“Vy not?” the old woman said, when she understood my desire. “I tells you mine an’ more, too, for down de stairs I buy every day for the girl that is sick and goes out no more. If I quick were as girl I could save much, but I have sixty-five year. How shall I be quick? I earn forty-five, fifty cents sometime, but forty-five for day’s work when I go as I can. An’ so for week dat is $2.70; I can ten dollars a month, sometimes twelve dollars, and I pays three dollars for this room. To eat I will buy tea and our bread,—rye, for dat is stronger as your fine wheat. Tea is American, but I will not beer any more, since I see how women drinks it and de kinder, and it not like our beer but more tipsy. So I makes tea, and de cheese and de wurst is all not so much. It is de coal that is most. Vat I vill eat, he cost not so more as fifty cent; sometimes sixty, but I eat not ever all I could, for I must be warm a little, and dere is light, and to wash, and some shoe. It is bad to be big as I, for shoe not last. But a loaf of bread, five cents, do all day and some in next; and cheese a pound is ten, if I have him; and wurst is fifteen, for sometime he is best, and a pound stay a week if I not greedy. Tea will be thirty cents, but he is good a month, and sugar a pound, two pound sometime, but butter no, and milk a cent for Sunday. So I live, and I beg not. Can I more? I thank the good God only that there is no more Hans or Lisa or any to be hungry with me. It is good they go.”
“And you buy for some one else?”
“Oh ja, but she will die soon and care not. It is de kinder that care. Two, and one six and one eight and cannot earn. She sew all day on machine. It is babies’ cloaks, so vite and nice. In two days she will make dree, for see, dere is two linings and cape and cuff is all scallop, and she must stitch first and then bind and hem. All is hem, all over inside, so nice, and she make dem so nice. But eight dollars a dozen is all, and it is a week for nine, and so she get not more as five dollars because she is sick and must stop. And there is the grandvater that is old, and de kinder and she and all must live. Rent is $5.50, dat I know, and I pay for her dis week $1.60 for bread and tea and potatoes and some milk, and molasses for de kinder on bread, and butter a little, and milk, but not meat. It is de grandvater eat too much, but how shall one help it? De rest is clothes for all, but dere is no shoe for de kinder, and I see not if dere will be shoe. How shall it be?”
One after another the cases on the west side gave in their testimony. Save in the first one there were no formal accounts. But a little thinking brought out the items,—for many baker’s bread, tea, sugar, a little milk, and butter and a bit of meat once or twice a week, the average cost of food per head for the majority of cases being ninety cents per week. All coal was bought by the scuttle, a scuttle of medium size counting as twelve cents’ worth, thus much more than doubling the cost per ton. In the same way, wood by the bundle and oil by the quart gave the utmost margin of profit to the seller, and the same fact applied to all provisions sold. In no case save the one first mentioned, where the mother had learned that cabbage-water can form the basis for a nourishing and very palatable soup, was there the faintest gleam of understanding that the same amount of money could furnish a more varied, more savory, and more nourishing regimen.
“Beans!” said one indignant soul. “What time have I to think of beans, or what money to buy coal to cook ’em? What you’d want if you sat over a machine fourteen hours a day would be tea like lye to put a back-bone in you. That’s why we have tea always in the pot, and it don’t make much odds what’s with it. A slice of bread is about all. Once in a while you get ragin’, tearin’ hungry. Seems as if you’d swallow teapot or anything handy to fill up like, but that ain’t often—lucky for us!”
“If you all clubbed together, couldn’t one cook for you,—make good soup and oatmeal and things that are nourishing? You would be stronger then.”
“Stronger for what? More hours at the machine? More grinding your own flesh and bones into flour for them that’s over us? Ma’am, it’s easy to see you mean well, an’ I won’t say but what you know more than some that comes around what you’re talkin’ about. Club we might. I’m not denying it could be done, if there was time; but who of us has the time even if she’d the will? I was never much hand for cookin’. We’d our tea an’ bread an’ a good bit of fried beef or pork, maybe, when my husband was alive an’ at work. He cared naught for fancy things like beans an’ such. It’s the tea that keeps you up, an’ as long as I can get that I’ll not bother about beans.”
In the same house an old Swiss woman, who had fallen from her first estate as lady’s maid through one grade and another of service, was ending her days on a wage of two dollars per week, earned in a suspender factory, where she sewed on buckles. In her case marriage with a drinking husband had eaten up both her savings and her earnings, and age now prevented her taking up household service, which she ranked as most comfortable and most profitable. But she had been taught while almost a child to cook, and though her expenditure for food was a little below a dollar per week, the savory smell from a saucepan on her tiny stove showed that she had something more nearly like nourishment than her neighbors.
“I try sometimes to teach,” she said. “I give some of my soup, and they eat it and say it is good, but they not stop to do so much dat is fuss. All this in the saucepan is seven cents,—three cents for bones and some bits the kind butcher trow in, and the rest vegetable and barley. But it makes me two days. I have lentils, too, yes, and beans, and plenty things to flavor, and I buy rye bread and coffee to Sunday. Never tea, oh, no! Tea is so vicket. It make hand shake and head fly all round. Good soup is best, and more when one can. Vegetable is many and salad, and when I make more dollar I buy some egg. But not tea; not big loaf of white bread dot swell and swell inside and ven it is gone leave one all so empty. I would teach many but they like it not. They want only de tea; always de tea.”
“De tea” and the sewing-machine are naturally inseparable allies, and so long as the sewing-women must work fourteen hours daily they will remain so; the rank fluid retarding digestion and thus proving as friendly an aid as the “bone” which the half-fed Irish peasant demands in his potato. For the west side the story was quite plain, but for such returns as the east side has to offer there is still room for further detail.