The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

And then he delighted in talk of other people than our own, and his knowledge of a somewhat general contemporaneous history was curiously varied and accurate. Stories of succeeding English ministries, and even of the short-lived French cabinets, were ready to his use, and he tactfully righted me in my errors. But he held me closest to my memories of things among the common people, the agricultural laborers in England, and their relation to the farmers, and theirs in turn to the landed proprietors, and the promise which the land could give of continued support to three classes, under the changed conditions of modern life. All that I could remember of a typical laborer's home, and of its manner of life, and of the general aspect of an English farm, seemed only to whet his appetite, and to strengthen his demand for what I knew of the continental peasantry. His interest centred strongly in the French, and there was plainly a peculiar charm for him in every detail which I could give of the French farmers, with their small holdings, and their inherited habits of thrift, and of the close culture of their lands. But he would even lead me on to speak of great cities, and of the life in them of the rich and poor, and of any signs, of which I knew, of growing social discontent. And with an interest that never flagged, he questioned me on works of art; and followed patiently, and with a zest that warmed one's own enthusiasm, through endless churches, and long dim galleries, and by narrow, crooked streets of a modern city to the ruins of its distant past. And there we restored the crumbling piles, until there stood clear to his imagination a vision of Imperial Rome, and his eyes kindled to some great general's triumph moving through the Via Sacra, and the people swarming to the very chimney-tops, their infants in their arms, and on the air the deep, rich moving roar of high acclaim!

Sunday was the last day of my stay on the farm. When, in the middle of the week, I found that Mr. Hill was likely to keep me, I was conscience-stricken, because I had not told him that my stay would be short. He said nothing at first in reply to my announcement, but presently remarked that it was very hard to get men in that part of the country.

"But, surely," I said, "more men apply to you for work than you can possibly employ."

He looked at me with some wonder, at my ignorance.

"For a long time I have been looking for a man to help me," he said. "I'm growing old, and I can't do the work that I once did. If I could find the right man, I'd keep him the year round, and pay him good wages. But the best young fellows go to the cities, and the rest are mostly a worthless lot. There's hardly a day in the year when I haven't a job for any decent man who'll ask for it. I have to go looking for men, and then I generally can't find one that's any account."

This was much the longest speech that he had made to me so far, and a very interesting one I thought it, and I am only sorry that I cannot reproduce the exact phraseology, with its Anglo-Saxon words set, by an instinctive choice, into rugged sentences which admirably expressed the man. I waited hopefully for further speech from him, and at last it came, quite of its own accord; for I had given up trying to draw him out.

We were sitting together on Sunday evening on the platform of the pump in front of the farm-house. It had been a very restful Sunday. In the morning I went to the village church, where two services followed each other in quick succession. The first was a prayer-meeting, attended by a little company of farming people and village folk, who conscientiously parted company at the door on the basis of sex, and sat on opposite sides of a central aisle.

The service was a simple one. The leader read a passage from the Bible, and offered prayer, and then gave out a hymn. When the singing ceased, one after another, the older men, with nervous pauses between, rose to "testify" or sank to their knees, and prayed aloud. I chiefly remember one as a typical figure—an old man, whose thick white hair mingled with a bushy beard that covered his face. I noticed him first in comfortable possession of a bench along which he stretched his legs. On his feet were loose carpet-slippers; and with his shoulders braced against the wall, and his head thrown back, and his eyes closed, he looked the vision of physical ease, which matched the expression of deep contentment that he wore. There was no suspicion of sleep about him. Most evidently he followed with liveliest sympathy every word that was said or sung. I looked up presently at the sound of a new voice, and found the old man on his feet. He was adding his "testimony" to what had gone before, and was speaking rapidly in a deep, gruff voice with blunt articulation. There was a strong reminder in the performance of a school-boy's "speaking his piece;" the monotonous, unnatural tone; the rapid flow of conventional, committed phrase; and the nervous tension, which communicated itself to his hearers in a fear that he might forget.

But there came at length, without calamity, the final "Pray for me that I may be kept faithful," and then he knelt in prayer. Invocations from the Prophets, and supplications from the Psalms, and glowing exhortations from the Epistles, were interwoven with strangest interpolations of his own, while his voice rose and fell in regular cadences and he audibly caught his breath between. But he was losing himself in his devotion, and presently his voice fell to a natural tone, and his words grew plain and direct, as he held converse with the Almighty about our common life—of sin and its awful guilt, of temptation and its fateful trial, of suffering and its terrible reality, of sorrow and its cruel mystery. Then, as though quickened by the touch of truth, his faith rose on surer wings, and his prayer breathed the sense of sin forgiven, and of life made strong by a power not our own, and of hope exultant in the knowledge "of that new life when sin shall be no more!"

A solemn stillness held us when he rose, and made us feel the presence in our common lot of things divine and that deep sacredness of life which awes us most.