The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

I walked on to the tavern. Its keeper was busy behind the bar when I asked him for a job. He surprised me immensely with a ready promise of work, and he asked me to wait until he could arrange matters. I went into an adjoining room, and took out my letters.

It was the pool-room, and the walls were hung with colored prints of prize-fighters, with arms folded on their bare chests in a way that put their biceps much in evidence. And there were pictures of race-horses which had won distinction. An old, much-battered pool-table occupied the middle of the room. Around the walls ran a rough wooden bench. Dirt was everywhere conspicuous. The ceiling and walls were filthy. The floor was bare and unswept, and there were accumulations of dust about the table-legs and in the corners under the benches, which could be accounted for only by a liberal allowance of time. The two small windows, through which one could see the dismal tavern yard, apparently had never been washed.

I sat on a bench, and opened the letters. The dim past of my "respectable" life began to brighten with increasing vividness. Quite lost to present surroundings, I was suddenly recalled to them by the appearance of the boss, who came with a cloth in hand, with which he aimlessly dusted the table while he questioned me. I was so absorbed in letters that, for a moment, I could not place myself, nor in the least account for the situation. The keeper was asking me what I could do. This was a natural question under the circumstances; but it took me by surprise, and it staggered me. I covered my confusion with a profession of willingness to be useful, and of a desire to work. The boss, a coarse, blear-eyed, sensuous-looking man, eyed me doubtfully, and suddenly concluded that he had no work for me.

But I was wide awake now. I knew that the nearest farms were some miles back in the country, and that, except at the tavern, I had slender chance of food or shelter. I said that if there was work to be done, I was eager to do it, and that if, after a trial, he found me incapable, he could dismiss me at any moment.

I fancied that I had gained my point, for he told me to follow him, as he led the way into the kitchen. There we found the cook bending over a range, in which the fire refused to burn.

"Mrs. Murphy," said the boss, "here's a man I've hired to help Sam," and then he turned sharply upon me with a "Damn you now, work! if you know how to work!"

My opportunity lay in the smouldering fire, so I hastened to the wood-pile, and presently returned with an armful of fine wood which insured a fire for dinner.

Mrs. Murphy was a little, old, emaciated Irish woman, with her thin white hair parted in the middle, smoothed back, and twisted into a careless knot on her crown. Her face was wrinkled almost to grotesqueness, and she had the passive air of one to whom can come no surprises of joy or sorrow, as though the capacity for sensation were gone, and life had reduced itself to mere existence. I watched for opportunities of helping her, and she accepted the services as though she had been accustomed to them always.

She began to interest me deeply. I learned from her that Sam, whom I was hired to help, was a scullion and stable boy. When she had nothing further for me to do in the kitchen, I returned to the wood-pile, and chopped industriously, hoping to give evidence of my fitness for the place. In an hour or more the proprietor called me, intending, I supposed, to give me a change of work; but, instead, he gave me a quarter, and told me, not unkindly, but firmly, that he did not want me.