curious looks of the little girls as by the annoyance of having to
remind the matron about the fifteen cents change still due me--"excuse
me, but I gave you twenty-five cents."
"And I gave you your change, my dear," the matron returned suavely but
decisively.
"I beg your pardon for contradicting you," I replied firmly, and without
taking my eyes from hers, which blinked unpleasantly. "You did _not_
give me any change."
"Look in your purse and see," said Mrs. Pitbladder.
"It is quite unnecessary," I replied; "but I will do so to satisfy you";
and I opened the purse again and showed my three remaining silver
pieces, which to further satisfy her I took out upon my palm and then
turned the purse's lining inside out.
But Mrs. Pitbladder did not seem impressed. I for my part resolved to be
equally insistent, inspired as I was with the determination that comes
to desperate people. There were fifteen cents due me, and nobody should
cheat me out of a single one of those precious pennies if I could
possibly prevent it. There was a short silence in which we took each
other's measure, the children looking on in evident enjoyment of the
situation. Finally the old lady opened the purse again and gave me the
change due, though she grumblingly maintained that it was I, not she,
who was in error.
When the door closed at last upon us, my small companion clutched my
hand and gave it a jubilant squeeze. "Golly! that did me good," she
whispered as we were going down-stairs. "She always lets on to make
mistakes about the girls' change, only most of 'em is so scairt of her
they just let her beat them out of it."
While the child went to find Mrs. Lumley I waited in the sitting-room.
It was an empty, ugly place, with bare floors and whitewashed walls, the
latter decorated, like those of the office, with framed scriptural
texts. Its furniture consisted of several long, slat-bottomed settees
and a single large rocking-chair which, crowded with children, was
swinging noisily over the bare boards. At our entrance the chair stopped
rocking, and one of the children climbed out.
It was Julia. She came promptly over to my side, while a half-dozen of
the other children jumped off the benches and ran to the rocking-chair
to squabble over the question of who should take the vacant place.
"Did yez have a row?" she asked eagerly. "Say, did yez?"
I evaded the question, thinking it neither advisable nor proper to
satisfy the curiosity of the little mite. To divert her attention, I
began questioning her about herself and her little companions--who were
they, what were they, and how did they come to be here?
"Why, don't you know?" the little one asked, looking at me in amazement.
"We're waifs!"
"Waifs! What sort of waifs?"
"Why, just waifs."
"But I didn't know this was an orphan-asylum," I said, looking about at
the children sitting in rows of two and three upon the scattered
settees.
"Oh, no, ma'am. We're not orfants," the child hastened to correct me;
"we're just waifs."
"And where are your fathers and mothers, then?" I cried.
"We ain't got none," Julia replied promptly, the little hand again
stealing through the long sleeve and stroking my much-admired skirt. She
had now snuggled down beside me upon the settee, and instinctively,
rather than from any desire to show friendliness, I drew my arm about
the small shoulders, which overture was interpreted as an invitation for
the cropped head to nestle closer.
"But if you haven't father or mothers, then you must be orphans," I
reasoned,--an argument which made Julia straighten up suddenly and look
at me in puzzled wonderment.
"No, we ain't orfants, neither, exceptin' just a few that did onct have
fathers and mothers, mebbe; but me and May Wistaria and Mintie
Delancy--they was the girls you seen up-stairs in HER room--we never did
have no fathers and mothers, we're just waifs, and so's them kids waifs
too that's playing in the rocking-chair. They was all foundling-asylum
kids."
At this moment a thick-set woman in a black dress appeared in the
doorway, which was a signal for all the little girls to make an
onslaught upon her. They twined their arms about her large waist, they
hung three and four upon each of her generous, kindly arms, and the
smaller girls held on to her skirts.
Thus encumbered, the good Mrs. Lumley introduced herself in an asthmatic
voice which was scarcely more than a whisper, and in a manner as kindly
as it was humble. Then she shoved the children back to their benches,
and led me up-stairs to the dormitory; showing me the cot where I was to
sleep, the lavatory where I would make my toilet in the mornings, and
the bath-room where I had the privilege of taking a bath once a week.
She also told me the rules of the house: first bell at six o'clock, when
everybody in the dormitory must rise and dress; second bell at half-past
six, when everybody must leave the dormitory, not to return until
bedtime. As to that hour, it came at various times: for the waifs it was
seven o'clock; for the regular lodgers, ten o'clock; and for the
transients, from seven till twelve o'clock, at which hour the house was
closed for the night.
All this Mrs. Lumley repeated in a dreary monotone which seemed
strangely out of keeping with the half-concealed kindliness which was
revealed in her homely countenance. She was a working matron, a sort of
upper servant, and had been three years in the place, which, I gradually
gleaned from her, had been started as a home for destitute children and
had eventually assumed the character and discharged the functions of a
girls' lodging-house. Under what auspices the house was conducted she
didn't know any more than did I, any more than I know to this day. There
was a board of managers,--ladies who sometimes came to look at the
dormitories and the bath-rooms and then went away again in their
carriages; there was the matron, Mrs. Pitbladder, who had been there
four or five years, she thought, but wasn't certain; there were several
under-matrons, who acted as teachers to the children. What did the
children study? Reading and writing and arithmetic and the Bible; and
then, as soon as they were old enough, they were turned into the
sewing-room, where they were taught dressmaking, or into the laundry,
where they learned to do fine laundry-work.
All this sounded just and good, and I began to alter my opinion of the
place. I even began to think that perhaps Mrs. Pitbladder was merely
absent-minded and a little crotchety; that she had not meant to forget
my fifteen cents change. I did not know until several days later that
the house did a large dressmaking and laundry business, and that their
advertisement appeared, and does to this day appear, in all the daily
newspapers. It was from the older girls in the dormitory, in whispered
talks we had at night after we were in bed, that I learned this and
innumerable other things, which my own observation during the weeks that
followed served to confirm.
To this home for working girls the waifs, the foundlings, came at all
sorts of tender years, came from God only knows where--I could never
find out exactly--some of them, perhaps, from city asylums, some from
the families upon which they had been left as an encumbrance. They came
as little children, and they went away as grown women. For them the home
was practically a prison. Locked in here from morning till night, week
in, week out, year after year, they were prisoners at all save certain
stated times when they were taken abroad for a walk under charge of the
matrons. In return for a scant education in the rudimentary branches,
and a very generous tuition in the drudgery of the kitchen, the laundry,
and the sewing-room, they received in all these years only their board
and clothes and a certain nominal protection against the vices and
corruptions of the street and the gutter from which they had been
snatched.
"You won't eat here?" Mrs. Lumley inquired as we were going down-stairs
again. To which I replied with a "Yes, why not? I have arranged with
Mrs. Pitbladder to do so."
We were on the landing where the stairs turned into the ground-floor.
She glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Pitbladder's door, into which a small
blue-aproned figure at this moment was passing with a tray laden with
Mrs. Pitbladder's breakfast. When it had closed again, she looked at me
hesitatingly, as if fearful of taking me too far into her confidence.
Then, perhaps reading a certain unconscious reassurance there, she
replied with a brief--
"I wouldn't, if I was you. You can't stand it."
"But I'll have to stand it," I returned; "I'm as poor as anybody here."
She shook her head. "But you couldn't work on it--you're not used to it.
I can see that. Besides, it isn't so cheap as you think it'll be. You'd
better go out. I wouldn't even eat here to-day. I wouldn't begin it.
There's a little lunch-room over on Third Avenue where you can get
enough to eat, and just as cheap as here."
The woman's manner was so mysterious, and withal so very earnest, not to
say urgent, that I felt instinctively that there was something more in
all she said than the mere depreciation of the quality of the victuals
she warned me against. So I was not surprised when she said slowly and
insinuatingly, as though feeling every step of the way:
"You know the misunderstanding you had this morning--about the change?"
"Yes," I answered, more mystified than ever. Then, as she looked me full
in the eyes, light dawned upon me, and I saw the old woman up-stairs in
a character as startling as it was infamous.
"Well," Mrs. Lumley said, when she saw that I understood; and with that
she again dropped into her habitual expression of bovine stolidness. We
parted at the foot of the stairs, she to disappear into the back of the
house, and I to join the waifs in the unfriendly sitting-room.
The afternoon I spent sitting in Union Square, whence I went at
half-past five for a bite of supper in the dairy lunch-room where I had
made my toilet in the morning. I had had no luncheon, feeling that I
could not afford more than two meals a day now. I sat a long time over
my cup of coffee and three hard rolls. I did not want to return to that
dreary house until the lamps should be lighted and it was time to go to
bed. The very thought of returning to sit with those forlorn waifs, in
that cheerless whitewashed sitting-room, was appalling.
I returned a few minutes before seven, just in time to hear the children
singing the last stanza of "Beulah Land" as I passed up-stairs to the
dormitory on the third floor. An old woman sat outside the door,
crocheting a shawl in such light as she could get from a blue-shaded
night-lamp that hung in the middle of the great whitewashed room within.
She looked up from her work long enough to challenge me with a shrewd,
impertinent look of inquiry, demanded to know if I had any lead-pencils
about my person, and, receiving a polite negative, allowed me to pass.
I was not the first arrival. In the dim light I could make out, here and
there, a bulging surface in the row of gray-blanketed cots, while in the
quiet I could hear the deep breathing of the sleepers. For they all
seemed to be asleep, save one who tossed from one side to the other and
sighed wearily. The latter was not far away from my own cot, and before
I had finished undressing she was sitting up looking at me.
"I'd give anything for a drink of water," she said softly.
"Why, is there no water?" I whispered.
The words were not out of my mouth before there was a thumping upon the
floor outside, and the voice of the beldame spoke sharply:
"No talking, girls!"
The thirsty girl dropped back to her pillow, and I crept under the
blanket. Later on I learned that each must have her drink of water
before entering the dormitory, because, once there, it was an iron-clad
rule that we should not leave until after the rising-bell had rung at
six the next morning. I also learned, later on, that had there not been
also an iron-clad rule against carrying lead-pencils into the
dormitory, the snowy-white walls were like as not to be scrawled with
obscenities during the night hours.
All sorts of girls seeking a night's refuge drifted into this
working-girls' home. Most of them were "ne'er-do-weels"; some of them
were girls of lax morality, though very few were essentially "bad."
When, however, they did happen to be "bad," they were very bad indeed.
And these lead-pencil inscriptions they left behind them were the
frightful testimony of their innate depravity.
Fortunately for me, I was quite ignorant on this first night of what the
character of the girls under the gray blankets might in all possibility
have been, and I settled myself to go to sleep with the thought that a
working-girls' home was not half bad, after all.
A little while later there was a fresh burst of childish voices and the
clatter of shoes on the stairs. It was the orphans marching up to bed
singing "Happy Day!" The music stopped when they reached the dormitory
door, which they entered silently, two by two. Their undressing was but
the matter of a few moments, so methodical and precise was every
movement. The small aprons and petticoats were folded across the foot of
each cot, and, on top, the long black stockings laid neatly. Each pair
of copper-toed shoes was placed in exactly the same spot under the foot
of each cot, and each little body, after wriggling itself into a gray
flannellet nightgown, dropped to its knees and bowed its head upon the
blanket in silent prayer.
After they had tucked themselves in bed a voice very near me, and which
I recognized as Julia's, whispered:
"May, are yez asleep?"
"No," muttered May.
"Say, is to-morrow bean day or molasses day?"
"Bean," replied May; and then all was silent in the dormitory, and so
remained save for the interruption caused by the tiptoe entrance of some
newly arrived "transient," some homeless wanderer driven here to seek a
night refuge.
In the morning we washed and combed in a large common toilet-room. There
were only a dozen face-bowls, and these we had to watch our chance to
pounce upon. I waited until the rush was over, and after the orphans had
scurried down to their breakfast I performed a more leisurely toilet.
Two other girls were there, doing the same thing. I recognized them as
transient lodgers, like myself, wanderers that had drifted in.
Both were very young, and one, whom I had heard sigh, and who groaned
continuously in her sleep, very, very pretty. The latter entered into
conversation as we combed before the long, narrow glass. "Do you stay
here all the time?" I asked. No, she had been living with her
"lady-friend"; and that lady-friend having departed to the country for
lack of employment until times would pick up, she was looking about for
a boarding-house. The subject of work gave me my opportunity, and I
asked her if she knew of a job. She shook her head. She was a
skirt-hand; she had worked in a Broadway sweat-shop, and didn't know
anything about any other sort of work. As we talked she finished her
toilet, putting on as the finishing touch a great picture-hat and a
scanty black Eton. Ready for the street, you would have little dreamed
that she had slept in a ten-cent lodging-house. After going through a
sort of inspection by the old woman at the entrance, during which it was
ascertained we had not pilfered anything, we were allowed to depart.
XII
IN WHICH I SPEND A HAPPY FOUR WEEKS MAKING ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS
Bright and early, after a four-cent breakfast, I was on my way to find
the place where I had read the sign, "Flower-makers Wanted.--Paid while
learning."
It was not difficult to find, even had I not had the number so securely
tucked away in my memory.
"Flowers & Feathers," in giant gilded letters, I read a block away, as I
dodged electric cars and motor vehicles, and threaded the maze of
delivery wagons and vans. I had a hasty interview with the
superintendent, a large and effusively polite man, whose plump white
hands sparkled with gems. He put me on the freight-elevator and told the
boy to show me to Miss Higgins. At the third floor the iron doors were
thrown open, and I stepped into what seemed to be a great, luxuriant
garden. The room was long and wide, and golden with April sunshine, and
in the April breeze that blew through the half-open windows a million
flowers fluttered and danced in the ecstacy of spring. Flowers, flowers,
flowers everywhere; piled high on the tables, tossed in mad confusion on
the floor, and strung in long garlands to the far end of the big room.
"The lady with the black hair, sitting down there by them American
Beauties," said the elevator-boy, waving his hand toward the rear.
I passed down a narrow path between two rows of tables that looked like
blossoming hedges. Through the green of branches and leaves flashed the
white of shirt-waists, and among the scarlet and purple and yellow and
blue of myriad flowers bobbed the smiling faces of girls as they looked
up from their task long enough to inspect the passing stranger. Here
were no harsh sounds, no rasping voices, no shrill laughter, no pounding
of engines. Everything just as one would expect to find it in a
flower-garden--soft voices humming like bees, and gentle merriment that
flowed musically as a brook over stones.
"The lady with the black hair" sat before a cleared space on a table
banked on either side with big red roses. In front of her were three or
four glasses, each containing one salmon-colored rose, fresh and
fragrant from the hothouse.
Leaning forward, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her palm,
she was staring intently at these four splendid blooms. Then she picked
up a half-finished muslin rose and compared them. All this I saw while I
waited timidly for her to look up. But she did not see me. She was
absorbed in the study of the living rose. At last I summoned courage to
inquire if she was Miss Higgins. She started, looked up quickly, and
nodded her head, with a smile that displayed a row of pretty teeth. Her
manner was cordial.
"Have you ever worked at flowers before?" she asked.
"No."
"Ever worked at feathers?"
"No."
"Well, the best I can do is to put you at blossom-making to-day, and see
how you take to it. It's too bad, though, you don't know anything about
feathers; for the flower season ends in a month, anyway, and then I have
to lay off all my girls till September, unless they can make feathers
too. Then they get jobs on the next floor. There'll be lots of work
here, though, for a month, and we might take you back in September."
The tone was so kindly, the interest so genuine, that I was prompted to
explain my situation, assuring her I should be glad to get work even for
four weeks. As a result, I was put on Rosenfeld's pay-roll for three and
a half dollars per week, with half a day's extra pay for night work: the
latter had been a necessity three or four nights every week for six
months, and was likely to continue for two, maybe three, weeks longer.
Besides the assurance of extra pay from this source, Miss Higgins also
intimated, as she conducted me to one of the tables, that if I was "able
to make good" she would raise me to four dollars at the end of the week.
Soon I was "slipping up" poppies under the instruction of Bessie, a
dreamy-eyed young Jewess. The process was simple enough, to watch the
skilled fingers of the other girls, but it was very tedious to my
untried hand. In awkward, self-conscious fashion I began to open out the
crimped wads of scarlet muslin which came to us hot from the
crimping-machine.
"You mustn't smooth the creases out too much," Bessie protested; and
with a deft touch, the right pull here, the proper flattening there, the
muslin scrap blossomed into a fluttering corolla.
"Don't get discouraged. We've all got to learn," one of the girls at
the far end of the table called out cheerily.
"Yes, and don't be afraid of making a mistake," put in my vis-a-vis, a
pretty Italian. "We all make mistakes while we're learning; but you'll
find this a nice place to work, and Miss Higgins is so lovely--she's
awful nice, too, to the new girls."
"Yes, indeed," added Bessie. "It isn't many years since she worked at
the table herself. I've often heard her tell about the first day she
went to work down at Golderberg's."
"That's the worst in town," piped another; "I stayed there just two
days. That was enough for me. Whenever the girls disagree down there,
they step out into the hall and lick each other. First day I was there,
one girl got two ribs broken. Her rival just walked all over her."
"What did they do with the girls?"
"Oh, nothing. They made it all up, and were as sweet as two
turtle-doves, walking around the workroom with their arms around each
other."
"Well, that's what it is to work in those cheap shops," commented Annie
Welshons, of the big blue eyes and yellow hair. "If they ever do get
respectable girls, they won't stay long."
As we worked the conversation ran easily. The talk was in good,
up-to-date English. There was rarely a mispronounced word, or a slip in
grammar; and there was just enough well-selected slang to make the
dialogue bright and to stamp the chatterers as conversant with the live
questions of the day. The topics at all times bespoke clean minds and an
intelligent point of view.
"Are you American born?" Bessie inquired by and by.
The question sounded unusual, almost unnecessary, until I discovered
that out of the eight girls in our immediate circle, only half were
native Americans. My vis-a-vis, Therese, was a Neapolitan; Mamie, a
Genoese; Amelia was born in Bohemia; the girl with the yellow hair was
North German; and Nellie declared she was from County Killarney and
mighty glad of it.
"Well, I'm an American," said Bessie, tossing her head in mock scorn, as
she cleared away a quantity of the flowers that had been meanwhile
accumulating on the wire lines.
Therese laughed. "But only by the skin of your teeth--an eleventh-hour
arrival." Then she turned to me and whispered that Bessie was born only
two weeks after her mother came to this country.
"Better late than never," laughed Bessie, casting a backward and
withering glance at the aliens as she moved away with her trayful of
scarlet blossoms to the branchers' table, where another relay of workers
twisted green leaves among the scarlet and tied them in wreaths and
bunches.
By eleven o'clock I had made two dozen poppies, which Amelia told me was
"just grand for a beginner." I began to feel confident that I should
hold the job, and my fingers flew. Into the glue-pot at my right hand I
dipped my little finger, picking up at the same moment with my other
hand a bit of paper-covered wire. On the end of the wire was a bunch of
short yellow threads, which were touched lightly with my glue-smeared
finger, the wire being held between the thumb and forefinger. With the
free left hand, I caught up a fluttering corolla, touching its
perforated center with glue; then I "slipped up" the wire about an inch,
took up another corolla in the same way, and then drew the two to the
"pipped" or heart end of the wire, where they now became a big red
flower with a golden eye. A bit of dark-green rubber tubing drawn over
the wire completed the process, the end was bent into a hook, and the
full-blown poppy hung on the line.
At a quarter past eleven a little girl wearing an immense flower-hat
and carrying a large market-basket came and asked us for our lunch
orders. She carried a long piece of pasteboard and wrote as the girls
dictated. One could buy anything one wanted, Bessie explained; bread and
butter, eggs, chops, steak, potatoes, canned goods, for which there was
ample provision for cooking on the gas-stoves used by the rose-makers to
heat their pincers. When the little girl was gone I learned that she was
one of the errand-runners, and that this was her daily task.
"How far does she go to market?"
"Over to First Avenue."
"Isn't that pretty far for a small girl to carry such a heavy load?"
"Oh, she doesn't mind it. All the errand-girls are tickled to death to
get the job. The grocers pay them ten per cent. commission on all they
buy."
It lacked but a few minutes of twelve when the child returned, panting
under her burden.
"How much did you clear to-day?" somebody asked.
"Twenty-one cents," the child answered, blushing as red as the poppies.