The Bread Line

: A Deal In Wheat And Other Stories

The street was very dark and absolutely deserted. It was a district on

the "South Side," not far from the Chicago River, given up largely to

wholesale stores, and after nightfall was empty of all life. The echoes

slept but lightly hereabouts, and the slightest footfall, the faintest

noise, woke them upon the instant and sent them clamouring up and down

the length of the pavement between the iron shuttered fronts. The only

/> light visible came from the side door of a certain "Vienna" bakery,

where at one o'clock in the morning loaves of bread were given away to

any who should ask. Every evening about nine o'clock the outcasts began

to gather about the side door. The stragglers came in rapidly, and the

line--the "bread line," as it was called--began to form. By midnight it

was usually some hundred yards in length, stretching almost the entire

length of the block.



Toward ten in the evening, his coat collar turned up against the fine

drizzle that pervaded the air, his hands in his pockets, his elbows

gripping his sides, Sam Lewiston came up and silently took his place at

the end of the line.



Unable to conduct his farm upon a paying basis at the time when Truslow,

the "Great Bear," had sent the price of grain down to sixty-two cents a

bushel, Lewiston had turned over his entire property to his creditors,

and, leaving Kansas for good, had abandoned farming, and had left his

wife at her sister's boarding-house in Topeka with the understanding

that she was to join him in Chicago so soon as he had found a steady

job. Then he had come to Chicago and had turned workman. His brother Joe

conducted a small hat factory on Archer Avenue, and for a time he found

there a meager employment. But difficulties had occurred, times were

bad, the hat factory was involved in debts, the repealing of a certain

import duty on manufactured felt overcrowded the home market with cheap

Belgian and French products, and in the end his brother had assigned and

gone to Milwaukee.



Thrown out of work, Lewiston drifted aimlessly about Chicago, from

pillar to post, working a little, earning here a dollar, there a dime,

but always sinking, sinking, till at last the ooze of the lowest bottom

dragged at his feet and the rush of the great ebb went over him and

engulfed him and shut him out from the light, and a park bench became

his home and the "bread line" his chief makeshift of subsistence.



He stood now in the enfolding drizzle, sodden, stupefied with fatigue.

Before and behind stretched the line. There was no talking. There was no

sound. The street was empty. It was so still that the passing of a

cable-car in the adjoining thoroughfare grated like prolonged rolling

explosions, beginning and ending at immeasurable distances. The drizzle

descended incessantly. After a long time midnight struck.



There was something ominous and gravely impressive in this interminable

line of dark figures, close-pressed, soundless; a crowd, yet absolutely

still; a close-packed, silent file, waiting, waiting in the vast

deserted night-ridden street; waiting without a word, without a

movement, there under the night and under the slow-moving mists of rain.



Few in the crowd were professional beggars. Most of them were workmen,

long since out of work, forced into idleness by long-continued "hard

times," by ill luck, by sickness. To them the "bread line" was a

godsend. At least they could not starve. Between jobs here in the end

was something to hold them up--a small platform, as it were, above the

sweep of black water, where for a moment they might pause and take

breath before the plunge.



The period of waiting on this night of rain seemed endless to those

silent, hungry men; but at length there was a stir. The line moved. The

side door opened. Ah, at last! They were going to hand out the bread.



But instead of the usual white-aproned under-cook with his crowded

hampers there now appeared in the doorway a new man--a young fellow who

looked like a bookkeeper's assistant. He bore in his hand a placard,

which he tacked to the outside of the door. Then he disappeared within

the bakery, locking the door after him.



A shudder of poignant despair, an unformed, inarticulate sense of

calamity, seemed to run from end to end of the line. What had happened?

Those in the rear, unable to read the placard, surged forward, a sense

of bitter disappointment clutching at their hearts.



The line broke up, disintegrated into a shapeless throng--a throng that

crowded forward and collected in front of the shut door whereon the

placard was affixed. Lewiston, with the others, pushed forward. On the

placard he read these words:



"Owing to the fact that the price of grain has been increased to two

dollars a bushel, there will be no distribution of bread from this

bakery until further notice."



Lewiston turned away, dumb, bewildered. Till morning he walked the

streets, going on without purpose, without direction. But now at last

his luck had turned. Overnight the wheel of his fortunes had creaked and

swung upon its axis, and before noon he had found a job in the

street-cleaning brigade. In the course of time he rose to be first

shift-boss, then deputy inspector, then inspector, promoted to the

dignity of driving in a red wagon with rubber tires and drawing a salary

instead of mere wages. The wife was sent for and a new start made.



But Lewiston never forgot. Dimly he began to see the significance of

things. Caught once in the cogs and wheels of a great and terrible

engine, he had seen--none better--its workings. Of all the men who had

vainly stood in the "bread line" on that rainy night in early summer,

he, perhaps, had been the only one who had struggled up to the surface

again. How many others had gone down in the great ebb? Grim question; he

dared not think how many.



He had seen the two ends of a great wheat operation--a battle between

Bear and Bull. The stories (subsequently published in the city's press)

of Truslow's countermove in selling Hornung his own wheat, supplied the

unseen section. The farmer--he who raised the wheat--was ruined upon one

hand; the working-man--he who consumed it--was ruined upon the other.

But between the two, the great operators, who never saw the wheat they

traded in, bought and sold the world's food, gambled in the nourishment

of entire nations, practised their tricks, their chicanery and oblique

shifty "deals," were reconciled in their differences, and went on

through their appointed way, jovial, contented, enthroned, and

unassailable.



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