STAMPING-GROUND OF THE MONKEY-PEOPLE
“It was colossal!” Hildegarde Hook panted boisterously, as she burst
into my room about four o’clock one morning during the Christmas
holidays. “My ideal marriage—eleven o’clock at night, in a dark church
with only the minister, the two contracting parties, and her best friend
present. And Joe Ellen didn’t even change her dress—didn’t even sew up
the slit in the back of her skirt.” Here she stopped panting long enough
to laugh loud and long, after the manner of Greenwich Villagers too
self-consciously innocent to consider the sleeper in the next room.
“Harris had on his old yellow-and-purple Mackinaw, out at both elbows,
and I think—yes, I’m sure, the pants he had on were the pair given him
by my burglar.” Here she jounced herself down on the side of my bed, and
drawing the pins from her hat, cast it on the top of my bureau. The pins
she stuck into the mattress. “Now, dear, don’t you agree with me that it
was an ideal marriage?—that is, of course, since our atrocious laws
force us to go through that silly ceremony. Now don’t you think it an
ideal way for two poets to be married?—so characteristic, so filled with
color. Two struggling young geniuses!”
“Is Harris a poet?” I questioned, as, having edged as far away from her
as the wall would permit, I sat up in bed. “I’ve read several of Joe
Ellen’s verses in the magazines. What’s Harris’s other name? What has he
written?”
“Casey—Harris Casey. Such a romantic name! Two epics and no end of
lyrics. Jack Harland says that Harris’s longer epic is the most colossal
thing in the English language since ‘Childe Harold.’ While I’m not sure
that Jack will ever accomplish anything worth while in the creative
field, you must admit that he is a perfectly colossal critic. You do
admit it?” she questioned so earnestly that any one entering the room
might have fancied that she pled for the salvation of her immortal soul.
“‘Childe Harold’ is not quite in the form of—” I began, determined not
to be led into a controversy so early in the morning, for I still
cherished the hope that she would take herself off.
“Form!” Hildegarde cried, as though invoking her patron saint. “Form!
the chief difference between poetry and prose. ‘Paradise Lost’ and
‘Lucile,’ for instance—both tragedies, in a way, yet each a different
form. You don’t mind if I slip my feet under the cover for a bit?—I’ve
taken off my slippers.”
Without waiting for my reply she hoisted up her feet and began to tug at
the bedclothes. Such looking feet! Her black stockings were without toes
and heels and her bare flesh glistened with moisture.
“Your feet are sopping wet!” I involuntarily expostulated.
“I never take cold,” she assured me, in the act of sticking her feet
between my sheets.
“Please,” I begged, grabbing the bedclothes from her hands. “Please, get
that bath-towel over there and dry them—give them a good rubbing. No use
taking risks when you don’t need to.”
“Risks!” she scoffed, in the act of stripping off one wet and tattered
stocking. “That’s what my burglar and I disputed about. We’ve been
sitting on a bench in Washington Square since twelve——”
“Of all things! And the ground covered with snow.”
“He brushed off a bench and I am never conscious of my body when
enthused,” she reproved me. “He is a stubborn man, but he finally had to
admit the justice of my argument—considering the risks in an undertaking
is the quickest way to insure defeat. Only a weak individuality will
consider risks. Once I make up my mind to do a thing, I do it.”
She was rubbing one foot with my face-towel after having tossed her
stocking on my pin-cushion.
“While making up your mind, don’t you consider the risks?” I inquired,
huddling up in the far corner of the bed. The thought of having her cold
feet come in contact with my flesh made me feel like climbing over the
headboard.
“Not at all. Not at _all_,” she replied emphatically, as she let fly her
second wet stocking and it landed on the fresh shirt-waist I had been so
careful to hang on the back of a chair. “When the colossal idea of
opening a tea-room struck me, instead of considering risks as a person
of weaker mentality undoubtedly would, I went ahead and did. Now see
where I am!—until this freeze came and burst my water-pipes and the gas
froze on me I was feeding half the village.”
“Half the village,” I murmured, at a loss for words—only a few days
before Christmas her younger sister, a hard-working, serious girl, had
been forced to pay two hundred and fifty dollars to keep Hildegarde’s
eating-place from being closed. Having lived in the house with
Hildegarde for more than three months, I realized the hopelessness of
attempting to make her see the truth, so I changed the subject. “You
didn’t finish telling me about the two poets. Did they go on a wedding
trip?”
“They are spending the night in my shop,” she told me, still busy
rubbing her toes.
“What on earth?” I questioned, so amazed that I forgot to notice that
she was slipping her feet between my sheets. “You have no sleeping
arrangements—only small tables and narrow benches.”
“Joe Ellen said it was better than taking Harris to her room and
to-morrow morning being ordered to leave the house or produce their
marriage license. They don’t intend the general public to know of their
marriage—not until they find a publisher for their first book of poems
in collaboration.”
“Oh!” was my meek reply, as I wondered why she had let me into such an
important secret. “They might have gone to a hotel,” was my next remark,
and being a normal idea it was so far out of focus that it impressed me
as an inspiration.
“Hotel?” she questioned indignantly. “That would have killed every bit
of romance. Besides, Joe Ellen only had seven dollars and a half—a check
she received for one of her short poems. Then, of course, as Mr.
Freeland pointed out, there was Harris’s clothes.”
“Who is he?”
“Mr. Freeland? He would have been best man had he received Harris’s note
in time. It was he who discovered Harris—a terrible night last November.
Harris had come up from Texas and was selling papers with his feet
wrapped in an old piece of carpet he had fished out of a garbage-can.”
Just what had become of my sense of humor that night I have never been
able to decide. Certainly it was not with me. Instead of howling with
laughter my brain felt as an egg looks when it is being prepared for
scrambling.
“Did Joe Ellen know him in Texas?” I asked, still feebly keeping to the
details of the affair.
“Exactly three days to the hour—that’s the reason they were married at
eleven o’clock at night—exactly three days to the minute that they first
met each other. Romance! Only a genius with Joe Ellen’s colossal brain
could have thought out such a perfect climax. You won’t mind if I take
your other pillow, will you, dear?”
“Oh, no, certainly not,” I assured her, as I hastily extracted one of
the two minute pillows from behind my back and handed it to her. As she
settled herself, her head at the foot of my bed and her feet in the
comfortably warm spot on which my shoulders had rested previous to her
bursting into my room, I meekly inquired: “Anybody in your room?”
“My burglar,” she answered in the matter-of-fact tone of one agreeing
that two and two make four. “I hadn’t thought of bringing him in until
he noticed that the policeman making his rounds looked at us. He got an
idea that the officer was coming back and tell us to move on just to get
a good look at him. He’s awfully psychic about policemen—says all men
who have served three terms in Sing Sing are. Of course, if it had been
the regular park policeman”—here she yawned and moved her feet nearer my
corner of refuge—“it would have been all right. I’ve helped him take
drunken women to Jefferson Market jail so often that we’ve got to be
real pals.”
She had hardly finished this last sentence when she began to snore, her
buttonhole mouth wide open and her nose startlingly like the beak of a
parrot. Convinced that I would never be able to get back to sleep with
such a noise so near, I slipped out of bed and proceeded to get my
breakfast with a tiny alcohol-lamp.
That was in the midst of one of the severest blizzards ever experienced
in New York City. It was impossible to get coal, and gas-pipes all over
town had frozen and burst. In spite of the warmth of my heavy blanket
bath-robe I was chilled to the bone.
I was sitting on my feet and eating my breakfast—a cup of hot tea
without milk or sugar, and war bread with margarine—when I heard a plank
in the hall outside my door groan. The burglar! Creeping noiselessly to
the door I listened. Some creature was trying to pass without detection
across the carpeted floor of the square hall. A second plank groaned.
Opening my door to a crack I peered out. The candle in a saucer which
our landlady, Miss O’Brien, had placed on a trunk the night before as a
substitute for the gas-jet, had burned out. At first I could see
nothing. Then I made out a tall oblong of duskiness—the doorway leading
to the staircase. The next instant a dark object filled the dusky space.
Another instant and the object disappeared. After a short wait I crept
out and looked over the banisters.
Once or twice, perhaps three times, I made out a sound so soft that it
seemed an echo of the footfall of a cat on the carpeted stairs. Finally
there came a sharp click that sent a gentle tremor through the house—the
front door had opened and closed. Hurrying back to my room, regardless
of the freezing air I threw up the little window and stuck my head far
out. Approaching the electric light at the MacDougal Street corner of
the square was what looked to be a comfortably dressed working man. He
was walking quietly along—evidently on his way to or from work.
My interest in Hildegarde Hook had been awakened by her telling me of
her first meeting with this man, whom she always spoke of as “my
burglar”—she never knew his name.
“You know, I never really wake up until after twelve at night,” she had
assured me. “Mother is like that—mother and I are just alike except that
mother hasn’t my colossal brain. She says so herself.” Such was the
introduction with which she always began her description of the
incident.
A stormy night during the previous winter she took shelter under the
arcade in front of Madison Square Garden, waiting for a particularly
heavy downpour to slacken. It was bitterly cold, and she noted that the
only lighted window in sight was that of the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She was just debating applying for
shelter in the Society room on the plea of being a human animal, when
she became aware that another person was occupying the opposite
door-jamb.
“Say, sis,” a man’s voice whispered, “kin youse see the door to that
cigar-store at corner of Twenty-seventh Street?” When Hildegarde replied
that she could, the voice added: “Keep your lamps peeled; when youse see
that cop hidin’ in the shadder ’cross the corner go in, gimme the
git-away, liker good gal.”
Until then Hildegarde had not noticed the dark figure of the policeman,
so nearly did his rain-washed rubber coat and helmet match the moist and
glistening darkness surrounding him. Standing there in the doorway of
Madison Square Garden she learned that the man who had spoken to her had
served three terms in the penitentiary for burglary, and was wanted for
a fourth offense. He had mistaken her for a “woman of the streets” and
naturally supposed that she also was hiding from the rubber-clad officer
of the law.
When finally the policeman did enter the cigar-store Hildegarde and the
burglar flitted around the corner at East Twenty-sixth Street, and
hastened to the safer shadows of Lexington Avenue. Seated on a bench in
Stuyvesant Square in the pouring rain, Hildegarde insisted that the
burglar had “made a full confession,” and promised to lead an honest
life. To further this end she required him to meet her once each month,
at twelve o’clock at night, usually in Washington Square.
As proof-reader in the multigraph department of the International Y. M.
C. A. my wage was twelve dollars a week, and I found it the most
uninteresting of all the positions held during my four years in the
underbrush. This was doubtless because it was something I had done
before. Not only had I read proof, but I had worked in a crowded dark
basement under electric lights, and for long hours. Reading the annual
reports of the Y. M. C. A. secretaries from about every country of the
world was something of a novelty, though many of them were far from
interesting.
What I did enjoy was the atmosphere, the spirit of the place—everybody
spoke to everybody, and always with smiling courtesy. It was charming.
Also it was comfortable to know that however ignorant you might be you
would not be snubbed nor sneered at. The war had increased the work so
much that the building on East Twenty-eighth Street swarmed with
workers. Practically every day a new department was organized, only to
be moved out the next day for the sake of getting larger quarters, and
to make room for yet another new branch of work.
For a good many years I had heard the two “Ys” sneered at for being
“sectarian.” While at the Jane Leonard, Miss Stafford had retorted to my
praise of the Y. W.: “Being a Catholic you know what I think of the
Young Woman’s _Christian_ Association.” She then assured me that both
the Y. W. and the Y. M. were so “dead against Catholics” that they even
refused to list them in their employment departments.
In the multigraph department at the International Headquarters of the Y.
M. I worked shoulder to shoulder with a young Catholic woman. Though she
was not particularly efficient, she had held the position for several
years; indeed, ever since she left school. Her younger sister was the
private secretary of the head of one of the departments. Both these
Catholic women had gotten their positions through the employment
department of the Y. W.
In the lunch-room of the International Headquarters I met several other
Catholic women, all earning their daily bread working for the Y. M. I
neither saw nor heard of their being discriminated against. One of them
boasted to me:
“Being a Catholic I’m not expected to go to prayers. That gives me an
extra half-hour to do with as I please. I usually run out and do a
little shopping or looking around, the stores are so convenient.”
Now, I hold no brief for any Church—I believe in Justice. In all my
dealings with the two “Ys” I never saw the slightest indication that any
creed was discriminated against.
Is it because the two “Ys” stand for progress that Catholics abuse them,
belittle their work?
It may have been because of my long hours in the basement of the
International Headquarters, or it may have been subsisting on such
scanty meals—in any event soon after giving up my position in the
multigraph department I was taken with a heavy cold. I know I had fever,
for twice a day my pillows and sheets were saturated with perspiration.
My head felt as big as a bushel measure, and was chockful of ache.
Struggle as hard as I might, and I did struggle, I couldn’t get up
sufficient strength to get down-stairs, even though after hours of
struggle I succeeded in putting on my clothes. The first Sunday of this
illness I think I must have been in a measure delirious, for I was
obsessed by the idea that no hospital would take me in, that I must wait
until Monday.
With that idea planted firmly in my mind, I pinned a note on the
pin-cushion—the name of the physician I wished called on Monday, and to
which hospital I was to be taken. A ten-cent bottle of vaseline being
all I possessed in the way of medicine, I put it beside my pillow and
between dozes ate it.
Sunday night I began to cough up the phlegm that had made my chest feel
so painfully tight. Then I fell asleep, such a good, sound sleep. When I
wakened it was Monday forenoon, my head had become normal in size, and
all the ache had disappeared. How weak I was! Trying to walk from the
bed to the window I almost fainted.
If it had not been for Jack Harland, who also had a room on the top
floor, I really don’t know what would have become of me. Miss O’Brien
never came near me, neither did Hildegarde Hook. Jack, my tall,
long-legged boy, as I used to call him, came twice a day, morning and
evening, to ask how I felt and learn what he could get for me in the way
of food.
Later, when I was able partially to dress and keep my eyes open, he
would come in evenings and read to me—the daily paper and parts of “Les
Misérables” and of “Ninety-Three.” Wonderful Victor Hugo! When read by a
sympathetic boy’s voice these books become wonderful indeed.
The first time I was able to creep out, on returning, mounting the four
flights of stairs to my room, I realized that something was the matter
with my heart. Instead of hunting a job next day, as I had planned, I
knew that I must wait until I got stronger. Working with a fluttery
heart like that I might drop in my tracks at any moment.
I had paid a week’s rent and still had five dollars in my pocketbook, so
why worry? Of course I would be fit before the end of the week. When
that time came not only was my heart as fluttery as ever, but I realized
that I had gained precious little, if any, strength.
A problem faced me—must I give up my plan of living on my wages, go to
the bank and get money to tide me over, or what? What would Polly
Preston, who had no money in bank, do under the circumstances? How was I
to feel as a working woman felt if I kept in the back of my mind the
knowledge that I could go to the bank and get money to tide me over a
rough place? Again what would Polly Preston do?
On leaving a bench in Washington Square I returned to the rooming-house,
and crawling up the stairs, I reached my room and took stock of my
scanty wardrobe. It must be either my furs or my cloak. Fortunately, the
weather was mild. I had exactly one dollar in my pocketbook, and
to-morrow was rent day.
The following day I set out soon after breakfast, wearing both my cloak
and furs over my coat suit. Recalling that I had seen one or more
pawn-shops on Sixth Avenue in the vicinity of West Fourteenth Street, I
went there. In the first I was told brusquely that they did not accept
wearing apparel of any sort.
On leaving the second pawn-shop I held twenty dollars in my hand and was
without my furs. Twenty dollars was ample provision for three weeks.
Long before that time I would be able to get a good job now that work
was so plentiful and so well paid.
Spending the rest of the day on a bench in Washington Square with a
library book in my hand convinced me that I must find some other way of
occupying my time if I was to gain strength. The afternoon paper solved
that problem.
The U. S. Employment Bureau on East Twenty-second Street was in need of
volunteer workers. On calling the next morning shortly after nine I
found the street in front of the Bureau crowded by men. When finally,
having wormed my way in and up the stairs, I made myself known and
offered my services I was quickly placed—given a chair at a long
make-shift table, planks on top of saw-horses, and told to register
applicants willing to take work in shipyards.
That was a motley crowd—men holding jobs paying as high as five hundred
dollars a month offered themselves for positions paying one-fifth that
amount, and men who had no work at all refused jobs, the only ones they
were fitted for, at three dollars a day.
One dear old Frenchman I shall never forget. He had passed down the long
line of registrars struggling to make himself understood when he reached
me. Though he had lived in New York more than twenty years he could
neither speak nor understand the American language.
He was a highly paid cabinetmaker. Up to the outbreak of the World War
his family comprised himself, his wife, five sons, and little Hortense.
When he reached me, a bright day when winter’s smile seems spring, his
little circle had dwindled within two years to himself and little
Hortense. His five sons were under the poppies somewhere in France, his
wife had died of a broken heart.
He acknowledged his age, past sixty, but insisted he still had strength
enough to work for America and France. He would take any job, at any
wage. I gave him a card and sent him to an employer who had specially
stipulated that he would take no man over forty.
Within an hour that employer telephoned and asked for me. Instead of the
blowing-up that the registrar at my elbow prophesied, he wished to thank
me. The Frenchman was a tip-top workman, he said. Then he added:
“It’s not often you find a person, man or woman, who knows when to break
a rule. That’s what I called you up for—to thank you for breaking my
rule. If you find any more men like your Frenchman, don’t ask his age,
just send him along.”
Learning that women were needed in the gas-mask factory at Long Island
City, I got a card of introduction from the head of the woman’s branch
of the employment bureau, and journeyed out. This woman had told me that
the wage was exceptional—twenty-five to forty a week.
As fifteen dollars a week had, up to that time, been the highest I had
received, and that for only a few weeks, I looked forward to making my
fortune in the gas-mask factory in a few days. Another case of
exaggerated wage. Fifteen dollars is what I was paid, and I would have
had to work there a good long time before getting a raise.
As it happened I worked there two days, received my training and was
made an inspector at fifteen dollars a week, then decided to find
another job. The fumes of gasolene gave me a hideous headache, and
besides I had seen large crowds of women turned away from the doors
every day.
Returning to the employment offices of the Y. W., I stipulated that my
next job must be work for the government, preferably in a munition
plant. There were plenty of openings, and taking cards of introduction
to several plants near New York City, I set out.
“Even if you don’t find anything to suit you,” the woman at the
employment desk told me, “it will be helping us, letting us know what
you think of the places.”
“Send only mature women to that plant in Hoboken. They want
night-workers,” I advised her on my return. “Those other two places over
in Jersey? If you have girls who have twenty dollars to spend before
their wages begin to come in, send them there.”
“But the clubwomen?” she questioned. “We were told that the clubwomen
had thrown open their homes, would board women workers in those plants.”
I showed her my figures, the lowest that I had been able to get, though
directed by the employment office of the munition plant: three dollars a
week for a small room, up two flights, seven dollars a week for two
meals a day and three on Sundays, sixty cents car-fare,—that is if you
caught a particular train making the trip for the purpose of taking
munition workers.
“The wage being eleven dollars a week, girls working there who room with
and are fed by those clubwomen, will have just forty cents with which to
get lunch, laundry, and any other little luxury,” I went on. “And don’t
forget she doesn’t get a dollar until the end of her second week. Her
first week’s pay is held until she leaves—God knows for why—and she is
not paid for her second week until she finishes it. In the meantime she
has to pay for everything in advance, board, lodging, and car-fare.”
“Those clubwomen!” she exclaimed, in disgust. “The fuss they made about
taking munition workers in their homes for the sake of helping the
government.”
“That’s what being a worker means—everybody’s prey,” I replied, and the
thought did not make me any the happier. “It’s gouge and squeeze, and
when only a flicker of life remains fling them in an almshouse or a
pauper’s grave. Ours is a Christian country.”
During the two months that followed I worked a few days in a cigarette
factory, in a second cracker factory, folded circulars, addressed
envelopes, stamped envelopes, and folded more circulars. It was on this
last job that I was taken for a labor organizer.
Having nothing else to say to the woman working at my elbow, I asked if
that printing-house was open or closed shop. Within three minutes she
pattered off, and held a lengthy conversation with the forewoman. Within
another three minutes this forewoman had informed me that as the work
was “running short,” she would have no need of my services “right then.”
Those two words, “right then,” so I was informed, prevented that
forewoman’s dismissal from being a discharge. Had she discharged me I
could have collected the wage due me; as I was “laid off,” I had to wait
until the next pay-day.
“There’s more ways of killing a dog besides choking it to death with
butter,” the woman who explained the matter to me added. “Some of these
days—if the workers’ day comes in my time—I’ll do some of the choking.”
On returning to my friend of the Y. W. employment department, she gave
me a handful of cards.
“They’re all good positions, but I know which you’ll take,” she told me.
“It’s the one with the smallest salary.”
“Why? I’m working for my living, living on my earnings,” I retorted, not
a bit pleased by her declaration.
“Yes, but you’ve got an enormous amount of curiosity,” she laughed at
me. “That position is with the American Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals. It’s in the office, posting the books, and the
salary is only fifteen a week. You’ll take it because you want to see
how it works.”
I handed all the other cards back to her and set out for the offices of
the A. S. P. C. A. There I was taken on and put to work at once—writing
in a huge book the numbers for the current year of licensed dogs. It was
not tenement work, but it touched the tenements and that pleased me.
During my second week, on learning that the society needed license
inspectors to take the place of the men who had gone to the front, I
determined to apply. When told by a man in the office that the positions
were for men only, I did not change my mind. Up I marched to Mr.
Horton’s office.
“Well,” said Mr. Horton, the manager, “we never have had a woman
inspector. Still, I don’t know any reason why a woman shouldn’t hold the
position. Do you know what the salary is?”
“No, sir.”
Mr. Horton smiled.
“Do you know what the duties are?”
“No, sir.”
Mr. Horton smiled again.
“Most of your work will be in the tenements, from house to house. Often
from flat to flat. You’ll have to go wherever there is a dog—to see if
it is licensed, healthy, and well cared for.”
It so happened that I did know all this. That was my reason for wanting
the job—it would take me into the tenements, to meet tenement-dwellers
face to face as fellow human beings. I would see the homes from which
the men and girls, my fellow workers for so many months, come.
At last I was going into the tenements, stepping into a more dense
section of the underbrush, where I would get at least glimpses of the
heart of the jungle.