Part 6 (2/2)
”If you mean that very complimentary description for me,” said Gray with sudden seriousness, ”I will say to you here and now that there is no preacher in me. But when I am a little clearer in my own mind as to what I believe, I shall practise. The only real creed is a manner of life. If you don't live it, you don't really believe it.”
CHAPTER VI
WEAVERS AND WEFT
The Hardwick mill was a large one; to the mountain-bred girl it seemed endless, while its clamour and roar was a thing to daunt. They pa.s.sed through the spinning department, in which the long lines of frames were tended by children, and reached the weaving-rooms whose looms required the attention of women, with here and there a man who had failed to make a success of male occupations and sunk to the ill-paid feminine activities. In a corner of one of these, Johnnie's guide stopped before two silent, motionless looms, and threw on the power. He began to instruct her in their operation, all communication being in dumb show; for the clapping thunder of the weaving-room instantly s.n.a.t.c.hes the sound from one's lips and batters it into shapelessness. Johnnie had been an expert weaver on the ancient foot-power looms of the mountains; but the strangeness of the new machine, the noise and her surroundings, bewildered her. When the man saw that she was not likely to injure herself or the looms, he turned away with a careless nod and left her to her fate.
It was a blowy April day outside, with a gay blue sky in which the white clouds raced, drawing barges of shadow over the earth below. But the necessity of keeping dust out of the machinery, the inconvenience of having flying ends carried toward it, closed every window in the big factory, and the operatives gasped in the early heat, the odour of oil, the exhausted air. There was a ventilating system in the Hardwick mill, and it was supposed to be exceptionally free from lint; but the f.a.gged children crowded to the cas.e.m.e.nts with instinctive longing for the outdoor air which could not of course enter through the gla.s.s; or plodded their monotonous rounds to tend the frames and see that the thread was running properly to each spool, and that the spools were removed, when filled.
By noon every nerve in Johnnie's body quivered with excitement and overstrain; yet when Mandy came for her at the dinner hour she showed her a face still resolute, and asked that a snack be brought her to the mill.
”I don't see why you won't come along home and eat your dinner,” the Meacham woman commented. ”The Lord knows you get time enough to stay in the mill working over them old looms. Say, I seen you in the hall--did you know who you was talking to?”
The red flooded Johnnie's face as she knelt before her loom interrogating its workings with a dexterous hand; even the white nape of her neck showed pink to Mandy's examining eye; but she managed to reply in a fairly even tone:
”Yes, that was Mr. Stoddard. I saw him yesterday evening when I was coming down the Ridge with Shade.”
”But did you know 'bout him? Say--Johnnie Consadine--turn yourself round from that old loom and answer me, I was goin' a-past the door, and when I ketched sight o' you and him settin' there talkin' as if you'd knowed each other all your lives, why you could have--could have knocked me down with a feather.”
Johnnie sat up on her heels and turned a laughing face across her shoulder.
”I don't see any reason to want to knock you down with anything,” she evaded the direct issue. ”Go 'long, Mandy, or you won't have time to eat your dinner. Tell Aunt Mavity to send me just a biscuit and a piece of meat.”
”Good land, Johnnie Consadine, but you're quare!” exclaimed Mandy, staring with bulging light eyes. ”If it was me I'd be all in a tremble yet--and there you sit and talk about meat and bread!”
Johnnie did not think it necessary to explain that the tremor of that conversation with Stoddard had indeed lasted through her entire morning.
”There was nothing to tremble about,” she remarked with surface calm.
”He'd never seen a pink moccasin flower, and I gave him the one I had and told him where it grew.”
”Well, he wasn't looking at no moccasin flower when I seed him,” Mandy persisted. ”He was lookin' at you. He jest eyed you as if you was Miss Lydia Sessions herself--more so, if anything.”
Johnnie inwardly rebuked the throb of joy which greeted this statement.
”I reckon his looks are his own, Mandy,” she said soberly. ”You and me have no call to notice them.”
”Ain't got no call to notice 'em? Well, I jest wish't I could get you and him up in front of Miss Sessions, and have her see them looks of his'n,” grumbled Mandy as she turned away. ”I bet you there'd be some noticin' done then!”
When in the evening Mandy came for Johnnie, she found the new mill hand white about the mouth with exhaustion, heavy-eyed, choking, and ready to weep.
”Uh-huh,” said the Meacham woman, ”I know just how you feel. They all look that-a-way the first day or two--then after that they look worse.”
Nervelessly Johnnie found her way downstairs in the stream of tired girls and women. There was more than one kindly greeting for the new hand, and occasionally somebody clapped her on the shoulder and a.s.sured her that a few days more would get her used to the work. The mill yard was large, filled with gra.s.s-plots and gravel walks; but it was shut in by a boarding so tall that the street could not be seen from the windows of the lower floor. To Johnnie, weary to the point where aching muscles and blood charged with uneliminated waste spelled pessimism, that high board fence seemed to make of the pretty place a prison yard.
A man was propping open the big wooden gates, and through them she saw the street, the sidewalk, and a carriage drawn up at the curb. In this vehicle sat a lady; and a gentleman, hat in hand, talked to her from the sidewalk.
”Come on,” hissed Mandy, seizing her companion's arm and dragging her forward. ”Thar's Miss Lydia Sessions right now, and that's Mr. Stoddard a-talkin' to her. I'll go straight up and give you a knockdown--I want to, anyway. She's the one that runs the Uplift Club. If she takes a s.h.i.+ne to you it'll be money in your pocket.”
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