Part 11

"I'm just gettin' a bite of supper," she said, before she asked the cause of Carrie's visit. "You'd better have some."

"No, thank you," replied the caller, with her careful night-school inflection. "I had mine early."

Katie looked at the speaker, whose round cheeks seemed drawn in a new determination, and whose jaw was swollen as if from a blow.

"How did you get through so early, Carrie?" she inquired.

The little Lithuanian's eyes sparkled.

"We've done it," she said.

"Done what?"

"Gone out."

"Struck?"

Carrie nodded.

"You know how it was," she explained; "all the girls around here do. We've had to work all day long from early morning till late night, Sundays too, and five dollars for the seven days is counted pretty good wages."

"But somebody said the firms' books showed your pay was higher."

"Oh, the books did show it. You see, they carry only a few of us on their salary list, and then each of the foremen hires helpers paid out of one girl's wages. You know as well as I do that most of us live on oatmeal and crackers, and rent one bed in somebody else's tenement."

Katie was acquainted with enough of the shirt-waist makers to be aware that this was true.

"That's so," she granted; "only I thought them things were all ended after the last row."

"Well, they weren't ended; they were only helped for a few months, and now it's summer and most of us would have been laid off. It's the worst time to strike--we know that--but things came to a point where we had to make a fight, or there wouldn't have been any of us left to fight when a better time did come."

"You're talkin' about the union?"

"Yes, that's the real point. The bosses started a union of their own."

"Among themselves?"

"No--they've always had that. I mean they got the new girls into what they called a beneficial association, with the bosses for officers. If you join that, you get all sorts of favors, but you can't join unless you leave the old union."

"Well?"

"Well, then, as soon as they get the beneficial association full enough, they discharge the union girls and, little by little, withdraw the privileges from the Association members, so that things go back to where they were before."

The girl spoke quietly, but Katie remembered many of the evils that Carrie had not mentioned. She recalled how each moment's pause in work meant a deduction from the worker's pay; how the elaborate system of fines taxed the girl whose fingers left her task to rearrange a straying lock of hair, and how the tears forced by overstrained nerves or over-exerted muscles cost the offender almost a fixed price apiece; how the girls that did piecework received no money unless they brought the little check for every article made, the firm thereby saving, through the inevitable loss of some of these checks, a proportion of payment as well known to them and as certain as the mortality rates of life insurance.

"An' so you went out, Carrie?" she said.

"Yes; they turned down our committee at three o'clock this afternoon, and at three-fifteen we had all left the shops. Oh, it was great! But they've got a lot of hands left, and they'll have some of their orders filled in Newark. I don't know how it will end."

"The bosses wouldn't budge?"

"Not an inch. The most they did was to get some of us aside, each away from the rest, and offer us seven dollars a week apiece if we'd fix things up so that our friends would go back to work without any more trouble."

Katie, who well knew what seven dollars a week must mean to this calm, hardworking Lithuanian girl, who had come to America alone and was saving to send her parents money enough to follow, shot a sidelong glance at the speaker; but Carrie's tone had not changed; she seemed unaware that she was narrating anything unusual.

"An' you turned down the offer?" asked Katie.

"Last strike," said Carrie, "one of those union girls was sent out to sell copies of a special edition of _The Call_ for the benefit of the strikers. She hadn't had anything to eat for three days. One man gave her a five-dollar bill for a single paper. Nobody saw him give it; she didn't have to account for it; and she was nearly starved; but she came back and turned in that whole five dollars to the fund. That was one of the girls I was representing this afternoon. Do you suppose I could go back on such girls? Do you suppose I could help myself when I knew it was hurting the others?"

Katie did not immediately reply, but her blue eyes shone. Presently she asked:

"Picket-duty, now, for yours?"

"I began it right away. I spoke to one scab as she came out--just asked her wouldn't she join the union for her own good and ours--just laid my hand on her wrist--but they had the cops ready and their own strong-arm men, and had three of them beating me for my pains."

"Pinched?"

"Of course. The magistrate let me off with a lecture on the rights of every girl to work for starvation-wages if she felt like doing it and like making others starve.--But next time it will be a fine or the workhouse."

Katie had begun to busy herself with the preparations for her meal. She had warmed some coffee on the gas-stove and taken from the cupboard a roll and a few slices of dried beef.

"Look here," she said, stopping in the midst of this task; "how much money have you got?"

"Oh, I'm all right, thanks."

"Maybe you are, but you might as well be better. Now, the while the strike lasts, just you give up that room acrost the hall an' come over here with me."

Carrie's brown locks shook in doubtful refusal.

"You're the real goods," she said; "but I don't have to do that."

"Of course you don't have to, but I'd take it a real kindness. What's the use o' keepin' a whole room to yourself when you'll be spendin' parts of the time in jail?"

Carrie laughed.

"Will you let me pay half?" she asked.

"Sure I will."

"Then perhaps----"

"That's settled," ended Katie, and it was arranged that Carrie's few sticks of furniture should be moved into the Irish girl's quarters the next morning.

The details had just been settled when Hermann entered, his cheerful lips concluding the last bar of "Die Wacht Am Rhein."

"Hello!" said Katie, smiling. "Are you out of a job, too? Or are you just goin' to be late the night?"

Hermann pulled his cap from his blonde curls and, with blushing cheeks, grinned broadly.

"Needer," he answered. "I'm chust on my vay to de saloon." He twisted his cap between his awkward fingers. "I vanted only to ask you somesing, Katie."

"All right. Sit down an' ask it. You know Carrie. Don't mind her."

"Sure I know her, only----"

Carrie rose. She was aware of the pair's relations, and too firmly bound by East Side etiquette to think it well to make of herself that third person who constitutes a crowd.

"I've got to be going," she said.

"Don't you pay no attention to him," Katie objected. "Sit still. Have some coffee, Hermann-boy?"

But Hermann shook his head.

"No, thank you," he said. "I've got chust a minute."

"Then what was it you were wishin' to say?"

"Aboud dot girl I dalked to you aboud on our vay to Coney. You see now you have a tshob, it seemed like ve might do somesing for her."

Katie dropped all trace of banter.

"I'll tell you how it is, Hermann," she said, and she did tell him.

As soon as she had secured her place, she had determined to help. At present much financial assistance was impossible, and employment there was none. It would be dangerous, moreover, to all concerned--not least of all to Violet--for the girl to make a dash for liberty in any manner that would give to Rose a chance to secure vengeance through her friends the police. But Katie was decided, and Carrie at once agreed, that, could the escape be arranged, Violet might at least be sheltered in Katie's room until some work should be found for her.

"All I want to know, Hermann-boy," concluded Katie, "is however in the world we're goin' to get word to her."

"Dot's chust vat I vanted fer to tell you aboud," said Hermann. "You know Conrad Schultz. He's now got my route vith de brewery-vagon. De stable's chust two doors round de corner. I've explained to him, und he'll slip a note to Miss Violet the first dime he sees her."

"We'll write to-night," said Carrie.

"An' I'll hand it to him on my way to work in th' mornin'," added Katie. "Now you run along or you'll be docked."

Hermann assented, smiling. He turned to the door, fumbled with the knob, and dropped his cap. Katie, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand, stooped to recover it just as Hermann himself bent forward. In the presence of a third person, the German felt a sudden thrill of courage.

"Ach, but you're a goot girl, Katie!" he cried. "Und here's a liddle revard fer it!"

He seized his cap, jerked her black head toward him, and imprinted a resounding kiss on her pink cheek.

Katie laughed and broke free. She spilled some of the coffee, but she administered a smart blow with her open palm on the offending mouth.

"You'd never dared to do it if you hadn't thought I had me hands full!" she called after her lover as he clattered heavily and happily down the stairs. "An' just in revenge for that," she added, still blushing, to Carrie, as she closed the door, "me an' you'll go out for a little spree of our own to-night."

"Where to?" asked the factory-girl.

"To a dance," answered Katie. "Me feet have got that lazy walkin' after a job that I'm afraid they'll forget all the dancin'-steps they ever knew, unless I hurry an' get some practicin' again."

"I don't know," said Carrie, doubtfully, "I've got to get up early in the morning."

"An' what about me? Besides, haven't I got me friend, the alarm-clock?"

"But my jaw's smashed from that fight."

"Who'll see it?"

"Let's make it a moving-picture show."

"An' pay the same for half an hour's headache that we could get a whole night's dancin' for?"

"I've got to be walking the picket-line all day to-morrow."

"Yes, an' I have to be standin' behind a counter. You haven't got nothin' on me there. Get your wraps together now an' come ahead, Carrie. I hear there's a new place opened on Grand Street."

Carrie knew how to dance--the poorest girl on the East Side knows that, because not to dance is to miss the one amusement obtainable by the very poor--and, like Katie, she was of that relatively small army that can frequent the dance-halls for perhaps as much as a year without contamination. Before she had taken her course at the night-school, she had even danced in the rooms that the Hebrew politicians provide behind their saloons near Houston Street, where she had seen cadets successfully ply their trade among bland-faced immigrant girls whose very language was unknown to them; and she was therefore wholly prepared for the picture that she confronted when, Katie having paid her ten cents for the two admissions, they entered the low-ceilinged basement of a saloon and tenement-house, and came upon the meeting-place of the Danny Delancy Social Club.

Through a veil of dust raised by stamping feet and swirling skirts, through a cloud of heat from a room with every window closed, through a blast of odors compounded of the fumes of alcohol, the scent of tobacco, and the miasma of sweating men and women, there rose, from somewhere, the cries of a beaten piano, struck and thumped into a shrieking likeness to the "Chocolate Soldier" waltz, which only now and then was made at all audible above the rhythmic hubbub. Although the evenings of Saturdays and Sundays were the most popular for dancing, the floor was so crowded that only the expertness of these trained dancers prevented collision and panic. The steam from the bodies of the performers joined with the dry dust in half obscuring the blue-burning gas. The strident laughter of the patrons helped the scraping of their feet in subduing the sounds of the piano. The men gyrated grimly in wet shirt-sleeves, and the women, affecting the most somber shades chosen for the longest wear, spun in their partners' arms with stolid, gum-grinding jaws and lips that were mirthless. Except for the youthful "spielers" admitted without charge, or even hired, to dance with the awkward or make wall-flowers sufficiently happy to insure their return, there were but two types of men among the patrons. There was the native of the quarter, heavy-faced, large-muscled, quick to anger and ready with the fists, a hard-drinking, hard-living sort, no more careful of his neighbor's morals than of his own, yet good-natured, easy-going, pliable. And winding in and out among these, slow and suave, like some sleek species of vulture, were the young men that came there not for pleasure, but for profit, always-smiling young men with manners offensively elaborate, whose shining black hair smelled of oil, whose skin was like decaying dough, and whose entire time was spent in making the acquaintance of new girls, giving dancing-lessons to new girls in crowded corners, and taking new girls into the adjoining back-bar for a drink.

To these types the attending women more or less corresponded. Most of them came alone, or in groups of two or three--a plain girl always befriended by one of more charm--because etiquette demanded that, if a man brought a companion, his companion must give him what dances he wanted, and so she would have few offers from his fellows, who observed a rigid code that forbade poaching upon a friend's preserve. There were some that could afford to wear gay dresses because they were frankly in a business that, of however brief duration, made gay dresses possible as a luxury and necessary as an advertisement, and this appearance of wealth was never absent from the hungry eyes of the young women about them. There were others, also few, who were plainly new either to the country or to this particular form of amusement. But the majority came from the factories and shops, lured by nothing worse than youth's natural craving for its right to pleasure, seeking to forget the exertions of the day in these new exertions of the night, drifting whither they neither knew nor greatly cared, the necessary factors of an industrial system too fatuous to conserve their efficiency.

On every chair along the reeking walls, now trodden underfoot on the floor, and now picked up like dry leaves and twirled about in the little eddies of warm air created by the romping dancers, were cards and handbills--"throwaways" the patrons called them--which, often in curious English, announced special balls and "grand receptions" shortly to be given in this or some similar club. Here one was "cordially invited" to the "third annual dance given by the two well-known friends, Greaser Einstein and Kid Boslair, at New Starlight Hall, Gents Twenty-five and Ladies Fifteen"; there one was cautioned not to miss the "Devil Dance" that would form a part of the forthcoming "reception of the Harry Cronin Association, Young Theo, floor-manager"; and again, one was told that the "Special Extra Event of the Season" would be the ball of the "Ryan McCall Social, Incorporated, Tammany Hall, ticket admit gent including wardrobe, Thirty-five cents; ladies free."

Katie and the shirtwaist-maker got seats near the door, waved and called to half a dozen acquaintances and strained their eyes to see through the swirling mist.

"It looks like old times," said Carrie.

"Smells like 'em," Katie amended; "only I've been away from these places for awhile an' I notice that, new place or old, the faces change pretty quick. Who's the woman in red, with the yellow hair, Carrie?"

She pointed to a figure spinning about the center of the room, her crimson skirt flying far behind her like the trail of a comet.

"I know her," said Carrie. "A year ago she came to New York from the country to find work. When she was about starved, she rang a bell under the sign 'Helping Hand Home'--she didn't know what that meant except that it meant charity. The superintendent told her his place couldn't do anything for her; she might be spoiled by associating with the people he helped; his mission was for bad women that were sorry; not for good women that hadn't anything to be sorry about. 'But I'm hungry,' she told him. 'Can't help it,' he said; 'you're not qualified.' This girl went away, and came back a month later. 'I don't want to come in just yet,' she said; 'but I do want to tell you that I'm qualified now'--and she was."

Katie took the facts for what, amid surroundings where such facts are plentiful, they seemed worth.

"Hard luck," she said, though not without meaning.

"Yes, and look at her clothes."

"That's the trouble," said Katie; "we can't help lookin' at them--the likes of us--any more than she can help wearin' them. It's that or a tenement with two dark rooms an' the rent raised every year."

They danced, for among the soberer men there were many that knew them, and neither girl remembered the weariness of her work in the exhaustion of her dancing. Between dances, in the dressing-room, they talked with their acquaintances among the girls, gossiping of the men and the other women, and now and then, their throats dry and their faces streaming, they were taken into the dingy side-bar and were bought a glass of beer.

As midnight drew closer the dance became more stormy. Many of the working-girls went home, and their places were filled by women of the brighter dressed class. There were some that were plainly drunk, and these clumsily imitated the suggestive contortions of the salaried dancers now sent upon the floor to stimulate the amateurs. One girl, in a cleared space surrounded by laughing men and envious, though apparently scornful, women, performed a dance popularly supposed to be forbidden by the police. There were several fights, and in one especially nasty scuffle a lad was badly cut by the knife of a jealous partner.

"I guess that's about plenty for us," observed Katie, as she and Carrie shouldered their way from the crowd surrounding the wounded boy and his shrieking assailant.

Both girls were sufficiently familiar with such episodes to accept them with calm, but both were at last tired out.

"I suppose you're right," Carrie assented, "though I did have a good time."

"An' it was you didn't want to come!" grinned Katie as they went out upon the cool street.

"I know." Carrie's round face grew hard and puzzled. "I know," she admitted, "only sometimes----"

"Och, come on, an' cheer up! We must write our letter for the brewery-man before we get to bed, Carrie-girl."

They did write it, but Carrie, when she had gone into her own room for the last night she was to spend there, sat for some time motionless upon the edge of the cot.

"I know," she repeated as if to some invisible confessor; "I know both sides of it, and, honestly, I don't know which is worse. I know all that can be said, only--sometimes--I wonder----"

XIII

JAIL-DELIVERY

Rose was ill--she had been drinking too much for the past week--and Violet, in her no longer fresh red kimona, was in the kitchen talking to Cassie when, one morning, the new driver of the brewery-wagon stopped at the door.

"Morning," he said with what at once struck Violet, who was now constantly on the watch, as a visible effort at nonchalance.

Conrad Schultz was a tall, raw-boned German-American, with a long nose and pale, sorrowful mustache, but with an eye in the cerulean depths of which there lurked the cold fire of reliable strategy.

"Come in," said Violet, "an' have a drop of something."

"Thanks."

He came in cumbersomely, and took an uneasy seat.

"Some chilly for this season," he remarked, with a cool glance in the direction of the ebony Cassie, hovering glumly in the background.

Violet thought she caught the meaning of the man, whom she knew was Hermann Hoffmann's successor.

"It is chilly for this time of year," she said. "What will you have? It better be something warming. There's whiskey here, or, if you don't mind waiting till Cassie goes for it, there's some good brandy in the cellar."

Schultz appeared to hesitate, and Violet, watching him, could not, for a moment, decide whether there was, after all, any foundation for the hope that his appearance had wakened.

"Well, if it ain't no trouble," he at last blurted, "I would like a taste of real brandy."

"Cassie," said Violet, "bring up a fresh bottle of brandy for Mr.--Mr.----"

"Schultz," prompted that individual.

"For Mr. Schultz, Cassie."

Cassie, however, seemed to have scented surrounding mystery.

"Ah reckon there's a bottle som'ares about yhere, Miss Vi'let," she demurred.

"No, there isn't."

"But, Miss Vi'let, there was one jes' half empty las' night."

"Miss Rose took that to bed with her. Don't talk so much. Go down an' get a fresh bottle for Mr. Schultz."

The girl left the room slowly and sullenly.

Schultz sat silent and motionless until a moment had followed the closing of the door. Then the cold flame was relighted in his eye.

"She called you Miss Violet?" he asked, though still in the most commonplace of tones.

"That's my name."

"Did you ever talk to the man that had my job before I had it?"

Violet, with the catlike quiet and ease that always characterized her movements, stepped to the door through which Cassie had just passed. She flung it quickly open. The black girl nearly fell headlong into the room.

Without an instant's hesitation, Violet did the one effective thing. She smacked the negress smartly across the face.

"I heard you!" she said, in tones that were all the more awe-inspiring because they were low. "What do you mean by spying on me, you black devil? Think I want to cheat the house? I'd not be so clumsy about it, if I did! Think I'm trying to skidoo? I'd walk out if I felt like it! I'll go right to Miss Rose about this, an' have you fired so quick you won't have time to pack your duds!"

The servant remained as she had sprawled.

"Oh, please don', miss!" she wailed. "Please don' tell Miss Rose! Ah wasn't tryin' to spy on youse. Ah jes' drapped somethin' yhere, an' ah was jes' tryin' to fin'----"

"Don't you lie to me," said Violet, her cheeks, now always so wan in the morning light, flushing to something like their former color. "Get up off your knees."

"Miss Vi'let, please don' tell on me."

The black girl's voice threatened to rise to a dangerous wail.

"All right," said Violet, quickly. "I'll let it go this time; but you hurry up and get that brandy, or I might change my mind. Pull the cork while you're at it, and fetch a decent glass from the dining-room."

Cassie, murmuring thanks with her thick lips, and wiping her eyes with the big knuckles of her right fist, scrambled to her feet, and started again upon her errand.