MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO
On arriving in Chicago I addressed myself to the ladies of Hull House,
asking for a tenement family who would take a factory girl to board. I
intended starting out without money to see at least how far I could go
before putting my hand into the depths where an emergency fund was
pinned in a black silk bag.
It was the first day of May. A hot wind blew eddies of dust up and down
the electric car tracks; the streets were alive with children; a group
swarmed in front of each doorstep, too large to fit into the house
behind it. Down the long, regular avenues that stretched right and left
there was a broken line of tenements topped by telegraph wires and
bathed in a soft cloud of black soot falling from a chimney in the
neighbourhood. The sidewalks were a patchwork of dirt, broken
paving-stones and wooden boards. The sunshine was hot and gloomy. There
were no names on the corner lamps and the house numbers were dull and
needed repainting. It was already late in the afternoon: I had but an
hour or two before dark to find a lodging. The miserable, overcrowded
tenement houses repelled me, yet I dreaded that there should not be room
among them for one more bread-winner to lodge. I hailed a cluster of
children in the gutter:
"Say," I said, "do you know where Mrs. Hicks lives to?"
They crowded around, eager. The tallest boy, with curly red hair and
freckles, pointed out Mrs. Hicks' residence, the upper windows of a
brick flat that faced the world like a prison wall. After I had rung and
waited for the responding click from above, a cross-eyed Italian woman
with a baby in her arms motioned to me from the step where she was
sitting that I must go down a side alley to find Mrs. Hicks. Out of a
promiscuous heap of filth, a broken-down staircase led upward to a row
of green blinds and a screen door. Somebody's housekeeping was scattered
around in torn bits of linen and tomato cans.
The screen door opened to my knock and the Hicks family gushed at
me--ever so many children of all ages and an immense mother in an
under-waist and petticoat. The interior was neat; the wooden floors were
scrubbed spotless. I congratulated myself. Mrs. Hicks clucked to the
family group, smiled at me, and said:
"I never took a boarder in my life. I ain't got room enough for my own
young ones, let alone strangers."
[Illustration: "THE BREATH OF THE BLACK, SWEET NIGHT REACHED THEM,
FETID, HEAVY WITH THE ODOUR OF DEATH AS IT BLEW ACROSS THE STOCKYARDS"]
There were two more names on my list. I proceded to the nearest and
found an Irish lady living in basement rooms ornamented with green
crochet work, crayon portraits, red plaid table-cloths and chromo
picture cards.
She had rheumatism in her "limbs" and moved with difficulty. She was
glad to talk the matter over, though she had from the first no intention
of taking me. From my then point of view nothing seemed so desirable as
a cot in Mrs. Flannagan's front parlour. I even offered in my eagerness
to sleep on the horsehair sofa. Womanlike, she gave twenty little
reasons for not taking me before she gave the one big reason, which was
this:
"Well, to tell you the truth, I wouldn't mind having you myself, but
I've got three sons, and you know _boys is queer_."
It was late, the sun had set and only the twilight remained for my
search before night would be upon me and I would be driven to some
charity refuge.
I had one more name, and climbed to find its owner in a tenement flat.
She was a German woman with a clubfoot. Two half-naked children
incrusted with dirt were playing on the floor. They waddled toward me as
I asked what my chances were for finding a room and board. The mother
struck first one, then the other, of her offspring, and they fell into
two little heaps, both wailing. From a hole back of the kitchen came the
sympathetic response of a half-starved shaggy dog. He howled and the
babes wailed while we visited the dusky apartment. There was one room
rented to a day lodger who worked nights, and one room without a window
where the German family slept. She proposed that I share the bed with
her that night until she could get an extra cot. Her husband and the
children could sleep on the parlour lounge. She was hideous and dirty.
Her loose lips and half-toothless mouth were the slipshod note of an
entire existence. There was a very dressy bonnet with feathers hanging
on a peg in the bedroom, and two gala costumes belonging to the tearful
twins.
"I'll come back in an hour, thank you," I said. "Don't expect me if I am
not here in an hour," and I fled down the stairs. Before the hour was up
I had found, through the guidance of the Irish lady with rheumatism, a
clean room in one street and board in another. This was inconvenient,
but safe and comparatively healthy.
My meals were thirty-five cents a day, payable at the end of the week;
my room was $1.25 a week, total $3.70 a week.
My first introduction to Chicago tenement life was supper at Mrs.
Wood's.
I could hear the meal sputtering on the kitchen stove as I opened the
Wood front door.
Mrs. Wood, combining duties as cook and hostess, called to me to make
myself at home in the front parlour. I seated myself on the sofa, which
exuded the familiar acrid odour of the poor. Opposite me there was a
door half open leading into a room where a lamp was lighted. I could see
a young girl and a man talking together. He was sitting and had his hat
on. She had a halo of blond hair, through which the lamplight was
shining, and she stood near the man, who seemed to be teasing her. Their
conversation was low, but there was a familiar cry now and then, half
vulgar, half affectionate.
When we had taken our places at the table, Mrs. Wood presented us.
"This is Miss Ida," she said, pointing to the blonde girl; "she's been
boarding over a year with me, and this," turning to the young man who
sat near by with one arm hanging listlessly over the back of a chair,
"this is Miss Ida's intended."
The other members of the household were a fox terrier, a canary and
"Wood"--Wood was a man over sixty. He and Mrs. Wood had the same devoted
understanding that I have observed so often among the poor couples of
the older generation. This good little woman occupied herself with the
things that no longer satisfy. She took tender care of her husband,
following him to the door with one hand on his shoulder and calling
after him as he went on his way: "Good-by; take care of yourself." She
had a few pets, her children were married and gone, she had a miniature
patch of garden, a trust in the church guild--which took some time and
attention for charitable works, and she did her own cooking and
housework. "And," she explained to me in the course of our conversation
at supper, "I never felt the need of joining these University Settlement
Clubs to get into society." Wood and his wife were a good sort. Miss Ida
was kind in her inquiries about my plans.
"Have you ever operated a power machine?" she asked.
"Yes," I responded--with what pride she little dreamed. "I've run an
electric Singer."
"I guess I can get you a job, then, all right, at my place. It's
piece-work; you get off at five, but you can make good money."
I thanked her, not adding that my Chicago career was to be a checkered
one, and that I was determined to see how many things I could do that I
had never done before.
But social life was beginning to wear on Miss Ida's intended. He took up
his hat and swung along toward the door. I was struggling to extract
with my fork the bones of a hard, fried fish. Mrs. Wood encouraged me in
a motherly tone:
"Oh, my, don't be so formal; take your knife."
"Say," called a voice from the door, "say, come on, Ida, I'm waiting for
you." And the blonde fiancée hurried away with an embarrassed laugh to
join her lover. She was refined and delicate, her ears were small, her
hands white and slender, she spoke correctly with a nasal voice, and her
teeth (as is not often the case among this class, whose lownesses seem
suddenly revealed when they open their mouths) were sound and clean.
The man's smooth face was all commonness and vulgarity.
"He's had appendicitis," Mrs. Wood explained when we were alone. "He's
been out of work a long time. As soon as he goes to his job his side
bursts out again where they operated on him. He ain't a bit strong."
"When are they going to be married?" I asked.
"Oh, dear me, they don't think of that yet; they're in no hurry."
"Will Miss Ida work after she's married?"
"No, indeed."
Did they not have their share of ideal then, these two young labourers
who could wait indefinitely, fed by hope, in their sordid, miserable
surroundings?
I returned to my tenement room; its one window opened over a narrow
alley flanked on its opposite side by a second tenement, through whose
shutters I could look and see repeated layers of squalid lodgings. The
thermometer had climbed up into the eighties. The wail of a newly born
baby came from the room under mine. The heat was stifling. Outdoors in
the false, flickering day of the arc lights the crowd swarmed, on the
curb, on the sidewalk, on the house steps. The breath of the black,
sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it
blew across the stockyards. Shouts, calls, cries, moans, the sounds of
old age and of infancy, of despair and of joy, mingled and became the
anonymous murmur of a hot, human multitude.
The following morning I put ten cents in my pocket and started out to
get a job before this sum should be used up. How huge the city seemed
when I thought of the small space I could cover on foot, looking for
work! I walked toward the river, as the commercial activity expressed
itself in that direction by fifteen-and twenty-story buildings and
streams of velvet smoke. Blocks and blocks of tenements, with the same
dirty people wallowing around them, answered my searching eyes in blank
response. There was an occasional dingy sign offering board and lodging.
After I had made several futile inquiries at imposing offices on the
river front I felt that it was a hopeless quest. I should never get work
unknown, unskilled, already tired and discouraged. My collar was wilted
in the fierce heat; my shabby felt sailor hat was no protection against
the sun's rays; my hands were gloveless; and as I passed the plate glass
windows I could see the despondent droop of my skirt, the stray locks of
hair that blew about free of comb or veil. A sign out: "Manglers
wanted!" attracted my attention in the window of a large steam laundry.
I was not a "mangler," but I went in and asked to see the boss. "Ever
done any mangling?" was his first question.
"No," I answered, "but I am sure I could learn." I put so much ardour
into my response that the boss at once took an interest.
"We might give you a place as shaker; you could start in and work up."
"What do you pay?"
"Four dollars a week until you learn. Then you would work up to five,
five and a half."
Better than nothing, was all I could think, but I can't live on four a
week.
"How often do you pay?"
"Every Tuesday night."
This meant no money for ten days.
"If you think you'd like to try shaking come round Monday morning at
seven o'clock."
Which I took as my dismissal until Monday.
At least I had a job, however poor, and strengthened by this thought I
determined to find something better before Monday. The ten-cent piece
lay an inviting fortune in my hand. I was to part with one-tenth of it
in exchange for a morning newspaper. This investment seemed a reckless
plunge, but "nothing venture, nothing have," my pioneer spirit prompted,
and soon deep in the list of _Wanted, Females_, I felt repaid. Even in
my destitute condition I had a choice in mind. If possible I wanted to
work without machinery in a shop where the girls used their hands alone
as power. Here seemed to be my heart's content--a short, concise
advertisement, "Wanted, hand sewers." After a consultation with a
policeman as to the whereabouts of my future employer, it became evident
that I must part with another of my ten cents, as the hand sewers worked
on the opposite side of the city from the neighbourhood whither I had
strayed in my morning's wanderings. I took a car and alighted at a busy
street in the fashionable shopping centre of Chicago. The number I
looked for was over a steep flight of dirty wooden stairs. If there is
such a thing as luck it was now to dwell a moment with one of the
poorest. I pushed open a swinging door and let myself into the office of
a clothing manufacturer.
The owner, Mr. F., got up from his desk and came toward me.
"I seen your advertisement in the morning paper."
"Yes," he answered in a kindly voice. "Are you a tailoress?"
"No, sir; I've never done much sewing except on a machine."
"Well, we have machines here."
"But," I almost interrupted, beginning to fear that my training at Perry
was to limit all further experience to an electric Singer, "I'd rather
work with my hands. I like the hand-work."
He looked at me and gave me an answer which exactly coincided with my
theories. He said this, and it was just what I wanted him to say.
"If you do hand-work you'll have to use your mind. Lots of girls come in
here with an idea they can let their thoughts wander; but you've got to
pay strict attention. You can't do hand-work mechanically."
"All right, sir," I responded. "What do you pay?"
"I'll give you six dollars a week while you're learning." I could hardly
control a movement of delight. Six dollars a week! A dollar a day for an
apprentice!
"But"--my next question I made as dismal as possible--"when do you pay?"
"Generally not till the end of the second week," the kindly voice said;
"but we could arrange to pay you at the end of the first if you needed
the money."
"Shall I come in Monday?"
"Come in this afternoon at 12:30 if you're ready."
"I'm ready," I said, "but I ain't brought no lunch with me, and it's too
late now to get home and back again."
The man put his hand in his pocket and laid down before me a fifty-cent
piece, advanced on my pay.
"Take that," he said, with courtesy; "get yourself a lunch in the
neighbourhood and come back at half-past twelve."
I went to the nearest restaurant. It was an immense bakery patronized by
office girls and men, hard workers who came for their only free moment
of the day into this eating-place. Everything that could be swallowed
quickly was spread out on a long counter, behind which there were
steaming tanks of tea, coffee and chocolate. The men took their food
downstairs and the ladies climbed to the floor above. I watched them.
They were self-supporting women--independent; they could use their money
as they liked. They came in groups--a rustling frou-frou announced silk
underfittings; feathers, garlands of flowers, masses of trimming weighed
down their broad-brimmed picture hats, fancy veils, kid gloves, silver
side-bags, embroidered blouses and elaborate belt buckles completed the
detail of their showy costumes, the whole worn with the air of a
manikin. What did these busy women order for lunch? Tea and buns,
ice-cream and buckwheat cakes, apple pie _a la mode_ and chocolate were
the most serious ménus. This nourishing food they ate with great nicety
and daintiness, talking the while about clothes. They were in a hurry,
as all of them had some shopping to do before returning to work, and
they each spent a prinking five minutes before the mirror, adjusting the
trash with which they had bedecked themselves exteriorly while their
poor hard-working systems went ungarnished and hungry within.
This is the wound in American society whereby its strength sloughs away.
It is in this class that campaigns can be made, directly and
indirectly, by preaching and by example. What sort of women are those
who sacrifice all on the altar of luxury? It is a prostitution to sell
the body's health and strength for gewgaws. What harmony can there be
between the elaborate get-up of these young women and the miserable
homes where they live? The idolizing of material things is a religion
nurtured by this class of whom I speak. In their humble surroundings the
love of self, the desire to possess things, the cherished need for
luxuries, crowd out the feelings that make character. They are but one
manifestation of the egoism of the unmarried American woman.
For what and for whom do they work?
Is their fundamental thought to be of benefit to a family or to some
member of a family? Is their indirect object to be strong, thrifty
members of society? No. Their parents are secondary, their health is
secondary to the consuming vanity that drives them toward a ruinous
goal. They scorn the hand-workers; they feel themselves a _noblesse_ by
comparison. They are the American snobs whose coat of arms marks not a
well-remembered family but prospective luxuries.... Married, they bring
as a portion thriftless tastes, to satisfy which more than one business
man has wrecked his career. They work like men; why should they not live
as men do, with similar responsibilities? What should we think of a
class of masculine clerks and employees who spent all their money on
clothes?
The boss was busy when I got back to the clothing establishment. From
the bench where I waited for orders I could take an inventory of the
shop's productions. Arrayed in rows behind glass cases there were all
manner of uniforms: serious uniforms going to the colonies to be shot to
pieces, militia uniforms that would hear their loudest heart-beats under
a fair head; drum-majors' hats that would never get farther than the
peaceful lawn of a military post; fireman's hats; the dark-blue coat of
a lonely lighthouse guardian; the undignified short jacket of a
"buttons." All that meant parade and glory, the uniforms that make men
identical by making each proud of himself for his brass buttons and gold
lace. Even in the heavy atmosphere of the shop's rear, though they
appeared somewhat dingy and tarnished, they had their undeniable charm,
and I thought with pity of the hands that had to sew on plain serge
suits.
[Illustration: IN A CHICAGO THEATRICAL COSTUME FACTORY]
As soon as the boss saw me, the generous Mr. F. who advanced me the
fifty cents smiled at the skeptical Mr. F. who had never expected to see
me again. One self said to the other: "I told you so!" and all the
kindly lines in the man's face showed that he had looked for the best
even in his inferiors and that he had found mankind worth trusting. He
was the most generous employer I met with anywhere; I also took him to
be the least businesslike. But, as though quickly to establish the law
of averages, his head forewoman counterbalanced all his mercies by her
ferocious crossness. She terrorized everybody, even Mr. F. It was to
her, I concluded, that we owed our $6 a week. No girl would stay for
less; it was an atelier chiefly of foreign employees; the proud American
spirit would not stand the lash of Frances' tongue. She had been ten
years in the place whose mad confusion was order to her. Mr. F. did not
dare to send her away; he preferred keeping a perpetual advertisement in
the papers and changing hands every few days.
The workroom on our floor was fifty or sixty feet long, with windows on
the street at one end and on a court at the other. The middle of the
room was lighted by gas. The air was foul and the dirt lay in heaps at
every corner and was piled up under the centre tables. It was less like
a workshop than an old attic. There was the long-accumulated disorder of
hasty preparation for the vanities of life. It had not at all the aspect
of a factory which makes a steady provision of practical things. There
were odds and ends of fancy costumes hanging about--swords, crowns,
belts and badges. Under the sewing machines' swift needles flew the
scarlet coats of a regiment; gold and silver braid lay unfurled on the
table; the hand-workers bent over an armful of khaki; a row of young
girls were fitting military caps to imaginary soldier's heads; the
ensigns of glory slipped through the fingers of the humble; chevrons and
epaulets were caressed never so closely by toil-worn hands. In the midst
of us sits a man on a headless hobby horse, making small gray trunks
bound in red leather, such boxes as might contain jewels for Marguerite,
a game of lotto, or a collection of jack-straws and mother-of-pearl
counters brought home from a first trip abroad. The trunk maker wears a
sombrero and smokes a corn-cob pipe. He is very handsome with dark eyes
and fine features, and he has the "average figure," so that he serves as
manikin for the atelier; and I find him alternately a workman in
overalls and a Turkish magnate with turban and flowing robes. It is into
this atmosphere of toil and unreality that I am initiated as a hand
sewer. Something of the dramatic and theatrical possesses the very
managers themselves. Below, a regiment waits impatient for new brass
buttons; we sew against time and break all our promises. Messengers
arrive every few minutes with fresh reports of rising ire on the part of
disappointed customers. Down the stairs pell-mell comes an elderly
partner of the firm with a gold-and-purple crown on his head and after
him follows the kindly Mr. F. in an usher's jacket. "If you don't start
now," he calls, "that order'll be left on our hands."
Amid such confusion the regular rhythm of the needle as it carries its
train of thread across the yards of coloured cloth is peaceful,
consoling. I have on one side of me a tailor who speaks only Polish, on
the other side a seamstress who speaks only German. Across the frontier
I thus become they communicate with signs, and I get my share of work
planned out by each. Every woman in the place is cross except the girl
next to me. She has only just come in and the poison of the forewoman
has not yet stung her into ill nature. She is, like all the foreigners,
neatly, soberly dressed in a sensible frock of good durable material.
The few Americans in the shop have on elaborate shirt-waists in
light-coloured silks with fancy ribbon collars. We are well paid, there
is no doubt of it. We begin work at 8 A.M. and have a generous half-hour
at noon. Most of the girls are Germans and Poles, and they have all
received training as tailoresses in their native countries. To the sharp
onslaught of Frances' tongue they make no response except in dogged
silent obedience, whereas the dressy Americans with their proper spirit
of independence touch the limit of insubordination at every new command.
Insults are freely exchanged; threats ring out on the tired ears.
Frances is ubiquitous. She scolds the tailors with a torrent of abuse,
she terrorizes the handsome manikin, she bewilders the kindly Mr. F.,
and before three days have passed she has dismissed the neat little
Polish girl, in tears. This latter comes to me, her face wrought with
emotion. She was receiving nine dollars a week; it is her first place in
America. This sudden dismissal, its injustice, requires an explanation.
She cannot speak a word of English and asks me to put my poor German at
her service as interpreter.
Mr. F. is clearly a man who advocates everything for peace, and as there
is for him no peace when Frances is not satisfied, we gain little by our
appeal to him except a promise that he will attend later to the troubles
of the Polish girl. But later, as earlier, Frances triumphs, and I soon
bid good-by to my seatmate and watch her tear-stained face disappear
down the dingy hallway. She was a skilled tailoress, but she could not
cut out men's garments, so Frances dismissed her. I wonder when my turn
will come, for I am a green hand and yet determined to keep the American
spirit. For the sake of justice I will not be downed by Frances.
It is hard to make friends with the girls; we dare not converse lest a
fresh insult be hurled at us. For every mistake I receive a loud, severe
correction. When night comes I am exhausted. The work is easy, yet the
moral atmosphere is more wearing than the noise of many machines. My job
is often changed during the week. I do everything as a greenhorn, but I
work hard and pay attention, so that there is no excuse to dismiss me.
"I am only staying here between jobs," the girl next me volunteers at
lunch. "My regular place burnt out. You couldn't get _me_ to work under
_her_. I wouldn't stand it even if they do pay well." She is an
American.
"You're lucky to be so independent," says a German woman whose dull
silence I had hitherto taken for ill nature. "I'm glad enough to get the
money. I was up this morning at five, working. There's myself and my
mother and my little girl, and not a cent but what I make. My husband is
sick. He's in Arizona."
"What were you doing at five?" I asked.
"I have a trade," she answers. "I work on hair goods. It don't bring me
much, but I get in a few hours night and morning and it helps some.
There's so much to pay."
She was young, but youth is no lover of discomfort. Hardships had chased
every vestige of _jeunesse_ from her high, wrinkled brow and tired brown
eyes. Like a mirror held against despair her face reflected no ray of
hope. She was not rebellious, but all she knew of life was written there
in lines whose sadness a smile now and again intensified.
Added to the stale, heavy atmosphere there is now a smell of coffee and
tobacco smoke. The old hands have boiled a noon beverage on the gas; the
tailors smoke an after-dinner pipe. Put up in newspaper by Mrs. Wood, at
my matinal departure, my lunches, after a journey across the city, held
tightly under my arm, become, before eating, a block of food, a
composite meal in which I can distinguish original bits of ham sandwich
and apple pie. The work, however, does not seem hard to me. I sew on
buttons, rip trousers, baste coat sleeves--I do all sorts of odd jobs
from eight until six, without feeling, in spite of the bad air, any
great physical fatigue which ten minutes' brisk walk does not shake off.
But never have the hours dragged so; the moral weariness in the midst of
continual scolding and abuse are unbearable. Each night I come to a firm
decision to leave the following day, but weakly I return, sure of my
dollar and dreading to face again the giant city in search of work.
About four one afternoon, well on in the week, Frances brings me a pair
of military trousers; the stripes of cloth at the side seam are to be
ripped off. I go to work cheerfully cutting the threads and slipping one
piece of cloth from the other.
Apparently Frances is exasperated that I should do the job in an easy
way. It is the only way I know to rip, but Frances knows another way
that breaks your back and almost puts your eyes out, that makes you
tired and behindhand and sure of a scolding. She shows me how to rip her
way. The two threads of the machine, one from above and one from below,
which make the stitch, must be separated. The work must be turned first
on the wrong, then on the right side, the scissors must lift first the
upper, then the under thread. I begin by cutting a long hole in the
trousers, which I hide so Frances will not see it. She has frightened me
into dishonesty. Arrived at the middle of the stripe I am obliged to
turn the trousers wrong side out and right side out again every other
stitch. While I was working in this way, getting more enraged every
moment, a bedbug ran out of the seam between my fingers. I killed it. It
was full of blood and made a wet red spot on the table. Then I put down
the trousers and drew away my chair. It was useless saying anything to
the girl next me. She was a Pole, dull, sullen, without a friendly word;
but the two women beyond had told me once that they pitied Frances'
husband, so I looked to them for support in what I was about to do.
"There's bedbugs in them clothes," I said. "I won't work on 'em. No,
sir, not if she sends me away this very minute."
In a great hurry Frances passed me twice. She called out angrily both
times without waiting for an answer:
"Why don't you finish them pants?"
Frances was a German. She wore two rhinestone combs in her frizzes,
which held also dust and burnt odds and ends of hair. She had no lips
whatever. Her mouth shut completely over them after each tirade. Her
eyes were separated by two deep scowls and her voice was shrill and
nasal.
On her third round she faced me with the same question:
"Why don't you finish them pants?"
"Because," I answered this time, "there's bedbugs in 'em and I ain't
goin' to touch 'em!"
"Oh! my!" she taunted me, in a sneering voice, "that's dreadful, ain't
it? Bedbugs! Why, you need only just look on the floor to see 'em
running around anywhere!"
I said nothing more, and this remark was the last Frances ever addressed
to me.
"Mike!" she called to the presser in the corner, "will you have this
_young lady's_ card made out."
She gave me no further work to do, but, too humiliated to sit idle, I
joined a group of girls who were sewing badges.
We had made up all description of political badges--badges for the
court, for processions, school badges, military badges, flimsy bits of
coloured ribbon and gold fringe which go the tour of the world, rallying
men to glory. In the dismal twilight our fingers were now busied with
black-and-silver "in memoriam" badges, to be worn as a last tribute to
some dead member of a coterie who would follow him to the grave under
the emblem that had united them.
We were behindhand for the dead as well as for the living. At six the
power was turned off, the machine hands went home, there was still an
unfinished heap of black badges.
I got up and put on my things in the dark closet that served for
dressing-room. Frances called to the hand sewers in her rasping voice:
"You darsn't leave till you've finished them badges."
How could I feel the slavery they felt? My nerves were sensitive; I was
unaccustomed to their familiar hardships. But on the other hand, my
prison had an escape; they were bound within four walls; I dared to
rebel knowing the resources of the black silk emergency bag, money
lined. They for their living must pay with moral submission as well as
physical fatigue. There was nothing between them and starvation except
the success of their daily effort. What opposition could the German
woman place, what could she risk, knowing that two hungry mouths waited
to be fed beside her own?
With a farewell glance at the rubbish-strewn room, the high, grimy
windows, the group of hand sewers bent over their work in the increasing
darkness, I started down the stairs. A hand was laid on my arm, and I
looked up and saw Mike's broad Irish face and sandy head bending toward
me.
"I suppose you understand," he said, "that there'll be no more work for
you."
"Yes," I answered, "I understand," and we exchanged a glance that meant
we both agreed it was Frances' fault.
In the shop below I found Mr. F. and returned the fifty cents he had
advanced me. He seemed surprised at this.
"I'm sorry," he said, in his gentle voice, "that we couldn't arrange
things."
"I'm sorry, too," I said. But I dared not add a word against Frances.
She had terrorized me like the rest, and though I knew I never would see
her again, her pale, lifeless mask haunted me. I remembered a remark the
German woman had made when Frances dismissed the Polish girl: "People
ought to make it easy, and not hard, for others to earn a living."
At the end of this somewhat agitating day I returned to my tenement
lodgings as to a haven of rest. There was one other lodger besides
myself: she was studying music on borrowed money at four dollars a
lesson. Obviously she was a victim to luxury in the same degree as the
young women with whom I had lunched at the bakery. Nothing that a rich
society girl might have had been left out of her wardrobe, and borrowed
money seemed as good as any for making a splurge.
Miss Arnold was something of a snob, intellectual and otherwise. It was
evident from my wretched clothes and poor grammar that I was not
accustomed to ladies of her type, but, far from sparing me, she
humiliated me with all sorts of questions.
"I'm tired of taffeta jackets, aren't you?" she would ask, apropos of my
flimsy ulster. "I had taffeta last year, with velvet and satin this
winter; but I don't know what I'll get yet this summer."
After supper, on my return, I found her sitting in the parlour with Mrs.
Brown. They never lighted the gas, as there was an electric lamp which
sent its rays aslant the street and repeated the pattern of the window
curtains all over Mrs. Brown's face and hands.
Drawn up on one end of the horsehair sofa, Miss Arnold, in a purple
velvet blouse, chatted to Mrs. Brown and me.
"I'm from Jacksonville," she volunteered, patting her masses of curly
hair. "Do you know anybody from Jacksonville? It's an elegant town, so
much wealth, so many retired farmers, and it's such an educational
centre. Do you like reading?" she asked me.
"I don't get time," is my response.
"Oh, my!" she rattles on. "I'm crazy about reading. I do love blank
verse--it makes the language so choice, like in Shakespeare."
Mrs. Brown and I, being in the majority as opposed to this autocrat,
remain placid. A current of understanding exists between us. Miss
Arnold, on the other hand, finds our ignorance a flattering background
for her learning and adventures. She is so obviously a woman of the
world on the tenement horsehair sofa.
"In case you don't like your work," she Lady Bountifuls me, "I can get
you a stylish place as maid with some society people just out of
Chicago--friends of mine, an elegant family."
"I don't care to live out," I respond, thanking her. "I like my Sundays
and my evenings off."
Mrs. Brown pricks up her ears at this, and I notice that thereafter she
keeps close inquiry as to how my Sundays and evenings are spent.
But the bell rings. Miss Arnold is called for by friends to play on the
piano at an evening entertainment. Mrs. Brown and I, being left alone,
begin a conversation of the personal kind, which is the only resource
among the poor. If she had had any infirmity--a wooden leg or a glass
eye--she would naturally have begun by showing it to me, but as she had
been spared intact she chose second best.
"I've had lots of shocks," she said, rocking back and forth in a squeaky
rocking-chair. The light from over the way flickered and gleamed. Mrs.
Brown's broad, yellow face and gray hair were now brilliant, now somber,
as she rocked in and out of the silver rays. Her voice was a metallic
whine, and when she laughed against her regular, even, false teeth there
was a sound like the mechanical yelp of a toy cat. Married at sixteen,
her whole life had been Brown on earth below and God in His heaven
above. Childless, she and Brown had spent over fifty years together. It
was natural in the matter of shocks the first she should tell me about
was Brown's death. The story began with "a breakfast one Sunday morning
at nine o'clock.... Brown always made the fire, raked down the ashes,
set the coffee to boil, and when the toast and eggs were ready he called
me. And that wasn't one morning, mind you--it was every morning for
fifty years. But this particular morning I noticed him speaking strange;
his tongue was kind o' thick. He didn't hardly eat nothing, and as soon
as I'd done he got up and carried the ashes downstairs to dump 'em. When
he come up he seemed dizzy. I says to him, 'Don't you feel good?' but he
didn't seem able to answer. He made like he was going to undress. He put
his hand in his pocket for his watch, and he put it in again for his
pocketbook; but the second time it stayed in--he couldn't move it no
more; it was dead and cold when I touched it. He leaned up against the
wall, and I tried to get him over on to the sofa. When I looked into his
eyes I see that he was gone. He couldn't stand, but I held on to him
with all my force; I didn't let his head strike as he went down. _When
he fell we fell together_." Her voice was choked; even now after three
years as she told the story she could not believe it herself.
Presently when she is calm again she continues the recital of her
shocks--three times struck by lightning and once run over. Her simple
descriptions are straightforward and dramatic. As she talks the wind
blows against the windows, the shutters rattle and an ugly white china
knob, against which the curtains are draped, falls to the floor.
Tenderly, amazed, she picks it up and looks at it.
"Brown put that up," she says; "there hasn't no hand touched it since
his'n."
Proprietor of this house in which she lives, Mrs. Brown is fairly well
off. She rents one floor to an Italian family, one to some labourers,
and one to an Irishman and his wife who get drunk from time to time and
rouse us in the night with tumult and scuffling. She has a way of
disappearing for a week or more and returning without giving any account
of herself. Relations are strained, and Mrs. Brown in speaking of her
says:
"I don't care what trouble I was in, I wouldn't call in that Irish
woman. I don't have anything to do with her. I'd rather get the Dago
next door." And hereafter follows a mild tirade against the
Italians--the same sentiments I have heard expressed before in the
labouring centres.
[Illustration: CHICAGO TYPES]
"They're kind folks and good neighbours," Mrs. Brown explains, "but
they're different from us. They eat what the rest of us throw away, and
there's no work they won't do. They're putting money aside fast; most of
'em owns their own houses; but since they've moved into this
neighbourhood the price of property's gone down. I don't have nothing to
do with 'em. We don't any of us. They're not like us; they're
different."
Without letting a day elapse I started early the following morning in
search of a new job. The paper was full of advertisements, but there was
some stipulation in each which narrowed my possibilities of getting a
place, as I was an unskilled hand. There was, however, one simple "Girls
wanted!" which I answered, prepared for anything but an electric sewing
machine.
The address took me to a more fashionable side of the city, near the
lake; a wide expanse of pale, shimmering water, it lay a refreshing
horizon for eyes long used to poverty's quarters. Like a sea, it rolled
white-capped waves toward the shore from its far-away emerald surface
where sail-freighted barks traveled at the wind's will. Free from man's
disfiguring touch, pure, immaculate, it appeared bridelike through a
veil of morning mist. And at its very brink are the turmoil and
confusion of America's giant industries. In less than an hour I am
receiving wages from a large picture frame company in East Lake Street.
Once more I have made the observation that men are more agreeable bosses
than women. The woman, when she is not exceptionally disagreeable, like
Frances, is always annoying. She bothers and nags; things must be done
her way; she enjoys the legitimate minding of other people's business.
Aiming at results only, the masculine mind is more tranquil. Provided
you get your work done, the man boss doesn't care what methods you take
in doing it. For the woman boss, whether you get your work done or not,
you must do it her way. The overseer at J.'s picture frame manufactory
is courteous, friendly, considerate. I have a feeling that he wishes me
to coöperate with him, not to be terrorized and driven to death by him.
My spirits rise at once, my ambition is stimulated, and I desire his
approval. The work is all done by the piece, he explains to me, telling
me the different prices. The girls work generally in teams of three,
dividing profits. Nothing could be more modern, more middle-class, more
popular, more philistine than the production of J.'s workrooms. They are
the cheap imitations fed to a public hungry for luxury or the semblance
of it. Nothing is genuine in the entire shop. Water colours are imitated
in chromo, oils are imitated in lithograph, white carved wood frames are
imitated in applications of pressed brass. Great works of art are
belittled by processes cheap enough to be within reach of the poorest
pocket. Framed pictures are turned out by the thousand dozens, every
size, from the smallest domestic scene, which hangs over the baby's crib
in a Harlem flat, to the large wedding-present size placed over the
piano in the front parlour. The range of subjects covers a familiar
list of comedies or tragedies--the partings before war, the interior
behind prison bars, the game of marbles, the friendly cat and dog, the
chocolate girl, the skipper and his daughter, etc., etc.
My job is easy, but slow. With a hammer and tacks I fasten four tin
mouldings to the four corners of a gilt picture frame. Twenty-five cents
for a hundred is the pay given me, and it takes me half a day to do this
many; but my comrades don't allow me to get discouraged.
"You're doing well," a red-haired _vis-a-vis_ calls to me across the
table. And the foreman, who comes often to see how I am getting along,
tells me that the next day we are to begin team-work, which pays much
better.
The hours are ten a day: from seven until five thirty, with twenty-five
minutes at noon instead of half an hour. The extra five minutes a day
mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off at five on Saturdays.
The conversation around me leads me to suppose that my companions are
not downtrodden in any way, nor that they intend letting work interfere
with happiness. They have in their favour the most blessed of all
gifts--youth. The tragic faces one meets with are of the women
breadwinners whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children in whom
physical fatigue arrests development and all possibility of pleasure.
My present team-mates and those along the rest of the room are Americans
between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full of unconscious hope
for the future, which is natural in healthy, well-fed youth, taking
their work cheerily as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they
can have more clothes and more diversions during their leisure hours.
The profitable job given us on the following day is monotonous and
dirty, but we net $1.05 each. There is a mechanical roller which passes
before us, carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of coloured
paper covered with glue. My _vis-à-vis_ and I lay the palms of our right
hands on to the glue surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on
the table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board. The boss of
the team fixes the two sheets together with a brush which she
manipulates skilfully. We are making in this way the stiff backs which
hold the pictures into their frames. When we have fallen into the proper
swing we finish one hundred sheets every forty-five minutes. We could
work more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at this rate, and
it is so comfortable that conversation is not interrupted. The subjects
are the same as elsewhere--dress, young men, entertainments. The girls
have "beaux" and "steady beaux." The expression, "Who is she going
with?" means who is her steady beau. "I've got Jim Smith _now_, but I
don't know whether I'll keep him," means that Jim Smith is on trial as
a beau and may become a "steady." They go to Sunday night subscription
dances and arrive Monday morning looking years older than on Saturday,
after having danced until early morning. "There's nothing so smart for a
ball," the mundane of my team tells us, "as a black skirt and white silk
waist."
About ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle or a bit of cocoanut
cake or some titbit from the lunch parcel which is opened seriously at
twelve.
The light is good, the air is good, the room where we work is large and
not crowded, the foreman is kind and friendly, the girls are young and
cheerful; one can make $7 to $8 a week.
The conditions at J.'s are too favourable to be interesting, and, having
no excuse to leave, I disappear one day at lunch time and never return
to get my apron or my wages. I shall be obliged to draw upon the
resources of the black silk bag, but before returning to my natural
condition of life I wish to try one more place: a printing job. There
are quantities of advertisements in the papers for girls needed to run
presses of different sorts, so on the very afternoon of my
self-dismissal I start through the hot summer streets in search of a
situation. On the day when my appearance is most forlorn I find
policemen always as officially polite as when I am dressed in my best.
Other people of whom I inquire my way are sometimes curt, sometimes
compassionate, seldom indifferent, and generally much nicer or not
nearly as nice as they would be to a rich person. Poor old women to whom
I speak often call me "dear" in answering.
Under the trellis of the elevated road the "cables" clang their way.
Trucks and automobiles, delivery wagons and private carriages plunge
over the rough pavements. The sidewalks are crowded with people who are
dressed for business, and who, whether men or women, are a business
type; the drones who taste not of the honey stored in the hives which
line the streets and tower against the blue sky, veiling it with smoke.
The orderly rush of busy people, among whom I move toward an address
given in the paper, is suddenly changed into confusion and excitement by
the bell of a fire-engine which is dragged clattering over the cobbles,
followed closely by another and another before the sound of the horses'
hoofs have died away. Excitement for a moment supersedes business. The
fire takes precedence before the office, and a crowd stands packed
against policemen's arms, gazing upward at a low brick building which
sends forth flames hotter than the brazen sun, smoke blacker than the
perpetual veil of soot.
I compare the dingy gold number over the burning door with the number in
print on the newspaper slip held between my thumb and forefinger.
Decidedly this is not one of my lucky days. The numbers correspond. But
there are other addresses and I collect a series of replies. The
employer in a box factory on the West Side takes my address and promises
to let me know if he has a vacancy for an unskilled hand. Another boss
printer, after much urging on my part, consents to give me a trial the
following Monday at three dollars a week. A kindly forelady in a large
printing establishment on Wabash Avenue sends me away because she wants
only trained workers. "I'm real sorry," she says. "You're from the East,
aren't you? I notice you speak with an accent."
By this time it is after three in the afternoon; my chances are
diminishing as the day goes on and others apply before me. There is one
more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a
girl to feed a Gordon press. I have never heard of a Gordon press, but I
make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a
job for the very next day. The stairway is dingy and irregular. My
spirits are not buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room with
a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist,
sits on a high stool overlooking the office. Three portly men, fat, well
nourished, evidently of one family, are installed behind yellow ash
desks, each with a lady typewriter at his right hand. I go timidly up to
the fattest of the three. He is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling the
heat painfully. He pretends to be very busy and hardly looks up when I
say:
"I seen your ad. in the paper this morning."
"You're rather late," is his answer. "I've got two girls engaged
already."
"Too late!" I say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a
minute while he looks at me. I profit by this moment, and, changing from
tragedy to a good-humoured smile, I ask:
"Say, are you sure those girls'll come? You can't always count on us,
you know."
He laughs at this. "Have you ever run a Gordon press?"
"No, sir; but I'm awful handy."
"Where have you been working?"
"At J.'s in Lake Street."
"What did you make?"
"A dollar a day."
"Well, you come in to-morrow about eleven and I'll tell you then whether
I can give you anything to do."
"Can't you be sure now?"
Truly disappointed, my voice expresses the eagerness I feel.
"Well," the fat man says indulgently, "you come in to-morrow morning at
eight and I'll give you a job."
The following day I begin my last and by far my most trying
apprenticeship.
The noise of a single press is deafening. In the room where I work
there are ten presses on my row, eight back of us and four printing
machines back of them. On one side of the room only are there windows.
The air is heavy with the sweet, stifling smell of printer's ink and
cheap paper. A fine rain of bronze dust sifts itself into the hair and
clothes of the girls at our end of the room, where they are bronzing
coloured advertisements. The work is all done standing; the hours are
from seven until six, with half an hour at noon, and holiday at one
thirty on Saturdays. It is to _feed_ a machine that I am paid three
dollars a week. The expression is admirably chosen. The machine's iron
jaws yawn for food; they devour all I give, and when by chance I am slow
they snap hungrily at my hand and would crush my fingers did I not
snatch them away, feeling the first cold clutch. It is nervous work.
Each leaf to be printed must be handled twice; 5,000 circulars or
bill-heads mean 10,000 gestures for the printer, and this is an
afternoon's work.
Into the square marked out for it by steel guards the paper must be
slipped with the right hand, while the machine is open; with the left
hand the printed paper must be pulled out and a second fitted in its
place before the machine closes again. What a master to serve is this
noisy iron mechanism animated by steam! It gives not a moment's respite
to the worker, whose thoughts must never wander from her task. The
girls are pale. Their complexions without exception are bad.
We are bossed by men. My boss is kind, and, seeing that I am ambitious,
he comes now and then and prints a few hundred bill-heads for me. There
is some complaining _sotto voce_ of the other boss, who, it appears, is
a hard taskmaster. Both are very young, both chew tobacco and
expectorate long, brown, wet lines of tobacco juice on to the floor.
While waiting for new type I get into conversation with the boss of
ill-repute. He has an honest, serious face; his eyes are evidently more
accustomed to judging than to trusting his fellow beings. He is
communicative.
"Do you like your job?" he asks.
"Yes, first rate."
"They don't pay enough. I give notice last week and got a raise. I guess
I'll stay on here until about August."
"Then where are you going?"
"Going home," he answers. "I've been away from home for seven years. I
run away when I was thirteen and I've been knocking around ever since,
takin' care of myself, makin' a livin' one way or another. My folks
lives in California. I've been from coast to coast--and I tell you I'll
be mighty glad to get back."
"Ever been sick?"
"Yes, twice. It's no fun. No matter how much licking a boy gets he
ought never to leave home. The first year or so you don't mind it so
much, but when you've been among strangers two years, three years, all
alone, sick or well, you begin to feel you must get back to your own
folks."
"Are you saving up?" I ask.
He nods his head, not free to speak for tobacco juice.
"I'll be able to leave here in August," he explains, when he has
finished spitting, "for Omaha. In three months I can save up enough to
get on as far as Salt Lake, and in another three months I can move on to
San Francisco. I tell you," he adds, returning to his work, "a person
ought never to leave home." He had nine months of work and privation
before reaching the goal toward which he had been yearning for years.
With what patience he appears possessed compared to our fretfulness at
the fast express trains, which seem to crawl when they carry us full
speed homeward toward those we love! Nine months, two hundred and
seventy days, ten-hour working days, to wait. He was manly. He had the
spirit of adventure; his experience was wide and his knowledge of men
extended; he had managed to take care of himself in one way or another
for seven years, the most trying and decisive in a boy's life. He had
not gone to the bad, evidently, and to his credit he was homeward bound.
His history was something out of the ordinary; yet beyond the circle
where he worked and was considered a hard taskmaster he was a
nonentity--a star in the milky way, a star whose faint rays, without
individual brilliancy, added to the general luster.
The first day I had a touch of pride in getting easily ahead of the new
girl who started in when I did. From my machine I could see only the
back of her head; it was shaking disapproval at every stroke she made
and had to make over again. She had a mass of untidy hair and a slouchy
skirt that slipped out from her belt in the back. If not actually
stupid, she was slow, and the foreman and the girl who took turns
teaching her exchanged glances, meaning that they were exhausting their
patience and would readily give up the job. I was pleased at being
included in these glances, and had a miserable moment of vanity at lunch
time when the old girls, the habitués, came after me to eat with them.
The girl with the untidy hair and the long skirt sat quite by her self.
Without unfolding her newspaper bundle, she took bites of things from
it, as though she were a little ashamed of her lunch. My moment of
vanity had passed. I went over to her, not knowing whether her
appearance meant a slipshod nature or extreme poverty. As we were both
new girls, there was no indiscretion in my direct question:
"Like your job?"
I could not understand what she answered, so I continued: "Ever worked
before?"
She opened her hands and held them out to me. In the palm of one there
was a long scar that ran from wrist to forefinger. Two nails had been
worn off below the quick and were cracked through the middle. The whole
was gloved in an iron callous, streaked with black.
"Does that look like work?" was her response. It was almost impossible
to hear what she said. Without a palate, she forced the words from her
mouth in a strange monotone. She was one of nature's monstrous failures.
Her coarse, opaque skin covered a low forehead and broad, boneless nose;
her teeth were crumbling with disease, and into her full lower lip some
sharp tool had driven a double scar. She kept her hand over her mouth
when she talked, and except for this movement of self-consciousness her
whole attitude was one of resignation and humility. Her eyes in their
dismal surroundings lay like clear pools in a swamp's midst reflecting
blue sky.
"What was you doing to get your hands like that?" I asked.
"Tipping shoe-laces. I had to quit, 'cause they cut the pay down. I
could do twenty-two gross in a day, working until eight o'clock, and I
didn't care how hard I worked so long as I got good pay--$9 a week. But
the employer'd been a workman himself, and they're the worst kind. He
cut me down to $4 a week, so I quit."
"Do you live home?"
"Yes. I give all I make to my mother, and she gives me my clothes and
board. Almost anywhere I can make $7 a week, and I feel when I earn that
much like I was doing right. But it's hard to work and make nothing. I'm
slow to learn," she smiled at me, covering her mouth with her hand, "but
I'll get on to it by and by and go as fast as any one; only I'm not very
strong."
"What's the matter with you?"
"Heart disease for one thing, and then I'm so nervous. It's kind of hard
to have to work when you're not able. To-day I can hardly stand, my
head's aching so. They make the poor work for just as little as they
can, don't they? It's not the work I mind, but if I can't give in my
seven a week at home I get to worrying."
Now and then as she talked in her inarticulate pitiful voice the tears
added luster to her eyes as her emotions welled up within her.
The machines began to roar and vibrate again. The noon recess was over.
She went back to her job. Her broad, heavy hands began once more to
serve a company on whose moderate remuneration she depended for her
daily bread. Her silhouette against the window where she stood was no
longer an object for my vain eyes to look upon with a sense of
superiority. I could hear the melancholy intonation of her voice,
pronouncing words of courage over her disfigured underlip. She was one
of nature's failures--one of God's triumphs.
Saturday night my fellow lodger, Miss Arnold, and I made an expedition
to the spring opening of a large dry-goods shop in the neighbourhood of
Mrs. Brown's. I felt rather humble in my toil-worn clothes to accompany
the young woman, who had an appearance of prosperity which borrowed
money alone can give. But she encouraged me, and we started together for
the principal street of the quarter whose history was told in its
show-case windows. Pawnshops and undertakers, bakeries and soda-water
fountains were ranged side by side on this highway, as the necessity for
them is ranged with incongruous proximity in the existence of those who
live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after the manner of the
poor. There was even a wedding coach in the back of the corner
undertaker's establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and
white, as though death itself were more attractive in the young, as
though the little people of the quarter were nearer Heaven and more
suggestive of angels than their life-worn elders. The spotless tiny
coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share of the ideal,
mysterious, unused and costly; in the same store with the wedding coach,
it suggested festivity: a reunion to celebrate with tears a small
pilgrim's right to sleep at last undisturbed.
The silver rays of the street lamps mingled with the yellow light of
the shop windows, and on the sidewalk there was a cosmopolitan public.
Groups of Italian women crooned to each other in their soft voices over
the bargains for babies displayed at the spring opening; factory girls
compared notes, chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by an
extravagant choice; the German women looked and priced and bought
nothing; the Hungarians had evidently spent their money on arriving.
From the store window wax figures of the ideal woman, clad in latest
Parisian garb, with golden hair and blue eyes, gazed down benignly into
the faces uplifted with envy and admiration. Did she not plainly say to
them "For $17 you can look as I do"?
The store was apparently flourishing, and except for such few useful
articles as stockings and shirts it was stocked with trash. Patronized
entirely by labouring men and women, it was an indication to their
needs. Here, for example, was a stand hung with silk dress skirts,
trimmed with lace and velvet. They were made after models of expensive
dress-makers and were attempts at the sort of thing a Mme. de Rothschild
might wear at the Grand Prix de Paris.
Varying from $11 to $20, there was not one of the skirts made of
material sufficiently solid to wear for more than a few Sunday outings.
On another counter there were hats with extravagant garlands of flowers,
exaggerated bows and plumes, wraps with ruffles of lace and long
pendant bows; silk boleros; a choice of things never meant to be
imitated in cheap quality.
[Illustration: THE REAR OF A CHICAGO TENEMENT]
I watched the customers trying on. Possessed of grace and charm in their
native costumes, hatless, with gay-coloured shawls on their shoulders,
the Italian women, as soon as they donned the tawdry garb of the
luxury-loving labourer, were common like the rest. In becoming
prosperous Americans, animated by the desire for material possession
which is the strength and the weakness of our countrymen, they lost the
character that pleases us, the beauty we must go abroad to find.
Miss Arnold priced everything, compared quality and make with
Jacksonville productions, and decided to buy nothing, but in refusing to
buy she had an air of opulence and taste hard to please which surpassed
the effect any purchase could have made.
Sunday morning Mrs. Brown asked me to join her and Miss Arnold for
breakfast They were both in slippers and dressing-gowns. We boiled the
coffee and set the table with doughnuts and sweet cakes, which Miss
Arnold kept in a paper bag in her room.
"I hardly ever eat, except between meals," she explained. "A nibble of
cake or candy is as much as I can manage, my digestion is so poor."
"Ever since Brown died," the widow responded, "I've had my meals just
the same as though he were here. All I want," she went on, as we seated
ourselves and exchanged courtesies in passing the bread and butter,
"all I want is somebody to be kind to me. I've got a young niece that
I've tried to have with me. I wrote to her and says: 'Your auntie's
heart's just crying out for you!' And I told her I'd leave her all I've
got. But she said she didn't feel like she could come."
As soon as breakfast is over the mundane member of the household starts
off on a day's round of visits. When the screen door has shut upon her
slender silhouette, Mrs. Brown settles down for a chat. She takes out
the brush and comb, unbraids her silver locks and arranges them while
she talks.
"Miss Arnold's always on the go; she's awful nervous. These society
people aren't happy. Life's not all pleasure for them. You can be sure
they have their ups and downs like the rest of us."
"I guess that's likely," is my response.
"They don't tell the truth always, in the first place. They say there's
got to be deceit in society, and that these stylish people pretend all
sorts of things. Well, then, all I say is," and she pricks the comb into
the brush with emphasis, "all I say is, you better keep out of society."
She had twisted her gray braids into a coil at the back of her head, and
dish-washing is now the order of the day. As we splash and wipe, Mrs.
Brown looks at me rather closely. She is getting ready to speak. I can
feel this by a preliminary rattle of her teeth.
"You're a new girl here," she begins; "you ain't been long in Chicago. I
just thought I'd tell you about a girl who was workin' here in the
General Electric factory. She was sixteen--a real nice-lookin' girl from
the South. She left her mother and come up here alone. It wasn't long
before she got to foolin' round with one of the young men over to the
factory. They were both young; they didn't mean no harm; but one day she
come an' told me, cryin' like anythin', that she was in trouble, and her
young man had slipped off up to Michigan."
Here Mrs. Brown stopped to see if I was interested, and as I responded
with a heartfelt "Oh, my!" she went on:
"Well, you ought to have seen that girl's sufferin', her loneliness for
her mother. I'd come in her room sometimes at midnight--the very room
you have now--and find her on the floor, weepin' her heart out. I want
to tell you never to get discouraged. Just you listen to what happened.
The gentleman from the factory got a sheriff and they started up north
after the young man, determined to get him by force if they couldn't by
kindness. Well, they found him and they brought him back; he was willin'
to come, and they got everythin' fixed up for the weddin' without
tellin' her a thing about it, and one day she was sittin' right there,"
she pointed to the rocking chair in the front parlour window, "when he
come in. He was carryin' a big bunch of cream roses, tied with long
white ribbons. He offered 'em to her, but she wouldn't look at them nor
at him. After awhile they went together into her room and talked for
half an hour, and when they come back she had consented to marry him. He
was real kind. He kept askin' me if she had cried much and thankin' me
for takin' care of her. They were married, and when the weddin' was over
she didn't want to stay with him. She said she wanted her mother, but we
talked to her and told her what was right, and things was fixed up
between them."
She had taken down from its hook in the corner sunlight the canary bird
and his cage. She put them on the table and prepared to give the bird
his bath and fresh seed.
"You see," she said, drawing up a chair, "that's what good employers
will do for you. If you're working in a good place they'll do right by
you, and it don't pay to get down-hearted."
I thanked her and showed the interest I truly felt in the story.
Evidently I must account for my Sundays! It was with the bird now that
Mrs. Brown continued her conversation. He was a Rip Van Winkle in
plumage. His claws trailed over the sand of the cage. Except when Mrs.
Brown had a lodger or two with her, the bird was the only living thing
in her part of the tenement.
"I've had him twenty-five years," she said to me. "Brown give him to
me. I guess I'd miss him if he died." And presently she repeated again:
"I don't believe I even know how much I'd miss him."
On the last evening of my tenement residence I was sitting in a
restaurant of the quarter, having played truant from Mrs. Wood's, whose
Friday fish dinner had poisoned me. My hands had been inflamed and
irritated in consequence, and I was now intent upon a good clean supper
earned by ten hours' work. My back was turned to the door, which I knew
must be open, as I felt a cold wind. The lake brought capricious changes
of the temperature: the thermometer had fallen the night before from
seventy to thirty. I turned to see who the newcomer might be. The sight
of him set my heart beating faster. The restaurant keeper was
questioning the man to find out who he was.... He was evidently
nobody--a fragment of anonymous humanity lashed into _debris_ upon the
edge of a city's vortex; a remnant of flesh and bones for human
appetites to feed on; a battleground of disease and vice; a beggar
animated by instinct to get from others what he could no longer earn for
himself; the type _par excellence_ who has worn out charity
organizations; the poor wreck of a soul that would create pity if there
were none of it left in the world. He was asking for food. The
proprietor gave him the address of a free lodging-house and turned him
away. He pulled his cap over his head; the door opened and closed,
letting in a fresh gale of icy air. The man was gone. I turned back to
my supper. Scientific philanthropists would have means of proving that
such men are alone to blame for their condition; that this one was in
all probability a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse than
useless, to help him. But he was cold and hungry and penniless, and I
knew it. I went as swiftly as I could to overtake him. He had not
traveled far, lurching along at a snail's pace, and he was startled when
I came up to him. One of his legs was longer than the other; it had been
crushed in an accident. They were not pairs, his legs, and neither were
his eyes pairs; one was big and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other
showed all his feelings. Across his nose there was a scar, a heavy scar,
pale like the rest of his face. He was small and had sandy hair. The
directors of charity bureaus could have detected perhaps a faint
resemblance to the odour of liquor as he breathed a halo of frosty air
over his scraggly red beard.
Through the weather-beaten coat pinned over it his bare chest was
visible.
"It's a cold night!" I began. "Are you out of a job?"
With his wistful eye he gave me a kind glance.
"I've been sick. There's a sharp pain right in through here." He showed
me a spot under his arm. "They thought at the hospital that I 'ad
consumption. But," his face brightened, "I haven't got it." He showed in
his smile the life-warrant that kept him from suicide. _He wanted to
live._
"Where did you sleep last night?" I asked. "It was a cold night."
"To tell you the truth," he responded in his strong Scotch accent, "I
slept in a wagon."
I proposed that we do some shopping together; he looked at me gratefully
and limped along to a cheap clothing store, kept by an Italian. The
warmth within was agreeable; there was a display of garments hung across
the ceiling under the gas-light. My companion waited, leaning against
the glass counter, while I priced the flannel shirts. To be sure, my own
costume promised little bounty. The price of the shirt was seventy-five
cents, and as soon as he heard this the poor man said:
"Oh, you mustn't spend as much as that."
Looking first at the pauper, then at me, the Italian leaned over and
whispered to me, "I think I understand. You can have the shirt for
sixty, and I'll put in a pair of socks, too."
Thus we had become a fraternity; all were poor, the stronger woe helping
the weaker.... When his toilet was complete the poor man looked half a
head taller.
"Shall I wrap up your old cap for you?" the salesman asked, and the
other laughed a broken, long-disused laugh.
"I guess I won't need it any more," he said, turning to me.
His face had changed like the children's valentines that grow at a touch
from a blank card to a glimpse of paradise.
Once in the street again we shook hands. I was going back to my supper.
He was going, the charity directors would say, to pawn his shirt and
coat.
The man had evidently not more than a few months to live; I was leaving
Chicago the following day. We would undoubtedly never meet again.
As his bony hand lay in mine, his eyes looked straight at me. "Thank
you," he said, and his last words were these:
"I'll stand by you."
It was a pledge of fraternity at parting. There was no material
substance to promise. I took it to mean that he would stand by any
generous impulses I might have; that he would be, as it were, a patron
of spontaneous as opposed to organized charity; a patron of those who
are never too poor to give to some one poorer; of those who have no
scientific reasons for giving, no statistics, only compassion and pity;
of those who want to aid not only the promising but the hopeless cases;
of those whose charity is tolerant and maternal, patient with the
helpless, prepared for disappointments; not looking for results, ever
ready to begin again, so long as the paradox of suffering and inability
are linked together in humanity.
* * * * *
THE MEANING OF IT ALL
* * * * *