- end_line
- 7815
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.883Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7735
- text
- 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 wood-shed,’ he replied, and disappeared inside the factory.
With much ado I managed to wedge in horse and pung between the 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 breast-band and breeching, so that the wind might not strip him
bare, I tied him fast, and ran lamely for the factory door, stiff 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, with
blank, 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soon as they curiously travelled from her on the cords, were withdrawn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
blood-hounds, one on each side, seemed mumbling them. I seemed Actaeon.
- title
- Chunk 4