The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

“Well, —— it, is he going to flood the place?”

I knew no answer to that question, and so I ventured to ask after the occupant of the bunk nearest the window.

“He’s an Englishman; works in the landscape gang wid me,” replied the Irishman, laconically.

By this time he had seated himself on his bed with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed with an air of weariness. The change of subject had, fortunately, been effective, for he no longer objected to my presence, and for some time he sat talking freely in a droning, disjointed way.

I gathered that he was thoroughly dissatisfied with his work and wages and his boarding-place and with life in general. He did not enter into details of his personal history; his mood spent itself in anathemas against his present lot: “Work, ceaseless, unprofitable, joyless work. Eat and work; eat more and work; eat again and sleep and eat and work. This and nothing more; body and soul sold at a dollar and a half a day. And nothing else to look forward to, with chances only of a steadily hardening lot, throughout the on-coming of old age to death.”

I had never heard a workman in pessimistic mood so coherent, and I felt sure that the Irishman was ill; for commonly with our class, a full meal and a pipeful at the end of a day’s labor are enough to banish care and to tinge living with a glow of satisfaction. The suspicion proved true enough, for the man soon began to shake with a malarial chill in our cheerless barrack, and he told me that the ague laid hold of him regularly on alternate days.

It was the loneliness of the fellow that impressed one as he lay shivering in his bunk. There were hundreds of men in the house, but not one of them was charged with any responsibility for him, and there was no provision for illness. On his bad days he would force himself through the usual routine, but, when the day was done, there was nothing for him but to lie in lonely misery in his bed. Not that he whined in the least. I gathered these facts by inference. It was the barrenness of his life that he cursed, not its hardness, for this he accepted as a matter of course.

And yet one could not fail to see where finer feeling inflicted a sharper pain in his suffering. I had marked at once the neatness of his dress, and especially the cleanliness of person by which one distinguishes instantly between a workman and a tramp.

There are interesting degrees of cleanness in workingmen. One sees it at its best, I think, among those of the building trades. The stains of their labor are clean in themselves, and the men partake of the wholesomeness of their employment. The workers at rougher jobs must show the marks of soiling labor, but there is infinite difference between the earth stains of a common laborer and the ingrained, begrimed uncleanness of an unwashed vagrant. Having in the house, however, so many men, and just at the end of the long period of unemployment, it is inevitable, perhaps, that there should be a few of the number whose status as between workingmen and tramps is not clearly defined. And some of the consequences are unpleasant.

It was this that the Irishman had in mind as he looked me over critically and was somewhat slow in welcoming me to the cabin.