“What word can I carry to her from you? I’m going to go and see her. If I could take a word from you, I know she would come back to the table. Shall I tell her you feel to blame?”
The answer was a long time coming; at last the man nodded an assent, the sweat pouring from his purple face. She had set him thinking, her victory was sure.
Lily almost ran out into the garden and to the strawberry patch, where she found Lucretia in her familiar, colorless, shapeless dress, picking berries in the hot sun, the mosquitoes biting her neck and hands.
“Poor, pathetic, dumb sufferer,” the girl thought as she ran up to her.
She dropped her dish as she heard Lily coming, and gazed up into the tender, pitying face. Not a word was spoken, but something she saw there made her eyes fill with tears, and her throat swell. It was pure sympathy. She put her arms around the girl’s neck and sobbed for the first time since Friday night. Then they sat down on the grass under the hedge and she told her story, interspersed with Lily’s horrified comments.
When it was all told the girl still sat listening. She heard Radbourn’s calm, slow voice again. It helped her not to hate Burns; it helped her to pity and understand him.
“You must remember that such toil brutalizes a man; it makes him callous, selfish, unfeeling necessarily. A fine nature must either adapt itself to its hard surroundings or die. Men who toil terribly in filthy garments day after day and year after year cannot easily keep gentle; the frost and grime, the heat and cold will sooner or later enter into their souls. The case is not all in favor of the suffering wives, and against the brutal husbands. If the farmer’s wife is dulled and crazed by her routine, the farmer himself is degraded and brutalized. They are both products of a social system, victims of a land system, which produces tenement houses in the city, and pushes the farmer into a semi-solitude—victims of land laws that are relics of feudalism, made in the interest of the man who holds a special privilege in the earth. Free America has set up on its soil the systems of land-owning which produces the lord and the tenant; that glorifies speculation in the earth, and gives the priceless riches of the hills and forests into a few hands. But this will not continue—it can’t continue. The awakening understanding of America cries out against it.”
As well as she could Lily explained all this to the woman who lay with her face buried in the girl’s lap. Lily’s arms were about her thin shoulders in an agony of pity.
“It’s hard, Lucretia, I know, more than you can bear, but you mustn’t forget what Sim endures, too. He goes out in the storms and in the heat and dust. His boots are hard, and see how his hands are all bruised and broken by his work! He was tired and hungry when he said that—he didn’t really mean it.”
The wife remained silent.