When she opened her eyes again, not only Otis Greenough but John Villard
and an office-boy were bending anxiously over her.
“My dear girl,” the agent was saying, “bless me, my dear, what is it?
How came you here and who has harmed you?”
“Don’t be alarmed, sir,” was her reply, as she got on her feet; and
then, somewhat excitedly, she told the events of the last fifteen or
twenty minutes, interrupted, every other sentence, by such ejaculations
as, “Great Scott,” “Bless me,” “The rascals,” “Confound them,” from the
elderly man, while the younger one listened in silent amazement.
Rapid search was made and the night-watch was found sleeping, in a
stupor which was evidently the work of a drug; while the police were, as
usual, nowhere to be found.
Salome was taken into the office—not without inward trembling, as she
feared further evidences of the miscreants.
Mr. Villard soon reported two kegs of gunpowder and a small dynamite
bomb in the room below, at the same time congratulating, most heartily,
the young woman who had saved their lives as well as the mills.
But her courage was now at a low ebb, and, woman-like, she shivered at
the close proximity of gunpowder, and begged to be taken home.
Mr. Greenough, who had come to realize the danger to himself and to the
mills which his obstinacy had provoked, was also anxious to leave the
premises and glad to accompany Salome home.
John Villard, meanwhile, attended to the duty of finding new watchmen
who should be reliable,—a difficult task. Against his will, he promised
Salome not to sleep at the mills, as he had been doing since the
machinery had been tampered with.
Salome was nearly prostrated when she reached home, and had but little
strength left with which to importune the agent to consent to any terms
for a settlement; but as the old man was, for once, thoroughly
frightened, it was not difficult to exact a promise that he would
consider a compromise.
Mrs. Soule, when she learned of Salome’s intrepidity,—set forth as it
was by Mr. Greenough’s gratitude and gallant appreciation,—was greatly
concerned for her niece and put her straightway to bed, where, in fact,
she had supposed her to be for the past hour, and where she wept over
and caressed her as she had not done since the girl had left home for
boarding-school. And then, what was far more to the purpose, she gave
her a bath of alcohol and olive oil, and soothed her to sleep.
Early the next morning the agent of the Shawsheen Mills sent a messenger
over to the dingy room which served as headquarters for the Labor Union,
begging for an interview.
As this was the first overture of peace from his side, it was natural
that it should be hailed with glee by the officers of the Union. And
although, the day before, the leaders of the strike had been closeted
together in a serious debate as to how much they should yield to
Capital, they now unanimously agreed not to “weaken” in the smallest
degree.
As for the agent, he had been persuaded to yield every point demanded by
the strikers, insisting only upon the one condition, that the Labor
Union should be disbanded.
The question of ten hours he granted without a murmur. He quibbled a
long time over the wage question, and the subject of weekly payments,
and only on seeing the dogged determination of the laborers did he come
to terms on that. But he very properly, and too peremptorily, refused to
remove the spinning frames which had formed one subject of contention.
And then he proceeded to overthrow the good effects of what concessions
he had made, by violently denouncing all labor unions, and vigorously
insisting that the one known as the Shawsheen Labor Union be immediately
and forever disbanded.
“Never,” said the foremost of the committee, “will we submit to so
arbitrary a demand. We have a perfect right to organize our forces and
assert our claims. How can we—a band of day-laborers,—dependent on
capital for a bare living, win a single cause for ourselves without
combinations of this kind? There are scores of questions which involve
not our welfare in one way alone, but our health, our wages, our morals,
our manhood, which we, as single individuals, can never cope with, but
which, as a united force, we can adjust. Besides, in all departments of
labor, the women and children equal or exceed the men. There are to-day
one hundred and seventy-five thousand more women working in mills than
there were ten years ago; and what are they but the weakest and most
dependent of employes? They have no strength to agitate; they have no
power to change any existing order of things. All they can do is to toil
and submit. We owe it to them as men, as husbands, brothers, and sons,
to lighten their burdens. As free American citizens we owe it to
ourselves, to settle the conditions of our own lives, so far as may be.
This can only be done by combinations of the laboring classes strong
enough to compel manufacturers to concede us our rights.”
“You are right to a degree,” answered Villard, before Mr. Greenough
could swallow his surprise at hearing such sentiments from one of his
operatives; “I believe there are some rights which you can only secure
by a combination of your forces as working-men. But when you let reason
lose its sway, and passion take its place; when you are influenced by
unworthy demagogues and unbalanced cranks, and seek to effect by strikes
and such arbitrary measures what might be better secured by a more
conciliatory course, you must not be surprised if you do not succeed in
bull-dozing a rich concern like this into obedience, and——”
“And when, by your —— labour unions, you sink so low as to countenance
incendiarism and murder—yes, sirs—that is what you attempted last night,
sirs,—you can’t expect this mill is going to countenance them. I’ll see
you all starve and rot first,” and Otis Greenough’s face was purple with
anger.
“We have already disclaimed all knowledge in our Union, sir,” said one
of the committee, “of last night’s outrage.”
“Blast it, what do I care for that?” roared the agent, as usual, out of
temper. “Whether you knew it or not, it was done under cover of your
strike, and your Union, and was one of the precious outgrowths of it.
Give up the —— thing, I say—or there is no compromise with these mills.”
“There is little use in prolonging this interview, I am afraid,” said
the first of the committee, taking up his hat.
“Impudent dogs!” said Mr. Greenough, as Villard tried to speak, anxious
to put things on a more satisfactory basis before the meeting closed.
“Let them go. They’ll find hard hoeing before they reach the end of
their row.”
“And, sir,” retorted a fiery-looking man who had not spoken before, “if
it comes to open war you’ll find us tough customers. We shall fight it
out like men, even if we starve like beasts.”
And with these words the committee departed, leaving matters worse than
ever before in the affairs of the Shawsheen Mills.
In vain did the two superintendents plead and argue and threaten the
choleric old agent. His blood was up and he was a veritable charger on
the eve of battle. There was no state board of arbitration then, and
therefore no available way of settling their difficulties except among
themselves. And as discussion only made matters worse, the subject which
was always uppermost in these three men’s minds was tacitly dropped.
Every precaution was taken to insure the mills from the danger it had
escaped the night before, and a detective was obtained from Boston to
hunt out the criminals who had perpetrated the dastardly act.
At noon, they were all surprised by a note from Miss Shepard. It ran as
follows:
“DEAR MR. GREENOUGH,
“As the owner of the Shawsheen Mill property, I hereby appoint a
meeting of all its officers at my house, to-night. Please have them
here at eight o’clock.
“Pardon me for the liberty I have seemed to take, and believe me ever
a loving and respectful friend,
“SALOME SHEPARD.”
“Well, you hear that, boys,” said Mr. Greenough, after reading it aloud.
“Be on hand. Tell the treasurer and cashier and head book-keeper. We’ll
all be there. The Lord only knows what she is up to; but if that young
woman hasn’t got a level head on her shoulders, then I don’t know who
has.”
“I reckon you’re right, sir,” echoed Mr. Burnham, while John Villard
laughed in his sleeve at the young woman who evidently dreamed of
settling a prolonged strike. “Why,” he said to himself, “she has never
known enough of the practical side of mill-life to recognize one of her
operatives, and hardly knows the different brands of cloth manufactured
by them.”
* * * * *
Salome Shepard had waked at an early hour that morning and found herself
unable to sleep again. Her mind was alive with gratitude for the part
she had been able to play the night before, with apprehension for the
future, and with increasing self-accusation for the state of things in
the Shawsheen Mills, both past and present.
“Pshaw!” she said to herself while dressing, true to her habit of
communing with her own conscience in default of a visible mentor, “how
can I be blamed for the state of things here? The entire business of the
mills was put out of my hands by my father’s will. I could have done no
differently.”
“You could,” replied that sternest of modern inquisitors—a New England
conscience. “It was in your power to see that the moral and physical
condition of these people was improved and cultivated. It was in your
power to give them better homes and more privileges. It was in your
power to raise their standards of life and to create new ones. But you
have ignored their very existence, and let them live a mean and sordid
life of unremitting toil, in order to furnish you with money to live a
selfish life of luxurious ease.”
Salome tied the blue ribbons to her wrapper, and giving her crimps a
last touch went down to breakfast.
Knowing she would be opposed, she said nothing of her plans for the
morning to her aunt, but simply announced, after they had left the
table, that she was going for a long walk.
Then she went upstairs and put on the plainest costume she owned (which,
by the way, was a tailor-made gown that had cost her one hundred and
fifty dollars), and started for the tenement houses where her operatives
lived.
It did not occur to her to feel any fear; nor that the miscreants who
had planned the explosion for the previous night might be watching her
footsteps. She felt it incumbent upon her to see for herself exactly how
these people lived, and what they were bearing and suffering in
consequence of the strike.
In the bright glare of the morning sun, the tenement houses had never
looked so dingy and mean. They were built in Newbern Shepard’s day, and
had received but very few repairs since that time. Although it was cold
January weather, Salome counted a dozen panes of glass gone from the
first house, and noticed that the lower hinge to the front door was
broken. It was a two-story wooden building with four tenements of four
rooms each.
She ascended the rickety steps and rapped on the door. One of the women
saw her from a front window and came to the door, holding it open only
so far as to permit her to see the strange caller.
“Good-morning,” said Salome in pleasant tones.
“Good-morning, miss.” The politeness of Salome’s manner thawed the other
woman, and the door opened a little wider. “Will you walk in?”
That was precisely what she had come for, and Salome stepped inside with
alacrity. She found herself in the sitting-room and living-room of the
family. It was a meager home. The remnant of a faded oil-cloth was on
the floor. The walls were unpapered and devoid of any attempts at
ornament, except one unframed, dilapidated old lithograph of “The Queen
of the West,”—a buxom young woman with disproportionately large black
eyes, a dress of bright scarlet cut extremely _décolleté_, and cheeks of
a yet more vivid hue. A pine table covered with a stamped red cloth was
littered with cheap, trashy story-papers and pamphlets addressed “To the
Laboring Men of America.” An old lounge, with broken springs, and six
common wooden chairs constituted the other furnishings of the room.
Salome’s first thought as she looked about her was:
“I don’t wonder these people get discontented and clamor for something
which seems to them better.”
But she found, before the forenoon was over, many houses that were not
so pleasant as this. For, once inside these rooms, everything was neat
and clean, and the woman who answered her questions was civil if not
talkative.
She found that five people lived in these four small rooms: this woman,
her two daughters, a son-in-law, and a grandchild. She also found that
the other tenements contained five, six, and seven people, making
twenty-three in all. There were absolutely no sanitary arrangements, and
she discovered that the sanitation of this tenement house district
consisted only of surface drainage. According to the statements of her
hostess, there was nearly always somebody “ailing” in these houses.
The first house she went into was a fair sample of the remainder. A few
were slightly better, but more were in a worse condition. In most
instances she was respectfully received, although at three houses she
was met by ungracious people, and received gruff replies to her
kindly-put inquiries.
Everywhere, strong, able-bodied men were lounging about in enforced
idleness; and one of them, resenting, with true American independence,
this intrusion into the sacred precincts of his miserable home, plainly
intimated that “they was well enough off now, and didn’t want no rich
folks as was livin’ on money _they_ earned, to come pryin’ round their
houses.” Finally, at the last of the tenement houses she was met by a
surly, burly mule-spinner, who gruffly refused her admittance.
Nothing daunted, however, she sought out a boarding-house for the young
women of the mills. The landlady, recognizing her, invited her in and
willingly told her all about the life of mill-girls, offering, at last,
to show her their rooms.
Salome gladly accepted and followed the woman up bare, unpainted stairs
to the rooms on the second and third floors. These were small and
perfectly bare of comforts, almost of necessities. The floors were
uncarpeted and guiltless of paint, or even of a very recent application
of soap and water. They had no closets. A common pine bedstead—sometimes
two of them—in each room, two chairs, in one of which stood a tin basin,
while beside it on the floor stood a bucket of water, and a small
bureau, made up the sum total of the furniture. In only one room did
Salome see any evidences of a literary taste, and that, if she had known
it, was a cheap paper, the worst of the sensational class.
Salome’s heart sank within her. She no longer wondered that the
mill-girls of to-day were a discontented, ignorant set, nor that many of
them sank into lives of degradation.
“The rooms are good enough for the girls,” said the woman, noticing the
look of disgust on Salome’s tell-tale face. “They seem poor enough to
elegant ladies like you. But these girls know no better. And they are
good enough to sleep off a drunk in,” she added, roughly.
“You don’t mean to say,” asked her guest, “that any of your girls get
intoxicated?”
“Intoxicated? I don’t know what else you’d call it, when they have to be
helped in at eleven o’clock Saturday night, and put to bed, and don’t
get up again until Monday morning.”
Salome was sick with pity and shame for her sex. She no longer
questioned whether she had a mission toward these, her people.
She went home and wrote the note to Mr. Greenough, given in an earlier
part of this chapter.