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Clayton," Hewitt said, "or what will become of us all? The doctor thinks it was an accident." He took a small bottle of sewing-machine oil from his pocket and handed it to the daughter, thanking her for the loan. There was little evidence at the inquest. The shot had been heard, the body had been found that was the practical sum of the matter. No friends or relatives of the dead man came forward.
Ninety-five per cent. received $12 a week or less. The female sewing-machine operators who bent over their tasks the long day, making the clothes sold in the Field stores, were paid the miserable wages of $6.75 a week. Makers of socks and stockings were paid from $4.57 to $4.75 a week. The working hours consisted variously of from fifty-nine to fifty-nine and a half a week.
Not long afterwards, overhearing a forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that she could run a sewing-machine at home. The forewoman, amused, placed her at the machine. After that she had stitched belts for eleven years, though not in the same factory. Leather belt stitching is at once heavy and skilled work. The row of stitching is placed at the very edge of the belt.
And Peter began telling her of some of the things which he had been able to do: of the surgical brace it had bought; of the lessons in wood-engraving it had given; of the sewing-machine it had helped to pay for; of the arrears in rent it had settled. "You see," he explained, "these people are too self-respecting to go to the big charities, or to rich people.
"The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike a dream that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details; even the ornament of the book-cover that lay on my wife's sewing-machine in the breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line that ran about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the messenger from my deserted party.
"S'pose we did fix it, what then?" "Send messages!" "How?" Russell pondered deeply. He was the member of the family who had a natural aptitude for mechanism; the one who mended toys, and on occasion was even consulted about mother's sewing-machine and escapes of gas, therefore he filled the place of engineer-royal and was expected to take all structural difficulties upon his own shoulders.
I rashly promised each child should find a clean white garment awaiting it on its arrival at my house, and took away a memorandum of all the different ages and sizes; the "order" never could have been accomplished without the aid of my sewing-machine.
Jackson was at work at her sewing-machine in the front hall; but she could not keep out of the kitchen, she made continual futile errands through it, giving anxious, sidelong glances at the child over whom her heart yearned. Finally, when she could bear it no more, "Did did something hurt your feelings over there, Ma'Lou?" she asked huskily. She spoke behind her daughter's shoulder.
This room in which she sat, like all other rooms of the district, was too primly neat to be cozy or comfortable. It contained a bright new rag carpet, a luridly painted wooden settee, a sewing-machine, and several uninviting wooden chairs.
The sight of you sitting in the middle of my life, between the sewing-machine and the type-writer, is getting on my nerves. Let us go into the drawing-room. There is an atmosphere of calm there " her voice quavered in a queer little choke "of sabbatical calm." I slid quickly from the table and put my arm round her waist. "Tell me, Judith, what is amiss with you."
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