What had Mary made of it, Hal wondered. Had she revelled, shop-girl fashion, in scenes of pallid ease? He learned that what she had made of it was despair. This world outside, with its freedom and cleanness, its people living gracious and worthwhile lives, was not for her; she was chained to a scrub-pail in a coal-camp. Things had got so much worse since the death of her mother, she said. Her voice had become dull and hard—Hal thought that he had never heard a young voice express such hopelessness.
“You’ve never been anywhere but here?” he asked.
“I been in two other camps,” she said—“first the Gordon, and then East Run. But they’re all alike.”
“But you’ve been down to the towns?”
“Only for a day, once or twice a year. Once I was in Sheridan, and in a church I heard a lady sing.”
She stopped for a moment, lost in this memory. Then suddenly her voice changed—and he could imagine in the darkness that she had tossed her head defiantly. “I’ll not be entertainin’ company with my troubles! Ye know how tiresome that is when ye hear it from somebody else—like my next-door neighbour, Mrs. Zamboni. D’ ye know her?”
“No,” said Hal.
“The poor old lady has troubles enough, God knows. Her man’s not much good—he’s troubled with the drink; and she’s got eleven childer, and that’s too many for one woman. Don’t ye think so?”
She asked this with a naivete which made Hal laugh. “Yes,” he said, “I do.”
“Well, I think people’d help her more if she’d not complain so! And half of it in the Slavish language, that a body can’t understand!” So Mary began to tell funny things about Mrs. Zamboni and her other polyglot neighbours, imitating their murdering of the Irish dialect. Hal thought her humour was naive and delightful, and he led her on to more cheerful gossip during the remainder of their walk.
XIII
But then, as they were on their way home, tragedy fell upon them. Hearing a step behind them, Mary turned and looked; then catching Hal by the arm, she drew him into the shadows at the side, whispering to him to be silent. The bent figure of a man went past them, lurching from side to side.
When he had turned and gone into the house, Mary said, “It’s my father. He’s ugly when he’s like that.” And Hal could hear her quick breathing in the darkness.
So that was Mary’s trouble—the difficulty in her home life to which she had referred at their first meeting! Hal understood many things in a flash—why her home was bare of ornament, and why she did not invite her company to sit down. He stood silent, not knowing what to say. Before he could find the word, Mary burst out, “Oh, how I hate O’Callahan, that sells the stuff to my father! His home with plenty to eat in it, and his wife dressin’ in silk and goin’ down to mass every Sunday, and thinkin’ herself too good for a common miner’s daughter! Sometimes I think I’d like to kill them both.”
“That wouldn’t help much,” Hal ventured.
“No, I know—there’d only be some other one in his place. Ye got to do more than that, to change things here. Ye got to get after them that make money out of O’Callahan.”
So Mary’s mind was groping for causes! Hal had thought her excitement was due to humiliation, or to fear of a scene of violence when she reached home; but she was thinking of the deeper aspects of this terrible drink problem. There was still enough unconscious snobbery in Hal Warner for him to be surprised at this phenomenon in a common miner’s daughter; and so, as at their first meeting, his pity was turned to intellectual interest.
“They’ll stop the drink business altogether some day,” he said. He had not known that he was a Prohibitionist; he had become one suddenly!
“Well,” she answered, “they’d best stop it soon, if they don’t want to be too late. ’Tis a sight to make your heart sick to see the young lads comin’ home staggerin’, too drunk even to fight.”
Hal had not had time to see much of this aspect of North Valley. “They sell to boys?” he asked.
“Sure, who’s to care? A boy’s money’s as good as a man’s.”
“But I should think the company—”
“The company lets the saloon-buildin’—that’s all the company cares.”
“But they must care something about the efficiency of their hands!”
“Sure, there’s plenty more where they come from. When ye can’t work, they fire ye, and that’s all there is to it.”
“And is it so easy to get skilled men?”
“It don’t take much skill to get out coal. The skill is in keepin’ your bones whole—and if you can stand breakin’ ’em, the company can stand it.”
They had come to the little cabin. Mary stood for a moment in silence. “I’m talkin’ bitter again!” she exclaimed suddenly. “And I promised ye me company manner! But things keep happening to set me off.” And she turned abruptly and ran into the house. Hal stood for a moment wondering if she would return; then, deciding that she had meant that as good night, he went slowly up the street.
He fought against a mood of real depression, the first he had known since his coming to North Valley. He had managed so far to keep a certain degree of aloofness, that he might see this industrial world without prejudice. But tonight his pity for Mary had involved him more deeply. To be sure, he might be able to help her, to find her work in some less crushing environment; but his mind went on to the question—how many girls might there be in mining-camps, young and eager, hungering for life, but crushed by poverty, and by the burden of the drink problem?
A man walked past Hal, greeting him in the semidarkness with a nod and a motion of the hand. It was the
