The Woman Who Toils Part 19

"Ten years. When you have worked ten years in Lynn you will be sick of the shops."

I was sick of the shops, and I had not worked ten years. And for my hard-toiling future, such as she imagined that it would be, I could see that she pitied me. Once, supposing that since I am so green and so ill-clad, and so evidently bent on learning my trade the best I knew, she asked me in a voice quick with sisterhood:

"Say, are you hungry?"

"No, no, no."

"You'll be all right! No American girl need to starve in America."

In the shops the odours are more easily endured than is the noise. All conversation is shrieked out, and all the vision that one has as one lifts one's eyes from time to time is a sky seen through dirty window-panes, distant chimney-pots, and the roof-lines of like houses of toil.

I gathered this from our interrupted talk that flowed unceasingly despite the noise of our hammers and the noise of the general room.

They worked at a trade uncongenial. Not one had a good word to say for shop-labour there, despite its advantages, in this progressive land of generous pay. Each woman in a narrow, touching degree was a dreamer.

Housework! too servile; but then, compared to shopwork it was leisure.

By four the gas was lit here and there where burners were available.

Over our heads was no arrangement for lighting. We bent lower in semi-obscurity. In the blending of twilight and gaslight the room became mysterious, a shadowy corridor. Figures grew indistinct, softened and blurred. The exhausted air surrounded the gas jets in misty circles.

Unaltered alone was the ceaseless thud, the chopping, pounding of the machinery, the long soughing of the power-engine.

Here and there a woman stops to rest a second, her head sunk in her hand; or she rises, stretches limbs and body. A man wanders in from the next room, a pipe in his mouth, or a bad cigar, and pausing by one of the pale operators, whose s.p.a.ce of rest is done, he flings down in front of her a new pile of piece-work from the cutting machines.

We are up five flights of stairs. There are at least two hundred girls.

Machine oil, rags, refuse, cover the floor--such _debris_ as only awaits a spark from a lighted match or cigar to burst into flames. Despite laws and regulations the building is not fire-proof. There is no fire-escape.

A cry of fire, and great Heaven! what escape for two hundred of us from this mountain height, level with roofs of the distant town!

Thus these women, shapes mysterious in gaslight and twilight, labour: life is at stake; health, youth, vigour, supply little more than bread.

I rise; my bruised limbs, at first numb, then aching, stir for the first time after five hours of steady work. The pile of shoes before me is feeble evidence of the last hours' painful effort.

I get into my clothes--skirt, jacket and hat, all impregnated now with factory and tenement odours, and stumble downstairs and out into the street. I have earned fifty cents to-day--but then, I am green!

When once more in the cool, fresh air, released, I draw in a long and grateful breath.

Lynn on this winter night is a snow-bound, midwinter village. In the heavens is the moon's ghost, a mist-shrouded, far-away disk. But it is the Christmas moon, s.h.i.+ning on the sleeping thousands in the town, where night alone is free. The giant factories are silent, the machines at last quiet, the long workrooms moon-invaded. Labour is holy, but serfdom is accursed, and toil which demands that every hour of daylight should be spent in the race for existence--all of the daylight--is kin to slavery! There is no time for mental or physical upright-standing, no time for pleasure.

One day I decided to consider myself dismissed from Parsons'. They had taught me all they could, unless I changed my trade, in that shop; I wished to learn a new one in another. Therefore, one morning I applied at another factory, again one of the largest in Lynn. The sign read:

"_Cleaner Wanted_!"

"Cleaner" sounded easy to learn. My experience this time was with a foreman instead of a forelady. The workroom I sought was on the second floor, a room filled with men, all of them standing. Far down the room's centre I saw the single figure of a woman at her job. By her side I was soon to be, and we two the sole women on the second floor.

The foreman was distinctly a personage. Small, kind, alive, he wore a straw hat and eye-gla.s.ses. He had decided in a moment that my short application for "something to do" was not to be gainsaid.

"Ever worked before?"

This time I had a branch of a trade at my fingers' ends.

"Yes, sir; presser."

I was proud of my trade.

I did not even know, as I do now, that "cleaning" is the filthiest job the trade possesses. It is in bad repute and difficult to secure a woman to do the unpleasant work.

"You come with me," he said cheerfully; "I'll teach you."

The forelady at Parsons' did not know whether I worked well or not. She never came to see. The foreman in Marches' taught me himself.

Two high desks, like old-time school desks, rose in the workshop's centre. Behind one of these I stood, whilst the foreman in front of me instructed my ignorance. The room was filled with high crates rolled hither and thither on casters. These crates contained anywhere from thirty-two to fifty pairs of boots. The cases are moved from operator to operator as each man selects the shoes to apply to them the especial branch of his trade. From the crate of boots rolled to my side I took four boots and placed them on the desk before me. With the heel of one pressed against my breast, I dipped my forefinger in a gla.s.s of hot soap and water, water which soon became black as ink. I pa.s.sed my wet, soapy finger all around the boot's edges, from toe to heel. This loosened, in the s.p.a.ce between the sole and vamp, the sticky dye substance on the leather and particles so-called "dirt." Then with a bit of wood covered with Turkish toweling I sc.r.a.ped the shoe between the sole and vamp and with a third cloth polished and rubbed the boot clean. In an hour's time I did one-third as well as my companion. I cleaned a case in an hour, whilst she cleaned three.

When my employer had left me I observed the woman at my side: an untidy, degraded-looking creature, long past youth. Her hands beggared description; their covering resembled skin not at all, but a dark-blue substance, leatherlike, bruised, ingrained, indigo-hued. Her nails looked as though they had been beaten severely. One of her thumbs was bandaged.

"I lost one nail; rotted off."

"Horrible! How, pray?"

"That there water: it's poison from the shoe-dye."

Swiftly my hands were changing to a faint likeness of my companion's.

"Don't tell him," she said, "that I told you that. He'll be mad; he'll think I am discouraging you. But you'll lose your forefinger nail, all right!" Then she gave a little laugh as she turned her boot around to polish it.

"Once I tried to clean my hands up. Lord! it's no good! I scrub 'em with a scrubbin'-brush on Sundays."

"How long have you been at this job?"

"Ten months."

They called her "Bobby"; the men from their machines nodded to her now and then, bantering her across the noise of their wheels. She was ignorant of it, too stupid to know whether life took her in sport or in earnest! The men themselves worked in their flannel s.h.i.+rts. Not far from us was a wretchedly ill-looking individual, the very shadow of manhood.

I observed that once he cast toward us a look of interest. Under my feet was a raised platform on which I stood, bending to my work. During the morning the consumptive man strolled over and whispered something to "Bobby." He made her dullness understand. When he had gone back to his job she said to me:

"Say, w'y don't yer push that platform away and stand down on the floor?

You're too tall to need that. It makes yer bend."

"Did that man come over to tell you this?"

"Yes. He said it made you tired."

From my work, across the room, I silently blessed the pale old man, bowed, thin, pitiful, over the shoe he held, obscured from me by the cloud of sawdust-like flying leather that spun scattered from the sole he held to the flying wheel.

I don't believe the shoe-dye really to be poisonous. I suppose it is scarcely possible that it can be so; but the constant pressure against forefinger nail is enough to induce disease. My fingers were swollen sore. The effects of the work did not leave my hands for weeks.

"Bobby" was not talkative or communicative simply because she had nothing to say. Over and over again she repeated the one single question to me during the time I worked by her side: "Do you like your job?" and although I varied my replies as well as I could with the not too exhausting topic she offered, I could not induce her to converse. She took no interest in my work, absorbed in her own. Every now and then she would compute the sum she had made, finally deciding that the day was to be a red-bean day and she would make a dollar and fifty cents.