Frederic Kenyon Brown

“ If I took hold of a broom, and tried to sweep, I had to drag the broom wearily after the first few moments. I went home after the day’s work as tired as if I had been holding up the world all day. And though I went to bed soon after supper, and slept soundly till the morning, I awoke as tired as if I had been toiling at a slave’s task every minute of the night.
I tried, in no complaining spirit, to describe my feelings to my aunt. “Why, they’re nothing but growing pains, Al,” she said. “You ought to feel proud that you’re going to be a tall man. It’ll pass. ”

“ Curley was Mallet’s antithesis in everything but moral ignorance. He was a towering brute, with a child’s, yes, less than a child’s, brain. He ran to muscle. He could outlift the strongest man in the mill without increasing his heartbeat. His chief diversions were lifting weights, boasting of his deeds with weights in contests of the past, and the recital of filthy yarns in which he had been the chief actor.
That afternoon of my first day in the mill, Mallet and Curley shut themselves in the elevator room with Zippy and me. ”

“ So we went back to the drug-store corner, [203] with its drinking trough, where we could have been found huddled, miserable, like animals who have so much liberty and do not know how intelligently to use it. For we knew that after the night, came the morning, and with the morning another round in the mill, a fight with a machine, a ten hours’ dwelling in heated, spiceless, unexciting monotony, and a thought like that made us want to linger as long as we dared on that drug-store corner. ”

“ I have seen her take broths and meats to neighbors, when uncle and I have had too much buttered bread and preserves. I have seen her take her apron with her to a neighbor’s, where she washed the dishes, while her own had to accumulate, to be later disposed of with my assistance. There was a shiftless man in the town, the town-crier, who would never take charity outright. Him did aunt persuade to come and paint rural scenes, highly colored with glaring tints, as if nature had turned color-blind. There were cows in every scene, and aunt noticed that all the cows were up to their knees in water. ”

“ The mill was bound to get me, in the long run. It was only playing with me in letting me out in the sun, the fresh air, and the fields for a while. The mill owned me. I would have to go back!
We tried to live through the winter, without getting word from my uncle, on the money I earned. Occasionally aunt would take some liquor, but she seemed to realize at last that she must not indulge overmuch. One day, growing desperate, I said to her, “If I catch you drinking on my money, now, I’ll leave home, you see! I’ll earn money to buy food, but I won’t earn it for no saloon-keeper, mark my words!” ”

“ The scene I had looked upon was disheartening, somewhat like a sudden blow in the face, for those box-like, wooden duck-houses were not to be compared with the ivy-covered, romantic rows of Hadfield with their flower-gardens, arches, and slate roofs! But I was in America, anyway!
We had the breakfast-table to ourselves, uncle, aunt, and myself, for the boarders had gone to work long ago, and this was our holiday, our first American day! What are those round golden things with holes in? Doughnuts? They don’t grow on trees, do they? Baked? Isn’t it funny they call them “nuts?” ”

“ I spoke to my uncle about it one noon-hour.
“Why can’t I work in the mill, too?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t you rather get some learning, Al?” he asked. “You know men can’t do much in the world without learning. It’s brains, not hands, that makes the world really go ahead. I wish you could get a lot of schooling and perhaps go to college. It’s what I always wanted and never got, and see where I am to-day. I’m a failure, Al, that’s what I am!”
“But aunt says that I’ve got to go in the mill as soon as I can, uncle.”
His face grew sad at that, and he said, “Yes, through our drinking and getting in debt! ”

“ When my uncle saw me reading the novels, he interposed with, “That’s cheap stuff, Al, and will never make you any better. You want to read refining things, the great books. There’s many an exciting one that is exciting without [146] being cheap. I wish you would let me plan for you.” I told him that I would—sometime, but I kept on reading Cheap John’s bargain-counter literature.
The ten and a half hours in the mill, with its humdrum rattle, its high-pitched hum, the regularity of its fixtures, the monotonousness of its routine, bullied my nerves into a tamed, cowed state. ”

“ But back of it all were good habits, fair speech, heroic chivalry, and Christian manliness, and the reading of it did me good, aroused my romantic interest in college, made me eager to live as clean a life as Frank amidst such profligacy as I had to meet. That reading spoiled me ever after for the mill, even if there had been nothing else to spoil me. I, too, a poor mill lad, with little chance for getting money, with so sober a background as was against my life, wanted to make my mark in the world as the great figures in history had done. ”

“ I stretched myself to my full height many times a day. I exercised with weights and broom handles, even though I found it very painful. I gulped in the fresh air when out of the mill, and walked with my chest thrust out, a stiff, self-conscious, growing lad, fighting ever against the impending tragedy of a deformed body. ”

“ Aunt Millie was drunk at home, too much intoxicated to make a warm dinner. We had to work through the afternoon, knowing that when we arrived home at night we should find her either at a saloon, in a back room at a neighbor’s, or at home, helpless, incoherent.
“Oh, Al,” sighed my uncle, “I don’t see what [182] we’re coming to. What’s the use of you and me slaving here and she taking on so? Do you wonder, lad, that it’s hard for me to keep a pledge? It just drives me mad. Here we have to go on through the day, working ourselves to death, only to have the money go in that way! ”

“ I wanted to do a man’s work now, in a man’s way, for a man’s wage. I learned with alarm, too, that I was getting past the age when young men enter college, and there I was, without even a common school education! Once more the gloom of the mill settled down on me. The old despair gripped me.
I did find companionship in my ambitions, now that I had left the gang. Pat Carroll, an Irishman, wanted to go to college also. He was far past me in the amount of schooling he had enjoyed, for by patient application to night-school in the winter, he had entered upon High School studies. ”

“ Three nights a week I walked back and forth to the Textile School, tired, but ambitious to make the most of my great opportunity. Week by week I went through various lessons until I began to design wall-papers with water-color and to make book-cover designs on which I prided myself, and on which my teacher complimented me.
Then my eyes began to weaken under the glare of the lights, and the long strain they had been under during the day, through staring at cotton threads and the fatigue of long hours [251] under the mill lights. ”

“ I spent in the elevator room, where the doffers also came for a rest.
I had occasion to get very well acquainted with two of the doffers that first day. Their names were “Mallet” and “Curley,” two French Canadians. Mallet was a lithe, sallow-faced, black-haired depreciator of morals, who fed on doughnuts, and spent most of his wages in helping out his good looks with the aid of the tailor, the boot-maker, and the barber. He came to the mill dressed in the extreme of fashion, and always with his upper lip curled, as if he despised every person he passed—save the good-looking girls. ”

“ Then one day there came a flash which clearly lighted up everything. “Why are you going through this wild, unequal labor in this dull room day by day! Why? Do you absolutely have to do it? Are others keeping at it, as you? Why, why, why?” each one bigger than its fellow, made me meet every fact squarely. “To what end all this?”
My labor was helping to buy beer at home! I was giving up all my wage to my aunt, and getting back a little spending money. I had fifteen cents in the bank at the time. ”

“ When I went home at the end of the day, aunt asked me what sort of a day I’d had. “Oh,” I said, “when I know the ropes it will be pretty fair.” I was thinking of the three dollars I should get the second week. I said nothing about the tobacco incident. When I sat down to supper, I could not eat. My aunt remarked, “Don’t let it take your appetite away, Al, lad. It takes strength to work in the mill.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said, and I was not; for, before my imagination, there rose up the persecuting figures of Mallet and Curley, and I could still taste the stinging flavor of the plug. ”

“ My aunt was only too eager to get away from a place where it was impossible to hide one’s actions.
A card came from my uncle announcing that he had returned to New Bedford already, and asking us to come and join him.
“Yes,” smiled my aunt, “I’ll bet he’s thinking of his stomach. He finds, when he’s away, that it isn’t every lodging-house keeper that can cook potato pies and things as tasty as his own wife. That’s what he’s homesick for, I’ll bet. Write him that we’ll be on hand. He means all right, but I’ll guarantee he’s half starved.” ”

“ There are no mistaken calculations, no chances with a machine except a break now and then of no great consequence. A machine never tires, is never hungry, has no heart to make it suffer. It never sleeps, and has no ears to listen to that appeal for “mercy,” which is sent to it. A machine is like Fate. It is Fate, itself. On, on, on, on it [178] clicks, relentlessly, insistently, to the end, in the set time, in the set way! It neither goes one grain too fast or too slow. Once started, it must go on, and on, and on, to the end of the task. Such was the machine against which I wrestled—in vain. ”

“ I had watched the mill-boys, some of them not much older than myself—and I was only eleven—and I wanted to swagger up and down the alleys like them. They were lightly clad in undershirt and overalls, so that in their bared feet they could run without slipping on the hot floor. They were working for wages, too, and took home a pay envelope every Saturday. Just think of going home every Saturday, and throwing an envelope on the table with three dollars in it, and saying, nonchalantly, “Aunt, there’s my wages. Just fork over my thirty cents spending money. ”

“ This week’s bill for groceries is five dollars and sixty-three cents, the baker has owing him about seventy-five, the meat man let me have them two ham bones and that shank end, and I owe him for that; there’s some white shirts and collars at the Chinaman’s, but I want to say right here that your uncle will have to pay for those out of his own spending money. That’s too much of a luxury, that is; we can’t go on with such gentlemanly notions in this house and ever get ahead. Oh, these debts, when will they be paid! That is all I think of except the beer man. ”

“ In place of making meals, when she wanted to visit with the neighbors, my aunt would give me five cents to spend on anything I liked.
The springtime was full on, and I found much pleasure in mixing with the tenement boys and girls, after school hours. While the schools were in session, however, I had a lonely time of it. But it was on those steps that I began to form a conception of what it means to be an American. It meant to me, then, the ability to speak slang, to be impertinent to adults, calling one’s father, “Old Man,” one’s mother, “My Old Woman,” and one’s friend, “that guy.” ”

“ You must give me a frank answer, even though it is very hard.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, wondering what it was to be.
“Al,” he said, sternly, like a judge, “is your aunt a regular drinker—of intoxicants?”
So that was the question! I gasped, choked, and with my eyes on the floor, confessed, “She is, sir.”
“Well,” said the superintendent, “I am very sorry for you, my boy! I am sorry that you have to suffer because of other people. We cannot allow women who drink to live in our houses. We will not allow it if we know about it.”
“But my aunt won’t drink here,” I said. ”

“ When Monday morning came, uncle was unfit to go to work. He told Aunt Millie so, and she immediately scolded him and worked herself in so violent a rage that the matter ended by uncle picking up some of his clothes and saying, “This is the last you’ll see of me, Dame! I’m going to some other place where I’ll be away from it. Al, there, can keep you on his four dollars a week—if he wants! I’m done!”
[188] “And how about the debts, you—coward!” cried aunt. “I’ll send the police after you, mind!”
“Let debts go to the dogs,” said my uncle. “You’ll always manage to have the beer-wagon call!” ”

“ All the dreams that I had indulged relative to classic halls, ivy-covered walls, the college fence, a dormitory, football field—all those dreams centered around that lumpish head, for the Scrubber had been to college! He represented to me the unattainable, the Mount Olympus top of ambitious effort. Suds, pail, soggy mop, grease pail, and lazy fat were transformed before me, for HE HAD BEEN TO COLLEGE!
[210] What college had he graduated from? I do not know to this day. How had he stood in college? Another shrug of the shoulders must suffice. WHY was HE in THE MILL? ”

“ The only time when he did call attention to himself was when he took “Bob,” our one-eyed horse, and peddled fish, humorously shouting through the streets, “Mussels and cockles alive! Buy ’em alive! Kill ’em as you want ’em!” At all other times, the “Blue Sign” and the “Linnet’s Nest,” our public-houses, could lure him away from his business very readily. Uncle Stanwood had a conspicuous artistic nature and training, and it was in these public-houses where he could display his talents to the best advantage. He could play a flute and also “vamp” on a piano. ”

“ The reason may be that the ring-spinners, at least in New England, are generally vivacious French-Canadian girls. There were some in the mill where I began work, who possessed an inordinate thirst for ornament and dress. The ring-spinners had clean surroundings and much easier work than their sisters in the weave-shed. Their labor was more genteel than that of their sisters in the carding-room.
Marie Poisson, who ran frames which I cleaned and oiled, was the leader of fashion in the room, and well she was fitted for it. ”

“ And oh, what prizes of the dump! Cracked plates, cups and saucers, tinware, bric-à-brac, footwear, clothing, nursing-bottles and nipples, bottles with the dregs of flavoring extracts, cod-liver oil, perfumes, emulsions, tonics, poisons, antiseptics, cordials, decayed fruit, and faded flowers! These were seized in triumph, taken home in glee, and no doubt used in faith. There is little philosophy in poverty, and questions of sanitation and prudence come in the stage beyond it. ”