For a time Rose hemmed shirt-flaps at four cents a dozen, then took first one form and then another of underclothing, the rates on which had fallen in the same proportion, to find each as sure a means of starvation as the last. She had no knowledge of ordinary family sewing, and no means of obtaining such work, had any training fitted her for it; domestic service was equally impossible for the same reason, and the added one that the children must not be left, and she struggled on, growing a little more haggard and worn with every week, but the pretty eyes still holding a gleam of the old merriment. Even that went at last. It was a hard winter. The steadiest work could not give them food enough or warmth enough. The children cried with hunger and shivered with cold. There was no refuge save in Norah’s bed, under the ragged quilts; and they cowered there till late in the day, watching Rose as she sat silent at the sewing-machine. There was small help for them in the house. The workers were all in like case, and for the most part drowned their troubles in stale beer from the bucket-shop below.
“Put the children in an asylum, and then you can marry Mike Rooney and be comfortable enough,” they said to her, but Rose shook her head.
“I’ve mothered ’em so far, and I’ll see ’em through,” she said, “but the saints only knows how. If I can’t do it by honest work, there’s one way left that’s sure, an’ I’ll try that.”
There came a Saturday night when she took her bundle of work, shirts again, and now eighty-five cents a dozen. There were five dozen, and when the $1.50 was laid aside for rent it was easy to see what remained for food, coal, and light. Clothing had ceased to be part of the question. The children were barefoot. They had a bit of meat on Sundays, but for the rest, bread, potatoes, and tea were the diet, with a cabbage and bit of pork now and then for luxuries. Norah had been failing, and to-night Rose planned to buy her “something with a taste to it,” and looked at the sausages hanging in long links with a sudden reckless determination to get enough for all. She was faint with hunger, and staggered as she passed a basement restaurant, from which came savory smells, snuffed longingly by some half-starved children. Her turn was long in coming, and as she laid her bundle on the counter she saw suddenly that her needle had “jumped,” and that half an inch or so of a band required resewing. As she looked the foreman’s knife slipped under the place, and in a moment half the band had been ripped.
“That’s no good,” he said. “You’re getting botchier all the time.”
“Give it to me,” Rose pleaded. “I’ll do it over.”
“Take it if you like,” he said indifferently, “but there’s no pay for that kind o’ work.”
He had counted her money as he spoke, and Rose cried out as she saw the sum.
“Do you mean you’ll cheat me of the whole dozen because half an inch on one is gone wrong?”
“Call it what you like,” he said. “R. & Co. ain’t going to send out anything but first-class work. Stand out of the way and let the next have a chance. There’s your three dollars and forty cents.”
Rose went out silently, choking down rash words that would have lost her work altogether, but as she left the dark stairs and felt again the cutting wind from the river, she stood still, something more than despair on her face. The children could hardly fare worse without her than with her. The river could not be colder than this cold world that gave her no chance, and that had no place for anything but rascals. She turned toward it as the thought came, but some one had her arm, and she cried out suddenly and tried to wrench away.
“Easy now,” a voice said. “You’re breakin’ your heart for trouble, an’ here I am in the nick o’ time. Come with me an’ you’ll have no more of it, for my pocket’s full to-night, an’ that’s more ’n it’ll be in the mornin’ if you don’t take me in tow.”
It was a sailor from a merchantman just in, and Rose looked at him for a moment. Then she took his arm and walked with him toward Roosevelt Street.
It might be dishonor, but it was certainly food and warmth for the children, and what did it matter? She had fought her fight for twenty years, and it had been a vain struggle. She took his money when morning came, and went home with the look that is on her face to-day.
“I’ll marry you out of hand,” the sailor said to her; but Rose answered, “No man alive’ll ever marry me after this night,” and she has kept her word. She has her trade, and it is a prosperous one, in which wages never fail. The children are warm and have no need to cry for hunger any more.
“It’s not a long life we live,” Rose says quietly. “My kind die early, but the children will be well along, an’ all the better when the time comes that they’ve full sense for not having to know what way the living comes. But let God Almighty judge who’s to blame most – I that was driven, or them that drove me to the pass I’m in.”
CHAPTER THIRD.
SOME METHODS OF A PROSPEROUS FIRM
“The emancipation of women is certainly well under way, when all underwear can be bought more cheaply than it is possible to make it up at home, and simple suits of very good material make it hardly more difficult for a woman to clothe herself without thought or worry, than it has long been for a man.”
This was the word heard at a woman’s club not long ago, and reinforced within the week by two well-known journals edited in the interests of women at large. The editorial page of one held a fervid appeal for greater simplicity of dress and living in general, followed by half a column of entreaty to women to buy ready-made clothing, and thus save time for higher pursuits and the attainment of broader views. With feebler pipe, but in the same key, sounded the second advocate of simplification, adding: —
“Never was there a time when women could dress with as much real elegance on as small an expenditure of money. Bargains abound, and there is small excuse for dowdiness. The American woman is fast taking her place as the best-dressed woman in the civilized world.”
Believing very ardently that the right of every woman born includes not only “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but beauty also, it being one chief end of woman to include in her own personality all beauty attainable by reasonable means, I am in heartiest agreement with one side of the views quoted. But in this quest we have undertaken, and from which, once begun, there is no retreat, strange questions arise; and in this new dawn of larger liberty and wider outlook is seen the little cloud which, if no larger than a man’s hand, holds the seed of as wild a storm as has ever swept over humanity.
For emancipation on the one side has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other; and as one woman selects, well pleased, garment after garment, daintily tucked and trimmed and finished beyond any capacity of ordinary home sewing, marvelling a little that a few dollars can give such lavish return, there arises, from narrow attic and dark, foul basement, and crowded factory, the cry of the women whose life-blood is on these garments. Through burning, scorching days of summer; through marrow-piercing cold of winter, in hunger and rags, with white-faced children at their knees, crying for more bread, or, silent