been given, Marvin began a tumbling performance on the low notes that won great applause.

“Tha’ went so low, lad, that we couldna’ ’ear thee, eh, folks?” grinned “Fatty.”

“Hear, hear! Hen-core, hen-core!” shouted the audience, but Marvin said that he’d better rest. Singing low tickled his whistle unduly.

But uncle knew “Sally In Our Alley,” which Tom Fellows sang with a lift of his light brows at the high notes, and a crinkling of his chin as he bent his head to get the low ones. Tom had almost a feminine voice; a romantic chord ran through all his singing, so that he was at his best in an original song of his, which he had written shortly before and was having the bandmaster set to four-part music for the piano. “Hum it,” said uncle. And Tom went through the usual process until uncle had the key, the time, and the chords. Tom’s song, which was later published at his own expense, began:

“Bright was the day,
Bells ringing gay,
When to church I brought my Sue.
I felt so proud
’Mongst all the crowd”--

and Uncle Stanwood considerably increased his reputation for improvisation when at the end of the verse, where Tom lingered lovingly on the sentiment to the extent of four full rests, he introduced a set of trills!

With this part of the program over, the company retired to the cellar, where there was a boarded floor, a man with a concertina, and a half-barrel of beer. There followed a square dance and some more singing, but the beer was the chief enjoyment.

It was not long before drink had inflamed the peculiarities of temper of our guests. “Fatty” let loose his oaths and his foul speech, while Uncle Stanwood nearly got into a fight with him over it, but was prevented by Tom Fellows falling against him, in a drunken lurch, thereby diverting the issue. My aunt’s tongue had a sting to it, and she was in a corner telling Mrs. Fellows that she, Mrs. Fellows, was not married to Tom, or else she would have her marriage certificate framed in the house, or, at least, could show it in the photograph album! Marvin was roaring “Rule Britannia,” with the energy and incoherency of a bull. I told “Fatty” that he had better go home or else I would send for the police, and when he aimed his fist at my head, I merely dodged and he fell with a crash to the floor and went off into a piggish snoring. Tom Fellows took his drunken leave, forgetting his wife, who was just then calling my aunt a series of uncomplimentary names. In some sort of way, our guests left us in the early morning. Then I saw that aunt and uncle were safely to sleep where they chanced to have stumbled, turned out the lamps, locked the door, and went to bed.

The next morning the Sabbath sun lighted up a sickening memento of the house-warming. Glasses were scattered about with odorous dregs of liquor in them. Chairs were overturned, and there were big splotches on the tablecloth in the kitchen, where port wine had been spilled. There was a lamp still burning, which I had overlooked, and it was sending out a sickly, oily fume. The house was like a barroom, with bottles scattered about the kitchen, clothes that had been left, and my foster parents yet in a drunken sleep where I had left them!

When Monday morning came, uncle was unfit to go to work. He told Aunt Millie so, and she immediately scolded him and worked herself in so violent a rage that the matter ended by uncle picking up some of his clothes and saying, “This is the last you’ll see of me, Dame! I’m going to some other place where I’ll be away from it. Al, there, can keep you on his four dollars a week--if he wants! I’m done!”

“And how about the debts, you--coward!” cried aunt. “I’ll send the police after you, mind!”

“Let debts go to the dogs,” said my uncle. “You’ll always manage to have the beer-wagon call!” And then he left the house.

He did not come to work that morning, and when the overseer asked me where he was, I said that uncle had left home and would not be back, so a spare man was put on uncle’s mules.

That day, opened with such gloom, was one of thick shadows for me. The outlook was certainly disheartening. Why should I have to stand it all? It was my wages that were making some of this squalor possible. It was my money that helped purchase the beer. Then the old question obtruded itself: “What other thing can you do? You’ll have to stay in the mill!”

I lost my heart then. I saw no way out from the mill, yet I knew that in the end, and that not long removed, the mill would overpower me and set me off on one side, a helpless, physical wreck. It was just a matter of a year or two, and that waiting line of out-of-works, which always came into the mule-room in the morning, would move up one, as the head boy was given my place.

Late in that afternoon, with the hands on the clock going slower than ever, and the bitterness of my life full before me, I began to think of suicide. I imagined that it would be the easiest and safest exit from it all. It would end the misery, the pain, the distraction, and the impending uselessness of my body for work! It was so easy, too. I took up a three-pound weight, and put it on a pile of bobbins high above my head. I balanced it on the edge where the merest touch would allow it to crash to the floor. Then I experimented with it, allowing it to fall to see how much force there was to it. I speculated as to whether it would kill me instantly or not. It was a great temptation. It just meant a touch of the finger, a closing of the eyes, a holding of the breath, and it would be over! I tried to imagine how sorry and repentant my aunt and uncle would feel. It might make them stop drinking. It was worth doing, then. But suddenly there loomed up the fact that there are two sides to a grave, and the thought of God, a judgment, and an eternity dazed me. I was afraid. I put the weight back, and thought: “Well, I guess I’ll have to do the best I can, but it’s hard!”

_Chapter XIV. Bad Deeds in a Union for Good Works_

_Chapter XIV. Bad Deeds in a Union for Good Works_

After he had been away from home two weeks, uncle sent us a letter from a Rhode Island mill-town, informing us that he had the malaria, bad. Would one of us come and bring him home? There was a postscript which read: “Be sure and come for me either on a Monday, Wednesday, or a Friday. They are the alternate days when I don’t have the shivers.”

The day he came home he and aunt patched up peace over a pailful of beer, and there the matter ended, save that echoes of it would be heard at the next wrangle. Uncle took his place in one of the long lines of unemployed that wait for work at the end of the mill alleys. The expenses of the household were dependent upon the four dollars and a half I was earning at the time.

Then came the oppressive hot days of summer, with their drawn-out days with sun and cheerful huckleberry fields in their glory, a summer day which I could not enjoy because I was shut out from it by the mill windows, and it was against the rules to look out of them. Some of the fellows left their work in the summer, and loafed like plutocrats, having the whole day and three meals to themselves. But if I had loafed I should have had neither money nor peace. My aunt would have made a loafing day so miserable for me that I should have been glad to be away from her scolding. Neither would she have fed me, and, all in all, I should have been the loser.

But the evenings were long and cool after the mill closed for the night. From half-past six to ten offered me many enticements, chief among which was the privilege of roaming the streets with the Point Roaders, a gang of mill-boys, into which I was admitted after I had kicked the shins of “Yellow Belly,” the leader. I was naturally drawn to make friends with Jakey McCarty, a merry fellow of deep designs, who would put a string around my neck while pretending to plan a walk somewhere, or have his finger in my pocket, poking for cigarette money, while talking about the peggy game he had last played.

In the winter we had a very lonesome time of it, as a gang. All we could do that was exciting included standing on a drug-store corner, where we splashed the icy waters of a drinking trough in one another’s faces, or attended, en masse, an indoor bicycle race at the “Rink,” then in its glory. But we kept very close to the drinking trough, as money was not very plentiful.

I grew tired of mere loafing, and I finally persuaded Jakey McCarty, who liked reading, to go with me and visit the public library at least once a week, when we secured books, and while there also rooted among the back numbers of illustrated magazines and comic papers and made a night of it. But the gang resented this weekly excursion and separation, and various members reproached us with the stigma, “Libree-struck!” which, I always supposed, carried with it the same significance as “sun struck,” _i.e._, crazy over books.

In the following spring, though, the gang put up a parallel bar in an empty lot, and spent the early evenings in athletic diversions. When darkness came on, there were usually Wild West hold-ups, Indian dances, and cattle round-ups, in imitation of the features we read in the five-cent novels we bought and exchanged among ourselves. Then, with the putting on of long trousers, the gang became more active, and roamed at night over a broader area than before. Two of the gang even left us because they were “love-struck.”