The Woman Who Toils Part 23

"Shall Molly sing By-O?"

She should. The little face, lifted, declared its request.

"Letty must sing, too," murmured the young girl. "Sing By-O! We'll all sing it together."

Letty covered her eyes with one hand-to feign sleep and sang her two words sweetly, "By-O! By-O!" and Molly joined her. Thus they rocked and hummed, a picture infinitely touching to see.

One of these two would soon be an unclaimed foundling when the unknown woman had faded out of existence. The other--who can say how to her maternity would come!

In the room where we sit Jones' wife died a few weeks before, victim to pneumonia that all winter has scourged the town--"the ketchin'

kind"--that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by many.[6]

[Footnote 6: There are no statistics, they tell me, kept of births, marriages or deaths in this State; it is less surprising that the mill village has none.]

In one corner stands a sewing machine, in another an organ--luxuries: in these cases, objects of art. They are bought on the installment plan, and some of these girls pay as high as $100 for the organ in monthly payments of $4 at a time. The mill-girl is too busy to use the machine and too ignorant to play the organ.

Jones is a courteous host. His lodgers occupy the comfortable seats, whilst he perches himself on the edge of a straight high-backed chair and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged, then deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs. I feel convinced that Jones thinks that Ma.s.sachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the social scale than South Carolina mill-girls! Because, after being witness more than once to my morning and evening ablutions on the back steps, he said:

"Now, I am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all; I'm goin' to fix up a wash-stand in that there loft." This is a triumph over the lax, uncleanly s.h.i.+ftlessness of the Southern settlement. Again:

"You-all must of had good food whar you come from: your skin shows it; 'tain't much like hyar-'bouts. Why, I'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if I met her at the North Pole--salla, pale, sickly."

I might have added for him, deathlike, ... skeleton ... _doomed_. But I listen, rocking in the best chair, whilst Mrs. White glides in from the kitchen and, un.o.bserved, takes her place on a little low chair by the sewing machine behind Jones. Her baby rocks contentedly in Molly's arms.

Jones continues: "I worked in the mill fifteen years. I have done a little of all jobs, I reckon, and I ain't got no use for mill-work. If they'd pay me fifty cents a side to run the 'speeders' I'd _go_ in fer an hour or two now and then. Why, I sell sewing machines and organs to the mill-hands all over the country. I make $60 a month, and _I touch all my money_," he said significantly. "It's the way to do. A man don't feel no dignity unless he does handle his own money, if it's ten cents or ten dollars." He then explains the corporation's methods of paying its slaves. Some of the hands never touch their money from month's end to month's end. Once in two weeks is pay-day. A woman has then worked 122 hours. The corporation furnishes her house. There is the rent to be paid; there are also the corporation stores from which she has been getting her food and coal and what gewgaws the cheap stuff on sale may tempt her to purchase. There is a book of coupons issued by the mill owners which are as good as gold. It is good at the stores, good for the rent, and her time is served out in pay for this representative currency. This is of course not obligatory, but many of the operatives avail themselves or bind themselves by it. When the people are ill, Jones says, they are docked for wages. When, for indisposition or fatigue, they knock a day off, there is a man, hired especially for this purpose, who rides from house to house to find out what is the matter with them, to urge them to rise, and if they are not literally too sick to move, they are hounded out of their beds and back to their looms.

Jones himself, mark you, is emanc.i.p.ated! He has set himself free; but he is still a too-evident although a very innocent partisan of the corporation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE SOUTHERN MILL HAND'S FACE IS UNIQUE, A FEARFUL TYPE"]

"I think," he says, "that the mill-hand is _meaner_ to the corporation than the corporation is to the mill-hand."

"Why?"

"Why, they would strike for shorter hours and better pay."

Unconsciously with one word he condemns his own cause.

"What's the use of these hyar mill-hands tryin' to fight corporations?

Why, Excelsior is the biggest mill under one roof in the world; its capital is over a million; it has 24,500 spindles. The men that run these mills have got all their stuff paid for; they've got piles of money. What do they care for a few penniless lot of strikers? They can shut down and not feel it. Why, these hyar people might just as well fight against a stone wall."

The wages of these people, remember, pay Jones for the organs upon which they cannot play and the machines which they cannot use. His home is a mill corporation house; he makes a neat sum by lodging the hands. He has fetched down from the hills Molly, his own niece, to work for him. He perforce _will_ speak well. I do not blame him.

He is by all means the most respectable-looking member of the colony. He wears store clothes; he dresses neatly; he is shaven, brushed and washed.

"Don't you let the mill hands discourage you with lies about the mill.

Any of 'em would be jealous of you-all." Then he warns, again forced to plead for another side: "You-all won't come out as you go in, I tell you! You're the picture of health. Why," he continues, a little later, "you ain't got no idea how light-minded the mill-girl is. Why, in the summer time she'll trolley four or five miles to a dance-hall they've got down to ---- and dance there till four o'clock--come home just in time to get into the mills at 5:45." Which fact convinces me of nothing but that the women are still, despite their condition and their white slavery, human beings, and many of them are young human beings (Thank G.o.d, for it is a prophecy for their future!) _not yet crushed to the dumb endurance of beasts_.

Rather early I bid them all good-night and climb the attic stairs to my loft. There the three beds arrayed in soggy striped comforters greet me.

Old boots and downtrodden shoes are thrown into the corners and the lines of clothing already describe fantastic shapes in the dark, suggesting pendant sinister figures. Windows are large, thank Heaven! In the mill district the air is heavy, singularly lifeless; the night is warm and stifling.

Close to an old trunk I sit down with a slip of paper on my knee and try to take a few notes. But no sooner have I begun to write than a step on the stair below announces another comer. Before annoyance can deepen too profoundly the big, awkward form of the landlady's niece slouches into sight. Sheepishly she comes across the room to me--sits down on the nearest bed. Molly's costume is typical: a dark cotton wrapper whose colours have become indistinct in the stains of machinery oil and perspiration. The mill girl boasts no coquetry of any kind around her neck and waist, but her headdress is a tribute to feminine vanity!

Compactly screwed curl papers, dozens of them, accentuate the hard, unlovely lines of her face and brow. Her features are coa.r.s.e, heavy and square, but her eyes are clear, frank and kind. She has an appealing, friendly expression; Molly is a distinctly whole-souled, nice creature.

One elbow sinks in the bed and she cradles her crimped head in her large, dirty hand.

"My, ef I could write as fast as you-all I'd write some letters, I reckon. Ust ter write; like it good enough, tew; but I ain't wrote in months. I was thinkin' th' other day ef I didn't take out the _pencile_ I'd dun forgit how to spell."

Without the window through which she gazes is seen the pale night sky and in the heavens hangs the thread of a moon. Its light is unavailing alongside of the artificial moon--an enormous electric light. This lifts its brilliant, dazzling circ.u.mference high in the centre of the mill street. I have but to move a trifle aside from the window coping's shelter to receive a blinding blaze. But Molly has been subtle enough to discover the natural beauty of the night. She sees, curiously enough, past this modern illumination: the young moon has charm for her. "Ain't it a pretty night?" she asks me. Its beauty has not much chance to enhance this room and the crude forms, but it has awakened something akin to sentiment in the breast of this young savage.

"I don't guess ever any one gets tired of hearing _sweet music_[7], does you-all?"

[Footnote 7: The Southern term for stringed instruments.]

"What is the nicest music you have ever heard, Molly?"

"Why, a gui-taar an' a mandolin. It's so sweet! I could sit for hours an' hyar 'em pick." Her curlpaper head wags in enthusiasm.

"Up to the hills, from whar I c.u.m, I ust ter hyar 'em a serenadin' of some gyrl an' I ust ter set up in bed and lis'en tel it died out; it warn't for _me_, tho'!"

"Didn't they ever serenade you?"

"No, _ma'am_; I don't pay no 'tention to spo'tin'."

Without, the moon's slender thread holds in a silvery circle the half-defined misty ball that shall soon be full moon. Thank heavens I shall not see this golden globe form, wane, decline in this town, forgotten of G.o.ds and men! But the woman at my side must see it mark its seasons; she is inscrutably part of the colony devoted to unending toil!

Here all she has brought of strong youth shall fade and perish; womanly sentiment be crushed; die out in sterility; or worse, coa.r.s.en to the animal like to those whose companion she is forced to be.

"I live to the Rockies, an' Uncle Tom he come up after me and carried me down hyar. My auntie died two weeks ago in the livin'-room; she had catchin' pneumonia. I tuk care of her all through her sickness, did every mite for her, and there was bo'ders, tew--I guess half a dozen of 'em--and I cooked and washed and everything for 'em all. When she died I went to work in the mill. Say, I reckon you-all didn't see my new hat?"

It was fetched, done up with care in paper. She displayed it, a white straw round hat, covered with roses. At praise of it and admiration the girl flushed with pleasure.

"My, you _dew_ like it? Why, I didn't think it _pretty, much_. Uncle Tom dun buy it for me."

She gives all her wages to Uncle Tom, who in turn brings her from time to time such stimulus to labour as some pretty feminine thing like this.

_This_ shall crown Molly's hair freed from the crimpers when the one day of the week, Sunday, comes! Not from Sunday till Sunday again are those hair crimpers unloosed.

Despite Uncle Tom's opposition to mill work for women, despite his cognizance of the unhealthfulness of the mills, he knew a thing or two when he put his strapping innocent niece to work thirteen hours a day and pocketed himself the spoils.

"I can't go to bade awful early, because I don't sleep ef I do; I'm too tired to sleep. When I feel real sick I tries to stay home a day, and then the overseer he rides around and _worries_ me to git up. I declare ef I wouldn't near as soon git up as to be roused up. They don't give you no peace, rousing you out of bed when you can scarcely stand. I suttenly dew feel bade to-night; I suttenly can't scarcely get to bed!"

Here into our discourse, mounting the stairs, comes the pale mother and her little child. This ghost of a woman, wedding-ringless, who called herself Mrs. White, could scarcely crawl to her bed. She was whiter than the moon and as slender. Molly's bed is close to mine. The night toilet of this girl consisted of her divesting herself of her shoes, stockings and her cotton wrapper, then in all the other garments she wore during the day she turned herself into bed, nightgownless, unwashed.

Mrs. White undressed her child, giving it very good care. It was a tiny creature, small-boned and meager. Every time I looked over at it it smiled appealingly, touchingly. Finally when she went downstairs to the pump to get a drink of water for it, I went over and in her absence stroked the little hand and arm: such a small hand and such an infinitesimal arm! Unused to attention and the touch, but not in the least frightened, Letty extended her miniature member and looked up at me in marvel. Mrs. White on her return made herself ready for the night.

She said in her frail voice: "Letty's a powerful hand for vegetubbles, and she eats everything."

Memory of the ham and the putrid fish I had seen this eighteen-months-old child devour not an hour ago came to my mind.

Mrs. White let down her hair--a nonchalance that Molly had not been guilty of. This woman's hair was no more than a wisp. It stood out thin, wiry, almost invisible in the semilight. This was the extent of her toilet. She slipped out of her shoes, but she did not even take off her dress. Then she turned in by her child. She was very ill; it was plain to be seen. Death was fast upon this woman's track; it should clutch her inevitably within the next few weeks at most, if that emaciated body had resistance for so long. Her languor was slow and indicative, her gray, ashen face like death itself.