The Woman Who Toils Part 22

With one finger of her right hand she detaches the yarn from the distaff that lies inert in the little iron rut before her. With her left hand she seizes the revolving circle of the large spool's top in front of her, holding this spool steady, overcoming the machinery for the moment not as strong as her grasp. This demands a certain effort. Still controlling the agitated spool with her left hand, she detaches the end of yarn with the same hand from the spool, and by means of a patent knotter harnessed around her palm she joins together the two loosened ends, one from the little distaff and one from this large spool, so that the two objects are set whirling in unison and the spool receives all the yarn from the distaff. Up and down this line the spooler must walk all day long, replenis.h.i.+ng the iron grooves with fresh yarn and reknitting broken strands. This is all that there is of "spooling." It demands alertness, quickness and a certain amount of strength from the left arm, and that is all! To conceive of a woman of intelligence pursuing this task from the age of eight years to twenty-two on down through incredible hours is not salutary. You will say to me, that if she demands nothing more she is fit for nothing more. I cannot think it.

The little girl who teaches me spooling is fresh and cheerful and jolly; I grant her all this. She lives at home. I am told by my subsequent friends that she thinks herself better than anybody. This pride and ambition has at least elevated her to neat clothes and a sprightliness of manner that is refres.h.i.+ng. She does not hesitate to evince her superiority by making sport of me. She takes no pains to teach me well. Instead of giving me the patent knotter, which would have simplified my job enormously, she teaches me what she expresses "the old-fas.h.i.+oned way"--knotting the yarn with the fingers. I have mastered this slow process by the time that the overseer discovers her trick and brings me the harness for my left hand. She is full of curiosity about me, asking me every sort of question, to which I give the best answers that I can. By and by she slips away from me. I turn to find her; she has vanished, leaving me under the care of a truly kind, sad little creature in a wrapper dress. This little Maggie has a heart of gold.

"Don't you-all fret," she consoles. "That's like Jeannie: she's so _mean_. When you git to be a remarkable fine spooler she'll want you on her side, you bet."

She a.s.sists my awkwardness gently.

"I'll learn you all right. You-all kin stan' hyar by me all day. Jeannie clean fergits she was a greenhorn herself onct; we all wuz. Whar you come from?"

"Lynn, Ma.s.sachusetts."

"Did you-all git _worried_ with the train? I only bin onto it onct, and it worried me for days!"

She tells me her simple annals with no question:

"My paw he married ag'in, and me stepmother peard like she didn't care for me; so one day I sez to paw, 'I'm goin' to work in the mills'--an' I lef home all alone and come here." After a little--"When I sayd good-by to my father peard like _he_ didn't care neither. I'm all alone here. I bo'ds with that girl's mother."

I wore that day in the mill a blue-checked ap.r.o.n. So did Maggie, but mine was from Wanamaker's in New York, and had, I suppose, a certain style, for the child said:

"I suttenly dew think that yere's a awful pretty ap.r.o.n: where'd you git it?"

"Where I came from," I answered, and, I am sorry to say, it sounded brusque. For the little thing blushed, fearful lest she had been indiscreet....(Oh, I a.s.sure you the qualities of good breeding are there! Some of my factory and mill friends can teach the set in which I move lessons salutary!)

"I didn't mean jest 'xactly wherebouts," she murmurs; "I only meant it warn't from these parts."

During the afternoon the gay Jeannie returns and presents to me a tin box. It is filled with a black powder. "Want some?" Well, what is it?

She greets my ignorance with shrieks of laughter. In a trice half a dozen girls have left their spooling and cl.u.s.ter around me.

"She ain't never _seen_ it!" and the little creature fills her mouth with the powder which she keeps under her tongue. "It is _snuff_!"

They all take it, old and young, even the smallest children. Their mouths are brown with it; their teeth are black with it. They take it and smell it and carry it about under their tongues all day in a black wad, spitting it all over the floor. Others "dip," going about with the long sticks in their mouths. The air of the room is white with cotton, although the spool-room is perhaps the freest. These little particles are breathed into the nose, drawn into the lungs. Lung disease and pneumonia--consumption--are the constant, never-absent scourge of the mill village. The girls expectorate to such an extent that the floor is nauseous with it; the little girls practise spitting and are adepts at it.

Over there is a woman of sixty, spooling; behind the next side is a child, not younger than eight, possibly, but so small that she has to stand on a box to reach her side. Only the very young girls show any trace of buoyancy; the older ones have accepted with more or less complaint the limitation of their horizons. They are drawn from the hill district with traditions no better than the loneliness, desertion and inexperience of the fever-stricken mountains back of them. They are illiterate, degraded; the mill has been their widest experience; and all their tutelage is the intercourse of girl to girl during the day and in the evenings the few moments before they go to bed in the mill-houses, where they either live at home with parents and brothers all working like themselves, or else they are fugitive lodgers in a boarding-house or a hotel, where their morals are in jeopardy constantly. As soon as a girl pa.s.ses the age, let us say of seventeen or eighteen, there is no hesitation in her reply when you ask her: "Do you like the mills?"

Without exception the answer is, "I _hate them_."

Absorbed with the novelty of learning my trade, the time goes swiftly.

Yet even the interest and excitement does not prevent fatigue, and from 12:45 to 6:45 seems interminable! Even when the whistle blows we are not all free--Excelsior is behindhand with her production, and those whom extra pay can beguile stay on. Maggie, my little teacher, walks with me toward our divided destinations, her quasi-home and mine.

Neither in the mill nor the shoe-shops did I take precaution to change my way of speaking--and not once had it been commented upon. To-day Maggie says to me:

"I reckon you-all is 'Piscopal?"

"Why?"

"Why, you-all _talks_ 'Piscopal."

So much for a tribute to the culture of the church.

At Jones' supper is ready, spread on a bare board running the length of the room--a bare board supported by saw-horses; the seats are boards again, a little lower in height. They sag in the middle threateningly.

One plate is piled high with fish--bones, skin and flesh all together in one odourous ma.s.s. Salt pork graces another platter and hominy another.

I am alone in the supper room. The guests, landlord and landlady are all absent. Some one, as he rushes by me, gives me the reason for the desertion:

"They've all gone to see the fight; all the white fellers is after a n.i.g.g.e.r."

Through the window I can see the fleeing forms of the settlers--women, sunbonnets in hand, the men hatless. It appears that all the world has turned out to see what lawless excitement may be in store. The whirling dust and sand in the distance denote the group formed by the Negro and his pursuers. This, standing on the little porch of my lodging-house, I see and am glad to find that the chase is fruitless. The black man, tortured to distraction, dared at length to rebel, and from the moment that he showed spirit his life was not worth a farthing, but his legs were, and he got clear of Excelsior. The lodgers troop back. Molly, my landlady's niece, breathing and panting, disheveled, leads the procession and is voluble over the affair.

"They-all pester a po'r n.i.g.g.e.r's life out 'er him, ye'es, they dew so!

Ef a n.i.g.g.e.r wants ter show his manners to me, why, I show mine to him,"

she said generously, "and ef he's a mannerly n.i.g.g.e.r, why, I ain't got nothin' ag'in him; no, sir, I suttenly ain't!"

It is difficult to conceive how broad and philanthropic, how generous and unusual this poor mill girl's standpoint is contrasted with the sentiment of the people with which she moves.

I slip into my seat at the table in the centre of the sagging board and find Molly beside me, the girl from Excelsior with the pretty hair on the other side. The host, Mr. Jones, honours the head of the table, and "grandmaw" waits upon us. Opposite are the three men operatives, flannel-s.h.i.+rted and dirty. The men are silent for the most part, and bend over their food, devouring the unpalatable stuff before them. I feel convinced that if they were not so terribly hungry they could not eat it. Jones discourses affably on the mill question, advising me to learn "speeding," as it pays better and is the only advanced work in the mill.

Molly, my elbow-companion, seems to take up the whole broad seat, she is so big and so pervading; and her close proximity--unwashed, heavy with perspiration as she is, is not conducive to appet.i.te. She is full of news and chatter and becomes the leading spirit of the meal.

"I reckon you-all never did see anything like the fight to the mill to-day."

She arouses at once the interest of even the dull men opposite, who pause, in the applying of their knives and forks, to hear.

"Amanda Wilc.o.x she dun tol' Ida Jacobs that she'd _do her_ at noon, and Ida she sarst her back. It was all about a _sport_[5]--Bill James.

He's been spo'tin' Ida Jacobs these three weeks, I reckon, and Amanda got crazy over it and 'clared she'd spile her game. And she tol' Ida Jacobs a lie about Bill--sayd he' been spo'tin' her down to the Park on Sunday.

[Footnote 5: A beau.]

"Well, sir, the whole spinnin'-room was out to see what they-all'd do at noon, and they jest resh'd for each other like's they was crazy; and one man he got between 'em and sayd, 'Now the gyrl what spits over my hand first can begin the fight.'

"They both them spit right, into each other's faces, they did so; and arter that yer couldn't get them apart. Ida Jacobs grabbed Amanda by the ha'r and Amanda hit her plump in the chest with her fist. They was suttenly like to kill each other ef the men hadn't just parted them; it took three men to part 'em."

Her story was much appreciated.

"Ida was dun fer, I can tell ye; she suttenly was. She can't git back to work fer days."

The spinning-room is the toughest room in the mill.

After supper the men went out on the porch with their pipes and we to the sitting-room, where Molly, the story-teller, seated herself in a comfortable chair, her feet outstretched before her. She made a lap, a generous lap, to which she tried to beguile the baby, Letty. Mrs. White had disappeared.

"You-all come here to me, Letty." She held out her large dirty hands to the blue-eyed waif. In its blue-checked ap.r.o.n, the remains of fish and ham around its mouth, its large blue eyes wandering from face to face in search of the pale mother who had for a time left her, Letty stood for a moment motionless and on the verge of tears.

"You-all come to Molly and go By-O."

There was some magic in that word that at long past eight charmed the eighteen-months'-old baby. She toddled across the floor to the mill-girl, who lifted her tenderly into her ample lap. The big, awkward girl, scarcely more than a child herself, uncouth, untutored, suddenly gained a dignity and a grace maternal--not too much to say it, she had charm.

Letty leaned her head against Molly's breast and smiled contentedly, whilst the mill-girl rocked softly to and fro.