Whenever a circus or a fête, like the semi-centennial of the city, was advertised, the gang always planned to attend, in spite of the fact that the mills would not shut down. Six of us, in one room, by keeping away at noon, could cripple the mule-room so seriously that it could not run, and the spinners would get an afternoon off. Sometimes a group of spinners would hint to us to stay out that they might have a chance. That was my first experience in a form of labor-unionism.
Some of the men we worked under in the mill had a club-room, where they played table games, drank beer when the saloons were legally closed, and had Saturday night smokers, which my uncle attended, and where he was generally called upon to “vamp” on the piano.
The gang used to haunt this club, and, when there was a concert on, would climb up and look in the windows. Finally we decided that we ought to have a club-room of our own. We sought out and rented a shanty which had served as a tiny shop, we pasted pictures of actresses, prize fighters, and bicycle champions around the walls, had a small card table covered with magazines and newspapers, and initiated ourselves into the “club.”
The evenings of the first week we occupied, mainly, in sitting in front of the club, tilted back in chairs, and shouting to other mill lads, as they passed, in reply to their cynical salutations of “Gee, what style!” or, “Aw, blow off!” with a swaggering, “Ah, there, Jimmy. Come in and have a game!” Each member of the club kept from work a day, the better to taste the joys of club life to the full. About the fourth week, after we had held forth in a tempestuous whirl of boxing bouts, card matches, smoking bouts, and sensational novel-reading, the landlord repented of his bargain, locked us out, and declared to our remonstrance committee that he could no longer rent us the shanty, because we had become a “set of meddlin’ ne’er-do-wells!”
So we went back to the drug-store corner, with its drinking trough, where we could have been found huddled, miserable, like animals who have so much liberty and do not know how intelligently to use it. For we knew that after the night, came the morning, and with the morning another round in the mill, a fight with a machine, a ten hours’ dwelling in heated, spiceless, unexciting monotony, and a thought like that made us want to linger as long as we dared on that drug-store corner.
Chapter XV. The College Graduate
Scrubber Refreshes
my Ambitions
Chapter XV. The College Graduate
Scrubber Refreshes
my Ambitions
AT sixteen years of age, after three years in a mill-room, and with the unsocial atmosphere of my home to discourage me, I had grown to discount that old ambition of mine, to “make something of myself.” My body had been beaten into a terrifying weakness and lassitude by the rigors of the mill. My esthetic sense of things had been rudely, violently assaulted by profanity, immorality, and vile indecencies. I had come to that fatalistic belief, which animates so many in the mill, that the social bars are set up, and are set up forever. I should always have to be in the mill. I should never get out of it!
Recurrently would pop up the old thought of self-destruction. There was some consolation in it too. I used to feel as if a great weight rested on my bent back: that it would weigh me down, as Christian’s sin had weighed him down, only mine was not the weight of sin, but the burden of social injustice. I seemed to be carrying the burden on a road that sloped upward, higher and higher, a road dark and haunted with chilly mists, growing darker, covering it. There was nothing but a climbing, a struggling ahead, nothing to walk into but gloom! What was the use of turning a finger to change it? I was branded from the first for the mill. You could turn back my scalp and find that my brain was a mill. You could turn back my brain, and find that my thoughts were a mill. I could never get out—away from the far-reaching touch of it. The pleasantest thing I enjoyed—an excursion to Cuttyhunk on a steamer, or a holiday at the ball game—had to be backgrounded against the mill. After everything, excursion, holiday, Sunday rest, a night of freedom on the street, an enjoyable illness of a day, a half day’s shut-down—the Mill! The Mill!
What difference did it make that I took question-and-answer grammar to the mill, and hid myself every now and then, to get it in my mind, or hurried my dinner that I might read it? After all, the mill, the toil, and the weakness. What difference did it make if I read good books, on my uncle’s recommendation? After I had gone through romance, there was the muddy prose of my life in the mill and at home!