Katie Flanagan arrived at the Lennox department-store every morning
at a quarter to eight o'clock. She passed through the employés' dark
entrance, a unit in a horde of other workers, and registered the
instant of her arrival on a time-machine that could in no wise be
suborned to perjury. She hung up her wraps in a subterranean
cloak-room, and, hurrying to the counter to which she was assigned,
first helped in "laying out the stock," and then stood behind her
wares, exhibiting, cajoling, selling, until an hour before noon. At
that time she was permitted to run away for exactly forty-five
minutes for the glass of milk and two pieces of bread and jam that
composed her luncheon. This repast disposed of, she returned to the
counter and remained behind it, standing like a war-worn watcher on
the ramparts of a beleaguered city, till the store closed at six,
when there remained to her at least fifteen minutes more of work
before her sales-book was balanced and the wares covered up for the
night. There were times indeed when she did not leave the store
until seven o'clock, but those times were caused rather by customers
than by the management of the store, which could prevent new shoppers
from entering the doors after six, but could hardly turn out those
already inside.
The automatic time-machine and a score of more annoying, and equally
automatic, human beings, kept watch upon all that she did. The
former, in addition to the floor-walker in her section of the store,
recorded her every going and coming, the latter reported every
movement not prescribed by the regulations of the establishment; and
the result upon Katie and her fellow-workers was much the result
observable upon condemned assassins under the unwinking surveillance
of the Death Watch.
If Katie was late, she was fined ten cents for each offense. She was
reprimanded if her portion of the counter was disordered after a
mauling by careless customers. She was fined for all mistakes she
made in the matter of prices and the additions on her sales-book; and
she was fined if, having asked the floor-walker for three or five
minutes to leave the floor in order to tidy her hair and hands, in
constant need of attention through the rapidity of her work and the
handling of her dyed wares, she exceeded her time limit by so much as
a few seconds.
There were no seats behind the counters, and Katie, whatever her
physical condition, remained on her feet all day long unless she
could arrange for relief by a fellow-worker during that worker's
luncheon time. There was no place for rest save a damp, ill-lighted
"Recreation Room" in the basement, furnished with a piano that nobody
had time to play, magazines that nobody had time to read, and wicker
chairs in which nobody had time to sit. All that one might do was to
serve the whims and accept the scoldings of women customers who knew
too ill, or too well, what they wanted to buy; keep a tight rein upon
one's indignation at strolling men who did not intend to buy anything
that the shop advertised; be servilely smiling under the innuendoes
of the high-collared floor-walkers, in order to escape their wrath;
maintain a sharp outlook for the "spotters," or paid spies of the
establishment; thwart, if possible, those pretending purchasers who
were scouts sent from other stores, and watch for shop-lifters on the
one hand and the firm's detectives on the other.
"It ain't a cinch, by no means"--thus ran the departing Cora
Costigan's advice to her successor--"but it ain't nothin' now to what
it will be in the holidays. I'd rather be dead than work in the
toy-department in December--I wonder if the kids guess how we that
sells 'em hates the sight of their playthings--and I'd rather be dead
_an'_ damned than work in the accounting-department. A girl friend
of mine worked there last year,--only it was over to Malcare's
store--an' didn't get through her Christmas Eve work till two on
Christmas morning, an' she lived over on Staten Island. She
overslept on the twenty-sixth, an' they docked her a half-week's pay.
"An' don't never," concluded Cora, "don't never let 'em transfer you
to the exchange department. The people that exchange things all
belong in the psychopathic ward at Bellevue--them that don't belong
in Sing Sing. Half the goods they bring back have been used for
days, an' when the store ties a tag on a sent-on-approval opera
cloak, the women wriggle the tag inside, an' wear it to the theater
with a scarf draped over the string. Thank God, I'm goin' to be
married!"
In these conditions Katie found many imperative duties, but none
quite so immediately imperative as the repression of Mr. Porter. She
had not made her first sale at the main women's hosiery counter on
the first floor, to which she had been assigned on her
arrival--pretty girls always being favored with first-floor
positions--when that tall, gray-whiskered gentleman, his duties in
his underground office not at this hour holding him, majestically
approached her.
"Good-morning, Miss Flanagan," he said, with a beneficent smile, as
he placed his white hand upon her quailing shoulder.
Katie became very busy with the stock that was new to her.
"Good-morning, Mr. Porter," she answered.--"Say, Miss Isaacs, how
much do these lisle ones sell at?"
"I thought," said Mr. Porter, fixing her with his apparently
emotionless gaze, "that I would just come over and see if you were
well taken care of."
"None better, Mr. Porter." Katie smiled sweetly as she said it, and
still more sweetly as she significantly added: "Them's always taken
good care of as are used to takin' good care of themselves."
Mr. Porter blinked, but his expression, or lack of expression, did
not alter.
"No doubt," he responded, as he reluctantly made ready to go away;
"but I shall be glad to be of help at any time I can."
"Thank you, Mr. Porter."
"And I shall drop around now and then to see that all goes well."
"Thank you, Mr. Porter."
"Because I was always interested in Miss Costigan--very much
interested, and she was very pleasant to me--and I am naturally very
much interested in her successor, too."
"Thank you, Mr. Porter."
"And, by the way, Miss Flanagan," he added as his Parthian shaft, "I
trust you won't worry over that little loan, you know; there's no
hurry in the world about repayment."
Katie met his vacant glance with the innocent eyes of a grateful
child.
"That's kind you are, Mr. Porter," she answered, "and since you say
it, I shan't worry, sir."
But for all that, she did not by any means dismiss the man from her
thoughts. Her true schooling had been received from the textbook of
life, and she had readily observed in Porter's demeanor the tokens
that announced the beginning of a chase. To one class of hunters
there is no closed season, and Katie knew that this class considered
her and her kind fair game.
There had been occasions when she had debated seriously, sometimes
with herself and sometimes with a companion, whether it was worth
while to continue the flight, whether from three to six years of
captivity, of toil that must end in death, but that was at least
assured of food, were not to be preferred to the continuance of a
precarious dodging through the industrial forest with the possibility
of starvation lurking behind every bush. But this question she had
always, thus far, answered in the negative, at first because of her
inherent disinclination to confess defeat in any struggle that
engaged her, and at last because of Hermann Hoffmann.
To Katie's cheerful cynicism that blind optimist was an object of
unfailing tenderness. She knew how he had been left, when his
father's heart was broken after a long battle against an oppressive
landlord system, with a gentle mother whom he worshiped and who thus
became entirely dependent upon him; how he had sold the few remaining
family belongings, escaped the threat of a compulsory military
service that would have left Frau Hoffmann in destitution, and come,
lured by the glittering promises of one of the immigration agents of
a steamship company, to the land where he had been told there existed
equality of opportunity for all men. And he had told Katie, in his
convincingly simple English, how, a shred at a time, the fabric of
his ideal had been torn away; how bitterly he had toiled only to keep
his foothold; how the little mother had fallen beneath the stress,
and yet how, to the last, he still retained his high hope, and still
dreamed of a genuine democracy in a country where the men that worked
would eventually become the owners of the wealth that their hands
created.
She was thinking of this when, that night, she returned to her
tenement and found waiting at her door her neighbor Carrie Berkowicz,
the shirt-waist worker, who had told her of the chance of a position
at the Lennox shop.
"Hello," said Katie. "Lookin' for me?"
"Yes."
"Come on in."
Katie led the way and lit the lamp, which threw a kindly light over
the neat, bare room, with its stiff wooden chairs, its
oilcloth-covered table, and the lithograph of Our Lady of the Rosary
tacked against the room door. A gas-stove, a cot, a bureau, and a
screened-off sink completed the furnishings.
"I'm just gettin' a bite of supper," she said, before she asked the
cause of Carrie's visit. "You'd better have some."
"No, thank you," replied the caller, with her careful night-school
inflection. "I had mine early."
Katie looked at the speaker, whose round cheeks seemed drawn in a new
determination, and whose jaw was swollen as if from a blow.
"How did you get through so early, Carrie?" she inquired.
The little Lithuanian's eyes sparkled.
"We've done it," she said.
"Done what?"
"Gone out."
"Struck?"
Carrie nodded.
"You know how it was," she explained; "all the girls around here do.
We've had to work all day long from early morning till late night,
Sundays too, and five dollars for the seven days is counted pretty
good wages."
"But somebody said the firms' books showed your pay was higher."
"Oh, the books did show it. You see, they carry only a few of us on
their salary list, and then each of the foremen hires helpers paid
out of one girl's wages. You know as well as I do that most of us
live on oatmeal and crackers, and rent one bed in somebody else's
tenement."
Katie was acquainted with enough of the shirt-waist makers to be
aware that this was true.
"That's so," she granted; "only I thought them things were all ended
after the last row."
"Well, they weren't ended; they were only helped for a few months,
and now it's summer and most of us would have been laid off. It's
the worst time to strike--we know that--but things came to a point
where we had to make a fight, or there wouldn't have been any of us
left to fight when a better time did come."
"You're talkin' about the union?"
"Yes, that's the real point. The bosses started a union of their
own."
"Among themselves?"
"No--they've always had that. I mean they got the new girls into
what they called a beneficial association, with the bosses for
officers. If you join that, you get all sorts of favors, but you
can't join unless you leave the old union."
"Well?"
"Well, then, as soon as they get the beneficial association full
enough, they discharge the union girls and, little by little,
withdraw the privileges from the Association members, so that things
go back to where they were before."
The girl spoke quietly, but Katie remembered many of the evils that
Carrie had not mentioned. She recalled how each moment's pause in
work meant a deduction from the worker's pay; how the elaborate
system of fines taxed the girl whose fingers left her task to
rearrange a straying lock of hair, and how the tears forced by
overstrained nerves or over-exerted muscles cost the offender almost
a fixed price apiece; how the girls that did piecework received no
money unless they brought the little check for every article made,
the firm thereby saving, through the inevitable loss of some of these
checks, a proportion of payment as well known to them and as certain
as the mortality rates of life insurance.
"An' so you went out, Carrie?" she said.
"Yes; they turned down our committee at three o'clock this afternoon,
and at three-fifteen we had all left the shops. Oh, it was great!
But they've got a lot of hands left, and they'll have some of their
orders filled in Newark. I don't know how it will end."
"The bosses wouldn't budge?"
"Not an inch. The most they did was to get some of us aside, each
away from the rest, and offer us seven dollars a week apiece if we'd
fix things up so that our friends would go back to work without any
more trouble."
Katie, who well knew what seven dollars a week must mean to this
calm, hardworking Lithuanian girl, who had come to America alone and
was saving to send her parents money enough to follow, shot a
sidelong glance at the speaker; but Carrie's tone had not changed;
she seemed unaware that she was narrating anything unusual.
"An' you turned down the offer?" asked Katie.
"Last strike," said Carrie, "one of those union girls was sent out to
sell copies of a special edition of _The Call_ for the benefit of the
strikers. She hadn't had anything to eat for three days. One man
gave her a five-dollar bill for a single paper. Nobody saw him give
it; she didn't have to account for it; and she was nearly starved;
but she came back and turned in that whole five dollars to the fund.
That was one of the girls I was representing this afternoon. Do you
suppose I could go back on such girls? Do you suppose I could help
myself when I knew it was hurting the others?"
Katie did not immediately reply, but her blue eyes shone. Presently
she asked:
"Picket-duty, now, for yours?"
"I began it right away. I spoke to one scab as she came out--just
asked her wouldn't she join the union for her own good and ours--just
laid my hand on her wrist--but they had the cops ready and their own
strong-arm men, and had three of them beating me for my pains."
"Pinched?"
"Of course. The magistrate let me off with a lecture on the rights
of every girl to work for starvation-wages if she felt like doing it
and like making others starve.--But next time it will be a fine or
the workhouse."
Katie had begun to busy herself with the preparations for her meal.
She had warmed some coffee on the gas-stove and taken from the
cupboard a roll and a few slices of dried beef.
"Look here," she said, stopping in the midst of this task; "how much
money have you got?"
"Oh, I'm all right, thanks."
"Maybe you are, but you might as well be better. Now, the while the
strike lasts, just you give up that room acrost the hall an' come
over here with me."
Carrie's brown locks shook in doubtful refusal.
"You're the real goods," she said; "but I don't have to do that."
"Of course you don't have to, but I'd take it a real kindness.
What's the use o' keepin' a whole room to yourself when you'll be
spendin' parts of the time in jail?"
Carrie laughed.
"Will you let me pay half?" she asked.
"Sure I will."
"Then perhaps----"
"That's settled," ended Katie, and it was arranged that Carrie's few
sticks of furniture should be moved into the Irish girl's quarters
the next morning.
The details had just been settled when Hermann entered, his cheerful
lips concluding the last bar of "Die Wacht Am Rhein."
"Hello!" said Katie, smiling. "Are you out of a job, too? Or are
you just goin' to be late the night?"
Hermann pulled his cap from his blonde curls and, with blushing
cheeks, grinned broadly.
"Needer," he answered. "I'm chust on my vay to de saloon." He
twisted his cap between his awkward fingers. "I vanted only to ask
you somesing, Katie."
"All right. Sit down an' ask it. You know Carrie. Don't mind her."
"Sure I know her, only----"
Carrie rose. She was aware of the pair's relations, and too firmly
bound by East Side etiquette to think it well to make of herself that
third person who constitutes a crowd.
"I've got to be going," she said.
"Don't you pay no attention to him," Katie objected. "Sit still.
Have some coffee, Hermann-boy?"
But Hermann shook his head.
"No, thank you," he said. "I've got chust a minute."
"Then what was it you were wishin' to say?"
"Aboud dot girl I dalked to you aboud on our vay to Coney. You see
now you have a tshob, it seemed like ve might do somesing for her."
Katie dropped all trace of banter.
"I'll tell you how it is, Hermann," she said, and she did tell him.
As soon as she had secured her place, she had determined to help. At
present much financial assistance was impossible, and employment
there was none. It would be dangerous, moreover, to all
concerned--not least of all to Violet--for the girl to make a dash
for liberty in any manner that would give to Rose a chance to secure
vengeance through her friends the police. But Katie was decided, and
Carrie at once agreed, that, could the escape be arranged, Violet
might at least be sheltered in Katie's room until some work should be
found for her.
"All I want to know, Hermann-boy," concluded Katie, "is however in
the world we're goin' to get word to her."
"Dot's chust vat I vanted fer to tell you aboud," said Hermann. "You
know Conrad Schultz. He's now got my route vith de brewery-vagon.
De stable's chust two doors round de corner. I've explained to him,
und he'll slip a note to Miss Violet the first dime he sees her."
"We'll write to-night," said Carrie.
"An' I'll hand it to him on my way to work in th' mornin'," added
Katie. "Now you run along or you'll be docked."
Hermann assented, smiling. He turned to the door, fumbled with the
knob, and dropped his cap. Katie, a steaming cup of coffee in one
hand, stooped to recover it just as Hermann himself bent forward. In
the presence of a third person, the German felt a sudden thrill of
courage.
"Ach, but you're a goot girl, Katie!" he cried. "Und here's a liddle
revard fer it!"
He seized his cap, jerked her black head toward him, and imprinted a
resounding kiss on her pink cheek.
Katie laughed and broke free. She spilled some of the coffee, but
she administered a smart blow with her open palm on the offending
mouth.
"You'd never dared to do it if you hadn't thought I had me hands
full!" she called after her lover as he clattered heavily and happily
down the stairs. "An' just in revenge for that," she added, still
blushing, to Carrie, as she closed the door, "me an' you'll go out
for a little spree of our own to-night."
"Where to?" asked the factory-girl.
"To a dance," answered Katie. "Me feet have got that lazy walkin'
after a job that I'm afraid they'll forget all the dancin'-steps they
ever knew, unless I hurry an' get some practicin' again."
"I don't know," said Carrie, doubtfully, "I've got to get up early in
the morning."
"An' what about me? Besides, haven't I got me friend, the
alarm-clock?"
"But my jaw's smashed from that fight."
"Who'll see it?"
"Let's make it a moving-picture show."
"An' pay the same for half an hour's headache that we could get a
whole night's dancin' for?"
"I've got to be walking the picket-line all day to-morrow."
"Yes, an' I have to be standin' behind a counter. You haven't got
nothin' on me there. Get your wraps together now an' come ahead,
Carrie. I hear there's a new place opened on Grand Street."
Carrie knew how to dance--the poorest girl on the East Side knows
that, because not to dance is to miss the one amusement obtainable by
the very poor--and, like Katie, she was of that relatively small army
that can frequent the dance-halls for perhaps as much as a year
without contamination. Before she had taken her course at the
night-school, she had even danced in the rooms that the Hebrew
politicians provide behind their saloons near Houston Street, where
she had seen cadets successfully ply their trade among bland-faced
immigrant girls whose very language was unknown to them; and she was
therefore wholly prepared for the picture that she confronted when,
Katie having paid her ten cents for the two admissions, they entered
the low-ceilinged basement of a saloon and tenement-house, and came
upon the meeting-place of the Danny Delancy Social Club.
Through a veil of dust raised by stamping feet and swirling skirts,
through a cloud of heat from a room with every window closed, through
a blast of odors compounded of the fumes of alcohol, the scent of
tobacco, and the miasma of sweating men and women, there rose, from
somewhere, the cries of a beaten piano, struck and thumped into a
shrieking likeness to the "Chocolate Soldier" waltz, which only now
and then was made at all audible above the rhythmic hubbub. Although
the evenings of Saturdays and Sundays were the most popular for
dancing, the floor was so crowded that only the expertness of these
trained dancers prevented collision and panic. The steam from the
bodies of the performers joined with the dry dust in half obscuring
the blue-burning gas. The strident laughter of the patrons helped
the scraping of their feet in subduing the sounds of the piano. The
men gyrated grimly in wet shirt-sleeves, and the women, affecting the
most somber shades chosen for the longest wear, spun in their
partners' arms with stolid, gum-grinding jaws and lips that were
mirthless. Except for the youthful "spielers" admitted without
charge, or even hired, to dance with the awkward or make wall-flowers
sufficiently happy to insure their return, there were but two types
of men among the patrons. There was the native of the quarter,
heavy-faced, large-muscled, quick to anger and ready with the fists,
a hard-drinking, hard-living sort, no more careful of his neighbor's
morals than of his own, yet good-natured, easy-going, pliable. And
winding in and out among these, slow and suave, like some sleek
species of vulture, were the young men that came there not for
pleasure, but for profit, always-smiling young men with manners
offensively elaborate, whose shining black hair smelled of oil, whose
skin was like decaying dough, and whose entire time was spent in
making the acquaintance of new girls, giving dancing-lessons to new
girls in crowded corners, and taking new girls into the adjoining
back-bar for a drink.
To these types the attending women more or less corresponded. Most
of them came alone, or in groups of two or three--a plain girl always
befriended by one of more charm--because etiquette demanded that, if
a man brought a companion, his companion must give him what dances he
wanted, and so she would have few offers from his fellows, who
observed a rigid code that forbade poaching upon a friend's preserve.
There were some that could afford to wear gay dresses because they
were frankly in a business that, of however brief duration, made gay
dresses possible as a luxury and necessary as an advertisement, and
this appearance of wealth was never absent from the hungry eyes of
the young women about them. There were others, also few, who were
plainly new either to the country or to this particular form of
amusement. But the majority came from the factories and shops, lured
by nothing worse than youth's natural craving for its right to
pleasure, seeking to forget the exertions of the day in these new
exertions of the night, drifting whither they neither knew nor
greatly cared, the necessary factors of an industrial system too
fatuous to conserve their efficiency.
On every chair along the reeking walls, now trodden underfoot on the
floor, and now picked up like dry leaves and twirled about in the
little eddies of warm air created by the romping dancers, were cards
and handbills--"throwaways" the patrons called them--which, often in
curious English, announced special balls and "grand receptions"
shortly to be given in this or some similar club. Here one was
"cordially invited" to the "third annual dance given by the two
well-known friends, Greaser Einstein and Kid Boslair, at New
Starlight Hall, Gents Twenty-five and Ladies Fifteen"; there one was
cautioned not to miss the "Devil Dance" that would form a part of the
forthcoming "reception of the Harry Cronin Association, Young Theo,
floor-manager"; and again, one was told that the "Special Extra Event
of the Season" would be the ball of the "Ryan McCall Social,
Incorporated, Tammany Hall, ticket admit gent including wardrobe,
Thirty-five cents; ladies free."
Katie and the shirtwaist-maker got seats near the door, waved and
called to half a dozen acquaintances and strained their eyes to see
through the swirling mist.
"It looks like old times," said Carrie.
"Smells like 'em," Katie amended; "only I've been away from these
places for awhile an' I notice that, new place or old, the faces
change pretty quick. Who's the woman in red, with the yellow hair,
Carrie?"
She pointed to a figure spinning about the center of the room, her
crimson skirt flying far behind her like the trail of a comet.
"I know her," said Carrie. "A year ago she came to New York from the
country to find work. When she was about starved, she rang a bell
under the sign 'Helping Hand Home'--she didn't know what that meant
except that it meant charity. The superintendent told her his place
couldn't do anything for her; she might be spoiled by associating
with the people he helped; his mission was for bad women that were
sorry; not for good women that hadn't anything to be sorry about.
'But I'm hungry,' she told him. 'Can't help it,' he said; 'you're
not qualified.' This girl went away, and came back a month later.
'I don't want to come in just yet,' she said; 'but I do want to tell
you that I'm qualified now'--and she was."
Katie took the facts for what, amid surroundings where such facts are
plentiful, they seemed worth.
"Hard luck," she said, though not without meaning.
"Yes, and look at her clothes."
"That's the trouble," said Katie; "we can't help lookin' at them--the
likes of us--any more than she can help wearin' them. It's that or a
tenement with two dark rooms an' the rent raised every year."
They danced, for among the soberer men there were many that knew
them, and neither girl remembered the weariness of her work in the
exhaustion of her dancing. Between dances, in the dressing-room,
they talked with their acquaintances among the girls, gossiping of
the men and the other women, and now and then, their throats dry and
their faces streaming, they were taken into the dingy side-bar and
were bought a glass of beer.
As midnight drew closer the dance became more stormy. Many of the
working-girls went home, and their places were filled by women of the
brighter dressed class. There were some that were plainly drunk, and
these clumsily imitated the suggestive contortions of the salaried
dancers now sent upon the floor to stimulate the amateurs. One girl,
in a cleared space surrounded by laughing men and envious, though
apparently scornful, women, performed a dance popularly supposed to
be forbidden by the police. There were several fights, and in one
especially nasty scuffle a lad was badly cut by the knife of a
jealous partner.
"I guess that's about plenty for us," observed Katie, as she and
Carrie shouldered their way from the crowd surrounding the wounded
boy and his shrieking assailant.
Both girls were sufficiently familiar with such episodes to accept
them with calm, but both were at last tired out.
"I suppose you're right," Carrie assented, "though I did have a good
time."
"An' it was you didn't want to come!" grinned Katie as they went out
upon the cool street.
"I know." Carrie's round face grew hard and puzzled. "I know," she
admitted, "only sometimes----"
"Och, come on, an' cheer up! We must write our letter for the
brewery-man before we get to bed, Carrie-girl."
They did write it, but Carrie, when she had gone into her own room
for the last night she was to spend there, sat for some time
motionless upon the edge of the cot.
"I know," she repeated as if to some invisible confessor; "I know
both sides of it, and, honestly, I don't know which is worse. I know
all that can be said, only--sometimes--I wonder----"