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aggressive than perhaps he meant to be, “do struggle and survival have to do with being a Christian? Turn the other cheek and trust in the Lord, that’s the message as I understand it was handed out.”
    “Fight the good fight, Mr. Kleist. Jesus was no namby-pamby. He knew life was a ceaseless battle—read the parable of the seeds. He warned us right out, He came to bring a sword.”
    “Yes, but did He intend the sword to be always in the hands of the rich?”
    “If it’s me you’re referring to, my good friend, I’m far from rich, as my missus here will attest. We live within our means and set a table more modest than this one here at the good reverend’s. I worked my way up from bobbin boy and when I graduated to a loom gave twelve hours a day of hard labor for half the weekly wage the weavers of today are grumbling at. Ask the men and women I employ if I’m not on the floor before they show up and if I’m not doing my figures when they’re safe at home, or more likely squandering their pay in the corner saloon.”
    “As it happens, Mr. Dearholt, I
do
know men fortunate enough, if that’s the word, to have been in your employ, and they tell me there’s nobody keeps a stricter watch on the offminutes and there’s nobody keener on stretching.”
    Mr. McDermott, halfway down the table, announced, “I’m not certain, sir, that all at this table know what stretching is.” He was a loom-fixer for Empire Silk—a tall man, gentle and precise, who loved the looms, though their clatter had taken away some of his hearing.
    “You can’t live in Paterson,” Clarence heard himself saying, as if on the other side of a wall, his own hearing having difficulty, “and not know about stretching.”
    Jared, his older son, sixteen at his last birthday, laughed at the far end of the table, as though his father had made more of a jest than intended. Jared was a quick, hazel-eyed, predatory boy, more like his grandfather Jared than like Clarence. He was seated next to the older Caravello daughter and may have felt obliged by that to call attention to himself. Seated next to his mother, little Teddy, whose eyes were chocolate-brown like hers but without the merry gleam—little lusterless passive pools of watchfulness instead—looked toward his father worriedly, sensing the grown man’s distress and disorientation.Tonight even Teddy’s lovingness struck Clarence as a bothersome burden.
    “Stretching,” McDermott was going on with his Scots pedantry, aiming his explanation most directly at the noncomprehending Italian widow, “signifies raising the ratio of machines to operators, which has become possible with all the marvellous improvements in the looms. The first improvement was the changeover from hand-power in the Eighteen-eighties, and then, more recently, the invention of these devices that stop the loom when a shuttle thread breaks, or when a warp end breaks. Before, you see, the operator had to spot the break and stop the loom himself. So a man now can operate two machines instead of one, and receive a higher pay.”
    “But far from
twice
the pay,” Mr. Kleist added in his pushing German voice, “though they do twice the work.”
    “No, now—not twice; let’s not exaggerate. The gain of productivity amounts at most to two-thirds.”
    “Regardless of the exact figures,” Mr. Dearholt impatiently intervened, “the point is that the fools resist progress at every point, just as the Luddites did a century ago. Men never learn: progress is inevitable, and everyone benefits by it in the long run. The anarchist mentality you see in Paterson now would have us all still walking the fields with wooden plows, looking at the rear end of a horse.”
    Kleist’s face, a bit concave, like Punch’s or the man in the moon’s, went rigid with the effort to keep his temper, and to organize his angry tumble of thoughts. “The men that own the plants benefit, there’s no argument there. But those same weavers that