Part 5

At last some one with a heart came out and told the girls we could step inside. By that time there were some ten of us, all ages and descriptions. What would a "typical" factory girl be like, I wonder. Statistics prove she is young and unmarried more than otherwise, but each factory does seem to collect the motleyest crew of a little of everything--old, young, married, single, homely, stupid, bright, pretty, sickly, husky, fat, thin, and so on down the line. Certain it is that they who picture a French-heeled, fur-coated, dolled-up creature as the "typical factory girl" are far wide of the mark. The one characteristic which so far does seem pretty universal is that one and all, no matter what the age or looks, are perfectly willing to tell you everything they know on short acquaintance. At first I felt a hesitancy at asking questions about their personal lives, yet I so much wanted to know what they did and thought, what they hoped and dreamed about. It was early apparent that sooner or later everything would come out with scant encouragement, and no amount of questioning ever is taken amiss. They in turn ask me questions, and I lie until I hate myself.

The plump Jewess was the first interviewed. When she heard the pay she departed. The elevator bride and I were taken together, and together we agreed to everything--wages thirteen dollars a week, "with one dollar a week bonus" (the bonus, as was later discovered, had numerous strings to it. I never did get any). Work began at 7.45, half hour for lunch, ended at 5. The bride asked if the work was dangerous. "That's up to you. Goin' upstairs is dangerous if you don't watch where you put your feet. Eh?" We wanted to start right in--I had my apron under my arm--but to-morrow would be time. I got quite imploring about beginning on that day. No use.

The bride and I departed with passes to get by with the next morning. That was the last I saw of the bride--or any of that group, except one little frozen thing without a hat. She worked three days, and used to pull my apron every time she went by and grin.

The factory was 'way over on the East Side. It meant gettin' up in the dark and three Subways--West Side, the Shuttle, East Side which could be borne amicably in the morning, but after eight and three-quarter hours of foot-press work, going home with that 5-6 rush--that mob who shoved and elbowed and pushed and jammed--was difficult to bear with Christian spirit. Except that it really is funny. What idea of human nature must a Subway guard between the hours of 5 and 6 be possessed of?

At noon I used to open my lunch anxiously, expecting to see nothing but a doughy mass of crumpled rye bread and jam. Several times on the Subway the apple got shoved into my ribs over a period where it seemed as if either the apple or the ribs would have to give in. But by noon my hunger was such that any state of anything edible was as nectar and ambrosia.

I am thinking that even a hardened factory hand might remember her first day at the brassworks. Up three flights of stairs, through a part of the men's factory, over a narrow bridge to a back building, through two little bobbing doors, and there you were admitted to that sanctuary where, according to the man who hired you, steady work and advancement to a rosy future awaited one.

True, I had only the candy factory as a basis of comparison, as far as working experience went. But I have been through factories and factories of all sorts and descriptions, and nothing had I ever seen like the brassworks. First was the smell--the stale smell of gas and metal. (Perhaps there is no such smell as stale metal, but you go down to the brassworks and describe it better!) Second, the darkness--a single green-shaded electric light directly over where any girl was working, but there were areas where there were no workers. Up the end of the floor, among the power presses, all belts and machines and whirring wheels, there were only three or four shaded lights. Windows lined both sides of the floor, but they had never been washed since the factory was built, surely. Anyhow, it was dark and rainy outside. The walls once had been white, but were now black. Dim, dirty, uneven boxes containing brass parts filled the spaces between the long tables where the foot presses stood. Third, the noise--the clump of the foot presses, the whirring of the pattern cutters--one sounded ever like a lusty woodpecker with a metal beak pecking on metal; rollings and rumblings from the floor above; jarrings and shakings from below.

Two-thirds of the entire floor was filled with long tables holding the foot presses--tables which years ago were clean and new, tables which now were worn, stained, and uneven, and permanently dirty. On each side of each long table stood five black iron presses, but there seemed to be never more than one or two girls working at a side. Each press performed a different piece of work--cut wick holes, fitted or clamped parts together, shaped the cones, and what not, but with only two general types of operation so far as the foot part went. One type took a long, firm, forward swing on the pedal; the other a short, hard, downward "kick." With the end of the pressure the steel die cut through the thin brass cone, or completed whatever the job was. As the pedal and foot swung back to position the girl removed the brass part, dropping it in a large box at her right. She kept a small bin on the table at the left of the press filled with parts she was to work on. Around the sides of the floor were the table workers--girls adjusting parts by hand, or soldering.

The other third of the floor was taken up with the machine presses, which mostly clicked away cutting patterns in the brass parts to hold the lamp chimney. In a far corner were the steaming, bleaching tubs where dull, grimy brass parts were immersed in several preparations, I don't know what, to emerge at last shining like the noonday sun.

The cold little girl with no hat, a strange, somewhat unsociable, new person, and I stood there waiting one hour. Some one took our names. The experienced feeling when they asked me where I had worked last and how long was I there, and why did I leave! At the end of an hour the forelady beckoned me--such a neat, sweet person as she was--and I took my initial whack at a foot press. If ever I do run an automobile the edge of first enjoyment is removed. A Rolls-Royce cannot make me feel any more pleased with life than the first ten minutes of that foot press. In ten minutes the job was all done and there I sat for an hour and a half waiting for another. Hard on a person with the foot-press fever. The times and times later I would gratefully have taken any part of that hour and a half to ease my weary soul!

Be it known, if I speak feelingly at times of the weariness of a foot press, that, though nothing as to size, I am a very husky person--perhaps the healthiest of the eight million women in industry! It was a matter of paternal dismay that I arrived in the world female instead of male. What Providence had overlooked, mortal ability would do everything possible to make up for--so argued a disappointed father. From four years of age on I was taught to do everything a boy could or would do; from jumping off cars while they were moving to going up in a balloon. A good part of my life I have played tennis and basketball and hockey, and swum, and climbed mountains, and ridden horseback, and rowed, and fished. I do not know what it is to have an ache or a pain from one end of the year to the other. All of which is mentioned merely because if certain work taxes my strength, who seldom has known what it is to be weary, what can it do to the average factory worker, often without even a fighting physical chance from birth on?

The jobs on our third floor where the girls and women worked concerned themselves with lamps--the old-fashioned kind, city folks are apt to think. Yet goodness knows we seemed during even my sojourn to make more lamp parts than creation ever had used in the heyday of lamps. Well, all but five per cent of farm women still use kerosene lamps, so the government tells us. Also fat Lizzie informed me, when I asked her who in the world could ever use just them lamp cones I made some one

## particular day, "Lor', child, they send them lamps all over the

world!" She made a majestic sweep with both arms. "Some of 'em goes as far--as far--as _Philadelphia_!" Once we were working on a rush order for fifty thousand lamps of one certain kind. Curiosity got the better of me and I took occasion to see where the boxes were being addressed. It was to a large mail-order house in Chicago.

The first noon whistle--work dropped--a rush for the washroom. Let no one think his hands ever were dirty until he labors at a foot press in a brassworks. Such sticky, grimy, oily, rough blackness never was--and the factory supplies no soap nor towels. You are expected to bring your own--which is all right the second day when you have found it out and come prepared.

The third floor had seemed dark and dismal enough during the morning; at noon all lights are turned off. Many of the workers went out for lunch, the rest got around in dismal corners, most of them singly, and ate by their machines, on the same hard seats they have been on since a quarter to 8. What a bacchanal festival of color and beauty now appeared the candy-factory whitewashed lunch room with the marble-topped tables! The airy sociability of it! I wandered about with my lunch in my hand, to see what I could see. Up amid the belts and power machines sat one of the girls who began that morning--not the cold, hatless one.

"You gonna stick it out?" she asked me.

"Sure. I guess it's all right."

"Oh gee! Ain't like no place I ever worked yet. Don't catch me standin' this long."

She did stand it four days. Minnie suggested then she stick it out till Christmas. "You'll need the money for Christmas y'know, an' you might not get the next job so easy now."

"Damn Christmas!" was all the new girl had to say to that.

"Sure now," said Irish Minnie, "an' she's takin her chances. It's an awful disgrace y'know, to be gettin' presents when y'ain't got none to give back. Ain't it, now? I'd never take no chances on a job so close to Christmas."

I talked to five girls that noon. None of them had been there longer than a week. None of them planned to stay.

All afternoon I worked the foot press at one job. My foot-press enthusiasm weakened--four thousand times I "kicked"--two thousand lamp-wick slots I make in the cones. Many of the first five hundred looked a bit sad and chewed at. The "boss" came by and saw that I was not one hundred per cent perfect. He gave me pointers and I did better. Each cone got placed over a slanted form just so; kick, and half the slot is made. Lift the cone up a wee bit, twist it round to an exact position, hold it in place, kick, and the other half is cut. The kick must be a stout kick--bing! down hard, to make a clean job of it. The thing they gave you to sit on! A high, narrow, homemade-looking, wooden stool, the very hardest article of furniture under the blue canopy of heaven. Some of them had little, narrow, straight backs--just boards nailed on behind. All of them were top heavy and fell over if you got off without holding on. By 4.30 standing up at the candy job seemed one of the happiest thoughts on earth. What rosy good old days those were! Dear old candy factory! Happy girls back there bending over the chocolates!

Next sat Louisa, an Italian girl who stuttered, and I had to stop my press to hear her. She stopped hers to talk. She should worry. It's the worst job she ever saw, and for thirteen dollars a week why should she work? She talked to me, kicked a few times, got a drink, kicked, talked, stood up and stretched, kicked, talked, got another drink. She is married, has a baby a year old, another coming in three months. She will stay her week out, then she goes, you bet. Her husband was getting fifty dollars a week in a tailor job--no work now for t-t-t-two months. He does a little now and then in the b-b-barber business. Oh, but life was high while the going was good! She leaned way over and told me in a hushed, inspired tone, to leave me awestruck, "When we was m-m-married we t-t-took a h-h-h-honeymoon!" I gasped and wanted details. To West Virginia they'd gone for a month. The fare alone, each way, had come to ten dollars apiece, and then they did no work for that month, but lived in a little hotel. Her husband was crazy of her, and she was of him now, but not when she was married. He's very good to her. After dinner every single night they go to a show.

"Every night?"

"Sure, every night, and Sundays two times."

It all sounded truly glowing.

"You married?"

"No."

"Well, don' you do it. Wish I wasn't married. Oh gee! Wish I wasn't married. I'm crazy of my husband, but I wish I wasn't married. See--once you married--pisht!--there you are--stay that way."

I agreed I was in no hurry about matrimony.

"Hurry? Na, no hurry; that's right. The h-h-hurrier you are the b-b-b-badder off you get!"

The next morning the Italian girl was late. The forelady gave her locker to some one else. Such a row! Louisa said: "I got mad, I did. I told her to go to hell. That's only w-w-w-way anybody gets anything in this world--get mad and say you go to h-h-hell. Betcha."

A little later the forelady, when the Italian was on one of her trips after a drink, leaned over and gave me her side of the story. She is such a very nice person, our forelady--quiet, attractive, neat as a pin. Her sister addresses boxes and does clerical work of one sort or another. Two subdued old maids they are; never worked any place but right on our third floor. "Ain't like what it used to be," she told me. "In the old days girls used to work here till they got married. We used to have parties here and, say! they was nice girls in them days. Look at 'em now! Such riffraff! New ones comin' in all the time, new ones worse each time. Riffraff, that's what they are. It sure looks nice to see a girl like you." (What good were the earrings doing?) "We'll make it just as nice here for you as we can." (Oh, how guilty I began to feel!)

She looked around to see if the Italian was about.

"Now you take this Eyetalian girl next to you. Gee! she's some fright. Oughtta heard her this morning. 'Spected me to keep her locker for her when she was late. How'd I know she was comin' back? I gave it to another girl. She comes tearin' at me. 'What the hell you think you're doin'?' she says to me. Now I ain't used to such talk, and I was for puttin' my hat and coat on right then and there and walkin' out. I must say I gotta stand all sorts of things in my job. It's awful what I gotta put up with. I never says nothin' to her. But any girl's a fool 'l talk to a person that way. Shows she's got nothin' up here [knocking her head] or she sure'd know better than get the forelady down on her like that. Gee! I was mad!"

Louisa returned and Miss Hibber moved on. "Some fright, that forelady," remarked Louisa. That night Louisa departed for good.

The second day I kicked over six thousand times. It seemed a lot when you think of the hard stool. It was a toss between which was the worse, the stool or the air. This afternoon, I was sure it must be 3.30. I looked back at the clock--1.10. It had seemed like two hours of work and it was forty minutes. No ventilation whatever in that whole room--not a crack of air. Wonder if there ever was any since the place was built decades ago. Once Louisa and I became desperate and got Tony to open a window. The forelady had a fit; so did Tillie. Both claimed they'd caught cold.

Tony is the Louis of the brassworks. He is young and very lame--one leg considerably shorter than the other. It makes me miserable to see him packing heavy boxes about. He told me he must get another job or quit. Finally they did put him at a small machine press. So many maimed and halt and decrepit as they employed about the works! Numbers of the workers were past-telling old, several were very lame, one errand boy had a fearfully deformed face, one was cross-eyed. I remarked to Minnie that the boss of the works must have a mighty good heart. Minnie has been working twenty-three years and has had the bloom of admiration for her fellow-beings somewhat worn off in that time. "Hm!" grunted Minnie. "He gets 'em cheaper that way, I guess."

The elevator man is no relation to the one at the candy factory. He is red faced and grinning, most of his teeth are gone, and he always wears a derby hat over one eye. One morning I was late. He jerked his head and thumb toward the elevator. "Come on, I'll give ya a lift up!" and when we reached our floor, though it was the men's side, "Third Avenue stop!" he called out cheerily, and grinned at the world. He had been there for years. The boss on our floor had been there for years--forty-three, to be exact. Miss Hibber would not tell how many years she had worked there, nor would Tillie. Tillie said she was born there.

If it were only the human element that counted, everyone would stay at the brassworks forever. I feel like a snake in the grass, walking off "on them" when they all were so nice. Nor was it for a moment the "dearie" kind of niceness that made you feel it was orders from above. From our floor boss down, they were people who were born to treat a body square. All the handicaps against them--the work itself, the surroundings, the low pay--had so long been part of their lives, these "higher ups" seemed insensible to the fact that such things were handicaps.

To-day was sunny and the factory not so dark--in fact, part of the time we worked with no electric lights. The crisp early morning air those four blocks from the Subway to the factory--it sent the spring fever through the blood. In the gutter of that dirty East Side street a dirty East Side man was burning garbage. The smoke curled up lazily. The sun just peeping up over the hospital at the end of the street made slanting shafts through the smoke. As I passed by it suddenly was no longer the East Side of New York City....

Now the Four Way Lodge is open, Now the hunting winds are loose, Now the smokes of spring go up to clear the brain....

Breakfast in a canon by the side of a stream--the odor of pines.... The little bobbing doors went to behind me and there I stood in floor three, the stale gas and metal smell ... the whirs of the belts ... the jarring of the presses....

Next to me this glorious morning sat a snip of a little thing all in black--so pretty she was, so very pretty. I heard the boss tell her it's not the sort of work she's been used to, she'll find it hard. Is she sure she wants to try it? And in the course of the morning I heard the story of Mame's life.

Mame's husband died three weeks ago. They had been married one month and two days--after waiting three years. Shall I write a story of Mame on the sob-sister order to bring the tears to your eyes? It could easily be done. But not honestly. Little Mame--how could her foot ever reach the press? And when she walked off after a drink, I saw that she was quite lame. A widow only three weeks. She'd never worked before, but there was no money. She lived all alone, wandered out for her meals--no mother, no father, no sisters or brothers. She cried every night. Her husband had been a traveling salesman--sometimes he made eighty-five dollars a week. They had a six-room apartment and a servant! She'd met him at a dance hall. A girl she was with had dared her to wink at him. Sure she'd do anything anybody dared her to. He came over and asked her what she was after, anyhow. That night he left the girl he'd taken to the dance hall to pilot her own way back to home and mother, and he saw Mame to her room. He was swell and tall. She showed me his picture in a locket around her neck. Meanwhile Mame kicked the foot press about twice every five minutes.

Why had they waited so long to get married? Because of the war. He was afraid he'd be killed and would leave her a widow. "He asked me to promise never to get married again if he did marry me and died. But,"--she leaned over my way--"that only meant if he died during the war, ain't that so? Lookit how long the war was over before he died."

He was awful good to her after they got married. He took her to a show every night--jes swell; and she had given him a swell funeral--you bet she did. The coffin had cost eighty-five dollars--white with real silver handles; and the floral piece she bought--"Gee! What's your name?... Connie, you oughtta seen that floral piece!" and Mame laid off work altogether to use her hands the better. It was shaped so, and in the middle was a clock made out of flowers, with the hands at the very minute and hour he'd died. (He passed away of a headache--very sudden.) Then below, in clay, were two clasped hands--his and hers. "Gee! Connie, you never seen nothin' so swell. Everybody seen it said so."