Life in the Iron-Mills

by Rebecca Harding Davis
"Is this the end?

O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?"

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?
The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air

is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It
stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely

see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd
of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their

pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells
ranging loose in the air.

The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in
slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and

settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke
on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,--

clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two
faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of

mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street,
have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside,

is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the
mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted

and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately
in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is

a very old dream,--almost worn out, I think.
From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down

to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river,
dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself

sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-
barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a

look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river
slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the

same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window
I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and

morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted
faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or

cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and
ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired

by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy
to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness

for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that,
amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing

to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,--
horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My

fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a
life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that

beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens,
dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing

crimson with roses,--air, and fields, and mountains. The future
of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be

stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the
muddy graveyard, and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor

curious roses.
Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping

the windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty
back-yard and the coalboats below, fragments of an old story

float up before me,--a story of this house into which I happened
to come to-day. You may think it a tiresome story enough, as

foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or
pleasure.--I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long

since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly
lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives,

like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-
butt.--Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my

friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a
moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to

do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean
clothes, and come right down with me,--here, into the thickest

of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this
story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that

has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to
you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making

straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it
clearly,--this terrible question which men here have gone mad

and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into
words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with

drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it
of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it.

There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great
hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that

this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the
sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of

its darkness, the most solemnprophecy which the world has known
of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but

will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul
and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with

death; but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no
perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that

shall surely come.
My story is very simple,--Only what I remember of the life of

one of these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's
rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the

great order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter;
run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I

choose the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of
myriads of these furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a

secret, underlyingsympathy between that story and this day with
its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or perhaps simply for the

reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There
were the father and son,--both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby

& John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah, their
cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was

rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the
cellar-rooms. The old man, like many of the puddlers and

feeders of the mills, was Welsh,--had spent half of his life in
the Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh emigrants,

Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any day.
They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny;

they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor
shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure,

unmixed blood, I fancy: shows itself in the slight angular
bodies and sharply-cut facial lines. It is nearly thirty years

since the Wolfes lived here. Their lives were like those of
their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms,

eating rank pork and molasses, drinking--God and the distillers
only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone for

some drunkenexcess. Is that all of their lives?--of the
portion given to them and these their duplicates swarming the

streets to-day?--nothing beneath?--all? So many a political
reformer will tell you,--and many a private reformer, too, who

has gone among them with a heart tender with Christ's charity,
and come out outraged, hardened.

One rainy night, about eleven o'clock, a crowd of half-clothed
women stopped outside of the cellar-door. They were going home

from the cotton-mill.
"Good-night, Deb," said one, a mulatto, steadying herself

against the gas-post. She needed the post to steady her. So