The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl, as Told by Herself

by Dorothy Richardson

CONTENTS

CHAPTER		PAGE
I	In which I Arrive in New York	[3]
II	In which I Start Out in Quest of Work	[16]
III	I Try "Light" Housekeeping in a Fourteenth-street Lodging-house	[27]
IV	Wherein Fate Brings Me Good Fortune in One Hand and Disaster in the Other	[44]
V	In which I am "Learned" by Phœbe in the Art of Box-making	[58]
VI	In which Phœbe and Mrs. Smith Hold Forth upon Music and Literature	[75]
VII	In which I Acquire a Story-book Name and Make the Acquaintance of Miss Henrietta Manners	[92]
VIII	Wherein I Walk through Dark and Devious Ways with Henrietta Manners	[108]
IX	Introducing Henrietta's "Special Gentleman-friend"	[123]
X	In which I Find Myself a Homeless Wanderer in the Night	[142]
XI	I Become an "Inmate" of a Home for Working Girls	[151]
XII	In which I Spend a Happy Four Weeks Making Artificial Flowers	[180]
XIII	Three "Lady-friends," and the Adventures that Befall Them	[197]
XIV	In which a Tragic Fate Overtakes my "Lady-friends"	[215]
XV	I Become a "Shaker" in a Steam-laundry	[229]
XVI	In which it is Proved to Me that the Darkest Hour Comes Just Before the Dawn	[249]
	Epilogue	[266]

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THE LONG DAY

I

IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK

The rain was falling in great gray blobs upon the skylight of the little room in which I opened my eyes on that February morning whence dates the chronological beginning of this autobiography. The jangle of a bell had awakened me, and its harsh, discordant echoes were still trembling upon the chill gloom of the daybreak. Lying there, I wondered whether I had really heard a bell ringing, or had only dreamed it. Everything about me was so strange, so painfully new. Never before had I waked to find myself in that dreary, windowless little room, and never before had I lain in that narrow, unfriendly bed.

Staring hard at the streaming skylight, I tried to think, to recall some one of the circumstances that might possibly account for my having entered that room and for my having laid me down on that cot. When? and how? and why? How inexplicable it all was in those first dazed moments after that rude awakening! And then, as the fantasies of a dream gradually assume a certain vague order in the waking recollection, there came to me a confused consciousness of the events of the preceding twenty-four hours—the long journey and the weariness of it; the interminable frieze of flying landscape, with its dreary, snow-covered stretches blurred with black towns; the shriek of the locomotive as it plunged through the darkness; the tolling of ferry-bells, and then, at last, the slow sailing over a black river toward and into a giant city that hung splendid upon the purple night, turret upon turret, and tower upon tower, their myriad lights burning side by side with the stars, a city such as the prophets saw in visions, a city such as dreamy childhood conjures up in the muster of summer clouds at sunset.

Suddenly out of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill in western Pennsylvania. With equal suddenness, too, the fugue of thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings of ferry-bells massed itself into the clangorous music of a terrifying monody—"WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!"