 | CHAPTER XII.
MAPLE LEAVES. The silent partner |  |
12. CHAPTER XII.
MAPLE LEAVES.
AN incident connected with Miss Kelso's experiments
in Five Falls, valuable chiefly
as indicative of the experimenter, and rather as a
hint than as history, occurred in the ripening
autumn. It has been urged upon me to find
place for it, although it is fragmentary and
incomplete.
A distant sea-swell of a strike was faintly
audible in Hayle and Kelso.
Hayle and Kelso were in trouble. Standfast
Brothers, of Town, solid as rock and old as
memory, had gone down; gone as suddenly and
blackly as Smashem & Co. of yesterday, and
gone with a clutch on Five Falls cotton, under
which Five Falls shook dizzily.
The serene face of the senior partner took, for
the first time since 1857, an anxious, or, it might
rather be called, an annoyed groove. All the
placidly, but Standfast Brothers were down, and
behold, the earth reeled and the foundations
thereof.
Two things, therefore, resulted. The progress
of the new mill was checked, and a notice of
reduction of wages went to the hands.
The sea-swell murmured.
Hayle and Kelso heard nothing.
The sea-swell growled.
Hayle and Kelso never so much as turned the
head.
The sea-swell splashed out a few delegates and
a request, respectful enough, for consultation and
compromise.
“We will shut down the mills first!” said
young Mr. Hayle between his teeth.
So the swell broke with a roar the next “Lord's
day.”
The groove grew a little jagged across the
Senior's face. A strike, it is well known, is by no
means necessarily an undesirable thing. Stock
accumulates. The market quickens. You keep
your finger on its pulse. You repair your machinery
and bide your time. A thousand people,
finger, empty-handed. What so easy as a little
stir of the finger now and then? You are not
hungry meanwhile; your daughter has her winter
clothes. You sit and file handcuffs playfully,
against that day when your “hands” shall have
gone hungry long enough. No more striking
presently! Meantime, you may amuse yourself.
There is something noteworthy about this
term “strike.” A head would think and outwit
us. A heart shall beat and move us. The
“hands” can only struggle and strike us, — foolishly
too, and madly, here and there, and desperately,
being ill-trained hands, never at so much
as a boxing-school, and gashing each other principally
in the contest.
There had been strikes in Hayle and Kelso
which had not caused a ruffle upon the Senior's
gentlemanly, smooth brow or pleasant smile; but
just now a strike was unfortunate.
“Very unfortunate,” said Mr. Hayle in the
counting-room on pay-day, in the noise of the
breaking swell.
The Company were all upon the ground, silent
and disturbed. There was a heavy crowd at the
altercation with them, made its way in jerks to
the counting-room.
By a chance Miss Kelso was in the counting-room;
had been over to put Mill's “Liberty”
into the library, and had been detained by the
gathering crowd.
She was uneasy like the rest; was in and out,
taking her own measure of the danger.
“There is nothing to be done,” said Mr. Garrick,
anxiously, the last time that she came into
the little gloomy room where they were sitting. It
was beginning to rain, and the windows, through
which growing spots of lowering faces could be
seen darkening the streets, were spattered and
dirty. “There is nothing to do about it. If
they will, they will. Had you better stay here?
We may have a noisy time of it.”
“There is one thing to do,” said the young
lady, decidedly, “only one. I wish, Mr. Garrick,
that you had never shut me out of this firm. I
belonged here! You do not one of you know
now what it is for your own interest to do!”
Mr. Hayle signified, smiling across his groove
of anxiety, that she was at liberty, of course, to
might be prepared for such an emergency.
“And fold my hands for a romantic woman
after it. However, that does not alter the fact;
there is just one thing to do to prevent the most
serious strike known in Five Falls yet. I know
those men better than you do.”
“We know them well enough,” said Maverick,
with a polite sneer. “This is a specimen of
`intelligent labor,' a fair one! These fellows
are like a horse blind in one eye; they will run
against a barn to get away from a barrel. Loose
the rein, and there 's mischief immediately. You
may invite them to supper to the end of their
days, Miss Kelso; but when you are in a genuine
difficulty, they will turn against you just as they
are doing now. There 's neither gratitude nor
common business sense among them. There 's
neither trust nor honor. They have no confidence
in their employers, and no foresight for
themselves. They would ruin us altogether for
fifty cents a week. A parcel of children with the
blessed addition of a few American citizens at
their head!”
“I was about to propose,” said Perley, quietly,
or confidence in them. I want Mr. Garrick to
go out and tell them why we must reduce their
wages.”
“Truly a young lady's suggestion,” said the
Senior.
“It is none of their business,” said Maverick,
“why we reduce their wages.”
Stephen Garrick said nothing.
“Such a course was never taken in the company,”
said the Senior.
“And never ought to be,” said the Junior. “It
is an unsuitable position for an employer to take,
— unsuitable! And disastrous as a precedent.
Next thing we know, we should have them regulating
the salary of our clerks and the size of
our invoices. Outside of the fancy of a cooperative
economist, such a principle would be
im— What a noise they 're making!”
“Every minute is precious,” exclaimed Perley,
rising nervously. “I tell you I know those men!
They will trust Mr. Stephen Garrick, if he treats
them like reasonable beings before it is too
late!”
The counting-room door slammed there, behind
he said; the Spinners' Union had evidently been
at work; there were a few brickbats about, and rum
enough to float a schooner; and an ugly kind of
setness all around; we were in for it, he thought,
now. Were there any orders?
No, no orders.
The counting-room door slammed again, and
the noise outside dashed against the sound with
a little spurt of defiance.
“It would be a most uncommon course to
take,” said the Senior, uneasily; “but the emergency
is great, and perhaps if Mr. Garrick felt
inclined to undertake such an extraordinary —”
Miss Kelso overrated his chances of success,
Mr. Garrick said, but she did not overrate the
importance of somebody's doing something. He
was willing to make the attempt.
The counting-room door slammed once more;
the spurt died down; the swell reared its head,
writhing a little to see what would happen.
Mr. Garrick took his hat off, and stood in the
door.
It was an ugly crowd, with a disheartening
“setness” about it. He wished, when he looked
his hat off, smiling.
He was smiling still when he came back to
the counting-room.
“Well?” asked Perley.
“For an unpopular master —”
“O hush!” said Perley.
“For an unpopular master,” repeated Mr. Garrick,
“I did as well as I expected. In fact, just
what I expected all the time has happened.
Listen!”
He held the door open. A cry came in from
outside, —
“Ask the young leddy!”
“You see, you should have gone in the first
place,” said the unpopular master, patiently.
“The rest of us are good for little, without your
indorsement.”
“Call the young leddy! Let's hear what the
young leddy says to 't! The young leddy! The
young leddy!”
The demand came in at the counting-room
door just as the “young leddy” went out.
The people parted for her right and left.
She stood in the mud, in the rain, among them.
would have made room for a sunbeam. The
drunkest fellows, some of them, slunk to the circumference
of the circle that had closed about
her. Oaths and brickbats seemed to have been
sucked out to sea by a sudden tide of respectability.
It has been said by those who witnessed
it that it was a scene worth seeing.
“She just stood in the mud and the rain,” said
Sip Garth, in telling the story. “If we 'd all
been in her fine parlors, we would n't have been
stiller. There was a kind of a shame and a sense
came to us, to see her standing so quiet in the
rain. The fellow that opened his lips for a
roughness before her would ha' been kicked into
the gutter, I can tell you. It was just like her.
There 's never mud nor rain amongst us, but you
look, and there she is! That day there seemed
to be a shining to her. We were all worked up
and angered; and she stood so white and still.
There was a minute that she looked at us, and
she looked — why, she looked as if she 'd be poor
folks herself, if only she could say how sorry she
was for us. Then she blazed out at us! `Did
Mr. Garrick ever tell any man of us a word but
n't he proved himself a friend to every soul of
you that needed friendliness?' says she. `And
when he told you that he must reduce your
wages, you should n't have sent for me!' says
she. But then she talks to us about the trouble
that the Company was in, and a foolishness
creeps round amongst us, as if we wished we
were at home. It 's not that they so much disbelieved
Mr. Garrick,” said Sip, “but when she
said she could n't afford to pay 'em, they believed
that.”
“I don't understand about these things,” said
Reuben Mell, slowly stepping out from the
crowd. “It 's very perplexing to me. It does n't
mean a dollar's worth less of horses and carriages,
and grand parties to the Company, such a trouble
as this don't seem to. And it means as we go
without our breakfast so 's the children sha' n't be
hungry; and it means as when our shoes are wore
out, we know no more than a babby in its cradle
where the next pair is to come from. That 's
what reduction o' wages means to us. I don't
understand the matter myself, but I 'm free to
say that we 'll not doubt as the young leddy does.
for one.”
Mr. Mell, with this, peaceably stepped up and
took the reduction from the counter, and peaceably
went home with it.
There was a little writhing of the flood-tide at
this, and then an ebb.
Miss Kelso came out of it, and left it to bubble
by itself for a while.
Within half an hour it had ebbed away, leaving
only a few weeds of small boys and a fellow
too drunk to float in sight of the mill-gate.
Until at least next “Lord's day,” there would
be no strike in Hayle and Kelso.
By that time Mr. Garrick hoped that we
should be upon our feet again.
Mr. Garrick walked home with Miss Kelso in
the autumn rain.
Unfortunately for the weed of a fellow stranded
in the mill-yard, they passed and recognized him.
It was the overseer, Irish Jim. Next morning
he received his notice. They had borne with
him too long, and warned him too often, Mr.
Garrick insisted. Go he should, and go he did.
But Mr. Garrick walked home with Miss Kelso
in the autumn rain.
They passed between the cotton-house and
the old boiler, in going out. Dirk Burdock had
stepped through just before them, trying to overtake
Sip in the distance, hurrying home. Either
this circumstance or a mood of the mill-master's
own recalled to his mind his midnight talk with
the young watchman on that spot, and what Dirk
had said of its being a “churchly place.” It was
a dreary, dingy place now, in the gray stormlight,
prosaic and extremely rusty. He held the
lady's cloak back from the boiler in passing by.
His hand had but brushed the hem of her
garment, but it trembled visibly. He touched a
priestess in a water-proof. Fire from heaven fell
before his eyes upon the yellow boiler. Such a
“churchliness” struck the mill-yard, that the
man would have lifted his hat, but considered
that he would take cold, and so kept it on like a
sensible fellow.
Of course he loved her. How should he help
it? Anybody but Perley would have thought
of it, long ago.
Yet, oddly enough, nobody had thought of it.
Occasionally one meets people, though they are
rather apt to be men than women, who seem to
Perley Kelso is one of them. Rumor winks and
blinks and shuts its eyes upon her. Your unpleasant
stories, “had upon authority,” pass her
by unscathed. This young lady's life had been a
peculiar, rather a public one, for now nearly two
years, and in its most vital interests Stephen
Garrick had stood heart and soul and hand in
hand with her. Yet her calm eyes turned upon
him that autumn afternoon as placidly as they
did upon the old boiler. When she saw that
tremble of the hand, she said: “You are cold?
It is growing chilly. The counting-room was
close.”
How could man help it? Of course he loved
her. He had seen the shining of her rare, fine
face in such strange places! In sick-rooms and
in the house of mourning he had learned to listen
for the stealing, strong sweetness of her young
voice. They had met by death-beds and over
graves. They had burrowed into mysteries of
misery and sin, in God's name, together. Wherever
people were cold, hungry, friendless, desolate,
in danger, in despair, she struck across his
path. Wherever there was a soul for which no
there was a life to be lifted from miasmas to
heights, he saw the waving of her confident
white hand. If ever there were earnest work,
solemn work, solitary work, mistrusted work,
work misunderstood, neglected, discouraging,
hopeless, thankless, — Christ's work, to be done,
he faced her.
Now, among several hundred factory-operatives,
it naturally happened that he had thus
faced her not infrequently.
The woman's life had become a service in a
temple, and he had lighted the candles for her.
One would miss it, perhaps, to worship in the
dark? The man asked himself the question, turning
his face stiffly against the autumn storm.
There had been no sun since yesterday. The
sky was locked with a surcharged cloud. A fine,
swift rain blurred the outlines of the river-banks
and hills.
“And yet,” he said, “the day seems to be full
of sun. Do you notice? There is light about us
everywhere.”
“It is from the hickories and maples,” said
Perley.
Ripened leaves streaked and dotted their path,
wreathed blazing arms about the pine groves,
smouldered over the fields, flung themselves
scorched into the water, flared across the dam,
and lighted the little cascades luridly. The singular
effect of dying trees on a dead day was at
its richest. One could not believe that the sun
did not shine.
“An unreal light,” said Stephen Garrick, hardly,
“and ugly. We should find it cold to live
by.”
“I had not thought of that,” said Perley, smiling;
“I rather like it.”
Her face, as she lifted it to his, seemed to warm
itself at its own calm eyes; slowly, perhaps, as if
the truant day had tried to leave a chill upon it,
but thoroughly and brightly.
Garrick turned, and looked it over and over
and through and through, — the lifted haunting
face!
What a face it was! His own turned sharply
gray.
“I see no room for me there!” he said, and
stopped short where he stood.
No; he was right. There was no room. The
drifted pale as his own.
“Let us walk on,” said Garrick, with a twang
in his voice.
They walked on nervously. Neither spoke
just then. They walked on, under and through
a solid arch of the unreal sunshine, which a phalanx
of maples made in meeting over their heads.
“I had hoped,” said Stephen Garrick then,
between his breath, “that I had — a chance. I
have been — stupid, perhaps. A man is so slow
to feel that he has — no chance. I have not
played at love like — many men. There has
been such an awfulness,” said Stephen Garrick,
passing his hand confusedly over his eyes, —
“such an awfulness about the ground I have
seen you tread upon. Most men love women in
parlors and on play-days; they can sing them
little songs, they can tie up flowers for them,
they can dance and touch their hands. I — I
have had no way in which to love you. We
have done such awful work together. In it,
through it, by it, because of it, I loved `you. I
think there 's something — in the love — that is
like the work. It has struck me under a ledge
up — hard.”
His hand dropped against his side, very slowly,
but the blue nails clenched the flesh from its
palm.
What did the woman mean? What should he
do with the sight, sound, touch of her; the rustle
of her dress, the ripple of her sweet breath, the
impenetrable calm of her grieving eyes?
He felt himself suddenly lifted and swung from
the centre of his controlled, common, regulated,
and regulating days. Five Falls operatives
ceased to appear absorbing as objects of life.
How go dribbling ideal Christian culture through
highways and hedges, if a man sat and starved on
husks himself, before the loaded board? The
salvation of the world troubled him yesterday.
To-day there was only this woman in it.
They two, in the mock light of dying leaves,
they two only and together, stood, the Alpha and
Omega, in the name of nature and in the sight
of God.
“I have loved you,” said the man, trembling
heavily, “so long! My life has not been like
that of — many people. I have taken it — hard
hard. You ought to love me. Before God, I
say you ought to love me!”
“The fact is — ” said Perley, in her sensible,
every-day voice.
Stephen Garrick drew breath and straightened
himself. His blanched face quivered and set
into its accustomed angles. His shut fingers
opened, and he cleared his throat. He struck to
his orbit. Ah! Where had he been? Most
too old a man for that! See how he had let
the rain drip on her. He grasped his umbrella.
He could go to a Mission meeting now. All the
women in the world might shake their beautiful
heads at him under yellow maple-trees in an
autumn rain!
“The fact is?” he gravely asked.
“The fact is,” repeated Perley, “that I have no
time to think of love and marriage, Mr. Garrick.
That is a business, a trade, by itself to women.
I have too much else to do. As nearly as I can
understand myself, that is the state of the case.
I cannot spare the time for it.”
And yet, as nearly as she understood herself,
she might have loved this man. The dial of her
sun to-day. She felt old before her time. All
the glamour that draws men and women together
had escaped her somehow. Possible wifehood
was no longer an alluring dream. Only its prosaic
and undesirable aspects presented themselves
to her mind. No bounding impulse cried
within her: That is happiness! There is rest!
But only: It were unreasonable; it is unwise.
And yet she might have loved the man. In
all the world, she felt as if he only came within
calling distance of her life. Out of all the world,
she would have named him as the knightly soul
that hers delighted to honor.
Might have loved him? Did she love him?
Garrick's hungry eyes pierced the lifted face
again over and over, through and through. If
not in this world, in another, perhaps? In any?
Somewhere? Somehow?
“I cannot tell,” said the woman, as if she had
been called; “I do not need you now. Women
talk of loneliness. I am not lonely. They are
sick and homeless. I am neither. They are
miserable. I am happy. They grow old. I am
not afraid of growing old. They have nothing
I do not need you, Stephen Garrick.”
“Besides,” she added, half smiling, half sighing,
“I believe that I have been a silent partner
long enough. If I married you, sir, I should invest
in life, and you would conduct it. I suspect
that I have a preference for a business of my
own. Perhaps that is a part of the trouble.”
They had reached the house, and turned, faces
against the scattering rain, to look down at the
darkening river, and the nestling that the town
made against the hill. The streets were full; and
the people, through the distance and the rain,
had a lean look, passing to and fro before the
dark, locked mills.
Perley Kelso, with a curious, slow gesture,
stretched her arms out toward them, with a face
which a man would remember to his dying day.
“Shall they call,” she said, “and I not answer?
If they cried, should not I hear?”
“Mr. Garrick!” She faced him suddenly on
the dripping lawn. “If a man who loves a
woman can take the right hand of fellowship
from her, I wish you would take it from me!”
She held out her full strong hand. The rain
Garrick gently brushed the few drops, as if they
had been tears, away, and, after a moment's hesitation,
took it.
If not in this world in another, perhaps? In
any? Somewhere? Somehow?
“I shall wait for you,” said the man. Perhaps
he will. A few souls can.
| CHAPTER XII.
MAPLE LEAVES. The silent partner | |