The Cotton-Mill ChildBy Mrs. John Van Vorst(From “The Cry of the Children.”[9])(See page 57)
By Mrs. John Van Vorst
(From “The Cry of the Children.”[9])
(See page 57)
The first child to whom I spoke stood waiting, without work, for the machinery to start up. He had on a cloth cap, overalls, and a blue cotton shirt open at the throat. His face was wan, his eyes blue, with an intense blue streak beneath them. His mouth was full of tobacco, which had collected in a dingy crust about his lips. As he leaned back, one foot crossed over the other, expectant for the spindles to begin their whirling, he presented in his attitude and gestures, the appearance, not of a child, but of a gaunt man shrunk to diminutive size. Goingover to where he sat, I started conversation with him about his work.
“How many sides do you run a day?” I asked.
“Three to four,” he answered.
“How much do you make?”
“About $2.40 a week.”
Then hastily I put the question: “How old are you!”
“Goin’ on tweayulve,” he responded. “I’ve been workin’ about four years. I come in here when I was seayvun.”
“Ever been to school?”
He shook his head. “No, meayum. I don’t know if I would like it. I reckon I’d as soon work here as be in school.”
“How many hours do you work here a day!”
“From six until six.”
The noise of the machine was distracting, and as I bent over him to catch his answer piped in a shrill, nasal voice, I could not but notice how fine and delicate his features were; the deep eyes, the high arched nose, the slender lips were placed in the oval face as features only can be placed by the unerring mold that breeding casts. Observing, also, the miniature shoulders that seemed to have been oppressed by some iron hand, I said:
“Don’t you get very tired?”
There was a pause which made more marked the honesty of his response.
“Why, I don’t never pay much attention whether I get tired or not.”
“You have an hour at noon?”
Here he brushed the cloth cap onto the back of his head, and sent a long, wet, black line from his mouth to the floor.
“Well,” he said (it was the man who spoke, his arms akimbo, his body warped in the long tussle for existence), “they aim to give us an hour, but we don’t never get more’n twenty-five minutes. We all live right up there.” He nodded toward the square of houses clustered around the mud-puddle on the brink of the slovenly hillside. Then the bobbins began to revolve slowly, and the boy started back to his work.
“You can’t loaf much,” he explained, “when the machine’s a runnin’.”
Up and down he plied on his monotonous beat—lone little figure....
Evidently waiting to join in the conversation, a small boy, I noticed, was standing beside me. His dark eyes sparkled merrily in his colorless face; he was dirty and covered with lint.
“What’s your job?”
“Sweepin’,” he grinned.
“How much do you make a day!”
“Twenty cents.”
“How old are you!”
“Seayvun.”
The boy at the machine, making bands for the spindles, was “goin’ on tayun.” He earned twenty cents a day. Others, I learned, were eight, nine and ten, and occasionally there was one as old as twelve.
As I walked on now through the mills talking with a twelve-year-old red-headed girl who had been four years at work, my eyes suddenly fell upon astrange couple. I could not take my attention from the tinier of the tiny pair; the boy’s hands appeared to be made without bones, his thumb flew back almost double as he pressed the cotton to loosen it from the revolving roller in the spinning frame; they no longer moved, these yellow, anemic hands, as though directed in their different acts by a thinking intelligence; they performed mechanically the gestures which had given them their definite form.
The red-headed girl laughed and nodded in the direction of the dwarfs.
“He’s most six,” she said. “He’s been here two years. He come in when he was most four. His little brother most four’s workin’ here now.”
“Yes? Where?”
“Oh, he works on the night shift. He comes in ’beaout half-a-past five and stays till six in the mornin’.”
I went over to the other dwarf of the couple, older, evidently, than the boy “most six.” Below her red cotton frock hung a long apron which reached to the ground. Her hair was short and shaggy, her face bloated, her eyes like a depression in the flesh, and about her mouth trailed streaks of tobacco. It seemed absurd to question her. Oblivion was the only thing that could have been mercifully tendered—even the peace of death could hardly have relaxed those tense features, cast in the dogged mould of suffering.
“How old are you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“What do you earn?”
She shook her head again.
Her fingers did not for a moment stop in their swift manipulation of the broken thread. Then, as if she had suddenly remembered something, she said:
“I’ve only been workin’ here a day.”
“Only one day?”
“I’ve been on the night shift till neow.”
Dwarfs? Ah, yes; dwarfs indeed. But would that those who affirm it might catch sight of the expression that lowered under the brows of those two miniature victims. Like a menace, threatening, terrible, it seemed to presage the storm that shall one day be unchained by the spirits too long pent up in service to the greed of man.
[9]Moffett, Yard & Company.
[9]Moffett, Yard & Company.
[9]Moffett, Yard & Company.