Part 9 (1/2)
The big drops lengthened themselves, as they came down, into tiny javelins and struck upon the rocks with a splash. The roar and drumming in the forest made a soft, blurring undertone of sound. The first rain lasted longer than Johnnie had counted on, and the clearing-up shower was slow in making its appearance. The two talked with ever-growing interest. Strangely enough Johnnie Consadine, who had no knowledge of any other life except through a few well-conned books, appreciated the values of this mountain existence with almost the detached view of an outsider. Her knowledge of it was therefore more a.s.sorted and available, and Stoddard listened to her eagerly.
”But what made you think you'd like to work in a cotton mill?” he asked suddenly. ”After all, weren't you maybe better off up in these mountains?”
And then and there Johnnie strove to put into exact and intelligent words what she had possessed and what she had lacked in the home of her childhood. Unconsciously she told him more than was in the mere words.
He got the situation as to the visionary, kindly father with a turn for book learning and a liking for enterprises that appealed to his imagination. Uncle Pros and the silver mine were always touched upon with the tender kindness Johnnie felt for the old man and his life-long quest. But the little mother and the children--ah, it was here that the listener found Johnnie's incentive.
”Mr. Stoddard,” she concluded, ”there wasn't a bit of hope of schooling for the children unless I could get out and work in the factory. I think it's a splendid chance for a girl. I think any girl that wouldn't take such a chance would be mighty mean and poor-spirited.”
Gray Stoddard revolved this conception of a chance in the world in his mind for some time.
”I did get some schooling,” she told him. ”You wouldn't think it to hear me talk, because I'm careless, but I've been taught, and I can do better. Yet if I don't see to it, how am I to know that the children will have as much even as I've had? Mountain air is mighty pure and healthy, and the water up here is the finest you ever drank; but that's only for the body. Of course there's beauty all about you--there was never anything more sightly than big Unaka and the ridges that run from it, and the sky, and the big woods--and all. And yet human beings have got to have more than that. I aim to make a chance for the children.”
”Are you going to bring them down and let them work in the mills with you?” Stoddard asked in a perfectly colourless tone.
Johnnie looked embarra.s.sed. Her week in the cotton mill had fixed indelibly on her mind the picture of the mill child, straggling to work in the gray dawn, sleepy, s.h.i.+vering, unkempt; of the young things creeping up and down the aisles between the endlessly turning spools, dully regarding the frames to see that the threads were not fouled or broken; of the tired little groups as they pressed close to the shut windows, neglecting their work to stare out into a world of blue sky and blowing airs--a world they could see but not enter, and no breath of which could come in to them. And so she looked embarra.s.sed. She was afraid that memory of those tired little faces would show in her own countenance. Her hands on the steering-wheel trembled. She remembered that Mr. Stoddard was, as Shade had said, one of the bosses in the Hardwick mill. It seemed too terrible to offend him. He certainly thought no ill of having children employed; she must not seem to criticize him; she answered evasively:
”Well, of course they might do that. I did think of it--before I went down there.”
”Before you went to work in the mills yourself,” supplied Stoddard, again in that colourless tone.
”Ye--yes,” hesitated Johnnie; ”but you mustn't get the idea that I don't love my work--because I do. You see the children haven't had any schooling yet, and--well, I'm a great, big, stout somebody, and it looks like I'm the one to work in the mill.”
She turned to him fleetingly a countenance of appeal and perplexity. It seemed indeed anything but certain that she was one to work in the mill.
There was something almost grotesque in the idea which made Stoddard smile a little at her earnestness.
”I'd like to talk it over with you when you've been at work there longer,” he found himself saying. ”You see, I'm studying mill conditions from one side, and you're studying them from the opposite--perhaps we could help each other.”
”I sure will tell you what I find out,” agreed Johnnie heartily. ”I reckon you'll want to know how the work seems to me at the side of such as I was used to in the mountains; but I hope you won't inquire how long it took me to learn, for I'm afraid I'm going to make a poor record. If you was to ask me how much I was able to earn there, and how much back on Unaka, I could make a good report for the mill on that, because that's all that's the matter with the mountains--they're a beautiful place to live, but a body can't hardly earn a cent, work as they may.”
Johnnie forgot herself--she was always doing that--and she talked freely and well. It was as inevitable that she should be drawn to Gray Stoddard as that she should desire the clothing and culture Miss Lydia possessed.
For the present, one aspiration struck her as quite as innocent as the other. Stoddard had not yet emerged from the starry constellations among which she set him, to take form as a young man, a person who might indeed return her regard. Her emotions were in that nebulous, formative stage when but a touch would be needed to show her whither the regard tended, yet till that touch should come, she as unashamedly adored Gray as any child of five could have done. It was not till they were well down the road to Cottonville that she realized the bald fact that she, a mill girl, was riding in an automobile with one of the mill owners.
She was casting about for some reasonable phrase in which to clothe the statement that it would be better he should stop the car and let her out; she had parted her lips to ask him to take the wheel, when they rounded a turn and came upon a company of loom-fixers from the village below. Behind them, in a giggling group, strolled a dozen mill girls in their Sunday best. Johnnie had sight of Mandy Meacham, fixing eyes of terrified admiration upon her; then she nodded in reply to Shade Buckheath's angry stare, and a rattle of wheels apprized her that a carriage was pa.s.sing on the other side. This vehicle contained the entire Hardwick family, with Lydia Sessions turning long to look her incredulous amazement back at them from her seat beside her brother-in-law.
It was all over in a moment. The loom-fixers had debouched upon the long, wooden bridge which crossed the ravine to their quarters; the girls were going on, Mandy Meacham hanging back and staring; a tree finally shut out Miss Sessions's accusing countenance.
”Please stop and let me out here,” said Johnnie, in a scarcely audible voice.
When Stoddard would have remonstrated, or asked why, his lips were closed by sight of her daunted, miserable face. He knew as well as she the mad imprudence of the thing which they had done, and blamed himself roundly with it all.
”I'll not forget to bring the books we were talking of,” he made haste to say. He picked up the little basket from the floor of the car.
”You'd better keep the flowers in that,” Johnnie told him lifelessly.
Her innocent dream was broken into by a cruel reality. She was struggling blindly under the weight of all her little world's disapprobation.
”You'll let me return the basket when I bring you the books,” Gray suggested, helplessly.
”I don't know,” Johnnie hesitated. Then, as a sudden inspiration came to her, ”Mandy Meacham said she'd try to get me into a club for girls that Miss Sessions has. She said Miss Sessions would lend me books. Maybe you might just leave them with her. I'm sure I should be mighty proud to have them. I know I'll love to read them; but--well, you might just leave them with her.”