She entered the vast, dingy factory; the woollen dust, the clammy air
of copperas were easier to breathe in; the cramped, sordid office, the
work, mere trifles to laugh at; and she bent over the ledger with its
hard lines in earnest good-will, through the slow creeping hours of the
long day. She noticed that the unfortunate chicken was making its
heart glad over a piece of fresh earth covered with damp moss. Dr.
Knowles stopped to look at it when he came, passing her with a surly
nod.
"So your master's not forgotten you," he snarled, while the blind old
hen cocked her one eye up at him.
Pike, the manager, had brought in some bills.
"Who's its master?" he said, curiously, stopping by the door.
"Holmes,--he feeds it every morning."
The Doctor drawled out the words with a covert sneer, watching the cold
face bending over the desk, meantime.
Pike laughed.
"Bah! it's the first thing he ever fed, then, besides himself. Chickens
must lie nearer his heart than men."
Knowles scowled at him; he had no fancy for Pike's scurrilous gossip.
The quiet face was unmoved. When he heard the manager's foot on the
ladder without, he tested it again. He had a vague suspicion which he
was determined to verify.
"Holmes," he said, carelessly, "has an affinity for animals. No
wonder. Adam must have been some such man as he, when the Lord gave
him 'dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air.'"
The hand paused courteously a moment, then resumed its quick, cool
movement over the page. He was not baffled.
"If there were such a reality as mastership, that man was born to rule.
Pike will find him harder to cheat than me, when he takes possession
here."
She looked up now.
"He came here to take my place in the mills,--buy me out,--articles
will be signed in a day or two. I know what you think,--no,--not worth
a dollar. Only brains and a soul, and he 's sold them at a high
figure,--threw his heart in,--the purchaser being a lady. It was
light, I fancy,--starved out, long ago."
The old man's words were spurted out in the bitterness of scorn. The
girl listened with a cool incredulity in her eyes, and went back to her
work.
"Miss Herne is the lady,--my partner's daughter. Herne and Holmes
they'll call the firm. He is here every day, counting future profit."
Nothing could be read on the face; so he left her, cursing, as he went,
men who put themselves up at auction,--worse than Orleans slaves.
Margret laughed to herself at his passion; as for the story he hinted,
it was absurd. She forgot it in a moment.
Two or three gentlemen down in one of the counting-rooms, just then,
looked at the story from another point of view. They were talking low,
out of hearing from the clerks.
"It's a good thing for Holmes," said one, a burly, farmer-like man, who
was choosing specimens of wool.
"Cheap. And long credit. Just half the concern he takes."
"There is a lady in the case?" suggested a young doctor, who, by virtue
of having spent six months in the South, dropped his r-s, and talked of
"niggahs" in a way to make a Georgian's hair stand on end.
"A lady in the case?"
"Of course. Only child of Herne's. HE comes down with the dust as
dowry. Good thing for Holmes. 'Stonishin' how he's made his way up.
If money 's what he wants in this world, he's making a long stride now
to 't."
The young doctor lighted his cigar, asserting that--
"Ba George, some low people did get on, re-markably! Mary Herne, now,
was best catch in town."
"Do you think money is what he wants?" said a quiet little man,
sitting lazily on a barrel,--a clergyman, Vandyke; whom his clerical
brothers shook their heads when they named, but never argued with, and
bowed to with uncommon deference.
The wool-buyer hesitated with a puzzled look.
"No," he said, slowly; "Stephen Holmes is not miserly. I've knowed him
since a boy. To buy place, power, perhaps, eh? Yet not that,
neither," he added, hastily. "We think a sight of him out our way,
(self-made, you see,) and would have had him the best office in the
State before this, only he was so cursedly indifferent."
"Indifferent, yes. No man cares much for stepping-stones in
themselves," said Vandyke, half to himself.
"Great fault of American society, especially in the West," said the
young aristocrat. "Stepping-stones lie low, as my reverend friend
suggests; impudence ascends; merit and refinement scorn such dirty
paths,"--with a mournful remembrance of the last dime in his
waistcoat-pocket.
"But do you," exclaimed the farmer, with sudden solemnity, "do you
understand this scheme of Knowles's? Every dollar he owns is in this
mill, and every dollar of it is going into some castle in the air that
no sane man can comprehend."
"Mad as a March hare," contemptuously muttered the doctor.
His reverend friend gave him a look,--after which he was silent.
"I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it," persisted
the wool-man, earnestly looking at the attentive face of his listener.
"We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart while he ruins himself.
It's something of a Communist fraternity: I don't know the name, but I
know the thing."
Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the
clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors.
"There's two ways for 'em to end. If they're made out of the top of
society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every particle flies
off on its own special path to the sun, and the Community 's broke; and
if they're made of the lower mud, they keep going down, down
together,--they live to drink and eat, and make themselves as near the
brutes as they can. It isn't easy to believe, Sir, but it's true. I
have seen it. I've seen every one of them the United States can
produce. It's FACTS, Sir; and facts, as Lord Bacon says, 'are the
basis of every sound speculation.'"
The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not
exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,--"You see, that nailed
the parson."
The parson nodded gravely.
"You'll find no such experiment in the Bible," threw in the young
doctor, alluding to "serious things" as a peace-offering to his
reverend friend.
"One, I believe," dryly.
"Well," broke in the farmer, folding up his wool, "that's neither here
nor there. This experiment of Knowles's is like nothing known since
the Creation. Plan of his own. He spends his days now hunting out the
gallows-birds out of the dens in town here, and they're all to be
transported into the country to start a new Arcadia. A few men and
women like himself, but the bulk is from the dens, I tell you. All
start fair, level ground, perpetual celibacy, mutual trust, honour,
rise according to the stuff that's in them,--pah! it makes me sick!"
"Knowles's inclination to that sort of people is easily explained,"
spitefully lisped the doctor. "Blood, Sir. His mother was a
half-breed Creek, with all the propensities of the redskins to
fire-water and 'itching palms.' Blood will out."
"Here he is," maliciously whispered the woolman. "No, it's Holmes," he
added, after the doctor had started into a more respectful posture, and
glanced around frightened.
He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes's coming footstep,--"a low fellah,
but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin' to marry the
best catch," etc., etc. The others, on the contrary, put on their hats
and sauntered away into the street.
The day broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars curdling
up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along the dry gutters.
The old school-master in the shade of the great horse-chestnuts
(brought from the homestead in the Piedmont country, every one) husked
corn for his wife, composing, meanwhile, a page of his essay on the
"Sirventes de Bertrand de Born." Joel, up in the barn by himself,
worked through the long day in the old fashion,--pondering gravely
(being of a religious turn) upon a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Clinche,
reported in the "Gazette;" wherein that disciple of the meek Teacher
invoked, as he did once a week, the curses of the law upon
slaveholders, praying the Lord to sweep them immediately from the face
of the earth. Which rendering of Christian doctrine was so much
relished by Joel, and the other leading members of Mr. Clinche's
church, that they hinted to him it might be as well to continue
choosing his texts from Moses and the Prophets until the excitement of
the day was over. The New Testament was,--well,--hardly suited for
the--emergency; did not, somehow, chime in with the lesson of the hour.
I may remark, in passing, that this course of conduct so disgusted the
High Church rector of the parish, that he not only ignored all new
devils, (as Mr. Carlyle might have called them,) but talked as if the
millennium were un fait accompli, and he had leisure to go and hammer
at the poor dead old troubles of Luther's time. One thing, though,
about Joel: while he was joining in Mr. Clinche's petition for the
"wiping out" of some few thousands, he was using up all the fragments
of the hot day in fixing a stall for a half-dead old horse he had found
by the road-side.
Perhaps, even if the listening angel did not grant the prayer, he
marked down the stall at least, as a something done for eternity.
Margret, through the stifling air, worked steadily alone in the dusty
office, her face bent over the books, never changing but once. It was
a trifle then; yet, when she looked back afterwards, the trifle was all
that gave the day a name. The room shook, as I said, with the
thunderous, incessant sound of the engines and the looms; she scarcely
heard it, being used to it. Once, however, another sound came
between,--an iron tread, passing through the long wooden corridor,--so
firm and measured that it sounded like the monotonous beatings of a
clock. She heard it through the noise in the far distance; it came
slowly nearer, up to the door without,--passed it, going down the
echoing plank walk. The girl sat quietly, looking out at the dead
brick wall. The slow step fell on her brain like the sceptre of her
master; if Knowles had looked in her face then, he would have seen
bared the secret of her life. Holmes had gone by, unconscious of who
was within the door. She had not seen him; it was nothing but a step
she heard. Yet a power, the power of the girl's life, shook off all
outward masks, all surface cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a
terrible passion at the sound; her blood burned fiercely; her soul
looked out, her soul as it was, as God knew it,--God and this man. No
longer a cold, clear face; you would have thought, looking at it, what
a strong spirit the soul of this woman would be, if set free in heaven
or in hell. The man who held it in his grasp went on carelessly, not
knowing that the mere sound of his step had raised it as from the dead.
She, and her right, and her pain, were nothing to him now, she
remembered, staring out at the taunting hot sky. Yet so vacant was the
sudden life opened before her when he was gone, that, in the
desperation of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again,
she would have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step
crush her life out,--as he would have done, she thought, choking down
the icy smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose, though it
cost his own heart's life to do it. He would trample her down, if she
kept him back from his end; but be false to her, false to himself, that
he would never be!
The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken
peering out, grew sharper and more real. Life was no morbid nightmare
now; her weak woman's heart found it near, cruel. There was not a pain
nor a want, from the dumb question in the dog's eyes that passed her on
the street, to her father's hopeless fancies, that did not touch her
sharply through her own loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to
do something to save others with this poor life left in her hands.
So the day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down
like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,--baking
the hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up
the bits of grass that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling
off the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses.
He looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these
where you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going
day by day through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, passing
through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange
meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I
might read, if our eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be, you
think? A commonplace crowd like this in the street without: women with
cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices,
draymen, prize-fighters, negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a
seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where
the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds,
philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their
death-struggle,--where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of
intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together,
struggling for victory.
Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in
its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before. People called
him a fanatic. It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man,
sick in soul from some pain that I dare not tell you of; in his own
life, looked into the depths of human loss with a mad desire to set it
right. On the very faces of those who sneered at him he found some
trace of failure, something that his heart carried up to God with a
loud and exceeding bitter cry. The voice of the world, he thought,
went up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind
world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?
The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on
open problems in the lives of these men and women, of these dogs and
horses who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye
could read. There were places where it did not shine: down in the
fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of
life lay there he dared not think of. God knows how the man groped for
the light,--for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.
There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer
than the sunshine, and purer. It fell on the dense crowds,--upon the
just and the unjust. It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from
which the coarser light was barred, into the deepest mires of body
where a soul could wallow, and made them clear. It lighted the depths
of the hearts whose outer pain and passion men were keen to read in the
unpitying sunshine, and bared in those depths the feeble gropings for
the right, the loving hope, the unuttered prayer. No kind thought, no
pure desire, no weakest faith in a God and heaven somewhere, could be
so smothered under guilt that this subtile light did not search it out,
glow about it, shine under it, hold it up in full view of God and the
angels,--lighting the world other than the sun had done for six
thousand years. I have no name for the light: it has a name,--yonder.
Not many eyes were clear to see its--shining that day; and if they did,
it was as through a glass, darkly. Yet it belonged to us also, in the
old time, the time when men could "hear the voice of the Lord God in
the garden in the cool of the day." It is God's light now alone.
Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes, of its heavenly
clearness. I think it was this light that made the burning of
Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that showed her all the
love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic which her eyes saw
perpetually in the old warm-hearted world. That evening, as she sat on
the step of her frame-shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her
scarred face and misshapen body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was
this that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile. It made her eyes
quick to know the message in the depths of colour in the evening sky,
or even the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its
crimson cornucopias filled with hot shining. She liked clear, vital
colours, this girl,--the crimsons and blues. They answered her,
somehow. They could speak. There were things in the world that like
herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry to know: the
gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens. She cried sometimes,
looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could not help it, with a
vague sense of loss. It seemed at those times so dreary for them to be
alive,--or for her. Other things her eyes were quicker to see than
ours: delicate or grand lines, which she perpetually sought for
unconsciously,--in the homeliest things, the very soft curling of the
woollen yarn in her fingers, as in the eternal sculpture of the
mountains. Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all
things alive to her,--that made her watch, in her ignorant way, the
grave hills, the flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the
face of some starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before
it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know
what they would say to us? Was it weakness and ignorance that made
everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or
me? She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and
sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in
the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the
shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of
water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned
trance, from which she roused herself, weak and tired.
She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,--knew nothing of
Nature's laws, as you do. Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of the
prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning, or, in the
farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the
life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor vile thing she was, some
coarse weight fell off, and something within, not the sickly Lois of
the mill, went out, free, like an exile dreaming of home.
You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature's brain,
there were fragments of some artistic insight that made her thus rise
above the level of her daily life, drunk with the mere beauty of form
and colour. I do not know,--not knowing how sham or real a thing you
mean by artistic insight. But I do know that the clear light I told
you of shone for this girl dimly through this beauty of form and
colour; alive. The Life, rather; and ignorant, with no words for her
thoughts, she believed in it as the Highest that she knew. I think it
came to her thus in imperfect language, (not an outward show of tints
and lines, as to artists,)--a language, the same that Moses heard when
he stood alone, with nothing between his naked soul and God, but the
desert and the mountain and the bush that burned with fire. I think
the weak soul of the girl staggered from its dungeon, and groped
through these heavy-browed hills, these colour-dreams, through the
faces of dog or man upon the street, to find the God that lay behind.
So she saw the world, and its beauty and warmth being divine as near to
her, the warmth and beauty became real in her, found their homely
reflection in her daily life. So she knew, too, the Master in whom she
believed, saw Him in everything that lived, more real than all beside.
The waiting earth, the prophetic sky, the very worm in the gutter was
but a part of this man, something come to tell her of Him,--she dimly
felt; though, as I said, she had no words for such a thought. Yet even
more real than this. There was no pain nor temptation down in those
dark cellars where she went that He had not borne,--not one. Nor was
there the least pleasure came to her or the others, not even a cheerful
fire, or kind words, or a warm, hearty laugh, that she did not know He
sent it and was glad to do it. She knew that well! So it was that He
took part in her humble daily life, and became more real to her day by
day. Very homely shadows her life gave of His light, for it was His:
homely, because of her poor way of living, and of the depth to which
the heavy foot of the world had crushed her. Yet they were there all
the time, in her cheery patience, if nothing more. To-night, for
instance, how differently the surging crowd seemed to her from what it
did to Knowles! She looked down on it from her high wood-steps with an
eager interest, ready with her weak, timid laugh to answer every
friendly call from below. She had no power to see them as types of
great classes; they were just so many living people, whom she knew, and
who, most of them, had been kind to her. Whatever good there was in
the vilest face, (and there was always something,) she was sure to see
it. The light made her poor eyes strong for that.
She liked to sit there in the evenings, being alone, yet never growing
lonesome; there was so much that was pleasant to watch and listen to,
as the cool brown twilight came on. If, as Knowles thought, the world
was a dreary discord, she knew nothing of it. People were going from
their work now,--they had time to talk and joke by the way,--stopping,
or walking slowly down the cool shadows of the pavement; while here and
there a lingering red sunbeam burnished a window, or struck athwart the
gray boulder-paved street. From the houses near you could catch a
faint smell of supper: very friendly people those were in these houses;
she knew them all well. The children came out with their faces washed,
to play, now the sun was down: the oldest of them generally came to sit
with her and hear a story.
After it grew darker, you would see the girls in their neat blue
calicoes go sauntering down the street with their sweethearts for a
walk. There was old Polston and his son Sam coming home from the
coal-pits, as black as ink, with their little tin lanterns on their
caps. After a while Sam would come out in his suit of Kentucky jean,
his face shining with the soap, and go sheepishly down to Jenny Ball's,
and the old man would bring his pipe and chair out on the pavement, and
his wife would sit on the steps. Most likely they would call Lois down,
or come over themselves, for they were the most sociable, cosiest old
couple you ever knew. There was a great stopping at Lois's door, as
the girls walked past, for a bunch of the flowers she brought from the
country, or posies, as they called them, (Sam never would take any to
Jenny but "old man" and pinks,) and she always had them ready in broken
jugs inside. They were good, kind girls, every one of them,--had taken
it in turn to sit up with Lois last winter all the time she had the
rheumatism. She never forgot that time,--never once.
Later in the evening you would see a man coming along, close by the
wall, with his head down, the same Margret had seen in the mill,--a
dark man, with gray, thin hair,--Joe Yare, Lois's old father. No one
spoke to him,--people always were looking away as he passed; and if old
Mr. or Mrs. Polston were on the steps when he came up, they would say,
"Good-evening, Mr. Yare," very formally, and go away presently. It
hurt Lois more than anything else they could have done. But she
bustled about noisily, so that he would not notice it. If they saw the
marks of the ill life he had lived on his old face, she did not; his
sad, uncertain eyes may have been dishonest to them, but they were
nothing but kind to the misshapen little soul that he kissed so warmly
with a "Why, Lo, my little girl!" Nobody else in the world ever called
her by a pet name.
Sometimes he was gloomy and silent, but generally he told her of all
that had happened in the mill, particularly any little word of notice
or praise he might have received, watching her anxiously until she
laughed at it, and then rubbing his hands cheerfully. He need not have
doubted Lois's faith in him. Whatever the rest did, she believed in
him; she always had believed in him, through all the dark years, when
he was at home, and in the penitentiary. They were gone now, never to
come back. It had come right. If the others wronged him, and it hurt
her bitterly that they did, that would come right some day too, she
would think, as she looked at the tired, sullen face of the old man
bent to the window-pane, afraid to go out. But they had very cheerful
little suppers there by themselves in the odd, bare little room, as
homely and clean as Lois herself.
Sometimes, late at night, when he had gone to bed, she sat alone in the
door, while the moonlight fell in broad patches over the square, and
the great poplars stood like giants whispering together. Still the far
sounds of the town came up cheerfully, while she folded up her
knitting, it being dark, thinking how happy an ending this was to a
happy day. When it grew quiet, she could hear the solemn whisper of
the poplars, and sometimes broken strains of music from the cathedral
in the city floated through the cold and moonlight past her, far off
into the blue beyond the hills. All the keen pleasure of the day, the
warm, bright sights and sounds, coarse and homely though they were,
seemed to fade into the deep music, and make a part of it.
Yet, sitting there, looking out into the listening night, the poor
child's face grew slowly pale as she heard it. It humbled her. It
made her meanness, her low, weak life so plain to her! There was no
pain nor hunger she had known that did not find a voice in its
articulate cry. SHE! what was she? The pain and wants of the world
must be going up to God in that sound, she thought. There was
something more in it,--an unknown meaning of a great content that her
shattered brain struggled to grasp. She could not. Her heart ached
with a wild, restless longing. She had no words for the vague,
insatiate hunger to understand. It was because she was ignorant and
low, perhaps; others could know. She thought her Master was speaking.
She thought that unknown Joy linked all earth and heaven together, and
made it plain. So she hid her face in her hands, and listened, while
the low harmony shivered through the air, unheeded by others, with the
message of God to man. Not comprehending, it may be,--the poor
girl,--hungry still to know. Yet, when she looked up, there were warm
tears in her eyes, and her scarred face was bright with a sad, deep
content and love.
So the hot, long day was over for them all,--passed as thousands of
days have done for us, gone down, forgotten: as that long, hot day we
call life will be over some time, and go down into the gray and cold.
Surely, whatever of sorrow or pain may have made darkness in that day
for you or me, there were countless openings where we might have seen
glimpses of that other light than sunshine: the light of that great
To-Morrow, of the land where all wrongs shall be righted. If we had
but chosen to see it,--if we only had chosen!