Life in the Iron Mills
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Rebecca Harding Davis >> Life in the Iron Mills
Life in the Iron-Mills
by Rebecca Harding Davis
"Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?"
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?
The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air
is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It
stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely
see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd
of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their
pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells
ranging loose in the air.
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in
slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and
settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke
on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,--
clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two
faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of
mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street,
have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside,
is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the
mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted
and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately
in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is
a very old dream,--almost worn out, I think.
From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down
to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river,
dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself
sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-
barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a
look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river
slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the
same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window
I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and
morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted
faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or
cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and
ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired
by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy
to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness
for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that,
amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing
to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,--
horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My
fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a
life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that
beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens,
dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing
crimson with roses,--air, and fields, and mountains. The future
of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be
stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the
muddy graveyard, and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor
curious roses.
Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping
the windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty
back-yard and the coalboats below, fragments of an old story
float up before me,--a story of this house into which I happened
to come to-day. You may think it a tiresome story enough, as
foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or
pleasure.--I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long
since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly
lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives,
like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-
butt.--Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my
friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a
moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to
do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean
clothes, and come right down with me,--here, into the thickest
of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this
story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that
has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to
you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making
straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it
clearly,--this terrible question which men here have gone mad
and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into
words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with
drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it
of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it.
There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great
hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that
this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the
sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of
its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known
of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but
will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul
and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with
death; but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no
perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that
shall surely come.
My story is very simple,--Only what I remember of the life of
one of these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's
rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the
great order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter;
run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I
choose the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of
myriads of these furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a
secret, underlying sympathy between that story and this day with
its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or perhaps simply for the
reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There
were the father and son,--both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby
& John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah, their
cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was
rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the
cellar-rooms. The old man, like many of the puddlers and
feeders of the mills, was Welsh,--had spent half of his life in
the Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh emigrants,
Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any day.
They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny;
they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor
shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure,
unmixed blood, I fancy: shows itself in the slight angular
bodies and sharply-cut facial lines. It is nearly thirty years
since the Wolfes lived here. Their lives were like those of
their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms,
eating rank pork and molasses, drinking--God and the distillers
only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone for
some drunken excess. Is that all of their lives?--of the
portion given to them and these their duplicates swarming the
streets to-day?--nothing beneath?--all? So many a political
reformer will tell you,--and many a private reformer, too, who
has gone among them with a heart tender with Christ's charity,
and come out outraged, hardened.
One rainy night, about eleven o'clock, a crowd of half-clothed
women stopped outside of the cellar-door. They were going home
from the cotton-mill.
"Good-night, Deb," said one, a mulatto, steadying herself
against the gas-post. She needed the post to steady her. So
did more than one of them.
"Dah's a ball to Miss Potts' to-night. Ye'd best come."
"Inteet, Deb, if hur'll come, hur'll hef fun," said a shrill
Welsh voice in the crowd.
Two or three dirty hands were thrust out to catch the gown of
the woman, who was groping for the latch of the door.
"No."
"No? Where's Kit Small, then?"
"Begorra! on the spools. Alleys behint, though we helped her,
we dud. An wid ye! Let Deb alone! It's ondacent frettin' a
quite body. Be the powers, an we'll have a night of it!
there'll be lashin's o' drink,--the Vargent be blessed and
praised for't!"
They went on, the mulatto inclining for a moment to show fight,
and drag the woman Wolfe off with them; but, being pacified, she
staggered away.
Deborah groped her way into the cellar, and, after considerable
stumbling, kindled a match, and lighted a tallow dip, that sent
a yellow glimmer over the room. It was low, damp,--the earthen
floor covered with a green, slimy moss,--a fetid air smothering
the breath. Old Wolfe lay asleep on a heap of straw, wrapped in
a torn horse-blanket. He was a pale, meek little man, with a
white face and red rabbit-eyes. The woman Deborah was like him;
only her face was even more ghastly, her lips bluer, her eyes
more watery. She wore a faded cotton gown and a slouching
bonnet. When she walked, one could see that she was deformed,
almost a hunchback. She trod softly, so as not to waken him,
and went through into the room beyond. There she found by the
half-extinguished fire an iron saucepan filled with cold boiled
potatoes, which she put upon a broken chair with a pint-cup of
ale. Placing the old candlestick beside this dainty repast, she
untied her bonnet, which hung limp and wet over her face, and
prepared to eat her supper. It was the first food that had
touched her lips since morning. There was enough of it,
however: there is not always. She was hungry,--one could see
that easily enough,--and not drunk, as most of her companions
would have been found at this hour. She did not drink, this
woman,--her face told that, too,--nothing stronger than ale.
Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale
life to keep her up,--some love or hope, it might be, or urgent
need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey.
Man cannot live by work alone. While she was skinning the
potatoes, and munching them, a noise behind her made her stop.
"Janey!" she called, lifting the candle and peering into the
darkness. "Janey, are you there?"
A heap of ragged coats was heaved up, and the face of a
young,girl emerged, staring sleepily at the woman.
"Deborah," she said, at last, "I'm here the night."
"Yes, child. Hur's welcome," she said, quietly eating on.
The girl's face was haggard and sickly; her eyes were heavy with
sleep and hunger: real Milesian eyes they were, dark, delicate
blue, glooming out from black shadows with a pitiful fright.
"I was alone," she said, timidly.
"Where's the father?" asked Deborah, holding out a potato,
which the girl greedily seized.
"He's beyant,--wid Haley,--in the stone house." (Did you ever
hear the word tail from an Irish mouth?) "I came here. Hugh
told me never to stay me-lone."
"Hugh?"
"Yes."
A vexed frown crossed her face. The girl saw it, and added
quickly,--
"I have not seen Hugh the day, Deb. The old man says his watch
lasts till the mornin'."
The woman sprang up, and hastily began to arrange some bread and
flitch in a tin pail, and to pour her own measure of ale into a
bottle. Tying on her bonnet, she blew out the candle.
"Lay ye down, Janey dear," she said, gently, covering her with
the old rags. "Hur can eat the potatoes, if hur's hungry.
"Where are ye goin', Deb? The rain's sharp."
"To the mill, with Hugh's supper."
"Let him bide till th' morn. Sit ye down."
"No, no,"--sharply pushing her off. "The boy'll starve."
She hurried from the cellar, while the child wearily coiled
herself up for sleep. The rain was falling heavily, as the
woman, pail in hand, emerged from the mouth of the alley, and
turned down the narrow street, that stretched out, long and
black, miles before her. Here and there a flicker of gas
lighted an uncertain space of muddy footwalk and gutter; the
long rows of houses, except an occasional lager-bier shop, were
closed; now and then she met a band of millhands skulking to or
from their work.
Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know
the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are
governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands
of each mill are divided into watches that relieve each other as
regularly as the sentinels of an army. By night and day the
work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek, the fiery
pools of metal boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in
half-courtesy to public censure, the fires are partially veiled;
but as soon as the clock strikes midnight, the great furnaces
break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begins with fresh,
breathless vigor, the engines sob and shriek like "gods in
pain."
As Deborah hurried down through the heavy rain, the noise of
these thousand engines sounded through the sleep and shadow of
the city like far-off thunder. The mill to which she was going
lay on the river, a mile below the city-limits. It was far, and
she was weak, aching from standing twelve hours at the spools.
Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man his supper,
though at every square she sat down to rest, and she knew she
should receive small word of thanks.
Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist's eye, the picturesque
oddity of the scene might have made her step stagger less, and
the path seem shorter; but to her the mills were only "summat
deilish to look at by night."
The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid
rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-
covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on
the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-
like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side.
Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that
burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible
form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames
writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons
filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches
stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-
clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light,
hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a
street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as she crept through,
"looks like t' Devil's place!" It did,--in more ways than one.
She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on
a furnace. He had not time to eat his supper; so she went
behind the furnace, and waited. Only a few men were with him,
and they noticed her only by a "Hyur comes t'hunchback, Wolfe."
Deborah was stupid with sleep; her back pained her sharply; and
her teeth chattered with cold, with the rain that soaked her
clothes and dripped from her at every step. She stood, however,
patiently holding the pail, and waiting.
"Hout, woman! ye look like a drowned cat. Come near to the
fire,"--said one of the men, approaching to scrape away the
ashes.
She shook her head. Wolfe had forgotten her. He turned,
hearing the man, and came closer.
"I did no' think; gi' me my supper, woman.
She watched him eat with a painful eagerness. With a woman's
quick instinct, she saw that he was not hungry,--was eating to
please her. Her pale, watery eyes began to gather a strange
light.
"Is't good, Hugh? T' ale was a bit sour, I feared."
"No, good enough." He hesitated a moment. "Ye're tired, poor
lass! Bide here till I go. Lay down there on that heap of ash,
and go to sleep."
He threw her an old coat for a pillow, and turned to his work.
The heap was the refuse of the burnt iron, and was not a hard
bed; the half-smothered warmth, too, penetrated her limbs,
dulling their pain and cold shiver.
Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a
limp, dirty rag,--yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene
of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one
looked deeper into the heart of things, at her thwarted woman's
form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain
and hunger,--even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper
yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this
wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul
filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness,
fierce jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one
human being whom she loved, to gain one look of real heart-
kindness from him? If anything like this were hidden beneath
the pale, bleared eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking face, no
one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs: not the
half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he was kind
to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats
that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way.
She knew that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to
her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life.
One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest,
finest of women's faces,--in the very midst, it may be, of their
warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of
intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces
and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no brilliancy, no
summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time to
gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no
one guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.
She lay quiet in the dark corner, listening, through the
monotonous din and uncertain glare of the works, to the dull
plash of the rain in the far distance, shrinking back whenever
the man Wolfe happened to look towards her. She knew, in spite
of all his kindness, that there was that in her face and form
which made him loathe the sight of her. She felt by instinct,
although she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of the
man, which made him among his fellow-workmen something unique,
set apart. She knew, that, down under all the vileness and
coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever
was beautiful and pure, that his soul sickened with disgust at
her deformity, even when his words were kindest. Through this
dull consciousness, which never left her, came, like a sting,
the recollection of the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of the
little Irish girl she had left in the cellar. The recollection
struck through even her stupid intellect with a vivid glow of
beauty and of grace. Little Janey, timid, helpless, clinging to
Hugh as her only friend: that was the sharp thought, the bitter
thought, that drove into the glazed eyes a fierce light of pain.
You laugh at it? Are pain and jealousy less savage realities
down here in this place I am taking you to than in your own
house or your own heart,--your heart, which they clutch at
sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or
low.
If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out
from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their
lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no
ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-
starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the
besotted faces on the street,--I can paint nothing of this, only
give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life
of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath
you can read according to the eyes God has given you.
Wolfe, while Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master, bent
over the furnace with his iron pole, unconscious of her
scrutiny, only stopping to receive orders. Physically, Nature
had promised the man but little. He had already lost the
strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his
nerves weak, his face ( a meek, woman's face) haggard, yellow
with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of the girl-
men: "Molly Wolfe" was his sobriquet. He was never seen in the
cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did,
desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed,
pommelled to a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood
was up: but he was no favorite in the mill; he had the taint of
school-learning on him,--not to a dangerous extent, only a
quarter or so in the free-school in fact, but enough to ruin him
as a good hand in a fight.
For other reasons, too, he was not popular. Not one of
themselves, they felt that, though outwardly as filthy and ash-
covered; silent, with foreign thoughts and longings breaking out
through his quietness in innumerable curious ways: this one,
for instance. In the neighboring furnace-buildings lay great
heaps of the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run.
Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of a delicate,
waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl,
Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of
chipping and moulding figures,--hideous, fantastic enough, but
sometimes strangely beautiful: even the mill-men saw that,
while they jeered at him. It was a curious fancy in the man,
almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and
hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch
came again,--working at one figure for months, and, when it was
finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of
disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to
feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there
among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that
you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night.
I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in
vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has
groped through as boy and man,--the slow, heavy years of
constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks
sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that
it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a
fierce thirst for beauty,--to know it, to create it; to
be--something, he knows not what,--other than he is. There are
moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple
thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a
passion of pain,--when his nature starts up with a mad cry of
rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile,
slimy life upon him. With all this groping, this mad desire, a
great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet's
heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer,
familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. Be
just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be
just,--not like man's law, which seizes on one isolated fact,
but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the
countless cankering days of this man's life, all the countless
nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him,
before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all.
I called this night the crisis of his life. If it was, it stole
on him unawares. These great turning-days of life cast no
shadow before, slip by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little
turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.
Wolfe, while Deborah watched him, dug into the furnace of
melting iron with his pole, dully thinking only how many rails
the lump would yield. It was late,--nearly Sunday morning;
another hour, and the heavy work would be done, only the
furnaces to replenish and cover for the next day. The workmen
were growing more noisy, shouting, as they had to do, to be
heard over the deep clamor of the mills. Suddenly they grew
less boisterous,--at the far end, entirely silent. Something
unusual had happened. After a moment, the silence came nearer;
the men stopped their jeers and drunken choruses. Deborah,
stupidly lifting up her head, saw the cause of the quiet. A
group of five or six men were slowly approaching, stopping to
examine each furnace as they came. Visitors often came to see
the mills after night: except by growing less noisy, the men
took no notice of them. The furnace where Wolfe worked was near
the bounds of the works; they halted there hot and tired: a
walk over one of these great foundries is no trifling task. The
woman, drawing out of sight, turned over to sleep. Wolfe,
seeing them stop, suddenly roused from his indifferent stupor,
and watched them keenly. He knew some of them: the overseer,
Clarke,--a son of Kirby, one of the mill-owners,--and a Doctor
May, one of the town-physicians. The other two were strangers.
Wolfe came closer. He seized eagerly every chance that brought
him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down on
him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being.
What made the difference between them? That was the mystery of
his life. He had a vague notion that perhaps to-night he could
find it out. One of the strangers sat down on a pile of bricks,
and beckoned young Kirby to his side.
"This is hot, with a vengeance. A match, please?"--lighting his
cigar. "But the walk is worth the trouble. If it were not that
you must have heard it so often, Kirby, I would tell you that
your works look like Dante's Inferno."