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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
up. There was no one to say good-by to. Ruth
and her whole family were spending the long summer in the Sierras, at
Lake Tahoe.
He arrived at Shelly Hot Springs, tired and dusty, on Sunday night. Joe
greeted him exuberantly. With a wet towel bound about his aching brow,
he had been at work all day.
"Part of last weeks washin mounted up, me bein away to get you," he
explained. "Your box arrived all right. Its in your room. But its a
hell of a thing to call a trunk. An whats in it? Gold bricks?"
Joe sat on the bed while Martin unpacked. The box was a packing-case for
breakfast food, and Mr. Higginbotham had charged him half a dollar for
it. Two rope handles, nailed on by Martin, had technically transformed
it into a trunk eligible for the baggage-car. Joe watched, with bulging
eyes, a few shirts and several changes of underclothes come out of the
box, followed by books, and more books.
"Books clean to the bottom?" he asked.
Martin nodded, and went on arranging the books on a kitchen table which
served in the room in place of a wash-stand.
"Gee!" Joe exploded, then waited in silence for the deduction to arise in
his brain. At last it came.
"Say, you dont care for the girls--much?" he queried.
"No," was the answer. "I used to chase a lot before I tackled the books.
But since then theres no time."
"And there wont be any time here. All you can do is work an sleep."
Martin thought of his five hours sleep a night, and smiled. The room
was situated over the laundry and was in the same building with the
engine that pumped water, made electricity, and ran the laundry
machinery. The engineer, who occupied the adjoining room, dropped in to
meet the new hand and helped Martin rig up an electric bulb, on an
extension wire, so that it travelled along a stretched cord from over the
table to the bed.
The next morning, at quarter-past six, Martin was routed out for a
quarter-to-seven breakfast. There happened to be a bath-tub for the
servants in the laundry building, and he electrified Joe by taking a cold
bath.
"Gee, but youre a hummer!" Joe announced, as they sat down to breakfast
in a corner of the hotel kitchen.
With them was the engineer, the gardener, and the assistant gardener, and
two or three men from the stable. They ate hurriedly and gloomily, with
but little conversation, and as Martin ate and listened he realized how
far he had travelled from their status. Their small mental caliber was
depressing to him, and he was anxious to get away from them. So he
bolted his breakfast, a sickly, sloppy affair, as rapidly as they, and
heaved a sigh of relief when he passed out through the kitchen door.
It was a perfectly appointed, small steam laundry, wherein the most
modern machinery did everything that was possible for machinery to do.
Martin, after a few instructions, sorted the great heaps of soiled
clothes, while Joe started the masher and made up fresh supplies of soft-
soap, compounded of biting chemicals that compelled him to swathe his
mouth and nostrils and eyes in bath-towels till he resembled a mummy.
Finished the sorting, Martin lent a hand in wringing the clothes. This
was done by dumping them into a spinning receptacle that went at a rate
of a few thousand revolutions a minute, tearing the matter from the
clothes by centrifugal force. Then Martin began to alternate between the
dryer and the wringer, between times "shaking out" socks and stockings.
By the afternoon, one feeding and one, stacking up, they were running
socks and stockings through the mangle while the irons were heating. Then
it was hot irons and underclothes till six oclock, at which time Joe
shook his head dubiously.
"Way behind," he said. "Got to work after supper." And after supper
they worked until ten oclock, under the blazing electric lights, until
the last piece of under-clothing was ironed and folded away in the
distributing room. It was a hot California night, and though the windows
were thrown wide, the room, with its red-hot ironing-stove, was a
furnace. Martin and Joe, down to undershirts, bare armed, sweated and
panted for air.
"Like trimming cargo in the tropics," Martin said, when they went
upstairs.
"Youll do," Joe answered. Martin Eden page 67 Martin Eden page 69 |