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The Portion of Labor, a novel by Mary E Wilkins Freeman |
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Chapter 14 |
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_ Chapter XIV The high-school master was a distant relative of the Lloyd's, through whom he had obtained the position. One evening when he was taking tea with them at Cynthia Lennox's, he spoke of Ellen. "I have one really remarkable scholar," he said, with a curious air of self-gratulation, as if he were principally responsible for it; "her name is Brewster--Ellen Brewster." "Good land! That must be the child that ran away five or six years ago, and all the town up in arms over it," said Mrs. Norman Lloyd. "Don't you remember, Cynthia?" "Yes," replied Cynthia, and continued pouring tea. Cynthia was very little changed. In some faces time seems to engrave lines delicately, once for all, and then lay by. She was rather more charming now than when one had looked at her with any expectancy of youth, since there was now no sense of disappointment. "I remember that," said Norman Lloyd. "The child would never tell where she had been. A curious case." "Well," said the school-master, "leaving that childish episode out of the question, she has a really remarkable mind. If she were a boy, I should advise a thorough education and a profession. I should as it is, if her family were able to bear the expense. She has that intuitive order of mind which is wonderful enough, though not, after all, so rare in a girl; but in addition she has the logical, which, according to my experience, is almost unknown in a woman. She ought to have an education." "But," said Risley, "what is the use of educating that unfortunate child?" "What do you mean?" "What I say. What is the use? There she is in her sphere of life, the daughter of a factory operative, in all probability in after-years to be the wife of one and the mother of others. Nothing but a rich marriage can save her, and that she is not likely to make. Milk-maids are more likely to make rich marriages than factory girls; there is a certain savor of romance about milk, and the dewy meadows, and the breath of kine, but a shoe factory is brutally realistic and illusionary. Now, why do you want to increase the poor child's horizon farther than her little feet can carry her? Fit her to be a good female soldier in the ranks of labor, to be a good wife and mother to the makers of shoes, to wash and iron their uniforms of toil, to cook well the food which affords them the requisite nourishment to make shoes, to appreciate book-lore, which is a pleasure and a profit to the makers of shoes; possibly in the non-event of marriage she will make shoes herself. The system of education in our schools is all wrong. It is both senseless and futile. Look at the children filing past to school, and look at their fathers, and their mothers too, filing past to the factory. Look at their present, and look at their future. And look at the trash taught them in their text-books--trash from its utter dissociation with their lives. You might as well teach a Zulu lace-work, instead of the use of the assagai." "Now look here, Mr. Risley," said the school-master, his face flushing, "is not--I beg your pardon, of course--this view of yours a little narrow and ultra-conservative? You do not want to establish a permanent factory-operative class in this country, do you? That is what your theory would ultimately tend towards. Ought not these children be given their chance to rise in the ranks; ought they to be condemned to tread in the same path as their fathers?" "I would have those little paths which intersect every unoccupied field in this locality worn by the feet of these men and their children after them unto the third and fourth generation," said Risley. "If not, where is our skilled labor?" "Oh, Mr. Risley," said Mrs. Lloyd, anxiously, "you wouldn't want all those dear little children to work as hard as their fathers, and not do any better, would you?" "If they don't, who is going to make our shoes, dear Mrs. Lloyd?" asked Risley. Mrs. Lloyd and the school-master stared at him, and Lloyd laughed his low, almost mirthless laugh. "Don't you know, Edward," he said, "that Mr. Risley is not in earnest, and speaks with the deadly intent of an anarchist with a bomb in his bag? He is the most out-and-out radical in the country. If there were a strike, and I did not yield to the demands of the oppressed, and imported foreign labor, I don't know that my life would be safe from him." "Then you do approve of a higher education?" asked the school-master, while Mrs. Lloyd stared from one to the other in bewilderment. "Yes, if we and our posterity have to go barefoot," said Risley, laughing out with a sudden undertone of seriousness. "I suppose everybody could get accustomed to going barefoot after a while," said Mrs. Lloyd. "Do you suppose that dear little thing was barefooted when she ran away, Cynthia?" Risley answered as if he had been addressed. "I can vouch for the fact that she was not, Mrs. Lloyd," he said. "They would sooner have walked on red-hot ploughshares themselves than let her." "Her father is getting quite an old man," Norman Lloyd said, with no apparent relevancy, as if he were talking to himself. All the time Cynthia Lennox had been quietly sitting at the head of the table. When the rest of the company had gone, and she and Risley were alone, seated in the drawing-room before the parlor fire, for it was a chilly day, she turned her fair, worn face towards him on the crimson velvet of her chair. "Do you know why I did not speak and tell them where the child was that time?" she asked. "Because of your own good sense?" "No; because of you." He looked at her adoringly. She was older than he, her beauty rather recorded than still evident on her face; she had been to him from the first like a fair, forbidden flower behind a wall of prohibition, but nothing could alter his habit of loving her. "Yes," said she. "It was more on your account than on my own; confession would be good for the soul. The secret has always rankled in my pride. I would much rather defy opinion than fly before it. But I know that you would mind. However, there was another reason." "What?" She hesitated a little and colored, even laughed a little, embarrassed laugh which was foreign to her. "Well, Lyman," said she, finally, "one reason why I did not speak was that I see my way clear to making up to that child and her parents for any wrong which I may have done them by causing them a few hours' anxiety. When she has finished the high-school I mean to send her to college." _ |
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