Margret Howth: A Story of To-Day | Page 4

Rebecca Harding Davis
I said,--only a rough sketch of
one or two of those people whom you see every day, and call "dregs,"
sometimes,--a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you might pick for
yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets. I expect you to
call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it pleases you
best to find; idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for
curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of
pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened themselves in
everybody's home. You want something, in fact, to lift you out of this
crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to kindle and chafe and glow
in you. I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American
life, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a new and awful
significance that we do not see.
Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now. Ha! that is
spirit-stirring!--that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood! Your
manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor daily
necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into this common,
every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not be in it also a great
warfare. Not a serfish war; not altogether ignoble, though even its only
end may appear to be your daily food. A great warfare, I think, with a
history as old as the world, and not without its pathos. It has its slain.
Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in
your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs sleep under every
green hill-side.
You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that war.
There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a judge's
bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly honour, for purer
triumph than his who falls foremost in the breach. Your enemy, Self,

goes with you from the cradle to the coffin; it is a hand-to-hand
struggle all the sad, slow way, fought in solitude,--a battle that began
with the first heart-beat, and whose victory will come only when the
drops ooze out, and sudden halt in the veins,--a victory, if you can gain
it, that will drift you not a little way upon the coasts of the wider,
stronger range of being, beyond death.
Let me roughly outline for you one or two lives that I have known, and
how they conquered or were worsted in the fight. Very common lives, I
know,--such as are swarming in yonder market-place; yet I dare to call
them voices of God,--all!
My reason for choosing this story to tell you is simple enough.
An old book, which I happened to find to-day, recalled it. It was a
ledger, iron-bound, with the name of the firm on the outside,--Knowles
& Co. You may have heard of the firm: they were large woollen
manufacturers: supplied the home market in Indiana for several years.
This ledger, you see by the writing, has been kept by a woman. That is
not unusual in Western trading towns, especially in factories where the
operatives are chiefly women. In such establishments, they can fill
every post successfully, but that of overseer: they are too hard with the
hands for that.
The writing here is curious: concise, square, not flowing,--very legible,
however, exactly suited to its purpose. People who profess to read
character in chirography would decipher but little from these cramped,
quiet lines. Only this, probably: that the woman, whoever she was, had
not the usual fancy of her sex for dramatizing her soul in her writing,
her dress, her face,--kept it locked up instead, intact; that her words and
looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere absorbents by
which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her, not flaunting
helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that lay within, before
careless passers-by. The first page has the date, in red letters, October 2,
1860, largely and clearly written. I am sure the woman's hand trembled
a little when she took up the pen; but there is no sign of it here; for it
was a new, desperate adventure to her, and she was young, with no
faith in herself. She did not look desperate, at all,--a quiet, dark girl,

coarsely dressed in brown.
There was not much light in the office where she sat; for the factory
was in one of the close by-streets of the town, and the office they gave
her was only a small square closet in the seventh story. It had but one
window, which overlooked a back-yard full of dyeing vats. The
sunlight that did contrive to struggle in obliquely through the
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