The Woman Who Toils Part 25

By this I was most thoroughly a mill-girl in appearance, at least; my clothes were white with cotton, my hair far from tidy; fatigue and listlessness una.s.sumed were in my att.i.tude. I had not heard the Southern dialect for so long not to be able to fall into it with little effort. I told him I had been a "spooler" and did not like it--"wanted to spin."

He listened silently, regarding me with interest and with what I trembled to fear was disbelief. I desperately pushed back my sunbonnet and in Southern drawl begged for work.

"Spinnin'?" he asked. "What do you want to spin for?"

He was a Yankee, his accent sharp and keen. How clean and decent and capable he appeared, the dark mill back of him; shantytown, vile, dirty, downtrodden, beside him!

I told him that I was tired of spooling and knew I could make more by something else.

He thrust his hands into his pockets. "To-night is Sat.u.r.day; alone here?"

"Yes."

"Where you going to stay in Granton?"

"I don't know yet."

"Don't learn spinnin'," he said decidedly. "I am head of the _speedin'-room_. I'll give you a job in my room on Monday morning."

My relief was immense. His subsequent questions I parried, thanked him, and withdrew to keep secret from Excelsior that I had deserted for Granton.

Although these mills are within three hundred feet of each other, the villagers do not a.s.sociate. The workings of Granton are unknown to Excelsior and vice versa.

The speeding-room in Granton is second only in noise to the weave-room.

Conversation must be entrancing and vital to be pursued here! The speeder has under her care as many machines as her skill can control.

My teacher, Bessie, ran four sides, seventy-six speeders on a side, her work being regulated by a crank that marked the vibrations. To the lay mind the terms of the speeding-room can mean nothing. This girl made from $1.30 to $1.50 a day. She controlled in all 704 speeders; these she had to replenish and keep running, and to clean all the machinery gear with her own hands; to oil the steel, even to bend and clean under the lower shelf and come into contact with the most dangerous parts of the mechanism. The girl at the speeder next to me had just had her hand mashed to a jelly. The speeder watches her ropers run out; these stand at the top and back of the line. The ropers are refilled and their ends attached to the flying speeders by a quick motion. The yarn from the ropers is wound off on to the speeders. When the speeders are full of yarn they are detached from the nest of steel in which they whirl and are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed about the room by the girls themselves. Speeding is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling and cleaning is only fit for a man to do.

The girl who teaches me has been at her work for ten years; she entered the factory at eight. She was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and capable, and, as far as I could judge in our acquaintance, thoroughly respectable.

There are long waits in this department of the cotton-spinning life. On tall green stools we sit at the end of our sides during the time it takes for one well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather contrive to make ourselves heard. She has a sweet, gentle face; she is courtesy and kindness itself.

"What do you think about all day?"

"Why, I couldn't even begin to tell all my thoughts."

"Tell me some."

"Why, I think about books, I reckon. Do you-all like readin'?"

"Yes."

"Ain't nuthin' I like so good when I ain't tyrd."

"Are you often tired?" And this question surprises her. She looks up at me and smiles. "Why, I'm _always_ tyrd! I read novels for the most part; like to read love stories and about fo'ran travel."

(For one short moment please consider: This hemmed-in life, this limited existence, encompa.s.sed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day, vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side. Before her the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year after year. It is not an experience to this woman who works beside me so patiently; it is her life. The forms she sees are warped and scarred; the intellects with which she comes in contact are dulled and undeveloped. All they know is toil, all they know of gain is a fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and cents again, never touching a two-dollar mark. The children who, barefooted, filthy, brush past her, sweeping the cotton from the infected floors, these are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen. The dirty women around her, low-browed, sensual, are the forms of womanhood that she knows; and the men? If she does not feed the pa.s.sion of the overseer, she may find some mill-hand who will contract a "mill marriage" with this daughter of the loom, a marriage little binding to him and which will give her children to give in time to the mill. This is the realism of her love story: She reads books that you, too, may have read; she dares to dream of scenes, to picture them--scenes that you have sought and wearied of. A t.i.the of our satiety would mean her banquet, her salvation!... Her happiness? _That_ question who can answer for her or for you?)

She continues: "I'm very fond of fo'ran travel, only I ain't never had much occasion for it."

This pathos and humour keep me silent. A few ropers have run out; she rises. I rise, too, to replace, to attach, and set the exhausted line taut and complete again.

Ten years! Ten years! All her girlhood and youth has been given to keeping ropers supplied with fresh yarn and speeders a-whirling. During this travail she has kept a serenity of expression, a depth of sweetness at which I marvel. Her voice is peculiarly soft and, coupled with the dialect drawl, is pleasant to hear.

"I hate the mills!" she says simply.

"What would you be if you could choose?" I venture to ask. She has no hesitation in answering.

"I'd love to be a trained nurse." Then, turn about is fair play in her mind, I suppose, for she asks:

"What would _you-all_ be?"

And ashamed not to well repay her truthfulness I frankly respond: "I'd like to write a book."

"I _dee_-clare." She stares at me. "Why, you-all _is_ ambitious. Did you ever write anything?"

"A letter or two."

She is interested and kindles, leaning forward. "I suttenly ain't so high in my ambitions," she says appreciatively. "Wish you'd write a love story for me to read," and she ponders over the idea, her eyes on my snowy flying speeders.

"Look a-hyar, got any of your sc.r.a.ppin's on writin' hyar? Ef you don't mind anybody's messin' with your things, bring your sc.r.a.ppin's to me an'

I'll soon tell you ef you can write a book er not," she whispered to me encouragingly, confidentially, a whisper reaching farther in the mills than a loud sound.

I thanked her and said: "Do you think that you'd know?"

"Well, I guess I would!" she said confidently. "I ain't read all my life sense I was eight years old not to know good writin' from bad. Can you-all sing?"

"No."

"Play sweet music?"

"No."

"I jest love it." She enthuses. "Every Sat.u.r.day afternoon I take of a music teacher on the gee-tar. It costs me a quarter."

I could see the scene: a shanty room, the tall, awkward figure bending over her instrument; the type that the teacher made, the ambition, the eagerness--all of which qualities we are so willing to deny to the slaves of toil.

"They ain't much flowers here in Granton," she said again. "'Tain't no use to try to have even a few geraneums; it's so dry; ain't no yards nor gardens, nuther."

Musing on this desolation as she walks up and down the line, she says: "I dew love flowers, don't you?"

Over and over again I am asked by those whose wish I suppose is to prove to themselves and their consciences that the working-girl is not so actively wretched, her outcry is not so audible that we are forced to respond:

"The working people are happy? The factory girls are happy, are they not? Don't you find them so?"

Is it a satisfaction to the leisure cla.s.s, to the capitalist and employer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral danger, every temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked, overstrained by labour varying from ten to thirteen hours a day, by all-night labour, and destruction of body and soul, _is happy_?

Do you _wish_ her to be so? Is the existence _ideal_?