Home > Authors Index > Mary E Wilkins Freeman > Portion of Labor > This page
The Portion of Labor, a novel by Mary E Wilkins Freeman |
||
Chapter 51 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ Chapter LI When Ellen started for the factory the next morning the storm had not ceased; the roads were very heavy, although the snow-plough had been out at intervals all night, and there was a struggling line of shovelling men along the car-track, but the cars were still unable to penetrate the drifts. When Ellen passed her grandmother's house the old woman tapped sharply on the window and motioned her back frantically with one bony hand. The window was frozen to the sill with the snow, and she could not raise it. Ellen shook her head, smiling. Her grandmother continued to wave her back, the lines of forbidding anxiety in her old face as strongly marked as an etching in the window frame. This love, which had at once coerced and fondled the girl since her birth, was very precious to her. This protection, which she was forced to repel, smote her like a pain. "Poor old grandmother!" she thought; "there she will worry about me all day because I have gone out in the storm." She turned back and waved her hand and nodded laughingly; but the old woman continued that anxiously imperative backward motion until Ellen was out of sight. Ellen walked in the car-track, as did everybody else, that being better cleared than the rest of the road. She was astonished that she heard nothing of the cut in wages from the men. There seemed to be no excitement at all. They merely trudged heavily along, their whitening bodies bent before the storm. There was an unusual doggedness about this march to the factory this morning, but that was all. Ellen returned the muttered greeting of several, and walked along in silence with the rest. Even when Abby Atkins joined her there was little said. Ellen asked for Maria, and Abby replied that she had taken more cold yesterday, and could not speak aloud; then relapsed into silence, making her way through the snow with a sort of taciturn endurance. Ellen looked at the struggling procession of which she was a part, all slanting with the slant of the storm, and a fancy seized her that rebellion and resistance were hopeless, that those parallel lines of yielding to the onslaughts of fate were as inevitable as life itself, one of its conditions. Men could not help walking that way when the bitter storm-wind was blowing; they could not help living that way when fate was in array against their progress. Then, thinking so, a mightier spirit of revolt than she had ever known awoke within her. She, as she walked, straightened herself. She leaned not one whit before the drive of the storm. She advanced with no yielding in her, her brave face looking ahead through the white blur of snow with a confidence which was almost exultation. "What do you think the men will do?" she said to Abby when they came in sight of Lloyd's, shaggy with fringes and wreaths and overhanging shelvings of snow, roaring with machinery, with the steady stream of labor pouring in the door. "Do?" repeated Abby, almost listlessly. "Do about what?" "About the cut in wages?" Abby turned on her with sudden fire. "Oh, my God, what can they do, Ellen Brewster?" she demanded. "Haven't they got to live? Hasn't Lloyd got it all his own way? How are men to live in weather like this without work? Bread without butter is better than none at all, and life at any cost is better than death for them you love. What can they do?" "It seems to me there is only one thing to do," replied Ellen. Abby stared at her wonderingly. "You don't mean--" she said, as they climbed up the stairs. "I mean I would do anything, at whatever cost to myself, to defeat injustice," said Ellen, in a loud, clear voice. Several men turned and looked back at her and laughed bitterly. "It's easy talking," said one to another. "That's so," returned the other. The people all settled to their work as usual. One of the foremen (Dennison), who was anxious to curry favor with his employer, reported to him in an undertone in the office that everything was quiet. Robert nodded easily. He had not anticipated anything else. In the course of the morning he looked into the room where Ellen was employed, and saw with relief and concern her fair head before her machine. It seemed to him that he could not bear it one instant longer to have her working in this fashion, that he must lift her out of it. He still tingled with his rebuff of the night before, but he had never loved her so well, for the idea that the cut in wages affected her relation to him never occurred to him. As he walked through the room none of the workers seemed to notice him, but worked with renewed energy. He might have been invisible for all the attention he seemed to excite. He looked with covert tenderness at the back of Ellen's head, and passed on. He reflected that he had adopted the measure of wage-cutting with no difficulty whatever. "All it needs is a little firmness," he thought, with a boyish complacency in his own methods. "Now I can keep on with the factory, and no turning the poor people adrift in midwinter." At noon Robert put on his fur-lined coat and left the factory, springing into the sleigh, which had drawn up before the door with a flurry of bells. He had an errand in the next town that afternoon, and was not going to return. When the sleigh had slid swiftly out of sight through the storm, which was lightening a little, the people in the office turned to one another with a curious expression of liberty, but even then little was said. Nellie Stone was at the desk eating her luncheon; Ed Flynn and Dennison and one of the lasters, who had looked in and then stepped in when he saw Lloyd was gone, were there. The laster, who was young and coarsely handsome, had an admiration for the pretty girl at the desk. Presently she addressed him, with her mouth full of apple-pie. "Say, George, what are you fellows going to do?" she asked. Dennison glanced keenly from one to the other; Flynn shrugged his shoulders and looked out of the window. "Looks as if it was clearing up," he remarked. "What are you going to do?" asked Nellie Stone again, with a coquettish flirt of her blond fluff of hair. "Grin and bear it, I s'pose," replied the young laster, with an adoring look at her. "My land! grin and bear a cut of ten per cent.? Well, I don't think you've got much spunk, I must say. Why don't you strike?" "Who's going to feed us?" replied the laster, in a tender voice. "Feed you? Oh, you don't want much to eat. Join the union. It's ridiculous so few of the men in Lloyd's belong to it, anyway; and then the union will feed you, won't it?" "The union did not do what it promised in the Scarboro strike," interposed Dennison, curtly. "Oh, we all know where you are, Frank Dennison," said the girl, with a soft roll of her blue eyes. "Besides, it's easy to talk when you aren't hit. Your wages aren't cut. But here is George May here, he's in a different box." "He's got nobody dependent on him, anyway," said Flynn. "If I wasn't going to get married I'd strike," cried the young man, with a fervent glance at the girl. She colored, half pleased, half angry, and the other men chuckled. She took another bite of pie to conceal her confusion. She preferred Flynn to the laster, and while she was not averse to proving to the former the triumph of her charms over another man, did not like too much concessions. "You'd better go and eat your dinner, George May," she said, in her sweet, shrill voice. "First thing you know the whistle will blow. Here's yours, Ed." With that she pulled out a leather bag from under the desk, where she had volunteered to place it for warmth and safety against the coil of steam-pipes. "I don't believe your coffee is very cold, Ed," said she. The laster glared from one to the other jealously. Dennison went towards a shelf where he had stored away his luncheon, when he stopped suddenly and listened, as did the others. There came a great uproar of applause from the next room beyond. Then it subsided, and a girl's clear, loud voice was heard. "What is going on?" cried Nellie Stone. She jumped up and ran to the door, still eating her pie, and the men followed her. At the end of one of the work-rooms, backed against a snowy window, clung about with shreds of the driving storm, stood Ellen Brewster, with some other girls around her, and a few men on the outskirts, and a steady, curious movement of all the other workmen towards her, as of iron filings towards a magnet, and she was talking. Her voice was quite audible all over the great room. It was low-pitched, but had a wonderful carrying quality, and there was something marvellous in its absolute confidence. "If you men will do nothing, and say nothing, it is time for a girl to say and act," she proclaimed. "I did not dream for a minute that you would yield to this cut in wages. Why should you have your wages cut?" "The times are pretty hard," said a doubtful voice among her auditors. "What if the times are hard? What is that to you? Have you made them hard? It is the great capitalists who have made them hard by shifting the wealth too much to one side. They are the ones who should suffer, not you. What have you done, except come here morning after morning in cold or heat, rain or shine, and work with all your strength? They who have precipitated the hard times are the ones who should bear the brunt of them. Your work is the same now as it was then, the strain on your flesh and blood and muscles is the same, your pay should be the same." "That's so," said Abby Atkins, in a reluctant, surly fashion. "That's so," said another girl, and another. Then there was a fusilade of hand-claps started by the girls, and somewhat feebly echoed by the men. One or two men looked rather uneasily back towards Dennison and Flynn and two more foremen who had come forward. "It ain't as though we had something to fall back on," said a man's grumbling voice. "It's easy to talk when you 'ain't got a wife and five children dependent on you." "That's so," said another man, doggedly. "That has nothing to do with it," said Ellen, firmly. "We can all club together, and keep the wolf from the door for those who are hardest pressed for a while; and as for me, if I were a man--" She paused a minute. When she spoke again her voice was full of childlike enthusiasm; it seemed to ring like a song. "If I were a man," said she, "I would go out in the street and dig--I would beg, I would steal--before I would yield--I, a free man in a free country--to tyranny like this!" There was a great round of applause at that. Dennison scowled and said something in a low voice to another foreman at his side. Flynn laughed, with a perplexed, admiring look at Ellen. "The question is," said Tom Peel, slouching on the outskirts of the throng, and speaking in an imperturbable, compelling, drawling voice, "whether the free men in the free country are going to kick themselves free, or into tighter places, by kicking." "If you have got to stop to count the cost of bravery and standing up for your rights, there would be no bravery in the world," returned Ellen, with disdain. "Oh, I am ready to kick," said Peel, with his mask-like smile. "So am I," said Granville Joy, in a loud voice. Amos Lee came rushing through the crowd to Ellen's side. He had been eating his dinner in another room, and had just heard what was going on. He opened his mouth with a motion as of letting loose a flood of ranting, but somebody interposed. John Sargent, bulky and irresistible in his steady resolution, put him aside and stood before him. "Look here," he said to them all. "There may be truth in what Miss Brewster says, but we must not act hastily; there is too much at stake. Let us appoint a committee and go to see Mr. Lloyd this evening, and remonstrate on the cutting of the wages." He turned to Ellen in a kindly, half-paternal fashion. "Don't you see it would be better?" he said. She looked at him doubtfully, her cheeks glowing, her eyes like stars. She was freedom and youth incarnate, and rebellious against all which she conceived as wrong and tyrannical. She could hardly admit, in her fire of enthusiasm, of pure indignation, of any compromise or arbitration. All the griefs of her short life, she had told herself, were directly traceable to the wrongs of the system of labor and capital, and were awakening within her as freshly as if they had just happened. She remembered her father, exiled in his prime from his place in the working world by this system of arbitrary employment; she remembered her aunt in the asylum; poor little Amabel; her own mother toiling beyond her strength on underpaid work; Maria coughing her life away. She remembered her own life twisted into another track from the one which she should have followed, and there was for the time very little reason or justice in her. That injustice which will arise to meet its kind in equal combat had arisen in her heart. Still, she yielded. "Perhaps you are right," she said to Sargent. She had always liked John Sargent, and she respected him. "I am sure it is the best course," he said to her, still in that low, confidential voice. It ended in a committee of four--John Sargent, Amos Lee, Tom Peel, and one of the older lasters, a very respectable man, a deacon in the Baptist Church--being appointed to wait on Robert Lloyd that evening. When the one-o'clock whistle blew, Ellen went back to her machine. She was very pale, but she was conscious of a curious steadiness of all her nerves. Abby leaned towards her, and spoke low in the roar of wheels. "I'll back you up, if I die for it," she said. But Sadie Peel, on the other side, spoke quite openly, with a laugh and shrug of her shoulders. "Land," she said, "father'll be with you. He's bound to strike. He struck when he was in McGuire's. Catch father givin' up anything. But as for me, I wish you'd all slow up an' stick to work, if you do get a little less. If we quit work I can't have a nearseal cape, and I've set my heart on a nearseal cape this winter." _ |
||