Against the Rules.
“Miss Rolfe, Mr Cunnington wants you in the counting-house,” exclaimed a youth approaching Marion just after ten o’clock the following morning. She had been in the department early, and was busy re-arranging an autumn costume upon a stand, with a ticket bearing the words, “Paris model, 49 shillings, 11 pence.”
The dread words that broke upon her ear caused her young heart to sink within her. As she feared, she was “carpeted.”
To be absent at night without leave was the “sack” at a moment’s notice to any of Cunnington’s girls. There was no leniency in that respect as in certain other large stores in London which I could name, where the girls are so very badly paid that it is a scandal and disgrace to the smug, church-going shareholders who grow fat upon their dividends. But who among those who bold shares in the big drapery concerns of London, or who among the millions of customers on the look-out for bargains at sales, care a jot for the poor girl-assistant, the drudgery she has to undergo, or the evils she suffers by the iniquitous system of “living-in?”
It is a dull, drab life indeed, the life of the London shop, with its fortnight’s holiday each year and its constant strain of the telling of untruths in order to sell goods. But the supply of shop labour is always greater than the demand. Girls and youths are always coming up from the country in constant streams, “cribbing,” as it is called—or on the lookout for a berth—and as soon as a girl loses her freshness, or a man’s hair begins to show silver threads, he is thrown out in favour of a youth—from Scotland or Wales by preference.
London, alas! little dreams of the callous heartlessness of employers in the drapery trade.
Marion knew this. Since she had been at Cunnington’s her eyes had been opened to the scant consideration she need expect. Girls who had worked in her department had been discharged merely because, suffering from a cold or from the stress of overwork, they had been absent a couple of days. And all the information vouchsafed them was that the firm could not afford to support invalids. Once, indeed, she had sat beside a dying girl in the Brompton Hospital—a girl to whom the close, vitiated atmosphere of the shop had brought consumption, and she had been sent forth, at a moment’s notice, homeless, and to die.
And so, when the youth made the announcement, she knit her brows, brushed the hair from her brow, placed down the pincushion in her hand, and followed him through the several shops into another building where Mr Cunnington’s private room was situated.
In the outer office of the counting-house several persons, buyers, callers, and others, were waiting audience with the chief.
One girl, a saucy, dark-haired assistant in the ribbons, exclaimed: