The New Wage Envelope
The baby had been fretful all that hot summer day. Every time he was passed over to the eldest little girl, he cried. So Mrs. Lewis had to keep him herself. All the twenty pounds of him rested heavily on her slender left arm while she went about the kitchen getting supper. With one hand she managed now and then to stir the potatoes “warming over” in the pan on the stove. She put the pinch of tea in the pot and set it steeping. And she fried the ham. She set on the table a loaf of bread, still warm from the day’s baking and called to the eldest little girl to bring the butter. “Aren’t we going to have the apple sauce too?” the child asked. “Oh, yes, bring it,” the mother had answered pettishly. “I’m that tired I don’t care how quickly you eat everything up.”
You see she had been going around like this with the heavy baby all day while she baked, and there were the three meals to cook. And she had done some of the ironing and there was the kitchen floor that had to be “washed down.” And the second little girl’s dress had to be finished for Sunday. And Jimmie, aged nine, whose food was always disagreeing with him, was in bed with one of his sick spells and called frequently for her to wait on him in the bedroom at the head of the stairs. And she had been up with the baby a good deal anyhow the night before. So you see why Mrs. Lewis was what is called “cross.”
Besides, she was just now facing a new anxiety. When her husband came in from the shop and hung up his hat and she had dished up the potatoes and the family sat down to the evening meal, there was just one subject of conversation. The State of New York was making its preparedness preparation with the military census that was to begin to-morrow, a detailed inventory of man power and possessions. Hitherto for America the war had been over in Europe. Now for the first time it was here for the Lewis family. And other similar supper tables all over the United States were facing it too. “But you couldn’t possibly go,” the tired woman said across the table.
“I may have to,” the man answered.
“Then what’ll happen to me and the children?” she returned desperately.
And he didn’t know. And she didn’t know. Hardly anybody knew. We on this side of the Atlantic are now beginning to find out.
Mr. Lewis was drafted last week. The rent is paid one month ahead. You can see the bottom of the coal bin. There’s only half a barrel of flour. And there are seven children to feed. No, there are none of her family nor his that want to adopt any of them as war work. Well, there you are. And there Mrs. Lewis is. In her nervous dread of the charity that she sees coming, she slaps the children twice as often as she used to and the baby cries all day.
But, Mrs. Lewis, listen. Don’t even ask the Exemption Board to release your husband. It’s your chance to be a patriot and let him go. And this war may not be as bad for you as you think. There are women on the other side could tell you. Suppose, suppose you never had to do another week’s baking and you were rested enough to love the last baby as you did the first, and all the children could have shoes when they needed them, and there was money enough beside for a new spring hat and the right fixings to make you pretty once more. So that your man coming back from the front when the war is won, may fall in love with you all over again. No, it’s not heaven I’m talking about. It’s here in a war-ridden world. This is no fairy tale. It’s the truth in Britain and France, as it’s going to be in the United States.
“Somewhere in England” Mrs. Black, when her country took up arms in 1914, was as anxious and concerned as you are to-day. Her man was a car-cleaner who earned 22 shillings a week on the Great Western Railway. That seems appallingly little from our point of view. But thousands of British working class families were accustomed to living on such a wage. The Blacks had to. It is true there wasn’t much margin for joy in it. And when the call to the colours came, it was to Mr. Black an invitation to a Great Adventure. He enlisted. Well, the first winter had not passed before it was demonstrated that Mrs. Black and the children—there were five of them—were not going to experience any new hardship because of the absence of the head of the family in Flanders. By January she was saying hopefully one morning across the fence to her neighbour in the next little smoke-coloured brick house in the long dingy row: “If them that’s makin’ this war’ll only keep it up long enough, I’ll be on my feet again.”