“Oh, well, maybe I can help her, po' little thing,” the Bishop said when the mother conducted him in. But one look at her was enough—that dead, unmeaning look, not unconscious, but unmeaning—deadened—a disease which to a robust child would mean fever and a few days' sickness—to this one the Bishop knew it meant atrophy and death. And as the old man looked at her, he thought it were better that she should go. For to her life had long since lost its individuality, and dwarfed her into a nerveless machine—the little frame was nothing more than one of a thousand monuments to the cotton mill—a mechanical thing, which might cease to run at any time.
“How old is she?” asked the Bishop, sitting down by the child on the side of the bed.
“We put her in the mill two years ago when she was seven,” said the mother. “We was starvin' an' had to do somethin'.” She added this with as much of an apologetic tone as her nature would permit. “We told the mill men she was ten,” she added. “We had to do it. The fust week she got two fingers mashed off.”
The Bishop was silent, then he said: “It's bes' always to tell the truth. Liar is a fast horse, but he never runs but one race.”
Although there were no laws in Alabama against child labor, the mill drew the lines then as now, if possible, on very young children. Not that it cared for the child—but because it could be brought to the mill too young for any practical use, unless it was wise beyond its age.
He handed the little thing a ginger man. She looked at it—the first she had ever seen,—and then at the giver in the way a wild thing would, as if expecting some trick in the proffered kindness; but when he tried to caress her and spoke kindly, she shrank under the cover and hid her head with fear.
It was not a child, but a little animal—a wild being of an unknown species in a child's skin—the missing link, perhaps; the link missing between the natural, kindly instinct of the wild thing, the brute, the monkey, the anthropoid ape, which protects its young even at the expense of its life, and civilized man of to-day, the speaking creature, the so-called Christian creature, who sells his young to the director-Devils of mills and machinery and prolongs his own life by the death of his offspring.
Biology teaches that many of the very lowest forms of life eat their young. Is civilized man merely a case, at last, of reversion to a primitive type?
She hid her head and then peeped timidly from under the cover at the kindly old man. He had seen a fox driven into its hole by dogs do the same thing.
She did not know what a smile meant, nor a caress, nor a proffered gift. Tremblingly she lay, under the dirty quilt, expecting a kick, a cuff.