Chapter VII. I am given the
Privilege of Choosing my
own Birthday
THE reopening of the public-schools in the fall found Aunt Millie stubbornly refusing to allow me to enter. “I shall never know anything,” I protested. But she replied, with confidence, “All knowledge and wisdom isn’t in schools. There’s as much common sense needed in getting a living. I’ll keep you out just as long as the truant officer keeps away. Mind, now, and not run blind into him when you’re on the street. If you do—why, you’ll know a thing or two, young man!”
Uncle pleaded with her in my behalf, but she answered him virulently, “Stop that, you boozer, you! We must get out of debt and never mind making a gentleman, which you seem set on. I’d be ashamed if I was you. Let him only earn a few dollars, and we’d be relieved. Goodness knows when you’re going to drop out, the way you’re guzzling things down. It wouldn’t surprise me to see you on your back any day, and I want to be ready.”
But some days later, my uncle came back home from work with much to say. “Look here, Millie, it might be good for us to send Al to school right away. If he must go in the mill, as it seems he must as soon as he can, then it’s to our advantage to get him in right away!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that he can’t go into the mill, according to law, until thirty weeks after he’s thirteen, and can show his school-certificate.”
“But he’s only just turned eleven,” protested my aunt, “that would keep him in the school practically three years. Three years!”
“Normally, it would,” agreed Uncle Stanwood, “but it don’t need to take that long, if we don’t care to have it so.”
“I’d like to know why!”
“Well, Millie,” explained uncle, “Al’s not been to school in America, yet. All we have to do is to put his age forward when he does go in—make him a year or two older than he actually is. They won’t ask for birth certificates or school papers from England. They will take our word for it. Then it won’t be long before we can have him working. Harry Henshaw tells me the trick’s common enough. Then when Al’s worked a while, and we get out of debt, he can go on with his schooling. It’s the only way to keep ahead, though I do hate to have him leave school, God knows!”
“None of that cant,” snapped aunt; “if it wasn’t for your drinking he wouldn’t have to go in the mill, and you know it.”
“Yes,” agreed uncle, sadly, “I know it!”
“Then,” said aunt, once more referring to the immediate subject of the conference, “it’s all decided that we get him in as soon as possible.”
“Yes,” agreed uncle, “we can put him any age we want, and lie about it like many are doing. What age shall we make him, Millie?”
“Better push his age forward as near to thirteen as possible,” said aunt. “He’s big for eleven, as big as some lads two years older. Lets call him twelve and a half!”
“Twelve, going on thirteen,” answered my uncle.
“Yes,” mused his wife, “but nearly thirteen, say thirteen about Christmas time, that would give him thirty weeks to go to school, and he would be in the mill a year from now. That will be all right.”
“If we get caught at it,” warned uncle, “it means prison for us, according to law.”
“Never mind, let’s take our chances like the rest,” answered aunt with great decision. “You tell me there aren’t any ever get caught!”
“Oh,” sighed uncle, “it’s safe enough for that matter, though it’s hard and goes against the grain to take Al from school.”
“Stop that cant!” thundered Aunt Millie. “I won’t have it. You want him to go into the mill just as bad as I do, you old hypocrite!”
“Don’t flare up so,” retorted uncle, doggedly. “You wag too sharp a tongue. It’s no use having a row over the matter. Let’s dispose of the thing before bedtime.”
“What else is there to settle?” asked my aunt.
“Al’s got to have a new birthday.” Aunt Millie laughed at the notion, and said, addressing me, “Now, Al, here’s a great chance for you. What day would you like for your birthday?”
“June would do,” I said.
“June won’t do,” she corrected, “the birthday has got to come in winter, near Christmas; no other time of the year is suitable. Now what part of November would you like it? We’ll give you that much choice.”
I thought it over for some time, for I seriously entered into the spirit of this unique opportunity of choosing my own birthday. “The twentieth of November will do, I think,” I concluded.
“The twentieth of November, then, it is,” answered my aunt. “You will be thirteen, thirteen, next twentieth of November, mind you. You are twelve, going on thirteen! Don’t forget that for a minute; if you do, it might get us all in jail for per-jury! Now, suppose that a man meets you on the streets to-morrow and asks you what your age is, what will you tell him?”
“I’m thirteen, going on——no, I mean twelve, going on thirteen, and will be thirteen the twentieth of November!”
“Say it half a dozen times to get it fixed in your mind,” said aunt, and I rehearsed it intermittently till bedtime, so that I had it indelibly fixed in my mind that, henceforth, I must go into the world and swear to a lie, abetted by my foster parents, all because I wanted to go into the mill and because my foster parents wanted me in the mill. Thus ended the night when I dropped nearly two years bodily out of my life, a most novel experience indeed and one that surely appeals to the imagination if not to the sympathy.
The following week, a few days before I was sent to the public-school, we removed to a part of the city where there were not so many mill tenements, into the first floor of a double tenement. There were only two of these houses in the same yard with a grass space between them facing the highway. In this space, during the early fall, the landlord dumped two bushels of apples every Monday morning at half-past eight. It was definitely understood that only the children of the tenants should be entitled to gather the fruit. No one was allowed to be out of the house until the landlord himself gave the signal that all was ready, so we could be found, peering from the back and front doors, a quick-eyed, competitive set of youngsters, armed with pillow-slips and baskets, leaping out at the signal, falling on the heap of apples, elbowing one another until every apple was picked, when the parents would run out, settle whatever fights had started up, note with jealous eyes how much of the fruit their respective representatives had secured, all the while the amused landlord stood near his carriage shouting, “Your Harry did unusually well to-day, Mrs. Burns. He beat them all. What a pillow-slipful he got, to be sure!”
Finally I found myself in an American school. I do not know what grade I entered, but I do know that my teacher, a white-haired woman with a saintly face, showed me much attention. It was she who kept me after school to find out more about me. It was she who inquired about my moral and spiritual welfare, and when she found that I did not go to a church, mainly on account of poor clothes, she took me to the shopping district one afternoon, and with money furnished her by a Woman’s Circle, fitted me out with a brand new suit, new shoes and hat, and sent me home with the promise that I would go with her to church the following Sunday morning. In passing down a very quiet street on my solitary way to church, the next Sabbath, I came to that high picket fence behind which grew some luscious blue grapes. I clambered over the fence, picked a pocketful of the fruit, and then went on to meet my teacher at the doors of the sombre city church, where the big bell clamored high in the air, and where the carpet was thick, like a bedspread, so that people walked down the aisles silent like ghosts and as sober. It was a strange, hushed, and very thrilling place, and when the massive organ filled the place with whispering chords, I went back to my old childish faith, that angels sat in the colored pipes and sang.
My days in the school-yard were very, very strenuous, for I had always to be protecting England and the English from assault. I found the Americans only too eager to reproduce the Revolution on a miniature scale, with Bunker Hill in mind, always.
My attendance at this school had only a temporary aspect to it. When my teacher spoke to me of going to the grammar school, I replied, “Oh, I’m going in the mill in a year, please. I want to go into the mill and earn money. It’s better than books, ma’am.” I had the mill in mind always. Every day finished in school was one day nearer to the mill. I judged my fellows, on the school-ground, by their plans of either going or not going into the mill as early as I.
This desire to enter the mill was more and more strengthened as the winter wore on, for then I was kept much at home and sent on the streets after wood and coal. It was impossible to pick cinders with mittens on, and especially the sort of mittens I wore—old stocking feet, doubled to allow one piece to hide the holes in its fellow. On a cold day, my fingers would get very blue, and my wrists, protruding far out of my coat-sleeves, would be frozen into numbness. Any lad who had once been in a mill would prefer it to such experiences.
My aunt kept me at home so often that she had to invent a most formidable array of excuses to send to my teacher, excuses which I had to write and carry. We never had any note-paper in the house, as there were so few letters ever written. When there was an excuse to write, I would take a crumpled paper bag, in which had been onions or sugar, or, when there were no paper bags, and the school bell was ringing, requiring haste, I would tear off a slip of the paper in which salt pork or butter had been wrapped, and on it write some such note as this:
“Dear Miss A: This is to say that Al had to stay home yesterday for not being very well. I hope you will excuse it. Very truly yours,” and my aunt would scribble her name to it, to make it authoritative.
It must have been the sameness of the notes, and their frequency, that brought the white-haired teacher to remonstrate with my aunt for keeping me away from school so much.
“He can never learn at his best,” complained the teacher. “He is really getting more and more behind the others.”
My aunt listened humbly enough to this complaint and then unburdened herself of her thoughts: “What do I care what he learns from books! There is coal and wood that’s needed and he is the one to help out. I only let him go to school because the law makes me. If it wasn’t for the law you’d not see him there, wasting his time. It’s only gentlemen’s sons that have time for learning from books. He’s only a poor boy and ought to be earning his own living. Coal and wood is more to the point in this house than books and play. Let them play that has time and go to school that has the money. All you hear in these days is, ‘School, school, school!’ Now, I have got through all these years without schooling, and others of my class and kind can. Why, Missis, do you know, I had to go into the mill when I was a slip of a girl, when I was only seven, there in England. I had to walk five miles to work every morning, before beginning the hard work of the day, and after working all day I had to carry my own dinner-box back that distance, and then, on top of that, there was duties to do at home when I got there. No one ever had mercy on me, and it isn’t likely that I’ll go having mercy on others. Who ever spoke to me about schooling, I’d like to know! It’s only people of quality who ought to go to get learning, for its only the rich that is ever called upon to use schooling above reading. If I got along with it, can’t this lad, I’d like to know?”
And with this argument my teacher had to be content, but she reported my absences to the truant officer, who came and so troubled my aunt, with his authority, that she sent me oftener to school after that.
About this time, at the latter end of winter, uncle removed to the region of the mill tenements again. I changed my school, also. This time I found myself enrolled in what was termed the Mill School.
As I recall it, the Mill School was a department of the common schools, in which were placed all boys and girls who had reached thirteen and were planning to enter the mill as soon as the law permitted. If you please, it was my “finishing school.” I have always considered it as the last desperate effort of the school authorities to polish us off as well as they could before we slipped out of their care forever. I am not aware of any other reason for the existence of the Mill School, as I knew it.
However, it was a very appropriate and suggestive name. It coupled the mill with the school very definitely. It made me fix my mind more than ever on the mill. Everybody in it was planning for the mill. We talked mill on the play-ground, drew pictures of mills at our desks, dreamed of it when we should have been studying why one half of a quarter is one fourth, or some similar exercise. We had a recess of our own, after the other floors had gone back into their classrooms, and we had every reason to feel a trifle more dignified than the usual run of thirteen-year-old pupils who plan to go through the grammar, the high, and the technical schools! After school, when we mixed with our less fortunate companions, who had years and years of school before them, we could not avoid having a supercilious twang in our speech when we said, “Ah, don’t you wish you could go into the mill in a few months and earn money like we’re going to do, eh?” or, “Just think, Herb, I’m going to wear overalls rolled up to the knees and go barefooted all day!”
If the thumbscrew of the Inquisition were placed on me, I could not state the exact curriculum I passed through during the few months in the Mill School. I did not take it very seriously, because my whole mind was taken up with anticipations of working in the mill. But the coming of June roses brought to an end my stay there. The teacher gave me a card which certified that I had fulfilled the requirements of the law in regard to final school attendance. I went home that afternoon with a consciousness that I had grown aged suddenly. When my aunt saw the card, her enjoyment knew no bounds.
“Good for you, Al!” she exclaimed, “We’ll make short work of having you in the mill now.”
As I attempt to visualize myself to myself at the time of my “graduation” from the common school, I see a lad, twelve years of age and growing rapidly in stature, with unsettled, brown hair which would neither part nor be smoothed, a front tooth missing, having been knocked out by a stone inadvertently thrown while he was in swimming, a lean, lank, uncouth, awkward lad at the awkward age, with a mental furnishing which permitted him to tell with authority when America was discovered, able to draw a half of an apple on drawing-paper, just in common fractions, able to distinguish between nouns and verbs, and a very good reader of most fearsome dime novels. The law said that I was “fitted” now to leave school and take my place among the world’s workers!
But now that I was ready to enter the mill, with my school-certificate in my possession, Uncle Stanwood raised his scruples again, saying regretfully enough, “Oh, Al mustn’t leave the school. He might never get back again, Millie.” My aunt laughed cynically, and handed two letters to her husband.
“Read them, and see what you think!” she said. Uncle read the two letters, and turned very pale, for they were lawyer’s letters, threatening to strip our house of the furniture and to sue us at law, if we did not bring up the back payments we owed on our clothing and our furniture! “You see, canter,” scoffed aunt, “he’s got to go in. There’s no other help, is there!” Uncle, crushed, said, “No, there isn’t. Would to God there was!” And so the matter was decided.
“In the morning you must take Al to the school-committee and get his mill-papers,” said my aunt, before we went to bed.
“I’ll ask off from work, then,” replied my uncle.
I always enjoyed being in the company of Uncle Stanwood. He was always trying to make me happy when it was in his power to do so. I knew his heart—that despite the weakness of his character, burned with great love for me. He was not, like Aunt Millie, buffeting me about, as if I were a pawn in the way. He had the kind word for me, and the desirable plan. On our walk to the school-committee’s office, in the heart of the city, we grew very confidential when we found ourselves beyond the keen, jealous hearing of Aunt Millie.
“That woman,” he said, “stops me from being a better man, Al. You don’t know, lad, how often I try to tone up, and she always does something to prevent my carrying it out. I suppose it’s partly because she drinks, too, and likes it better than I do. Drink makes quite a difference in people, God knows! It’s the stuff that kept me from being a man. Now that you’re going into the mill, Al, I hope you’ll not be led off to touch it. Whatever you’re tempted to do, don’t drink!” Then he added, “I’m a nice one to be telling you that. You see it every day, and probably will see it every day while your aunt’s with me. I could leave it alone if she weren’t in the house. But now we’ve got to be planning what we are going to do in the office that we’re going to, I suppose. There’s a lie in it for both of us, Al, now that we have our foot in so far. You’ll have to swear with me that you’re the right, legal age, though it’s a deliberate lie. My God, who would ever have thought that I’d come to it. It’s jail if we’re caught, lad, but we won’t be caught. Don’t do anything but answer questions as they’re put. That will keep you from saying too much. Stand on your tip-toes, and talk deep, so that you’ll seem big and old.”
Finally we approached the office of the school-committee, in a dingy, wooden building, on the ground floor. A chipped tin sign was tacked underneath the glass panels of the door, and, sure of the place, we entered. We were in a narrow, carpeted hall, long and darkened, which passed before a high, bank desk, behind which sat a young man mumbling questions to a dark woman, who stood with her right hand held aloft, while a boy stood at her side trying to button his coat as fast as he could, in nervousness. There were several other boys and a few girls, seated with their parents on the settee near the wall. We found a place among them, and watched the solemn proceedings that were taking place before us, as boys and girls were questioned by the young man, vouched for by their parents, and sent off with their mill-certificates.
One by one they left us: tall Portuguese lads, with baggy, pepper-and-salt trousers over their shoe tops, and a shine on their dark cheeks, little girls in gaudy dresses and the babyishness not yet worn off their faces; Irish lads, who, in washing up for this solemn time, had forgotten patches of dirt in their ears and on their necks; an American boy, healthy, strong, and self-confident, going to join the ranks of labor.
Then it was my turn. Uncle stood up before that perfunctory young man and began to answer questions, pinching me every now and then in warning to remember what he had said. I braced up, as well as I could, muttering to myself, “Thirteen on the twentieth of November, going on fourteen, sir!” lest, when the time came, I should make a guilty slip. My school-certificate was produced, the books were consulted, and that part of the matter ended. The clerk then looked me over for an instant, asked me a few questions which I cannot now recall, and then turned to uncle. Slowly, with hand raised to God, my uncle swore that I was “thirteen last November.” In about five minutes the examination was completed. In that time there had been a hurried scratching of a pen, a flourish or two, the pressure of a blotter and a reaching out of uncle Stanwood’s hand. The last barrier between me and the mill was down! The law had sanctioned my fitness for a life of labor. Henceforth neither physician could debar me, nor clergyman nor teacher nor parent! No one seemed to have doubted my uncle’s word, nor to have set a moral plumb-line against me. It had been a mere matter of question and answer, writing and signing. The law had perfunctorily passed me, and that was enough!
So we passed out of that office, my uncle grimly clutching the piece of paper for which he had perjured himself—the paper which was my warrant, consigning me to years of battling beyond my strength, to years of depression, morbidity, and over-tired strain, years to be passed in the center of depravity and de-socializing doctrine. But that was a memorable and glad moment for me, for to-morrow, maybe, I should carry my own dinner pail, and wear overalls, and work for wages!