"I don't suppose they have much chance to bathe here. The city cannot
afford to put up public baths and employers rarely think of those
things."
"Look at the rotten stuff they eat!" The mason pointed disdainfully to
the tipcarts drawn up along the curb, where men and women were
chaffering over dried fish and forlorn vegetables that would have soured
the soul of old Adams, who once raised celery on this very spot. "Don't
the folks in these parts eat better than that?"
"Not generally," the judge replied. "We have no public market in this
city, and it is very difficult for the poorer sort to get fresh food."
"You'd oughter see the California markets!" the young man bragged.
"Tell me about them," the judge said.
And while the young mason expatiated on his land of plenty where the
poor man could still enjoy his own bit of God's sunlight and fresh fruit
and flowers from the earth, Adelle watched the thick stream of workers
in Clark's Field, pushing and dawdling along the narrow street. There
were girls with bare arms and soiled shirt-waists and black skirts,
there were lean, pale boys, and women old before their time, hurrying
from tenement to shop, their hearts divided between the two cares of
home and livelihood. Adelle recalled one of her first talks with the
stone mason, in which he had crudely told her that her yearly income
represented the total wages of four or five hundred able-bodied men and
women, such as these, who worked from ten to sixteen hours a day for
three hundred days each year, when they could, and all told earned
hardly what she drew by signing her name to slips of paper as income
from her property during the same space of time. He said to her,--"You
can think that you are worth about four hundred human lives! Who talks
about slavery being abolished? Hell!" She had thought then that his way
of putting it was quite wrong, unjust: she was sure that Major Pound
could easily have disposed of his contention. Indeed, she had heard the
major and men like him maintain that capitalists like herself were the
only true benefactors of humanity, that without them the working-people
could never be fed! But to-day she was not sure that her cousin had been
wrong. She saw a concrete proof of his statement in this stream of
poorly nourished, hard-worked men, women, boys, and girls, all toiling
to maintain themselves and pay her the interest upon the crowded land of
Clark's Field. In a very definite sense they were all working for her;
they were her slaves!
The younger women and girls looked into the judge's brougham curiously
or impudently, attracted by the spectacle of leisure and quiet richness
that Adelle presented, a sight not commonly afforded them in the streets
of Clark's Field and always fascinating to women of any class wherever
it may be. Adelle's dress was plain black, and she had shed much of her
jewelry; but beneath her simple gown and fine linen and carefully
cherished skin she began to feel a new sensation, not exactly pity for
these less lucky sisters, rather wonder that it should all be so, that
she should be sitting there in idleness and comfort and they should be
tramping the pavement of Clark's Field to the factory....
When she saw the boys playing in the mud puddle in the one vacant lot,
she thought of her own little boy, on whom she had lavished every care,
every luxury. So with these working-girls, she thought how easily she
might have been one of them going from the rooming-house in Church
Street to shop or factory, as many women of better Puritan families than
hers had done. It was pure accident, she could see, why she and her
child had been saved from such a lot--due neither to her own ability nor
that of any of her Clark forbears! It was a humbling perception.
"Hell!" her cousin was saying explosively, "these people are no better
'n cattle. At least they ought to give 'em a trough to wash in and a
place where they could buy decent food."
"A few other things, too, perhaps," the judge added with his gentle
smile. "But who will do it? The city is already badly debt-ridden. The
owners of the land pay so much in taxes and interest, due to the high
price of the land here, that they probably make a bare eight per cent
net on their investment."
He looked inquiringly at the young man.
"It's all wrong," the mason retorted heatedly, forgetting that he had
hoped to become one of these "owners of the land," and returning to his
incipient rebellion at the state of society in which he lived. "Somebody
ought to be made to do such things."