the few hours that I could snatch between five o'clock, the closing-time
at the shop, and ten o'clock, the curfew hour at the "home." On
Wednesday the strain grew unbearable. All the associations of Wolff's
were tinctured with memories of the dead Bessie and the lost Eunice.
Under the counter, in the big pasteboard box, their checked-gingham
aprons were still rolled up just as they had left them, with the
scissors inside; and on the pine table under my eyes were their names
and mine, scrawled in a lead-pencil by Bessie's hand, and framed with
heavy lines. Their high stools, which were on either side of mine, had
been given over to two new-comers, also "lady-friends," who chewed gum
vigorously and discussed beaux and excursions to Coney Island with a
happy vivacity that made my secret misery all the harder to bear. That
night I went to the desk and drew my money, tucked the two aprons away
in a bundle with my own, and said good-by to Wolff's. The sum total of
my capital now amounted to five dollars; and with this I felt that I
could afford to spend the remainder of the week trying to find Eunice,
and trust to luck to get taken back at Wolff's the following Monday
morning.
After three days' systematic inquiry, I climbed the stairs to the
dormitory late on Sunday night, no wiser than I had been a week before.
My discouragement gave way to a thrill of joyous surprise when I
descried a long, thin form stretched under the gray blanket of Eunice's
cot. I sprang forward and laid an eager hand on the thin shoulder.
"Gr-r-r! Don't you try gettin' fresh, Susie Jane, er I'll smash yer
face!" snarled the angry voice of a new-comer, as she pulled the
coverlet up to her eyes and rolled over on the other side.
Monday morning I presented myself at the jewel-case factory, and asked
Miss Gibbs to take me back. But I was already adjudged a "shiftless
lot," not steady, and was accordingly "turned down." Then once more I
scanned the advertising columns.
"Shakers Wanted.--Apply to Foreman" was the first that caught my eye. I
didn't know what a "shaker" was, but that did not deter me from forming
a sudden determination to be one. The address took me into a street
up-town--above Twenty-third Street--the exact locality I hesitate to
give for reasons that shortly will become obvious. Here I found the
"Pearl Laundry," a broad brick building, grim as a fortress, and
fortified by a breastwork of laundry-wagons backed up to the curb and
disgorging their contents of dirty clothes. Making my way as best I
could through the jam of horses and drivers and baskets, I reached the
narrow, unpainted pine door marked, "Employees' Entrance," and filed up
the stairs with a crowd of other girls--all, like myself, seeking work.
At the head of the stairs we filed into a mammoth steam-filled room that
occupied an entire floor. The foreman made quick work of us. Thirty-two
girls I counted as they stepped up to the pale-faced, stoop-shouldered
young fellow, who addressed each one as "Sally," in a tone which,
despite its good-natured familiarity, was none the less businesslike
and respectful. At last it came my turn.
"Hello, Sally! Ever shook?"
"No."
"Ever work in a laundry?"
"No; but I'm very handy."
"What did you work at last?"
"Jewel-cases."
"All right, Sally; we'll start you in at three and a half a week, and
maybe we'll give you four dollars after you get broke in to the
work.--Go over there, where you seen them other ladies go," he called
after me as I moved away, and waved his hand toward a pine-board
partition. Here, sitting on bundles of soiled linen and on hampers, my
thirty-two predecessors were corralled, each awaiting assignment to
duty. They were dressed, literally, "some in rags and some in tags and
some in velvet gowns." Calico wrappers brushed against greasy satin
skirts, and faded kimono dressing-jackets vied in filth and slovenliness
with unbelted shirt-waists. A faded rose bobbed in one girl's head, and
on another's locks was arranged a gorgeous fillet of pale-blue ribbon of
the style advertised at the time in every shop-window in New York as the
"Du Barry." The scene was a sorry burlesque on the boudoir and the
ball-room, a grim travesty on the sordid realities of the kitchen on
wash-day.
"Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" asked a stupid Irish girl, looking
at me curiously. I looked blank, and she repeated the question.
"What does she mean?" I asked a more intelligent girl who was seated on
a bundle in the corner.
"Didn't yez come in Tony's wagon?"
"No; who's Tony?"
"Oh, Tony he's a barber--a Ginny barber--that goes out with a wagon when
they run short of help, and he picks up any girls he can find and hauls
them in. He brought three loads this morning. We thought Tony picked you
up. Me and her," pointing to a black-browed girl who was nodding to
sleep with her mouth wide open, "we come in the barber's wagon."
The girl's face, fat, heavy, dough-colored, had become suffused with
amiability, and giving her snoozing comrade a gentle push, she made room
for me on the bundle beside her.
"Ever worked at this job before?" she asked.
"No. Have you?"
She replied with a sharp laugh, and flinging back the sleeve of her
kimono, thrust out the stump of a wrist. At my exclamation of horror,
she grinned.
"Why, that's nothing in this here business," she said. "It happens
every wunst in a while, when you was running the mangles and was tired.
That's the way it was with me: I was clean done out, one Saturday night,
and I jist couldn't see no more; and first thing I know--Wo-o-ow! and
that hand went right straight clean into the rollers. And I was jist
tired, that's all. I didn't have nothing to drink all that day,
excepting pop; but the boss he swore I was drunk, and he made the
foreman swear the same thing, and so I didn't try to get no damages.
They sent me to the horspital, and they offered me my old job back
again; but I jist got up my spunk and says if they can't pay me some
damages, and goes and swears I was drunk when I didn't have nothing but
rotten pop, I says, I can up and go some place else and get my four
dollars a week."
Before I could ask what the poor creature would be able to do with only
one hand, the foreman appeared in the door, and we trooped out at his
heels. Down the length of the big room, through a maze of moving
hand-trucks and tables and rattling mangles, we followed him to the
extreme rear, where he deposited us, in groups of five and six, at the
big tables that were ranged from wall to wall and heaped high with wet
clothes, still twisted just as they were turned out of the
steam-wringer. An old woman with a bent back showed me the very simple
process of "shaking."
"Jist take the corners like this,"--suiting the action to the
word,--"and give a shake like this, and pile them on top o' one
another--like this," and with that she turned to her own "shaking" and
resumed gossip with her side-partner, another old woman, who was roundly
denouncing the "trash" that was being thrust upon her as table-mates,
and throwing out palpable insults to the "Ginnies" who stood vis-a-vis,
and who either didn't hear or, hearing, didn't understand or care.
For the first half-hour I shook napkins bearing the familiar
legend--woven in red--of a ubiquitous dairy-lunch place, and the next
half-hour was occupied with bed-linen bearing the mark of a famous
hostelry. During that time I had become fairly accustomed to my new
surroundings, and was now able to distinguish, out of the steamy
turmoil, the general features of a place that seethed with life and
action. All the workers were women and girls, with the exception of the
fifteen big, black, burly negroes who operated the tubs and the wringers
which were ranged along the rear wall on a platform that ran parallel
with and a little behind the shakers' tables. The negroes were stripped
to the waist of all save a thin gauze undershirt. There was something
demoniacal in their gestures and shouts as they ran about the vats of
boiling soap-suds, from which they transferred the clothes to the
swirling wringers, and then dumped them at last upon the big trucks. The
latter were pushed away by relays of girls, who strained at the heavy
load. The contents of the trucks were dumped first on the shakers'
tables, and when each piece was smoothed out we--the shakers--redumped
the stacks into the truck, which was pushed on to the manglers, who
ironed it all out in the hot rolls. So, after several other dumpings and
redumpings, the various lots were tied and labeled.
Meanwhile a sharp, incessant pain had grown out of what was in the first
ten or fifteen minutes a tired feeling in the arms--that excruciating,
nerve-torturing pain which comes as a result of a ceaseless muscular
action that knows no variation or relaxation. To forget it, I began to
watch the eight others at our particular table. There were four
Italians, all stupid, uninteresting-looking girls, of anywhere from
fifteen to twenty-five years old; there was a thin, narrow-chested girl,
with delicate wrists and nicely shaped hands, who seemed far superior
to her companions, and who might have been pretty had it not been for
the sunken, blue-black cavity where one eye should have been; there was
a fat woman of forty, with a stiff neck, and of a religious temperament,
who worked in a short under-petticoat and was stolidly indifferent to
the conversation round her; the others were the two old dames--she who
had initiated me, and her sprightlier though not less ancient crony,
Mrs. Mooney. Both fairly bristled with spite and vindictiveness toward
everything in general, and us new-comers in particular, and each
sustained her flagging energies with frequent pinches of snuff and
chunks of coffee-cake which they drew from inexhaustible pockets. My
attempts at conversation with these two having been met with chilling
silence, and as Mrs. Mooney had given me several painful thrusts with
her sharp elbow when I happened to get too close to her, I took care to
keep a safe distance, puzzled as to wherein I might have offended, and
lapsing into a morbid interest in the gossip flying thick and fast
around me.
The target of scandal was "the queen," a big, handsome blonde girl of
about twenty-five, who in a different environment and properly corseted
and gowned would have been set down unquestionably as "a voluptuous
beauty." Here in the laundry, in stocking-feet and an unbelted black
shirt-waist turned far in at the neck, she was merely "mushy," to use
the adjective of her detractors. The queen owed her nickname to the
boss, with whom she was said to "stand in," being "awful soft after
him." She was a sort of assistant to the foreman, bossing the job when
he was not around, and lending a hand in rush hours with true democratic
simplicity such as only the consciousness of her prestige could warrant
her in doing. Now she was assisting the black men load a truck, now
helping a couple of girls push it across the floor, now helping us dump
it on the table--laughing and joking all the while, but at the same time
goading us on to the very limit of human endurance. She had been in the
"Pearl" for seven years, slaved harder than any of us, and she looked as
fresh and buoyant as if she never had known what work was. I rather
liked the queen, despite the fact that I detected in her immediately a
relentless task-master; everybody else seemed to like her,
notwithstanding the malicious things they said about her.
"Tired?" asked the one-eyed girl. "Yes, it's hard work, but it's steady.
You're never out of a job if you're a steady shaker that can be relied
on."
There was cheerfulness in her tone, and both the old women stopped
talking.
"Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" Mrs. Mooney asked. On being
assured that we had not, she proceeded to establish amicable relations
with the one-eyed girl and me by telling us she was glad we "weren't
Ginnies, anyway."
"Whatever happened to yer eye?" inquired the other crone of my
companion.
Unresentful of the blunt inquisitiveness, the girl responded cordially
with her little story--glad, apparently, to have a listener.
"It was something I caught in the hospital when I had appendicitis three
years ago. When I was discharged my appendicitis was well, but my eye
had took sore. The doctor he says when he seen it, 'That eye's too far
gone, and it's got to come out, or the poison 'll spread to the t'other
eye, and then you won't have no eyes at all.' My mother she didn't know
nothing about it till it was all over. She'd have carried on awful if
she'd knowed it. But it didn't hurt a bit. I went under chloroform, and
when I come out of it I jist thought I'd been having a long sleep in a
big brass bedstead, with hem-stitched sheets and things like that," and
she pointed to the hotel linen we were all shaking.
"That's the way with them hospitals," said Mrs. Mooney,
sympathetically, and proffering the heroine of the story a chunk of
spice-cake.
"You'd been better to ha' stayed at home. Poor folks don't have no
chanst in them high-toned places."
"Why don't you take off yer shoes like us, and let yer feet spread
out?--it'll rest them," suggested Mrs. Mooney, now passing me a
peace-offering of coffee-cake, and tightening her mouth in a grim
determination to be civil.
Indeed, the one-eyed girl's story had wrought a transformation in these
two sullen old women. All that was human in them had been touched by the
tale of physical suffering, and we now met on common ground--the common
ground of brute sympathy which one animal feels for another in distress.
The work was now under full blast, and every one of the hundred and
twenty-five girls worked with frenzied energy as the avalanche of
clothes kept falling in upon us and were sent with lightning speed
through the different processes, from the tubs to the packers' counters.
Nor was there any abatement of the snowy landslide--not a moment to stop
and rest the aching arms. Just as fast as the sweating negroes could
unload the trucks into the tubs, more trucks came rolling in from the
elevator, and the foaming tubs swirled perpetually, swallowing up, it
would seem, all the towels and pillow-cases and napkins in Greater New
York. Above the orchestra of noise I distinguished a faintly familiar
voice, which I could not place until I heard:
"And it was nothing but pop I had that day--I hadn't had nothing but
rotten old pop all day!"
From the girl's argument it was hard to determine whether she was more
grieved at not having had stronger potations than pop on that fatal
occasion, or at the implied aspersions upon her character for sobriety.
Looking up, I saw that she was in one of the truck-teams. She had her
one hand and arm strained against the rear of the sodden load, which she
was urging forward with her hip. The load happened to be for our table,
and as we dumped it out I asked her if there wasn't anything easier she
could do. She responded cheerily:
"No. You've got to have two hands to run the mangles, and you've got to
have two hands to shake, and you've got to have two hands to tie up, but
you can push a truck with one hand." Which statement of the case,
combined with the cripple's optimism, made us laugh--all except the
one-eyed girl, espying whom, the maimed girl suddenly changed the tone
of levity with which she treated her own misfortune, and asked in a
lowered voice: "What's the matter with yer eye?" And the hospital
infection tale was repeated.
Could a duchess have claimed greater grace than that poor, unlettered,
uncouth creature's delicate perception of that subtle principle of
courtesy, which allowed her to jest over her own misfortunes, but which
prompted a gentle hesitation in speaking to another about hers!
In the excruciating agony of the hours that followed, the trucks became
a veritable anodyne for the pains that shot through my whole body.
Leaning over their deep sides was a welcome relief from the strained,
monotonous position at the tables. The one-eyed girl had likewise
discovered the anodyne, and remarked upon it once as we dived into the
wet freight.
"It's so funny how one kind of pain sort of eases up another," she said;
"I always feel good every time I see the truck coming, though trucking's
far harder work than shaking if you had to do it steady. I wonder why it
is. It was the same way with my eye. When it was getting better and just
ached a little bit, steady, all the time, I used to wish I could have
real hard jumping toothache, just for a change."
"God love ye, and it's so," fervently exclaimed Mrs. Mooney.
The day was terrifically hot outdoors, and with the fearful heat that
came up through the floor from the engine-room directly under us,
combined with the humidity of the steam-tilled room, we were all driven
to a state of half-dress before the noon hour arrived. The women opened
their dresses at the neck and cast off their shoes, and the foreman
threw his suspenders off his shoulders, while the colored washers
paddled about on the sloppy floor in their bare black feet.
"Don't any men work in this place except the foreman?" I asked Mrs.
Mooney, who had toiled a long time in the "Pearl" and knew everything.
"Love of Mary!" she exclaimed indignantly; "and d' ye think any white
man that called hisself a white man would work in sich a place as this,
and with naygurs?"
"But we work here," I argued.
"Well, we be wimmin," she declared, drawing a pinch of snuff into her
nostrils in a manner that indicated finality.
"But if it isn't good enough for a man, it isn't good enough for us,
even if we are women!" I persisted.
She looked at me half in astonishment, half in suspicion at my daring to
question the time-honored order of things. Economics could make no
appeal to her intelligence, and shooting a glance out of her hard old
black eyes, she replied with a logic that permitted no gainsaying.
"Love of Mary! if yez don't like yer job, ye can git out. Sure and we
don't take on no airs around here!"
At twelve the noise ceased, and a shrill whistle ushered in the
half-hour's respite. The effect of that raucous shriek was as solemn, as
awe-inspiring, for the first moment, as the ringing of the Angelus bell
in a Catholic country-side. For one moment everybody stood motionless
and mute, the women with arms akimbo on aching hips, the black washers
with drooping, relaxed shoulders. Each tortured frame seemed to heave
with an inaudible "Thank God!" and then we slowly scattered in all
directions--some to the cloak-room, where the lunches were stored along
with the wraps, some down the stairs into the street.
On this day the one-eyed girl and I found a bundle of clothes large
enough for two to sit on, and shared our lunch. For half a ham sandwich
she gave me a piece of cold sausage, and I gave her a dill pickle for a
greasy doughnut. The inevitable bottle of "pop" neither of us was able
to open until the foreman came along and lent his assistance. He
lingered a moment to talk the usual inanities that pass between a
democratic foreman and a couple of new girls. Under his jovial exterior
there seemed to be a vein of seriousness, amounting almost to sadness
when one looked at his well-modeled face and his steady gray eyes. Tall
and pale and prematurely bent, he had a certain distinction, as if he
had been cut out for better things. His manner had lost all the easy
familiarity of a few hours before, and he asked us in the kindest tone
possible how we liked the work, and heartened us with the assurance that
it wouldn't be nearly so hard in a few days, telling us to "stand
slack-like" and see if it didn't make the pain in our backs better. By
slack-like he meant stoop-shouldered, as everybody grows sooner or later
in a laundry.
The foreman's hygienic lecture was interrupted by the warning rumble of
the awakening machinery, and we scurried back to our table to make
practical test of his theory. We followed it to the letter, but, like
every other palliative of pain, it soon lost its virtue, and the long
afternoon was one of unspeakable agony. There were now not only aching
backs and arms and legs, but feet parboiled to a blister on the burning
floors. The air was rent with lamentations, and before long my
side-partner and I had also shed our shoes. By four o'clock everybody
had sunk into a state of apathetic quiet, and even the exuberant Queen
lost something of her vivaciousness, and attended strictly to the
business of goading us on to our tasks.
"We're two days behind with them hospital sheets," she screamed to one
relay; "S---- Hotel Barber Shop got to go out to-night," which
information brought groans from Mrs. Mooney.
"Mother of God!" she cried. "Sure and that means nine o'clock to-night."
"Aren't we going to get out at six?" asked the one-eyed girl, while I
glanced dismally at the never-ending train of trucks that kept rolling
out upon the washers' platform, faster now than at any other time of the
day.
"God love ye! dearie, no," returned Mrs. Mooney. "Ye'll never get
outside _this_ shop at six any night, unless ye're carried out dead.
We're in luck to get out as early as eight."
"Every night?"
"Sure, every night exceptin' Saturday, and then it's twelve to
half-past one."
"Oh, that's not so bad if you have a half-holiday."
"Half-holiday!" echoed Mrs. Mooney. "Will ye listen to that! A
half-holiday, indeed!" Then the mocking voice grew kinder. "Sure and
it's every minute of twelve o'clock or a half-hour into Sunday mornin'
afore you ever see the outside of this place of a Saturday in
summer-time, with all the washin' and ironin' for the summer hotels and
the big bugs as is at the sea-shore."
"Youse ain't got no kick coming," said one of the Ginney girls. "Youse
gets six cents an hour overtime, and youse 'll be mighty glad to make
that exter money!"
Mrs. Mooney glared viciously at the interlopers. "Yes, and if it wasn't
for the likes of yez Ginnies that 'll work for nothing and live in
pig-pens, the likes of us white people wouldn't have to work nights."
"Well I made ninety-six cents' overtime last week," spoke up the silent
fat woman in the under-petticoat, "and I was thankful to the Lord to get
it."
Of the two hours or more that followed I have only a hazy recollection
of colored men bending over the pungent foam, of straining, sweating
women dragging their trucks round and round the great steaming-room. I
remembered nothing whatever of the moment when the agony was ended and
we were released for the day. Up to a certain dim borderland I remember
that my back ached and that my feet dragged heavily over the burning
floor, two pieces of boiling flesh. I do remember distinctly, however,
suddenly waking up on Third Avenue as I was walking past a delicatessen
store, and looking straight into the countenance of a pleasant-faced
woman. I must have walked right into her, for she seemed amused, and
went on her way laughing at something--probably my look of surprise as
the impact brought me suddenly to full consciousness. A clock was
hanging in the delicatessen-store window, and the hour-hand stood at
nine. A cooling sea-breeze was blowing up from the south, and as I
continued my walk home I realized that I had just passed out of a sort
of trance,--a trance superinduced by physical misery,--a merciful
subconscious condition of apathy, in which my soul as well as my body
had taken refuge when torture grew unbearable.
XVI
IN WHICH IT IS PROVED TO ME THAT THE DARKEST HOUR COMES JUST BEFORE THE
DAWN
The next morning I asked Mrs. Mooney what time it was when we left the
laundry the evening before, and she said half-past eight. Then I
recounted the strange experience of the trance, which did not arouse the
interest I had expected.
"That's nothing. That's the way we all get sometimes," she declared. "If
we didn't get into them trance-spells there'd be none of us workin' here
at all, at all."
"Yes, indeed," said a prayerful voice. "Praise God, it's one of his
blessid pervisions to help us bear our crosses."