On the third day, toward three in the afternoon of Monday, lo, a miracle! For the money was all gone, and the barrel of beer was empty, and the bottles were empty, and the bones of the geese and the turkeys were all that was left of the feast. The company broke up, the cousin departed, the family threw themselves upon the beds and slept the clock twice round. Who could forget this noble Christmas? Who could forget a feast that lasted for three whole days and three long nights?
Liz had got through her school-time; she must go to work.
Of course, she knew all along what awaited her. She must do as the others did, she must enter a factory. She contemplated the necessity without any misgiving. Why should she not go into a factory? It was all in the natural order of things, like getting hungry or waking up in the morning. Every girl had to be cuffed, every girl had to get out of the way when her father was drunk, every girl had to go to work as soon as she left school.
There is apparently a choice of work. There are many industries which employ girls. There is the match-making, there is the bottle-washing, there is the box-making, there is the paper-sorting, there is the jam-making, the fancy confectionery, the cracker industry, the making of ornaments for wedding-cakes, stockings for Christmas, and many others. There are many kinds of sewing. Virtually, however, this child had no choice; her sisters were in the jam factory, her mother had been in the jam factory, she too went to the jam factory.
There are many branches of work more disagreeable than the jam factory. Liz found herself at half-past seven in the morning in a huge building, where she was one among a thousand working women and girls, men and boys, but chiefly girls. The place was heavily laden with an overpowering fragrance of fruit and sugar. In some rooms the fruit was boiling in great copper pots; in some girls were stirring the fruit, after it had been boiled, to get the steam out of it; in some machinery crushed and ground the sugar till it became as fine as flour. The place was like a mill. The flour of sugar hung about the room in a cloud of dust; it lay in such dust on the tables and the casks; it got into the girls’ hair, so that they were fain to tie up their heads with white caps; it covered their clothes, and made them sticky; it made tables, benches, floor, all alike sticky. There were other developments of sugar; sometimes it lay on tables in huge, flat cakes of soft gray stuff like gelatine; they turned this mass, by their craft and subtlety, into innumerable threads of fine white silk; they drew it through machines, and brought it out in all the shapes that children love. Then there were rooms full of cocoanut. They treated casks full of dessicated cocoanut till that also became like flour. There were other rooms full of almonds, which they stripped and bleached and converted also into fine flour; or they turned boxes of gelatine into Turkish delight and jujubes. All day long and all the year round they made crackers; they made ornaments for wedding-cakes; they made favors; they made caramels; they made acidulated drops; they made things unnamed except by children. In all these rooms girls worked by hundreds, some sitting at long tables, some boiling the sugar, filling the pots with jam, stirring the boiling fruit, feeding machinery, filling molds; all were as busy as bees and as mute as mice. Some of them wore white caps to cover their hair, some wore white aprons, some wore coarse sacking tied all round for a skirt to keep off stickiness. All day long the machinery whirred and pulsed an accompaniment to the activity and industry of the place.
“I like the smell,” said Liz. First impressions are the best; she continued to like the smell and the factory and the work.
She was stouter and stronger than most girls. They gave her a skirt of sacking, and put her where her strength would be of use. She liked the movement, she liked the exercise of her strong arms, and she liked the noise of the place; she liked the dinner-hour, with its talking and laughing; she liked the factory better than the school; she liked the pay-day, and the money which she kept for herself.
I say that she liked the work and the sense of society and animation. About a year afterward, however, a strange and distressing restlessness seized her. Whether she was attracted by the talk of the other girls, or whether it was an instinctive yearning for change and fresh air, I know not. The thing was infectious. Many other girls compared their symptoms, and found them the same. Finally, the restlessness proving altogether too much for the children, they took hands, thirty of them, and one Saturday afternoon, without bag or baggage, they ran away.
They ran through Wapping and along Thames Street, which is empty on Saturday afternoon; they ran across London Bridge, they poured into London Bridge Station. One of the girls knew the name of the station they wanted; it was in Kent. They took tickets, and they went off.
They had gone hopping.