All the week the two girls worked together at the mill; a week which was to Helen one long nightmare, filled, as it was, with the hum and roar of machinery, the hot breath of the mill, and worst of all, the seared and deadening thought that she was disgraced.
In the morning she entered the mill hoping it might fall on and destroy her. At night she went home to a drunken father and a little sister who needed, in her childish sorrow, all the pity and care of the elder one.
And one night her father, being more brutal than ever, had called out as Helen came in: “Come in, my mill-girl!”
Richard Travis always drove her home, and each night he became more familiar and more masterful. She felt,—she knew—that she was falling under his fascinating influence.
And worse than all, she knew she did not care.
There is a depth deeper even than the sin—the depth where the doer ceases to care.
Indeed, she was beginning to make herself believe that she loved him—as he said he wished her to do—and as he loved her, he said; and with what he said and what he hinted she dreamed beautiful, desperate dreams of the future.
She did not wonder, then, that on one drive she had permitted him to hold her hand in his. What a strong hand it was, and how could so weak a hand as her's resist it? And all the time he had talked so beautifully and had quoted Browning and Keats. And finally he had told her that she had only to say the word, and leave the mill with him forever.
But where, she did not even care—only to get away from the mill, from her disgrace, from her drunken father, from her wretched life.
And another night, when he had helped her out of the buggy, and while she was close to him and looking downward, he had bent over her and kissed her on the neck, where her hair had been gathered up and had left it white and fair and unprotected. And it sent a hot flame of shame to the depths of her brain, but she could only look up and say—“Oh, please don't—please don't, Mr. Travis,” and then dart quickly into the old gate and run to her home.
But within it was only to meet the taunts and sneers of her father that brought again the hot Conway blood in defying anger to her face, and then she had turned and rushed back to the gate which Travis had just left, crying:
“Take me now—anywhere—anywhere. Carry me away from here.”
But she heard only the sound of his trotters' feet up the road, and overcome with the reflective anguish of it all, she had tottered and dropped beneath the tree upon the grass—dropped to weep.
After a while she sat up, and going down the long path to the old spring, she bathed her face and hands in its cool depths. Then she sat upon a rock which jutted out into the water. It calmed her to sit there and feel the rush of the air from below, upon her hot cheeks and her swollen eyes.
The moon shone brightly, lighting up the water, the rocks which held the spring pool within their fortress of gray, and the long green path of water-cresses, stretching away and showing where the spring branch ran to the pasture.
Glancing down, she saw her own image in the water, and she smiled to see how beautiful it was. There was her hair hanging splendidly down her back, and in the mirror of water beneath she saw it was tinged with that divine color which had set the Roman world afire in Cleopatra's days. But then, there was her dress—her mill dress.
She sighed—she looked up at the stars. They always filled her with great waves of wonder and reverence.
“Is mother in one of you?” she asked. “Oh, mother, why were you taken from your two little girls? and if the dead are immortal, can they forget us of earth? Can they be indifferent to our fate? How could they be happy if they knew—” She stopped and looking up, picked out a single star that shone brighter than the others, clinging so close to the top of Sunset Rock as to appear a setting to his crown.
“I will imagine she is there”—she whispered—“in that world—O mother—mother—will you—cannot you help me?”
She was weeping and had to bathe her face again. Then another impulse seized her—an impulse of childhood. Pulling off her stockings, she dipped her feet in the cool water and splashed them around in sheer delight.
The moonbeams falling on them under the water turned the pink into white, and she smiled to see how like the pictures of Diana her ankles looked.
She had forgotten that the old spring was near the public road and that the rail fence was old and fallen. Her revery was interrupted by a bantering, half drunken, jolly laugh:
“Well, I must say I never saw anything quite so pretty!”
She sprang up in shame. Leaning on the old fence, she saw Harry Travis, a roguish smile on his face. She thought she would run, then she remembered her bare feet and she sat down on the grass, covering her ankles with her skirt. At first she wanted to cry, then she grew indignant as he came tipsily toward her and sat down by her side.
She was used to the smell of whiskey on the breath. Its slightest odor she knew instantly. To her it was the smell of death.
“Got to the Gov'nor's private bottle to-night,” he said familiarly, “and took a couple of cocktails. Going over to see Nellie, but couldn't resist such beauties as”—he pointed to her feet.
“It was mean of you to slip upon me as you did,” she said. Then she turned the scorn of her eyes on him and coolly looked him over, the weak face, the boyish, half funny smile, the cynical eyes,—trying to be a man of the world and too weak to know what it all meant.
The Conway spirit had come to her—it always did in a critical moment. She no longer blushed or even feared him.
“How, how,” she said slowly and looking him steadily over, “did I ever love such a thing as you?”
He moved up closer. “You will have to kiss me for that,” he said angrily. “I've kissed you so often I know just how to do it,” and he made an attempt to throw his arms around her.
She sprang away from him into the spring branch, standing knee deep in the water and among the water-cresses.
He arose hot with insolence: “Oh, you think you are too good for me now—now that the Gov'nor has set his heart on you. Damn him—you were mine before you were his. He may have you, but he will take you with Cassius' kisses on your lips.”
He sprang forward, reached over the rock and seized her by the arm. But she jerked away from him and sprang back into the deeper water of the spring. She did not scream, but it seemed that her heart would burst with shame and anger. She thought of Ophelia, and as she looked down into the water she wiped away indifferently and silently the cool drops which had splashed up into her face, and she wondered if she might not be able to drop down flat and drown herself there, and thus end it all.
He had come to the edge of the rock and stood leering drunkenly down on her.
“I love you,” he laughed ironically.
“I hate you,” she said, looking up steadily into his eyes and moving back out of his reach.
The water had wet her dress, and she stooped and dipped some of it up and bathed her hot cheeks.
“I'll kiss you if I have to wade into that spring.”
“If I had a brother,—oh, if I even had a father,” she said, looking at him with a flash of Conway fire in her eyes—“and you did—you would not live till morning—you know you wouldn't.”
She stood now knee-deep in water. Above her the half-drunken boy, standing on the rock which projected into the spring, emboldened with drink and maddened by the thought that she had so easily given him up, had reached out and seized her around the neck. He was rough, and it choked her as he drew her to him.
She screamed for the first time—for she thought she heard hoof beats coming down the road; then she heard a horseman clear the low fence and spur into the spring branch. The water from the horse's feet splashed over her. She remembered it only faintly—the big glasses—the old straw hat,—the leathern bag of samples around his shoulders.
“Most unusual,” she heard him say, with more calmness it seemed to Helen than ever: “Quite unusual—insultingly so!”
Instinctively she held up her arms and he stooped in the saddle and lifted her up and set her on the stone curbing on the side farthest from Harry Travis.
Then he turned and very deliberately reached over and seized Harry Travis, who stood on the rock, nearly on a line with the pommel of the saddle. But the hand that gripped the back of Harry's neck was anything but gentle. It closed around the neck at the base of the brain, burying its fingers in the back muscles with paralyzing pain and jerked him face downward across the saddle with a motion so swift that he was there before he knew it. Then another hand seized him and rammed his mouth, as he lay across the pommel of the saddle, into the sweaty shoulders below the horse's withers, and he felt the horse move out and into the road and up to the crossing of the ways just as a buggy and two fast bay mares came around the corner.
The driver of the bays stopped as he saw his cousin thrown like a pig over the pommel and held there kicking and cursing.
“I was looking for him,” said Richard Travis quietly, “but I would like to know what it all means.”
The big glasses shone in kindly humor. They did not reflect any excitement in the eyes behind them.
“I am afraid it means that he is drunk. Perhaps he will tell you about it. Quite unusual, I must say—he seemed to be trying to drown a young lady in a spring.”
He eased his burden over the saddle and dropped him into the road.
Richard Travis took it in instantly, and as Clay rode away he heard the cousin say: “You damned yellow cur—to bear the name of Travis.”
It was an hour before Clay Westmore rode back to Millwood. He had been too busy plowing that day to get, sooner, a specimen of the rock he had seen out-cropping on Sand Mountain. At night, after supper, he had ridden over for it.
And now by moonlight he had found it!
He flushed with the strength of it all as he put it in his satchel—the strength of knowing that not even poverty, nor work, nor night could keep him from accomplishing his purpose.
Then he rode back, stopping at Millwood. For he thought, too, that he might see Helen, and while he had resolved not to force himself on her after what she had said when he last saw her, still he wished very much to see her now and then.
For somehow, it never got out of his deductive head that some day she would learn to love him. Had he known the temptation, the despair that was hers, he would not have been so quietly deliberate. But she had never told him. In fact, he had loved her from a distance all his life in his quiet way, though now, by her decree, they were scarcely more than the best of friends. Some day, after he had earned enough, he would tell her just how much he loved her. At present he could not, for was he not too poor, and were not his mother and sister dependent upon him?
He knew that Harry Travis loved her in a way—a love he was certain would not last, and in the fullness and depths of his sincere nature, he felt as sure of ultimately winning her, by sheer force of strength, of consistency and devotion, as he was that every great thing in life had been done by the same force and would be to the end of time.
As sure as that, by this same force, he, himself, would one day discover the vein of coal which lay somewhere in the beautiful valley of the Tennessee.
And so he waited his time with the easy assurance of the philosopher which he was, and with that firm faith which minds of his strength always have in themselves and their ultimate success.
It surprised him, it is true—hurt him—when he found to what extent Harry Travis had succeeded in winning the love of Helen. He was hurt because he expected—hoped—she would see further into things than she had. And counting all the poverty and hardships of his life, the Sunday afternoon when he had left her in the arbor, after she had told him she was engaged to Harry Travis, he could not remember when anything had been so hard for him to bear. Later he had heard how she had gone to work in the mill, and he knew that it meant an end of her love affair with Harry.
To-night something told him it was time to see her again, not to tell her of his own love, and how it would never change, whether she was mill girl or the mistress of Millwood, but to encourage her in the misery of it all.
Work—and did not he himself love to work? Was it not the noblest thing of life?
He would tell her it was.
He was surprised when he saw what had just happened; but all his life he had controlled himself to such a degree that in critical moments he was coolest; and so what with another might have been a serious affair, he had turned into half retributive fun, but the deadliest punishment, as it afterwards turned out, that he could have inflicted on a temperament and nature such as Harry Travis'. For that young man, unable to stand the gibes of the neighborhood and the sarcasm of his uncle when it all became known, accepted a position in another town and never came back again.
To have been shot or floored in true melodramatic style by his rival, as he stood on a rock with a helpless girl in his clutch, would have been more to his liking than to be picked up bodily, by the nape of his neck, and taken from the scene of his exploits like a pig across a saddle.
That kind of a combat did not meet his ideas of chivalry.
Helen was dressed in her prettiest gown when Clay rode back to Millwood, after securing the samples he had started for. She knew he was coming and so she tied a white scarf over her head and went again to her favorite seat beneath the trees.
“I don't know how to thank you, Clay,” she said, as he swung down from his saddle and threw his leathern bag on the grass.
“Now, you look more like yourself,” he smiled admiringly, as he looked down on her white dress and auburn hair, drooping low over her neck and shoulders.
“Tell me about yourself and how you like it at the mill,” he went on as he sat down.
“Oh, you will not be willing to speak to me now—now that I am a mill-girl,” she added. “Do you know? Clay—”
“I know that, aside from being beautiful, you have just begun to be truly womanly in my sight.”
“Oh, Clay, do you really think that? It is the first good word that has been spoken to me since—since my—disgrace.”
He turned quickly: “Your disgrace! Do you call it disgrace to work—to make an honest living—to be independent and self-reliant?”
He picked up his bag of samples and she saw that his hands had become hard and sunburnt from the plow handles.
“Helen,” he went on earnestly, “that is one of the hide-bound tyrannies that must be banished from our Southland—banished as that other tyranny, slavery, has been banished—a sin, which, with no fault of our own, we inherited from the centuries. We shall never be truly great—as God intended we should be great—until we learn to work. We have the noblest and sunniest of lands, with more resources than man now dreams of, a greater future than we know of if we will only work—work and develop them. You have set an example for every girl in the South who has been thrown upon her own resources. Never before in my life have I cared—so—much—for you.”
And he blushed as he said it, and fumbled his samples.
“Then you do care some for me?” she asked pleadingly. She was heart-sick for sympathy and did not know just what she said.
He flushed and started to speak. He looked at her, and his big glasses quivered with the suppressed emotions which lay behind them in his eyes.
But he saw that she did not love him, that she was begging for sympathy and not for love. Besides, what right had he to plan to bring another to share his poverty?
He mounted his horse as one afraid to trust himself to stay longer. But he touched her hair in his awkward, funny way, before he swung himself into the saddle, and Helen, as she went into the desolate home, felt uplifted as never before.
Never before had she seen work in that light—nor love.
It was Maggie's last day at the mill, and she had been unusually thoughtful. Her face was more pinched, Helen thought, and the sadness in her eyes had increased.
Helen had proved to be an apt pupil, and Maggie declared that thereafter she would be able to run her machine without assistance.
It was Saturday noon and Maggie was ready to go, though the mill did not shut down until six that day. And so she found herself standing and looking with tearful eyes at the machine she had learned to love, at the little room in which she had worked so long, supporting her invalid father and her little ones—as she motherly called the children. It had been hard—so hard, and the years had been long and she was so weak now, compared to what she had been. How happy she had thought the moment of her leaving would be; and yet now that it had come—now—she was weeping.
“I didn't think,” she said to Helen—“I didn't think I'd—I'd care so to leave it—when—when—the time—came.”
She turned and brushed away her tears in time to see Travis come smiling up.
“Why, Maggie,” he said playfully flipping the tip of her ear as he passed her. “I thought you left us yesterday afternoon. You'll not be forgetting us now that you will not see us again, will you?”
She flushed and Helen heard her say: “Forget you—ever? Oh, please, Mr. Travis—” and her voice trembled.
“Oh, tut,” he said, frowning quickly—“nothing like that here. Of course, you will hate to leave the old mill and the old machine. Come, Maggie, you needn't wait—you're a good girl—we all know that.”
He turned to Helen and watched her as she drew in the threads. Her head was bent over, and her great coil of hair sat upon it like a queen on a throne.
What a neck and throat she had—what a beautiful queenly manner!
Travis smiled an amused smile when he thought of it—an ironical sneering smile; but he felt, as he stood there, that the girl had fascinated him in a strange way, and now that she was in his power, “now that Fate, or God has combined to throw her into my arms—almost unasked for—is it possible that I am beginning to fall in love with her?”
He had forgotten Maggie and stood looking at Helen. And in that look Maggie saw it all. He heard her sit down suddenly.
“I would go if I were you, Maggie—you are a good girl and we shall not forget you.”
“May I stay a little while longer?” she asked. “I won't ever come back any more, you know.”
Travis turned quickly and walked off. He came back and spoke to Helen.
“Remember, I am to take you home to-night. But it will be later than usual, on account of the pay-roll.”
As he shut the door Maggie turned, and her heart being too full to speak, she came forward and dropped on her knees, burying her face in Helen's lap. “You must not notice me,” she said—“don't—don't—oh, don't look at me.”
Helen stroked her cheek and finally she was quiet.
Then she looked into Helen's face. “Do you know—oh, will you mind if I speak to you—or perhaps I shouldn't—but—but—don't you see that he loves you?”
Helen reddened to her ears.
“I am foolish—sick—nervous—I know I am silly an' yet I don't see how he could help it—you are so queenly—beautiful—so different from any that are here. He—he—has forgotten me—”
Helen looked at her quickly.
“Why, I don't understand,” she said.
“I mean,” she stammered, “he used to notice us common girls—me and the others—”
“I don't understand you,” said Helen, half indignantly.
“Oh, don't pay no 'tention to me,” she said. “I, I fear I am sick, you know—sicker than I thought,” and she coughed violently.
She lay with her head in Helen's lap. “Please,” she said timidly, looking up into Helen's face at last—“please let me stay this way a while. I never knew a mother—nobody has ever let me do this befo', an' I am so happy for it.”
Helen stroked her face and hair anew, and Maggie kneeled looking up at her eagerly, earnestly, hungrily, scanning every feature of the prettier girl with worshipping eyes.
“How could he he'p it—how could he he'p it,” she said softly—“yes—yes—you are his equal and so beautiful.”
“I don't understand you, Maggie—indeed I do not.”
Maggie arose quickly: “Good-bye—let me kiss you once mo'—I feel like I'll never see you again—an'—an'—I've learned to love you so!”
Helen raised her head and kissed her.
Then Maggie passed quickly out, and with her eyes only did she look back and utter a farewell which carried with it both a kiss and a tear. And something else which was a warning.
And Helen never forgot.
It was Saturday afternoon and pay-day, and the mill shut down at six o'clock.
When Helen went in Kingsley sat at the Superintendent's desk, issuing orders on the Secretary and Treasurer, Richard Travis, who sat at his desk near by and paid the wages in silver.
Connected with the mill was a large commissary or store—a cheap modern structure which stood in another part of the town, filled with the necessaries of life as well as the flimsy gewgaws which delight the heart of the average mill hand. In establishing this store, the directors followed the usual custom of cotton-mills in smaller towns of the South; paying their employees part in money and part in warrants on the store. It is needless to add that the prices paid for the goods were, in most cases, high enough to cut the wages to the proper margin. If there was any balance at the end of the month, it was paid in money.
Kingsley personally supervised this store, and his annual report to the directors was one of the strong financial things of his administration.
A crowd of factory hands stood around his desk, and the Superintendent was busy issuing orders on the store, or striking a balance for the Secretary and Treasurer to pay in silver.
They stood around tired, wretched, lint- and dust-covered, but expectant. Few were there compared with the number employed; for the wages of the minors went to their parents, and as minors included girls under eighteen and boys under twenty-one, their parents were there to receive their wages for them.
These children belonged to them as mercilessly as if they had been slaves, and despite the ties of blood, no master ever more relentlessly collected and appropriated the wages of his slaves than did the parents the pitiful wages of their children.
There are two great whippers-in in the child slavery of the South—the mills which employ the children and the parents who permit it—encourage it. Of these two the parents are often the worse, for, since the late enactment of child labor laws, they do not hesitate to stultify themselves by false affidavits as to the child's real age.
Kingsley had often noticed how promptly and even proudly the girls, after reaching eighteen, and the boys twenty-one, had told him hereafter to place their wages to their own credit, and not to the parent's. They seemed to take a new lease on life. Decrepit, drawn-faced, hump-shouldered and dried up before their time, the few who reached the age when the law made them their own masters, looked not like men and women who stand on the threshold of life, but rather like over-worked middle-aged beings of another period.
Yet that day their faces put on a brighter look.
They stood around the office desk, awaiting their turn. The big engine had ceased to throb and the shuttles to clatter and whirl. The mill was so quiet that those who had, year in and year out, listened to its clatter and hum, seemed to think some overhanging calamity was about to drop out of the sky of terrible calm.
“Janette Smith,” called out Kingsley.
She came forward, a bony, stoop-shouldered woman of thirty-five years who had been a spooler since she was fifteen.
“Seventy-seven hours for the week”—he went on mechanically, studying the time book, “making six dollars and sixteen cents. Rent deducted two dollars. Wood thirty-five cents. Due commissary for goods furnished—here, Mr. Kidd,” he said to the book-keeper, “let me see Miss Smith's account.” It was shoved to him across the desk. Kingsley elevated his glasses. Then he adjusted them with a peculiar lilt—it was his way of being ironical:
“Oh, you don't owe the store anything, Miss Smith—just eleven dollars and eighty cents.”
The woman stood stoically—not a muscle moved in her face, and not even by the change of an eye did she indicate that such a thing as the ordinary human emotions of disappointment and fear had a home in the heart.
“Mother was sick all last month,” she said at last in a voice that came out in the same indifferent, unvarying tone. “I had to overdraw.”
Kingsley gave his eye-glasses another lilt. They said as plainly as eye-glasses could: “Well, of course, I made her sick.” Then he added abruptly: “We will advance you two dollars this week—an' that will be all.”
“I hoped to get some little thing that she could eat—some relish,” she began.
“Not our business, Miss Smith—sorry—very sorry—but try to be more economical. Economy is the great objective haven of life. Emerson says so. And Browning in a most beautiful line of poetry says the same thing,” he added.
“The way to begin economy is to begin it—Emerson is so helpful to me—he always comes in at the right time.”
“And it's only to be two dollars,” she added.
“That's all,” and he pushed her the order. She took it, cashed it and went hurriedly out, her poke bonnet pulled over her face. But there were hot tears and a sob under her bonnet.
And so it went on for two hours—some drawing nothing, but remaining to beg for an order on the store to keep them running until next week.
One man with six children in the mill next came forward and drew eighteen dollars. He smiled complacently as he drew it and chucked the silver into his pocket. This gave Jud Carpenter, standing near, a chance to get in his mill talk.
“I tell you, Joe Hopper,” he said, slapping the man on the back, “that mill is a great thing for the mothers an' fathers of this little settlement. What 'ud we do if it warn't for our chillun?”
“You're talkin now—” said Joe hopefully.
“It useter be,” said Jud, looking around at his crowd, “that the parents spoiled the kids, but now it is the kids spoilin' the parents.”
His audience met this with smiles and laughter.
“I never did know before,” went on Jud, “what that old sayin' really meant: 'A fool for luck an' a po' man for chillun.'”
Another crackling laugh.
“How much did Joe Hopper's chillun fetch 'im in this week?”
Joe jingled his silver in his pocket and spat importantly on the floor.
“I tell you, when I married,” said Jud, “I seed nothin' but poverty an' the multiplication of my part of the earth ahead of me—poverty, I tell you, starvation an' every new chile addin' to it. But since you started this mill, Mister Kingsley (Kingsley smiled and bowed across the desk at him), I've turned what everybody said 'ud starve us into ready cash. And now I say to the young folks: 'Marry an' multiply an' the cash will be forthcomin'.'”
This was followed by loud laughs, especially from those who were blessed with children, and they filed up to get their wages.
Jim Stallings, who had four in the mill, was counted out eleven dollars. As he pocketed it he looked at Jud and said:
“Oh, no, Jud; it don't pay to raise chillun. I wish I had the chance old Sollerman had. I'd soon make old Vanderbilt look like shin plaster.”
He joined in the laughter which followed.
In the doorway he cut a pigeon-wing in which his thin, bowed legs looked comically humorous.
Jud Carpenter was a power in the mill, standing as he did so near to the management. To the poor, ignorant ones around him he was the mouth-piece of the mill, and they feared him even more than they did Kingsley himself, Kingsley with his ironical ways and lilting eye-glasses. With them Jud's nod alone was sufficient.
They were still grouped around the office awaiting their turn. In the faces of some were shrewdness, cunning, hypocrisy. Some looked out through dull eyes, humbled and brow-beaten and unfeeling. But all of them when they spoke to Jud Carpenter—Jud Carpenter who stood in with the managers of the mill—became at once the grinning, fawning framework of a human being.
“Yes, boys,” said Jud patronizingly as Stallings went out, “this here mill is a god-send to us po' folks who've got chillun to burn. They ain't a day we ortenter git down on our knees an' thank Mr. Kingsley an' Mister Travis there. You know I done took down that sign I useter have hangin' up in my house in the hall—that sign which said, God bless our home? I've put up another one now.”
“What you done put up now, Jud?” grinned a tall weaver with that blank look of expectancy which settles over the face of the middle man in a negro minstrel troupe when he passes the stale question to the end man, knowing the joke which was coming.
“Why, I've put up,” said Jud brutally, “'Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me.' That's scriptural authority for cotton mills, ain't it?”
The paying went on, after the uproarious laughter had subsided, and down the long row only the clinking of silver was heard, intermingled now and then with the shrill voice of some creature disputing with Kingsley about her account. Generally it ran thus: “It cyant be thet away. Sixty hours at five cents an hour—wal, but didn't the chillun wuck no longer than that? I cyant—I cyant—I jes' cyant live on that little bit.”
Such it was, and it floated down the line to Helen like the wail of a lost soul. When her time came Kingsley met her with a smile. Then he gave her an order and Travis handed her a bright crisp ten-dollar bill.
She looked at him in astonishment. “But—but,” she said. “Surely, I didn't earn all this, did I? Maggie—you had to pay Maggie for teaching me this week. It was she who earned it. I cannot take it.”
Kingsley smiled: “If you must know—though we promised her we would not tell you,” he said—“no, Miss Conway, you did not earn but five dollars this week. The other five is Maggie's gift to you—she left it here for you.”
She looked at him stupidly—in dazed gratitude. Travis came forward:
“I've ordered Jim to take you home to-night. I cannot leave now.”
And he led her out to where the trotters stood. He lifted her in, pressing her hand as he did so—but she did not know it—she burned with a strange fullness in her throat as she clutched her money, the first she had ever earned, and thought of Maggie—Maggie, dying and unselfish.
Work—it had opened a new life to her. Work—and never before had she known the sweetness of it.
“Oh, father,” she said when she reached home, “I have made some money—I can support you and Lily now.”
When Travis returned Jud Carpenter met him at the door.
“I had a mess o' trouble gittin' that gal into the mill. Huh! but ain't she a beaut! I guess you 'orter tip me for throwin' sech a peach as that into yo' arms. Oh, you're a sly one—” he went on whisperingly—“the smoothest one with women I ever seed. But you'll have to thank me for that queen. Guess I'll go down an' take a dram. I want to git the lint out of my throat.”
“I'll be down later,” said Travis as he looked at his watch. “Charley Biggers and I. It's our night to have a little fun with the boys.”
“I'll see you there,” said Jud.
The clinking of silver, questions, answers, and expostulations went on. In the midst of it there was the sudden shrill wail of an angry child.
“I wants some of my money, Paw—I wants to buy a ginger man.”
Then came a cruel slap which was heard all over the room, and the boy of ten, a wild-eyed and unkempt thing, staggered and grasped his face where the blow fell.
“Take that, you sassy meddling up-start—you belong to me till you are twenty-one years old. What 'ud you do with a ginger man 'cept to eat it?” He cuffed the boy through the door and sent him flying home.
It was Joe Sykes, the wages of whose children kept him in active drunkenness and chronic inertia. He was the champion loafer of the town.
In a short time he had drawn a pocketful of silver, and going out soon overtook Jud Carpenter.
“I tell you, Jud, we mus' hold these kids down—we heads of the family. I've mighty nigh broke myself down this week a controllin' mine. Goin' down to take a drink or two? Same to you.”
A village bar-room is a village hell.
Jud Carpenter and Joe Hopper were soon there, and the silver their children had earned at the mill began to go for drinks.
The drinks made them feel good. They resolved to feel better, so they drank again. As they drank the talk grew louder. They were joined by others from the town—ne'er-do-wells, who hung around the bar—and others from the mill.
And so they drank and sang and danced and played cards and drank again, and threw dice for more drinks.
It was nearly nine o'clock before the Bacchanal laugh began to ring out at intervals—so easily distinguished from the sober laugh, in that it carries in its closing tones the queer ring of the maniac's.
Only the mill men had any cash. The village loafers drank at their expense, and on credit.
“And why should we not drink if we wish,” said one of them. “Our children earned the money and do we not own the children?”
Twice only were they interrupted. Once by the wife of a weaver who came in and pleaded with her husband for part of their children's money. Her tears touched the big-hearted Billy Buch, and as her husband was too drunk to know what he was doing, Billy took what money he had left and gave it to the wife. She had a sick child, she told Billy Buch, and what money she had would not even buy the medicine.
Billy squinted the corner of one eye and looked solemnly at the husband: “He ha'f ten drinks in him ag'in, already. I vill gif you pay for eet all for the child. An' here ees one dollar mo' from Billy Buch. Now go, goot voman.”
The other interruption was the redoubtable Mrs. Billings; her brother, also a slubber, had arrived early, but had scarcely taken two delightful, exquisite drinks before she came on the scene, her eyes flashing, her hair disheveled, and her hand playing familiarly with something under her apron.
Her presence threw them into a panic.
“Mine Gott!” said Billy, turning pale. “Eet es Meeses Billings an' her crockery.”
Half a dozen jubilants pointed out a long-haired man at a center table talking proudly of his physical strength and bravery.
“Cris Ham?” beckoned Mrs. Billings, feeling nervously under her apron. “Come with me!”
“I'll be along t'orectly, sis.”
“You will come now,” she said, and her hands began to move ominously beneath her apron.
“To be sho',” he said as he walked out with her. “I didn't know you felt that away about it, sis.”
It was after ten o'clock when the quick roll of a buggy came up to the door, and Richard Travis and Charley Biggers alighted.
They had both been drinking. Slowly, surely, Travis was going down in the scale of degeneracy. Slowly the loose life he was leading was lowering him to the level of the common herd. A few years ago he would not have thought of drinking with his own mill hands. To-night he was there, the most reckless of them all. Analyzed, it was for the most part conceit with him; the low conceit of the superior intellect which would mingle in infamy with the lowest to gain its ignorant homage. For Intellect must have homage if it has to drag it from the slums.
Charley Biggers was short and boyish, with a fat, round face. When he laughed he showed a fine set of big, sensual teeth. His eyes were jolly, flighty, insincere. Weakness was written all over him, from a derby hat sitting back rakishly on his forehead to the small, effeminate boot that fitted so neatly his small effeminate foot. He had a small hand and his little sensual face had not a rough feature on it. It was set off by a pudgy, half-formed dab of a nose that let his breath in and out when his mouth happened to be shut. His eyes were the eyes of one who sees no wrong in anything.
They came in and pulled off their gloves, daintily. They threw their overcoats on a chair. Travis glanced around the circle of the four or five who were left and said pompously:
“Come up, gentlemen, and have something at my expense.” Then he walked up to the bar.
They came. They considered it both a pleasure and an honor, as Jud Carpenter expressed it, to drink with him.
“It is a good idea to mingle with them now and then,” whispered Travis to Charley. “It keeps me solid with them—health, gentlemen!”
Charley Biggers showed his good-natured teeth:
“Health, gentlemen,” he grinned.
Then he hiccoughed through his weak little nose.
“Joe Hopper can't rise, gentlemen, Joe is drunk, an'—an' a widderer, besides,” hiccoughed Joe from below.
Joe had been a widower for a year. His wife, after being the mother of eleven children, who now supported Joe in his drunkenness, had passed away.
Then Joe burst into tears.
“What's up, Joe?” asked Jud kindly.
“Liza's dead,” he wailed.
“Why, she's been dead a year,” said Jud.
“Don't keer, Jud—I'm jes'—jes' beginnin' to feel it now”—and he wept afresh.
It was too much for Charley Biggers, and he also wept. Travis looked fixedly at the ceiling and recited portions of the Episcopal burial service. Then Jud wept. They all wept.
“Gentlemen,” said Travis solemnly, “let us drink to the health of the departed Mrs. Hopper. Here's to her!”
This cheered all except Joe Hopper—he refused to be comforted. They tried to console him, but he only wept the more. They went on drinking and left him out, but this did not tend to diminish his tears.
“Oh, Mister Hopper, shet up,” said Jud peremptorily—“close up—I've arranged for you to marry a grass-widder.”
This cheered him greatly.
“O Jud—Jud—if I marry a grass-widder whut—whut'll I be then?”
“Why? a grasshopper, sure,” said Travis.
They all roared. Then Jud winked at Travis and Travis winked at the others. Then they sat around a table, all winking except poor Joe, who continued to weep at the thought of being a grasshopper. He did not quite understand how it was, but he knew that in some way he was to be changed into a grasshopper, with long green wings and legs to match.
“Gentlemen,” said Jud seriously—“it is our duty to help out po' Joe. Now, Joe, we've arranged it for you to marry Miss Kate Galloway—the grass-widder.”
“Not Miss Kate,” said Travis with becoming seriousness.
“Why not her, Mr. Travis?” asked Jud, winking.
“Because his children will be Katydids,” said Travis.
This brought on thundering roars of laughter and drinks all around. Only Joe wept—wept to think his children would be katydids.
“Now, Joe, it's this way. I've talked it all over and arranged it. That's what we've met for to-night—ain't it, gents?” said Jud.
“Sure—sure,” they all exclaimed.
“Now, Joe, you mus' dry yo' tears an' become reconciled—we've got a nice scheme fixed for you.”
“I'll never be reconciled—never,” wailed Joe. “Liza's dead an'—I'm a grasshopper.”
“Now, wait till I explain to you—but, dear, devoted friend, everything is ready. The widder's been seen an' all you've got to do is to come with us and get her.”
“She's a mighty handsome 'oman,” said Jud, winking his eye. “Dear—dear frien's—all—I'm feelin' reconciled already”—said Joe.
They all joined in the roar. Jud winked. They all winked. Jud went on:
“Joe, dear, dear Joe—we have had thy welfare at heart, as the books say. We wanted thee to become a millionaire. Thou hast eleven children to begin with. They pay you—”
“Eighteen dollars a week, clear,”—said Joe proudly.
“Well, now, Joe—it's all arranged—you marry the widder an' in the course of time you'll have eleven mo'. That's another eighteen dollars—or thirty-six dollars a week clear in the mills.”
“Now, but I hadn't thought of that,” said Joe enthusiastically—“that's a fact. When—when did you say the ceremony'd be performed?”
“Hold on,” said Jud, “now, we've studied this thing all out for you. You're a Mormon—the only one of us that is a Mormon—openly.”
They all laughed.
“Openly—” he went on—“you've j'ined the Mormon church here up in the mountains.”
“But we don't practise polygamy—now”—said Joe.
“That's only on account of the Grand Jury and the law—not yo' religion. You see—you'll marry an' go to Utah—but—es the kids come you'll sen' 'em all down here to the mills—every one a kinder livin' coupon. All any man's got to do in this country to git rich is to marry enough wives.”
“Can I do that—do the marryin' in Utah an' keep sendin' the—the chilluns down to the mill?” His eyes glittered.
“Sart'inly”—said Jud—“sure!”
“Then there's Miss Carewe”—he went on—“you haf'ter cal'clate on feedin' several wives in one, with her. But say eleven mo' by her. That's thirty-seven mo'.”
Joe jumped up.
“Is she willin'?”
“Done seen her,” said Jud; “she say come on.”
“Hold on,” said Travis with feigned anger. “Hold on. Joe is fixin' to start a cotton-mill of his own. That'll interfere with the Acme. No—no—we must vote it down. We mustn't let Joe do it.”
Joe had already attempted to rise and start after his wives. But in the roar of laughter that followed he sat down and began to weep again for Liza.
It was nearly midnight. Only Travis, Charley Biggers and Jud remained sober enough to talk. Charley was telling of Tilly and her wondrous beauty.
“Now—it's this way,” he hiccoughed—“I've got to go off to school—but—but—I've thought of a plan to marry her first, with a bogus license and preacher.”
There was a whispered conversation among them, ending in a shout of applause.
“What's the matter with you takin' yo' queen at the same time?” asked Jud of Travis.
Travis, drunk as he was, winced to think that he would ever permit Jud Carpenter to suggest what he had intended should only be known to himself. His tongue was thick, his brain whirled, and there were gaps in his thoughts; but through the thickness and heaviness he thought how low he had fallen. Lower yet when, despite all his vanishing reserve, all his dignity and exclusiveness, he laughed sillily and said:
“Just what I had decided to do—two queens and an ace.”
They all cheered drunkenly.