Part 3

“Now, you see, my dear,” he answered, “just how much encouragement one gets in trying to do anything for the laboring classes. They turn upon you and use the goodness of your heart and your generous motives to drag themselves down to a lower depth of degradation. Good-day, my dear, and don’t be led away by your feelings.”

Salome stood looking after him, heart-sick and discouraged. The world—her part of it, at least—was all wrong, and she, with plenty of money and an awakening desire to help, was powerless. She ordered the pony phaeton again and started for a drive. She obeyed a sudden impulse to go through the factory precincts. There were evidences of a suppressed excitement. Knots of desperate-looking men stood about. But they hushed their voices as she drew near, and stood in sullen silence as she passed.

“There is evidently something in the wind,” she thought, urging the pony to quicken his pace.

She did not know that the committee from the Labor Union had that morning made a third attempt to treat with her agent and failed.

“No compromise,” was still his watchword.

“I’ll send for Marion Shaw,” she said to herself, on her way home an hour later. “She is a practical, sensible, business-like woman. Perhaps she will know of some way to help me to help others. And she needs rest.”

This idea so inspired her that she arrived home quite elated, and stated her plan to Mrs. Soule at dinner-time with much animation.

But later in the evening, the groups of men she had seen on “the corporation” came back to her mind and caused her a certain feeling of uneasiness. What had they been talking about so excitedly as she drew near?

It was one of those suddenly warm nights in January that succeed, in our fickle climate, a bitter cold day, and Salome felt an unaccountable desire to be in the open air. She threw on a warm wrap and hood, and saying nothing, went out on the piazza, and crossed the lawn to a favorite walk of hers in summer—a path under a long group of fir-trees down by the street at the back of the house.

After a few turns, she heard a peculiar whistle which was answered by another.

She withdrew still more into the shadow and waited. Presently two men met.

“Well, what’s the news?” eagerly asked one.

“Sh—sh! not so loud,” replied the other. “It’s all right, and better than we expected.”

“Why—how better?” asked the first.

They spoke lower, so that Salome could scarcely catch the tones.

“Because,” the first was saying, “the old man himself has gone down to the mill.”

“Whe—e—w!”

“Yes. What on earth possessed him? But then that’s none of our affairs. If he wants to run the risk of losing his life—that’s his business, not mine.”

“Well, but,” and the first voice had a timid note, “that’s going too far—we were only to blow up the mill—not to kill anybody.”

“Can’t help that. Fifteen minutes more, if everything works well, and old man Greenough’s day is over. Jim’s just about lighting the fuse, I reckon, now. It’s an awful long one, but the fire’ll creep round there in time.”

“What about the police?”

“He’s all right. We’ve fixed him.”

The voices grew fainter and ceased altogether, only the dull sound of the men’s footsteps reaching her as they passed down the hill away from the grounds.

Salome stood an instant, rooted to the spot. What was this horrible thing she had heard?

The factory to be blown up?

She must go for help.

And Mr. Greenough down there, risking his life?

No. There was no time to get help.

“Fifteen minutes more, if everything works well, and old man Greenough’s day is over.”

The whole plot flashed across her bewildered brain. She dashed through the back-gate and down the deserted street towards the mills. It was a ten minutes’ walk across that way, but she ran,—flew,—tore down the lonely road in less than half that time.

Otis Greenough might be an unreasonable, hot-headed, obstinate agent, but he was her father’s friend and had loved and petted her when she was a motherless child.

What could she do? Raise an alarm? Call for help? Rouse everybody?

But the fuse was already lighted.

Where was it?

Under the office window most likely, since they knew that the old agent was in there.

She came in sight of that window. There was a dim light there. All else was dark. The south wind moaned dismally.

She hurried faster and came nearer the office window. Under it was another window with a broken pane, from which hung something she instantly divined as the fuse.

Yes. A fiery spark crept closer and closer to the wall.

By the time she reached the window it was out of her reach.

Oh, God! could she do nothing?

She had been sewing on some dainty trifle earlier in the evening, and a pair of small scissors still hung at her waist.

Closer drew the spark of fire to the broken window pane, whence it would disappear to work its fearful errand. It seemed to twinkle and mock at her in fiendish delight. She grasped the jutting window-frame and jumped upon the broad sill.

Thank God, she had it at last. One snip of her scissors, and the spark of fire dropped harmlessly to the ground. She turned slightly to step off the window-ledge. Her foot slipped and she fell, a white, faint heap upon the ground.

VI.

When she opened her eyes again, not only Otis Greenough but John Villard and an office-boy were bending anxiously over her.

“My dear girl,” the agent was saying, “bless me, my dear, what is it? How came you here and who has harmed you?”

“Don’t be alarmed, sir,” was her reply, as she got on her feet; and then, somewhat excitedly, she told the events of the last fifteen or twenty minutes, interrupted, every other sentence, by such ejaculations as, “Great Scott,” “Bless me,” “The rascals,” “Confound them,” from the elderly man, while the younger one listened in silent amazement.

Rapid search was made and the night-watch was found sleeping, in a stupor which was evidently the work of a drug; while the police were, as usual, nowhere to be found.

Salome was taken into the office—not without inward trembling, as she feared further evidences of the miscreants.

Mr. Villard soon reported two kegs of gunpowder and a small dynamite bomb in the room below, at the same time congratulating, most heartily, the young woman who had saved their lives as well as the mills.

But her courage was now at a low ebb, and, woman-like, she shivered at the close proximity of gunpowder, and begged to be taken home.

Mr. Greenough, who had come to realize the danger to himself and to the mills which his obstinacy had provoked, was also anxious to leave the premises and glad to accompany Salome home.

John Villard, meanwhile, attended to the duty of finding new watchmen who should be reliable,—a difficult task. Against his will, he promised Salome not to sleep at the mills, as he had been doing since the machinery had been tampered with.

Salome was nearly prostrated when she reached home, and had but little strength left with which to importune the agent to consent to any terms for a settlement; but as the old man was, for once, thoroughly frightened, it was not difficult to exact a promise that he would consider a compromise.

Mrs. Soule, when she learned of Salome’s intrepidity,—set forth as it was by Mr. Greenough’s gratitude and gallant appreciation,—was greatly concerned for her niece and put her straightway to bed, where, in fact, she had supposed her to be for the past hour, and where she wept over and caressed her as she had not done since the girl had left home for boarding-school. And then, what was far more to the purpose, she gave her a bath of alcohol and olive oil, and soothed her to sleep.

Early the next morning the agent of the Shawsheen Mills sent a messenger over to the dingy room which served as headquarters for the Labor Union, begging for an interview.

As this was the first overture of peace from his side, it was natural that it should be hailed with glee by the officers of the Union. And although, the day before, the leaders of the strike had been closeted together in a serious debate as to how much they should yield to Capital, they now unanimously agreed not to “weaken” in the smallest degree.

As for the agent, he had been persuaded to yield every point demanded by the strikers, insisting only upon the one condition, that the Labor Union should be disbanded.

The question of ten hours he granted without a murmur. He quibbled a long time over the wage question, and the subject of weekly payments, and only on seeing the dogged determination of the laborers did he come to terms on that. But he very properly, and too peremptorily, refused to remove the spinning frames which had formed one subject of contention. And then he proceeded to overthrow the good effects of what concessions he had made, by violently denouncing all labor unions, and vigorously insisting that the one known as the Shawsheen Labor Union be immediately and forever disbanded.

“Never,” said the foremost of the committee, “will we submit to so arbitrary a demand. We have a perfect right to organize our forces and assert our claims. How can we—a band of day-laborers,—dependent on capital for a bare living, win a single cause for ourselves without combinations of this kind? There are scores of questions which involve not our welfare in one way alone, but our health, our wages, our morals, our manhood, which we, as single individuals, can never cope with, but which, as a united force, we can adjust. Besides, in all departments of labor, the women and children equal or exceed the men. There are to-day one hundred and seventy-five thousand more women working in mills than there were ten years ago; and what are they but the weakest and most dependent of employes? They have no strength to agitate; they have no power to change any existing order of things. All they can do is to toil and submit. We owe it to them as men, as husbands, brothers, and sons, to lighten their burdens. As free American citizens we owe it to ourselves, to settle the conditions of our own lives, so far as may be. This can only be done by combinations of the laboring classes strong enough to compel manufacturers to concede us our rights.”

“You are right to a degree,” answered Villard, before Mr. Greenough could swallow his surprise at hearing such sentiments from one of his operatives; “I believe there are some rights which you can only secure by a combination of your forces as working-men. But when you let reason lose its sway, and passion take its place; when you are influenced by unworthy demagogues and unbalanced cranks, and seek to effect by strikes and such arbitrary measures what might be better secured by a more conciliatory course, you must not be surprised if you do not succeed in bull-dozing a rich concern like this into obedience, and——”

“And when, by your —— labour unions, you sink so low as to countenance incendiarism and murder—yes, sirs—that is what you attempted last night, sirs,—you can’t expect this mill is going to countenance them. I’ll see you all starve and rot first,” and Otis Greenough’s face was purple with anger.

“We have already disclaimed all knowledge in our Union, sir,” said one of the committee, “of last night’s outrage.”

“Blast it, what do I care for that?” roared the agent, as usual, out of temper. “Whether you knew it or not, it was done under cover of your strike, and your Union, and was one of the precious outgrowths of it. Give up the —— thing, I say—or there is no compromise with these mills.”

“There is little use in prolonging this interview, I am afraid,” said the first of the committee, taking up his hat.

“Impudent dogs!” said Mr. Greenough, as Villard tried to speak, anxious to put things on a more satisfactory basis before the meeting closed. “Let them go. They’ll find hard hoeing before they reach the end of their row.”

“And, sir,” retorted a fiery-looking man who had not spoken before, “if it comes to open war you’ll find us tough customers. We shall fight it out like men, even if we starve like beasts.”

And with these words the committee departed, leaving matters worse than ever before in the affairs of the Shawsheen Mills.

In vain did the two superintendents plead and argue and threaten the choleric old agent. His blood was up and he was a veritable charger on the eve of battle. There was no state board of arbitration then, and therefore no available way of settling their difficulties except among themselves. And as discussion only made matters worse, the subject which was always uppermost in these three men’s minds was tacitly dropped. Every precaution was taken to insure the mills from the danger it had escaped the night before, and a detective was obtained from Boston to hunt out the criminals who had perpetrated the dastardly act.

At noon, they were all surprised by a note from Miss Shepard. It ran as follows:

“DEAR MR. GREENOUGH,

“As the owner of the Shawsheen Mill property, I hereby appoint a meeting of all its officers at my house, to-night. Please have them here at eight o’clock.

“Pardon me for the liberty I have seemed to take, and believe me ever a loving and respectful friend,

“SALOME SHEPARD.”

“Well, you hear that, boys,” said Mr. Greenough, after reading it aloud. “Be on hand. Tell the treasurer and cashier and head book-keeper. We’ll all be there. The Lord only knows what she is up to; but if that young woman hasn’t got a level head on her shoulders, then I don’t know who has.”

“I reckon you’re right, sir,” echoed Mr. Burnham, while John Villard laughed in his sleeve at the young woman who evidently dreamed of settling a prolonged strike. “Why,” he said to himself, “she has never known enough of the practical side of mill-life to recognize one of her operatives, and hardly knows the different brands of cloth manufactured by them.”

* * * * *

Salome Shepard had waked at an early hour that morning and found herself unable to sleep again. Her mind was alive with gratitude for the part she had been able to play the night before, with apprehension for the future, and with increasing self-accusation for the state of things in the Shawsheen Mills, both past and present.

“Pshaw!” she said to herself while dressing, true to her habit of communing with her own conscience in default of a visible mentor, “how can I be blamed for the state of things here? The entire business of the mills was put out of my hands by my father’s will. I could have done no differently.”

“You could,” replied that sternest of modern inquisitors—a New England conscience. “It was in your power to see that the moral and physical condition of these people was improved and cultivated. It was in your power to give them better homes and more privileges. It was in your power to raise their standards of life and to create new ones. But you have ignored their very existence, and let them live a mean and sordid life of unremitting toil, in order to furnish you with money to live a selfish life of luxurious ease.”

Salome tied the blue ribbons to her wrapper, and giving her crimps a last touch went down to breakfast.

Knowing she would be opposed, she said nothing of her plans for the morning to her aunt, but simply announced, after they had left the table, that she was going for a long walk.

Then she went upstairs and put on the plainest costume she owned (which, by the way, was a tailor-made gown that had cost her one hundred and fifty dollars), and started for the tenement houses where her operatives lived.

It did not occur to her to feel any fear; nor that the miscreants who had planned the explosion for the previous night might be watching her footsteps. She felt it incumbent upon her to see for herself exactly how these people lived, and what they were bearing and suffering in consequence of the strike.

In the bright glare of the morning sun, the tenement houses had never looked so dingy and mean. They were built in Newbern Shepard’s day, and had received but very few repairs since that time. Although it was cold January weather, Salome counted a dozen panes of glass gone from the first house, and noticed that the lower hinge to the front door was broken. It was a two-story wooden building with four tenements of four rooms each.

She ascended the rickety steps and rapped on the door. One of the women saw her from a front window and came to the door, holding it open only so far as to permit her to see the strange caller.

“Good-morning,” said Salome in pleasant tones.

“Good-morning, miss.” The politeness of Salome’s manner thawed the other woman, and the door opened a little wider. “Will you walk in?”

That was precisely what she had come for, and Salome stepped inside with alacrity. She found herself in the sitting-room and living-room of the family. It was a meager home. The remnant of a faded oil-cloth was on the floor. The walls were unpapered and devoid of any attempts at ornament, except one unframed, dilapidated old lithograph of “The Queen of the West,”—a buxom young woman with disproportionately large black eyes, a dress of bright scarlet cut extremely _décolleté_, and cheeks of a yet more vivid hue. A pine table covered with a stamped red cloth was littered with cheap, trashy story-papers and pamphlets addressed “To the Laboring Men of America.” An old lounge, with broken springs, and six common wooden chairs constituted the other furnishings of the room.

Salome’s first thought as she looked about her was:

“I don’t wonder these people get discontented and clamor for something which seems to them better.”

But she found, before the forenoon was over, many houses that were not so pleasant as this. For, once inside these rooms, everything was neat and clean, and the woman who answered her questions was civil if not talkative.

She found that five people lived in these four small rooms: this woman, her two daughters, a son-in-law, and a grandchild. She also found that the other tenements contained five, six, and seven people, making twenty-three in all. There were absolutely no sanitary arrangements, and she discovered that the sanitation of this tenement house district consisted only of surface drainage. According to the statements of her hostess, there was nearly always somebody “ailing” in these houses.

The first house she went into was a fair sample of the remainder. A few were slightly better, but more were in a worse condition. In most instances she was respectfully received, although at three houses she was met by ungracious people, and received gruff replies to her kindly-put inquiries.

Everywhere, strong, able-bodied men were lounging about in enforced idleness; and one of them, resenting, with true American independence, this intrusion into the sacred precincts of his miserable home, plainly intimated that “they was well enough off now, and didn’t want no rich folks as was livin’ on money _they_ earned, to come pryin’ round their houses.” Finally, at the last of the tenement houses she was met by a surly, burly mule-spinner, who gruffly refused her admittance.

Nothing daunted, however, she sought out a boarding-house for the young women of the mills. The landlady, recognizing her, invited her in and willingly told her all about the life of mill-girls, offering, at last, to show her their rooms.

Salome gladly accepted and followed the woman up bare, unpainted stairs to the rooms on the second and third floors. These were small and perfectly bare of comforts, almost of necessities. The floors were uncarpeted and guiltless of paint, or even of a very recent application of soap and water. They had no closets. A common pine bedstead—sometimes two of them—in each room, two chairs, in one of which stood a tin basin, while beside it on the floor stood a bucket of water, and a small bureau, made up the sum total of the furniture. In only one room did Salome see any evidences of a literary taste, and that, if she had known it, was a cheap paper, the worst of the sensational class.

Salome’s heart sank within her. She no longer wondered that the mill-girls of to-day were a discontented, ignorant set, nor that many of them sank into lives of degradation.

“The rooms are good enough for the girls,” said the woman, noticing the look of disgust on Salome’s tell-tale face. “They seem poor enough to elegant ladies like you. But these girls know no better. And they are good enough to sleep off a drunk in,” she added, roughly.

“You don’t mean to say,” asked her guest, “that any of your girls get intoxicated?”

“Intoxicated? I don’t know what else you’d call it, when they have to be helped in at eleven o’clock Saturday night, and put to bed, and don’t get up again until Monday morning.”

Salome was sick with pity and shame for her sex. She no longer questioned whether she had a mission toward these, her people.

She went home and wrote the note to Mr. Greenough, given in an earlier part of this chapter.

VII.

Promptly, at the hour named, Otis Greenough, accompanied by the other officers of the mill, appeared at the mansion of the Shepard family.

Tall, beautiful, and always impressive in her bearing, Salome was at her best to-night. The fire of a new-born purpose was in her face, and a new force, born of spiritual struggles, stamped upon her brow.

There are people who can look calmly upon a sunset, and see nothing but a glare of red and yellow light. There are others who see in it a glorious picture with matchless tints and shadows. There are yet others, fewer, indeed, than the rest, but who hold the secret of God’s holy purpose written more or less plainly in their souls; who see not only the glare of red and yellow light, whose brilliant tints and deep tones make an unrivaled picture, but who read something of the deeper meanings of the Great Artist; who receive into their own hearts some part of the glowing light which strengthens purpose, and crystallizes hopes and ideals hitherto dreamy and undefined.

Salome Shepard had stood at a western window at sunset. In the hush and stillness of the hour, the poet-quality of her soul had interpreted to her the meaning of life and the great fact of human brotherhood. And when she finally drew the curtains on the deepening night, she felt that a sudden revelation had come to her—that, at last, her life purpose, in the shape of a sternly defined duty, stood revealed.

“Well,” said Mr. Greenough, after a few moments of aimless conversation, for nobody seemed desirous of taking the initiative, “what are you going to do with us all to-night, little girl? Don’t you think you rather usurp the privileges of an old man in calling together a meeting to discuss business, of which he is the legal head? Come, give an account of yourself and your quixotic actions.”

“Oh, I beg that none of you will think that.” And Salome looked around the room appealingly. “I simply wished that we might have a fair and honest talk. I want every one here to express his views. And I want to express mine—for at last, thank heaven, I have some.”

“Getting strong-minded, eh?” retorted Mr. Greenough. “Well, go on. I suppose you want to practice on us before taking a larger field. Going to take the suffrage platform? or build school-houses for the niggers? Or do you aspire to the bureau of Indian Affairs? Which is it?”

“None of them,” responded Salome, inwardly resenting the untimely jest, but determined not to show her impatience. “None of them. I propose to begin nearer home. I propose to go to work, earnestly, and I hope practically, to raise the condition, morally, mentally and physically, of my own factory-people.”

“Bravo!” exclaimed Villard and the head book-keeper.