Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  A heap of ragged coats was heaved up, and the face of a young girl emerged, staring sleepily at the woman.

  “Deborah,” she said, at last, “I’m here the night.”

  “Yes, child. Hur’s welcome,” she said, quietly eating on.

  The girl’s face was haggard and sickly; her eyes were heavy with sleep and hunger: real Milesian eyes they were, dark, delicate blue, glooming out from black shadows with a pitiful fright.

  “I was alone,” she said, timidly.

  “Where’s the father?” asked Deborah, holding out a potato, which the girl greedily seized.

  “He’s beyant,—wid Haley,—in the stone house.” (Did you ever hear the word jail from an Irish mouth?) “I came here. Hugh told me never to stay me-lone.”

  “Hugh?”

  “Yes.”

  A vexed frown crossed her face. The girl saw it, and added quickly,—

  “I have not seen Hugh the day, Deb. The old man says his watch lasts till the mornin’.”

  The woman sprang up, and hastily began to arrange some bread and flitch* in a tin pail, and to pour her own measure of ale into a bottle. Tying on her bonnet, she blew out the candle.

  “Lay ye down, Janey dear,” she said, gently, covering her with the old rags. “Hur can eat the potatoes, if hur’s hungry.”

  “Where are ye goin’, Deb? The rain’s sharp.”

  “To the mill, with Hugh’s supper.”

  “Let him bide till th’ morn. Sit ye down.”

  “No, no,”—sharply pushing her off. “The boy’ll starve.”

  She hurried from the cellar, while the child wearily coiled herself up for sleep. The rain was falling heavily, as the woman, pail in hand, emerged from the mouth of the alley, and turned down the narrow street, that stretched out, long and black, miles before her. Here and there a flicker of gas lighted an uncertain space of muddy footwalk and gutter; the long rows of houses, except an occasional lager-bier shop, were closed; now and then she met a band of mill-hands skulking to or from their work. . . .

  As Deborah hurried down through the heavy rain, the noise of these thousand engines sounded through the sleep and shadow of the city like far-off thunder. The mill to which she was going lay on the river, a mile below the city-limits. It was far, and she was weak, aching from standing twelve hours at the spools.* Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man his supper, though at every square she sat down to rest, and she knew she should receive small word of thanks.

  Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist’s eye, the picturesque oddity of the scene might have made her step stagger less, and the path seem shorter; but to her the mills were only “summat deilish to look at by night.”

  The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as she crept through, “’T looks like t’ Devil’s place!” It did,—in more ways than one.

  She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on a furnace. He had not time to eat his supper; so she went behind the furnace, and waited. . . .

  If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you.

  Wolfe, while Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master, bent over the furnace with his iron pole, unconscious of her scrutiny, only stopping to receive orders. Physically, Nature had promised the man but little. He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face (a meek, woman’s face) haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: “Molly Wolfe” was his sobriquet. He was never seen in the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did, desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed, pommelled to a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was up: but he was no favorite in the mill; he had the taint of school-learning on him,—not to a dangerous extent, only a quarter or so in the free-school in fact,* but enough to ruin him as a good hand in a fight.

  For other reasons, too, he was not popular; . . . silent, with foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness in innumerable curious ways: this one, for instance. In the neighboring furnace-buildings lay great heaps of the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run. Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl, Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and moulding figures,—hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,—working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.

  I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has groped through as boy and man,—the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that it will ever end. Think that God put into this man’s soul a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something, he knows not what,—other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child’s face, will rouse him to a passion of pain,—when his nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him. With all this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet’s heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. Be just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be just,—not like man’s law, which seizes on one isolated act, but like God’s judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man’s life, all the countless nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all. . . .

  “Here, some of you men!” said Kirby, “bring up those boards. We may as well sit down, gentlemen, until the rain is over. It cannot last much longer at this rate.”

  “Pig-metal,”—mumbled the reporter,—“um!—coal facilities,—um!—hands employed, twelve hundred,—bitumen,—um!—all right, I believe, Mr. Clarke;—sinking-fund,—what did you say was your sinking-fund?”

  “Twelve hundred hands?” said the stranger, the young man who had first spoken. “Do you control their votes, Kirby?”

  “Control? No.” The young man smiled complacently. “But my father brought seven hundred votes to the polls for his candidate last November. No for
ce-work, you understand,—only a speech or two, a hint to form themselves into a society, and a bit of red and blue bunting to make them a flag. The Invincible Roughs,—I believe that is their name. I forget the motto: ‘Our country’s hope,’ I think.” . . .

  The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons. The mills were deserted on Sundays, except by the hands who fed the fires, and those who had no lodgings and slept usually on the ash-heaps. The three strangers sat still during the next hour, watching the men cover the furnaces, laughing now and then at some jest of Kirby’s.

  “Do you know,” said Mitchell, “I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in the den.”

  Kirby laughed. “You are fanciful. Come, let us get out of the den. The spectral figures, as you call them, are a little too real for me to fancy a close proximity in the darkness,—unarmed, too.”

  The others rose, buttoning their over-coats, and lighting cigars.

  “Raining, still,” said Doctor May, “and hard. Where did we leave the coach, Mitchell?”

  “At the other side of the works.—Kirby, what’s that?”

  Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,—a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning.

  “Stop! Make that fire burn there!” cried Kirby, stopping short.

  The flame burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief.

  Mitchell drew a long breath.

  “I thought it was alive,” he said, going up curiously.

  The others followed.

  “Not marble, eh?” asked Kirby, touching it.

  One of the lower overseers stopped.

  “Korl, Sir.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Can’t say. Some of the hands; chipped it out in off-hours.”

  “Chipped to some purpose, I should say. What a flesh-tint the stuff has! Do you see, Mitchell?”

  “I see.”

  He had stepped aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking at it in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman’s form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolfs. Kirby and Doctor May walked around it, critical, curious. Mitchell stood aloof, silent. The figure touched him strangely.

  “Not badly done,” said Doctor May. “Where did the fellow learn that sweep of the muscles in the arm and hand? Look at them! They are groping,—do you see?—clutching: the peculiar action of a man dying of thirst.”

  “They have ample facilities for studying anatomy,” sneered Kirby, glancing at the half-naked figures.

  “Look,” continued the Doctor, “at this bony wrist, and the strained sinews of the instep! A working-woman,—the very type of her class.”

  “God forbid!” muttered Mitchell.

  “Why?” demanded May. “What does the fellow intend by the figure? I cannot catch the meaning.”

  “Ask him,” said the other, dryly. “There he stands,”—pointing to Wolfe, who stood with a group of men, leaning on his ash-rake.

  The Doctor beckoned him with the affable smile which kindhearted men put on, when talking with these people.

  “Mr. Mitchell has picked you out as the man who did this,—I’m sure I don’t know why. But what did you mean by it?”

  “She be hungry.”

  Wolfe’s eyes answered Mitchell, not the Doctor.

  “Oh-h! But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow! You have given no sign of starvation to the body. It is strong,—terribly strong. It has the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning.”

  Wolfe stammered, glanced appealingly at Mitchell, who saw the soul of the thing, he knew. But the cool, probing eyes were turned on himself now,—mocking, cruel, relentless.

  “Not hungry for meat,” the furnace-tender said at last.

  “What then? Whiskey?” jeered Kirby, with a coarse laugh.

  Wolfe was silent a moment, thinking.

  “I dunno,” he said, with a bewildered look. “It mebbe. Summat to make her live, I think,—like you. Whiskey ull do it, in a way.”

  The young man laughed again. Mitchell flashed a look of disgust somewhere,—not at Wolfe.

  “May,” he broke out impatiently, “are you blind? Look at that woman’s face! It asks questions of God, and says, ‘I have a right to know.’ Good God, how hungry it is!”

  They looked a moment; then May turned to the mill-owner:—

  “Have you many such hands as this? What are you going to do with them? Keep them at puddling iron?”

  Kirby shrugged his shoulders. Mitchell’s look had irritated him.

  “Ce n’est pas mon affaire. I have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses. I suppose there are some stray gleams of mind and soul among these wretches. The Lord will take care of his own; or else they can work out their own salvation. I have heard you call our American system a ladder which any man can scale. Do you doubt it? Or perhaps you want to banish all social ladders, and put us all on a flat table-land,—eh, May?”

  The Doctor looked vexed, puzzled. Some terrible problem lay hid in this woman’s face, and troubled these men. Kirby waited for an answer, and, receiving none, went on, warming with his subject.

  “I tell you, there’s something wrong that no talk of ‘Liberté’ or ‘Égalité’ will do away. If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands. It would be kindness. God help them! What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives as that?” He pointed to Deborah, sleeping on the ash-heap. “So many nerves to sting them to pain. What if God had put your brain, with all its agony of touch, into your fingers, and bid you work and strike with that?”

  “You think you could govern the world better?” laughed the Doctor.

  “I do not think at all.”

  “That is true philosophy. Drift with the stream, because you cannot dive deep enough to find bottom, eh?”

  “Exactly,” rejoined Kirby. “I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other’s throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible.”

  The Doctor sighed,—a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach.

  “God help us! Who is responsible?”

  “Not I, I tell you,” said Kirby, testily. “What has the man who pays them money to do with their souls’ concerns, more than the grocer or butcher who takes it?”

  “And yet,” said Mitchell’s cynical voice, “look at her! How hungry she is!” . . .

  “Money has spoken!” [Mitchell] said, seating himself lightly on a stone with the air of an amused spectator at a play. “Are you answered?”—turning to Wolfe his clear, magnetic face. . . . He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.

  “Are you answered? Why, May, look at him! ‘De profundis clamavi.’ Or, to quote in English, ‘Hungry and thirsty, his soul faints in him.’ And so Money sends back its answer into the depths through you, Kirby! Very clear the answer, too!— . . . Now, Doctor, the pocket of the world having uttered its voice, what has the heart to say? You are a philanthropist, in a small way,—n’estce pas? Here, boy, this gentleman can show you how to cut korl better,—or your destiny. Go on, May!” . . .

  He went to Wolfe and put his hand kindly on his arm. Something of a vague idea possessed the Doctor’s brain that much good was to be done
here by a friendly word or two: a latent genius to be warmed into life by a waited-for sun-beam. Here it was: he had brought it. So he went on complacently:—

  “Do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man?—do you understand?” (talking down to the capacity of his hearer: it is a way people have with children, and men like Wolfe,)—“to live a better, stronger life than I, or Mr. Kirby here? A man may make himself anything he chooses. God has given you stronger powers than many men,—me, for instance.”

  May stopped, heated, glowing with his own magnanimity. And it was magnanimous. The puddler had drunk in every word, looking through the Doctor’s flurry, and generous heat, and self-approval, into his will, with those slow, absorbing eyes of his.

  “Make yourself what you will. It is your right.”

  “I know,” quietly. “Will you help me?”

  Mitchell laughed again. The Doctor turned now, in a passion,—

  “You know, Mitchell, I have not the means. You know, if I had, it is in my heart to take this boy and educate him for”—

  “The glory of God, and the glory of John May.”

  May did not speak for a moment; then, controlled, he said,—

  “Why should one be raised, when myriads are left?—I have not the money, boy,” to Wolfe, shortly.