"RebeccaHardingDavis-LifeInTheIronMills" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Rebecca Harding)

and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and the coalboats below,
fragments of an old story float up before me,--a story of this house into which
I happened to come to-day. You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as
the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.--I know: only the
outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its
own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives,
like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water- butt.--Lost? There is
a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy,
dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you
to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and
come right down with me,--here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul
effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this
nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing
to you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths
for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,--this terrible question which
men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret
into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken faces and
brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God. Their lives
ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I
have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this
terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we
think it, but, from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy
which the world has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no
clearer, but will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and
dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death; but if your eyes
are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with
promise of the day that shall surely come.
My story is very simple,--Only what I remember of the life of one of these
men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You
know the mills? They took the great order for the lower Virginia railroads there
last winter; run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose
the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these
furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a secret, underlying sympathy between
that story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or perhaps
simply for the reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There
were the father and son,--both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby & John's mills
for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah, their cousin, a picker in some of the
cotton-mills. The house was rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had
two of the cellar-rooms. The old man, like many of the puddlers and feeders of
the mills, was Welsh,--had spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You
may pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the
windows, any day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so
brawny; they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor shout, nor
stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure, unmixed blood, I fancy:
shows itself in the slight angular bodies and sharply-cut facial lines. It is
nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived here. Their lives were like those of
their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork
and molasses, drinking--God and the distillers only know what; with an
occasional night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess. Is that all of their
lives?--of the portion given to them and these their duplicates swarming the