In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont to
boast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered,
the helpless--and there are many--are torn from the parent rock, crushed,
rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was Edward
Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm granite
of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale; surrounded
by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen. Thus, at
five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathan Chippering
Mill in the city of Hampton.
That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an
historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at times
to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him,
and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions into
which he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments. For a
long time he had clung to the institution he had been taught to believe
was the rock of ages, the Congregational Church, finally to abandon it;
even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodied in the
edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had attended
for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton.
The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered
Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to
compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of
rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And the
minister was sensational and dramatic. He looked like an actor, he
aroused in Edward Bumpus an inherent prejudice that condemned the stage.
Half a block from this tabernacle stood a Roman Catholic Church,
prosperous, brazen, serene, flaunting an eternal permanence amidst the
chaos which had succeeded permanence!
There were, to be sure, other Protestant churches where Edward Bumpus and
his wife might have gone. One in particular, which he passed on his way
to the mill, with its terraced steeple and classic facade, preserved all
the outward semblance of the old Order that once had seemed so enduring
and secure. He hesitated to join the decorous and dwindling
congregation,--the remains of a social stratum from which he had been
pried loose; and--more irony--this street, called Warren, of arching elms
and white-gabled houses, was now the abiding place of those prosperous
Irish who had moved thither from the tenements and ruled the city.
On just such a street in the once thriving New England village of Dolton
had Edward been born. In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of names, rooted
there since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared to listen he
would have told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the history of
a family that by right of priority and service should have been destined
to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it
delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had
been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could never
understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had
suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite of
youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectarian
college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence may
prosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic one.
Experience even had been powerless to impress this upon him. For more
than twenty years after leaving college he had clung to a clerkship in a
Dolton mercantile establishment before he felt justified in marrying
Hannah, the daughter of Elmer Wench, when the mercantile establishment
amalgamated with a rival--and Edward's services were no longer required.
During the succession of precarious places with decreasing salaries he
had subsequently held a terrified sense of economic pressure had
gradually crept over him, presently growing strong enough, after two
girls had arrived, to compel the abridgment of the family ....It would be
painful to record in detail the cracking-off process, the slipping into
shale, the rolling, the ending up in Hampton, where Edward had now for
some dozen years been keeper of one of the gates in the frowning brick
wall bordering the canal,--a position obtained for him by a compassionate
but not too prudent childhood friend who had risen in life and knew the
agent of the Chippering Mill, Mr. Claude Ditmar. Thus had virtue failed
to hold its own.
One might have thought in all these years he had sat within the gates
staring at the brick row of the company's boarding houses on the opposite
bank of the canal that reflection might have brought a certain degree of
enlightenment. It was not so. The fog of Edward's bewilderment never
cleared, and the unformed question was ever clamouring for an answer--how
had it happened? Job's cry. How had it happened to an honest and virtuous
man, the days of whose forebears had been long in the land which the Lord
their God had given them? Inherently American, though lacking the saving
quality of push that had been the making of men like Ditmar, he never
ceased to regard with resentment and distrust the hordes of foreigners
trooping between the pillars, though he refrained from expressing these
sentiments in public; a bent, broad shouldered, silent man of that
unmistakable physiognomy which, in the seventeenth century, almost wholly
deserted the old England for the new. The ancestral features were there,
the lips--covered by a grizzled moustache moulded for the precise
formation that emphasizes such syllables as el, the hooked nose and
sallow cheeks, the grizzled brows and grey eyes drawn down at the
corners. But for all its ancestral strength of feature, it was a face
from which will had been extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism,
the indomitable hardness it should have proclaimed, and which have been
so characteristically embodied in Mr. St. Gaudens's statue of the
Puritan. His clothes were slightly shabby, but always neat.
Little as one might have guessed it, however, what may be called a
certain transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him. He had a hobby almost
amounting to an obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who have
slipped downward in the social scale. It was the Bumpus Family in
America. He collected documents about his ancestors and relations, he
wrote letters with a fine, painful penmanship on a ruled block he bought
at Hartshorne's drug store to distant Bumpuses in Kansas and Illinois and
Michigan, common descendants of Ebenezer, the original immigrant, of
Dolton. Many of these western kinsmen answered: not so the magisterial
Bumpus who lived in Boston on the water side of Beacon, whom likewise he
had ventured to address,--to the indignation and disgust of his elder
daughter, Janet.
"Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?" she demanded once, scornfully.
"Why? Aren't we descended from him?"
"How many generations?"
"Seven," said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.
Janet was quick at figures. She made a mental calculation.
"Well, you've got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors of
Ebenezer's time, haven't you?"
Edward was a little surprised. He had never thought of this, but his
ardour for Ebenezer remained undampened. Genealogy--his own--had become
his religion, and instead of going to church he spent his Sunday mornings
poring over papers of various degrees of discolouration, making careful
notes on the ruled block.
This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that had
somehow been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, was also
a comfort. It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack of sympathy
of his daughters and his wife. Hannah Bumpus took the situation more
grimly: she was a logical projection in a new environment of the
religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance. She did
not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; life was a
trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular
trap had a treadmill,--a round of household duties she kept whirling with
an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of
the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible
belief in one's destiny,--which Hannah had not. But she kept the little
flat with its worn furniture,--which had known so many journeys--as clean
as a merchant ship of old Salem, and when it was scoured and dusted to
her satisfaction she would sally forth to Bonnaccossi's grocery and
provision store on the corner to do her bargaining in competition with
the Italian housewives of the neighborhood. She was wont, indeed, to
pause outside for a moment, her quick eye encompassing the coloured
prints of red and yellow jellies cast in rounded moulds, decked with
slices of orange, the gaudy boxes of cereals and buckwheat flour, the
"Brookfield" eggs in packages. Significant, this modern package system,
of an era of flats with little storage space. She took in at a glance the
blue lettered placard announcing the current price of butterine, and
walked around to the other side of the store, on Holmes Street, where the
beef and bacon hung, where the sidewalk stands were filled, in the
autumn, with cranberries, apples, cabbages, and spinach.
With little outer complaint she had adapted herself to the constantly
lowering levels to which her husband had dropped, and if she hoped that
in Fillmore Street they had reached bottom, she did not say so. Her
unbetrayed regret was for the loss of what she would have called
"respectability"; and the giving up, long ago, in the little city which
had been their home, of the servant girl had been the first wrench. Until
they came to Hampton they had always lived in houses, and her adaptation
to a flat had been hard--a flat without a parlour. Hannah Bumpus regarded
a parlour as necessary to a respectable family as a wedding ring to a
virtuous woman. Janet and Lise would be growing up, there would be young
men, and no place to see them save the sidewalks. The fear that haunted
her came true, and she never was reconciled. The two girls went to the
public schools, and afterwards, inevitably, to work, and it seemed to be
a part of her punishment for the sins of her forefathers that she had no
more control over them than if they had been boarders; while she looked
on helplessly, they did what they pleased; Janet, whom she never
understood, was almost as much a source of apprehension as Lise, who
became part and parcel of all Hannah deemed reprehensible in this new
America which she refused to recognize and acknowledge as her own
country.
To send them through the public schools had been a struggle. Hannah used
to lie awake nights wondering what would happen if Edward became sick. It
worried her that they never saved any money: try as she would to cut the
expenses down, there was a limit of decency; New England thrift, hitherto
justly celebrated, was put to shame by that which the foreigners
displayed, and which would have delighted the souls of gentlemen of the
Manchester school. Every once in a while there rose up before her
fabulous instances of this thrift, of Italians and Jews who, ignorant
emigrants, had entered the mills only a few years before they, the
Bumpuses, had come to Hampton, and were now independent property owners.
Still rankling in Hannah's memory was a day when Lise had returned from
school, dark and mutinous, with a tale of such a family. One of the
younger children was a classmate.
"They live on Jordan Street in a house, and Laura has roller skates. I
don't see why I can't."
This was one of the occasions on which Hannah had given vent to her
indignation. Lise was fourteen. Her open rebellion was less annoying than
Janet's silent reproach, but at least she had something to take hold of.
"Well, Lise," she said, shifting the saucepan to another part of the
stove, "I guess if your father and I had put both you girls in the mills
and crowded into one room and cooked in a corner, and lived on onions and
macaroni, and put four boarders each in the other rooms, I guess we could
have had a house, too. We can start in right now, if you're willing."
But Lise had only looked darker.
"I don't see why father can't make money--other men do."
"Isn't he working as hard as he can to send you to school, and give you a
chance?"
"I don't want that kind of a chance. There's Sadie Howard at school--she
don't have to work. She liked me before she found out where I lived..."
There was an element of selfishness in Hannah's mania for keeping busy,
for doing all their housework and cooking herself. She could not bear to
have her daughters interfere; perhaps she did not want to give herself
time to think. Her affection for Edward, such as it was, her loyalty to
him, was the logical result of a conviction ingrained in early youth that
marriage was an indissoluble bond; a point of views once having a
religious sanction, no less powerful now that--all unconsciously--it had
deteriorated into a superstition. Hannah, being a fatalist, was not
religious. The beliefs of other days, when she had donned her best dress
and gone to church on Sundays, had simply lapsed and left--habits. No new
beliefs had taken their place....
Even after Janet and Lise had gone to work the household never seemed to
gain that margin of safety for which Hannah yearned. Always, when they
were on the verge of putting something by, some untoward need or accident
seemed to arise on purpose to swallow it up: Edward, for instance, had
been forced to buy a new overcoat, the linoleum on the dining-room floor
must be renewed, and Lise had had a spell of sickness, losing her
position in a flower shop. Afterwards, when she became a saleslady in the
Bagatelle, that flamboyant department store in Faber Street, she earned
four dollars and a half a week. Two of these were supposed to go into the
common fund, but there were clothes to buy; Lise loved finery, and Hannah
had not every week the heart to insist. Even when, on an occasional
Saturday night the girl somewhat consciously and defiantly flung down the
money on the dining-room table she pretended not to notice it. But Janet,
who was earning six dollars as a stenographer in the office of the
Chippering Mill, regularly gave half of hers.
The girls could have made more money as operatives, but strangely enough
in the Bumpus family social hopes were not yet extinct.
Sharply, rudely, the cold stillness of the winter mornings was broken by
agitating waves of sound, penetrating the souls of sleepers. Janet would
stir, her mind still lingering on some dream, soon to fade into the
inexpressible, in which she had been near to the fulfilment of a heart's
desire. Each morning, as the clamour grew louder, there was an interval
of bewilderment, of revulsion, until the realization came of mill bells
swinging in high cupolas above the river,--one rousing another. She could
even distinguish the bells: the deep-toned, penetrating one belonged to
the Patuxent Mill, over on the west side, while the Arundel had a high,
ominous reverberation like a fire bell. When at last the clangings had
ceased she would lie listening to the overtones throbbing in the air,
high and low, high and low; lie shrinking, awaiting the second summons
that never failed to terrify, the siren of the Chippering Mill,--to her
the cry of an insistent, hungry monster demanding its daily food, the
symbol of a stern, ugly, and unrelenting necessity.
Beside her in the bed she could feel the soft body of her younger sister
cuddling up to her in fright. In such rare moments as this her heart
melted towards Lise, and she would fling a protecting arm about her. A
sense of Lise's need of protection invaded her, a sharp conviction, like
a pang, that Lise was destined to wander: Janet was never so conscious of
the feeling as in this dark hour, though it came to her at other times,
when they were not quarreling. Quarreling seemed to be the normal
reaction between them.
It was Janet, presently, who would get up, shivering, close the window,
and light the gas, revealing the room which the two girls shared
together. Against the middle of one wall was the bed, opposite this a
travel-dented walnut bureau with a marble top, with an oval mirror into
which were stuck numerous magazine portraits of the masculine and
feminine talent adorning the American stage, a preponderance of the music
hall variety. There were pictures of other artists whom the recondite
would have recognized as "movie" stars, amazing yet veridic stories of
whose wealth Lise read in the daily press: all possessed limousines--an
infallible proof, to Lise, of the measure of artistic greatness. Between
one of these movie millionaires and an ex-legitimate lady who now found
vaudeville profitable was wedged the likeness of a popular idol whose
connection with the footlights would doubtless be contingent upon a
triumphant acquittal at the hands of a jury of her countrymen, and whose
trial for murder, in Chicago, was chronicled daily in thousands of
newspapers and followed by Lise with breathless interest and sympathy.
She was wont to stare at this lady while dressing and exclaim:--"Say, I
hope they put it all over that district attorney!"
To such sentiments, though deeply felt by her sister, Janet remained
cold, though she was, as will be seen, capable of enthusiasms. Lise was a
truer daughter of her time and country in that she had the national
contempt for law, was imbued with the American hero-worship of criminals
that caused the bombardment of Cora Wellman's jail with candy, fruit and
flowers and impassioned letters. Janet recalled there had been others
before Mrs. Wellman, caught within the meshes of the law, who had incited
in her sister a similar partisanship.
It was Lise who had given the note of ornamentation to the bedroom.
Against the cheap faded lilac and gold wall-paper were tacked
photo-engravings that had taken the younger sister's fancy: a young man
and woman, clad in scanty bathing suits, seated side by side in a
careening sail boat,--the work of a popular illustrator whose manly and
womanly "types" had become national ideals.
There were other drawings, if not all by the same hand, at least by the
same school; one, sketched in bold strokes, of a dinner party in a
stately neo-classic dining-room, the table laden with flowers and silver,
the bare-throated women with jewels. A more critical eye than Lise's,
gazing upon this portrayal of the Valhalla of success, might have
detected in the young men, immaculate in evening dress, a certain effort
to feel at home, to converse naturally, which their square jaws and
square shoulders belied. This was no doubt the fault of the artist's
models, who had failed to live up to the part. At any rate, the sight of
these young gods of leisure, the contemplation of the stolid butler and
plush footmen in the background never failed to make Lise's heart beat
faster.
On the marble of the bureau amidst a litter of toilet articles, and
bought by Lise for a quarter at the Bagatelle bargain counter, was an
oval photograph frame from which the silver wash had begun to rub off,
and the band of purple velvet inside the metal had whitened. The frame
always contained the current object of Lise's affections, though the
exhibits--as Janet said--were subject to change without notice. The
Adonis who now reigned had black hair cut in the prevailing Hampton
fashion, very long in front and hanging down over his eyes like a
Scottish terrier's; very long behind, too, but ending suddenly, shaved in
a careful curve at the neck and around the ears. It had almost the
appearance of a Japanese wig. The manly beauty of Mr. Max Wylie was of
the lantern-jawed order, and in his photograph he conveyed the astonished
and pained air of one who has been suddenly seized by an invisible
officer of the law from behind. This effect, one presently perceived, was
due to the high, stiff collar, the "Torture Brand," Janet called it, when
she and her sister were engaged in one of their frequent controversies
about life in general: the obvious retort to this remark, which Lise
never failed to make, was that Janet could boast of no beaux at all.
It is only fair to add that the photograph scarcely did Mr. Wylie
justice. In real life he did not wear the collar, he was free and easy in
his manners, sure of his powers of conquest. As Lise observed, he had
made a home-run with her at Slattery's Riverside Park. "Sadie Hartmann
was sure sore when I tangoed off with him," she would observe
reminiscently....
It was Lise's habit to slight her morning toilet, to linger until the
last minute in bed, which she left in reluctant haste to stand before the
bureau frantically combing out kinks of the brown hair falling over her
shoulders before jamming it down across her forehead in the latest mode.
Thus occupied, she revealed a certain petulant beauty. Like the majority
of shop-girls, she was small, but her figure was good, her skin white;
her discontented mouth gave her the touch of piquancy apt to play havoc
with the work of the world. In winter breakfast was eaten by the light of
a rococo metal lamp set in the centre of the table. This was to save gas.
There was usually a rump steak and potatoes, bread and "creamery"
butterine, and the inevitable New England doughnuts. At six thirty the
whistles screeched again,--a warning note, the signal for Edward's
departure; and presently, after a brief respite, the heavy bells once
more began their clamour, not to die down until ten minutes of seven,
when the last of the stragglers had hurried through the mill gates.
The Bumpus flat included the second floor of a small wooden house whose
owner had once been evilly inspired to paint it a livid clay-yellow--as
though insisting that ugliness were an essential attribute of
domesticity. A bay ran up the two stories, and at the left were two
narrow doorways, one for each flat. On the right the house was separated
from its neighbour by a narrow interval, giving but a precarious light to
the two middle rooms, the diningroom and kitchen. The very
unattractiveness of such a home, however, had certain compensations for
Janet, after the effort of early rising had been surmounted, felt a real
relief in leaving it; a relief, too, in leaving Fillmore Street, every
feature of which was indelibly fixed in her mind, opposite was the blind
brick face of a warehouse, and next to that the converted dwelling house
that held the shop of A. Bauer, with the familiar replica of a green
ten-cent trading stamp painted above it and the somewhat ironical
announcement--when boar frost whitened the pavement--that ice-cold soda
was to be had within, as well as cigars and tobacco, fruit and candy.
Then came a tenement, under which two enterprising Greeks by the name of
Pappas--spelled Papas lower down--conducted a business called "The
Gentleman," a tailoring, pressing, and dyeing establishment. Janet could
see the brilliantined black heads of the two proprietors bending over
their boards, and sometimes they would be lifted to smile at her as she
passed. The Pappas Brothers were evidently as happy in this drab
environment as they had ever been on the sunny mountain slopes of Hellas,
and Janet sometimes wondered at this, for she had gathered from her
education in the Charming public school that Greece was beautiful.
She was one of the unfortunate who love beauty, who are condemned to
dwell in exile, unacquainted with what they love. Desire was incandescent
within her breast. Desire for what? It would have been some relief to
know. She could not, like Lise, find joy and forgetfulness at dance
halls, at the "movies," at Slattery's Riverside Park in summer, in "joy
rides" with the Max Wylies of Hampton. And beside, the Max Wylies were
afraid of her. If at times she wished for wealth, it was because wealth
held the magic of emancipation from surroundings against which her soul
revolted. Vividly idealized but unconfided was the memory of a seaside
village, the scene of one of the brief sojourns of her childhood, where
the air was fragrant with the breath of salt marshes, where she recalled,
through the vines of a porch, a shining glimpse of the sea at the end of
a little street....
Next to Pappas Brothers was the grey wooden building of Mule Spinners'
Hall, that elite organization of skilled labour, and underneath it the
store of Johnny Tiernan, its windows piled up with stoves and stovepipes,
sheet iron and cooking utensils. Mr. Tiernan, like the Greeks, was happy,
too: unlike the Greeks, he never appeared to be busy, and yet he throve.
He was very proud of the business in which he had invested his savings,
but he seemed to have other affairs lying blithely on his mind, affairs
of moment to the community, as the frequent presence of the huge
policemen, aldermen, and other important looking persons bore witness. He
hailed by name Italians, Greeks, Belgians, Syrians, and "French"; he
hailed Janet, too, with respectful cheerfulness, taking off his hat. He
possessed the rare, warm vitality that is irresistible. A native of
Hampton, still in his thirties, his sharp little nose and twinkling blue
eyes proclaimed the wisdom that is born and not made; his stiff hair had
a twist like the bristles in the cleaning rod of a gun.
He gave Janet the odd impression that he understood her. And she did not
understand herself!
By the time she reached the Common the winter sun, as though red from
exertion, had begun to dispel the smoke and heavy morning mists. She
disliked winter, the lumpy brown turf mildewed by the frost, but one day
she was moved by a quality, hitherto unsuspected, in the delicate tracery
against the sky made by the slender branches of the great elms and
maples. She halted on the pavement, her eyes raised, heedless of
passers-by, feeling within her a throb of the longing that could be so
oddly and unexpectedly aroused.
Her way lay along Faber Street, the main artery of Hampton, a wide strip
of asphalt threaded with car tracks, lined on both sides with incongruous
edifices indicative of a rapid, undiscriminating, and artless prosperity.
There were long stretches of "ten foot" buildings, so called on account
of the single story, their height deceptively enhanced by the
superimposition of huge and gaudy signs, one on top of another,
announcing the merits of "Stewart's Amberine Ale," of "Cooley's Oats, the
Digestible Breakfast Food," of graphophones and "spring heeled" shoes,
tobacco, and naphtha soaps. "No, We don't give Trading Stamps, Our
Products are Worth all You Pay." These "ten foot" stores were the
repositories of pianos, automobiles, hardware, and millinery, and
interspersed amongst them were buildings of various heights; The
Bagatelle, where Lise worked, the Wilmot Hotel, office buildings, and an
occasional relic of old Hampton, like that housing the Banner. Here,
during those months when the sun made the asphalt soft, on a scaffolding
spanning the window of the store, might be seen a perspiring young man in
his shirt sleeves chalking up baseball scores for the benefit of a crowd
below. Then came the funereal, liver-coloured, long-windowed Hinckley
Block (1872), and on the corner a modern, glorified drugstore thrusting
forth plate glass bays--two on Faber Street and three on Stanley--filled
with cameras and candy, hot water bags, throat sprays, catarrh and kidney
cures, calendars, fountain pens, stationery, and handy alcohol lamps.
Flanking the sidewalks, symbolizing and completing the heterogeneous and
bewildering effect of the street were long rows of heavy hemlock trunks,
unpainted and stripped of bark, with crosstrees bearing webs of wires.
Trolley cars rattled along, banging their gongs, trucks rumbled across
the tracks, automobiles uttered frenzied screeches behind startled
pedestrians. Janet was always galvanized into alertness here, Faber
Street being no place to dream. By night an endless procession moved up
one sidewalk and down another, staring hypnotically at the flash-in and
flash-out electric, signs that kept the breakfast foods and ales, the
safety razors, soaps, and soups incessantly in the minds of a fickle
public.
Two blocks from Faber Street was the North Canal, with a granite-paved
roadway between it and the monotonous row of company boarding houses.
Even in bright weather Janet felt a sense of oppression here; on dark,
misty mornings the stern, huge battlements of the mills lining the
farther bank were menacing indeed, bristling with projections, towers,
and chimneys, flanked by heavy walls. Had her experience included Europe,
her imagination might have seized the medieval parallel,--the arched
bridges flung at intervals across the water, lacking only chains to raise
them in case of siege. The place was always ominously suggestive of
impending strife. Janet's soul was a sensitive instrument, but she
suffered from an inability to find parallels, and thus to translate her
impressions intellectually. Her feeling about the mills was that they
were at once fortress and prison, and she a slave driven thither day
after day by an all-compelling power; as much a slave as those who
trooped in through the gates in the winter dawn, and wore down, four
times a day, the oak treads of the circular tower stairs.
The sound of the looms was like heavy rain hissing on the waters of the
canal.
The administrative offices of a giant mill such as the Chippering in
Hampton are labyrinthine. Janet did not enter by the great gates her
father kept, but walked through an open courtyard into a vestibule where,
day and night, a watchman stood; she climbed iron-shod stairs, passed the
doorway leading to the paymaster's suite, to catch a glimpse, behind the
grill, of numerous young men settling down at those mysterious and
complicated machines that kept so unerring a record, in dollars and
cents, of the human labour of the operatives. There were other suites for
the superintendents, for the purchasing agent; and at the end of the
corridor, on the south side of the mill, she entered the outer of the two
rooms reserved for Mr. Claude Ditmar, the Agent and general-in-chief
himself of this vast establishment. In this outer office, behind the rail
that ran the length of it, Janet worked; from the window where her
typewriter stood was a sheer drop of eighty feet or so to the river,
which ran here swiftly through a wide canon whose sides were formed by
miles and miles of mills, built on buttressed stone walls to retain the
banks. The prison-like buildings on the farther shore were also of
colossal size, casting their shadows far out into the waters; while in
the distance, up and down the stream, could be seen the delicate web of
the Stanley and Warren Street bridges, with trolley cars like toys
gliding over them, with insect pedestrians creeping along the footpaths.
Mr. Ditmar's immediate staff consisted of Mr. Price, an elderly bachelor
of tried efficiency whose peculiar genius lay in computation, of a young
Mr. Caldwell who, during the four years since he had left Harvard, had
been learning the textile industry, of Miss Ottway, and Janet. Miss
Ottway was the agent's private stenographer, a strongly built, capable
woman with immense reserves seemingly inexhaustible. She had a deep,
masculine voice, not unmusical, the hint of a masculine moustache, a
masculine manner of taking to any job that came to hand. Nerves were
things unknown to her: she was granite, Janet tempered steel. Janet was
the second stenographer, and performed, besides, any odd tasks that might
be assigned.
There were, in the various offices of the superintendents, the paymaster
and purchasing agent, other young women stenographers whose companionship
Janet, had she been differently organized, might have found congenial,
but something in her refused to dissolve to their proffered friendship.
She had but one friend,--if Eda Rawle, who worked in a bank, and whom she
had met at a lunch counter by accident, may be called so. As has been
admirably said in another language, one kisses, the other offers a cheek:
Janet offered the cheek. All unconsciously she sought a relationship
rarely to be found in banks and business offices; would yield herself to
none other. The young women stenographers in the Chippering Mill,
respectable, industrious girls, were attracted by a certain indefinable
quality, but finding they made no progress in their advances, presently
desisted they were somewhat afraid of her; as one of them remarked, "You
always knew she was there." Miss Lottie Meyers, who worked in the office
of Mr. Orcutt, the superintendent across the hall, experienced a brief
infatuation that turned to hate. She chewed gum incessantly, Janet found
her cheap perfume insupportable; Miss Meyers, for her part, declared that
Janet was "queer" and "stuck up," thought herself better than the rest of
them. Lottie Meyers was the leader of a group of four or five which
gathered in the hallway at the end of the noon hour to enter animatedly
into a discussion of waists, hats, and lingerie, to ogle and exchange
persiflages with the young men of the paymaster's corps, to giggle, to
relate, sotto voce, certain stories that ended invariably in hysterical
laughter. Janet detested these conversations. And the sex question,
subtly suggested if not openly dealt with, to her was a mystery over
which she did not dare to ponder, terrible, yet too sacred to be
degraded. Her feelings, concealed under an exterior of self-possession,
deceptive to the casual observer, sometimes became molten, and she was
frightened by a passion that made her tremble--a passion by no means
always consciously identified with men, embodying all the fierce
unexpressed and unsatisfied desires of her life.
These emotions, often suggested by some hint of beauty, as of the sun
glinting on the river on a bright blue day, had a sudden way of
possessing her, and the longing they induced was pain. Longing for what?
For some unimagined existence where beauty dwelt, and light, where the
ecstasy induced by these was neither moiled nor degraded; where shame, as
now, might not assail her. Why should she feel her body hot with shame,
her cheeks afire? At such moments she would turn to the typewriter, her
fingers striking the keys with amazing rapidity, with extraordinary
accuracy and force,--force vaguely disturbing to Mr. Claude Ditmar as he
entered the office one morning and involuntarily paused to watch her. She
was unaware of his gaze, but her colour was like a crimson signal that
flashed to him and was gone. Why had he never noticed her before? All
these months, for more than a year, perhaps,--she had been in his office,
and he had not so much as looked at her twice. The unguessed answer was
that he had never surprised her in a vivid moment. He had a flair for
women, though he had never encountered any possessing the higher values,
and it was characteristic of the plane of his mental processes that this
one should remind him now of a dark, lithe panther, tensely strung,
capable of fierceness. The pain of having her scratch him would be
delectable.
When he measured her it was to discover that she was not so little, and
the shoulder-curve of her uplifted arms, as her fingers played over the
keys, seemed to belie that apparent slimness. And had he not been
unacquainted with the subtleties of the French mind and language, he
might have classed her as a fausse maigre. Her head was small, her hair
like a dark, blurred shadow clinging round it. He wanted to examine her
hair, to see whether it would not betray, at closer range, an
imperceptible wave,--but not daring to linger he went into his office,
closed the door, and sat down with a sensation akin to weakness, somewhat
appalled by his discovery, considerably amazed at his previous stupidity.
He had thought of Janet--when she had entered his mind at all--as
unobtrusive, demure; now he recognized this demureness as repression. Her
qualities needed illumination, and he, Claude Ditmar, had seen them
struck with fire. He wondered whether any other man had been as
fortunate.
Later in the morning, quite casually, he made inquiries of Miss Ottway,
who liked Janet and was willing to do her a good turn.
"Why, she's a clever girl, Mr. Ditmar, a good stenographer, and
conscientious in her work. She's very quick, too.
"Yes, I've noticed that," Ditmar replied, who was quite willing to have
it thought that his inquiry was concerned with Janet's aptitude for
business.
"She keeps to herself and minds her own affairs. You can see she comes of
good stock." Miss Ottway herself was proud of her New England blood. "Her
father, you know, is the gatekeeper down there. He's been unfortunate."
"You don't say--I didn't connect her with him. Fine looking old man. A
friend of mine who recommended him told me he'd seen better days ...."