The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

My course from Wilton lay through Ridgefield and Salem and Golden's Bridge, and then, crossing the line between Connecticut and New York, it made directly for the Hudson River.

This was no great distance; but in the early stages of the march I was much delayed by rains. Driven to shelter, I found it usually in a barn, or a shed under which were housed the farming implements. Here is an example: From a sudden downpour of rain I ran to an open barn. A farmer, whom I found there unhitching his horses, eyed me suspiciously, and gave a halting assent to my request for shelter. He soon left me alone. I tried to read, and could not. The dull day was deeply depressing. Like the burden of a haunting sorrow the trial of separation weighed upon me. It was not homesickness alone, but added to that a feeling of isolation. Poverty, I had thought, would at once bring me into vital contact with the very poor. Instead, it had made me an object of unfailing distrust. The very poor I found in an occasional cottage of a farm laborer, or some grotesquely dilapidated hovel, swarming with negro life. But they were no more hospitable to my approach than were the well-to-do farmers, and I met not a single vagrant like myself in the course of my walk to the Hudson. I was lonely with the loneliness of a castaway, and I climbed into the hay-loft and fell asleep. Here, at least, was comfort; the deep, dreamless sleep, to which I had long been a stranger, was making gracious advances. When I awoke, the rain was past for the time, and I resumed my journey, with a leaden sky overhead, and soft, clinging mud under foot; but I was strangely refreshed, and walked on quite enheartened.

The intermittent rains interfered with my progress, and increased the difficulty of finding chance work. Repeatedly I was offered a meal, but denied the privilege of working for it. For twenty-four hours I went hungry, and spent much of that time asleep in a hole which I burrowed into a hay-stack.

But under a brightening sky on Friday, I was given some wood to chop, and the promise of a dinner in payment.

The work was soon done, and to the dinner there was given an added pleasure in the company of one of the two old women for whom I chopped the wood. She sat at the table and talked to me. Perhaps she was solicitous for her spoons. Certainly she was very entertaining. Her dark calico dress fitted closely her thin figure; and she sat very straight in her chair, with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes bright with gentle benignity.

In all the farming region through which I have passed on my way to the Hudson, I have been much impressed by an unlooked-for quality in the intelligence of the people. The books, of which I now and then caught glimpses in their homes, were often of a surprising range. On the sitting-room table of one farm-house I noticed a Milton, and several volumes of Emerson, and a copy of Stevenson's Essays, besides much current literature. Not infrequently the conversation of these people had in it a curious suggestion of cultivation, curious only because a dainty choice of words, and the graceful turn of a phrase were accompanied by habitual inaccuracies of speech. They have, for example, their own forms of the verb "to be." "I be" and "You be" are invariable in their common usage. I wondered whether the conventional forms which they find in their reading did not strike them as oddly foreign.

The prim little lady who sat near me through my dinner proved charming. She showed no curiosity about my history, nor the least anxiety to tell me hers. With an air of quiet self-possession she followed the conversation into its natural channels, and sometimes followed it far; for at one time she was describing for me, with admirable vividness, the methods of irrigation in use in Colorado. But she consistently made done do duty for did, and she used, in some of her sentences, negatives enough to satisfy the needs of negation in the purest of Attic speech.

One more incident of the tramp to the Hudson: Late on Friday afternoon I was nearing Golden's Bridge, a village on the Harlem division of the New York Central Railroad. My road lay over the hills of a rolling farm-region. The fields of corn were radiant with sunlight reflected from great drops of rain which rested on the nodding blades. In the meadows was the rich sheen of the after-growth. Golden-rod and sumach grew thick on the roadside, and half concealed the rails of the zigzag fences. From the forest there came a breath of fragrant coolness.

After sundown the twilight soon faded into dark. My efforts to secure further work had been unsuccessful. Once I was nearing the ruin of a little wooden cottage, on the porch of which sat a woman enjoying the cool of the evening. Upon seeing me enter the gate she fled within, and slammed the door; and I heard the key turn in the lock. I was growing tired. The actual journey had not carried me far, but the long fast of the previous day and the toilsome walking over soft roads had resulted in exhaustion. Scarcely physical strength remained with which to move farther, and I was ready to throw myself down, with infinite relief, under any chance shelter, when I caught sight of the village lights not a quarter of a mile beyond.

I knocked at the first door on the street. A farmer's wife appeared, and kindly offered to consult her husband on the subject of work. She soon returned with a favorable reply, and invited me to follow her into the kitchen. Carpetless as it was, and stained as to walls and ceiling, and low, and dimly lighted, the shelter of that room was like softest luxury. A pitcher of milk and some slices of bread were placed on the table, and I ate ravenously.