Gale Zona
A Daughter of the Morning
CHAPTER VII
I showed Mr. Carney which way. We went past the girls, and round the corner, and straight down the narrow street where we always walked eating our lunch. I motioned where to stop. I jumped out. Sergeant Ebbit was alone just inside the door of the police station.
"Hello, Beauty," he says; "what can I do for you?"
I says, "I want you to come out here and arrest a fresh young guy with a car, that's been bothering me."
He jumped up and followed. He was new there, as Rose had said, and then he kind of liked me, too. I'd known that several days, and I was depending on it now. He come hurrying, like I thought he would, and he says, "I know them fool kids, and I'll learn 'em, if you say so." And before he see Mr. Carney he blew his whistle.
"That's him," I says, pointing to the little shiny car.
It makes me laugh now to remember the sergeant's face. But another policeman was coming, running. And folks stopped and stared. And I slipped out the station door quick, and turned the corner and dodged straight across the factory yard and took to my heels.
It was after six o'clock, so the streets were alive. I walked along, never noticing where I was going. I looked down the street. As far as I could see there went the heads, men and women, bobbing along home. Half of them, I thought, had just the same kind of box to live in that Mis' Bingy and I had. Yet there they was, going to work every day by clockwork, always thinking something good was going to come of it. I tramped along with them. There was something good in the way our feet all come down on the walk together. In spite of everything, I felt fine. But I guess that was because I was young and well. Some of them that passed me, their heads didn't stay up and their feet dragged. And they didn't seem to know each other was there. If only they could have felt the good feeling of marching together, it seemed to me they'd be less tired.
"They've got to find out different," I thought. "How can they?"
The most of them crossed east on Broadway and under a covered place with bells clanging. I saw the sign "Brooklyn Bridge," so I went up the steps and out on the bridge, and I walked clear across it and back again. I'll never forget that walk. I was looking at the others and looking at them – the folks that was workers, like me. I seemed to know something about them they didn't know. It seemed as if I had to do something.
A bunch of little young girls passed me, all laughing. They seemed years younger than I was. I thought of them – of the day they'd had in the factory – bad air, noise, work that was dead before it was born, and maybe a home where there was rows, or maybe just nobody at all; and somebody like Arthur Carney coming to help them be a little less lonesome. And then I faced it honest: Suppose he hadn't had flat hair and light eyes. Suppose he had looked different, so that I would have wanted to go to dinner with him?
I begun to walk fast, back to town. Across the bridge I went in a little down-stairs place to get something to eat. I was thinking so hard I never knew I'd ordered a quarter's worth till I got the bill. But I didn't care much. Everything else seemed all of a sudden to matter so much more.
That night, when I walked into the meeting, they all stared. I s'pose the word had got round that I'd gone with him. I whispered to Rose that I wanted to say something, and she give me a chance right away. When I got up on the platform and faced 'em, I wasn't afraid. I was glad.
I told them that just because I had got to leave, I didn't want them to think I was going to forget. And that they mustn't forget, either. "It ain't caught me yet," I told 'em. "I'm new and from the country, and I can see what it is that you're getting, like you can't see. And what I say is this: Quit your hoping. Just know that until we get together ourselves, nothing will come out of the factory except what we're getting now. Quit your hoping, and help. That's my last word."
And yet I guess you can't blame anybody for being afraid of being hungry. I'd never been hungry yet, so I was brave.
I didn't tell Mis' Bingy that night that I'd lost my job. I didn't tell her till next morning when she woke up, scared that I was late. We went out in the park with the baby.
"We'll be all right, Mis' Bingy," I says, "don't you worry."
I was sitting on the grass. And when I spoke so, I happened to see my foot sticking from under my skirt. The whole half of my shoe sole had come off, and was gone, and the nails was all showing. Ten days' rent it would take to buy me another pair.
Just now I tore out thirty pages of this book. And just now I read them over. They made me sick to read them, not because of what was there, but because of what wasn't there. It was the same thing over and over again all that time. Hat factory, ribbon factory, braid factory, silk factory, and ten weeks rolling stogies. Some places the girls cared, and was trying to make others care to get things better. In others it was get what you could, look your best, and marry the first man that asked you.
Every place I went, I begun asking about the things that Rose had taught me about – fines, and dockings, and fire safety, and the rest. Then I talked to the girls. That was why I didn't "last."
"You'll get used to things one of these days," says a forelady to me.
"That's what I'm afraid of," I told her.
But the worst was, there wasn't any fun. There wasn't anything to go to, and, anyhow, I couldn't afford the car-fare back in the evening.
Mis' Bingy had found a place where she could leave the baby a little while every day, and she done some cleaning. We moved out of our first room to one farther up that didn't cost so high. I got so I begun to think ahead, nights.
Then one night when I come in, the lady we rented of says a lady had been there to see me; "A lady," she says, "that come in a automobile and says her words as careful as if she was a-singin' in the church. She's a-comin' back again."
And when she come, she stood by the table and says:
"Miss Wakely, I am Mis' Arthur Carney."
"My land!" I says. It had never entered my head that he might have a wife on top of everything else.
"I have been hearing," she says, "of what you did some time ago. I mean about – Mr. Carney. I have come to find you, because it seemed to me that you must be a remarkable girl."
"Oh, Mis' Carney," I says, "nobody needs to be remarkable to think of getting him arrested."
And then I remembered something: "Yes, sir!" I says, "it was you! It was you that was in the pinkish dress in Mr. Ember's house that day!"
And I told her what she had been saying when she passed the door. But all I was thinking was – she knew; him. She knew Mr. Ember, too!
She talked to me a long time. She didn't ask me many questions – and I didn't tell her much about me, but still in a little while we felt real acquainted. And pretty soon she says:
"I came really, you know, to see whether you had found another position – after you left that one. I've had a good deal of a time finding you out. What have you done since? What are you doing now?"
I told her some of it.
"And what do you want to do?" she says then.
I don't know what give me the courage. It was just like something in me said: "Tell her. Tell her. Tell her." And I said it.
"Oh," I says, "I'd work my head off if I could go somewheres to school. But I don't want to know just school things. I want to know more than them…"
"What do you want to know?" she says.
It was funny how easy it was to talk to her. Father or Mother or Luke or Mis' Bingy, that I'd known all my life, I couldn't have explained things to like I could to her. But I think that was part because she didn't need everything all said out in sentences, and then it was part because I knew she wouldn't make a fuss at me when I got through.
When she went away: "I'm going to look around a little," she says, "I'll come back in a few days."
"But, oh," I says, "you know, there's Mis' Bingy and the baby. I couldn't do anything that'd take me away from her. I don't know why you bother with me anyway," I says.
She had the loveliest dignified way. "We owe you something, my husband and I," she says.
But of course I knew that that was just her manner of speaking, and that her husband didn't know a thing about what she was doing, and that probably it was one of those speeches that everybody keeps making, like when Mis' Bingy talked, in the depot, of taking her baby away from "a father's care."
She went off in her automobile, and I stood on the step looking after her. The very thought that there could be anybody in the world like her, that would do what she'd done, made me feel like I understood the earth. I told Mis' Bingy, and she sat a long time looking out the window with her mouth open.
"If Keddie had done that," she says, "I bet a quarter of a pound of tea, I'd blame the girl."
I'd have thought everybody would. We talked it over.
"Mis' Bingy," I says, "maybe they's ways to be decent we don't even know about."
She kep' her mouth open. "Then who's to blame if we don't act up to 'em, I donno," she says, after a while.
"I donno, too," I says. "It must be somebody, though."
And we both thought it must be.
The next day was Sunday, and Mis' Bingy and I done what we'd been going to do for a long time. We walked up to the park, and inside the big building where the pictures are. Mis' Bingy set on a bench and fed the baby, while I wandered round.
I guess you're supposed to feel nice and real awed when you first go to that big place. I guess you're supposed to be glad you live in a city where they're free to you. I thought I was going to have a good time. But instead of that I kept getting madder and madder. Once I begun to talk out loud, and I was afraid they'd put me out. It was when I come to a big room full of statues, with one big white one that said under it "Apollo." I'd never heard the name. I says to the man in the hall:
"Can you tell me who that Apollo was – and why he's stuck up here?"
"Catalogues twenty-five cents each, at the door," says the man.
"Well," I says, "I ain't got the quarter to spare. But I thought mebbe you knew."
"He was the Greek god of beauty and song," he says, stiff. And the next thing I knew I was standing there in front of the Greek god talking out loud. And I says:
"I'd like to twist the nose off your face, just because I've never heard of you before – nor you – nor you – nor you – nor you. Why ain't I never heard of you?"
I run for Mis' Bingy.
"Mis' Bingy," I says, "are you ready to go?"
She followed me without a word. Out on the steps she says, shaking:
"Which was it – Keddie or Carney?"
"It was neither," I says, "it was that smart white god in there, and all the rest of 'em. Mis' Bingy! Folks know about 'em. They know when they go there, and they know about pictures. I heard 'em talking. What's the reason we don't know?"
"Go on!" says Mis' Bingy. "We ain't the kind of folks them things are calculated for."
"It's a lie!" I says. "It's a lie! I could almost like 'em now – only I got so mad."
I set down on a bench in the park, and cried. And I didn't care who heard me.
Mis' Bingy stood up, waiting for me, hushing the baby back and forth on her hip.
"I use' to feel like that when I was a girl," she says. "You'll get over it." She kept saying that, several times. "You'll get over it, Cossy," as if she thought it was some comfort.
"That's what I'm afraid of," I says, after a while.
We transferred at Eighth Street on the way down, because there was something else I'd heard about and I hadn't ever seen yet. We walked east through the square, under the arch, and I asked a policeman for what I was looking for, and he showed me: The top story where the fire had been in a factory. The girls had told me about it, and I told Mis' Bingy, and we stood and looked. That was where they had jumped from. That was where they had hit the sidewalk, a hundred and eighteen of them, smashed or burned to death.
"It might have been you, Cossy," Mis' Bingy says, staring up and swinging the baby.
"It was me," I says. "I felt like it was me when I heard it – and I feel like it was me now."
But I didn't want to cry for that. While I looked I got still inside, still and sick, and sure. I guess I felt like I was every factory girl in in New York. The hundred and eighteen wasn't the worst off – I knew that now. I wondered how many of them some Carney had chased, to "help them be a little less lonesome." I wondered how many of them could talk English. I wondered how many of them ever had it in their heads for a minute that there was anything else for them only just what they had. Then I thought about that Greek god of beauty and song. And them hundred and eighteen and most of the other girls and Mis' Bingy and me never even knew there was such a guy.
Two days later Mis' Carney come back. The landlady had a book agent, entertaining him in the parlor, so I had to take her right up to our room. It was nice and clean, and Mis' Bingy always combed her hair and changed her dress after dinner, just like she had at home afternoons, when she'd got the dishes washed up. She was making lace by the window, and the baby was on the floor. It was late, and we'd got a whole pie tin of wieners sizzling over the gas-jet.
"Mis' Carney, you meet Mis' Bingy," I says. But Mis' Carney hardly looked at her. She bent right over the pillow that Mis' Bingy's work was on.
"Do you mean," Mis' Carney said, "that you are actually making the lace? Here in New York?"
"Yes, ma'am," Mis' Bingy says. "Ma taught me – in the old country."
"Have you any of it made?" Mis' Carney says.
Mis' Bingy opened the washstand drawer and took out what she had, tied up in a pillow case. Mis' Carney set on the bed and took it in her hands. After a long time she looked up at me, and her face was lovely.
"Miss Wakely," she says, "I came to tell you what I have for you to do – and I was a good deal bothered – about your friend, Mis' Bingy. But it seems to me that she can earn considerably more than you can – with her lace. I paid six dollars a yard for lace like this not a fortnight ago."
Then she turned to me. "You're going to a school right here in town," she said; "I have arranged everything. And now Mis' Bingy is going to find a larger room and make her lace."
The wieners had burned black before any of us noticed. If ever you seen the sky open back, I guess you know.
Mis' Carney asked me to spend Friday to Monday with her, and then she would take me over to the school.
"Have I got to see your husband?" I says to her, direct.
Her husband was in Europe, so that was how she could ask me. And Friday afternoon she come for me.
"We can take your trunk in the car, if it's a small one," she says.
"I ain't even got a satchel," I told her. "My other dress and things are in this here."
Mis' Bingy was hanging over the bannister post, and the landlady with her.
"Don't you go and forget me, Cossy," says Mis' Bingy, crying.
The landlady used her face all the time like a strong light was in her eyes.
"She'll forget you, all right," she says. "I got two daughters somewheres that I never hear a word out of. Best say good-by and leave it go at that."
I always wanted everybody to tell the truth, but that woman sort of undressed it, and then told it. And it made a little hush, there in the hall.
Mis' Carney's house was big and still. She took me to a bedroom at the back, looking out on a square garden. The furniture was white, with rose-buds on, and there were gray and pink rugs on the floor. The light colored rugs seemed so wonderful – just as if it didn't matter if they did get soiled, no more than towels. Nor not so much so. On the wall was a little picture of a boat with a bright-colored sail, on a real blue sky. The minute I see it, the whole thing kind of come over me. And I begun to cry.
"Oh, Mis' Carney," I says, "we got a picture in the parlor, home. But it don't look like that."
"Is that what you are crying for?" she asked.
"No," I says, "I don't think so. I was thinking about the bed. Mother and I looked at one in a show-window, once."
I remembered how Mother had stood and looked at it, all made up clean and pretty, even after I was tired and wanted to go on.
Saturday morning we went shopping. I'd never been down-town before when I wasn't walking fast to get somewheres. This was the first time I had ever looked. Everywhere there were people, hurrying and thinking.
"Look in this window, Cosma," Mis' Carney said as we went in a store. "How would you like that shade?"
But the man that was fixing the things looked like a man that sold mackintoshes at the county fair, and I watched him.
"You ought to have a longish coat," she says, "you're so tall."
Just then I saw a woman with gray hair, and I stood staring at her, wondering if there was anybody's mother that looked as grand as her.
"Cosma," Mis' Carney said, "look at the things, please. Never mind the people."
"Never mind the people." I knew then that they were all I cared about. It wasn't so much the folks shopping that I saw – it was the girls, the whole army of girls that was waiting on them. When you get to look at the shops that way, then you know more about them than you did before. But the folks on the sidewalks kind of got me too. Out in the car I says to Mis' Carney:
"I know! It ain't just school or clothes or you that makes me feel good. It's something else. It's because I ain't worrying over the rent!"
I saw the folks on the sidewalks, all hurrying and thinking. I knew them all now. Half of them were worrying just the way I had been, just the way Rose was, just the way all the girls did. I felt bad for them. I wanted to take them all off with me, to school or somewheres.
Then come the evening I'll never forget. Mis' Carney and I had dinner by ourselves in a little glass room just off the big dining-room; and afterward we went into the library. She was showing me some books, when a bell rung, somewheres off in the house, and a maid come with a card.
"Show him to the drawing-room," Mis' Carney said, and gave me a lot more books and left me. And then I heard his voice in the next room where she'd gone. I knew – the minute I heard him speak I knew. I dropped my books and run to the curtains and stood where I could see.
And Mr. Ember was standing by the table, with his face turned toward me, looking just like I'd seen him last, there in Twiney's pasture. One hand was resting on the table and the other was pushing his hair back from his forehead, two, three times, kind of as if he was tired. And when I see him, from my head to my feet I begun to tremble. I'd felt like that once or twice before – once when the team got scared and begun to back off the bridge.
"I'm in town for the rest of the winter," he was saying. "I've a few lectures to pull off – and a lot of proof to keep me busy. What have you been doing with yourself?"
Then my heart beat harder. What if she told him about me? And one minute I was sick with being afraid she would, and next minute I was wild for fear she wouldn't. I didn't want to see him. I'd said I wasn't going to see him till I could meet him sometime when I was the way I was going to be. But I'd have come pretty near to giving up my whole chance of ever being anything, just to have his hands shut over mine and to hear him say my name again.
She didn't tell him, Mrs. Carney wasn't the telling kind. In a few minutes they begun to talk of other things – Europe and Washington and theaters. And while I stood there, looking at him and looking, it came over me that to be listening there wouldn't be the way Mrs. Carney would act, nor the way he'd meant me to act. So I looked at him once, hard enough to last, the best a look can last, and then I run away up to my room and locked the door. I stood in the middle of the floor and kind of flung myself on to something or somebody in the air, that it seemed to me must have been listening to me.
"Make me like I ain't," I says. "Make me different! Make me different – YOU!"
When I heard the door shut, I went back down-stairs. I wanted to be the next one to talk to her after he had. She was in the library, putting the books back. And her face was shining like I'd never seen it.
"Oh, Cosma," she said, "some people make you feel as if it's a good world!"
"It is," I says, "while they're around."
"Yes," she says, "it is – while they're around."
That was all she said. Pretty soon she went back in the drawing-room, and I followed her so's to be where he had been. I'd been going to sit down in the chair where he had sat, but she sat down there. So I stood by the table. And I was glad it happened that neither of us said anything for quite a while.
