The woman rose mechanically and took up her thin shawl. Carmen gave a few directions to the gaping children. And as she went out into the bleak hall with the woman she heard one of them whisper in tones of awe:
“Tony, she said she––she was––an angel! Quick! Get down on your knees and cross yourself!”
Upward to the blue vault of heaven, like the streaming mists that rise through the tropic moonlight from the hot llanos, goes the ceaseless cry of humanity. Oh, if the god of the preachers were real, his heart must have long since broken! Upward it streams, this soul-piercing cry; up from the sodden, dull-brained toiler at the crashing loom; up from the wretched outcast woman, selling herself to low passions to escape the slavery of human exploitation; up from the muttering, ill-fed wreck, whose life has been cashed into dividends, whose dry, worthless hulk now totters to the scrap heap; up from the white-haired, flat-chested mother, whose stunted babes lie under little mounds with rude, wooden crosses in the dreary textile burial grounds; up from the weak, the wicked, the ignorant, the hopeless martyrs of the satanic social system that makes possible the activities of such human vultures as the colossus whose great mills now hurled their defiant roar at this girl, this girl whose life-motif was love.
Close about her, at the wretched little table, sat the wondering group of children, greedily gorging themselves on the only full meal that they could remember. And with them sat the still bewildered mother, straining her dark eyes at the girl, and striving to see in her a human being, a woman like herself. At her right sat the widow Marcus, who lived just across the hall. 152 Her husband had been crushed to death in one of the pickers two years before. The company had paid her a hundred dollars, but had kept back five for alleged legal fees. She herself had lost an arm in one of these same pickers, long ago, because the great owner of the mills would not equip his plant with safety devices.
“Come, Tony!” said the mother at length, as a sense of the reality of life suddenly returned to her. “The lunch for your father!”
Tony hurriedly swept the contents of his plate into his mouth, and went for the battered dinner pail.
“My man goes to work at six-thirty in the morning,” she explained to Carmen, when the little fellow had started to the mills with the pail unwontedly full. “And he does not leave until five-thirty. He was a weaver, and he earned sometimes ten dollars a week. But he didn’t last. He wore out. And so he had to take a job as carder. He earns about eight dollars a week now. But sometimes only six or seven.”
“But you can’t live on that, with your children!” exclaimed Carmen.
“Yes, we could,” replied the woman, “if the work was steady. But it isn’t. You see, if I could work steady, and the children too, we could live. I am a good spinner. And I am not nearly so worn out as he is. I have several years left in me yet.”