After she had become accustomed to the smell of rancid oil and

dyestuffs and the interminable racket of machinery she did not find

her work at the knitting mill disagreeable. It was like any work, she

imagined, an uninteresting task which had to be done.

The majority of the girls and young men of the village worked there in

various capacities; wages were fair, salaries better, union

regulations prevailed. There was nothing to complain of.

And nothing to expect except possible increase in wages, holidays, and

a disquieting chance of getting caught in the machinery, which

familiarity soon discounted.

As for the social status of the mill workers, the mill was Gayfield;

and Gayfield was a village where the simpler traditions of the

Republic still survived; where there existed no invidious distinction

in vocations; a typical old-time community harbouring the remains of a

Grand Army Post and too many churches of too many denominations; where

the chance metropolitan stranger was systematically "done"; where

distrust of all cities and desire to live in them was equalled only by

a passion for moving pictures and automobiles; where the school

trustees used double negatives and traced their ancestry to Colonial

considerables--who, however, had signed their names in "lower case" or

with a Maltese cross--the world in miniature, with its due proportion

of petty graft, petty squabbles, envy, kindness, jealousy, generosity,

laziness, ambition, stupidity, intelligence, honesty, hypocrisy,

hatred, affection, badness and goodness, as standardised by the code

established according to folk-ways on earth--in brief, a perfectly

human community composed of the usual ingredients, worthy and

unworthy--that was Gayfield, Mohawk County, New York.

Before spring came--before the first robin appeared, and while icy

roads still lay icy under sunlit pools of snow-water--a whole winter

indoors, and a sedentary one, had changed the smoothly tanned and

slightly freckled cheeks of Rue Carew to a thinner and paler oval.

Under her transparent skin a tea-rose pink came and went; under her

grey eyes lay bluish shadows. Also, floating particles of dust, fleecy

and microscopic motes of cotton and wool filling the air in the room

where Ruhannah worked, had begun to irritate her throat and bronchial

tubes; and the girl developed an intermittent cough.

When the first bluebird arrived in Gayfield the cough was no longer

intermittent; and her mother sent her to the village doctor. So Rue

Carew was transferred to the box factory adjoining, in which the mill

made its own paper boxes, where young women sat all day at intelligent

machines and fed them with squares of pasteboard and strips of gilt

paper; and the intelligent and grateful machines responded by turning

out hundreds and hundreds of complete boxes, all neatly gilded,

pasted, and labelled. And after a little while Ruhannah was able to

nourish one of these obliging and responsive machines. And by July her

cough had left her, and two delicate freckles adorned the bridge of

her nose.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024