The Outcast Manufacturers By

The Outcast Manufacturers by Charles Hoy Fort CHAPTER I TO THE west, the street-wide Palisades, dull-gray as a block of lead; a streak of North River gleaming like bright, clean metal melted from the base. Windows of tenement houses black with the inside pall of dark homes, unclean children, seeming dirtier because of their pallor, playing ball, with a banana stalk for a bat, in the middle of the street. A dead horse lying in the southside gutter; boys jumping on it, enjoying the elasticity of its ribs; a greasy old man prying off the horseshoes. On the sidewalk, stained where passing epicures had thrown out stale beer before having pails and pitchers filled up again, stood a young man -- very young man; light clothes, straw hat, suit-case in hand -- tall young man with half-closed eyelids and wide, irregular, heavy lips; lids and lips like a fleeting impression of the stubby nails of fingers idly dropping a skein of worsted; young man standing irresolutely between the dead horse and the low stoop of a house. On the stoop's first step, a young woman, in a sleeveless wrapper, making her form serpentine, bulging out a hip to support an infant under her arm. On the top step, a burly woman, her hair gray with ashes that she had been sifting. "Scabs! scabs!" she shouted back into the house. "The boss inspector!" jeeringly from a woman, darkened in the front hall. "Union men for me!" from her of the powdered coiffure. "Union men who ain't afraid to go out of doors nights! "You can't stand out on the stoop with them, if things keeps up!" she said plaintively to the serpentine young woman, who budged some more, giggled, and, giggling, turned her face away. "Lot of damn scabs! scabs! or you're no union men, anyway! How the lot of yez makes a living is the block's mystery!" "The boss inspector! Everywhere she ever lived she was known as a disturber!" "Let your old man come out and fight me! I'll show him what a woman can do." Then, very gently, to the young woman: "Warm ain't it? How's baby?" A bulky man came out to the stoop, his suspenders hanging in two loops behind him; a man with a large face, curiously flat and white of nose tip, chin tip, and cheek- bones; such a face as bakers see pressed white and flat against their window glass. "Oh, now, Mrs. Maheffy, my wife didn't mean anything. You ought to know that by this time. Isn't she always saying: 'What would the house be without Mrs. Maheffy?' You two haven't any call to fall out." "Ah, sure, man dear, 'tis the weather; sure, any woman's apt to be expressing the bit of an opinion now and then. What's ailing you, man dear? Don't pay any attention to me." "Excuse me!" said the youth with the suitcase, his long lips flickering in an uncontrollable grin. "I'm a little lost I think -- I mean I think I've got the wrong number. What I mean is I'm looking for the Universal Manufacturing Company --" Said the pressed-faced man: "Come right this way. Am I wrong in taking you for Mr. Rakes, of Jersey?" "Yes -- well, they generally call me Sim. Yes, I'm Sim Rakes. I was looking for a factory, though. Is Mr. Birtwhistle here?" The man had turned his broad back, with the dangling suspender-loops, and was shuffling to the first doorway of the rooms east of the hall. He whispered to some one in the front room, and shuffled back to the young man who was generally called Sim, who had slowly followed. He said awkwardly: "Oh, did you get my letter? You're Mr. Rakes? Yes, I'm Mr. Birtwhistle. Yes, we have a vacancy at present. Warm, ain't it?" facing Sim, slowly shuffling backward toward the side door, calling over his shoulder: "He got my letter." A pattering sound. When Sim was permitted to reach the doorway, he looked into the front room, and saw a woman darting around; a woman husked in wilted green, her hair, like a tuft of sunburned corn-silk, hanging and unkempt; darting here and there, picking up clothes and papers, with which the floor was strewn; pattering to things that she kicked under a stove, which was opposite the doorway; thrusting things under a sofa, which was between the two front windows. She saw Sim, and ran to an inner room, through a doorway, where blue curtains, meeting at top, dwindled away from each other, like overalls of a straddling giant. Against the hall wall were two tables, at which sat the office staff of the Universal Manufacturing Company -- a man and a woman. On the office floor were newspapers and trodden letters and stained paper that had been wrapped around meat; bones and heads of fish that had been thrown to a cat; excelsior from the sofa, the springs of which touched the floor. "He got the letter, all right," said Mr. Birtwhistle. By the first table -- the two tables along the hall wall-- sat a woman, with one shoulder somewhat lower than the other; with shoulders rounded so that she was almost humpbacked; her hair was black and shiny and compact with pomade; parted in the middle, this heavy hair, smooth and shiny, looked like the slightly parted wing-cases of a monstrous beetle. The woman wore a glaring red waist, ribbons of a lighter, and even more glaring red, at her elbows. "He's come, Miss Guffy," said Mr. Birtwhistle. Miss Guffy turned, and threw her left arm over the back of her chair, which made her shoulders seem of equal height; she stared at Sim, saying nothing. At the second table, which was by a window, sat a man; hair cut in the shape of a chopping bowl, worn down over his ears -- or ear, for one ear was gone -- chopping bowl clapped down over his head; features gentle and boyish. "He's come, Asbury," said Mr. Birtwhistle. The man was wearing a nightshirt, tucked down in his trousers; sockless feet in heelless slippers; he was holding his hands, drooping like a kangaroo's front paws, over a dusty typewriter. "Mr. Rakes, Mr. Asbury Parker." Mr. Asbury Parker, sitting with hands wilted over the typewriter, slowly looking around; then-- "Oh! were you speaking to me? Oh, how are you?" He rose, standing beside his table, saying nothing-- Sim's hand shifting and shifting hat and suit-case. Emotional blue curtains; the woman behind them clutching them. Piles of stationery between the two tables; disordered piles of typewritten letters that had fallen upon stacks of envelopes, mixed with catalogs and paper wrappers. "Have a seat, have a seat, sir," said Mr. Birtwhistle in wretched briskness. Sim sitting in a chair with its back to the blue curtains; Sim spurred forward upon the very edge of the chair, protruding springs of it prodding him. The green-painted walls of the room were blotched with stove smoke; soot- smeared with strange shapes; a green room, like a caisson of glass sunk in the sea; in a green sea, but in no clear, bright ocean depths; a caisson sunk somewhere amid suspended, water-soaked wreckage and weeds; a sunken cell in the Sargasso Sea. "We didn't expect you to-day, or we'd have-- but I'll not apologize!" said Mr. Birtwhistle, Mr. Asbury Parker still standing stiff by his table-- Miss Guffy, with her arm over the back of her chair, staring at Sim. "Oh, that's all right" said Sim. "Quite a lively street, here." He laughed immoderately. He tried not to look at fish heads on the floor; then he looked away from a pan of ashes halfway under the stove. "I guess we can do better for you than that," said Mr. Birtwhistle, pointing to the chair that prodded when Sim sat back in it. "Delia," he said, going to the wriggling blue curtains. At first Mrs. Birtwhistle would not come out. Whispering behind the curtains, the wriggling curtains. Mr. Birtwhistle reappeared, carrying a chair with a concave, cane seat, nevertheless a chair that would not prod. Then Mrs. Birtwhistle came out defiantly, eyes straight ahead, eyes away from Sim, though she nodded in his direction slightly. She had piled her hair into a high, toppling peak; her face was sallow; under a short upper lip were two exposed, white teeth, standing out like only two kernels upon a scraped, sallow ear of corn. "Asbury," she said sharply, "you can go on with your work." "Mr. Rakes," began Mr. Birtwhistle, in a kind of desperate pomposity; in stepping forward pompously a hanging loop of his suspenders caught upon a corner of the stove, dragging him back. "Oh, cusses!" said Mr. Birtwhistle weakly. "Mr. Rakes must take us as he finds us," declared Mrs. Birtwhistle. With her foot she pushed the pan of ashes farther under the stove. "Certainly!" quickly from Sim. "Oh, sit down!" said Mr. Parker. He dropped into his chair and sat holding his languid hands motionless over the rickety typewriter. "That's all right; that's all right," said Sim. "Don't mind me-- I always make myself at home everywhere"-- laboriously speaking, his eyes wavering, his mouth in a twitching grin-- "I mean-- that's all right, you know." "Then you got my letter?" asked Mr. Birtwhistle. "Has your dropping in this afternoon got any reference to that?" "I happened to be in town, you know.

Load more