The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

At one end of the table sat the farmer in his shirt-sleeves, with a newspaper spread before him. He was in the midst of his haying, he said, and had plenty of work, and was willing enough that I should join the other men in the hay-field. The shed for the hands was full, so I offered to go to the barn, and was soon fast asleep on the loose hay in a stall.

As the farmer and I walked to the barn, I had taken occasion to fortify myself in the agreement regarding work. He was an old man, very hale and hearty and genial, and he walked with a curiously stiff movement of the legs, and with his feet nearly at right angles to the line of progress. He set my mind at rest with the assurance that there would be plenty of work for me, if the morning proved good.

The morning was all that could be desired. I got up early, and went to the kitchen, where an Irish maid-of-all-work gave me a bit of soap and some water in a tin basin, with which to finish my preparation for breakfast. She was a beautiful girl, large and awkward and ill-groomed; but her features were strikingly handsome, and her clear, rich complexion would of itself have constituted a claim to beauty, while sprays of golden hair fell in effective curls about her forehead, and heightened the charm of her deep-set Celtic blue eyes. I was drying my face and hands on a coarse towel which hung on a roller near the kitchen-door, and which was used in common by all of the hired men. She watched me curiously. Presently she ventured an inquiry as to whether "the boss" had given me "a job." I said that he had. "Her eyes were homes" of deep concern, and in her voice was that note of pity so effective in the Celtic accent. She was saying that my hands did not look as though I was used to work. I was blushingly conscious that my hands were against me, but she tactfully tried to relieve the situation by supposing that I was a "tradesman." Then had to come the damaging confession that I was not. But the other hired men now began to enter, and we sat down to breakfast.

A breakfast on a farm is not always the appetizing reality that the inexperienced imagination paints. The cloth, in this case, was ragged, and showed signs of long use since its last washing, and there were no napkins. The service was repulsive in its hideous tastelessness. Flies swarmed in the room, and crowded one another into our food. The men were in their working clothes, coatless, sleeves rolled up, and their begrimed shirts open at the neck. When our coffee was poured out and handed to us, each used his own spoon in dipping sugar from a bowl which was passed from hand to hand. The butter, in a half-melting condition, and dark with imprisoned flies, was within reach of us all, and each helped himself with his knife, and then used it in conveying food to his mouth. This last feat I did not try. There was in it a suggestion of necromancy, and I had doubts of my success. We ate in silence, as though the gravity of the occasion was beyond speech. The farmer did not appear until we had finished breakfast, and I waited at the kitchen-door for orders from him.

He came at last, kind and cordial as ever, but quite changed in purpose regarding my going to work. He urged my confessed inexperience, and the danger of exposure to the sun. I protested my willingness to assume the risks, and begged to be allowed at least to work for what had been given me. But he would not listen, and appeared to think that he set matters right by assuring me repeatedly that to what I had received I was "perfectly welcome." His wife gave me, at parting, some tracts, and a religious newspaper, and in these I found presented, in somewhat lurid light, the evil consequences of insobriety.

Knowing that I was within walking distance of Garrisons-on-Hudson, I resolved to reach that point before night. My letters had been forwarded there, and my eagerness to get them was of a kind unexperienced before. It was Saturday, and, late in the afternoon, I reached Garrisons after a hard day's march. The heat was intense, and although I walked but a little more than twenty miles, the effort of carrying my pack was thoroughly exhausting. The woman in charge at the post-office was in evident doubt about the safety of giving me so large a packet of letters, but yielded at sight of others which I showed her, and readily agreed to look after my pack until I should call for it.

Between the station and the river was a tavern, and there I meant to apply for work. As I neared the station platform, a train from New York drew in. Something familiar in one of the passengers who alighted put me on my guard. In a moment I recognized a fellow-guest at a dinner-party of a few evenings before, and I remembered, with an odd sense of another existence, that, over our coffee, on a broad veranda, overlooking a harbor, bright with the night-lights of a squadron of yachts, he had given me the benefit of an amazing familiarity with the details of the recent baccarat scandal. My anxiety was needless, for I easily passed unnoticed in the crowd.

I EASILY PASSED UNNOTICED IN THE CROWD.