Windy McPherson's Son

In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a thought he had got from a book of Janet’s or from some talk he had heard, perhaps at his own dinner table.

“It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying dead.”

At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that issued from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam, hurrying and seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to the old commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his forces to withstand an attack.

“I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth,” he said.

Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction from the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed feet on the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon his body and subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind, chilled by the winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer’s dog licking his face.

Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or on the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he talked and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in life, sought no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the romance went out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and stupid, they were, almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they wanted passionately to get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding life with its problems and responsibilities. They always talked of the big cities, of “Chi” and “Cinci” and “Frisco,” and were bent upon getting to one of these places. They condemned the rich and begged and stole from the poor, talked swaggeringly of their personal courage and ran whimpering and begging before country constables. One of them, a tall, leering youth in a grey cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the edge of a village in Indiana, tried to rob him. Full of his new strength and with the thought of Ed’s wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind, Sam sprang upon him and had revenge for the beating received in the office of Ed’s hotel by beating this fellow in his turn. When the tall youth had partially recovered from the beating and had staggered to his feet, he ran off into the darkness, stopping when well out of reach to hurl a stone that splashed in the mud of the road at Sam’s feet.

Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in the day coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one of whom had weak lungs and had, with two younger brothers, taken up government land in the west. The woman had been with them for some months, helping them to get a start.

“I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know,” she told Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of fellow passengers.

She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a house, and had grown brown and strong at the work.

“And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has gained eleven pounds,” she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her heavy, muscular forearms.

She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods store, with her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her hearer’s interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the west and the loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they sometimes made her heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved success, although he did not see how her experience could serve as a guide to him.

“You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth,” he said, taking her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.

At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, “Where are you going?” adding genially, “I may be able to give you a lift.”

Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man’s manner or in his dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.

“I am on my way to the New Jerusalem,” he said seriously. “I am one who seeks God.”

The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when he saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam’s mouth, he turned the wheels of his buggy.

“Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,” he said.

On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road, told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward which he might work.

“It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I got at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me, and I want to find that way.”

The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious outlook on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking half the night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at her breast, who got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the shadows in a corner of the living-room listening to their talk.

The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at a coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.

“There is no spirit of God here,” he said, poking viciously at the coals in the stove. “The people here do not want me to talk to them of God. They have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has put them here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind of glorified Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished this life of work and of putting money in the savings bank.”

For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the country with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the house, continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man preach in his church.

The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and unnatural.

“The man,” thought Sam, “has no feeling for public address and is not treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the ideas he has expounded to me in his house.” He decided there was something to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort.

One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to him as he stood on the little porch before the house.

“I wish you would go away,” she said, standing with her babe in her arms and looking at the porch floor. “You stir him up and make him dissatisfied.”

Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness. There had been tears in the wife’s eyes.

In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and eating with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they would try to settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at some farm during the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man in the crew never talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long Sunday afternoons and whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.

The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe, who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the men all day, drove about the country half the night making deals with farmers for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked constantly on the point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one of the men, who had been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that at the end of the season their employer did not have enough money left from his season of work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines and that he continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.

“One has to keep going,” said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him on the matter.

When told to keep Sam’s wage until the end of the season he looked relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried and said that he had no money.

“I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a little time,” he said.

Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him from the shadows at the back of the barn.

“Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?” he asked.

Joe looked indignant.

“A man wants independence,” he said.

When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a stream, and tearing up Joe’s note watched the torn pieces of it float away upon the brown water.

CHAPTER III

Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days on which something happened or on which something outside himself interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed, staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange experiences.

At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town in eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a railroad track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September at the end of his first year of wandering and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood by the bar drinking together. As they drank they became more and more friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs and boasting. One of them got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced man with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender and had to work long hours.

“Drink what you want, boys, and then I’ll tell you what you owe,” he said to the men standing along the bar.

Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room, and looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had for the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen, Sam said to himself, “I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At least I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this tramping on the road and thinking.”

The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an obscure place had made its proprietor what is called “well fixed.” It had a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the main street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks was but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men from the freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand about drinking beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at the side door was prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door, took drinks and hurried out again, looking up the alley and running quickly when they found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and when Sam had worked for a few days in the place he once made the mistake of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.

“Let them ask for it,” said the proprietor gruffly. “Do you want to insult a man?”

On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks. When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these men and put the bottle before them, saying, “Drink all you want of the stuff.”

When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment by the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat pockets and looking at the floor.

“Bar flies,” the proprietor explained laconically.

The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it into stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into bottles as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles of well known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for one of these brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from beneath the bar, a bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of his own mixture. As Al sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know nothing the bartender’s art and stood all day handing out Al’s poisonous stuff and the foaming glasses of beer the workingmen drank in the evening.

Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam most. Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over their shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at Sam apologetically.

“Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold,” they would say, as though repeating a formula.

At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life’s unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day’s duty, and his curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in at the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked them why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam’s question an impertinence.

“You fool, don’t you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?” Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.

CHAPTER IV

One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and women going through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to overcome a feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening before. He had come into town over a poorly made clay road running through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores of a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges of the town.

Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of man’s struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in the little park, with the early morning sun shining down through the glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him through the night.

A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying workers, and stopped to sit beside him.

“On the road, brother?” he asked.

Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.

“Fools and slaves,” he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women passing on the sidewalk. “See them going like beasts to their bondage? What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of dogs.”

He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.

“We are all fools and slaves,” said Sam, stoutly.

Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.

“There, you talk sense,” he cried. “Welcome to our town, stranger. We have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among them. Come and have breakfast with me.”

In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of the fact.

“I refuse to work! I scorn it!” he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in the air.

Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried because of his connection with the movement.

“She wants me to be respectable,” he said sadly, and added, “What’s the use trying to explain to a woman? I can’t get her to see the difference between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I’ve given up trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police.”

He talked of a strike going on among some girl employés of a Jewish shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to the scene of the strike.

The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting oaths over his shoulder.

Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and down with them before the grocery store.

“What are you doing to win?” he asked when they had told him of their grievances.

“We do what we can!” said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and spokesman among the strikers. “We walk up and down here and try to get a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns, when they go in and come out.”

Frank, the University man, spoke up. “We are putting up stickers everywhere,” he said. “I myself have put up hundreds of them.”

He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles about town. The thing was vilely written. “Down with the dirty scabs” was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.

Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude brutality of the text printed on the slip.

“Do you call women workers names like that?” he asked.

“They have taken our work from us,” the Jewish girl answered simply and began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the low wage had meant to them and to their families. “To me it does not so much matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can support me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here with which to feed their families.”

Sam’s mind began working on the problem.

“Here,” he declared, “is something definite to do, a battle in which I will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women.”

He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of honour unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to Bill and Ed.

“I failed with my money,” he thought, “now I will try to help these girls with my energy.”

Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.

“I will help you get your places back,” he said.

Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as they came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and turned in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar still in his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets running forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one of whom, a young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted something over her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the Hebrew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled and lighted his pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls running through his mind.

During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a saloon in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to men of the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three girls patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless walking seemed to him a useless waste of energy.