“Oh, yes, I have. I was reading it for the second time to-day.”
As he hastily concealed the book under his blouse, he looked anxiously about him, fearing they might be observed, unwilling to compromise her in the least. The craft of a man is rarely equal to that of a woman, no matter how young she may be. Edna smiled as she noticed his perturbation.
“There is no one to see us,” she said, “and if there were, it would not matter. They would merely think I was giving improving literature and good advice to an under-gardener—which, indeed, is exactly what I am doing when I tell him to work hard, and—forget!”
As Edna said this she opened her hand and allowed to flutter upon the heap at his feet the minute fragments of a letter, which floated down through the air like a miniature snowfall, and she was gone before he could say “Good-by” for the second time.
Marsten stood there looking down at the bits of torn paper scattered over the heap, the remnants, undoubtedly, of the letter he had brought; and although he had had no word of encouragement—which, in spite of his disclaimer, he had yearned to hear—each separate piece of white paper reflected upwards to him a ray of hope.
CHAPTER XXV.
SARTWELL, as he had written to his daughter and telegraphed to Barney Hope, found himself very busy, now the men had come back. Although he dismissed none who had taken part in the strike, he rearranged, with a dogged ruthlessness, the whole service of the works. Few men got their old jobs back again, or their old wages. There were promotions and retrogradations, although no one was discharged. At first it seemed to the men that this was a mere brutal display of power, presided over by wanton caprice, but as time went on they began to see the glimmering of a method in the weaving of the web. Those who were degraded to the meanest and most poorly paid work the firm had to offer were the men who had been most hot-headed in bringing on the strike, and the most persistent in opposing its conclusion. The soberer heads among the men, who had been thrust into the background during the agitation, were in every instance given promotion and higher pay; and as these changes took place one after another—for Sartwell was not the man to disorganize the works by any sweepingly radical changes—the general conclusion was that the manager merely desired to show the men that those whom they had valued lightly were the workmen whom he prized. Yet it could not be denied, even by those who lost in the game of reorganization, that the more conservative men thus advanced were among the most capable workmen in the factory. They were the men who had most to lose by a strike, and had naturally been most reluctant to enter into a contest the end of which no one could foresee. By-and-by it began to be suspected that the manager must have in his possession a complete and accurate record of every action and speech during the strike, so entirely did his shifting about of the pawns, which he played with such cool and silent relentlessness, coincide with the doings of each piece during the trouble they thought was past and hoped had been forgotten. In some instances it seemed as if Sartwell had deliberately marked the contrast by bringing the degraded and the elevated into purposeful juxtaposition, so that his design in showing that he held the future of each man in his hand could not be misunderstood by even the most stupid of his employees. It was a grim object lesson, apparently intended to convey Sartwell’s determination to stick by the men who, even remotely, had sympathized with him in the late struggle; for not a word was spoken, and when a man protested humbly against debasement, the manager made no reply, and the workman knew he had either to submit or to apply for his wages at the office.
In no instance was the evidence of Sartwell’s silent wrath more manifest than in the cases of Braunt and Scimmins. The two men had been equal in position when the strike began, although Scimmins received rather more money than Braunt. Now Braunt was made superintendent of the upper floor, where most of the employees were women and boys, while Scimmins was given the work which one of the boys who did not return at the end of the strike had done. Scimmins had the double humiliation of being under the none too gentle orders of the big Yorkshireman whom he had flouted during the strike, and also of having to accept little more than boy’s wages. He cursed Sartwell loud and often; but the manager was a man who paid little heed to the curses of others, and Scimmins was not in a position to refuse the small pay he received.