The Autobiography of an Individualist: Iv
I
HAVING made up my mind to leave South Africa, it did n’t take me long to get under way. The situation at the time, political and otherwise, was not very promising. With outspoken sympathy for Boers and Kaffirs, my prospects were anything but bright. In most of the towns, British sentiment was very aggressive, and personal encounters between Uitlandcrs and Africanders were of daily occurrence. As a matter-of-fact, there was nearly as much danger in leaving the country as there was in remaining and facing the music. But having made up my mind, I selected the easiest route and that was by way of the Diamond Fields. On a former visit to these fields I had got a glimpse of their interest ing activities, and I was anxious to widen the experience. So I made my plans to travel from Pretoria to Kimberley, and thence to the Cape.
Just before leaving Pretoria, however, I met a prospector by the name of James. He was one of those enthusiastic individuals who never take no for an answer, or defeat for an end. He had been one of the first on the ground at the Pilgrims Rest Gold Fields, and when speculation grew tame in that quarter, he turned his attention to Rustenburg and to the district now known as the Rand.
When I met James in Pretoria the future of the Rand, with commerce and railroads and Johannesburg and billions of gold in the mountains, was already clearly mapped out in his prophetic yet practical imagination. In fact, he had the samples of quartz in his saddle-bags at the time, and he was quietly trying to raise the funds wherewith to purchase a few farms in the district, upon which his faith in the Transvaal and his hopes for his own future were pinned. His enthusiasm was contagious. His was the inspiration derived from a certainty. I was sorely tempted to embark, in a small way, in his venture. Indeed, I actually put off my departure for a day or two, hesitating.
But James could n’t wait for me or anybody else. The gold fever was already in the air, the price of farms in the promising districts was on the jump, and altogether the situation was vastly different from the days at the end of the Burgers’ administration, when a farm of six thousand acres was actually exchanged for two bottles of Hennessey’s ‘three star’ brandy.
But mental and political considerations were more potent than the glitter of gold dust or the dreams of riches. So, finally, I purchased a passage on the Kimberley coach and made my exit from the Transvaal.
The Diamond Fields at the time of my last visit was without doubt one of the most peculiar and interesting spots on the face of the earth. Their desolate, sun-baked surroundings, the diamond-crazed faces of the inhabitants, the absolute fury of the social and business conditions, and above all, that awful ‘pit’ with its hive of toiling humanity in the bowels of the earth, are never-to-be-forgotten features of my African experience. If I were not positive, however, that these scenes and conditions made such a lasting impression on my mind as to influence, in some degree, the current of my human philosophy, I should now dismiss the diamond fields without further comment. But the impressions were lasting, and the pictures that remain in my mind are most interesting. In passing, then, let me take a final glance at the strange panorama.
Kimberley was not then the city of to-day. The pit itself was its principal and its unforgettable feature. Forever widening and deepening, it was constantly forcing the houses away and back from its edges. Everywhere on these edges, shanties and bar-rooms and brokers’ offices were literally hanging. Farther back there were streets, hotels by the dozen, and a wide market-place. Scattered in tents, wagons, and houses on the surrounding plain were thousands of white men, thousands of Kaffirs, and here and there a woman. Over the town itself, during the day-time, there was a dazzling glare from a sea of white iron roofs. The pit itself, as far down as the eye could penetrate, was a labyrinth of steel wires and flying buckets, forever hoisting, darting hither and thither , and emptying their precious loads of slimy blue clay. Everywhere on the enormous wings and ends of the pit, terraces rose above terraces, all of them lined with puffing engines, and swarming with human dots.
At the time of my last visit to these diamond fields the community was divided into two hostile camps, consisting of legitimate and illegitimate brokers. The former had offices and a license, the latter scorned expense and control of any kind, and had dealings directly, and on the quiet, with the Kaffirs in the pit. The Kaffir laborers were just then beginning to understand the opportunities connected with their employment, and scores of valuable stones were finding their way into the market and giving no end of trouble to the legitimate dealers. When a Kaffir was caught at the game he received an unmerciful thrashing from the vigilance committee, and occasionally was strung up on a lamp-post, for there were no trees in the vicinity. But the thrashed Kaffir went home to his Kraal and thought it all over; he inevitably returned with all sorts of ingenious devices for concealing the gems on his naked person, which he perforated with holes and tunnels, and in his stomach, which he manipulated in various ways at will. Finally, in course of time, the mine itself was surrounded by a high fence and a rigid system of examination was instituted by the authorities. Its principal features were emetics, tapping the bodies to locate the cavities, and hanging by the neck; but at the time I left the fields this naked Kaffir thief was still the unsolved problem.
I took passage for Cape Town on the ‘Royal Mail’ cart. It was then known as the ‘Diamond Express.’ The fare was double that charged on the ordinary diligence. The equipment was a small two-wheeled cart, four horses or mules, a Hottentot driver, the mailbags, and a single passenger. The stages were about two hours, ‘on horseback,’ apart, and the pace was a break-neck gallop, night and day, four hundred miles, from Kimberley to Beaufort,— the latter was then the terminus of the railroad, — and thence to Cape Town.
In this way, then, without further adventure, I took my departure from South Africa.
II
In looking back I always find that the days spent in South Africa are among the most useful and personally interesting of my career. Just at the time when my intellectual and religious development was being subjected to tests, on the outcome of which to quite an extent the direction of my activities for the future was dependent, a sort of physical appeal to my manhood, and to my human sympathies, was experienced. It is quite clear to me now that a healthy and vigorous body and an adventurous spirit, such as I acquired in South Africa, were among the essential characteristics that later on enabled and encouraged me to go to work on wider problems than were to be found in the surroundings and routine of a switch-tower.
The voyage from Cape Town, South Africa, to Boston, Massachusetts, was uneventful; and there was not an incident connected with it, or a personage met on the way, that calls for attention.
I arrived in Boston in the month of May, 1881. So far as my acquaintance with a single inhabitant of the United States was concerned, I might just as well have dropped down from the moon. I was almost as ignorant of the geography of the country as was Columbus at the time he was trying to figure out the location of the continent in the western hemisphere. My personal interest in the country dates from my conversation with ‘Bull Run ’ Russell; and backed by a roving disposition, and a mind that was just beginning to develop its world-interest, I came over to America to investigate. My people in different parts of the world had already given me up as an irreclaimable wanderer.
Following along the lines of my special interest then, I began by spending some time wandering about the streets of the city of Boston, studying manners, conditions, and people. I had a little money in my pocket, and I was in no particular hurry to make myself known or to settle down at a fixed occupation. I visited churches, factories, stores, theatres, dance-halls, and the slums. To a certain extent, under different conditions, I had behaved in a similar manner in South America and Africa; but my points of view had been changing and, when I arrived in Boston I was no longer a boy, trying to protect myself from society and social temptations, but a man of considerable experience, with a more or less definite purpose.
My personal appearance at the time was a little out of the ordinary. I wore a corduroy coat with a belt, very negligée shirts, and on my wrists were a number of copper rings or Kaffir bangles, popularly worn by white people of those days in many parts of South Africa. But, to my mind, I was by no means as picturesque as the average Bostonian of the period. For one thing, the coat of the day was ridiculously short, and the significant feature of the male countenance was the popular ‘mutton-chop’ patch on the cheeks, which hitherto I had always associated with the box-seat of a carriage.
Still more astonishing was the costume of the women: hideous ‘barberpole’ skirts, which gave an up-anddown appearance to the faces, were supplemented by greasy-looking curls or ringlets patched indiscriminately on the forehead and occasionally on the back of the neck. Added to this was the huge, yet in some way jaunty, projection or bustle that brought up the rear of this typical female ensemble of the early eighties.
Turning from people to conditions, however, the situation at the time appeared to be something of a paradox. Taking into account the manifest energy and resourcefulness of the people, it was difficult to account for the unsatisfactory social conditions that existed, it would seem, almost unobserved. Beggars were numerous, side streets were filthy, in some districts loafers and drunkards on the sidewalks seemed to constitute a majority of the people in sight, while on some of the streets the soliciting heads of women at windows could be noticed in rows, and counted by the dozen. This state of affairs elicited but little comment in newspapers or otherwise, and I myself, like the community at large, looked upon it all as more or less inevitable.
But when I turned from this social and economic survey of the mental and personal activities of the average New Englander of those days, a remarkable state of affairs, in which I was intensely interested, was unfolded. Society at the time, from top to bottom, was absorbingly interested in personal culture and development of every description. In the year 1881, self-culture was the supreme topic in the public mind, much as is social and industrial betterment at the present day.
Notable among the teachers of this personal religion were Phillips Brooks, and William H. Baldwin of the Boston Young Men’s Christian Union. There were many others, but I was particularly impressed by the wide human sympathy that permeated the individualistic doctrines of these men. It was through Mr. Baldwin that I was able to come in contact with people who were actively engaged in spreading the propaganda of personal development and personal responsibility so congenial to me.
After a month or two spent in circumspection of this kind in and around the city of Boston, I began to think about securing some kind of employment. Very naturally I turned my attention to the telegraph business with which, already, I was more or less conversant. After some preliminary breaking-in, I secured a temporary position at Hancock, New Hampshire, and then a permanent one as a telegraph operator in a railroad office at East Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Thus my personal venture on the sea of American social life and industry was made. Intellectually, my equipment at the time was very crude. Religiously, so far as affiliations were concerned, I was in a sort of personal dreamland, in which, I confess, I am still thankfully and joyously floundering. In the distance the problems of American life were beginning to take form on the horizon, and there was no mistaking the nature of the rudder with which I was preparing to navigate into the beckoning future.
Shakespeare has divided the itinerary of imaginary human pilgrims into a number of characteristic stages. He lakes ‘the whining school-boy,’ and conducts him through a series of adventures from stage to stage, until, finally, in old age, tottering in limbs and faculties, with ‘shrunkshank’ and ‘childish treble,’ he ends his strange eventful history in mere oblivion.
But the thinking man on the upward climb, pausing at intervals and looking backward, has or should have a much more vital and interesting experience to chronicle than is contained in Shakespeare’s theatrical conception. On the whole, either in tendency or emphatically, the man has been one of two things — either his associations, and the inner impulse coming down from the inscrutable past, have been carrying him along and directing his movements this way or that, or, on the other hand, his will in great and small, consciously and persistently, has been hewing a personal trail through a forest of difficulties. With individual progress of the latter description my story has now to deal.
III
From the standpoint of conditions on railroads at the present day, the buildings and equipment at East Deerfield at the time of my first appearance on the scene were decidedly primitive. The principal structure was a long pierlike shed, erected on piles, on one end of which my headquarters, the telegraph office, was poised at an ever-shifting angle, according to the weather and the moisture, or lack of it, in the ground. In the rear of the office there was a long wooden building with facilities for the transfer of freight. Again, close at hand, there was an enginehouse, a coal-elevator, a building used for the storage of flour, and an extensive freight yard. The buildings and facilities, however, were not much ahead of the methods that were employed in taking care of the property that was being hauled over the railroad.
Shortly after my arrival I noticed in one of the sheds several pieces of merchandise for which owners were wanted. The marks on these packages were very indistinct. Some one had been guessing at the consignees’ names and addresses, and the stuff was at East Deerfield to be guessed at again, and forwarded accordingly. But in pursuit of articles of this description, as I found out later, there inevitably came along, sooner or later, what was known as a ‘tracer.’ Sometimes the tracer came ahead of the goods; sometimes the goods came ahead of the tracer. In any case, the two items were forever in pursuit of each other, and, besides, there was a specially employed railroad official, who did nothing but travel from place to place in a desperate
endeavor to make the fugitives connect. In one instance a bale of cotton, indistinctly marked, made tours of the United States in this way, and on the second year of its pilgrimage the tracer that was hunting for it was as bulky as any history of the country for the same period.
But my life and surroundings at East Deerfield can be better illustrated by a glance at my companions and fellow workers. From these men I derived my first ideas of Americans as individuals, and of some of their characteristics. And more particularly my attention was directed to the type commonly spoken of as the Yankee. To me, at the time, he was a puzzling personality. I was given to understand that he was world-famous as the man with a ‘knack.’ During the period of my initiation at East Deerfield, three of these typical New Englanders formed almost exclusively the circle of my social and business acquaintanceship.
The first man I will simply refer to as Henry. He was a big fellow in every way, except perhaps in the matter of brains. But in his case this was not much of a drawback. That which in most people would be looked upon as unforgivable ‘ bluff,’ in him was simply an overflow of animal spirits. His conversation, containing neither rhyme nor reason, was always on the rampage. His natural ability was insignificant, but his failures were all turned into pleasantries which became the stepping-stones to continued enterprise in other directions. His happygo-lucky disposition dispensed with formalities and made light of impediments, and as a result, in course of time, while I and others were at a standstill, Henry bounded from one lucrative situation to another, until finally he settled down as mayor of a city in Connecticut. From this man I got my first idea of Yankee push and assurance.
The word type is frequently misunderstood and misapplied. Henry, for instance, was not a typical Yankee. He was a variation from the type, and a very forcible embodiment of one or two Yankee characteristics.
My second companion at East Deerfield I will call Jake. I cannot say that his occupation at East Deerfield could be taken as an index to his character, but it is somewhat difficult to think of them apart. He had charge of the flourhouse at the back of the freight yards. He was working for one of the wealthiest and best-known business combinations in the country.
One evening Jake received a telegram inst ructing him to send three shipments of flour of different quality or brand to three widely separated points in New England. He happened to be in a hurry that evening, so he asked me to help him in rolling the barrels from the house into the car. Jake began operations with the matter-of-fact statement, ‘I have n’t got a single barrel of the brands that are called for, but just watch me make them.’ So he went to work and gave me a demonstration of how quality can be imparted to flour, and stamped on a barrel in the form of a brand, in a very few minutes, with the aid of a scraper, a little paint, and a stencil.
Jake was a business variation from the original Yankee stem. Of course, the instance I have given is only an illustration of a practice that was followed in that flour-house year in and year out.
But the genuine fully equipped and right-minded Yankee at East Deerfield, was the station agent, Mr. F. A. Field. From the day of my arrival, without interruption, until I left the place, I was attached to him in a close social and business relationship. Under his friendly tutelage, I soon acquired a fairly comprehensive insight into social and industrial conditions in America. In age, Mr. Field was my senior by four or five years. So far as knowledge of human nature and human society was concerned, he was also far and away my superior. Furthermore, at the telegraph key, in directing the movement of trains and the activities of men, in fact, in all the important and intricate duties of a railroad yard-master, I have never since met his equal. For the rest, he was a widely informed man, shrewd, honest, tenacious of his opinions, and interested in the world to an absorbing degree. His general vitality can be understood from one of his favorite remarks: ‘I can never allow myself to grow old.’
But to my mind, the outstanding feature of his character was his social and economic enthusiasm. Backed by columns of facts and figures, he studied the signs of the times, and applied his own sympathetic brand of social philosophy to their interpretation. He was particularly interested in my educational ideas and programme, and the benefit I derived from his companionship was inestimable.
In regard to the recognition of personal merit, and the preservation of individual initiative in human society, Mr. Field and I were of one mind, but I remember distinctly we took different sides on the subject of favoritism in the railroad service. I insisted that, as a rule, the energetic, capable man was selected, regardless of friendships, and so forth; he contended that the exceptions to the rule were intolerable. It was plain to us both that the manager was to blame; but, alas, the manager himself was sometimes appointed in the same way.
But Field’s philosophical circumspection was not confined to the railroad service. He considered his country from one end to the other, with its boundless acreage and resources, and when he thought of the lamentable lack of food, clothing, and decent housing conditions among the masses, he refused to be comforted. So the remedy and the reform were forever the topics of his conversation. In course of time, one after another, the popular panaceas, such as the single tax, populism, and free silver, came up for discussion. In connection with them all, in their time, Mr. Field could plainly discern the signs of social salvation on the horizon. I, on the other hand, anticipated the awakening of the social conscience, and I believed in the gradual and natural evolution of the existing order of things.
At any rate, this was the school at East Deerfield in which my individualistic opinions first came in contact with the practical problems of life.
Mr. Field’s home was on a farm, situated on the Connecticut River, near Montague, Massachusetts. Here, for a number of years, I was privileged to consider myself as one of the family. From the social and literary points of view, a more delightful environment could not be imagined. Our discussions, which to me were so vitally interesting, were frequently started in the office at East Deerfield, continued along the railroad tracks on the way home, and taken up again after supper, amid a circle of interested listeners.
IV
The story of my intellectual development in the school of discussion, with Frank Field as interpreter, of American life and conditions has overlapped my business experience in the telegraph office. Turning now to this side of my personal progress, my most vivid impression of American railroad life in those days was produced by man’s inhumanity to man. Neither the social conscience of the community, nor the personal conscience of the employee, paid any attention to the sacrifice of life on the railroads that the nation was paying to the blind spirit of industrial progress. In the business itself this lamentable state of affairs was basic, and its effect was far-reaching. For example, in some of the departments it was considered nothing less than a crime to be a beginner. The green brakeman and the green telegraph operator were the most conspicuous victims of this understanding. Only those who have run the gauntlet of this experience can have any idea of its bitterness. Without preliminary instructions of any kind, a man was assigned to a freight train; in three cases out of five the next thing for the railroad to do was to bury him. It was the link and pin, the overhead bridge, or the stealthy freight-car on a flying switch, that closed the accounts.
I was in at the death in a hundred such cases, and, although blood was as red and hearts were as warm then as to-day, there seemed to be no power on earth, or incentive in the human mind, to move people to action in the matter. As with the mind of a child, I suppose, so with that of a nation; civilized ideas have a fixed order of development and decay. Social sympathy is the last born of social conceptions. In the early eighties evidence of social responsibility, in the slaughter on railroads, was confined to the sign on the crossing, ‘Look out for the engine!’
From the fact that my mind was neither obscured by traditions nor influenced by commercialism, the situation on the railroads in those days was more incomprehensible to me than the deplorable social conditions in South America. In discussion with Mr. Field the accident was one of our standard topics, and every word I have written on the matter since owes its vitality to the vivid impressions I received in t hose first years at East Deerfield.
The railroad itself in those days, and particularly the train service, was looked upon by the public as a semidisreputable business. New England parents, for example, never thought of mapping out a future for their boys in any department of railroad life. The consensus of opinion on the subject was by no means unreasonable, for the train and yard crews, especially, were recruited, generally speaking, from the floating army of misfits and breakdowns to be found at all times in every community. The average railroad telegrapher, that is the veteran, was emphatically a suspect of this description.
But the recruiting of the telegraph service was conducted in a field by itself. Generally speaking, if a telegraph operator held on to his job for two or three months, he was considered unusually reliable. Consequently, with so much shifting and discharging of men on every railroad in the country, beginners were always in demand. Almost without exception, these beginners were drawn from respectable homes in the country. In most instances, however, these boys and girls drifted to the railroad as students, against the wishes of parents. After a short period of training, they were placed in charge of offices at night. Their duties consisted in sending and receiving a variety of orders relating to the movements of trains, and in seeing to it that these orders were clearly understood by the trainmen.
Humanly speaking, these young boys and girls, some of them just out of school, had no more business in these telegraph offices than so many untutored savages. For the railroad business was not then the simplified system of to-day. It was complicated by the use of green, white, red, and blue signals, and by a score of rules and understandings, in the confusion of which the right of way on single track was frequently in doubt, and was sometimes figured out by conductors and others after considerable argument. In the midst of it all, the inexperienced operator sat in the telegraph office, frequently with a trembling heart, handing out train-orders, during the execution of which human lives were at all times hanging in the balance.
It was the green telegraph operator of those days, then, and I was one of them, who, witnessing the slaughter and understanding many of its causes, felt the inhumanity of the whole situation in double degree, and the following was one of the most significant reasons.
In everyday conversation a polite request for the repetition of a word or a remark would occasion no comment whatever; but anything of the kind on the telegraph wires, in those days, in regard to figures or words misunderstood, was nearly always the signal for a ‘roast’ from the man at the other end of the wire, in which the beginner was t reated to a lurid description of his personal and professional short-comings. Students, or ‘plugs,’as they are called, frequently succumbed to this treatment and resigned their positions in dismay; and of those who weathered the storm, the majority became more afraid of the hectoring they anticipated than they were of making mistakes, and for this reason fatalities were continually being traced to the door of the nervously-bewildered beginners. The unreasonable behavior of the experienced men was not a matter of design, or temperament: it was simply a habit that a nerve-racking state of affairs seemed to instill into everybody from the superintendent downward; and thus the beginners themselves, when they, in turn, had climbed to positions of responsibility, resorted, without fail, to the same practices.
Personally, I was just thick-skinned enough to worry through this breaking-in period without serious results.
But it was the first phase of the personal problem in the railroad service to which my attention was directed, and the inspiration for all my subsequent analysis of conditions on American railroads was derived from the vividness of these early impressions.
Just as soon, however, as I became fairly conversant with my duties at East Deerfield, I turned once more to the wider interests of education and personal development, to which I had renewed my allegiance on my arrival in Boston.
v
My sojourn at East Deerfield may be termed aptly the reading period of my life. Once in a while, indeed, I thought about writing down some of my observations, but I was always held in check by the lack of statistics and information outside my immediate surroundings, and above all I felt the pressing need of a more extensive vocabulary. I think it was in my second year at East Deerfield, that I turned to my English dictionary to appease this craving for words. My delight in the occupation can, I think, only be properly appreciated by the student who, in his youth, has wrestled enthusiastically with passages in Homer or Virgil, turning over the leaves of his dictionary, from left to right and from right to left, hundreds of times in an evening, until, utterly exhausted, he has fallen asleep as I have, with head at rest on the open volume.
For two or three years, while at East Deerfield, I carried a small English dictionary in my pocket. I never looked at it, however, except when on railroad journeys, and on long walks which I delighted to take into the surrounding country. In this way, I read the dictionary through word by word, from cover to cover, three or four times, not to mention the more important words, which received special attention and were reinvestigated in larger dictionaries.
Later, however, it became clear to me that stowed away in my mind somewhere there had been, from my schooldays onward, words in plenty, and ideas enough for my purposes. What I really lacked was practice, conversationally and with the pen, in the use of them. Not only was my vocabulary sufficient, but in thinking it over later I discovered and followed to its source the method by which I acquired this vocabulary.
In presenting an argument, stating a case, or pleading a cause, other things being equal, I always attributed my intellectual advantage to the fact that in my youth I had received a thorough drilling in Latin and Greek, while my companions, as a rule, in my line of life, had not. As a simple practical equipment for life’s journey, what may be called my classical foundation seems to me now to be worth all the other features of my school education put together.
This reading stage of my life, together with the study of the dictionary for a definite purpose, derived most of its inspiration from the literary circle on the Field farm. My own intellectual enterprise at the time, however, was not to be a fitful dipping into literature: it soon took form as a simple scheme of education. That these kind friends on the Field farm should know more than I did about life and literature was to me an intolerable situation. Every indication of the kind, and I noticed these indications daily, was an additional spur to exertion. And thus, with every topic that was brought up for discussion, or alluded to in those long winter evenings, there came to me the ever-recurring question, ‘What do you know about this matter?’
How full of inspiration to me at the time were these literary gatherings! How eagerly we used to watch each other for the slightest indication of originality in treatment or matter! It is true, I was abnormally sensitive and enthusiastic at the time. It was always up to me, I thought, to know more than the other fellows; and my ambitions, as I have said, took a definite and practical form. In brief then, what had I, comparatively a youth, fresh from the wilds of Africa, to say, in the company of these new-found American friends, about religion, slavery, philosophy, history, and the march of the human race from the time of the cave-dwellers up to Emerson and Darwin? Here was a definite outline of desired knowledge.
When men were spoken of, what did I know about Plato and Mahomet, Alexander and Charlemagne, Cæsar and Alfred, Shaftesbury and Lincoln? How about the mighty roll of poets and thinkers — Shakespeare and Milton, Gibbon and Plutarch, Scott and Lecky, Darwin and Spencer, Carlyle and Ruskin, Burns and Tennyson? But, above all, what did I know about the great industrial and social problems of the day? All kinds — grand, ridiculous, and menacing — were on the horizon, and all sorts of startling schemes for social betterment were being hatched from day to day. Sooner or later they all came up, in some form or other, in the Field circle, for debate. What then did I know about socialism, the single tax, social democracy, and the labor movement?
One night in the office at East Deerfield, the necessity for a comprehensive course of reading, to take in nearly all of these subjects, dawned upon me. 1 distinctly remember every detail of that night’s work and thought. Being Saturday night and Sunday morning, there was little or nothing on the road. I wrote everything down — the topics, the authors, as many as I could call to mind, and the ideas, so far as my knowledge extended at the time, and somewhat as it is all outlined above. I remember the first passenger train from the West, the ‘Albany,’ was just whistling into Greenfield when I finished my programme.
With me it is not now a case of recalling with an effort this incident or that experience; every step of my intellectual development at East Deerfield is as well remembered as the exciting details of an African hunting trip. This fact remains then, that I went to work and covered, as thoroughly as I could, the literary ground outlined in the foregoing sketch of my ambitions.
During this period I also paid considerable attention to the works of Shakespeare. To begin with, my delight in his genius was of a religious nature. Although I still read my Bible occasionally, I no longer had the opportunity to attend church services, and in some way Shakespeare seemed to bring my religious instincts and faith into practical contact with people and modern life, to a degree that in my experience had never been reached by the Bible. One of my favorite topics at the time was the religion of Shakespeare as it illuminated human interests from the bottom to the top of the scale. There was no preaching in this religion: it consisted of vivid word-pictures and the impressions I derived from them. I used to call attention to a series of these religious pictures in the ascending order of their importance, somewhat as follows.
I began with the glorification of physical form and expression. For example, I took a certain degree of religious pleasure in the struggle and methods of the brave swimmer beating the surges under him and riding upon their back, as described by Francisco in The Tem-pest. Then again, that hymn of the horse in ‘Venus and Adonis,’ ending,
Look, what a horse should have, he did not lack, Save a proud rider on so proud a back,
seemed to give spiritual sanction lo my devotion to animal life. From this lower plane the religion of Shakespeare ascended in terrace above terrace of ethical significance. Coriolanus and all-sacrificing mother-love, the victory of childish pleading over cruelty and brute force in the scene between Arthur and Hubert in King John; the ‘ quality of mercy ’ passage in The Merchant of Venice; the flashlight interpretation of the human conscience, so vividly depicted as a knocking at the gate, in Macbeth; these scenes all came home to me as religious lessons applied to the hard-pan of everyday human conditions.
And then again, unmistakable in its usefulness to me at the time, was the chapel scene in Hamlet, with its graphic analysis of a soul laid bare on the pillory of repentance. Finally, in all the grandeur of its social and religious interpretation, came the study of The Tempest. To my mind, at the time, this play was more than a poet’s dream of moral and social regeneration. It pointed to chaos as the inevitable outcome of all government without spiritual guidance and discipline of individuals. Calibans, Stephanos, and scheming political Antonios, are forever and everywhere at war with Prospero and his celestial agencies.
This study of Shakespeare was a three-cornered undertaking carried on between the book in my office, the theatres in Boston, and the Field farm.
During my stay at East Deerfield I worked, for the most part on the nightshift, for something like eight dollars a week. I saved a little money in those days. Once in a while a proposition was made in regard to an increase of salary, but I told the authorities not to bother about it, and they did not. I had plans of my own, and seclusion on that night job with its opportunity for study and thought was absolutely essential. In course of time, however, the night job was abolished, and I was glad to fall heir to the day work at the same place.
But the old office at night had for me a strange fascination. I got into the habit of returning there in the evening for the purpose of readingand listening to the business on the wire. Frequently I remained at my desk until one or two o’clock in the morning. The traindispatcher soon became accustomed to my presence, and sometimes asked questions about trains. One night he gave an emergency signal and asked me to rush down the yard with my red light. I succeeded in stopping the train, but, returning through the yard in a hurry, I fell into an open culvert, and did not wake up until daylight. When the superintendent heard of it he said he would not forget it, and he kept his word.
But it was just about this time that what is called telegrapher’s cramp attacked my right hand, and it then took me several months of constant application to bring my left hand into service and working order. Moreover, after my fall into the culvert, my health began to show signs of long-continued physical and mental strain, so I determined to take a vacation.
I went to Boston and secured an outfit of pillow-sham holders and started out, on foot, to stock the state of New Hampshire with my merchandise. The venture was a great success so far as my health was concerned.
In about three months I returned, and met the superintendent of the Fitchburg Railroad on the station platform at Fitchburg. I told him I was ready to return to work. He replied, ‘All right, and you may jump on the first pay car that comes your way: there is something coming to you.' I did so, and drew in a lump sum full pay for every day of my three months’ absence.
This superintendent was one of those unforgettable men of the old school, who ‘never made a mistake.’ One night, while listening to the wire at East Deerfield, I heard him call attention to this fact in unmistakable language. In giving an order to an engine to ‘ run wild,’ a train-dispatcher had forgotten to warn the engineman to ‘ look out for a snow-plough ahead ’; consequently there was a smash-up. The dispatcher told his chief about it on the wire and added, ‘We are all liable to mistakes.’ The superintendent, a dispatcher himself for twenty years, got hold of the key and told the man what he thought of such philosophy in the railroad business. He concluded the dialogue in this way: ‘I never made a mistake in my life and never intend to. Come to Boston in the morning.’
This was the man, Mr. E. A. Smith, from whom I derived all my ideas of duty and efficiency in the railroad service. He retired from active duties a few months ago. Forty-five years or so without a mistake is a pretty good railroad record.
But before leaving East Deerfield, I wish to mention another railroad man to whom, probably without his knowledge, I was very much indebted. He was the civil engineer who was doubletracking the Fitchburg Railroad at the time between Fitchburg and Greenfield. He is still among us somewhere. The first time I saw him he was standing on an abutment of a washed-away bridge over the Millers River, near Erving, I think it was. It was somewhere round midnight. He was watching the effect of the rushing waters on the temporary trestle that had just been constructed. The energy and limitless resource of this man while building the old Fitchburg Railroad made a tremendous impression upon me.
Between Erving and Millers Falls, on what is now the Boston and Maine Railroad, on the right side going west, at or near the place where several turns in the river-bed were cut out, there stands in a vacant space a huge shaft of earth which is pointed out to you by railroad men as ‘Turner’s Monument.’ His real monument, however, was the men he left behind him to continue his personal work and policy in nearly every department of the service. They are, to-day, everywhere distinguished among their fellows.
In course of time this railroad engineer became superintendent of the division. His headquarters were in Fitchburg. He was a stalwart individualist — so it seemed to me at any rate. He believed in personal contact. His own private room in a Fitchburg hotel was the sanctum into which the men whom he sometimes selected, or intended to promote, were invited, usually on a Sunday morning. My turn came for an invitation of this nature. In brief, an interlocking tower had been installed at West Cambridge; for such and such reasons, he requested me to take one of the shifts.
Without any hesitation I accepted the appointment for two or three very good reasons. In the first place, it was to be a change from a twelveto an eight-hour situation; secondly, it would bring me near Boston, the libraries, the lecture platforms, and the churches; and thirdly, by reason of these shorter hours and the change of location, I expected to be able to devote more time and study to the great social and industrial problems of the day, to which, at this time, I was beginning to direct my attention.