Spending the rest of the day on a bench in Washington Square with a library book in my hand convinced me that I must find some other way of occupying my time if I was to gain strength. The afternoon paper solved that problem.
The U. S. Employment Bureau on East Twenty-second Street was in need of volunteer workers. On calling the next morning shortly after nine I found the street in front of the Bureau crowded by men. When finally, having wormed my way in and up the stairs, I made myself known and offered my services I was quickly placed—given a chair at a long make-shift table, planks on top of saw-horses, and told to register applicants willing to take work in shipyards.
That was a motley crowd—men holding jobs paying as high as five hundred dollars a month offered themselves for positions paying one-fifth that amount, and men who had no work at all refused jobs, the only ones they were fitted for, at three dollars a day.
One dear old Frenchman I shall never forget. He had passed down the long line of registrars struggling to make himself understood when he reached me. Though he had lived in New York more than twenty years he could neither speak nor understand the American language.
He was a highly paid cabinetmaker. Up to the outbreak of the World War his family comprised himself, his wife, five sons, and little Hortense. When he reached me, a bright day when winter’s smile seems spring, his little circle had dwindled within two years to himself and little Hortense. His five sons were under the poppies somewhere in France, his wife had died of a broken heart.
He acknowledged his age, past sixty, but insisted he still had strength enough to work for America and France. He would take any job, at any wage. I gave him a card and sent him to an employer who had specially stipulated that he would take no man over forty.
Within an hour that employer telephoned and asked for me. Instead of the blowing-up that the registrar at my elbow prophesied, he wished to thank me. The Frenchman was a tip-top workman, he said. Then he added:
“It’s not often you find a person, man or woman, who knows when to break a rule. That’s what I called you up for—to thank you for breaking my rule. If you find any more men like your Frenchman, don’t ask his age, just send him along.”
Learning that women were needed in the gas-mask factory at Long Island City, I got a card of introduction from the head of the woman’s branch of the employment bureau, and journeyed out. This woman had told me that the wage was exceptional—twenty-five to forty a week.
As fifteen dollars a week had, up to that time, been the highest I had received, and that for only a few weeks, I looked forward to making my fortune in the gas-mask factory in a few days. Another case of exaggerated wage. Fifteen dollars is what I was paid, and I would have had to work there a good long time before getting a raise.