University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
A FANCY CASE.

THE oculist shut the door. For a popular
oculist, with a specialty for fancy cases,
he looked disturbed.

A patient in waiting — a mild, near-sighted
case — asked what was the matter with the
girl.

“Why, the creature 's deaf and dumb!”

“Not growing blind, I hope?”

“Incurably blind. A factory-girl, a charity
case of Miss Kelso's. You know of Miss Kelso,
Mr. Blodgett?”

Mr. Blodgett knew, he thought. The young
lady from whom Wiggins bought that new house
on the Mill-Dam. An eccentric young lady,
buried herself in Five Falls ever since the old
gentleman's death, broke an engagement, and
was interested in labor reform, or something
of that description.

“The same. Enthusiastic, very; and odd.
Would send the girl to me, for instance; naturally
it would have been a hospital case, you see.
I have to thank her for a hard morning's work.
There was a sister in the matter. She would be
told then and there; a sharp girl, and I could
n't put her off.”

Ah! Mr. Blodgett weakly sighs. Very sad!
Worn out at the looms perhaps? He seemed to
have heard that the gaslight is trying in factories.

“This is wool-picking, sir; a clear case, but
a little extraordinary. There 's a disease of the
hands those people acquire from wool-picking
sometimes; an ugly thing. The girl rubbed her
eyes, I suppose. The mischief has been a long
time in progress, or she might have stood a chance,
which gaslight-work has killed, to be sure; but
there 's none for her here, none!”

Sip and Catty, in the entry, sat down upon the
office stairs. Sip was dizzy, she said. She drew
up her knees and put her face into her hands.
She could hear the doctor through the door
saying, “None for her!” and the near-sighted
patient babbling pity, and the rumble of the

street, as if it had been miles away, and a newsboy
shrieking a New York wedding through it. A
singular, painful, intense interest in that wedding
took hold of her. She wondered what the bride
wore, and how much her veil cost. Long bridal
parties filed before her eyes, and flowers fell, and
sweet scents were in the air. It seemed imperative
to think about the wedding. The solid earth
would reel if she did not think about the wedding.
She clung to the banisters with both hands, lest
she should not think about the wedding.

The newsboy shrieked the wedding out of
hearing, and Catty touched her on the arm.

“Good God!” cried Sip. A whirl of flowers
and favors shot like a rocket by and beyond her,
and a ragged newsboy chased them, and all the
brides were blind, and she thrust out her hands;
and she was sitting in the entry on the stairs, and
the wind blew up, and she had frightened Catty.

So she said, “There, there!” as if Catty could
hear her, and held by the banisters and stood up.

Catty wanted to know what had happened,
very petulantly; the more so because she could
not see Sip's face. She had been very cross
since the blur came over Sip's face.

“Nothing has happened,” said Sip, — “nothing
but a — pain I had.”

“I 've got the pain,” scowled Catty. She put
her hand to her shrunken eyes and cowered on
the stairs, whining a little, like a hurt brute.

“Well, well,” said Sip, on her fingers, stiffly,
“very well. Stop that noise and come away,
Catty! I cannot bear that noise, not for love's
sake, I can't bear it. Come!”

They crept slowly down the stairs and out into
the street. It was a bright day, and everybody
laughed. This seemed to Sip very strange.

She tried to tie Catty's face up in a thick veil
she had; but Catty pulled it off; and she took
her hand upon her arm, but did it weakly, and
Catty jerked away. She was quite worn out
when they got to the depot and the cars, and sat
with her head back and shut her eyes.

“What 's the matter with the girl? Blind,
ain't she?”

A curious passenger somewhere behind her
said this loudly, as the train swept out of
the station dusk. Sip turned upon him like a
tiger. She could not remember that Catty could
not hear. The word was so horrible to her; she

had not said it herself yet. She put her arm
about Catty, and said, “Don't you talk!”

“Dear, dear!” said the curious passenger,
blandly, “I would n't harm ye.”

“I had n't told her,” said Sip, catching her
breath; “I had n't gone away — by ourselves with
the doors locked — to tell her. Do you think I 'd
have it said out loud before a carful of folks?”

Miss Kelso met her when she got home;
looked at her once; put a quick, strong arm
about her, and got the two girls into the carriage
with the scented cushions immediately. Catty
was delighted with this, and talked rapidly about
it on her fingers all the way to the stone house.
Sip pulled her hat over her eyes like a man, and
sat up straight.

The little stone house was lighted, and supper
was ready. The windows were open, and the
sweet spring night airs wandered in and out.
The children in the streets were shouting. Sip
shut the window hard. She stood uncertainly by
the door, while Catty went to take off her things.

“If I can do anything for you —” said Perley,
gently.

Sip held up her hands and her brown face.

“Do you suppose,” she said, “that you could
— kiss me?”

Perley sat down in the wooden rocking-chair
and held out her beautiful arms.

Sip crept in like a baby, and there she began to
cry. She cried and cried. Catty ate her supper,
and nobody said anything, and she cried and
cried.

“My dear!” said Perley, crying too.

“Let me be,” sobbed Sip, — “let me be for a
minute. I 'll bear it in a minute. I only wanted
some women-folks to cry to! I had n't anybody.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed with
Catty as soon as they were alone. She had
dried her eyes to bear it now. Catty must
understand. She was quite determined to have
it over. She set her lips together, and knotted
her knuckles tightly.

The light was out, but a shaft of wan moonlight
from the kitchen windows struck into the
closet bedroom, and lay across the floor and
across the patch counterpane. Catty sat in it.
She was unusually quiet, and her face indicated

some alarm or uneasiness, when Sip held up her
trembling hand in the strip of light to command
her close attention, and touched her eyes. Catty
put out her supple fingers and groped, poor
thing, after Sip's silent words. Walled up and
walled in now from that long mystery which
we call life, except at the groping, lithe, magnetic
fingers, she was an ugly girl.

Sip looked at her for a minute fiercely.

“I should like to know what God means!” she
said. But she did not say it to Catty. She
would not speak to Catty till she had wiped her
dry lips to wipe the words off. Whatever He
meant, Catty should not hear the words.

She tried, instead, to tell her very gently,
and quite as if He meant a gentle thing by Catty,
how it was.

In the strip of unreal light, the two hands, the
groping hand and the trembling hand, interchanging
unreal, soundless words, seemed to
hang with a pitiful significance. One might
have thought, to see them, how the mystery of
suffering and the mystery of love grope and
tremble forever after one another, with no speech
nor language but a sign.

“There 's something I 've got to tell you,
dear,” said the trembling hand.

“For love's sake?” asked the hand that
groped.

“For love's sake,” said the trembling hand.

“Yes,” nodded Catty, with content.

“A long time ago,” said Sip; “before we went
to Waltham, Catty, when you picked the wool —”

“And hurt my hands,” said Catty, scowling.

“Something went wrong,” said the trembling
hand, “with your poor eyes, Catty. O your poor,
poor eyes, my dear! All that you had left, —
the dear eyes that saw me and loved me, and
that I taught to understand so much, and to be
so happy for love's sake! The poor eyes that I
tried to keep at home, and safe, and would have
died for, if they need never, never have looked
upon an evil thing! The dear eyes, Catty, that
I would have hunted the world over, if I could, to
find pretty things for, and pleasant things and
good things, and that I never had anything for
but such a miserable little room that they got so
tired of! The poor dear eyes!”

The shrunken and disfigured eyes, that had
been such wandering, wicked eyes, turned and

strained painfully in the half-light. Sip had said
some of this with her stiff lips, but the trembling
hand had made it for the most part plain to the
groping hand. Catty herself sat and trembled
suddenly.

When should she see the supper-table plain
again? the groping hand made out to ask. And
the picture by the china-closet? And the flies
upon the window-pane?

“Never!” said the trembling hand.

But when should she see Sip's face again without
the blur?

“Never! O Catty, never again!”

The trembling hand caught the groping hand
to sting it with quick kisses. Sip could not,
would not, see what the poor hand might say.
She held it up in the streak of light. God might
see. She held it up, and pulled Catty down upon
her knees, with her face in the patch counterpane.

When Catty was asleep that night, Sip went
out and got down upon the floor in the kitchen.

She got down, with her hands around her
knees, in the wan lightness that fell about the
picture behind the china-closet door. The driving

dream seemed to fill the room. The factory-girl
on the kitchen floor felt herself swept into it.
Her lips worked and she talked to it.

“I could ha' borne it if it had been me,”
she said. Did the pictured women, with their
arms up, nod as they drove wailing by? Sip
could have sworn to it.

“We could have borne, if it had been we,” they
said.

“What 's the sense of it?” asked Sip, in her
rough way, half aloud. She had such a foolish
way about that picture, often talking to it by the
hour, upon the kitchen floor.

But the women only waved their arms and
nodded solemnly. That which they could not
know nor consider nor understand was in the
question. They drifted over it with the helplessness
of hopeless human pain.

“You 're good for nothing,” said Sip, and
turned the picture to the wall.

She stumbled over something in doing this,
and stooped to see what it was. It was an
abused old book that Catty had taken once
from the Mission Sunday School, and had never
returned, — a foolish thing, with rough prints.

Catty had thrown it under the table in ten minutes.
It opened in Sip's hands now, by chance,
at a coarse plate of the Crucifixion.

Sip threw it down, but picked it up again, lost
the place, and hunted for it; bent over it for a
few minutes with a puzzled face.

Somehow the driving dream and the restless
dreamer hushed away before the little woodcut.
In some way the girl herself felt quieted by the
common thing. For some reason — the old, the
unexplained, the inexplicable reason — the Cross
with the Man upon it put finger on the bitter lips
of Sip's trouble. She could not ask a Man upon
a Cross, “What was the sense of it?” So she
only said, “O my poor Catty! my poor, poor
Catty!” and softly shut the foolish little book
and went to bed.

Beethoven did not stay with his face to the
wall, however. Sip took a world of curious comfort
out of that picture; quite perplexed Perley,
who had only thought in sending it to do a
pleasant thing, who had at that time never
guessed — how should she? — that a line engraving
after Lemude could make a “forgetting”
in the life of a factory-girl.

“Sometimes now, when Catty is so bad,” said
Sip one day, “there 's music comes out of that
picture all about the room. Sometimes in the
night I hear 'em play. Sometimes when I sit
and wait for her, they sit and play. Sometimes
when the floor 's all sloppy and I have to wash up
after work, I hear 'em playing over all the dirt.
It sounds so clean!” said Sip.

“Is Catty still so troublesome?” asked Perley.

Sip's face dropped.

“Off and on a little worse, I think. The
blinder she grows the harder it is to please
her and to keep her still. I come home all beat
out; and she 's gone. Or, I try so hard to make
her happy after supper, and along by nine o'clock
she 's off. She 's dreadful restless since she left
off workin', and gets about the street a'most as
easy, for aught I see, as ever. She 's so used to
the turns and all; and everybody knows her, and
turns out for her. I 've heard of blind folks that
was like her; she was n't stupid, Catty was n't,
if she 'd been like other folks. There 's nights I
sit and look for her to be run over and brought
in. There 's nights she gets at liquor. There 's
nights I follow her round and round, and follow

her home, and make as if I sat there and she 'd
just come in. That 's the worst, you see.
What was that you said? No; I 'll not have
Catty sent anywhere away from me. There 's no
kind folks in any good asylum that would make it
comfortable for Catty away from me. You need
n't think,” — Sip set her tough little lips together
— “you need n't think that you nor anybody
could separate me and Catty. She 's never to
blame, Catty is n't. I know that. I can work.
I 'll make her comfortable. It 's only God in
heaven that will separate me and Catty.”

It was about this time that Miss Kelso attempted,
in view of Sip's increasing care, a long-cherished
plan of experiment in taking the girl
out of the mills.

“It is not a girl to spend life in weaving
cotton,” said the young lady to Stephen Garrick.
“That would be such exorbitant waste.”

“There 's waste enough at those looms,” said
Mr. Garrick, pointing to his mills, “to enrich a
Commonwealth perceptibly. We live fast down
there among the engines. It is hot-house
growth. There 's the difference between a man
brought up at machinery and a man brought

up at a hoe, for instance, that there is between
forced fruit and frozen fruit. Few countries
understand what possibilities they possess in
their factory population. We are a fever in the
national blood that it will not pay to neglect;
there 's kill or cure in us.”

“What 's the use?” said Sip, with sullen, unresponsive
eyes. “You 'll have all your bother
for nothing, Miss Kelso. If I get away from my
loom, I shall come back to my loom. Look at
the factory-folks in England! From father to
child, from children to children's children, — a
whole race of 'em at their looms. It 's in the
blood.”

“Try it,” urged Perley. “Try it for Catty's
sake, at least. There are so many ways in which
it would be better for Catty.”

“I should like it,” said Sip, slowly, “to get
Catty among some other folks than mill-folks.
It seems as if I could have done it once; but
it 's too late now.”

Now Sip was barely twenty-one. She said
this with the unconscious assurance of fifty.

“I 'd try anything for Catty; and almost
anything for you; and almost anything to get
out of the mills; but I 'm afraid it 's too late.”

But Perley was persistent in her fancy, and
between them they managed to “try it” faithfully.

Sip went out as somebody's cook, and burned
all the soup and made sour bread. She drew
about a baby's carriage for a day and a half, and
left because the baby cried and she was afraid
that she should shake it. She undertook to be a
hotel table-girl, and was saucy to the house-keeper
before night. She took a specimen of
her sewing to a dressmaker, and was told that
the establishment did not find itself in need of
another seamstress. She stood behind a dry-goods
counter, but it worried her to measure off
calico for the old ladies. Finally, Perley put her
at the printer's trade, and Sip had a headache
and got inky for a fortnight.

Then she walked back to her overseer, and
“asked in” for the next morning.

“I told you it was no use,” she said, shaking
her head at Miss Kelso, half whimsically, half
sadly too. “It 's too late. What am I fit for?
Nothing. What do I know? Nothing. I can
weave; that 's all. I 'm used to that. I 'm used
to the noise and the running about. I 'm used to

the dirt and the roughness. I can't sit still on
a high stool all day. I don't know how to spell,
if I do. They 're too fussy for me in the shops.
I hate babies. It 's too late. I 'm spoiled. I
knew I should come back. My father and mother
came back before me. It 's in the blood.”

Perley would have liked even then, had it
seemed practicable, to educate the girl; but Sip
shook her dogged head.

“It 's too late for that, too. Once I would
have liked that. There 's things I think I could
ha' done.” Sip's sullen eyes wandered slowly
to the plunging dream and the solitary dreamer
behind the china-closet door, and, resting there,
flashed suddenly. “There 's things I seem to
think I might ha' done with that; but I 've lost
'em now. Nor that ain't the worst. I 've lost the
caring for 'em, — that 's the thing I 've lost. If I
was to sit still and study at a grammar, I should
scream. I must go back to the noise and the
dirt. Catty and me must stay there. Sometimes
I seem to think that I might have been a
little different someways; if maybe I 'd been
helped or shown. There was an evening school
to one place where I worked. I was running four

looms twelve hours and a half a day. You 're so
dull about the head, you see, when you get home
from work; and you ache so; and you don't feel
that interest in an education that you might.”

“Sometimes,” added Sip, with a working of
the face, “it comes over me as if I was like a —
a patchwork bed-quilt. I 'd like to have been
made out of one piece of cloth. It seems as if
your kind of folks got made first, and we down
here was put together out of what was left.

“Sometimes, though,” continued the girl, “I
wonder how there came to be so much of me as
there is. I don't set up for much, but I wonder
why I was n't worse. I believe you would yourself,
if you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Knew what!” echoed the factory-girl. “Knew
that as you know no more of than you know of
hell! Have n't I told you that you can't know?
You can't understand. If I was to tell you, you
could n't understand. It ain't so much the
bringing up I got, as the smooch of it. That 's
the wonder of it. You may be ever so clean,
but you don't feel clean if you 're born in the
black. Why, look here; there was my mother,

into the mills off and on between her babies.
There 's me, from the time I run alone, running
alone. She comes home at night. I 'm
off about the street all day. I learned to swear
when I learned to talk. Before I 'd learned to
talk I 'd seen sights that you 've never seen yet in
all your fine life long. That 's the crock of it.
And the wonder. And the talk in the mills —
for a little girl to hear! Only eight years old
— such a little girl — and all sorts of women
working round beside you. If ever I 'd like to
call curses down on anybody, it 's on a woman
that I used to know for the way she talked to
little girls! Why did nobody stop it? Why, the
boss was as bad himself, every whit and grain.
The gentlemen who employed that boss were
professors of religion, all of them.

“But I 've tried to be good!” broke off Sip,
with a little sudden tremor of her bitter lip. “I
know I 'm rough, but I 've tried to be a good
girl!”