Life in the Iron-Mills | Page 4

honest. This is
what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to
your clean clothes, and come right down with me,--here, into the
thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this
story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain
dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist,

or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet
on the hills, do not see it clearly,--this terrible question which men here
have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into
words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken faces
and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God.
Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I will tell you
plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is
this: that this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the
sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of its
darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the
Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but will only tell
my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark as this thick
vapor about us, and as pregnant with death; but if your eyes are free as
mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with
promise of the day that shall surely come.
My story is very simple,--Only what I remember of the life of one of
these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's
rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the great
order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter; run usually with
about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose the half-forgotten
story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands.
Perhaps because there is a secret, underlying sympathy between that
story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or
perhaps simply for the reason that this house is the one where the
Wolfes lived. There were the father and son,--both hands, as I said, in
one of Kirby & John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah,
their cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented
then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms.
The old man, like many of the puddlers and feeders of the mills, was
Welsh,--had spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You may
pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the
windows, any day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not
so brawny; they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell,
nor shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure,
unmixed blood, I fancy: shows itself in the slight angular bodies and
sharply-cut facial lines. It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived
here. Their lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping

in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking--God
and the distillers only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to
atone for some drunken excess. Is that all of their lives?--of the portion
given to them and these their duplicates swarming the streets
to-day?--nothing beneath?--all? So many a political reformer will tell
you,--and many a private reformer, too, who has gone among them
with a heart tender with Christ's charity, and come out outraged,
hardened.
One rainy night, about eleven o'clock, a crowd of half-clothed women
stopped outside of the cellar-door. They were going home from the
cotton-mill.
"Good-night, Deb," said one, a mulatto, steadying herself against the
gas-post. She needed the post to steady her. So did more than one of
them.
"Dah's a ball to Miss Potts' to-night. Ye'd best come."
"Inteet, Deb, if hur'll come, hur'll hef fun," said a shrill Welsh voice in
the crowd.
Two or three dirty hands were thrust out to catch the gown of the
woman, who was groping for the latch of the door.
"No."
"No? Where's Kit Small, then?"
"Begorra! on the spools. Alleys behint, though we helped her, we dud.
An wid ye! Let Deb alone! It's ondacent frettin' a quite body. Be the
powers, an we'll have a night of it! there'll be lashin's o' drink,--the
Vargent be blessed and praised for't!"
They went on, the mulatto inclining for a moment to show fight, and
drag the woman Wolfe off with them; but, being pacified, she staggered
away.
Deborah groped her way