winter days in a great city bring some peculiar sights. if it snows, the streets are at once a slushy mess, and the transaction of business is, to a certain extent, a hardship. in its first flakes it is picturesque; the air is filled with flying feathers and the sky lowery with somber clouds. later comes the slush and dirt, and not infrequently bitter cold. the city rings with the grind and squeak of cold-bitten vehicles, and men and women, the vast tide of humanity which fills its streets, hurry to and fro so as to be through with the work or need that keeps them out of doors.
in certain sections of the city at a period like this may be found groups of men who are constituted by nature and conditions to be an integral part of every storm. they are like the gulls that follow the schools of fish at sea. poverty is the bond which makes them kin and gives them, after a fashion, a class distinction. they are not only always poor in body, but poor in mind also, and as for earthly belongings, of course they have not any.
these men, like the gulls and their fish, pick a little something from the storm. they follow the fortunes of the contractors who make arrangements with the city for the removal of the snow, and about the wagon-barns where the implements of snow removal are kept, and where daily cards of employment are issued they may234 be seen waiting by hundreds, and not at such hours and under such conditions as are at all pleasant to contemplate, either. in the early hours of the morning, when the work of the day is first being doled out, they may be seen, cold, overcoatless, often with bare hands and necks, no collar, or, if so, only a rag of a thing, and hats too battered and timeworn to be honestly dignified by the name of hat at all.
the city usually pays at the rate of two dollars a day for what shoveling these men can do. they are not wanted even at that rate by the contractors, for stray, healthy laborers are usually preferred; but the pressure under which the contractors are put by the city and the public makes a showing necessary. so thousands are admitted to temporary labor who would not otherwise be considered, and these are they.
so in this cold, raw, strenuous weather they stand like so many sheep waiting at the entrance to a fold. there is no particular zeal in this effort which they are making to live. hunger for life they have, but it is a rundown hunger, dispirited by lack of encouragement. they have been kicked and pushed about the world in an effort to live until, as a rule, they are comparatively heartbroken and courage-broken. this storm, which spells comfort and indoor seclusion and amusement for many, spells a rough opportunity for them—a gutter crust, to be sure, but a crust.
the men in the snow
and so they are here early in the morning, in the dark. they stand in a long file outside the contractors’ stable door, waiting for that consideration which his present need may show. a man at a little glass window235 cut in a door receives them. he is a hearty, material, practical soul who has very little to suggest in the way of mentality but much in the spirit of acquisitiveness. he is not interested in the condition of the individuals before him. it does not concern him that in most cases this is a last despairing grasp at a straw. will this fellow work? will he be satisfied to take $1.75 in place of the $2.00 which the city pays? he does not ask them that so clearly; it is done in another way.
“got a shovel?”
“no, sir.”
“well, it’ll cost you a quarter to get one.”
“i ain’t got no quarter.”
“well, that’s all right. we’ll take it out o’ your pay.”
not for to-day only, mind you, but for every day in which work is done, the quarter comes out for the shovel. it is suggested in some sections that the shovel is sometimes stolen, but there are gang foremen, and no money is paid without a foreman’s o. k., and he is responsible for the shovels.... hence——
but these men are a bit of dramatic color in the city’s life, whatever their sufferings. to see them following in droves through the bitter winter streets the great wagons which haul the snow away is fascinating, at times pitiful. i have seen old men with white beards and uncut snowy hair shoveling snow into a truck. i have seen lean, unfed strips of boys without overcoats and with long, lean, red hands protruding from undersized coat sleeves, doing the same thing. i have seen an?mic236 benchers and consumptives following along illy clad but shoveling weakly in the snow and cold.
it is a sad mix-up at best, this business of living. fortune deals so haphazardly at birth and at death that it is hard to criticize. it so indifferently smashes the dreams of kings and beggars, dealing the golden sequins to the sleeping man, taking from the earnest plodder the little which he has gained, that one becomes, at last, confused. it is easy for many to criticize, for one reason and another, and justly mayhap, but at the same time it is so easy to see how it all may have come about. wit has not always been present, but sickness, a perverted moral point of view, an error in honesty, and the climbing of years is over; the struggling toad has fallen back into the well. there is now nothing but struggle and crumb-picking at the bottom. and these are they.
and so these storms, like the bread-line, like the bowery lodging, offer them something; not much. a few days, and the snow will be over. a few days, and the sun of a warm day will end all opportunity for work. they will go back again into the gloomy adventuring whence they emerged. only now they are visible collectively, here in the cold and the snow, shoveling.
i like to think of them best and worst, though, as i have seen them time and time again waiting outside the wagon barns at night, the labor of the day over. it is something even to be a “down-and-out” and stand waiting for a pittance which one has really earned. you can see something of the satisfaction of this even in this gloomy line. in the early dark of a winter evening,237 the street’s lamps lighted, these men are shuffling their feet to keep warm. they are waiting to be paid, as they are at the end of each work day, but in their hearts is a faint response to the thought of gain—one dollar and seventy-five cents for the long day in the cold. the quarter is yielded gladly. the contractor finds a fat profit in the many quarters he can so easily garner. but these? to them it is a satisfaction to get the wherewithal to face another day. it is something to have the money wherewith to obtain a lodging and a meal for a night. that one-seventy-five—how really large it must look, like fifty or a hundred or a thousand to some. satisfactions and joys are all so relative. but they have really earned one dollar and seventy-five cents and can hurry away to that marvelous table of satisfaction which one dollar and seventy-five cents will provide.
