The Portion of Labor Part 68

"I know of only one thing to think," replied Ellen, in a dogged voice.

As she spoke she pulled the tag off a shoe-string because it would not go through the eyelet.

"What is that?" asked f.a.n.n.y, in a hard voice.

"I think it is cruelty and tyranny," said Ellen, pulling the rough end of the string through the eyelet.

"I suppose the times are pretty hard," ventured Andrew; but Ellen cut him short.

"Robert Lloyd has half a million, which has been acc.u.mulated by the labor of poor men in prosperous times," said she, with her childlike severity and pitilessness. "There is no question about the matter."

Then f.a.n.n.y flung all self-interest to the wind and was at her daughter's side like a whirlwind. The fact that the two were of one blood was never so strongly evident. Red spots glowed in the elder woman's cheeks and her black eyes blazed.

"Ellen's right," said she; "she's right. For a man worth half a million to cut down the wages of poor, hard-working folks in midwinter is cruelty. I don't care who does it."

"Yes, it is," said Ellen.

f.a.n.n.y opened her mouth to tell Ellen of the rumor concerning Robert's engagement to Maud Hemingway, then she refrained, for some reason which she could not a.n.a.lyze. In her heart she did not believe the report to be true, and considered the telling of it a slight to Ellen, but it influenced her in her indignation against Robert for the wage-cutting.

"What are they going to do?" asked Andrew.

"I don't know," replied Ellen.

"Did he--young Lloyd--talk to the men?"

"No; notices were tacked up all over the shop."

"That was the way his uncle would have done," said Andrew, in a curious voice of bitterness and respect.

"So you don't know what they are going to do?" said f.a.n.n.y.

"No."

"Well, I know what I would do," said f.a.n.n.y. "I never would give in, if I starved--never!"

Chapter LI

When Ellen started for the factory the next morning the storm had not ceased; the roads were very heavy, although the snow-plough had been out at intervals all night, and there was a struggling line of shovelling men along the car-track, but the cars were still unable to penetrate the drifts. When Ellen pa.s.sed her grandmother's house the old woman tapped sharply on the window and motioned her back frantically with one bony hand. The window was frozen to the sill with the snow, and she could not raise it. Ellen shook her head, smiling. Her grandmother continued to wave her back, the lines of forbidding anxiety in her old face as strongly marked as an etching in the window frame. This love, which had at once coerced and fondled the girl since her birth, was very precious to her. This protection, which she was forced to repel, smote her like a pain.

"Poor old grandmother!" she thought; "there she will worry about me all day because I have gone out in the storm." She turned back and waved her hand and nodded laughingly; but the old woman continued that anxiously imperative backward motion until Ellen was out of sight.

Ellen walked in the car-track, as did everybody else, that being better cleared than the rest of the road. She was astonished that she heard nothing of the cut in wages from the men. There seemed to be no excitement at all. They merely trudged heavily along, their whitening bodies bent before the storm. There was an unusual doggedness about this march to the factory this morning, but that was all. Ellen returned the muttered greeting of several, and walked along in silence with the rest. Even when Abby Atkins joined her there was little said. Ellen asked for Maria, and Abby replied that she had taken more cold yesterday, and could not speak aloud; then relapsed into silence, making her way through the snow with a sort of taciturn endurance. Ellen looked at the struggling procession of which she was a part, all slanting with the slant of the storm, and a fancy seized her that rebellion and resistance were hopeless, that those parallel lines of yielding to the onslaughts of fate were as inevitable as life itself, one of its conditions. Men could not help walking that way when the bitter storm-wind was blowing; they could not help living that way when fate was in array against their progress. Then, thinking so, a mightier spirit of revolt than she had ever known awoke within her. She, as she walked, straightened herself. She leaned not one whit before the drive of the storm. She advanced with no yielding in her, her brave face looking ahead through the white blur of snow with a confidence which was almost exultation.

"What do you think the men will do?" she said to Abby when they came in sight of Lloyd's, s.h.a.ggy with fringes and wreaths and overhanging shelvings of snow, roaring with machinery, with the steady stream of labor pouring in the door.

"Do?" repeated Abby, almost listlessly. "Do about what?"

"About the cut in wages?"

Abby turned on her with sudden fire. "Oh, my G.o.d, what can they do, Ellen Brewster?" she demanded. "Haven't they got to live? Hasn't Lloyd got it all his own way? How are men to live in weather like this without work? Bread without b.u.t.ter is better than none at all, and life at any cost is better than death for them you love. What can they do?"

"It seems to me there is only one thing to do," replied Ellen.

Abby stared at her wonderingly. "You don't mean--" she said, as they climbed up the stairs.

"I mean I would do anything, at whatever cost to myself, to defeat injustice," said Ellen, in a loud, clear voice.

Several men turned and looked back at her and laughed bitterly.

"It's easy talking," said one to another.

"That's so," returned the other.

The people all settled to their work as usual. One of the foremen (Dennison), who was anxious to curry favor with his employer, reported to him in an undertone in the office that everything was quiet. Robert nodded easily. He had not antic.i.p.ated anything else.

In the course of the morning he looked into the room where Ellen was employed, and saw with relief and concern her fair head before her machine. It seemed to him that he could not bear it one instant longer to have her working in this fas.h.i.+on, that he must lift her out of it. He still tingled with his rebuff of the night before, but he had never loved her so well, for the idea that the cut in wages affected her relation to him never occurred to him. As he walked through the room none of the workers seemed to notice him, but worked with renewed energy. He might have been invisible for all the attention he seemed to excite. He looked with covert tenderness at the back of Ellen's head, and pa.s.sed on. He reflected that he had adopted the measure of wage-cutting with no difficulty whatever.

"All it needs is a little firmness," he thought, with a boyish complacency in his own methods. "Now I can keep on with the factory, and no turning the poor people adrift in midwinter."

At noon Robert put on his fur-lined coat and left the factory, springing into the sleigh, which had drawn up before the door with a flurry of bells. He had an errand in the next town that afternoon, and was not going to return. When the sleigh had slid swiftly out of sight through the storm, which was lightening a little, the people in the office turned to one another with a curious expression of liberty, but even then little was said. Nellie Stone was at the desk eating her luncheon; Ed Flynn and Dennison and one of the lasters, who had looked in and then stepped in when he saw Lloyd was gone, were there. The laster, who was young and coa.r.s.ely handsome, had an admiration for the pretty girl at the desk. Presently she addressed him, with her mouth full of apple-pie.

"Say, George, what are you fellows going to do?" she asked.

Dennison glanced keenly from one to the other; Flynn shrugged his shoulders and looked out of the window.

"Looks as if it was clearing up," he remarked.

"What are you going to do?" asked Nellie Stone again, with a coquettish flirt of her blond fluff of hair.

"Grin and bear it, I s'pose," replied the young laster, with an adoring look at her.

"My land! grin and bear a cut of ten per cent.? Well, I don't think you've got much s.p.u.n.k, I must say. Why don't you strike?"

"Who's going to feed us?" replied the laster, in a tender voice.

"Feed you? Oh, you don't want much to eat. Join the union. It's ridiculous so few of the men in Lloyd's belong to it, anyway; and then the union will feed you, won't it?"

"The union did not do what it promised in the Scarboro strike,"

interposed Dennison, curtly.

"Oh, we all know where you are, Frank Dennison," said the girl, with a soft roll of her blue eyes. "Besides, it's easy to talk when you aren't hit. Your wages aren't cut. But here is George May here, he's in a different box."

"He's got n.o.body dependent on him, anyway," said Flynn.

"If I wasn't going to get married I'd strike," cried the young man, with a fervent glance at the girl. She colored, half pleased, half angry, and the other men chuckled. She took another bite of pie to conceal her confusion. She preferred Flynn to the laster, and while she was not averse to proving to the former the triumph of her charms over another man, did not like too much concessions.