A QUICK CONVERSION
It happened that morning that the old Bishop was on his daily round,
visiting the sick of Cottontown. He went every day, from house to
house, helping the sick, cheering the well, and better than all
things else, putting into the hearts of the disheartened that
priceless gift of coming again.
For of all the gifts the gods do give to men, that is the
greatest--the ability to induce their fallen fellow man to look up
and hope again. The gift to spur others onward--the gift to make men
reach up. His flock were all mill people, their devotion to him
wonderful. In the rush and struggle of the strenuous world around
them, this humble old man was the only being to whom they could go
for spiritual help.
To-day in his rounds, one thing impressed him more sadly than
anything else--for he saw it so plainly when he visited their
homes--and that was that with all their hard work, from the oldest to
the youngest, with all their traffic in human life, stealing the bud
along with the broken and severed stem--as a matter of fact, the Acme
mills paid out to the people but very little money. Work as they
might, they seldom saw anything but an order on a store, for clothes
and provisions sold to them at prices that would make a Jew peddler
blush for shame.
The Bishop found entire families who never saw a piece of money the
year round.
There are families and families, and some are more shiftless than
others.
In one of the cottages the old man found a broken down little thing
of seven, sick. For just such trips he kept his pockets full of
things, and such wonderful pockets they would have been to a
healthful natural child! Ginger cakes--a regular Noah's Ark, and
apples, red and yellow. Sweet gum, too, which he had himself gathered
from the trees in the woods. And there were even candy dolls and
peppermints.
"Oh, well, maybe I can help her, po' little thing," the Bishop said
when the mother conducted him in. But one look at her was
enough--that dead, unmeaning look, not unconscious, but
unmeaning--deadened--a disease which to a robust child would mean
fever and a few days' sickness--to this one the Bishop knew it meant
atrophy and death. And as the old man looked at her, he thought it
were better that she should go. For to her life had long since lost
its individuality, and dwarfed her into a nerveless machine--the
little frame was nothing more than one of a thousand monuments to the
cotton mill--a mechanical thing, which might cease to run at any
time.
"How old is she?" asked the Bishop, sitting down by the child on the
side of the bed.
"We put her in the mill two years ago when she was seven," said the
mother. "We was starvin' an' had to do somethin'." She added this
with as much of an apologetic tone as her nature would permit. "We
told the mill men she was ten," she added. "We had to do it. The fust
week she got two fingers mashed off."
The Bishop was silent, then he said: "It's bes' always to tell the
truth. Liar is a fast horse, but he never runs but one race."
Although there were no laws in Alabama against child labor, the mill
drew the lines then as now, if possible, on very young children. Not
that it cared for the child--but because it could be brought to the
mill too young for any practical use, unless it was wise beyond its
age.
He handed the little thing a ginger man. She looked at it--the first
she had ever seen,--and then at the giver in the way a wild thing
would, as if expecting some trick in the proffered kindness; but when
he tried to caress her and spoke kindly, she shrank under the cover
and hid her head with fear.
It was not a child, but a little animal--a wild being of an unknown
species in a child's skin--the missing link, perhaps; the link
missing between the natural, kindly instinct of the wild thing, the
brute, the monkey, the anthropoid ape, which protects its young even
at the expense of its life, and civilized man of to-day, the speaking
creature, the so-called Christian creature, who sells his young to
the director-Devils of mills and machinery and prolongs his own life
by the death of his offspring.
Biology teaches that many of the very lowest forms of life eat their
young. Is civilized man merely a case, at last, of reversion to a
primitive type?
She hid her head and then peeped timidly from under the cover at the
kindly old man. He had seen a fox driven into its hole by dogs do the
same thing.
She did not know what a smile meant, nor a caress, nor a proffered
gift. Tremblingly she lay, under the dirty quilt, expecting a kick, a
cuff.
The Bishop sat down by the bedside and took out a paper. "It'll be an
hour or so I can spend," he said to the mother--"maybe you'd like to
be doin' about a little."
"Come to think of it, I'm pow'ful obleeged to you," she said. "I've
all my mornin' washin' to do yit, only I was afraid to leave her
alone."
"You do yo' washin'--I'll watch her. I'm a pretty good sort of a hoss
doctor myse'f."
The child had nodded off to sleep, the Bishop was reading his paper,
when a loud voice was heard in the hallway and some rough steps that
shook the little flimsily made floor of the cottage, and made it rock
with the tramp of them. The door opened suddenly and Jud Carpenter,
angry, boisterous, and presumptuous, entered. The child had awakened
at the sound of Carpenter's foot fall, and now, frightened beyond
control, she trembled and wept under the cover.
There are natural antipathies and they are God-given. They are the
rough cogs in the wheel of things. But uneven as they are, rough and
grating, strike them off and the wheel would be there still, but it
would not turn. It is the friction of life that moves it. And
movement is the law of life.
Antipathies--thank God who gave them to us! But for them the shepherd
dog would lie down with the wolf.
The only man in Cottontown who did not like the Bishop was Jud
Carpenter, and the only man in the world whom the Bishop did not love
was Jud Carpenter. And many a time in his life the old man had
prayed: "O God, teach me to love Jud Carpenter and despise his ways."
Carpenter glared insolently at the old man quietly reading his paper,
and asked satirically. "Wal, what ails her, doctor?"
"Mill-icious fever," remarked the Bishop promptly with becoming
accent on the first syllable, and scarcely raising his eyes from the
paper.
Carpenter flushed. He had met the Bishop too often in contests which
required courage and brains not to have discovered by now that he was
no match for the man who could both pray and fight.
"They aint half as sick as they make out an' I've come to see about
it," he added. He felt the child's pulse. "She ain't sick to hurt.
That spinner is idle over yonder an' I guess I'll jes' be carryin'
her back. Wuck--it's the greatest tonic in the worl'--it's the
Hostetter's Bitters of life," he added, trying to be funny.
The Bishop looked up. "Yes, but I've knowed men to get so drunk on
bitters they didn't kno' a mill-dam from a dam'-mill!"
Carpenter smiled: "Wal, she ain't hurt--guess I'll jes' git her
cloze on an' take her over"--still feeling the child's wrist while
she shuddered and hid under the cover. Nothing but her arm was out,
and from the nervous grip of her little claw-like fingers the old man
could only guess her terrible fear.
"You sho'ly don't mean that, Jud Carpenter?" said the Bishop, with
surprise in his heretofore calm tone.
"Wal, that's jus' what I do mean, Doctor," remarked Carpenter dryly,
and in an irritated voice.
"Jud Carpenter," said the old man rising--"I am a man of God--it is
my faith an' hope. I'm gettin' old, but I have been a man in my day,
an' I've still got strength enough left with God's he'p to stop you.
You shan't tech that child."
In an instant Carpenter was ablaze--profane, abusive, insolent--and
as the old man stepped between him and the bed, the Whipper-in's
anger overcame all else.
The child under the cover heard a resounding whack and stuck her head
out in time to see the hot blood leap to the old man's cheeks where
Carpenter's blow had fallen. For a moment he paused, and then the
child saw the old overseer's huge fist gripping spasmodically, and
the big muscles of his arms and shoulders rolling beneath the folds
of his coat, as a crouching lion's skin rolls around beneath his mane
before he springs.
Again and again it gripped, and relaxed--gripped and relaxed again.
Mastering himself with a great effort, the old man turned to the man
who had slapped him.
"Strike the other cheek, you coward, as my Master sed you would."
Even the child was surprised when Carpenter, half wickedly, in rage,
half tauntingly slapped the other cheek with a blow that almost sent
the preacher reeling against the bed. Again the great fist gripped
convulsively, and the big muscles that had once pitched the Mountain
Giant over a rail fence worked--rolled beneath their covering.
"What else kin I do for you at the request of yo' Master?" sneered
Carpenter.
"As He never said anything further on the subject," said the old man,
in a dry pitched voice that told how hard he was trying to control
himself, "I take it He intended me to use the same means that He
employed when He run the thieves an' bullies of His day out of the
temple of God."
The child thought they were embracing. It was the old hold and the
double hip-thrust, by which the overseer had conquered so often
before in his manhood's prime. Nor was his old-time strength gone. It
came in a wave of righteous indignation, and like the gust of a
whirlwind striking the spars of a rotting ship. Never in his life had
Carpenter been snapped so nearly in two. It seemed to him that every
bone in his body broke when he hit the floor.... It was ten minutes
before his head began to know things again. Dazed, he opened his eyes
to see the Bishop sitting calmly by his side bathing his face with
cold water. The blood had been running from his nose, for the rag and
water were colored. His head ached.
Jud Carpenter had one redeeming trait--it was an appreciation of the
humorous. No man has ever been entirely lost or entirely miserable,
who has had a touch of humor in him. As the Bishop put a pillow under
his head and then locked the door to keep any one else out, the
ridiculousness of it all came over him, and he said sillily:
"Wal, I reckin you've 'bout converted me this time."
"Jud Carpenter," said the Bishop, his face white with shame, "for
God's sake don't tell anybody I done that--"
Jud smiled as he arose and put on his hat. "I can stan' bein'
licked," he added good naturedly--"because I remember now that I've
run up agin the old champion of the Tennessee Valley--ain't that what
they useter call you?--but it does hurt me sorter, to think you'd
suppose I'd be such a damned fool as to tell it."
He felt the child's wrist again. "'Pears lak she's got a little fever
since all this excitement--guess I'll jes' let her be to-day."
"I do think it 'ud be better, Jud," said the Bishop gently.
And Jud pulled down his hat and slipped quietly out.
The mother never did understand from the child just what happened.
When she came in the Bishop had her so much better that the little
thing actually was playing with his ginger cake dolls, and had eaten
one of them.
It was bed time that night before the child finally whispered it
out: "Maw, did you ever see two men hug each other?"
"No--why?"
"Why, the Bishop he hugged Jud Carpenter so hard he fetched the bleed
out of his nose!"
It was her first and last sight of a ginger-man. Two days later she
was buried, and few save the old Bishop knew she had died; for
Cottontown did not care.