MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

On arriving in Chicago I addressed myself to the ladies of Hull House, asking for a tenement family who would take a factory girl to board. I intended starting out without money to see at least how far I could go before putting my hand into the depths where an emergency fund was pinned in a black silk bag.

It was the first day of May. A hot wind blew eddies of dust up and down the electric car tracks; the streets were alive with children; a group swarmed in front of each doorstep, too large to fit into the house behind it. Down the long, regular avenues that stretched right and left there was a broken line of tenements topped by telegraph wires and bathed in a soft cloud of black soot falling from a chimney in the neighbourhood. The sidewalks were a patchwork of dirt, broken paving-stones and wooden boards. The sunshine was hot and gloomy. There were no names on the corner lamps and the house numbers were dull and needed repainting. It was already late in the afternoon: I had but an hour or two before dark to find a lodging. The miserable, overcrowded tenement houses repelled me, yet I dreaded that there should not be room among them for one more bread-winner to lodge. I hailed a cluster of children in the gutter:

“Say,” I said, “do you know where Mrs. Hicks lives to?”

They crowded around, eager. The tallest boy, with curly red hair and freckles, pointed out Mrs. Hicks’ residence, the upper windows of a brick flat that faced the world like a prison wall. After I had rung and waited for the responding click from above, a cross-eyed Italian woman with a baby in her arms motioned to me from the step where she was sitting that I must go down a side alley to find Mrs. Hicks. Out of a promiscuous heap of filth, a broken-down staircase led upward to a row of green blinds and a screen door. Somebody’s housekeeping was scattered around in torn bits of linen and tomato cans.

The screen door opened to my knock and the Hicks family gushed at me ever so many children of all ages and an immense mother in an under-waist and petticoat. The interior was neat; the wooden floors were scrubbed spotless. I congratulated myself. Mrs. Hicks clucked to the family group, smiled at me, and said:

“I never took a boarder in my life. I ain’t got room enough for my own young ones, let alone strangers.”

There were two more names on my list. I proceded to the nearest and found an Irish lady living in basement rooms ornamented with green crochet work, crayon portraits, red plaid table-cloths and chromo picture cards.

She had rheumatism in her “limbs” and moved with difficulty. She was glad to talk the matter over, though she had from the first no intention of taking me. From my then point of view nothing seemed so desirable as a cot in Mrs. Flannagan’s front parlour. I even offered in my eagerness to sleep on the horsehair sofa. Womanlike, she gave twenty little reasons for not taking me before she gave the one big reason, which was this:

“Well, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind having you myself, but I’ve got three sons, and you know boys is queer.”

It was late, the sun had set and only the twilight remained for my search before night would be upon me and I would be driven to some charity refuge.

I had one more name, and climbed to find its owner in a tenement flat. She was a German woman with a clubfoot. Two half-naked children incrusted with dirt were playing on the floor. They waddled toward me as I asked what my chances were for finding a room and board. The mother struck first one, then the other, of her offspring, and they fell into two little heaps, both wailing. From a hole back of the kitchen came the sympathetic response of a half-starved shaggy dog. He howled and the babes wailed while we visited the dusky apartment. There was one room rented to a day lodger who worked nights, and one room without a window where the German family slept. She proposed that I share the bed with her that night until she could get an extra cot. Her husband and the children could sleep on the parlour lounge. She was hideous and dirty. Her loose lips and half-toothless mouth were the slipshod note of an entire existence. There was a very dressy bonnet with feathers hanging on a peg in the bedroom, and two gala costumes belonging to the tearful twins.

“I’ll come back in an hour, thank you,” I said. “Don’t expect me if I am not here in an hour,” and I fled down the stairs. Before the hour was up I had found, through the guidance of the Irish lady with rheumatism, a clean room in one street and board in another. This was inconvenient, but safe and comparatively healthy.

My meals were thirty-five cents a day, payable at the end of the week; my room was $1.25 a week, total $3.70 a week.

My first introduction to Chicago tenement life was supper at Mrs. Wood’s.

I could hear the meal sputtering on the kitchen stove as I opened the Wood front door.

Mrs. Wood, combining duties as cook and hostess, called to me to make myself at home in the front parlour. I seated myself on the sofa, which exuded the familiar acrid odour of the poor. Opposite me there was a door half open leading into a room where a lamp was lighted. I could see a young girl and a man talking together. He was sitting and had his hat on. She had a halo of blond hair, through which the lamplight was shining, and she stood near the man, who seemed to be teasing her. Their conversation was low, but there was a familiar cry now and then, half vulgar, half affectionate.

When we had taken our places at the table, Mrs. Wood presented us.

“This is Miss Ida,” she said, pointing to the blonde girl; “she’s been boarding over a year with me, and this,” turning to the young man who sat near by with one arm hanging listlessly over the back of a chair, “this is Miss Ida’s intended.”

The other members of the household were a fox terrier, a canary and “Wood” Wood was a man over sixty. He and Mrs. Wood had the same devoted understanding that I have observed so often among the poor couples of the older generation. This good little woman occupied herself with the things that no longer satisfy. She took tender care of her husband, following him to the door with one hand on his shoulder and calling after him as he went on his way: “Good-by; take care of yourself.” She had a few pets, her children were married and gone, she had a miniature patch of garden, a trust in the church guild which took some time and attention for charitable works, and she did her own cooking and housework. “And,” she explained to me in the course of our conversation at supper, “I never felt the need of joining these University Settlement Clubs to get into society.” Wood and his wife were a good sort. Miss Ida was kind in her inquiries about my plans.

“Have you ever operated a power machine?” she asked.

“Yes,” I responded with what pride she little dreamed. “I’ve run an electric Singer.”

“I guess I can get you a job, then, all right, at my place. It’s piece-work; you get off at five, but you can make good money.”

I thanked her, not adding that my Chicago career was to be a checkered one, and that I was determined to see how many things I could do that I had never done before.

But social life was beginning to wear on Miss Ida’s intended. He took up his hat and swung along toward the door. I was struggling to extract with my fork the bones of a hard, fried fish. Mrs. Wood encouraged me in a motherly tone:

“Oh, my, don’t be so formal; take your knife.”

“Say,” called a voice from the door, “say, come on, Ida, I’m waiting for you.” And the blonde fiancee hurried away with an embarrassed laugh to join her lover. She was refined and delicate, her ears were small, her hands white and slender, she spoke correctly with a nasal voice, and her teeth (as is not often the case among this class, whose lownesses seem suddenly revealed when they open their mouths) were sound and clean.

The man’s smooth face was all commonness and vulgarity.

“He’s had appendicitis,” Mrs. Wood explained when we were alone. “He’s been out of work a long time. As soon as he goes to his job his side bursts out again where they operated on him. He ain’t a bit strong.”

“When are they going to be married?” I asked.

“Oh, dear me, they don’t think of that yet; they’re in no hurry.”

“Will Miss Ida work after she’s married?”

“No, indeed.”

Did they not have their share of ideal then, these two young labourers who could wait indefinitely, fed by hope, in their sordid, miserable surroundings?

I returned to my tenement room; its one window opened over a narrow alley flanked on its opposite side by a second tenement, through whose shutters I could look and see repeated layers of squalid lodgings. The thermometer had climbed up into the eighties. The wail of a newly born baby came from the room under mine. The heat was stifling. Outdoors in the false, flickering day of the arc lights the crowd swarmed, on the curb, on the sidewalk, on the house steps. The breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards. Shouts, calls, cries, moans, the sounds of old age and of infancy, of despair and of joy, mingled and became the anonymous murmur of a hot, human multitude.

The following morning I put ten cents in my pocket and started out to get a job before this sum should be used up. How huge the city seemed when I thought of the small space I could cover on foot, looking for work! I walked toward the river, as the commercial activity expressed itself in that direction by fifteen-and twenty-story buildings and streams of velvet smoke. Blocks and blocks of tenements, with the same dirty people wallowing around them, answered my searching eyes in blank response. There was an occasional dingy sign offering board and lodging. After I had made several futile inquiries at imposing offices on the river front I felt that it was a hopeless quest. I should never get work unknown, unskilled, already tired and discouraged. My collar was wilted in the fierce heat; my shabby felt sailor hat was no protection against the sun’s rays; my hands were gloveless; and as I passed the plate glass windows I could see the despondent droop of my skirt, the stray locks of hair that blew about free of comb or veil. A sign out: “Manglers wanted!” attracted my attention in the window of a large steam laundry. I was not a “mangler,” but I went in and asked to see the boss. “Ever done any mangling?” was his first question.

“No,” I answered, “but I am sure I could learn.” I put so much ardour into my response that the boss at once took an interest.

“We might give you a place as shaker; you could start in and work up.”

“What do you pay?”

“Four dollars a week until you learn. Then you would work up to five, five and a half.”

Better than nothing, was all I could think, but I can’t live on four a week.

“How often do you pay?”

“Every Tuesday night.”

This meant no money for ten days.

“If you think you’d like to try shaking come round Monday morning at seven o’clock.”

Which I took as my dismissal until Monday.

At least I had a job, however poor, and strengthened by this thought I determined to find something better before Monday. The ten-cent piece lay an inviting fortune in my hand. I was to part with one-tenth of it in exchange for a morning newspaper. This investment seemed a reckless plunge, but “nothing venture, nothing have,” my pioneer spirit prompted, and soon deep in the list of Wanted, Females, I felt repaid. Even in my destitute condition I had a choice in mind. If possible I wanted to work without machinery in a shop where the girls used their hands alone as power. Here seemed to be my heart’s content a short, concise advertisement, “Wanted, hand sewers.” After a consultation with a policeman as to the whereabouts of my future employer, it became evident that I must part with another of my ten cents, as the hand sewers worked on the opposite side of the city from the neighbourhood whither I had strayed in my morning’s wanderings. I took a car and alighted at a busy street in the fashionable shopping centre of Chicago. The number I looked for was over a steep flight of dirty wooden stairs. If there is such a thing as luck it was now to dwell a moment with one of the poorest. I pushed open a swinging door and let myself into the office of a clothing manufacturer.

The owner, Mr. F., got up from his desk and came toward me.

“I seen your advertisement in the morning paper.”

“Yes,” he answered in a kindly voice. “Are you a tailoress?”

“No, sir; I’ve never done much sewing except on a machine.”

“Well, we have machines here.”

“But,” I almost interrupted, beginning to fear that my training at Perry was to limit all further experience to an electric Singer, “I’d rather work with my hands. I like the hand-work.”

He looked at me and gave me an answer which exactly coincided with my theories. He said this, and it was just what I wanted him to say.

“If you do hand-work you’ll have to use your mind. Lots of girls come in here with an idea they can let their thoughts wander; but you’ve got to pay strict attention. You can’t do hand-work mechanically.”

“All right, sir,” I responded. “What do you pay?”

“I’ll give you six dollars a week while you’re learning.” I could hardly control a movement of delight. Six dollars a week! A dollar a day for an apprentice!

“But” my next question I made as dismal as possible “when do you pay?”

“Generally not till the end of the second week,” the kindly voice said; “but we could arrange to pay you at the end of the first if you needed the money.”

“Shall I come in Monday?”

“Come in this afternoon at 12:30 if you’re ready.”

“I’m ready,” I said, “but I ain’t brought no lunch with me, and it’s too late now to get home and back again.”

The man put his hand in his pocket and laid down before me a fifty-cent piece, advanced on my pay.

“Take that,” he said, with courtesy; “get yourself a lunch in the neighbourhood and come back at half-past twelve.”

I went to the nearest restaurant. It was an immense bakery patronized by office girls and men, hard workers who came for their only free moment of the day into this eating-place. Everything that could be swallowed quickly was spread out on a long counter, behind which there were steaming tanks of tea, coffee and chocolate. The men took their food downstairs and the ladies climbed to the floor above. I watched them. They were self-supporting women independent; they could use their money as they liked. They came in groups a rustling frou-frou announced silk underfittings; feathers, garlands of flowers, masses of trimming weighed down their broad-brimmed picture hats, fancy veils, kid gloves, silver side-bags, embroidered blouses and elaborate belt buckles completed the detail of their showy costumes, the whole worn with the air of a manikin. What did these busy women order for lunch? Tea and buns, ice-cream and buckwheat cakes, apple pie a la mode and chocolate were the most serious menus. This nourishing food they ate with great nicety and daintiness, talking the while about clothes. They were in a hurry, as all of them had some shopping to do before returning to work, and they each spent a prinking five minutes before the mirror, adjusting the trash with which they had bedecked themselves exteriorly while their poor hard-working systems went ungarnished and hungry within.

This is the wound in American society whereby its strength sloughs away. It is in this class that campaigns can be made, directly and indirectly, by preaching and by example. What sort of women are those who sacrifice all on the altar of luxury? It is a prostitution to sell the body’s health and strength for gewgaws. What harmony can there be between the elaborate get-up of these young women and the miserable homes where they live? The idolizing of material things is a religion nurtured by this class of whom I speak. In their humble surroundings the love of self, the desire to possess things, the cherished need for luxuries, crowd out the feelings that make character. They are but one manifestation of the egoism of the unmarried American woman.

For what and for whom do they work?

Is their fundamental thought to be of benefit to a family or to some member of a family? Is their indirect object to be strong, thrifty members of society? No. Their parents are secondary, their health is secondary to the consuming vanity that drives them toward a ruinous goal. They scorn the hand-workers; they feel themselves a noblesse by comparison. They are the American snobs whose coat of arms marks not a well-remembered family but prospective luxuries.... Married, they bring as a portion thriftless tastes, to satisfy which more than one business man has wrecked his career. They work like men; why should they not live as men do, with similar responsibilities? What should we think of a class of masculine clerks and employees who spent all their money on clothes?

The boss was busy when I got back to the clothing establishment. From the bench where I waited for orders I could take an inventory of the shop’s productions. Arrayed in rows behind glass cases there were all manner of uniforms: serious uniforms going to the colonies to be shot to pieces, militia uniforms that would hear their loudest heart-beats under a fair head; drum-majors’ hats that would never get farther than the peaceful lawn of a military post; fireman’s hats; the dark-blue coat of a lonely lighthouse guardian; the undignified short jacket of a “buttons.” All that meant parade and glory, the uniforms that make men identical by making each proud of himself for his brass buttons and gold lace. Even in the heavy atmosphere of the shop’s rear, though they appeared somewhat dingy and tarnished, they had their undeniable charm, and I thought with pity of the hands that had to sew on plain serge suits.

As soon as the boss saw me, the generous Mr. F. who advanced me the fifty cents smiled at the skeptical Mr. F. who had never expected to see me again. One self said to the other: “I told you so!” and all the kindly lines in the man’s face showed that he had looked for the best even in his inferiors and that he had found mankind worth trusting. He was the most generous employer I met with anywhere; I also took him to be the least businesslike. But, as though quickly to establish the law of averages, his head forewoman counterbalanced all his mercies by her ferocious crossness. She terrorized everybody, even Mr. F. It was to her, I concluded, that we owed our $6 a week. No girl would stay for less; it was an atelier chiefly of foreign employees; the proud American spirit would not stand the lash of Frances’ tongue. She had been ten years in the place whose mad confusion was order to her. Mr. F. did not dare to send her away; he preferred keeping a perpetual advertisement in the papers and changing hands every few days.

The workroom on our floor was fifty or sixty feet long, with windows on the street at one end and on a court at the other. The middle of the room was lighted by gas. The air was foul and the dirt lay in heaps at every corner and was piled up under the centre tables. It was less like a workshop than an old attic. There was the long-accumulated disorder of hasty preparation for the vanities of life. It had not at all the aspect of a factory which makes a steady provision of practical things. There were odds and ends of fancy costumes hanging about swords, crowns, belts and badges. Under the sewing machines’ swift needles flew the scarlet coats of a regiment; gold and silver braid lay unfurled on the table; the hand-workers bent over an armful of khaki; a row of young girls were fitting military caps to imaginary soldier’s heads; the ensigns of glory slipped through the fingers of the humble; chevrons and epaulets were caressed never so closely by toil-worn hands. In the midst of us sits a man on a headless hobby horse, making small gray trunks bound in red leather, such boxes as might contain jewels for Marguerite, a game of lotto, or a collection of jack-straws and mother-of-pearl counters brought home from a first trip abroad. The trunk maker wears a sombrero and smokes a corn-cob pipe. He is very handsome with dark eyes and fine features, and he has the “average figure,” so that he serves as manikin for the atelier; and I find him alternately a workman in overalls and a Turkish magnate with turban and flowing robes. It is into this atmosphere of toil and unreality that I am initiated as a hand sewer. Something of the dramatic and theatrical possesses the very managers themselves. Below, a regiment waits impatient for new brass buttons; we sew against time and break all our promises. Messengers arrive every few minutes with fresh reports of rising ire on the part of disappointed customers. Down the stairs pell-mell comes an elderly partner of the firm with a gold-and-purple crown on his head and after him follows the kindly Mr. F. in an usher’s jacket. “If you don’t start now,” he calls, “that order’ll be left on our hands.”

Amid such confusion the regular rhythm of the needle as it carries its train of thread across the yards of coloured cloth is peaceful, consoling. I have on one side of me a tailor who speaks only Polish, on the other side a seamstress who speaks only German. Across the frontier I thus become they communicate with signs, and I get my share of work planned out by each. Every woman in the place is cross except the girl next to me. She has only just come in and the poison of the forewoman has not yet stung her into ill nature. She is, like all the foreigners, neatly, soberly dressed in a sensible frock of good durable material. The few Americans in the shop have on elaborate shirt-waists in light-coloured silks with fancy ribbon collars. We are well paid, there is no doubt of it. We begin work at 8 A.M. and have a generous half-hour at noon. Most of the girls are Germans and Poles, and they have all received training as tailoresses in their native countries. To the sharp onslaught of Frances’ tongue they make no response except in dogged silent obedience, whereas the dressy Americans with their proper spirit of independence touch the limit of insubordination at every new command. Insults are freely exchanged; threats ring out on the tired ears. Frances is ubiquitous. She scolds the tailors with a torrent of abuse, she terrorizes the handsome manikin, she bewilders the kindly Mr. F., and before three days have passed she has dismissed the neat little Polish girl, in tears. This latter comes to me, her face wrought with emotion. She was receiving nine dollars a week; it is her first place in America. This sudden dismissal, its injustice, requires an explanation. She cannot speak a word of English and asks me to put my poor German at her service as interpreter.

Mr. F. is clearly a man who advocates everything for peace, and as there is for him no peace when Frances is not satisfied, we gain little by our appeal to him except a promise that he will attend later to the troubles of the Polish girl. But later, as earlier, Frances triumphs, and I soon bid good-by to my seatmate and watch her tear-stained face disappear down the dingy hallway. She was a skilled tailoress, but she could not cut out men’s garments, so Frances dismissed her. I wonder when my turn will come, for I am a green hand and yet determined to keep the American spirit. For the sake of justice I will not be downed by Frances.

It is hard to make friends with the girls; we dare not converse lest a fresh insult be hurled at us. For every mistake I receive a loud, severe correction. When night comes I am exhausted. The work is easy, yet the moral atmosphere is more wearing than the noise of many machines. My job is often changed during the week. I do everything as a greenhorn, but I work hard and pay attention, so that there is no excuse to dismiss me.

“I am only staying here between jobs,” the girl next me volunteers at lunch. “My regular place burnt out. You couldn’t get me to work under her. I wouldn’t stand it even if they do pay well.” She is an American.

“You’re lucky to be so independent,” says a German woman whose dull silence I had hitherto taken for ill nature. “I’m glad enough to get the money. I was up this morning at five, working. There’s myself and my mother and my little girl, and not a cent but what I make. My husband is sick. He’s in Arizona.”

“What were you doing at five?” I asked.

“I have a trade,” she answers. “I work on hair goods. It don’t bring me much, but I get in a few hours night and morning and it helps some. There’s so much to pay.”

She was young, but youth is no lover of discomfort. Hardships had chased every vestige of jeunesse from her high, wrinkled brow and tired brown eyes. Like a mirror held against despair her face reflected no ray of hope. She was not rebellious, but all she knew of life was written there in lines whose sadness a smile now and again intensified.

Added to the stale, heavy atmosphere there is now a smell of coffee and tobacco smoke. The old hands have boiled a noon beverage on the gas; the tailors smoke an after-dinner pipe. Put up in newspaper by Mrs. Wood, at my matinal departure, my lunches, after a journey across the city, held tightly under my arm, become, before eating, a block of food, a composite meal in which I can distinguish original bits of ham sandwich and apple pie. The work, however, does not seem hard to me. I sew on buttons, rip trousers, baste coat sleeves I do all sorts of odd jobs from eight until six, without feeling, in spite of the bad air, any great physical fatigue which ten minutes’ brisk walk does not shake off. But never have the hours dragged so; the moral weariness in the midst of continual scolding and abuse are unbearable. Each night I come to a firm decision to leave the following day, but weakly I return, sure of my dollar and dreading to face again the giant city in search of work. About four one afternoon, well on in the week, Frances brings me a pair of military trousers; the stripes of cloth at the side seam are to be ripped off. I go to work cheerfully cutting the threads and slipping one piece of cloth from the other.

Apparently Frances is exasperated that I should do the job in an easy way. It is the only way I know to rip, but Frances knows another way that breaks your back and almost puts your eyes out, that makes you tired and behindhand and sure of a scolding. She shows me how to rip her way. The two threads of the machine, one from above and one from below, which make the stitch, must be separated. The work must be turned first on the wrong, then on the right side, the scissors must lift first the upper, then the under thread. I begin by cutting a long hole in the trousers, which I hide so Frances will not see it. She has frightened me into dishonesty. Arrived at the middle of the stripe I am obliged to turn the trousers wrong side out and right side out again every other stitch. While I was working in this way, getting more enraged every moment, a bedbug ran out of the seam between my fingers. I killed it. It was full of blood and made a wet red spot on the table. Then I put down the trousers and drew away my chair. It was useless saying anything to the girl next me. She was a Pole, dull, sullen, without a friendly word; but the two women beyond had told me once that they pitied Frances’ husband, so I looked to them for support in what I was about to do.

“There’s bedbugs in them clothes,” I said. “I won’t work on ’em. No, sir, not if she sends me away this very minute.”

In a great hurry Frances passed me twice. She called out angrily both times without waiting for an answer:

“Why don’t you finish them pants?”

Frances was a German. She wore two rhinestone combs in her frizzes, which held also dust and burnt odds and ends of hair. She had no lips whatever. Her mouth shut completely over them after each tirade. Her eyes were separated by two deep scowls and her voice was shrill and nasal.

On her third round she faced me with the same question:

“Why don’t you finish them pants?”

“Because,” I answered this time, “there’s bedbugs in ’em and I ain’t goin’ to touch ’em!”

“Oh! my!” she taunted me, in a sneering voice, “that’s dreadful, ain’t it? Bedbugs! Why, you need only just look on the floor to see ’em running around anywhere!”

I said nothing more, and this remark was the last Frances ever addressed to me.

“Mike!” she called to the presser in the corner, “will you have this young lady’s card made out.”

She gave me no further work to do, but, too humiliated to sit idle, I joined a group of girls who were sewing badges.

We had made up all description of political badges badges for the court, for processions, school badges, military badges, flimsy bits of coloured ribbon and gold fringe which go the tour of the world, rallying men to glory. In the dismal twilight our fingers were now busied with black-and-silver “in memoriam” badges, to be worn as a last tribute to some dead member of a coterie who would follow him to the grave under the emblem that had united them.

We were behindhand for the dead as well as for the living. At six the power was turned off, the machine hands went home, there was still an unfinished heap of black badges.

I got up and put on my things in the dark closet that served for dressing-room. Frances called to the hand sewers in her rasping voice:

“You darsn’t leave till you’ve finished them badges.”

How could I feel the slavery they felt? My nerves were sensitive; I was unaccustomed to their familiar hardships. But on the other hand, my prison had an escape; they were bound within four walls; I dared to rebel knowing the resources of the black silk emergency bag, money lined. They for their living must pay with moral submission as well as physical fatigue. There was nothing between them and starvation except the success of their daily effort. What opposition could the German woman place, what could she risk, knowing that two hungry mouths waited to be fed beside her own?

With a farewell glance at the rubbish-strewn room, the high, grimy windows, the group of hand sewers bent over their work in the increasing darkness, I started down the stairs. A hand was laid on my arm, and I looked up and saw Mike’s broad Irish face and sandy head bending toward me.

“I suppose you understand,” he said, “that there’ll be no more work for you.”

“Yes,” I answered, “I understand,” and we exchanged a glance that meant we both agreed it was Frances’ fault.

In the shop below I found Mr. F. and returned the fifty cents he had advanced me. He seemed surprised at this.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in his gentle voice, “that we couldn’t arrange things.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. But I dared not add a word against Frances. She had terrorized me like the rest, and though I knew I never would see her again, her pale, lifeless mask haunted me. I remembered a remark the German woman had made when Frances dismissed the Polish girl: “People ought to make it easy, and not hard, for others to earn a living.”

At the end of this somewhat agitating day I returned to my tenement lodgings as to a haven of rest. There was one other lodger besides myself: she was studying music on borrowed money at four dollars a lesson. Obviously she was a victim to luxury in the same degree as the young women with whom I had lunched at the bakery. Nothing that a rich society girl might have had been left out of her wardrobe, and borrowed money seemed as good as any for making a splurge.

Miss Arnold was something of a snob, intellectual and otherwise. It was evident from my wretched clothes and poor grammar that I was not accustomed to ladies of her type, but, far from sparing me, she humiliated me with all sorts of questions.

“I’m tired of taffeta jackets, aren’t you?” she would ask, apropos of my flimsy ulster. “I had taffeta last year, with velvet and satin this winter; but I don’t know what I’ll get yet this summer.”

After supper, on my return, I found her sitting in the parlour with Mrs. Brown. They never lighted the gas, as there was an electric lamp which sent its rays aslant the street and repeated the pattern of the window curtains all over Mrs. Brown’s face and hands.

Drawn up on one end of the horsehair sofa, Miss Arnold, in a purple velvet blouse, chatted to Mrs. Brown and me.

“I’m from Jacksonville,” she volunteered, patting her masses of curly hair. “Do you know anybody from Jacksonville? It’s an elegant town, so much wealth, so many retired farmers, and it’s such an educational centre. Do you like reading?” she asked me.

“I don’t get time,” is my response.

“Oh, my!” she rattles on. “I’m crazy about reading. I do love blank verse it makes the language so choice, like in Shakespeare.”

Mrs. Brown and I, being in the majority as opposed to this autocrat, remain placid. A current of understanding exists between us. Miss Arnold, on the other hand, finds our ignorance a flattering background for her learning and adventures. She is so obviously a woman of the world on the tenement horsehair sofa.

“In case you don’t like your work,” she Lady Bountifuls me, “I can get you a stylish place as maid with some society people just out of Chicago friends of mine, an elegant family.”

“I don’t care to live out,” I respond, thanking her. “I like my Sundays and my evenings off.”

Mrs. Brown pricks up her ears at this, and I notice that thereafter she keeps close inquiry as to how my Sundays and evenings are spent.

But the bell rings. Miss Arnold is called for by friends to play on the piano at an evening entertainment. Mrs. Brown and I, being left alone, begin a conversation of the personal kind, which is the only resource among the poor. If she had had any infirmity a wooden leg or a glass eye she would naturally have begun by showing it to me, but as she had been spared intact she chose second best.

“I’ve had lots of shocks,” she said, rocking back and forth in a squeaky rocking-chair. The light from over the way flickered and gleamed. Mrs. Brown’s broad, yellow face and gray hair were now brilliant, now somber, as she rocked in and out of the silver rays. Her voice was a metallic whine, and when she laughed against her regular, even, false teeth there was a sound like the mechanical yelp of a toy cat. Married at sixteen, her whole life had been Brown on earth below and God in His heaven above. Childless, she and Brown had spent over fifty years together. It was natural in the matter of shocks the first she should tell me about was Brown’s death. The story began with “a breakfast one Sunday morning at nine o’clock.... Brown always made the fire, raked down the ashes, set the coffee to boil, and when the toast and eggs were ready he called me. And that wasn’t one morning, mind you it was every morning for fifty years. But this particular morning I noticed him speaking strange; his tongue was kind o’ thick. He didn’t hardly eat nothing, and as soon as I’d done he got up and carried the ashes downstairs to dump ’em. When he come up he seemed dizzy. I says to him, ‘Don’t you feel good?’ but he didn’t seem able to answer. He made like he was going to undress. He put his hand in his pocket for his watch, and he put it in again for his pocketbook; but the second time it stayed in he couldn’t move it no more; it was dead and cold when I touched it. He leaned up against the wall, and I tried to get him over on to the sofa. When I looked into his eyes I see that he was gone. He couldn’t stand, but I held on to him with all my force; I didn’t let his head strike as he went down. When he fell we fell together.” Her voice was choked; even now after three years as she told the story she could not believe it herself.

Presently when she is calm again she continues the recital of her shocks three times struck by lightning and once run over. Her simple descriptions are straightforward and dramatic. As she talks the wind blows against the windows, the shutters rattle and an ugly white china knob, against which the curtains are draped, falls to the floor. Tenderly, amazed, she picks it up and looks at it.

“Brown put that up,” she says; “there hasn’t no hand touched it since his’n.”

Proprietor of this house in which she lives, Mrs. Brown is fairly well off. She rents one floor to an Italian family, one to some labourers, and one to an Irishman and his wife who get drunk from time to time and rouse us in the night with tumult and scuffling. She has a way of disappearing for a week or more and returning without giving any account of herself. Relations are strained, and Mrs. Brown in speaking of her says:

“I don’t care what trouble I was in, I wouldn’t call in that Irish woman. I don’t have anything to do with her. I’d rather get the Dago next door.” And hereafter follows a mild tirade against the Italians the same sentiments I have heard expressed before in the labouring centres.

“They’re kind folks and good neighbours,” Mrs. Brown explains, “but they’re different from us. They eat what the rest of us throw away, and there’s no work they won’t do. They’re putting money aside fast; most of ’em owns their own houses; but since they’ve moved into this neighbourhood the price of property’s gone down. I don’t have nothing to do with ’em. We don’t any of us. They’re not like us; they’re different.”

Without letting a day elapse I started early the following morning in search of a new job. The paper was full of advertisements, but there was some stipulation in each which narrowed my possibilities of getting a place, as I was an unskilled hand. There was, however, one simple “Girls wanted!” which I answered, prepared for anything but an electric sewing machine.

The address took me to a more fashionable side of the city, near the lake; a wide expanse of pale, shimmering water, it lay a refreshing horizon for eyes long used to poverty’s quarters. Like a sea, it rolled white-capped waves toward the shore from its far-away emerald surface where sail-freighted barks traveled at the wind’s will. Free from man’s disfiguring touch, pure, immaculate, it appeared bridelike through a veil of morning mist. And at its very brink are the turmoil and confusion of America’s giant industries. In less than an hour I am receiving wages from a large picture frame company in East Lake Street. Once more I have made the observation that men are more agreeable bosses than women. The woman, when she is not exceptionally disagreeable, like Frances, is always annoying. She bothers and nags; things must be done her way; she enjoys the legitimate minding of other people’s business. Aiming at results only, the masculine mind is more tranquil. Provided you get your work done, the man boss doesn’t care what methods you take in doing it. For the woman boss, whether you get your work done or not, you must do it her way. The overseer at J.’s picture frame manufactory is courteous, friendly, considerate. I have a feeling that he wishes me to cooeperate with him, not to be terrorized and driven to death by him. My spirits rise at once, my ambition is stimulated, and I desire his approval. The work is all done by the piece, he explains to me, telling me the different prices. The girls work generally in teams of three, dividing profits. Nothing could be more modern, more middle-class, more popular, more philistine than the production of J.’s workrooms. They are the cheap imitations fed to a public hungry for luxury or the semblance of it. Nothing is genuine in the entire shop. Water colours are imitated in chromo, oils are imitated in lithograph, white carved wood frames are imitated in applications of pressed brass. Great works of art are belittled by processes cheap enough to be within reach of the poorest pocket. Framed pictures are turned out by the thousand dozens, every size, from the smallest domestic scene, which hangs over the baby’s crib in a Harlem flat, to the large wedding-present size placed over the piano in the front parlour. The range of subjects covers a familiar list of comedies or tragedies the partings before war, the interior behind prison bars, the game of marbles, the friendly cat and dog, the chocolate girl, the skipper and his daughter, etc., etc.

My job is easy, but slow. With a hammer and tacks I fasten four tin mouldings to the four corners of a gilt picture frame. Twenty-five cents for a hundred is the pay given me, and it takes me half a day to do this many; but my comrades don’t allow me to get discouraged.

“You’re doing well,” a red-haired vis-a-vis calls to me across the table. And the foreman, who comes often to see how I am getting along, tells me that the next day we are to begin team-work, which pays much better.

The hours are ten a day: from seven until five thirty, with twenty-five minutes at noon instead of half an hour. The extra five minutes a day mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off at five on Saturdays.

The conversation around me leads me to suppose that my companions are not downtrodden in any way, nor that they intend letting work interfere with happiness. They have in their favour the most blessed of all gifts youth. The tragic faces one meets with are of the women breadwinners whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children in whom physical fatigue arrests development and all possibility of pleasure. My present team-mates and those along the rest of the room are Americans between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full of unconscious hope for the future, which is natural in healthy, well-fed youth, taking their work cheerily as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they can have more clothes and more diversions during their leisure hours.

The profitable job given us on the following day is monotonous and dirty, but we net $1.05 each. There is a mechanical roller which passes before us, carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of coloured paper covered with glue. My vis-a-vis and I lay the palms of our right hands on to the glue surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on the table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board. The boss of the team fixes the two sheets together with a brush which she manipulates skilfully. We are making in this way the stiff backs which hold the pictures into their frames. When we have fallen into the proper swing we finish one hundred sheets every forty-five minutes. We could work more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at this rate, and it is so comfortable that conversation is not interrupted. The subjects are the same as elsewhere dress, young men, entertainments. The girls have “beaux” and “steady beaux.” The expression, “Who is she going with?” means who is her steady beau. “I’ve got Jim Smith now, but I don’t know whether I’ll keep him,” means that Jim Smith is on trial as a beau and may become a “steady.” They go to Sunday night subscription dances and arrive Monday morning looking years older than on Saturday, after having danced until early morning. “There’s nothing so smart for a ball,” the mundane of my team tells us, “as a black skirt and white silk waist.”

About ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle or a bit of cocoanut cake or some titbit from the lunch parcel which is opened seriously at twelve.

The light is good, the air is good, the room where we work is large and not crowded, the foreman is kind and friendly, the girls are young and cheerful; one can make $7 to $8 a week.

The conditions at J.’s are too favourable to be interesting, and, having no excuse to leave, I disappear one day at lunch time and never return to get my apron or my wages. I shall be obliged to draw upon the resources of the black silk bag, but before returning to my natural condition of life I wish to try one more place: a printing job. There are quantities of advertisements in the papers for girls needed to run presses of different sorts, so on the very afternoon of my self-dismissal I start through the hot summer streets in search of a situation. On the day when my appearance is most forlorn I find policemen always as officially polite as when I am dressed in my best. Other people of whom I inquire my way are sometimes curt, sometimes compassionate, seldom indifferent, and generally much nicer or not nearly as nice as they would be to a rich person. Poor old women to whom I speak often call me “dear” in answering.

Under the trellis of the elevated road the “cables” clang their way. Trucks and automobiles, delivery wagons and private carriages plunge over the rough pavements. The sidewalks are crowded with people who are dressed for business, and who, whether men or women, are a business type; the drones who taste not of the honey stored in the hives which line the streets and tower against the blue sky, veiling it with smoke. The orderly rush of busy people, among whom I move toward an address given in the paper, is suddenly changed into confusion and excitement by the bell of a fire-engine which is dragged clattering over the cobbles, followed closely by another and another before the sound of the horses’ hoofs have died away. Excitement for a moment supersedes business. The fire takes precedence before the office, and a crowd stands packed against policemen’s arms, gazing upward at a low brick building which sends forth flames hotter than the brazen sun, smoke blacker than the perpetual veil of soot.

I compare the dingy gold number over the burning door with the number in print on the newspaper slip held between my thumb and forefinger. Decidedly this is not one of my lucky days. The numbers correspond. But there are other addresses and I collect a series of replies. The employer in a box factory on the West Side takes my address and promises to let me know if he has a vacancy for an unskilled hand. Another boss printer, after much urging on my part, consents to give me a trial the following Monday at three dollars a week. A kindly forelady in a large printing establishment on Wabash Avenue sends me away because she wants only trained workers. “I’m real sorry,” she says. “You’re from the East, aren’t you? I notice you speak with an accent.”

By this time it is after three in the afternoon; my chances are diminishing as the day goes on and others apply before me. There is one more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a girl to feed a Gordon press. I have never heard of a Gordon press, but I make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a job for the very next day. The stairway is dingy and irregular. My spirits are not buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room with a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist, sits on a high stool overlooking the office. Three portly men, fat, well nourished, evidently of one family, are installed behind yellow ash desks, each with a lady typewriter at his right hand. I go timidly up to the fattest of the three. He is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling the heat painfully. He pretends to be very busy and hardly looks up when I say:

“I seen your ad. in the paper this morning.”

“You’re rather late,” is his answer. “I’ve got two girls engaged already.”

“Too late!” I say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a minute while he looks at me. I profit by this moment, and, changing from tragedy to a good-humoured smile, I ask:

“Say, are you sure those girls’ll come? You can’t always count on us, you know.”

He laughs at this. “Have you ever run a Gordon press?”

“No, sir; but I’m awful handy.”

“Where have you been working?”

“At J.’s in Lake Street.”

“What did you make?”

“A dollar a day.”

“Well, you come in to-morrow about eleven and I’ll tell you then whether I can give you anything to do.”

“Can’t you be sure now?”

Truly disappointed, my voice expresses the eagerness I feel.

“Well,” the fat man says indulgently, “you come in to-morrow morning at eight and I’ll give you a job.”

The following day I begin my last and by far my most trying apprenticeship.

The noise of a single press is deafening. In the room where I work there are ten presses on my row, eight back of us and four printing machines back of them. On one side of the room only are there windows. The air is heavy with the sweet, stifling smell of printer’s ink and cheap paper. A fine rain of bronze dust sifts itself into the hair and clothes of the girls at our end of the room, where they are bronzing coloured advertisements. The work is all done standing; the hours are from seven until six, with half an hour at noon, and holiday at one thirty on Saturdays. It is to feed a machine that I am paid three dollars a week. The expression is admirably chosen. The machine’s iron jaws yawn for food; they devour all I give, and when by chance I am slow they snap hungrily at my hand and would crush my fingers did I not snatch them away, feeling the first cold clutch. It is nervous work. Each leaf to be printed must be handled twice; 5,000 circulars or bill-heads mean 10,000 gestures for the printer, and this is an afternoon’s work.

Into the square marked out for it by steel guards the paper must be slipped with the right hand, while the machine is open; with the left hand the printed paper must be pulled out and a second fitted in its place before the machine closes again. What a master to serve is this noisy iron mechanism animated by steam! It gives not a moment’s respite to the worker, whose thoughts must never wander from her task. The girls are pale. Their complexions without exception are bad.

We are bossed by men. My boss is kind, and, seeing that I am ambitious, he comes now and then and prints a few hundred bill-heads for me. There is some complaining sotto voce of the other boss, who, it appears, is a hard taskmaster. Both are very young, both chew tobacco and expectorate long, brown, wet lines of tobacco juice on to the floor. While waiting for new type I get into conversation with the boss of ill-repute. He has an honest, serious face; his eyes are evidently more accustomed to judging than to trusting his fellow beings. He is communicative.

“Do you like your job?” he asks.

“Yes, first rate.”

“They don’t pay enough. I give notice last week and got a raise. I guess I’ll stay on here until about August.”

“Then where are you going?”

“Going home,” he answers. “I’ve been away from home for seven years. I run away when I was thirteen and I’ve been knocking around ever since, takin’ care of myself, makin’ a livin’ one way or another. My folks lives in California. I’ve been from coast to coast and I tell you I’ll be mighty glad to get back.”

“Ever been sick?”

“Yes, twice. It’s no fun. No matter how much licking a boy gets he ought never to leave home. The first year or so you don’t mind it so much, but when you’ve been among strangers two years, three years, all alone, sick or well, you begin to feel you must get back to your own folks.”

“Are you saving up?” I ask.

He nods his head, not free to speak for tobacco juice.

“I’ll be able to leave here in August,” he explains, when he has finished spitting, “for Omaha. In three months I can save up enough to get on as far as Salt Lake, and in another three months I can move on to San Francisco. I tell you,” he adds, returning to his work, “a person ought never to leave home.” He had nine months of work and privation before reaching the goal toward which he had been yearning for years. With what patience he appears possessed compared to our fretfulness at the fast express trains, which seem to crawl when they carry us full speed homeward toward those we love! Nine months, two hundred and seventy days, ten-hour working days, to wait. He was manly. He had the spirit of adventure; his experience was wide and his knowledge of men extended; he had managed to take care of himself in one way or another for seven years, the most trying and decisive in a boy’s life. He had not gone to the bad, evidently, and to his credit he was homeward bound. His history was something out of the ordinary; yet beyond the circle where he worked and was considered a hard taskmaster he was a nonentity a star in the milky way, a star whose faint rays, without individual brilliancy, added to the general luster.

The first day I had a touch of pride in getting easily ahead of the new girl who started in when I did. From my machine I could see only the back of her head; it was shaking disapproval at every stroke she made and had to make over again. She had a mass of untidy hair and a slouchy skirt that slipped out from her belt in the back. If not actually stupid, she was slow, and the foreman and the girl who took turns teaching her exchanged glances, meaning that they were exhausting their patience and would readily give up the job. I was pleased at being included in these glances, and had a miserable moment of vanity at lunch time when the old girls, the habitues, came after me to eat with them. The girl with the untidy hair and the long skirt sat quite by her self. Without unfolding her newspaper bundle, she took bites of things from it, as though she were a little ashamed of her lunch. My moment of vanity had passed. I went over to her, not knowing whether her appearance meant a slipshod nature or extreme poverty. As we were both new girls, there was no indiscretion in my direct question:

“Like your job?”

I could not understand what she answered, so I continued: “Ever worked before?”

She opened her hands and held them out to me. In the palm of one there was a long scar that ran from wrist to forefinger. Two nails had been worn off below the quick and were cracked through the middle. The whole was gloved in an iron callous, streaked with black.

“Does that look like work?” was her response. It was almost impossible to hear what she said. Without a palate, she forced the words from her mouth in a strange monotone. She was one of nature’s monstrous failures. Her coarse, opaque skin covered a low forehead and broad, boneless nose; her teeth were crumbling with disease, and into her full lower lip some sharp tool had driven a double scar. She kept her hand over her mouth when she talked, and except for this movement of self-consciousness her whole attitude was one of resignation and humility. Her eyes in their dismal surroundings lay like clear pools in a swamp’s midst reflecting blue sky.

“What was you doing to get your hands like that?” I asked.

“Tipping shoe-laces. I had to quit, ’cause they cut the pay down. I could do twenty-two gross in a day, working until eight o’clock, and I didn’t care how hard I worked so long as I got good pay $9 a week. But the employer’d been a workman himself, and they’re the worst kind. He cut me down to $4 a week, so I quit.”

“Do you live home?”

“Yes. I give all I make to my mother, and she gives me my clothes and board. Almost anywhere I can make $7 a week, and I feel when I earn that much like I was doing right. But it’s hard to work and make nothing. I’m slow to learn,” she smiled at me, covering her mouth with her hand, “but I’ll get on to it by and by and go as fast as any one; only I’m not very strong.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Heart disease for one thing, and then I’m so nervous. It’s kind of hard to have to work when you’re not able. To-day I can hardly stand, my head’s aching so. They make the poor work for just as little as they can, don’t they? It’s not the work I mind, but if I can’t give in my seven a week at home I get to worrying.”

Now and then as she talked in her inarticulate pitiful voice the tears added luster to her eyes as her emotions welled up within her.

The machines began to roar and vibrate again. The noon recess was over. She went back to her job. Her broad, heavy hands began once more to serve a company on whose moderate remuneration she depended for her daily bread. Her silhouette against the window where she stood was no longer an object for my vain eyes to look upon with a sense of superiority. I could hear the melancholy intonation of her voice, pronouncing words of courage over her disfigured underlip. She was one of nature’s failures one of God’s triumphs.

Saturday night my fellow lodger, Miss Arnold, and I made an expedition to the spring opening of a large dry-goods shop in the neighbourhood of Mrs. Brown’s. I felt rather humble in my toil-worn clothes to accompany the young woman, who had an appearance of prosperity which borrowed money alone can give. But she encouraged me, and we started together for the principal street of the quarter whose history was told in its show-case windows. Pawnshops and undertakers, bakeries and soda-water fountains were ranged side by side on this highway, as the necessity for them is ranged with incongruous proximity in the existence of those who live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after the manner of the poor. There was even a wedding coach in the back of the corner undertaker’s establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and white, as though death itself were more attractive in the young, as though the little people of the quarter were nearer Heaven and more suggestive of angels than their life-worn elders. The spotless tiny coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share of the ideal, mysterious, unused and costly; in the same store with the wedding coach, it suggested festivity: a reunion to celebrate with tears a small pilgrim’s right to sleep at last undisturbed.

The silver rays of the street lamps mingled with the yellow light of the shop windows, and on the sidewalk there was a cosmopolitan public. Groups of Italian women crooned to each other in their soft voices over the bargains for babies displayed at the spring opening; factory girls compared notes, chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by an extravagant choice; the German women looked and priced and bought nothing; the Hungarians had evidently spent their money on arriving. From the store window wax figures of the ideal woman, clad in latest Parisian garb, with golden hair and blue eyes, gazed down benignly into the faces uplifted with envy and admiration. Did she not plainly say to them “For $17 you can look as I do”?

The store was apparently flourishing, and except for such few useful articles as stockings and shirts it was stocked with trash. Patronized entirely by labouring men and women, it was an indication to their needs. Here, for example, was a stand hung with silk dress skirts, trimmed with lace and velvet. They were made after models of expensive dress-makers and were attempts at the sort of thing a Mme. de Rothschild might wear at the Grand Prix de Paris.

Varying from $11 to $20, there was not one of the skirts made of material sufficiently solid to wear for more than a few Sunday outings. On another counter there were hats with extravagant garlands of flowers, exaggerated bows and plumes, wraps with ruffles of lace and long pendant bows; silk boléros; a choice of things never meant to be imitated in cheap quality.

I watched the customers trying on. Possessed of grace and charm in their native costumes, hatless, with gay-coloured shawls on their shoulders, the Italian women, as soon as they donned the tawdry garb of the luxury-loving labourer, were common like the rest. In becoming prosperous Americans, animated by the desire for material possession which is the strength and the weakness of our countrymen, they lost the character that pleases us, the beauty we must go abroad to find.

Miss Arnold priced everything, compared quality and make with Jacksonville productions, and decided to buy nothing, but in refusing to buy she had an air of opulence and taste hard to please which surpassed the effect any purchase could have made.

Sunday morning Mrs. Brown asked me to join her and Miss Arnold for breakfast They were both in slippers and dressing-gowns. We boiled the coffee and set the table with doughnuts and sweet cakes, which Miss Arnold kept in a paper bag in her room.

“I hardly ever eat, except between meals,” she explained. “A nibble of cake or candy is as much as I can manage, my digestion is so poor.”

“Ever since Brown died,” the widow responded, “I’ve had my meals just the same as though he were here. All I want,” she went on, as we seated ourselves and exchanged courtesies in passing the bread and butter, “all I want is somebody to be kind to me. I’ve got a young niece that I’ve tried to have with me. I wrote to her and says: ’Your auntie’s heart’s just crying out for you!’ And I told her I’d leave her all I’ve got. But she said she didn’t feel like she could come.”

As soon as breakfast is over the mundane member of the household starts off on a day’s round of visits. When the screen door has shut upon her slender silhouette, Mrs. Brown settles down for a chat. She takes out the brush and comb, unbraids her silver locks and arranges them while she talks.

“Miss Arnold’s always on the go; she’s awful nervous. These society people aren’t happy. Life’s not all pleasure for them. You can be sure they have their ups and downs like the rest of us.”

“I guess that’s likely,” is my response.

“They don’t tell the truth always, in the first place. They say there’s got to be deceit in society, and that these stylish people pretend all sorts of things. Well, then, all I say is,” and she pricks the comb into the brush with emphasis, “all I say is, you better keep out of society.”

She had twisted her gray braids into a coil at the back of her head, and dish-washing is now the order of the day. As we splash and wipe, Mrs. Brown looks at me rather closely. She is getting ready to speak. I can feel this by a preliminary rattle of her teeth.

“You’re a new girl here,” she begins; “you ain’t been long in Chicago. I just thought I’d tell you about a girl who was workin’ here in the General Electric factory. She was sixteen a real nice-lookin’ girl from the South. She left her mother and come up here alone. It wasn’t long before she got to foolin’ round with one of the young men over to the factory. They were both young; they didn’t mean no harm; but one day she come an’ told me, cryin’ like anythin’, that she was in trouble, and her young man had slipped off up to Michigan.”

Here Mrs. Brown stopped to see if I was interested, and as I responded with a heartfelt “Oh, my!” she went on:

“Well, you ought to have seen that girl’s sufferin’, her loneliness for her mother. I’d come in her room sometimes at midnight the very room you have now and find her on the floor, weepin’ her heart out. I want to tell you never to get discouraged. Just you listen to what happened. The gentleman from the factory got a sheriff and they started up north after the young man, determined to get him by force if they couldn’t by kindness. Well, they found him and they brought him back; he was willin’ to come, and they got everythin’ fixed up for the weddin’ without tellin’ her a thing about it, and one day she was sittin’ right there,” she pointed to the rocking chair in the front parlour window, “when he come in. He was carryin’ a big bunch of cream roses, tied with long white ribbons. He offered ’em to her, but she wouldn’t look at them nor at him. After awhile they went together into her room and talked for half an hour, and when they come back she had consented to marry him. He was real kind. He kept askin’ me if she had cried much and thankin’ me for takin’ care of her. They were married, and when the weddin’ was over she didn’t want to stay with him. She said she wanted her mother, but we talked to her and told her what was right, and things was fixed up between them.”

She had taken down from its hook in the corner sunlight the canary bird and his cage. She put them on the table and prepared to give the bird his bath and fresh seed.

“You see,” she said, drawing up a chair, “that’s what good employers will do for you. If you’re working in a good place they’ll do right by you, and it don’t pay to get down-hearted.”

I thanked her and showed the interest I truly felt in the story. Evidently I must account for my Sundays! It was with the bird now that Mrs. Brown continued her conversation. He was a Rip Van Winkle in plumage. His claws trailed over the sand of the cage. Except when Mrs. Brown had a lodger or two with her, the bird was the only living thing in her part of the tenement.

“I’ve had him twenty-five years,” she said to me. “Brown give him to me. I guess I’d miss him if he died.” And presently she repeated again: “I don’t believe I even know how much I’d miss him.”

On the last evening of my tenement residence I was sitting in a restaurant of the quarter, having played truant from Mrs. Wood’s, whose Friday fish dinner had poisoned me. My hands had been inflamed and irritated in consequence, and I was now intent upon a good clean supper earned by ten hours’ work. My back was turned to the door, which I knew must be open, as I felt a cold wind. The lake brought capricious changes of the temperature: the thermometer had fallen the night before from seventy to thirty. I turned to see who the newcomer might be. The sight of him set my heart beating faster. The restaurant keeper was questioning the man to find out who he was.... He was evidently nobody a fragment of anonymous humanity lashed into debris upon the edge of a city’s vortex; a remnant of flesh and bones for human appetites to feed on; a battleground of disease and vice; a beggar animated by instinct to get from others what he could no longer earn for himself; the type par excellence who has worn out charity organizations; the poor wreck of a soul that would create pity if there were none of it left in the world. He was asking for food. The proprietor gave him the address of a free lodging-house and turned him away. He pulled his cap over his head; the door opened and closed, letting in a fresh gale of icy air. The man was gone. I turned back to my supper. Scientific philanthropists would have means of proving that such men are alone to blame for their condition; that this one was in all probability a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse than useless, to help him. But he was cold and hungry and penniless, and I knew it. I went as swiftly as I could to overtake him. He had not traveled far, lurching along at a snail’s pace, and he was startled when I came up to him. One of his legs was longer than the other; it had been crushed in an accident. They were not pairs, his legs, and neither were his eyes pairs; one was big and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other showed all his feelings. Across his nose there was a scar, a heavy scar, pale like the rest of his face. He was small and had sandy hair. The directors of charity bureaus could have detected perhaps a faint resemblance to the odour of liquor as he breathed a halo of frosty air over his scraggly red beard.

Through the weather-beaten coat pinned over it his bare chest was visible.

“It’s a cold night!” I began. “Are you out of a job?”

With his wistful eye he gave me a kind glance.

“I’ve been sick. There’s a sharp pain right in through here.” He showed me a spot under his arm. “They thought at the hospital that I ’ad consumption. But,” his face brightened, “I haven’t got it.” He showed in his smile the life-warrant that kept him from suicide. He wanted to live.

“Where did you sleep last night?” I asked. “It was a cold night.”

“To tell you the truth,” he responded in his strong Scotch accent, “I slept in a wagon.”

I proposed that we do some shopping together; he looked at me gratefully and limped along to a cheap clothing store, kept by an Italian. The warmth within was agreeable; there was a display of garments hung across the ceiling under the gas-light. My companion waited, leaning against the glass counter, while I priced the flannel shirts. To be sure, my own costume promised little bounty. The price of the shirt was seventy-five cents, and as soon as he heard this the poor man said:

“Oh, you mustn’t spend as much as that.”

Looking first at the pauper, then at me, the Italian leaned over and whispered to me, “I think I understand. You can have the shirt for sixty, and I’ll put in a pair of socks, too.”

Thus we had become a fraternity; all were poor, the stronger woe helping the weaker.... When his toilet was complete the poor man looked half a head taller.

“Shall I wrap up your old cap for you?” the salesman asked, and the other laughed a broken, long-disused laugh.

“I guess I won’t need it any more,” he said, turning to me.

His face had changed like the children’s valentines that grow at a touch from a blank card to a glimpse of paradise.

Once in the street again we shook hands. I was going back to my supper. He was going, the charity directors would say, to pawn his shirt and coat.

The man had evidently not more than a few months to live; I was leaving Chicago the following day. We would undoubtedly never meet again.

As his bony hand lay in mine, his eyes looked straight at me. “Thank you,” he said, and his last words were these:

“I’ll stand by you.”

It was a pledge of fraternity at parting. There was no material substance to promise. I took it to mean that he would stand by any generous impulses I might have; that he would be, as it were, a patron of spontaneous as opposed to organized charity; a patron of those who are never too poor to give to some one poorer; of those who have no scientific reasons for giving, no statistics, only compassion and pity; of those who want to aid not only the promising but the hopeless cases; of those whose charity is tolerant and maternal, patient with the helpless, prepared for disappointments; not looking for results, ever ready to begin again, so long as the paradox of suffering and inability are linked together in humanity.