Levinsky," he said. "Take up cloak-making."
He made me write down his address. He expected that I would do it in Yiddish. When he saw me write his name and the name of the street in English he said, reverently: "Writing English already!
There is a mind for you! If I could write like that I could become a designer. Well, don"t lose the address. Call on me, and if you make up your mind to take up cloak-making just say the word and I"ll fix you up. When Gitelson says he will, he will." The image of that cloak-operator reading books and laying by money for a college education haunted me. Why could I not do the same? I pictured myself working and studying and saving money for the kind of education which Matilda had dinned into my ears
I accepted Gitelson"s offer. Cloak-making or the cloak business as a career never entered my dreams at that time. I regarded the trade merely as a stepping-stone to a life of intellectual interests
CHAPTER II
THE operator to whom Gitelson apprenticed me was a short, plump, dark-complexioned fellow named Joe. I have but a dim recollection of his features, though I distinctly remember his irresistible wide-eyed smile and his emotional nature
He taught me to bind seams, and later to put in pockets, to st.i.tch on "under collars," and so forth. After a while he began to pay me a small weekly wage, he himself being paid, for our joint work, by the piece. The shop was not the manufacturer"s. It belonged to one of his contractors, who received from him "bundles" of material which his employees (tailors, machine - operators, pressers, and finisher girls) made up into cloaks or jackets. The cheaper goods were made entirely by operators; the better grades partly by tailors, partly by operators, or wholly by tailors; but these were mostly made "inside," in the manufacturer"s own establishment.
The designing, cutting, and making of samples were "inside"
branches exclusively. Gitelson, as a skilled tailor, was an "inside"
man, being mostly employed on samples
My work proved to be much harder and the hours very much longer than I had antic.i.p.ated. I had to toil from six in the morning to nine in the evening.
(Joe put in even more time. I always found him grinding away rapturously when I came to the shop in the morning, and always left him toiling as rapturously when I went home in the evening.) Ours is a seasonal trade. All the work of the year is crowded into two short seasons of three and two months, respectively, during which one is to earn enough to last him twelve months (only sample-makers, high-grade tailors like Gitelson, were kept busy throughout the year). But then wages were comparatively high, so that a good mechanic, particularly an operator, could make as much as seventy-five dollars a week, working about fifteen hours a day. However, during the first two or three weeks I was too much borne down by the cruelty of my drudgery to be interested in the luring rewards which it held out. Not being accustomed to physical exertion of any kind, I felt like an innocent man suddenly thrown into prison and put at hard labor. I was shocked. I was crushed. I was continually looking at the clock, counting the minutes, and when I came home I would feel so sore in body and spirit that I could not sleep. Studying or reading was out of the question
Moreover, as a peddler I seemed to have belonged to the world of business, to the same cla.s.s as the rich, the refined, while now, behold! I was a workman, a laborer, one of the ma.s.ses. I pitied myself for a degraded wretch. And when some of my shopmates indulged in coa.r.s.e pleasantry in the hearing of the finisher girls it would hurt me personally, as a confirmation of my disgrace. "And this is the kind of people with whom I am doomed to a.s.sociate!" I would lament. In point of fact, there were only four or five fellows of this kind in a shop of fifty. Nor were some of the peddlers or music-teachers I had known more modest of speech than the worst of these cloak-makers. What was more, I felt that some of my fellow-employees were purer and better men than I. But that did not matter. I abhorred the shop and everybody in it as a well-bred convict abhors his jail and his fellow-inmates
When the men quarreled they would call one another, among other things, "bundle-eaters." This meant that they accused one another of being ever hungry for bundles of raw material, ever eager to "gobble up all the work in the shop." I wondered how one could be anxious for physical toil. They seemed to be a lot of savages
The idea of leaving the shop often crossed my mind, but I never had the courage to take it seriously. I had tried my hand at peddling and failed.
Was I a failure as a mechanic as well? Was I unfit for anything?
The other fellows at the shop had a definite foothold in life, while I was a waif, a ne"er-do-well, nearly two years in America with nothing to show for it.
Thoughts such as these had a cowing effect on me. They made me feel somewhat like the fresh prisoner who has been put to work at stone-breaking to have his wild spirit broken. I dared not give up my new occupation. I would force myself to work hard, and as I did so the very terrors of my toil would fascinate me, giving me a sense of my own worth. As the jackets that bore my st.i.tches kept piling up, the concrete result of my useful performance would become a source of moral satisfaction to me. And when I received my first wages--the first money I had ever earned by the work of my hands--it seemed as if it were the first money I had ever earned honestly
By little and little I got used to my work and even to enjoy its processes.
Moreover, the thinking and the dreaming I usually indulged in while plying my machine became a great pleasure to me. It seemed as though one"s mind could not produce such interesting thoughts or images unless it had the rhythmic whir of a sewing-machine to stimulate it
I now ate well and slept well. I was in the best of health and in the best of spirits. I was in an uplifted state of mind. No one seemed to be honorable who did not earn his bread in the sweat of his brow as I did. Had I then chanced to hear a Socialist speech I might have become an ardent follower of Karl Marx and my life might have been directed along lines other than those which brought me to financial power
The girls in the shop, individually, scarcely interested me, but their collective presence was something of which I never seemed to be quite unconscious. It was as though the workaday atmosphere were scented with the breath of a delicate perfume--a perfume that was tainted with the tang of my yearning for Matilda
Two girls who were seated within a yard from my machine were continually bandying secrets. Now one and then the other would look around to make sure that the contractor was not watching, and then she would bend over and whisper something into her chum"s ear. This would set my blood tingling with a peculiar kind of inquisitiveness. It was reasonable to suppose that their whispered conferences mostly bore upon such innocent matters as their work, earnings, lodgings, or dresses. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that their whispers, especially when accompanied by a smile, a giggle, or a wink, conveyed some of their intimate thoughts of men. They were homely girls, with pinched faces, yet at such moments they represented to me all that there was fascinating and disquieting in womanhood
The jests of the foul-mouthed rowdies would make me writhe with disgust. As a rule they were ostensibly addressed to some of the other fellows or to n.o.body in particular, their real target being the nearest girls. These would receive them with gestures of protest or with an exclamation of mild repugnance, or--in the majority of cases--pa.s.s them unnoticed, as one does some unavoidable discomfort of toil. There was only one girl in the shop who received these jests with a shamefaced grin or even with frank appreciation, and she was a perfectly respectable girl like the rest.
There were some finisher girls who could not boast an unsullied reputation, but none of them worked in our shop, and, indeed, their number in the entire trade was very small
One of the two girls who sat nearest to my machine was quite popular in the shop, but that was because of her sweet disposition and sound sense rather than for her looks. She was known to have a snug little account in a savings-bank. It was for a marriage portion she was saving; but she was doing it so strenuously that she stinted herself the expense of a decent dress or hat, or the price of a ticket to a ball, picnic, or dancing-cla.s.s.
The result was that while she was pinching and scrimping herself to pave the way to her marriage she barred herself, by this very process, from contact with possible suitors. She was a good soul.
From time to time she would give some of her money to a needy relative, and then she would try to make up for it by saving with more ardor than ever. Her name was Gussie
Joe, the plump, dark fellow who was teaching me the trade, was one of the several men in the shop who were addicted to salacious banter. One of his favorite pranks was to burlesque some synagogue chant from the solemn service of the Days of Awe, with disgustingly coa.r.s.e Yiddish in place of the Hebrew of the prayer. But he was not a bad fellow, by any means. He was good-natured, extremely impressionable, and susceptible of good influences.
A sad tune would bring a woebegone look into his face, while a good joke would make him laugh to tears. He was fond of referring to himself as my "rabbi," which is Hebrew for teacher, and that was the way I would address him, at first playfully, and then as a matter of course
One day, after he had delivered himself of a quip that set my teeth on edge, I said to him, appealingly: "Why should you be saying these things, rabbi?"
"If you don"t like them you can stop your G.o.d-fearing ears," he fired back, good-naturedly
I retorted that it was not a matter of piety, but of common decency, and my words were evidently striking home, but the girls applauded me, which spoiled it all
"If you want to preach sermons you"re in the wrong place," he flared up.
"This is no synagogue."
"Nor is it a pigsty," Gussie urged, without raising her eyes from her work
A month or two later he abandoned these sallies of his own accord.
The other fellows twitted him on his burst of "righteousness" and made efforts to lure him into a race of ribald punning, but he stood his ground
By and by it leaked out that he was engaged and madly in love with his girl.
I warmed to him.
The young woman who had won his heart was not an employee of our shop.
Indeed, love-affairs between working-men and working-girls who are employed in the same place are not quite so common as one might suppose. The factory is scarcely a proper setting for romance. It is one of the battle-fields in our struggle for existence, where we treat woman as an inferior being, whereas in civilized love-making we prefer to keep up the chivalrous fiction that she is our superior. The girls of our shop, hard-worked, disheveled, and handled with anything but chivalry, aroused my sympathy, but it was not the kind of feeling that stimulates romantic interest. Still, collectively, as an abstract reminder of their s.e.x, they flavored my sordid environment with poetry
CHAPTER III
THE majority of the students at the College of the City of New York was already made up of Jewish boys, mostly from the tenement-houses. One such student often called at the cloak-shop in which I was employed, and in which his father--a tough-looking fellow with a sandy beard, a former teamster--was one of the pressers. A cla.s.smate of this boy was supported by an aunt, a spinster who made good wages as a bunch-maker in a cigar-factory.
To make an educated man of her nephew was the great ambition of her life.
All this made me feel as though I were bound to that college with the ties of kinship. Two of my other shopmates had sons at high school. The East Side was full of poor Jews--wage-earners, peddlers, grocers, salesmen, insurance agents--who would beggar themselves to give their children a liberal education. Then, too, thousands of our working-men attended public evening school, while many others took lessons at home. The Ghetto rang with a clamor for knowledge
To save up some money and prepare for college seemed to be the most natural thing for me to do. I said to myself that I must begin to study for it without delay. But that was impossible, and it was quite some time before I took up the course which the presser"s boy had laid out for me. During the first three months I literally had no time to open a book. Nor was that all.
My work as a cloak-maker had become a pa.s.sion with me, so much so that even on Sat.u.r.days, when the shop was closed, I would scarcely do any reading.
Instead, I would seek the society of other cloak-makers with whom I might talk shop
I was developing speed rather than skill at my sewing-machine, but this question of speed afforded exercise to my brain. It did not take me long to realize that the number of cloaks or jackets which one turned out in a given length of time was largely a matter of method and system. I perceived that Joe, who was accounted a fast hand, would take up the various parts of a garment in a certain order calculated to reduce to a minimum the amount of time lost in pa.s.sing from section to section. So I watched him intently, studying his system with every fiber of my being. Nor did I content myself with imitating his processes. I was forever pondering the problem and introducing little improvements of my own. I was making a science of it. It was not merely physical exertion. It was a source of intellectual interest as well. I was wrapped up in it. If I happened to meet a cloak-operator who was noted for extraordinary speed I would feel like an ambitious musician meeting a famous virtuoso. Some cloak-operators were artists. I certainly was not one of them. I admired their work and envied them, but I lacked the artistic patience and the dexterity essential to workmanship of a high order. Much to my chagrin, I was a born bungler. But then I possessed physical strength, nervous vitality, method, and inventiveness--all the elements that go to make up speed
I was progressing with unusual rapidity. Joe criticized my work severely, often calling me botcher, but I knew that this was chiefly intended to veil his satisfaction at the growing profits that my work was yielding him
I now earned about ten dollars a week, of which I spent about five, saving the rest for the next season of idleness