A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

“Those who work neither with their brains nor their hands are a menace to the public safety.” Roosevelt.

Well and good! In the great mobs and riots of history, what class is it which forms the brawn and muscle and sinew of the disturbance? The workmen and workwomen in whom discontent has bred the disease of riot, the abnormality, the abortion known as Anarchy, Socialism. The hem of the uprising is composed of idlers and loungers, indeed, but it is the labourer’s head upon which the red cap of protest is seen above the vortex of the crowd.

That those who labour with their hands may have no cause to menace society, those who labour with their brains shall strive to encompass.

Evils in any system American progress is sure to cure. Shops such as the Plant shoe factory in Boston, with its eight-hour labour, ample provision for escape in case of fire, its model ventilating, lavish employment of new machinery tells on the great manufacturing world.

Reason, human sympathy, throughout history have been enemies to slavery or its likeness: reason and sympathy suggest that time and place be given for the operative man and woman to rest, to benefit by physical culture, that the bowed figures might uplift the flabby muscles. Time is securely past when the manufacturers’ greed may sweat the labourers’ souls through the bodies’ pores in order that more stuff may be turned out at cheaper cost.

The people through social corporations, through labour unions, have made their demands for shorter hours and better pay.

LYNN

Luxuries to me are what necessities are to another. A boot too heavy, a dress ill-hung, a stocking too thick, are annoyances which to the self-indulgent woman of the world are absolute discomforts. To omit the daily bath is a little less than a crime in the calendar; an odour bordering on the foul creates nausea to nostrils ultra-refined; undue noises are nerve exhausting. If any three things are more unendurable to me than others, they are noises, bad smells and close air.

I am in no wise unique, but represent a class as real as the other class whose sweat, bone and fiber make up a vast human machine turning out necessities and luxuries for the market.

The clothes I laid aside on December 18, 1901, were as follows:

Hat $
Sealskin coat
Black cloth dress
Silk underskirt
Kid gloves
Underwear

$ 447

The clothes I put on were as follows:

Small felt hat $ .
Woolen gloves .
Flannel shirt-waist 1.
Gray serge coat 3.
Black skirt 2.
Underwear 1.
Tippet 1.

$9.45

When I outlined to my friends my scheme of presenting myself for work in a strange town with no introduction, however humble, and no friends to back me, I was assured that the chances were that I would in the end get nothing. I was told that it would be impossible to disguise my class, my speech; that I would be suspected, arouse curiosity and mistrust.

One bitter December morning in 1901 I left Boston for Lynn, Mass. The route of my train ran close to marshes; frozen hard ice many feet thick covered the rocks and hillocks of earth, and on the dazzling winter scene the sun shone brilliantly.

No sooner had I taken my place in my plain attire than my former personality slipped from me as absolutely as did the garments I had discarded. I was Bell Ballard. People from whose contact I had hitherto pulled my skirts away became my companions as I took my place shoulder to shoulder with the crowd of breadwinners.

Lynn in winter is ugly. The very town itself seemed numbed and blue in the intense cold well below zero. Even the Christmas-time greens in the streets and holly in the store windows could not impart festivity to this city of workers. The thoroughfares are trolley lined, of course, and a little beyond the town’s centre is a common, a white wooden church stamping the place New England.

Lynn is made up of factories great masses of ugliness, red brick, many-windowed buildings. The General Electric has a concern in this town, but the industry is chiefly the making of shoes. The shoe trade in our country is one of the highest paying manufactures, and in it there are more women employed than in any other trade. Lynn’s population is 70,000; of these 10,000 work in shoe-shops.

The night must not find me homeless, houseless. I went first to a directory and found the address of the Young Women’s Christian Association: a room upstairs in a building on one of the principal streets. Here two women faced me as I made my appeal, and I saw at once displayed the sentiments of kindness thenceforth to greet me throughout my first experience qualities of exquisite sympathy, rare hospitality and human interest.

“I am looking for work. I want to get a room in a safe place for the night.”

I had not for a moment supposed that anything in my attire of simple decorous work-clothes could awaken pity. Yet pity it was and nothing less in the older woman’s face.

“Work in the shops?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The simple fact that I was undoubtedly to make my own living and my own way in the hard hand-to-hand struggle in the shops aroused her sympathy.

She said earnestly: “You must not go anywhere to sleep that you don’t know about, child.”

She wrote an address for me on a slip of paper.

“Go there; I know the woman. If she can’t take you, why, come back here. I’ll take you to my own house. I won’t have you sleep in a strange town just anywheres! You might get into trouble.”

She was not a matron; she was not even one of the staff of managers or directors. She was only a woman who had come in to ask some question, receive some information; and thus in marvelous friendliness she turned and outstretched her hand I was a stranger and this was her welcome.

I had proved a point at the first step; help had been extended. If I myself failed to find shelter I could go to her for protection. I intended to find my lodging place if possible without any reference or any aid.

Out of the town proper in a quiet side street I saw a little wooden tenement set back from the road.

“Furnished Room to Rent,” read the sign in the window. A sweet-faced woman responded to the bell I had rung. One glance at me and she said:

“Ve only got a ‘sheep’ room.”

At the compliment I was ill-pleased and told her I was looking for a cheap room: I had come to Lynn to work. Oh! that was all right. That was the kind of people she received.

I followed her into the house. I must excuse her broken English. She was French. Ah! was she? That made my way easier. I told her I was from Paris and a stranger in this part of the country, and thenceforth our understanding was complete. In 28 Viger Street we spoke French always.

My room in the attic was blue-and-white papered; a little, clean, agreeable room.

Madam begged that I would pardon the fact that my bed had no sheets. She would try to arrange later. She also insinuated that the “young ladies” who boarded with her spoiled all her floor and her furniture by slopping the water around. I assured her that she should not have to complain of me I would take care.

The room was $1.25 a week. Could I pay her in advance? I did so, of course. I would have to carry up my water for washing from the first floor morning and night and care for my room. On the landing below I made arrangements with the tenant for board at ten cents a meal. Madame Courier was also a French Canadian, a mammoth creature with engaging manners.

“Mademoiselle Ballard has work?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, if you don’t get a job my husband will speak for you. I have here three other young ladies who work in the shops; they’ll speak for you!”

Before the door of the first factory I failed miserably. I could have slunk down the street and gladly taken the first train away from Lynn! My garments were heavy; my skirt, lined with a sagging cotton goods, weighed a ton; the woolen gloves irritated.

The shop fronted the street, and the very sight through the window of the individuals representing power, the men whom I saw behind the desks, frightened me. I could not go in. I fairly ran through the streets, but stopped finally before a humbler shop where a sign swung at the door: “Hands Wanted.” I went in here and opened a door on the third floor into a small office.

I was before a lank Yankee manufacturer. Leaning against his desk, twisting from side to side in his mouth a toothpick, he nodded to me as I entered. His wife, a grim, spectacled New Englander, sat in the revolving desk-chair.

“I want work. Got any?”

“Waal, thet’s jist what we hev got! Ain’t we, Mary?”

(I felt a flashing sensation of triumph.)

“Take your tippet off, set right down, ef you’re in earnest.”

“Oh, I am in earnest; but what sort of work is it?”

“It’s gluein’ suspender straps.”

“Suspenders! I want to work in a shoe-shop!”

He smiled, indulgent of this whim.

“They all does! Don’t they, Mary?” (She acquiesced.)

“Then they get sick of the shop, and they come back to me. You will!”

“Let me try the shoe-shop first; then if I can’t get a job I’ll come back.”

He was anxious to close with me, however, and took up a pile of the suspender straps, tempting me with them.

“What you ever done?”

“Nothing. I’m green!”

“That don’t make no difference; they’re all green, ain’t they, Mary?”

“Yes,” Mary said; “I have to learn them all.”

“Now, to Preston’s you can get in all right, but you won’t make over four dollars a week, and here if you’re smart you’ll make six dollars in no time.” ...

Preston’s!

That was the first name I had heard, and to Preston’s I was asking my way, stimulated by the fact, though I had been in Lynn not an hour and a half, a job was mine did I care to glue suspender straps!

I afterward learned that Preston’s, a little factory on the town’s outskirts, is a model shoe-shop in its way. I did not work there, and neither of the factories in which I was employed was “model” to my judgment.

A preamble at the office, where they suggested taking me in as office help:

“But I am green; I can’t do office work.”

Then Mr. Preston himself, working-director in drilling-coat, sat before me in his private office. I told him: “I want work badly ”

He had nothing was, indeed, turning away hands; my evident disappointment had apparently impressed a man who was in the habit of refusing applicants for work.

“Look here” he mitigated his refusal “come to-morrow at nine. I’m getting in a whole bale of cloth for cutting linings.”

“You’ll give me a chance, then?”

“Yes, I will!”

It was then proven that I could not starve in Lynn, nor wander houseless.

With these evidences of success, pride stirred. I determined before nightfall to be at work in a Lynn shoe-shop. It was now noon, streets filled with files and lines of freed operatives. Into a restaurant I wandered with part of the throng, and, with excitement and ambition for sauce, ate a good meal.

Factories had received back their workers when I applied anew. This time the largest building, one of the most important shops in Lynn, was my goal. At the door of Parsons’ was a sign reading:

“Wanted, Vampers.”

A vamper I was not, but if any help was wanted there was hope. My demand for work was greeted at the office this time with “Any signs out?”

“Yes.”

(What they were I didn’t deem it needful to say!) The stenographer nodded: “Go upstairs, then; ask the forelady on the fifth floor.”

Through the big building and the shipping-room, where cases of shoes were were being crated for the market, I went, at length really within a factory’s walls. From the first to the fifth floor I went in an elevator a freight elevator; there are no others, of course. This lift was a terrifying affair; it shook and rattled in its shaft, shook and rattled in pitch darkness as it rose between “safety doors” continuations of the building’s floors. These doors open to receive the ascending elevator, then slowly close, in order that the shaft may be covered and the operatives in no danger of stepping inadvertently to sudden death.

I reached the fifth floor and entered into pandemonium. The workroom was in full working swing. At least five hundred machines were in operation and the noise was startling and deafening.

I made my way to a high desk where a woman stood writing. I knew her for the forelady by her “air”; nothing else distinguished her from the employees. No one looked up as I entered. I was nowhere a figure to attract attention; evidently nothing in my voice or manner or aspect aroused supposition that I was not of the class I simulated.

Now, into my tone, as I spoke to the forelady bending over her account book, I put all the force I knew. I determined she should give me something to do! Work was everywhere: some of it should fall to my hand.

“Say, I’ve got to work. Give me anything, anything; I’m green.”

She didn’t even look at me, but called shrieked, rather above the machine din to her colleagues:

“Got anything for a green hand?”

The person addressed gave me one glance, the sole and only look I got from any one in authority in Parsons’.

“Ever worked in a shoe-shop before?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’ll have you learned pressin’; we need a presser. Go take your things off, then get right down over there.”

I tore off my outside garment in the cloak-room, jammed full of hats and coats. I was obliged to stack my belongings in a pile on the dirty floor.

Now hatless, shirt-waisted, I was ready to labour amongst the two hundred bond-women around me. Excitement quite new ran through me as I went to the long table indicated and took my seat. My object was gained. I had been in Lynn two hours and a half and was a working-woman.

On my left the seat was vacant; on my right Maggie McGowan smiled at me, although, poor thing, she had small cause to welcome the green hand who demanded her time and patience. She was to “learn me pressin’,” and she did.

Before me was a board, black with stains of leather, an awl, a hammer, a pot of foulest-smelling glue, and a package of piece-work, ticketed. The branch of the trade I learned at Parsons’ was as follows:

Before me was outspread a pile of bits of leather foxings, back straps, vamps, etc. Dipping my brush in the glue, I gummed all the extreme outer edges. When the “case” had been gummed, the first bits were dry, then the fingers turned down the gummed edges of the leather into fine little seams; these seams are then plaited with the awl and the ruffled hem flattened with the hammer this is “pressing.” The case goes from presser to the seaming machine.

The instruments turn in my awkward fingers. I spread glue where it should not be: edges designated for its reception remain innocent. All this means double work later. “Twict the work!” my teacher remarks. Little by little, however, the simplicity of the manual action, the uniformity, the mechanical movement declare themselves. I glance from time to time at my expert neighbours, compare our work; in an hour I have mastered the method skill and rapidity can be mine only after many days; but I worked alone, unaided.

As raw edges, at first defying my clumsiness, fell to fascinating rounds, as the awl creased the leather into the fluting folds, as the hammer mashed the gummed seam down, I enjoyed the process; it was kindergarten and feminine toil combined, not too hard; but it was only the beginning!

Meanwhile my teacher, patient-faced, lightning-fingered, sat close to me, reeking perspiration, tired with the ordeal of instructing a greenhorn. With no sign of exhausted patience, however, she gummed my vamps with the ill-smelling glue.

“This glue makes lots of girls sick! In the other shops where I worked they just got sick, one by one, and quit. I stuck it out. The forelady said to me when I left: ’My! I never thought anybody could stand it’s long’s you have.’”

I asked, “What would you rather do than this?”

She didn’t seem to know.

“I don’t do this for fun, though! Nor do you I bet you!”

(I didn’t but not quite for her reason.)

As I had yet my room to make sure of, I decided to leave early. I told Maggie McGowan I was going home.

“Tired already?” There was still an hour to dark.

As I explained to her my reasons she looked at my amateur accomplishment spread on the board before us. I had only pressed a case of shoes three dozen pairs.

“I guess I’ll have to put it on my card,” she soliloquized, “’cause I learned you.”

“Do do ”

“It’s only about seven cents, anyway.”

“Three hours’ work and that’s all I’ve made?"

She regarded me curiously, to see how the amount tallied with my hope of gain and wealth.

“Yet you tell me I’m not stupid. How long have you been at it?”

Miss P., an experienced “gummer” on vamp linings, is a New England girl, and makes $8 or $9 a week. The new hand makes from $2.50 to $3 a week at the same work]

“Ten years.”

“And you make?”

“Well, I don’t want to discourage you.” ...

(If Maggie used this expression once she used it a dozen times; it was her pat on the shoulder, her word of cheer before coming ill news.)

“... I don’t want to discourage you, but it’s slow! I make about twelve dollars a week.”

“Then I will make four!”

(Four? Could it be possible I dreamed of such sums at this stage of ignorance!)

“I don’t want to discourage you, but I guess you’d better do housework!”

It was clear, then, that for weeks I was to drop in with the lot of women wage-earners who make under five dollars a week for ten hours a day labour.

“Why don’t you do housework, Maggie?”

“I do. I get up at five and do all the work of our house, cook breakfast, and clean up before I come to the shop. I eat dinner here. When I go home at night I get supper and tidy up!”

My expression as I fell to gumming foxings was not pity for my own fate, as she, generous creature, took it to be.

“After you’ve been here a few years,” she said, “you’ll make more than I do. I’m not smart. You’ll beat me.”

Thus with tact she told me bald truth, and yet had not discouraged!

Novel situations, long walks hither and thither through Lynn, stairs climbed, and three hours of intense application to work unusual were tiring indeed. Nevertheless, as I got into my jacket and put on my hat in the suffocation of the cloak-room I was still under an exhilarating spell. I belonged, for time never so little, to the giant machine of which the fifth floor of Parsons’ is only an infinitesimal humming, singing part. I had earned seven cents! Seven cents of the $4,000,000 paid to Lynn shoe employees were mine. I had bought the right to one piece of bread by the toil of my unskilled labour. As I fastened my tippet of common black fur and drew on my woolen gloves, the odour from my glue-and leather-stained hands came pungent to my nostrils. Friends had said to me: “Your hands will betray you!” If the girls at my side in Parsons’ thought anything about the matter they made no such sign as they watched my fingers swiftly lose resemblance to those of the leisure class under the use of instruments and materials damning softness and beauty from a woman’s hands.

Yet Maggie had her sensitiveness on this subject. I remarked once to her: “I don’t see how you manage to keep your hands so clean. Mine are twice as black.” She coloured, was silent for a time, then said: “I never want anybody to speak to me of my hands. I’m ashamed of ’em; they used to be real nice, though.” She held the blunted ends up. “They’re awful! I do love a nice hand.”

The cold struck sharp as a knife as I came out of the factory. Fresh air, insolent with purity, cleanness, unusedness, smiting nostrils, sought lungs filled too long with unwholesome atmosphere.

Heated by a brisk walk home, I climbed the stairs to my attic room, as cold as Greenland. It was nearly six thirty, supper hour, and I made a shift at a toilet.

Into the kitchen I was the last comer. All of the supper not on the table was on the stove, and between this red-hot buffet and the supper table was just enough room for the landlady to pass to and fro as she waited upon her nine guests.

No sooner did I open the door into the smoky atmosphere, into the midst of the little world here assembled, than I felt the quick kindness of welcome.

My place was at the table’s end, before the Irish stew.

“Miss Ballard!” The landlady put her arm about my waist and introduced me, mentioning the names of every one present. There were four women besides myself and four men.

“I don’t want Miss Ballard to feel strange,” said my hostess in her pretty Canadian patois. “I want her to be at home here.”

I sat down.

“Oh, she’ll be at home all right!” A frowzy-headed, pretty brunette from the table’s other end raised kind eyes to me and nodded a smiling good-fellowship.

“Come to work in the shops?”

“Yes.”

“Ever been to Lynn before?”

“No; live in Paris stranger.”

“My, but that’s hard all alone here! Got a job?”

“Yes.”

And I explained to the attentive interest of all.

From the Irish stew before me they helped themselves, or passed to me the plates from the distance. If excitement had not taken from me every shred of appetite, the kitchen odours, smoke and frying, the room’s stifling heat would have dulled hunger.

Let it go! I was far too interested to eat.

The table was crowded with all manner of substances passing for food cheese, preserves, onion pickles, cake and Irish stew, all eaten at one time and at will; the drink was tea.

At my left sat a well-dressed man who would pass anywhere for a business man of certain distinction. He was a common operator. Next him was a bridal couple, very young and good looking; then came the sisters, Mika and Nannette, their brother, a packer at a shop, then Mademoiselle Frances, expert hand at fourteen dollars a week (a heavy swell indeed), then Maurice.

Although I was evidently an object of interest, although countless questions were put to me, let me say that curiosity was markedly absent. Their attitude was humane, courteous, sympathetic, agreeable, which qualities I firmly believe are supreme in those who know hardship, who suffer privation, who labour.

Great surprise was evinced that I had so soon found a job. Mika and Nannette, brunette Canadians, with voices sweet and carrying, talked in good English and mediocre French.

“It’s wonderful you got a job right off! Ain’t she in luck! Why, most has to get spoken of weeks in advance introduced by friends, too!”

Mika said: “My name’s been up two months at my sister’s shop. The landlady told us about your coming, Miss Ballard. We was going to speak for you to our foreladies.”

Here my huge hostess, who during my stay stood close to my side as though she thought I needed her motherliness, put her hand on my shoulder.

“Yes, mon enfant, we didn’t want you to get discouraged in a strange place. Ici nous sommes toute une famille”.

“All one family?” Oh, no, no, kind creature, hospitable receiver of a stranger, not all one family! I belong to the class of the woman who, one day by chance out of her carriage, did she happen to sit by your side in a cable car, would pull her dress from the contact of your clothes, heavy with tenement odours; draw back as you crushed your huge form down too close to her; turn no look of sisterhood to your face, brow-bound by the beads of sweat, its signet of labour.

Not one family! I am one with the hostess, capable even of greeting her guest with insolent discourtesy did such a one chance to intrude at an hour when her presence might imperil the next step of the social climber’s ladder.

Not one family, but part of the class whose tongues turn the truffle buried in pate de foie gras; whose lips are reddened with Burgundies and cooled with iced champagnes; who discuss the quality of a canard a la presse throughout a meal; who have no leisure, because they have no labour such as you know the term to mean; who create disease by feeding bodies unstimulated by toil, whilst you, honestly tired, really hungry, eat Irish stew in the atmosphere of your kitchen dining-hall.

Not one family, I blush to say! God will not have it so.

The Irish stew had all disappeared, every vestige.

“But mademoiselle eats nothing a bird’s appetite.” And here was displayed the first hint of vulgarity we are taught to look for in the other class.

She put her hands about my arms. “Tiens! un bras tout de meme!” and she looked at Maurice, the young man on my right.

“Maurice c’est toi qui devrait t’informer des bras d’mademoiselle."

("Maurice, it is you who should inform yourself of mademoiselle’s arms.”)

Maurice laughed with appreciation, as did the others. He was the sole American at table; out of courtesy for him we talked English from time to time, although he assured us he understood all we said in “the jargon.”

To Maurice a master pen could do justice; none other. His type is seen stealing around corners in London’s Whitechapel and in the lowest quarters of New York: a lounger, indolent, usually drunk. Maurice was the type, with the qualities absent. Tall, lank, loosely hung together, made for muscular effort, he wore a dark flannel shirt, thick with grease and oil stains, redolent with tobacco, a checked waistcoat, no collar or cravat. From the collarless circle of his shirt rose his strong young neck and bullet head; his forehead was heavy and square below the heavy brows; his black eyes shone deep sunken in their caverns.

His black hair, stiff as a brush, came low on his forehead; his mouth was large and sensual, his teeth brilliant. But his hands! never to be forgotten! Scrubbed till flesh might well have parted from the bones! clean, even if black and mutilated with toil; fingers forever darkened; stained ingrained ridges rising around the nails, hard and ink-black as leather. Maurice was Labour its Symbol its Epitome.

At the landlady’s remark he had blushed and addressed me frankly:

“Say, I work to de ‘Lights.’”

(Lights! Can such a word be expressive of the factory which has daily blackened and scarred and dulled this human instrument?)

“To the ‘Lights,’ and it ain’t no cinch, I can tell you! I got to keep movin’. Every minute I’m late I get docked for wages it’s a day’s work to the ‘Lights.’ When she calls me at six why, I don’t turn over and snooze another! I just turn right out. I walk two miles to my shop and every man in his place at 6:45! Don’t you forgit it!”

He cleaned his plate of food.

“I jest keep movin’ all de time.”

He wiped his mouth rose unceremoniously, put on his pot-like derby ajaunt, lit a vile cigar, slipped into a miserable old coat, and was gone, the odour of his weed blending its new smell with kitchen fumes.

He is one of the absolutely real creatures I have ever seen. Of his likeness types of crime are drawn. Maurice blade keen-edged, hidden in its battered sheath, its ugly case terrible yet attractive specimen of strength and endurance Youth and Manhood in you are bound to labour as on the rack, and in the ordeal you keep (as does the mass of humanity) Silence!

Eat by this man’s side, heap his plate with coarse victuals, feel the touch of his flannel sleeve against your own flannel blouse, see his look of brotherhood as he says:

“Say, if de job dey give you is too hard, why, I guess I kin get yer in to the ’Lights’!”

These are sensations facts alone can give.

After dinner we sit all together in the parlour, the general living-room: carpet-covered sofa, big table, few chairs that’s all. We talk an hour and on what? We discuss Bernhardt, the divine Sarah. “Good shows don’t come to Lynn much; it don’t pay them. You can’t get more than fifty cents a seat. Now Bernhardt don’t like to act for fifty-cent houses! But the theatres are crowded if ever there’s a good show. We get tired of the awful poor shows to the Opera House.” Maude Adams was a favourite. Rejane had been seen. Of course, the vital American interest money is touched upon, let me say lightly, and passed. The packer at Rigger’s, intelligent and well-informed and well-read, discoursed in good French about English and French politics and on the pleasure it would be to travel and see the world.

At nine, friendly handshaking. “Good-night. You’re tired. You’ll like it all right to the shops, see if you don’t! You’ll make money, too. The forelady must a-seen that you were ambitious. Why, to my shop when a new hand applies for a job the foreman asks: ’What does he look like? Ambitious lookin’? Well, then there’s room.”

Ambitious to make shoes! To grind out all you can above the average five dollars a week, all you may by conscientious, unflagging work during 224 hours out of a month.

Good-night to the working world! Landlady and friendly co-labourers.

“Il ne faut pas vous gêner, mademoiselle; nous sommes toute une famille.”

Upstairs in my room the excitement died quite out of me. I lay wakeful in the hard, sheetless bed. It was cold, my window-pane freezing rapidly. I could not sleep. On either side, through the thin walls of the house, I could hear my neighbours settling to repose. Maurice’s room was next to mine. He whistled a short snatch of a topical song as he undressed. On the other side slept the landlady’s children; opposite, the packer from Rigger’s. The girls’ room was downstairs. When Maurice’s song had reached its close he heaved a profound sigh, and then followed silence, as slumber claimed the sole period of his existence not devoted to work. The tenement soon passed to stillness complete.

Before six the next morning black as night the call: “Mau rice! Mau rice!” rang through the hall. Summons to us all, given through him on whom the exigencies of life fell the heaviest. Maurice worked by day system the rest of us were freed men and women by comparison.

The night before, timid and reluctant to descend the two flights of pitch dark stairs with a heavy water-pitcher in my hand, I had brought up no water! It is interesting to wonder how scrupulous we would all be if our baths were carried up and down two flights of stairs pitcher by pitcher. A little water nearly frozen was at hand for my toilet. By six I was dressed and my bed made; by 6:15 in the kitchen, dense with smoke from the frying breakfast. Through the haze the figures of my friends declared themselves. Codfish balls, bread and butter and coffee formed the repast.

Maurice is the first to finish, standing a moment to light his pipe, his hat acock; then he is gone. The sisters wash at the sink, Mika combing her mass of frowzy dark hair, talking meanwhile. The sisters’ toilet, summary and limited, is frankly displayed.

At my right the bride consumes five enormous fish balls, as well as much bread. Her husband, a young, handsome, gentle creature, eats sparingly. His hand is strapped up at the wrist.

“What’s wrong?”

“Strained tendons. Doctor says they’d be all right if I could just hold up a little. They don’t get no chance to rest.”

“But why not ‘hold up’ awhile?” He regards me sympathetically as one who says to an equal, a fellow: “You know why! for the same reason that you yourself will work sick or well.”

“On fait ce que l’on peut!”

("One does one’s best!”)

When the young couple had left the room our landlady said:

“The little woman eats well, doesn’t she! She needs no tonic! All day long she sits in my parlour and rocks and rocks.”

“She does nothing?”

Madame shrugged.

“But yes! She reads novels!”

It was half-past six when I got into the streets. The midwinter sky is slowly breaking to dawn. The whole town white with fresh snow, and still half-wedded to night, is nevertheless stirring to life.

I become, after a block or two, one of a hurrying throng of labour-bound fellows dark forms appear from streets and avenues, going in divers directions toward their homes. Homes? Where one passes most of one’s life, is it not Home?

These figures to-day bend head and shoulders against the wind as it blows neck-coverings about, forces bare hands into coat pockets.

By the time the town has been traversed, railroad track crossed, and Parsons’ in sight, day has nearly broken. Pink clouds float over factory roofs in a sky growing bluer, flushing to day.

From now on the day is shut out for those who here and there enter the red-brick factories. An hour at noon? Of course, this magnificent hour is theirs! Time to eat, time to feed the human machine. One hour in which to stretch limbs, to pull to upright posture the bent body. Meanwhile daylight progresses from glowing beauty to high noon, and there the acme of brilliance seems to pause, as freed humanity stares half-blinded at God’s midday rest.

All the remaining hours of daylight are for the leisure world. Not till night claims Lynn shall the factory girl be free.

Ascending the five flights of dirty stairs, my steps fell side by side those of a young workman in drilling coat. He gave me a good-morning in a cheery tone.

“Working here? Got it good?”

“I guess so.”

“That’s all right. Good-day.”

Therefore I began my first labour day with a good wish from my new class!

On the fifth floor I was one of the very first arrivals. If in the long, low-ceiled room windows had been opened, the flagging air gave no sign to the effect. It was fetid and cold. Daylight had not fully found the workshop, gas was lit, and no work prepared. I was eager to begin, but was forced to wait before idle tools till work was given me hard ordeal for ambitious piece-worker. At the tick of seven, however, I had begun my branch of the shoe-making trade. One by one my mates arrived; the seats beyond me and on either side were filled.

Opposite me sat a ghost of girlhood. A tall, slender creature, cheeks like paper, eyes sunken. She, too, had the smile of good-fellowship coin freely passed from workwoman to workwoman.

This girl’s job was filthy. She inked edges of the shoes with a brush dipped in a pot of thick black fluid. Pile after pile of piece-work was massed in front of her; pile by pile disappeared. She worked like lightning.

“Do you like your job?” I ventured. This seemed to be the open sesame to all conversations in the shops. She shrugged her narrow shoulders but made no direct reply. “I used to have what you’re doing; it’s awful. That glue made me sick. I was in bed. So when I came back I got this.” She was separated from my glue-pot by a table’s length only.

“But don’t you smell it from here?”

“Not so bad; this here” (pointing to her black fluid) “smells stronger; it drownds it.

“I make my wages clear,” she announced to me a few minutes later.

“How do you mean?”

“Why, at noon I wait in a restaurant; they give me my dinner afterward. I go back there and wait on the table at supper, too. My vittles don’t cost me anything!”

So that is where your golden noon hour is spent, standing, running, waiting, serving in the ill-smelling restaurant I shall name later; and not your dinner hour alone, but the long day’s fag end!

“I ain’t from these parts,” she continued, confidentially, “I’m down East. I used to run a machine, but it hurts my side.”

My job went well for an amateur. I finished one case of shoes (thirty-six pairs) in little more than an hour. By ten o’clock the room grew stifling hot. I was obliged to discard my dress skirt and necktie, loosen collar, roll up my sleeves. My warmer blooded companions did the like. It was singular to watch the clock mark out the morning hours, and at ten, already early, very early in the forenoon, feel tired because one had been three hours at work.

A man came along with nuts and apples in a basket to sell. I bought an apple for five cents. It was regarded by my teacher, Maggie, as a prodigal expenditure! I shared it with her, and she in turn shared her half with her neighbours, advising me wisely.

“Say, you’d better earn an apple before you buy one!”

My companion on the other side was a pretty country girl. She regarded her work with good-humoured indifference; indeed, her labour was of very indifferent quality. I don’t believe she was ever intended to make shoes. In a cheerful “undertone she sang topical songs the morning long. It drove Maggie McGowan “mad,” so she said.

“Say, why don’t some of youse sing?” said the little creature, looking down our busy line. “I never hear no singing in the shops.”

Maggie said, “Sing! Well, I don’t come here to sing.”

The other laughed sweetly.

“Well, I jest have to sing.”

“You seem happy; are you?” She looked at me out of her pretty blue eyes.

“You bet! That’s the way to be!” Then after a little, in an aside to me alone, she whispered:

“Not always. Sometimes I cry all to myself.

“See the sun?” she exclaimed, lifting her head. (It shone golden through the window’s dirty, cloudy pane.) “He’s peekin’ at me! He’ll find you soon. Looks like he was glad to see us sitting here!”

Sun, friend, light, air, seek them seek them! Pour what tide of pure gold you may in through the sullied pane; touch, caress the bowed heads at the clicking machines! Shine on the dusty, untidy hair! on the bowed shoulders! on the flying hands!

At noon I made a reluctant concession to wisdom and habit. Unwilling to thwart my purposes and collapse from sheer fatigue, at the dinner hour I went to a restaurant and ordered a meal in keeping with my appetite. I had never been so hungry. I almost wept with joy when the chicken and cranberry and potato appeared. Never was sauce more poignant than that which seasoned the only real repast I had in Lynn.

The hours, from one to three went fairly well, but by 3:30 I was tired out, my fingers had grown wooden with fatigue, glue-pot and folding-line, board, hammer and awl had grown indistinct. It was hard-to continue. The air stifled. Odours conspired together. Oil, leather, glue (oh, that to-heaven-smelling glue!), tobacco smoke, humanity.

Maggie asked me, “How old do I look?” I gave her thirty. Twenty-five it seemed she was. In guessing the next girl’s age no better luck. “It’s this,” Maggie nodded to the workroom; “it takes it out of you! Just you wait till you’ve worked ten years in Lynn.”

Ten years! Heaven forbid! Already I could have rushed from the factory, shaken its dust from my feet, and with hands over ears shut out the horrid din that inexorably cried louder than human speech.

Everything we said was shrieked in the friendly ear bent close.

Although Maggie McGowan was curious about me, in posing her questions she was courtesy itself.

“Say,” to her neighbour, “where do you think Miss Ballard’s from? Paris!”

My neighbour once-removed leaned forward to stare at me. “My, but that’s a change to Lynn! Ain’t it? Now don’t you think you’ll miss it?”

She fell to work again, and said after a little: “Paris! Why, that’s like a dream. Is it like real places? I can’t never guess what it is like!”

The girl at the machine next mine had an ear like a sea-shell, a skin of satin. Her youth was bound, strong shoulders already stooped, chest fast narrowing. At 7 A.M. she came: albeit fresh, pale still and wan; rest of the night too short a preparation for the day’s work. By three in the afternoon she was flushed, by five crimson. She threw her hands up over her head and exclaimed: “My back’s broke, and I’ve only made thirty-five cents to-day.”

Maggie McGowan (indicating me): “Here’s a girl who’s had the misfortune never to work in a shoe-shop.”

“Misfortune? You don’t mean that!”

Maggie: “Well, I guess I don’t! If I didn’t make a joke now and then I’d jump into the river!”

She sat close to me patiently directing my clumsy fingers.

“Why do you speak so strongly? ‘Jump into the river!’ That’s saying a lot!”

“I am sick of the shoe-shops.”

“How long have you been at this work?”

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

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

“Say, are you hungry?”

“No, no, no.”

“You’ll be all right! No American girl need to starve in America.”

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

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

They worked at a trade uncongenial. Not one had a good word to say for shop-labour there, despite its advantages, in this progressive land of generous pay. Each woman in a narrow, touching degree was a dreamer. Housework! too servile; but then, compared to shopwork it was leisure.

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

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

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

We are up five flights of stairs. There are at least two hundred girls. Machine oil, rags, refuse, cover the floor such debris as only awaits a spark from a lighted match or cigar to burst into flames. Despite laws and regulations the building is not fire-proof. There is no fire-escape. A cry of fire, and great Heaven! what escape for two hundred of us from this mountain height, level with roofs of the distant town!

Thus these women, shapes mysterious in gaslight and twilight, labour: life is at stake; health, youth, vigour, supply little more than bread. I rise; my bruised limbs, at first numb, then aching, stir for the first time after five hours of steady work. The pile of shoes before me is feeble evidence of the last hours’ painful effort.

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

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

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

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

“Cleaner Wanted!”

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

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

“Ever worked before?”

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

“Yes, sir; presser.”

I was proud of my trade.

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

“You come with me,” he said cheerfully; “I’ll teach you.”

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

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

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

“I lost one nail; rotted off.”

“Horrible! How, pray?”

“That there water: it’s poison from the shoe-dye.”

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

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

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

“How long have you been at this job?”

“Ten months.”

They called her “Bobby”; the men from their machines nodded to her now and then, bantering her across the noise of their wheels. She was ignorant of it, too stupid to know whether life took her in sport or in earnest! The men themselves worked in their flannel shirts. Not far from us was a wretchedly ill-looking individual, the very shadow of manhood. I observed that once he cast toward us a look of interest. Under my feet was a raised platform on which I stood, bending to my work. During the morning the consumptive man strolled over and whispered something to “Bobby.” He made her dullness understand. When he had gone back to his job she said to me:

“Say, w’y don’t yer push that platform away and stand down on the floor? You’re too tall to need that. It makes yer bend.”

“Did that man come over to tell you this?”

“Yes. He said it made you tired.”

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

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

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

In this shop it was hotter than in Parsons’. We sweltered at our work. Once a case of shoes was cleaned, I wrote my initial “B” on the tag and rolled the crate across the floor to the man next me, who took it into his active charge.

The foreman came to me many times to inspect, approve and encourage. He was a model teacher and an indefatigable superintendent. Just how far personal, and just how far human, his kindness, who can say?

“You’ve been a presser long at the shoe-shops?”

“No.”

“I like your pluck. When a girl has never had to work, and takes hold the way you do, I admire it. You will get along all right.”

“Thank you; perhaps I won’t, though.”

“Now, don’t get nervous. I am nervous myself,” he said; “I know how that is.”

On his next visit he asked me: “Where you goin’; to when you get out of here to-night?”

I told him that I was all right that I had a place to stay.

“If you’re hard up, don’t get discouraged; come to me.”

Mrs. T earns $8 or $9 a week. Her husband also works in a factory, and between them they have made enough to build a pretty little cottage]

Mrs. F., who has worked in the factory more than twenty years, once as a forewoman, now earns only $5 or $6 a week]

I thanked him again and said that I could not take charity.

“Nonsense! I don’t call it charity! If I was hard put, don’t you s’pose I’d go to the next man if he offered me what I offer you? The world owes you a livin’.”

When the foreman had left me I turned to look at “Bobby.” She was in the act of lifting to her lips a glass of what was supposed to be water.

“You’re not going to drink that!” I gasped, horrified. “Where did you get it?”

“Oh, I drawed it awhile ago,” she said.

It had stood gathering microbes in the room, visible ones evidently, for a scum had formed on the glass that looked like stagnant oil. She blew the stuff back and drank long. Her accent was so bad and her English so limited I took her to be a foreigner beyond doubt. She proved to be an American. She had worked in factories all her life, since she was eight years old, and her brain was stunted.

At dinner time, when I left Marches’, I had stood, without sitting down once, for five hours, and according to Bobby’s computation I had made the large sum of twenty-five cents, having cleaned a little more than one hundred shoes. To all intents, at least for the moment, my hands were ruined. At Weyman’s restaurant I went in with my fellow workwomen and men.

Weyman’s restaurant smells very like the steerage in a vessel. The top floor having burned out a few weeks before, the ceiling remained blackened and filthy. The place was so close and foul-smelling that eating was an ordeal. If I had not been so famished, it would have been impossible for me to swallow a mouthful. I bought soup and beans, and ate, in spite of the inconveniences, ravenously, and paid for my dinner fifteen cents. Most of my neighbours took one course, stew or soup. I rose half-satisfied, dizzy from the fumes and the bad air. I am safe in saying that I never smelled anything like to Weyman’s, and I hope never to again. Never again shall I hear food and drink discussed by the gourmet discuss, indeed, with him over his repast but there shall rise before me Weyman’s restaurant, low-ceiled, foul, crowded to overflowing. I shall see the diners bend edged appetites to the unpalatable food. These Weyman patrons, mark well, are the rich ones, the swells of labour able to squander fifteen to twenty cents on their stew and tea. There are dozens, you remember, still in the unaired fourth and fifth stories at “lunching” over their sandwiches. Far more vivid, more poignant even must be to me the vision of “Bobby.” I shall see her eat her filthy sandwich with her blackened hands, see her stoop to blow the scum of deadly matter from her typhoid-breeding glass.

In Lynn, unless she boards at home, a girl’s living costs her at best $3.75 a week. If she be of the average her month’s earnings are $32. Reduce this by general expenses and living and her surplus is $16, to earn which she has toiled 224 hours. You will recall that there are, out of the 22,000 operatives in Massachusetts, 5,000 who make under $5 a week. I leave the reader to compute from this the luxuries and possible pleasures consistent with this income.

A word for the swells of the trade, for swells exist. One of my companions at 28 Viger Street made $14 a week. Her expenses were $4; she therefore had at her disposition about $40 a month. She had no family every cent of her surplus she spent on her clothes.

“I like to look down and see myself dressed nice,” she said; “it makes me feel good. I don’t like myself in poor clothes.”

She was well-dressed her furs good, her hat charming. We walked to work side by side, she the lady of us. Of course she belongs to the Union. Her possible illness is provided for; her death will bring $100 to a distant cousin. She is only tired out, thin, undeveloped, pale, that’s all. She is almost a capitalist, and extremely well dressed.

Poor attire, if I can judge by the reception I met with in Lynn, influences only those who by reason of birth, breeding and education should be above such things. In Viger Street I was more simply clad than my companions. My aspect called forth only sisterhood and kindness.

Fellowship from first to last, fellowship from their eyes to mine, a spark kindled never to be extinguished. The morning I left my tenement lodging Mika took my hand at the door.

“Good-by.” Her eyes actually filled. “I’m awful sorry you’re going. If the world don’t treat you good come back to us.”

I must qualify a little. One member of the working class there was on whom my cheap clothes had a chilling effect the spoiled creature of the traveling rich, a Pullman car porter on the train from Boston to New York! Although I called him first and purposely gave him my order in time, he viewed me askance and served me the last of all. As I watched my companions in their furs and handsome attire eat, whilst I sat and waited, my woolen gloves folded in my lap, I wondered if any one of the favoured was as hungry, as famished as the presser from Parsons’, the cleaner from Marches’.