Fearful Fate's Abyss.' What d' ye think of that?"
"It sounds very int'resting. Who wrote it?"
"Charles Garvice," replied Phoebe. "Didn't you ever read none of his,
e--y--e--ther?"
"No, I must say I never did," I answered, ignoring their mischievous
raillery with as much grace as I could summon, but taking care to choose
my words so as to avoid further pitfalls.
"And did you never read none of Charlotte M. Braeme's?" drawled Mrs.
Smith, with remorseless cruelty--"none of Charlotte M. Braeme's,
eye-ther?"
"No."
"Nor none by Effie Adelaide Rowlands, e--y--e-ther?" still persisted
Mrs. Smith.
"No; none by her."
"E--y--e--ther!" Both my tormentors now raised their singing-voices into
a high, clear, full-blown note of derisive music, held it for a brief
moment at a dizzy altitude, and then in soft, long-drawn-out cadences
returned to earth and speaking-voices again.
"What kind of story-books do you read, then?" they demanded. To which I
replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day
classics that the school-boy and-girl are supposed to have read. They
had never heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever
heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had
heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name
of an entrancing romance. "Little Women," "John Halifax, Gentleman,"
"The Cloister and the Hearth," "Les Miserables," were also unknown,
unheard-of literary treasures. They were equally ignorant of the
existence of the conventional Sunday-school romance. They stared at me
in amazement when I rattled off a heterogeneous assortment from the
fecund pens of Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, "Pansy," Amanda M. Douglas, and
similar good-goody writers for good-goody girls; their only remarks
being that their titles didn't sound interesting. I spoke
enthusiastically of "Little Women," telling them how I had read it four
times, and that I meant to read it again some day. Their curiosity was
aroused over the unheard-of thing of anybody ever wanting to read any
book more than once, and they pressed me to reciprocate by repeating the
story for them, which I did with great accuracy of statement, and with
genuine pleasure to myself at being given an opportunity to introduce
anybody to Meg and Jo and all the rest of that delightful March family.
When I had finished, Phoebe stopped her cornering and Mrs. Smith looked
up from her label-pasting.
"Why, that's no story at all," the latter declared.
"Why, no," echoed Phoebe; "that's no story--that's just everyday
happenings. I don't see what's the use putting things like that in
books. I'll bet any money that lady what wrote it knew all them boys and
girls. They just sound like real, live people; and when you was telling
about them I could just see them as plain as plain could be--couldn't
you, Gwendolyn?"
"Yep," yawned our vis-a-vis, undisguisedly bored.
"But I suppose farmer folks likes them kind of stories," Phoebe
generously suggested. "They ain't used to the same styles of anything
that us city folks are."
While we had been trying to forget our tired limbs in a discussion of
literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the
treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. The
quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane
doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and
exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild
laughter. At another table the forthcoming ball of the "Moonlight
Maids" was under hot discussion, and at a very long table in front of
the elevator they were talking in subdued voices about dreams and omens,
making frequent reference to a greasy volume styled "The Lucky Dream
Book."
Far over, under the windows, the stripper girls were tuning up their
voices preparatory to the late-afternoon concert, soon to begin. They
hummed a few bars of one melody, then of another; and at last, Angela's
voice leading, there burst upon the room in full chorus, to the rhythmic
whir of the wheels, the melodious music and maudlin stanzas of "The
Fatal Wedding."
Phoebe lent her flute-like soprano to the next song, the rather pretty
melody of which was not sufficient to redeem the banality of the words:
"The scene is a banquet where beauty and wealth
Have gathered in splendid array;
But silent and sad is a fair woman there,
Whose young heart is pining away.
"A card is brought to her--she reads there a name
Of one that she loved long ago;
Then sadly she whispers, 'Just say I'm not here,
For my story he never must know.'
"That night in the banquet at Misery Hall
She reigned like a queen on a throne;
But often the tears filled her beautiful eyes
As she dreamed of the love she had known.
"Her thoughts flowed along through the laughter and song
To the days she could never recall,
And she longed to find rest on her dear mother's breast
At the banquet in Misery Hall.
"The time passes quickly, and few in the throng
Have noticed the one vacant chair--
Till out of the beautiful garden beyond
A pistol-shot rings on the air.
"Now see, in the moonlight a handsome youth lays--
Too quickly his life doth depart;
While kneeling beside him, the woman he'd loved
Finds her picture is close to his heart."
"What is the name of that song?" I asked when the last cadence of
Phoebe's voice, which was sustained long after every other in the room
was hushed, had died away.
"That! Why, it's 'The Banquet in Misery Hall,'" answered Mrs. Smith,
somewhat impatient of my unfolding ignorance. But I speedily forgot the
rebuke in a lively interest in the songs that followed one another
without interlude. Phoebe was counting her pile of boxes and ranging
them into piles of twelve high; so she couldn't sing, and I,
consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. The theme in
every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal
rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books.
Reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject--the
frailty of woman. On the one side was presented Virtue tempted,
betrayed, repentant; on the other side, Virtue fighting at bay,
persecuted, scourged, but emerging in the end unspotted and victorious,
with all good things added unto it.
It was to me an entirely new way of looking at life; and though I
couldn't in the least explain it to myself, it seemed, to my
unsophisticated way of looking at such matters, that the propensity to
break the seventh commandment was much exaggerated, and that songs about
other subjects would have been much more interesting and not nearly so
trying to the feelings. For the sweet voices of the singers could not
but make the tears come to my eyes, in spite of the fact that the burden
of the song seemed so unworthy.
"You all sing so beautifully!" I cried, in honest admiration, at the
close of one particularly melodious and extremely silly ditty. "Where
did you learn?"
Phoebe was pleased at the compliment implied by the tears in my eyes,
and even Mrs. Smith forgot to throw out her taunting "eye-ther" as she
stood still and regarded my very frank and unconcealed emotion.
"I guess we sort of learn from the Ginney girls," explained Phoebe.
"Them Ginneys is all nice singers, and everybody in the shop kind of
gets into the way of singing good, too, from being with them. You ought
to hear them sing Dago songs, oughtn't she, Gwendolyn?"
"Yep," answered Gwendolyn; "I could just die hearing Angela and Celie
Polatta singing that--what-d'ye-call-it, that always makes a body bu'st
out crying?"
"You mean 'Punchinello.' Yep, that's a corker; but, Lord! the one what
makes me have all kinds of funny cold feelings run up my back is that
'Ave Maria.' Therese Nicora taught them--what she says she learned in
the old country. I wouldn't want anything to eat if I could hear songs
like that all the time."
The clock-hands over Annie Kinzer's desk had now crept close to the hour
of six, and Angela had only begun the first stanza of--
"Papa, tell me where is mama," cried a little girl one day;
"I'm so lonesome here without her, tell me why she went away.
You don't know how much I'm longing for her loving
good-night kiss!"
Papa placed his arms around her as he softly whispered this:
"Down in the City of Sighs and Tears, under the white
light's glare,
Down in the City of Wasted Years, you'll find your mama there,
Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of
lost careers;
And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of Sighs
and Tears."
The machinery gave a ponderous throb, the great black belts sagged and
fell inert, the wheels whirred listlessly, clocks all over the great
city began to toll for one more long day ended and gone, while the
voices of the girl toilers rose superbly and filled the gathering
stillness with the soft crescendo refrain:
"Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of
lost careers;
And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of
Sighs and Tears--
In the City of Sighs and Tears."
VII
IN WHICH I ACQUIRE A STORY-BOOK NAME AND MAKE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MISS
HENRIETTA MANNERS
Before entering upon my second day's work at the box-factory, and before
detailing any of the strange things which that day brought forth, I feel
it incumbent upon me to give some word of explanation as to my
whereabouts during the intervening night. It will be remembered that
when I left the factory at the end of the first day, I had neither a
lodging nor a trunk. I will not dwell upon the state of my feelings when
I walked out of Thompson Street in the consciousness that if I had been
friendless and homeless before, I was infinitely more so now. I will say
nothing of the ache in my heart when my thoughts traveled toward the
pile of ruins in Fourteenth Street, with the realization of my
helplessness, my sheer inability even to attempt to do a one last humble
little act of love and gratitude for the dead woman who had been truly
my friend.
Briefly stated, the facts are these: I had, all told, one dollar, and I
walked from Thompson Street straight to the Jefferson Market
police-station, which was not a great distance away. I stated my case to
the matron, a kindly Irishwoman. I was afraid to start out so late in
the evening to look for a lodging for the night. I would have thought
nothing of such a thing a few weeks previous, but the knowledge of life
which I had gained in my brief residence in Fourteenth Street and from
the advice of Mrs. Pringle had showed me the danger that lurked in such
a course. The police matron said my fears were well founded, and she
gave me the address of a working-girls' home over on the East Side,
which she said was not the pleasantest place in the world for a
well-brought-up girl of refinement and intelligence, such as she took me
to be, but was cheap, and in which I would be sure of the protection
which any young, inexperienced woman without money needs so badly in
this wicked city. She wrote down the address for me, and I had started
to the door of her little office when her motherly eye noticed how
fagged out and lame I was--and indeed I could scarcely stand--and with a
wave of her plump arm she brought me back to her desk.
"Why don't you stay here with me to-night?" she asked. "You needn't
mind; and if I was you I would do it and save my pennies and my tired
legs. You can have a bite of supper with me, and then bundle right off
to bed. You look clean tuckered out."
So to my fast-growing list of startling experiences I added a night in
the station-house; but a very quiet, uneventful night it was, because
the matron tucked me away in her own little room. That is, it was quiet
and uneventful so far as my surroundings were concerned, though I slept
little on account of my aching bones. All night I tossed, pain-racked
and discouraged; for, after all the long, hard day's work of the day
before, Phoebe's card had only checked one dollar and five cents, which
represented two persons' work. Such being the case, how could I expect
to grow sufficiently skilful and expeditious to earn enough to keep body
and soul together in the brief apprenticeship I had looked forward to?
Unable to sleep, I was up an hour earlier than usual, and after I had
breakfasted--again by the courtesy of the matron--I was off to work long
before the working-day began.
I had thought to be the first arrival, but I was not. A girl was already
bending over her paste-pot, and the revelers of the "Ladies' Moonlight
Pleasure Club" came straggling in by twos and threes. Some of the weary
dancers had dropped to sleep, still wearing their ball-gowns and
slippers and bangles and picture-hats, their faces showing ghastly white
and drawn in the mote-ridden sunbeams that fell through the dirty
windows. Others were busy doffing Cinderella garments, which rites were
performed with astounding frankness in the open spaces of the big loft.
"Oh, Henrietta, you had ought to been there," Georgiana gushed, dropping
her lace-trimmed petticoats about her feet and struggling to unhook her
corsets. "It was grand, but I'm tired to death; and oh, dear! I've
another blow-out to-night, and the 'Clover Leaf' to-morrow night!" With
a weary yawn, the society queen departed with her finery.
"You didn't go to the ball?" I suggested to the girl addressed as
Henrietta, and whom I now recalled as one who had worked frantically all
the day before.
"Me? No. I don't believe in dancing," she replied, without looking up.
"Our church's down on it. I came early to get ahead with my order. You
can do more work when there's not so many round."
Such strict conformity to her religious scruples, combined with such
pathetic industry, seemed to augur well for the superior worth of this
tall, blonde, blue-eyed girl. I was anxious to make a friend of her,
and accordingly proffered my services until Phoebe should come to claim
me. She accepted gladly, and for the first time looked up and rewarded
me with a smile. I caught a glimpse of an unprepossessing
countenance--despite rather good features and fine hair--the most
striking characteristics of which were a missing front tooth and lips
that hung loose and colorless.
As we worked, the conversation became cordial. She inquired my name, and
I repeated the plain, homely Scotch-Irish cognomen that had been handed
down to me by my forefathers.
"Why don't you get a pretty name?" she asked, in a matter-of-fact tone.
"All the girls do it when they come to the factory to work. It don't
cost no more to have a high-sounding name."
Much interested, I protested, half in fun, that I didn't know any name
to take, and begged her to suggest one. She was silent for a moment.
"Well, last night," she went on--"last night I was reading a story about
two girls that was both mashed on the same feller. He was rich and they
was poor and worked, and one of them was called 'Rose Fortune.'"
"That's a very pretty name," I remarked.
"Isn't it, though? Rose Fortune--ever so much prettier than your own.
Say, why don't you take it, and I'll begin calling you by it right
away."
"And what's your name?" I ventured.
"Mine? Oh, mine's Henrietta Manners; only," she added hastily--"only
that's my real name. I was born with it. Now most of the girls got
theirs out of story-books. Georgiana Trevelyan and Goldy Courtleigh and
Gladys Carringford and Angelina Lancaster and Phoebe Arlington--them
girls all got theirs out of stories. But mine's my own. You see," and
she drew near that no other ear might hear the secret of her proud
birth--"you see, Manners was my mother's name, and she ran away and
married my papa against her rich father's wishes. He was a banker. I
mean mama's papa was a banker, but my papa was only a poor young
gentleman. So grandfather cut her off without a cent in his will, but
left everything to me if I would take the name of Manners."
The heroine of this strange romance stopped for breath, and if I had
cherished any doubts of the truth of her story in the beginning, at
least I was sure now that she believed it all herself; one glance into
her steady blue eyes, in which a telltale moisture was already
gathering, was proof of that.
"No, indeed," continued Miss Manners: "I haven't always been a
working-girl. I used to go to boarding-school. I thought I'd be a
governess or something, and once I tried to learn bookkeeping, but my
eyes give out, and the figures mixed up my brain so, and then I got sick
and had to come to this box-factory. But I'm the first Manners that ever
worked."
I was now thoroughly ashamed of my first unjust suspicions that
Henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and I inquired with sincere
interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family.
"All dead and sleeping in our family vault," she replied wistfully. "But
don't let us talk anything more about it. I get so worked up and mad
when I talk about the Mannerses and the way they treated me and my poor
parents!"
The threatened spell with Henrietta's nerves was averted by a sudden
turning on of the power, and the day's work began. Phoebe did not appear
to claim me, and I worked away as fast as I could to help swell
Henrietta's dividends.
"I guess you can stay with her the rest of the day," Annie Kinzer said,
stopping at the table. "The 'Moonlight Maids' must have been too much
for Phoebe. Guess she won't show up to-day."
Henrietta was naturally delighted with the arrangement, which would add
a few pennies to her earnings. "I only made sixty cents yesterday, and I
worked like a dog," she remarked. "It was a bad day for everybody. We
ought to make more than a dollar to-day. Phoebe says you're a hustler."
Our job was that of finishing five hundred ruching-boxes. Henrietta
urged me frequently to hurry, as we were away behind with the order. I
soon discovered that for all her Manners blood and alleged gentle
breeding, she was a harder taskmaster than the good-natured but plebeian
Phoebe. Her obvious greed for every moment of my time, for every
possible effort of my strength and energy, I gladly excused, however,
when she revealed the fact that all her surplus earnings went toward the
support of a certain mission Sunday-school in which she was a teacher.
The conversation drifted from church matters to my own personal affairs.
"Isn't it awful lonesome living alone in a room?"
"How did you know I lived in a room?" I inquired in surprise, with the
uncomfortable feeling that I had been the subject of ill-natured gossip.
"Oh, Annie Kinzer told me. Say, I wouldn't tell her anything about my
affairs. She's an awful clack."
We were silent for a moment, while I wondered if Henrietta, if Annie
Kinzer, if any girl in all the world could ever guess how lonely I had
been every moment since I had come to this great city to work and to
live. Then came the unexpected.
"Wouldn't you like to come and room with me?"
"With you?" I was half pleased, half doubtful.
"Yes. I've got plenty of room."
"Perhaps I couldn't afford it."
"Yes, you can. I don't put on style. It won't cost us more than a dollar
and a half a week for each--rent, eating, and everything else. I was
thinking, as you're a learner, it will be a long time before you can
make much, and you'd be glad to go halvers with somebody. Two can always
live cheaper than one."
A dollar and a half a week! That was indeed cheaper than I had been
living. I had something less than two dollars in my purse, and pay-day,
for me, was still a week off.
And so I accepted the proposition, and by lunch-time the news was all
over the factory that the new girl was to be Henrietta's room-mate.
Annie Kinzer--everybody, in fact--approved, except, possibly, Emma. Emma
was a homely, plainly dressed girl who had worked ten years here at
Springer's. She bore the reputation of being a prudey and a kill-joy.
Thus far she had never deigned to look at me, but now she took occasion
to pass the time of day when we met at the water-faucet, and asked, in a
doubtful tone, how long I had known Henrietta Manners.
Meanwhile we "cornered" and "tissued" and "laced" and "labeled." Higher
and higher grew our pasteboard castle, which we built as children pile
up brightly colored blocks. At eleven Henrietta sent me below for
trimmings.
"How do you like your job?" asked the young fellow who filled my order.
This was strictly conventional, and I responded in kind. While Charlie
cut tapes and counted labels, he made the most of his opportunity to
chat. Dismissing, with brief comment, the weather and the peculiar
advantages and disadvantages of box-making as a trade, he diplomatically
steered the talk along personal and social lines by suggesting, with a
suppressed sigh, the probability that I should not always be a
box-maker. I replied heartily that I hoped not, which precipitated
another question: "Is the day set yet?" My amused negative to the query,
and intimation that I had no "steady," were gratefully received, and
warranted the suggestion that, as a matter of course, I liked to go to
balls.
"My pleasure club has a blow-out next Sunday night," he remarked
significantly, as I gathered up my trimmings and departed.
During my five minutes' absence the most exciting event of the day had
occurred. Adrienne, one of the strippers, had just been carried away,
unconscious, with two bleeding finger-stumps. In an unguarded moment the
fingers had been cut off in her machine. Although their work does not
allow them to stop a moment, her companions were all loud in sympathy
for this misfortune, which is not rare. Little Jennie, the unfortunate
girl's turner-in and fellow-worker for two years, wept bitterly as she
wiped away the blood from the long, shining knife and prepared to take
the place of her old superior, with its increased wage of five dollars
and a half a week. The little girl had been making only three dollars
and a quarter, and so, as Henrietta remarked, "It's a pretty bad
accident that don't bring good to somebody."
"Did they take her away in a carriage?" Henrietta asked of Goldy
Courtleigh, who had stopped a moment to rest at our table.
"Well, I should say! What's the use of getting your fingers whacked off
if you can't get a carriage-ride out of it?"
"Yes, and that's about the only way you'd ever squeeze a carriage-ride
out of this company," commented Henrietta. "Now I've two lady-friends
who work in mills where a sick headache and a fainting-spell touch the
boss for a carriage-ride every time!"
The order on which we worked was, like most of the others on the floor
that day, for late-afternoon delivery. Our ruching-boxes had to be
finished that day, even though it took every moment till six or even
seven o'clock. Saturday being what is termed a "short-day," one had to
work with might and main in order to leave at half-past four. This
Henrietta was very anxious to do, partly because she had her Easter
shopping to do, and partly because this was the night I was to be
installed in my new quarters. Lunch-time found us still far behind.
Therefore we did not stop to eat, but snatched bites of cake and
sandwich as hunger dictated, and convenience permitted, all the while
pasting and labeling and taping our boxes. Nor were we the only toilers
obliged to forgo the hard-earned half-hour of rest.
The awakening thunder of the machinery burst gratefully on our ears. It
meant that the last half of the weary day had begun. How my blistered
hands ached now! How my swollen feet and ankles throbbed with pain!
Every girl limped now as she crossed the floor with her towering
burden, and the procession back and forth between machines and tables
began all over again. Lifting and carrying and shoving; cornering and
taping and lacing--it seemed as though the afternoon would never wear to
an end.
The whole great mill was now charged with an unaccustomed excitement--an
excitement which had in it something of solemnity. There was no sign of
the usual mirth and hilarity which constitute the mill's sole
attraction. There was no singing--not even Angelina's "Fatal Wedding."
No exchange of stories, no sallies. Each girl bent to her task with a
fierce energy that was almost maddening in its intensity.