She had gone to work among them with brave face but trembling heart. There was no lack of children in the grimy cabins; it made her soul sick to look at them. She asked that she might be permitted to teach them. But she encountered a strange apathy. The parents looked at her with suspicion. She was not one of them; why should she wish to meddle? Besides, the boys must help the men; the girls must help the women—even a very small girl can take care of a baby, and so lift that weight from the mother’s shoulders.
“But have the children never been sent to school?” she asked.
No, they said, never. The other teachers didn’t bother them. Why should she? The children could grow up as their parents had. They had other things to think about besides going to school. There was the coal to be dug.
A few of the better families sent their children, however—the superintendent, the school directors, the mine bosses, the fire bosses,—in the mines, every one is a “boss” who is paid a fixed monthly wage by the company,—but Bessie Andrews found herself every day looking over the vacant forms in the little schoolhouse and telling herself that she had failed—that she had not reached the people who most needed it.
More than once had she been tempted to confess her defeat, resign the place, and return to Richmond; yet the sympathy and encouragement of Jabez Smith, the director who had secured her appointment, gave her strength to keep up the fight. A simple, homely man, a justice of the peace and postmaster of Wentworth, he had welcomed her kindly, and she had found his house a place of refuge.
“You’ll git discouraged,” he had said to her the first day, “but don’t you give up. Th’ people up here ain’t th’ kind you’ve been used to, an’ it takes ’em some little time t’ git acquainted. You jest keep at it, an’ you’ll win out in the end.”
There was another, too, who spoke words of hope and comfort—the Rev. Robert Bayliss, minister of the little church on the hillside, who had come, like herself, a pilgrim into this wilderness.
“You are doing finely,” he would say. “Why, look at me. I’ve been here four years, and am almost as far from my goal as you are; but I’m not going to give up the fight till I get every miner and every miner’s wife into that church. As yet, I haven’t got a dozen of them.”
And as she glanced askant at his firm mouth and determined chin, she decided inwardly that this was the kind of man who always won his battles, whether of the spirit or of the flesh.
As she stood there in the school-house door, thinking of all this and looking out across the valley, she heard the whistle blow at the drift-mouth, a signal that no more coal would be weighed that day; and in a few moments she saw a line of men coming down the hillside toward her. She waited to see them pass,—grimy, weary, perspiring, fresh from the mine and the never-ending battle with the great veins of coal,—and she noted sadly how many boys there were among them. Some of them glanced at her shyly and touched their hats, but the most went by without heeding her, the younger, the driver-boys, laughing and jesting among themselves, the older tramping along in the silence of utter fatigue. She watched them as they went, and then turned slowly back into the room and picked up her hat.