Clark was nearly mad with suppressed delight when he met me in the entrance of the post-office, where he had asked me to await his return. With his usual generosity he shared his good fortune with me, and, before we went to the railway station together we had a farewell dinner on beefsteak and onions and unlimited coffee and bread.
My own success followed Clark’s by only a few days, when I was taken on as a hand-truckman in a factory on the West Side; but there is one intervening experience which belongs distinctively to this part of the general experiment.
I found, one early morning, among a lot of “fake” advertisements, which I had come to recognize with ease, one notice of “a man wanted” which rang with genuineness. Applicants were told to report at a certain shop just without the Stock-yards at twelve o’clock that day. In ample time I crossed over to Halsted Street and walked in a leisurely way down that marvellous thoroughfare. It was not new to me, and I was missing Clark sorely and was experiencing a new phase of the loneliness of being “left behind.” And yet I could but mark again with fresh interest the wonders of this great artery of the West Side in the five miles of its length through which I walked to the appointed number. It is essentially a cheap street: cheap buildings line it, in which tenants rent cheap lodgings and shop-keepers employ cheap labor and sell cheap wares of every kind to those of the poor “whose destruction is their poverty.” Every sort of structural flimsiness looks down upon you as you pass: ghastly imitations in stone of real, substantial buildings; the unblinking fronts of glaring red-brick shells, whose shoddiness is the more apparent in gaudy shops and in “all the modern improvements” and in the heavy cotton-lace at the upper windows. And there are wooden shanties with “false fronts,” after the manner of frontier “cities,” and wooden hovels with sloping roofs which are far along in process of decay, and here and there a substantial house which was built upon the open prairie, and which looks with amazement upon the fungus growth about it, while struggling pitifully to maintain its dignity in the uncongenial company which it is forced to keep.
Down miles of such a street I went on sidewalks which were chiefly rotting planks, with black mire, as of a pig-sty, straining through the cracks under the pressure of passing feet. The street itself is paved with cylindrical blocks of wood, ill laid at the beginning, and having now closely pounded filth between them, while the whole surface presents an infinite variety of concavities, in which, especially along the gutters, lay garbage in frozen, shallow cesspools.
A saloon stood on almost every corner, and sometimes I counted seven pawnbrokers’ signs within the limits of a square. It was interesting to watch the run of “loan agencies,” and “collateral banks,” and other euphemisms under which the business was disguised.
Large quantities of provisions lay heaped in baskets and measures along the pavements in front of grocers’ shops, catching the soot and the floating dust of the open street. Cheap ready-made and second-hand garments hung flapping like scare-crows overhead, or clothed grotesque wooden dummies which stood chained to the shop doors or to the wood-work below the show-windows. Scores of idle men, with the unvarying leaden eye and soggy droop of their kind, loungingly exchanged the comfort of a mutual support with doorposts, chiefly of saloons. Little children in every stage of condition, from decent warmth to utter rags, and from wholesome cleanliness to dirt grown clean in unconsciousness of itself, played about the pavements and in the gutters, or ran screaming with delight across the street-car lines, along which the trams moved slowly, drawn by horses with bells tinkling from the harness.
The first sight of my destination was very reassuring. It was evidently a shop of the first class. A second glance was disheartening, for already there were fully thirty men before me, and the number was increasing. From one of the men employed in the shop I learned that a man from the packing-house of the firm would be out to see us at the appointed hour. The appointed hour came and passed, and we waited on, our numbers grown now to nearly fifty. It was not far from two o’clock when the man appeared who had been commissioned to see us.
There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a hireling who is puffed up with momentary authority but who knows nothing of responsibility. The man who finally came among us was a clerical subordinate, sleek, clean-shaven, overfed; a man of thirty, dressed as any like Johnnie of the town, and, except for his slender hold upon the means of livelihood, no better than most of the men who now hung breathless upon his words.
He swaggered in among us with a leer and a call across the shop to a fellow-employee.
“Say, Jim, how’s this for a collection of freaks, all out for a fifteen-dollar job?”