As we entered the kitchen, a tiny room with one window in it, I
glanced around it as I had done at the front room, the two seeming to
complete the suite occupied by Mrs. Gibbons. My survey was quick and
cautious, but not too much so for mental noting of the conservation
of time and space and labor represented by an arrangement of
household effects I had never seen before. Health and comfort were
the principal omissions.
In one corner of the room was a bed covered with a calico quilt of
many colors, and under it a pallet, tucked away for convenience in
the daytime, but obviously out at night. Close to the bed was a
large stove in which a good fire was burning, and from the
blue-and-white saucepan on the top came forth odor of a soup with
which I was not familiar. The door of the oven was partly open, and
in the latter could be seen a pan of heavy-looking biscuits which
apparently awaited their devouring at any time that suited the desire
of the devourer. Bettina looked at them and then at me, but she said
nothing--that is, nothing out loud.
"Set down." Mrs. Gibbons, the baby still in her arms, made effort to
dust one of the two chairs in the room with the gingham apron she was
wearing, and, after failing, motioned me to take it. The other one
she pushed toward Bettina with her foot. On the bed was a little
girl of six or seven, and as we took our seats a boy, who barely
looked ten, came from behind a couple of wash-tubs in an opposite
corner of the room and wiped his hands on a towel hanging from a hook
in the wall. To ask something concerning this boy was the purpose of
our visit.
"Speak to the lady, Jimmy. Anybody would think you didn't have no
manners! No, you can't have your supper yet."
Mrs. Gibbons waved her hand weakly at her son, who, smiling at us,
had gone to a corner cupboard with perforated tins of diamond pattern
in its doors, and taken therefrom a soup-plate and cup and saucer.
Paying no attention to his mother's reference to a delayed meal, he
ladled out of the big saucepan, with a cracked cup, a plate of the
steaming soup, and carried it carefully to an oilcloth-covered table,
on which was a lamp and glass pitcher, some unwashed dishes left from
the last meal, a broken doll, and a child's shoe. Putting down the
plate of soup, he came back to the stove and poured out a cup of
feeble-looking coffee.
"Goin' to be extras out to-night and I mightn't get back till after
ten." Again his gay little smile lighted his thin face. "Ifen I
don't eat now I mightn't eat at all. Have one?"
He poked a plate of the health-destroying biscuits at Bettina with a
merry little movement, and bravely she took one, bravely made effort
to eat it. "What's your name?" I heard him ask her, and then I
turned to Mrs. Gibbons.
"It is about your little boy I've come to see you." I moved my chair
as far as possible from the red-hot stove and opened my coat. "He is
too young to be at work. He isn't twelve, is he?"
The indignation I had felt on hearing of Jimmy's bondage to a bench
from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with an interval of
an hour for lunch, was unaccountably disappearing. With helplessness
and incapacity I was not ordinarily patient, and Mrs. Gibbons was an
excellent example of both. Still--"He isn't twelve yet, is he?" I
repeated.
Mrs. Gibbons pushed the little girl, who was trying to get out of the
bed, back in it, and shifted the whimpering baby from one arm to the
other. For a moment she hesitated, looked at me uncertainly.
"No 'm, he ain't but eleven, but I had to tell the mayor that signed
the papers permitting of him to work, that he was twelve. The law
don't let children work lessen they're twelve, and only then if their
mother is a widow and 'ain't got nothing and nobody to do for her. I
don't like to tell a story if I can help it, and them what don't know
nothing 'bout how things is can't understand, and say we oughtn't to
do it. They'd do it, too, ifen they had to. After his father died I
had to take Jimmy out of school and put him to work. There wasn't
nothing else to do."
"Has his father been dead long?" I moved still further from the
stove. My question was unthinking. He couldn't have been dead long.
"In days and months it 'ain't been so long, but it's been awful long
to me. 'Taint been more'n a year since they brought him home to me
dead, and I been plum' no 'count ever since. This baby," she put the
child in her arms on her lap and shook her knees in mechanical effort
to still its cries, "this baby was born while its father was being
buried, and when I took in my man was gone and wouldn't never come
home no more, never give me his wages on Saturday nights, and
wouldn't be here to do nothing for me and the children, seems like
something inside me just give out. I reckon you 'ain't never had
nothing to happen to you like that, have you?"
"No, I've never had anything like that to happen to me." The last
remnant of indignation was vanishing. That is, against the helpless,
incapable, worn-out woman who was Jimmy's mother. Against something
else, something I could not place or define or call by name, it was
rising stormily. "I know you need Jimmy's help," I said, after a
moment, "but he is too young to work, too small."
"Came near not getting a job 'count of not being no bigger."
His mouth filled with half a biscuit, the boy nodded at me gleefully,
then putting down his spoon, he dusted his hands and wiped them on
the side of his trousers. "The first place mother and me went to,
they wouldn't take me 'cause the table where I'd had to work struck
me right here." His hands swiped his throat just under his chin.
"But the next place was all right. They had a boys' table and the
bench was made high on purpose."
"What is it you do?" I asked, and again my voice sounded strange.
"Is it a box-factory you're in?"
"Soap and pills." Head thrown back, Jimmy drained the last drop of
coffee from his cup, then scraped the latter with a tin spoon for its
last bit of sugar. "We are pasters, our gang is. We paste the paper
on the boxes. There's a boy sits next to me what's the fastest
paster in town, but I'm going to beat him some day. I can paste
almost as fast as he can now."
"He could beat him now if he didn't play so much." In his mother's
voice was neither scolding nor complaint. "Jimmy always would play
some from the time he was born. His boss says he's the best worker
he's got 'cepting the boy who sits next to him, and if he'd just stay
still all day--"
"Oh, can he play?" I made no apology for the interruption. The
child was undersized and illy-nourished, and to let him work ten
hours a day seemed a crime for which I, and all others who cared for
children, were somehow responsible. But if he had a chance to play--
"When old Miss High-Spy goes out the room we play." Jimmy gave his
trousers a jerk and made effort to force connection between a button
and a buttonhole belonging respectively to his upper and his lower
garments. "She's a regular old tale-teller, but soon as she's out
the room we get down from our bench and rush around and tag each
other. Our benches 'ain't got no backs to 'em, and if we didn't get
off sometimes we couldn't sit up all day. The other fellows, the big
ones, don't tell on us. They make us put the windows down from the
top when she's out."
"Do you mean you don't have any air in the room?" My voice was
unbelieving, and at something in my face Jimmy laughed.
"Not when we're working. The wind might blow the little pieces of
paper off the table and we'd lose time getting 'em, she says. Some
the boys get so sick from the heat and the glue smell they heave up
their breakfast and can't eat nothing all day. I 'ain't fainted but
twice since I been there, but Alex Hobbs keels over once a week,
anyhow. Used to frighten me at first when I saw him getting green-y,
but I don't mind it now."
With a quick turn of his head Jimmy looked at a small clock on the
shelf above the wash-tubs, and got up with even quicker movement. "I
forgot about the wood, and the papers will be ready 'fore I can get
there if I don't hurry. Good-by to you all," and, slamming the door
behind him, he ran down the kitchen steps into the yard, where in a
moment we heard him whistling as he chopped the wood that must be
brought up for the morning.
It was not often Mrs. Gibbons had a listener who had never before
heard of her hardships, and after explaining to me why Jimmy was at
home at that time of the day, his presence being due not to trifling
on his part, but to the half-time the factory was running, she gave
herself up to the luxury of telling me in detail of her many
misfortunes and of her inability to get through the winter unless
additional help were given her.
"Can't you work?" I asked. "If the children are put in a day nursery
they would be well looked after, and you would probably be more
comfortable in a good factory than here."
"A good factory!" The inflection in her voice was one of listless
tolerance for my ignorance. "I don't reckon you ever worked in one.
There ain't none of 'em good. Some's better than others, but when
you get up at five o'clock on winter mornings and make the fire and
melt the water, if it's frozen, to wash your face with, and--"
"Does it freeze in here?" Bettina, who had by effort restrained
herself from taking part in the conversation, leaned forward and dug
her hands deep in her lap. "Does it really freeze in this hot room?"
"It ain't hot in here at night. Last winter it froze 'most every
night for a month. Mis' Cotter was boarding with me last winter, her
and her little girl both. She's the lady what rents the room between
the kitchen and the front room from me. She sews on carpets and the
place she works at is right far from here. She warn't well last
winter--some kind of misery is always on her--and she asked me to
board her so she wouldn't have to do no cooking before she goes away
in the morning and when she comes back at night."
"With a swift movement of her hand Mrs. Gibbons caught the little
girl, who, behind her back, was making ready to slip off the bed and
on the floor, but as she swung her again in place she kept up her
talking, and by neither rise nor fall was the monotone of her voice
broken.
"I had to get up at five so as to have breakfast in time, for I can't
get the room warm and the things cooked in less'n an hour, and she
has to leave here a little after six so as to take her little girl to
the nursery before she goes to her place, and they ain't noways close
together. The stars are shining when she goes out and they're
shining when she comes in; that is, if the weather's good. She's
been so wore out lately she's been taking her meals again with me,
but I don't see much of her. She goes to bed the minute she's
through supper."
Bettina twisted in her chair. "Do you eat and sleep in here, too?"
she asked. Her eyes were on Mrs. Gibbons. Carefully she kept them
from mine. "Do you always eat in here?"
"We eat in here all the time and sleep in here in winter, because
there ain't but one fire. That goes out early, which is why the
water freezes. Jimmy has to bring it up from the yard in buckets,
and as the nurse-lady who comes down here says we must have fresh air
in the room, being 'tis all four of us sleep in it, I keep the window
open at night. I don't take no stock in all this fresh-air talk.
'Taint only the water what gets froze--"
"Why don't you cover a bucketful of it with one of those tubs?"
Again Bettina's forefinger pointed. "That would keep the wind off
and the water wouldn't freeze if it was covered up."
"I never thought of that. Get back, Rosie!" Mrs. Gibbons made effort
to catch her little daughter, but this time the child wriggled down
from the foot of the bed and came toward me, hands behind her back,
and stared up into my face.
"Whatcha name?"
I told her and asked hers, and without further preliminaries she came
close to me and hunched her shoulders to be taken in my lap.
"We've got to go--we're bound to go, Miss Dandridge!" With a leap
Bettina was out of her chair, and, catching the little girl by the
hand, she drew her from me and dangled in front of her a
once-silvered mesh-bag, took from it a penny, and gave it to her;
then she turned to Mrs. Gibbons.
"We're awful glad we've seen you." Bettina nodded gravely to the
woman on the bed. "And of course we won't tell anybody about Jimmy
not being twelve yet; but Miss Heath wants him to go back to school,
and she's coming to see you soon about it. We've got to go now."
In a manner I could not understand, Bettina, who had gotten up and
was now standing behind Mrs. Gibbons, beckoned to me mysteriously,
and, fearing the latter might become aware of her violent movements,
I, too, got up and shook hands with my hostess.
"I will see you in a few days," I said. "There's no chance for Jimmy
if he doesn't have some education. He ought to go back to school."
"Yes 'm, I know he ought, but he can't go." Jimmy's mother shook
hands, limply. "The pickle-factory where I used to work is turning
off hands every week, and I can't get nothing to do there. I don't
know how to do nothing but pickles. Sometimes I gets a little sewing
at home, but I ain't a sewer. The Charities sends me a basket of
keep-life-in-you groceries every now and then, and the city gives me
some coal and wood when there's enough to go round more than once,
but I need Jimmy's money for the rent."
"If the rent were paid would you let him go back to school?"
"Yes 'm." The dull voice quickened not at all. "I'd be glad to let
him go. I don't want him to work, but them that don't know how it is
can't understand. You-all must come again. Good-by. Come back
here, Rosie. You'll catch your death out there. Good-by."
In the open air, which felt good after the steaming heat of the
bedroom-kitchen, Bettina and I walked for a few moments in silence,
and then, slipping her arm in mine, she looked up at me with wise
little eyes.
"Please excuse me for telling you, Miss Dandridge, but you're new yet
in the places you've been going to since you came to Scarborough
Square, and you'll have to be careful about taking the children on
your lap and in your arms, if they're babies. You love children, and
you just naturally hold out your hands to them, but if you don't know
them very well, you'd better not. All of them ain't healthy, and
hardly any--"
Bettina stopped and, standing still, looked straight ahead of her at
a man and a young woman crossing the street some little distance from
us. Then she looked up at me. The man was Selwyn. The girl with
him was the odd and elfish little creature who had been hurt in
Scarborough Square and whom he had helped bring in to Mrs. Mundy.