One of Life's Slaves

Chapter 6

THE FACTORY GIRLS

What becomes of all the swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets

and outskirt alleys of the capital--children of whom no one has any

account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one

floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are

floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day

become large male and female fish?

Disease wields a broad broom in the earliest age. The harbour takes them

into its embrace; the streets with their stray livelihoods, or a

wandering vagabond life, takes them; refuges, police-stations, prisons

and the house of correction take them. In later years, labour also, on a

great scale, has taken them into its embrace--the factory doors stand

wide open.

People who now and then have an attack of conscientious scruples about

existences to which they may possibly stand in original relationship,

can draw a sigh of relief. The responsibility is at any rate diminished,

as the chances now are that they will be drawn into Labour's educating

wheel; and then, too, the matter is in certain respects carried over

into moral territory.

There they sat, the more ripely-developed youth of the town, in rows

up in the rooms of the Veyergang firm's great factory, and minded the

whirring shuttles, balls and rollers--Swedish Lena, and Stina, and

Kristofa, and Kalla, and Josefa and Gunda, and all the rest of them. Had

any one asked them about their parents, they would now and then have

been hard put to it for an answer.

The conversation went on very busily at the top of the room; it was even

continued with nods and glances whenever one or other of the controlling

authorities turned his steps in that direction. They had to gesticulate,

nod, talk in a loud voice, but they got on best with their faces close

up to one another in all this whizzing, where the band-wheels each

whirred away for their little sub-division of power, the boards of the

floor quivered and shook with the movement of the engines, and the

waterfall outside in the sun, with a thundering and deafening roar,

buried the great water-wheel beneath its creamy, powerful splendour.

They were for the most part quite young vagabond girls of from barely

sixteen to twenty, who were making the noise up there: new-comers, more

or less, without practice, who were still striving to acquire the knack.

And that was Silla Holman, she with the dark hair, slender and freckled,

with heelless slippers and a large spot of paraffine on the front of her

dress, who coughed and questioned, and questioned and coughed, while her

eyes looked like two little round, black fire-balls, and her weak, flat

chest went up and down with the mere exertion of making herself heard.

She sat there among the youngest; her fingers worked among the spools,

and now and then she looked up like a bird.

They had got over the angry dispute about Josefa's new braided jacket.

She need not try to persuade any one that she had got the money from her

stepmother; no, let any one who liked believe that, but neither Gunda

nor Jakobina did! Then Kristofa had related her wonderful adventure of

last Sunday--she was always passing through remarkable occurrences, most

wonderfully interesting, if not true to quite a corresponding degree,

in which fine ladies and gentlemen played the principal parts, and she

chanced to be the initiated one.

And now the conversation had turned upon something so interesting that

Silla listened with both her ears. There was to be dancing on Sunday

evening up at the Letvindt, and the talk was of handkerchiefs, bows, and

finery--which some possessed and others had to borrow--and of who danced

best and treated most liberally. Kristofa was able to inform them that

there was to be a violin and a clarionet, and that both students and

ordinary people and ships' officers were to be there!

Some strangers who were going over the factory came up the room, and

stopped and questioned and examined. And the young workwomen sat each in

her place, with head bent over her work, as if she had no thought for

anything but her reels.

The morning light shone with a kind of dizzy stillness in from the great

windows high up in the wall, over human beings, machinery and bales.

It was nearly twelve. The last hour always dragged so slowly, and the

smell of oil and the heat from the engines seemed to increase and become

almost stupifying.

Still a few more long stifling minutes. At last the bell rang.

And dressed, as if by a stroke of magic, the factory girls swarmed down

the steps, with their breakfast-tins in their hands, in their neat

aprons, handkerchiefs nicely tied under their chins, and knitted shawls

crossed over their chests.

Oh, the bright spring air!--to take a good breath of it! Silla, hot and

thirsty, knocked off a bit of frozen snow from the fence with her tin

and ate it.

With her head full of all that Kristofa had held out to her about the

dance at the Letvindt, she wandered down arm-in-arm with a long row of

her companions. The road out from the factory was quite crowded; lower

down it widened out, with a street-like pavement.

"Look, look, Kristofa! Veyergang has come back from England already!"

The young girls nudged each other, highly interested. "New topcoat;

light, light brown!"

"Pooh! _I_ saw him come by the steamer yesterday, him and a whole heap

of English people. They were all brown together; I counted exactly seven

different kinds of dirt-colour!" It was Josefa who was using her tongue;

she had had practice at a milliner's.

"He'll have to take care of the oil!" tittered one.

"He's awfully handsome! Look what a grand forehead! Oh, what a lovely

red silk handkerchief in his breast-pocket!" whispered Kristofa to

Silla.

The row squeezed themselves up against the fence. The person in question

came by humming carelessly, with his head held high and swinging his

walking-stick. All the young girls stared respectfully and stupidly

straight in front of them, though not without a glance out of the corner

of their eye. He disappeared up the stream, cleaving it like a salmon.

"He parts his hair at the back of his head!"--"His hat is like a

pudding-basin!"--"Don't breathe upon him, he is so thin!"--"He is his

own father's son!"--"Oh, what a conceited stick!"

They had turned to look after him.

"He isn't nearly so stern as he walks there; but in the factory, you

know, he has to be as firm as a rock. Johanna Sjoberg, who does clear

starching, recognised him down at the masked ball at the fair; she told

me so herself."

"You can just fancy," struck in Jakobina, "what a number of fine people

come to the rooms in that way. You think you are only waltzing with a

common man, and perhaps it is the son of the richest man in the town!

But if you are a little careful you can easily tell by the way they

dance, or by their watch, or their shirt-collar, or because they chew

such fine tobacco."

"He looked at us, did you notice?" whispered Kristofa eagerly into

Silla's ear.

"Yes, because he knows me," said Silla, a little confused at his having

fixed his eyes on her.

There was a burst of laughter.

"Is that young crow going to caw too?"

The young crow grew hot beneath her handkerchief, but she did not

answer. She knew quite well, that he did know her; he had been in the

office when she went out with her mother to the Consul-General's to

apply for a place in the factory.

A stream of girls from another factory fell like a tributary into

theirs, and then through ramifications of streets and lanes, the whole

flowed out into the irregular part of the town that was built of wood,

below--through narrow entrances and up narrow flights of steps, into

brown, red, white or grey houses, houses with slate roofs, with turf

roofs, with tile roofs, and new houses that had barely been roofed.

Silla slipped into a narrow, damp entry. The sun shone through the

cracks in the rotten woodwork full of bent rusty nails, and from time to

time a dirty stream issued from beneath the gate, and disappeared into

the gutter.

She stopped a moment as she heard her mother's righteous indignation

venting itself within, in the familiar, dry, measured tones; and it was

hesitatingly and with a depressed look that she opened the gate, behind

which stood Mrs. Andersen's servant-maid, furiously red, and incapable

of defending herself, while Mrs. Holman, her skirts fastened up, and her

feet astride over the gutter-board, was rinsing and wringing out

clothes. She was working calmly and deliberately; nothing in her cold

grey eyes betrayed agitation.

"Mrs. Andersen ought at least to have the good sense to understand that

clothes that had been used so long couldn't be got ready in one week.

For that matter, you're welcome to tell her so from me. And I haven't

been accustomed either, even in my humble position, to send clothes to

the wash not patched or mended; and I can tell you that both Mother

Nilsen next door and the people in this house have wondered to see the

things that a person, who calls herself a chandler's wife, lets her

husband and children wear! No, you needn't contradict me, my good girl;

when I say a thing, it's the truth. And the stockings--we'll say nothing

about them; for one heel was gathered up with a piece of twine, so that

it was a disgrace to stand and wash them. People may look as high and

mighty as they like--the wash speaks out!"

With slow, crushing significance she turned to her daughter.

"If you had come a little sooner, Silla, you might have saved me a great

deal of work. But it's of no consequence; the sooner I'm dead and gone,

the better. I've never wanted to live either, since your father went

away."

"I'll help you wring, mother."

"Now it's all done? Many thanks! But it would have shown a little

forethought, if you, who have only been sitting up in the factory, had

hurried yourself a little to help your mother, who's had to stand and

work hard all the morning."

"Thanks for the information, Mrs. Holman." It was Mrs. Andersen's

servant, who had at last recovered her voice. "But I think you won't

need to trouble yourself any more about our washing. It's much too plain

and humble for such grand sentiments."

She dropped a curtsey, and then added, as she vanished quickly out of

the gate:

"If only your soap-lye was half as sharp as your tongue!"

It was always Mrs. Holman's strong point, and one on which she prided

herself, that she was always hungering and thirsting after righteousness

in this world--in others. Inasmuch as part of this sentence also points

inwards towards one's self, she was fortunate in finding her own

doorstep well swept. She was also in the favourable position of being

able to lay down both the law and the exceptions.

To every one comes a time when he is surrounded by a lustre, and that

blockmaker Holman had existed was something which was really properly

understood--perhaps by his wife too--only after he had disappeared from

the scene.

The fact is, that it makes a great difference to a household whether it

has the husband's work and weekly wages to subsist upon or not, and as

a further aggravation of the situation, her dead husband's bill at Mrs.

Selvig's thrust its extremely unexpected, unwelcome face into Mrs.

Holman's room. Mrs. Holman could never get into her head that that bill

was correct--why, Holman had had his fixed, regular pocket-money!

Mrs. Holman's bitter observations were numerous when she found herself

compelled to choose between want and seeking work.

She had known to a pin's point how she would employ her husband's

earnings in her own room, and occupied herself also with the way in

which others might have things in theirs. During all these years, she

had, so to speak, sat comfortably on the top of the load and driven; but

now, unfortunately, the day had come when she herself must get down and

draw--and that she felt herself less fitted for.

It was when brought into this critical situation that Mrs. Holman

thought that if an exertion was ever to be made, it must be made

now--by whom, she left unsaid. To this end she availed herself of her

acquaintance with Consul Veyergang to get her daughter Silla taken into

his factory. Unemployed hands must have something to do, and it would,

at any rate, yield some small compensation for the weekly money lost

with her husband. If she then stayed at home and kept house well, and

in addition mended and took in washing when it came in her way, no one

would venture to charge Mrs. Holman with not knowing how to do her duty

during these hard days.

And she still discharged this duty of hers by strictly keeping Silla

from passing her leisure time in idleness, which was dangerous for young

people. Sewing and darning and patching all the evening--there could be

no better way of being trained in steadiness.

But it was just while Silla sat and sewed and darned and patched in the

evening by the low oil-lamp that the dancing and gaiety were best

carried on in her head, and that all Kristofa's and her friends'

word-pictures transformed themselves into actual experiences. Bubble

after bubble, the one more wonderful than the other, floated up or burst

right in front of Mrs. Holman's nose, while she sat knitting. She saw

nothing, only wondered a little sometimes what there could be to smile

and laugh at in the heel of a stocking.