Читать книгу The Portion of Labor - Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman - Страница 8

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That morning, after the street in front of Lloyd's factory had been cleared of the flocking employés with their little dinner-boxes, and the great broadside of the front windows had been set with faces of the workers, a distracted figure came past. A young fellow at a window of the cutting-room noticed her first. “Look at that, Jim Tenny,” said he, with a shove of an elbow towards his next neighbor.

“Get out, will ye?” growled Jim Tenny, but he looked.

Then three girls from the stitching-room came crowding up behind with furtively tender pressings of round arms against the shoulders of the young men. “We come in here to see if that was Eva Loud,” said one, a sharp-faced, alert girl, not pretty, but a favorite among the male employés, to the constant wonder of the other girls.

“Yes, it's her fast enough,” rejoined another, a sweet-faced blonde with an exaggeratedly fashionable coiffure and a noticeable smartness in the tie of her neck-ribbon and the set of her cotton waist. “Just look at the poor thing's hair. Only see how frowsly it is, and she has come out without her hat.”

“Well, I don't wonder,” said the third girl, who was elderly and whose complexion was tanned and weather-beaten almost to the color of the leather upon which she worked. Yet through this seamed and discolored face, with thin grayish hair drawn back tightly from the temples, one could discern, as through a transparent mask, a past prettiness and an exceeding gentleness and faithfulness. “If my sister's little Helen was to be lost I shouldn't know whether my hat was on or not,” said she. “I believe I should go raving mad.”

“You wouldn't have to slave as you have done supportin' it ever since your sister's husband died,” said the pretty girl. “Only look how Eva's waist bags in the back and she 'ain't got any belt on. I wouldn't come out lookin' so.”

“I should die if I didn't have something to work for. That's the difference between being a worker and a slave,” said the other girl, simply. “Poor Eva!”

“Well, it was a pretty young one,” said the first girl.

“Looks to me as if Eva Loud's skirt was comin' off,” said the pretty girl. She pressed close to Jim Tenny with a familiar air of proprietorship as she spoke, but the young man did not seem to heed her. He was looking over his bench at the figure on the street below, and his heavy black eyebrows were scowling, and his mouth set.

Jim Tenny was handsome after a swarthy and grimy fashion, for the tint of the leather seemed to have become absorbed into his skin. His black mustache bristled roughly, but his face was freer than usual from his black beard-stubble, because the day before had been Sunday and he had shaved. His black right hand with its squat discolored nails grasped his cutting-knife with a hard clutch, his left held the piece of leather firmly in place, while he stared out with that angry and anxious scowl at Eva, who had paused on the street below, and was staring up at the windows, as if she meditated a wild search in the factory for the lost child. There was a curious likeness between the two faces; people had been accustomed to say that Eva Loud and her gentleman looked more like brother and sister than a courting couple, and there was, moreover, a curious spirit of comradeship between the two. It asserted itself now with the young man, in opposition to the more purely sexual attraction of the pretty girl who was leaning against him, and for whom he had deserted Eva.

After all, friendship and good comradeship are a steadier force than love, if not as overwhelming, and it may be that tortoise of the emotions which outruns the hare.

“Well, for my part, I think a good deal more of Eva Loud than if she had come out all frizzed and ruffled—shows her heart is in the right place,” said the man who had spoken first. He spoke with a guttural drawl, and kept on with his work, but there was a meaning in his words for the pretty girl, who had coquetted with him before taking up with Jim Tenny.

“That is so,” said another man at Jim Tenny's right. “She is right to come out as she has done when she is so anxious for the child.” This man was a fair-haired Swede, and he spoke English with a curious and careful precision, very different from the hurried, slurring intonations of the other men. He had been taught the language by a philanthropic young lady, a college graduate, in whose father's family he had lived when he first came to America, and in consequence he spoke like a gentleman and had some considerable difficulty in understanding his companions.

“Eva Loud has had a damned hard time, take it all together,” spoke out another man, looking over is bench at the girl on the street. He was small and thin and wiry, a mass of brown-coated muscles under his loose-hanging gingham shirt. He plied feverishly his cutting-knife with his lean, hairy hands as he spoke. He was accounted one of the best and swiftest cutters in Lloyd's, and he worked unceasingly, for he had an invalid wife and four children to support. Now and then he had to stop to cough, then he worked faster.

“That's so,” said the first man.

“Yes, that is so,” said the Swede, with a nod of his fair head.

“And now to lose this young one that she set her life by,” said the first girl, with an evident point of malice in her tone, and a covert look at the pretty girl at Jim Tenny's side. Jim Tenny paled under his grime; the hand which held the knife clinched.

“What do you s'pose has become of the young one?” said the first girl. “There's a good many out from the shop huntin' this mornin', ain't there?”

“Fifty,” said the first man, laconically.

“You three were out all day yesterday, wa'n't you?”

“Yes, Jim and Carl and me were out till after midnight.”

“Well, I wonder whether the poor little young one is alive? Don't seem as if she could be—but—”

“Look there! look there!” screamed the elderly girl suddenly. “Look at there!” She began to dance, she laughed, she sobbed, she waved her lean hands frantically out of the window, leaning far over the bench. “Look at there!” she kept crying. Then she turned and ran out of the room, with the other girls and half the cutting-room after her.

“Damn it, she's got the child!” said the thin man. He kept on working, his dark, sinewy hands flying over the sheets of leather, but the tears ran down his cheeks. Lloyd's emptied itself into the street, and surrounded Eva Loud and Ellen, who, running aimlessly, had come straight to her aunt. Jim Tenny was first.

Eva stood clasping the child, who was too frightened to cry, and was breathing in hushed gasps, her face hidden on her aunt's broad bosom. Eva had caught her up at the first sight of her, and now she stood clasping her fiercely, and looking at them all as if she thought they wanted to rob her of the child. Even when a great cheer went up from the crowd, and was echoed by another from the factory, with an accompaniment of waving bare, leather-stained arms and hands, that expression of desperate defiance instead of the joy of recovery did not leave her face, not until she saw Jim Tenny's face working with repressed emotion and met his eyes full of the memory of old comradeship. Then her bold heart and her pride all melted and she burst out in a great wail before them all.

“Oh, Jim!” she cried out. “Oh, Jim, I lost you, and then I thought I'd lost her! Oh, Jim!”

Then there was a chorus of feminine sobs, for Eva's wild weeping had precipitated the ready sympathy of half the girls present. The men started a cheer to cover a certain chivalrous shamefacedness which was upon them at the sight of the girl's grief, and another cheer from the factory echoed it. Then came another sound, the great steam-whistle of Lloyd's; then the whistles of the other neighboring factories responded, and people began to swarm out of them, and the windows to fill with eager faces. Jim Tenny grasped Eva's arm with a grasp like a vise. “Come this way,” said he, sharply. “Come this way, Eva.”

“Oh, Jim! oh, Jim!” Eva sobbed again; but she followed him, little Ellen's golden fleece tossing over her shoulder.

“She's got her; she's got her!” shouted the people.

Then the leather-stained hands gyrated, the cheers went up, and again the whistles blew.

Jim Tenny, with his hand on Eva's arm, pushed his way through the crowd.

“Where you goin', Jim?” asked the pretty girl at his elbow, but he pushed past her roughly, and did not seem to hear. Eva's face was all inflamed and convulsed with sobs, but she did not dream of covering it—she was full of the holy shamelessness of grief and joy. “Let me see her! let me see her! Oh, the dear little thing, only look at her! Where have you been, precious? Are you hungry? Oh, Nellie, she is hungry, I know! She looks thin. Run over to the bakery and buy her some cookies, quick! Are you cold? Give her this sacque. Only look at her! Kate, only look at her! Are you hurt, darling? Has anybody hurt you? If anybody has, he shall be hung! Oh, you darling! Only see her, 'Liza.”

But Jim Tenny, his mouth set, his black brows scowling, his hard grasp on Eva's arm, pushed straight through the gathering crowd until they came to Clarkson's stables at the rear of Lloyd's, where he kept his horse and buggy—for he lived at a distance from his work, and drove over every morning. He pointed to a chair which a hostler had occupied, tilted against the wall, for a morning smoke, after the horses were fed and watered, and which he had vacated to join the jubilant crowd. “Sit down there,” he said to Eva. Then he hailed a staring man coming out of the office. “Here, help me in with my horse, quick!” said he.

The man stared still, with slowly rising indignation. He was portly and middle-aged, the senior partner of the firm, who seldom touched his own horses of late years, and had a son at Harvard. “What's to pay? What do you mean? Anybody sick?” he asked.

“Help me into the buggy with my horse!” shouted Jim Tenny. “I tell you the child is found, and I've got to take it home to its folks.”

“Don't they know yet? Is that it?”

“Yes, I tell you.” Jim was backing out his horse as he spoke.

Mr. Clarkson seized a harness and threw the collar over the horse's head, while Jim ran out the buggy. When Mr. Clarkson lifted Eva and Ellen into the buggy he gave the child's head a pat. “God bless it!” he said, and his voice broke.

The horse was restive. Jim took a leap into the buggy at Eva's side, and they were out with a dash and a swift rattle. The crowd parted before them, and cheer after cheer went up. The whistles sounded again. Then all the city bells rang out. They were signalling the other searchers that the child was found. Jim and Eva and Ellen made a progress of triumph down the street. The crowd pursued them with cheers of rejoicing; doors and windows flew open; the house-yards were full of people. Jim drove as fast as he could, scowling hard to hide his tenderness and pity. Eva sat by his side, weeping in her terrible candor of grief and joy, and Ellen's golden locks tossed on her shoulder.