“I lost one nail; rotted off.”

“Horrible!  How, pray?”

“That there water:  it’s poison from the shoe-dye.”

Swiftly my hands were changing to a faint likeness of my companion’s.

“Don’t tell him,” she said, “that I told you that.  He’ll be mad; he’ll think I am discouraging you.  But you’ll lose your forefinger nail, all right!” Then she gave a little laugh as she turned her boot around to polish it.

“Once I tried to clean my hands up.  Lord! it’s no good!  I scrub ’em with a scrubbin’-brush on Sundays.”

“How long have you been at this job?”

“Ten months.”

They called her “Bobby”; the men from their machines nodded to her now and then, bantering her across the noise of their wheels.  She was ignorant of it, too stupid to know whether life took her in sport or in earnest!  The men themselves worked in their flannel shirts.  Not far from us was a wretchedly ill-looking individual, the very shadow of manhood.  I observed that once he cast toward us a look of interest.  Under my feet was a raised platform on which I stood, bending to my work.  During the morning the consumptive man strolled over and whispered something to “Bobby.”  He made her dullness understand.  When he had gone back to his job she said to me: 

“Say, w’y don’t yer push that platform away and stand down on the floor?  You’re too tall to need that.  It makes yer bend.”

“Did that man come over to tell you this?”

“Yes.  He said it made you tired.”

From my work, across the room, I silently blessed the pale old man, bowed, thin, pitiful, over the shoe he held, obscured from me by the cloud of sawdust-like flying leather that spun scattered from the sole he held to the flying wheel.

* * * * *

I don’t believe the shoe-dye really to be poisonous.  I suppose it is scarcely possible that it can be so; but the constant pressure against forefinger nail is enough to induce disease.  My fingers were swollen sore.  The effects of the work did not leave my hands for weeks.

“Bobby” was not talkative or communicative simply because she had nothing to say.  Over and over again she repeated the one single question to me during the time I worked by her side:  “Do you like your job?” and although I varied my replies as well as I could with the not too exhausting topic she offered, I could not induce her to converse.  She took no interest in my work, absorbed in her own.  Every now and then she would compute the sum she had made, finally deciding that the day was to be a red-bean day and she would make a dollar and fifty cents.  During the time we worked together she had cleaned seventeen cases of shoes.

In this shop it was hotter than in Parsons’.  We sweltered at our work.  Once a case of shoes was cleaned, I wrote my initial “B” on the tag and rolled the crate across the floor to the man next me, who took it into his active charge.