The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
Breakfast was soon over and then the hour came--the hour when Helen
Conway would begin her new life. This thought--and this only--burned
into her soul: To-day her disgrace began. She was no longer a Conway.
The very barriers of her birth, that which had been thrown around her
to distinguish her from the common people, had been broken down. The
foundation of her faith was shattered with it.
For the last time, as a Conway, she looked at the fields of
Millwood--at the grim peak of Sunset Rock above--the shadowed wood
below. Until then she did not know it made such a difference in the
way she looked at things. But now she saw it and with it the ruin,
the abandonment of every hope, every ambition of her life. As she
stood upon the old porch before starting for the mill, she felt that
she was without a creed and without a principle.
"I would do anything," she cried bitterly--"I care for nothing. If I
am tempted I shall steal, I know I shall--I know I shall"--she
repeated.
It is a dangerous thing to change environments for the worse. It is
more dangerous still to break down the moral barrier, however frail
it may be, which our conscience has built between the good and the
evil in us. Some, reared under laws that are loose, may withstand
this barrier breaking and be no worse for the change; but in the case
of those with whom this barrier of their moral belief stands securely
between conscience and forbidden paths, let it fall, and all the best
of them will fall with it.
For with them there are no degrees in degradation--no caste in the
world of sin. Headlong they rush to moral ruin. And there are those
like Helen Conway, too blinded by the environment of birth to know
that work is not degradation. To them it is the lowering of every
standard of their lives, standards which idleness has erected. And
idleness builds strange standards.
If it had occurred to Helen Conway--if she had been reared to know
that to work honestly for an honest living was the noblest thing in
life, how different would it all have been!
And so at last what is right and what is wrong depend more upon what
has gone before than what follows after. It is more a question of
pedigree and environment than of trials and temptations.
"I shall steal," she repeated--"oh, I know I shall."
And yet, as her father drove her in the old shambling buggy across
the hill road to the town, there stood out in her mind one other
picture which lingered there all day and for many days. She could not
forget it nor cast it from her, and in spite of all her sorrow it
uplifted her as she had been uplifted at times before when, reading
the country newspaper, there had blossomed among its dry pages the
perfume of a stray poem, whose incense entered into her soul of
souls.
It was a young man in his shirt sleeves, his face flushed with work,
his throat bare, plowing on the slope of the hillside for the fall
sowing of wheat.
What a splendid picture he was, silhouetted in the rising sun against
the pink and purple background of sunbeams!
It was Clay Westmore, and he waved his hand in his slow, calm
forceful way as he saw her go by.
It was a little thing, but it comforted her. She remembered it long.
The mill had been running several hours when Kingsley looked up, and
saw standing before him at his office window a girl of such stately
beauty that he stood looking sillily at her, and wondering.
He did not remember very clearly afterwards anything except this
first impression; that her hair was plaited in two rich coils upon
her head, and that never before had he seen so much beauty in a
gingham dress.
He remembered, too, that her eyes, which held him spellbound, wore
more an expression of despair and even desperation than of youthful
hope. He could not understand why they looked that way, forerunners
as they were of such a face and hair.
And so he stood, sillily smiling, until Richard Travis arose from his
desk and came forward to meet her.
She nodded at him and tried to smile, but Kingsley noticed that it
died away into drawn, hard lines around her pretty mouth.
"It is Miss Conway," he said to Kingsley, taking her hand familiarly
and holding it until she withdrew it with a conscious touch of
embarrassment.
"She is one of my neighbors, and, by the way, Kingsley, she must have
the best place in the mill."
Kingsley continued to look sillily at her. He had not heard of
Helen--he did not understand.
"A place in the mill--ah, let me see," he said thoughtfully.
"I've been thinking it out," went on Travis, "and there is a
drawing-in machine ready for her. I understand Maggie is going to
quit on account of her health."
"I, ah--" began Kingsley--"Er--well, I never heard of a beginner
starting on a drawing-in machine."
"I have instructed Maggie to teach her," said Travis shortly. Then he
beckoned to Helen: "Come."
She followed Richard Travis through the mill. He watched her as she
stepped in among the common herd of people--the way at first in which
she threw up her head in splendid scorn. Never had he seen her so
beautiful. Never had he desired to own her so much as then.
"The exquisite, grand thing," he muttered. "And I shall--she shall be
mine."
Then her head sank again with a little crushed smile of helpless pity
and resignation. It touched even Travis, and he said, consolingly, to
her:
"You are too beautiful to have to do this and you shall not--for
long. You were born to be queen of--well, The Gaffs, eh?"
He laughed and then he touched boldly her hair which lay splendidly
around her temples.
She looked at him resignedly, then she flushed to her eyes and
followed him.
The drawer-in is to the loom what the architect is to the building.
And more--it is both architect and foundation, for as the threads are
drawn in so must the cloth be.
The work is tedious and requires skill, patience, quickness, and that
nicety of judgment which comes with intellect of a higher order than
is commonly found in the mill. For that reason the drawer-in is
removed from the noise of the main room--she sits with another
drawer-in in a quiet, little room nearby, and, with her trained
fingers, she draws in through the eyelets the threads, which set the
warp.
Maggie was busy, but she greeted him with a quaint, friendly little
smile. Helen noticed two things about her at once: that there was a
queer bright light in her eyes, and that beneath them glowed two
bright red spots, which, when Travis approached, deepened quickly.
"Yes, I am going to leave the mill," she said, after Travis had left
them together. "I jus' can't stan' it any longer. Mother is dead, you
know, an' father is an invalid. I've five little brothers and sisters
at home. I couldn't bear to see them die in here. It's awful on
children, you know. So I've managed to keep 'em a-goin'
until--well--I've saved enough an' with the help
of--a--a--friend--you see--a very near friend--I've managed to get us
a little farm. We're all goin' to it next week. Oh, yes, of course,
I'll be glad to teach you."
She glanced at Helen's hands and smiled: "Yo' hands don't look like
they're used to work. They're so white and beautiful."
Helen was pleased. Her fingers were tapering and beautiful, and she
knew her hands were the hands of many generations of ladies.
"I have to make a living for myself now," she said with a dash of
bitterness.
"If I looked like you," said Maggie, slyly and yet frankly, "I'd do
something in keeping with my place. I can't bear to think of anybody
like you bein' here."
Helen was silent and Maggie saw that the tears were ready to start.
She saw her half sob and she patted her cheek in a motherly way as
she said:
"Oh, but I didn't mean to hurt you so. Only I do hate so to see--oh,
I am silly, I suppose, because I am going to get out of this
terrible, terrible grind."
Her pale face flushed and she coughed, as she bent over her work to
show Helen how to draw in the threads.
"Now, I'm a good drawer-in, an' he said onct"--she nodded at the door
from which Travis had gone out--"that I was the best in the worl';
the whole worl'." She blushed slightly. "But, well--I've made no
fortune yet--an' somehow, in yo' case now--you see--somehow I feel
sorter 'fraid--about you--like somethin' awful was goin' to happen to
you."
"Why--what--" began Helen, surprised.
"Oh, it ain't nothin'," she said trying to be cheerful--"I'll soon
get over this ... out in the air. I'm weak now and I think it makes
me nervous an' skeery.... I'll throw it off that quick," she snapped
her fingers--"out in the open air again--out on the little farm." She
was silent, as if trying to turn the subject, but she went back to it
again. "You don't know how I've longed for this--to get away from the
mill. It's day in an' day out here an' shut up like a convict. It
ain't natural--it can't be--it ain't nature. If anybody thinks it is,
let 'em look at them little things over on the other side," and she
nodded toward the main room. "Why, them little tots work twelve hours
a day an' sometimes mo'. Who ever heard of children workin' at all
befo' these things come into the country? Now, I've no objection to
'em, only that they ought to work grown folks an' not children. They
may kill me if they can," she laughed,--"I am grown, an' can stan'
it, but I can't bear to think of 'em killin' my little brothers an'
sisters--they're entitled to live until they get grown anyway."
She stopped to cough and to show Helen how to untangle some threads.
"Oh, but they can't hurt me," she laughed, as if ashamed of her
cough; "this is bothersome, but it won't last long after I get out on
the little farm."
She stopped talking and fell to her work, and for two hours she
showed Helen just how to draw the threads through, to shift the
machine, to untangle the tangled threads.
It was nearly time to go home when Travis came to see how Helen was
progressing. He came up behind the two girls and stood looking at
them work. When they looked up Maggie started and reddened and Helen
saw her tighten her thin lips in a peculiar way while the blood flew
from them, leaving a thin white oval ring in the red that flushed her
face.
"You are doing finely," he said to Helen--"you will make a swift
drawer-in." He stooped over and whispered: "Such fingers and hands
would draw in anything--even hearts."
Helen blushed and looked quickly at Maggie, over whose face the
pinched look had come again, but Maggie was busy at her machine.
"I remember when I came here five years ago," went on Maggie after
Travis had left, "I was so proud an' happy. I was healthy an' well
an' so happy to think I cu'd make a livin' for the home-folks--for
daddy an' the little ones. Oh, they would put them in the mill, but I
said no, I'll work my fingers off first. Let 'em play an' grow. Yes,
they've lived on what I have made for five years--daddy down on his
back, too, an' the children jus' growin', an' now they are big enough
and strong enough to he'p me run the little farm--instead"--she said
after a pause--"instead of bein' dead an' buried, killed in the mill.
That was five years ago--five years"--she coughed and looked out of
the window reflectively.
"Daddy--poor daddy--he couldn't help the tree fallin' on his back an'
cripplin' him; an' little Buddy, well, he was born weakly, so I done
it all. Oh, I am not braggin' an' I ain't complainin', I'm so proud
to do it."
Helen was silent, her own bitterness softened by the story Maggie was
telling, and for a while she forgot herself and her sorrow.
It is so always. When we would weep we have only to look around and
see others who would wail.
"When I come I was as rosy as you," Maggie went on; "not so pretty
now, mind you--nobody could be as pretty as you."