woman's offer to pilot me, and yet I really had not the heart to offend
the old creature, for there was genuine sympathy betrayed in her voice
at the mention of sickness. She seemed to take my silence for
acceptance, however; and placing her arm on mine, conducted me down the
dark street. At the corner we passed under a gas-lamp, when we saw each
other distinctly for the first time. She was dark and swarthy, with
deep-set black eyes, and her thin, coarse, bristling gray hair, I
noticed, was full of wisps of excelsior and grass box-packing. She was
about sixty-two or-three, and had a spare, brawny frame with heavy,
stooped shoulders. Evidently she had taken just as careful an inventory
of my appearance, for we had not gone far before she was giving me all
manner of good advice about taking care of myself in a big, wicked city,
with repeated asseverations that she always knew a lady when she saw
one, and that if I wasn't one of that enviable species, then her name
wasn't Mrs. Bridget Reynolds; and the latter being "a proper married
woman and the mother of a family all dead now, God rest their souls!"
who should know a lady better than she? And why was Mrs. Bridget
Reynolds, a proper married and equally proper widowed woman of her
reverend years, sitting upon a doorstep at three o'clock of a cold March
morning? Och! God bless ye, just a little trouble with the landlord, no
work for several weeks, and a recent eviction; a small matter that had
often happened before, and was like as not to happen ag'in, God willing!
And who was Mrs. Bridget Reynolds's sleeping mate left behind on the
doorstep? Divil a bit did Mrs. Bridget Reynolds know about her, only
that she had found her that night in the empty warehouse, where she had
gone like herself to sleep, among the packing-cases, under the straw and
excelsior, which made a bed fit for a queen, and where they might still
have been taking their ease had not a heartless cop chased them out, bad
luck to him!
Such was the gist of Mrs. Reynolds's discourse. I have not the courage
to attempt to transcribe her rich brogue and picturesque phraseology;
and even were I able to do so, it could give the reader no adequate idea
of the wealth of optimism and cheerfulness that throbbed in her
quavering voice. Hers could be a violent tongue, too, as the several
men who accosted us on our dark way discovered at their first approach
to familiarity; and on one occasion, when a drunken sailor leered up to
my side, Mrs. Bridget spat at him like an angry tabby-cat. Somehow, I no
longer felt afraid under her protection and guidance.
At last, after a very long walk, we came in sight of the brightly
lighted windows of a drug-store, and Mrs. Reynolds said we were on
Bleecker Street. I had now to explain that my asking the way to a
drug-store had been merely a bit of subterfuge, which I did in fear and
trembling as to how Mrs. Reynolds would accept such deception on my
part. But she was all good humor.
"Sure, dearie, it's all right! I'm glad to do a good turn for yez, being
as you're a poor body like mesilf, even if ye air a lady!"
We were now standing in the glare of the big colored-glass carboys in
the drug-store window at the corner of Bleecker Street and some one of
its intersecting alleys. It was now four in the morning, and the streets
were almost deserted. My companion smiled at me with the maudlin
tenderness which gin inspires in the breast of an old Irishwoman, and as
we stood irresolute on the corner I noticed how thinly clad she was.
The sharp wind wrapped her calico skirt about her stiffened limbs, and
her only wrap was a little black knitted fascinator which did not meet
over the torn calico blouse.
"A wee nip of gin would go right to the spot now, wouldn't it, dearie?"
the old soul asked wistfully, which reminded me of something I had
forgotten: that I still had my precious dollar and a half snugly stowed
away in my petticoat pocket. So I suggested that we go to a lunch-room
and have a good meal and a cup of hot coffee, and sit there till
daylight, which now was not far off.
The prospect of something to eat and something hot to drink infused
great cheerfulness into my strange chaperon; she grasped my arm with the
gaiety of a school-girl, and we walked eastward until we came to a dairy
lunch-room upon the great plate-glass windows of which was enameled in
white letters a generous bill of fare at startlingly low prices. The
place was of the sort where everybody acts as his own waiter, buying
checks for whatever he wants from the cashier and presenting them at a
long counter piled up with eatables. Mrs. Reynolds was modesty itself in
accepting of my bounty.
When we had finished it was daylight, and I parted from my duenna at the
door, she with innumerable terms of maudlin endearment, and an
invocation to all the saints in the calendar that they should keep a
kindly eye upon me. As to my own feelings, I felt heartless to be
obliged to leave the poor creature with nothing more than a
twenty-five-cent piece, and with no proffer of future help--if, indeed,
she was not beyond help. But I was powerless; for I was as poor as she
was. I had suggested her applying to the authorities for aid, but she
had received it scornfully, even indignantly, declaring that Mrs.
Bridget Reynolds would die and rot before she'd be beholden to anybody
for charity. Anything in the shape of organized authority was her
constitutional enemy, and the policeman was her hereditary foe.
Hospitals were nefarious places where the doctors poisoned you and the
nurses neglected you in order that you should die and furnish one more
cadaver to the dissecting-rooms; almshouses were the last resort of the
broken in heart and spirit, institutions where unspeakable crimes were
perpetrated upon the old and helpless. Therefore, was it any wonder this
independent old dame of Erin preferred deserted warehouses and dark
doorways as shelter?
And so, early in this Easter morning, I left Mrs. Bridget Reynolds at
the door of the Bleecker Street lunch-room, she to go her way and I to
go mine. I looked back when I had got half a block away, and she was
still standing there, apparently undetermined which way to turn. I
watched a moment, and presently she ambled across the street and rattled
the door of the "ladies'" entrance to the saloon on the corner. Then I
turned my face toward the reddening east, against which the shabby
housetops and the chimneys and the distant spires and smokestacks
stretched out in a broken, black sky-line. I was going to find the home
for working girls which the good matron at Jefferson Market had
recommended, and the address of which I still had in the bottom of my
purse.
XI
I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS
The spirit of the early Easter Day had breathed everywhere its own
ineffable Sabbath peace, and when at last I emerged into Broadway, it
was to find that familiar thoroughfare strangely transformed. On the six
days preceding choked with traffic and humming with ten thousand noises,
it was now silent and deserted as a country lane--silent but for the
echo of my own footsteps upon the polished stone flagging, and deserted
but for the myriad reflections of my own disheveled self which the great
plate-glass windows on either side of the street flashed back at me.
My way lay northward, with the spire of Grace Church as a finger-post.
Grace Church had become a familiar landmark in the preceding weeks, so
often had I walked past it in my hopeless quest, and now I approached it
as one does a friend seen suddenly in a crowd of strangers. The fact
that I was approaching an acquaintance, albeit a dumb and unseeing one,
now made me for the first time conscious of my personal appearance so
persistently reflected by the shop windows. Before one of them I stopped
and surveyed myself. Truly I was a sorry-looking object. I had not been
well washed or combed since the last morning at Mrs. Pringle's house;
for two days I had combed my long and rather heavy hair with one of the
small side-combs I wore, and on neither morning had I enjoyed the luxury
of soap. And two successive mornings without soap and the services of a
stout comb are likely to work all sorts of demoralizing transformations
in the appearance of even a lady of leisure, to say nothing of a girl
who had worked hard all day in a dirty factory.
Fortunately the street was deserted. I stepped into the entrance of a
big, red-sandstone building, and standing between the show-windows, took
off my hat, laid it on the pavement, and proceeded to unroll my hair and
slick it up once more with the aid of the side-comb, of which I had now
only one left, having lost the other somewhere in my flight from
Henrietta's. That I should have thought to put on my hat in preparing
for that flight I do not understand, for I forgot my gloves, a
brand-new pair too; my handkerchief; and, most needful of all else, my
ribbon stock-collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin
above my dusty jacket-collar. Looking at it ruefully, I began to feel
for the first time what was for me at least the very quintessence of
poverty--the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of
decent raiment. I had known hunger and loneliness since I had come to
New York, but never before had I experienced this new, this infinitely
greater terror--lack of self-respect. That I had done nothing to lower
my self-respect had nothing whatever to do with it, since self-respect
is often more a matter of material things than of moral values. It is
possible for a hungry woman to walk with pride, and it is possible for
the immoral and utterly degraded woman to hold her own with the best of
her sisters, when it comes to visible manifestation of self-respect, if
only she is able to maintain her usual degree of cleanliness and good
grooming. But unacquainted with soap for two days! and without a collar!
How could I ever summon courage to present myself to anybody in such a
condition? Had I been an old woman, I mightn't have cared. But I was a
girl; and, being a girl, I suffered all of a girl's heartache and
melancholy wretchedness when I remembered that it was Sunday and that
there was no hope of buying either collar or comb for twenty-four
hours--if, indeed, I dared to spend any of my few remaining dimes and
nickels for these necessities, which had suddenly soared to the heights
of unattainable luxuries.
In the full consciousness of my disreputable appearance, I hung in the
doorway, reluctant to fare forth in the cruel light of the thoroughfare.
Hitherto I had had the street all to myself, so it had not mattered so
much how I looked. But now an empty car hurtled by, its gong breaking
for the first time the silence of the long vista stretching away and
dipping southward to the Battery. Then another car came speeding along
from the opposite direction, whirled past Grace Church, and northward
around the curve at Fourteenth Street; and following in the wake of the
car, a hansom-cab with a jaded man and woman locked in each other's arms
and fast asleep. As the latter passed close to the curb, I drew into the
embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by
the cabman--as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not;
but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood.
It was then that I noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had
been staring at me during all these ineffectual attempts to "primp."
"Wanted--Girls to learn flower-making. Paid while learning. Apply Monday
morning at nine o'clock."
I repeated the street-number over and over, so as to make sure of
remembering it; and then, screwing up my courage, walked hurriedly up
the street, trying to ignore the glances which were cast at me by
occasional pedestrians. I happened to think of a large dairy lunch-room
on Fourteenth Street where I had several times gone for coffee and
rolls, and where the cashier and waitresses knew me by sight, and where
I thought, by investing in a cup of coffee, I might tidy up a bit in the
toilet-room. If only the place should be open on Sunday morning!
And it was. The cashier had just stepped into her cage-like desk, and
the waitresses were lined up in their immaculate white aprons and lace
head-dresses. I was their first customer, apparently. The cashier, a
pretty, amiable girl, suppressed any surprise she may have felt at my
appearance, and greeted me with the same dazzling smile with which she
greeted every familiar face. I explained to her what I wanted to do,
apologizing for my slovenliness. She was all sympathetic attention, her
eyes snapped with good-humored interest, and she told me to go back and
take all the time I wanted to wash up. In a few minutes she sent me, by
one of the waitresses, a fresh piece of soap, a comb, a bit of
pumice-stone, a whisk-broom, a nail-file, a pair of curved
nail-scissors, a tiny paper parcel containing some face-powder, and,
wonder of wonders, a beautifully clean, fresh, shining collar!
Before the big, shimmering mirrors I washed and splashed to my heart's
content and to the infinite advantage of my visage. How delicious it was
to see and hear and feel the clear, hot water as it rushed from the
silver faucet into the white porcelain bowl! I washed and I washed, I
combed and I combed, until there was absolutely no more excuse for doing
either; then I powdered my face, just enough to take the shine off,
filed my finger-nails, brushed my clothing, put on my borrowed collar,
and stepped out into the eating-room, feeling, if not looking, like the
"perfect lady" which the generous-hearted cashier declared I resembled
"as large as life."
"Never mind about the collar; you can just keep it," she said when I
returned her toilet articles. "It's not worth but a few cents, anyway,
and I've got plenty more of them.... Don't mention it at all; you're
perfectly welcome. I didn't do anything more for you than I'd expect
you to do for me if I was in such a pickle. If we working girls don't
stand up and help one another, I'd like to know who's going to do it for
us.... So long!"
"So long!" It was not the first time that I had heard a working girl
deliver herself of that laconic form of adieu, and heretofore I had
always execrated it as hopelessly vulgar and silly, which no doubt it
was and is. But from the lips of that kind-hearted woman it fell upon my
ears with a sort of lingering sweetness. It was redolent of hope and
good cheer.
The home for working girls I found, not very far away from this
lunch-room, in one of the streets south of Fourteenth Street and well
over on the East Side. It was a shabby, respectable, unfriendly-looking
building of red brick, with a narrow, black-painted arched door. On the
cross-section of the center panel was screwed a silver plate, with the
name of the institution inscribed in black letters, which gave to the
door the gruesome suggestion of a coffin set on end.
A polite pull at the rusty handle of the bell-cord brought no response,
and I rang again, a little louder. A chain was rattled and a bolt drawn
back. The lid of the black coffin flew open, disclosing, with the
suddenness of a jack-in-the-box, a withered old beldam with a large
brass key clutched in a hand that trembled violently with palsy.
She grumbled inarticulately, and with a jerk of her head motioned me
into a small room opening off the hall, while she closed and locked the
door with the great brass key.
The little reception-room, or office, was no more cheerful than the
front door, and, like it, partook somewhat of an ecclesiastical aspect.
Arranged in a sort of frieze about the room were a series of framed
scriptural texts, all of which served to remind one in no ambiguous
terms of the wrath of God toward the froward-hearted and of the eternal
punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners. And then, at intervals, the
vindictive utterances were broken by pictures--these, too, of a
religious or pseudo-religious nature.
One of these pictures particularly attracted my attention. It was
entitled "Hope leaning upon Faith," and showed an exceedingly
sentimental young girl leaning heavily upon an anchor, her eyes lifted
heavenward, where the sun was just breaking through black clouds, and
all against a perspective of angry sea. I was trying to apply its
symbolism to my own case, when a sharp, metallic voice inquired
abruptly:
"What did you wish?"
I turned about quickly. A tall, hard-faced woman of forty or thereabouts
stood in the door, and looked at me coldly through spectacles that
hooked behind ears the natural prominence of which was enhanced by her
grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very
top of the head. She was the personification of neatness, if such be the
word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly
spinster. She wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low
heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as I was shortly to discover,
had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "Old Gum Heels." What her real
name was I never found out. Nobody knew. She was the most hated of all
our tormentors; and in all of the weeks I was to remain in the house
over which she was one of the supervisors, I never heard her referred to
by any other than the very disrespectful cognomen already quoted. But I
am anticipating.
"I would like to get board here," I replied timidly, for the very manner
of the woman had in it an acid-like quality which bit and burned the
sensibilities like vitriol does the flesh.
"Have you any money?"
"Not very much."
"How much?" she demanded.
"About one dollar."
"What baggage have you?"
"None," I replied, and related as well as my embarrassment would allow
me the story of the fire and of my flight from Henrietta, not forgetting
the generosity of the cashier in the dairy lunch-room. She listened in
silence, and when I had finished I thought I saw the repression of a
smile, which may or may not have been of the sardonic order. Then she
motioned me to follow her through the long, gloomy hall to the rear of
the house, where, turning an angle, we came to a staircase down which a
flood of sunlight streamed from the big window on the landing. The
sunlight showed walls of shimmering whitewashed purity and unpainted
oaken stairs scoured white as a bone. "Old Gum Heels" stopped here, and
was beginning to give me directions for finding the matron's room on the
floor above, when a door at the back opened and a very little girl
appeared with a very large pitcher of hot water, which she held tight in
her arms as though it were a doll, jiggling at every step a little of
the contents upon the floor.
"Julia, take this girl along with you to Mrs. Pitbladder's room, and
tell her that she wishes to make arrangements about board and lodging."
And then to me: "Mrs. Pitbladder is the matron. You will pay your money
to her, and she will tell you the rules and regulations for
inmates.--And then, Julia, hurry back to the kitchen; I'll need you
right away."
"Yes, ma'am," replied the child, timidly, with a shy glance at me as she
proceeded laboriously up the stairs. At the landing she stopped to draw
breath, putting the pitcher upon the floor and relaxing her thin little
arms. She was such a mite of a child, hardly more than eight or nine, if
judged from the size of the spindly, undeveloped figure. This was
swaddled in the ugly apron of blue-checked gingham, fastened down the
back with large bone buttons, and so long in the sleeves that the little
hands were all but lost, and so long in the skirt that only the ends of
the small copper-toed shoes showed beneath. Judged, however, by the
close-cropped head and the little sallow face that surmounted the
aproned figure, she might have been a woman of twenty-five, so maturely
developed was the one, so shrewd and knowing the other. The child leaned
her shoulders upon the whitewashed wall and stared at me in bold, though
not unfriendly curiosity, which, undoubtedly, I reciprocated. She was
evidently sizing me up. I smiled, and she screwed her full, sensitive
mouth into a judicial expression, puckering her forehead; then, in a
deep, contralto voice, she spoke. What she said I didn't hear, or rather
didn't grasp, in my wonder at the quality and timbre of that great
voice, which, issuing from the folds of the checked apron, seemed fairly
to fill the big hall below and the stair-well above with a deep,
beautiful sound. I apologized and asked her to repeat what she had said.
"Your skirt--it's so stylish," she said, and the little hand stole out
and began stroking the snugly-fitting serge of that very unpretentious
garment.
"I'm very glad you like it," I laughed, "for it's the only skirt I
have"; and I picked up the heavy pitcher and carried it up the rest of
the way, the child following me, holding up her apron skirts with both
hands to keep from stumbling, and making a ringing, metallic noise as
the copper toes struck the wood at every rise. She took the pitcher at
the head of the stairs without comment, but with a look full of
diffident gratitude. Stopping before one of the doors, the child rapped
timidly--so timidly, in fact, that it could scarcely be heard. No answer
coming, she rapped again, this time a little louder, and a woman's
shrill voice screamed, "Come in!"
"Mis' Pitbladder, the lady down-stairs says as this is a young girl
what wants to have a talk with youse about coming here," my little guide
announced all in one breath, and almost before the door had entirely
swung open upon the group within, consisting of an old lady and two
little girls. The old lady was in a comfortable state of dishabille; the
little girls each wore big checked gingham aprons like Julia's, and
buttoned down the back with the same big, white bone buttons. One of
them was waving Mrs. Pitbladder's hair with a crimping-iron which she
heated in a gas-jet before the bureau; the other child was laboriously
working at one of the pudgy hands with a pair of nail-scissors.
"Come in, come in, and don't stand there with the door open," mumbled
the bowed figure in the armchair, who held a twisted bit of uncrimped
forelock between her teeth to keep it from getting mixed with what was
already waved, and which fell over her face so that I could not see her
features.
"So you want to come here to board with us, my dear?" began the masked
one, which was the signal for an exchange of grave winks between the
hairdresser, the manicure, and the little slavey, Julia, who was pouring
the hot water into the pitcher on the washstand.
"If I could arrange it," I replied quickly, taking courage from the
woman's kindly manner of putting the question, which was in such
startling contrast to that of the dragon down-stairs.
"You are a working girl, are you, my dear?"
"I want to be. I'm looking for work now, and I hope to get a job in a
few days. I understand your rates are very low, and that I can live here
cheaper than almost anywhere else."
"And who sent you here, my dear?"
In answer to this I told her my story almost in totality, leaving out
only such details as could not possibly have concerned her. Perfect
candor, I was fast learning, was the only way in which one in my
desperate situation could hope for any degree of sympathetic treatment,
as the time for all silly pride was passed.
Then Mrs. Pitbladder explained the system upon which the house was run.
I could have a room all to myself for a dollar and a half a week, or I
could sleep in the dormitory for ten cents a night, or fifty cents a
week; all terms payable in advance. The latter fact she was particular
to impress upon me. As to food, she named a price which fairly took away
my breath. Six cents each for meals--six cents each for breakfast,
dinner, and supper! I said at once I would become a boarder, and that I
would take a cot in the dormitory, for which I would pay from night to
night.
At this juncture the girl who answered to the name of May finished
undulating the last strand of gray hair, and as she lifted it off her
mistress's face that lady raised her head and we looked at each other
for the first time. She was somewhere between sixty-five and seventy,
and very fat. Mrs. Pitbladder's face was a surprise to me, for all it
was a round, red face--the very sort of face in which one would have
expected good nature to repose. Its predominating features were a huge,
beaked nose and high cheek-bones which encroached to an alarming degree
upon the eye-sockets, wherein little dark, furtive eyes regarded me
fixedly. It was a face which even the most unsophisticated observer
could scarcely fail to characterize as that of a woman hardened in every
sort of petty tyranny, a woman who, having the power to make others
uncomfortable, found infinite pleasure in doing so, quite apart from any
motive of selfish interest. To be sure, I did not read all this in Mrs.
Pitbladder's face by the end of our first meeting. The supreme question
to be settled, the only one which had for me a vital interest then, was
how long I might still put off utter destitution in the event of my not
finding work within the ensuing week.
The terms were always in advance, Mrs. Pitbladder again repeated, as she
entered my name and age in a long book which May brought from the dark
mahogany desk that matched the rest of the well-made furniture in the
spacious room. I would now pay her, she said, ten cents for the bed I
was to sleep in that night, and my board money would be paid meal by
meal to the woman in charge of the dining-room. I gave her a
twenty-five-cent piece. I had remaining three other silver quarters. I
watched my twenty-five-cent piece drop into Mrs. Pitbladder's purse, and
heard the greedy mouth of that receptacle snap shut.
"Mintie," Mrs. Pitbladder spoke briskly, "show this girl to the
sitting-room, and then go and find Mrs. Lumley and tell her to come to
me at once."
Mintie, who had now finished lacing the matron's shoes, rose eagerly
and, with a shy glance toward me, made for the door. I hesitated, and
looked at Mrs. Pitbladder.
"You may go now," she said, with a wave of the pudgy hand.