He thrust Will from him, kicked him savagely on the shins, then reached for him and slammed him face downward in the dirt.Nor did he release him till the face had been rubbed into the dirt several times.Then the mother arrived, an anaemic whirlwind of solicitude and maternal wrath.
"Why can't he leave me alone?" was Johnny's reply to her upbraiding.
"Can't he see I'm tired?"
"I'm as big as you," Will raged in her arms, his face a mass of tears, dirt, and blood."I'm as big as you now, an' I'm goin' to git bigger.
Then I'll lick you--see if I don't."
"You ought to be to work, seein' how big you are," Johnny snarled."That's what's the matter with you.You ought to be to work.An' it's up to your ma to put you to work.""But he's too young," she protested."He's only a little boy.""I was younger'n him when I started to work."Johnny's mouth was open, further to express the sense of unfairness that he felt, but the mouth closed with a snap.He turned gloomily on his heel and stalked into the house and to bed.The door of his room was open to let in warmth from the kitchen.As he undressed in the semi-darkness he could hear his mother talking with a neighbour woman who had dropped in.His mother was crying, and her speech was punctuated with spiritless sniffles.
"I can't make out what's gittin' into Johnny," he could hear her say."He didn't used to be this way.He was a patient little angel.
"An' he is a good boy," she hastened to defend."He's worked faithful, an'
he did go to work too young.But it wasn't my fault.I do the best I can, I'm sure."Prolonged sniffling from the kitchen, and Johnny murmured to himself as his eyelids closed down, "You betcher life I've worked faithful."The next morning he was torn bodily by his mother from the grip of sleep.
Then came the meagre breakfast, the tramp through the dark, and the pale glimpse of day across the housetops as he turned his back on it and went in through the factory gate.It was another day, of all the days, and all the days were alike.
And yet there had been variety in his life--at the times he changed from one job to another, or was taken sick.When he was six, he was little mother and father to Will and the other children still younger.At seven he went into the mills--winding bobbins.When he was eight, he got work in another mill.His new job was marvellously easy.All he had to do was to sit down with a little stick in his hand and guide a stream of cloth that flowed past him.This stream of cloth came out of the maw of a machine, passed over a hot roller, and went on its way elsewhere.But he sat always in one place, beyond the reach of daylight, a gas-jet flaring over him, himself part of the mechanism.
He was very happy at that job, in spite of the moist heat, for he was still young and in possession of dreams and illusions.And wonderful dreams he dreamed as he watched the steaming cloth streaming endlessly by.But there was no exercise about the work, no call upon his mind, and he dreamed less and less, while his mind grew torpid and drowsy.Nevertheless, he earned two dollars a week, and two dollars represented the difference between acute starvation and chronic underfeeding.
But when he was nine, he lost his job.Measles was the cause of it.After he recovered, he got work in a glass factory.The pay was better, and the work demanded skill.It was piecework, and the more skilful he was, the bigger wages he earned.Here was incentive.And under this incentive he developed into a remarkable worker.
It was simple work, the tying of glass stoppers into small bottles.At his waist he carried a bundle of twine.He held the bottles between his knees so that he might work with both hands.Thus, in a sitting position and bending over his own knees, his narrow shoulders grew humped and his chest was contracted for ten hours each day.This was not good for the lungs, but he tied three hundred dozen bottles a day.
The superintendent was very proud of him, and brought visitors to look at him.In ten hours three hundred dozen bottles passed through his hands.
This meant that he had attained machine-like perfection.All waste movements were eliminated.Every motion of his thin arms, every movement of a muscle in the thin fingers, was swift and accurate.He worked at high tension, and the result was that he grew nervous.At night his muscles twitched in his sleep, and in the daytime he could not relax and rest.He remained keyed up and his muscles continued to twitch.Also he grew sallow and his lint-cough grew worse.Then pneumonia laid hold of the feeble lungs within the contracted chest, and he lost his job in the glass-works.
Now he had returned to the jute mills where he had first begun with winding bobbins.But promotion was waiting for him.He was a good worker.He would next go on the starcher, and later he would go into the loom room.
There was nothing after that except increased efficiency.
The machinery ran faster than when he had first gone to work, and his mind ran slower.He no longer dreamed at all, though his earlier years had been full of dreaming.Once he had been in love.It was when he first began guiding the cloth over the hot roller, and it was with the daughter of the superintendent.She was much older than he, a young woman, and he had seen her at a distance only a paltry half-dozen times.But that made no difference.On the surface of the cloth stream that poured past him, he pictured radiant futures wherein he performed prodigies of toil, invented miraculous machines, won to the mastership of the mills, and in the end took her in his arms and kissed her soberly on the brow.
But that was all in the long ago, before he had grown too old and tired to love.Also, she had married and gone away, and his mind had gone to sleep.
Yet it had been a wonderful experience, and he used often to look back upon it as other men and women look back upon the time they believed in fairies.
He had never believed in fairies nor Santa Claus; but he had believed implicitly in the smiling future his imagination had wrought into the steaming cloth stream.
