Life in the Iron-Mills | Page 3

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Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis

"Is this the end? O Life, as futile, then, as frail! What hope of answer or
redress?"
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The
sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick,
clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open
the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the
grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing
Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the
foul smells ranging loose in the air.
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds
from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in
black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke
on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,-- clinging in a coating of greasy
soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the
passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron
through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking
sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward
from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke,
clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately
in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old
dream,--almost worn out, I think.
From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to
the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and
tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of
the heavy weight of boats and coal- barges. What wonder? When I was

a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of
the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day.
Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the
street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past,
night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull,
besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or
cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes;
stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens
of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air
saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body.
What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it
an altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest,
a joke,-- horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My
fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What
if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it
odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of
apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,--air, and fields, and
mountains. The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so
pleasant. To be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in
the muddy graveyard, and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor
curious roses.
Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the
windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard
and the coalboats below, fragments of an old story float up before
me,--a story of this house into which I happened to come to-day. You
may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by
no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.--I know: only the outline of a
dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was
vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like
those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water- butt.--Lost? There
is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in
a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be