Gale Zona
A Daughter of the Morning
CHAPTER VI
I counted up, and found if we were to have enough for room rent and food, I couldn't spend any sixty cents a week for car-fare. So I left home at seven every morning and walked to work. At night I was so tired I took the car. Then we'd have supper on the gas-jet, and I'd try to write; but almost always I was so sleepy I went right to bed.
Mis' Bingy had got so she didn't cry so much. She didn't take much comfort going out to walk, she was so afraid of Keddie finding her.
"It's comfort enough not to feel I'm goin' to be murdered every night," she says. "I'd just as lieve set here."
After we'd been there three days, I wrote to Mother and to Luke. To Mother I said:
"Dear Mother:
"We are well, and hope this finds you the same. I have got a job. We are all right, and hope you are. I hope the boys are all right, and Father. Mis' Bingy says for you to be sure to tell her the news when you write. Mis' Bingy and the baby are well, and I am the same. So good-by now.
"Cosma."
I read it over, and wondered about it. I had never been away from home before long enough to write a letter to them. And I couldn't think of anything to say. It seemed to me I was a little girl in my letter. I wondered if that was because they thought that was what I was.
Then I wrote to Luke. You'd think that would have been harder, but it was easier. I says:
"Dear Luke:
"They told you, I guess, how I come off with Mis' Bingy. But, Luke, I would of come anyway, if I could. I thought it was all right to be your wife, but I want to see if there is anything else I would rather do. So I'm not engaged to you any more. If I come back, and if you are not married to somebody else, all right, if you still want me by that time. But I don't think I'll come back for a long time. I told you I didn't think I loved you, and you said I had to marry somebody. But now I don't, Luke, because I got a job. Please don't think hard of me. This was meant right, Luke.
"Cosma."
I wrote another letter, too – just because it felt good to be writing it. It said:
"Dear Mr. Ember:
"I want you to know I done as you said. I left home, and I left Luke, and I'm going to see if there is anything in the world for me to be that I can get to be. I've got a job, and I've got you to thank for that. Mr. Carney's nephew got it for me.
"There's something I want to say to you that's hard to say. I want you to know that the walk that morning was the nicest thing that ever happened to me. It made me see that the cheap me – the vulgar me, like you said – wasn't the only me there is to me. Clear inside is something that can be another me. I knew that before, in the grove, and early in the morning, like I said. But I didn't think I could ever let it out enough to be me. I didn't trust it, not till you came.
"And that's what makes me think I can be different, the way you said to. I'd hate for you to think I was just the sassy girl I acted that morning. There's something else I can't bear to have you think – that's that I didn't know how different I acted at the table from what you did. I did know.
"I've got a job, and Mis' Bingy and the baby are here – I knocked her husband down before I come because he was drunk and was going to kill her, so we thought we better leave there. That was how we come. But I guess I would have come anyway after I talked with you.
"Your friend,"Cosma Wakely."
"P. S. – I say Cosma all the time now."
I sealed it up and directed it, and slipped it in my book. I wouldn't send it; but it was nice to write it.
The second day I was in the factory, a girl come to me in the hall and asked me if I'd go out with her to lunch. I said I had my roll and a banana; but I'd walk along with her and eat 'em. She said that was what she meant – she had some crackers and an apple. So we walked down the block. Her name was Rose Everly.
There was a place half-way along there where some policemen were always sitting out, and when we went past there one of them spoke to her. She stopped, and she gave me an introduction.
"Miss Wakely," she says, "you meet Sergeant Ebbit."
"Pleased to make your acquaintance," says he. "How's the strike coming on?"
"I don't know as I know anything about any strike," she says, throwing up her head.
"How about you?" he says to me. "You whinin' too?"
I didn't know what he meant, and I guess he see I didn't. He laughed, and brought us out a couple of oranges.
"I'll be the first to run in the both of you, though," he says, "if you start any nonsense."
"What's he mean?" I says, when we went on.
"He's new over here, or he wouldn't be so sassy, not to me," says Rose. "Well, I brought you out here to put you wise."
Then she told me, while we walked up and down and et our oranges.
It seems there was things in the factory that I didn't have any notion about. My own job was in the printing office, connected with the factory. I was running a Gordon press, at slow speed, learning to feed it right. At the first of the next week, I was going to be put on full speed. We was to print from twelve thousand to fifteen thousand envelopes a day, then; and I knew what that meant, from watching the other machines. There was a time keeper over the full-speed machines, and it was hurry, hurry, hurry, all day long. It was all right while I was learning it, but I hated to think about making the same motion twelve or fifteen thousand times every day. In our room there was sixty or so. I used to notice the air, it smelled of some kind of gas and it was full of paper dust. When they swept up they never wet the broom; and when I asked the man if he didn't know enough to do that he swore at me. It wasn't a nice place to work.
But it seems there was other things that I didn't know about yet. There was fines for everything, and dockings for most that many. We had to go through the other factory to get out, and it seems they locked the doors on us as soon as we got in, and of course that was bad if there'd be a fire. Then there was things about the foreman; and there wasn't any Saturday half-holiday. And it seems the girls had joined together and asked for better things. And Rose wanted to know if I'd be one of them.
"Sure," I says, "is there anybody that won't?"
"Them that's afraid of their jobs," she says. "If we don't get what we think we ought to have, we'll – quit. We're going to have a meeting to-morrow night. Can you come, and will you talk?"
"Sure I'll come," I says. "But I can't talk. I don't know enough."
The sergeant says something else to us when we come back.
"He'll likely be running us both in for getting a row made at us, picketing, next week at this time," Rose said. At the door she took hold of my arm. "Good for you!" she says. "We was all afraid of you when we heard about Carney."
"What do you mean?" I asked her.
"'Bout Arthur Carney gettin' you your job," she says.
"Yes," I says. "What's that got to do with it?"
She laughed. "You baby!" she says. "Don't you know he owns the whole outfit?"
"The factory?" I says.
He owned most of it, she told me. I kept going over that all the while I fed my machine. And I kept going over what he'd said to me in his car. I felt as if I didn't want to see him again, no matter how much he talked about school; but I tried not to think that, because he was Mr. Carney's nephew, and Mr. Carney was Mr. Ember's friend.
I went to the meeting, as I said I would; but it was hard for me to make much out of it. There was all these things ought to be changed in the factory, and we knew it, and we thought we'd ought to have a little more wages; I wanted more when I began on full speed, but I didn't think I was going to get it. It seemed to me the thing to do was to ask to have things changed, and, if they didn't do it, quit till they did change them. But at the meeting I found that there was those that was afraid to ask – just for fire-escapes and decent cleanliness and a few cents more a week and extra pay for overtime. And then I found out something else, that if they wouldn't give us these things and we did quit, there was some of us that wouldn't agree to quit, and maybe others that would come in and take our jobs, and put up with what we had been trying to make better. When I got that through my head, I stood right up at the meeting to ask a question.
"They couldn't take our jobs if we stood out in front and tried to get it into their heads what we was trying to do, could they?" I says. "Ain't it just because they don't see what we're trying to do?"
They all laughed, and the woman that was speaking – somebody from outside the factory – says yes, she thought that was it, they didn't see what we were trying to do.
The next day was Sunday, and I could hardly wait. I was up early and out while Mis' Bingy was still asleep. I hated to leave her all day, but it seemed as if ever since I come to the city something out there was calling me. I dunno where I went. I tramped for miles, and I spent fifteen cents car-fare, besides transfers, but I didn't care. I had some rolls in a bag, and I et them when I didn't show. And I looked and looked.
I found hundreds of folks, going off for all day, washed and dressed up and with lunches and children, headed out in the country, I judged. Some of them looked like Father and Mother and Mis' Bingy, and as if they couldn't be any other way. I set on the car with them, and kind of see through them, and knew how they must snap each other up, home, when they wasn't dressed up. I wondered what God wanted so many for, that couldn't be different because it was too late. But some, and most of all the children, looked as if they might have been most anybody, if they were given a chance. I wondered how they could get the chance, and if none of them tried. I wondered how I could try. I knew I'd never get it in the factory. No matter if we got all the things we were asking for, it was a dog's life – I knew that already. It wasn't much better than Bert and Henny had, to the blast furnace. They got dirty, and had to work straight twenty-four hours once every two weeks; but they made their dollar-twenty a day, and not any of us done that. I kept trying to think how to get started.
At the end of one car line I got off and walked over to the river. There was beautiful houses there – more beautiful than I had ever seen, even in the pictures. I thought they must have awful big families, they had so many up-stairs rooms. The grass looked combed and fluffed, much better than the babies' hair around the factory. Somebody give an awful lot of time to the flowers, and the river showed through the bushes. I liked the nice curtains, and when automobiles went by I liked to look at the ladies, they seemed so clean and tended. But I wondered why.
I stood looking through the iron fence of a great big house when a policeman come along.
I says to him, before he could get passed, "I was wishing I knew the names of the folks that live in there."
He stopped like a wall that knew how to walk. "Well, missy," says he, "and was ye thinkin' of buyin' it in?"
"No," I says, "not with nothin' but you to watch it." And then I walked on fast, and felt sick, sick at myself. Not one of them tended ladies in the automobiles would have spoke like that. And Mr. Ember would have hated me if he'd heard me say it. How did folks ever get over being smart and quick, and be just regular?
After a while, I come past a big church, and I went in. I never liked church, because the minister had always kept at me to join and I didn't think I was good enough. But I knew nobody would ever ask me to join here. There was one reason, though, why I liked it, even home – everybody acted nice, and like there was company. Once I said that, home, to the table, when everybody was jawing, "Let's act like we was in church," I said. But it made Father mad, and he couldn't understand that I hadn't meant the being good part at all. I only meant the acting nice part.
In the church it was like that, just as if everybody had company and was on their good behavior. They set me in the gallery, and I could see the whole crowd. The hats was grand. But the nicest was the colors in the dresses and the windows and the flowers. It was funny, but something in them made me hurt. And when the music burst out sudden, it hurt me so that I dropped my bag of rolls so's to get down and pick them up, and get my mind off my throat. I was thinking about it afterward, and it was the first music I'd ever heard except our reed organ in church, and Lena Curtsy's piano, and the movies, and the circus band. And even the circus band had hurt my throat, too.
I never knew a word the man said, I mean the minister. He didn't talk anyhow – he just kept on about something, as if he was trying to make somebody mean something they didn't mean. But I liked being there. Everybody seemed like they ought to seem. I wondered if they was. I couldn't seem to see through, like I could with the folks in the street-car. It didn't seem possible that those folks down there ever yipped out about anything to each other, and, anyway, what could they have to yip out about? They were all clean and tended, too. Afterward I stood in the door and watched them pour out, talking fast, and drive off. I liked to see them close to, and hear the way they said their words. It made a real nice morning, but I never heard a word about God.
I et my rolls in the park, and I stayed there a good while. The sun or the green or something made me feel good. I tried to look at the animals, but I hated it in the smelly places, with the poor live things in cages. When they tore around and couldn't sit still in any one place, I thought it was just like Mother and Father and the boys and Mis' Bingy, they all had to stay in a little place they didn't like, doing what they didn't want to do. I didn't blame any of them for being ugly. The more I looked at the animals, the better I understood. Then I thought about Keddie Bingy – and he didn't have only that little place to stay, with the bed in the kitchen, and he hated being a stone mason, I'd heard him tell Father that. I didn't know but I could understand why he got drunk. Then there was Joe, that had the Dew Drop Inn, and he had to stay there in that place, and he couldn't get out; and, anyway, the United States let him; and I begun to see how it was that Joe got Keddie drunk all the time. So I was glad I went to see the animals, even if I couldn't stay on account of it making me sick.
Outside the park was the big hotels. I wondered if I could walk inside and look at them, but when I got to the steps, I was afraid. Then I see a big red house behind more iron fence, with an American flag overhead, and I asked a little boy with some papers if that was where the mayor lived.
"Naw," says he. "Private party. I t'ought youse was their chum, the way youse was rubberin'."
I give him a penny for a paper and didn't say anything. And then I felt better about the way I'd answered the policeman. It ain't so hard to act nice if you can only think in time.
I walked all the way home. I went in every church I come to, because it was some place to go in. If I'd been shot out of a gun I couldn't have told 'em apart, and I wondered how they could tell themselves. And everywhere I went, there wasn't a soul to speak to. I tried to imagine what if Mis' Bingy and the baby wasn't back there in the room, and there was nobody to speak to when I got back. It felt funny, like once when I got too far from shore in the pond, home. I couldn't help thinking about Mr. Carney saying: "You must let me help you to keep from being too lonesome." And if he'd come along just then with his shiny car, I don't know but I'd have got in.
It was the day after that that he come to the factory and asked for me. I didn't think he'd do that, but I guess he didn't care what he done. The foreman called me out, and when I got into his office there was Mr. Arthur, and he left me there with him. Mr. Arthur's hat was on the back of his head, and his light hair was flat down on his forehead, and his light-colored eyes and eyebrows made me want to get away from him, even if he was Mr. Ember's friend.
"Child," he says to me, "why are you trying to avoid me? I've found a place for you where you can go and learn as much as you want. I've been waiting to tell you about it. Don't you trust me?" he says.
I says, "I'd trust any friend of Mr. Ember's."
"Well," he says, "anyhow, trust me. I'll call here for you to-night, and you let me tell you what I've got planned for you."
"I'm going to meet with some of the girls to-night, Mr. Carney," I says.
"Cut that out," he says. "Come with me."
I laughed at that. "You act like your way was the way things are," I says.
"I wish it were," he says, "I wish it were."
"Listen, Mr. Carney," I says. "I've got a good job, and I like the girls. It's a dirty, disagreeable place to work, and we'd ought to have a good many things we haven't got," I says to him, "but I guess I'll stick it out for a while. I couldn't come to-night, anyway."
"I'll wait for you to-morrow night, then," he says. "We'll have a little dinner somewhere, and a run in the car – "
It was getting awful hard to remember to act nice, and I spilled over.
"You got the ways of a hitching-post," I says; "but you ain't got the tie-strap." And I walked out and left him there.
Two nights he run his car down to the door where he'd found I come out. Once I pretended not to see him, and run and caught a street-car. Once he jumped out and walked along beside me, and the girls fell back. I told him Mis' Bingy and I were going to have a banquet of wieners, fried on the gas-jet, and I couldn't come. He put a note in my hand, he never seemed to care what anybody thought, I noticed that about him.
Mis' Bingy and I read the note, while the wieners were frying.
"Don't keep me waiting," it said. "I want to see you the glorious creature you could be if you had the training you say you want. Music, riding, whatever you ask for, you shall have it all, on my honor. Don't I deserve a little more confidence from you?
A. C."
Mis' Bingy rocked back and forth on the bed.
"Cossy Wakely," she said, "it's my fault, it's my fault. I brung you. Let's us go back, Cossy, right off. Let's us go back."
"Oh, pshaw, Mis' Bingy!" I says, "I guess he means it right. We're just – vulgar."
"Oh, what a world," says Mis' Bingy. "Ain't there no place women can get shed of men, with their drunkenness and their devilment?"
I couldn't feel that way a bit. "I don't want to," I says. "I want to find the other kind of men. There is them!"
We had a nice supper, and then I wrote in this book. It was beginning to be so I could hardly wait to get at it. I wondered if that was the way Mr. Ember felt about his work. Then I thought about the factory, and remembered that that was work, too. It didn't seem as if they ought to have the same name.
Next morning Rose went up the stairs with me.
"You know you'll either have to quit your job or else give in, don't you?" she says.
I looked at her.
"Are you sure?" I says, "I thought maybe my being afraid of him was just being – vulgar."
"You baby," she says. "It ain't your fault. Everybody understands. We always tell the new pretty ones. But he brought you here – "
I tried to think what to do, all that day, while I fed the press. I could think well enough – the work was just one motion, one motion, one motion, and I didn't have to think about that. But I knew in a little while the rest of my head wouldn't think while I worked, and that I should just stand there with the smell of the oil and the ink and the gas and the paper dust, and the noise. I wondered what we was all doing it for, just to earn money to keep breathing, and to supply Mr. Arthur Carney with money for "little dinners somewhere," and the shiny car. It didn't seem worth while, not for any of us.
At noon Rose and I walked again, she wanted to tell me about a meeting for that night. They'd heard that morning from Mr. Carney. He wouldn't give in on one of the things, except to promise to unlock the doors while we worked. "But he's promised that before," Rose says. "It don't last. We're going to take the vote to-night on walking out."
"What!" says Sergeant Ebbit, when we come by. "Ain't you two struck yet?"
"Don't you want to be?" says Rose, pretending to hit at him. I don't know how any of us can act nice, with everybody joshing us so free.
I promised to go to the meeting, and that meant that I couldn't go home to supper, because it was so far to walk back. And when I come out the door, there was Mr. Carney's car, and him walking toward me. I never stopped a minute. I walked straight through the girls and got into his car. He jumped in after me and banged the door. I heard the girls titter. "You glorious thing," I heard him say; and I says, low:
"I've got one errand, though. Will you take me there?"
"Anywhere under heaven," he says.
