"The Whited Sepulcher," as some of the bitterest of her poorly paid
slaves called the model factory, stood coolly, insolently, among her
dirty, red-brick, grime-stained neighbors; like some dainty lady
appareled in sheer muslins and jewels appearing on the threshold of the
hot kitchen where her servitors were sweating and toiling to prepare her
a feast.
The luxuriant vines were green and abundant, creeping coolly about the
white walls, befringing the windows charmingly, laying delicate clinging
fingers even up to the very eaves, and straying out over the roof. No
matter how parched the ground in the little parks of the district, no
matter how yellow the leaves on the few stunted trees near by, no matter
how low the city's supply of water, nor how many public fountains had to
be temporarily shut off, that vine was always well watered. Its root lay
deep in soft, moist earth well fertilized and cared for; its leaves were
washed anew each evening with refreshing spray from the hose that played
over it. "Seems like I'd just like to lie down there and sleep with my
face clost up to it, all wet and cool-like, all night!" sighed one poor
little bony victim of a girl, scarcely more than a child, as the throng
pressed out the wide door at six o'clock and caught the moist fragrance
of the damp earth and growing vine.
"You look all in, Susie!" said her neighbor, pausing in her interminable
gum-chewing to eye her friend keenly. "Say, you better go with me to
the movies to-night! I know a nice cool one fer a nickel!"
"Can't!" sighed Susie. "'Ain't got ther nickel, and, besides, I gotta
stay with gran'mom while ma goes up with some vests she's been makin'.
Oh, I'm all right! I jus' was thinkin' about the vine; it looks so cool
and purty. Say, Katie, it's somepin' to b'long to a vine like that, even
if we do have it rotten sometimes! Don't you always feel kinda
proud-like when you come in the door, 'most as if it was a palace? I
like to pertend it's all a great big house where I live, and there's
carpets and lace curtings to the winders, and a real gold sofy with
pink-velvet cushings! And when I come down and see one of the company's
ottymobiles standin' by the curb waitin', I like to pertend it's mine,
only I don't ride 'cause I've been ridin' so much I'd _ruther_ walk!
Don't you ever do that, Katie?"
"Not on yer _life_, I don't!" said Katie, with an ugly frown. "I hate
the old dump! I hate every stone in the whole pile! I could tear that
nasty green vine down an' stamp on it. I'd like to strip its leaves off
an' leave it bare. I'd like to turn the hose off and see it dry up an'
be all brown, an' ugly, an' dead. It's stealin' the water they oughtta
have over there in the fountain. It's stealin' the money they oughtta
pay us fer our work! It's creepin' round the winders an' eatin' up the
air. Didn't you never take notice to how they let it grow acrost the
winders to hide folks from lookin' in from the visitor's winders there
on the east side? They don't care how it shuts away the draught and
makes it hotter 'n a furnace where we work! No, you silly! I never was
proud to come in that old marble door! I was always mad, away down
inside, that I had to work here. I had to go crawlin' and askin' fer a
job, an' take all their insults, an' be locked in a trap. Take it from
me, there's goin' to be some awful accident happen here some day! If a
fire should break out how many d'you s'pose could get out before they
was burned to a crisp? Did you know them winders was nailed so they
wouldn't go up any higher 'n a foot? Did you know they 'ain't got 'nouf
fire-escapes to get half of us out ef anythin' happened? Did you never
take notice to the floor roun' them three biggest old machines they've
got up on the sixth? I stepped acrost there this mornin'--Mr. Brace sent
me up on a message to the forewoman--an' that floor shook under my feet
like a earthquake! Sam Warner says the building ain't half strong enough
fer them machines, anyway. He says they'd oughtta put 'em down on the
first floor; but they didn't want to 'cause they don't show off good to
visitors, so they stuck 'em up on the sixth, where they don't many see
'em. But Sam says some day they're goin' to bust right through the
floor, an' ef they do, they ain't gonta stop till they get clear down to
the cellar, an' they'll wipe out everythin' in their way when they go!
B'leeve me! I don't wantta be workin' here when that happens!"
"_Good night!_" said Susie, turning pale. "Them big machines on the
sixth is right over where I work on the fifth! Say, Katie, le's ast Mr.
Brace to put us on the other side the room! Aw, gee! Katie! What's the
use o' livin'? I'd 'most be willin' to be dead jest to get cool! Seems
zif it's allus either awful hot er awful cold!"
They went to their stifling tenements and their unattractive suppers.
They dragged their weary feet over the hot, dark pavements, laughing and
talking boisterously with their comrades, or crowded into places of
amusement to forget for a little while, then to creep back to toss the
night out on a hard cot in breathless air or to creep to fire-escape or
flat roof for a few brief hours of relief, till it was time to return to
the vine-clad factory and its hot, noisy slavery for another day.
Three girls fainted on the fifth floor and two on the sixth next
morning. They were not carried to the cool and shaded rest-rooms to
revive, but lay on the floor with their heads huddled on a pile of
waste, and had a little warmish water from the rusty "cooler" in the
back stairway poured upon them as they lay. No white-clad nurse with
palm leaf and cooling drinks attended their unconscious state, although
there was one in attendance in the rest-room whose duty it was to look
after the comfort of any chance visitors. When any stooped to succor
here, she fanned her neighbor with her apron, casting an anxious eye on
her own silent machine and knowing she was losing "time."
Susie fainted three times that morning, and Katie lost an hour in all,
bringing water and making a fan out of a newspaper. Also she had an
angry altercation with the foreman. He said if Susie "played up" this
way she'd have to quit; there were plenty of girls waiting to take her
place, and he hadn't time to fool with kids that wanted to lie around
and be fanned. It was his last few words as she was reviving that stung
Susie to life again and put her back at her machine for the last time in
nervous panic, with the thought of what would happen at home if she lost
her job. Up above her the great heavy machines thrashed on and the floor
trembled with their movement. Black and thick and hot was the air around
Susie and she scarcely could see, for dizziness, the machinery which she
worked from habit, as she stood swaying in her place, and wondering if
she could hold out till the noon whistle blew.
Down in the basement, near one of the elevator shafts, a pile of waste
lay smoldering, out of sight. One of the boys from the lumber-yard down
the next block had stopped to light his cigarette as he passed out into
the street after bringing a bill to the head manager. He tossed his
match away, not seeing where it fell. The big factory thundered on in
full swing of a busy, driving morning, and the little match lay nursing
its flame and smoldering.
How long it crept and smoldered no one knew. It seemed to come from
every floor at once, that smell of smoke and cry of fire! More smoke in
volumes pouring up suddenly through cracks and bursting from the
elevator shaft; a lick of flame darting out like a serpent ready to
strike, menacing against the heat of the big rooms.
Panic and smoke and fire! Cries and clashing of machinery thundering on
like a storm above an angry sea!
The girls rushed together in fear, or, screaming, ran desperately to
windows which they knew they could not raise! They pounded at the locked
doors and crowded in the narrow passages, frantically surging this way
and that. There was no one to quiet them or tell them what to do. If
some one would only stop that awful machinery! Was the engineer dead?
Mockingly the little cool vines crept in about the window-sills and over
the imprisoning panes, as if to taunt the victims who were caught in the
death-trap.
"At any rate, if we die you'll die too!" cried Katie Craigin, shaking
her fist at the long green tendrils that swept across the window nearest
her machine. "Oh, you! You'll burn to a crisp at the roots! You'll
wither up an' die. You'll be dead an' brown an' ugly! An' I'm glad!
_Glad!_ For I hate you. _I hate you!_ Do you hear?" And she grasped a
handful of leaves that edged the window-sill, spat upon them, and
stamped them under her foot, then turned to look for Susie.
But Susie had fallen once more by her machine, leaving it unguarded
while it thrashed on uselessly. Her little pinched face looked up from
the dirty floor in pitiful unconsciousness amid the wild rush and whirl
of the fear-maddened company. If terror drove them they would pass over
her without knowing it. They were blind with desperation.
The room seemed about to burst with the heat. Timbers were cracking. All
the stories they had heard of the frailty of the building came now to
goad them as they hurtled from one end of their pen to the other, while
intermittent clouds of smoke and darting flames conspired to bewilder
their senses.
Katie sprang to seize her friend and draw her out of the path of the
stampede. As she lifted her a cry arose, like the wail of a lost world
facing the judgment. The floor swayed, the machines about seemed to
totter, and the floor above seemed bending down with some great weight.
There was a cracking, wrenching, twisting, as of the whole great
building in mortal pain, and just as Katie drew her unconscious friend
away to the window the floor above gave way and down crashed three awful
machines, like great devouring juggernauts, to crush and bear away
whatever came in their way.
After that, hell itself could scarcely have presented a more terrible
spectacle of writhing, tortured souls, pinned anguishing amid the
flames; of white faces below looking up to ghastly ones above that gazed
down with horror into the awful cavern, closed their eyes, clung to
walls and windows, and knew not what to do!
The fearful noise of machinery had suddenly ceased and been succeeded
by a calm in which the soft sound of rushing flames, the babble of the
crowd outside, the gong of fire-engines, and the cry of firemen seemed
balm of music in the ears. Water hissed on hot machinery and burning
walls. It splashed inside the window and on the white face of Susie. It
touched the hot hands of Katie as she lifted her friend nearer to the
blessed spray. A shadow of a ladder somewhere crossed the window.
Splintered glass fell all about her, and a hand reached in and crushed
the window frame.
It was Pat who lifted out the limp Susie and handed her down to
Courtland, who was just below, while Katie turned and looked back at the
fearful pit of fire beneath her, knowing that in but a few more seconds,
if help came not, she, too, would be a part of that writhing, awful
heap! She saw the white face and staring eyes of the gray-haired woman
who ran the machine next to hers lying beneath a pile of dead. She
reeled and felt her senses going. Her hot hands clung to the hotter
window-ledge. The flames were leaping nearer! She could not hold out--
Then a strong hand grasped her and drew her out into the blessed air,
and she felt herself being carried down, down, safely, wondering, as she
went, if the vine was roasted yet, or if it still smirked greenly
outside this holocaust; wished she had strength to shake a mocking
finger at it; and then she knew no more.
For three long hours Courtland and Pat worked side by side, bringing out
the living, searching for the dead and dying, carrying them to an
improvised hospital in an old warehouse in the next block. Grim and
soiled and gray, with singed hair, blistered hands and faces, and
sickened hearts, they toiled on.
To Courtland the experience was like walking with God and being shown
the way he might have gone, and how he had been saved. If he had
accepted Ramsey Thomas's proposition he would have been a sharer in the
sin that caused this catastrophe. He would have been a murderer, almost
as much responsible for that charred body lying at his feet, for all
those dead and dying, as if he had owned the place.
The whited sepulcher lay a heap of blackened ruins. Only one small
corner rose, of blackened marble, to which clung a fragment of brave
green to show what had been but a few short hours before. The morning's
sun would see it, too, withered and black like the rest. The model
factory was gone! But the money that had built it, the money that it had
made, was still in existence to build it over again, a perpetual blind
to the lawmakers who might have otherwise put a stop to its abuses! It
would undoubtedly be built again, more whited, more sepulchral than
before.
As he looked upon the ruin a great resolve came to him. He would give
his life to fight the power that was setting its heel upon humanity and
putting a price upon its blood. He would devote all his powers to the
uplifting of people who had been downtrodden and oppressed in the simple
act of earning their daily bread!
Ramsey Thomas, happening to be in a near-by city, and answering a
summons by telegraph, arrived at the scene in an automobile as Courtland
stood there, grimed and tattered from his fight with death.
Ramsey Thomas, baffled, angry, distressed, wriggled out of his car to
the sidewalk and faced Courtland, curiously conspicuous and recognizable
with all his disarray. Courtland towered above the great man with
righteous wrath in his eyes. Ramsey Thomas cringed and looked
embarrassed. He had come to look over the ground to see how much trouble
they were going to have getting the insurance, and he hadn't expected
to be met by a giant Nemesis with blackened face and singed eyebrows.
"Oh, why--I," he began, nervously. "It's Mr. Courtland, isn't it? They
tell me you've been very helpful during the fire! I'm sure we're much
obliged. We'll not forget this, I assure you--"
"Mr. Thomas," broke in Courtland, in a clear, decisive voice, "you
wanted to know a year ago why I wouldn't accept your proposition, and
you couldn't understand my reason for refusing. There it is!"
He pointed eloquently to the heap of ruins.
"Go over to that warehouse and see the rows of charred bodies! Look at
the agonized faces of the dead, and hear the groans of the dying. See
the living who are scarred or crippled for life. You are responsible for
all that! If I had accepted your proposal I would have been responsible,
too. And now I mean to spend the rest of my life fighting the conditions
that make such a catastrophe as this possible!"
Courtland turned, and in spite of his tatters and soil walked
majestically away from him down the street.
Ramsey Thomas stood rooted to the ground, watching him, a strange
mingling of emotions chasing one another over his rugged old
countenance: astonishment, admiration, and fury in quick succession.
"Drat him!" he said, under his breath. "Drat him! Now he'll be a worse
pest than that little rat of a preacher, for he's got twice as much
brains and education!"