There being only three rooms in Mary's home, two of these necessarily bed-rooms, she entertained her company in the kitchen. The room was bare, Hal saw--there was not even so much as a clock by way of ornament.
The only charm the girl had been able to give to it, in preparation for company, was that of cleanness. The board floor had been newly sanded and scrubbed; the kitchen table also had been scrubbed, and the kettle on the stove, and the cracked tea-pot and bowls on the shelf. Mary's little brother and sister were in the room: Jennie, a dark-eyed, dark-haired little girl, frail, with a sad, rather frightened face; and Tommie, a round headed youngster, like a thousand other round headed and freckle-faced boys. Both of them were now sitting very straight in their chairs, staring at the visitor with a certain resentment, he thought. He suspected that they had been included in the general scrubbing. Inasmuch as it had been uncertain just when the visitor would come, they must have been required to do this every night, and he could imagine family disturbances, with arguments possibly not altogether complimentary to Mary's new "feller."
There seemed to be a certain uneasiness in the place.
Mary did not invite her company to a seat, but stood irresolute; and after Hal had ventured a couple of friendly remarks to the children, she said, abruptly, "Shall we be takin' that walk that we spoke of, Mr.
Smith?"
"Delighted!" said Hal; and while she pinned on her hat before the broken mirror on the shelf, he smiled at the children and quoted two lines from his Harrigan song--
"Oh, Mary-Jane, come out in the lane, The moon is a-shinin' in the old pecan!"
Tommie and Jennie were too shy to answer, but Mary exclaimed, "'Tis in a tin-can ye see it shinin' here!"
They went out. In the soft summer night it was pleasant to stroll under the moon--especially when they had come to the remoter parts of the village, where there were not so many weary people on door-steps and children playing noisily. There were other young couples walking here, under the same moon; the hardest day's toil could not so sap their energies that they did not feel the spell of this soft summer night.
Hal, being tired, was content to stroll and enjoy the stillness; but Mary Burke sought information about the mysterious young man she was with. "Ye've not worked long in coal-mines, Mr. Smith?" she remarked.
Hal was a trifle disconcerted. "How did you find that out?"
"Ye don't look it--ye don't talk it. Ye're not like anybody or anything around here. I don't know how to say it, but ye make me think more of the poetry-books."
Flattered as Hal was by this nave confession, he did not want to talk of the mystery of himself. He took refuge in a question about the "poetry-books." "I've read some," said the girl; "more than ye'd have thought, perhaps." This with a flash of her defiance.
He asked more questions, and learned that she, like the Greek boy, "Andy," had come under the influence of that disturbing American institution, the public-school; she had learned to read, and the pretty young teacher had helped her, lending her books and magazines. Thus she had been given a key to a treasure-house, a magic carpet on which to travel over the world. These similes Mary herself used--for the Arabian Nights had been one of the books that were loaned to her. On rainy days she would hide behind the sofa, reading at a spot where the light crept in--so that she might be safe from small brothers and sisters!
Joe Smith had read these same books, it appeared; and this seemed remarkable to Mary, for books cost money and were hard to get. She explained how she had searched the camp for new magic carpets, finding a "poetry-book" by Longfellow, and a book of American history, and a story called "David Copperfield," and last and strangest of all, another story called "Pride and Prejudice." A curious freak of fortune--the prim and sentimentally quivering Jane Austen in a coal-camp in a far Western wilderness! An adventure for Jane, as well as for Mary!
What had Mary made of it, Hal wondered. Had she revelled, shop-girl fashion, in scenes of pallid ease? He learned that what she had made of it was despair. This world outside, with its freedom and cleanness, its people living gracious and worth-while lives, was not for her; she was chained to a scrub-pail in a coal-camp. Things had got so much worse since the death of her mother, she said. Her voice had become dull and hard--Hal thought that he had never heard a young voice express such hopelessness.
"You've never been anywhere but here?" he asked.
"I been in two other camps," she said--"first the Gordon, and then East Run. But they're all alike."
"But you've been down to the towns?"
"Only for a day, once or twice a year. Once I was in Sheridan, and in a church I heard a lady sing."
She stopped for a moment, lost in this memory. Then suddenly her voice changed--and he could imagine in the darkness that she had tossed her head defiantly. "I'll not be entertainin' company with my troubles! Ye know how tiresome that is when ye hear it from somebody else--like my next-door neighbour, Mrs. Zamboni. D' ye know her?"
"No," said Hal.
"The poor old lady has troubles enough, God knows. Her man's not much good--he's troubled with the drink; and she's got eleven childer, and that's too many for one woman. Don't ye think so?"
She asked this with a navete which made Hal laugh. "Yes," he said, "I do."
"Well, I think people'd help her more if she'd not complain so! And half of it in the Slavish language, that a body can't understand!" So Mary began to tell funny things about Mrs. Zamboni and her other polyglot neighbours, imitating their murdering of the Irish dialect. Hal thought her humour was nave and delightful, and he led her on to more cheerful gossip during the remainder of their walk.
SECTION 13.
But then, as they were on their way home, tragedy fell upon them.
Hearing a step behind them, Mary turned and looked; then catching Hal by the arm, she drew him into the shadows at the side, whispering to him to be silent. The bent figure of a man went past them, lurching from side to side.
When he had turned and gone into the house, Mary said, "It's my father.
He's ugly when he's like that." And Hal could hear her quick breathing in the darkness.
So that was Mary's trouble--the difficulty in her home life to which she had referred at their first meeting! Hal understood many things in a flash--why her home was bare of ornament, and why she did not invite her company to sit down. He stood silent, not knowing what to say. Before he could find the word, Mary burst out, "Oh, how I hate O'Callahan, that sells the stuff to my father! His home with plenty to eat in it, and his wife dressin' in silk and goin' down to mass every Sunday, and thinkin'
herself too good for a common miner's daughter! Sometimes I think I'd like to kill them both."
"That wouldn't help much," Hal ventured.
"No, I know--there'd only be some other one in his place. Ye got to do more than that, to change things here. Ye got to get after them that make money out of O'Callahan."
So Mary's mind was groping for causes! Hal had thought her excitement was due to humiliation, or to fear of a scene of violence when she reached home; but she was thinking of the deeper aspects of this terrible drink problem. There was still enough unconscious snobbery in Hal Warner for him to be surprised at this phenomenon in a common miner's daughter; and so, as at their first meeting, his pity was turned to intellectual interest.
"They'll stop the drink business altogether some day," he said. He had not known that he was a Prohibitionist; he had become one suddenly!
"Well," she answered, "they'd best stop it soon, if they don't want to be too late. 'Tis a sight to make your heart sick to see the young lads comin' home staggerin', too drunk even to fight."
Hal had not had time to see much of this aspect of North Valley. "They sell to boys?" he asked.
"Sure, who's to care? A boy's money's as good as a man's."
"But I should think the company--"
"The company lets the saloon-buildin'--that's all the company cares."
"But they must care something about the efficiency of their hands!"
"Sure, there's plenty more where they come from. When ye can't work, they fire ye, and that's all there is to it."
"And is it so easy to get skilled men?"
"It don't take much skill to get out coal. The skill is in keepin' your bones whole--and if you can stand breakin' 'em, the company can stand it."
They had come to the little cabin. Mary stood for a moment in silence.
"I'm talkin' bitter again!" she exclaimed suddenly. "And I promised ye me company manner! But things keep happening to set me off." And she turned abruptly and ran into the house. Hal stood for a moment wondering if she would return; then, deciding that she had meant that as good night, he went slowly up the street.
He fought against a mood of real depression, the first he had known since his coming to North Valley. He had managed so far to keep a certain degree of aloofness, that he might see this industrial world without prejudice. But to-night his pity for Mary had involved him more deeply. To be sure, he might be able to help her, to find her work in some less crushing environment; but his mind went on to the question--how many girls might there be in mining-camps, young and eager, hungering for life, but crushed by poverty, and by the burden of the drink problem?
A man walked past Hal, greeting him in the semi-darkness with a nod and a motion of the hand. It was the Reverend Spragg, the gentleman who was officially commissioned to combat the demon rum in North Valley.
Hal had been to the little white church the Sunday before, and heard the Reverend Spragg preach a doctrinal sermon, in which the blood of the lamb was liberally sprinkled, and the congregation heard where and how they were to receive compensation for the distresses they endured in this vale of tears.
What a mockery it seemed! Once, indubitably, people had believed such doctrines; they had been willing to go to the stake for them. But now nobody went to the stake for them--on the contrary, the company compelled every worker to contribute out of his scanty earnings towards the preaching of them. How could the most ignorant of zealots confront such an arrangement without suspicion of his own piety? Somewhere at the head of the great dividend-paying machine that was called the General Fuel Company must be some devilish intelligence that had worked it all out, that had given the orders to its ecclesiastical staff: "We want the present--we leave you the future! We want the bodies--we leave you the souls! Teach them what you will about heaven--so long as you let us plunder them on earth!"
In accordance with this devil's program, the Reverend Spragg might denounce the demon rum, but he said nothing about dividends based on the renting of rum-shops, nor about local politicians maintained by company contributions, plus the profits of wholesale liquor. He said nothing about the conclusions of modern hygiene, concerning over-work as a cause of the craving for alcohol; the phrase "industrial drinking," it seemed, was not known in General Fuel Company theology! In fact, when you listened to such a sermon, you would never have guessed that the hearers of it had physical bodies at all; certainly you would never have guessed that the preacher had a body, which was nourished by food produced by the overworked and under-nourished wage-slaves whom he taught!