Part 10

The voice dropped to so low a whisper that Violet could hear no more, and, before it was raised, the doorbell had sounded and she had heard Celeste, upstairs, calling her. She tiptoed back to the upper hallway.

"Cassie say you' New York Central frien' ees askin' for you," volunteered the French girl as they met.

"All right," answered Violet. "I'll be right down. I was trying to swipe a bottle. And say, Celeste, how does that Wesley Dyker come to have such a pull with Miss Rose?"

"Oh-h! You don' know? That Wes' Dyk' 'e mabby be a magistrate nex' 'lection. 'E's one gran' man now for bail an' lawyer when trouble come.--'Es's frien's with so many politicians, too. But Meess Rose, she know 'e will be some more eef 'e be 'lected magistrate."

"Oh, I see. But doesn't she keep standing in, on the quiet, with the other people who want the place, too?"

Celeste nodded a cheerful agreement.

"But of a certainty," she said. "Meess Rose, she know 'er beezness. Whoever get that 'lection, Meess Rose, she will 'ave been 'ees frien'."

Violet asked no more. She had learned enough to put into her hands the best weapon just then available.

XII

ON STRIKE

Katie Flanagan arrived at the Lennox department-store every morning at a quarter to eight o'clock. She passed through the employés' dark entrance, a unit in a horde of other workers, and registered the instant of her arrival on a time-machine that could in no wise be suborned to perjury. She hung up her wraps in a subterranean cloak-room, and, hurrying to the counter to which she was assigned, first helped in "laying out the stock," and then stood behind her wares, exhibiting, cajoling, selling, until an hour before noon. At that time she was permitted to run away for exactly forty-five minutes for the glass of milk and two pieces of bread and jam that composed her luncheon. This repast disposed of, she returned to the counter and remained behind it, standing like a war-worn watcher on the ramparts of a beleaguered city, till the store closed at six, when there remained to her at least fifteen minutes more of work before her sales-book was balanced and the wares covered up for the night. There were times indeed when she did not leave the store until seven o'clock, but those times were caused rather by customers than by the management of the store, which could prevent new shoppers from entering the doors after six, but could hardly turn out those already inside.

The automatic time-machine and a score of more annoying, and equally automatic, human beings, kept watch upon all that she did. The former, in addition to the floor-walker in her section of the store, recorded her every going and coming, the latter reported every movement not prescribed by the regulations of the establishment; and the result upon Katie and her fellow-workers was much the result observable upon condemned assassins under the unwinking surveillance of the Death Watch.

If Katie was late, she was fined ten cents for each offense. She was reprimanded if her portion of the counter was disordered after a mauling by careless customers. She was fined for all mistakes she made in the matter of prices and the additions on her sales-book; and she was fined if, having asked the floor-walker for three or five minutes to leave the floor in order to tidy her hair and hands, in constant need of attention through the rapidity of her work and the handling of her dyed wares, she exceeded her time limit by so much as a few seconds.

There were no seats behind the counters, and Katie, whatever her physical condition, remained on her feet all day long unless she could arrange for relief by a fellow-worker during that worker's luncheon time. There was no place for rest save a damp, ill-lighted "Recreation Room" in the basement, furnished with a piano that nobody had time to play, magazines that nobody had time to read, and wicker chairs in which nobody had time to sit. All that one might do was to serve the whims and accept the scoldings of women customers who knew too ill, or too well, what they wanted to buy; keep a tight rein upon one's indignation at strolling men who did not intend to buy anything that the shop advertised; be servilely smiling under the innuendoes of the high-collared floor-walkers, in order to escape their wrath; maintain a sharp outlook for the "spotters," or paid spies of the establishment; thwart, if possible, those pretending purchasers who were scouts sent from other stores, and watch for shop-lifters on the one hand and the firm's detectives on the other.

"It ain't a cinch, by no means"--thus ran the departing Cora Costigan's advice to her successor--"but it ain't nothin' now to what it will be in the holidays. I'd rather be dead than work in the toy-department in December--I wonder if the kids guess how we that sells 'em hates the sight of their playthings--and I'd rather be dead _an'_ damned than work in the accounting-department. A girl friend of mine worked there last year,--only it was over to Malcare's store--an' didn't get through her Christmas Eve work till two on Christmas morning, an' she lived over on Staten Island. She overslept on the twenty-sixth, an' they docked her a half-week's pay.

"An' don't never," concluded Cora, "don't never let 'em transfer you to the exchange department. The people that exchange things all belong in the psychopathic ward at Bellevue--them that don't belong in Sing Sing. Half the goods they bring back have been used for days, an' when the store ties a tag on a sent-on-approval opera cloak, the women wriggle the tag inside, an' wear it to the theater with a scarf draped over the string. Thank God, I'm goin' to be married!"

In these conditions Katie found many imperative duties, but none quite so immediately imperative as the repression of Mr. Porter. She had not made her first sale at the main women's hosiery counter on the first floor, to which she had been assigned on her arrival--pretty girls always being favored with first-floor positions--when that tall, gray-whiskered gentleman, his duties in his underground office not at this hour holding him, majestically approached her.

"Good-morning, Miss Flanagan," he said, with a beneficent smile, as he placed his white hand upon her quailing shoulder.

Katie became very busy with the stock that was new to her.

"Good-morning, Mr. Porter," she answered.--"Say, Miss Isaacs, how much do these lisle ones sell at?"

"I thought," said Mr. Porter, fixing her with his apparently emotionless gaze, "that I would just come over and see if you were well taken care of."

"None better, Mr. Porter." Katie smiled sweetly as she said it, and still more sweetly as she significantly added: "Them's always taken good care of as are used to takin' good care of themselves."

Mr. Porter blinked, but his expression, or lack of expression, did not alter.

"No doubt," he responded, as he reluctantly made ready to go away; "but I shall be glad to be of help at any time I can."

"Thank you, Mr. Porter."

"And I shall drop around now and then to see that all goes well."

"Thank you, Mr. Porter."

"Because I was always interested in Miss Costigan--very much interested, and she was very pleasant to me--and I am naturally very much interested in her successor, too."

"Thank you, Mr. Porter."

"And, by the way, Miss Flanagan," he added as his Parthian shaft, "I trust you won't worry over that little loan, you know; there's no hurry in the world about repayment."

Katie met his vacant glance with the innocent eyes of a grateful child.

"That's kind you are, Mr. Porter," she answered, "and since you say it, I shan't worry, sir."

But for all that, she did not by any means dismiss the man from her thoughts. Her true schooling had been received from the textbook of life, and she had readily observed in Porter's demeanor the tokens that announced the beginning of a chase. To one class of hunters there is no closed season, and Katie knew that this class considered her and her kind fair game.

There had been occasions when she had debated seriously, sometimes with herself and sometimes with a companion, whether it was worth while to continue the flight, whether from three to six years of captivity, of toil that must end in death, but that was at least assured of food, were not to be preferred to the continuance of a precarious dodging through the industrial forest with the possibility of starvation lurking behind every bush. But this question she had always, thus far, answered in the negative, at first because of her inherent disinclination to confess defeat in any struggle that engaged her, and at last because of Hermann Hoffmann.

To Katie's cheerful cynicism that blind optimist was an object of unfailing tenderness. She knew how he had been left, when his father's heart was broken after a long battle against an oppressive landlord system, with a gentle mother whom he worshiped and who thus became entirely dependent upon him; how he had sold the few remaining family belongings, escaped the threat of a compulsory military service that would have left Frau Hoffmann in destitution, and come, lured by the glittering promises of one of the immigration agents of a steamship company, to the land where he had been told there existed equality of opportunity for all men. And he had told Katie, in his convincingly simple English, how, a shred at a time, the fabric of his ideal had been torn away; how bitterly he had toiled only to keep his foothold; how the little mother had fallen beneath the stress, and yet how, to the last, he still retained his high hope, and still dreamed of a genuine democracy in a country where the men that worked would eventually become the owners of the wealth that their hands created.

She was thinking of this when, that night, she returned to her tenement and found waiting at her door her neighbor Carrie Berkowicz, the shirt-waist worker, who had told her of the chance of a position at the Lennox shop.

"Hello," said Katie. "Lookin' for me?"

"Yes."

"Come on in."

Katie led the way and lit the lamp, which threw a kindly light over the neat, bare room, with its stiff wooden chairs, its oilcloth-covered table, and the lithograph of Our Lady of the Rosary tacked against the room door. A gas-stove, a cot, a bureau, and a screened-off sink completed the furnishings.

"I'm just gettin' a bite of supper," she said, before she asked the cause of Carrie's visit. "You'd better have some."

"No, thank you," replied the caller, with her careful night-school inflection. "I had mine early."

Katie looked at the speaker, whose round cheeks seemed drawn in a new determination, and whose jaw was swollen as if from a blow.

"How did you get through so early, Carrie?" she inquired.

The little Lithuanian's eyes sparkled.

"We've done it," she said.

"Done what?"

"Gone out."

"Struck?"

Carrie nodded.

"You know how it was," she explained; "all the girls around here do. We've had to work all day long from early morning till late night, Sundays too, and five dollars for the seven days is counted pretty good wages."

"But somebody said the firms' books showed your pay was higher."

"Oh, the books did show it. You see, they carry only a few of us on their salary list, and then each of the foremen hires helpers paid out of one girl's wages. You know as well as I do that most of us live on oatmeal and crackers, and rent one bed in somebody else's tenement."

Katie was acquainted with enough of the shirt-waist makers to be aware that this was true.

"That's so," she granted; "only I thought them things were all ended after the last row."

"Well, they weren't ended; they were only helped for a few months, and now it's summer and most of us would have been laid off. It's the worst time to strike--we know that--but things came to a point where we had to make a fight, or there wouldn't have been any of us left to fight when a better time did come."

"You're talkin' about the union?"

"Yes, that's the real point. The bosses started a union of their own."

"Among themselves?"

"No--they've always had that. I mean they got the new girls into what they called a beneficial association, with the bosses for officers. If you join that, you get all sorts of favors, but you can't join unless you leave the old union."

"Well?"

"Well, then, as soon as they get the beneficial association full enough, they discharge the union girls and, little by little, withdraw the privileges from the Association members, so that things go back to where they were before."

The girl spoke quietly, but Katie remembered many of the evils that Carrie had not mentioned. She recalled how each moment's pause in work meant a deduction from the worker's pay; how the elaborate system of fines taxed the girl whose fingers left her task to rearrange a straying lock of hair, and how the tears forced by overstrained nerves or over-exerted muscles cost the offender almost a fixed price apiece; how the girls that did piecework received no money unless they brought the little check for every article made, the firm thereby saving, through the inevitable loss of some of these checks, a proportion of payment as well known to them and as certain as the mortality rates of life insurance.

"An' so you went out, Carrie?" she said.

"Yes; they turned down our committee at three o'clock this afternoon, and at three-fifteen we had all left the shops. Oh, it was great! But they've got a lot of hands left, and they'll have some of their orders filled in Newark. I don't know how it will end."

"The bosses wouldn't budge?"

"Not an inch. The most they did was to get some of us aside, each away from the rest, and offer us seven dollars a week apiece if we'd fix things up so that our friends would go back to work without any more trouble."

Katie, who well knew what seven dollars a week must mean to this calm, hardworking Lithuanian girl, who had come to America alone and was saving to send her parents money enough to follow, shot a sidelong glance at the speaker; but Carrie's tone had not changed; she seemed unaware that she was narrating anything unusual.

"An' you turned down the offer?" asked Katie.

"Last strike," said Carrie, "one of those union girls was sent out to sell copies of a special edition of _The Call_ for the benefit of the strikers. She hadn't had anything to eat for three days. One man gave her a five-dollar bill for a single paper. Nobody saw him give it; she didn't have to account for it; and she was nearly starved; but she came back and turned in that whole five dollars to the fund. That was one of the girls I was representing this afternoon. Do you suppose I could go back on such girls? Do you suppose I could help myself when I knew it was hurting the others?"

Katie did not immediately reply, but her blue eyes shone. Presently she asked:

"Picket-duty, now, for yours?"

"I began it right away. I spoke to one scab as she came out--just asked her wouldn't she join the union for her own good and ours--just laid my hand on her wrist--but they had the cops ready and their own strong-arm men, and had three of them beating me for my pains."

"Pinched?"

"Of course. The magistrate let me off with a lecture on the rights of every girl to work for starvation-wages if she felt like doing it and like making others starve.--But next time it will be a fine or the workhouse."

Katie had begun to busy herself with the preparations for her meal. She had warmed some coffee on the gas-stove and taken from the cupboard a roll and a few slices of dried beef.

"Look here," she said, stopping in the midst of this task; "how much money have you got?"

"Oh, I'm all right, thanks."

"Maybe you are, but you might as well be better. Now, the while the strike lasts, just you give up that room acrost the hall an' come over here with me."

Carrie's brown locks shook in doubtful refusal.

"You're the real goods," she said; "but I don't have to do that."

"Of course you don't have to, but I'd take it a real kindness. What's the use o' keepin' a whole room to yourself when you'll be spendin' parts of the time in jail?"

Carrie laughed.

"Will you let me pay half?" she asked.

"Sure I will."

"Then perhaps----"

"That's settled," ended Katie, and it was arranged that Carrie's few sticks of furniture should be moved into the Irish girl's quarters the next morning.

The details had just been settled when Hermann entered, his cheerful lips concluding the last bar of "Die Wacht Am Rhein."

"Hello!" said Katie, smiling. "Are you out of a job, too? Or are you just goin' to be late the night?"

Hermann pulled his cap from his blonde curls and, with blushing cheeks, grinned broadly.

"Needer," he answered. "I'm chust on my vay to de saloon." He twisted his cap between his awkward fingers. "I vanted only to ask you somesing, Katie."

"All right. Sit down an' ask it. You know Carrie. Don't mind her."

"Sure I know her, only----"

Carrie rose. She was aware of the pair's relations, and too firmly bound by East Side etiquette to think it well to make of herself that third person who constitutes a crowd.

"I've got to be going," she said.

"Don't you pay no attention to him," Katie objected. "Sit still. Have some coffee, Hermann-boy?"

But Hermann shook his head.

"No, thank you," he said. "I've got chust a minute."

"Then what was it you were wishin' to say?"

"Aboud dot girl I dalked to you aboud on our vay to Coney. You see now you have a tshob, it seemed like ve might do somesing for her."

Katie dropped all trace of banter.

"I'll tell you how it is, Hermann," she said, and she did tell him.

As soon as she had secured her place, she had determined to help. At present much financial assistance was impossible, and employment there was none. It would be dangerous, moreover, to all concerned--not least of all to Violet--for the girl to make a dash for liberty in any manner that would give to Rose a chance to secure vengeance through her friends the police. But Katie was decided, and Carrie at once agreed, that, could the escape be arranged, Violet might at least be sheltered in Katie's room until some work should be found for her.

"All I want to know, Hermann-boy," concluded Katie, "is however in the world we're goin' to get word to her."

"Dot's chust vat I vanted fer to tell you aboud," said Hermann. "You know Conrad Schultz. He's now got my route vith de brewery-vagon. De stable's chust two doors round de corner. I've explained to him, und he'll slip a note to Miss Violet the first dime he sees her."

"We'll write to-night," said Carrie.

"An' I'll hand it to him on my way to work in th' mornin'," added Katie. "Now you run along or you'll be docked."

Hermann assented, smiling. He turned to the door, fumbled with the knob, and dropped his cap. Katie, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand, stooped to recover it just as Hermann himself bent forward. In the presence of a third person, the German felt a sudden thrill of courage.

"Ach, but you're a goot girl, Katie!" he cried. "Und here's a liddle revard fer it!"

He seized his cap, jerked her black head toward him, and imprinted a resounding kiss on her pink cheek.

Katie laughed and broke free. She spilled some of the coffee, but she administered a smart blow with her open palm on the offending mouth.

"You'd never dared to do it if you hadn't thought I had me hands full!" she called after her lover as he clattered heavily and happily down the stairs. "An' just in revenge for that," she added, still blushing, to Carrie, as she closed the door, "me an' you'll go out for a little spree of our own to-night."

"Where to?" asked the factory-girl.

"To a dance," answered Katie. "Me feet have got that lazy walkin' after a job that I'm afraid they'll forget all the dancin'-steps they ever knew, unless I hurry an' get some practicin' again."

"I don't know," said Carrie, doubtfully, "I've got to get up early in the morning."

"An' what about me? Besides, haven't I got me friend, the alarm-clock?"

"But my jaw's smashed from that fight."

"Who'll see it?"

"Let's make it a moving-picture show."

"An' pay the same for half an hour's headache that we could get a whole night's dancin' for?"

"I've got to be walking the picket-line all day to-morrow."

"Yes, an' I have to be standin' behind a counter. You haven't got nothin' on me there. Get your wraps together now an' come ahead, Carrie. I hear there's a new place opened on Grand Street."

Carrie knew how to dance--the poorest girl on the East Side knows that, because not to dance is to miss the one amusement obtainable by the very poor--and, like Katie, she was of that relatively small army that can frequent the dance-halls for perhaps as much as a year without contamination. Before she had taken her course at the night-school, she had even danced in the rooms that the Hebrew politicians provide behind their saloons near Houston Street, where she had seen cadets successfully ply their trade among bland-faced immigrant girls whose very language was unknown to them; and she was therefore wholly prepared for the picture that she confronted when, Katie having paid her ten cents for the two admissions, they entered the low-ceilinged basement of a saloon and tenement-house, and came upon the meeting-place of the Danny Delancy Social Club.

Through a veil of dust raised by stamping feet and swirling skirts, through a cloud of heat from a room with every window closed, through a blast of odors compounded of the fumes of alcohol, the scent of tobacco, and the miasma of sweating men and women, there rose, from somewhere, the cries of a beaten piano, struck and thumped into a shrieking likeness to the "Chocolate Soldier" waltz, which only now and then was made at all audible above the rhythmic hubbub. Although the evenings of Saturdays and Sundays were the most popular for dancing, the floor was so crowded that only the expertness of these trained dancers prevented collision and panic. The steam from the bodies of the performers joined with the dry dust in half obscuring the blue-burning gas. The strident laughter of the patrons helped the scraping of their feet in subduing the sounds of the piano. The men gyrated grimly in wet shirt-sleeves, and the women, affecting the most somber shades chosen for the longest wear, spun in their partners' arms with stolid, gum-grinding jaws and lips that were mirthless. Except for the youthful "spielers" admitted without charge, or even hired, to dance with the awkward or make wall-flowers sufficiently happy to insure their return, there were but two types of men among the patrons. There was the native of the quarter, heavy-faced, large-muscled, quick to anger and ready with the fists, a hard-drinking, hard-living sort, no more careful of his neighbor's morals than of his own, yet good-natured, easy-going, pliable. And winding in and out among these, slow and suave, like some sleek species of vulture, were the young men that came there not for pleasure, but for profit, always-smiling young men with manners offensively elaborate, whose shining black hair smelled of oil, whose skin was like decaying dough, and whose entire time was spent in making the acquaintance of new girls, giving dancing-lessons to new girls in crowded corners, and taking new girls into the adjoining back-bar for a drink.