CHAPTER I. ACROSS THE GULF.
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THE rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives,
are by no means the saddest.
This occurred to Miss Kelso one January
night, not many winters ago. Though, to be
exact, it was rather the weather than the simile
which occurred to her. The weather may happen
to anybody, and so serves a purpose like
photography and weddings. Reflections upon
life you run your chance of at twenty-three.
If, in addition to the circumstance of being
twenty-three, you are the daughter of a gentleman
manufacturer, and a resident of Boston,
it would hardly appear that you require the
ceremony of an introduction. A pansy-bed in
the sun would be a difficult subject of classification.
Undoubtedly, pages might with ease
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be occupied in treating of Miss Kelso's genealogy.
Her descent from the Pilgrims could be
indisputably proved. It would be possible to
ascertain whether or not she cried at her mother's
funeral. Thrilling details of her life in the
nursery are upon record. Her first composition
is still legible. Indeed, three chapters, at the
least, might be so profitably employed in conveying
to the intelligence of the most far-sighted
reader the remotest intimation of Miss Kelso's
existence, that one feels compelled into an apology
to high art for presenting her in three lines
and a northeaster.
Perhaps it should be added that this young
lady was engaged to be married to her father's
junior partner, and that she was sitting in her
father's library, with her hands folded, at the
time when the weather occurred to her; sitting,
as she had been sitting all the opaque, gray
afternoon, in a crimson chair by a crimson fire,
a creamy profile and a creamy hand lifted and
cut between the two foci of color. The profile
had a level, generous chin. The hand had —
rings.
There are people who never do anything that
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is not worth watching; they cannot eat an apple
or button a shoe in an unnoticeable, unsuggestive
manner. If they undertake to be awkward, they
do it so symbolically that you feel in debt to
them for it. Miss Kelso may have been one
of these indexical persons; at any rate, there
was something in her simple act of sitting before
a fire, in her manner of shielding her eyes
from the warmth to which her figure was languidly
abandoned, which to a posture-fancier
would have been very expressive.
She had noticed in an idle way, swathed to
the brain in her folds of heat and color, that the
chromatic run of drops upon a window, duly
deadened by drawn damask, and adapted nicely
to certain conditions of a cannel blaze, had a
pleasant sound. Accurately, she had not found
herself to be the possessor of another thought
since dinner; she had dined at three.
It had been a long storm, but Miss Kelso had
found no occasion to dampen the sole of her
delicate sandals in the little puddles that dotted
the freestone steps and drained pavement. It
had been a cold storm, but the library held, as
a library should, the tints and scents of June.
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It had been a dismal storm; but what of that?
Miss Kelso was young, well, in love, and — Miss
Kelso. Given the problem, Be miserable, she
would have folded her hands there by her fire,
like a puzzled snow-flake in a gorgeous poppy,
and sighed, “But I do not understand!”
To be sure, her father was out of town, and she
had mislaid the score of La Grande Duchesse, —
undesirable circumstances, both, but not without
their compensations. For the placid pleasantness
of five o'clock paternal society, she had the rich,
irregular delights of solitude in a handsome house,—
a dream, a doubt, a daring fancy that human
society would snap, an odd hope pellmell upon
the heels of an extraordinary fear, snatches of
things, the mental chaos of a liberated prisoner.
Isolation in elegance is not apt to be productive
of thought, however, as I intimated.
Opposed to the loss of La Duchesse would be
the pleasure of making Maverick look for it.
Miss Kelso took a keen, appreciative enjoyment
in having a lazy lover; he gave her something
to do; he was an occupation in himself. She
had indeed a weakness for an occupation; suffered
passions of superfluous life; at the Cape
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she rebelled because Providence had not created
her a bluefisher; in Paris she would make
muslin flowers, and learn the métier to-morrow.
This was piquant in her; her plighted husband
found himself entertained by it always;
he folded her two hands like sheets of ricepaper
over his own, with an easy smile.
The weather occurred to the young lady
about six o'clock in the form of a query: Was
it worth while to go out to-night? She cultivated
an objection to Don Giovanni in the rain,—
and it always rained on Giovanni; Maverick
could talk Brignoli to Mrs. Silver, and hold a
fan for Fly, as well without her; she happened
to find herself more interested in an arm-chair
than in anything else in the world, and slippers
were the solution of the problem of life. Was
it worth while?
This was one of those vital questions which
require immediate motives for a settlement, and
of immediate motives Miss Kelso possessed very
few. Indeed, it was as yet unanswered in her
own mind, when the silver handle of her carriage-door
had shut with a little shine like a smile
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upon her, and Fly's voice, like boiling candy,
bubbled at her from the front seat.
Maverick had called; there had been a whiff
of pleasant wet air in her face; and, after all, life
and patent springs are much alike in doors or out.
Miss Kelso sank languidly back into the perfumed
cushions; the close doors and windows
shut in their thick sweetness; the broken lights
of the street dropped in, and Maverick sat beside
her.
“You have had your carriage re-scented,
Perley, I 'm sure,” said Fly, who was just
enough at home with Perley to say it.
“From Harris's, — yes.”
“Santalina, unless I am quite mistaken?”
This, softly, from Mrs. Silver; Mrs. Silver
was apt to speak very softly.
“I was tired to death of heliotrope,” said
Perley, with a weary motion of her well-shaped
head; “it clings so. There was some trouble,
I believe, to take it out; new stuffing and
covering. But I think it pays.”
“Indeed, yes, richly.”
“It always pays to take trouble for sachet, I
think,” said Fly, sententiously.
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“Perley never makes a mistake in a perfume,”—
that came, of course, from Maverick.
“Perley never did make a mistake in a perfume,”
observed Mrs. Silver, in the mild motherly
manner which she had acquired from frequently
matronizing Perley. “Never from the
day Burt made the blunder of tuberoses for
her poor mother. The child flung them out
of the casket herself. She was six years old
the day before. It was a gratification to me
when Burt went out of fashion.”
Perley, it may be presumed, feeling always
some awkwardness at the mention of a dead
parent for whom propriety required her to
mourn, and in connection with whose faint memory
she could not, do the best she might, acquire
an unhappiness, made no reply, and sachet and
Mrs. Silver dropped into silence together. Fly
broke it, in her ready way: “So kind in you
to send for us, Perley!”
“It was quite proper,” said Perley.
She did not think of anything else to say,
and fell, as her santalina and her chaperone
had fallen, a little noticeably out of the conversation.
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Fly and Maverick Hayle did the talking. Mrs.
Silver dropped in now and then properly.
Perley listened lazily to the three voices; one
sometimes hears very noticeable voices from very
unnoticeable people; these were distinct of note
as a triplet; idle, soft, and sweet — sweetly, softly
idle. She played accompaniments with them to
her amused fancy.
The triplet rounded into a chord presently, and
made her a little sleepy. Sensitive only to an
occasional flat or sharp of Brignoli or Kellogg,
she fell with half-closed eyes into the luxury of
her own thoughts.
What were they? What does any young lady
think about on her way to the opera? One
would like to know. A young lady, for instance,
who is used to her gloves, and indifferent to her
stone cameos; who has the score by heart, and
is tired of the prima donna; who has had a
season ticket every winter since she can remember,
and will have one every winter till
she dies?
The ride to the theatre was not a short one,
and slow that night on account of the storm,
which was thickening a little, half snow.
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Perley, through the white curtains of her falling
eyelids, looked out at it; she was fond of
watching the streets when no one was watching
her, especially on stormy nights, for no reason
in particular that she knew of, except that
she felt so dry and comfortable. So clean too!
There were a great many muddy people out that
night; the sleet did not wash them as fast as the
mud spattered them; and the wind at the corners
sprang on them sharply. From her carriage
window she could look on and see it lying in
wait for them, and see it crouch and bound and
set teeth on them. She really followed with
some interest, having nothing better to do, the
manful struggles of a girl in a plaid dress, who
battled with the gusts about a carriage-length
ahead of her, for perhaps half a dozen blocks.
This girl struck out with her hands as a boxer
would; sometimes she pommelled with her elbows
and knees like a desperate prize-fighter;
she was rather small, but she kept her balance;
when her straw hat blew off, she chased headlong
after it, and Perley languidly smiled. She
was apt to be amused by the world outside of
her carriage. It conceived such original ways
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of holding its hands, and wearing its hats, and
carrying its bundles. It had such a taste in
colors, such disregard of clean linen, and was
always in such a hurry. This last especially
interested her; Miss Kelso had never been in
a hurry in her life.
“There!” said Fly.
“Where?” said Perley, starting.
“I 've broken my fan; made a perfect wreck
of it! What shall I do? No, thank you.
Mr. Hayle, I am in blue to-night. You know
you could n't fail to get me a green one if you
tried. You must bring me out — but it 's too
wet to bring fans out. Mother, we must go in
ourselves.”
So it came about that in the land of fans, or in
the region roundabout, Maverick and the Silvers
disappeared in the flash of a fancy-store, and
Perley, in the carriage, was left alone.
“Dear me!” said Mrs. Silver, placidly, as the
umbrella extinguished her, “we are making our
friends a great deal of trouble, Fly, for a little
thing.”
Now Perley did not find it a trouble. She
was rather glad to be alone for a few minutes.
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In fact, she took it very kindly in Fly to break
that fan, and, as she afterwards thought, with
reason.
The carriage door was left open, by her orders.
She found something pleasant in the wet wildness
of the storm; it came near enough almost to
dampen her cheek as she leaned forward towards
it; and the street came into the frame that was
left, in a sharp picture.
The sidewalk was very wet; in spots the
struggling snow drifted grayish white, and went
out into black mud under a sudden foot; the
eaves and awnings dripped steadily, and there
was a little puddle on the carriage step; the
colored lights of a druggist's window shimmered
and broke against the pavement and the carriage
and the sleet, leaving upon the fancy the surprise
of a rainbow in a snow-storm; people's
faces dipped through it curiously; here, a fellow
with a waxed mustache struck into murderous
red, and dripped so horridly that a policeman,
in the confusion of the storm, eyed him for half a
block; there, a hale old man fell suddenly into
the last stages of jaundice; beyond, a girl straggling
jealously behind a couple of very wet, but
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very happy lovers, turned deadly green; a little
this way, another stepped into a bar of lily
white, and stood and shone in it for an instant,
“without spot or stain, or any such thing,” but
stepped out of it, quite out, shaking herself a
little as she went, as if the lighted touch had
scorched her.
Still another girl (Miss Kelso expressed to
herself some languid wonder that the night
should find so many young girls out, and alone,
and noted how little difference the weather appeared
to make with that class of people) — the
girl in plaid, whom the storm had buffeted
back for the last few moments — came up with
the carriage, and stopped, full against the druggist's
window, for breath. She looked taller,
standing in the light, than she had done when
boxing the wind at the corners, but still a little
undersized; she had no gloves, and her straw hat
hung around her neck by the strings; she must
have been very cold, for her lips were blue, but
she did not shiver.
Who has not noticed that fantastic fate of
galleries, which will hang a saint and a Magdalene,
a Lazarus and Dives, face to face? And
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who has not felt, with those transfixed glances,
doomed by sunlight, starlight, moonlight, twilight,
in crowds and in hush, from year unto
year, to struggle towards each other, — vain builders
of a vain bridge across the fixed gulf of an
irreparable lot, — a weariness of sympathy, which
wellnight extinguished the artistic fineness of the
chance? Something of this feeling would have
struck a keen observer of Miss Kelso and the
little girl in plaid.
Their eyes had met, when the girl lifted her
arms to tie on her hat. Against the burning
globes of the druggist's window, which quivered
and swam through the sheen of the fall of sleet,
and just where the perfect prism broke about
her, she made a miserably meagre figure. Miss
Kelso, from the soft dry gloom of her carriage
door, leaned out resplendent.
The girl's lips moved angrily, and she said
something in a sharp voice which the wind must
have carried the other way, for the druggist
heard it, and sent a clerk out to order her off.
Miss Kelso, obeying one of her whimsical impulses, —
who had a better right, indeed, to be
whimsical? — beckoned to the girl, who, after
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swearing a little at the druggist's clerk, strode
up rather roughly to the carriage.
“What do you want of me? and what were
you staring at? Did n't you ever see anybody
lose his hat in a sleet-storm before?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Miss Kelso; “I did
not mean to be rude.”
She spoke on the instinct of a lady. She was
nothing of a philanthropist, not much of a Christian.
Let us be honest, even if inbred sin
and courtesy, not justification by faith, and conscience,
induced this rather remarkable reply. I
call it remarkable, from the standpoint of girls in
plaid. That particular girl, without doubt, found
it so. She raised her eyes quickly and keenly to
the young lady's face.
“I think I must have been sorry for you,”
observed Miss Kelso; “that was why I looked at
you. You seemed cold and wet.”
“You 're not cold and wet, at any rate.”
This was raggedly said, and bitter. It made
Miss Kelso feel singularly uncomfortable; as if
she were to blame for not being cold and wet.
She felt a curious impulse towards self-defence,
and curiously enough she followed it by saying,
“I cannot help that!”
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“No,” said the girl, after a moment's thought.
“N-no; but I hate to be pitied by carriage-folks.
I won't be pitied by carriage-folks!”
“Sit down on the steps,” said Miss Kelso, “and
let me look at you. I do not often see people
just like you. What is your name?”
“What 's yours?”
“I am called Miss Kelso.”
“And I am called Sip Garth.”
That ragged bitterness was in the girl's voice
again, much refined, but distinct. Miss Kelso, to
whom it seemed quite natural that the small
minority of the world should feel at liberty to
use, at first sight, the Christian name of the large
remainder, took little or no notice of it.
But what could bring her out in such a
storm, asked Miss Kelso of Sip Garth.
“The Blue Plum brings out better than me.
Who cares for a little sleet? See how wet I
am! I don't care.” She wrung out her thin
and dripping shawl, as she spoke, between her
bare, wet hands.
“The Blue Plum?” Miss Kelso hesitated,
taking the thing daintily upon her lips. What
did she, or should she, know of the Blue Plum?
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“But the theatre is no place for you, my poor
girl.” She felt sure of as much as that. She
had dimly understood as much from her father
and the newspapers. No theatre patronized by
the lower classes could be a place for a poor
girl.
“It 's no place for you,” she said again. “You
had so much better go home.”
Sip Garth laughed. She swung herself upon
the highest step of Miss Kelso's carriage, and
laughed almost in Miss Kelso's fine, shocked
face.
“How do you know whether I had so much
better go home? Wait till you've been working
on your feet all day, and wait till you live where
I live, before you know whether I had so much
better go home! Besides” — she broke off with
a quick change of tone and countenance — “I
don't go for the Plum. The Plum does n't make
much odds to me. I go to see how much better
I could do it.”
“Could you?”
“Could n't I!”
“I don't quite understand.”
“I don't suppose you do. Give me the music,
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give me the lights, and the people, and the
poetry, and I'd do it. I 'd make 'em laugh,
would n't I? I 'd make 'em cry, you may make
up your mind on that. That 's what I go to the
Plum for. I do it over. That 's what you think
of in the mills, don't you see? That 's so much
better than going home, — to do it over.”
“You seem,” said Miss Kelso, with some perplexed
weariness in her expression, — perhaps
she had carried her whim quite far enough, —
“you seem to be a very singular girl.”
Evidently Miss Kelso's coachman, whose hatbrim
appeared and peered uneasily over the box
at disgusted intervals, thought so too. Evidently
the passers, such of them as had preserved their
eyesight from the ravages of the sleet, thought
so too. Evidently it was quite time for the girl
in plaid to go.
“I wonder what you seem like,” said Sip
Garth, thoughtfully. She leaned, as she spoke,
into the sweet dimness of the carriage, and
gravely studied the sweet dimness of the young
lady's face. Having done this, she nodded to
herself once or twice with a shrewd smile, but
said nothing. Her wet shawl now almost brushed
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Miss Kelso's dress; the girl was not filthy, but
the cleanliest poverty in a Boston tenementhouse
fails to acquire the perfumes of Arabia,
and Perley sickened and shrank. Yet it struck
her as odd, for the moment, if you will believe it,
that she should have santalina in her carriage
cushions; not as ill-judged, not as undesirable,
not as in any way the concern of girls from tenement-houses,
not at all as something which she
would not do again to-morrow, but only as odd.
She had thought no more than this, when the
disgusted coachman, with an air of infinite personal
relief, officially announced Mr. Hayle, and
Fly came laughing sweetly back. It was quite
time for Sip to go.
In the confusion she dripped away among the
water-spouts like one of them, before Miss Kelso
could speak to her again.
The street came into the frame that was left in
a sharp picture. The sidewalk was once more
very wet; in spots the struggling snow drifted,
grayish white, and went out into black mud
under sudden feet; the eaves and awnings
dripped steadily, and there was a little puddle
on the carriage steps.
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Miss Kelso had a young, fresh imagination,
a little highly colored, perhaps, by opera music,
and it made these things a vivid background
for the girl in plaid, into which and out of which
she stepped with a fanciful significance.
With the exception of her servants, her seamstresses,
and the very little members of a very little
Sabbath-school class, which demanded of her
very little thought and excited in her very little
interest, Miss Kelso had never in her life before—
I think I speak without exaggeration — had
never in her life before exchanged a dozen words
with an example of what Maverick Hayle was
pleased to term the &rbogr;ι πολλο&iacgr;, thereby evincing
at once his keen appreciation of the finer distinctions
both of life and letters, as well as the
fact, that, though a successful manufacturer, he
had received a collegiate education and had not
yet forgotten it. And, indeed, as he was accustomed
to observe, “Nothing gives a man such a
prestige in society.”
The girl in plaid then, to repeat, was a novelty
to Perley Kelso. She fell back into her cushions
again to think about her.
“Poor Perley! I hope she found herself amused
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while we were gone,” sympathized Fly, fluttering
in with her new fan. Perley thanked her, and
had found herself amused, much amused.
Yet, in truth, she had found herself saddened,
singularly saddened. She could scarcely have
understood why. Nothing more definite than an
uncomfortable consciousness that all the world
had not an abundance of sachet and an appreciation
of Brignoli struck her distinctly. But how
it rained on that girl looking in at her from the
carriage steps! It must rain on many girls
while she sat in her sweet, warm, sheltered darkness.
It must be a disagreeable thing, this being
out in the rain. She did not fancy the thud of
drops on her carriage-roof as much as usual; the
wind waiting at corners to crouch and spring
on people ceased to amuse her; it looked cruel
and cold. She shivered and looked so chilly
that Maverick folded her ermines like a wonderful
warm snow-cloud tenderly about her, and
drowned the storm from her hearing with his
tender, lazy voice.
In the decorous rustle of the crowd winding
down through the corridors, like a glittering
snake, after Giovanni that night, Fly started
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with a little faint scream, and touched Perley
on the arm.
“My dear Perley! — Mr. Hayle, there is a girl
annoying Perley.”
At Perley's elbow, trying quietly but persistently
to attract her attention, Perley was startled
and not well pleased to see the girl in plaid. In
the heat and light and scent and soft babble of
the place, she cut a jagged outline. The crowd
broke in beautiful billows about her and away
from her. It seemed not unlike a radiant sea
out of which she had risen, black and warning as
a hidden reef. She might have been thought to be
not so much a foreign horror as a sunken danger
in the shining place. She seemed, indeed, rather
to have bounded native from its glitter, than to
have forced herself upon it. Her eyes were very
large and bright, and she drew Perley's beautiful,
disturbed face down to her own with one bare
hand.
“Look here, young lady, I want to speak to
you. I want to know why you tell me the Plum
is no place for me? What kind of a place is
this for you? — now say, what kind of a place?
You don't know; but I do. I followed you here
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to see. I tell you it 's the plating over that 's
the difference; the plating over. At the Plum
we say what we mean; and we mean bad enough,
very like. We 're rough, and we 're out with it.
Up at this place they 're in with it. They plate
over. The music plates over. The people plate
over. It 's different from us, and it ain't different
from us. Don't you see? No, you don't. I do.
But you 'd ought to, — you 'd ought to. You 're
old enough and wise enough. I don't mean to
be saucy; but I put it to you honest, if I have
n't seen and heard that in this grand place to-night—
all plated over — that 's no more fit for a
lady like you seem to be to sit and see and hear,
than it 's fit for me and the like of me to sit and
see and hear the Plum. I put it to you honest,
and that 's all, and I 'm sorry to plague you with
all your fine friends about, for I liked the looks
of you right well when I sat on your carriage
steps. But it ain't often you 'll have the chance
to hear truer words from a rough girl like me;
and it ain't likely you hear no more words true
nor false from me; so good by, young lady. I
put it to you honest!”
“Hush!” said Miss Kelso, somewhat pale, as
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Maverick stepped up to drive the girl away.
“Let her alone. It 's only a girl I — amused
myself with when you went with Fly for the fan.
Let her be. It was only a whim of mine, and, as
it has proved, a foolish one. I am not used to
such people. She was coarse and hurt me. But
let her go.”
“I should advise you to choose your amusements
more wisely another time,” said Maverick
Hayle, looking angrily after Sip, who was edging
her way, with a sharp motion, through the radiant
sea. She disappeared from view on the
stairway suddenly, and the waves of scent and
light and heat and babble met and closed over
her as merrily as waves are wont to meet and
close over sunken reefs.
The ripple of Miss Kelso's disturbed thoughts
closed over her no less thoroughly, after the
momentary annoyance was past. She had done
a foolish thing, and been severely punished for
it. That was all. As Maverick said, the lower
classes could not bear any unusual attention from
their betters, without injury. Maverick in his
business connection had occasion to know. He
must be right.
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Maverick in his business connection had occasion
to know another thing that night. Maverick
in his business connection was met by a telegram,
on returning with Miss Kelso to her
father's house. The senior partner held the
despatch in his hand. He was sitting in Miss
Kelso's parlor. His face was grave and disturbed.
“Losses, perhaps,” thought Perley, and left
father and son alone. They did not seem inclined
to remain alone, however. She had not
yet taken off her wraps in the hall, when she
heard Maverick say in an agitated voice, “I
can't! I cannot do it!” and Mr. Hayle the
senior came out. The despatch was still in
his hand.
“My dear Miss Perley,” he said, with some
hesitation.
“Yes, sir?” said Perley, unfastening her
corded fur.
“Your father —”
“Wait a minute!” said Perley, speaking fast.
She unfastened the fur, and folded the cape up
into a white heap with much pains and precision.
She was struck with a childish dread of
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hearing a horrible thing. She felt singularly confused.
Snatches of Giovanni danced through
her brain. She thought that she saw the girl
in plaid sitting on her front stairs, with a worldful
of rain upon her head. Her own thought
came curiously back to her, in words: “How
disagreeable it must be to sit out in the rain!”
Her youth and happiness shrank with a sudden
faint sickness at being disturbed. It was with as
much fright as grief that she took the paper from
her father's old friend and read: —
“Crushed at six o'clock this afternoon, in the
freight depot at Five Falls. Instant death.”
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CHAPTER II. THE SLIPPERY PATH.
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NOTHING is more conducive to one's sense
of personal comfort than to live in a factory
town and not be obliged to answer factory
bells. This is especially to be said of those misty
morning bells, which lay a cloudy finger upon
one's last lingering dream, and dip it and dimple
it into shreds; of those six-o'clock winter bells,
whose very tongues seem to have stiffened with
the cold, and to move thickly and numbly against
their frosted cheeks. One listens and dozes, and
would dream again but for listening again, and
draws one's silk and eider shoulder-robe closer to
one's warm throat with a shiver of rare enjoyment.
Iron voices follow, and pierce the shoulder-robe.
They are distinct in spite of the eider,
though a little hoarse. One turns and wraps
one's self again. They are dulled, but inexorable.
One listens and dozes, and would dream again
-- 035 --
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but for listening. The inexorable is the delightful.
One has to take only the pleasure of listening.
A dim consciousness of many steps of cold
people cutting the biting, sunless air, gives a
crispness to the blankets. The bells shiver in
sympathy with the steps, and the steps shiver in
response to the bells. The bells hurry, hurry,
hurry to the steps. The steps hurry, hurry,
hurry to the bells. The bells grow cross and
snappish, — it is so cold. The steps grow pert
and saucy, — it is so cold. Bells and steps, in a
convulsion of ill-temper, go out from hearing together,
and only a sense of pillows and two hours
before breakfast fills the world.
Miss Kelso, waking to the six-o'clock bells of a
winter morning, appreciates this with uncommon
keenness; with the more uncommon keenness
that she has never waked to the six-o'clock bells
of a winter morning before. She has experienced
the new sensation of spending, for the first time,
a February night in her July house, and is so
thoroughly convinced that she ought to be cold,
and so perfectly assured that she is n't, that the
dangerous consideration of the possible two hours
before mentioned, and the undeniable fact that
-- 036 --
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she has invited Maverick to breakfast at seven,
incite between her delicate young flesh and her
delicate young conscience one of those painful
and prolonged struggles which it is impossible for
any one who is obliged to get up in the morning
to appreciate. Conscience conquering, after
a protracted contest, the vanquished party slips
reluctantly and slowly out of silk and eider
into crépins and Persiana, just as Mr. Maverick
Hayle's self-possessed ring plays leisurely
through the house.
The ghastly death of the managing partner
has had its effect upon his business and his
daughter, without doubt. Upon his business —
as might be assumed from the fact that Maverick
Hayle should breakfast at seven o'clock — a confusing
effect, requiring care and time to adjust
with wisdom. Upon his daughter, — what, for
instance? If he slipped from her life, as he slips
from her story, so heart slips away from heart,
and love from love, with the slide of every hour.
To cross the gap from life with a father to life
without, very much as the February night
descended upon the July house, were not unnatural.
One must be warm, at all events.
-- 037 --
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Her grief was wrapped in swaddling-clothes.
It was such a young grief, and she so young a
griever; and the sun shone, and the winter air
was crisp.
Perley had been fond of her father, — of course;
and mourned him, — of course: but fondness is
not friendship, and mourning is not desolation.
Add to this a certain obstinate vein in this
young woman, which suggested it to her fancy
as a point of loyalty to her father's memory
not to strain her sorrow beyond its honest
altitude, and what follows? To be at first very
sadly shocked, to be next very truly lonely; to
wish that she had never been cross to him
(which she had), and to be sure that he had never
been cross to her (which he had); to see, and
love to see, the best of the departed life and
the sweetest of the departed days; and then to
wander musing away, by sheer force of contrast,
upon her own unfinished life, and into
the sweetness of her own coming days, and repent
of it next moment; to forget one afternoon
to notice the five-o'clock solitude because
Maverick comes in; to take very much to her
Prayer-Book the first fortnight, and entirely to
-- 038 --
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Five Falls the second; and to be pouring out
her lover's coffee this morning, very lovely, a
little quiet, and less unhappy.
“But pale?” suggested Maverick, leaning
back in his chair, with the raised eyebrow of a
connoisseur, to pronounce upon the effect of her.
The effect was good, very good. Her black
dress, and the little silver tête-à-tête service over
which she leaned, set one another off quaintly;
and a trifle more color in her face would have
left the impression of a sketch finished by two
artists who had failed of each other's idea.
Perley did not know that she was pale; did
not feel pale; felt perhaps — and paused.
How did she feel?
Apparently she did not feel like explaining
to Maverick Hayle. Something in the delicate
motion with which he raised the delicate napkin
in his well-shaped hand to his delicately
trimmed mustache acted perhaps as a counterirritant
to some delicate shading of her thought.
It would not have been the first time that such
a thing had happened. He was as necessary to
Perley Kelso as her Axminster carpets; he
suited her in the same way; in the same way
-- 039 --
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he — sometimes — wearied her. But how did
she feel?
“As nearly as I can make out,” said Perley,
“I feel like a large damask curtain taken down
for the first time off its cornice,” with a glance
at the heavy walnut mouldings of her windows.
“All in a heap, you know, and surprised. Or
like a — what do you call it? that part of a
plane that runs in a groove, when you stop the
groove up. And I 'm not used, you know, Maverick,
to feeling at all; it 's never been asked of
me before.”
She smiled and playfully shook her head; but
her young eyes were perplexed and gently sad.
“It was coming to this cold house, under the
circumstances,” suggested Maverick.
No; Perley shook her head again; the house
was not cold; never mind. Was his cup out?
The milk was cold, at any rate; he must wait
a minute; and so sat thoughtfully silent while
she touched the bell, with the little silver service
shining against her shoulder and the curve
of her arm.
“What did you come down here for?” asked
Maverick, over his second cup.
-- 040 --
[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]
Perley did n't know.
“When shall you go back?”
Perley did n't know that.
“What are you going to do?”
Perley did n't know that, either. “Perhaps I
shall not go back. I am tired of town. Perhaps
I shall stay here and look after — things.”
“Things? For instance?”
“The mills, for instance. My property, for
instance.”
Maverick lazily laughed; pushing back his
chair, and raising the connoisseur's eyebrow
again at the little shining service, and the black
curve of the womanly, warm arm.
Perhaps she would take his place this morning;
he was late, now; she could rake over a
shoddy-heap, he was sure, or scold an overseer.
He would agree to sit by the fire and order dinner,
if she would just run over to father's for him
and bring him his slippers.
“I 'll run over to the counting-room with you,
and bring you to repentance,” said Perley; “the
air must be like wine this morning, and the sun
like heaven.”
The air was so much like wine and the sun like
-- 041 --
[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]
heaven, that Perley, upon leaving the junior partner
at the mill-gates, strolled on by a path on the
river's brink through and beyond the town, finding
herself loath to go back and sit by the fire
and order dinner; the more so, possibly, because
she was a bit annoyed that Maverick should have
hit with such exactness her typical morning; it
had, somehow, a useless, silly sound.
A useless, silly sound in this town of Five
Falls was artistically out of place. She almost
felt herself to be a superfluity in the cold, crisp
air filled to the full with business noises; and
took a pleasure in following the river almost out
of hearing of the mill machinery, and quite into
the frozen silence of the upper stream.
Though the stream was large, the town was
not; neither had the mills, from that distance, an
imposing air. Perley, with a sudden remembrance
of the size of her income, wondered at
this for the first time. “The business” had been
a standing mystery in the young lady's careless
fancy, the existence of which she had dimly understood
from her father, as she had dimly understood
the existence of “The Blue Plum”; perhaps
both had been about equally withheld from
-- 042 --
[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]
her comprehension. That there was some cotton
in it she felt sure; that it was a responsible business
and a profitable business she understood;
that there were girls in little shawls, ragged men,
and bad tobacco, an occasional strike, and a mission
Sunday school connected with it, she remembered.
Upon the cool of her summer rest the hot
whir of the thing had never breathed. Factory
feet had trodden as lightly as dewdrops upon her
early dreams.
She put on Five Falls for a few months every
year as she put on a white dress, — a cool thing,
which kept wash-people busy.
Five Falls in July agreed with her, and she
fancied it. Five Falls in February entertained
her, and she found it suggestive; and indeed
Five Falls in February was not a barren sight.
She had wandered, it might be, half a mile up
stream, and had turned to look behind her, just
at the spot from which the five cascades, which
named the town, broke into view; more accurately,
there were four cascades — pretty, swift,
slender things — and the dam. The stream was
a deep one, with a powerful current, and Perley
-- 043 --
[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]
noticed the unusual strength of the bridge below
the dam. It was a county bridge and well built;
its stone piers, freckled and fringed with heavy
frost, had the sombre, opulent air of time-worn
frescos, behind which arches of light and sky
drew breath like living things, and palpitated in
time to the irregular pulse of the water.
The pulse of the water was sluggish, half
choked by swathings of beautiful ice; the falls,
caught in their tiny leap, hung, frozen to the heart,
in mid-air; the open dam, swift, relentless, and
free, mocked at them with peals of hollow laughter;
and great puffs and palls of smoke, which
overhung the distant hum of the little town, made
mouths, one fancied, at the shining whiteness of
the fields and river bank.
Miss Kelso, turning to retrace her steps with
her face set thoughtfully towards this sight, was
disturbed by a quick, loud tread behind her; it
came abreast of her and passed her, and, in so
doing, thrust the flutter of a dingy plaid dress
against her in the narrow path.
Either some faded association with the faded
dress or with the energetic tread, or both, puzzled
Miss Kelso, and she stopped to consider it.
-- 044 --
[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]
Apparently the girl stopped to consider something,
but without turning her head. Miss Kelso,
after a moment's hesitation, stepped up and
touched her on the shoulder.
“I knew you,” said the girl abruptly, still without
turning her head. “I did n't suppose you 'd
know me. You need n't unless you want to.”
“I had forgotten you,” said Perley, frankly.
“But I remember now. I remember very well.
I am surprised to see you in Five Falls.”
“You need n't never be surprised to see factory
folks anywhere,” said Sip Garth. “We 're a
restless set. Wanderers on the face of the earth.”
“Are you in my father's — in the mills?”
“Yes,” more gently, and with a glance at Perley's
mourning, “in your mills, I suppose; the
brick ones, — yes. I supposed they were yours
when I heard the names. But folks told me you
only come down here in summer-time. I did n't
expect to see you. I 've been here three
weeks.”
“You like it here?” asked Miss Kelso, somewhat
at a loss how to pursue the art of conversation
under what she found to be such original circumstances, —
she and Sip were walking towards
-- 045 --
[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]
the town now, in the widening path, side by
side.
“I hope you like it here?” she repeated.
“Catty likes. It does n't make much odds to
me.”
“Who is Catty?”
“That 's my sister; we 're the last of us, she
and I. Father got smashed up three weeks ago
last Friday; caught in the gearing by the arm.
They would n't let Catty and me look at him, he
was smashed so. But I looked when there
was n't anybody round. I wanted to see the last
of him. I never thought much of father, but I
wanted to see the last of him.”
In her controlled, well-bred way, Perley sickened
and shrunk again, as she had sickened and
shrunk from this girl before, but said quickly, “O,
I am sorry!”
“You need n't be,” said Sip Garth. “Have n't
I told you that I did n't think much of father? I
never did neither.”
“But that is dreadful!” exclaimed Miss
Kelso. “Your own father! and now he is
dead!”
Something in their kindred deprivation moved
-- 046 --
[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]
Perley; an emotion more like sympathy than
recoil, and more like attraction than disgust,
took possession of her as they walked slowly
and more slowly, in the ever-widening path, side
by side into the town.
“He beat Catty,” said Sip, after a pause, in a
low voice. “He beat me, but I did n't make so
much of that. He used to take my wages. I
had to hide 'em, but he used to find 'em. He
spent it on drink. You never saw a man get
drunker than my father could, Miss Kelso.”
Miss Kelso presumed that she never had;
thinking swiftly how amused Maverick would
be at that, but said nothing.
“Drunk as a beast,” continued Sip, in an interested
tone, as if she were explaining a problem
in science, — “drunk as a fool. Why, so
drunk, he 'd lie on a rummy's floor for twenty-four
hours, dead as a door-nail. I 've seen them
kick him out, down the steps, into the ditch, you
know, when they could n't get rid of him no
other way. Then” — lowering her voice again—
“then he came home and beat Catty.”
“You seem to be fond of your sister,” observed
Miss Kelso.
-- 047 --
[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]
“Yes,” said Sip, after some silence, — “yes,
I love Catty.”
“You have not been to work this morning?”
asked Perley, for want of something better to
say.
“No, I asked out to-day. Catty 's sick. I 've
just been up river to Bijah's after some dock-weed
for her; he had some dock-weed, and he
told me to come; he 's a well-meaning old chap,
Bijah Mudge.”
Not having the pleasure of the acquaintance
of Mr. Mudge, Perley was perplexed how to
follow the topic, and did not try.
“I suppose you think I was saucy to you,”
said Sip, suddenly, “in the Opera House, I mean.
I did n't expect you 'd ever notice me again.”
“You `put it to me honest,' certainly,” said
Miss Kelso, smiling. “But though, of course, you
were quite mistaken, I did not think, as far as
I thought at all about it, that you meant to be
impertinent. The Opera question, Sip, is one
which it takes a cultivated lover of music to
understand.”
“Oh!” said Sip with a puzzled face.
“Poetry, fiction, art, all are open to the same
-- 048 --
[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
objections which you found to Giovanni. People
are affected by these things very differently.
Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air;
and only —”
Miss Kelso remembered suddenly that she was
talking to an ignorant factory-girl; a girl who
went to the Blue Plum, and had never heard of
Mozart; wondered how she could have made
such a blunder; collected her scattered pearls
into a hasty change of subject, — something about
the cold weather and mill-hours and Catty.
“Catty 's deaf,” said Sip again in her sudden
way, after they had walked in silence for a few
moments down the shining, slippery, broadening
way. She lifted her little brown face sidewise to
Perley's abstracted one, to watch the effect of
this; hesitating, it seemed, whether it were worth
while to bestow some lingering confidence upon
her.
“Ah!” said Perley; “poor thing!”
The little brown face fell, and with it fell another
pause. It had been a thoughtful pause for
Miss Kelso, and she broke it in a thoughtful voice.
“Can you stop with your dock-weed long
enough to sit down here a minute? It is
-- 049 --
[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]
warm in the sun just here on these rocks, and
we are so close to town; and I want you to talk
to me.”
“I have n't got anything to say to you,” said
Sip a little sullenly, sitting down, however, upon
a broad, dry rock, and spreading her hands,
which were bare and purple, out upon her lap
in the sun.
“Don't you earn enough to buy you gloves?”
asked Miss Kelso.
“Catty had my gloves,” said Sip, evasively.
“What do you want of me? I can't stay long.”
“Why, I hardly know,” said Perley, slowly.
“I want you to talk without being questioned.
I don't like to question you all the time. But I
want to hear more about you, and — you did n't
speak of your mother; and where you live, and
how; and many other things. I am not used to
people who live as you do. I presume I do not
understand how to treat you. I do not think it
is curiosity. I think it is — I do not know
what it is. I suppose I am sorry.”
“You need n't trouble yourself to be sorry, as
I 've said before,” replied Sip, chafing her purple
fingers. “Besides, I have n't much to tell.
-- 050 --
[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]
There 's folks in your mills has enough to tell,
that would make stories in newspapers, I bet
you! Foreigners mostly. If you want stories
to amuse you, you 've come to the wrong place.
I 'm a Yankee, and my mother was a Yankee.
Father was n't; but I don't know what he was,
and I don't believe he knew himself. There 's
been six of us, put together; the rest died,
babies mostly, of drink and abuse. I wish
Catty and me 'd been two of 'em! Well, mother
she died with one of 'em four years ago (it was
born of a Tuesday, and Thursday morning she
was to work, and Saturday noon she was dead),
and father he died of the gearing, and Catty and
me moved here where there was easy work for
Catty. We was in a hoop-skirt factory before, at
Waltham; I used to come in nights to the Blue
Plum, as you see me in your carriage. I guess
that 's all. I 've worked to cotton-mills before
the hoops; so they put me right to weaving. I
told you we 're a restless lot. But we 're always
at factory jobs someways, from father to son and
mother to daughter. It 's in the blood. But I
guess that 's all.
“You have good prompt pay,” said Miss Kelso,
-- 051 --
[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]
properly. “I suppose that you could not have
a better or healthier occupation. You get so
much exercise and air.”
She had heard her father say this, in times
long past.
Sip shrugged her shoulders with a suppressed
laugh; the unmistakable, incorrigible, suppressed
laugh of “discontented labor,” but said nothing.
“I should like to see your sister Catty,” said
Perley, obliged to reintroduce conversation.
“We 're on the Company board. You can
come when she gets well.”
“How long has she been deaf?”
“It may not please you to hear,” said Sip,
reluctantly.
Miss Kelso was sure that it would not displease
her to hear.
“Well, they were running extra time,” said
Sip, “in the town where we was at work before
Catty was born. They were running fourteen
hours a day. Mother she was at work,
you know. There was no two ways to that.
Father was on a spree, and we children were
little shavers, earning next to nothing. She
begged off from the extra; but it was all, or
-- 052 --
[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]
quit; it 's always all or quit. Quit she could n't.
I 'll say this for Jack Bench, — he was our boss,—
Jack, he had n't got it through his head what
condition she was in. But she worked till a
Saturday night, and Catty was born on a Monday
morning. Father came off his drunk Sunday,
and Jack Bench he always laid it on to
that; but Catty was born deaf. Father did
fly round pretty well that Sunday night, and
maybe it helped. But he did n't strike mother.
I was round all day to see to it that he should
n't strike. But Catty was born deaf — and,”
half under her breath, “and — queer, and dumb,
you know; but I 've taught her a little talk.
She talks on her fingers. Sometimes she makes
sounds in her throat. But I can always understand
Catty. Poor Catty! It 's never her fault,
but she 's a world of care and wear.”
“But such things,” said Miss Kelso, rising
with a shocked face from the sunny stone, “do
not often happen in our New England factories!”
“I only know what I know,” said Sip, shortly;
“I did n't blame anybody. I never knew any
other woman as it turned out so bad to. They
-- 053 --
[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]
're mostly particular about women in that state;
fact is, they 're mostly more particular than the
women themselves. I 've seen a boss threaten
a woman with her notice to get her home, and
she would n't stir. But it 's all or quit, in
general.”
“But these people cannot be in such need of
money as that!” said Perley.
“Folks don't do such things for fun,” said
Sip, shortly.
“But in our mills —”
“Your own mills are your own affairs,” interrupted
Sip. “You 'd better find out for yourself.
It ain't to complain to you that I talk to you.”
They had come now quite into the town, and
stopped, at the parting of their several ways.
Miss Kelso held out her hand to the girl, with
a troubled face. The mills were making a
great noise and confused her, and she felt that
it was of little use to say anything further than
that she should try to come and see Catty, and
that she thanked her for — but she was sure that
she did not know for what, and so left the sentence
unfinished, and bade her good morning
instead.
-- 054 --
[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]
Sip Garth stood still in a snow-drift, and
rubbed her hands, which had grown pink and
warm. Her brown little face was puzzled.
“It was n't all the sun, nor yet the touch.
It was the newness, I think,” she said.
She said it again to Catty, when she got home
with the dock-weed.
“Eh!” said Catty. She made a little harsh
sound like a croak.
“O, no matter,” said Sip, talking upon her
fingers, “you could n't understand! But I think
it must have been the newness.”
-- 055 -- p476-060
CHAPTER III. A GAME OF CHESS.
[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]
“I BEG your pardon?” said Maverick Hayle.
He said it in simple bewilderment.
Perley repeated her remark.
“You wish — excuse me — do I understand
you to wish —”
“`Partner' was undoubtedly the word that she
used, Maverick,” said Mr. Hayle the senior, with
an amused smile.
“I want to be a partner in the firm,” reiterated
Perley, with great distinctness; “you 're very stupid
this morning, Maverick, if you 'll excuse me.
I thought I had expressed myself clearly. I want
to be a partner in Hayle and Kelso.”
They were sitting — the two gentlemen and the
young lady — around a table in Miss Kelso's parlor:
a little table which Perley had cleared to
its pretty inlaid surface, with some indefinite idea,
which vastly entertained Maverick, of having
-- 056 --
[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]
room in which to “conduct business.” Some
loose papers, a new glazed blank-book, and a little
gold pencil lay upon the table. The pattern of
the table was a chess-board of unusual beauty:
Miss Kelso's hand, slightly restless, traced the
little marble squares, sometimes with the pencil,
sometimes without, while she talked. The squares
were of veined gray and green.
“I sent for you this morning,” said Perley,
turning to the elder gentleman, “because it
seemed to me quite time that I should understand
the state of my affairs as my father's death has
left them. I am very ignorant, of course. He
never talked to me about the business; but I
suppose that I could learn. I should prefer to
learn to understand my own affairs. This is not
inconsistent, I am sure you will appreciate, with
that confidence which it is my delight to feel in
you and Maverick.”
Maverick, at the sound of his own name, looked
up with a faint effort to recall what had preceded
it, having plunged suddenly and irretrievably into
the depths of a decision that Story, the next time
he was in the country, should make a study of a
hand upon squares of gray and green. In self-defence
he said so.
-- 057 --
[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]
“Whatever responsibilities,” said Perley, with
a slight twitch of annoyance between her eyes,
and speaking still to the elder gentleman, — “whatever
responsibilities rest upon me, as sole heir to
my father's property, I am anxious to fulfil in
person. Whatever connection I have with the
Hayle and Kelso Mills, I am anxious, I am exceedingly
anxious, to meet in person. And I thought,”
added the young lady, innocently, “that the simplest
way would be for me to become a partner.”
“Now I don't know another woman,” said
Maverick, rousing, with an indulgent smile, “who
could have originated that, father, if she had tried.
Let us take her in. By all means take her in.
As she says, what could be simpler?”
“Miss Perley will of course understand what
would be in due time legally and suitably explained
to her,” observed Mr. Hayle, “that she
has, and need have, no responsibilities as heir to
her father's property; that she has, and can have,
no such connection with the Hayle and Kelso
Mills as requires the least exertion or anxiety
upon her part.”
“But I don't understand at all,” said Perley.
-- 058 --
[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]
“I thought I fell heir to all that, with the money.
At least I thought I could if I wished to.”
“But we 're private, not corporate, don't you
see?” explained Maverick, carelessly. “You
don't fall heir to a partnership in a company as
you would to stock in a corporation, Perley.
You must see that.”
Probably Perley did not see that in the least.
The little gold pencil traced a row of greens and
skipped a row of grays in a sadly puzzled, unbusiness-like
way.
“You could not fall heir to the partnership
even if you were a man,” continued Maverick, in
his patronizing fashion. “The choice of a new
partner, or whether, indeed, there shall be a new
partner, is a matter resting wholly with the Senior
and myself to settle. Do I make it clear?”
“Quite clear,” said Perley, brightening; “so
clear, that I do not see anything in the world to
prevent your choosing me.”
Both gentlemen laughed; about as much as
they seemed to think was expected of them.
Maverick took up the pencil which Perley had
laid down, and jotted green squares at his end of
the table. Perley, at hers, slipped her empty
-- 059 --
[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]
fingers musingly along a soft gray vein. She
was half vexed, and a little mortified. For the
first time in her life, she was inclined to feel
ashamed of being a woman. She was seriously
interested, — perhaps, again, for the first time in
her life, seriously interested — in this matter. A
faint sense of degradation at being so ignorant
that she could not command the respect of two
men sufficiently to the bare discussion of it possessed
her.
“One need not be a child because one is a
woman!” she said, hotly.
“The case is just this, my dear,” said the
Senior, kindly observant of her face and tone.
“Your father dies” — this with a slight, decorous
sadness in his voice, but mathematically withal, as
he would propound a sum for Perley's solution:
A man buys a bushel; or, A boy sold a yard —
“your father dies. Maverick and I reorganize
the firm in our own way: that is our affair. You
fall heir to a certain share of interest in the business:
that is your affair. It is for you to say
what shall be done with your own property. You
are even quite at liberty to withdraw it entire
from the concern, or you can leave it in our
-- 060 --
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hands, which, I am free to say, we should, in the
existing state of affairs, prefer —”
“And expect,” interrupted Maverick, pleasantly,
making little faces on Perley's pink, shell-like
nails with the pencil.
“Which we prefer, and very naturally, under
the circumstances, expect,” continued the Senior.
“You then receive certain dividends, which will
be duly agreed upon, and have thus the advantage
of at once investing your property in a safe,
profitable, and familiar quarter, and of feeling no
possible obligation or responsibility — business
obligation and responsibility are always so trying
to a lady — about it. You thus become, in fact
and in form, if you prefer, a silent partner. Indeed,
my dear,” finished the Senior, cheerfully,
“I do not see but this would meet your fancy
perfectly.”
“Especially as you are going to marry into
the firm,” observed Maverick.
“Has a silent partner a voice and vote in —
questions that come up?” asked Perley, hesitating,
and rubbing off the little faces from her nails
with a corner of her soft handkerchief.
“No,” said Maverick; “none at all. An
-- 061 --
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ordinary, unprivileged dummy, I mean. If you have
your husband's, that 's another matter. A woman's
influence, you know; you 've heard of it.
What could be more suitable?”
“Then, if I understand,” said Perley, “I invest
my property in your mills. You call me a silent
partner, to please me and to stop my asking
questions. I have nothing to do with the mills
or the people. I have nothing to do but to spend
the money and let you manage it. That 's all it
amounts to.”
“That 's all,” said Maverick.
Perley's light finger and the Junior's pencil
skirmished across the chess-table for a few moments
in silence; the finger from gray to gray;
the pencil on green and green; the finger, by
chance, it seemed, pursuing; the pencil, unconsciously,
it seemed, retreating, as if pencil-mark
and finger-touch had been in the first idle stages
of a long game.
“Who will go into the firm if I can't?” asked
Perley, suddenly.
“Father talks of our confidential clerk,” said
Maverick, languidly, “a fellow we 've promoted
from East Street, but smart. Smart as a trap.
-- 062 --
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Garrick by name. You 've seen him, perhaps, —
Stephen Garrick. But nothing is settled; and
this is submitted,” bowing, “to the close confidence
of our silent partner.”
Perley did not seem to be in a mood for gallantry;
did not smile, but only knitted her soft brows.
“Still, I do not see that there is anything to
prevent my becoming an active partner. There
is nothing the matter with the law, I suppose,
which forbids a woman becoming an active partner
in anything?”
Maverick assured her that there was nothing
the matter with the law; that the matter was
entirely with the existing firm. Excepting, indeed,
some technicality, about which he could
not, at the moment, be precise, which, he believed,
would make formal partnerships impossible
in the case of husband and wife.
“But that case we are not considering,” said
Perley, quickly. “That case it will be time
enough to consider when it occurs. As long as
I am unmarried and independent, Maverick, I
am very much in earnest in my wish to manage
my mills myself. I do not like to think that a
great many people may be affected by the use
-- 063 --
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of my property in ways over which I can have no
possible control. Of course, I don't know what
else to do with my money, and if it must be, it
must be,” — Perley noticed with some wonder
here an amused glance between father and son.
“But I shall be very much disappointed; and
I am much, I am very much, in earnest.”
“I verily believe she is,” said Maverick, with
sudden conviction. “Now, I admire that! It
is ingenuous and refreshing.”
“Then why don't you take my part, Maverick,
instead of laughing at me?” asked Perley, and
was vexed at herself for asking immediately.
“O, that,” said Maverick, “is another matter.
I may find myself entertained to the last degree
by the piquancy, originality, esprit, of a lady,
when I may be the last man upon earth to consent
to going into business with my wife. Seriously,
Perley,” for Perley did not bear this well,
“I don't see what has given you this kink, nor
why you have become so suddenly reluctant to
intrust the management of your property to me.”
“It is not my property,” said Perley, in a low
voice, “which I am reluctant to intrust to you.”
“What, then, may it be?”
-- 064 --
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“My people, — the people. Perhaps I have
thought of them suddenly. But it may be better
to remember a thing suddenly than never to
remember it at all.”
“People! O, the hands, the mill-people.
A little Quixotic fancy there. Yes, I understand
now; and very pretty and feminine it is
too. My dear Perley, you may set your kind
heart at rest about the mill-people, — a well-paid,
well-cared-for, happy set of laboring people
as you could ask to see. You can go down into
our mission school and take a class, if that is
what you are troubled about.”
“Suppose I were to withdraw my share of the
business,” suggested Perley, abruptly. “Suppose,
upon being refused this partnership for which I
have asked this morning, I should prefer to withdraw
my interest in the mills?”
“We should regret it,” said Mr. Hayle, courteously;
“but we should have nothing to do but
to make the best of circumstances.”
“I see, I see now!” Perley flushed as the eyes
of the two gentlemen met again and again with
suppressed amusement in them. “I ought to have
said that before I told you that I did n't know
-- 065 --
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what else to do with the money. Of course!
I see, I 've made a bad business blunder. I see
that you think I should always make bad business
blunders. Now, Maverick Hayle, I don't
believe I should!”
“My dear Perley,” said Maverick, wearily,
“just listen to reason for reason's sake. A
lady's patience and a gentleman's time are too
valuable to throw away at this rate. Even if
you possessed any other qualification, which you
do not, or all other qualifications, which you cannot,
for this ridiculous partnership, you lack an
absolutely essential one, — the acquaintance of
years with the business. Just reflect upon your
acquaintance with the business!”
“I will acquire an acquaintance of years with
the business,” said Perley, firmly.
“Begin at the spools, for example?”
“I will begin at the spools.”
“Or inspect the cotton?”
“Or inspect the cotton.”
“Wear a calico dress, and keep the books
in a dingy office?”
“Wear a dozen calico dresses, and keep books
in the dingiest office you have. I repeat, I am in
-- 066 --
[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]
earnest. I ask for the vacant partnership, or
a chance to fit myself for a partnership, in Hayle
and Kelso. Whatever my disqualifications, I am
ready to remove them, any and all. If you refuse
it to me, while I suppose we shall all go on and
be very good-natured about it, I shall feel that
you refuse it to me because I am a young lady,
not because I do not stand ready to remove a
young lady's disqualifications.”
“Really, Perley, this is becoming absurd, and
the morning is half gone. If you won't take a
gallant dismissal of a foolish subject, then I do
refuse it to you because you are a young lady.”
“We must refuse it to you certainly, on whatever
grounds,” remarked the Senior, with politeness,
“however unpleasant it may be to refuse
you even the gratification of an eccentric fancy.”
Perley's pursuing finger on the little gray
squares thoughtfully traced the course of Maverick's
retreating pencil on the green. Pencilmark
and finger-touch played faster now, as if in
the nervous stages of a shortening game.
“What do you do,” asked the young lady, irrelevantly,
and still with her light fingers thoughtfully
tracking the chess-board, and still watching
-- 067 --
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the little gold pencil, which still retreated before
it, “in your mills, when you have occasion to run
extra time?”
“Run it,” said Maverick, laconically.
“But what do you do with the people, — the
operatives, I mean?”
“Pay them extra.”
“But they are not obliged, unless they desire,
to work more than eleven hours a day?”
“No,” said the Junior, nonchalantly; “they
can leave if they prefer.”
Perley's face, bent over the squares of gray and
green, changed color slightly. She would have
spoken, it seemed, but thought better of it, and
only played with her thoughtful finger silently
along the board.
“Your remark will leave an unfortunate impression
upon the young lady, my son,” observed
the elder Mr. Hayle, “unless you explain to her
that in times of pressure it would be no more
possible for a mill to thin out its hands in extra
hours than it would be for her to dismiss her
cook when she has a houseful of company. The
state of the market is an inexorable fact, an inex-orable
fact, Miss Perley, before which
-- 068 --
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employer and employé, whose interests, of course,
are one, have little liberty of choice. The
wants of the market must be met. In fast times,
we are all compelled to work pretty hard. In
dull times, we rest and make up for it. I can
assure you that we have almost universally found
our hands willing and anxious to run an extra
hour or so for the sake of extra pay.”
“How long a day's work has the state of the
market ever required of your mills?” asked
Perley, still with her head bent and her finger
moving.
“Perhaps thirteen hours and a half. We ran
thirteen hours and a half for a week last July,
was n't it, Maverick?”
“What is the use of talking business to a woman?”
said Maverick, with such unusual animation
that he said it almost impatiently.
“I understand then,” said Perley, with the same
abruptness which had characterized her words so
often that morning, “that my application to look
after my mills in an official capacity is refused?”
“Is refused.”
“In any official capacity?”
“In any official capacity.”
-- 069 --
[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]
“But that,” with a faint smile, “of silent partner.”
“But that,” with a bow, “of silent partner.”
“It is quite impossible to gratify me in this
respect?” pursued Perley, with her bent head
inclined a little to the Senior.
“Quite impossible,” replied the Junior.
“So, out of the question.”
“And so, out of the question.”
The finger-touch brought the pencil-mark abruptly
to a stop upon a helpless square of green.
“Checkmate?” asked the young man, smiling.
“Checkmate,” said the young lady, smiling
too.
She closed the pencil-case with a snap, tossed
the little glazed blank-book into the fire, and rang
for luncheon, which the three ate upon the chess-table, —
smiling.
-- 070 -- p476-075
CHAPTER IV. THE STONE HOUSE.
[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]
IF you are one of “the hands” in the Hayle and
Kelso Mills, you go to your work, as is well
known, from the hour of half past six to seven,
according to the turn of the season. Time has
been when you went at half past four. The
Senior forgot this the other day in a little talk
which he had with his silent partner, — very naturally,
the time having been so long past; but the
time has been, is now, indeed, yet in places. Mr.
Hayle can tell you of mills he saw in New
Hampshire last vacation, where they ring them
up, if you 'll believe it, winter and summer, in
and out, at half past four in the morning. O no,
never let out before six, of course. Mr. Hayle
disapproves of this. Mr. Hayle thinks it not
humane. Mr. Hayle is confident that you would
find no mission Sunday school connected with
that concern.
-- 071 --
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If you are one of “the hands” in the Hayle
and Kelso Mills — and again, in Hayle and Kelso,—
you are so dully used to this classification, “the
hands,” that you were never known to cultivate
an objection to it, are scarcely found to notice its
use or disuse. Being surely neither head nor
heart, what else remains? Conscious scarcely,
from bell to bell, from sleep to sleep, from day to
dark, of either head or heart, there seems even a
singular appropriateness in the chance of the
word with which you are dimly struck. Hayle
and Kelso label you. There you are. The world
thinks, aspires, creates, enjoys. There you are.
You are the fingers of the world. You take your
patient place. The world may have need of you,
but only that it may think, aspire, create, enjoy.
It needs your patience as well as your place.
You take both, and you are used to both, and the
world is used to both, and so, having put the label
on for safety's sake, lest you be mistaken for a
thinking, aspiring, creating, enjoying compound,
and so some one be poisoned, shoves you into
your place upon its shelf, and shuts its cupboard
door upon you.
If you are one of “the hands,” then, in Hayle
-- 072 --
[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]
and Kelso, you have a breakfast of bread and
molasses probably; you are apt to eat it while
you dress; somebody is heating the kettle, but you
cannot wait for it; somebody tells you that you
have forgotten your shawl, you throw it over one
shoulder, and step out, before it is fastened, into
the sudden raw air; you left lamp-light in-doors;
you find moonlight without; the night seems to
have overslept itself; you have a fancy for trying
to wake it, would like to shout at it or cry
through it, but feel very cold, and leave that for
the bells to do by and by. You and the bells are
the only waking things in life. The great brain
of the world is in serene repose. The great heart
of the world lies warm to the core with dreams.
The great hands of the world, the patient, perplexed,
one almost fancies at times, just for the
fancy, seeing you here by the morning moon, the
dangerous hands, alone are stirring in the dark.
You hang up your shawl and your crinoline,
and understand, as you go shivering by gaslight
to your looms, that you are chilled to the heart,
and that you were careless about your shawl, but
do not consider carefulness worth your while by
nature or by habit; a little less shawl means a
-- 073 --
[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]
few less winters in which to require shawling.
You are a godless little creature, but you cherish
a stolid leaning, in these morning moons, towards
making an experiment of death and a wadded
coffin.
By the time that gas is out, you cease, perhaps,
though you cannot depend upon that, to shiver,
and incline less and less to the wadded coffin, and
more to a chat with your neighbor in the alley.
Your neighbor is of either sex and any description,
as the case may be. In any event, warming
a little with the warming day, you incline
more and more to chat. If you chance to be a
cotton-weaver, you are presently warm enough.
It is quite warm enough in the weaving-room.
The engines respire into the weaving-room; with
every throb of their huge lungs you swallow
their breath. The weaving-room stifles with
steam. The window-sills of this room are guttered
to prevent the condensed steam from running
in streams along the floor; sometimes they
overflow, and water stands under the looms; the
walls perspire profusely; on a damp day, drops
will fall from the roof.
The windows of the weaving-room are closed;
-- 074 --
[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]
the windows must be closed; a stir in the air
will break your threads. There is no air to stir.
You inhale for a substitute motionless, hot moisture.
If you chance to be a cotton-weaver, it is
not in March that you think most about your
coffin.
Being “a hand” in Hayle and Kelso, you are
used to eating cold luncheon in the cold at noon,
or you walk, for the sake of a cup of soup or
coffee, half a mile, three quarters, a mile and a
half, and back. You are allowed three quarters
of an hour in which to do this. You come and
go upon the jog-trot.
You grow moody, being “a hand” at Hayle
and Kelso's, with the growing day; are inclined
to quarrel or to confidence with your neighbor in
the alley; find the overseer out of temper, and
the cotton full of flaws; find pains in your feet,
your back, your eyes, your arms; feel damp and
sticky lint in your hair, your neck, your ears,
your throat, your lungs; discover a monotony
in the process of breathing hot moisture, lower
your window at your risk; are bidden by somebody
whose threads you have broken at the other
end of the room to put it up, and put it up;
-- 075 --
[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]
are conscious that your head swims, your eye-balls
burn, your breath quickens; yield your
preference for a wadded coffin, and consider
whether the river would not be the comfortable
thing; cough a little, cough a great deal, lose
your balance in a coughing fit, snap a thread,
and take to swearing roundly.
From swearing you take to singing; both
perhaps are equal relief, active and diverting.
There is something curious about that singing
of yours. The time, the place, the singers,
characterize it sharply, — the waning light, the
rival din, the girls with tired faces. You start
some little thing with a refrain and a ring to it;
a hymn, it is not unlikely; something of a River
and of Waiting, and of Toil and Rest, or Sleep,
or Crowns, or Harps, or Home, or Green Fields, or
Flowers, or Sorrow, or Repose, or a dozen things,
but always, it will be noticed, of simple, spotless
things, such as will surprise the listener who
caught you at your oath of five minutes past.
You have other songs, neither simple nor spotless,
it may be; but you never sing them at your
work, when the waning day is crawling out from
spots between your looms, and the girls lift up
-- 076 --
[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]
their tired faces to catch and keep the chorus in
the rival din.
You like to watch the contest between the
chorus and the din; to see — you seem almost to
see — the struggle of the melody from alley to
alley, from loom to loom, from darkening wall
to darkening wall, from lifted face to lifted face;
to see — for you are very sure you see — the
machinery fall into a fit of rage. That is a sight!
You would never guess, unless you had watched
it just as many times as you have, how that machinery
will rage. How it throws its arms about,
what fists it can clench, how it shakes at the
elbows and knees, what teeth it knows how to
gnash, how it writhes and roars, how it clutches
at the leaky, strangling gas-lights, and how it
bends its impotent black head, always, at last,
without fail, and your song sweeps triumphant,
like an angel, over it! With this you are very
much pleased, though only “a hand,” to be sure,
in Hayle and Kelso.
You are singing when the bell strikes, and
singing still when you clatter down the stairs.
Something of the simple spotlessness of the
little song is on your face, when you dip into
-- 077 --
[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]
the wind and dusk. Perhaps you have only
pinned your shawl, or pulled your hat over your
face, or knocked against a stranger on the walk;
but it passes; it passes and is gone. It is cold
and you tremble, direct from the morbid heat in
which you have stood all day; or you have been
cold all day, and it is colder, and you shrink; or
you are from the weaving-room, and the wind
strikes you faint, or you stop to cough and the
girls go on without you. The town is lighted,
and people are out in their best clothes. You
pull your dingy veil about your eyes. You are
weak and heart-sick all at once. You don't
care to go home to supper. The pretty song
creeps, wounded, back for the engines in the
deserted dark to crunch You are a miserable
little factory-girl with a dirty face.
A broken chatter falls in pieces about you;
all the melody of the voices that you hear has
vanished with the vanquished song; they are
hoarse and rough.
“Goin' to the dance to-night, Bet?”
“Nynee Mell! yer alway speerin' awa' after
some young mon. Can't yer keep yer een at
home like a decint lassie?”
-- 078 --
[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]
“An' who gave you lave to hoult a body's
hand onasked an' onrequested, Pathrick Donnavon?”
“Sip Garth, give us `Champagne Charley';
can't you?”
“Do you think the mules will strike?”
“More mules they, if they do. Did ye never
see a mouse strike a cat?”
“There 's Bub beggin' tobacco yet! How old
is that little devil?”
“The Lord knows!”
“Pity the Lord don't know a few more
things as one would suppose might fall in his
line.”
“A tract?”
“A tract. Bless you, four pages long. Says
I, What in — 's this? for I was just going in
to the meetin' to see the fun. So he stuffs it
into my hand, and I clears out.”
“Sip, I say! Priscilla! Sip Garth —”
But Sip Garth breaks out of sight as the
chatter breaks out of hearing; turns a corner;
turns another; walks wearily fast, and wearily
faster; pushes her stout way through a dirty
street and a dirtier street; stops at shadowy
-- 079 --
[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]
corners to look for something which she does
not find; stops at lighted doors to call for
something that does not answer; hesitates a
moment at the dismal gate of a dismal little
stone house by the water, and, hesitating still
and with a heavy sigh, goes in.
It is a damp house, and she rents the dampest
room in it; a tenement boasting of the
width of the house, and a closet bedroom with
a little cupboard window in it; a low room
with cellar smells and river smells about it, and
with gutter smells and drain smells and with
unclassified smells of years settled and settling
in its walls and ceiling. Never a cheerful
room; never by any means a cheerful room,
when she and Catty — or she without Catty —
come home from work at night.
Something has happened to the forlorn little
room to-night. Sip stops with the door-latch
in her hand. A fire has happened, and the
kerosene lamp has happened, and drawn curtains
have happened; and Miss Kelso has happened, —
down on her knees on the bare floor,
with her kid gloves off, and a poker in her
hands.
-- 080 --
[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]
So original in Perley! Maverick would say;
Maverick not being there to say it, Perley
spoke for herself, with the poker in her hand,
and still upon her knees.
“I beg your pardon, Sip, but they told me,
the other side of the house, that you would be
in in five minutes, and the room was dark and
so I took the liberty. If you would n't mind
me, and would go right on as if I had n't come,
I should take it very kindly.”
“All right,” said Sip.
“The fact is,” said Miss Kelso, meditatively
twirling her poker, “that that is the first fire I
ever made in my life. Would you believe it,
to look at it?”
“I certainly should n't,” said Sip.
“And you 're quite sure that you would n't
mind me?”
“No, not quite sure. But if you 'll stay
awhile, I 'll find out and tell you.”
“Very well,” said Miss Kelso.
“See how dirty I am,” said Sip, stopping in
the full light on her way to the closet bedroom.
“I had n't seen,” said Miss Kelso to the
poker.
-- 081 --
[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]
“O, well. No matter. I did n't know but
you 'd mind.”
There was dust about Sip, and oil about her,
and a consciousness of both about her, that
gave her a more miserable aspect than either.
In the full light she looked like some half-cleared
Pompeian statue just dug against the
face of day.
“We can't help it, you see,” said poor Sip;
“mill-folks can't. Dust we are and to dust do
we return. I 've got a dreadful sore-throat to-night.”
“Have you taken cold?”
“O no. I have it generally. It comes from
sucking filling through the shuttle. But I don't
think much of it. There 's girls I know, weavers,
can't even talk beyond a whisper; lost their voices
some time ago.”
Sip washed and dressed herself after this in
silence. She washed herself in the sink; there
was no pump to the sink; she went out bareheaded,
and brought water in from a well in
the yard; the pail was heavy, and she walked
wearily, with her head and body bent to balance
it, over the slippery path. She coughed while
-- 082 --
[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]
she walked and when she came in, — a peculiar,
dry, rasping cough, which Perley learned afterwards
to recognize as the “cotton-cough.” She
washed herself in a tin basin, which she rinsed
carefully and hung up against the wall. While she
was dressing in the closet bedroom, Perley still
knelt, thoughtfully playing with the poker beside
the fire.
“I don't suppose,” said Sip, coming out presently
in her plaid dress, with her hair in a net,
and speaking as if she had not been interrupted,—
“I don't suppose you 'd ever guess how much
difference the dirt makes. I don't suppose you
ever could. Cotton ain't so bad, though. Once
I worked to a flax-mill. That was dirt.”
“What difference?”
“Hush!” said Sip, abruptly, “I thought I
heard —” She went to the window and looked
out, raising her hands against her eyes, but
came back with a disappointed face.
“Catty has n't come in,” she said, nervously.
“There 's times she slips away from me; she
works in the Old Stone, and I can't catch her.
There 's times she does n't come till late. Will
you stay to tea?” with a quick change of voice.
-- 083 --
[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]
“Thank you. I don't understand about Catty,”
with another.
Sip set her table before she spoke again; bustled
about, growing restless; put the kettle on
and off the hob; broke one of her stone-china
plates; stopped to sweep the floor a little and to
fill her coal-hod; the brown tints of her rugged
little face turning white and pinched in spots
about the mouth.
She came, presently, and stood by the fire by
Miss Kelso's side, in the full sweep of the light.
“Miss Kelso,” her hands folding and unfolding
restlessly, “there 's many things you don't understand.
There 's things you could n't understand.”
“Why?”
“I don't know why. I never did quite know
why.”
“You may be right; you may be wrong.
How can you tell till you try me?”
“How can I tell whether I can skate on running
water till I try it? — I wish Catty would
come!”
Sip walked to the window again, and walked
back again, and took a look at the teapot, and
cut a slice or two of bread.
-- 084 --
[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]
“So you 've left the Company board,” observed
Miss Kelso, quite as if they had been
talking about the Company board. “You did n't
like it?”
“I liked well enough.”
“You left suddenly?”
“I left sudden.” Sip threw her bread-knife
down, with an aimless, passionate gesture. “I
suppose it 's no good to shy off. I might as well
tell o't first as last. They turned us off!”
“Turned you off?”
“On account of Catty.”
Miss Kelso raised a confused face from the
poker and the fire.
“You see,” said Sip, “I told you there 's things
you could n't understand. Now there ain't one
of my own kind of folks, your age, would n't have
understood half an hour ago, and saved me the
trouble of telling. Catty 's queer, don't you see?
She runs away, don't you see? Sometimes she
drinks, don't you understand? Drinks herself
the dead kind. That ain't so often. Most times
she just runs away about streets. There 's sometimes
she does — worse.”
“Worse?” The young lady's pure, puzzled
-- 085 --
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face dropped suddenly. “O, I was very dull! I
am sorry. I am not used —” And so broke off,
with a sick look about the lips, — a look which
did not escape the notice of the little brown,
pinched face in the firelight, for it was curving
into a bitter smile when the door opened, banging
back against the wall as if the opener had
either little consciousness or little care of the
noise it made.
“There 's Catty,” said Sip, doggedly. “Come
and get warm, Catty.” This is their silent language
on her rapid, work-worn fingers.
“If you mind me now, I 'll go,” said Miss
Kelso, in a low voice.
“That 's for you to say, whether I shall mind
you now.”
“Poor Catty!” said Perley, still in a very low
voice. “Poor, poor Catty!”
Sip flushed, — flushed very sweetly and suddenly
all over her dogged face. “Now I don't
mind you. Stay to supper. We 'll have supper
right away. Come here a minute, Catty dear.”
Catty dear would not come. Catty dear stood
scowling in the middle of the room, a sullen, ill-tempered,
ill-controlled, uncontrollable Catty dear
as one could ask to see.
-- 086 --
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“For love's sake,” said Sip, on her patient
fingers; “here a minute, for love's sake, Catty.”
“For love's sake?” repeated Catty, in her
pathetic language.
“Only for love's sake, dear,” said Sip.
Catty came with this, and laid her head down
with a singularly gentle motion on Sip's faded
plaid lap. Miss Kelso could see her now, in the
light in which they three were sitting. A girl
possibly of fifteen years, — a girl with a low forehead,
with wandering eyes, with a dull stoop to
the head, with long, lithe, magnetic fingers,
with a thick, dropping under lip, — a girl walled
up and walled in from that labyrinth of sympathies,
that difficult evolution of brain from beast,
the gorgeous peril of that play at good and evil
which we call life, except at the wandering eyes,
and at the long, lithe, magnetic fingers. An ugly
girl.
She lay, for an ugly girl, very still in her sister's
lap. Sip softly stroked her face, talking
now to the child and now to her visitor, wound
about in a pretty net of soft sounds and softer
emotions. A pleasant change had fallen upon
her since the deaf-mute came in.
-- 087 --
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“See how pleasant it is to come home early,
Catty.” (She won't talk to-night, because you 're
here.) “For love's sake, dear, you know.” (That'
s the way I get along with her. She likes that.)
“For love's sake and my sake, and with the lamp
and fire bright. So much better — ” (It 's never
her fault, poor dear! God knows, I never, never
laid it up against her as it was her fault.) “Better
than the dark street-corners, Catty — ”
“There 's light in the shops,” said Catty, on
her long fingers, with a shrewd, unpleasant smile.
“And supper at home,” said Sip, quickly, rising.
“For love's sake, you know. And company
to supper!”
“For love's sake?” asked Catty, rising too.
“I don't know for whose sake!” said Sip, all
the pleasantness gone in a minute from her.
The young lady and Catty were standing now,
between the lamp-glow and the fire-glow, side by
side. They were a startling pair to be standing
side by side. They stood quite still, except that
Catty passed her fingers curiously over Miss
Kelso's dress, — it seemed that she saw quite as
much with her fingers as with her eyes, — and
that she nodded once or twice, as if she were
-- 088 --
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talking to herself, in a stupid way. Perley's fine,
fair, finished smile seemed to blot out this miserable
figure, and to fill the room with a kind of
dazzle.
“Good God!” cried Sip, sharply. “You asked
me for the difference. Look at that! You
asked what difference the dirt makes. That 's
the difference! To be born in it, breathe it,
swallow it, grow on it, live it, die and go back to
it — bah! If you want to go the devil, work in
the dirt. Look at her!”
“I look at her,” said Perley, with a solemn,
frightened look upon her young face, — “I look
at her, Sip. For love's sake. Believe me if you
can. Make her understand. I look for love's
sake.”
Is it possible? Is Miss Kelso sure? Not for a
whim's sake? Not for fancy's sake? Not for
the sake of an idle moment's curiosity? Not to
gratify an eccentric taste, — playing my Lady
Bountiful for a pretty change in a pretty life?
Look at her; it is a very loathsome under lip.
Look well at her; they are not pleasant eyes.
An ugly girl, — a very ugly girl. For love's sake,
Miss Kelso?
-- 089 --
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Catty sat down to supper without washing her
face. This troubled Sip more than it did her
visitor. Her visitor, indeed, scarcely noticed it.
Her face wore yet something of the solemn fright
which had descended on it with Catty's coming
in.
She noticed, however, that she had bread and
butter for her supper, and that she was eating
from a stone-china plate, and with a steel fork
and with a pewter spoon. She noticed that the
bread was toasted, it seemed in deference to the
presence of a guest, and that the toasting had
feverishly flushed Sip's haggard face. She noticed
that Sip and Catty ate no butter, but dipped
their bread into a little blue bowl of thick black
molasses. She noticed that there was a kind of
coarse black tea upon the table, and noticed that
she found a single pewter spoonful of it quite
sufficient for her wants. She noticed that Sip
made rather a form than a fact of playing with
her toasted bread in the thick black molasses,
and that she drained her dreadful teacup thirstily,
and that she then leaned, with a sudden sick look,
back into her chair.
Everything tasted of oil, she said. She could
-- 090 --
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not eat. There were times that she could not eat
day nor night for a long time. How long? She
was not sure. It had been often two days that
nothing passed her lips. Sometimes, with the
tea, it was longer. There were times that she
came home and got right into bed, dirt and
all. She could n't undress, no, not if it was to
save her soul, nor eat. But, generally, she managed
to cook for Catty. Besides, there was the
work.
“What work?” asked Miss Kelso, innocently.
“Washing. Ironing. Baking. Sweeping.
Dusting. Sewing. Marketing. Pumping. Scrubbing.
Scouring,” said Sip, drumming out her
periods on a teaspoon with her hard, worn fingers.
“Oh!” said Miss Kelso.
“For two, you see,” said Sip.
“But all this, — you cannot have all this to do
after you have stood eleven hours and a half at
your loom?”
“When should I have it to do! There 's Sunday,
to be sure; but I don't do so much now Sundays,
except the washing and the brushing up.
I like,” with a gentle, quick look at the deaf and
dumb girl, who still sat dipping bread crusts into
-- 091 --
[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]
black molasses, absorbed and still, “to make it a
kind of a comfortable day for Catty, Sunday.
I don't bother Catty so much to help me, you
know,” added Sip, cheerfully. “I like,” with another
very pleasant look, “to make it comfortable
for Catty.”
“I went into the mills to-day,” said Miss Kelso,
in reply. It was not very much to the point as a
reply, and was said with an interrogatory accent,
which lessened its aptness.
“Yes?” said Sip, in the same tone.
“I never was in a mill before.”
“No?”
“No.”
There was a pause, in which the young lady
seemed to be waiting for a leading question, like a
puzzled scholar. If she were, she had none. Sip
sat with her dogged smile, and snapped little paper
balls into the fire.
“I thought it rather close in the mills.”
“Yes?”
“And — dirty. And — there was one very
warm room; the overseer advised me not to go in.”
“It was very good advice.”
“I went into the Company boarding-house too.”
-- 092 --
[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]
“For the first time?”
“For the first time. I went to inquire after
you. The landlady took me about. Now I think
of it, she invited me to tea.”
“Why did n't you stay?”
“Why, to tell the truth, the — tablecloth was—
rather dirty.”
“Oh!”
“And I saw her wipe her face on — the dishtowel.
Do the girls often sleep six in a room?
They had no wash-stands. I saw some basins
set on trunks. They carried all the water up and
down stairs themselves; there were two or three
flights. There was n't a ventilator in the house.
I saw a girl there sick.”
“Sick? O, Bert Bush. Yes. Pleurisy. She 's
going to work her notice when she gets about
again. Given out.”
“She coughed while I was there. I thought
her room was rather cold. I thought all the
rooms were rather cold. I did n't seem to see
any fire for anybody, except in the common sitting-room.
But the bread was sweet.”
“Yes, the bread was sweet.”
“And the gingerbread.”
-- 093 --
[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]
“Very sweet.”
“And, I suppose, the board —
“The board is quarter of a dollar cheaper than
in other places.”
Sip stopped snapping paper balls into the fire,
and snapped instead one of her shrewd, sidewise
glances at her visitor's face.
The fine, fair, finished face! How puzzled it
looked! Sip smiled.
Catty had crept around while they were talking,
and sat upon the floor by Miss Kelso's chair.
She was still amusing herself with the young
lady's dress, passing her wise fingers to and fro
across its elegant surface, and nodding to herself
in her dull way. Miss Kelso's hand, the one with
the rings, lay upon her lap, and Catty, attracted
suddenly by the blaze of the jewels, took it up.
She took it up as she would a novel toy, examined
it for a few moments with much pleasure, then
removed the rings and dropped them carelessly,
and laid her cheek down upon the soft flesh. It
was such a dusty cheek, and such a beautiful,
bare, clean hand, that Sip started anxiously to
speak to Catty, but saw that Perley sat quite still,
and that her earnest eyes were full of sudden tears.
-- 094 --
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“You will not let me say, you know, that I am
sorry for you. I have been trying all the evening.
I can't come any nearer than this.” This
she said smiling.
“Look here!” said Sip; her brown face worked
and altered. She said, “Look here!” again, and
stopped. “That 's nigh enough. I 'll take that.
I like that. I like you. Look here! I never
said that to one of your kind of folks before; I
like you. Generally I hate your kind of folks.”
“Now that,” said Miss Kelso, musing, “perplexes
me. We feel no such instinct of aversion
to you. As far as I understand `my kind of
folks,' they have kindly hearts, and they have it
in their hearts to feel very sorry for the poor.”
“Who wants their pity? And who cares
what 's in their hearts?”
Sip had hardened again like a little growing
prickly nut. The subject and her softer mood
dropped away together.
“Sip,” said Perley, fallen into another revery,
“you see how little I know —”
Sip nodded.
“About — people who work and — have a
hard time.”
-- 095 --
[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]
“They don't none of 'em know. That 's why
I hate your kind of folks. It ain't because they
don't care, it 's because they don't know; nor
they don't care enough to know.”
“Now I have always been brought up to believe,”
urged Miss Kelso, “that our factory-people,
for instance, had good wages.”
“I never complained of the wages. Hayle
and Kelso could n't get a cotton-weaver for
three dollars a week, like a paper-factory I
know about in Cincinnati. I knew a girl as
worked to Cincinnati. Three dollars a week,
and board to come out of it! Cotton-weaving'
s no play, and cotton-weavers are no
fools.”
“And I always thought,” continued Miss Kelso,
“that such people were — why, happy and comfortable,
you know. Of course, I knew they must
economize, and that, but —”
She looked vaguely over at the supper-table;
such uncertain conceptions as she might hitherto
be said to have had of “economizing” acquiring
suddenly the form of thick, black molasses,
a little sticky, to be sure, but tangible.
Sip made no reply, and Perley, suddenly aware
-- 096 --
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
of the lateness of the hour, started in dismay to
take her leave. It occurred to her that the sticky
stone-china dishes were yet to be washed, and
that she had done a thoughtless thing in imposing,
for a novel evening's entertainment, upon
the scanty leisure of a worn-out factory-girl.
She turned, however, neither an entertained
nor a thoughtless face upon Sip when she tried
to rise from her chair. Catty had fallen asleep,
with her dirty cheek upon the shining hand, from
which the rings were gone. Her ugly lower lip
protruded, and all the repulsive lines about her
eyes came out. Her long fingers moved a little,
as is often the way with the deaf and dumb in
sleep, framing broken words. Even in her
dreams, this miserable creature bore about her a
dull sense of denial and distress. Even in her
dreams she listened for what she never heard,
and spoke that which no man understood.
“Mother used to say,” said Sip, under her
breath, “that it was the noise.”
“The noise?”
“The noise of the wheels. She said they
beat about in her head. She come home o'
nights, and says to herself, `The baby 'll never
-- 097 --
[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
hear in this world unless she hears the wheels';
and sure enough” (Sip lifted her face to Perley's,
with a look of awe), “it is true enough that
Catty hears the wheels; but never anything
besides.”
-- 098 -- p476-103
CHAPTER V. BUB MELL.
[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]
IT was a March night, and a gray night, and a
wild night; Perley Kelso stepped out into
it, from the damp little stone house, with something
of the confusion of the time upon her. Her
head and heart both ached. She felt like a
stranger setting foot in a strange land. Old,
home-like boundary lines of things to which her
smooth young life had rounded, wavered before
her. It even occurred to her that she should
never be very happy again, for knowing that factory-girls
ate black molasses and had the cotton-cough.
She meant to tell Maverick about it. She
might have meant many other things, but for
being so suddenly and violently jerked by the
elbow that she preserved herself with difficulty
from a smart fall into the slushy street. Striking
out with one hand to preserve her balance, she
-- 099 --
[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]
found herself in the novel position of collaring
either a very old young child or a very young
old man, it was impossible at first sight to tell
which. Whatever he was, it was easy at first
sight to tell that he was filthy and ragged.
“Le' go!” yelled the old young creature,
writhing. “Le' go, I say, dern yer! Le' me be!”
Perley concluded, as her eyes wonted to the
dark street, that the old young creature was by
right a child.
“If yer had n't le' go I 'd 'a' made yer, yer
bet,” said the boy, gallantly. “Pretty way to
treat a cove as doin' yer a favor. You bet.
Hi-igh!”
This, with a cross between a growl of defiance
and a whine of injury.
“Guess what I 've got o' yourn? You could n't.
You bet.”
“But I don't bet,” said Perley, with an amused
face.
“Yer don't? I do. Hi-igh! Don't I though?
You bet! Now what do you call that? Say!”
“I call that my glove. I did not miss it till
this minute. Did you pick it up? Thank you.”
“You need n't thank me till you 've got it, you
-- 100 --
[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]
need n't,” said the child. “I 'm a cove as knows
a thing or two. I want ten cents. You bet I do.”
“Where do you live?” asked Perley.
He lived down to East Street. Fust Tenement.
No. 6. What business was it of hern,
he 'd like to know.
“Have you a father and mother?”
Lor yes! Two of 'em. Why should n't he?
“I believe I will go home with you,” said Perley,
“it is so near by; and — I suppose you are
poor?”
Lor, yes. She might bet.
“And I can make it right about the recovery
of the glove when I get there?”
“N-n-oo you don't!” promptly, from the cove
as knew a thing or two. “You 'll sling over
to the old folks, I 'll bet. You don't come
that!”
“But,” suggested Perley, “I can, perhaps,
give your father and mother a much larger
sum of money than I should think it best to
give you. If they are poor, I should think you
would be glad that they should have it. And
I can't walk in, you know, and give your father
and mother money for nothing.”
-- 101 --
[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]
“You give me ten cents,” said this young old
man, stoutly, “or what do you s'pose I 'll do with
this 'ere glove? Guess now!”
Perley failed to guess now.
“I 'll cut 'n' run with it. I 'll cut 'n' run like
mad. You bet. I 'll snip it up with a pair of
shears I know about. I 'll jab holes in it with
a jackknife I 've got. No, I won't. I 'll swop
it off with my sister, for a yaller yaggate I 've got
my eye on in the 'pothecarry's winder. My sister'
s a mill-gal. She 'll wear it on one hand to
meetin', an' stick the t'other in her muff. That 's
what I 'll do. How 'll you like that? Hi-igh!
You bet!”
“At least, I can go home with you,” said
Perley, absently effecting an exchange between
her glove and a fresh piece of ten-cent scrip,
which the boy held up in the light from a shopwindow,
and tested with the air of a middle-aged
counterfeiter; “you ought to have been at home
an hour ago.”
“Lor now,” said this promising youth, “I was
just thinkin' so ought you.”
“What is your name?” asked Perley, as they
turned their two faces (one would have been
-- 102 --
[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]
struck, seeing them together, with thinking how
much younger the woman looked than the child),
toward East Street, the First Tenement, and
No. 6.
“My name 's Bub. Bub Mell. They used to
call me Bubby, for short, till I got so large they
give it up.”
“How old are you?”
“Eight last Febiverry.”
“What do you do?”
“Work to the Old Stone.”
“But I thought no children under ten years
of age were allowed to work in the mills.”
“You must be green!” said Bub.
“But you go to school?”
“I went to school till I got so large they
give it up.”
“But you go a part of the time, of course?”
“No, I don't neither. Don't you s'pose I
knows?”
“What is that you have in your mouth?”
asked Perley, suddenly.
Bub relieved himself of a quid of fabulous size,
making quite superfluous the concise reply, “Terbaccer.”
-- 103 --
[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]
“I never saw such a little boy as you chew
tobacco before,” said Perley, gasping.
“You must be green! I took my fust swag a
year and a half ago. We all does. I 'm just
out, it happens,” said Bub, with a candid smile.
“That 's what I wanted your ten cents for.
I smokes too,” added Bub, with an air of
having tried not to mention it, for modesty's
sake, but of being tempted overmuch. “You
bet I do! Sometimes it 's pipes, and sometimes
it 's ends. As a gener'l thing, give me a pipe.”
“What else do you do?” demanded Perley,
faintly.
“What else?” Bub reflected, with his old,
old head on one side. He bet on marbles.
He knew a tip-top gin-sling, when he see it, well
as most folks. He could pitch pennies. He
could ketch a rat ag'in any cove on East Street.
Lor! could n't he?
“But what else?” persisted Perley.
Bub was puzzled. He thought there warn't
nothin' else. After that he had his supper.
“And after that?”
Lor. After that he went to bed.
“And after that?”
-- 104 --
[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]
After that he got up and went in.
“Went in where?”
She must be green. Into the Old Stone.
Spoolin', you know.
Did he go to church?
She might bet he did n't! Why, when
should he ketch the rats?
Nor Sunday school?
He went to the Mission once. Had a card
with a green boy onto it. Got so old he give
it up.
What did he expect, asked Perley, in a
sudden, severe burst of religious enthusiasm,
would become of him when he died?
Eh?
When he died, what would become of him?
Lor.
Could he read?
Fust Primer. Never tried nothin' else.
Could he write?
No.
Was he going to school again?
Could n't say.
Why did n't his parents send him?
Could n't say that. Thought they was too old;
-- 105 --
[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]
no, thought he was too old; well, he did n't know;
thought somebody was too old, and give it up.
Was this where he lived?
She must be green! Of course he did.
Comin' in?
Perley was coming in. With hesitation she
came in.
She came into what struck her as a very
unpleasant place; a narrow, crumbling place;
a place with a peculiar odor; a very dark place.
Bub cheerfully suggested that she 'd better look
out.
For what?
Holes.
Where?
Holes in the stairs. He used to step into 'em
and sprain his ankles, you bet, till he got so old
he give it up She 'd better look out for the
plaster too. She 'd bump her head. She never
saw nothin' break like that plaster did; great
cakes of it. Here, this way. Keerful now!
By this way and that way, by being careful
now and patient then and quite persistent at
all times, Perley contrived to follow Bub in safety
up two flights of villanous stairs and into the
-- 106 --
[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]
sudden shine of a low, little room, into which he
shot rather than introduced her, with the unembarrassing
remark that he did n't know what
she 'd come for, but there she was.
There were six children, a cooking-stove, a
bed, a table, and a man with stooped shoulders
in the room. There was an odor in the room
like that upon the stairs. The man, the children,
the cooking-stove, the bed, the table, and the odor
quite filled the room.
The room opened into another room, in which
there seemed to be a bureau, a bed, and a sick
woman.
Miss Kelso met with but a cool reception in
these rooms. The man, the children, the cooking-stove,
the bed, the odor, and the woman thrust
her at once, she could not have said how, into
the position of an intruder. The sick woman,
upon hearing her errand, flung herself over to
the wall with an impatient motion. The man sullenly
invited her to sit down; gave her to understand—
again she could hardly have told how —
that he wanted no money of her; no doubt the
boy had had more than he deserved; but that, if
she felt inclined, she might sit down.
-- 107 --
[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]
“To tell the truth,” said Perley, in much confusion,
“I did not come so much on account of
the glove as on account of the boy.”
What had the boy been up to now? The
sullen man darted so fierce a look at the boy,
who sat with his old, old smile, lighting an old
pipe behind the cooking-stove, that Perley hastened
to explain that she did not blame the boy.
Who could blame the boy?
“But he was out so late about the streets, Mr.
Mell. He uses tobacco as most children use
candy. And a child of that age ought not to be
in the mills, sir,” said Perley, warming, “he ought
to be at school!”
O, that was all, was it? Mr. Mell pushed back
his stooped shoulders into his chair with an air
of relief, and Bub lighted his pipe in peace. But
he had a frowning face, this Mr. Mell, and he
turned its frown upon his visitor. He would like
to know what business it was of hers what he did
with his boy, and made no scruple of saying so.
“It ought to be some of my business,” said the
young lady, growing bolder, “when a child of
eight years works all the year round in these
mills. I have no doubt that I seem very rude,
-- 108 --
[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]
sir; but I have in fact come out, and come out
alone as you see me, to see with my own eyes
and to hear with my own ears how people live
who work in these mills.”
Had she? Mr. Mell smiled grimly. Not a pleasant
job for a lady he should think; and uncommon.
“It 's a job I mean to finish,” said Miss Kelso,
firmly. “The stairs in this house are in a shocking
condition. What is — excuse me — the very
peculiar odor which I notice on these premises?
It must be poisonous to the sick woman, — your
wife?”
It was his wife. Yes; consumption; took it
weaving; had been abed this four month; could
n't say how long she 'd hold out. Doctor said,
five month ago, as nothin' would save her but a
change. So he sits and talks about Florida and
the South sun, and the folks as had been saved
down there. It was a sort of a fretful thing to
hear him. Florida! Good God! How was the
likes of him to get a dyin' wife to Florida?
She did n't like strangers overmuch; better not
go nigh her; she was kind of fretful; the childern
was kind of fretful too; sometimes they cried
like as his head would split; he kept the gell
-- 109 --
[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]
home to look after 'em; not the first gell; he
could n't keep her to home at all; she made
seven; he did n't know 's he blamed her; it was
a kind of a fretful place, let alon' the stairs and
the smell. It come from the flood, the smell did.
“The flood?”
Yes, the cellar flooded up every spring from the
river; it might be drained, he should think; but
it never was as he heard of. There was the
offal from the mills floated in; it left a smell
pretty much the year round; and a kind of chill.
Then they had n't any drain, you see. There was
that hole in the wall where they threw out dishwater
and such. So it fell into the yard under
the old woman's window, and made her kind of
fretful. It made her fretful to see the children
ragged too. She greeted over it odd times. She
had a clean way about her, when she was up and
about, the old woman had.
“Who owns this house?” asked Miss Kelso,
with burning eyes.
The man seemed unaccountably reluctant to
reply; he fixed the fire, scolded Bub, scolded a
few other children, and shook the baby, but was
evidently unwilling to reply.
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Upon Perley's repeating her question, the sick
woman, with another impatient fling against the
wall, cried out sharply, What was the odds? Do
tell the girl. It could n't harm her, could it?
Her husband, very ill at ease, believed that young
Mr. Hayle owned the house; though they dealt
with his lessee; Mr. Hayle had never been down
himself.
For a sullen man, with a stoop in the shoulders,
a frown in the face, seven children, a sick
wife, and no drain-spout, Mr. Mell did very well
about this. He grew even communicative, when
the blaze in Miss Kelso's eyes went out, paled
by the sudden fire in her cheek.
He supposed he was the more riled up by this
and that, he said, for being English; Scotch by
breed, you know; they 'd named the first gell
after her grandma, — Nynee; quite Scotch, ye
see; she was a Hielander, grandma, — but married
to England, and used to their ways. Now there
was ways and ways, and one way was a ten-hour
bill. There was no mistaking that, one way was
a ten-hour bill, and it was a way they did well by
in England, and it was a way they 'd have to walk
in this side the water yet — w-a-l-k in y-e-t!
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He 'd been turned out o' mills in this country
twice for goin' into a ten-hour strike; once to
Lawrence and once up to New Hampshire. He 'd
given it up. It did n't pay. Since the old woman
was laid up, he must get steady work or
starve.
He 'd been a factory operative* thirty-three
years; twenty-three years to home, and ten years
to the United States, only one year as he was
into the army; he was forty-three years old.
Why did n't he send that boy to school? Why
did n't he drive a span of grays! He could n't
send the boy to school, nor none of the other boys
to school, except as mayhap they took their turn
occasional. He made it a point to send them
till they was eight if he could; he did n't like
to put a young un to spoolin' before he was eight,
if he could help it. The law? O yes, there was
a law, and there was ways of getting round a law,
bless you! Ways enough. There was parties
as had it in their hands to make it none so easy,
and again to make it none so hard.
“What parties?”
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Parties as had an interest in spoolin in common
with the parent.
“The child's employers?”
Mr. Mell suddenly upon his guard. Mr. Mell
trusted to the good feelin' of a young lady as
would have a heart for the necessities of poverty,
and changed the subject.
“But you cannot mean,” persisted Perley, “that
a healthy man like you, with his grown children
earning, finds it impossible to support his family
without the help of a poor baby like Bub over
there?”
Mr. Mell quite meant it. Did n't know what
other folks could do; he could n't; not since the
rise in prices, and the old woman givin' out.
Why, look at here. There was the gell, twenty
year old; she worked to weaving; there was the
boy as was seventeen, him reading the picture
paper over to the table there, he draws and
twists; there was another gell of fifteen, you
might say, hander at the harnesses into the
dressing-room; then there was Bub, and the
babies.
Counting in the old woman and the losses,
he must have Bub. The old woman ate a power
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ful sight of meat. He went without himself whensoever
he could; but his work was hard; it made
him kind of deathly to the stomach if he went
without his meat.
What losses did he speak of? Losses enough.
High water. Low water. Strikes. Machinery
under repair. Besides the deathly feelin' to the
stomach. He'd been out for sickness off and on,
first and last, a deal; though he looked a healthy
man, as she said, and you would n't think it.
Fact was, he 'd never worked but one whole
month in six year; nor he 'd never taken a
week's vacation at a time, of his own will an'
pleasure, for six year. Sometimes he lost two
days and a half a week, right along, for lack of
work.* Sometimes he give out just for the heat.
He 'd often seen it from 110° to 116° Fahrenheit
in the dressing-room. He wished he was back
to England. He would n't deny but there was
advantages here, but he wished he was back.
(This man had worked in England from 6 A. M.
to 8 o'clock P. M., with no time allowed for dinner;
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he paid threepence a week to an old woman who
brought hot water into the mills at noon, with
which she filled the tin pot in which he had
brought tea and sugar from home. He had, besides,
a piece of bread. He ate with one hand
and worked with the other.)
He warn't complainin' of nobody in particular,
to nobody in particular, but he thought he had a
kind of a fretful life. He had n't been able to lay
by a penny, not by this way nor that, considerin'
his family of nine and the old woman, and the
feelin' to the stomach. Now that made him fretful
sometimes. He was a temperate man, he 'd
like to have it borne in mind. He was a member
of a ten-hour society, of the Odd Fellows, Good
Templars, and Orthodox Church.
Anything for him? No; he did n't know of
anything she could do for him. He 'd never
taken charity from nobody's hands yet. He
might, mayhap, come to it some day. He supposed
it was fretful of him, but he 'd rather lay in
his grave. The old woman she would n't never
know nothing of that; it was a kind of a comfort,
that was. He was obliged to her for wishing
him kindly. Sorry the old woman was so
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fretful to-night; she was oncommon noisy; and the
children. He 'd ask her to call again, if the old
woman was n't so fretful about strangers. Hold
the door open for the lady, Bub. Put down your
pipe, sir! Have n't ye no more manners than to
smoke in a lady's face? There. Now, hold the
door open wide.
Wide, very wide, the door flung that Bub
opened to Perley Kelso. As wide it seemed to
her as the gray, wild, March night itself. At the
bottom of the stairs, she stood still to take its
touch upon her burning face.
Bub crept down after her, and knocked the
ashes out of his pipe against the door.
“Ain't used to the dark, be ye?”
No; not much used to the dark.
“Afraid?”
Not at all afraid.
Lor. He was goin' to offer to see her home, —
for ten cents. He used to be afraid. Got so old
he give it up.
Half-way home, Miss Kelso was touched upon
the arm again; this time gently, and with some
timidity. Sip Garth, with a basket on her arm,
spoke as she turned; she had been out
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marketing, she said; getting a little beef for to-morrow's
dinner; had recognized and watched her half up
the street; it was very late; Miss Kelso was not
so used to being out late as mill-girls were; and
if she cared for company —
“I do not know that there is any reason why I
should not be out as late as mill-girls are,” mused
Miss Kelso, struck by the novelty of the idea. But
she was glad of the company, certainly; fell into
step with the mill-girl upon the now crowded walk.
“This is very new to me,” she said in a low
voice, as they turned a corner where a gust of
oaths met her like an east-wind and took away
her breath.
“You 'll see strange sights,” said Sip, with her
dogged smile.
She saw strange sights, indeed; strange sights
for delicate, guarded, fine young eyes; but so
pitifully familiar to the little mill-girl with the
dogged smile! As familiar, for instance, as
Maverick and Axminster carpets to Miss Kelso,
Miss Kelso wondered.
The lights of the little town were all ablaze;
shops and lounging-places full. Five Falls was
as restless as the restless night.
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“Always is,” said Sip, “in a wind. Take a
good storm, or even take the moon, and it 's
different. When mill-folks have a man to hate,
or a wife to beat, or a child to drown, or a sin to
think of, or any ugly thing to do, you may notice,
ten to one, they 'll take a windy night; a dark
night like this, when you can't see what the
gale is up to, when you 're blown along,
when you run against things, when you can't
help yourself, when nothing seems to be anybody's
fault, when there 's noises in the world
like the engines of ten thousand factories let
loose. You can't keep still. You run about.
You 're in and out. You 've got so used to a
noise. You feel as if you were part and parcel
of it. I do. Next morning, if you 've lost your
soul, — why, the wind 's down, and you don't
understand it.”
Sip's dark face lighted fitfully, as if the gusty
weather blew its meaning to and fro; she gesticulated
with her hands like a little French woman.
It struck Perley that the girl was not far wrong
in fancying that she could “do it over” at the
Blue Plum.
But Perley saw strange sights. Five Falls in
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the gusty weather was full of them. Full of
knots of girls in bright ribbons singing unpleasantly;
of knots of men at corners drinking
heavily; of tangles where the two knots met
with discordant laughter; of happy lovers that
one sighed over; of haggard sinners that one
despaired of praying over; of old young children
with their pipes, like Bub; of fragments of murderous
Irish threats; of shattered bits of sweet
Scotch songs; of half-broken English brogue;
of German gutturals thick with lager; only now
and then the shrewd, dry Yankee twang.
It was to be noticed of these people that the
girls swore, that the babies smoked, that the men,
more especially the elder men, had frowns like
Mr. Mell.
“One would think,” said Miss Kelso, as she
watched the growing crowd, “that they had no
homes.”
“They have houses,” said Sip.
They passed a dark step where something lay
curled up like a skulking dog.
“What 's that?” said Miss Kelso, stopping and
stooping. It was a little girl, — a very little girl.
She had a heavy bundle or a pail upon her arm;
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had been sent upon an errand, it seemed, and
had dropped upon the step asleep; had been
trodden on once or twice, for her clothes bore
the mark of muddy feet.
“That 's Dib Docket,” said Sip. “Go home,
Dib!” Sip shook her, not ungently.
The little thing moved away uncertainly like a
sleep-walker, jostled to and fro by people in the
street. She seemed either too weak or too weary
to sit or stand.
“That 's Dib Docket,” repeated Sip. “That
child walks, at her work in the mills, between
twenty and thirty miles a day. I counted it up
once. She lives three quarters of a mile from
the factory besides. She 's not so bright as she
might be. It 's a wicked little devil; knows
more wickedness than you 've ever thought of,
Miss Kelso. No, you 'd better not go after her;
you would n't understand.”
Women with peculiar bleached yellow faces
passed by. They had bright eyes. They looked
like beautiful moving corpses; as if they might
be the skeletons among the statues that were dug
against the face of day. Miss Kelso had noticed
them since she first came out.
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“What are they?”
“Cotton-weavers. You can tell a weaver by
the skin.”
Threading her way through a blockade of loudspeaking
young people by the railroad station
(there was always plenty going on at the station,
Sip said), Miss Kelso caught a bit of talk about
“the Lord's day.” Surprised at this evidence
of religious feeling where she was not prepared
to expect it, she expressed her surprise to Sip.
“O,” said Sip, “we mean pay-day; that 's
all the Lord's day we know much about.”
There was an old man in this crowd with very
white hair. He had a group of young fellows
about him, and gesticulated at them while he
talked. The wind was blowing his hair about.
He had a quavering voice, with a kind of mumble
to it, like the voice of a man with a chronic
toothache.
“Hear him!” said Sip.
Perley could hear nothing but a jargon of
“Eight hour,” “Ten hour,” “Labor reform,”
“Union,” “Slaves and masters,” “Next session,”
and “Put it through.” Some of the young fellows
seemed to listen, more laughed.
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“Poor old Bijah!” said Sip, walking on; “always
in a row, — Bijah Mudge; can't outgrow it.
He 's been turned out of half the mills in New
England, folks say. He 'll be in hot water in
Five Falls before long, if he don't look out. But
he 's a lonesome old fellow, — Bijah.”
Just beyond the station Sip suddenly stopped.
They were in the face of a gay little shop, with
candy and dry goods in the windows.
“And rum enough in the back room there to
damn an angel!” said Sip, passionately, “and he
will have her in there in five minutes! Hold on,
will you?” She broke away from Miss Kelso,
who “held on” in bewilderment.
A pretty girl was strolling up and down the
platform of this place, with her hand upon the
arm of a young fellow with a black mustache.
The girl had a tint like that of pale gold about
her hair and face, and large, vain, unhappy eyes.
She wore blue ribbons, and looked like a Scotch
picture.
Sip stopped at the foot of the platform, and
called her. The girl came crossly, and yet with
a certain air of relief too.
“What do you want, Sip Garth?”
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“I want you to go home, Nynee Mell.”
“Home!” said Nynee, with weak bitterness.
“Yes, home; it 's better than this.”
“It frets me so, to go home!” said Nynee, impatiently.
“I hate to go home.”
“It is better than this,” repeated Sip, earnestly.
“Come. I don't set up to be a preacher,
Nynee, but I do set up that Jim 's no company
fit for a decent girl.”
“I 'm a decent girl,” said poor Nynee, trying
to toss her silly head, but looking about her with
an expression of alarm. “Who said I was n't?”
Sip's reply Miss Kelso lost. The two girls
talked together for a few moments in low tones.
Presently Nynee walked slowly away.
“Jim 'll be cross to-morrow, if I give him the
slip,” she said, pettishly, but still she walked
away.
“There!” exclaimed Sip, stopping where she
stood, “that will do. Dirk! Dirk, I say!”
Dirk I say stopped too. He had been walking
rapidly down the street when Sip spoke. He was
a young man of perhaps twenty-five, with a strong
hand and a kindly eye. He looked very kindly
at Sip.
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“I want you to go home with Nynee Mell,”
said Sip.
“I 'd a sight rather go home with some others
than Nynee Mell,” said the kindly young man.
“I know what I 'm about,” said Sip. “I know
who 'll keep Nynee Mell out of mischief. Go
quick, can't you?”
The kindly young man kindly went; not so
quickly as he might, but he went.
“Who was that young man?” asked Miss
Kelso, as they climbed the hill.
“Jim? A miserable Irishman, Jim is; has n't
been in Five Falls a month, but long enough to
show his colors, and a devilish black mustache,
as you see. You see, they put him to work next
to Nynee; he must go somewhere; they put him
where the work was; they did n't bother their
heads about the girl; they 're never bothered with
such things. And there ain't much room in the
alley. So she spends the day with him, pushing
in and out. So she gets used to him and all that.
She 's a good girl, Nynee Mell; wildish, and
spends her money on her ribbons, but a good girl.
She 'll go to the devil, sure as death, at this rate.
Who would n't? Leastways, being Nynee Mell.”
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“But I meant the other young man,” observed
Miss Kelso.
“Him? O, that 's Dirk Burdock; watchman
up at the Old Stone.”
“A friend of yours?”
“I never thought of it,” said Sip, gravely.
“Perhaps that 's what you 'd call him. I like
Dirk first-rate.”
Sip pointed out one other young man to Miss
Kelso before they were quite at home. They
were passing a dingy hall where the mission, Sip
said, held a weekly prayer meeting. The young
man came out with the worshippers. It was Mr.
Garrick (said Sip), the new partner. He 'd been
in the way of going since he was in the dressing-room
himself; folks thought he 'd give it up now;
she guessed it was the first time you 'd ever
caught the firm into the mission meeting; meaning
no offence, however.
He was a grave man, this Mr. Garrick; a man
with premature wrinkles on the forehead; with a
hard-worked, hard-working mouth; with a hard
hand, with a hard step; a man, you would say,
in a hard place, acquired by a hard process; a
man, perhaps, who would find it hard to hope, and
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harder to despair. But a man with a very bright,
sweet, sudden smile. A man of whom Perley
Kelso had seen or heard half her life; who had
been in and out of the house on business; who
had run on her errands, or her father's, — it made
little difference — in either case she had never
troubled herself about the messenger; but a man
whose face she could no more have defined than
she could, for instance, that of her coachman.
Her eyes followed him, therefore, with some
curiosity, as he lifted his hat in grave surprise at
passing her, and went his way.
Perley counted the people that came out from
the mission meeting. There were six in all.
“There must be sixty folks within sight,” observed
Sip, running her quick eye up and down
the gaudy little street, “as many as sixty loafin',
I mean.”
Miss Kelso made no answer, and they reached
and entered her own still, clean, elegantly trimmed
lawn in silence.
“Now I 've seen you safe home,” said the mill-girl,
“I shall feel better. The fact was, I did n't
know but the boys would bother you; they 're a
rough set; and you ain't used to 'em.”
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“I never thought of such a thing!” exclaimed
the young lady. “They all know me, you know.”
“Yes; they all know you.”
“I supposed they would feel a kind of interest,
or respect —”
“What reason have you ever given them,”
said Sip in a low tone, “to feel any special interest
or respect for you?”
“You are right,” said Miss Kelso, after a moment's
thought. “They have no reason. I have
given them none. I wish you would come in a
minute.”
“Have I been saucy?”
“No; you have been honest. Come in a
minute; come, I want you.”
The lofty, luxurious house was lighted and
still. Sip held her breath when the heavy front
door shut her into it. Her feet fell on a carpet
like thick, wild moss, as she crossed the warm
wide hall. Miss Kelso took her, scarcely aware,
it seemed, that she did so, into the parlors, and
shut their oaken doors upon their novel guest.
She motioned the girl to a chair, and flung herself
upon another.
Now, for a young lady who had had a
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season ticket to the Opera every winter of her
life, it will be readily conjectured that she had
passed an exciting evening. In her way, even
the mill-girl felt this. But in her way, the mill-girl
was embarrassed and alarmed by the condition
in which she found Miss Kelso.
The young lady sat, white to the lips, and
trembled violently; her hands covered and recovered
each other, with a feeble motion, as they
lay upon her lap; the eyes had burned to a
still white heat; her breath came as if she were
in pain.
Suddenly she rose with a little crouch like a
beautiful leopardess and struck the gray and
green chess-table with her soft hand; the blow
snapped one of her rings.
“You do not understand,” she cried, “you people
who work and suffer, how it is with us! We
are born in a dream, I tell you! Look at these
rooms! Who would think — in such a room as
this — except he dreamed it, that the mothers
of very little children died for want of a few
hundreds and a change of climate? Why, the
curtains in this room cost six! See how it is!
You touch us — in such a room — but we dream;
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we shake you off. If you cry out to us, we only
dream that you cry. We are not cruel, we are
only asleep. Sip Garth, when we have clear eyes
and a kind heart, and perhaps a clear head, and
are waked up, for instance, without much warning,
it is nature to spring upon our wealth, to hate
our wealth, to feel that we have no right to our
wealth; no more moral right to it than the
opium-eater has to his drug!
“Why, Sip,” rising to pick up the chess-table,
“I never knew until to-night what it was like to
be poor. It was n't that I did n't care, as you
said. I did n't know. I thought it was a respectable
thing, a comfortable thing; a thing that
could n't be helped; a clean thing, or a dirty
thing, a lazy thing, or a drunken thing; a thing
that must be, just as mud must be in April; a
thing to put on overshoes for.”
And now what did she think?
“Who knows what to think,” said Perley
Kelso, “that is just waked up?”
“Miss Kelso?” said Sip.
“Yes,” said Miss Kelso.
“I never knew in all my life how grand a
room could be till I come into this grand room
to-night. Now, you see, if it was mine —”
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“What would you do, if this grand room were
yours?” asked Miss Kelso, curiously.
“Just supposing it, you know, — am I very
saucy?”
“Not very, Sip.”
“Why,” said Sip, “the fact is, I 'd bring Nynee
Mell in to spend an evening!”
An engraving that lay against a rich easel in a
corner of the room attracted the girl's attention
presently. She went down on her knees to examine
it. It chanced to be Lemude's dreaming
Beethoven. Sip was very still about it.
“What is that fellow doing?” she asked, after a
while, — “him with the stick in his hand.”
She pointed to the leader of the shadowy orchestra,
touching the baton through the glass,
with her brown finger.
“I have always supposed,” said Perley, “that
he was only floating with the rest; you see the
orchestra behind him.”
“Floating after those women with their arms
up? No, he is n't!”
“What is he doing?”
“It 's riding over him, — the orchestra. He
can't master it. Don't you see? It sweeps him
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along. He can't help himself. They come and
come. How fast they come! How he fights
and falls! O, I know how they come. That 's
the way things come to me; things I could do,
things I could say, things I could get rid of if I
had the chance; they come in the mills mostly;
they tumble over me just so; I never have the
chance. How he fights! I did n't know there
was any such picture as that in the world. I 'd
like to look at that picture day and night. See!
O, I know how they come.”
“Miss Kelso —” after another silence and
still upon her knees before the driving Dream
and the restless dreamer. “You see, that 's it.
That 's like your pretty things. I 'd keep your
pretty things if I was you. It ain't that there
should n't be music anywhere. It 's only that
the music should n't ride over the master. Seems
to me it is like that.”
eaf476n1* Mr. Mell's “testimony” may be found in the reports of the
Massachusetts Bureau of Labor.
eaf476n2*
“We may here add that our inquiries will authorize us to
say that three out of every five laboring men were out of
employ.”
— Statistics of Labor.
-- 131 -- p476-136
CHAPTER VI. MOULDINGS AND BRICKS.
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“MAVERICK!”
“At your service.”
“But Maverick — ”
“What then?”
“Last year, at Saratoga, I paid fifteen dollars
apiece for having my dresses done up!”
“Thus supporting some pious and respectable
widow for the winter, I have no doubt.”
“Maverick! how much did I think about the
widow?”
“I should say, from a cursory examination of
the subject, that your thoughts would be of less
consequence — excuse me — to a pious and respectable
widow, than — how many times fifteen?
Without doubt, a serious lack of taste on the part
of a widow; but, I fear, a fatal fact.”
“But, Maverick! I know a man on East Street
whom I never could make up my mind to look in
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the face again, if he should see the bill for santalina
in those carriage cushions!”
The bill was on file, undoubtedly, suggested
Maverick. Allow her friend an opportunity to
see it, by all means.
“Maverick! do you see that shawl on the arm
of the tête-à-tête? It cost me three thousand
dollars.”
Why not? Since she did the thing the honor
to become it, she must in candor admit, amazingly.
“And there 's lace up stairs in my bureau
drawer for which I paid fifty dollars a yard. And,
Maverick! I believe the contents of any single
jewel-case in that same drawer would found a
free bed in a hospital. And my bill for Farina
cologne and kid gloves last year would supply a
sick woman with beefsteak for this. And Maverick!”
“And what?” very languidly from Maverick.
“Nothing, only — why, Maverick! I am a
member of a Christian church. It has just occurred
to me.”
“Maverick!” again, after a pause, in which
Maverick had languished quite out of the
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conversation, and had entertained himself by draping
Perley in the shawl from the tête-à-tête, as if she
had been a lay-figure for some crude and gorgeous
design which he failed to grasp. Now he made a
Sibyl of her, now a Deborah, now a Maid of Orleans,
a priestess, a princess, a Juno; after some
reflection, a Grace Darling; after more, a prophetess
at prayer.
“Maverick! we must have a library in our
mills.”
“Must we?” mused Maverick, extinguishing
his prophetess in a gorgeous turban.
“There; how will that do? What a Nourmahal
you are!”
“And relief societies, and half-time schools,
and lectures, and reading-rooms, and, I hope, a
dozen better things. Those will only do to start
with.”
“A modest request — for Cophetua, for instance,”
said Maverick, dropping the shawl in a
blazing heap at her feet.
“Maverick! I 've been a lay-figure in life long
enough, if you please. Maverick, Maverick! I
cannot play any longer. I think you will be sorry
if you play with me any longer.”
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Cophetua said this with knitted brows. Maverick
tossed the shawl away, and sat down beside
her. The young man's face also had a wrinkle
between the placid eyes.
“Those will only do to start with,” repeated
Perley, “but start with those we must. And,
Maverick,” with rising color, “some tenementhouses,
if you please, that are fit for human beings
to inhabit; more particularly human beings who
pay their rentals to Christian people.”
“It seems to me, Perley,” said her lover, pleasantly,
“a great blunder in the political economy of
Hayle and Kelso that you and I should quarrel
over the business. Why should we quarrel over the
business? It is the last subject in the world that
collectively, and as comfortable and amiable engaged
people, can concern us. If you must amuse
yourself with these people, and must run athwart
the business, go to father. Have you been to
father?”
“I had a long talk with your father,” said Perley,
“yesterday.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He said something about Political Economy;
he said something else about Supply and Demand.
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He said something, too, about the State of the
Market.”
“He said, in short, that we cannot afford any
more experiments in philanthropy on this town of
Five Falls?”
“He said, in short, just that.”
“He said, undoubtedly, the truth. It would
be out of the question. Why, we ran the works
at a dead loss half of last year; kept the hands
employed, and paid their wages regularly, when
the stock was a drug in the market and lay like
lead on our hands. Small thanks we get for that
from the hands, or — you.”
“Your machinery, I suppose, would not have
been improved by lying unused?” observed Perley,
quietly.
“It would have been injured, I presume.”
“And it has been found worth while, from a
business point of view, to retain employés even
at a loss, rather than to scatter them?”
“It has been, perhaps,” admitted Maverick, uneasily.
“One would think, however, Perley, that
you thought me destitute of common humanity,
just because you cannot understand the
ins and outs of the thousand and one questions
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which perplex a business man. I own that I do
not find these people as much of a diversion as
you do, but I protest that I do not abuse them.
They go about their business; and I go about
mine. Master and man meet on business grounds,
and business grounds alone. Bub Mell and a
young lady with nothing else to do may meet,
without doubt, upon religious grounds; upon the
highest religious grounds.”
“These improvements which I suggest,” pursued
Perley, waving Maverick's last words away
with her left hand (it was without ornament and
had a little bruise upon one finger), “have been
successful experiments, all of them, in other mills;
most of them in the great Pacific. Look at the
great Pacific!”
“The great Pacific can afford them,” said
Maverick, shortly. “That 's the way with our
little country mills always. If we don't bankrupt
ourselves by reflecting every risk that the great
concerns choose to run, some soft-hearted and
soft-headed philanthropist pokes his finger into
our private affairs, and behold, there 's a hue and
cry over us directly.”
“For a little country mill,” observed Perley,
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making certain figures in the air with her
bruised white finger, “I think, if I may judge
from my own income, that a library and a reading-room
would not bankrupt us, at least this
year. However, if Hayle and Kelso cannot
afford some few of these little alterations, I think
their silent partner can.”
“Very well,” laughed Maverick; “we 'll make
the money and you may spend it.”
“Maverick Hayle,” said Perley, after a silence,
“do you know that every law of this State which
regulates the admission of children into factories
is broken in your mills?”
“Ah?” said Maverick.
“I ask,” insisted Perley, “if you know it?”
“Why, no,” said Maverick, with a smile; “I
cannot say that I know it exactly. I know that
nobody not behind the scenes can conceive of the
dodges these people invent to scrape and screw
a few dollars, more or less, out of their children.
As a rule, I believe the more they earn themselves
the more they scrape and screw. I know
how they can lie about a child's age. Turn a
child out of one mill for his three months' schooling,
and he 's in another before night, half the
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time. Get him fairly to school, and I 've known
three months' certificates begged or bribed out
of a school-mistress at the end of three weeks.
Now, what can I do? You can't expect a mill-master
to have the time, or devote it to running
round the streets compelling a few Irish babies
to avail themselves of the educational privileges
of this great and glorious country!”
“That is a thing,” observed Perley, “that I
can look after in some measure, having, as you
noticed, nothing else to do.”
“That is a thing,” said Maverick, sharply,
“which I desire, Perley, that you will let alone.
I must leave it to the overseers, or we shall
be plunged into confusion worse confounded.
That is a thing which I must insist upon it
that you do not meddle with.”
Perley flushed vividly. The little scar upon
her finger flushed too. She raised it to her lips
as if it pained her.
“There is reason,” urged Maverick, — “there
is reason in all things, even in a young lady's
fancies. Just look at it! You run all over Five
Falls alone on a dark night, very improperly,
to hear mill-people complain of their drains,
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and — unrebuked by you — of their master. You
come home and break your engagement ring and
cut your finger. Forthwith you must needs turn
my mill-hands into lap-dogs, and feed them
on — what was it? roast beef? — out of your
jewelry-box!”
“I do not think,” said Perley, faintly smiling,
“that you understand, Maverick.”
“I do not think I understand,” said Maverick.
“You do not understand,” repeated Perley,
firmly but faintly still. “Maverick! Maverick!
if you cannot understand, I am afraid we shall
both be very sorry!”
Perley got up and crossed the room two or
three times. There was a beautiful restlessness
about her which Maverick, leaning back upon
the tête-à-tête, with his mustache between his
fingers, noted and admired.
“I cannot tell you,” pursued Perley in a low
voice, “how the world has altered to me, nor how
I have altered to myself, within the past few
weeks. I have no words to say how these people
seem to me to have been thrust upon my hands,—
as empty, idle, foolish hands, God knows, as
ever he filled with an unsought gift!”
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“Now I thought,” mentioned Maverick, gracefully,
“that both the people and the hands did
well enough as they were.”
Perley spread out the shining hands, as if in
appeal or pain, and cried out, as before, “Maverick!
Maverick!” but hardly herself knowing,
it seemed, why she cried.
“One would think,” pursued Maverick, with a
jerk at his mustache, “to hear and to see you,
Perley, that there were no evils in the country
but the evils of the factory system; that there
was no poverty but among weavers earning ten
dollars a week. Questions which political economists
spend life in disputing, you expect a mill-master—”
“Who does n't care a fig about them,” interrupted
Perley.
“Who does n't care a fig about them,” admitted
the mill-master, “you are right; between you
and me, you are right; who does n't care a fig
about them — to settle. Now there 's father; he
is au fait in all these matters; has a theory for
every case of whooping-cough, — and a mission
school. Once for all, I must beg to have it
understood that I turn you and the State
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committees over to father. You should hear him
talk to a State committee!”
“And yet,” said Perley, sadly, “your father
and you tie my hands to precisely the same extent
by different methods.”
“No?” said Maverick, “really?”
“He with Adam Smith, and you with a tête-a-t
ête. He is too learned, and you are too lazy. I
have not been educated to reason with him, and
I suppose I am too fond of you to deal with
you,” said the young lady. “But, Maverick,
there is something in this matter which neither
of you touch. There is something about the
relations of rich and poor, of master and man,
with which the state of the market has nothing
whatever to do. There is something, — a claim,
a duty, a puzzle, it is all too new to me to know
what to call it, — but I am convinced that there
is something at which a man cannot lie and twirl
his mustache forever.”
Being a woman, and having no mustache to
twirl, urged Maverick, nothing could well be more
natural than that she should think so. An appropriate
opinion, and very charmingly expressed.
Should he order the horses at half past ten?
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“Maverick!” cried Perley, thrusting out her
hands as before, and as before hardly knowing, it
seemed, why she cried, — “Maverick, Maverick!”
Possibly it was a week later that the new
partner called one evening upon Miss Kelso.
He was there, he said, at the request of Mr.
Hayle the junior; was sorry to introduce business
into a lady's parlor; but there was a little
matter about the plans —
“Ah, yes,” said Miss Kelso, hastily, “plans of
the new mill?”
“A plan for the new mill; yes. Mr. Hayle
desired your opinion about some mouldings, I
believe; and, as I go in town to-morrow to meet
an appointment with the architect, it fell to my
lot to confer with you. Mr. Hayle desired me to
express to you our wish — I think he said our
wish — that any preference you might have in
the ornamentation of the building should be
rigidly regarded.”
“Very thoughtful in Mr. Hayle,” said Perley,
“and characteristic. Sit down, if you please, Mr.
Garrick.”
He was a grave man, this Mr. Garrick; if there
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were a biting breath in the young lady's even
voice, if a curl as light as a feather fell across her
unsmiling mouth, one would suppose that Stephen
Garrick, sitting gravely down with mill plans in
his hand, beside her, was the last man upon earth
to detect either.
“Now,” said Miss Kelso, pulling towards her
across the table a marvellous green mill on a
gray landscape, with full-grown umber shade-trees
where a sand heap rightfully belonged, and
the architect's name on a sign above the counting-room,
“what is this vital question concerning
which Mr. Hayle desires my valuable opinion?”
“The question is, whether you would prefer
that the mouldings — here is a section; you can
see the design better about this door — should be
of Gloucester granite or not.”
“Or what?” asked Perley.
“Or not,” said Mr. Garrick, smiling.
“I never saw you smile before,” said Miss
Kelso, abruptly, tossing away the plans. “I did
not know that you could. It is like —”
“What is it like?” asked Stephen Garrick,
smiling again.
“It is like making a burning-glass out of a
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cast-iron stove. Excuse me. That mill has
tumbled over the edge of the table, Mr. Garrick.
Thank you. Is Gloucester granite of a violet
tint?”
“Outside of an architect's privileged imagination,
not exactly. What shall I tell Mr. Hayle?”
“You may tell Mr. Hayle that I do not care
whether the mouldings are of Gloucester granite
or of green glass. No; on the whole, I will tell
him myself.
“You see, Mr. Garrick,” said Miss Kelso after
an awkward pause, “when you are a woman and
a silent partner, it is only the mouldings of a
matter that fall to you.”
Mr. Garrick saw.
“And so,” piling up the plans upon the table
thoughtfully, “you become a little sensitive upon
the subject of mouldings. You would so much
rather be a brick-maker!”
“I suppose,” said Stephen Garrick, “that I
have been what you would call a brick-maker.”
“I suppose you have,” said Miss Kelso, still
thoughtfully. “Mr. Garrick?”
Mr. Garrick lifted his grave face inquiringly.
“I suppose you know what it is to be very poor?”
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“Very poor.”
“And now you will be very rich. That must
be a singular life!”
“It is in some respects a dangerous life, Miss
Kelso.”
“It is in other respects a privileged life, Mr.
Garrick.”
“It is proverbial of men with my history,”
said Garrick, slowly, — “men who have crawled on
their hands and knees from the very quagmires
of life, — men who know, as no other men can
know, that the odds are twenty to one when a
poor man makes a throw in the world's play —”
“Are they?” interrupted the lady.
“Twenty to one,” said Stephen Garrick, in a
dry statistical tone, “against poverty, always. It
is proverbial, I say, that men who know as God
knows that it is by `him who hath no money'
that the upright, downright, unmistakable miseries
of life are drained to the dregs, — that such
men prove to be the hardest of masters and the
most conservative of social reformers. It has been
the fancy of my life, I may say that it has been
more like a passion than a fancy,” said the parvenu
in Hayle and Kelso, laying his hard hand hardly
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clenched upon the colored plates that Perley had
piled up beside him, “as fast and as far as I got
out of the mud myself to bring other people with
me. I cannot find any dainty words in which to
put this, Miss Kelso, for it is a very muddy thing
to be poor.”
“I have thought it — but very lately — to be
a hard thing,” said Perley.
The hard lines about Stephen Garrick's mouth
worked, but he said nothing. Perley, looking up
suddenly, saw what hard lines they were; and
when he met her look he smiled, and she
thought what a pleasant smile it was.
“Mr. Garrick, do you think it is possible, —
this thing of which you speak? Possible to be
Hayle and Kelso, and yet to pick people out of
the mud?”
“I believe it to be possible.”
“You are not in an easy position, it strikes
me, Mr. Garrick.”
“It strikes me — I beg your pardon — that
you are not in another, Miss Kelso.”
Stephen Garrick took his leave with this;
wisely, perhaps; would have taken his leave with
a gravely formal bow, but that Miss Kelso held
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out to him a sudden, warm, impulsive woman's
hand.
Walking home with his pile of colored plans
under his arm, Mr. Garrick fell in with two of the
mill-people, the young watchman Burdock and a
girl whom he did not recognize. He said, What a
pleasant evening for a walk it was! as he went
by them, cheerily.
“It 's nothing to say `A pleasant evening,' I
know,” said Dirk as he passed them; “but it 's a
way I like about Mr. Garrick. A man thinks
better of himself for it; feels as if he was somebody—
almost. I mean to be somebody yet, Sip.”
“Do you?” said Sip, with a patient smile. He
said it so often! She had so little faith that he
would ever do any more than say it.
“It 's a hard rut to wrench out of, Dirk, — the
mills. How many folks I 've seen try to get out
of the mills! They always came back.”
“But they don't always come back, Sip. Look
at Stephen Garrick.”
“Yes, yes,” said Sip patiently, “I know they
don't always come back, and I 've looked at Stephen
Garrick; but the folks as I knew came
back. I 'd go back. I know I should.”
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“It would be never you that would go back,”
urged Dirk, anxiously. “You 're the last girl I
know for that.”
Sip shook her head. “It 's in the blood, maybe.
I know I should go back. What a kind of
a pleasantness there is about the night, Dirk!”
There was somehow a great pleasantness to
Sip about the nights when she had a walk with
Dirk; she neither understood nor questioned
how; not a passion, only a pleasantness; she noticed
that the stars were out; she was apt to hear
the tiny trail of music that the cascades made
above the dam; she saw twice as many lighted
windows with the curtains up as she did when
she walked alone; if the ground were wet, it did
did not trouble her; if the ground were dry, it
had a cool touch upon her feet; if there were a
geranium anywhere upon a window-sill, it pleased
her; if a child laughed, she liked the sound; if
Catty had been lost since supper, she felt sure that
they should find her at the next corner; if she
had her week's ironing to do when she got home,
she forgot it; if a rough word sprang to her lips,
it did not drop; if her head ached, she smiled;
if a boy twanged a jew's-harp, she could have
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danced to it; if poor little Nynee Mell flitted
jealously by with Jim, in her blue ribbons, she
could sit down and cry softly over her, — such a
gentleness there was about the night.
It was only pleasantness and gentleness that
ever lay between her and Dirk. Sip never
flushed or frowned, never pouted or coquetted
at her sparse happiness; it might be said that
she never hoped or dreamed about it; it might
even be that the doggedness of her little brown
face came over it or into it, and that it was not
without a purpose that she neither dreamed nor
hoped. Miss Kelso sometimes wondered. Dirk
dully perplexed himself about her now and then.
“I wish,” said Sip, as they came into the yard
of the damp stone house, “that you 'd look in at
the window for me a minute, Dirk.”
“What shall I look at?” said Dirk, stepping
up softly to the low sill, “her?”
Catty was in view from the window; sitting on
the floor with her feet crossed, stringing very
large yellow beads; she did this slowly, and with
some hesitation; now and then a kind of ill-tempered
fright seemed to fall upon her repulsive
face; once or twice she dropped the toys, and
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once she dashed them with a little snarl like an
annoyed animal's upon her lap.
“I give them to her to try her,” whispered Sip.
“Do you see anything about her that is new?
anything, Dirk, that you never took a notice of
before?”
“Why, no,” said Dirk, “I don't see nothin' uncommon.
What 's the matter?”
“Nothing! It 's nothing only a fear I had.
Never mind!”
Sip drew a sudden long breath, and turned
away.
Now it was pleasant to Sip to share even a fear
with Dirk.
“Look in again,” she said, with a low laugh,
“over on the wall beyond Catty. Look what is
hanging on the wall.”
“O, that big picture over to the left of the
chiny-closet?” Dirk pointed to the Beethoven
dreaming wildly in the dingy little room.
“A little to the left of the cupboard, — yes.
One night I walked in and found it, Dirk! She
hung it there for me to walk in and find. I laid
awake till three o'clock next morning, I laid and
looked at it. I don't know anybody but you,
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Dirk, as could guess what a strangeness and a
forgetting it makes about the room.”
Now it was very new to Sip to have a “forgetting”
that she could share with even Dirk.
“It looks like the Judgment Day,” said Dirk,
looking over Catty's head at the plunging dream
and the solitary dreamer.
There chanced that night two uncommon occurrences;
for one, the watchman at the Old
Stone was sleepy; for another, Miss Kelso was
not.
The regulations in Hayle and Kelso were inexorable
at night. Two fires and three drunken
watchmen within the limits of a year had put it
out of the question to temper justice with mercy.
To insure the fidelity of the watch, he was required
to strike the hour with the factory bell
from nine at night till four o'clock in the morning.
Now upon the night in question Miss Kelso's
little silver clock struck twelve, but the great
tongue of the Old Stone did not. In perhaps
twenty minutes, Old Stone woke up with a jerk,
and rang in the midnight stoutly.
To be exact, I should have said that there
chanced that night three uncommon occurrences.
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For that a young lady should get up on a
chilly and very dark spring midnight, dress herself,
steal down stairs, unlock the front door, and
start off alone to walk a quarter of a mile, and
save a sleepy young watchman from disgrace, is
not, it must be allowed, so characteristic an
event as naturally to escape note.
It happened, furthermore, that it did not escape
the note of the new partner, coming out
on precisely the same errand at the same time.
They met at the lady's gate: she just passing
through, he walking rapidly by; she with a smile,
he with a start.
“Miss Kelso!”
“Mr. Garrick?”
“Is anything wrong?”
“With the watchman? Yes, or will be. I had
hoped I was the only person who knew that midnight
came in at twenty minutes past twelve.”
“And I had hoped that I was.”
“It was very thoughtful in you, Mr. Garrick,”
said Perley, heartily,
He did not say that it was thoughtful in her.
He turned and looked at her as she stood shivering
and smiling, with her hand upon the gate, —
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the bare hand on which the bruise had been.
He would have liked to say what he thought
it, but it struck him as a difficult thing to do.
Graceful words came so hardly to him; he felt
this hardly at the moment.
“I suppose I must leave the boy to you then,”
said Perley, slowly.
“You are taking cold,” said the mill-master, in
his hard way. It was very dark where they
stood, yet not so dark but that he could see, in
bowing stiffly, how Miss Kelso, with her bruised
hand upon the gate, shot after him a warm, sweet,
impulsive woman's smile.
Dirk was sitting ruefully upon an old boiler
in the mill-yard. He rubbed his eyes when Mr.
Garrick came up. When he saw who it was, the
boy went white to the lips.
“Burdock, the bell was not struck to-night at
twelve o'clock.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Dirk, desperately making
his last throw.
“Not at twelve o'clock.”
“Punctually, sir, you may be sure; I never
missed a bell in Hayle and Kelso yet.”
“The bell rang,” observed Mr. Garrick, with
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quiet sternness, “at twenty-one minutes past
midnight, exactly.”
“Mr. Garrick —” begged the watchman, but
stammered and stopped.
“Of course you know the consequences,” said
the master, more gently, sitting down upon the
rusty boiler beside the man, “of a miss in the
bell, — of a single miss in a bell.”
“I should think I 'd been in Hayle and Kelso
long enough to know,” said Dirk, with his head
between his knees. “Mr. Garrick, upon my word
and honor, I never slept on watch before. I was
kind of beat out to-night.” The truth was, that
Dirk had been carrying in coal for Sip half the
afternoon. “Had n't so much sleep as common
to-day; but that 's no excuse for me, I know.”
He thought he would not say anything about
the coal. “I would n't ha' cared so much about
keepin' the place,” broke forth the young man,
passionately, “but for a reason I had, — I worked
so hard for the place! and so long, sir! And,
God knows, sir, I had such a reason for lookin'
on to keep the place!”
“Infidelity on the part of a watchman, you see,
Burdock,” urged the master, “is not a matter that
his employer can dally with.”
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“I 'm no fool, sir,” said the man; “I see that.
Of course I look to lose the place.”
“Suppose I were to offer to you, with a reprimand
and warning, the trial of the place again?”
“Sir!” Dirk's head came up like a diver's
from between his knees. “You 're — your 're
good to me, sir! I — I did n't look for that,
sir!”
Mr. Garrick made no reply, but got up and
paced to and fro between the boiler and a little
old, disused cotton-house that stood behind it,
absorbed in thought.
“Mr. Garrick,” said the watchman, suddenly,
“did you get out of bed and come over here to
save the place for me?”
“For some such reason, I believe.”
“Mr. Garrick, I did n't look to be treated like
that. I thank you, sir. Mr. Garrick —”
“Well?” said the master, stopping his walk
between the boiler and the cotton-house.
“I told you the first lie, sir, that I 've told any
man since I lied sick to stay to home from the
warping-room, when I was n't much above that
boiler there in highness. I think I 'd not have
been such a sneak, sir, but for the reason that I
had.”
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It seemed that the master said “Well?” again,
though in fact he said nothing, but only stood
between the boiler and the cotton-house, gravely
looking at the man.
“There 's a — girl I know,” said Dirk, wiping
rust from his hands upon his blue overalls, “I
don't think, sir, there 's a many like her, I don't
indeed.”
“Ah!” said Stephen Garrick, restlessly pacing
to and fro again, in the narrow limit that the
boiler and the cotton-house shut in.
“I don't indeed, sir. And I 've always looked
to being somebody, and pushin' in the mills on
account of her. And I should have took it very
hard to lose the place, sir, — on account of her.
there don't seem to be what you might call a
fair chance for a man in the mills, Mr. Garrick.”
“No, not what might be called a fair chance, I
think,” said Mr. Garrick.
“Not comparing with some other calls in life,
it don't seem to me,” urged Dirk, disconsolately.
“The men to the top they stay to the top, and
the men to the bottom they stay to the bottom.
There is n't a many sifts up like yourself, sir.
It 's like a strawberry-box packed for market, the
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[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]
factory trade is. And when there 's a reason,—
and a girl comes into the account, it 's none
so easy.”
“No, it 's not easy, I grant you, Burdock.
What a place this is to spend a night in!”
“A kind of a churchly place,” said the young
watchman, glancing over the cotton-house at the
purple shadow that the mill made against the
purple sky; and at purple shadows that the silent
village made, and the river, and the bridge.
“Takin' in the screech of the dam, it 's a solemn
place; a place where if a man knows a reason, —
or a girl, he thinks o' 't. It 's a place where, if a
man has ever any longin's for things 't he can
call hisn, — wife, and home, and children, and
right and might to make 'em comfortable, you
know, — he 'll consider of 'em. It is a kind of a
surprising thing, sir, — the feelin's that a man
will have for a good woman.”
“A surprising thing,” said Stephen Garrick
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CHAPTER VII. CHECKMATE!
[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]
“I DO not love you, Maverick Hayle.”
May sweetness was in the breakfast-room;
broken, warm airs from the river; a breath of
yellow jonquils, and a shadow of a budding bough;
on a level with the low window-sill a narcissus
with a red eye winked steadily. The little silver
service was in the breakfast-room, in sharp
rilievo against a mourning-dress and the curve of
a womanly, warm arm. Maverick Hayle, struck
dumb upon his feet, where he stood half pushing
back his chair, was in the breakfast-room.
On either side of the tiny teapot the man's
face and the woman's lay reflected; it was a
smooth, octagonal little teapot, and the two faces
struck upon it without distortion; hung, like
delicate engraving, as if cut into the pretty toy.
There was something very cosey and homelike
about this senseless little teapot, and there was
-- 159 --
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something very lonely and cold about the man's
face and the woman's, fixed and separated by the
wee width of the polished thing.
Both faces in the teapot were a trifle pale.
Both faces out of the teapot were a trifle paler.
“It is not possible!” exclaimed the man,
instinctively.
“It is quite possible,” explained the woman,
calmly.
His face in the teapot flushed now scorching
red. Hers in the teapot only whitened visibly.
The young man flung himself back into his
chair and ground his teeth. The young woman
sat and looked at the teapot and trembled.
“I do not believe it, Perley!” said her plighted
husband, fiercely.
“I do not love you, Maverick,” repeated Perley,
firmly. “I have been afraid of it for a long time.
I am very certain of it now. Maverick, Maverick,
I am very sorry! I told you we should both be
very sorry! But you could not understand.”
“If it was your foolish furor over a parcel of
factory-girls that I could not understand —”
began Maverick.
But Perley sternly stopped him.
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“Never mind about the poor little factory-girls,
Maverick. It is you that I do not love.”
This was a thrust which even Maverick Hayle
could not lightly parry; he was fond of Perley
and fond of himself, and he writhed in his chair
as if it actually hurt him.
“I do not know how it is nor why it is,” said
Perley, sadly, “but I feel as if there had been a
growing away between us for a great while. It
may be that I went away and you stood still; or
that we both went away and both in different
ways; or that we had never, Maverick, been in
the same way at all, and did not know it. You
kissed me, and I did not know it!”
“And if I kiss you again, you will not know
it,” said Maverick, with an argument of smothered
passion in his voice.
“I would rather,” said the lady, evenly, “that
you did not kiss me again.”
Her face in the teapot shone as if a silver veil
fell over it. His face in the teapot clouded and
dropped.
“We have loved each other for a long time,
Perley,” said the young man in a husky voice.
“A long time,” said Perley, sorrowfully.
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“And were very happy.”
“Very happy.”
“And should have had — I had thought we
should have had such a pleasant life!”
“A miserable life, Maverick; a most miserable
life.”
“What in Heaven's name has come over you,
Perley!” expostulated the young man. “There
is no other man —”
“No other man,” said Perley, thoughtfully,
“could come between you and me. I do not see,
Maverick, how I could ever speak of love to any
other man.” This she said with her head bent,
and with grave, far-reaching eyes. “A woman
cannot do that thing. I mean there 's nothing in
me that understands how she can do it. I was
very fond of you, Maverick.”
“That is a comfort to me now,” said Maverick,
bitterly.
“I was fond of you, Maverick. I promised to
be your wife. I do not think I could ever say that
to another man. The power to say it has gone
with the growing away. There was the love
and the losing, and now there 's only the sorrow.
I gave you all I had to give. You used it up, I
-- 162 --
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think. But the growing-away came just the
same. I do not love you.”
“You women do not understand yourselves
any better than you do the rest of the world!”
exclaimed the rejected lover with a bewildered
face. “Why should we grow away? You have
n't thought how you will miss me.”
“I shall miss you,” said Perley. “Of course I
shall miss you, Maverick. So I should miss the
piano, if it were taken out of the parlor.”
Maverick made no reply to this. He felt more
humiliated than pained, as was natural. When
a man becomes only an elegant piece of furniture
in a woman's life, to be dusted at times,
and admired at others, and shoved up garret at
last by remorseless clean fingers that wipe the
cobwebs of him off, it will be generally found
that he endures the annoyance of neglected furniture—
little more. The level that we strike in
the soul that touches us most nearly is almost
sure to be the high-water mark of our own.
Now Maverick, it will be seen, struck no tidemark
in Perley. It had never been possible for
him to say to the woman, “Thus far shalt thou
go.” Men say that to women, and women to
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men. The flood mistakes a nilometer for a
boundary line, placidly. It is one of the bittersweet
blunders of love, that we can stunt ourselves
irretrievably for the loved one's sake, and
be only a little sadder, but never the wiser,
for it.
Perley Kelso thus swept herself over and
around her plighted husband; and in her very
fulness lay his content. He would probably
have loved her without a question, and rested in
her, without a jar, to his dying day. A man
often so loves and so rests in a superior woman.
He thinks himself to be the beach against which
she frets herself; he is the wreck which she has
drowned.
Maverick Hayle, until this morning in the
breakfast-room, had loved Perley in this unreasonable,
unreasoning, and, I believe, irreclaimable
masculine manner; had accepted her as serenely
as a child would accept the Venus de Milo for a
ninepin. One day the ninepin will not roll.
There is speculation in the beautiful dead eyes
of the marble. The game is stopped. He
gathers up his balls and sits down breathless.
“But you love me!” cries the player. “It
-- 164 --
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must be that you love me at times. It must be
that you will love me in moods and minutes,
Perley. I cannot have gone forever out of all
the moods and minutes of your life. I have
filled it too long.”
He filled it, forsooth! Perley slightly, slowly,
sadly smiled.
“If there is any love in the world, Maverick,
that ought to be independent of moods and
master of all moods, it is the love that people
marry on. Now I 'm neither very old nor very
wise, but I am old enough and wise enough to
understand that it is only that part of me which
gets tired, and has the blues, and minds an
easterly storm, and has a toothache, and wants
to be amused, and wants excitement, and — somebody
the other side of a silver teapot — which
loves you. I do not love you, Maverick Hayle!”
“In that case,” said Maverick, after a pause,
“it is rather awkward for me to be sitting here
any longer.”
“A little.”
“And I might as well take your blessing —
and my hat.”
“Good by,” said Perley, very sadly.
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“Good by,” said Maverick, very stiffly.
“You 'll tell your father?” asked the young
lady.
“We 're in an awkward fix all around,” said
the young man, shortly. “I suppose we shall
have to make up our minds to that.”
“But you and I need not be on awkward
terms, — need we?” asked Perley.
“Of course not. `Mutual thing; and part
excellent friends,”' bitingly from Maverick.
“But I shall always be — a little fond of you!”
urged the woman, with a woman's last clutch at
the pleasantness of an old passion.
“Perley,” said Maverick, suddenly holding out
his hand, “I won't be cross about it. I 've
never deserved that you should be any more
than a little fond of me. You 've done the honorable
thing by me, and I suppose I ought to
thank you.”
He shut the door of the breakfast-room upon a
breath of yellow jonquils, and a shadow of a budding
bough, and the narcissus winking steadily;
upon the little silver service, and the curving,
womanly, warm arm, and the solitary face that
hung engraved upon the senseless little teapot.
-- 166 -- p476-171
CHAPTER VIII. A TROUBLESOME CHARACTER.
[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]
OLD Bijah Mudge stepped painfully over a
tub of yellow ochre and crossed the print-room
at the overseer's beck. There had been an
order of some kind, but he was growing deaf, and
the heavy engines were on. The overseer repeated
it.
“Sir?”
“I said your notice, did n't I? I say your
notice, don't I? You 'll work your notice, you
will.”
“A-a-ah!” said Bijah, drawing a long breath.
He stood and knotted his lean fingers together,
watching the yellow dye drop off.
“Is there a reason given, sir?”
“No reason.”
“Folks my age ain't often ordered on notice
without reason,” said the old man, feebly.
“Folks your age should be more particular
-- 167 --
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how they give satisfaction,” said the overseer,
significantly.
“I 've known o' cases as where a boss has
guessed at a reason, on his own hook, you know,
Jim.”
Prish Jim was in the print-rooms at Hayle and
Kelso at that time. Some said the new partner
had a finger in getting him out of the weaving-room.
It was a sharp fellow, and belonged somewhere.
Here he would be brutal to old men and
little boys; but there were no girls in the print-room.
“On his own hook and at a guess,” said the
“boss,” “a man might ask who testified to Boston
on a recent little hour-bill as we know of.”
“I testified,” cried the old man, shrilly, “before
a committee of the Legislature of the State
of Massachusetts. I 'd do it ag'in, Jim! In the
face of my notice, I 'd do it ag'in! At the risk
o' the poor-us, I 'd do it ag'in! I call Hayle and
Kelso to witness as I 'd do it ag'in! In the name
of the State of Massachusetts, I 'd do it ag'in!”
“Do it again!” said Jim, with a brutal oath.
“Who hinders you?”
“But there were no reasons!” added the
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overseer, sharply. “You fail to give satisfaction,
that 's all; there 's no reasons.”
“I am an old man to be turned out o' work
sudden, sir.” The thin defiance in Bijah's voice
broke. He made an obsequious little bow to
the Irishman, wringing his dyed hands dry, and
lifting them weakly by turns to his mouth.
“It 's not always easy for an old man to get
work, sir.”
But Jim was at the other end of the print-room,
having some trouble with the crippled
tender, who always spilled the violet dye. The
boy had cut himself upon a “doctor,” it seemed,
to-day. Bijah saw blood about, and felt faint,
and slunk away.
“Can I have work?”
“What can you do?”
“Anything.”
“Where from?”
“Five Falls.”
“Hayle and Kelso?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You talk like a man with a toothache.”
“Ay? Folks has told me that before. An
old habit, sir.”
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“You have been printing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For three months?”
“Just about, sir.”
“There 's yellow ochre on your clothes, I
see.”
“I 've none better, sir. I — I 'd not have travelled
in my working-close if I 'd had better; I 'd
not have done it once. But I 'm an old man, and
out of work.”
“Your name is Bijah Mudge?”
“I 'd not told you my name, sir.”
“No, you 'd not told your name; but you 're
Bijah Mudge. We 've got no work for you.”
“I am an old man, sir.”
“You 're a troublesome character, sir.”
“I 'm quite out of work, sir.”
“You 'll stay quite out as far as we 're concerned.
We 've got no place for you, I say, on
this corporation.”
“Very well, sir,” bowing with grim courtesy.
“Good evening, sir. I can try elsewhere.”
“O yes,” with a slight laugh, “you can try
elsewhere.”
“It 's a free country, sir!” cried the
-- 170 --
[figure description] Page 170.[end figure description]
troublesome character, in a little spirit of his shrill
defiance.
“O yes; it 's a free country, without doubt;
quite right. You 'll see the door at your left, there.—
Patrick! the door. Show the man the door.”
“And this is the end on 't.”
The old man said that to Perley Kelso three
weeks later. He said it in bed in the old men's
ward of the almshouse at Five Falls. There was
a chair beside the bed.
The room was full of beds with chairs beside
them. These beds and chairs ran in a line along
the wall, numbered nicely. In general, when you
had taken possession of your bed, your chair, and
your number, and sat or lay with folded, thin
hands and gazed about with weak, bleared eyes,
and so sat or lay gazing till you died; you commanded
such variety and excitement as consist
in being bounded on both sides by another bed,
another chair, another pair of folded hands, and
another set of gazing eyes. Old Bijah's bed and
chair stood the last in the line. So he lay and
looked at the wall, when he said, “This is the
end on 't.”
-- 171 --
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He liked to talk, they said; talked a great deal;
talked to the doctor, the paupers, the cat; talked
to the chair and the wall; talked to Miss Kelso
now, because she came between the chair and the
wall; had talked since he was brought struggling
in and put to bed with nobody knew what
exactly the matter with him. He was dead beat
out, he said.
He must have talked a great deal upon his
journey; especially in its later days, since
the earnings of the last “Lord's day” were
gone; since he had travelled afoot and gone
without his, dinner; since he had taken to
sleeping in barns and under fences, and in
meadow-places undisturbed and wet with ebbing
floods; since he had traversed the State, and
ventured into New Hampshire, and come back
into the State, and lost heart and gained it, and
lost it again and never gained it again, and so
begged his way back to his old shanty up the
river, and been found there by Stephen Garrick,
in a driving storm, dozing on the floor in a little
pool of water, and with the door blown down
upon him by the gale.
He had talked to the fences, the sky, the
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Merrimack, the sea when he caught a glimpse of
it, the dam at Lawrence, and the Lowell bells,
and the wind that sprang up in an afternoon, and
gray clouds, and red sunsets, and the cattle on
the road, especially, he said, to trees; but always
rather to these things than to a human hearer.
“They listened to me,” he said, turning shrewd
eyes and a foolish smile upon his visitor. “They
always listen to me. It 's a free country and I 'm
a troublesome character, but they listen — they
listen. It 's a free country and there 's room for
them and me. I 'm an old man to be turned out
o' work. One night I sat down on Lawrence
Bridge and said so. It was coming dark, and all
the little trees were green. No, marm, I 'm not
out o' my head. I 'm only a troublesome character
out of work in a free country. The mill-gals
they went by, but I 'd rather tell the little
trees. I had n't eat no dinner nor no supper. It
was dark ag'in the water and ag'in the sky; all
the lights in the mills was blazin', and the streets
was full; if I 'd been a younger man I 'd not have
took it quite so hard, mebbe. A younger man
might set his hand to this and that; but I 've
worked to factories fifty-six years, and I was very
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[figure description] Page 173.[end figure description]
old to get my notice unexpected. I 'm sixty-six
years old.
“`We know you,' says they to me, `we don't
want you!' says they. Here and there, up to
New Hampshyre and back ag'in, this place and
that and t'other, `We know you,' says they.
“So I set on Lawrence Bridge; there was cars
and ingines come screechin' by; `We know you,'
says they; and the little trees held up like as
it was their hands to listen. `They know me,'
says I, `I 'm a troublesome character out o' work!'
There was a little Irish gal come by that night
and took me home to supper. She lived in one
o' them new little houses adown the road.
“There, there, there! Well, well, it 's oncommon
strange how much more cheery-like it is a
talkin' to women-folks than it is to trees. And
clearin' to the head. But you 'd never guess,
unless you was a troublesome character and out
o' work, how them trees would listen —
“I like the looks of you setting up ag'in the
chair; it makes a variety about the wall. You 'd
never know, onless you 'd come to the end on 't,
how little of what you may call variety there is
about that wall.
-- 174 --
[figure description] Page 174.[end figure description]
“Now I remember what I had to say; I remember
clear. I think I 've had a fever-turn about
me, and a man gets muddled now and then from
talking to so many trees and furrests. There 's
a sameness about it. They 're good listeners,
but there 's a sameness about 'em; and a lonesomeness.
“Now this is what I had to say; in the name of
the State of Massachusetts, this is what I 've got
to say: I 've worked to factories fifty-six years.
I have n't got drunk not since I was fifteen year
old. I 've been about as healthy, take it off and
on, as most folks, and I guess about as smart.
I 'm a moral man, and I used to be a Methodist
class-leader. I 've worked to factories fifty-six
years steady, and I 'm sixty-six year old, and in
the poor-us.
“I don't know what the boys would say if they
see me in the poor-us.
“I 've married a wife and buried her. I 've
brought up six children and buried 'em all. Me
and the bed and the chair and the wall are the
end on 't.
“It kind o' bothers me, off and on, wonderin'
what the boys would say.
-- 175 --
[figure description] Page 175.[end figure description]
“There was three as had the scarlet fever, and
two as I lost in the war (three and two is five;
and one —) there 's one other, but I don't rightly
remember what she died on. It was a gal, and
kinder dropped away.
“I 've worked fifty-six years, and I 've earned
my bread and butter and my shoes and hats, and
I give the boys a trade, and I give 'em harnsome
coffins; and now I 'm sixty-six year old and in
the poor-us.
“Once when I broke my leg, and the gal was
sick, and the boys was in the tin-shop, and their
mother she lay abed with that baby that kep'
her down so long, I struck for higher wages, and
they turned me off. There was other times as I
struck for wages, I forget what for, and they
turned me off. But I was a young man then,
and so I sawed wood and waited my chances, and
name of the State of Massachusetts.
“Now I 've testified afore the Legislature, and
I 've got my notice; and away up in New Hampshyre
they knew the yellow ochre on my close,
and I could n't get the toothache out o' my voice,
and I would n't disown my honest name, — in
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[figure description] Page 176.[end figure description]
the name of the State of Massachusetts, I would
n't beg for honest work, unless I got it in my
honest name, — and so I am sixty-six year old,
and in the poor-us.
“Tell Hayle and Kelso, — will you? — that
I 'm sixty-six year old, and an honest man, and
dead beat out and in the poor-us! Curse 'em!
“All the leaves o' the trees o' the State of Massachusetts
knows it. All the fields and the rivers
and the little clouds and the winds o' dark nights
and the grasses knows it. I told 'em, I told 'em!
And you' d never know how they listened —
See here, marm. I 'm no fool, except for the fever
on me. I knew when I set out what I 'd got
to say. I 'm no fool, and I never asked no
favors from the State of Massachusetts. See
here! A workingman, as is only a workingman,
and as lives and dies a workingman, he 'll earn
enough to get him vittels, and to get him close,
and to get him a roof above his head, and he
genrilly won't earn much more; and I never
asked it of the State of Massachusetts as he
should. But now, look here! When I was to
Boston on my journey, I picked up a newspaper
to the depot, and I read as how a man paid forty
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[figure description] Page 177.[end figure description]
thousand dollars for the plate-glass winders in
his house. Now, look here! I say there 's something
out o' kilter in that Commonwealth, and in
that country, and in that lot of human creeturs,
and in them ways of rulin', and in them ways of
thinkin', and in God's world itself, when a man
ken spend forty thousand dollars on the plate-glass
winders of his house, and I ken work
industrious and honest all my life and be beholden
to the State of Massachusetts for my
poor-us vittels when I 'm sixty-six year old!
“Not but what I 've had money in the bank in
my day, a many times. I had forty-six dollars
laid by to once. I went into the dye-rooms that
year, and my rubber boots was wore out. We
stand about in dye, and it 's very sloppy work,
you know. I 'd been off work and out o' cash,
and so I tried to get along without; so I wet my
feet and wet my feet, standing round in the stuff.
So there was lung fever and doctors' bills enough
to eat that bank account out as close as famine.
“Why was n't I far-seein' enough to get my
boots to the first place and save my fever? Now
that 's jest sech a question as I 'd look to get
from them as is them of property. That 's jest a
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[figure description] Page 178.[end figure description]
specimen o' the kind of stoopidity as always
seems to be a layin' atween property and poverty,
atween capital and labor, atween you settin' thar
with yer soft ways and yer soft dress ag'in you,
and me, and the bed, and the chair, and the wall,
and the end on 't.
“How was I a goin' to get into that thar bank
account forty mile away in East Boston? Say!
You 'd never thought on 't, would you? No,
nor none the rest of you as has yer thousands,
and the trust as thousands brings, and as would
make no more of buyin' a pair o' rubber boots
than ye would o' the breath ye draws. I was a
stranger to town then, and it 's not for the likes
of me to get a pair of rubber boots on trust. So
I 'd had my lung fever and lost my bank account
afore I could lay finger on it.
“So with this and that and t'other, I 've come
into my old age without a dollar, and I 'm a
troublesome character, and my boys are dead,
and I 'm in the poor-us, and I 'm sixty-six years
old.
“I won't say but there's those of us that lays up
more than I did; but I will say that there 's not
a man of us that ever I knew to spend his life in
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[figure description] Page 179.[end figure description]
the mills, and lay by that as would begin to keep
him in his old age. If there 's any such man, I 'd
like to see him.
“I tell you, marm, there 's a many men and women
in Hayle and Kelso, and there 's a many men
and women in a many factories of this here free
country, as don't dare to testify afore a Legislature.
When their testimony tells ag'in the interest
of their employers, they don't dare. There 's
them as won't do it not for nobody. There 's
them as does it on the sly, a holdin' back their
names onto the confidence o' the committee, out
o' dread and fear. We 're poor folks. We can't
help ourselves, ye see. We 're jest clutched up
into the claws o' capital tight, and capital knows
it, jest as well as we do. Capital says to us,
`Hold your tongue, or take your notice.' It
ain't a many poor men as can afford to say, `I 'll
take my notice, thankee!' I done it! And
I 'd do it ag'in! I 'd do it ag'in! In the name o'
the State of Massachusetts, I 'd do it ag'in!”
Old Bijah lies for a while, with this, blankly
gazing at the wall and at the visitor with the
“soft dress ag'in her,” and at the paupers, and at
the cat. Now and then he shrewdly nods, and
-- 180 --
[figure description] Page 180.[end figure description]
now and then he smiles quite foolishly, and now
the rows of beds and chairs file into hickory-trees,
he says, and lift up their leaves in the name of
the State of Massachusetts, and listen — And
now he sees the visitor again, and turns sharply
on her, and the hickory-trees file off and wring
their hands in going.
“I heerd the t'other day of a man as give
thirty thousand dollars for a fancy mare!”
All the trees of the State of Massachusetts are
filing out of the old men's ward of the almshouse
at Five Falls now, and all in going wring
their hands and listen —
“Thirty thousand dollars for a mare! Jest fur
the fancy of the fancy creetur. Thirty thousand
dollars for a mare!”
He lies quite still once more, till the last
hickory hands have passed, wringing, out of the
almshouse, and some one has shut the door upon
them, and the visitor softly stirs in going after
them. He notices that the visitor does not wring
her hands, but holds them folded closely down
before her as she stirs.
He cries out that he wonders what the boys
would say, and that he give 'em harnsome coffins,
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[figure description] Page 181.[end figure description]
and that she is to tell Hayle and Kelso, curse 'em,
as he 's sixty-six year old, and out o' work, and in
the poor-us; and when she opens the door in
passing out, half the forests of New England jostle
over her and jostle in, and fill the room, and stand
and listen —
The visitor unclasps her hands on stepping
into the heart of the southern storm; it may be
fancy, or it may be that she slightly wrings them,
as if she had mistaken herself for a hickory-tree.
“They are cold!” exclaims Stephen Garrick,
who waits for her with an umbrella and an enigmatical
face. He takes one of the hands upon
his arm, and folds the other for her in her cloak.
Apparently, neither the man nor the umbrella
nor the action attracts her attention pointedly, till
the man says: “It is a furious storm, and you
will get very wet. What have you been about?”
“Feeling my way.”
“I am afraid that is all you will ever do.”
“I presume that is all I can ever do.”
“But that is something.”
“Something.”
“You are not expected to cut and carve a
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[figure description] Page 182.[end figure description]
quarry with tied hands. You have at least the
advantage of not being responsible for the
quarry.”
“Who can hold you responsible for a case like
this? You are one of three, and, as you say,
tied by the hands.”
“That old man will hold me responsible to his
dying day. Half our operatives will hold me
responsible. Miss Kelso, I am one of those
people of whom you will always find a few in
the world, adjusted by fate or nature to a position
of unavoidable and intolerable mistake and
pain.”
His face, through the gray of the growing
storm, wears a peculiar and a patient smile which
Perley notes; there being always something noteworthy
about Stephen Garrick's smile.
“A position,” he repeats slowly, “in which a
man must appear, from force of circumstances, to
pass the — the wounded part of the world by
upon the other side. And I believe, before God,
that I would begin over again in East Street to-morrow,
if I could help to bind it up, and set it
healthily upon its way!”
Perley believes he would, and says so, solemnly.
-- 183 --
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She says too, very earnestly, that she cannot
think it to be true that a man who holds to such
a purpose, and who holds it with — she falters —
with such a smile, can permanently and inevitably
be misunderstood and pained. She cannot
think it.
Stephen Garrick shakes his head.
“I suspect there always are and always will
be a few rich men, Miss Kelso, who just because
they are rich men will be forever mistranslated
by the suffering poor, and I suspect that I am
one of them. I do not know that it matters.
Let us talk of something else.”
“Of something else than suffering and poverty?
Mr. Garrick,” — Perley turns her young face
against the west, where the sultry storm is
crouching and springing, — “why, Mr. Garrick!
sometimes I do not see — in God's name I do not
see — what else there can be to talk about in
such a world as this! I 've stepped into it, as we
have stepped out into this storm. It has wrapped
me in, — it has wrapped me in!”
The sultry rain wraps them in, as they beat
against it, heavily. It is not until a little lurid
tongue of light eats its way through and over the
-- 184 --
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hill, and strikes low and sidewise against the wet
clovers that brush against their feet, that Perley
breaks a silence into which they fall, to say, in a
changed tone, “It is not an uncommon case, this
old man's?” and that Mr. Garrick tells her, “Not
an uncommon case”; and that she leaves him,
nodding, at the corner of the road, and climbs the
hill alone; and that he stands in the breaking
storm for a moment there to watch her, brushing
gilded wet clovers down about her as she climbs.
-- 185 -- p476-190
CHAPTER IX. A FANCY CASE.
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THE oculist shut the door. For a popular
oculist, with a specialty for fancy cases,
he looked disturbed.
A patient in waiting — a mild, near-sighted
case — asked what was the matter with the
girl.
“Why, the creature 's deaf and dumb!”
“Not growing blind, I hope?”
“Incurably blind. A factory-girl, a charity
case of Miss Kelso's. You know of Miss Kelso,
Mr. Blodgett?”
Mr. Blodgett knew, he thought. The young
lady from whom Wiggins bought that new house
on the Mill-Dam. An eccentric young lady,
buried herself in Five Falls ever since the old
gentleman's death, broke an engagement, and
was interested in labor reform, or something
of that description.
-- 186 --
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“The same. Enthusiastic, very; and odd.
Would send the girl to me, for instance; naturally
it would have been a hospital case, you see.
I have to thank her for a hard morning's work.
There was a sister in the matter. She would be
told then and there; a sharp girl, and I could
n't put her off.”
Ah! Mr. Blodgett weakly sighs. Very sad!
Worn out at the looms perhaps? He seemed to
have heard that the gaslight is trying in factories.
“This is wool-picking, sir; a clear case, but
a little extraordinary. There 's a disease of the
hands those people acquire from wool-picking
sometimes; an ugly thing. The girl rubbed her
eyes, I suppose. The mischief has been a long
time in progress, or she might have stood a chance,
which gaslight-work has killed, to be sure; but
there 's none for her here, none!”
Sip and Catty, in the entry, sat down upon the
office stairs. Sip was dizzy, she said. She drew
up her knees and put her face into her hands.
She could hear the doctor through the door
saying, “None for her!” and the near-sighted
patient babbling pity, and the rumble of the
-- 187 --
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street, as if it had been miles away, and a newsboy
shrieking a New York wedding through it. A
singular, painful, intense interest in that wedding
took hold of her. She wondered what the bride
wore, and how much her veil cost. Long bridal
parties filed before her eyes, and flowers fell, and
sweet scents were in the air. It seemed imperative
to think about the wedding. The solid earth
would reel if she did not think about the wedding.
She clung to the banisters with both hands, lest
she should not think about the wedding.
The newsboy shrieked the wedding out of
hearing, and Catty touched her on the arm.
“Good God!” cried Sip. A whirl of flowers
and favors shot like a rocket by and beyond her,
and a ragged newsboy chased them, and all the
brides were blind, and she thrust out her hands;
and she was sitting in the entry on the stairs, and
the wind blew up, and she had frightened Catty.
So she said, “There, there!” as if Catty could
hear her, and held by the banisters and stood up.
Catty wanted to know what had happened,
very petulantly; the more so because she could
not see Sip's face. She had been very cross
since the blur came over Sip's face.
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“Nothing has happened,” said Sip, — “nothing
but a — pain I had.”
“I 've got the pain,” scowled Catty. She put
her hand to her shrunken eyes and cowered on
the stairs, whining a little, like a hurt brute.
“Well, well,” said Sip, on her fingers, stiffly,
“very well. Stop that noise and come away,
Catty! I cannot bear that noise, not for love's
sake, I can't bear it. Come!”
They crept slowly down the stairs and out into
the street. It was a bright day, and everybody
laughed. This seemed to Sip very strange.
She tried to tie Catty's face up in a thick veil
she had; but Catty pulled it off; and she took
her hand upon her arm, but did it weakly, and
Catty jerked away. She was quite worn out
when they got to the depot and the cars, and sat
with her head back and shut her eyes.
“What 's the matter with the girl? Blind,
ain't she?”
A curious passenger somewhere behind her
said this loudly, as the train swept out of
the station dusk. Sip turned upon him like a
tiger. She could not remember that Catty could
not hear. The word was so horrible to her; she
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had not said it herself yet. She put her arm
about Catty, and said, “Don't you talk!”
“Dear, dear!” said the curious passenger,
blandly, “I would n't harm ye.”
“I had n't told her,” said Sip, catching her
breath; “I had n't gone away — by ourselves with
the doors locked — to tell her. Do you think I 'd
have it said out loud before a carful of folks?”
Miss Kelso met her when she got home;
looked at her once; put a quick, strong arm
about her, and got the two girls into the carriage
with the scented cushions immediately. Catty
was delighted with this, and talked rapidly about
it on her fingers all the way to the stone house.
Sip pulled her hat over her eyes like a man, and
sat up straight.
The little stone house was lighted, and supper
was ready. The windows were open, and the
sweet spring night airs wandered in and out.
The children in the streets were shouting. Sip
shut the window hard. She stood uncertainly by
the door, while Catty went to take off her things.
“If I can do anything for you —” said Perley,
gently.
Sip held up her hands and her brown face.
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“Do you suppose,” she said, “that you could—
kiss me?”
Perley sat down in the wooden rocking-chair
and held out her beautiful arms.
Sip crept in like a baby, and there she began to
cry. She cried and cried. Catty ate her supper,
and nobody said anything, and she cried and
cried.
“My dear!” said Perley, crying too.
“Let me be,” sobbed Sip, — “let me be for a
minute. I 'll bear it in a minute. I only wanted
some women-folks to cry to! I had n't anybody.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed with
Catty as soon as they were alone. She had
dried her eyes to bear it now. Catty must
understand. She was quite determined to have
it over. She set her lips together, and knotted
her knuckles tightly.
The light was out, but a shaft of wan moonlight
from the kitchen windows struck into the
closet bedroom, and lay across the floor and
across the patch counterpane. Catty sat in it.
She was unusually quiet, and her face indicated
-- 191 --
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some alarm or uneasiness, when Sip held up her
trembling hand in the strip of light to command
her close attention, and touched her eyes. Catty
put out her supple fingers and groped, poor
thing, after Sip's silent words. Walled up and
walled in now from that long mystery which
we call life, except at the groping, lithe, magnetic
fingers, she was an ugly girl.
Sip looked at her for a minute fiercely.
“I should like to know what God means!” she
said. But she did not say it to Catty. She
would not speak to Catty till she had wiped her
dry lips to wipe the words off. Whatever He
meant, Catty should not hear the words.
She tried, instead, to tell her very gently,
and quite as if He meant a gentle thing by Catty,
how it was.
In the strip of unreal light, the two hands, the
groping hand and the trembling hand, interchanging
unreal, soundless words, seemed to
hang with a pitiful significance. One might
have thought, to see them, how the mystery of
suffering and the mystery of love grope and
tremble forever after one another, with no speech
nor language but a sign.
-- 192 --
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“There 's something I 've got to tell you,
dear,” said the trembling hand.
“For love's sake?” asked the hand that
groped.
“For love's sake,” said the trembling hand.
“Yes,” nodded Catty, with content.
“A long time ago,” said Sip; “before we went
to Waltham, Catty, when you picked the wool —”
“And hurt my hands,” said Catty, scowling.
“Something went wrong,” said the trembling
hand, “with your poor eyes, Catty. O your poor,
poor eyes, my dear! All that you had left, —
the dear eyes that saw me and loved me, and
that I taught to understand so much, and to be
so happy for love's sake! The poor eyes that I
tried to keep at home, and safe, and would have
died for, if they need never, never have looked
upon an evil thing! The dear eyes, Catty, that
I would have hunted the world over, if I could, to
find pretty things for, and pleasant things and
good things, and that I never had anything for
but such a miserable little room that they got so
tired of! The poor dear eyes!”
The shrunken and disfigured eyes, that had
been such wandering, wicked eyes, turned and
-- 193 --
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strained painfully in the half-light. Sip had said
some of this with her stiff lips, but the trembling
hand had made it for the most part plain to the
groping hand. Catty herself sat and trembled
suddenly.
When should she see the supper-table plain
again? the groping hand made out to ask. And
the picture by the china-closet? And the flies
upon the window-pane?
“Never!” said the trembling hand.
But when should she see Sip's face again without
the blur?
“Never! O Catty, never again!”
The trembling hand caught the groping hand
to sting it with quick kisses. Sip could not,
would not, see what the poor hand might say.
She held it up in the streak of light. God might
see. She held it up, and pulled Catty down upon
her knees, with her face in the patch counterpane.
When Catty was asleep that night, Sip went
out and got down upon the floor in the kitchen.
She got down, with her hands around her
knees, in the wan lightness that fell about the
picture behind the china-closet door. The
-- 194 --
[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]
driving dream seemed to fill the room. The factory-girl
on the kitchen floor felt herself swept into it.
Her lips worked and she talked to it.
“I could ha' borne it if it had been me,”
she said. Did the pictured women, with their
arms up, nod as they drove wailing by? Sip
could have sworn to it.
“We could have borne, if it had been we,” they
said.
“What 's the sense of it?” asked Sip, in her
rough way, half aloud. She had such a foolish
way about that picture, often talking to it by the
hour, upon the kitchen floor.
But the women only waved their arms and
nodded solemnly. That which they could not
know nor consider nor understand was in the
question. They drifted over it with the helplessness
of hopeless human pain.
“You 're good for nothing,” said Sip, and
turned the picture to the wall.
She stumbled over something in doing this,
and stooped to see what it was. It was an
abused old book that Catty had taken once
from the Mission Sunday School, and had never
returned, — a foolish thing, with rough prints.
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Catty had thrown it under the table in ten minutes.
It opened in Sip's hands now, by chance,
at a coarse plate of the Crucifixion.
Sip threw it down, but picked it up again, lost
the place, and hunted for it; bent over it for a
few minutes with a puzzled face.
Somehow the driving dream and the restless
dreamer hushed away before the little woodcut.
In some way the girl herself felt quieted by the
common thing. For some reason — the old, the
unexplained, the inexplicable reason — the Cross
with the Man upon it put finger on the bitter lips
of Sip's trouble. She could not ask a Man upon
a Cross, “What was the sense of it?” So she
only said, “O my poor Catty! my poor, poor
Catty!” and softly shut the foolish little book
and went to bed.
Beethoven did not stay with his face to the
wall, however. Sip took a world of curious comfort
out of that picture; quite perplexed Perley,
who had only thought in sending it to do a
pleasant thing, who had at that time never
guessed — how should she? — that a line engraving
after Lemude could make a “forgetting”
in the life of a factory-girl.
-- 196 --
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“Sometimes now, when Catty is so bad,” said
Sip one day, “there 's music comes out of that
picture all about the room. Sometimes in the
night I hear 'em play. Sometimes when I sit
and wait for her, they sit and play. Sometimes
when the floor 's all sloppy and I have to wash up
after work, I hear 'em playing over all the dirt.
It sounds so clean!” said Sip.
“Is Catty still so troublesome?” asked Perley.
Sip's face dropped.
“Off and on a little worse, I think. The
blinder she grows the harder it is to please
her and to keep her still. I come home all beat
out; and she 's gone. Or, I try so hard to make
her happy after supper, and along by nine o'clock
she 's off. She 's dreadful restless since she left
off workin', and gets about the street a'most as
easy, for aught I see, as ever. She 's so used to
the turns and all; and everybody knows her, and
turns out for her. I 've heard of blind folks that
was like her; she was n't stupid, Catty was n't,
if she 'd been like other folks. There 's nights I
sit and look for her to be run over and brought
in. There 's nights she gets at liquor. There 's
nights I follow her round and round, and follow
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her home, and make as if I sat there and she 'd
just come in. That 's the worst, you see.
What was that you said? No; I 'll not have
Catty sent anywhere away from me. There 's no
kind folks in any good asylum that would make it
comfortable for Catty away from me. You need
n't think,” — Sip set her tough little lips together—
“you need n't think that you nor anybody
could separate me and Catty. She 's never to
blame, Catty is n't. I know that. I can work.
I 'll make her comfortable. It 's only God in
heaven that will separate me and Catty.”
It was about this time that Miss Kelso attempted,
in view of Sip's increasing care, a longcherished
plan of experiment in taking the girl
out of the mills.
“It is not a girl to spend life in weaving
cotton,” said the young lady to Stephen Garrick.
“That would be such exorbitant waste.”
“There 's waste enough at those looms,” said
Mr. Garrick, pointing to his mills, “to enrich a
Commonwealth perceptibly. We live fast down
there among the engines. It is hot-house
growth. There 's the difference between a man
brought up at machinery and a man brought
-- 198 --
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up at a hoe, for instance, that there is between
forced fruit and frozen fruit. Few countries
understand what possibilities they possess in
their factory population. We are a fever in the
national blood that it will not pay to neglect;
there 's kill or cure in us.”
“What 's the use?” said Sip, with sullen, unresponsive
eyes. “You 'll have all your bother
for nothing, Miss Kelso. If I get away from my
loom, I shall come back to my loom. Look at
the factory-folks in England! From father to
child, from children to children's children, — a
whole race of 'em at their looms. It 's in the
blood.”
“Try it,” urged Perley. “Try it for Catty's
sake, at least. There are so many ways in which
it would be better for Catty.”
“I should like it,” said Sip, slowly, “to get
Catty among some other folks than mill-folks.
It seems as if I could have done it once; but
it 's too late now.”
Now Sip was barely twenty-one. She said
this with the unconscious assurance of fifty.
“I 'd try anything for Catty; and almost
anything for you; and almost anything to get
out of the mills; but I 'm afraid it 's too late.”
-- 199 --
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But Perley was persistent in her fancy, and
between them they managed to “try it” faithfully.
Sip went out as somebody's cook, and burned
all the soup and made sour bread. She drew
about a baby's carriage for a day and a half, and
left because the baby cried and she was afraid
that she should shake it. She undertook to be a
hotel table-girl, and was saucy to the house-keeper
before night. She took a specimen of
her sewing to a dressmaker, and was told that
the establishment did not find itself in need of
another seamstress. She stood behind a dry-goods
counter, but it worried her to measure off
calico for the old ladies. Finally, Perley put her
at the printer's trade, and Sip had a headache
and got inky for a fortnight.
Then she walked back to her overseer, and
“asked in” for the next morning.
“I told you it was no use,” she said, shaking
her head at Miss Kelso, half whimsically, half
sadly too. “It 's too late. What am I fit for?
Nothing. What do I know? Nothing. I can
weave; that 's all. I 'm used to that. I 'm used
to the noise and the running about. I 'm used to
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[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]
the dirt and the roughness. I can't sit still on
a high stool all day. I don't know how to spell,
if I do. They 're too fussy for me in the shops.
I hate babies. It 's too late. I 'm spoiled. I
knew I should come back. My father and mother
came back before me. It 's in the blood.”
Perley would have liked even then, had it
seemed practicable, to educate the girl; but Sip
shook her dogged head.
“It 's too late for that, too. Once I would
have liked that. There 's things I think I could
ha' done.” Sip's sullen eyes wandered slowly
to the plunging dream and the solitary dreamer
behind the china-closet door, and, resting there,
flashed suddenly. “There 's things I seem to
think I might ha' done with that; but I 've lost'
em now. Nor that ain't the worst. I 've lost the
caring for 'em, — that 's the thing I 've lost. If I
was to sit still and study at a grammar, I should
scream. I must go back to the noise and the
dirt. Catty and me must stay there. Sometimes
I seem to think that I might have been a
little different someways; if maybe I 'd been
helped or shown. There was an evening school
to one place where I worked. I was running four
-- 201 --
[figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]
looms twelve hours and a half a day. You 're so
dull about the head, you see, when you get home
from work; and you ache so; and you don't feel
that interest in an education that you might.”
“Sometimes,” added Sip, with a working of
the face, “it comes over me as if I was like a —
a patchwork bed-quilt. I 'd like to have been
made out of one piece of cloth. It seems as if
your kind of folks got made first, and we down
here was put together out of what was left.
“Sometimes, though,” continued the girl, “I
wonder how there came to be so much of me as
there is. I don't set up for much, but I wonder
why I was n't worse. I believe you would yourself,
if you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Knew what!” echoed the factory-girl. “Knew
that as you know no more of than you know of
hell! Have n't I told you that you can't know?
You can't understand. If I was to tell you, you
could n't understand. It ain't so much the
bringing up I got, as the smooch of it. That 's
the wonder of it. You may be ever so clean,
but you don't feel clean if you 're born in the
black. Why, look here; there was my mother,
-- 202 --
[figure description] Page 202.[end figure description]
into the mills off and on between her babies.
There 's me, from the time I run alone, running
alone. She comes home at night. I 'm
off about the street all day. I learned to swear
when I learned to talk. Before I 'd learned to
talk I 'd seen sights that you 've never seen yet in
all your fine life long. That 's the crock of it.
And the wonder. And the talk in the mills —
for a little girl to hear! Only eight years old—
such a little girl — and all sorts of women
working round beside you. If ever I 'd like to
call curses down on anybody, it 's on a woman
that I used to know for the way she talked to
little girls! Why did nobody stop it? Why, the
boss was as bad himself, every whit and grain.
The gentlemen who employed that boss were
professors of religion, all of them.
“But I 've tried to be good!” broke off Sip,
with a little sudden tremor of her bitter lip. “I
know I 'm rough, but I 've tried to be a good
girl!”
-- 203 -- p476-208
CHAPTER X. ECONOMICAL.
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THERE is something very pleasant about
the town of Five Falls early on a summer
morning.
There was something very pleasant about the
town of Five Falls on one summer morning when
Bub Mell got up at five o'clock to catch a rat.
To pluck a Five Falls morning in the bud, one
should be up and in it before the bells, — like
Bub. Until the bells are awake, there is a stillness
and a cleanliness about the place that are
noticeable; about the dew-laid dusty streets
and damp sidewalks bare of busy feet; about
the massive muteness of the mills; about the
very tenements on East Street, washed and made
shining by the quiet little summer shower that
fell perhaps last night, like old sins washed out
by tears; about the smooth, round cheek of the
sky before the chimneys begin to breathe upon it;
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about the little cascades at play like babies upon
the bosom of the upper stream; about the arches
of the stone bridge, great veins, one thinks, for the
pulsing dam; about the slopes of buttercups and
clover which kneel to the water's edge with a
reverent look, as if they knelt for baptism; about
some groups of pines that stretch their arms out
like people gone wearily to sleep. The pines, the
clover slopes, the dam, the streets and houses, the
very sky, everything, in fact, in Five Falls, except
those babies of cascades, wears, upon a summer
morning, that air of having gone or of having
been wearily to sleep, — an air of having been
upon its feet eleven hours and a half yesterday,
and of expecting to be upon its feet eleven hours
and a half to-day.
Bub has been awake for some fifteen minutes —
he sleeps upon a mat, like a puppy. behind the
door, — before he shakes himself a little in his
rags (the ceremony of a toilet is one of Bub's lost
arts; he can, indeed, remember faintly having been
forcibly induced to take certain jerks at the street
pump on mild mornings, at some indefinite past
period of juvenile slavery, till his mother was
nicely laid up out of the way in the bedroom, and
-- 205 --
[figure description] Page 205.[end figure description]
he “got so old he give it up”), and trots down the
wretched stairs, and out with the other puppies
into the clean stillness of the early time.
The sick woman is troublesome this morning;
there is a great deal of coughing and confusion
going on; and the husband up since midnight.
Bub finds it annoying to be broken of his sleep;
suffers from some chronic sensitiveness on the
dangers of being at hand to be despatched for the
doctor; and finds in the rat at once an inspiration
and a relief.
There is indeed peculiar inspiration in the case
of that rat. Bub chuckles over his shoulder at
himself as he trots out into the peaceful time;
there is a large three-cornered jagged rag among
Bub's rags; the rat bit it yesterday; it hangs down
from his little trousers behind and wags as he
trots. He put the rat into a hogshead to pay for
it; and shut it down with that piece of board
fence with which he provided himself last week
(from Mr. Hayle's garden) for such emergencies.
There is a richness about going to sleep over-night
with the game for your morning's hunt in
a hogshead, which is not generally appreciated
by gentlemen of the chase. There is a kind of
-- 206 --
[figure description] Page 206.[end figure description]
security of happiness, a lingering on the lips of
a sure delight, a consciousness of duty done and
pleasure in waiting, which have quite an individual
flavor.
None the other coves know about that rat.
You bet. Not much. Hi-igh.
Bub's right shoulder chuckles at his left shoulder,
and his left shoulder chuckles at his right
shoulder, and the jagged rag behind wags with
delight. Won't he jab him now! Hi-igh, there.
Hi-igh! See him! He thinks he 's a goin' to
cut 'n' run, does he? He must be green.
Away goes Mr. Hayle's board fence into the
bean patch, and down goes Bub into the hogshead.
There 's a contest for you! All Bub's poor
little puzzling soul is in his eyes. All his old
young face — the only old young thing in the
dawning time — is filled and fired. Won't he
have that rat? Five hundred cascades might
play upon the pure bosom of the river, and all
the buttercups in Five Falls kneel for baptism,—
but he 'll have that rat.
The smooth, round cheek of the sky seems to
stoop to the very hogshead, and lay itself tenderly
down to cover the child and the vermin
from the sight of the restful time.
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Presently it begins to be very doubtful who
shall cut 'n' run. And by and by it begins to be
more than doubtful who must be green.
At one fell swoop of anguish, Bub finds his
dirty little finger bitten to the bone, and himself
alone in the hogshead.
Hi-igh!
Bub sits down in the bottom of the hogshead
and grits his teeth. He does n't cry, you understand.
Not he. Used to cry when he got
bit. And holler. But got so old he give it up.
Lor. Ain't he glad none the other coves knows
now. You bet. Hi-igh.
All the foreheads of the buttercups and clovers
seem dripping with sacred water, when Bub lifts
his little aged yellow face with the dirt and
blood and tobacco upon it, over — just over —
the edge of the hogshead to see what became of
the rat. The cheek of the sky blushes a sadder
red for shame. The sleepy pine-trees stretch their
arms out solemnly towards the little fellow. The
cascades are at play with each other's hands and
feet. The great pulse of the dam, as sad as life,
as inexorable as death, as mysterious as both,
beats confused meanings into the quiet time.
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“Lor,” says Bub in the hogshead, looking out,
half pausing for the instant with his gashed finger
at his sly mouth, — “Lor, it 's goin' to be a boozier
of a day. I 'll bet.”
But the bells have waked, with a cross cry, and
Five Falls starts, to stand for eleven hours and a
half upon its feet. The peaceful time has slipped
and gone. The pine-trees rub their eyes and
sigh. The pulse of the dam throbs feverishly
fast. The sun dries the baptismal drops from the
heads of the buttercups and clovers. The dew-laid
streets fill and throng; the people have dirty
clothes and hurried faces; the dust flies about;
the East Street tenements darken to the sight in
the creeping heat, like the habit of old sins returned
to darken a sad and sorry life; you see
that there are villanous stairs and no drains;
you hear coughing and confusion from the
woman's bedchamber overhead. You see, too,
that the spotless cheek of the sky is blackened
now by the chimneys all about, and how still and
patiently it lies to take the breath of the toilworn
town.
Only those tiny cascades play — eternal children—
upon a mother's bosom; as if the heart
-- 209 --
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of a little child, just for being the heart of a little
child, must somehow, somewhere, play forever in
the smile of an undying morning.
By means of stopping to have his finger bound,
and of a search in the bean-patch for the rat, and
of another search in the cellar for the rat, and of
the delay occasioned by a vindictive kick or two
at the hogshead, and by forgetting his breakfast
and remembering it, and going back for it to find
that it is all eaten, if indeed there has ever been
any, which the confusion in the sick-room renders
a probable theory, Bub is late this morning.
Nynee was cross about the finger, too; pulled
the thread and hurt him; wanted her own breakfast
probably. Bub's little old face wears an extra
shade of age and evil as he trots away to work,
and he swears roundly by the way; swears loud
enough to be heard across the street, for Mr.
Garrick, on his way to the station, turns his head
to look after the child. Bub shies away; has
been a little skittish about Mr. Garrick, since they
tried to put him to school and his father swore
him off for ten years old. It is generally understood
now in Hayle and Kelso that the firm occasionally
pull in different ways; Mr. Mell knows
-- 210 --
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where to trace any unusual disturbance of his
family government which is calculated to arrest
a child's steady stride to ruined manhood; everybody
knows; Mr. Garrick is unpopular accordingly.
He has his friends among his work-people,
chiefly of the kind that do not easily come to
the surface. The young watchman at the Old
Stone is one of them, you may be sure. But he
is not a popular master so far.
Bub, with his sly eyes, and tobacco-yellowed
skin, and his pipe in his mouth, and the blood
and dirt upon his clothes, and the little rag behind,
and his old, old smile, trots away to the
mills, whose open door has, to Mr. Garrick's
fancy, an air of gaping after the child.
“As a prison-door will do in the end,” muses
Mr. Garrick.
He takes a note-book from his pocket, jotting
something in it; about the child, perhaps. He
has been making an estimate this week of the
suffering and profligate children in his mills.
There is scarcely a vice on the statute-book
which he has not found in existence among the
little children in those mills.
The leaf of the note-book turns, in closing, to
recent entries, which run like this: —
-- 211 --
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“Said the chaplain of an English prison, after
showing the cost of ninety-eight juvenile criminals
to the State, in six years, to have amounted,
in various ways, to £ 6,063 ($ 30,315): `They have
cost a sum of money which would have kept them
at a boarding-school the whole time.'
“Said the Honorable, the late Clerk of the Police
of Fall River, Mass., in answer to an inquiry as
to the number of children in that town peculiarly
exposed to a life of crime:.... `I should say,
after consulting the docket of our Police Court,
and inquiring as to the subsequent expenses, that
the cost of such juvenile offenders as ultimately
reach the State Prison would average two hundred
and fifty dollars. We have had some who
have cost much more than this; one as much as
five hundred dollars.”'
Mr. Garrick glances over them with his peculiar
smile, just as Bub and the little wagging rag
disappear in the yawn of the mill-door.
There is another noticeable entry, by the way,
in Mr. Garrick's note-book. It lies against little
Dib Docket's name: —
“In H — the Chief of the Police estimates the
number of openly abandoned women at not less
-- 212 --
[figure description] Page 212.[end figure description]
than seventy-five, besides an equal number of a
less notorious and degraded class. `They are,'
said he, `brought before the Police Court again
and again. Most of them are under twenty years
of age. They come from the country and the
manufacturing towns. They are the children of
drunken and vicious parents.”'
Bub dips into the mouth of the door and crawls
up the stairs on “all fours,” so much, so very
much like a little puppy! He is a little afraid
of his overseer, being so late. At the top of the
stairs he loiters and looks down. In the blue
distance beyond the windows, the cascades are
just to be seen at their eternal play.
The machinery is making a great noise this
morning. The girls are trying to sing, but the
engines have got hold of the song, and crunch
it well. Bub, on the threshold of the spooling-room,
stops with a queer little chuckle like a sigh.
He wishes he need n't go in. It looks kinder
jolly out. Lor! don't it? Would a'most go to
school fur the sake uv gettin' out. But guesses
he must be too old.
Won't that boss jaw this mornin'! He 'll bet.
Hi-igh!
-- 213 --
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The strain from down stairs struggles and faints
as Bub goes in to work; as if the engines had a
mouthful of it, and were ready for more.
The “boss” does “jaw” this morning. Bub
expects it, deserves it, bears it, hangs his head
and holds his tongue, glad, on the whole, that it is
no worse. A cuff or a kick would not surprise
him. The overseer is a passionate man, of a race
of passionate men; an overseer by birthright;
comes from a family of them, modernized, in a
measure, to be sure. He can remember when his
father, being an overlooker in a Rhode Island mill,
carried to work a leathern strap, with tacks inserted,
for the flagellation of children. This man
himself can tell you of children whom he has run,
in some parts of the country, at night work, when
the little creatures dropped asleep upon their
feet, and he was obliged to throw water over
them to keep them awake and at work.
The girls down stairs are singing something
this morning about a “Happy Day.” Bub, dimly
hearing, dimly wonders what; having never had
but one green boy at the Mission, does not know;
thinks it has a pretty sound, wishes the wheels
would let it alone, hopes the boss is out of the way
-- 214 --
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now, wishes he had a chew, finds himself out of
tobacco, and recovers sufficiently from the mortification
of the “jawing” to lift his little, wrinkled
face — it seems as if it never before had borne
such wrinkles — to see what he can do about it.
Another little wrinkled face, old, yellow, sly,
and sad, works close beside him. It has mouth
and pockets full of quids.
“Give us a chaw,” says Bub.
“Not much,” says the little face, with a wink.
“Seems as if I should choke!” says Bub. “I
must have a chaw, Bill.”
“You don't do none of my chawin',” says Bill,
“less 'n five cents down.”
“Fact is,” says Bub, ruefully, “I 'm out o' cash
just now. Never you mind, though.”
Bub minds, however. He goes to work again
with one eye on Bill. Bill's pocket is torn down.
He must be green. You could a'most get a quid
out and he 'd never know it. Bub watches his
chance. He must have tobacco at any chance.
The child lives upon it, like an old toper on his
dram. Every inch of his little body craves it.
He is in a dry, feverish heat. He thinks he shall
burn up, if he does not get it. To work till
-- 215 --
[figure description] Page 215.[end figure description]
nooning without it is not to be thought of. He
meant to have sold that rat to a chap he knew,
and to have been supplied.
Think a cove of his size can work all day
without it? You — bet — not —
There is a spring and a cry. Bub has pounced
upon Bill's torn pocket. Bill has backed, and
dragged him. The wagging rag on Bub's little
trousers has caught in a belt.
All over the spooling-room there is a spring
and a cry.
All up the stairs there seems to be a spring
and a cry. They come from the song about the
Happy, Happy Day. The engines close teeth on
the song and the child together.
They stop the machinery; they run to and
fro; they huddle together; they pick up something
here, and wipe up something there, and
cover up something yonder, closely; they look
at one another with white faces; they sit down
sickly; they ask what is to do next.
There is nothing to do. Bub has saved the
State his two hundred and fifty dollars, and has
Bill's quid of tobacco in his mangled hand.
There is nothing to do. Life, like everything
-- 216 --
[figure description] Page 216.[end figure description]
else, was quite too young for Bub. He has got
so old, he has given it up.
There is nothing to do but to carry the news
now; nobody likes to carry the news to the sick
woman; nobody offers; the overseer, half wishing
that there had been an oath or two less in
the “jawing,” volunteers to help about the — the—
pieces, if they 'll find somebody to go on ahead.
That 's all he objects to; goin' on ahead.
Mr. Hayle the senior, who has been summoned
from the counting-room, takes his hat to go in
search of some one; would go himself, but the
fact is, he has never seen the woman, nor the
father to know him by name, and feels a delicacy
about obtruding his services. He mentions the
matter to his son, but Maverick succinctly refuses;
remembers just now, for the first time
since it happened, some long-past allusion of
Miss Kelso's to a drain, and concludes that his
personal sympathy can hardly be the most
desirable to offer to Mr. Mell.
Just without the mill-yard, bent upon some
early errand of her own, the two gentlemen
chance upon Perley.
-- 217 --
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“Ask her,” says the younger man, in a low
voice; “she would do to break ill news to the
mother of the Maccabees.”
They pause to tell her what has happened;
their shocked faces speak faster than their slow
words; she understands quite what is needed of
her; has turned the corner to East Street, while
their unfinished explanation hangs upon their
decorous lips.
The young man stands for a moment looking
after her swift, strong, helpful figure, as it
vanishes from view, with a sense of puzzled loss
upon his handsome face, but shrugs his shoulders,
and back in the counting-room shrugs them
again.
Perley is none too soon at the First Tenement
and No. 6.
The overlooker and his covered burden, and
the little crowd that trails whispering after it,
are just in sight, as she climbs the villanous
stairs.
The overlooker, and the covered burden, and
the whispering crowd, are none too late at the
First Tenement and No. 6.
Mr. Mell comes out from the sick-room on
-- 218 --
[figure description] Page 218.[end figure description]
tiptoe; the children crouch and hide their faces
behind the door; the doctor, who has been, has
gone, and the coughing and confusion are quite
over.
Mr. Mell stands still in the middle of the
kitchen, with his hand at his ear. Whether he
is listening to a thing which Perley says, — a
gentle, awful thing, said in a gentle, awful voice,—
or whether he is listening to certain sounds of
feet upon the stairs, it were difficult to say.
He stands still in the middle of the kitchen,
with his hand behind his ear.
The feet upon the stairs have climbed the
stairs, have passed the stairs, have passed the
door, have paused.
The overlooker, with his hat in his hand, has
laid the covered burden softly down upon the
mat behind the door, where the little burden,
like a little puppy, slept last night.
Mr. Mell sits down then in the nearest chair.
He points at the open bedroom door. He seems
to be weak from watching, and the hand with
which he points trembles badly.
“Do you see?” he says. “Look there. See,
don't ye? I 'm glad ye did n't come ten minute
-- 219 --
[figure description] Page 219.[end figure description]
sooner. It would ha' ben such a fretful thing for
her. She would ha' greeted sair, I 'm feared.
Keep the laddie well covered, will ye? I wald
na' like so much as her dead een to seem to see
it. It would ha' ben sae fretful for her; I wald
na' likit to see her greetin' ower the laddie. I
wald na' likit you; keep him covered, will ye?”
It is very touching to hear the man mourn
in the old long-disused Scotch words of his
youth, and very touching to hear what a cry
there is in the words themselves.
But it is not heart-breaking, like the thing
which he says in broad English, next. It is after
the overlooker has gone, and the covered burden
is laid decently upon a bed, and Perley has been
busied in and out of the bedroom, and the children
have been washed a little, and the “fust
gell,” crying bitterly over a cup of coffee which
she is trying to make, has been comforted, and a
cleanly silence has fallen upon the two rooms,
and upon the two beds with their mute occupants.
It is after he has sat stupidly still with his face
in his hands. It is just as Perley, seeing nothing
more that she can do for him, is softly shutting
the door to go and find flowers for little Bub.
-- 220 --
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Look a here. Say! What damages do you
think the mills 'll give me? I 'd ought to have
damages on the loss of the boy's wages. He was
earnin' reglar, and growin' too.
At the foot of the stairs Perley finds a girl
with large eyes, and soiled blue ribbons on her
hair, sitting and sobbing in her mill-dress, rubbing
the dust about her pretty face.
“I would n't sit here, Nynee,” suggests Perley
gently; “go up and help your sister, and do not
cry.”
“It seems as if everything fretful happened to
me,” sobs Nynee, pettishly. “The mills was bad
enough. Then it was mother, and then it was
somebody comin' in to tell me about Bub, and
now it 's both of 'em. I wish I 'd tied up Bub's
finger pleasant this morning. It 'll be fretfuller
than ever to home now. I wish I was dead like
them two; yes, I do. I had other things that
bothered me besides. I did n't want no more!”
“What other things?” asks Perley, very gently
sitting down on the stairs, and very wisely taking
no heed just now of the little miserable, selfish
sobs.
“O, different things. Things about
-- 221 --
[figure description] Page 221.[end figure description]
somebody that I — like, and somebody that I don't
like, and some folks that like some folks better
than me. I was bothered to death before!” cries
Nynee.
“Some time,” says Perley, “you shall tell me all
about them. Run up to your sister, now.”
Nynee runs up, and Perley, in going for Bub's
flowers, thinks that she would rather gain the
hearing of that little love-story, sitting on the
dirty stairs, than to get the girl to church with
her for a year to come.
-- 222 -- p476-227
CHAPTER XI. GOING INTO SOCIETY.
[figure description] Page 222.[end figure description]
“DELIGHTED, Perley, I am sure, and shall
be sure to come. Nothing could give
us greater pleasure than a day with you in your
lovely, Quixotic, queer venture of a home. Mamma
begs me, with her love and acceptance, to
assure you that she appreciates,” etc., etc.
“As for my friends, the Van Doozles of New
York, you know, (it is Kenna Van Doozle who is
engaged to Mr. Blodgett,) they are charmed. It
was just like you to remember them in your
kind,” etc.
“And actually to see for ourselves one of your
dear, benevolent, democratic, strong-minded reunions,
of which we have heard so much! What
could be more?” etc.
“I promise you that I will be very good and
considerate of your protégés. I will wear nothing
gayer than a walking-suit, and I will inform myself
-- 223 --
[figure description] Page 223.[end figure description]
beforehand upon the ten-hour question, and I will
be as charming as I know how, so that you shall
not regret having honored me by,” etc.
“And now, my dear Perley, I cannot come to
Five Falls without telling you myself what I
should break my heart if you should hear from
anybody but myself.
“I know that you must have guessed my little
secret before now. But Maverick and I thought
that we should like at least to pretend that it was
a secret for a little while.
“Ah, Perley, I see your great wise eyes smile!
Do you know, I suspect that you were too wise for
him, dear boy! He seems to think a little, foolish,
good-for-nothing girl like me would make
him happy.
“And I know he wants me to say, dear Perley,
how we have neither of us ever had any hardness
in our hearts towards you, or ever can. How
can we now? We are so very happy! And I
know how wise he thinks you still, and how
good. So very good! A great deal better than
his ridiculous little Fly, I have no doubt; but
then, you see, we don't either of us mind that,”
etc., etc., etc.
-- 224 --
[figure description] Page 224.[end figure description]
Fly's note preceded Fly by but a few hours, it
so chanced. That evening Miss Kelso's parlors
presented what Fly perhaps was justified in calling
“such a dear, delightful, uncommon appearance.”
Kenna Van Doozle called it outré. She was
sitting on a sofa by Nynee Mell when she said so.
It was a stifling July night, and closed a stifling
day. Mrs. Silver, in the cars, on the Shore Line,
and swept by sea breezes, had “suffered agonies,”
so she said. Even in the close green dark of
Miss Kelso's lofty rooms, life had ceased to be desirable,
and the grasshopper had been a burden,
until dusk and dew-fall.
“In the houses from which my guests are
coming to-night,” she had said at supper, “the
mercury has not been below 90°, day nor night,
for a week.”
Her guests seemed to appreciate the fact;
shunned the hot lawn and garden, where a pretty
show of Chinese lanterns and a Niobe at a fountain
(new upon the grounds, this year) usually
attracted them, and grouped in the preserved
coolness of the parlor.
Her guests, in those parlors, were worth a ride
from town in the glare to meet.
-- 225 --
[figure description] Page 225.[end figure description]
There were some thirty, perhaps, in all; families,
for the most part, just as they came. Mr.
Mell, for instance, in decent clothes; the “fust
gell,” with one of the children; Nynee, in light
muslin and bright ribbons; old Bijah Mudge in
a corner with little Dib Docket, — they sent Dib
to the poorhouse by especial permit to bring
him, always; Catty, closely following the crisp
rustle of the hostess's plain white dress (Sip was
delayed, nobody knew just why); and Dirk Burdock,
apart from the other young fellows, drifting
restlessly in and out of the hot, bright lawn;
little knots of young people chattering over picture-racks;
a sound of elections and the evening
news in other knots where their fathers stood with
hands behind them; the elder women easily
seated in easy-chairs; a tangle about the piano,
where a young weaver was doing a young waltz
very well.
Now there was one very remarkable thing
about these thirty people. With the exception
of a little plainness about their dress (plainness
rather than roughness, since in America we will
die of bad drainage, but we will manage to have
a “best suit” when occasion requires) and an air
-- 226 --
[figure description] Page 226.[end figure description]
of really enjoying themselves, they did not, after
all, leave a very different impression upon the
superficial spectator from that of any thirty people
whom Fly Silver might collect at a musicale.
The same faces at their looms to-morrow you
could not identify.
“I suppose they 're on their best behavior,”
suggested Fly, in an opportunity.
“What have you and I been on all our lives?”
asked Perley, smiling. “One does not behave
till one has a chance.”
“And not in the least afraid of us,” observed
Fly, with some surprise. “I was afraid we should
make it awkward for them.”
“But how,” asked Miss Van Doozle, with
her pale eyes full of a pale perplexity, — “you
are exceedingly original, I know, — but how, for
instance, have you ever brought this about? I
had some such people once, in a mission class; I
could do nothing with them; they pulled the fur
out of my muff, and got up and left in the middle
of the second prayer.”
“I have brought nothing about,” said Perley,
“They have brought themselves about. All that
-- 227 --
[figure description] Page 227.[end figure description]
I do is to treat these people precisely as I treat
you, Miss Van Doozle.”
“Ah?” blankly from Miss Van Doozle.
“For instance,” said the hostess in moving
away, “I get up thirty or so of those every fortnight.
I don't know how this came here. Put it
in your pocket, please.”
She tossed from the card-basket a delicate
French envelope, of the latest mode of monogram
and tint, enclosing a defective invitation in her
own generous hand, running: —
“Miss Kelso requests the pleasure of Mr. Mell's
company at half past seven o'clock on Friday evening
next.
“July 15.”
“Perley,” observed Mrs. Silver, pensively,
“ought to have been a literary character. I have
always said so; have n't I, Fly?”
“Why, mamma?” asked Fly.
“That excuses so much always, my dear,” softly
said Mrs. Silver.
There seemed to be some stir and stop in Miss
Kelso's “evening,” that hot Friday. Dirk Burdock,
restlessly diving in and out of the lawn,
finally found his hat, and, apparently at the
-- 228 --
[figure description] Page 228.[end figure description]
hostess's request, excused himself and disappeared.
The young weaver played the young waltz out,
and politics in corners lulled.
“It is a Victor Hugo evening,” explained Miss
Kelso to her friends from town, “and our reader
has not come. We always manage to accomplish
something. I wish you could have heard an
essay on Burns from a Scotchman out of the
printing-rooms, a fortnight ago. Or some of our
Dickens readings. Something of that or this
kind takes better with the men than a musical
night; though we have some fine voices, I assure
you. I wish, Fly, you would play to us a little,
while we are waiting.”
Fly, not quite knowing what else to do, but feeling
surprisingly ill at ease, accomplished a sweet
little thin thing, and was prettily thanked by
somebody somewhere; but still the reader had
not come.
It has been said, upon authority, that the
next thing which happened was the Andante from
the Seventh Symphony, Miss Kelso herself at
the keys.
Mrs. Silver looked at Miss Van Doozle. Miss
Van Doozle looked at Mrs. Silver.
-- 229 --
[figure description] Page 229.[end figure description]
“She has made a mistake,” said Mrs. Silver's
look.
“The people cannot appreciate Beethoven,”
was Miss Van Doozle's look.
Now, in truth, Beethoven could not have asked
a stiller hearing than he and Miss Kelso commanded
out of those thirty work-worn factory
faces.
The blind-mute Catty stood beside Miss Kelso
while she played. She passed the tips of her
fingers like feathers over the motion of Perley's
hands. It was a privilege she had. She bent
her head forward, with her lip dropped and dull.
“When she plays,” she often said to Sip,
“there 's wings of things goes by.”
“What, wings?” asked Sip.
“I don't know — wings. When I catch, they
fly.”
Miss Kelso's elegant white, without flaw or
pucker of trimming, presented a broad and shining
background to the poor creature's puzzled
figure. Catty seemed to borrow a glory from it,
as a lean Byzantine Madonna will, from her
gilded sky. Mrs. Silver fairly wiped her eyes.
After Beethoven there was Nynee Mell, with a
-- 230 --
[figure description] Page 230.[end figure description]
song or two in Scotch; and then another stop
and stir. The reader, they said, was coming.
Fly Silver, in the pauses, had done very well.
She was a good-hearted little lady, and nobody
succeeded in being afraid of her. She had catechised
Dib Docket a little, and effected a timid
acquaintance with Bijah Mudge. The old man
was in a wise dotage peculiarly his own. He
came, however, regularly to Miss Kelso's “evenings”;
enjoyed his saucer of ice-cream as much
as any other child there; and yet always managed
to gather about him a little audience of men with
frowns in their foreheads, who listened to his
wild ravings with a kind of instinctive respect,
which pleased the old fellow amazingly.
He had a paper in his hand which he showed
to Fly. He always had a paper in his hand. It
was a petition to the Legislature of the State of
Massachusetts, with illustrated margins of etchings
in pen and ink. The designs ran all to foliage, —
indiscriminate underbrush at first glance;
upon examination, forests came out in rows; upon
study, hands came out from the forests, hundreds
of them, from bough, from twig, from stem, from
leaf. The forest on the left margin wrung its
-- 231 --
[figure description] Page 231.[end figure description]
hands, it seemed. The forest on the right margin
clapped them smartly.
“What for?” asked Fly, politely.
“Is it not written,” said the old man, solemnly,
“that in that day all the trees of the field shall
clap their hands?”
“But what about?” persisted Fly.
“The voice said, `Cry!”' said Bijah, shrilly;
“and I said, `What shall I cry?”' He lifted
his petition to the Legislature of the State of
Massachusetts in his shaking hand, and fixed his
bleared eyes over it upon Fly's pretty, frightened
face. “What shall I cry? `And thou
saidst in thine heart, I shall be a lady forever; so
that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart,
neither didst remember the latter end of it!”'
“O dear!” said Fly, and rippled away.
“A Hebrew prophet and a canary-bird,”
thought Perley, when she heard of it.
Fly rippled out into the hall, where the stir
and stop seemed to have centred. The hostess
was there, talking to Sip Garth in a low tone.
Dirk Burdock was there, having found Sip, he
said, half - way over; and a young Irish girl
whom Sip had with her, a fine-featured little
-- 232 --
[figure description] Page 232.[end figure description]
creature, with heavy sodden circles about her eyes
and mouth.
She was sorry to be so late, Sip was saying,
“But Maggie 'd set her heart so on coming, you
see; and there she lay and fainted, and I have
n't been able to bring her round enough to get
over here till this minute. Her folks was all
away, and I could n't seem to leave her; and
she did so set her heart on coming! She has
been carried in a faint out of the mill four times
to-day — out into the air, and a dash of water —
and back again; and down again. The thermometer
has stood at 115° in our room to-day.
It has n't been below 110° not since last Saturday.
It 's 125° in the dressing-room. There 's
men in the dressing-room with the blood all
gathered black about their faces, just from heat;
they look like men in a fit; they 're all purple.
You 'd ought to see the clothes we wear! —
drenched like fine folks' bathing-clothes. I could
wring mine out. We call it the lake of fire, — our
room. That 's all I could think of since Sunday:
the Last Day and the lake with all the folks in it.
I have n't been in such a coolness not since I
was here last time, Miss Kelso. It 's most as bad
as hell to be mill-folks in July!”
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“A blowzy, red-faced girl,” Miss Van Doozle
thought, when the reader came in.
“My Lords!” began the red-faced reader, “I
impart to you a novelty. The human race exists”....
“We have nothing so popular,” whispered
Miss Kelso, “as that girl's readings and recitations.
They ring well.”
“An unappreciated Siddons, perhaps?” The
pale Van Doozle eyes assumed the homœopathic
trituration of a sarcasm. The Van Doozle eyes
were not used to Sip exactly.
“I have thought that there might be greater
than Siddons in Sip,” replied Miss Kelso, musingly;
“but not altogether of the Siddons sort, I
admit.”
Sip followed Miss Kelso, in the breaking up of
the evening, after the books and the ices were
out of the way. They had some plan about the
little Irish girl already; a week's rest at least.
There was that family on the Shore Line; and
the hush of the sea; where they took such care of
poor Bert Bush. If Catty were well, Sip would
take her down.
“I know the girl. She must be got away till
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this drought's over. She 'll work till the breath
is out of her, but she 'll work; has a brother in
an insane asylum, and likes to pay his board.
Maggie 's obstinate as death about such things.
You 'd ought to see her pushing back her hair
and laughing out, when she come out of those
faints to-day, and at it again, for all anybody
could say. You would n't think that she 'd ever
take to Jim, would you? But got over it, I guess.
Had a hard time, though. Look here! I found
a piece in a newspaper yesterday, and cut it out
to show to you.”
Sip handed to Miss Kelso, with a smile, a slip
from one of the leading city dailies, reading
thus: —
“What is generally written about Lorenzo factory-girls
is sensational and pure nonsense. They
are described as an overworked class, rung up,
rung out, rung in; as going to their labors worn,
dispirited, and jaded; as dreading to meet their
task-masters in those stifling rooms, where they
have cultivated breathing as a fine art; as coming
home from their thraldom happy but for
thoughts of the resumption of their toil on the
morrow. The fact is, sympathy has been offered
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where it was not needed. The officers of the mills
and the girls themselves will tell you the tasks
are not exhaustive. No one gets so tired that
she cannot enjoy the evening, every thought
of work dismissed. Her employment is such that
constant attention is not demanded. She may
frequently sit thinking of the past or planning
for the future. She earns nearly four dollars per
week, beside her board. The pleasantest relations
subsist between her and her overseer, who
is frequently the depositary of her funds, who
perhaps goes with her to buy her wedding or
household outfit, who is her counsellor and protector.
Her step is not inelastic, but firm.....
The mills are high studded, well ventilated, and
scrupulously clean. The girls are healthy and well
looking, and men and women, who have worked
daily for twenty or thirty years, are still in undiminished
enjoyment of sound lungs and limbs.”
“I never was in Lorenzo,” said Sip, drily, as
Perley folded the slip, “but mills are mills. I 'd
like to see the fellow that wrote that.”
Fly and her friends had sifted into the library,
while Miss Kelso's guests were thinning.
“This, I suppose,” Mrs. Silver was sadly
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saying, “is but a specimen of our poor dear Perley's
life.”
“You speak as if she were dead and buried,
mamma,” said Fly, making a dazzling little heap
of herself upon a cricketful of pansies.
“So she is,” affirmed Mrs. Silver, plaintively,—
“so she is, my dear, as far as Society is concerned.
I have been struck this evening by the
thought, what a loss to Society! Why, Miss
Kenna, I am told that this superb house has
been more like a hospital or a set of public souprooms
for six months past, than it has like the
retiring and secluded home of a young lady.
Those people overrun it. They are made welcome
to it at all hours and under all circumstances.
She invites them to tea, my dear!
They sit down at her very table with her. I
have known her to bring out Mirabeau from town
to furnish their music for them. Would you
credit it? Mirabeau! In the spring she bought
a Bierstadt. I was with her at the time. `I
have friends in Five Falls who have never seen
a Bierstadt,' she said. Now what do you call
that? I call it morbid,” nodded the lady, making
soft gestures with her soft hands, — “morbid!”
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“I don't suppose anybody knows the money
that she has put into her libraries, and her model
tenements, and all that, either,” mused Fly, from
her cricket.
“It does well enough in that Mr. Garrick,”
proceeded Mrs. Silver, in a gentle bubble of despair;
“I don't object to fanatical benevolence in
a man like him. It is natural, of course. He is
self-made entirely; twenty years ago might have
come to Miss Kelso's evenings himself, you
know. It is excusable in him, though awkward
in the firm, as I had reason to know, when he
started to build that chapel. Now there is
another of poor Perley's freaks. What does
she do but leave Dr. Dremaine's, where she
had at least the dearest of rectors and the best
pew-list in Five Falls, on the ground that the
mill-people do not frequent Dr. Dremaine's, and
take a pew in the chapel herself! They have a
young preacher there fresh from a seminary,
and Perley and the mill-girls will sit in a row
together and hear him! Now that may be
Christianity,” adds Mrs. Silver, in a burst of
heroism, “but I call it morbidness, sheer morbidness!”
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“But these people are very fond of Perley,
mamma,” urged Fly, lifting some honest trouble
in her face out of the pretty shine that she made
in the dim library.
“They ought to be!” said Mrs. Silver, with
unwonted sharpness.
Now Fly, in her own mind, had meant to find
out something about that; she went after the
Hugo reader, it just occurring to her, and took
her into a corner before everybody was gone.
She made a great glitter of herself here too;
she could not help it, in her shirred lace and
garnets. Sip looked her over, smiling as she
would at a pretty kitten. Sip was more gentle
in her judgments of “that kind of folks” than
she used to be.
“What do we think of her?” Sip's fitful face
flushed. “How can I tell you what we think of
her? There 's those of us here, young girls of us,”
Nynee Mell's blue ribbons, just before them, were
fluttering through the door, “that she has saved
from being what you would n't see in here to-night.
There 's little children here that would be little
devils, unless it was for her. There 's men of us
with rum to fight, and boys in prison, and debts to
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pay, and hearts like hell, and never a friend in
this world or the other but her. There 's others
of us, that — that — God bless her!” broke off
Sip, bringing her clenched little hands together,—
“God bless her, and the ground she treads on,
and the air she breathes, and the sky that is over
her, and the friends that love her, and the walls
of her grand house, and every dollar of her
money, and every wish she wishes, and all the
prayers she prays — but I cannot tell you, young
lady, what we think of her!”
“But Society,” sighed Mrs. Silver, — “Society
has rights which every lady is bound to respect;
poor Perley forgets her duties to Society. Where
we used to meet her in our circle three times, we
meet her once now.”
“Once of Perley is equal to three times of
most people,” considered Fly, appearing with
Maverick (who had slipped in as the “evening”
slipped out) from some lovers' corner. “And she
does n't rust, you must own, mamma; and seems
to enjoy herself so, besides.”
“I have understood,” observed the elder Miss
Van Doozle, “that she has been heard to say
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that she could never spend an evening in an
ordinary drawing-room party happily again.”
This, in fact, was a report very common about
Miss Kelso at one time. Those well acquainted
with her and with her movements in Five Falls
will remember it.
“Poor Perley” herself came in just in time to
hear it then.
“I always forgave the falsity of that, for the
suggestiveness of it,” she said, laughing.
“A thoughtful set of guests you have here,”
said Fly. “We have been finding fault with you
all the evening.”
“That is what I expected.”
“So we supposed. Perley!”
“Well, my dear?”
“Are you happy?”
“Quite happy, Fly.”
“I should be so miserable!” said Fly, with a
shade of the honest trouble still on her pretty
face.
“I have been saying,” began Mrs. Silver, “that
Society is a great loser by your philanthropy,
Perley.”
Perley lighted there.
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“Society!” she said, “I feel as if I had but
just begun to go into society!”
“But, on your theories,” said Kenna Van
Doozle, with a clumsy smile of hers, “we shall
have our cooks up stairs playing whist with us,
by and by.”
“And if we did?” quietly. “But Miss Van
Doozle, I am not a reformer; I have n't come to
the cooks yet; I am only a feeler. The world
gets into the dark once in a while, you know;
throws out a few of us for groping purposes.”
“Kenna and I, for instance, being spots on the
wings?” asked Fly.
“Naturalists insist that the butterfly will pause
and study its own wings, wrapt in —”
“O Maverick!”
“Admiration,” finished Maverick.
“But one must feel by something,” persisted
Fly, “guess or measure. It is all very beautiful
in you, Perley. But it seems to me such a
venture. I should be frightened out of it a dozen
times over.”
Perley took a little book out of a rack upon one
of the tables, where Mr. Mell's ice-cream saucer yet
lay unremoved, — Isaac Taylor in bevelled board.
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“Here,” she said, “is enough to feel by, even
if I feel my way to your cook, Miss Kenna.”
“`To insure, therefore, its large purpose of good-will
to man, the law of Christ spreads out its
claims very far beyond the circle of mere pity or
natural kindness, and in absolute and peremptory
terms demands for the use of the poor, the ignorant,
the wretched, and demands from every one
who names the name of Christ, the whole residue
of talent, wealth, time, that may remain after
primary claims have been satisfied.”'
-- 243 -- p476-248
CHAPTER XII. MAPLE LEAVES.
[figure description] Page 243.[end figure description]
AN incident connected with Miss Kelso's experiments
in Five Falls, valuable chiefly
as indicative of the experimenter, and rather as a
hint than as history, occurred in the ripening
autumn. It has been urged upon me to find
place for it, although it is fragmentary and
incomplete.
A distant sea-swell of a strike was faintly
audible in Hayle and Kelso.
Hayle and Kelso were in trouble. Standfast
Brothers, of Town, solid as rock and old as
memory, had gone down; gone as suddenly and
blackly as Smashem & Co. of yesterday, and
gone with a clutch on Five Falls cotton, under
which Five Falls shook dizzily.
The serene face of the senior partner took, for
the first time since 1857, an anxious, or, it might
rather be called, an annoyed groove. All the
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manufacturing panics of the war had fanned it
placidly, but Standfast Brothers were down, and
behold, the earth reeled and the foundations
thereof.
Two things, therefore, resulted. The progress
of the new mill was checked, and a notice of
reduction of wages went to the hands.
The sea-swell murmured.
Hayle and Kelso heard nothing.
The sea-swell growled.
Hayle and Kelso never so much as turned the
head.
The sea-swell splashed out a few delegates and
a request, respectful enough, for consultation and
compromise.
“We will shut down the mills first!” said
young Mr. Hayle between his teeth.
So the swell broke with a roar the next “Lord's
day.”
The groove grew a little jagged across the
Senior's face. A strike, it is well known, is by no
means necessarily an undesirable thing. Stock
accumulates. The market quickens. You keep
your finger on its pulse. You repair your machinery
and bide your time. A thousand people,
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living from hand to mouth, may be under your
finger, empty-handed. What so easy as a little
stir of the finger now and then? You are not
hungry meanwhile; your daughter has her winter
clothes. You sit and file handcuffs playfully,
against that day when your “hands” shall have
gone hungry long enough. No more striking
presently! Meantime, you may amuse yourself.
There is something noteworthy about this
term “strike.” A head would think and outwit
us. A heart shall beat and move us. The
“hands” can only struggle and strike us, — foolishly
too, and madly, here and there, and desperately,
being ill-trained hands, never at so much
as a boxing-school, and gashing each other principally
in the contest.
There had been strikes in Hayle and Kelso
which had not caused a ruffle upon the Senior's
gentlemanly, smooth brow or pleasant smile; but
just now a strike was unfortunate.
“Very unfortunate,” said Mr. Hayle in the
counting-room on pay-day, in the noise of the
breaking swell.
The Company were all upon the ground, silent
and disturbed. There was a heavy crowd at the
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gates, and the sound of the overseers' voices in
altercation with them, made its way in jerks to
the counting-room.
By a chance Miss Kelso was in the counting-room;
had been over to put Mill's “Liberty”
into the library, and had been detained by the
gathering crowd.
She was uneasy like the rest; was in and out,
taking her own measure of the danger.
“There is nothing to be done,” said Mr. Garrick,
anxiously, the last time that she came into
the little gloomy room where they were sitting. It
was beginning to rain, and the windows, through
which growing spots of lowering faces could be
seen darkening the streets, were spattered and
dirty. “There is nothing to do about it. If
they will, they will. Had you better stay here?
We may have a noisy time of it.”
“There is one thing to do,” said the young
lady, decidedly, “only one. I wish, Mr. Garrick,
that you had never shut me out of this firm. I
belonged here! You do not one of you know
now what it is for your own interest to do!”
Mr. Hayle signified, smiling across his groove
of anxiety, that she was at liberty, of course, to
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offer any valuable suggestion with which she
might be prepared for such an emergency.
“And fold my hands for a romantic woman
after it. However, that does not alter the fact;
there is just one thing to do to prevent the most
serious strike known in Five Falls yet. I know
those men better than you do.”
“We know them well enough,” said Maverick,
with a polite sneer. “This is a specimen of
`intelligent labor,' a fair one! These fellows
are like a horse blind in one eye; they will run
against a barn to get away from a barrel. Loose
the rein, and there 's mischief immediately. You
may invite them to supper to the end of their
days, Miss Kelso; but when you are in a genuine
difficulty, they will turn against you just as they
are doing now. There 's neither gratitude nor
common business sense among them. There 's
neither trust nor honor. They have no confidence
in their employers, and no foresight for
themselves. They would ruin us altogether for
fifty cents a week. A parcel of children with the
blessed addition of a few American citizens at
their head!”
“I was about to propose,” said Perley, quietly,
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“that their employers should exhibit some trust
or confidence in them. I want Mr. Garrick to
go out and tell them why we must reduce their
wages.”
“Truly a young lady's suggestion,” said the
Senior.
“It is none of their business,” said Maverick,
“why we reduce their wages.”
Stephen Garrick said nothing.
“Such a course was never taken in the company,”
said the Senior.
“And never ought to be,” said the Junior. “It
is an unsuitable position for an employer to take,—
unsuitable! And disastrous as a precedent.
Next thing we know, we should have them regulating
the salary of our clerks and the size of
our invoices. Outside of the fancy of a cooperative
economist, such a principle would be
im— What a noise they 're making!”
“Every minute is precious,” exclaimed Perley,
rising nervously. “I tell you I know those men!
They will trust Mr. Stephen Garrick, if he treats
them like reasonable beings before it is too
late!”
The counting-room door slammed there, behind
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a messenger from the clerk. Things looked badly,
he said; the Spinners' Union had evidently been
at work; there were a few brickbats about, and rum
enough to float a schooner; and an ugly kind of
setness all around; we were in for it, he thought,
now. Were there any orders?
No, no orders.
The counting-room door slammed again, and
the noise outside dashed against the sound with
a little spurt of defiance.
“It would be a most uncommon course to
take,” said the Senior, uneasily; “but the emergency
is great, and perhaps if Mr. Garrick felt
inclined to undertake such an extraordinary —”
Miss Kelso overrated his chances of success,
Mr. Garrick said, but she did not overrate the
importance of somebody's doing something. He
was willing to make the attempt.
The counting-room door slammed once more;
the spurt died down; the swell reared its head,
writhing a little to see what would happen.
Mr. Garrick took his hat off, and stood in the
door.
It was an ugly crowd, with a disheartening
“setness” about it. He wished, when he looked
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it over, that he had not come; but stood with
his hat off, smiling.
He was smiling still when he came back to
the counting-room.
“Well?” asked Perley.
“For an unpopular master —”
“O hush!” said Perley.
“For an unpopular master,” repeated Mr. Garrick,
“I did as well as I expected. In fact, just
what I expected all the time has happened.
Listen!”
He held the door open. A cry came in from
outside, —
“Ask the young leddy!”
“You see, you should have gone in the first
place,” said the unpopular master, patiently.
“The rest of us are good for little, without your
indorsement.”
“Call the young leddy! Let's hear what the
young leddy says to 't! The young leddy! The
young leddy!”
The demand came in at the counting-room
door just as the “young leddy” went out.
The people parted for her right and left.
She stood in the mud, in the rain, among them.
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They made room for her, just as the dark day
would have made room for a sunbeam. The
drunkest fellows, some of them, slunk to the circumference
of the circle that had closed about
her. Oaths and brickbats seemed to have been
sucked out to sea by a sudden tide of respectability.
It has been said by those who witnessed
it that it was a scene worth seeing.
“She just stood in the mud and the rain,” said
Sip Garth, in telling the story. “If we 'd all
been in her fine parlors, we would n't have been
stiller. There was a kind of a shame and a sense
came to us, to see her standing so quiet in the
rain. The fellow that opened his lips for a
roughness before her would ha' been kicked into
the gutter, I can tell you. It was just like her.
There 's never mud nor rain amongst us, but you
look, and there she is! That day there seemed
to be a shining to her. We were all worked up
and angered; and she stood so white and still.
There was a minute that she looked at us, and
she looked — why, she looked as if she 'd be poor
folks herself, if only she could say how sorry she
was for us. Then she blazed out at us! `Did
Mr. Garrick ever tell any man of us a word but
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[figure description] Page 252.[end figure description]
honest truth?' she wanted to know. `And has
n't he proved himself a friend to every soul of
you that needed friendliness?' says she. `And
when he told you that he must reduce your
wages, you should n't have sent for me!' says
she. But then she talks to us about the trouble
that the Company was in, and a foolishness
creeps round amongst us, as if we wished we
were at home. It 's not that they so much disbelieved
Mr. Garrick,” said Sip, “but when she
said she could n't afford to pay 'em, they believed
that.”
“I don't understand about these things,” said
Reuben Mell, slowly stepping out from the
crowd. “It 's very perplexing to me. It does n't
mean a dollar's worth less of horses and carriages,
and grand parties to the Company, such a trouble
as this don't seem to. And it means as we go
without our breakfast so 's the children sha' n't be
hungry; and it means as when our shoes are wore
out, we know no more than a babby in its cradle
where the next pair is to come from. That 's
what reduction o' wages means to us. I don't
understand the matter myself, but I 'm free to
say that we 'll not doubt as the young leddy does.
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I 'll take the young leddy's word for it, this time,
for one.”
Mr. Mell, with this, peaceably stepped up and
took the reduction from the counter, and peaceably
went home with it.
There was a little writhing of the flood-tide at
this, and then an ebb.
Miss Kelso came out of it, and left it to bubble
by itself for a while.
Within half an hour it had ebbed away, leaving
only a few weeds of small boys and a fellow
too drunk to float in sight of the mill-gate.
Until at least next “Lord's day,” there would
be no strike in Hayle and Kelso.
By that time Mr. Garrick hoped that we
should be upon our feet again.
Mr. Garrick walked home with Miss Kelso in
the autumn rain.
Unfortunately for the weed of a fellow stranded
in the mill-yard, they passed and recognized him.
It was the overseer, Irish Jim. Next morning
he received his notice. They had borne with
him too long, and warned him too often, Mr.
Garrick insisted. Go he should, and go he did.
But Mr. Garrick walked home with Miss Kelso
in the autumn rain.
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They passed between the cotton-house and
the old boiler, in going out. Dirk Burdock had
stepped through just before them, trying to overtake
Sip in the distance, hurrying home. Either
this circumstance or a mood of the mill-master's
own recalled to his mind his midnight talk with
the young watchman on that spot, and what Dirk
had said of its being a “churchly place.” It was
a dreary, dingy place now, in the gray stormlight,
prosaic and extremely rusty. He held the
lady's cloak back from the boiler in passing by.
His hand had but brushed the hem of her
garment, but it trembled visibly. He touched a
priestess in a water-proof. Fire from heaven fell
before his eyes upon the yellow boiler. Such a
“churchliness” struck the mill-yard, that the
man would have lifted his hat, but considered
that he would take cold, and so kept it on like a
sensible fellow.
Of course he loved her. How should he help
it? Anybody but Perley would have thought
of it, long ago.
Yet, oddly enough, nobody had thought of it.
Occasionally one meets people, though they are
rather apt to be men than women, who seem to
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[figure description] Page 255.[end figure description]
go mailed through life in a gossip-proof armor.
Perley Kelso is one of them. Rumor winks and
blinks and shuts its eyes upon her. Your unpleasant
stories, “had upon authority,” pass her
by unscathed. This young lady's life had been a
peculiar, rather a public one, for now nearly two
years, and in its most vital interests Stephen
Garrick had stood heart and soul and hand in
hand with her. Yet her calm eyes turned upon
him that autumn afternoon as placidly as they
did upon the old boiler. When she saw that
tremble of the hand, she said: “You are cold?
It is growing chilly. The counting-room was
close.”
How could man help it? Of course he loved
her. He had seen the shining of her rare, fine
face in such strange places! In sick-rooms and
in the house of mourning he had learned to listen
for the stealing, strong sweetness of her young
voice. They had met by death-beds and over
graves. They had burrowed into mysteries of
misery and sin, in God's name, together. Wherever
people were cold, hungry, friendless, desolate,
in danger, in despair, she struck across his
path. Wherever there was a soul for which no
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[figure description] Page 256.[end figure description]
man cared, he found her footprints. Wherever
there was a life to be lifted from miasmas to
heights, he saw the waving of her confident
white hand. If ever there were earnest work,
solemn work, solitary work, mistrusted work,
work misunderstood, neglected, discouraging,
hopeless, thankless, — Christ's work, to be done,
he faced her.
Now, among several hundred factory-operatives,
it naturally happened that he had thus
faced her not infrequently.
The woman's life had become a service in a
temple, and he had lighted the candles for her.
One would miss it, perhaps, to worship in the
dark? The man asked himself the question, turning
his face stiffly against the autumn storm.
There had been no sun since yesterday. The
sky was locked with a surcharged cloud. A fine,
swift rain blurred the outlines of the river-banks
and hills.
“And yet,” he said, “the day seems to be full
of sun. Do you notice? There is light about us
everywhere.”
“It is from the hickories and maples,” said
Perley.
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Ripened leaves streaked and dotted their path,
wreathed blazing arms about the pine groves,
smouldered over the fields, flung themselves
scorched into the water, flared across the dam,
and lighted the little cascades luridly. The singular
effect of dying trees on a dead day was at
its richest. One could not believe that the sun
did not shine.
“An unreal light,” said Stephen Garrick, hardly,
“and ugly. We should find it cold to live
by.”
“I had not thought of that,” said Perley, smiling;
“I rather like it.”
Her face, as she lifted it to his, seemed to warm
itself at its own calm eyes; slowly, perhaps, as if
the truant day had tried to leave a chill upon it,
but thoroughly and brightly.
Garrick turned, and looked it over and over
and through and through, — the lifted haunting
face!
What a face it was! His own turned sharply
gray.
“I see no room for me there!” he said, and
stopped short where he stood.
No; he was right. There was no room. The
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[figure description] Page 258.[end figure description]
womanly, calm face leaped with quick color, then
drifted pale as his own.
“Let us walk on,” said Garrick, with a twang
in his voice.
They walked on nervously. Neither spoke
just then. They walked on, under and through
a solid arch of the unreal sunshine, which a phalanx
of maples made in meeting over their heads.
“I had hoped,” said Stephen Garrick then,
between his breath, “that I had — a chance. I
have been — stupid, perhaps. A man is so slow
to feel that he has — no chance. I have not
played at love like — many men. There has
been such an awfulness,” said Stephen Garrick,
passing his hand confusedly over his eyes, —
“such an awfulness about the ground I have
seen you tread upon. Most men love women in
parlors and on play-days; they can sing them
little songs, they can tie up flowers for them,
they can dance and touch their hands. I — I
have had no way in which to love you. We
have done such awful work together. In it,
through it, by it, because of it, I loved `you. I
think there 's something — in the love — that is
like the work. It has struck me under a ledge
-- 259 --
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of granite, I believe. Miss Kelso, it would come
up — hard.”
His hand dropped against his side, very slowly,
but the blue nails clenched the flesh from its
palm.
What did the woman mean? What should he
do with the sight, sound, touch of her; the rustle
of her dress, the ripple of her sweet breath, the
impenetrable calm of her grieving eyes?
He felt himself suddenly lifted and swung from
the centre of his controlled, common, regulated,
and regulating days. Five Falls operatives
ceased to appear absorbing as objects of life.
How go dribbling ideal Christian culture through
highways and hedges, if a man sat and starved on
husks himself, before the loaded board? The
salvation of the world troubled him yesterday.
To-day there was only this woman in it.
They two, in the mock light of dying leaves,
they two only and together, stood, the Alpha and
Omega, in the name of nature and in the sight
of God.
“I have loved you,” said the man, trembling
heavily, “so long! My life has not been like
that of — many people. I have taken it — hard
-- 260 --
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and slowly. I have loved you slowly, and —
hard. You ought to love me. Before God, I
say you ought to love me!”
“The fact is — ” said Perley, in her sensible,
every-day voice.
Stephen Garrick drew breath and straightened
himself. His blanched face quivered and set
into its accustomed angles. His shut fingers
opened, and he cleared his throat. He struck to
his orbit. Ah! Where had he been? Most
too old a man for that! See how he had let
the rain drip on her. He grasped his umbrella.
He could go to a Mission meeting now. All the
women in the world might shake their beautiful
heads at him under yellow maple-trees in an
autumn rain!
“The fact is?” he gravely asked.
“The fact is,” repeated Perley, “that I have no
time to think of love and marriage, Mr. Garrick.
That is a business, a trade, by itself to women.
I have too much else to do. As nearly as I can
understand myself, that is the state of the case.
I cannot spare the time for it.”
And yet, as nearly as she understood herself,
she might have loved this man. The dial of her
-- 261 --
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young love and loss cast a little shadow in her
sun to-day. She felt old before her time. All
the glamour that draws men and women together
had escaped her somehow. Possible wifehood
was no longer an alluring dream. Only its prosaic
and undesirable aspects presented themselves
to her mind. No bounding impulse cried
within her: That is happiness! There is rest!
But only: It were unreasonable; it is unwise.
And yet she might have loved the man. In
all the world, she felt as if he only came within
calling distance of her life. Out of all the world,
she would have named him as the knightly soul
that hers delighted to honor.
Might have loved him? Did she love him?
Garrick's hungry eyes pierced the lifted face
again over and over, through and through. If
not in this world, in another, perhaps? In any?
Somewhere? Somehow?
“I cannot tell,” said the woman, as if she had
been called; “I do not need you now. Women
talk of loneliness. I am not lonely. They are
sick and homeless. I am neither. They are
miserable. I am happy. They grow old. I am
not afraid of growing old. They have nothing
-- 262 --
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to do. If I had ten lives, I could fill them! No,
I do not need you, Stephen Garrick.”
“Besides,” she added, half smiling, half sighing,
“I believe that I have been a silent partner
long enough. If I married you, sir, I should invest
in life, and you would conduct it. I suspect
that I have a preference for a business of my
own. Perhaps that is a part of the trouble.”
They had reached the house, and turned, faces
against the scattering rain, to look down at the
darkening river, and the nestling that the town
made against the hill. The streets were full; and
the people, through the distance and the rain,
had a lean look, passing to and fro before the
dark, locked mills.
Perley Kelso, with a curious, slow gesture,
stretched her arms out toward them, with a face
which a man would remember to his dying day.
“Shall they call,” she said, “and I not answer?
If they cried, should not I hear?”
“Mr. Garrick!” She faced him suddenly on
the dripping lawn. “If a man who loves a
woman can take the right hand of fellowship
from her, I wish you would take it from me!”
She held out her full strong hand. The rain
-- 263 --
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dripped on it from an elm-tree overhead. Stephen
Garrick gently brushed the few drops, as if they
had been tears, away, and, after a moment's hesitation,
took it.
If not in this world in another, perhaps? In
any? Somewhere? Somehow?
“I shall wait for you,” said the man. Perhaps
he will. A few souls can.
-- 264 -- p476-269
CHAPTER XIII. A FEVERISH PATIENT.
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THE Pompeian statues in Hayle and Kelso
were on exhibition in a cleared and burnished
condition for nearly a week last spring.
That is to say, Hayle and Kelso were off work,
for high water. It will be well remembered how
serious the season's freshets were, and that Five
Falls had her full share of drenching.
The river had been but two days on the gallop
before the operatives, wandering through their
holidays in their best clothes, began to knot into
little skeins about the banks, watching the leap
that the current made over the dam.
By the third day the new mill was considered
in danger, and diked a little.
By the fourth day heavy wagons were forbidden
the county bridge.
The skeins upon the banks interwound and
thickened. Five Falls became a gallery.
-- 265 --
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Sunbreak had flung back the curtain from a picture
which hundreds crept up on tiptoe to see.
Between the silent, thronged banks and the
mute, unclouded sky, the river writhed like a
thing that was tombed alive. The spatter of the
cascades had become smooth humps, like a
camel's. The great pulse of the dam beat horribly.
The river ran after it, plunged at it, would
run full and forever. It looked as hopeless as
sin, and as long as eternity. You gazed and despaired.
There was always more, more, more.
There was no chain for its bounding. There was
no peace to its cries. No sepulchre could stifle
it, no death still it. You held out your hands and
cried for mercy to it.
Beautiful whirlpools of green light licked the
base of the stone river-walls. Flecks of foam
were picked up in the fields. People stood for
hours in the spray, clinging to the iron railings
by the dam, deafened and drenched, to watch the
sinuous trail of the under-tints of malachite and
gold and umber that swung through. As one
looked, the awful oncoming of the upper waters
ceased to be a terror, ceased, or seemed to cease,
to be a fact. Mightiness of motion became
-- 266 --
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repose. The dam lay like a mass of veined agate
before the eyes, as solid as the gates of the city
whose builder and maker is God; of the city in
which sad things shall become joy, dark things
light, stained things pure, old things new.
The evening and the morning were the fifth
day. Between their solemn passing, Sip and
Catty sat alone in the little damp, stone house.
The air was full of the booming of the flood,
and Catty laid her head upon Sip's knee, listening,
as if she heard it. The wind was high and
blew a kind of froth of noise in gusts against the
closed windows and doors; but never laid finger's
weight upon the steady, deadly underflow of sound
that filled the night. A dark night. Sip, going to
the window, from whence she could dimly see the
sparks of alarm-lights and the shadows of watchmen
on the endangered bridge, felt a little displeasure
with the night. It was noisy and confused
her. It was wild and disturbed her. The
crowds still lingered on the banks, where the
green whirlpools had grown black, and where the
tints of malachite and gold and umber, swinging
on their bright arms through the dam, had
become purple and gray and ghastliness, and
-- 267 --
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wrapped the stone piers in dark files, as if they
had been mourners at a mighty funeral. Cries
of excitement or fear cut the regular thud of the
water, now and then, and there was unwonted
light about the dikes of the new mill, and on the
railway crossing, which had been loaded with the
heaviest freight at command, in anticipation of
the possible ruin and attack of the upper bridge.
The water was still rising, and the wind. An
undefined report had risen with them, through
the day, of runaway lumber up the stream. Five
Falls was awake and uneasy.
“I don't wonder,” thought Sip, coming back
from the window. “It 's a kind of night that I
can't make out. Can you, Catty?”
It was a night that Catty could hear, or thought
she could, and this pleased her.
“It is like wheels,” she said, having never
heard but those two things, the machinery in
the mills and this thunder. It carried her round
and round, she signified, making circles with her
fingers in the air.
She got up presently and walked with the
fancy in circles about the little kitchen. It
seemed to perplex her that she always came back
to her starting-point.
-- 268 --
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“I thought I was going to get out,” she said,
stretching out her arms.
“Don't!” said Sip, uneasily, covering her eyes.
Catty looked so ugly when she took fancies!
She never could bear them; begged her to come
back again and put her head upon her knee.
“But where shall I stop?” persisted Catty. “I
can't go round and go round. Who will stop me,
Sip?”
“Never mind,” said Sip. “There, there!”
All the stone house was full of the boom of
the river. The two girls sat down again, it
seemed, in the heart of it. Sip took Catty's
hands. She was glad to have her at home
to-night. She kissed her finger-tips and her
cropped, coarse hair.
“Last night,” said Catty, suddenly, “I stayed at
home.”
“So you did, dear.”
“And another night, besides.”
“Many other nights,” said Sip, encouragingly.
Did that make Sip happy? Catty asked.
Very, very happy.
For love's sake?
For love's sake, dear.
-- 269 --
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“I 'll stay at home to-morrow night,” Catty
nodded sharply, — “I 'll stay at home to-morrow
night, for love's sake.”
In the middle of the night, Sip, with a sense of
disturbance or alarm, waked suddenly. The little
closet bedroom was dark and close. A great
shadow in the kitchen wrapped her pictured
dreamer, and his long, unresting dream. It was
so dark, that she could fairly touch, she thought,
the solemn sound that filled the house. It took
waves like the very flood itself. If she put her
hand out over the edge of the bed, she felt an
actual chill from it. There seemed to be nothing
but that noise in all the world.
Except Catty, sitting up straight in bed, awake
and talkative.
“What is it?” asked Sip, sitting up too.
In the dead dark, Catty put out her hands. In
the dead dark Sip answered them.
“Sip,” said Catty, “who was it?”
“Who was what, dear?”
“Who was it that made this?” touching her
ears.
“Him that made this awful noise,” said Sip.
“And this?” brushing her eyes.
-- 270 --
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“Him that made this awful dark,” said Sip.
“And this?” She put her fingers to her mute,
rough lips.
“Him that learned the wind to cry at nights,”
said Sip.
“Did he do it for love's sake?” asked Catty.
“I can't find out. Did he do it for love's sake,
Sip?”
“For — love's — sake?” said Sip, slowly. “I
suppose he did. I pray to Heaven that he did.
When I 'm on my knees, I know he did.”
“If it was for love's sake,” said Catty, “I 'll
go to sleep again.”
So the evening and the morning were the fifth
day of the great freshets at Five Falls.
Catty woke early and helped Sip to get breakfast.
She was very happy, though the coffee
burned, and laughed discordantly when Sip made
griddle-cakes for her of the Indian meal. Sip
could not eat her own griddle-cakes for pleasure
at this. She walked up and down the room with
her hands behind her, kissing Catty's finger-tips
and her ragged hair.
The Pompeian statues came to the face of the
day; the crowds upon the river-brinks formed
-- 271 --
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again, thickened, doubled; the bright-armed malachite
and umber leaped again dizzily down the
dams.
Still the pulse of the river rose. The county
bridge shrunk and shivered in fits to it. The
river had the appearance of having an attack of
fever and ague.
The timber alarm, in the wearing on of the
day, waxed and grew.
Five thousand feet of timber, in the upper
floods, had broken loose, and were on their way
down stream.
Ten thousand feet.
Twenty.
Five hundred thousand.
A million feet of logs, in the upper floods, had
broken their chains, and would be at Five Falls
before night.
Catty was sitting alone in the stone house, in
the slope of the afternoon. She had been out
with Sip, half the day, “to see the flood”; lifting
her listening face against the spray, with pathetic
pleasure; holding out her hands sometimes, they
said, as if to measure the sweep of the sounding
water; nodding to herself about it, with her dull
laugh.
-- 272 --
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Sip would be back at dusk. Catty had promised,
coming home a little tired, to sit still and
wait for her; would not venture out again among
the crowd; would go to sleep perhaps; would be
a good girl, at any rate; stroked Sip's face a little
as she went away. Sip kissed her, and, when she
had shut the door, came back and kissed her
again. A little shopping up town, and an errand
at Miss Kelso's, and perhaps another look at the
flood, would not delay her very long; and Catty
had kept her promises lately. Sip bade her good
by with a light heart, and shut the door again.
Catty sat still for a while after the door was
shut. Then she slept awhile. Afterwards she
sat still for a while again. She got up and
walked about the kitchen. She sat down on the
kitchen floor. She nodded and talked to herself.
Sip might have been gone an hour; she might have
been gone a week; Catty did not feel sure which;
she lost her hold of time when she sat alone; she
put her fingers down on the floor and counted
them, guessing at how long Sip had been away.
Her fingers, when she put them on the floor,
splashed into something cold.
Had the water-pail tipped over? If it had, it
-- 273 --
[figure description] Page 273.[end figure description]
must have been very full. Catty discovered that
she was sitting in a puddle of water; that
water gurgled over her feet; that water rippled
about the legs of the stove; that a gentle bubble
of water filled the room.
She crawled, dripping, up, and made her way
to the door. As she opened it, she let in a swash
about her ankles.
She spattered across the entry to find the Irish
woman who rented the other tenement; she had
gone, like the rest of the world, to see the flood,
it seemed; Catty received no answer to her uncouth
calls; she was alone in the house.
This disturbed her. She felt puzzled about
the water; alarmed, because she could neither see
nor hear the reason of it; annoyed at the cold
crawling that it made about her ankles, and
anxious for Sip to come and explain it.
She went to the front door and opened that.
A rush, like a tiny tide, met her. She stooped
and put her hand out, over the step. It dipped
into a pool of rising water.
Catty shrank back and shut the door. The
noise like wheels was plain to her. It waited for
her outside of that door. It struck like claws
-- 274 --
[figure description] Page 274.[end figure description]
upon her locked ears. It frightened her. She
would not for the world open the door to it. She
drew the bolt hard, in a childish fright, and sat
down again in the slow gurgle on the kitchen
floor.
Suddenly it occurred to her that she might go
and find Sip. But Sip would not be in the noise.
Where would she be?
Catty pushed herself along on the floor, pushing
out of the way of the water as she reflected.
That was how another thing occurred to her.
The farther that she pushed herself the thinner
the gurgle grew. In the closet bedroom it was
scarcely wet.
At this side of the house she lost, or thought
she lost, the noise. It must be at this side of the
house that she should find Sip. Sip had often
lost her out of the closet bedroom. She remembered,
with a laugh, how many times she had
climbed out of that little cupboard window after
Sip was asleep. She felt her way to it eagerly.
It was shut and buttoned. She pushed it, slamming,
back, climbed to the high sill, and let herself
drop.
Catty might have remained in the closet
-- 275 --
[figure description] Page 275.[end figure description]
bed-room, had she but known it, high and dry. The
stone house received a thorough soaking, but not
a dangerous one. The water sucked in for a
while at the locked front door, played drearily
about the empty kitchen, mopped the entry floor,
set the Irish woman's bread-pan and coal-hod
afloat, and dawdled away again down the steps;
the result, it seemed, of a savage and transient
shiver on the part of that fitful invalid, the river.
The county bridge, in fact, was as good as
gone. The transient shiver in the lower floods
had been caused by the sinking of a pier.
It had been a fine sight. Masses of men, women,
and children hung, chained like galley-slaves, to
either bank, intent and expectant on it. Foot
and horse forsook the bridge. Police guarded it.
A red sunset sprang up and stared at it. An
avalanche of dead-white spray chewed the malachite
and umber. Curious, lurid colors bounded
up where they sank, and bruised and beat themselves
against the fallen and the falling piers.
The gorgeous peril of the tinted water, and the
gorgeous safety of the tinted sky, struck against
each other fancifully. There seemed a rescue in
the one for the ruin of the other. One was sure
-- 276 --
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that the drowned colors held up their arms again,
secure, inviolate, kindled, living, in the great
resurrection of the watching heavens.
It must have been not far from the moment
when Catty dropped from the cupboard window,
that, on the beautiful madness of the river, up
where the baby souls of the cascades had transmigrated
into camels, a long, low, brown streak
appeared.
It appeared at first sight to lie quite still. At
second sight, it undulated heavily, like a huge
boa. At the third, it coiled and plunged.
“The logs! The logs! The logs are here!”
The cry ran round the banks. Maverick Hayle
sat down on a stone and looked at his new mill
stupidly. Passers cleared the railway crossing.
People ran about and shouted. They climbed
rocks and trees to look. The guards on the
bridge disappeared. The smooth outlines of the
boa grew jagged. The timber leaped and tangled
in sweeping down. All through its wounded
arches, the heavy bridge creaked and cried.
The people on the banks cried too, from sheer
excitement.
“The logs, the logs, the logs! The bridge!”
-- 277 --
[figure description] Page 277.[end figure description]
“Look on the bridge! Look there! Good
God! How did she get there? On the bridge!
Woman on the bridge!”
Past the frightened guards, past the occupied
eyes of a thousand people, on the bridge, over
the bridge, not twelve feet from the sunken piers,
stood a girl with low forehead, and dropping lip,
and long, outstretching hands.
“Catty! Catty! O Catty, Catty, Catty!”
The uncouth name rang with a terrible cry.
It cleft the crowd like a knife. They parted before
it, here and there and everywhere, letting a
ghastly girl plunge through.
“O Catty, Catty, Catty! For love's sake,
stop! For dear love's sake!”
It was too late for dear love to touch her. Its
piteous call she could not hear. Its wrung face
she could not see. Her poor, puzzled lips moved
as if to argue with it, but made no sound.
Type of the world from which she sprang, —
the world of exhausted and corrupted body, of
exhausted and corrupted brain, of exhausted and
corrupted soul, the world of the laboring poor as
man has made it, and as Christ has died for it,
of a world deaf, dumb, blind, doomed, stepping
-- 278 --
[figure description] Page 278.[end figure description]
confidently to its own destruction before our eyes,—
Catty stood for a moment still, a little perplexed,
it seemed, feeling about her patiently in
the spray-sown, lighted air.
One beck of a human hand would save her;
but she could not see it. One cry would turn
her; but her ears were sealed.
Still, in the great dream of dying, as in the
long dream of life, this miserable creature listened
for what she never heard, and spoke that which
no man understood.
“She 's making signs to me,” groaned Sip;
“she 's making signs to call my name!”
The Perley Kelso put both arms about her.
Then the solid shore staggered suddenly. Then
a ragged shadow loomed across the dam. Then
there was a shock, and thunder.
Then some one covered her eyes, close.
When she opened them, timber was tearing by.
Spray was in her face. Dirk was beside her on
his knees, and men had their hats off.
On the empty ruin of the sliced bridge, two
logs had caught and hung, black against the color
of the water and the color of the sky. They
had caught transversely, and hung like a cross.
-- 279 -- p476-284
CHAPTER XIV. SWEPT AND GARNISHED.
[figure description] Page 279.[end figure description]
IT was Dirk who had covered Sip's eyes when
the timber struck the bridge.
She did not think of it at the time, but remembered
it afterwards.
She remembered it when he came that evening
to the door of the lonely, sodden house, after Miss
Kelso had gone, asking how she was, but refusing
to enter lest, he said, he should be “one too
many.” She liked that. They did not want him—
she and Catty — that night. This thing, in
the solitude of the dripping house, had surprised
her. God in heaven did not seem to have separated
her and Catty, after all. The silence of
death was spared her. Catty's living love had
made no sound; her dead love made none
either. A singular comfort came to Sip, almost
with the striking of her sorrow. She and Catty
could not be parted like two speaking people.
-- 280 --
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Passed into the great world of signs, the deaf-mute,
dead, grew grandly eloquent. The ring of the
flood was her solemn kiss. The sunshine on the
kitchen floor to-morrow would be her dear good-morning.
Clouds and shadows and springing
green gave her speech forever. The winds of
long nights were language for her. Ah, the
ways, the ways which Catty could find to speak
to her!
Sip walked about the room with dry, burning
eyes. She could not cry. She felt exultant,
excited. The thing which she greatly feared had
come upon her. The worst that ever could hurt
her and Catty was over. And now how privileged
and rich she was! What ways! How
many ways! Only she and Catty knew. How
glad she was now that Catty had never talked
like other people!
This curious mood — if it should be called a
mood — lasted, evenly, till the poor, disfigured
heap found one day in the ebbing of the flood
flung upright against a rock, a mile below the
dam, with its long hands outstretched, spelling
awful dumb words, had been brought to the
stone house and carried away again, and left
-- 281 --
[figure description] Page 281.[end figure description]
until the day when the lips of the dumb shall
be unsealed, to spell its untranslated message
through a tangle of myrtle into the smoky factory
air.
After that she shrank suddenly, like a waked
somnambulist, and went sick to bed.
One day she got up and went to work again.
That was the day that Dirk Burdock had
watched for, had grown impatient about, seized
impetuously when it came.
It had been a pleasant day, with a grave sunlight
and a quiet sky. Sip took a grave and
pleasant face out into it. She wore a grave and
pleasant smile when the young watchman's eager
step overtook her, where the rusty boiler (made
rustier than ever by the flood, and since removed)
had stood beside the cotton-house.
“I 'm glad to see you out again, Sip,” said
the young man, awkwardly, striding out of step
with her, and falling back with a jerk.
“Yes,” said Sip, “it is quite time I should be
at work again.”
“It 's a pleasant day,” said Dirk.
“A very pleasant day,” said Sip.
“Been to see the new mill since the
-- 282 --
[figure description] Page 282.[end figure description]
repairs?” asked Dirk, as if struck by a bright
thought. Now Dirk had vowed within himself,
that, whatever else he said to Sip, he would say
nothing about the flood. He had an idea that it
might make her cry. He had another, that it was
about time for her to forget it. He had another
still, somewhat to the effect that he was the man
to make her forget. In the face of these three
ideas, Dirk could have bitten his tongue out for
his question. However, Sip did not cry, neither
did she seem to have forgotten the flood, neither
did she seem anxious to forget it or avoid it.
She said, Yes, smiling, that she had walked by
on her way to work this morning. There must
have been a good deal of damage done?
“A sight,” said Dirk, with a sigh of relief.
“They say the young man lost the most out o'
that affair.”
“Young Hayle?”
“Yes; though they was all involved, I suppose,
for that matter, — her among 'em. But she
never bothered her head about it at the time
o' 't. She was all taken up with —”
“I know,” Sip ran on, gently, when poor Dirk
stuck in despair. “I do not think she thought of
-- 283 --
[figure description] Page 283.[end figure description]
anything else but Catty and me. It was like her,—
like her.”
“She must have lost,” said Dirk, reviving
again; “I thought the fall lectures would be
broke off, but it seems they ain't.”
Sip said nothing; did not seem inclined to
talk, and the two young people turned a couple
of corners on the way to the stone house in
thoughtful silence. They were almost too young
to be so thoughtful and so silent; more especially
the young man, growing nervous, and taking
furtive, anxious glances at the girl's face.
It was an inscrutable face.
Sip had shut her lips close; she looked straight
ahead; the brown, dull tints of her cheeks and
temples came out like a curtain, and folded all
young colors and flushes and tremors, all hope
and fear, all longing or purpose, need or fulness
in her, out of sight. She only looked straight on
and waited for Dirk to speak.
She quite knew that and what he would speak.
When he began, presently, with a quivering face,
“Well, Sip, I don't see that I 'm getting on
any in the mills, after all,” she was neither
surprised nor off her guard. She was not yet
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twenty-three, but she was too old to be put off her
guard by a young man with a quivering face. If
she had a thing to do, she meant to do it; put
her hands together in that way she had, bent at
the knuckles, resolutely.
“No,” she said, “no; you 'll never get any
farther, Dirk.”
“But I meant to,” said Dirk, hotly. “I thought
I should! Mebbe you think it 's me that 's the
trouble, not the getting on!”
“Perhaps there is a trouble about you,” said
Sip, honestly; “I don't know; and I don't much
care whether there is or not. But I think most of
the trouble is in the getting on. Mills ain't made
to get on in. It ain't easy, I know, Dirk. It
ain't. It 's the staying put of 'em, that 's the
worst of 'em. Don't I know? It 's the staying
put that 's the matter with most o' folks in the
world, it seems to me. For we are the most o'
folks, — us that stay put, you know.”
“Are we?” said Dirk, a little puzzled by Sip's
social speculations. “But I 'm getting steady
pay now, Sip, at any rate; and I 've a steady
chance. Garrick 's a friend o' mine, I believe,
and has showed himself friendly. He 'll keep me
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the watch, at least, — Mr. Garrick. I might be
worse off than on watch, Sip.”
“O yes,” said Sip; “you 've got a good place,
Dirk.”
“With a chance,” repeated Dirk.
“With a chance? Maybe,” answered Sip.
“And now,” said Dirk, trembling suddenly,
“what with the place and the chance — maybe,
and the pay and the steadiness, sure, I 've been
thinking, Sip, as the time had come to ask
you —”
“Don't!” said Sip.
All young colors and flushes and tremors,
hopes and fears, longing and need, broke now
out of the brown curtain of Sip's face. In the
instant she was a very lonely, very miserable
little girl, not by any means over twenty-three,
and the young man had eyes so cruelly kind!
But she said: “Don't, Dirk! O please, don't!”
“Well!” said Dirk. He stopped and drew
breath as if she had shot him.
They had come to the stone house now, and
Sip began walking back and forth in front of it.
“But I was going to ask you to be my wife!”
said Dirk. “It 's so long that I have n't dared
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to ask you, and now you say don't! Don't? But
I will; I 'll ask at any rate. Sip, will you marry
me? There! I should choke if I did n't ask.
You may say what you please.”
“I can't say what I please,” said Sip, in a low
voice, walking faster.
“I don't know what's to hinder,” said Dirk,
in an injured tone; “I always knew I was n't
half fit for you, and I always knew you 'd ought
to have a man that could get on. But considering
the steadiness and the chance, and that I —
I set such a sight by you, Sip, and sometimes
I 've thought you — liked me well enough,” concluded
Dirk, candidly.
“I like you, Dirk,” said Sip, slowly, “well
enough.”
“Well enough to be my wife?”
“Well enough to be your wife.”
“Then I should n't think,” observed Dirk, simply,
and with a brightening face, “that you 'd
find it very hard saying what you please.”
“Maybe I should n't,” said Sip, “if I could be
your wife; but I can't.”
Her bent hands fell apart weakly; she did not
look at Dirk; she fixed her eyes on a little clump
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of dock-weed at her feet, beside the fence; she
looked sick and faint.
“I 'll not marry you,” said the girl feebly; “I 'll
not marry anybody. Maybe it is n't the way a
girl had ought to feel when she likes a young fellow,”
added Sip, with a kind of patient aged bitterness
crawling into her eyes. “But we don't
live down here so 's to make girls grow up like
girls should, it seems to me. Things as would
n't trouble rich folks troubles us. There 's things
that troubles me. I 'll never marry anybody,
Dirk. I 'll never bring a child into the world to
work in the mills; and if I 'd ought not to say it,
I can't help it, for it 's the truth, and the reason,
and I 've said it to God on my knees a many and
a many times. I 've said it before Catty died, and
I 've said it more than ever since, and I 'll say
it till I die. I 'll never bring children into this
world to be factory children, and to be factory
boys and girls, and to be factory men and women,
and to see the sights I 've seen, and to bear the
things I 've borne, and to run the risks I 've run,
and to grow up as I 've grown up, and to stop
where I 've stopped, — never. I 've heard tell
of slaves before the war that would n't be fathers
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and mothers of children to be slaves like them.
That 's the way I feel, and that 's the way I mean
to feel. I won't be the mother of a child to go
and live my life over again. I 'll never marry
anybody.”
“But they need n't be factory people,” urged
Dirk, with a mystified face. “There 's trades and—
other things.”
“I know, I know,” Sip shook her head, — “I
know all about that. They 'd never get out of
the mills. It 's from generation to generation. It
could n't be helped. I know. It 's in the blood.”
“But other folks don't take it so,” urged Dirk,
after a disconsolate pause. “Other folks marry,
and have their homes and the comfort of 'em.
Other folks, if they love a man, 'll be his wife
someways or nuther.”
“Sometimes,” said Sip, “I seem to think that
that I 'm not other folks. Things come to me
someways that other folks don't understand nor
care for.” She crushed the dock-weed to a
wounded mass, and dug her foot into the ground,
and stamped upon it.
“I 've made up my mind, Dirk. It 's no use
talking. It — it hurts me,” with a tender motion of
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the restless foot against the bruised, rough leaves
of the weed which she was covering up with sand.
“I 'd rather not talk any more, Dirk. There 's
other girls. Some other girl will do.”
“I 'll have no other girl if I can't have you!”
said poor Dirk, turning away. “I never could
set such a sight by another girl as I 've set by
you. If you don't marry, Sip, no more 'll I.”
Sip smiled, but did not speak.
“Upon my word, I won't!” cried Dirk. “You
think I 'm one of other folks, I guess. You wait
and see. I 've loved you true. If ever man
loved a girl, I 've loved you true. If I can't
have you, I 'll have nobody!”
But Sip only smiled.
She went into the house after Dirk had gone,
weakly. The flushing tremors in her face had
set into a dead color, and her hands came together
again at the knuckles.
The Irish woman was away, and the house was
lonely and still. The kitchen fire was out. She
went out into the little shed for kindlings, thinking
that she would make a cup of tea directly,
she felt so weak.
When she got there, she sat down on the
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chopping-block, and covered her face, her feet
hanging, listlessly against the axe. She wished
that she need never lift her head nor look about
again. She wished that when the Irish woman
came home she should just step into the little
shed and find her dead. What a close little
warm sheltered shed it was! All the world outside
of it seemed emptied, swept, and garnished.
She felt as if her life had just been through a
“house-cleaning.” It was clean and washed, and
proper and right, and as it should be, and drearily
in order forever. Now it was time to sit down in it.
Sip had what Mr. Mill calls a “large share of
human nature,” and she loved Dirk, and she led
a lonely life. She was neither a heroine, nor a
saint, nor a fanatic, sitting out there in the little
wood-shed on the chopping-block.
“I don't see why I could n't have had that,
leastways,” she cried between her hands. “I
have n't ever had much else. I don't see why
that should go too.”
But she did see. In about ten minutes she
saw clearly enough to get up from the chopping-block,
and go in and make her cup of tea.
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CHAPTER XV. A PREACHER AND A SERMON.
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SHE saw clearly enough in time to be a very
happy woman.
Perley Kelso, at least, was thinking so, when
she went the other day with young Mrs. Hayle
to hear one of her street sermons.
Sip had “set up for a preacher,” after all;
she hardly knew how; nobody knew exactly how;
it had come about, happened; taken rather the
form of a destiny than a plan.
The change had fallen upon her since Catty's
passing “out of sight.” She was apt to speak of
Catty so. She was not dead nor lost. She listened
still and spoke. She only could not see
her.
“But she talks,” said Sip under her breath, —
“she talks to me. There 's things she 'd have me
say. That was how I first went to the meetings.
I 'd never cared about meetings. I 'd never been
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religious nor good. But Catty had such things
to say! and when I saw the people's faces, lifted
up and listening, and when I talked and talked,
it all came to me one night like this. Do you
see? Like this. I was up to the Mission reading
a little hymn I know, and the lights were on the
people's faces, and in a minute it was like this.
God had things to say. I 'd been talking Catty's
words. God had words. I cannot tell you how
it was; but I stood right up and said them; and
ever since there 's been more than I could say.”
“What is there about the girl that can attract
so many people?” asked Mrs. Maverick Hayle,
standing on tiptoe beside Perley on the outer edge
of Sip's audience, and turning her wide eyes on it,
like a child at a menagerie. “There are old men
here, and old women. There 's everybody here.
The girl looks too young to instruct them.”
She must judge for herself what there was
about her, Miss Kelso said; it had been always
so; since she started her first neighborhood
meeting in the Irish woman's kitchen at the stone
house, she had found listeners enough; they were
too many for tenement accommodations after a
while, and so the thing grew.
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Sometimes she used the chapel. Sometimes
she preferred a doorstep like this, and the open
air.
“I undertook to help her at the first,” said
Miss Kelso, smiling, “but I was only among them
at best; Sip is of them; she understands them
and they understand her; so I left her to her
work, and I keep to my own. Hush! Here she
is; can you see? Just over there on the upper
step.”
They were in a little court, a miserable place,
breaking out like a wart from one of the foulest
alleys in Five Falls; a place such as Sip was
more apt than not to choose for her “sermons.”
The little court was sheltered, however, and comparatively
quiet. There may have been fifty
people in it.
“Everybody,” as Mrs. Hayle said, — old Bijah,
with heavy crutches, sitting on a barrel, and
offering his services as prompter now and then,
out of a petition to the Legislature of the State
of Massachusetts; Dib Docket, grown into long
curls and a brass necklace; pretty little Irish
Maggie, with her thin cheek upon her hand;
Mr. Mell, frowningly attentive; the young
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watchman, and his young wife in blue ribbons, making
a Scotch picture of herself up against the old
court pump; all Sip's friends, and strangers who
drifted in, from curiosity, or idleness, or that sheer
misery which has an instinct always for such
crowds.
Sip was used now to the Scotch picture, quite.
She had expected it, was ready for it. Dirk was
one of “other folks,” in spite of himself. She
had understood that from the first. She did not
mind it very much. She framed the picture
in with “God's words,” with a kind of solemn
joy. Dirk was happy. She liked to see it, know
it, while she talked. She was glad that Nynee
inclined to come with him so often to hear her.
Sip came out on the doorstep and stood for a
moment with her hands folded down before her,
and her keen eyes taking the measure of every
face, it seemed, in the little court.
There was nothing saintly about Sip. No
halo struck through the little court upon her
doorstep. Florence Nightingale or the Quaker
Dinah would not have liked her. She was just
a little rough, brown girl, bringing her hands
together at the knuckles and talking fast.
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“But such a curious preacher!” said Mrs.
Maverick Hayle.
The little preacher had a wandering style, as
most such preachers have. Such a style can no
more be caught on the point of a pen than the
rustle of crisp leaves or the aroma of dropping
nuts. There was a syntax in Sip's brown face
and bent hands and poor dress and awkward
motions. There were correctness and perspicuity
about that old doorstep. The muddy little court
was an appeal, the square of sky above her head
a peroration. In that little court Sip was eloquent.
Here on the parlor sofa, in clean cuffs
and your slippers, she harangues you.
“Look here,” she was saying, “you men
and women, and you boys and girls, that have
come to hear me! You say that you are poor
and miserable. I 've heard you. You say you 're
worked and drove and slaved, and up early and
down late, and hurried and worried and fretted,
and too hot and too cold, and too cross and
too poor, to care about religion. I know. I 'm
worked and drove, and up and down, and hurried
and worried and fretted, and hot and cold,
and cross and poor myself. I know about that.
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Religion will do for rich folks. That 's what you
say, — I know. I 've said it a many times myself.
Curse the rich folks and their religion! —
that 's what you say. I know. Have n't I said
it a many times myself?
“Now see here! O you men and women,
and you boys and girls, can't you see? It ain't a
rich folks' religion that I 've brought to talk to
you. Rich religion ain't for you and ain't for me.
We 're poor folks, and we want a poor folks' religion.
We must have a poor folks' religion or
none at all. We know that.
“Now listen to me! O you men and women,
and you girls and boys, listen to what I 've got to
tell you. The religion of Jesus Christ the Son of
God Almighty is the only poor folks' religion in
all the world. Folks have tried it many times.
They 've got up pious names and pious fights.
There have been wars and rumors of wars, and
living and dying, and books written, and money
spent, and blood shed for other religions, but
there 's never been any poor folks' religion
but that of Jesus Christ the Son of God Almighty.....
“O listen to me! You go on your wicked
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ways, and you drink, and fight, and swear, and
you live in sinful shames, and you bring your
little children up to shameful sins, and when
Jesus Christ the Son of God Almighty does you
the favor to ask you for your wicked hearts, you
hold up your faces before him, and you say,
`We 're poor folks, Lord. We 're up early, and
we 're down late, and we 're droved and slaved,
and rich folks are hard on us. The mill-masters
drive their fine horses, Lord, and we walk and
work till we 're worn out. There 's a man with
a million dollars, Lord, and we have n't laid by
fifty yet against a rainy day!' Then you grow
learned and wise, and you shake your heads, and
you say, `Capital has all the ease, Lord, and
labor has all the rubs; and things ain't as they
should be; and it can't be expected of us to be
religious in such a state of affairs.' And you say,
`I 'm at work all day and nights, I 'm tired'; or,
`I 'm at work all the week, and of a Sunday I
must sleep; I can't be praying'; and so you say,
`I pray thee, Lord, have me excused!' and so
you go your wicked ways.
“O listen to me! This is what he says, `I
was up, and down, and drove, and slaved, and
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hurried, myself,' he says, `I was too hot, and
too cold, and worried, and anxious, and I saw
rich folks take their ease, and I was poor like
you,' he says.
“O you men and women, and you boys and
girls, listen to him! Never you mind about me
any longer, listen to HIM!
“He won't be hard on you. Don't you suppose
he knows how the lives you live are hard enough
without that heaped against them? Don't you
suppose he knows how the world is all a tangle,
and how the great and the small, and the wise
and the foolish, and the fine and the miserable,
and the good and the bad, are all snarled in and
out about it? And does n't he know how long it
is unwinding, and how the small and the foolish
and the bad and the miserable places stick in his
hands? And don't you suppose he knows what
places they are to be born in and to die in, and
to inherit unto the third and fourth generations
of us, like the color of our hair, or the look about
our mouths?
“I tell you, he knows, he knows! I tell you,
he knows where the fault is, and where the knot
is, and who 's to blame, and who 's to suffer.
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And I tell you he knows there 'll never be any
way but his way to unsnarl us all.
“Folks may make laws, but laws won't do it.
Kings and congresses may put their heads together,
but they 'll have their trouble for nothing.
Governments and churches may finger us over,
but we 'll only snarl the more.
“Rich and poor, big or little, there 's no way
under heaven for us to get out of our twist, but
Christ's way.
“O you men and women, and you girls and
boys, look in your own hearts and see what way
that is. That way is in the heart. I can't see it.
I can't touch it. I can't mark it and line it for
you. Look. Mind that you don't look at the
rich folks' ways! Mind that you don't stop to
say, It 's their way to do this, and that, and the
other, that they 'd never do nor think on. Perhaps
it is. But that 's none of your business,
when the Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God
Almighty does you the favor to ask for you, and
your heart, and your ways, to gather 'em up into
his poor cut hands and hold them, and to bow
his poor hurt face down over them and bless
them!
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“O you men and women, and you boys and
girls, Christ's way is a patient way, it is a pure
way, it is a way that cares more for another world
than for this one, and more to be holy than to
be happy, and more for other folks than for itself.
It 's a long way and a winding way, but it 's a
good way and a true way, and there 's comfort in
it, and there 's joy at the end of it, and there 's
Christ all over it, and I pray God to lead you in
it, every one, forever.
“Christ in heaven!” said Sip then, bending
her lighted, dark face, “thou hast been Christ
on earth. That helps us. That makes us brave
to hunt for thee. We are poor folks, Christ, and
we 've got a load of poor folks' sorrows, and of
poor folks' foolishness, and of poor folks' fears,
and of poor folks' wickedness, and we 've got nowheres
else to take it. Here it is. Lord Christ,
we seem to feel as if it belonged to thee. We
seem to feel as if we was thy folks. We seem to
know that thou dost understand us, someways,
better than the most of people. Be our Saviour,
Lord Christ, for thine own name's sake.”
Miss Kelso and Mrs. Hayle left the little
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[figure description] Page 301.[end figure description]
preacher still speaking God's words — and Catty's,
and stole away before the breaking up of her
audience. They walked in silence for a few
minutes up the street.
“They listened to her,” said Fly then, musingly.
“On the whole, I don't know that I wonder.
They looked as if they needed it.”
“There are few things that they do not need,”
said Perley, quietly. “We do not quite understand
that, I think, — we who never need. It is
a hungry world, Fly.”
“Yes?” said Fly, placidly perplexed; “I don't
know much about the world, Perley.”
Perley was silent. She was wondering what
good it would do — either the world or Fly — if
she did.
“Kenna Van Doozle was asking the other
day,” said Fly, suddenly, “whether you still went
about among these people at all hours of the day
and evening, as you used, alone. I should be so
timid, Perley! And then, do you always find it
quite proper?”
“I have no reason to feel afraid of my friends
in Five Falls at any hour,” said Miss Kelso, reservedly.
There seemed such a gulf between
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[figure description] Page 302.[end figure description]
her and this pretty, good-natured little lady.
Proper! Why try to pass the impassable? Fly
might stay where she was.
“And yet,” sighed Mrs. Maverick Hayle, “this
dreary work seems to suit you through and
through. That is what troubles me about it.”
Perley Kelso's healthy, happy face took the
quiver of a smile. The fine, rare face! The
womanly, wonderful face! Fly was right. It
was a “suited” face. It begged for nothing. It
was opulent and warm. Life brimmed over at it.
Stephen Garrick, on the opposite side of the
road, climbed the hill alone. It was a late November
day; a day of cleared heavens and bared
trees. Yet he looked about for bright maples,
and felt as if he walked under a sealed sky, and
in an unreal light of dying leaves.
THE END.
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Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1844-1911 [1871], The silent partner. (James R. Osgood and Company, Boston) [word count] [eaf476T].
