The Bishop of Cottontown Part 68

Maggie arose quickly: "Good-bye--let me kiss you once mo'--I feel like I'll never see you again--an'--an'--I've learned to love you so!"

Helen raised her head and kissed her.

Then Maggie pa.s.sed quickly out, and with her eyes only did she look back and utter a farewell which carried with it both a kiss and a tear. And something else which was a warning.

And Helen never forgot.

CHAPTER V

PAY-DAY

It was Sat.u.r.day afternoon and pay-day, and the mill shut down at six o'clock.

When Helen went in Kingsley sat at the Superintendent's desk, issuing orders on the Secretary and Treasurer, Richard Travis, who sat at his desk near by and paid the wages in silver.

Connected with the mill was a large commissary or store--a cheap modern structure which stood in another part of the town, filled with the necessaries of life as well as the flimsy gewgaws which delight the heart of the average mill hand. In establishing this store, the directors followed the usual custom of cotton-mills in smaller towns of the South; paying their employees part in money and part in warrants on the store. It is needless to add that the prices paid for the goods were, in most cases, high enough to cut the wages to the proper margin. If there was any balance at the end of the month, it was paid in money.

Kingsley personally supervised this store, and his annual report to the directors was one of the strong financial things of his administration.

A crowd of factory hands stood around his desk, and the Superintendent was busy issuing orders on the store, or striking a balance for the Secretary and Treasurer to pay in silver.

They stood around tired, wretched, lint- and dust-covered, but expectant. Few were there compared with the number employed; for the wages of the minors went to their parents, and as minors included girls under eighteen and boys under twenty-one, their parents were there to receive their wages for them.

These children belonged to them as mercilessly as if they had been slaves, and despite the ties of blood, no master ever more relentlessly collected and appropriated the wages of his slaves than did the parents the pitiful wages of their children.

There are two great whippers-in in the child slavery of the South--the mills which employ the children and the parents who permit it--encourage it. Of these two the parents are often the worse, for, since the late enactment of child labor laws, they do not hesitate to stultify themselves by false affidavits as to the child's real age.

Kingsley had often noticed how promptly and even proudly the girls, after reaching eighteen, and the boys twenty-one, had told him hereafter to place their wages to their own credit, and not to the parent's. They seemed to take a new lease on life. Decrepit, drawn-faced, hump-shouldered and dried up before their time, the few who reached the age when the law made them their own masters, looked not like men and women who stand on the threshold of life, but rather like over-worked middle-aged beings of another period.

Yet that day their faces put on a brighter look.

They stood around the office desk, awaiting their turn. The big engine had ceased to throb and the shuttles to clatter and whirl. The mill was so quiet that those who had, year in and year out, listened to its clatter and hum, seemed to think some overhanging calamity was about to drop out of the sky of terrible calm.

"Janette Smith," called out Kingsley.

She came forward, a bony, stoop-shouldered woman of thirty-five years who had been a spooler since she was fifteen.

"Seventy-seven hours for the week"--he went on mechanically, studying the time book, "making six dollars and sixteen cents. Rent deducted two dollars. Wood thirty-five cents. Due commissary for goods furnished--here, Mr. Kidd," he said to the book-keeper, "let me see Miss Smith's account." It was shoved to him across the desk. Kingsley elevated his gla.s.ses. Then he adjusted them with a peculiar lilt--it was his way of being ironical:

"Oh, you don't owe the store anything, Miss Smith--just eleven dollars and eighty cents."

The woman stood stoically--not a muscle moved in her face, and not even by the change of an eye did she indicate that such a thing as the ordinary human emotions of disappointment and fear had a home in the heart.

"Mother was sick all last month," she said at last in a voice that came out in the same indifferent, unvarying tone. "I had to overdraw."

Kingsley gave his eye-gla.s.ses another lilt. They said as plainly as eye-gla.s.ses could: "Well, of course, I made her sick." Then he added abruptly: "We will advance you two dollars this week--an' that will be all."

"I hoped to get some little thing that she could eat--some relish,"

she began.

"Not our business, Miss Smith--sorry--very sorry--but try to be more economical. Economy is the great objective haven of life. Emerson says so. And Browning in a most beautiful line of poetry says the same thing," he added.

"The way to begin economy is to begin it--Emerson is so helpful to me--he always comes in at the right time."

"And it's only to be two dollars," she added.

"That's all," and he pushed her the order. She took it, cashed it and went hurriedly out, her poke bonnet pulled over her face. But there were hot tears and a sob under her bonnet.

And so it went on for two hours--some drawing nothing, but remaining to beg for an order on the store to keep them running until next week.

One man with six children in the mill next came forward and drew eighteen dollars. He smiled complacently as he drew it and chucked the silver into his pocket. This gave Jud Carpenter, standing near, a chance to get in his mill talk.

"I tell you, Joe Hopper," he said, slapping the man on the back, "that mill is a great thing for the mothers an' fathers of this little settlement. What 'ud we do if it warn't for our chillun?"

"You're talkin now--" said Joe hopefully.

"It useter be," said Jud, looking around at his crowd, "that the parents spoiled the kids, but now it is the kids spoilin' the parents."

His audience met this with smiles and laughter.

"I never did know before," went on Jud, "what that old sayin' really meant: 'A fool for luck an' a po' man for chillun.'"

Another crackling laugh.

"How much did Joe Hopper's chillun fetch 'im in this week?"

Joe jingled his silver in his pocket and spat importantly on the floor.

"I tell you, when I married," said Jud, "I seed nothin' but poverty an' the multiplication of my part of the earth ahead of me--poverty, I tell you, starvation an' every new chile addin' to it. But since you started this mill, Mister Kingsley (Kingsley smiled and bowed across the desk at him), I've turned what everybody said 'ud starve us into ready cash. And now I say to the young folks: 'Marry an'

multiply an' the cash will be forthcomin'.'"

This was followed by loud laughs, especially from those who were blessed with children, and they filed up to get their wages.

Jim Stallings, who had four in the mill, was counted out eleven dollars. As he pocketed it he looked at Jud and said:

"Oh, no, Jud; it don't pay to raise chillun. I wish I had the chance old Sollerman had. I'd soon make old Vanderbilt look like shin plaster."

He joined in the laughter which followed.

In the doorway he cut a pigeon-wing in which his thin, bowed legs looked comically humorous.

Jud Carpenter was a power in the mill, standing as he did so near to the management. To the poor, ignorant ones around him he was the mouth-piece of the mill, and they feared him even more than they did Kingsley himself, Kingsley with his ironical ways and lilting eye-gla.s.ses. With them Jud's nod alone was sufficient.

They were still grouped around the office awaiting their turn. In the faces of some were shrewdness, cunning, hypocrisy. Some looked out through dull eyes, humbled and brow-beaten and unfeeling. But all of them when they spoke to Jud Carpenter--Jud Carpenter who stood in with the managers of the mill--became at once the grinning, fawning framework of a human being.