“I guess we who are not too old to learn could run machines as well as anybody, if we tried,” returned the young man, scornfully; “and as for the rest, handwork is always going to have a market value, and there'll always be some sort of a demand for it. It would go hard if we couldn't give those that couldn't run machines something to do, if we had the factory; but we haven't, and, what's more, we sha'n't have.” As he spoke, he went over to Jerome, who was prying up a heavy log, and lifted with him.
“Do you think you could form a company, if you had enough money between you?” Jerome asked him.
“Yes, of course; we'd be fools if we didn't,” he said.
“I say, curse the railroads and the machines! I wish every railroad track in the country was tore up! I wish every train of cars was kindlin'-wood, an' all the engine wheels an' the machine wheels would lock, till the crack of doom!” shouted the bitter voice again.
“There's no use in damning progress because we happen to be in the way of it. I'd rather be run over than lock the wheels myself,” Jerome said, suddenly.
“It remains to be seen whether ye would or not,” the voice returned, with sarcastic meaning. There was a smothered chuckle from the crowd, which began to disperse; the shadows were getting thick in the wood.
After supper that night, Jerome went up to his room, and sat down at his window. His curtain was pulled high. He looked out into the darkness and tried to think, but directly a door slammed, and a shrill babble of feminine tongues began in the room below. Belinda Lamb had arrived.
Jerome got his hat, stole softly down-stairs, and out of the front door. “I've got to be alone somewhere, where I can think,” he said to himself, and forthwith made for the site of his mill; he could be sure of solitude there at that hour.
When he arrived, he sat down on a pile of logs and gazed unseeingly at the broad current of the brook, silvering out of the shadows to the light of a young moon. The roar of it was loud in his ears, but he did not seem to hear it. There are times when the spirit of the living so intensifies that it comes into a silence and darkness of nature like death.
Jerome, in the solitude of the woods, without another human soul near, could concentrate his own into full action. As he sat there, he began to defend his own case like a lawyer against a mighty opponent, whom he recognized from the dogmas of orthodoxy, and also from an insight inherited from generations of Calvinistic ancestors, as his own conscience.