UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 / 
 
 / 
 
 J 
 
 3^
 
 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 A MIDDLE-CLASS NEW-ENGLANDER 
 EMIGRATES TO AMERICA
 
 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 A MIDDLE-CLASS NEW-ENGLANDER 
 EMIGRATES TO AMERICA 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM CARLETON 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Copyright, 191 1 
 
 By Small, Maynard & Company 
 
 (incorporated) 
 
 Entered at Stationers' Hall 
 
 Published January, 2S, 1911 ; second printing January 
 
 Third printing February ; fourth printing March 
 
 Fifth printing, October, 191 1 
 
 Presswork by The University Press, 
 Cambridge, U.S.A.
 
 
 TO HER 
 WHO WASN'T AFRAID 
 
 UJ 
 
 is: 
 
 UJ 
 QQ 
 
 'MyiViV.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEE PAGE 
 
 I A Born and Bred New Englander . i 
 
 II Thirty Dollars a Week . . . . i8 
 
 III The Middle Class Hell .... 37 
 
 IV We Emigrate to America .... 53 
 V We Prospect ^7 
 
 VI I Become a Day Laborer ... 82 
 
 VII Nine Dollars a Week 94 
 
 VIII Sunday 112 
 
 IX Plans for the Future 125 
 
 X The Emigrant Spirit 146 
 
 XI New Opportunities 165 
 
 XII Our First Winter 183 
 
 XIII I Become a Citizen 200 
 
 XIV Fifteen Dollars a Week . . . .216 
 XV The Gang 234 
 
 XVI Dick Finds a Way Out, Too . . . 252 
 
 XVII The Second Year 266 
 
 XVIII Maturing Plans 283 
 
 XIX Once Again a New Englander . , 298
 
 ONE WAY OUT
 
 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 
 
 My great-grandfather was killed in the Rev- 
 olution ; my grandfather fought in the War of 
 1812; my father sacrificed his health in the 
 Civil War; but I, though born in New Eng- 
 land, am the first of my family to emigrate to 
 this country — the United States of America. 
 That sounds like a riddle or a paradox. It 
 isn't ; it's a plain statement of fact. 
 
 As a matter of convenience let me call my- 
 self Carleton. I've no desire to make public 
 my life for the sake of notoriety. My only 
 idea in writing these personal details is the 
 hope that they may help some poor devil out 
 of the same hole in which I found myself mired. 
 They are of too sacred a nature to share ex- 
 cept impersonally. Even behind the disguise 
 of an assumed name I passed some mighty un- 
 comfortable hours a few months ago when I 
 
 I
 
 2 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 sketched out for a magazine and saw in cold 
 print what I'm now going to give in full. 
 It made me feel as though I had pulled down 
 the walls of my house and was living my life 
 open to the view of the street. For a man 
 whose home means what it does to me, there's 
 nothing pleasant about that. 
 
 However, I received some letters follow- 
 ing that brief article which made the dis- 
 comfort seem worth while. My wife and I 
 read them over with something like awe. 
 They came from Maine and they came 
 from Texas; they came from the north, they 
 came from the south, until we numbered our 
 unseen friends by the hundred. Running 
 through these letters was the racking cry that 
 had once rended our own hearts — "How to get 
 out!" As we read some of them our throats 
 grew lumpy. 
 
 "God help them," said my wife over and 
 over again. 
 
 As we read others, we felt very glad that 
 our lives had been in some way an inspiration 
 to them. After talking the whole matter over 
 we decided that if it helped any to let people 
 know how we ourselves pulled out, why it was 
 our duty to do so. For that purpose, which is
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 3 
 
 the purpose of this book, Carleton is as good a 
 name as any. 
 
 My people were all honest, plodding, middle- 
 class Americans. They stuck where they 
 were born, accepted their duties as they came, 
 earned a respectable living and died without 
 having money enough left to make a will worth 
 while. They were all privates in the ranks. 
 But they were the best type of private — hon- 
 est, intelligent, and loyal unto death. They 
 were faithful to their families and unswerv- 
 ing in their duty to their country. The rec- 
 ords of their lives aren't interesting, but they 
 are as open as daylight. 
 
 My father seems to have had at first a bit 
 more ambition stirring within him than his 
 ancestors. He started in the lumber business 
 for himself in a small way but with the first 
 call for troops sold out and enlisted. He did 
 not distinguish himself but he fought in more 
 battles than many a man who came out a cap- 
 tain. He didn't quit until the war was over. 
 Then he crawled back home subdued and 
 sick. He refused ever to draw a pension be- 
 cause he felt it was as much a man's duty to 
 fight for his country as for his wife. He se- 
 cured a position as head clerk and confidential
 
 4 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 man with an old established lumber firm and 
 here he stuck the rest of his life. He earned a 
 decent living and in the course of time married 
 and occupied a comfortable home. My mother 
 died when I was ten and after that father 
 sold his house and we boarded. It was a 
 dreary enough life for both of us. Mother 
 was the sort of mother who lives her whole 
 life in caring for her men folks so that her go- 
 ing left us as helpless as babies. For a long 
 while we didn't even know when to change our 
 stockings. But obeying the family tradition, 
 father accepted his lot stoically and as final. 
 No one in our family ever married twice. 
 With the death of the wife and mother the 
 home ceased and that was the end of it. 
 
 I remember my father with some pride. He 
 was a tall, old-fashioned looking man with a 
 great deal of quiet dignity. I came to know 
 him much better in the next few years after 
 mother died than ever before for we lived to- 
 gether in one room and had few friends. I 
 can see him now sitting by a small kerosene 
 lamp after I had gone to bed clumsily trying to 
 mend some rent in my clothes. I thought 
 it an odd occupation for a man but I know now 
 what he was about. I think his love for my
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 5 
 
 mother must have been deep for he talked to 
 me a great deal of her and seemed much more 
 concerned about my future on her account 
 than on either his own or mine. I think it 
 was she — she was a woman of some spirit — 
 who persuaded him to consider sending me to 
 college. This accounted partly for the mend- 
 ing although there was some sentiment about 
 it too. I think he liked to feel that he was 
 carrying out her work for me even in such a 
 small matter as this. 
 
 How much he was earning and how much 
 he saved I never knew. I went to school and 
 had all the common things of the ordinary 
 boy and I don't remember that I ever asked 
 him for any pocket money but what he gave 
 it to me. It was towards the end of my senior 
 year in the high school that I began to notice 
 a change in him. He was at times strangely 
 excited and at other times strangely blue. He 
 asked me a great many questions about my 
 preference in the matter of a college and bade 
 me keep well up in my studies. He began to 
 skimp a little and I found out afterw^ards that 
 one reason he grew so thin was because he did 
 away with his noon meal. It makes my blood 
 boil now when I remember where the fruit of
 
 6 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 this self-sacrifice went. I wouldn't recall it 
 here except as a humble tribute to his memory. 
 
 One night I came back to the room and 
 though it was not yet dark I was surprised to 
 see a crack of yellow light creeping out from 
 beneath the sill. Suspecting something was 
 wrong, I pushed open the door and saw my 
 father seated by the lamp with a pair of 
 trousers I had worn when a kid in his hands. 
 His head was bent and he was trying to sew. 
 I went to his side and asked him what the 
 trouble was. He looked up but he didn't know 
 me. He never knew me again. He died a 
 few days afterwards. I found then that he 
 had invested all his savings in a wild-cat mining 
 scheme. They had been swept away. 
 
 So at eighteen I was left alone with the only 
 capital that succeeding generations of my 
 family ever inherited — a common school edu- 
 cation and a big, sound physique. My father's 
 tragic death was a heavy blow but the mere 
 fact that I was thrown on my own resources did 
 not dishearten me. In fact the prospect rather 
 roused me. I had soaked in the humdrum 
 atmosphere of the boarding house so long that 
 the idea of having to earn my own living came 
 rather as an adventure. While dependent on
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 7 
 
 my father, I had been chained to this one room 
 and this one city, but now I feh as though the 
 whole wide world had suddenly been opened up 
 to me. I had no particular ambition beyond 
 earning a comfortable living and I was sure 
 enough at eighteen of being able to do this. 
 If I chose, I could go to sea — there wasn't a 
 vessel but what would take so husky a young- 
 ster ; if I wished, I could go into railroading — 
 here again there was a demand for youth and 
 brawn. I could go into a factory and learn 
 manufacturing or I could go into an office and 
 learn a business. I was young, I was strong, 
 I was unfettered. There is no one on earth so 
 free as such a young man. I could settle in 
 New York or work my way west and settle in 
 Seattle or go north into Canada. My legs 
 were stout and I could walk if necessary. And 
 wherever I was, I had only to stop and offer 
 the use of my back and arms in return for 
 food and clothes. Most men feel like this only 
 once in their lives. In a few years they be- 
 come fettered again — this time for good. 
 
 Having no inclination towards the one thing 
 or the other, I took the first opportunity that 
 offered. A chum of mine had entered the em- 
 ploy of the United Woollen Company and see-
 
 8 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 ing another vacancy there in the clerical de- 
 partment, he persuaded me to join him. I be- 
 gan at five dollars a week. I was put at work 
 adding up columns of figures that had no more 
 meaning to me than the problems in the school 
 arithmetic. But it wasn't hard work and my 
 hours were short and my associates pleasant. 
 After a while I took a certain pride in being 
 part of this vast enterprise. My chum and I 
 hired a room together and we both felt like 
 pretty important business men as we bought 
 our paper on the car every morning and went 
 down town. 
 
 It took close figuring to do anything but live 
 that first year and yet we pushed our way with 
 the crowd into the nigger heavens and saw 
 most of the good shows. I had never been to 
 the theatre before and I liked it. 
 
 Next year I received a raise of five dollars 
 and watched the shows from the rear of the 
 first balcony. That is the only change the 
 raise made that I can remember except that I 
 renewed my stock of clothes. The only thing 
 I'm sure of is that at the end of the second 
 year I didn't have anything left over. 
 
 That is true of the next six years. My 
 salary was advanced steadily to twenty dollars
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 9 
 
 and at that time it took just twenty dollars a 
 week for me to live. I wasn't extravagant 
 and I wasn't dissipated but every raise found 
 a new demand. It seemed to work automatic- 
 ally. You might almost say that our salaries 
 were not raised at all but that we were pro- 
 moted from a ten dollar plane of life to a fif- 
 teen dollar plane and then to a twenty. And 
 we all went together — that is the men who 
 started together. Each advance meant un- 
 consciously the wearing of better clothes, room- 
 ing at better houses, eating at better restau- 
 rants, smoking better tobacco, and more fre- 
 quent amusements. This left us better satis- 
 fied of course but after all it left us just where 
 we began. Life didn't mean much to any of 
 us at this time and if we were inclined to look 
 ahead why there were the big salaried jobs be- 
 fore us to dream about. But even if a man 
 had been forehanded and of a saving nature, 
 he couldn't have done much without sacrificing 
 the only friends most of us had — his office as- 
 sociates. For instance — to save five dollars a 
 week at this time I would have had to drop 
 back into the fifteen dollars a week crowd and 
 I'd have been as much out of place there as a 
 boy dropped into a lower grade at school. I
 
 lO ONE WAY OUT 
 
 remember that when I was finally advanced 
 another five dollars I half-heartedly resolved 
 to put that amount in the bank weekly. But 
 at this point the crowd all joined a small coun- 
 try club and I had either to follow or drop out 
 of their lives. Of course in looking back I 
 can see where I might have done differently 
 but I wasn't looking back then — nor very far 
 ahead either. If it would have prevented my 
 joining the country club I'm glad I didn't. 
 
 It was out there that I met the girl who be- 
 came my wife. My best reason for remaining 
 anon}Tnous is the opportunity it will give me 
 to tell about Ruth. I want to feel free to rave 
 about her if I wish. She objected in the mag- 
 azine article and she objects even more 
 strongly now but, as before, I must have an 
 uncramped hand in this. The chances are 
 that I shall talk more about her than I did the 
 first time. The w^hole scheme of my life, be- 
 ginning, middle and end, swings around her. 
 Without her inspiration I don't like to think 
 what the end of me might have been. And it's 
 just as true to-day as it was in the stress of the 
 fight. 
 
 I was twenty-six when I met Ruth and she 
 was eighteen. She came out to the club one
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER ii 
 
 Saturday afternoon to watch some tennis. It 
 happened that I had worked into the finals of 
 the tournament but that day I wasn't playing 
 very well. I was beaten in the first set, six- 
 two. What was worse I didn't care a hang if 
 I was. I had found myself feeling like this 
 about a lot of things during those last few 
 months. Then as I made ready to serve the 
 second set I happened to see in the front row 
 of the crowd to the right of the court a slight 
 girl with blue eyes. She was leaning forward 
 looking at me with her mouth tense and her 
 fists tight closed. Somehow I had an idea that 
 she wanted me to win. I don't know why, be- 
 cause I was sure I'd never seen her before ; but 
 I thought that perhaps she had bet a pair 
 of gloves or a box of candy on me. If she had, 
 I made up my mind that she'd get them. I 
 Started in and they said, afterwards, I never 
 played better tennis in my life. At any rate I 
 beat my man. 
 
 After the game I found someone to intro- 
 duce me to her and from that moment on there 
 was nothing else of so great consequence in 
 my life. I learned all about her in the course 
 of the next few weeks. Her family, too, was 
 distinctly middle-class, in the sense that none
 
 12 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 of them had ever done anything to distinguish 
 themselves either for good or bad. Her par- 
 ents Hved on a small New Hampshire farm and 
 she had just been graduated from the village 
 academy and had come to town to visit her 
 aunt. The latter was a tall, lean woman, who, 
 after the death of her husband had been forced 
 to keep lodgers to eke out a living. Ruth 
 showed me pictures of her mother and father, 
 and they might have been relatives of mine as 
 far as looks went. The father had caught an 
 expression from the granite hills which most 
 New England farmers get — a rugged, strained 
 look; the mother was lean and kind and wor- 
 ried. I met them later and liked them. 
 
 Ruth was such a woman as my mother would 
 have taken to; clear and laughing on the sur- 
 face, but with great depths hidden among the 
 golden shallows. Her experience had all been 
 among the meadows and mountains so that she 
 was simple and direct and fearless in her 
 thoughts and acts. You never had to wonder 
 what she meant when she spoke and when you 
 came to know her you didn't even have to won- 
 der what she was dreaming about. And yet 
 she was never the same because she was al- 
 ways growing. But the thing that woke me
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 13 
 
 up most of all from the first day I met her was 
 the interest she took in everyone and every- 
 thing. A fellow couldn't bore Ruth if he 
 tried. She would have the time of her life 
 sitting on a bench in the park or walking down 
 the street or just staring out the window of her 
 aunt's front room. And that street looked 
 like Sunday afternoon all the week long. 
 
 I began to do some figuring when I was 
 alone but there wasn't much satisfaction in it. 
 I had the clothes in my room, a good collection 
 of pipes, and ten dollars of my last week's 
 salary. A man couldn't get married on that 
 even to a girl like Ruth who wouldn't want 
 much. I cut down here and there but I nat- 
 urally wanted to appear well before Ruth and 
 so the savings went into new ties and shoes. 
 In this way I fretted along for a few months 
 until I screwed my courage up to ask for an- 
 other raise. Those were prosperous days for 
 the United Woollen and everyone from the 
 president to the office boy was in good humor. 
 I went to Morse, head of the department, and 
 told him frankly that I wished to get married 
 and needed more money. That wasn't a busi- 
 ness reason for an increase but those of us who 
 had worked there some years had come to feel
 
 14 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 like one of the family and it wasn't unusual 
 for the company to raise a man at such a time. 
 He said he'd see what he could do about it and 
 when I opened my pay envelope the next week 
 I found an extra five in it. 
 
 I went direct from the office to Ruth and 
 asked her to marry me. She didn't hang her 
 head nor stammer but she looked me straight 
 in the eyes a moment longer than usual and 
 answered : 
 
 "All right, Billy." 
 
 'Then let's go out this afternoon and see 
 about getting a house," I said. 
 
 I don't think a Carleton ever boarded when 
 first married. To me it wouldn't have seemed 
 like getting married. I knew a suburb where 
 some of the men I had met at the country club 
 lived and we went out there. It was a beauti- 
 ful June day and everything looked clean and 
 fresh. We found a little house of eight rooms 
 that we knew we wanted as soon as we saw it. 
 It was one of a group of ten or fifteen that 
 were all very much alike. There was a piazza 
 on the front and a little bit of lawn that looked 
 as though it had been squeezed in afterwards. 
 In the rear there was another strip of land 
 where we thought we might raise some garden
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 15 
 
 stuff if we put it in boxes. The house itself 
 had a front hall out of which stairs led to the 
 next floor. To the right there was a large 
 room separated by folding doors with another 
 good-sized room next to it which would nat- 
 urally be used as a dining room. In the rear 
 of this was the kitchen and besides the door 
 there was a slide through which to pass the 
 food. Upstairs there were four big rooms 
 Stretching the whole width of the house. 
 Above these there was a servant's room. The 
 whole house was prettily finished and in the 
 two rooms down stairs there were fireplaces 
 which took my eye, although they weren't big- 
 ger than coal hods. It was heated by a fur- 
 nace and lighted by electricity and there were 
 stained glass panels either side of the front 
 door. 
 
 The rent was forty dollars a month and I 
 signed a three years' lease before I left. The 
 next week was a busy one for us both. We 
 bought almost a thousand dollars' worth of 
 furniture on the installment plan and even 
 then we didn't seem to get more than the bare 
 necessities. I hadn't any idea that house fur- 
 nishings cost so much. But if the bill had 
 come to five times that I wouldn't have cared.
 
 l6 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 The installments didn't amount to very much 
 a week and I already saw Morse promoted and 
 myself filling his position at twenty-five hun- 
 dred. I hadn't yet got over the feeling I had 
 at eighteen that life was a big adventure and 
 that a man with strong legs and a good back 
 couldn't lose. With Ruth at my side I bought 
 like a king. Though I never liked the idea of 
 running into debt this didn't seem like a debt. 
 I had only to look into her dear blue eyes to 
 feel myself safe in buying the store itself. 
 Ruth herself sometimes hesitated but, as I told 
 her, we might as well start right and once for 
 all as to go at it half heartedly. 
 
 The following Saturday we were married. 
 My vacation wasn't due for another month so 
 we decided not to wait. The old folks came 
 down from the farm and we just called in a 
 clergyman and were married in the front par- 
 lor of the aunt's house. It was both very sim- 
 ple and very solemn. For us both the ceremony 
 meant the taking of a sacred oath of so serious 
 a nature as to forbid much lightheartedness. 
 And yet I did wish that the father and mother 
 and aunt had not dressed in black and cried 
 during it all. Ruth wore a white dress and 
 looked very beautiful and didn't seem afraid.
 
 A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 17 
 
 As for me, my knees trembled and I was chalk 
 white. I think it was the old people and the 
 room, for when it was over and we came out 
 into the sunshine again I felt all right except 
 a bit light-headed. I remember that the street 
 and the houses and the cars seemed like very- 
 small matters.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 
 
 When, with Ruth on my arm, I walked up 
 the steps of the house and unlocked the front 
 door, I entered upon a new life. It was my 
 first taste of home since my mother died and 
 added to that was this new love which was 
 finer than anything I had ever dreamed about. 
 It seemed hard to have to leave every morn- 
 ing at half past six and not get back until 
 after five at night, but to offset this we used to 
 get up as early as four o'clock during the long 
 summer days. Many the time even in June 
 Ruth and I ate our breakfast by lamp-light. 
 It gave us an extra hour and she was bred in 
 the country where getting up in the morning 
 is no great hardship. 
 
 We couldn't afford a servant and we didn't 
 want one. Ruth was a fine cook and I cer- 
 tainly did justice to her dishes after ten years 
 of restaurants and boarding-houses. On rainy 
 days when we couldn't get out, she used to do 
 
 i8
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 19 
 
 her cooking early so that I might watch her. 
 It seemed a lot more like her cooking when I 
 saw her pat out the dough and put it in the 
 oven instead of coming home and finding it all 
 done. I used to fill up my pipe and sit by the 
 kitchen stove until I had just time to catch the 
 train by sprinting. 
 
 But when the morning was fine we'd either 
 take a long walk through the big park reser- 
 vation which was near the house or we'd fuss 
 over the garden. We had twenty-two inches 
 of radishes, thirty-eight inches of lettuce, four 
 tomato plants, two hills of corn, three hills of 
 beans and about four yards of early peas. In 
 addition to this Ruth had squeezed a geranium 
 into one corner and a fern into another and 
 planted sweet alyssum around the whole busi- 
 ness. Everyone out here planned to raise his 
 own vegetables. It was supposed to cut down 
 expenses but I noticed the market man always 
 did a good business. 
 
 I had met two or three of the men at 
 the country club and they introduced me to the 
 others. We were all earning about the same 
 salaries and living in about the same type of 
 house. Still there were differences and you 
 could tell more by the wives than the husbands
 
 20 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 those whose salaries went over two thousand. 
 Two or three of the men were in banks, one 
 was in a leather firm, one was an agent for an 
 insurance company, another was with the tele- 
 graph company, another was with the Standard 
 Oil, and two or three others were with firms 
 like mine. Most of them had been settled out 
 here three or four years and had children. In 
 a general way they looked comfortable and 
 happy enough but you heard a good deal of 
 talk among them about the high cost of living 
 and you couldn't help noticing that those who 
 dressed the best had the fewest children. One 
 or two of them owned horses but even they 
 felt obliged to explain that they saved the cost 
 of them in car fares. 
 
 They all called and left their cards but that 
 first year we didn't see much of them. There 
 wasn't room in my life for anyone but Ruth at 
 that time. I didn't see even the old office 
 gang except during business hours and at 
 lunch. 
 
 The rent scaled my salary down to one thou- 
 sand and eighty dollars at one swoop. Then 
 we had to save out at least five dollars a week 
 to pay on the furniture. This left eight hun- 
 dred and twenty, or fifteen dollars and seventy-
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 2 1' 
 
 five cents a week, to cover running expenses. 
 We paid cash for everything and though 
 we never had much left over at the end 
 of the week and never anything at the end 
 of the month, we had about everything we 
 wanted. For one thing our tastes were not 
 extravagant and we did no entertaining. 
 Our grocery and meat bill amounted to from 
 five to seven dollars a week. Of course I had 
 my lunches in town but I got out of those for 
 twenty cents. My daily car fare was twenty 
 cents more which brought my total weekly 
 expenses up to about three dollars. This left a 
 comfortable margin of from five to seven dol- 
 lars for light, coal, clothes and amusements. 
 In the summer the first three items didn't 
 amount to much so some weeks we put most 
 of this into the furniture. But the city was 
 new to Ruth, especially at night, so we were 
 in town a good deal. She used to meet me at 
 the office and we'd walk about the city and 
 then take dinner at some little French restau- 
 rant and then maybe go to a concert or the 
 theatre. She made everything new to me 
 again. At the theatre she used to perch on 
 the edge of her seat so breathless, so respon- 
 sive that I often saw the old timers watch her
 
 22 Ox\E WAY OUT 
 
 instead of the show. I often did myself. And 
 sometimes it seemed as though the whole com- 
 pany acted to her alone. 
 
 Those days were perfect. The only incident 
 to mar them was the death of Ruth's parents. 
 They died suddenly and left an estate of six 
 or seven hundred dollars. Ruth insisted upon 
 putting that into the furniture. But in our 
 own lives every day was as fair as the first. 
 My salary came as regularly as an annuity and 
 there was every prospect for advancement. 
 The garden did well and Ruth became ac- 
 quainted with most of the women in a sociable 
 way. She joined a sewing circle which met 
 twice a month chiefly I guess for the purpose 
 of finding out about one another's husbands. 
 At any rate she told me more about them than 
 I would have learned in ten years. 
 
 Still, during the fall and winter we kept 
 pretty much by ourselves, not deliberately but 
 because neither of us cared particularly about 
 whist parties and such things but preferred to 
 spend together what time we had. And then 
 I guess Ruth was a little shy about her 
 clothes. She dressed mighty well to my eye 
 but she made most of her things herself and 
 didn't care much about style. She didn't no-
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 23 
 
 tice the difference at home but when she was 
 out among others, they made her feel it. 
 However spring came around again and we 
 forgot all about those details. We didn't go 
 in town so much that summer and used to 
 spend more time on our piazza. I saw more 
 of the men in this way and found them a 
 pleasant, companionable lot. They asked me 
 to join the Neighborhood Club and I did, more 
 to meet them half way than because I wanted 
 to. There we played billiards and discussed 
 the stock market and furnaces. All of them 
 had schemes for making fortunes if only they 
 had a few thousand dollars capital. Now and 
 then you'd find a group of them in one corner 
 discussing a rumor that so and so had lost his 
 job. They spoke of this as they would of a 
 death. But none of those subjects interested 
 me especially in view of what I was looking 
 forward to in my own family. 
 
 In the afternoons of the early fall the women 
 sent over jellies and such stuff to Ruth and 
 dropped in upon her with whispered advice. 
 She used to repeat it to me at night with a; 
 gay little laugh and her eyes sparkling like 
 diamonds. She was happier now than I had 
 ever seen her and so was I myself. When I
 
 24 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 went in town in the morning I felt very im- 
 portant. 
 
 I thought I had touched the cHmax of Hfe 
 when I married Ruth but when the boy came 
 he lifted me a notch higher. And with him 
 he brought me a new wife in Ruth, without 
 taking one whit from the old. Sweetheart, 
 wife and mother now, she revealed to me new 
 depths of womanhood. 
 
 She taught me, too, what real courage is. I 
 was the coward when the time came. I had 
 taken a day off but the doctor ordered me out 
 of the house. I went down to the club and I 
 felt more one of the neighborhood that day 
 than I ever did before or afterwards. It was 
 Saturday and during the afternoon a number 
 of the men came in and just silently gripped 
 my hand. 
 
 The women, too, seemed to take a new inter- 
 est in us. When Ruth was able to sit up they 
 brought in numberless little things. But you'd 
 have thought it was their house and not mine, 
 the way they treated me. When any of them 
 came I felt as though I didn't belong there and 
 ought to tip-toe out. 
 
 We'd been saving up during the summer for 
 this emergency so that we had enough to pay
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 25 
 
 for the doctor and the nurse but that was only 
 the beginning of the new expenses. In the 
 first place we had to have a servant now. I 
 secured a girl who knew how to cook after a 
 fashion, for four dollars a week. But that 
 wasn't by any means what she cost us. In 
 spite of Ruth's supervision the girl wasted as 
 much as she used so that our provision bill 
 was nearly doubled. If we hadn't succeeded 
 in paying for the furniture before this I don't 
 know what we would have done. As it was 
 I found my salary pretty well strained. I 
 hadn't any idea that so small a thing as a baby 
 could cost so much. Ruth had made most of 
 his things but I know that some of his shirts 
 cost as much as mine. 
 
 When the boy was older Ruth insisted upon 
 getting along without a girl again. I didn't 
 approve of this but I saw that it would make 
 her happier to try anyway. How in the world 
 she managed to do it I don't know but she did. 
 This gave her an excuse for not going out — 
 though it was an excuse that made me half 
 ashamed of myself — and so we saved in an- 
 other way. Even with this we just made both 
 ends meet and that was all. 
 
 The boy grew like a weed and before I knew
 
 26 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 it he was five years old. Until he began to 
 walk and talk I didn't think of him as a pos- 
 sible man. He didn't seem like anything in 
 particular. He was just soft and round and 
 warm. But when he began to wear knicker- 
 bockers he set me to thinking hard. He wasn't 
 going to remain always a baby; he was going 
 to grow into a boy and then a young man and 
 before I knew it he would be facing the very 
 same problem that now confronted me. And 
 that problem was how to get enough ahead of 
 the game to give him a fair start in life. I 
 realized, too, that I wanted him to do some- 
 thing better than I had done. When I stopped 
 to think of it I had accomplished mighty little. 
 I had lived and that was about all. That I 
 had lived happily was due to Ruth. But if I 
 was finding difficulty in keeping even with the 
 game now, what was I going to do when the 
 youngster would prove a decidedly more 
 serious item of expense? 
 
 I talked this over with Ruth and we both 
 decided that somehow, in some way, we must 
 save some money every year. We started in 
 by reducing our household expenses still fur- 
 ther. But it seemed as though fate were 
 against us for prices rose just enough to ab-
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 27 
 
 sorb all our little economies. Flour went up 
 and sugar went up, and though we had done 
 away with meat almost wholly now, vegetables 
 went up. So, too, did coal. Not only that 
 but we had long since found it impossible to 
 keep to ourselves as we had that first year. 
 Little by little we had been drawn into the 
 social life of the neighborhood. Not a month 
 went by but what there was a dinner or two or 
 a whist party or a dance. Personally I didn't 
 care about such things but as Ruth had be- 
 come a matron and in consequence had been 
 thrown more in contact with the women, she 
 had lost her shyness and grown more sociable. 
 She often suggested declining an invitation but 
 we couldn't decline one without declining all. 
 I saw clearly enough that I had no right to 
 do this. She did more work than I and did 
 not have the daily change. To have made a 
 social exile of her would have been to make 
 her little better than a slave. But it cost 
 money. It cost a lot of money. We had to 
 do our part in return and though Ruth accom- 
 plished this by careful buying and all sorts of 
 clever devices, the item became a big one in 
 the year's expenses. 
 
 I began to look forward with some anxiety
 
 28 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 for the next raise. At the office I hunted for 
 extra work with an eye upon the place above; 
 but though I found the work nothing came of 
 it but extra hours. In fact I began to think 
 myself lucky to hold the job I had for a grad- 
 ual change of methods had been slowly going 
 on in the office. Mechanical adding machines 
 had cost a dozen men their jobs; a card system 
 of bookkeeping had made it possible to dis- 
 charge another dozen, while an oft* year in 
 woollens sent two or three more flying, among 
 them the man who had found me the position 
 in the first place. But he hadn't married and 
 he went out west somewhere. Occasionally 
 when work picked up again a young man was 
 taken on to fill the place of one of the dis- 
 charged men. The company always saved a 
 few hundred dollars by such a shift for the 
 lad never got the salary of the old employee, 
 and so far as anyone could see the work went 
 on just as well. 
 
 While these moves were ominous, as I can 
 see now in looking back, they didn't disturb 
 me very much at the time. I filled a little 
 niche in the office that w^as all my own. At 
 every opportunity I had familiarized myself 
 with the work of the man above me and was
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 29 
 
 on very good terms with him. I waited pa- 
 tiently and confidently for the day when Morse 
 should call me in and announce his own advance 
 and leave me to fill his place. I might have 
 to begin on two thousand but it was a sure 
 twenty-five hundred eventually to say nothing 
 of what it led to. The president of the com- 
 pany had begun as I had and had moved up 
 the same steps that now lay ahead of me. 
 
 In the meanwhile the life at home ran 
 smoothly in spite of everything. Neither the 
 wife, the boy nor I was sick a day for we all 
 had sound bodies to start with. Our country- 
 bred ancestors didn't need a will to leave us 
 those. If at times we felt a trifle pinched espe- 
 cially in the matter of clothes, it was wonderful 
 how rich Ruth contrived to make us feel. She 
 knew how to take care of things and though I 
 didn't spend half what some of the men spent 
 on their suits, I went in town every morning 
 looking better than two-thirds of them. I was 
 inspected from head to foot before I started 
 and there wasn't a wrinkle or a spot so small 
 that it could last twenty-four hours. I shined 
 my own shoes and pressed my own trousers 
 and Ruth looked to it that this was done well. 
 Moreover she could turn a tie, clean and press
 
 30 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 it so that it looked brand new. I think some 
 of the neighbors even thought I was extrava- 
 gant in my dressing. 
 
 She did the same for herself and had caught 
 the knack of seeming to dress stylishly without 
 really doing so. She had beautiful hair and 
 this in itself made her look well dressed. As 
 for the boy he was a model for them all. 
 
 In the meanwhile the boy had grown into 
 short trousers and before we knew it he was 
 in school. It made it lonesome for her during 
 the day when he began to trudge off every 
 morning at nine o'clock. She began to look 
 forward to Saturdays as eagerly as the boy 
 did. Then the next thing we knew he'd start 
 off even earlier on that day to join his play- 
 mates. Sunday was the only day either of us 
 had him to ourselves. 
 
 After he began to go to school, Ruth and I 
 seemed to begin another life. In a way we 
 felt all by ourselves once more. I didn't get 
 home until half past seven now and Dick was 
 then abed. He was abed too when I left in 
 the morning. Of course he was never off my 
 mind and if he hadn't been asleep upstairs I 
 guess I'd have known a difference. But at 
 the same time he was, in a small way, living
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 31 
 
 his own life now which left Ruth and me 
 to ourselves once more. She used to go 
 over for me all the details of his day from 
 the time she took him up in the morning 
 until she tucked him away in bed again 
 at night and then there would come a pause. 
 It seemed as though there ought to be some- 
 thing more, but there wasn't. The next few 
 months it seemed almost as though she was 
 w^aiting. For what, I didn't know and yet I 
 too felt there was a lapse in our lives. I never 
 loved her more. There was never a time when 
 she was so truly my wife and yet in our com- 
 bined lives there was something lacking. 
 After a w^iile I began to notice a wistful ex- 
 pression in her eyes. It always came after 
 she had said, 
 
 "So Dicky said, *God bless father and 
 mother,' and then he went to sleep." 
 
 Then one night it dawned on me. Hers was 
 the same heart hunger that had been eating 
 at me. Dick was a boy now and there was no 
 baby to take his place. But, good Lord, as 
 it was I hadn't been able to save a dollar. I 
 knew that we were simply holding on tight and 
 drifting. The boat was loaded to the gun- 
 wales even now. And yet that expression in
 
 32 
 
 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 her eyes had a right to be answered. But I 
 couldn't answer it. I didn't dare open my 
 mouth. I didn't dare speak even one night 
 when she said, 
 
 "He's all we have, Billy — just one." 
 
 I gripped her hand and sat staring into the 
 little coal hod fireplace which we didn't light 
 more than once a month now. Even as I 
 watched the flames I saw them licking up pen- 
 nies. 
 
 Just one ! And I too wanted a houseful like 
 Dick. 
 
 I had to see that look night after night and 
 I had to go to town knowing I was leaving 
 her all alone with the one away at school. And 
 what a mother she was! She ought to have 
 had a baby by her side all the time. 
 
 As the one grew, his expenses increased. 
 The only way to meet them was by cutting 
 down our own expenses still more. I cut out 
 smoking and made my old clothes do an 
 extra year. Ruth spent half her time in 
 bargain hunting and saved still more by 
 taking it out of herself. Poor little woman, 
 she worked harder for a quarter than I 
 did and I was working harder for that 
 sum than I used to work for a dollar.
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 33 
 
 But we were not alone in the struggle. As 
 we came to know more about the people in that 
 group of snug little houses we knew that the 
 same grim fight was going on in all of them. 
 Some of them were not so lucky as we and ran 
 into debt while a few of them were luckier and 
 were helped out with legacies or by well-to-do 
 relatives. We were as much alike as peas in 
 a pod. We were living on the future and 
 bluffing out the present. You'd have thought 
 it would have cast a gloom over the neighbor- 
 hood — you'd have thought it would have done 
 away with some of the parties and dances. But 
 it didn't. In the first place this was, to most 
 of us, just life. In the second place there 
 didn't seem to be any alternative. There was 
 no other way of living. The conditions seemed 
 to be fixed; we had to eat, we had to wear a 
 certain type of dress ; and unless we wished to 
 exist as exiles we had to meet on a certain 
 plane of social intercourse. The conventions 
 were as iron clad here as among the nobility 
 of England. No one thought of violating 
 them; no one thought it was possible. You 
 had to live as the others did or die and be 
 done with it. If anyone of us had thought 
 we might have seen the foolishness of this
 
 34 
 
 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 but it was all so manifest that no one 
 did think. The only method of escape was a 
 raise and that meant moving into another 
 sphere which would cover that. 
 
 A new complication came wdien the boy grew 
 old enough to have social functions of his own. 
 He had made many new friends and he wanted 
 to join a tennis club, a dancing class and con- 
 tribute towards the support of the athletic 
 teams of the school. Moreover he was in- 
 vited to parties and had to give parties 
 himself. Once again I tried to see some way 
 out of this social business. It seemed such a 
 pitiful waste of ammunition under the circum- 
 stances. I wanted to save the money if it was 
 possible in any way to eke it out, for his edu- 
 cation. But what could I do? The boy had 
 to live as his friends lived or give them up. 
 He wasn't asked to do any more than the other 
 boys of the neighborhood but he was rightly 
 asked to do as much. If he couldn't it would 
 be at the sacrifice of his pride that he associated 
 with them at all. And a just pride in a boy 
 is something you can't safely tamper with. He 
 had to have the money and we managed it 
 somehow. But it brought home the old grim 
 fact that I hadn't as yet saved a dollar.
 
 THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 35 
 
 I clung more than ever now to the one ray 
 of hope — the job ahead. It was the only com- 
 fort Ruth and I had and whenever I felt espe- 
 cially downhearted she'd start in and plan how 
 we'd spend it. It took the edge off the imme- 
 diate thought of danger. In the meanwhile I 
 resigned even from the Neighborhood Club and 
 let the boy join the tennis club. I noticed at 
 once a change in the attitude of the men to- 
 wards me. But I was reaching a point now 
 where I didn't care. 
 
 In this way, then, we lived until I was thir- 
 ty-eight and Ruth was thirty, and the boy was 
 eleven. For the last few months I had been 
 doing night work without extra pay and so 
 was practically exiled from the boy except on 
 Sundays. He was not developing the way I 
 wanted. The local grammar school was al- 
 most a private school for the neighborhood. 
 I should have preferred to have it more cos- 
 mopolitan. The boy was rubbing up against 
 only his own kind and this was making him 
 soft, both physically and mentally. He was 
 also getting querulous and autocratic. Ruth 
 saw it, but with only one. . . . Well, on 
 Sundays I took the boy with me on long cross- 
 country jaunts and did a good deal of talking
 
 36 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 to him. But all I said rolled off like water off a 
 duck. He lacked energy and initiative. He 
 was becoming distinctly more middle-class than 
 either of us, with some of the faults of the 
 so-called upper class thrown in. He chattered 
 about Harvard, not as an opportunity, but as 
 a class privilege. I didn't like it. But before 
 I had time to worry much about this the crash 
 came that I had not been wise enough to fore- 
 see.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 
 
 One Saturday afternoon, after we had been 
 paid off, Morse, the head of the department, 
 whose job I had been eyeing enviously for five 
 years now, called me into his office. For three 
 minutes I saw all my hopes realized; for three 
 minutes I walked dizzily with my whole life 
 justified. I could hardly catch my breath as 
 I followed him. I didn't realize until then how 
 big a load I had been carrying. As a drown- 
 ing man is said to see visions of his whole past 
 life, I saw visions of my whole future. I saw 
 Ruth's eager face lifted to mine as I told her 
 the good news; I saw the boy taken from his 
 commonplace surroundings and doing himself 
 proud in some big preparatory school where 
 he brushed up against a variety of other boys ; 
 I saw — God pity me for the fool I was — other 
 children at home to take his place. I can say 
 that for three minutes I have lived. 
 
 Morse seated himself in the chair before his 
 
 Z7 
 
 'i540S
 
 38 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 desk and, bending over his papers, talked with- 
 out looking at me. He was a small fellow. I 
 don't suppose a beefy man ever quite gets over 
 a certain feeling of superiority before a small 
 man. I could have picked up Morse in one 
 hand. 
 
 **Carleton," he began, "I've got to cut down 
 your salary five hundred dollars." 
 
 It came like a blow in the face. I don't 
 think I answered. 
 
 *'Sorry," he added, *'but Evans says he can 
 double up on your work and offers to do it for 
 two hundred dollars more." 
 
 I repeated that name Evans over and over. 
 He was the man under me. Then I saw my 
 mistake. While watching the man ahead of 
 me I had neglected to watch the man behind 
 me. Evans and I had been good friends. I 
 liked him. He was about twenty, and a hard 
 worker. 
 
 "Well?" said Morse. 
 
 I recovered my wind. 
 
 "Good God," I cried; "I can't live on any 
 less than I'm getting now!" 
 
 "Then you resign?" he asked quickly. 
 
 For a second I saw red. I wanted to take 
 this pigmy by the throat. I wanted to shake
 
 THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 39 
 
 him. He didn't give me time before exclaim- 
 ing: 
 
 ''Very well, Carleton. I'll give you an order, 
 for two weeks' pay in advance." 
 
 The next thing I knew I was in the outer 
 office with the order in my hand. I saw Evans 
 at his desk. I guess I must have looked queer, 
 for at first he shrank away from me. Then he 
 came to my side. 
 
 "Carleton," he said, "what's the matter?" 
 
 "I guess you know," I answered. 
 
 "You aren't fired?" 
 
 I bucked up at this. I tried to speak natu- 
 rally. 
 
 " Yes," I said, "I'm fired." 
 
 "But that isn't right, Carleton," he pro- 
 tested. "I didn't think it would come to that. 
 I went to Morse and told him I wanted to get 
 married and needed more money. He asked 
 me if I thought I could do your work. I said 
 yes. I'd have said yes if he'd asked me 
 if I could do the president's work. But — 
 come back and let me explain it to Morse." 
 
 It was white of him, wasn't it? But I saw 
 clearly enough that he was only fighting for 
 his right to love as I was fighting for mine. 
 I don't know that I should have been as gen-
 
 40 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 croiis as he was — ten years before. He had 
 started toward the door when I called him 
 back. 
 
 "Don't go in there," I warned. **The first 
 thing you know you'll be doing my work with- 
 out your two hundred." 
 
 "That's so," he answered. *'But what are 
 you going to do now?" 
 
 "Get another job," I answered. 
 
 One of the great blessings of my life is the 
 fact that it has always been easy to report 
 bad news to Ruth. I never had to break things 
 gently to her. She always took a blow stand- 
 ing up, like a man. So now I boarded my 
 train and went straight to the house and told 
 her. She listened quietly and then took my 
 hand, patting it for a moment without saying 
 anything. Finally she smiled at me. 
 
 "Well, Billy," she said, "it can't be helped, 
 can it? So good luck to Evans and his 
 bride." 
 
 When a woman is as brave as that it stirs 
 up all the fighting blood in a man. Looking 
 into her steady blue eyes I felt that I had ex- 
 aggerated my misfortune. Thirty-eight is not 
 old and I was able-bodied. I might land some- 
 thing even better than that which I had lost.
 
 THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 41 
 
 So instead of a night of misery I actually felt 
 almost glad. 
 
 I started in town on Monday in high hope. 
 But when I got off the train I began to won- 
 der just where I was bound. What sort of a 
 job was I going to apply for? What was my 
 profession, anyway? I sat down in the station 
 to think the problem over. 
 
 For twenty years now I had been a cog in 
 the clerical machinery of the United Woollen 
 Company. I was known as a United Woollen 
 man. But just what else had this experience 
 made of me? I was not a bookkeeper. I 
 knew no more about keeping a full set of books 
 than my boy. I had handled only strings of 
 United Woollen figures; those meant nothing 
 outside that particular office. I was not a 
 stenographer, or an accountant, or a secretary. 
 I had been called a clerk in the directory. But 
 what did that mean? What the devil was I, 
 after twenty years of hard work? 
 
 The question started the sweat to my fore- 
 head. But I pulled myself together again. 
 At least I was an able-bodied man. I was 
 willing to work, had a record of honesty and 
 faithfulness, and was intelligent as men go. I 
 didn't care what I did, so long as it gave me
 
 42 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 a living wage. Surely, then, there must be 
 some place for me in this alert, hustling city. 
 
 I bought a paper and turned to "Help 
 Wanted." I felt encouraged at sight of the 
 long column. I read it through carefully. 
 Half of the positions demanded technical train- 
 ing; a fourth of them demanded special experi- 
 ence ; the rest asked for young men. I couldn't 
 answer the requirements of one of them. 
 Again and again the question was forced in 
 upon me — what the devil was I? 
 
 I didn't know which way to turn. I had no 
 relatives to help me — from the days of my 
 great-grandfather no Carleton had ever quit 
 the game more than even. My business asso- 
 ciates were as badly off as I was and so were 
 my neighbors. 
 
 My relations with the latter were peculiar, 
 now that I came to think of it. In these last 
 dozen years I had come to know the details 
 of their lives as intimately as my own. In 
 a way we had been like one big family. 
 Wq knew each other as Frank, and Joe, and 
 Bill, and Josh, and were familiar with one an- 
 other's physical ailments when any of us had 
 any. If any of the children had whooping 
 cough or the measles every man and woman in
 
 THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 43 
 
 the neighborhood watched at the bedside, in 
 a sense, until the youngster was well again. 
 We knew to a dollar what each man was earn- 
 ing and what each was spending. We bor- 
 rowed one another's garden tools and the 
 women borrowed from each other's kitchens. 
 ,On the surface we were just about as intimate 
 as it's possible for a community to be. And 
 yet what did it amount to ? 
 
 There wasn't a man-son of them to whom I 
 would have dared go and confess the fact I'd 
 lost my job. They'd know it soon enough, be 
 sure of that; but it mustn't come from me. 
 There wasn't one of them to whom I felt free 
 to go and ask their help to interest their own 
 firms to secure another position for me. Their 
 respect for me depended upon my ability to 
 maintain my social position. They were like 
 steamer friends. On the voyage they clung to 
 one another closer than bark to a tree, but 
 once the gang plank was lowered the intimacy 
 vanished. If I wished to keep them as friends 
 I must stick to the boat. 
 
 I knew they couldn't do anything if they 
 had wanted to, but at the same time I felt 
 there was something wrong in a situation that 
 would not allow me to ask even for a letter
 
 44 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 of introduction without feeling like a beggar. 
 1 felt there was something wrong when they 
 made me feel not like a brother in hard luck 
 but like a criminal. I began to wonder what 
 of sterling worth I had got out of this life dur- 
 ing the past decade. 
 
 However that was an incidental matter. 
 The only time I did such thinking as this was 
 towards the early morning after I had lain 
 awake all night and exhausted all other re- 
 sources. I tackled the problem in the only 
 way I could think of and that was to visit the 
 houses with whom I had learned the United 
 Woollen did business. I remembered the 
 names of about a dozen of them and made the 
 rounds of these for a starter. It seemed like 
 a poor chance and I myself did not know ex- 
 actly what they could do with me but it would 
 keep me busy for a while. 
 
 With waits and delays this took me two 
 weeks. Without letters it was almost impos- 
 sible to reach the managers but I hung on in 
 every case until I succeeded. Here again I 
 didn't feel like an honest man offering to do 
 a fair return of work for pay, so much as I 
 did a beggar. This may have been my fault; 
 but after you've sat around in offices and cor-
 
 THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 45 
 
 ridors and been scowled at as an intruder for 
 three or four hours and then been greeted 
 with a surly "What do you want?" you can't 
 help having a grouch. There wasn't a man 
 who treated my offer as a business proposi- 
 tion. 
 
 At the end of that time two questions were 
 burned into my brain: "What can you do?" 
 and "How old are you?" The latter question 
 came as a revelation. It seems that from a 
 business point of view I was considered an 
 old man. My good strong body counted for 
 nothing; my willingness to undertake any task 
 counted for nothing. I was too old. No one 
 wanted to bother with a beginner over 
 eighteen or twenty. The market demanded 
 youth — youth with the years ahead that I had 
 already sold. Wherever I stumbled by chance 
 upon a vacant position I found waiting there 
 half a dozen stalwart youngsters. They looked 
 as I had looked when I joined the United 
 Woollen Company. I offered to do the same 
 work at the same wages as the youngsters, but 
 the managers didn't want me. They didn't 
 want a man around with wrinkles in his face. 
 Moreover, they were looking to the future. 
 They didn't intend to adjust a man into theii:
 
 46 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 machinery only to have him die in a dozen 
 years. I wasn't a good risk. Moreover, I 
 wouldn't be so easily trained, and with a wider 
 experience might prove more bothersome. At 
 thirty-eight I was too old to make a beginning. 
 The verdict was unanimous. And yet I had a 
 physique like an ox and there wasn't a gray 
 hair in my head. I came out of the last of 
 those offices with my fists clenched. 
 
 In the meanwhile I had used up my advance 
 salary and was, for the first time in my life, 
 running into debt. Having always paid my 
 bills weekly I had no credit whatever. Even 
 at the end of the third week I knew that the 
 grocery man and butcher were beginning 
 to fidget. The neighbors had by this time 
 learned of my plight and were gossiping. And 
 yet in the midst of all this I had some of the 
 finest hours with my wife I had ever known. 
 
 She sent me away every morning with fresh 
 hope and greeted me at night with a cheerful- 
 ness that was like wine. And she did this 
 without any show of false optimism. She was 
 not blind to the seriousness of our present posi- 
 tion, but she exhibited a confidence in me that 
 did not admit of doubt or fear. There was 
 something almost awesomely beautiful about
 
 THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 47 
 
 standing by her side and facing the approach- 
 ing storm. She used to place her small hands 
 upon my back and exclaim : 
 
 "Why, Billy, there's work for shoulders like 
 those." 
 
 It made me feel like a giant. 
 
 So another month passed. I subscribed to 
 an employment bureau, but the only offer I 
 received was to act as a sort of bouncer in a 
 barroom. I suppose my height and weight 
 and reputation for sobriety recommended me 
 there. There was five dollars a week in it, 
 and as far as I alone was concerned I would 
 have taken it. That sum would at least buy 
 bread, and though it may sound incredible the 
 problem of getting enough to eat was fast be- 
 coming acute. The provision men became 
 daily more suspicious. We cut down on every- 
 thing, but I knew it was only a question of time 
 when they would refuse to extend our credit 
 for the little we had to have. And all around 
 me my neighbors went their cheerful ways and 
 waited for me to work it out. But whenever I 
 thought of the barroom job and the money it 
 would bring I could see them shake their heads. 
 
 It was hell. It was the deepest of all deep 
 hells — the middle-class hell. There was noth-
 
 48 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 inc^ theatrical about it — no fireworks or red 
 lights. It was plain, dull, sodden. Here was 
 my position: work in my own class I couldn't 
 get; work as a young man I was too old to 
 get; work as just plain physical labor these 
 same middle-class neighbors refused to allow 
 me to undertake. I couldn't black my neigh- 
 bors' boots without social ostracism, though 
 Pasquale, w^ho kept the stand in the United 
 Woollen building, once confided to me that he 
 cleared some twenty-five dollars a week. I 
 couldn't mow my neighbors' front lawns or de- 
 liver milk at their doors, though there was 
 food in it. That was honest work — clean 
 work; but if I attempted it would they play 
 golf with me? Personally I didn't care. I 
 would have taken a job that day. But there 
 were the wife and boy. They were held in 
 ransom. It's all very well to talk about scorn- 
 ing the conventions, to philosophize about the 
 dignity of honest work, to quote "a man's a 
 man for a' that"; but associates of their own 
 kind mean more to a woman and a growing 
 boy than they do to a man. At least I thought 
 so at that time. When I saw my wife sur- 
 rounded by well-bred, well-dressed women, 
 they seemed to me an essential part of her life.
 
 THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 49 
 
 What else did living mean for her ? When my 
 boy brought home with him other boys of his 
 age and kind — though to me they did not rep- 
 resent the highest type — I felt under obliga- 
 tions to retain those friends for him. I had 
 begot him into this set. It seemed barbarous 
 to do anything that would allow them to point 
 the finger at him. 
 
 I felt a yearning for some primeval employ- 
 ment. I hungered to join the army or go to 
 sea. But here again were the wife and boy. 
 I felt like going into the Northwest and pre- 
 empting a homestead. That was a saner idea, 
 but it took capital and I didn't have enough. 
 I was tied hand and foot. It was like one of 
 those nightmares where in the face of danger 
 you are suddenly struck dumb and immovable. 
 
 I was beginning to look wild-eyed. Ruth 
 and I were living on bread, without butter, 
 and canned soup. I sneaked in town with a 
 few books and sold them for enough to keep 
 the boy supplied with meat. My shoes were 
 worn out at the bottom and my clothes were 
 getting decidedly seedy. The men with whom 
 I was in the habit of riding to town in the 
 morning gave me as wide a berth as though 
 I had the leprosy. I guess they were afraid
 
 50 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 my hard luck was catching. God pity them, 
 many of them were dangerously near the rim 
 of this same hell themselves. 
 
 One morning my wife came to me reluc- 
 tantly, but with her usual courage, and said: 
 
 "Billy, the grocery man didn't bring our or- 
 der last night." It was like a sword-thrust. 
 It made me desperate. But the worst of the 
 middle-class hell is that there is nothing to fight 
 back at. There you are. I couldn't say any- 
 thing. There was no answer. My eyes must 
 have looked queer, for Ruth came nearer and 
 whispered: 
 
 "Don't go in town to-day, Billy." 
 
 I had on my hat and had gathered up two 
 or three more volumes in my green bag. I 
 looked at the trim little house that had been 
 my home for so long. The rent would be due 
 next month. I looked at the other trim little 
 houses around me. Was it actually possible 
 that a man could starve in such a community? 
 It seemed like a satanic joke. Why, every 
 year this country was absorbing immigrants 
 by the thousand. They did not go hungry. 
 They waxed fat and prosperous. There was 
 Pasquale, the bootblack, who was earning 
 nearly as much as I ever did.
 
 THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 51 
 
 We were standing on the porch. I took 
 Ruth in my arms and kissed her. She drew 
 back with a modest protest that the neighbors 
 might see. The word neighbors goaded me. 
 I shook my fist at their trim Httle houses and 
 voiced a passion that had slowly been gather- 
 ing strength. 
 
 "Damn the neighbors!" I cried 
 
 Ruth was startled. I don't often swear. 
 
 "Have they been talking about you?" she 
 asked suddenly, her mouth hardening. 
 
 "I don't know. I don't care. But they 
 hold you in ransom like bloody Moroccan 
 pirates." 
 
 "How do they, Billy?" 
 
 "They won't let me work without taking it 
 out of you and the boy." 
 
 Her head dropped for a second at mention 
 of the boy, but it was soon lifted. 
 
 "Let's get away from them," she gasped. 
 "Let's go where there are no neighbors." 
 
 "Would you?" I asked. 
 
 "I'd go to the ends of the earth with you, 
 Billy," she answered quietly. 
 
 How plucky she was! I couldn't help but 
 smile as I answered, more to myself: 
 
 "We haven't even the carfare to go to the
 
 52 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 ends of the earth, Ruth. It will take all we 
 have to pay our bills." 
 
 "All we have?" she asked. 
 
 No, not that. They could get only a little 
 of what she and I had. They could take our 
 belongings, that's all. And they hadn't got 
 those yet. 
 
 But I had begun to hate those neighbors 
 with a fierce, unreasoning hatred. In silence 
 they dictated, without assisting. For a dozen 
 years I had lived with them, played with them, 
 been an integral part of their lives, and now 
 they were worse than useless to me. There 
 wasn't one of them big enough to receive me 
 into his home for myself alone, apart from the 
 work I did. There wasn't a true brother 
 among them. 
 
 Our lives turn upon little things. They 
 turn swiftly. Within fifteen minutes I had 
 solved my problem in a fashion as unexpected 
 as it was radical.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA 
 
 Going down the path to town bitterly and 
 blindly, I met Murphy. He was a man with 
 not a gray hair in his head who was a 
 sort of man-of-all-work for the neighborhood. 
 He took care of my furnace and fussed about 
 the grounds when I was tied up at the office 
 with night work. He stopped me with rather 
 a shamefaced air. 
 
 "Beg pardon, sor," he began, "but I've got 
 a bill comin' due on the new house — " 
 
 I remembered that I owed him some fifteen 
 dollars. I had in my pocket just ten cents over 
 my carfare. But what arrested my attention 
 was the mention of a new house. 
 
 "You mean to tell me that you're putting up 
 a house?" 
 
 "The bit of a rint, sor, in Street." 
 
 The contrast was dramatic. The man who 
 emptied my ashes was erecting tenements and 
 I was looking for work that would bring me 
 
 53
 
 54 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 in food. ]\Iy people had lived in this country 
 some two hundred years or more, and Murphy 
 had probably not been here over thirty. There 
 was something wrong about this, but I seemed 
 to be getting hold of an idea. 
 
 "How old are you, Murphy?" I asked. 
 
 *'Goin' on sixty, sor." 
 
 *'You came to America broke?" 
 
 **Dead broke, sor." 
 
 "You have a wife and children ?" 
 
 "A woman and six childer." 
 
 Six ! Think of it ! And I had one. 
 
 ^'Children in school?" 
 
 I asked it almost in hope that here at least 
 I would hold the advantage. 
 
 *'Two of them in college, sor." 
 
 He spoke it proudly. Well he might. But 
 to me it was confusing. 
 
 "And you have enough left over to put up a 
 house?" I stammered. 
 
 "It's better than the bank," Murphy said 
 apologetically. 
 
 "And you aren't an old man yet," I mur- 
 mured. 
 
 "Old, sor?" 
 
 "Why you're young and strong and inde- 
 pendent. Murphy. You're " But I
 
 WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA 55 
 
 guess I talked a bit wild. I don't know what 
 I said. I was breathless — lightheaded. I 
 wanted to get back to Ruth. 
 
 "Pat," I said, seizing his hand — "Pat, you 
 shall have the money within a week. Fm go- 
 ing to sell out and emigrate." 
 
 "Emigrate?" he gasped. "Where to?" 
 
 I laughed. The solution now seemed so 
 easy. 
 
 ' "Why, to America, Pat. To America where 
 you came thirty years ago." I left him staring 
 at me. I hurried into the house with my heart 
 in my throat. 
 
 I found Ruth in the sitting-room with her 
 chin in her hands and her white forehead knot- 
 ted in a frown. She didn't hear me come in, 
 but when I touched her arm she jumped up, 
 ashamed to think I had caught her looking 
 even puzzled. But at sight of my face her 
 expression changed in a flash. 
 
 "Oh, Billy," she cried, "it's good news?" 
 
 "It's a way out — if you approve," I an- 
 swered. 
 
 "I do, Billy," she answered, without waiting 
 to hear. 
 
 "Then listen," I said. "If we were living 
 in England or Ireland or France or Germany
 
 56 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 and found life as hard as this and some one 
 left us five hundred dollars what would you 
 advise doing?" 
 
 "Why, we'd emigrate, Billy," she said in- 
 stantly. 
 
 "Exactly. Where to?" 
 
 "To America." 
 
 "Right," I cried. "And we'd be one out of 
 a thousand if we didn't make good, wouldn't 
 we?" 
 
 "Why, every one succeeds who comes here 
 from somewhere else," she exclaimed. 
 
 "And why do they?" I demanded, getting 
 excited with my idea. "Why do they? There 
 are a dozen reasons. One is because they 
 come as pioneers — with all the enthusiasm and 
 eagerness of adventurers. Life is fresh and 
 romantic to them over here. Hardships only 
 add zest to the game. Another reason is that 
 it is all a fine big gamble to them. They have 
 everything to gain and nothing to lose. It's 
 the same spirit that drives young New Eng- 
 landers out west to try their luck, to preempt 
 homesteads in the Northwest, to till the prai- 
 ries. Another reason is that they come over 
 here free — unbound by conventions. They 
 can work as they please, live as they please.
 
 ,WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA 57 
 
 They haven't any caste to hamper them. An- 
 other reason is that, being on the same great 
 adventure, they are all brothers. They pull 
 together. Still another reason is that as emi- 
 grants the whole United States stands ready 
 to help them with schools and playgrounds and 
 hospitals and parks." 
 
 I paused for breath. She cut in excitedly: 
 
 "Then we're going out west?" 
 
 "No; we haven't the capital for that. By 
 selling all our things we can pay our debts and 
 have a few dollars over, but that wouldn't take 
 us to Chicago. I'm not going ten miles from 
 home." 
 
 "Where then, Billy?" 
 
 "You've seen the big ships come in along 
 the water-front? They are bringing over 
 hundreds of emigrants every year and landing 
 them right on those docks. These people have 
 had to cross the ocean to reach that point, but 
 our ancestors made the voyage for you and me 
 two hundred years ago. We're within ten 
 miles of the wharf now." 
 
 She couldn't make out what I meant. 
 
 '*Why, wife o' mine," I ran on, "all we need 
 to do is to pack up, go down to the dock and 
 start from there. We must join the emigrants
 
 58 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 and follow them into the city. These are the 
 only people who are finding America to-day. 
 We must take up life among them; work as 
 they work; live as they live. Why, I feel my 
 back muscles straining even now; I feel the 
 tingle of coming down the gangplank with our 
 fortunes yet to make in this land of opportu- 
 nity. Pasquale has done it ; Murphy has done 
 it. Don't you think I can do it ?" 
 
 She looked up at me. I had never seen her 
 face more beautiful. It was flushed and eager. 
 She clutched my arm. Then she whispered : 
 
 ''My man — my wonderful, good man!'* 
 
 The primitive appellation was in itself like 
 a whiff of salt air. It bore me back to the days 
 when a husband's chief function was just that 
 — being a man to his own good woman. We 
 looked for a moment into each other's eyes. 
 Then the same question was born to both of 
 us in a moment. 
 
 ''What of the boy?" 
 
 It was a more serious question to her, I 
 think, than it was to me. I knew that the 
 sons of other fathers and mothers had wrestled 
 with that life and come out strong. There 
 were Murphy'§ boys, for instance. Of course 
 the life would be new to my boy, but the keen
 
 WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA 59 
 
 competition ought to drive him to his best. 
 His present Hfe was not doing that. As for 
 the coarser details from which he had been so 
 sheltered — well, a man has to learn sooner or 
 later, and I wasn't sure but that it was better 
 for him to learn at an age when such things 
 would offer no real temptations. With Ruth 
 back of him I didn't worry much about that. 
 Besides, the boy had let drop a phrase or two 
 that made me suspect that even among his pres- 
 ent associates that same ground was being ex- 
 plored. 
 
 "Ruth," I said, "I'm not worrying about 
 Dick." 
 
 "He has been kept so fresh," she murmured. 
 
 "It isn't the fresh things that keep longest," 
 I said. 
 
 "That's true, Billy," she answered. 
 
 Then she thought a moment, and as though 
 with new inspiration answered me using again 
 that same tender, primitive expression: 
 
 "I don't fear for my man-child." 
 
 When the boy came home from school that 
 night I had a long talk with him. I told him 
 frankly how I had been forced out of my posi- 
 tion, how I had tried for another, how at 
 length I had resolved to go pioneering just as
 
 6o ONE WAY OUT 
 
 his great-grandfather had done among the In- 
 dians. As I thought, the naked adventure of 
 it appealed to him. That was all I wished; it 
 was enough to work on. 
 
 The next day I brought out a second-hand 
 furniture dealer and made as good a bargain 
 as I could with him for the contents of the 
 house. We saved nothing but the sheer es- 
 sentials for light housekeeping. These con- 
 sisted of most of the cooking utensils, a half 
 dozen plates, cups and saucers and about a 
 dozen other pieces for the table, four table- 
 cloths, all the bed linen, all our clothes, in- 
 cluding some old clothes we had been upon the 
 point of throwing away, a few personal gim- 
 cracks, and for furniture the following articles : 
 the folding wooden kitchen table, a half dozen 
 chairs, the cot bed in the boy's room, the iron 
 bed in our room, the long mirror I gave Ruth 
 on her birthday, and a sort of china closet that 
 stood in the dining-room. To this we added 
 bowls, pitchers, and lamps. All the rest, which 
 included a full dining-room set, a full dinner 
 set of china, the furnishings of the front room, 
 including books and book case, chairs, rugs, 
 pictures and two or three good chairs, a full 
 bed-room set in our room and a cheaper one
 
 WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA 6l 
 
 in the boy's room, piazza furnishings, garden 
 tools, and forty odds and ends all of which had 
 cost me first and last something like two thou- 
 sand dollars, I told the dealer to lump together. 
 He looked it over and bid six hundred dol- 
 lars. I saw Ruth swallow hard, for she had 
 taken good care of everything so that to us it 
 was worth as much to-day as we had paid 
 for it. But I accepted the offer without dick- 
 ering, for it was large enough to serve my 
 ends. It would pay off all our debts and leave 
 us a hundred dollars to the good. It was the 
 first time since I married that I had been that 
 much ahead. 
 
 That afternoon I saw Murphy and hired of 
 him the top tenement of his new house. It 
 was in the Italian quarter of the city and my 
 flat consisted of four rooms. The rent was 
 three dollars a week. Murphy looked sur- 
 prised enough at the change in my affairs and 
 I made him promise not to gossip to the neigh- 
 bors about where I'd gone. 
 
 "Faith, sor," he said, "and they wouldn't 
 believe it if I told them." 
 
 This wasn't all I accomplished that day. I 
 bought a pair of overalls and presented myself 
 at the office of a contractor's agent. I didn't
 
 62 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 have any trouble in getting in there and I 
 didn't feel hke a beggar as I took my place in 
 line with about a dozen foreigners. I looked 
 them over with a certain amount of self-con- 
 fidence. Most of them were undersized men 
 with sagging shoulders and primitive faces. 
 With their big eyes they made me think 
 of shaggy Shetland ponies. Lined up man for 
 man with my late associates they certainly 
 looked like an inferior lot. I studied them 
 with curiosity; there must be more in them 
 than showed on the surface to bring them over, 
 here — there must be something that wasn't in 
 the rest of us for them to make good the way 
 they did. In the next six months I meant to 
 find out what that was. In the meantime just 
 sitting there among them I felt as though I 
 had more elbow room than I had had since I 
 was eighteen. Before me as before them a 
 continent stretched its great length and 
 breadth. They laughed and joked among 
 themselves and stared about at everything 
 with eager, curious eyes. They were ready for 
 anything, and everything was ready for them 
 — the ditch, the mines, the railroads, the wheat 
 fields. Wherever things were growing and 
 needed men to help them grow, they would
 
 WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA 63 
 
 play their part. They say there's plenty of 
 room at the top, but there's plenty of room at 
 the bottom, too. It's in the middle that men 
 get pinched. 
 
 I worked my way up to the window where 
 a sallow, pale-faced clerk sat in front of a big 
 book. He gave me a start, he was such a 
 contrast to the others. In my new enthusiasm 
 I wanted to ask him why he didn't come out 
 and get in line the other side of the window. 
 He yawned as he wrote down my name. I 
 didn't have to answer more than half a dozen 
 questions before he told me to report for 
 work Monday at such and such a place. I 
 asked him what the work was and he looked 
 up. 
 
 "Subway," he answered. 
 
 I asked him how much the pay was. He 
 looked me over at this. I don't know what 
 he thought I was. 
 
 "Dollar and a half — nine hours." 
 
 "All right," I answered. 
 
 He gave me a slip of paper and I hurried 
 out. It hadn't taken ten minutes. And a dol- 
 lar and a half a day was nine dollars a week! 
 It was almost twice as much as I had started 
 on with the United; it was over a third of
 
 64 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 what I had been getting after my first ten 
 years of hard work with them. It seemed too 
 good to be true. Taking out the rent, this left 
 me six dollars for food. That was as much as 
 it had cost Ruth and me the first year we were 
 married. There was no need of going hungry 
 on that. 
 
 I came back home jubilant. Ruth at first 
 ,took the prospect of my digging in a ditch a 
 bit hard, but that was only because she con- 
 trasted it with my former genteel employment. 
 
 "Why, girl," I explained, "it's no more than 
 I would have to do if we took a homestead out 
 west. I'd as soon dig in Massachusetts as 
 Montana." 
 
 She felt of my arm. It's a big arm. Then 
 she smiled. It was the last time she mentioned 
 the subject. 
 
 We didn't say anything to the neighbors 
 until the furniture began to go out. Then 
 the women flocked in and Ruth was hard 
 pressed to keep our secret. I sat upstairs and 
 chuckled as I heard her replies. She says 
 it's the only time I ever failed to stand by her, 
 but it didn't seem to me like anything but a 
 joke. 
 
 "We shall want to keep track of you," said
 
 WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA 65 
 
 little Mrs. Grover. "Where shall we address 
 you?" 
 
 ''Oh, I can't tell," answered Ruth, truthfully 
 enough. 
 
 "Are you going far?" 
 
 "Yes. Oh — a long, long way." 
 
 That was true enough too. We couldn't 
 have gone farther out of their lives if we'd 
 sailed for Australia. 
 
 And so they kept it up. That night we made 
 a round of the houses and everyone was very 
 much surprised and very much grieved and 
 very curious. To all their inquiries, I made 
 the same reply; that I was going to emigrate. 
 Some of them looked wistful. 
 
 "Jove," said Brown, who was with the in- 
 surance company, "but I wish I had the nerve 
 to do that. I suppose you're going west?" 
 
 "We're going west first," I answered. 
 
 The road to the station was almost due west. 
 
 "They say there are great chances out in that 
 country," he said. "It isn't so overcrowded 
 as here.'* 
 
 "I don't know about that," I answered, "but 
 there are chances enough." 
 
 Some of the women cried and all the men 
 shook hands cordially and wished us good
 
 66 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 luck. But it didn't mean much to me. The 
 time I needed their handshakes was gone. I 
 learned later that as a result of our secrecy I 
 was variously credited with having lost my 
 reason with my job; with having inherited a 
 fortune, with having gambled in the market, 
 with, thrown in for good measure, a darker 
 hint about having misappropriated funds of 
 the United Woollen. But somehow their nas- 
 tiest gossip did not disturb me. It had no 
 power to harm either me or mine. I was 
 already beyond their reach. Before I left I 
 wished them all Godspeed on the dainty journey 
 they were making in their cockleshell. Then 
 so far as they were concerned I dropped off 
 into the sea with my wife and boy.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 WE PROSPECT 
 
 We were lucky in getting into a new tene- 
 ment and lucky in securing the top floor. This 
 gave us easy access to the flat roof five 
 stories above the street. From here we not 
 only had a magnificent view of the harbor, but 
 even on the hottest days felt something of a 
 sea breeze. Coming down here in June we 
 appreciated that before the summer was over. 
 
 The street was located half a dozen blocks 
 from the waterfront and was inhabited almost 
 wholly by Italians, save for a Frenchman on 
 the corner who ran a bake-shop. The street 
 itself was narrow and dirty enough, but it 
 opened into a public square which was decidedly 
 picturesque. This was surrounded by tiny 
 shops and foreign banks, and was always alive 
 with color and incident. The vegetables dis- 
 played on the sidewalk stands, the gay hues 
 of the women's gowns, the gaudy kerchiefs of 
 the men, gave it a kaleidoscopic effect that 
 
 67
 
 68 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 made it as fascinating to us as a trip abroad. 
 The section was known as Little Italy, and so 
 far as we were concerned was as interesting as 
 Italy itself. 
 
 There were four other families in the house, 
 but the only things we used in common were 
 the narrow iron stairway leading upstairs and 
 the roof. The other tenants, however, seldom 
 used the latter at all except to hang out their 
 occasional washings. For the first month or 
 so we saw little of these people. We were far 
 too busy to make overtures, and as for them 
 they let us severely alone. They were not 
 noisy, and except for a sick baby on the first 
 floor we heard little of them above the clamor 
 of the street below. We had four rooms. 
 The front room we gave to the boy, the 
 next room we ourselves occupied, the third 
 room we used for a sitting- and dining- 
 room, while the fourth was a small kitchen with 
 running water. As compared with our house 
 the quarters at first seemed cramped, but we 
 had cut down our furniture to what was abso- 
 lutely essential, and as soon as our eyes ceased 
 making the comparison we were surprised to 
 find how comfortable we were. In the dining- 
 room, for instance, we had nothing but three
 
 WE PROSPECT 69 
 
 chairs, a folding table and a closet for the 
 dishes. Lounging chairs and so forth we did 
 away with altogether. Nor was there any 
 need of making provision for possible guests. 
 Here throughout the whole house was the 
 greatest saving. I took a fierce pleasure at 
 first in thus caring for my own alone. 
 
 The boy's room contained a cot, a chair, a 
 rug and a few of his personal treasures; our 
 own room contained just the bed, chair and 
 washstand. Ruth added a few touches with 
 pictures and odds and ends that took off the 
 bare aspect without cluttering up. In two 
 weeks these scant quarters were every whit as 
 much home as our tidy little house had been. 
 That was Ruth's part in it. She'd make a 
 home out of a prison. 
 
 On the second day we were fairly settled,, 
 and that night after the boy had gone to bed 
 Ruth sat down at my side with a pad and 
 pencil in her hand. 
 
 "Billy," she said, "there's one thing we're 
 going to do in this new beginning: we're go- 
 ing to save — if it's only ten cents a week." 
 
 I shook my head doubtfully. 
 
 "I'm afraid you can't until I get a raise," 
 I said.
 
 70 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 "We tried waiting for raises before," she 
 answered. 
 
 "I know, but—" 
 
 "There aren't going to be any buts," she an- 
 swered decidedly. 
 
 "But six dollars a week — " 
 
 "Is six dollars a week," she broke in. 
 "We must live on five-fifty, that's all." 
 
 "With steak thirty cents a pound?" 
 
 "We won't have steak. That's the point. 
 Our neighbors around here don't look starved, 
 and they have larger families than ours. And 
 they don't even buy intelligently." 
 
 "How do you know that?" 
 
 "I've been watching them at the little stores 
 in the square. They pay there as much for 
 half-decayed stuff as they'd have to pay for 
 fresh odds and ends at the big market." 
 
 She rested her pad upon her knee. 
 
 "Now in the first place, Billy, we're going 
 to live much more simply." 
 
 "We've never been extravagant," I said. 
 
 "Not in a way," she answered slowly, "but 
 in another way we have. I've been doing a lot 
 of thinking in the last few days and I see now 
 where we've had a great many unnecessary 
 things." 
 
 J
 
 WE PROSPECT 71 
 
 "Not for the last few weeks, anyhow," I 
 said. 
 
 "Those don't count. But before that I 
 mean. For instance there's coffee. It's a lux- 
 ury. Why we spent almost thirty cents a week 
 on that alone." 
 
 "I know but—" 
 
 "There's another but. There's no nourish- 
 ment in coffee and we can't afford it. We'll 
 spend that money for milk. We must have 
 good milk and you must get it for me some- 
 where up town. I don't like the looks of the 
 milk around here. That will be eight cents 
 a day." 
 
 "Better have two quarts," I suggested. 
 
 She thought a moment. 
 
 "Yes," she agreed, "two quarts, because 
 that's going to be the basis of our food. 
 That's a dollar twelve cents a week." 
 
 She made up a little face at this. I smiled 
 grandly. 
 
 "Now for breakfast we must have oatmeal 
 every morning. And we'll get it in bulk. 
 I've priced it and it's only a little over three 
 cents a pound at some of the stores." 
 
 "And the kind we've always had?" 
 
 "About twelve when it's done up in pack-
 
 72 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 ages. That's about the proportion by which 
 I expect to cut down everything. But you'll 
 have to eat milk on it instead of cream. Then 
 we'll use a lot of potatoes. They are very 
 good baked for breakfast. And with them 
 you may have salt fish — oh, there are a dozen 
 nice ways of fixing that. And you may have 
 griddle cakes and — you wait and see the things 
 I'll give you for breakfast. You'll have to 
 have a good luncheon of course, but we'll have 
 our principal meal when you get back from 
 work at night. But you won't get steak. 
 When we do get meat we'll buy soup bones and 
 meat we can boil. And instead of pies and 
 cakes we'll have nourishing puddings of corn- 
 starch and rice. There's another good point — 
 rice. It's cheap and we'll have a lot of it. 
 Look at how the Japanese live on it day after 
 day and keep fat and strong. Then there's 
 cheap fish; rock cod and such to make good 
 chowders of or to fry in pork fat like the bass 
 and trout I used to have back home. Then 
 there's baked beans. We ought to have them 
 at least twice a week in the winter. But this 
 summer we'll live mostly on fish and vegeta- 
 bles. I can get them fresh at the market." 
 **It sounds good," I said.
 
 WE PROSPECT '73 
 
 "Just you wait," she cried excitedly. "I'll 
 fatten up both you and the boy." 
 
 "And yourself, little woman," I reminded 
 her. "I'm not going to take the saving out 
 of you." 
 
 "Don't you worry about me," she answered. 
 "This will be easier than the other life. I 
 shan't have to worry about clothes or dinners 
 or parties for the boy. And it isn't going to 
 take any time at all to keep these four rooms 
 clean and sweet." 
 
 I took the rest of the week as a sort of vaca- 
 tion and used it to get acquainted with my new 
 surroundings. It's a fact that this section of 
 the city which for twenty years had been 
 within a short walk of my office was as foreign 
 to me as Europe. I had never before been 
 down here and all I knew about it was through 
 the ocasional head-lines in the papers in con- 
 nection with stabbing affrays. For the first 
 day or two I felt as though I ought to carry a 
 revolver. Whenever I was forced to leave 
 Ruth alone in the house I instructed her upon 
 no circumstances to open the door. The boy 
 and I arranged a secret rap — an idea that 
 pleased him mightily — and until she heard the 
 single knock followed by two quick sharp ones,
 
 74 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 she was not to answer. But in wandering 
 around among these people it was difficult to 
 think of them as vicious. The Italian element 
 was a laughing, indolent-appearing group; the 
 scattered Jewish folk were almost timid and 
 kept very much to themselves. I didn't find a 
 really tough face until I came to the water front 
 where they spoke English. 
 
 On the third morning after a breakfast of 
 oatmeal and hot biscuit — and, by the way, 
 Ruth effected a fifty per cent, saving right here 
 by using the old-fashioned formula of soda and 
 cream of tartar instead of baking powder — 
 and baked potatoes, Ruth and the boy and my- 
 self started on an exploring trip. Our idea 
 was to get a line on just what our opportuni- 
 ties were down here and to nose out the best 
 and cheapest places to buy. The thing that 
 impressed us right off was the big advantage 
 we had in being within easy access of the big 
 provision centres. We were within ten min- 
 utes' walk of the market, within fifteen of the 
 water front, within three of the square and 
 within twenty of the department stores. At 
 all of these places we found special bargains 
 for the day made to attract in town those from 
 a distance. If one rose early and reached
 
 WE PROSPECT 75 
 
 them about as soon as they were opened one 
 could often buy things almost at cost and some- 
 times below cost. For instance, we went up 
 town to one of the largest but cheaper grade 
 department stores — we had heard its name for 
 years but had never been inside the building — 
 and we found that in their grocery department 
 they had special mark-downs every day in the 
 week for a limited supply of goods. We 
 bought sugar this day at a cent a pound less 
 than the market price and good beans for two 
 cents a quart less. It sounds at first like 
 rather picayune saving but it counts up at the 
 end of the year. Then every stall in the 
 market had its bargain of meats — wholesome 
 bits but unattractive to the careless buyer. We 
 bought here for fifty cents enough round steak 
 for several good meals of hash. We couldn't 
 have bought it for less than a dollar in the 
 suburbs and even at that we wouldn't have 
 known anything about it for the store was too 
 far for Ruth to make a personal visit and the 
 butcher himself would never have mentioned 
 such an odd end to a member of our neighbor- 
 hood. 
 
 We enjoyed wandering around this big 
 market which in itself was like a trip to another
 
 76 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 land. Later one of our favorite amuse- 
 ments was to come down here at night and 
 watch the hustHng crowds and the hghts and 
 the pretty colors and confusion. It reminded 
 Ruth, she said, of a country fair. She always 
 carried a pad and pencil and made notes of 
 good places to buy. I still have those and am 
 referring to them now as I write this. 
 
 "Blanks," she writes (I omit the name), 
 **nice clean store with pleasant salesman. Has 
 good soup bones," 
 
 Again, "Blank and Blank — good place to 
 buy sausage." 
 
 Here too the market gardeners gathered as 
 early as four o'clock with their vegetables 
 fresh from the suburbs. They did mostly a 
 wholesale business but if one knew how it was 
 always possible to buy of them a cabbage or 
 a head of lettuce or a few apples or a peck of 
 potatoes. They were a genial, ruddy-cheeked 
 lot and after a while they came to know Ruth. 
 Often I'd go up there with her before work 
 and she with a basket on her arm would buy 
 for the day. It was always, "Good morning, 
 miss," in answer to her smile. They were 
 respectful whether I was along or not. But 
 for that matter I never knew anyone who
 
 WE PROSPECT ^y 
 
 wasn't respectful to Ruth. They used to Hke 
 to see her come, I think, for she stood out in 
 rather marked contrast to the bowed figures of 
 the other women. Later on they used to save 
 out for her any particularly choice vegetable 
 they might have. She insisted however in 
 paying them an extra penny for such things. 
 
 From the market we went down a series of 
 narrow streets which led to the water front. 
 Here the vessels from the Banks come in to 
 unload. The air was salty and though to us 
 at first the wharves seemed dirty we got used 
 to them, after a while, and enjoyed the smell 
 of the fish fresh from the water. 
 
 Seeing whole push carts full of fish and 
 watching them handled with a pitch fork as a 
 man tosses hay didn't whet our appetites any, 
 but when we remembered that it was these 
 same fish — a day or two older, — for which we 
 had been paying double the price charged for 
 them here the difiference overcame our scruples. 
 The men here interested me. I found that 
 while the crew of every schooner numbered a 
 goodly per cent, of foreigners, still the greater 
 part were American born. The new comers as 
 a rule bought small launches of their own and 
 went into business for themselves. The Eng-
 
 78 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 lish speaking portion of the crews were also as 
 a rule the rougher element. The loafers and 
 hangers-on about the wharves were also Eng- 
 lish speaking. This was a fact that later on 
 I found to be rather significant and to hold 
 true in a general way in all branches of the 
 lower class of labor. 
 
 The barrooms about here — always a pretty 
 sure index of the men of any community — 
 were more numerous and of decidedly a 
 rougher character than those about the square. 
 A man would be a good deal better justified in 
 carrying a revolver on this street than he would 
 in Little Italy. I never allowed Ruth to come 
 down here alone. 
 
 From here we wandered back and I found 
 a public playground and bathhouse by the wa- 
 ter's edge. This attracted me at once. I in- 
 vestigated this and found it offered a fine op- 
 portunity for bathing. Little dressing-rooms 
 were provided and for a penny a man could 
 get a clean towel and for five cents a bathing 
 suit. There was no reason that I could see, 
 however, why we shouldn't provide our own. 
 It was within an easy ten minutes of the flat 
 and I saw right then where I would get a dip 
 every day. It would be a great thing for the
 
 WE PROSPECT 79 
 
 boy, too. I had always wanted him to learn to 
 swim. 
 
 On the way home we passed through the 
 Jewish quarter and I made a note of the cloth- 
 ing offered for sale here. The street was lined 
 with second hand stores with coats and trousers 
 swinging over the sidewalk, and the windows 
 were filled with odd lots of shoes. Then too 
 there were the pawnshops. I'd always 
 thought of a pawnshop as not being exactly 
 respectable and had the feeling that anyone 
 who secured anything from one of them was 
 in a way a receiver of stolen goods. But as 
 I passed them now, I received a new impres- 
 sion. They seemed, down here, as legitimate a 
 business as the second hand stores. The win- 
 dows offered an assortment of everything from 
 watches to banjoes and guns but among them 
 I also noticed many carpenter's tools and so 
 forth. That might be a useful thing to remem- 
 ber. 
 
 It was odd how in a day our point of view 
 had changed. If I had brought Ruth and the 
 boy down through here a month before, we 
 would all, I think, have been more impressed 
 by the congestion and the picturesque details 
 of the squalor than anything else. We would
 
 8o ONE WAY OUT 
 
 have picked our way gingerly and Ruth would 
 have sighed often in pity and, comparing the 
 lives of these people with our own, would prob- 
 ably have made an extra generous contribution 
 to the Salvation Army the next time they came 
 round. I'm not saying now that there isn't 
 misery enough there and in every like section 
 of every city, but I'll say that in a great many 
 cases the same people who grovel in the filth 
 here would grovel in a different kind of filth 
 if they had ten thousand a year. At that you 
 can't blame them greatly for they don't know 
 any better. But when you learn, as I learned 
 later, that some of the proprietors of these 
 second hand stores and fly-blown butcher shops 
 have sons in Harvard and daughters in Wel- 
 lesley, it makes you think. But I'm running 
 ahead. 
 
 The point was that now that we felt ourselves 
 in a way one of these people and viewed the 
 street not from the superior height of native- 
 born Americans but just as emigrants, neither 
 the soiled clothes of the inhabitants nor the clut- 
 tered street swarming with laughing young- 
 sters impressed us unfavorably at all. The 
 impassive men smoking cigarettes at their 
 doors looked contented enough, the women
 
 WE PROSPECT 8l 
 
 were not such as to excite pity, and if you no- 
 ticed, there were as many children around the 
 local soda water fountains as you'd find in a 
 suburban drug store. They all had clothes 
 enough and appeared well fed and if some of 
 them looked pasty, the sweet stuff in the stores 
 was enough to account for that. 
 
 At any rate we came back to our flat that 
 day neither depressed nor discouraged but de- 
 cidedly in better spirits. Of course we had 
 seen only the surface and I suspected that when 
 we really got into these lives we'd find a bad 
 condition of things. It must be so, for that 
 was the burden of all we read. But we would 
 have time enough to worry about that when 
 we discovered it for ourselves.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 I BECOME A DAY LABORER 
 
 That night Ruth and I had a talk about the 
 boy. We both came back from our walk, with 
 him more on our minds than anything else. 
 He had been interested in everything and had 
 asked about a thousand questions and gone to 
 bed eager to be out on the street again the next 
 day. We knew we couldn't keep him cooped 
 up in the flat all the time and of course both 
 Ruth and I were going to be too busy to go 
 out with him every time he went. As for let- 
 ting him run loose around these streets with 
 nothing to do, that would be sheer foolhardi- 
 ness. It was too late in the season to enroll 
 him in the public schools and even that would 
 have left him idle during the long summer 
 months. 
 
 We talked some at first of sending him off 
 into the country to a farm. There were two 
 or three families back where Ruth had lived 
 who might be willing to take him for three or 
 
 ^2
 
 I BECOME A DAY LABORER 83 
 
 four dollars a week and we had the money left 
 over from the sale of our household goods to 
 cover that. But this would mean the sacri- 
 fice of our emergency fund which we wished 
 to preserve more for the boy's sake than our 
 own and it would mean leaving Ruth very 
 much alone. 
 
 ''I'll do it, Billy," she said bravely, "but can't 
 we wait a day or two before deciding? And I 
 think I can make time to get out with him. 
 I'll get up earlier in the morning and I'll leave 
 my work at night until after he's gone to bed." 
 
 So she would. She'd have worked all night 
 to keep him at home and then gone out with 
 him all day if it had been possible. I saw it 
 would be dragging the heart out of her to send 
 the boy away and made up my mind right then 
 and there that some other solution must be 
 found for the problem. Good Lord, after I'd 
 led her down here the least I could do was to 
 let her keep the one. And to tell the truth 
 I found my own heart sink at the suggestion. 
 
 "What do the boys round here do in the 
 summer?" she asked. 
 
 I didn't know and I made up my mind to 
 find out. The next day I went down to a set- 
 tlement house which I remembered passing at
 
 84 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 some time or other. I didn't know what it was 
 but it sounded Hkc some sort of philanthropic 
 enterprise for the neighborhood and if so they 
 ought to be able to answer my questions there. 
 The outside of the building was not particularly 
 attractive but upon entering I was pleasantly 
 surprised at the air of cleanliness and comfort 
 which prevailed. There were a number of 
 small boys around and in one room I saw them 
 reading and playing checkers. I sought out the 
 secretary and found him a pleasant young fel- 
 low though with something of the professional 
 pleasantness which men in this work seem to 
 acquire. He smiled too much and held my 
 hand a bit too long to suit me. He took me 
 into his office and offered me a chair. I told 
 him briefly that I had just moved down here 
 and had a boy of ten whom I wished to keep 
 off the streets and keep occupied. I asked him 
 what the boys around here did during the sum- 
 mer. 
 
 "Most of them work," he answered. 
 
 I hadn't thought of this. 
 
 "What do they do?" 
 
 "A good many sell papers, some of them 
 serve as errand boys and others help their par- 
 ents."
 
 I BECOME A DAY LABORER 85 
 
 Dick was certainly too inexperienced for the 
 first two jobs and there was nothing in my 
 work he could do to help. Then the man be- 
 gan to ask me questions. He was evidently 
 struck by the fact that I didn't seem to be in 
 place here. I answered briefly that I had been 
 a clerk all my life, had lost my position and 
 was now a common day laborer. The boy, I 
 explained, was not yet used to his life down 
 here and I wanted to keep him occupied until 
 he got his strength. 
 
 ''You're right," he answered. "Why don't 
 you bring him in here?" 
 
 "What would he do here?" 
 
 "It's a good loafing place for him and we 
 have some evening classes." 
 
 "I want him at home nights," I answered. 
 
 "The Y. M. C. A. has summer classes which 
 begin a little later on. Why don't you put 
 him into some of those?" 
 
 I had always heard of the Y. M. C. A., but 
 I had never got into touch with it, for I 
 thought it was purely a religious organization. 
 But that proposition sounded good. I'd passed 
 the building a thousand times but had never 
 been inside. I thanked him and started to 
 leave.
 
 86 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 "I hope this won't be your last visit," he said 
 cordially. "Come down and see what we're 
 doing. You'll find a lot of boys here at night." 
 
 "Thanks," I answered. 
 
 I went direct to the Y. M. C. A. building. 
 Here again I was surprised to find a most at- 
 tractive interior. It looked like the inside of 
 a prosperous club house. I don't know what 
 I expected but I wouldn't have been startled if 
 I'd found a hall filled with wooden settees and 
 a prayer meeting going on. I had a lot of 
 such preconceived notions knocked out of my 
 head in the next few years. 
 
 In response to my questions I received re- 
 plies that made me feel I'd strayed by mistake 
 into some university. For that matter it zvas 
 a university. There was nothing from the pri- 
 mary class in English to a professional educa- 
 tion in the law that a man couldn't acquire here 
 for a sum that was astonishingly small. The 
 most of the classes cost nothing after payment 
 of the membership fee of ten dollars. The in- 
 structors were, many of them, the same men 
 who gave similar courses at a neighboring 
 college. Not only that, but the hours were so 
 arranged as to accommodate workers of all 
 classes. If you couldn't attend in the day-
 
 I BECOME A DAY LABORER 8/ 
 
 time, you could at night. I was astonished to 
 think that this opportunity had always been 
 at my hand and I had never suspected it. In 
 the ten years before I was married I could 
 have qualified as a lawyer or almost anything 
 else. 
 
 This was not all; a young man took me 
 over the building and showed me the library, 
 the reading-room, rooms where the young men 
 gathered for games, and then down stairs to 
 the well equipped gymnasium with its shower 
 baths. Here a boy could take a regular course 
 in gymnasium work under a skilled instructor 
 or if he showed any skill devote himself to 
 such sports as basketball, running, baseball 
 or swimming. In addition to these advan- 
 tages amusements were provided through the 
 year in the form of lectures, amateur shows 
 and music. In the summer, special opportuni- 
 ties were offered for out-door sports. More- 
 over the Association managed summer camps 
 where for a nominal fee the boys could enjoy 
 the life of the woods. A boy must be poor in- 
 deed who could not afford most of these oppor- 
 tunities. And if he was out of work the em- 
 ployment bureau conducted here would help 
 him to a position. I came back to the main
 
 88 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 office wondering still more how in the world 
 rd ever missed such chances all these years. 
 It was a question I asked myself many times 
 during the next few months. And the answer 
 seemed to lie in the dead level of that other 
 life. We never lifted our eyes; we never 
 looked around us. If we were hard pressed 
 either we accepted our lot resignedly or cursed 
 our luck, and let it go at that. These op- 
 portunities were for a class which had no lot 
 and didn't know the meaning of luck. The 
 others could have had them, too — can have 
 them — for the taking, but neither by education 
 nor temperament are they qualified to do so. 
 There's a good field for missionary work there 
 for someone. 
 
 Before I came out of the building I had en- 
 rolled Dick as a member and picked out for 
 him a summer course in English in which he 
 was a bit backward. I also determined to 
 start him in some regular gymnasium work. 
 He needed hardening up. 
 
 I came home and announced my success to 
 Ruth and she was delighted. I suspected by 
 the look in her eyes that she had been worrying 
 all day for fear there would be no alternative 
 but to send the boy off.
 
 I BECOME A DAY LABORER 89 
 
 "I knew you would find a way," she said 
 excitedly. 
 
 "I wish I'd found it twenty years ago," I 
 said regretfully. "Then you'd have a lawyer 
 for a husband instead of a — ." 
 
 "Hush," she answered putting her hand 
 over my mouth. "I've a man for a husband 
 and that's all I care about." 
 
 The way she said it made me feel that after 
 all being a man was what counted and that if I 
 could live up to that day by day, no matter what 
 happened, then I could be well satisfied. I 
 guess the city directory was right when before 
 now it couldn't define me any more definitely 
 than, "clerk." And there is about as much 
 man in a clerk as in a valet. They are both 
 shadows. 
 
 The boy fell in with my plans eagerly, for 
 the gymnasium work made him forget the 
 study part of the programme. The next day I 
 took him up there and saw him introduced to 
 the various department heads. I paid his 
 membership fee and they gave him a card 
 which made him feel like a real club man. I 
 tell you it took a weight off my mind. 
 
 On the Monday following our arrival in our 
 new quarters, I rose at five-thirty, put on my
 
 90 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 overalls and had breakfast. I ate a larg-e bowl 
 of oatmeal, a generous supply of flapjacks, 
 made of some milk that had soured, sprinkled 
 with molasses, and a cup of hot black coffee 
 — the last of a can we had brought down with 
 us among the left-over kitchen supplies. 
 
 For lunch Ruth had packed my box with 
 cold cream-of-tartar biscuit, well buttered, a 
 bit of cheese, a little bowl of rice pudding, two 
 hard-boiled eggs and a pint bottle of cold 
 coffee. I kissed her goodby and started out 
 on foot for the street where I was to take up 
 my work. The foreman demanded my name, 
 registered me, told me where to find a shovel 
 and assigned me to a gang under another fore- 
 man. At seven o'clock I took my place with a 
 dozen Italians and began to shovel. My 
 muscles were decidedly flabby, and by noon I 
 began to find it hard work. I was glad to 
 stop and eat my lunch. I couldn't remember 
 a meal in five years that tasted as good as 
 that did. My companions watched me curi- 
 ously — perhaps a bit suspiciously — but they 
 chattered in a foreign tongue among them- 
 selves and rather shied away from me. On 
 that first day I made up my mind to one thing 
 — I would learn Italian before the year was
 
 I BECOME A DAY LABORER 91 
 
 done, and know something more about these 
 people and their ways. They were the key to 
 the contractor's problem and it would pay a 
 man to know how to handle them. As I 
 watched the boss over us that day it did not 
 seem to me that he understood very well. 
 
 From one to five the work became an in- 
 creasing strain. Even with my athletic train- 
 ing I wasn't used to such a prolonged test of 
 one set of muscles. My legs became heavy, 
 my back ached, and my shoulders finally re- 
 fused to obey me except under the sheer com- 
 mand of my will. I knew, however, that time 
 would remedy this. I might be sore and lame 
 for a day or two, but I had twice the natural 
 strength of these short, close-knit foreigners. 
 The excitement and novelty of the employment 
 helped me through those first few days. I felt 
 the joy of the pioneer — felt the sweet sense of 
 delving in the mother earth. It touched in 
 me some responsive chord that harked back to 
 my ancestors who broke the rocky soil of New 
 England. Of the life of my fellows bustling 
 by on the earth-crust overhead — those fellows 
 of whom so lately I had been one — I was not 
 at all conscious. I might have been at work 
 on some new planet for all they touched my
 
 92 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 new life. I could see them peering over the 
 wooden rail around our excavation as they 
 stopped to stare down at us, but I did not con- 
 nect them with myself. And yet I felt closer 
 to this old city than ever before. I thrilled 
 with the joy of the constructor, the builder, 
 even in this humble capacity. I felt superior 
 to those for whom I was building. In a 
 coarse way I suppose it was a reflection of 
 some artistic sense — something akin to the 
 creative impulse. I can say truthfully that at 
 the end of that first day I came home — be- 
 grimed and sore as I was — with a sense of 
 fuller life than so far I had ever experienced. 
 I found Ruth waiting for me with some anx- 
 iety. She came into my soil-stained arms as 
 eagerly as a bride. It was good. It took all 
 the soreness out of me. Before supper I took 
 the boy and we went down to the public baths 
 on the waterfront and there I dived and 
 splashed and swam like a young whale. The 
 sting of the cold salt water was all the further 
 balm I needed. I came out tingling and fit 
 right then for another nine-hour day. But 
 when I came back I threatened our first week's 
 savings at the supper-table. Ruth had made
 
 I BECOME A DAY LABORER 93 
 
 more hot griddle-cakes and I kept her at the 
 stove until I was ashamed to do it longer. 
 The boy, too, after his plunge, showed a better 
 appetite than for weeks.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 KINE DOLLARS A WEEK 
 
 The second day, I woke up lame and stiff 
 but I gave myself a good brisk rub down and 
 kneaded my arm and leg muscles until they 
 were pretty well limbered up. The thing that 
 pleased me was the way I felt towards my 
 new work that second morning. I'd been a 
 bit afraid of a reaction — of waking up with all 
 the romance gone. That, I knew, would be 
 deadly. Once let me dwell on the naked 
 material facts of my condition and I'd be lost. 
 That's true of course in any occupation. The 
 man who works without an inspiration of some 
 sort is not only discontented but a poor work- 
 man. I remember distinctly that when I 
 opened my eyes and realized my surroundings 
 and traced back the incidents of yesterday 
 to the ditch, I was concerned principally 
 with the problem of a stone in our path upon 
 which we had been working. I wanted to 
 get back to it. We had worked upon it for 
 
 94
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK 95 
 
 an hour without fully uncovering it and I was 
 as eager as the foreman to learn whether it 
 was a ledge rock or just a fragment. This 
 interest was not associated with the elevated 
 road for whom the work was being done, nor 
 the contractor who had undertaken the job, 
 nor the foreman who was supervising it. It 
 was a question which concerned only me and 
 Mother Earth who seemed to be doing her best 
 to balk us at every turn. I forgot the sticky, 
 wet clay in which I had floundered for nine 
 hours, forgot the noisome stench which at 
 times we were forced to breathe, forgot my 
 lame hands and back. I recalled only the 
 problem itself and the skill with which the man 
 they called Anton' handled his crow bar. He 
 was a master of it. In removing the smaller 
 slabs which lay around the big one he aston- 
 ished me with his knowledge of how to place 
 the bar. He'd come to my side where I was 
 prying with all my strength and with a wave 
 of his hand for me to stand back, would ad- 
 just two or three smaller rocks as a fulcrum 
 and then, with the gentlest of movements, 
 work the half-ton weight inch by inch to 
 where he wanted it. He could swing the rock 
 to the right or left, raise or lower it, at will.
 
 96 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 and always he made the weight of the rock, 
 against which I had striven so vainly, do the 
 work. That was something worth learning. 
 I wanted to get back and study him. I 
 wanted to get back and finish uncovering that 
 rock. I wanted to get back and bring the job 
 as a whole to a finish so as to have a new one 
 to tackle. Even at the end of that first day 
 I felt I had learned enough to make myself a 
 man of greater power than I was the day be- 
 fore. And always in the background was the 
 unknown goal to which this toil was to lead. 
 I hadn't yet stopped to figure out what the 
 goal was but that it was worth while I had no 
 doubt for I was no longer stationary. I was a 
 constructor. I was in touch with a big enter- 
 prise of development. 
 
 I don't know that I've made myself clear. 
 I wasn't very clear in my own mind then but 
 I know that I had a very conscious impression 
 of the sort which I've tried to put into words. 
 And I know that it filled me with a great big 
 joy. I never woke up with any such feeling 
 when with the United Woollen. My only 
 thought in the morning then was how much 
 time I must give myself to catch the six-
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK 97 
 
 thirty. When I reached the office I hung up 
 my hat and coat and sat down to the imper- 
 sonal figures hke an automaton. There was 
 nothing of me in the work; there couldn't be. 
 How petty it seemed now! I suppose the 
 company, as an industrial enterprise, was in 
 the line of development, but that idea 
 never penetrated as far as the clerical depart- 
 ment. We didn't feel it any more than the 
 adding machines do. 
 
 Ruth had a good breakfast for me and when 
 I came into the kitchen she was trying to brush 
 the dried clay ofif my overalls. 
 
 ''Good Heavens!" I said, **don't waste your 
 strength doing that.'' 
 
 She looked up from her task with a smile. 
 
 "I'm not going to let you get slack down 
 here" she said. 
 
 ''But those things will look just as bad 
 again five minutes after I've gone down the 
 ladder." 
 
 "But I don't intend they shall look like this 
 on your way to the ladder," she answered. 
 
 "All right," I said "then let me have them. 
 I'll do it myself." 
 
 "Have you shaved ?" she asked.
 
 98 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 I rubbed my hand over my chin. It wasn't 
 very bad and I'd made up my mind I wouldn't 
 shave every day now. 
 
 "No," I said. "But twice or three times a 
 week—" 
 
 "Billy!" she broke in, "that will never do. 
 You're going down to your new business look- 
 ing just as ship-shape as you went to the old. 
 You don't belong to that contractor; you be- 
 long to me." 
 
 In the meanwhile the boy came in with my 
 heavy boots which he had brushed clean and 
 oiled. There w^as nothing left for me to do 
 but to shave and I'll admit I felt better for. 
 it. 
 
 "Do you want me to put on a high collar?'* 
 I asked. 
 
 "Didn't you find the things I laid out for 
 you?" 
 
 I hadn't looked about. I'd put on the things 
 I took off. She led me back into the bed room, 
 and over a chair I saw a clean change of under- 
 clothing and a new grey flannel shirt. 
 
 "Where did you get this?" I asked. 
 
 "I bought it for a dollar," she answered. 
 "It's too much to pay. I can make one for 
 fifty cents as soon as I get time to sew."
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK 99 
 
 That's the way Ruth was. Every day after 
 this she made me change, after I came back 
 from my swim, into the business suit I wore 
 when I came down here, and which now by con- 
 trast looked almost new. She even made me 
 wear a tie with my flannel shirt. Every morn- 
 ing I started out clean shaven and with my 
 work clothes as fresh as though I were a con- 
 tractor myself. I objected at first because it 
 seemed too much for her to do to wash the 
 things every day, but she said it was a good deal 
 easier than washing them once a week. In- 
 cidentally that was one of her own little 
 schemes for saving trouble and it seemed to 
 me a good one ; instead of collecting her soiled 
 clothes for seven days and then tearing her- 
 self all to pieces with a whole hard fore- 
 noon's work, she washed a little every day. 
 By this plan it took her only about an hour 
 each morning to keep all the linen in the house 
 clean and sweet. We had the roof to dry it 
 on and she never ironed anything except per- 
 haps the tablecloths and handkerchiefs. We 
 had no company to cater to and as long as we 
 knew things were clean that's all we cared. 
 
 We got around the rock all right. It 
 proved not to be a ledge after all. I myself,
 
 100 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 however, didn't accomplish as much as I did the 
 first day, for I was slower in my movements. 
 On the other hand, I think I improved a little 
 in my handling of the crowbar. At the noon 
 hour I tried to start a conversation with An- 
 ton,' but he understood little English and I 
 knew no Italian, so we didn't get far. As he 
 sat in a group of his fellow countrymen laugh- 
 ing and jabbering he made me feel distinctly 
 like an outsider. There were one or two Eng- 
 lish-speaking workmen besides myself, but 
 somehow they didn't interest me as much as 
 these Italians. It may have been my imagina- 
 tion but they seemed to me a decidedly in- 
 ferior lot. As a rule they were men who took 
 the job only to keep themselves from starving 
 and quit at the end of a week or two only 
 to come back when they needed more money. 
 
 I must make an exception of an Irishman I 
 will call Dan Rafiferty. He was a big blue- 
 eyed fellow, full of fun and fight, with a 
 good natured contempt of the Dagoes, and 
 was a born leader. I noticed, the first day, 
 that he came nearer being the boss of the 
 gang than the foreman, and I suspect the 
 latter himself noticed it, for he seemed to 
 have it in for Dan. There never was an
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK loi 
 
 especially dirty job to be done but what 
 Dan was sent. He always obeyed but he 
 used to slouch off with his big red fist 
 doubled up, muttering curses that brought 
 out his brogue at its best. Later on he con- 
 fided in me what he was going to do to that 
 boss. If he had carried out his threats he 
 would long since have been electrocuted and 
 I would have lost a good friend. Several 
 times I thought the two men were coming to 
 blows but though Dan would have dearly 
 loved a fight and could have handled a dozen 
 men like the foreman, he always managed to 
 control himself in time to avoid it. 
 
 "I don't wanter be after losin' me job for 
 the dirthy spalpeen," he growled to me. 
 
 But he came near it in a way he wasn't 
 looking for later in the week. It was Friday 
 and half a dozen of us had been sent down to 
 work on the second level. It was damp and 
 suffocating down there, fifty feet below the 
 street. I felt as though I had gone into the 
 mines. I didn't like it but I knew that there 
 was just as much to learn here as above and 
 that it must all be learned eventually. The 
 sides were braced with heavy timbers like a 
 mine shaft to prevent the dirt from falling in
 
 102 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 and there was the constant danger that in 
 spite of this it might cave in. We went down 
 by rough ladders made by naihng strips of 
 board across two pieces of joist and the work 
 down there was back-breaking and monoto- 
 nous. We heaved the dirt into a big iron 
 bucket lowered by the hoisting engine above. 
 It was heavy, wet soil that weighed like lead. 
 
 From the beginning the men complained 
 of headaches and one by one they crawled up 
 the ladder again for fresh air. Others were 
 sent down but at the end of an hour they too 
 retreated. Dan and I stuck it out for a while. 
 Then I began to get dizzy myself. I didn't 
 know what the trouble was but when I began 
 to wobble a bit Dan placed his hand on my 
 shoulder. 
 
 ''Betther climb out o' here," he said. "I'm 
 thinkin' it's gas." 
 
 At that time I didn't know what sewer gas 
 was. I couldn't smell anything and thought 
 he must be mistaken. 
 
 "You'd better come too," I answered, mak- 
 ing for the ladder. 
 
 He wasn't coming but I couldn't get up 
 very well without him so he followed along 
 behind. At the top we found the foreman
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK 103 
 
 fighting mad and trying to spur on another 
 gang to go down. They wouldn't move. 
 When he saw us come up he turned upon Dan. 
 
 "Who ordered you out of there?" he 
 growled. 
 
 "The gas," answered Dan. 
 
 "Gas be damned," shouted the foreman. 
 "You're a bunch of white livered cowards — 
 all of you." 
 
 I saw Dan double up his fists and start to- 
 wards the man. The latter checked him with 
 a command. 
 
 "Go back down there or you're fired," he 
 said to him. 
 
 Dan turned red. Then I saw his jaws come 
 together. 
 
 "Begod!" he answered. "You shan't fire 
 me, anyhow." 
 
 Without another word he started down the 
 ladder again. I saw the Italians crowd to- 
 gether and watch him. By that time my head 
 was clearer but my legs were weak. I sat 
 down a moment uncertain what to do. Then 
 I heard someone shout: 
 
 "By God, he's right! He's lying there at 
 the bottom." 
 
 I started towards the ladder but some one
 
 104 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 shoved me back. Then I thought of the 
 bucket. It was above ground and I staggered 
 towards it gaining strength at each step. I 
 jumped in and shouted to the engineer to lower 
 me. He obeyed from instinct. I went down, 
 down, down to what seemed Hke the center of 
 the earth. When the bucket struck the 
 ground I was dizzy again but I managed to 
 get out, heave the unconscious Dan in and 
 pile on top of him myself. When I came to, 
 I was in an ambulance on my way to the 
 hospital but by the time I had reached the 
 emergency room I had taken a grip on my- 
 self. I knew that if ever Ruth heard of this 
 she would never again be comfortable. When 
 they took us out I was able to walk a little. 
 The doctors wanted to put me to bed but I 
 refused to go. I sat there for about an hour 
 while they worked over Dan. When I found 
 that he would be all right by morning I in- 
 sisted upon going out. I had a bad headache, 
 but I knew the fresh air would drive this 
 away and so it did, though it left me weak. 
 
 One of the hardest day's work I ever did 
 in my life was killing time from then until 
 five o'clock. Of course the papers got hold 
 of it and that gave me another scare but
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK 105 
 
 luckily the nearest they came to my name was 
 Daiiinton, so no harm was done. And they 
 didn't come within a mile of getting the real 
 story. When in a later edition one of them 
 published my photograph I felt absolutely safe 
 for they had me in a full beard and thinner 
 than I've ever been in my life. 
 
 When I came home at my usual time look- 
 ing a bit white perhaps but otherwise normal 
 enough, the first question Ruth asked me 
 was: 
 
 "What have you done with your dinner pail, 
 Billy?" 
 
 Isn't a man always sure to do some sucK 
 fool thing as that, when he's trying to keep 
 something quiet from the wife? I had to ex- 
 plain that I had forgotten it and that was 
 enough to excite suspicion at any time. She 
 kept me uneasy for ten minutes and the best 
 I could do was to admit finally that I wasn't 
 feeling very well. Whereupon she made me 
 go to bed and fussed over me all the even- 
 ing and worried all the next day. 
 
 I reported for work as usual in the morn- 
 ing and found we had a new foreman. It 
 was a relief because I guess if Dan hadn't 
 knocked down the other one, someone else
 
 lo6 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 would have done it sooner or later. At that 
 the man had taught me something about 
 sewer gas and that is when you begin to feel 
 dizzy fifty feet below the street, it's time to 
 go up the ladder about as fast as your 
 wobbly legs will let you, even if you don't 
 smell anything. 
 
 Rafferty didn't turn up for two or three 
 days. When he did appear it was with a 
 simple : 
 
 "Mawnin, mon." 
 
 It wasn't until several days later I learned 
 that the late foreman had left town nursing a 
 black eye and a cut on one cheek such as 
 might have been made by a set of red knuckles 
 backed by an arm the size of a small ham. 
 
 On Saturday night of that first week I 
 came home with nine dollars in my pocket. 
 I'll never be prouder again than I was when 
 I handed them over to Ruth. And Ruth will 
 never again be prouder than she was when, 
 after she had laid aside three of them for the 
 rent and five for current expenses, she picked 
 out a one-dollar bill and, crossing the room, 
 placed it in the ginger jar. This was a little 
 blue affair in which we had always dropped 
 what pennies and nickels we could spare.
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK 107 
 
 " There's our nest-egg," she announced. 
 
 "You don't mean to tell me you're that 
 much ahead of the game the first week?" 
 
 "Look here, Billy," she answered. 
 
 She brought out an itemized list of every- 
 thing she had bought from last Monday, in- 
 cluding Sunday's dinner. I've kept that list. 
 Many of the things she had bought were not 
 yet used up but she had computed the cost of 
 the amount actually used. Here it is as I 
 copied it off : 
 
 Flour, .25 
 
 Lard, .15 
 
 Cream of tartar and soda, .05 
 
 Oat meal, .04 
 
 Molasses, .05 
 
 Sugar, .12 
 
 Potatoes, .20 
 
 Rice, .06 
 
 Milk, 1. 12 
 
 Eggs, .24 
 
 Rye bread, .10 
 
 Sausages, .22 
 
 Lettuce, .03 
 
 Beans, .12 
 
 Salt pork, .15
 
 io8 ONE WAY OUT, 
 
 Corn meal, ,06 
 
 Graham meal, .05 
 
 Butter, .45 
 
 Cheese, .06 
 
 Shin of beef, .39 
 
 Fish, .22 
 
 Oil, .28 
 
 Soap, .09 
 
 Vinegar, salt and pepper, about .05 
 
 Can of corn, .07 
 
 Onions, .06 
 
 Total $4.68 
 
 In this account, too, Ruth was liberal in 
 her margins. She did better than this later 
 on. A fairer estimate could have been made 
 at the end of the month and a still fairer 
 even than that, at the end of the year. It 
 sounded almost too good to be true but it was 
 a fact. We had lived, and lived well on this 
 amount and as yet Ruth was inexperienced. 
 She hadn't learned all she learned later. For 
 the benefit of those who may think we went 
 hungry I have asked Ruth to write out the 
 bill of fare for this week as nearly as she 
 can remember it. One thing you must keep 
 in mind is that of everything we had, we
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK 109 
 
 had enough. Neither Ruth, the boy, nor 
 myself ever left the table or dinner pail un- 
 satisfied. Here's what we had and it was 
 better even than it sounds for whatever Ruth 
 made, she made well. I copy it as she wrote 
 it out. 
 
 Monday. 
 
 Breakfast: oatmeal, griddle-cakes with mo- 
 lasses, cream of tartar biscuits, milk. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, two hard- 
 boiled eggs, bowl of rice, cold coffee; for Dick 
 and me : cold biscuits, milk, rice. 
 
 Dinner: baked potatoes, griddle-cakes, milk. 
 
 Tuesday. 
 
 Breakfast: baked potatoes, graham muffins, 
 oatmeal, milk. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: cold muffins, two hard- 
 boiled eggs, rice, milk; for Dick and me: cold 
 muffins, rice and milk. 
 
 Dinner: boiled potatoes, pork scraps, hot 
 biscuits, milk. 
 
 Wednesday. 
 Breakfast: oatmeal, fried potatoes, warmed 
 over biscuits. 
 
 Luncheon : for Billy : cold biscuits, two hard-
 
 no ONE WAY OUT 
 
 boiled eggs, bread pudding: for Dick and me: 
 baked potatoes, cold biscuits, bread pudding. 
 
 Dinner: beef stew with dumplings, hot bis- 
 cuits, milk. 
 
 Thursday. 
 
 Breakfast: fried sausages, baked potatoes, 
 graham muffins, milk. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: cold muffins, cold sau- 
 sage and rice; for Dick and me: the same. 
 
 Dinner : warmed over stew, lettuce, hot bis- 
 cuits, milk. 
 
 Friday. 
 
 Breakfast: oatmeal, fried rock cod, baked 
 potatoes, rye bread, milk. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: rye bread, potato 
 salad, rice; for Dick and me: the same. 
 
 Dinner: soup made from stock of beef, left 
 over fish, boiled potatoes, rice, milk. 
 
 Saturday. 
 
 Breakfast: oatmeal, fried corn mush with 
 molasses, milk. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, two hard- 
 boiled eggs, cheese, rice; for Dick and me: 
 German toast. 
 
 Dinner : baked beans, hot biscuits.
 
 NINE DOLLARS A WEEK in 
 
 Sunday. 
 Breakfast : baked beans, graham muffins. 
 Dinner : boiled potatoes, pork scraps, canned 
 corn, corn cake, bread pudding. 
 
 A word about that bread pudding. Ruth 
 tells me she puts in an extra quart of milk 
 and then bakes it all day when she bakes 
 her beans, stirring it every now and then. I 
 never knew before how the trick was done 
 but it comes out a rich brown and tastes like 
 plum pudding without the raisins. She says 
 that if you put in raisins it tastes exactly like 
 a plum pudding. 
 
 So at the end of the first week I found my- 
 self with eighty dollars left over from the old 
 home, one dollar saved in the new, all my bills 
 paid, and Ruth, Dick and myself all fit as a 
 fiddle.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 SUNDAY 
 
 That first dollar saved was the germ of a 
 new idea. 
 
 It is a further confession of a middle-class 
 mind that in coming down here I had not 
 looked forward beyond the immediate present. 
 With the horror of that last week still on me 
 I had considered only the opportunity I had for 
 earning a livelihood. To be sure I had seen 
 no reason why an intelligent man should not 
 in time be advanced to foreman, and why he 
 should not then be able to save enough to ward 
 off the poorhouse before old age came on. 
 But now — with that first dollar tucked away 
 in the ginger jar — I felt within me the stir- 
 ring of a new ambition, an ambition born of 
 this quick young country into which I had 
 plunged. Why, in time, should I not become 
 the employer? Why should I not take the ini- 
 tiative in some of these progressive enter- 
 prises? Why should I not learn this business 
 
 112
 
 SUNDAY 113 
 
 of contracting and building and some day con- 
 tract and build for myself? With that first 
 dollar saved I was already at heart a capitalist. 
 
 I said nothing of this to Ruth. For six 
 months I let the idea grow. If it did noth- 
 ing else it added zest to my new work. I 
 shoveled as though I were digging for dia- 
 monds. It made me a young man again. It 
 made me a young American again. It 
 brought me out of bed every morning with 
 visions; it sent me to sleep at night with 
 dreams. 
 
 But Fm running ahead of my story. 
 
 I thought I had appreciated Sunday when 
 it meant a release for one day from the office 
 of the United Woollen, but as with all the other 
 things I felt as though it had been but the 
 shadow and that only now had I found the 
 substance. In the first place I had not been 
 able completely to shake the office in the last 
 few years. I brought it home with me and 
 on Sundays it furnished half the subject of 
 conversation. Every little incident, every bit 
 of conversation, every expression on Morse's 
 face was analyzed in the attempt to see what 
 it counted, for or against, the possible future 
 raise. Even when out walking with the boy
 
 114 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 the latter was a constant reminder. It was as 
 though he were merely a ward of the United 
 Woollen Company. 
 
 But when I put away my shovel at five o'- 
 clock on Saturday that was the end of my ditch 
 digging. I came home after that and I was at 
 home until I reported for work on Monday 
 morning. There was neither work nor worry 
 left hanging over. It meant complete relax- 
 ation — complete rest. And the body, I found, 
 rests better than the mind. 
 
 Later in my work I didn't experience this so 
 perfectly as I now did because then I accepted 
 new responsibilities, but for the first few 
 months I lived in lazy content on this one day. 
 For the most part those who lived around me 
 did all the time. On fair summer days half 
 the population of the little square basked in 
 the sun with eyes half closed from morning 
 until night. Those who didn't, went to the 
 neighboring beaches many of which they 
 could reach for a nickel or visited such public 
 buildings as were open. But wherever they 
 went or whatever they did, they loafed about 
 it. And a man can't truly loaf until he's done 
 a hard week's work which ends with the week. 
 
 As for us we had our choice of any num-
 
 SUNDAY 115 
 
 ber of pleasant occupations. I insisted that 
 Ruth should make the meals as simple as possi- 
 ble on that day and both the boy and myself 
 helped her about them. We always washed 
 the dishes and swept the floor. First of all 
 there was the roof. I early saw the possibility 
 of this much neglected spot. It was flat and 
 had a fence around it for it was meant to be 
 used for the hanging out of clothes. Being 
 a new building it had been built a story 
 higher than its older neighbors so that we 
 overlooked the other roofs. There was a 
 generous space through which we saw the 
 harbor. I picked up a strip of old canvas for 
 a trifle in one of the shore-front junk-shops 
 which deal in second-hand ship supplies and 
 arranged it over one corner like a canopy. 
 Then I brought home with me some bits of 
 board that were left over from the wood con- 
 struction at the ditch and nailed these together 
 to make a rude sort of window box. It was 
 harder to get dirt than it was wood but little 
 by little I brought home enough finally to 
 fill the boxes. In these we planted radishes 
 and lettuce and a few flower seeds. We 
 had almost as good a garden as we used 
 to have in our back yard. At any rate it
 
 Ii6 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 was just as much fun to watch the things 
 grow, and though the lettuce never amounted 
 to much we actually raised some very good rad- 
 ishes. The flowers did well, too. 
 
 We brought up an old blanket and spread 
 it out beneath the canopy and that, with a 
 chair or two, made our roof garden. A 
 local branch of the Public Library was not 
 far distant so that we had all the reading 
 matter we wanted and here we used to sit all 
 day Sunday when we didn't feel like doing 
 anything else. Here, too, w^e used to sit even- 
 ings. On several hot nights Ruth, the boy and 
 I brought up our blankets and slept out. 
 The boy liked it so well that finally he came 
 to sleep up here most of the summer. It was 
 fine for him. The harbor breeze swept the 
 air clean of smoke so that it was as good for 
 him as being at the sea-shore. 
 
 To us the sights from this roof were marvel- 
 ous. They appealed strongly because they 
 were unlike anything w^e had ever seen or for 
 that matter unlike anything our friends had 
 ever seen. I think that a man's friends often 
 take away the freshness from sights that other- 
 wise might move him. I've never been to 
 Europe but what with magazine pictures and
 
 SUNDAY 117 
 
 snap shots and Mrs. Grover, who never for- 
 got that before she married Grover she had 
 travelled for a whole year, I haven't any 
 special desire to visit London or Paris. I 
 suppose it would be different if I ever went 
 but even then I don't think there would be the 
 novelty to it we found from our roof. And it 
 was just that novelty and the ability to ap- 
 preciate it that made our whole emigrant life 
 possible. It was for us the Great Adven- 
 ture again. I suppose there are men who will 
 growl that it's all bosh to say there is any 
 real romance in living in four rooms in a 
 tenement district, eating what we ate, dig- 
 ging in a ditch and mooning over a view from 
 a roof top. I want to say right here that for 
 such men there wouldn't be any romance or 
 beauty in such a life. They'd be miserable. 
 There are plenty of men living down there now 
 and they never miss a chance to air their opin- 
 ions. Some of them have big bodies but I 
 wouldn't give them fifty cents a day to work 
 for me. Luckily however, there are not many 
 of them in proportion to the others, even 
 though they make more noise. 
 
 But when you stop to think about it what else 
 is it but romance that leads men to spend their
 
 Ii8 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 lives fishing oil the Banks when they could 
 remain safely ashore and get better pay driv- 
 ing a team? Or what drives them into the 
 army or to work on railroads when they 
 neither expect nor hope to be advanced? 
 The men themselves can't tell you. They take 
 up the work unthinkingly but there is some- 
 thing in the very hardships they suffer which 
 lends a sting to the life and holds them. The 
 only thing I know of that will do this and turn 
 the grind into an inspiration is romance. It's 
 what the new-comers have and it's what our 
 ancestors had and it's what a lot of us who 
 have stayed over here too long out of the cur- 
 rent have lost. 
 
 On the lazy summer mornings we could 
 hear the church bells and now and then a set 
 of chimes. Because we were above the street 
 and next to the sky they sounded as drowsily 
 musical as in a country village. They made me 
 a bit conscience-stricken to think that for the 
 boy's sake I didn't make an efifort and go to 
 some church. But for a while it was church 
 enough to devote the seventh day to what 
 the Bible says it was made for. Ruth used 
 to read out loud to us and we planned to
 
 SUNDAY 119 
 
 make our book suit the day after a fashion. 
 Sometimes it was Emerson, sometimes Tenny- 
 son — I was very fond of the Idylls — and some- 
 times a book of sermons. Later on we had a 
 call from a young minister who had a little 
 mission chapel not far from our flat and who 
 looked in upon us at the suggestion of the 
 secretary of the settlement house. We went 
 to a service at his chapel one Sunday and be- 
 fore we ourselves realized it we were attend- 
 ing regularly with a zest and interest which 
 we had never felt in our suburban church-go- 
 ing. Later still we each of us found a share 
 in the work ourselves and came to have a 
 great satisfaction and contentment in it. But 
 I am running ahead of my story. 
 
 We'd have dinner this first summer at about 
 half past one and then perhaps we'd go for 
 a walk. There wasn't a street in the city 
 that didn't interest us but as a rule we'd 
 plan to visit one of the parks. I didn't know 
 there were so many of them or that they 
 were so different. We had our choice of the 
 ocean or a river or the woods. If we had 
 wished to spend say thirty cents in car fare 
 we could have had a further choice of the
 
 120 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 beach, the mountains, or a taste of the country 
 \vhich in places had not changed in the last 
 hundred years. This would have given us a 
 two hours' ride. Occasionally we did this but 
 at present there was too much to see within 
 walking distance. 
 
 For one thing it suddenly occurred to me 
 that though I had lived in this city over thirty 
 years I had not yet seen such places of inter- 
 est as always attracted visitors from out of 
 town. My attention was brought to this first 
 by the need of limiting ourselves to amuse- 
 ments that didn't cost anything, but chiefly 
 by learning where the better element down 
 here spent their Sundays. You have only to 
 follow this crowd to find out where the objects 
 of national pride are located. An old battle 
 flag will attract twenty foreigners to one 
 American. And incidentally I wish to confess 
 it was they who made me ashamed of my 
 ignorance of the country's history. Beyond 
 a memory of the Revolution, the Civil War 
 and a few names of men and battles connected 
 therewith, I'd forgotten all I ever learned at 
 school on this subject. But here the many 
 patriotic celebrations arranged by the local 
 schools in the endeavor to instill patriotism and
 
 SUNDAY 121 
 
 the frequent visits of the boys to the museums, 
 kept the subject fresh. Not only Dick but 
 Ruth and myself soon turned to it as a vital part 
 of our education. Inspired by the old trophies 
 that ought to stand for so much to us of to-day 
 we took from the library the first volume of 
 Fiske's fine series and in the course of time 
 read them all. As we traced the fortunes of 
 those early adventurers who dreamed and 
 sailed towards an unknown continent, pictured 
 to ourselves the lives of the tribes who 
 wandered about in the big tangle of forest 
 growth between the Atlantic and the Pacific, 
 as we landed on the bleak New England 
 shores with the early Pilgrims, then fought 
 with Washington, then studied the perilous 
 internal struggle culminating with Lincoln 
 and the Civil War, then the dangerous period 
 of reconstruction with the breathless progress 
 following — why it left us all better Americans 
 than we had ever been in our lives. It gave 
 new meaning to my present surroundings and 
 helped me better to understand the new- 
 comers. Somehow all those things of the past 
 didn't seem to concern Grover and the rest of 
 them in the trim little houses. They had no 
 history and they were a part of no history.
 
 122 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 Perhaps that's because they were making no 
 history themselves. As for myself, I know 
 that I was just beginning to get acquainted 
 with my ancestors — that for the first time in 
 my life, I was really conscious of being a 
 citizen of the United States of America. 
 
 But I soon discovered that not only the 
 historic but the beautiful attracted these peo- 
 ple. They introduced me to the Art Mu- 
 seum. In the winter following our first 
 summer here, when the out of door attrac- 
 tions were considerably narrowed down, Ruth 
 and I used to go there about every other 
 Sunday with the boy. We came to feel as 
 familiar with our favorite pictures as though 
 they hung in our own house. The Museum 
 ceased to be a public building; it was our own. 
 We went in with a nod to the old doorkeeper 
 who came to know us and felt as unconstrained 
 there as at home. We had our favorite nooks, 
 our favorite seats and we lounged about in 
 the soft lights of the rooms for hours at a 
 time. The more we looked at the beautiful 
 paintings, the old tapestries, the treasures of 
 stone and china, the more we enjoyed them. 
 We were sure to meet some of our neighbors 
 there and a young artist who lived on the sec-
 
 SUNDAY 123 
 
 ond floor of our house and whom later I came 
 to know very well, pointed out to us new beau- 
 ties in the old masters. He was selling plaster 
 casts at that time and studying art in the 
 night school. 
 
 In the old life, an art museum had meant 
 nothing to me more than that it seemed a nec- 
 essary institution in every city. It was a mark 
 of good breeding in a town, like the library in a 
 good many homes. But it had never occurred 
 to me to visit it and I know it hadn't to any of 
 my former associates. The women occasion- 
 ally went to a special exhibition that was likely 
 to be discussed at the little dinners, but a week 
 later they couldn't have told you what they had 
 seen. Perhaps our neighborhood was the ex- 
 ception and a bit more ignorant than the aver- 
 age about such things, but I'll venture to say 
 there isn't a middle-class community in this 
 country where the paintings play the part in 
 the lives of the people that they do among 
 the foreign-born. A class better than they 
 does the work; a class lower enjoys it. Where 
 the middle-class comes in, I don't know. 
 
 After being gone all the afternoon we'd be 
 glad to get home again and maybe we'd have 
 a lunch of cold beans and biscuits or some of
 
 124 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 the pudding that was left over. Then during 
 the summer months we'd go back to the roof 
 for a restful evening. At night the view was 
 as different from the day as you could imagine. 
 Behind us the city proper was in a bluish haze 
 made by the electric lights. Then we could 
 see the yellow lights of the upper windows in 
 all the neighboring houses and beyond these, 
 over the roof tops which seemed now to huddle 
 closer together, we saw the passing red and 
 green lights of moving vessels. Overhead 
 were the same clean stars which were at the 
 same time shining down upon the woods and 
 the mountain tops. There was something 
 about it that made me feel a man and a free 
 man. There was twenty years of slavery 
 back of me to make me appreciate this. 
 
 And Ruth reading my thoughts in my eyes 
 used to nestle closer to me and the boy with 
 his chin in his hands would stare out at sea 
 and dream his own dreams.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 
 
 As I said, with that first dollar in the ginger 
 jar representing the first actual saving I had 
 ever effected in my whole life, my imagina- 
 tion became fired with new plans. I saw no 
 reason why I myself should not become an 
 employer. As in the next few weeks I en- 
 larged my circle of acquaintances and pushed 
 my inquiries in every possible direction I 
 found this idea was in the air down here. 
 The ambition of all these people was towards 
 complete independence. Either they hoped to 
 set up in business for themselves in this 
 country or they looked forward to saving 
 enough to return to the land of their birth and 
 live there as small land owners. I speak more 
 especially of the Italians because just now I 
 was thrown more in contact with them than 
 the others. In my city they, with the Irish, 
 seemed peculiarly of real emigrant stuff. 
 The Jews were so clannish that they were a 
 
 125
 
 ij6 one way out 
 
 problem in themselves; the Germans assimi- 
 lated a little better and yet they too were like 
 one large family. They did not get into the 
 city life very much and even in their business 
 stuck pretty closely to one line. For a good 
 many years they remained essentially Germans. 
 But the Irish were citizens from the time they 
 landed and the Italians eventually became such 
 if by a slower process. 
 
 The former went into everything. They 
 are a tremendously adaptable people. But 
 whatever they tackled they looked forward to 
 independence and generally won it. Even a 
 man of so humble an ambition as Murphy had 
 accomplished this. The Italians either went 
 into the fruit business for which they seem 
 to have a knack or served as day laborers 
 and saved. There was a man down here 
 who was always ready to stake them to a 
 cart and a supply of fruit, at an exorbitant 
 price to be sure, but they pushed their carts 
 patiently mile upon mile until in the end they 
 saved enough to buy one of their own. The 
 next step was a small fruit store. The 
 laborers, once they had acquired a work- 
 ing capital, took up many things — a lot of 
 them going into the country and buying de-
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 127 
 
 serted farms. It was wonderful what they 
 did with this land upon which the old stock 
 New Englander had not been able to live. 
 But of course in part explanation of this, you 
 must remember that these New England vil- 
 lages have long been drained of their best. In 
 many cases only the maim, the halt, and the 
 blind are left and these stand no more chance 
 against the modern pioneer than they would 
 against one of their own sturdy forefathers. 
 
 Another occupation which the Italians 
 seemed to preempt was the boot-blacking busi- 
 ness. It may seem odd to dignify so menial an 
 employment as a business but there is many a 
 head of such an establishment who could show 
 a fatter bank account than two-thirds of his 
 clients. The next time you go into a little 
 nook containing say fifteen chairs, figure out 
 for yourself how many nickels are left there 
 in a day. The rent is often high — it is 
 some proof of a business worth thought when 
 you consider that they are able to pay for po- 
 sitions on the leading business streets — ^but the 
 labor is cheap and the furnishings and cost 
 of raw material slight. Pasquale had set 
 me to thinking long before, when I learned 
 that he was earning almost as much a week as
 
 uS ONE WAY OUT 
 
 I. It is no imiisiinl thing for a man who owns 
 his ''emporium" to draw ten dollars a day in 
 profits and not show himself until he empties 
 the cash register at night. 
 
 But the fact that impressed me in these 
 people — and this holds peculiarly true of the 
 Jews — was that they all shied away from the 
 salaried jobs. In making such general- 
 izations I may be running a risk because I'm 
 only giving the results of my own limited ob- 
 servation and experience. But I want it un- 
 derstood that from the beginning to the end 
 of these recollections I'm trying to do nothing 
 more. I'm not a student. I'm not a sociolo- 
 gist. The conditions which I observed may 
 not hold elsewhere for all I know. From a 
 different point of view, they might not to an- 
 other seem to hold even in my own city. I 
 won't argue with anyone about it. I set down 
 what I myself saw and let it go at that. 
 
 Going back to the small group among whom 
 I lived when I was with the United Woollen, 
 it seems to me that every man clung to 
 a salary as though it were his only possible 
 hope. I know men among them who even re- 
 fused to work on a commission basis although 
 they were practically sure of earning in this
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 129 
 
 way double what they were being paid by the 
 year. They considered a salary as a form of 
 insurance and once in the grip of this idea 
 they had nothing to look forward to except an 
 increase. I was no better myself. I didn't 
 really expect to be head of the firm. Nor did 
 the other men. We weren't working and 
 holding on with any notion of winning inde- 
 pendence along that line. The most we hoped 
 for was a bigger salary. Some men didn't an- 
 ticipate more than twenty-five hundred like 
 me, and others — the younger men — talked 
 about five thousand and even ten thousand. I 
 didn't hear them discuss what thej were go- 
 ing to do when they were general managers or 
 vice-presidents but always what they could 
 enjoy when they drew the larger annuity. 
 And save those who saw in professional work 
 a way out, this was the career they were 
 choosing for their sons. They wanted to get 
 them into banks and the big companies where 
 the assurance of lazy routine advancement up 
 to a certain point was the reward for industry, 
 sobriety and honesty. A salary with an old, 
 strongly established company semed to them 
 about as big a stroke of luck for a young man 
 as a legacy. I myself had hoped to find a
 
 130 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 place for Dick with one of the big trust com- 
 panies. 
 
 Of course down here these people did not 
 have the same opportunities. Most of the old 
 firms preferred the ''bright young American" 
 and I guess they secured most of them. I pity 
 the "bright young American" but I can't help 
 congratulating the bright young Italians and 
 the bright young Irishmen. They are forced 
 as a result to make business for themselves 
 and they are given every opportunity in the 
 world for doing it. And they are doing it. 
 And I, breathing in this atmosphere, made up 
 my mind that I would do it, too. 
 
 With this in mind I outlined for myself a 
 systematic course of procedure. It was evi- 
 dent that in this as in any other business I 
 must master thoroughly the details before 
 taking up the larger problems. The details of 
 this as of any other business lay at the bottom 
 and so for these at least I was at present in the 
 best possible position. The two most impor- 
 tant factors to the success of a contractor 
 seemed to me to be, roughly speaking, the se- 
 curing and handling of men and the purchase 
 and use of materials. Of the two, the former 
 appeared to be the more important. Even
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 
 
 131 
 
 in the few weeks I had been at work here I 
 had observed a big difference in the amount of 
 labor accompHshed by different men individ- 
 ually. I could have picked out a half dozen 
 that were worth more than all the others put 
 together. And in the two foremen I had no- 
 ticed another big difference in the varying ca- 
 pacity of a boss to get work out of the men 
 collectively. In work where labor counted for 
 so much in the final cost as here, it appeared as 
 though this involved almost the whole ques- 
 tion of profit and loss. With a hundred men 
 employed at a dollar and a half a day, the sav- 
 ing of a single hour meant the saving of a 
 good many dollars. 
 
 It may seem odd that so obvious a fact was 
 not taken advantage of by the present con- 
 tractors. Doubtless it was realized but my 
 later experience showed me that the obvious is 
 very often neglected. In this business as in 
 many others, the details fall into a rut and 
 often a newcomer with a fresh point of view 
 will detect waste that has been going on unno- 
 ticed for years. I was almost forty years old, 
 fairly intelligent, and I had everything at stake. 
 So I was distinctly more alert than those who 
 retained their positions merely by letting things
 
 n,2 
 
 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 run along as well as they always had been go- 
 ing. But however you may explain it, I knew 
 that the foreman didn't get as much work out 
 of me as he might have done. In spite of all 
 the control I exercised over myself I often quit 
 work realizing that half my strength during 
 the day had gone for nothing. And though it 
 may sound like boasting to say it, I think I 
 worked both more conscientiously and intel- 
 ligently than most of the men. 
 
 In the first place the foreman was a bully. 
 He believed in driving his men. He swore at 
 them and goaded them as an ignorant coun- 
 tryman often tries to drive oxen. The result 
 was a good deal the same as it is with oxen — 
 the men worked excitedly when under the sting 
 and loafed the rest of the time. In a crisis the 
 boss was able to spur them on to their best — 
 though even then they wasted strength in 
 frantic endeavor — but he could not keep them 
 up to a consistent level of steady work. And 
 that's what counts. As in a Marathon race 
 the men who maintain a steady plugging pace 
 from start to finish are the ones who accom- 
 plish. 
 
 The question may be asked how such a boss 
 could keep his job. I myself did not under-
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 133 
 
 stand that at first but later as I worked with 
 different men and under different bosses I saw 
 that it was because their methods were much 
 ahke and that the results were much alike. A 
 certain standard had been established as to 
 the amount of work that should be done by a 
 hundred men and this was maintained. The 
 boss had figured out loosely how much the men 
 would work and the men had figured out to 
 a minute how much they could loaf. Neither 
 man nor boss took any special interest in the 
 work itself. The men were allowed to waste 
 just so much time in getting water, in filling 
 their pipes, in spitting on their hands, in rest- 
 ing on their shovels, in lazy chatter, and so 
 long as they did not exceed this nothing wasi 
 said. 
 
 The trouble was that the standard was low 
 and this was because the men had nothing to 
 gain by steady conscientious work and also be- 
 cause the boss did not understand them nor dis- 
 tinguish between them. For instance the fore- 
 man ought to have got the work of two men 
 out of me but he wouldn't have, if I hadn't 
 chosen to give it. That held true also of Raf- 
 ferty and one or two others. 
 
 Now my idea was this : that if a man made a
 
 134 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 study of these men who, in this city at any rate, 
 were the key to the contractor's problem, and 
 learned their little peculiarities, their stand- 
 ards of justice, their ambitions, their weakness 
 and their strength, he ought to be able to in- 
 crease their working capacity. Certainly an 
 intelligent teamster does this with horses and 
 it seemed as though it ought to be possible to 
 accomplish still finer results with men. To go 
 a little farther in my ambition, it also seemed 
 possible to pick and select the best of these men 
 instead of taking them at random. For in- 
 stance in the present gang there were at least 
 a half dozen who stood out as more intelligent 
 and stronger physically than all the others. 
 Why couldn't a man in time gather about him 
 say a hundred such men and by better treat- 
 ment, possibly better pay, possibly a guaran- 
 tee of continuous work, make of them a loyal, 
 hard working machine with a capacity for 
 double the work of the ordinary gang? Such 
 organization as this was going on in other 
 lines of business, why not in this? With such 
 a machine at his command, a man ought to 
 make himself a formidable competitor with 
 even the long established firms. 
 
 At any rate this was my theory and it gave
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 135 
 
 a fresh inspiration to my work. Whether any- 
 thing came of it or not it was something to 
 hope for, something to toil for, something 
 which raised this digging to the plane of the 
 pioneer who joyfully clears his field of stumps 
 and rocks. It swung me from the present into 
 the future. It was a different future from 
 that which had weighed me down when with 
 the United Woollen. This was no waiting 
 game. Neither your pioneer nor your true 
 emigrant sits down and waits. Here was 
 something which depended solely upon my own 
 efforts for its success or failure. And I knew 
 that it wasn't possible to fail so dismally but 
 what the joy of the struggle would always be 
 mine. 
 
 In the meanwhile I carried with me 
 to my work a note book and during the 
 noon hour I set down everything which I 
 thought might be of any possible use to me. 
 I missed no opportunity for learning even the 
 most trivial details. A great deal of the in- 
 formation was superficial and a great deal of 
 it was incorrect but down it went in the note 
 book to be revised later when I became better 
 informed. 
 
 I watched my fellow workmen as much as
 
 136 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 possible and plied them with questions. I 
 wanted to know where the cement came from 
 and in what proportion it was mixed with sand 
 and gravel and stone for different work. I 
 wanted to know where the sand and gravel 
 and stone came from and how it was graded. 
 Wherever it was possible I secured rough 
 prices for different materials. I wanted to 
 know where the lumber was bought and I 
 wanted to know how the staging was built and 
 why it was built. Understand that I did not 
 flatter myself that I was fast becoming a 
 mason, a carpenter, an engineer and a con- 
 tractor all in one and all at once. I knew that 
 the most of my information was vague and 
 loose. Half the men who w^ere doing the work 
 didn't know why they were doing it and a lot 
 of them didn't know how they were doing it. 
 They worked by instinct and habit. Then, 
 too, they were a clannish lot and a jealous lot. 
 They resented my questioning however deli- 
 cately I might do it and often refused to an- 
 swer me. But in spite of this I found myself 
 surprised later with the fund of really valuable 
 knowledge I acquired. 
 
 In addition to this I acquired sources of in- 
 formation. I found out where to go for the
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 137 
 
 real facts. I learned for instance who for this 
 particular job was supplying for the contrac- 
 tor his cement and gravel and crushed stone — 
 though as it happened this contractor himself 
 either owned or controlled his own plant for 
 the production of most of his material. How- 
 ever I learned something when I learned that. 
 For a man who had apparently been in busi- 
 ness all his life, I was densely ignorant of even 
 the fundamentals of business. This idea of 
 running the business back to the sources of the 
 raw material was a new idea to me. I had not 
 thought of the contractor as owning his own 
 quarries and gravel pits, obvious as the ad- 
 vantage was. I wanted to know where the 
 tools were bought and how much they cost — 
 from the engines and hoisting cranes and car- 
 rying system down to pick-axes, crowbars and 
 shovels. I made a note of the fact that many 
 of the smaller implements were not cared for 
 properly and even tried to estimate how with 
 proper attention the life of a pick-axe could be 
 prolonged. I joyed particularly in every such 
 opportunity as this no matter how trivial it ap- 
 peared later. It was just such details as these 
 which gave reality to my dream. 
 
 I figured out how many cubic feet of earth
 
 138 ONE WAY OUli 
 
 per day per man was being handled here and 
 how this varied under different bosses. I 
 pried and hstened and questioned and figured 
 even when digging. I worked with my eyes 
 and ears wide open. It was wonderful how 
 quickly in this way the hours flew. A day 
 now didn't seem more than four hours long. 
 Many the time I've felt actually sorry when 
 the signal to quit work was given at night and 
 have hung around for half an hour while the 
 engineer fixed his boiler for the night and the 
 old man lighted his lanterns to string along the 
 excavation. I don't know what they all 
 thought of me, but I know some of them set 
 me down for a college man doing the work for 
 experience. This to say the least was flatter- 
 ing to my years. 
 
 As I say, a lot of this work was wasted 
 energy in the sense that I acquired anything 
 worth while, but none of it was wasted when 
 I recall the joy of it. If I had actually been a 
 college boy in the first flush of youthful en- 
 thusiasm I could not have gone at my work 
 more enthusiastically or dreamed wilder or big- 
 ger dreams. Even after many of these bub- 
 bles were pricked and had vanished, the mood 
 which made them did not vanish. I have never
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 139 
 
 forgotten and never can forget the sheer de- 
 light of those months. I was eighteen again 
 with a lot besides that I didn't have at eight- 
 een. 
 
 My work along another line was more prac- 
 tical and more successful. What I learned 
 about the men and the best way to handle them 
 was genuine capital. In the first place I lost 
 no opportunity to make myself as solid as pos- 
 sible with Dan Rafferty. This was not alto- 
 gether from a purely selfish motive either. I 
 liked the man. In a way I think he was the 
 most lovable man I ever met, although that 
 seems a lady-like term to apply to so rugged a 
 fellow. But below his beef and brawn, below 
 his aggressiveness, below his coarseness, below 
 even a peculiar moral bluntness about a good 
 many things, there was a strain of something 
 fine about Dan Rafferty. I had a glimpse of it 
 when he preferred going back to the sewer gas 
 rather than let a man like the old foreman 
 force him into a position where the latter could 
 fire him. But that was only one side of him. 
 He had a heart as big as a woman's and one 
 as keen to respond to sympathy. This in its 
 turn inspired in others a feeling towards him 
 that to save my life I can only describe as love
 
 140 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 — love in its big sense. He'd swear like a 
 pirate at the Dagoes and they'd only grin back 
 at him where'd they'd feel like knifing any 
 other man. And when Dan learned that An- 
 ton' had lost his boy he sent down to the house 
 a wreath of flowers half as big as a cart wheel. 
 There was scarcely a day when some old lady 
 didn't manage to see Dan at the noon hour 
 and draw him aside with a mumbled plea that 
 always made him dig into his pockets. He 
 caught me watching him one day and said in 
 explanation, "She's me grandmither." 
 
 After I'd seen at least a dozen different 
 ones approach him I asked him if they were all 
 his grandmothers. 
 
 "Sure," he said. 'Tvery ould woman in the 
 ward is me grandmither." 
 
 Those same grandmothers stood him in good 
 stead later in his life, for every single grand- 
 mother had some forty grandchildren and half 
 of these had votes. But Dan wasn't looking 
 that far ahead then. Two facts rather dis- 
 tinguished him at the start; he didn't either 
 drink or smoke. He didn't have any opinions 
 upon the subject but he was one of the rare 
 Irishmen born that way. Now and then you'll 
 find one and as likely as not he'll prove one of
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 141 
 
 the good fellows you'd expect to see in the 
 other crowd. However, beyond exciting my 
 interest and leading me to score him some fifty 
 points in my estimate of him as a good work- 
 man, I was indifferent to this side of his char- 
 acter. The thing that impressed me most was 
 a quality of leadership he seemed to possess. 
 There was nothing masterful about it. You 
 didn't look to see him lead in any especially 
 good or great cause, but you could see 
 readily enough that whatever cause he chose, 
 it would be possible for him to gather 
 about him a large personal following. I 
 was attracted to this side of him in con- 
 sidering him as having about all the good 
 raw material for a great boss. Put twenty 
 men on a rope with Dan at the head of them 
 and just let him say, "Now, biys — altogither," 
 and you'd see every man's neck grow taut with 
 the strain. I know because I've been one of 
 the twenty and felt as though I wanted to drag 
 every muscle out of my body. And when it 
 was over I'd ask myself why in the devil I 
 pulled that way. When I told myself that it 
 was because I was pulling with Dan Rafferty I 
 said all I knew about it. 
 
 It seemed to me that any man who secured
 
 142 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 Dan as a "boss would already have the back- 
 bone of his gang. I didn't ever expect to use 
 him in this way but I wanted the man for a 
 friend and I wanted to learn the secret of his 
 power if I could. But I may as well confess 
 right now that I never fully fathomed that. 
 
 In the meanwhile I had not neglected the 
 other men. At every opportunity I talked with 
 them. At the beginning I made it a point to 
 learn their names and addresses which I jot- 
 ted down in my book. I learned something 
 from them of the padrone system and the un- 
 fair contracts into which they were trapped. 
 I learned their likes and dislikes, their am- 
 bitions, and as much as possible about their 
 families. It all came hard at first but little by 
 little as I worked with them I found them 
 trusting me more with their confidences. 
 
 In this way then the first summer passed. 
 Both Ruth and the boy in the meanwhile were 
 just as busy about their respective tasks as I 
 was. The latter took to the gymnasium work 
 like a duck to water and in his enthusiasm for 
 this tackled his lessons with renewed interest. 
 He put on five pounds of weight and what with 
 the daily ocean swim which we both enjoyed, 
 his cheeks took on color and he became as
 
 PIJVNS FOR THE FUTURE 143 
 
 brown as an Indian. If he had passed the 
 summer at the White Mountains he could not 
 have looked any hardier. He made many- 
 friends at the Y. M. C. A. They were all am- 
 bitious boys and they woke him up wonder- 
 fully. I was careful to follow him closely 
 in this new life and made it a point to see the 
 boys myself and to make him tell me at the 
 end of each day just what he had been about. 
 Dick was a boy I could trust to tell me every 
 detail. He was absolutely truthful and he 
 wasn't afraid to open his heart to me with 
 whatever new questions might be bothering 
 him. As far as possible I tried to point out to 
 him what to me seemed the good points in his 
 new friends and to warn him against any little 
 weaknesses among them which from time to 
 time I might detect. Ruth did the rest. A 
 father, however much a comrade he may be 
 with his boy, can go only so far. There is al- 
 ways plenty left which belongs to the mother — 
 if she is such a mother as Ruth. 
 
 As for Ruth herself I watched her anxiously 
 in fear lest the new life might wear her down 
 but honestly as far as the house was concerned 
 she didn't seem to have as much to bother her 
 as she had before. She was slowly getting
 
 144 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 the buying and the cooking down to a science. 
 Many a week now our food bill went as low as 
 a little over three dollars. We bought in 
 larger quantities and this always effected a 
 saving. We bought a barrel of flour and half 
 a barrel of sugar for one thing. Then as the 
 new potatoes came into the market we bought 
 half a barrel of those and half a barrel of ap- 
 ples. She did wonders with those apples and 
 they added a big variety to our menus. An- 
 other saving was effected by buying suet which 
 cost but a few cents a pound, trying this out 
 and mixing it with the lard for shortening. 
 As the weather became cooler we had baked 
 beans twice a week instead of once. These 
 made for us four and sometimes five or six 
 meals. We figured out that we could bake a 
 quart pot of beans, using half a pound of pork 
 to a pot, for less than twenty cents. This gave 
 the three of us two meals with some left over 
 for lunch, making the cost per man about three 
 cents. And they made a hearty meal, too. 
 That was a trick she had learned in the coun- 
 try where baked beans are a staple article of 
 diet. I liked them cold for my lunch. 
 
 As for clothes neither Ruth nor myself 
 needed much more than we had. I bought
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 145 
 
 nothing but one pair of heavy boots which Ruth 
 picked up at a bankrupt sale for two dollars. 
 On herself she didn't spend a cent. She brought 
 down here with her a winter and a summer, 
 street suit, several house dresses and three or 
 four petticoats and a goodly supply of under 
 things. She knew how to care for them and 
 they lasted her. I brought down, in addition 
 to my business suit, a Sunday suit of blue 
 serge and a dress suit and a Prince Albert. 
 I sold the last two to a second hand dealer for 
 eleven dollars and this helped towards the 
 boy's outfit in the fall. She bought for him a 
 pair of three dollar shoes for a dollar and a 
 half at this same "Sold Out" sale, a dollar's 
 worth of stockings and about a dollar's worth 
 of underclothes. He had a winter overcoat 
 and hat, though I could have picked up these 
 in either a pawnshop or second hand store for 
 a couple of dollars. It was wonderful what 
 you could get at these places, especially if any- 
 one had the knack which Ruth had of making 
 over things.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 
 
 That fall the boy passed his entrance exam- 
 inations and entered the finest school in the 
 state — the city high school. If he had been 
 worth a million he couldn't have had better 
 advantages. I v^^as told that the graduates of 
 this school entered college with a higher av- 
 erage than the graduates of most of the big 
 preparatory schools. Certainly they had just 
 as good instruction and if anything better dis- 
 cipline. There was more competition here and 
 a real competition. Many of the pupils were 
 foreign born and a much larger per cent of 
 them children of foreign born. Their parents 
 had been over here long enough to realize 
 what an advantage an education was and the 
 children went at their work with the feeling 
 that their future depended upon their applica- 
 tion here. 
 
 The boy's associates might have been more 
 carefully selected at some fashionable school 
 
 146
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 147 
 
 but I was already beginning to realize that 
 selected associates aren't always select asso- 
 ciates and that even if they are this is more 
 of a disadvantage than an advantage. The 
 fact that the boy's fellows were all of a kind 
 was what had disturbed me even in the little 
 suburban grammar school. For that matter I 
 can see now that even for Ruth and me this 
 sameness was a handicap for both us and our 
 neighbors. There was no clash. There was 
 a dead level. I don't believe that's good for 
 either boys or men or for women. 
 
 Supposing this open door policy did admit a 
 few worthless youngsters into the school and 
 supposing again that the private school didn't 
 admit such of a different order (which I very 
 much doubt) — along with these Dick was go- 
 ing to find here the men — the past had proved 
 this and the present was proving it — who 
 eventually would become our statesmen, our 
 progressive business men, our lawyers and 
 doctors — if not our conservative bankers. 
 For one graduate of such a school as my 
 former surroundings had made me think 
 essential for the boy, I could count now a dozen 
 graduates of this very high school who were 
 distinguishing themselves in the city. The
 
 148 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 boy was going to meet here the same spirit I 
 was getting in touch with among my emigrant 
 friends — a zeal for hfe, a behef in the possi- 
 bihties of hfe, an optimistic determination to 
 use these possibihties, which somehow the blue- 
 blooded Americans were losing. It seemed to 
 me that life was getting stale for the fourth 
 and fifth generation. I tried to make the boy 
 see this point of view. I went back again with 
 him to the pioneer idea. 
 
 "Dick," I said in substance, "your great- 
 great-grandfather pulled up stakes and came 
 over to this country when there was nothing 
 here but trees, rocks and Indians. It was a 
 hard fight but a good fight and he left a son to 
 carry on the fight. So generation after gen- 
 eration they fought but somehow they grew a 
 bit weaker as they fought. "Now," I said, 
 "you and I are going to try to recover that lost 
 ground. Let's think of ourselves as like our 
 great-great-grandfathers. We've just come 
 over here. So have about a mihion others. 
 The fight is a different fight to-day but it's no 
 less a fight and we're going to win. We have 
 a good many advantages that these newcom- 
 ers haven't. You see them making good on 
 every side of you but I'll bet they can't lick a
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 149 
 
 good American — when he isn't asleep. You 
 and I are going to make good too." 
 
 "You bet we are, Dad," he said, with his 
 eyes grown bright. 
 
 "Then," I said, "you must work the way 
 the newcomers work. I don't want you to 
 think you're any better than they are. You 
 aren't. But you're just as good and these two 
 hundred years we've hved here ought to count 
 for something." 
 
 The boy hfted his head at this. 
 
 "You make me feel as though we'd just 
 landed with the Pilgrims," he said. 
 
 "So we have," I said. "June seventh of this' 
 very year we landed on Plymouth Rock just as, 
 our ancestors did two centuries ago. They've 
 been all this time paving the way for you and 
 me. They've built roads and schools and fac- 
 tories and it's up to us now to use them. 
 You and I have just landed from England. 
 Let's see what we can do as pioneers." 
 
 I wanted to get at the young American in 
 him. I wanted him to realize that he was 
 something more than the son of his parents; 
 something more than just an average English- 
 speaking boy. I wanted him to feel the im- 
 petus of the big history back of him and the
 
 150 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 big history yet to be made ahead of him. He 
 had known nothing of that before. The word 
 American had no meaning to him except when 
 a regiment of soldiers was marching by. I 
 wanted him to feel all the time as he did when 
 his throat grew lumpy with the band playing 
 and the stars and stripes flying on Fourth of 
 July or Decoration Day. 
 
 I urged him to study hard as the first es- 
 sential towards success but I also told him 
 to get into the school life. I didn't want him 
 to stand back as his tendency was and watch 
 the other fellows. I didn't want him to sit in 
 the bleachers — at least not until he had proved 
 that this was the place for him. Even then I 
 wanted him to lead the cheering. I w^anted 
 him to test himself in the literary societies, the 
 dramatic clubs, on the athletic field. In other 
 words, instead of remaining passive I w^anted 
 him to take an aggressive attitude tow^ards life. 
 In still other words instead of being a middle- 
 classer I wanted him to get something of the 
 emigrant spirit. And I had the satisfaction 
 of seeing him begin his work with the germ of 
 that idea in his brain. 
 
 In the meanwhile w^ith the approach of cold 
 weather I saw a new item of expense loom up
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 151 
 
 in the form of coal. We had used kerosene 
 all summer but now it became necessary for 
 the sake of heat to get a stove. For a week I 
 took what time I could spare and wandered 
 around among the junk shops looking for a 
 second hand stove and finally found just what 
 I wanted. I paid three dollars for it and it 
 cost me another dollar to have some 
 small repairs made. I set it up myself in the 
 living room which we decided to use as a 
 kitchen for the winter. But when I came to 
 look into the matter of getting coal down here 
 I found I was facing a pretty serious prob- 
 lem. Coal had been a big item in the suburbs 
 but the way people around me were buying it, 
 made it a still bigger one. No cellar accom- 
 modations came with the tenement and so each 
 one was forced to buy his coal by the basket or 
 bag. A basket of anthracite was costing them 
 at this time about forty cents. This was for 
 about eighty pounds of coal, which made the 
 total cost per ton eleven dollars — at least three 
 dollars and a half over the regular price. Even 
 with economy a person would use at least a 
 bag a week. This, to leave a liberal margin, 
 would amount to about a ton and a half of 
 coal during the winter months. I didn't like
 
 152 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 the idea of absorbing the half dollar or so a 
 week that Ruth was squeezing out towards 
 what few clothes we had to buy, in this way — 
 at least the over-charge part of it. With the 
 first basket I brought home, I said, "I see 
 where you'll have to dig down into the ginger 
 jar this winter, little woman." 
 
 She looked as startled as though I had told 
 her someone had stolen the savings. 
 
 "What do you mean?" she asked. 
 
 I pointed to the basket. 
 
 "Coal costs about eleven dollars a ton, down 
 here." 
 
 When she found out that this was all that 
 caused my remark, she didn't seem to be dis- 
 turbed. 
 
 "Billy," she said, "before we touch the ginger 
 jar it will have to cost twenty dollars a ton. 
 We'll live on pea soup and rice three times a 
 day before I touch that." 
 
 "All right," I said, "but it does seem a pity 
 that the burden of such prices as these should 
 fall on the poor." 
 
 "Why do they?" she asked. 
 
 "Because in this case," I said, "the dealers 
 seem to have us where the wool is short." 
 
 "How have they?" she insisted.
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 153 
 
 "We can't buy coal by the ton because we 
 haven't any place to put it." She thought a 
 moment and then she said : 
 
 "We could take care of a fifth of a ton, Billy. 
 That's only five baskets." 
 
 'They won't sell five any cheaper than one." 
 
 "And every family in this house could take 
 care of five," she went on. "That would make 
 a ton." 
 
 I began to see what she meant and as I 
 thought of it I didn't see why it wasn't a prac- 
 tical scheme. 
 
 "I believe that's a good idea," I said. "And 
 if there were more women like you in the world 
 I don't believe there'd be any trusts at all." 
 
 "Nonsense," she said. "You leave it to me 
 now and I'll see the other women in the house. 
 They are the ones who'll appreciate a good sav- 
 ing like that." 
 
 She saw them and after a good deal of talk 
 they agreed, so I told Ruth to tell them to save 
 out of next Saturday night's pay a dollar and 
 a half apiece. I was a bit afraid that if I 
 didn't get the cash when the coal was delivered 
 I might get stuck on the deal. The next Mon- 
 day I ordered the coal and asked to have it 
 delivered late in the day. When I came home
 
 154 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 I found the wagon waiting and it created 
 about as much excitement on the street as 
 an ambulance. I guess it was the first time 
 in the history of Little Italy that a coal 
 team had ever stopped before a tenement. 
 The driver had brought baskets with him 
 and I filled up one and took it to a store 
 nearby and weighed into it eighty pounds 
 of coal. With that for my guide I gathered 
 the other men of the families about me and 
 made them carry the coal in while I measured 
 it out. The driver who at first was inclined to 
 object to the whole proceeding was content to 
 let things go on when he found himself re- 
 heved of all the carrying. We emptied the 
 wagon in no time and the other men insisted 
 upon carrying up my coal for me. I collected 
 every cent of my money and incidentally es- 
 tablished myself on a firm footing with every 
 family in the house. Several other tenements 
 later adopted the plan but the idea didn't take 
 hold the way you'd have thought it would. I 
 guess it was because there weren't any more 
 Ruths around there to oversee the job. Then, 
 too, while these people are far-sighted in a good 
 many ways, they are short-sighted in others. 
 Neither the wholesale nor co-operative plans.
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 155 
 
 appeal to them. For one thing they are 
 suspicious and for another they don't Hke 
 to spend any more than they have to day by 
 day. Later on through Ruth's influence we 
 carried our scheme a Httle farther with just the 
 people in the house and bought flour and sugar 
 that way but it was made possible only through 
 their absolute trust in her. We always in- 
 sisted on carrying out every such little opera- 
 tion on a cash basis and they never failed us. 
 
 Ruth's influence had been gradually spread- 
 ing through the neighborhood. She had 
 found time to meet the other families in the 
 house and through them had met a dozen 
 more. The first floor was occupied by 
 Michele, an Italian laborer, his wife, his wife's 
 sister and two children. On the second floor 
 there was Giuseppe, the young sculptor, and 
 his father and mother. The father was an in- 
 valid and the lad supported the three. On the 
 third floor lived a fruit peddler, his wife and his 
 wife's mother — rather a commonplace family, 
 while the fourth floor was occupied by Pietro, 
 a young fellow who sold cut flowers on the 
 street and hoped some day to have a garden of 
 his own. He had two children and a grand- 
 mother to care for.
 
 156 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 It certainly afforded a contrast to visit those 
 other fiats and then Ruth's. Right here is 
 where her superior intelhgence came in, of 
 course. The foreign-born women do not so 
 quickly adapt themselves to the standards of 
 this country as the men do. Most of them as 
 I learned, come from the country districts of 
 Italy where they live very rudely. Once here 
 they make their new quarters little better than 
 their old. The younger ones however who are 
 going to school are doing better. But taken 
 by and large it was difficult to persuade them 
 that cleanliness offered any especial advan- 
 tages. It wasn't as though they minded the 
 dirt and were chained to it by circumstances 
 from which they couldn't escape — as I used to 
 think. They simply didn't object to it. So 
 long as they were warm and had food enough 
 they were content. They didn't suffer in any 
 way that they themselves could see. 
 
 But when Ruth first went into their quarters 
 she was horrified. She thought that at length 
 she was face to face with all the misery and 
 squalor of the slums of which she had read. I 
 remember her chalk-white face as she met me 
 at the door upon my return home one night. 
 She nearly drove the color out of my own
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 157 
 
 cheeks for I thought surely that something 
 had happened to the hoy. But it wasn't that; 
 she had heard that the baby on the first floor 
 was ill and had gone down there to see if there 
 was anything she might do for it. Until then 
 she had seen nothing but the outside of the 
 other doors from the hall and they looked no 
 different from our own. But once inside — 
 well I guess that's where the two hundred years 
 if not the four hundred years back of us native 
 Americans counts. 
 
 "Why, Billy," she cried, "it was awful. I'll 
 never get that picture out of mind if I live to 
 be a hundred." 
 
 "What's the matter?" I asked. 
 
 "Why the poor little thing—" 
 
 "What poor little thing?" I interrupted. 
 
 "Michele's baby. It lay there in dirty rags 
 with its pinched white face staring up at me as 
 though just begging for a clean bed." 
 
 "What's the matter with it?" 
 
 "Matter with it ? It's a wonder it isn't dead 
 and buried. The district nurse came in while 
 I was there and told me," — she shuddered — 
 "that they'd been feeding it on macaroni cooked 
 in greasy gravy. And it isn't six months old 
 yet."
 
 158 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 "No wonder it looked white," I said, remem- 
 bering how we had discussed for a week the 
 wisdom of giving Dick the coddled white of an 
 egg at that age. 
 
 "Why the conditions down there are terri- 
 ble," cried Ruth. "Michele must be very, very 
 poor. The floor wasn't washed, you couldn't 
 see out of the windows, and the clothes — " 
 
 She held up her hands unable to find words. 
 
 "That does sound bad," I said. 
 
 "It's criminal. Billy — we can't allow a 
 family in the same house with us to suffer like 
 that, can we?" 
 
 I shook my head. 
 
 "Then go down and see what you can do. I 
 guess we can squeeze out fifty cents for them, 
 can't we, Billy?" 
 
 "I guess you could squeeze fifty cents out of 
 a stone for a sick baby," I said. 
 
 The upshot of it was that I went down and 
 saw Michele. As Ruth had said his quarters 
 were anything but clean but they didn't im- 
 press me as being in so bad a condition as she 
 had described them. Perhaps my work in the 
 ditch had made me a little more used to dirt. 
 I found Michele a healthy, temperate, able- 
 bodied man and I learned that he was earning
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 159 
 
 as much as I. Not only that but the women 
 took in garments to finish and picked up the 
 matter of two or three dohars a week extra. 
 There were five in the family but they were 
 far from being in want. In fact Michele had 
 a good bank account. They had all they 
 wanted to eat, were warm and really prosper- 
 ous. There was absolutely no need of the dirt. 
 It was there because they didn't mind it. A 
 five cent cake of soap would have made the 
 rooms clean as a whistle and there were two 
 women to do the scrubbing. I didn't leave my 
 fifty cents but I came back upstairs with a bet- 
 ter appreciation, if that were possible, of what 
 such a woman as Ruth means to a man. Even 
 the baby began to get better as soon as the 
 district nurse drove into the parent's head a 
 few facts about sensible infant feeding. 
 
 I don't want to make out that life is all beer 
 and skittles for the tenement dwellers. It 
 isn't. But I ran across any number of such 
 cases as this where conditions were not nearly 
 so bad as they appeared on the surface. Tak- 
 ing into account the number of people who 
 were gathered together here in a small area I 
 didn't see among the temperate and able- 
 bodied any worse examples of hard luck than
 
 i6o ONE WAY OUT 
 
 I saw among my former associates. In fact 
 of sheer abstract hard luck I didn't see as 
 much. In seventy-five per cent of the cases 
 the conditions were of their own making — 
 either the man was a drunkard or the women 
 slovenly or the whole family was just naturally 
 vicious. Ignorance may excuse some of this 
 but not all of it. Perhaps I'm not what you'd 
 call s>Tnpathetic but I've heard a lot of men 
 talk about these people in a way that sounds 
 to me like twaddle. I never ran across a fam- 
 ily down here in such misery as that which 
 Steve Bonnington's wife endured for years 
 without a whimper. 
 
 Bonnington was a clerk with a big in- 
 surance company. He lived four houses be- 
 low us on our street. I suppose he was earn- 
 ing about eighteen hundred dollars a year 
 when he died. He left five children and he 
 never had money enough even to insure in his 
 own company. He didn't leave a cent. When 
 Helen Bonnington came back from the grave 
 it was to face the problem of supporting un- 
 aided, either by experience or relatives, five 
 children ranging from twelve to one. She 
 was a shy, retiring little body who had sapped 
 her strength in just bringing the children into
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT i6l 
 
 the world and caring for them in the privacy 
 of her home. She had neither the tempera- 
 ment nor the training to face the world. 
 But she bucked up to it. She sold out of 
 the house what things she could spare, se- 
 cured cheap rooms on the outskirts of the 
 neighborhood and announced that she would 
 do sewing. What it cost her to come back 
 among her old friends and do that is a 
 particularly choice type of agony that it 
 would be impossible for a tenement widow to 
 appreciate. And this same self-respect which 
 both Helen's education and her environment 
 forced her to maintain, handicapped her in 
 other ways. You couldn't give Mrs. Bon- 
 nington scraps from your table; you couldn't 
 give her old clothes or old shoes or money. It 
 wasn't her fault because this was so; it wasn't 
 your fault. 
 
 When her children were sick she couldn't 
 send them off to the public wards of the hos- 
 pitals. In the first place half the hospitals 
 wouldn't take them as charity patients simply 
 because she maintained a certain dignity, and 
 in the second place the idea, by education, was 
 so repugnant to her that it never entered her 
 head to try. So she stayed at home and
 
 i62 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 sewed from daylight until she couldn't hold 
 open her eyes at night. That's where you get 
 your true "Song of the Shirt." She not only 
 sewed her fingers to the bone but while doing 
 it she suffered a very fine kind of torture won- 
 dering what would happen to the five if she 
 broke down. Asylums and homes and hos- 
 pitals don't imply any great disgrace to most 
 of the tenement dwellers but to a woman of that 
 type they mean Hell. God knows how she did 
 it but she kept the five alive and clothed and 
 in school until the boy was about fifteen and 
 went to work. When I hear of the lone wid- 
 ows of the tenements, who are apt to be very 
 husky, and who work out with no great mental 
 struggle and who have clothes and food given 
 them and who set the children to work as soon 
 as they are able to walk, I feel like getting up 
 in my seat and telling about Helen Bonning- 
 ton — a plain middle-classer. And she was no 
 exception either. 
 
 I seem to have rambled ofif a bit here but 
 this was only one of many contrasts which I 
 made in these years which seemed to me to be 
 all in favor of my new neighbors. The point 
 is that at the bottom you not only see advan- 
 tages you didn't see before but you're in a po-
 
 THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 163 
 
 sition to use them. You aren't shackled by 
 conventions; you aren't cramped by caste. 
 The world stands ready to help the under dog 
 but before it will lift a finger it wants to see 
 the dog stretched out on its back with all four 
 legs sticking up in prayer. Of the middle-class 
 dog who fights on and on, even after he's wob- 
 bly and can't see, it doesn't seem to take much 
 notice. 
 
 However Ruth started in with a few reforms 
 of her own. She made it a point to go down 
 and see young Michele every day and watch 
 that he didn't get any more macaroni and 
 gravy. The youngster himself resented this 
 interference but the parents took it in good 
 part. Then in time she ventured further and 
 suggested that the baby would be better off if 
 the windows were washed to let in the sun- 
 shine and the floor scrubbed a bit. Finally she 
 became bold enough to hint that it might be 
 well to wash some of the bed clothing. 
 
 The district nurse appreciated the change, 
 if Michele himself didn't and I found that it 
 wasn't long before Miss Colver was making 
 use of this new influence in the house. She 
 made a call on Ruth and discussed her cases 
 with her until in the end she made of her a
 
 l64 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 sort of first assistant. This was the beginning 
 of a new field of activity for Ruth which finally 
 won for her the name of Little Mother. It 
 was wonderful how quickly these people dis- 
 covered the sweet qualities in Ruth that had 
 passed all unnoticed in the old life. 
 It made me very proud.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES 
 
 I had found that I was badly handicapped in 
 all intercourse with my Italian fellow workers 
 by the fact that I knew nothing of their lan- 
 guage and that they knew but little English. 
 The handicap did not lie so much in the fact 
 that we couldn't make ourselves understood — 
 we could after a rough fashion — as it did in 
 the fact that this made a barrier which kept 
 our two nationalities sharply defined. I was 
 always an American talking to an Italian. 
 The boss was always an American talking to 
 a Dago. This seemed to me a great disad- 
 vantage. It ought to be just a foreman to his 
 man or one man to another. 
 
 The chance to acquire a new language I 
 thought had passed with my high school days, 
 but down here everyone was learning English 
 and so I resolved to study Italian. I made a 
 bargain with Giuseppe, the young sculptor, who 
 
 165
 
 1 66 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 was now a frequent visitor at our flat, to teach 
 me his language in return for instruction in 
 mine. He agreed though he had long been get- 
 ting good instruction at the night school. But 
 the lad had found an appreciative friend in 
 Ruth who not only sincerely admired the work 
 he was doing but who admired his enthusiasm 
 and his knowledge of art. I liked him myself 
 for he was dreaming bigger things than I. To 
 watch his thin cheeks grow red and his big 
 brown eyes flash as he talked of some old 
 painting gave me a realization that there was 
 something else to be thought of even down 
 here than mere money success. It was good 
 for me. 
 
 The poor fellow was driven almost mad by 
 having to offer for sale some of the casts which 
 his master made him carry. He would have 
 liked to sell only busts of Michael Angelo and 
 Dante and worthy reproductions of the old 
 masters. 
 
 "There are so many beautiful things," he 
 used to exclaim excitedly in broken English; 
 "why should they want to make anything that 
 is not beautiful?" 
 
 He sputtered time and time again over the 
 pity of gilding the casts. You'd have thought
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES 167 
 
 it was a crime which ought to be punished by 
 hanging. 
 
 "Even Dante," he groaned one night, "that 
 wonderful, white sad face of Dante covered 
 all over with gilt!" 
 
 "It has to look like gold before an American 
 will buy it," I suggested. 
 
 "Yes," he nodded. "They would even gild 
 the Christ." 
 
 Ruth said she wanted to learn Italian with 
 me, and so the three of us used to get together 
 every night right after dinner. I bought a 
 grammar at a second hand bookstore but we 
 used to spend most of our time in memorizing 
 the common every day things a man would be 
 likely to use in ordinary conversation. Giu- 
 seppe would say, "Ha Ella il mio cappello?" 
 
 And I would say, 
 
 "Si, Signore, ho il di Lei cappello." 
 
 "Ha Ella il di Lei pane?" 
 
 "Si, Signore, ho il mio pane." 
 
 "Ha Ella il mio zucchero?" 
 
 "Si, Signore, ho il di Lei zucchero." 
 
 There wasn't much use in going over such 
 simple things in English for Giuseppe and so 
 instead of this Ruth would read aloud some- 
 thing from Tennyson. After explaining to
 
 i68 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 him just what every new word meant, she 
 would let him read aloud to her the same pas- 
 sage. He soon became very enthusiastic over 
 the text itself and would often stop her with 
 the exclamation, 
 
 "Ah, there is a study !" 
 
 Then he would tell us just how he would 
 model whatever the picture happened to be 
 that he saw in his mind. It was wonderful 
 how clearly he saw these pictures. He could 
 tell you even down to how the folds of the 
 women's dresses should fall just as though he 
 were actually looking at living people. 
 
 After a week or two when we had learned 
 some of the simpler phrases Ruth and I used 
 to practise them as much as possible every day. 
 We felt quite proud when we could ask one 
 another for ''quel libro" or "quell' abito" or 
 "il cotello" or "il cucchiaio." I was surprised 
 at how soon we were able to carry on quite 
 a long talk. 
 
 This new idea — that even though I was ap- 
 proaching forty I wasn't too old to resume my 
 studies — took root in another direction. As I 
 had become accustomed to the daily physical 
 exercise and no longer returned home ex- 
 hausted I felt as though I had no right to loaf
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES 169 
 
 through my evenings, much as the privilege of 
 spending them with Ruth meant to me. My 
 muscles had become as hard and tireless as 
 those of a well-trained athlete so that at night 
 I was as alert mentally as in the morning. It 
 made me feel lazy to sit around the house after 
 an hour's lesson in Italian and watch Ruth busy 
 with her sewing and see the boy bending over 
 his books. Still I couldn't think of anything 
 that was practicable until I heard Giuseppe 
 talk one evening about the night school. I 
 had thought this was a sort of grammar school 
 with clay modeling thrpwn in for amusement. 
 
 "No, Signore," he said. "You can learn 
 anything there. And there is another school 
 where you can learn other things." 
 
 I went out that very evening and found that 
 the school he attended taught among other 
 subjects, book keeping and stenography — two 
 things which appealed to me strongly. But in 
 talking to the principal he suggested that be- 
 fore I decided I look into the night trade school 
 which was run in connection with a manual 
 training school. I took his advice and there 
 I found so many things I wanted that I didn't 
 know what to choose. I was amazed at the 
 opportunity. A man could learn here about
 
 170 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 any trade he cared to take up. Both tools and 
 material were furnished him. And all this 
 was within ten minutes' walk of the house. I 
 could still have my early evenings with Ruth 
 and the boy even on the three nights I would 
 be in school until a quarter past seven, spend 
 two hours at learning my trade, and get back 
 to the house again before ten. I don't see 
 how a man could ask for anything better than 
 this. Even then I wouldn't be away from 
 home as much as I often was in my old life. 
 There were many dreary stretches towards the 
 end of my service with the United Woollen 
 when I didn't get home until midnight. And 
 the only extra pay we salaried men received 
 for that was a brighter hope for the job ahead. 
 This was always dangled before our eyes by 
 Morse as a bait when he wished to drive us 
 harder than usual. 
 
 I had my choice of a course In carpentry, 
 bricklaying, sheet metal work, plumbing, elec- 
 tricity, drawing and pattern draughting. The 
 work covered from one to three years and as- 
 sured a man at the end of this time of a posi- 
 tion among the skilled workmen who make in 
 wages as much as many a professional man. 
 Not only this but a man with such training as
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES 171 
 
 this and with ambition could look forward 
 without any great stretch of the imagination 
 to becoming a foreman in his trade and eventu- 
 ally winning independence. All this he could 
 accomplish while earning his daily wages as 
 an apprentice or a common laborer. 
 
 The class in masonry seemed to be more in 
 line with my present plans than any of the 
 other subjects. It ought to prove of value, I 
 thought, to a man in the general contracting 
 business and certainly to a man who under- 
 took the contracting of building construction. 
 At any rate it was a trade in which I was 
 told there was a steady demand for good 
 men and at which many men were earn- 
 ing from three to five dollars a day. I must 
 admit that at first I didn't understand how 
 brick-laying could be taught for I thought it 
 merely a matter of practice but a glance at the 
 outline of the course showed me my error. It 
 looked as complicated as many of the univer- 
 sity courses. The work included first the lay- 
 ing of a brick to line. A man was given actual 
 practice with bricks and mortar under an ex- 
 pert mason. From this a man was advanced, 
 when he had acquired sufficient skill, to the 
 laying out of the American bond; then the
 
 172 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 building' of square piers of different sizes; 
 then the building of square and pigeon 
 hole corners, then the laying out of brick foot- 
 ings. The second year included rowlock 
 and bonded segmental arches; blocking, 
 toothing, and corbeling; building and bond- 
 ing of vaulted walls; polygonal and circu- 
 lar walls, piers and chimneys; fire-places and 
 flues. The third year advanced a man to the 
 nice points of the trade such as the foreign 
 bonds — Flemish, Dutch, Roman and Old Eng- 
 lish; cutting and turning of arches of all kinds, 
 — straight, cambered, semi-circular, three cen- 
 tred elliptical, and many forms of Gothic and 
 Moorish arches ; also brick panels and cornices. 
 Finally it gave practice in the laying out of 
 plans and work from these plans. Whatever 
 time was left was devoted to speed in all these 
 things as far as it was consistent with accurate 
 and careful workmanship. 
 
 I enrolled at once and also entered a class in 
 architectural drawing which was given in con- 
 nection with this. 
 
 I came back and told Ruth and though of 
 course she was afraid it might be too hard 
 work for me she admitted that in the end it 
 might save me many months of still harder
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES 173 
 
 work. If it hadn't been for the boy I think 
 she would have Hked to follow me even in 
 these studies. Whatever new thing I took up, 
 she wanted to take up too. But as I told her, 
 it was she who was making the whole business 
 possible and that was enough for one woman 
 to do. 
 
 The school didn't open for a week and dur- 
 ing that time I saw something of Rafferty. 
 He surprised me by coming around to the flat 
 one night — for what I couldn't imagine. I 
 was glad to see him but I suspected that he 
 had some purpose in making such an effort. 
 I introduced him to Ruth and we all sat down 
 in the kitchen and I told him what I was plan- 
 ning to do this winter and asked him why he 
 didn't join me. I was rather surprised that 
 the idea didn't appeal to him but I soon found 
 out that he had another interest which took 
 all his spare time. This interest was nothing 
 else than politics. And Rafferty hadn't been 
 over here long enough yet to qualify as a voter. 
 In spite of this he was already on speaking 
 terms with the state representative from our 
 district, the local alderman, and was an active 
 lieutenant of Sweeney's — the ward boss. At 
 present he was interesting himself in the can-
 
 174 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 didacy of this same Sweeney who was the Dem- 
 ocratic machine candidate for Congress. Ow- 
 ing to some local row he was in danger of being 
 knifed. Dan had come round to make sure I 
 was registered and to swing me over if pos- 
 sible to the ranks of the faithful. 
 
 The names of which he spoke so familiarly 
 meant nothing to me. I had heard a few of 
 them from reading the papers but I hadn't read 
 a paper for three months now and knew noth- 
 ing at all about the present campaign. As a 
 matter of fact I never voted except for the reg- 
 ular Republican candidate for governor and 
 the regular Republican candidate for presi- 
 dent. And I did that much only from habit. 
 My father had been a Republican and I was a 
 Republican after him and I felt that in a gen- 
 eral way this party stood for honesty as against 
 Tammanyism. But with councillors, and sen- 
 ators and aldermen, or even with congress- 
 men I never bothered my head. Their election 
 seemed to be all prearranged and I figured that 
 one vote more or less wouldn't make much 
 difference. I don't know as I even thought 
 that much about it; I ignored the whole mat- 
 ter. What was true of me was true largely 
 of the other men in our old neighborhood.
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES 175 
 
 Politics, except perhaps for an abstract discus- 
 sion of the tariff, was not a vital issue with 
 any of us. 
 
 Now here I found an emigrant who couldn't 
 as yet qualify as a citizen knowing all the local 
 politicians by their first names and spending 
 his nights working for a candidate for con- 
 gress. Evidently my arrival down here had 
 been noted by those keen eyes which look after 
 every single vote as a miser does his pennies. 
 A man had been found who had at least a 
 speaking acquaintance with me, and plans 
 already set on foot to round me up. 
 
 I was inclined at first to treat this new de- 
 velopment as a joke. But as Rafferty talked 
 on he set me to thinking. I didn't know any- 
 thing about the merits of the two present can- 
 didates but was strongly prejudiced to believe 
 that the Democratic candidate, on general 
 principles, was the worst one. However quite 
 apart from this, wasn't Rafferty to-day a better 
 citizen than I? Even admitting for the sake 
 of argument that Sweeney was a crook, wasn't 
 Rafferty who was trying his humble best to 
 get him elected a better American than I who 
 was willing to sit down passively and allow 
 him to be elected? Rafferty at any fate was
 
 I176 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 getting into the fight. His motive may have 
 been selfish but I think his interest really 
 sprang first from an instinctive desire to get 
 into the game. Here he had come to a new 
 country where every man had not only the 
 chance to mix with the afifairs of the ward, the 
 city, the state, the nation, but also a good 
 chance to make himself a leader in them. 
 Sweeney himself was an example. 
 
 For twenty-five years or more Raflferty's 
 countrymen had appreciated this opportunity 
 for power and gone after it. The result every- 
 one knows. Their victory in city politics at 
 least had been so decisive year after year that 
 the native born had practically laid down his 
 arms as I had. And the reason for this peren- 
 nial victory lay in just this fact that men like 
 Rafferty were busy from the time they landed 
 and men like me were lazily indifferent. 
 
 Three months before, a dozen speakers 
 couldn't have made me see this. I had no 
 American spirit back of me then to make me 
 appreciate it. You might better have talked 
 to a sleepy Russian Jew a week off the steamer. 
 He at least would have sensed the sacred 
 power for liberty which the voting privilege 
 bestows.
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES 177 
 
 I began to ask questions of Rafferty about 
 the two men. He didn't know much about the 
 other fellow except that he was "agin honest 
 labor and a tool of the thrusts." But on 
 Sweeney he grew eloquent. 
 
 ''Sure/' he said. "There's a mon after ye 
 own heart, me biy. Faith he's dug in ditches 
 himself an he knows wot a full dinner pail 
 manes." 
 
 "What's his business?" I asked. 
 
 "A contracthor," he said. "He does big 
 jobs for the city." 
 
 He let himself loose on what Sweeney pro- 
 posed to do for the ward if elected. He would 
 have the government undertake the dredging 
 of the harbor thereby giving hundreds of jobs 
 to the local men. He would do this thing and 
 that — all of which had for their object ap- 
 parently just that one goal. It was a direct 
 personal appeal to every man toiler. In addi- 
 tion to this, Rafferty let drop a hint or two 
 that Sweeney had jobs in his own business 
 which he filled discreetly from the ranks of the 
 wavering. It wasn't more than a month later, 
 by the way, that Rafferty himself was ap- 
 pointed a foreman in the firm of Sweeney 
 Brothers.
 
 178 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 But apart from the merits of the question, 
 the thing that impressed me was Rafferty's 
 earnestness, the dehght he took in the contest 
 itself, and his activity. He was very much 
 disappointed when I told him I wasn't even 
 registered in the ward but he made me prom- 
 ise to look after that as soon as the lists were 
 again opened and made an appointment for 
 the next evening to take me round to a rally 
 to meet the boys. 
 
 I went and was escorted to the home of the 
 Sweeney Club. It was a good sized hall up a 
 long flight of stairs. Through the heavy blue 
 smoke which filled the room I saw the walls 
 decorated with American flags and the framed 
 crayon portraits of Sweeney and other local 
 politicians. Large duck banners proclaimed 
 in black ink the current catch lines of the cam- 
 paign. At one end there was a raised plat- 
 form, the rest of the room was filled with 
 wooden settees. My first impression of it all 
 was anything but favorable. It looked rather 
 tawdry and cheap. The men themselves who 
 filled the room were pretty tough-looking 
 specimens. I noticed a few Italians of the fat 
 class and one or two sharp-faced Jews, but for 
 the most part these men were the cheaper ele-
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES 179 
 
 ment of the second and third generation. 
 They were the loafers — the ward heelers. I 
 certainly felt out of place among them and to 
 me even Rafferty looked out of place. There 
 was a freshness, a bulk about him, that his 
 fellows here didn't have. 
 
 As he shoved his big body through the 
 crowd, they greeted him by his first name with 
 an oath or a joke and he beamed back at them 
 all with a broad wave of his hand. It was evi- 
 dent that he was a man of some importance 
 here. He worked a passage for me to the 
 front of the hall and didn't stop until he 
 reached a group of about a dozen men who 
 were all puffing away at cigars. In the midst 
 of them stood a man of about Rafiferty's size 
 in frame but fully fifty pounds heavier. He 
 had a quiet, good-natured face. On the whole 
 it was a strong face though a bit heavy. His 
 eyes were everywhere. He was the first to 
 notice Rafiferty. He nodded with a familiar, 
 
 "Hello, Dan." 
 
 Dan seized my arm and dragged me for- 
 ward: 
 
 'T want ye to meet me frind. Mister Carle- 
 ton," he said. 
 
 Sweeney rested his grey eyes on me a sec-
 
 i8o ONE WAY OUT 
 
 ond, saw that I was a stranger here, and 
 stepped forward instantly with his big hand 
 outstretched. He spoke without a trace of 
 brogue. 
 
 "I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Carleton," 
 he said. 
 
 I don't know that I'm easily impressed and 
 I flattered myself that I could recognize a poli- 
 tician when I saw one, but I want to confess 
 that there was something in the way he 
 grasped my hand that instantly gave me a dis- 
 tinctly friendly feeling towards Sweeney. I 
 should have said right then and there that the 
 man wasn't as black as he was painted. He 
 was neither oily nor sleek in his manner. We 
 chatted a minute and I think he was a bit sur- 
 prised in me. He wanted to know where I 
 lived, where I was working, and how much of 
 a family I had. He put these questions in so 
 frank and fatherly a fashion that they didn't 
 seem so impertinent to me at the time as they 
 did later. Some one called him and as he 
 turned away, he said to Rafferty, 
 
 "See me before you go, Dan." 
 
 Then he said to me, 
 
 "I hope I'll see you down here often, Carle- 
 ton."
 
 NEW OPPORTUNITIES i8i 
 
 With that Dan took me around and intro- 
 duced me to Tom, Dick and Harry or rather 
 to Tim, Denny and Larry. This crowd came 
 nearer to the notion I had of ward poHticians. 
 They were a noisy, husky-throated lot, but 
 they didn't leave you in doubt for a minute 
 but what every mother's son of them was 
 working for Sweeney as though they were 
 one big family with Daddy Sweeney at the 
 head. You could overhear bits of plots and 
 counter plots on every side. I was offered a 
 dozen cigars in as many minutes and though 
 some of the men rather shied away from me 
 at first a whispered endorsement from Dan was 
 all that was needed to bring them back. 
 
 There was something contagious about it 
 and when later the meeting itself opened and 
 Sweeney rose to speak I cheered him as heart- 
 ily as anyone. By this time a hundred or more 
 other men had come in who looked more out- 
 side the inner circle. Sweeney spoke simply 
 and directly. It was a personal appeal he 
 made, based on promises. I listened with in- 
 terest and though it seemed to me that many 
 of his pledges were extravagant he showed 
 such a good spirit back of them that his speech 
 on a whole produced a favorable effect.
 
 i82 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 At any rate I came away from the meeting 
 with a stronger personal interest in pohtics 
 than I had ever felt in my life. Instead of 
 seeming like an abstruse or vague issue it 
 seemed to me pretty concrete and pretty vital. 
 It concerned me and my immediate neighbors. 
 Here was a man who was going to Congress 
 not as a figurehead of his party but to make 
 laws for Rafferty and for me. He was to be 
 my congressman if I chose to help make him 
 such. He knew my name, knew my occupa- 
 tion, knew that I had a wife and one child, 
 knew my address. And I want to say that he 
 didn't forget them either. 
 
 As I walked back through the brightly 
 lighted streets which were still as much alive as 
 at high noon, I felt that after all this was 
 my ward and my city. I wasn't a mere 
 dummy, I was a member of a vast corporation. 
 I had been to a rally and had shaken hands 
 with Sweeney. 
 
 Ruth's only comment was a disgusted grunt 
 as she smelled the rank tobacco in my clothes. 
 She kept them out on the roof all the next day.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 
 
 This first winter was filled with just about 
 as much interest as it was possible for three 
 people to crowd into six or seven months. And 
 even then there was so much left over which 
 we wanted to do that we fairly groaned as we 
 saw opportunity after opportunity slip by 
 which we simply didn't have the time to im- 
 prove. 
 
 To begin with the boy, he went at his studies 
 with a zest that placed him among the first 
 ten of his class. Dick wasn't a quick boy at 
 his books and so this stood for sheer hard 
 plugging. To me this made his success all the 
 more noteworthy. Furthermore it wasn't the 
 result of goading either from Ruth or myself. 
 I kept after him about the details of his school 
 life and about the boys he met, but I let him 
 go his own gait in his studies. I wanted to 
 see just how the new point of view would 
 work out in him. The result as I saw it was 
 
 183
 
 i84 ONE WAY OUT. 
 
 that every night after supper he went at his 
 problems not as a mere school boy but 
 man-fashion. He sailed in to learn. He had 
 to. There was no prestige in that school com- 
 ing from what the fathers did. No one knew 
 what the fathers did. It didn't matter. With 
 half a dozen nationalities in the race the school 
 was too cosmopolitan to admit such local 
 issues. A few boys might chum together feel- 
 ing they were better than the others, but the 
 school as a whole didn't recognize them. 
 [Each boy counted for what he did — what he 
 was. 
 
 Of the other nine boys in the first ten, four 
 were of Jewish origin, three were Irish, one 
 was Italian, and the other was American born 
 but of Irish descent. Half of them hoped to 
 go through college on scholarships and the 
 others had equally ambitious plans for busi- 
 ness. The Jews were easily the most brilliant 
 Students but they didn't attempt anything else. 
 The Italian showed some literary ability and 
 wrote a little for the school paper. The Amer- 
 ican born Irish boy was made manager of the 
 Freshman football team. The other four were 
 natural athletes — two of them played on the 
 school eleven and the others were just built
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 185' 
 
 for track athletics and basket ball. Dick tried 
 for the eleven but he wasn't heavy enough for 
 one thing and so didn't make anything but a 
 substitute's position with the freshmen. I 
 was just as well satisfied. I didn't mind the 
 preliminary training but I felt I would as soon 
 he added a couple more years to his age before 
 he really played football, even if it was in him 
 to play. My point had been won when he 
 went out and tried. 
 
 At the end of the first four months in the 
 school I thought I saw a general improvement 
 in him. He held himself better for one thing 
 — with his head higher and his shoulders well 
 back. This wasn't due to his physical train- 
 ing either. It meant a changed mental atti- 
 tude. Ruth says she didn't notice any differ- 
 ence and she thinks this is nothing but my 
 imagination. But she's wrong. I was look- 
 ing for something she couldn't see that the boy 
 lacked before. Dick to her was always all 
 right. Of course I knew myself that the boy 
 couldn't go far wrong whatever his training, 
 but I knew also that his former indifferent 
 attitude was going to make his path just so 
 much harder for him. Dick, when he read 
 over this manuscript, said he thought the
 
 i86 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 whole business was foolish and that even if I 
 wanted to tell the story of my own life, the 
 least I could do was to leave out him. But 
 his life was more largely my life than he real- 
 izes even now. And his case was in many 
 ways a better example of the true emigrant 
 spirit than my own. 
 
 He joined the indoor track squad this win- 
 ter, too, but here again he didn't distinguish 
 himself. He fought his way into the finals at 
 the interscholastic meet but that was all. 
 However this, too, was good training for him. 
 I saw that race myself and I watched his mouth 
 instead of his legs. I liked the way his jaws 
 came together on the last lap though it hurt 
 to see the look in his eyes when he fell so far 
 behind after trying so hard. But he crossed 
 the finish line. 
 
 In the meanwhile Ruth was just about the 
 busiest little woman in the city. And yet 
 strangely enough this instead of dragging her 
 down, built her up. She took on weight, her 
 cheeks grew rosier than I had seen them for 
 five years and she seemed altogether happier. 
 I watched her closely because I made up my 
 mind that ginger jar or no ginger jar the 
 moment I saw a trace of heaviness in her eyes,
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 187 
 
 she would have to quit some of her bargain 
 hunting. I didn't mean to barter her good 
 health for a few hundred dollars even if I had 
 to remain a day laborer the rest of my life. 
 
 That possibility didn't seem to me now half 
 so terrifying as did the old bogey of not get- 
 ting a raise. I suppose for one thing this 
 was because we neither of us felt so keenly 
 the responsibility of the boy. In the old days 
 we had both thought that he was doomed if 
 we didn't save enough to send him through col- 
 lege and give him, at the end of his course, 
 capital enough to start in business for himself. 
 In other words, Dick seemed then utterly de- 
 pendent upon us. It was as terrible a thought 
 to think of leaving him penniless at twenty- 
 one as leaving him an orphan at five months. 
 The burden of his whole career rested on our 
 shoulders. 
 
 But now as I saw him take his place among 
 fellows who were born dependent upon them- 
 selves, as I learned about youngsters at the 
 school who at ten earned their own living sell- 
 ing newspapers and even went through college 
 on their earnings, as I watched him grow 
 strong physically and tackle his work aggres- 
 sively, I realized that even if anything should
 
 i88 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 happen to either Ruth or myself the boy would 
 be able to stand on his own feet. He had the 
 whole world before him down here. If worst 
 came to worst he could easily support himself 
 daytimes, and at night learn either a trade or 
 a profession. This was not a dream on my 
 part; I saw men who were actually doing it. 
 I was doing it myself for that matter. Per- 
 sonally I felt as easy about Dick's future by 
 the middle of that first winter as though I had 
 established an annuity for him which would 
 assure him all the advantages I had ever hoped 
 he might receive. So did Ruth. 
 
 I remember some horrible hours I passed in 
 that little suburban house towards the end of 
 my life there. Ruth would sit huddled up in 
 a chair and try to turn my thoughts to other 
 things but I could only pace the floor when I 
 thought what would happen to her and the 
 boy if anything should happen to me; or what 
 would happen to the boy alone if anything 
 should happen to the both of us. The case of 
 Mrs. Bonnington hung over me like a night- 
 mare and the other possibility was even worse. 
 Why, when Cummings came down with pneu- 
 monia and it looked for a while as though he 
 might die, I guess I suffered, by applying his
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 189 
 
 case to mine, as much as ever he himself did 
 on his sick bed. I used to inquire for his tem- 
 perature every night as though it were my 
 own. So did every man in the neighborhood. 
 
 Sickness was a wicked misfortune to that 
 Httle crowd. When death did pick one of us, 
 the whole structure of that family came tum- 
 bling down like a house of cards. If by the 
 grace of God the man escaped, he was left 
 hopelessly in debt by doctor's bills if in the 
 meanwhile he hadn't lost his job. Sickness 
 meant disaster, swift and terrible whatever its 
 outcome. We ourselves escaped it, to be sure,: 
 but I've sweat blood over the mere thought 
 of it. 
 
 Now if our thoughts ever took so grim a 
 turn, we could speak quite calmly about it. 
 It was impossible for me ever to think of Ruth 
 as sick. My mind couldn't grasp that. But 
 occasionally when I have come home wet and 
 Ruth has said something about my getting 
 pneumonia if I didn't look out, I've asked my- 
 self what this would mean. In the first place 
 I now could secure admission to the best hos- 
 pitals in the country free of cost. I had only 
 to report my case to the city physician and 
 if I were sick enough to warrant it, he would
 
 I90 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 notify the hospital and they would send down 
 an ambulance for me. I would be carried to 
 a clean bed in a clean room and would receive 
 such medical attention as before I could have 
 had only as a millionaire. Physicians of na- 
 tional reputation would attend me, medicines 
 would be supplied me, and I'd have a night 
 and day nurse for whom outside I would have 
 had to pay some forty dollars a week. Not 
 only this but if I recovered I would be supplied 
 the most nourishing foods in the market and 
 after that sent out of town to one of the quiet 
 convalescent hospitals if my condition war- 
 ranted it. I don't suppose a thousand dollars 
 would cover what here would be given me for 
 nothing. And I wouldn't either be considered 
 or treated like a charity patient. This was all 
 my due as a citizen — as a toiler. Of course 
 this would be done also for Dick as well as for 
 Ruth. 
 
 I don't mean to say that such thoughts took 
 up much of my time. I'm not morbid and we 
 never did have any sickness — we lived too 
 sanely for that. But just as our new view- 
 point on Dick relieved us of a tension which 
 before had sapped our strength, so it was a 
 great relief to have such insurance as this in
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 191 
 
 the background of our minds. It took all the 
 curse off sickness that it's possible to take 
 off. In three or four such ways as these a 
 load of responsibility was removed from us 
 and we were left free to apply all our energy 
 to the task of upbuilding which we had in 
 hand. 
 
 This may account somewhat for the reserve 
 strength which Ruth as well as myself seemed 
 to tap. Then of course the situation as a whole 
 was such as to make any woman with imagina- 
 tion buoyant. Ruth had an active part in 
 making a big rosy dream come true. She was 
 now not merely a passive agent. She wasn't 
 economizing merely to make the salary cover 
 the current expenses. Her task was really 
 the vital one of the whole undertaking ; she was 
 accumulating capital. When you stop to 
 think of it she was the brains of the business ; 
 I was only the machine. I dug the money out 
 of the ground but that wouldn't have amounted 
 to much if it had all gone for nothing except 
 to keep the machine moving from day to day. 
 The dollar she saved was worth more than a 
 hundred dollars earned and spent again. It 
 was the only dollar which counted. They say 
 a penny saved is a penny earned. To my mind
 
 192 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 a penny saved was worth to us at this time 
 every cent of a dollar. 
 
 So Ruth was not only an active partner but 
 there was another side to the game that ap- 
 pealed to her. 
 
 "The thing I like about our life down here," 
 she said to me one night, **is the chance it gives 
 me to get something of myself into every single 
 detail of the home." 
 
 I didn't know what she meant because it 
 seemed to me that was just what she had 
 always done. But she shook her head when I 
 said so. 
 
 "No," she said. "Not the way I can now." 
 
 "Well, you didn't have a servant and must 
 have done whatever was done," I said. 
 
 "I didn't have time to pick out the food for 
 the table," she said. "I had to order it of the 
 grocery man. I didn't have time to make as 
 many of your clothes as I wanted. Why i 
 didn't even have time to plan." 
 
 "If anyone had told me that a woman could 
 do any more than you then were doing, I 
 should have laughed at them," I said. 
 
 "You and the boy weren't all my own then," 
 she said. "I had to waste a great deal of time 
 on things outside the house. Sometimes it
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 193 
 
 used to make me feel as though you were just 
 one of the neighbors, Billy." 
 
 I began to see what she meant. But she 
 certainly found now just as much time if not 
 more to spare on the women and babies all 
 around us. 
 
 "They aren't neighbors/* she said. "They 
 are friends." 
 
 I suppose she felt like that because what she 
 did for them wasn't just wasted energy like 
 an evening at cards. 
 
 But she went back again and again, as 
 though it were a song, to this notion that our 
 new home was all her own. 
 
 "You may think me a pig, Billy," she said. 
 "But I like it. I like to pick out all myself,, 
 every single potato you and the boy eat; I like 
 to pick out every leaf of lettuce, every apple. 
 It makes me feel as though I was doing some- 
 thing for you." 
 
 "Good land—" I said. 
 
 But she wouldn't let me finish. 
 
 "No, Billy," she said. "You don't under- 
 stand what all that means to me — how it makes 
 me a part of you and Dick as I never was be- 
 fore. And I like to think that in everything 
 you wear there's a stitch of mine right close
 
 194 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 to you. And that when you and the boy lie 
 down at night I'm touching you because I 
 made everything clean for you with my own 
 hands." 
 
 It makes my throat grow lumpy even now 
 when I remember the eager, half-ashamed way 
 she looked up into my eyes as she said this. 
 Lord, sometimes she made me feel like a little 
 child and other times she made me feel like a 
 giant. But whichever way she made me feel 
 at the moment, she always left me wishing 
 that I had in me every good thing a man can 
 have so that I might be half way worthy of 
 her. There are times when a fellow knows 
 that as a man he doesn't count for much as 
 compared with any woman. And with such 
 a woman as Ruth — well, God knows I tried to 
 do my best in those days and have tried to do 
 that ever since, but it makes me ache to think 
 how little I've been able to give her of all she 
 deserves. 
 
 In her housework Ruth had developed a sys- 
 tem that would have made a fortune for any 
 man if applied in the same degree to his busi- 
 ness. I learned a lot from her. Instead of 
 going at her tasks in the haphazard fashion of 
 most women or doing things just because her
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 195 
 
 grandmother and her mother did them a cer- 
 tain way, she used her head. I've already told 
 how she did her washing little by little every 
 day instead of waiting for Monday and then 
 tearing herself all to pieces, and that's a fair 
 example of her method. When she was cook- 
 ing breakfast and had a good fire, she'd have 
 half her dinner on at the same time. Anything 
 that was just as good warmed up, she'd do 
 then. She'd make her stews and soups while 
 waiting for the biscuits to bake and boil her 
 rice or make her cold puddings while we were 
 eating. When that stove was working in the 
 morning you couldn't find a square inch of it 
 that wasn't working. As a result, she planned 
 never to spend over half an hour on her din- 
 ner at night and by the time the breakfast 
 dishes were washed she was through with her 
 cooking until then. 
 
 She used her head even in little things ; she'd 
 make one dish do the work of three. She 
 never washed this dish until she was through 
 with it for good. And she'd find the time at 
 odd moments during her cooking to wash these 
 dishes as they came along. If she spilled any- 
 thing on the floor she stopped right then and 
 there and cleaned it up, with the result that
 
 196 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 when breakfast was served, the kitchen looked 
 as ship-shape as when she began. When she 
 was busy, she was the busiest woman you ever 
 saw. She worked with her head, both hands, 
 and her feet. As a result instead of fiddling 
 around all day, when she was through she was 
 through. 
 
 When she got up in the morning she knew 
 exactly what she had to do for the day, just 
 how she was going to do it and just when she 
 was going to do it. And you could bank that 
 the things at night would be done, and be done 
 just as she had planned. She thought ahead. 
 That's a great thing to master in any business. 
 
 In my own work, the plan I had outlined for 
 myself I developed day by day. At the end of 
 three months I found that even what little 
 Italian I had then learned was a help to me. 
 The mere fact that I was studying their lan- 
 guage placed me on a better footing with my 
 fellows. They seemed to receive it as a com- 
 pliment and to feel that I was taking a per- 
 sonal interest in them as a race. My desire 
 to practise my few phrases was always a letter 
 of introduction to a newcomer. 
 
 I talked with them about everything — 
 where they came from, what made them come^
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 197 
 
 what they did before they came, how long they 
 worked and what pay they got in Italy, how 
 they saved to get over here, how they secured 
 their jobs, what they hoped to do eventually, 
 where they lived, how large their families 
 were, how much it cost them to live and what 
 they ate. I inquired as to what they liked 
 and what they disliked about their work ; what 
 they considered fair and what unfair about the 
 labor and the pay; what they liked and didn't 
 like about the foreman. Often I couldn't get 
 any opinion at all out of them on these sub- 
 jects ; often it wasn't honest and often it wasn't 
 intelligent. But as with my other question- 
 ing when I sifted it all down and thought it 
 over, I was surprised at how much information 
 I did get. If I didn't learn facts which could 
 be put into words, I was left with a very defi- 
 nite impression and a very wide general 
 knowledge. 
 
 In the meanwhile my note book was always 
 busy. I kept jotting down names and ad- 
 dresses with enough running comment to help 
 me to recall the men individually. I wasn't 
 able to locate one out of ten of these men later 
 but the tenth man was worth all the trouble. 
 
 As the winter advanced and the air grew
 
 198 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 frosty and the snow and ice came, the work 
 in a good many ways was harder. And yet 
 everything considered I don't know but what 
 I'd rather work outdoors at zero than at eighty- 
 five. Except that my hands got numb and 
 everything was more difficult to handle I didn't 
 mind the cold. There was generally exercise 
 enough to keep the blood moving. 
 
 We had a variety of work before spring. 
 After the subway job I shifted to a big house 
 foundation and there met another group of 
 skilled workmen from whom I learned much. 
 The work was easier and the surroundings 
 pleasanter if you can speak of pleasant sur- 
 roundings about a hole in the ground. The 
 soil was easier to handle and we went to no 
 great depth. Here too I met a new gang of 
 laborers. I missed many familiar faces out 
 of the old crowd and found some interesting 
 new men. Rafferty had gone and I was sorry. 
 I saw more or less of him however during the 
 winter for he dropped around now and then 
 on Sunday evenings. I don't think he ever 
 forgot the incident of the sewer gas. 
 
 I enjoyed too every hour in my night school. 
 I found here a very large per cent, of foreign- 
 ers and they were naturally of the more ambi-
 
 OUR FIRST WINTER 199 
 
 tious type. I found I had a great deal to learn 
 even in the matter of spreading mortar and 
 using a trowel. It was really fascinating 
 work and in the instructor I made an invalu- 
 able friend. Through him I was able to 
 arrange my scattered fragments of informa- 
 tion into larger groups. Little by little I told 
 him something of my plan and he was very 
 much interested in it. He gave me many val- 
 uable suggestions and later proved of substan- 
 tial help in more ways than one.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 
 
 As I said, there were still many opportuni- 
 ties which I didn't have time to improve. 
 The three of us seemed to have breathed in 
 down here some spirit which left us almost 
 feverish in our desire to learn. Whether it 
 was the opportunity which bred the desire or 
 the desire as expressed by all these newcom- 
 ers, fresh from the shackles of their old lives, 
 which created the opportunity, I leave to the 
 students of such matters. All I know is that 
 we were offered the best in practical in- 
 formation, such as the trade schools and the 
 night high schools; the best in art, the best 
 in music, the best in the drama. I am speak- 
 ing always of the newcomer — the emigrant. 
 Sprinkled in with these was the cheaper element 
 of the native-born, whether of foreign or of 
 American descent, who spent their evenings on 
 the street or at the cheap theatres or in the bar- 
 rooms. This class despised the whole busi- 
 
 200 
 
 i
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 201 
 
 tiess. Incidentally these were the men who 
 haunted the bread line, the Salvation Army 
 barracks, and were the first to join in any pub- 
 lic demonstration against the rich. The 
 women, not always so much by their own fault, 
 were the type which keeps the charitable asso- 
 ciations busy. I'm not saying that among 
 these there were not often cases of sheer hard 
 luck. Now and then sickness played the devil 
 with a family and more often the cussedness 
 of some one member dragged down a half 
 dozen innocent ones with him, but I do say 
 that when misfortune did come to this particu- 
 lar class they didn't buck up to it as Helen 
 Bonnington did or use such means as were at 
 their disposal to pull out of it. They just 
 caved in. Even in their daily lives, when 
 things were going well with them, they lost in 
 the glitter and glare of the city that spark 
 which my middle-class friends lost by stagna- 
 tion. 
 
 Because there was no poetic romance left in 
 their own lives, they despised it in the lives of 
 others and laughed at it in art. Whatever 
 went back into the past, they looked upon 
 scornfully as "ancient." They lived each day 
 as it came with a pride in being up-to-date.
 
 202 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 As a result, they preferred musical comedy o£ 
 the horse play kind to real music; they pre- 
 ferred cheap melodrama to Shakespere. They 
 lived and breathed the spirit of the yellow jour- 
 nals. 
 
 I don't know what sort of an education it is 
 the Italians come over here with, but they were 
 a constant surprise to me in their appreciation 
 of the best in art. And it was genuine — it 
 was simple. I've heard a good many jokes 
 about the foolishness of giving them a diet of 
 Shakespere and Beethoven, of Maeterlinck and 
 Mascagni, but that sort of talk comes either 
 from the outsiders or from the Great White 
 Way crowd. When you've seen Italians not 
 only crowd in to the free productions down 
 here but have seen them put up good money to 
 attend the best theatres; when you've heard 
 them whistle grand opera at their work and 
 save hard earned dollars to spend on it down 
 town; when you've seen them crowd the art 
 museums on free days and spend a half dollar 
 to look at some private exhibition of a fellow 
 countryman's, you begin to think, if you're 
 honest, that the laugh is on you. They made 
 me feel ashamed not only because I was igno- 
 rant but because after I became more familiar
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 203 
 
 with the works of the masters I was slower 
 than they to appreciate them. In many cases I 
 couldn't. I didn't flatter myself either that 
 this was because of my superior frankness or 
 up-to-dateness. I knew well enough that it 
 was because of a lack in me and my ancestors. 
 Scarcely a week passed when there wasn't 
 something worth seeing or hearing presented 
 to these people. It came either through a set- 
 tlement house or through the generosity of 
 some interested private patron. However it 
 came, it was always through the medium of a 
 class which until now had been only a name 
 to me. This was the independently well-to-do 
 American class — the Americans who had 
 partly made and partly inherited their fortunes 
 and had not yet come to misuse them. It is a 
 class still active in American life, running how- 
 ever more to the professions than to business. 
 Many of their family names have been familiar 
 in history to succeeding generations since the 
 early settlement of New England. They were 
 intellectual leaders then and they are intellec- 
 tual leaders now. If I could with propriety 
 I'd like to give here a list of half a dozen of 
 these men and women who came, in time, to 
 revive for me my belief that after all there still
 
 204 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 is left in this country the backbone of a worthy 
 old stock. But they don't need any such triv- 
 ial tribute as I might give them. The thing 
 that struck me at once about them was that 
 they were still finding an outlet for their 
 pioneer instinct not only in their professions 
 and their business, but in the interest they 
 took in the new pioneer. Shoulder to shoul- 
 der with the modern Pilgrims they were push- 
 ing forward their investigations in medicine, 
 in science, in economics. They were adapting 
 old laws to new conditions; they were devel- 
 oping the new West ; they were the new think- 
 ers and the new politicians. 
 
 I don't suppose that if I had lived for fifty 
 years under the old conditions I would have 
 met one of them. There was no meeting 
 ground for us, for we hM nothing in common. 
 I couldn't possibly interest them and I'm sure I 
 was too busy with my own troubles to take 
 any interest in them even if I had known of 
 their existence. 
 
 Even down here I resented at first their pres- 
 ence as an intrusion. Whenever I met them 
 I was inclined to play the cad and there's no 
 bigger cad on the face of the earth than a 
 workingman who is beginning to feel his oats.
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 205 
 
 But as I watched them and saw how earnest 
 they were and how really valuable their efforts 
 were I was able to distinguish them from still 
 another crowd who flaunted their silly charities 
 in the newspapers. But these other quiet men 
 and women were of different calibre; they 
 were the ones who established pure milk sta- 
 tions, who encouraged the young men of real 
 talent like Giuseppe, and who headed all the 
 real work for good done down here. 
 
 They came into my life when I needed them ; 
 when perhaps I was swinging too far in my 
 belief that the emigrant was the only force 
 for progress in our nation. I know they 
 checked me in some wild thinking in which I 
 was beginning to indulge. 
 
 I find I have been wandering a little. But 
 what we thought, counted for as much towards 
 the goal as what we did and even if the think- 
 ing is only that of one man — and an ordinary 
 man at that — why, so for that matter was the 
 whole venture. I want to say again that all 
 I'm trying to do is to put down as well as I 
 can remember and as well as I am able, my 
 own acts and thoughts and nothing but my 
 own. Of course that means Ruth's and 
 Dick's too as far as I understood them, for
 
 2o6 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 they were a part of my own. I don't want 
 what I write to be taken as the report of an 
 investigation but just as the diary of one man's 
 experience. 
 
 If I had had the time I could have seen at least 
 two of Shakespere's plays — presented by ama- 
 teurs, to be sure, but amateurs with talent and 
 enthusiasm and guided by professionals. I 
 could have heard at least a half dozen good 
 readers read from the more modern classics. 
 I could have listened to as many concerts by 
 musicians of good standing. I could have 
 heard lectures on a dozen subjects of vital in- 
 terest. Then there were entertainments de- 
 signed confessedly to entertain. In addition 
 to these there were many more lectures in the 
 city itself open free to the public and which I 
 now for the first time learned about. There 
 was one series in particular which was ad- 
 dressed once a week by men of international 
 renown. It was a liberal education in itself. 
 Many of my neighbors attended. 
 
 But as for Dick he was too busy with his 
 studies and Ruth was too glad to sit at home 
 and watch him, to go out at night. 
 
 What spare time I myself had I began to 
 devote to a new interest. Rafiferty had first
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 207 
 
 roused me to my duty as a citizen in the mat- 
 ter of local politics and through the winter 
 called often enough to keep my interest whet- 
 ted. But even without him I couldn't have 
 escaped the question. Politics was a live issue 
 down here every day in the year. One cam- 
 paign was no sooner ended than another was 
 begun. Sweeney was no sooner elected than 
 he began to lay wires for his fellows in the 
 coming city election who in their turn would 
 sustain him in whatever further political ambi- 
 tions he might have. If the hold the boss had 
 on a ward or a city was a mystery to me at 
 first, it didn't long remain so. The secret of 
 his power lay in the fact that he never let go. 
 He was at work every day in the year and he 
 had an organization with which he could keep 
 in touch through his lieutenants whether he 
 was in Washington or at home. Sweeney's 
 personality was always right there in his ward 
 wherever his body might be. 
 
 The Sweeney Club rooms were always open. 
 Night after night you could find his trusted 
 men there. Here the man out of a job came 
 and from here was recommended to one con- 
 tractor or another or to the "city"; here the 
 man with the sick wife came to have her sent
 
 2o8 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 to some hospital which perhaps for some rea- 
 son would not ordinarily receive her; here the 
 men in court sent their friends for bail; here 
 came those with bigger plans afoot in the mat- 
 ter of special contracts. If Sweeney couldn't 
 get them what they wanted, he at least sent 
 them away with a feeling of deep obligation 
 to him. Naturally then when election time 
 came around these people obeyed Sweeney's 
 order. It wasn't reasonable to suppose that 
 a campaign speech or two could affect their 
 loyalty. 
 
 Of course the rival party followed much the 
 same methods but the man in power had a 
 tremendous advantage. The only danger he 
 needed to fear was a split in his own faction 
 as some young man loomed up with ambitions 
 that moved faster than Sweeney's own for 
 him. Such a man I began to suspect — though 
 it was looking a long way into the future — 
 was Rafiferty. That winter he took out his 
 naturalization papers and soon afterwards he 
 began an active campaign for the Common 
 Council. It was partly my interest in him and 
 partly a new sense of duty I felt towards the 
 whole game that made me resolve to have a 
 hand in this. I owed that much to the ward
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 209 
 
 in which I lived and which was doing so much 
 for me. 
 
 In talking with some of the active settlement 
 workers down here, I found tHem as strongly- 
 prejudiced against the party in power as I had 
 been and when I spoke to them of Rafferty 
 I found him damned in their eyes as soon as I 
 mentioned his party. 
 
 *'The whole system is corrupt from top to 
 bottom/' said the head of one settlement house 
 to me. 
 
 "Are you doing anything to remedy it?" I 
 asked. 
 
 "What can you do?" he said. "We are do- 
 ing the only thing possible — we're trying to 
 get hold of the youngsters and give them a 
 higher sense of civic virtue." 
 
 "That's good," I said, "but you don't get 
 hold of one in ten of the coming voters. And 
 you don't get hold of one in a hundred of the 
 coming politicians. Why don't you take hold 
 of a man like Dan who is bound to get power 
 some day and talk a little civic virtue into him.'* 
 
 "You said he was a Democrat and a machine 
 man," said he, as though that settled it. 
 
 "I don't see any harm in either fact," I said, 
 "if you get at the good in him. A good Dem-
 
 210 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 ocrat is a good citizen and a good machine is 
 a good power," I said. 
 
 The man smiled. 
 
 *'You don't know," he said. 
 
 "Do you know ?" I asked. "Have you been 
 to the ralHes and met the men and studied their 
 methods ?" 
 
 "All you have to do is to read the papers,'* 
 he answered. 
 
 "I don't think so," I said. "To beat an 
 enemy you ought to study him at first hand. 
 You ought to find out the good as well as the 
 bad in him. You ought to find out where he 
 gets his power." 
 
 "Graft and patronage," he answered. 
 
 "What about the other party?" I said. 
 
 "Just as bad." 
 
 "Then what are you going to do about it?" 
 I asked. 
 
 "Our only hope is education," he said. 
 
 "Then," I said, "why not educate the 
 young politicians? Get to know Rafferty — 
 he's young and simple and honest now. Help 
 him to advance honestly and keep him that 
 way." 
 
 He shook his Hea3 doubtfully but he agreed 
 to have a talk with Dan. In the meanwhile
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 211 
 
 I had a talk with Dan myself. I told him 
 what my scheme was. 
 
 **Dan," I said, "you must decide right at 
 the beginning of your career whether you're 
 going to be just a tool of Sweeney's or whether 
 you're going to stand on your own feet." 
 
 ''Phot's the mather with Sweeney, now?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "In some ways he's all right," I said. "And 
 in other ways he isn't. But anyhow he's your 
 boss and you have to do what he tells you 
 to do just as though he was your landlord 
 back in Ireland and you nothing but a ten- 
 ant." 
 
 "Eh?" he said looking up quick. 
 
 I thought I'd strike a sore spot there and I 
 made the most of it. I talked along like this 
 for a half hour and I saw his lips come to- 
 gether. 
 
 "He'd knife me," he said finally. "He's 
 sore now 'cause I'm afther wantin' to run for 
 the council this year." 
 
 I had heard the rumor. 
 
 "Then," I said, "why don't you pull free 
 and make a little machine of your own. Some 
 of the boys will stand by you, won't they ?" 
 
 "Will they?" he grinned.
 
 212 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 With that I took him around to the settle- 
 ment house. Dan Hstened good naturedly to 
 a lot of talk he didn't understand but he lis- 
 tened with more interest to a lot of talk about 
 the needs of the district which it was now get- 
 ting cheated out of, which he did understand. 
 ,And incidentally the man who at first did all 
 the talking in the end listened to Dan. After 
 the latter had gone, he turned to me and said: 
 
 ''I like that fellow Rafferty." 
 
 That seemed to me the really important thing 
 and right there and then we sat down and 
 worked out the basis of the "Young American 
 Political Club." Our object was to reach the 
 young voter first of all and through him to 
 reach the older ones. To this end we had a 
 ''Committee on Boys" and a "Committee on 
 Naturalization." I insisted from the begin- 
 ning that we must have an organization as 
 perfect as that of any political machine. Un- 
 til we felt our strength a little however, I 
 suggested it was best to limit our efforts to 
 the districts alone. We took a map of the 
 city and we cut up the districts into blocks 
 with a young man at the head of each block. 
 He was to make a list of all the young voters 
 and keep as closely in touch as possible with 
 
 i
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 213 
 
 the political gossip of both parties. Over him 
 there was to be a street captain and over him 
 a district captain and finally a president. 
 
 All this was the result of slow and careful 
 study. All the workers down here fell in with 
 the plan eagerly and one of them agreed to 
 pay the expenses of a hall any time we wished 
 to use one for campaign purposes. At first 
 our efforts passed unnoticed by either political 
 party. It was thought to be just another fan- 
 ciful civic dream. We were glad of it. It 
 gave us time to perfect our organization with- 
 out interference. 
 
 This business took up all the time I could 
 spare during the winter. But instead of find- 
 ing it a drag I found it an inspiration. They 
 insisted upon making me president of the Club 
 and though I would rather have had a younger 
 man at its head I accepted the honor with a 
 feeling of some pride. It was the first public 
 office I had ever held and it gave me a new 
 sense of responsibility and a better sense of 
 citizenship. 
 
 In the meanwhile Dan made no open break 
 with Sweeney but it soon became clear that 
 he was not in such good favor as before. Al- 
 though we had not yet openly endorsed his
 
 214 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 candidacy we were doing a good deal of talk- 
 ing for him. I received several visits from 
 Sweeney's lieutenants who tried to find out just 
 what we were about. My answer invariably 
 was *'No partisanship but clean politics." 
 
 When it came time to register I was forced 
 to register with one of the two parties in order 
 to take any part in the primaries. I registered 
 as a Democrat for the first time in my life. I 
 also attended a primary for the first time in 
 my life. I also felt a new power back of me 
 for the first time in my life. Little by little 
 Dan had come to be an issue. Sweeney did 
 not openly declare himself but it was soon evi- 
 dent that he had come to the primaries pre- 
 pared to knife Rafferty if it were possible. 
 Back of Dan stood his large personal follow- 
 ing; back of me stood the balance of power. 
 Sweeney saw it, gave the nod, and Dan was 
 nominated. 
 
 Six weeks later he was elected, too. You'd 
 have thought he had been elected mayor by 
 the noise the small boys made. Rafiferty came 
 to me with his big paw outstretched, 
 
 "Carleton," he said, "the only thing I've got 
 agin ye is thot ye ain't an Irishmon. Faith, 
 ye'd make a domd foine Irishmon."
 
 I BECOME A CITIZEN 215 
 
 "It's up to you now," I said, "to make a 
 damned fine American." 
 
 It wasn't more than two months later that 
 Dan came to me to ask my opinion on a request 
 of Sweeney's. It looked a bit off color and I 
 said so. 
 
 "You can't do it, Dan," I said. 
 
 "It manes throuble," he said. 
 
 "Let it come. We're back of you with both 
 feet." 
 
 Dan followed my advice and the trouble 
 came. He was fired from his job as foreman 
 under Sweeney. 
 
 But you can't keep down as good a foreman 
 as Dan was and he had another job within a 
 week. 
 
 A few months later I had another job my- 
 self. I was made foreman with my own firm 
 at a wage of two dollars and a half a day. 
 When I went back and announced this to 
 Ruth, she cried a little. Truly our cup seemed 
 full and running over.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 
 
 My first thought when I received my ad- 
 vance in pay was that I could now reheve Ruth 
 of some of her burdens. There was no longer 
 any need of her spending so much time in trot- 
 ting around the markets and the department 
 stores. Nor was there any need of her doing 
 so much plotting and planning in her endeavor 
 to save a penny. Furthermore I was deter- 
 mined that she should now enjoy some of the 
 little luxuries of life in the way of better things 
 to wear and better things to eat. But that idea 
 was taken out of me in short order. 
 
 "No," she said, as soon as she recovered 
 from the good news. "We mustn't spend one 
 cent more than we've been spending." 
 
 "But look here," I said; "what's the good 
 of a raise if we don't use it?" 
 
 "What's the good of a raise if we spend it?" 
 she asked me. "We'll use it, Billy, but we'll 
 use it wisely. How many times have you told 
 
 216
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 217 
 
 me that if you had your life to Hve over again 
 you wouldn't spend one cent over the first sal- 
 ary you received, if it was only three dollars 
 a week, until you had a bank account?" 
 
 *1 know that," I said. "But when a man 
 has a wife and boy like you and Dick — " 
 
 *'He doesn't want to turn them into burdens 
 that will hold him down all his life," she broke 
 in. "It isn't fair to the wife and boy," she 
 said. 
 
 I couldn't quite follow her reasoning but I 
 didn't have to. When I came home the next 
 Saturday night with fifteen dollars in my 
 pocket instead of nine she calmly took out 
 three for the rent, five for household expenses 
 and put seven in the ginger jar. I suggested 
 that at least we have one celebration and with 
 the boy go to the little French restaurant we 
 used to visit, but she held up her hands in 
 horror. 
 
 "Do you think I'd spend two dollars and a 
 half for — why, Billy, you wouldn't!" 
 
 "I'd like to spend ten," I said. "I'd like to 
 go there to dinner and buy you a half dozen 
 roses and get the three best seats in the best 
 theater in town," I said. 
 
 She came to my side and patted my arm.
 
 2i8 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 'Thank you, Billy," she said. "But honest 
 — it's just as much fun to have you want to do 
 those things as really do them." 
 
 I believe she meant it. I wouldn't believe it 
 of anyone else but for a week she talked about 
 that dinner and those flowers and the theater 
 until she had me wondering if we hadn't actu- 
 ally gone. Dick thought we were crazy. 
 
 And so, just as usual, after this she'd take 
 her basket and start out two or three mornings 
 a week and walk with me as far as the market. 
 She'd spend an hour here and then if she 
 needed anything more she'd go down town to 
 the big stores and wander around here for an- 
 other hour. But Saturday nights was her 
 great bargain opportunity. If I couldn't go 
 with her she'd take Dick and the two would 
 plan to get there at about nine o'clock. From 
 this time on she often picked up for a song odd 
 ends of meat and good vegetables which the 
 market men didn't want to carry over to Mon- 
 day. In fact they had to sell out these things 
 as their stock at the beginning of the week had 
 to be fresh. I suppose marketing at this time 
 of day would be a good deal of a hardship for 
 those living in the suburbs but it was a reg- 
 ular lark for her. Most everyone is good
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 219 
 
 natured on Saturday night if on no other 
 night. The week's work is done and people 
 have enough money from their pay enve- 
 lopes to feel rich for a few hours anyway. 
 Then there were the lights and the crowd and 
 the shouting so that it was like twenty country 
 fairs rolled into one. 
 
 After the exitement of coming home Satur- 
 days with so much money wore off, I began 
 to forget that I was earning fifteen instead 
 of nine. If Ruth had spent it on the 
 table I'm sure I'd have forgotten it even more 
 quickly. I was getting all I wanted to eat, 
 was warm and had a good clean bed to sleep 
 in and what more can a man have even if 
 he's earning a hundred a week? I think 
 people are very apt to forget that after all 
 a millionaire can spend only about so much 
 on himself. And after the newness of fresh 
 toys has worn off — like steam yachts and 
 private cars — he is forced to be satisfied with 
 just what I had, no matter how much more 
 money he makes. He has only his five senses 
 and once these are satisfied he's no better off 
 than a man who satisfies these same senses on 
 eight dollars a week. Generally he's worse off 
 because in a year or so he has probably dulled
 
 220 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 them all. Rockefeller himself probably never 
 in his life got half the fun out of anything 
 that I did in just crawling into my clean bed 
 at night with every tired muscle purring con- 
 tentedly and my mind at rest about the next 
 day. I doubt if he knows the joy of wak- 
 ing up in the morning rested and hungry. 
 The only advantage he had over me that I can 
 see is the power he had to help others. In 
 a way I don't believe he found any greater 
 opportunity even for that than Ruth found 
 right here. 
 
 For those interested in the details I'm go- 
 ing to give another quotation from Ruth's 
 note book. But to my mind these details 
 aren't the important part of our venture. 
 The thing that counted was the spirit back 
 of them. It isn't the fact that we lived on 
 from six to eight dollars a week or the sta- 
 tistics of how we lived on that which makes 
 my life worth telling about if it is worth 
 telling about. In the first place prices vary 
 in different localities and shift from year to 
 year. In fact since we began they have al- 
 most doubled. In the second place people 
 have lived and are living to-day on less than we 
 did. I give our figures simply to satisfy the
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 221 
 
 curious and to show how Ruth planned. But 
 no one could do as she did or do as we did 
 merely by aping her little economies, or ac- 
 cepting the result of them. Either they would 
 find the task impossible or look upon it as a 
 privation and endure it as martyrs. In this 
 mood they wouldn't last a week. I know that 
 people who read this without at least a germ of 
 the pioneer in them will either smile or shrug 
 their shoulders. I've met plenty of this sort. 
 I met them by the dozen down here. As I 
 said, you can find them in every bread line, 
 in every Salvation Army barracks or the As- 
 sociated Charities will furnish you a list of 
 as many as you want. You'll find them in 
 the suburbs or you'll find them marching 
 in line the next time there is a procession of 
 the unemployed. 
 
 But give me true pioneers such as our own 
 forefathers were, such as the young men out 
 West are to-day, such as every steamer 
 lands here by the hundreds from foreign 
 countries every week and I say you can't down 
 that kind, you can't kill them, I don't say 
 that it's right to raise the price of necessities. 
 I don't think it is, though I don't know much 
 about it. But I do say that if you double
 
 222 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 the cost of food stuffs and then double it again, 
 though you may cruelly starve out the weak- 
 lings, you'll find the pioneers still on their feet,, 
 still fighting. 
 
 It seems strange to me that men will go 
 to Alaska and contentedly freeze and dig all 
 day in a mine — not of their own, but for 
 wages — and not feel so greatly abused or un- 
 happy; that they will swing an axe all day in 
 a forest and live on baked beans and bread 
 without feeling like martyrs ; that they will go 
 to sea and grub on hard tack and salt pork 
 and fish without complaint and then will 
 turn Anarchists on the same fare in the 
 East. It seems strange too that these men 
 keep strong and healthy, and that our an- 
 cestors kept strong and healthy on even a 
 still simpler diet. Why, my father fought 
 battles — and the mental strain must have been 
 terrific — and did more actual labor every day 
 in carrying a rifle and marching than I do 
 in a week, and slept out doors under a 
 blanket — all on a diet that the average tramp 
 of to-day would spurn. He did this for four 
 years and if the sanitary conditions had been 
 decent would have returned well and strong as 
 many a man did who didn't run afoul typhoid
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 223 
 
 fever and malaria. Men who do such things 
 have something in them that the men back 
 East have lost. I call it the romantic spirit 
 or the pioneer spirit and I say that a man who 
 has it won't care whether he's living in Maine 
 or California and that whatever the condi- 
 tions are he will overcome them. I know that 
 we three would have lived on almost rice alone 
 as the Japanese do before we'd have cried quit. 
 That was because we were tackling this 
 problem not as Easterners but as Westerners; 
 not as poor whites but as emigrants. Men 
 on a ranch stand for worse things than we 
 had and have less of a future to dream about. 
 So I repeat that to my mind the house details 
 don't count here for any more than they did 
 in the lives of the original New England set- 
 tlers, or the forty-niners, or those on home- 
 steads or in Alaska to-day. However, I'll 
 put them in and I'll take the month of May 
 as an example — the first month after I was 
 made foreman. It's fairer to give the items 
 for a month. They are as follows: 
 
 Oatmeal, .17 
 
 Corn meal, .10 
 
 About one tenth barrel flour, .65
 
 224 ONE WAY OUT. 
 
 Potatoes, .35 
 Rice, .08 
 Sugar, .40 
 White beans, .16 
 Pork, .20 
 Molasses, .10 
 Onions, .23 
 Lard, .50 
 Apples, .36 
 Soda, etc., .14 
 Soap, .20 
 Cornstarch, .10 
 Cocoa shells, .05 
 Eggs, .75 
 Butter, 1. 12 
 Milk, 4.48 
 Meats, 1.60 
 Fish, .60 
 Oil, .20 
 
 Yeast cakes, .06 
 Macaroni, .09 
 Crackers, .06 
 Total $12.75 
 
 This makes an average of three dollars 
 and nineteen cents a week. With a fluctua- 
 tion of perhaps twenty-five cents either way
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 225 
 
 Ruth maintained this pretty much throughout 
 the year now. It fell off a little in the sum- 
 mer and increased a little in the winter. It's 
 impossible to give any closer estimate than 
 this. Even this month many things were 
 used which were left over from the week pre- 
 ceding and, on the other hand, some things 
 on this list like molasses and sugar and corn- 
 starch went towards reducing the total of the 
 month following. 
 
 This left say a dollar and seventy-five cents 
 a week for such small incidentals as are not 
 accounted for here but chiefly for sewing 
 material, bargains in cloth remnants and such 
 things as were needed towards the repair of 
 our clothes as well as for such new clothes 
 as we had to buy from time to time. I think 
 we spent more on shoes than we did clothes 
 but Ruth by patronizing the sample shoe shops 
 always came home with a three or four dollar 
 pair for which she never paid over two dollars 
 and sometimes as low as a dollar and a half. 
 The boy and I bought our shoes at the same 
 reduction at bankrupt sales. We gave our 
 neighbors this tip and saw them save a good 
 many dollars in this way. 
 
 On the whole these people were not good
 
 226 ONE WAY, OUT 
 
 buyers; they never looked ahead but bought 
 only when they were in urgent need and then 
 bought at the cheapest price regardless of 
 quality. They would pay two and two and 
 a half for shoes that wouldn't last them any 
 time at all. Whatever Ruth bought she con- 
 sidered the quality first and the price after- 
 wards. Then, too, she often ran across some- 
 thing she didn't need at the time but which 
 was a good bargain; she would buy this 
 and put it away. She was able to buy 
 many things which were out of season for half 
 what the same things would cost six months 
 later. It was very difficult to make our 
 neighbors see the advantage of this practice 
 and their blindness cost them many a good 
 dollar. 
 
 We also had the advantage of our neigh- 
 bors in knowing how to take good care of 
 our clothes. The average man was careless 
 and slovenly. In a week a new suit would be 
 spotted with grease, wrinkled, and all out of 
 shape. He never thought of pressing it, 
 cleaning it or of putting it away carefully 
 when through wearing it. The women were 
 no better about their own clothes. This was 
 also true of their shoes. They might shine
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 227 
 
 them once a month but generally they let them 
 go until they dried up and cracked. In this 
 way their new clothes soon became workday 
 clothes, their new shoes, old shoes, and as such 
 they lasted a very few months. 
 
 Dick and I might have done a little better 
 than our neighbors even without Ruth to 
 watch us, but we certainly would not have had 
 the training we did have. Shoes had to be 
 cleaned and either oiled or shined before going 
 to bed. If it rained we wore our old pairs 
 whether it was Sunday or not or else we 
 Stayed at home. Every time Dick or I put on 
 our good clothes we were as carefully inspected 
 as troops on parade. If a grease spot was 
 found, it was removed then and there. If a 
 button was missing or a bit of fringe showed 
 or a hole the size of a pin head was found we 
 had to wait until the defect was remedied. 
 Every Sunday morning the boy pressed both 
 his suit and mine and every night we had to 
 hang our coats over a chair and fold our 
 trousers. If we were careless about it, the 
 little woman without a word simply got up 
 and did them over again herself. 
 
 These may seem like small matters but the 
 result was that we all of us kept looking ship-
 
 228 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 shape and our clothes lasted. When we 
 finally did finish with them they weren't 
 good for anything but old rags and even then 
 Ruth used them about her housework. I 
 figured roughly that Ruth kept us well dressed 
 on about half what it cost most of our neigh- 
 bors and yet we appeared to be twice as 
 well dressed as any of them. Of course we 
 had a good many things to start with when 
 we came down here but our clothing bill 
 didn't go up much even during the last year 
 when our original stock was very nearly ex- 
 hausted. She accomplished this result about 
 one-half by long-headed buying, and one-half 
 by her carefulness and her skill with the 
 needle. 
 
 To go back to the matter of food, I'll copy 
 off a week's bill of fare during this month. 
 Ruth has written it out for me. You'll notice 
 that it doesn't vary very much from the 
 earlier ones. 
 
 Sunday. 
 
 Breakfast: fried hasty pudding with mo- 
 lasses; doughnuts, cocoa made from cocoa 
 shells. 
 
 Dinner: lamb stew with dumplings, boiled 
 potatoes, boiled onions, corn starch pudding.
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 229 
 
 Monday. 
 
 Breakfast : oatmeal, baked potatoes, creamed 
 codfish, biscuits. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: brown bread sand- 
 wiches, cold beans, doughnuts, milk; for Dick 
 and me: boiled rice, cold biscuits, baked ap- 
 ples, milk. 
 
 Dinner: warmed over lamb stew, baked ap- 
 ples, cocoa, cold biscuits. 
 
 Tuesday. 
 
 Breakfast: oatmeal, milk toast, cocoa. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, hard- 
 boiled eggs, doughnuts; for Dick and me: 
 warmed over beans, biscuits. 
 
 Dinner: hamburg steak, baked potatoes, 
 graham muffins, apple sauce, milk. 
 
 Wednesday. 
 
 Breakfast: oatmeal, griddle-cakes with mo- 
 lasses, cocoa shells. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: sandwiches made of 
 biscuits and left over steak, doughnuts; for 
 Dick and me: crackers and milk, hot ginger- 
 bread. 
 
 Dinner : vegetable hash, hot biscuits, ginger- 
 bread, apple sauce, milk.
 
 230 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 Thursday. 
 
 Breakfast: oatmeal, fried hasty pudding, 
 doughnuts, cocoa shells. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: hard-boiled eggs, cold 
 biscuits, gingerbread, baked apple; for Dick 
 and me: baked potatoes, apple sauce, cold bis- 
 cuits, milk. 
 
 Dinner: lyonnaise potatoes, hot corn bread, 
 Poor man's pudding, milk. 
 
 Friday. 
 
 Breakfast: smoked herring, baked potatoes, 
 oatmeal, graham muffins. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: herring, cold muffins, 
 doughnuts; for Dick and me: German toast, 
 apple sauce. 
 
 Dinner: fish hash, biscuits, Indian pudding, 
 milk, 
 
 Saturday. 
 
 Breakfast: oatmeal, German toast, cocoa 
 shells. 
 
 Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, hard- 
 boiled eggs, bowl of rice; for Dick and me: 
 rice and milk, doughnuts, apple sauce. 
 
 Dinner : baked beans, new raised bread.
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 
 
 231 
 
 To a man accustomed to a beafsteak break- 
 fast, fried hasty pudding may seem a poor 
 substitute and griddle cakes may seem well 
 enough to taper off with but scarcely stuff for 
 a full meal. All I say is, have those things 
 well made, have enough of them and then try 
 it. If a man has a sound digestion and a 
 good body I'll guarantee that such food will 
 not only satisfy him but furnish him fuel for 
 the hardest kind of physical exercise. I know 
 because I've tried it. And though to some 
 my lunches may sound slight, they averaged 
 more in substance and variety than the 
 lunches of my foreign fellow-workmen. A 
 hunk of bread and a bit of cheese was often 
 all they brought with them. 
 
 Dick thrived on it too. The elimination of 
 pastry from his simple luncheons brought 
 back the color to his cheeks and left him hard 
 as nails. 
 
 I've read since then many articles on do- 
 mestic economy and how on a few dollars a 
 week a man can make many fancy dishes which 
 will fool him into the belief that he is getting 
 the same things which before cost him a great 
 many more dollars. Their object appears to
 
 232 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 be to give such a variety that the man will not 
 notice a change. Now this seems to me all 
 wrong. What's the use of clinging to the 
 notion that a man lives to eat? Why not get 
 down to bed rock at once and face the fact that 
 a man doesn't need the bill of fare of a modern 
 hotel or any substitute for it? A few simple 
 foods and plenty of them is enough. When 
 a man begins to crave a variety he hasn't 
 placed his emphasis right. He hasn't worked 
 up to the right kind of hunger. Com- 
 pare the old-time country grocery store with 
 the modern provision house and it may help 
 you to understand why our lean sinewy fore- 
 fathers have given place to the sallow, fat 
 parodies of to-day. A comparison might also 
 help to explain something of the high cost of 
 living. My grandfather kept such a store and 
 I've seen some of his old account books. 
 About all he had to sell in the way of food 
 was flour, rice, potatoes, sugar and molasses, 
 butter, cheese and eggs. These articles 
 weren't put up in packages and they weren't 
 advertised. They were sold in bulk and all 
 you paid for was the raw material. The cat- 
 alogue of a modern provision house makes a 
 book. The whole object of the change it seems
 
 FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 233 
 
 to me is to fill the demand for variety. You 
 have to pay for that. But when you trim 
 your ship to run before a gale you must throw 
 overboard just such freight. Once you do, 
 you'll find it will have to blow harder than it 
 does even to-day to sink you. I am constantly 
 surprised at how few of the things we think 
 we need we actually do need. 
 
 The pioneer of to-day doesn't need any 
 more than the pioneer of a hundred years ago. 
 To me this talk that a return to the customs 
 of our ancestors involves a lowering of the 
 standard of living is all nonsense; it means 
 nothing but a simplifying of the standard of 
 living. If that's a return to barbarism then 
 I'm glad to be a barbarian and I'll say there 
 never were three happier barbarians than 
 Ruth, the boy and myself.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE GANG 
 
 If I*d been making five dollars a <day at 
 this time, I wouldn't have moved from the 
 tenement. In the first place as far as phy- 
 sical comfort went I was never better off. 
 We had all the room we needed. During the 
 winter we had used the living room as a 
 kitchen and dining room just as our fore- 
 fathers did. We economized fuel in this way 
 and Ruth kept the rooms spotless. We had 
 no fires in our bedrooms and did not want 
 any. We all of us slept with our win- 
 dows wide open. If we had had ten more 
 rooms we wouldn't have known what to do 
 with them. When we had a visitor we re- 
 ceived him in the kitchen. Some of our 
 neighbors took boarders and also slept in the 
 kitchen. I don't know as I should want to do 
 that but at the same time many a family lives 
 in a one room hut in the forest after this 
 fashion. By outsiders it's looked upon as 
 
 234
 
 THE GANG 235 
 
 rather romantic. It isn't considered a great 
 hardship by the settlers themselves. 
 
 Then we had the advantage of our roof and 
 with summer coming on we looked forward to 
 the garden and the joy of the warm starry 
 nights. We had some wonderful winter 
 pictures, too, from that same roof. It was 
 worth going up there to see the house tops 
 after a heavy snow storm. 
 
 If I had wanted to move I could have done 
 only one of two things; either gone back into 
 the suburbs or taken a more expensive flat 
 up town. I certainly had had enough of the 
 former and as for the latter I could see no 
 comparison. If anything this flat business 
 was worse than the suburbs. I would be 
 surrounded by an ordinary group of people 
 who had all the airs of the latter with none 
 of their good points. I'd be hedged in by 
 conventions with which I was now even in 
 less sympathy than before. I wouldn't have 
 exchanged my present freedom of movement 
 and independence of action for even the best 
 suite in the most expensive apartment house 
 in the city. Not for a hundred dollars a week. 
 Advantages? What were they? Would a 
 higher grade of wall paper, a more expen-
 
 236 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 sive set of furniture and steam heat compen- 
 sate me for the loss of the soHd comfort I 
 found here by the side of my httle iron stove? 
 Was an electric elevator a fair swap for my 
 roof? Were the gilt, the tinsel and the soft 
 carpets w^orth the privilege I enjoyed here of 
 dressing as I pleased, eating what I pleased, 
 doing what I pleased? Was their apartment- 
 house friendship, however polished, worth the 
 simple genuine fellowship I enjoyed among my 
 present neighbors? What could such a life 
 offer me for my soul's or my body's good that 
 I didn't have here? I couldn't see how in a 
 single respect I could better my present condi- 
 tion except with the complete independence 
 that might come with a fortune and a country 
 estate. Any middle ground, assuming that I 
 could afford it, meant nothing but the under- 
 taking again of all the old burdens I had just 
 shaken off. 
 
 Ruth, the boy and myself now knew genu- 
 inely more people than we had ever before 
 known in our lives. And most of them were 
 worth knowing and the others worth some 
 endeavor to make worth knowing. We were 
 all pulling together down here — some harder 
 than others, to be sure, but all with a distinct
 
 THE GANG 237 
 
 ambition that was dependent for success upon 
 nothing but our own efforts. 
 
 I was in touch with more opportunities than 
 I had ever dreamed existed. All three of us 
 were enjoying more advantages than we had 
 ever dreamed would be ours. My Italian was 
 improving from day to day. I could handle 
 mortar easily and naturally and point a 
 joint as well as my instructor. I could build 
 a true square pier of any size from one brick 
 to twenty. I could make a square or pigeon- 
 hole corner or lay out a brick footing. And 
 I was proud of my accomplishment. 
 
 But more interesting to me than anything 
 else was the opportunity I now had as a fore- 
 man to test the value of the knowledge of my 
 former fellow workmen which I had been 
 slowly acquiring. I was anxious to see if my 
 ideas were pure theory or whether they were 
 practical. They had proven practical at any 
 rate in securing my own advance. This had 
 come about through no such pull as Raf- 
 ferty's. It was the result of nothing but m}' 
 intelligent and conscientious work in the ditch 
 and among the men. And this in turn was 
 made possible by the application of the 
 knowledge I picked up and used as I had the
 
 238 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 chance. It was only because I had shown my 
 employers that I was more valuable as a fore- 
 man than a common laborer that I was not 
 still digging. I had been able to do this be- 
 cause having learned from twenty different 
 men how to handle a crowbar for instance^ 
 I had from time to time been able to direct 
 the men with whom I was working as at 
 the start I myself had been directed by Anton'. 
 Anton' was still digging because that was 
 all he knew. I had learned other things. I 
 had learned how to handle Anton'. 
 
 I had no idea that my efforts were being 
 watched. I don't know now how I was 
 picked out. Except of course that it must 
 have been because of the work I did. 
 
 At any rate I found myself at the head of 
 twenty men — all Italians, all strangers and 
 among them three or four just off the steamer. 
 My first job was on a foundation for an 
 apartment house. Of course my part in it 
 was the very humble one of seeing that the 
 men kept at work digging. The work 
 had all been staked out and the architect's 
 agent was there to give all incidental instruc- 
 tions. He was a young graduate of a techni- 
 cal school and I took the opportunity this of-
 
 THE GANG 239 
 
 fered — for he was a good-natured boy — to use 
 what Httle I had learned in my night school 
 and study his blue prints. At odd times he 
 explained them to me and aside from what I 
 learned myself from them it helped me to di- 
 rect the men more intelligently. 
 
 But it was on the men themselves that I 
 centred my efforts. As soon as possible I 
 learned them by name. At the noon hour I 
 took my lunch with them and talked with 
 them in their own language. I made a note 
 of where they lived and found as I expected 
 that many were from my ward. Incidentally 
 I dropped a word here and there about the 
 **Young American Political Club," and asked 
 them to come around to some of the meetings. 
 I found out where they came from and 
 wherever I could, I associated them with some 
 of their fellows with whom I had worked. I 
 found out about their families. In brief I 
 made myself know every man of them as inti- 
 mately as was possible. 
 
 I don't suppose for a minute that I could 
 have done this successfully if I hadn't really 
 been genuinely interested in them. If I had 
 gone at it like a professional hand shaker they 
 would have detected the hypocrisy in no time.
 
 240 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 Neither did I attempt a chummy attitude nor 
 a fatherly attitude. I made it clearly under- 
 stood that I was an American first of all and 
 that I was their boss. It was perfectly easy 
 to do this and at the same time treat them like 
 men and like units. I tried to make them feel 
 that instead of being merely a bunch of 
 Dagoes they were Italian workingmen. 
 lYour foreign laborer is quick to appreciate 
 such a distinction and quick to respond to it. 
 With the American-born you have to draw a 
 sharper line and hold a steadier rein. I fig- 
 ured out that when you find a member of the 
 second or third generation still digging, you've 
 found a man with something wrong about 
 him. 
 
 The next thing I did was to learn what 
 each man could do best. Of course I could 
 make only broad classifications. Still there 
 were men better at lifting than others; men 
 better with the crowbar; men better at shovel- 
 ing; men naturally industrious who would 
 leaven a group of three or four lazy ones. 
 As well as I could I sorted them out in this 
 way. 
 
 In addition to taking this personal interest 
 in them individually, I based my relations
 
 THE GANG 241 
 
 with them collectively on a principle of strict, 
 homely justice. I found there was no quality 
 of such universal appeal as this one of justice. 
 Whether deahng with Italians, Russians, 
 Portuguese, Poles, Irish or Irish-Americans 
 you could always get below their national 
 peculiarities if you reached this common de- 
 nominator. However browbeaten, however 
 slavish, they had been in their former lives 
 this spark seemed always alive. However 
 cocky or anarchistic they might feel in their 
 new freedom you could pull them up with a 
 sharp turn by an appeal to their sense of jus- 
 tice. And by justice I mean nothing but 
 what ex-president Roosevelt has now made 
 familiar by the phrase "a square deal." 
 Justice in the abstract might not appeal to 
 them but they knew when they were being 
 treated fairly and when they were not. Also 
 they knew when they were treating you fairly 
 and when they were not. I never allowed a 
 man to feel bullied or abused; I never gave a 
 sharp order without an explanation. I never 
 discharged a man without making him feel 
 guilty in his heart no matter how much he 
 protested with his lips. And I never dis- 
 charged him without making the other men
 
 242 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 clearly see his guilt. When a man went, he 
 left no sympathizers behind him. 
 
 On the other hand I made them act justly 
 towards their employer and towards me. I 
 taught them that justice must be on both sides. 
 I tried to make them understand that their part 
 was not to see how little work they could do 
 for their money and that mine was not to see 
 how much they could do, but that it was up to 
 both of us to turn out a full fair day's work. 
 They were not a chain gang but workmen sell- 
 ing their labor. Just as they expected the 
 store-keepers to sell them fair measure and 
 full weight, so I expected them to sell a full 
 day and honest effort. 
 
 It wasn't always possible to secure a result 
 but when it wasn't I got rid of that man on the 
 first occasion. It was very much easier to 
 handle in this way the freedom-loving foreign- 
 ers than I looked for; with the American-born 
 it was harder than I expected. 
 
 On the whole however I was mighty well 
 pleased. I certainly got a lot of work out of 
 them without in any way pushing them. They 
 didn't sweat for me and I didn't want them to 
 — but they kept steadily at their work from 
 morning until night. Then too, I didn't hes-
 
 THE GANG 243 
 
 itate to do a little work myself now and then. 
 If at any point another man seemed to be 
 needed to help over a difficulty I jumped in. 
 I not only often saved the useless efforts of 
 three or four men in this way but I convinced 
 them that I too had my employers' interests 
 at heart. My object wasn't simply to earn 
 my day's pay, it was to finish the job we were 
 on in the shortest possible time. It makes a 
 big difference whether a man feels he is work- 
 ing by the day or by the job. I tried to make 
 them feel that we were all working by the job. 
 
 Without boasting I think I can say that we 
 cut down the contractor's estimate by at least 
 a full day. I know they had to do some hus- 
 tling to get the pile-drivers to the spot on time. 
 
 On the next job I had to begin all over again 
 with a new gang. It seemed a pity that all 
 my work on the other should be wasted but I 
 didn't say anything. For two months I took 
 each time the men I had and did my best with 
 them. I had my reward in finding myself 
 placed at the head of a constantly increasing 
 force. I also found that I was being sent on 
 all the hurry-up work. I learned something 
 every day. Finally when the time seemed ripe 
 I went to the contractor's agent with the
 
 244 ^NE WAY OUT 
 
 proposition towards which I had all along been 
 working. This was that I should be allowed 
 to hire my own men. 
 
 The agent was skeptical at first about the 
 wisdom of entrusting such power as this to a 
 subordinate but I put my case to him squarely. 
 I said in brief that I was sure I could pick 
 a gang of fifty men who would do the work 
 of seventy-five. I told him that for a year 
 now I had been making notes on the best 
 workers and I thought I could secure them. 
 But I would have to do it myself. It would 
 be only through my personal influence with 
 them that they could be got. He raised sev- 
 eral objections but I finally said: 
 
 "Let me try it anyhow. The men won't 
 cost you any more than the others and if I 
 don't make good it's easy enough to go back 
 to the old way." 
 
 It's queer how stubbornly business men 
 cling to routine. They get stuck in a system 
 and hate to change. He finally gave me per- 
 mission to see the men. I was then to turn 
 them over to the regular paymaster who would 
 engage them. This was all I wanted and with 
 my note book I started out.
 
 THE GANG 245 
 
 It was no easy job for me and for a week 
 I had to cut out my night school and give all 
 my time to it. Many of the men had moved 
 and others had gone into other work but I 
 kept at it night after night trotting from one 
 end of the city to the other until I rounded 
 up about thirty of them. This seemed to me 
 enough to form a core. I could pick up others 
 from time to time as I found them. The 
 men remembered me and when I told them 
 something of my plan they all agreed with a 
 grin to report for work as soon as they were 
 free. And this was how Carleton's gang 
 happened to be formed. 
 
 It took me about three months to put all 
 my fifty men into good working order and it 
 wasn't for a year that I had my machine 
 where I wanted it. But it was a success from 
 the start. At the end of a year I learned that 
 even the contractor himself began to speak with 
 some pride of Carleton's gang. And he used it. 
 He used it hard. In fact he made something 
 of a special feature of it. It began to bring 
 him emergency business. Wherever speed 
 was a big essential, he secured the contract 
 through my gang. He used us altogether for
 
 246 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 foundation work and his business increased so 
 rapidly that we were never idle. I became 
 proud of my men and my reputation. 
 
 But of course this success — this proof that 
 my idea was a good one — only whetted my 
 appetite for the big goal still ahead of me. 
 I was eager for the day when this group of 
 men should really be Carleton's gang. It 
 was hard in a way to see the result of my 
 own thought and work turning out big profits 
 for another when all I needed was a little cap- 
 ital to make it my own. Still I knew I must be 
 patient. There were many things yet that I 
 must learn before I should be competent to un- 
 dertake contracts for myself. In the mean- 
 while I could satisfy my ambition by constantly 
 strengthening and perfecting the machine. 
 
 Then, too, I found that the gang was bring- 
 ing me into closer touch with my superiors. 
 One day I was called to the office of the firm 
 and there I met the two men who until now had 
 been nothing to me but two names. For a 
 year I had stared at these names painted in 
 black on white boards and posted about the 
 grounds of every job upon which I had worked. 
 I had never thought of them as human beings 
 so much as some hidden force — like the unseen
 
 THE GANG 247 
 
 dynamo of a power plant. They were both 
 Irish- Americans — strong, prosperous-looking 
 men. Somehow they made me distinctly con- 
 scious of my own ancestry. I don't mean that 
 I was over-proud — in a way I don't suppose 
 there was anything to boast of in the Carletons 
 — but as I stood before these men in the posi- 
 tion of a minor employee I suppose that un- 
 consciously I looked for something in my past 
 to offset my present humiliating situation. 
 'And from a business point of view, it was 
 humiliating. The Carletons had been in this 
 country two hundred years and these men 
 but twenty-five or thirty and yet I was the man 
 who stood while they faced me in their easy 
 chairs before their roll-top desks. It was then 
 that I was glad to remember there hadn't 
 been a war in this country in which a Carleton 
 had not played his part. I held myself a little 
 better for the thought. 
 
 They were unaffected and business-like but 
 when they spoke it was plain "Carleton" and 
 when I spoke it was "Mr. Corkery," or "Mr. 
 Galvin." That was right and proper enough. 
 
 They had called me in to consult with me on 
 a big job which they were trying to figure down 
 to the very lowest point. They were willing to
 
 248 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 get out of it with the smallest possible margin 
 of profit for the advertisement it would give 
 them and in view of future contracts with the 
 same firm which it might bring. The largest 
 item in it was the handling of the dirt. They 
 showed me their blue prints and their rough 
 estimate and then Mr. Corkery said: 
 
 ''How much can you take off that, Carle- 
 ton?" 
 
 I told him I would need two or three hours 
 to figure it out. He called a clerk. 
 
 "Give Carleton a desk," he said. 
 
 Then he turned to me : 
 
 "Stay here until you've done it," he said. 
 
 It took me all the forenoon. I worked care- 
 fully because it seemed to me that here was a 
 big chance to prove myself. I worked at those 
 figures as though I had every dollar I ever 
 hoped to have at stake. I didn't trim it as 
 close as I would have done for myself but as it 
 was I took ofif a fifth — the matter of five thou- 
 sand dollars. When I came back, Mr. Cork- 
 ery looked over my figures. 
 
 "Sure you can do that ?" he asked. 
 
 I could see he was surprised. 
 
 "Yes, sir," I said. 
 
 "I'd hate like hell to get stuck," he said.
 
 THE GANG 249 
 
 "You won't get stuck," I answered. 
 
 "It isn't the loss I mind," he said, "but — 
 well there is a firm or two that is waiting to 
 give me the laugh." 
 
 "They won't laugh," I said. 
 
 He looked at me a moment and then called 
 in a clerk. 
 
 "Have those figures put in shape," he said, 
 "and send in this bid." 
 
 Corkery secured the contract. I picked one 
 hundred men. The morning we began I held 
 a sort of convention. 
 
 "Men," I said, "I've promised to do this in 
 so many days. They say we can't do it. If 
 we don't, here's where they laugh at the gang." 
 
 We did it. I never heard from Corkery 
 about it but when we were through I thanked 
 the gang and I found them more truly mine 
 than they had ever been before. 
 
 Every Saturday night I brought home my 
 fifteen dollars, and Ruth took out three for the 
 rent, five for household expenses, and put 
 seven in the ginger jar. We had one hun- 
 dred and thirty dollars in the bank before the 
 raise came, and after this it increased rapidly. 
 There wasn't a week we didn't put aside seven 
 dollars, and sometimes eight. The end of my
 
 250 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 first year as an emigrant found me with the 
 following items to my credit: Ruth, the boy 
 and myself in better health than we had ever 
 been; Ruth's big mother-love finding outlet in 
 the neighborhood ; the boy alert and ambitious ; 
 myself with the beginning of a good technical 
 education, to say nothing of the rudiments of 
 a new language, with a loyal gang of one hun- 
 dred men and two hundred dollars in cash. 
 
 This inventory does not take into account my 
 new friends, my new mental and spiritual out- 
 look upon life, or my enhanced self-respect. 
 Such things cannot be calculated. 
 
 That first year was, of course, the important 
 year — the big year. It proved what could be 
 done, and nothing remained now but time 
 in which to do it. It established the evident 
 fact that if a raw, uneducated foreigner can 
 come to this country and succeed, a native- 
 born with experience plus intelligence ought to 
 do the same thing more rapidly. But it had 
 taught me that what the native-born must 
 do is to simplify his standard of living, take 
 advantage of the same opportunities, toil 
 with the same spirit, and free himself from 
 the burdensome bonds of caste. The ad- 
 vantage is all with the pioneer, the adven-
 
 THE GANG 251 
 
 turer, the emigrant. These are the real chil- 
 dren of the republic — here in the East, at any 
 rate. Every landing dock is Plymouth Rock 
 to them. They are the real forefathers of the 
 coming century, because they possess all the 
 rugged strength of settlers. They are making 
 their own colonial history.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO 
 
 When school closed in June, Dick came to me 
 and said: 
 
 "Dad, I don't want to loaf all summer." 
 
 "No need of it," I said. "Take another 
 course in the summer school." 
 
 "I want to earn some money," he said, "I 
 want to go to work." 
 
 If the boy had come to me a year ago with 
 that suggestion I should have felt hurt. I 
 would have thought it a reflection upon my 
 ability to support my family. We salaried 
 men used to expect our children to be depend- 
 dent on us until they completed their educa- 
 tions. For a boy to work during his summer 
 vacation was almost as bad form as for the 
 wife to work for money at any time. It had 
 to be explained that the boy was a prodigy 
 with unusual business ability or that he was 
 merely seeking experience. But Dick did not 
 fall into any of these classes. This was what 
 
 252
 
 DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO 253 
 
 made his proposal the more remarkable to me. 
 It meant that he was willing to take just a plain 
 every-day plugging job. 
 
 And underlying this willingness was the 
 spirit that was resurrecting us all. Instead of 
 acting on the defensive, Dick was now eager 
 to play the aggressive game. I hadn't looked 
 for this spirit to show in him so soon, in his 
 life outside of school. I was mighty well 
 pleased. 
 
 ''All right," I said, "what do you think you 
 can do?" 
 
 "I've talked with some of the fellows," he 
 said, "and the surest thing seems to be selling 
 papers." 
 
 I gave a gasp at that. I hadn't yet lost the 
 feeling that a newsboy was a sort of cross be- 
 tween an orphan and a beggar. He was 
 to me purely an object of pity. Of course I'd 
 formed this notion like a good many others 
 from the story books and the daily paper. I 
 connected a newsboy with blind fathers and 
 sick mothers if he had any parents at all. 
 
 "I guess you can get something better than 
 that to do," I said. 
 
 "What's the matter with selling papers?" 
 he asked.
 
 254 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 When I stopped to think of the work in that 
 way — as just the buying and selhng of papers 
 — I couldn't see anything the matter with it. 
 Why wasn't it hke buying and selhng any- 
 thing? You were selhng a product in which 
 millions of money was invested, a product 
 which everyone wanted, a product where you 
 gave your customers their money's worth. 
 The only objection I could think of at the mo- 
 ment was that there was so little in it. 
 
 **It will keep you on the streets five or six 
 hours a day," I said, "and I don't suppose you 
 can make more than a dollar a week." 
 
 "A dollar a week !" he said. **Do you know 
 what one fellow in our class makes right 
 through the year ?" 
 
 "How much?" I asked. 
 
 "He makes between six and eight dollars a 
 week," said Dick. 
 
 "That doesn't sound possible," I said. 
 
 "He told me he made that. And another 
 fellow he knows about did as well as this even 
 while he was in college. He pretty nearly 
 paid his own way." 
 
 "What do you make on a paper ?" I asked. 
 
 "About half a cent on the one cent papers,, 
 and a cent on the two cent papers."
 
 DICK FINDS A .WAY OUT, TOO 255 
 
 "Then these boys have to sell over two hun- 
 dred papers a day." 
 
 'They have about a hundred regular cus- 
 tomers/' said Dick, *'and they sell another 
 hundred papers besides." 
 
 It seemed to me the boys must have exag- 
 gerated because eight dollars a week was pretty 
 nearly the pay of an able-bodied man. It 
 didn't seem possible that these youngsters 
 whom I'd pitied all my life could earn such an 
 income. However if they didn't earn half as 
 much, it wasn't a bad proposition for a lad. 
 
 I talked the matter over with Ruth and I 
 found she had the same prejudices I had had. 
 She, too, thought selling papers was a branch 
 of begging. I repeated what Dick told me 
 and she shook her head doubtfully. 
 
 "It doesn't seem as though I could let the 
 boy do that," she said. 
 
 If there was one thing down here the little 
 woman always worried about deep in her 
 heart, it was lest the boy and myself might 
 get coarsened. She thought, I think, with- 
 out ever exactly saying so to herself that in 
 our ambition to forge ahead we might 
 lose some of the finer standards of life. She 
 was bucking against that tendency all the
 
 256 ONE WAY OUT. 
 
 time. That's why she made me shave every 
 morning, that's why she made me keep my 
 shoes blacked, that's why she made us both 
 dress up on Sunday w'hether we went to church 
 or not. She for her part kept herself looking 
 even more trig than when she had the fear 
 that Mrs. Grover might drop in at any time. 
 And every night at dinner she presided with 
 as much form as though she were entertain- 
 ing a dinner party. I guess she thought we 
 might learn to eat with our knives if she 
 didn't. 
 
 "Well,'' I said, "your word is final. But 
 let's look at this first as a straight business 
 proposition." 
 
 So I went over the scheme just as I had to 
 myself. 
 
 "These boys aren't beggars," I said. "They 
 are little business men. And as a matter of 
 fact most of them are earning as much as their 
 fathers. The trouble is that they've been 
 given a black eye by well-meaning sympathiz- 
 ers who haven't taken the trouble to find out 
 just what the actual facts are. A group of 
 big-hearted women who see their own chickens 
 safely rounded up at six every night, find the 
 newsboys on the street as they themselves are
 
 DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO 257 
 
 on their way to the opera and conclude it's a 
 great hardship and that the lads must be home- 
 less and suffering. Maybe they even find a case 
 or two which justifies this theory. But on the 
 whole they are simply comparing the outside 
 of these boys' lives with the lives of their own 
 sheltered boys. They don't stop to consider 
 that these lads are toughened and that they'd 
 probably be on the street anyway. And they 
 don't figure out how much they earn or what 
 that amount stands for down here." 
 
 Ruth listened and then she said: 
 
 "But isn't it a pity that the boys are tough- 
 ened, Billy?" 
 
 "No," I said, "it would be a pity if they 
 weren't. They wouldn't last a year. We 
 have to have some seasoned fighters in the 
 world." 
 
 "But Dick—" 
 
 "Dick has found his feet now. The sug- 
 gestion was his own. Personally I believe in 
 letting him try it." 
 
 "All right, Billy," she said. 
 
 But she said it in such a sad sort of way 
 that I said: 
 
 "If you're going to worry about him, this 
 ends it. But I'd like to see the boy so well
 
 258 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 seasoned that you won't have to worry about 
 him no matter where he is, no matter what he's 
 doing." 
 
 ^'You're right," she said, "I want to see him 
 like you. I never worry about you, Billy." 
 
 It pleased me to have her say that. I know 
 a lot of men who wouldn't believe their wives 
 loved them unless they fretted about them 
 all the time. I think a good many fellows 
 even make up things just to see the 
 women worry. I remember that Stevens al- 
 ways used to come home either with a sick 
 headache or a tale of how he thought he might 
 lose his job or something of the sort and poor 
 Dolly Stevens would stay awake half the night 
 comforting him. She'd tell Ruth about it the 
 next day. I may have had a touch of that dis- 
 ease myself before I came down here but I 
 know that ever since then I've tried to lift the 
 worrying load off the wife's shoulders. I've 
 done my best to make Ruth feel I'm strong 
 enough to take care of myself. I've wanted 
 her to trust me so that she'd know I act always 
 just as though she was by my side. Of 
 course I've never been able to do away alto- 
 gether with her fear of sickness and sudden 
 death, but so far as my own conduct is con-
 
 DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO 259 
 
 cerned I've tried to make her feel secure in 
 me. 
 
 When I stop to think about it, Ruth has 
 really lived three lives. She has lived her own 
 and she has lived it hard. She not only has 
 done her daily tasks as well as she knew how 
 but she has tried to make herself a little better 
 every day. That has been a waste of time be- 
 cause she was just naturally as good as they 
 make them but you couldn't ever make her see 
 that. I don't suppose there's been a day when 
 at night she hasn't thought she might have 
 done something a little better and lain awake 
 to tell me so. 
 
 Then Ruth has lived my life and done over 
 again every single thing I've done except the 
 actual physical labor. Why every evening 
 when I came back from work she wanted me to 
 begin with seven-thirty a. m. and tell her 
 everything that happened after that. And 
 when I came back from school at night, she'd 
 wake up out of a sound sleep if she had 
 gone to bed and ask me to tell her just what 
 I'd learned. Though she never held a trowel 
 in her hand I'll bet she could go out to-day and 
 build a true brick wall. And though she has 
 never seen half the men I've met, she knows
 
 26o ONE WAY OUT 
 
 them as well as I do myself. Some of them 
 she knows better and has proved to me time 
 and again that she does. I've often told her 
 about some man I'd just met and about whom 
 I was enthusiastic for the moment and she'd 
 say: 
 
 "Tell me what he looks like, Billy." 
 
 I'd tell her and then she'd ask about his eyes 
 and about his mouth and what kind of a voice 
 he had and whether he smiled when he said so 
 and so and whether he looked me in the eyes 
 at that point and so on. Then she'd say: 
 
 ^'Better be a little careful about him"; or "I 
 guess you can trust him, Billy." 
 
 Sometimes she made mistakes but that was 
 because I hadn't reported things to her just 
 right. Generally I'd trust her judgment in the 
 face of my own. 
 
 Then Ruth led the boy's life. Every am- 
 bition he had was her ambition. Besides that 
 she had a dozen ambitions for him that he 
 didn't know anything about. And she thought 
 and worked and schemed to make every single 
 one of them come true. Every trouble he had 
 was her trouble too. If he worried a half 
 hour over something, she worried an hour. 
 Then again there were a whole lot of other
 
 DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO 261 
 
 troubles in connection with him which both- 
 ered her and which he didn't know about. 
 
 Besides all these things she was busy about 
 dressing us and feeding us and making us 
 comfortable. She was always cleaning our 
 rooms and washing our clothes and mending 
 our socks. Then, too, she looked after the 
 finances and this in itself was enough for one 
 woman to do. Then as though this wasn't 
 plenty she kept light-hearted for our sakes. 
 You'd find her singing about her work when- 
 ever you came in and always ready with a 
 smile and a joke. And if she herself had a 
 headache you had to be a doctor and a lawyer 
 rolled in one to find it out. 
 
 So I say the least I could do was to make her 
 trust me so thoroughly that she'd have one less 
 burden. And I wanted to bring up Dick in 
 the same way. Dick was a good boy and I'll 
 say that he did his best. 
 
 Ruth says that if I don't tear up these last 
 few pages, people will think I'm silly. I'm 
 willing so long as they believe me honest. Of 
 course, in a way, such details are no one's busi- 
 ness but if I couldn't give Ruth the credit which 
 is her due in this imdertaking, I wouldn't take 
 the trouble to write it all out.
 
 262 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 Dick told his school friend what he wanted 
 to do and asked his advice on the best way to 
 go at it. The latter went with him and helped 
 him get his license, took him down to the news- 
 paper offices and showed him where to buy his 
 papers, and introduced him to the other boys. 
 The newsboys hadn't at that time formed a union 
 but there was an agreement among them about 
 the territory each should cover. Some of the 
 boys had worked up a regular trade in certain 
 places and of course it wasn't right for a new- 
 comer to infringe upon this. There was con- 
 siderable talking and some bargaining and 
 finally Dick was given a stand in the banking 
 district. This was due to Dick's classmate 
 also. The latter realized that a boy of Dick's 
 appearance would do better there than any- 
 where. 
 
 So one morning Dick rose early and I 
 staked him to a dollar and he started off in 
 high spirits. He didn't have any of the false 
 pride about the work that at first I myself had 
 felt. He was on my mind pretty much all 
 that day and I came home curious and a little 
 bit anxious to learn the result. He had been 
 back after the morning editions. Ruth re- 
 ported he had sold fifty papers and had
 
 DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO 263 
 
 returned more eager than ever. She said he 
 wouldn't probably be home until after seven. 
 He wanted to catch the crowds on their way to 
 the station. 
 
 I suggested to Ruth that we wait dinner for 
 him and go on up town and watch him. She 
 hesitated at this, fearing the boy wouldn't like 
 it and perhaps not over anxious herself to see 
 him on such a job. But as I said, if the boy 
 wasn't ashamed I didn't think we ought to be. 
 So she put on her things and we started. 
 
 We found him by the entrance to one of the 
 big buildings with his papers in a strap 
 thrown over his shoulder. He had one paper 
 in his hand and was offering it, perhaps a bit 
 shyly, to each passer-by with a quiet, "Paper, 
 sir?" We watched him a moment and Ruth 
 kept a tight grip on my arm. 
 
 "Well," I said, "what do you think of him?" 
 
 "Billy," she said with a little tremble in her 
 voice, "I'm proud of him." 
 
 "He'll do," I said. 
 
 Then I said : 
 
 "Wait here a moment." 
 
 I took a nickel from my pocket and hurried 
 towards him as though I were one of the crowd 
 hustling for the train. I stopped in front of
 
 264 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 him and he handed me a paper without looking 
 up. He began to make change and it wasn't 
 until he handed me back my three coppers that 
 he saw who I was. Then he grinned. 
 
 "Hello, Dad/' he said. 
 
 Then he asked quickly, 
 
 "Where's mother?" 
 
 But Ruth couldn't wait any longer and she 
 came hurrying up and placed her hand under- 
 neath the papers to see if they were too heavy 
 for him. 
 
 Dick earned three dollars that first week and 
 he never fell below this during the summer. 
 Sometimes he went as high as five and when it 
 came time for him to go to school again he had 
 about seventy-five regular customers. He had 
 been kept out of doors between six and seven 
 hours a day. The contact with a new type of 
 boy and even the contact with the brisk busi- 
 ness men who were his customers had sharp- 
 ened up his wits all round. In the ten weeks 
 he saved over forty dollars. I wanted him to 
 put this in the bank but he insisted on buying 
 his own winter clothes with it and on the whole 
 I thought he'd feel better if I let him. Then 
 he had another proposition. He wanted to 
 keep his evening customers through the year.
 
 DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO 265 
 
 I thought it was going to be pretty hard for 
 him to do this with his school work but we 
 finally agreed to let him try it for a while any- 
 way. After all I didn't like to think he 
 couldn't do what other boys were doing.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 
 
 Now as far as proving to us the truth of my 
 theory that an inteUigent able-bodied Ameri- 
 can ought to succeed where milhons of igno- 
 rant, half-starved emigrants do right along, 
 this first year had already done it. It had also 
 proved, to our own satisfaction at least, that 
 such success does not mean a return to a 
 lower standard of living but only a return to a 
 simpler standard of living. With soap at five 
 cents a cake it isn't poverty that breeds filth, but 
 ignorance and laziness. When an able-bodied 
 fnan can earn at the very bottom of the ladder 
 a dollar and a half a day and a boy can earn 
 from three to five dollars a week and still go 
 to school, it isn't a lack of money that makes 
 the bread line; it's a lack of horse sense. 
 We found that we could maintain a higher 
 standard of living down here than we were 
 able to maintain in our old life; we could 
 live more sanely, breathe in higher ideals, 
 
 266
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 267 
 
 and find time to accept more opportuni- 
 ties. The sheer, naked conditions were better 
 for a higher Hfe here than they were in the 
 suburbs. 
 
 I'm speaking always of the able-bodied man. 
 A sick man is a sick man whether he's worth 
 a million or hasn't a cent. He's to be pitied. 
 With the public hospitals what they are to-day, 
 you can't say that the sick millionaire has any 
 great advantage over the sick pauper. Money 
 makes a bigger difference of course to the sick 
 man's family but at that you'll find for every 
 widow O'Toole, a widow Bonnington and for 
 every widow Bonnington you'll find the heart- 
 broken widow of some millionaire who doesn't 
 consider her dollars any great consolation in 
 such a crisis. 
 
 Then, too, a man in hard luck is a man in 
 hard luck whether he has a bank account or 
 whether he hasn't. I pity them both. If a 
 rich man's money prevents the necessity of his 
 airing his grief in public, it doesn't help him 
 much when he's alone in his castle. It seems 
 to me that each class has its own peculiar mis- 
 fortunes and that money breeds about as much 
 trouble as it kills. To my mind once a man 
 earns enough to buy himself a little food, put
 
 268 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 any sort of a roof over his head, and keep him- 
 self warm, he has everything for which money 
 is absokitely essential. This much he can 
 always get at the bottom. And this much is 
 all the ammunition a man needs for as good 
 a fight as it's in him to put up. It gives him a 
 chance for an extra million over his nine dol- 
 lars a week if he wants it. But the point I 
 'learned down here is that the million is extra — 
 it isn't essential. Its possession doesn't make a 
 Paradise free from sickness and worry and 
 hard luck, and the lack of it doesn't make a 
 Hell's Kitchen where there is nothing but sick- 
 ness and trouble and where happiness cannot 
 enter. 
 
 As I say, I consider this first year the big 
 year because it taught me these things. In a 
 sense the value of my diary ends here. Once 
 I was able to understand that I had everything 
 and more that the early pioneers had and that 
 all I needed to do to-day was to live as they did 
 and fight as they did, I had all the inspiration a 
 man needs in order to live and in order to feel 
 that he's living. In looking back on the subur- 
 ban life at the end of this first twelve months, 
 it seemed to me that the thing which made it so 
 ghastly was just this lack of inspiration that
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 269 
 
 comes with the blessed privilege of fighting. 
 That other was a waiting game and no help 
 for it. I was a shadow living in the land of 
 shadows with nothing to hit out at, nothing to 
 feel the sting of my fist against. The fight was 
 going on above me and below me and we in 
 the middle only heard the din of it. It was as 
 though we had climbed half way up a rope 
 leading from a pit to the surface. We had 
 climbed as far as we could and unless they 
 hauled from above we had to stay there. If 
 we let go — poor devils, we thought there was 
 nothing but brimstone below us. So we 
 couldn't do much but hold on and kick — at 
 nothing. 
 
 But down here if a man had any kick in him, 
 he had something to kick against. When he 
 struck out with his feet they met something; 
 when he shot a blow from the shoulder he felt 
 an impact. If he didn't like one trade he could 
 learn another. It took no capital. If he 
 didn't like his house, he could move ; he wasn't 
 tearing up anything by the roots. If he didn't 
 like his foreman, he could work under another. 
 It didn't mean the sacrifice of any past. If he 
 found a chance to black boots or sell papers, he 
 could use it. His neighbors wouldn't exile
 
 270 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 him. He was as free as the winds and what 
 he didn't hke he could change. I don't sup- 
 pose there is any human being on earth so in- 
 dependent as an able-bodied working-man. 
 
 The record of the next three years only 
 traces a slow, steady strengthening of my po- 
 sition. Not one of us had any set-back 
 through sickness because I considered our 
 health as so much capital and guarded it as 
 carefully as a banker does his money. I was 
 afraid at first of the city water but I found it 
 was as pure as spring water. It was protected 
 from its very source and was stored in a care- 
 fully guarded reservoir. It was frequently 
 analyzed and there wasn't a case of typhoid in 
 the ward which could be traced to the water. 
 The milk was the great danger down here. At 
 the small shops it was often carelessly stored 
 and carelessly handled. From the beginning, I 
 bought our milk up town though I had to pay 
 a cent a quart more for it. Ruth picked out all 
 the fish and meat and of course nothing tainted 
 in this line could be sold to her. We ate few 
 canned goods and then nothing but canned 
 vegetables. Many of our neighbors used 
 canned meats. I don't know whether any 
 sickness resulted from this or not but I know
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 271 
 
 that they often left the stuff for hours in an 
 opened tin. Many of the tenements swarmed 
 with flies in the summer although it was a 
 small matter to keep them out of four rooms. 
 So if the canned stuff didn't get infected it was 
 a wonder. 
 
 The sanitary arrangements in the flat were 
 good, though here again many families pro- 
 ceeded to make them bad about as fast as they 
 could. These people didn't seem to mind dirt 
 in any form. It was a perfectly simple and 
 inexpensive matter to keep themselves and 
 their surroundings clean if they cared to take 
 the trouble. 
 
 Then the roof contributed largely towards 
 our good health. Ruth spent a great deal of 
 time up there during the day and the boy slept 
 there during the summer. 
 
 Our simple food and exercise also helped, 
 while for me nothing could have been better 
 than my daily plunge in the salt water. I 
 kept this up as long as the bath house was 
 open and in the winter took a cold sponge 
 and rub-down every night. So, too, did the 
 boy. 
 
 For the rest, we all took sensible precautions 
 against exposure. We dressed warmly and
 
 272 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 kept our feet dry. Here again our neighbors 
 were insanely foolish. They never changed 
 their clothes until bed time, didn't keep them 
 clean or fresh at any time, and they lived in a 
 temperature of eighty-five with the air foul 
 from many breaths and tobacco smoke. Even 
 the children had to breathe this. Then both 
 men and women went out from this into the 
 cold air either over-dressed or under-dressed. 
 The result of such foolishness very naturally 
 was tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid and 
 about everything else that contributes to a 
 high death rate. Not only this but one person 
 suffering from any of these things infected a 
 whole family. 
 
 Such conditions were not due to a lack 
 of money but to a lack of education. The 
 new generation was making some changes 
 however. Often a girl or boy in the public 
 schools would come home and transform the 
 three or four rooms though always under pro- 
 test from the elders. Clean surroundings and 
 fresh air troubled the old folks. 
 
 Ruth, too, was responsible for many changes 
 for the better in the lives of these people. Her 
 very presence in a room was an inspiration for 
 cleanliness. Her clothes were no better than
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 273 
 
 theirs but she stood out among them like a 
 vestal virgin. She came into their quarters 
 and made the women ashamed that the rooms 
 were not better fitted to receive so pure a be- 
 ing. You would scarcely have recognized 
 Michele's rooms at the end of the first year. 
 The windows were cleaned, the floors scrubbed,, 
 and even the bed linen was washed occasionally. 
 The baby gained in weight and Michele when 
 he wanted to smoke either sat outside on the 
 door step or by an open window. But Michele 
 was an exception. 
 
 Ruth's efforts were not confined to our own 
 building either. Her influence spread down 
 the street and through the whole district. The 
 district nurse was a frequent visitor and kept 
 her informed of all her cases. Wherever Ruth 
 could do anything she did it. Her first object 
 was always to awaken the women to the value 
 of cleanliness and after that she tried her best 
 to teach them little ways of preparing their 
 food more economically. Few of them knew 
 the value of oatmeal for instance though of 
 course their macaroni and spaghetti was a 
 pretty good substitute. In fact Ruth picked up 
 many new dishes of this sort for herself from 
 among them.
 
 274 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 Some families spent as much for beer as for 
 milk. Ruth couldn't change that practice but 
 she did make them more careful where they 
 bought their milk — especially when there was a 
 baby in the house. Then, too, she shared all 
 her secrets of where and how to buy cheaply. 
 Sometimes advantage was taken of these hints, 
 but more often not. They didn't pay much 
 more for many articles than she did but they 
 didn't get as good quality. However as long 
 as the food tasted good and satisfied their 
 hunger you couldn't make them take an extra 
 effort and get stuff because it was more nutri- 
 tious or more healthful. They couldn't think 
 ahead except in the matter of saving dollars 
 and cents. 
 
 These people of course were of the lower 
 class. There was another element of decidedly 
 finer quality. Giuseppe for example was one 
 of these and there were hundreds of others. It 
 was among these that Ruth's influence counted 
 for the most. They not only took advan- 
 tage of her superior intelligence in conduct- 
 ing their households but they breathed in 
 something of the soul of her. When I saw 
 them send for her in their grief and in their 
 joy, when I heard them ask her advice with al-
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 275 
 
 most the confidence with which they prayed, 
 when I heard them give her such names as 
 "the angel mother," "the blessed American 
 saint," I felt very proud and very humble. 
 Such things made me glad in another way for 
 the change which had taken her out of the old 
 life where such qualities were lost and brought 
 her down here where they counted for so much. 
 These people stripped of convention live with 
 their hearts very near the surface. They 
 don't try to conceal their emotions and so you 
 are brought very quickly into close touch with 
 them. Ruth herself was a good deal like that 
 and so her influence for a day among them 
 counted for as much as a year with the old 
 crowd. 
 
 In the meanwhile I resumed my night school 
 at the end of the summer vacation and was 
 glad to get back to it. I had missed the work 
 and went at it this next winter with increased 
 eagerness to perfect myself in my trade. 
 
 During this second year, too, I never re- 
 laxed my efforts to keep my gang up to 
 standard and whenever possible to better it by 
 the addition of new men. Every month I 
 thought I increased the respect of the men for 
 me by my fair dealing with them. I don't
 
 276 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 mean to say I fully realized the expectations of 
 ^vhich I had dreamed. I suppose that at first 
 I dreamed a bit wildly. There was very little 
 sentiment in the relation of the men to me, 
 although there w^as some. Still I don't want 
 to give the impression that I made of them a 
 gang of blind personal followers such as some 
 religious cranks get together. It was neces- 
 sary to make them see that it was for their in- 
 terest to work for me and with me and that I 
 did do. I made them see also that in order to 
 work for me they had to work a little more 
 faithfully than they worked for others. So it 
 was a straight business proposition. What 
 sentiment there was came through the personal 
 interest I took in them outside of their work. 
 It was this which made them loyal instead of 
 merely hard working. It was this which made 
 them my gang instead of Corkery's gang — a 
 thing that counted for a good deal later on. 
 
 The personal reputation I had won gave me 
 new opportunities of which I took every advan- 
 tage this second year. It put me in touch 
 with the responsible heads of departments. 
 Through them I was able to acquire a much 
 broader and more accurate knowledge of the 
 business as a whole. I asked as many ques-
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 277 
 
 tions here as I had below. I received more 
 intelHgent answers and was able to understand 
 them more intelligently. I not only learned 
 prices but where to get authoritative prices. 
 As far as possible I made myself acquainted 
 with the men working for the building con- 
 structors and for those working for firms 
 whose specialty was the tearing down of build- 
 ings. I used my note-book as usual and en- 
 tered the names of every man who, in his line, 
 seemed to me especially valuable. 
 
 And everywhere, I found that my experi- 
 ment with the gang was well known. I found 
 also that my tendency for asking questions was 
 even better known. It passed as a joke in a 
 good many cases. But better than this I found 
 that I had established a reputation for sobri- 
 ety, industry and level-headedness. I can't 
 help smiling how little those things counted for 
 me with the United Woollen or when I sought 
 work after leaving that company. Here they 
 counted for a lot. I realized that when it came 
 time for me to seek credit. 
 
 In the meanwhile I didn't neglect the fight 
 for clean politics in my ward. 
 
 I resigned from the presidency of the young 
 men's club at the end of a year and we elected
 
 278 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 a young lawyer who was taking a great inter- 
 est in the work down here to fill the vacancy. 
 That was a fine selection. The man was fresh 
 from the law school and was full of ideals which 
 dated back to the Mayflower. He hadn't been 
 long enough in the world to have them dimmed 
 and was full of energy. He took hold of the 
 original idea and developed it until the organ- 
 ization included every ward in this section 
 of the city. He held rallies every month and 
 brought down big speakers and kept the senti- 
 ment of the youngsters red hot. This had its 
 effect upon the older men and before we knew 
 it we had a machine that looked like a real 
 power in the whole city. Sweeney saw it and 
 so did the bigger bosses of both parties. But 
 the president kept clear of alliances with any 
 of them. He stood pat with what promised to 
 be a balance of power, ready to swing it to the 
 cleanest man of either party who came up for 
 office. 
 
 I made several speeches myself though it was 
 hard work for me. I don't run to that 
 sort of thing. I did it however just be- 
 cause I didn't like it and because I felt it 
 was the duty of a citizen to do something 
 now and then he doesn't like for his city
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 279 
 
 and his country. The old excuse with me 
 had been that poHtics was a dirty business 
 at best and that it ought to be left to the law- 
 yers and such who had something to gain from 
 it. The only men I ever knew who went into 
 it at all were those who had a talent for it and 
 who liked it. Of course that's dead wrong. 
 A man who won't take the trouble to find out 
 about the men up for office and who won't 
 bother himself to get out and hustle for the 
 best of them isn't a good citizen or a good 
 American. He deserves to be governed by 
 the newcomers and deserves all they hand out 
 to him. And the time to do the work isn't 
 when a man is up for president of the United 
 States, it's when the man is up for the com- 
 mon council. The higher up a politician gets, 
 the less the influence of the single voter counts. 
 It was in the spring that some of my ideals 
 received a set back. The alderman from our 
 ward died suddenly and Rafferty was naturally 
 hot after the vacancy. He came to see me 
 about it, but before he broached this subject he 
 laid another before me that took away my 
 breath. It was nothing else than that I should 
 go into partnership with him under the firm 
 name of "Carleton and Rafiferty." I couldn't
 
 28o ONE WAY OUT 
 
 believe it possible that he was in a position to 
 take such a step within a couple of years of dig- 
 ging in the ditch. But when he explained the 
 scheme to me, it was as simple as rolling off 
 a log. A firm of liquor dealers had agreed to 
 back him — form a stock company and give him 
 a third interest to manage it. He had spoken 
 to them of me and said he'd do it if they would 
 make it a half interest and give us each a quar- 
 ter. 
 
 "But good Lord, Dan," I said, "we'd have 
 to swing a lot of business to make it go." 
 
 "Never you worry about thot, mon," he said. 
 "I'll fix thot all right if I'm elicted to the 
 boord." 
 
 "You mean city contracts?" I said. 
 
 "Sure." 
 
 I began to see. The liquor house was look- 
 ing for more licenses and would get their pay 
 out of Dan even if the firm didn't make a cent. 
 But Dan with such capital back of him as well 
 as his aldermanic power was sure to get the 
 contracts. He would leave the actual work 
 to me and my men. 
 
 I sat down and for two hours tried to make 
 Dan realize how this crowd wanted to use him. 
 I couldn't. In addition to being blinded by
 
 THE SECOND YEAR 281 
 
 his overwhelming ambition, he actually couldn't 
 see anything crooked in what they wanted. 
 He couldn't understand why he should let such 
 an opportunity drop for someone else to pick 
 up. He had slipped out of my hands com- 
 pletely. This was where the difference be- 
 tween five or six years in America as against 
 two hundred showed itself. And yet what 
 was the old stock doing to offset such personal 
 ambition and energy as Rafferty stood for? 
 
 "No, Dan," I said, *T can't do it. And 
 what's more I won't let you do it if I can help 
 it." 
 
 "Phot do yez mane?" he asked. 
 
 "That I'm going to fight you tooth and nail," 
 I said. 
 
 He turned red. Then he grinned. 
 
 "Well," he said, "it'll be a foine fight any- 
 how." 
 
 I went to the president of the club and told 
 him that here was where we had to stop Raf- 
 ferty. He listened and then he said, 
 
 "Well, here's where we do stop him." 
 
 We went at the job in whirlwind fashion. 
 I spoke a half dozen times but to save my life 
 I couldn't say what I wanted to say. Every 
 time I stood up I seemed to see Dan's big round
 
 282 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 face and I remembered the kindly things he 
 used to do for the old ladies. And I knew that 
 Dan's offer to take me into partnership wasn't 
 prompted altogether by selfish motives. He 
 could have found other men who would have 
 served his purpose better. 
 
 In the meanwhile Dan had organized "Social 
 Clubs" in half a dozen sections. For the first 
 few weeks of the campaign I never heard of him 
 except as leading grand marches. But the last 
 week he waded in. There's no use going into 
 details. He beat us. He rolled up a tremen- 
 dous majority. The president of the club 
 couldn't understand it. He was discouraged. 
 
 "I had every boy in the ward out working," 
 he said. 
 
 "Yes," I said, "but Dan had every grand- 
 mother and every daughter and every grand- 
 daughter out working." 
 
 Dan came around to the flat one night after 
 the election. He was as happy as a boy over 
 his victory. 
 
 "Carleton," he said, again, "it's too domd 
 bad ye ain't an Irishmon." 
 
 After he had gone, Ruth said to me : 
 
 "I don't think Mr. Rafferty will make a bad 
 alderman at all."
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 MATURING PLANS 
 
 I received several offers from other 
 firms and as a result of these my wages were 
 advanced first to three dollars a day and then 
 to three and a half. Still Ruth refused to 
 take things easier by increasing the household 
 expenses. During the third year we lived ex- 
 actly as we had lived during the first year. In 
 a way it was easier to do this now that we knew 
 there was no actual necessity for it. Of 
 course it was easier, too, now that we had fallen 
 into a familiar routine. The things which had 
 seemed to us like necessities when we came 
 down here now seemed like luxuries. And we 
 none of us had either the craving for lux- 
 uries or the time to enjoy them had we 
 wished to spend the money on them. In 
 the matter of clothes we cared for nothing 
 except to be warmly and cleanly dressed. 
 Strip the problem of clothes down to this 
 and it's not a very serious one. To real- 
 
 283
 
 284 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 ize that you've only to remember how the 
 average farmer dresses or how the homesteader 
 dresses. It's only when you introduce style 
 and the conventions that the matter becomes 
 complicated. Perhaps it was easier for me to 
 dress as I pleased than for the boy or Ruth 
 but even they got right down to bed rock. 
 The boy wore grey flannel shirts and so at a 
 stroke did away with collars and cuffs. For 
 the rest a simple blue suit, a cap, stockings 
 and shoes were all he needed outside his under 
 clothes which Ruth made for him. Ruth her- 
 self dressed in plain gowns that she could do 
 up herself. For the street, she still had the 
 costumes she came down here with. None of 
 us kept any extra clothes for parade. 
 
 We carried out the same idea in our food, 
 as I've tried to show; we insisted that it must 
 be wholesome and that there must be enough 
 of it. Those were the only two things that 
 counted. Variety except of the humblest 
 kind, we didn't strive for. I've seen cook 
 books which contain five hundred pages; if 
 Ruth compiled one it wouldn't have twenty. 
 Here again the farmer and the pioneer were 
 our models. If anyone in the country had 
 lived the way we were living, it wouldn't have
 
 MATURING PLANS 285 
 
 seemed worth telling about. I find the fact 
 which amazes people in our experiment was 
 that we should have tried the same standard 
 in the city. Everyone seems to think this 
 was a most dangerous thing to attempt. The 
 men who on a camping trip consider them- 
 selves well fed on such food as we had to eat 
 expect to starve to death if placed on the same 
 diet once within sound of the trolley cars. 
 And on the camping trip they do ten times the 
 physical labor and do it month after month in 
 air that whets the appetite. Then they come 
 back and boast how strong they've grown, and 
 begin to eat like hogs again and wonder why 
 they get sick. 
 
 We camped out in the city — that's all we 
 did. And we did just what every man in camp 
 does; we stripped down to essentials. We 
 could have lived on pork scraps and potatoes if 
 that had been necessary. We could have wor- 
 ried along on hard tack and jerked beef if 
 we'd been pressed hard enough. Men chase 
 moose, and climb mountains and prospect for 
 gold on such food. Why in Heaven's name 
 can't they shovel dirt on the same diet? 
 
 So, too, about amusements. When a man 
 is trying to clear thirty acres of pine stumps,
 
 286 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 he doesn't fret at the end of the day because 
 he can't go to the theatre. He doesn't want 
 to go. Bed and his dreams are amusement 
 enough for him. And he isn't called a low- 
 browed savage because he's satisfied with this. 
 He's called a hero. The world at large 
 doesn't say that he has lowered the standard 
 of living; it boasts about him for a true Amer- 
 ican. Why can't a man lay bricks without the 
 theatre ? 
 
 As a matter of fact however we could have 
 had even the amusements if we'd wanted them. 
 For those who needed such things in order to 
 preserve a high standard of living they were 
 here. And I don't say they didn't serve a use- 
 ful purpose. What I do say is that they aren't 
 absolutely necessary; that a high standard of 
 living isn't altogether dependent on sirloin 
 steaks, starched collars and music halls as I've 
 heard a good many people claim. 
 
 This third year finished my course in 
 masonry. I came out in June with a trade at 
 which I could earn from three dollars to five 
 dollars a day according to my skill. It was a 
 trade, too, where there was pretty generally 
 steady employment. A good mason is more in 
 demand than a good lawyer. Not only that
 
 MATURING PLANS 287 
 
 but a good mason can find work in any city 
 in this country. Wherever he lands, he's sure 
 of a comfortable living. I was told that out 
 west some men were making as high as ten 
 dollars a day. 
 
 I had also qualified in a more modest way as 
 a mechanical draftsman. I could draw my 
 own plans for work and what was more useful 
 still, do my work from the plans of others. 
 
 By now I had also become a fairly proficient 
 Italian scholar. I could speak the language 
 fluently and read it fairly well. It wasn't the 
 fault of Giuseppe if my pronunciation was 
 sometimes queer and if very often I used the 
 jargon of the provinces. My object was served 
 as long as I could make myself understood to 
 the men. And I could do that perfectly. 
 
 This year I watched Rafferty's progress with 
 something like envy. The firm was "D. Raf- 
 ferty and Co." Within two months I began 
 to see the name on his dump carts whenever I 
 went to work. Within six months he secured 
 a big contract for repaving a long stretch of 
 street in our ward. I knew our firm had put 
 in a bid on it and knew they must have been 
 in a position to put in a mighty low bid. I 
 didn't wonder so much about how Dan got this
 
 288 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 away from us as I did how he got it away from 
 Sweeney. That was explained to me later 
 when I found that Sweeney was in reality back 
 of the liquor dealers. Sweeney owned about 
 half their stores and had taken this method to 
 bring Dan back to the fold, once he found he 
 couldn't check his progress. 
 
 During this year Dan bought a new house 
 and married. We went to the wedding and it 
 was a grand affair with half the ward there. 
 Mrs. Rafferty was a nice looking girl, daugh- 
 ter of a well-to-do Irishman in the real estate 
 business. She had received a good education 
 in a convent and was altogether a girl Dan 
 could be proud of. The house was an old- 
 fashioned structure built by one of the old fam- 
 ilies who had been forced to move by the for- 
 eign invasion. Mrs. Rafferty had furnished it 
 somewhat lavishly but comfortably. 
 
 As Ruth and I came back that night I said : 
 
 "I suppose if it had been 'Carleton and Raf- 
 ferty' I might have had a house myself by 
 now." 
 
 *T guess it's better as it is, Billy," she said, 
 with a smile. 
 
 Of course it was better but I began to feel 
 discontented with my present position. I felt,
 
 MATURING PLANS 289 
 
 uncomfortable at still being merely a foreman. 
 When we reached the house Ruth and I took 
 the bank book and figured out just what our 
 capital in money was. Including the boy's 
 savings which we could use in an emergency 
 it amounted to fourteen hundred dollars. 
 During the first year we saved one hundred and 
 twenty dollars, which added to the eighty we 
 came down here with, made two hundred dol- 
 lars. During the second year we saved three 
 hundred and ninety dollars. During the third 
 year we saved six hundred dollars. This made 
 a total of eleven hundred and ninety dollars in 
 the bank. The boy had saved more than two 
 hundred dollars over his clothes in the last 
 two years. 
 
 It was Rafiferty who helped me turn this 
 over in a real estate deal in which he was inter- 
 ested. I made six hundred dollars by that. 
 Everything Rafferty touched now seemed to 
 turn to money. One reason was that he was 
 thrown in contact with money-makers all of 
 whom were anxious to help him. He received 
 any number of tips from those eager to win 
 his favor. Among the tips were many that 
 were legitimate enough like the one he shared 
 with me but there were also many that were
 
 290 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 not quite so above-board. But to Dan all was' 
 fair in business and politics. Yet I don't know 
 a man I'd sooner trust upon his honor in a 
 purely personal matter. He wouldn't graft 
 from his friends however much he might from 
 the city. In fact his whole code as far as I 
 could see was based upon this imswerving loy- 
 alty to his friends and scrupulous honesty in 
 dealing with them. It was only when honesty 
 became abstract that he couldn't see it. You 
 could put a thousand dollars in gold in his 
 keeping without security and come back twenty 
 years later and find it safe. But he'd scheme 
 a week to frame up a deal to cheat the city out 
 of a hundred dollars. And he'd do it with his 
 head in the air and a grin on his face. I've 
 seen the same thing done by educated men who 
 knew better. I wouldn't trust the latter with 
 a ten cent piece without first consulting a 
 lawyer. 
 
 The money I had saved didn't represent all 
 my capital. I had as my chief asset the gang 
 of men I had drilled. Everything else being 
 equal they stood ready to work for me in pref- 
 erence to any other man in the city. In fact 
 their value as a machine depended on me. If 
 I had been discharged and another man put in
 
 MATURING PLANS 
 
 291 
 
 my place the gang would have resolved itself 
 again into merely one hundred day labor- 
 ers. Nor was this my only other asset. I 
 had established myself as a reliable man in 
 the eyes of a large group of business men. 
 This meant credit. Nor must I leave out Dan 
 and his influence. He stood ready to back me 
 not only financially but personally. And he 
 knew me well enough to know this would 
 not involve anything but a business obligation 
 on my part. 
 
 With these things in mind then I felt ready 
 to take a radical departure from the routine 
 of my life when the opportunity came. But 
 I made up my mind I would wait for the oppor- 
 tunity. I must have a chance which would not 
 involve too much capital and in which my chief 
 asset would be the gang. Furthermore it must 
 be a chance that I could use without resorting 
 to pull. Not only that but it must be some- 
 thing on which I could prove myself to such 
 good advantage that other business would be 
 sure to follow. I couldn't cut loose with my 
 men and leave them stranded at the end of a 
 single job. 
 
 I watched every public proposal and analyzed 
 them all. I found that they very quickly re-
 
 292 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 solved themselves into Dan's crowd. I kept 
 my ears wide open for private contracts but by 
 the time I heard of any I was too late. So I 
 waited for perhaps three months. Then I saw 
 in the daily paper what seemed to me my oppor- 
 tunity. It was an open bid for some park con- 
 struction which was under the guardianship of 
 a commission. It was a grading job and so 
 would require nothing but the simplest equip- 
 ment. I looked over the ground and figured 
 out the gang's part in it first. Then I went 
 to Rafferty and told him what I wanted in the 
 way of teams. I wanted only the carts and 
 horses — I would put my own men to work with 
 them. I asked him to take my note for the 
 cost. 
 
 *T'll take your word, Carleton," he said. 
 "Thot's enough." 
 
 But I insisted on the note. He finally 
 agreed and offered to secure for me anything 
 I wanted for the work. 
 
 I went back to Ruth and we sat down and 
 figured the matter all over once again. We 
 stripped it down to a figure so low that my 
 chief profit would come on the time I could 
 save with my machine. I allowed for the 
 scantiest profit on dirt and rock though I had
 
 MATURING PLANS 
 
 293 
 
 secured a good option on what I needed of this. 
 I was lucky in finding a short haul though I 
 had had my eye on this for some time. Of one 
 thing I was extremely careful — to make my 
 estimate large enough so that I couldn't pos- 
 sibly lose anything but my profit. Even if I 
 wasn't able to carry out my hope of being able 
 to speed up the gang I should be able to pay 
 my bills and come out of the venture even. 
 
 Ruth and I worked for a week on it and 
 when I saw the grand total it took away my 
 breath. I wasn't used to dealing in big 
 figures. They frightened me. I've learned 
 since then that it's a good deal easier in some 
 ways to deal in thousands than it is in ones. 
 You have wider margins, for one thing. But 
 I must confess that now I was scared. I was 
 ready to back out. When I turned to Ruth 
 for the final decision, she looked into my eyes 
 a second just as she did when I asked her to 
 marry me and said, 
 
 "Go after it, Billy. You can do it." 
 That night I sent in my estimate endorsed 
 by Dan and a friend of his and for a month 
 I waited. I didn't sleep as well as usual but 
 Ruth didn't seem to be bothered. Then one 
 night when I came home I found Ruth at the
 
 294 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 outside door waiting for me. I knew the thing 
 had been decided. She came up to me and put 
 her hand on my shoulder and patted me. 
 
 *'It's yours, Billy," she said. 
 
 My heart stopped beating for a moment and 
 then it went on again beating a dozen ticks to 
 the second. 
 
 The next day I closed up my options. I 
 went to Corkery, gave my notice and told him 
 what I was going to do. He was madder 
 than a hornet. I listened to what he had to 
 say and went off without a word in reply. He 
 was so unreasonable that it didn't seem worth 
 it. That noon I rounded up the men and told 
 them frankly that I was going to start in busi- 
 ness for myself and needed a hundred men. 
 I told them also that this first job might last 
 only four or five weeks and that while I had 
 nothing definite in mind after that I was in 
 hopes to secure in the meanwhile other con- 
 tracts. I said this would be largely up to 
 them. I told them that I didn't want a man 
 to come who wasn't willing to take the chance. 
 Of course it was something of a chance be- 
 cause Corkery had been giving them steady 
 employment. Still it wasn't a very big chance 
 because there was always work for such men.
 
 MATURING PLANS 295 
 
 I watched anxiously to see how they would 
 take it. I felt that the truth of my theories 
 were having their hardest test. When they 
 let out a cheer and started towards me in a 
 mass I saw blurry. 
 
 I'll never forget the feeling I had when I 
 started out in the morning that first day as an 
 independent contractor; I'll never forget my 
 feeling as I reached the work an hour ahead 
 of my men and waited for them to come strag- 
 gling up. I seemed closer than ever to my 
 ancestors. I felt as my great-great-grandfa- 
 ther must have felt when he cut loose from the 
 Massachusetts colony and went off down into 
 the unknown Connecticut. I was full enough 
 of confidence but I knew that a month might 
 drive me back again. Deeper than this trivial 
 fear however there was something bigger — 
 something finer. I was a free man in a larger 
 way than I had ever been before. It made me 
 feel an American to the very core of my mar- 
 row. 
 
 The work was all staked out but before the 
 men began I called them all together. I didn't 
 make a speech; I just said: 
 
 "Men — I've estimated that this can be done 
 by an ordinary bunch of men in forty days;
 
 296 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 I've banked that you can do it in thirty. If 
 you succeed, it gives me profit enough to take 
 another contract. Do the best you can." 
 
 There wasn't a mother's son among them 
 who didn't appreciate my position. There 
 were a good many who knew Ruth and knew 
 her through what she had done for their fam- 
 ihes, and these understood it even better. The 
 dirt began to fly and it was a pretty sight to 
 watch. I never spoke again to the men. I 
 simply directed their efforts. I spent about 
 half the time with a shovel in my hands myself. 
 There was scarcely a day when Ruth didn't 
 come out to watch the work with an anxious 
 eye but after the first week there was little 
 need for anxiety. I think she would have liked 
 to take a shovel herself. One Saturday Dick 
 came out and actually insisted upon being 
 allowed to do this. The men knew him and 
 liked to see such spirit. 
 
 Well, we clipped ten days from my estimate, 
 which left me with all my bills paid and with a 
 handsome profit. Better still I had secured on 
 the strength of Carleton's gang another con- 
 tract. 
 
 The night I deposited my profit in the bank, 
 Ruth quite unconsciously took her pad and pen-
 
 MATURING PLANS 297 
 
 cil and sat down by my side as usual to figure 
 up the household expenses for the week. We 
 had been a bit extravagant that week because 
 she had been away from the house a good 
 deal. The total came to four dollars and sixty- 
 seven cents. When Ruth had finished I took 
 the pad and pencil away from her and put it 
 in my pocket. 
 
 "There's no use bothering your head any 
 more over these details," I said. 
 
 She looked at me almost sadly. 
 
 "No, Billy," she said, with a sigh, "there 
 isn't, is there?"
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 ONCE AGAIN A NEW ENGLANDER 
 
 During all those years we had never seen or 
 heard of any of our old neighbors. They had 
 hardly ever entered our thoughts except as 
 very occasionally the boy ran across one of his 
 former playmates. Shortly after this, how- 
 ever, business took me out into the old neigh- 
 borhood and I was curious enough to make a 
 few inquiries. There was no change. My 
 trim little house stood just as it then stood and 
 around it were the other trim little houses. 
 There were a few new houses and a few new- 
 comers, but all the old-timers were still there. 
 I met Grover, who was just recovering from a 
 long sickness. He didn't recognize me at first. 
 I was tanned and had filled out a good deal. 
 
 "Why, yes," he said, after I had told my 
 name. *'Let me see, you went off to Australia 
 or somewhere, didn't you, Carleton?" 
 
 "1 emigrated," I answered. 
 
 He looked up eagerly. 
 298
 
 ONCE AGAIN A NEW ENGLANDER 299 
 
 "I remember now. It seems to have agreed 
 with you." 
 
 ''You're still with the leather firm?" I in- 
 quired. 
 
 He almost started at this unexpected ques- 
 tion. 
 
 "Yes," he answered. 
 
 His eyes turned back to his trim little house, 
 then to me as though he feared I was bringing 
 him bad news. 
 
 "But I've been laid up for six weeks," he 
 faltered. 
 
 I knew what was troubling him. He was 
 wondering whether he would find his job when 
 he got back. Poor devil! If he didn't what 
 would become of his trim little house ? Grover 
 was older by five years than I had been when 
 the axe fell. 
 
 I talked with him a few minutes. There 
 had been a death or two in the neighborhood 
 and the children had grown up. That was the 
 only change. The sight of Grover made me 
 uncomfortable, so I hurried about my business, 
 eager to get home again. 
 
 God pity the poor ? Bah ! The poor are all 
 right if by poor you mean the tenement dwell- 
 ers. When you pray again pray God to pity
 
 300 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 the middle-class American on a salary. Pray 
 that he may not lose his job; pray that if he 
 does it shall be when he is very young; pray 
 that he may find the route to America. The 
 tenement dwellers are safe enough. Pray — 
 and pray hard — for the dwellers in the trim lit- 
 tle houses of the suburbs. 
 
 I've had my ups and downs, my profits and 
 losses since I entered business for myself but 
 I've come out at the end of each year well ahead 
 of the game. I never made again as much in 
 so short a time as I made on that first job. 
 One reason is that as soon as I was solidly on 
 my feet I started a profit sharing scheme, 
 dividing with the men what was made on 
 every job over a certain per cent. Many of 
 the original gang have left and gone into busi- 
 ness for themselves of one sort and another but 
 each one when he went, picked a good man to 
 take his place and handed down to him the 
 spirit of the gang. 
 
 Dick went through college and is now in my 
 office. He's a hustler and is going to make a 
 good business man. But thank God he has a 
 heart in him as well as brains. He hopes to 
 make "Carleton and Son" a big firm some day 
 and he will. If he does, every man who faith-
 
 ONCE AGAIN A NEW ENGLANDER 301 
 
 fully and honestly handles his shovel will be 
 part of the big firm. His idea isn't to make 
 things easy for the men; it's to preserve the 
 spirit they come over v^ith and give them a 
 share of the success due to that spirit. 
 
 We didn't move away from our dear, true 
 friends until the other boy came. Then I 
 bought two or three deserted farms outside the 
 city — fifty acres in all. I bought them on time 
 and at a bargain. I'm trying another experi- 
 ment here. I want to see if the pioneer spirit 
 won't bring even these worn out acres to life. 
 I find that some of my foreign neighbors have 
 made their old farms pay even though the good 
 Americans who left them nearly starved to 
 death. I have some cows and chickens and 
 pigs and am using every square foot of the soil 
 for one purpose or another. We pretty nearly 
 get our living from the farm now. 
 
 We entertain a good deal but we don't enter- 
 tain our new neighbors. There isn't a week 
 summer or winter that I don't have one or more 
 families of Carleton's gang out here for a half 
 holiday. It's the only way I can reconcile my- 
 self to having moved away from among them. 
 Ruth keeps very closely in touch with them all 
 and has any number of schemes to help them.
 
 302 
 
 ONE WAY OUT 
 
 Her pet one just now is for us to raise enough 
 cows so that we can sell fresh milk at cost to 
 those families which have kiddies. - 
 
 Dan comes out to see us every now and then. 
 He's making ten dollars to my one. He says 
 he's going to be mayor of the city some day. 
 I told him I'd do my best to prevent it. That 
 didn't seem to worry him. 
 
 'Tf ye was an Irishmon, now," he said, *T'd 
 be after sittin' up nights in fear of ye. But ye 
 ain't." 
 
 I'm almost done. This has been a hard job 
 for me. And yet it's been a pleasant job. It's 
 always pleasant to talk about Ruth. I found 
 that even by taking away her pad and pencil 
 I didn't accomplish much in the way of making 
 her less busy. Even with three children to 
 look after instead of one she does just as much 
 planning about the housework. And we don't 
 have sirloin steaks even now. We don't want 
 them. Our daily fare doesn't vary much from 
 what it was in the tenement. 
 
 Ruth just came in with Billy, Jr., in her arms 
 and read over these last few paragraphs. She 
 says she's glad I'm getting through with this 
 because she doesn't know what I might tell 
 about next. But there's nothing more to tell
 
 ONCE AGAIN A NEW ENGLANDER 303 
 
 about except that to-day as at the beginning 
 Ruth is the biggest thing in my life. I can't 
 wish any better luck for those trying to fight 
 their way out than they may find for a partner 
 half as good a wife as Ruth. I wouldn't be 
 afraid to start all over again to-day with her 
 by my side. 
 
 THE END
 
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