Silences (17 page)

The three-hundred-page novel,
A Story of Today
(afterward called
Margret Howth
), was near completion when
Life in the Iron Mills
appeared.

To the readers of that April 1891
Atlantic, Life in the Iron Mills
came as absolute News, with the shock of unprepared-for revelation.

(To repeat:) in the consciousness of literary America, there had been no dark satanic mills;
^*
outside of slavery, no myriads of
human beings whose lives were “terrible
tragedy . . . a reality of soul starvation, of living death.” When industry was considered at all, it was as an invasion of pastoral harmony, a threat of materialism to the
spirit.
If working people (again, outside of slavery) existed—and nowhere were they material for serious attention, let alone central subject—they were “clean-haired Yankee mill girls,” “mind[s] among the spindles,” or Whitman’s

            
workwomen and workmen of these States having your own divine and strong life . . .

“Life lies about us dumb,” Emerson had written. “How few materials are yet used by our arts. The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant.” This reality, hitherto “dumb . . . secret . . . in this nightmare fog,” verified him beyond expectation with its crowding of implications,
troublings, its new themes and types, images, sounds, smells, dictions.

Life in the Iron Mills
was an instant sensation; it was recognized as a literary landmark. A wide and distinguished audience, shaken by its power and original vision, spoke of it as a work of genius.

Far off in her native Wheeling, little of this acclaim reached Rebecca. Forwarded letters began to arrive, but her first real
indication of the impact her work was having came with a note from Hawthorne, Hawthorne himself, the author of those three anonymous tales she had memorized as a child. He was in Washington, would be going on to Harpers Ferry, and might he come on from there to meet her?

“Well, I suppose Esther felt a little in that way when the king’s scepter touched her,” Rebecca wrote.

Hawthorne never came.
The Civil War had broken out; the railroad was cut.

Much else was severed. Virginia seceded. Wheeling became the center of pro-Union loyalties, soon the capital of self-proclaimed free New (later West) Virginia. Martial law was declared; the local theater turned into a jail; an island in the river, visible from
Rebecca’s window, a prison camp. The house directly across the street from the Hardings’
was commandeered for General Rosecrans’s Union Army Western Department headquarters.

Rebecca’s brother Dick, along with several other young men of the Harding circle, made plans to join the Secessionists. They were talked out of it only at the last minute by the mayor: “It would ruin their families . . . he spoke particularly of Pa,” Rebecca wrote a cousin.

And in the midst of this, in mid-May,
Fields sent back
A Story of Today:
“It assembles the gloom too depressingly.”

Rebecca’s letter reveals how shaken she was. She begged Fields to tell her “if that was the only objection, the one you assign?” She “thanked him for candor and kindness.” She asked: “If you do not think I could alter the story, shall I try again, or do you care to have me as a contributor?”

He wrote back at once,
assuring her that the
Atlantic
wanted very much to keep her—and suggesting that she dispel some of the gloom, then resubmit the book. Fearful lest he lose his great discovery, he asked his young wife, Annie, to write also—a letter of such strong intelligent admiration, it was the start of Rebecca’s closest and most supporting literary friendship, though in this beginning, not necessarily in the
right direction. “I will try to meet Mr. Fields’ wishes of being more cheerful,” Rebecca agreed, “though humor had need to be as high as God’s sunshine to glow cheerily on Virginia soil just now.”

What made her agree? Isolated, had she so little confidence in her own judgment? Was the terror of the oblivion from which she was just emerging so great, the need for the verification publication gives
so compelling? Was she (a woman in that day) so afraid of jeopardizing the one way seemingly open to independence, occupation, public esteem, self-worth?

At just this time, one of Rebecca’s literary admirers, L. Clarke Davis, already a regular correspondent, wrote asking her to contribute to a new Philadelphia magazine,
Peterson’s,
for which he was a reader. It would be a different kind of writing—entertainment
not literature.

Perhaps
Life in the Iron Mills had
been a fluke, “the novelty of the scene,” and not the achievement she had tried to make it, had believed it to be. Perhaps the merit of
A Story of Today
was self-delusion too, as was her being worthy of a place in the exalted
Atlantic
company. She promised to write for
Peterson’s.

For six weeks Rebecca struggled with the revision of
A Story
of Today.
Without the original manuscript, there is no way of knowing what the gloom was that she dispelled, and how much was marred and lost thereby; how much of the imperfect working out of character, the marks of haste and of patching, are in the original, how much the result of shaken judgment in a revision having to be made, furthermore, under “the shadow of death,” “from the border of the
battlefield.”

In the beginning, she defends the very concerns of the book:

            
The shadow of death has fallen on us. . . . Do not call us traitors . . . who choose to be cool and silent through the fever of the hour,—who choose to search in common things for auguries . . . hint that there are yet other characters besides that of Patriot in which a man may appear creditably. . . .

 
                 
I want you to go down into this common every-day drudgery . . . and consider if there might not be in it also a great warfare. . . . It has its slain. Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in your alleys.

Margret Howth has gone into a textile mill as a bookkeeper to “support a helpless father and mother. It was a common story.”
^*
Holmes, the man she
loves and who loves her, has broken off their secret engagement.

            
He had turned his back on love and kindly happiness and warmth, on all that was weak and useless in the world. . . . All men around him were doing the same,—thrusting and jostling and struggling up, up. It was the American motto, Go ahead; mothers taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of glittering
prizes. He at least saw the higher meaning of the truth.

He is “one of the new men who will mould the age.”

Knowles (not too successfully modeled after Doctor LeMoyne), Margret’s employer and the mill owner, is in the process of selling his mill. “His veins thick with the blood of a despised race”—he is part Indian—”a disciple of Garrison, you know,” he plans to use the money to organize in
“the great city, with its stifling gambling hells, its negro-pens, its foul cellars,” and to make available a communal “new Arcadia.” It is for this work he seeks Margret’s help.

“You will fail, Knowles,” predicts Margret’s blind father (longtime adversary to Knowles, as Rebecca’s father was to LeMoyne):

            
“. . . any plan, Phalanstery or Community, call it what you please, founded
on self-government, is based on . . . the tawdriest of shams. . . . There never was a thinner-crusted Devil’s egg in the world than democracy. . . .

                  
“Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs. . . . Your own phantom, your Republic, your experiment to prove that all men are born free and equal—what is it to-day?”

“Don’t sneer at Knowles,” the author says:

            
Your own clear, tolerant brain, that reflects all men and creeds alike, like colorless water, drawing the truth from all, is very different, doubtless, from this narrow, solitary soul, who thought the world waited for him to fight down . . . evil. . . . An intolerant fanatic, of course. But the truth he did know was so terribly real to him. . . . And then, fanatics must make history
for conservative men to learn from, I suppose.

From Knowles, and from the black peddler Lo with whom she feels the tie of identity, Margret glimpses and feels the “unhelped pain of life.” During an early morning walk with Lo, memorable for the descriptive immediacy of the changing mists, the transition from the countryside’s beauty into the city slums where Margret works, Lo, in the closeness
of shared response, tells Margret of how her childhood in the mill deformed her:

            
It was a good while I was there: from seven year old till sixteen. ’T seemed longer t’ me ’n ’t was. ’T seemed as if I’d been there allus,
—jes’ forever, yoh know . . . like as I was part o’ th’ engines, somehow. Th’ air used to be thick in my mouth, black wi’ smoke ’n’ wool ’n’ smells.

            
      
In them years I got dazed in my head, I think. ’T was th’ air ’n’ th’ work. . . . ’T got so that th’ noise o’ th’ looms went on in my head night ’n’ day,—allus thud, thud. ’N’ hot days, when th’ hands was chaffin’ ’n’ singin’, th’ black wheels ’n’ rollers was alive, starin’ down at me, ’n’ th’ shadders o’ th’ looms was like snakes creepin’,—creepin’ anear all th’ time.

As Margret and Knowles
later walk the city, he looks

            
about him as into a seething caldron in which . . . the blood of uncounted races was fused . . . where creeds, philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,—where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.

                  
Vulgar
American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before.

They go to a hovel, a temporary one-room refuge he has established,

            
swarming with human life. Women, idle trampers, whiskey-bloated, filthy, lay half-asleep, or smoking, on the floor. . . . Half-naked children crawled about in rags. . . . In the corner slept a
heap of half-clothed blacks. Going on the underground railroad to Canada.

                  
“Did I call it a bit of hell? [Knowles rages.] It’s only a glimpse of the under-life of America,—God help us!—where all men are born free and equal . . .

                  
“And you,” he said, savagely, “you sit by the road-side, with help in your hands, and Christ in your heart, and call your life lost,
quarrel with your God, because that mass of selfishness has left you. . . . Look at these women. What is
their
loss, do you think? Go back, will you, and drone out your life whimpering over your lost dream, and go to Shakespeare for tragedy when you want it? Tragedy! Come here,—let me hear what you call this.”

Lo, much mourned, dies from burns after a fire set in the mills by her father, who
has been hounded as an ex-convict. Knowles, an old man now, has no money left to finance his dreams.

The tacked-on happy ending is grotesquely evident, a contrived reformation, out of it true love triumphing: the success-is-all Holmes converts to plainer, older virtues; Margret, obeying “the law of her woman’s nature” marries him and gives up working for social change. There is even an oil well
opportunely gushing up in the back yard to keep them from poverty.

It is an awkward book, sometimes embarrassingly bad. Nevertheless, it is also a rewarding, fascinatingly native book of substance and power. It accomplishes much of what Rebecca set out to do in that first ardent fever of work after the
Atlantic’s
acceptance. Essential reading for any literary or social historian concerned with
the period,
Margret Howth: A Story of Today
justifies re-evaluation, perhaps resurrection.

Fields had the revision back at the end of July and accepted it at once. Rebecca hastily concocted the promised mystery novel for
Peterson’s.
Then she stopped writing.

She could no longer “search in common things for auguries.” That “poor everyday warfare for bread” could not hold attention with the bloody,
physical war all around. Wheeling was under threat of immediate attack from Lee’s surrounding armies and in “a state of panic not to be described.”

She had schooled herself to observe and read behaviors; now the behaviors were more than she could absorb. “Malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks. . . a slavery of intolerance; hands wet with a brother’s blood for Right”; fears, corruptions,
political jobbery. The behavior of women—that she thought she understood:

            
They had taken the war into their whole strength, like their sisters, North and South: as women greedily do anything that promises to be an outlet for what power of brain, heart, or animal fervor they have, over what is needed for wifehood or maternity.

If there were, as there must also have been, evidences
of true conviction, nobility, they were obscured for her by the other behaviors, and by her inability to come to a whole-selfed stand on the war.

Southern bred, nearly all her blood ties were Secessionist in sympathy, when not in action. Her other bonds and allegiances
were Northern. She believed uncompromisingly that slavery, the greatest of wrongs, must be ended. But the federal government
was making it clear that the war was not to end slavery, it was to end secession from the Union. Secession to her was a state’s right, “though I never would, never could, live in a slave confederacy.” Neither should slaves: the enslaved had an absolute right to their freedom. Yet how would they—who had never been permitted freedom—know how to use it? Deep in her was the Southern guilt-fear; freed
slaves might take revenge, justified retribution. Then the innocent would suffer as well, wrong again come out of right. Round and round within her, the doubt and fear and contradiction, while all about her was destruction and bloodletting, with slavery seemingly no closer to being ended.