Rebecca Harding Davis was born in Washington, Pennsylvania. Seven years later, her family moved to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia) where Davis saw first-hand the depredations of both the Civil War and industrialization. She attended the Washington Female Seminary, graduating as class valedictorian in 1848.<\/p>\n
In 1861, her first publication appeared in the prestigious The Atlantic Monthly. Life in the Iron Mills won Davis immediate fame and a lifelong readership. She subsequently wrote twelve novels, hundreds of children\u2019s stories and short stories, an autobiography, and over 200 essays and articles. She published in popular periodicals, including Harper\u2019s Magazine and Scribner\u2019s Magazine. From 1875 to around 1895, she wrote as a contributing editor for the New-York Tribune, resigning that position when her work was censored. She also wrote for The Independent and The Saturday Evening Post.<\/p>\n
Her work raised awareness of the adverse effects of slavery, increasing industrialization, workplace labor abuses, the treatment of the insane and imprisoned, and the destructive effects of the Civil War on men and women\u2019s lives and on landscapes, particularly in places like where she lived, Wheeling, VA (now West Virginia), which was a border state. She sought pragmatic reform for more humane treatment for the marginalized. For women, she advocated fair wages and fair work hours and, in such essays as \u201cLow Wages for Women\u201d and \u201cIn the Market,\u201d encouraged women to claim control over their own lives and live independently, even without marriage. However, she neither joined any women\u2019s rights organization nor lauded the appearance of the New Woman, that is, women who sought other \u201cprofessional\u201d vocations than marriage. In 1863, she married L. Clarke Davis. They had three children and survived mainly on the income from her work. Davis\u2019s writing fell into neglect until 1972, when Tillie Olsen (1912\u20132007) republished Life in the Iron Mills in the Feminist Press.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Housing in a Mills Factory in Alabama, 1910<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Davis contributed to the mid-nineteenth century trend of Realism in literature, as she consciously rejected what she saw as the elitism of Transcendentalism. Realism took the familiar and every day for its subject matter and focused on the so-called lowly and poor, as did Romanticism. Realism, however, dwelt more on the urban than rural landscape, without apprehending an animism or metaphysical force in the environment. Realism also did not infuse its depictions of reality with (often ostentatious) emotion and subjectivity, taking instead an apparently objective view\u2014almost like that of a court report\u2014and letting often \u201csordid\u201d facts and details speak for themselves.<\/p>\n
Davis\u2019s Life in the Iron Mills realistically depicts unpleasant details and facts, particularly of the political, social, and aesthetic divide between laborers and factory-owners, the poor and the landed wealthy, the charitable and the hypocrite. However, she frames her story\u2019s perspective within a Christian context in apparent hope of reform.<\/p>\n
Life in the Iron Mills (1861)<\/h2>\n
\u201cIs this the end?
\nO Life, as futile, then, as frail!
\nWhat hope of answer or redress?\u201d<\/p>\n
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer\u2019s shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.<\/p>\n
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,\u2014clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,\u2014almost worn out, I think.<\/p>\n
From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the riverside, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coalbarges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the streetwindow I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,\u2014horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,\u2014air, and fields, and mountains. The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard, and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.<\/p>\n
Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and the coalboats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,\u2014a story of this house into which I happened to come to-day. You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.\u2014I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.\u2014Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,\u2014here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,\u2014this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death; but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.<\/p>\n
My story is very simple,\u2014Only what I remember of the life of one of these men,\u2014a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John\u2019s rolling-mills,\u2014Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the great order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter; run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose the halfforgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a secret, underlying sympathy between that story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,\u2014or perhaps simply for the reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There were the father and son,\u2014 both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby & John\u2019s mills for making railroad-iron,\u2014and Deborah, their cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms. The old man, like many of the puddlers and feeders of the mills, was Welsh,\u2014had spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny; they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure, unmixed blood, I fancy: shows itself in the slight angular bodies and sharply-cut facial lines. It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived here. Their lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking\u2014God and the distillers only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess. Is that all of their lives?\u2014of the portion given to them and these their duplicates swarming the streets to-day?\u2014 nothing beneath?\u2014all? So many a political reformer will tell you,\u2014and many a private reformer, too, who has gone among them with a heart tender with Christ\u2019s charity, and come out outraged, hardened.<\/p>\n
One rainy night, about eleven o\u2019clock, a crowd of half-clothed women stopped outside of the cellar-door. They were going home from the cotton-mill.<\/p>\n
\u201cGood-night, Deb,\u201d said one, a mulatto, steadying herself against the gas-post. She needed the post to steady her. So did more than one of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cDah\u2019s a ball to Miss Potts\u2019 to-night. Ye\u2019d best come.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cInteet, Deb, if hur\u2019ll come, hur\u2019ll hef fun,\u201d said a shrill Welsh voice in the crowd.<\/p>\n
Two or three dirty hands were thrust out to catch the gown of the woman, who was groping for the latch of the door.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo? Where\u2019s Kit Small, then?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBegorra! on the spools. Alleys behint, though we helped her, we dud. An wid ye! Let Deb alone! It\u2019s ondacent frettin\u2019 a quite body. Be the powers, an we\u2019ll have a night of it! there\u2019ll be lashin\u2019s o\u2019 drink,\u2014the Vargent be blessed and praised for\u2019t!\u201d<\/p>\n
They went on, the mulatto inclining for a moment to show fight, and drag the woman Wolfe off with them; but, being pacified, she staggered away.<\/p>\n
Deborah groped her way into the cellar, and, after considerable stumbling, kindled a match, and lighted a tallow dip, that sent a yellow glimmer over the room. It was low, damp,\u2014the earthen floor covered with a green, slimy moss,\u2014a fetid air smothering the breath. Old Wolfe lay asleep on a heap of straw, wrapped in a torn horse-blanket. He was a pale, meek little man, with a white face and red rabbit-eyes. The woman Deborah was like him; only her face was even more ghastly, her lips bluer, her eyes more watery. She wore a faded cotton gown and a slouching bonnet. When she walked, one could see that she was deformed, almost a hunchback. She trod softly, so as not to waken him, and went through into the room beyond. There she found by the half-extinguished fire an iron saucepan filled with cold boiled potatoes, which she put upon a broken chair with a pint-cup of ale. Placing the old candlestick beside this dainty repast, she untied her bonnet, which hung limp and wet over her face, and prepared to eat her supper. It was the first food that had touched her lips since morning. There was enough of it, however: there is not always. She was hungry,\u2014one could see that easily enough,\u2014and not drunk, as most of her companions would have been found at this hour. She did not drink, this woman,\u2014her face told that, too,\u2014nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,\u2014some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone. While she was skinning the potatoes, and munching them, a noise behind her made her stop.<\/p>\n
\u201cJaney!\u201d she called, lifting the candle and peering into the darkness. \u201cJaney, are you there?\u201d<\/p>\n
A heap of ragged coats was heaved up, and the face of a young girl emerged, staring sleepily at the woman.<\/p>\n
\u201cDeborah,\u201d she said, at last, \u201cI\u2019m here the night.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, child. Hur\u2019s welcome,\u201d she said, quietly eating on.<\/p>\n
The girl\u2019s face was haggard and sickly; her eyes were heavy with sleep and hunger: real Milesian eyes they were, dark, delicate blue, glooming out from black shadows with a pitiful fright.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was alone,\u201d she said, timidly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere\u2019s the father?\u201d asked Deborah, holding out a potato, which the girl greedily seized.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s beyant,\u2014wid Haley,\u2014in the stone house.\u201d (Did you ever hear the word tail from an Irish mouth?) \u201cI came here. Hugh told me never to stay me-lone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d A vexed frown crossed her face. The girl saw it, and added quickly,\u2014<\/p>\n
\u201cI have not seen Hugh the day, Deb. The old man says his watch lasts till the mornin\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
The woman sprang up, and hastily began to arrange some bread and flitch in a tin pail, and to pour her own measure of ale into a bottle. Tying on her bonnet, she blew out the candle.<\/p>\n
\u201cLay ye down, Janey dear,\u201d she said, gently, covering her with the old rags. \u201cHur can eat the potatoes, if hur\u2019s hungry.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere are ye goin\u2019, Deb? The rain\u2019s sharp.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo the mill, with Hugh\u2019s supper.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLet him bide till th\u2019 morn. Sit ye down.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, no,\u201d\u2014sharply pushing her off. \u201cThe boy\u2019ll starve.\u201d<\/p>\n
She hurried from the cellar, while the child wearily coiled herself up for sleep. The rain was falling heavily, as the woman, pail in hand, emerged from the mouth of the alley, and turned down the narrow street, that stretched out, long and black, miles before her. Here and there a flicker of gas lighted an uncertain space of muddy footwalk and gutter; the long rows of houses, except an occasional lagerbier shop, were closed; now and then she met a band of millhands skulking to or from their work.<\/p>\n
Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands of each mill are divided into watches that relieve each other as regularly as the sentinels of an army. By night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek, the fiery pools of metal boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in half-courtesy to public censure, the fires are partially veiled; but as soon as the clock strikes midnight, the great furnaces break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begins with fresh, breathless vigor, the engines sob and shriek like \u201cgods in pain.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Deborah hurried down through the heavy rain, the noise of these thousand engines sounded through the sleep and shadow of the city like far-off thunder. The mill to which she was going lay on the river, a mile below the city-limits. It was far, and she was weak, aching from standing twelve hours at the spools. Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man his supper, though at every square she sat down to rest, and she knew she should receive small word of thanks.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist\u2019s eye, the picturesque oddity of the scene might have made her step stagger less, and the path seem shorter; but to her the mills were only \u201csummat deilish to look at by night.\u201d<\/p>\n
The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as she crept through, \u201clooks like t\u2019 Devil\u2019s place!\u201d It did,\u2014in more ways than one.<\/p>\n
She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on a furnace. He had not time to eat his supper; so she went behind the furnace, and waited. Only a few men were with him, and they noticed her only by a \u201cHyur comes t\u2019hunchback, Wolfe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deborah was stupid with sleep; her back pained her sharply; and her teeth chattered with cold, with the rain that soaked her clothes and dripped from her at every step. She stood, however, patiently holding the pail, and waiting.<\/p>\n
\u201cHout, woman! ye look like a drowned cat. Come near to the fire,\u201d\u2014said one of the men, approaching to scrape away the ashes.<\/p>\n
She shook her head. Wolfe had forgotten her. He turned, hearing the man, and came closer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did no\u2019 think; gi\u2019 me my supper, woman.\u201d<\/p>\n
She watched him eat with a painful eagerness. With a woman\u2019s quick instinct, she saw that he was not hungry,\u2014was eating to please her. Her pale, watery eyes began to gather a strange light.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs\u2019t good, Hugh? T\u2019 ale was a bit sour, I feared.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, good enough.\u201d He hesitated a moment. \u201cYe\u2019re tired, poor lass! Bide here till I go. Lay down there on that heap of ash, and go to sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n
He threw her an old coat for a pillow, and turned to his work. The heap was the refuse of the burnt iron, and was not a hard bed; the half-smothered warmth, too, penetrated her limbs, dulling their pain and cold shiver.<\/p>\n
Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty rag,\u2014yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one looked deeper into the heart of things, at her thwarted woman\u2019s form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain and hunger,\u2014even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one human being whom she loved, to gain one look of real heart-kindness from him? If anything like this were hidden beneath the pale, bleared eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking face, no one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs: not the half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he was kind to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way. She knew that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life. One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women\u2019s faces,\u2014in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer\u2019s day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no brilliancy, no summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time to gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no one guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.<\/p>\n
She lay quiet in the dark corner, listening, through the monotonous din and uncertain glare of the works, to the dull plash of the rain in the far distance, shrinking back whenever the man Wolfe happened to look towards her. She knew, in spite of all his kindness, that there was that in her face and form which made him loathe the sight of her. She felt by instinct, although she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of the man, which made him among his fellowworkmen something unique, set apart. She knew, that, down under all the vileness and coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and pure, that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity, even when his words were kindest. Through this dull consciousness, which never left her, came, like a sting, the recollection of the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of the little Irish girl she had left in the cellar. The recollection struck through even her stupid intellect with a vivid glow of beauty and of grace. Little Janey, timid, helpless, clinging to Hugh as her only friend: that was the sharp thought, the bitter thought, that drove into the glazed eyes a fierce light of pain. You laugh at it? Are pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking you to than in your own house or your own heart,\u2014your heart, which they clutch at sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.<\/p>\n
If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,\u2014I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you.<\/p>\n
Wolfe, while Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master, bent over the furnace with his iron pole, unconscious of her scrutiny, only stopping to receive orders. Physically, Nature had promised the man but little. He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face ( a meek, woman\u2019s face) haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: \u201cMolly Wolfe\u201d was his sobriquet. He was never seen in the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did, desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed, pommelled to a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was up: but he was no favorite in the mill; he had the taint of school-learning on him,\u2014not to a dangerous extent, only a quarter or so in the free-school in fact, but enough to ruin him as a good hand in a fight.<\/p>\n
For other reasons, too, he was not popular. Not one of themselves, they felt that, though outwardly as filthy and ash-covered; silent, with foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness in innumerable curious ways: this one, for instance. In the neighboring furnace-buildings lay great heaps of the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run. Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl, Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and moulding figures,\u2014hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,\u2014working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.<\/p>\n
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has groped through as boy and man,\u2014the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that it will ever end. Think that God put into this man\u2019s soul a fierce thirst for beauty,\u2014to know it, to create it; to be\u2014something, he knows not what,\u2014other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child\u2019s face, will rouse him to a passion of pain,\u2014when his nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him. With all this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet\u2019s heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. Be just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be just,\u2014 not like man\u2019s law, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God\u2019s judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man\u2019s life, all the countless nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all.<\/p>\n
I called this night the crisis of his life. If it was, it stole on him unawares. These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.<\/p>\n
Wolfe, while Deborah watched him, dug into the furnace of melting iron with his pole, dully thinking only how many rails the lump would yield. It was late,\u2014 nearly Sunday morning; another hour, and the heavy work would be done, only the furnaces to replenish and cover for the next day. The workmen were growing more noisy, shouting, as they had to do, to be heard over the deep clamor of the mills. Suddenly they grew less boisterous,\u2014at the far end, entirely silent. Something unusual had happened. After a moment, the silence came nearer; the men stopped their jeers and drunken choruses. Deborah, stupidly lifting up her head, saw the cause of the quiet. A group of five or six men were slowly approaching, stopping to examine each furnace as they came. Visitors often came to see the mills after night: except by growing less noisy, the men took no notice of them. The furnace where Wolfe worked was near the bounds of the works; they halted there hot and tired: a walk over one of these great foundries is no trifling task. The woman, drawing out of sight, turned over to sleep. Wolfe, seeing them stop, suddenly roused from his indifferent stupor, and watched them keenly. He knew some of them: the overseer, Clarke,\u2014a son of Kirby, one of the mill-owners,\u2014and a Doctor May, one of the town-physicians. The other two were strangers. Wolfe came closer. He seized eagerly every chance that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What made the difference between them? That was the mystery of his life. He had a vague notion that perhaps to-night he could find it out. One of the strangers sat down on a pile of bricks, and beckoned young Kirby to his side.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is hot, with a vengeance. A match, please?\u201d\u2014lighting his cigar. \u201cBut the walk is worth the trouble. If it were not that you must have heard it so often, Kirby, I would tell you that your works look like Dante\u2019s Inferno.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kirby laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes. Yonder is Farinata himself in the burning tomb,\u201d\u2014pointing to some figure in the shimmering shadows.<\/p>\n
\u201cJudging from some of the faces of your men,\u201d said the other, \u201cthey bid fair to try the reality of Dante\u2019s vision, some day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Young Kirby looked curiously around, as if seeing the faces of his hands for the first time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re bad enough, that\u2019s true. A desperate set, I fancy. Eh, Clarke?\u201d<\/p>\n
The overseer did not hear him. He was talking of net profits just then,\u2014giving, in fact, a schedule of the annual business of the firm to a sharp peering little Yankee, who jotted down notes on a paper laid on the crown of his hat: a reporter for one of the city-papers, getting up a series of reviews of the leading manufactories. The other gentlemen had accompanied them merely for amusement. They were silent until the notes were finished, drying their feet at the furnaces, and sheltering their faces from the intolerable heat. At last the overseer concluded with\u2014<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that is a pretty fair estimate, Captain.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHere, some of you men!\u201d said Kirby, \u201cbring up those boards. We may as well sit down, gentlemen, until the rain is over. It cannot last much longer at this rate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPig-metal,\u201d\u2014mumbled the reporter,\u2014\u201dum! coal facilities,\u2014um! hands employed, twelve hundred,\u2014bitumen,\u2014um!\u2014all right, I believe, Mr. Clarke;\u2014 sinking-fund,\u2014what did you say was your sinking-fund?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTwelve hundred hands?\u201d said the stranger, the young man who had first spoken. \u201cDo you control their votes, Kirby?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cControl? No.\u201d The young man smiled complacently. \u201cBut my father brought seven hundred votes to the polls for his candidate last November. No force-work, you understand,\u2014only a speech or two, a hint to form themselves into a society, and a bit of red and blue bunting to make them a flag. The Invincible Roughs,\u2014I believe that is their name. I forget the motto: \u2018Our country\u2019s hope,\u2019 I think.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was a laugh. The young man talking to Kirby sat with an amused light in his cool gray eye, surveying critically the half-clothed figures of the puddlers, and the slow swing of their brawny muscles. He was a stranger in the city,\u2014spending a couple of months in the borders of a Slave State, to study the institutions of the South,\u2014a brother-in-law of Kirby\u2019s,\u2014Mitchell. He was an amateur gymnast,\u2014 hence his anatomical eye; a patron, in a blase\u2019 way, of the prize-ring; a man who sucked the essence out of a science or philosophy in an indifferent, gentlemanly way; who took Kant, Novalis, Humboldt, for what they were worth in his own scales; accepting all, despising nothing, in heaven, earth, or hell, but one-idead men; with a temper yielding and brilliant as summer water, until his Self was touched, when it was ice, though brilliant still. Such men are not rare in the States.<\/p>\n
As he knocked the ashes from his cigar, Wolfe caught with a quick pleasure the contour of the white hand, the blood-glow of a red ring he wore. His voice, too, and that of Kirby\u2019s, touched him like music,\u2014low, even, with chording cadences. About this man Mitchell hung the impalpable atmosphere belonging to the thoroughbred gentleman, Wolfe, scraping away the ashes beside him, was conscious of it, did obeisance to it with his artist sense, unconscious that he did so.<\/p>\n
The rain did not cease. Clarke and the reporter left the mills; the others, comfortably seated near the furnace, lingered, smoking and talking in a desultory way. Greek would not have been more unintelligible to the furnace-tenders, whose presence they soon forgot entirely. Kirby drew out a newspaper from his pocket and read aloud some article, which they discussed eagerly. At every sentence, Wolfe listened more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid look creeping over his face, glancing now and then at Mitchell, marking acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained soul.<\/p>\n
Never! He had no words for such a thought, but he knew now, in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf never to be passed. Never!<\/p>\n
The bell of the mills rang for midnight. Sunday morning had dawned. Whatever hidden message lay in the tolling bells floated past these men unknown. Yet it was there. Veiled in the solemn music ushering the risen Saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong,\u2014even this social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler grappled with madly to-night.<\/p>\n
The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons. The mills were deserted on Sundays, except by the hands who fed the fires, and those who had no lodgings and slept usually on the ash-heaps. The three strangers sat still during the next hour, watching the men cover the furnaces, laughing now and then at some jest of Kirby\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you know,\u201d said Mitchell, \u201cI like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in the den.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kirby laughed. \u201cYou are fanciful. Come, let us get out of the den. The spectral figures, as you call them, are a little too real for me to fancy a close proximity in the darkness,\u2014unarmed, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
The others rose, buttoning their overcoats, and lighting cigars.<\/p>\n
\u201cRaining, still,\u201d said Doctor May, \u201cand hard. Where did we leave the coach, Mitchell?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the other side of the works.\u2014Kirby, what\u2019s that?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,\u2014a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning.<\/p>\n
\u201cStop! Make that fire burn there!\u201d cried Kirby, stopping short.<\/p>\n
The flame burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief.<\/p>\n
Mitchell drew a long breath.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was alive,\u201d he said, going up curiously.<\/p>\n
The others followed.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot marble, eh?\u201d asked Kirby, touching it.<\/p>\n
One of the lower overseers stopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cKorl, Sir.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWho did it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCan\u2019t say. Some of the hands; chipped it out in off-hours.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChipped to some purpose, I should say. What a flesh-tint the stuff has! Do you see, Mitchell?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI see.\u201d<\/p>\n
He had stepped aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking at it in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman\u2019s form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf\u2019s. Kirby and Doctor May walked around it, critical, curious. Mitchell stood aloof, silent. The figure touched him strangely.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot badly done,\u201d said Doctor May, \u201cWhere did the fellow learn that sweep of the muscles in the arm and hand? Look at them! They are groping, do you see?\u2014 clutching: the peculiar action of a man dying of thirst.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have ample facilities for studying anatomy,\u201d sneered Kirby, glancing at the half-naked figures.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook,\u201d continued the Doctor, \u201cat this bony wrist, and the strained sinews of the instep! A working-woman,\u2014the very type of her class.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGod forbid!\u201d muttered Mitchell.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy?\u201d demanded May, \u201cWhat does the fellow intend by the figure? I cannot catch the meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAsk him,\u201d said the other, dryly, \u201cThere he stands,\u201d\u2014pointing to Wolfe, who stood with a group of men, leaning on his ash-rake.<\/p>\n
The Doctor beckoned him with the affable smile which kind-hearted men put on, when talking to these people.<\/p>\n
\u201cMr. Mitchell has picked you out as the man who did this,\u2014I\u2019m sure I don\u2019t know why. But what did you mean by it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe be hungry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wolfe\u2019s eyes answered Mitchell, not the Doctor.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh-h! But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow! You have given no sign of starvation to the body. It is strong,\u2014terribly strong. It has the mad, halfdespairing gesture of drowning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wolfe stammered, glanced appealingly at Mitchell, who saw the soul of the thing, he knew. But the cool, probing eyes were turned on himself now,\u2014mocking, cruel, relentless.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot hungry for meat,\u201d the furnace-tender said at last.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat then? Whiskey?\u201d jeered Kirby, with a coarse laugh.<\/p>\n
Wolfe was silent a moment, thinking.<\/p>\n
\u201cI dunno,\u201d he said, with a bewildered look. \u201cIt mebbe. Summat to make her live, I think,\u2014like you. Whiskey ull do it, in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The young man laughed again. Mitchell flashed a look of disgust somewhere,\u2014 not at Wolfe.<\/p>\n
\u201cMay,\u201d he broke out impatiently, \u201care you blind? Look at that woman\u2019s face! It asks questions of God, and says, \u2018I have a right to know,\u2019 Good God, how hungry it is!\u201d<\/p>\n
They looked a moment; then May turned to the mill-owner:\u2014<\/p>\n
\u201cHave you many such hands as this? What are you going to do with them? Keep them at puddling iron?\u201d<\/p>\n
Kirby shrugged his shoulders. Mitchell\u2019s look had irritated him.<\/p>\n
\u201cCe n\u2019est pas mon affaire. I have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses. I suppose there are some stray gleams of mind and soul among these wretches. The Lord will take care of his own; or else they can work out their own salvation. I have heard you call our American system a ladder which any man can scale. Do you doubt it? Or perhaps you want to banish all social ladders, and put us all on a flat tableland,\u2014eh, May?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Doctor looked vexed, puzzled. Some terrible problem lay hid in this woman\u2019s face, and troubled these men. Kirby waited for an answer, and, receiving none, went on, warming with his subject.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tell you, there\u2019s something wrong that no talk of \u2018Liberte\u2019 or \u2018Egalite\u2019 will do away. If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world\u2019s work should be machines,\u2014nothing more,\u2014hands. It would be kindness. God help them! What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives as that?\u201d He pointed to Deborah, sleeping on the ash-heap. \u201cSo many nerves to sting them to pain. What if God had put your brain, with all its agony of touch, into your fingers, and bid you work and strike with that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think you could govern the world better?\u201d laughed the Doctor.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not think at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is true philosophy. Drift with the stream, because you cannot dive deep enough to find bottom, eh?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cExactly,\u201d rejoined Kirby. \u201cI do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,\u2014slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,\u2014the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other\u2019s throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Doctor sighed,\u2014a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach.<\/p>\n
\u201cGod help us! Who is responsible?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot I, I tell you,\u201d said Kirby, testily. \u201cWhat has the man who pays them money to do with their souls\u2019 concerns, more than the grocer or butcher who takes it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd yet,\u201d said Mitchell\u2019s cynical voice, \u201clook at her! How hungry she is!\u201d<\/p>\n
Kirby tapped his boot with his cane. No one spoke. Only the dumb face of the rough image looking into their faces with the awful question, \u201cWhat shall we do to be saved?\u201d Only Wolfe\u2019s face, with its heavy weight of brain, its weak, uncertain mouth, its desperate eyes, out of which looked the soul of his class,\u2014only Wolfe\u2019s face turned towards Kirby\u2019s. Mitchell laughed,\u2014a cool, musical laugh.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoney has spoken!\u201d he said, seating himself lightly on a stone with the air of an amused spectator at a play. \u201cAre you answered?\u201d\u2014turning to Wolfe his clear, magnetic face.<\/p>\n
Bright and deep and cold as Arctic air, the soul of the man lay tranquil beneath. He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you answered? Why, May, look at him! \u2018De profundis clamavi.\u2019 Or, to quote in English, \u2018Hungry and thirsty, his soul faints in him.\u2019 And so Money sends back its answer into the depths through you, Kirby! Very clear the answer, too!\u2014I think I remember reading the same words somewhere: washing your hands in Eau de Cologne, and saying, \u2018I am innocent of the blood of this man. See ye to it!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Kirby flushed angrily.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou quote Scripture freely.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo I not quote correctly? I think I remember another line, which may amend my meaning? \u2018Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto me.\u2019 Deist? Bless you, man, I was raised on the milk of the Word. Now, Doctor, the pocket of the world having uttered its voice, what has the heart to say? You are a philanthropist, in a small Way,\u2014n\u2019est ce pas? Here, boy, this gentleman can show you how to cut korl better,\u2014or your destiny. Go on, May!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think a mocking devil possesses you to-night,\u201d rejoined the Doctor, seriously.<\/p>\n
He went to Wolfe and put his hand kindly on his arm. Something of a vague idea possessed the Doctor\u2019s brain that much good was to be done here by a friendly word or two: a latent genius to be warmed into life by a waited-for sunbeam. Here it was: he had brought it. So he went on complacently:<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man? do you understand?\u201d (talking down to the capacity of his hearer: it is a way people have with children, and men like Wolfe,)\u2014\u201dto live a better, stronger life than I, or Mr. Kirby here? A man may make himself anything he chooses. God has given you stronger powers than many men,\u2014me, for instance.\u201d<\/p>\n
May stopped, heated, glowing with his own magnanimity. And it was magnanimous. The puddler had drunk in every word, looking through the Doctor\u2019s flurry, and generous heat, and self-approval, into his will, with those slow, absorbing eyes of his.<\/p>\n
\u201cMake yourself what you will. It is your right.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know,\u201d quietly. \u201cWill you help me?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mitchell laughed again. The Doctor turned now, in a passion,\u2014<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, Mitchell, I have not the means. You know, if I had, it is in my heart to take this boy and educate him for\u201d\u2014<\/p>\n
\u201cThe glory of God, and the glory of John May.\u201d<\/p>\n
May did not speak for a moment; then, controlled, he said,\u2014<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy should one be raised, when myriads are left?\u2014I have not the money, boy,\u201d to Wolfe, shortly.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoney?\u201d He said it over slowly, as one repeats the guessed answer to a riddle, doubtfully. \u201cThat is it? Money?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, money,\u2014that is it,\u201d said Mitchell, rising, and drawing his furred coat about him. \u201cYou\u2019ve found the cure for all the world\u2019s diseases.\u2014Come, May, find your good-humor, and come home. This damp wind chills my very bones. Come and preach your Saint-Simonian doctrines\u2019 to-morrow to Kirby\u2019s hands. Let them have a clear idea of the rights of the soul, and I\u2019ll venture next week they\u2019ll strike for higher wages. That will be the end of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWill you send the coach-driver to this side of the mills?\u201d asked Kirby, turning to Wolfe.<\/p>\n
He spoke kindly: it was his habit to do so. Deborah, seeing the puddler go, crept after him. The three men waited outside. Doctor May walked up and down, chafed. Suddenly he stopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cGo back, Mitchell! You say the pocket and the heart of the world speak without meaning to these people. What has its head to say? Taste, culture, refinement? Go!\u201d<\/p>\n
Mitchell was leaning against a brick wall. He turned his head indolently, and looked into the mills. There hung about the place a thick, unclean odor. The slightest motion of his hand marked that he perceived it, and his insufferable disgust. That was all. May said nothing, only quickened his angry tramp.<\/p>\n
\u201cBesides,\u201d added Mitchell, giving a corollary to his answer, \u201cit would be of no use. I am not one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou do not mean\u201d\u2014said May, facing him.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, I mean just that. Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people\u2019s has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass. Think back through history, and you will know it. What will this lowest deep\u2014thieves, Magdalens, negroes\u2014do with the light filtered through ponderous Church creeds, Baconian theories, Goethe schemes? Some day, out of their bitter need will be thrown up their own light-bringer,\u2014their Jean Paul, their Cromwell, their Messiah.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBah!\u201d was the Doctor\u2019s inward criticism. However, in practice, he adopted the theory; for, when, night and morning, afterwards, he prayed that power might be given these degraded souls to rise, he glowed at heart, recognizing an accomplished duty.<\/p>\n
Wolfe and the woman had stood in the shadow of the works as the coach drove off. The Doctor had held out his hand in a frank, generous way, telling him to \u201ctake care of himself, and to remember it was his right to rise.\u201d Mitchell had simply touched his hat, as to an equal, with a quiet look of thorough recognition. Kirby had thrown Deborah some money, which she found, and clutched eagerly enough. They were gone now, all of them. The man sat down on the cinder-road, looking up into the murky sky.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018T be late, Hugh. Wunnot hur come?\u201d<\/p>\n
He shook his head doggedly, and the woman crouched out of his sight against the wall. Do you remember rare moments when a sudden light flashed over yourself, your world, God? when you stood on a mountain-peak, seeing your life as it might have been, as it is? one quick instant, when custom lost its force and every-day usage? when your friend, wife, brother, stood in a new light? your soul was bared, and the grave,\u2014a foretaste of the nakedness of the Judgment-Day? So it came before him, his life, that night. The slow tides of pain he had borne gathered themselves up and surged against his soul. His squalid daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the ashes into his skin: before, these things had been a dull aching into his consciousness; to-night, they were reality. He griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot, about him, and tore it savagely from his arm. The flesh beneath was muddy with grease and ashes,\u2014and the heart beneath that! And the soul? God knows.<\/p>\n
Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him,\u2014the pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty or truth. In his cloudy fancy he had pictured a Something like this. He had found it in this Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at his pain: a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,\u2014the keen glance of his eye falling like a sceptre on other men. And yet his instinct taught him that he too\u2014He! He looked at himself with sudden loathing, sick, wrung his hands With a cry, and then was silent. With all the phantoms of his heated, ignorant fancy, Wolfe had not been vague in his ambitions. They were practical, slowly built up before him out of his knowledge of what he could do. Through years he had day by day made this hope a real thing to himself,\u2014a clear, projected figure of himself, as he might become.<\/p>\n
Able to speak, to know what was best, to raise these men and women working at his side up with him: sometimes he forgot this defined hope in the frantic anguish to escape, only to escape,\u2014out of the wet, the pain, the ashes, somewhere, anywhere,\u2014only for one moment of free air on a hill-side, to lie down and let his sick soul throb itself out in the sunshine. But to-night he panted for life. The savage strength of his nature was roused; his cry was fierce to God for justice.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook at me!\u201d he said to Deborah, with a low, bitter laugh, striking his puny chest savagely. \u201cWhat am I worth, Deb? Is it my fault that I am no better? My fault? My fault?\u201d<\/p>\n
He stopped, stung with a sudden remorse, seeing her hunchback shape writhing with sobs. For Deborah was crying thankless tears, according to the fashion of women.<\/p>\n
\u201cGod forgi\u2019 me, woman! Things go harder Wi\u2019 you nor me. It\u2019s a worse share.\u201d<\/p>\n
He got up and helped her to rise; and they went doggedly down the muddy street, side by side.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all wrong,\u201d he muttered, slowly,\u2014\u201dall wrong! I dunnot understan\u2019. But it\u2019ll end some day.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCome home, Hugh!\u201d she said, coaxingly; for he had stopped, looking around bewildered.<\/p>\n
\u201cHome,\u2014and back to the mill!\u201d He went on saying this over to himself, as if he would mutter down every pain in this dull despair.<\/p>\n
She followed him through the fog, her blue lips chattering with cold. They reached the cellar at last. Old Wolfe had been drinking since she went out, and had crept nearer the door. The girl Janey slept heavily in the corner. He went up to her, touching softly the worn white arm with his fingers. Some bitterer thought stung him, as he stood there. He wiped the drops from his forehead, and went into the room beyond, livid, trembling. A hope, trifling, perhaps, but very dear, had died just then out of the poor puddler\u2019s life, as he looked at the sleeping, innocent girl,\u2014 some plan for the future, in which she had borne a part. He gave it up that moment, then and forever. Only a trifle, perhaps, to us: his face grew a shade paler,\u2014that was all. But, somehow, the man\u2019s soul, as God and the angels looked down on it, never was the same afterwards.<\/p>\n
Deborah followed him into the inner room. She carried a candle, which she placed on the floor, closing the door after her. She had seen the look on his face, as he turned away: her own grew deadly. Yet, as she came up to him, her eyes glowed. He was seated on an old chest, quiet, holding his face in his hands.<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh!\u201d she said, softly.<\/p>\n
He did not speak.<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh, did hur hear what the man said,\u2014him with the clear voice? Did hur hear? Money, money,\u2014that it wud do all?\u201d<\/p>\n
He pushed her away,\u2014gently, but he was worn out; her rasping tone fretted him.<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh!\u201d<\/p>\n
The candle flared a pale yellow light over the cobwebbed brick walls, and the woman standing there. He looked at her. She was young, in deadly earnest; her faded eyes, and wet, ragged figure caught from their frantic eagerness a power akin to beauty.<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh, it is true! Money ull do it! Oh, Hugh, boy, listen till me! He said it true! It is money!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know. Go back! I do not want you here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh, it is t\u2019 last time. I\u2019ll never worrit hur again.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were tears in her voice now, but she choked them back:<\/p>\n
\u201cHear till me only to-night! If one of t\u2019 witch people wud come, them we heard oft\u2019 home, and gif hur all hur wants, what then? Say, Hugh!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her whisper shrilled through his brain.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf one oft\u2019 witch dwarfs wud come from t\u2019 lane moors to-night, and gif hur money, to go out,\u2014OUT, I say,\u2014out, lad, where t\u2019 sun shines, and t\u2019 heath grows, and t\u2019 ladies walk in silken gownds, and God stays all t\u2019 time,\u2014where t\u2019man lives that talked to us to-night, Hugh knows,\u2014Hugh could walk there like a king!\u201d<\/p>\n
He thought the woman mad, tried to check her, but she went on, fierce in her eager haste.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I were t\u2019 witch dwarf, if I had t\u2019 money, wud hur thank me? Wud hur take me out o\u2019 this place wid hur and Janey? I wud not come into the gran\u2019 house hur wud build, to vex hur wid t\u2019 hunch,\u2014only at night, when t\u2019 shadows were dark, stand far off to see hur.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mad? Yes! Are many of us mad in this way?<\/p>\n
\u201cPoor Deb! poor Deb!\u201d he said, soothingly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is here,\u201d she said, suddenly, jerking into his hand a small roll. \u201cI took it! I did it! Me, me!\u2014not hur! I shall be hanged, I shall be burnt in hell, if anybody knows I took it! Out of his pocket, as he leaned against t\u2019 bricks. Hur knows?\u201d<\/p>\n
She thrust it into his hand, and then, her errand done, began to gather chips together to make a fire, choking down hysteric sobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cHas it come to this?\u201d<\/p>\n
That was all he said. The Welsh Wolfe blood was honest. The roll was a small green pocket-book containing one or two gold pieces, and a check for an incredible amount, as it seemed to the poor puddler. He laid it down, hiding his face again in his hands.<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh, don\u2019t be angry wud me! It\u2019s only poor Deb,\u2014hur knows?\u201d<\/p>\n
He took the long skinny fingers kindly in his.<\/p>\n
\u201cAngry? God help me, no! Let me sleep. I am tired.\u201d<\/p>\n
He threw himself heavily down on the wooden bench, stunned with pain and weariness. She brought some old rags to cover him.<\/p>\n
It was late on Sunday evening before he awoke. I tell God\u2019s truth, when I say he had then no thought of keeping this money. Deborah had hid it in his pocket. He found it there. She watched him eagerly, as he took it out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI must gif it to him,\u201d he said, reading her face.<\/p>\n
\u201cHur knows,\u201d she said with a bitter sigh of disappointment. \u201cBut it is hur right to keep it.\u201d His right! The word struck him. Doctor May had used the same. He washed himself, and went out to find this man Mitchell.<\/p>\n
His right! Why did this chance word cling to him so obstinately? Do you hear the fierce devils whisper in his ear, as he went slowly down the darkening street?<\/p>\n
The evening came on, slow and calm. He seated himself at the end of an alley leading into one of the larger streets. His brain was clear to-night, keen, intent, mastering. It would not start back, cowardly, from any hellish temptation, but meet it face to face. Therefore the great temptation of his life came to him veiled by no sophistry, but bold, defiant, owning its own vile name, trusting to one bold blow for victory.<\/p>\n
He did not deceive himself. Theft! That was it. At first the word sickened him; then he grappled with it. Sitting there on a broken cart-wheel, the fading day, the noisy groups, the church-bells\u2019 tolling passed before him like a panorama, while the sharp struggle went on within. This money! He took it out, and looked at it. If he gave it back, what then? He was going to be cool about it.<\/p>\n
People going by to church saw only a sickly mill-boy watching them quietly at the alley\u2019s mouth. They did not know that he was mad, or they would not have gone by so quietly: mad with hunger; stretching out his hands to the world, that had given so much to them, for leave to live the life God meant him to live. His soul within him was smothering to death; he wanted so much, thought so much, and knew\u2014nothing. There was nothing of which he was certain, except the mill and things there. Of God and heaven he had heard so little, that they were to him what fairy-land is to a child: something real, but not here; very far off. His brain, greedy, dwarfed, full of thwarted energy and unused powers, questioned these men and women going by, coldly, bitterly, that night. Was it not his right to live as they,\u2014a pure life, a good, true-hearted life, full of beauty and kind words? He only wanted to know how to use the strength within him. His heart warmed, as he thought of it. He suffered himself to think of it longer. If he took the money?<\/p>\n
Then he saw himself as he might be, strong, helpful, kindly. The night crept on, as this one image slowly evolved itself from the crowd of other thoughts and stood triumphant. He looked at it. As he might be! What wonder, if it blinded him to delirium,\u2014the madness that underlies all revolution, all progress, and all fall?<\/p>\n
You laugh at the shallow temptation? You see the error underlying its argument so clearly,\u2014that to him a true life was one of full development rather than selfrestraint? that he was deaf to the higher tone in a cry of voluntary suffering for truth\u2019s sake than in the fullest flow of spontaneous harmony? I do not plead his cause. I only want to show you the mote in my brother\u2019s eye: then you can see clearly to take it out.<\/p>\n
The money,\u2014there it lay on his knee, a little blotted slip of paper, nothing in itself; used to raise him out of the pit, something straight from God\u2019s hand. A thief! Well, what was it to be a thief? He met the question at last, face to face, wiping the clammy drops of sweat from his forehead. God made this money\u2014the fresh air, too\u2014for his children\u2019s use. He never made the difference between poor and rich. The Something who looked down on him that moment through the cool gray sky had a kindly face, he knew,\u2014loved his children alike. Oh, he knew that!<\/p>\n
There were times when the soft floods of color in the crimson and purple flames, or the clear depth of amber in the water below the bridge, had somehow given him a glimpse of another world than this,\u2014of an infinite depth of beauty and of quiet somewhere,\u2014somewhere, a depth of quiet and rest and love. Looking up now, it became strangely real. The sun had sunk quite below the hills, but his last rays struck upward, touching the zenith. The fog had risen, and the town and river were steeped in its thick, gray damp; but overhead, the sun-touched smoke-clouds opened like a cleft ocean,\u2014shifting, rolling seas of crimson mist, waves of billowy silver veined with blood-scarlet, inner depths unfathomable of glancing light. Wolfe\u2019s artist-eye grew drunk with color. The gates of that other world! Fading, flashing before him now! What, in that world of Beauty, Content, and Right, were the petty laws, the mine and thine, of mill-owners and mill hands?<\/p>\n
A consciousness of power stirred within him. He stood up. A man,\u2014he thought, stretching out his hands,\u2014free to work, to live, to love! Free! His right! He folded the scrap of paper in his hand. As his nervous fingers took it in, limp and blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color. Clutching it, as if the tightness of his hold would strengthen his sense of possession, he went aimlessly down the street. It was his watch at the mill. He need not go, need never go again, thank God!\u2014shaking off the thought with unspeakable loathing.<\/p>\n
Shall I go over the history of the hours of that night? how the man wandered from one to another of his old haunts, with a half-consciousness of bidding them farewell,\u2014lanes and alleys and back-yards where the mill-hands lodged,\u2014noting, with a new eagerness, the filth and drunkenness, the pig-pens, the ash-heaps covered with potato-skins, the bloated, pimpled women at the doors, with a new disgust, a new sense of sudden triumph, and, under all, a new, vague dread, unknown before, smothered down, kept under, but still there? It left him but once during the night, when, for the second time in his life, he entered a church. It was a sombre Gothic pile, where the stained light lost itself in far-retreating arches; built to meet the requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe\u2019s. Yet it touched, moved him uncontrollably. The distances, the shadows, the still, marble figures, the mass of silent kneeling worshippers, the mysterious music, thrilled, lifted his soul with a wonderful pain. Wolfe forgot himself, forgot the new life he was going to live, the mean terror gnawing underneath. The voice of the speaker strengthened the charm; it was clear, feeling, full, strong. An old man, who had lived much, suffered much; whose brain was keenly alive, dominant; whose heart was summer-warm with charity. He taught it to-night. He held up Humanity in its grand total; showed the great world-cancer to his people. Who could show it better? He was a Christian reformer; he had studied the age thoroughly; his outlook at man had been free, world-wide, over all time. His faith stood sublime upon the Rock of Ages; his fiery zeal guided vast schemes by which the Gospel was to be preached to all nations. How did he preach it tonight? In burning, light-laden words he painted Jesus, the incarnate Life, Love, the universal Man: words that became reality in the lives of these people,\u2014that lived again in beautiful words and actions, trifling, but heroic. Sin, as he defined it, was a real foe to them; their trials, temptations, were his. His words passed far over the furnace-tender\u2019s grasp, toned to suit another class of culture; they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue. He meant to cure this world-cancer with a steady eye that had never glared with hunger, and a hand that neither poverty nor strychnine-whiskey had taught to shake. In this morbid, distorted heart of the Welsh puddler he had failed.<\/p>\n
Eighteen centuries ago, the Master of this man tried reform in the streets of a city as crowded and vile as this, and did not fail. His disciple, showing Him tonight to cultured hearers, showing the clearness of the God-power acting through Him, shrank back from one coarse fact; that in birth and habit the man Christ was thrown up from the lowest of the people: his flesh, their flesh; their blood, his blood; tempted like them, to brutalize day by day; to lie, to steal: the actual slime and want of their hourly life, and the wine-press he trod alone.<\/p>\n
Yet, is there no meaning in this perpetually covered truth? If the son of the carpenter had stood in the church that night, as he stood with the fishermen and harlots by the sea of Galilee, before His Father and their Father, despised and rejected of men, without a place to lay His head, wounded for their iniquities, bruised for their transgressions, would not that hungry mill-boy at least, in the back seat, have \u201cknown the man\u201d? That Jesus did not stand there.<\/p>\n
Wolfe rose at last, and turned from the church down the street. He looked up; the night had come on foggy, damp; the golden mists had vanished, and the sky lay dull and ash-colored. He wandered again aimlessly down the street, idly wondering what had become of the cloud-sea of crimson and scarlet. The trialday of this man\u2019s life was over, and he had lost the victory. What followed was mere drifting circumstance,\u2014a quicker walking over the path,\u2014that was all. Do you want to hear the end of it? You wish me to make a tragic story out of it? Why, in the police-reports of the morning paper you can find a dozen such tragedies: hints of shipwrecks unlike any that ever befell on the high seas; hints that here a power was lost to heaven,\u2014that there a soul went down where no tide can ebb or flow. Commonplace enough the hints are,\u2014jocose sometimes, done up in rhyme.<\/p>\n
Doctor May a month after the night I have told you of, was reading to his wife at breakfast from this fourth column of the morning-paper: an unusual thing,\u2014these police-reports not being, in general, choice reading for ladies; but it was only one item he read.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, my dear! You remember that man I told you of, that we saw at Kirby\u2019s mill?\u2014that was arrested for robbing Mitchell? Here he is; just listen:\u2014\u2019Circuit Court. Judge Day. Hugh Wolfe, operative in Kirby & John\u2019s Loudon Mills. Charge, grand larceny. Sentence, nineteen years hard labor in penitentiary. Scoundrel! Serves him right! After all our kindness that night! Picking Mitchell\u2019s pocket at the very time!\u201d<\/p>\n
His wife said something about the ingratitude of that kind of people, and then they began to talk of something else.<\/p>\n
Nineteen years! How easy that was to read! What a simple word for Judge Day to utter! Nineteen years! Half a lifetime!<\/p>\n
Hugh Wolfe sat on the window-ledge of his cell, looking out. His ankles Were ironed. Not usual in such cases; but he had made two desperate efforts to escape. \u201cWell,\u201d as Haley, the jailer, said, \u201csmall blame to him! Nineteen years\u2019 imprisonment was not a pleasant thing to look forward to.\u201d Haley was very good-natured about it, though Wolfe had fought him savagely.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen he was first caught,\u201d the jailer said afterwards, in telling the story, \u201cbefore the trial, the fellow was cut down at once,\u2014laid there on that pallet like a dead man, with his hands over his eyes. Never saw a man so cut down in my life. Time of the trial, too, came the queerest dodge of any customer I ever had. Would choose no lawyer. Judge gave him one, of course. Gibson it Was. He tried to prove the fellow crazy; but it wouldn\u2019t go. Thing was plain as daylight: money found on him. \u2018T was a hard sentence,\u2014all the law allows; but it was for \u2018xample\u2019s sake. These mill-hands are gettin\u2019 onbearable. When the sentence was read, he just looked up, and said the money was his by rights, and that all the world had gone wrong. That night, after the trial, a gentleman came to see him here, name of Mitchell,\u2014him as he stole from. Talked to him for an hour. Thought he came for curiosity, like. After he was gone, thought Wolfe was remarkable quiet, and went into his cell. Found him very low; bed all bloody. Doctor said he had been bleeding at the lungs. He was as weak as a cat; yet if ye\u2019ll b\u2019lieve me, he tried to get a-past me and get out. I just carried him like a baby, and threw him on the pallet. Three days after, he tried it again: that time reached the wall. Lord help you! he fought like a tiger,\u2014giv\u2019 some terrible blows. Fightin\u2019 for life, you see; for he can\u2019t live long, shut up in the stone crib down yonder. Got a death-cough now. \u2018T took two of us to bring him down that day; so I just put the irons on his feet. There he sits, in there. Goin\u2019 to-morrow, with a batch more of \u2018em. That woman, hunchback, tried with him,\u2014you remember?\u2014she\u2019s only got three years. \u2018Complice. But she\u2019s a woman, you know. He\u2019s been quiet ever since I put on irons: giv\u2019 up, I suppose. Looks white, sick-lookin\u2019. It acts different on \u2018em, bein\u2019 sentenced. Most of \u2018em gets reckless, devilish-like. Some prays awful, and sings them vile songs of the mills, all in a breath. That woman, now, she\u2019s desper\u2019t\u2019. Been beggin\u2019 to see Hugh, as she calls him, for three days. I\u2019m a-goin\u2019 to let her in. She don\u2019t go with him. Here she is in this next cell. I\u2019m a-goin\u2019 now to let her in.\u201d<\/p>\n
He let her in. Wolfe did not see her. She crept into a corner of the cell, and stood watching him. He was scratching the iron bars of the window with a piece of tin which he had picked up, with an idle, uncertain, vacant stare, just as a child or idiot would do.<\/p>\n
\u201cTryin\u2019 to get out, old boy?\u201d laughed Haley. \u201cThem irons will need a crow-bar beside your tin, before you can open \u2018em.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wolfe laughed, too, in a senseless way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019ll get out,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe his brain\u2019s touched,\u201d said Haley, when he came out.<\/p>\n
The puddler scraped away with the tin for half an hour. Still Deborah did not speak. At last she ventured nearer, and touched his arm.<\/p>\n
\u201cBlood?\u201d she said, looking at some spots on his coat with a shudder.<\/p>\n
He looked up at her, \u201cWhy, Deb!\u201d he said, smiling,\u2014such a bright, boyish smile, that it Went to poor Deborah\u2019s heart directly, and she sobbed and cried out loud.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, Hugh, lad! Hugh! dunnot look at me, when it wur my fault! To think I brought hur to it! And I loved hur so! Oh lad, I dud!\u201d<\/p>\n
The confession, even In this wretch, came with the woman\u2019s blush through the sharp cry.<\/p>\n
He did not seem to hear her,\u2014scraping away diligently at the bars with the bit of tin.<\/p>\n
Was he going mad? She peered closely into his face. Something she saw there made her draw suddenly back,\u2014something which Haley had not seen, that lay beneath the pinched, vacant look it had caught since the trial, or the curious gray shadow that rested on it. That gray shadow,\u2014yes, she knew what that meant. She had often seen it creeping over women\u2019s faces for months, who died at last of slow hunger or consumption. That meant death, distant, lingering: but this\u2014Whatever it was the woman saw, or thought she saw, used as she was to crime and misery, seemed to make her sick with a new horror. Forgetting her fear of him, she caught his shoulders, and looked keenly, steadily, into his eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh!\u201d she cried, in a desperate whisper,\u2014\u201doh, boy, not that! for God\u2019s sake, not that!\u201d<\/p>\n
The vacant laugh went off his face, and he answered her in a muttered word or two that drove her away. Yet the words were kindly enough. Sitting there on his pallet, she cried silently a hopeless sort of tears, but did not speak again. The man looked up furtively at her now and then. Whatever his own trouble was, her distress vexed him with a momentary sting.<\/p>\n
It was market-day. The narrow window of the jail looked down directly on the carts and wagons drawn up in a long line, where they had unloaded. He could see, too, and hear distinctly the clink of money as it changed hands, the busy crowd of whites and blacks shoving, pushing one another, and the chaffering and swearing at the stalls. Somehow, the sound, more than anything else had done, wakened him up,\u2014made the whole real to him. He was done with the world and the business of it. He let the tin fall, and looked out, pressing his face close to the rusty bars. How they crowded and pushed! And he,\u2014he should never walk that pavement again! There came Neff Sanders, one of the feeders at the mill, with a basket on his arm. Sure enough, Nyeff was married the other week. He whistled, hoping he would look up; but he did not. He wondered if Neff remembered he was there,\u2014if any of the boys thought of him up there, and thought that he never was to go down that old cinder-road again. Never again! He had not quite understood it before; but now he did. Not for days or years, but never!\u2014that was it.<\/p>\n
How clear the light fell on that stall in front of the market! and how like a picture it was, the dark-green heaps of corn, and the crimson beets, and golden melons! There was another with game: how the light flickered on that pheasant\u2019s breast, with the purplish blood dripping over the brown feathers! He could see the red shining of the drops, it was so near. In one minute he could be down there. It was just a step. So easy, as it seemed, so natural to go! Yet it could never be\u2014not in all the thousands of years to come\u2014that he should put his foot on that street again! He thought of himself with a sorrowful pity, as of some one else. There was a dog down in the market, walking after his master with such a stately, grave look!\u2014only a dog, yet he could go backwards and forwards just as he pleased: he had good luck! Why, the very vilest cur, yelping there in the gutter, had not lived his life, had been free to act out whatever thought God had put into his brain; while he\u2014No, he would not think of that! He tried to put the thought away, and to listen to a dispute between a countryman and a woman about some meat; but it would come back. He, what had he done to bear this?<\/p>\n
Then came the sudden picture of what might have been, and now. He knew what it was to be in the penitentiary, how it went with men there. He knew how in these long years he should slowly die, but not until soul and body had become corrupt and rotten,\u2014how, when he came out, if he lived to come, even the lowest of the mill-hands would jeer him,\u2014how his hands would be weak, and his brain senseless and stupid. He believed he was almost that now. He put his hand to his head, with a puzzled, weary look. It ached, his head, with thinking. He tried to quiet himself. It was only right, perhaps; he had done wrong. But was there right or wrong for such as he? What was right? And who had ever taught him? He thrust the whole matter away. A dark, cold quiet crept through his brain. It was all wrong; but let it be! It was nothing to him more than the others. Let it be!<\/p>\n
The door grated, as Haley opened it.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome, my woman! Must lock up for t\u2019 night. Come, stir yerself!\u201d<\/p>\n
She went up and took Hugh\u2019s hand. \u201cGood-night, Deb,\u201d he said, carelessly.<\/p>\n
She had not hoped he would say more; but the tired pain on her mouth just then was bitterer than death. She took his passive hand and kissed it.<\/p>\n
\u201cHur\u2019ll never see Deb again!\u201d she ventured, her lips growing colder and more bloodless.<\/p>\n
What did she say that for? Did he not know it? Yet he would not be impatient with poor old Deb. She had trouble of her own, as well as he.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, never again,\u201d he said, trying to be cheerful.<\/p>\n
She stood just a moment, looking at him. Do you laugh at her, standing there, with her hunchback, her rags, her bleared, withered face, and the great despised love tugging at her heart?<\/p>\n
\u201cCome, you!\u201d called Haley, impatiently.<\/p>\n
She did not move.<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh!\u201d she whispered.<\/p>\n
It was to be her last word. What was it?<\/p>\n
\u201cHugh, boy, not THAT!\u201d<\/p>\n
He did not answer.<\/p>\n
She wrung her hands, trying to be silent, looking in his face in an agony of entreaty. He smiled again, kindly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is best, Deb. I cannot bear to be hurted any more.<\/p>\n
\u201cHur knows,\u201d she said, humbly.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell my father good-bye; and\u2014and kiss little Janey.\u201d<\/p>\n
She nodded, saying nothing, looked in his face again, and went out of the door. As she went, she staggered.<\/p>\n
\u201cDrinkin\u2019 to-day?\u201d broke out Haley, pushing her before him. \u201cWhere the Devil did you get it? Here, in with ye!\u201d and he shoved her into her cell, next to Wolfe\u2019s, and shut the door.<\/p>\n
Along the wall of her cell there was a crack low down by the floor, through which she could see the light from Wolfe\u2019s. She had discovered it days before. She hurried in now, and, kneeling down by it, listened, hoping to hear some sound. Nothing but the rasping of the tin on the bars. He was at his old amusement again. Something in the noise jarred on her ear, for she shivered as she heard it. Hugh rasped away at the bars. A dull old bit of tin, not fit to cut korl with.<\/p>\n
He looked out of the window again. People were leaving the market now. A tall mulatto girl, following her mistress, her basket on her head, crossed the street just below, and looked up. She was laughing; but, when she caught sight of the haggard face peering out through the bars, suddenly grew grave, and hurried by. A free, firm step, a clear-cut olive face, with a scarlet turban tied on one side, dark, shining eyes, and on the head the basket poised, filled with fruit and flowers, under which the scarlet turban and bright eyes looked out half-shadowed. The picture caught his eye. It was good to see a face like that. He would try to-morrow, and cut one like it. To-morrow! He threw down the tin, trembling, and covered his face with his hands. When he looked up again, the daylight was gone.<\/p>\n
Deborah, crouching near by on the other side of the wall, heard no noise. He sat on the side of the low pallet, thinking. Whatever was the mystery which the woman had seen on his face, it came out now slowly, in the dark there, and became fixed,\u2014a something never seen on his face before. The evening was darkening fast. The market had been over for an hour; the rumbling of the carts over the pavement grew more infrequent: he listened to each, as it passed, because he thought it was to be for the last time. For the same reason, it was, I suppose, that he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of each passer-by, wondering who they were, what kind of homes they were going to, if they had children,\u2014listening eagerly to every chance word in the street, as if\u2014(God be merciful to the man! what strange fancy was this?)\u2014as if he never should hear human voices again.<\/p>\n
It was quite dark at last. The street was a lonely one. The last passenger, he thought, was gone. No,\u2014there was a quick step: Joe Hill, lighting the lamps. Joe was a good old chap; never passed a fellow without some joke or other. He remembered once seeing the place where he lived with his wife. \u201cGranny Hill\u201d the boys called her. Bedridden she Was; but so kind as Joe was to her! kept the room so clean!\u2014and the old woman, when he was there, was laughing at some of \u201ct\u2019 lad\u2019s foolishness.\u201d The step was far down the street; but he could see him place the ladder, run up, and light the gas. A longing seized him to be spoken to once more.<\/p>\n
\u201cJoe!\u201d he called, out of the grating. \u201cGood-bye, Joe!\u201d<\/p>\n
The old man stopped a moment, listening uncertainly; then hurried on. The prisoner thrust his hand out of the window, and called again, louder; but Joe was too far down the street. It was a little thing; but it hurt him,\u2014this disappointment.<\/p>\n
\u201cGood-bye, Joe!\u201d he called, sorrowfully enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cBe quiet!\u201d said one of the jailers, passing the door, striking on it with his club.<\/p>\n
Oh, that was the last, was it?<\/p>\n
There was an inexpressible bitterness on his face, as he lay down on the bed, taking the bit of tin, which he had rasped to a tolerable degree of sharpness, in his hand,\u2014to play with, it may be. He bared his arms, looking intently at their corded veins and sinews. Deborah, listening in the next cell, heard a slight clicking sound, often repeated. She shut her lips tightly, that she might not scream; the cold drops of sweat broke over her, in her dumb agony.<\/p>\n
\u201cHur knows best,\u201d she muttered at last, fiercely clutching the boards where she lay.<\/p>\n
If she could have seen Wolfe, there was nothing about him to frighten her. He lay quite still, his arms outstretched, looking at the pearly stream of moonlight coming into the window. I think in that one hour that came then he lived back over all the years that had gone before. I think that all the low, vile life, all his wrongs, all his starved hopes, came then, and stung him with a farewell poison that made him sick unto death. He made neither moan nor cry, only turned his worn face now and then to the pure light, that seemed so far off, as one that said, \u201cHow long, O Lord? how long?\u201d<\/p>\n
The hour was over at last. The moon, passing over her nightly path, slowly came nearer, and threw the light across his bed on his feet. He watched it steadily, as it crept up, inch by inch, slowly. It seemed to him to carry with it a great silence. He had been so hot and tired there always in the mills! The years had been so fierce and cruel! There was coming now quiet and coolness and sleep. His tense limbs relaxed, and settled in a calm languor. The blood ran fainter and slow from his heart. He did not think now with a savage anger of what might be and was not; he was conscious only of deep stillness creeping over him. At first he saw a sea of faces: the mill-men,\u2014women he had known, drunken and bloated,\u2014Janey\u2019s timid and pitiful-poor old Debs: then they floated together like a mist, and faded away, leaving only the clear, pearly moonlight.<\/p>\n
Whether, as the pure light crept up the stretched-out figure, it brought with It calm and peace, who shall say? His dumb soul was alone with God in judgment. A Voice may have spoken for it from far-off Calvary, \u201cFather, forgive them, for they know not what they do!\u201d Who dare say? Fainter and fainter the heart rose and fell, slower and slower the moon floated from behind a cloud, until, when at last its full tide of white splendor swept over the cell, it seemed to wrap and fold into a deeper stillness the dead figure that never should move again. Silence deeper than the Night! Nothing that moved, save the black, nauseous stream of blood dripping slowly from the pallet to the floor!<\/p>\n
There was outcry and crowd enough in the cell the next day. The coroner and his jury, the local editors, Kirby himself, and boys with their hands thrust knowingly into their pockets and heads on one side, jammed into the corners. Coming and going all day. Only one woman. She came late, and outstayed them all. A Quaker, or Friend, as they call themselves. I think this woman Was known by that name in heaven. A homely body, coarsely dressed in gray and white. Deborah (for Haley had let her in) took notice of her. She watched them all\u2014sitting on the end of the pallet, holding his head in her arms with the ferocity of a watch-dog, if any of them touched the body. There was no meekness, no sorrow, in her face; the stuff out of which murderers are made, instead. All the time Haley and the woman were laying straight the limbs and cleaning the cell, Deborah sat still, keenly watching the Quaker\u2019s face. Of all the crowd there that day, this woman alone had not spoken to her,\u2014only once or twice had put some cordial to her lips. After they all were gone, the woman, in the same still, gentle way, brought a vase of wood-leaves and berries, and placed it by the pallet, then opened the narrow window. The fresh air blew in, and swept the woody fragrance over the dead face, Deborah looked up with a quick wonder.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid hur know my boy wud like it? Did hur know Hugh?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know Hugh now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The white fingers passed in a slow, pitiful way over the dead, worn face. There was a heavy shadow in the quiet eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid hur know where they\u2019ll bury Hugh?\u201d said Deborah in a shrill tone, catching her arm.<\/p>\n
This had been the question hanging on her lips all day.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn t\u2019 town-yard? Under t\u2019 mud and ash? T\u2019 lad\u2019ll smother, woman! He wur born in t\u2019 lane moor, where t\u2019 air is frick and strong. Take hur out, for God\u2019s sake, take hur out where t\u2019 air blows!\u201d<\/p>\n
The Quaker hesitated, but only for a moment. She put her strong arm around Deborah and led her to the window.<\/p>\n
\u201cThee sees the hills, friend, over the river? Thee sees how the light lies warm there, and the winds of God blow all the day? I live there,\u2014where the blue smoke is, by the trees. Look at me,\u201d She turned Deborah\u2019s face to her own, clear and earnest, \u201cThee will believe me? I will take Hugh and bury him there to-morrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deborah did not doubt her. As the evening wore on, she leaned against the iron bars, looking at the hills that rose far off, through the thick sodden clouds, like a bright, unattainable calm. As she looked, a shadow of their solemn repose fell on her face; its fierce discontent faded into a pitiful, humble quiet. Slow, solemn tears gathered in her eyes: the poor weak eyes turned so hopelessly to the place where Hugh was to rest, the grave heights looking higher and brighter and more solemn than ever before. The Quaker watched her keenly. She came to her at last, and touched her arm.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen thee comes back,\u201d she said, in a low, sorrowful tone, like one who speaks from a strong heart deeply moved with remorse or pity, \u201cthee shall begin thy life again,\u2014there on the hills. I came too late; but not for thee,\u2014by God\u2019s help, it may be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not too late. Three years after, the Quaker began her work. I end my story here. At evening-time it was light. There is no need to tire you with the long years of sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love, needed to make healthy and hopeful this impure body and soul. There is a homely pine house, on one of these hills, whose windows overlook broad, wooded slopes and clover-crimsoned meadows,\u2014niched into the very place where the light is warmest, the air freest. It is the Friends\u2019 meeting-house. Once a week they sit there, in their grave, earnest way, waiting for the Spirit of Love to speak, opening their simple hearts to receive His words. There is a woman, old, deformed, who takes a humble place among them: waiting like them: in her gray dress, her worn face, pure and meek, turned now and then to the sky. A woman much loved by these silent, restful people; more silent than they, more humble, more loving. Waiting: with her eyes turned to hills higher and purer than these on which she lives, dim and far off now, but to be reached some day. There may be in her heart some latent hope to meet there the love denied her here,\u2014that she shall find him whom she lost, and that then she will not be all-unworthy. Who blames her? Something is lost in the passage of every soul from one eternity to the other,\u2014something pure and beautiful, which might have been and was not: a hope, a talent, a love, over which the soul mourns, like Esau deprived of his birthright. What blame to the meek Quaker, if she took her lost hope to make the hills of heaven more fair?<\/p>\n
Nothing remains to tell that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here in a corner of my library. I keep it hid behind a curtain,\u2014it is such a rough, ungainly thing. Yet there are about it touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master\u2019s hand. Sometimes,\u2014to-night, for instance,\u2014the curtain is accidentally drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine: a wan, woful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work. Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a terrible question. \u201cIs this the End?\u201d they say,\u2014\u201dnothing beyond? no more?\u201d Why, you tell me you have seen that look in the eyes of dumb brutes,\u2014 horses dying under the lash. I know.<\/p>\n
The deep of the night is passing while I write. The gas-light wakens from the shadows here and there the objects which lie scattered through the room: only faintly, though; for they belong to the open sunlight. As I glance at them, they each recall some task or pleasure of the coming day. A half-moulded child\u2019s head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves; music; work; homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty. Prophetic all! Only this dumb, woful face seems to belong to and end with the night. I turn to look at it. Has the power of its desperate need commanded the darkness away? While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the flickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the promise of the Dawn.<\/p>\n
The following video offers an explanation of \u201cLife in the Iron\u00a0 Mills,\u201d with some analysis. Please understand that there are many possible interpretations and many different ways to analyze this story.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=O4IlxGQ2LUw<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"Rebecca](\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5583\/2021\/03\/05190734\/14-224x300.jpg\")
\r\n\r\nRebecca Harding Davis was born in Washington, Pennsylvania. Seven years later, her family moved to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia) where Davis saw first-hand the depredations of both the Civil War and industrialization. She attended the Washington Female Seminary, graduating as class valedictorian in 1848.\r\n\r\nIn 1861, her first publication appeared in the prestigious The Atlantic Monthly. Life in the Iron Mills won Davis immediate fame and a lifelong readership. She subsequently wrote twelve novels, hundreds of children\u2019s stories and short stories, an autobiography, and over 200 essays and articles. She published in popular periodicals, including Harper\u2019s Magazine and Scribner\u2019s Magazine. From 1875 to around 1895, she wrote as a contributing editor for the New-York Tribune, resigning that position when her work was censored. She also wrote for The Independent and The Saturday Evening Post.\r\n\r\nHer work raised awareness of the adverse effects of slavery, increasing industrialization, workplace labor abuses, the treatment of the insane and imprisoned, and the destructive effects of the Civil War on men and women\u2019s lives and on landscapes, particularly in places like where she lived, Wheeling, VA (now West Virginia), which was a border state. She sought pragmatic reform for more humane treatment for the marginalized. For women, she advocated fair wages and fair work hours and, in such essays as \u201cLow Wages for Women\u201d and \u201cIn the Market,\u201d encouraged women to claim control over their own lives and live independently, even without marriage. However, she neither joined any women\u2019s rights organization nor lauded the appearance of the New Woman, that is, women who sought other \u201cprofessional\u201d vocations than marriage. In 1863, she married L. Clarke Davis. They had three children and survived mainly on the income from her work. Davis\u2019s writing fell into neglect until 1972, when Tillie Olsen (1912\u20132007) republished Life in the Iron Mills in the Feminist Press.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_699\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]