Salome Shepard gazed wonderingly at the crowd of people in the street,
as she guided her pony-phaeton through the factory precincts.
“What can be the matter with these people?” she thought. “I’m sure they
ought to have gone to their work before this.”
It was a wet October day. The narrow street was slippery with the muddy
water that oozed along to the gutters. The factory boardinghouses loomed
up on either side, dingy and desolate. Even the mills looked larger and
coarser, in the gloomy air of the morning.
As she drove by them, the fair owner listened in vain for the rumble of
machinery. Inside, the great, well-lighted rooms looked dreary and
barn-like in the gray mist that struggled through the windows.
One hour before, the machinery, shrieking and groaning, had voiced the
protest of the “hands” against their fancied and their real wrongs. One
hour before, every employe had been in his or her place. But the gloom
of the atmosphere could not obscure the suppressed excitement of the
morning. Shortsighted and blind to their best interest, they might have
been; but there was not a man among them who did not feel a tremendous
underlying principle at stake.
And so, at precisely ten o’clock, the machinery had suddenly and
mysteriously stopped, and every man, woman and child, without a word,
had left the mills.
All this had happened while Salome Shepard was calling on an elderly
friend of her mother’s at the other end of the town. It had been a
delightfully cosy morning in spite of the rain; and, after a gossipy
fashion, they had passed it in discussing, as women will, the newest
pattern of crochet, the last society-novel, the coming concerts in town.
Salome’s mood was the comfortable one conduced by such soothing
intellectual food, as she set forth on her homeward drive. The rain had
ceased, and only along the river did the mists hover, suggesting to her
idle fancy the thick smoke which hangs over a smouldering fire.
But the fire which had been creeping under the life of the Shawsheen
Mills had but just burst into flames, which mounted higher and higher as
the day wore on.
All through the factory precincts the unwonted excitement was manifest.
Groups of employes were everywhere—on the street-corners, in front of
tenements and boardinghouses, in the middle of the street;—and all were
engaged in absorbing discussion of one exciting theme—the strike.
Men without coats or hats; women with shawls thrown loosely over their
heads; girls, bonnetless and neglectful of dress; unkempt old women, who
were perhaps the home-makers for these hard-worked and ill-paid people;
all were indifferent save to one subject.
Even the quick passage, through their midst, of the pony-phaeton and its
mistress failed to attract attention beyond an occasional surly glance
from the men or an envious one from the women. Unmindful of the long
days in store, when there would be ample time to discuss their wrongs,
they remained huddled in excited groups in the wet October air, talking
over the strike,—the famous strike of the Shawsheen Mills.
“I declare!” muttered the young woman who was hurrying the pony out of
these disagreeable surroundings; “it must be a strike! Nothing else
would crowd them into the street so. I wonder what they want? Dear me!
what nuisances these work-people are. Why can’t they be sensible, and
when they are earning a living, be content? Dear me! if I had the making
over of this world I would make everybody comfortably off, and nobody
rich—unless it were myself,” she added, laughing; for absolute
truthfulness was a necessity of Salome Shepard’s nature, and she knew
perfectly well that she could not do without the luxuries to which she
had always been accustomed.
“If I had the making over of the world!”
The words repeated themselves in her mind. If any human being has the
power of making over the world in any smallest degree, something
whispered, that person must be a young, attractive woman, with a vast
property and absolute control of several hundred people, besides two
millions of dollars in her own right.
“Dear me!” she said aloud, as she drove up the graveled road under the
dripping yellow beeches. “How positively dreadful it must be to be a
reformer! How would I look in a bloomer costume and black bombazine
bonnet? No. Let things alone, keep to your sphere, young woman,—the
proper, well-regulated, protected and chaperoned sphere of a delicate
young lady, and let the world right its own wrongs.”
She jumped lightly from the phaeton, tossing the reins to James, and
showing her fine, well-turned figure to excellent advantage as she ran
up the broad steps.
The massive doors turned noiselessly at her approach. She passed through
the fine old hall and went directly up the broad oak staircase to her
room.
“How comfortable this is,” she said to herself, as the blazing wood-fire
threw flickering shadows over the dainty hangings, the warm rugs and the
choice pictures.
But even as she drew a long sigh of contentment with her lot, a picture
of wet and muddy streets, thickset with groups of brawny men and
bedraggled, unkempt women, intruded itself, and the sigh changed its
tenor.
“If I only had the making over of the world!” she said again aloud; and
added resolutely, “but I haven’t.”