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THE LONG DAY
The Story of a New York Working Girl * * As Told by Herself
[Illustration: Logo]
New York
The Century Co.
1905
[Illustration]
Copyright, 1905, by The Century Co.
Published October, 1905
The Devinne Press
TO MY THREE "LADY-FRIENDS"
Happy, fortunate Minnie; Bessie, of gentle memory; and that other,
silent figure in the tragedy of Failure, the long-lost, erring Eunice,
with the hope that, if she still lives, her eye may chance to fall upon
this page, and reading the message of this book, she may heed.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK 3
II IN WHICH I START OUT IN QUEST OF WORK 16
III I TRY "LIGHT" HOUSEKEEPING IN A FOURTEENTH-STREET
LODGING-HOUSE 27
IV WHEREIN FATE BRINGS ME GOOD FORTUNE IN ONE HAND
AND DISASTER IN THE OTHER 44
V IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PHOEBE IN THE ART
OF BOX-MAKING 58
VI IN WHICH PHOEBE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH UPON
MUSIC AND LITERATURE 75
VII IN WHICH I ACQUIRE A STORY-BOOK NAME AND MAKE
THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MISS HENRIETTA MANNERS 92
VIII WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS
WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS 108
IX INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND" 123
X IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF A HOMELESS WANDERER
IN THE NIGHT 142
XI I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS 151
XII IN WHICH I SPEND A HAPPY FOUR WEEKS MAKING
ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS 180
XIII THREE "LADY-FRIENDS," AND THE ADVENTURES THAT
BEFALL THEM 197
XIV IN WHICH A TRAGIC FATE OVERTAKES MY "LADY-FRIENDS" 215
XV I BECOME A "SHAKER" IN A STEAM-LAUNDRY 229
XVI IN WHICH IT IS PROVED TO ME THAT THE DARKEST HOUR
COMES JUST BEFORE THE DAWN 249
EPILOGUE 266
THE LONG DAY
I
IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK
The rain was falling in great gray blobs upon the skylight of the little
room in which I opened my eyes on that February morning whence dates the
chronological beginning of this autobiography. The jangle of a bell had
awakened me, and its harsh, discordant echoes were still trembling upon
the chill gloom of the daybreak. Lying there, I wondered whether I had
really heard a bell ringing, or had only dreamed it. Everything about me
was so strange, so painfully new. Never before had I waked to find
myself in that dreary, windowless little room, and never before had I
lain in that narrow, unfriendly bed.
Staring hard at the streaming skylight, I tried to think, to recall some
one of the circumstances that might possibly account for my having
entered that room and for my having laid me down on that cot. When? and
how? and why? How inexplicable it all was in those first dazed moments
after that rude awakening! And then, as the fantasies of a dream
gradually assume a certain vague order in the waking recollection, there
came to me a confused consciousness of the events of the preceding
twenty-four hours--the long journey and the weariness of it; the
interminable frieze of flying landscape, with its dreary, snow-covered
stretches blurred with black towns; the shriek of the locomotive as it
plunged through the darkness; the tolling of ferry-bells, and then, at
last, the slow sailing over a black river toward and into a giant city
that hung splendid upon the purple night, turret upon turret, and tower
upon tower, their myriad lights burning side by side with the stars, a
city such as the prophets saw in visions, a city such as dreamy
childhood conjures up in the muster of summer clouds at sunset.
Suddenly out of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came
the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill
in western Pennsylvania. With equal suddenness, too, the fugue of
thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings
of ferry-bells massed itself into the clangorous music of a terrifying
monody--"WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!"
And then I remembered! An unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl
of eighteen, utterly alone in the world, I was a stranger in a strange
city which I had not yet so much as seen by daylight. I was a waif and a
stray in the mighty city of New York. Here I had come to live and to
toil--out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and
stress of the wide, wide, workaday world. Very wide awake now, I jumped
out of bed upon the cold oil-cloth and touched a match to the pile of
paper and kindling-wood in the small stove. There was a little puddle of
water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip in
falling had brushed against the sleeve of my shirt-waist and soaked into
the soles of my only pair of shoes. I dressed as quickly as the cold and
my sodden garments permitted. On the washstand I found a small tin ewer
and a small tin basin to match, and I dabbed myself gingerly in the
cold, stale water.
Another jangle of the harsh bell, and I went down dark stairs to the
basement and to breakfast, wondering if I should be able to recognize
Miss Jamison; for I had caught but a glimpse of my new landlady on my
arrival the previous midnight. Wrapped in a faded French flannel
kimono, her face smeared with cold cream, her hair done up in curling
"kids," she had met and arranged terms with me on the landing in front
of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due
allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono,
curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug
corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance,
respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss
Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted
to myself. The secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association, to
which I had written some weeks before for information as to respectable
and cheap boarding-houses, had responded with a number of names and
addresses, among them that of Miss Elmira Jamison, "a lady of very high
Christian ideals."
Miss Jamison was no disappointment. She fulfilled perfectly all my
preconceived notions of what she would look like when properly attired.
Spying me the moment I got inside the dining-room door, she immediately
pounced upon me and hurried me off to a seat, when a girl in a dirty
white apron began to unload off a tray a clatter of small dishes under
my nose, while another servant tossed a wet, warm napkin upon my plate.
My breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things in the
collection of dishes, and which I ate with not the greatest relish in
the world.
There were several score of breakfasters in the two big rooms, which
seemed to occupy the entire basement floor. They ate at little tables
set uncomfortably close together. Gradually my general observations
narrowed down to the people at my own table. I noticed a young man
opposite who wore eye-glasses and a carefully brushed beard; an old
lady, with a cataract in her left eye, who sat at the far end of the
table; a little fidgety, stupid-looking, and very ugly woman who sat
next the bearded young man; and a young girl, with dancing, roguish
black eyes, who sat beside me. The bearded young man talked at a great
rate, and judging from the cackling laughter of the fidgety woman and
the intensely interested expression of the cataracted lady, the subject
was one of absorbing interest.
Gradually I discovered that the topic of discourse was none other than
our common hostess and landlady; and gradually, too, I found myself
listening to the history of Miss Elmira Jamison's career as a purveyor
of bed and board to impecunious and homeless mortals.
Five years ago Miss Jamison had come into this shabby though eminently
respectable neighborhood, and opened a small boarding-house in a
neighboring street. She had come from some up-State country town, and
her bureaus and bedsteads were barely enough to furnish the small,
old-fashioned house which she took for a term of years. Miss Jamison was
a genius--a genius of the type peculiar to the age in which we live. She
wasn't the "slob" that she looked. The epithet is not mine, but that of
the young gentleman to whom I am indebted for this information. No,
indeed; Miss Jamison was anything but a "slob," as one soon found out
who had occasion to deal with her very long. A shrewd, exacting,
penny-for-penny and dollar-for-dollar business woman was concealed under
the mask of her good-natured face and air of motherly solicitude. Miss
Jamison, at the very start-out of her career, was inspired to call her
little "snide" boarding-house after the founder of the particular creed
professed by the congregation of the neighboring church. The result was
that "The Calvin" immediately became filled with homeless Presbyterians,
or the homeless friends and acquaintances of Presbyterians. They not
only filled her house, but they overflowed, and to preserve the overflow
Miss Jamison rented the adjoining house.
Miss Jamison was now a successful boarding-house keeper on a scale
large enough to have satisfied the aspirations of a less clever woman.
But she longed for other denominations to feed and house. Of the
assortment that offered themselves, she chose the Methodists next, and
soon had several flourishing houses running under the pious appellation
"Wesley," which name, memorialized in large black letters on a brass
sign, soon became a veritable magnet to board-seeking Methodism.
The third and last venture of the energetic lady, and the one from which
she was to derive her largest percentage of revenue, was the
establishment of the place of which I had so recently become an inmate.
Of all three of Miss Jamison's boarding-houses, this was the largest and
withal the cheapest and most democratic: in which characteristics it but
partook of the nature of the particular sort of church-going public it
wished to attract, which was none other than the heterodox element which
flocked in vast numbers to All People's church. The All People's edifice
was a big, unsightly brick building. It had been originally designed for
a roller-skating rink.
All People's, as the church was colloquially named, was one of the most
popular places of worship in the city. Every Sunday, both at morning and
evening services, the big rink was packed to the doors with people who
were attracted quite as much by the good music as they were by the
popular preaching of the very popular divine. A large percentage of this
great congregation was recruited from the transient element of
population which lives in lodgings and boarding-houses. From its
democracy and lack of all ceremony, it was a church which appealed
particularly to those who were without ties or affiliations. Into this
sanctuary the lonely young man (or girl) of a church-going temperament
was almost sure to drift sooner or later if his probationary period of
strangerhood happened to fall in this section of the city.
The clever Miss Jamison put a sign bearing the legend, "All People's,"
on each of the doors of six houses, opposite the church, which she
acquired one by one as her business increased. The homeless and lonely
who came to All People's for spiritual refreshment, or to gratify their
curiosity, remained to patronize Miss Jamison's "special Sunday"
thirty-five-cent table d'hote, served in the basement of one house; or
bought a meal-ticket for four dollars, which entitled them to twenty-one
meals served in the basement of another of the houses; or for the sum of
five dollars and upward insured themselves the privilege of a week's
lodging and three meals a day served in still another of the basements.
Such is the history of Miss Jamison as detailed at the breakfast-table
that Sunday morning.
I went out for a walk late in the afternoon, and wandered about,
homesick and lonely. When I returned dinner was over and the dining-room
almost deserted, only a few remaining to gossip over their dessert and
coffee. At my table all had gone save the young girl with the dark eyes,
who, I felt instinctively, was a very nice and agreeable girl. As I
approached the table, she raised her eyes from the book she was reading
and gave me a diffident little bow, when, seeing I was so glad to
respond to it, she immediately smiled in a friendly way.
From the glimpse I had caught of her during the morning meal, I had
thought her very pretty in a smart, stiffly starched, mannish-looking
shirt-waist. That night she looked even prettier, clad in a
close-fitting cloth gown of dark wine-color. I noticed, too, as I sat
down beside her, that she was an unusually big woman.
"How do you like the boarding-house by this time?" she asked, with an
encouraging smile, to which I responded as approvingly as I could in the
remembrance of the cheerless hall bedroom far above, and in the
presence of the unappetizing dinner spread before me.
"Well, I think it's rotten, if you'll excuse my French," laughed Miss
Plympton, as she cut a square of butter off the common dish and passed
it to me. "And I guess you think so, too, only you're too polite to
roast the grub like the rest of us do. But you'll get over that in time.
I was just the same way when I first begun living in boarding-houses,
but I've got bravely over that now.
"I've been here just a little over a week myself," she went on in her
frank and engaging manner. "I saw you this morning, and I just knew how
you felt. I thought I'd die of homesickness when I came. Not a soul
spoke to me for four days. Not that anybody would want to particularly
get acquainted with these cattle, only I'm one of the sort that has got
to have somebody to speak to. So this morning I said to myself, when I
saw you, that I'd put on nerve and up and speak to you even if you did
turn me down. And that's why I waited for you to-night."
I responded that I was glad she had been so informal; absence of
formality being the meaning I interpreted from her slang, which was much
more up-to-date and much more vigorous than that to which I had been
accustomed in the speech of a small country village. As I ate, we
talked. We talked a little about a great many things in which we were
not at all interested, and a very great deal about ourselves and the
hazards of fortune which had brought our lives together and crossed them
thus at Miss Jamison's supper-table,--subjects into which we entered
with all the zest and happy egotism of youth. Of this egotism I had the
greater preponderance, probably because of my three or four years' less
experience of life. Before we rose from the table I had told Miss
Plympton the story of my life as it had been lived thus far.
Of her own story, all I knew was that she was a Westerner, that she had
worked a while in Chicago, and had come to New York on a mission similar
to my own--to look for a job. We went together to her room, which was as
small and shabby as my own, and a few minutes later we were sitting
round the little Jenny Lind stove, listening to the pleasant crackle of
the freshly kindled fire. Both were silent for a few minutes. Then my
new friend spoke.
"What does that put you in mind of?" she asked slowly.
"You mean the crackle of the kindling-wood and the snap of the coal as
the flames begin to lick it?" I asked.
"U-m-m, yes; the crackle of the wood and the snap of the coal," said the
girl in a dreamy tone.
"Home!" I cried, quick as a flash. "It makes me think of home--of the
home I used to have," and my eyes blurred.
"Here, too! Home!" she replied softly. "Funny, isn't it, that we have so
many ideas exactly alike? But I suppose that's because we were both
brought up in the country."
"In the country!" I exclaimed in surprise. "I thought you were from
Chicago."
"Oh, no; I'm from the country. I didn't go to Chicago till I was twenty.
I lived all my life on a farm in Iowa, till I went up to get a job in
Chicago after my father died and I was all alone in the world. We lived
in the very wildest part of the State--in the part they call the 'Big
Woods.' Oh, I know all about frontier life. And there's hardly any kind
of 'roughing it' that I haven't done. I was born to it."
She laughed, opening the stove door, for the elbow of the pipe was now
red-hot and threatening conflagration to the thin board partition
behind, which divided the little room from that of the next lodger.
A loud thump upon the board partition startled us. We listened for a
few moments,--at first with alarm,--and then realized that the noise was
only the protest of a sleepy boarder.
Presently, as we continued to talk, the banging of a shoe-heel on the
wall grew more insistent. We heard doors opening along the hall, and a
high, raucous voice invoked quiet in none too polite phrase. So I said,
"Good night," in a whisper and tiptoed to my own door.
Thus began my acquaintance with Minnie Plympton--an acquaintance which,
ripening later into a warm friendship, was to have an incalculable
influence upon my life.
II
IN WHICH I START OUT IN QUEST OF WORK
When I woke up the next morning it was to find a weight of homesickness
lying heavy upon my heart--homesickness for something which, alas! no
longer existed save in memory. Then I remembered the girl on the floor
below, and soon I was dressing with a light heart, eager to hurry down
to breakfast. I was somewhat disappointed to find that she had eaten her
breakfast and gone. I went out upon the stoop, hailed a newsboy, and
sought my skylight bedroom.
It was with a hope born of youth and inexperience that I now gave
systematic attention to "HELP WANTED--Female." I will confess that at
first I was ambitious to do only what I chose to esteem "lady-like"
employment. I had taught one winter in the village school back home, and
my pride and intelligence naturally prompted me to a desire to do
something in which I could use my head, my tongue, my wits--anything,
in fact, rather than my hands. The advertisements I answered all held
out inducements of genteel or semi-genteel nature--ladies' companions;
young women to read aloud to blind gentlemen and to invalids; assistants
in doctors' and dentists' offices, and for the reception-room of
photograph galleries. All of them requested answers in "own handwriting,
by mail only." I replied to scores of such with no success.
There was also another kind of illusive advertisement which I answered
in prodigal numbers in the greenness of these early days. These were
those deceitfully worded requests for "bright, intelligent ladies--no
canvassing." And not less prodigal were the returns I got. They came in
avalanches by every mail, from patent-medicine concerns,
subscription-book publishers, novelty manufacturers--all in search of
canvassers to peddle their trash.
I might have saved much superfluous effort, and saved myself many
postage-stamps, had I been fortunate enough to have had the advice of
Miss Plympton throughout this first week. But Miss Plympton had gone
away for several days. I had not seen her since we had parted on Sunday
night; but Monday evening, when I went to the table, I found a hasty
note saying she had gone out of town to see about a job, and would see
me later. That was all. I found myself longing for her more and more as
the week wore away.
Meanwhile, however, I did not allow the sentiment of an interrupted
acquaintance to interfere with my quest for a job, nor did I sit idle in
Miss Jamison's boarding-house waiting for replies. I had only a few
dollars in the world, and on the other side of those few dollars I saw
starvation staring me in the face unless I found work very soon. I
planned my search for work as systematically as I might have conducted a
house-cleaning. As soon as each day's grist of "wants" was sifted and a
certain quota disposed of by letter, I set out to make personal
applications to such as required it. This I found to be an even more
discouraging business than the epistolary process, as it was bitterly
cold and the streets were filled with slush and snow. The distances were
interminable, and each day found my little hoard dwindling away with
frightful rapidity into innumerable car-fares and frequent cups of
coffee at wayside lunch-counters. I traveled over miles and miles of
territory, by trolley-car, by elevated train and ferry-boat, to
Brooklyn, to Harlem, to Jersey City and Newark, only to reach my
destination cold and hungry, and to be interviewed by a seedy man with
a patent stove-lifter, a shirt-waist belt, a contrivance for holding up
a lady's train, or a new-fangled mop--anything, everything that a
persistent agent might sell to the spendthrift wife of an American
workingman.
By the end of the week I was obliged to hunt for another boarding-house
as well as continue the search for work. My little bedroom under the
skylight, and three meals per day of none too plentiful and wretchedly
cooked food, required the deposit of five dollars a week in advance.
With but a few dollars left in my purse, and the prospect of work still
far off, nothing in the world seemed so desirable as that I might be
able to pass the remainder of my days in Miss Jamison's house, and that
I might be able to breakfast indefinitely in her dark basement
dining-room.
Sunday morning came around again. I had been a week in the city, and was
apparently no nearer to earning a livelihood than the day I started out.
I had gained a little experience, but it had been at the cost of nearly
five precious dollars, all spent in street-car fare and postage-stamps;
of miles and miles of walking through muddy, slushy streets; and at the
sacrifice of my noon lunch, which I could have had done up for me at the
boarding-house without extra charge, but which my silly vanity did not
allow me to carry around under my arm.
Sunday morning again, and still no Miss Plympton. She was under
discussion when I reached the breakfast-table. The lady with the
cataract and her friend were speaking of how well she always dressed,
and one of them wondered how she managed to do it, since she had no
visible means of support. Dr. Perkins didn't seem to relish the turn the
conversation had taken, and suddenly he fell completely out of it. But
the gossips clacked on regardless, until they were brought to a
standstill by a peremptory exclamation from the end of the table.
"Excuse me," spoke up the doctor, dryly, "but I'll have to ask you to
change the subject. You are talking about a young lady of whom you know
absolutely nothing!"
The scandal-mongers finished breakfast in silence and soon shuffled away
in their bedroom slippers.
"Old cats!" said the doctor, energetically. "Boarding-house life breeds
them. A boarding-house is no place for anybody. It perverts all the
natural instincts, mental, moral, and physical. You'd hardly believe it,
but I've lived in boarding-houses so long that I can't digest really
wholesome food any more."
When at last we rose to go, he handed me a card upon which I later read
this astonishing inscription in heavy black type: "PAINLESS PERKINS";
and, in smaller type underneath, the information that the extracting or
filling of molars; crown and bridge work; or the fitting of artificial
teeth, would be done by Painless Perkins in a "Particularly Pleasing
Way," and that he was "Predisposed to Popular Prices."
With no books to read, and no advertisements to answer, and no friend
with whom to gossip, the day stretched before me a weary, dreary waste,
when I happened to think of the church across the way, something of the
history of which I had heard from Painless Perkins. And so I joined the
crowd of strangers who were pouring into the doors of "All People's" to
the music of a sweet-toned bell.
I was there early, but the auditorium was packed, and I was ushered to a
camp-chair in the aisle. The crowd was not suggestive of fashionable New
York, though there were present many fine-looking, well-groomed men and
women. But nearly everybody was neatly and decently if not well dressed.
Many of the faces looked as sad and lonely as I felt. They appeared to
be strangers--homeless wanderers who had come here to church not so much
for worship as to come in touch with human beings. I was too tired, too
discouraged even to hear what the earnest-voiced preacher said. The two
girls sitting directly in front of me listened intently, as they passed
a little bag of peppermints back and forth, and I envied them the
friendship which that furtive bag of peppermints betokened. If I had had
any prospect of getting a job the following week, I too could have
listened to the preacher. As it was, my ears were attuned only to the
terrifying refrain which had haunted me all week: "WORK OR STARVE, WORK
OR STARVE!" After a while I tried to rouse myself and to take in the
sermon which was holding the great congregation breathless. It was about
the Good Samaritan. I heard a few sentences. Then the preacher's voice
was lost once more in that insistent refrain.
Dinner at noon and supper in the evening in the dark house across the
street, and still my friend was absent. The scandal-mongers were as busy
as ever, for Painless Perkins was away.
Monday morning I made my way eastward on foot, across Union Square. The
snow had been falling all night and was still sifting down in big,
flowery flakes. The trees under their soft, feathery burdens looked like
those that grow only in a child's picture-book. The slat-benches were
covered with soft white blankets that were as yet undisturbed, for the
habitual bench tramp was not abroad so early in the morning.
I was up extraordinarily early, as I started out on a double search. The
first item on my list--"Board and room, good neighborhood, $3.00"--took
me south across Fourteenth Street, choked and congested with the morning
traffic. The pavements were filled with hurrying crowds--factory-hands,
mill-girls, mechanics--the vanguard of the great labor army. I hunted
for Mrs. McGinniss's residence in a street which pays little attention
to the formality of numbers. An interview with a milk-cart driver
brought the discouraging news that I might find it somewhere between
First and Second avenues, and I hurried on down the street, which
stretched away and dipped in the far distance under the framework of the
elevated railroad. The stoop-line on either side presented an
interminable vista of small, squalid shops, meat-markets, and saloons.
Wedged between a paper-box factory and a blacksmith's shop I found Mrs.
McGinniss's number. It was a five-story red-brick tenement, like all the
others that rise above the stoop-line of this poverty-stricken street. A
soiled scrap of paper pasted beneath the button informed possible
visitors that Mrs. McGinniss lived on the fifth floor, that her bell was
out of order, and that one should "Push Guggenheim's."
The Guggenheims responded with a click from above. I ascended a flight
of dark stairs, at the top of which there was ranged an ambuscade of
numerous small Guggenheims who had gushed out in their underdrawers and
petticoats. Their mother, in curl-papers, gave explicit directions for
my guidance upward.
"Is this where Mrs. McGinniss lives?" I inquired of the dropsical
slattern who responded to my rap.
"I'm her."
Mrs. McGinniss's manner was aggressive. Conscious of her bare, sodden
arms and dripping gingham apron, she evidently supposed I had mistaken
her for a laundress instead of the lady of her own house, and she showed
her resentment by chilly reticence.
"I don't run no boarding-house, and I don't take just any trash that
come along, either."
I agreed that these were excellent qualities in a landlady, and then,
somewhat mollified, she led the way through a steamy passage into a
stuffy bedroom. It had one window, looking out into an air-shaft filled
with lines of fluttering garments and a network of fire-escapes. A
slat-bed, a bureau, a washstand with a noseless pitcher, and a
much-spotted Brussels carpet completed the furnishings, and out of all
exuded ancient odors of boiled cabbage and soap-suds.
"There's one thing, though, I won't stand for, and that's cigarettes.
I've had the last girl in my house that smokes cigarettes I'm going to
have. Look at that nice carpet! Look at it! All burned full of holes
where that trollop throwed her matches."
I hurried away, with a polite promise to consider the McGinniss
accommodations.
The abode of Mrs. Cunningham was but a few blocks away. Mrs. Cunningham
did not live in a flat, but in the comparative gentility of "up-stairs
rooms" over a gaudy undertaking establishment. She proved to be an Irish
lady with a gin-laden breath. Her eyes were blue and bleared, and looked
in kindly fashion through a pair of large-rimmed and much-mended
spectacles, from which one of the glasses had totally disappeared. She
was affable, and responded to my questions with almost maudlin
tenderness, calling me "dearie" throughout the interview. Her little
parlor was hung with chromo reproductions of great religious paintings,
and the close atmosphere was redolent of the heavy perfume of lilies
and stale tuberoses. Remarking the unusual prodigality of flowers, the
good lady explained that the undertaker beneath was in the habit of
showing his esteem by the daily tender of such funeral decorations as
had served their purpose. Mrs. Cunningham's accommodations at four
dollars per week were beyond my purse, however; but, as she was willing
to talk all day, my exit was made with difficulty.
The remainder of that day and a good part of the days that followed were
spent in interviewing all manner of landladies, most of whom, like Mrs.
McGinniss's bell, were disordered physically or mentally. Heartsick, I
decided by Saturday to take blind chances with the janitress of a
Fourteenth-street lodging-house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could
understand of her mutilated talk was that the room would be one dollar a
week with "light-housekeeping" privileges thrown in. I had either to pay
Miss Jamison another five dollars that next morning or take chances
here. I took the hazard, paid the necessary one dollar to the more or
less inarticulate woman, and went back to Miss Jamison's to get my
baggage and to eat the one dinner that was still due me--not forgetting
to leave a little note for the still absent Minnie Plympton, giving her
my new address.
III
I TRY "LIGHT" HOUSEKEEPING IN A FOURTEENTH-STREET LODGING-HOUSE
Bedtime found me thoroughly settled in my new quarters, and myself in
quite an optimistic frame of mind as I drew close to the most fearfully
and wonderfully mutilated little cook-stove that ever cheered the heart
of a lonely Fourteenth-street "light housekeeper." In the red-hot glow
of its presence, and with the inspiring example of courage and fortitude
which it presented, how could I have felt otherwise than optimistic? It
was such a tiny mite of a stove, and it seemed to have had such a world
of misfortune and bad luck! There was something whimsically, almost
pathetically, human about it. This, it so pleased my fancy to believe,
was because of the sufferings it had borne. Its little body cracked and
warped and rust-eaten, the isinglass lights in its door long since
punched out by the ruthless poker, the door itself swung to on the
broken hinge by a twisted nail--a brave, bright, merry little cripple
of a stove, standing on short wooden legs. I made the interesting
discovery that it was a stove of the feminine persuasion; "Little
Lottie" was the name which I spelled out in the broken letters that it
wore across its glowing heart. And straightway Little Lottie became more
human than ever--poor Little Lottie, the one solitary bright and
cheerful object within these four smoke-grimed walls which I had elected
to make my home.
Home! The tears started at the mere recollection of the word. The
firelight that flickered through the broken door showed an ironical
contrast between the home that now was and that which once had been, and
to which I looked back with such loving thoughts that night. A narrow
wooden bedstead, as battered and crippled as Little Lottie, but without
the latter's air of sympathy and companionship; a tremulous kitchen
table; a long box set on end and curtained off with a bit of faded
calico, a single chair with a mended leg--these rude conveniences
comprised my total list of housekeeping effects, not forgetting, of
course, the dish-pan, the stubby broom, and the coal-scuttle, along with
the scanty assortment of thick, chipped dishes and the pots and pans on
the shelf behind the calico curtain. There was no bureau, only a waved
bit of looking-glass over the sink in the corner. My wardrobe was strung
along the row of nails behind the door, a modest array of petticoats and
skirts and shirt-waists, with a winter coat and a felt sailor-hat.
Beneath them, set at right angles to the corner, was the little
old-fashioned swell-top trunk, which precaution prompted me to drag
before the door. It had been my mother's trunk, and this was the first
journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the
Philadelphia Centennial. In the quiet, uneventful years that followed it
had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual
spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "The Mistletoe Bough"
and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic of our
grandfather's student days.
What a change for the little old trunk and what a change for me the last
twelve months had brought about! After the door had been further
barricaded by piling the chair on top of the trunk, and the coal-scuttle
on top of the chair, I blew out the evil-smelling lamp and crept with
fear and trembling into a most inhospitable-looking bed. It received my
slight weight with a groan, and creaked dismally every time I stirred.
Through the thin mattress I could feel the slats, that seemed hard
bands of pain across my tired body.
From where I was lying I could look straight into Little Lottie's heart,
now a steady, glowing mass of coals. Little Lottie invited me to
retrospection. How different it all was in reality from what I had
imagined it would be! In the story-books it is always so alluring--this
coming to a great city to seek one's fortune. A year ago I had been
teaching in a little school-house among my Pennsylvania hills, and I
recalled now, very vividly, how I used to love, on just such cold winter
nights as this, when the wind whistled at every keyhole of the
farm-house where I boarded during the school year to pull my
rocking-chair into the chimney-corner and read magazine stories about
girls who lived in hall bedrooms on little or nothing a week; and of
what good times they had, or seemed to have, with never being quite
certain where the next meal was to come from, or whether it was to come
at all.
I was wakened by the rattle of dishes, the clatter of pots and pans, and
the rancid odor of frying bacon, bespeaking the fact that somebody's
breakfast was under way in the next room to mine. I stepped across the
bare, cold floor to the window, and, rolling up the sagging
black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. Bleak and unbeautiful was
the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral
fire-escape--a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all
about with the rear walls of high, gaunt, tottering tenements, the dirty
windows of which were filled with frowzy-headed women and children.
Something interesting was going on below, for in a moment every window
was thrown up, and a score of heads leaned far out. I followed suit.
In the sloppy, slush-filled courtyard below two untidy women were
engaged in coarse vituperation that shortly led to blows. The window
next to mine was quickly raised, and I drew back to escape being
included in the category of curious spectators to this disgraceful
scene--but too late.
"What's the row?" a voice asked with friendly familiarity. It was the
girl who had been frying the bacon, and she still held a greasy knife in
her hand. I answered that I did not know. She was very young, hardly
more than sixteen. She had a coarse, bold, stupid face, topped by a
heavy black pompadour that completely concealed any forehead she might
be supposed to possess. She was decidedly an ill-looking girl; but the
young fellow in his shirt-sleeves who now stuck his head out of the
window alongside of hers was infinitely more so. He had a weak face,
covered with pimples, and the bridge of his nose was broken; but,
despite these manifest facial defects, and notwithstanding the squalor
of his surroundings, a very high collar and a red necktie gave him the
unmistakable air of the cheap dandy. Again I gave a civil evasion to the
girl's trivial question, and as I did so her companion, looking over her
frowzy pompadour, stared at me with insolent familiarity. I jerked my
head in hurriedly, and, shutting the window, turned my attention to
Little Lottie. It was not long before my tea-kettle was singing merrily.
I was about to sit down to the first meal in my new abode, when an
insinuating rat-tat sounded on the door. I opened it to find the
ill-looking young fellow leaning languidly against the door-jamb, a
cigarette between his teeth.
"What do you wish?" I asked, in my most matter-of-fact manner.
He puffed some smoke in my face, then took the cigarette from his mouth
and looked at me, evidently at a loss for an answer.
"The girl in there wants to know if you'll loan her one of your plates,"
he replied at last.
"I am sorry," I said, with freezing politeness--"I am very sorry, but I
have only one plate, and I'll need that myself," and I closed the door.
After breakfast I walked up to First Avenue to lay in my provisions for
the day--a loaf of bread, a quart of potatoes, a quarter of a pound of
butter, and two cents' worth of milk. Never in my life before had I
bought anything on the Sabbath day, and never before had I seen a place
of business open for trade on that day. My people had not been sternly
religious people, and, theoretically, I didn't think I was doing
anything wicked; yet I felt, as I gave my order to the groceryman, as
though I were violating every sacred tradition of birth and breeding.
After that I tried to do all necessary marketing the day before, and if
I needed anything on Sunday I made myself go without it.
Returning with my unholy provisions tucked under my arm and a
broken-nosed blue pitcher deftly concealed under my protecting cape, I
made my first daylight inventory of that block of Fourteenth Street
where I lived. On each corner stood a gaudy saloon, surmounted by a
Raines law hotel. It seemed to have been at one time the abode of
fashion, for though both ends of the block were supported by business
buildings, the entire middle presented a solid front of brownstone,
broken at intervals by long flights of steps leading to handsome,
though long-neglected black-walnut doors. The basements were given over
to trade.
On the stairs I was brought face to face again with my sinister-looking
young man. I looked straight ahead, so as to avoid his eyes. But I found
the way blocked, as he stretched his arms from banister to wall.
"What's the matter with you?" he began coaxingly. "Say, I'll take you to
the theater, if you want to go. What do you say to 'The Jolly Grass
Widows' to-morrow night?"
Thoroughly frightened, I responded to the unwarranted invitation by
retreating two steps down the stairs, whereupon the young ruffian jumped
down and grasped the arm in which I held my packages. I don't know what
nerved me up to such a heroic defense, but in the twinkling of an eye he
fell sprawling down the stairs, followed by the flying remnants of my
landlady's milk-pitcher. Then I ran up the remaining two flights as fast
as my feet would carry me, and landed in the midst of an altercation
between the inarticulate landlady and my girl neighbor. In passing, I
could make out enough of the wrangle to understand that the latter was
being ordered out of the house.
When quietness had been restored, there was a tap at my door. I
demanded the name of my visitor in as brave a voice as I could command.
"Mrs. Pringle," returned the broken voice of the landlady. I saw, when I
opened the door, that she wanted to talk to me. I also saw, what I had
not noticed in my hasty interview the night before, that she was
superior to most of the women of her class. She had been grimy and
unkempt the night before, after her long week's work of sweeping and
cleaning and coal-carrying; but to-day, in her clean wrapper and smooth
gray hair, there was a pathetic Sabbath-day air of cleanliness about her
spare, bent figure. Somehow, I felt that she would not be so very angry
when I explained about the pitcher, and I invited her in with genuine
cordiality.
She listened in silence to my story, her knotted hands folded upon her
starched gingham apron.
"That's all right!" she replied, a smile lighting up her tired face.
"I'm just glad you broke the pitcher over that vile fellow's head."
"You know him, then?" I suggested.
She shook her head. "No, I don't know him, but I know the bad lot he
belongs to. I've just warned this girl in here to leave as soon as she
can pack her things. I gave her back her rent-money. She only come day
afore yesterday, and I supposed she was an honest working-girl or I'd
never have took her. She pretended to me she was a skirt-hand, and it
turns out she's nothin' but a common trollop. And I hated to turn her
out, too, even if she did talk back to me something awful. She can't be
more 'n sixteen; but, somehow or t' other, when a girl like that goes to
be bad, there ain't no use trying to reason 'em out of it. You come from
the country, don't you?"
There was a kindly curiosity mirrored in the dim, sunken eyes which
surveyed me steadily, a lingering accent of repressed tenderness in her
voice, and I did not deem it beneath my dignity to tell this decent,
motherly soul my little story.
She listened attentively. "I knowed you were a well-brought-up young
woman the moment I laid eyes on you," she began, the maimed words
falling gently from her lips, despite the high, cracked voice in which
they were spoken. "And I knowed you was from the country, too; so I did.
You don't mind, honey, do you, if I speak sort of plain with you, being
as I'm an old woman and you just a slip of a girl? Do you, now?"
I replied that she might speak just as plainly as she liked with me and
I would take no offense, and then she smiled approvingly upon me and
drew her little checked breakfast-shawl closer about her sunken bosom.
"I like to hear you say that," she went on, "because so many girls won't
listen to a word of advice--least of all when it comes from an old woman
that they thinks don't know as much as they does. They don't relish
being told how careful they ought to be about the people they get
acquainted with. Now I'm talking to you just as if you was one of my
own. You may think you are wise, and all that,--and you are a bright
sort of girl, I'll give you credit for that, only this is such a wicked
city. A young girl like you, with no folks of her own to go to when
she's discouraged and blue, 'll find plenty and to spare that'll be
willing to lead her off. This is a bad neighborhood you're in, and you
got to be mighty careful about yourself. Forewarned is forearmed, as
you've heard tell before; and I have saw so many young girls go wrong
that I felt could have been saved if somebody had just up and talked
straight at them in the beginning, like I'm talking here to you. I had a
girl here in this house two years agone. A pretty girl she was, and she
was from the country too. Somewheres up in Connecticut she come from.
She was a nice, innocent girl too, so she was, when she come here to
rent a room. This very room you've got was the one she had. Just as
quiet and modest and respectful spoken to her elders as you are, she
was. She worked down in St. Mark's Place. She was a cap-maker and got
four dollars a week. She started out to live honest, for she'd been
brought up decent. Her father, she told me when she come here, was a
blacksmith in some of them little country towns up there. She thought
she could make lots of money to come down here to work, and that she
could have a fine time; and I guess she was terrible disappointed when
she found just how things really was. She hankered for fine clothes and
to go to theaters, and there wasn't any chanst for neither on four
dollars a week. By and by, though, she did get to going out some with a
young fellow that worked where she did. He was a nice, decent young
fellow, and I'll warrant you she could have married him if she had acted
wise and sensible; and he'd like as not have made her a good provider. I
don't blame the men out and out, as some folks do; and I say that when a
young fellow sees that a girl 'll let him act free with her, he just
says to himself she'll let other fellows act free with her, and then he
don't want to marry her, no difference how much he might have thought of
her to begin with. That's what, I think, started this girl going wrong.
At first he'd just bring her to the door when they'd be out to the
theater, but by and by she got to taking him up to her room. Now it's
none of my business to interfere with people's comings and goings in
this house, being as I'm only the janitress. I have my orders from the
boss--who's a real nice sort of man--to only rent rooms to respectable
people, and to put anybody out where I knows there's bad conduct going
on. He's strong on morals, the boss is. He used to be a saloon-keeper,
and the Salvation Army converted him; and then he sold out and went into
this business. He has this place, and then he has a boarding-house on
Second Avenue. These Germans are awful kind men, when they are kind, and
Mr. Schneider has did a lot of good. If any of his tenants get sick and
can't pay their rent, or if they get out of work, he don't bounce them
into the street, but he just tells them to stay on and pay him when they
get caught up; and would you believe it that he never loses a cent,
either!"
Here the woman stopped for breath, which gave me an opportunity to turn
the channel of her talk back to the girl from Connecticut.
"Well, I didn't have no right to tell the girl that she mustn't take her
gentleman friend to her room, because there ain't no law again it in
any light-housekeeping rooms. The people who live here are all
working-people and earn their livings; and they've got a right to do as
they please so they're quiet and respectable. But I took it on myself to
kind of let the girl understand that her beau would think more of her if
she just dropped him at the front door. A man 'll always pick a spunky,
independent girl that sort of keeps him at a stand-off every time,
anyway. She looked sort of miffed when I said this, and then I said that
she could set up with him any time she wanted in my sitting-room in the
basement, what is real comfortable furnished and pretty-looking--and
which you too is perfectly welcome to bring any gentleman company to any
time you've a mind.
"Well, she looked at me sort of scornful, and answered me real
peart-like, and said she guessed she could take care of herself. She
tossed her head in a pretty taking way she had, and walked down-stairs,
as though I had turribly insulted her; so what could I do?"
Again she paused, panting for breath in short, wheezy gasps.
"And what became of her at last?" I asked.