Short Fiction by Herman Melville (leveled readers txt) 📕

A row of horse-posts, their north sides plastered with adhesive snow, flanked the factory wall. The bleak frost packed and paved the square as with some ringing metal.

The inverted similitude recurred⁠—“The sweet, tranquil Temple garden, with the Thames bordering its green beds,” strangely meditated I.

But where are the gay bachelors?

Then, as I and my horse stood shivering in the wind-spray, a girl ran from a neighboring dormitory door, and throwing her thin apron over her bare head, made for the opposite building.

“One moment, my girl; is there no shed hereabouts which I may drive into?”

Pausing, she turned upon me a face pale with work, and blue with cold; an eye supernatural with unrelated misery.

“Nay,” faltered I, “I mistook you. Go on; I want nothing.”

Leading my horse close to the door from which she had come, I knocked. Another pale, blue girl appeared, shivering in the doorway as, to prevent the blast, she jealously held the door ajar.

“Nay, I mistake again. In God’s name shut the door. But hold, is there no man about?”

That moment a dark-complexioned well-wrapped personage passed, making for the factory door, and spying him coming, the girl rapidly closed the other one.

“Is there no horse-shed here, Sir?”

“Yonder, the woodshed,” he replied, and disappeared inside the factory.

With much ado I managed to wedge in horse and pung between scattered piles of wood all sawn and split. Then, blanketing my horse, and piling my buffalo on the blanket’s top, and tucking in its edges well around the breastband and breeching, so that the wind might not strip him bare, I tied him fast, and ran lamely for the factory door, still with frost, and cumbered with my driver’s dreadnaught.

Immediately I found myself standing in a spacious place, intolerably lighted by long rows of windows, focusing inward the snowy scene without.

At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.

In one corner stood some huge frame of ponderous iron, with a vertical thing like a piston periodically rising and falling upon a heavy wooden block. Before it⁠—its tame minister⁠—stood a tall girl, feeding the iron animal with half-quires of rose-hued note paper, which, at every downward dab of the piston-like machine, received in the corner the impress of a wreath of roses. I looked from the rosy paper to the pallid cheek, but said nothing.

Seated before a long apparatus, strung with long, slender strings like any harp, another girl was feeding it with foolscap sheets, which, so soon as they curiously traveled from her on the cords, were withdrawn at the opposite end of the machine by a second girl. They came to the first girl blank; they went to the second girl ruled.

I looked upon the first girl’s brow, and saw it was young and fair; I looked upon the second girl’s brow, and saw it was ruled and wrinkled. Then, as I still looked, the two⁠—for some small variety to the monotony⁠—changed places; and where had stood the young, fair brow, now stood the ruled and wrinkled one.

Perched high upon a narrow platform, and still higher upon a high stool crowning it, sat another figure serving some other iron animal; while below the platform sat her mate in some sort of reciprocal attendance.

Not a syllable was breathed. Nothing was heard but the low, steady overruling hum of the iron animals. The human voice was banished from the spot. Machinery⁠—that vaunted slave of humanity⁠—here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan. The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels.

All this scene around me was instantaneously taken in at one sweeping glance⁠—even before I had proceeded to unwind the heavy fur tippet from around my neck. But as soon as this fell from me the dark-complexioned man, standing close by, raised a sudden cry, and seizing my arm, dragged me out into the open air, and without pausing for a word instantly caught up some congealed snow and began rubbing both my cheeks.

“Two white spots like the whites of your eyes,” he said; “man, your cheeks are frozen.”

“That may well be,” muttered I; “ ’tis some wonder the frost of the Devil’s Dungeon strikes in no deeper. Rub away.”

Soon a horrible, tearing pain caught at my reviving cheeks. Two gaunt bloodhounds, one on either side, seemed mumbling them. I seemed Actaeon.

Presently, when all was over, I re-entered the factory, made known my business, concluded it satisfactorily, and then begged to be conducted throughout the place to view it.

“Cupid is the boy for that,” said the dark-complexioned man. “Cupid!” and by this odd fancy-name calling a dimpled, red-cheeked, spirited-looking, forward little fellow, who was rather impudently, I thought, gliding about among the passive-looking girls⁠—like a gold fish through hueless waves⁠—yet doing nothing in particular that I could see, the man bade him lead the stranger through the edifice.

“Come first and see the waterwheel,” said this lively lad, with the air of boyishly-brisk importance.

Quitting the folding-room, we crossed some damp, cold boards, and stood beneath a great wet shed, incessantly showered with foam, like the green barnacled bow of some East Indiaman in a gale. Round and round here went the enormous revolutions of the dark colossal waterwheel, grim with its one immutable purpose.

“This sets our whole machinery a-going, Sir; in every part of all these buildings; where the girls work and all.”

I looked, and saw that the turbid waters of Blood River had not changed their hue by coming under the use of man.

“You make only blank paper; no printing of any sort, I suppose? All blank paper, don’t you?”

“Certainly; what else should a paper-factory make?”

The lad here looked at me as if suspicious of my common sense.

“Oh, to be sure!” said I, confused and stammering; “it only struck me as so strange that red waters should turn out pale chee⁠—paper, I mean.”

He took me up a wet and rickety