Presently she raised her eyes and glanced across at the shelf with its row of tin boxes marked "Bread," "Coffee," "Sugar." On the next shelf was Grit's molasses jug. She arose and fumbled behind this, but nothing was there—Grit's Bible was gone. Then she remembered, and striking a match placed her cheek to the floor and found the grimy book beneath the stationary washtubs. "Stone wall," she murmured, "Grit was a stone wall." At the mantelpiece she caught a glimpse of herself in the cracked little mirror, but she was too weary to care what she looked like, too weary to notice that her hair was matted, that grime and smudges made hollows in her cheeks, and that even her nose seemed crooked.
She sank again into the chair beneath the screeching gas-jet. "Grit," she repeated dully, "was a stone wall." And between very honest, tired, and lonely tears she began slowly to spell out the words of the coverless book, having gained within the past few hours some understanding of what it means in the battle of life to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.
There came another afternoon, another evening, another year, and still another; but this narrative covers merely a part of two days—Great Taylor's first and last as a junk-woman. The latter came nearly ten years after the burial of Grit. For almost a decade Nell followed in his grimy footprints and the polyglot people of the lower East Side, looking down from their windows as she passed through the congested streets pushing steadily with head bent, thought of her either as an infinitesimal molecule at the bottom of the mass where the light of idealism seldom penetrates or else as a female Colossus striding from end to end of the Devil's Own city only ankle-deep in the débris from which she wrested an existence. But to Great Taylor it seemed not to matter what people thought. She sang her song through the cavernous streets, the only song she knew: "Rags, old iron, bottles, and ra-ags." She pounded with a huge, determined fist on alley gates, she learned expertly to thread the traffic and to laugh at the teamsters, their oaths, their curses. "They ain't so bad." And, finally, bickering and bargaining with men of all classes, she came to wonder why people called this the Devil's Own city. In all those years of toil she did not once see him in the eyes of men. But there came the day when she said, "I'm done."
On this day Great Taylor lifted the end of a huge kitchen range against two struggling members of the other sex. A pain shot through her breast, but she carried her part of the dead weight, saying nothing, and, at high noon, pushed her jingling, jangling cart through streets sharply outlined with sunlight and shadow to a dilapidated brick warehouse that, long since, had taken the place of Grit's junk-yard.
There, in the interior gloom of the shabby old building, could be seen piles of broken, twisted, and rusty things—twisted iron rods, broken cam-shafts, cog wheels with missing teeth, springs that had lost their elasticity—a miniature mountain of scrap iron each piece of which at some time had been a part of some smoothly working machine. In another pile were discarded household utensils—old pots and pans and burnt-out kettles, old stoves through the linings of which the flames had eaten and the rust had gnawed. There were other hillocks and mountains with shadowy valleys between—a mountain of waste paper, partly baled, partly stuffed into bursting bags of burlap, partly loose and scattered over the grimy floor; a hill of rags, all colours fading into sombre shadows…. And in the midst of these mountains and valleys of junk sat Great Taylor upon her dilapidated throne.
She drooped there over an old coverless book, spelling out the words and trying to forget the pain that was no longer confined to her breast. From shoulder to hip molten slag pulsed slowly through her veins and great drops of sweat moved from her temples and made white-bottomed rivulets among the smudges of her cheeks. "I'm done," she mumbled, closing Grit's book. "I got a right to quit. I got a right to be idle like other people…."
Raising her head she appraised the piles that surrounded her. "All this stuff!" It had to be disposed of. She lifted herself from the creaking chair and, finding a pot of black paint and a board, laboured over this latter for a time. "I could get rid of it in a week," she mused. But she was done—done for good. "I ain't going to lay a hand on the cart again!" She studied the sign she had painted, and spelled out the crooked letters: "M A n WAnTeD." It would take a man a month, maybe more, she reckoned, adding: "Grit could done it in no time." She moved to the arched door of the warehouse and hung the sign outside in the sunlight against an iron shutter and for a moment stood there blinking. Despite the sunlight and warmth she was trembling, the familiar noises were a babel to her ears; the peddlers with their carts piled high with fruits and vegetables and colourful merchandise seemed like strangers; the glossy-haired women with baskets seemed to be passing backward out of her life, and the street was suddenly an alien land. "What's the matter with me?" she asked herself.
Returning to the interior gloom of the warehouse, she looked down upon the old junk-cart. The string of bells was the only part of it that had not been renewed twice, thrice, a number of times since Grit had left it standing on the vacant lot. "Guess I'll save the bells," she decided.
The rest she would destroy. Nobody else was going to use it—nobody. She cast about for an adequate instrument of destruction, an axe or sledge, and remembering a piece of furnace grate upon the farther pile of junk, made her way slowly into the deepening shadows.
There, at the foot of the rusty mountain of scrap iron, Great Taylor stood irresolute, straining her eyes to pierce the gloom. She had not seen any one enter; and yet, standing beyond the pile with white hands stabbing the bottom of his pockets, was a man. She could not remember having seen him before, and yet he was vaguely familiar. One eye looked at her steadily from beneath a drooping lid, the other blinked like the shutter of a camera and seemed to take intimate photographs of all parts of her grimy person. His sleek hair was curled over his temples with ends pointing up, and she caught, or imagined, the fragrance of pomade.