After the tune, and while Miss Flaffer had left the room to get her notebook, I noted with chagrin that my perspiring fingers had left marks on the snowy keyboard where they would surely be seen. I listened, and heard Miss Flaffer rummaging among some books, and then desperately spat on my coat cuff and rubbed the keyboard vigorously until I thought that I had obliterated the traces of my fingers. Then Miss Flaffer returned, and I tried to act unconcernedly by whistling, under my breath, “After the Ball.”
By the time the lesson was over, it was raining outside, and Miss Flaffer said, “I have to go to the corner of the next street, Albert. (Albert!) I want you to share my umbrella with me so that you will not get wet.”
I mumbled, “All right, I don’t care if I do,” and prepared to go. Before we had left the house I had put on my hat twice and opened and shut the door once in my extreme excitement. Then we went out, and there rushed to my mind, from my reading, the startling question, “How to act when walking on the street with a fine woman, and there is an umbrella?” I said, when we were on the sidewalk, “Please let me carry that,” and pointed to the umbrella. “Certainly,” she said, and handed it to me. Before we had attained the corner, I had managed to poke the ends of the umbrella ribs down on Miss Flaffer’s hat, and to knock it somewhat askew. I found, also, that I was shielding myself to such an extent as to leave Miss Flaffer exposed to the torrents of rain. On the street corner, she took the umbrella, and, as my car came into view, she said, “Good-by, Albert. You did very well to-day. Practise faithfully, and be sure to come next week.” I called, “So long,” and ran for the car.
I only took two other lessons from Miss Flaffer. I never had the manners to send her word that I could no longer afford them. I was afraid that she would offer to teach me free, and I could not stand the confinement to the house after a hard day in the mill. But I had learned something besides piano-playing with her. I had seen fine manners contrasted against my own uncouth ways. I had seen a dustless house contrasted against my own ill-kept home. I had been called Albert!
Chapter XII. Machinery
and Manhood
Chapter XII. Machinery
and Manhood
MY work in the spinning-room, in comparison with my new work in the mule-room, had been mere child’s play. At last the terror of the mill began to blacken my life. The romance, the glamour, and the charm were gone by this only a daily dull, animal-like submission to hard tasks had hold of me now.
Five days of the week, at the outer edge of winter, I never stood out in the daylight. I was a human mole, going to work while the stars were out and returning home under the stars. I saw none of the world by daylight, except the staring walls, high picket-fences, and drab tenements of that immediate locality. The sun rose and set on the wide world outside, rose and set five times a week, but I might as well have been in a grave; there was no exploration abroad.
The mule-room atmosphere was kept at from eighty-five to ninety degrees of heat. The hardwood floor burned my bare feet. I had to gasp quick, short gasps to get air into my lungs at all. My face seemed swathed in continual fire. The tobacco chewers expectorated on the floor, and left little pools for me to wade through. Oil and hot grease dripped down behind the mules, sometimes falling on my scalp or making yellow splotches on my overalls or feet. Under the excessive heat my body was like a soft sponge in the fingers of a giant; perspiration oozed from me until it seemed inevitable that I should melt away at last. To open a window was a great crime, as the cotton fiber was so sensitive to wind that it would spoil. (Poor cotton fiber!) When the mill was working, the air in the mule-room was filled with a swirling, almost invisible cloud of lint, which settled on floor, machinery, and employees, as snow falls in winter. I breathed it down my nostrils ten and a half hours a day; it worked into my hair, and was gulped down my throat. This lint was laden with dust, dust of every conceivable sort, and not friendly at all to lungs.
There are few prison rules more stringent than the rules I worked under in that mule-room. There are few prisoners watched with sterner guards than were the bosses who watched and ordered me from this task to that.