“We’ve clubbed, so’s to get ahead a little,” said the finisher, whose fingers flew as she made buttonholes in the waistband and flap of the overalls. “We were each in a room by ourselves, but after the fever, when the children died and I hadn’t but two left, it seemed as if we’d be more sensible to all go in together and see if we couldn’t be more comfortable. We’d have left anyway, and tried for a better place, but for one thing,—we hadn’t time to move; and for another, queer as it seems, you get used to even the worst places and feel as if you couldn’t change. We’ll have to, if the landlord doesn’t do something about the closets. It’s no good telling the agent, and I don’t know as anybody in the house knows just who the landlord is. Anyway, the smell’s enough to kill you sometimes, and it’s a burning disgrace that human beings have to live in such a pig-pen. It’s cheap rent. We pay five dollars a month for this place. When I came here it was from a neck-tie place over on Allen Street, that’s moved now, and my husband was mate on a tug and earned well. But he took to drink and sold off everything I’d brought with me, and at last he was hurt in a fight round the corner, and died in hospital of gangrene. Mary’s husband there was a bricklayer and had big wages, but he drank them fast as he made them, and he was ugly when the drink was in, which mine wasn’t. But there’s hardly one in this house, man or woman, that don’t take a drop to keep off the fever; and even I, that hate the sight or smell of it, I wake up in the morning with an awful kind o’ goneness that seems as if a taste might help it. The tea stops that, though. Tea’s the best friend we’ve got. We’d never stand it if it wasn’t for tea.”
“Are overalls steady pay through the year?”
“There’s nothing that’s steady, so far as I can find out, but want and misery. Just now overalls are up; the Lord only knows why, for you never can tell what’ll be up and what down. They’re up, and we’re making a dollar a dozen on these. I have done a dozen a day, but it’s generally ten. There’s the long seams, and the two pockets, and the buckle strap and the waistband and three buttonholes, and the stays and the finishing. They’re heavy machines too, and take the backbone right out of you before night comes. But you sleep like the dead, that’s one comfort. It would be more if you didn’t have to wake more than they do. When the overall rush is over, it’ll be back to pants again. That’s my trade. I learned it regular after I was married, when I saw Tim wasn’t going to be any dependence. There were the children then, and I thought I’d send ’em to school and keep things decent maybe. I know all about pants, the best and the worst, but it’s mostly worse these days. First the German women piled in ready to do your work for half your rates, and when they’d got well started, in comes the Italians and cuts under, till it’s a wonder anybody keeps soul and body together.”
“We don’t,” one of the women said, turning suddenly. “I got rid o’ my soul long ago, such as ’twas. Who’s got time to think about souls, grinding away here fourteen hours a day to turn out contract goods? ’Tain’t souls that count. It’s bodies that can be driven, an’ half starved an’ driven still, till they drop in their tracks. I’m driving now to pay a doctor’s bill for my three that went with the fever. Before that I was driving to put food into their mouths. I never owed a cent to no man. I’ve been honest and paid as I went and done a good turn when I could. If I’d chosen the other thing while I’d a pretty face of my own I’d a had ease and comfort and a quick death. Such life as this isn’t living.”
The machine whirled on as she ended, to make up the time lost in her outburst. The finisher shook her head as she looked at her, then poured a cup of tea and put it silently on the edge of the table where it could be reached.
“She’s right enough,” she said, “but there’s no use thinking about it. I try to sometimes, just to see if there’s any way out, but there isn’t. I’ve even said I’d take a place; but I don’t know anything about housework, and who’d take one looking as I do, and not a rag that’s fit to be put on? I cover up in an old waterproof when I go for work. They wouldn’t give it to me if they saw my dress in rags below, and me with no time to mend it. But we’re doing better than some. We’ve had meat twice this week, and we’ve kept warm. It’s the coal that eats up your money,—twelve cents a scuttle, and no place to keep more if ever we got ahead enough to get more at a time. It’s lucky that tea’s so staying. Give me plenty of tea, and the most I want generally besides is bread and a scrape of butter. It’s all figured out. It’s long since I’ve spent more than seventy-five cents a week for what I must eat. I’ve no time to cook even if I had anything, so it’s lucky I haven’t. I suppose there’d be plenty to eat if you once made up your mind to take a place.”
It was the second machine that stopped now, and the haggard woman running it faced about suddenly. “Do you know what come to my girl,” she said,—“my girl that I brought up decent and that was a good girl? I said to myself a trade was no good, for it was more an’ more starvation wages, and I’d put her with folks that would be good to her, even if the other girls did look down on her for going into service. She was fifteen, and a still little thing with soft eyes and a pretty, soft way, if she did come of a drinking father. I put her with a lady that wanted a waitress and said she’d train her well. She’d three boarders in the house, and all gentlemen to look at, and one that’s in a bank to-day he did his best to turn her head on the sly, and when he found he couldn’t, one Sunday when she was alone in the house and none to hear or help, he had his will. The mistress turned her off the hour she heard it, for Nettie went to her when she come home. ‘Such things don’t happen unless the girl is to blame,’ she said. ‘Never show your shameless face here again.’ Nettie came home to me kind of dazed, and she stayed dazed till she went to a hospital and a baby was born dead, and she dead herself a week after. An’ it isn’t one time alone or my girl alone. It’s over an’ over an’ over that that thing happens. There’s plenty that go to the bad of their own free will, but I know plenty more with the same chance that doesn’t, an’ there’s many a mother that’s been in service herself that says, ‘Whatever the mistress may know about it she can’t tell, but the devil’s let loose when the master or a son maybe is around, an’ they’ll not have their girls standing what they had to stand and then turned off without a character because they were found with the master talkin’ to ’em.’ It’s women that keeps women down an’ is hard on ’em. I’ll take my chances with any Jew you’ll bring along before I’ll put myself in the power of women that calls themselves ladies an’ hasn’t as much heart as a broomstick; an’ I’ll warn every girl to keep to herself an’ learn a trade, an’ not run the risk she’ll run if she goes out to service, letting alone the way you’re looked down on.”
There was no time for discussion. The machines must go on; but, as usual, much more than the fact of which I was in search had come to me, and, strangely enough, in this house and in others of its kind inspected one after another, much the same story was told. In the “improved tenements” close at hand, where comparative comfort reigned, more than one woman gave willingly the detail of the weekly expenditure for food, and added, as if the underlying question had made itself felt, “It’s betther to be a little short even an’ your own misthress,” with other words that have their place elsewhere. On the upper floor of one of these houses a pantaloon-maker sat in a fireless room, finishing the last of a dozen which when taken back would give her money for coal and food. She had been ill for three days, and on the bed,—an old mattress on a dry-goods box in the corner. “Even that’s more than I had for a good while,” she said. “I’d pawned everything before my husband died, except the machine. I couldn’t make but twenty-two cents a pair on the pants, an’ as long as he could hold up he did the pressing. With him to help a little I made three a day. That seems little, but there was so many pieces to each pair,—side and watch and pistol pockets, buckle strap, waistband, and bottom facings and lap; six buttonholes and nine buttons. We lived—I don’t just know how we lived. He was going in consumption an’ very set about it. ‘I’ll have no medicine an’ no doctor to make me hang an’ drag along,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to go, an’ I know it, an’ I’ll do it as fast as I can.’ He was Scotch, an’ took his porridge to the last, but I came to loathe the sight of it. He could live on six cents a day. I couldn’t. ‘I’m the kind for your contractors,’ he’d say. ‘It’s a glorious country, and the rich’ll be richer yet when there’s more like me.’ He didn’t mind what he said, an’ when a Bible-reader put her head in one day, ‘Come in,’ he says. ‘My wife’s working for a Christian contractor at sixty-six cents a day, an’ I’m what’s left of another Christian’s dealings with me, keeping me as a packer in a damp basement and no fire. Come in and let’s see what more Christianity has to say about it.’ He scared her, his eyes was so shiny an’ he most gone then. But there’s many a one that doesn’t go over fifty cents a week for what she’ll eat. God help them that’s starving us all by bits, if there is a God, but I’m doubting it, else why don’t things get better, an’ not always worse an’ worse?”
For east and west, however conditions might differ, the final word was the same, and it stands as the summary of the life that is lived from day to day by these workers,—“never better, always worse and worse.”