He had stirred them up—some of them. Some remained just as they had been. Her little family in the canary-cage house were that sort. They lived simply, quietly, snugly in that tiny house. They did not ask for a bigger house. They had no car. They did not crave excitement. Their lives were like small, deep, still running streams.
Once those streams had been disturbed, horribly disturbed. That was when the mill shut down four years before. It was Tom Maver, father of the family, who had told her about it. Tom was a small, quiet sort of man.
“I’ve worked in the mill since I was sixteen,” he said. “Always tending a bank of spinning wheels. Never did anything else. We were happy. Had our home, our garden, our little orchard all snug and cozy.
“Then,” he had sighed, “mills down south where labor is cheap, child labor and all that, cut in on our trade. The mill shut down. I had to find work. I went to a farm. They set me cutting corn, by hand. The corn was taller than I was, and heavier. I lasted three days. My face and hands were cut, and my back nearly broken. I was sick when I came home.” A look of pain overspread his honest face. “I tried ditch-digging and, in winter, putting up ice. That was terrible. I fell in and was nearly drowned. After that I—I just gave up.
“Well,” he sighed, “we didn’t starve, but we didn’t miss it much.
“But now,” he added brightly, “the mill is running and we are happy.”
“Yes,” Florence thought to herself, “they say they are happy, and I believe they are. And that’s what counts most—happiness.” Yes, that was it. They did not need jazz and a saxophone, a grinning Hugo and his roaring tub to make them happy. They had something better, a simple, kindly peace.
“Jazz,” she murmured. “It seems to get into people’s very lives.” She was thinking now of a friend, a beautiful girl not yet twenty. Her life was a round of jazz dances. Her doctor had ordered her to an island in Lake Superior for her health. She had been taking drugs for hay fever. This was affecting her heart. On this island there was no hay fever. She had escaped hay fever, but there was no jazz and her cigarettes ran out. “In another week I should have died—simply died,” she had said to Florence. And Florence knew she had spoken the truth. “How terrible to become a slave to habits that are not necessary to our lives!” she whispered. “And yet, I must not judge others. I only can try to select the best from both the old and the new for myself.”
As she sat there looking down upon the city, thinking of its joys and its sorrows, its successes and its perils, she was like some brooding Greek goddess dreaming of the future.
Suddenly she stood up straight and tall. Flinging her arms wide, she remained thus, motionless as a statue. She was beautiful, was this girl of strong heart and a strong body, beautiful as heroic Greek statuary is beautiful. Standing there, she saw the sun come out from behind a cloud to bathe the hillside with its glory of light. Racing down the hill, this narrow patch of light appeared at last to linger lovingly over the little city.