The Iron Woman | Page 5

stranger; she was chilled, too, by
another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor of childhood
he made no effort to conceal. One of his first expressions of opinion
had been contained in the single word "uggy," accompanied by a finger
pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed--and she was one of those
people who cannot, or do not, moderate a sneeze--Blair had a nervous
paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst into
furious tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her scratchy
black alpaca breast, he would say violently, "No, no! No, no!" at which
she would push him roughly from her knee, and fall into hurt silence.
Once, when he was five years old, she came in to dinner hot from a
morning in the Works, her moist forehead grimy with dust, and bent
over to kiss him; at which the little boy wrinkled up his nose and turned
his face aside.
"What's the matter?" his mother said; and called sharply to the nurse: "I
won't have any highfalutin' business in this boy! Get it out of him."
Then resolutely she took Blair's little chin in her hand--a big, beautiful,
powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails--and turning his
wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. "Get over your

airs!" she said, and sat down and ate her dinner without another word to
Blair or any one else. But the next day, as if to purchase the kiss he
would not give, she told him he was to have an "allowance." The word
had no meaning to the little fellow, until she showed him two bright
new dollars and said he could buy candy with them; then his brown
eyes smiled, and he held up his lips to her. It was at that moment that
money began to mean something to him. He bought the candy, which
he divided with Nannie, and he bought also a present for his mother,--a
bottle of cologne, with a tiny calendar tied around its neck by a red
ribbon. "The ribbon is pretty," he explained shyly. She was so pleased
that she instantly gave him another dollar, and then put the long green
bottle on her painted pine bureau, between two of his photographs.
In the days when the four children played in the orchard, and had
lessons with Miss White, in the school-room in Mr. Ferguson's garret,
and were "treated" by Blair to candy or pink ice-cream-- even in those
days Mercer was showing signs of what it was ultimately to become:
the apotheosis of materialism and vulgarity. Iron was entering into its
soul. It thought extremely well of itself; when a new mill was built, or a
new furnace blown in, it thought still better of itself. It prided itself
upon its growth; in fact, its complacency, its ugliness and its size kept
pace with one another.
"Look at our output," Sarah Maitland used to brag to her general
manager, Mr. Robert Ferguson; "and look at our churches! We have
more churches for our size than any town west of the Alleghanies."
"We need more jails than any town, east or west," Mr. Ferguson
retorted, grimly.
Mrs. Maitland avoided the deduction. Her face was full of pride. "You
just wait! We'll be the most important city in this country yet, because
we will hold the commerce of the world right here in our mills!" She
put out her great open palm, and slowly closed the strong, beautiful
fingers into a gripping fist. "The commerce of the world, right _here!"
she said, thrusting the clenched hand, that quivered a little, almost into
his face.

Robert Ferguson snorted. He was a melancholy man, with thin, bitterly
sensitive lips, and kind eyes that were curiously magnified by
gold-rimmed eyeglasses, which he had a way of knocking off with
disconcerting suddenness. He did not, he declared, trust anybody.
"What's the use?" he said; "you only get your face slapped!" For his
part, he believed the Eleventh Commandment was, "Blessed is he that
expecteth nothing, because he'll get it."
"Read your Bible!" Mrs. Maitland retorted; "then you'll know enough
to call it a Beatitude, not a Commandment."
Mr. Ferguson snorted again. "Bible? It's all I can do to get time to read
my paper. I'm worked to death," he reproached her. But in spite of
being worked to death he always found time on summer evenings to
weed the garden in his back yard, or on winter mornings to feed a flock
of Mercer's sooty pigeons; and he had been known to walk all over
town to find a particular remedy for a sick child of one of his molders.
To be sure he alleged, when Mrs. Maitland accused him of kindness,
that, as far as the child