Life in the Iron-Mills | Page 7

listening, through the monotonous din
and uncertain glare of the works, to the dull plash of the rain in the far
distance, shrinking back whenever the man Wolfe happened to look
towards her. She knew, in spite of all his kindness, that there was that
in her face and form which made him loathe the sight of her. She felt
by instinct, although she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of
the man, which made him among his fellow-workmen something
unique, set apart. She knew, that, down under all the vileness and
coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was
beautiful and pure, that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity,
even when his words were kindest. Through this dull consciousness,
which never left her, came, like a sting, the recollection of the dark blue

eyes and lithe figure of the little Irish girl she had left in the cellar. The
recollection struck through even her stupid intellect with a vivid glow
of beauty and of grace. Little Janey, timid, helpless, clinging to Hugh
as her only friend: that was the sharp thought, the bitter thought, that
drove into the glazed eyes a fierce light of pain. You laugh at it? Are
pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am
taking you to than in your own house or your own heart,--your heart,
which they clutch at sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy, be the
octave high or low.
If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the
hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a
symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify
you more. A reality of soul- starvation, of living death, that meets you
every day under the besotted faces on the street,--I can paint nothing of
this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of
one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you can
read according to the eyes God has given you.
Wolfe, while Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master, bent over
the furnace with his iron pole, unconscious of her scrutiny, only
stopping to receive orders. Physically, Nature had promised the man
but little. He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man,
his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face ( a meek, woman's face)
haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of
the girl- men: "Molly Wolfe" was his sobriquet. He was never seen in
the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did,
desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed,
pommelled to a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was
up: but he was no favorite in the mill; he had the taint of
school-learning on him,--not to a dangerous extent, only a quarter or so
in the free-school in fact, but enough to ruin him as a good hand in a
fight.
For other reasons, too, he was not popular. Not one of themselves, they
felt that, though outwardly as filthy and ash- covered; silent, with
foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness in
innumerable curious ways: this one, for instance. In the neighboring
furnace-buildings lay great heaps of the refuse from the ore after the
pig-metal is run. Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of a

delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl,
Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and
moulding figures,--hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely
beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was a
curious fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he
spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his
watch came again,--working at one figure for months, and, when it was
finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A
morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness
and crime, and hard, grinding labor.
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among
the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him
justly when you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back, as
he does every day, at his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember
the heavy years he has groped through as boy and man,--the slow,
heavy years of constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks
sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that it