Chapter I: Try "light" Housekeeping in a Fourteenth-Street Lodging-House (1)

Bedtime found me thoroughly settled in my new quarters, and myself in quite an optimistic frame of mind as I drew close to the most fearfully and wonderfully mutilated little cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a lonely Fourteenth-street "light housekeeper." In the red-hot glow of its presence, and with the inspiring example of courage and fortitude which it presented, how could I have felt otherwise than optimistic? It was such a tiny mite of a stove, and it seemed to have had such a world of misfortune and bad luck! There was something whimsically, almost pathetically, human about it. This, it so pleased my fancy to believe, was because of the sufferings it had borne. Its little body cracked and warped and rust-eaten, the isinglass lights in its door long since punched out by the ruthless poker, the door itself swung to on the broken hinge by a twisted nail--a brave, bright, merry little cripple of a stove, standing on short wooden legs. I made the interesting discovery that it was a stove of the feminine persuasion; "Little Lottie" was the name which I spelled out in the broken letters that it wore across its glowing heart. And straightway Little Lottie became more human than ever--poor Little Lottie, the one solitary bright and cheerful object within these four smoke-grimed walls which I had elected to make my home.

Home! The tears started at the mere recollection of the word. The firelight that flickered through the broken door showed an ironical contrast between the home that now was and that which once had been, and to which I looked back with such loving thoughts that night. A narrow wooden bedstead, as battered and crippled as Little Lottie, but without the latter's air of sympathy and companionship; a tremulous kitchen table; a long box set on end and curtained off with a bit of faded calico, a single chair with a mended leg--these rude conveniences comprised my total list of housekeeping effects, not forgetting, of course, the dish-pan, the stubby broom, and the coal-scuttle, along with the scanty assortment of thick, chipped dishes and the pots and pans on the shelf behind the calico curtain. There was no bureau, only a waved bit of looking-glass over the sink in the corner. My wardrobe was strung along the row of nails behind the door, a modest array of petticoats and skirts and shirt-waists, with a winter coat and a felt sailor-hat. Beneath them, set at right angles to the corner, was the little old-fashioned swell-top trunk, which precaution prompted me to drag before the door. It had been my mother's trunk, and this was the first journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial. In the quiet, uneventful years that followed it had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "The Mistletoe Bough" and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic of our grandfather's student days.

What a change for the little old trunk and what a change for me the last twelve months had brought about! After the door had been further barricaded by piling the chair on top of the trunk, and the coal-scuttle on top of the chair, I blew out the evil-smelling lamp and crept with fear and trembling into a most inhospitable-looking bed. It received my slight weight with a groan, and creaked dismally every time I stirred. Through the thin mattress I could feel the slats, that seemed hard bands of pain across my tired body.

From where I was lying I could look straight into Little Lottie's heart, now a steady, glowing mass of coals. Little Lottie invited me to retrospection. How different it all was in reality from what I had imagined it would be! In the story-books it is always so alluring--this coming to a great city to seek one's fortune. A year ago I had been teaching in a little school-house among my Pennsylvania hills, and I recalled now, very vividly, how I used to love, on just such cold winter nights as this, when the wind whistled at every keyhole of the farm-house where I boarded during the school year to pull my rocking-chair into the chimney-corner and read magazine stories about girls who lived in hall bedrooms on little or nothing a week; and of what good times they had, or seemed to have, with never being quite certain where the next meal was to come from, or whether it was to come at all.

I was wakened by the rattle of dishes, the clatter of pots and pans, and the rancid odor of frying bacon, bespeaking the fact that somebody's breakfast was under way in the next room to mine. I stepped across the bare, cold floor to the window, and, rolling up the sagging black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. Bleak and unbeautiful was the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral fire-escape--a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all about with the rear walls of high, gaunt, tottering tenements, the dirty windows of which were filled with frowzy-headed women and children. Something interesting was going on below, for in a moment every window was thrown up, and a score of heads leaned far out. I followed suit.

In the sloppy, slush-filled courtyard below two untidy women were engaged in coarse vituperation that shortly led to blows. The window next to mine was quickly raised, and I drew back to escape being included in the category of curious spectators to this disgraceful scene--but too late.

"What's the row?" a voice asked with friendly familiarity. It was the girl who had been frying the bacon, and she still held a greasy knife in her hand. I answered that I did not know. She was very young, hardly more than sixteen. She had a coarse, bold, stupid face, topped by a heavy black pompadour that completely concealed any forehead she might be supposed to possess. She was decidedly an ill-looking girl; but the young fellow in his shirt-sleeves who now stuck his head out of the window alongside of hers was infinitely more so. He had a weak face, covered with pimples, and the bridge of his nose was broken; but, despite these manifest facial defects, and notwithstanding the squalor of his surroundings, a very high collar and a red necktie gave him the unmistakable air of the cheap dandy. Again I gave a civil evasion to the girl's trivial question, and as I did so her companion, looking over her frowzy pompadour, stared at me with insolent familiarity. I jerked my head in hurriedly, and, shutting the window, turned my attention to Little Lottie. It was not long before my tea-kettle was singing merrily. I was about to sit down to the first meal in my new abode, when an insinuating rat-tat sounded on the door. I opened it to find the ill-looking young fellow leaning languidly against the door-jamb, a cigarette between his teeth.

"What do you wish?" I asked, in my most matter-of-fact manner.

He puffed some smoke in my face, then took the cigarette from his mouth and looked at me, evidently at a loss for an answer.

"The girl in there wants to know if you'll loan her one of your plates," he replied at last.

"I am sorry," I said, with freezing politeness--"I am very sorry, but I have only one plate, and I'll need that myself," and I closed the door.

After breakfast I walked up to First Avenue to lay in my provisions for the day--a loaf of bread, a quart of potatoes, a quarter of a pound of butter, and two cents' worth of milk. Never in my life before had I bought anything on the Sabbath day, and never before had I seen a place of business open for trade on that day. My people had not been sternly religious people, and, theoretically, I didn't think I was doing anything wicked; yet I felt, as I gave my order to the groceryman, as though I were violating every sacred tradition of birth and breeding. After that I tried to do all necessary marketing the day before, and if I needed anything on Sunday I made myself go without it.

Returning with my unholy provisions tucked under my arm and a broken-nosed blue pitcher deftly concealed under my protecting cape, I made my first daylight inventory of that block of Fourteenth Street where I lived. On each corner stood a gaudy saloon, surmounted by a Raines law hotel. It seemed to have been at one time the abode of fashion, for though both ends of the block were supported by business buildings, the entire middle presented a solid front of brownstone, broken at intervals by long flights of steps leading to handsome, though long-neglected black-walnut doors. The basements were given over to trade.

On the stairs I was brought face to face again with my sinister-looking young man. I looked straight ahead, so as to avoid his eyes. But I found the way blocked, as he stretched his arms from banister to wall.

"What's the matter with you?" he began coaxingly. "Say, I'll take you to the theater, if you want to go. What do you say to 'The Jolly Grass Widows' to-morrow night?"

Thoroughly frightened, I responded to the unwarranted invitation by retreating two steps down the stairs, whereupon the young ruffian jumped down and grasped the arm in which I held my packages. I don't know what nerved me up to such a heroic defense, but in the twinkling of an eye he fell sprawling down the stairs, followed by the flying remnants of my landlady's milk-pitcher. Then I ran up the remaining two flights as fast as my feet would carry me, and landed in the midst of an altercation between the inarticulate landlady and my girl neighbor. In passing, I could make out enough of the wrangle to understand that the latter was being ordered out of the house.

When quietness had been restored, there was a tap at my door. I demanded the name of my visitor in as brave a voice as I could command. "Mrs. Pringle," returned the broken voice of the landlady. I saw, when I opened the door, that she wanted to talk to me. I also saw, what I had not noticed in my hasty interview the night before, that she was superior to most of the women of her class. She had been grimy and unkempt the night before, after her long week's work of sweeping and cleaning and coal-carrying; but to-day, in her clean wrapper and smooth gray hair, there was a pathetic Sabbath-day air of cleanliness about her spare, bent figure. Somehow, I felt that she would not be so very angry when I explained about the pitcher, and I invited her in with genuine cordiality.

She listened in silence to my story, her knotted hands folded upon her starched gingham apron.

"That's all right!" she replied, a smile lighting up her tired face. "I'm just glad you broke the pitcher over that vile fellow's head."

"You know him, then?" I suggested.

She shook her head. "No, I don't know him, but I know the bad lot he belongs to. I've just warned this girl in here to leave as soon as she can pack her things. I gave her back her rent-money. She only come day afore yesterday, and I supposed she was an honest working-girl or I'd never have took her. She pretended to me she was a skirt-hand, and it turns out she's nothin' but a common trollop. And I hated to turn her out, too, even if she did talk back to me something awful. She can't be more 'n sixteen; but, somehow or t' other, when a girl like that goes to be bad, there ain't no use trying to reason 'em out of it. You come from the country, don't you?"

There was a kindly curiosity mirrored in the dim, sunken eyes which surveyed me steadily, a lingering accent of repressed tenderness in her voice, and I did not deem it beneath my dignity to tell this decent, motherly soul my little story.

She listened attentively. "I knowed you were a well-brought-up young woman the moment I laid eyes on you," she began, the maimed words falling gently from her lips, despite the high, cracked voice in which they were spoken. "And I knowed you was from the country, too; so I did. You don't mind, honey, do you, if I speak sort of plain with you, being as I'm an old woman and you just a slip of a girl? Do you, now?"

I replied that she might speak just as plainly as she liked with me and I would take no offense, and then she smiled approvingly upon me and drew her little checked breakfast-shawl closer about her sunken bosom.

"I like to hear you say that," she went on, "because so many girls won't listen to a word of advice--least of all when it comes from an old woman that they thinks don't know as much as they does. They don't relish being told how careful they ought to be about the people they get acquainted with. Now I'm talking to you just as if you was one of my own. You may think you are wise, and all that,--and you are a bright sort of girl, I'll give you credit for that, only this is such a wicked city. A young girl like you, with no folks of her own to go to when she's discouraged and blue, 'll find plenty and to spare that'll be willing to lead her off. This is a bad neighborhood you're in, and you got to be mighty careful about yourself. Forewarned is forearmed, as you've heard tell before; and I have saw so many young girls go wrong that I felt could have been saved if somebody had just up and talked straight at them in the beginning, like I'm talking here to you. I had a girl here in this house two years agone. A pretty girl she was, and she was from the country too. Somewheres up in Connecticut she come from. She was a nice, innocent girl too, so she was, when she come here to rent a room. This very room you've got was the one she had. Just as quiet and modest and respectful spoken to her elders as you are, she was. She worked down in St. Mark's Place. She was a cap-maker and got four dollars a week. She started out to live honest, for she'd been brought up decent. Her father, she told me when she come here, was a blacksmith in some of them little country towns up there. She thought she could make lots of money to come down here to work, and that she could have a fine time; and I guess she was terrible disappointed when she found just how things really was. She hankered for fine clothes and to go to theaters, and there wasn't any chanst for neither on four dollars a week. By and by, though, she did get to going out some with a young fellow that worked where she did. He was a nice, decent young fellow, and I'll warrant you she could have married him if she had acted wise and sensible; and he'd like as not have made her a good provider. I don't blame the men out and out, as some folks do; and I say that when a young fellow sees that a girl 'll let him act free with her, he just says to himself she'll let other fellows act free with her, and then he don't want to marry her, no difference how much he might have thought of her to begin with. That's what, I think, started this girl going wrong. At first he'd just bring her to the door when they'd be out to the theater, but by and by she got to taking him up to her room. Now it's none of my business to interfere with people's comings and goings in this house, being as I'm only the janitress. I have my orders from the boss--who's a real nice sort of man--to only rent rooms to respectable people, and to put anybody out where I knows there's bad conduct going on. He's strong on morals, the boss is. He used to be a saloon-keeper, and the Salvation Army converted him; and then he sold out and went into this business. He has this place, and then he has a boarding-house on Second Avenue. These Germans are awful kind men, when they are kind, and Mr. Schneider has did a lot of good. If any of his tenants get sick and can't pay their rent, or if they get out of work, he don't bounce them into the street, but he just tells them to stay on and pay him when they get caught up; and would you believe it that he never loses a cent, either!"

Here the woman stopped for breath, which gave me an opportunity to turn the channel of her talk back to the girl from Connecticut.

"Well, I didn't have no right to tell the girl that she mustn't take her gentleman friend to her room, because there ain't no law again it in any light-housekeeping rooms. The people who live here are all working-people and earn their livings; and they've got a right to do as they please so they're quiet and respectable. But I took it on myself to kind of let the girl understand that her beau would think more of her if she just dropped him at the front door. A man 'll always pick a spunky, independent girl that sort of keeps him at a stand-off every time, anyway. She looked sort of miffed when I said this, and then I said that she could set up with him any time she wanted in my sitting-room in the basement, what is real comfortable furnished and pretty-looking--and which you too is perfectly welcome to bring any gentleman company to any time you've a mind.

"Well, she looked at me sort of scornful, and answered me real peart-like, and said she guessed she could take care of herself. She tossed her head in a pretty taking way she had, and walked down-stairs, as though I had turribly insulted her; so what could I do?"

Again she paused, panting for breath in short, wheezy gasps.

"And what became of her at last?" I asked.

"What became of her!" she echoed. "What becomes of all of 'em?" and she jerked her head significantly in the vague direction of the street. "She left soon after that, though I never said another word to her, but just kept on bidding her the time of day, as if nothing had ever passed between us. I felt turrible about her leaving, too; and I tried to persuade her she was making a mistake by leaving a house that she knowed was decent and where she could manage to live within her means. Oh, you don't know how I felt for days and weeks after she went. I knew how good she was when she come to this house, and I kept thinking how my Annie might have been just as foolish and heedless if she'd been throwed amongst strangers and had the same temptations. I don't know where she went exactly. She didn't give me much satisfaction about it, and I never seen her again, till one morning this winter, when I went out to bring in my ash-cans, I run right into her. It was real early in the morning, just getting daylight. I always get up at five o'clock winter and summer, because I'm used to it; and then I've got to, so's to get the work done, for I can't work fast with my rheumatics. It was hardly light enough yet for me to recognize her right away, and she did look so forlorn and pitiful-like walking there so early in the morning in the snow. It had snowed in the night, and it was the first we'd had this season. She didn't see me at first. She was walking slow,--real slow and lingering-like,--like them poor things do. I was standing at the top of the stairs in the areaway, and her face was turned across the street, as if she was expecting somebody. I tried to speak to her, but sometimes something catches me when I'm strong moved and I can't sound a word for several moments. And that's the way I was struck that morning. I started to run after her; then I thought better of it, and sort of guessed she'd turn around at the corner and come back. So I went to the cans and made believe to be turrible interested in them, and when I looked up, sure enough she had started back again, and I had caught her eye.

"Thinking of Annie, I bade her the time of day real friendly-like, just as though everything was all right, and I asked her to come in and have a bite of breakfast. I'd left the coffee on the stove, and had fried myself a nice mess of onions. She looked sort of half shamed and half grateful, and had started to come with me, when all of a sudden she stopped and said she guessed she couldn't that morning. Then she strolled off again. I picked up my ash-cans and started down-stairs, but I wasn't half-way down when I saw her hurrying along the other side of the street with a man I'd seen come round the corner by Skelly's saloon while we was talking together. And I never saw her again."

An expression of pathos, infinitely sweet and tender, had crept into the woman's thin, worn face--an expression in strange, almost ludicrous, contrast to the high, cracked voice in which the talc had been delivered. I gazed at the bent old creature with something like reverence for the nobility which I now could read so plainly in every line of her face--the nobility which can attach itself only to decency of life and thought and action. In my brief interview with her in the twilight of the evening before I had heard only the ridiculous jargon of a woman without a palate, and I had seen only an old crone with a soot-smeared face. But now the maimed voice echoed in my ears like the sound of the little old melodeon with the broken strings--which had been my mother's.

"I must be going now," she said, rising with an effort. "You'll come down and see me sometimes, won't you, honey? I like young people. They sort of cheer me up when I feel down. Come down this afternoon, if you haven't got any place to go. Come down and I'll lend you some books."

I thanked her, and promised I would.

IV

WHEREIN FATE BRINGS ME GOOD FORTUNE IN ONE HAND AND DISASTER IN THE OTHER

Monday morning--a cheerless, bleak Monday morning, with the rain falling upon the slush-filled streets. I ate a hurried breakfast of bread and butter and black coffee, locked my door, and started out with renewed vigor to look for a job. I had learned by this time to use a little discrimination in answering advertisements; and from now on I paid attention to such prospective employers only as stated the nature of their business and gave a street number.

I had also learned another important thing, and that was that I could not afford to be too particular about the nature of my job, as I watched my small capital diminish day by day, despite my frugality. I would have been glad, now, to get work at anything that promised the chance of a meager livelihood. Anything to get a foothold. The chief obstacle seemed to be my inexperience. I could obtain plenty of work which in time promised to pay me five dollars a week, but in the two or three months' time necessary to acquire dexterity I should have starved to death, for I had not money to carry me over this critical period.

Work was plenty enough. It nearly always is so. The question was not how to get a job, but how to live by such jobs as I could get. The low wages offered to green hands--two and a half to three dollars a week--might do for the girl who lived at home; but I had to pay room-rent and car-fare and to buy food. So, as long as my small capital could be made to hold out I continued my search for something that would pay at least five dollars a week to begin with.

On Monday night I was no nearer to being a bread-winner than when I had started out for the first time from Miss Jamison's boarding-house. I climbed the bare stairs at nightfall, and as I fumbled at the keyhole I could hear the click of a typewriter in the room next to mine. My room was quite dark, but there was a patch of dim white on the floor that sent a thrill of gladness all over me. I lighted the lamp and tore open the precious envelop before taking off my gloves or hat. It was a note from Minnie Plympton, saying she had got employment as demonstrator for a cereal-food company, and was making a tour of the small New England cities. The letter was dated at Bangor, Maine, and she asked me to write her at Portland, where she expected to be all week; and which I did, at considerable length, after I had cooked and eaten my supper.

Bread and butter and black coffee for breakfast, and potato-soup and bread and butter for supper, with plain bread and butter done up in a piece of paper and carried with me for luncheon--this was my daily menu for the weeks that followed, varied on two occasions by the purchase of a half-pint of New Orleans molasses.

The advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were very numerous; and as that sounded like humble work, I thought I might stand a better chance in that line than any other. Accordingly I applied to the foreman of a factory in Avenue A, who wanted "bunch-makers." He heard my petition in a drafty hallway through which a small army of boys and girls were pouring, each one stopping to insert a key in a time-register. They were just coming to work, for I was very early. The foreman, a young German, cut me off unceremoniously by asking to see my working-card; and when I looked at him blankly, for I hadn't a ghost of an idea what he meant, he strode away in disgust, leaving me to conjecture as to his meaning.

Nothing daunted, however, for I meant to be very energetic and brave that morning, I went to the next factory. Here they wanted "labelers," and as this sounded easy, I approached the foreman with something like confidence. He asked what experience I'd had, and I gave him a truthful reply.

"Sorry, but we're not running any kindergarten here," he replied curtly and turned away.

I was still determined that I'd join the rank of cigar-makers. Somehow, they impressed me as a very prosperous lot of people, and there was something pungent and wholesome in the smell of the big, bright workrooms.

The third foreman I besought was an elderly German with a paternal manner. He listened to me kindly, said I looked quick, and offered to put me on as an apprentice, explaining with much pomposity that cigar-making was a very difficult trade, at which I must serve a three years' apprenticeship before I could become a member of the union and entitled to draw union wages. I left him feeling very humble, and likewise disillusioned of my cigar-making ambitions.

"Girls wanted to learn binding and folding--paid while learning." The address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange, dark thoroughfare running toward the East River. Above was the great bridge, unreal, fairy-like in the morning mist. I was looking for Rose Street, which proved to be a zigzag alley that wriggled through one of the great bridge arches into a world of book-binderies. Rose Street was choked with moving carts loaded with yellow-back literature done up in bales. The superintendent proved to be a civil young man. He did not need me before Monday, but he told me to come back that day at half-past seven and to bring a bone paper-cutter with me. He paid only three dollars a week, and I accepted, but with the hope that as this was only Thursday, and not yet nine o'clock, I might find something better in the meantime.

A Brooklyn merchant was in need of two "salesladies--experience not necessary." A trolley-car swirled me across the river, now glistering in the spring sunshine. We were hurtled down interminable vistas of small shops, always under the grim iron trestle of the elevated railroad. At the end of an hour I entered the "Majestic," a small store stocked with trash. After much dickering, Mr. Lindbloom and his wife decided I'd do at three and a half dollars per week, working from seven in the morning till nine in the evening, Saturdays till midnight. I departed with the vow that if I must work and starve, I should not do both in Lindbloom's.

Five cents got me back to Cortlandt Street in Manhattan, where I called upon a candy-manufacturer who wanted bonbon-makers. The French foreman, in snowy cap and apron, received me in a great room dazzling with white-tile walls and floor, and filled with bright-eyed girls, also in caps and aprons, and working before marble tables. The Frenchman was polite and apologetic, but they never hired any but experienced workers.

It was half-past three, and I had two more names on my list. Rose-making sounded attractive, and I walked all the way up to Bond Street. Shabby and prosaic, this street, strangely enough, has been selected as the forcing-ground or nursery of artificial flowers. Its signs on both sides, even unto the top floor, proclaim some specialization of fashionable millinery--flowers, feathers, aigrets, wire hat-frames. On the third floor, rear, of a once fashionable mansion, now fallen into decay, I stumbled into a room, radiantly scarlet with roses. The jangling bell attached to the door aroused no curiosity whatever in the white-faced girls bending over these gay garlands. It was a signal, though, for a thick-set beetle-browed young fellow to bounce in from the next room and curtly demand my business.

"We only pay a dollar and a half to learners," he said, smiling unpleasantly over large yellow teeth. I fled in dismay. Down Broadway, along Bleecker, and up squalid Thompson Street I hurried to a paper-box factory.

The office of E. Springer & Company was in pleasant contrast to the flower sweat-shop, for all its bright colors. So, too, was there a grateful comparison between the Jew of the ugly smile and the portly young man who sat behind a glass partition and acknowledged my entrance by glancing up from his ledger. The remark he made was evidently witty and not intended for my ears, for it made the assistant bookkeeper--a woman--and the two women typewriters laugh and crane their necks in my direction. The bookkeeper climbed down from his high stool and opened the glass door. He was as kind now as he was formerly merry. Possibly he had seen my chin quiver the least bit, and knew I was almost ready to cry. He did not ask many questions; but presently he sent one typewriter flying up-stairs for the superintendent, and the other was sent to ask of the forewoman if all the jobs were filled. The superintendent proved to be a woman, shrewd, keen-faced, and bespectacled. The forewoman sent down word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could have her key. The pay was three dollars a week to learners, but Miss Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week's time, which opinion the portly gentleman heartily indorsed, and so I allowed him to enroll my name. He gave me a key, showed me how to "ring up" in the register at the foot of the stairs, and told me that henceforth I should be known as "105."

I thanked him in as steady a voice as I could command, and reached the street door on the stroke of six, just in time to hear my shopmates of the morrow laughing and scrambling down-stairs in their mad effort to get away from that which I had been trying to obtain for so many weeks.

The street I stepped into had been transformed. Behind my blurred vision, as I hurried along, I saw no squalor, no wretchedness now. Through tears of thankfulness the houses, the streets, and the hurrying people were all glorified, all transfigured. Everything was right--the whole world and everybody in it.

Thus I sped homeward on that eventful evening, eager to tell my good news to Mrs. Pringle, who, I knew, would be glad to hear it. As I drew near the block where I lived, I became half conscious of something strange and unusual in the atmosphere; I felt the strange sensation of being lost, of being in the wrong place. Men and women stood about in silent knots, and through the deep twilight I felt rather than heard the deep throbbing of fire-engines. Pressing through the little knots of men and women, I stood before the red mass of embers and watched the firemen pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging-house.

Dazed, stupefied, I asked questions of the bystanders. But nobody knew anything definite. One man said he guessed a good many lives had been lost; the woman next to him said she'd heard the number was five.

The houses on both sides were still standing, the windows smashed in, and the tenants fled. There seemed to be not even a neighbor who might know of the fate of my lodging-house acquaintance or of my good friend Mrs. Pringle. I spoke to a policeman. He listened gently, and then conducted me to a house in Fifteenth Street, where they had offered shelter for the night to any refugees who might desire it.

The basement of this house had been turned into a dormitory, one section for the men and the other for the women, who were in greater number and came straggling in one by one. A man-servant in livery passed hot coffee and sandwiches, which we swallowed mechanically, regarding one another and our surroundings with stupid bewilderment. I had never met any of these people before, though they had all been my fellow-lodgers.

The girl sitting on the cot next to mine passed her cup up for more coffee, and as she did so turned a quizzical gaze upon me. She was stupid and ugly. Her quizzical look deepened into curiosity, and by and by she asked:

"Youse didn't live there too, did youse?"

Our common misfortune inspired me to a cordial reply, and we fell into a discussion of the catastrophe. Her English was so sadly perverted and her voice so guttural that I could make out her meaning only with the greatest exercise of the imagination. But it was to the effect that the fire had started in a room on the top floor, whither poor old Mrs. Pringle had gone about three o'clock in the afternoon with a bucket of coal for the fire. Just what happened nobody knew. Every one on the top floor at the time had perished, including Mrs. Pringle.

"Didn't youse get nothin' out, neither?" asked my companion. And then it dawned upon me for the first time that I had nothing in all the world now but the clothes on my back and the promise of work on the morrow.

"Yes, I have lost everything," I answered.

"Youse got anything in the bank?" she pursued.

The question seemed to me ironical and not worthy of notice.

"I have. I've got 'most five hundred dollars saved up," she went on.

"Five hundred dollars!"

The girl nodded. "Huh, that's what! I could live tony if I wanted, but I like to save my money. I makes good money, too,--twelve dollars a week,--and I don't spend it, neither."

"What do you do?" I asked, regarding the large, rough hands with something like admiration for their earning abilities.

"I'm a lady-buffer," she answered, with a touch of pride.

"A lady-buffer! What's that?" I cried, looking at the slovenly, dirt-streaked wrapper and the shabby golf-cape that had slipped from her shoulders to the cot. She regarded me with pity for my ignorance, and then delivered herself of an axiom.

"A lady-buffer is a lady what buffs." And, to render the definition still more explicit, she rolled up the sleeve of her wrapper, showed me mighty biceps, and then with her arm performed several rapid revolutions in midair.

"What do you buff?" I next ventured.

"Brass!"

This laconic reply squelched me completely, and I subsided without further conversation.

Despite my weariness, there was little sleep for me that night. Affairs had come to a crisis; my condition was about as bad as it could possibly be. Whatever was going to become of me? Why, in the name of all common sense, had I ever come to New York? Why was I not content to remain a country school-ma'am, in a place where a country school-ma'am was looked up to as something of a personage? That night, if I had had enough money to buy a ticket back to the town I had come from, my fate would have been settled definitely then and there.

Not the least distressing part of my condition was the fact that there was really no help for me save what I should be able to give myself. To be sure, I had certain distant relatives and friends who had warned me against my flight to the city, and to whom I might have written begging for money sufficient to carry me back to my native place, and the money, with many "I-told-you-so's," would have been forthcoming. To return discredited was more than my pride could bear. I had to earn my livelihood anyway, and so, on this night of grim adversity, owing my very bed and supper to charity, I set my teeth, and closed my tired lids over the tears I could not hide, and swore I'd fight it out alone, so long as I had strength to stand and heart to hope; and then there was the prospect of a job at Springer's on the morrow, though the wage would hardly keep body and soul together.

The next morning, while her servants were giving us our breakfast, a stately middle-aged woman came down to the basement and passed among us, making inquiries regarding our various conditions, and offering words of well-meant, if patronizing, advice and suggestion wherever she thought them needed, but which somehow did not seem to be relished as her more material kindness had been. When it came my turn to be interviewed I answered her many questions frankly and promptly, and, encouraged by the evident interest which she displayed in my case, I was prompted to ask her if she might know of any place where I could get work. She looked at me a moment out of fine, clear eyes.

"You would not go into service, I suppose?" she asked slowly.

I had never thought of such an alternative before, but I met it without a moment's hesitation. "No, I would not care to go into service," I replied, and as I did so the lady's face showed mingled disappointment and disgust.

"That is too bad," she answered, "for in that case I'm afraid I can do nothing for you." And with that she went out of the room, leaving me, I must confess, not sorry for having thus bluntly declared against wearing the definite badge of servitude.

V

IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PHOEBE IN THE ART OF BOX-MAKING

The "lady-buffer" and I were the last to leave the house. We went out together and parted company at Third Avenue, she going south to her work, and I continuing along the street westward. The catastrophe of the preceding day seemed to have entirely evaporated from her memory; she seemed also to have forgotten the incident of our meeting and conversation of the night before, for she made no comment, nor even gave me a parting greeting.

I was inclined to reproach such heartlessness as I hurried along, when suddenly it was borne in upon my consciousness that it was I, not she, who was open to that charge. Here I was, speeding along to my work with hope in my heart, sometimes almost forgetting that the woman who had been so kind to me was probably lying in the morgue, awaiting burial in the Potter's Field, unless saved from that ignoble end by some friend. And yet I was powerless. I could not even spare time to go to the morgue or to make inquiries. I knew not a soul who could have helped me, and I had only one dollar and a half in all the world, no place to sleep that night, no change of garments, nothing except the promise of work that morning at Springer's. I stopped at the corner, strongly tempted by my innate sense of decency to the memory of the dead. But only for a moment: the law of life--self-preservation--again asserted itself, and for the time being I put the past behind me and hurried on toward Thompson Street.

It lacked but a few minutes of eight o'clock when, at last, I turned into the squalid street at the end of which stands Springer's. In the sunshine of the mild March morning the facade of the tall buff building looked for all the world like a gaunt, ugly, unkempt hag, frowning between bleared old eyes that seemed to coax--nay, rather to coerce me into entering her awful house.

The instant impression was one of repulsion, and the impulse was to run away. But there was fascination, too, in the hag-like visage of those grim brick walls, checkered with innumerable dirty windows and trussed up, like a paralytic old crone, with rusty fire-escapes. It was the fascination of the mysterious and of the evil; and, repulsive and forbidding as was its general aspect, nothing could now have induced me to turn back. Instinct told me that I was about to enter into no commonplace experience. And so, unresisting, I was borne along in the swift current of humanity that was swept down the street, like the water in a mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. Before Springer's a great arm of this human mill-stream eddied inward, to be lost in another moment in the vortex of the wide black doors, whence issued muffled sounds of the pandemonium within. At the last moment I hesitated, obsessed once more with the indefinable horror of it all. Again there was the strong impulse to run away--far, far away from Springer's and from Thompson Street, when suddenly the old monody began to ring in my ears, "WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!" Another moment, and I too had passed within the wide black doors.

The entrance passage was lighted by a sickly gas-jet, and in its flicker a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert their keys in the time-register. I was jostled and tumbled over unceremoniously. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall. From the scrambling and confusion it was evident everybody was late, and tones and language attested to racked nerves and querulous tempers. Suddenly there was a scuffle and the sharp scraping of feet on the floor.

"Get out, yez dirty Irish!" rang out in the stifling air.

"I wuz here fust!" snarled another voice.

"Call me dirty Irish ag'in and I'll dirty Irish you."

The black-haired girl had accepted the challenge, and the maligned daughter of Erin, cheeks aflame and eyes blazing, rushed at her detractor with clenched fist.

"Go for her, Rosie! She's nothin' but a dirty black Ginney, nohow!"

"Pitch into her, Celie! Punch her!" yelled a chorus from the stairs who came swooping down from above, attracted by the scrimmage, and just in time to see the combatants rush at each other in a hand-to-hand struggle, punctuated with loud oaths.

The noise suddenly subsided at the screeching of a raucous nasal voice.

"Well, young ladies! What does this mean?" demanded the superintendent, and Rosie and Celie both began to talk at once.

"Never mind about the rest of it," snapped Miss Price, cutting the tale short. "I'll dock you both half a day's pay: and the next time it happens you'll both be fired on the spot."

Then Miss Price turned to me, while the now silent wranglers meekly turned their keys in the register and marched up-stairs, whither their respective factions had since disappeared.

"I do hope to goodness you ain't high-tempered like some is," she remarked, with an effort toward affability, as we stepped before the time-register, where I inserted my key for the first time. "All I got to say is, don't get into no fights with the girls. When they say things to you, don't talk back. It's them that just takes things as they come, and lets bygones be bygones, that get the good checks at the end of the week. Some of them fight more 'n they work, but I guess you won't be that kind," she concluded, with an unctuous smile, displaying two rows of false teeth. Then, with a quick, nervous, jerky gait, she hopped up the flight of rough plank stairs, threw open a door, and ushered me into the bedlam noises of the "loft," where, amid the roar of machinery and the hum of innumerable voices, I was to meet my prospective forewoman.

"Miss Kinzer! Here's a lady wants to learn," shrilled the high nasal voice. "Miss Kinzer! Where's Miss Kinzer? Oh, here you are!" as a young woman emerged from behind a pile of pasteboard boxes. "I've a learner for you, Miss Kinzer. She's a green girl, but she looks likely, and I want you to give her a good chance. Better put her on table-work to begin with." And with that injunction the little old maid hopped away, leaving me to the scrutiny and cross-questioning of a rather pretty woman of twenty-eight or thirty.

"Ever worked in a factory before?" she began, with lofty indifference, as if it didn't matter whether I had or had not.

"No."

"Where did you work?"

"I never worked any place before."

"Oh-h!" There was a world of meaning, as I afterward discovered, in Miss Kinzer's long-drawn-out "Oh-h!" In this instance she looked up quickly, with an obvious display of interest, as if she had just unearthed a remarkable specimen in one who had never worked at anything before.

"You're not used to work, then?" she remarked insinuatingly, straightening up from the rude desk where she sat like the judge of a police-court. She was now all attention.

"Well, not exactly that," I replied, nettled by her manner and, above all, by her way of putting things. "I have worked before, but never at factory-work."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

She now opened her book and inscribed my name therein.

"Where do you live?"

"Over in East Fourteenth Street," I replied mechanically, forgetting for the moment the catastrophe that had rendered me more homeless than ever.

"Home?"

"No, I room." Then, reading only too quickly an unpleasant interpretation in the uplifted eyebrows, a disagreeable curiosity mirrored in the brown eyes beneath, I added hastily, "I have no home. My folks are all dead."

What impression this bit of information made I was unable to determine as I followed her slender, slightly bowed figure across the busy, roaring workroom.

"Be careful you don't get hurt," she cried, as we threaded a narrow passage in and out among the stamping, throbbing machinery, where, by the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague, confused glimpses of girl-faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels, and above the bedlam noises came girlish laughter and song.

"Good morning, Carrie!" one quick-witted toiler sang out as she spied the new girl in tow of the forewoman, and suddenly the whole room had taken up the burden of the song.

"Don't mind them," my conductor remarked. "They don't mean nothing by it--watch out there for your head!"

Safe through the outlying ramparts of machinery, we entered the domain of the table-workers, and I was turned over to Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise ear-rings and curl-papers. Phoebe was assigned to "learn" me in the trade of "finishing." Somewhat to my surprise, she assumed the task joyfully, and helped me off with my coat and hat. From the loud-mouthed tirades as to "Annie Kinzer's nerve," it became evident that the assignment of the job of "learner" is one to cause heartburning jealousies, and that Phoebe, either because of some special adaptability or through favoritism, got the lion's share of novices.

"That's right, Phoebe; hog every new girl that comes along!" amiably bawled a bright-faced, tidy young woman who answered to the name of Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith worked briskly as she talked, and the burden of her conversation appeared to be the heaping of this sort of good-natured invective upon the head of her chum--or, as she termed it, her "lady-friend," Phoebe. The amiability with which Mrs. Smith dealt out her epithets was only equaled by the perfect good nature of her victim, who replied to each and all of them with a musically intoned, "Hot air!"

"Hot A--i--r!" The clear tones of Phoebe's soprano set the echoes ringing all over the great workroom. In and out among the aisles and labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the dusky recess of the uttermost table, the musical cry reverberated.

"Hot a--i--r!" Every few minutes, all through the long, weary day, Phoebe found occasion for sounding that magic call.

"The rest of the ladies get up their backs something awful," Phoebe explained as she dragged a big green pasteboard box from beneath the work-table. "They say she gives me more 'n my share of learners because I'm easy to get on with, I guess, and don't play no tricks on them.... You have a right to put your things in here along with my lunch. Them girls is like to do 'most anything to a new girl's duds if you wuz to hang them in the coat-room. Them Ginneys 'll do 'most anything. Wuz you down-stairs when Celie Polatta got into the fight with Rosie?"

"I just missed it," she sighed in reply to my affirmative. "I was born unlucky."

"Hello, Phoebe! So you've hogged another!" a new voice called across the table, and I put a question.

"Why do they all want to teach the new girl? I should think they'd be glad to be rid of the trouble."

"You mean _learn_ her? Why, because the girl that learns the green hand gets all her work checked on to her own card while she's learning how. Never worked in a box-factory before?" I shook my head.

"I guessed as much. Well, box-making's a good trade. Have you an apron?"

As I had not, I was then ordered to "turn my skirt," in order that I might receive the inevitable coat of glue and paste on its inner rather than on its outer surface. I gently demurred against this very slovenly expedient.

"All right; call it hot air if you want to. I s'pose you know it all," tossing her curl-papers with scorn. "You know better 'n me, of course. Most learners do think they knows it all. Now looky here, I've been here six years, and I've learned lots of green girls, and I never had one as didn't think she hadn't ought to turn her skirt. The ladies I'm used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they're like other times."

With the respectability of my ladyhood thus impeached, and lest I infringe upon the cast-iron code of box-factory etiquette, there was nothing to do but yield. I unhooked my skirt, dropped it to the floor, and stepped out of it in a trice, anxious to do anything to win back the good will of Phoebe. Instantly she brightened, and good humor once more flashed over her grimy features.