I sweep and set to rights, limping, lurching along. At last the whistle blows! In a swarm we report;
we put on our things and get away into the cool night air. I have stood ten hours; I have fitted 1,300 corks; I have hauled and loaded 4,000 jars of pickles. My pay is seventy cents.
The impressions of my first day crowd pell-mell upon my mind. The sound of the machinery dins in my ears. I can hear the sharp, nasal voices of the forewoman and the girls shouting questions and answers.
A sudden recollection comes to me of a Dahomayan family I had watched at work in their hut during the Paris Exhibition. There was a magic spell in their voices as they talked together; the sounds they made had the cadence of the wind in the trees, the running of water, the song of birds: they echoed unconsciously the caressing melodies of nature. My factory companions drew their vocal inspiration from the bedlam of civilization, the rasping and pounding of machinery, the din which they must out-din to be heard.
For the two days following my first experience I am unable to resume work. Fatigue has swept through my blood like a fever. Every bone and joint has a clamouring ache. I pass the time visiting other factories and hunting for a place to board in the neighbourhood of the pickling house. At the cork works they do not need girls; at the cracker company I can get a job, but the hours are longer, the advantages less than where I am; at the broom
factory they employ only men. I decide to continue with tin caps and pickle jars.
My whole effort now is to find a respectable boarding-house. I start out, the thermometer near zero, the snow falling. I wander and ask, wander and ask. Up and down the black streets running parallel and at right angles with the factory I tap and ring at one after another of the two-story red-brick houses. More than half of them are empty, tenantless during the working hours. What hope is there for family life near the hearth which is abandoned at the factory's first call? The sociableness, the discipline, the division of responsibility make factory work a dangerous rival to domestic care. There is something in the modern conditions of labour which act magnetically upon American girls, impelling them to work not for bread alone, but for clothes and finery as well. Each class in modern society knows a menace to its homes: sport, college education, machinery—each is a factor in the gradual transformation of family life from a united domestic group to a collection of individuals with separate interests and aims outside the home.
I pursue my search. It is the dinner hour. At last a narrow door opens, letting a puff of hot rank air blow upon me as I stand in the vestibule questioning: "Do you take boarders?"
The woman who answers stands with a spoon in her hand, her eyes fixed upon a rear room
where a stove, laden with frying-pans, glows and sputters.