Life in the Iron-Mills | Page 9

employed, twelve hundred,--bitumen,--um!--all right, I believe, Mr.
Clarke;--sinking-fund,--what did you say was your sinking-fund?"
"Twelve hundred hands?" said the stranger, the young man who had
first spoken. "Do you control their votes, Kirby?"
"Control? No." The young man smiled complacently. "But my father
brought seven hundred votes to the polls for his candidate last
November. No force-work, you understand,--only a speech or two, a
hint to form themselves into a society, and a bit of red and blue bunting
to make them a flag. The Invincible Roughs,--I believe that is their
name. I forget the motto: 'Our country's hope,' I think."
There was a laugh. The young man talking to Kirby sat with an amused
light in his cool gray eye, surveying critically the half-clothed figures
of the puddlers, and the slow swing of their brawny muscles. He was a
stranger in the city,--spending a couple of months in the borders of a
Slave State, to study the institutions of the South,--a brother-in-law of
Kirby's,-- Mitchell. He was an amateur gymnast,--hence his anatomical
eye; a patron, in a blase' way, of the prize-ring; a man who sucked the
essence out of a science or philosophy in an indifferent, gentlemanly
way; who took Kant, Novalis, Humboldt, for what they were worth in
his own scales; accepting all, despising nothing, in heaven, earth, or
hell, but one-idead men; with a temper yielding and brilliant as summer
water, until his Self was touched, when it was ice, though brilliant still.
Such men are not rare in the States.

As he knocked the ashes from his cigar, Wolfe caught with a quick
pleasure the contour of the white hand, the blood-glow of a red ring he
wore. His voice, too, and that of Kirby's, touched him like music,--low,
even, with chording cadences. About this man Mitchell hung the
impalpable atmosphere belonging to the thoroughbred gentleman,
Wolfe, scraping away the ashes beside him, was conscious of it, did
obeisance to it with his artist sense, unconscious that he did so.
The rain did not cease. Clarke and the reporter left the mills; the others,
comfortably seated near the furnace, lingered, smoking and talking in a
desultory way. Greek would not have been more unintelligible to the
furnace-tenders, whose presence they soon forgot entirely. Kirby drew
out a newspaper from his pocket and read aloud some article, which
they discussed eagerly. At every sentence, Wolfe listened more and
more like a dumb, hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid look
creeping over his face, glancing now and then at Mitchell, marking
acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to himself, seeing
as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained soul.
Never! He had no words for such a thought, but he knew now, in all the
sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great
gulf never to be passed. Never!
The bell of the mills rang for midnight. Sunday morning had dawned.
Whatever hidden message lay in the tolling bells floated past these men
unknown. Yet it was there. Veiled in the solemn music ushering the
risen Saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world
gone wrong,--even this social riddle which the brain of the grimy
puddler grappled with madly to-night.
The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons. The mills
were deserted on Sundays, except by the hands who fed the fires, and
those who had no lodgings and slept usually on the ash-heaps. The
three strangers sat still during the next hour, watching the men cover
the furnaces, laughing now and then at some jest of Kirby's.
"Do you know," said Mitchell, "I like this view of the works better than
when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the
amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy
these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and
the spectral figures their victims in the den."
Kirby laughed. "You are fanciful. Come, let us get out of the den. The

spectral figures, as you call them, are a little too real for me to fancy a
close proximity in the darkness,-- unarmed, too."
The others rose, buttoning their overcoats, and lighting cigars.
"Raining, still," said Doctor May, "and hard. Where did we leave the
coach, Mitchell?"
"At the other side of the works.--Kirby, what's that?"
Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the
white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,-- a woman, white,
of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in
some wild gesture of warning.
"Stop! Make that fire burn there!" cried Kirby, stopping short.
The flame burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief.
Mitchell drew a long breath.
"I thought it was alive," he