Lack of money forced me back to work. The last of the fifty dollars for which I had worked so hard, and skimped so carefully, had to be drawn from the savings-bank to pay my board. Fortunately the Y. W. would get me a job without first exacting a fee.
On my explaining that I didn’t feel quite honest—taking a position and receiving the training, and then leaving within a couple of weeks—the woman in charge of the employment bureau advised me to take temporary positions. There was always quite a demand for such workers, she explained. Now that there was so much government work to be done, she found it hard to get any one to so much as consider a temporary job.
“Have you anything temporary in the way of government work?” I asked. “I’d like to feel that I was helping the government if there is anything you think I could do.”
“I wish all the girls sent out from here were as well equipped,” she told me while looking over her file. “I’ll give you a card to ex-State Senator Gallagher. He is organizing and setting in motion the working end of the District Board for the City of New York, down in the old Post-Office Building. There are plenty of other openings, but I’m quite sure he’ll take you.”
CHAPTER XII
JACKALS FIGHT TO KEEP FROM FIGHTING
The evening after my first day spent as a clerk of the District Board for the City of New York I reached the Jane Leonard in time to be among the first who entered the dining-room for dinner. The meal was good enough, soup, roast lamb and a vegetable, and it being Monday the aprons and shirt-waists of the waitresses were still clean, but—oh, the flies! These pests swarmed over everything except Miss Diggs’ table. That was always kept carefully covered with mosquito-netting.
Getting through dinner as soon as I decently could, I hurried up to one of the piazzas and sat watching the boats passing back and forth on the river—every conceivable sort of craft from a tiny dory manned by two half-nude small boys to huge Sound steamers with noisily splashing side-wheels. Among this noisy throng now and then there would pass such strangely colored boats, boats that made me think them the product of some cubist or futurist when in the clutches of a nightmare—camouflage, weird twistings and curves in blues, greens, purples, black, gray, white. It was soon after the disappearance of one such boat that Miss Stafford came out and took the chair next to mine.
“How do you like your new position?” she asked, as turning her chair sideways to the piazza railing she put her feet on the rung of my chair.
“W-e-l-l,” I hesitated. “I don’t know whether to be amused by it or to hate it—reading the affidavits of draft-evaders. There are so many of them I feel like kicking, yet, at the same time I feel like crying—to find that there are so many persons living in our country, fattening on it, enjoying its benefits and not caring enough for it to fight for its ideals.”
“You mustn’t expect everybody to be as keen about doing their bit as you are. Your fingers are never still. You must roll bandages or knit sweaters in your sleep,” she laughed. “What are the other employees like?”