I AM SICK IN THE UNDERBRUSH
About a week before leaving the T. Z. I had a set-to with my landlady.
Stopping at the door of her room to pay my rent, I handed her two
dollars and seventy-five cents—the additional quarter for gas used in
cooking. Imagine my astonishment when the woman began to goggle her eyes
at me, to wiggle her tongue back and forth, making a hissing sound, all
the while trying to elongate and contract her fat stub of a neck. When I
demanded to know if she had lost her mind, she became apologetic and
assured me that she was only trying to get my vibrations. Thereupon,
forgetting the biblical threat of hell-fire, I told her she was a
fool—not the scientific fool that she claimed to be, but the plain
garden variety.
Finding Molly on the top floor, I told her I did not wish Mrs. Brown to
go into my room so long as I paid rent for it. The next day I went
direct from work to the Jane Leonard House—another home for working
girls. There I paid a deposit on a room with two meals a day at
six-fifty a week, to take possession at the end of my time with Mrs.
Brown. When I notified this woman that I was leaving her house she
denounced me bitterly.
“You’re deserting me because I didn’t succeed in stopping the war,” she
accused. Then she added, wagging her head at me: “I would’ve done it if
President Wilson had a-done what I told him to. That’s who’s a
fool—President Wilson. If he’d a stopped the war my fortune would’ve
been made.”
President Wilson! I wonder how many persons call him a fool because he
refused to make them fortunes? But that was not the last of this owner
of my first rooming-house. The day that I moved out she waylaid me on
the stairs.
“Ain’t you ashamed?” she demanded. “Ain’t you ashamed to treat a fellow
woman like you’ve treated me?”
“It is because you are a woman that I am leaving your house,” I told
her. “You are knowingly and intentionally a faker. It is the duty of
every decent woman to make you feel that you dishonor your sex. A man
won’t do it—not an American—he has too much respect for your sex.”
“It’s a shame!” she cried, shedding copious tears. “Men are always
kinder to a woman than other women.”
“It’s because a woman better understands a woman. Knowing the strength
as well as the weakness of her own sex, she recognizes their petty
deceits and dishonesties,” I replied soothingly, while I resisted an
inclination to give her a good deep jab with my hatpin, and thereby give
her a cause for real tears. “Don’t forget, ‘it takes a thief to catch a
thief.’ Good-by, Mrs. Brown.” And I ran down the stairs and out at the
front door. So far as I am concerned that was the last of Mrs. Brown,
the inventor of the theory of “vibrations.”
When engaging a room at the Jane Leonard the clerk told me that guests
were not allowed to keep their trunks in their rooms, and I thereupon
congratulated myself on my trunks being in storage. On moving in, for in
that “home” for working women guests engage rooms sight unseen, I
wondered that the management had taken the trouble to formulate a rule
against trunks. There was literally no place for even the smallest trunk
unless it was swung from the ceiling—the bed being too low for even the
thinnest of steamers.
Besides a narrow cot the top of which was scarcely one foot above the
floor, there was a small rocking-chair, a small table with one minute
drawer, a narrow chiffonier with five shallow drawers, topped by a
mirror narrow both ways. There was also a sash-curtain, a window-shade,
a white cotton cover on the table and another on the chiffonier, a
clothes-closet, and a face-towel so tiny I felt sure it would never grow
up. Besides a brown door with a transom and a narrow window opening on a
court only slightly wider than the door, my room consisted of four shiny
yellow walls, a shiny white ceiling, and a shiny brown floor. After my
first peer around my new quarters—because of the narrowness of the court
and the height of the two buildings my window only admitted twilight—I
took myself to task for being overcritical. Though I was paying two
dollars and a quarter a week more than room and food had cost at Mrs.
Brown’s, I would not have to do either cooking or dish-washing.
Doubtless the meals would be better and more abundant than those I had
prepared for myself.
Then there were the piazzas, one on each floor, and the roof-garden, all
overlooking the river, I continued, enumerating all the advantages of my
new abiding-place. It would be so lovely after a hard day down-town to
sit and watch the river until bedtime. Of course I must get another job
on Monday; no use of loafing when our country needed every woman as well
as every man. By that time my friend, a librarian who had lived in the
Jane Leonard for several years, would return from her vacation, and I
would have a companionable person to speak to—for weeks before leaving
the rooming-house Molly was my only speaking acquaintance.
Dinner that night did not come up to my expectations—my pet
abominations, baked beans and a brown bread even worse than the
concoction set before you three times a week in Boston. For in spite of
my three years in a Massachusetts college, I never learned to enjoy its
national dish, or two dishes. Before going to the Jane Leonard when this
combination was put before me I had always looked the other way and
waited for the next course. Here there was no next course. Baked beans
and brown bread was dinner.
A woman who sat under my elbow—the table was so tiny that the four of us
literally sat under each other’s elbows—this neighbor of mine who had an
unpronounceable German name and looked like an American of African
descent, warned me darkly that I would be glad to get such nourishing
food before “this country” got out of the war. Nourishing! The very
adjective that had been drummed into my ears while at college! Even
three years’ drumming did not make me form the habit. Its worse result
was a play.
I do not now recall just what it was about that composition that so
aroused the ire of Professor Baker. It may have been that it proved my
point—that New Englanders partake of their Wednesday and Saturday
dinners and their Sunday breakfasts as a sort of memorial feast in honor
of the hardships enjoyed by their ancestors when they first landed on
their rock-bound coast. Mr. Baker would not agree that his ancestors
enjoyed hardships. All one has to do is to read history. Early New
Englanders enjoyed hardships just as the Irish do being persecuted—and
almost as much. The result was pretty much the same—both peoples
multiplied on the face of the earth and left their descendants a subject
for conversation, a veritable snowball of a subject, which, by the
simple method of rolling it over the tongue a hard fact becomes slushy
fiction.
The next morning, Sunday, we had eggs for breakfast. Unfortunately I was
the first at table, so did not have the advantage of advice from my
table-mates. I ordered it medium-boiled. When peeled, it closely
resembled a golf ball that had been lying in the wet grass for a couple
of months. That proved to be an intensely hot day, but sitting on the
roof-garden or the piazzas was impossible because of a virulent stench.
“It’s from the dumping-plant, where the city garbage is loaded on scows
to take out to sea,” a woman who saw me hurry down from the roof-garden
explained. “The wind always blows from that direction hot days.”
Being too dark to read or write in my room, I spent the morning
straightening out my few belongings. On hanging the suit in which I had
set out on my adventure and my coat in the closet, it seemed so full
that I decided to fold my nightie and place it under my pillow.
A few minutes later a gaily frescoed individual, who informed me that
she was the assistant housekeeper, entered to exchange my Peter Pan
towel for a fresh one. Evidently she realized that my little pancake of
a pillow had risen too high and too suddenly, for she jerked it up.
“There!” she exclaimed, pointing a stubby red finger at my nightie.
“Night-clothes are to be hung in the closet. Don’t you see the
rules?”—pointing at a long, printed page tacked against the inside of my
door. “Can’t you read? You can’t keep nothin’ under your piller nor
under your bed neither.”
Here, going down on her knees, she peered carefully under the bed; then,
still kneeling, she passed her eyes over every square inch of the four
shiny yellow walls. When they encountered a paper bag hanging on a nail
to one side of the narrow chiffonier, she scuffled angrily to her feet.
“I’m gonna report you,” she cried, glaring at me. “It’s positive against
our rules—guests drivin’ nails in the walls. This ain’t no tenement.
Seems like you can’t teach some folks nothin’.”
“Suppose you look at that nail,” I advised her, as I removed the paper
bag. “You can see for yourself that it has been here since before the
walls were painted. It is covered with the same coat of yellow paint. If
you draw it out ever so carefully it would mar the wall.”
“Well, you mustn’t hang nothin’ on it,” she told me.
“What am I to do with my winter hat?” I asked, as I slipped a quarter
into the pocket of her apron. “It is too large to get in the closet, and
too good to throw away. Besides, that manila bag is so near the color of
the wall it is scarcely noticeable.”
She put her hand into her pocket and felt the size of the coin.
“Well, if you didn’t drive the nail I won’t say nothin’ about the other
things,” she agreed. Then she added cautiously: “But you’ll have to be
on the lookout when Miss Digges comes round. She don’t allow nothin’
hung on the walls.”
“Who is Miss Digges?”
“She’s the head one, the manager. And you never know when she’s comin’.”
She snatched the door open, and popping her head out looked up and down
the hall. “I caught her once, just like that. She was followin’ me
around. Be careful about that hat now.”
With that parting injunction she took her departure. Her hand was in the
pocket of her apron and her gaudily painted face wreathed with smiles.
Money talks!
That midday dinner was a fairly good meal. After a good soup there was
chicken fricassee, a vegetable, a salad, and ice-cream. The waitresses
all wore clean aprons and the table linen was fresh. During the first
part of the meal I realized an indefinite feeling of discomfort that I
had attributed to “nerves” had become a headache. As dinner went on
instead of the pain becoming less it increased.
The little waitress placed my ice-cream before me and I glanced up and
smiled at her. That movement of the muscles in my face explained my
headache. My skin felt so tightly stretched that it seemed as though I
should have heard it crinkle. Leaving the ice-cream untouched I excused
myself and hurried up to my room.
If I could only take my erysipelas medicine in time it would lessen the
horror, perhaps prevent it entirely. Fumbling in the semidarkness of the
hall I got my key in the lock of my room door, then found that I could
neither turn it nor get it out. I must have struggled with that key for
twenty minutes. Then going to the elevator I asked the operator if he
could get it out.
“Sure, lady, I can get it out,” he told me. “But I don’t know what song
and dance to give ’em in the office that’ll make ’em let me leave the
elevator. I’ll go try and see.”
After waiting fifteen minutes for the man to return I pushed the button.
The elevator started up at once. In sight of me the operator shook his
head.
“I’ve been waiting for you to ring. I can’t move unless I get a ring.
That’s a rule.” He opened the elevator door. “Maybe if you goes down you
can get that woman to let me off. I told her you was sick and that it
wouldn’t take me ten minutes, but it didn’t do no good.”
I stepped into the elevator and went down to the office. The clerk that
afternoon was a small blonde woman, with a face as hard as a flint rock.
After explaining conditions I asked her to allow the operator to leave
the elevator long enough to get the key from my door—the man standing at
my elbow remarking that it would not take more than five or six minutes.
“No,” snapped flint-face. “We’ve had all we’re going to take—guests
putting their keys in upside down. We’re going to stop it. You’ll have
to wait until Jack gets off. Then if he wants to help you it’s no affair
of ours what he does in his free time.”
“When do you get off?” I asked the operator.
“Six o’clock.”
It was then seventeen minutes of three. Three hours and seventeen
minutes to wait! The tight sensation in my face had passed into a sharp
stinging burning that every minute was growing more and more intense.
Three hours and seventeen minutes! The doctors had cautioned me against
allowing erysipelas to get to my eyes.
I begged that woman as though begging for my life—for I believed that I
begged for my sight. It had absolutely no effect on her. When I asked
for the manager she laughed at me.
“Miss Diggs is resting,” she told me, and she chuckled with delight.
“You disturb her Sunday-afternoon nap and she would have your key taken
out the lock, and tomorrow morning she’ll have you moved out the house.
If guests don’t like our rules they can leave. We’ve got dozens on our
waiting-list ready to take your place.”
Despairing of getting the woman to change her mind, I stepped into the
hot little reception-room and took my seat. It was stifling. I could see
the sun beaming through the windows of the library and the dance-hall on
the other side of the exchange, so I knew they were still hotter. My
face was like a red-hot blaze, and no tooth ever ached as painfully as
my whole head.
Putting my pride in my pocket I crept out and asked the woman to let me
have five cents to telephone to a drug-store. I reminded her that my
pocketbook was locked in my room, then that I was a friend of Miss
Stafford, who had lived at the Jane Leonard for nearly five years.
“Why don’t you borrow of Miss Stafford?”
“You know yourself she is not here,” I wailed. “You told me so yesterday
when I came in. Said she wouldn’t be back from her vacation until
to-morrow. I gave you a note to be delivered as soon as she arrived.”
“Why don’t you borrow of the elevator-man?” she asked, then added with a
devil’s grin: “you’ve got thick enough with him considering you’ve been
here less than twenty-four hours.”
“I shall ask him,” I told her. “If he’s got it I’m sure he’ll lend it to
me.”
And I would have done it had I not recalled that the prescription was in
my pocketbook, locked up in my room. I knew nothing of the drug-stores
of that neighborhood. If the clerk at the desk would not trust me enough
to lend me five cents, it was not at all probable that a druggist would
let me have a medicine for which I could not pay. For the sake of
getting farther away from that clerk when the elevator returned I took
it and went back to my floor.
In the Jane Leonard one of the many “features” advertised is the
sitting-rooms, one on each floor. It was to one of these I now crept. My
head! My God! the pain in my head. The living flame that was my face!
If, when I die, I go to hell I do not believe I shall—that I can suffer
greater agony than I did during the three hours spent in that hot little
room opening on a court and shut off from the outside air. Even now,
looking back at this distance, that afternoon—like one mad, hideously
flaming blur—is painful.
When, after eons of time, the elevator-man appeared in the door of that
sitting-room, he had to repeat his statement that he had opened my door
before I could understand. I think that I must have been semidelirious.
I remember that as he followed me to my door he said that it had not
taken him five minutes. Also—this more vividly—that he refused to take
the tip that, though suffering pain almost unendurable, I had memory
enough to offer.
Though the first half of that night was a hideous nightmare it was not
so bad as the afternoon. I could not lie down, but I rested on the bed
with my head on a pillow against the wall. Besides I had water, not very
cool, but a refreshing moisture to the fever of my face. Most of all was
the certainty that relief was on the way—once the medicine had time to
act.
This must have happened toward midnight. I was sufficiently conscious to
recognize the step of a man passing along the hall, and to know that he
was the night-watchman. Calling through a crack of my door I asked him
to turn off the light in the hall immediately in front of my transom. He
was so concerned about my not being asleep that screwing up my courage I
asked if he thought he could get me a small piece of ice.
“Sure, lady,” he told me. “I’ll get it from the ice-box in the basement,
and I’ll bring it straight up—not wait to come on my rounds.”
That flint-faced woman in the office had shaken my faith in humanity to
such an extent that I did not believe this watchman. I thought he was
jollying me. So sure of it that I went back to dabbling my handkerchief
in the little pan of water that I had fetched from the bathroom, and
tried to make myself as comfortable as might be sitting on the bed with
my head propped against the wall.
In a surprisingly short time the night-watchman was back again. He had
brought me a pitcherful of ice, not a small pitcher either. He explained
that he had put the large piece at the bottom so that I might easily get
the smaller ones. When I offered him a tip he stepped beyond the reach
of my hand, and told me:
“My wife’s niece lived in a place like this before she married. One time
she took sick and ’most starved to death before she could get us
word—nobody come near her for more’n two days. If you want anything just
you call when you hear me passing.”
For the first time I realized fully the blessing of ice. The little
towel being too rough I tore up the softer of my two nighties to get a
cloth large enough to cover my face and neck. After several applications
of this cloth saturated in ice-cold water, I fell asleep, comforted by
the belief that the medicine and ice had come in time to prevent the
erysipelas from reaching my eyes.
When I waked I could not open my eyes. I distinctly recall that I had no
thoughts, no fears—just a stunned feeling. Next I decided that I must
not cry—that would not help matters, only lessen the chance of saving my
sight, that is, if it could be saved. Then I determined that if I did
have to be blind I did not have to be a coward. Groping about I located
my little pan and the pitcher. Two pieces of ice still floated in the
deliciously cold water, and I proceeded to apply the cloth saturated
with the water.
As the time wore on I heard alarm-clocks in the rooms about me go off,
their owners get up, move about while dressing, then go out, always
banging their doors. One by one I listened as their footfalls became
less and less distinct and merged into silence. The chambermaids came
on. I heard them talking and the clash and thumping of the dustpans and
brooms. Finally one came to my room.
Without knocking she opened the door, and before I could prevent her
turned on the light. I shrieked with pain. Then as automatically heaved
a sigh of relief—if light hurt my eyes I could not be totally blind. On
learning that I was sick and would make my own bed, the maid turned and
was leaving the room. I asked her to turn off the light, and then after
an effort inquired if she could get me some cracked ice. She took the
pitcher and promised to bring back the ice as soon as she got a
“chance.”
As time passed and the girl did not return I realized my folly in
allowing her to take the pitcher—even tepid water was more soothing to
my inflamed face and eyes than the dry cloth. At last, giving up all
expectation of getting ice until the return of Miss Stafford, I took my
little tin pan and groped my way to the bathroom.
Back in my room I found that I had barely a half-teacup of
water—doubtless there was a rule against spilling water along the halls.
Fortunately, I reasoned, the heat would soon dry it up. The house was
profoundly still. If there was anybody in it they didn’t come to my
hall. Several times I made the trip back and forth to the bathroom with
my tin pan, each time realizing that the inflammation must be less
because I could see a little better.
It was a long day but I did not get hungry. When the women began to
return from work I began nervously to wait for my friend. Being employed
in the library of a down-town mortgage company, I knew their closing
hour was not later than five-thirty. Time passed, but none of the
footsteps passing so frequently along the hall stopped at my door.
One woman’s voice called along the hall asking the time. Another
answered that it was a few minutes before eight. Eight o’clock! Miss
Stafford had not returned from her vacation and I was dependent on the
night-watchman. He had told me that he made his first round at eleven
o’clock, so I set about preparing for the three hours’ wait—to make my
little pan of water last until he came. Now the inflammation had
subsided sufficiently to make me keenly conscious of the difference
between the duskiness of the halls during daylight and the glare under
electric lights.
One of the footfalls along the hall did stop at my door. There was a tap
and my friend entered.
“Why!” she exclaimed. “What makes you such a night-owl? I’m going to
turn on the light.”
Fortunately I spoke before she found the electric button. She was
shocked on learning what was the matter, and how it had all happened,
and even more shocked when I told her that I had moved in the previous
Saturday afternoon and left a note for her with the clerk. She had
returned from her vacation Saturday forenoon, had been in the Jane
Leonard all Saturday afternoon, all Sunday except for the time spent
lunching with a friend a few blocks away. She had returned from her
office a few minutes before six that afternoon, got her mail and
room-key at the office on her way to her room. Returned, handed in her
key at the office, had her dinner, and then gone out for a walk. It was
after this walk, when she stopped at the office for the key of her room,
that my note was given her by the night-clerk.
The only information vouchsafed to Miss Stafford and me by the woman to
whom I had given the note was:
“It was misplaced. I put it in 507 as soon as it turned up.” And the
tone in which that statement was made was not in the slightest
apologetic. Indeed it was impatient to the point of rudeness.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Miss Stafford told me. “Mrs. Scrimser,
that’s the room-clerk’s name, is a special friend of Miss Diggs. Miss
Diggs? She belongs to an old New York family, they say. She’s always
very nice to me. She always speaks to me.”
“Why!” I exclaimed. “Doesn’t she speak to every guest who has been here
long enough for her to know them?”
Miss Stafford shook her head.
“That’s the reason we consider it worth mentioning when she does. You’ll
have to wait and see for yourself. It’s a condition that can’t exactly
be explained.”
A very wise reply I found that to be before I left the Jane Leonard—a
condition that cannot exactly be explained. At least it could not be
explained with credit to the persons controlling the house, nor to the
woman whom they employed to manage it.
Because of that attack of erysipelas I was confined to my room for
nearly a week. When I felt strong enough to go out, it was only in the
evening to the roof-garden, or for a walk along the river’s edge. Even
then I was compelled to wear a broad-brimmed hat and colored glasses to
shield my eyes. When at last my eyes became strong enough for me to lay
aside the glasses, it was a couple of weeks before I dared to read or do
anything besides coarse knitting—sweaters for our soldiers.
Lack of money forced me back to work. The last of the fifty dollars for
which I had worked so hard, and skimped so carefully, had to be drawn
from the savings-bank to pay my board. Fortunately the Y. W. would get
me a job without first exacting a fee.
On my explaining that I didn’t feel quite honest—taking a position and
receiving the training, and then leaving within a couple of weeks—the
woman in charge of the employment bureau advised me to take temporary
positions. There was always quite a demand for such workers, she
explained. Now that there was so much government work to be done, she
found it hard to get any one to so much as consider a temporary job.
“Have you anything temporary in the way of government work?” I asked.
“I’d like to feel that I was helping the government if there is anything
you think I could do.”
“I wish all the girls sent out from here were as well equipped,” she
told me while looking over her file. “I’ll give you a card to ex-State
Senator Gallagher. He is organizing and setting in motion the working
end of the District Board for the City of New York, down in the old
Post-Office Building. There are plenty of other openings, but I’m quite
sure he’ll take you.”