The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

"Was you raised in these parts?"

My negative gave her the opening for which she was unconsciously feeling. She was born and "raised" on that spot, and had lived there for nearly eighty years, and she hastened to tell me so. There was nothing voluble in the recital of her history, only a directness and simplicity of speech and a certain quiet reserve which rendered the narrative absorbing to us both. Some bond of sympathy began to make itself felt, for she was dwelling on the losses of her life, and, quite unconsciously, she wept as she told me of the death of one and another, until not one of all her family or kindred was left to her, except her grandson, with whom she now lived. She said no word of complaint; and, in the presence of her human sorrows, she had no memory of poverty, and of the bitter struggle against want which life had plainly been for her. She was sobbing softly, with her head bent upon the table, when she ceased speaking, and no comfort that I could offer her was comparable to the relief that she felt in telling her story. When I arose to go, she was breathing deeply, like a comforted child.

For a stretch of several miles of country road I spurred myself to knock at every door to which I came. My reception was curiously uniform. I never got beyond the request for leave to show the magazine. The reply was invariably a negative; sometimes polite, but always emphatic. Once I did not get so far as that. A portly negress saw me approaching her cottage from the road, and, standing strident on guard before her door, she shouted to me across the meadow that nothing was wanted there, and that I might save myself the walk.

It was nearing noon, and I was very hungry. The question of earning a meal was no longer an interesting speculation, but a pressing necessity. I turned all my attention to that. A large iron gateway leading into a cemetery attracted me. Several ragged, tow-headed children were playing about the lodge. One of them told me that his father was inside, and he indicated the general direction of the tomb-stones. I found the digger sweating freely in a half-finished grave, and instantly offered my help as a means of earning a dinner. The grave-digger was an Irishman. He leaned at ease upon his spade, and soberly looked me over, and then declined my offer. He was polite, but not at all communicative, and he met my advances with the one remark that his "old woman" was not at home.

A little farther on, I saw three women in pursuit of a hen. I eagerly volunteered my help, and asked for a dinner in payment. They quit the chase, and stood confronting me with serious faces, while I eloquently pleaded my readiness to help them. Nothing in the situation seemed to strike them as strange or irregular, but they touched upon it with short, grave speech, until I had the feeling of something momentous, and I accepted their refusal with a sense of relief.

At last, in the outskirts of the village of Westport, I found a man mowing his lawn, and he was willing to give me a dinner for completing the work. My final success in getting an odd job was a splendid stimulus. I urged the mower over the lawn with a vigor that surprised me, and the dinner which I ate in the dim corner of an immaculate kitchen was a liberal return for the labor.

All that long summer afternoon I went from house to house, asking subscriptions for the magazine. The rack would have been easier upon my feelings, but I was eager to discover some ready way of approaching people. Not even the loafers at the station were in the least inclined to share their company with me. At nightfall I earned, by sawing wood for an hour, a supper and the right to sleep in an unused barn.

When I awoke, in the early morning, I looked with bewilderment at the dull gray light that shone between the parted boards and through the rifts among the shingles. I came to myself with homesickness in full possession of me, and my back aching from the pressure of that intolerable pack. At the pump in the barn-yard I washed myself, and sat down to eat a slice of cold meat and some pieces of bread which I had saved from supper. An unfriendly collie watched me, and growled threateningly until I won him over with a share of the breakfast.

The village was muffled in a heavy, clinging fog. The buoyancy of the previous morning was gone. It was with some difficulty that I found the road which had been pointed out to me as the shortest cut across country to the Hudson. I could not shake off the feeling of homelessness and isolation; and, under its influence, the lot of the farmers' boys, whom I met driving their carts to early market, appeared infinitely to be desired. A life of any honest work which accounts for one, and includes some human fellowship, and a reasonable certainty of food and shelter, began to take on undreamed-of attractiveness, in contrast with vagrancy. I felt outside of the true order of things, and as having no contact with any vital current of the world. Perhaps it was in some measure the Philistine in me asserting himself, in the absence of his customary bath and hot coffee; for, as the fog lifted and the sun appeared, I came upon a brook which I had only to follow a hundred yards or more to a well-shaded pool, where the bath was soon achieved, and I emerged feeling that a vagrant life, with some purpose in it, was, after all, rather desirable.

The morning was only fairly begun when I reached the village of Wilton, eight miles from Westport. Already I was tired, and certain muscles of the shoulders and back were in violent revolt. I left my pack at the post-office. Passing up a street, which runs at right angles to the one by which I entered the village, I presently knocked at the last of a row of comfortable cottages.