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

came again,--working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished,
breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man,
untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard,
grinding labor.
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the lowest
of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you
hear the story of this night. I want you to look back, as he does every day, at
his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has
groped through as boy and man,--the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So
long ago he began, that he thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There
is no hope that it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a
fierce thirst for beauty,--to know it, to create it; to be--something, he knows
not what,--other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun
glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him
to a passion of pain,--when his nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against
God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him. With all
this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong,
a loving poet's heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer,
familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. Be just: when I tell you
about this night, see him as he is. Be just,--not like man's law, which seizes
on one isolated fact, but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all
the countless cankering days of this man's life, all the countless nights, when,
sick with starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this
night, the saddest of all.
I called this night the crisis of his life. If it was, it stole on him unawares.
These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously.
Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.

Wolfe, while Deborah watched him, dug into the furnace of melting iron with his
pole, dully thinking only how many rails the lump would yield. It was
late,--nearly Sunday morning; another hour, and the heavy work would be done,
only the furnaces to replenish and cover for the next day. The workmen were
growing more noisy, shouting, as they had to do, to be heard over the deep
clamor of the mills. Suddenly they grew less boisterous,--at the far end,
entirely silent. Something unusual had happened. After a moment, the silence
came nearer; the men stopped their jeers and drunken choruses. Deborah, stupidly
lifting up her head, saw the cause of the quiet. A group of five or six men were
slowly approaching, stopping to examine each furnace as they came. Visitors
often came to see the mills after night: except by growing less noisy, the men
took no notice of them. The furnace where Wolfe worked was near the bounds of
the works; they halted there hot and tired: a walk over one of these great
foundries is no trifling task. The woman, drawing out of sight, turned over to
sleep. Wolfe, seeing them stop, suddenly roused from his indifferent stupor, and
watched them keenly. He knew some of them: the overseer, Clarke,--a son of
Kirby, one of the mill-owners,--and a Doctor May, one of the town-physicians.
The other two were strangers. Wolfe came closer. He seized eagerly every chance
that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down on him
perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What made the difference
between them? That was the mystery of his life. He had a vague notion that
perhaps to-night he could find it out. One of the strangers sat down on a pile