Chapter VI. The Luxurious
Possibilities of the Dollar-Down-Dollar-a-Week
System of Housekeeping
DURING the remainder of the school year, from March to June, no public-school officer came to demand my attendance at school.
“Aren’t we lucky?” commented Aunt Millie. “It gives you such a chance to help out. The instalment men must be paid, and we need every cent. It’s such a mercy that the long holiday’s on. It gives you a good chance.”
By this time I had added to my activities that of carrying my uncle’s dinner to the mill. My aunt always considered this a waste of time. “It takes Al away from his own work,” she would remonstrate with my uncle. “If he has to carry your dinner, I wish he would take it in his wagon so that he can bring back what coal and wood he finds on the street.” When that combination was in effect, she was mollified, for I managed to secure a load of fuel almost every day in my journey from the mill to the house.
This was the first cotton-mill I ever entered. Every part of it, inside, seemed to be as orderly as were the rows of bricks in its walls. It was a new mill. Its walls were red and white, as were the iron posts that reached down in triple rows through the length of it. There was the odor of paint everywhere. The machinery seemed set for display, it shone and worked so smoothly. The floor of the mule-room, where uncle worked, was white and smooth. The long alleys at the ends of the mules were like the decks of a ship. The whirling, lapping belts had the pungent odor of new leather about them, and reminded me of the smell of a new pair of shoes. The pulleys and shaftings gleamed under their high polish. Altogether it was a wonderful sight to my eyes, which, for some time, had only seen dismal tenements, dirty streets, and drifting ash heaps.
The mill was trebly attractive on chilly, rainy days, when it was so miserable a task outside to finger among soggy ash piles for coals and to go splashing barefooted through muddy streets. At such times it was always a relief to feel the warm, greasy boards of the mill underneath my feet, and to have my body warmed by the great heat. No matter how it rained outside with the rain-drops splashing lonesomely against the windows, it did not change the atmosphere of the mill one jot. The men shouted and swore as much as ever, the doffers rode like whirlwinds on their trucks, the mules creaked on the change, the belts hummed and flapped as regularly as ever.
It was very natural, then, that I should grow to like the mill and hate the coal picking. My uncle gave me little chores to do while he ate his dinner. He taught me how to start and stop a mule; how to clean and take out rollers; how to piece broken threads, and lift up small cops. When the doffers came to take the cops off the spindles, I learned to put new tubes on and to press them in place at the bottom of the spindles. I found it easy to use an oil can, to clean the cotton from the polished doors of the mules, to take out empty bobbins of cotton rope, and put in full ones to give a new supply for the thread which was spun.
I became so valuable a helper during the noon hour that my uncle persuaded my aunt to put in some dinner for me, also, so that I could eat it with him. He did this simply because he wanted me to have some reward for my work besides the fifteen cents a week he gave me. So I used to sit with him, and he would divide a meat-pie with me, let me drink some coffee from the top of the dinner pail, and share a piece of pudding. There was always a bright gleam in his eyes as he watched me eat, a gleam that said as plainly as words, “It’s good to see you have a good time, Al, lad!”
By the end of the summer I was so familiar with the mill that I wanted to spend my whole time in it. I had watched the mill-boys, some of them not much older than myself—and I was only eleven—and I wanted to swagger up and down the alleys like them. They were lightly clad in undershirt and overalls, so that in their bared feet they could run without slipping on the hot floor. They were working for wages, too, and took home a pay envelope every Saturday. Just think of going home every Saturday, and throwing an envelope on the table with three dollars in it, and saying, nonchalantly, “Aunt, there’s my wages. Just fork over my thirty cents spending money. I’m going to see the matinee this afternoon at the theater. It’s ‘Michael Strogroff,’ and they say there’s a real fight in the second act and eight changes of scenery, for ten cents. They’ve got specialties between the acts, too!”
Other temporal considerations entered into this desire to go into the mill. I wanted to have a dinner pail of my own, with a whole meat-pie in it, or a half-pound of round steak with its gravy dripping over a middle of mashed potatoes with milk and butter in them! Then there were apple dumplings to consider, and freedom from coal picking and the dirty life on the dumps. All in all, I knew it would be an excellent exchange, if possible. I spoke to my uncle about it one noon-hour.
“Why can’t I work in the mill, too?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t you rather get some learning, Al?” he asked. “You know men can’t do much in the world without learning. It’s brains, not hands, that makes the world really go ahead. I wish you could get a lot of schooling and perhaps go to college. It’s what I always wanted and never got, and see where I am to-day. I’m a failure, Al, that’s what I am!”
“But aunt says that I’ve got to go in the mill as soon as I can, uncle.”
His face grew sad at that, and he said, “Yes, through our drinking and getting in debt! That’s what it’s all leading to! It’s a pity, a sad pity!” and he grew so gloomy that I spoke no more about the matter that day.
It was one of the paradoxes of my home, that being heavily in debt for our steamship tickets and household furnishings, and both giving a large amount of patronage to the saloons, my aunt and uncle involved themselves more inextricably in debt by buying clothes and ornaments on the “Dollar-Down-Dollar-a-Week” plan. There was no economy, no recession of tastes, no limit of desire to save us. Every penny that I secured was spent as soon as earned. I learned this from my foster parents. Uncle had his chalk-mark at the saloon, and aunt received regular thrice-a-week visits from the beer pedler. On gala days, when there was a cheap excursion down the bay, aunt could make a splendid appearance on the street in a princess dress, gold bracelets, a pair of earrings, and gloves (Dollar-Down-Dollar-a-Week plan). When Mrs. Terence O’Boyle, and Mrs. Hannigan, daughter to Mrs. O’Boyle, and Mrs. Redden, the loom fixer’s wife with her little baby, came to our house, after the breakfast had been cleared away, and the men were hard at work, Aunt Millie would exclaim, “Now, friends, the beer man’s just brought a dozen lagers and a bottle of port wine. Sit right up, and make a merry morning of it. You must be tired, Mrs. Hannigan. Won’t your babby take a little sup of port for warming his stomach?” Of course, Mrs. O’Boyle returned these parties, as did her daughter and Mrs. Redden.
My uncle dared not say too much about the visits of the beer-wagon, because he had his own score at the saloon, and his appetite for drink was transcendant. Aunt had little ways of her own for pacifying him in the matter. She would save a half dozen bottles till night, and then, when he came home, she would say, “Now, Stanwood, after tea, let’s be comfortable. I’ve six bottles in for you, and we’ll take our comfort grand!”
By Friday morning the financial fret began. My aunt, as financier of the house, had the disposal of her husband’s fifteen dollars in charge. In the disposal of this amount, she indulged in a weird, incomprehensible arithmetical calculation, certainly original if not unique. In place of numerals and dollar signs, she dotted a paper with pencil points, and did some mysterious but logical ruminating in her head. Her reasoning always followed this line, however:
“Fifteen dollars with a day out, that leaves—let me see—oh, say in round numbers, thirteen, maybe a few cents out. Well, now, let me see, out of that comes, first of all, forty cents for union money, if he pays it this week; two and a half for rent, only we owe fifty cents from last week, which we must pay this, or else we’ll be thrown out. Then there’s fifteen cents for that dude of an insurance man—he says he’ll lapse us if we let it run on like we have. Let him do it, the old cheat! I don’t believe they’d plan to pay us if any of us should die. They’re nothing but robbers, anyhow. Where was I, Al? Let me see, there’s owing a dollar for the furniture—WHEN will we have it paid for?—and there’s two dollars that should be paid the Jew, only we’ll have to satisfy him with fifty cents this week, because there’s a day out.” (The Jew was the man who kept the “New England Clothing and Furnishing Company,” from whom we had bought our clothes, a set of furs, and the gold bracelets on instalments.) “This week’s bill for groceries is five dollars and sixty-three cents, the baker has owing him about seventy-five, the meat man let me have them two ham bones and that shank end, and I owe him for that; there’s some white shirts and collars at the Chinaman’s, but I want to say right here that your uncle will have to pay for those out of his own spending money. That’s too much of a luxury, that is; we can’t go on with such gentlemanly notions in this house and ever get ahead. Oh, these debts, when will they be paid! That is all I think of except the beer man. He won’t wait, whatever comes or goes. There, that reckons up to—why, how in the name of God are we going to face the world this way? I’m getting clean worn out with this figuring every week!”
After finding that she would not have money enough to go around to satisfy all the clamorants, she would proceed with a process of elimination, putting off first the tradesman who received explanations with the most graciousness. The insurance man she did not care for, so he had to be put off, but, with his own interests in mind, he would carry us out of his own pocket until some grand week when aunt would feel kindly towards him, and she would generously make up all back payments. Aunt always went to the uttermost limit of credit possibility, arranging her numerous creditors like checkers on a board to be moved backwards and forwards week by week. The beer man got his pay every week. He did not allow his bills to grow old. In arranging for that payment, aunt used to say, as if protesting to her own conscience, “Well, suppose some others do have to wait! I want to have a case of lager in over Sunday. We’re not going to scrimp and slave without some enjoyment!”
Week after week this same exasperating allotment of uncle’s wage took place, with but minor variations. Time after time the insurance would drop behind and would be taken up again. Time after time the Jew would threaten to put the lawyers on us. Time after time the grocer would withhold credit until we paid our bill, yet the beer-wagon stopped regularly at our door, and Mrs. O’Boyle, her daughter, and Mrs. Redden would exchange courtesies and bottles. And Aunt was always consoling her sister women on such occasions with this philosophy: “The rich have carriages and fine horses and grand mansions for enjoyment; we poor folks, not having such, must get what comfort we can out of a stimulating sup!”
And Mrs. Redden would reply, “Yes, Mrs. Brindin, you’re right for sure. Just warm a bit of that ale with a bit of sugar stirred in, will you, please? It will warm the baby’s belly. I forgot to bring his milk bottle, like the absent-minded I am.”