PAY-DAY
It was Saturday afternoon and pay-day, and the mill shut down at six o'clock.
When Helen went in Kingsley sat at the Superintendent's desk, issuing orders on the Secretary and Treasurer, Richard Travis, who sat at his desk near by and paid the wages in silver.
Connected with the mill was a large commissary or store—a cheap modern structure which stood in another part of the town, filled with the necessaries of life as well as the flimsy gewgaws which delight the heart of the average mill hand. In establishing this store, the directors followed the usual custom of cotton-mills in smaller towns of the South; paying their employees part in money and part in warrants on the store. It is needless to add that the prices paid for the goods were, in most cases, high enough to cut the wages to the proper margin. If there was any balance at the end of the month, it was paid in money.
Kingsley personally supervised this store, and his annual report to the directors was one of the strong financial things of his administration.
A crowd of factory hands stood around his desk, and the Superintendent was busy issuing orders on the store, or striking a balance for the Secretary and Treasurer to pay in silver.
They stood around tired, wretched, lint- and dust-covered, but expectant. Few were there compared with the number employed; for the wages of the minors went to their parents, and as minors included girls under eighteen and boys under twenty-one, their parents were there to receive their wages for them.
These children belonged to them as mercilessly as if they had been slaves, and despite the ties of blood, no master ever more relentlessly collected and appropriated the wages of his slaves than did the parents the pitiful wages of their children.
There are two great whippers-in in the child slavery of the South—the mills which employ the children and the parents who permit it—encourage it. Of these two the parents are often the worse, for, since the late enactment of child labor laws, they do not hesitate to stultify themselves by false affidavits as to the child's real age.
Kingsley had often noticed how promptly and even proudly the girls, after reaching eighteen, and the boys twenty-one, had told him hereafter to place their wages to their own credit, and not to the parent's. They seemed to take a new lease on life. Decrepit, drawn-faced, hump-shouldered and dried up before their time, the few who reached the age when the law made them their own masters, looked not like men and women who stand on the threshold of life, but rather like over-worked middle-aged beings of another period.
Yet that day their faces put on a brighter look.
They stood around the office desk, awaiting their turn. The big engine had ceased to throb and the shuttles to clatter and whirl. The mill was so quiet that those who had, year in and year out, listened to its clatter and hum, seemed to think some overhanging calamity was about to drop out of the sky of terrible calm.
“Janette Smith,” called out Kingsley.
She came forward, a bony, stoop-shouldered woman of thirty-five years who had been a spooler since she was fifteen.
“Seventy-seven hours for the week”—he went on mechanically, studying the time book, “making six dollars and sixteen cents. Rent deducted two dollars. Wood thirty-five cents. Due commissary for goods furnished—here, Mr. Kidd,” he said to the book-keeper, “let me see Miss Smith's account.” It was shoved to him across the desk. Kingsley elevated his glasses. Then he adjusted them with a peculiar lilt—it was his way of being ironical:
“Oh, you don't owe the store anything, Miss Smith—just eleven dollars and eighty cents.”
The woman stood stoically—not a muscle moved in her face, and not even by the change of an eye did she indicate that such a thing as the ordinary human emotions of disappointment and fear had a home in the heart.
“Mother was sick all last month,” she said at last in a voice that came out in the same indifferent, unvarying tone. “I had to overdraw.”
Kingsley gave his eye-glasses another lilt. They said as plainly as eye-glasses could: “Well, of course, I made her sick.” Then he added abruptly: “We will advance you two dollars this week—an' that will be all.”
“I hoped to get some little thing that she could eat—some relish,” she began.
“Not our business, Miss Smith—sorry—very sorry—but try to be more economical. Economy is the great objective haven of life. Emerson says so. And Browning in a most beautiful line of poetry says the same thing,” he added.
“The way to begin economy is to begin it—Emerson is so helpful to me—he always comes in at the right time.”
“And it's only to be two dollars,” she added.
“That's all,” and he pushed her the order. She took it, cashed it and went hurriedly out, her poke bonnet pulled over her face. But there were hot tears and a sob under her bonnet.
And so it went on for two hours—some drawing nothing, but remaining to beg for an order on the store to keep them running until next week.
One man with six children in the mill next came forward and drew eighteen dollars. He smiled complacently as he drew it and chucked the silver into his pocket. This gave Jud Carpenter, standing near, a chance to get in his mill talk.
“I tell you, Joe Hopper,” he said, slapping the man on the back, “that mill is a great thing for the mothers an' fathers of this little settlement. What 'ud we do if it warn't for our chillun?”
“You're talkin now—” said Joe hopefully.
“It useter be,” said Jud, looking around at his crowd, “that the parents spoiled the kids, but now it is the kids spoilin' the parents.”
His audience met this with smiles and laughter.
“I never did know before,” went on Jud, “what that old sayin' really meant: 'A fool for luck an' a po' man for chillun.'”
Another crackling laugh.
“How much did Joe Hopper's chillun fetch 'im in this week?”
Joe jingled his silver in his pocket and spat importantly on the floor.
“I tell you, when I married,” said Jud, “I seed nothin' but poverty an' the multiplication of my part of the earth ahead of me—poverty, I tell you, starvation an' every new chile addin' to it. But since you started this mill, Mister Kingsley (Kingsley smiled and bowed across the desk at him), I've turned what everybody said 'ud starve us into ready cash. And now I say to the young folks: 'Marry an' multiply an' the cash will be forthcomin'.'”
This was followed by loud laughs, especially from those who were blessed with children, and they filed up to get their wages.
Jim Stallings, who had four in the mill, was counted out eleven dollars. As he pocketed it he looked at Jud and said:
“Oh, no, Jud; it don't pay to raise chillun. I wish I had the chance old Sollerman had. I'd soon make old Vanderbilt look like shin plaster.”
He joined in the laughter which followed.
In the doorway he cut a pigeon-wing in which his thin, bowed legs looked comically humorous.
Jud Carpenter was a power in the mill, standing as he did so near to the management. To the poor, ignorant ones around him he was the mouth-piece of the mill, and they feared him even more than they did Kingsley himself, Kingsley with his ironical ways and lilting eye-glasses. With them Jud's nod alone was sufficient.
They were still grouped around the office awaiting their turn. In the faces of some were shrewdness, cunning, hypocrisy. Some looked out through dull eyes, humbled and brow-beaten and unfeeling. But all of them when they spoke to Jud Carpenter—Jud Carpenter who stood in with the managers of the mill—became at once the grinning, fawning framework of a human being.
“Yes, boys,” said Jud patronizingly as Stallings went out, “this here mill is a god-send to us po' folks who've got chillun to burn. They ain't a day we ortenter git down on our knees an' thank Mr. Kingsley an' Mister Travis there. You know I done took down that sign I useter have hangin' up in my house in the hall—that sign which said, God bless our home? I've put up another one now.”
“What you done put up now, Jud?” grinned a tall weaver with that blank look of expectancy which settles over the face of the middle man in a negro minstrel troupe when he passes the stale question to the end man, knowing the joke which was coming.
“Why, I've put up,” said Jud brutally, “'Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me.' That's scriptural authority for cotton mills, ain't it?”
The paying went on, after the uproarious laughter had subsided, and down the long row only the clinking of silver was heard, intermingled now and then with the shrill voice of some creature disputing with Kingsley about her account. Generally it ran thus: “It cyant be thet away. Sixty hours at five cents an hour—wal, but didn't the chillun wuck no longer than that? I cyant—I cyant—I jes' cyant live on that little bit.”
Such it was, and it floated down the line to Helen like the wail of a lost soul. When her time came Kingsley met her with a smile. Then he gave her an order and Travis handed her a bright crisp ten-dollar bill.
She looked at him in astonishment. “But—but,” she said. “Surely, I didn't earn all this, did I? Maggie—you had to pay Maggie for teaching me this week. It was she who earned it. I cannot take it.”
Kingsley smiled: “If you must know—though we promised her we would not tell you,” he said—“no, Miss Conway, you did not earn but five dollars this week. The other five is Maggie's gift to you—she left it here for you.”
She looked at him stupidly—in dazed gratitude. Travis came forward:
“I've ordered Jim to take you home to-night. I cannot leave now.”
And he led her out to where the trotters stood. He lifted her in, pressing her hand as he did so—but she did not know it—she burned with a strange fullness in her throat as she clutched her money, the first she had ever earned, and thought of Maggie—Maggie, dying and unselfish.
Work—it had opened a new life to her. Work—and never before had she known the sweetness of it.
“Oh, father,” she said when she reached home, “I have made some money—I can support you and Lily now.”
When Travis returned Jud Carpenter met him at the door.
“I had a mess o' trouble gittin' that gal into the mill. Huh! but ain't she a beaut! I guess you 'orter tip me for throwin' sech a peach as that into yo' arms. Oh, you're a sly one—” he went on whisperingly—“the smoothest one with women I ever seed. But you'll have to thank me for that queen. Guess I'll go down an' take a dram. I want to git the lint out of my throat.”
“I'll be down later,” said Travis as he looked at his watch. “Charley Biggers and I. It's our night to have a little fun with the boys.”
“I'll see you there,” said Jud.
The clinking of silver, questions, answers, and expostulations went on. In the midst of it there was the sudden shrill wail of an angry child.
“I wants some of my money, Paw—I wants to buy a ginger man.”
Then came a cruel slap which was heard all over the room, and the boy of ten, a wild-eyed and unkempt thing, staggered and grasped his face where the blow fell.
“Take that, you sassy meddling up-start—you belong to me till you are twenty-one years old. What 'ud you do with a ginger man 'cept to eat it?” He cuffed the boy through the door and sent him flying home.
It was Joe Sykes, the wages of whose children kept him in active drunkenness and chronic inertia. He was the champion loafer of the town.
In a short time he had drawn a pocketful of silver, and going out soon overtook Jud Carpenter.
“I tell you, Jud, we mus' hold these kids down—we heads of the family. I've mighty nigh broke myself down this week a controllin' mine. Goin' down to take a drink or two? Same to you.”