The Bishop of Cottontown Part 46

"A raw onion in vinegar," said her mother--"It's the only thing that seems to make you want to eat a little. An' reddishes--we had some new reddishes fur dinner--didn't we, Samanthy?"

"Good Lord," snapped Jud--"reddishes an' b.u.t.termilk--no wonder you needed that weight on your stomach--it's all that kept you from floatin' in the air. Cyant eat--O good Lord!"

They were silent--Miss Samantha making wry faces with her pain.

"Of course you didn't eat no supper?" he asked.

"No--we don' eat no supper Sunday night," said Mrs. Carewe.

"Didn't eat none at all," asked Jud--"not even a little?"

"Well, 'bout nine o'clock I thought I'd eat a little, to keep me from gittin' hungry befo' day, so I et a raw onion, an' some black walnuts, and dried prunes, an'--an'--"

"A few apples we had in the cellar," added her mother, "an' a huckleberry pie, an' b.u.t.termilk--"

Jud jumped up--"Good Lord, I thought you was a fool when you said you put that stone on her stomach, but now I know you done the right thing--you might have anch.o.r.ed her by a chain to the bed post, too, in case the rock didn't hold her down. Now look here," he went on to Mrs. Carewe, "I'll go to the sto' an' send you a half pound of salts, a bottle of oil an' turbb'ntine. Give her plenty of it an' have her at the mill by to-morrow, or I'll cut off all your rations. As it is I don't see that you need them, anyway, to eat"--he sneered--"for you 'aint got no appet.i.te at all.'"

From the Carewe cottage Jud went to a small yellow cottage on the farthest side of the valley. It was the home of John Corbin, and Willis, his ten-year-old son, was one of the main doffers. The father was lounging lazily on the little front verandah, smoking his pipe.

"What's the matter with Willis?" asked Jud after he had come up.

"Why, nothin'--" drawled the father. "Aint he at the mill?"

"No--the other four children of your'n is there, but Willis aint."

The man arose with more than usual alacrity. "I'll see that he is there--" he declared--"it's as much as we can do to live on what they makes, an' I don't want no dockin' for any sickness if I can he'p it."

Willis, a pale over-worked lad, was down with tonsillitis. Jud heard the father and mother in an angry dispute. She was trying to persuade him to let the boy stay at home. In the end hot words were used, and finally the father came out followed by the pale and hungry-eyed boy.

"He'd better die at the mill at work than here at home," the father added brutally, as Jud led him off, "fur then the rest of us will have that much ahead to live on."

He settled lazily back in his chair, and resumed his smoking.

CHAPTER XIX

A QUICK CONVERSION

It happened that morning that the old Bishop was on his daily round, visiting the sick of Cottontown. He went every day, from house to house, helping the sick, cheering the well, and better than all things else, putting into the hearts of the disheartened that priceless gift of coming again.

For of all the gifts the G.o.ds do give to men, that is the greatest--the ability to induce their fallen fellow man to look up and hope again. The gift to spur others onward--the gift to make men reach up. His flock were all mill people, their devotion to him wonderful. In the rush and struggle of the strenuous world around them, this humble old man was the only being to whom they could go for spiritual help.

To-day in his rounds, one thing impressed him more sadly than anything else--for he saw it so plainly when he visited their homes--and that was that with all their hard work, from the oldest to the youngest, with all their traffic in human life, stealing the bud along with the broken and severed stem--as a matter of fact, the Acme mills paid out to the people but very little money. Work as they might, they seldom saw anything but an order on a store, for clothes and provisions sold to them at prices that would make a Jew peddler blush for shame.

The Bishop found entire families who never saw a piece of money the year round.

There are families and families, and some are more shiftless than others.

In one of the cottages the old man found a broken down little thing of seven, sick. For just such trips he kept his pockets full of things, and such wonderful pockets they would have been to a healthful natural child! Ginger cakes--a regular Noah's Ark, and apples, red and yellow. Sweet gum, too, which he had himself gathered from the trees in the woods. And there were even candy dolls and peppermints.

"Oh, well, maybe I can help her, po' little thing," the Bishop said when the mother conducted him in. But one look at her was enough--that dead, unmeaning look, not unconscious, but unmeaning--deadened--a disease which to a robust child would mean fever and a few days' sickness--to this one the Bishop knew it meant atrophy and death. And as the old man looked at her, he thought it were better that she should go. For to her life had long since lost its individuality, and dwarfed her into a nerveless machine--the little frame was nothing more than one of a thousand monuments to the cotton mill--a mechanical thing, which might cease to run at any time.

"How old is she?" asked the Bishop, sitting down by the child on the side of the bed.

"We put her in the mill two years ago when she was seven," said the mother. "We was starvin' an' had to do somethin'." She added this with as much of an apologetic tone as her nature would permit. "We told the mill men she was ten," she added. "We had to do it. The fust week she got two fingers mashed off."

The Bishop was silent, then he said: "It's bes' always to tell the truth. Liar is a fast horse, but he never runs but one race."

Although there were no laws in Alabama against child labor, the mill drew the lines then as now, if possible, on very young children. Not that it cared for the child--but because it could be brought to the mill too young for any practical use, unless it was wise beyond its age.

He handed the little thing a ginger man. She looked at it--the first she had ever seen,--and then at the giver in the way a wild thing would, as if expecting some trick in the proffered kindness; but when he tried to caress her and spoke kindly, she shrank under the cover and hid her head with fear.

It was not a child, but a little animal--a wild being of an unknown species in a child's skin--the missing link, perhaps; the link missing between the natural, kindly instinct of the wild thing, the brute, the monkey, the anthropoid ape, which protects its young even at the expense of its life, and civilized man of to-day, the speaking creature, the so-called Christian creature, who sells his young to the director-Devils of mills and machinery and prolongs his own life by the death of his offspring.

Biology teaches that many of the very lowest forms of life eat their young. Is civilized man merely a case, at last, of reversion to a primitive type?

She hid her head and then peeped timidly from under the cover at the kindly old man. He had seen a fox driven into its hole by dogs do the same thing.

She did not know what a smile meant, nor a caress, nor a proffered gift. Tremblingly she lay, under the dirty quilt, expecting a kick, a cuff.

The Bishop sat down by the bedside and took out a paper. "It'll be an hour or so I can spend," he said to the mother--"maybe you'd like to be doin' about a little."

"Come to think of it, I'm pow'ful obleeged to you," she said. "I've all my mornin' washin' to do yit, only I was afraid to leave her alone."

"You do yo' washin'--I'll watch her. I'm a pretty good sort of a hoss doctor myse'f."

The child had nodded off to sleep, the Bishop was reading his paper, when a loud voice was heard in the hallway and some rough steps that shook the little flimsily made floor of the cottage, and made it rock with the tramp of them. The door opened suddenly and Jud Carpenter, angry, boisterous, and presumptuous, entered. The child had awakened at the sound of Carpenter's foot fall, and now, frightened beyond control, she trembled and wept under the cover.

There are natural antipathies and they are G.o.d-given. They are the rough cogs in the wheel of things. But uneven as they are, rough and grating, strike them off and the wheel would be there still, but it would not turn. It is the friction of life that moves it. And movement is the law of life.

Antipathies--thank G.o.d who gave them to us! But for them the shepherd dog would lie down with the wolf.

The only man in Cottontown who did not like the Bishop was Jud Carpenter, and the only man in the world whom the Bishop did not love was Jud Carpenter. And many a time in his life the old man had prayed: "O G.o.d, teach me to love Jud Carpenter and despise his ways."

Carpenter glared insolently at the old man quietly reading his paper, and asked satirically. "Wal, what ails her, doctor?"

"Mill-icious fever," remarked the Bishop promptly with becoming accent on the first syllable, and scarcely raising his eyes from the paper.

Carpenter flushed. He had met the Bishop too often in contests which required courage and brains not to have discovered by now that he was no match for the man who could both pray and fight.

"They aint half as sick as they make out an' I've come to see about it," he added. He felt the child's pulse. "She ain't sick to hurt.

That spinner is idle over yonder an' I guess I'll jes' be carryin'

her back. Wuck--it's the greatest tonic in the worl'--it's the Hostetter's Bitters of life," he added, trying to be funny.

The Bishop looked up. "Yes, but I've knowed men to get so drunk on bitters they didn't kno' a mill-dam from a dam'-mill!"