THE MOCCASIN FLOWER
Johnnie was used to hardship and early rising, but in an intermittent
fashion; for the Passmores and Consadines were a haggard lot that came
to no lure but their own pleasure. They might--and often did--go hungry,
ill-clad, ill-housed; they might sometimes--in order to keep soul and
body together--have to labour desperately at rude tasks unsuited to
them; but these times were exceptions, and between such seasons, down to
the least of the tribe, they had always followed the Vision, pursuing
the flying skirts of whatever ideal was in their shapely heads. The
little cabin in the gash of the hills owned for domain a rocky ravine
that was the standing jest of the mountain-side.
"Sure, hit's good land--fine land," the mountaineers would comment with
their inveterate, dry, lazy humour. "Nothing on earth to hender a man
from raisin' a crap off 'n it--ef he could once git the leathers on a
good stout, willin' pa'r o' hawks or buzzards, an' a plough hitched to
'em." And Johnnie could remember the other children teasing her and
saying that her folks had to load a gun with seed corn and shoot it into
the sky to reach their fields. Yet, the unmended roof covered much joy
and good feeling. They were light feet that trod the unsecured
puncheons. The Passmores were tender of each other's eccentricities,
admiring of each other's virtues. A wolf race nourished on the knees of
purple kings, how should they ever come down to wearing any man's
collar, to slink at heel and retrieve for him?
One would have said that to the daughter of such the close cotton-mill
room with its inhuman clamour, its fetid air, its long hours of
enforced, monotonous, mechanical toil, would be prison with the torture
added. But Johnnie looked forward to her present enterprise as a soldier
going into a new country to conquer it. She was buoyantly certain, and
determinedly delighted with everything. When, the next morning after her
arrival, Mandy Meacham shook her by the shoulder and bade her get up,
the room was humming with the roar of mill whistles, and the gray dawn
leaking in at its one window in a churlish, chary fashion, reminded her
that they were under the shadow of a mountain instead of living upon
its top.
"I don't see what in the world could 'a' made me sleep so!" Johnnie
deprecated, as she made haste to dress herself. "Looks like I never had
nothing to do yesterday, except walking down. I've been on foot that
much many a time and never noticed it."
The other girls in the room, poor souls, were all cross and sleepy.
Nobody had time to converse with Johnnie. As they went down the stairs
another contingent began to straggle up, having eaten a hasty meal after
their night's work, and making now for certain of the just-vacated beds.
Johnnie ran into the kitchen to help Mrs. Bence get breakfast on the
table, for Pap Himes was bad off this morning with a misery somewhere,
and his daughter was sending word to the cotton mill to put a substitute
on her looms till dinner time. Almost as much to her own surprise as to
that of everybody else, Mandy Meacham proposed to stay and take Johnnie
in to register for a job.
When the others were all seated at table, the new girl from the
mountains took her cup of coffee and a biscuit and dropped upon the
doorstep to eat her breakfast. The back yard was unenclosed, a litter of
tin cans and ashes running with its desert disorder into a similar one
on either side. But there were no houses back of the Himes place, the
ground falling away sharply to the rocky creek bed. Across the ravine
half a dozen strapping young fellows were lounging, waiting for
breakfast; loom-fixers and mechanics these, whose hours were more
favourable than those of the women and children workers.
"It's lots prettier out here than it is in the house," she returned
smilingly, when Mavity Bence offered to get her a chair. "I do love to
be out-of-doors."
"Huh," grunted Mandy with her mouth full of biscuit, "I reckon a cotton
mill'll jest about kill you. What makes you work in one, anyhow? I
wouldn't if I could help it."
Johnnie eyed the tall girl gravely. "I've got to earn some money," she
said at length. "Ma and the children have to be taken care of. I don't
know of any better way than the mill."
"An' I don't know of any worse," retorted Mandy sourly, as they went out
together.
Johnnie began to feel timid. There had been a secret hope that she would
meet Shade on the way to the mill, or that Mrs. Bence would finally get
through in time to accompany her. She was suddenly aware that there was
not a soul within sound of her voice who had belonged to her former
world. With a little gasp she looked about her as they entered
the office.
The Hardwick mill to which they now came consisted of a number of large,
red brick buildings, joined by covered passage-ways, abutting on one of
those sullen pools Johnnie had noted the night before, the yard enclosed
by a tight board fence, so high that the operatives in the first-and
second-floor rooms could not see the street. This for the factory
portion; the office did not front on the shut-in yard, but opened out
freely on to the street, through a little grassy square of its own,
tree-shadowed, with paved walks and flower beds. As with all the mills
in its district, the suggestion was dangerously apt of a penitentiary,
with its high wooden barrier, around all the building, the only free
approach from the world to its corridors through the seemly, humanized
office, where abided the heads, the bosses, the free men, who came and
went at will. The walls were already beginning to wear that garment of
green which the American ivy flings over so many factory buildings.
As the two girls came up, Johnnie looked at the wide, clear, plate
windows, the brass railing that guarded the heavy granite approach, the
shining name "Hardwick" deep-set in brazen lettering on the step over
which they entered. Inside, the polished oak and metal of office
fittings carried on the idea of splendour, if not of luxury. Back of the
crystal windows were the tempering shades, all was spacious, ordered
with quiet dignity, and there was no sense of hurry in the well-clad,
well-groomed figures of men that sat at the massive desks or moved about
the softly carpeted floors. The corridor was long, but cleanly swept,
and, at its upper portion, covered with a material unfamiliar to
Johnnie, but which she recognized as suited to its purpose. Down at the
further end of that corridor, something throbbed and moaned and roared
and growled--the factory was awake there and working. The contrast
struck cold to the girl's heart. Here, yet more sharply defined, was the
same difference she had noted between the Palace of Pleasure on the
heights and the mills at the foot of the mountain.
Would the people think she was good enough? Would they understand how
hard she meant to try? For a minute she had a desperate impulse to turn
and run. Then she heard Mandy's thin, flatted tones announcing:
"This hyer girl wants to git a job in the mill. Miz Bence, she cain't
come down this morning--you'll have to git somebody to tend her looms
till noon; Pap, he's sick, and she has obliged to wait on him--so I
brung the new gal."
"All right," said the man she addressed. "She can wait there; you go on
to your looms."
Johnnie sat on the bench against the wall where newcomers applying for
positions were placed. The man she was to see had not yet come to his
desk, and she remained unnoticed and apparently forgotten for more than
an hour. The offices were entered from the other side, yet a doorway
close by Johnnie commanded a view of a room and desk. To it presently
came one who seated himself and began opening and reading letters.
Johnnie caught her breath and leaned a little forward, watching him, her
heart in her eyes, hands locked hard together in her lap. It was the
young man of the car. He was not in white flannels now, but he looked
almost as wonderful to the girl in his gray business suit, with the air
of easy command, and the quiet half-smile only latent on his face. Shade
Buckheath had spoken of Gray Stoddard as the boss of the bosses down at
Cottonville. Indeed, his position was unique. Inheritor of large
holdings in Eastern cotton-mill stock, he had returned from abroad on
the death of his father, to look into this source of his very ample
income. The mills in which he was concerned were not earning as they
should, so he was told; and there was discussion as to whether they be
moved south, or a Southern mill be established which might be considered
in the nature of a branch, and where the coarser grades of sheeting
would be manufactured, as well as all the spinning done.
But Stoddard was not of the blood that takes opinions second-hand. Upon
his mother's side he was the grandson of one of the great anti-slavery
agitators. The sister of this man, Gray's great-aunt, had stood beside
him on the platform when there was danger in it; and after the Negro was
freed and enfranchised, she had devoted a long life to the cause of
woman suffrage. The mother who bore him died young. She left him to the
care of a conservative father, but the blood that came through her did
not make for conservatism.
Perhaps it was some admixture of his father's traits which set the young
man to investigating the cotton-mill situation in his own fashion. To do
this as he conceived it should be done, he had hired himself to the
Hardwick Spinning Company in an office position which gave him a fair
outlook on the business, and put him in complete touch with the
practical side of it; yet the facts of the case made the situation
evident to those under him as well as his peers. Whatever convictions
and opinions he was maturing in this year with the Hardwicks, he kept to
himself; but he was supposed to hold some socialistic ideas, and Lydia
Sessions, James Hardwick's sister-in-law, made her devoir to these by
engaging zealously in semi-charitable enterprises among the mill-girls.
He was a passionate individualist. The word seems unduly fiery when one
remembers the smiling, insouciant manner of his divergences from the
conventional type; yet he was inveterately himself, and not some
schoolmaster's or tailor's or barber's version of Gray Stoddard; and in
this, though Johnnie did not know it, lay the strength of his charm
for her.
The moments passed unheeded after he came into her field of vision, and
she watched him for some time, busy at his morning's work. It took her
breath when he raised his eyes suddenly and their glances encountered.
He plainly recognized her at once, and nodded a cheerful greeting. After
a while he got up and came out into the hall, his hands full of papers,
evidently on his way to one of the other offices. He paused beside the
bench and spoke to her.
"Waiting for the room boss? Are they going to put you on this morning?"
he asked pleasantly.
"Yes, I'm a-going to get a chance to work right away," she smiled up at
him. "Ain't it fine?"
The smile that answered hers held something pitying, yet it was a pity
that did not hurt or offend.
"Yes--I'm sure it's fine, if you think so," said Stoddard, half
reluctantly. Then his eye caught the broken pink blossom which Johnnie
had pinned to the front of her bodice. "What's that?" he asked. "It
looks like an orchid."
He was instantly apologetic for the word; but Johnnie detached the
flower from her dress and held it toward him.
"It is," she assented. "It's an orchid; and the little yellow flower
that we-all call the whippoorwill shoe is an orchid, too."
Stoddard thrust his papers into his coat pocket and took the blossom in
his hand.
"That's the pink moccasin flower," Johnnie told him. "They don't bloom
in the valley at all, and they're not very plenty in the mountains. I
picked this one six miles up on White Oak Ridge yesterday. I reckon I
haven't seen more than a dozen of these in my life, and I've hunted
flowers all over Unaka."
"I never had the chance to analyze one," observed Stoddard. "I'd like to
get hold of a good specimen.
"I'm sorry this one's broken," Johnnie deprecated. Then her clouded face
cleared suddenly with its luminous smile. "If it hadn't been for you I
reckon it would have been knocked over the edge of the road," she added.
"That's the flower I had in my handkerchief yesterday evening."
Stoddard continued to examine the pink blossom with interest.
"You said it grew up in the mountains--and didn't grow in the valley,"
he reminded her.
She nodded. "Of course I'm not certain about that," and while she spoke
he transferred his attention from the flower to the girl. "I really know
mighty little about such things, and I've not been in the valley to
exceed ten times in my life. Miss Baird, that taught the school I went
to over at Rainy Gap, had a herbarium, and put all kinds of pressed
flowers in it. I gathered a great many for her, and she taught me to
analyze them--like you were speaking of--but I never did love to do
that. It seemed like naming over and calling out the ways of your
friends, to pull the flower all to pieces and press it and paste it in a
book and write down all its--its--ways and faults."
Again she smiled up at him radiantly, and the young man's astonished
glance went from her dusty, cowhide shoes to the thick roll of fair hair
on her graceful head. What manner of mill-girls did the mountains send
down to the valley?
"But I--" began Stoddard deprecatingly, when Johnnie reddened and broke
in hastily.
"Oh, I don't mean that for you. Miss Baird taught me for three years,
and I loved her as dearly as I ever could any one. You may keep this
flower if you want to; and, come Sunday, I'll get you another one that
won't be broken."
"Why Sunday?" asked Stoddard.
"Well, I wouldn't have time to go after them till then, and the ones I
know of wouldn't be open before Sunday. I saw just three there by the
spring. That's the way they grow, you know--two or three in a place,
and not another for miles."
"You saw them growing?" repeated Stoddard. "I should like to see one on
its roots, and maybe make a little sketch of it. Couldn't you just as
well show me the place Sunday?"
For no reason that she could assign, and very much against her will,
Johnnie's face flushed deeply.
"I reckon I couldn't," she answered evasively. "Hit's a long ways
up--and--hit's a long ways up."
"And yet you're going to walk it--after a week's work here in the mill?"
persisted Stoddard. "You'd better tell me where they grow, and let me go
up in my car."
"I wish't I could," said Johnnie, embarrassed. "But you'd never find it
in the world. They isn't one thing that I could tell you to know the
place by: and you have to leave the road and walk a little piece--oh,
it's no use--and I don't mind, I'd just love to go up there and get the
flowers for you."
"Are you the new girl?" inquired a voice at Johnnie's shoulder.
They turned to find a squat, middle-aged man regarding them dubiously.
"Yes," answered Johnnie, rising. "I've been waiting quite a while."
"Well, come this way," directed the man and, turning, led her away. Down
the hall they went, then up a flight of wooden stairs which carried them
to a covered bridge, and so to the upper story of the factory.
"That's an unusual-looking girl." Old Andrew MacPherson made the comment
as he received the papers from Stoddard's hands.
"The one I was speaking to in the hall?" inquired Stoddard rather
unnecessarily. "Yes; she seems to have an unusual mind as well. These
mountain people are peculiar. They appear to have no idea of class, and
therefore are in a measure all aristocrats."
"Well, that ought to square with your socialistic notions," chaffed
MacPherson, sorting the work on his desk and pushing a certain portion
of it toward Stoddard. "Sit down here, if you please, and we'll go over
these now. The girl looked a good deal like a fairy princess. I don't
think she's a safe topic for susceptible young chaps like you and me,"
the grizzled old Scotchman concluded with a chuckle. "Your socialistic
hullabaloo makes you liable to foregather with all sorts of
impossible people."
Gray shook his head, laughing, as he seated himself at the desk beside
the other.
"Oh, I'm only a theoretical socialist," he deprecated.
"Hum," grunted the older man. "A theoretical socialist always seemed to
me about like a theoretical pickpocket--neither of them stands to do
much harm. For example, here you are, one of the richest young fellows
of my acquaintance, living along very contentedly where every tenet you
profess to hold is daily outraged. You're not giving away your money.
You take a healthy interest in a good car, a good dinner, the gals; I'm
even told you have a fad for old porcelains--and yet you call yourself a
socialist."
"These economic conditions are not a pin," answered Gray, smiling. "I
don't have to jump and say 'ouch!' the minute I find they prick me.
Worse conditions have always been, and no doubt bad ones will survive
for a time, and pass away as mankind outgrows them. I haven't the
colossal conceit to suppose that I can reform the world--not even push
it much faster toward the destination of good to which it is rolling.
But I want to know--I want to understand, myself; then if there is
anything for me to do I shall do it. It may be that the present
conditions are the best possible for the present moment. It may be that
if a lot of us got together and agreed, we could better them
exceedingly. It is not certain in my mind yet that any growth is of
value to humanity which does not proceed from within. This is true of
the individual--must it not be true of the class?"
"No doubt, no doubt," agreed MacPherson, indifferently. "Most of the men
who are loud in the leadership of socialism have made a failure of their
own lives. We'll see what happens when a man who is a personal and
economic success sets up to teach."
"If you mean that very complimentary description for me," said Gray with
sudden seriousness, "I will say to you here and now that there is no
preacher in me. But when I am a little clearer in my own mind as to what
I believe, I shall practise. The only real creed is a manner of life. If
you don't live it, you don't really believe it."