Prisoners of Poverty Part 8

CHAPTER FOURTEENTH.

THE WIDOW MALONEY'S BOARDERS.

To the old New-Yorker taking his pensive way through streets where only imagination can supply the old landmarks, long ago vanished, there is a conviction that he knows the city foot by foot as it has crept northward; and he repudiates the thought that its growth has ended such possibility, and that many a dark corner is as remote from his or any knowledge save that of its occupants as if in Caffre-land. The newest New-Yorker has small interest in anything but the west side and the s.p.a.ce down-town occupied by his store or office.

And so it chances that in spite of occasional series of descriptive articles, in spite of an elaborately written local history and unnumbered novels whose background is the city life and thought, there is little real knowledge, and, save among charitable workers, the police, and adventurous newspaper men, no thought of what life may be lived not a stone's-throw from the great artery of New York, Broadway.

On one point there can be no doubt. Not Africa in its most pestilential and savage form holds surer disease or more determined barbarians than nest together under many a roof within hearing of the rush and roar of the busy streets where men come and go, eager for no knowledge or wisdom under the sun save the knowledge that will make them better bargainers.

There comes even a certain impatient distrust of those who persist in unsavory researches and more unsavory details of the results. If there is not distrust; if the easy-going kindliness that is a portion of the American temperament is stirred, it is but for the moment; and when the hand that sought the pocket or the check-book instinctively has presented its gift, interest is over. A fresh sensation wipes out all trace of the transient feeling, and though it may again be roused by judicious effort, how rarely is it that more than the automatic movement toward the pocket results! What might come if for even one hour the impatient giver walked through the dark pa.s.sages, stood in the foul, dimly lighted rooms and saw what manner of creature New York nourishes in her slums, giving to every child in freest measure that training in all foulness that eye or ear or mind can take in that will fit it in time for the habitation in prison or reformatory on which money is never spared,--who shall say? They are filled by free choice, these nests of all evil. The men and women who herd in them know nothing better; indeed, may have known something even worse. They are Polish Jews, Bohemians, the lowest order of Italians, content with unending work, the smallest wage, and an order of food that the American, no matter how low he may be brought, can never stomach. Yet they a.s.similate in one point, being as bent upon getting on as the most determined American, and accepting to this end conditions that seem more those of an Inferno than anything the upper world has known. It is among these people, chiefly Polish Jews and Bohemians, with the inevitable commixture of Irish, that one finds the worst forms of child-labor; children that in happy homes are still counted babies here in these dens beginning at four or five to sew on b.u.t.tons or pick out threads.

It is not of child-labor and the outrages involved in it that I speak to-day, save indirectly, as it forms part of the ma.s.s of evil making up the present industrial system and to be encountered at every turn by the most superficial investigation. It is rather of certain specific conditions, found at many points in tenement-house life, but never in such acc.u.mulated degree of vileness at any point save one outside the Fourth Ward. And if the reader, like various recent correspondents, is disposed to believe that I am merely "making up a case," using a little experience and a great deal of imagination, I refer him or her to the forty-third annual report of the New York a.s.sociation for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor. There, in detail to a degree impossible here, will be found the official report of the inspector appointed to examine the conditions of life in the building known as "The Big Flat," in Mulberry Street. There are smaller houses that are worse in construction and condition, but there is none controlled by one management where so many are gathered under one roof. The first floor has rooms for fourteen families, the remaining five for sixteen each; and the census of 1880 gave the number of inhabitants as 478, a sufficient number to make up the population of the average village. The formal inspection and the report upon it were made in September, 1886, and the report is now accessible to all who desire information on these phases of city life. It is Mrs. Maloney herself whose methods best give us the heart of the matter, and who, having several callings, is the owner of an experience which appears to hold as much surprise for herself as for the hearer.

"Shure I foind things that interestin' that I'm in no haste to be through wid 'em, an' on for me taste o' purgatory, not hintin' that there mightn't be more 'n a taste," Mrs. Maloney said, on a day in which she unfolded to me her views of life in general, her small gray eyes twinkling, her arms akimbo on her mighty hips, and her cap-border flapping about a face weather-beaten and high-colored to a degree not warranted even by her present profession as apple-woman. Whether whiskey or stale beer is more responsible is unknown. It is only certain that, having submitted with the utmost cheerfulness to the perennial beatings of a husband only half her size, she found consolation in a gla.s.s now and then with a sympathizing neighbor and at last in a daily resort to the same friend. There had been a gradual descent from prosperity. Dennis, if small, was wiry and phenomenally strong, and earned steady wages as porter during their first years in the country. But the children, as they grew, went to the bad entirely, living on the earnings of the mother, who washed and scrubbed and slaved, with a heart always full of excuses for the hulking brutes, who came naturally at last to the ends that might have been foretold. Their education had been in the Fourth Ward; they were champion bullies and ruffians of whom the ward still boasts, Mrs. Maloney herself acquiring a certain distinction as the mother of the hardest cases yet sent up from Cherry Street. But if she had no power to save her own, life became easier for whomsoever she elected to guard. Wretched children crept under her wing to escape the beating awaiting them when they had failed to bring home the amount demanded of them. Women, beaten and turned out into the night, fled to her for comfort, and the girl who had lost her place, or to whom worse misfortune had come, told her story to the big-hearted sinner, who nodded and cried and said, "It's the Widdy Maloney that'll see you're not put upon more. Hold on an' be aisy, honey, an' all'll come out the way you'd be havin' it, an' why not?"

It was at this stage of experience that Mrs. Maloney decided to remove to the Big Flat. The last raid of Dennis, the youngest and only boy not housed at the expense of the State, had reduced her belongings to their lowest terms, and she took possession of her new quarters, accompanied only by a rickety table, three chairs, a bed with two old straw mattresses, and some quilts too ragged to give any token of their original characteristics, a stove which owned but one leg,--the rest being supplied by bricks,--and such dishes and other small furniture as could be carried in a basket. But there went with her a girl kicked out by the last man who had temporarily called her his mistress,--a mere child still, who at ten had begun work in a bag-factory pa.s.sing through various grades of slightly higher employment, till seduced by the floor-walker of the store that it had been her highest ambition to reach. Almost as much her fault as his undoubtedly, her silly head holding but one desire, that for fine clothes and never to work any more, but a woman's heart waking in her when the baby came, and prompting her to harder work and better life than she had ever known.

There was no chance of either with the baby, and when at last she farmed out the enc.u.mbrance to an old couple in a back building who made this their business, and took a place again in the store, it was relief as well as sorrow that came when the wretched little life was over. But the descent had been a swift one. When what she had called life was quite over, and she sat dumb and despairing in the doorway to which she had been thrust, thinking of the river as the last refuge left, the widow had pushed her before her up the stairs and said,--

"Poor sowl, if there's none to look out for ye, then who but me should do it?"

This was the companion who lay by her side under the ragged quilts, life still refusing to give place to death, though every paroxysm of coughing shortened the conflict.

"She's that patient that the saints themselves--all glory to their blessed names!--couldn't be more so; but I'd not know how to manage if it wasn't for the foot-warmer I call her; that's Angela there, wid eyes that go through you an' the life beaten out of her by the man that called himself her father, an' wasn't at all, at all. It's she that does the kaping of the house, an' sleeps across the foot, an' it's mine they think the two av 'em, else they'd never a let me in, the rules bein', 'no lodgers.' It's not lodgers they are. It's me boarders, full fledged, an' who's a better right than me, though I'd not be sayin' so to the housekeeper that'd need forty pair o' eyes to her two to see what's goin' on under her nose."

The "foot-warmer's" office had ceased for one of them before the month ended, and when the Potter's Field had received the pine coffin followed only by the two watchers, the widow made haste to bring in another candidate for the same position; one upon whom she had kept her eye for a month, certain that worse trouble was on the way than loss of work.

"There was the look on her that manes but the one thing," she said afterward. "There's thim that sthand everything an' niver a word, an'

there's thim that turns disperate. She was a disperate wan."

Never had a "disperate wan" better reason. A factory girl almost from babyhood, her apprentices.h.i.+p having begun at seven, she had left the mill at fourteen, a tall girl older than her years in look and experience. New York was her Mecca, and to New York she came, with a week's wages in her pocket on which to live till work should be found, and neither relative nor friend save a girl who had preceded her by a few months and was now at work in a fringe and gimp factory, earning seven dollars a week and promising the same to the child after a few weeks' training. But seven years in a cotton-mill, if they had given quickness in one direction, had blunted all power in others. The fingers were unskilful and clumsy and her mind too wandering and inattentive to master details, and the place was quickly lost. She entered her name as candidate for the first vacancy in a Grand Street store, and in the mean time went into a coffee and spice mill and became coffee-picker at three dollars a week. This lasted a month or two, but even here there was dissatisfaction with lack of thoroughness, and she was presently discharged. The vacancy had come, and she went at once into the store, her delicate face and pretty eyes commending her to the manager, who lost no time in telling her what impression she could produce if she were better dressed. Weak, irresponsible, hopelessly careless, and past any power to undo these conditions, there was some instinct in the untaught life that put her instantly on the defensive.

"I'm not good for much," she said, "but I'm too good for that. There's nothing you could promise would get you your will and there won't be."

Naturally, as the siege declared itself a hopeless one, the manager found it necessary to fill her place by some more competent hand. There was an interval of waiting in which she p.a.w.ned almost the last article of clothing remaining that could be dispensed with, and then went into a bakery, where the hours were from seven A. M. to ten P. M., sometimes later. She was awkward at making change, but her gentle manners attracted customers, and the baker himself soon cast a favorable eye upon her, and speedily made the same proposition that had driven her from her last employment. The baker's wife knew the symptoms, and on the same day discharged the girl.

"I don't say it's your fault," she said, "but he's started about you, and it's for your own good I tell you to go. The best thing for you is to go back to your mother, or else take a place with some nice woman that'll keep an eye to you. You'll always be run after. I know your kind, that no man looks at without wanting to fool with 'em. You take my advice and go into a place."

The chance came that night. The mistress of a cheap boarding-house in East Broadway, her patrons chiefly young clerks from Grand and Division Street stores, offered her home and eight dollars a month, and Lizzie, who by this time was frightened and discouraged, accepted on the instant. She was well accustomed to long hours, and she had never minded standing as many of the girls did, her apprentices.h.i.+p in the mill having made it comparatively easy.

But the drudgery undergone here was beyond anything her life had ever known. Her day began at five and it never ended before eleven. She slept on an old mattress on the kitchen floor, and as her strength failed from the incessant labor, lost all power of protest and accepted each new demand as something against which there could be no revolt. There was abundance of coa.r.s.e food and thus much advantage, but she had no knowledge that taught her how to make work easier, nor had her mistress any thought of training her. She was a dish-was.h.i.+ng machine chiefly, and broke and chipped even the rough ware that formed the table furniture, till the exasperated mistress threatened to turn her off if another piece were destroyed. It was a case of hopeless inapt.i.tude; and when in early spring she sickened, and the physician grudgingly called in declared it a case of typhus brought on by the conditions in which she had lived, she was sent at once to the hospital and left to such fate as might come.

A clean bed, rest, and attendance seemed a heaven to the girl when consciousness came back, and she shrank from any thought of going out again to the fight for existence.

"I don't know what the matter is," she said to the doctor as she mended, "but somehow I ain't fit to make a living. I shall have to go back to the mill, but I said I never would do that."

"You shall go to some training-school and be taught," said the doctor, who had stood looking at her speculatively yet pitifully.

"Ah, but I couldn't learn. Somehow things don't stick to me. I'm not fit to earn a living."

"You're of the same stuff as a good many thousand of your kind," the doctor said under his breath, and turned away with a sigh.

Lizzie went out convalescent, but still weak and uncertain, and took refuge with one of the bakery girls who had half of a dark bedroom in a tenement house near the Big Flat. She looked for work. She answered advertis.e.m.e.nts, and at last began upon the simplest form of necktie, and in her slow, bungling fas.h.i.+on began to earn again. But she had no strength. She sat at the window and looked over to the Big Flat and watched the swarm that came and went; five hundred people in it, they told her, and half of them drunk at once. It was certain that there were always men lying drunk in the hallways in the midst of ashes and filth that acc.u.mulated there almost unchecked. The saloon below was always full; the stale beer dives all along the street full also, above all, at night, when the flaunting street-walkers came out, and fiddles squeaked, and cheap pianos rattled, and songs and shouts were over-topped at moments by the shrieks of beaten women or the oaths and cries of a sudden fight. Slowly it was coming to the girl that this was all the life New York had for her; that if she failed to meet the demand employer after employer had made upon her, she would die in this hole, where neither joy nor hope had any place. Her clothes were in rags. She went hungry and cold, and had grown too stupefied with trouble to plan anything better. At last it was plain to her that death must be best.

She said to herself that the river could never tell, and that there would be rest and no more cold or hunger, and it was to the river that she went at night as the Widow Maloney rose before her and said,--

"You'll come home wid me, me dear, an' no wurruds about it."

Lizzie looked at her stupidly. "You'd better not stop me," she said.

"I'm no good. I can't earn my living anywhere any more. I don't know how. I'd better be out of the way."

"Shure you'll be enough out o' the way whin you're in the top o' the Big Flat," said Mrs. Maloney. "An' once there we'll see."

Lizzie followed her without a word, but when the stairs were climbed and she sunk panting and ghastly on one of the three chairs, it was quite plain to the widow that more work had begun. That it will very soon end is also quite plain to whoever dares the terrors of the Big Flat, and climbs to the wretched room, which in spite of dirt and foulness within and without is a truer sanctuary than many a better place. The army of incompetents will very shortly be the less by one, but more recruits are in training and New York guarantees an unending supply.

"Shure if there's naught they know how to do," says the widow, "why should one be lookin' to have thim do what they can't. It's one thing I've come to, what with seein' the goings on all me life, but chiefly in the Big Flat, that if childers be not made to learn, whither they like it or not, somethin' that'll keep hands an' head from mischief, there's shmall use in laws an' less in muddlin' about 'em when they're most done with livin' at all, at all. But that's a thing that's beyond me or the likes o' me, an' I'm only wonderin' a thrifle like an' puttin' the question to meself a bit, 'What would you be doin', Widdy Maloney, if the doin' risted on you an' no other?'"

CHAPTER FIFTEENTH.

AMONG THE SHOP-GIRLS.

Why this army of women, many thousand strong, is standing behind counters, over-worked and underpaid, the average duration of life among them as a cla.s.s lessening every year, is a question with which we can at present deal only indirectly. It is sufficient to state that the retail stores of wellnigh every order, though chiefly the dry-goods retail trade, have found their quickness and aptness to learn, the honesty and general faithfulness of women, and their cheapness essentials in their work; and that this combination of qualities--cheapness dominating all--has given them permanent place in the modern system of trade. A tour among many of the larger establishments confirmed the statement made by employers in smaller ones, the summary being given in the words of a manager of one of the largest retail houses to be found in the United States.

"We don't want men," he said. "We wouldn't have them even if they came at the same price. Of course cheapness has something to do with it, and will have, but for my part give me a woman to deal with every time. Now there's an ill.u.s.tration over at that hat-counter. We were short of hands to-day, and I had to send for three girls that had applied for places, but were green--didn't know the business. It didn't take them ten minutes to get the hang of doing things, and there they are, and you'd never know which was old and which was new hand. Of course they don't know all about qualities and so on, but the head of the department looks out for that. No, give me women every time. I've been a manager thirteen years, and we never had but four dishonest girls, and we've had to discharge over forty boys in the same time. Boys smoke and lose at cards, and do a hundred things that women don't, and they get worse instead of better. I go in for women."

"How good is their chance of promotion?"

"We never lose sight of a woman that shows any business capacity, but of course that's only as a rule in heads of departments. A saleswoman gets about the same right along. Two thirds of the girls here are public-school girls and live at home. You see that makes things pretty easy, for the family pool their earnings and they dress well and live well. We don't take from the poorer cla.s.s at all. These girls earn from four and a half to eight dollars a week. A few get ten dollars, and they're not likely to do better than that. Forty dollars a month is a fortune to a woman. A man must have his little fling, you know. Women manage better."

"If they are really worth so much to you, why can't you give better pay?

What chance has a girl to save anything, unless she lives at home?"

"We give as high pay as anybody, and we don't give more because for every girl here there are a dozen waiting to take her place. As to saving, she doesn't want to save. There isn't a girl here that doesn't expect to marry before long, and she puts what she makes on her back, because a fellow naturally goes for the best-looking and the best-dressed girl. That's the woman question as I've figured it out, and you'll find it the same everywhere."

Practically he was right, for the report, though varying slightly, summed up as substantially the same. Descending a grade, it was found that even in the second and third rate stores the system of fines for any damage soon taught the girls carefulness, and that while a few were discharged for hopeless incompetency, the majority served faithfully and well.

"I dare say they're put upon," said the manager of one of the cheaper establishments. "They're sa.s.sy enough, a good many of them, and some of the better ones suffer for their goings-on. But they ain't a bad set--not half; and these women that come in complaining that they ain't well-treated, nine times out of ten it's their own airs that brought it on. It's a shop-girl's interest to behave herself and satisfy customers, and she's more apt to do it than not, according to my experience."

"They'd drive a man clean out of his mind," said another. "The tricks of girls are beyond telling. If it wasn't for fines there wouldn't one in twenty be here on time, and the same way with a dozen other things. But they learn quick, and they turn in anywhere where they're wanted. They make the best kind of clerks, after all."

"Do you give them extra pay for over-hours during the busy season?"

"Not much! We keep them on, most of them, right through the dull one.

Why shouldn't they balance things for us when the busy time comes? Turn about's fair play."

A girl who had been sent into the office for some purpose shook her head slightly as she heard the words, and it was this girl who, a day or two later, gave her view of the situation. The talk went on in the pretty, home-like parlors of a small "Home" on the west side, where rules are few and the atmosphere of the place so cheery that while it is intended only for those out of work, it is constantly besieged with requests to enlarge its borders and make room for more. Half a dozen other girls were near: three from other stores, one from a s.h.i.+rt factory, one an artificial-flower-maker who had been a shop-girl.