"Tell it to us all now, Kitty," the Major said.
It was a pleasant time to hear a story. The room was quiet, for most of the diners had left. Madame sat at the desk in the corner counting her receipts, while a couple of elderly men in the middle of the room played at dominoes. There was an air of homelikeness about the place. Major Hayes and William Applebaum, lighting their cigars, leaned back in their chairs to listen, while Hertha sipped her coffee that she knew she should not drink, and looked with apprehension, but with admiration also, into Kathleen"s face. What wonderful gray eyes this Irishwoman had, and how whole-heartedly she flung herself into whatever she had to say! She was like a bright beam of sunlight falling suddenly into a dull room; or, again, like a flash of lightning that carried with it an ominous rumble of thunder. The world would be a wonderful, sublimely happy place when it let the sunlight triumph in lives like Kathleen"s.
"I was eleven years old," she began, "when I led out the spinning-room in the factory up in the hills in this glorious old state. We were all a lot of children, some bigger than me, some smaller, and we worked from sun to sun. For wages, we had none, not that we ever knew, and I doubt if our fathers or mothers ever saw a penny from us, for what with the rent and the bills at the company store, it"s little money they ever handled. But every morning we went into the huge building that shut out the world from us and turned our red lips white, and every night we came back, the boys too tired to throw stones at a stray hen.
"Well, one day when we started work we found a new foreman. The man before him had been a decent sort of chap, rough after his fashion, pulling our ears maybe to make us work faster, or batting a boy over the head, but with a heart in his body. But this morning he was gone, and in his place a great giant of a creature named Hicks who roared at us in a voice that made our hearts jump. Not but what we was always ruled by terror. It was do as you were bid or death, and no incarnation, but forever and ever annihilation. But Hicks was the very ogre of the story book, and we expected to hear him call out any minute:
""Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Irishman!"
And make a pounce on one of us. And we weren"t mistaken, for soon the pounce came.
"It"s hard work in the spinning-room and I wonder now how such children as we ever managed to do it at all. I suppose our strength and power, that ought to have gone out into lessons at school, and learning to keep house at home, and baseball and fishing and swimming, went into watching the spools as they whirled on the spindles or keeping our eyes open to catch the broken threads. How I used to see those spools, hundreds there were that I took care of, twirling around and around before my eyes when I"d lie down to go to sleep! Some of us was quicker than others, but to do the work right we needed to keep together a bit and it was when Jules Claire, a little French Canadian, got ahead of us at doffing time, that trouble began.
"Jules was a born Frenchman. There was a gesture in everything he did, and he couldn"t live without showing off. He was the fastest worker in the room, and when we were taking the full spools off and putting the empty ones on, one child one side the frame, the other the other, Jules must go ahead of his mate. We tried to stop him for we didn"t want the foreman to think we could all work at that pace, but he was an artist and must do things his own way. So he hurries down his line, his little hands moving like lightning, and when he comes to the end, and we still plodding, he jumps on an empty truck and stamping with his bare feet, gives himself three cheers.
"Then the ogre sees him, and the great hulking sneak jumps on the boy, clouts him over the head, and kicks him with his boot. All he saw was an idle child. The little fellow was too surprised to cry. "My G.o.d," he whispers coming to me, "did you see dat?" "I did," I answers, "and you got what was coming to you for going ahead of the rest!" But while I said it I laid my plans, for there was fire in my heart.
"There"s one way a child can always leave her place whether at the mill or the school and that"s by asking for a drink of water. The good Lord must have made the little ones so dry that they would be sure of moving about once in a while during the long day. After a time, when Hicks had us whiter than the cotton we was working on, I got permission to get a drink. That meant I must go through another room to where the bucket of water was. After I"d drunk my fill I walked back, and there were the two girls in charge of the warper looking out of the window, the machines going merrily all the while. They glanced around at me and then turned to the window again, and just then I slipped my roller-hook into a nice place in the machinery where I thought it would do me some good, and, as innocent looking as a cat that"s stole the cream, went back to the spinning-room.
"It isn"t but three or four minutes before one of the two girls come to the old ogre to say something"s wrong with the machinery. The man gives an oath and leaves us. I knew he"d be some minutes finding the trouble, and I began talking to my mates. There was a big window near where I worked that looked out on an embankment, and one by one I called the boys and girls to me, and explained that we must go on a strike. We oughtn"t to work for a man that beat and hollered at us the way Hicks did. "Twas the time now to show our strength and get out of this dirty hole.
"I don"t remember my arguments very well. I think they were somewhat hurried, with one eye on the window and the other on the door where the ogre might come back. But the children got into the spirit of the thing, and it was jump out of the window and the strike was on!
"Jules went first. We made him, but he was game for it anyway. And then the rest of us dropped down the few feet on the gra.s.s and away to the hills at the back of the town.
"Ah, that was a great day! I can see it now! The apple trees were in blossom and the gra.s.s was thick with violets, while in the woods were frail blue and white flowers. Everything smelled of the sunshine and the fresh earth, and we little white-faced youngsters swung in the trees, and picked the flowers, and played tag, and called and shouted to one another. Some of the boys gathered stones and made a barricade and when any one from the town came to get us, he was so pelted with rocks that he beat a quick retreat. So we played on through the long spring day, while in the spinning-room the spools twirled round and round, and the cotton tangled and knotted and broke, and enough damage was done to take days to set right again. It was a great time! But every day must come to an end, and the sun went down on our day, until at last, tired and rosy and hungry we turned with lagging and timid steps toward home."
CHAPTER XXIV
When Kathleen ceased speaking there was a little murmur of applause throughout the room. Every one had been listening--Madame at her desk, the men at their table, their dominoes dropped from their hands, Marie in the doorway. Kathleen"s own guests had been wholly absorbed. To all, from this time, child labor would no longer be an academic question but a vivid reality.
The Major was the first to break the silence. "That was a fine tale," he said, bowing gravely to the story-teller who sat opposite him, her cheeks rosy with excitement, one hand drumming the Ma.r.s.eillaise on the table cloth. "Thank you for letting me hear it."
"I told it for Hertha," Kathleen said pointedly.
"Yes?" The Major looked at the southern girl, not for the first time that evening, and was struck anew by her beauty and her repose. While evidently embarra.s.sed, she said nothing in reply to Kathleen, but sat, a quiet listener, her hands in her lap. The city, he realized, had not yet taught her to think in flashes or to move in jerks.
"What has Miss Ogilvie to learn from this strike?" the old man asked.
"Didn"t you tell me that she had already led one out?"
"Led it out only to leave it," Kathleen answered vehemently. "The girls are in the street now working to keep their clothes from being s.n.a.t.c.hed off their backs by a lot of dirty scabs."
Seeing that an explanation was demanded of her, Hertha turned to the Major and said with a blush, "I am not willing to picket." Then, with more animation in her manner, she questioned her friend. "You didn"t tell us how your strike ended. What happened after the children went home?"
"Well, I"m not saying how their fathers and mothers took it, but they won at the mill all right. The ogre was given another job."
"I"m glad of that," with a pleasant, propitiatory smile; "I was afraid you had only won a holiday."
But Kathleen would not be cajoled. "No, indeed," she answered; "we got our rights by standing out for them."
"Don"t be a fool, Kitty," the Major remarked abruptly.
Kathleen looked at him, bewildered and aggrieved. Formerly he had been her champion when in this same room she had been attacked by bourgeois guests armed with conventional arguments. Then he had spoken more bitterly than she and had been placed by her among her revolutionists.
For him to turn upon her now was not only unkind but treacherous. What did she know about him after all, she thought? Only the common talk of this place where he was accounted one familiar with strange lands who could speak in any tongue that sounded over Madame"s tables.
"You"re an old man, Major," she said a little stiffly, "and I was counting you a good comrade. Maybe you"ll show me the folly in saying that you get your rights by standing out for them."
"You didn"t get your rights," was the blunt answer. "When you led the children out you merely exchanged one foreman for another a little less brutal. You did not win the sunshine and the fresh air for every day."
"But that has come now," Applebaum said.
Leaning back in his chair, smoking a good cigar, the younger man had listened tolerantly to the talk. He spoke now, not to defend Kathleen who, he knew, was a captain in dialectics where he was a cabin boy, but to sound his note of confident optimism.
"The good time has come to more children than formerly," the Major answered, "but those who can really bask in the sunshine are few."
"They are very many." The young man spoke in a cheerful, a.s.sertive manner. "And the others will later receive their due. We must wait for the slow processes of evolution."
He looked about the company, his pleasant mouth smiling, his eyes shining good-will; but when his glance encountered the Major his countenance dropped. That former soldier eyed him as he might in the old days have eyed a sentry caught asleep at his post.
"The slow processes of evolution," the Major said, contempt in every drawling word. "Did man wait for the slow processes of evolution that you are so glib about, when he invented the machinery that sucked up and still sucks up the life of the child? If you"re not incredibly ignorant you know that man does not leave nature to go her slow way, but makes changes with the rapidity of lightning. Two things, though, never change," lifting up two long fingers, "poverty and greed."
Applebaum put down his cigar, his face flushed with anger; but, looking across at Hertha, his brow cleared. She was smiling at him--a grateful smile--as though to thank him for drawing the fire from her quarter.
Kathleen, too, had a relieved expression upon her face. Girding up his loins, he decided to continue the discussion though he might later be forced to retreat. It was scarcely a fair fight when one of the contestants had the handicap of venerable age.
"Surely," he said augmentatively, "times have improved with some rapidity. There are fewer of the poor and oppressed than there were one hundred years ago."
"How do you know?" the Major asked.
While Applebaum drew breath to summon his facts in proof of progress, the Major answered his own question as though his opponent were already disposed of.
"Small thievery is controlled," he said; "held in check better than formerly. St.u.r.dy beggars are not so often seen in the market-place. But these men rarely stole from the poor. Your powerful thief, however, never had so good a chance as to-day. There"s no government he cannot buy, and our rapid means of transportation make it possible for him to gather a harvest from more fields than were gleaned by his cleverest and most rapacious predecessors."
"But, granting for the sake of argument that he may not always get his money honestly, doesn"t he give a fair share of all he gathers to the poor?" Applebaum asked.
"To the producers, you mean, the men who made his wealth? Not such a n.o.ble portion as you might think. I was in India once, during a famine.
Children lay dead by the wayside, their thin little arms stiff at their sides. At night when you went by a native hut you heard a baby sobbing as it pulled at an empty breast, or you listened to that saddest cry in the world, a mother wailing for her dead child."
"Bad crops?" Billy questioned.
"Thievery!" the Major answered in a tone that made Madame jump at her distant table, while the three immediate listeners felt as though a bomb had exploded. Then in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, as though narrating a commonplace: "Down at the coast I saw ships laden with grain for England, loaded by those people who you feel give a fair share of what they gather to the poor."
"That"s like the English!" Kathleen cried, her Irish blood a.s.serting itself. "They"re the oppressors of the world!"
"Nonsense," the Major retorted, "you don"t know what you"re talking about. When the English conquered India the natives exchanged one master for another, that was all. If the native princes and rajahs stole less than the British, and I don"t know that this was the case, it was stupidity not kindliness that kept them from making a complete job."