The "Imperial," to which Hertha went every morning, was a high-grade
shop. The large room in which she spent forty-nine hours a week was as
clean as a conscientious scrubwoman could make it; the ventilation was
not bad, and few of the workers were obliged to use artificial light. At
rare moments of interruption, when stopping to catch a bit of thread or
to adjust a piece of trimming, Hertha would look about at her companions
bent over their machines, one running a tuck here, another attaching the
lace to the muslin there, and would marvel at their dexterity and at the
speed with which the finished product came out ready to go to another
room to be pressed. Later she might see it at a department store, thrown
over a show figure, and priced at $5.65 or $3.95, according to the day
of the week. They were pretty shirtwaists and she took a pride in her
part in their production.
By January the trade became brisk. Orders for "Imperial" waists were
shipped to-day to give place to new orders to be shipped to-morrow. The
girls were paid by the piece, and were, for their own interest, likely
to work as fast as they could; but foreman and manufacturer were
continually calling for greater speed. The exigencies of the
trade--capricious changes of style, a keen competition among the
manufacturers--created a period of swift production to be followed by a
period of unemployment. Now, in midwinter, work was speeded up; and,
bending over each whirring machine, was a taut, tired girl whose one
thought, if she thought at all, was of the signal that should come at
last to tell her that this day's work was done.
Hertha never became accustomed to the daily speeding. Not only did her
body rebel against it, but her spirit refused to accept its sacrilege.
She had always enjoyed making clothes, seeing a garment grow under her
fingers. No matter how simple the article might be at which she was at
work, she had felt the satisfaction of the creator when the final stitch
was taken and the parts had become a useful whole. But now nothing grew;
everything was made artificially by a series of explosions as they made
puffed rice. At her machine she ran row after row of small tucks,
fashioning the shoulders to give fullness to the bust. It was a graceful
pattern, but if she stopped a moment to think of it she lost money for
her employer and for herself. Her mind must be concentrated on her
machine and on the goods that she fed it with the constant suggestion of
hurrying, and again hurrying, and under the accusing eye of the foreman
hurrying yet again.
Among the few American girls who worked at the shop was one Annie Black,
who lived in a suburb. Annie seemed always to be running to and from
trains. Her life on the road bore a striking similarity to her life at
her machine. She rushed in the morning to get the 6:59, which, if it
were on time, got her in and at work by eight. By shortening her noon
hour she could just catch the 5:51 train for home. But if the 6:59 was
late, then it was futile to attempt to make up lost time and she must
work until nearly six and take the 6:41 back to a late dinner. And as
her trains moved so moved her machine with its girl engine driver
impatient for each run to be over and done.
We all love to make things, and the tragedy of the modern factory is
that it denies this joy to the worker. Within the great buildings that
we see from the street car window or that we flash by on the railroad
train, men and women are not fashioning shirtwaists or shoes or
automobiles; they are not seeing one out of the million things of man's
creation grow beneath their touch; they are performing a series of
motions for which they receive remuneration. The swifter and more
accurate the performance of these motions the better the pay; but of the
finished product they have neither knowledge nor thought. At ten years
of age, with needle or wheel, they are better, more intelligent creators
than at thirty, when, with fagged brain, they mechanically add their
part to the multitude of parts that make up the factory product. At ten
they take joy in the thing they have made and may sell it for a nickel
or a kiss; at thirty they have but one desire, to dispose of their part
of the product as dearly as they can. For, as they have no part in the
creation of the whole, so they have no share in the intricate ways of
business that make possible the factory's life. They are only tools like
the machines they operate, to be used by the few, the creators, who,
like the gods themselves, conceive and command.
At the Imperial shop most of the girls were Jewish. Annie Black and half
a dozen other young Americans sat by themselves at a north window and
when luncheon time came rehearsed the very lively happenings of the
night before over their indigestible food; but the other girls were
Russian Jews and spoke in Yiddish. Hertha was glad to have been seated
with the latter group, for from the first she liked them better than her
compatriots. Her shyness, coupled with her dislike of the vulgar, kept
her from making any acquaintances among the American girls, but she
sometimes regretted that the barrier of language separated her from the
Jewish. Some of them were, to be sure, foolish and vain, but the
majority were serious, and a few appealed to her sense both of decorum
and beauty. These girls had broad foreheads and wore their dark hair
parted and drawn down over the upper part of their ears. Their deep
brown eyes had long curling lashes. They carried serious looking books
to and from their work. She often wondered what they were talking about
when they got together at luncheon, and she always smiled when she
passed them to go out at noon.
One night, early in January, she got into conversation with one of them
as they left the factory. It was Sophie Switsky, a small, thin young
woman of eighteen whose dark hair and eyes made almost too striking a
contrast to her white face. "I go with you?" she had asked, looking up
at Hertha as they went out into the rain, "I go under your umbrella?"
Hertha had said "yes" eagerly, ashamed not to have offered shelter
herself. Then, looking down at her companion's feet that were rapidly
becoming soaked, she asked, smiling, "You didn't think it would rain
when you left home this morning?"
"No," Sophie answered, without the smile that is as much a part of the
American greeting as a handshake. "I did not to forget. All the money I
have I save for my brother in Lithuania to bring him here to me."
"Yes?"
"Then I must keep money for the summer when we shall have no work."
"No work?" Hertha questioned.
"Did you not know? This trade is very bad, very bad. In the winter we
work like the slaves and in the summer no work. And before the work will
stop we sit in the room and wait and wait to see if we will be needed
for the day. Sometimes we sit for one week, two weeks, and only work a
day; we cannot tell."
"Why don't we work all the year through, but have shorter hours, and not
speed?" Hertha asked.
"The trade is like that," Sophie Switsky answered wisely. "People want
everything the same time, made the same way. Then the fashions change,
and people throw away all that they have and buy again."
"How silly," Hertha thought to herself. The ways of trade seemed to her
lacking not so much in humanity as in ordinary common sense.
Their way lay along the same streets until they came almost to Hertha's
door when they said good-night, Sophie refusing to allow her new
acquaintance to go further. "It is nothing to get wet," she averred, "I
used to it;" and she hurried on, mingling so swiftly with the crowd that
thronged the Bowery that Hertha soon lost sight of her small figure. She
felt attracted to this young Jewish girl, and yet she half feared that
she, too, like Kathleen, had a vision, and she questioned whether she
desired another friend who wished to change the world.
And yet, when she had finished a supper alone and had dropped wearily
into a chair by the lamp, she found she was almost ready for a
world-change herself. She was too tired to care to read, too tired for
coherent thought. In her head buzzed and hummed and roared the machines
of the shop and every now and then her whole body twitched convulsively.
Outside the rain beat steadily upon the pavement. It was a night like
this, she remembered, that she had been carried, a little new-born baby,
and placed on mammy's big bed. Who did such a thing? Not her young
mother who had died so soon after her birth. Not her grandfather who in
the end had given her his name. Was it her mother's mother who had tried
to hide the family shame? She shrewdly suspected so. Well, she had not
succeeded, for here was Hertha Ogilvie, after all. It was not so easy to
hide a white child, not so easy to stifle the spirit of remorse.
As she sat in her chair, her eyes half closed, she found her thoughts,
as so often happened, drifting back to her home among the pines, to the
cabin with the white sand at the doorway and the red roses clambering
over the porch. Instead of coming home to this empty flat, Ellen and her
mother and Tom were on hand to welcome her. They helped take off her
things, they dried her shoes, they gave her hot coffee to drink. Was it
foolish to have gone away to enter the life of this ruthless city that
held you in a mad whirl of work for half the year and for the other half
left you to starve; this city in which there was no time for a pleasant
homecoming and an evening meal together; this city in which you met a
friendly face and lost it again in the great crowds that swarmed in
millions over the miles of narrow streets? Her head drooped as though
nodding yes to her questions, and her eyes wholly closed.
But just then the doorbell rang.