An Underfed Nursling

I

IT appears that Miss Wooding, my new room-mate in the New York Home for Self-Supporting Gentlewomen, has been doing something mysterious to gentlemen’s neckties at a factory here, for forty years or so. I suppose that she has not always been in this particular place, but that she emigrated here from the South in some prehistoric period when any sort of migration would be less like the dead awakening.

I can speak of her but inadequately, feeling that the only form of expression which would be appropriate to her would be sentences trailing weakly off into the three dots which I have always claimed that only a slacker uses. Everything about her is inadequate. There is not enough of her in any respect. Her black skirt is scant, and her white waist, pulled down tight, reveals no normal curve of the bosom. She looks as if as an infant she had not had enough milk, and as if, ever since, she had not had enough leisure or money or food or clothing or recreation.

At present, the rest of the self-supporting gentlewomen are trying to convey to me by that prudent adroitness of non-committal speech in which these girls are proficient, that my room-mate is mentally affected. ‘She has n’t quite all that’s coming to her,’ said one; which kindly euphemism expresses Miss Wooding with a painful literalness, so it seems to me. Her scantiness has a somewhat childlike appeal; and yet all the child that one can see in her is like a flower ‘pressed flat between the pages of a book.’ She reminded me the first instant I saw her of the smallest thing I have ever seen in my life, the thing that first made vivid to me, in its beautiful concreteness, Plato’s idea of smallness — a boy covered from head to foot with the light, lamb-like fuzz of the cotton mills, whose small form, in sharp relief against the many-windowed, sunlit wall of a huge factory, offered the inadequate argument of its twelve-year-old speck of personality against that age-old bulk of matter looming up behind him.

Her daily existence is meagre, too, and unvaried, as if there were not enough life going on in her to make growth possible. She is an expression of immortality in which one feels he has to believe, not because the overflowing fullness of life seems so impossibly remote from exhaustion, but because the cup could never in the world be emptied by such a scanty sipping.

I have always had the haziest idea of factory women, as young and rather hard females with plastered hair and a rouge-pot — just as immigrants have always appeared in my muddled consciousness as swarthy fellows with red kerchiefs. But now, as the sharp silhouettes of the city and the hard ring of its pavements are administering a swift cure to my erstwhile bucolic, meandering way of thinking in general, so Miss Wooding, in our illuminating intimacy as room-mates, is demonstrating for me the superficiality of certain specific conceptions.

‘Miss Wooding,’ I said one evening, ‘do you know how I feel since I have been living here? I feel just as if my brain had a lot of little facts all running around loose in it that I had never really cared for — just as if my mind were an orphan asylum. It drives me crazy.’

‘It must give you the headache,’ replied my room-mate. ‘I never get a headache. It is nice and light at the factory and the air is good. You did n’t mean I gave you a headache, did you, Miss Morris?’

‘Indeed I did n’t. You give me something that I know is good. It’s not your fault; but my brain is not only like an uncared-for orphanage, but like an orphanage that the Germans have dropped a bomb into.’

‘That must be terrible,’ said Miss Wooding sympathetically. ‘But I guess you’re like me. You can’t afford to call in a doctor for anything. I had one once, and it cost me two dollars. I guess it was worth it, though, because I’ve never had to have one since.’

‘Well,’ I continued, while she watched me undress with the same mild interest with which she read war-news, ‘at last I am seized with a maternal desire to mother these young orphans, to feel their pressure against me, to turn my mental asylum into a home. What would you suggest doing?’

Miss Wooding answered immediately with the gentle astuteness of simplicity: —

‘I wish you’d work in a factory as I do, Miss Morris. It is very easy. I work all day and I sleep so well. You are very restless.’

‘That’s a great idea of yours, Miss Wooding. I don’t sleep well. Perhaps I need the same insidious anæsthetic of monotony that is your lullaby.’

‘Miss Morris,’ she said, after a long pause, ‘ if you need anything I can give you, I’ll be so glad. You are so kind, always giving me pins. Is n’t it strange I never could keep pins? And it was kind of you to give me those chocolate creams, since we have n’t had any sugar on account of the war.’

Miss Wooding had a characteristic liking for these childish sweets, which was in keeping with Lamb’s conviction that all innocent-minded people liked apple-dumplings.

She kept rocking a little harder as I took up a book. I could feel her eyes fixed upon my back in quiet, patient anxiety, and I knew she was wrestling with the eternal question, between room-mates, of bedtime. Presently she discovered that if she talked to me I could not get lost in the book, and there would not be that nerve-racking anxiety about the light.

‘Miss Morris,’ she said apologetically.

‘Yes, Miss Wooding?’

‘Here’s an advertisement in the paper that says, “Young man, what do you do with your spare time?” I was just thinking. Of course, I’m no young man ’ (she smiled disparagingly at her flippancy), ‘but I never had any spare time, especially when I was young. I always sit around a little after supper and then go to bed because I have to get up so early. Would you like to go to bed early to-night?’ she added as on a sudden inspiration; ‘but of course if you want to keep the light on, I don’t mind at all.’

‘I’d as soon hang myself on it as keep it on when you are ready for bed,’ I assured her.

To which she replied, ‘Don’t try; you might succeed.’

II

A few days later, I found Miss Wooding rocking in her small chair, in what was, for her, considerable agitation.

‘Why are you home so early?’ I inquired, finding that she was non-communicative.

‘I am not to go to the factory any more. That rich lady I told you about is going to take care of me.’

‘That is very nice, is n’t it?’ I said. ‘You won’t have to work any more.’

‘Yes,’she answered doubtfully. ‘But, do you know,’ she added, with her little confiding smile, ‘I always just before supper wash out my white silk gloves, and I don’t know just what to do now because I won’t need them tomorrow morning. So I’m reading the paper now, which I always read after supper, and after supper I won’t know what to do, and all day to-morrow when everyone else goes to work. It will be very dreary. I like to go to the factory. I’ve got so used to it. But she would think me ungrateful if I kept on, would n’t she?’ she asked appealingly.

‘Yes, I’m afraid she wouldn’t understand. She thinks it will be so nice for you to rest after all these years of work.’

‘A long time ago I would have liked it. I remember I wanted to play long ago, but I was so tired when I went to bed. But it sounds silly now wanting to play, and I hope you will excuse me for saying it.’

‘It sounds frightfully sentimental,’ I said with a smile; ‘I’m surprised at you.’

‘Yes, doesn’t it?’ she said vaguely. ‘Anyway, it’s different now.’

After a little silence I suggested that she write a note of thanks to the lady.

‘That’s right, so I must!’ she exclaimed with deep relief. ‘Now I know what to do after supper.’ And she turned to the paper.

If one knows just before supper what one must do after supper, that is all that is necessary when one has lived, since a childhood deprived of play, in a little unilluminated corner of habit. My mind dwelt on that uneasy period of her youth, to which she had alluded, which had been, at last, so effectually quieted. She had said to me once, ‘You think a great deal, don’t you, Miss Morris?’ and had added apologetically, ‘I used to plan every night to do a little thinking before I went to bed; but do you know,’ — and with that she had smiled in her little confiding way, — ‘I have always gone right to sleep, so I’ve never done it yet. But I always plan to do it.’

She had indeed had time to sleep. There was nothing cruel, startling. Only, I felt my mind and heart leap up and accuse me because that other mind and heart had been betrayed by an imperceptibly gradual starvation more insidiously evil than any spectacular injustice, which at least carries with itself the saving grace of an incentive to retaliation. It was not Miss Wooding’s fault that she had begun to work so early, but where was her champion when, defenseless, gentle, impressionable, easily moulded, she had gone on and on, slipping little by little into the tragedy of purely mechanical usefulness, her whole life oiled for her into this ghastly soporific smoothness?

The next morning, in obedience to Miss Wooding’s suggestion, I went to the date-factory which I had picked out at random from the advertisements in the papers. I gave my name as Wooding, projecting myself back into her youth. I felt alert, energetic, ambitious. My one idea was to become a good date-packer. In fifteen minutes I was a good date-packer; in half an hour I was a perfect date-packer. ’Just to think,’ I said to myself. ‘My one ideal has been attained in thirty minutes.’ I looked around at the other girls fastidiously picking out the good dates and eating them, an eye on the foreman’s door, while they deftly packed the bad ones.

Presently, even on this first day, ardor fell from me. I could already do as well as possible the one thing which, presumably, I was to do for weeks and months. The mechanical perfection of the hand left the mind empty, and, like a hungry hawk, it seized on Bessie or Jennie and devoured her poor pitiful little morsel of personality at a gulp. They were not going to school, were twelve and thirteen (they said), chattering revealingly, and although innocent of the feel of dirt, perhaps, yet preferring it, like sparrows chirping in a gutter.

A more sturdy and resistant person than most of these children and the child Miss Wooding had been, would pull out of the rut in time; but there is a certain docility in many uneducated minds, a lack of virility and an uneasy need for leadership which has to pay the debt of lifelong dependence on its leader. One persists in thinking of other possible moulds in which the clay might have been cast.

Factory-work made me sleep so well that one morning I overslept and stayed at home, rejoicing.

‘Every day is just like Sunday now,’ remarked Miss Wooding; and added after a helpless pause, ’I never did care for Sunday. The Lord’s day, some call it, but if you will excuse me for saying so, Miss Morris, the Lord is welcome to it.’

‘You might go to the moving pictures to-day,’ I suggested amiably, eating a chocolate cream for breakfast.

‘I’d so much rather go to the factory. It’s nearer and does n’t cost anything.’

‘Does n’t cost anything?’ I repeated. ‘Well, I’ll tell you the story of a white bear I was reading about up in the library. The bear lies down and lets the snow cover her and sleeps all winter buried, her warm breath making a little tunnel up through the snow for just enough air to keep life in her. She lies like the dead, but at the end of the winter snows, she digs herself out and comes forth to greet a new spring with a new cub at her side.’

‘Suppose the snow got so deep the bear could n’t get out with the cub. Would n’t it be dreadful?’ said my room-mate.

‘Yes, it certainly would. Not only would she die, but the little scarcely born cub would perish before anyone had ever seen him. But I guess a bear always digs herself out. There are some people, though, who have had a longer hibernation than the bear’s and their atmosphere has had scarcely that little tunnel into the upper air for invigoration, and the snow keeps wrapping them up silently, flake by flake, and whatever they might have brought forth as a contribution to the race is smothered with them. That is sadder still.’

’I never did see why people would go wandering off hunting for the Pole, though. But it’s too bad they get killed,’ she said, with the easy sympathy one feels for whatever is remote from one’s own interests.

‘Yes, it is — for who can say that a thousand boxes of dates packed by the deft human hands compensate for the one flash of thought that might have been produced in the reasonable leisure of an educated mind? You don’t mind my becoming rhetorical, do you, Miss Wooding?’

‘You know that I love to hear you talk, Miss Morris. I’ve often said so. Perhaps if I had been to school more and read as you do, I might know more what the words you use mean — but you spoke beautifully about the bear,’ she hastened to add apologetically. ‘What else did you read about?’

‘I didn’t read any more. I looked at a parade on the Avenue. I thought of the stars on some of those brave service-flags which, I know, meant not only that a man had gone to war but that a child is taking his place. The bright twinkling of such stars hurts my eyes — unspeakably.’

’It’s good you came home. And you had n’t locked your closet-door and your clothes might have been stolen. You ought to get into the habit of locking it. There was a girl here once that never locked hers because she said locking it would make her feel as if there was something valuable inside, and then when she went to open it, she’d be disappointed. And her rubbers were stolen. Was n’t she foolish?’

The time was approaching when there would be the vacancy in the Old Ladies’ Home which Miss Wooding was to fill. She was very restless and unhappy in a tentative sort of way, as if no one had told her to be unhappy and so she could n’t be. But now, all of a sudden, the depressed, but obedient, expression she had worn so habitually during the painful tedium of her holiday had disappeared. Moreover, she was washing her gloves with the most astounding enthusiasm. As she walked across the floor to hang them at the window, she left wet footprints.

‘Good gracious, Miss Wooding, take those wet shoes off,’ I commanded sternly.

‘Oh, I never take them off till I go to bed,’ she said, as if my request were both unreasonable and immodest; ‘my feet are so nice and warm. I won’t catch cold.’

’I hope you are a Christian Scientist,’ I said.

‘Well,’ she remarked reasonably, ‘you’ve got to be a Christian anyway or you can’t live here. It’s a home for Christian gentlewomen.’

’I never heard such sensible theology in all my life — simple, practical —’

‘Miss Morris, excuse me for interrupting you, but what do you think? One of the women from the factory came to see me to-day. We had such a nice talk. She was telling me about everything at the factory. There’s a girl named Minnie, that used to sit next to me, put all her last week’s pay in a hat and it blew off as she came over in the ferry. Was n’t that too bad? She’s going to do overtime until she’s caught up.’ She hesitated a little. ‘My friend said that they’d take me on again even though I’ve been away so long. They are very kind that way. So I went up to see about it. That’s how I got my feet wet.’

‘What would the lady say who took you out?’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure.’ She turned wearily, and sitting down in the small chair, began to rock nervously. ‘The days are so long,’ she said, with a pitiful little puzzled frown between her eyes. ‘I wish everything was like it used to be.’

I stood at the window and watched the rain beating down. I could see a sycamore tree, its wet bark beautifully green and olive and black, its little balls dancing in the fresh fragrant downpour.

‘If you’d like to go back, Miss Wooding, I’ll see the lady about it for you. I’m sure she will understand. Don’t worry any more about it. And for heaven’s sake, change your shoes.’

‘I have n’t any others, so I can’t change them, can I?’ she said.

‘You’ve worked like a slave for forty years. You ought to have a dozen pairs of shoes,’ I retorted.

The lady thought it was extraordinary that Miss Wooding should want to go back to the factory.

‘And Miss Wooding has never seemed extraordinary to me before. You know, in her little tight clothes, she always made me think of those little cheap dolls one sees on a bargain table at Christmas-time. I’ve known her many years and she has always seemed just the same.’

‘Then how can you hope to change her now? How should she know how to enjoy leisure, to spend her old age sitting peacefully in a garden with the sun on her back? Her need for you was forty years ago; it was fifty years ago, when she was a baby.’

‘I cannot think of her as a baby.’

‘No, it is difficult. But once I saw a woman, as she was running across the street from the factory to nurse her baby, start to unfasten her dress as she ran. She was taking time off and her pay was being docked. Perhaps that was Miss Wooding’s babyhood.’

‘It sounds—meagre.’

I stood looking at Miss Wooding as she lay so profoundly asleep after her day’s work. Her old-fashioned, highnecked nightgown made her look childlike in spite of the gray hair and barren lines of her small form. My hand dropped upon her scant black skirt carefully folded on the chair at her bedside, and my helpless fingers seemed to grasp the forlorn, inglorious trouble that lay in its weaving. Anyway, I was glad that my room-mate was sleeping so soundly, as if lulled by some little monotonous tune. What was it? Yes —