Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/272

262 “Do you? Is your mother still in that mill?”

“I can’t get her to leave. She says she’ll keep on, no matter what happens, until I graduate. Of course in a way she has reason on her side, for as long as I stay at school there is no other way for her to live except the mill.”

Sakai bit his lips as he plucked stalks of grass, and his voice became thoughtful.

“Lately I’ve begun to have doubts about life,” he said. “For instance, take that mill: now there are about 300 girls working there. They’re mostly from fifteen to twenty-four years of age, all farmers’ daughters from the neighbouring villages. When they come they’re young, country girls with good strong bodies, but after a year or two they begin bandaging up their throats and coughing suspiciously; their eyes become red and swollen, and their fingers whitish and rotten, and then they return home. Some of them wither and die while in the mill, and you hear sometimes of girls getting their hair caught in the machines.

“The humid air; the long hours from morning right on into the night; insufficient food—when I see those girls under such conditions, wearing out their young bodies before my very eyes, I think of the kettles and of the cocoons which the girls reel.

“Each one, boiled in the hot water, becoming thinner and thinner; its life drained from it by that single invisible thread, until finally the black grub—now a useless dead thing—is cast up on the surface of the water.

“But on the other hand—and this is what you’ve got to notice isn’t there—exactly