SILVER JAWS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 851, 20 December 1929, Page 7 (Supplement)

SILVER JAWS

- By

P. K. NEWTON.

MHE slid into a chair and crouched there, shivering with rage. She could hear his footsteps plodding ! ’ heavily down the narrow stairs, I • getting fainter and fainter. She I clenched her lists and hammered a tattoo on the wicker arms of the chair, choking back a scream because the people through the wall would hear her. They were very thin, those walls. She hated him, hated him, hated him! She hated living, she hated everything! She wanted to die. Her nerves relaxed. She began t" sob brokenly, great wrenching sobs that shook and tore her. They were always quarrelling. He was so solid, so wooden; he never tried to understand. He looked at her unblmkingly with his china blue eyes—so expressionless those blue eyes were—and reiterated that he did not know what she meant. She would clench her hands then, to stop the tide of angry, exasperated words, and try to explain it to him again. She had loved his blue eyes. She loved them now, more, she knew, than anything else in the world. A very ordinary commonplace little romance theirs had been! And yet is any romance commonplace? A yellow-haired factory boy and a girl from a milliner’s shop. Blue eyes meeting brown; a smile hovering on red lifs; a quickening of a fresh young heart. He had told her about the factory and she had listened, fearful and yet entranced. The gre?it steel pulses, throbbing like fanatical masic. The slender, thread-like bands. The cruel gaping silver jaws. The delicate, horrible loveliness of it. The silent men who hovered like priests about a sfcrine, The silence, and the heat, and the eternal throbthrobbing of the tireless machines. She had waited for him all her life; it seemed. A golden brown youth with china blue eyes. He

radiated her life. It was funny how things seemed to change. Her poor pricked fingers seemed less sore; the dreadful, stuffy little sunless backroom where she worked did not seem sp % bad after all. What if the day was especially tiring? What did it matter how many silly hats there were to trim, if it meant an hour or so with him in the dusk? She married him, and went with him to his home; two rooms crushed together like lovers high up in a dingy grey building. They clustered around the huge factory like hungry grey rats, these tenements, housing, some of tfjem, as many as thirty families. They were a world in themselves, their sphere bounded by the silver machines. They watched from their high narrow windows the thousand upon thousand loads of new boxes being vomited out upon the world, with a kind of religious awe. Sacred, it was to them; it meant bread and milk, and, very occasionally, new clothes. The throbbing of the machines formed a background for their poor colourless lives; they drifted into a weary, dreamless sleep at night with the same dull pulsing in their ears. Her sobbing had long ceased. She sat up and dried her eyes. How silly she had been! It had after all been but a passing storm. By evening he would be home again, full of love and laughter, penitent and thoroughly adorable as usual. She would pYove to him that she had forgiven and already forgotten. She would tidy up the ugly rooms, gather fresh flowers . . . She hurried about, her heart growing perceptibly lighter. She swept the worn brown patterned oilcloth on the floor, straightened the broken dejected articles of furniture, dusted the stiff marble mantle. She ran down the six flights of stairs and out into the sunshine, singing a little, because she was suddenly queerly happy. There were few enough flowers to be got around the fa.ctory districts. A patch of flaming nasturtiums climbing over a corner of a nearby rubbish-tip. She picked them gently, holding them cradled in her arms, tenderly, as she would have a baby. She begged a rose from the window-box at the cobbler’s shop, and (Continued in last columns.)