BOOK FOUR. -- THE LEVEL

CHAPTER V.

MY PROBLEM DEFINES ITSELF AND I SOLVE IT.

HIS is the last chapter of my wanderings.
Light gleamed ahead. My life-work was clearly outlined in my mind. I had discovered the soil in which I could grow. This book has nothing to do with that life-work itself; it does not deal with the growth in that soil. Its topic is the search and its end. I might stop here; I had found.
Unfortunately, and typically for the immigrant, a conspiracy of circumstances seemed to arise, bent upon, and well capable of, shaking the strongest faith of him whose wider outlook was none too firmly established as yet.
I was reconciled to America. I was convinced that the American ideal was right; that it meant a tremendous advance over anything which before the war could reasonably be called the ideal of Europe. A reconciliation of contradictory tendencies, a bridging of the gulf between the classes was aimed at, in Europe, at best by concessions from above, from condescension; in America the fundamental rights of those whom we may call the victims of civilization were clearly seen and, in principle, acknowledged -- so I felt -- by a majority of the people. Consequently the gulf existing between the classes was more apparent than real; the gulf was there, indeed; but it was there as a consequence of an occasional vitiation of the system, not of the system itself. I might put it this way. In Europe the city was the crown of the edifice of the state; the city culminated in the court -- a republican country like France being no exception, for the bureaucracy took the place, there, of the aristocracy in other countries. In America the city was the mere agent of the

page 435

country -- necessary, but dependent upon the country in every way -- politically, intellectually, economically. Let America beware of the time when such a relation might be reversed: it would become a mere bridgehead of Europe, as in their social life some of its cities are even now.* The real reason underlying this difference I believed to be the fact that Europe, as far as the essentials of life were concerned, was a consumer; whereas America was a producer. The masses were fed, in Europe, from the cities; the masses were fed, in America, from the country. Blessed is the nation that remains rural in this respect, for it will inherit the world. Freedom and happiness flee, unless "superest ager."
That was my idea; and it contained the germ of an error. In my survey of the American attitude I was apt to take ideals for facts, aspirations for achievements. From the vantage-ground of retrospection, I can only be glad that an anticlimax intervened before I set about building my life.
When I came from Europe, I came as an individual; when I settled down in America, at the end of my wanderings, I was a social man. My view of life, if now, at the end, I may use this word once more, had been, in Europe, historical, it had become, in America, ethical. We come indeed from Hell and climb to Heaven; the Golden Age stands at the never-attainable end of history, not at Man's origins. Every step forward is bound to be a compromise; right and wrong are inseparably mixed; the best we can hope for is to make right prevail more and more; to reduce wrong to a smaller and smaller fraction of the whole till it reaches the vanishing point. Europe regards the past; America regards the future. America is an ideal and as such has to be striven for; it has to be realized in partial victories.**

*I must repeat that this book was, in all its essential parts, written decades ago.

**I have since come to the conclusion that the ideal as I saw and still see it has been abandoned by the U.S.A. That is one reason why I became and remained a Canadian.

page 436

---

When I walked back to Walloh, I had two hundred dollars deposited to my name in the bank of the town, and some little sum in my pocket besides. I carried my bundle as I had done three months ago, when I had walked the same road in the opposite direction. Financially I was very nearly where I had been when I had first landed at Montreal. But then my only idea had been to make money; now my one idea was to live and to help others to live.

Three months ago I had been a hobo; now I adopted the disguise of one. I have since gone out like that again, a good many times; I have always enjoyed such holidays.

I reached Walloh late in the afternoon and boarded an evening train going north. After a ride of seventy or eighty miles I dropped off at some junction and struck west again. For two or three days I tramped it, alone. The crops stood in stooks; I should find work at threshing.

Then I came to a town. As it chanced, I hit upon a livery-stable, somewhere along the track. The front of the building was occupied by a real-estate broker's office.

I entered the stable and found the hostler, a morose elderly man crippled with rheumatism.

"Any work around here?" I enquired.

"Sure," he grumbled. "Might pull the harness off that horse there." He stopped at a stall, looking with helpless eyes at a long-legged driver.

"I'll do that for you," I replied, for he was bent double with suffering. When I had finished, I turned and said, "But, you know, that was not exactly the way I meant it."

Since I had helped him, he softened. "I guess not," he said with a sigh and went to the front of the building.

I followed him.

"No," he answered my question at last. "Not yet. They are through cutting, and haven't started threshing. But in a few days, I suppose. You see the boss."

"The livery man?" I asked.

"Barn belongs to two lawyers," he said. "Real estate

page 437

---

and farm loans, too. They've got a big farm south of here, fifteen miles out. Three thousand acres or so."

"Where can I find either one?"

"Stick around," he replied. "One of them will drop in before dark."

In the dusk of the evening a small, stout man appeared in the office in front of the stable. I followed him in.

"Have you any use for a harvest-hand?" I enquired.

He looked me over. "I can use some teamsters," he said. "Can you handle horses?"

"I can," I replied. "For threshing?"

"Yes; but we won't start before next week. Meanwhile I need a man to look after a bunch of horses here in town if you are satisfied with the wages I offer."

"How much would that be?"

"Well," he said, "I'll pay you a dollar and a half a day. You will have to board yourself. Not here. In the stable at my house. You can sleep in the hayloft, if you want to. Meanwhile you can haul hay for my drivers. When I take you out to the farm, you get your board, of course, and the current wages."

"All right," I said. And thus it was settled.

I began work next day, hauling hay from a nearby half-section of land owned by my employer. There was a man living on the place, a Finn who spoke only the most broken of English. Since he was getting ready to move, I presumed him to be a renting tenant; I was interested in his experience. My curiosity as to the economic life of the immigrant settler led to enquiries; and they disclosed a startling condition.

This man had come to America five or six years ago; he had brought a family which had since increased by three or four members. This family he had at first left behind in the city, while he himself was drifting about. He had come to this town and started to work for my present employer who, seeing his great strength and his love of work, had treated him well, had gained his confidence, and

page 438

---

finally had made him an offer which had seemed good to the Finn. It had even seemed kind.

The offer was this. The lawyer would sell the Finn a half-section of land at twenty dollars an acre, to be paid for in half-crop payments. He would build a shack and a stable for him at so-and-so much, and equip him besides with all the machinery and the horses he needed at stated prices. The machinery was second-hand; I do not remember the sums involved; but I do remember that the price as stipulated was what it had cost when new. Of horses there had been five-good horses, the Finn admitted; but colts, not broken or trained for the work. The price of these was one thousand dollars. For the whole of this equipment the Finn had been induced to give five notes, lien-notes, with that iniquitous clause, ". . . Or if the party of the first part should consider this note insecure, he shall have full power to declare this and all other notes made by me in his favour due and payable forthwith, and he may take possession of the property and hold it until this note and all other notes made by me are paid, or sell the said property at public or prIvate sale; the proceeds thereof to be applied in reducing the amount unpaid thereon; and the holder thereof, notwithstanding such taking possession or sale, shall thereafter have the right to proceed against me and recover, and I agree to pay, the balance then found to be due thereon."

This, I am aware, is perfectly within the law; it may even work without hardship where "the party of the second part" is fully aware of what he signs, though I doubt it. This Finn was an intelligent man; he could read and write his own language. But, as far as English goes, he was to all intents and purposes illiterate; through none of his fault. He had been turned loose on American soil, equipped for the struggle of life with nothing but an inherent trustfulness; he was paying for his lesson with bankruptcy. My own, comparatively trifling and mild experiences, annoying as they had been, here widened out for the first time into the experience of a whole class of

page 439

---

immigrants, and that the most desirable one. In every nation there are sharks, of course; it is only just to say that in later years I found the worst of the sharks among successful immigrants. In every nation there are brutes and fools; we cannot charge their doings to the collective score. But children need looking after; and the immigrant is, as far as the ways of this country are concerned, no better than a child. Here was a bona-fide settler, a prospective citizen of the most promising kind, turned into a sower of discontent. Do you blame him?

Let me explain how the compact between the lawyer and the Finn worked out.

The lawyer played the part of the lumber-dealer, the contractor, the implement-dealer, the horse-dealer, the real estate agent, the collector, the bailiff. At his disposal were willing friends and helpers; there was, above all, the whole, inexorable, and irresistible machinery of the law which he knew well how to handle. With all these assistants, he stood arrayed against a single man who was helpless because he did not even know the language of the country.

The lawyer made a profit on the lumber, on the building, on the implements, on the horses, and on the land; but he was not satisfied with that.

If he had rented the land, he would have had to furnish all that he had furnished the Finn, free of charge; his only gain would have been the customary half-share of the crop. It is true, he would have remained the owner of the land and the equipment; but he also would have had to pay the taxes on the property. As it was, the Finn paid the taxes and the interest on his debt for two years, in addition to two payments on the capital involved.

Then one of the horses fell; the machinery -- which had not been new in the first place -- began to go wrong at a critical time. When the third of the notes fell due and he found himself unable to pay, the bailiff seized machinery and live-stock. These were offered at prIvate sale and readily found a buyer who proved to be the second lawyer

page 440

---

of the little town, the seller's partner; he paid a laughable price for the whole of the outfit and shortly sold it back to the first owner at a profit, but still at considerably less than the Finn had paid. His profit was his part of the loot.

The Firm still owed a considerable balance; his equity in the farm and whatever he had acquired in the first two years of his life as an independent farmer -- two cows, some pigs, a flock of chickens, the furniture in his shack, and so on -- came under the hammer. The net result was that the Finn had worked three years for nothing -- not as a renter would work -- with an eye only to his advantage but as the owner works, from sun to sun and longer, straining his powers to the very limit.

I might add right here that the same farm was sold again, equipment and all, under exactly the same conditions -- with the price of the land raised to twenty-five dollars an acre -- before I even left town, that is, within three or four weeks.

My first impulse was, of course, to leave then and there; but on second thought I decided. otherwise. To leave would have been a weakness. If at any future time I wanted to be of help, I had to study just such cases. I saw even at the time that, unless such problems are faced and the easy remedies applied, nothing could come from the indiscriminate admission of immigrants, but unmitigated evil. I might add that most of the fashionable talk about Americanization strikes me as mere cant. I know of no more effective means towards that end than the open, Frank, unsugared square deal.

With my new employer no such relation was possible as had sprung up between Mr. Mackenzie and myself. The farm was a matter of fifteen miles from the town. Its lay-out resembled in a general way that of the outlying camps on the Mackenzie place, though, of course, things were on a smaller scale. There were only twenty-five men in the crew; but in the absence of the owners of the land -- which was primarily held for speculation and disposed

page 441

---

of in parts as buyers were found -- there was again that impersonal air about the work which had characterized the organization on Mr. Mackenzie's farm.

I found the crew in a turmoil. When I appeared, I was questioned about wages offered in town. I was little interested in the amounts I was making and could give no information on this point.

The foreman asserted that the men were getting what anybody else got in this neighbourhood. But they demanded certainty. They were in a strange isolation on the farm. They were kept busy throughout, rain or shine; and the only way to get to town would have been to ask the foreman to let them off from their work for a day and to give them a ride to boot. They were all of that type of men who, like the Swedes, hang on to the work as long as they can, most of them being Finns. I was most forcibly struck by the way in which nationalities ran in streaks in this northern harvest-migration of floating labour. At Mr. Mackenzie's place the Swedes had predominated; here it was the Finns.

I had been on the place for two weeks or so, driving a four-horse team with a load of wheat to town in the morning and coming back late at night. Then, one evening, the men held a secret meeting in the horse-barn, and I was asked to come.

When I entered, I found them talking in a lively and excited way, in Finnish, which I did not understand. What struck me, however, right at the start, was the air of mistrust, of suspicion with regard to the management of the farm. Apparently the owners enjoyed a "hard name". On the Mackenzie place nobody had ever questioned the perfect fairness in money-matters between men and owner. The wages had been about twenty-five cents above those which other farmers of the neighbourhood were paying; whenever an advance took place, the foreman had made it known at the breakfast table. Here it turned out that nobody knew exactly what he was being credited with. All of them had been engaged at "current

page 442

---

wages"; the foreman, when asked, was evasive; he never stated a definite sum without adding "I think" the last sum which he had mentioned that way had been three and a half dollars a day; but even that was no more than "he thought" they were getting. The season was drawing towards its end; none of these men had any particular reason to work on this farm rather than on any other. There was no consideration of loyalty involved. They were after the greatest number of dollars in the shortest possible time.

As it happened, it was my turn next morning to take the first load to town; my tank had been filled just before quitting time at night. Under these circumstances I would start before break of day and reach town in time for feeding the horses; that would leave me an hour or so for my own meal and for whatever else I might wish to undertake.

The men asked me to go to the station at train-time, when farmers would be in, looking for help, and to enquire about the wages paid elsewhere. I promised to do so, and we dispersed.

At the station next day three or four farmers addressed me, offering work; an enquiry as to the wages disclosed the fact that nobody offered less than four dollars, while one of them offered four and a quarter a day.

It was about five o'clock in the afternoon when I got home. As soon as I appeared on the road, within sight of the crews, the whistle of the engine blew for me to come out to the field and to reload for the next morning. I turned on to the stubble and, when I passed through the corner where the men were loading sheaves, they crowded around me and asked for the news.

Everybody, as if by a concerted plan, dropped his work and jumped into the box of my grain-tank. It was thus, with a load of seething humanity, that I reached the separator.

The men at once called the foreman aside and surrounded him, threatening. I heard the foreman protesting, arguing, promising; and after a short

page 443

---

time, while I was waiting for the grain to begin pouring into my tank, the men dispersed, going back to their work.

The foreman came over to where I was waiting.

"Get out of that tank," he shouted to me, his voice nearly drowned by the vibratory pounding of engine and separator which were running empty.

"I'll give you your time," he went on; "I'm going to town, you come along."

I jumped to the ground. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"No damned foreign agitators wanted around," he shouted angrily.

I shrugged my shoulders and walked off to camp.

When we reached the office in front of the livery stable, the foreman and my employer held a whispered conference. Then the lawyer went to a desk and made out a cheque.

I sat down and waited till he tossed the pink slip across a small table at which I was sitting. I looked at it and did some rapid mental arithmetic.

"Just what do you call current wages?" I asked.

"What I pay the rest of my men," he replied. "How much that is is none of your business. You don't think that I pay current wages to a man who quits before the work is finished, do you?"

"Oh," I said with a shrug of my shoulders and a smile, "that explains this cheque."

I crushed it into my pocket and rose.

That was the end of my work as a harvest hand.

Now those were the years of tree-planting in these parts. Every house in town was surrounded by a yard with young plantations a few years old. It had struck me that many of them needed attending to. The tree used was box-elder, a bad choice in a windy country, since it is apt to break in the crotch. I still had my tree-saw and pruning knife; and somehow I did not wish to leave the town just then. I went out offering my services as a tree-pruner, charging forty cents an hour, and finding an ample clientele.

One day, a man who reminded me of the senatorial Mr.

page 444

---

Warburton, the manager of the veneer-mill in the little Indiana town, had been watching me for some time at work and at last addressed me.

"You seem to know your business," he said. "I have a large plantation at the north end of the town. Do you care to look it over and see what you can do with it?"

"Certainly," I agreed. "I'll go with you now."

We came to an agreement on the basis of my usual charge; I estimated that the work would take me five or six days.

I did not know the man; but an enquiry brought out the fact that he was the partner of my previous employer; a curious coincidence, I thought.

I went to work with even more than my usual vigour and alacrity; I was anxious to show that I, at least, was willing to give a square deal even though I had not received it at his partner's hands. Frequently, while I was at work, the man would come and look on, asking questions, making suggestions. By dint of special efforts I managed to finish the work in four days.

On the morning of the fifth day I wrote a bill for sixteen dollars and went to the law-office to present it. A stenographer took the bill and asked me to return in the afternoon. When I did so, she handed me four dollars and stated that her employer had said that was all my work was worth.

I refused to take the money and asked to see him; but he was not in.

I went to his house, and he was not there; nor could I find him anywhere else. A sullen anger took possession of me; at him and his partner. They were the lawyers in town; they were prominent and respected citizens; but they were crooks, and I longed to tell them so.

To this very day I hope they will read this record; if they do, they may rest assured that I hoard their names in my memory.

In the evening I was sitting at the station, on the platform, talking with the section-boss with whom I had

page 445

---

fallen in and to whom I told my experience with the noble pair, when a tall, skinny man touched me on the shoulder and gave me a sign to follow him. He led the way to the side of the station-building.

"I'm the chief?" he said by way of introduction.

"The chief?" I asked blankly.

"Yes," he said, uncovering a badge on the edge of his vest. "The chief of police. You better leave town; there are complaints against you."

"Complaints?" I asked. "Of what nature?"

"Never mind," he said and turned to go. "You know. You can't go about here and threaten respectable citizens. Take my advice and clear out." With that he walked off.

Then I returned to the section-boss and told him of the new development.

He, too, laughed; but to my amazement he advised me to take the hint and go. "Can't beat politics in this country," he said.

"But what can they do except expose their own crooked dealings?"

"Railroad you on a trumped-up charge," he replied.

I mused for a while. When my first anger had cooled, I decided that the advice was good. What did it matter? I wanted to get out in any case. After I had made the big change, then it would be time to go after men like these. I had meanwhile seen enough of America to put the incident down for what it was: an incident. It no longer clouded my whole horizon for me, as my experiences with Messrs. Hannan and Howard, Tinker and Wilbur had done. I had simply run up against a pair that were sailing close to the wind; I had hit upon another crooked game; crooked games were no longer the world. The immigrant always sees only a partial view; but I had seen enough partial views to make their average more or less true to reality. I even thought myself lucky to have run up against this case; the very fact that I could take it as I did seemed to prove that I was ready for the work which I had chosen. If you run down a river in a boat

page 446

---

and your boat brings up against a snag, you do not get out to dam the river and to dislodge the snag; you turn your boat and push it off into the current; the snag is not the river, after all.

As it happened, the section-boss could offer me means to leave town. He was shorthanded in his gang; that very morning a man, after receiving his wages, quitted work, leaving at his tool-shed a hand-car which was needed further back along the line. The signal-posts along the track were to be repainted before snow-up; there was a week's work to be done, at a dollar and seventy-five a day. If I cared to take the "job", I could have it; he would get into communication with the district-superintendent over the wire.

Thus it came that my rambles ended by a week in the open. I shot along the line of steel at a speed which depended only on my endurance and strength. There was fun in the work. Sometimes I wished that one of my old friends in the capitals of Europe could see me thus. Whenever I met a signal-post, I got off my hand-car, armed with paint-pot and brush. At night I made some station and stayed in town. To all whom I met I was no longer a tramp or a hobo; I was a duly labelled painter of signs for one of the great lines on the American continent; as such I "belonged".

For the first time in a year I thought of young Ray; one day I wrote to him to find out where he might be. I gave the city of Winnipeg as my address; for by now I felt that I wanted to become "repatriated" in Canada where I had made my first fight for economic independence.

At last the day came when I reported at the office at Grand Forks, handed over my car, and received my pay.

I have mentioned a little notebook which I had started to use soon after I had first set out from New York. A few years ago that little booklet was still at hand. It held my accounts, among other things; and I remember that, when I had received the wages earned on Mr. Mackenzie's farm and left on deposit in the bank, the net result of my

page 447

---

season's work as a harvest-hand showed a saving of $249.35, on the day when I bought my ticket for Winnipeg.

When I arrived there, I had a number of interviews. I wanted to go to foreign settlements and help recent immigrants to build their partial views of America into total views; I wanted to assist them in realizing their promised land. The upshot was that I applied for and obtained a position as teacher.

I have been a teacher ever since; and not only a teacher, but the doctor, lawyer, and business-agent of all the immigrants in my various districts.

And twenty-seven years after the end of my rambles I published the first of my few books.

THE END

 

A Note on the Type: 1927 (First Edition, Graphic Publishers)

Advertisements: 1927 (First Edition, Graphic Publishers)

Previous Chapter Contents