and began to pin on her hat it was always a sign that the lunch-hour had
come. One hundred and twenty girls popped up from their hiding-places
behind the hedges, which had grown to great height since morning. In a
trice spaces were cleared on the tables. Cups and saucers and knives and
forks appeared as if by magic. In that portion of the room where the
crimping-machines stood preparations for cooking commenced. The pincers
and tongs of the rose-makers, and the pressing-molds of the
leaf-workers, were taken off the fires, and in their place appeared
stew-pans and spiders, and pots and kettles. Bacon and chops sputtered,
steak sizzled; potatoes, beans, and corn stewed merrily. What had been
but lately a flower-garden, by magic had become a mammoth kitchen filled
with appetizing sounds and delicious odors. White-aproned cooks scurried
madly. It was like a school-girls' picnic. As they moved about I noticed
how well dressed and neat were my shop-mates in their white shirt-waists
and dark skirts. Indeed, in the country village I had come from any one
of them would have appeared as the very embodiment of fashion.
Cooked and served at last, we ate our luncheon at leisure, and with the
luxury of snowy-white table-cloths and napkins of tissue-paper, which
needs of the workroom were supplied in prodigal quantities.
During this hour I heard a great deal about the girls and their work.
They told me, as they told all new-comers, of the wonderful rise of Miss
Higgins, who began as a table-worker at three and a half dollars a week,
and was now making fifty dollars. They told me of her rise from the best
rose-maker in New York to designer and forewoman. They dwelt on her
kindness to everybody, discussed her pretty clothes, and wondered which
of her beaux she was going to marry.
All afternoon I "slipped up" poppies. At five Miss Higgins came to tell
me I was "doing fine," and that I should have four dollars instead of
three and a half. This made the work easier than ever, and my fingers
flew happily till six o'clock. Then we cooked dinner as we did our
luncheon, but we took only half an hour for our evening meal, so as to
get off at half-past nine instead of ten. At night the work was harder,
as the room became terribly hot from the gas-jets and from the stoves
where the rose-makers heated their tools. The faces grew tired and pale,
and the girls sang to keep themselves awake. "The Rabbi's Daughter,"
"The City of Sighs and Tears," and "The Banquet in Misery Hall" were the
favorite songs. A rising breeze swept up Broadway, now almost deserted,
and rushed through the windows, setting all our blossoms fluttering.
Outside a soft, warm spring rain began to fall on the tired, sleepy
city.
One week, two weeks, passed in these pleasant surroundings. I was still
"slipping up" poppies all day long, and every evening till half-past
nine. Then I went home to the little cot in the dormitory of the "home."
It would seem that all the world's wife and daughters were to wear
nothing but poppies that season. But ours was only a small portion of
Rosenfeld's output. Violets, geraniums, forget-me-nots,
lilies-of-the-valley, apple-blossoms, daisies, and roses of a score of
varieties were coming to life in this big garden in greater multitudes
even than our common poppies. Forty girls worked on roses alone. The
rose-makers are the swells of the trade. They are the best paid, the
most independent, and always in competitive demand during the flower
season. Any one can learn with patience how to make other kinds of
flowers; but the rose-maker is born, and the thoroughly experienced
rose-maker is an artist. Her work has a distinction, a touch, a "feel,"
as she calls it, which none but the artist can give.
The star rose-maker of the shop, next to the forewoman (who was reputed
the finest in America), was about twenty-five. Her hair was fluffy and
brown, and her eyes big and dark blue. She was of Irish birth, and had
been in America about fourteen years. One day I stopped at her chair and
asked how long it took her to learn.
"I'm still learning," she replied, without looking up from the tea-rose
in her fingers. "It was seven years before I considered myself
first-class; and though I'm at it now thirteen, I don't consider I know
it all yet." She worked rapidly, flecking the delicate salmon-colored
petals with her glue-finger, and pasting them daintily around the
fast-growing rose. I watched her pinch and press and crease each frail
petal with her hot iron instruments, and when she had put on a thick
rubber stem and hung the finished flower on the line she looked up and
smiled.
"Want to see a rose-maker's hand?" she remarked, turning her palm up for
my inspection. She laughed aloud at my exclamation of horror. Calloused
and hard as a piece of tortoise-shell, ridged with innumerable
corrugations, and hopelessly discolored, with the thumb and forefinger
flattened like miniature spades, her right hand had long ago lost nearly
all semblance to the other.
"It is the hot irons do that," she said, drawing her pincers from the
fire and twirling them in the air until they grew cool enough to proceed
with the work. "We use them every minute. We crease the petals with
them, and crinkle and vein and curl the outer edges. And we always have
to keep them just hot enough not to scorch the thin muslin."
"How many can you make a day?"
"That depends on the rose. This sort--" picking up a small, cheap June
rose--"this sort a fair worker can make a gross of a day. But I have
made roses where five single flowers were considered a fine day's job.
Each of those roses had one hundred and seventy-five pieces, however;
and there were eighteen different shapes and sizes of petals; and
besides that, every one of those pieces had to be put in its own place.
If one piece had been wrongly applied, the whole rose would have been
spoiled. But they don't make many of such complicated roses in this
country. They have to import them. They haven't enough skilled workers
to fill big orders, and it doesn't pay the manufacturers to bother with
small orders."
The girl did all the fine work of the place, and had always more waiting
to be done than she could have accomplished with four hands instead of
two. She had no rival to whom this surplus work could be turned over.
The dull season had no terrors for her, nor would it have had for her
comrades had they been equally skilled. She made from twenty-two to
twenty-five dollars a week, all the year round, and was too busy ever to
take a vacation. The other girls averaged nine dollars, and if they got
eight months' work a year they considered themselves fortunate. They
were clever and industrious, but they had not learned to make the finer
grade of roses.
The third week came and went all too quickly, and we were now entering
on the fourth. Plainly the season was drawing to its close. The orders
that had come pouring in from milliners and modistes all over the land
for six months were now dwindling daily. The superintendent and the
"boss" walked through the department every day, and we heard them talk
about overproduction. Friday the atmosphere was tense with anxiety. The
girls' faces were grave. Almost without exception, there were people at
home upon whom this annual "lay-off" fell with tragic force. I have not
talked with one of them who did not have to work, and they have always
some one at home to care for. A few were widows with small children at
home or in the day nursery. One can tell little, by their appearance,
about these secret burdens. Each girl wears a mask. The neat costume,
made with her own hands in midnight hours snatched from hard-earned
rest, is no evidence of extravagance, or even of comfortable
circumstances. It is only that manifestation of proper pride and
self-respect which the best type of wage-earning woman is never without.
If they sometimes talk happily about theaters and parties and beaux, if
occasionally there is a brief spell of innocent hilarity in the
workroom, it is only the inevitable and legitimate outcropping of
healthy and wholesome animal spirits, of a vigorous hope which not even
the hard conditions of life can crush.
On Saturday morning many of the girls sat idle. "Don't work too fast, or
you'll work yourself out of a job," one cried in jest; but the meaning
was one of dead earnest. And as the day passed the prophecy came true to
one after another. In the afternoon we made a feint of work by papering
wires and opening petals for those who were still busy. The hours passed
drearily. Miss Higgins was going over her pay-roll, checking off the
names of the girls who could make feathers as well as flowers. All
others were to be laid off indefinitely that night. We watched anxiously
for the moment, which was not far off.
"I hope Miss Higgins won't cry--she did last year. It breaks her up
terribly to let us off," somebody remarked.
"It's a long time to be idle--till September," I suggested to the girl
across the work-table. She looked up in surprise.
"Idle!" she exclaimed. "But we are never idle. We daren't. We get other
jobs."
"What?"
"Oh, everything: waitress in a summer boarding-house, novelty goods,
binderies, shirt-waists, stores, anything we can get."
"She's coming," some one whispered. Everybody tried to look unconcerned.
Those who had no work to claim attention looked carefully at their
finger-nails, or found sudden necessity to adjust collars and belts.
Miss Higgins passed along the tables, bending over the heads and
speaking to each in a low voice. The tears were running down her cheeks.
Those retained concealed their happiness as best they could, and spoke
words of sympathy and encouragement to their less fortunate companions.
The warrants were received with a stoicism that was more pathetic than
tears. From the far end of the room I heard an unaccustomed sound, and
turning, I saw the forewoman, who had dropped into a chair at the
forget-me-not table, her face buried in her arms, and sobbing like a
child. It was the signal that her cruel duty was done, that the last
"lay-off" sentence had been pronounced, that the work for the day and
for the "season" was over, that it had come time to say good-by.
"Good-by!" The voices echoed as we trooped down-stairs to the street
door. "Good-by! Good-by!" The lingering farewells rose faintly above the
noises of Broadway, as we scattered at the corner. Good-by to
Rosenfeld's--now no longer a reality, but rather a memory of idyllic
beauty--the workroom bright with sunshine and flashing with color, with
the faces of the workers bent over the fashioning of rose and poppy, and
best of all, the kind hearts and the quick sympathy that blossomed there
as luxuriantly as the flowers themselves.
Good-by to my four happiest weeks in the workaday world.
XIII
THREE "LADY-FRIENDS," AND THE ADVENTURES THAT BEFALL THEM
Into every human experience there must come sooner or later the bitter
consciousness that Nature is remorselessly cruel; that she laughs
loudest when we are most miserable; that she is never so bright, never
so beautiful as in the darkest hour of our need; that she ever makes
mock of our agony and ever smiles serenely at our despair.
Such, at least, were my feelings in those long, beautiful June days that
followed close on the "lay-off" at Rosenfeld's.
Dear little Bessie! poor unhappy Eunice! This chapter of my experiences
is so dominated by their personalities that I shall devote a few words
to recounting the circumstances which brought us together and sent us
faring forth on a summer's day to seek new fortunes, three
"lady-friends," arm in arm. I make no apology for saying
"lady-friends." I know all the prejudices of polite society, which
smiles at what is esteemed to be a piece of vulgar vanity characteristic
of the working-girl world. And yet I use the term here in all
seriousness, in all good faith; not critically, not playfully, but
tenderly. Because in the humble world in which our comradeship was
formed there is none other to designate the highest type of friendship,
no other phrase to define that affection between girl and girl which is
as the love of sisters. In the great workaday world where we toiled and
hoped and prayed and suffered together for a brief period we were called
"the three lady-friends" by our shop-mates, and such we were to each
other always, and such we shall be throughout the chapter; and I know,
if Bessie and Eunice were here to-night, looking over my shoulder as I
write the account of that sordid little tragedy and the part they played
in it,--I know they would clasp their rough little hands in mine and nod
approval.
Bessie had been my "learner" at Rosenfeld's. I still remember her
exactly as I saw her that first time, a slender little figure bending
over the work-table. Her shirt-waist was snowy-white, and fastened
down--oh, so securely!--under the narrow leather belt; she had a wealth
of straight blonde hair of that clear, transparent quality which, when
heaped high on her head, looked like a mass of spun glass; her cheeks,
which were naturally very pale, burned a deep crimson as they reflected
the light on the poppies beneath; and after a while, when she raised her
head, I saw that her eyes were blue, and that her profile, sharp and
clear cut, was that of a young Jewess. I had thought her to be about
twenty-two,--for, pretty and fresh as she was, she looked every day of
it,--but I found out later that she was not then eighteen.
We had not been long getting acquainted--that is, as well acquainted as
was possible in a busy shop like Rosenfeld's. Indeed, it would be a
strange, sad world--stranger and sadder than it really is--if Bessie and
I had not sooner or later established a certain bond of intimacy.
Sitting opposite at the same work-table, we made poppies together and
exchanged our little stories. She had been working, since she was
fifteen, at all sorts of odd jobs: cash-girl in a department store;
running errands for a fashionable modiste; cashier in a dairy
lunch-room; making picture-frames. This was her second season at
flower-making, and she liked it better than anything she had ever tried,
if only there was work all the year round; for she couldn't afford to
sit idle through the long summer months--well, I should say not!--with
eight small brothers and sisters at home, and a rather incompetent
father, and sixteen dollars a month rent! The experiences of a score of
shops, and the motley crew of people she had worked with in these busy
years, Bessie in her careless, simple narrative had the power to invest
with lifelike reality.
Scarcely less interesting than all this to me was my own story to
Bessie, which found ready sympathy in her tender heart, especially that
part of it that had to do with the home for working girls where I was
now living. For to Bessie, with her inborn racial love of family,
nothing was so much to be pitied as the unfortunates who found shelter
there. She seemed to take a certain sort of consolation for her own hard
life in hearing the sordid details of the wretched waifs and strays that
came wandering into the "home" at all hours of the day and night. I told
her about the dormitory where we slept side by side in gray-blanketed
cots, each girl's clothes folded neatly across the footboard; of the
cross old dragon who sat outside in the brightly lighted passageway, and
snored all night long, when she should have been attending to her
duties,--which duties were to keep an eye on us lest we rob one another
of the few pennies we might have under our pillows, or that we might not
scrawl obscene verses on the whitewashed walls, in case we had succeeded
in smuggling in a forbidden lead-pencil. For such offenses, and they
happened only too often, we were all held equally guilty in the eyes of
the sour, autocratic matron. As each night brought a fresh relay of
girls to the dormitory, it was productive of a new series of episodes,
which I related faithfully to Bessie.
That is how she became interested in Eunice. The latter had come
tiptoeing into the dormitory one night long after the other girls were
fast asleep, and without undressing threw herself on the vacant cot next
to mine. In the lamplight that shone from the passageway full on her
face, I saw, as I peeped above the rough blanket, that the new-comer was
no common type of waif and stray. There was an elusive charm in the
glimpse of profile and in the delicate aquiline features, a certain
suggestion of beauty, were it not for the white, drawn look that
enveloped them like a death-mask. As I was gazing furtively at her she
turned on her side, moaning as only a girl can moan when peace of mind
is gone forever. Such sounds were not uncommon in the dormitory. Several
times, waking in the night, I had listened pityingly to the same
half-smothered lament. On this night I had fallen asleep as usual, when
suddenly a shriek rang out, and I wakened to hear the angry accents of
the beldam protesting against "hysterics," and the indistinct muttering
of the girlish sleepers whose rest the stranger had so inconsiderately
disturbed. In a few moments everything was quiet again, our old woman
had renewed her snoring, and then the new-comer, repressing her anguish
as best she could, slid kneeling to the floor.
It was then, all sleep gone for that night, I reached out my hand and
touched the sleeve of her black dress.
From that moment we became friends. The information which she vouchsafed
about herself was meager and not of a character to throw much light upon
her former condition and environment. It was obvious that there had been
a tragedy in her life, and I instinctively guessed what that tragedy
was, although I respected the reserve she threw around her and asked no
indiscreet questions. She was fairly well educated, had been brought up
in a small New Jersey village, and had been a stenographer until she
went to a telephone office to tend a switchboard. Between that job and
her advent in the "home" was an obvious hiatus, which at times she
vaguely referred to as a period wherein she "lost her grip on
everything." She had no money, and her clothes were even shabbier than
my own, and she was too discouraged even to look for work. Her cot and
three meager meals a day, consisting of bread and tea for breakfast and
supper, and bread and coffee and soup for dinner, she received, as did
all the transient boarders, in return for a ten-hour-day's work in the
"home" kitchen. After a few nights she ceased moaning, and settled
gradually into a hopeless apathy, while over her deep gray eyes there
grew a film of silent misery.
Stirred by my fragmentary accounts of Eunice's wretchedness, the
generous-hearted Bessie one day suggested that we take her with us to
look for a job as soon as the anticipated "lay-off" notice came into
effect at Rosenfeld's. And so, on the Monday morning following that
dreaded event, Bessie met Eunice and me at the lower right-hand corner
of Broadway and Grand Street, and together we applied for work at the
R---- Underwear Company, which had advertised that morning for twenty
operators.
"Ever run a power Singer?" queried the foreman.
"No, but we can learn. We're all quick," answered Bessie, who had
volunteered to act as spokesman.
"Yes, I guess you can learn all right, but you won't make very much at
first. All come together?... So! Well, then, I guess you'll want to work
in the same room," and with that he ushered us into a very inferno of
sound, a great, yawning chaos of terrific noise. The girls, who sat in
long rows up and down the length of the great room, did not raise their
eyes to the new-comers, as is the rule in less strenuous workrooms.
Every pair of eyes seemed to be held in fascination upon the flying and
endless strip of white that raced through a pair of hands to feed itself
into the insatiable maw of the electric sewing-machine. Every face,
tense and stony, bespoke a superb effort to concentrate mind and body,
and soul itself, literally upon the point of a needle. Every form was
crouched in the effort to guide the seam through the presser-foot. And
piled between the opposing phalanxes of set faces were billows upon
billows of foamy white muslin and lace--the finished garments wrought by
the so-many dozen per hour, for the so-many cents per day,--and wrought,
too, in this terrific, nerve-racking noise.
The foreman led us into the middle of the room, which was lighted by
gas-jets that hung directly over the girls' heads, although the ends of
the shop had bright sunshine from the windows. He seemed a good-natured,
respectable sort of man, of about forty, and was a Jew. Bessie and me he
placed at machines side by side, and Eunice a little farther down the
line. Then my first lesson began. He showed me how to thread bobbin and
needle, how to operate ruffler and tucker, and also how to turn off and
on the electric current which operated the machinery. My first attempt
to do the latter was productive of a shock to the nerves that could not
have been greater if, instead of pressing the harmless little lever
under the machine with my knee, I had accidently exploded a bomb. The
foreman laughed good-naturedly at my fright.
"You'll get used to it by and by," he shouted above the noise; "but like
as not for a while you won't sleep very good nights--kind of nervous;
but you'll get over that in a week or so," and he ducked his head under
the machine to adjust the belt. Suddenly, above all the frenzied
crashing of the machines came a sound, half scream, half cackle:
"Yi! yi! my pretty one, you'll get used to it by and by; you'll get used
to anything in this world." It was an old woman's voice, and looking
across the table, I saw a merry-eyed, toothless old crone, who was
grinning and nodding at me.
"Hello! hello there, Miriam! what's eating you now?" shouted the
foreman, emerging and scrambling to his feet as he turned to get Bessie
started. But the strange old creature only grinned wider and screeched,
"Yi! yi!" louder than ever.
But I had not time, either, to look at or listen to her now, as I leaned
over the machine and practised at running a straight seam. Ah, the skill
of these women and girls, and of the strange creature opposite, who can
make a living at this torturing labor! How very different, how
infinitely harder it is, as compared with running an ordinary
sewing-machine. The goods that my nervous fingers tried to guide ran
every wrong way. I had no control whatever over the fearful velocity
with which the needle danced along the seam. In utter discouragement, I
stopped trying for a moment, and watched the girl at my right. She was a
swarthy, thick-lipped Jewess, of the type most common in such places,
but I looked at her with awe and admiration. In Rachel Goldberg's case
the making of muslin, lace-trimmed corset-covers was an art rather than
a craft. She was a remarkable operator even among scores of experts at
the R----. Under her stubby, ill-kept hands ruffles and tucks and
insertion bands and lace frills were wrought with a beauty and softness
of finish, and a speed and precision of workmanship, that made her the
wonder and envy of the shop. And with what ease she seemed to do
it all, despite the riveted eyes and tense-drawn muscles of her
expressionless face! Suddenly her machine stopped, she looked
up with a loud yawn, and stretched her arms above her head. She
acknowledged the flattery of my look with a patronizing smile and a
"How-do-you-think-you're-going-to-like-your-job?" I answered the
conventional question in the usual way, and remarked that she sewed as
if she had done it for ever and ever, and as if it were no work at all.
She shook her head. "Yes, I've worked a long time at it, but my shoulder
aches as bad this morning as it did when I was a learner like you," and
she pressed the power-lever and again bent over the tucking.