|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A Story of To day
M >> Margret Howth >> A Story of To day Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 Scanned by Charles Keller with
OmniPage Professional OCR software
donated by Caere Corporation, 1-800-535-7226.
Contact Mike Lough
MARGRET HOWTH.
A STORY OF TO-DAY
"My matter hath no voice to alien ears."
TO MY MOTHER.
CHAPTER I.
Let me tell you a story of To-Day,--very homely and narrow in its
scope and aim. Not of the To-Day whose significance in the
history of humanity only those shall read who will live when you
and I are dead. We can bear the pain in silence, if our hearts
are strong enough, while the nations of the earth stand afar off.
I have no word of this To-Day to speak. I write from the border
of the battlefield, and I find in it no theme for shallow
argument or flimsy rhymes. The shadow of death has fallen on us;
it chills the very heaven. No child laughs in my face as I pass
down the street. Men have forgotten to hope, forgotten to pray;
only in the bitterness of endurance, they say "in the morning,
`Would God it were even!' and in the evening, `Would God it were
morning!'" Neither I nor you have the prophet's vision to see
the age as its meaning stands written before God. Those who
shall live when we are dead may tell their children, perhaps,
how, out of anguish and darkness such as the world seldom has
borne, the enduring morning evolved of the true world and the
true man. It is not clear to us. Hands wet with a brother's
blood for the Right, a slavery of intolerance, the hackneyed cant
of men, or the blood-thirstiness of women, utter no prophecy to
us of the great To-Morrow of content and right that holds the
world. Yet the To-Morrow is there; if God lives, it is there.
The voice of the meek Nazarene, which we have deafened down as
ill-timed, unfit to teach the watchword of the hour, renews the
quiet promise of its coming in simple, humble things. Let us go
down and look for it. There is no need that we should feebly
vaunt and madden ourselves over our self-seen rights, whatever
they may be, forgetting what broken shadows they are of eternal
truths in that calm where He sits and with His quiet hand
controls us.
Patriotism and Chivalry are powers in the tranquil, unlimited
lives to come, as well as here, I know; but there are less
partial truths, higher hierarchies who serve the God-man, that do
not speak to us in bayonets and victories,-- Mercy and Love. Let
us not quite neglect them, unpopular angels though they be. Very
humble their voices are, just now: yet not altogether dead, I
think. Why, the very low glow of the fire upon the hearth tells
me something of recompense coming in the hereafter,--
Christmas-days, and heartsome warmth; in these bare hills
trampled down by armed men, the yellow clay is quick with pulsing
fibres, hints of the great heart of life and love throbbing
within; slanted sunlight would show me, in these sullen
smoke-clouds from the camp, walls of amethyst and jasper, outer
ramparts of the Promised Land. Do not call us traitors, then,
who choose to be cool and silent through the fever of the
hour,--who choose to search in common things for auguries of the
hopeful, helpful calm to come, finding even in these poor
sweet-peas, thrusting their tendrils through the brown mould; a
deeper, more healthful lesson for the eye and soul than warring
truths. Do not call me a traitor, if I dare weakly to hint that
there are yet other characters besides that of Patriot in which a
man may appear creditably in the great masquerade, and not blush
when it is over; or if I tell you a story of To-Day, in which
there shall be no bloody glare,--only those homelier, subtiler
lights which we have overlooked. If it prove to you that the sun
of old times still shines, and the God of old times still lives,
is not that enough?
My story is very crude and homely, as I said,--only a rough
sketch of one or two of those people whom you see every day, and
call "dregs," sometimes,--a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you
might pick for yourself out of any of these warehouses or
back-streets. I expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I
know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find; idyls
delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious
eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of
pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened
themselves in everybody's home. You want something, in fact, to
lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to
kindle and chafe and glow in you. I want you to dig into this
commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it.
Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do
not see.
Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now. Ha! that is
spirit-stirring!--that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood!
Your manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor
daily necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into
this common, every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not
be in it also a great warfare. Not a serfish war; not altogether
ignoble, though even its only end may appear to be your daily
food. A great warfare, I think, with a history as old as the
world, and not without its pathos. It has its slain. Men and
women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in
your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs sleep
under every green hill-side.
You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that
war. There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a
judge's bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly
honour, for purer triumph than his who falls foremost in the
breach. Your enemy, Self, goes with you from the cradle to the
coffin; it is a hand-to-hand struggle all the sad, slow way,
fought in solitude,--a battle that began with the first
heart-beat, and whose victory will come only when the drops ooze
out, and sudden halt in the veins,--a victory, if you can gain
it, that will drift you not a little way upon the coasts of the
wider, stronger range of being, beyond death.
Let me roughly outline for you one or two lives that I have
known, and how they conquered or were worsted in the fight. Very
common lives, I know,--such as are swarming in yonder
market-place; yet I dare to call them voices of God,--all!
My reason for choosing this story to tell you is simple enough.
An old book, which I happened to find to-day, recalled it. It
was a ledger, iron-bound, with the name of the firm on the
outside,--Knowles & Co. You may have heard of the firm: they
were large woollen manufacturers: supplied the home market in
Indiana for several years. This ledger, you see by the writing,
has been kept by a woman. That is not unusual in Western trading
towns, especially in factories where the operatives are chiefly
women. In such establishments, they can fill every post
successfully, but that of overseer: they are too hard with the
hands for that.
The writing here is curious: concise, square, not flowing,--very
legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose. People who
profess to read character in chirography would decipher but
little from these cramped, quiet lines. Only this, probably:
that the woman, whoever she was, had not the usual fancy of her
sex for dramatizing her soul in her writing, her dress, her
face,--kept it locked up instead, intact; that her words and
looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere absorbents
by which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her, not
flaunting helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that
lay within, before careless passers-by. The first page has the
date, in red letters, October 2, 1860, largely and clearly
written. I am sure the woman's hand trembled a little when she
took up the pen; but there is no sign of it here; for it was a
new, desperate adventure to her, and she was young, with no faith
in herself. She did not look desperate, at all,--a quiet, dark
girl, coarsely dressed in brown.
There was not much light in the office where she sat; for the
factory was in one of the close by-streets of the town, and the
office they gave her was only a small square closet in the
seventh story. It had but one window, which overlooked a
back-yard full of dyeing vats. The sunlight that did contrive to
struggle in obliquely through the dusty panes and cobwebs of the
window, had a sleepy odour of copperas latent in it. You smelt
it when you stirred. The manager, Pike, who brought her up, had
laid the day-books and this ledger open on the desk for her. As
soon as he was gone, she shut the door, listening until his heavy
boots had thumped creaking down the rickety ladder leading to the
frame-rooms. Then she climbed up on the high office-stool
(climbed, I said, for she was a little, lithe thing) and went to
work, opening the books, and copying from one to the other as
steadily, monotonously, as if she had been used to it all her
life. Here are the first pages: see how sharp the angles are of
the blue and black lines, how even the long columns: one would
not think, that, as the steel pen traced them out, it seemed to
be lining out her life, narrow and black. If any such morbid
fancy were in the girl's head, there was no tear to betray it.
The sordid, hard figures seemed to her types of the years coming,
but she wrote them down unflinchingly: perhaps life had nothing
better for her, so she did not care. She finished soon: they had
given her only an hour or two's work for the first day. She
closed the books, wiped the pens in a quaint, mechanical fashion,
then got down and examined her new home.
It was soon understood. There were the walls with their broken
plaster, showing the laths underneath, with here and there, over
them, sketches with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had
been an artist in his way,--his name, P. Teagarden, emblazoned on
the ceiling with the smoke of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in
the dusty corners; a half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the
old toppling desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P.
Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full of ends of
cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was all,
except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the
whole. One thing more, odd enough there: a wire cage, hung on
the wall, and in it a miserable pecking chicken, peering
dolefully with suspicious eyes out at her, and then down at the
mouldy bit of bread on the floor of his cage,--left there, I
suppose, by the departed Teagarden. That was all, inside. She
looked out of the window. In it, as if set in a square black
frame, was the dead brick wall, and the opposite roof, with a cat
sitting on the scuttle. Going closer, two or three feet of sky
appeared. It looked as if it smelt of copperas, and she drew
suddenly back.
She sat down, waiting until it was time to go; quietly taking the
dull picture into her slow, unrevealing eyes; a sluggish,
hackneyed weariness creeping into her brain; a curious feeling,
that all her life before had been a silly dream, and this dust,
these desks and ledgers, were real,--all that was real. It was
her birthday; she was twenty. As she happened to remember that,
another fancy floated up before her, oddly life-like: of the old
seat she made under the currant-bushes at home when she was a
child, and the plans she laid for herself, when she should be a
woman, sitting there,--how she would dig down into the middle of
the world, and find the kingdom of the griffins, or would go
after Mercy and Christiana in their pilgrimage. It was only a
little while ago since these things were more alive to her than
anything else in the world. The seat was under the
currant-bushes still. Very little time ago; but she was a woman
now,--and, look here! A chance ray of sunlight slanted in,
falling barely on the dust, the hot heaps of wool, waking a
stronger smell of copperas; the chicken saw it, and began to
chirp a weak, dismal joy, more sorrowful than tears. She went to
the cage, and put her finger in for it to peck at. Standing
there, if the vacant life coming rose up before her in that hard
blare of sunlight, she looked at it with the same still, waiting
eyes, that told nothing.
The door opened at last, and a man came in,--Dr. Knowles, the
principal owner of the factory. He nodded shortly to her, and,
going to the desk, turned over the books, peering suspiciously at
her work. An old man, overgrown, looking like a huge misshapen
mass of flesh, as he stood erect, facing her.
"You can go now," he said, gruffly. "Tomorrow you must wait for
the bell to ring, and go--with the rest of the hands."
A curious smile flickered over her face like a shadow; but she
said nothing. He waited a moment.
"So!" he growled, "the Howth blood does not blush to go down into
the slime of the gutter? is sufficient to itself?"
A cool, attentive motion,--that was all. Then she stooped to tie
her sandals. The old man watched her, irritated. She had been
used to the keen scrutiny of his eyes since she was a baby, so
was cool under it always. The face watching her was one that
repelled most men: dominant, restless, flushing into red gusts of
passion, a small, intolerant eye, half hidden in folds of yellow
fat,--the eye of a man who would give to his master (whether God
or Satan) the last drop of his own blood, and exact the same of
other men.
She had tied her bonnet and fastened her shawl, and stood ready to go.
"Is that all you want?" he demanded. "Are you waiting to hear
that your work is well done? Women go through life as babies
learn to walk,--a mouthful of pap every step, only they take it
in praise or love. Pap is better. Which do you want? Praise, I fancy."
"Neither," she said, quietly brushing her shawl. "The work is
well done, I know."
The old man's eye glittered for an instant, satisfied; then he
turned to the books. He thought she had gone, but, hearing a
slight clicking sound, turned round. She was taking the chicken
out of the cage.
"Let it alone!" he broke out, sharply. "Where are you going with it?"
"Home," she said, with a queer, quizzical face. "Let it smell
the green fields, Doctor. Ledgers and copperas are not good food
for a chicken's soul, or body either."
"Let it alone!" he growled. "You take it for a type of yourself, eh?
It has another work to do than to grow fat and sleep about the barnyard."
She opened the cage.
"I think I will take it."
"No," he said, quietly. "It has a master here. Not P. Teagarden.
Why, Margret," pushing his stubby finger between the tin bars
"do you think the God you believe in would have sent it here
without a work to do?"
She looked up; there was a curious tremour in his flabby face, a
shadow in his rough voice.
"If it dies here, its life won't have been lost. Nothing is lost.
Let it alone."
"Not lost?" she said, slowly, refastening the cage. "Only I think"----
"What, child?"
She glanced furtively at him.
"It's a hard, scraping world where such a thing as that has work to do!"
He vouchsafed no answer. She waited to see his lip curl
bitterly, and then, amused, went down the stairs. She had paid
him for his sneer.
The steps were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great
staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the
factory. It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the
suburbs of trading towns. This one went round the four sides of
a square, with the yard for the vats in the middle. The ladders
and passages she passed down were on the inside, narrow and dimly
lighted: she had to grope her way sometimes. The floors shook
constantly with the incessant thud of the great looms that filled
each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder. It deafened her,
made her dizzy, as she went down slowly. It was no short walk to
reach the lower hall, but she was down at last. Doors opened
from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw
vast, dingy recesses of boxes piled up to the dark ceilings.
There was a crowd of porters and draymen cracking their whips,
and lounging on the trucks by the door, waiting for loads,
talking politics, and smoking. The smell of tobacco, copperas,
and burning logwood was heavy to clamminess here. She stopped,
uncertain. One of the porters, a short, sickly man, who stood
aloof from the rest, pushed open a door for her with his staff.
Margret had a quick memory for faces; she thought she had seen
this one before as she passed,--a dark face, sullen,
heavy-lipped, the hair cut convict-fashion, close to the head.
She thought too, one of the men muttered "jail-bird," jeering him
for his forwardness. "Load for Clinton! Western Railroad!" sung
out a sharp voice behind her, and, as she went into the street, a
train of cars rushed into the hall to be loaded, and men swarmed
out of every corner,--red-faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and
heavy-brained, Irish, Dutch, black, with souls half asleep
somewhere, and the destiny of a nation in their grasp,--hands,
like herself, going through the slow, heavy work, for, as Pike
the manager would have told you, "three dollars a week,--good
wages these tight times." For nothing more? Some other meaning
may have fallen from their faces into this girl's subtile
intuition in the instant's glance,--cheerfuller, remoter aims,
hidden in the most sensual face,--homeliest home-scenes, low
climbing ambitions, some delirium of pleasure to come,--whiskey,
if nothing better: aims in life like yours differing in degree.
Needing only to make them the same----did you say what?
She had reached the street now,--a back-street, a crooked sort of
lane rather, running between endless piles of warehouses. She
hurried down it to gain the suburbs, for she lived out in the
country. It was a long, tiresome walk through the outskirts of
the town, where the dwelling-houses were,--long rows of two-story
bricks drabbled with soot-stains. It was two years since she had
been in the town. Remembering this, and the reason why she had
shunned it, she quickened her pace, her face growing stiller than
before. One might have fancied her a slave putting on a mask,
fearing to meet her master. The town, being unfamiliar to her,
struck her newly. She saw the expression on its face better. It
was a large trading city, compactly built, shut in by hills. It
had an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator concluding a
keen bargain; the very dwelling-houses smelt of trade, having
shops in the lower stories; in the outskirts, where there are
cottages in other cities, there were mills here; the trees, which
some deluded dreamer had planted on the flat pavements, had all
grown up into abrupt Lombardy poplars, knowing their best policy
was to keep out of the way; the boys, playing marbles under them,
played sharply "for keeps;" the bony old dray-horses, plodding
through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes, that measured
their oats at night with a "you-don't-cheat-me" look. Even the
churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder
in the hills, where the few field-people--Arians, Calvinists,
Churchmen-- gathered every Sunday, and air and sunshine and
God's charity made the day holy. These churches lifted their
hard stone faces insolently, registering their yearly alms in the
morning journals. To be sure the back-seats were free for the
poor; but the emblazoned crimson of the windows, the carving of
the arches, the very purity of the preacher's style, said plainly
that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
than for a man in a red wamus to enter the kingdom of heaven
through that gate.
Nature itself had turned her back on the town: the river turned
aside, and but half a river crept reluctantly by; the hills were
but bare banks of yellow clay. There was a cinder-road leading
through these. Margret climbed it slowly. The low town-hills,
as I said, were bare, covered at their bases with dingy stubble-
fields. In the sides bordering the road gaped the black mouths
of the coal-pits that burrowed under the hills, under the town.
Trade everywhere,--on the earth and under it. No wonder the girl
called it a hard, scraping world. But when the road had crept
through these hills, it suddenly shook off the cinders, and
turned into the brown mould of the meadows,--turned its back on
trade and the smoky town, and speedily left it out of sight
contemptuously, never looking back once. This was the country
now in earnest.
Margret slackened her step, drawing long breaths of the fresh
cold air. Far behind her, panting and puffing along, came a
black, burly figure, Dr. Knowles. She had seen him behind her
all the way, but they did not speak. Between the two there lay
that repellent resemblance which made them like close
relations,--closer when they were silent. You know such people?
When you speak to them, the little sharp points clash. Yet they
are the few whom you surely know you will meet in the life beyond
death, "saved" or not. The Doctor came slowly along the quiet
country-road, watching the woman's figure going as slowly before
him. He had a curious interest in the girl,--a secret reason for
the interest, which as yet he kept darkly to himself. For this
reason he tried to fancy how her new life would seem to her. It
should be hard enough, her work,--he was determined on that; her
strength and endurance must be tested to the uttermost. He must
know what stuff was in the weapon before he used it. He had been
reading the slow, cold thing for years,--had not got into its
secret yet. But there was power there, and it was the power he
wanted. Her history was simple enough: she was going into the
mill to support a helpless father and mother; it was a common
story; she had given up much for them;--other women did the same.
He gave her scanty praise. Two years ago (he had keen, watchful
eyes, this man) he had fancied that the homely girl had a dream,
as most women have, of love and marriage: she had put it aside,
he thought, forever; it was too expensive a luxury; she had to
begin the life-long battle for bread and butter. Her dream had
been real and pure, perhaps; for she accepted no sham love in its
place: if it had left an empty hunger in her heart, she had not
tried to fill it. Well, well, it was the old story. Yet he
looked after her kindly as he thought of it; as some people look
sorrowfully at children, going back to their own childhood. For
a moment he half relented in his purpose, thinking, perhaps, her
work for life was hard enough. But no: this woman had been
planned and kept by God for higher uses than daughter or wife or
mother. It was his part to put her work into her hands.
The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out
through the hills. A sleepy, quiet road. The restless dust of
the town never had been heard of out there. It went wandering
lazily through the corn-fields, down by the river, into the very
depths of the woods,--the low October sunshine slanting warmly
down it all the way, touching the grass-banks and the corn-fields
with patches of russet gold. Nobody in such a road could be in a
hurry. The quiet was so deep, the free air, the heavy trees, the
sunshine, all so full and certain and fixed, one could be sure of
finding them the same a hundred years from now. Nobody ever was
in a hurry. The brown bees came along there, when their work was
over, and hummed into the great purple thistles on the road-side
in a voluptuous stupor of delight. The cows sauntered through
the clover by the fences, until they wound up by lying down in it
and sleeping outright. The country-people, jogging along to the
mill, walked their fat old nags through the stillness and warmth
so slowly that even Margret left them far behind. As the road
went deeper into the hills, the quiet grew even more penetrating
and certain,--so certain in these grand old mountains that one
called it eternal, and, looking up to the peaks fixed in the
clear blue, grew surer of a world beyond this where there is
neither change nor death.
It was growing late; the evening air more motionless and cool;
the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now;
in the valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment.
Margret turned from the road, and went down the fields. One did
not wonder, feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps
of meadow, that this woman, coming down from among them, should
be strangely still, with dark questioning eyes dumb to their own
secrets.
Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing: that
she had left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the
thought of them off her brain. No miles could measure the
distance between her home and them. At a stile across the field
an old man sat waiting. She hurried now, her cheek colouring.
Dr. Knowles could see them going to the house beyond, talking
earnestly. He sat down in the darkening twilight on the stile,
and waited half an hour. He did not care to hear the story of
Margret's first day at the mill, knowing how her father and
mother would writhe under it, soften it as she would. It was
nothing to her, he knew. So he waited. After a while he heard
the old man's laugh, like that of a pleased child, and then went
in and took her place beside him. She went out, but came back
presently, every grain of dust gone, in her clear dress of pearl
gray. The neutral tint suited her well. As she stood by the
window, listening gravely to them, the homely face and waiting
figure came into full relief. Nature had made the woman in a
freak of rare sincerity. There were no reflected lights about
her; no gloss on her skin, no glitter in her eyes, no varnish on
her soul. Simple and dark and pure, there she was, for God and
her master to conquer and understand. Her flesh was cold and
colourless,--there were no surface tints on it,--it warmed
sometimes slowly from far within; her voice, quiet,--out of her
heart; her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless
brown, lay in unpolished folds of dark shadow. I saw such hair
once, only once. It had been cut from the head of a man, who,
unconscious, simple as a child, lived out the law of his nature,
and set the world at defiance,--Bysshe Shelley.
Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13
|
|
|
|
|
|