When I proposed the matter to my aunt, she agreed to let me go. The following morning I obtained a day’s holiday and went on the electric cars to the noted seaport town.
This trip abroad, with its opportunities to see that there were people who did other things besides work in the mill, and with its freedom and sunshine, made me more desperate than ever to leave the mill. I was like the Pilgrim in the first chapter of Bunyan’s allegory, running from the City of Destruction, fingers in ears, calling “Life, Life!”
I walked around Newport cliffs and touched the gateways of the palaces which front the famous walk. I reveled in the shimmer of the sea and the fragrance of shrubs and flowers. This was life and the world! I must get out in it; take my place daily in it, and live the life of a Man. God made the sun and the fragrant air; he made the flowers and created health. That was due me, because it was not my sin, but that of my elders, which had shut me out of it through my boyhood. These were some of the thoughts uppermost in my mind. I walked the narrow streets and broad avenues—places which I had read of and had never hoped to see. If I had to return to the mill, I could say that I had seen so much of the outside world, at least!
After I had watched the departure of some torpedo-boats in the direction of a gray-fronted fort across the bay, I hurried in the direction of the naval college to see if Uncle Sam would give me the chance to leave the mill which others had denied.
I passed a training-ship with its housed deck. I walked along past drill grounds and barracks and entered a quiet office. With a beating heart I announced to the attendant that I had come to offer myself for enlistment in the training-school. He led me into a large, dim room to a group of uniformed officers. They asked me a few questions, tested me with bits of colored wool, and then I was commanded to disrobe.
The remainder of the examination must have been exceedingly perfunctory, for the scales registered only one hundred and eighteen pounds and I stood five feet eleven inches in my bare feet. That was enough to exclude me, but they went on with the tests, examining my teeth (the front one was missing), pounding my chest, and testing the beat of my heart. No comments were made, and after I had dressed again I was sent to an anteroom and told to wait their decision.
For a few long minutes I sat in the silent room wondering what would be the decision. I was optimistic enough to plan what I would do if I should enter the navy. I should—here the attendant came, offered me a tiny card, and without a word bowed me to the door. I knew then that I had been refused. I walked through the yard in a daze. When I reached the city, I took heart to read the card they had given me. I recall that it read thus simply: “REFUSED. Defective teeth. Cardia—” Uncle Sam did not want to give me a chance!
Chapter XXI. The Ichabod of
Mule-rooms, some Drastic Musing,
College at my Finger-tips,
the Mill People wait to let me
pass, and I am Waved
into the World by a
Blind Woman
Chapter XXI. The Ichabod of
Mule-rooms, some Drastic Musing,
College at my Finger-tips,
the Mill People wait to let me
pass, and I am Waved
into the World by a
Blind Woman
ON my return from Newport I went to work in one of the oldest mills in the city. The “mules” were in a gloomy basement—a crowded, dim, and very dirty place to work in. It was the Ichabod of mule-rooms, with every trace of glory gone. The machinery was obsolete and had to be helped along with monkey-wrenches, new parts, and constant, nerve-wearing wearing watchfulness. The alleys were so narrow that the back-boys had to edge in between the frames; and expanded chest often meant a destructive rubbing on bobbins and a breaking of threads. It always seemed to me that this room was reserved by the corporation to work off its veteran spinners and its unreliable ones, its veteran machinery, and its bad-tempered, ineffective bosses. This mule-room was the byword among the spinners at that end of the city. A man hung his head when he had to tell another that he was working in it; for it generally was his testimony to his fellows that he was in the last ditch. Spinners graduated from that room into scrubbing or oiling.