“You want me to be a knobstick, is that it? You’re telling me to break the strike?”
“I’m telling you to pull your weight. When a girl gets to fifteen, she ought know how to walk for herself and not tug on other people’s sleeves.”
“The neighbors will make it hard for us. They’ll shut us out.”
“Let the neighbors act for themselves. They can throw stones at us, for all I’ll cry, as long as we can feed ourselves.”
“Who wants to work in the mill anyhows. It’s the mill is keeping us down. It’s the mill that’s killing us.”
“Fine sentiments, sister lady, but I hate to tell you, it’s the clemming that’s killing you right now, and unless you find yourself a swell and marry up quick, it’s the mill or a pauper’s grave for you.”
And true enough, it’s the hunger that eventual brings me round. Weeks, the mills stay closed, the Ermen & Engels the same as the rest, and without Mary’s wage, we’re brought to winking distance of the workhouse ourselves. I feel I’d like to cry, only I don’t have the forces, and I know then I’m in the last ditch and sinking, for I’d like to and I can’t. And in that moment I know that when the gates of the Ermen & Engels are thrown back, I’ll be there in the horde, elbowing and stepping on heads to get to the front.
An animal, that’s what chance makes of me.
On my first day, the girls are already talking about the owner’s son. “Soon he’ll be coming,” they says to each other, for there isn’t much else to amuse them in the yard. “Soon he’ll be coming from Germany to learn the strings, and one day he’ll be the boss man himself.” And they’re excited about this idea. They can’t wait to slap an eye on him, for they’ve heard he’s quite the looker.
They haven’t a good head between them. Most of them are yet young like myself, some of them well under the age, and every morning that he doesn’t appear makes the next morning a thing for them to look forward to. Me, I dread the next morning as a plague, for it only promises more of the same: a job that lays you low and saps you. And I can’t picture how the owner’s son, however dapper, could change it.
I’m unhappy, but more than that, I’m raging. In the place bare a month and I’m already having urges. To scream and shout. To climb on top of the yard wall, and from there to get onto the roof so there’d be no one in Manchester who didn’t hear me. But in actual fact, I do what I’m told. I stay quiet, just as Mary has warned me, and don’t let tell of my affairs. I keep my opinions and my illnesses hidden. I put a rag over my mouth to keep from coughing. And I work hard, harder than I’ve ever worked at anything before, by putting my cholers into it.
“The strikes came at a good time,” we’re told at assembly one morning. “The strikes came at a good time for you.” The mill has bought new machines, the latest crop of mules that need but a fraction of the hands to work. They were planning to let go of the people they no longer needed, given the advances. But—luck and behold—the job was done for them, the troublemakers weeded out natural. Leaving us, the new, leaner, better Ermen & Engels family to march with the banner.
Mary is thankful to be given one of the new mules. I think better of reminding her of the people her mule is replacing, people she knew and declared to care for; or of the meanness of her new wage, lower than what they were giving her before. I think better of it because she knows these things well and is choosing not to give them their proper weight, for if she did, they’d crush her.
I’m to follow her on the floor, pick up the new ways, and then take over a mule of my own. “Be fast,” she says to me. “Be fast and you’ll be seen, and you’ll move up,” for it’s a fine spinner she wants us to be, a spinner of the Diamond Thread, which she believes to be a situation that can’t be robbed by the machines or by the children. “If we don’t learn the fine spinning,” she says, “we’ll go the same way as the men. Out on our backs and not a situation in Manchester to be had.”
Though it makes me bitter to do it, I give in and learn, and what I do well I try to do better and faster, for that’s the way to beat the weariness and to sleep at night. I come early and leave late. I join in the talk in the yard. I spend my Sundays with the girls in the halls and the fairs. And when the time comes, in spite of myself, I have to own that he’s handsome.
He holds himself slim and erect, and has a good forehead, and—still so young—all the color is yet in his hair. At assembly he talks quick and short, ashamed, it seems, about the foreign in his patter. He’s going to make a tour, he says, and he promises to get to know each and every one of us, which makes everybody giddy. Except Mary. It makes her regular cross. “When he comes,” she says, “keep at it and put on you don’t even see him. The last thing he wants is a mill full of girls losing the run of themselves.”
Of course, it’s herself, then, who goes and loses herself entire.
His laughter comes into the room before he does, and it’s catching. “Lethal as the consumption,” Mary will say later.
“My lucky day!” he belts from the doorway, stretching out his arms to get the full lung into it. He looks around. Even from a distance I can see his eyes take in the world and see to the bottom of things, and though he keeps his face, I know he’s disappointed by us. Fine lookers between us, there aren’t many. There’s only Adele in the carding room, but she’s got very thin and looks to be down with something serious. And Maggie two rows up, I suppose, if that’s your dish of tea.
As he moves around, he waves his hand in front of his face to keep off the dust, and I’d like to tell him it’s a useless exercise, all that waving, for it only wafts the flyings in, but of course I keep my trap shut. He’s nowhere near me yet anyhows, and I don’t know if he’ll even get close, for time’s ticking on and work hasn’t been takenup proper, and he’s stopping at every girl and asking them questions—about themselves and where they’re from and their work and how they’re finding it—and he doesn’t seem to be putting on, he appears sincere enough and waits for their answers, though the bulk of them can only stretch to a blush and a curtsy.
Soon Mr. Ermen loses patience and hurries him on—something about having to finish the tour before Christmas—and then all he can spare is a flash of his whites as he passes. He doesn’t even stretch that far with me, but strolls by without so much as a glance. I see his cheek out of the side of my eye: skin like the back of a babby. He goes past Lydia, too, without a look, I’m glad to see. And Mary. And soon all there’s left of him is his little arse, swaggering away out of our lives.
Only what happens then is, he nigh on catches his side against a wheel. Mary rushes over to steady him, for she’s the closest. She takes tight of his arm and pulls him away from the danger, and while he’s still reeling in his boots, heedless to what’s happening to him, she says to his face a curse in the Irish, something our mother used to say when we were being hazards to ourselves.
The room catches its breath. Speaking out of turn costs you sixpence of your wage, and that’s on an ordinary day. Mr. Ermen makes for Mary and looks ready to handle her, but Frederick, now recovered, waves him away and tells him not to be so jumpy. Can’t he see this woman has saved him from an injury? Then, God bless him, he asks her to repeat what she said, for he loves a joke.
“Let us hear it,” he says.
She wipes her brow and looks about at all the faces, and in that moment I wish her looks were doing her better justice, for she’s recent taken on a touch of jaundice and isn’t as flush as God wants her.
“Come on, do share,” he says, and folds his arms across like someone biding to be impressed.
Mary coughs. “It’s only something Mammy used to say when we were little.”
There’s a shuffle of feet as we prepare for the worst.
“Go