Only a Conversation

I

TO-DAY, as always on days when the cannery was closed, Mrs. Kazalski wavered between relief at having free time for housework und distress at the loss of a day’s earnings. Good, at least, that the weather was fine, she thought; and told Katie to take her cough out into the sunshine, and to see that the baby did not cut himself on the oystershells. Then she sent Dan to the pump, at one end of the ‘camp,’ for water, and turned to sort an accumulation of soiled clothes, which smelt unpleasantly of stale oyster-juice.

Mrs. Kazalski accepted the distasteful odor with a dull fatalism, as she accepted the rest of her widow’s lot: as she accepted everything in her life. A careless observ er might have called her broad peasant-face stupid, might never have guessed that the thick crust of acceptance covered a shrinking sensitiveness, and had nothing to do with her thoughts. These, in so far as she thought at all, concerned themselves with obvious things; worry over Katie’s cough, the debt at the company store, a mingled hope and dread of the early call of the factory siren on the morrow; for an early siren meant a big load of oysters, and consequently more nickels.

She had put the clothes in to soak, when she became aware of excitement in the camp, and the sharp voice of Mrs. Oshinsky’s Annie in breathless recital. Mrs. Kazalski put her head out of the door, and saw a group of women and children — Katie among them — at the end of the building.

One of the women called her, and in the next sentence told Mrs. Oshinsky’s Annie not to talk so loud. She arrived in the midst of the hushed importance of Annie’s outpouring.

‘ Gov’ment ladies. It’s men dressed like ladies. Two. One went to talk to the boss. Mike Salinsky says it’s inspectors. The other went down to the lower camp, but she says she ain’t a inspector. She ’ll be here after a while. If they catch on us kids is working, you got to pay fines. Twenty-five dollars, Mike says. He says the gov’ment pays them to be inspectors, and that’s why things cost so much at the store. He’s awful mad. He says if it was n’t for inspectors, everything would be better for us. He says maybe they ’ll take the work away from us. He says maybe they ’ll put us in jail. I think maybe they got revolvers — ’

She was interrupted here, instructed to let her thoughts alone, and to stick to what she had heard and knew; and to repeat her tale in Polish, for the benefit of those who knew no English. She finished, and presently broke the short awed silence by beginning again, partly to prolong her importance, partly because talking kept her free of the fear manifest in the eyes of her listeners’ otherwise impassive faces. But when it became clear that she had nothing more to tell, her elders silenced her, and took counsel.

After some discussion, Mrs. Kazalski spoke.

‘It ain’t nothing. They can’t take money we ain’t got. If we keep our mouths shut, they won’t know the children work. The cannery ain’t running to-day. Everybody’s got to tell their children to shut up, and to shut up theirselves, only be polite. They can’t do us nothing. No gov’ment lady or man neither won’t get something out of me.’

All morning, as she worked, however, she worried about the ‘gov’ment lady.’ Suppose that someone should let it out! Jail? No, surely not that. But if they should stop the children from working, how could they live? Suppose the company should refuse credit at the store! Once she had wished to cheat the Virgin Mary of a half-burned candle. Could this be punishment?

And suddenly, athwart her numb acceptance of life, came a passionate regret: if only she had never left Baltimore! Why, why, had she yielded to the persuasions of Mike Salinsky! She went over in her mind all the incidents that had influenced her to ‘come South to oysters.’ The day of Mike Salinsky’s visit stood out as clearly in her mind as if it had been yesterday, instead of the day of her husband’s funeral, three months ago.

Carrying the baby, and followed by the other children and her sister-in-law, she had come into the kitchen. The funeral was over.

‘Take off your things,’ she ordered the children; but she herself did not remove her shawl. She slumped into a chair, rested her elbow on the kitchen table, and, chin in hand, stared into space.

‘What you going to do now?’ asked Annie Pritoff, the sister-in-law.

She did not answer. If only her sister-in-law would go! She wished to be alone, wished to do two things. The candle burning under the image of the Virgin Mary — she would extinguish that. All winter she had kept a candle burning there, that Mike might be spared. Mike had died. But she had not the courage to snuff out the light before her sister-in-law.

Her other impulse was to look in her purse. She knew it contained exactly five dollars and thirty-eight cents, knew that counting it again would add nothing; yet before she had made sure, once more, she could not turn her thoughts to the future.

Now Annie Pritoff was chattering again. ‘He left you insurance?’

‘Only for the funeral.’

‘But you got money in the bank? He earned good, when he worked, no?’

‘He was six months sick. It costs to live. The doctors and the medicines took everything.’

‘Well, it was a decent funeral you gave him.’

Katie, her oldest, a thin girl of twelve, with hollow eyes and straight yellow hair, began to cough.

‘Did you ask sometime the doctor about Katie’s cough?’ continued Mrs. Pritoff.

‘Yes,’ Mrs. Kazalski answered dully.

‘Well, what did he say?’

‘He said to eat eggs and milk, and sleep with the window open. She sleeps with the window open.’

‘But no eggs and milk, eh?’

‘Oh, let me be, let me be!’

Mrs. Pritoff was offended. ‘I knew he was a good man, and did n’t beat you, but I did n’t know you was so stuck on him you could n’t be polite to your sister-in-law.’

Mrs. Kazalski roused herself a little. ‘Don’t be offended, Annie,’ she said in Polish. ‘ I don’t know what I ’m saying. I want to be alone. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

‘Mamma,’ asked Katie, anxiously, ‘have n’t we any money left?’

‘ Go ’way. Be quiet. Let me have a little peace.'

Mrs. PritofF spoke again, this time with hesitation. ‘ I could take the baby, Marya. We ain’t got money, but Pete’s got steady work, and one child does n’t cost much extra, and he could be a help to us when he grows up. The doctor says I ’ll never have one of my own.'

' No, thanks, Annie. I keep my baby.'

‘Well, what you going to do? You can’t take boarders here in three rooms. And you can’t go to work, with the baby. Will you ask charity? They’d put away the children in the orphan ’sylum. Ain’t it better I should have the baby than the orphan ’sylum?'

‘So low as orphan ’sylums and charity we ain’t got yet.'

‘ Well, what you going to do, Marva?’

' I don’t know, I don’t know. Just let me alone.'

When the sister-in-law had gone, she took out her purse and counted the money. Five dollars and thirty-eight, cents. The rent was paid, She must buy some cough medicine for Katie. That would leave —

No use. Five dollars or ten dollars, it would soon dribble away. Something must be done. She stared at the money, but could not think.

The baby woke and cried, and she nursed it. Presently the other children began asking for food. She sent Katie to the grocery for cabbage and bread.

’Could n’t we have meat to-day, mamma? It’s like a holiday.’ said sixyear-old Mary.

' Meat ? God knows when we ’ll have meat again. Meat!’

Mary began to cry.

‘ Be quiet! ’

Katie left, coughing. Her mother set a kettle on the gas-flame, and walked aimlessly about the room. Then she remembered the candle. She hesitated, crossed herself, and stretched forth her hand. But she could not put it out.

After the supper dishes were washed, Katie put the younger children to bed, and then came back into the kitchen. She wanted to sit close to her mother, now so strangely remote and indifferent. But, afraid of being ordered to bed, she sat quietly in a far corner of the room, anxious and frightened at the awful events of the day — the black coffin, with papa dead in it. And to have it put under the ground! But far more frightening was the change in her mother. It was as if her mother were not t here.

Mrs. Kazalski was still unable to think. Again and again she looked at the money in her purse, again and again said over to herself, ‘What next? What shall I do?’ and could find no answer.

About nine o’clock, a heavy step was heard on the tenement stairs, and then a loud knocking at the door. Katie, frightened, looked at her mother, who sat as if she had not heard. When the knock was repeated, Katie herself asked, ‘Who’s there?’

‘Does Mrs. Kazalski live here? I’m Mike Salinsky.’

‘Who? Come in.’

A fat, florid man entered. ‘Good evening, good evening,’ he said; and began at once a long rapid speech, in Polish. ‘ I learned from the undertaker about your grief. Very sad. My condolences. Life is strange. The will of God. You never can tell. But what would the world come to if we gave in to our grief? We must think of the living, of the living.’

He found an unresponsive audience. Katie, now leaning against her mother, gazed at him, wide-eyed, unsmiling. Mrs. Kazalski, contemptuous, hardly noticed him.

‘I ’ll just sit down,’ he said, ‘and get my breath.’

Katie began to cough.

‘My, what a bad cough, for such a nice little girl! ’ said the stranger. ‘ This climate — bad for coughs. How many children have you, Mrs. Kazalski?’

With an effort she tore her mind away from its vacant brooding, and focused it upon her visitor.

‘What, do you want of me? Why do you come here? What business is it of yours how many children I have?’

‘No offense, no offense,’ he replied, always in Polish. ‘I’m here to help you. The undertaker told me you were a widow with several children, and my business, you might say, is to help widows with children. I can do you a good turn.’

She did not answer, and he went on, quite unembarrassed: —

‘How’d you like to go South? How’d you like to go down to the Gulf of Mexico, down in Mississippi, where it’s nice and warm, and where you and all the children could get nice easy work, and good pay, and free rent, and free fuel? How ’d you like to go South and shuck oysters and pick shrimps? For the winter. I’m the row-boss for the O. U. Oyster Company, and they sent me up here to get families to come down and work. We pay the fare, and if you stay the whole season, and work whenever there’s work to be done, we pay your fare back to Baltimore. People earn three or four dollars a day. Oh, not at the very first, but — do you know the Blitskys?’

‘No.’

‘Well, Mrs. Blitsky earned two hundred dollars last year, and she ’s gone down again. Her children make fifty or seventy-five cents apiece, some days.’

Mrs. Kazalski, by nature cautious and mistrustful of strangers, eyed the speaker with suspicion. Why should he come to her? If the work was so good, why did n’t the people who lived down there do it? Why should he come all the way to Baltimore to get workers? She did not ask these questions. What use? He would give her some smooth answer. He had a smooth, oily look. She mistrusted him.

Suddenly, while she was looking at him, the candle sputtered and went out. She turned to it. Perhaps — who knows? — perhaps it was a sign. Perhaps this was an honest offer of help, heaven sent — a reward from the Virgin for not putt ing out the candle this afternoon? At any rate, it would do no harm to ask questions.

The work was seasonal, he said. There were not enough people in the locality to do it, and not enough work the year round to keep a large population there. The canneries ran only from October to May. Every year, canneries all along the Gulf coast, in Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana, brought down thousands of workers for the season. Surely she must have known some people who had ‘gone South to oysters.’ Had she never heard of Biloxi? Biloxi was less than fifty miles from the O. U. Oyster Cannery.

It happened that Mrs. Kazalski had heard of Biloxi. The family who had occupied these very rooms, before she took them, had gone to Biloxi. She had not known them, nor had she heard how they fared, but the familiar name gave her a feeling of security. She continued to ask questions. The row-boss gave information fluently.

The house they would live in was less than a stone’s throw from the cannery. The climate was warm. Fire was needed only for cooking, and the company supplied the wood. The furniture, too. All she need bring was bedding, dishes, and clothing. The work was healthy, practically out-of-door work, and mothers brought their babies along to the canning-shed with them. ‘you must have heard of the Sunny South,’ he continued. ‘Lots of rich people go South for consumption. It would be awfully good for your girl’s cough, down there. And she can work while she’s getting well, and so can all the other children work too. How old are they?’

‘Katie’s twelve, and Dan’s eight, and Mary’s six, and Lisbeth is four, and the baby ’s two months.’

‘Well, well, quite a jump from Katie to Dan! Ha, ha!' But as she did not respond to his joke, he continued seriously, ‘Every one of them could help you, except the baby.’

There was more talk. The row-boss soon discovered that Mrs. Kazalski’s chief interest lay in the answer to the question, ‘You ’re sure it’s good for coughs?’

When he had gone, Katie’s mother was no longer strange and distant. She held Katie on her lap, — a rare endearment, — and repeated to herself, in Polish, ‘The sunny South, the sunny South. Good for consumption. The sunny South!’ She beat down the misgivings that forced themselves into her heart.

II

Despite the discomforts of the overcrowded coach, the two days’ trip down to the O. U. Oyster Cannery was of great interest to Mrs. Kazalski. She could not remember any previous two days of her life spent thus idly, except for her trip to America from the old country, nine years ago. It was pleasant to look from the train-window at the passing landscape; pleasant to talk with the other Polish women — a number of them, like herself, in the greenness of their grief, going to escape such poverty as attended widowhood in Baltimore. A few families were fortunate in having fathers, coming to work on the oysterand shrimp-catching boats. The men, however, were few. Chiefly there were women and children.

The flaw was the changed attitude of Mike Salinskv, the row-boss. He had no longer the suave manner of his visit to her home. Every now and then he walked through the train, looking over the ‘bunch’ he had rounded up, with an insolent air. Once, as he passed, Katie was coughing, and he told her sharply to ‘ hold her noise.’

At noon of the third day the train stopped at a small covered platform, and the passengers trooped out. No town, no stores, only a stopping-place for the train, and a signpost, on which a painted hand pointed the direction of t he O. U. Oyster Cannery. The land about the platform was marshy, with low palms and bracken and other lush growth.

The large wagon that met the train could take only part of the crowd at one time. Mrs. Kazalski and her children and baggage were piled on with the first load.

When the road along which the wagon jogged turned away from the swamps, and into a lovely pine wood, Mrs. Kazalski felt reassured. It was a bright sunny day, and the air was soft and warm. She reproached herself for her fears. The sweet country smell made her think of the fields of Galicia.

A half-hour’s drive brought the road to a turning; and suddenly there appeared the cannery, the ‘camp,’ and the blue sweep of the Gulf.

As the wngon pulled out of the wood, the sun was so blinding that the newcomers could scarcely take in the scene. The ‘camp’ had been built up on piles of crushed oyster-shells, bleached white and glaring in the sunlight. A single palm tree, close to one of the camp buildings, was the only growing thing near the O. U. Oyster Cannery. Several long, low, unpainted structures stood flimsily on stilts, above the shellfoundation. Everywhere flies buzzed, and mosquitoes whined.

‘Hurry up, hurry up, pick your rooms!’ said the driver, as he deposited the families. ‘All just alike. Does n’t matter which you take. First come, first served.'

The women stood about, dazed. ‘Is this where we — live?' asked Mrs. Kazalski, at last.

‘Where the hell do you think you live? Of course this is where you live. Every room furnished. A room for each family.'

He turned his horses, and drove back for the second load.

Some of the women began running in and out of the various rooms, to see which were preferable. Mrs. Kazalski stood still. Her imagination had pictured a small cottage, with a garden. To be sure, the row-boss had not promised a garden and a cottage, but somehow she had pictured it so; and this long, narrow, flimsy, barn-like shack shocked her. The building was two rooms deep, and twelve rooms long. Each room had a dooi and a small window. A sagging uncovered porch, or platform, ran the whole length of the structure, front and back. To the right of each door, protruding from the wall of the house, near the low roof, was a stovepipe. Twenty-four families were to occupy the twenty-four rooms. A pump at each end of the shack supplied water.

Mrs. Kazalski chose the room nearest the palm tree. It measured twelve by fourteen feet. Its furniture consisted of a stove, a table, a bench, and a bunk built up about one foot from the floor — all made of rough, unpainted planks. Thin board partitions divided her compartment from that on either side, and from the one behind hers. The room lacked closets and cupboards. Rusty nails in the walls invited such clothing as the members of the family did not have upon their persons. A small shelf offered support for a few dishes and food.

She sighed. Then she said to herself, ‘No matter. The climate is good for consumption.’

The cannery was not running on the day of her arrival. She setlled her few belongings, carried some wood from the camp woodpile, and went to the commissary to buy food.

‘How much?’ she asked, having made her selection.

‘Cash or book?’

If one had no cash the company allowed credit, its extent depending upon the number of working children in the family, and the experience of the mother. But articles cost about one third more on credit than when cash was paid. In either case, the prices seemed to Mrs. Kazalski exorbitant; but she could do nothing, no other store was available. Grateful that her purse still held two dollars, she paid cash.

After a dinner of bread and beans and coffee, she washed the clothes that the journey had soiled, and bathed the children. Then, while t he clothes were drying, she sat on the edge of the platform in front of her door, nursing her baby, and blinking in t hesunlight, content. This drenching, dazzling sunshine &emdah; nothing could exaggerate it. Surely it would cure Katie’s cough. The children had run down to the water’s edge, to the right of the cannery, to play. Yes, it was much better than Baltimore.

But that night it began to rain, and the dampness permeated everything. The roof leaked. The mosquitoes bit viciously. All the children were restless. Katie coughed almost incessantly, and the neighbors on all three sides protested. ‘Shut up, you ’re keeping the whole camp awake,’ called the neighbor on the right. ‘That ’s right, she is! ’ responded the father of the lefthand family, and added, ‘Damn these mosquitoes!’ It. was almost as if they were all sleeping in one room, so thin were the partitions. Mrs. Kazalski gave Katie a double dose of the cough medicine.

It seemed as if she had hardly fallen asleep, when a shrill siren startled the night, and tore her senses awake. The baby and little Mary screamed in terror. Only Katie, drugged by the cough medicine, slept through the disturbance.

‘There must be a fire somewhere,’ was Mrs. Kazalski’s first thought; for it was dark — it could not be four o’clock in the morning.

Soon a heavy knocking was heard next door, and then at Mrs. Kazalski’s door came a pounding, and the voice of the night watchman: ‘Get up, hurry up, the oysters are waiting. Everybody up!’ He pounded with a heavy stick, and Katie woke, frightened.

‘What is it, mother?’

‘Come, we must get up and go to work.’

‘But it’s nighttime, and very cold.’

The damp wood smoked, but Mrs. Kazalski succeeded in building a fire; and after a breakfast of bread and coffee with condensed milk, Mrs. Kazalski and her dazed, sleepy children stumbled across the short stretch of crushed oyster-shells, to the cannery. She carried the baby in her arms.

The work itself was not hard, but Mrs. Kazalski hated it from the start. She hated the chill, damp, shuckingshed, the smell of steamed oysters, the dirtiness of the work. The oysters were unloaded from the boats into small cars out on the pier; the cars were run through a ‘steam box’ at the entrance to the shed, and then, steaming and dripping, traveled along tracks into the shucking-shed, where the workers clustered about them. Each worker was given a bucket, — called a cup, — a knife, and a glove to protect the hand from the sharp rough edge of the shells. It took only a minute to learn the work. One attached one’s cup to the side of the car, took a cluster of oysters from the car, broke it apart, opened the oysters, which the steam had already partly opened, and cut out the meat, leaving the eyes in the shells, which were dropped to the floor.

‘A baby could do it,’ said Mike Salinsky, no longer resplendent in city clothes, but authoritative. The owner of the factory came in to look about, and left. Mike and another row-boss supervised the work.

‘There ’s no gloves for the children,’ said one woman.

‘You can buy some for them, tomorrow,’ said Mike. ‘You got to buy your own, after this, too. The company gives only the first glove. Hey, you,’ — this to Mrs. Kazalski, — ‘you can’t work with that baby in your arms. Put it over there, with the other babies.’

‘You should have brought something to put it on,’ said Mrs. Kazalski’s neighbor, who had been in the camp several weeks. ‘I take a box along for mine; the floor’s awful wet.’

Mrs. Kazalski looked helplessly about. Then she sent Katie home for a quilt.

‘Here, where you going?’ demanded Mike Salinsky, as Katie was slipping out of the shed.

‘My mother wants a quilt to put the baby on.’

‘Well, see you hurry back, and quit your coughing!’

About seven shuckers stood at each car. As they shucked, they dropped the shells to the floor, standing among them, and on them. As the piles of shells on the floor grew, and as the cars emptied, the shuckers had to bend over farther and farther, to reach the oysters. They worked with a swaying motion, to ease the monotony of standing. When a cup was filled, the shucker took it to the weigher, who gave her a nickel for every two pounds. The mothers dumped the oysters their children had shucked in with their own, and received the money.

By noon, Mrs. Kazalski and her children had earned thirty-five cents. She was discouraged, she was wet and dirty, she was worried. Katie had coughed straight through the morning, and Dan was beginning to sneeze and sniffle. The younger children had once or twice fallen asleep on the floor, among the oyster-shells, and she did not disturb them, until she saw Mike Salinsky approaching.

‘You make more, after a while,’encouraged her neighbor, Mrs. Oshinsky. ‘And when you stop minding the smell, you eat more oysters, — they ’re real good, — and you don’t get so tired. It’s awful the first few days.’

Mrs. Kazalski thought she would never eat an oyster.

She determined not to bring the smaller children back to the cannery in the afternoon; but when she saw other children following their mothers, she changed her mind.

The children, however, worked only fitfully in the afternoon; and it seemed understood that they need not shuck steadily. At least, though Mike Salinsky shouted at them when he saw them idling or playing together, he did not drive them to work, as he had in the morning.

The first day finished at three o’clock. Counting the time off for breakfast at nine o’clock and dinner at noon, they had worked ten hours. The fastest shucker in the shed had earned two dollars. A family of a mother and four children had earned three dollars. The nickels of the Kazalski family added up to ninety cents.

Mrs. Kazalski went home, discouraged. She was strong, but the standing and stooping over the oyster-cars had tired her, had made her back ache. Her clothes were wet and dirty. ‘No use to wash them,’ she said. ‘They ’d be as dirty after an hour to-morrow.’ She changed the children’s clothes and her own, and hung the dirty ones behind the stove to dry.

She recalled something Mrs. Oshinsky had said: ‘This ain’t nothing to shrimps. That’s a stink to complain about. And the shrimp-juice eats the skin off your fingers, till they bleed. But you can get used to anything.’

That had been the beginning. Better days had followed, and worse — the day of the accident, for instance. A child had got in the way of an oystercar. Mrs. Kazalski shuddered, remembering the crushed hand, and turned her thoughts away. Some days the boats brought in neither oysters nor shrimps, and then one could rest. But no work meant no money; and before the season was half over Mrs. Kazalski owed eighteen dollars to the company store. How could she pay it? She could never catch up. She bought as little food as possible, and tried to fill herself, and urged the children to fill themselves, on oysters. She could contrive no further economy, except that of buying less cough medicine. But Katie suffered, and could not sleep without the medicine. The sunny South had not helped her. She was worse.

Mr. Kazalski struggled hard against despair. If only she had never left Baltimore!

And now the government, the government was sending inspectors, to fine them, to starve them, to take the work away from their children! Twentyfive dollars! Suppose they discovered that her children worked, that she had not the twenty-five dollars? Some of the neighbors might let it out. Well, the government lady would get nothing from her, not a thing. She would be civil, but not a word about the work!

III

The government lady was in the door. ‘It’s not a man, dressed as a woman,’ was Mrs. Kazalski’s first thought. ‘Annie Oshinskv is a fool!’ She responded, unsmiling, to the ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Kazalski. I ’m Miss Egmont of the Children’s Bureau. May I come in?’

‘Sit down,’ she said, in a dull voice. But she thought, as she looked at the short, slight, brown-clad figure, the pointed piquant face under the closefitting little round hat, ‘She looks — almost — as if she could be happy!’ It came as a revelation to her that any adult could look like this.

Afterward, thinking of her, Mrs. Kazalski wondered why she had seemed so remarkable. She was not pretty, nor yet clever: apparently she had not. noticed Mrs. Kazalski’s hostility, had acted as if she were welcome. She had said, easily, ‘May I take off my hat? It fits a little too tight’; and, without waiting for permission, bad removed it and hung it on the knob of the chair.

Afterward, as during the interview, Mrs. Kazalski felt about in her sparsely furnished mind for a word to explain this visitor, so unlike anyone she had ever met. The Polish word for ‘separate’ kept coming to her mind; but, being unused to abstract thinking, she did not recognize it as exactly the word to express Miss Egmont’s detachment, — detachment from herself, apparent freedom from problems of her own,— which was the quality that puzzled and attracted Mrs. Kazalski.

‘Did you ever hear of the Children’s Bureau?’ began Miss Egmont. And when Mrs. Kazalski had said, ‘No’m,’ she continued, ‘Well, it’s a part of the government that is trying to find out how children and mothers are getting along, and what they do, in order to learn what things are best for them. Now we are visiting all mothers with children in these little canning camps. How many children have you?’

Mrs. Kazalski was immediately on her guard. Miss Egmont’s pencil was poised over a large card, on which Mrs. Kazalski could see irregular patches of printing, combined with blank spaces, and red-and-blue ruled lines. Miss Egmont was not looking at the card, but at her hostess, with half-smiling encouragement. And surely, thought Mrs. Kazalski, that was a harmless question. No harm, either, in giving their ages, and telling at what grades they had stopped in school. In fact. Miss Egmont turned directly to Katie and Dan, who stood by, their wide eyes upon her, and asked them questions about school. Katie, who coughed most of the time, coughed harder, now, from nervousness; and Miss Egmont’s face clouded, as she asked about the cough.

Despite her resolution to be circumspect in her dealings with this intruder, Mrs. Kazalski scarcely listened to what she was saying, so preoccupied was she in her personality. ‘If she had my life and my troubles,’ she thought, ‘would she be so — so different?’

‘You ’Merican lady?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Egmont, ‘but my grandparents came from the old country. How long have you been in America?’

‘Nine year. How old you are, lady?’

If Miss Egmont was surprised, she did not show it. ‘Thirty-two,’ she replied. ‘And you?’

Mrs. Kazalski’s eyes opened wide. Thirty-two! Why, she herself was only thirty. She would have guessed Miss Egmont fully ten years younger. Then surely this apparent happiness was not real. Why, she was not married: was an old maid. Mrs. Kazalski softened, with something like pity. So busy was she speculating about her visitor, that she answered questions mechanically. But suddenly, one question brought her up short.

‘Now tell me about the children’s work. I suppose Katie can’t help you very much at the factory, because of her cough?’

Mrs. Kazalski’s face hardened. She made no answer. Miss Egmont might ask till doomsday, she’d get nothing out of her. Yet it was strange that she should ask the question so directly — not at all as if she were trying to surprise an answer from her.

‘I’d like to know,’ Miss Egmont went on, in her soft, even voice, ‘about the work you and the children do in the cannery — just what you do, and how much you earn, and what time you go to work, and some other things. But first, are you sure you understand just why I ’m asking these questions? Sometimes people are suspicious, can’t understand why the government, far off in Washington, should send someone away down here to ask questions. Maybe you ’d like to ask me some questions before you answer mine?’

‘Mrs. Osh insky says you come to collect the fines.'

‘Fines?'

‘The twenty-five dollars for people, if their children work. You inspector?’

‘No,’ said Miss Egmont, simply, and it surprised Mrs. Kazalski that the accusation did not embarrass her. ‘There are inspectors,’ Miss Egmont continued, ‘and there are fines for employing children; but the bosses, not the workers, pay the fines. Only, my work has nothing to do with fines. The government is making a study of what’s good for children and what ’s bad for children. You see, children are the most valuable things in the world; but it is only lately people have learned that, in order to make them healthier and happier, we have to study them, and see how things affect them. The Children’s Bureau is finding out how work affects them — how it affects their health and their chances of growing up strong and healthy and happy. What do you think about it? How do you feel about the work your children do, and the other children?’

Mrs. Kazalski had never thought of it. But the question turned her scrutiny back from her visitor to herself. It half flashed through her mind that she had never before thought of anything aside from how to get money for the next day’s living; how to keep her children and her house clean; what to cook; whether the oysters would be large or small; how to pick out the wettest car and to work quickly, so that as much water as possible would get in with the oyster-meat, before it was weighed.

But now, here was a new thing. Her opinion was being asked. She shrugged her shoulders. What had she to do with these things?

Yet something quite strange and new seemed to be pushing up in her mind. A slow anger was part of it, but there was another element in it, too. She had an opinion, and she wanted, not to be silent, and sullen with this government lady, but to talk, to argue with her. Presently she was answering: —

‘ I think too bad for children to work; but what you can do? Il ’s better to work and live, than to starve and die. What would do poor people without husband, if the children don’t work? Without the children, I no could make half to live on. Even with the children, I got a debt eighteen dollars, at the store. And you — the government —it don’t give money, no? No, just questions it gives. How can help us — questions? The row-boss say you get money for questions, that’s why things cost too much — for tax. You say it’s good for children — questions. Will it help my children?’

This was a long speech for Mrs. Kazalski. She was breathing hard and perspiring with the effort of it.

Miss Egmont’s face was thoughtful. ‘I’m not absolutely sure it will help your children.’ She spoke slowly, experienced in making simple people understand new things. ’I ’m not sure the results of a study like this will come soon enough, though they may come in time to help the younger ones. Do you know,’ she went on, ‘that some states give money to widows, so that their children can go to school? And that, in some countries, fathers and bosses and the government together pay for insurance, so that, if the father dies, the mother will have some money every month, and won’t have to put the children to work? Well, how do you suppose those countries and those states came to do these things? They sent people like me to go and study what the people needed, how they lived and how they worked; and then they planned ways to help them. But it takes time, and to learn these things we must depend on what the workers tell us, and what the bosses tell us. You, when you tell me about your children’s work and about your work, are helping the government to make things better for all children, even though the changes may not come tomorrow or for several years. I believe they will come in your children’s lifetime. Don’t you want to help make things better for children?’

Mrs. Kazalski felt strangely moved. Only partly by the argument of her visitor, only partly by the visitor’s personality. Mainly, it was the fact of this visit, the fact of this conversation, which had swerved her mind from its familiar groove into the rough vastness of new thinking. To think, for the first time in one’s life, of anything outside the range ot one’s experience and observation, is a profound experience. As Mrs. Kazalski’s untutored but not stupid mind followed Miss Egmont’s simple explanation, she forgot about her debt to the store, forgot Katie’s cough (for Katie, listening intently, had not coughed for some minutes). A strange emotion welled up in her, a feeling of value, a feeling that her children were really important, not only to herself, but to the country.

She shook her head several times. ‘It should be a good work,’ she said slowly, at last. And when Miss Egmont took up her questioning again, with ‘How did you happen to leave Baltimore, to come down here?’ Mrs. Kazalski found herself wanting to tell the whole story of her hardships. It would be a blessed relief to talk about her troubles, to put them into words, to a person quite detached from her life, someone she would never see again. Never had she done this; never had it Occurred to her. She had always thought of her burdens as inevitable, inflicted by Providence, goading her to laborious, irksome effort, which offered no reward. She was not a woman to pity herself, but now, as she poured forth her tale, it was as if she had been given the power to stand apart and see herself; and a rush of self-pity, the first she had known, flooded her for the moment — a strange indulgence of pain that was hotter, but softer, than the hard accepting silence of her many months. Yet there was nothing in her voice, no moisture in her eyes, to tell Miss Egmont, who listened with understanding, of her emotion. She had sent the children out of doors, and in a low voice — that her neighbors might not hear — she had begun: —

‘Things were enough good with us, till the accident. After five months sick, my man die; and was left in the house only five dollar thirty-eight cents. Katie coughed bad. That night came the row-boss — ’

She told of Mike Salinsky’s visit, of her trip down, of her disappointment; of the draughty coldness of the canningshed in bad wet weather; how the roof of her house ‘leaked like a basket’ when it rained; how she lay awake at night, too tired to sleep, worrying, waiting for the siren, yet dreading it; waiting and dreading the watchman’s pounding on the door, which never failed to fill her with anger; hating to force the children from their beds at four or five or six o’clock in the morning — according to the size of the catch; how fast the shucking-gloves wore out — ‘one glove a day, and we cut our hands yet’; how much worse picking shrimps was than shucking oysters, because of the acid in the head of the shrimps: ‘After two days at shrimps, my hands look like butcher-shop, but that’s the only one thing to make think there is in the world meat! And the stink! You smelt it once? So!’

But, worst of all, was the worry about Katie’s cough. That kept recurring again and again in her outpouring. She talked with the simple vividness of a person unused to fluent speech. ‘I no would care about work, I no would care for nothing, if Katie could get well. When I go away from Baltimore, I say, charity the Kazalskis no take. But now I think foolish to be more proud than to care of your child’s health. It ain’t proud, having them work over mud and wet, in clothes soaked and torn like noodles. And I think maybe oysters no good for the cough.’

‘Did you ask the boss if he would send you back now, instead of waiting till the end?’

Mrs. Kazalski laughed bitterly. ‘He gave me a mouthful,’ she said.

‘Excuse me, I tell you all this,’ she went on, ‘but you want to know why children got to work. That’s why. But if Katie could get well, I’d give — I’d give — well, I ain’t got nothing to give. Excuse me, miss, your face looks very sorry. But you ask — and now you know.

Miss Egmont was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘Did your husband’s boss do nothing for you when he died? ’

‘Why he should do something? It was no his fault— the accident. My man,’ — she paused, — ‘he good worker, nine year one boss; but he make himself the accident. Sixteen hours he work, and he was much tired. He was good worker, but we no could ask something from the boss, when my husband make the accident.’

‘When you get back to Baltimore, what will you do?’

Mrs. Kazalski had asked herself this same question many times, and never had she found any answer. But now, miraculously, she discovered that she had a plan, a plan that sprang up of its own accord, that rushed forth, almost as a part of her outpouring.

‘I go to a charity. I say, “Let me take money for rooms; I take lodgers, so I can get a doctor for Katie; I take in washings; I pay back the money.” Maybe I pay neighbor to take care the baby; I go factory, maybe. But I send my children on the school; they should grow up, like you say, like people, not like pigs. What for I leave Baltimore, to come down to this pig-life, I don’t know. If only,’ she added, wistfully, ‘if only Katie should live till we get back.’

Miss Egmont. looked away, out of the open doorway, to the Gulf. The water was a deep blue. A white sail moved slowly, in the sunlight, along the horizon.

‘Well,’ she said, bringing her eyes back to Mrs. Kazalski, ‘you have had a hard time. But there are only six weeks more, and you have been here, you say, nearly fourteen already. Six weeks is not so terribly long. About the debt, I should not. worry too much. Are you the only person here with a debt at the store?’

‘Oh no! All people got debt at the store!’

‘Well, surely the company won’t w ant to keep all of you here, for your debt. At the worst, they will take some of your bedding to pay for it. And there may be a heavy run of oysters. And thank you very much for giving me this information. Would you mind if I look over this card, to see that I have n’t forgotten to ask anything? I ’m supposed to have an answer for every question.’

Mrs. Kazalski did not accuse her of indifference. Her mind was so occupied with her sudden, new plans for the ordering of her life on her return to Baltimore, that she was scarcely conscious of Miss Egmont.

Miss Egmont stayed a few minutes longer to get in detail the earnings of each member of the family since their coming, and the hours of work. Presently she left, hoping things would go better, hoping Katie would improve, suggesting a Baltimore clinic.

Mrs. Kazalski went back to her washtub. She could hear Miss Egmont making the same explanation in the next compartment, could hear her neighbor’s guarded, reluctant answers. She did not listen to the words, though she could easily have heard them — at first. But after a while her neighbor’s voice lowered. Then it occurred to her that perhaps her neighbor had some trouble as real as her own; perhaps — why, surely, every woman in the camp had troubles. Most of them were widows, most of them had children to support. And perhaps other women, all over the country! Why, of course, it was right that the government should send someone down to see how things were!

That night she went to bed with a new feeling. It was as if, for the first time in her life, she was fully alive. Not happy, but awake. Sometimes, in her youth, — say fourteen years ago, — at a wedding in Galicia, after a peasant dance, she had a feeling akin to this, yet different. Then the dancing made one forget the hard furrows and the heavy plough. Now there was no forgetting, rather a full remembering, a coming alive of her mind. A full remembering of herself, and, therefore, of others.

Yet, she told herself, nothing had happened, really. A woman had come, had asked questions, had gone away. She had answered questions, had stated her situation. ‘Yet nothing has happened,’ she repeated to herself in Polish, ‘only a conversation. Talk, only.’ The debt was still unpaid, Katie was this minute coughing, and life in Baltimore, at the end of six weeks, would be a hard struggle, even though she nowhad a plan. Why then this new courage, this strange, warm feeling, which reached out, even beyond this roomful of her own family — which included even more than the whole camp? Was this, she asked herself, what they meant by patriotism?

The wind blew, and the single palm tree outside her door crackled. The sound was like the rattle of hard rain. Other nights she had hated it, had thought it mournful, but now she liked it. She raised her head from the bed, and through the window she could see the tree. The moonlight seemed to drip off the sharp fingers of the leaves. Splotches of light and black shadow’s made a grotesquery; and for the first time she saw a beauty in it. She could close her ears to the heavy breathing of her neighbors, and to Katie s cough, and could listen to the orchestra of crickets and frogs, against the night’s outer silence, with — was it possible? — almost with happiness.