When the six o'clock whistle blew on the first night I had finished only two dozen shirts. "You've got a good job," my teacher said, as we came out together in the cool evening air. "You seem to be taking to it." They size a girl up the minute she comes in. If she has quick motions she'll get on all right. "I guess you'll make a good finisher."
Once more we assembled to eat and chat and relax. After a moment by the kitchen pump we took our places at table. Our hostess waited upon us. "It takes some grit," she explained, "and more grace to keep boarders." Except on Sundays, when all men might be considered equals in the sight of the Lord, she and her husband did not eat until we had finished. She passed the dishes of our frugal evening meal—potatoes, bread and butter and cake—and as we served ourselves she held her head in the opposite direction, as if to say, "I'm not looking; take the biggest piece."
It was with my roommates I became the soonest acquainted. The butcher's widow from Batavia was a grumbler. "How do you like your job?" I asked her as we fumbled about in the dim light of our low-roofed room.
"Oh, Lordy," was the answer, "I didn't think it would be like this. I'd rather do housework any day. I bet you won't stay two weeks." She was ugly and stupid. She had been married young to a butcher. Left alone to battle with the world, she might have shaken out some of her dullness, but the butcher for many years had stood between her and reality, casting a still deeper shadow on her ignorance. She had the monotony of an old child, one who questions constantly but who has passed the age when learning is possible. The butcher's death had opened new possibilities. After a period of respectful
mourning, she had set out, against the wishes of her family, with a vague, romantic hope that was expressed not so much in words as in a certain picture hat trimmed with violet chiffon and carried carefully in a bandbox by itself, a new, crisp sateen petticoat, and a golf skirt she had sat up until one o'clock to finish the night before she left home. It was inevitable that the butcher's widow should be disappointed. There was too much grim reality in ten-hour days spent over a machine in the stifling mill room to feed a sentimentalist whose thirty odd years were no accomplice to romance. She grumbled and complained. Secret dissatisfaction preyed upon her. She was somewhat exasperated at the rest of us, who worked cheerily and with no arrière pensée. At the end of the first week the picture hat was tucked away in the bandbox; the frou-frou of the sateen petticoat and the daring swish of the golf skirt were packed up, like the remains of a bubble that had reflected the world in its brilliant sides one moment and the next lay a little heap of soap-suds. She had gone behind in her work steadily at the factory; she was not making more than sixty cents a day. She left us and went back to do housework in Batavia.
My other roommate was of the Madonna type. In our class she would have been called an invalid. Her hands trembled, she was constantly in pain, and her nerves were rebellious without frequent doses of
bromide. We found her one night lying in a heap on the bed, her moans having called us to her aid. It was the pain in her back that never stopped, the ache between her shoulders, the din of the machines in her ears, the vibration, the strain of incessant hours upon her tired nerves. We fixed her up as best we could, and the next day at quarter before seven she was, like the rest of us, bending over her machine again. She had been a school-teacher, after passing the necessary examination at the Geneseo Normal School. She could not say why school-teaching was uncongenial to her, except that the children "made her nervous" and she wanted to try factory work. Her father was a cheese manufacturer up in the Genesee Valley. She might have lived quietly at home, but she disliked to be a dependent. She was of the mystic, sentimental type. She had a broad forehead, straight auburn hair, a clear-cut mouth, whose sharp curves gave it sweetness. Though her large frame indicated clearly an Anglo-Saxon lineage, there was nothing of the sport about her. She had never learned to skate or swim, but she could sit and watch the hills all day long. Her clothes had an esthetic touch. Mingled with her nervous determination there was a sentimental yearning. She was an idealist, impelled by some controlling emotion which was the mainspring of her life.
Little by little we became friends. Our common
weariness brought us often together after supper in a listless, confidential mood before the parlour stove. We let the conversation drift inevitably toward the strong current that was marking her with a touch of melancholy, like all those of her type whose emotional natures are an enchanted mirror, reflecting visions that have no place in reality. We talked about blondes and brunettes, tall men and short men, our favourite man's name; and gradually the impersonal became personal, the ideal took form. Her voice, like a broken lute that might have given sweet sounds, related the story. It was inevitable that she should love a dreamer like herself. Nature had imbued her with a hopeless yearning. She slipped a gold locket from a chain on her throat. It framed her hero's picture, the source of her courage, the embodiment of her heroic energy: a man of thirty, who had failed at everything; good-looking, refined, a personage in real life who resembled the inhabitants of her enchanted mirror. In the story she told there were stars and twilight, summer evenings, walks, talks, hopes and vague projects. Any practical questions I felt ready to ask would have sounded coarse. The little school-teacher with shattered nerves embodied a hope that was more to her than meat and drink and money. She was of those who do not live by bread alone.
Among the working population of Perry there are all manner of American characteristics manifest.