WHEN GOD LAUGHS

AND OTHER STORIES

BY JACK LONDON

McKINLAY, STONE & MACKENZIE

NEW YORK

Copyright, 1906, by the Ess Ess Publishing Company, by the Crowell Publishing Company, and by the Short Story Publishing Company.

Copyright, 1907, by the Ess Ess Publishing Company, by the International Magazine Company, and by the Pacific Monthly Pub- lishing Company.

Copyright, 1908, by the Town Topics Publishing Company.

Copyright, 1909, by Jas. Horsburgh, Jr., by Harper and Brothers, and by the Curtis Publishing Company.

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Stt up and electFotyped. Published January, 1911.

JAN 2 7 1966

WHEN GOD LAUGHS

(WITH COMPLIMENTS TO HARRY COWELL)

" The gods, the gods are stronger; time Falls down before them, all men's knees Bow, all men's prayers and sorrows climb Like incense toward them; yea, for these Are gods, Felise."

CARQUINEZ had relaxed finally. He stole a glance at the rattling win- dows, looked upward at the beamed roof, and listened for a moment to the savage roar of the southeaster as it caught the bunga- low in its bellowing jaws. Then he held his glass between him and the fire and laughed for joy through the golden wine.

"It is beautiful," he said. "It is sweetly sweet. It is a woman's wine, and it was made for gray-robed saints to drink."

"We grow it on our own warm hills," I said, with pardonable California pride. "You rode

3

4 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

up yesterday through the vines from which it was made."

It was worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his blood. He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he was prone to be as deadly dull as a British Sunday — not dull as other men are dull, but dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte Carquinez was when he was really himself.

From all this it must not be inferred that Carquinez, who is my dear friend and dearer comrade, was a sot. Far from it. He rarely erred. As I have said, he was an artist. He knew when he had enough, and enough, with him, was equilibrium — the equilibrium that is yours and mine when we are sober.

His was a wise and instinctive temperateness that savored of the Greek. Yet he was far from Greek. "I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Span- iard," I have heard him say. And in truth he

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 5

looked it, a compound of strange and ancient races, what of his swarthy skin and the asym- metry and primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively arched brows, were wide apart and black with the blackness that is barbaric, while before them was perpetually falling down a great black mop of hair through which he gazed like a roguish satyr from a thicket. He invariably wore a soft flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket, and his neck- tie was red. This latter stood for the red flag (he had once lived with the socialists of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and brotherhood of man. Also, he had never been known to wear anything on his head save a leather- banded sombrero. It was even rumored that he had been born with this particular piece of headgear. And in my experience it was pro- vocative of nothing short of sheer delight to see that Mexican sombrero hailing a cab in Picca- dilly or storm-tossed in the crush for the New York Elevated.

As I have said, Carquinez was made quick by wine — " as the clay was made quick when

6 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

God breathed the breath of life into it," was his way of saying it. I confess that he was blasphemously intimate with God; and I must add that there was no blasphemy in him. He was at all times honest, and, because he was compounded of paradoxes, greatly misunder- stood by those who did not know him. He could be as elementally raw at times as a scream- ing savage; and at other times as delicate as a maid, as subtle as a Spaniard. And — well, was he not Aztec ? Inca ? Spaniard ?

And now I must ask pardon for the space I have given him. (He is my friend, and I love him.) The house was shaking to the storm, as he drew closer to the fire and laughed at it through his wine. He looked at me, and by the added lustre of his eye, and by the alertness of it, I knew that at last he was pitched in his proper key.

"And so you think you've won out against the gods ?" he demanded.

"Why the gods?"

"Whose will but theirs has put satiety upon man ?" he cried.

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 7

"And whence the will in me to escape satiety ?" I asked triumphantly.

"Again the gods," he laughed. "It is their game we play. They deal and shuffle all the cards . . . and take the stakes. Think not that you have escaped by fleeing from the mad cities. You with your vine-clad hills, your sun- sets and your sunrises, your homely fare and simple round of living !

"I've watched you ever since I came. You have not won. You have surrendered. You have made terms with the enemy. You have made confession that you are tired. You have flown the white flag of fatigue. You have nailed up a notice to the effect that life is ebbing down in you. You have run away from life. You have played a trick, shabby trick. You have balked at the game. You refuse to play. You have thrown your cards under the table and run away to hide, here amongst your hills."

He tossed his straight hair back from his flash- ing eyes, and scarcely interrupted to roll a long, brown, Mexican cigarette.

"But the gods know. It is an old trick. All

8 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

the generations of man have tried it ... and lost. The gods know how to deal with such as you. To pursue is to possess, and to possess is to be sated. And so you, in your wisdom, have refused any longer to pursue. You have elected surcease. Very well. You will become sated with surcease. You say you have escaped satiety! You have merely bartered it for sen- ility. And senility is another name for satiety. It is satiety's masquerade. Bah ! "

"But look at me!" I cried.

Carquinez was ever a demon for haling one's soul out and making rags and tatters of it.

He looked me witheringly up and down.

"You see no signs," I challenged.

"Decay is insidious," he retorted. "You are rotten ripe."

I laughed and forgave him for his very deviltry. But he refused to be forgiven.

"Do I not know?" he asked. "The gods always win. I have watched men play for years what seemed a winning game. In the end they lost."

"Don't you ever make mistakes ?" I asked.

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 9

He blew many meditative rings of smoke before replying.

"Yes, I was nearly fooled, once. Let me tell you. There was Marvin Fiske. You remem- ber him ? And his Dantesque face and poet's soul, singing his chant of the flesh, the very priest of Love ? And there was Ethel Baird, whom also you must remember/'

"A warm saint," I said.

"That is she! Holy as Love, and sweeter! Just a woman, made for love ; and yet — how shall I say ? — drenched through with holiness as your own air here is with the perfume of flowers. Well, they married. They played a hand with the gods — "

"And they won, they gloriously won!" I broke in.

Carquinez looked at me pityingly, and his voice was like a funeral bell.

" They lost. They supremely, colossally lost."

"But the world believes otherwise," I ven- tured coldly.

"The world conjectures. The world sees only the face of things. But I know. Has it

io WHEN GOD LAUGHS

ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the veil, buried herself in that dolorous convent of the living dead ?"

"Because she loved him so, and when he died . . ."

Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez's sneer.

"A pat answer," he said, "machine-made like a piece of cotton-drill. The world's judgment ! And much the world knows about it. Like you, she fled from life. She was beaten. She flung out the white flag of fatigue. And no belea- guered city ever flew that flag in such bitterness and tears.

"Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I know. They had pon- dered the problem of satiety. They loved Love. They knew to the uttermost farthing the value of Love. They loved him so well that they were fain to keep him always, warm and athrill in their hearts. They welcomed his coming; they feared to have him depart.

"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking easement, and when he

WHEN GOD LAUGHS n

found that for which he sought, he died. Love denied was Love alive ; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you follow me ? They saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it has. To eat and still be hungry — man has never accomplished that feat. The problem of satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp famine-edge of appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem, for they loved Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet ardors brimming in their eyes ; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks; his voice playing in and out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo in their throats, and again shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness which he alone can utter.

" How do I know all this ? I saw — much. More I learned from her diary. This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wan- dering voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that flame-winged lute-player whom none sees but for a moment, in a rain- bow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call Amor,

12 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one wrought by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent with desire.' v "How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence of desire ? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was a great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.

"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of Love. They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before, with others, in the days before they met; and in those days they had throttled Love with caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him in the pit of satiety.

"They were not cold wraiths, this man and woman. They were warm human. They had no Saxon soberness in their blood. The color of it was sunset-red. They glowed with it. Temperamentally theirs was the French joy in the flesh. They were idealists, but their ideal-

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 13

ism was Gallic. It was not tempered by the chill and sombre fluid that for the English serves as blood. There was no stoicism about them. They were Americans, descended out of the English, and yet the refraining and self-denying of the English spirit-groping were not theirs.

"They were all this that I have said, and they were made for joy, only they achieved a concept. A curse on concepts ! They played with logic, and this was their logic. — But first let me tell you of a talk we had one night. It was of Gautier's Madeline de Maupin. You remem- ber the maid ? She kissed once, and once only, and kisses she would have no more. Not that she found kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with repetition they would cloy. Satiety again ! She tried to play without stakes against the gods. Now this is contrary to a rule of the game the gods themselves have made. Only the rules are not posted over the table. Mortals must play in order to learn the rules.

" Well, to the logic. The man and the woman argued thus : Why kiss once only ? If to kiss

14 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

once were wise, was it not wiser to kiss not at all ? Thus could they keep Love alive. Fasting, he would knock forever at their hearts.

"Perhaps it was out of their heredity that they achieved this unholy concept. The breed will out, and sometimes most fantastically. Thus in them did cursed Albion array herself a schem- ing wanton, a bold, cold-calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this I know : it was out of their inordinate desire for joy that they forewent joy.

"As he said (I read it long afterward in one of his letters to her) : 'To hold you in my arms, close, and yet not close. To yearn for you, and never to have you, and so always to have you/ And she : 'For you to be always just beyond my reach. To be ever attaining you, and yet never attaining you, and for this to last forever, always fresh and new, and always with the first flush upon us.'

"That is not the way they said it. On my lips their love-philosophy is mangled. And who am I to delve into their soul-stuff ? I am a frog, on the dank edge of a great darkness, gazing

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 15

goggle-eyed at the mystery and wonder of their flaming souls.

"And they were right, as far as they went. Everything is good ... as long as it is un- possessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses ; they run in span.

"'And time could only tutor us to eke

Our rapture's warmth with custom's afterglow.'

"They got that from a sonnet of Alfred Aus- tin's. It was called 'Love's Wisdom.' It was the one kiss of Madeline de Maupin. How did it run ?

"'Kiss we and part; no further can we go;

And better death than we from high to low Should dwindle, or decline from strong to weak.'

" But they were wiser. They would not kiss and part. They would not kiss at all, and thus they planned to stay at Love's topmost peak. They married. You were in England at the time. And never was there such a marriage. They kept their secret to themselves. I did not know, then. Their rapture's warmth did not cool. Their love burned with increasing

16 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

brightness. Never was there anything like it. The time passed, the months, the years, and ever the flame-winged lute-player grew more resplendent.

"Everybody marvelled. They became the wonderful lovers, and they were greatly envied. Sometimes women pitied her because she was childless ; it is the form the envy of such crea- tures takes.

"And I did not know their secret. I pondered and I marvelled. As first I had expected, sub- consciously I imagine, the passing of their love. Then I became aware that it was Time that passed and Love that remained. Then I be- came curious. What was their secret ? What were the magic fetters with which they bound Love to them ? How did they hold the graceless elf? What elixir of eternal love had they drunk together as had Tristram and Iseult of old time ? And whose hand had brewed the fairy drink ?

"As I say, I was curious, and I watched them. They were love-mad. They lived in an unend- ing revel of Love. They made a pomp and cere- monial of it. They saturated themselves in the

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 17

art and poetry of Love. No, they were not neurotics. They were sane and healthy, and they were artists. But they had accomplished the impossible. They had achieved deathless desire.

"And I ? I saw much of them and their everlasting miracle of Love. I puzzled and won- dered, and then one day — "

Carquinez broke off abruptly and asked, "Have you ever read, 'Love's Waiting Time' ?"

I shook my head.

" Page wrote it — Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of verse that gave me the clew. One day, in the window-seat near the big piano — you remember how she could play ? She used to laugh, sometimes, and doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called me a 'music-sot,' once, a 'sound-de- bauchee.' What a voice he had ! When he sang I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew almost patronizing, and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could outwit them and their tricks.

"It was a spectacle for God, that man and

i8 WHEN' GOD LAUGHS

woman, years married, and singing love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love him- self, with a ripeness and wealth of ardor that young lovers can never know. Young lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To see them, all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance, lavishing caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every silence — their love driving them toward each other, and they withholding like fluttering moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving each about the other in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight ! It seemed, in obedience to some great law of physics, more potent than gravitation and more subtle, that they must corporeally melt each into each there before my very eyes. Small wonder they were called the wonderful lovers.

"I have wandered. Now to the clew. One day in the window-seat I found a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to ' Love's Waiting Time/ The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and there I read : —

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 19

"'So sweet it is to stand but just apart, To know each other better, and to keep The soft, delicious sense of two that touch . . .

O love, not yet ! . . . Sweet, let us keep our love Wrapped round with sacred mystery awhile, Waiting the secret of the coming years, That come not yet, not yet . . . sometime . . . not yet ...

Oh, yet a little while our love may grow! When it has blossomed it will haply die. Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep, Bedded in dead denial yet some while . . . Oh, yet a little while, a little while.'

"I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without moving for a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the verse had imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of God's lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the forerunner of young life — young life that is imperative to be born !

"I conned the lines over in my mind — 'Not yet, sometime' — 'O Love, not yet' — 'Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.' And I laughed aloud, ha ! ha ! I saw with white vision their

20 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

blameless souls. They were children. They did not understand. They played with Nature's fire and bedded with a naked sword. They laughed at the gods. They would stop the cos- mic sap. They had invented a system, and brought it to the gaming-table of life, and ex- pected to win out. 'Beware!' I cried. 'The gods are behind the table. They make new rules for every system that is devised. You have no chance to win.'

"But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their system was worth- less and throw it away. They would be content with whatever happiness the gods gave them and not strive to wrest more away.

"I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and still the famine- edge of their love grew the sharper. Never did they dull it with a permitted love-clasp. They ground and whetted it on self-denial, and sharper and sharper it grew. This went on until even I doubted. Did the gods sleep ? I wondered. Or were they dead ? I laughed to myself. The man and the woman had made a

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 21

miracle. They had outwitted God. They had shamed the flesh, and blackened the face of the good Earth Mother. They had played with her fire and not been burned. They were immune. They were themselves gods, knowing good from evil and tasting not. 'Was this the way gods came to be ? ' I asked myself. * I am a frog,' I said. 'But for my mud-lidded eyes I should have been blinded by the brightness of this won- der I have witnessed. I have puffed myself up with my wisdom and passed judgment upon gods/

"Yet even in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods. They were man and woman — soft clay that sighed and thrilled, shot through with desire, thumbed with strange Weaknesses which the gods have not."

Carquinez broke from his narrative to roll another cigarette and to laugh harshly. It was not a pretty laugh ; it was like the mockery of a devil, and it rose over and rode the roar of the storm that came muffled to our ears from the crashing outside world.

"I am a frog," he said apologetically. "How

22 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

were they to understand ? They were artists, not biologists. They knew the clay of the studio, but they did not know the clay of which they themselves were made. But this I will say — they played high. Never was there such a game before, and I doubt me if there will ever be such a game again.

" Never was lovers' ecstasy like theirs. They had not killed Love with kisses. They had quickened him with denial. And by denial they drove him on till he was all aburst with desire. And the flame-winged lute-player fanned them with his warm wings till they were all but swooning. It was the very delirium of Love, and it continued undiminished and in- creasing through the weeks and months.

"They longed and yearned, with all the fond pangs and sweet delicious agonies, with an in- tensity never felt by lovers before nor since.

"And then one day the drowsy gods ceased nodding. They aroused and looked at the man and woman who had made a mock of them. And the man and woman looked into each other's eyes one morning and knew that something was

WHEN GOD LAUGHS 23

gone. It was the flame-winged one. He had fled, silently, in the night, from their anchorites' board.

"They looked into each other's eyes and knew that they did not care. Desire was dead. Do you understand ? Desire was dead. And they had never kissed. Not once had they kissed. Love was gone. They would never yearn and burn again. For them there was nothing left — no more tremblings and flutterings and delicious anguishes, no more throbbing and pulsing, and sighing and song. Desire was dead. It had died in the night, on a couch cold and unattended ; nor had they witnessed its passing. They learned it for the first time in each other's eyes.

"The gods may not be kind, but they are often merciful. They had twirled the little ivory ball and swept the stakes from the table- All that remained was the man and woman gaz- ing into each other's cold eyes. And then he died. That was the mercy. Within the week Marvin Fiske was dead — you remember the ac- cident. And in her diary, written at this time, I long afterward read Mitchell Kennedy's : —

*4 WHEN GOD LAUGHS

"There was not a single hour We might have kissed and did not

"Oh, the irony of it!" I cried out.

And Carquinez, in the firelight a veritable Mephistopheles in velvet jacket, fixed me with his black eyes.

"And they won, you said ? The world's judgment ! I have told you, and I know. They won as you are winning, here in your hills."

" But you," I demanded hotly ; " you with you orgies of sound and sense, with your mad cities and madder frolics — bethink you that you win?"

He shook his head slowly. " Because you, with your sober bucolic regime, lose, is no reason that I should win. We never win. Sometimes we think we win. That is a little pleasantry of the gods."

THE APOSTATE

THE APOSTATE

Now I wake me up to work; I pray the Lord I may not shirk. If I should die before the night,

I pray the Lord my work's all right.

Amen.

"TF you don't git up, Johnny, I won't give

you a bite to eat!"

The threat had no effect on the boy. He clung stubbornly to sleep, fighting for its ob- livion as the dreamer fights for his dream. The boy's hands loosely clenched themselves, and he made feeble, spasmodic blows at the air. These blows were intended for his mother, but she betrayed practised familiarity in avoid- ing them as she shook him roughly by the shoulder.

"Lemme 'lone!"

It was a cry that began, muffled, in the deeps of sleep, that swiftly rushed upward, like a wail, into passionate belligerence, and that

27

28 THE APOSTATE

died away and sank down into an inarticulate whine. It was a bestial cry, as of a soul in torment, filled with infinite protest and pain.

But she did not mind. She was a sad- eyed, tired-faced woman, and she had grown used to this task, which she repeated every day of her life. She got a grip on the bed- clothes and tried to strip them down; but the boy, ceasing his punching, clung to them des- perately. In a huddle, at the foot of the bed, he still remained covered. Then she tried dragging the bedding to the floor. The boy opposed her. She braced herself. Hers was the superior weight, and the boy and bedding gave, the former instinctively following the latter in order to shelter against the chill of the room that bit into his body.

As he toppled on the edge of the bed it seemed that he must fall head-first to the floor. But consciousness fluttered up in him. He righted himself and for a moment perilously balanced. Then he struck the floor on his feet. On the instant his mother seized him by the shoulders and shook him. Again his

THE APOSTATE 29

fists struck out, this time with more force and directness. At the same time his eyes opened. She released him. He was awake.

"All right/' he mumbled.

She caught up the lamp and hurried out, leaving him in darkness.

"You'll be docked," she warned back to him.

He did not mind the darkness. When he had got into his clothes, he went out into the kitchen. His tread was very heavy for so thin and light a boy. His legs dragged with their own weight, which seemed unreasonable be- cause they were such skinny legs. He drew a broken-bottomed chair to the table.

"Johnny!" his mother called sharply.

He arose as sharply from the chair, and, without a word, went to the sink. It was a greasy, filthy sink. A smell came up from the outlet. He took no notice of it. That a sink should smell was to him part of the natural order, just as it was a part of the natural order that the soap should be grimy with dish-water and hard to lather. Nor did he try very hard to make it lather. Several splashes of the

30 THE APOSTATE

cold water from the running faucet completed the function. He did not wash his teeth. For that matter he had never seen a tooth- brush, nor did he know that there existed beings in the world who were guilty of so great a foolishness as tooth washing.

"You might wash yourself wunst a day without bein' told," his mother complained.

She was holding a broken lid on the pot as she poured two cups of coffee. He made no remark, for this was a standing quarrel be- tween them, and the one thing upon which his mother was hard as adamant. "Wunst" a day it was compulsory that he should wash his face. He dried himself on a greasy towel, damp and dirty and ragged, that left his face covered with shreds of lint.

"I wish we didn't live so far away," she said, as he sat down. "I try to do the best I can. You know that. But a dollar on the rent is such a savin', an' we've more room here. You know that."

He scarcely followed her. He had heard it all before, many times. The range of her

THE APOSTATE 31

thought was limited, and she was ever harking back to the hardship worked upon them by living so far from the mills.

"A dollar means more grub," he remarked sententiously. "I'd sooner do the walkin' an* git the grub."

He ate hurriedly, half chewing the bread and washing the unmasticated chunks down with coffee. The hot and muddy liquid went by the name of coffee. Johnny thought it was coffee — and excellent coffee. That was one of the few of life's illusions that remained to him. He had never drunk real coffee in his life.

In addition to the bread, there was a small piece of cold pork. His mother refilled his cup with coffee. As he was finishing the bread, he began to watch if more was forthcoming. She intercepted his questioning glance.

"Now, don't be hoggish, Johnny," was her comment. "You've had your share. Your brothers an' sisters are smaller'n you."

He did not answer the rebuke. He was not much of a talker. Also, he ceased his hungry

32 THE APOSTATE

glancing for more. He was uncomplaining, with a patience that was as terrible as the school in which it had been learned. He finished his coffee, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and started to rise.

"Wait a second," she said hastily. "I guess the loaf kin stand you another slice — a thin un."

There was legerdemain in her actions. With all the seeming of cutting a slice from the loaf for him, she put loaf and slice back in the bread box and conveyed to him one of her own two slices. She believed she had deceived him, but he had noted her sleight-of-hand. Nevertheless, he took the bread shamelessly. He had a philosophy that his mother, what of her chronic sickliness, was not much of an eater anyway.

She saw that he was chewing the bread dry, and reached over and emptied her coffee cup into his.

"Don't set good somehow on my stomach this morning/' she explained.

A distant whistle, prolonged and shrieking,

THE APOSTATE 33

brought both of them to their feet. She glanced at the tin alarm-clock on the shelf. The hands stood at half-past five. The rest of the factory world was just arousing from sleep. She drew a shawl about her shoulders, and on her head put a dingy hat, shapeless and ancient.

"We've got to run," she said, turning the wick of the lamp and blowing down the chim- ney.

They groped their way out and down the stairs. It was clear and cold, and Johnny shivered at the first contact with the outside air. The stars had not yet begun to pale in the sky, and the city lay in blackness. Both Johnny and his mother shuffled their feet as they walked. There was no ambition in the leg muscles to swing the feet clear of the ground.

After fifteen silent minutes, his mother turned off to the right.

"Don't be late," was her final warning from out of the dark that was swallowing her up.

He made no response, steadily keeping on his way. In the factory quarter, doors were opening everywhere, and he was soon one of a

D

34 THE APOSTATE

multitude that pressed onward through the dark. As he entered the factory gate the whistle blew again. He glanced at the east. Across a ragged sky-line of housetops a pale light was beginning to creep. This much he saw of the day as he turned his back upon it and joined his work gang.

He took his place in one of many long rows of machines. Before him, above a bin filled with small bobbins, were large bobbins revolv- ing rapidly. Upon these he wound the jute- twine of the small bobbins. The work was simple. All that was required was celerity. The small bobbins were emptied so rapidly, and there were so many large bobbins that did the emptying, that there were no idle moments.

He worked mechanically. When a small bobbin ran out, he used his left hand for a brake, stopping the large bobbin and at the same time, with thumb and forefinger, catch- ing the flying end of twine. Also, at the same time, with his right hand, he caught up the loose twine-end of a small bobbin. These various acts with both hands were performed

THE APOSTATE 35

simultaneously and swiftly. Then there would come a flash of his hands as he looped the weaver's knot and released the bobbin. There was nothing difficult about weaver's knots. He once boasted he could tie them in his sleep. And for that matter, he sometimes did, toiling centuries long in a single night at tying an end- less succession of weaver's knots.

Some of the boys shirked, wasting time and machinery by not replacing the small bobbins when they ran out. And there was an over- seer to prevent this. He caught Johnny's neighbor at the trick, and boxed his ears.

" Look at Johnny there — why ain't you like him ?" the overseer wrathfully demanded.

Johnny's bobbins were running full blast, but he did not thrill at the indirect praise. There had been a time . . . but that was long ago, very long ago. His apathetic face was expressionless as he listened to himself being held up as a shining example. He was the perfect worker. He knew that. He had been told so, often. It was a commonplace, and besides it didn't seem to mean anything to him

36 THE APOSTATE

any more. From the perfect worker he had evolved into the perfect machine. When his work went wrong, it was with him as with the machine, due to faulty material. It would have been as possible for a perfect nail-die to cut imperfect nails as for him to make a mis- take.

And small wonder. There had never been a time when he had not been in intimate re- lationship with machines. Machinery had al- most been bred into him, and at any rate he had been brought up on it. Twelve years before, there had been a small flutter of excite- ment in the loom room of this very mill. Johnny's mother had fainted. They stretched her out on the floor in the midst of the shriek- ing machines. A couple of elderly women were called from their looms. The foreman assisted. And in a few minutes there was one more soul in the loom room than had entered by the doors. It was Johnny, born with the pounding, crashing roar of the looms in his ears, drawing with his first breath the warm, moist air that was thick with flying lint. He

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had coughed that first day in order to rid his lungs of the lint; and for the same reason he had coughed ever since.

The boy alongside of Johnny whimpered and sniffed. The boy's face was convulsed with hatred for the overseer who kept a threaten- ing eye on him from a distance; but every bobbin was running full. The boy yelled ter- rible oaths into the whirling bobbins before him; but the sound did not carry half a dozen feet, the roaring of the room holding it in and containing it like a wall.

Of all this Johnny took no notice. He had a way of accepting things. Besides, things grow monotonous by repetition, and this par- ticular happening he had witnessed many times. It seemed to him as useless to oppose the overseer as to defy the will of a machine. Machines were made to go in certain ways and to perform certain tasks. It was the same with the overseer.

But at eleven o'clock there was excitement in the room. In an apparently occult way the excitement instantly permeated everywhere.

38 THE APOSTATE

The one-legged boy who worked on the other side of Johnny bobbed swiftly across the floor to a bin truck that stood empty. Into this he dived out of sight, crutch and all. The super- intendent of the mill was coming along, accom- panied by a young man. He was well dressed and wore a starched shirt — a gentleman, in Johnny's classification of men, and also, "the Inspector."

He looked sharply at the boys as he passed along. Sometimes he stopped and asked ques- tions. When he did so, he was compelled to shout at the top of his lungs, at which mo- ments his face was ludicrously contorted with the strain of making himself heard. His quick eye noted the empty machine alongside of Johnny's, but he said nothing. Johnny also caught his eye, and he stopped abruptly. He caught Johnny by the arm to draw him back a step from the machine; but with an exclama- tion of surprise he released the arm.

"Pretty skinny," the superintendent laughed anxiously.

"Pipe stems," was the answer. "Look at

THE APOSTATE 39

those legs. The boy's got the rickets — in- cipient, but he's got them. If epilepsy doesn't get him in the end, it will be because tuber- culosis gets him first."

Johnny listened, but did not understand. Furthermore he was not interested in future ills. There was an immediate and more serious ill that threatened him in the form of the in- spector.

"Now, my boy, I want you to tell me the truth," the inspector said, or shouted, bending close to the boy's ear to make him hear. "How old are you ?"

"Fourteen," Johnny lied, and he lied with the full force of his lungs. So loudly did he lie that it started him off in a dry, hacking cough that lifted the lint which had been settling in his lungs all morning.

"Looks sixteen at least," said the superin- tendent.

"Or sixty," snapped the inspector.

"He's always looked that way."

"How long?" asked the inspector, quickly.

"For years. Never gets a bit older."

40 THE APOSTATE

"Or younger, I dare say. I suppose he's worked here all those years?"

"Off and on — but that was before the new law was passed," the superintendent hastened to add.

" Machine idle ? " the inspector asked, point- ing at the unoccupied machine beside Johnny's, in which the part-filled bobbins were flying like mad.

"Looks that way." The superintendent mo- tioned the overseer to him and shouted in his ear and pointed at the machine. "Machine's idle," he reported back to the inspector.

They passed on, and Johnny returned to his work, relieved in that the ill had been averted. But the one-legged boy was not so fortunate. The sharp-eyed inspector haled him out at arm's length from the bin truck. His lips were quivering, and his face had all the expression of one upon whom was fallen profound and irremediable disaster. The overseer looked astounded, as though for the first time he had laid eyes on the boy, while the superintendent's face expressed shock and displeasure.

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"I know him/' the inspector said. "He's twelve years old. I've had him discharged from three factories inside the year. This makes the fourth."

He turned to the one-legged boy. "You promised me, word and honor, that you'd go to school."

The one-legged boy burst into tears. " Please, Mr. Inspector, two babies died on us, and we're awful poor."

"What makes you cough that way?" the inspector demanded, as though charging him with crime.

And as in denial of guilt, the one-legged boy replied: "It ain't nothin'. I jes' caught a cold last week, Mr. Inspector, that's all."

In the end the one-legged boy went out of