In those days five tracks ran from the freight yards of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company through the Belle Dock sheds. Grooved by the double line of hand-trucks hauled over them in day and night shifts, splintered platforms separated the tracks, sloping as they reached the dock. At night, rows of lanterns on the doors of cars being loaded or unloaded lined those wooden runways, a checker or tallyman in charge of each car, under him, freight-handlers and a stevedor. The tallyman's unloading job was just a matter of checking, but loading against time was another proposition. His efficiency was judged by the amount of freight he could load into a car, for it needed experience to take advantage of every cubic foot. There were a few old-timers on the job who could pack a third more freight into an empty than anyone else, and their salaries ran from twelve to fourteen dollars a week. Overtime would boost these figures as high as sixteen or seventeen when freight was heavy.
These nights, often below zero in winter, with rain and wind sweeping in from the dock; and in summer, stifling, smelling of human sweat, crude oil, hemp and cattle-cake have left their impression on me, for my first job, that of night messenger between the docks and the freight agent's office in the Red Building, took me through the sheds a couple of times a night to collect the waybills from the steamers that plied between New York and New Haven, the Richard Peck and the Chester Chapin.
Most of the freight-handlers in sheds A and B and at the Belle Dock were foreigners. The only ones I could talk to myself were Negroes and Irish. The others, in gangs bossed by stevedors who had memorized a few American phrases, were 'Souegians' (so we classified all Scandinavians), Sicilians, Polaks, Russians, Mexicans and a few Chinese. All day, all night, in alternate shirts, they hauled loads of woodpulp, spare parts, glassware, pig-iron, piping, rocksalt, and other commodities from the cars to the boats, or from the boats to the cars, shouting, grunting, and cursing in all their languages and American. Now and again you would hear a yelp out of one of them, for a false step on the incline to the dock meant a pile-up, the trucks gathering speed until they hit the freight gangways that rose from wharf to cargo doors.
I went to work these days at 6:00 p.m., upstairs in the frame office building across the road from the docks, where I helped the night clerks in the record office copy waybills until midnight, which was dinnertime. Some of the clerks brought their food in dinnerpails like the yardmen. I brought mine in my pocket, as I only ate sandwiches. Next door to the freight office was the Dutchman's saloon, where a nickel got you a beer and free lunch of pretzels, sausage and sauerkraut; and, if you felt that way, for twentyfive cents more you could have the Dutchman's daughter as well in the little room behind the bar. But you had to put her wise ahead of time, for between giving the Dutchman a hand tending bar, rinsing the glasses, working the cash register and the little room, she was kept on the run. Only the night clerks and the tallymen used the Dutchman's bar and daughter, and there was not room for them all at the same time. The dockhands sat around anywhere in summertime, and in winter, behind the bales in the freighthouse, all huddled together for warmth, pushing hunks of bread and cheese with garlic and tomatoes into their faces with their penknives. I often wondered why the tallymen waited around for the Dutchman's daughter instead of going after some of the girls on a side street a couple of hundred yards from the docks. Maybe it was the Dutchman's player-piano and the glare of the chandelier in the soaped-over mirrors that made her more glamorous. There are folks who like a lot of light and noise with their beer and everything. And then, two hundred yards is a mile to a guy that has been on his feet six hours.
When the Richard Peck was on time she docked half an hour after midnight, and about 12:15 am, her siren would let off a couple of blasts. Through the doors of the saloon we could see her. All windows, she was, with topheavy tiers of deck space that must have made her waltz like a drunk when she struck a swell. In summer the decks would be crowded with week-end trippers. Many of them just made the trip both ways without setting foot ashore in New Haven. They were mostly poor people, clerks, shopgirls, family outings. They used to lean over the rails and watch the unloading. Once in a while I got acquainted with a girl that came down alone, but only when the boat was ahead of time as I had to be on the job at 1:00 a.m. sharp. The Dutchman used to heave himself over to the docks now and again to give these girls the once over.
"Svell punch of proads he haf, Mister Richart Beck," he would say. "Pfwat a puisness I could make mit him!"
He was sure anyone who would buy the steamer and turn her into a floating brothel could make a fortune. He seemed to imagine that the girls would be included in the deal. Full of ideas, the Dutchman was, but he never had a chance to put them in practice. Someone else got this one and tried it out later, but not with the Richard Peck.
I landed my job with the railroad company through the gentleman my father had given me a letter for. He was the freight agent at the Red Building, a man about sixty, a fine type of Connecticut Yankee with a hatchet face and a stoop. His eyes were deep set and though he wore glasses, piercing. If it had not been for his stoop you might have taken him for an ex-army officer with his scrubby moustache and crisp way of talking like a man used to giving orders, which he was. His wife was younger, and a gifted musician, I understood, though it was hard for me to judge because she only played classical selections on the harmonium in the drawing-room. These required slick finger work, but did not sound so good to me on account of having no tunes. She said when I told her this that a sixty-piece orchestra was needed to render these selections in a fitting manner and, anyway, classical music did not require tunes. If it was tunes I wanted I could go and listen to the caliope at Savin Rock. She felt that G.B., as her husband was always referred to, was responsible for her missing her vocation. If she had not married him she would have become a symphonic orchestra leader, she said. She may have been right. She certainly could make people do what she wanted at the time she wanted it, which seems to be the most important thing in leading orchestras. Her father was about eighty and lived with them. He had been born in Scotland and looked like Andrew Carnagietyping error in original.. He was very feeble and difficult around the house and gave everyone a lot of trouble. G.B. was always very patient with him, even when he came home tired from the office. After I began working nights I saw very little of him myself.
The day I got to New Haven, G.B. and his wife had invited me to spend a couple of weeks with them in their little frame house in Fairhaven, and I accepted gladly. I explained to G.B. that I wanted to get a job, and showed him my diploma from the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pa. He said advertising was not in his line, but that he would see if there was a vacant job in his department. About a week later he told me they had decided to retire the night messenger between the Belle Dock and the Red Building, as he had been on the job forty years and his legs were beginning to go back on him. The job paid eight dollars a week, but G.B. said that was only to start with. All of which made me wonder whether they would be giving me a raise or retiring me at the end of the first forty years. But I was glad to get a chance to be able to stay and work in America and get American clothes with shoulder-supremacy and shoes with bulldog toes, and maybe become an American citizen like the rest of the Irish in America. So I started to look for a room near the docks. But Mrs. G.B. had figured it all out and said I could stay right there in Fairhaven with them and have my lunch there and she would fix sandwiches for me to take along for the midnight break when I went to work at five-thirty. She would do all this and let me have the little room where I was, for four dollars a week, which was less than I would have had to pay anywhere else, so I decided to stay. Allowing for the additional expenditure of ten cents a day for carfare from Fairhaven to the railroad bridge above the Red Building where the streetcars stopped, I expected to put aside between $3. and $3.40 every week.
There was a fellow called Scotty who used to work over in freight house B. as a clerk. He came back from a visit to Scotland after I had been on the job about a month. I used to meet him coming from work about the time I got to the docks. He was tall, a little bald, and he dressed well for a freight clerk and had a very superior air with everyone who was not Scotch. He tolerated the Irish and Welsh because he said they were Celts, though of an inferior brand. He became friendly with me when I told him my father's grandmother had been lowland Scotch and her grandfather had been hung for stealing sheep from the English. When I told him that G.B.'s father-in-law was Scotch he said he would love to meet him. I said I would ask Mrs, G.B., and I did, and she said it would be very nice indeed for her father to meet a compatriot. Mrs. G.B.'s sister, Mrs. Lindsey, was there, too, when I told her, and they both thought it would be so nice for their father to meet a compatriot, for he liked to talk about his Scotch ancestors who spelled their name with a y, —Smyth.
So one Sunday I brought Scotty along with me, and G.B. and his wife were there and her father, and Mrs. Lindsey and her husband, a kindly stoutish man with protruding moustaches and teeth who thought it very interesting that his wife's maiden name was spelled with a y, which he often mentioned. Everyone was pleased with Scotty, and Scotty was pleased with himself, and very pleased to meet G.B. who was an important man in the freight department where Scotty worked. The gracious aloofness of his manner wore off when he heard Mrs. Lindsey liked the theatre and had seen Pavlova dance at the Century Theatre in New York, because he was very well known in Scottish amateur theatrical circles, he said, and had won a medal when he was thirteen for dancing a Highland fling for an hour without stopping. When Mrs. G.B. mentioned that she was a musician he asked if she knew any Highland flings. She said she was afraid her repertoire was exclusively classical, but if he had the music she could play anything he wanted on the harmonium in the drawing-room. Then Mrs. Lindsey said she was giving a benefit for the widows and orphans of Fairhaven the following Sunday with other society ladies and would he dance a Highland fling and had he any kilts. Mrs. G.B. was going to play some classical selections, Mr. Lindsey would sing Asleep in the Deep, and she herself intended to recite a couple of poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Scotty said he never travelled without kilts and was a great believer in charity and considered it nothing short of a duty to comply, which he did.
When Scotty came to do his Highland fling at the annual benefit for widows and orphans, Mrs. Lindsey took him under her wing, and she told me aside he was one of the most refined men she had ever met. Knowing Scotty, I figured it must have been his kilts that created this impression. But Mrs. Lindsey changed her ideas on the subject at 10:30 p.m. when Scotty, excusing himself on the grounds of a pressing engagement, happened to mention with excusable pride, and in the hearing of other society ladies, that it was with no less a person than the housemaid of President Hadley of Yale University.