Folks wonder why a girl slaves in a factory when she could be earning good money and a home thrown in doing housework. I think of that as I watch Annie. Imagine Annie poking about by her lonesome, saying, “No, ma'm,” “Yes, ma'm,” “No, sir,” “Yes, sir.” “Can I go out for a few moments, Mrs. Jones?” “Oh, all right, ma'm!” Annie, whose talk echoes up and down the room all day. She is Annie to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who pokes his nose in our packing room, but they are Tom, Dick, and Harry to her. It is not being called by your first name that makes the rub. It is being called it when you must forever tack on the Mr. and the Mrs. and the Miss. Annie is in awe of no human being. Annie is the fastest packer in the room and draws the most pay. Annie sasses the entire factory. Annie neverstops talking unless she wants to. Which is only now and then when her mother has had a bad spell and Annie gets a bit blue. Little Pauline, an Italian, only a few months in this country, only a few weeks in the factory, works across the table from Annie. Pauline is the next quickest packer in our room. She cannot speak a word of English. Annie gives a sigh audible from one end of the room to the next. “My Gawd!” moans Annie to the entire floor. “If this here Eyetalian don't learn English pretty soon I gotta learn Eyetalian. I can't stand here like a dead one all day with nobody to talk to.” Pauline might perhaps be reasoning that, after all, why learn English, since she would never get a silent moment in which to practice any of it.
I very much love little Pauline. All day long her fingers fly; all day long not a word does she speak, only every now and then little Pauline turns around to me and we smile at each other. Once on the street, a block or so from the factory, little Pauline ran up to me, put her arm through mine, and caught my hand. So we walked to work. Neither could say a word to the other. Each just smiled and smiled. For the first time in all my life I really felt the melting pot first hand. To Pauline I was no agent of Americanization, no superior proclaiming the need of bathtubs and clean teeth, no teacher of the “Star-spangled banner” and the Constitution. To Pauline I was a fellow-worker, and she must know, for such things are always known, that I loved her. To myself, I felt suddenly the hostess—the generation-longinhabitant of this land so new and strange to little Pauline. She was my guest here. I would indeed have her care for my country, have her glad she came to my home. That day Pauline turned around and smiled more often than before.
I finally settled down to eating lunch daily between Tessie and Mrs. Lewis, the Englishwoman. We do so laugh at one another's jokes. I know everything that ever happened to Tessie and Mrs. Lewis from the time they were born; all the heartbreaking stories of the first homesick months in this my land, all the jobs they have labored at. Mrs. Lewis has worked “in the mills” ever since she was born, it would seem, first in England, later in Michigan. Tessie and her husband mostly have hired out together in this country for housework, and she likes that better than packing chocolates standing up, she says. Mrs. Lewis is—well, she's Indian summer, too, along with Lillian and Sadie and Fannie, only she makes no bones about it (nor does black Fannie, for that matter). Mrs. Lewis is thin and wrinkled, with a skimpy little dust cap on her head. Her nose is very long and pointed, her teeth very false. Her eyes are always smiling. She loves to laugh. One day we were talking about unemployment.
“Don't you know, it's awful in Europe,” volunteers Mrs. Lewis.
“One hundred thousand unemployed in Paris alone—saw it in headlines this morning,” I advance.
“Paris?” said Tessie. “Paris? Where's Paris?”
If one could always be so sure of one's facts.
“France.”
Mrs. Lewis wheels about in her chair, looks at me sternly over the top of her spectacles, and:
“Do you know, they're telling me that's a pretty fast country, that France.”
“You don't say!” I look interested.
“No—no I haven't got the detailsyet”—she clasped her chin with her hand—“but 'fast' was the word I heard used.”
Irene is a large, florid, bleached blonde. She worked at the table behind me about four days. “Y'know”—Irene has a salon air—“y'know, I jus' can't stand steppen on these soft chocolates. Nobody knows how I suffer. It just goes through me like a knife.” She spent a good part of each day scraping off the bottoms of her French-heeled shoes with a piece of cardboard. It evidently was too much for her nerves. She is no more.
The sign reads, “Saturdays 8-12.” When Saturday came around Ida hollered down the room, “Everybody's gotta work to-day till five.” The howl that went up! I supposed “gotta” meant “gotta.” But Lena came up to me.
“You gonna work till five? Don't you do it. We had to strike to get a Saturday half holiday. Now they're tellin' us we gotta work till five—pay us for it, o' course. If enough girls'll stay, pretty soon they'll be sayin: 'See? What ud we tell ya? The girls want to work Saturday afternoons'; and they'll have us back regular again.” In the end not a girl in our room stayed, and Ida wrung her hands.
Monday next, though, Ida announced, “Everybody's gotta work till seven to-night 'cause ya all went home Saturday afternoon. Three nights a week now you gotta work till seven.” To stand from 1 to 7! One girl in the room belonged to some union or other. She called out, “Will they pay time and a half for overtime?” At which everyone broke into laughter. “Gee! Ida, here's a girl wants time and a half!” Tessie, Mrs. Lewis, Sadie, and I refused to work till 7. Ida used threats and argument. “I gotta put down your numbers!” We stood firm—6 o'clock was long enough. “Gee! You don't notice that last hour—goes like a second,” argued Ida. We filed out when the 6-o'clock bell rang.
The girls all fuss over the hour off at noon. It takes at best twenty minutes to eat lunch. For the rest of the hour there is no place to go, nothing to do, but sit in the hard chairs at the marble-topped tables in the whitewashed room for half an hour till the bell rings at 12.50, and you can sit on the edge of a truck upstairs for ten minutes longer. They all say they wish to goodness we could have half an hour at noon and get off half an hour earlier at night.
A tragedy the first pay day. I was so excited when that Saturday came round, to see what it would all be like—to get my first pay envelope. About 11.30 two men came in, one carrying a wooden box filled with little envelopes. Girls appear suddenly from every place and crowd around the two men. One calls out a number, the girl takes her envelope andgoes off. I keep working away, thinking you are not supposed to step up till your number is called. But, lo! everyone seems paid off and the men departing, whereat I leave my work with beating heart and announce: “You didn't call 1075.” But it seems I was supposed to step up and give 1075. I get handed my little envelope. Connie Parker in one corner, 1075 in the other, the date, and $6.81. Six dollars and eighty-one cents, and I had expected fourteen dollars. (I had told Ida at last that I thought I ought to get fourteen dollars, and she thought so, too, and said she'd “speak to the man” about it.) I clutched Ida—“only six dollars and eighty one cents!” “Well, what more do ya want.”
“But you said fourteen dollars.”
It seems the week goes Thursday to Thursday, instead of Monday to Saturday, so my first pay covered only three days and a deduction for my locker key.
At that moment a little cry just behind me from Louisa. Louisa had been packing with Irene—dark little, frail little Yiddish Louisa; big brawny bleached-blond Irene.
“I've lost my pay envelope!”
Wan little Louisa! She had been talking to Topsy, Fannie's helper. Her envelope had slipped out of her waist, and when she went to pick it up, lo! there was nothing there to pick—fourteen dollars gone! There was excitement for you. Fourteen dollars in Wing 13, Room 3, was equal to fourteen million dollars in Wall Street. Everybody pulledout boxes and searched, got down on hands and knees and poked, and the rest mauled Louisa from head to foot.
“Sure it ain't in your stocking? Well, lookagain.”
“What's this?”—jabbing Louisa's ribs—“this?”
Eight hands going over Louisa's person as if the anguished slip of a girl could not have felt that stiff envelope with fourteen dollars in it herself had it been there. She stood helpless, woebegone.
Ida rose Napoleon-like to the rescue. “I'll search everybody in the room!”
Whereat she made a grab at Topsy and removed her. “They” say Topsy was stripped to the breezes in Ida's fury, but no envelope.
Topsy, be it known, was already a suspicious character. That very week Fannie's purse had disappeared under circumstances pointing to Topsy. Which caused a strained relationship between the two. One day it broke—such relationship as existed.
Fannie up at her end of the boxes was heard to screech down the line to where Topsy was sorting chocolate rolls:
“How dare you talk to me like that?”
“I ain't talkin' to you!”
“You am. You called me names.”
“I never. I called you nothin', you ole white nigger.”
“You stand lie to me like that and call me names?”
“Who say lie? I ain't no liar. You shut up; you ain't my boss. I'll call you anythin' I please, sassin' me that way!”
“I didn't sassed you. You called me names.”
“I don't care what I called you—I know what youis.” Here Topsy gathered all her strength and shouted up to Fannie, “You're aheifer, you is.”
Now there is much I do not know about the world, and maybe heifer is a word like some one or two others you are never supposed to set down in so many letters. If so, it is new to me and I apologize. The way Topsy called it, and the way Fannie acted on hearing herself called it, would lead one to believe it is a word never appearing in print.
“You—call—me aheifer?” shrieked Fannie. “I'll tell ya landlady on ya, I will!”
“Don' yo' go mixin' up in my private affairs. You shut yo' mouth, yo' hear me? yo'heifer!”
“Iain'tno heifer!”
Fortunately Ida swung into our midst about then and saved folk from bodily injury. A few days later Fanny informed me privately that she don't say nothin' when that nigger starts rowin' with her, but if she jus' has her tin lunch box with her next time when that nigger starts talkin' fresh—callin' her a heifer—her!—she'll slug her right 'cross the face with it.
So Topsy was searched. When she got her garments back on she appeared at the door—a small black goddess of fury. “Yo' fresh Ida, yo'—yessa—yo' jus' searched me 'cause I'm black. That's all, 'cause I'm black. Why don't you search all that white trash standin' there?” And Topsy flung herself out. Monday she appeared with a new maroonembroidered suit. Cost every nickel of thirty-eight dollars, Fannie informed me. In the packing room she had a hat pin in her cap. Some girl heard Topsy tell some other girls she was going stick that pin in Fannie if Fannie got sassin' her again. Ida made her remove the hat pin. In an hour she disappeared altogether and stayed disappeared forever after. “Went South,” Fannie told me. “Always said she was goin' South when cold weather started.... Huh! Thought she'd stick me with a hat pin. I was carryin' a board around all mornin'. If she so much as come near me I was goin' to give her a crack aside the head.”
But there was little Louisa—and no longer could she keep back the tears. Nor could ever the pay envelope be unearthed. Later I found her sitting on the pile of dirty towels in the washroom, sobbing her heart out. It was not so much that the money was gone—that was awful enough—fourteen dollars!—fourteen dollars!—oh-h-h,—but her mother and father—what would they do to her when she came home and told 'em? They mightn't believe it was lost and think she'd spent it on somethin' for herself. The tears streamed down her face. And that was the last we ever saw of Louisa.
Had “local color” been all we were after, perhaps Wing 13, Room 3, would have supplied sufficient of that indefinitely, with the combination of the ever-voluble Lena and the ever-present labor turnover. Even more we desired to learn the industrial feel ofthe thing—what do some of the million and more factory women think about the world of work? Remaining longer in Wing 13 would give no deeper clue to that. For all that I could find out, the candy workers there thought nothing about it one way or the other. The younger unmarried girls worked because it seemed the only thing to do—they or their families needed the money, and what would they be doing otherwise? Lena claimed, if she could have her way in the world, she would sleep until 12 every day and go to a show every afternoon. But that life would pall even on Lena, and she giggled wisely when I slangily suggested as much.
The older married women worked either because they had to, since the male breadwinner was disabled (an old fat Irishwoman at the chocolate dipper had a husband with softening of the brain. He was a discharged English soldier who “got too much in the sun in India”) or because his tenure of job was apt to be uncertain and they preferred to take no chances. Especially with the feel and talk of unemployment in the air, two jobs were better than none. A few, like Mrs. Lewis, worked to lay by toward their old age. Mrs. Lewis's husband had a job, but his wages permitted of little or no savings. Some of her friends told her: “Oh, well, somebody's bound to look out for you somehow when you get old. They don't let you die of hunger and cold!” But Mrs. Lewis was not so sure. She preferred to save herself from hunger and cold.
Such inconveniences of the job as existed weretaken as being all in the day's work—like the rain or a cold in the head. At some time they must have shown enough ability for temporary organization to strike for the Saturday half holiday. I wish I could have been there when that affair was on. Which girls were the ringleaders? How much agitation and exertion did it take to acquire the momentum which would result in enforcing their demands? Had I entered factory work with any idea of encouraging organization among female factory workers, I should have considered that candy group the most hopeless soil imaginable. Those whom I came in contact with had no class feeling, no ideas of grievances, no ambitions over and above the doing of an uninteresting job with as little exertion as possible.
I hated leaving Tessie and Mrs. Lewis and little Pauline. Already I miss the life behind those candy scenes. For the remainder of my days a box of chocolates will mean a very personal—almost too personal for comfort!—thing to me. But for the rest of the world....
Some place, some moonlight night, some youth, looking like a collar advertisement, will present his fair love with a pound box of fancy assorted chocolates—in brown paper cups; and assured of at least a generous disposition, plus his lovely collar-advertisement hair, she will say yes. On the sofa, side by side, one light dimly shining, the nightingale singing in the sycamore tree beside the front window, their two hearts will beat as one—for the time being.They will eat the chocolates I packed and life will seem a very sweet and peaceful thing indeed. Nor will any disturbing notion of how my feet felt ever reach them, no jarring “you heifer!” float across the states to where they sit. Louie to them does not exist—Louie, forever on the run with, “Louie, move these trays!” “Louie, bottoms!” “Louie, tops!” “Louie, cardboards!” “Louie, the truck!” “Louie, sweep the floor! How many times I told you that to-day!” “Louie, get me a box a' ca'mels, that's a good dope!” “Louie, turn out them lights!” “Louie, turn on them lights!” “Louie, ya leave things settin' round like that!” “Louie, where them covers?” and then Louie smashes his fingers and retires for ten minutes.
Nor is Ida more than a strange name to those two on the sofa. No echoes reach them of, “Ida, where them wax papers?” “Ida, where's Fannie?” “Ida, where them picture tops?” “Ida, ain't no more 'coffees.' What'll I use instead?” “Ida! Where's Ida? Mike wants ya by the elevator.” “Ida, I jus' packed sixty; ten sixty-two is my number.” “Ida, Joe says they want 'drops' on the fifth.” “Ida, ain't no more trays.” “Ida, gimme the locker-door key. 'M cold—want ma sweater. (Gee! it 'u'd freeze the stuffin' outa ya in this ice box!)”
Those chocolates appeared in a store window in Watertown, and that's enough. Not for their moonlit souls the clang of the men building a new dipper and roller in our room—the bang of the blows of metal on metal as they pierce your soul along about5 of a weary afternoon. Lena's giggles and Ida's “Lee-na, stop your talk and go to work!... Louie, stop your whistlin'!... My Gawd! girls, don' you know no better n' to put two kinds in the same box? ... Hey, Lena, this yere Eyetalian wants somethin'; come here and find out what's ailin' her.... Fannie, ain't there no more plantations?... Who left that door open?... Louie, for Gawd's sake how long you gonna take with that truck?... Lena, stop your talkin' and go to work....”
And 'round here, there, and every place, “My Gawd! my feet are like ice!” “Say, len' me some of yo'r cardboards—hey?” “You Pearl White [black as night], got the tops down there?” “Hey, Ida, the Hungarian girl wants somethin'. I can't understand her....”
Those two sit on the sofa. The moon shines on the nightingale singing in the sycamore tree. Nor do they ever glimpse a vision of little Italian Pauline's swift fingers dancing over the boxes, nor do they ever guess of wan Louisa's sobs.
Sweetnessand Light.
So now appears the candy factory in retrospect.
Shall we stumble upon a job yet that will make brass seem as a haven of refuge? Allah forbid!
After all, factory work, more than anything so far, has brought out the fact that life from beginning to end is a matter of comparisons. The factory girl, from my short experience, is not fussing over what her job looks like compared to tea at the Biltmore. She is comparing it with the last job or with home. And it is either slightly better or slightly worse than the last job or home. Any way round, nothing to get excited over. An outsider, soul-filled college graduate with a mission, investigates a factory and calls aloud to Heaven: “Can such things be? Why do womenstayin such a place?”
The factory girl, if she heard those anguished cries, would as like as not shrug her shoulders and remark: “Ugh! she sh'u'dda seen ——'s factory where I worked a year ago.” Or, “Gawd! what does she think a person's goin' to do—sit home all day and scrub the kitchen?”
And yet the fact remains that some things get toomuch on even a philosophical factory girl's nerves. Whereat she merely walks out—if she has gumption enough. The labor turnover, from the point of view of production and efficiency, can well be a vital industrial concern. To the factory girl, it saves her life, like as not. Praise be the labor turnover!
If it were not for that same turnover, I, like the soul-filled college graduate, might feel like calling aloud, not to Heaven, but to the President of the United States and Congress and the Church and Women's clubs: “Come quick and rescue females from the brassworks!” As it is, the females rescue themselves. If there's any concern it's “the boss he should worry.” He must know how every night girls depart never to cross those portals again, so help them Gawd. Every morning a new handful is broken in, to stay there a week or two, if that long, and take to their heels. Praise be the labor turnover, as long as we have such brassworks.
Before eight o'clock of a cold Monday morning (thank goodness it was not raining, since we stood in shivering groups on the sidewalk) I answered the Sunday-morning “ad”:
GIRLS AND WOMENbetween 16 and 36; learners and experienced assemblers and foot-press operators on small brass parts; steady; half day Saturday all year around; good pay and bonus. Apply Superintendent's office.
GIRLS AND WOMEN
between 16 and 36; learners and experienced assemblers and foot-press operators on small brass parts; steady; half day Saturday all year around; good pay and bonus. Apply Superintendent's office.
The first prospects were rather formidable—some fifty men and boys, no other girl or woman. Soon two cold females made their appearance and weshivered together and got acquainted in five minutes, as is wont under the circumstances. One rawboned girl with a crooked nose and frizzled blond hair had been married just two months. She went into immediate details about a party at her sister-in-law's the night before, all ending at a dance hall. The pretty, plump Jewess admitted she had never danced.
“What?” almost yelled the bride, “Neverdanced? Good Gawd! girl, you might as well bedead!”
“You said it!” I chimed in. “Might as well dig a hole in the ground and crawl in it.”
“You said it!” and the husky bride and erstwhile (up to the week before) elevator operator at twenty-three dollars a week (she said) gave me a smart thump of understanding. “Girl, you neverdanced? It's—it's the grandest thing inlife!”
The plump Jewess looked a little out of things. “I know,” she sighed, “they tell me it 'u'd make me thin, too, but my folks don't let me go out no place.”
Whereat we changed to polishing off profiteers and the high cost of living. The Jewish girl's brother knew we were headin' straight for civil war. “They'll be comin' right in folks' homes and killen 'em before a year's out. See if they don't.” I asked her if she'd ever worked in a union shop. “Na, none of that stuff for me! Wouldn't go near a union.” Both girls railed over the way people were losing their jobs. Anyhow, the bride was goin' to a dance that night, you jus' bet.
At last some one with a heart came out and toldthe girls we could step inside. By that time there were some ten of us, all ages and descriptions. What would a “typical” factory girl be like, I wonder. Statistics prove she is young and unmarried more than otherwise, but each factory does seem to collect the motleyest crew of a little of everything—old, young, married, single, homely, stupid, bright, pretty, sickly, husky, fat, thin, and so on down the line. Certain it is that they who picture a French-heeled, fur-coated, dolled-up creature as the “typical factory girl” are far wide of the mark. The one characteristic which so far does seem pretty universal is that one and all, no matter what the age or looks, are perfectly willing to tell you everything they know on short acquaintance. At first I felt a hesitancy at asking questions about their personal lives, yet I so much wanted to know what they did and thought, what they hoped and dreamed about. It was early apparent that sooner or later everything would come out with scant encouragement, and no amount of questioning ever is taken amiss. They in turn ask me questions, and I lie until I hate myself.
The plump Jewess was the first interviewed. When she heard the pay she departed. The elevator bride and I were taken together, and together we agreed to everything—wages thirteen dollars a week, “with one dollar a week bonus” (the bonus, as was later discovered, had numerous strings to it. I never did get any). Work began at 7.45, half hour for lunch, ended at 5. The bride asked if the work was dangerous.“That's up to you. Goin' upstairs is dangerous if you don't watch where you put your feet. Eh?” We wanted to start right in—I had my apron under my arm—but to-morrow would be time. I got quite imploring about beginning on that day. No use.
The bride and I departed with passes to get by with the next morning. That was the last I saw of the bride—or any of that group, except one little frozen thing without a hat. She worked three days, and used to pull my apron every time she went by and grin.
The factory was 'way over on the East Side. It meant gettin' up in the dark and three Subways—West Side, the Shuttle, East Side which could be borne amicably in the morning, but after eight and three-quarter hours of foot-press work, going home with that 5-6 rush—that mob who shoved and elbowed and pushed and jammed—was difficult to bear with Christian spirit. Except that it really is funny. What idea of human nature must a Subway guard between the hours of 5 and 6 be possessed of?
At noon I used to open my lunch anxiously, expecting to see nothing but a doughy mass of crumpled rye bread and jam. Several times on the Subway the apple got shoved into my ribs over a period where it seemed as if either the apple or the ribs would have to give in. But by noon my hunger was such that any state of anything edible was as nectar and ambrosia.
I am thinking that even a hardened factory hand might remember her first day at the brassworks.Up three flights of stairs, through a part of the men's factory, over a narrow bridge to a back building, through two little bobbing doors, and there you were admitted to that sanctuary where, according to the man who hired you, steady work and advancement to a rosy future awaited one.
True, I had only the candy factory as a basis of comparison, as far as working experience went. But I have been through factories and factories of all sorts and descriptions, and nothing had I ever seen like the brassworks. First was the smell—the stale smell of gas and metal. (Perhaps there is no such smell as stale metal, but you go down to the brassworks and describe it better!) Second, the darkness—a single green-shaded electric light directly over where any girl was working, but there were areas where there were no workers. Up the end of the floor, among the power presses, all belts and machines and whirring wheels, there were only three or four shaded lights. Windows lined both sides of the floor, but they had never been washed since the factory was built, surely. Anyhow, it was dark and rainy outside. The walls once had been white, but were now black. Dim, dirty, uneven boxes containing brass parts filled the spaces between the long tables where the foot presses stood. Third, the noise—the clump of the foot presses, the whirring of the pattern cutters—one sounded ever like a lusty woodpecker with a metal beak pecking on metal; rollings and rumblings from the floor above; jarrings and shakings from below.
Two-thirds of the entire floor was filled with long tables holding the foot presses—tables which years ago were clean and new, tables which now were worn, stained, and uneven, and permanently dirty. On each side of each long table stood five black iron presses, but there seemed to be never more than one or two girls working at a side. Each press performed a different piece of work—cut wick holes, fitted or clamped parts together, shaped the cones, and what not, but with only two general types of operation so far as the foot part went. One type took a long, firm, forward swing on the pedal; the other a short, hard, downward “kick.” With the end of the pressure the steel die cut through the thin brass cone, or completed whatever the job was. As the pedal and foot swung back to position the girl removed the brass part, dropping it in a large box at her right. She kept a small bin on the table at the left of the press filled with parts she was to work on. Around the sides of the floor were the table workers—girls adjusting parts by hand, or soldering.
The other third of the floor was taken up with the machine presses, which mostly clicked away cutting patterns in the brass parts to hold the lamp chimney. In a far corner were the steaming, bleaching tubs where dull, grimy brass parts were immersed in several preparations, I don't know what, to emerge at last shining like the noonday sun.
The cold little girl with no hat, a strange, somewhat unsociable, new person, and I stood there waiting one hour. Some one took our names. Theexperienced feeling when they asked me where I had worked last and how long was I there, and why did I leave! At the end of an hour the forelady beckoned me—such a neat, sweet person as she was—and I took my initial whack at a foot press. If ever I do run an automobile the edge of first enjoyment is removed. A Rolls-Royce cannot make me feel any more pleased with life than the first ten minutes of that foot press. In ten minutes the job was all done and there I sat for an hour and a half waiting for another. Hard on a person with the foot-press fever. The times and times later I would gratefully have taken any part of that hour and a half to ease my weary soul!
Be it known, if I speak feelingly at times of the weariness of a foot press, that, though nothing as to size, I am a very husky person—perhaps the healthiest of the eight million women in industry! It was a matter of paternal dismay that I arrived in the world female instead of male. What Providence had overlooked, mortal ability would do everything possible to make up for—so argued a disappointed father. From four years of age on I was taught to do everything a boy could or would do; from jumping off cars while they were moving to going up in a balloon. A good part of my life I have played tennis and basketball and hockey, and swum, and climbed mountains, and ridden horseback, and rowed, and fished. I do not know what it is to have an ache or a pain from one end of the year to the other. All of which is mentioned merely because if certain worktaxes my strength, who seldom has known what it is to be weary, what can it do to the average factory worker, often without even a fighting physical chance from birth on?
The jobs on our third floor where the girls and women worked concerned themselves with lamps—the old-fashioned kind, city folks are apt to think. Yet goodness knows we seemed during even my sojourn to make more lamp parts than creation ever had used in the heyday of lamps. Well, all but five per cent of farm women still use kerosene lamps, so the government tells us. Also fat Lizzie informed me, when I asked her who in the world could ever use just them lamp cones I made some one particular day, “Lor', child, they send them lamps all over the world!” She made a majestic sweep with both arms. “Some of 'em goes as far—as far—asPhiladelphia!” Once we were working on a rush order for fifty thousand lamps of one certain kind. Curiosity got the better of me and I took occasion to see where the boxes were being addressed. It was to a large mail-order house in Chicago.
The first noon whistle—work dropped—a rush for the washroom. Let no one think his hands ever were dirty until he labors at a foot press in a brassworks. Such sticky, grimy, oily, rough blackness never was—and the factory supplies no soap nor towels. You are expected to bring your own—which is all right the second day when you have found it out and come prepared.
The third floor had seemed dark and dismal enoughduring the morning; at noon all lights are turned off. Many of the workers went out for lunch, the rest got around in dismal corners, most of them singly, and ate by their machines, on the same hard seats they have been on since a quarter to 8. What a bacchanal festival of color and beauty now appeared the candy-factory whitewashed lunch room with the marble-topped tables! The airy sociability of it! I wandered about with my lunch in my hand, to see what I could see. Up amid the belts and power machines sat one of the girls who began that morning—not the cold, hatless one.
“You gonna stick it out?” she asked me.
“Sure. I guess it's all right.”
“Oh gee! Ain't like no place I ever worked yet. Don't catch me standin' this long.”
She did stand it four days. Minnie suggested then she stick it out till Christmas. “You'll need the money for Christmas y'know, an' you might not get the next job so easy now.”
“Damn Christmas!” was all the new girl had to say to that.
“Sure now,” said Irish Minnie, “an' she's takin her chances. It's an awful disgrace y'know, to be gettin' presents when y'ain't got none to give back. Ain't it, now? I'd never take no chances on a job so close to Christmas.”
I talked to five girls that noon. None of them had been there longer than a week. None of them planned to stay.
All afternoon I worked the foot press at one job.My foot-press enthusiasm weakened—four thousand times I “kicked”—two thousand lamp-wick slots I make in the cones. Many of the first five hundred looked a bit sad and chewed at. The “boss” came by and saw that I was not one hundred per cent perfect. He gave me pointers and I did better. Each cone got placed over a slanted form just so; kick, and half the slot is made. Lift the cone up a wee bit, twist it round to an exact position, hold it in place, kick, and the other half is cut. The kick must be a stout kick—bing! down hard, to make a clean job of it. The thing they gave you to sit on! A high, narrow, homemade-looking, wooden stool, the very hardest article of furniture under the blue canopy of heaven. Some of them had little, narrow, straight backs—just boards nailed on behind. All of them were top heavy and fell over if you got off without holding on. By 4.30 standing up at the candy job seemed one of the happiest thoughts on earth. What rosy good old days those were! Dear old candy factory! Happy girls back there bending over the chocolates!
Next sat Louisa, an Italian girl who stuttered, and I had to stop my press to hear her. She stopped hers to talk. She should worry. It's the worst job she ever saw, and for thirteen dollars a week why should she work? She talked to me, kicked a few times, got a drink, kicked, talked, stood up and stretched, kicked, talked, got another drink. She is married, has a baby a year old, another coming in three months. She will stay her week out, then she goes, you bet. Her husband was getting fifty dollars a week in a tailor job—nowork now for t-t-t-two months. He does a little now and then in the b-b-barber business. Oh, but life was high while the going was good! She leaned way over and told me in a hushed, inspired tone, to leave me awestruck, “When we was m-m-married we t-t-took a h-h-h-honeymoon!” I gasped and wanted details. To West Virginia they'd gone for a month. The fare alone, each way, had come to ten dollars apiece, and then they did no work for that month, but lived in a little hotel. Her husband was crazy of her, and she was of him now, but not when she was married. He's very good to her. After dinner every single night they go to a show.
“Every night?”
“Sure, every night, and Sundays two times.”
It all sounded truly glowing.
“You married?”
“No.”
“Well, don' you do it. Wish I wasn't married. Oh gee! Wish I wasn't married. I'm crazy of my husband, but I wish I wasn't married. See—once you married—pisht!—there you are—stay that way.”
I agreed I was in no hurry about matrimony.
“Hurry? Na, no hurry; that's right. The h-h-hurrier you are the b-b-b-badder off you get!”
The next morning the Italian girl was late. The forelady gave her locker to some one else. Such a row! Louisa said: “I got mad, I did. I told her to go to hell. That's only w-w-w-way anybody gets anything in this world—get mad and say you go to h-h-hell. Betcha.”
A little later the forelady, when the Italian was on one of her trips after a drink, leaned over and gave me her side of the story. She is such a very nice person, our forelady—quiet, attractive, neat as a pin. Her sister addresses boxes and does clerical work of one sort or another. Two subdued old maids they are; never worked any place but right on our third floor. “Ain't like what it used to be,” she told me. “In the old days girls used to work here till they got married. We used to have parties here and, say! they was nice girls in them days. Look at 'em now! Such riffraff! New ones comin' in all the time, new ones worse each time. Riffraff, that's what they are. It sure looks nice to see a girl like you.” (What good were the earrings doing?) “We'll make it just as nice here for you as we can.” (Oh, how guilty I began to feel!)
She looked around to see if the Italian was about.
“Now you take this Eyetalian girl next to you. Gee! she's some fright. Oughtta heard her this morning. 'Spected me to keep her locker for her when she was late. How'd I know she was comin' back? I gave it to another girl. She comes tearin' at me. 'What the hell you think you're doin'?' she says to me. Now I ain't used to such talk, and I was for puttin' my hat and coat on right then and there and walkin' out. I must say I gotta stand all sorts of things in my job. It's awful what I gotta put up with. I never says nothin' to her. But any girl's a fool 'l talk to a person that way. Shows she's got nothin' up here [knocking her head] or she sure'dknow better than get the forelady down on her like that. Gee! I was mad!”
Louisa returned and Miss Hibber moved on. “Some fright, that forelady,” remarked Louisa. That night Louisa departed for good.
The second day I kicked over six thousand times. It seemed a lot when you think of the hard stool. It was a toss between which was the worse, the stool or the air. This afternoon, I was sure it must be 3.30. I looked back at the clock—1.10. It had seemed like two hours of work and it was forty minutes. No ventilation whatever in that whole room—not a crack of air. Wonder if there ever was any since the place was built decades ago. Once Louisa and I became desperate and got Tony to open a window. The forelady had a fit; so did Tillie. Both claimed they'd caught cold.
Tony is the Louis of the brassworks. He is young and very lame—one leg considerably shorter than the other. It makes me miserable to see him packing heavy boxes about. He told me he must get another job or quit. Finally they did put him at a small machine press. So many maimed and halt and decrepit as they employed about the works! Numbers of the workers were past-telling old, several were very lame, one errand boy had a fearfully deformed face, one was cross-eyed. I remarked to Minnie that the boss of the works must have a mighty good heart. Minnie has been working twenty-three years and has had the bloom of admiration for her fellow-beings somewhat worn off in that time.“Hm!” grunted Minnie. “He gets 'em cheaper that way, I guess.”
The elevator man is no relation to the one at the candy factory. He is red faced and grinning, most of his teeth are gone, and he always wears a derby hat over one eye. One morning I was late. He jerked his head and thumb toward the elevator. “Come on, I'll give ya a lift up!” and when we reached our floor, though it was the men's side, “Third Avenue stop!” he called out cheerily, and grinned at the world. He had been there for years. The boss on our floor had been there for years—forty-three, to be exact. Miss Hibber would not tell how many years she had worked there, nor would Tillie. Tillie said she was born there.
If it were only the human element that counted, everyone would stay at the brassworks forever. I feel like a snake in the grass, walking off “on them” when they all were so nice. Nor was it for a moment the “dearie” kind of niceness that made you feel it was orders from above. From our floor boss down, they were people who were born to treat a body square. All the handicaps against them—the work itself, the surroundings, the low pay—had so long been part of their lives, these “higher ups” seemed insensible to the fact that such things were handicaps.
To-day was sunny and the factory not so dark—in fact, part of the time we worked with no electric lights. The crisp early morning air those four blocks from the Subway to the factory—it sent the spring fever through the blood. In the gutter of that dirtyEast Side street a dirty East Side man was burning garbage. The smoke curled up lazily. The sun just peeping up over the hospital at the end of the street made slanting shafts through the smoke. As I passed by it suddenly was no longer the East Side of New York City....
Now the Four Way Lodge is open,Now the hunting winds are loose,Now the smokes of spring go up to clear the brain....
Now the Four Way Lodge is open,Now the hunting winds are loose,Now the smokes of spring go up to clear the brain....
Breakfast in a cañon by the side of a stream—the odor of pines.... The little bobbing doors went to behind me and there I stood in floor three, the stale gas and metal smell ... the whirs of the belts ... the jarring of the presses....
Next to me this glorious morning sat a snip of a little thing all in black—so pretty she was, so very pretty. I heard the boss tell her it's not the sort of work she's been used to, she'll find it hard. Is she sure she wants to try it? And in the course of the morning I heard the story of Mame's life.
Mame's husband died three weeks ago. They had been married one month and two days—after waiting three years. Shall I write a story of Mame on the sob-sister order to bring the tears to your eyes? It could easily be done. But not honestly. Little Mame—how could her foot ever reach the press? And when she walked off after a drink, I saw that she was quite lame. A widow only three weeks. She'd never worked before, but there was no money. She lived all alone, wandered out for her meals—nomother, no father, no sisters or brothers. She cried every night. Her husband had been a traveling salesman—sometimes he made eighty-five dollars a week. They had a six-room apartment and a servant! She'd met him at a dance hall. A girl she was with had dared her to wink at him. Sure she'd do anything anybody dared her to. He came over and asked her what she was after, anyhow. That night he left the girl he'd taken to the dance hall to pilot her own way back to home and mother, and he saw Mame to her room. He was swell and tall. She showed me his picture in a locket around her neck. Meanwhile Mame kicked the foot press about twice every five minutes.
Why had they waited so long to get married? Because of the war. He was afraid he'd be killed and would leave her a widow. “He asked me to promise never to get married again if he did marry me and died. But,”—she leaned over my way—“that only meant if he died during the war, ain't that so? Lookit how long the war was over before he died.”
He was awful good to her after they got married. He took her to a show every night—jes swell; and she had given him a swell funeral—you bet she did. The coffin had cost eighty-five dollars—white with real silver handles; and the floral piece she bought—“Gee! What's your name?... Connie, you oughtta seen that floral piece!” and Mame laid off work altogether to use her hands the better. It was shaped so, and in the middle was a clock made out of flowers,with the hands at the very minute and hour he'd died. (He passed away of a headache—very sudden.) Then below, in clay, were two clasped hands—his and hers. “Gee! Connie, you never seen nothin' so swell. Everybody seen it said so.”
Once he bought her a white evening dress, low neck, fish-tail train, pearls all over the front—cost him one whole week's salary, eighty-five dollars! She had diamond earrings and jewels worth at least one thousand dollars. She had lovely clothes. Couldn't she just put a black band around the arms and go on wearing them? She took a look at my earrings. Gee! they were swell. She had some green ones herself. Next morning she appeared in her widow's weeds with bright-green earrings at least a quarter of an inch longer than mine.
From the first Mame clung to me morning and night. Usually mornings she threw her arms around me in the dressing room. “Here's my Connie!” I saw myself forced to labor in the brassworks for life because of Mame's need of me. This need seemed more than spiritual. One day her pocketbook with twelve dollars had been stolen in the Subway. I lent her some cash. Another time she left her money at the factory. I lent her the wherewithal to get home with, etc. One day I was not at work. Somehow the other girls all were down on Mame. I have pondered much on that. When it came to the needed collection Mame found it hard pickings. She got a penny from this girl, another from that one, until she had made up a nickel to get home with. Irish Minniegave her a sandwich and an apple. The girls all jumped on me: “The way you let that Frenchie work ya! Gee! you believe everything anybody tells ya.”
“But,” says I, “she's been a widow only three weeks and I'm terrible sorry for her.”
“How d'ya know she ever had a husband?” “How d'ya know he's dead?” “How'd ya....”
The skepticism of factory workers appals me. They suspect everybody and everything from the boss down. I believed almost everything about Mame, especially since she paid back all she ever borrowed. No one else in that factory believed a word she said. They couldn't “stand her round.”
“How d'ya know she lost her pocketbook?” (Later she advertised and got it back—a doctor's wife found it on the early Subway.)
“Doctor's wife,” sniffed Minnie. “Who ever heard of a doctor's wife up at seven o'clock in the mornin'?”
And now I have walked off and left Mame to that assemblage of unbelievers. At least Mame has a tongue of her own she is only too glad of a chance to use. It is meat and drink to Mame to have a man look her way. “Did you see that fella insult me?” and she calls back protective remarks for half a block. Sentiments that usually bring in mention of the entertained youth's mother and sisters, and wind up with allusions to a wife, which if he doesn't possess now, he may some day. Once I stopped with Mame while she and Irene phoned a “fella” of Irene's from a drug-store telephone booth. Suchgigglings and goings on, especially since the “fella” was unknown to Mame at the time. Outside in the store a pompous, unromantic man grew more and more impatient for a turn at that booth. When Mame stepped out he remarked casually that he hoped she felt she'd gotten five cents' worth. The dressing down Mame then and there heaped upon that startled gentleman! Who was he to insult her? I grew uneasy and feared a scene, but the pompous party took hasty refuge in the telephone booth and closed the door. Mame was very satisfied with the impression she must have made. “The fresh old guy!”
Another time Mame sought me out in the factory, her eyes blazing. “Connie, I been insulted, horribly insulted, and I don't see how I can stay in this factory! You know that girl Irene? Irene she says to me, 'Mamie, you plannin' to get married again?'
“'I dunno,' I says to her, 'but if I do it'll be to some single fella.'
“'Huh!' Irene says to me, 'You won't get no single fella; you'll have to marry a widower with two or three children.' Think of her insultin' me like that! I could 'a' slapped her right in the face!”
I asked Mame one Saturday what she'd be doing Sunday. She sighed. “I'll be spendin' the day at the cemetery, I expect.”
Monday morning I asked Mame about Sunday. She'd been to church in the morning (Mame, like most of the girls at the brassworks, was a Catholic),a show in the afternoon, cabaret for dinner, had danced till 1, and played poker until 4A.M.“If only my husband was alive,” said Mame, “I'd be the happiest girl on earth.”
One night Mame's landlady wanted to go out and play poker. She asked Mame to keep her eye and ear out for the safety of the house. Every five minutes Mame thought she heard a burglar or somethin'. “Gee! I hardly slept at all; kep' wakin' up all the time. An' that landlady never got in till six this mornin'!”
“My Gawd!” I exclaimed. “Hope she was lucky after playin' poker that long!”
“She sure was,” sighed Mame. “Gee! I jus' wish ya c'u'd see the swell prize she won!—the most beau-teful statue—stands about three feet high—of Our Blessed Lady of the Immaculate Conception.”
Mame's friendship could become almost embarrassing. One day she announced she wanted me to marry one of her brothers-in-law. “I got two nice ones and we'll go out some Sunday afternoon and you can have your pick. One's a piano tuner; the other's a detective.” I thought offhand the piano tuner sounded a bit more domestic. He was swell, Mame said.
Mame didn't think she'd stay long in the brassworks. It was all right—the boss she thought was sort of stuck on her. Did he have a wife? (The boss, at least sixty years old.) Also Charlie was making eyes at her. (Charlie was French; so was Mame. Charlie knew six words of English. Mame threewords of French. Charlie was sixteen). No, aside from matrimony, Mame was going to train in Bellevue Hospital and earn sixty dollars a week being a children's nurse. She'd heard if you got on the right side of a doctor it was easy, and already a doctor was interested in getting Mame in.
And I've just walked off and left Mame.
Kicked the foot press 7,149 times by the meter to-day and expected to die of weariness. Thumped, thumped, thumped without stopping. As with candy, I got excited about going on piecework. Asked Miss Hibber what the rates were for my job—four and a half cents for one hundred and fifty. Since I had to kick twice for every cone top finished, that would have meant around one dollar fifteen cents for the day. Vanished the piece-rate enthusiasm. Tillie seemed the only girl on our floor doing piecework. Tillie, who “was born there.” She was thin and stoop shouldered, wore spectacles, and did her hair according to the pompadour styles of some twenty years ago. The work ain't so bad. Tillie don't mind it. There's just one thing in the world Tillie wants. What's that? “A man!” Evidently Tillie has made no bones of her desire. The men call back kindly to Tillie as she picks her way up the dark stairs in the morning, “Hello there, sweetheart!” That week had been a pretty good one for Tillie—she'd made sixteen dollars forty-nine cents.
“Ain't much, p'raps, one way, but there's jus' this about it, it's steady. They never lay anybodyoff here, and there's a lot. You hear these girls 'round here talk about earnin' four, five, six dollars a day. Mebbe they did, but why ain't they gettin' it now? 'Shop closed down,' or, 'They laid us off.' That's it. Add it up over a year and my sixteen forty-nine'll look big as their thirty dollars to forty dollars a week, see if it don't.”
Tillie's old, fat, wheezy mother works on our floor—maybe Tillie really was born there.
One day I decided to see what could be done if I went the limit. Suppose I had a sick mother and a lame brother—a lot of factory girls have. I was on a press where you had to kick four separate times on each piece—small lamp cones, shaped, slot already in. My job was to punch four holes for the brackets to hold the chimney. The day before I had kicked over 10,000 times. This morning I gritted my teeth and started in. Between 10 and 11 I had gotten up to 2,000 kicks an hour. Miss Hibber went by and I asked her what piece rates for that machine were. She said six and one-quarter cents for one hundred and fifty. I did not stop then to do any figuring. Told her rather chestily I could kick 2,000 times an hour. “That all? You ought to do much more than that!” Between 11 and 12 I worked as I had never worked. It was humanly impossible to kick that machine oftener than I did. Never did I let my eyes or thoughts wander. When the whistle blew at 12 I had kicked 2,689. For a moment I figured. It takes about an hour in the morning to get on to the swing. From 11 to 12 was always my best output.After lunch was invariably deadly. From 12.30 until 2.30 it seemed impossible to get up high speed. That left at best 2.30 to 4 for anything above average effort. From 4 to 5 it was hard again on account of physical weariness. But say I could average 2,500 an hour during the day. That would have brought me in, four kicks to each cone, around two dollars and a quarter a day. The fact of the matter was that after kicking 8,500 times that morning I gave up the ghost as far as that job went. I ached body and soul. By that time I had been on that one job several days and was sick to death of it. Each cone I picked up to punch those four holes in made something rub along my backbone or in the pit of my stomach or in my head—or in all of them at once. Yet the old woman next me had been at her same job for over a week. The last place she'd worked she'd done the identical thing six months—preferred it to changing around. Most of the girls took that attitude. Up to date that is the most amazing thing I have learned from my factory experiences—the difference between my attitude toward a monotonous job, and the average worker's. In practically every case the girl has actually preferred the monotonous job to one with any variety. The muscles in my legs ached so I could almost have shed tears. The day before I had finished at 5 tired out. That morning I had wakened up tired—the only time in my life. I could hardly kick at all the first half hour. There was a gnawing sort of pain between my shoulders. Suppose I really had been on piecework and had tokeep up at that breaking rate, only to begin the next morning still more worn out? My Gawd!
Most of the girls kick with the same leg all the time. I tried changing off now and then. With the four-hole machine, using the left leg meant sitting a little to the right side. Also I tried once using my left hand to give the right a rest. Thus the boss observed me.
“Now see here, m'girl, why don't you do things the way you're taught? That ain't the right way!”
He caught me at the wrong moment. I didn't care whether the earth opened up and swallowed me.
“I know the right way of runnin' this machine good as you do,” I fairly glared at him. “I'm sick and tired of doin' it the right way, and if I want to do it wrong awhile for a change I guess I can!”
“You ain't goin' to get ahead in this world if you don't do thingsright, m'girl.” And he left me to my fate.
At noon that day the girls got after me. “You're a fool to work the way you do. You never took a drink all this mornin'—jus' sit there kickin', kickin', kickin'. Where d'ya think ya goin' to land? In a coffin, that's where. The boss won't thank ya for killin' yourself on his old foot press, neither. You're jus' a fool, workin' like that.” And that's just what I decided. “Lay off now and then.” Yes indeed, I was going to lay off now and then.
“I see myself breakin' my neck for thirteen dollars a week,” Bella chipped in.
“You said it!” from all the others.
So I kicked over 16,000 times that day and let it go as my final swan song. No more breaking records for me. My head thumped, thumped, thumped all that night. After that I strolled up front for a drink and a gossip or back to a corner of the wash room where two or three were sure to be squatting on some old stairs, fussing over the universe. When the boss was up on the other end of the floor, sometimes I just sat at my machine and did nothing. It hurt something within my soul at first, but my head and hands and legs and feet and neck and general disposition felt considerably better.
Lunch times suited me exactly at the brassworks, making me feel I was getting what I was after. Three of us used to gather around Irish Minnie, put two stools lengthwise on the floor, and squat along the sides. Bella, who'd worked in Detroit for seven dollars a day (her figures), a husky good-looking person; Rosie, the prettiest little sixteen-year-old Italian girl; and I. Such conversations! One day they unearthed Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit and redid their past, present, and probable future. We discussed whether Olive Thomas had really committed suicide or died of an overdose of something. How many nights a week could a girl dance and work next day? Minnie was past her dancing days. She'd been married 'most twenty years and was getting fat and unformed-looking; shuffled about in a pair of old white tennis shoes and a pink boudoir cap. (No one else wore a cap at the brassworks.) Minnie had worked fifteen years at a power press,eleven years at her last job. She was getting the generous stipend of fourteen dollars a week (one dollar more than the rest of us). She had earned as much as twenty-five dollars a week in her old job at the tin can company, piecework. Everybody about the factory told her troubles to Minnie, who immediately told them to everybody else. It made for a certain community interest. One morning Minnie would tell me, as I passed her machine, “Rosie 'n' Frank have had a fight.” With that cue it was easy to appear intelligent concerning future developments. Frank was one of the machinists, an Italian. Rosie had let him make certain advances—put his arm around her and all that—but she told us one lunch time, “he'd taken advantage of her,” so she just sassed him back now. Bella announced Frank was honeying around her. “Well, watch out,” Rosie advised, with the air of Bella's greataunt.
As to dancing, Bella's chum in Detroit used to go to a dance every single night and work all day. Sundays she'd go to a show and a dance. Bella tried it one week and had to lay off three days of the next week before she could get back to work. Lost her twenty-one dollars. No more of that for Bella. Just once in a while was enough for her.
They did not talk about “vamping dopes” at the brassworks. Everyone asked you if you were “keepin' company,” and talked of fellas and sweethearts and intended husbands. That was the scale. As before, all the married ones invariably advised against matrimony. Irish Minnie told us one lunchtime that it was a bad job, this marrying business. “Of course,” she admitted, pulling on a piece of roast pork with her teeth, “my husband ain't what you'd call abadman.” That was as far as Minnie cared to go.
Perhaps one reason why the brassworks employed so many crooked and decrepit was as an efficiency measure. The few males who were whole caused so many flutterings among the female hands that it seriously interfered with production. Rosie's real cause for turning Frank down was that she was after Good Lookin'. Good Lookin' would not have been so good lookin' out along the avenue, but in the setting of our third floor he was an Adonis. Rosie worked a power press. I would miss the clank of her machine. There she would be up in the corner of the floor where Good Lookin' worked. Good Lookin' would go for a drink. Rosie would get thirsty that identical moment. They would carry on an animated conversation, to be rudely broken into by a sight of the boss meandering up their way. Rosie would make a dash for her machine, Good Lookin' would saunter over to his.
From the start I had pestered the boss to be allowed on a power press, for two reasons: one just because I wanted to—the same reason why a small boy wants to work at machinery; secondly, I wanted to be able to pose at the next job as an experienced power-press worker and sooner or later get a high-power machine. One day the boss was watching meat the foot press. “Y'know, m'girl, I think you really got intelligence, blessed if I don't. I'm goin' to push you right ahead. I'll make a machinist out of you yet, see if I don't. You stay right on here and you'll be making big money yet.” (Minnie—eleven years in her last job—fourteen dollars a week now.) Anyway, one morning he came up—and that morning foot presses of every description had lost all fascination for me—and he said, “You still want a power press?”
“Bet your life I do!”
And he gave me a power press deserted that morning by one of the boys. Life looked worth living again. All I had to do to work miracles was press ever so lightly a pedal. The main point was to get my foot off it as quick as I got it on, or there was trouble. I wasn't to get my fingers here or there, or “I'd never play the piano in this life.” If the belt flew off I wasn't to grab it, or I'd land up at the ceiling. For the rest, I merely clamped a round piece on the top of a nail-like narrow straight piece—the part that turned the lamp wick up and down. Hundreds and thousands of them I made. The monotony did not wear on me there; it was mixed with no physical exertion. I could have stayed on at the brassworks the rest of my life—perhaps.
One night I was waiting at a cold, windy corner on Fifth Avenue for a bus. None came. A green Packard limousine whirled by. The chauffeur waved and pointed up the Avenue. In a flash I thought, now if I really were a factory girl I'd surely jump ata chance to ride in that green Packard. Up half a block I ran, and climbed in the front seat, as was expected of me. He was a very nice chauffeur. His mistress, “the old lady,” was at a party and he was killing time till 11.30. Would I like to ride till then? No, I wanted to get home—had to be up too early for joy riding. Why so early? The factory. And before I realized it there I sat, the factory girl. Immediately he asked me to dinner any night I said. Now I really thought it would be worth doing; no one else I knew had been out to dine with a chauffeur. Where would he take me? What would he talk about? But my nerve failed me. No, I didn't think I'd go. I fussed about for some excuse. I was sort of new in New York—out West, it was different. There you could pick up with anybody, go any place. “Good Gawd! girl,” said the chauffeur, earnestly, “don't try that in New York; you'll get in awful trouble!” All through Central Park he gave me advice about New York and the pitfalls it contained for a Westerner. He'd be very careful about me if I'd go out with him, any place I said, and he'd get me home early as I said. But I didn't say. I'd have to think it over. He could telephone to me. No, he couldn't. The lady I lived with was very particular. Well, anyhow, stormy days he'd see to it he'd be down by the factory and bring me home. Would I be dressed just the way I was then? Just the way—green tam and all.
The next day while I thumped out lamp parts I tried to screw my courage up to go out with thatchauffeur. Finally I decided to put it up to the girls. I meandered back to the wash room. There on the old stairs sat Irish Minnie and Annie, fat and ultradignified. They were discussing who the father of the child really was. I breezed in casually.
“Vamped a chauffeur last night.”
“Go-an.”
“Sure. He asked me to ride home with him an' I did.”
“Got in the machine with him?”
“Sure!”
“Youfool! You youngfool!”
Goodness! I was unprepared for such comment.
“What did he do to ya?”
“Nothin'. An' he wants me to go to dinner with him. What'll I say?”
Both pondered. “Sure,” said Minnie, “I b'lieve in a girl gettin' all that's comin' to her, but all I want to tell ya is, chauffeurs are a bad lot—the worst, I tell ya.”
“You said it!” nodded fat Annie, as if years of harrowing experience lay behind her. “He was all right to ya the first time so as to lure you out the next.”
“But,” says Minnie, “if ya go to dinner with him, don't you go near his machine. Steer clear of machines. Eat all ya can off him, but don't do no ridin'.”
“You said it!” again Annie backed her up. Annie was a regular sack slinger. She could have hurled two men off Brooklyn Bridge with one hand. “Ifyou was as big an' strong as me you c'u'd take 'most any chance. I'd like to see a guy try to pull anythin' on me.” I'd like to see him, too.
“Some day”—Minnie wanted to drive her advice home by concrete illustration—“some day a chauffeur'll hold a handkerchief under your nose with somethin' on it. When ya come to, goodness knows where you'll be.”
I began to feel a little as if I'd posed as too innocent.
“You see, out West—” I began.
“My Gawd!”—Minnie waved a hand scornfully—“don't be tryin' to tell me all men are angels out West.”
Just then Miss Hibber poked her head in and we suddenly took ourselves out.
“You go easy, now,” Minnie whispered after me.
I lacked the nerve, anyhow, and they put on the finishing touches. A bricklayer would not have been so bad. How did I know the chauffeur was not working for a friend of mine? That, later on, would make it more embarrassing for him than me. I should think he would want to wring my neck.
It was about time to find a new job, anyhow. But leaving the brassworks is like stopping a novel in the middle. What about Rosie and good looking Bella and her brother she was trying to rescue from the grip of the poolroom? Mame—Mame and her kaleidoscope romances, insults, and adventures? I just hate walking off and leaving it all. And the boss and Miss Hibber so nice to me about everything.
Before a week is gone Minnie will be telling in an awed voice that she knows what happened. She told me not to go out with that chauffeur. I went, anyhow, and they found my mangled body in the gutter in Yonkers.