FILLMER AND BYLLES.
It was a hot morning in the heart of summer. The girls, coming in to
their work, after breakfasts of sour rolls, cheap, raw, bitter
coffee and blue milk, with a greasy relish, perhaps, of sausage,
bacon, fried potatoes, or whatever else was economical and
untouchable,--with the world itself frying in the fervid blaze of a
sun rampant for fifteen hours a day,--saw in the windows early
peaches, cool salads, and fresh berries; yellow and red bananas in
mellow, heavy clusters; morning bouquets lying daintily on wet
mosses; pale, beryl-green, transparent hothouse grapes hanging their
globes of sweet, refrigerant juices before toil-parched,
unsatisfied, feverish lips.
Let us hope that it did them good; it is all we can do now about it.
Up in the work-room of a great dress-making establishment were heaps
of delicate cambric, Victoria lawn, piqués, muslins, piles of
frillings, Hamburg edgings, insertions, bands. Machines were
tripping and buzzing; cutters were clipping at the tables; the
forewoman was moving about, directing here, hurrying there,
reproving now and then for some careless tension, rough fastening,
or clumsy seam. Out of it all were resulting lovely white suits;
delicate, cloud-like, flounced robes of bewitching tints; graceful
morning wrappers,--perfect toilets of all kinds for girls at
watering-places and in elegant summer homes.
Orders kept coming down from the mountains, up from the
sea-beaches, in from the country seats, where gay, friendly circles
were amusing away the time, and making themselves beautiful before
each others' eyes.
For it was fearfully hot again this year.
Bel Bree did not care. It all amused her. She had not got worn down
yet, and she did not live in a cheap, working-girls' boarding-house.
She had had radishes that morning with her bread and butter, and a
little of last year's fruit out of a tin can for supper the night
before. That was the way Miss Bree managed about peaches. I believe
that was the way she thought the petition in the Litany was
answered,--"Preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth, that
in due time we may enjoy them;" after the luckier people have had
their fill, and begun on the new, and the cans are cheap. There are
ways of managing things, even with very little money. If you pay for
the _managing_, you have to do without the things. Bel and her aunt
together, with their united earnings and their nice, cosy ways, were
very far from being uncomfortable. Bel said she liked the
pinch,--what there was of it. She liked "a little bit brought home
in a paper and made much of."
Bel had been just a fortnight in the city. She had gone right to
work with her aunt at Fillmer & Bylles, she was bright and quick,
knew how to run a "Wilcox & Gibbs," and had "some perception," the
forewoman said, grimly; with a delicate implication that some others
had not. Miss Tonker's praises always pared off on one side what
they put on upon another.
It had taken Bel a fortnight to feel her ground, and to get exactly
the "lay of the land." Then she went to work, unhesitatingly, to set
some small things right.
This morning she had hurried herself and her aunt, come early, and
put Miss Bree down, resolutely, against all her disclaimers, in a
corner of the very best window in the room. To do this, she moved
Matilda Meane's sewing-machine a little.
When Matilda Meane came in, she looked as though she thought the
world was moved. She did not exactly dare to order Miss Bree up; but
she elbowed about, she pushed her machine this way and that; she
behaved like a hen hustled off her nest and not quite making up her
mind whether she would go back to it or not. Miss Bree's nose grew
apprehensive; it drew itself up with a little, visible, trembling
gasp,--her small eyes glanced timidly from under the drawn, puckered
lids, it was evidently all she could do to hold her ground. But Bel
had put her there, and loyalty to Bel kept her passive. It is so
much harder for some poor meek things ever to take anything, than it
is forever to go without. Only for love and gratefulness can they
ever be made to assume their common human rights.
Presently it had to come out.
Bel was singing away, as she gathered her work together in an
opposite quarter of the room, keeping a glance out at her right
eye-corner, expectantly.
"Who moved this machine?" asked Matilda Meane, stopping short in her
endeavors to make it take up the middle of the window without
absolutely rolling it over Aunt Blin's toes.
"I did, a little," answered Bel, promptly. "There was plenty of room
for two; and if there hadn't been, Aunt Blin must have a good light,
and have it over her left shoulder, at that. She's the oldest person
in the room, Miss Meane!"
"She was spoken to yesterday about her buttonholes," she added, in
a lower tone, to Eliza Mokey, as she settled herself in her own seat
next that young lady. "And it was all because she could hardly see."
"Buttonholes or not," answered Eliza, who preferred to be called
"Elise," "I'm glad somebody has taken Mat Meane down at last. She
needed it. I wish you could take her in hand everywhere. If _you_
boarded at our house"--
"I shouldn't," interrupted Bel, decisively. "Not under any
circumstances, from what you tell of it."
"That's all very well to say now; you're in clover, comparatively.
'Chaters' and real tea,--_and_ a three-ply carpet!"
Miss Mokey had gone home with Bel and Aunt Blin, one evening lately,
when there had been work to finish and they had made a "bee" of it.
"See if you could help yourself if you hadn't Aunt Blin."
"Why couldn't I help myself as well as she? She had a nice place all
alone, before I came."
"She must have half starved herself to keep it, then. Stands to
reason. Dollar and a quarter a day, and five dollars a week for your
room. Where's your muffins, and your Oolong? Or else, where's your
shoes?--Where's that Hamburg edging?"
"We don't have any Hamburg edging," said Bel, laughing.
"Nonsense. You know what I mean. O, here it is, under all that
piqué! For mercy's sake, won't Miss Tonker blow?--Now I get my nine
dollars a week, and out of it I pay six for my share of that
miserable sky-parlor, and my ends of the crusts and the
cheese-parings. No place to myself for a minute. Why, I feel mixed
up sometimes to that degree that I'd almost like to die, and begin
again, to find out who I am!"
"Well, I wouldn't live so. And Aunt Blin wouldn't. I'm afraid she
_didn't_ have other things quite so--corresponding--when she was by
herself; but she had the home comfort. And, truly, now, I shouldn't
wonder if there was real nourishment in just looking round,--at a
red carpet and things,--when you've got 'em all just to your own
mind. You can piece out with--peace!"
For two or three minutes, there was nothing heard after that in Bel
and Elise's corner, but the regular busy click of the machines, as
the tucks ran evenly through. Miss Tonker was hovering in the
neighborhood. But presently, as she moved off, and Elise had a spool
to change, Bel began again.
"Why don't you get up something different? Why couldn't a dozen, or
twenty, take a flat, or a whole house, and have a housekeeper, and
live nice? I believe I could contrive."
Bel was a born contriver. She was a born reformer, as all poets are;
only she did not know yet that she was either. That had been the
real trouble up in New Hampshire. She had her ideals, and she could
not carry them out; so she sat and dreamed of what she would do if
she could. If she might in any way have moulded her home to her own
more delicate instincts, it may be that her step-mother need not
have had to complain that "there was no spunk or snap to her about
anything." It was not in her to "whew round" among tubs and
whey,--to go slap-dash into soapmaking, or the coarse Monday's
washing, when all nicer cares were evaded or forbidden, when chairs
were shoved back against each other into corners, table-cloths left
crooked, and dragging and crumby, drawing the flies,--mantel
ornaments of uncouth odds and ends pushed all awry and one side
during a dusting, and left so,--carpets rough and untidy at the
corners; no touch of prettiness or pleasantness, nothing but clear,
necessary _work_ anywhere. She would have made home _home_; then she
would have worked for it.
Aunt Blin was like her. She would rather sit behind her blinds in
her neat, quiet room of a Sunday, too tired to go to church, but
with a kind of sacred rest about her, and a possible hushed thought
of a presence in a place that God had let her make that He might
abide with her in it,--than to live as these girls did,--even to
have been young like them; to have put on fine, gay things, bought
with the small surplus of her weekly earnings after the wretched
board was paid, and parade the streets, or sit in a pew, with a
Sunday-consciousness of gloves and new bonnet upon her.
"O, faugh!" said Elise Mokey, impatiently, to Bel's "I could
contrive." "I should like to see you, with girls like Matilda Meane.
You've got to _get_ your dozen or twenty, first, and make them
agree."
Miss Mokey had very likely never heard of Mrs. Glass, or of the
"catching your hare," which is the impracticable hitch at the start
of most delicious things that might otherwise be done.
"I think this world is a kind of single-threaded machine, after all.
There's always something either too tight or too loose the minute
you double," she said, changing her tension-screw as she spoke. "No;
we've just got to make it up with cracker-frolics, the best way we
can; and that takes one more of somebody's nine dollars, every time.
There's some fun in it, after all, especially to see Matilda Meane
come to the table. I do believe that girl would sell her soul if she
could have a Parker House dinner every day. When it's a little
worse, or a little better than usual, when the milk gives out, or we
have a yesterday's lobster for tea,--I wish you could just see her.
She's so mad, or she's so eager. She _will_ have claw-meat; it _is_
claw-meat with her, sure enough; and if anybody else gets it first,
or the dish goes round the other way and is all picked over,--she
_looks_! Why, she looks as if she desired the prayers of the
congregation, and nobody would pray!"
"What _are_ you two laughing at?" broke in Kate Sencerbox, leaning
over from her table beyond. "Bel Bree, where are your crimps?"
In the ardor of her work, or talk, or both, Bel's hair, as usual,
had got pushed recklessly aside.
"O, I only have a little smile in my hair early in the morning,"
replies quick, cheery Bel. "It never crimps decidedly, and it all
gets straightened out prim enough as the day's work comes on. It's
like the grass of the field, and a good many other things; in the
morning it is fresh and springeth up; in the evening it _giveth_ up,
and is down flat."
"I guess you'll find it so," said Elise Mokey, splenetically.
"Was _that_ what you were laughing at?" asked Kate. "Seems to me you
choose rather aggravating subjects."
"Aggravations are as good as anything to laugh at, if you only know
how," Bel Bree said.
"They're always handy, at any rate," said Elise.
"I thought 'aggravate' meant making worse than it is," said quiet
little Mary Pinfall.
"Just it, Molly!" answered Bel Bree, quick as a flash. "Take a
plague, make it out seven times as bad as it is, so that it's
perfectly ridiculous and impossible, and then laugh at it. Next time
you put your finger on it, as the Irishman said of the flea, it
isn't there."
"That's hommerpathy," said Miss Proddle. "Hommerpathy cures by
aggravating."
Miss Proddle was tiresome; she always said things that had been said
before, or that needed no saying. Miss Proddle was another of those
old girls who, like Miss Bree among the young ones, have outlived
and lost their Christian names, with their vivacity. Never mind; it
is the Christian name, and the Lord knows them by it, as He did
Martha and Mary.
"_Reductio ad absurdum_," put in Grace Toppings, who had been at a
High School, and studied geometry.
"Grace Toppings!" called out Kate Sencerbox, shortly, "you've
stitched that flounce together with a twist in it!"
Miss Tonker heard, and came round again.
"Gyurls!" she said, with elegantly severe authority, "I _will_ not
have this talking over the work. Miss Toppings, this whole skirt is
an unmitigated muddle. Head-tucks half an inch too near the bottom!
No _room_ for your flounce. If you can't keep to your measures,
you'd better not undertake piece-work. Take that last welt out, and
put it in over the top. And make no more blunders, if you please,
unless you want to be put to plain yard-stitching."
"Eight inches and a half is _some_ room for a flounce, I guess, if
it ain't nine inches," muttered the mathematical Grace, as she began
the slow ripping of the lock-stitched tucking, that would take half
an hour out of the value of her day.
"That's a comfort, ain't it?" whispered mischievous, sharp,
good-natured Kate. "Look here; I'll help, if you won't talk any more
Latin, or Hottentot."
It was of no use to tell those girls not to talk over their work.
The more work they had in them, the more talk; it was a test, like a
steam-gauge. Only the poor, pale, worn-out ones, like Emma Hollen,
who coughed and breathed short, and could not spend strength even in
listening, amidst the conflicting whirr of the feeds and
wheels,--and the old, sobered-down, slow ones, like Miss Bree and
Miss Proddle, button-holing and gather-sewing for dear life, with
their spectacles over their noses, and great bald places showing on
the tops of their bent heads,--kept time with silent thoughts to the
beat of their treadles and the clip of their needles against the
thimble-ends.
Elise Mokey stretched up her back slowly, and drew her shoulders
painfully out of their steady cramp.
"There! I went round without stopping! I put a sign on it, and I've
got my wish! I'd rather sweep a room, though, than do it again."
"You _might_ sweep a room, instead," said Emma Hollen, in her low,
faint tone, moved to speak by some echo in that inward rhythm of her
thinking. "I partly wish _I_ had, before now."
"O, you goose! Be a kitchen-wolloper!"
"May be I sha'n't be anything, very long. I should like to feel as
if I _could_ stir round."
"I wouldn't care if anybody could see what it came to, or what there
was left of it at the year's end," said Elise Mokey.
"I'd sweep a room fast enough if it was my own," said Kate
Sencerbox. "But you won't catch me sweeping up other folks' dust!"
"I wonder what other folks' dust really is, when you've sifted it,
and how you'd pick out your own," said Bel.
"I'd have my own _place_, at any rate," responded Kate, "and the
dust that got into it would go for mine, I suppose."
Bel Bree tucked away. Tucked away thoughts also, as she worked. Not
one of those girls who had been talking had anything like a home.
What was there for them at the year's end, after the wearing round
and round of daily toil, but the diminishing dream of a happier
living that might never come true? The fading away out of their
health and prettiness into "old things like Miss Proddle and Aunt
Blin,"--to take their turn then, in being snubbed and shoved aside?
Bel liked her own life here, so far; it was pleasanter than that
which she had left; but she began to see how hundreds of other girls
were going on in it without reward or hope; unfitting themselves,
many of them utterly, by the very mode of their careless, rootless
existence,--all of them, more or less, by the narrow specialty of
their monotonous drudgery,--for the bright, capable, adaptive
many-sidedness of a happy woman's living in the love and use and
beauty of home.
Some of her thoughts prompted the fashion in which she recurred to
the subject during the hour's dinner-time.
They were grouped together--the same half dozen--in a little
ante-room, with a very dusty window looking down into an alley-way,
or across it rather, since unless they really leaned out from their
fifth story, the line of vision could not strike the base of the
opposite buildings, a room used for the manifold purposes of
clothes-hanging, hand-washing, brush and broom stowing, and
luncheon eating.
"Girls! What would you do most for in this world? What would you
have for your choice, if you could get it?"
"Stories to read, and theatre tickets every night," said Grace
Toppings.
"Something decent to eat, as often as I was hungry," said Matilda
Meane, speaking thick through a big mouthful of cream-cake.
"To be married to Lord Mortimer, and go and live in an Abbey," said
Mary Pinfall, who sat on a box with a cracker in one hand, and the
third volume of her old novel in the other.
The girls shouted.
"That means you'd like a real good husband,--a Tom, or a Dick, or a
Harry," said Kate Sencerbox. "Lord Mortimers don't grow in this
country. We must take the kind that do. And so we will, every one of
us, when we can get 'em. Only I hope mine will keep a store of his
own, and have a house up in Chester Park!"
"If I can ever see the time that I can have dresses made for me,
instead of working my head and feet off making them for other
people, I don't care where my house is!" said Elise Mokey.
"Or your husband either, I suppose," said Kate, sharply.
"Wouldn't I just like to walk in here some day, and order old Tonker
round?" said Elise, disregarding. "I only hope she'll hold out till
I can! Won't I have a black silk suit as thick as a board, with
fifteen yards in the kilting? And a violet-gray, with a yard of
train and Yak-flounces!"
"That isn't _my_ sort," said Kate Sencerbox, emphatically. "It's
played out, for me. People talk about our being in the way of
temptation, always seeing what we can't have. It isn't _that_ would
ever tempt me; I'm sick of it. I know all the breadth-seams, and the
gores, and the gathers, and the travelling round and round with the
hems and trimmings and bindings and flouncings. If I could get _out_
of it, and never hear of it again, and be in a place of my own, with
my time to myself! Wouldn't I like to get up in the morning and
_choose_ what I would do?--when it wasn't Fast Day, nor Fourth of
July, nor Washington's Birthday, nor any day in particular? I think,
on the whole, I'd choose _not_ to get up. A chance to be lazy;
that's my vote, after all, Bel Bree!"
"O, dear!" cried Bel, despairingly. "Why don't some of you wish for
nice, cute little things?"
"Tell us what," said Kate. "I think we _have_ wished for all sorts,
amongst us."
"O, a real little _home_--to take care of," said Bel. "Not fine, nor
fussy; but real sweet and pleasant. Sunny windows and flowers, and a
pretty carpet, and white curtains, and one of those chromos of
little round, yellow chickens. A best china tea-set, and a real trig
little kitchen; pies to make for Sundays and Thanksgivings; just
enough work to do in the mornings, and time in the afternoons to sit
and sew, and--somebody to read to you out loud in the evenings! I
think I'd do anything--that wasn't wicked--to come to live just like
that!"
"There isn't anybody that does live so nowadays," said Kate.
"There's nothing between horrid little stivey places, and a regular
scrub and squall and slop all the week round, and silk and snow and
ordering other folks about. You've got to be top or bottom; and if
it's all the same to you, I mean to be top if I can; even if"--
Kate was a great deal better than her pretences, after all. She did
not finish the bad sentence.
"I'll tell you what I do wonder at," said Bel Bree. "So many great,
beautiful homes in this city, and so few people to live in them. All
the rest crowded up, and crowded out. When I go round through Hero
Street, and Pilgrim Street, and past all the little crammy courts
and places, out into the big avenues where all the houses stand back
from each other with such a grand politeness, I want to say, Move up
a little, can't you? There's such small room for people in there,
behind!"
"Say it, why don't you? I'll tell you who'd listen. Washington,
sitting on his big bronze horse, pawing in the air at Commonwealth
Avenue!"
"Well--Washington _would_ listen, if he wasn't bronze. And its grand
for _everybody_ to look at him there. I shouldn't really want the
houses to move up, I suppose. It's good to have grandness somewhere,
or else nobody would have any place to stretch in. But there must be
some sort of moving up that could be, to make things evener, if we
only knew!"
Poor little Bel Bree, just dropped down out of New Hampshire! What a
problem the great city was already to her!
Miss Tonker put her sub-aristocratic face in at the door. It is a
curious kind of reflected majesty that these important functionaries
get, who take at first hand the magnificent orders, and sustain
temporary relations of silk-and-velvet intimacy with Spreadsplendid
Park.
The hour was up. Mary Pinfall slid her romance into the pocket of
her waterproof; Matilda Meane swallowed her last mouthful of the
four cream-cakes which she had valorously demolished without
assistance, and hastily washed her hands at the faucet; Kate and
Elise and Grace brushed by her with a sniff of generous contempt.
In two minutes, the wheels and feeds were buzzing and clicking
again. What did they say, and emphasize, and repeat, in the ears
that bent over them? Mechanical time-beats say something, always.
They force in and in upon the soul its own pulses of thought, or
memory, or purpose; of imagination or desire. They weld and
consolidate our moods, our elements. Twenty miles of musing to the
rhythmic throbbings of a railroad train, who does not know how it
can shape and deepen and confirm whatever one has started with in
mind or heart?