The Portion of Labor Part 17

As for the teacher and her mother, they simply adored the child--as indeed everybody did. She continued at her first school for a year, which was one of the hardest financially ever experienced in Rowe.

Norman Lloyd during all that time did not reopen his factory, and in the autumn two others shut down. The streets were full of the discontented ranks of impotent labor, and all the public buildings were props for the weary shoulders of the unemployed. On pleasant days the sunny sides of the vacant factories, especially, furnished settings for lines of scowling faces of misery.

This atmosphere affected Ellen more than any one realized, since the personal bearing of it was kept from her. She did not know that her father was drawing upon his precious savings for daily needs, she did not know how her aunt Eva and her uncle Jim were getting into greater difficulties every day, but she was too sensitive not to be aware of disturbances which were not in direct contact with herself.

She never forgot what she had overheard that night Lloyd's had shut down; it was always like a blot upon the face of her happy consciousness of life. She often overheard, as then, those loud, dissenting voices of her father and his friends in the sitting-room, after she had gone to bed; and then, too, Abby Atkins, who was not spared any knowledge of hards.h.i.+p, told her a good deal. "It's awful the way them rich folks treat us," said Abby Atkins. "They own the shops and everything, and take all the money, and let our folks do all the work. It's awful. But then," continued Abby Atkins, comfortingly, "your father has got money saved in the bank, and he owns his house, so you can get along if he don't have work. My father 'ain't got any, and he's got the old-fas.h.i.+oned consumption, and he coughs, and it takes money for his medicine. Then mother's sick a good deal too, and has to have medicine. We have to have more medicine than most anything else, and we hardly ever have any pie or cake, and it's all the fault of them rich folks." Abby Atkins wound up with a tragic climax and a fierce roll of her black eyes.

That evening Ellen went in to see her grandmother, and was presented with some cookies, which she did not eat.

"Why don't you eat them?" Mrs. Zelotes asked.

"Can I have them to do just what I want to with?" asked Ellen.

"What on earth do you want to do with a cooky except eat it?" Ellen blushed; she had a shamed-faced feeling before a contemplated generosity.

"What do you want to do with them except eat them?" her grandmother asked, severely.

"Abby Atkins don't have any cookies 'cause her father's out of work," said Ellen, abashedly.

"Did that Atkins girl ask you to bring her cookies?"

"No, ma'am."

"You can do jest what you are a mind to with 'em," Mrs. Zelotes said, abruptly.

Ellen never knew why her grandmother insisted upon her drinking a little gla.s.s of very nice and very spicy cordial before she went home, but the truth was, that Mrs. Zelotes thought the child so angelic in this disposition to give up the cookies which she loved to her little friend that she was straightway alarmed and thought her too good to live.

The next day she told f.a.n.n.y, and said to her, with her old face stern with anxiety, that the child was lookin' real pindlin', and Ellen had to take bitters for a month afterwards because she gave the cookies to Abby Atkins.

Chapter XIII

In all growth there is emulation and striving for precedence between the spiritual and the physical, and this very emulation may determine the rate of progression of the whole. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, may be in advance, but all the time the tendency is towards the distant goal. Sometimes the two keep abreast, and then there is the greatest harmony in speed. In Ellen Brewster at twelve and fifteen the spiritual outstripped the physical, as is often the case. Her eyes grew intense and hollow with reflection under knitting brows, her thin shoulders stooped like those of a sage bent with study and contemplation. She was slender to emaciation; her clothes hung loosely over her form, which seemed as s.e.xless as a lily-stem; indeed, her body seemed only made for the head, which was flower-like and charming, but almost painful in its delicacy, and with such weight of innocent pondering upon the unknown conditions of things in which she found herself. At times, of course, there were ebullitions of youthful spirit, and the child was as inconsequent as a kitten. At those times she was neither child nor woman; she was an anomalous thing made up not so much of actualities as of instincts. She romped with her mates as unseen and uncomprehended of herself as any young animal, but the flame of her striving spirit made everything full of unread meaning.

Ellen was accounted a most remarkable scholar. She had left Miss Mitch.e.l.l's school, and was in one of a higher grade. At fifteen she entered the high-school and had a master.

Andrew was growing old fast in those days, though not so old as to years. Though he was far from old, his hair was gray, his back bent.

He moved with a weary shuffle. The men in the shop began to eye him furtively. "Andrew Brewster will get fired next," they said. "The boss 'ain't no use for men with the first snap gone." Indeed, Andrew was constantly given jobs of lower grades, which did not pay so well. Whenever the force was reduced on account of dulness in trade, Andrew was one of the first to be laid aside on waiting orders in the regular army of toil. On one of these occasions, in the spring after Ellen was fifteen, his first fit of recklessness seized him. One night, after loafing a week, he came home with fever spots in his cheeks and a curiously bright, strained look in his eyes. f.a.n.n.y gazed sharply at him across the supper-table. Finally she laid down her knife and fork, rested her elbows on the table, and fixed her eyes commandingly upon him. "Andrew Brewster, what is the matter?" said she. Ellen turned her flower-like face towards her father, who took a swallow of tea without saying a word, though he shuffled his feet uneasily. "Andrew, you answer me," repeated f.a.n.n.y.

"There ain't anything the matter," answered Andrew, with a strange sullenness for him.

"There is, too. Now, Andrew Brewster, I ain't goin' to be put off. I know you're on the shelf on account of hard times, so it ain't that.

It's something new. Now I want to know what it is."

"It ain't anything."

"Yes, it is. Andrew, you ought to tell me. You know I ain't afraid to bear anything that you have to bear, and Ellen is getting old enough now, so she can understand, and she can't always be spared.

She'd better get a little knowledge of hards.h.i.+ps while she has us to help her bear 'em."

"This ain't a hards.h.i.+p, and there ain't anything to spare, Ellen,"

said Andrew; and he laughed with a hilarity totally unlike him.

That was all f.a.n.n.y could get out of him, but she was half rea.s.sured.

She told Eva that she didn't believe but he had been buying some Christmas present that he knew was extravagant for Ellen, and was afraid to tell her because he knew she would scold. But Andrew had not been buying Christmas presents, but speculating in mining stocks. He had resisted the temptation long. Year in and year out he had heard the talk right and left in the shop, on the street, and at the store of an evening. "I'll give you a point," he had heard one say to another during a discussion as to prices and dividends. He had heard it all described as a short cross-cut over the fields of hard labor to wealth and comfort, and he had kept his face straight ahead in his narrow track of caution and hereditary instincts until then. "The savings bank is good enough for me," he used to say; "that's where my father kept his money. I don't know anything about your stocks. I'd rather have a little and have it safe." The men could not reason him out of his position, not even when Billy Monroe made fifteen hundred dollars on a Colorado mine which had cost him fifteen cents per share, and left the shop, and drove a fast horse in a G.o.ddard buggy.

It was even reported that fifteen hundred was fifteen thousand, but Andrew was proof against this brilliant loadstar of success, though many of his mates followed it afar, just before the shares dropped below par.

Jim Tenny went with the rest. "Tell you what 'tis, Andrew, old man,"

he said, clapping Andrew on the shoulder as they were going out of the shop one night, "you'd better go in too."

"The savings-bank is good enough for me," said Andrew, with his gentle doggedness.

"You can buy a trotter," urged Jim.

"I never was much on trotters," replied Andrew.

"I ain't going to walk home many times more, you bet," Jim said to Eva when he got home, and then he bent back her tensely set face and kissed it. Eva was crocheting hoods for fifteen cents apiece for a neighboring woman who was a padrone on a small scale, having taken a large order from a dealer for which she realized twenty cents apiece, and employed all the women in the neighborhood to do the work.

"Why not?" said she.

"Oh," said Jim, gayly, "I've bought some of that 'Golden Hope'

mining stock. Billy Monroe has just made fifteen thousand on it, and I'll make as much in a week or two."

"Oh, Jim, you 'ain't taken all the money out of the bank?"

"Don't you worry, old girl," replied Jim. "I guess you'll find I can take care of you yet."

But the stock went down, and Jim's little venture with it.

"Guess you were about right, old man," he said to Andrew.

Andrew was rather looked up to for his superior caution and sagacity. He was continually congratulated upon it. "Savings-banks are good enough for me," he kept repeating. But that was four years ago, and now his turn had come; the contagion of speculation had struck him at last. That was the way with Lloyd's failing employes.

Andrew kept his stock certificate in a little, tin, trunk-shaped box which had belonged to his father. It had a key and a tiny padlock, and he had always stored in it the deed of his house, his savings-bank book, and his insurance policy. He carried the key in his pocket. f.a.n.n.y never opened the box, or had any curiosity about it, believing that she was acquainted with its contents; but now when, on coming unexpectedly into the bedroom--the box was always kept at the head of the bed--she heard a rattle of papers, and caught Andrew locking the box with a confused air, she began to suspect something. She began to look hard at the box, to take it up and shake it when her husband was away. f.a.n.n.y was crocheting hoods as well as Eva. Ellen wished to learn, but her mother would not allow that. "You've got enough to do to study your lessons," she said. Andrew watched his wife crochet with ill-concealed impatience.

"I ain't goin' to have you do that long," he said--"workin' at that rate for no more money. That Mrs. William Pendergra.s.s that lets out these hoods is as bad as any factory boss in the country."

"Well, she got the chance," said f.a.n.n.y, "and they won't let out the work except that way; they can get it done so much cheaper."

"Well, you sha'n't have it, anyhow," said Andrew, smiling mysteriously.

"Why, you ain't goin' to work again, be you, Andrew?"

"You wait."

"Well, don't you talk the way poor Jim did. Eva wasn't going to crochet any more hoods, and now Jim's out of work again. Eva told me yesterday that she didn't know where the money was comin' from.

Jim's mother owns the place, and it ain't worth much, anyhow, and they can't take it from her in her lifetime, even if she was willing to let it go. Eva said she was goin' to try again for work herself in the shop. She thought maybe there might be some kind of a job she could get. Don't you talk like Jim did about his good-for-nothin'

mining stock. I've been glad enough that you had sense enough to keep what little we had where 'twas safe."