Poor White: A Novel Read online

  CHAPTER IV

  Hugh McVey was twenty-three years old when he went to live in Bidwell.The position of telegraph operator at the Wheeling station a mile northof town became vacant and, through an accidental encounter with a formerresident of a neighboring town, he got the place.

  The Missourian had been at work during the winter in a sawmill in thecountry near a northern Indiana town. During the evenings he wandered oncountry roads and in the town streets, but he did not talk to any one.As had happened to him in other places, he had the reputation of beingqueer. His clothes were worn threadbare and, although he had moneyin his pockets, he did not buy new ones. In the evening when he wentthrough the town streets and saw the smartly dressed clerks standingbefore the stores, he looked at his own shabby person and was ashamed toenter. In his boyhood Sarah Shepard had always attended to the buyingof his clothes, and he made up his mind that he would go to the place inMichigan to which she and her husband had retired, and pay her a visit.He wanted Sarah Shepard to buy him a new outfit of clothes, but wantedalso to talk with her.

  Out of the three years of going from place to place and working withother men as a laborer, Hugh had got no big impulse that he felt wouldmark the road his life should take; but the study of mathematicalproblems, taken up to relieve his loneliness and to cure his inclinationto dreams, was beginning to have an effect on his character. He thoughtthat if he saw Sarah Shepard again he could talk to her and through herget into the way of talking to others. In the sawmill where he worked heanswered the occasional remarks made to him by his fellow workers ina slow, hesitating drawl, and his body was still awkward and his gaitshambling, but he did his work more quickly and accurately. In thepresence of his foster-mother and garbed in new clothes, he believedhe could now talk to her in a way that had been impossible during hisyouth. She would see the change in his character and would be encouragedabout him. They would get on to a new basis and he would feel respectfor himself in another.

  Hugh went to the railroad station to make inquiry regarding the fare tothe Michigan town and there had the adventure that upset his plans. Ashe stood at the window of the ticket office, the ticket seller, who wasalso the telegraph operator, tried to engage him in conversation. Whenhe had given the information asked, he followed Hugh out of the buildingand into the darkness of a country railroad station at night, and thetwo men stopped and stood together beside an empty baggage truck. Theticket agent spoke of the loneliness of life in the town and said hewished he could go back to his own place and be again with his ownpeople. "It may not be any better in my own town, but I know everybodythere," he said. He was curious concerning Hugh as were all the peopleof the Indiana town, and hoped to get him into talk in order that hemight find out why he walked alone at night, why he sometimes worked allevening over books and figures in his room at the country hotel, and whyhe had so little to say to his fellows. Hoping to fathom Hugh's silencehe abused the town in which they both lived. "Well," he began, "Iguess I understand how you feel. You want to get out of this place."He explained his own predicament in life. "I got married," he said."Already I have three children. Out here a man can make more moneyrailroading than he can in my state, and living is pretty cheap. Justto-day I had an offer of a job in a good town near my own place in Ohio,but I can't take it. The job only pays forty a month. The town's allright, one of the best in the northern part of the State, but you seethe job's no good. Lord, I wish I could go. I'd like to live again amongpeople such as live in that part of the country."

  The railroad man and Hugh walked along the street that ran from thestation up into the main street of the town. Wanting to meet theadvances that had been made by his companion and not knowing how to goabout it, Hugh adopted the method he had heard his fellow laborers usewith one another. "Well," he said slowly, "come have a drink."

  The two men went into a saloon and stood by the bar. Hugh made atremendous effort to overcome his embarrassment. As he and the railroadman drank foaming glasses of beer he explained that he also had oncebeen a railroad man and knew telegraphy, but that for several years hehad been doing other work. His companion looked at his shabby clothesand nodded his head. He made a motion with his head to indicate that hewanted Hugh to come with him outside into the darkness. "Well, well,"he exclaimed, when they had again got outside and had started along thestreet toward the station. "I understand now. They've all been wonderingabout you and I've heard lots of talk. I won't say anything, but I'mgoing to do something for you."

  Hugh went to the station with his new-found friend and sat down in thelighted office. The railroad man got out a sheet of paper and began towrite a letter. "I'm going to get you that job," he said. "I'm writingthe letter now and I'll get it off on the midnight train. You've got toget on your feet. I was a boozer myself, but I cut it all out. A glassof beer now and then, that's my limit."

  He began to talk of the town in Ohio where he proposed to get Hugh thejob that would set him up in the world and save him from the habit ofdrinking, and described it as an earthly paradise in which lived bright,clear-thinking men and beautiful women. Hugh was reminded sharply of thetalk he had heard from the lips of Sarah Shepard, when in his youth shespent long evenings telling him of the wonder of her own Michigan andNew England towns and people, and contrasted the life lived there withthat lived by the people of his own place.

  Hugh decided not to try to explain away the mistake made by his newacquaintance, and to accept the offer of assistance in getting theappointment as telegraph operator.

  The two men walked out of the station and stood again in the darkness.The railroad man felt like one who has been given the privilege ofplucking a human soul out of the darkness of despair. He was full ofwords that poured from his lips and he assumed a knowledge of Hugh andhis character entirely unwarranted by the circumstances. "Well," heexclaimed heartily, "you see I've given you a send-off. I have told themyou're a good man and a good operator, but that you will take the placewith its small salary because you've been sick and just now can't workvery hard." The excited man followed Hugh along the street. It waslate and the store lights had been put out. From one of the town's twosaloons that lay in their way arose a clatter of voices. The old boyhooddream of finding a place and a people among whom he could, by sittingstill and inhaling the air breathed by others, come into a warmcloseness with life, came back to Hugh. He stopped before the saloon tolisten to the voices within, but the railroad man plucked at his coatsleeve and protested. "Now, now, you're going to cut it out, eh?" heasked anxiously and then hurriedly explained his anxiety. "Of courseI know what's the matter with you. Didn't I tell you I've been theremyself? You've been working around. I know why that is. You don't haveto tell me. If there wasn't something the matter with him, no man whoknows telegraphy would work in a sawmill.

  "Well, there's no good talking about it," he added thoughtfully. "I'vegiven you a send-off. You're going to cut it out, eh?"

  Hugh tried to protest and to explain that he was not addicted to thehabit of drinking, but the Ohio man would not listen. "It's all right,"he said again, and then they came to the hotel where Hugh lived and heturned to go back to the station and wait for the midnight train thatwould carry the letter away and that would, he felt, carry also hisdemand that a fellow-human, who had slipped from the modern path ofwork and progress should be given a new chance. He felt magnanimous andwonderfully gracious. "It's all right, my boy," he said heartily. "Nouse talking to me. To-night when you came to the station to ask the fareto that hole of a place in Michigan I saw you were embarrassed. 'What'sthe matter with that fellow?' I said to myself. I got to thinking. ThenI came up town with you and right away you bought me a drink. I wouldn'thave thought anything about that if I hadn't been there myself. You'llget on your feet. Bidwell, Ohio, is full of good men. You get in withthem and they'll help you and stick by you. You'll like those people.They've got get-up to them. The place you'll work at there is far out oftown. It's away out about a mile at a little kind of outside-like placecalled Pickleville. Th
ere used to be a saloon there and a factory forputting up cucumber pickles, but they've both gone now. You won't betempted to slip in that place. You'll have a chance to get on your feet.I'm glad I thought of sending you there."

  * * * * *

  The Wheeling and Lake Erie ran along a little wooded depression that cutacross the wide expanse of open farm lands north of the town of Bidwell.It brought coal from the hill country of West Virginia and southeasternOhio to ports on Lake Erie, and did not pay much attention to thecarrying of passengers. In the morning a train consisting of a combinedexpress and baggage car and two passenger coaches went north and westtoward the lake, and in the evening the same train returned, boundsoutheast into the Hills, The Bidwell station of the road was, in an oddway, detached from the town's life. The invisible roof under which thelife of the town and the surrounding country was lived did not cover it.As the Indiana railroad man had told Hugh, the station itself stood on aspot known locally as Pickleville. Back of the station there was a smallbuilding for the storage of freight and near at hand four or five housesfacing Turner's Pike. The pickle factory, now deserted and with itswindows gone, stood across the tracks from the station and beside asmall stream that ran under a bridge and across country through a groveof trees to the river. On hot summer days a sour, pungent smell arosefrom the old factory, and at night its presence lent a ghostly flavor tothe tiny corner of the world in which lived perhaps a dozen people.

  All day and at night an intense persistent silence lay over Pickleville,while in Bidwell a mile away the stir of new life began. In the eveningsand on rainy afternoons when men could not work in the fields, old JudgeHanby went along Turner's Pike and across the wagon bridge into Bidwelland sat in a chair at the back of Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked.Men came in to listen to him and went out. New talk ran through thetown. A new force that was being born into American life and intolife everywhere all over the world was feeding on the old dyingindividualistic life. The new force stirred and aroused the people. Itmet a need that was universal. It was meant to seal men together, towipe out national lines, to walk under seas and fly through the air,to change the entire face of the world in which men lived. Already thegiant that was to be king in the place of old kings was calling hisservants and his armies to serve him. He used the methods of oldkings and promised his followers booty and gain. Everywhere he wentunchallenged, surveying the land, raising a new class of men topositions of power. Railroads had already been pushed out across theplains; great coal fields from which was to be taken food to warm theblood in the body of the giant were being opened up; iron fields werebeing discovered; the roar and clatter of the breathing of the terriblenew thing, half hideous, half beautiful in its possibilities, that wasfor so long to drown the voices and confuse the thinking of men, washeard not only in the towns but even in lonely farm houses, where itswilling servants, the newspapers and magazines, had begun to circulatein ever increasing numbers. At the town of Gibsonville, near Bidwell,Ohio, and at Lima and Finley, Ohio, oil and gas fields were discovered.At Cleveland, Ohio, a precise, definite-minded man named Rockefellerbought and sold oil. From the first he served the new thing well andhe soon found others to serve with him. The Morgans, Fricks, Goulds,Carnegies, Vanderbilts, servants of the new king, princes of the newfaith, merchants all, a new kind of rulers of men, defied the world-oldlaw of class that puts the merchant below the craftsman, and addedto the confusion of men by taking on the air of creators. They weremerchants glorified and dealt in giant things, in the lives of men andin mines, forests, oil and gas fields, factories, and railroads.

  And all over the country, in the towns, the farm houses, and the growingcities of the new country, people stirred and awakened. Thought andpoetry died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who alsobecame servants of the new order. Serious young men in Bidwell and inother American towns, whose fathers had walked together on moonlightnights along Turner's Pike to talk of God, went away to technicalschools. Their fathers had walked and talked and thoughts had grownup in them. The impulse had reached back to their father's fathers onmoonlit roads of England, Germany, Ireland, France, and Italy, andback of these to the moonlit hills of Judea where shepherds talked andserious young men, John and Matthew and Jesus, caught the drift of thetalk and made poetry of it; but the serious-minded sons of these men inthe new land were swept away from thinking and dreaming. From all sidesthe voice of the new age that was to do definite things shouted at them.Eagerly they took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices arose.The clamor became terrible, and confused the minds of all men. In makingway for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day toemerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities tocover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies ofmen.

  And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giantwalked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent hisdays at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried toadjust his mind to the realization of the fact that he was not to beaccepted as fellow by the citizens of the new place to which he hadcome. During the day he sat in the tiny telegraph office or, pulling anexpress truck to the open window near his telegraph instrument, lay onhis back with a sheet of paper propped on his bony knees and did sums.Farmers driving past on Turner's Pike saw him there and talked of himin the stores in town. "He's a queer silent fellow," they said. "What doyou suppose he's up to?"

  Hugh walked in the streets of Bidwell at night as he had walked in thestreets of towns in Indiana and Illinois. He approached groups of menloafing on a street corner and then went hurriedly past them. On quietstreets as he went along under the trees, he saw women sitting in thelamplight in the houses and hungered to have a house and a woman of hisown. One afternoon a woman school teacher came to the station to makeinquiry regarding the fare to a town in West Virginia. As the stationagent was not about Hugh gave her the information she sought and shelingered for a few moments to talk with him. He answered the questionsshe asked with monosyllables and she soon went away, but he wasdelighted and looked upon the incident as an adventure. At night hedreamed of the school teacher and when he awoke, pretended she was withhim in his bedroom. He put out his hand and touched the pillow. It wassoft and smooth as he imagined the cheek of a woman would be. He didnot know the school teacher's name but invented one for her. "Be quiet,Elizabeth. Do not let me disturb your sleep," he murmured into thedarkness. One evening he went to the house where the school teacherboarded and stood in the shadow of a tree until he saw her come out andgo toward Main Street. Then he went by a roundabout way and walked pasther on the sidewalk before the lighted stores. He did not look at her,but in passing her dress touched his arm and he was so excited laterthat he could not sleep and spent half the night walking about andthinking of the wonderful thing that had happened to him.

  The ticket, express, and freight agent for the Wheeling and Lake Erieat Bidwell, a man named George Pike, lived in one of the houses near thestation, and besides attending to his duties for the railroad company,owned and worked a small farm. He was a slender, alert, silent man witha long drooping mustache. Both he and his wife worked as Hugh had neverseen a man and woman work before. Their arrangement of the division oflabor was not based on sex but on convenience. Sometimes Mrs. Pike cameto the station to sell tickets, load express boxes and trunks on thepassenger trains and deliver heavy boxes of freight to draymen andfarmers, while her husband worked in the fields back of his house orprepared the evening meal, and sometimes the matter was reversed andHugh did not see Mrs. Pike for several days at a time.

  During the day there was little for the station agent or his wife to doat the station and they disappeared. George Pike had made an arrangementof wires and pulleys connecting the station with a large bell hung ontop of his house, and when some one came to the station to receive ordeliver freight Hugh pulled at the wire and the bell began to ring. Ina few minutes either George Pike or his wife came running from the houseor fi
elds, dispatched the business and went quickly away again.

  Day after day Hugh sat in a chair by a desk in the station or wentoutside and walked up and down the station platform. Engines pullinglong caravans of coal cars ground past. The brakemen waved their handsto him and then the train disappeared into the grove of trees thatgrew beside the creek along which the tracks of the road were laid. InTurner's Pike a creaking farm wagon appeared and then disappeared alongthe tree-lined road that led to Bidwell. The farmer turned on his wagonseat to stare at Hugh but unlike the railroad men did not wave his hand.Adventurous boys came out along the road from town and climbed, shoutingand laughing, over the rafters in the deserted pickle factory across thetracks or went to fish in the creek in the shade of the factory walls.Their shrill voices added to the loneliness of the spot. It becamealmost unbearable to Hugh. In desperation he turned from the rathermeaningless doing of sums and working out of problems regarding thenumber of fence pickets that could be cut from a tree or the number ofsteel rails or railroad ties consumed in building a mile of railroad,the innumerable petty problems with which he had been keeping his mindbusy, and turned to more definite and practical problems. He rememberedan autumn he had put in cutting corn on a farm in Illinois and, goinginto the station, waved his long arms about, imitating the movements ofa man in the act of cutting corn. He wondered if a machine might not bemade that would do the work, and tried to make drawings of the parts ofsuch a machine. Feeling his inability to handle so difficult a problemhe sent away for books and began the study of mechanics. He joined acorrespondence school started by a man in Pennsylvania, and worked fordays on the problems the man sent him to do. He asked questions andbegan a little to understand the mystery of the application of power.Like the other young men of Bidwell he began to put himself into touchwith the spirit of the age, but unlike them he did not dream of suddenlyacquired wealth. While they embraced new and futile dreams he worked todestroy the tendency to dreams in himself.

  Hugh came to Bidwell in the early spring and during May, June and Julythe quiet station at Pickleville awoke for an hour or two each evening.A certain percentage of the sudden and almost overwhelming increase inexpress business that came with the ripening of the fruit and berry cropcame to the Wheeling, and every evening a dozen express trucks, piledhigh with berry boxes, waited for the south bound train. When the traincame into the station a small crowd had assembled. George Pike andhis stout wife worked madly, throwing the boxes in at the door of theexpress car. Idlers standing about became interested and lent a hand.The engineer climbed out of his locomotive, stretched his legs andcrossing a narrow road got a drink from the pump in George Pike's yard.

  Hugh walked to the door of his telegraph office and standing in theshadows watched the busy scene. He wanted to take part in it, to laughand talk with the men standing about, to go to the engineer and askquestions regarding the locomotive and its construction, to help GeorgePike and his wife, and perhaps cut through their silence and his ownenough to become acquainted with them. He thought of all these thingsbut stayed in the shadow of the door that led to the telegraph officeuntil, at a signal given by the train conductor, the engineer climbedinto his engine and the train began to move away into the eveningdarkness. When Hugh came out of his office the station platform wasdeserted again. In the grass across the tracks and beside the ghostlylooking old factory, crickets sang. Tom Wilder, the Bidwell hack driver,had got a traveling man off the train and the dust left by the heelsof his team still hung in the air over Turner's Pike. From the darknessthat brooded over the trees that grew along the creek beyond the factorycame the hoarse croak of frogs. On Turner's Pike a half dozen Bidwellyoung men accompanied by as many town girls walked along the path besidethe road under the trees. They had come to the station to have somewhereto go, had made up a party to come, but now the half unconscious purposeof their coming was apparent. The party split itself up into couples andeach strove to get as far away as possible from the others. One of thecouples came back along the path toward the station and went to the pumpin George Pike's yard. They stood by the pump, laughing and pretendingto drink out of a tin cup, and when they got again into the road theothers had disappeared. They became silent. Hugh went to the end of theplatform and watched as they walked slowly along. He became furiouslyjealous of the young man who put his arm about the waist of hiscompanion and then, when he turned and saw Hugh staring at him, took itaway again.

  The telegraph operator went quickly along the platform until he was outof range of the young man's eyes, and, when he thought the gatheringdarkness would hide him, returned and crept along the path beside theroad after him. Again a hungry desire to enter into the lives of thepeople about him took possession of the Missourian. To be a young mandressed in a stiff white collar, wearing neatly made clothes, and in theevening to walk about with young girls seemed like getting on the roadto happiness. He wanted to run shouting along the path beside the roaduntil he had overtaken the young man and woman, to beg them to take himwith them, to accept him as one of themselves, but when the momentaryimpulse had passed and he returned to the telegraph office and lighteda lamp, he looked at his long awkward body and could not conceiveof himself as ever by any chance becoming the thing he wanted to be.Sadness swept over him and his gaunt face, already cut and marked withdeep lines, became longer and more gaunt. The old boyhood notion, putinto his mind by the words of his foster-mother, Sarah Shepard, that atown and a people could remake him and erase from his body the marksof what he thought of as his inferior birth, began to fade. He tried toforget the people about him and turned with renewed energy to the studyof the problems in the books that now lay in a pile upon his desk. Hisinclination to dreams, balked by the persistent holding of his mind todefinite things, began to reassert itself in a new form, and his brainplayed no more with pictures of clouds and men in agitated movement buttook hold of steel, wood, and iron. Dumb masses of materials taken outof the earth and the forests were molded by his mind into fantasticshapes. As he sat in the telegraph office during the day or walked alonethrough the streets of Bidwell at night, he saw in fancy a thousand newmachines, formed by his hands and brain, doing the work that had beendone by the hands of men. He had come to Bidwell, not only in the hopethat there he would at last find companionship, but also because hismind was really aroused and he wanted leisure to begin trying to dotangible things. When the citizens of Bidwell would not take him intotheir town life but left him standing to one side, as the tiny dwellingplace for men called Pickleville where he lived stood aside out fromunder the invisible roof of the town, he decided to try to forget menand to express himself wholly in work.