V. V.'s Eyes Part 74

The peep was meant to end there, and should have done so. But unluckily, at just that juncture, there came a small diversion. The gaunt girl Miller, by whose machine the little party stood, took it into her head to keep at it no longer.

Though n.o.body had noticed it, this girl had been in trouble for the last five minutes. The presence of the visitors, or of the superintendent, had evidently made her nervous; she kept looking half-around out of the darting corners of her eyes. Three times, as the men watched and talked about her, she had raised a hand in the heat and brushed it hurriedly before her eyes. And then, just as the superintendent turned from her and all would have been well again, her overdrawn nerve gave out. The hands became suddenly limp on the machine they knew so well; they slid backward, at first slowly and then with the speed of a falling body; and poor Miller slipped quietly from her stool to the floor, her head actually brushing the lady's skirt as she fell.

Cally stifled a little cry. Hugo, obvious for once, said, "Why, she's fainted!"--in an incredulous voice. Considerably better in action were the experienced Works people. MacQueen sprang for a water-bucket with a celerity which strongly suggested practice. A stout, unstayed buncher filled a long-felt want by flinging open a window. One from a neighboring machine sat on the floor, Miller's head on her lap. Two others stood by....

Carlisle, holding to the silenced machine with a small gloved hand, gazed down as at a bit of stage-play.

They had formed a screen about the fallen girl, under MacQueen's directions, to cut her off from the general view. The superintendent's gaze swept critically about. However, the sudden confusion had drawn the attention of all that part of the room, and concealment proved a too optimistic hope. The moment happened to be ripe for one of those curious panics of the imagination to which crowded womanhood is psychologically subject. Knowledge that somebody was down ran round the room as if it had been shouted; and on the knowledge, fear stalked among the tired girls, and the thing itself was born of the dread of it.

So it was that Carlisle, gripping fast to poor Miller's machine, heard an odd noise behind her, and turned with a sickening dropping of the heart. Five yards away a girl gave a little moan and flopped forward upon her machine. She was a fine, strapping young creature, and it is certain that two minutes before nothing had been further from her mind than fainting. It did not stop there. Far up the room a "wrapper" rose in the dense air, took her head in both hands and fell backward into the arms of the operative next her. In the extreme corner of the great room a little stir indicated that another had gone down there. Work had almost ceased. Many eyes stared with sudden nervous apprehension into other eyes, as if to say: "_Am I to be the next?_..."

MacQueen's voice rang out--a fine voice it was, the kind that makes people sit down again in a fire-scared theatre:

"_Take your seats, every one of you_.... Nothing's going to happen.

You're all right, I say. Go on with your work. _Sit down. Get to work_...."

"Air," said Cally Heth, in a small colorless voice.

Hugo wheeled sharply.

"Great heavens!--_Carlisle_!... Do you feel faint?"

He had her at the open window in a trice, clasping her arm tight, speaking masculine encouragement.... "Hold hard, my dear!... I should have watched you.... Now, breathe this.... Gulp it in, Cally...."

His beloved, indeed, like the work-sisters, had felt the brush of the black wing. For an instant nothing had seemed surer than that the daughter of the Works would be the fifth girl to faint in the bunching-room that day; she had seen the floor rise under her whirling vision....

But once at the window the dark minute pa.s.sed speedily. The keen October air bore the gift of life. Blood trickled back into the dead white cheeks.

"I ... was just a little dizzy," said Cally, quite apologetically....

And, though the visitors departed then, almost immediately, all signs of the sudden little panic in the bunching-room were already rapidly disappearing. Work proceeded. The gaunt girl Miller, who had earned MacQueen's permanent dislike by starting all the trouble, was observed sitting again at her machine, hands and feet reaching out for the accustomed levers.

It made an amazing difference simply to be outdoors again. The last few minutes in the Works had been like a waxing nightmare. But the sunshine was bright and sane; the raw clean winds blew the horrors away.

Carlisle, realizing that she had been swept along toward something like hysterics, struggled with some success to recapture poise and common sense.

But she could not now quite strike the manner of one who has merely paused for an irresponsible peep. Hugo was aware of a change in her, before they were fairly in the car again. He had occasion to reflect anew, not without irritation, what an unfortunate turn she had given to the afternoon of romance, over his own plainly expressed wishes....

Yet nothing could have exceeded his solicitousness. He seemed to feel that he had been neglectful upstairs, that she would not have felt faint if he had properly presided over her movements. Cally had to a.s.sure him half a dozen times in as many blocks that she felt quite herself again.

And, meantime, he conscientiously gave himself to relieving her mind of the effects of her own feminine foolishness. That queer and undoubtedly upsetting bit of "crowd psychology" they had seen--that, he pointed out, had come merely from the unusual heat, the control of the steam-pipes happening to be out of whack to-day. Such a thing didn't happen once in six months; so that surly fellow MacQueen had said. Of course, producing wealth was a hard business at best, let none deny it. Everybody would like to see factories run on the model theory, like health resorts, but the truth was that those ideas were mostly wind and water, and had never worked out yet. An owner must think of his profits first, unfeeling as that might seem; else he would have to shut up shop, and then where would those girls be for a living? They needn't work for her father unless they wanted to, of course....

"You should look into a cannery some day, for sights--by which I mean that you shouldn't do anything of the sort!... Oh, get us to some quieter street there, Frederick!... But it was my fault for agreeing to go with you. I knew, as you couldn't, that a going factory's no place for a girl delicately brought up. Those women don't mind. That is, as a rule ..."

Carlisle responded to this sensible treatment with what lightsomeness she could muster; but the odd truth was that she hardly listened to Hugo. Heaven knew that she needed the strong sane arguments, heaven knew that he could state them all unanswerably. And yet, just as she was aware that her woman's feelings about the bunching-room would have no weight with Hugo, so she was curiously aware that Hugo's arguments produced no effect at all upon her. If she had relied upon him as a demolishing club against Vivian, the over-sympathetic, it appeared that his strength was not equal to the peculiar demand. And all at once she seemed to have gotten to know her lover very well; there were no more surprises in him. She suddenly perceived a strange and hitherto unsuspected likeness between Hugo and mamma, in that you could not talk over things with either of them....

"Remember, Cally," he said, summing up, "this is the first factory you've ever seen in your life. You've nothing at all to judge by, in a business matter of this sort--"

Something in his tone flicked her briefly out of her resolve not to argue; but she spoke lightly enough.

"Yes, I judge by the way it made me feel. I judge everything that way."

"That's natural, of course," said he, with a slight smile, "but after all it's rather a woman's way of judging things than a sociologist's.

Isn't it?"

"But I am a woman."

The car shook off the dust of the business district, mounted a long hill, bowled into streets fairer than Ca.n.a.l. Hugo's sense of a grievance deepened. Granted that she had nearly fainted, as a consequence of her own foolish perversity, it was surely now due to him that she should begin to be her sweet natural self again.

He had had quite enough of this irrational invasion of his afternoon; and so, having said just a word or two in reply to her last remark, he banished the matter from the conversation.

"Now," said he, "to fresh woods and pastures new, and a song of the open road!... Which way shall we go?"

Cally hesitated.

"I'm sorry, Hugo--but I think I should like to go home, if you don't mind."

"_Home?_"

"I really don't feel quite like a drive now. I'm very sorry--"

Canning gazed down at her in dismay.

"I knew you didn't feel quite yourself yet. You couldn't deceive _me_ ... But don't let's go _home!_ Why, this air is the very thing you need, Carlisle. It will set you up in no time."

But no, she seemed to think that was not what she needed, nor were her doubts removed by several further arguments from him.

Canning sat back in the care with an Early Christian expression. She had said, not five minutes ago, that she felt perfectly well; perfectly well she looked. Was it imaginable that she really took seriously the absurd little smatterings of new-womanism she had picked up, G.o.d knew where, while waiting for love to come?...

"Carlisle," he began, patiently, "I understand your feelings perfectly, of course, and natural enough they are to a girl brought up as you've been. At the same time, I'm not willing to leave you feeling disgusted with your father's methods of--"

"Disgusted with papa!" exclaimed Cally, quite indignantly. But she added, in a much more tempered tone: "Why, Hugo--how could you think such a thing?... I a.s.sure you I'm disgusted with n.o.body on earth but myself."

At that the annoyed young man gave a light laugh.

"I'm evidently about fifty years before the war, as you say down here. I can't understand, to save me, how--"

"I know it, Hugo. You never understand how I feel about things, and always a.s.sume that I'll feel the way you want me to."

Carlisle spoke quietly, almost gently. Yet Canning's feeling was like that of a man who, in the dark, steps down from a piazza at a point where steps are not. The jolt drove some of the blood from his cheek.

But his only reply was to poke his hired driver in the back with his stick and say, distantly: "Nine hundred and three Washington."

The hired car rolled swiftly, in sun and wind, toward the House of Heth.

Cobblestones were left behind; the large wheels skimmed the fair asphaltum. Three city blocks they went with no music of human speech....

"But I didn't mean to seem rude," said Cally, in a perfectly natural manner, "and I _am_ really very sorry to--to change the afternoon's plans. I don't feel quite well, and I think perhaps I ought to rest--just till dinner-time. You remember you are dining with us to-night."

The apology, the pacific, non-controversial tone, unbent the young man instantly. Small business for the thinking s.e.x to harbor a grudge against an irrational woman's moment of pique. Moreover, whatever this woman's foibles, Hugo Canning chanced to find himself deep in love with her. He met her advance with only a slight trace of stiffness. By the time they arrived at the Heth house, mamma's two young people were chatting along almost as if nothing had happened....