“Anyway, it makes more jobs for other workers.
“What difference does it make? Are workers — who are always getting it in the neck — who always in the history of man did get it in the neck — are they, can they be, nice people?”
It was all queer and puzzling to Red Oliver. Having been with the workers a little, having worked with them a little, he thought they were nice. He couldn’t help thinking it. There was his own mother — she was also a worker — gone so queerly religious. She was looked down upon by the better-fixed people in his own town of Langdon. He had come to realize that. She was always alone, always silent, always at work or prayer. He hadn’t done very well in his efforts to get close to her. He knew that. When the crisis had come in his own life he had run away from her and from his home town. He hadn’t talked it over with her. He couldn’t. She was too shy and silent and she made him shy and silent. Just the same he knew she was nice, at bottom she was damn nice.
“Oh, hell, it’s true. Those who are always getting it in the neck are the nicest people. I wonder why.”
5
ONE SUMMER, WHEN Molly Seabright was working nights in the mill at Birchfield... she had just passed twenty... it was a queer summer for her.... That summer she had an experience. For some reason everything in her body and mind seemed dragged out and slow that summer. There was in her a kind of weariness she couldn’t shake off.
Her sick times were harder on her. They hurt her more.
During that summer the machines in the mill seemed to her to become more and more alive. On some days the queer fantastic dreams of her days, when she was trying to sleep, came into the waking working hours at night.
There were queer desires that frightened her. Sometimes she half wanted to throw herself into one of the looms. She wanted to put her hand or her arm into one of the looms... the blood of her own body woven into the cloth she was making. It was a fantastic notion, a whim. She knew it. She wanted to ask some of the other women and girls, working in the room with her, “Do you ever feel so and so?” She didn’t ask. It wasn’t her way to talk very much.
There were too many women and girls, she thought. “I wish there were more men.” In the house where she had got a room, there were two older women and three younger ones, all workers in the mill. They all worked days and she was alone in the house during the day. There had once been a man in the house... one of the older women had been married but he had died. She wondered sometimes... did men in the mill die easier than women? There seemed so many old women, unattached workers, who had once had men. Did she herself hunger for a man of her own? She didn’t know.
Then her mother grew ill. The days that summer were all hot and dry. The mother had to have the doctor all summer. Every night in the mill she thought about her mother ill at home. The mother had to have the doctor all summer. Doctors cost money.
Molly wanted to quit the mill. She wished she could. She knew she couldn’t. She ached to quit. She would have liked to go, as Red Oliver had gone when a crisis had come into his life, to wander in strange places. She didn’t want to be herself. “I wish I could get out of my body,” she thought. She wished she were more beautiful. She had heard stories about girls... they left their families and the places where they worked... they went out into the world among men... they sold themselves to men. “I don’t care. I’d do it too if I had a chance,” she thought sometimes. She wasn’t beautiful enough. She wondered sometimes, looking at herself in a glass in her room... a room she rented in a mill house in the mill village... she looked pretty dragged out....
“What’s the use,” she kept saying to herself. She couldn’t quit working. Life would never open out for her. “I’ll bet I never can quit working in this place,” she thought. She felt dragged out and tired all the time.
At night she kept having queer dreams. She dreamed all the time of looms.
The looms became alive. They leaped at her. They seemed to say, “There you are. We want you.”
Everything to her that summer became strange and more strange. She looked at herself in the little glass she had in her room, looking both mornings when she came from work and afternoons when she had got out of bed to prepare her own supper before going to the mill. The days got hot. The house was hot. She stood in her room looking at herself. She was so tired all that summer that she thought she couldn’t go on working, but the strange thing was that sometimes... it surprised her... she couldn’t believe it... sometimes she looked all right. She was even beautiful. She was beautiful all that summer, but she didn’t know it for sure, couldn’t have been sure of it. Now and then she thought, “I’m beautiful.” The thought sent a little wave of happiness through her but most of the time she didn’t feel it very definitely. She felt it vaguely, knew it vaguely. It gave her a kind of new happiness.
There were men who knew. Every man who saw her that summer might have known. It may be that every woman has a time like that in her life — her own ultimate beauty. Every grass, every bush, every tree in the forest has its time of bloom. Men were better at making Molly know it than the other women were. The men working with her in the loom-room of the Birchfield mill... there were a few men in there... men weavers... the sweepers... the men who passed through the room kept looking sharply at her.
There was something in her that made them look. Her time of bloom had come. It hurt. She knew without quite knowing and the men knew without quite knowing.
She knew they knew. It tempted her. It frightened her.
There was one man, a young foreman, in her room, who was married but who had a sick wife. He kept walking near her. He stopped to talk. “Hello,” he said. He came near and stood there. He was embarrassed. Sometimes he even touched her body with his body. He didn’t do it often. It was always as though it had happened quite accidentally. He stood there. Then he walked past her. His body touched her body.
It was as though she had said to him, “Don’t. Be gentle now. Don’t. Be gentle now.” He was gentle.
She used to say the words sometimes when he wasn’t about, when there was no one about. “I guess I’m going a little crazy,” she thought. She found herself speaking, not to another human being like herself but to one of her looms.
A thread had broken on one of the looms and she ran to fix it, to tie it in. The loom was standing silently there. It was still. It seemed to want to leap at her.
“Be gentle now,” she whispered to it. Sometimes she said the words aloud. There was always a roar in the room. No one could hear.
It was absurd. It was silly. How could a loom, a thing of steel and iron, be gentle? A loom couldn’t. That was a human attribute. “Sometimes, maybe... even machines... absurd. Take yourself in hand.... If I could only run away from here for a time.”
She thought of her childhood on her father’s farm. Scenes of her childhood returned to her. Nature could be gentle sometimes. There were gentle days, gentle nights, in nature. Did she think all that? They were feelings, not thoughts.
It might have been that the young foreman in her room didn’t want to. He was a man who belonged to a church. He tried not to. There was a small stock room at one corner of the loom-room in the mill. They kept extra supplies in there. “Go in there,” he said to her one night. His voice was husky when he said it. His eyes kept seeking her eyes. His eyes were like the eyes of a hurt animal. “Rest a little,” he said. He used to say that to her sometimes when she wasn’t very tired. “I’m getting woozy-headed,” she thought. Such things happened sometimes in mills, in automobile factories where modern workmen worked with fast-flying modern machines. A factory workman, suddenly, without warning, went fantod. He began to yell. It happened to men more often than to women. When a workman was that way he was dangerous. He might hit some one with a tool, kill some one. He might begin to destroy machines. In some factories and mills they kept special men, big fellows, sworn in as police, to take care of such cases. It was like shell-shock in war. The workman had to be knocked out by a strong man; he h
ad to be carried out of the mill.
At first, when the foreman in the room spoke to Molly so nicely, so gently... Molly didn’t go to rest in the little room as he told her to but sometimes, later, she did. There were bales and piles of thread and cloth in there. There were spoiled pieces of cloth. She could lie down on a pile of goods and close her eyes.
It was very odd. She could rest in there, even sleep a little sometimes that summer, when she couldn’t get any rest or sleep at home in her room. It was odd — so close to the flying machines. It seemed better to be close to them. He put another worker, an extra woman, in her place at her looms and she went in there. The superintendent of the mill didn’t know.
The other girls in the room knew. They didn’t know. They could guess but they pretended they didn’t know. They were pretty decent. They didn’t say anything.
He didn’t follow her in there. When he sent her in... it happened a dozen times during that summer... he stayed in the big loom-room or went away to some other part of the mill, and Molly always thought, afterwards, after what finally happened, that he was off somewhere, after he had sent her into the room, fighting with himself. She knew it. She knew he was fighting with himself. She liked him. “He’s my own kind,” she thought. She never blamed him.
He was wanting to and not wanting to. He did, finally. You could come into the little stock room through a door from the loom-room or by a narrow stairway from an upstairs room and once, in half darkness, with the door to the loom-room half open, the other weavers all out there at work... so near... the dancing looms in the loom-room so near... he was silent... he might have been one of the looms... leaping thread... making firm fine cloth... making fine woven cloth.... Molly feeling so strangely dragged out. She couldn’t have fought anything. She really didn’t want to fight. She got pregnant.
Not caring and at the same time caring terribly.
So did he. He was okay, she thought.
If her mother found out. She never did. Molly was grateful for that.
She managed to lose it. No one ever knew. When she went home, over the week-end after that, her mother lying there in bed, she tried everything. She went up into the wood above the house alone where no one could see her and ran hard up and down. That was in the same overgrown woods’ road in which she afterwards saw Red Oliver. She leaped and jumped like the looms in the loom-room in the mill. She had heard something. She took great quantities of quinine.
She was ill for a week when she lost it but she didn’t have the doctor. She and her mother were ill in the same bed, but when she knew the doctor was coming she crept out of bed and hid in the wood. “He’ll only charge it,” she said to her mother. “I don’t need him,” she said. Then she got well and it never happened again. That fall the foreman’s wife died and he went away and got another job in another mill in some other town. He was ashamed. After it happened he was ashamed to come near her. She wondered sometimes — would he get married again now? He was nice, she thought. He had never been gruff and hard-boiled with the workers in the loom-room as most of the foremen were and he wasn’t a smarty. He never got gay with you. Would he get married again? He never knew what she went through when she was that way. She hadn’t told him she was that way at all. She couldn’t help wondering if he would get him a new wife in the new place and what his new wife would be like.
6
MOLLY SEABRIGHT, WHO had found young Red Oliver in the woods above her father’s house and who thought he was a young communist going to help the workers in the strike at Birchfield, did not want her father and mother to know about him or his presence on the farm. She had not tried to explain to them the new doctrines that were being taught to her in the strikers’ camp. She couldn’t. She couldn’t herself understand. She was full of admiration for the men and the women who had come among the strikers and were now leading them, but she didn’t understand their words or their ideas.
They were always, for one thing, using strange words she had never heard before — the proletariat — the bourgeoisie. There was this or that to be “liquidated.” You went to the right or to the left. There was a strange language — big hard words. She had been emotionally aroused. Vague hopes were alive in her. The strike at Birchfield, started over a question of wages and hours, had suddenly become something else. There was talk of a new world to be made, of people like herself lifted out from under the shadow of the mills. There was to be a new world in which the workers were of importance. Those who raised food for others to eat, who made cloth to clothe people, who built houses in which people could live, these people were suddenly to emerge — to stand forth. The future was to be in their hands. The whole thing was to Molly not understandable but the ideas that had been put into her head by the communists, talking in the camp at Birchfield, although perhaps unattainable, were tempting. They made you feel big and real and strong. There was a kind of nobility in the ideas, but you couldn’t explain them to your father and mother. Molly wasn’t a talker.
And then also there was confusion among the workers. Sometimes, when the communist leaders were not about, they talked among themselves. “It can’t be. It can’t be. You? Us?” There was amusement. Fear grew. Uncertainty grew. Just the same, the fear and the uncertainty seemed to draw the workers together. They felt themselves isolated — a little island of people separated from the great continent of other people that was America.
“Can there ever be such a world as these men and this woman talk about?” Molly Seabright couldn’t quite believe, but at the same time something had happened to her. At times she felt herself willing to die for the men and women who had suddenly brought the new promise into her life and into the lives of the other workers. She tried to think. She was like Red Oliver struggling with himself. The woman communist who had come to Birchfield with the men was small and dark. She could get up before the workers and talk. Molly admired and envied her. She wished she could be such another.... “If I had education and wasn’t so shy I’d try,” she thought sometimes. The strike at Birchfield, the first strike she had ever been in, had brought her many new and strange emotions she didn’t much understand and couldn’t explain to others. Listening to the talkers in the camp she had times of feeling suddenly big and strong. She joined in the singing of new songs, full of strange words. She had come to believe in the communist leaders. They were young and full of daring, full of courage, she thought. Sometimes she thought they had too much courage. The town of Birchfield was all alive with threats against them. When the strikers marched singing through the streets of the town, as they sometimes did, the crowds watching scolded at them. There were hisses, oaths, threats shouted. “You sons-of-bitches, we’ll get you.” The newspaper at Birchfield ran a cartoon on its front page showing a serpent twined about the American flag and it was labeled “Communism.” Boys came and threw copies of the paper about the strikers’ camp.
“I don’t care. They lie.”
She felt hatred in the air. It made her afraid for the leaders. It made her tremble. The law had been looking for such a one, she now thought, when she had accidentally come upon Red Oliver in the wood. She wanted to protect him, make him safe but at the same time didn’t want her father and mother to know. She did not want them to get into trouble, but, as for herself, she had come to feel that she didn’t care. The law had been to the house down below once that evening, and now, after asking questions gruffly — the law was always brutal with the poor — she knew that — now the law had driven away along the mountain road, but any minute the law might return and might begin again asking questions. The law might even find out that she was herself one of the Birchfield strikers. The law hated strikers. There had been several half riots already in Birchfield, the strikers, men and women, on the one side, and the scabs brought in from the outside to take their places and the people of the town and the mill owners on the other. The law was always against the strikers. It always would be. The law would be glad of the chance to hurt any one connected with one of the striker
s. She thought that. She believed it. She didn’t want her father and mother to know of Red Oliver’s presence. Their hard lives might be made harder.
“No use making them tell lies,” she thought. Her people were good people. They belonged to a church. They could never be good liars. She didn’t want them to be. She told Red Oliver to stay hidden in the wood until darkness came. When she was talking to him in the wood, in the half darkness, looking through trees, they could just see the house down below. There was an opening between trees and she pointed. Molly’s mother had lighted a lamp in the kitchen of the house. She would be getting supper. “You stay up here,” she said softly and blushed saying it. It was strange to her to be talking thus with a strange man, taking care of him, protecting him. Some of the feeling of love and admiration she had got for the communist leaders of the strike she had at once for Red. He would be as they were — no doubt an educated man. Such men, and such women as the little dark communist woman in the strikers’ camp, would have made sacrifices to come to the aid of the strikers, of the poor workers on strike. Already she felt dimly that these men were in some way better, nobler, more courageous, than the kind of men she had always thought of as good. She had always thought that preachers must be the best men in the world but that was strange too. The preachers in the town of Birchfield were against the strikers. They were crying out against the new leaders the strikers had found. Once the woman communist in the camp had talked to the other women. She had pointed out to them how the Christ, the preachers were always talking about, had stood by the poor and lowly. He had stood by people in trouble, by people who were oppressed as the workers were. The woman communist had said that the attitude of the preacher was a betrayal not only of the workers but even of their own Christ and Molly had begun to understand what she meant, what she was talking about. The whole thing was a puzzle and there were other things that also puzzled. One of the women workers, one of the strikers at Birchfield, an old woman, a church woman, a good woman, Molly thought, had wanted to bring a present to one of the communist leaders. She wanted to express her love. She thought the man brave. For the sake of the strikers he was defying the town and the police of the town, and the police had no use for workers on strike. They only liked workers who were always humble, who always submitted. The old workingwoman had thought and thought, wanting to do something for the man she admired. The incident was more amusing, more tragically amusing than Molly knew. One of the communist leaders was standing up before the strikers talking to them and the old woman came up to him. She pushed her way up through the crowd. She had brought him as a present her Bible. It was the only thing she had to give to the man she loved and to whom she wanted to express her love by giving a present.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 169