Gale Zona
A Daughter of the Morning
"I'm afraid I'll get typewriter oil on you," I said, "and it's smelly."
He went on with the letters without another word. There were two great envelopes of proof. He never could have got through them alone.
The night that he spoke to the girls, I went over early and slipped in the back seat. The hall was filled; I was glad of that. And as soon as he began speaking I saw that he knew how to talk to them. He was just talking to them about the fundamental of human growth, and how the whole industrial struggle was nothing but the assertion of the right of the workers to growth. He showed this struggle as but one phase of something as wide as life.
"You want a better life, don't you?" he said. "You want to enjoy more, and know more and be more. And the people who can individually get these things by your toil you are set against… But what are you working for? Food and clothes and a little fun? And your own children? I say that those of you who are working just for these things for yourselves are almost as bad as those who work for their own luxury… What then? What are we working for? Why, to make the world where all of us can have a better life, and enjoy more, and know more, and be more. And we've got to do this together. And those of us who are not trying to raise the standard for all of us, whether employers or employees, are all outlaws together."
It was wonderful to see how he faced that audience of tired men and women, and kindled them into human beings. It was wonderful to see the hope and then the belief and then the courage come quickening in their eyes, in their faces, in their applause. Afterward they went forward like one person to meet him, to take his hand. While they were with him, they became one person. It was almost as if they became, before his eyes, what he was there to tell them that they could go toward.
I had meant to slip out of the hall afterward. The last thing that I had meant to do was to walk down the aisle and put out my hand. Yet when he had finished, that was what I did.
"You liked it?" he said to me.
"I know it!" I told him.
"Ah, that's it," he answered. "Wait," he added.
So I waited until they had all spoken with him, and I wondered how any one could watch them and not understand them. One girl, new in the factory, came to him:
"Now you have showed me where I belong in my little life," she said to him in broken English. "Before, I felt as if I had been born and then somebody had walked away and left me there. Now I see where I am, after all."
Afterward, Rose came to me, and her face was new. "If only we could keep them where they are now," she said. "But when they get hungry once, they forget it all."
Mr. Ember and I went down to the street. "Don't you want to walk home?" he said to me. And when we had left the push-carts and the noise, he turned to me in the still street:
"Now tell me?" he said. "How do you know those girls so well?"
I answered in genuine surprise. It seemed to me he must know.
"You!" he exclaimed. "Worked in a factory? At what? And when?"
I told him some of the things that I had done. He listened, and had no idea in the world that it was he who began it all for me. He smiled with me at my year with Miss Manners and Miss Spot. "And now what?" he asked.
"Now I'm secretary to you," I reminded him.
"You are not," he said, "you're an unpaid slave, being exploited for all you're worth, and you ought to be on strike this minute. Seriously," he added, "I can't go on this way. Don't you see that I can't allow it?"
"I beg your pardon," I said – and indeed I had hardly heard what he had been saying, for I was thinking: Here – walking along the street with me – John Ember, John Ember, John Ember!
"I'm saying," he observed, "that I discharge you from to-night."
"Look here, Mr. Ember," I said, "you can't discharge me – don't you understand! I've made up my mind to stay with you."
"Oh!" he exclaimed. "So you've made up your mind?"
"You mustn't be so selfish," I explained it. "You must think a little of me. Here you are, doing a big, fine work, work that interests me more than anything in the world. I've no other chance to help on, except through you and Rose. Why do you want to drive me out?"
"But, my child," he said, "if you don't mind the practicality of the question, what are you living on?"
"Oh, that!" I said. "I pay my way by making Mrs. Bingy's lace."
He was silent for a moment. "You really want to?" he asked. "It isn't pity?"
"I really want to," I told him. "That's why I'm going to!"
He drew a deep breath. "Then that's settled," he said; "I own up to you. I didn't know how on earth I was going to get on without you!"
CHAPTER XVI
So there went on that relation for which this age has no name of its own: the relation of the man, as worker, and the "out-family" woman who is his helper. It is a new thing, for a new day. There has never been a time when its need was not recognized; but usually, if this need was filled at all, it had to be filled clandestinely. It used to be the courtezans who had the brains, or, at any rate, who used them. The "protected" woman, sunk in domestic drudgery, or in fashion and folly, or exquisitely absorbed in the rearing of her children, could not often share in her husband's work. And, too, in the new order, she is not necessary to share in her husband's work, for she is to have work of her own, sometimes like his and sometimes quite other. The function of the "out-family" woman is clearly defined. And the relationship will be nothing that the wife of the future will fear.
It happened that I loved this man to whom I assumed the relationship of helper, and that I had loved him before I began to share his work. But it is true that, as the days went on, I began to dwell more on our work and less on my loving him. It was not that I loved him less. As I worked near him, and came to know him better, mind and heart, I loved him more but there was no time to think about that! All day we worked at his proof, his lectures, his correspondence with men and women, bent, as he was bent, on great issues. Gradually our hours of work lengthened, began earlier, lasted into the dusk; and I had the sense of definite service to a great end. Most of all I had this when I answered the letters from the workers themselves, for then it seemed to me that I went close to the moving of great tides.
"You speak for us – you say the thing we are too dumb to say. Maybe you are the one who is going to make people listen while we breathe down here under their feet, when we can breathe at all."
Letters like this, misspelled, half in a foreign tongue, delivered by hand or coming across the continent, were a part of the work which had become my life. And all the breathlessness, the tremor, the delicious currents of those first days were less real than this new relation, deeper than anything which those first days had dreamed.
One day I had forgotten to go to luncheon and, some time after two, Torchido being absent to lecture at a young ladies' seminary, Mr. Ember came bringing me a tray himself.
"If any one was to do that you ought to have let me," I cried.
"Why?" he demanded. "Now, why? You mean because you're a woman!"
"Yes," I admitted, "I suppose that's what I did mean."
"You ought to be ashamed of that," he said, "you cave-woman. I don't believe you can cook, anyway."
"No," I owned, "I can't cook. And I don't want to cook."
"Yet you automatically assume the rôle the moment it presents itself," he charged. "It's always amazing. A man will pick up a woman's handkerchief, help her up a step which she can get up as well as he, walk on the outside of the walk to protect her from lord knows what – and yet the minute that a dish rattles anywhere, he retires, in content and lets her do the whole thing. We're a wondrous lot."
"Give us another million years," I begged. "We're coming along."
He served me, and ate something himself. And this was the first time that we had broken bread together since that morning at the Dew Drop Inn, when I had ordered salt pork and a piece of pie. Obviously, this was the time to tell him… My heart began to beat. I played with the moment, thinking as I had thought a hundred times, how I would tell him. Suppose I said: "Do you imagine that this is the first time we have eaten together?" Or, "Do you remember the last time we sat at table?" Or, "Have you ever wondered what became of Cosma Wakely?" I discarded them all, and just then I heard him saying:
"I like very well to see you eat, Mademoiselle Secretary. You do it with the tips of your fingers."
"Truly?" I cried. And suddenly my eyes brimmed with tears. I remembered Cossy Wakely and her peaches.
"What is it?" he asked quickly.
But I only said: "Oh, I was just thinking about the 'infinite improvability of the human race'!"
Then Lena was summoned home, and she begged me to go with her.
She had been for three months at Mrs. Bingy's, and a drawer of my bureau was filled with dainty clothes that, with Mrs. Bingy's help, she had made. We had contributed what we could, and all day long and for long evenings, she had sat contentedly at her work. But she kept putting off home-going, and one night she had told me the reason.
"Cossy," she said, "you remember how it is there to Luke's folks' house – everybody scolding and jawing. And I know I'll be just like 'em. And it kind of seems as if, if I could stay here, where it's still and decent and good-natured, it might make some difference – to it."
On the morning that the message came to her, Mrs. Carney had come into Mr. Ember's workroom. Mr. Ember was out. A small portrait exhibit was being made at one of the galleries and, having promised, he had gone off savagely to see it on the exhibit's last day. It was then that Mrs. Bingy telephoned, in spasms of excitement over the telegram. Luke's mother had fallen and hurt her hip. Lena must come home.
"And, Cossy!" Mrs. Bingy shouted, "Lena thought – Lena wondered – Lena wants you should go with her."
I understood. Lena dreaded to face that household after her absence, even though she was returning with her precious work.
"I'll go," I told her; "I'll be there in an hour."
When I turned, Mrs. Carney sat leaning a little toward me, with an expression in her face that I did not know.
"Cosma," she said, "I want to tell you something – while John Ember is away. I have wanted you to know."
She had beautifully colored, and she was intensely grave.
"I've taken it for granted, dear," she said, "that you must know that I love him."
I stood staring down at her. "Mr. Ember?" I said, "Why, no! No!"
"Well, neither does he know," she said, "and I do not mean that he ever shall. I should of course be ashamed of loving Mr. Carney."
"Then why – why – " I began and stopped.
"Why do we keep on living together?" she asked. "I haven't the courage. And I have no property. And I have no way to earn my living – now. Cosma – I'm caught, bound. To love John Ember has made life bearable to me. Can you understand?"
Then she kissed me. "Cosma!" she said, "I'm glad that you know. I've wanted you to know. For I was afraid that you had guessed, and that it might make a difference to you … when he tells you."
"Tells me…" I repeated. "Tells me…"
The blood came beating in my face and in my throat. Seeing this, she spoke on quietly about herself. We were sitting so when Mr. Ember came home. And I was struck by the exquisite dignity and beauty of her manner to him. She was like some one looking at him from some near-by plane, knowing that she might not touch him or speak to him – not because it was forbidden, but because they themselves were the law.
Then I looked at him, and I saw that he was looking at me strangely. There was a curious searching, meditative quality in his look which somehow terrified me. I sprang up.
"Mr. Ember," I said, "they want me to go home – there has been a telegram to a friend. I want to go with her. She needs me…"
"Where is 'home'?" he asked only.
"In the country," I answered, and had on my wraps and was at the door, "I'll be back to-morrow," I told him.
Mrs. Carney had risen.
"Cosma!" she said clearly. "Wait. I'll drive you home."
As she spoke my name, my eyes flew to his. He was looking at me with a kind of soft brilliance in his face, and the surprise of some certainty. Then I knew that something had happened to make him know, and that now he remembered.
I ran out and down the walk before Mrs. Carney.
CHAPTER XVII
In the late afternoon light, Katytown looked to me beautiful: the weather-beaten station, the empty platform, the long, dusty main street, which informally became the country road without much change of habit. Lena and I took what Katytown called "the rig," and drove out to Luke's father's farm.
We went into the kitchen, and Luke's mother, helpless now in her chair, broke out at us shrilly: "Well, and about time, you good-for-nothing high-fly!" she welcomed her daughter-in-law.
Luke, eating his supper, shuffled up from the table and came toward her. Lena amazed me. She went to him and kissed him, not with a manner of apology, but of abstraction. Then she opened her suit-case. "Look, Luke," she said. "Look, Mother," and hardly heard the mother's talk, flowing on. Luke's mother watched her, lowering. Luke commented awkwardly, and went off to the barn. Lena turned to the sink, filled with unwashed dishes. The clatter of these, of faultfinding, the murk of steam received her. But she moved among these with a new dignity. It seemed as if life would have let Lena be so much, if only somebody had understood in time.
I left her, and walked toward my own home. But for that morning in Twiney's pasture, six years ago, I should be back there now, in Lena's place. For me, somebody had understood in time. Before I knew it, I had broken into swift running along the country road. I must somehow make everybody understand in time.
The house lay quiet in the dreaming sunshine. I stepped to the open kitchen door. They were at supper. My mother pushed back her chair and came running to the door.
"Cossy!" she cried. "Oh, Cossy! I mean Cosma."
"You call me whatever you want to," I said, and kissed her.
Bert and Henny came roaring out at me. They filled the kitchen with their bodies and voices. Father kissed me. They sat with me, while Mother brought me some supper.
"Flossy dress, sis," Henny offered easily. "Day after to-morrow," he said, when I asked him when he was going back to his work. "We've got a committee to meet with a committee of the traction folks. We may be hot in it in another week." And when I asked, in what, he added: "Oh, we've got some fines and dockings and cuts in wages to fix up, and they're trying to make us pay more for our dynamite – you wouldn't understand."
I turned and looked at my brothers. For some reason, never until that moment had it occurred to me to count them in with those of us who were dreaming new dreams for labor. They had been simply my brothers, ugly, irritable, teasing. But they were laborers with whom, as strangers, I could make common cause. Bert's great figure and dead eyes and brutalized mouth were the figure and eyes and mouth of "The Puddler," which I had lately gone to an art gallery to see!
"I tell you," Father said, "there's new times coming for you fellows, or I miss my guess. I say it every day when I read the papers."
So then we talked, Father and Henry and Bert and I. For the first time in our years together, we spoke of these matters and listened to one another. This was talk such as would have been impossible while I stayed there, either idle or drudging. Now I was a person, and we could exchange impressions. It came to me what family meetings might be, if each one were engaged in some happy, chosen toil, with its interests to exchange. And warm in me came welling and throbbing an understanding of them all, as fellow human beings, fellow workers, a relationship which the sense of family had hitherto obstructed and bound.
Presently Father and the boys went away.
"Let's sit down a while and talk," Mother said to me, turning her back on the dishes. "Shall we go in the parlor?" she asked.
I voted against the parlor, and we sat in the kitchen.
"You've never once come up to the city, Mother," I said, "since I've been there. Won't you come some time? We could have a drive and a play."
"I've always wanted to go to the city again," she said; "I've always wanted to be there Sunday, and go to church in a big church." She looked out to see if Father was back. "Cossy," she said, "since you've been up there, have you seen much of any silverware?"
"Silverware?" I repeated.
"Not knives and forks. I mean pitchers – and coffee pots. I s'pose the houses you went to must use them common." And when I had answered, "I'd like to see some, some time, before I die," she said. "And I'd like to see a hothouse, with roses in winter."
"Come on then," I said. "We'll find some, Mother."
"The fare up and back is just exactly the fire-insurance money for three years," she said. "I always think of that."
Later, she went to baking pies, against the morrow. And she scolded somewhat about the lamp wick that was too short, and the green wood on the fire and I went and hugged her, merely because I seemed to know so well what had always made her cross. For here was the same condition which we fought for the other workers: badly remunerated toil, which was not the real expression of the toiler; and no recreation.
That night I went up to my little old room, and nothing was changed. The little tintype of me was still stuck in the mirror. "Shall I sleep with you?" Mother said. I lay with my hand in hers, immersed in a new knowledge.
My family was dear to me – not on the old hypocritical basis which would have pretended to a nearness that it did not feel. But dear through the only real basis, a basis which we had persistently baffled and inhibited all the while that we lived together: human understanding.
CHAPTER XVIII
I had planned to be back in the city by noon the next day. But there was something that I wanted to do before I left Katytown. I wanted to go into the little grove which, far more than the up-stairs place where I slept, had always seemed to me to be "my room." I went there after our early breakfast. The place was considerably thinned, but it was still sanctuary.
When I reached the fence by the road, I went over it in the old way. As I went, I was conscious that some one, somewhere, was singing. As I struck into the road, the low humming which I had heard was mounting. And then it lifted suddenly into the words of its song. The man who was singing it had just passed, and he had his face set from me. But I knew him, as I knew his song. Then the time and the hour swept over me, and I sang with him:
"Oh, Mother dear, Jerusalem, Thy joys when shall I see…"
He wheeled, and stood still in the road and let me come to him. And the song broke off, and he was saying:
"Cosma! Cosma Wakely! I've come to scold you!"
"It was such fun!" I pleaded.
"But so to take in a near-sighted old gentleman who goes out of his mind trying to remember any of the thousand faces he sees in a year of lectures – ah, it was too bad. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I was trying to get made over," I said. "And I'm not made over yet. You had no right to find me out! How did you find me out?"
"I went to that gallery," he explained, "yesterday. And there I saw Gerald Massy's portrait of you – and underneath he has, you know, set 'Cosma.' I have never forgotten that name – how could I? So I came galloping home to accuse you. And there sat Mrs. Carney calling you 'Cosma,' before my eyes. What I can't understand," he ended savagely, "is how I can have been so dumb. Now, tell me – tell me!"
We were walking in the road, which had somehow assumed a docile and appeased look, like something which we were stroking as it was meant to be stroked. And I told him the rest, beginning with the hour that he had left me in Twiney's pasture. And so we came to Twiney's pasture again.
We broke through the wet sedge, and went over the fence as we had gone that other morning. And presently we stood at the top of the hill from which he had first shown me the whole world.
Then I did my best to tell him. "Mr. Ember!" I said, "all the little bit I've been able to make out of myself, you've made. I want to tell you that – and I'm not telling it at all!" I cried.
He stood as he had stood before, with the sky's great blue behind him. And he said:
"Then just don't bother with it. Besides, I've something far more important to try to say to you – the best I know how. Cosma – will you marry me?"
In those first days, I had sometimes dreamed of his saying that – dreamed it hopelessly; but sometimes, too, I had sunk warm in the thought of it, as if there all thought had come home. Yet now, when he actually said it, it came to me with a great shock. And out of the fulness of what I suddenly read in my heart, I answered him:
"Why, I can't marry you," I said. "I can't give up my work with you!"
He looked down at me gravely, and he made me the answer of all men.
"Give up the work! But the work together is one of the reasons why I love you."
"I can see that," I said. "And the work together is one of the reasons I love you. But – "
He put out his arms then, and took me.
"You said you loved me!" he said.
"I do," I said, "why of course I do – "
And when he kissed me it was as if nothing new had happened, but only something which was already ours.
"Then what is it," he asked, "but you for me, and me for you?"
And I cried, "Oh, don't you see? That after being what I've been to you – knowing your work and your thought – I can't stop it and be just your wife? I can't exchange this for looking after your house and ordering your food, and sending off the laundry and keeping your clothes mended?"
"But, my child – " he began.
"I know what you mean," I told him, "you think it wouldn't be that way. You think we'd go on as we are. We wouldn't – we wouldn't. All those things have to be done – I'd be the one to do them. It would be I who would begin to play myself false, I who would begin to do all the little housewifely things that other women do. It would get me – it would eat up my time and my real work with you – I tell you it would get me in the end! It gets every woman!"
"Well," he said again, "what then?"
I saw his eyes, understanding, humorous, tender. "Don't!" I cried; "it's almost got me now – when you look at me like that."
"Well," he said again, "what then?"
"Oh, don't you see?" I cried, "I've got myself to fight. I care now for big issues – for life and death and the workers – for the future more than for now. We are working for them – you and I. I will not let myself care only for getting your food and keeping the house tidy!"
He looked away over the fields, and by his eyes I thought that now I had lost him for good and all. But he only said:
"To think what we have done to love – all of us. Of course I know that the possibility is exactly what you say it is."
"Not the possibility," I said, "the inevitability. Look at all of them down there – Mother, Lena, Luke's mother, every woman in Katytown – and most of them everywhere else. They're all prostituted to housework. Don't let me do it! You've saved me this far – you've helped me to be the little that I've made of myself. Now help me! And," I added, "you'll have to help me. For I want to do it!"
He put out his hand, not like a lover, but like a comrade. And when I gave him mine, he shook it, like a friend.
"I will help you," he said. "Here's my hand on it. And it strikes me that this is about the most poignant appeal that a woman can make to a man. To his chivalry, if you like!"
And then I said the rest: "And you must see – I'm not a mother-woman. I should love children – to have them, to give them every free chance to grow. But it would be the same with them: their sewing, their mending, a good deal of the care of them – I don't know about it, and I shouldn't like it. I shouldn't be wise about their feeding, or the care of them if they were sick. And as for saying that the knowledge comes with the physical birth of the child, that's sheer nonsense."
"Oh, utter nonsense," he agreed. "Yes, I know you're not a 'mother-woman,' in the sense that means a nurse. Many women are not who are afraid to acknowledge it. But you'd give strength and health to your children – you're fitted to bring them into the world – you'd love them, and all children."
And this was thrillingly true for me. "What I really want to do," I said, "is to help make the world a home for all children – to make life – and their birth – normal and healthful and right, my own children included."
"You're the new factor that we've got to deal with, Cosma," he said, "the mother-to-the-race woman. A woman whose passion for the children of the race isn't necessarily to be confused with a passion for keeping their ears clean. It's something that we've all got to work out together…" He broke off, and cried out to me, "Cosma! Are you willing that we shall let this beat us?"
I looked up at him.
"It's something that has to be worked out," he repeated. "All that you've been saying – it's got to be worked out for all women. Well, it's not going to be done by every woman funking it, and staying unmarried."
He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.
"Are you sure," he said, "that I understand? That from the bottom of my heart I know and feel what you've been saying? And that I'll do the best I can to help you work it out?"
"Yes," I said, "I'm sure of that."
I was intensely sure of him – sure that we looked at life with the same love for the same kind of living.
"Will you come?" he cried. "Will you come and face it with me? And do your best, somehow, to work it out with me?"
His arms drew me, and in them was home. And for my life I could not have told whether I went to meet his challenge, or whether I went because we were each other's in the ancient way.
