Chapter 15

But eight and one-half hours a day of parrying the advances of affectionate waiters--a law should be passed limiting the cause for such exertion to two hours a day, no overtime. Nor have I taken the gentle reader into my confidence regarding the Spanish chef in the main kitchen. He did the roasting. I had to pass his stove on my way to the elevators. At which he dropped everything, wiped his hands on his apron, and beamed from ear to ear until I got by. One day he dashed along beside me and directed an outburst of Spanish into my ear. When I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders and got it into his head that I was not a countrywoman, his dismay was purely temporary. He spoke rather flowery English. Would I walk up the stairs with him? No, I preferred the elevator. He, did too. I made the most of it by asking him questions too fast for him to ask me any. He was a tailor by trade, but business had been dull for months. In despair he had taken to roasting. Some six months he had been at our hotel. He much preferred tailoring, and in two months he would be back at his trade in a little shop of his own, making about fifty to seventy-five dollars a week. And then he got in his first question.

"Are you married?"

"No."

"Could I then ask you to go out with me some evening?"--all this with many beams and wipings of hands on his apron.

Well, I was very busy.

But one evening. Oh, just one evening--surely one evening.

Well, perhaps--

To-night, then?

No, not to-night.

To-morrow night?

No, no night this week or next week, but perhaps week after next.

Ah, that is so long, so long!

There was no earthly way to get to the stairs or elevators except by his stove. I came to dread it. Always the Spanish ex-tailor dropped everything with a clatter and chased after me. I managed to pass his confines at greater and greater speed. Invariably I heard his panting, "Listen! Listen!" after me, but I tore on, hoping to get an elevator that started up before he could make it.

One day the Spaniard, this tall thin roaster with the black mustache, was waiting as I came out of the locker room.

"Listen! Listen!" he panted, from force of habit. "Next week is still so very long off."

It so happened it was my last day at the hotel. I told him I was leaving that night.

"Oh, miss!" He looked really upset. "Then you will go out to-night with me. Surely to-night."

No, I had a date.

To-morrow night.

No, I had another date.

Sunday--oh, Sunday, just one Sunday.

Sunday I had two dates.

I should be able to flatter my female soul that at least he forgot the seasoning that night in his roasts.

Downstairs that first Saturday the little quiet Spaniard of the pies and ice cream screwed up his courage, crossed over to my precinct, leaned his arms on my front counter, and said, "If I had a wife like you I would be happy all the rest of my life!"

Having delivered himself of those sentiments, he hastily returned to his pies and ice cream.

The Greek coffee man would take me to a show that night.

Saturday, to my surprise, was a slack day in the café business. Trade is always light. Sunday our kitchen closed shop. Another reason why my job held allurements. I was the only girl to get Sunday off. Also, because we were the only department in the hotel to close down altogether, it seems we were wont to have an annual picnic. Alas that I had to miss it!

Plans were just taking shape, too, for this year's event. Last year they motored over to Long Island. Much food, many drinks. It was a rosy memory. This year Kelly wanted a hay ride. Kelly, he of the highly colored past, even so contended there was nothing in the world like the smell of hay.

There was no fun to the supper that Saturday night. I sat at a table with a deaf girl, two dirty men, and a fat, flabby female with pop eyes, and not a one of them acted as if he possessed the ability to speak. Except the deaf girl, who did tell me she couldn't hear.

So I ate hastily and made for the recreation room. For the first time the piano was in use. A chambermaid, surrounded by four admiring fellow-workers, was playing "Oh, they're killin' men and women for a wearin' of the green." That is, I made out she meant it for that tune. With the right hand she picked out what every now and then approached that melody. With the left she did a tum-te-dum which she left entirely to chance, the right hand and its perplexities needing her entire attention. During all of this, without intermission, her foot conscientiously pressed the loud pedal.

Altogether there were seven in the chambermaid's audience. I sat down next to a little wrinkled auburn-haired Irish chambermaid whose face looked positively inspired. She beat time with one foot and both hands. "Ain't it jus' grand!" she whispered to me. "If I c'u'd jus' play like that!" Her eyes sought the ceiling. When the player had finished her rendition there was much applause. One girl left the clouds long enough to ask, "Oh, Jennie, is it really true you never took a lesson?" Jennie admitted it was true. "Think of that, now!" the little woman by me gasped.

The chambermaid next gave an original interpretation of "Believe me if all those endearing young charms." At least it was nearer that than anything else. I had to tear myself away in the middle of what five out of seven people finally would have guessed was "Way down upon the Suwanee River." The faces of the audience were still wreathed in that expression you may catch on a few faces at Carnegie Hall.

Monday there was a chambermaids' meeting. Much excitement. They had been getting seven dollars a week. The management wished to change and pay them by the month, instead--thirty dollars a month. There was something underhanded about it, the girls were sure of that. In addition there was a general feeling that everyone was in for more or less of a cut in wages about September. A general undertone of suspicion that day was over everything and everybody. Several chambermaids were waiting around the recreation room the few moments before the meeting. They were upset over that sign under the picture of Christ, "No cursing no stealing when tempted look on his kindly face." As long as they'd been in that hotel they'd never heard no cursin' among the girls, and as for stealin'--well, they guessed the guests stole more than ever the girls did. There were too many squealers around that hotel, that was the trouble. One girl spoke up and said it wasn't the hotel. New York was all squealers--worst "race" she ever knew for meanness to one another--nothin' you'd ever see in the Irish!

I thought back over the dinner conversation that noon. An Irish girl asked me what my hurry was, when my work didn't begin till 1.30. I told her I helped out the Spanish woman and remarked that I thought it wrong that she didn't get more pay than I. "Say," said the Irish girl, "you jus' look out for your own self in this world and don't you go round worryin' over no one else. You got number one to look out for and that's all."

The excitement of the day was that the Big Boss for the first time took note of the fact I was alive. He said good evening and thought he'd look in my ice chest. My heart did flutter, but I knew I was safe. I had scrubbed and polished that ice chest till it creaked and groaned the Saturday night before. The brass parts were blinding. But there was too much food in it for that hour of the night. He called Schmitz--Schmitz was abject reverence and acquiescence. It was, of course, Kelly's fault for leaving so much stuff there when he went at 3. And Kelly was gruff as a bear next day. Evidently the Big Boss spoke to him about sending stuff upstairs after the lunch rush was over. He almost broke the plates hurling things out of the ice box at 2.30. And the names he called Schmitz I dare not repeat. He swore and he swore and he _swore_! And he stripped the ice box all but bare.

How down on prohibition were Kelly and many of those waiters! Perhaps all the waiters, but I did not hear all express opinions. A waiter was talking to Kelly about it in front of my counter one day. "How can we keep this up?" the waiter moaned. "There was a time when if you got desperate you could take a nip and it carried you over. But I ask you, how can a man live when he works like this and works and then goes home and sits around and goes to bed, and then gets up and goes back and works and works, and then goes home and sits around? You put a dollar down on the table and look at it, and then pick it up and put it in your pocket again. Hell of a life, I say, and I don't see how we can keep it up with never a drink to make a man forget his troubles!"

Kelly put forth that favorite claim that there was far more evil-doing of every sort and description since prohibition than before--and then added that everyone had his home-brew anyhow. He told of how the chefs and he got to the hotel early one morning and started to make up six gallons of home-brew down in our kitchen. Only, o' course, "some dirty guy had to go an' squeal" on 'em and Kelly 'most lost his job, did Kelly.

I had a very nice Italian friend--second cook, he called himself--who used to come over to the compartment of Monsieur Le Bon Chef and talk over the partition to me every afternoon from four to half past. He also was not in the least fresh, but just talked and talked about many things. His first name in Italian was "Eusebio," but he found it more convenient in our land to go under the name of "Vwictor." He came from a village of fifty inhabitants not far from Turin, almost on the Swiss border, where they had snow nine months in the year. Why had he journeyed to America? "Oh, I donno. Italians in my home town have too little money and too many children."

Victor was an intelligent talker. I asked him many questions about the labor problem generally. When he first came to this country seven years ago he started work in the kitchen of the Waldorf-Astoria. In those days pay for the sort of general unskilled work he did was fifteen to eighteen dollars a month. Every other day hours were from 6 A.M. to 8.30 P.M.; in between days they got off from 2 to 5 in the afternoon. Now, in the very same job, a man works eight hours a day and gets eighteen dollars a week. Victor at present drew twenty-two dollars a week, plus every chef's allotment of two dollars and forty cents a week "beer money." (It used to be four bottles of beer a day at ten cents a bottle. Now that beer was a doubtful bestowal, the hotels issued weekly "beer money." You could still buy beer at ten cents a bottle, only practically everyone preferred the cash.)

But Victor thought he was as well off seven years ago on eighteen dollars a month as he would be to-day on eighteen dollars a week. Then, it seems, he had a nice room with one other man for four dollars a month, including laundry. Now he rooms alone, it is true, but he pays five dollars a week for a room he claims is little, if any, better than the old one, and a dollar a week extra for laundry. Then he paid two to three dollars for a pair of shoes, now ten or twelve, and they wear out as fast as the two-dollar shoes of seven years before. Now fifty dollars for a suit no better than the one he used to get for fifteen dollars. Thus spoke Victor.

Besides, Victor could save nothing now, for he had a girl, and you know how it is with women. It's got to be a present all the time. You can't get 'em by a store window without you go in and buy a waist or a hat or goodness knows what all a girl doesn't manage to want. He went into detail over his recent gifts. Why was he so generous as all that to his fair one? Because if he didn't get the things for her he was afraid some other man would.

Nor could Victor understand how people lived in this country without playing more. Every night, every single night, he must find some countryman and play around a little bit before going to bed. "These fellas who work and work all day, and then eat some dinner, and then go home and sit around and go to bed." No, Victor preferred death to such stagnation. If it was only a game of cards and a glass of wine (prohibition did not seem to exist for Victor and his countrymen) or just walking around the streets, talking. _Anything_, so long as it was _something_.

Victor was a union man. Oh, sure. He was glowing with pride and admiration in the union movement in Italy--there indeed they accomplished things! But in this country, no, the union movement would never amount to much here. For two reasons. One was that working people on the whole were treated too well here to make good unionists. Pay a man good wages and give him the eight-hour day--what kind of a union man will he make? The chances are he won't join at all.

But the main reason why unions would never amount to much here was centered in the race question. Victor told of several cooks' strikes he had been in. What happens? A man stands up and says something, then everybody else says, "Don't listen to him; he's only an Irishman." Some one else says something, and everyone says, "Don't pay any attention to him; he's only an Italian." The next man--he's only a Russian, and so on.

Then pretty soon what happens next? Pretty soon a Greek decides he'll go back to work, and then all the Greeks go back; next an Austrian goes back--all his countrymen follow. And, anyhow, says my Italian friend Eusebio, you can't understand nothin' all them foreigners say, anyhow.

I asked him if Monsieur Le Bon Chef after his start as a strike breaker had finally joined a union. "Oh, I guess he's civilized now," grinned Victor.

Numerous times one person or another about our hotel spoke of the suddenness with which the workers there would be fired. "Bing, you go!" just like that. Kelly, who had been working there over two years, told me that the only way to think of a job was to expect to be fired every day. He claimed he spent his hour's ride in to work every morning preparing himself not to see his time card in the rack, which would mean no more job for him.

I asked Victor one day about the girl who had held my job a year and a half and why she was fired. There was a story for you! Kelly a few days before had told me that he was usually able to "get" anybody. "Take that girl now what had your job. I got her. She was snippy to me two or three times and I won't stand that. It's all right if anybody wants to get good and mad, but I detest snippy folks. So I said to myself, 'I'll get you, young lady,' and within three days I had her!"

Kelly was called away and never finished the story, but Victor did. The girl, it seems, got several slices of ham one day from one of the chefs. She wrapped them carefully in a newspaper and later started up the stairs with the paper folded under her arm, evidently bound for the locker room. Kelly was standing at the foot of the stairs--"Somebody had tipped him off, see?"

"What's the news to-day?" asked Kelly.

"'Ain't had time to read the paper yet," the girl replied.

"Suppose we read it now together," said Kelly, whereupon he slipped the paper out from under her arm and exposed the ham to view.

"You're fired!" said Kelly.

He sent her up to the Big Boss, and he did everything he could think of to get the girl to tell which chef had given her the ham. The girl refused absolutely to divulge that.

The Big Boss came down to our kitchen. He asked each chef in turn if he had given the girl the ham, and each chef in turn said _No_.

The Big Boss came back again in a few minutes. "We can put the detective force of the hotel on this job and find out within a few days who _did_ give that ham away and the man will be fired. But I don't want to do it that way. If the man who did it will confess right now that he did I promise absolutely he will not be fired."

A chef spoke up, "I did it."

Within fifteen minutes he was fired.

* * * * *

As ever, the day for leaving arrived. This time I gave notice to Kelly three days in advance, so that a girl could be found to take my place. "The Big Chief and I both said when we seen you, she won't stay long at this job."

"Why not?" I indignantly asked Kelly.

"Ah, shucks!" sighed Kelly. Later: "Well, you're a good kid. You were making good at your job, too. Only I'll tell y' this. You're too conscientious. Don't pay."

And still later, "Aw, forget this working business and get married."

There was much red tape to leaving that hotel--people to see, cards to sign and get signed. Everyone was nice. I told Kelly--and the news spread--the truth, that I was unexpectedly going to Europe, being taken by the same lady who brought me out from California, her whose kids I looked after. If after six months I didn't like it in Europe--and everyone was rather doubtful that I would, because they don't treat workin' girls so very well in Europe--the lady would pay my way back to America second-class. (The Lord save my soul.)

I told Schmitz I was going on the afternoon of the evening I was to leave. Of course he knew it from Kelly and the others. "Be sure you don't forget to leave your paring knife," was Schmitz's one comment.

Farewells were said--I did surely feel like the belle of the ball that last half hour. On the way out I decided to let bygones be bygones and sought out Schmitz to say good-by.

"You sure you left that paring knife?" said Schmitz.

CONCLUSION

Here I sit in all the peace and stillness of the Cape Cod coast, days filled with only such work as I love, and play aplenty, healthy youngsters frolicky about me, the warmest of friends close by. The larder is stocked with good food, good books are on the shelves, each day starts and ends with a joyous feeling about the heart.

And I, this sunburnt, carefree person, pretend to have been as a worker among workers. Again some one says, "The artificiality of it!"

Back in that hot New York the girls I labored among are still packing chocolates, cutting wick holes for brass lamp cones, ironing "family," beading in the crowded dress factory. Up at the Falls they are hemming sheets and ticketing pillow cases. In the basement of the hotel some pantry girl, sweltering between the toaster and the egg boiler, is watching the clock to see if rush time isn't almost by.

Granted at the start, if you remember, and granted through each individual job, it was artificial--my part in it all. But what in the world was there to do about that? I was determined that not forever would I take the say-so of others on every phase of the labor problem. Some things I would experience for myself. Certain it is I cannot know any less than before I started. Could I help knowing at least a bit more? I do know more--I know that I know more!

And yet again I feel constrained to call attention to the fact that six jobs, even if the results of each experience were the very richest possible, are but an infinitesimal drop in what must be a full bucket of industrial education before a person should feel qualified to speak with authority on the subject of labor. Certain lessons were learned, certain tentative conclusions arrived at. They are given here for what they may be worth and in a very humble spirit. Indeed, I am much more humble in the matter of my ideas concerning labor than before I took my first job.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson learned was that a deep distrust of generalizations has been acquired, to last, I hope, the rest of life. It is so easy, so comfortable, to make a statement of fact to cover thousands of cases. Nowhere does the temptation seem to be greater than in a discussion of labor. "Labor wants this and that!" "Labor thinks thus and so!" "Labor does this and the other thing!" Thus speaks the labor propagandist, feeling the thrill of solid millions behind him; thus speaks the "capitalist," feeling the antagonism of solid millions against him.

And all this time, how many hearts really beat as one in the labor world?

Indeed, the situation would clear up with more rapidity if we went to the other extreme and thought of labor always as thirty million separate individuals. We would be nearer the truth than to consider them as this one great like-minded mass, all yearning for the same spiritual freedom; all eager for the downfall of capitalism.

What can one individual know of the hopes and desires of thirty millions? Indeed, it is a rare situation where one person can speak honestly and intelligently for one hundred others. Most of us know precious little about ourselves. We understand still less concerning anyone else. In a very general way, everyone in the nation wants the same things. That is a good point to remember, for those who would exaggerate group distinctions. In a particular way, no two people function exactly alike, have the same ambitions, same capacities.

There is, indeed, no great like-minded mass of laborers. Instead we have millions of workers split into countless small groups, whose group interests in the great majority of cases loom larger on the horizon than any hold the labor movement, as such, might have on them. Such interests, for instance, as family, nationality, religion, politics. Besides, there is the division which sex interests and rivalries make--the conflict, too, between youth and age.

Yet for the sake of a working efficiency we must do a minimum of classifying. Thirty million is too large a number to handle separately. There seems to be a justification for a division of labor, industrially considered, into three groups, realizing the division is a very loose one:

1. Labor or class-conscious group. 2. Industrially conscious group. 3. Industrially nonconscious group.

The great problem of the immediate future is to get groups 1 and 3 into Group 2. The more idealistic problem of the more distant future is to turn a great industrially conscious group into a socially conscious group.

* * * * *

By the first group, the labor or class-conscious group, is meant the members of the American Federation of Labor, Industrial Workers of the World, four railroad Brotherhoods, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, socialist and communist organizations--workers whose affiliations with certain bodies tend to make them ultraconscious of the fact that they are wage workers and against the capitalist system. Class antagonism is fostered. There is much use of the word "exploited." In their press and on their platforms such expressions are emphasized as "profits for the lazy who exploit the workers." Everything possible is done to paint labor white, the employer black, forgetting that no side has the monopoly in any shade.

To those who from sympathy or antagonism would picture at least organized labor as like-minded, it must be pointed out that for the great part the several millions represented by Group 1 are perhaps more often warring in their aims and desires than acting as one. Never have they acted as one. Organized labor represents but a fraction of labor as a whole. Some more or less spectacular action on the part of capital against labor always tends to solidify the organized workers. They are potentially like-minded in specific instances. Otherwise the interests of the carpenters' union tends to overshadow the interests of the A. F. of L. as a whole; the interests of the A. F. of L. tend most decidedly to overshadow the interests of organized labor as a whole. Socialists bark at communists. Charges of capitalist tendencies are made against the four Brotherhoods. The women's unions feel legislated against in the affairs of labor. Indeed, only utter stupidity on the part of capital ever could weld organized labor into enough solidarity to get society or anyone else agitated for long. Much of the "open shop" fight borders on such stupidity.