第14章

"Say," began the girl at her left, "what jeh think he said?"

"I don't know."

"He said he saw us with Eddie Harris at Martin's last night."

"No!" They both giggled.

A youth with tan-coloured hair, that needed clipping very badly, came shuffling along between the machines, bearing a basket of leather findings under his left arm, and pressed against his stomach.When near Carrie, he stretched out his right hand and gripped one girl under the arm.

"Aw, let me go," she exclaimed angrily."Duffer."

He only grinned broadly in return.

"Rubber!" he called back as she looked after him.There was nothing of the gallant in him.

Carrie at last could scarcely sit still.Her legs began to tire and she wanted to get up and stretch.Would noon never come? It seemed as if she had worked an entire day.She was not hungry at all, but weak, and her eyes were tired, straining at the one point where the eye-punch came down.The girl at the right noticed her squirmings and felt sorry for her.She was concentrating herself too thoroughly--what she did really required less mental and physical strain.There was nothing to be done, however.The halves of the uppers came piling steadily down.Her hands began to ache at the wrists and then in the fingers, and towards the last she seemed one mass of dull, complaining muscles, fixed in an eternal position and performing a single mechanical movement which became more and more distasteful, until as last it was absolutely nauseating.When she was wondering whether the strain would ever cease, a dull-

sounding bell clanged somewhere down an elevator shaft, and the end came.In an instant there was a buzz of action and conversation.All the girls instantly left their stools and hurried away in an adjoining room, men passed through, coming from some department which opened on the right.The whirling wheels began to sing in a steadily modifying key, until at last they died away in a low buzz.There was an audible stillness, in which the common voice sounded strange.

Carrie got up and sought her lunch box.She was stiff, a little dizzy, and very thirsty.On the way to the small space portioned off by wood, where all the wraps and lunches were kept, she encountered the foreman, who stared at her hard.

"Well," he said, "did you get along all right?"

"I think so," she replied, very respectfully.

"Um," he replied, for want of something better, and walked on.

Under better material conditions, this kind of work would not have been so bad, but the new socialism which involves pleasant working conditions for employees had not then taken hold upon manufacturing companies.

The place smelled of the oil of the machines and the new leather--

a combination which, added to the stale odours of the building, was not pleasant even in cold weather.The floor, though regularly swept every evening, presented a littered surface.Not the slightest provision had been made for the comfort of the employees, the idea being that something was gained by giving them as little and making the work as hard and unremunerative as possible.What we know of foot-rests, swivel-back chairs, dining-rooms for the girls, clean aprons and curling irons supplied free, and a decent cloak room, were unthought of.The washrooms were disagreeable, crude, if not foul places, and the whole atmosphere was sordid.

Carrie looked about her, after she had drunk a tinful of water from a bucket in one corner, for a place to sit and eat.The other girls had ranged themselves about the windows or the work-