XVI
THE WOMAN WHO WORKS IN THE CITY OF UNREST
At a quarter to seven the alarm-clock went off next her bed—how she would have liked to sleep for another hour, or lie warm and cosy under the clothes! The training in the habit of doing what she did not like helped her into a little tin bath, and to dress close to the radiator, as it was a bitterly cold morning. At 7.30 she stepped out into a snow-covered street and then hurried across Washington-square. Bitterly cold wind shivered through the white coral-like branches of the trees. The snow brought out the carving on the Washington Arch; the snow seemed to suit the whole square, and make it seem still less a part of the City—the Sleepy Hollow in the City of Unrest, with the solid big houses around it where ladies and gentlemen lived who had refused to be hustled into joining in the general dollar scramble.
In the street on the other side of the square she entered a restaurant, already full of breakfasters. She sat down at one of the marble tables with a couple of men she knew, ordered an orange, coffee, porridge, roll, two eggs—total, thirty cents. Her friends were in offices down town, one of them not earning as much as she was. They were comrades, chums, so much that he often borrowed a dollar from her during those critical days at the month's end.
General Yule's Column On The Way To Ladysmith.
Breakfast finished, and a glance at the paper—at least, enough to read the headings—and then out on Broadway to take the down-town car. Two passed as she stood at the corner, so packed that there was not standing-room even on the platform for another; then one stopped from which a few passengers struggled out, and she got in. All along the centre of the car men and women were standing, holding on to the straps, swaying backwards and forwards as the car swooped forward, and jerking forward every time it stopped. No idea in such a car of the men sitting down, against whose knees hers rubbed, to get up and relinquish their seats—why should they? She did not expect it. Was she not by her very going down town taking the place of a possible man there? was she not showing that she could do a man's work? Equality—he might think himself called on to give up his seat to one of the weaker sex. But there is no sex in the City. Swaying, squeezing, jostling, twenty minutes of uncomfortable cattle-truck-like journey brought her to the big office where she worked.
Men do not doff their hats in the down-town elevators which brought her up to the big office where she was employed, a great room near the top of one of the high down-town buildings; the windows looked out on the river, now a white mass of down-flowing ice, through which the calling steamers worked their way laboriously towards the harbour, to the Statue of Liberty standing beside what now looked a white gravel path of entry to the city.
There were about fifty people at work in the room, three-fourths women, seated at desks and tables, and some occupied the dignified position of little glass-partitioned rooms. She had one of these to herself, in which there was also a table for a stenographer. It was a publishing-house; books, illustrations, manuscripts, were in evidence everywhere. Near the door was a sort of railed-in pen where men with bundles of manuscript under their arms were usually to be seen seated, waiting. Some of these were even shown into her office, and left minus their bundles, or more often with them. There was a hum of chattering typewriting machines constantly in the air, like the chirruping of insects heard from tropical trees. Constantly her telephone rang and she had to make excursions to the manager's office, and head printers and printers'-ink-marked men came to her with proof-sheets, and so on, till 12.30, when she went out to lunch at the women's cafe and had lunch not unlike her breakfast.