United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But by noon my hunger was such that any state of anything edible was as nectar and ambrosia. I am thinking that even a hardened factory hand might remember her first day at the brassworks.
The brassworks was hard—one sat, but the foot exercise was wearying and the seat fearfully uncomfortable. Ironing was hardest—one stood all day and used the feet for hard pressure besides. Yet I was sorry to leave the laundry! Perhaps it was just as well for me that Lucia could not talk English. She might have used it on me, and already the left ear was talked off by Irma.
I venture to say the majority of girls there had had no more than the rudiments of the three r's. It looked well in print. One of the girls from the brassworks stood first in line. She had tried two jobs since I saw her last. She did not try the laundry at all. I was third in line. The manager himself interviewed us inside, since the “Welfare Worker” was ill.
Irish Minnie told us one lunch time that it was a bad job, this marrying business. “Of course,” she admitted, pulling on a piece of roast pork with her teeth, “my husband ain't what you'd call a bad man.” That was as far as Minnie cared to go. Perhaps one reason why the brassworks employed so many crooked and decrepit was as an efficiency measure.
One day she announced she wanted me to marry one of her brothers-in-law. “I got two nice ones and we'll go out some Sunday afternoon and you can have your pick. One's a piano tuner; the other's a detective.” I thought offhand the piano tuner sounded a bit more domestic. He was swell, Mame said. Mame didn't think she'd stay long in the brassworks.
Curiosity got the better of me and I took occasion to see where the boxes were being addressed. It was to a large mail-order house in Chicago. The first noon whistle—work dropped—a rush for the washroom. Let no one think his hands ever were dirty until he labors at a foot press in a brassworks. Such sticky, grimy, oily, rough blackness never was—and the factory supplies no soap nor towels.
If it were not for that same turnover, I, like the soul-filled college graduate, might feel like calling aloud, not to Heaven, but to the President of the United States and Congress and the Church and Women's clubs: “Come quick and rescue females from the brassworks!” As it is, the females rescue themselves.
But I have been through factories and factories of all sorts and descriptions, and nothing had I ever seen like the brassworks. First was the smell—the stale smell of gas and metal. Up the end of the floor, among the power presses, all belts and machines and whirring wheels, there were only three or four shaded lights.
The heat I raised was superb a white heat, sufficient to melt in a crucible six or eight pounds of brass. Then I had a box of moulding sand, where the moulds were gently rammed in around the pattern previous to the casting. But how did I get my brass? All the old brassworks in my father's workshop drawers and boxes were laid under contribution.
If the thought of the brassworks comes in one breath and the bleachery in the next, the poetry must needs be set to music—the Song of the Bleachery. What satisfaction there must be to an employer who grows rich—or makes his income, whatever it may be—from a business where so much light-heartedness is worked into the product!
Word Of The Day