CHAPTER XXVI
THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED
“I am very tired to-night,” Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later. “I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all the leading firms, but—here I am, still without a place. I thought I might get a place in one of them where I could finish my law studies, and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had dreams of working into the firm in time, but they were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone glimmering. The men who are employed in the law offices are already admitted to the bar; most of them are young fellows, but some are old and gray-headed, and the sight of them gave me the blues.
“I did not get to see many of the firm members themselves; their offices are formidable places. There is no office in Macochee like them; they have big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks and there is a boy at a desk who makes you tell your business before you can get in to see any of the lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big, important fellows. Most of them would not see me at all; several said they had no place for me and dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one man, when I asked him if he thought there was an opening, said he supposed there ought to be, as one lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only the day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I shall never forget, took pains to sit down and talk with me a long time, but he was no more encouraging than the others. He said the profession was terribly overcrowded, ‘that is,’ he corrected himself with a tired smile, ‘if you can call it a profession any longer. It is more of a business nowadays and the only ones who get ahead are those who have big corporations for clients. How they all live is a mystery to me!’ He thought I had better not undertake it and advised me to go into some business. But then most of them did that.
“But I must tell you of my visit to Judge Johnson. You will remember my telling you of him; he was Wade Powell’s chum in the law school in Cincinnati, and Mr. Powell had given me a letter to him. I had a hard time seeing him; the hardest of all. When I went into the big stone government building he was holding court, and a lawyer was making an argument before him. I waited till they were all done, and then when the crier had adjourned court—he said ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez,’ instead of the ‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye’ we have in Ohio; it sounded so old and quaint, even if he did say ‘Oh yes,’ for ‘Oyez!’ It comes from the old Norman-French, you know; ask your father about it, he’ll explain it—I tried to get in to him. I succeeded at last, but it was hard work. He didn’t seem glad to see me; he looked at me coldly, and made me feel as if I ought to hurry up and state my business promptly and get away. When I gave him Wade Powell’s letter he put on his gold glasses and read it; but—what do you think?—I don’t believe he remembered Wade Powell at all! At least he seemed not to. Of course he may have been putting it on. Wouldn’t it make Wade Powell mad to know that? I’d give a dollar—and I haven’t any to spare either—to see him when he hears that his old friend, Judge Johnson of the United States Circuit Court, couldn’t remember him! Well, the judge didn’t let me detain him long, he looked at his watch a moment, and then he advised me not to try it in Chicago; he said there were too many lawyers here anyhow, and that he thought a young man made a mistake in coming to a city at all.
“‘Why don’t you stay in a small town?’ he asked, looking at me sternly over his glasses. ‘Living is cheaper there, and life is much more simple than it is in the cities. I’ve often wished I had stayed in a little town.’
“I came away, as you can imagine, feeling pretty much cast down and humbled in spirit. There are four thousand lawyers in Chicago; just think of it, almost as many lawyers as there are people in Macochee! As I walked through the crowded streets with men and women rushing along, I wondered how they all lived. What do they do? Where are they all going, and how do they get a place to stand on? As I came across the bridge over to the North Side I felt that there was no place for me here in this great, dirty, ugly city, just as there is no place for me back in peaceful Macochee, where every minute of the day I long to be. Anyway, I am sure that there is no place for me here in the law, and I shall have to look for something else. I see so much wretchedness and poverty and squalor; it is in the street everywhere—pale, gaunt men, who look at you out of sick, appealing eyes.
“This morning I saw a sight down-town that filled me with horror; it was noon, and a great crowd of ragged men were waiting in front of the Daily News office in Fifth Avenue. They were all standing idly and yet expectantly about; I stood and watched them. Presently, as at some signal, they all rushed for the office door, and then all at once they seemed to be enveloped in a white, rustling cloud. Each one had a newspaper, and they all turned to one page and began to read rapidly; sometimes two or three men bent over the same paper; in another moment they had scattered, going in all directions. Then it flashed upon me: they had been waiting for the noon edition of the paper and the page they had all turned to was the page with the ‘want ads’ on it; they were all looking for jobs! It made me inexpressibly sad. I do not wish to inflict my own sorrow upon you, dear heart, but it made me shudder; what if I—but no, the thought is too horrible to mention. And yet I, too, belong to this great army of the unemployed.
“As I write the clock in the steeple of a church a block away chimes the hour of midnight; so you see that I’ve retained my nocturnal habits. When the poets of a coming generation sing of me (as they doubtless will, after my death) their songs will be called Nocturnes.”
That same day Doctor Marley received a letter from his son which Mrs. Marley, though her husband passed it over to her to read, did not show to Lavinia. It ran:
“It’s rather expensive living here, I find; especially for one who belongs to the great army of the unemployed. My contract with my basiliscine landlady calls for two meals a day and a bed at night—also for three-fifty per week in payment of said two meals and bed. My lunches I get down-town; that is, I did get them down-town; for two days I have gone without lunches, and the aforesaid landlady looks reproachfully at me at night when she sees me laying in an extra supply of dinner. I don’t mind the lack of the lunches, even if she does, but I’ll have to pay her in a day or so now. I’m in poor spirits to-night, so can’t write well; cause of said low mental temperature, only eighty cents in the world between me, my landlady and ultimate starvation. It’s funny how much hungrier a fellow gets as the food supply gets low. A word to the wise, etc.
“What do you think? I met Charlie Davis on the street this morning. He is living here now, working in some big department store. My, it was good to see some one from Macochee! How small the world is, after all!
“How are you all? How is Dolly? Does Smith Johnson still clap his hands at his dog every evening as he comes home, and does the dog run out to meet him as joyously as of yore? And does Hank Delphy still go down-town in his shirt-sleeves? And has Charlie Fouly had any fits in the Square lately? And, father, has mother got a girl yet? Give her an ocean of love and tell her not to work too hard, and to let the heathen shift for themselves a while. They haven’t any trusts to monopolize the jobs as yet, and they ought to be able to get along. Oh, how I’d like to see you all! Answer all my questions: I propounded numerous ones to you. I don’t remember now what all of them were, but I know they were all momentous and had much to do with my well-being, spiritual and physical, not to say financial. And see that the moss doesn’t get too thickly overlaid on my memory.”
Marley’s new life in Chicago, as somewhat vaguely reflected in his letters, impressed those who had a sense of having been left behind in Macochee, as but a continuation of the life he had led there, that is, it was presented to them as one long, hopeless search for employment. He told of his daily tramps up and down the city, of his dutiful applications for work in every place where the boon of work might be bestowed, and of the unvarying refusals of those in whose hands had been intrusted, by some inscrutable decree of the providence of economics, the right to control the opportunity of labor. It was as if the primal curse of earning his bread were in a fair way to be taken from man, had not the primal necessity of eating his bread continued unabated.
The routine through which he went each day had begun to weary Marley, and it might have begun to weary his readers in Macochee, had they not all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up with his. He apologized in his nightly letters for the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal of his life that he could give. He tried at times to give his letters a lighter tone by describing, with a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents that attracted him in a city whose life was all so new and strange to him; he could not help a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia was probably unconscious of the change, his letters were now less concerned with the things of the life he had left in Macochee, and more and more with the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago; as on a palimpsest, the old impressions were erased to make way for new ones.
But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer that was far from expressing his own spirit, he could not save them from the despair that was laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated itself in the declaration that it was now no longer with him a question of selecting employment.
“I must take,” he wrote, “whatever I can get, and that will probably be some kind of manual, if not menial, work. Sometimes,” so he let himself go on, “I feel as if I would give up and go back to Macochee, defeated and done for. But I can not come to that yet, though I would like to; oh, how I would like to! But I don’t dare, my pride won’t let me act the part of a coward, though I know I am one at heart. One thing keeps me up and that is the thought of you; I see your face ever before me, and your sweet eyes ever smiling at me—”
Lavinia’s eyes were not smiling as she read this; and she poured out her own grief and sympathy in a long letter that she promptly tore up, to pen in its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten him in the struggle which, as she proudly assured him, he was making for her.
Marley’s description of his straits partly prepared Lavinia for the shock of the letter in which he said he had found a job at last, but she was hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far from her conception of what was due him as a job trucking freight for a railroad. The mockery he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper and overalls could not console her, and she kept the truth from every one, except her mother; she preferred rather that they number Marley still with the army of the unemployed than to count him among those who toiled so desperately with the muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to conceal in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of which she felt she should be ashamed, and she tried to show her appreciation of his droll sarcasms about the preparation his four years of college had given him for the task of trundling barrels of sugar and heaving pianos down from box-cars.
“I’m sure it’s honest work,” she wrote, “but do be careful, dear, not to hurt yourself in lifting such heavy loads.” It was a comfort to remind him that he was not intended to do such work.
There was a relief, however, that she did not dare admit, when he told her three days later that he had lost his job.
“I realize for the first time my importance in the great scheme of things,” he wrote. “I was fired because I do not belong to the freight handlers’ union. It took them three days to find this out, and then they threatened to strike if the railroad company did not immediately discharge me. The railroad company, after due consideration, decided to let me out, and—I’m out. It makes me tremble to think of the consequences that would have followed had they decided otherwise. Think of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill and the commerce of the nation paralyzed, and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is really encouraging to know that my presence on the earth is actually known to my fellow-mortals; it has at least been discovered that I am alive and in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by Freight Handlers’ Union No. 63. And now,” he concluded, “as Kipling says, it’s ‘back to the army again, Sergeant, back to the army again’—the army of the unemployed.”
Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later when on opening her letter she met the announcement that he had been offered a job with another railroad as a freight handler.
“But you need not be alarmed,” she was reassured to read—though it was not until she thought it all over afterward that she began to wonder how he had divined her dislike of his being in such work—“I haughtily declined, and turned them down. You see this road is just now in the throes of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out. Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do the work of the strikers. They take anybody—that’s why they were ready to take me. But as I said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to take a place away from a union man.”
Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley’s declination of the position for a satisfaction in the nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation she related the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley had declined such an employment she felt safe in doing this. But her father did not see it in her light, or at least in Marley’s light.
“Humph!” he sneered; “so he sympathizes with unionism, does he? Well, those unions will own the whole earth if they keep on.”
“But he says he thought of the wives and children of the union men—”
“Well, but why doesn’t he think of the wives and children of the scabs, as he calls them? They have as much right to live and work as the union men.”
Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself, could not answer this argument, though she felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before she could proceed in his defense, her father, strangely enraged at the mere mention of the policies of the unions, hurried on:
“The union didn’t show any consideration for him when it took his other job away from him.”
Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother, who did not see it because she was shooting a glance more than reproachful at her husband, and it had the effect of silencing and humbling the judge, as all of Lavinia’s arguments, or all of the arguments known to the propaganda of union labor, could not have done.
CHAPTER XXVII
A FOOTHOLD
The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began ecstatically:
“I’ve got a job at last! I’m now working for the C. C. and P. Railroad, in their local freight office, and I’m not trucking freight either, but I’m a clerk—a bill clerk, to be more exact. My duties consist in sitting at a desk and writing out freight bills, for which by some inscrutable design of Providence my study of common carriers and contracts in the law was doubtless intended to prepare me.
“To-day I wrote out a bill for freight to Cook and Jennings, Macochee, Ohio, and you can imagine my sensations. It made me homesick for a while; I wished that by some necromancy I might conceal myself in the bill and go to Macochee with it; I had a notion to write a little word of greeting on the bill, but I didn’t; it might have worried old man Cook’s brain and he couldn’t stand much of a strain of that kind. But I’m getting nearer Macochee every day now. I guess I’m to be a railroad man after all, and some day you’ll be proud to tell your friends that I started at the bottom. ‘Oh, yes,’ you’ll be boasting, ‘Mr. Marley began as a common freight trucker; and worked his way up to general manager.’ Then we’ll go back to Macochee in my private car. I can see it standing down by the depot, on the side track close to Market Street, baking in the hot sun, and the little boys from across the tracks will be crowding about it, gaping at the white-jacketed darky who’ll be getting the dinner ready. We’ll have Jack and Mayme down to dine with us, and your father and mother and Chad and Connie, and my folks, too, and maybe, if you’ll let me, Wade Powell. Then, of course, the Macochee people will think better of me; they won’t be saying that I’m no good, but instead they’ll stand around, in an easy, careless way, and say, ‘Oh, yes, I knew Glenn when he was a boy. I always said he’d get up in the world.’
“But, ah me, just now I’m a bill clerk at fifty dollars a month, thank you, and glad of the chance to get it; so is my voluptuous landlady glad; she’ll get her board money a little more regularly now.
“I suppose you’ll want to know something about my surroundings. They are not elegant; the office is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks, where we sit and write from eight in the morning until any hour at night when it occurs to the boss to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten o’clock before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us an hour in which to run out to a restaurant for supper. The windows in the office were washed, so tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus landed. Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly so as to keep the noise going. My boss, whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort of fool of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious ass, but a poor, unfortunate, deluded simpleton. He’s one of those close-fisted reubs whose chief care is the pennies, and whose only interest in life is the C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his business his own personal affair and the C. C. and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays twenty cents for his lunch, never more, often fifteen. One of the first things he told me was, now that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin to save money. They have a young man in the office here, whose desk is next to mine, who was born somewhere in Canada, and is always ’a-servin’ of her Majesty the Queen,’ as Kipling says. He told me with much gusto how he had hung out of the office window last New Year’s a Canadian flag. He seemed proud of having done so, and also told me, boasted to me, in fact, that he was going to hang the same flag out of the same window on the Fourth of July. ‘Oh, yes, you are!’ thinks I. So I got the flag and ripped it into shreds and started it through the waste-basket on a hurried trip to oblivion. À bas the Canadian flag! He’ll probably get another one, but if I get hold of it, it’ll meet the same fate as the first one. Then I have something to think of that’ll keep my mind off my horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I smile in ghoulish glee with a cynical leer overspreading my classic features, at the young man’s disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in the office aren’t much to boast of. They’re a diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian and Bill Hoffman the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it were buried under seven hundred and thirty feet of Lake Michigan.”
Marley’s next letter to Lavinia opened thus:
“Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson, Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20.
“‘New man on desk next to mine; young, about 24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not think he will last. Took me to lunch with him this evening.’
“Now what do you think of that? The youth I described to you at such length keeps a diary, and the foregoing is culled therefrom. He left it by some mistake on top of his desk, and I picked it up innocently enough to-night, to see what it was, and that was the first thing my eye lit on. He is evidently an adept at coming to conclusions, apparently he can sum one up in two whisks of a porter’s broom. I was much surprised to find myself so well done. Done on every side in those few words. I’ve rather enjoyed it; strikes me as being uproariously funny. Maybe his dictum is correct. You’ll agree with me as to his richness. Tell every one about it and see what they will think. Tell your mother and my mother. Tell Jack and give him a chance to laugh. Tell Mayme Carter, too.”
Lavinia ran at once to her mother.
“Listen,” she said. And she read it.
Mrs. Blair laughed.
“How funny!” she said, “and how well he writes! I should think he’d go into literature.”
Lavinia laid the letter down in her lap and looked at her mother as if she had been startled by a striking coincidence.
“Why, do you know, I’ve thought of that very thing myself.”
“But read on,” urged Mrs. Blair.
Lavinia picked up the letter again and began:
“Well, de—”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, blushing hotly, “I can’t read you that. Let’s see—”
She leafed over the letter, one, two, three, four sheets. Mrs. Blair was smiling.
“Aren’t you leaving out the best parts?” she asked archly.
“Oh, there’s nothing,” Lavinia said, not looking up. “But—oh, well, this is all. He says—
“‘There is a good deal of unrest and uneasiness here just now, because the first of May is coming. The road is anticipating trouble with the freight handlers; they may go out on a strike that day.’
“Oh, dear,” sighed Lavinia, “more strikes, and I suppose that means more trouble for Glenn.”
“Why, the strike of those men can’t affect him,” Mrs. Blair assured her. “He’s a clerk now.”
“Yes, I know, but what if he gets the notion he ought to help them by quitting too?”