ON Monday at the lunch hour--or, rather, halfhour--Susan ventured in to see the boss.
Matson had too recently sprung from the working class and was too ignorant of everything outside his business to have made radical changes in his habits.He smoked five-cent cigars instead of "twofurs"; he ate larger quantities of food, did not stint himself in beer or in treating his friends in the evenings down at Wielert's beer garden.Also he wore a somewhat better quality of clothing; but he looked precisely what he was.Like all the working class above the pauper line, he made a Sunday toilet, the chief features of which were the weekly bath and the weekly clean white shirt.Thus, it being only Monday morning, he was looking notably clean when Susan entered--and was morally wound up to a higher key than he would be as the week wore on.
At sight of her his feet on the leaf of the desk wavered, then became inert; it would not do to put on manners with any of the "hands." Thanks to the bath, he was not exuding his usual odor that comes from bolting much strong, cheap food.
"Well, Lorny--what's the kick?" inquired he with his amiable grin.His rise in the world never for an instant ceased to be a source of delight to him; it--and a perfect digestion--kept him in a good humor all the time.
"I want to know," stammered Susan, "if you can't give me a little more money."He laughed, eyeing her approvingly.Her clothing was that of the working girl; but in her face was the look never found in those born to the modern form of slavery-wage servitude.If he had been "cultured" he might have compared her to an enslaved princess, though in fact that expression of her courageous violet-gray eyes and sensitive mouth could never have been in the face of princess bred to the enslaving routine of the most conventional of conventional lives; it could come only from sheer erectness of spirit, the exclusive birthright of the sons and daughters of democracy.
"More money!" he chuckled."You _have_ got a nerve!--when factories are shutting down everywhere and working people are tramping the streets in droves.""I do about one-fourth more than the best hands you've got,"replied Susan, made audacious by necessity."And I'll agree to throw in my lunch time.""Let me see, how much do you get?"
"Three dollars."
"And you aren't living at home.You must have a hard time.Not much over for diamonds, eh? You want to hustle round and get married, Lorny.Looks don't last long when a gal works.But you're holdin' out better'n them that gads and dances all night.""I help at the restaurant in the evening to piece out my board.
I'm pretty tired when I get a chance to go to bed.""I'll bet!...So, you want more money.I've been watchin'
you.I watch all my gals--I have to, to keep weedin' out the fast ones.I won't have no bad examples in _my_ place! As soon as I ketch a gal livin' beyond her wages I give her the bounce."Susan lowered her eyes and her cheeks burned--not because Matson was frankly discussing the frivolous subject of sex.Another girl might have affected the air of distressed modesty, but it would have been affectation, pure and simple, as in those regions all were used to hearing the frankest, vilest things--and we do not blush at what we are used to hearing.
Still, the tenement female sex is as full of affectation as is the sex elsewhere.But, Susan, the curiously self-unconscious, was incapable of affectation.Her indignation arose from her sense of the hideous injustice of Matson's discharging girls for doing what his meager wages all but compelled.
"Yes, I've been watching you," he went on, "with a kind of a sort of a notion of makin' you a forelady.That'd mean six dollars a week.But you ain't fit.You've got the brains--plenty of 'em.But you wouldn't be of no use to me as forelady.""Why not?" asked Susan.Six dollars a week! Affluence! Wealth!
Matson took his feet down, relit his cigar and swung himself into an oracular attitude.
"I'll show you.What's manufacturin'? Right down at the bottom, I mean." He looked hard at the girl.She looked receptively at him.
"Why, it's gettin' work out of the hands.New ideas is nothin'.
You can steal 'em the minute the other fellow uses 'em.No, it's all in gettin' work out of the hands."Susan's expression suggested one who sees light and wishes to see more of it.He proceeded:
"You work for me--for instance, now, if every day you make stuff there's a profit of five dollars on, I get five dollars out of you.If I can push you to make stuff there's a profit of six dollars on, I get six dollars--a dollar more.Clear extra gain, isn't it? Now multiply a dollar by the number of hands, and you'll see what it amounts to.""I see," said Susan, nodding thoughtfully.
"Well! How did I get up? Because as a foreman I knew how to work the hands.I knew how to get those extra dollars.And how do Ikeep up? Because I hire forepeople that get work out of the hands."Susan understood.But her expression was a comment that was not missed by the shrewd Matson.
"Now, listen to me, Lorny.I want to give you a plain straight talk because I'd like to see you climb.Ever since you've been here I've been laughin' to myself over the way your forelady--she's a fox, she is!--makes you the pacemaker for the other girls.She squeezes at least twenty-five cents a day over what she used to out of each hand in your room because you're above the rest of them dirty, shiftless muttonheads."Susan flushed at this fling at her fellow-workers.
"Dirty, shiftless muttonheads," repeated Matson."Ain't I right?
Ain't they dirty? Ain't they shiftless--so no-account that if they wasn't watched every minute they'd lay down--and let me and the factory that supports 'em go to rack and ruin? And ain't they muttonheads? Do you ever find any of 'em saying or doing a sensible thing?"Susan could not deny.She could think of excuses--perfect excuses.But the facts were about as he brutally put it.
"Oh, I know 'em.I've dealt with 'em all my life," pursued the box manufacturer."Now, Lorny, you ought to be a forelady.
