The respectable portion of the population of Janway's Mills believed in
church-going and on Sunday-school attendance--in fact, the most entirely
respectable believed that such persons as neglected these duties were
preparing themselves for damnation. They were a quiet, simple, and
unintellectual people. Such of them as occasionally read books knew
nothing of any literature which was not religious. The stories they had
followed through certain inexpensive periodicals were of the order which
describes the gradual elevation of the worldly-minded or depraved to the
plane of church-going and Sunday-school. Their few novels made it their
_motif_ to prove that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of
a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Any
hero or heroine of wealth who found peace of mind and married happily,
only attained these objects through the assistance of some noble though
humble unsecular person whose example and instruction led them to adopt
unsecular views. The point of view of Janway's Mills was narrow and far
from charitable when it was respectable; its point of view, when it was
not respectable, was desperate. Even sinners, at Janway's Mills, were
primitive and limited in outlook. They did not excuse themselves with
specious argument for their crimes of neglecting church-going, using bad
language, hanging about bar-rooms, and loose living. They were not
brilliant wrongdoers and made no attempt at defending themselves or
pretending that they did not know they were going to perdition. The New
England mind is not broad or versatile, and, having begun life in a
Puritan atmosphere, it is not quick to escape its influence. Society at
the Mills recognised no social distinction which was not founded upon the
respectability of church-going and the observance of social laws made by
church-goers; it recognised none because it absolutely _knew_ of none.
The great world was not far from Janway's Mills, but they did not touch
each other. Willowfield was near, Boston and New York themselves were not
far distant, but the curious fact being that millions of human minds may
work and grow and struggle as if they were the minds of dwellers upon
another planet, though less than a hundred miles may separate them, the
actual lives, principles, and significances of the larger places did not
seem to touch the smaller one. The smaller one was a village of a few
streets of small houses which had grown up about the Mills themselves.
The Mills gave employment to a village full of hands, so the village
gradually evolved itself. It was populated by the uneducated labouring
class; some were respectable, some were dissolute and lived low and gross
lives, but all were uneducated in any sense which implies more than the
power to read, write, and make a few necessary calculations. Most of them
took some newspaper. They read of the multi-millionaires who lived in New
York and Chicago and California, they read of the politicians in
Washington, they found described to them the great entertainments given
by millionaires' wives and daughters, the marvellous dresses they wore,
the multifarious ways in which they amused themselves, but what they read
seemed so totally unlike anything they had ever seen, so far apart from
their own lives, that though they were not aware of the fact, the truth
was that they believed in them with about the same degree of realisation
with which they believed in what they heard in the pulpit of the glories
of the New Jerusalem. No human being exists without an ambition, and the
ambition of Janway's Millers of the high-class was to possess a neat
frame-house with clean Nottingham lace curtains at the windows, fresh
oilcloth on the floor of the front hall, furniture covered with green or
red reps in the parlour, a tapestry Brussels carpet, and a few
lithographs upon the walls. It was also the desire of the owners of such
possessions that everyone should know that they attended one of the
churches, that their house-cleaning was done regularly, that no member of
the family frequented bar-rooms, and that they were respectable people.
It was an ambition which was according to their lights, and could be
despised by no honest human being, however dull it might appear to him.
It resulted oftener than not in the making of excellent narrow lives
which brought harm to no one. The lives which went wrong on the
street-corners and in the bar-rooms often did harm. They produced
discomfort, unhappiness, and disorder; but as it is also quite certain
that no human being produces these things without working out his own
punishment for himself while he lives on earth, the ends of justice were
doubtless attained.
If a female creature at the Mills broke the great social law, there was
no leaning towards the weakness of pity for her, Janway's was not
sufficiently developed, mentally, to deal with gradations or analysis of
causes and impelling powers. The girl who brought forth a child without
the pale of orthodox marriage was an outcast and a disgraced creature,
and nobody flinched from pronouncing her both.
"It's disgustin', that's what I call it," it was the custom for
respectable wives and mothers to say. "It's disgustin'! A nice thing
she's done for herself. I h'ain't no patience with girls like her, with
no fear o' God or religion in them an' no modesty and decency. She
deserves whatever comes to her!"
Usually every tragedy befell her which could befall a woman. If her child
lived, it lived the life of wretchedness and was an outcast also. The
outcome of its existence was determined by the order of woman its mother
chanced to be. If the maternal instinct was warm and strong within her
and she loved it, there were a few chances that it might fight through
its early years of struggle and expand into a human being who counted as
_one_ at least among the world's millions. Usually the mother died in the
gutter or the hospital, but there had been women who survived, and when
they did so it was often because they made a battle for their children.
Sometimes it was because they were made of the material which is not
easily beaten, and then they learned as the years went by that the human
soul and will may be even stronger than that which may seem at the outset
overwhelming fate.
When the girl Susan Chapman fell into misfortune and disgrace, her path
was not made easy for her. There were a few months when the young mill
hand who brought disaster upon her, made love to her, and hung about her
small home, sometimes leaning upon the rickety gate to talk and laugh
with her, sometimes loitering with her in the streets or taking her to
cheap picnics or on rather rowdy excursions. She wore the excited and
highly pleased air seen in young women of her class when the masculine
creature is paying court. She spent her wages in personal decoration, she
bought cheap feathers and artificial flowers and remnants on "bargain
days," and decked herself with them. Her cheap, good looks reached their
highest point because she felt the glow of a promotive triumph and her
spirits were exhilarated. She was nearer happiness than she had ever been
before. The other girls, who were mill hands like herself, were full of
the usual rather envious jokes about her possible marriage. To be married
was to achieve a desirable distinction and to work at home instead of at
the Mills. The young man was not an absolute villain, he was merely an
ignorant, foolish young animal. At first he had had inchoate beliefs in a
domestic future with the girl. But the time came when equally inchoate
ideas of his own manhood led him to grow cool. The New England atmosphere
which had not influenced him in all points, influenced him in the matter
of feeling that the woman a man married must have kept herself
respectable. The fact that he himself had caused her fall from the plane
of decency was of comparatively small moment.
A man who married a woman who had not managed to keep straight, put
himself into a sort of ridiculous position. He lost masculine
distinction. This one ceased to lean on the gate and talk at night, and
went to fewer picnics. He was in less high spirits, and so was the girl.
She often looked pale and as if she had been crying. Then Jack Williams
gave up his place at the Mill and left the village. He did not tell his
sweetheart. The morning after he left, Susan came to her work and found
the girls about her wearing a mysterious and interested air.
"What are you whispering about?" she asked. "What's the secret?"
"'Tain't no secret," was the answer. "Most everybody's heard it, and I
guess it ain't no secret to you. I guess he told you when he made up his
mind to go."
"Who?" she asked.
"Jack Williams. He's gone out to Chicago to work somewhere there. He kept
it pretty dark from us, but when he went off on the late train last
night, Joe Evans saw him, and he said he'd had the offer of a first-rate
job and was going to it. How you stare, Sue! Your eyes look as if they'd
pop out o' yer head."
She was staring and her skin had turned blue-white. She broke into a
short hysteric laugh and fell down. Then she was very sick and fainted
and had to be taken home trembling so that she could scarcely crawl as
she walked, with great tears dropping down her cold face. Janway's Mills
knew well enough after this that Jack Williams had deserted her, and had
no hesitation in suggesting a reason for his defection.
The months which followed were filled with the torments of a squalid
Inferno. Girls who had regarded her with envy, began to refuse to speak
to her or to be seen in her company. Jack Williams's companions were
either impudent or disdainful, the married women stared at her and
commented on her as she passed; there were no more picnics or excursions
for her; her feathers became draggled and hung broken in her hat. She had
no relatives in the village, having come from a country place. She was
thankful that she had not a family of aunts on the spot, because she knew
they would have despised her and talked her over more than the rest. She
lived in a bare little room which she rented from a poor couple, and she
used to sit alone in it, huddled up in a heap by the window, crying for
hours in the evening as she watched the other girls go by laughing and
joking with their sweethearts.
One night when there was a sociable in the little frame Methodist church
opposite, and she saw it lighted up and the people going in dressed in
their best clothes and excited at meeting each other, the girls giggling
at the sight of their favourite young men--just as she had giggled six
months before--her slow tears began to drip faster and the sobs came one
upon another until she was choked by them and she began to make a noise.
She sobbed and cried more convulsively, until she began to scream and
went into something like hysterics. She dropped down on her face and
rolled over and over, clutching at her breast and her sides and throwing
out her arms. The people of the house had gone to the sociable and she
was alone, so no one heard or came near her. She shrieked and sobbed and
rolled over and over, clutching at her flesh, trying to gasp out words
that choked her.
"O, Lord!" she gasped, wild with the insensate agony of a poor, hysteria
torn, untaught, uncontrolled thing, "I don't know what I've done! I
don't! 'Tain't fair! I didn't go to! I can't bear it! He h'ain't got
nothin' to bear, he ain't! O, Lord God, look down on me!"
She was the poor, helpless outcome of the commonest phase of life, but
her garret saw a ghastly tragedy as she choked through her hysterics. Who
is to blame for and who to prevent such tragedies, let deep thinkers
strive to tell.
The day after this was the one on which little Margery Latimer came into
her life. It was in the early spring, just before the child had gone to
Boston to begin her art lessons. She had come to Janway's Mills to see a
poor woman who had worked for her mother. The woman lived in the house in
which Susan had her bare room. She began to talk about the girl half
fretfully, half contemptuously.
"She's the one Jack Williams got into trouble and then left to get out of
it by herself as well as she could," she said. "She might ha' known it.
Gals is fools. She can't work at the Mills any more, an' last night when
we was all at the Sosherble, she seems to've had a spasm o' some kind;
she can't get out o' bed this mornin' and lies there lookin' like death
an' moanin'. I can't 'tend to her, I've got work o' my own to do. Lansy!
how she was moanin' when I passed her door! Seemed like she'd kill
herself!"
"Oh, poor thing!" cried Margery; "let me go up to her."
She was a sensitive creature, and the colour had ebbed out of her pretty
face.
"Lor, no!" the woman cried; "she ain't the kind o' gal you'd oughter be
doing things for, she was allus right down common, an' she's sunk down
'bout as low as a gal can."
But Margery went up to the room where the moaning was going on. She stood
outside the door on the landing for a few moments, her heart trembling in
her side before she went in. Her life had been a simple, happy, bright
one up to this time. She had not seen the monster life close at hand. She
had large, childish eyes which were the colour of harebells and
exquisitely sympathetic and sweet. There were tears in them when she
gently opened the door and stood timidly on the threshold.
"Let me, please let me come in," she said. "Don't say I mayn't."
The moaning and low choking sobs went on, and in a very few moments they
so wrought upon her, that she pushed the door farther open and entered
the room. What she saw was a barren, common little place, and on the bed
a girl lying utterly prostrated by an hysteric tempest which had lasted
hours. Her face was white and swollen and covered with red marks, as if
she had clutched and torn it with her fingers, her dress was torn open at
the bosom, and her hair tumbled, torn, and loose about the pillow; there
was a discoloured place upon her forehead which was settling into a
bruise. Her eyes were puffed with crying until they were almost closed.
Her breast rose with short, exhausted, but still convulsive sobs. Margery
felt as if she was drawn into a vortex of agony. She could not resist it.
She went to the bed, stood still a second, trembling, and then sank upon
her knees and put her face down upon the wretched hand nearest and kissed
it with piteous impulsive sympathy.
"Oh! don't cry like that," she said, crying herself. "Oh, don't! Oh,
don't! I'm so sorry for you--I'm _so_ sorry for you."
She did not know the girl at all, she had never even heard of her before,
but she kissed her hand and cried over it and fondled it against her
breast. She was one of those human things created by Nature to suffer
with others, and for them, and through them.
She did not know how long it was before the girl became sufficiently,
articulate to speak to her. She herself was scarcely articulate for some
time. She could only try to find words to meet a need so far beyond her
ken. She had never come in contact with a woman in this strait before.
But at last Susan was lying in the bed instead of on its tossed and
tumbled outside. Margery had done the nearest, simple things for her. She
had helped her to bathe her face with cold water, to undress and put on
her nightgown; she had prepared her narrow bed for her decently, and
smoothed and wound up her hair. Then she had gone downstairs, got her a
cup of tea, and sat by her and made her drink it. Then she set the room
in order and opened the window to air it.
"There is a bruise on your forehead," she had said, as she was arranging
the torn hair. "You must have struck it against something when you were
ill last night."
"I struck it against the wall," Susan answered, in a monotonous voice. "I
did it on purpose. I banged my head against the wall until I fell down
and was sick."
Margery's face quivered again.
"Don't think about it," she said. "You ought not to have been alone.
Some--some friend ought to have been with you."
"I haven't got any friends," Susan answered. "I don't know why you came
up to me. I don't guess you know what's the matter with me."
"Yes, I do," said Margery. "You are in great trouble."
"It's the worst kind o' trouble a woman can get into," said Susan, the
muscles of her face beginning to be drawn again. "I don't see why--why
Jack Williams can skip off to Chicago to a new, big job that's a stroke
o' luck--an' me left lie here to bear everything--an' be picked at, an'
made fun of, an' druv mad with the way I'm kicked in the gutter. I don't
see no _right_ in it. There _ain't_ no right in it; I don't believe
there's no God anyhow; I won't never believe it again. No one can't make
me. If I've done what gives folks a right to cast me off, so's Jack
Williams."
"You haven't pretended to love a person and then run away and left them
to--to suffer," said little Margery, on the verge of sobs again.
"No, I haven't!" said the girl, her tears beginning to stream anew. "I'm
not your kind. I'm not educated. I'm only a common mill hand, but I did
love Jack Williams all I knew how. He had such a nice way with him--kind
of affectionate, an'--an' he was real good-lookin' too when he was fixed
up. If I'd been married to him, no one would have said nothin', an'--an'
'tain't nothin' but a minister readin' somethin' anyhow--marryin' ain't."