Prisoners of Poverty Part 9

"When I began," said the first, "father was alive, and I used what I earned just for dressing myself. We were up at Morrisania, and I came down every day. I was in the worsted and fancy department at D----'s, and I had such a good eye for matching and choosing that they seemed to think everything of me. But then father fell sick. He was a painter, and had painter's colic awfully and at last paralysis. Then he died finally and left mother and me, and she's in slow consumption and can't do much.

I earned seven dollars a week because I'd learned fancy work and did some things evenings for the store, and we should have got along very well. We'd had to move out a little farther, to the place mother was born in, because rent was cheaper and she could never stand the city.

But this is the way it worked. I have to be at the store at eight o'clock. The train that leaves home at seven gets me to the store two minutes after eight, but though I've explained this to the manager he says I've got to be at the store at eight, and so, summer and winter, I have to take the train at half-past six and wait till doors are open.

It's the same way at night. The store closes at six, and if I could leave then I could catch an express train that would get me home at seven. The rules are that I must stop five minutes to help the girls cover up the goods, and that just hinders my getting the train till after seven, so that I am not home till eight."

I looked at the girl more attentively. She was colorless and emaciated, and, when not excited by speaking, languid and heavy.

"Are you sure that you have explained the thing clearly so that the manager understands?" I asked.

"More than once," the girl answered, "but he said I should be fined if I were not there at eight. Then I told him that the girls at my counter would be glad to cover up my goods, and if he would only let me go at six it would give me a little more time for mother. I sit up late anyway to do things she can't, for we live in two rooms and I sew and do a good many things after I go home."

Inquiry a day or two later showed that her story was true in every detail and also that she was a valuable a.s.sistant, one of the best among a hundred or so employed. The firm gives largely to charitable objects, and pays promptly, and at rates which, if low, are no lower than usual; but they continue to exact this seven minutes' service from one whose faithfulness might seem to have earned exemption from a purely arbitrary rule--in such a case mere tyranny. The girl had offered to give up her lunch hour, but the manager refused; and she dared not speak again for fear of losing her place.

"After all, she's better off than I am or lots of others," said one who sat near her. "I'm down in the bas.e.m.e.nt at M----'s, and forty others like me, and about forty little girls. There's gas and electric light both, but there isn't a breath of air, and it's so hot that after an hour or two your head feels baked and your eyes as if they would fall out. The dull season--that's from spring to fall--lasts six months, and then we work nine and a half hours and Sat.u.r.days thirteen. The other six months we work eleven hours, and holiday time till ten and eleven. I'm strong. I'm an old hand and somehow stand things, but I've a cousin at the ribbon counter, the very best girl in the world, I do believe. She always makes the best of things, but this year it did seem as if the whole town was at that counter. They stood four and five deep. She was penned in with the other girls, a dozen or two, with drawers and cases behind and counter in front, and there she stood from eight in the morning till ten at night, with half an hour off for dinner and for supper. She could have got through even that, but you see there has to be steady pa.s.sing in that narrow s.p.a.ce, and she was knocked and pushed, first by one and then by another, till she was sore all over; and at last down she dropped right there, not fainting, but sort of gone, and the doctor says she's most dead and can't go back, he doesn't know when.

Down there in the bas.e.m.e.nt the girls have to put on blue gla.s.ses, the glare is so dreadful, but they don't like to have us. The only comfort is you're with a lot and don't feel lonesome. I can't bear to do anything alone, no matter what it is."

A girl with clear dark eyes and a face that might have been almost beautiful but for its haggard, worn-out expression, turned from the table where she had been writing and smiled as she looked at the last speaker.

"That is because you happen to be made that way," she said. "I am always happier when I can be alone a good deal, but of course that's never possible, or almost never. I shall want the first thousand years of my heaven quite to myself, just for pure rest and a chance to think."

"I don't know anything about heaven," the last speaker said hastily, "but I'm sure I hope there's purgatory at least for some of the people I've had to submit to. I think a woman manager is worse than a man. I've never had trouble anywhere and always stay right on, but I've wanted to knock some of the managers down, and it ought to have been done. Just take the new superintendent. We loved the old one, but this one came in when she died, and one of the first things she did was to discharge one of the old girls because she didn't smile enough. Good reason why. She'd lost her mother the week before and wasn't likely to feel much like smiling. And then she went inside the counters and pitched out all the old shoes the girls had there to make it easier to stand. It 'most kills you to stand all day in new shoes, but Miss T---- pitched them all out and said she wasn't going to have the store turned into an old-clothes shop."

"Well, it's better than lots of them, no matter what she does," said another. "I was at H----'s for six months, and there you have to ask a man for leave every time it is necessary to go upstairs, and half the time he would look and laugh with the other clerks. I'd rather be where there are all women. They're hard on you sometimes, but they don't use foul language and insult you when you can't help yourself."

This last complaint has proved for many stores a perfectly well-founded one. Wash-rooms and other conveniences have been for common use, and many sensitive and shrinking girls have brought on severe illnesses arising solely from dread of running this gantlet.

Here and there the conditions of this form of labor are of the best, but as a whole the saleswoman suffers not only from long-continued standing, but from bad air, ventilation having no place in the construction of the ordinary store. Separate dressing-rooms are a necessity, yet are only occasionally found, the system demanding that no outlay shall be made when it is possible to avoid it. Overheating and overcrowding, hastily eaten and improper food, are all causes of the weakness and anaemic condition so perceptible among shop and factory workers, these being divided into many cla.s.ses. For a large proportion it can be said that they are tolerably educated, so far as our public-school system can be said to educate, and are hard-working, self-sacrificing, patient girls who have the American knack of dressing well on small outlay, and who have tastes and aspirations far beyond any means of gratifying them. For such girls the working-women's guilds and the Friendly societies--these last of English origin--have proved of inestimable service, giving them the opportunities long denied. In such guilds many of them receive the first real training of eye and hand and mind, learn what they can best do, and often develop a practical ability for larger and better work.

Even in the lowest order filling the cheaper stores there is always a proportion eager to learn. But here, as in all ordinary methods of learning, the market is overstocked, and even the best-trained girl may sometimes fail of employment. Now and then one turns toward household service, but the ma.s.s prefer any cut in wages and any form of privation to what they regard as almost a final degradation. A mult.i.tude of their views on this point are recorded and will in time find place.

In the mean time a minute examination of the causes that determine their choice and of the conditions surrounding it as a whole go to prove the justice of the conviction that penetrates the student of social problems. Again, the shop-girl as a cla.s.s demonstrates the fact that not with her but with the cla.s.s above her, through accident of birth or fortune, lies the real responsibility for the follies over which we make moan. The cheaper daily papers record in fullest detail the doings of that fashionable world toward which many a weak girl or woman looks with unspeakable longing; and the weekly "story papers" feed the flame with unending details of the rich marriage that lifted the poor girl into the luxury which stands to her empty mind as the sole thing to be desired in earth or heaven. She knows far better what const.i.tutes the life of the rich than the rich ever know of the life of the poor. From her post behind the counter the shop-girl examines every detail of costume, every air and grace of these women whom she despises, even when longing most to be one of them. She imitates where she can, and her cheap shoe has its French heel, her neck its tin dog-collar. Gilt rings and bracelets and bangles, frizzes and bangs and cheap tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of every order, swallow up her earnings. The imitation is often more effective than the real, and the girl knows it. She aspires to a "manicure" set, to an opera-gla.s.s, to anything that will simulate the life daily more pa.s.sionately desired; and it is small wonder that when sudden temptation comes and the door opens into that land where luxury is at least nearer, she falls an easy victim. The cla.s.s in which she finally takes rank is seldom recruited from sources that would seem most fruitful. The sewing-woman, the average factory worker, is devitalized to such an extent that even ambition dies and the brain barely responds to even the allurements of the weekly story paper. It is the cla.s.s but a grade removed, to whom no training has come from which strength or simplicity or any virtue of honest living could grow, that makes the army of women who have chosen degradation.

A woman, herself a worker, but large-brained and large-hearted beyond the common endowment, wrote recently of the dangers put in the way of the average shop or factory girl, imploring happy women living at ease to adopt simpler forms, or at least to ask what form of living went on below them. She wrote:--

"It may be urged that ignorant and inexperienced as these workers are, they see only the bubbles and the froth, the superficial glitter and exuberant overflow of pa.s.sing styles and social pleasures, and miss much, if not all, of the earnestness, the virtue, the charity, and the refinement which may belong to those they imitate, but with whom they seldom come in contact. This is the very point and purpose of this paper, to remonstrate against the injustice done to the women of wealth and leisure by their own carelessness and indifference, and to urge them to come down to those who cannot come up to them, to study them with as keen an interest as they themselves are studied,--to know how that other half lives."

"To know how that other half lives." That is the demand made upon woman and man alike. Once at least put yourselves in the worker's place, if it be but for half an hour, and think her thought and live her starved and dreary life. Then ask what work must be done to alter conditions, to kill false ideals, and vow that no day on earth shall pa.s.s that has not held some effort, in word or deed, to make true living more possible for every child of man. No mission, no guild, no sermon, has or can have power alone. Only in the determined effort of the individual, in individual understanding and renunciation forever of what has been selfish and mean and base, can humanity know redemption and walk at last side by side in that path where he who journeys alone finds no entrance, nor can win it till self has dropped away, and knowledge come that forever we are our brothers' keepers.

CHAPTER SIXTEENTH.

TWO HOSPITAL BEDS.

Why and how the money-getting spirit has become the ruler of American life and thought no a.n.a.lyzer of social conditions has yet made plain.

That New York might be monopolist in this respect could well be conceived, for the Dutch were traders by birthright and New Amsterdam arose to this one end. But why the Puritan colony, whose first act before even the tree stumps were brown in their corn-fields was the founding of a college, and whose corner-stone rested on a book,--why these people should have come to represent a spirit of bargaining and an apt.i.tude for getting on unmatched by the keenest-witted Dutchman hath no man yet told us.

The sharpest business men of the present are chiefly "Yankees;" and if "Jew" and "a hard bargain" are counted synonymes, "New-Englander" has equal claim to the place. The birthplace and home of all reform, New England is the home also of a greed born of hard conditions and developing a keenness unequalled by that of any other bargainer on earth. The Italian, the Greek, the Turk, find a certain aesthetic satisfaction in bargaining and do it methodically, but always picturesquely and with a relish unaffected by defeat; but with the Yankee it is a pa.s.sionate, absorbing desire, sharpening every line of the face and felt even in the turn of the head or shoulders, and in every line of the eager, restless figure. Success a.s.sured softens and modifies these tendencies. Defeat aggravates them. One meets many a man for whom it is plain that the beginning of life held unlimited faith that the great city meant a fortune, the sanguine conviction pa.s.sing gradually into the interrogative form. The fortune is still there. Thus far the conviction holds good, but his share in it has become more and more problematical. The flying and elusive shadow still holds for him the only real substance, but his hands have had no power to grasp or detain, and the most dogged determination gives way at last to the sense of hopeless failure. For this type may be the ending as cheap clerk or bookkeeper, with furtive attempts at speculation when a few dollars have been saved, or a retreat toward that remote West which has hidden effectually so many baffled and defeated lives. There may also come another ending, and the feverish, scheming soul lose its hold on the body, which has meant to it merely a means of getting and increasing money.

It is this latter fate that came to a man who would have no place in this record save for the fact that his last querulous and still-questioning days were lived side by side with a man who had also sought money, and having found it had chosen for it certain experimental uses by means of which siphon he was presently drained dry. For him also had been many defeats. A hospital ward held them both, and the two beds were side by side, the one representing a patience that never failed, yet something more than patience. For the face of this man bore no token of defeat. It was rather triumph that looked at moments from the clear eyes that had also an almost divine pity as they turned toward the neighbor who poured out his story between paroxysms of coughing, and having told it once, proceeded to tell it again, his sole and final satisfaction in life being the arraignment of all living. The visitor who came into the ward was pinned on the instant, the fiery eyes demanding the hearing which was the last gift time held for him. It was a common story often told, this slow, inevitable descent into poverty.

Its force lay in the condensed fury of the speaker, who looked on the men he had known as sworn conspirators against him, and cursed them in their going out and coming in with a relish that no argument could affect. What his neighbor might have to tell was a matter of the purest indifference. It was impossible even to ask his story; and it remained impossible until a day when arraignment was cut short and the disappointed, bitter soul pa.s.sed on to such conditions as it had made for itself.

"You've got the best of me. They all do," he said in dying, with a last turn of the sombre eyes toward his neighbor. "You ought to have gone first by a week, and there you are. But this time I guess it's just as well. I don't seem to want to fight any longer, and I'm glad I'm done.

It's your turn next. Good--"

The words had come with gasps between and long pauses. Here they stopped once for all. Good had found him; the only good for the child of earth, who, having failed to learn his lesson here, must try a larger school with a different system of training. The empty bed was not filled at once. A screen shut it off. There was time now to hear other words than the pa.s.sionate railings that had monopolized all time. The sick man mended a little, and in one of the days in which speech was easier gave this record of his forty years:--

"It's a fact, I believe, that the sons of reformers seldom walk in the same track. My father was one of the old Abolitionists, and an honest one, ready to give money when he could and any kind of work when he couldn't. It was a great cause. I cried over the negroes down South and went without sugar a year or so, and learned to knit so that I could knit some stockings for the small slaves my own size. But by the time I was eight years old it was plain enough to me that there were other kinds of slavery quite as bad, and that my own mother wore as heavy bonds as any of them. She was a farmer's wife, and from year's end to year's end she toiled and worked. She never had a cent of her own, for the b.u.t.ter money was consecrated to the cause, and she gave it gladly.

My father had no particular intention to be unkind. He was simply like a good two-thirds of the farmers I have known,--much more careful of his animals than of his wife. A woman was so much cooking and cleaning and b.u.t.ter-making force, and child-bearing an incident demanding as little notice as possible. It is because of that theory that I am five inches shorter than any of our tribe. My mother was a tall, slender woman, with a springy step and eyes as clear as a brook. I see them sometimes as I lie here at night.

"I said to myself when I was ten that I'd have things easier for her before she died. I said it straight ahead while I was working my way up in the village store, for I would not farm, and when she died I said it to her in the last hour I ever heard her voice: 'What I couldn't do for you, mother, I'll do for all women as long as I am on the earth.'

"I was eighteen then, and whichever way I turned some woman was having a hard time, and some brute was making it for her. I knew it was partly their own fault for not teaching their boys how to be unselfish and decent, but custom and tradition, the law and the prophets, were all against them. I watched it all I could, but I was deep in trying to get ahead and I did. Somehow, in spite of my dreams and my fancies, there was a money-making streak in me. It's a lost vein. You may search as you will and find no trace, but it was there once and gave good returns. I left the village at twenty-one and went to Philadelphia, and the small savings I took with me from my clerking soon began to roll up. I had the chance to go into a soap-factory; a queer change, but the old Quaker who owned it knew my father and wanted to do me a good turn, and by the time I had got the hang of it all I was junior partner and settled for life if I liked.

"Well, here it was again. This man was honest and clean. He meant to do fairly by all mankind, and he tried to. He had some secrets in his methods that made his soap the best in the market. The chief secret was honest ingredients, but it was famous. If you've ever been in a soap-factory you know what it is like. Every pound of it was wrapped in paper as fast as it cooled, and the cooling and cutting room was filled with girls who did the work. They were not the best order of girls. The wages a week were from three to five dollars, and they were at it from seven A. M. to six P. M. There was a good woman in the office,--a woman with a head as well as a heart,--and she did the directing and disciplining. It was no joke to keep peace if the cooling delayed and the creatures began squabbling together, but she managed it, and by night they were always meek enough. You're likely to be meek when you've carried soap ten pounds at a time ten hours a day, from the cutting table to the cooling table, across floors as slippery as gla.s.s or glare ice. They picked it up as it cooled, wrapped it in paper, and had it in boxes, five pounds to the minute, three hundred pounds an hour. The caustic soda in it first turned their nails orange-color and then it ate off their finger tips till they bled. They could not wear gloves, for that would have interfered with the packing.

"Now and then one cried, but only seldom. They were big, hearty girls.

They had to be to do that work, but my heart ached for them as they filed out at night, so worn that there was no life left for anything but to get home and into bed. Very few stayed on. The smart ones graduated into something better. The stupid ones fell back and tried something easier. But as I watched them and it came over me how untrained and helpless they were, and how every chance of learning was cut off by the long labor and the dead weariness, I said to myself that we owed them something: shorter hours; better wages; some sort of share in the money we were making. Friend Peter shook his head when I began to hint these things. 'They fare well enough,' he said. 'Thee must not get socialistic notions in thy head.' 'I know nothing about socialism,' I said. 'All I want is justice, and thee wants it too. Thee has cried out for it for the black brother and sister; why not for the white?'

"'Thee is talking folly,' he said and would make no other answer.

"It all weighed on me. Here was the money rolling in, or so it seemed to me. We did make it in a sure, comfortable fashion. I was well off at twenty-five, and better off every month; and I said to myself, the money would have a curse on it if those who helped to earn it had no share. I talked to the men in the boiling department. It takes brains to be a good soap-maker. We kept to the old ways, simply because what they call improvement in soap-making, like many another improvement, has been the cheapening the product by the addition of various articles that lower the quality. Experience has to teach. Theoretical knowledge isn't much use save as foundation. A man must use eyes and tongue, and watch for the critical moment in the finishing like a lynx.

"Well, I beat my head against that wall of obstinacy till head and heart were sore. It was enough to the old Quaker that he paid promptly and did honest work; and when I told him at last that his gains were as fraudulent as if he cheated deliberately, he said, 'Then thee need share them no longer. Go thy way for a hot-headed fool.'

"I went. There was an opening in New York, and I had every detail at my fingers' ends. I went in with a man a little older, who seemed to think as I did, and who did, till I made practical application of my theories.

I had studied everything to be had on the subject. I had mastered a language or two in my evenings, for I lived like a hermit; but now I began to talk with every business man, and try to understand why compet.i.tion was inevitable. I was in no haste. I admitted that men must be trained to co-operate, but I said, 'We shall never learn by waiting.

We must learn by trying.' I tried to bring in other soap-makers, and one or two listened; but most of them were using the cheap methods,--increasing the quant.i.ty and lowering the quality. Some of the men had come on to me from Philadelphia, and were bound to stay, but it was hard on them. They had to go into tenement-houses, for there were no homes for them such as building a.s.sociations in Philadelphia make possible for every workman.

But I took a house and divided it up and made it comfortable, and I lived on the lower floor myself, so that kept them contented. I fitted up a room for a reading-room, and twice a week had talks; not lectures, but talks where every man had a chance to speak five minutes if he would, and to ask questions. I coaxed the women to come. I wanted them to understand, and two or three took hold. I made a decent place for them to eat their dinners, and put these women in charge. I put in an oil-stove and a table and seats, and gave them coffee and tea at two cents a cup, and tried to have them care for the place. That has been done over and over by many an employer who pities his workers; and nine times out of ten the same result follows. The animal crops out. They were rough girls at any time, yet, taken one by one, behaved well enough. But I've seen boys and girls at a donation party throw cheese and what not on the carpet and rub it in deliberately, and I don't know that one need wonder that lunch-rooms in store or factory turn into pig-pens, and the few decent ones can make no headway.

"I spoke out to them all, but it was no more than the wind blowing, and at last even I gave it up. There was no conscience in them to touch.

They wanted shorter hours and more money, when they had got to the point of seeing that I was trying to help, but they had no notion of helping back. With my men it worked, and they talked down the women sometimes.

But when a bad year came,--for soap has its ups and downs like everything else,--most of them struck, and the wise ones could make no headway. 'It's a losing game,' my partner said; 'if you want to go on you must go on alone.'

"I did go on alone. He left and took his capital with him. The best men stayed with me and swore to take their chances. The soap was good, and I made a hit in one or two fancy kinds, but I could not compete with men who used mean material and turned out something that looked as well at half the price. My money melted away, and a fire--set, they told me, by a man I had discharged for long-continued dishonesty--finished me. I had the name of stirring up strife for the manufacturers, because I tried to teach my workers the principle of co-operation, and begged for it where I could. It hurt my business standing. Men felt that I must be a fool. I had worked for it with such absorption that I had had little time for any joy of life. I had neither wife nor child, though I longed for both.

I would not have ease and happiness alone. I wanted it for my fellows.

To-day it might be. Ten years ago it only the thought of a dreamer, and I made no headway.

"The fire left me stranded. I went in as superintendent of some new works, but went out in a month, for I could not consent to cheat, and fraud was in every pound sent out. I tried one place and another with the same result. Compet.i.tion makes honesty impossible. A man would admit it to me without hesitation, but would end: 'There's no other way. Don't be a fool. You can't stand out against a system.'

"'I will stand out if it starves me,' I said. 'I will not sell my soul for any man's hire. The time is coming when this rottenness must end.

Make one more to fight it now.'

"Men looked at me pitifully. 'I was throwing away chances,' they said.

'Why wouldn't I hear reason? We were in the world, not in Utopia.'

"'We are in the h.e.l.l we have made for all mankind,' I said. 'The only real world is the world which is founded on truth and justice.

Everything else falls away.'