I took a seat, glancing at the interior which my little friend called “home.” The outer room was a kitchen—though it might, except for the stove, have been mistaken for a hen coop. The chickens pecked their way about the dirty floor, venturing as far, even, as the table upon which stood the meagre remains of a noonday meal. The second and the inner room had each a bed;—an unmade bed, I was going to say, but how, indeed, could a bed be made without either sheets or pillows? Two grimy counterpanes were flung in disorder across the mattresses; a few chairs, a bureau and the sewing machine completed the house furnishings.
As the listless woman talked with me in a kindly manner about work, the baby, who had crawled in from the porch, and arrived as far as his mother’s skirts, now tugged at these, to be taken up. His tiny hands had served as propellers across the filthy floor. The piece of lemon candy had added to the general stickiness of the dirt, with which both hands and face were smeared. As a soldier shoulders a gun—the burden to which he is most accustomed—this mother swung her baby into her arms, and, while she talked on, giving items about the cost of living, and factory wages, she loosened her cotton jacket—evidently the only garment she had on—and folding the baby to her breast, she lulled its whimperings.
“Yes,” she said, “we pay $1.50 a week for three rooms. That’s a little over six a month. I call it high. We don’t get no runnin’ water. Every drop we use’s got to be drawed in the yard; an’ we don’t get no light, either, nuthin’ but lamps.”
The baby, comfortable and contented, let his hand stray over the mother’s throat, with little spasmodic caresses which left in their trail smears of dirt, flecked with tiny scarlet streaks where the sharp nails had caught in the pale, withered flesh.
“I reckon you-all might be cold,” she said, directing the older child to put more wood on the open grate fire, thinking apparently nothing of herself. “We don’t like it here first-rate. Maybe we’ll move on. I sure do crave traveling. Well, honey,” this was addressed to the baby, who had sat up with a jerk and began to whine. The candy picked up from the floor where it had fallen and restored to its owner’s mouth, did not seem the desired thing. The mother looked at me with a knowing smile.
“I reckon I can guess what ails him. He wants his babies.” And at this, always without getting out of her chair before the machine, she reached behind her and drew from a shelf over her head two white rats. These were apparently what the baby wanted. In the game that ensued between him and his pets, his chief delight seemed to be in seeing the rats disappear through the open throated gown of his mother, and making the tour of her bodice, wriggling, burrowing, crawling, to emerge finally from her collar at the nape of her neck. Sometimes they diversified their gyrations, proceeding upward into her hair and down again by way of her ears onto easier climbing ground. Impassable, unmoved, she talked on in her gentle voice, giving no sign whatever that she noticed the animals. It was only when the baby plunged his short nails into the white rat’s side that she ejaculated mercifully:
“Quit that! You-all ’ll hurt them babies.”
I was somewhat dazed as I proceeded presently with my little girl guide from this interior to the mill. The squalor and disorder of what I had seen, the ignorance and the insensibility, contrasted strangely with the courtesy that had been shown me, the friendly concern about any intention I might have to get work, the desire to help me on my way, the strange lethargic tenderness which took the form of pity for even rats.
“Like animals,” my friend had told me. That we must wait to see.