“Say, young fellow, is them all the recommends you have? You was a very short time at both of them places.”
This fatal defect in my references had never occurred to me, and I began to stammer explanations which only served to get me into deeper water. Mr. ---- interrupted me, and handing back my letters, he said:
“You’ll have to bring me something more satisfactory than them,” and went on with his work.
The young Swede followed me out of the passage.
“Did you get the job?” he asked, in good English.
“No,” I said, “not yet. You have a good chance; you would better wait until the boss sends for you.”
“I guess not to-day,” he answered, and he stolidly refused my advice, and I saw him disappear by another way from the Stock-yards.
No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO, Wednesday, February 3, 1892.
At half-past five this afternoon I completed seven weeks of service as a hand-truckman in a factory. Mrs. Schultz, my landlady, tells me that she is sorry that I am going away; and now that the long-looked-for end is come, I am not in the least elated, as I thought that I should be. But the days are lengthening markedly with the promise of the coming spring, and I am forcefully reminded that the time grows short for the study at close range of much that still awaits me in this great working city before I can well set out again upon my westward journey.
Seven weeks as a factory-hand is very little. Like all phases of my experiment, it is but the lightest touch upon the surface of the life which I seek to understand. Strong and infinitely appealing are the basal elements of existence, and yet mysterious, evasive, receding like a spectre from your craving grasp. And in the secret of its veiled presence speaks a Voice: “Only through living is it given unto men to know; none but the heaven-sent may know otherwise. Not by experiment, but only through the poignancy of real agony and joy is my secret learned.”
As a witness of certain external conditions and as a sharer in them, I may tell nothing but the truth, and yet the whole truth reaches far beyond the compass of my vision--the joys and creature comforts of men whose birth and breeding and life-long training fit them smoothly to circumstances which seem to me all friction; the blind human agony of these men, as necessity bears hard upon them, and, helpless, they watch the sufferings of their wives and children, and have no hope nor any escape but death; the unconscious delight in living intensely in the present with easy adjustment to homely surroundings, and no anxious thought for the future and no morbid introspection; the sharply conscious endurance of grim realities, which baffle the untrained reason and paralyze the will, and make of a strong man a terrified child in the grip of the superstitious horrors of disease, and loss of work, and the “bad luck” which plays so large a part in that sordid thing which he calls life.