There was a driving snow-storm the next day. When Ellen started for the factory the white twilight of early morning still lingered. Everywhere were the sons and daughters of toil plodding laboriously and noiselessly through the snow, each keeping in the track of the one who went before. There was no wind blowing, and the snow was in a blue-white level; the trees bent stiffly and quietly beneath a heavy shag of white, and now and then came a clamor of birds, which served to accentuate the silence and peace. Ellen could always be forced by an extreme phase of nature to forgetfulness of her own stresses. For the time being she forgot everything; her vain watching for Robert, the talk of trouble in the factory, the disappointment in her home—all were forgotten in the contemplation, or rather in the absorbing, of this new-old wonder of snow.
There was a survival of the old Greek spirit in the girl, and had she come to earth without her background of orthodox traditions, she might have easily found her own deities in nature. The peace of the snow enveloped her soul as well as the earth, and she became a beneficiary of the white storm; the graceful droop of the pine boughs extended to her thoughts, and the clamor of the birds aroused in her a winged freedom, so that she felt at once peace and a sort of ecstasy. She walked in the track of a stolidly plodding man before her, as different a person as if she were an inhabitant of another planet. He was digesting the soggy, sweet griddle-cakes which he had eaten for breakfast, and revolving in his mind two errands for his wife—one, a pail of lard; the other, three yards of black dress braid; he was considering the surface scum of existence, that which pertained solely to his own petty share of it; the girl, the clear residue of life which was, and had been, and would be. Each was on the way to humble labor for daily bread, but with a difference of eternity between them.
But when Ellen reached the end of the cross street where the Atkins girls lived, she heard a sound which dispelled her rapt state. Her far vision became a near one; she saw, as it were, the clouded window-glass between her mortal eyes and the beyond, and the sound of a cough brought it about. Abby and Maria were coming towards her through the snow. Maria was coughing violently, and Abby was scolding her.
“I don't care anything about it, Maria Atkins,” Abby was saying, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself coming out such a morning as this. There isn't any sense in it. You know you'll catch cold, and then there'll be two of you to take care of. You don't help a mite doing so, you needn't think you do.”
When Abby caught sight of Ellen she hastened forward, while Maria, still coughing, trailed behind, lifting her little, heavy, snow-bound feet wearily.
“Ellen, I wish you'd tell Maria to turn around and go home,” she said. “Just hear her cough, and out in all this snow, and getting her skirts draggled. She hasn't got common-sense, you tell her so.”
Ellen stopped, nodding assentingly. “I think she's right, Maria,” she said. “You ought not to be out such a morning as this. You had better go home.”
Maria came up smiling, though her lips were quite white, and she controlled her cough to convulsive motions of her chest.
“I am no worse than usual,” said she. “I feel better than I generally do in the morning. I haven't coughed any more, if I have as much, and I am holding my dress up high, and you know how warm the factory is. It will be enough sight warmer than it is at home. It is cold at home.”
“Lloyd don't have to save coal,” said Abby, bitterly, “but that don't alter the fact of your getting your skirts draggled.”
Maria pulled up her skirts so high that she exposed her slender ankles, then seeing that she had done so, she let them fall with a quick glance at two men behind them.
“The snow will shake right off; it's light, Abby,” she said.
“It ain't light. I should think you might listen to Ellen, if you won't to me.”
Ellen pressed close to Maria, and pulled her thin arm through her own. “Look here,” she said, “don't you think—”
Then Maria burst out with a pitiful emphasis. “I've got to go,” she said. “Father had a bad spell last night; he can't get out. He'll lose his place this time, we are afraid, and there's a note coming due that father says he's paid, but the man didn't give it up, and he's got to pay it over again; the lawyer says there is no other way, and we can't let John Sargent do everything. He's got a sister out West he's about supporting since her husband died last fall. I've got to go to work; we've got to have the money, Ellen, and as for my cough, I have always coughed. It hasn't killed me yet, and I guess it won't yet for a while.” Maria said the last with a reckless gayety which was unusual to her.
Abby trudged on ahead with indignant emphasis. “I'd like to know what good it is going to do to work and earn and pay up money if everybody is going to be killed by it?” she said, without turning her head.
Ellen pulled up Maria's coat-collar around her neck and put an extra fold of her dress-skirt into her hand.
“There, you can hold it up as high as that, it looks all right,” said she.
“I wish Robert Lloyd had to get up at six o'clock and trudge a mile in this snow to his work,” said Abby, with sudden viciousness. “He'll be driven down in his Russian sleigh by a man looking like a drum-major, and cut our poor little wages, and that's all he cares. Who's earning the money, he or us, I'd like to know? I hate the rich!”
“If it's true, what you say,” said Maria, “it seems to me it's like hating those you have given things to, and that's worse than hating your enemies.”
“Don't say given, say been forced to hand over,” retorted Abby, fiercely; “and don't preach, Maria Atkins, I hate preaching; and do have sense enough not to talk when you are out in this awful storm. You can keep your mouth shut, if you can't do anything else!”
Ellen had turned quite white at Abby's words.
“You don't think that he means to cut the wages?” she said, eagerly.
“I know he does. I had it straight. Wait till you get to the shop.”
“I don't believe it.”
“You wait. Norman Lloyd was as hard as nails, and the young one is just like him.” Abby looked relentlessly at Ellen.
“Maybe it isn't so,” whispered Maria to Ellen.
“I don't believe it is,” responded Ellen, but Abby heard them, and turned with a vicious jerk.
“Well, you wait!” said she.
The moment Ellen reached the factory she realized that something unwonted had happened. There were groups of men, talking, oblivious even of the blinding storm, which was coming in the last few minutes with renewed fury, falling in heavy sheets like dank shrouds.
Ellen saw one man in a muttering group throw out an arm, whitened like a branch of a tree, and shake a rasped, red fist at the splendid Russian sleigh of the Lloyd's, which was just gliding out of sight with a flurry of bells and a swing of fur tails, the whole surmounted by the great fur hat of the coachman. Abby turned and looked fiercely at Ellen.
“What did I tell you?” she cried.
Even then Ellen would not believe. She caught a glimpse of Robert's fair head at the office window, and a great impulse of love and loyalty came over her.
“I don't believe it,” she said aloud to Maria. Maria held her arm tightly.
“Maybe it isn't so,” she said.
But when they entered the room where they worked, there was a sullen group before a placard tacked on the wall. Ellen pressed closely, and saw what it was—a reduced wage-list. Then she went to her machine.
Ellen had a judicial turn of mind, as her school-master had once said of her. She was able to look at matters from more than one stand-point, but she reasoned with a New Testament clearness of impartiality. She was capable of uncompromising severity, since she brought such a clear light of youth and childhood to bear upon even those things which needed shadows for their true revelation. Everything was for her either black or white. She had not lived long enough, perhaps she never would, for a comprehension of half-tones. The situation to her mind was perfectly simple, and she viewed it with a candor which was at once terrible and cruel, for it involved cruelty not only to Robert but to herself. She said to herself, here was this rich man, this man with accumulation of wealth, not one dollar of which he had earned himself, either by his hands or his brains, but which had been heaped up for his uncle by the heart and back breaking toil of all these poor men and women; and now he was going to abuse his power of capital, his power to take the bread out of their mouths entirely, by taking it out in part. He was going to reduce their wages, he was deliberately going to cause privation, and even suffering where there were large families. She felt the most unqualified dissent and indignation, and all the love which she had for the man only intensified it. Love, with a girl like this, tended to clearness of vision instead of blindness. She judged him as she would have judged herself. As she stood working at her machine, stitching linings to vamps, she kept a sharply listening ear for what went on about her, but there was very little to hear after work had fairly commenced and the great place was in full hum. The demand of labor was so imperative that the laborers themselves were merged in it; they ceased to be for the time, and, instead of living, they became parts of the struggle for life. A man hustling as if the world were at stake to get his part of a shoe finished as soon as another man, so as not to clog and balk the whole system, had no time for rebellion. He was in the whirlpool which was mightier than himself and his revolt. After all, a man is a small and helpless factor before his own needs. For a time those whirring machines, which had been evolved in the first place from the brains of men, and partook in a manner of both the spirit and the grosser elements of existence, its higher qualities and its sordid mechanism, like man himself, had the best of it. The swart arms of the workmen flew at their appointed tasks, they fed those unsatisfied maws, the factory vibrated with the heavy thud of the cutting-machines like a pulse, the racks with shoes in different stages of completion trundled from one department to another, propelled by men with tense arms and doggedly bent heads.
Ellen worked with the rest, but she was one of the few whose brain could travel faster than her hands. She thought as she worked, for her muscles did not retard her mind. She was composed of two motions, one within the other, and the central motion was so swift that it seemed still.
Ed Flynn came down the room and bent over her.
“Good-morning,” he said. He was too gayly confident to be entirely respectful, but he had always a timidity of bearing which sat oddly upon him before Ellen. He looked half boldly, half wistfully at her fair face, and challenged her with gay eyes, which had in their depths a covert seriousness.
Ellen stood between Abby Atkins and Sadie Peel at her work. Sadie Peel turned on the foreman coquettishly and said, “You'd better go an' talk to Mamie Brady, she's got on a new blue bow on her red hair. Why don't you give her some better work than tying those old shoes? Here she's been workin' in this shop two years. You needn't come shinin' round Ellen an' me! We don't want you.”
Flynn colored angrily and shot a vicious glance at the girl.
“It's a pretty hard storm,” he said to Ellen, as if the other girl had not spoken.
“You needn't pretend you don't hear me, Ed Flynn,” called out the girl. Her cheap finery was in full force that morning, not a lock of her brown hair was unstudied in its arrangement, and she was as conscious of her pose before her machine as if she had been on the stage. She knew just how her slender waist and the graceful slope of her shoulders appeared to the foreman, and her voice, in spite of its gay rallying and audacity, was wheedling.
Flynn caught hold of her shoulders, round and graceful under her flannel blouse, and shook her, half in anger, half in weakness.
“You shut up, you witch,” said he. Then he turned to Ellen again, and his whole manner and expression changed.
“I'm sorry about that new list,” he said, very low, in her ear. Ellen never looked at him, and did not make a motion as if she heard.
“It's a hard storm,” the foreman said again, almost appealingly.
“Yes, it is very hard,” replied Ellen, slipping another shoe under the needles.
“What on earth ails you this morning, Ellen Brewster?” Sadie Peel said to her, when the foreman had gone. “You look queer and act queer.”
“Ellen ain't in the habit of joking with Ed Flynn,” said Abby Atkins, on the other side, with sarcastic emphasis.
“My, don't you feel big!” sneered Sadie Peel. There was always a jarring inconsequence about this girl, she was so delicately pretty and refined in appearance, her ribbons were so profuse and cheap, and her manners were so recklessly coarse.
Ellen said nothing, but worked steadily.
“Mame Brady's just gone on Ed Flynn, and he goes with her just enough to keep her hangin', and I don't believe he means to marry her, and I think it's mean,” said Sadie Peel.
“She ought to have more sense than to take any stock in him,” said Abby.
“She ain't the only one,” said Sadie. “Nellie Stone in the office has been daft over him since she's been there, and he don't look at her. I don't see what there is about Ed Flynn, for my part.”
“I don't,” said Abby, dryly.
“Well, I don't know. He's pretty good-looking,” said Sadie Peel, “and he's got a sort of a way with him.” All the time the girl was talking her heart was aching. The foreman had paid her some little attention, which she had taken seriously, but nobody except her father had known it, or known when he had fallen off. Sometimes Flynn, meeting the father's gaze as he passed him at his work at the cutting-bench, used to waver involuntarily, though he asked himself with perfect good faith what was it all about, for he had done the girl no harm. He felt more guilty concerning Mamie Brady.
Ellen worked on, with her fingers flying and her forehead tense with thought. The chatter of the girls ceased. They were too busy to keep it up. The hum of work continued. Once Ellen knew, although she did not see him, by some subtle disturbance of the atmosphere, a little commotion which was perfectly silent, that Robert Lloyd had entered the room. She knew when he passed her, and she worked more swiftly than ever. After he had gone out there was a curiously inarticulate sound like a low growl of purely animal dissent over the room; a word of blasphemy sounded above the din of the machines. Then all went on as before until the noon whistle blew.
Even then there was not so much discussion as might have been expected. Robert, since the storm was so heavy, remained in the office, and sent a boy out for a light luncheon, and the foremen were much in evidence. There was always an uncertainty about their sentiments, occupying as they did a position half-way between employer and employés; and then, too, they were not affected by the cut in wages. The sentiments of the unaffected are always a matter of suspicion to those who suffer themselves. There were grumblings carried on in a low key behind Flynn's back, but the atmosphere for the most part was one of depression. Ellen ate her luncheon with Maria and Abby. Willy Jones came up timidly when they were nearly finished, feeling his way with a remark about the storm, which was increasing.
“All the cars are tied up,” he said, “and the noon train isn't in.”
He leaned, with a curious effort at concealment from them all and himself, upon the corner of the bench near Abby. Then a young man passed them, with such an air of tragedy and such a dead-white face that they all stared after him.
“What in the world ails you, Ben Simmons?” called out Sadie Peel. But he did not act as if he heard. He crossed vehemently to the other side of the room, and stood at a window, looking out at the fierce white slant of the storm.
“What in creation ails him?” cried Sadie Peel.
“I guess I know,” Willy Jones volunteered, timidly.
“What?”
“He was going to get married, and this cut in his wages is going to put a stop to it. I heard him say so this morning.”
“Married! Who to?” asked Sadie Peel.
“Floretta Vining.”
“My land!” cried Sadie Peel. “So she did take up with him after the school-teacher went away. I always said she would. I always knew Edward Harris wouldn't marry her, and I always said Ben Simmons would get her if he hung on long enough. Floretta was bound to marry somebody; she wasn't going to wind up an old maid; and if she couldn't get one, she'd take another. I suppose Ben has got that sick sister of his to do for since her father died, and thinks he can't get married with any less pay. Floretta won't make a very cheap wife. She's bound to have things whether or no, and Ben 'ain't never earned so much as some. He's awful steady, but he's slow as cold molasses, and he won't let his sister suffer for no Floretta.”
“That's so; I don't believe he would,” said Abby. “What any man in his senses wants a doll like that for enough to look as if he was dead when he's got to put off marrying her!”
“That's because you ain't a man, Abby Atkins,” said Sadie Peel. “All the men think of is looks, and little fine airs and graces.”
“It seems as if they might get along,” ventured Willy Jones, “as if they might do with less for a while.”
Then Ellen turned to him unexpectedly. “There's no use in talking about doing with less when every single cent has to count,” said she, sternly. “Ben Simmons has his taxes and insurance, and a steady doctor's bill for his sister, and medicines to buy. He can't have laid up a cent, for he's slow, though he's a good workman. You can't do with less when you haven't any more than enough.”
“That's so,” said Abby. Then she turned a tender, conciliating, indulgent gaze on the young man at her side. “If I were Floretta Vining,” said she, “and if Ellen were, we would go without things, and never know it. We'd go to work; but Floretta, she's different. We went to school with Floretta Vining.”
“Floretta Vining is dreadful fond of men, but she wouldn't go without a yard of ribbon for one if he was dying,” said Sadie Peel, conclusively. “It's awful hard on Ben Simmons, and no mistake.”
“What?” said Amos Lee, coming up.
“Oh, what's hard on all of us? What's the use of asking?” said the girl, with a bitter coquetry. “I shouldn't think any man with horse-sense would ask what's hard on us when he's seen the ornaments tacked up all over the shop this morning.”
“That's so,” said Lee, with a glance over his shoulder. Flynn was at the other end of the room. Granville Joy, Dixon, and one or two other men were sauntering up. For a second the little group looked at one another.
“What are you going to do?” asked Ellen, in a low voice, which had an intonation that caused the others to start.
“I know what I'll do, if I can get enough to back me,” cried Lee, in a loud voice.
“Hush up!” said Sadie Peel. Then her father came along smiling his imperturbable smile on his wide face, which had a Slavonic cast, although he was New England born and bred. He looked from one to the other without saying a word.
“We're deciding whether to strike or not, father,” said Sadie, in a flippant manner. She raised a hand and adjusted a stray lock of hair as she spoke, then she straightened her ribbon stock. Her father said nothing, but his face assumed a stolidity of expression.
“I know what I'll do,” proclaimed Amos Lee again.
“Hush up!” cried Sadie Peel again, with a giggle. “Here's Ed Flynn.” And the foreman came sauntering up as the one-o'clock whistle blew, and the workers sprang to their posts of work.
The snow increased all day. When the six-o'clock whistle blew, and the workmen streamed out of the factories, it was a wild waste of winter and storm. The wind had come up, and the light snow arose in the distance like white dancers of death, spinning furiously over the level, then settling into long, gravelike ridges. Ellen glanced into the office as she passed the door, and saw Robert Lloyd talking busily with Flynn and another foreman by the name of Dennison. As she passed, Robert turned with a look as if he had been watching for her, and came forward hastily.
“Miss Brewster!” he called.
Mamie Brady, following close behind, gave Ellen an admonishing nudge. “Boss wants to see you,” she whispered, loudly. Ellen stopped, and Robert came up.
“Please step in here a moment, Miss Brewster,” he said, and colored a little.
Granville Joy, who was following Ellen, looked keenly at him, some one sniggered aloud, and a girl said quite audibly, “My land!”
Ellen followed Robert into the office, and he bent over her, speaking rapidly, in a low voice.
“You must not walk home in this snow,” he said, “and the cars are not running. You must let me take you. My sleigh is at the door.”
Ellen turned white. Somehow this protecting care for herself, in the face of all which she had been considering that day, gave her a tremendous shock. She felt at once touched and more indignant than she had ever been in her whole life. She had been half believing that Robert was neglecting her, that he had forgotten her; all day she had been judging his action of cutting the wages of the workmen from her unswerving, childlike, unshadowed point of view, and now this little evidence of humanity towards her, in the face of what she considered wholesale inhumanity towards others, made her at once severe to him and to herself, and she forced back sternly the leap of pleasure and happiness which this thought of her awakened. “No, thank you,” she said, shortly; “I am much obliged, but I would rather walk.”
“But you cannot, in this storm,” pleaded Robert, in a low voice.
“Yes, I can; it is no worse for me than for others. There is Maria Atkins, she has been coughing all day.”
“I will take her too. Ellen, you cannot walk. You must let me take you.”
“I am much obliged, but I would rather not,” replied Ellen, in an icy tone. She looked quite hard in his face.
Robert looked at her perplexed. “But it is drifting,” he said.
“It is no worse for me than for the others.” Ellen turned to go. Her attitude of rebuff was unmistakable.
Robert colored. “Very well; I will not urge you,” he said, coldly. Then he returned to his desk, and Ellen went out. She caught up with Maria Atkins, who was struggling painfully through the drifts, leaning on Abby's arm, and slipped a hand under her thin shoulder.
“I expect nothing but she'll get her death out in this storm,” grumbled Abby. “What did he want, Ellen?”
“Nothing in particular,” replied Ellen. Uppermost in her mind at that moment was the charge of cruelty against Robert for not taking her hint as to Maria. “He can ask me to ride because he has amused himself with me, but as for taking this poor girl, whom he does not love, when it may mean life or death to her, he did not think seriously of doing that for a moment,” she thought.
Maria was coughing, although she strove hard to smother the coughs. Granville Joy, who was plodding ahead, turned and waited until they came up.
“You had better let me carry you, Maria,” he said, jocularly, but his honest eyes were full of concern.
“He is enough sight kinder than Robert Lloyd,” thought Ellen; “he has a better heart.” And then the splendid Lloyd sleigh came up behind them and stopped, tilting to a drift. Robert, in his fur-lined coat, sprang out and went up to Maria.
“Please let me take you home,” he said, kindly. “You have a cold, and this storm is too severe for you to be out. Please let me take you home.”
Maria looked at him, fairly gasping with astonishment. She tried to speak, but a cough choked her.
“You had better go if Mr. Lloyd will take you,” Abby said, decisively. “Thank you, Mr. Lloyd; she isn't fit to be out.” She urged her sister towards the sleigh, and Robert assisted her into the fur-lined nest.
“I can sit with the driver,” said Robert to Abby, “if you will come with your sister.”
“No, thank you,” replied Abby. “I am able to walk, but I will be much obliged if you will take Maria home.”
Robert sprang in beside Maria, and the sleigh slid out of sight.
“I never!” said Abby. Ellen said nothing, but plodded on, her eyes fixed on the snowy track.
“I am glad she had a chance to ride,” said Granville Joy, in a tentative voice. He looked uneasily at Ellen.
“It beats the Dutch,” said Abby. She also regarded Ellen with sympathy and perplexity. When they reached the street where she lived, up which the sleigh had disappeared, she let Granville go on ahead, and she spoke to Ellen in a low tone. “Why didn't he ask you?” she said.
“He did,” replied Ellen.
“In the office?”
“Yes.”
“And you wouldn't?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don't care to accept favors from a man who oppresses all my friends!”
“He was good to take in Maria,” said Abby, in a perplexed voice. “His uncle would never have thought of it.”
Ellen made no reply. She stood still in the drifting snow, with her mouth shut hard.
“You feel as if this cutting wages was a pretty hard thing?” said Abby.
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, so do I. I wonder what they will do about it. I don't know how the men feel. Somehow, folks can't seem to think or plan much in a storm like this. There's the sleigh coming back.”
“Good-night,” Ellen said, hurriedly, and trudged on as fast as she was able in order not to have the Lloyd sleigh pass her; it had to turn after reaching the end of the street. Ellen caught up with Granville Joy. Robert, glancing over the waving fringe of fur tails, saw disappearing in the pale gleam of the electric-light the two dim figures veiled by the drifting snow. He thought to himself, with a sharp pain, that perhaps, after all, Granville Joy was the reason for her rebuff. It never occurred to him that his action in cutting the wages could have anything to do with it.
Ellen went along with Granville, who was anxious to offer her his arm, but did not quite dare. He kept thrusting out an elbow in her direction, and an inarticulate invitation died in his throat. Finally, when they reached an unusually high drift of snow, he plucked up sufficient courage.
“Take my arm, won't you?” he said, with a pitiful attempt at ease, then stared as if he had been shot, at Ellen's reply.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I think it is easier to walk alone in snow like this.”
“Maybe it is,” assented Granville, dejectedly. He walked on, scuffling as hard as he could to make a path for Ellen with the patient faithfulness of a dog.
“What are you going to do about the cut in wages?” Ellen asked, presently.
Granville started. The sudden transition from personalities to generalities confused him.
“What?” he said.
Ellen repeated her question.
“I don't know,” said Granville. “I don't think the boys have made up their minds. I don't know what they will do. They have been weeding out union men. I suppose the union would have something to say about it otherwise. I don't know what we will do.”
“I shouldn't think there would be very much doubt as to what to do,” said Ellen.
Granville stared at her over his shoulder in a perplexed, admiring fashion. “You mean—?” he asked.
“I shouldn't think there would be any doubt.”
“Well, I don't know. It is a pretty serious thing to get out of work in midwinter for a good many of us, and as long as the union isn't in control, other men can come in. I don't know.”
“I know,” said Ellen.
“You mean—?”
“I mean that I do not think it right, that it is unjust, and I believe in resisting injustice.”
“Men have resisted injustice ever since the Creation,” said Granville, in a bitter voice.
“Well, resistance can continue as long as life lasts,” returned Ellen. Just then came a fiercer blast than ever, laden with a stinging volley of snow, and seemed to sweep the words from the girl's mouth. She bent before it involuntarily, and the conviction forced itself upon her that, after all, resistance to injustice might be as futile as resistance to storm, that injustice might be one of the primal forces of the world, and one of the conditions of its endurance, and yet with the conviction came the renewed resolution to resist.
“What can poor men do against capital unless they are backed up by some labor organization?” asked Granville. “And I don't believe there are a dozen in the factory who belong to the union. There has been an understanding, without his ever saying so that I know of, that the old boss didn't approve of it. So lots of us kept out of it, we wanted work so bad. What can we do against such odds?”
“When right is on your side, you have all the odds,” said Ellen, looking back over her snow-powdered shoulder.
“Then you would strike?”
“I wouldn't submit.”
“Well, I don't know how the boys feel,” said Granville. “I suppose we'll have to talk it over.”
“I shouldn't need to talk it over,” said Ellen. “You've gone past your house, Granville.”
“I ain't going to let you go home alone in such a storm as this,” said Granville, in a tender voice, which he tried to make facetious. “I wouldn't let any girl go home alone in such a storm.”
Ellen stopped short. “I don't want you to go home with me, thank you, Granville,” she said. “Your mother will have supper ready, and I can go just as well alone.”
“Ellen, I won't let you go alone,” said the young man, as a wilder gust came. “Suppose you should fall down?”
“Fall down!” repeated Ellen, with a laugh, but her regard of the young man, in spite of her rebuff, was tender. He touched her with his unfailing devotion; the heavy trudging by her side of this poor man meant, she told herself, much more than the invitation of the rich one to ride behind his bays in his luxurious sleigh. This meant the very bone and sinew of love. She held out her little, mittened hand to him.
“Good-night, Granville,” she said.
Granville caught it eagerly. “Oh, Ellen,” he murmured.
But she withdrew her hand quickly. “We have always been good friends, and we always will be,” said she, and her tone was unmistakable. The young man shrank back.
“Yes, we always will, Ellen,” he said, in a faithful voice, with a note of pain in it.
“Good-night,” said Ellen again.
“Good-night,” responded Granville, and turned his plodding back on the girl and retraced his laborious steps towards his own home, which he had just passed. There come times for all souls when the broad light of the path of humanity seems to pale to insignificance before the intensity of the one little search-light of personality. Granville Joy felt as if the eternal problem of the rich and poor, of labor and capital, of justice and equality, was as nothing before the desire of his heart for that one girl who was disappearing from his sight behind the veil of virgin snow.
When Ellen came in sight of her house that night she saw her father's bent figure moving down the path with sidewise motions of a broom. He had been out at short intervals all the afternoon, that she should not have to wade through drifts to the door. The electric-light shone full on this narrow, cleared track and the toiling figure.
“Hullo, father!” Ellen called out. Andrew turned, and his face lit with love and welcome and solicitude.
“Be you dreadful snowy?” he asked.
“Oh no, father, not very.”
“It's an awful storm.”
“Pretty bad, but I got along all right. The snow-plough has been out.”
“Wait a minute till I get this swept,” said Andrew, sweeping violently before her.
“You needn't have bothered, father,” said Ellen.
“I 'ain't anything else to do,” replied Andrew, in a sad voice.
“There's mother watching,” said Ellen.
“Yes, she's been diggin' at them wrappers all day.”
“I suppose she has,” Ellen returned, in a bitter tone. Her father stared at her. Ellen never spoke like that. For the first time she echoed him and her mother. Something like terror came over him at the sound of that familiar note of his own life from this younger one. He seemed to realize dimly that a taint of his nature had descended upon his child.
When Ellen entered the house, the warm air was full of savory odors of toast and tea and cooking meat and vegetables.
“You'd better go right up-stairs and put on a dry dress, Ellen,” said Fanny. “I put your blue one out on your bed, and your shoes are warming by the sitting-room stove. I've been worrying as to how you were going to get home all day.” Then she stopped short as she caught sight of Ellen's face. “What on earth is the matter, Ellen Brewster?” she said.
“Nothing,” said Ellen. “Why?”
“You look queer. Has anything happened?”
“Yes, something has happened.”
“What?”
Andrew turned pale. He stood in the entry with his snowy broom in hand, staring from one to the other.
“Nothing that you need worry about,” said Ellen. “I'll tell you when I get my dress changed.”
Ellen pulled off her rubbers, and went up-stairs to her chamber. Fanny and Andrew stood looking at each other.
“You don't suppose—” whispered Andrew.
“Suppose what?” responded Fanny, sharply.
They continued to look at each other. Fanny answered Andrew as if he had spoken, with that jealous pride for her girl's self-respect which possessed her even before the girl's father.
“Land, it ain't that,” said she. “You wouldn't catch Ellen lookin' as if anything had come across her for such a thing as that.”
“No, I suppose she wouldn't,” said Andrew; and he actually blushed before his wife's eyes.
That afternoon Mrs. Wetherhed had been in, and told Fanny that she had heard that Robert Lloyd was to be married to Maud Hemingway; and both Andrew and Fanny had thought of that as the cause of Ellen's changed face.
“You'd better take that broom out into the shed, and get the snow off yourself, and come in and shut the door,” Fanny said, shortly. “You're colding the house all off, and Amabel has got a cold, and she's sitting right in the draught.”
“All right,” replied Andrew, meekly, though Fanny had herself been holding the sitting-room door open. In those days Andrew felt below his moral stature as head of the house. Actually, looking at Fanny, who was earning her small share towards the daily bread, she seemed to him much taller than he, though she was a head shorter. He thought so little of himself, he seemed to see himself as through the wrong end of a telescope. Fanny went into the sitting-room and shut the door with a bang. Amabel did not look up from her book. She was reading a library book much beyond her years, and sniffing pathetically with her cold. Amabel had begun to discover an omnivorous taste for books, which stuck at nothing. She understood not more than half of what she read, but seemed to relish it like indigestible food.
When Ellen came down-stairs, and sat beside the coal stove to change her shoes, she looked at the book which Amabel was reading. “You ought not to read that book, dear,” she said. “Let Ellen get you a better one for a little girl to-morrow.”
But Amabel, without paying the slightest heed to Ellen's words, looked up at her with amazement, as Andrew and Fanny had done. “What's the matter, Ellen?” she asked, in her little, hoarse voice.
Fanny and Andrew, who had just entered, stood waiting. Ellen bent over her shoe, drawing in the strings firmly and evenly.
“Mr. Lloyd has reduced the wage-list,” she said.
“How much?” asked Andrew, in a hoarse voice.
“Ten per cent.”
There was a dead silence. Andrew and Fanny looked at Ellen like people who are uncertain of their next move; Amabel stared from one to the other with her weak, watery eyes. Ellen continued to lace her shoes.
“What do you think about it, Ellen?” asked Andrew, almost timidly.
“I know of only one thing to think,” replied Ellen, in a dogged voice.
As she spoke she pulled the tag off a shoe-string because it would not go through the eyelet.
“What is that?” asked Fanny, in a hard voice.
“I think it is cruelty and tyranny,” said Ellen, pulling the rough end of the string through the eyelet.
“I suppose the times are pretty hard,” ventured Andrew; but Ellen cut him short.
“Robert Lloyd has half a million, which has been accumulated by the labor of poor men in prosperous times,” said she, with her childlike severity and pitilessness. “There is no question about the matter.”
Then Fanny flung all self-interest to the wind and was at her daughter's side like a whirlwind. The fact that the two were of one blood was never so strongly evident. Red spots glowed in the elder woman's cheeks and her black eyes blazed.
“Ellen's right,” said she; “she's right. For a man worth half a million to cut down the wages of poor, hard-working folks in midwinter is cruelty. I don't care who does it.”
“Yes, it is,” said Ellen.
Fanny opened her mouth to tell Ellen of the rumor concerning Robert's engagement to Maud Hemingway, then she refrained, for some reason which she could not analyze. In her heart she did not believe the report to be true, and considered the telling of it a slight to Ellen, but it influenced her in her indignation against Robert for the wage-cutting.
“What are they going to do?” asked Andrew.
“I don't know,” replied Ellen.
“Did he—young Lloyd—talk to the men?”
“No; notices were tacked up all over the shop.”
“That was the way his uncle would have done,” said Andrew, in a curious voice of bitterness and respect.
“So you don't know what they are going to do?” said Fanny.
“No.”
“Well, I know what I would do,” said Fanny. “I never would give in, if I starved—never!”
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.”
Ellen resolved that she would say as little as possible about the trouble at home that night. She did not wish her parents to worry over it until it was settled in one way or another.
When her mother asked what they had done about the wage-cutting, she replied that a committee had been appointed to wait on Mr. Lloyd that evening, and talk it over with him; then she said nothing more.
“He won't give in if he's like his uncle,” said Fanny.
Ellen went on eating her supper in silence. Her father glanced at her with sharp solicitude.
“Maybe he will,” said he.
“No, he won't,” returned Fanny.
Ellen was very pale and her eyes were bright. After supper she went to the window and pressed her face against the glass, shielding her eyes from the in-door light, and saw that the storm had quite ceased. The stars were shining and the white boughs of the trees lashing about in the northwest wind. She went into the entry, where she had hung her hat and coat, and began putting them on.
“Where are you going, Ellen?” asked her mother.
“Just down to Abby's a minute.”
“You don't mean to say your are goin' out again in this snow, Ellen Brewster? I should think you were crazy.” When Fanny said crazy, she suddenly started and shuddered as if she had struck herself. She thought of Eva. Always the possibility of a like doom was in her own mind.
“It has stopped snowing, mother,” Ellen said.
“Stopped snowing! What if it has? The roads ain't cleared. You can't get down to Abby Atkins's without gettin' wet up to your knees. I should think if you got into the house after such a storm you'd have sense enough to stay in. I've worried just about enough.”
Ellen took off her coat and hat and hung them up again. “Well, I won't go if you feel so, mother,” she said, patiently.
“It seems as if you might get along without seein' Abby Atkins till to-morrow mornin', when you'd seen her only an hour ago,” Fanny went on, in the high, nagging tone which she often adopted with those whom she loved the dearest.
“Yes, I can,” said Ellen. It seemed to her that she must see somebody with whom she could talk about the trouble in the factory, but she yielded. There was always with the girl a perfect surface docility, as that she seemed to have no resistance, but a little way down was a rock-bed of firmness. She lighted her lamp, and took her library book and went up-stairs to bed to read. But she could not read, and she could not sleep when she had put aside her book and extinguished her lamp. She could think of nothing except Robert, and what he would say to the committee. She lay awake all night thinking of it. Ellen was a girl who was capable of the most devoted love, and the most intense dissent and indignation towards the same person. She could love in spite of faults, and she could see faults in spite of love. She thought of Robert Lloyd as of the one human soul whom she loved best out of the whole world, whom she put before everybody else, even her own self, and she also thought of him with a wrath which was pitiless and uncompromising, and which seemed to tear her own heart to pieces, for one cannot be wroth with love without a set-back of torture. “If he does not give in and raise the wages, I shall hate him,” thought Ellen; and her heart stung her as if at the touch of a hot iron, and then she could have struck herself for the supposition that he would not give in. “He must,” she told herself, with a great fervor of love. “He must.”
But when she went down to breakfast the next morning her mother stared at her sharply.
“Ellen Brewster, what is the matter with you?” she cried.
“Nothing. Why?”
“Nothing! You look like a ghost.”
“I feel perfectly well,” said Ellen. She made an effort to eat as much breakfast as usual in order that her mother should not suspect that she was troubled. When at last she set out for the factory, in the early morning dusk, she was chilled and trembling with excitement.
The storm had quite ceased, and there was a pale rose-and-violet dawn-light in the east, and presently came effects like golden-feathered shafts shooting over the sky. The road was alive with shovelling men, construction-cars of the railroad company were laboring back and forth to clear the tracks, householders were making their way from their doors to their gates, clearing their paths, lifting up the snow in great, glittering, blue-white blocks on their clumsy shovels. Everywhere were the factory employés hastening to their labor; the snow was dropping from the overladen tree branches in great blobs; there was an incessant, shrill chatter of people, and occasional shouts. It was the rally of mankind after a defeat by a primitive force of nature. It was the eternal reassertion of human life and a higher organization over the elemental. Men who had walked doggedly the morning before now moved with a spring of alacrity, although the road was very heavy. There was a new light in their eyes; their cheeks glowed. Ellen had no doubt whatever that if Robert Lloyd had not yielded the attitude of the employés of Lloyd's would be one of resistance. She herself seemed to breathe in resistance to tyranny, and strength for the right in every breath of the clear, crisp morning air. She felt as if she could trample on herself and her own weakness, for the sake of justice and the inalienable good of her kind, with as little hesitation as she trampled on the creaking snow. Yet she trembled with that deadly chill before a sense of impending fate. When she returned the salutations of her friends on the road she felt that her lips were stiff.
“You look dreadful queer, Ellen,” Abby Atkins said, anxiously, when she joined her. Maria also was out that morning.
“Have you heard what they are going to do?” Ellen asked, in a sort of breathless fashion.
“You mean about the wage-cutting? Don't look so, Ellen.”
Maria pressed close to Ellen, and slid her thin arm through hers.
“Yes,” said Ellen. “What did John Sargent say when he got home last night?”
Abby hesitated a second, looking doubtfully at Ellen. “I don't see that there is any need for you to take all this so much to heart,” she said.
“What did he say?”
“Well,” Abby replied, reluctantly, “I believe Mr. Lloyd wouldn't give in. Ellen Brewster, for Heaven's sake, don't look so!”
Ellen walked on, her head high, her face as white as death. Maria clung closely to her, her own lips quivering.
“What are the men going to do, do you think?” asked Ellen, presently, in a low voice.
“I don't know,” replied Abby. “John Sargent seems to think they'll give in. He says he doesn't know what else they can do. The times are hard. I believe Amos Lee and Tom Peel are for striking, but he says he doesn't believe the men will support them. The amount of it all is, a man with money has got it all his own way. It's like fighting with bare hands to oppose him, and getting yourself cut, and not hurting him at all. He's got all the weapons. We simply can't go without work all winter. It is better to do with less than with nothing at all. What can a man like Willy Jones do if he hasn't any work? He and his mother would actually suffer. What could we do?”
“I don't think we ought to think so much about that,” said Ellen.
“What do you think we ought to think about, for goodness' sake?”
“Whether we are doing right or not, whether we are furthering the cause of justice and humanity, or hindering it. Whether it is for good in the long run or not. There have always been martyrs; I don't see why it is any harder for us to be martyrs than for those we read about.”
Sadie Peel came pressing up behind eagerly, her cheeks glowing, holding up her dress, and displaying a cheap red petticoat. “Ellen Brewster,” she exclaimed, “if you dare say anything more to-day I'm goin' to talk. Father is tearing, though he goes around looking as if he wouldn't jump at a cannon-ball. Do, for Heaven's sake, keep still; and if you can't get what you want, take what you can get. I ain't goin' to be cheated out of my nearseal cape, nohow.”
“Sadie Peel, you make me tired,” cried Abby Atkins. “I don't say that I'm striking, but I'd strike for all a nearseal cape. I'm ashamed of you.”
“I don't care if you be,” said the girl, tossing her head. “A nearseal cape means as much to me as some other things to you. I want Ellen Brewster to hold her tongue.”
“Ellen Brewster will hold her tongue or not, just as she has a mind to,” responded Abby, with a snap. She did not like Sadie Peel.
“Oh, stick up for her if you want to, and get us all into trouble.”
“I shall stick up for her, you can be mighty sure of that,” declared Abby.
Ellen walked on as if she heard nothing of it at all, with little Maria clinging closely to her. Robert Lloyd got out of his sleigh and went up-stairs just before they reached the factory, and she heard a very low, subdued mutter of execration.
“They don't mean to strike,” she told herself. “They mean to submit.”
All went to their tasks as usual. In a minute after the whistle blew the great pile was in the full hum of labor. Ellen stood for a few moments at her machine, then she left it deliberately, and made her way down the long room to where John Sargent stood at his bench cutting shoes, with a swift faithfulness born of long practice. She pressed close to him, while the men around stared.
“What is going to be done?” she asked, in a low voice.
Sargent turned and looked at her in a troubled fashion, and spoke in a pacific, soothing tone, as her father might have done. He was much older than Ellen.
“Now look here, child,” he said, “I don't dare take the responsibility of urging all these men into starvation this kind of weather. The times are hard. Lloyd has some reason—”
Ellen walked away from him swiftly and went to the row of lasting-machines where Amos Lee and Tom Peel stood. She walked up to them and spoke in a loud, clear voice.
“You are not going to give in?” said she. “You don't mean to give in?”
Lee turned and gave her one stare, and left his machine.
“Not another stitch of work will I do under this new wage-list, so help me, God!” he proclaimed.
Tom Peel stood for a second like an automaton, staring at them both. Then he turned back to his post.
“I'm with ye,” he said.
The lasters, for some occult reason, were always the most turbulent element in Lloyd's. In less than three minutes the enthusiasm of revolt had spread, and every laster had left his machine. In a half-hour more there was an exodus of workmen from Lloyd's. There were very few left in the factory. Among them were John Sargent, the laster who was a deacon and had formed one of the consulting committee, Sadie Peel, who wanted her nearseal cape, and Mamie Brady, who would do nothing which she thought would displease the foreman, Flynn.
“If father's mind to be such a fool, it's no reason why I should,” said Sadie Peel, stitching determinedly away. Mamie Brady looked at Flynn, when he came up to her, with a gentle, wheedling smile. There was no one near, and she fancied that he might steal a kiss. But instead he looked at her, frowning.
“No use you tying away any longer, Mamie,” he said. “The strike's on.”