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                               FOUR YEARS
                           IN THE UNDERBRUSH

                               FOUR YEARS
                           IN THE UNDERBRUSH

                     ADVENTURES AS A WORKING WOMAN
                              IN NEW YORK

[Illustration: colophon]

                                NEW YORK
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                  1921

                          COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                                  ---

                        Published October, 1921

                               PRINTED AT
                           THE SCRIBNER PRESS
                           NEW YORK, U. S. A.

                             =To=

                            SISTER WEE WEE

     TAMPA, FLORIDA
          March 8th, 1921

                                CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE

       I. FOR POLLY PRESTON’S SAKE                                     3

      II. MY FIRST STEPS IN THE UNDERBRUSH                            11

     III. SLIMY THINGS THAT WALK ON LEGS                              24

      IV. AGAINST A RUSH OF THE HERD                                  37

       V. HUMAN COOTIES                                               51

      VI. GOOD HUNTING-GROUND                                         77

     VII. FEMALES OF THE SPECIES                                      86

    VIII. ST. ROSE’S HOME FOR GIRLS                                  101

      IX. RODMAN HALL: CHILDREN’S HOME                               114

       X. TRUSTED WITH BILLIONS, PAID IN MILLS                       129

      XI. I AM SICK IN THE UNDERBRUSH                                143

     XII. JACKALS FIGHT TO KEEP FROM FIGHTING                        157

    XIII. “MORE DEADLY THAN THE MALE”                                174

     XIV. STAMPING-GROUND OF THE MONKEY-PEOPLE                       185

      XV. THE HEART OF THE JUNGLE                                    201

     XVI. BURROWING IN                                               207

    XVII. THE SCOURGE                                                225

   XVIII. JIST DOGS!                                                 235

     XIX. FAITH OF JUNGLE-MOTHERS                                    246

      XX. A PEST HOUSE?                                              256

     XXI. FORCING THE GOOSE TO LAY MORE DOLLARS                      265

    XXII. WOLVES AS SOCIAL LEADERS                                   275

   XXIII. LEADERS OF THE HERD                                        288

    XXIV. THE GALL OF THE YOKE                                       300

     XXV. THE END OF THE TRAIL                                       311

                      FOUR YEARS IN THE UNDERBRUSH

                      FOUR YEARS IN THE UNDERBRUSH

                               CHAPTER I
                        FOR POLLY PRESTON’S SAKE

The evening of November 8, 1916, I walked out of the National Arts Club
and into the underbrush of the greatest jungle of civilization—I entered
the world of the unskilled working woman of New York City. Though a
sudden move, such an adventure had been in my mind for weeks. When
thinking over the plot of my fifth novel my conscience had demanded:

“Why don’t you go out and get first-hand experience for Polly Preston?
She is a child of your own brain. You know her temperamentally as well
as mentally and physically. You should be able to judge how she would
react under given conditions. Come, be a sport! Get out and see what
Polly will really be up against.”

When the opportunity presented itself on the above-mentioned date my
reason for accepting it was for the single purpose of getting material
for my novel—not because of any special interest in working people,
either men or women, as a class. Indeed, it had always been my faith
that they who scrub floors or dig ditches are only fit to scrub floors
or dig ditches—humanity, like water, finds its own level.

The clock over the main entrance of the Grand Central Station was on the
stroke of twelve when I passed under it on my way to the woman’s
waiting-room. Glancing around to select the most desirable of the
unoccupied chairs, my attention was caught—a woman with a strong Slavic
accent was giving a group of immigrant girls a lesson in—not
English—American.

“’Ello!” the woman exclaimed, and smiling broadly she extended her hand.

“’Ello!” each girl responded in her turn, and she stolidly allowed her
hand to be pumped up and down by the woman.

“Sure,” cried the woman, nodding her head vigorously.

“Zuer,” the girls repeated, and they also nodded vigorously.

“No, no,” was emphasized by a shake of the head.

“Nun, nun,” the girls grunted, but they shook their heads so violently
that there could be no doubt of their understanding.

“Goo’-by,” the teacher said at the end of the lesson, as, rising, she
held out her hand.

“Goo’-by?” the five questioned in chorus. Then they struggled to their
feet and made an awkward attempt at shaking hands.

While the woman was in the lavatory, the girls, glancing around, saw me.
Their prolonged stare was followed by an animated discussion. What was
there about my appearance to cause anyone to single me out for special
comment? The quickest way to settle the question seemed to be to drag my
chair across the floor and join the group.

“Hello!” I greeted the five as I planted my chair facing them.

“’Ello!” was their relieved chorus, and cordial smiles flashed over the
five faces which an instant before had reflected surprise with a glint
of fear.

“’Merican?” the girl nearest asked, and before I could reply the others
questioned in chorus “’Merican?”

“Sure, I’m an American,” I assured them, and very gravely I shook, in
turn, five surprisingly large hands.

This rite finished, the girl next me reached over and stroked my muff.
It was so evident that the others wished to do the same thing that I
handed the muff over. It was passed around the circle, each girl
stroking it and pressing it for an instant against her cheek—a movement
too distinctly feminine to need explanation. Once the muff was back in
my possession their interest shifted to my shoes.

“Did they expect me to pass my shoes around for inspection?” was the
query that flashed through my mind.

Fortunately the woman returned at that instant. She explained that the
girls could not understand why an American woman with mink furs should
wear such unfashionable shoes. The girls, all five of them,
understanding her explanation, stuck out their feet evidently sure of my
approval. They wore silk stockings with the latest cut of low shoes—high
French heels with needle-pointed toes. The woman informed me that silk
stockings and American shoes were always the first purchase made by an
immigrant woman on landing in this country.

My reason for spending the first night of my adventure in the Grand
Central was because Polly Preston would not have money enough to go to a
hotel and, being a stranger in New York, would know nothing of the
municipal lodging-house for women. It was far from a disagreeable
experience—that night in the woman’s waiting-room. Indeed, my attention
was so absorbed by watching the persons around me, that the announcement
of an early train for the West came as a distinct surprise. By the clock
it was within a few minutes of five—a new day had come.

Passing through the great concourse of the station I entered a
subterranean passage, and, on again coming to the surface of the earth,
found myself near the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
Halting I gazed around in surprise. A dream city stretched around me—the
city whose dimly realized beauty we all cherish in the depth of our
soul. The wide avenue, the buildings, every object in sight, even space
itself, was done in soft, luminous grays. There was not a sound—no clang
of surface-car, no honk of automobile, no rumble of elevated, no muffled
growl of subway, not even the pad of a horse’s hoofs on the velvet
asphalt. I was alone in the heart of a great sleeping city—wonderful,
mysterious, superb!

The realization of the marvellous beauty of the scene was so unexpected
and acute that it hurt. In the pain there was an exaltation that lifted
me above the problems of every-day life. Struggling to realize myself as
Polly Preston I called to mind the lone five-dollar bill in my purse.
Then I sternly reminded myself that my only other worldly possession was
the scanty change of underwear folded about my tooth-brush and
dressing-comb in the pockets of my coat. Contemplation of my poverty
failing to lessen my enjoyment of my surroundings, I focussed my
thoughts on my people—my sisters and my brothers and my cousins. How
they would shake their heads could they know of my wandering around New
York at night and alone!

“Thank God!” I heard them exclaim in chorus, “your dear mother didn’t
live to see it.”

Instead of being overwhelmed by a feeling of forlorn loneliness I felt
myself grin. Not even one small pang for setting at naught the
conventions of my class! A longing to stop the clock possessed me, to
hold back dawn, to keep the people asleep, that I, like a disembodied
spirit, might wander over the city and drink my fill of its enchanted
loveliness. With this wish filling my mind I stood staring along Fifth
Avenue—down in the dusk toward Washington Square, up, up between the
tall buildings that seemed almost a tunnel, to the faint luminousness
which I knew marked the beginning of Central Park.

Yet, excited as my imagination was, it did not warn me that the
adventure begun so carelessly would extend over four years instead of a
few weeks—and those four years the most eventful in all history—that the
war then going on between a few nations in Europe would convulse the
world and threaten the very foundations of civilization. No premonition
whispered to me of the host of khaki-clad young men whose tramp, tramp,
tramp along the wide avenue would be echoed in millions of breaking
hearts throughout the length and breadth of our country. Nor of the
return march of those same boys—yet were they the same?—in battle-marred
uniforms whose faces, though alight with the joys of home-coming and the
conscious knowledge that their strength had put an end to the world
nightmare, seemed strangely old and still.

In the soft gray dawn touching with silver the still-life scene about me
there was no suggestion of Fifth Avenue ablaze with silk flags, its
asphalt strewn with flowers, its sidewalk packed by millions of people
come to honor the famous personages who would pass, as in review, before
the lions guarding the public library—a marshal of France, a
general-in-chief of Italy, a king and his queen, and the future ruler of
a great empire—each sent by a grateful country as an expression of
gratitude and friendship to the people of the United States. And more
thrilling perhaps than any of these parades was that at the head of
which marched the President of our country, followed by thousands of
women, soldiers who know neither nationality nor creed, and the red
cross whose banner symbolizes universal mother love.

Then last of all a horde of Jewish children swept along the historic
thoroughfare singing psalms of praise, rejoicing over the rebirth of the
nation of their fathers—Jerusalem, wrested from Turkish rule, had after
centuries again become the capital of the Jewish race.

Nor, standing there in that mild November morning, did I dream that
within sound of the human voice almost under the eaves of the public
library, as it were, I would find superstition more rampant than among
the negroes in the Dark Corner of my native State—a county untouched by
railroads and cut off from the rest of the world by turbulent rivers,
and in which the white children never have more than three months public
schooling during a year and negro children much less. No guardian angel
warned me of the plague of influenza that, sweeping around the world,
would hover over our great city, touching alike with the finger of death
those who dwelt in palaces and they who huddled in tenement homes. No
suspicion of the coming of nationwide prohibition was planted in my
mind, nor, more surprising still, the knowledge that at our next
presidential election men and women, equal as citizens, would cast their
ballots standing side by side.

All during those eventful four years I remained in the underbrush—the
world of the unskilled working woman of New York City. During that time
I held twenty-five different positions in almost as many different
fields of work. I directed envelopes for a large mail-order house, was a
saleswoman in one of the most advertised of metropolitan department
stores, addressed envelopes for a woman’s magazine, folded circulars for
one of the largest publishing houses in the country, acted as saleswoman
in the premium station of a large profit-sharing business, packed
cigarettes, served as waitress in one of the more fashionable hotels at
a popular winter health resort, was a packer in a cracker factory, an
assistant to a chocolate-dipper in a candy factory, head chambermaid in
the home of a millionaire, maid of all work in a two-servant family,
helper in a church home for small girls, gentlewoman maid of all work in
a philanthropic institution for dependent children, assistant in the
loan department of a Wall Street banking institution—one of the largest
in the world—and a clerk of the District Board for the city of New York.
I addressed envelopes for the same mail-order house, was paid canvasser
for the Woman Suffrage Party, proof-reader in that department of the
International Y. M. C. A. known as “the guts” of the organization,
inspector in a gas-mask factory. I folded circulars in a large printing
plant, stamped envelopes for yet another woman’s magazine, worked in the
Social Service Department of Bellevue Hospital, was a clerk in the
offices of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals, a license inspector for the same society, and finally
saleswoman in the Store Beautiful—perhaps the largest and most beautiful
store in the world.

Working shoulder to shoulder and living among my fellow workers on my
wages, I became in reality one of the class known as Labor. I shared its
misery during the months preceding the entrance of our country into the
World War—caused by the continued low wages after the enormous increase
in price of every necessity of life; and I suffered along with my
fellows the nerve-racking period when our plea for an increase of wage
hung in the balance. When finally the general increase was obtained I,
with all other inhabitants of the underbrush, drew a breath of relief.
When the trend of wages continued upward—judged by the reports in the
daily press by leaps and bounds, but by us, who had struggled to keep
body and soul together on six or seven dollars a week, or less—the
feeling of relief deepened.

With the coming of national prohibition the atmosphere in the tenement
districts of New York became almost that of contentment. Many
women—hundreds of them—told me:

“My children have shoes, now that the saloon don’t get the first pull at
my husband’s pay envelope. It’s grand!”

But that atmosphere of near-contentment did not continue long after the
close of the war. During my last year in the underbrush, the working
world—including office-workers—had become as one huge caldron simmering,
simmering, simmering with suspicion, fear, and hate. One of the chief
causes, in New York City, at least, is the housing condition. While the
homes of the rich in the Golden Zone remain untenanted the year round,
the tenements are so enormously congested that decent family life is
next to impossible. Children and young people are forced to spend their
leisure time outside their homes. One result of which is the rapid
increase in crime—the so-called “crime wave.”

Because I am convinced that these conditions in America are brought
about chiefly by lack of understanding, I shall write in the chapters
that follow my experience during my four years spent as a working woman
in New York City. And I shall earnestly try to show conditions as they
actually exist. The bits of conversations given will be taken directly
from my diary, and are as nearly _verbatim_ as I could write when each
incident was fresh in my mind.

How long I stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,
on that November morning, which now seems both so near and so far away,
it is impossible for me to say. The spell that gripped me was broken by
a sound like a whisper of a roar that increased until, with a clanking
crash, an elevated train came to a halt at Third Avenue and Forty-second
Street.

Turning down Fifth Avenue I set out in search of Alice Tompkins. Across
Bryant Park a single lighted window near the top of a tall building
flared out. In the east the waning moon hung a silver crescent against
the purple-black curtain of fathomless space.

                               CHAPTER II
                    MY FIRST STEPS IN THE UNDERBRUSH

A note from Alice Tompkins had been among the batch of mail handed me
the night before as I left the National Art Club. She was in New York,
and particularly wished to see me, as soon as convenient.

“Had she given up her teacher’s position in the school for defective
children?” I wondered, on my way to look her up. “And why was she
stopping in such an out-of-the-way corner of the lower West Side?”

Though I loitered over the three miles and more of streets it was not
quite seven o’clock when I rang the bell at the home for working girls
which I found at the number given in Alice’s note. The stare of
indignant protest hurled at me by the woman who opened the door!

“No,” she snapped, without giving me time to speak, “we haven’t got a
vacancy. Everything’s filled up.” And she would have banged the door
shut had I not put my foot in the opening.

“I’m calling on a guest,” I hastened to say, and taking out Alice’s note
I offered it as proof.

“Oh! I mistook you for one of them laundry-workers,” she told me
apologetically. “They’re always ringing me up this time mornings, though
it do seem like they’d a-found out by now we ain’t goin’ to take ’em in
however often they come.”

“Then you have vacancies?” I asked in surprise as she led the way to the
reception-room of the home.

“Sure! Plenty of them for the kind of girls we want. What price was you
expectin’ to pay?”

She accepted, with a gracious smile, my promise to call on her in case I
decided to come there to live. While waiting for Alice my eyes wandered
speculatively about the bleak little room, and I wondered how much she
was paying.

“Four dollars a week for my room and two meals a day,” she told me,
replying to one of my first questions. “That is one reason I wrote
instead of waiting to call on you. I thought you might know of a better
place?”

“You don’t suppose you could find a place for less money?” Her
discontent nettled me, for I had more than half made up my mind to come
there to live.

“For less money!” Alice shrugged her shoulders. “It means paying four
dollars a week for my room. The meals are simply uneatable.” Then she
explained her presence in New York. Being disappointed in the teacher’s
position obtained immediately on leaving college she had given it up and
hastened to New York, confident that she would be able to get just the
place she wished.

“It’s the wrong season. All the agencies tell me they haven’t a thing in
my line.” Then she added, with a snap of determination in both her tone
and manner: “I’m not going back to Washington City—having people say
that I can’t hold down a job. I answered an advertisement in Sunday’s
paper and got a place with Jones Brothers directing envelopes and
folding circulars.”

My interest became personal. Polly Preston would be able to direct
envelopes and fold circulars.

“What do they pay you?”

Alice shook her head.

“When the manager heard that I had been getting twenty-five dollars a
week, he said he was ashamed to tell me what they paid. He asked what
was the least I would come for. I don’t see how any one can possibly
live on less than twelve dollars a week in New York. Do you?”

“He’ll give you more than that,” was my confident assurance. “He knows
you’re a college woman. He wouldn’t think of paying you less than
fifteen, maybe twenty. If you will let me pay for my breakfast——”

“Don’t you do it,” Alice interrupted, grabbing me by the arm. “The bread
is stale and cold, the butter is uneatable, the coffee is not coffee at
all, and the milk is skimmed until it is a blue-green. You won’t be able
to eat a thing, and they’ll charge you thirty cents for it.”

While thirty cents did not, at that time, seem to me a great price to
pay for a breakfast, stale bread and blue-green milk was not tempting.
Though my plans had never included a second person, it now occurred to
me that if Alice wished to join me she might be of real assistance as
well as a pleasant companion.

“Wonderful!” she exclaimed, on hearing my explanation. “If we can only
stick it out through the Christmas rush you’ll get material for no end
of stories. I’ve always wanted to see just what the Christmas rush is
like in a popular New York store.”

Alice was about twenty-three and small. Like many small women, she was
continually standing on her dignity. And like many men and more women,
the first of their family to attain a college degree, she was
perpetually bringing the fact of having that degree before her
associates. She was the best example I have ever seen of beauty without
symmetry. Her dark hair was stringy, her face was long, her upper lip
short, showing a glint of teeth, her brows were straight and dark, her
lashes short and dark, her nose long and her dark complexion blotchy.
She had but one really fine feature—eyes, blue-gray in color and
eloquently expressive. Because of her eyes she must always be a
noticeably attractive woman.

On leaving her I walked across town to the Central Branch of the Y. W.
C. A., and after getting a satisfying breakfast for fifteen cents I
asked the price of rooms. The cheapest rate was sixty-five cents the
night with two in a room. Clutching my pocketbook I hurried out—the
purchasing power of five dollars might not be so great as it had
appeared.

A subway train set me down at the entrance of a large department store
whose advertisement for salesladies in that morning’s paper had
attracted my attention. The advertisement read “experience unnecessary”
and I knew the head of the firm to be one of the most widely known
philanthropists in the country.

In the employment department of this great store I stared at the
voluminous application-blank given me to fill out. My age, color,
nationality, my mother’s maiden name, my father’s profession. Were my
parents living or dead. My own personal history for the past ten years.
The names and addresses of two property-owners who would vouch for me.

“Ah!” I congratulated myself, on reading this last item. “The
superintendent has his eye on you for a good position at a fat salary.”

On returning the paper with all the questions truthfully answered the
girl at the window informed me that they would drop me a card in a day
or so telling me when to come to work. A glow of satisfied pride swept
over me. Who said an unskilled woman had a hard time earning an honest
living in New York? Alice hadn’t found it difficult to get a job at a
living wage. I was sure of one. However, no use loafing.

It was past ten o’clock when I applied at a mail-order house advertising
for addressers.

“Any experience?” was the only question asked by the kindly little
manager.

Who has not addressed envelopes? It proved to be piece-work in a
well-lighted, comfortably heated loft. At five o’clock that afternoon I
had finished one thousand envelopes and thereby earned one dollar and a
quarter—it being three-line work. On leaving the building the problem of
where to spend the night faced me. A thought of the municipal
lodging-house for women again occurred to me, but recalling that I was a
working woman, not an investigator, and as Polly Preston would know
nothing about such a place, I pushed the suggestion aside. Returning to
the Y. W. C. A., I meekly asked for a bed in a sixty-five-cent room.

My roommate was an oldish young lady who confided to me that she had
come from a small town in the Middle West to take a position with the
Metropolitan Opera Company. She had no acquaintance with the manager or
any member of the company. Indeed I could not learn that she had an
acquaintance in New York City. Her confidence was nothing short of
sublime. While she might not get a leading rôle, never having studied
abroad, she assured me that she had a hunch that she would get an
important part—far above the chorus.

All the evening and far into the night, when she was not singing the
latest ragtime she was crowing like a hen. She called it exercising her
upper register. Having spent one year as a student in a conservatory of
music I knew from experience the only thing to do was to let her find
out conditions for herself.

The following day by writing steadily from eight to six I managed to
address fifteen hundred envelopes. The companionship of the six women
who shared the long table with me was diverting. Before the day was half
gone each of the five had confided to all within reach of her voice her
personal history and reason for working. During the lunch-hour the sixth
woman continued to write, nibbling from time to time at an apple and
what appeared to be a slice of dry bread. Finally she inquired if I were
married.

“You’re lucky,” she congratulated me. “If I could make sure my four
children would be took care of I’d put myself to sleep and never wake
up.”

“How about your husband?” was my horrified rejoinder.

“He’s gone,” she replied with a quavering little chuckle. “When our
fifth baby came he left.” After a pause she added: “Maybe he wouldn’t
have gone if he’d a-knowd it was goin’ to die so soon.” Another pause.
Then wistfully: “Maybe he would—never no countin’ on a man.”

The next day at eleven the little manager informed us that having
finished all the envelopes he would have no further need of our services
until time to send out their spring catalogues. Having received a
post-card from the department store telling me to report ready for work
at eight-thirty the following Monday morning, this abrupt ending of my
first job caused me no regret.

Deciding to devote the afternoon to looking for rooms, I hurried back to
the Y. W. C. A. and approached the woman in charge of the Rooming
Bureau. When she learned that my limit was two dollars and a half a week
she shook her head. She had not had a room as low as that in at least
two years. So late in the season and two rooms on the same floor?
Impossible! When I reminded her of newspapers and magazine articles
advising working women on the economic division of their wages her face
crinkled into a smile.

“Those people find out the wage of the average working girl—some don’t
even take that trouble—then they sit at their desks and divide it up for
her. Sometimes they make real touching stories. I’ve often wondered how
much they are paid.” She looked me over. “Perhaps you can tell me? You
are a writer.”

The attack was so unexpected that I actually stuttered. When I asked why
she had made such a guess she replied indifferently:

“Only a professional social investigator or a writer could be so
ignorant and at the same time so cock-sure. You are not a social
investigator. At least I never saw one whose shoes were so clean this
late in the week.”

On my making a full confession her interest was aroused. When she was
convinced that Alice and I purposed to live on our earnings she turned
her catalogue of rooms over to me. Selecting twenty of what appeared to
me to be the most desirable addresses I set out.

It was after three o’clock when the door at the last address on my list
closed behind me. The cheapest room I had seen was three dollars and a
half a week. Its only window opened on a shaft and there was no heat of
any sort. In an effort to bolster up my flagging spirits I became
defiantly independent.

Why confine myself to the Y. W. C. A. list? I had passed a number of
attractive-looking houses with the sign “furnished rooms” out. Why not
investigate them? Alice and I were both old enough, had sufficient
experience and judgment, to see if anything was amiss.

Just off one of the most beautiful squares in New York I came upon an
unusually attractive-looking house with a furnished-room sign out. Even
the sign itself was neater and more cheerful-appearing than any that had
previously attracted my attention. The door was opened by the landlady.
It was a charming room—on the second floor with a huge bay window—that
overlooked a well-kept back yard. The bathroom was on the same floor,
and in a little private hall just outside the door of the room there was
a gas-stove with two burners.

On learning that the rent was three dollars the week, including gas for
cooking, I opened my pocketbook to pay a week advance.

“Emily.”

Quickly turning toward the door from which direction the call appeared
to come, I as quickly remembered that my mother had been in her grave
more than fourteen years. Without thought, moved entirely by instinct, I
slipped by the woman and out of the room. Halting on the stairs between
her and the door I explained that it seemed to me wiser to consult Alice
before definitely deciding.

Out on the streets my cheeks tingled with shame. Was I a fool or a
coward or both? There had been nothing suspicious about the woman and
certainly her house was more attractive than any on the Y. W. list. Out
there in the sunlight it seemed the height of absurdity to imagine that
my mother had spoken to me. Deciding to telephone Alice and ask her to
meet me at the house on her way from work I turned toward Third Avenue
to look for the nearest drug-store.

Discovering that I was almost under the eaves of a home for deaconesses,
it occurred to me that they might have a list of decent rooming-houses
in that neighborhood. At any rate, I reasoned, they would certainly be
in a position to reassure me about the house I had just left.

While the little deaconess who opened the door was going over her list
of rooms looking for a vacancy, I mentioned having called at a house on
that block, giving the number.

“Oh, my dear!” she exclaimed. “You mustn’t think of going there. That
house has been raided by the police three times within the past month.”

When at last she found a rooming-house on her list not marked “filled”
she gave me the address. Within half an hour I had taken and paid for
exactly what Alice and I had set our hearts on—two small clean rooms on
the top floor in the back of an old-fashioned house in a convenient and
decent neighborhood.

“Of course we shall have to keep our living expenses within what you are
now paying,” I told Alice that evening, when she stopped in on her way
from work. “Two dollars and a half each a week for rent and one dollar
and a half each for our household budget. It would have been nicer if
you could have moved to-night.”

“I’d have come quick enough,” Alice retorted. “You told me not to dare
to come before Tuesday.”

“Certainly. You have paid until Tuesday noon. You cannot afford to give
that home the price of five meals and three nights’ room-rent. We are
out to learn the value of money, not how to spend it.”

“I don’t believe we’ll get very much to spend,” Alice replied
despondently. “Everything in New York seems very expensive. Maybe the
food they give us at the Home is as good as——”

“Stop it! If you knew the price of foodstuffs in the push-cart markets
you’d know that three dollars a week will give two women all they can
eat—provided they do their own cooking and use common sense in buying.”

“Will you do the buying for the first week?” Alice demanded.

“No indeed. No weekly shifts for me—either as a buyer or as a cook. A
month is the shortest period one should attempt when economy is to be
considered. I have thought it all out. The one who does the buying cooks
dinner and washes up the breakfast dishes. The other washes the dinner
dishes and cooks breakfast. How does that suit you?”

“I’m willing to do the work,” Alice assured me. “But I believe we’ll
starve to death if we don’t put in more than a dollar and a half a week
for food.”

“I was forgetting to tell you about my adventure,” I said, hoping to
give her a change of thought and thereby stop her croaking. “It was
really exciting.” I then described my experience at the unlisted
rooming-house and the deaconess home.

“How comforting it is to know that the spirits of our loved ones are
always hovering around us, guarding us from harm!” she commented
solemnly. “After such a direct manifestation—What!” she cried,
interrupting herself as she realized the significance of my smile. “Do
you mean to say that you don’t believe your mother could come to warn
you?”

“I know nothing about would or could, but I don’t believe she did. What
you call a direct manifestation seems to me merely a vestigial faculty
inherited from our remote ancestors—who, not yet having developed the
orderly, conscious mind, existed by means of powers akin to instinct of
animals. It may not be very flattering to think of one’s ancestors as
the missing link, but I prefer it to the suspicion that the spirit of my
mother has nothing better to do than to chase around after me.”

For a few minutes there was a profound silence. Then Alice began to snap
and unsnap the fastening of her glove while I continued to polish my
shoes.

“Well,” my friend began with a sigh, “of course every one has a right to
their own opinion. I don’t believe in the missing-link theory. What’s
more, I do believe in a hereafter and that I shall be able to come back
and help the people I love.”

“Don’t forget the parable of Lazarus and Dives,” I cautioned her, as I
stored the bottle of shoe-polish on the shelf of my tiny wardrobe. “In
that parable it is made very plain that as the brothers of Dives had not
heeded the teachings of Moses and the prophets they would pay no
attention to Lazarus risen from the dead. My plans for the next world do
not include any time or thought devoted to the interest of my friends.”

Alice dragged her chair nearer to mine and looked eagerly into my face.

“Tell me,” she asked breathlessly. “What do you plan to do? What is the
very first thing you plan to do when you step behind the curtain of
now?”

“Get Mr. Shakespeare and Lord Bacon in a corner and make the old codgers
tell me who really did write the plays.”

Unable to keep my face straight a moment longer I hurried across the
hall and turned on the water in the bathtub. Returning to the room a few
minutes later it was evident from the prim set of Alice’s lips that she
had decided to overlook my levity. What had come over the girl?—I
wondered. Why had she suddenly become such a killjoy?

“You haven’t asked me about my salary,” she said, almost as though in
reply to my questions. “This was pay-day.”

“How much did you get?” My eagerness was not assumed. “You will remember
my telling you that you’d get a good salary. How much?”

“Eight dollars.”

“What?” The next instant it dawned on me that she was jesting. “Oh, I
see! Eight dollars a day. Do they pay you forty-eight or fifty-six a
week?”

There was a pause, then she glanced up at me with a little twisted
smile.

“Eight dollars a week.” Answering my continued speechless stare she
added: “All the other girls got seven—I saw their envelopes. Some of
them have been working there more than a year. Evidently,” she said
bitterly, “that one dollar is a concession to my college degree.”

Taking my seat on the foot of the bed I stared through the window at the
torch flaming on the top of the Metropolitan tower. Eight hours a day,
six days a week—they did not even give Saturday afternoon. Eight dollars
a week minus sixty cents car-fare—twelve cents the hour. And in a
publishing house of international reputation!

At this thought I burst out laughing. Alice stared.

“Those are the kind of publishers dear kind Mr. Hezekiah Butterworth
used to caution me against,” I explained. “It was just after the
publication of my first novel—a ‘best seller,’ as you may recall. When I
used to grow enthusiastic about my publishers, Mr. Butterworth would
remind me: ‘Don’t forget, my dear, Judas Iscariot was a publisher.’”

But even the silliness of this hoary joke did not make Alice forget her
disappointment. Watching her as she sat silent and woebegone in the
meagre light of the bare little room I congratulated myself on having
induced her to join me. What a mine of material she would furnish me!
Polly Preston working in New York at twelve cents an hour, half-fed,
going without clothes, perhaps walking ten miles a day to save car-fare.
With such a background there could be no doubt about my making an
intensely emotional story. Of course, I reasoned to myself, out of the
abundance of my salary I would see to it that Alice did not actually
suffer.

“What do you advise me to do?” Alice finally asked, interrupting me in
the midst of my ghoulish air-castle architecture. “Do you think I had
better go back to work on Monday or—or go home?”

How I wished she had not asked me that question! It is not easy to act
the ghoul when the person you plan to plunder sits up and holds out her
hands to you. In that instant I saw all the material—the very best
material—needed to build my History of Polly Preston go up, as it were,
in thin smoke. With a sigh of genuine regret I said:

“Go back to work,” and my voice was emphatic. “You don’t want to throw
up the sponge and go back home your first year out of college. Eight
dollars a week will pay your actual living expenses. You needn’t run
behind. Besides,” I added as a morsel of consolation, and with an unholy
sigh, “it won’t be for long. As soon as I get settled in the department
store I’ll look around and get you a good opening.”

“But you don’t know that you are going to get a decent wage!” Alice
wailed. “You may not get much more than they pay me.”

“Don’t be silly,” I reproved, suppressing the irritation caused by being
forced, as I considered it, to fill up with my own hands such a rich
mine of literary material. “If you had seen that application-blank you’d
know that I am to get a good—not wage—but a good salary, a good fat
salary.”

                     SLIMY THINGS THAT WALK ON LEGS

Monday morning I jammed myself into a subway train bound for the
responsible, high-salaried position which my vanity assured me waited
for me in the department store. Arriving a few minutes after eight I
found at least fifty women and girls already waiting and fully as many
more came later. On the opening of the employees’ entrance we were
directed to one corner of the damp, unheated basement and there kept
standing for nearly two hours. Finally a man and a woman made their
appearance and divided us into squads of five or six.

The squad to which I was assigned was told to follow a little girl with
a pale face and very bowed legs. After about a half-hour spent in
climbing up and down stairs and waiting outside closed doors we at last
came to a halt in the loft in which we had left our hats and coats.
Here, after a wait of another half-hour, a youngish man took charge of
us and conducting us to one corner of a large lunch-room informed us
that he would teach us the cardinal principles of salesmanship. This, so
far as I was able to understand, comprised making out sale-slips and
wearing a perpetual smile and a black shirtwaist.

“The company won’t stand for a grouchy saleslady. I’m tellin’ you,” this
teacher warned us at the end of the lesson. “And if you don’t want to
get fired you’ll come to-morrow in a black shirtwaist. Skirts don’t
matter so much, but you must wear a black waist. You can get ’em at the
regular counter—dollar and a quarter, all sizes.”

Being paired with a woman whose name, she confided to me, was Mrs.
McDavit, I was ordered to follow yet another little girl with a pale
face and very bowed legs. Coming to a halt in the underwear department,
the little girl turned us over to the aisle manager. He stationed us at
a long aisle-counter piled with garments ranging in price from nineteen
to ninety-seven cents. A Mrs. Johnson, who was in charge of an adjoining
counter, was to see to it that we made no mistakes.

When ordered, by the assistant aisle manager, to go with Mrs. Johnson to
lunch, my salesbook showed that I had sold three times as much as Mrs.
McDavit and considerably more than Mrs. Johnson.

“You’ll make a good saleslady,” Mrs. Johnson encouraged. “Maybe they’ll
make a permanent of you.”

“What am I now?”

“You’re an extra. You’ll get paid every night.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Dollar a day.”

Stopping in the middle of the floor I stared at the two women. “A dollar
a day! Did you know you were to be paid only a dollar a day?” I demanded
of Mrs. McDavit.

“’Tain’t much,” she apologized, “but my daughter thinks it better than
takin’ in wash.”

“My son has charge of a stationary engine and Mondays and Saturdays are
his long shifts,” Mrs. Johnson explained. “I can work without his
knowing it. He’s studying for the ministry and me earning two dollars a
week makes it easier for him.”

In the lunch-room maintained by the firm for its employees, from a long
list of what appeared to be low-priced dishes I ordered vegetable soup,
a baked apple, and bread and butter. The enticingly misnamed soup proved
to be hot water thickened with flour and colored with tomato catsup.
After investigating the lumps of uncooked flour at the bottom of the
bowl I put it aside and devoted myself to the lumpy little apple and the
bread and butter. This last consisted of two thin slices of white bread
between which was the thinnest coating of butter I had, at that time,
ever seen. Later I learned that it was put on with a brush dipped in
melted margarine.

Shortly after three o’clock the aisle manager ordered me to report to
the superintendent. That dignitary pompously ordered me to report the
following morning and take charge of the counter at which Mrs. McDavit
and I were stationed.

“We’ve decided to keep you on regular,” he informed me.

“How much am I to be paid?” I asked.

“Six a week,” was his complacent reply.

“No wonder your advertisement is always in the papers.”

He came down in his chair with a bang.

“We have girls who have worked here months, years,” he retorted angrily.
“They are content on six dollars a week, glad to get it. You are only a
greenhorn.”

“But not green enough to work for six dollars a week,” and turning I
left his office.

So ended my dream of a highly paid responsible position.

Employees not being allowed to use the elevator during busy hours, I was
forced to tramp up three flights of stairs. On reaching the counter I
swung out the silly little seat attached to one of the table-legs and
sat down.

“Get up. Get up,” Mrs. Johnson urged in a whisper as she hurried toward
me.

“Won’t they even let you sit down?” I demanded, struggling to my aching
feet.

“They won’t say nothing to you but if the aisle manager sees you he’ll
put you on their black list.”

I looked the two women over. Mrs. Johnson’s white face was haggard until
it looked pinched. Mrs. McDavit had lost much of her ruddy color and
dark circles had formed under her eyes.

“You are both dead tired. Both ready to drop,” I told them. “Your feet
ache so badly that you feel like cutting them off.”

“If my back didn’t ache I don’t believe I’d mind my feet so much,” Mrs.
Johnson admitted. “When I was young girls didn’t go to business as they
do now, so I didn’t get no training. Maybe if I had it wouldn’t come so
hard to me now.”

“It’s harder than washin’. I’ve found that out,” Mrs. McDavit said.
After a moment she added diffidently: “If you was a married woman you’d
know how hard it is to work at a thing that made your children ashamed
of you.”

It was not long after this little exchange of confidences that an
elderly man, whom I had noticed earlier in the afternoon loitering near
our counter, approached and spoke to me.

“These are not of very good quality?” he questioned, fingering the
underwear.

“They are unusually good value,” I truthfully replied. “Good for the
price.”

“Not such as a lady like yourself would prefer?”

“We cannot always choose,” I answered, recalling my one change of
undergarments.

“You would like those better,” he said, indicating the display of silk
underwear at the regular counter.

“Any woman would,” I admitted indifferently, as I turned to wait on a
customer.

A few minutes later Mrs. Johnson asked my bust measure. She explained
that a customer at the regular counter was buying silk underwear for a
lady about my size. Glancing across I saw the elderly man talking with
the regular saleswoman. He looked to be a man of refinement with ample
means.

The next time my end of the counter was free of customers he approached
me and thrust a parcel into my hands.

“What is this for?” I asked, recognizing that it was the parcel he had
received at the regular underwear counter.

“For you,” he leered. Then before I could so much as wink my staring
eyes he whispered: “I want you to meet me to-night—in Times Square
drug-store at eight—sharp.”

Every drop of blood in my body seemed to rush to my head. In that
instant I realized the significance of the expression “seeing red.” I
was all but blind and choking with rage. Another instant and I would
have done my best to wring his flabby neck.

A woman at my elbow asked the price of a corset-cover. At the elevator
the old reprobate turned and blew me a kiss from his gloved fingers.

Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. McDavit received my indignant explanation more
calmly than I had expected.

“They usually come round this time,” Mrs. Johnson stated. “They wait
until a girl is all tired out, willing for ’most anything. Then they
flash their money before her eyes. It’s a cruel shame.”

“I’m going to tell the aisle manager!” I declared, disgusted by what
appeared to me the callous acceptance by the two women of a heinous
condition.

Mrs. McDavit grabbed me by the arm.

“Hush,” she told me. “Hush! Don’t talk so loud. My daughter had a friend
who was fired for doing that. They wouldn’t give her a reference—she’d
worked for ’em more’n two years.”

Mrs. Johnson took the parcel of silk underwear and slipped it under the
garments on our table. Later, when it was uncovered by a customer, Mrs.
McDavit handed it to the aisle manager, who in turn sent it to the lost
and found desk.

At six o’clock the extra saleswomen were called on to sign for and
receive their pay for that day. Opening my envelope I stared at its
contents. I had risen before six, dressed without time for a proper
bath, cooked my breakfast, stood packed like a sardine in a subway train
for more than ten miles, worked standing on my feet all day, been forced
to accept the vile allurements of an old reprobate all for—one dollar.
Surely no ruby, no pearl, ever cost more! A bit of green paper!

It was nearly half past six when the closing-bell rang—the store having
first to be cleared of inconsiderate customers. Another ten minutes was
consumed in tidying up the counters and drawing on their covers. And yet
another ten minutes was required to cross to the loft building and get
our hats and coats.

As we poured out the wide door a steady stream of women and girls, by
the hundreds, it gave me a thrill of pleased surprise to realize that we
were not unexpected. It had not occurred to me that the fathers,
brothers, and sweethearts of my fellow workers would be on hand to
escort them home. Yet there they were, a double line of them stretching
along both sides of the street for more than one long block.

As we passed between this double line the men, one by one, would step
out and take the arm of the girl or woman for whom he waited. Turning to
cross the street I noted unheedingly that a man detached himself from
the outer line and was coming in the same direction.

“Wait there, Maisie,” he called. He was so near me that, fancying he had
made a mistake, I glanced back to see if he really was calling me.
“Wanter make five dollars easy money?” he asked, grinning in my face.

I stepped up on the sidewalk and faced him. It was on a corner and under
the full glare of an electric light.

“You go to hell,” I told him.

Had he come one step nearer I would have done my best to have sent him
to hell. The ferule of a steel-framed umbrella is a dangerous weapon in
the hands of an infuriated woman.

The next morning on being awakened by the alarm-clock I bounded out of
bed only to sink back with a half-smothered wail of pain. The muscles of
my feet, my ankles, and my legs up to the small of my back felt like
red-hot cords suddenly drawn taut through my raw flesh. Every inch of me
below my waist ached horribly. Involuntary tears sprang to my eyes. It
took more than ten minutes for me to get a grip on myself. Then
carefully and painfully I raised myself to a sitting position and
finally stood on my aching feet.

The Metropolitan clock chimed for the first time that day as I halted at
a subway entrance and bought a newspaper. Having determined to get work
that would enable me to sit down until my feet and limbs stopped aching,
my heart throbbed with pleasure on finding an advertisement for
addressers. Knowing the importance of being among the early arrivals, I
hurried to the place indicated.

“We pay one dollar a thousand,” the assistant manager, a young girl,
informed me. “And please be careful with the file.”

It needed only a glance at the return address on the envelopes to assure
me that we were working for one of the most widely known woman’s
magazines in the world. Sure of having found a good job even at one
dollar a thousand I glanced around me. The loft was in a large corner
building and might have been well lighted as well as comfortably heated
had the windows been washed. At first I mistook them for ground glass.

There were only fourteen women besides myself, though judging by the
chairs and tables accommodations had been provided for fully two
hundred. Having seen the number of women turned away by the mail-order
house, this scarcity of workers caused me considerable surprise.

Drawing a card from the file I stared at it in astonishment. Instead of
a distinctly written name and address in black ink on a white card this
thing was in two shades of purple, the name and address stamped in
purple on a thin glazed purple paper which was stretched on a purple
cardboard frame. A woman across the table noticing my surprise explained
that it was stencil-work.

Becoming thoroughly engrossed by my effort to make out the cards, I was
startled when some one announced that it was past eleven o’clock. Two
hours and a half had passed and I had addressed twenty-seven envelopes.
With a pang of horror I realized that I could not distinguish the
features of women less than ten feet away.

“Is this _Blank’s Magazine_?” I demanded of the assistant manager. When
she replied in the affirmative my indignation, goaded by fear of having
permanently injured my eyes, frothed over. “All of my life—before I was
born _Blank’s Magazine_ has been proclaiming its interest in women—its
efforts to help working women. Here you not only underpay them but give
work to destroy their eyes. Take your file.”

Snatching my hat and coat I hurried from the building without waiting to
put them on. Fortunately the cold air of the street brought me to my
senses. Stepping again from the building—this time clothed in my right
mind as well as my hat and coat—I took the newspaper from my pocket for
the purpose of consulting the help-wanted column.

The sheet was a blurred mass of indistinct figures and lines. I could
not make out a word. Thoroughly alarmed I hurried back to my room. There
deciding to wait until after the lunch-hour before consulting an
oculist, I dropped down on the bed and buried my head in the pillow,
determined not to give way to tears. The arrival of the expressman with
Alice’s trunk aroused me. It was nearly five o’clock and my sight had
become normal.

That evening when Alice came from work she found our little table set
for our first meal and our dinner ready to take up.

“You’ll have to get out the knife you brought from home,” I explained
after her first gust of enthusiasm had subsided. “Sixty cents seemed
about all we could spare this week for kitchen and dining-room
furnishings.”

“Sixty cents!” she cried. “I was just thinking these forks and spoons
the real thing—things you brought from home.”

“Two and a half cents each,” was my reply as I set the pan of rice in
the centre of the table. “For the present we’ll have to serve ourselves
directly from the cooking utensils.”

“It will save dish-washing,” she approved, as she took a chop from the
pie-plate on which it had been broiled. “But where is the soup?”

“Soup! You don’t mean that you expect both soup and meat for the same
dinner?”

“Then why soup plates?”

Squaring my shoulders I sat up very proud.

“You can eat cereals out of a soup-plate, you can drink soup, when we
have it, out of a soup-plate. Indeed you can do a lot of things with a
soup-plate that would be utterly impossible with either a breakfast or a
dinner plate.”

“So you can,” agreed Alice. “And it saves dish-washing.”

While she washed up our dinner things I made an account-book of the
paper in which our purchases had been wrapped. From it, under date of
November 14, 1916, I now copy:

            Gas stove         .10     2 chops           .10
            gas pipe          .10     ½lb butter        .20
            2 s. plates       .10     1pt milk          .07
            2 cups            .10     1 cereal          .05
            2 table spoons    .05     1 bread           .06
            2 tea spoons      .05     5lbs sugar        .40
            2 forks           .05     5lbs rice         .39
            2 tins            .05     salt              .05
                              ———     4 bananas         .05
                              .60     6 apples          .05
                             1.42                       ———
                              ———                      1.42
                            $2.02

The fruit was bought at a push-cart market, but all the other eatables
at standard shops. In one particular we were fortunate. Being
Southerners we preferred rice to white potatoes.

The following morning we were both out before the Metropolitan clock
announced eight—Alice to walk to Jones Bros. while I hurried to look for
a new job. Answering advertisements I called at six places before ten
o’clock. At each place the applicants far outnumbered the positions to
be filled. For one clerical position there were twenty-one applicants,
an office wishing two addressers turned away thirty-seven. At a candy
factory I found the entrance so jammed by women, all answering the
advertisement, that a glance assured me it would be useless to wait my
turn.

Journeying farther up-town I made my seventh call. It proved to be one
of the largest publishing houses in the country and they advertised for
both addressers and folders. My face must have expressed disappointment
on learning from the manager that he had already taken on all he needed.
As I started toward the door he called me back.

“That woman over there,” he said, indicating a vacant chair, “was
telephoned for. One of her children had come home from school sick. If
she doesn’t come back in the morning and you are on time I’ll give you
her seat. Be sure to be here before eight o’clock.”

Seven-thirty the next morning found me at the publishing house and true
to his word the manager gave me the vacant chair. Although monotonous,
folding, like addressing is not unpleasant work. Busy fingers did not
prevent those women from talking and I soon heard a lot of gossip about
several of my neighbors. The young woman across the table from me was
the wife of a chauffeur. As she worked, she used her handkerchief from
time to time to absorb tears that rolled over her baby-doll cheeks.

Her husband, so the whisper ran around, was in love with his employer.
This woman, according to his wife, not only gave the chauffeur handsome
presents, but held long conversations with him over the telephone the
first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Besides, she
took him to the theatre with her and had him lunch and dine with her at
obscure road-houses when they went alone for long drives into the
country.

“How many children have you?” I asked the weeping woman.

She tossed her head scornfully and assured me and all in ear-shot that
she hadn’t any and never had intended to have any, thank God! Not she,
to lose her shape for a child! Later on I remarked to an older woman who
sat next to me that I didn’t see why the chauffeur’s wife should be so
broken up—she called her husband a scoundrel and they had no children.

“A married woman hadn’t ought to have to work,” my neighbor reproved me.
“Unless her husband is sick or misfortunate.”

Evidently her opinion was shared by all my neighbors. This woman in
perfect health, under thirty and whining, actually shedding tears
because she had to work, had their sympathy. Not that she was poorer or
her condition in any way harder than their own, but for the single
reason that she as a married woman had a right to be supported. While
turning this idea over in my mind my attention was attracted by a ripple
of pleased exclamations.

A slender old gentleman had entered the loft from the elevator and was
passing along the aisle between the workers. The carnation in his
buttonhole was not more spotlessly white than his hair and whiskers.
From time to time when he would recognize a worker he would pause, shake
hands, and exchange a few remarks. At the end of our table he greeted
the woman in charge of the folders cordially, told her that he was glad
to see her back and hoped that she would remain until the work was
finished. When in reply to his question she assured him that everything,
including the delivery of the bottled milk, was being done for the
workers’ comfort, he bowed to us all and passed on.

The last glimpse I had of him was among the men workers at the far end
of the loft. He had stooped to pick up the crutch of a lame man, an old
addresser who, I was told, did more than two thousand envelopes a day.

During the three days and a half that I worked for that firm I never
heard so much as a whispered complaint against conditions. The loft in
which we worked was well lighted and ventilated. Though the weather was
bitterly cold it was always comfortably heated. The chairs were
comfortable and the tables of a comfortable height. Though pens and ink
and other supplies were never wasted, the workers were generously
supplied.

On Saturday at one o’clock I was paid eight dollars. It seemed a huge
amount compared to the six dollars I might have received had I continued
at the department store.

Not having planned to have Polly spend her life addressing envelopes or
folding circulars, Monday morning found me again on the tramp, looking
for a job. At three places I turned away without making my application
known—having learned from experience that no business occupying a few
small rooms has need of twoscore or more workers. The fourth place
advertised for girls to count coupons. The woman manager expressed
regret at having filled her last vacancy. Then she added:

“If you apply on the street floor, maybe Mr. Spencer will take you on.
Tell him that Mrs. Linwood sent you.”

The street floor, to my eyes, had the appearance of a sort of general
store—practically every article one could wish for was to be seen and
attractively arranged. On finding Mr. Spencer I delivered Mrs. Linwood’s
message.

“If you are willing to begin at seven dollars a week I can place you at
once,” he told me.

Recalling that it was a dollar more than offered by the department store
and, being in walking distance, would require no car-fare, I promptly
accepted.

“Been to lunch?” Mr. Spencer inquired. “Better go now. Take your full
hour. When you get back report to me.”

Halting on the other side of the street I looked up at the sign across
the front of the building. What had appeared to me to be a general store
was the chief premium station of a widely known company that claimed to
do business on a profit-sharing basis. Reading the advertisements of
this firm I had always set them down as a set of crooks catering to the
American craving to get something for nothing.

So I had engaged to work for crooks!

                               CHAPTER IV
                       AGAINST A RUSH OF THE HERD

On my return from lunch Mr. Spencer escorted me to a counter marked
“Men’s Department” and introduced me to the head of stock, Nora Joyce, a
neat young girl with serious blue eyes. After introducing me to the
other girls in the department Nora gave me the stand next to her own and
set about explaining the work to me.

There were one hundred and fifty different kinds of articles behind that
counter, all for masculine use. The value of each article was reckoned
in certificates instead of dollars and cents. It takes five coupons to
make a certificate and there are half-coupons and quarter-coupons.

It was all very confusing at first. Noting the dexterity with which the
girls counted the little slips of paper, the ease with which they
recognized each kind by its color, and calculated their value, seemed to
me nothing short of marvellous. While Nora was at lunch and while I was
immersed in a sample package of coupons, struggling to impress their
color and value on my eyes and mind, I suddenly realized that some one
on the other side of the counter was speaking to me. Glancing up, my
eyes encountered those of my first customer.

“If you can spare the time,” she said, with an accent on spare, “I would
like a box of men’s hose—black.” She was an unusually handsome young
woman and stunningly dressed.

On my asking what size she wished she stared at me as though I had made
an impertinent inquiry.

“They are for my husband,” she haughtily informed me, evidently
expecting that to settle the matter. She could not tell me the size of
her husband’s shoe, the size of his glove, what he weighed, nor his
height. After many questions she finally divulged that he was not much
shorter than she and that he was quite thin.

The price of that box of socks was seven hundred and fifty coupons.
Imagine my feelings when that first customer of mine handed me one
hundred coupons and the balance in quarter-coupons. And all the while I
counted them she stood first on one foot, then on the other, sighed
heavily, and in other ways made me aware of her great impatience. Before
I was half through she stalked over to the manager’s office and demanded
to know how much longer she was to be kept waiting for her purchase.

A few minutes after she took her departure Mr. Spencer came across from
his office with a little bench. It was the sixth of its kind behind our
counter, and he placed it at my station.

“The management likes the girls to sit down when not waiting on
customers,” he explained to me. “Sit down as often as you can.”

That evening at dinner, when describing my new position to Alice, I
mentioned the incident of the little bench, and added:

“Crooks or honest folk, they are mighty pleasant to work with.”

It was later that same night that the tragedy hovering over our quiet
rooming-house first made itself heard. I must have been asleep for some
time when I was suddenly awakened by a shriek. Listening breathlessly I
almost imagined that I had dreamed. A second shriek ending in a moan!
Jumping out of bed I ran across the room and looking out the window
listened. The torch on the top of the Metropolitan tower made the back
yards of that entire block as bright as day. Everything was quiet. There
was not a living creature to be seen.

Slipping on my cloak I stepped into the hall. A young man was coming up
the stairs.

“Did you hear a woman scream?” I asked.

“Just as I came in the front door,” he told me. “I’m almost sure it came
from this floor.”

A woman whom I had never seen opened the door next mine.

“I’m the widow of a policeman,” she informed the young man and me. “I
advise you not to go running around a rooming-house at night when you
think you hear somebody scream. I heard nobody scream and I’m a light
sleeper. It was your loud talking before my door that waked me up.”

She looked the man on the stairs over so fiercely that he hastened to
give an account of himself—he was a reporter for a morning paper and
seldom got in before three in the morning. On the slight foundation of
that conversation the policeman’s widow appointed herself
chaperon-in-chief to Alice and me. Her name was Wilkins, and we soon
learned that she was a trimmer of men’s stiff hats.

Our circle of acquaintances broadened so rapidly that within a few days
it included everybody rooming on the top floor. The first of the three
front rooms was occupied by a man who kept a restaurant; next him lived
a little woman who was organist in a near-by church; while in the third
lived a slender young woman, unusually pretty, who was a milliner. In
the front skylight room, companion to the one occupied by the reporter,
lived a man who, according to Molly, the negro maid, had a walking-stick
and a pair of shoes to match every pair of trousers.

After making a survey, as it were, of the inhabitants of our top floor,
Mrs. Wilkins announced to Alice and me that she was convinced that the
shrieks had come from the organist.

“Did you ever see one of ’em at it?” she asked one evening when Alice
and I were in her room being instructed in the art of stiff-hat
trimming. “It’s the hardest work ever I seen—playin’ an organ. They
pound with their fingers, stomp with their feet, and butt with their
head—all at the same time. It’s enough to give anybody nightmare—playin’
an organ.”

At the premium station as time wore on I learned the full significance
of the dreaded Christmas rush. Every morning before the store opened the
sidewalk was banked with people. As soon as the doors were unlocked they
pushed in, trampling everything before them like a herd of cattle. It
seemed to me that at least one-half of them always made straight for our
counter.

There were whole days when I scarcely raised my eyes from the coupons I
counted. Person after person was served without my so much as glancing
at their faces. I had become a machine. My sole aim was to serve
customers as fast as possible, and so lessen the crowd that packed the
space in front of our counter.

And the team-work of the girls behind that counter! I never have seen it
equalled. Never an impatient word nor an angry glance. Whenever a
desired article was beyond the reach of the girl serving a customer some
other girl would reach it for her. If a customer contested the count of
his coupons—and they were continually doing so—the next saleswoman was
always ready to change customers and verify or correct the count.

Don’t imagine that the low money value of the certificates and coupons
prevented such incidents. During the five weeks I served behind that
counter there were scores of persons, men and women, and most of them
well dressed, who disputed hotly over a half, or even a quarter, coupon.
One such individual threatened to have me arrested if I did not
“produce” a quarter-coupon which he claimed to have given me. He was
buying a pipe the value of which was two hundred certificates. In the
soiled, crumpled mass of paper which he handed me he claimed was the
exact number required. My count revealed only five hundred coupons, with
one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine quarter-coupons. I’ve often
wondered what punishment a judge would mete out to a woman accused of
hypothecating a half of a mill.

Of the seven saleswomen in our department—not counting myself—there were
five Roman Catholics, one Protestant, and one Jewess. Church questions
were not infrequently touched on in our conversation. One point on which
they all agreed was that clergymen of all denominations were best
described by a shrug of the shoulders.

One day feeling Nora’s elbow on my ribs I glanced up from the coupons in
my hand.

“That’s my clergyman,” she whispered. “Wait on ’im, please.”

He proved to be pleasanter than I had expected after hearing all the
girls behind the counter declaim against men of his cloth. He did become
irritated when I refused to break a box of silk socks for him. When I
explained that it was against the rules to deliver goods until after the
coupons had been counted, he turned his back on me. He was so much
better than some other customers who had fallen to my lot that I
remonstrated with Nora for refusing to serve him.

“Oh, I know’ em!” she replied impatiently. “See how sleek and fat and
selfish he is! Last week one of ’em came to our flat and worried mother
until she gave him the money she’d been saving for more than six months
to get herself a pair of thick shoes.”

“Much he cared what she was saving for,” the little Jewess chipped in.
“My father keeps a butcher-shop, and whenever mother sees a rabbi coming
she hides everything except the toughest cuts. They only take the best,
and want ’em for nothing.”

“Ministers are like everybody else,” the Protestant girl announced.
“They’ve got to feather their own nests.”

“What would your minister say to that?” I asked her.

“My minister!” she scoffed. “He don’t know me from Adam’s cat. He never
speaks to nobody off Fifth Avenue.”

For years I had heard persons, men and women, declaim against the
incomprehensible devotion of “shop-girls” to chocolate éclairs and
gum-drops. Indeed only a few days before quitting the National Arts Club
I overheard a high-priced music teacher declare that she lost all
patience with “shop-girls” when she saw them lunching on a chocolate
éclair instead of a bowl of oatmeal and milk, or of “good, nourishing
soup.” My five weeks behind the counter furnished me with a proved
solution to the problem.

The first time I tried lunching on a bowl of oatmeal and milk I began to
experience a most uncomfortable sensation under my apron before three
o’clock. By five that sensation had become a sharp griping pain. The day
following I tried soup. In the middle of the afternoon when Nora learned
how I was suffering, she went scurrying around among the girls in
various departments and returned with three gum-drops, which she made me
eat.

After that when I had ten cents or less to spend for lunch I invested in
a chocolate éclair and gum-drops. Without a doubt such a diet does
produce pale faces and a predisposition to tuberculosis. Experience
taught me that it staves off the griping agony produced by hunger and
standing on one’s feet longer than any other food to be had in New York
City for the same money. When a girl’s wage is seven dollars a week, or
less, ten cents a day is all she can spend for lunch.

At that time mothers on the lower East Side were rioting as a protest
against the high price of milk and potatoes On the grocery floor of one
of the largest department stores, where all foodstuffs were usually to
be had at rock-bottom prices, onions were priced to me at thirty-nine
cents the pound, white potatoes at twenty-seven, and butter at
ninety-three. Three small bananas were offered and bought at twenty
cents—a Saturday-night bargain.

Of course Alice and I could afford none of these luxuries. Having
discovered black-eyed peas at ten cents a pound, and that a pound was
enough for four dinners, we vied with each other in proclaiming our
fondness for black-eyed peas. Another discovery was our mutual relish of
peanut butter. We consumed it morning, noon, and night. As a substitute
for meat we never found its equal.

During this time, on several occasions, I had been aroused by a
repetition of that piercing shriek. Because no one else heard it I
allowed Mrs. Wilkins and Alice to half-persuade me that it was a cat.
Three times I got out of bed, and looking out my window tried to
discover in the brilliantly lighted back yards the cat which could so
exactly imitate a human being in agony.

About ten days before Christmas the entire population of our top floor,
along with a good many roomers in other parts of the house, was aroused.
The shrieks and groans came from the room of the young milliner. After
pounding in vain on the milliner’s door the organist ran downstairs and
returned followed by the landlady with her bunch of pass-keys. After
they entered the room we saw the restaurant-keeper hurry out. Later he
returned with a bottle of whiskey. While all this took place Alice, the
newspaperman, and I had been kept in our rooms under the stern
guardianship of the policeman’s widow.

“You don’t know what you’ll get mixed up in in a roomin’-house,” she
warned us. “For all you can tell all who goes in that room will be
hauled into court as witnesses—maybe put in jail.”

The next morning the little organist came to ask Alice and me to use our
influence with Mrs. Brown, the landlady, to prevent her from forcing the
milliner to leave the house.

“Mrs. Howard was in a sort of stupor last night when we got in her
room,” the organist told us, referring to the milliner. “She seemed to
be suffering intensely, and didn’t come round until she had taken a
stiff drink of whiskey and I had rubbed her side. She only wants to stay
until after Christmas; then she won’t be so rushed with work and can
look around for another room, but Mrs. Brown says she was drunk last
night, and must get out.”

Later, on my way to work, I stopped at the door of Mrs. Brown’s room for
the purpose of speaking to her about the milliner. Answering my knock
she came to the door, her face wreathed in smiles. Without giving me
time to open my lips, she exclaimed:

“I’ve just received a letter from Mrs. Houghton-Smith,” she told me,
mentioning the name of one of the most prominent women in New York. “She
wants me to save her an hour this afternoon.” Seeing that I did not
understand, she added: “Mrs. Houghton-Smith has me read her vibrations
before every one of her visits to Washington.”

“Vibrations?” I questioned stupidly.

“Didn’t you know that I discovered the vibration theory?” she demanded.
“Yes, indeed. And when I first came to New York I held my circles in the
drawing-rooms of the most exclusive people in the city. I’d be doing it
now if my son wasn’t such a fool.”

She then informed me that Mrs. Houghton-Smith was such a firm believer
in vibrations that she had tried to induce her, Mrs. Brown, to go to
Washington and get President Wilson’s vibrations. This Mrs. Brown
refused to do, because, being of American Revolutionary stock, she felt
it would not be well for any person to be in a position to control a
President of the United States.

It all sounded like pure nonsense to me, but that afternoon on returning
from work there was a limousine standing before the door. It was a
noticeably handsome car. The chauffeur and footman were in livery.
Judging by the brilliant lights in Mrs. Brown’s rooms I was sure she had
company.

Three evenings later Alice burst into my room while I was cooking our
dinner.

“What on earth has Bernstorf been doing here?” she demanded. “I met him
coming down the front steps.”

“You mean the German ambassador?” I questioned.

“Exactly who I do mean. If ever I saw him I met him on the steps. He got
in the taxi that was waiting at the curb, and turned up Fourth Avenue.”

“Vibrations must be powerful,” I remarked, “to attract such busy people
as Mrs. Houghton-Smith and Count Bernstorf.”

Explaining, I told Alice of my conversation with Mrs. Brown about
vibrations. To both of us it seemed a huge joke, but when later the two
incidents were reported to Mrs. Wilkins, she shook her head.

“Mrs. Brown was a fortune-teller,” she assured us. “But she went under
another name—something I-talian, or French. My husband knew her when she
kept her carriage and horses, and used to go out with swells.”

On my way to work the following morning Mrs. Brown waylaid me on the
stairs. She caught me by the sleeve and drew my ear down to the level of
her lips.

“I’ve found it,” she whispered jubilantly.

“Oh! I’m so glad!” I assured her, remembering that the one safe way to
treat lunatics was to agree with all they said.

“I’ve been concentrating on it for months,” she went on. “Mrs.
Houghton-Smith is the only person whose current I have allowed to touch
my own. I wouldn’t have taken even that risk if I hadn’t needed her
help. She has to take it to the President, you know.”

Being a silent listener I learned that Mrs. Brown’s discovery was
nothing more nor less than a way to stop the war. Beyond the bare
statement that it had something to do with Mexico, and that only
President Wilson would be able to turn the trick, she would tell me
nothing. In the midst of her talk she struck the banister sharply with
her fist, and exclaimed:

“Just to think it might all have come to nothing! That villain Bernstorf
came here last night. He asked for me by my other name, and the maid has
orders never to let such callers in. He made her bring up his card—said
Mrs. Houghton-Smith had given him my address. Had I seen him our
currents would have come into such conflict that I might never have
discovered the way to end the war.”

Saturday before Christmas the crush in the premium station was so great
that several times the doors were closed to keep more customers from
crowding in. There was never a break in the crowd before our counter.
More than once Mr. Spencer wedged his way through the packed humanity to
tell us to keep our seats while waiting on customers. Then he turned to
the waiting throng and called out:

“You people must have patience. I won’t have my girls killing
themselves.”

When six o’clock came, though he had the doors closed promptly, there
was such a crowd inside that it was well past seven before the station
could be cleared. Even then he had to forbid the salespeople waiting on
any more customers, and ordered us out from behind the counters.

On reaching my room I found Alice and Mrs. Wilkins waiting for me with
my dinner nice and hot. On trying to explain my delay I found that I
could not pronounce the words needed by my mind to express my thoughts.
Intuitively, it would seem, Alice recognized what was the matter.

“Wait!” she cried, springing up. “Don’t try to say a word. Get her
undressed, Mrs. Wilkins. I’ll be right back.”

She dashed into her room and came racing back with two white pellets and
a glass of cold water. As soon as I swallowed the pellets they put me to
bed, and I imagine that as soon as my head touched the pillow I fell
asleep.

On waking the next day I found Mrs. Wilkins standing over me with a bowl
of hot milk. It was after two o’clock. Every time I opened my eyes
during that afternoon either Mrs. Wilkins or Alice insisted on my eating
something, which they always had ready.

Later Alice explained that she had suffered from a similar breakdown
from overstudy during a college exam. The two white pellets were left
over from that attack.

Two nights later the whole house was aroused by the milliner’s shrieks.
We learned that she had been suffering almost nightly, but because of
timely care given by the restaurant-keeper and the organist, her attacks
had been checked before becoming acute. Now it so happened that the
restaurant man had been called out of town, and the little organist,
fatigued by rehearsing her choir for Christmas, had not been aroused in
time.

Recalling Mrs. Brown’s threat to turn the girl out if she again
disturbed her roomers, Alice and I stopped in to see the landlady on our
way to work. We explained that the milliner only wished to remain until
the Christmas rush in her trade was over. After that she would be able
to return to her home in Vermont or find another room. The landlady was
so stubborn that Alice was finally forced to use her trump card.

“My mother has ordered me to come home for Christmas—sent me a railroad
ticket. I am leaving to-morrow immediately on leaving work. If you have
really promised Mrs. Howard’s room to another person, I’ll ask her to
use my room until my return. I paid my rent yesterday, you remember.”

Finding that we were both determined to see that the milliner got a
square deal, Mrs. Brown agreed not to give her any more trouble, to
allow her to remain until the end of the milliners’ season.

That day a circular letter from the firm, addressed to their employees
in the premium station, aroused the little Jewess.

“The owners!” she exclaimed. “It’s always the owners. In the subway
they’ve even got papers stuck on the windows, urging us to pay higher
fares so that the owners can get bigger dividends. I’m tired working for
the owners.”

“Who is not?” Nora demanded.

“You said it!” the Protestant girl added.

Though most of the articles being sold at the premium station were for
Christmas presents, there was not much talk of Christmas behind the
counters. The day preceding the holiday one girl joyfully confided to us
all that her mother had promised the family a turkey dinner.

“Turkey!” Nora exclaimed. Then she turned to me. “Groceries have gone up
so that it takes all father and I can do to get the cheapest sorts of
food for the children. Mother is a fine buyer, but we never have meat
more than once a day. Then it is only stew or fish. I used to couldn’t
bear either, but you’ll eat anything when you’re real hungry and
dog-tired.”

Late that afternoon Mr. Spencer stopped at my end of the counter. He had
been watching me, he said, and he liked the way I worked. If I wished to
come back after Christmas he would be glad to give me a permanent
position. Though I had never intended to remain longer than the holiday
rush, his manner was so pleasant, so sincerely appreciative, that before
I realized it I had promised to report the day after Christmas.

That evening, Christmas Eve, on returning from work I found a white
sheet spread on the floor of the hall, just within the front door and by
the side of the stairs. The lines into which the sheet had fallen struck
me as peculiar, and I paused on the stairs and stared down at it. My
eyes wandering farther made out the uniform of a policeman in the dusk
of the rear hall.

“That’s Mrs. Howard,” the voice of the little organist told me as she
developed from the shadow beyond the policeman. “She was taken sick
while at work, this morning—they sent her home in a cab. When I got a
doctor he said she must go at once to a hospital. She died as the
stretcher-bearers were bringing her down the stairs. She has to remain
here on the floor until the coroner comes.”

“Heart trouble?” I asked.

“Yes. The doctor said it was brought on by overwork and underfeeding.”
The little organist’s voice trembled, and she gulped down a sob as she
added: “And on Christmas Eve, too!”

“And in a Christian country,” I agreed. “In the richest city in the
world.”

That Christmas was the first holiday I ever really appreciated.
Remaining in bed the entire day I subsisted on a loaf of stale bread and
two specked apples, both left-overs of the hat-trimmer, who had gone to
spend a week with her brother in Jersey.

During the second week in January Mr. Spencer again brought up the
question of my becoming a regular saleswoman in the premium station.
Nora thought he planned to make me head of stock at a near-by counter.
Forced to give him a definite answer, I told him that conditions at my
home made it necessary for me to leave New York—I would give up my job
at the end of that week. On my telling him good-by he assured me that he
would always have an opening for me whenever I chose to return.

Alice and the hat-trimmer were the only persons who knew that I had
signed a contract with the Sea Foam Hotel, a large hotel at a well-known
resort. I was to serve as waitress.

                               CHAPTER V
                             HUMAN COOTIES

When planning my adventure as Polly Preston, the heroine of my proposed
novel, the idea of including domestic service did not occur to me. It
was Alice who first caused me to consider such an experience. Telling
why she had given up her position in the institution for defective
children, she had exclaimed:

“I was engaged as a teacher—the people at college all understood I was
to have a teacher’s position. After they got me there they treated me
like a servant.”

Thinking over this incident, I wondered how it felt to be treated as a
servant. Were well-bred people really so disagreeable to those who
served them? How had the servants at home looked upon our household? Was
it possible that they found fault with my mother’s treatment of them? If
so, in what particular had she failed?

These thoughts called to mind words of the late Franklin B. Sanborn when
recounting to me his recollections of Louisa M. Alcott. It was near the
end of a perfect October day spent rambling about Concord with Mr.
Sanborn as my escort. After spending some time in the School of
Philosophy we crossed to the Alcott house and, going up-stairs, took our
seats near the window at which Miss Alcott sat when writing “Little
Women.” Mr. Sanborn had been talking continuously for several minutes
when suddenly he stopped and sat looking thoughtfully out of the window.

“Louisa was wonderful!” he exclaimed, beginning to talk as suddenly as
he had stopped. “Yes, she was wonderful. Even to the last she was as
ready to experiment as she had been when a young girl.” He paused for an
instant, then added in a different tone: “It was that that caused her to
try going out as a domestic servant.” He shook his head. “It was a
mistake. It was a mistake. Even Louisa couldn’t stand that.”

Now recalling these words, I wondered what it was that even Louisa could
not stand. Louisa, the woman whom Mr. Sanborn had described as
wonderful, with a heart overflowing with love and human kindliness. What
was it that even such a woman could not stand?

Thinking of the women and girls with whom I had worked, I wondered why
some of them who appeared so sensible should persist in a struggle to
eke out a half-starved existence on such low wages when in domestic
service they would get all the comforts of a good home along with wages.
All my life I had heard persons, experienced men and women, protesting
against this condition. Some of them had gone so far as to assert that
there should be laws prohibiting women and girls from working in shops
and factories—so forcing them into domestic service.

Once while working in the premium station I attempted to discuss the
subject with Nora.

“Not that!” the girl cried, the lines in her forehead contracting into
little knots. “I’ll go to the river first.”

Nora was a sensible girl. Why should she feel like that? She helped her
mother with the work of their little flat. She washed her own clothes
and on Sunday enjoyed cooking dinner. She made many of her own clothes
and helped sew for her younger brothers and sisters. She looked forward
to the time when the young man to whom she was engaged would earn enough
for them to marry. She expected to do her own housework. Then why should
she object, and so passionately, to doing housework for which she was
paid, to becoming a domestic servant?

The problem haunted me for weeks. During that period every time I looked
over the help-wanted columns of certain papers I saw that Sea Foam Hotel
was in need of chambermaids and waitresses. Not until I had mailed my
letter applying for a position as chambermaid did I mention it to Alice
and Mrs. Wilkins.

The expression of horror that sprang into Alice’s eyes was somewhat
moderated when the hat-trimmer expressed her satisfaction. She declared
it would be the very best thing Alice and I could do—both go to the
seashore as hotel help. What could we save on seven and eight dollars a
week? She by sitting up evenings to make the little bows used on the
inside of men’s stiff hats, in addition to regular nine hours a day six
days a week, was only able to get twelve dollars a week.

Then gouging down in her stocking she drew out a roll of bills.

“There!” she said, throwing the money into my lap. “You can count it
yourself. I’ve been workin’ since the middle of September—nearly four
months—and that’s all I’ve saved. You know how plain I eat and I ain’t
spent as much as ten dollars for clothes. Count it.”

Eleven one-dollar bills.

“The only time I can save money,” she went on, “is durin’ the summer I
works in the linen-room of a hotel down on Coney Island. The eatin’ is
somethin’ grand. Because there ain’t room enough in the hotel for us
linen-room girls they allows us three dollars a week extra. Last summer
I and another girl got a room for fifteen dollars a month. Besides
savin’ our wages we both had somethin’ left of our room money.”

The elaborate prospectus—“Information for Waitresses,” it was
headed—described in such glowing terms the many advantages provided for
the help of the Sea Foam that Mrs. Wilkins all but threw up her
hat-trimming job to go with me.

“It must be grand!” she exclaimed. “To get such good things to eat all
the year round as they give us at Coney in the summer. Sure, you’ll get
it at that hotel! That place is sweller than Coney. An’ your tips will
be bigger, too.”

When I called her attention to the statement that waitresses serving in
the side halls received sixteen dollars a month while those serving in
the main dining-room only got thirteen she urged me to “sign up” for a
side hall job. Side hall she assured me meant a piazza glassed in or a
sun parlor.

“Them’s the places real swells like to eat in so they can see things
whilst they’re eatin’,” she insisted. “They’ll be further from the
kitchen and serving-room, but you’ll get bigger tips. Better ‘sign up’
for the job in the side hall.”

And she talked so much about the grand food supplied by the Coney Island
hotel and the grander food that I was sure to get at the Sea Foam that I
used to dream about it. For, though Alice and I were not actually
starving, we had suppressed our craving for food to such an extent that
passing a bake-shop or a restaurant caused an unpleasant sensation. I
had gone off seventeen pounds in weight, and Alice was so thin that she
didn’t dare get on the scales.

When buying my ticket I learned that the rates quoted by the prospectus
had been out of date more than five years. On arriving at Belgrave
House, the waitresses’ dormitory, I mentioned to the housekeeper as she
registered me that I wished to buy one of the black and one of the white
uniforms, also mentioned in the prospectus as being supplied at
wholesale prices. She showed considerable embarrassment. Waitresses, she
explained, had not liked the cut of the skirts, so there was not a full
line on hand.

Those skirts! They were of that period when the hour-glass was the model
of feminine grace and elegance. The largest waist measure in stock was
nineteen inches. That skirt was forty-four inches long and measured more
than six yards around the bottom. Having to go on duty within three
hours, I was forced to get something in the way of a uniform.
Fortunately, on a pinch, I can cut and sew. Buying a black and a white
skirt—dimensions, nineteen by forty-four inches by six yards—I set to
work.

After shortening the white skirt and making it wider at the top and
narrower at the bottom I rushed to the boardwalk, where I bought a white
and a black shirtwaist.

Of course, they cost me three times as much as they were selling for in
New York.

The waitresses’ dinner was in progress when I presented myself in my
uniform. The assistant housekeeper of Belgrave being at the desk, she
conducted me into the large, poorly lighted dining-room and found me a
vacant chair at a table for eight. During the meal, when the waitress
next me cordially offered her help, I asked if she was stationed in the
main dining-room or the side-hall. After saying she was in the main
dining-room she shut up like a clam. Every effort to learn where and
what the side-hall was met an unmistakable rebuff. Puzzled, and a little
bit miffed, I at length said to the waitress who had offered me her
assistance:

“You’ll be helping me a lot if you will tell me what to do to get a good
station.” Then, including all at table, for I knew they were all
listening, I added: “You see, this is my first time in a hotel. I’ve
always worked in a private family. Please tell me what to do.”

“Follow along with us when we report for dinner, take your seat in the
back of the dining-room, and wait till the head waiter comes,” she told
me.

“When the head waiter sees you sitting there he’ll know you’re new and
give you a station,” another waitress added. “You just follow along with
us.”

Following these directions took me through a covered passageway
connecting Belgrave with the Sea Foam. From this we entered a large
kitchen which, on my first entrance, seemed thronged with men—black and
white. From the kitchen we went down a long flight of unusually steep
stairs to a basement passageway in which I got my first glimpse of a
time-clock. After punching her time the waitress who had spoken to me at
dinner signalled for me to follow her.

“That is the side-hall dining-room,” she told me, indicating a large
basement room, rudely equipped with tables and chairs. “It’s where the
office help, housekeepers, and linen-room girls eat.” We turned and were
going back up the steep stairs when she asked: “Did you notice that the
assistant housekeeper of Belgrave is lame?”

“She’s so lame that she can hardly walk,” I exclaimed. “I had to notice
it.”

“She served in the side-hall,” the girl told me, still speaking half
under her breath. “She fell down these steps with a loaded tray and was
in the hospital for more than a year. She’s got her position for life.
The Sea Foam has to take care of her.”

From the kitchen we passed through a long serving-room and from that we
entered the Sea Foam dining-room. It was a spacious one with rows of
very broad windows on four sides, those on three sides giving a splendid
view of the ocean. The walls, woodwork, and the slender pillars
supporting the ceiling were white enamel. There was a long strip of
blue-gray velvet carpet extending from the door the entire length of the
room. The steam-radiators, which almost encircled the room, were so
brilliantly gilded that I almost imagined them covered with gold-leaf.

At dinner I was stationed at a table of six covers. My guests, I soon
learned, were the family of a multimillionaire—wife, three small
children, their French governess, and a trained nurse. For the first
three meals I worked under the supervision of Anna, a waitress who had
been in the Sea Foam for more than six months. One of her first
instructions was:

“Don’t pay no attention to her,” indicating the millionaire’s wife.
“She’ll work your head off and won’t give you so much as a thank-you.”

This family took their meals in two sections—the children with the
governess and nurse, the mother alone. At the first dinner I served
without the assistance of Anna the mistress of millions wrote her order
as follows:

“Two portions of oysters on the half shell, two portions of olives, two
portions of asparagus, two portions of the heart of lettuce without
dressing, two portions of fried oysters, eight portions of the heart of
celery, six portions of radishes, two portions of apples, two portions
crystallized ginger, two cups of hot chocolate, two portions of
crackers, two portions of cheese, two portions of squabs, two portions
of green peas, two portions of queen fritters, two portions of chocolate
ice-cream, and two portions of cake.”

She ordered me to bring it all in on the same tray, as she did not wish
to be kept waiting. When one recalls the weight of hotel china and the
custom of covering each dish with one a size smaller, the physical
impossibility of obeying this order will be understood. Following Anna’s
instructions, I “paid no attention” to the millionaire’s wife. It
required three trays as heavy as I could lift to get her dinner in to
her.

Each time I returned from the kitchen I found her in the act of trying
to complain to the assistant head waiter. She grumbled at me because I
did not stand behind her chair and put the dishes before her as fast as
she wanted them. Of course, she did not eat all she ordered. She only
cut a bit from the breast of both squabs, selected the oysters that
suited her fancy, nibbled at the innermost hearts of the lettuce and the
celery. What her dinner really amounted to was rendering unfit for use
food which would have fed six hungry women. The ginger and the fruit she
carried away in her work-bag.

Had this woman been coarse or ordinary in appearance I might have felt
sorry for her lack of breeding. She was quite the reverse. She was
small, with a piquantly pretty face and a pretty plump figure. She knew
how to dress—wore beautiful clothes at the right times and painted her
cheeks and lips only in the evening. Her hands, though not beautiful in
shape, were exquisitely kept; all of her numerous rings were handsome.
She seldom wore more than two besides her wedding-ring, and they were
always appropriate.

The cause of her ill-breeding was her selfishness. She was determined to
get all that was coming to her and could not tolerate any person from
whom she could gain nothing. She was a typical daughter of a
horse-leech—however much she had she must still cry “Give.”

At the end of my first week practically all the waitresses urged me to
ask the head waiter to give me another station. A waitress, they assured
me, was never expected to serve longer than one week at a table where
tips were not given. As kindly as this advice was intended it did not
happen to suit my case—not exactly. Never again, in human probability, I
reasoned, would so good an opportunity to study this type of American
come my way.

The millionaire paid two visits to his family while I was serving them.
During each visit he took five meals. A Sunday dinner when he and his
wife ate alone is memorable. After ordering practically everything on
the menu, and just as I imagined them ready to leave the table, he
turned on me and demanded white potatoes. He said that he had ordered
mashed potatoes and that I had failed to bring them. His attack was so
unexpected that I was dumb. Not so Anna.

Crossing to the table she pulled a platter from among the pile of soiled
dishes surrounding his plate and held it out to him.

“There’s your white potatoes,” she told him. “You done eat ’em.”

Several days before Easter this family departed. I had served them three
hundred and seventy-nine elaborate meals, been found fault with, rudely
ordered about, grumbled at, and might have been reprimanded by the head
waiter had he not, having learned that no tips were to be expected,
studiously kept away from their table. My tip was a soiled one-dollar
bill ungraciously given. It was one hundred cents more than any of their
former waitresses had received, and they had been stopping in the hotel
for more than four months.

The family occupied five of the most expensive rooms in the hotel and
monopolized the services of two chambermaids and a scrubwoman. There was
not a week while I was serving them that the wife did not make at least
one trip to one of the neighboring cities. On her return she invariably
boasted to any waitress who would listen of the amount of money she had
spent and the expensive clothes she had bought. At one dinner she wore a
wonderful evening gown, for which she stated she had paid twenty-five
hundred dollars.

Knowing the wages paid to working women in New York at that time, I
wondered what per cent of that sum had reached the women who had made
the gown. What was their weekly wage?

It was not, however, the conduct of this family of millionaires that
convinced me before I had been a week at the Sea Foam that domestic
service is very different from what I had imagined. In the first place I
had always assumed that hotel waiters had the same food as the guests,
certainly what was left over. Such, I was assured by the head waiter and
the steward, is the custom only in “cheap joints.” At the Sea Foam, if a
waitress ate so much as a mouthful of food left by a guest she was
discharged in disgrace.

Our food—that is, the food prepared in the kitchen of Belgrave House—was
the worst I have ever tried to swallow. During my second week, the
breakfast being more uneatable than usual, I complained to Mary, my
roommate. Mary was scrubwoman and maid of all work in the Belgrave
kitchen. I asked her why, if they were going to send us scraps of meat
over from the Sea Foam, it was not properly cooked?

She assured me that the only food sent from the hotel were the meals for
the Belgrave housekeeper. In proof of this she took me down to the
kitchen of the dormitory and showed me the box of sliced bacon from
which what I had called “meat scraps” had been taken. It was the best
grade.

Mary explained that the cook had emptied half of the contents of a box
into a huge pan and put it over the fire. To keep it from burning he
stirred it around from time to time, then ladled the mass into dishes
and sent it into the dining-room. That bacon is a fair sample of the
food served in the waitresses’ dining-room while I worked at the Sea
Foam.

What the consequences might have been had the waitresses been supplied
with sufficient amount of palatable food may be questioned. As to what
actually happened there can be no doubt. “Dog tired” from overwork and a
lack of food, a large majority of the waitresses hurried to the seashore
immediately on leaving the dining-room after dinner. Often this was
after nine o’clock at night.

Their first trip was taken in search of food. Accompanied by two of my
fellow waitresses, I made such a trip the night after my arrival. Twenty
men, in groups of two or more, invited us to eat with them. It is a
question easily settled when a girl has money, but when she has no money
and is hungry, what then? This is no abnormal appetite created by sea
air. It is hard work and lack of food at our regular meals.

Another of my misapprehensions. I had fancied that the duty of a waiter
or a waitress was to serve food, three meals a day. Time between meals I
assumed they were free to use as they pleased.

When on regular duty a waitress at the Sea Foam reports for breakfast
not later than a quarter before seven. To do this I had to rise at five
forty-five. In that hour I had to take my bath, dress, make my bed,
straighten up my room, eat my breakfast, punch the time-clock in the
basement of the hotel, and get in the dining-room before the time
mentioned. If so much as a fraction of a second late the door was bolted
against me.

Though breakfast was supposed to end at nine, a waitress seldom, almost
never, got rid of her guests until a half-hour later. Then came the
collection of used napkins and table-cloths and exchanging them for
fresh ones. Next the washing and polishing of silver and glass, the
cleaning and filling of sugar-bowls, water-bottles, salt-shakers,
pepper-shakers, vinegar-cruets, oil-bottle, and, last though by no means
least, the arranging of cut flowers. After this was all accomplished to
the satisfaction of the head waiter or his assistant the chairs,
side-tables, radiators, and all the woodwork in the dining-room had to
be gone over with a damp cloth. Then came the setting of the tables,
leaving them ready for the next meal. It was seldom we got through this
morning work before eleven.

Between that time and twelve-fifty there was always more than enough
personal work to be done—washing and ironing one’s clothes, polishing
one’s shoes, mending, and the thousand and one little odds and ends that
must be promptly attended to if a waitress is to appear well groomed.

The prospectus sent me before I left New York distinctly stated that the
laundry of waitresses was done by the hotel free of charge. When I
inquired about sending my clothes to the hotel laundry all the
waitresses shook their heads. I might take the risk if I had a mind,
they told me, but so far as their experience went garments were seldom
returned, never in as good condition as when sent out. On learning that
the two waitresses who had been in the employ of the Sea Foam for more
than one year both did their own laundry, I decided to follow their
example.

Lunch and dinner at the Sea Foam were like breakfast—long-drawn-out
meals. A waitress seldom got rid of her guests under a half-hour after
the dining-room closed, and often it was a full hour.

When on “early watch” a waitress had to be in the hotel dining-room not
later than six in the morning. This is for the convenience of guests
leaving by early train. “Late watch” means remaining until midnight to
serve guests arriving on late trains or those who, after a promenade
along the shore, felt the need of an extra meal. Being on watch does not
curtail in any particular the regular duties of a waitress.

On one such occasion my diary reads: “April 2, 1917. Went on watch at
5.58 A. M., served four early breakfasts and reset tables. Return
Belgrave at 6.46 and ate my breakfast. Back in dining-room at 6.57. Put
water, ice, and menus on my table. The family of the multimillionaire
having left the night before, the assistant head waiter gave me three
two-seaters nearer the dining-room door. I set up these tables and
served six breakfasts. Returned to Belgrave at 11.32. Ironed two aprons,
a white skirt, a petticoat, and two collar-and-cuff sets. Ate my lunch
and was back in the dining-room at 12.57. Served seven lunches and then
held open the dining-room door for fifty-two minutes that late guests
might pass out. Rolled the carpet, set up my tables and returned to
Belgrave at 4.15. Rested nearly a half-hour, then pressed my black
waist, took a bath, went to a store on the corner for some peanut butter
and crackers. Ate dinner and returned to the hotel dining-room at 6.07.
Served eight dinners and went off duty at 8.56.”

Do not forget that at the Sea Foam it is not considered good form to
employ bus boys. A waitress not only brings in all food but she must
carry out all dishes and wash, polish, dry, and bring back to the
dining-room all china, glass, and silver used on her tables.

My diary for the following day, April 3, reads: “Yesterday was a
memorable day in the history of our country—perhaps of the
world—President Wilson asked Congress to declare that a state of war
exists between the United States and Germany. Excepting myself I believe
every waitress in the Sea Foam has written either to the secretary of
war or direct to the President offering her services. So far as the six
persons at my tables are concerned only the little boy from Wilmington,
Delaware, has shown any interest in the matter. He came in a half-hour
ahead of his mother this morning and spent the time talking to me about
our preparedness, etc. He’s a dear little chap.”

Only lack of money kept me at Sea Foam. Before the end of my second week
I had learned more than enough to understand why women and girls prefer
to eke out an existence on the meagre wage received in shops and
factories rather than enjoy the “home comforts” offered by domestic
service. Only the experience of Beulah, a dear little girl from Canada,
prevented me from giving up my job and returning to New York.

Beulah, whose season in Bermuda had been cut short by the war, came to
Sea Foam on a three weeks’ contract. Through a waitress friend she
received an offer of a permanent position in a hotel near New York City.
Though it was ten days before Easter and gave the head waiter ample time
to fill her place, he not only refused to pay the wage due her but
threatened to have her black-listed in hotel employment bureaus. In
order to reach her new position Beulah was forced to borrow money to pay
her railroad fare.

Not wishing to write and borrow money of Alice to pay my way back to New
York, I determined to get myself discharged. How to accomplish this
without doing anything rude or disorderly became my problem. When, a few
days before Easter, the assistant housekeeper of the Belgrave confided
to me that the head waiter had confided to her his intention of giving
me a year’s contract, perhaps making me a “captain,” I gritted my teeth.
Determined not to borrow of Alice, I was equally as determined not to
remain to the end of my contract.

The day before Easter I was put on early watch for the second time. As
waitresses are supposed to take turns at watch duty, believing that my
opportunity for getting myself discharged had come, I hurried to the
head waiter. He listened to my complaint against his assistant and then
explained that he had suggested my being put on watch because there were
so many new waitresses who could not be trusted to “swing the job.”

“You’ve got a head on your shoulders,” he informed me. “The management
has decided to keep you on after Easter. That’s the reason I’m pushing
you forward—to get you promoted.”

Easter morning found the head waiter and his assistant so nervous that
they reminded me of ill-conditioned sheepdogs snapping and snarling at
each and every member of their flock. A few minutes after the
dining-room door opened for breakfast, just when the earliest guests
began to trickle in, the first of a veritable avalanche of potted plants
and cut flowers were brought in. Certain guests, wishing their tables to
be especially attractive, had ordered these flowers and plants added to
the abundant supply already provided by the hotel.

So, after getting rid of our breakfast guests, in addition to our
routine work we waitresses had to put those plants and flowers on the
tables indicated, and make them look as presentable as possible. This
was far from an easy task, for in most cases the plants and flowers had
been chosen because of their beauty and utterly regardless of the size
or the shape of the table to be decorated. It was twenty-six minutes
after twelve when I left that dining-room, and several waitresses were
still struggling with their over-abundance of cut flowers and potted
plants.

Having changed my uniform and swallowed a few morsels in the way of
lunch, I was back in the dining-room at twelve thirty-seven. When the
doors opened, the occupants of my three tables, instead of being among
the early diners as they had all promised, were all late. Anna, whose
station was next mine, was unfortunate in the opposite direction—her
guests, four at one table and two at the other, all arrived at the same
time.

For the sake of helping Anna I took the order of the guests at her
two-seater—a German-American and his American wife, the most perfect
example of a rooster-pecked woman I have ever seen. On returning from
the kitchen with the second course for this couple, I found all my
guests in their seats. After serving the course on my tray I went to the
assistant head waiter, explained to him that Anna needed assistance, and
turned over to him the order of the German-American. Then, returning to
my station, I took the orders of my own people.

At that time, on a bench at the back of the dining-room, there were
seated, waiting to be called on, nine extra waitresses who had been
brought on from a near-by city that morning. When instructing the
regular waitresses that morning the head waiter had ordered us to report
to himself or his assistant when any of us needed the help of these
girls. Naturally I expected the assistant head waiter to send one of
them to finish serving the guests at Anna’s two-seater.

On returning with my tray laden with the first course for my six guests
I found Anna’s station in an uproar. The German-American, having seen me
take the orders of my regular guests, had complained so loudly that the
head waiter had to be called from the front of the dining-room to
straighten matters out. Catching sight of me on my return from the
kitchen, the hyphenated citizen again persisted in his demand to have
“that one with hair” finish serving his table. The head waiter, who was
really a very good sort, firmly insisted that he must either accept the
services of the extra waitress or wait and take his turn with Anna.

On my way back to the kitchen the assistant head waiter met me. He was
on the carpet and I in the aisle next the wall.

“This is the last meal you’ll serve for me,” he called across the double
line of tables to me, throwing up his arms in a nervous way he had.

“I accept my discharge,” I replied, realizing in a flash the opportunity
for which I had been looking.

In the serving-room and kitchen I scattered the news broadcast, telling
every one with whom I came in speaking distance that the assistant head
waiter had discharged me. The steward assured me that it was all a
mistake. The assistant head waiter was under a great strain, he
explained, and very nervous. He tried to get me to promise not to notice
the incident and to report as usual in the dining-room for supper.

Two of my guests who overheard me tell Anna offered to take the matter
up with the manager of the hotel if the head waiter refused to keep me
on. This frightened me stiff. Ten days more at the Sea Foam was more
than I could look forward to with equanimity. There was genuine pathos
in my voice when I begged them not to interfere.

My description of my discharge so affected Mary, my roommate, that she
insisted on taking me for an outing. In fact, nothing but my positive
refusal to get into a wheel-chair prevented her from indulging in that
extravagant attention. Truthfully assuring her that it would be much
more enjoyable to sit and watch the crowd, we found comfortable seats
under a pavilion and there spent the afternoon.

Perhaps it was the weather, or maybe the reaction following the
emotional elation caused by the incident of my discharge. Whatever the
reason, I have never before or since experienced such a virulent attack
of discouragement as I did while watching that moving throng. Not for
myself alone, but for the human race. While watching the people passing
in front of us—two steady streams of walkers with two packed lines of
wheel-chairs between—I suddenly realized them as an endless succession
of pygmies.

Not one of them nor all of them could stop the incoming nor the outgoing
of the sea that over the beach had the look of dirty bilge-water as
creeping in higher and higher it slapped the sand. Nor could one of them
nor all of them sweep aside the mist that like a dingy white curtain cut
off our view of the ocean and rendered indistinct the end of the
boardwalk.

What were they trying to do, these pygmies? For what were they
struggling? Here they were tramping futilely up and down the shore,
working hard to digest the food with which they had just stuffed
themselves—while in the rear of the hotels I knew there were ten times
as many working even harder to get food to support life.

What did it all mean—this endless, unceasing struggle between human
cooties and human drudges? What did it all amount to—the lives of these
pygmies? Where had they come from? Where were they going? What were they
trying to do?

Then, my thoughts turning inward, I demanded of myself:

“What are you trying to do? Granting that these pygmies crawling along
the beaches are human cooties and those working in the hotels are human
drudges, what then? The cooties are no more to blame for our economic
system than the drudges. You’ve been a human cooty and you know that you
did not give any more thought to the human drudges who slaved for your
comfort than these people do to you. Remember the time you stopped at
the Ardale-Stratton? Spent money like water.”

Thus reminded of my first visit to this resort, my mind slipped back
more than ten years. I had come down from New York City under the
chaperonage of one of the most distinguished women in the country. We
planned to remain two weeks. Before the end of that time she had been
taken seriously ill, and, though her own relatives and friends left her
and returned to their homes, I remained. Bored by the monotony of hotel
life, with the knowledge of spending too much money perpetually nagging
at my consciousness, I dreaded to leave the old lady among strangers and
attended only by her maid. Our visit stretched from two weeks to five
months. Day after day I had loafed along the beach, watching the
water—the threatening, the greedy, the sullen, the laughing, the
beautiful, the peaceful, the soothing sea.

With a throb of pride I recalled that every Sunday morning during that
tedious visit I had tipped my waiter and chambermaid one dollar each.
Though I recalled that the service they gave me was always the best, I
could not remember the name of either. Were they to meet me face to face
I would not be conscious of ever having seen them before. I had never
realized them as fellow human beings. I had never considered their
convenience. I had never considered their feelings. In extenuation I
told myself that it was because I had not understood.

“Neither do the persons with whom you are now finding fault understand,”
my conscience flashed back at me. “Yet you call them human
cooties—criticise their lack of purpose. What do you think you will
accomplish, sitting out here with a kitchen-maid? You had better take
your own advice to heart—get back where you belong and take care of
yourself. You never planned to have Polly Preston become a domestic
servant. Go back where you belong.”

Yawning, I rose to my feet. It seemed the sensible thing to do—to tell
Mary that I was going for a walk and she must not wait for me. During
Easter there was certain to be a number of my acquaintances at the
Ardale-Stratton. I had only to register or send my visiting-card to the
proprietor to get the best that the hotel had to offer. Telegraphing for
my trunks and writing Alice that I had gotten all the first-hand
material needed for my novel were simple details.

Before speaking to Mary, and while still yawning, my eyes wandered out
to sea. The wind had blown a hole in the mist. Across this opening in
the foreground there was steaming a black-gray dreadnought, its three
funnels belching black-gray smoke. My country was at war and I had
forgotten it!

As the battleship disappeared behind the bank of mist that formed the
westerly frame of the picture in the far corner, in the background three
slender spars of a schooner-rigged sailing-vessel crept into view. Her
hull seemed a black cord above the silvery sea, and her stretch of
canvas, low down, appeared hardly larger than my thumbnail.

“The new and the old!” I exclaimed, comparing the majestic power of the
dreadnought with the struggling sailing-ship.

Every drop of blood in your veins crossed the Atlantic in a vessel no
larger and in all human probabilities no more seaworthy than that
schooner, my thoughts ran on. What voyages those must have been! Storms!
Shipwrecks! What men and what women!—French Huguenot, English, Welsh,
and Scot.

Standing there under the pavilion with my eyes fastened on the
struggling ship, I fell to musing about those ancestors of mine—how they
had struggled against all the forces of nature to conquer a wilderness
inhabited by savages; how, after conquering that wilderness, they had
wrenched their new homes free from the mother country. And with a start
of amazement I considered their reason, why they had dared all, suffered
all—to found a government under which every child might be born free and
equal.

Free and equal! What did that mean? What had those wonderful old men and
women planned?

I looked down at Mary. And across my mind there swept stories of the man
from whom my Welsh strain sprung. After serving as governor of the
colony he had enlisted in the Continental army as a private. Though his
son-in-law, one generation nearer me, had become one of Washington’s
major-generals—a private the old Welshman persisted in remaining to the
end of the Revolution.

Hot blood crept up into my face until my cheeks burned and my ears
tingled. Who was I, what had I accomplished, that gave me the right to
turn up my nose at associating with a kitchen-maid? I slipped back into
the seat beside Mary.

What had I done? What was I doing to carry on the high resolves of this
old Welshman and the rest of my hard-fighting, high-thinking ancestors?
If I could not go to the front and fight to carry on the ideals of the
country they had founded I could at least try to bring about an
understanding of conditions at home—conditions caused by the
ever-increasing struggle between human cooties and human drudges—a
struggle which appears to me now as I write to threaten a greater
disaster than that of the World War!

Turning to the woman at my side, I asked:

“Mary, didn’t you say that your cousin planned to give up her position
as head chambermaid with a wealthy family in Pennsylvania?”

“She give notice more’n three months ago,” my roommate assured me, eager
to get me to talk. “If the housekeeper wasn’t so mortal hard to please
Jennie’d be married and livin’ in her own home. The man she’s goin’ to
marry owns his own farm and lives real well.” And Mary rambled off,
giving a minute description of her cousin’s future husband and home.

On our way back to the Belgrave after helping Mary compose a
night-letter to her cousin I sent a telegram to Alice announcing that I
would return the next day to New York. That evening on their return from
work in the Sea Foam my fellow waitresses gave me a farewell
entertainment.

And it was a real entertainment, for several of the girls had good
natural voices and an ear for music. It will be a long time before
memories of “I’d Give My Crown for an Irish Stew,” as sung by
laughter-loving Mollie, fades from my mind. One young waitress seemed to
me as good a clog-dancer as I had seen on the stage. She had picked up
the steps at a minstrel show—one attendance. What was still more
surprising to me was that every one of them could do something in the
way of playing the piano. Only one of them had ever taken lessons.

Though I thoroughly enjoyed that evening I do not believe that in my
whole life I ever felt so diffidently self-conscious. The realization of
yourself as the only hypocrite among honest folk is not pleasant. These
girls were all genuinely sorry for me, for my being discharged. Each one
had contributed her mite to pay for the bunch of flowers presented to me
at the end of the evening. I felt like a thief.

The next morning when I applied at the hotel office for the wage due me,
the paymaster gave me a receipt to sign. He had computed the amount at
the rate of thirteen dollars a month.

“According to my contract I was to be paid at the rate of sixteen
dollars a month,” I reminded him, returning the paper unsigned.

“You are not working in the side-hall,” he snapped back at me.

“I went where I was sent,” I told him. “The head waiter stationed me in
the dining-room. Since the hotel required me to sign a contract I shall
require the hotel to live up to that contract.”

Being accustomed to handling uneducated women this man fancied that all
he had to do to intimidate me was to talk loud. When he paused in his
shouting I repeated my first statement—the hotel must live up to its
contract with me. After a second bout at loud talking the stenographer
came to his assistance. She assured me “as a friend” that I had best
take the amount offered me, as it was all that I would get. Besides I
had no copy of the contract I claimed to have signed.

She gasped on being assured that I did have a second copy of the
contract—the copy Mrs. Wilkins had sent for. Taking another tack, this
girl reminded me that the difference between sixteen and thirteen was
too small to dispute about. Whereupon I inquired why the hotel was
unwilling to pay it.

Declaring that nothing could be done until my contract was found, both
the stenographer and the paymaster went back to their work. After
waiting thirty minutes by the clock I again asked for my wages. The
paymaster informed me that my contract had not been found and that I
would have to wait till they had time to look for it. At the end of the
second thirty minutes, and seeing that no effort was being made to get
the contract, I remarked that perhaps it might be just as well for me to
call on the clerk of the district court while waiting.

Simple as that statement may seem, it had a surprising effect on the
paymaster. Hurrying to the door of his enclosure he urged me to enter,
sit down, and wait for the manager. The manager, he assured me, kept all
contracts locked in a safe of which he alone knew the combination. On my
persisting he followed me along the passageway, begging me “as a friend”
to have a little patience. Another odd feature of the performance was
that the housekeeper of the Belgrave, though she had held the position
for more than ten years, could not direct me to the city hall.

Once on the streets every passer-by was able to point out the city hall
and tell me in just which corner I would find the clerk of court. This
man was or pretended to be as ignorant of Sea Foam as the housekeeper
had been of his whereabouts. When I first stated my case he had some
difficulty in recalling that there was such a hotel in the place—it is
one of the best known thereabouts and less than five blocks from his
office. His negro man of all work was so well informed that he was able
not only to locate it exactly but to give the names of the stockholders.

The clerk of court, when warning me against “invoking the law” for such
a small sum, informed me:

“The judge is all right, of course, but when it comes to a case against
one of our large hotels there’s never any telling which way the cat will
jump. I strongly advise you to go back to the hotel and see the manager.
Maybe they will have found your contract and will be willing to pay you
at the rate of sixteen a month.” Then he added, as he handed me his
card: “I wouldn’t be surprised you’d find them with the money all
counted out ready for you.”

 “Neither would I,” I answered, keeping tight hold on the muscles of my
face to prevent myself from returning his smile.

And it proved even as he said. Not only was the money ready for me but
the paymaster’s manner had undergone a complete change. Telling me that
the manager wished to speak to me, he held open the office-door and
politely ushered me in.

The manager of the Sea Foam is, or was at that time, a square-built man
with red hair. As we stared at each other across the broad top of his
mahogany office-table our eyes were on a level. It was quite evident
that he expected to stare me out of countenance. He made a mistake. His
eyes were the first to give way.

“Won’t you sit down?” he said, motioning to a chair.

“Thank you. I have neither the time nor the inclination,” I told him.
“What is it you wish to say to me?”

“To ask you why you went to the clerk of court.”