"Say, if de job dey give you is too hard, why, I guess I kin get yer in to the 'Lights'!"
These are sensations facts alone can give.
After dinner we sit all together in the parlour, the general living-room: carpet-covered sofa, big table, few chairs—that's all. We talk an hour—and on what? We discuss Bernhardt, the divine Sarah. "Good shows don't come to Lynn much; it don't pay them. You can't get more than fifty cents a seat. Now Bernhardt don't like to act for fifty-cent houses! But the theatres are crowded if ever there's a good show. We get tired of the awful poor shows to the Opera House." Maude Adams was a favourite. Réjane had been seen. Of course, the vital American interest—money—is touched upon, let me say lightly, and passed. The packer at Rigger's, intelligent and well-informed and well-read, discoursed in good French about English and French politics and on the pleasure it would be to travel and see the world.
At nine, friendly handshaking. "Good-night. You're tired. You'll like it all right to the shops, see if you don't! You'll make money, too. The forelady must a-seen that you were ambitious. Why, to my shop when a new hand applies for a job the foreman asks: 'What does he look like? Ambitious lookin'? Well, then—there's room."
Ambitious to make shoes! To grind out all you can above the average five dollars a week, all you may by conscientious, unflagging work during 224 hours out of a month.
Good-night to the working world! Landlady and friendly co-labourers.
"Il ne faut pas vous gener, mademoiselle; nous sommes toute une famille."
Upstairs in my room the excitement died quite out of me. I lay wakeful in the hard, sheetless bed. It was cold, my window-pane freezing rapidly. I could not sleep. On either side, through the thin walls of the house, I could hear my neighbours settling to repose. Maurice's room was next to mine. He whistled a short snatch of a topical song as he undressed. On the other side slept the landlady's children; opposite, the packer from Rigger's. The girls' room was downstairs. When Maurice's song had reached its close he heaved a profound sigh, and then followed silence, as slumber claimed the sole period of his existence not devoted to work. The tenement soon passed to stillness complete.
Before six the next morning—black as night—the call: "Mau—rice! Mau—rice!" rang through the hall. Summons to us all, given through him on whom the exigencies of life fell the heaviest. Maurice worked by day system—the rest of us were freed men and women by comparison.