Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives. Campbell Helen

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СКАЧАТЬ Ah! that’s good!” she added, for the girl had shaken off her hand and sped away as swiftly as she had come. “That’s seven since yesterday, and I wish it were seven hundred. It’s time somebody turned watchdog.”

      “That ain’t your business. That’s a matter for the law,” said the big policeman, who had glanced anxiously up to the second-story window and then looked reassured and serene, as the stout gentleman made a significant movement, which indicated that bribery was as possible for one sex as for the other. “The law’ll straighten out anything that you’ve a mind to have it.”

      “The law! Lord help them that think the law is going to see them through,” the small woman said, with a fierceness that made the big policeman start and lay his hand on his club. “What’s the law worth when it can’t give to you one dollar of two hundred and eight that’s owed; and she that earned them gasping her life out with consumption? If it was my account alone do you suppose I’d care? Mine’s eighty-five, and I went to law for it, to find she’d as long a head as she has smooth tongue, and had fixed things so that there wasn’t a stick of furniture nor a dollar of property that could be levied on. If she’d been a man the new law that gives a cheating employer fifteen days’ imprisonment might have worked with her as it’s worked with many a rascal that never knew he could be brought up with a round turn. But she’s a woman and she slides through, and a judgment against her isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. So as I can’t take it out in money I take it out in being even with her. There are the papers that show I don’t lie, and here I sit the time I’ve fixed to sit, and if she gets the three new hands she’s after, it won’t be because I haven’t done what came to me to do to hinder it.”

      The policeman had moved away before the words ended, the stout gentleman having descended the steps for a moment, and stood in a position which rendered his little transaction feasible and almost invisible. He beckoned to me as the small woman sat down again on the steps, and I followed him into the vestibule.

      “You’re interested, my dear madam,” he said. “You’re interested, and you ought to be. I’ve stayed home from business to make sure she wasn’t interfered with, and I’d do it again with the greatest pleasure. I’d like to post one like her before every establishment in New York where cheating goes on, and I’m going to see this thing through!”

      There was no time for questions. My appointment must be kept, and with one pause to take the name and number of the small Nemesis I went my way. Three days later she sat there still, and on the following one, as the warm spring rain fell steadily, she kept her post, sheathed in a rubber cloak, and protected by an umbrella which, from its size and quality, I felt must be the stout gentleman’s. With Saturday night her self-imposed siege ended, and she marched away, leaving the enemy badly discomfited and much more disposed to consider the rights of the individual, if not of the worker in general. As Madame’s prices were never less than fifty dollars for the making of a suit, ranging from this to a hundred or more, and as her three children were still small and her husband an undiscoverable factor, it became an interesting question to know where she placed the profits which, even when lessened by non-paying customers, could never be anything but great. Madame, however, had been too keen even for the sharp-witted lawyer of the Protective Union, whose utmost efforts only disclosed the fact that she was the probable backer of a manufacturer whose factory and farm were on Long Island, and whose business capacity had till within a few years never insured him more than a bare living.

      It is an old story, yet an always new one, and in this case Madame had quieted her conscience by providing a comfortable lunch for the workers and allowing them more space than is generally the portion in a busy establishment. Well housed and well fed through the day and paid at intervals enough to meet the demands of rent or board bill, it was easy to satisfy her hands by the promise of full and speedy settlement, and when this failed, to tell a pitiful tale of unpaid bills and conscienceless customers, who could not be forced. When these resources were exhausted discharge solved any further difficulties, and a new set came in, to undergo the same experience. In an establishment where honesty has any place, the wages are rather beyond the average, skirt-hands receiving from seven to nine dollars a week and waist-hands from ten to fifteen. In the case of stores this latter class make from eighteen to forty dollars per week, and often accumulate enough capital to start in business for themselves. But a skirt-hand like Mary M – seldom passes on to anything higher, and counts herself well paid if her week of sixty hours brings her nine dollars, not daring to grumble seriously if it falls to seven or even six. On the east side the same work must be done for from four to six dollars a week, the latter sum being considered high pay. But the work is an advance upon factory work and has a better sound, the dressmaker’s assistant looking down upon the factory hand or even the seamstress as of an inferior order.

      In time I learned the full story of the little woman, ordinarily reticent and shrinking, but brought by trouble and indignation to the fiercest protest against oppression. Born in a New-England village she had learned a milliner’s trade, to which she presently added dressmaking, and succeeded in making a fair living, till bitten by the desire to see larger life and share all the good that the city seems to offer the shut-in country life, she came to New York with her small savings, expecting to find work easily, and did so, going at once into a store where a friend was at work. Sanitary conditions were all bad. Her hall bedroom on a fourth floor and the close confinement all did their work, and a long illness wasted strength and savings. When recovery came her place had been filled; and she wandered from store to store seeking employment, doing such odd jobs as were found at intervals, and powerless to recover the lost ground.

      “It was like heaven to me,” she said, “when my friend came back to the city and got me that place as skirt-hand at Madame M – ’s. I was so far gone I had even thought of the river, and said to myself it might be the easiest way out. You can’t help but like Madame, for she’s smooth-tongued and easy, and praises your work, and she made me think I’d soon be advanced and get the place I ought to have. She paid regularly at first, and I began to pick up courage. It was over-hours always. Madame would come in smiling and say: ‘Ah, dear girls! What trouble! It is an order that must be finished so soon. Who will be kind and stay so leetle longer?’ Then we all stayed, and she’d have tea made and send it in, and sandwiches or something good, and they all said, ‘She’s an angel. You won’t find anybody like Madame.’ She was so plausible, too, that even when there was longer and longer time between the payments the girls didn’t blame her, but borrowed of one another and put off their landladies and managed all ways to save her feelings. Jenny G – had been here longer than any of them, and she worshipped Madame and wouldn’t hear a word even when one or another complained. But Jenny’s feet were on the ground and she hadn’t a stitch of warm underclothes, and she took a cold in December, and by January it had tight hold of her. I went to Madame myself then, and begged her to pay Jenny if it wasn’t but a little, and she cried and said if she could only raise the money she would. She didn’t; and by and by I went again, and then she turned ugly. I looked at her dumfounded when she spoke her real mind and said if we didn’t like it we could leave; there were plenty of others. I wouldn’t believe my ears even, and said to myself she was worn out with trouble and couldn’t mean a word of it. I wanted money for myself, but I wouldn’t ask even for anybody but Jenny.

      “Next day Madame brought her ten dollars of the two hundred and twenty she owed her, and Jenny got shoes; but it was too late. I knew it well, for I’d seen my sister go the same way. Quick consumption ain’t to be stopped with new shoes or anything but new lungs, and there’s no patent for them yet that ever I’ve heard of. She was going last night when I went round, and sure as you live I’m going to put her death in the paper myself. I’ve been saving my money off lunches to do it, and I’ll write it: ‘Murdered by a fashionable dressmaker on – Street, in January, 1886, Jenny G – , age nineteen years and six months.’ Maybe they won’t put it in, but here it is, ready for any paper that’s got feeling enough to care whether sewing-girls are cheated and starved and killed, or whether they get what they’ve earned. I’ve got work at home now. It don’t matter so much to me; but I’m a committee to attend to this thing, and I’ll СКАЧАТЬ