Chapter VIII
As thoughts of Pete came to Maggie's mind, she began to have
an intense dislike for all of her dresses.
"What deh hell ails yeh? What makes yeh be allus fixin' and
fussin'? Good Gawd," her mother would frequently roar at her.
She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women
she met on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. She
craved those adornments of person which she saw every day on the
street, conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to women.
Studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls she
chanced to meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherished
and watched over by those they loved.
The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her.
She knew she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot,
stuffy room. The begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the
passing of elevated trains. The place was filled with a whirl of
noises and odors.
She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the
room, mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out,
with heads bended over their work, tales of imagined or real
girlhood happiness, past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages.
She speculated how long her youth would endure. She began to see
the bloom upon her cheeks as valuable.
She imagined herself, in an exasperating future, as a scrawny
woman with an eternal grievance. Too, she thought Pete to be
a very fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.
She felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingers
in the oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment.
He was a detestable creature. He wore white socks with low shoes.
When he tired of this amusement he would go to the mummies and
moralize over them.
Usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he had
to go through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment.
"What deh hell," he demanded once. "Look at all dese little
jugs! Hundred jugs in a row! Ten rows in a case an' 'bout a
t'ousand cases! What deh blazes use is dem?"
Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the
brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her
guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the
beautiful sentiments. The latter spent most of his time out at
soak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver,
rescuing aged strangers from villains.
Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in
snow storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir within
singing "Joy to the World." To Maggie and the rest of the audience
this was transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, like
the actor, inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselves
in ecstatic pity of their imagined or real condition.
The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the
magnate of the play was very accurately drawn. She echoed the
maledictions that the occupants of the gallery showered on this
individual when his lines compelled him to expose his extreme
selfishness.
Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured
villainy of the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and
applauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently
sincere admiration for virtue.
The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the
oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and
jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers.
When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned.
They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.
In the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, to
wealth and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the
enemies that he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which
applauded his generous and noble sentiments and confounded the
speeches of his opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp
remarks. Those actors who were cursed with villainy parts were
confronted at every turn by the gallery. If one of them rendered
lines containing the most subtile distinctions between right and
wrong, the gallery was immediately aware if the actor meant
wickedness, and denounced him accordingly.
The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the
masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain
and the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed
with tyrannical purposes, imperturbable amid suffering.
Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing
places of the melodrama. She rejoiced at the way in which the poor
and virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked. The
theatre made her think. She wondered if the culture and refinement
she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the
stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house
and worked in a shirt factory.