"The women know, they will tell you."
I was thrown back upon the convicts again for my instructions.
I went on, despairing of help, to study them out as best I could. Sometimes by asking left-hand questions of the women, and sometimes by getting direct explanations from them; but chiefly by watching the progress of the work. The place seemed to me full of disorder, confusion, and dirt.
When the Deputy came round again, I was full of trouble.
He said, when I complained to him,—
"You will find things in confusion. The Matron who went away yesterday was inefficient."
"Perhaps so," I replied; "but the confusion appears to me to date farther back than the last Matron. It arises from the want of a head officer to regulate affairs."
"I have double the trouble on this side, with four Matrons and a hundred women, than with three hundred men and more than a dozen officers on the other."
"You would insinuate that women are more difficult to get on with than men. I make a very different solution of the difficulty in this particular case. You are on the ground all of the time; explain his duty to every officer, and see that he does it. That makes the officer's work distinct before him. It is done under your eye, which makes it promptly and well done. If that were the case on this side, we might be as orderly, and have as little trouble in performing our part, as you on yours. The cook tells me that certain work belongs to the slide woman; the slide woman says it belongs to the sink women; the sink women shift it on the steam woman, and so I am kept on the chase, from one to another, for some one to do a piece of labor. I do not know who ought to do it, and they know it. If they do not intend to confuse me, they intend to clear themselves of all the work they can."
"Use your own judgment, and call on whom you please. They are all obliged to obey any order that you give."