by Rebecca Harding Davis
“Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?”
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky
sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy
with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the
window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's
shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg
tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul
smells ranging loose in the air.
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds
from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in
black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on
the dingy boats, on the yellow river,--clinging in a coating of greasy
soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the
passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through
the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides.
Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from
the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted
and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a
cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old
dream,--almost worn out, I think.
From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to
the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and
tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired
of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges. What wonder? When I was a
child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the
negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something
of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window
I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and
morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces
bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin
and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night
over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and
infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and
grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case
like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing
to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,--horrible to
angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My fancy about the river was
an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What if it be stagnant and
slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight,
quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and
flushing crimson with roses,--air, and fields, and mountains. The future
of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be stowed
away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard,
and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.
Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the
windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and
the coalboats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,--a
story of this house into which I happened to come to-day. You may think
it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden
flashes of pain or pleasure.--I know: only the outline of a dull life,
that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly
lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those
of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.--Lost? There is a
curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a
lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is
what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed
to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,--here, into the
thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this
story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain
dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist,
or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet
on the hills, do not see it clearly,--this terrible question which men
here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret
into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken
faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or
of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I
will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you
to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own
reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but, from the
very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world
has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but
will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark
as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death; but if your
eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be
so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.
My story is very simple,--Only what I remember of the life of one
of these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's
rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the great
order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter; run usually
with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose the half-forgotten
story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands.
Perhaps because there is a secret, underlying sympathy between that
story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or
perhaps simply for the reason that this house is the one where the
Wolfes lived. There were the father and son,--both hands, as I said,
in one of Kirby & John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah,
their cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented
then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms.
The old man, like many of the puddlers and feeders of the mills, was
Welsh,--had spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You may
pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the
windows, any day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not
so brawny; they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor
shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure,
unmixed blood, I fancy: shows itself in the slight angular bodies and
sharply-cut facial lines. It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes
lived here. Their lives were like those of their class: incessant
labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses,
drinking--God and the distillers only know what; with an occasional
night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess. Is that all of their
lives?--of the portion given to them and these their duplicates swarming
the streets to-day?--nothing beneath?--all? So many a political reformer
will tell you,--and many a private reformer, too, who has gone among
them with a heart tender with Christ's charity, and come out outraged,
hardened.
One rainy night, about eleven o'clock, a crowd of half-clothed women
stopped outside of the cellar-door. They were going home from the
cotton-mill.
“Good-night, Deb,” said one, a mulatto, steadying herself against the
gas-post. She needed the post to steady her. So did more than one of
them.
“Dah's a ball to Miss Potts' to-night. Ye'd best come.”
“Inteet, Deb, if hur'll come, hur'll hef fun,” said a shrill Welsh voice
in the crowd.
Two or three dirty hands were thrust out to catch the gown of the woman,
who was groping for the latch of the door.
“No.”
“No? Where's Kit Small, then?”
“Begorra! on the spools. Alleys behint, though we helped her, we dud.
An wid ye! Let Deb alone! It's ondacent frettin' a quite body. Be the
powers, an we'll have a night of it! there'll be lashin's o' drink,--the
Vargent be blessed and praised for't!”
They went on, the mulatto inclining for a moment to show fight, and drag
the woman Wolfe off with them; but, being pacified, she staggered away.
Deborah groped her way into the cellar, and, after considerable
stumbling, kindled a match, and lighted a tallow dip, that sent a yellow
glimmer over the room. It was low, damp,--the earthen floor covered with
a green, slimy moss,--a fetid air smothering the breath. Old Wolfe lay
asleep on a heap of straw, wrapped in a torn horse-blanket. He was a
pale, meek little man, with a white face and red rabbit-eyes. The woman
Deborah was like him; only her face was even more ghastly, her lips
bluer, her eyes more watery. She wore a faded cotton gown and a
slouching bonnet. When she walked, one could see that she was deformed,
almost a hunchback. She trod softly, so as not to waken him, and went
through into the room beyond. There she found by the half-extinguished
fire an iron saucepan filled with cold boiled potatoes, which she put
upon a broken chair with a pint-cup of ale. Placing the old candlestick
beside this dainty repast, she untied her bonnet, which hung limp and
wet over her face, and prepared to eat her supper. It was the first
food that had touched her lips since morning. There was enough of it,
however: there is not always. She was hungry,--one could see that easily
enough,--and not drunk, as most of her companions would have been
found at this hour. She did not drink, this woman,--her face told that,
too,--nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had
some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,--some love or hope, it
might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take
to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone. While she was skinning the
potatoes, and munching them, a noise behind her made her stop.
“Janey!” she called, lifting the candle and peering into the darkness.
“Janey, are you there?”
A heap of ragged coats was heaved up, and the face of a young girl
emerged, staring sleepily at the woman.
“Deborah,” she said, at last, “I'm here the night.”
“Yes, child. Hur's welcome,” she said, quietly eating on.
The girl's face was haggard and sickly; her eyes were heavy with sleep
and hunger: real Milesian eyes they were, dark, delicate blue, glooming
out from black shadows with a pitiful fright.
“I was alone,” she said, timidly.
“Where's the father?” asked Deborah, holding out a potato, which the
girl greedily seized.
“He's beyant,--wid Haley,--in the stone house.” (Did you ever hear the
word tail from an Irish mouth?) “I came here. Hugh told me never to stay
me-lone.”
“Hugh?”
“Yes.”