The Woman Who Toils Part 5

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN

No place in America could have afforded better than Pittsburg a chance to study the factory life of American girls, the stimulus of a new country upon the labourers of old races, the fervour and energy of a people animated by hope and stirred to activity by the boundless opportunities for making money. It is the labourers' city _par excellence_; and in my preceding chapters I have tried to give a clear picture of factory life between the hours of seven and six, of the economic conditions, of the natural social and legal equipment of woman as a working ent.i.ty, of her physical, moral and esthetic development.

Now, since the time ticked out between the morning summoning whistle to that which gives release at night is not half the day, and only two-thirds of the working hours, my second purpose has been to find a place where the factory girl's own life could best be studied: her domestic, religious and sentimental life.

Somewhere in the western part of New York State, one of my comrades at the pickle works had told me, there was a town whose population was chiefly composed of mill-hands. The name of the place was Perry, and I decided upon it as offering the typical American civilization among the working cla.s.ses. New England is too free of grafts to give more than a single aspect; Pittsburg is an international bazaar; but the foundations of Perry are laid with bricks from all parts of the world, held together by a strong American cement.

Ignorant of Perry further than as it exists, a black spot on a branch of a small road near Buffalo, I set out from New York toward my destination on the Empire State Express. There was barely time to descend with my baggage at Rochester before the engine had started onward again, trailing behind it with world-renowned rapidity its freight of travelers who, for a few hours under the car's roof, are united by no other common interest than that of journeying quickly from one spot to another, where they disperse never to meet again. My Perry train had an altogether different character. I was late for it, but the brakeman saw me coming and waved to the engineer not to start until my trunk was checked and safely boarded like myself. Then we b.u.mped our way through meadows quickened to life by the soft spring air; we halted at crossroads to pick up stray travelers and shoppers; we unloaded plowing machines and shipped crates of live fowl; we waited at wayside stations with high-sounding names for family parties whose unpunctuality was indulgently considered by the occupants of the train.

My companions, chiefly women, were of the homely American type whose New England drawl has been modified by a mingling of foreign accents. They took advantage of this time for "visiting" with neighbours whom the winter snows and illnesses had rendered inaccessible. Their inquiries for each other were all kindliness and sympathy, and the peaceful, tolerant, uneventful way in which we journeyed from Rochester to Perry was a symbol of the way in which these good people had journeyed across life. Perry, the terminus of the line, was a frame station lodged on stilts in a sea of surrounding mud. When the engine had come to a standstill and ceased to pant, when the last truck had been unloaded, the baggage room closed, there were no noises to be heard except those that came from a neighbouring country upon whose peace the small town had not far encroached; the splash of a horse and buggy through the mud, a monotonous voice mingling with the steady tick of the telegraph machine, some distant barnyard chatter, and the mysterious, invisible stir of spring shaking out upon the air damp sweet odours calling the earth to colour and life. Descending the staircase which connected the railroad station with the hill road on which it was perched, I joined a man who was swinging along in rubber boots, with several farming tools, rakes and hoes, slung over his shoulder. A repugnance I had felt in resuming my toil-worn clothes had led me to make certain modifications which I feared in so small a town as Perry might relegate me to the cla.s.s I had voluntarily abandoned. The man in rubber boots looked me over as I approached, bag in hand, and to my salutation he replied:

"Going down to the mill, I suppose. There's lots o' ladies comes in the train every day now."

He was the perfection of tact; he placed me in one sentence as a mill-hand and a lady.

"I'll take you down as far as Main Street," he volunteered, giving me at once a feeling of kindly interest which "city folks" have not time to show.

We found our way by improvised crossings through broad, soft beds of mud. Among the branches of the sap-fed trees which lined the unpaved streets transparent b.a.l.l.s of gla.s.s were suspended, from which, as twilight deepened, a brilliant artificial light shot its rays, the perfection of modern invention, over the primitive, unfinished little town of Perry, which was all contrast and energy, crudity and progress.

"There's a lot of the girls left the mill yesterday," my companion volunteered. "They cut the wages, and some of the oldest hands got right out. There's more than a thousand of 'em on the pay-roll, but I guess you can make good money if you're ready to work."

We had reached Main Street, which, owing to the absence of a trolley, had retained a certain individuality. The rivers of mud broadened out into a sea, flanked by a double row of two-story, flat-roofed frame stores, whose monotony was interrupted by a hotel and a town hall. My guide stopped at a corner butcher shop. Its signboard was a couple of mild-eyed animals hanging head downward, presented informally, with their skins untouched, and having more the appearance of some ill-treated pets than future beef and bouillon for the Perry population.

"Follow the boardwalk!" was the simple command I received. "Keep right along until you come to the mill."

I presently fell in with a drayman, who was calling alternately to his horse as it sucked in and out of the mud and to a woman on the plank walk. She had on a hat with velvet and ostrich plumes, a black frock, a side bag with a lace handkerchief. She was not young and she wore spectacles; but there was something nervous about her step, a slight tremolo as she responded to the drayman, which suggested an adventure or the hope of it. The boardwalk, leading inevitably to the mill, announced our common purpose and saved us an introduction.

"Going down to get work?" was the question we simultaneously asked of each other. My companion, all eagerness, shook out the lace handkerchief in her side bag and explained:

"I don't have to work; my folks keep a hotel; but I always heard so much about Perry I thought I'd like to come up, and," she sighed, with a flirt of the lace handkerchief and a contented glance around at the rows of white frame houses, "I'm up now."

"Want board?" the drayman called to me. "You kin count on me for a good place. There's Doctor Meadows, now; he's got a nice home and he just wants two boarders."

The middle-aged woman with the gla.s.ses glanced up quickly.

"Doctor Meadows of t.i.ttihute?" she asked. "I wont go there; he's too strict. He's a Methodist minister. You couldn't have any fun at all."

I followed suit, denouncing Doctor Killjoy as she had, hoping that her nervous, frisky step would lead me toward the adventure she was evidently seeking.

"Well," the drayman responded indulgently, "I guess Mr. Norse will know the best place for you folks."

We had come at once to the factory and the end of the boardwalk. It was but a few minutes before Mr. Norse had revealed himself as the pivot, the human hub, the magnet around which the mechanism of the mill revolved and clung, sure of finding its proper balance. Tall, lank and meager, with a wrinkled face and a furtive mustache, Mr. Norse made his rounds with a list of complaints and comments in one hand, a pencil in the other and a black cap on his head which tipped, indulgent, attentive to hear and overhear. His manner was professional. He looked at us, placed us, told us to return at one o'clock, recommended a boarding-house, and, on his way to some other case, sent a small boy to accompany us on future stretches of boardwalk to our lodgings. The street we followed ended in a rolling hillside, and beyond was the mysterious blue that holds something of the infinite in its mingling of clouds and shadows. The Geneseo Valley lay near us like a lake under the sky, and silhouetted against it were the factory chimney and buildings.

The wood's edge came close to the town, whose yards prolong themselves into green meadows and farming lands. We knocked at a rusty screen door and were welcomed with the cordiality of the country woman to whom all folks are neighbours, all strangers possible boarders. The house, built without mantelpiece or chimney, atoned for this cheerlessness with a large parlour stove, whose black arms carried warmth through floor and ceiling. A table was spread in the dining-room. A loud-ticking clock with a rusty bell marked the hour from a shelf on the wall, and out of the kitchen, seen in vista, came a spluttering sound of frying food. Our hostess took us into the parlour. Several family pictures of stony-eyed women and men with chin beards, and a life-sized Frances Willard in chromo, looked down at our ensuing interview.

Board, lodging, heat and light we could have at $2.75 a week. Before the husky clock had struck twelve, I was installed in a small room with the middle-aged woman from Batavia and a second unknown roommate.

Now what, I asked myself, is the mill's attraction and what is the power of this small town? Its population is 3,346. Of these, 1,000 work in the knitting-mill, 200 more in a cutlery factory and 300 in various flour, b.u.t.ter, barrel, planing mills and salt blocks. Half the inhabitants are young hands. Not one in a hundred has a home in Perry; they have come from all western parts of the State to work. There are scarcely any children, few married couples and almost no old people. It is a town of youthful contemporaries, stung with the American's ambition for independence and adventure, charmed by the gaiety of being boys and girls together, with an ever possible touch of romance which makes the hardest work seem easy. Within the four board walls of each house, whose type is repeated up and down Perry streets, there is a group of factory employees boarding and working at the mill. Their names suggest a foreign parentage, but for several generations they have mingled their diverse energies in a common effort which makes Americans of them.

As I lived for several weeks among a group of this kind, who were fairly representative, I shall try to give, through a description of their life and conversation, their personalities and characteristics, their occupations out of working hours, a general idea of these unknown toilers, who are so amazingly like their more fortunate sisters that I became convinced the difference is only superficial--not one of kind but merely of variety. The Perry factory girl is separated from the New York society girl, not by a few generations, but by a few years of culture and training. In America, where tradition and family play an unimportant part, the great educator is the spending of money. It is through the purchase of possessions that the Americans develop their taste, declare themselves, and show their inherent capacity for culture. Give to the Perry mill-hands a free chance for growth, transplant them, care for them, and they will readily show how slight and how merely a thing of culture the difference is between the wild rose and the American beauty.

What were my first impressions of the hands who returned at noon under the roof which had extended unquestioning its hospitality? Were they a band of slaves, victims to toil and deprivation? Were they making the pitiful exchange of their total vitality for insufficient nourishment?

Did life mean to them merely the diminishing of their forces?

On the contrary, they entered gay, laughing young, a youth guarded intact by freedom and hope. What were the subjects of conversation pursued at dinner? Love, labour, the price paid for it, the advantages of town over country life, the neighbour and her conduct. What was the appearance of my companions? There was nothing in it to shock good taste. Their hands and feet were somewhat broadened by work, their skins were imperfect for the lack of proper food, their dresses were of coa.r.s.e material; but in small things the differences were superficial only. Was it, then, in big things that the divergence began which places them as a lower cla.s.s? Was it money alone that kept them from the places of authority? What were their ambitions, their perplexities? What part does self-respect play? How well satisfied are they, or how restless? What can we learn from them? What can we teach them?

We ate our dinner of boiled meat and custard pie and all started back in good time for a one o'clock beginning at the mill. For the s.p.a.ce of several hundred feet its expressionless red brick walls lined the street, implacable, silent. Within all hummed to the collective activity of a throng, each working with all his force for a common end. Machines roared and pounded; a fine dust filled the air--a cloud of lint sent forth from the friction of thousands of busy hands in perpetual contact with the shapeless anonymous garments they were fashioning. There were, on their way between the cutting-and the finishing-rooms, 7,000 dozen shirts. They were to pa.s.s by innumerable hands; they were to be held and touched by innumerable individuals; they were to be begun and finished by innumerable human beings with distinct tastes and likings, abilities and failings; and when the 7,000 dozen shirts were complete they were to look alike, and they were to look as though made by a machine; they were to show no trace whatever of the men and the women who had made them.

Here we were, 1,000 souls hurrying from morning until night, working from seven until six, with as little personality as we could, with the effort to produce, through an action purely mechanical, results as nearly as possible identical one to the other, and all to the machine itself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THEY TRIFLE WITH LOVE"]

What could be the result upon the mind and health of this frantic mechanical activity devoid of thought? It was this for which I sought an answer; it is for this I propose a remedy.

At the threshold of the mill door my roommate and I encountered Mr.

Norse. There was irony in the fates allotted us. She was eager to make money; I was indifferent. Mr. Norse felt her in his power; I felt him in mine. She was given a job at twenty-five cents a day and all she could make; I was offered the favourite work in the mill--shirt finishing, at thirty cents a day and all I could make; and when I shook my head to see how far I could exploit my indifference and said, "Thirty cents is too little," Mr. Norse's answer was: "Well, I suppose you, like the rest of us, are trying to earn a living. I will guarantee you seventy-five cents a day for the first two weeks, and all you can make over it is yours."

My apprenticeship began under the guidance of an "old girl" who had been five years in the mill. A dozen at a time the woolen shirts were brought to us, complete all but the adding of the linen strips in front where the b.u.t.tons and b.u.t.tonholes are st.i.tched. The price of this operation is paid for the dozen shirts five, five and a half and six cents, according to the complexity of the finish. My instructress had done as many as forty dozen in one day; she averaged $1.75 a day all the year around.

While she was teaching me the factory paid her at the rate of ten cents an hour.

A touch of the machine's pedal set the needle to st.i.tching like mad. A second touch in the opposite direction brought it to an abrupt standstill. For the five hours of my first afternoon session there was not an instant's harmony between what I did and what I intended to do. I sewed frantically into the middle of shirts. I watched my needle, impotent as it flew up and down, and when by chance I made a straight seam I brought it to so sudden a stop that the thread raveled back before my weary eyes. When my back and fingers ached so that I could no longer bend over the work, I watched my comrades with amazement. The machine was not a wild animal in their hands, but an instrument that responded with niceness to their guidance. Above the incessant roar and burring din they called gaily to each other, gossiping, chatting, telling stories. What did they talk about? Everything, except domestic cares. The management of an interior, housekeeping, cooking were things I never once heard mentioned. What were the favourite topics, those returned to most frequently and with surest interest? Dress and men. Two girls in the seaming-room had got into a quarrel that day over a packer, a fine looking, broad-shouldered fellow who had touched the hearts of both and awakened in each an emotion she claimed the right to defend.

The quarrel began lightly with an exchange of unpleasant comment; it soon took the proportions of a dispute which could not give itself the desired vent in words alone. The boss was called in. He made no attempt to control what lay beyond his power, but applying factory legislation to the case, he ordered the two Amazons to "register out" until the squabble was settled, as the factory did not propose to pay its hands for the time spent in fights. So the two girls "rang out" past the timekeeper and took an hour in the open air, hand to hand, fist to fist, which, as it happens to man, had its calming effect.

We st.i.tched our way industriously over the 7,000 dozen. Except for the moments when some girl called a message or shouted a conversation, there was nothing to occupy the mind but the vibrating, pulsing, pounding of the machinery. The body was shaken with it; the ears strained.

The little girl opposite me was a new hand. Her rosy cheeks and straight shoulders announced this fact. She had been five months in the mill; the other girls around her had been there two years, five years, nine years.

There were 150 of us at the long, narrow tables which filled the room.

By the windows the light and air were fairly good. At the centre tables the atmosphere was stagnant, the shadows came too soon. The wood's edge ran within a few yards of the factory windows. Between it and us lay the stream, the water force, the power that had called men to Perry. There, as everywhere in America, for an individual as for a place, the attraction was industrial possibilities. As Niagara has become more an industrial than a picturesque landscape, so Perry, in spite of its serene and beautiful surroundings, is a shrine to mechanical force in whose temple, the tall-chimneyed mill, a human sacrifice is made to the worshipers of gain.

My _vis-a-vis_ was talkative. "Say," she said to her neighbour, "Jim Weston is the worst flirt I ever seen."

"Who's Jim Weston?" the other responded, diving into the box by her side for a handful of gray woolen shirts.

"Why, he's the one who made my teeth--he made teeth for all of us up home," and her smile reveals the handiwork of Weston.

"If I had false teeth," is the comment made upon this, "I wouldn't tell anybody."

"I thought some," continues the implacable new girl, unruffled, "of having a gold filling put in one of my front teeth. I think gold fillings are so pretty," she concludes, looking toward me for a response.

This primitive love of ornament I found manifest in the same medico-barbaric fancy for wearing eye-gla.s.ses. The nicety of certain operations in the mill, performed not always in the brightest of lights, is a fatal strain upon the eyes. There are no oculists in Perry, but a Buffalo member of the profession makes a monthly visit to treat a new harvest of patients. Their daily effort toward the monthly finishing of 40,000 garments permanently diminishes their powers of vision. Every thirty days a new set of girls appears with gla.s.ses. They wear them as they would an ornament of some kind, a necklace, bracelet or a hoop through the nose.

When the six o'clock whistle blew on the first night I had finished only two dozen shirts. "You've got a good job," my teacher said, as we came out together in the cool evening air. "You seem to be taking to it."

They size a girl up the minute she comes in. If she has quick motions she'll get on all right. "I guess you'll make a good finisher."

Once more we a.s.sembled to eat and chat and relax. After a moment by the kitchen pump we took our places at table. Our hostess waited upon us.

"It takes some grit," she explained, "and more grace to keep boarders."

Except on Sundays, when all men might be considered equals in the sight of the Lord, she and her husband did not eat until we had finished. She pa.s.sed the dishes of our frugal evening meal--potatoes, bread and b.u.t.ter and cake--and as we served ourselves she held her head in the opposite direction, as if to say, "I'm not looking; take the biggest piece."

It was with my roommates I became the soonest acquainted. The butcher's widow from Batavia was a grumbler. "How do you like your job?" I asked her as we fumbled about in the dim light of our low-roofed room.

"Oh, Lordy," was the answer, "I didn't think it would be like this. I'd rather do housework any day. I bet you won't stay two weeks." She was ugly and stupid. She had been married young to a butcher. Left alone to battle with the world, she might have shaken out some of her dullness, but the butcher for many years had stood between her and reality, casting a still deeper shadow on her ignorance. She had the monotony of an old child, one who questions constantly but who has pa.s.sed the age when learning is possible. The butcher's death had opened new possibilities. After a period of respectful mourning, she had set out, against the wishes of her family, with a vague, romantic hope that was expressed not so much in words as in a certain picture hat trimmed with violet chiffon and carried carefully in a bandbox by itself, a new, crisp sateen petticoat, and a golf skirt she had sat up until one o'clock to finish the night before she left home. It was inevitable that the butcher's widow should be disappointed. There was too much grim reality in ten-hour days spent over a machine in the stifling mill room to feed a sentimentalist whose thirty odd years were no accomplice to romance. She grumbled and complained. Secret dissatisfaction preyed upon her. She was somewhat exasperated at the rest of us, who worked cheerily and with no _arriere pensee_. At the end of the first week the picture hat was tucked away in the bandbox; the frou-frou of the sateen petticoat and the daring swish of the golf skirt were packed up, like the remains of a bubble that had reflected the world in its brilliant sides one moment and the next lay a little heap of soap-suds. She had gone behind in her work steadily at the factory; she was not making more than sixty cents a day. She left us and went back to do housework in Batavia.