Chapter VI

When the doctor left the Drummond house that day, Edith went to her room and thought over the situation. The mirror showed her that her cheeks were flushed, and she found herself walking around the room, unnecessarily putting things to rights.

What had she done? In the first place, she had listened with reasonable politeness to some very extraordinary language. There had been a certain austerity about it, a surgical cleanness, but it had been merciless. In all her life nothing had so surprised her. What else? She had promised to be a personal friend to some unknown girl. Personal friendship with the poor was notoriously a chimera, but she had driven Dr. Trench to a dramatic impasse where he had married her off to some unknown girl forever.

Finally, she had engaged to show Dr. Trench that the chemical theory of life is impossible. At least, she was going to get the arguments. And to understand them, she must do laboratory work.

Before she forgot all the things he had said, she must make a memorandum. She hunted up a note-book, and wrote down every sentence she could recall. More than once she dug the pencil through the paper. She would understand this man. She would analyse him as if he were a starfish.

She told Helena what advice he had given her, but nothing of the discussion which led up to it. Neither did she explain just why she was going back to the university.

At last quarantine was lifted, and the windows were opened to blow away the last reek of formalin, and Bobbie came down. The car was at the door, to take him out into the air.

“Aren’t you coming with us?” Helena put her arm around her sister’s waist.

“Not I. I’m off—to enlarge the family circle.”

Helena kissed her. “You blessed Don Quixote. But you’d better do a little choosing, as I told you. Take Mrs. Draper’s advice.”

Edith watched the car whirl away triumphantly. She closed her eyes and spoke within her soul to the Presence there: “You are good to us still. Always good to us.”

Then she made ready and found her way to little Mrs. Draper, of the Woman’s Trade Union League. Mrs. Draper received her with a nervous handshake.

“Helena Drummond’s sister is very welcome in this office. It’s well that you didn’t let your brother-in-law bring you, because he scares me with his handsome big countenance before I can really remember my rights. He banks for several of my bitterest enemies.”

“Do you really have enemies? How can anybody be your enemy?”

“You are a nice girl to say that. But no member of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association would shed tears if I caught something in the shops, and were driven off in a beautiful automobile hearse.”

Edith’s eyes looked very tender. “We’ve just been spared something like that at our house. My little nephew has pulled through a siege of diphtheria, and is now out for his first ride.”

Mrs. Draper’s mobile face was all sympathy. “I am so glad for you. Maybe Mr. Drummond won’t feel so stern toward the factory girls he doesn’t know anything about. And now what can I do for Helena Drummond’s sister?”

“You’ll laugh at me.”

“Maybe I shall, but you mustn’t mind.”

“I want—a friend. I’ve always been to school, and Helena’s suffrage craze has brought only her own friends to the house. They’re very nice as folks go—but they lack flavour.”

“I can introduce you to flavour,” said Mrs. Draper, thoughtfully, “if you’re quite sure it’s what you want.”

Edith pondered. “Of late,” she said, “I hardly know what I want or what I mean. I want to find out whether I can be real personal friends with a factory girl, and it must be a girl whose moral surroundings are against her.”

“It’s a curious wish, Miss Bridgman, but it does you credit. Praise God, the great majority of the girls are wise in their generation. But there are exceptions enough. I think of one shop—there’s no worse shop in Chicago—where no virtuous girl can hope for good wages.”

“Will you name it?”

“Ischl’s. A girl named Clara Narcisco told me last week that she was going to be a forewoman at Ischl’s, and I did my best to stop her.”

“I’d like an Italian friend. We spent a winter in Florence when I was a little girl.”

Mrs. Draper glanced at her watch, drew a pad of paper forward on her desk, and scrawled an address. “Go over at once and ask for her. And may the good Lord give you tact out of His abundant tactfulness. Amen.”

Twenty minutes later, having threaded her way down side streets, up a flight of stairs and between crowded power machines, Edith found the object of her search. Clara Narcisco was sitting in a window and eating a cream puff. Outside the window, on the platform of a fire escape, sat another girl. Edith introduced herself, and Clara brought a chair for her.

“Are you slumming, Miss Bridgman?”

“I am, Signorina, and I wish you to come slumming in my street. The way I keep my room is a sight.”

“That is a great big whopper,” said Clara judiciously, elevating one end of the cream puff so that it would not trickle. “Anybody whose clothes fit ’em the way yours do don’t leave no muss about a room.”

“Do you really like this dress? I made it myself.”

“It’s too plain,” said Clara, “but it hangs something elegant. Are you an inspector?”

“No. I’m a sort of fraud, because I don’t often make my own dresses.”

The girl on the fire escape was listening to all this, and now she leaned forward. “Are you a representative of the idle rich?”

“I am.”—As she spoke, she feared she was carrying the pose too far, but she was vastly mistaken.

“Miss Bridgman,” said Clara, “this is just as good as a show at the Venezia. We welcome you to our palazzo Ischl. Allow me to present my humble friend, Elsie Shaviro on the new fire escape.”

Edith was equal to the occasion, and rose and bowed. “I am highly flattered to meet Miss Shaviro, and I request the honour of both your presences at my mansion this evening to dinner.”

“Brava! brava!” shouted Clara. “You done that fine, Miss Bridgman.”

“You are to call me Edith. I want you two girls for friends, to have and to hold, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. You two are it, if you’ll have me.”

“Quit your kiddin’, Miss Bridgman.”

“Whom are you addressing?”

“Gee! You dare me to try it on? Well, watch me! Edith Bridgman, did I hear you invite me to eats this evening?”

“You certainly did. I’d rather go to your house, but you don’t want me.”

Clara looked at her long and keenly, and then she pulled a handkerchief from her belt and pressed it against her eyes.

“You’re all right—Edith. But what’s the use? I can’t go after any pipedream like that. I got a brother and sister to look after. My mother is dead, and my dad—God only knows where he is. Maybe Elsie will go.”

The girl on the fire escape leaped lightly in, and Edith saw that she was no ordinary person. Edith could think only of Nazimova, though Elsie’s face was untrained to pretence.

“I am a socialist,” said Elsie.

“I don’t care,” said Edith.

“But I do. If I go to your house I am disloyal to the workers. If you would join the socialist party—that would be different.” Elsie took off her eyeglasses to wipe them, a process which revealed the loveliness of her dark eyes.

“I should cut a pretty figure joining the socialist party for love of you,” said Edith. “All I know about socialism was learned in one quarter of economics, and it struck me as what Clara calls a pipedream.”

“Of course it did. But if you would be as poor as Clara and me you’d be a socialist.”

“I ain’t so sure of that,” interrupted Clara. “I’m a good Catholic. It’s only Sheenies like you that get nutty over socialism. Anyhow, you ought to give the poor little rich girl a chance. You can’t say, Edith, I’ll love you if you’ll send a hundred beans to socialist headquarters.”

“That’s so,” reflected the Yiddish girl. “Could we be friends for a year, Miss Bridgman, and then quit if you would not have succumbed to propaganda?”

“Yes, that’s fair. But you must call me by my first name, and come to dinner.”

“I’ll call you Edith, and it’s a pretty name. But I’m proletariat, and if I will dine in a rich house I will not feel comfortable. I spend most of my evenings studying. When you would study with me, perhaps we could be friends after all.”

“I’m to be in the University this year. But we could spend Sundays together.”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” cried Clara. “I was the first one she spoke to, and now I ain’t in it a little bit. I ain’t highbrow enough. I see little Clara going with Gino and Maria to the nickel show forever and ever.”

“Do you love the theatre?”

“Do I love teatro? Santa Chiara, what a question! There’s girls in this shop that would go wrong to get a ticket.”

Edith opened her pocket-book. “You give this dollar to some nice old woman to get dinner and stay with Gino and Maria, for you and Elsie and I are going to see the best play there is in this town to-night. La prego umilmente.”

Clara took the dollar bill and put it back into Edith’s pocket-book. “If Madonina can talk Italian, she is coming to eat spaghetti al pomidoro with Clara and Gino and Maria. Altro! The awful Sheeny can come too, and we three will go to the big show.” She suddenly leaned down and kissed Edith, and friendship was sealed.

Clara’s quite unexpected surrender seemed to impress Elsie.—“If you are going to Clara’s house, you must come to mine. My sister is going to be married next week, and you may as well see what we are like.”

“I shall be more than happy to come. And isn’t there something friendly I can do for you? Think hard, Elsie.”

“Well, when you would help me with shall and will and should and would and a few things like that, it would be very kind. You could call me down every time I make a break when I talk. And I’m reading Westermarck, and I could write out the main things in each chapter, and send them to you, if you would be so very kind and correct them.”

“Splendid! Send your papers to me at the address I’m pencilling on this card. Do you mean the Westermarck who wrote about the origin of moral ideas?”

“Yes. That’s the man. I’ve written one chapter already.”

“Here, you girls,” cried Clara, “don’t you get agoing on any more highbrow stuff. The whistle’s going to blow pretty quick. But tell me who sent you here.”

“Mrs. Draper told me your name.”

“Mrs. Draper’s all right, but she’s too swift. She wants us to organise this shop. You ought to see my girls upstairs. They’re just over and they can’t speak a word, and they don’t know enough to go in the house when it rains.”

“We did think of organising,” said Elsie, “but there’s a good reason why we aren’t trying just now.”

“What reason?”

“Because Ischl has turned decent already so sudden. Look at the new fire escape. He was reported already by the inspector time and again, but he’s got such a drag that he ain’t got to obey the law. Look at the new fans—why, we nearly died this summer with the heat. Look at the carpenters over there. That place wasn’t fit for a decent girl to go into. There’s handrails on the stairs and rubber on the steps, and they’re fixing the exits. And, listen, Edith Bridgman, last week he actually raised the scale! Ischl is going to die.”

Clara tossed her beautiful head. “’Tain’t that, Elsie. He is cleaning up in my honour.”

“I wonder,” said Edith apprehensively. Her desire to help was obscuring her sense of humour.

“I’m kidding you,” said Clara. “Ischl is scared. There’s going to be trouble in the shops again this winter, just like we had three years ago. Things is awful dull, and the girls are working for nothing.”

“Never you mind, my dear! I promise right now to go on picket duty with you and Miss Starr. And if we get arrested, my sister will bail us out.”

“You’re all right, Edith. But there’s worse things than being arrested. Flesh and blood can’t stand what I stood across the street.”

“What was that, Clara dear?”

“Why, I was over there and I was an experienced girl. I knew how many coats a girl could make. To make them good with small stitches I could make seven in ten hours. Well, the boss comes along and he says to me, ‘I want ten coats a day from you. I want all these girls should make ten coats a day.’ ‘Basta, basta!’ I says, and I stuck my fingers in my ears. ‘I don’t mean no basting,’ he says, ‘I mean whole coats.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘you’re the boss, but no greenhorn can do it. I’m an experienced girl,’ I says, ‘and I know. They can’t make five!’ ‘Let ’em take the coats home,’ he says, ‘if they want six dollars a week.’ Then he went off, and the greenhorns had to take coats home and work fifteen hours and they couldn’t make seven coats then. He kept coming round to me. ‘I want somebody to make them fools work,’ he says. ‘The contractor he cuts me twenty-five cents on a coat, and I got to live.’ ‘You got to live, have you?’ says I. ‘You’re a rich man and you talk like that. What about me? Where do I come in? Ain’t I got to live?’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you’re pretty. You don’t have to work.’ He wasn’t far off and I slapped his face for fair. ‘Come now, Clara,’ he says, ‘I didn’t mean nothing. I’m going to make you forelady so you can learn ’em something.’ First I didn’t say nothing, I was so mad. But then I began to think about little Gino and I began to cry. ‘All right,’ I says, ‘I’ll be forelady, but if you ever speak like that to me again, I’ll kill you, and after this I’m going to carry something that ain’t ribbons in my stocking.’ So I was forelady. But then I couldn’t stand it at all. I was such a fool I didn’t pipe that all he wanted me was I should wring the girls out like dishrags. I went to him and I says, ‘I’m going to quit. I’m going to try it at Ischl’s.’ ‘Ischl’s!’ he yells. ‘He’ll say things to you I never said.’ ‘Don’t fret yourself,’ I says. ‘I’ve got that thing in my stocking yet.’ Would you blame me, Edith?”

“No.”

“Well, I come over here and told Ischl I was an experienced girl and I was a forelady, but I didn’t want no job to drive niggers. So Ischl took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at me. ‘My forewomen,’ he says, ‘don’t drive no niggers. I seen some handwritin’ on the wall. Damn it,’ he says—Ischl swears something awful—‘damn it,’ he says, ‘you can ask Elsie Shaviro. She’s forewoman on the second floor, and she’s a good one. But I got a fool for a forewoman on the third floor. Mebbe I’ll put her back on a machine and let you try to boss ’em. You sure can’t do any worse,’ he says. And then he showed me a peach of a scale he’s just drawed up. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘Mr. Ischl, I guess you did see some sort of handwriting on the wall. I ain’t asking what,’ I says. ‘But I’ll say this right here off the bat, that if I give satisfaction there won’t be no walkout in this place.’ ‘Damn the walkout,’ he says. ‘Go and see Elsie, unless you’re sore on Sheenies.’ ‘Sheeny or Catholic,’ I says, ‘they all look alike to me in the shop.’”

Clara stopped, quite out of breath, as the whistle blew.

“Wait just a second,” said Edith. “I want your address.”

“No, you couldn’t find it, cara mia. Be at Hull-House at six, and Gino will find you.”

“All right. I’ll stay there in the car till he comes.”

“The car! Santa Maria Vergine! I’ll be scared to death and my other dress ain’t much better than this one. But oh, you automobile!”