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Life in the Iron-Mills


Life in the Iron-Mills
Rebecca Harding Davis

"Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?"

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank
down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the
breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking
out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd
of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect
the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the
great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on
the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow
river,-- clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded
poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses
of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their
reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing
upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted
and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside
me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,--almost worn
out, I think.
From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the
river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored,
(la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of
boats and coal- barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a look
of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing
its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day,
when from the street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping
past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted
faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and
muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling
caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing
from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness
for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist?
You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a
drunken jest, a joke,-- horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough.
My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What if
it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous
sunlight, quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and
flushing crimson with roses,--air, and fields, and mountains. The future of the
Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be stowed away, after his
grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard, and after that, not air,
nor green fields, nor curious roses.
Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the windowpane,