Part 24

"Say," chuckled Mamie, "I could 'a' died laughin' once. A fella came through here askin' everybody what we thought of the Partnership Plan. My Gawd! when he got to me I jus' told him I didn't understand the first thing about it. What ud he do but get out a little book and write what I said down. Never again! Anybody asks me now what I think of the Partnership Plan, and I keep my mouth shut, you bet."

Once an enthused visitor picked on me to ask what I thought of working under the Partnership Plan. After he moved on the girls got the giggles. "Say, these folks that come around here forever asking what we think about the Partnership Plan! Say, what any of us knows about that could be put in a nutshell."

And gray-haired Ella Jane, smartest of all, ten years folding pillow cases, said: "I don't know anything about that Partnership Plan. All I know is that we get our share of the profits and our bonuses, and I can't imagine a nicer place to work. They do make you work for what you get, though. But it's all white and aboveboard and you know nobody's trying to put something over on you."

But the general spirit of the place? Could that be traced to anything else but the special industrial scheme of things? One fact at least is certain--the employing end is spared many a detail of management; the shift in responsibility is educating many a worker to the problems of capital. And production is going up.

* * * * *

Have you ever tried to find a spare bed in a town where there seems to be not a spare bed to be had? I left my belongings in an ice cream store and followed every clue, with a helpful hint from the one policeman, or the drug store man, or a fat, soiled grandmother who turned me down because they were already sleeping on top of one another in her house. In between I dropped on a grassy hillside and watched Our Bleachery baseball team play a Sunday afternoon game with the Colored Giants. We won.

And then I took up the hunt again, finally being guided by the Lord to the abode of the sisters Weston--two old maids, combined age one hundred and forty-nine years, who took boarders. Only there were no more to take. The Falls was becoming civilized. Improvements were being installed in most of the houses. Boarders, which meant mainly school-teachers, preferred a house with Improvements. The abode of the sisters Weston had none. It was half a company house, with a pump in the kitchen which drew up brown water of a distressing odor.

The sisters Weston had worked in the overall factory in their earlier years, hours 7 to 6, wages five dollars a week, paid every five to six weeks. Later they tried dressmaking; later still, boarders. I belonged to the last stage of all--they no longer took boarders, they took a boarder. Mr. Welsh from the electrical department in the bleachery, whose wife was in Pennsylvania on a visit to her folks, being sickly and run down, as seemed the wont of wives at the Falls, took his meals at our boarding house, when he was awake for them. Every other week Mr. Welsh worked night shift.

My belongings were installed in the room assigned me, and the younger of the sisters Weston, seventy-three, sat stiffly but kindly in a chair. "Now about the room rent...?" she faltered. Goodness! yes! My relief at finding a place to sleep in after eleven turn-downs was so great that I had completely neglected such a little matter as what the room might cost me.

"What do you charge?" I asked.

"What do you feel you can pay? We want you should have some money left each week after your board's paid. What do you make at the bleachery?"

My conscience fidgeted within me a bit at that. "I'd rather you charged me just what you think the room and board are worth to you, not what you think I can pay."

"Well, we used to get eight dollars a week for room and board. It's worth that."

It is cheaper to live than die in the Falls at that rate. Three hot meals a day I got: breakfast, coffee, toast, two eggs, mush, later fruit; dinner, often soup, always meat, potatoes, vegetables, coffee, and a dessert; supper, what wasn't finished at dinner, and tea. Always there was plenty of everything. Sometimes too much, if it were home-canned goods which had stood too many years on the shelves, due to lack of boarders to eat the same. But the sisters Weston meant the best.

"How d'ya like the punkin pie?" the older, Miss Belle, would ask.

The pumpkin pie had seemed to taste a trifle strange, but we laid it to the fact that it was some time since we had eaten pumpkin pie. "It tastes all right."

"Now, there! Glad to hear you say it. Canned that punkin ourselves. Put it up several years ago. Thought it smelled and looked a bit spoiled, but I says, guess I'll cook it up; mebbe the heat 'n' all'll turn it all right again. There's more in the kitchen!"

But it suddenly seemed as if I must get to work earlier that noon than I had expected. "Can't ya even finish your pie? I declare I'm scared that pie won't keep long."

Mr. Welsh got sick after the first couple of meals, but bore on bravely, nor did the matter of turned string beans consciously worry Mr. Welsh. The sisters themselves were always dying; their faithful morning reports of the details of what they had been through the night before left nothing to the imagination. "Guess I oughtn't ta 'a' et four hot cakes for supper when I was so sick yesterday afternoon. I sure was thinking I'd die in the night.... 'Liza, pass them baked beans; we gotta git them et up."

* * * * *

At six o'clock in the morning the bleachery whistle blows three times loud enough to shake the shingles on the roofs of the one-hundred-year-old houses and the leaves on the more than one-hundred-year-old trees about the Falls. Those women who have their breakfasts to get and houses to straighten up before they leave for work--and there are a number--must needs be about before then. Seven o'clock sees folks on all roads leading to the bleachery gate. At 7.10 the last whistle blows; at 7.15 the power is turned on, wheels revolve, work begins.

It must be realized that factory work, or any other kind of work, in a small town is a different matter from work in a large city, if for no other reason than the transportation problem. Say work in New York City begins at 7.45. That means for many, if not most, of the workers, an ordeal of half an hour's journey in the Subways or "L," shoving, pushing, jamming, running to catch the shuttle; shoving, pushing, jamming, running for the East Side Subway; shoving, pushing, jamming, scurrying along hard pavements to the factory door; and at the end of a day of eight or nine hours' work, all that to be done over again to get home.

Instead, at the Falls, it meant a five minutes' leisurely--unless one overslept--walk under old shade trees, through the glen along a path lined with jack-in-the-pulpits, wild violets, moss--the same five minutes' walk home at noon to a hot lunch, plenty of time in which to eat it, a bit of visiting on the way back to the factory, and a leisurely five minutes' walk home in the late afternoon. No one has measured yet what crowded transportation takes out of a body in the cities.

New York factories are used to new girls--they appear almost daily in such jobs as I have worked in. At the Falls a strange person in town is excitement enough, a strange girl at the bleachery practically an unheard-of thing. New girls appear now and then to take the places of those who get married or the old women who must some time or other die. But not strange girls. Everyone in the bleachery grew up with everyone else; as Ella Jane said, you know their mothers and their grandmothers, too.

It so happened that a cataclysmic event had visited the Falls the week before my appearance. A family had moved away, thereby detaching a worker from the bleachery--the girl who ticketed pillow cases. The Sunday I appeared in town, incidentally, seven babies were born. That event--or those events--plus me, minus the family who moved away and an old man who had died the week before, made the population of the Falls 4,202. Roughly, half that number either worked at the bleachery or depended on those who worked there. Who or what the other half were, outside the little group of Main Street tradespeople, remained a mystery. Of course, there were the ministers of the gospel and their families--in the same generous overdose--apportioned to most small towns. The actual number working in the bleachery was about six hundred and twenty men and women.

Odd, the different lights in which you can see a small town. The chances are that, instead of being a worker, I might have spent the week end visiting some of the "élite" of the Falls. In that case we should have motored sooner or later by the bleachery gate and past numerous company houses. My host, with a wave of the hand, would have dispatched the matter by remarking, "The town's main industry. The poor devils live in these houses you see."

Instead, one day I found myself wandering along the street of the well-to-do homes. What in the world...? Who all ever lived way up here? Whatever business had they in our Falls? Did they have anyone to talk to, anything to do? I laid the matter before Mamie O'Brien.

"Any rich folk living around here?"