That was a hard winter for Rowe. Aside from the financial stress,
the elements seemed to conspire against the people who were so
ill-prepared to meet their fury. It was the coldest winter which had
been known for years; coal was higher, and the poor people had less
coal to burn. Storm succeeded storm; then, when there came a warm
spell, there was an epidemic of the grippe, and doctors' bills to
pay and quinine to buy--and quinine was very dear.
The Brewsters managed to keep up the interest on the house mortgage,
but their living expenses were reduced to the smallest possible
amount. In those days there was no wood laid ready for kindling in
the parlor stove, since there was neither any wood to spare nor
expectation of Robert's calling. Ellen and her mother sat in the
dining-room, for even the sitting-room fire had been abolished, and
they heated the dining-room whenever the weather admitted it from
the kitchen stove, and worked on the wrappers for their miserable
pittance.
The repeated storms were in a way a boon to Andrew, since he got
many jobs clearing paths, and thus secured a trifle towards the
daily expenses.
In those days Mrs. Zelotes watched the butcher-cart anxiously when
it stopped before her son's house, and she knew just what a tiny bit
of meat was purchased, and how seldom. On the days when the cart
moved on without any consultation at the tail thereof, the old woman
would buy an extra portion, cook it, and carry some over to her
son's.
Times grew harder and harder. Few of the operatives who had struck
in Lloyd's succeeded in obtaining employment elsewhere, and most of
them joined the union to enable them to do so. There was actual
privation. One evening, when the strike was some six weeks old, Abby
Atkins came over in a pouring rain to see Ellen. There were a number
of men in the dining-room that night. Amos Lee and Frank Dixon were
among them. It was a singular thing that Andrew, taking, as he had
done, no active part in any rebellion against authority, should have
come to see his house the headquarters for the rallies of
dissension. Men seemed to come to Andrew Brewster's for the sake of
bolstering themselves up in their hard position of defiance against
tremendous odds, though he sat by and seldom said a word. As for
Ellen, she and her mother on these occasions sat out in the kitchen,
sewing on the endless seams of the endless wrappers. Sometimes it
seemed to the girl as if wrappers enough were being made to clothe
not only the present, but future generations of poor women. She
seemed to see whole armies of hopeless, overburdened women, all
arrayed in these slouching garments, crowding the foreground of the
world.
That evening little Amabel, who had developed a painful desire to
make herself useful, having divined the altered state of the family
finances, was pulling out basting-threads, with a puckered little
face bent over her work. She was a very thin child, but there was an
incisive vitality in her, and somehow Fanny and Ellen contrived to
keep her prettily and comfortably clothed.
"I've got to do my duty by poor Eva's child, if I starve," Fanny
often said.
When the side door opened, Ellen and her mother thought it was
another man come to swell the company in the dining-room.
"It beats all how men like to come and sit round and talk over
matters; for my part, I 'ain't got any time to talk; I've got to
work," remarked Fanny.
"That's so," rejoined Ellen. She looked curiously like her mother
that night, and spoke like her. In her heart she echoed the sarcasm
to the full. She despised those men for sitting hour after hour in a
store, or in the house of some congenial spirit, or standing on a
street corner, and talking--talking, she was sure, to no purpose. As
for herself, she had done what she thought right; she had, as it
were, cut short the thread of her happiness of life for the sake of
something undefined and rather vague, and yet as mighty in its
demands for her allegiance as God. And it was done, and there was no
use in talking about it. She had her wrappers to make. However, she
told herself, extenuatingly, "Men can't sew, so they can't work
evenings. They are better off talking here than they would be in the
billiard-saloon." Ellen, at that time of her life, had a slight,
unacknowledged feeling of superiority over men of her own class. She
regarded them very much as she regarded children, with a sort of
tolerant good-will and contempt. Now, suddenly, she raised her head
and listened. "That isn't another man, it's a woman--it's Abby," she
said to her mother.
"She wouldn't come out in all this rain," replied Fanny. As she
spoke, a great, wind-driven wash of it came over the windows.
"Yes, it is," said Ellen, and she jumped up and opened the
dining-room door.
Abby had entered, as was her custom, without knocking. She had left
her dripping umbrella in the entry, and her old hat was flattened on
to her head with wet, and several damp locks of her hair straggled
from under it and clung to her thin cheeks. She still held up her
wet skirts around her, as she had held them out-of-doors, but she
was gesticulating violently with her other hand. She was repeating
what she had said before. Ellen had heard her indistinctly through
the door.
"Yes, I mean just what I say," she cried. "Get up and go to work, if
you are men! Stop hanging around stores and corners, and talking
about the tyranny of the rich, and go to work, and make them pay you
something for it, anyhow. This has been kept up long enough. Get up
and go to work, if you don't want those belonging to you to starve."
Abby caught sight of Ellen, pale and breathless, in the door, with
her mother looking over her shoulder, and she addressed her with
renewed violence. "Come here, Ellen," she said, "and put yourself on
my side. We've got to give in."
"You go away," cried little Amabel, in a shrill voice, looking
around Ellen's arm; but nobody paid any attention to her.
"I never will," returned Ellen, with a great flash, but her voice
trembled.
"You've got to," said Abby. "I tell you there's no other way."
"I'll die before I give up," cried Lee, in a loud, threatening
voice.
"I'm with ye," said Tom Peel.
Dixon and the young laster who sat beside him looked at each other,
but said nothing. Dixon wrinkled his forehead over his pipe.
"Then you'd better go to work quick, before some that I know of, who
are enough sight better worth saving than you are, starve," replied
Abby, unshrinkingly. "If I could I would go to Lloyd's and open it
on my own account to-morrow. I believe in bravery, but nothing
except fools and swine jump over precipices."
Abby passed through the room, sprinkling rain-drops from her
drenched skirts, and went into the kitchen with Ellen. Fanny cast an
angry glance at her, then a solicitous one at her dripping garments.
"Abby Atkins, you haven't got any rubbers on," said she.
"Rubbers!" repeated Abby.
"You just slip off those wet skirts, and Amabel will fetch you down
Ellen's old black petticoat and brown dress. Amabel--"
But Abby seated herself peremptorily before the kitchen stove and
extended one soaked little foot in its shabby boot. "I'm past
thinking or caring about wet skirts," said she. "Good Lord, what do
wet skirts matter? We can't make wrappers any longer. We had to sell
the sewing-machine yesterday to pay the rent or be turned out, and
we haven't got a thing to eat in the house except potatoes and a
little flour. We haven't had any meat for a week. Nice fare for a
man like poor father and a girl like Maria! We have come down to the
kitchen fire like you, but we can't keep it burning as late as this.
The rest went to bed an hour ago to keep warm. Maria has got more
cold. She did seem better one spell, but now she's worse again. Our
chamber is freezing cold, and we haven't had a fire in it since the
strike. John Sargent has ransacked every town within twenty miles
for work, but he can't get any, and his sick sister keeps sending to
him for money. He looks as if he was just about done, too. He went
off somewhere after supper. A great supper! He don't smoke a pipe
nowadays. Father don't get the medicine he ought to have, and that
cold spell he just about perished for a little whiskey. The bedroom
was like ice with no fire in the sitting-room, and he didn't sleep
warm. It's one awful thing after another happening. Did you know
Mamie Brady took laudanum last night?"
"Good land!" said Fanny.
"Yes, she did. Ed Flynn has been playing fast and loose with her for
a long time, and she's none too well balanced, and when it came to
her not having enough to eat, and to keep her warm, and her mother
nagging at her all the time--you know what an awful hard woman her
mother is--she got desperate. She gulped it down when the last car
went past and Ed Flynn hadn't come; she had been watchin' out for
him; then she told her mother, and her mother shook her, then run
for Dr. Fox, and he called in Dr. Lord, and they worked with a
stomach-pump till morning, and she isn't out of danger yet. Then
that isn't all. Willy Jones's mother is failing. He was over to our
house last evening, telling us about it, and he fairly cried, poor
boy. He said he actually could not get her what she needed to make
her comfortable this awful winter. It was all he could do with odd
jobs to keep the roof over their heads, that she hadn't actually
enough to eat and keep her warm. It seemed as if he would die when
he told about it. And that isn't all. Those little Blake children
next door are fairly starving. They are going around to the
neighbors' swill-buckets--it's a fact--just like little hungry dogs,
and it's precious little they find in them. Mrs. Wetherhed has let
her sewing-machine go, and Edward Morse is going to be sold out for
taxes. And that isn't all." Abby lowered her voice a little. She
cast an apprehensive glance at the door of the other room, and at
Amabel. "Mamie Bemis has gone to the bad. I had it straight. She's
in Boston. She didn't have enough to pay for her board, and got
desperate. I know her sister did wrong, but that was no reason why
she should have, and I don't believe she would if it hadn't been for
the strike. It's all on account of the strike. There's no use
talking: before the sparrow flies in the eyes of the tiger, he'd
better count the cost."
Fanny, quite white, stood staring from Abby to Ellen, and back
again.
Amabel was holding fast to a fold of Ellen's skirt. Ellen looked
rigid.
"I knew it all before," she said, in a low voice.
Suddenly Abby jumped up and caught the other girl in a fierce
embrace. "Ellen," she sobbed--"Ellen, isn't there any way out of it?
I can't see--"
Ellen freed herself from Abby with a curious imperative yet gentle
motion, then she opened the door into the other room again. The loud
clash of voices hushed, and every man faced towards her standing on
the threshold, with her mother and Abby and little Amabel in the
background. "I want to say to you all," said Ellen, in a clear
voice, "that I think I did wrong. I have been wondering if I had not
for some time, and growing more and more certain. I did not count
the cost. All I thought of was the principle, but the cost is a part
of the principle in this world, and it has to be counted in with it.
I see now. I don't think the strike ought ever to have been. It has
brought about too much suffering upon those who were not responsible
for it, who did not choose it of their own free will. There are
children starving, and people dying and breaking their hearts. We
have brought too much upon ourselves and others. I am sorry I said
what I did in the shop that day, if I influenced any one. Now I am
not going to strike any longer. Let us all accept Mr. Lloyd's terms,
and go back to work."
But Ellen's voice was drowned out in a great shout of wrath and
dissent from Lee. He directly leaped to the conclusion that the girl
took this attitude on account of Lloyd, and his jealousy, which was
always smouldering, flamed.
"Well, I guess not!" he shouted. "I rather guess not! I've struck,
and I'm going to stay struck! I ain't goin' to back out because a
girl likes the boss, damn him!"
Andrew and the young laster rose and moved quietly before Ellen. Tom
Peel said nothing, but he grinned imperturbably.
"I 'ain't had a bit of tobacco, and the less said about what I've
had to eat the better," Lee went on, in a loud, threatening voice,
"but I ain't going to give up. No, miss; you've het up the fightin'
blood in me, and it ain't so easy coolin' of it down."
The door opened, and Granville Joy entered. He had knocked several
times, but nobody had heard him. He looked inquiringly from one to
another, then moved beside Andrew and the laster.
Dixon got up. "It looks to me as if it was too soon to be giving up
now," he said.
"It's easy for a man who's got nobody dependent upon him to talk,"
cried Abby.
"I won't give up!" cried Dixon, looking straight at Ellen, and
ignoring Abby.
"That's so," said Lee. "We don't give up our rights for bosses, or
bosses' misses."
As he said that there was a concerted movement of Andrew, the
laster, and Granville. Granville was much slighter than Lee, but
suddenly his right arm shot out, and the other man went down like a
log. Andrew followed him up with a kick.
"Get out of my house," he shouted, "and never set foot in it again!
Out with ye!"
Lee was easily cowed. He did not attempt to make any resistance, but
gathered himself up, muttering, and moved before the three into the
entry, where he had left his coat and hat. Dixon and Peel followed
him. When the door was shut, Ellen turned to the others, with a
quieting hand on Amabel's head, who was clinging to her, trembling.
"I think it will be best to talk to John Sargent," said she. "I
think a committee had better be appointed to wait upon Mr. Lloyd
again, and ask him to open the factory. I'm not going to strike any
longer."
"I'm sure I'm not," said Abby.
"Abby and I are not going to strike any longer," said Ellen, in an
indescribably childlike way, which yet carried enormous weight with
it.