- description
- # This is the rag-room
## Overview - What this is (type, form, dates, scope)
This subsection, labeled "This is the rag-room," is a portion of the text extracted from the file [billy_budd.txt](arke:01KG89J1FFTGRE9J93Z3K29NGY) and is part of the [Melville Complete Works](arke:01KG89HMDZKNY753EZE1CJ8HZW) collection. The text was extracted on January 30, 2026, by the "structure-extraction-lambda" process. It describes a room within a paper factory, focusing on the work of the girls employed there.
## Context - Background and provenance from related entities
This subsection is part of the larger segment titled "II. THE TARTARUS OF MAIDS" ([arke:01KG8AJVQF918PGCQ05DDR9BEW]), which is a section within the text file. The text describes a visit to a paper factory, where the narrator is guided by a young boy. The preceding section, "Come first and see the water-wheel" ([arke:01KG8AKGP1ACHZBV5JXPKQ6CVZ]), describes the water wheel. The subsequent section, "The Vats" ([arke:01KG8AKGP1YPP113ASV99PFSEA]), describes the vats where the paper pulp is created.
## Contents - What it contains, key subjects and details
The text describes a "rag-room" where girls are employed to tear apart rags, converting them into a material used in paper-making. The room is described as having "manger-like receptacles" where the girls work with "long, glittering scythes" to rip the rags. The air is filled with "poisonous particles." The narrator and the boy discuss the source of the rags, some of which come from overseas. The narrator reflects on the girls' pale appearance and the grim nature of their work.
- description_generated_at
- 2026-01-30T20:49:34.301Z
- description_model
- gemini-2.5-flash-lite
- description_title
- This is the rag-room
- end_line
- 7934
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.323Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7852
- text
- He took me up a wet and rickety stair to a great light room, furnished
with no visible thing but rude, manger-like receptacles running all
round its sides; and up to these mangers, like so many mares haltered to
the rack, stood rows of girls. Before each was vertically thrust up a
long, glittering scythe, immovably fixed at bottom to the manger-edge.
The curve of the scythe, and its having no snath to it, made it look
exactly like a sword. To and fro, across the sharp edge, the girls
forever dragged long strips of rags, washed white, picked from baskets
at one side; thus ripping asunder every seam, and converting the tatters
almost into lint. The air swam with the fine, poisonous particles, which
from all sides darted, subtilely, as motes in sunbeams, into the lungs.
‘This is the rag-room,’ coughed the boy.
‘You find it rather stifling here,’ coughed I, in answer; ‘but the girls
don’t cough.’
‘Oh, they are used to it.’
‘Where do you get such hosts of rags?’ picking up a handful from a
basket.
‘Some from the country round about; some from far over sea--Leghorn and
London.’
‘’Tis not unlikely, then,’ murmured I, ‘that among these heaps of rags
there may be some old shirts, gathered from the dormitories of the
Paradise of Bachelors. But the buttons are all dropped off. Pray, my
lad, do you ever find any bachelor’s buttons hereabouts?’
‘None grow in this part of the country. The Devil’s Dungeon is no place
for flowers.’
‘Oh! you mean the _flowers_ so called--the Bachelor’s Buttons?’
‘And was not that what you asked about? Or did you mean the gold
bosom-buttons of our boss, Old Bach, as our whispering girls all call
him?’
‘The man, then, I saw below is a bachelor, is he?’
‘Oh yes, he’s a Bach.’
‘The edges of those swords, they are turned outward from the girls, if I
see right; but their rags and fingers fly so, I cannot distinctly see.’
‘Turned outward.’
Yes, murmured I to myself; I see it now; turned outward; and each
erected sword is so borne, edge outward, before each girl. If my reading
fails me not, just so, of old, condemned state-prisoners went from the
hall of judgment to their doom: an officer before, bearing a sword, its
edge turned outward, in significance of their fatal sentence. So,
through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white
girls to death.
‘Those scythes look very sharp,’ again turning toward the boy.
‘Yes; they have to keep them so. Look!’
That moment two of the girls, dropping their rags, plied each a
whetstone up and down the sword-blade. My unaccustomed blood curdled at
the sharp shriek of the tormented steel.
Their own executioners; themselves whetting the very swords that slay
them, meditated I.
‘What makes those girls so sheet-white, my lad?’
‘Why’--with a roguish twinkle, pure ignorant drollery, not-knowing
heartlessness--‘I suppose the handling of such white bits of sheets all
the time makes them so sheety.’
‘Let us leave the rag-room now, my lad.’
More tragical and more inscrutably mysterious than any mystic sight,
human or machine, throughout the factory, was the strange innocence of
cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy.
‘And now,’ said he, cheerily, ‘I suppose you want to see our great
machine, which cost us twelve thousand dollars only last autumn. That’s
the machine that makes the paper, too. This way, sir.’
- title
- This is the rag-room