To-night, then?
No, not to-night.
To-morrow night?
No, no night this week or next week, but perhaps week after next.
Ah, that is so long, so long!
There was no earthly way to get to the stairs or elevators except by
his stove. I came to dread it. Always the Spanish ex-tailor dropped
everything with a clatter and chased after me. I managed to pass his
confines at greater and greater speed. Invariably I heard his panting,
"Listen! Listen!" after me, but I tore on, hoping to get an elevator
that started up before he could make it.
One day the Spaniard, this tall thin roaster with the black mustache,
was waiting as I came out of the locker room.
"Listen! Listen!" he panted, from force of habit. "Next week is still
so very long off."
It so happened it was my last day at the hotel. I told him I was
leaving that night.
"Oh, miss!" He looked really upset. "Then you will go out to-night
with me. Surely to-night."
No, I had a date.
To-morrow night.
No, I had another date.
Sunday--oh, Sunday, just one Sunday.
Sunday I had two dates.
I should be able to flatter my female soul that at least he forgot the
seasoning that night in his roasts.
Downstairs that first Saturday the little quiet Spaniard of the pies
and ice cream screwed up his courage, crossed over to my precinct,
leaned his arms on my front counter, and said, "If I had a wife like
you I would be happy all the rest of my life!"
Having delivered himself of those sentiments, he hastily returned to
his pies and ice cream.
The Greek coffee man would take me to a show that night.
Saturday, to my surprise, was a slack day in the cafe business. Trade
is always light. Sunday our kitchen closed shop. Another reason why my
job held allurements. I was the only girl to get Sunday off. Also,
because we were the only department in the hotel to close down
altogether, it seems we were wont to have an annual picnic. Alas that
I had to miss it!
Plans were just taking shape, too, for this year's event. Last year
they motored over to Long Island. Much food, many drinks. It was a
rosy memory. This year Kelly wanted a hay ride. Kelly, he of the
highly colored past, even so contended there was nothing in the world
like the smell of hay.
There was no fun to the supper that Saturday night. I sat at a table
with a deaf girl, two dirty men, and a fat, flabby female with pop
eyes, and not a one of them acted as if he possessed the ability to
speak. Except the deaf girl, who did tell me she couldn't hear.
So I ate hastily and made for the recreation room. For the first time
the piano was in use. A chambermaid, surrounded by four admiring
fellow-workers, was playing "Oh, they're killin' men and women for a
wearin' of the green." That is, I made out she meant it for that tune.
With the right hand she picked out what every now and then approached
that melody. With the left she did a tum-te-dum which she left
entirely to chance, the right hand and its perplexities needing her
entire attention. During all of this, without intermission, her foot
conscientiously pressed the loud pedal.
Altogether there were seven in the chambermaid's audience. I sat down
next to a little wrinkled auburn-haired Irish chambermaid whose face
looked positively inspired. She beat time with one foot and both
hands. "Ain't it jus' grand!" she whispered to me. "If I c'u'd jus'
play like that!" Her eyes sought the ceiling. When the player had
finished her rendition there was much applause. One girl left the
clouds long enough to ask, "Oh, Jennie, is it really true you never
took a lesson?" Jennie admitted it was true. "Think of that, now!" the
little woman by me gasped.
The chambermaid next gave an original interpretation of "Believe me if
all those endearing young charms." At least it was nearer that than
anything else. I had to tear myself away in the middle of what five
out of seven people finally would have guessed was "Way down upon the
Suwanee River." The faces of the audience were still wreathed in that
expression you may catch on a few faces at Carnegie Hall.
Monday there was a chambermaids' meeting. Much excitement. They had
been getting seven dollars a week. The management wished to change and
pay them by the month, instead--thirty dollars a month. There was
something underhanded about it, the girls were sure of that. In
addition there was a general feeling that everyone was in for more or
less of a cut in wages about September. A general undertone of
suspicion that day was over everything and everybody. Several
chambermaids were waiting around the recreation room the few moments
before the meeting. They were upset over that sign under the picture
of Christ, "No cursing no stealing when tempted look on his kindly
face." As long as they'd been in that hotel they'd never heard no
cursin' among the girls, and as for stealin'--well, they guessed the
guests stole more than ever the girls did. There were too many
squealers around that hotel, that was the trouble. One girl spoke up
and said it wasn't the hotel. New York was all squealers--worst "race"
she ever knew for meanness to one another--nothin' you'd ever see in
the Irish!
I thought back over the dinner conversation that noon. An Irish girl
asked me what my hurry was, when my work didn't begin till 1.30. I
told her I helped out the Spanish woman and remarked that I thought it
wrong that she didn't get more pay than I. "Say," said the Irish girl,
"you jus' look out for your own self in this world and don't you go
round worryin' over no one else. You got number one to look out for
and that's all."
The excitement of the day was that the Big Boss for the first time
took note of the fact I was alive. He said good evening and thought
he'd look in my ice chest. My heart did flutter, but I knew I was
safe. I had scrubbed and polished that ice chest till it creaked and
groaned the Saturday night before. The brass parts were blinding. But
there was too much food in it for that hour of the night. He called
Schmitz--Schmitz was abject reverence and acquiescence. It was, of
course, Kelly's fault for leaving so much stuff there when he went at
3. And Kelly was gruff as a bear next day. Evidently the Big Boss
spoke to him about sending stuff upstairs after the lunch rush was
over. He almost broke the plates hurling things out of the ice box at
2.30. And the names he called Schmitz I dare not repeat. He swore and
he swore and he _swore_! And he stripped the ice box all but bare.
How down on prohibition were Kelly and many of those waiters! Perhaps
all the waiters, but I did not hear all express opinions. A waiter was
talking to Kelly about it in front of my counter one day. "How can we
keep this up?" the waiter moaned. "There was a time when if you got
desperate you could take a nip and it carried you over. But I ask you,
how can a man live when he works like this and works and then goes
home and sits around and goes to bed, and then gets up and goes back
and works and works, and then goes home and sits around? You put a
dollar down on the table and look at it, and then pick it up and put
it in your pocket again. Hell of a life, I say, and I don't see how we
can keep it up with never a drink to make a man forget his troubles!"
Kelly put forth that favorite claim that there was far more evil-doing
of every sort and description since prohibition than before--and then
added that everyone had his home-brew anyhow. He told of how the chefs
and he got to the hotel early one morning and started to make up six
gallons of home-brew down in our kitchen. Only, o' course, "some
dirty guy had to go an' squeal" on 'em and Kelly 'most lost his job,
did Kelly.
I had a very nice Italian friend--second cook, he called himself--who
used to come over to the compartment of Monsieur Le Bon Chef and talk
over the partition to me every afternoon from four to half past. He
also was not in the least fresh, but just talked and talked about many
things. His first name in Italian was "Eusebio," but he found it more
convenient in our land to go under the name of "Vwictor." He came from
a village of fifty inhabitants not far from Turin, almost on the Swiss
border, where they had snow nine months in the year. Why had he
journeyed to America? "Oh, I donno. Italians in my home town have too
little money and too many children."
Victor was an intelligent talker. I asked him many questions about the
labor problem generally. When he first came to this country seven
years ago he started work in the kitchen of the Waldorf-Astoria. In
those days pay for the sort of general unskilled work he did was
fifteen to eighteen dollars a month. Every other day hours were from 6
A.M. to 8.30 P.M.; in between days they got off from 2 to 5 in the
afternoon. Now, in the very same job, a man works eight hours a day
and gets eighteen dollars a week. Victor at present drew twenty-two
dollars a week, plus every chef's allotment of two dollars and forty
cents a week "beer money." (It used to be four bottles of beer a day
at ten cents a bottle. Now that beer was a doubtful bestowal, the
hotels issued weekly "beer money." You could still buy beer at ten
cents a bottle, only practically everyone preferred the cash.)
But Victor thought he was as well off seven years ago on eighteen
dollars a month as he would be to-day on eighteen dollars a week.
Then, it seems, he had a nice room with one other man for four dollars
a month, including laundry. Now he rooms alone, it is true, but he
pays five dollars a week for a room he claims is little, if any,
better than the old one, and a dollar a week extra for laundry. Then
he paid two to three dollars for a pair of shoes, now ten or twelve,
and they wear out as fast as the two-dollar shoes of seven years
before. Now fifty dollars for a suit no better than the one he used to
get for fifteen dollars. Thus spoke Victor.
Besides, Victor could save nothing now, for he had a girl, and you
know how it is with women. It's got to be a present all the time. You
can't get 'em by a store window without you go in and buy a waist or a
hat or goodness knows what all a girl doesn't manage to want. He went
into detail over his recent gifts. Why was he so generous as all that
to his fair one? Because if he didn't get the things for her he was
afraid some other man would.
Nor could Victor understand how people lived in this country without
playing more. Every night, every single night, he must find some
countryman and play around a little bit before going to bed. "These
fellas who work and work all day, and then eat some dinner, and then
go home and sit around and go to bed." No, Victor preferred death to
such stagnation. If it was only a game of cards and a glass of wine
(prohibition did not seem to exist for Victor and his countrymen) or
just walking around the streets, talking. _Anything_, so long as it
was _something_.
Victor was a union man. Oh, sure. He was glowing with pride and
admiration in the union movement in Italy--there indeed they
accomplished things! But in this country, no, the union movement would
never amount to much here. For two reasons. One was that working
people on the whole were treated too well here to make good unionists.
Pay a man good wages and give him the eight-hour day--what kind of a
union man will he make? The chances are he won't join at all.
But the main reason why unions would never amount to much here was
centered in the race question. Victor told of several cooks' strikes
he had been in. What happens? A man stands up and says something, then
everybody else says, "Don't listen to him; he's only an Irishman."
Some one else says something, and everyone says, "Don't pay any
attention to him; he's only an Italian." The next man--he's only a
Russian, and so on.
Then pretty soon what happens next? Pretty soon a Greek decides he'll
go back to work, and then all the Greeks go back; next an Austrian
goes back--all his countrymen follow. And, anyhow, says my Italian
friend Eusebio, you can't understand nothin' all them foreigners say,
anyhow.
I asked him if Monsieur Le Bon Chef after his start as a strike
breaker had finally joined a union. "Oh, I guess he's civilized now,"
grinned Victor.
Numerous times one person or another about our hotel spoke of the
suddenness with which the workers there would be fired. "Bing, you
go!" just like that. Kelly, who had been working there over two years,
told me that the only way to think of a job was to expect to be fired
every day. He claimed he spent his hour's ride in to work every
morning preparing himself not to see his time card in the rack, which
would mean no more job for him.
I asked Victor one day about the girl who had held my job a year and a
half and why she was fired. There was a story for you! Kelly a few
days before had told me that he was usually able to "get" anybody.
"Take that girl now what had your job. I got her. She was snippy to me
two or three times and I won't stand that. It's all right if anybody
wants to get good and mad, but I detest snippy folks. So I said to
myself, 'I'll get you, young lady,' and within three days I had her!"
Kelly was called away and never finished the story, but Victor did.
The girl, it seems, got several slices of ham one day from one of the
chefs. She wrapped them carefully in a newspaper and later started up
the stairs with the paper folded under her arm, evidently bound for
the locker room. Kelly was standing at the foot of the stairs--"Somebody
had tipped him off, see?"
"What's the news to-day?" asked Kelly.
"'Ain't had time to read the paper yet," the girl replied.
"Suppose we read it now together," said Kelly, whereupon he slipped
the paper out from under her arm and exposed the ham to view.
"You're fired!" said Kelly.
He sent her up to the Big Boss, and he did everything he could think
of to get the girl to tell which chef had given her the ham. The girl
refused absolutely to divulge that.
The Big Boss came down to our kitchen. He asked each chef in turn if
he had given the girl the ham, and each chef in turn said _No_.
The Big Boss came back again in a few minutes. "We can put the
detective force of the hotel on this job and find out within a few
days who _did_ give that ham away and the man will be fired. But I
don't want to do it that way. If the man who did it will confess right
now that he did I promise absolutely he will not be fired."