Afterwards he thought of it. Going through
the office, the fat old book-keeper, Huff, stopped him with a
story he had been keeping for him all day. He liked to tell a
story to Holmes; he could see into a joke; it did a man good to
hear a fellow laugh like that. Holmes did laugh, for the story
was a good one, and stood a moment, then went in, leaving the old
fellow chuckling over his desk. Huff did not know how, lately,
after every laugh, this man felt a vague scorn of himself, as if
jokes and laughter belonged to a self that ought to have been
dead long ago. Perhaps, if the fat old book-keeper had known it,
he would have said that the man was better than he knew. But
then,--poor Huff! He passed slowly through the alleys between
the great looms. Overhead the ceiling looked like a heavy maze
of iron cylinders and black swinging bars and wheels, all in
swift, ponderous motion. It was enough to make a brain dizzy
with the clanging thunder of the engines, the whizzing spindles
of red and yellow, and the hot daylight glaring over all. The
looms were watched by women, most of them bold, tawdry girls of
fifteen or sixteen, or lean-jawed women from the hills, wives of
the coal-diggers. There was a breathless odour of copperas. As
he went from one room to another up through the ascending
stories, he had a vague sensation of being followed. Some shadow
lurked at times behind the engines, or stole after him in the
dark entries. Were there ghosts, then, in mills in broad
daylight? None but the ghosts of Want and Hunger and Crime, he
might have known, that do not wait for night to walk our streets:
the ghosts that poor old Knowles hoped to lay forever.
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