Clementine Classics: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. Theodore Dreiser

whether the interview had terminated. “Don’t wait!” he exclaimed. “Remember we are very busy here.”

      Carrie began to move quickly to the door.

      “Hold on,” he said, calling her back. “Give me your name and address. We want girls occasionally.”

      When she had gotten safely into the street, she could scarcely restrain the tears. It was not so much the particular rebuff which she had just experienced, but the whole abashing trend of the day. She was tired and nervous. She abandoned the thought of appealing to the other department stores and now wandered on, feeling a certain safety and relief in mingling with the crowd.

      In her indifferent wandering she turned into Jackson Street, not far from the river, and was keeping her way along the south side of that imposing thoroughfare, when a piece of wrapping paper, written on with marking ink and tacked up on the door, attracted her attention. It read, “Girls wanted—wrappers & stitchers.” She hesitated a moment, then entered. Another street, another fucking terrible president. Andrew Jackson, aka “Old Hickory,” loved slavery and chasing out Native Americans. His forehead was also so large it was technically a five-head.

      The firm of Speigelheim & Co., makers of boys’ caps, occupied one floor of the building, fifty feet in width and some eighty feet in depth. It was a place rather dingily lighted, the darkest portions having incandescent lights, filled with machines and work benches. At the latter laboured quite a company of girls and some men. The former were drabby-looking creatures, stained in face with oil and dust, clad in thin, shapeless, cotton dresses and shod with more or less worn shoes. Many of them had their sleeves rolled up, revealing bare arms, and in some cases, owing to the heat, their dresses were open at the neck. Whores—they’re whores! What next, Dreiser? You’re going to tell us they’re exposing some nubile young ankles? They were a fair type of nearly the lowest order of shop-girls—careless, slouchy, and more or less pale from confinement. They were not timid, however; were rich in curiosity, and strong in daring and slang. These sound like my kind of broads. Hedgehogs are purely solitary creatures, but if I were to run with a girl gang, I’d probably choose these bitches.

      Carrie looked about her, very much disturbed and quite sure that she did not want to work here. Aside from making her uncomfortable by sidelong glances, no one paid her the least attention. She waited until the whole department was aware of her presence. Then some word was sent around, and a foreman, in an apron and shirt sleeves, the latter rolled up to his shoulders, approached.

      “Do you want to see me?” he asked.

      “Do you need any help?” said Carrie, already learning directness of address.

      “Do you know how to stitch caps?” he returned.

      “No, sir,” she replied.

      “Have you ever had any experience at this kind of work?” he inquired. She answered that she had not.

      “Well,” said the foreman, scratching his ear meditatively, Dear God, please don’t let this foreshadow that this factory has some sort of plague. I was just joking about all that Upton Sinclair bullshit, but I do not want this novel to turn into The Jungle. Hedgehogs are fucking terrified of mites — I can not handle any disease books. This is why I am not a fucking doctor. “we do need a stitcher. We like experienced help, though. We’ve hardly got time to break people in.” He paused and looked away out of the window. “We might, though, put you at finishing,” he concluded reflectively.

      “How much do you pay a week?” ventured Carrie, emboldened by a certain softness in the man’s manner and his simplicity of address.

      “Three and a half,” he answered.

      “Oh,” she was about to exclaim, but checked herself and allowed her thoughts to die without expression. Historical tidbit: The phrase “Check yourself and allow your thoughts to die without expression” later devolved over the years to the current, “Check yo’self before you wreck yo’self.”

      “We’re not exactly in need of anybody,” he went on vaguely, looking her over as one would a package. “You can come on Monday morning, though,” he added, “and I’ll put you to work.”

      “Thank you,” said Carrie weakly.

      “If you come, bring an apron,” he added.

      He walked away and left her standing by the elevator, never so much as inquiring her name.

      While the appearance of the shop and the announcement of the price paid per week operated very much as a blow to Carrie’s fancy, the fact that work of any kind was offered after so rude a round of experience was gratifying. She could not begin to believe that she would take the place, modest as her aspirations were. She had been used to better than that. Her mere experience and the free out-of-door life of the country caused her nature to revolt at such confinement. Dirt had never been her share. Her sister’s flat was clean. This place was grimy and low, the girls were careless and hardened. They must be bad-minded and hearted, she imagined. Now I’m excited. A “bad-minded and hearted” Carrie is exactly what I want. Come on, show us your tits —er, I mean, wrists! Still, a place had been offered her. Surely Chicago was not so bad if she could find one place in one day. She might find another and better later.

      Her subsequent experiences were not of a reassuring nature, however. From all the more pleasing or imposing places she was turned away abruptly with the most chilling formality. In others where she applied only the experienced were required. She met with painful rebuffs, the most trying of which had been in a manufacturing cloak house, where she had gone to the fourth floor to inquire.

      “No, no,” said the foreman, a rough, heavily built individual, who looked after a miserably lighted workshop, “we don’t want any one. Don’t come here.”

      With the wane of the afternoon went her hopes, her courage, and her strength. She had been astonishingly persistent. So earnest an effort was well deserving of a better reward. On every hand, to her fatigued senses, the great business portion grew larger, harder, more stolid in its indifference. It seemed as if it was all closed to her, that the struggle was too fierce for her to hope to do anything at all. Men and women hurried by in long, shifting lines. She felt the flow of the tide of effort and interest—felt her own helplessness without quite realizing the wisp on the tide that she was. She cast about vainly for some possible place to apply, but found no door which she had the courage to enter. It would be the same thing all over. The old humiliation of her plea, rewarded by curt denial. Sick at heart and in body, she turned to the west, the direction of Minnie’s flat, which she had now fixed in mind, and began that wearisome, baffled retreat which the seeker for employment at nightfall too often makes. In passing through Fifth Avenue, south towards Van Buren Street, where she intended to take a car, Four dollars in your purse, and you’re taking a cab? Don’t let Dreiser win, Carrie. Use your fucking brain she passed the door of a large wholesale shoe house, through the plate-glass windows of which she could see a middle-aged gentleman sitting at a small desk.. One of those forlorn impulses which often grow out of a fixed sense of defeat, the last sprouting of a baffled and uprooted growth of ideas, seized upon her. She walked deliberately through the door and up to the gentleman, who looked at her weary face with partially awakened interest.

      “What is it?” he said.

      “Can you give me something to do?” said Carrie. Homegirl really needs to work on her interviewing skills. She needs to fucking sell herself. Flash some ankle if you need to.

      “Now, I really don’t know,” he said kindly. “What kind of work is it you want—you’re not a typewriter, are you?”

      “Oh, no,” answered Carrie.

      “Well, we only employ book-keepers and typewriters here. You might go around to the side and inquire upstairs. They did want some help upstairs a few days ago. Ask for Mr. Brown.”

      She hastened around to the side entrance and was taken up by the elevator to the fourth floor. “Call Mr. Brown, Willie,” said the elevator man to a boy nearby. Willie went off and presently