The Camera Eye (2)
we hurry wallowing like in a boat in the musty stably-smelling herdic cab He kept saying What would you do Lucy if I were to invite one of them to my table? They’re very lovely people Lucy the colored people and He had cloves in a little silver box and a rye whisky smell on his breath hurrying to catch the cars to New York
and She was saying Oh dolly I hope we wont be late and Scott was waiting with the tickets and we had to run up the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and all the little cannons kept falling out of the Olympia and everybody stooped to pick them up and the conductor Allaboard lady quick lady
they were little brass cannons and were bright in the sun on the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and Scott hoisted us all up and the train was moving and the engine bell was ringing and Scott put in your hand a little handful of brass tiny cannons just big enough to hold the smallest size red firecracker at the battle of Manila Bay and said Here’s the artillery Jack
and He was holding forth in the parlor car Why Lucy if it were necessary for the cause of humanity I would walk out and be shot any day you would Jack wouldn’t you? wouldn’t you porter? who was bringing appolinaris and He had a flask in the brown grip where the silk initialed handkerchiefs always smelt of bay rum
and when we got to Havre de Grace He said Remember Lucy we used to have to ferry across the Susquehanna before the bridge was built
and across Gunpowder Creek too
Mac
Russet hills, patches of woods, farmhouses, cows, a red colt kicking up its heels in a pasture, rail fences, streaks of marsh.
“Well, Tim, I feel like a whipped cur . . . So long as I’ve lived, Tim, I’ve tried to do the right thing,” Pop kept repeating in a rattling voice. “And now what can they be asayin’ about me?”
“Jesus God, man, there was nothin’ else you could do, was there? What the devil can you do if you haven’t any money and haven’t any job and a lot o’ doctors and undertakers and landlords come round with their bills and you with two children to support?”
“But I’ve been a quiet and respectable man, steady and misfortunate ever since I married and settled down. And now what’ll they be thinkin’ of me sneakin’ out like a whipped cur?”
“John, take it from me that I’d be the last one to want to bring disrespect on the dead that was my own sister by birth and blood . . . But it ain’t your fault and it ain’t my fault . . . it’s the fault of poverty, and poverty’s the fault of the system . . . Fenian, you listen to Tim O’Hara for a minute and Milly you listen too, cause a girl ought to know these things just as well as a man and for once in his life Tim O’Hara’s tellin’ the truth . . . It’s the fault of the system that don’t give a man the fruit of his labor . . . The only man that gets anything out of capitalism is a crook, an’ he gets to be a millionaire in short order . . . But an honest workin’ man like John or myself we can work a hundred years and not leave enough to bury us decent with.”
Smoke rolled white in front of the window shaking out of its folds trees and telegraph poles and little square shingle-roofed houses and towns and trolleycars, and long rows of buggies with steaming horses standing in line.
“And who gets the fruit of our labor, the goddam business men, agents, middlemen who never did a productive piece of work in their life.”
Fainy’s eyes are following the telegraph wires that sag and soar.
“Now, Chicago ain’t no paradise, I can promise you that, John, but it’s a better market for a workin’ man’s muscle and brains at present than the East is . . . And why, did you ask me why . . . ? Supply and demand, they need workers in Chicago.”
“Tim, I tellyer I feel like a whipped cur.”
“It’s the system, John, it’s the goddam lousy system.”
A great bustle in the car woke Fainy up. It was dark. Milly was crying again. He didn’t know where he was.
“Well, gentlemen,” Uncle Tim was saying, “we’re about to arrive in little old New York.”
In the station it was light; that surprised Fainy, who thought it was already night. He and Milly were left a long time sitting on a suitcase in the waitingroom. The waitingroom was huge, full of unfamiliarlooking people, scary like people in picture-books. Milly kept crying.
“Hey, Milly, I’ll biff you one if you don’t stop crying.”
“Why?” whined Milly, crying all the more.
Fainy stood as far away from her as possible so that people wouldn’t think they were together. When he was about ready to cry himself Pop and Uncle Tim came and took them and the suitcase into the restaurant. A strong smell of fresh whisky came from their breaths, and they seemed very bright around the eyes. They all sat at a table with a white cloth and a sympathetic colored man in a white coat handed them a large card full of printing.
“Let’s eat a good supper,” said Uncle Tim, “if it’s the last thing we do on this earth.”
“Damn the expense,” said Pop, “it’s the system that’s to blame.”
“To hell with the pope,” said Uncle Tim. “We’ll make a social-democrat out of you yet.”
They gave Fainy fried oysters and chicken and icecream and cake, and when they all had to run for the train he had a terrible stitch in his side. They got into a daycoach that smelt of coalgas and armpits. “When are we going to bed?” Milly began to whine. “We’re not going to bed,” said Uncle Tim airily. “We’re going to sleep right here like little mice . . . like little mice in a cheese.” “I doan like mice,” yelled Milly with a new flood of tears as the train started.
Fainy’s eyes smarted; in his ears was the continuous roar, the clatter clatter over crossings, the sudden snarl under bridges. It was a tunnel, all the way to Chicago it was a tunnel. Opposite him Pop’s and Uncle Tim’s faces looked red and snarling, he didn’t like the way they looked, and the light was smoky and jiggly and outside it was all a tunnel and his eyes hurt and wheels and rails roared in his ears and he fell asleep.
When he woke up it was a town and the train was running right through the main street. It was a sunny morning. He could see people going about their business, stores, buggies and spring-wagons standing at the curb, newsboys selling newspapers, wooden Indians outside of cigarstores. At first he thought he was dreaming, but then he remembered and decided it must be Chicago. Pop and Uncle Tim were asleep on the seat opposite. Their mouths were open, their faces were splotched and he didn’t like the way they looked. Milly was curled up with a wooly shawl all over her. The train was slowing down, it was a station. If it was Chicago they ought to get off. At that moment the conductor passed, an old man who looked a little like Father O’Donnell.
“Please, mister, is this Chicago?” “Chicago’s a long way off yet, son,” said the conductor without smiling. “This is Syracuse.”
And they all woke up, and for hours and hours the telephone poles went by, and towns, frame houses, brick factories with ranks and ranks of glittering windows, dumping grounds, trainyards, plowed land, pasture, and cows, and Milly got trainsick and Fainy’s legs felt like they would drop off from sitting in the seat so long; some places it was snowing and some places it was sunny, and Milly kept getting sick and smelt dismally of vomit, and it got dark and they all slept; and light again, and then the towns and the farmhouses and the factories all started drawing together, humping into warehouses and elevators, and the trainyards spread out as far as you could see and it was Chicago.
But it was so cold and the wind blew the dust so hard in his face and his eyes were so stuck together by dust and tiredness that he couldn’t look at anything. After they had waited round a long while, Milly and Fainy huddled together in the cold, they got on a streetcar and rode and rode. They were so sleepy they never knew exactly where the train ended and the streetcar began. Uncle Tim’s voice went on talking proudly excitedly, Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. Pop sat with his chin on his crutch. “Tim, I feel like a whipped cur.”
Fainy lived ten years in Chicago.
At first
he went to school and played baseball on back lots on Saturday afternoons, but then came his last commencement, and all the children sang My Country, ’Tis Of Thee, and school was over and he had to go to work. Uncle Tim at that time had his own jobprinting shop on a dusty side street off North Clark in the ground floor of a cranky old brick building. It only occupied a small section of the building that was mostly used as a warehouse and was famous for its rats. It had a single wide plateglass window made resplendent by gold Old English lettering: TIMOTHY O’HARA, JOB PRINTER.
“Now, Fainy, old sport,” said Uncle Tim, “you’ll have a chance to learn the profession from the ground up.” So he ran errands, delivered packages of circulars, throwaways, posters, was always dodging trolleycars, ducking from under the foamy bits of big truckhorses, bumming rides on delivery-wagons. When there were no errands to run he swept out under the presses, cleaned type, emptied the office wastepaper basket, or, during rush times, ran round the corner for coffee and sandwiches for the typesetter, or for a small flask of bourbon for Uncle Tim.
Pop puttered round on his crutch for several years, always looking for a job. Evenings he smoked his pipe and cursed his luck on the back stoop of Uncle Tim’s house and occasionally threatened to go back to Middletown. Then one day he got pneumonia and died quietly at the Sacred Heart Hospital. It was about the same time that Uncle Tim bought a linotype machine.
Uncle Tim was so excited he didn’t take a drink for three days. The floorboards were so rotten they had to build a brick base for the linotype all the way up from the cellar. “Well, when we get another one we’ll concrete the whole place,” Uncle Tim told everybody. For a whole day there was no work done. Everybody stood around looking at the tall black intricate machine that stood there like an organ in a church. When the machine was working and the printshop filled with the hot smell of molten metal, everybody’s eyes followed the quivering inquisitive arm that darted and flexed above the keyboard. When they handed round the warm shiny slugs of type the old German typesetter who for some reason they called Mike pushed back his glasses on his forehead and cried. “Fifty-five years a printer, and now when I’m old I’ll have to carry hods to make a living.”
The first print Uncle Tim set up on the new machine was the phrase: Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
When Fainy was seventeen and just beginning to worry about skirts and ankles and girls’ underwear when he walked home from work in the evening and saw the lights of the city bright against the bright heady western sky, there was a strike in the Chicago printing trades. Tim O’Hara had always run a union shop and did all the union printing at cost. He even got up a handbill signed, A Citizen, entitled An Ernest Protest, which Fainy was allowed to set up on the linotype one evening after the operator had gone home. One phrase stuck in Fainy’s mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.
The next day was Sunday, and Fainy went along Michigan Avenue with a package of the handbills to distribute. It was a day of premature spring. Across the rotting yellow ice on the lake came little breezes that smelt unexpectedly of flowers. The girls looked terribly pretty and their skirts blew in the wind and Fainy felt the spring blood pumping hot in him, he wanted to kiss and to roll on the ground and to run out across the icecakes and to make speeches from the tops of telegraph poles and to vault over trolleycars; but instead he distributed handbills and worried about his pants being frayed and wished he had a swell looking suit and a swell looking girl to walk with.
“Hey, young feller, where’s your permit to distribute them handbills?” It was a cop’s voice growling in his ear. Fainy gave the cop one look over his shoulder, dropped the handbills and ran. He ducked through between the shiny black cabs and carriages, ran down a side street and walked and walked and didn’t look back until he managed to get across a bridge just before the draw opened. The cop wasn’t following him anyway.
He stood on the curb a long time with the whistle of a peanutstand shrilling derisively in his ear.
That night at supper his uncle asked him about the handbills.
“Sure I gave ’em out all along the lakeshore . . . A cop tried to stop me but I told him right where to get off.” Fainy turned burning red when a hoot went up from everybody at the table. He filled up his mouth with mashed potato and wouldn’t say any more. His aunt and his uncle and their three daughters all laughed and laughed. “Well, it’s a good thing you ran faster than the cop,” said Uncle Tim, “else I should have had to bail you out and that would have cost money.”
The next morning early Fainy was sweeping out the office, when a man with a face like a raw steak walked up the steps; he was smoking a thin black stogy of a sort Fainy had never seen before. He knocked on the ground glass door.
“I want to speak to Mr. O’Hara, Timothy O’Hara.”
“He’s not here yet, be here any minute now, sir. Will you wait?”
“You bet I’ll wait.” The man sat on the edge of a chair and spat, first taking the chewed end of the stogy out of his mouth and looking at it meditatively for a long time. When Tim O’Hara came the office door closed with a bang. Fainy hovered nervously around, a little bit afraid the man might be a detective following up the affair of the handbills. Voices rose and fell, the stranger’s voice in short rattling tirades, O’Hara’s voice in long expostulating clauses, now and then Fainy caught the word foreclose, until suddenly the door flew open and the stranger shot out, his face purpler than ever. On the iron stoop he turned and pulling a new stogy from his pocket, lit it from the old one; growling the words through the stogy and the blue puff of smoke, he said, “Mr. O’Hara, you have twenty-four hours to think it over . . . A word from you and proceedings stop immediately.” Then he went off down the street leaving behind him a long trail of rancid smoke.
A minute later, Uncle Tim came out of the office, his face white as paper. “Fenian, old sport,” he said, “you go get yourself a job. I’m going out of business . . . Keep a weather eye open. I’m going to have a drink.” And he was drunk for six days. By the end of that time a number of meeklooking men appeared with summonses, and Uncle Tim had to sober up enough to go down to the court and put in a plea of bankruptcy.
Mrs. O’Hara scolded and stormed, “Didn’t I tell you, Tim O’Hara, no good’ll ever come with your fiddlin’ round with these godless labor unions and social-democrats and knights of labor, all of ’em drunk and loafin’bums like yourself, Tim O’Hara. Of course the master printers ud have to get together and buy up your outstandin’ paper and squash you, and serve you right too, Tim O’Hara, you and your godless socialistic boosin’ ways only they might have thought of your poor wife and her helpless wee babes, and now we’ll starve all of us together, us and the dependents and hangers on you’ve brought into the house.”
“Well, I declare,” cried Fainy’s sister Milly. “If I haven’t slaved and worked my fingers to the bone for every piece of bread I’ve eaten in this house,” and she got up from the breakfast table and flounced out of the room. Fainy sat there while the storm raged above his head; then he got up, slipping a corn muffin into his pocket as he went. In the hall he found the “help wanted” section of the Chicago Tribune, took his cap and went out into a raw Sunday morning full of churchbells jangling in his ears. He boarded a streetcar and went out to Lincoln Park. There he sat on a bench for a long time munching the muffin and looking down the columns of advertisements: Boy Wanted. But they none of them looked very inviting. One thing he was bound, he wouldn’t get another job in a printing shop until the strike was over. Then his eye struck
Bright boy wanted with amb. and lit. taste, knowledge of print. and pub. business. Conf. sales and distrib. proposition $15 a week apply by letter P.O. Box 1256b
Fainy’s head suddenly got very light. Bright boy, that’s me, ambition and literary taste . . . Gee, I must finish Looking Backward. . . and jez, I like read
ing fine, an’ I could run a linotype or set up print if anybody’d let me. Fifteen bucks a week . . . pretty soft, ten dollars’ raise. And he began to write a letter in his head, applying for the job.
DEAR SIR (MY DEAR SIR)
or maybe GENTLEMEN,
In applying for the position you offer in today’s Sunday Tribune I want to apply, (allow me to state) that I’m seventeen years old, no, nineteen, with several years’ experience in the printing and publishing trades, ambitious and with excellent knowledge and taste in the printing and publishing trades,
no, I can’t say that twice . . . And I’m very anxious for the job . . . As he went along it got more and more muddled in his head.
He found he was standing beside a peanut wagon. It was cold as blazes, a razor wind was shrieking across the broken ice and the black patches of water of the lake. He tore out the ad and let the rest of the paper go with the wind. Then he bought himself a warm package of peanuts.
Newsreel II
Come on and hear
Come on and hear
Come on and hear
In his address to the Michigan state Legislature the retiring governor, Hazen S. Pingree, said in part: I make the prediction that unless those in charge and in whose hands legislation is reposed do not change the present system of inequality, there will be a bloody revolution in less than a quarter of a century in this great country of ours.
CARNEGIE TALKS OF HIS EPITAPH
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
It is the best
It is the best