After she had become accustomed to the smell of rancid oil and
dyestuffs and the interminable racket of machinery she did not find
her work at the knitting mill disagreeable. It was like any work, she
imagined, an uninteresting task which had to be done.
The majority of the girls and young men of the village worked there in
various capacities; wages were fair, salaries better, union
regulations prevailed. There was nothing to complain of.
And nothing to expect except possible increase in wages, holidays, and
a disquieting chance of getting caught in the machinery, which
familiarity soon discounted.
As for the social status of the mill workers, the mill was Gayfield;
and Gayfield was a village where the simpler traditions of the
Republic still survived; where there existed no invidious distinction
in vocations; a typical old-time community harbouring the remains of a
Grand Army Post and too many churches of too many denominations; where
the chance metropolitan stranger was systematically "done"; where
distrust of all cities and desire to live in them was equalled only by
a passion for moving pictures and automobiles; where the school
trustees used double negatives and traced their ancestry to Colonial
considerables--who, however, had signed their names in "lower case" or
with a Maltese cross--the world in miniature, with its due proportion
of petty graft, petty squabbles, envy, kindness, jealousy, generosity,
laziness, ambition, stupidity, intelligence, honesty, hypocrisy,
hatred, affection, badness and goodness, as standardised by the code
established according to folk-ways on earth--in brief, a perfectly
human community composed of the usual ingredients, worthy and
unworthy--that was Gayfield, Mohawk County, New York.
Before spring came--before the first robin appeared, and while icy
roads still lay icy under sunlit pools of snow-water--a whole winter
indoors, and a sedentary one, had changed the smoothly tanned and
slightly freckled cheeks of Rue Carew to a thinner and paler oval.
Under her transparent skin a tea-rose pink came and went; under her
grey eyes lay bluish shadows. Also, floating particles of dust, fleecy
and microscopic motes of cotton and wool filling the air in the room
where Ruhannah worked, had begun to irritate her throat and bronchial
tubes; and the girl developed an intermittent cough.
When the first bluebird arrived in Gayfield the cough was no longer
intermittent; and her mother sent her to the village doctor. So Rue
Carew was transferred to the box factory adjoining, in which the mill
made its own paper boxes, where young women sat all day at intelligent
machines and fed them with squares of pasteboard and strips of gilt
paper; and the intelligent and grateful machines responded by turning
out hundreds and hundreds of complete boxes, all neatly gilded,
pasted, and labelled. And after a little while Ruhannah was able to
nourish one of these obliging and responsive machines. And by July her
cough had left her, and two delicate freckles adorned the bridge of
her nose.