While my mother started to cook,I plunged into bread and butter;but before my appetite was appeased,or the steak fried,I was sound asleep.In vain my mother strove to shake me awake enough to eat the meat.Failing in this,with the assistance of my father she managed to get me to my room,where I collapsed dead asleep on the bed.They undressed me and covered me up.In the morning came the agony of being awakened.I was terribly sore,and,worst of all,my wrists were swelling.But I made up for my lost supper,eating an enormous breakfast,and when I hobbled to catch my car I carried a lunch twice as big as the one the day before.
Work!Let any youth just turned eighteen try to out-shovel two man-grown coal-shovellers.Work!Long before midday I had eaten the last scrap of my huge lunch.But I was resolved to show them what a husky young fellow determined to rise could do.The worst of it was that my wrists were swelling and going back on me.
There are few who do not know the pain of walking on a sprained ankle.Then imagine the pain of shovelling coal and trundling a loaded wheelbarrow with two sprained wrists.
Work!More than once I sank down on the coal where no one could see me,and cried with rage,and mortification,and exhaustion,and despair.That second day was my hardest,and all that enabled me to survive it and get in the last of the night coal at the end of thirteen hours was the day fireman,who bound both my wrists with broad leather straps.So tightly were they buckled that they were like slightly flexible plaster casts.They took the stresses and pressures which hitherto had been borne by my wrists,and they were so tight that there was no room for the inflammation to rise in the sprains.
And in this fashion I continued to learn to be an electrician.
Night after night I limped home,fell asleep before I could eat my supper,and was helped into bed and undressed.Morning after morning,always with huger lunches in my dinner pail,I limped out of the house on my way to work.
I no longer read my library books.I made no dates with the girls.I was a proper work beast.I worked,and ate,and slept,while my mind slept all the time.The whole thing was a nightmare.I worked every day,including Sunday,and I looked far ahead to my one day off at the end of a month,resolved to lie abed all that day and just sleep and rest up.
The strangest part of this experience was that I never took a drink nor thought of taking a drink.Yet I knew that men under hard pressure almost invariably drank.I had seen them do it,and in the past had often done it myself.But so sheerly non-alcoholic was I that it never entered my mind that a drink might be good for me.I instance this to show how entirely lacking from my make-up was any predisposition toward alcohol.And the point of this instance is that later on,after more years had passed,contact with John Barleycorn at last did induce in me the alcoholic desire.
I had often noticed the day fireman staring at me in a curious way.At last,one day,he spoke.He began by swearing me to secrecy.He had been warned by the superintendent not to tell me,and in telling me he was risking his job.He told me of the day coal-passer and the night coal-passer,and of the wages they had received.I was doing for thirty dollars a month what they had received eighty dollars for doing.He would have told me sooner,the fireman said,had he not been so certain that I would break down under the work and quit.As it was,I was killing myself,and all to no good purpose.I was merely cheapening the price of labour,he argued,and keeping two men out of a job.
Being an American boy,and a proud American boy,I did not immediately quit.This was foolish of me,I know;but I resolved to continue the work long enough to prove to the superintendent that I could do it without breaking down.Then I would quit,and he would realise what a fine young fellow he had lost.
All of which I faithfully and foolishly did.I worked on until the time came when I got in the last of the night coal by six o'clock.Then I quit the job of learning electricity by doing more than two men's work for a boy's wages,went home,and proceeded to sleep the clock around.
Fortunately,I had not stayed by the job long enough to injure myself--though I was compelled to wear straps on my wrists for a year afterward.But the effect of this work orgy in which I had indulged was to sicken me with work.I just wouldn't work.The thought of work was repulsive.I didn't care if I never settled down.Learning a trade could go hang.It was a whole lot better to royster and frolic over the world in the way I had previously done.So I headed out on the adventure-path again,starting to tramp East by beating my way on the railroads.
