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....”