The Woman Who Toils Part 10

Mrs. Brown and I, being in the majority as opposed to this autocrat, remain placid. A current of understanding exists between us. Miss Arnold, on the other hand, finds our ignorance a flattering background for her learning and adventures. She is so obviously a woman of the world on the tenement horsehair sofa.

"In case you don't like your work," she Lady Bountifuls me, "I can get you a stylish place as maid with some society people just out of Chicago--friends of mine, an elegant family."

"I don't care to live out," I respond, thanking her. "I like my Sundays and my evenings off."

Mrs. Brown p.r.i.c.ks up her ears at this, and I notice that thereafter she keeps close inquiry as to how my Sundays and evenings are spent.

But the bell rings. Miss Arnold is called for by friends to play on the piano at an evening entertainment. Mrs. Brown and I, being left alone, begin a conversation of the personal kind, which is the only resource among the poor. If she had had any infirmity--a wooden leg or a gla.s.s eye--she would naturally have begun by showing it to me, but as she had been spared intact she chose second best.

"I've had lots of shocks," she said, rocking back and forth in a squeaky rocking-chair. The light from over the way flickered and gleamed. Mrs.

Brown's broad, yellow face and gray hair were now brilliant, now somber, as she rocked in and out of the silver rays. Her voice was a metallic whine, and when she laughed against her regular, even, false teeth there was a sound like the mechanical yelp of a toy cat. Married at sixteen, her whole life had been Brown on earth below and G.o.d in His heaven above. Childless, she and Brown had spent over fifty years together. It was natural in the matter of shocks the first she should tell me about was Brown's death. The story began with "a breakfast one Sunday morning at nine o'clock.... Brown always made the fire, raked down the ashes, set the coffee to boil, and when the toast and eggs were ready he called me. And that wasn't one morning, mind you--it was every morning for fifty years. But this particular morning I noticed him speaking strange; his tongue was kind o' thick. He didn't hardly eat nothing, and as soon as I'd done he got up and carried the ashes downstairs to dump 'em. When he come up he seemed dizzy. I says to him, 'Don't you feel good?' but he didn't seem able to answer. He made like he was going to undress. He put his hand in his pocket for his watch, and he put it in again for his pocketbook; but the second time it stayed in--he couldn't move it no more; it was dead and cold when I touched it. He leaned up against the wall, and I tried to get him over on to the sofa. When I looked into his eyes I see that he was gone. He couldn't stand, but I held on to him with all my force; I didn't let his head strike as he went down. _When he fell we fell together_." Her voice was choked; even now after three years as she told the story she could not believe it herself.

Presently when she is calm again she continues the recital of her shocks--three times struck by lightning and once run over. Her simple descriptions are straightforward and dramatic. As she talks the wind blows against the windows, the shutters rattle and an ugly white china k.n.o.b, against which the curtains are draped, falls to the floor.

Tenderly, amazed, she picks it up and looks at it.

"Brown put that up," she says; "there hasn't no hand touched it since his'n."

Proprietor of this house in which she lives, Mrs. Brown is fairly well off. She rents one floor to an Italian family, one to some labourers, and one to an Irishman and his wife who get drunk from time to time and rouse us in the night with tumult and scuffling. She has a way of disappearing for a week or more and returning without giving any account of herself. Relations are strained, and Mrs. Brown in speaking of her says:

"I don't care what trouble I was in, I wouldn't call in that Irish woman. I don't have anything to do with her. I'd rather get the Dago next door." And hereafter follows a mild tirade against the Italians--the same sentiments I have heard expressed before in the labouring centres.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHICAGO TYPES]

"They're kind folks and good neighbours," Mrs. Brown explains, "but they're different from us. They eat what the rest of us throw away, and there's no work they won't do. They're putting money aside fast; most of 'em owns their own houses; but since they've moved into this neighbourhood the price of property's gone down. I don't have nothing to do with 'em. We don't any of us. They're not like us; they're different."

Without letting a day elapse I started early the following morning in search of a new job. The paper was full of advertis.e.m.e.nts, but there was some stipulation in each which narrowed my possibilities of getting a place, as I was an unskilled hand. There was, however, one simple "Girls wanted!" which I answered, prepared for anything but an electric sewing machine.

The address took me to a more fashionable side of the city, near the lake; a wide expanse of pale, shimmering water, it lay a refreshing horizon for eyes long used to poverty's quarters. Like a sea, it rolled white-capped waves toward the sh.o.r.e from its far-away emerald surface where sail-freighted barks traveled at the wind's will. Free from man's disfiguring touch, pure, immaculate, it appeared bridelike through a veil of morning mist. And at its very brink are the turmoil and confusion of America's giant industries. In less than an hour I am receiving wages from a large picture frame company in East Lake Street.

Once more I have made the observation that men are more agreeable bosses than women. The woman, when she is not exceptionally disagreeable, like Frances, is always annoying. She bothers and nags; things must be done her way; she enjoys the legitimate minding of other people's business.

Aiming at results only, the masculine mind is more tranquil. Provided you get your work done, the man boss doesn't care what methods you take in doing it. For the woman boss, whether you get your work done or not, you must do it her way. The overseer at J.'s picture frame manufactory is courteous, friendly, considerate. I have a feeling that he wishes me to cooperate with him, not to be terrorized and driven to death by him.

My spirits rise at once, my ambition is stimulated, and I desire his approval. The work is all done by the piece, he explains to me, telling me the different prices. The girls work generally in teams of three, dividing profits. Nothing could be more modern, more middle-cla.s.s, more popular, more philistine than the production of J.'s workrooms. They are the cheap imitations fed to a public hungry for luxury or the semblance of it. Nothing is genuine in the entire shop. Water colours are imitated in chromo, oils are imitated in lithograph, white carved wood frames are imitated in applications of pressed bra.s.s. Great works of art are belittled by processes cheap enough to be within reach of the poorest pocket. Framed pictures are turned out by the thousand dozens, every size, from the smallest domestic scene, which hangs over the baby's crib in a Harlem flat, to the large wedding-present size placed over the piano in the front parlour. The range of subjects covers a familiar list of comedies or tragedies--the partings before war, the interior behind prison bars, the game of marbles, the friendly cat and dog, the chocolate girl, the skipper and his daughter, etc., etc.

My job is easy, but slow. With a hammer and tacks I fasten four tin mouldings to the four corners of a gilt picture frame. Twenty-five cents for a hundred is the pay given me, and it takes me half a day to do this many; but my comrades don't allow me to get discouraged.

"You're doing well," a red-haired _vis-a-vis_ calls to me across the table. And the foreman, who comes often to see how I am getting along, tells me that the next day we are to begin team-work, which pays much better.

The hours are ten a day: from seven until five thirty, with twenty-five minutes at noon instead of half an hour. The extra five minutes a day mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off at five on Sat.u.r.days.

The conversation around me leads me to suppose that my companions are not downtrodden in any way, nor that they intend letting work interfere with happiness. They have in their favour the most blessed of all gifts--youth. The tragic faces one meets with are of the women breadwinners whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children in whom physical fatigue arrests development and all possibility of pleasure.

My present team-mates and those along the rest of the room are Americans between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full of unconscious hope for the future, which is natural in healthy, well-fed youth, taking their work cheerily as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they can have more clothes and more diversions during their leisure hours.

The profitable job given us on the following day is monotonous and dirty, but we net $1.05 each. There is a mechanical roller which pa.s.ses before us, carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of coloured paper covered with glue. My _vis-a-vis_ and I lay the palms of our right hands on to the glue surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on the table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board. The boss of the team fixes the two sheets together with a brush which she manipulates skilfully. We are making in this way the stiff backs which hold the pictures into their frames. When we have fallen into the proper swing we finish one hundred sheets every forty-five minutes. We could work more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at this rate, and it is so comfortable that conversation is not interrupted. The subjects are the same as elsewhere--dress, young men, entertainments. The girls have "beaux" and "steady beaux." The expression, "Who is she going with?" means who is her steady beau. "I've got Jim Smith _now_, but I don't know whether I'll keep him," means that Jim Smith is on trial as a beau and may become a "steady." They go to Sunday night subscription dances and arrive Monday morning looking years older than on Sat.u.r.day, after having danced until early morning. "There's nothing so smart for a ball," the mundane of my team tells us, "as a black skirt and white silk waist."

About ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle or a bit of cocoanut cake or some t.i.tbit from the lunch parcel which is opened seriously at twelve.

The light is good, the air is good, the room where we work is large and not crowded, the foreman is kind and friendly, the girls are young and cheerful; one can make $7 to $8 a week.

The conditions at J.'s are too favourable to be interesting, and, having no excuse to leave, I disappear one day at lunch time and never return to get my ap.r.o.n or my wages. I shall be obliged to draw upon the resources of the black silk bag, but before returning to my natural condition of life I wish to try one more place: a printing job. There are quant.i.ties of advertis.e.m.e.nts in the papers for girls needed to run presses of different sorts, so on the very afternoon of my self-dismissal I start through the hot summer streets in search of a situation. On the day when my appearance is most forlorn I find policemen always as officially polite as when I am dressed in my best.

Other people of whom I inquire my way are sometimes curt, sometimes compa.s.sionate, seldom indifferent, and generally much nicer or not nearly as nice as they would be to a rich person. Poor old women to whom I speak often call me "dear" in answering.

Under the trellis of the elevated road the "cables" clang their way.

Trucks and automobiles, delivery wagons and private carriages plunge over the rough pavements. The sidewalks are crowded with people who are dressed for business, and who, whether men or women, are a business type; the drones who taste not of the honey stored in the hives which line the streets and tower against the blue sky, veiling it with smoke.

The orderly rush of busy people, among whom I move toward an address given in the paper, is suddenly changed into confusion and excitement by the bell of a fire-engine which is dragged clattering over the cobbles, followed closely by another and another before the sound of the horses'

hoofs have died away. Excitement for a moment supersedes business. The fire takes precedence before the office, and a crowd stands packed against policemen's arms, gazing upward at a low brick building which sends forth flames hotter than the brazen sun, smoke blacker than the perpetual veil of soot.

I compare the dingy gold number over the burning door with the number in print on the newspaper slip held between my thumb and forefinger.

Decidedly this is not one of my lucky days. The numbers correspond. But there are other addresses and I collect a series of replies. The employer in a box factory on the West Side takes my address and promises to let me know if he has a vacancy for an unskilled hand. Another boss printer, after much urging on my part, consents to give me a trial the following Monday at three dollars a week. A kindly forelady in a large printing establishment on Wabash Avenue sends me away because she wants only trained workers. "I'm real sorry," she says. "You're from the East, aren't you? I notice you speak with an accent."

By this time it is after three in the afternoon; my chances are diminishing as the day goes on and others apply before me. There is one more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a girl to feed a Gordon press. I have never heard of a Gordon press, but I make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a job for the very next day. The stairway is dingy and irregular. My spirits are not buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room with a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist, sits on a high stool overlooking the office. Three portly men, fat, well nourished, evidently of one family, are installed behind yellow ash desks, each with a lady typewriter at his right hand. I go timidly up to the fattest of the three. He is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling the heat painfully. He pretends to be very busy and hardly looks up when I say:

"I seen your ad. in the paper this morning."

"You're rather late," is his answer. "I've got two girls engaged already."

"Too late!" I say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a minute while he looks at me. I profit by this moment, and, changing from tragedy to a good-humoured smile, I ask:

"Say, are you sure those girls'll come? You can't always count on us, you know."

He laughs at this. "Have you ever run a Gordon press?"

"No, sir; but I'm awful handy."

"Where have you been working?"

"At J.'s in Lake Street."

"What did you make?"

"A dollar a day."

"Well, you come in to-morrow about eleven and I'll tell you then whether I can give you anything to do."

"Can't you be sure now?"

Truly disappointed, my voice expresses the eagerness I feel.

"Well," the fat man says indulgently, "you come in to-morrow morning at eight and I'll give you a job."

The following day I begin my last and by far my most trying apprenticeship.

The noise of a single press is deafening. In the room where I work there are ten presses on my row, eight back of us and four printing machines back of them. On one side of the room only are there windows.

The air is heavy with the sweet, stifling smell of printer's ink and cheap paper. A fine rain of bronze dust sifts itself into the hair and clothes of the girls at our end of the room, where they are bronzing coloured advertis.e.m.e.nts. The work is all done standing; the hours are from seven until six, with half an hour at noon, and holiday at one thirty on Sat.u.r.days. It is to _feed_ a machine that I am paid three dollars a week. The expression is admirably chosen. The machine's iron jaws yawn for food; they devour all I give, and when by chance I am slow they snap hungrily at my hand and would crush my fingers did I not s.n.a.t.c.h them away, feeling the first cold clutch. It is nervous work.

Each leaf to be printed must be handled twice; 5,000 circulars or bill-heads mean 10,000 gestures for the printer, and this is an afternoon's work.

Into the square marked out for it by steel guards the paper must be slipped with the right hand, while the machine is open; with the left hand the printed paper must be pulled out and a second fitted in its place before the machine closes again. What a master to serve is this noisy iron mechanism animated by steam! It gives not a moment's respite to the worker, whose thoughts must never wander from her task. The girls are pale. Their complexions without exception are bad.

We are bossed by men. My boss is kind, and, seeing that I am ambitious, he comes now and then and prints a few hundred bill-heads for me. There is some complaining _sotto voce_ of the other boss, who, it appears, is a hard taskmaster. Both are very young, both chew tobacco and expectorate long, brown, wet lines of tobacco juice on to the floor.

While waiting for new type I get into conversation with the boss of ill-repute. He has an honest, serious face; his eyes are evidently more accustomed to judging than to trusting his fellow beings. He is communicative.