Chapter 17

DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO

When school closed in June, Dick came to me and said:

"Dad, I don't want to loaf all summer."

"No need of it," I said. "Take another course in the summer school."

"I want to earn some money," he said, "I want to go to work."

If the boy had come to me a year ago with that suggestion I should have felt hurt. I would have thought it a reflection upon my ability to support my family. We salaried men used to expect our children to be dependent on us until they completed their educations. For a boy to work during his summer vacation was almost as bad form as for the wife to work for money at any time. It had to be explained that the boy was a prodigy with unusual business ability or that he was merely seeking experience. But Dick did not fall into any of these classes. This was what made his proposal the more remarkable to me. It meant that he was willing to take just a plain every-day plugging job.

And underlying this willingness was the spirit that was resurrecting us all. Instead of acting on the defensive, Dick was now eager to play the aggressive game. I hadn't looked for this spirit to show in him so soon, in his life outside of school. I was mighty well pleased.

"All right," I said, "what do you think you can do?"

"I've talked with some of the fellows," he said, "and the surest thing seems to be selling papers."

I gave a gasp at that. I hadn't yet lost the feeling that a newsboy was a sort of cross between an orphan and a beggar. He was to me purely an object of pity. Of course I'd formed this notion like a good many others from the story books and the daily paper. I connected a newsboy with blind fathers and sick mothers if he had any parents at all.

"I guess you can get something better than that to do," I said.

"What's the matter with selling papers?" he asked.

When I stopped to think of the work in that way--as just the buying and selling of papers--I _couldn't_ see anything the matter with it. Why wasn't it like buying and selling anything? You were selling a product in which millions of money was invested, a product which everyone wanted, a product where you gave your customers their money's worth. The only objection I could think of at the moment was that there was so little in it.

"It will keep you on the streets five or six hours a day," I said, "and I don't suppose you can make more than a dollar a week."

"A dollar a week!" he said. "Do you know what one fellow in our class makes right through the year?"

"How much?" I asked.

"He makes between six and eight dollars a week," said Dick.

"That doesn't sound possible," I said.

"He told me he made that. And another fellow he knows about did as well as this even while he was in college. He pretty nearly paid his own way."

"What do you make on a paper?" I asked.

"About half a cent on the one cent papers, and a cent on the two cent papers."

"Then these boys have to sell over two hundred papers a day."

"They have about a hundred regular customers," said Dick, "and they sell another hundred papers besides."

It seemed to me the boys must have exaggerated because eight dollars a week was pretty nearly the pay of an able-bodied man. It didn't seem possible that these youngsters whom I'd pitied all my life could earn such an income. However if they didn't earn half as much, it wasn't a bad proposition for a lad.

I talked the matter over with Ruth and I found she had the same prejudices I had had. She, too, thought selling papers was a branch of begging. I repeated what Dick told me and she shook her head doubtfully.

"It doesn't seem as though I could let the boy do that," she said.

If there was one thing down here the little woman always worried about deep in her heart, it was lest the boy and myself might get coarsened. She thought, I think, without ever exactly saying so to herself that in our ambition to forge ahead we might lose some of the finer standards of life. She was bucking against that tendency all the time. That's why she made me shave every morning, that's why she made me keep my shoes blacked, that's why she made us both dress up on Sunday whether we went to church or not. She for her part kept herself looking even more trig than when she had the fear that Mrs. Grover might drop in at any time. And every night at dinner she presided with as much form as though she were entertaining a dinner party. I guess she thought we might learn to eat with our knives if she didn't.

"Well," I said, "your word is final. But let's look at this first as a straight business proposition."

So I went over the scheme just as I had to myself.

"These boys aren't beggars," I said. "They are little business men. And as a matter of fact most of them are earning as much as their fathers. The trouble is that they've been given a black eye by well-meaning sympathizers who haven't taken the trouble to find out just what the actual facts are. A group of big-hearted women who see their own chickens safely rounded up at six every night, find the newsboys on the street as they themselves are on their way to the opera and conclude it's a great hardship and that the lads must be homeless and suffering. Maybe they even find a case or two which justifies this theory. But on the whole they are simply comparing the outside of these boys' lives with the lives of their own sheltered boys. They don't stop to consider that these lads are toughened and that they'd probably be on the street anyway. And they don't figure out how much they earn or what that amount stands for down here."

Ruth listened and then she said:

"But isn't it a pity that the boys _are_ toughened, Billy?"

"No," I said, "it would be a pity if they weren't. They wouldn't last a year. We have to have some seasoned fighters in the world."

"But Dick--"

"Dick has found his feet now. The suggestion was his own. Personally I believe in letting him try it."

"All right, Billy," she said.

But she said it in such a sad sort of way that I said:

"If you're going to worry about him, this ends it. But I'd like to see the boy so well seasoned that you won't have to worry about him no matter where he is, no matter what he's doing."

"You're right," she said, "I want to see him like you. I never worry about you, Billy."

It pleased me to have her say that. I know a lot of men who wouldn't believe their wives loved them unless they fretted about them all the time. I think a good many fellows even make up things just to see the women worry. I remember that Stevens always used to come home either with a sick headache or a tale of how he thought he might lose his job or something of the sort and poor Dolly Stevens would stay awake half the night comforting him. She'd tell Ruth about it the next day. I may have had a touch of that disease myself before I came down here but I know that ever since then I've tried to lift the worrying load off the wife's shoulders. I've done my best to make Ruth feel I'm strong enough to take care of myself. I've wanted her to trust me so that she'd know I act always just as though she was by my side. Of course I've never been able to do away altogether with her fear of sickness and sudden death, but so far as my own conduct is concerned I've tried to make her feel secure in me.

When I stop to think about it, Ruth has really lived three lives. She has lived her own and she has lived it hard. She not only has done her daily tasks as well as she knew how but she has tried to make herself a little better every day. That has been a waste of time because she was just naturally as good as they make them but you couldn't ever make her see that. I don't suppose there's been a day when at night she hasn't thought she might have done something a little better and lain awake to tell me so.

Then Ruth has lived my life and done over again every single thing I've done except the actual physical labor. Why every evening when I came back from work she wanted me to begin with seven-thirty A.M. and tell her everything that happened after that. And when I came back from school at night, she'd wake up out of a sound sleep if she had gone to bed and ask me to tell her just what I'd learned. Though she never held a trowel in her hand I'll bet she could go out to-day and build a true brick wall. And though she has never seen half the men I've met, she knows them as well as I do myself. Some of them she knows better and has proved to me time and again that she does. I've often told her about some man I'd just met and about whom I was enthusiastic for the moment and she'd say:

"Tell me what he looks like, Billy."

I'd tell her and then she'd ask about his eyes and about his mouth and what kind of a voice he had and whether he smiled when he said so and so and whether he looked me in the eyes at that point and so on. Then she'd say:

"Better be a little careful about him"; or "I guess you can trust him, Billy."

Sometimes she made mistakes but that was because I hadn't reported things to her just right. Generally I'd trust her judgment in the face of my own.

Then Ruth led the boy's life. Every ambition he had was her ambition. Besides that she had a dozen ambitions for him that he didn't know anything about. And she thought and worked and schemed to make every single one of them come true. Every trouble he had was her trouble too. If he worried a half hour over something, she worried an hour. Then again there were a whole lot of other troubles in connection with him which bothered her and which he didn't know about.

Besides all these things she was busy about dressing us and feeding us and making us comfortable. She was always cleaning our rooms and washing our clothes and mending our socks. Then, too, she looked after the finances and this in itself was enough for one woman to do. Then as though this wasn't plenty she kept light-hearted for our sakes. You'd find her singing about her work whenever you came in and always ready with a smile and a joke. And if she herself had a headache you had to be a doctor and a lawyer rolled in one to find it out.

So I say the least I could do was to make her trust me so thoroughly that she'd have one less burden. And I wanted to bring up Dick in the same way. Dick was a good boy and I'll say that he did his best.

Ruth says that if I don't tear up these last few pages, people will think I'm silly. I'm willing so long as they believe me honest. Of course, in a way, such details are no one's business but if I couldn't give Ruth the credit which is her due in this undertaking, I wouldn't take the trouble to write it all out.

Dick told his school friend what he wanted to do and asked his advice on the best way to go at it. The latter went with him and helped him get his license, took him down to the newspaper offices and showed him where to buy his papers, and introduced him to the other boys. The newsboys hadn't at that time formed a union but there was an agreement among them about the territory each should cover. Some of the boys had worked up a regular trade in certain places and of course it wasn't right for a newcomer to infringe upon this. There was considerable talking and some bargaining and finally Dick was given a stand in the banking district. This was due to Dick's classmate also. The latter realized that a boy of Dick's appearance would do better there than anywhere.

So one morning Dick rose early and I staked him to a dollar and he started off in high spirits. He didn't have any of the false pride about the work that at first I myself had felt. He was on my mind pretty much all that day and I came home curious and a little bit anxious to learn the result. He had been back after the morning editions. Ruth reported he had sold fifty papers and had returned more eager than ever. She said he wouldn't probably be home until after seven. He wanted to catch the crowds on their way to the station.

I suggested to Ruth that we wait dinner for him and go on up town and watch him. She hesitated at this, fearing the boy wouldn't like it and perhaps not over anxious herself to see him on such a job. But as I said, if the boy wasn't ashamed I didn't think we ought to be. So she put on her things and we started.

We found him by the entrance to one of the big buildings with his papers in a strap thrown over his shoulder. He had one paper in his hand and was offering it, perhaps a bit shyly, to each passer-by with a quiet, "Paper, sir?" We watched him a moment and Ruth kept a tight grip on my arm.

"Well," I said, "what do you think of him?"

"Billy," she said with a little tremble in her voice, "I'm proud of him."

"He'll do," I said.

Then I said:

"Wait here a moment."

I took a nickel from my pocket and hurried towards him as though I were one of the crowd hustling for the train. I stopped in front of him and he handed me a paper without looking up. He began to make change and it wasn't until he handed me back my three coppers that he saw who I was. Then he grinned.

"Hello, Dad," he said.

Then he asked quickly,

"Where's mother?"

But Ruth couldn't wait any longer and she came hurrying up and placed her hand underneath the papers to see if they were too heavy for him.

Dick earned three dollars that first week and he never fell below this during the summer. Sometimes he went as high as five and when it came time for him to go to school again he had about seventy-five regular customers. He had been kept out of doors between six and seven hours a day. The contact with a new type of boy and even the contact with the brisk business men who were his customers had sharpened up his wits all round. In the ten weeks he saved over forty dollars. I wanted him to put this in the bank but he insisted on buying his own winter clothes with it and on the whole I thought he'd feel better if I let him. Then he had another proposition. He wanted to keep his evening customers through the year. I thought it was going to be pretty hard for him to do this with his school work but we finally agreed to let him try it for a while anyway. After all I didn't like to think he couldn't do what other boys were doing.