Twelve Men

THE MIGHTY ROURKE

When I first met him he was laying the foundation for a small dynamo in the engine-room of the repair shop at Spike, and he was most unusually loud in his protestations and demands. He had with him a dozen Italians, all short, swarthy fellows of from twenty-five to fifty years of age, who were busy bringing material from a car that had been pushed in on the side-track next to the building. This was loaded with crushed stone, cement, old boards, wheelbarrows, tools, and the like, all of which were to be used in the labor that he was about to undertake. He himself was standing in the doorway of the shop where the work was to be conducted, coat off, sleeves rolled up, and shouting with true Irish insistence, “Come, Matt! Come, Jimmie! Get the shovels, now! Get the picks! Bring some sand here! Bring some stone! Where’s the cement, now? Where’s the cement? Jasus Christ! I must have some cement! What arre ye all doin’? What do ye think ye’re up here fer? Hurry, now, hurry! Bring the cement!” and then, having concluded this amazing fanfare, calmly turning to gaze about as if he were the only one in the world who had the right to stand still.

More or less oppressed with life myself at the time, I was against all bosses, and particularly against so seemingly a vicious one as this. “What a slave driver!” I thought. “What a brute!” And yet I remember thinking that he was not exactly

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unpleasant to look at, either – quite the contrary. He was medium in height, thick of body and neck, with short gray hair and mustache, and bright, clear, twinkling Irish gray eyes, and he carried himself with an air of unquestionable authority. It was much as if he had said, “I am the boss here”; and, indeed, he was. Is it this that sends the Irish to rule as captains of hundreds the world over?

The job he was bossing was not very intricate or important, but it was interesting. It consisted of digging a trench ten by twelve feet, and shaping it up with boards into a “form,” after which concrete was to be mixed and poured in, and some iron rods set to fasten the engine to – an engine bed, no less. It was not so urgent but that it might have been conducted with far less excitement, but what are you to do when you are naturally excitable, love to make a great noise, and feel that things are going forward whether they are or not? Plainly this particular individual loved noise and a great stir. So eager was he to have done with it, no matter what it was or where, that he was constantly trotting to and fro, shouting, “Come, Matt! Come, Jimmie! Hurry, now, bring the shovels! Bring the picks!” and occasionally bursting forth with a perfect avalanche of orders. “Up with it! Down with it! Front with it! Back with it! In with it! Out with it!” all coupled with his favorite expletive, “Jasus Christ,” which was as innocent of evil, I subsequently came to know, as a prayer. In short, he was simply wild Irish, and that was all there was to him – a delightful specimen, like Namgay Doola.

But, as I say, at the time he seemed positively appalling to me, a virulent specimen, and I thought, “The Irish brute! To think of human beings having to work for a brute like that! To

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think of his driving men like that!” However, I soon began to discover that he was not so bad as he seemed, and then I began to like him.

The thing that brought about this swift change of feeling in me was the attitude of his men toward him. Although he was so insistent with his commands, they did not seem to mind nor to strain themselves working. They were not killing themselves, by any means. He would stand over them, crying, “Up with it! Up with it! Up with it! Up with it!” or “Down with it! Down with it! Down with it!” until you would have imagined their nerves would be worn to a frazzle. As it was, however, they did not seem to care any more than you would for the ticking of a clock; rather, they appeared to take it as a matter of course, something that had to be, and that one was prepared for. Their steps were in the main as leisurely as those of idlers on Fifth Avenue or Broadway. They carried boards or stone as one would objects of great value. One could not help smiling at the incongruity of it; it was farcical. Finally gathering the full import of it all, I ventured to laugh, and he turned on me with a sharp and yet not unkindly retort.

“Ha! ha! ha!” he mocked. “If ye had to work as hard as these min, ye wouldn’t laugh.”

I wanted to say, “Hard work, indeed!” but instead I replied, “Is that so? Well, I don’t see that they’re killing themselves, or you either. You’re not as fierce as you sound.”

Then I explained that I was not laughing at them but at him, and he took it all in good part. Since I was only a nominal laborer here, not a real one – permitted to work for my health, for twelve cents an hour – we fell to conversing upon railroad matters, and in this way our period of friendship began.

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As I learned that morning, Rourke was the foreman-mason for minor tasks for all that part of the railroad that lay between New York and fifty miles out, on three divisions. He had a dozen or so men under him and was in possession of one car, which was shunted back and forth between the places in which he happened to be working. He was a builder of concrete platforms, culverts, coal-bins, sidewalks, bridge and building piers, and, in fact, anything that could be made out of crushed stone and cement, or bricks and stone, and he was sent here and there, as necessity required. As he explained to me at the time, he sometimes rose as early as four a.m. in order to get to his place of labor by seven. The great railroad company for which he toiled was no gentle master, and did not look upon his ease, or that of his men, as important. At the same time, as he himself confessed, he did not mind hard work – liked it, in short. He had been working now for the company for all of twenty-two years, “rain or shine.” Darkness or storm made no difference to him. “Shewer, I have to be there,” he observed once with his quizzical, elusive Irish grin. “They’re not payin’ me wages fer lyin’ in bed. If ye was to get up that way yerself every day fer a year, me b’y,” he added, eyeing my spare and none too well articulated frame, “it’d make a man av ye.”

“Yes?” I said tolerantly. “And how much do you get, Rourke?”

“Two an’ a half a day.”

“You don’t say!” I replied, pretending admiration.

The munificence of the corporation that paid him two and a half dollars a day for ten hours’ work, as well as for superintending and constructing things of such importance, struck me forcibly. Perhaps, as we say in America, he “had a right” to

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be happy, only I could not see it. At the same time, I could not help thinking that he was better situated than myself at the time. I had been ill, and was now earning only twelve cents an hour for ten hours’ work, and the sight of the foreman for whom I was working was a torture to my soul. He was such a loud-mouthed, blustering, red-headed ignoramus, and I wanted to get out from under him. At the same time, I was not without sufficient influence so to do, providing I could find a foreman who could make use of me. The great thing was to do this, and the more I eyed this particular specimen of foreman the better I liked him. He was genial, really kindly, amazingly simple and sincere. I decided to appeal to him to take me on his staff.

“How would you like to take me, Mr. Rourke, and let me work for you?” I asked hopefully, after explaining to him why I was here.

“Shewer,” he replied. “Ye’d do fine.”

“Would I have to work with the Italians?” I asked, wondering how I would make out with a pick and shovel. My frame was so spare at the time that the question must have amused him, considering the type of physique required for day labor.

“There’ll be plenty av work fer ye to do without ever yer layin’ a hand to a pick er shovel,” he replied comfortingly. “Shewer, that’s no work fer white min. Let the nagurs do it. Look at their backs an’ arrms, an’ then look at yers.”

I was ready to blush for shame. These poor Italians whom I was so ready to contemn were immeasurably my physical superiors.

“But why do you call them negroes, Rourke?” I asked after a time. “They’re not black.”

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“Well, bedad, they’re not white, that’s waan thing shewer,” he added. “Aany man can tell that be lookin’ at thim.”

I had to smile. It was so dogmatic and unreasoning.

“Very well, then, they’re black,” I said, and we left the mat-

ter.

Not long after I put in a plea to be transferred to him, at his request, and it was granted. The day that I joined his flock, or gang, as he called it, he was at Williamsbridge, a little station north on the Harlem, building a concrete coal-bin. It was a pretty place, surrounded by trees and a grass-plot, a vast improvement upon a dark indoor shop, and seemed to me a veritable haven of rest. Ah, the smiling morning sun, the green leaves, the gentle fresh winds of heaven!

Rourke was down in an earthen excavation under the depot platform when I arrived, measuring and calculating with his plumb-bob and level, and when I looked in on him hopefully he looked up and smiled.

“So here ye arre at last,” he said with a grin. “Yes,” I laughed.

“Well, ye’re jist in time; I waant ye to go down to the ahffice.”

“Certainly,” I replied, but before I could say more he climbed out of his hole, his white jeans odorous of the new-turned earth, and fished in the pocket of an old gray coat which lay beside him for a soiled and crumpled letter, which he finally unfolded with his thick, clumsy fingers. Then he held it up and looked at it defiantly.

“I waant ye to go to Woodlawn,” he continued, “an’ look after some bolts that arre up there – there’s a keg av thim – an’ sign the bill fer thim, an’ ship thim down to me. An’ thin I

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waant ye to go down to the ahffice an’ take thim this o.k.” Here again he fished around and produced another crumpled slip, this time of a yellow color (how well I came to know them!), which I soon learned was an o.k. blank, a form which had to be filled in and signed for everything received, if no more than a stick of wood or a nail or a bolt. The company demanded these of all foremen, in order to keep its records straight. Its accounting department was useless without them. At the same time, Rourke kept talking of the “nonsinse av it,” and the “onraisonableness” of demanding o.k.s for everything. “Ye’d think some one was goin’ to sthale thim from thim,” he declared irritably and defiantly.

I saw at once that some infraction of the railroad rules had occurred and that he had been “called down,” or “jacked up” about it, as the railroad men expressed it. He was in a high state of dudgeon, and as defiant and pugnacious as his royal Irish temper would allow. At the same time he was pleased to think that I or some one had arrived who would relieve him of this damnable “nonsinse,” or so he hoped. He was not so inexperienced as not to imagine that I could help him with all this. In fact, as time proved, this was my sole reason for being here.

He flung a parting shot at his superior as I departed.

“Tell him that I’ll sign fer thim when I get thim, an’ not before,” he declared.

I went on my way, knowing full well that no such message was for delivery, and that he did not intend that it should be. It was just the Irish of it. I went off to Woodlawn and secured the bolts, after which I went down to the “ahffice” and reported. There I found the chief clerk, a mere slip of a dancing master in a high collar and attractive office suit, who was also in a

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high state of dudgeon because Rourke, as he now explained, had failed to render an o.k. for this and other things, and did not seem to understand that he, the chief clerk, must have them to make up his reports. Sometimes o.k.s did not come in for a month or more, the goods lying around somewhere until Rourke could use them. He wanted to know what explanation Rourke had to offer, and when I suggested that the latter thought, apparently, that he could leave all consignments of goods in one station or another until such time as he needed them before he o.k.ed for them, he fairly foamed.

“Say,” he almost shouted, at the same time shoving his hands distractedly through his hair, “what does he think I am? How does he think I’m going to make up my books? He’ll leave them there until he needs them, will he? Well, he’s a damned fool, and you go back and tell him I said so. He’s been long enough on the road to know better. You go back and tell him I said that I want a signed form for everything consigned to him the moment he learns that it’s waiting for him, and I want it right away, without fail, whether it’s a single nut or a car of sand. I want it. He’s got to come to time about this now, or something’s going to drop. I’m not going to stand it any longer. How does he think I’m going to make up my books? I wish he’d let you attend to these matters while you’re up there. It will save an awful lot of trouble in this office and it may save him his job. There’s one thing sure: he’s got to come to time from now on, or either he quits or I do.”

These same o.k.s plus about twenty-five long-drawn-out reports or calculations, retroactive and prospective, covering every possible detail of his work from the acknowledgment of all material received up to and including the expenditure of even

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so much as one mill’s worth of paper, were the bane of my good foreman’s life. As I learned afterward, he had nearly his whole family, at least a boy and two girls, assisting him nights on this part of the work. In addition, while they were absolutely of no import in so far as the actual work of construction was concerned – and that was really all that interested Rourke – they were an essential part of the system which made it possible for him to do the work at all – a point which he did not seem to be able to get clear. At the same time, there was an unsatisfactory side to this office technicalia, and it was this: If a man could only sit down and reel off a graphic account of all that he was doing, accompanied by facts and figures, he was in excellent standing with his superiors, no matter what his mechanical defects might be; whereas, if his reports were not clear, or were insufficient, the efficiency of his work might well be overlooked. In a vague way, Rourke sensed this and resented it. He knew that his work was as good as could be done, and yet here were these constant reports and o.k.s to irritate and delay him. Apparently they aided actual construction no whit – but, of course, they did. Although he was a better foreman than most, still, because of his lack of skill in this matter of accounting, he was looked upon as more or less a failure, especially by the chief clerk. Naturally, I explained that I would do my best, and came away.

When I returned, however, I decided to be politic. I could not very well work with a pick and shovel, and this was about all that was left outside of that. I therefore explained as best I could the sad plight of the chief clerk, who stood in danger of losing his job unless these things came in promptly.

“You see how it is, Rourke, don’t you?” I pleaded.

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