CHAPTER IV. Margret Howth: A Story of To-Day | ||
4. CHAPTER IV.
SHE entered the vast, dingy factory; the woollen dust, the clammy air of copperas were easier to breathe in; the cramped, sordid office, the work, mere trifles to laugh at; and she bent over the ledger with its hard lines in earnest good-will, through the slow creeping hours of the long day. She noticed that the unfortunate chicken was making its heart glad over a piece of fresh earth covered with damp moss. Dr. Knowles stopped to look at it when he came, passing her with a surly nod.
"So your master+'s not forgotten you,'' he snarled, while the blind old hen cocked her one eye up at him.
Pike, the manager, had brought in some bills.
"Who+'s its master?'' he said, curiously, stopping by the door.
"Holmes,—he feeds it every morning.''
The Doctor drawled out the words with a covert sneer, watching the cold face bending over the desk, meantime.
Pike laughed.
"Bah! it+'s the first thing he ever fed, then,
Knowles scowled at him; he had no fancy for Pike's scurrilous gossip.
The quiet face was unmoved. When he heard the manager's foot on the ladder without, he tested it again. He had a vague suspicion which he was determined to verify.
"Holmes,'' he said, carelessly, "has an affinity for animals. No wonder. Adam must have been some such man as he, when the Lord gave him `dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air.' ''
The hand paused courteously a moment, then resumed its quick, cool movement over the page. He was not baffled.
"If there were such a reality as mastership, that man was born to rule. Pike will find him harder to cheat than me, when he takes possession here.''
She looked up now.
"He came here to take my place in the mills, —buy me out,—articles will be signed in a day or two. I know what you think,—no, —not worth a dollar. Only brains and a soul, and he 's sold them at a high figure,—threw his heart in,—the purchaser being a lady. It was light, I fancy,—starved out, long ago.''
The old man's words were spurted out in the
"Miss Herne is the lady,—my partner's daughter. Herne and Holmes they+'ll call the firm. He is here every, day, counting future profit.''
Nothing could be read on the face; so he left her, cursing, as he went, men who put themselves up at auction,—worse than Orleans slaves. Margret laughed to herself at his passion; as for the story he hinted, it was absurd. She forgot it in a moment.
Two or three gentlemen down in one of the counting-rooms, just then, looked at the story from another point of view. They were talking low, out of hearing from the clerks.
"It+'s a good thing for Holmes,'' said one, a burly, farmer-like man, who was choosing specimens of wool.
"Cheap. And long credit. Just half the concern he takes.''
"There is a lady in the case?'' suggested a young doctor, who, by virtue of having spent six months in the South, dropped his r-s, and talked of "niggahs'' in a way to make a Georgian's hair stand on end.
"A lady in the case?''
"O-f course. Only child of Herne's. He
The young doctor lighted his cigar, asserting that—
"Ba George, some low people did get on, re-markably! Mary Herne, now, was best catch in town.''
"Do you think money is what he wants?'' said a quiet little man, sitting lazily on a barrel, —a clergyman, Vandyke; whom his clerical brothers shook their heads when they named, but never argued with, and bowed to with uncommon deference.
The wool-buyer hesitated with a puzzled look.
"No,'' he said, slowly; "Stephen Holmes is not miserly. I+'ve knowed him since a boy. To buy place, power, perhaps, eh? Yet not that, neither,'' he added, hastily. "We think a sight of him out our way, (self-made, you see,) and would have had him the best office in the State before this, only he was so cursedly indifferent.''
"Indifferent, yes. No man cares much for stepping-stones in themselves,'' said Vandyke, half to himself.
"Great fault of American society, especially
"But do you,'' exclaimed the farmer, with sudden solemnity, "do you understand this scheme of Knowles's? Every dollar he owns is in this mill, and every dollar of it is going into some castle in the air that no sane man can comprehend.''
"Mad as a March hare,'' contemptuously muttered the doctor.
His reverend friend gave him a look,—after which he was silent.
"I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it,'' persisted the wool-man, earnestly looking at the attentive face of his listener. "We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart while he ruins himself. It+'s something of a Communist fraternity: I don't know the name, but I know the thing.''
Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors.
"There+'s two ways for 'em to end. If they+'re made out of the top of society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every particle
The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,—"You see, that nailed the parson.''
The parson nodded gravely.
"You+'ll find no such experiment in the Bible,'' threw in the young doctor, alluding to "serious things'' as a peace-offering to his reverend friend.
"One, I believe,'' dryly.
"Well,'' broke in the farmer, folding up his wool, "that+'s neither here nor there. This experiment of Knowles's is like nothing known since the Creation. Plan of his own. He spends his days now hunting out the gallows-birds out of the dens in town here, and they+ 're all to be transported into the country to start a new Arcadia. A few men and women like himself, but the bulk is from the dens, I
"Knowles's inclination to that sort of people is easily explained,'' spitefully lisped the doctor. "Blood, Sir. His mother was a half-breed Creek, with all the propensities of the redskins to fire-water and `itching palms.' Blood will out.''
"Here he is,'' maliciously whispered the woolman. "No, it+'s Holmes,'' he added, after the doctor had started into a more respectful posture, and glanced around frightened.
He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes's coming footstep,—"a low fellah, but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin' to marry the best catch,'' etc., etc. The others, on the contrary, put on their hats and sauntered away into the street.
The day broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars curdling up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along the dry gutters. The old school-master in the shade of the great horse-chestnuts (brought from the homestead in the Piedmont country, every one) husked corn for his wife, composing, meanwhile, a page of his essay on the "Sirventes de Bertrand de Born.'' Joel, up in the barn by him-
Margret, through the stifling air, worked steadily alone in the dusty office, her face bent over the books, never changing but once. It was a trifle then; yet, when she looked back afterwards, the trifle was all that gave the day a name. The room shook, as I said, with the thunderous, incessant sound of the engines and the looms; she scarcely heard it, being used to it. Once, however, another sound came between,— an iron tread, passing through the long wooden corridor,—so firm and measured that it sounded like the monotonous beatings of a clock. She heard it through the noise in the far distance; it came slowly nearer, up to the door without,—passed it, going down the echoing plank walk. The girl sat quietly, looking out at the dead brick wall. The slow step fell on her brain like the sceptre of her master; if Knowles had looked in her face then, he would have seen bared the secret of her life. Holmes had gone by, unconscious of who was within the door. She had not seen him; it was nothing but a step she heard. Yet a power, the power of the girl's life, shook off all outward masks, all surface cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a terrible passion at the sound; her
The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken peering out, grew sharper and more real. Life was no morbid nightmare now; her weak woman's heart found it near, cruel. There was not a pain nor a want, from the dumb question in the dog's eyes that passed her on the street, to her father's
So the day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,—baking the hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up the bits of grass that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling off the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses. He looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these where you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going day by day through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, passing through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange meanings by this common light of the sun,—meanings such as you and I might read, if our eyes were clear as his, —or morbid, it may be, you think? A commonplace crowd like this in the street without: women with cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize-fighters, negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,— where creeds, philosophies, centuries old, grap-
Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before. People called him a fanatic. It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man, sick in soul from some pain that I dare not tell you of; in his own life, looked into the depths of human loss with a mad desire to set it right. On the very faces of those who sneered at him he found some trace of failure, something that his heart carried up to God with a loud and exceeding bitter cry. The voice of the world, he thought, went up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,—the great blind world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?
The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women, of these dogs and horses who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read. There were places where it did not shine: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of life lay there he dared not think of. God knows how the man
There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer than the sunshine, and purer. It fell on the dense crowds,—upon the just and the unjust. It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from which the coarser light was barred, into the deepest mires of body where a soul could wallow, and made them clear. It lighted the depths of the hearts whose outer pain and passion men were keen to read in the unpitying sunshine, and bared in those depths the feeble gropings for the right, the loving hope, the unuttered prayer. No kind thought, no pure desire, no weakest faith in a God and heaven somewhere, could be so smothered under guilt that this subtile light did not search it out, glow about it, shine under it, hold it up in full view of God and the angels,—lighting the world other than the sun had done for six thousand years. I have no name for the light: it has a name,—yonder. Not many eyes were clear to see its—shining that day; and if they did, it was as through a glass, darkly. Yet it belonged to us also, in the old time, the time when men could "hear the voice of the Lord God in the garden in the cool of the day.'' It is God's light now alone.
Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, some-
She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois, —knew nothing of Nature's laws, as you do. Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of the prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning, or, in the farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor vile thing she was, some coarse weight fell off, and something within, not the sickly Lois of
You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature's brain, there were fragments of some artistic insight that made her thus rise above the level of her daily life, drunk with the mere beauty of form and colour. I do not know,—not knowing how sham or real a thing you mean by artistic insight. But I do know that the clear light I told you of shone for this girl dimly through this beauty of form and colour; alive. The Life, rather; and ignorant, with no words for her thoughts, she believed in it as the Highest that she knew. I think it came to her thus in imperfect language, (not an outward show of tints and lines, as to artists,) —a language, the same that Moses heard when he stood alone, with nothing between his naked soul and God, but the desert and the mountain and the bush that burned with fire. I think the weak soul of the girl staggered from its dungeon, and groped through these heavy-browed hills, these colour-dreams, through the faces of dog or man upon the street, to find the God that lay behind. So she saw the world, and its beauty and warmth being divine as near to her, the warmth and beauty became real in her, found their homely reflection in her daily life. So she knew, too, the Master in whom she be-
She liked to sit there in the evenings, being alone, yet never growing lonesome; there was so much that was pleasant to watch and listen to, as the cool brown twilight came on. If, as Knowles thought, the world was a dreary discord, she knew nothing of it. People were going from their work now,—they had time to talk and joke by the way,—stopping, or walking slowly down the cool shadows of the pavement; while here and there a lingering red sunbeam burnished a window, or struck athwart the gray boulder-paved street. From the houses near you could catch a faint smell of supper: very friendly people those were in these houses; she knew them all well. The children came out with their faces washed, to play, now the sun was down: the oldest of them generally came to sit with her and hear a story.
After it grew darker, you would see the girls in their neat blue calicoes go sauntering down the street with their sweethearts for a walk. There was old Polston and his son Sam coming home from the coal-pits, as black as ink, with their little tin lanterns on their caps. After
Later in the evening you would see a man coming along, close by the wall, with his head down, the same Margret had seen in the mill,— a dark man, with gray, thin hair,—Joe Yare, Lois's old father. No one spoke to him,— people always were looking away as he passed; and if old Mr. or Mrs. Polston were on the steps when he came up, they would say, "Good-evening, Mr. Yare,'' very formally, and go away presently. It hurt Lois more than anything else they could have done. But she bustled
Sometimes he was gloomy and silent, but generally he told her of all that had happened in the mill, particularly any little word of notice or praise he might have received, watching her anxiously until she laughed at it, and then rubbing his hands cheerfully. He need not have doubted Lois's faith in him. Whatever the rest did, she believed in him; she always had believed in him, through all the dark years, when he was at home, and in the penitentiary. They were gone now, never to come back. It had come right. If the others wronged him, and it hurt her bitterly that they did, that would come right some day too, she would think, as she looked at the tired, sullen face of the old man bent to the window-pane, afraid to go out. But they had very cheerful little suppers there by themselves in the odd, bare little room, as homely and clean as Lois herself.
Sometimes, late at night, when he had gone to bed, she sat alone in the door, while the
Yet, sitting there, looking out into the listening night, the poor child's face grew slowly pale as she heard it. It humbled her. It made her meanness, her low, weak life so plain to her! There was no pain nor hunger she had known that did not find a voice in its articulate cry. She! what was she? The pain and wants of the world must be going up to God in that sound, she thought. There was something more in it,—an unknown meaning of a great content that her shattered brain struggled to grasp. She could not. Her heart ached with a wild, restless longing. She had no words for the vague, insatiate hunger to understand. It
So the hot, long day was over for them all, —passed as thousands of days have done for us, gone down, forgotten: as that long, hot day we call life will be over some time, and go down into the gray and cold. Surely, whatever of sorrow or pain may have made darkness in that day for you or me, there were countless openings where we might have seen glimpses of that other light than sunshine: the light of that great To-Morrow, of the land where all wrongs shall be righted. If we had but chosen to see it,—if we only had chosen!
CHAPTER IV. Margret Howth: A Story of To-Day | ||