Part 8

"You're not used to work, then?" she remarked insinuatingly, straightening up from the rude desk where she sat like the judge of a police-court. She was now all attention.

"Well, not exactly that," I replied, nettled by her manner and, above all, by her way of putting things. "I have worked before, but never at factory-work."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

She now opened her book and inscribed my name therein.

"Where do you live?"

"Over in East Fourteenth Street," I replied mechanically, forgetting for the moment the catastrophe that had rendered me more homeless than ever.

"Home?"

"No, I room." Then, reading only too quickly an unpleasant interpretation in the uplifted eyebrows, a disagreeable curiosity mirrored in the brown eyes beneath, I added hastily, "I have no home. My folks are all dead."

What impression this bit of information made I was unable to determine as I followed her slender, slightly bowed figure across the busy, roaring workroom.

"Be careful you don't get hurt," she cried, as we threaded a narrow passage in and out among the stamping, throbbing machinery, where, by the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague, confused glimpses of girl-faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels, and above the bedlam noises came girlish laughter and song.

"Good morning, Carrie!" one quick-witted toiler sang out as she spied the new girl in tow of the forewoman, and suddenly the whole room had taken up the burden of the song.

"Don't mind them," my conductor remarked. "They don't mean nothing by it--watch out there for your head!"

Safe through the outlying ramparts of machinery, we entered the domain of the table-workers, and I was turned over to Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise ear-rings and curl-papers. Phoebe was assigned to "learn" me in the trade of "finishing." Somewhat to my surprise, she assumed the task joyfully, and helped me off with my coat and hat. From the loud-mouthed tirades as to "Annie Kinzer's nerve," it became evident that the assignment of the job of "learner" is one to cause heartburning jealousies, and that Phoebe, either because of some special adaptability or through favoritism, got the lion's share of novices.

"That's right, Phoebe; hog every new girl that comes along!" amiably bawled a bright-faced, tidy young woman who answered to the name of Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith worked briskly as she talked, and the burden of her conversation appeared to be the heaping of this sort of good-natured invective upon the head of her chum--or, as she termed it, her "lady-friend," Phoebe. The amiability with which Mrs. Smith dealt out her epithets was only equaled by the perfect good nature of her victim, who replied to each and all of them with a musically intoned, "Hot air!"

"Hot A--i--r!" The clear tones of Phoebe's soprano set the echoes ringing all over the great workroom. In and out among the aisles and labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the dusky recess of the uttermost table, the musical cry reverberated.

"Hot a--i--r!" Every few minutes, all through the long, weary day, Phoebe found occasion for sounding that magic call.

"The rest of the ladies get up their backs something awful," Phoebe explained as she dragged a big green pasteboard box from beneath the work-table. "They say she gives me more 'n my share of learners because I'm easy to get on with, I guess, and don't play no tricks on them.... You have a right to put your things in here along with my lunch. Them girls is like to do 'most anything to a new girl's duds if you wuz to hang them in the coat-room. Them Ginneys 'll do 'most anything. Wuz you down-stairs when Celie Polatta got into the fight with Rosie?"

"I just missed it," she sighed in reply to my affirmative. "I was born unlucky."

"Hello, Phoebe! So you've hogged another!" a new voice called across the table, and I put a question.

"Why do they all want to teach the new girl? I should think they'd be glad to be rid of the trouble."

"You mean learn her? Why, because the girl that learns the green hand gets all her work checked on to her own card while she's learning how. Never worked in a box-factory before?" I shook my head.

"I guessed as much. Well, box-making's a good trade. Have you an apron?"

As I had not, I was then ordered to "turn my skirt," in order that I might receive the inevitable coat of glue and paste on its inner rather than on its outer surface. I gently demurred against this very slovenly expedient.

"All right; call it hot air if you want to. I s'pose you know it all," tossing her curl-papers with scorn. "You know better 'n me, of course. Most learners do think they knows it all. Now looky here, I've been here six years, and I've learned lots of green girls, and I never had one as didn't think she hadn't ought to turn her skirt. The ladies I'm used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they're like other times."

With the respectability of my ladyhood thus impeached, and lest I infringe upon the cast-iron code of box-factory etiquette, there was nothing to do but yield. I unhooked my skirt, dropped it to the floor, and stepped out of it in a trice, anxious to do anything to win back the good will of Phoebe. Instantly she brightened, and good humor once more flashed over her grimy features.

"H-m! that's the stuff! There's one thing you hadn't ought to forget, and mind, I'm speaking as one lady-friend to another when I tell you these things--and that is, that you have a right to do as the other girls in the factory or you'll never get 'long with them. If you don't they'll get down on you, sure's pussy's a cat; and then they'll make it hot for you with complaining to the forelady. And then she'll get down on you after while too, and won't give you no good orders to work on; and--well, it's just this way: a girl mustn't be odd."

Continuing her philosophy of success, Phoebe proceeded to initiate me into the first process of my job, which consisted in pasting slippery, sticky strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling, which was trellised over with a network of electric wires and steam-pipes. Two hundred and fifty of these boxes remained to be finished on the particular order upon which Phoebe was working. Each must be given eight muslin strips, four on the box and four on its cover; two tapes, inserted with a hair-pin through awl-holes; two tissue "flies," to tuck over the bonnet soon to nestle underneath; four pieces of gay paper lace to please madame's eye when the lid is lifted; and three labels, one on the bottom, one on the top, and one bearing the name of a Fifth Avenue modiste on an escutcheon of gold and purple.

The job, as it progressed, entailed ceaseless shoving and shifting and lifting. In order that we might not be walled in completely by our cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across the floor to the "strippers."