WHAT POVERTY THREATENED: OF GRANITE AND BRASS
Minnie's flat, as the one-floor resident apartments were then being
called, was in a part of West Van Buren Street inhabited by families of
labourers and clerks, men who had come, and were still coming, with the
rush of population pouring in at the rate of 50,000 a year. It was on
the third floor, the front windows looking down into the street, where,
at night, the lights of grocery stores were shining and children were
playing. To Carrie, the sound of the little bells upon the horse-cars,
as they tinkled in and out of hearing, was as pleasing as it was novel.
She gazed into the lighted street when Minnie brought her into the front
room, and wondered at the sounds, the movement, the murmur of the vast
city which stretched for miles and miles in every direction.
Mrs. Hanson, after the first greetings were over, gave Carrie the baby
and proceeded to get supper. Her husband asked a few questions and sat
down to read the evening paper. He was a silent man, American born, of a
Swede father, and now employed as a cleaner of refrigerator cars at the
stock-yards. To him the presence or absence of his wife's sister was a
matter of indifference. Her personal appearance did not affect him one
way or the other. His one observation to the point was concerning the
chances of work in Chicago.
"It's a big place," he said. "You can get in somewhere in a few days.
Everybody does."
It had been tacitly understood beforehand that she was to get work and
pay her board. He was of a clean, saving disposition, and had already
paid a number of monthly instalments on two lots far out on the West
Side. His ambition was some day to build a house on them.
In the interval which marked the preparation of the meal Carrie found
time to study the flat. She had some slight gift of observation and that
sense, so rich in every woman--intuition.
She felt the drag of a lean and narrow life. The walls of the rooms were
discordantly papered. The floors were covered with matting and the hall
laid with a thin rag carpet. One could see that the furniture was of
that poor, hurriedly patched together quality sold by the instalment
houses.
She sat with Minnie, in the kitchen, holding the baby until it began to
cry. Then she walked and sang to it, until Hanson, disturbed in his
reading, came and took it. A pleasant side to his nature came out here.
He was patient. One could see that he was very much wrapped up in his
offspring.
"Now, now," he said, walking. "There, there," and there was a certain
Swedish accent noticeable in his voice.
"You'll want to see the city first, won't you?" said Minnie, when they
were eating. "Well, we'll go out Sunday and see Lincoln Park."
Carrie noticed that Hanson had said nothing to this. He seemed to be
thinking of something else.
"Well," she said, "I think I'll look around to-morrow. I've got Friday
and Saturday, and it won't be any trouble. Which way is the business
part?"
Minnie began to explain, but her husband took this part of the
conversation to himself.
"It's that way," he said, pointing east. "That's east." Then he went off
into the longest speech he had yet indulged in, concerning the lay of
Chicago. "You'd better look in those big manufacturing houses along
Franklin Street and just the other side of the river," he concluded.
"Lots of girls work there. You could get home easy, too. It isn't very
far."
Carrie nodded and asked her sister about the neighbourhood. The latter
talked in a subdued tone, telling the little she knew about it, while
Hanson concerned himself with the baby. Finally he jumped up and handed
the child to his wife.
"I've got to get up early in the morning, so I'll go to bed," and off he
went, disappearing into the dark little bedroom off the hall, for the
night.
"He works way down at the stock-yards," explained Minnie, "so he's got
to get up at half-past five."
"What time do you get up to get breakfast?" asked Carrie.
"At about twenty minutes of five."
Together they finished the labour of the day, Carrie washing the dishes
while Minnie undressed the baby and put it to bed. Minnie's manner was
one of trained industry, and Carrie could see that it was a steady round
of toil with her.
She began to see that her relations with Drouet would have to be
abandoned. He could not come here. She read from the manner of Hanson,
in the subdued air of Minnie, and, indeed, the whole atmosphere of the
flat, a settled opposition to anything save a conservative round of
toil. If Hanson sat every evening in the front room and read his paper,
if he went to bed at nine, and Minnie a little later, what would they
expect of her? She saw that she would first need to get work and
establish herself on a paying basis before she could think of having
company of any sort. Her little flirtation with Drouet seemed now an
extraordinary thing.
"No," she said to herself, "he can't come here."
She asked Minnie for ink and paper, which were upon the mantel in the
dining-room, and when the latter had gone to bed at ten, got out
Drouet's card and wrote him.
"I cannot have you call on me here. You will have to wait until you hear
from me again. My sister's place is so small."
She troubled herself over what else to put in the letter. She wanted to
make some reference to their relations upon the train, but was too
timid. She concluded by thanking him for his kindness in a crude way,
then puzzled over the formality of signing her name, and finally decided
upon the severe, winding up with a "Very truly," which she subsequently
changed to "Sincerely." She sealed and addressed the letter, and going
in the front room, the alcove of which contained her bed, drew the one
small rocking-chair up to the open window, and sat looking out upon the
night and streets in silent wonder. Finally, wearied by her own
reflections, she began to grow dull in her chair, and feeling the need
of sleep, arranged her clothing for the night and went to bed.
When she awoke at eight the next morning, Hanson had gone. Her sister
was busy in the dining-room, which was also the sitting-room, sewing.
She worked, after dressing, to arrange a little breakfast for herself,
and then advised with Minnie as to which way to look. The latter had
changed considerably since Carrie had seen her. She was now a thin,
though rugged, woman of twenty-seven, with ideas of life coloured by her
husband's, and fast hardening into narrower conceptions of pleasure and
duty than had ever been hers in a thoroughly circumscribed youth. She
had invited Carrie, not because she longed for her presence, but because
the latter was dissatisfied at home, and could probably get work and pay
her board here. She was pleased to see her in a way, but reflected her
husband's point of view in the matter of work. Anything was good enough
so long as it paid--say, five dollars a week to begin with. A shop girl
was the destiny prefigured for the newcomer. She would get in one of the
great shops and do well enough until--well, until something happened.
Neither of them knew exactly what. They did not figure on promotion.
They did not exactly count on marriage. Things would go on, though, in a
dim kind of way until the better thing would eventuate, and Carrie would
be rewarded for coming and toiling in the city. It was under such
auspicious circumstances that she started out this morning to look for
work.
Before following her in her round of seeking, let us look at the sphere
in which her future was to lie. In 1889 Chicago had the peculiar
qualifications of growth which made such adventuresome pilgrimages even
on the part of young girls plausible. Its many and growing commercial
opportunities gave it widespread fame, which made of it a giant magnet,
drawing to itself, from all quarters, the hopeful and the
hopeless--those who had their fortune yet to make and those whose
fortunes and affairs had reached a disastrous climax elsewhere. It was a
city of over 500,000, with the ambition, the daring, the activity of a
metropolis of a million. Its streets and houses were already scattered
over an area of seventy-five square miles. Its population was not so
much thriving upon established commerce as upon the industries which
prepared for the arrival of others. The sound of the hammer engaged upon
the erection of new structures was everywhere heard. Great industries
were moving in. The huge railroad corporations which had long before
recognised the prospects of the place had seized upon vast tracts of
land for transfer and shipping purposes. Street-car lines had been
extended far out into the open country in anticipation of rapid growth.
The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions
where, perhaps, one solitary house stood out alone--a pioneer of the
populous ways to be. There were regions open to the sweeping winds and
rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking
lines of gas-lamps, fluttering in the wind. Narrow board walks extended
out, passing here a house, and there a store, at far intervals,
eventually ending on the open prairie.
In the central portion was the vast wholesale and shopping district, to
which the uninformed seeker for work usually drifted. It was a
characteristic of Chicago then, and one not generally shared by other
cities, that individual firms of any pretension occupied individual
buildings. The presence of ample ground made this possible. It gave an
imposing appearance to most of the wholesale houses, whose offices were
upon the ground floor and in plain view of the street. The large plates
of window glass, now so common, were then rapidly coming into use, and
gave to the ground floor offices a distinguished and prosperous look.
The casual wanderer could see as he passed a polished array of office
fixtures, much frosted glass, clerks hard at work, and genteel business
men in "nobby" suits and clean linen lounging about or sitting in
groups. Polished brass or nickel signs at the square stone entrances
announced the firm and the nature of the business in rather neat and
reserved terms. The entire metropolitan centre possessed a high and
mighty air calculated to overawe and abash the common applicant, and to
make the gulf between poverty and success seem both wide and deep.
Into this important commercial region the timid Carrie went. She walked
east along Van Buren Street through a region of lessening importance,
until it deteriorated into a mass of shanties and coal-yards, and
finally verged upon the river. She walked bravely forward, led by an
honest desire to find employment and delayed at every step by the
interest of the unfolding scene, and a sense of helplessness amid so
much evidence of power and force which she did not understand. These
vast buildings, what were they? These strange energies and huge
interests, for what purposes were they there? She could have understood
the meaning of a little stone-cutter's yard at Columbia City, carving
little pieces of marble for individual use, but when the yards of some
huge stone corporation came into view, filled with spur tracks and flat
cars, transpierced by docks from the river and traversed overhead by
immense trundling cranes of wood and steel, it lost all significance in
her little world.
It was so with the vast railroad yards, with the crowded array of
vessels she saw at the river, and the huge factories over the way,
lining the water's edge. Through the open windows she could see the
figures of men and women in working aprons, moving busily about. The
great streets were wall-lined mysteries to her; the vast offices,
strange mazes which concerned far-off individuals of importance. She
could only think of people connected with them as counting money,
dressing magnificently, and riding in carriages. What they dealt in, how
they laboured, to what end it all came, she had only the vaguest
conception. It was all wonderful, all vast, all far removed, and she
sank in spirit inwardly and fluttered feebly at the heart as she thought
of entering any one of these mighty concerns and asking for something to
do--something that she could do--anything.