The Power and the Glory Part 3

"I didn't name no man," she said mildly. "I don't reckon anybody's goin'

to give me things. Ain't there the factory where a body may work and earn money for all they need?"

"Well, I reckon they might, if they was good and careful to need powerful little," allowed Shade.

At the moment they came to the opening of a small path which plunged abruptly down the steep side of the ridge, curving in and out with--and sometimes across--a carriage road. As they took the first steps on this the sun forsook the valley at last, and lingered only on the mountain top where was that Palace of Pleasure into which He and She had vanished, before which the strange chariot waited. And all at once the little brook that wound, a golden thread, between the bulk of the mills, flowed, a stream of ink, from pool to pool of black water. The way down turned and turned; and each time that Shade and Johnnie got another sight of the buildings of the little village below, they had changed in character with the changing point of view. They loomed taller, they looked darker in spite of the pulsing light from their many windows.

And now there burst out a roar of whistles, like the bellowing of great monsters. Somehow it struck cold upon the girl's heart. They were coming down from that wonderful highland where she had seemed to see all the kingdoms of earth spread before her, hers for the conquering; they were descending into the shadow.

As they came quite to the foot they saw groups of women and children, with here and there a decrepit man, leaving the cottages and making their way toward the lighted mills. From the doors of little shanties tired-faced women with boys and girls walking near them, and, in one or two cases, very small ones clinging to their skirts and hands, reinforced the crowd which set in a steady stream toward the bridges and the open gates in the high board fences.

"What are they a-goin' to the factory for on Sunday evening?" Johnnie inquired.

"Night turn," replied Buckheath briefly. "Sunday's over at sundown."

"Oh, yes," agreed Johnnie dutifully, but rather disheartened. "Trade must be mighty good if they have to work all night."

"Them that works don't get any more for it," retorted Shade harshly.

"What's the little ones goin' to the mill for?" Johnnie questioned, staring up at him with apprehensive eyes.

"Why, to play, I reckon," returned the young fellow ironically. "Folks mostly does go to the mill to play, don't they?"

The girl ran forward and clasped his arm with eager fingers that shook.

"Shade!" she cried; "they can't work those little babies. That one over there ain't to exceed four year old, and I know it."

The man looked indifferently to where a tiny boy trotted at his mother's heels, solemn, old-faced, unchildish. He laughed a little.

"That thar chap is the oldest feller in the mills," he said. "That's Benny Tarbox. He's too short to tend a frame, but his maw lets him help her at the loom--every weaver has obliged to have helpers wait on 'em.

You'll get used to it."

Get used to it! She pulled the sunbonnet about her face. The gold was all gone from the earth, and from her mood as well. She raised her eyes to where the last brightness lingered on the mountain-top. Up there they were happy. And even as her feet carried her forward to Pap Himes's boarding-house, her soul went clamouring, questing back toward the heights, and the sunlight, the love and laughter, she had left behind.

"The power and the glory--the power and the glory," she whispered over and over to herself. "Is it all back there?" Again she looked wistfully toward the heights. "But maybe a body with two feet can climb."

CHAPTER IV

OF THE USE OF FEET

The suburb of Cottonville bordered a creek, a starveling, wet-weather stream which offered the sole suggestion of sewerage. The village was cut in two by this natural division. It clung to the shelving sides of the shallow ravine; it was scattered like bits of refuse on the numerous railroad embankments, where building was unhandy and streets almost impossible, to be convenient to the mills. Six big factories in all, some on one side of the state line and some on the other, daily breathed in their live current of operatives and exhaled them again to fill the litter of flimsy shanties.

The road which wound down from the heights ran through the middle of the village and formed its main street. Across the ravine from it, reached by a wooden bridge, stood a pretentious frame edifice, a boarding-house built by the Gloriana mill for the use of its office force and mechanics. Men were lounging on the wide porches of this structure in Sabbath-afternoon leisure, smoking and singing. The young Southern male of any cla.s.s is usually melodious. Across the hollow came the sounds of a guitar and a harmonica.

"Listen a minute, Shade. Ain't that pretty? I know that tune," said Johnnie, and she began to hum softly under her breath, her girlish heart responding to the call.

"Hush," admonished Buckheath harshly. "You don't want to be runnin'

after them fellers. It's some of the loom-fixers."

In silence he led the way past the great mill buildings of red brick, square and unlovely but many-windowed and glowing, alight, throbbing with the hum of pent industry. Johnnie gazed steadily up at those windows; the glow within was other than that which gilded turret and pinnacle and fairy isle in the Western sky, yet perchance this light might be a lamp to the feet of one who wished to climb that way. Her adventurous spirit rose to the challenge, and she said softly, more to herself than to the man:

"I'm a-goin' to be a boss hand in there. I'm goin' to get the highest wages of any girl in the mill, time I learn my trade, because I'm goin'

to try harder 'n anybody."

Shade looked around at her, curiously. Her beauty, her air of superiority, still repelled him--such fancy articles were not apt to be of much use--but this sounded like a woman who might be valuable to her master.

Johnnie returned his gaze with the frank good will of a child, and suddenly he forgot everything but the adorable lift of her pink lip over the s.h.i.+ning white teeth.

The young fellow now halted at the step of a big frame house. The outside was of an extent to seem fairly pretentious; yet so mean was the construction, so sparing of window and finish, that the building showed itself instantly for what it was--the cheap boarding-house of a mill town. A group of tired-looking girls sitting on the step in blessed Sunday idleness and cheap Sunday finery stared as he and Johnnie ascended and crossed the porch. One of these, a tall lank woman of perhaps thirty years, got up and followed a few hesitating paces, apparently more as a matter of curiosity than with any hospitable intent.

A man with a round red face and a bald pate whose curly fringe of grizzled, reddish hair made him look like a clown in a pantomime, motioned them with a surly thumb toward the back of the house, where clattering preparations for supper were audible and odoriferous. The old fellow sat in a splint-bottomed chair of extra size and with arms. This he had kicked back against the wall of the house, so that his short legs did not reach the floor, the big carpet-slippered feet finding rest on the rung of the chair. His att.i.tude was one of relaxation. The face, broad, flat, small of eye and wide of mouth, did indeed suggest the clown countenance; yet there was in it, and in the whole personality, something of the Eastern idol, the journeyman attempt of crude humanity to represent power. And the potential cruelty of the type slept in his placid countenance as surely as ever in the dreaming face of s.h.i.+va, the destroyer.

"Mrs. Bence--Aunt Mavity," called Shade, advancing into the narrow hall.

In answer a tired-faced woman came from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her checked ap.r.o.n.

"Good Lord, if it ain't Johnnie! I was 'feared she Wouldn't git here to-night," she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed when she saw the girl. "Take her out on the porch, Shade; I ain't got a minute now. Pap's poorly again, and I'm obliged to put the late supper on the table for them thar gals--the night s.h.i.+ft's done eat and gone. I'll show her whar she's to sleep at, after while. I don't just rightly know whar Pap aimed to have her stay,"

she concluded hastily, as something boiled over on the stove. Johnnie set her bundle down in the corner of the kitchen.

"I'll help," she said simply, as she drew the excited coffee-pot to a corner of the range and dosed it judiciously with cold water.

"Well, now, that's mighty good of you," panted worried Mavity Bence.

"How queer things comes 'round," she ruminated as they dished up the biscuits and fried pork. "I helped you into the very world, Johnnie. I lived neighbour to your maw, and they wasn't n.o.body else to be with her when you was born, and I went over. I never suspicioned that you would be helpin' me git supper down here in the settlement inside o'

twenty year."

Johnnie ran and fetched and carried, as though she had never done anything else in her life, intent on the one task. She was alive in every fibre of her young body; she saw, she heard, as these words cannot always be truthfully applied to people.

"Did Shade tell you anything about Louvania?" inquired the woman at length.

"No," replied Johnnie softly, "but I seen it in the paper."

Louvania Bence, the only remaining child of the widow, had, two weeks before, left her work at the mill, taken the trolley in to Watauga, walked out upon the county bridge across the Tennessee and jumped off.

Johnnie had read the published account, pa.s.sed from hand to hand in the mountains where Pap Himes and Mavity Bence had troops of kin and where Louvania was born. The statement ran that there was no love affair, and that the girl's distaste for her work at the cotton mill must have been the reason for the suicide.

"That there talk in the newspaper wasn't right," Louvania's mother choked. "They wasn't a word of truth in it. You know in reason that if Louvany hated to work in the mill as bad as all that she'd have named it to me--her own mother--and she never did. She never spoke a word like it, only to say now and ag'in, as we all do, that it was hard, and that she'd--well, she did 'low she'd ruther be dead, as gals will; but she couldn't have meant it. Do you think she could have meant it, Johnnie?"

The faded eyes, clouded now by tears, stared up into Johnnie's clear young orbs.

"Of course she couldn't have meant it," Johnnie comforted her. "Why, I'm sure it's fine to work in the mill. If she didn't feel so, she'd have told you the thing. She must have been out of her mind. People always are when they--do that."

"That's what I keep a-thinkin'," the poor mother said, clinging pathetically to that which gave her consolation and cheer. "I say to myself that it must have been some brain disease took her all of a sudden and made her crazy that-a-way; because G.o.d knows she had nothing to fret her nor drive her to such."

By this time the meal was on the table, and the girls trooped in from the porch. The old man with the bald pate was seating himself at the head of the board, and Johnnie asked the privilege of helping wait on table.

"No, you ain't a-goin' to," Mrs. Bence said hospitably, pus.h.i.+ng her into a seat. "If you start in to work in the morning, like I reckon you will, you ain't got no other time to get acquainted with the gals but right now. You set down. We don't take much waitin' on. We all pa.s.s things, and reach for what we want."

In the smoky illumination of the two ill-cleaned lamps which stood one at each end of the table, Johnnie's fair face shone out like a star. The tall woman who had shown a faint interest in them on the porch was seated just opposite. Her bulging light-blue eyes scarcely left the newcomer's countenance as she absent-mindedly filled her mouth. She was a scant, stringy-looking creature, despite her height; the narrow back was hooped like that of an old woman and the shoulders indrawn, so that the chest was cramped, and sent forth a wheezy, flatted voice that sorted ill with her inches; her round eyes had no speculation in them; her short chin was obstinate without power; the thin, half-gray hair that wanted to curl feebly about her lined forehead was stripped away and twisted in a knot no bigger than a walnut, at the back of a bent head.

For some time the old man at the end of the table stowed himself methodically with victuals; his air was that of a man packing a box; then he brought his implements to half-rest, as it were, and gave a divided attention to the new boarder.