Part 19

That moment two of the girls, dropping their rags, plied each a whetstone up and down the sword-blade. My unaccustomed blood curdled at the sharp shriek of the tormented steel.

Their own executioners; themselves whetting the very swords that slay them, meditated I.

‘What makes those girls so sheet-white, my lad?’

‘Why’--with a roguish twinkle, pure ignorant drollery, not-knowing heartlessness--‘I suppose the handling of such white bits of sheets all the time makes them so sheety.’

‘Let us leave the rag-room now, my lad.’

More tragical and more inscrutably mysterious than any mystic sight, human or machine, throughout the factory, was the strange innocence of cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy.

‘And now,’ said he, cheerily, ‘I suppose you want to see our great machine, which cost us twelve thousand dollars only last autumn. That’s the machine that makes the paper, too. This way, sir.’

Following him, I crossed a large, bespattered place, with two great round vats in it, full of a white, wet, woolly-looking stuff, not unlike the albuminous part of an egg, soft-boiled.

‘There,’ said Cupid, tapping the vats carelessly, ‘these are the first beginnings of the paper; this white pulp you see. Look how it swims bubbling round and round, moved by the paddle here. From hence it pours from both vats into that one common channel yonder; and so goes, mixed up and leisurely, to the great machine. And now for that.’

He led me into a room, stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal heat, as if here, true enough, were being finally developed the germinous particles lately seen.

Before me, rolled out like some long Eastern manuscript, lay stretched one continuous length of iron framework--multitudinous and mystical, with all sorts of rollers, wheels, and cylinders, in slowly-measured and unceasing motion.

‘Here first comes the pulp now,’ said Cupid, pointing to the nighest end of the machine. ‘See; first it pours out and spreads itself upon this wide, sloping board; and then--look--slides, thin and quivering, beneath the first roller there. Follow on now, and see it as it slides from under that to the next cylinder. There; see how it has become just a very little less pulpy now. One step more, and it grows still more to some slight consistence. Still another cylinder, and it is so knitted--though as yet mere dragon-fly wing--that it forms an air-bridge here, like a suspended cobweb, between two more separated rollers; and flowing over the last one, and under again, and doubling about there out of sight for a minute among all those mixed cylinders you indistinctly see, it reappears here, looking now at last a little less like pulp and more like paper, but still quite delicate and defective yet awhile. But--a little further onward, sir, if you please--here now, at this further point, it puts on something of a real look, as if it might turn out to be something you might possibly handle in the end. But it’s not yet done, sir. Good way to travel yet, and plenty more of cylinders must roll it.’

‘Bless my soul!’ said I, amazed at the elongation, interminable convolutions, and deliberate slowness of the machine; ‘it must take a long time for the pulp to pass from end to end, and come out paper.’

‘Oh! not so long,’ smiled the precocious lad, with a superior and patronising air; ‘only nine minutes. But look; you may try it for yourself. Have you a bit of paper? Ah! here’s a bit on the floor. Now mark that with any word you please, and let me dab it on here, and we’ll see how long before it comes out at the other end.’

‘Well, let me see,’ said I, taking out my pencil; ‘come, I’ll mark it with your name.’

Bidding me take out my watch, Cupid adroitly dropped the inscribed slip on an exposed part of the incipient mass.

Instantly my eye marked the second-hand on my dial-plate.

Slowly I followed the slip, inch by inch; sometimes pausing for full half a minute as it disappeared beneath inscrutable groups of the lower cylinders, but only gradually to emerge again; and so, on, and on, and on--inch by inch; now in open sight, sliding along like a freckle on the quivering sheet; and then again wholly vanished; and so, on, and on, and on--inch by inch; all the time the main sheet growing more and more to final firmness--when, suddenly, I saw a sort of paper-fall, not wholly unlike a water-fall; a scissory sound smote my ear, as of some cord being snapped; and down dropped an unfolded sheet of perfect foolscap, with my ‘Cupid’ half faded out of it, and still moist and warm.

My travels were at an end, for here was the end of the machine.

‘Well, how long was it?’ said Cupid.

‘Nine minutes to a second,’ replied I, watch in hand.

‘I told you so.’

For a moment a curious emotion filled me, not wholly unlike that which one might experience at the fulfilment of some mysterious prophecy. But how absurd, thought I again; the thing is a mere machine, the essence of which is unvarying punctuality and precision.

Previously absorbed by the wheels and cylinders, my attention was now directed to a sad-looking woman standing by.

‘That is rather an elderly person so silently tending the machine-end here. She would not seem wholly used to it either.’

‘Oh,’ knowingly whispered Cupid, through the din, ‘she only came last week. She was a nurse formerly. But the business is poor in these parts, and she’s left it. But look at the paper she is piling there.’

‘Ay, foolscap,’ handling the piles of moist, warm sheets, which continually were being delivered into the woman’s waiting hands. ‘Don’t you turn out anything but foolscap at this machine?’

‘Oh, sometimes, but not often, we turn out finer work--cream-laid and royal sheets, we call them. But foolscap being in chief demand, we turn out foolscap most.’

It was very curious. Looking at that blank paper continually dropping, dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of writings would be writ on those now vacant things--sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on, without end. Then, recurring back to them as they here lay all blank, I could not but bethink me of that celebrated comparison of John Locke, who, in demonstration of his theory that man had no innate ideas, compared the human mind at birth to a sheet of blank paper; something destined to be scribbled on, but what sort of characters no soul might tell.

Pacing slowly to and fro along the involved machine, still humming with its play, I was struck as well by the inevitability as the evolvement-power in all its motions.

‘Does that thin cobweb there,’ said I, pointing to the sheet in its more imperfect stage, ‘does that never tear or break? It is marvellous fragile, and yet this machine it passes through is so mighty.’

‘It never is known to tear a hair’s point.’

‘Does it never stop--get clogged?’

‘No. It _must_ go. The machinery makes it go just _so_; just that very way, and at that very pace you there plainly _see_ it go. The pulp can’t help going.’

Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood spellbound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes--there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica.

‘Halloa! the heat of the room is too much for you,’ cried Cupid, staring at me.

‘No--I am rather chill, if anything.’

‘Come out, sir--out--out,’ and, with the protecting air of a careful father, the precocious lad hurried me outside.

In a few moments, feeling revived a little, I went into the folding-room--the first room I had entered, and where the desk for transacting business stood, surrounded by the blank counters and blank girls engaged at them.

‘Cupid here has led me a strange tour,’ said I to the dark-complexioned man before mentioned, whom I had ere this discovered not only to be an old bachelor, but also the principal proprietor. ‘Yours is a most wonderful factory. Your great machine is a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.’

‘Yes, all our visitors think it so. But we don’t have many. We are in a very out-of-the-way corner here. Few inhabitants, too. Most of our girls come from far-off villages.’

‘The girls,’ echoed I, glancing round at their silent forms. ‘Why is it, sir, that in most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are indiscriminately called girls, never women?’

‘Oh! as to that--why, I suppose, the fact of their being generally unmarried--that’s the reason, I should think. But it never struck me before. For our factory here, we will not have married women; they are apt to be off-and-on too much. We want none but steady workers: twelve hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and sixty-five days, excepting Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Fast-days. That’s our rule. And so, having no married women, what females we have are rightly enough called girls.’

‘Then these are all maids,’ said I, while some pained homage to their pale virginity made me involuntarily bow.

‘All maids.’

Again the strange emotion filled me.

‘Your cheeks look whitish yet, sir,’ said the man, gazing at me narrowly. ‘You must be careful going home. Do they pain you at all now? It’s a bad sign, if they do.’

‘No doubt, sir,’ answered I, ‘when once I have got out of the Devil’s Dungeon, I shall feel them mending.’

‘Ah, yes; the winter air in valleys, or gorges, or any sunken place, is far colder and more bitter than elsewhere. You would hardly believe it now, but it is colder here than at the top of Woedolor Mountain.’

‘I dare say it is, sir. But time presses me; I must depart.’

With that, remuffling myself in dreadnaught and tippet, thrusting my hands into my huge sealskin mittens, I sallied out into the nipping air, and found poor Black, my horse, all cringing and doubled up with the cold.

Soon, wrapped in furs and meditations, I ascended from the Devil’s Dungeon.

At the Black Notch I paused, and once more bethought me of Temple Bar. Then, shooting through the pass, all alone with inscrutable nature, I exclaimed--Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

JIMMY ROSE

A time ago, no matter how long precisely, I, an old man, removed from the country to the city, having become unexpected heir to a great old house in a narrow street of one of the lower wards once the haunt of style and fashion, full of gay parlours and bridal chambers; but now, for the most part, transformed into counting-rooms and ware-houses. There bales and boxes usurp the place of sofas; day-books and ledgers are spread where once the delicious breakfast toast was buttered. In those old wards the glorious old soft-waffle days are over.

Nevertheless, in this old house of mine, so strangely spared, some monument of departed days survived. Nor was this the only one. Amidst the warehouse ranges some few other dwellings likewise stood. The street’s transmutation was not yet complete. Like those old English friars and nuns, long haunting the ruins of their retreats after they had been despoiled, so some few strange old gentlemen and ladies still lingered in the neighbourhood, and would not, could not, might not quit it. And I thought that when, one spring, emerging from my white-blossoming orchard, my own white hairs and white ivory-headed cane were added to their loitering census, that those poor old souls insanely fancied the ward was looking up--the tide of fashion setting back again.

For many years the old house had been unoccupied by an owner; those into whose hands it from time to time had passed having let it out to various shifting tenants; decayed old townspeople, mysterious recluses, or transient, ambiguous-looking foreigners.

While from certain cheap furbishings to which the exterior had been subjected, such as removing a fine old pulpit-like porch crowning the summit of six lofty steps, and set off with a broad-brimmed sounding-board over-shadowing the whole, as well as replacing the original heavy window shutters (each pierced with a crescent in the upper panel to admit an Oriental and moony light into the otherwise shut-up rooms of a sultry morning in July) with frippery Venetian blinds; while, I repeat, the front of the house hereby presented an incongruous aspect, as if the graft of modernness had not taken in its ancient stock; still, however it might fare without, within little or nothing had been altered. The cellars were full of great grim, arched bins of blackened brick, looking like the ancient tombs of Templars, while overhead were shown the first floor timbers, huge, square, and massive, all red oak, and through long eld, of a rich and Indian colour. So large were those timbers, and so thickly ranked, that to walk in those capacious cellars was much like walking along a line-of-battle ship’s gun-deck.

All the rooms in each story remained just as they stood ninety years ago, with all their heavy-moulded, wooden cornices, panelled wainscots, and carved and inaccessible mantels of queer horticultural and zoological devices. Dim with longevity, the very covering of the walls still preserved the patterns of the times of Louis XVI. In the largest parlour (the drawing-room, my daughters called it, in distinction from two smaller parlours, though I did not think the distinction indispensable) the paper-hangings were in the most gaudy style. Instantly we knew such paper could only have come from Paris--genuine Versailles paper--the sort of paper that might have hung in Marie Antoinette’s boudoir. It was of great diamond lozenges, divided by massive festoons of roses (onions, Biddy the girl said they were, but my wife soon changed Biddy’s mind on that head); and in those lozenges, one and all, as in an over-arboured garden-cage, sat a grand series of gorgeous illustrations of the natural history of the most imposing Parisian-looking birds--parrots, macaws, and peacocks, but mostly peacocks. Real Prince Esterhazies of birds; all rubies, diamonds, and Orders of the Golden Fleece. But, alas! the north side of this old apartment presented a strange look; half mossy and half mildew; something as ancient forest trees on their north sides, to which particular side the moss most clings, and where, they say, internal decay first strikes. In short, the original resplendence of the peacocks had been sadly dimmed on that north side of the room, owing to a small leak in the eaves, from which the rain had slowly trickled its way down the wall, clean down to the first floor. This leak the irreverent tenants, at that period occupying the premises, did not see fit to stop, or rather, did not think it worth their while, seeing that they only kept their fuel and dried their clothes in the parlour of the peacocks. Hence many of the once glowing birds seemed as if they had their princely plumage bedraggled in a dusty shower. Most mournfully their starry trains were blurred. Yet so patiently and so pleasantly, nay, here and there so ruddily did they seem to bide their bitter doom, so much of real elegance still lingered in their shapes, and so full, too, seemed they of a sweet, engaging pensiveness, meditating all day long, for years and years, among their faded bowers, that though my family repeatedly adjured me (especially my wife, who, I fear, was too young for me) to destroy the whole hen-roost, as Biddy called it, and cover the walls with a beautiful, nice, genteel, cream-coloured paper, despite all entreaties, I could not be prevailed upon, however submissive in other things.

But chiefly would I permit no violation of the old parlour of the peacocks or room of roses (I call it by both names), on account of its long association in my mind with one of the original proprietors of the mansion--the gentle Jimmy Rose.

Poor Jimmy Rose!

He was among my earliest acquaintances. It is not many years since he died; and I and two other tottering old fellows took hack, and in sole procession followed him to his grave.

Jimmy was born a man of moderate fortune. In his prime he had an uncommonly handsome person; large and manly, with bright eyes of blue, brown curling hair, and cheeks that seemed painted with carmine; but it was health’s genuine bloom, deepened by the joy of life. He was by nature a great ladies’ man, and like most deep adorers of the sex, never tied up his freedom of general worship by making one wilful sacrifice of himself at the altar.

Adding to his fortune by a large and princely business, something like that of the great Florentine trader, Cosmo the Magnificent, he was enabled to entertain on a grand scale. For a long time his dinners, suppers, and balls were not to be surpassed by any given in the party-giving city of New York. His uncommon cheeriness, the splendour of his dress, his sparkling wit, radiant chandeliers, infinite fund of small talk, French furniture, glowing welcomes to his guests, his bounteous heart and board, his noble graces and his glorious wine, what wonder if all these drew crowds to Jimmy’s hospitable abode? In the winter assemblies he figured first on the manager’s list. James Rose, Esq., too, was the man to be found foremost in all presentations of plate to highly successful actors at the Park, or of swords and guns to highly successful generals in the field. Often, also, was he chosen to present the gift on account of his fine gift of finely saying fine things.

‘Sir,’ said he, in a great drawing-room in Broadway, as he extended toward General G---- a brace of pistols set with turquoise. ‘Sir,’ said Jimmy, with a Castilian flourish and a rosy smile, ‘there would have been more turquoise here set, had the names of your glorious victories left room.’

Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy! Thou didst excel in compliments. But it was inwrought with thy inmost texture to be affluent in all things which give pleasure. And who shall reproach thee with borrowed wit on this occasion, though borrowed indeed it was? Plagiarise otherwise as they may, not often are the men of this world plagiarists in praise.

But times changed. Time, true plagiarist of the seasons.

Sudden and terrible reverses in business were made mortal by mad prodigality on all hands. When his affairs came to be scrutinised, it was found that Jimmy could not pay more than fifteen shillings in the pound. And yet in time the deficiency might have been made up--of course, leaving Jimmy penniless--had it not been that in one winter gale two vessels of his from China perished off Sandy Hook; perished at the threshold of their port.

Jimmy was a ruined man.

It was years ago. At that period I resided in the country, but happened to be in the city on one of my annual visits. It was but four or five days since seeing Jimmy at his house the centre of all eyes, and hearing him at the close of the entertainment toasted by a brocaded lady, in these well-remembered words: ‘Our noble host; the bloom on his cheek, may it last long as the bloom in his heart!’ And they, the sweet ladies and gentlemen there, they drank that toast so gaily and frankly off; and Jimmy, such a kind, proud, grateful tear stood in his honest eye, angelically glancing round at the sparkling faces, and equally sparkling, and equally feeling, decanters.

Ah! poor, poor Jimmy--God guard us all--poor Jimmy Rose!

Well, it was but four or five days after this that I heard a clap of thunder--no, a clap of bad news. I was crossing the Bowling Green in a snowstorm not far from Jimmy’s house on the Battery, when I saw a gentleman come sauntering along, whom I remembered at Jimmy’s table as having been the first to spring to his feet in eager response to the lady’s toast. Not more brimming the wine in his lifted glass than the moisture in his eye on that happy occasion.

Well, this good gentleman came sailing across the Bowling Green, swinging a silver-headed ratan; seeing me, he paused, ‘Ah, lad, that was rare wine Jimmy gave us the other night. Shan’t get any more, though. Heard the news? Jimmy’s burst. Clean smash, I assure you. Come along down to the Coffee-house and I’ll tell you more. And if you say so, we’ll arrange over a bottle of claret for a sleighing party to Cato’s to-night. Come along.’

‘Thank you,’ said I, ‘I--I--I am engaged.’

Straight as an arrow I went to Jimmy’s. Upon inquiring for him, the man at the door told me that his master was not in; nor did he know where he was; nor had his master been in the house for forty-eight hours.

Walking up Broadway again, I questioned passing acquaintances; but though each man verified the report, no man could tell where Jimmy was, and no one seemed to care, until I encountered a merchant, who hinted that probably Jimmy, having scraped up from the wreck a snug lump of coin, had prudently betaken himself off to parts unknown. The next man I saw, a great nabob he was too, foamed at the mouth when I mentioned Jimmy’s name. ‘Rascal; regular scamp, sir, is Jimmy Rose! But there are keen fellows after him.’ I afterward heard that this indignant gentleman had lost the sum of seventy-five dollars and seventy-five cents indirectly through Jimmy’s failure. And yet I dare say the share of the dinners he had eaten at Jimmy’s might more than have balanced that sum, considering that he was something of a wine-bibber, and such wines as Jimmy imported cost a plum or two. Indeed, now that I bethink me, I recall how I had more than once observed this same middle-aged gentleman, and how that toward the close of one of Jimmy’s dinners he would sit at the table pretending to be earnestly talking with beaming Jimmy, but all the while, with a half-furtive sort of tremulous eagerness and hastiness, pour down glass after glass of noble wine, as if now, while Jimmy’s bounteous sun was at meridian, was the time to make his selfish hay.