The Long Day: the Story of a New York Working Girl, As Told by Herself

Part 1

THE LONG DAY

The Story of a New York Working Girl * * As Told by Herself

New York The Century Co. 1905

Copyright, 1905, by The Century Co.

Published October, 1905

The Devinne Press

TO MY THREE "LADY-FRIENDS"

Happy, fortunate Minnie; Bessie, of gentle memory; and that other, silent figure in the tragedy of Failure, the long-lost, erring Eunice, with the hope that, if she still lives, her eye may chance to fall upon this page, and reading the message of this book, she may heed.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK 3

II IN WHICH I START OUT IN QUEST OF WORK 16

III I TRY "LIGHT" HOUSEKEEPING IN A FOURTEENTH-STREET LODGING-HOUSE 27

IV WHEREIN FATE BRINGS ME GOOD FORTUNE IN ONE HAND AND DISASTER IN THE OTHER 44

V IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PHOEBE IN THE ART OF BOX-MAKING 58

VI IN WHICH PHOEBE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH UPON MUSIC AND LITERATURE 75

VII IN WHICH I ACQUIRE A STORY-BOOK NAME AND MAKE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MISS HENRIETTA MANNERS 92

VIII WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS 108

IX INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND" 123

X IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF A HOMELESS WANDERER IN THE NIGHT 142

XI I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS 151

XII IN WHICH I SPEND A HAPPY FOUR WEEKS MAKING ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS 180

XIII THREE "LADY-FRIENDS," AND THE ADVENTURES THAT BEFALL THEM 197

XIV IN WHICH A TRAGIC FATE OVERTAKES MY "LADY-FRIENDS" 215

XV I BECOME A "SHAKER" IN A STEAM-LAUNDRY 229

XVI IN WHICH IT IS PROVED TO ME THAT THE DARKEST HOUR COMES JUST BEFORE THE DAWN 249

EPILOGUE 266

THE LONG DAY

Part 2

IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK

The rain was falling in great gray blobs upon the skylight of the little room in which I opened my eyes on that February morning whence dates the chronological beginning of this autobiography. The jangle of a bell had awakened me, and its harsh, discordant echoes were still trembling upon the chill gloom of the daybreak. Lying there, I wondered whether I had really heard a bell ringing, or had only dreamed it. Everything about me was so strange, so painfully new. Never before had I waked to find myself in that dreary, windowless little room, and never before had I lain in that narrow, unfriendly bed.

Staring hard at the streaming skylight, I tried to think, to recall some one of the circumstances that might possibly account for my having entered that room and for my having laid me down on that cot. When? and how? and why? How inexplicable it all was in those first dazed moments after that rude awakening! And then, as the fantasies of a dream gradually assume a certain vague order in the waking recollection, there came to me a confused consciousness of the events of the preceding twenty-four hours--the long journey and the weariness of it; the interminable frieze of flying landscape, with its dreary, snow-covered stretches blurred with black towns; the shriek of the locomotive as it plunged through the darkness; the tolling of ferry-bells, and then, at last, the slow sailing over a black river toward and into a giant city that hung splendid upon the purple night, turret upon turret, and tower upon tower, their myriad lights burning side by side with the stars, a city such as the prophets saw in visions, a city such as dreamy childhood conjures up in the muster of summer clouds at sunset.

Suddenly out of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill in western Pennsylvania. With equal suddenness, too, the fugue of thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings of ferry-bells massed itself into the clangorous music of a terrifying monody--"WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!"

And then I remembered! An unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of eighteen, utterly alone in the world, I was a stranger in a strange city which I had not yet so much as seen by daylight. I was a waif and a stray in the mighty city of New York. Here I had come to live and to toil--out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and stress of the wide, wide, workaday world. Very wide awake now, I jumped out of bed upon the cold oil-cloth and touched a match to the pile of paper and kindling-wood in the small stove. There was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip in falling had brushed against the sleeve of my shirt-waist and soaked into the soles of my only pair of shoes. I dressed as quickly as the cold and my sodden garments permitted. On the washstand I found a small tin ewer and a small tin basin to match, and I dabbed myself gingerly in the cold, stale water.

Another jangle of the harsh bell, and I went down dark stairs to the basement and to breakfast, wondering if I should be able to recognize Miss Jamison; for I had caught but a glimpse of my new landlady on my arrival the previous midnight. Wrapped in a faded French flannel kimono, her face smeared with cold cream, her hair done up in curling "kids," she had met and arranged terms with me on the landing in front of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono, curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance, respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted to myself. The secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association, to which I had written some weeks before for information as to respectable and cheap boarding-houses, had responded with a number of names and addresses, among them that of Miss Elmira Jamison, "a lady of very high Christian ideals."

Miss Jamison was no disappointment. She fulfilled perfectly all my preconceived notions of what she would look like when properly attired. Spying me the moment I got inside the dining-room door, she immediately pounced upon me and hurried me off to a seat, when a girl in a dirty white apron began to unload off a tray a clatter of small dishes under my nose, while another servant tossed a wet, warm napkin upon my plate. My breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things in the collection of dishes, and which I ate with not the greatest relish in the world.

There were several score of breakfasters in the two big rooms, which seemed to occupy the entire basement floor. They ate at little tables set uncomfortably close together. Gradually my general observations narrowed down to the people at my own table. I noticed a young man opposite who wore eye-glasses and a carefully brushed beard; an old lady, with a cataract in her left eye, who sat at the far end of the table; a little fidgety, stupid-looking, and very ugly woman who sat next the bearded young man; and a young girl, with dancing, roguish black eyes, who sat beside me. The bearded young man talked at a great rate, and judging from the cackling laughter of the fidgety woman and the intensely interested expression of the cataracted lady, the subject was one of absorbing interest.

Gradually I discovered that the topic of discourse was none other than our common hostess and landlady; and gradually, too, I found myself listening to the history of Miss Elmira Jamison's career as a purveyor of bed and board to impecunious and homeless mortals.

Five years ago Miss Jamison had come into this shabby though eminently respectable neighborhood, and opened a small boarding-house in a neighboring street. She had come from some up-State country town, and her bureaus and bedsteads were barely enough to furnish the small, old-fashioned house which she took for a term of years. Miss Jamison was a genius--a genius of the type peculiar to the age in which we live. She wasn't the "slob" that she looked. The epithet is not mine, but that of the young gentleman to whom I am indebted for this information. No, indeed; Miss Jamison was anything but a "slob," as one soon found out who had occasion to deal with her very long. A shrewd, exacting, penny-for-penny and dollar-for-dollar business woman was concealed under the mask of her good-natured face and air of motherly solicitude. Miss Jamison, at the very start-out of her career, was inspired to call her little "snide" boarding-house after the founder of the particular creed professed by the congregation of the neighboring church. The result was that "The Calvin" immediately became filled with homeless Presbyterians, or the homeless friends and acquaintances of Presbyterians. They not only filled her house, but they overflowed, and to preserve the overflow Miss Jamison rented the adjoining house.

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