The two cars raced along the road, the law’s car constantly gaining, the law shooting at the tires of the Packard. The other cars, also containing officers, the one she had managed to stop, had, with a good deal of cursing — cries, she said, of, “You wait. We’ll get you, you bitch” — got clear and was following as was she.
“I was crying,” she said.
She said it was bad business, crying at such a time. It was because she liked the boy in the car ahead and was afraid they would get him. She said the tears in her eyes made her drive like a punk. It was her notion that she should get in front of both cars containing the law and either stop them or wreck their cars.
She hadn’t any gun, she said, because a pilot car, driven as hers was by a seemingly innocent girl... it was her game if caught to pull the innocent racket.... “I couldn’t shoot,” she said.
The Packard car, driven by Jim — in the game as Kit had explained only for the fun and excitement to be got out of it — had got into the main street of a town. It was a small county-seat town and there was a courthouse with a lawn in front. There was an iron fence.
And so Jim, in the stolen Packard, went right through the fence.
There were stone steps that went up to the courthouse door and Jim’s car dashed for them — something may have gone wrong with the steering rod of the car. It plunged half way up the steps and turned over and Jim’s body was so crushed, his face so crushed, that he could not be identified.
“He was sure killed dead,” Kit said. “He was a swell kid,” she added. She said there wasn’t a thing on him that could be used for identification. The car he drove had been stolen. What could you make out of that?”
“And you?” I asked, when Kit had finished the tale.
“I’d turned into a side street,” she said. “I went to have a look.” None of the officers had recognized her as the girl who had stalled the car in the road.
It seemed to me that Kit was trying to prove to me how hard-boiled she could be.
“We buried him all right,” she said. “The men of Tom Halsey’s crowd had got a woman, the mother of a man of the crowd, to identify the college boy as one of her sons.
Kit said that for weeks the newspapers of the State were full of the story of a college boy who had mysteriously disappeared. His father and in particular his mother would not believe he was dead. “I guess they are still looking for him. Maybe his mother is praying for him,” Kit said, and when I turned to look at her I saw, as I often did during our talks, an odd far-away light in her eyes.
CHAPTER THREE
KIT BRANDON HAD certainly her own nice strangeness. She talked of her experiences as a young girl, growing into womanhood, after she had run away from her home.
She was at work in the spinning-room of a big cotton mill. Afterward, in the year after she left the mill, there was a strike, a peculiarly ugly strike with several people killed. She had no part in that, no part in the agitation that led up to it. The labor movement, labor getting all the time more and more self-conscious, gaining thereby more self-respect, apparently gaining strength, obviously didn’t touch her.
Kit was in the big spinning-room of the mill, having “a side” to care for, light streaming in at the windows, the walls of the big room all painted white, with the rafters up above a light blue. “A side,” she explained, was one worker’s section, a place of many flying bobbins.
There was a mist, a fine mist of cotton lint in the air. The employees were called “lint-heads” by the people of the town.
“We didn’t live in the town. We had our own town, or rather it was a town owned by the mill.”
“It was pretty,” Kit said. She was impressed, had come down out of the hills, barefooted, barelegged.
“It was a Saturday when I got down there.”
There had been an old man in a battered Ford who had picked her up in the road. “He was a nice old man,” she said.
She had been frightened and trembling when he had stopped his car in the road but she was very tired and very hungry. In fancy I saw her thus, a half wild thing, like a little animal, a rabbit crouched in long grass in a field, a hunter with his dogs and his gun passing near. “I might have walked and run twenty miles.” She said that the old man, an old worker, took her to the cotton-mill town and to his house. It was a little frame house, at the edge of the town. He was a carpenter and a small farmer, she said.
He had nieces, two young girls who worked in the mill, and they told Kit what to say when she went to apply for work and later one of the girls helped her to get the trick of it, the trick of the tying in of the broken threads on the fastflying bobbins.
There was a little machine you held in your hand. One of the girls had loaned her shoes and stockings to wear until she got a little money ahead and could buy her own. “The girls were nice,” she said. There was in them the niceness, the often almost unbelievable kindness of the poor.
She found it difficult to talk to others. “For a long time I just couldn’t say a thing,” she declared. I gathered she had gone for weeks about her work, the two girls, nieces of the old farmer-carpenter, having got her a place to board in the mill village. Their own house was small. She said, “I had to sleep with the two girls, all three of us in one bed. One of the girls, the older one” — they were, I gathered, mere children— “had asthma. She sat up in bed at night and fought for breath.”
The mill village seemed to Kit a very pretty place. The thing that had offended me in my studies of such places, what I had thought the deadly sameness of the little houses, all painted the same color, little flower beds before the doors of many houses all alike, all of this had in no way offended her.
“It was nice,” Kit said and I gathered from her talk that she liked something that had happened to her there.
The particular mill in which she worked was a kind of show place, belonged, as I knew, to a company that also owned several other big mills. During the World War the company had made money hand over fist.
There was a big income tax to pay.
How foolish to pay all that money to government! Why not spend the money to build more and more mills?
“We’ll build a mill village that will make people sit up and take notice.”
It could be done, during the World War, and the money so spent, often recreation houses for the workers built, tennis courts and baseball grounds laid off... such a feeling of Christian virtue got... ministers of God hired and paid by the mill... it could be done, during the World War and the money spent, like the money spent for pages of advertising in newspapers and magazines, cost nothing. It so cut down income taxes that it came as a gift from God. Oh thou free and unhampered press!
And after the war, after the boom times, there remained the new and bigger mills and the so glorified mill villages. They both belonged to the companies. They did not belong to the workers.
For a time Kit had loved the mill and the mill village. She was lost there and wanted to be lost. There were so many girls, so many men and women. She was like a young tree in a vast forest, a blade of grass in the spring in a meadow.
She had begun from the first saving money. She worked for a few weeks on the day shift and then was shunted to the night shift. She explained, laughing, “I had to count the steps I went from the mill gate to another gate that led into the mill village.” She meant that she was afraid she would get lost in the big strange place with its swarms of people. Oh, mighty world of the workers, the hundreds of thousands of men and women, even children in factory towns, mill towns, coal mining towns... the big factories, many of them very beautiful with a strange new kind of beauty... great dynamos, power out of rivers, dipped up out of earth, harnessed... the refinement of all this... speed, efficiency... the goods rolling out of the factories, something new, strange, wonderful...
Thought that we might all now go well shod, well clothed, well housed in a strange but new and comfortable world.
.. fingers of workers willing...
> .. machines willing...
.. the old stupidity, refusal to give to the lives of the workers the dignity that might make the revolutionized world, going on and on.
Kit turned to the right when she got to the gate of the mill. It was surrounded by a wall and there were climbing roses on the wall. She went down past four streets and turned to the left and took 273 steps and there she was at the door of the house in which she had come to live. What difference to her that it was exactly like some two or three hundred other houses in the prize mill village, so that you had to count your steps to be sure you had got to your own door?
And what strangeness, coming to that out of the lonely hill cabin!
She lived in the mill village with two older people, childless, who had both been in the mill since they were children. The woman of the house was small, silent and wiry. She was a weaver and her man a loom fixer. There were two young men workers also boarded in the house but Kit never saw them. When she was on the day shift they were working at night and when she was shunted to the night shift they were also shunted.
For some months she led a strange, silent, half-frightened life. She had to accustom herself to the new feel of people, always about her everywhere, eyes of young male workers, in the mill and in the street, as she hurried from mill to house, from house to mill, eyes taking quick account of her slim young figure, thick soft hair, straight, clean young legs... her young breasts, head that sat so nicely on white fleshed neck... other girls’ eyes, often inviting her to friendship. One of the two girls, nieces of the old carpenter, was on her “side” for a time, helping her from day to day to acquire the trick of the work, and then she was sent away, ahead she went — twice she said — to the old carpenter’s house, to take back the shoes and stockings she had borrowed. “I wanted to pay. I was at that house, when I first came, four or five days. I wanted to pay my board and for using the shoes and stockings. I had got some of my own.” She talked, at length, of the little adventure, going to the house with the money saved and being ashamed to offer it and then going again. “I couldn’t say so. There was something in them. They were so nice. They were an old pair, hard workers and childless.”
“I was scared to try to say it,” Kit said.
She talked of going at night, at first alone, when she had got a little accustomed to the new life, out of the mill village and down into the town. This would be on a Saturday night, the town crowded with mill girls and boys on their night off — the girl Kit, afterwards such a striking figure in the semi-criminal world of illicit liquor makers, rumrunners, liquor dealers — some of the mill girls so pretty in their clean washed and ironed dresses.
This would have been in the boom years of twenty-three and four, the mills crowded with workers, America’s export business booming, huge harbors of cities full of ships, loading and unloading Coolidge prosperity.
Hoover, the engineer, who was to make the thing perpetual, put the chicken in every pot and the two automobiles in every garage, looming on the American consciousness.
“There must have been good going in the liquor racket that year in that town,” Kit said laughing, as she thought back into the time of her own innocence, her greenness.
She making such a very enticing picture of herself, she still the frightened little mountain girl, straight legs, new stockings. There would be the picture of her going on one of the two trips down to the house of the old carpenter-farmer. She carried a bundle containing the borrowed shoes and stockings, under her arm. “I’d washed the stockings. They had holes in them.”
She knew nothing of such little woman’s tricks, darning of stocking and mending of clothes, but had watched the mill woman in the house where she had the room darn some stockings and then went and got needles and darning cotton in a five-and-ten-cent store.
“It seemed to hurt my jaws to speak, even to a clerk when I got into a store,” she said, speaking thus of her first days in the big world.
She began going about, sometimes at night, in the streets of a North Carolina town, keeping her eyes open. All the little happenings of such nights made a deep impression on her. At first she did not dare loiter in the streets, having an everpresent fear that some one would speak to her, compelling her also to say words. “As though I were hurrying to catch a train,” she said. She had started to tell me of a young boy she met at that time in the mill but kept speaking of other things, other adventures.
So that I would understand the strangeness, half wonder, half terror of it all to her — coming so suddenly out of her quiet hills, no sounds there sometimes for hours — except perhaps the chattering of some mountain stream or the scolding of a mountain boomer — the little red squirrel of the hills.
The crowded industrial town and what being there, suddenly a part of it, had meant to her during those first weeks and months — the bold eyes of people — girls walking the streets with their young men — smell of the crowds, the feel of the crowd in herself, it seemed to her at first, she said, in the very bones and flesh of herself.
“You’re so little, so lost. It’s nice to be little and lost,” she said.
The eyes of a little hunted wild thing. They got bold enough later. She began, almost at once, as soon as the first quick terror had passed, to take note of other women and girls, how they made their cheeks and lips red, the way they did their hair, the clothes they wore.
“The young mill men didn’t look at me much then,” Kit said smiling. “I was too countrified then.”
She kept insisting upon her tale of the attempt to pay for the use of the borrowed shoes and stockings and for the food and the sleep had in the house of the old carpenter-farmer. She went there and went again.
“And so I went down along that street and got to where they lived. They had been so good to me, he and his wife and the two girls, his nieces.”
It was out a little beyond the town.
The last time she went she stopped outside. She could hear the man talking to his wife inside the house. She didn’t think she ought to be beholden to them. Her father, who had frightened her away from home, had always been saying that to her— “Don’t be beholden to people,” he said. She said that she thought afterwards that it was all foolishness.
Pride, often enough absurd, of a poor mountain man. Kit laughed at herself, telling of it. “It was pretty dark that night,” she said. There was a fence and a gate but the gate creaked when you pushed it open and so, not wanting to be heard, she climbed over the fence. “I had a dollar. It was all I did have.” She had already been at work for several weeks but had been buying clothes. “I had to, I was so near naked.”
She kept saying to herself, “I’m going to thank them, I’m going to pay them.” She had thought up some words to be used. “I was saying the words over aloud to myself that night while I was going down there,” she explained. “Here mister is pay for my board, for the days I was here in your house, before I got my job.
“I ain’t aiming to be beholden to you. You name it. How much is it I owe?”
A kind of ungraciousness in it all as a more sophisticated Kit herself later realized.
“And here’s the stockings and the shoes you let me have.” She said she had rubbed the shoes as clean as she could. She had tried to mend the stockings but had made a mess of the job and the woman where she boarded had seen her trying and had taken the job away from her.
“You name it — how much do I owe?”
It was at the time a great shame to her, not being able to do it. She had crawled over the fence and had got to the house door but there she stopped. There was talking going on in the house and the asthmatic niece was there and was having one of her spells. Kit could hear the queer whistling sound she made as she fought for breath. She said she laid the things she’d brought in the dark on the porch and put the dollar she’d saved inside one of the shoes. Then she got back over the fence and ran away into the darkness.
She jumped from that first tale of her life as a young mill girl to an
other.
She had worked for some months in the spinning-room of the big mill, that great light singing place. She said, “There was a new kind of quiet you got.” She thought that even the faces of the young girls and boys working in the place changed. There was a singing roar. She had got into the night shift.
There was the white flying thread, coming down through the machines.
There you were, on your side, a little narrow passage, like the narrow hallway of a big house, light streaming down from above.
The thread came dancing, dancing. “It made you want to dance,” Kit said. She began to like her life in the factory. That impulse didn’t last. She thought the loss of the feeling of being a part of something big and significant came from a certain attitude toward workers by those up above. It came from society. It was in the town to which the workers trooped on Saturday night — contempt, held tight too, treasured by those not mill workers. Kit was shrewd. “It might be,” she said, “that business people for example, people who lived by buying and selling — there were a lot of them — really felt cheapness, something mean in their own lives.
“So they had to pump up contempt for us.”
However, at first, it was all different. “I liked it,” she said.
The thread was coming down into and through the beautiful, smooth-running machines on her “side.”
“Go on, thread, come dancing down, run swiftly onto the bobbins, run into the great loom room, make cloth, make cloth to clothe all the world.” It was dancing. It joined another thread and the two were twisted together, making one. “I don’t know why it didn’t break away into nothing, the so-little slender thread running so fast. It didn’t often.”
The thread was being spun. It was running down, at terrific speed, to be wound on to bobbins.
Come on, workers, stand together in this.
Makers of these modern beautiful machines, stand on your own dignity.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 180