For this she contrived to save $4 a month out of her income of $4 a week. Sarina packed powders in a drug factory from eight to six o'clock, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch. She was a beautiful and brilliant girl, who used to come to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat, with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress, money with which she could learn to read "Othello" and "King Lear" in the original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of the struggle in Russia.
In the drug factory, and in her East Side hall bedroom, she lived in a world of her own—a splendid, generous world of the English tragedies she studied at night school, and of the thrilling hopes and disappointments of the Russian revolution.
She had been in New York a year. In this time she had worked in an artificial flower factory, earning from $2 to $2.25 a week; then as a cutter in a box factory, where she had $3 a week at first, and then $5, for ten hours' work a day. She left this place because the employer was very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of small amounts. She then tried finishing men's coats; but working from seven-thirty to twelve and from one to six daily brought her only $3 a week and severe exhaustion.[[19]]
From her present wage of $4 she spent 60 cents a week for carfare and $4.25 a month for her share of a tenement hall bedroom. Although she did not live with them, her mother and father were in New York, and she had her dinners with them, free of cost. Her luncheon cost her from 7 to 10 cents a day, and her breakfast consisted of 1½ cents' worth of rolls.
All that made Sarina Bashkitseff's starved and drudging days endurable for her was her clear determination to escape from them by educating herself. Her fate might be expressed in Whitman's words, "Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune."
Whatever her circumstances, few persons in the world could ever be in a position to pity her.
Marta Neumann, another unskilled factory worker, an Austrian girl of nineteen, was also trying to escape from her present position by educating herself at night school, but was drained by cruel homesickness.
Marta had spent all her youth, since her childhood, at home,—four years in New York,—in factory work, without the slightest prospect of advancement. Her work was of the least skilled kind—cutting off the ends of threads from men's suspenders, and folding and placing them in boxes. She earned at first $3 a week, and had been advanced to $5 by a 50-cent rise at every one of the last four Christmases since she had left her mother and father. But she knew she would not be advanced beyond this last price, and feared to undertake heavier work, as, though she had kept her health, she was not at all strong.
She worked from eight to six, with half an hour at noon. On Saturday the factory closed at five in winter and at one in summer. Her income for the year had been $237.50. She had spent $28.50 for carfare; $13 for a suit; $2 for a hat; and $2 for a pair of shoes she had worn for ten months. Her board and lodging with a married sister had cost her $2.50 a week, less in one way than with strangers. But she slept with part of her sister's family, did her own washing and her sister's, scrubbed the floor, and rose every day at half past five to help with the work and prepare her luncheon before starting for the factory at seven.
Marta could earn so little that she had never been able to save enough to make her deeply desired journey back to Austria to see her mother and father. Although both their children were in the new country, her mother and father would not be admitted under the immigration law, because her father was blind.