The Portion of Labor Part 46

Ellen colored. "I am going to talk the way I think best, the way I have been taught is right, and if that makes you think I am stuck up, I can't help it."

"My, don't get mad. I didn't mean anything," said the other girl.

All the time while Ellen was working, and even while the exultation and enthusiasm of her first charge in the battle of labor was upon her, she had had, since her feminine instincts were, after all, strong with her, a sense that Robert Lloyd was under the same great factory roof, in the same human hive, that he might at any moment pa.s.s through the room. That, however, she did not think very likely.

She fancied the Lloyds seldom went through the departments, which were in charge of foremen. Mr. Norman Lloyd was at the mountains with his wife, she knew. They left Robert in charge, and he would have enough to do in the office. She looked at the grimy men working around her, and she thought of the elegant young fellow, and the utter incongruity of her being among them seemed so great as to preclude the possibility of it. She had said to herself when she thought of obtaining work in Lloyd's that she need not hesitate about it on account of Robert. She had heard her father say that the elder Lloyd almost never came in contact with the men, that everything was done through the foremen. She reasoned that it would be the same with the younger Lloyd. But all at once the girl at her side gave her a violent nudge, which did not interrupt for a second her own flying fingers.

"Say," she said, "ain't he handsome?"

Ellen glanced over her shoulder and saw Robert Lloyd coming down between the lines of workmen. Then she turned to her work, and her fingers slipped and bungled, her ears rang. He pa.s.sed without speaking.

Mamie Brady openly stared after him. "He's awful handsome, and an awful swell, but he's awful stuck up, just like the old boss," said she. "He never notices any of us, and acts as if he was afraid we'd poison him. My, what's the matter with you?"

"Nothing," said Ellen.

"You look white as a sheet; ain't you well?"

Ellen turned upon her with sudden fury. She had something of the blood of the violent Louds and of her hot-tempered grandmother. She had stood everything from this petty, insistent tormentor.

"Yes, I am well," she replied, "and I will thank you to let me alone, and let me do my work, and do your own."

The other girl stared at her a minute with curiously expressive, uplifted eyebrows.

"Whew!" she said, in a half whistle then, and went on with her work, and did not speak again.

Ellen was thankful that Robert Lloyd had not spoken to her in the factory, and yet she was cut to the quick by it. It fulfilled her antic.i.p.ations to the letter. "I was right," she said to herself; "he can never think of me again. He is showing it." Somehow, after he had pa.s.sed, her enthusiasm, born of a strong imagination, and her breadth of nature failed her somewhat. The individual began to press too closely upon the aggregate. Suddenly Ellen Brewster and her own heartache and longing came to the front. She had put herself out of his life as completely as if she had gone to another planet. Still, feeling this, she realized no degradation of herself as a cause of it. She realized that from his point of view she had gone into a valley, but from hers she was rather on an opposite height. She on the height of labor, of skilled handiwork, which is the manifestation in action of brain-work, he on the height of pure brain-work unpressed by physical action.

At noon, when she was eating her dinner with Abby and Maria, Abby turned to her and inquired if young Mr. Lloyd had spoken to her when he came through the room.

"No, he didn't," replied Ellen.

Abby said nothing, but she compressed her lips and gave her head a hard jerk. A girl who ran a machine next to Abby's came up, munching a large piece of pie, taking clean semicircular bites with her large, white teeth.

"Say," she said, "did you see the young boss's new suit? Got up fine, wasn't he?"

"I'd like to see him working where I be for an hour," said a young fellow, strolling up, dipping into his dinner-bag. He was black and greasy as to face and hands and clothing. "Guess his light pants and vest would look rather different," said he, and everybody laughed except the Atkins girls and Ellen.

"I guess he washed his hands, anyway, before he ate his dinner,"

said Abby, sharply, looking at the young man's hands with meaning.

The young fellow colored, though he laughed. "There ain't a knife in this shop so sharp as some women's tongues," said he. "I pity the man that gets you."

"There won't be any man get me," retorted Abby. "I've seen all I want to see of men, working with 'em every day."

"Mebbe they have of you," called back the young fellow, going away.

"The saucy thing!" said the girl who st.i.tched next to Abby.

"There isn't any excuse for a man's eating his dinner with hands like that," said Abby. "It's worse to poison yourself with your own dirt than with other folks'. It hurts your own self more."

"He ain't worth minding," said the girl.

"Do you suppose I do mind him?" returned Abby. Maria looked at her meaningly. The young man, whose name was Edison Bartlett, had once tried to court Abby, but neither she nor Maria had ever told of it.

"His clothes were a pearl gray," said the girl at the st.i.tching-machine, reverting to the original subject.

"Good gracious, who cares what color they were?" cried Abby, impatiently.

"He looked awful handsome in 'em," said the girl. "He's awful handsome."

"You'd better look at handsome fellows in your own set, Sadie Peel,"

said Abby, roughly.

The girl, who was extremely pretty, carried herself well, and dressed with cheap fastidiousness, colored.

"I don't see what we have to think about sets for," said she. "I guess way back the Peels were as good as the Lloyds. We're in a free country, where one is as good as another, ain't we?"

"No one is as good as another, except in the sight of the Lord, in any country on the face of this earth," said Abby.

"If you are as good in your own sight, I don't see that it makes much difference about the sight of other human beings," said Ellen.

"I guess that's what makes a republic, anyway."

Sadie Peel gave a long, bewildered look at her, then she turned to Abby.

"Do you know where I can get somebody to do accordion-plaiting for me?" she asked.

"No," said Abby. "I never expect to get to the height of accordion-plaiting."

"I know where you can," said another girl, coming up. She had light hair, falling in a harsh, uncurled bristle over her forehead; her black gown was smeared with paste, and even her face and hands were sticky with it.

"There's a great splash of paste on your nose, Hattie Wright," said Abby.

The girl took out a crumpled handkerchief and began rubbing her nose absently while she went on talking about the accordion-plaiting.

"There's a woman on Joy Street does it," said she. "She lives just opposite the school-house, and she does it awful cheap, only three cents a yard." She thrust the handkerchief into her pocket.

"You haven't got it half off," said Abby.

"Let it stay there, then," said the girl, indifferently. "If you work pasting linings in a shoe-shop you've got to get pasted yourself."

Ellen looked at the girl with a curious reflection that she spoke the truth, that she really was pasted herself, that the soil and the grind of her labor were wearing on her soul. She had seen this girl out of the shop--in fact, only the day before--and no one would have known her for the same person. When her light hair was curled, and she was prettily dressed, she was quite a beauty. In the shop she was a slattern, and seemed to go down under the wheels of her toil.

"On Joy Street, you said?" said Sadie Peel.

"Yes. Right opposite the school-house. Her name is Brackett."

Then the one-o'clock whistle blew, and everybody, Ellen with the rest, went back to their stations. Robert Lloyd did not come into the room again that afternoon. Ellen worked on steadily, and gained swiftness. Every now and then the foreman came and spoke encouragingly to her.

"Look out, Mamie," he said to the girl at her side, "or she'll get ahead of you."