Chapter XVI: The Woman Who Works in the City of Unrest

At a quarter to seven the alarm-clock went off next her bed--how she would have liked to sleep for another hour, or lie warm and cosy under the clothes! The training in the habit of doing what she did not like helped her into a little tin bath, and to dress close to the radiator, as it was a bitterly cold morning. At 7.30 she stepped out into a snow-covered street and then hurried across Washington-square. Bitterly cold wind shivered through the white coral-like branches of the trees. The snow brought out the carving on the Washington Arch; the snow seemed to suit the whole square, and make it seem still less a part of the City--the Sleepy Hollow in the City of Unrest, with the solid big houses around it where ladies and gentlemen lived who had refused to be hustled into joining in the general dollar scramble.

In the street on the other side of the square she entered a restaurant, already full of breakfasters. She sat down at one of the marble tables with a couple of men she knew, ordered an orange, coffee, porridge, roll, two eggs--total, thirty cents. Her friends were in offices down town, one of them not earning as much as she was. They were comrades, chums, so much that he often borrowed a dollar from her during those critical days at the month's end.

Breakfast finished, and a glance at the paper--at least, enough to read the headings--and then out on Broadway to take the down-town car. Two passed as she stood at the corner, so packed that there was not standing-room even on the platform for another; then one stopped from which a few passengers struggled out, and she got in. All along the centre of the car men and women were standing, holding on to the straps, swaying backwards and forwards as the car swooped forward, and jerking forward every time it stopped. No idea in such a car of the men sitting down, against whose knees hers rubbed, to get up and relinquish their seats--why should they? She did not expect it. Was she not by her very going down town taking the place of a possible man there? was she not showing that she could do a man's work? Equality--he might think himself called on to give up his seat to one of the weaker sex. But there is no sex in the City. Swaying, squeezing, jostling, twenty minutes of uncomfortable cattle-truck-like journey brought her to the big office where she worked.

Men do not doff their hats in the down-town elevators which brought her up to the big office where she was employed, a great room near the top of one of the high down-town buildings; the windows looked out on the river, now a white mass of down-flowing ice, through which the calling steamers worked their way laboriously towards the harbour, to the Statue of Liberty standing beside what now looked a white gravel path of entry to the city.

There were about fifty people at work in the room, three-fourths women, seated at desks and tables, and some occupied the dignified position of little glass-partitioned rooms. She had one of these to herself, in which there was also a table for a stenographer. It was a publishing-house; books, illustrations, manuscripts, were in evidence everywhere. Near the door was a sort of railed-in pen where men with bundles of manuscript under their arms were usually to be seen seated, waiting. Some of these were even shown into her office, and left minus their bundles, or more often with them. There was a hum of chattering typewriting machines constantly in the air, like the chirruping of insects heard from tropical trees. Constantly her telephone rang and she had to make excursions to the manager's office, and head printers and printers'-ink-marked men came to her with proof-sheets, and so on, till 12.30, when she went out to lunch at the women's cafe and had lunch not unlike her breakfast.

The room was full of girls similarly employed, ten to thirty cents being the average of their expenditure; all real workers, none of them the fancy stenographers that their employers frequently take out to little lunches at the smarter restaurants at safe distance from their wives up town. They were not a very attractive crowd--thin, flat-chested, and often anæmic, occasionally with pretty faces, hair, or eyes; but work, daily work, had left its impress on them all. Some (their luncheon bills did not exceed ten cents) looked, with their thin fingers and arms, like human attachments to typewriting machines. There was a something not in the least mannish, but still not appealingly womanly, in these self-reliant, quiet business beings. Was it a sort of neuter gender, a sexless being that was there in course of development? Somehow, they did not strike one as beings who would bear and suckle and nurse children. Was this severe struggle and necessity of existence to eliminate the supreme joy of motherhood from their lives?

Back to the office, where they joined their fellow men-workers; they were just fellow-workers, no quarter given or looked for in the failure to do their work. Some of them earned fine salaries, yet there seemed a limit-point--thus far and no farther--men were always in the highest positions. Put it down to tenacity of possession, jealousy, prejudice--anything but want of perseverance, circumspection, industry: the obviousness of the fact remains.

Until half-past five her work goes on just the same as before lunch, and then up town on the elevator. Dry snow is spotting the swirling wind that eddies round the corners; the sidewalks are thick with hurrying people; the elevator is packed to the platforms with men and women tightly crushed together, worse even than coming down. She dines at a little Italian restaurant, where the proprietor, his wife, and children personally attend on their customers; it is known only to a few who mostly know each other--constant _habitués_--magazine writers and magazine artists, and miscellaneous, but interesting, nondescripts; and her dinner, with Italian wine included, costs forty cents. It is the pleasantest part of the day for her--men and women of that little writing, artistic, thoughtful, and, in a way, thoughtless set she had known for years; men who could never boom themselves or others, or keep up a bluff even enough to advertise themselves; the slow steps of actual merit made their progress seem like marking time. Ruggles, commonly known to his friends as Rembrandt, saw her home--old Ruggles, who painted better pictures than half the foreigners who came to New York, but who would never be a prophet in his own country. Nice old boy, Ruggles; but the fire was burning low in him, its only fuel being the ashes of disappointment.

The sky had cleared, and the moon shone out on the glorious old square, and red lights suggestive of old port and big wood fires streaked the silent snow from the windows. "Bully, isn't it?" And the silent pressure of her arm was affirmative of complete understanding. Her tiny sitting-room was warm; the cheap eastern rugs and dark green background of the walls and some clever original sketches, all were in the harmony of taste that loved restfulness. She lit the gas-stove of imitation logs; Ruggles wheeled a chair in front of it and filled his pipe; from his match she glowed a cigarette, and with a great sigh of relief and tiredness lay back on the sofa.

Then they chatted chum-like of many things. She was doing well--doing a man's work and getting a man's pay, supporting her mother and the two younger girls in the country. It was a strain; but is not successful effort Brian L'Estrange's definition of happiness? So they chatted on until it was time for Ruggles to go.

"Thank you so much for coming, dear old Ruggles; it is so lonely when I come back here by myself."

"Why don't you get married?"

"Ah! I don't know. Perhaps I'm getting old working, and the men I would like to marry don't care for me, and those that would I don't like. I don't think I want really to marry any one, either."

As he shook hands at the door he said, "You ought to get married, girlie. What a good, and true, and beautiful mother you would make for a boy-child!"

The shooting of the door-hasp seemed to let go the flood-gates of her heart. There was the great longing of her heart--to bear a boy-child. "For joy that a man is born into the world" seemed vaguely ringing in her ears. Like a deep-down spring surface-seeking, that old desire welled up, the perfect reward and crown of valiant womanhood--and she felt how good and tender and true a mother she could be; and as the desolation of denial flooded her soul she threw herself on that sofa made of empty cases, held the cushions to her, and cried--cried as if her heart would break.

Being independent and alone in her own room, she could cry out her lone cry without any one interfering with unwelcome comforting. Then, pale-faced and red-eyed, she got up, the sobs still coming in little gasps. She looked in the glass as she pushed the black hair back from her blue-veined forehead. With one of those strange revelations of reality that come to people in life when in solitude they look at their own reflection in a mirror--she thought--spoke. "It is too late--too late--for me to be the mother of a boy-child."

Then she went and set her alarm-clock to a quarter to seven in the morning.