boxes toward the clock above Annie Kinzer's desk. It was only two. Every
effort, human and mechanical, all over the great factory, was now
strained almost to the breaking-point. How long can this agony last? How
long can the roar and the rush and the throbbing pain continue until
that nameless and unknown something snaps like an overstrained
fiddle-string and brings relief? The remorseless clock informed us that
there were two hours more of this torture before the signal to "clean
up"--a signal, however, which is not given until the last girl has
finished her allotted task. At half-past two it appeared hopeless even
to dream of getting out before the regular six o'clock.
The head foreman rushed through the aisles and bawled to us to "hustle
for all we were worth," as customers were all demanding their goods.
"My God! ain't we hustling?" angrily shouted Rosie Sweeny, a pretty girl
at the next table, who supplied most of the profanity for our end of the
room. "God Almighty! how I hate Easter and Christmas-time! Oh, my legs
is 'most breaking," and with that the overwrought girl burst into a
passionate tirade against everybody, the foreman included, and all the
while she never ceased to work.
There were not many girls in the factory like Rosie. Hers were the
quickest fingers, the sharpest tongue, the prettiest face. She was
scornful, impatient, and passionate--qualities not highly developed in
her companions, and which in her case foreboded ill if one believed
Annie Kinzer's prophecy: "That Rosie Sweeny 'll go to the bad yet, you
mark my words."
Three o'clock, a quarter after, half-past! The terrific tension had all
but reached the breaking-point. Then there rose a trembling,
palpitating sigh that seemed to come from a hundred throats, and
blended in a universal expression of relief. In her clear, high treble
Angelina began the everlasting "Fatal Wedding." That piece of false
sentiment had now a new significance. It became a song of deliverance,
and as the workers swelled the chorus, one by one, it meant that the end
of the day's toil was in sight.
By four o'clock the last box was done. Machines became mute, wheels were
stilled, and the long black belts sagged into limp folds. Every girl
seized a broom or a scrub-pail, and hilarity reigned supreme while we
swept and scrubbed for the next half-hour, Angelina and her chorus
singing all the while endless stanzas of the "Fatal Wedding."
Henrietta sent me for a fresh pail of water, which I got from the faucet
in the toilet-room; and as I filled my bucket I made a mental inventory
of my fellow-toilers' wardrobes. Hanging from rows of nails on all sides
were their street garments--a collection of covert-cloth jackets, light
tan automobile coats, black silk box-coats trimmed in white lace,
raglans, and every other style of fashionable wrap that might be cheaply
imitated. Sandwiched among the street garments were the trained skirts
and evening bodices of the "Moonlight Maids" of the night before, and
which were to be again disported at some other pleasure-club festivity
that Easter evening, now drawing near. Along the walls were ranged the
high-heeled shoes and slippers, a bewildering display of gilt buckles
and velvet bows; each pair waiting patiently for the swollen, tired feet
of their owner to carry them away to the ball. The hats on the shelf
above were in strict accord with the gowns and the cloaks and the
foot-gear--a gorgeous assortment of Easter millinery, wherein the
beflowered and beplumed picture-hat predominated.
I hurried back with my bucket of water, hoping in my heart that the
pleasure their wearers got out of this finery might be as great as the
day's work which earned it was long and hard. And so indeed it must have
been, if Henrietta was any authority on such questions.
"I love nice clothes, even if I do have to work hard to get them," she
remarked, as we turned into Bleecker Street a few minutes later, four
one-dollar bills safely tucked away in her stocking. "But say, you ought
to see my new hat. It's elegant," and drawing my arm through hers, my
new room-mate hurried me through the Saturday-evening crowd of
homeward-bound humanity.
VIII
WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS
It had been an ideal day for March--a day touched with pale-yellow
sunshine in which one felt the thrill and the promise of the springtime,
despite the chill east wind.
Into the murky, evil-smelling squalor of Thompson Street this shy
primrose sunshine had poured in the earlier part of the afternoon; but,
being a north-and-south thoroughfare, it had all filtered out by
half-past four, only to empty itself with increased warmth and glory
into the east-and-west cross-streets, leaving Thompson dim and cold by
comparison when Henrietta Manners and I emerged from Springer's.
Henrietta wore a dusty picture-hat of black velvet with a straight
ostrich feather and streamers of soiled white tulle, and a shabby
golf-cape of blue and white check which was not quite long enough to
conceal the big brass safety-pins with which her trained skirt was
tucked up, and which she had forgotten to remove until we had gone some
yards down the street. While we stopped long enough for her to perform
this most important sartorial detail, my eye traversed the street before
us, which with a gentle descent drops downward and stretches away toward
the south--a long, dim, narrow vista, broken at regular intervals by
brilliant shafts of gold streaming from the sunlit cross-streets, and
giving to the otherwise squalid brick-walled canyon the appearance of a
gay checkered ribbon. But if the March sunshine had deserted Thompson
Street, the March winds still claimed it as their own. Up and down they
had swept all day, until the morning mud on the cobblestones had been
long dried up and turned to dust, which now swirled along, caught up in
innumerable little whirlwinds that went eddying down the street.
Grabbing up her demi-train in her bare hand, Henrietta and I also eddied
down the street and were lost to view for a few moments in the whirlwind
which struck us at the crowded corner of Bleecker Street.
This whirlwind was the result partly of physical and partly of human
forces. For it was Saturday night, and life was running at flood-tide
all over the great city. Always tempestuous, always disturbed with the
passion and pain and strife of its struggle to maintain the ground it
had gained, never for one brief moment calm, even at its lowest
ebb--now, on this last night of the long, weary week, all the currents
and counter-currents of the worker's world were suddenly released. At
the stroke of bell, at the clang of deep-mouthed gong, at the scream of
siren whistle, the sluice-gates were lifted from the great human
reservoirs of factory and shop and office, and their myriad toilers
burst forth with the cumulative violence of six days' restraint.
It was a shabby carnival of nations that jostled one another at this
windy corner--Italian, Spanish, German, Slav, Jew, Greek, with a
preponderance of Irish and "free-born" Americans. The general air was
one of unwonted happiness and freedom. The atmosphere of holiday liberty
was vibrant with the expectation of Saturday-night abandon to fun and
frolic or wild carousal.
For "the ghost had walked" through the workaday world that day, and
everybody had his "envelop" in his pocket. It is a pleasant sensation to
feel the stiff-cornered envelop tucked safely away in your vest pocket,
or in the depths of your stocking, where Henrietta had hidden hers safe
out of the reach of the wily pickpocket, who, she told me, was lurking
at every corner and sneaking through every crowd on that Saturday
evening, which was also Easter Eve.
Easter Eve! I had almost forgotten the fact which accounted for this
more than usual activity on the part of the hurrying crowds, and for the
unmistakable holiday air which Bleecker Street displayed. As far as we
could see, lined up on both sides of the curb were the pushcart
peddlers, and at every step a sidewalk fakir, all crying their Easter
wares.
Henrietta lingered first about one pushcart, then about another, opening
her gaudy side-bag, then shutting it resolutely and marching on,
determined not to succumb to the temptation to squander her hard-earned
pennies. She succeeded admirably until we came upon a picturesque
Italian and his wife who were doing a flourishing business from a
pushcart piled high with sacred images. Henrietta showed a lively
interest in the cut prices at which they were going: ten cents for St.
Peter in a scarlet robe and golden sandals; fifteen cents for St. John
in purple; and only twenty-five for the Blessed Virgin in flowing blue
clasping the Holy Babe.
They were "dirt-cheap," Henrietta declared, as we watched the plaster
casts pass over the heads of the crowd, out of which by and by emerged
our shopmate, little Angela, clasping a Madonna under her arm and
counting her change.
The three of us resumed our homeward walk together, without any comment
until Angela had satisfied herself about the correctness of her change.
"What a slop you are!" remarked Henrietta, as her critical eye swept
over the undeveloped little figure in the long, greasy black-taffeta
coat, which, flapping open in front, disclosed the pasty surface of a
drabbled blue skirt. "Why don't you never turn your skirt, Angela?"
"Oh, what's the dif?" replied Angela. "There ain't no fellows going to
look at me any more now."
This reply, commonplace enough, might have passed unnoticed had there
not been a note of tragedy in her deep contralto voice.
"Why, what's the matter?" I asked.
"Don't you know?" she demanded, scowling at Henrietta's silly, vacant
"tee-hee."
"Know? Know what?" I asked.
"That I'm a grass-widow."
"A grass-widow!" I echoed in astonishment, and looked upon the childish
creature in sheer unbelief--for child I had always considered her. "Why,
how old are you, anyway, Angela?"
"Fifteen--I mean I'm 'most fifteen."
"And you're really married!" I exclaimed again, quite aghast and
altogether innocent of the construction which Angela immediately put
upon the qualifying adverb.
"Well, if you don't believe me look at that!" she cried, and stuck out a
tiny, dirty hand, with finger-nails worn to the quick, and decorated
with a gold band broad enough and heavy enough to have held a woman ten
times Angela's weight and size in the bands of indissoluble matrimony;
"I was married for fair, and I was married lawful. A priest did it."
"Oh, I didn't mean to question that," I hastened to apologize with some
confusion. "Only you seemed so very young, I thought you were just
joking me."
"Well, it's no joke to be married and have a baby, specially when you've
got to s'port it," returned the girl, her lips still pouting.
"And you've a baby, too--you!"
The bedraggled little prima donna nodded; the pout on the lips blossomed
into a smile, and a look of infinite tenderness transformed the tired,
dark little face. "It's up to the creche--that's where I'm going now.
The ladies keeps it awful good for me."
"And it's such a lovely baby, too!" declared Henrietta, softly. "I seen
it once."
"She's cute; there's no lie 'bout that," assented the little mother.
"Look what I bought her--here, you hold this Peter a minute--Henrietta,
just hang on to the Holy Virgin," and thrusting them into our hands, she
opened the box under her arm and drew forth a gaily painted hen that
clucked and laid a painted egg, to the uproarious delight of Henrietta.
Henrietta meanwhile had begun counting the change in her side-bag.
"I don't never like to break a bill unless I've got to," she remarked,
returning the Holy Virgin to Angela's arms; "but I'm going to have one
of them chickens too," and away she went after the fakir. A moment later
she emerged from the crowd with a little brown box under her arm, and we
three continued our walk westward along Bleecker, dropping little Angela
at the corner of the street which was to lead her to the day-nursery
where she would pick up her baby and carry it home.
"That was a 'fatal wedding' for fair, wasn't it?" I remarked, as my eyes
followed the little figure.
But my companion paid no attention to my attempt to be facetious, if
indeed she heard the remark at all. She seemed to be deep in a brown
study, and several times I caught her watching me narrowly from the
corner of her eye. I was already beginning to have some misgivings as
to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found
friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat
and sleep. And this feeling increased with every block we covered, for
by and by I found myself studying Henrietta in the same furtive manner
as she was evidently studying me.
At last, when we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of
Bleecker Street for a dark, noisome side-street, she broke out
explosively:
"Hope to God you ain't going to turn out the way my last room-mate did!"
"Why? What did she do?"
"Went crazy," came the laconic reply, and she shivered and drew the old
golf-cape more closely about her shoulders; for the damp of the dark,
silent tenements on either side seemed to strike to the marrow.
Something in her manner seemed to say, "Ask no more questions," but
nevertheless I pursued the subject.
"Went crazy! How?"
"I d'know; she just went sudden crazy. She come to Springer's one day
just like you, and she said how she was wanting to find a place to board
cheap; and she was kind of down in the mouth, and she come home with me;
and all of a sudden in the night I woke up with her screamin' and going
on something fearful, and I run down and got the Dago lady in the
basement to come up, and her man run for the police. They took her away
to the lock-up in the hurry-up wagon, and the next day they said she was
crazy,--clean crazy,--and she's in the crazy-house over on the Island
now."
"What island?" I asked, not with any desire to know this minor detail,
but because I was too disturbed for the moment to make any other
comment. It seemed to Henrietta, however, a most senseless question, for
she remarked rather testily:
"Why, just the Island, where they send all the crazy folks, and the
drunks, and the thieves and murderers, and them that has smallpox."
"Mercy! what an awful place it must be!" I cried. "And that's where the
poor girl went?"
"That's where she went--say, tell me honest now, didn't you run away?"
"Run away! Where from?"
"Run away from home--now didn't you?"
"Mercy, no! What put such an idea as that in your head?" I asked,
laughing.
"Fanny Harley did."
"Who's Fanny Harley?"
"She's the girl they took to the crazy-house."
"But," I argued, "is that any reason for you to suppose that I ran away
from home too?"
"Yep, it is. You're ever so much like Fanny Harley. You talk just alike,
and you've got just the same notions she had, from what I can make; and
she did run away from home. She told me so. She lived up-state
somewhere, and was off a farm just like you; and--"
"But I'm not a farmer, and never was," I put in.
"Why, you told me yourself you was born in the country, didn't you?" and
I saw there was no use trying to point out to Henrietta the difference
between farmers and those born in the country, both of which were terms
of contempt in her vocabulary. We were still threading the maze of
strange, squalid streets which was to lead us eventually to the former
brief abiding-place of Fanny Harley; and, filled with curiosity
regarding my own resemblance to my unfortunate predecessor, I revived
the subject by asking carelessly:
"How is it I talk and act that makes me like Fanny Harley?"
"Well, you 've got a kind of high-toned way of talking," she explained.
"I don't mind the way you talk, though,--using big words and all that.
That ain't none of our business, I tell the girls; but you do walk so
funny and stand so funny, that it is all I can do to keep from bu'stin'
out laughing to see you. And the other girls says it's the same with
them, but I told them it was because you was just from the country, and
that farmers all walk the same way. But really, Rose,--you're getting
used to that name, ain't you?--you ought to get yourself over it as
quick as you can; you ain't going to have no lady-friends in the factory
if you're going to be queer like that."
"But I walk as I always did. How else should I walk? How do I walk that
makes me so funny?" I asked, mortified at the thought of my having been
the butt of secret ridicule. Henrietta was cordial in her reply.
"You walk too light," she explained; "you don't seem to touch the ground
at all when you go along, and you stand so straight it makes my back
ache to watch you."
Then my mentor proceeded to correct my use and choice of diction.
"And what makes you say 'lid' when you mean a cover? Why, it just about
kills us girls to hear you say 'lid.'"
"But," I remonstrated, aggravated by her silly "tee-hee" into defense of
my English, "why shouldn't I say 'lid' if I want to? It means just the
same as cover."
"Well, if it mean the same, why don't you say 'cover'?" my "learner"
retorted, with ill-disguised anger that I should question her authority;
and I dropped the subject, and the remainder of the walk was continued
in silence.
It was growing more and more apparent that I had not made a wise
selection in my room-mate, but it seemed too late to back out now--at
least until I had given her a trial of several days.
I felt as though I had obtained, as if by magic, a wonderfully
illuminating insight into her nature and character during this short
walk from the factory. I had thought her at the work-table a
kind-hearted, honest toiler, a bit too visionary, perhaps, to accord
with perfect veracity, and woefully ignorant, but with an ignorance for
which I could feel nothing but sorrow and sympathy, as the inevitable
result of the hard conditions of her life and environment. But now I
recognized with considerable foreboding, not only all this, but much
more besides. Henrietta Manners, that humble, under-fed, miserable
box-maker, was the very incarnation of bigotry and intolerance, one by
whom any idea, or any act, word, or occurrence out of the ordinary rut
set by box-factory canons of taste and judgment, must be condemned with
despotic severity. And yet, in the face of all these unpleasant
reflections upon poor Henrietta's unbeautiful mental characteristics, I
felt a certain shamefaced gratitude toward the kind heart which I knew
still beat under that shabby golf-cape.
Meanwhile, Henrietta had again lapsed into a silent, sullen mood, as she
pitched along in the nervous, jerky, heavy-footed gait which she had
urged me to emulate, and which I thought so hideous. I did not know
then, but I do know now, that such gait is invariably a characteristic
of the constitution in which there is not the proper coordination of
muscular effort. In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can
now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that
tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering,
mystic eyes of periwinkle blue--I can see in that girl-face framed by a
trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape,
one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature
doomed from her mother's womb--physically, mentally, and morally doomed.
I was, however, on this memorable Easter Eve most happily innocent of my
Lombroso and my Mantagazza, else I had not been walking home with
Henrietta Manners, in all the confidence of an unsophisticated
country-girl. So much confidence did I have in my shop-mate that I did
not yet know the name of the street on the West Side where my future
home was, nor did I know any of the strange, dark, devious paths by
which she led me through a locality that, though for the most part
eminently respectable, is dotted here and there, near the river-front,
with some of the worst plague-spots of moral and physical foulness to be
found in New York.
In later and more prosperous years I have several times walked into
Thompson Street, and from that as a starting-point tried to retrace our
walk of that night, bordering along old Greenwich Village, but as well
have tried to unravel the mazes of the Cretan Labyrinth.
The last westward street we traversed, dipping under the trellis of an
elevated railroad, led straight into a lake of sunset fire out of which
the smoking funnels of a giant steamship lying at her dock rose dark and
majestic upon the horizon.
A little cry of admiration escaped me at sight of the splendid picture,
and I hoped secretly that our way might continue to the water's edge;
but instead, reaching the line of the elevated, we turned in and
followed the old, black street above which the noisy trains ran. The
street itself presented the appearance of a long line of darkened
warehouses, broken occasionally by a dismal-looking dwelling, through
the uncurtained windows of which we could see slattern housewives busy
getting supper.
It was the most miserable and squalid of all the miserable and squalid
streets I had thus far seen, and it had the additional disadvantage of
being practically deserted of everything save the noise and smoke
overhead. There were no foot-passengers, no human sounds. It was all so
hideous and fearsome that after five minutes' walk I was not surprised
to see Henrietta select the most wretched of all the wretched houses as
the one we should enter. As we climbed the high stoop, I could see,
through the interstices of rusted ironwork that had once been handsome
balusters, the form of an Italian woman sitting in the basement window
beneath, nursing a baby at her breast.
"That's the lady what come up to help hold Fanny Harley," my room-mate
remarked as we passed inside.
IX
INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND"
"Say! ain't you got no special gentleman-friend?"
Henrietta's voice, breaking a pregnant silence, startled me so that I
nearly jumped off the empty soap-box where for some minutes I had sat
watching her bend over a smoking skillet of frying fat.
An answer was not to be given unadvisedly, such was the moral effect of
the question. It hadn't been asked in a casual way, but showed, by its
explosive form of utterance, that it was the result not so much of a
pent-up curiosity as of a careful speculation as to the manner in which
I would receive it. So I tried to look unconscious, and at this critical
juncture the thunder of an elevated train came adventitiously to my
rescue and gave me a few moments in which to consider what I should
reply. And as I considered unconsciously my eye took in an inventory of
the room. The heavily carved woodwork hinted of the fact that it had
once been a lady's bedchamber in the bygone days when this was a
fashionable quarter of New York, and its spaciousness and former
elegance now served rather to increase the squalor as well as to
accentuate the barrenness of its furnishings. The latter consisted of
two wooden boxes, one of which I sat upon; an empty sugar-barrel, with a
board laid across the top; a broken-down bed in an uncurtained alcove; a
very large, substantial-looking trunk, iron-bound and brass-riveted; and
last, but not least, a rusty stove, now red-hot, which might well have
been the twin sister of my own "Little Lottie" at the ill-fated
Fourteenth-street house. This stove, connected with the flue by a small
pipe, fitted into what had once been a beautiful open fireplace, but
which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel
of Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometheus's boon to
mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of
vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. Overhead the
ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen
away, and the uncarpeted floor was strewn with bread-crumbs and marked
by a trail of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from which
the fire was replenished. The door to the closet was gone, and in its
recess a pair of trousers hung limply, while Henrietta's scant wardrobe
was ranged along the black-painted wall outside. The long, cobweb-hung
windows, bare of blind or curtain, showed a black-mirrored surface
against the batten shutters.