Part 10 (1/2)

J.W. found himself taking notice in a way he had not done before through all his years in Delafield. As might be expected, he had come home from college with new ideas and new standards. The town looked rather more sordid and commonplace than was his boy's remembrance of it. Of late it had taken to growing, and a large part of its development had come during his college years. So he must needs learn his own town all over again.

Cheris.h.i.+ng his young college graduate's vague new enthusiasm for a better world, he had little sympathy with much that Delafield opinion acclaimed as progress.

The Delafield Daily Dispatch carried at its masthead every afternoon one or more of such slogans as these: ”Be a Delafield Booster,” ”Boost for more Industries,” ”Put Delafield on the Map,” ”Double Delafield in Half a Decade,” ”Delafield, the Darling of Destiny,” ”Watch Delafield Grow, but Don't Stop Boosting to Rubber.”

These were taken by many citizens as a sort of business gospel; any ”theorist” who ventured to question the wisdom of bringing more people to town, whether the town's business could give them all a decent living or not, was told to sell his hammer and buy a horn. J.W. said nothing; he was too young and too recent a comer into the town's business life.

But he could not work up any zeal for this form of town ”loyalty.”

A big cannery had been built down near the river, where truck gardens flourished, and there was a new furniture factory at the edge of the freight yards. Hereabouts a lot of supremely ugly flats had gone up, two families to each floor and three stories high; and in J.W.'s eyes the rubbish and disorder and generally slattern appearance of the region was no great addition to Delafield's attractions.

Still more did the tumbledown shacks in the neighborhood of the cannery offend the eyes and, to be frank, the ears and nose as well. It was a forlorn-looking lot of hovels, occupied by listless, frowsy adults and noisy children. Here existence seemed to be a grim caricature of life; the children, the only symbol of abundance to be seen, continued to be grotesque in their very dirt. What clothes they had were second or third-hand garments too large for them, which they seemed to be perpetually in danger of losing altogether.

To J.W., Delafield had always been a town of homes; but in these dismal quarters there was little to answer to the home idea. They were merely places where people contrived to camp for a time, longer or shorter; none but a Gradgrind could call them homes.

One of the factory foremen was a great admirer of Mr. Drury, who introduced him to J.W. one day when the foreman had come to the store for some tools. He had talked with J.W., and in time a rather casual friendliness developed between them. It was this same Foreman Angus MacPherson, a Scot with a name for shrewdness, who gave the boy his first glimpse of what the factory and the cannery meant to Delafield--especially the factory.

J.W. was down at the factory to see about some new band-saws that had been installed; and, his errand finished, he stopped for a chat with Angus.

”This factory wasn't here when I went off to college,” he said. ”What ever brought it to Delafield?”

At that MacPherson was off to a perfect start.

”Ye see, my boy,” he began, ”Delafield is so central it is a good town for a good-working plant; freights on lumber and finished stuff are not so high as in some places. And then there's labor. Lots of husky fellows around here want better than farm wages, and they want a chance at town life as well. Men from the big cities, with families, hope to find a quieter, cheaper place to live. So we've had no trouble getting help.

Skill isn't essential for most of the work. It's not much of a trick nowadays to get by in most factories--the machines do most of the thinking for you, and that's good in some ways. Only the men that 'tend the machines can't work up much pride in the output. Things go well enough when business is good. But when the factory begins to run short time, and lay men off, like it did last winter, there's trouble.”

J.W. wanted to know what sort of trouble.

”Oh, well,” said MacPherson, ”strikes hurt worst at the time, but strikes are just like boils, a sign of something wrong inside. And short-time and lay-offs--well, ye can't expect the factory to go on making golden oak rockers just to store in the sheds. Somebody has to buy 'em. But the boys ain't happy over four-day weeks, let alone no jobs at all.”

His sociology professor at Cartwright, J.W. recalled, had talked a good deal about the labor question, but maybe this foreman knew something about it too. So J.W. put it up to him: ”What is at the bottom of it all, MacPherson? What makes the thing the papers call 'labor unrest'?”

MacPherson hesitated a moment. Then he settled himself more comfortably on a pile of boards and proceeded to deliver his soul, or part of it.

”I can tell you; but there's them that would s.h.i.+p me out of town if I talked too much, so I'll have to be careful. John Wesley, you've got a grand name, and the church John Wesley started has a good name, though it's not my church. I'm a Scot, you know. But I know your preacher, and he and I are of the same mind about this, I know. Well, then, if your Methodist Church could find a method with labor, it would get hold of the same sort of common people as the ones who heard Jesus gladly. These working-men are not in the way of being saints, ye ken, but they think that somewhere there is a rotten spot in the world of factories and shops and mills. They think they learn from experience, who by the way, is the dominie of a high-priced school, that they get most of the losses and few of the profits of industry. They get a living wage when times are good. When times are bad they lose the one thing they've got to sell, and that's their day's work; when a loafing day is gone there's nothing to show for it, and no way to make it up. Maybe that's as it should be, but the worker can't see it, especially if the boss can still buy gasoline and tires when the plant is idle. Oh, yes, laddie, I know the working man is headstrong. I'll tell you privately, I think he's a fool, because so often he gets into a blind rage and wants to smash the very tools that earn his bite and sup. He may have reason to hate some employer, but why hate the job? It's a good job, if he makes good chairs. He goes on strike, many's the time, without caring that it hurts him and his worse than it hurts the boss. And often the boss thinks he wants nothing bigger than a few more things. Maybe he _is_ wild for a phonograph and a Ford and golden oak rockers of his own in the parlor, and photographs enlarged in crayon hanging on the walls--and a steady job. But, listen to me, John Wesley, Jr., and you'll be a credit to your namesake: these wild, unreasonable workers, with all their foolishness and sometimes wickedness, are whiles dreaming of a different world, a better world for everybody. 'Twould be no harm if some bosses dreamed more about that too, me boy. Your preacher--he's a fine man too, is Mr.

Drury--he understands that, and he wants to use it for something to build on. That's why I tell folks he's a Methodist preacher with a real method in his ministry. Now I'll quit me fas.h.i.+n' and get back to the job. I doubt you'll be busy yourself this afternoon.”

He gripped J.W.'s hand, so that the knuckles were unable to forget him all day, but what he had said gripped harder than his handshake. If the furniture factory was a mixed blessing, what of the cannery?

Somewhat to his own surprise, J.W. was getting interested in his town, but if at first he was inclined to wonder how he happened to develop all this new concern, he soon ceased to think of it. So slight a matter could not stay in the front of his thinking when he really began to know something of the Delafield to which he had never paid much attention.

It was through Joe Carbrook that he got his next jolt. Joe, now spending his vacations in ways that amazed people who had memories of his wild younger manner, was in and out of the Farwell store a good deal. Also he spent considerable time with Pastor Drury, though there is no record of what they talked about.

”J.W., old boy,” Joe asked one day, coming away from the pastor's study, ”have you ever by any chance observed Main Street?”

”Why, yes,” J.W. answered, ”seeing that two or three or four times a day I walk six blocks of it back and forth to this store door, I suppose I have.”

”Oh, yes, that way,” Joe came back at him, ”and you've seen me, a thousand times. But did you ever observe me? My ears, for instance,” and he put his hands over them. ”Which one is the larger?”

Without in the least understanding what his friend was driving at, and stupidly wondering if he ever had noticed any difference in Joe's ears, J.W. stared with inane bewilderment. ”Is one really larger than the other?” he asked, helplessly.

Joe took his hands down, and laughed. ”I knew it,” he said. ”You've never observed my ears, and yet you think you have observed Main Street.

As it happens, each of my ears takes the same-sized ear-m.u.f.f. But you didn't know it. Well, never mind ears; I'm thinking about Main Street.