SHORT STORY

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 382, 3 September 1903, Page 7

SHORT STORY

In the morning, when the workmen arrive at the shop, they find it cold and Wack with the sorrow of ruin. At the end of the great hall, the machine with its thin are s and motionless wheels, stands dumb, lending a still more penetrating seme of desolation to the rcom which, until then, had resrasded with the cheerful clatter and whirring noses o2 the big machine, throbbing like tbe heart of the mill. The ouster comes down from his little office and says sadly to the workers: ' My men, there iB no work—to-day-there are no mora orders; instead, I am receiving countermands on tvary side, and all the merchandise will be left upon my banc's. This Dscember, the month of Bach heavy work in other years, and upon which I had counted so much, threatens to ruin the strongest concernp. We ehall have to suer.end.' And as he sees the workmen looking at each other with fee r in their eyes of returning empty-handed to their homes, a fear of hunger on the morrow, he adds in a lower tone t 'I am not saltish, no, I Bwear to you that lam not. My situation is as terrible, even more terrible, perhaps, than yours. I have lost f.50.000 in less than a week. I am stopping the work to-day so' as not to deepen the gulf. I have not the first sou f toward my bills of the loth. You see I am not hiding anything from you. I speak to you as a friend. Tomorrow, perhaps, the bailiffs will be here. That is notour fault, is it? We have struggled to the very end. I have wished, from the bottom of my heart, that I could help you over this hard time; but the end has come. I have lost everything, and have no longer any bread to share.' He holds out hi? hand. The men shake it silently, and for some moments remain there looking at their useless tools, their bands clinched. Every other morning the files had song and the hammers had sounded rhythmically and now it seemed aa though all that were sleeping in the dust of failure. There were twenty, there were thirty families who would not have an] tiling to eat during the following week. Same of the women who work in the mill wipe away the tears from the coiner of their eyes. The men try to look more firm. Tney speak bravely saying that one does not die of hunger in . Paris. Ther, when the master leaves them and they see him walk away, bent and stoophm, crushed within eight days by a disaster, perhaps greater than he will tell them, they, emotbering in that room, go out, one by one, their throats choked and their hearts cold with sorrow, as if they were leaving a clumber of death. The dead ia their work, the huge, dumb machine, whose shelter is ghastly in the shadows. IL The workman is outside, in the street, on the pavement. He has tramped the sidewalks for eight days without being successful in finding work. He has gone from door to door, offering his arms, offer, lag his hands, offering his whole body for any work, even the most revolting, the hardest, the most deadly. Every door is shut. There is nothing, nothing. Then the workman has offered to work at half price. The doors will not reopen. He would work for nothing if they would only take him on. It is the strike, the terrible strike that is tolling the knell of the garrets. The panic hss stopped all the industries, and money, cowardly money, is hidden fearfully away. At the dose of the eighth day the end has indeed come. The workman has made one last, supreme effort, and now he is l coming slowly back, his hands empty, } bowed with misery. It is evening, and the rain is falling heavily; Paris is funereal in the mud. He walks beneath the heavy shower without noticing it, feeling only his hunger, loitering, that he may reach home leas quickly. He leans over the side of one of the bridges of the Seine, the rising waters iu=h by with a continual noise and the spurts of whits foam break against the piles of the bridge. He leans farther, over, the mighty flood passes underneath him, throwing him a furious appeal. He draws himself up and turns away, muttering that he must be strong a little longer. Tho rain has stopped. The gas blazes in the jeweller's windows. If he could break tbe glass, he could seize bread enough in one handful to last for years. The restaurants are lighting up and behind the curtains of white muslin he can see.the people eataxg. He hastens his step, te goes back along the street once more, in front of the butcher's, the cook's shop and the baker's, in front of all greedy Paris who feasts in the hour of famine. When the wife and the little one wept that morning, he promised to bring them bread that night. He dares not go home just yet and say that he lied. And while he walks, he asks himself how he will return, what he will say to make them patient a little longer. They cannot go many more days without eating. He can do.very well without food, but the wife and the other little one are too week. For an instant, tha idea of begging comes to him. But when a lady or a gentleman pass beside him and he thinks of stretching out his hand, his arm stiffens at his aide, and his throat tightens. &* remains rooted to the sidewalk, while the properly clad people turn away from him, believing him drunk as they lock his drawn, famished face. mi ?he workman's wife, leaving the little girl asleep, has come downstairs to the threshold of the door. The woman is very thin and clad in a gown cf printed calico. She shivers in the icy breezes of the street. She has nothing more in the house; she has carried everything to the Mont-de-Piete. Eight days without work are enough to strip the little house. The night before she sold the last handful of wool in her mattress to,an old clothes man: the mattress itself has gone now; therCis nothing but the cover left. She has hung ttai > B a hook, before the window to keep out some* oE the cold blasts,

Terrors of a Strike,

for the little girl coughs painfully. Without saying anything to her husband she has looked for work, but the strike has struck the women even more heavily than the men. At her stair-head there are poor unfortunate women whom she heard weeping the whole night through. She met one standing at the corner of the sidewalk, one is dead and another has disappeared. Happily for her, she has a husband who does not drink, a good man. They would be comfortable if the dead seasons had

net despoiled them of everything. She has exhausted her credit, she owes the baker, the grocer, the fruit man, and she no longer dares even to pass by their sfcopa That afternoon she had been to borrow 20 sous of her sister, but there ako she found such misery that, v< ithout saying a word, she began to weep, and together with her sister she wept for a long time. And when she went away she premised to bm g her a morEel of bread if her husband came back with some. The husband doss not return. The rain is falling heavily; she takes refuge under the door, tho. big drops splash at ber feet, a stream of water wets her thin diess. At'nteivais, seized with impatience she goes down the steps, in spite of the heavy shower and runs away to the end of the street, to see if she cannot somewhere in the distance catch a glimpse cf him for whom she is waiting. And when she comes back she is soaked through. She rubs her hinds over her thin hair to dry it and again settles down patiently, though she is shaken by heavy fits of fever. The coming and going of the patsarEby jostle her. Sie tries to make herself very small so as not to trouble anyone. Some of the men peer closely into her face, and sometimes she feels a warm breath, tonching lightly her neck. All of suspicious Paris, the street with its mud, the brilliant lights, ths rolling carriages, seem to wish to take her and throw her into the stream of it all. She is hungry. She belongs to the whole world. Ia front of her is a bskery and she thinks of the little girl upstairs asleep, Then, when her husband appears at last, veering away from the housea like a poor wretch, she rushes t i meet him and looks anxiously at him. 'Well!' she stammers. He does uot answer, but bends bis head even lower. Then, pale as death, she mounts the stairs. IV."" Upstairs the little girl is not sleeping. She is waked up and is thinking, watching the end of the candle as it flickers on a corner of the table. No one knows what monstrous, heart-breaking shadows sweep across the face of this little girl of seven years, with the Eerious, withered features of an old woman. She is sitting on the edge of the box which serves her as a bed. Her feet hang down Bhiveringly, her Bickly, doll-like hands are holding against her breast the rags that cover her. Sho feels a burning there, a fire that she would like to put out. She is thinking. She has never had any playthings. She could not go to school because she did net have any shoes. When she was very little, she remembers how her mother took her out in the sunshine. Bat that was long ago. They had to work, and after that it always, seemed as if there were a cold wind blowing in the house. She has not f sit very comfortable, either, the has always been hungry. She has thought a good deal about that, but she cannot understand. Is everybody

always hungry, then ? She has tried very hard to get used to it, but she has never been able to. She thinks she is too little, that one must he bigger to understand. Her mother knows, though, this strange thing that is hidden-from little girls. If she dared she would ask her who it was put you into the world to be hungry. Then, too, it is homely in their house. She looks at the window where the empty cover of the mattress flaps in the wind, at the bare walls, the broken furniture, all the shame of the attic which the strike soils with its despair. In her ignorance she thinks she has dreamed of warm rooms filled with beautiful things that shone ; she shuts her eyes again to see them, and through her thin eyelashes the light of the candle becomes a great resplendence of gold, into which she would like to go. But the wind comes blowing in, and there is suoh a enrrent of air from the window that she is seised with an attack of cough* ing, and when it is over her eyes are filled with tears. She always used to be afraid before they left her all alone; now she does not care; it doesn't make any difference. They haven't eaten anything since last night, so she thinks her mother has gone out to look for some bread. The idea amuses her. She breaks her bread in email pieces and eats a few slowly, one by one; then she playß with it. Her mother has come back; father has shut the door. The little girl looks at their hands very surprisingly. . Then, when they do not say anything, at the end of a long moment, she repeats in a mechanical voice: • Fm very hungry, Pm very hungry.' Her father, holding his head between his hands, sits in a dark corner; he stays there, utterly crushed, shaken with heavy, silent sobs. The mother, stifling her tears, again puts the little one into the box, She covers her with all the clothes in the room, and tells her to be good and go to sleep. And the child, whose teeth are chattering with cold, who feels the fire in her breast burning stronger, becomes very brave. She puts her arm around her mother's neck and whispers softly:. ■ Tell me, mamma, why are we always hungry?'—Ehile Zula