The Bishop of Cottontown Part 38

It is all done with two quick movements--a flash and a jerk of one hand up, and the other down, the eye riveted to the nicety of a hair's breadth, the stroke downward gauged to the cup of a thimble, to settle over the point of the spindle's end; for the missing of a thread's breadth would send a spindle blade through the hand, or tangle and snap a thread which was turning with a thousand revolutions in a minute.

_Snap--bang! Snap--bang!_ One hundred and twenty times--_Snap--bang!_ and back again, went the deft little workers pus.h.i.+ng their cart before them.

Full at last, their cart is whirled away with flying heels to another machine.

It was a steady, lightning, endless track. Their little trained fingers betook of their surroundings and worked like fingers of steel. Their legs seemed made of India rubber. Their eyes shot out right and left, left and right, looking for the broken threads on the whirling bobbins as hawks sweep over the marsh gra.s.s looking for mice, and the steel claws, which swooped down on the bobbins when they found it, made the simile not unsuitable.

Young as she was, s.h.i.+loh managed one of these harnessed, fiery lines of dancing witches, pirouetting on boards of hardened oak or hickory.

Up and down she walked--up and down, watching these endless whirling figures, her bare fingers pitted against theirs of bra.s.s, her bare feet against theirs shod with iron, her little head against theirs insensate and unpitying, her little heart against theirs of flame which throbbed in the boiler's bosom and drove its thousand steeds with a whip of fire.

In the bloodiest and cruelest days of the Roman Empire, man was matched against wild beasts. But in the man's hand was the blade of his ancestors and over his breast the steel ribs which had helped his people to conquer the world.

And in the Beast's body was a heart!

Ay, and the man was a man--a trained gladiator--and he was nerved by the cheers of thousands of sympathizing spectators.

And now, centuries after, and in the age of so-called kindness, comes this battle to be fought over. And the fight, now as then, is for bread and life.

But how cruelly unfair is the fight of to-day, when the weak and helpless child is made the gladiator, and the fight is for bread, and the Beast is of steel and steam, and is soulless and heartless.

Steel--that by which the old gladiator conquered--that is the heart of the Thing the little one must fight. And the cheers--the glamour of it is lacking, for the little one cannot hear even the sound of its own voice--in the roar of the thousand-throated Thing which drives the Steel Beast on.

Seven o'clock--eight o'clock--s.h.i.+loh's head swam--her shoulders ached, her ears quivered with sensitiveness, and seemed not to catch sounds any more, but sharp and shooting pains. She was dazed already and weak; but still the Steam Thing cheered its steel legions on.

Up and down, up and down she walked, her baby thoughts coming to her as through the roar of a Niagara, through pain and sensitiveness, through aches and a dull, never-ending sameness.

Nine o'clock! Oh, she was so tired of it all!

Hark, she thought she heard a bird sing in a far off, dreamy way, and for a moment she made mud pies in the back yard of the hut on the mountain, under the black-oak in the yard, with the glint of soft suns.h.i.+ne over everything and the murmur of green leaves in the trees above, as the wind from off the mountain went through them, and the anemone, and bellworts, and daisies grew beneath and around. Was it a bluebird? She had never seen but one and it had built its nest in a hole in a hollow tree, the summer before she went into the mill to work.

She listened again--yes, it did sound something like a bluebird, peeping in a distant far off way, such as she had heard in the cabin on the mountain before she had ever heard the voice of the Big Thing at the mill. She listened, and a wave of disappointment swept over her baby face; for, listening closely, she found it was an unoiled separator, that peeped in a bluebird way now and then, above the staccato of some rusty spindle.

But in the song of that bluebird and the glory of an imaginary mud pie, all the disappointment of what she had missed swept over her.

Ten o'clock--the little fingers throbbed and burned, the tiny legs were stiff and tired, the little head seemed as a block of wood, but still the Steam Thing took no thought of rest.

Eleven o'clock--oh, but to rest awhile! To rest under the trees in the yard, for the suns.h.i.+ne looked so warm and bright out under the mill-windows, and the memory of that bluebird's song, though but an imitation, still echoed in her ear. And those mud pies!--she saw them all around her and in such lovely bits of old broken crockery and--....

She felt a rude punch in the side. It was Jud Carpenter standing over her and pointing to where a frowzled broken thread was tangling itself around a separator. She had dreamed but a minute--half a dozen threads had broken.

It was a rude punch and it hurt her side and frightened her. With a snarl and a glare he pa.s.sed on while s.h.i.+loh flew to her bobbin.

This fright made her work the next hour with less fatigue. But she could not forget the song of the bluebird, and once, when Appomattox looked at her, she was working her mouth in a song,--a Sunday School song she had picked up at the Bishop's church. Appomattox could not hear it--no one had a license to hear a song in the Beast Thing's Den--nothing was ever privileged to sing but it,--but she knew from the way her mouth was working that s.h.i.+loh was singing.

Oh, the instinct of happiness in the human heart! To sing through noises and aches and tired feet and stunned, blocky heads. To sing with no hope before her and the theft of her very childhood--ay, her life--going on by the Beast Thing and his men.

G.o.d intended us to be happy, else He had never put so strong an instinct there.

Twelve o'clock. The Steam Beast gave a triumphant scream heard above the roar of shuttle and steel. It was a loud, defiant, victorious roar which drowned all others.

Then it purred and paused for breath--purred softer and softer and--slept at last.

It was noon.

The silence now was almost as painful to s.h.i.+loh as the noise had been. The sudden stopping of shuttle and wheel and belt and beam did not stop the noise in her head. It throbbed and buzzed there in an echoing ache, as if all the previous sounds had been fire-waves and these the scorched furrows of its touch. Wherever she turned, the echo of the morning's misery sounded in her ears.

And now they had forty minutes for noon recess.

They sat in a circle, these five children--and ate their lunch of cold soda biscuits and fat bacon.

Not a word did they say--not a laugh nor a sound to show they were children,--not even a sigh to show they were human.

Silently, like wooden things they choked it down and then--O men and women who love your own little ones--look!

Huddled together on the great, greasy, dirty floor of this mill, in all the att.i.tudes of tired-out, exhausted childhood, they slept. s.h.i.+loh slept bolt upright, her little head against the spinning-frame, where all the morning she had chased the bobbins up and down the long aisle.

Appomattox and Atlanta were grouped against her. Bull Run slept at her feet and Seven Days lay, half way over on his bobbin cart, so tired that he went to sleep as he tried to climb into it.

In other parts of the mill, other little ones slept and even large girls and boys, after eating, dozed or chatted. Spoolers, weavers, slubbers, warpers, nearly grown but all hard-faced, listless--and many of them slept on shawls and battings of cotton.

They were awakened by the big whistle at twenty minutes to one o'clock.

At the same time, Jud Carpenter, the foreman, pa.s.sed down the aisles and dashed cold water in the sleeping faces. Half laughingly he did it, but the little ones arose instantly, and with stooped forms, and tired, cowed eyes, in which the Anglo-Saxon spirit of resentment had been killed by the Yankee spirit of greed, they looked at the foreman, and then began their long six hours' battle with the bobbins.

Three o'clock! The warm afternoon's sun poured on the low flat tin roof of the mill and warmed the interior to a temperature which was uncomfortable.

s.h.i.+loh grew sleepy--she dragged her stumbling little feet along, and had she stopped but a moment, she had paid the debt that childhood owes to fairy-land. The air was close--stifling. Her shoulders ached--her head seemed a stuffy thing of wood and wooly lint.

As it was she nodded as she walked, and again the song of the bluebird peeped dreamily from out the unoiled spindle. She tried to sing to keep awake, and then there came a strange phantasy to mix with it all, and out of the half-awake world in which she now staggered along she caught sight of something which made her open her eyes and laugh outright.

_Was it--could it be? In very truth it was--_

_Dolls!_

_And oh, so many! And all in a row dressed in matchless gowns of snowy white. She would count them up to ten--as far as she had learned to count.... But there were ten,--yes, and many more than ten-- ... and just to think of whole rows of them-- ... all there-- ... and waiting for her to reach out and fondle and caress._

_And she--never in her life before had she been so fortunate as to own one...._

A smile lit up her dreaming eyes. _Rows upon rows of dolls.... And not even Appomattox and Atlanta had ever seen so many before; and now how funny they acted, dancing around and around and bobbing their quaint bodies and winking and nodding at her.... It was Mayday with them and down the long line of spindles these cotton dolls were dancing around their May Queen, and beckoning s.h.i.+loh to join them...._

_It was too cute--too cunning--! they were dancing and drawing her in--they were actually singing-- ... humming and chanting a May song...._

_O lovely--lovely dolls!..._

Jud Carpenter found her asleep in the greasy aisle, her head resting on her arm, a smile on her little face--a hand clasping a rounded well-threaded doll-like bobbin to her breast.

It is useless to try to speak in a room in which the Steam Beast's voice drowns all other voices. It is useless to try to awaken one by calling. One might as well stand under Niagara Falls and whistle to the little fishes. No other voice can be heard while the Steam Beast speaks.

s.h.i.+loh was awakened by a dash of cold water and a rough kick from the big boot of that other beast who called himself the overseer. He did not intend to jostle her hard, but s.h.i.+loh was such a little thing that the kick she got in the side accompanied by the dash of water shocked and frightened her instantly to her feet, and with scared eyes and blanched face she darted down to the long line of bobbins, mending the threads.

If, in the great Mystic Unknown,--the Eden of Balance,--there lies no retributive Cause to right the injustice of that cruel Effect, let us hope there is no Here-after; that we all die and rot like dogs, who know no justice; that what little kindness and sweetness and right, man, through his happier dreams, his hopeful, cheerful idealism, has tried to establish in the world, may no longer stand as mockery to the Sweet Philosopher who long ago said: "_Suffer the little children to come unto me._..."