The Woman Who Toils Part 20

During the time we worked together she had cleaned seventeen cases of shoes.

In this shop it was hotter than in Parsons'. We sweltered at our work.

Once a case of shoes was cleaned, I wrote my initial "B" on the tag and rolled the crate across the floor to the man next me, who took it into his active charge.

The foreman came to me many times to inspect, approve and encourage. He was a model teacher and an indefatigable superintendent. Just how far personal, and just how far human, his kindness, who can say?

"You've been a presser long at the shoe-shops?"

"No."

"I like your pluck. When a girl has never had to work, and takes hold the way you do, I admire it. You will get along all right."

"Thank you; perhaps I won't, though."

"Now, don't get nervous. I am nervous myself," he said; "I know how that is."

On his next visit he asked me: "Where you goin'; to when you get out of here to-night?"

I told him that I was all right--that I had a place to stay.

"If you're hard up, don't get discouraged; come to me."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "FANCY GUMMING."

Mrs. T earns $8 or $9 a week. Her husband also works in a factory, and between them they have made enough to build a pretty little cottage]

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ALL-AROUND, EXPERIENCED HAND.

Mrs. F., who has worked in the factory more than twenty years, once as a forewoman, now earns only $5 or $6 a week]

I thanked him again and said that I could not take charity.

"Nonsense! I don't call it charity! If I was hard put, don't you s'pose I'd go to the next man if he offered me what I offer you? The world owes you a livin'."

When the foreman had left me I turned to look at "Bobby." She was in the act of lifting to her lips a gla.s.s of what was supposed to be water.

"You're not going to drink that!" I gasped, horrified. "Where did you get it?"

"Oh, I drawed it awhile ago," she said.

It had stood gathering microbes in the room, visible ones evidently, for a sc.u.m had formed on the gla.s.s that looked like stagnant oil. She blew the stuff back and drank long. Her accent was so bad and her English so limited I took her to be a foreigner beyond doubt. She proved to be an American. She had worked in factories all her life, since she was eight years old, and her brain was stunted.

At dinner time, when I left Marches', I had stood, without sitting down once, for five hours, and according to Bobby's computation I had made the large sum of twenty-five cents, having cleaned a little more than one hundred shoes. To all intents, at least for the moment, my hands were ruined. At Weyman's restaurant I went in with my fellow workwomen and men.

Weyman's restaurant smells very like the steerage in a vessel. The top floor having burned out a few weeks before, the ceiling remained blackened and filthy. The place was so close and foul-smelling that eating was an ordeal. If I had not been so famished, it would have been impossible for me to swallow a mouthful. I bought soup and beans, and ate, in spite of the inconveniences, ravenously, and paid for my dinner fifteen cents. Most of my neighbours took one course, stew or soup. I rose half-satisfied, dizzy from the fumes and the bad air. I am safe in saying that I never smelled anything like to Weyman's, and I hope never to again. Never again shall I hear food and drink discussed by the _gourmet_--discuss, indeed, with him over his repast--but there shall rise before me Weyman's restaurant, low-ceiled, foul, crowded to overflowing. I shall see the diners bend edged appet.i.tes to the unpalatable food. These Weyman patrons, mark well, are the rich ones, the swells of labour--able to squander fifteen to twenty cents on their stew and tea. There are dozens, you remember, still in the unaired fourth and fifth stories--at "lunching" over their sandwiches. Far more vivid, more poignant even must be to me the vision of "Bobby." I shall see her eat her filthy sandwich with her blackened hands, see her stoop to blow the sc.u.m of deadly matter from her typhoid-breeding gla.s.s.

In Lynn, unless she boards at home, a girl's living costs her at best $3.75 a week. If she be of the average[4] her month's earnings are $32. Reduce this by general expenses and living and her surplus is $16, to earn which she has toiled 224 hours. You will recall that there are, out of the 22,000 operatives in Ma.s.sachusetts, 5,000 who make under $5 a week. I leave the reader to compute from this the luxuries and possible pleasures consistent with this income.

[Footnote 4: Lynn's average wages are $8 per week.]

A word for the swells of the trade, for swells exist. One of my companions at 28 Viger Street made $14 a week. Her expenses were $4; she therefore had at her disposition about $40 a month. She had no family--_every cent of her surplus she spent on her clothes_.

"I like to look down and see myself dressed nice," she said; "it makes me feel good. I don't like myself in poor clothes."

She _was_ well-dressed--her furs good, her hat charming. We walked to work side by side, she the lady of us. Of course she belongs to the Union. Her possible illness is provided for; her death will bring $100 to a distant cousin. She is only tired out, thin, undeveloped, pale, that's all. She is almost a capitalist, and extremely well dressed.

Poor attire, if I can judge by the reception I met with in Lynn, influences only those who by reason of birth, breeding and education should be above such things. In Viger Street I was more simply clad than my companions. My aspect called forth only sisterhood and kindness.

Fellowship from first to last, fellowship from their eyes to mine, a spark kindled never to be extinguished. The morning I left my tenement lodging Mika took my hand at the door.

"Good-by." Her eyes actually filled. "I'm awful sorry you're going. If the world don't treat you good come back to us."

I must qualify a little. One member of the working cla.s.s there was on whom my cheap clothes had a chilling effect--the spoiled creature of the traveling rich, a Pullman car porter on the train from Boston to New York! Although I called him first and purposely gave him my order in time, he viewed me askance and served me the last of all. As I watched my companions in their furs and handsome attire eat, whilst I sat and waited, my woolen gloves folded in my lap, I wondered if any one of the favoured was as hungry, as famished as the presser from Parsons', the cleaner from Marches'.

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

CHAPTER VIII

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

THE MILL VILLAGE

Columbia, South Carolina, of course is conscious that there are mills without its city precincts. It is proud of the manufacture that gives the city precedence and commercial value all over the world. The trolley runs to the mills empty, as a rule, after the union depot is pa.s.sed.

Frankly, what is there to be seen in these dusty suburbs? Entry to the mills themselves is difficult, if not absolutely impossible. And that which forms the background for the vast buildings, the Mill Village, is a section to be shunned like the plague. Plague is not too strong a word to apply to the pest-ridden, epidemic-filled, filthy settlement where in this part of the country the mill-hand lives, moves and has his being, horrible honeycomb of lives, shocking morals and decency.

Around Columbia there lie five mills and their respective settlements--Excelsior, the Granton, Calcutta, the Richland and the Capital City. Each of these mills boasts its own so-called town. When these people are free on Sat.u.r.day afternoon and Sunday they are too exhausted to do anything but turn into their hovels to sleep. At most on Sat.u.r.day afternoons or Sundays they board a trolley and betake themselves to a distant park which, in the picturesque descriptions of Columbia, reads like an Arcadia and is in reality desolation.

The mill-hands are not from the direct section of Columbia. They are strangers brought in from "the hills" by the agents of the company, who go hither and thither through the different parts of the country describing to the poor whites and the hill dwellers work in the mills as a way to riches and success. Filled with dreams of gain and possessions, with hopes of decent housing and schooling for their children, they leave their distant communities and troop to the mills. These immigrants are picturesque, touching to see. They come with all they own in the world on their backs or in their hands; penniless; burrs and twigs often in the hair of the young girls. They are hatless, barefooted, ignorant; innocent for the most part--and hopeful! What the condition of these labourers is after they have tested the promises of the manufacturer and found them empty bubbles can only be understood and imagined when one has seen their life, lived among them, worked by their side, and comprehended the tragedy of this population--a floating population, going from Granton to Excelsior, from Excelsior to Richland, hither and thither, seeking--seeking better conditions. They have no affiliation with the people of the town; they are looked down upon as sc.u.m: and in good sooth, for good reason, sc.u.m they are!

It is spring, warm, gracious. This part of the world seems to be well-nigh treeless! There is no generous foliage, but wherever there are branches to bear it the first green has started out, delicate, tender and beautiful.