Part 11

Now the Four Way Lodge is open, Now the hunting winds are loose, Now the smokes of spring go up to clear the brain....

Breakfast in a cañon by the side of a stream--the odor of pines.... The little bobbing doors went to behind me and there I stood in floor three, the stale gas and metal smell ... the whirs of the belts ... the jarring of the presses....

Next to me this glorious morning sat a snip of a little thing all in black--so pretty she was, so very pretty. I heard the boss tell her it's not the sort of work she's been used to, she'll find it hard. Is she sure she wants to try it? And in the course of the morning I heard the story of Mame's life.

Mame's husband died three weeks ago. They had been married one month and two days--after waiting three years. Shall I write a story of Mame on the sob-sister order to bring the tears to your eyes? It could easily be done. But not honestly. Little Mame--how could her foot ever reach the press? And when she walked off after a drink, I saw that she was quite lame. A widow only three weeks. She'd never worked before, but there was no money. She lived all alone, wandered out for her meals--no mother, no father, no sisters or brothers. She cried every night. Her husband had been a traveling salesman--sometimes he made eighty-five dollars a week. They had a six-room apartment and a servant! She'd met him at a dance hall. A girl she was with had dared her to wink at him. Sure she'd do anything anybody dared her to. He came over and asked her what she was after, anyhow. That night he left the girl he'd taken to the dance hall to pilot her own way back to home and mother, and he saw Mame to her room. He was swell and tall. She showed me his picture in a locket around her neck. Meanwhile Mame kicked the foot press about twice every five minutes.

Why had they waited so long to get married? Because of the war. He was afraid he'd be killed and would leave her a widow. "He asked me to promise never to get married again if he did marry me and died. But,"--she leaned over my way--"that only meant if he died during the war, ain't that so? Lookit how long the war was over before he died."

He was awful good to her after they got married. He took her to a show every night--jes swell; and she had given him a swell funeral--you bet she did. The coffin had cost eighty-five dollars--white with real silver handles; and the floral piece she bought--"Gee! What's your name?... Connie, you oughtta seen that floral piece!" and Mame laid off work altogether to use her hands the better. It was shaped so, and in the middle was a clock made out of flowers, with the hands at the very minute and hour he'd died. (He passed away of a headache--very sudden.) Then below, in clay, were two clasped hands--his and hers. "Gee! Connie, you never seen nothin' so swell. Everybody seen it said so."

Once he bought her a white evening dress, low neck, fish-tail train, pearls all over the front--cost him one whole week's salary, eighty-five dollars! She had diamond earrings and jewels worth at least one thousand dollars. She had lovely clothes. Couldn't she just put a black band around the arms and go on wearing them? She took a look at my earrings. Gee! they were swell. She had some green ones herself. Next morning she appeared in her widow's weeds with bright-green earrings at least a quarter of an inch longer than mine.

From the first Mame clung to me morning and night. Usually mornings she threw her arms around me in the dressing room. "Here's my Connie!" I saw myself forced to labor in the brassworks for life because of Mame's need of me. This need seemed more than spiritual. One day her pocketbook with twelve dollars had been stolen in the Subway. I lent her some cash. Another time she left her money at the factory. I lent her the wherewithal to get home with, etc. One day I was not at work. Somehow the other girls all were down on Mame. I have pondered much on that. When it came to the needed collection Mame found it hard pickings. She got a penny from this girl, another from that one, until she had made up a nickel to get home with. Irish Minnie gave her a sandwich and an apple. The girls all jumped on me: "The way you let that Frenchie work ya! Gee! you believe everything anybody tells ya."

"But," says I, "she's been a widow only three weeks and I'm terrible sorry for her."

"How d'ya know she ever had a husband?" "How d'ya know he's dead?" "How'd ya...."

The skepticism of factory workers appals me. They suspect everybody and everything from the boss down. I believed almost everything about Mame, especially since she paid back all she ever borrowed. No one else in that factory believed a word she said. They couldn't "stand her round."

"How d'ya know she lost her pocketbook?" (Later she advertised and got it back--a doctor's wife found it on the early Subway.)

"Doctor's wife," sniffed Minnie. "Who ever heard of a doctor's wife up at seven o'clock in the mornin'?"

And now I have walked off and left Mame to that assemblage of unbelievers. At least Mame has a tongue of her own she is only too glad of a chance to use. It is meat and drink to Mame to have a man look her way. "Did you see that fella insult me?" and she calls back protective remarks for half a block. Sentiments that usually bring in mention of the entertained youth's mother and sisters, and wind up with allusions to a wife, which if he doesn't possess now, he may some day. Once I stopped with Mame while she and Irene phoned a "fella" of Irene's from a drug-store telephone booth. Such gigglings and goings on, especially since the "fella" was unknown to Mame at the time. Outside in the store a pompous, unromantic man grew more and more impatient for a turn at that booth. When Mame stepped out he remarked casually that he hoped she felt she'd gotten five cents' worth. The dressing down Mame then and there heaped upon that startled gentleman! Who was he to insult her? I grew uneasy and feared a scene, but the pompous party took hasty refuge in the telephone booth and closed the door. Mame was very satisfied with the impression she must have made. "The fresh old guy!"

Another time Mame sought me out in the factory, her eyes blazing. "Connie, I been insulted, horribly insulted, and I don't see how I can stay in this factory! You know that girl Irene? Irene she says to me, 'Mamie, you plannin' to get married again?'

"'I dunno,' I says to her, 'but if I do it'll be to some single fella.'

"'Huh!' Irene says to me, 'You won't get no single fella; you'll have to marry a widower with two or three children.' Think of her insultin' me like that! I could 'a' slapped her right in the face!"

I asked Mame one Saturday what she'd be doing Sunday. She sighed. "I'll be spendin' the day at the cemetery, I expect."

Monday morning I asked Mame about Sunday. She'd been to church in the morning (Mame, like most of the girls at the brassworks, was a Catholic), a show in the afternoon, cabaret for dinner, had danced till 1, and played poker until 4 A.M. "If only my husband was alive," said Mame, "I'd be the happiest girl on earth."

One night Mame's landlady wanted to go out and play poker. She asked Mame to keep her eye and ear out for the safety of the house. Every five minutes Mame thought she heard a burglar or somethin'. "Gee! I hardly slept at all; kep' wakin' up all the time. An' that landlady never got in till six this mornin'!"

"My Gawd!" I exclaimed. "Hope she was lucky after playin' poker that long!"

"She sure was," sighed Mame. "Gee! I jus' wish ya c'u'd see the swell prize she won!--the most beau-teful statue--stands about three feet high--of Our Blessed Lady of the Immaculate Conception."

Mame's friendship could become almost embarrassing. One day she announced she wanted me to marry one of her brothers-in-law. "I got two nice ones and we'll go out some Sunday afternoon and you can have your pick. One's a piano tuner; the other's a detective." I thought offhand the piano tuner sounded a bit more domestic. He was swell, Mame said.

Mame didn't think she'd stay long in the brassworks. It was all right--the boss she thought was sort of stuck on her. Did he have a wife? (The boss, at least sixty years old.) Also Charlie was making eyes at her. (Charlie was French; so was Mame. Charlie knew six words of English. Mame three words of French. Charlie was sixteen). No, aside from matrimony, Mame was going to train in Bellevue Hospital and earn sixty dollars a week being a children's nurse. She'd heard if you got on the right side of a doctor it was easy, and already a doctor was interested in getting Mame in.

And I've just walked off and left Mame.

* * * * *

Kicked the foot press 7,149 times by the meter to-day and expected to die of weariness. Thumped, thumped, thumped without stopping. As with candy, I got excited about going on piecework. Asked Miss Hibber what the rates were for my job--four and a half cents for one hundred and fifty. Since I had to kick twice for every cone top finished, that would have meant around one dollar fifteen cents for the day. Vanished the piece-rate enthusiasm. Tillie seemed the only girl on our floor doing piecework. Tillie, who "was born there." She was thin and stoop shouldered, wore spectacles, and did her hair according to the pompadour styles of some twenty years ago. The work ain't so bad. Tillie don't mind it. There's just one thing in the world Tillie wants. What's that? "A man!" Evidently Tillie has made no bones of her desire. The men call back kindly to Tillie as she picks her way up the dark stairs in the morning, "Hello there, sweetheart!" That week had been a pretty good one for Tillie--she'd made sixteen dollars forty-nine cents.

"Ain't much, p'raps, one way, but there's jus' this about it, it's steady. They never lay anybody off here, and there's a lot. You hear these girls 'round here talk about earnin' four, five, six dollars a day. Mebbe they did, but why ain't they gettin' it now? 'Shop closed down,' or, 'They laid us off.' That's it. Add it up over a year and my sixteen forty-nine'll look big as their thirty dollars to forty dollars a week, see if it don't."