A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Stillwater Tragedy

T >> Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> The Stillwater Tragedy




"Shackford is a different build from Slocum," said Piggott.

"I guess the yard will find that out when he gets to be
proprietor," rejoined Durgin, clicking his spoon against the empty
glass to attract Snelling's attention.

"Going to be proprietor, is he?"

"Some day or other," answered Durgin. "First he'll step into the
business, and then into the family. He's had his eye on Slocum's girl
these four or five years. Got a cast of her fist up in his workshop.
Leave Dick Shackford alone for lining his nest and making it soft all
round."

"Why shouldn't he?" asked Stevens. "He deserves a good girl, and
there's none better. If sickness or any sort of trouble comes to a
poor man's door, she's never far off with her kind words and them
things the rich have when they are laid up."

"Oh, the girl is well enough."

"You couldn't say less. Before your mother died,"--Mrs. Durgin had
died the previous autumn,--"I see that angil going to your house many
a day with a little basket of comforts tucked under her wing. But
she's too good to be praised in such a place as this," added Stevens.
After a pause he inquired, "What makes you down on Shackford? He has
always been a friend to you."

"One of those friends who walk over your head," replied Durgin. "I
was in the yard two years before him, and see where he is."

"Lord love you," said Stevens, leaning back in his chair and
contemplating Durgin thoughtfully, "there is marble and marble; some
is Carrara marble, and some isn't. The fine grain takes a polish you
can't get on to the other."

"Of course, he is statuary marble, and I'm full of seams and
feldspar."

"You are like the most of us,--not the kind that can be worked up
into anything very ornamental."

"Thank you for nothing," said Durgin, turning away. "I came from
as good a quarry as ever Dick Shackford. Where's Torrini to-night?"

"Nobody has seen him since the difficulty," said Dexter, "except
Peters. Torrini sent for him after supper."

As Dexter spoke, the door opened and Peters entered. He went
directly to the group composed chiefly of Slocum's men, and without
making any remark began to distribute among them certain small blue
tickets, which they pocketed in silence. Glancing carelessly at his
piece of card-board, Durgin said to Peters,--

"Then it's decided?"

Peters nodded.

"How's Torrini?"

"He's all right."

"What does he say?"

"Nothing in perticular," responded Peters, "and nothing at all
about his little skylark with Shackford."

"He's a cool one!" exclaimed Durgin.

Though the slips of blue pasteboard had been delivered and
accepted without comment, it was known in a second through the
bar-room that a special meeting had been convened for the next night
by the officers of the Marble Workers' Association.






XIV





On the third morning after Torrini's expulsion from the yard, Mr.
Slocum walked into the studio with a printed slip in his hand. A
similar slip lay crumpled under a work-bench, where Richard had
tossed it. Mr. Slocum's kindly visage was full of trouble and
perplexity as he raised his eyes from the paper, which he had been
re-reading on the way up-stairs.

"Look at that!"

"Yes," remarked Richard, "I have been honored with one of those
documents."

"What does it mean?"

"It means business."

The paper in question contained a series of resolutions
unanimously adopted at a meeting of the Marble Workers' Association
of Stillwater, held in Grimsey's Hall the previous night. Dropping
the preamble, these resolutions, which were neatly printed with a
type-writing machine on a half letter sheet, ran as follows:--

_Resolved,_ That on and after the First of June proximo, the
pay of carvers in Slocum's Marble Yard shall be $2.75 per day,
instead of $2.50 as heretofore.

_Resolved,_ That on and after the same date, the rubbers and
polishers shall have $2.00 per day, instead of $1.75 as heretofore.

_Resolved,_ That on and after the same date the millmen are
to have $2.00 per day, instead of $1.75 as heretofore.

_Resolved,_ That during the months of June, July, and August
the shops shall knock off work on Saturdays at five P.M., instead of
at six P.M.

_Resolved,_ That a printed copy of these Resolutions be laid
before the Proprietor of Slocum's Marble Yard, and that his immediate
attention to them be respectfully requested. _Per order of
Committee M. W. A._

"Torrini is at the bottom of that," said Mr. Slocum.

"I hardly think so. This arrangement, as I told you the other day
before I had the trouble with him, has been in contemplation several
weeks. Undoubtedly Torrini used his influence to hasten the movement
already planned. The Association has too much shrewdness to espouse
the quarrel of an individual."

"What are we to do?"

"If you are in the same mind you were when we talked over the
possibility of an unreasonable demand like this, there is only one
thing to do."

"Fight it?"

"Fight it."

"I have been resolute, and all that sort of thing, in times past,"
observed Mr. Slocum, glancing out of the tail of his eye at Richard,
"and have always come off second best. The Association has drawn up
most of my rules for me, and had its own way generally."

"Since my time you have never been in so strong a position to make
a stand. We have got all the larger contracts out of the way.
Foreseeing what was likely to come, I have lately fought shy of
taking new ones. Here are heavy orders from Rafter & Son, the
Builders' Company, and others. We must decline them by to-night's
mail."

"Is it really necessary?" asked Mr. Slocum, knitting his forehead
into what would have been a scowl if his mild pinkish eyebrows had
permitted it.

"I think so."

"I hate to do that."

"Then we are at the mercy of the Association."

"If we do not come to their terms, you seriously believe they will
strike?"

"I do," replied Richard, "and we should be in a pretty fix."

"But these demands are ridiculous."

"The men are not aware of our situation; they imagine we have a
lot of important jobs on hand, as usual at this season. Formerly the
foreman of a shop had access to the order-book, but for the last year
or two I have kept it in the safe here. The other day Dexter came to
me and wanted to see what work was set down ahead in the blotter; but
I had an inspiration and didn't let him post himself."

"Is not some kind of compromise possible?" suggested Mr. Slocum,
looking over the slip again. "Now this fourth clause, about closing
the yard an hour early on Saturdays, I don't strongly object to that,
though with eighty hands it means, every week, eighty hours' work
which the yard pays for and doesn't get."

"I should advise granting that request. Such concessions are never
wasted. But, Mr. Slocum, this is not going to satisfy them. They have
thrown in one reasonable demand merely to flavor the rest. I happen
to know that they are determined to stand by their programme to the
last letter."

"You know that?"

"I have a friend at court. Of course this is not to be breathed,
but Denyven, without being at all false to his comrades, talks freely
with me. He says they are resolved not to give an inch."

"Then we will close the works."

"That is what I wanted you to say, sir!" cried Richard.

"With this new scale of prices and plenty of work, we might
probably come out a little ahead the next six months; but it wouldn't
pay for the trouble and the capital invested. Then when trade
slackened, we should be running at a loss, and there'd be another
wrangle over a reduction. We had better lie idle."

"Stick to that, sir, and may be it will not be necessary."

"But if they strike"--

"They won't all strike. At least," added Richard, "I hope not. I
have indirectly sounded several of the older hands, and they have
half promised to hold on; only half promised, for every man of them
at heart fears the trades-union more than No-bread--until No-bread
comes."

"Whom have you spoken with?"

"Lumley, Giles, Peterson, and some others,--your pensioners, I
call them."

"Yes, they were in the yard in my father's time; they have not
been worth their salt these ten years. When the business was turned
over to me I didn't discharge any old hand who had given his best
days to the yard. Somehow I couldn't throw away the squeezed lemons.
An employer owes a good workman something beyond the wages paid."

"And a workman owes a good employer something beyond the work
done. You stood by these men after they outlived their usefulness,
and if they do not stand by you now, they're a shabby set."

"I fancy they will, Richard."

"I think they had better, and I wish they would. We have enough
odds and ends to keep them busy awhile, and I shouldn't like to have
the clinking of chisels die out altogether under the old sheds."

"Nor I," returned Mr. Slocum, with a touch of sadness in his
intonation. "It has grown to be a kind of music to me," and he paused
to listen to the sounds of ringing steel that floated up from the
workshop.

"Whatever happens, that music shall not cease in the yard except
on Sundays, if I have to take the mallet and go at a slab all alone."

"Slocum's Yard with a single workman in it would be a pleasing
spectacle," said Mr. Slocum, smiling ruefully.

"It wouldn't be a bad time for _that_ workman to strike,"
returned Richard with a laugh.

"He could dictate his own terms," returned Mr. Slocum, soberly.
"Well, I suppose you cannot help thinking about Margaret; but don't
think of her now. Tell me what answer you propose to give the
Association,--how you mean to put it; for I leave the matter wholly
to you. I shall have no hand in it, further than to indorse your
action."

"To-morrow, then," said Richard, "for it is no use to hurry up a
crisis, I shall go to the workshops and inform them that their
request for short hours on Saturdays is granted, but that the other
changes they suggest are not to be considered. There will never be a
better opportunity, Mr. Slocum, to settle another question which has
been allowed to run too long."

"What's that?"

"The apprentice question."

"Would it be wise to touch on that at present?"

"While we are straightening out matters and putting things on a
solid basis, it seems to me essential to settle that. There was never
a greater imposition, or one more short-sighted, than this rule which
prevents the training of sufficient workmen. The trades-union will
discover their error some day when they have succeeded in forcing
manufacturers to import skilled labor by the wholesale. I would like
to tell the Marble Workers' Association that Slocum's Yard has
resolved to employ as many apprentices each year as there is room
for."

"I wouldn't dare risk it!"

"It will have to be done, sooner or later. It would be a capital
flank movement now. They have laid themselves open to an attack on
that quarter."

"I might as well close the gates for good and all."

"So you will, if it comes to that. You can afford to close the
gates, and they can't afford to have you. In a week they'd be back,
asking you to open them. Then you could have your pick of the live
hands, and drop the dead wood. If Giles or Peterson or Lumley or any
of those desert us, they are not to be let on again. I hope you will
promise me that, sir."

"If the occasion offers, you shall reorganize the shops in your
own way. I haven't the nerve for this kind of business, though I have
seen a great deal of it in the villages, first and last. Strikes are
terrible mistakes. Even when they succeed, what pays for the lost
time and the money squandered over the tavern-bar? What makes up for
the days or weeks when the fire was out on the hearth and the
children had no bread? That is what happens, you know."

"There is no remedy for such calamities," Richard answered. "Yet I
can imagine occasions when it would be better to let the fire go out
and the children want for bread."

"You are not advocating strikes!" exclaimed Mr. Slocum.

"Why not?"

"I thought you were for fighting them."

"So I am, in this instance; but the question has two sides. Every
man has the right to set a price on his own labor, and to refuse to
work for less; the wisdom of it is another matter. He puts himself in
the wrong only when he menaces the person or the property of the man
who has an equal right not to employ him. That is the blunder
strikers usually make in the end, and one by which they lose public
sympathy even when they are fighting an injustice. Now, sometimes it
_is_ an injustice that is being fought, and then it is right to
fight it with the only weapon a poor man has to wield against a power
which possesses a hundred weapons,--and that's a strike. For example,
the smelters and casters in the Miantowona Iron Works are meanly
underpaid."

"What, have they struck?"

"There's a general strike threatened in the village; foundry-men,
spinners, and all."

"So much the worse for everybody! I did not suppose it was as bad
as that. What has become of Torrini?"

"The day after he left us he was taken on as forgeman at Dana's."

"I am glad Dana has got him!"

"At the meeting, last night, Torrini gave in his resignation as
secretary of the Association; being no longer a marble worker, he was
not qualified to serve."

"We unhorsed him, then?"

"Rather. I am half sorry, too."

"Richard," said Mr. Slocum, halting in one of his nervous walks up
and down the room, "you are the oddest composition of hardness and
softness I ever saw."

"Am I?"

"One moment you stand braced like a lion to fight the whole yard,
and the next moment you are pitying a miscreant who would have laid
your head open without the slightest compunction."

"Oh, I forgive him," said Richard. "I was a trifle hasty myself.
Margaret thinks so too."

"Much Margaret knows about it!"

"I was inconsiderate, to say the least. When a man picks up a tool
by the wrong end he must expect to get cut."

"You didn't have a choice."

"I shouldn't have touched Torrini. After discharging him and
finding him disposed to resist my order to leave the yard, I ought to
have called in a constable. Usually it is very hard to anger me; but
three or four times in my life I have been carried away by a devil of
a temper which I couldn't control, it seized me so unawares. That was
one of the times."

The mallets and chisels were executing a blithe staccato movement
in the yard below, and making the sparks dance. No one walking among
the diligent gangs, and observing the placid faces of the men as they
bent over their tasks, would have suspected that they were awaiting
the word that meant bread and meat and home to them.

As Richard passed through the shops, dropping a word to a workman
here and there, the man addressed looked up cheerfully and made a
furtive dab at the brown paper cap, and Richard returned the salute
smilingly; but he was sad within. "The foolish fellows," he said to
himself, "they are throwing away a full loaf and are likely to get
none at all." Giles and two or three of the ancients were squaring a
block of marble under a shelter by themselves. Richard made it a
point to cross over and speak to them. In past days he had not been
exacting with these old boys, and they always had a welcome for him.

Slocum's Yard seldom presented a serener air of contented industry
than it wore that morning; but in spite of all this smooth outside it
was a foregone conclusion with most of the men that Slocum, with
Shackford behind him, would never submit to the new scale of wages.
There were a few who had protested against these resolutions and
still disapproved of them, but were forced to go with the
Association, which had really been dragged into the current by the
other trades.

The Dana Mills and the Miantowona Iron Works were paying lighter
wages than similar establishments nearer the great city. The managers
contended that they were paying as high if not higher rates, taking
into consideration the cheaper cost of living in Stillwater. "But you
get city prices for your wares," retorted the union; "you don't pay
city rents, and you shall pay city wages." Meetings were held at
Grimsey's Hall and the subject was canvassed, at first calmly and
then stormily. Among the molders, and possibly the sheet-iron
workers, there was cause for dissatisfaction; but the dissatisfaction
spread to where no grievance existed; it seized upon the spinners,
and finally upon the marble workers. Torrini fanned the flame there.
Taking for his text the rentage question, he argued that Slocum was
well able to give a trifle more for labor than his city competitors.
"The annual rent of a yard like Slocum's would be four thousand or
five thousand dollars in the city. It doesn't cost Slocum two hundred
dollars. It is no more than just that the laborer should have a
share--he only asks a beggarly share--of the prosperity which he has
helped to build up." This was specious and taking. Then there came
down from the great city a glib person disguised as The Workingman's
Friend,--no workingman himself, mind you, but a ghoul that lives upon
subscriptions and sucks the senses out of innocent human beings,--who
managed to set the place by the ears. The result of all which was
that one May morning every shop, mill, and factory in Stillwater was
served with a notice from the trades-union, and a general strike
threatened.

But our business at present is exclusively with Slocum's Yard.






XV





"Since we are in for it," said Mr. Slocum the next morning, "put
the case to them squarely."

Mr. Slocum's vertebræ had stiffened over night.

"Leave that to me, sir," Richard replied. "I have been shaping out
in my mind a little speech which I flatter myself will cover the
points. They have brought this thing upon themselves, and we are
about to have the clearest of understandings. I never saw the men
quieter."

"I don't altogether admire that. It looks as if they hadn't any
doubt as to the issue."

"The clearest-headed have no doubt; they know as well as you and I
do the flimsiness of those resolutions. But the thick heads are in a
fog. Every man naturally likes his pay increased; if a simple fellow
is told five or six hundred times that his wages ought to be raised,
the idea is so agreeable and insidious that by and by he begins to
believe himself grossly underpaid, though he may be getting twice
what he is worth. He doesn't reason about it; that's the last thing
he'll do for you. In this mood he lets himself be flown away by the
breath of some loud-mouthed demagogue, who has no interest in the
matter beyond hearing his own talk and passing round the hat after
the meeting is over. That is what has happened to our folks below.
But they _are_ behaving handsomely."

"Yes, and I don't like it."

Since seven o'clock the most unimpeachable decorum had reigned in
the workshops. It was now nine, and this brief dialogue had occurred
between Mr. Slocum and Richard on the veranda, just as the latter was
on the point of descending into the yard to have his talk with the
men.

The workshops--or rather the shed in which the workshops were, for
it was one low structure eighteen or twenty feet wide and open on the
west side--ran the length of the yard, and with the short extension
at the southerly end formed the letter L. There were no partitions,
an imaginary line separating the different gangs of workers. A person
standing at the head of the building could make himself heard more or
less distinctly in the remotest part.

The grating lisp of the wet saws eating their way into the marble
bowlder, and the irregular quick taps of the seventy or eighty
mallets were not suspended as Richard took his stand beside a tall
funereal urn at the head of the principal workshop. After a second's
faltering he rapped smartly on the lip of the ukrn with the key of
his studio-door.

Instantly every arm appeared paralyzed, and the men stood
motionless, with the tools in their hands.

Richard began in a clear but not loud voice, though it seemed to
ring on the sudden silence:--

"Mr. Slocum has asked me to say a few words to you, this morning,
about those resolutions, and one or two other matters that have
occurred to him in this connection. I am no speech-maker; I never
learned that trade"--

"Never learned any trade," muttered Durgin, inaudibly.

--"but I think I can manage some plain, honest talk, for
straight-forward men."

Richard's exordium was listened to with painful attention.

"In the first place," he continued, "I want to remind you,
especially the newer men, that Slocum's Yard has always given steady
work and prompt pay to Stillwater hands. No hand has ever been turned
off without sufficient cause, or kept on through mere favoritism.
Favors have been shown, but they have been shown to all alike. If
anything has gone crooked, it has been straightened out as soon as
Mr. Slocum knew of it. That has been the course of the yard in the
past, and the Proprietor doesn't want you to run away with the idea
that that course is going to be changed. One change, for the time
being, is going to be made at our own suggestion. From now, until the
1st of September, this yard will close gates on Saturdays at five
P.M. instead of six P.M."

Several voices cried, "Good for Slocum!" "Where's Slocum?" "Why
don't Slocum speak for himself?" cried one voice.

"It is Mr. Slocum's habit," answered Richard, "to give his
directions to me, I give them to the foremen, and the foremen to the
shops. Mr. Slocum follows that custom on this occasion. With regard
to the new scale of wages which the Association has submitted to him,
the Proprietor refuses to accept it, or any modification of it."

A low murmur ran through the workshops.

"What's a modificashun, sir?" asked Jemmy Willson, stepping
forward, and scratching his left ear diffidently.

"A modification," replied Richard, considerably embarrassed to
give an instant definition, "is a--a"--

"A splitting of the difference, by--!" shouted somebody in the
third shop.

"Thank you," said Richard, glancing in the direction of his
impromptu Webster's Unabridged. "Mr. Slocum does not propose to split
the difference. The wages in every department are to be just what
they are,--neither more nor less. If anybody wishes to make a
remark," he added, observing a restlessness in several of the men, "I
beg he will hold on until I get through. I shall not detain you much
longer, as the parson says before he has reached the middle of his
sermon.

"What I say now, I was charged to make particularly clear to you.
It is this: In future Mr. Slocum intends to run Slocum's Yard
himself. Neither you, nor I, nor the Association will be allowed to
run it for him. [Sensation.] Until now the Association has tied him
down to two apprentices a year. From this hour, out, Mr. Slocum will
take on, not two, or twenty, but two hundred apprentices if the
business warrants it."

The words were not clearly off Richard's lips when the foreman of
the shop in which he was speaking picked up a couple of small drills,
and knocked them together with a sharp click. In an instant the men
laid aside their aprons, bundled up their tools, and marched out of
the shed two by two, in dead silence. That same click was repeated
almost simultaneously in the second shop, and the same evolution took
place. Then click, click, click! went the drills, sounding fainter
and fainter in the distant departments; and in less than three
minutes there was not a soul left in Slocum's Yard except the Orator
of the Day.

Richard had anticipated some demonstration, either noisy or
violent, perhaps both; but this solemn, orderly desertion dashed him.

He stepped into the middle of the yard, and glancing up beheld
Margaret and Mr. Slocum standing on the veranda. Even at that
distance he could perceive the pallor on one face, and the
consternation written all over the other.

Hanging his head with sadness, Richard crossed the yard, which
gave out mournful echoes to his footfalls, and swung to the large
gate, nearly catching old Giles by the heel as he did so. Looking
through the slats, he saw Lumley and Peterson hobbling arm in arm
down the street,--after more than twenty-five years of kindly
treatment.

"Move number one," said Richard, lifting the heavy cross-piece
into its place and fastening it with a wooden pin. "Now I must go and
prop up Mr. Slocum."






XVI





There is no solitude which comes so near being tangible as that of
a vast empty workshop, crowded a moment since. The busy, intense life
that has gone from it mysteriously leaves behind enough of itself to
make the stillness poignant. One might imagine the invisible ghost of
doomed Toil wandering from bench to bench, and noiselessly fingering
the dropped tools, still warm from the workman's palm. Perhaps this
impalpable presence is the artisan's anxious thought, stolen back to
brood over the uncompleted task.

Though Mr. Slocum had spoken lightly of Slocum's Yard with only
one workman in it, when he came to contemplate the actual fact he was
struck by the pathos of it, and the resolution with which he awoke
that morning began to desert him.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.