Chapter XIV. Bad Deeds in a
Union for Good Works
AFTER he had been away from home two weeks, uncle sent us a letter from a Rhode Island mill-town, informing us that he had the malaria, bad. Would one of us come and bring him home? There was a postscript which read: “Be sure and come for me either on a Monday, Wednesday, or a Friday. They are the alternate days when I don’t have the shivers.”
The day he came home he and aunt patched up peace over a pailful of beer, and there the matter ended, save that echoes of it would be heard at the next wrangle. Uncle took his place in one of the long lines of unemployed that wait for work at the end of the mill alleys. The expenses of the household were dependent upon the four dollars and a half I was earning at the time.
Then came the oppressive hot days of summer, with their drawn-out days with sun and cheerful huckleberry fields in their glory, a summer day which I could not enjoy because I was shut out from it by the mill windows, and it was against the rules to look out of them. Some of the fellows left their work in the summer, and loafed like plutocrats, having the whole day and three meals to themselves. But if I had loafed I should have had neither money nor peace. My aunt would have made a loafing day so miserable for me that I should have been glad to be away from her scolding. Neither would she have fed me, and, all in all, I should have been the loser.
But the evenings were long and cool after the mill closed for the night. From half-past six to ten offered me many enticements, chief among which was the privilege of roaming the streets with the Point Roaders, a gang of mill-boys, into which I was admitted after I had kicked the shins of “Yellow Belly,” the leader. I was naturally drawn to make friends with Jakey McCarty, a merry fellow of deep designs, who would put a string around my neck while pretending to plan a walk somewhere, or have his finger in my pocket, poking for cigarette money, while talking about the peggy game he had last played.
In the winter we had a very lonesome time of it, as a gang. All we could do that was exciting included standing on a drug-store corner, where we splashed the icy waters of a drinking trough in one another’s faces, or attended, en masse, an indoor bicycle race at the “Rink,” then in its glory. But we kept very close to the drinking trough, as money was not very plentiful.
I grew tired of mere loafing, and I finally persuaded Jakey McCarty, who liked reading, to go with me and visit the public library at least once a week, when we secured books, and while there also rooted among the back numbers of illustrated magazines and comic papers and made a night of it. But the gang resented this weekly excursion and separation, and various members reproached us with the stigma, “Libree-struck!” which, I always supposed, carried with it the same significance as “sun struck,” i.e., crazy over books.
In the following spring, though, the gang put up a parallel bar in an empty lot, and spent the early evenings in athletic diversions. When darkness came on, there were usually Wild West hold-ups, Indian dances, and cattle round-ups, in imitation of the features we read in the five-cent novels we bought and exchanged among ourselves. Then, with the putting on of long trousers, the gang became more active, and roamed at night over a broader area than before. Two of the gang even left us because they were “love-struck.”
At the end of the following winter the catalogue of the various activities of the gang would read like a chapter from the Hunnish Invasion. There were Saturday night excursions up to the center of the city, which led us through Water street, through the Jewish and the Portuguese sections. As we passed by a grocery store, with tin advertising signs projecting from its doorway, we would line up, and each lad would leap in the air and snap his fist against the sign, producing a loud clatter and leaving it vibrating at great speed. Before the clerks had appeared on the scene we had passed on, and mixed with the Saturday night throng of shoppers. Our next stop was before a Jewish butcher shop, in front of which, on a projecting hook, hung a cow’s heart and liver. Forming another line, the gang would leap again and catch that a resounding slap with the palm. Then one of the fellows poked his head in the shop door, and called, “Say, daddy, we’ll give yer five cents if you’ll let us take three more slaps!” On the next block, we came across a venerable Israelite, long-bearded and somnolent, watching for custom before his one-windowed clothing shop. Jakey leaped forward, gave a vigorous tug on the venerable’s beard, and we broke into a run, with a shrieking, horrified group of Jews in mad pursuit.
HE PLUCKED THE VENERABLE BEARD OF A SOMNOLENT HEBREW
Our objective in this series of adventures had been the Union for Good Works, a benevolent institution, with splendid rooms, to which we went for our shower-bath; cost, five cents!
After we had taken our baths, and while we were busy with nine-pins, Jakey stood at an opposite end of the room, and plastered the frescoed walls of the Union for Good Works with the pasty contents of a silver package of cream cheese, to which he had helped himself at the stall of a large public market. That same night, when we arrived at the South End and were disbanding, Jakey set on view before our astonished eyes a five-pound pail of lard, a cap, and several plugs of tobacco, which he carried home and presented to his mother, saying that he had been to an auction!
Such are only a few of the adventures in which we indulged after a depressing day of it in the mill. One Fourth of July night we roamed over the city, through the aristocratic section, and in a wild, fanatical, mob-spirit, entirely without a thought as to the criminal lengths of our action, leaped over low fences, went through gates and ran on lawns, tramping down flower-beds, crushing down shrubs, and snatching out of their sockets the small American flags with which the houses were decorated.
The only religious declaration the gang made came in the winter, when, on dull Sunday afternoons, merely for the walk it offered and the entertainments to which it gave us the entrée, we joined the classes in the Mission. I enjoyed sitting near the aristocratic, finely dressed young woman who instructed me as to the mighty strength of Samson, the musical and shepherding abilities of David, the martial significance of Joshua, and the sterling qualities of St. Paul. Most truly was my interest centered in the jeweled rings my teacher wore, or in the dainty scent that was wafted from her lace handkerchief when she gave one of those cute little feminine coughs! How far away, after all, was she from a knowledge of our lives and the conditions under which we lived! She aimed well, but whatever she intended, in her secret heart, went very, very wide of the mark. She had no moral thrills to treat us to, nor did she ever couch her appeal in so definite a way as to disturb our sins one bit. Perhaps she did not think we needed such strong medicine. Maybe she classed us as “Poor, suffering mill-boys!” and let that suffice. We needed someone to shake us by the shoulders, and tell us that we were cowards, afraid to make men of ourselves. We needed a strong, manly fellow, just then, to tell us, in plain speech, about the sins we were following. We needed, more truly than all else, a man’s Man, a high, convincing Character, a Spiritual Ideal, The Christ, pointed out to us. But this was not done, and we left the Mission with derision in our hearts for things we ought to have respected. Some of the fellows lighted their cigarettes with the Sunday-school papers they had been presented with.
Many of the Monday evenings in winter were gala nights, when we marched to the Armory and watched the militia drill. On our return home, we walked through the streets with soldierly precision, wheeling, halting, presenting arms, and making skilful formations when “Yellow Belly” ordered.
In September, the rules were posted in the mill that all minors who could not read and write must attend public evening school, unless prevented by physical incapacity. Four of us, “Yellow Belly,” Jakey, Dutchy Hermann, and myself, had a consultation, and decided that we would take advantage of the evening school and improve our minds. But the remainder of the gang, with no other intention than to break up the school, went also, and though there was a special officer on guard, and a masculine principal walking on rubber soles through the halls and opening classroom doors unexpectedly, they had their fling.
An evening school in a mill city is a splendid commentary on ambition. There one finds ambition at its best. After a day’s work of ten and a half hours, tired, tired, tired with the long day of heat and burden-bearing, lungs choking for inhalations of fresh, cool air, faces flushed with the dry heat of the room, ears still dulled by the roar and clank of machines, brains numbed by hours and hours of routine—yet there they are, men grown, some of them with moustaches, growing lads of fifteen, and sixteen, girls and women, all of many nationalities, spending a couple of the precious hours of their freedom scratching on papers, counting, musing over dry stuff, all because they want to atone for past intellectual neglect. I was there because I wanted to push past fractions and elementary history, and go on towards the higher things. I was entirely willing to forego priceless hours for two nights a week to get more of a knowledge of the rudiments from which I had been taken by the mill.
I had a seat quite back in the room, because I had intimations that some of the gang were going to “cut up,” and that a back seat would put me out of the danger zone of shooting peas, clay bullets, and other inventions. The man directly in front of me, with a first reader in his hand, was a tall Portuguese, the father of a family of children.
As soon as the starting gong had clanged through the halls, the gang began its operations. Dutchy, in spite of his avowed intention of seriously entering the school, pretended that he could not recite the alphabet. “Bunny,” a young Englishman, tried to pass himself off as a Swede and ignorant of English entirely. While the teachers were busy with the details of organization, the air was filled with riot, the special policeman was called in, and I along with the gang was threatened with arrest. Notwithstanding that such careful watch was maintained, the two weeks of night-school that I attended were filled with such disturbances that I grew discouraged and abandoned the project.
Whenever a circus or a fête, like the semi-centennial of the city, was advertised, the gang always planned to attend, in spite of the fact that the mills would not shut down. Six of us, in one room, by keeping away at noon, could cripple the mule-room so seriously that it could not run, and the spinners would get an afternoon off. Sometimes a group of spinners would hint to us to stay out that they might have a chance. That was my first experience in a form of labor-unionism.
Some of the men we worked under in the mill had a club-room, where they played table games, drank beer when the saloons were legally closed, and had Saturday night smokers, which my uncle attended, and where he was generally called upon to “vamp” on the piano.
The gang used to haunt this club, and, when there was a concert on, would climb up and look in the windows. Finally we decided that we ought to have a club-room of our own. We sought out and rented a shanty which had served as a tiny shop, we pasted pictures of actresses, prize fighters, and bicycle champions around the walls, had a small card table covered with magazines and newspapers, and initiated ourselves into the “club.”
The evenings of the first week we occupied, mainly, in sitting in front of the club, tilted back in chairs, and shouting to other mill lads, as they passed, in reply to their cynical salutations of “Gee, what style!” or, “Aw, blow off!” with a swaggering, “Ah, there, Jimmy. Come in and have a game!” Each member of the club kept from work a day, the better to taste the joys of club life to the full. About the fourth week, after we had held forth in a tempestuous whirl of boxing bouts, card matches, smoking bouts, and sensational novel-reading, the landlord repented of his bargain, locked us out, and declared to our remonstrance committee that he could no longer rent us the shanty, because we had become a “set of meddlin’ ne’er-do-wells!”
So we went back to the drug-store corner, with its drinking trough, where we could have been found huddled, miserable, like animals who have so much liberty and do not know how intelligently to use it. For we knew that after the night, came the morning, and with the morning another round in the mill, a fight with a machine, a ten hours’ dwelling in heated, spiceless, unexciting monotony, and a thought like that made us want to linger as long as we dared on that drug-store corner.