Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/715



HE blazing sun filtered through the dusty windows. Inside the air was moist and heavy ; the throbbing of machinery was the only sound that broke the stillness. The man bending over the whirring wheels, straight- ened up, and setting the oil can down for a moment, wiped the humid drops from his forehead.

lie looked what he was — a part of his surroundings — a mere cog in the wheels of a mighty enterprise, an adjunct in the great shops in the shadow of which he had been born and raised; where his father had worked before him, and his oAvn work had begun at the age which was a crime against childhood.

He was nothing outside the works. His education was the merest rudiments gained at night school, and such general knowledge as might be obtained from laborious and desultory reading of the newspapers. He never had any youth.

It was characteristic of this man that he seldom spoke. What could he have to say? When the superintendent or foreman came around, or perchance the owner of the shops, he listened in stoical silence, and did as he was told. Counting by years he was young, measuring by the days of his servitude he was very old.

Uncommunicative, the other hands fought shy of him. "Stupid, but faithful," his superiors called him, a man who did his work well because it was second nature. A valuable man whom it was not necessary to advance, since he had been identified with the works too long to be useful anywhere else.

Nature had given hiui a man's full heritage of magnificent strength and vigor, a broad shouldered young giant, but cursed by the brand of servitude out of all semblance of manhood.

Up to this time he had only existed.

As he reached out his hand for the oil can, the sound of approaching footsteps was heard. Someone was entering the room. A silvery laugh rang out behind him, the delicate perfume of after of roses came to him. Something went through him like a faint shock from an electric battery.

He remained with his hand extended, again that soft laugh rang out, this time nearer. It was a girFs voice — such a voice as he had never heard before. Others were with the owner of the voice,- a gentleman and the superintendent, who was evidentlv showing them around.

The man did not move nor turn. The soft swish of skirts was behind him, so near they brushed against him in passing. The faint perfume that seemed a part of the laugh, a part of the clear, pure-toned voice rolled over him like a wave; it got into his blood, and a strange dizziness swept over him.

He remained motionless; something held him in its grasp. A new, strange sensation of awakening pride forbade him to turn his head — even when they had passed out through the door he did not look back. But as their footsteps receded, his hand, which had fallen to his side, clenched unconsciously, and he turned slowly. As he did so his eyes discovered something.

A rose, lush, white-petaled and perfect as the hand of nature could make it, lay on the floor at hi& feet.

To the m.an it seemed like a living thing, symbolic of that invisible presence that had touched him in passing. As his eyes rested on it something entered his face that had never been there before. A new life stirred in him, awakened and struggled for existence.

He bent down and with trembling fingers picked up the rose. Some strong emo- tion shook him, evidence of the throes of birth within.

"Oh God !" The words were wrung from his twitching lips.

What message had the rose brought to the man It was not the clod that had