As Hugh wanders miserably through the night, the author uses simile and metaphor to convey the disconnect between the preacher's message and the reality of a mill-worker's hardscrabble life:
His words passed far over the furnace-tender's grasp, toned to suit another class of culture; they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue. He meant to cure this world-cancer with a steady eye that had never glared with hunger, and a hand that neither poverty nor strychnine-whiskey had taught to shake. In this morbid, distorted heart of the Welsh puddler he had failed.
The simile the narrator uses here compares the preacher’s words to "a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue." Although Hugh can hear some of the beauty in the preacher's words, they are functionally meaningless to him. They are not aimed at an audience of people like him. Rather, they are “toned to suit another class of culture,” which Hugh has no access to because of his different life experiences and Welsh immigrant background.
The metaphor of "world-cancer" here refers to the social ills that the preacher wants to help heal; illness, starvation, poverty, injustice. However, because his approach comes from a position of privilege, he can’t speak about those problems in a way that has anything to do with Hugh’s reality. The preacher has never experienced the hardships of poverty, and so his words “have failed” Hugh. Because he has never suffered hunger and the effects of cheap intoxicants like "strychnine-whiskey," the preacher can only speculate about social improvements. In the “morbid, distorted” view of Hugh and people like him, there’s a vast chasm between his good intentions and their results. The preacher's attempts at spiritual guidance fail to address the tangible needs of the workers, even though he tries.
As Mitchell, Kirby, and Dr. May discuss the Kerl-woman stature with Hugh, the author uses a simile to characterize the young visiting industrialist’s distant and unfeeling perspective:
Bright and deep and cold as Arctic air, the soul of the man lay tranquil beneath. He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.
The simile Davis uses here explains Mitchell’s attitude toward workers like Hugh to the reader. By comparing Mitchell's soul to the stark coldness of the Arctic, the author suggests that he’s emotionally cold. He’s immune to feeling sorry for workers like Hugh, or to seeing them as equals. There’s a fundamental remoteness within Mitchell's character, which itself indicates a lack of any empathy towards people who occupy lower rungs of the social ladder.
By comparing Hugh to a “rare mosaic,” Mitchell dehumanizes the furnace-tender. Mitchell has apparently seen two things that interest him on this day; a “rare mosaic” and this worker, and the worker is more “amusing” to him. Mitchell views the laborer as an object of study or entertainment rather than a living person. Watching Hugh speak about wanting to practice his art, Mitchell's “soul” can be as “tranquil” as it was when looking at ceramics. He doesn’t think of the furnace-tender as having thoughts and feelings. Even though the labor of workers like Hugh provides Mitchell’s livelihood, he doesn’t care about them as people in the slightest.
Having gone to find Hugh and bring him food as he works at the furnaces, Deborah lies down on a pile of warm ashes to sleep:
Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty rag,—yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime. Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy?
The simile Davis uses here compares Deborah to "a limp, dirty rag.” She is utterly worn out and lies down in the warmth to try and get a modicum of her strength back as Hugh works. Just as a rag is used and discarded to clean unwanted mess, Deborah has soaked up too much dirt and unpleasantness to be able to go on. Her “limpness” indicates her physical and emotional exhaustion, as if she’s become boneless and floppy as a result of too much work. In a home, one would usually sweep up ashes, as they transfer dirt everywhere and can stain. Deborah, however, lies down in them to sleep, suggesting that the ashes are no dirtier than her clothes and body already are.
The narrator appeals to the reader’s sense of pathos in this scene in order to support Davis’s argument that conditions like these are cruel and unsustainable. They ask if the reader can find anything “worth reading in this wet, faded thing,” before going on to imply that there undoubtedly are things “worth reading.” Their invitation to "look deeper" implies that beneath Deborah's “limp” surface there’s the same "groping passionate love" and "heroic unselfishness” that any good person might have. These rhetorical questions prompt the reader to consider how external conditions shape people’s behavior and affect other people's tendencies to judge them on appearance alone.
In this passage, which introduces where Hugh works at the mill, the narrator depicts a dramatic scene of nighttime industrial labor using the visual imagery of flames and several similes. Describing Hugh’s workplace, Davis writes:
Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand…and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a street in Hell.
The visual imagery of "pits of flame" and "liquid metal-flames" paints a picture of intense heat for the reader. There’s fire everywhere, making the area around the furnaces seem inescapable and hellish. The contrast between the brightness of the molten metal’s “red light” and the surrounding darkness brings the scene to life for the reader. They can almost see the glowing furnace and the surrounding night full of bodies, feel its heat and sweat. This imagery does two things here. It captures the physical intensity of working at the mill, but also presents the reader with the idea that these men are laboring as a punishment. The description of the hordes of “half-clad men" further suggests that this work strips people of their personhood. These aren’t individuals, they’re a “crowd” who are “throwing masses of glittering fire.” They become an undifferentiated group united in their suffering.
The two similes in the quote support this, coming in close proximity to one another at the end. The men labor in the night "like revengeful ghosts,” eerie in the menacing glow of the mill's fires. It’s as if they are already dead and are being punished for their sins by being made to return to this work. The second simile, which sums up all of this description of the furnaces as being "like a street in Hell," also reinforces the idea that these men are doing hard and horrible work in an awful place.
