From: Arden Town (1913; Unpublished MS)
Author: Scott Nearing
Published:
The date of the bee had been fixed two weeks in advance, so that everyone might have an opportunity to be present. The women collected a quarter from every man in Arden, bought groceries, made potato salad, and prepared a tasty luncheon, which they set out in the grove near the Club House. Meanwhile the men had gone to work on the floor. At eight o’clock they began to assemble, garbed in overalls, and armed with hatchets and hammers. The lumber had already been piled in handy places, and three gangs of five men each were started on the floor. Fred Allen would have joined one of those gangs, but Will Evans held him back.
“Those muscular shoulders will do far better service over here,” he said, leading the way.
They reached a sharp rise in the ground, on the west side of the Club House, where several men were already at work with shovels, picks, mattocks, and wheelbarrows, cutting into the bank. The men were singing blithely as they worked. The sun was hot on the east wall, but there was shelter here from its sharp rays. Nevertheless, perspiration ran freely, loosening up the vocal cords, and’ softening the disposition to an amazing degree.
“A fireplace goes here,” Will Evans explained, “and we are digging for the foundation. We purpose to take the dirt to that hole,” pointing to a low spot, “and fill it in level. You see where they have been dumping?”
Fred Allen followed the direction, nodding his head.
“Well, Ed has been running those wheelbarrows for quite a while. Suppose you spell him off.”
“All right. boss,” and with a cordial nod of the head Fred Allen took his place on the transportation division, pulling a full wheelbarrow out of the cut where the men were working, pushing the empty one into its place, running blithely down the hill to the low spot, dumping the wheelbarrow with a rush and a shout, climbing the hill again to find the empty one already full, replacing it with the empty one which he brought, and so on and on. Each trip took him into the glaring sunshine; each trip up the hill forced him to bend his back stiffly; little water drops trickled from the end of his nose; his khaki shirt was blotched with great wet patches; still he hustled the barrow with a right good will, while the pickers and shovelers sang snatches of ballads, ditties, and ragtime melodies, winking quietly at one another, meanwhile, as their barrow-smasher panted and perspired.
“He’s not good for half an hour,” one of them had remarked when Fred Allen started the work. The half hour had passed, though, and with the exception of a pause for a long pull at the water contained in a fourteen-quart milk-pail, Fred Allen had worked ceaselessly.
Above stairs in the Club House the floor-laying was proceeding merrily. Each gang divided its work, assigning one man to get lumber, two to saw, and two to nail. Thus dividing the labor they worked with great quickness; and, by assigning each task to the man who had a special preference or aptitude for it, they worked with great speed and success, each team striving to outdo the others in the neatness of its joints and the speed of its work. Some men who had not taken a hammer seriously for years, turned to it now with the gladness of a school-boy, shouting gayly as they drove nails home, and competing against the rival gang with all of the ardor of youth.
The hours passed rapidly. At mid-morning Will Evans took Fred Allen off from the wheelbarrow, telling him, with a friendly slap on the shoulder, that he had done his work nobly.
“Well done, good and faithful servant,” he cried, “since thou hast been a faithful barrow-smasher, I will make thee ruler over a gang of floor-layers. Nothing too much,” he added. “Besides, I want you to have a taste of the upstairs life. It is much more intellectual than that of the circle in which you have been moving.”
Chaffing and chatting, they made their way up into the Club House. Fred Allen stepped back aghast.
“Why,” he cried, “it’s nearly half done!”
Will Evans turned to him earnestly.
“Did you ever say a thing like that to the men in your factory?” he asked. “My experience in factories has been that no matter how fast men work, there is always a prod to make them go faster.”
For a moment Fred Allen cast his eyes down, thinking deeply.
“You are right,” he said at last. “I never saw it that way before, you know. But to-day, the work downstairs seemed to drag a little at times, and up here,—why it has gone like fire. How did they do it?”
“Cooperation and enthusiasm.” replied Will Evans, “sets the heart-strings to vibrating and stimulates the goodwill. It is a guaranteed cure for grouches, grumbles, and grumps. Your money back if not satisfied. Here’s your crowd.”
To Fred Allen, coming out of the open air, the Club House seemed a bedlam of noise. saws were humming; half a dozen hammers sounded continually. The air was closer, and the noises mingled into a solid volume of sound.
“Here’s our new boss,” exclaimed one of the sawers, “that third gang is two boards in the lead. If you can’t get us past that handicap, you’re fired!”
“That’s what I’m here for,” replied Fred Allen. “Here, you take this hammer and let me push a saw for a jiffy.” Already he had noticed that occasional mistakes in sawing were playing havoc with the time of his crew. He had always prided himself on his ability with the saw, and it was not long before he felt that his work was telling. They caught up one board; then they were even.
The “third gang” had made a change, too, in the hammer men. The new arrangement slightly bettered their work. For a solid hour the two crews worked board by board, neither gaining on the other.
Perhaps it was twelve-thirty when several or the children ran over to say that lunch was ready. To Fred Allen it seemed an age since breakfast. As he strode across the green which lay between the Club House and the grove in which the lunch was served, he found himself wondering whether he could have carried that great emptiness which he felt within him much longer.
The lunch was delicious. Indeed, men turned to one another with the question.—“Did you ever taste better?” Many of the men who had spent that morning with hammer and pick had not done a day’s physical work in years, and the sharpening of the apetite which pen, typewriter, and dictaphone can never give, seasoned the potato salad, sandwiches, pickles, homemade root beer, and cake, with a flavor which the daintiest foods no longer possess for the man who foregoes the joys of muscular labor.
While they ate generously of the lunch which the women had served, they compared notes on the morning’s work. Everyone was elated. The progress made, the looks of the new floor, the speed with which the earth-cutting had been carried forward, lent an enthusiastic joy to the whole matter, which quite surpassed the expectations of even the most sanguine.
“Well, you should have seen the dear boy at the barrow-smashing business.” Will Evans was speaking to a little knot of which Ruth Wade was one. “He covered himself with glory, for the boys pushed him hard; and never once, they tell me, was he behind with his barrow.”
“Did you like it, Mr. Allen?” one of the ladies asked.
“I never enjoyed anything more. They work together just like boys.”
“What you mean is that they work together just as boys do, and just as men would if a drive-me-to-death-system of wages did not kill all of the joy and enthusiasm in them.” Ruth Wade smiled just a little as she delivered the gentle reprimand.
“Most men have that spirit of boyhood in them,” interposed Will Evans. “Look at those chaps that were laying floor in your crew. One is an insurance broker, one is a manufacturer, one is an artist, and one is a lecturer and writer. In town each one of them is a conventional, reserved, unnatural, more or less unhappy grown-up. Here they play with the abandon of childhood.”
“It’s on the same principle that our school is founded,” one of the women suggested.
“Exactly,” Ruth Wade agreed. “Interest, enthusiasm, and cooperation—the Holy Trinity of education,” she laughed. “You were asking me whether we were religious, and there you are. Here in God’s first temples, we teach the children how to be strong men and women. That trinity supplies all of the theology necessary, and by way of a. creed, we teach them to believe in each other.”
“Speaking of religion,” Will Evans put in, “the person who made this cake deserves a statue with her ancestors.”
Fred Allen leaned back against the ragged trunk of live oak with a contented sigh. It was all so perfect—the gentle mid-day breeze, the hum of merry voices, the pleasure of physical tiredness, with an appetite at last satisfied, the calm majesty of the great trees, and through it all the hearty good-comradeship manifested everywhere.
“I think the train will be waiting for us,” Will Evans said, rising. “If we start now we will barely make it.”
One by one the men and boys picked themselves up from the grass and joined in the procession that was wending its way back to the Club House.
“We had nearly forty this morning,” exclaimed Will Evans gayly. “There will be twelve or fifteen more this afternoon. By the by,” and he turned to Fred Allen, “if you don’t object, I’ll put you on another job.”
“You are the master, and I the boyishly enthusiastic man,” he answered with a good-humored laugh.
“It’s this way,” Will Evans explained. “There are two carpenters, hired from the city, who are working on a house down here. What do you think they’ve done? At noon they quit work for wages, and will spend the afternoon working for joy and love:”
“That means with this good company?”
“Precisely. They’re joining the ranks of the enthusiastic cooperators, and I should like to put them at work where they will do the most. As for you, I have a neat little job. There is a pile of building-stones which must be shifted around to the front of the Club House. Thou are the man.”
“Do I get any help?” asked Fred Allen.
“Indeed, you shall have ten stalwart men and true under your charge,” Will Evans assured him.
So it came about that while the hammers pounded, and the “mud gang” cheered one another on, Fred Allen and his corporal’s guard of recruits wheeled building-stone. The path was poor; the stones heavy. Fingers were pinched and worn. But the stone pile dwindled at one side, and rose on the other.
When the sun was at its hottest, and the stone shifters were lagging a bit from sheer exhaustion, a little company of younger girls with Ruth Wade at their head, made its appearance around the corner of the Club House. Several of them carried banjos and mandolins. Seating themselves on the grass, they presently began to sing. The transformation was wonderful. The men braced their shoulders, jerked their dangling arms into more rigid postures, and went at the stone with a new ardor. Whether it was the presence of the fair ones, or the music, or the irresistible combination of both, the effect was none the less marvelous! To the tune of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” “Swanee River,” “A Warrior Bold,” “Ben Bolt,” “The Dummy Line,” and a score of other oft-sung lays, the men pressed at their work. It was after four when the last stone was placed on a wheelbarrow, yet how the time had flown?
After cordially thanking the girls for their music, the men crowded into the Club House, where the finishing touches were being put on the floor. The crowd that had been working at the cut for the fireplace had already finished its work. The floor-layers gave a few parting taps with their hammers; all looked with an air of satisfaction at the well-laid floor; the stone carters thought of the stone; the cutters of the earth displaced. In one day the Club had received a tremendous forward push – three or four hundred working hours at the very least. They had all enjoyed the day, and now they would now enjoy the floor—their floor. With a sense of personal ownership in it, and of personal pride in its completion, the men turned toward the swimming- hole. The day’s work was over.
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