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 entity, 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 classes. 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 bumped 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 class 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 balls of glass 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 glasses glanced up quickly.

“Doctor Meadows of Tittihute?” 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, butter, 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 coarse 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 class? 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 space 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 pass 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.

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 buttons and buttonholes are stitched. 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 stitching 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 stitched 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-glasses. 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 glasses. 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 assembled 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 passed the dishes of our frugal evening meal potatoes, bread and butter 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 passed 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 arrière 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.

My other roommate was of the Madonna type. In our class she would have been called an invalid. Her hands trembled, she was constantly in pain, and her nerves were rebellious without frequent doses of bromide. We found her one night lying in a heap on the bed, her moans having called us to her aid. It was the pain in her back that never stopped, the ache between her shoulders, the din of the machines in her ears, the vibration, the strain of incessant hours upon her tired nerves. We fixed her up as best we could, and the next day at quarter before seven she was, like the rest of us, bending over her machine again. She had been a school-teacher, after passing the necessary examination at the Geneseo Normal School. She could not say why school-teaching was uncongenial to her, except that the children “made her nervous” and she wanted to try factory work. Her father was a cheese manufacturer up in the Genesee Valley. She might have lived quietly at home, but she disliked to be a dependent. She was of the mystic, sentimental type. She had a broad forehead, straight auburn hair, a clear-cut mouth, whose sharp curves gave it sweetness. Though her large frame indicated clearly an Anglo-Saxon lineage, there was nothing of the sport about her. She had never learned to skate or swim, but she could sit and watch the hills all day long. Her clothes had an esthetic touch. Mingled with her nervous determination there was a sentimental yearning. She was an idealist, impelled by some controlling emotion which was the mainspring of her life.

Little by little we became friends. Our common weariness brought us often together after supper in a listless, confidential mood before the parlour stove. We let the conversation drift inevitably toward the strong current that was marking her with a touch of melancholy, like all those of her type whose emotional natures are an enchanted mirror, reflecting visions that have no place in reality. We talked about blondes and brunettes, tall men and short men, our favourite man’s name; and gradually the impersonal became personal, the ideal took form. Her voice, like a broken lute that might have given sweet sounds, related the story. It was inevitable that she should love a dreamer like herself. Nature had imbued her with a hopeless yearning. She slipped a gold locket from a chain on her throat. It framed her hero’s picture, the source of her courage, the embodiment of her heroic energy: a man of thirty, who had failed at everything; good-looking, refined, a personage in real life who resembled the inhabitants of her enchanted mirror. In the story she told there were stars and twilight, summer evenings, walks, talks, hopes and vague projects. Any practical questions I felt ready to ask would have sounded coarse. The little school-teacher with shattered nerves embodied a hope that was more to her than meat and drink and money. She was of those who do not live by bread alone.

Among the working population of Perry there are all manner of American characteristics manifest. In a country where conditions change with such rapidity that each generation is a revelation to the one which preceded it, it is inevitable that the family and the State should be secondary to the individual. We live with our own generation, with our contemporaries. We substitute experience for tradition. Each generation lives for itself during its prime. As soon as its powers begin to decline it makes way with resignation for the next: “We have had our day; now you can have yours.” Thus in the important decisions of life, the choosing of a career, matrimony or the like, the average American is much more influenced by his contemporaries than by his elders, much more stimulated or determined by the friends of his own age than by the older members of his family. This detaching of generations through the evolution of conditions is inevitable in a new civilization; it is part of the country’s freedom. It adds fervour and zest and originality to the effort of each. But it means a youth without the peace of protection; an old age without the harvest of consolation. The man in such a battle as life becomes under these circumstances is better equipped than the woman, whose nature disarms her for the struggle. The American woman is restless, dissatisfied. Society, whether among the highest or lowest classes, has driven her toward a destiny that is not normal. The factories are full of old maids; the colleges are full of old maids; the ballrooms in the worldly centres are full of old maids. For natural obligations are substituted the fictitious duties of clubs, meetings, committees, organizations, professions, a thousand unwomanly occupations.

I cannot attempt to touch here upon the classes who have not a direct bearing on our subject, but the analogy is striking between them and the factory elements of which I wish to speak. I cannot dwell upon details that, while full of interest, are yet somewhat aside from the present point, but I want to state a fact, the origin of whose ugly consequences is in all classes and therefore concerns every living American woman. Among the American born women of this country the sterility is greater, the fecundity less than those of any other nation in the world, unless it be France, whose anxiety regarding her depopulation we would share in full measure were it not for the foreign immigration to the United States, which counteracts the degeneracy of the American. The original causes for this increasing sterility are moral and not physical. When this is known, does not the philosophy of the American working woman become a subject of vital interest? Among the enemies to fecundity and a natural destiny there are two which act as potently in the lower as in the upper classes: the triumph of individualism, the love of luxury. America is not a democracy, the unity of effort between the man and the woman does not exist. Men were too long in a majority. Women have become autocrats or rivals. A phrase which I heard often repeated at the factory speaks by itself for a condition: “She must be married, because she don’t work.” And another phrase pronounced repeatedly by the younger girls: “I don’t have to work; my father gives me all the money I need, but not all the money I want. I like to be independent and spend my money as I please.”

What are the conclusions to be drawn? The American-born girl is an egoist. Her whole effort (and she makes and sustains one in the life of mill drudgery) is for herself. She works for luxury until the day when a proper husband presents himself. Then, she stops working and lets him toil for both, with the hope that the budget shall not be diminished by increasing family demands.

In those cases where the woman continues to work after marriage, she chooses invariably a kind of occupation which is inconsistent with child-bearing. She returns to the mill with her husband. There were a number of married couples at the knitting factory at Perry. They boarded, like the rest of us. I never saw a baby nor heard of a baby while I was in the town.

I can think of no better way to present this love of luxury, this triumph of individualism, this passion for independence than to continue my account of the daily life at Perry.

On Saturday night we drew our pay and got out at half-past four. This extra hour and a half was not given to us; we had saved it up by beginning each day at fifteen minutes before seven. In reality we worked ten and a quarter hours five days in the week in order to work eight and a half on the sixth.

By five o’clock on Saturdays the village street was animated with shoppers the stores were crowded. At supper each girl had a collection of purchases to show: stockings, lace, fancy buckles, velvet ribbons, elaborate hairpins. Many of them, when their board was paid, had less than a dollar left of the five or six it had taken them a week to earn.

“I am not working to save,” was the claim of one girl for all. “I’m working for pleasure.”

This same girl called me into her room one evening when she was packing to move to another boarding-house where were more young men and better food. I watched her as she put her things into the trunk. She had a quantity of dresses, underclothes with lace and tucks, ribbons, fancy hair ornaments, lace boléros, handkerchiefs. The bottom of her trunk was full of letters from her beau. The mail was always the source of great excitement for her, and having noticed that she seemed especially hilarious over a letter received that night, I made this the pretext for a confidence.

“You got a letter to-night, didn’t you?” I asked innocently. “Was it the one you wanted?”

“My, yes,” she answered, tossing up a heap of missives from the depths of her trunk. “It was from the same one that wrote me these. I’ve been going with him three years. I met him up in the grape country where I went to pick grapes. They give you your board and you can make twenty-seven or thirty dollars in a fall. He made up his mind as soon as he saw me that I was about right. Now he wants me to marry him. That’s what his letter said to-night. He is making three dollars a day and he owns a farm and a horse and wagon. He bought his sister a $300 piano this fall.”

“Well, of course,” I said eagerly, “you will accept him?”

She looked half shy, half pleased, half surprised.

“No, my! no,” she answered, shaking her head. “I don’t want to be married.”

“But why not? Don’t you think you are foolish? It’s a good chance and you have already been ‘going with him’ three years.”

“Yes, I know that, but I ain’t ready to marry him yet. Twenty-five is time enough. I’m only twenty-three. I can have a good time just as I am. He didn’t want me to come away and neither did my parents. I thought it would ’most kill my father. He looked like he’d been sick the day I left, but he let me come ’cause he knew I’d never be satisfied until I got my independence.”

What part did the love of humanity play in this young egoist’s heart? She was living, as she had so well explained it, “not to save, but to give herself pleasure”; not to spare others, but to exercise her will in spite of them. Tenderness, reverence, gratitude, protection are the feelings which one generation awakens for another. Among the thousand contemporaries at Perry, from the sameness of their ambitions, there was inevitable rivalry and selfishness. The closer the age and capacity the keener the struggle.

There are seven churches in Perry of seven different denominations. In this small town of 3,000 inhabitants there are seven different forms of worship. The church plays an important part in the social life of the mill hands. There are gatherings of all sorts from one Sunday to another, and on Sunday there are almost continuous services. There are frequent conversions. When the Presbyterian form fails they “try” the Baptist. There is no moral instruction; it is all purely religious; and they join one church or another more as they would a social club than an ordained religious organization.

Friday was “social” night at the church. Sometimes there was a “poverty” social, when every one put on shabby clothes, and any one who wore a correct garment of any sort was fined for the benefit of the church. Pound socials were another variety of diversion, where all the attendants were weighed on arriving and charged a cent admission for every pound of avoirdupois.

The most popular socials, however, were box socials, and it was to one of these I decided to go with two girls boarding in the house. Each of us packed a box with lunch as good as we could afford eggs, sandwiches, cakes, pickles, oranges and arrived with these, we proceeded to the vestry-room, where we found an improvised auctioneer’s table and a pile of boxes like our own, which were marked and presently put up for sale. The youths of the party bid cautiously or recklessly, according as their inward conviction told them that the box was packed by friend or foe.

My box, which, like the rest, had supper for two, was bid in by a tall, nice-looking mill hand, and we installed ourselves in a corner to eat and talk. He was full of reminiscence and had had a checkered career. His first experience had been at night work in a paper mill. He worked eleven hours a night one week, thirteen hours a night the next week, in and out of doors, drenched to the skin. He had lost twenty-five pounds in less than a year, and his face was a mere mask drawn over the irregular bones of the skull.

“I always like whatever I am doing,” he responded at my protestation of sympathy. “I think that’s the only way to be. I never had much appetite at night. They packed me an elegant pail, but somehow all cold food didn’t relish much. I never did like a pail.... How would you like to take a dead man’s place?” he asked, looking at me grimly.

I begged him to explain.

“One of my best friends,” he began, “was working alongside of me, and I guess he got dizzy or something, for he leaned up against the big belt that ran all the machinery and he was lifted right up in the air and tore to pieces before he ever knew what struck him. The boss came in and seen it, and the second question he asked, he says, ’Say, is the machinery running all right?’ It wasn’t ten minutes before there was another man in there doing the dead man’s work.”

I began to undo the lunch-box, feeling very little inclined to eat. We divided the contents, and my friend, seeing perhaps that I was depressed, told me about the “shows” he had been to in his wanderings.

“Now, I don’t care as much for comedy as some folks,” he explained. “I like ‘Puddin’ Head Wilson’ first rate, but the finest thing I ever seen was two of Shakespeare’s: ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and ‘Julius Cæsar.’ If you ever get a chance I advise you to go and hear them; they’re great.”

I responded cordially, and when we had exhausted Shakespeare I asked him how he liked Perry people.

“Oh, first rate,” he said. “I’ve been here only a month, but I think there’s too much formality. It seems to me that when you work alongside of a girl day after day you might speak to her without an introduction, but they won’t let you here. I never seen such a formal place.”

I said very little. The boy talked on of his life and experiences. His English was good except for certain grammatical errors. His words were well chosen. There was between him and the fortunate boys of a superior class only a few years of training.

The box social was the beginning of a round of gaieties. The following night I went with my box-social friend to a ball. Neither of us danced, but we arrived early and took good places for looking on. The barren hall was dimly lighted. In the corner there was a stove; at one end a stage. An old man with a chin beard was scattering sand over the floor with a springtime gesture of seed sowing. He had his hat on and his coat collar turned up, as though to indicate that the party had not begun. By and by the stage curtain rolled up and the musicians came out and unpacked a violin, a trombone, a flute and a drum. They sat down in the Medieval street painted on the scenery back of them, crossed their legs and asked for sol la from an esthetic young lady pianist, with whom they seemed on very familiar terms. The old man with the chin beard made an official entree from the wing, picked up the drum and became a part of the orchestra. The subscribers had begun to arrive, and when the first two-step struck up there were eight or ten couples on the floor. They held on to each other closely, with no outstretched arms as is the usual form, and they revolved very slowly around and around the room. The young men had smooth faces, patent leather boots, very smart cravats and a sheepish, self-conscious look. The girls had elaborate constructions in frizzed hair, with bows and tulle; black trailing skirts with coloured ruffled under-petticoats, light-coloured blouses and fancy belts. They seemed to be having a very good time.

On the way home we passed a brightly lighted grocery shop. My friend looked in with interest. “Goodness,” he said, “but those Saratoga chips look good. Now, what would you order,” he went on, “if you could have anything you liked?” We began to compose a menu with oysters and chicken and all the things we never saw, but it was not long before my friend cried “Mercy! Oh, stop; I can’t stand it. It makes me too hungry.”

The moon had gone under a cloud. The wooden sidewalks were rough and irregular, and as we walked along toward home I tripped once or twice. Presently I felt a strong arm put through mine, with this assurance: “Now if you fall we’ll both fall together.”

After four or five days’ experience with a machine I began to work with more ease and with less pain between my shoulders. The girls were kind and sympathetic, stopping to help and encourage the “new girl.” One of the shirt finishers, who had not been long in the mill herself, came across from her table one day when I was hard at work with a pain like a sword stab in my back.

“I know how you ache,” she said. “It just makes me feel like crying when I see how you keep at it and I can guess how tired you are.”

Nothing was so fatiguing as the noise. In certain places near the eyelet and buttonhole machines it was impossible to make one’s neighbour hear without shouting. My teacher, whose nerves, I took it, were less sensitive than mine, expressed her sensations in this way:

“It’s just terrible sitting here all day alone, worrying and thinking all by yourself and hustling from morning until night. Lots of the girls have nervous prostration. My sister had it and I guess I’m getting it. I hear the noise all night. Quite a few have consumption, too, from the dust and the lint.”

The butcher’s widow, the school-teacher and I started in at about the same time. At the end of two weeks the butcher’s widow had long been gone. The school-teacher had averaged seventy-nine cents a day and I had averaged eighty-nine. My best day I finished sixteen dozen shirts and netted $1.11. My board and washing cost me three dollars, so that from the first I had a living insured.

There was one negress in the factory. She worked in a corner quite by herself and attended to menial jobs, such as sweeping and picking up scraps. A great many of the girls and boys took correspondence courses in stenography, drawing, bookkeeping, illustrating, etc., etc. The purely mechanical work of the mill does not satisfy them. They are restless and ambitious, exactly the material with which to form schools of industrial art, the class of hand-workers of whom I have already spoken.

One of the girls who worked beside us as usual in the morning, left a note on her machine at noon one day to say that she would never be back. She was going up to the lake to drown herself, and we needn’t look for her. Some one was sent in search. She was found sitting at the lake’s edge, weeping. She did not speak. We all talked about it in our leisure moments, but the work was not interrupted. There were various explanations: she was out of her mind; she was discouraged with her work; she was nervous. No one suggested that an unfortunate love affair be the cause of her desperate act. There was not a word breathed against her reputation. I would have felt impure in proposing what to me seemed most probable.

The mill owners exert, as far as possible, an influence over the moral tone of their employees, assuming the right to judge their conduct both in and out of the factory and to treat them as they see fit. The average girls are self-respecting. They trifle with love. The attraction they wish to exert is ever present in their minds and in their conversation. The sacrifices they make for clothes are the first in importance. They have superstitions of all kinds: to sneeze on Saturday means the arrival of a beau on Sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall or a short caller, and so on. There is a book of dreams kept on one table in the mill, and the girls consult it to find the interpretation of their nocturnal reveries. They are fanciful, sentimental, cold, passionless. The accepted honesty of married life makes them slow to discard the liberty they love, to dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding as one would a funeral.

There is, of course, another category of girl, who goes brutally into passionate pleasures, follows the shows, drinks and knocks about town with the boys. She is known as a “bum,” has sacrificed name and reputation and cannot remain in the mill.

We discussed one night the suitable age for a girl to become mistress of herself. The boy of the household maintained that at eighteen a girl could marry, but that she must be twenty-one before she could have her own way. All the girls insisted that they could and did boss themselves and had even before they were eighteen.

Two chums who boarded in my house gave a charming illustration of the carelessness and the extravagance, the independence and love of it which characterizes feminine America. One of these was a deracinee, a child with a foreign touch in her twang; a legend of other climes in the dexterity of her deft fingers; some memory of an exile from France in her name: Lorraine. Her friend was a mondaine. She had the social gift, a subtle understanding of things worldly, the glissey mortel n’appuyez jamais attitude toward life. By a touch of flippancy, an adroit turn of mind, she kept the knowing mastery over people which has mystified and delighted in all great hostesses since the days of Esther.

When the other girls waited feverishly for love letters, she was opening a pile of invitations to socials and theatre parties. Discreet and condescending, she received more than she gave.

As soon as the posters were out for a Tuesday performance of “Faust,” preparations began in the household to attend. Saturday shopping and supper were hurried through and by six o’clock Lorraine was at the sewing machine tucking chiffon for hats and bodices. After ten hours’ work in the mill, she began again, eager to use the last of the spring twilight, prolonged by a quarter moon. There was a sudden, belated gust of snow; in the blue mist each white frame house glowed with a warm, pink light from its parlour stove. Lorraine’s fingers flew. A hat took form and grew from a heap of stuff into a Parisian creation; a bolero was cut and tucked and fitted; a skirt was ripped and stitched and pressed; a shirt-waist was started and finished. For two nights the girls worked until twelve o’clock so that when the “show” came they might have something new to wear that nobody had seen. This must have been the unanimous intention of the Perry populace, for the peanut gallery was a bower of fashion. Styles, which I had thought were new in Paris, were familiarly worn in Perry by the mill hands. White kid gloves were en règle. The play was “Faust.” All allusions to the triumph of religion over the devil; all insinuations on the part of Méphistophélès in regard to the enviable escape of Martha’s husband and of husbands in general, from prating women in general; all invocations of virtue and moral triumph, were greeted with bursts of applause. Between the acts there was music, and the ushers distributed showers of printed advertisements, which the audience fell at once to reading as though they had nothing to talk about.

I heard only one hearty comment about the play: “That devil,” said Lorraine, as we walked home together, “was a corker!”

I have left until the last the two friends who held a place apart in the household: the farmer and his wife, the old people of another generation with whom we boarded. They had begun life together forty years ago. They lived on neighbouring farms. There was dissension between the families such as we read of in “Pyramus and Thisbe,” “Romeo and Juliet.” The young people contrived a means of corresponding. An old coat that hung in the barn, where nobody saw it, served as post-office. Truman pleaded his cause ardently and won his Louisa. They fixed a day for the elopement. A fierce snowstorm piled high its drifts of white, but all the afternoon long the little bride played about, burrowing a path from the garden to her bedroom window, and when night came and brought her mounted hero with it, she climbed up on to the saddle by his side and rode away to happiness, leaving ill nature and quarrels far behind. Side by side, as on the night of their wedding ride, they had traversed forty years together. Ill health had broken up their farm home. When Truman could no longer work they came in to Perry to take boarders, having no children. The old man never spoke. He did chores about the house, made the fire mornings, attended to the parlour stove; he went about his work and no one ever addressed a word to him; he seemed to have no more live contact with the youth about him than driftwood has with the tree’s new shoots. He had lived his life on a farm; he was a land captain; he knew the earth’s secrets as a ship’s captain knows the sea’s. He paced the mild wooden pavements of Perry, booted, and capped for storm and wind, deep snow and all the inimical elements a pioneer might meet with. His new false teeth seemed to shine from his shaggy gray beard as a symbol of this new town experience in a rough natural existence, out of keeping, ill assorted. Tempted to know what his silence hid, I spent an hour with him by the kitchen stove one Sunday afternoon. His memory went easily back to the days when there were no railroads, no telegraphs, no mills. He was of a speculative turn of mind:

“I don’t see,” he said, “what makes men so crazy after gold. They’re getting worse all the time. Gold ain’t got no real value. You take all the gold out of the world and it wouldn’t make no difference whatever. You can’t even make a tool to get a living with, out of gold; but just do away with the iron, and where would you be?” And again, he volunteered:

“I think Mr. Carnegie would have done a deal nobler if he had paid his men a little more straight along. He wouldn’t have had such a name for himself. But don’t you believe it would have been better to have paid those men more for the work they were doing day by day than it is now to give pensions to their families? I know what I think about the matter.”

The mill girls’ excursion resort. A special train and ’busses run on
Sundays, and “everybody” goes.]

I asked him how he liked city life.

“Give me a farm every time,” was his answer. “Once you’ve seen a town you know it all. It’s the same over and over again. But the country’s changing every day in the year. It’s a terrible thing, being sick,” he went on. “It seems sometimes as though the pain would tear me to pieces when I walk across the floor. I wasn’t no good on the farm any more, so my wife took a notion we better come in town and take boarders.”

Thus it was with this happily balanced couple; as his side grew heavier she took on more ballast and swung even with him. She had the quick adaptability common to American women. During the years of farm life religious meetings and a few neighbours had kept her in touch with the outside world. The church and the kitchen were what she had on the farm; the church and the kitchen were what she had in town; family life supplemented by boarders, a social existence kept alive by a few faithful neighbours. She had retained her activity and sympathy because she was intelligent, because she lived with the young. The man could not make himself one of another generation, so he lived alone. He had lost his companions, the “cow kind and the sheep kind”; he had lost control over the earth that belonged to him; he was disused; he suffered; he pined. But as they sat together side by side at table, his look toward her was one of trust and comfort. His glance traveled back over a long vista of years seen to them as their eyes met, invisible to those about years that had glorified confidence in this life as it passed and transfigured it into the promise of another life to come.