message lay in the tolling bells floated past these men unknown. Yet it was there. Veiled in the solemn music ushering the risen Saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong,—even this social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler grappled with madly to-night.
The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons. The mills were deserted on Sundays, except by the hands who fed the fires, and those who had no lodgings and slept usually on the ash-heaps. The three strangers sat still during the next hour, watching the men cover the furnaces, laughing now and then at some jest of Kirby’s.
“Do you know,” said Mitchell, “I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in the den.”
Kirby laughed. “You are fanciful. Come, let us get out of the den. The spectral figures, as you call them, are a little too real for me to fancy a close proximity in the darkness,—unarmed, too.”
The others rose, buttoning their overcoats, and lighting cigars.
“Raining, still,” said Doctor May, “and hard. Where did we leave the coach, Mitchell?”
“At the other side of the works.—Kirby, what’s that?”
Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,—a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning.
“Stop! Make that fire burn there!” cried Kirby, stopping short.
The flame burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief.
Mitchell drew a long breath.
“I thought it was alive,” he said, going up curiously.
The others followed.
“Not marble, eh?” asked Kirby, touching it.
One of the lower overseers stopped.
“Korl, Sir.”
“Who did it?”
“Can’t say. Some of the hands; chipped it out in off-hours.”
“Chipped to some purpose, I should say. What a flesh-tint the stuff has! Do you see, Mitchell?”
“I see.”
He had stepped aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking at it in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman’s form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf’s. Kirby and Doctor May walked around it, critical, curious. Mitchell stood aloof, silent. The figure touched him strangely.
“Not badly done,” said Doctor May, “Where did the fellow learn that sweep of the muscles in the arm and hand? Look at them! They are groping, do you see?—clutching: the peculiar action of a man dying of thirst.”
“They have ample facilities for studying anatomy,” sneered Kirby, glancing at the half-naked figures.
“Look,”continued the Doctor, “at this bony wrist, and the strained sinews of the instep! A working-woman,—the very type of her class.”
“God forbid!” muttered Mitchell.
“Why?” demanded May, “What does the fellow intend by the figure? I cannot catch the meaning.”
“Ask him,” said the other, dryly, “There he stands,”—pointing to Wolfe, who stood with a group of men, leaning on his ash-rake.
The Doctor beckoned him with the affable smile which kind-hearted men put on, when talking to these people.
“Mr. Mitchell has picked you out as the man who did this,—I’m sure I don’t know why. But what did you mean by it?”
“She be hungry.”
Wolfe’s eyes answered Mitchell, not the Doctor.
“Oh-h! But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow! You have given no sign of starvation to the body. It is strong,—terribly strong. It has the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning.”
Wolfe stammered, glanced appealingly at Mitchell, who saw the soul of the thing, he knew. But the cool, probing eyes were turned on himself now,—mocking, cruel, relentless.
“Not hungry for meat,” the furnace-tender said at last.
“What then? Whiskey?” jeered Kirby, with a coarse laugh.
Wolfe was silent a moment, thinking.
“I dunno,” he said, with a bewildered look. “It mebbe. Summat to make her live, I think,—like you. Whiskey ull do it, in a way.”
The young man laughed again. Mitchell flashed a look of disgust somewhere,—not at Wolfe.
“May,” he broke out impatiently, “are you blind? Look at that woman’s face! It asks questions of God, and says, ‘I have a right to know,’ Good God, how hungry it is!”
They looked a moment; then May turned to the mill-owner:—
“Have you many such hands as this? What are you going to do with them? Keep them at puddling iron?”
Kirby shrugged his shoulders. Mitchell’s look had irritated him.
“Ce n’est pas mon affaire. I have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses. I suppose there are some stray gleams of mind and soul among these wretches. The Lord will take care of his own; or else they can work out their own salvation. I have heard you call our American system a ladder which any man can scale. Do you doubt it? Or perhaps you want to banish all social ladders, and put us all on a flat table-land,—eh, May?”
The Doctor looked vexed, puzzled. Some terrible problem lay hid in this woman’s face, and troubled these men. Kirby waited for an answer, and, receiving none, went on, warming with his subject.
“I tell you, there’s something wrong that no talk of ‘Liberté’ or ‘Egalité’ will do away. If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands. It would be kindness. God help them! What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives as that?” He pointed to Deborah, sleeping on the ash-heap. “So many nerves to sting them to pain. What if God had put your brain, with all its agony of touch, into your fingers, and bid you work and strike with that?”
“You think you could govern the world better?” laughed the Doctor.
“I do not think at all.”
“That is true philosophy. Drift with the stream, because you cannot dive deep enough to find bottom, eh?”
“Exactly,” rejoined Kirby. “I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other’s throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible.”
The Doctor sighed,—a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach.
“God help us! Who is responsible?”
“Not I, I tell you,” said Kirby, testily. “What has the man who pays them money to do with their souls’ concerns, more than the grocer or butcher who takes it?”
“And yet,” said Mitchell’s cynical voice, “look at her! How hungry she is!”
Kirby tapped his boot with his cane. No one spoke. Only the dumb face of the rough image looking into their faces with the awful question, “What shall we do to be saved?” Only Wolfe’s face, with its heavy