Gale Zona
A Daughter of the Morning
CHAPTER VIII
The school was three great buildings a little way from Mrs. Carney's house. I had never dreamed of anything so grand as those rooms seemed to me. What I couldn't get over was the padded carpets that you didn't make a sound when you walked on. The furniture was big pieces, all carved and hard to dust; and lights that didn't show was burning in the inside rooms. There was great vases, as tall as I, and pictures as big as the ceiling of Mrs. Bingy's and my whole room.
The first days at that school are the kind of nightmare that it hurts to remember even in the daytime. I begun by feeling so grand. By the second meal I was wretched. By the time the first evening was half over and the dancing in the gymnasium, I was sick. School wasn't the way I thought it was.
If only they'd taken me out and ducked me, or buried me, or left me on the roof all night every night. But the ways they had were like pouring vinegar in a skinned place in my heart. I ain't going to talk about it!
And yet I never minded their laughing, if only they looked at me when they laughed. But when they looked at each other and laughed, that killed me.
I'd been at the school about six months when one afternoon I was coming across the field that everybody called the "campus." I'd never called it that yet – it sounded like putting on. I met a lot of them coming down from their classes. I used to begin looking at them when they were way ahead, hoping there was somebody I knew and could speak to. I liked to speak to them. I'd had an introduction to most of them; but they didn't always remember me. When they did remember, they didn't always speak. Some of them done it on purpose. But always I knew which was such. That afternoon so many of them didn't speak to me that all of a sudden I felt crazy to get away from them all, off somewhere by myself. I run down the hill back of the main building. A stone wall went along by the road. The wall was pretty high, but I put my hands on it the way I used to at home, and I jumped up on it with my head in some branches. And I says out loud:
"I know how Keddie Bingy used to feel when he got drunk."
"My word!" said somebody. "And how did he feel?"
I looked down, and there was an automobile drawn up by the wall and a man in it, rolling a cigarette.
"Don't you know?" I says.
"I don't know but I do," says he. "For example, I've been sitting here one-half hour waiting for my sister. Do I feel the way you mean?"
"Nothing like," I says, and turned to jump down again.
"Don't let me drive you away," he says; "I don't mean to bother you. I beg your pardon like anything."
"It's all right," I said; "I was going. I didn't want to sit up here. I don't know what I got up here for, anyway."
I picked up my books, and he spoke again.
"If you're really going," he said, "I wonder if I could send a message by you?"
"Sure thing," I says.
"Do you know Antoinette Massy?" he asked.
"I know her when I see her," I said; "I never spoke to her."
"She's in the tennis court over there – or she said she'd be," he went on. "Would you mind telling her that her brother has been sitting here like an image for thirty-six minutes – up to now? And that in five minutes he won't be here any more?"
"Oh," I says, "Miss Massy! She went up to Mann Hall to rehearse, half an hour ago. They never get through till dinner time."
"Gad!" he said; "it takes a man's sister to put him in his true light." He done something to the car, and then looked at me. "Would – would you care to come for a little spin?" he asked.
"I'd care like everything," I says; "but I can't go."
"No?" he says. "Yes, you can!"
"I'm not going," I says. "Thanks, though."
"Would you mind telling me why not?" he says. "Since you say you want to, you know."
I couldn't think of anything but the truth.
"I'm trying to act as nice as I can," I says, "since I've been to this school. And I guess it's nicer not to go with you."
His face was pleasant when he kept on looking at me, though he was laughing at me, too.
"Look here, then," he said, "will you go with my sister and me some day? As a favor to me, you know – so you'll get her here on time."
"Oh," I says, "I'd love to!"
"Done," he said. "Tell me your name, and I'll tell her we've got an engagement with her."
When he'd gone I jumped down from the wall and ran pell-mell up the hill. Before I knew it, I was humming. Ain't it the funniest thing how one little bit of a nice happening from somebody makes you all over like new?
Two days afterward I was leaving the dining-room when I saw Miss Antoinette Massy coming toward me. My heart begun to beat. She was so beautiful and dressed like a dream. She's always seemed to me somebody far off, and different – like somebody that had died and been born again from the way I was.
"You're Cosma Wakely, aren't you?" she said. "My brother told me about meeting you." I couldn't think of a thing to say. I just kept thinking how the lace of her waist looked as if it hadn't ever been worn before; and I noticed her pretty, rosy, shining nails. "I wondered if you wouldn't go for a motor ride with my brother, Gerald, and myself, to-morrow afternoon?"
"Oh," I says, "I could, like anything."
And all that night when I woke up, I kept thinking what was going to happen, and it was in my head like, something saying something. It wasn't so much for the ride – it was that they'd been the way they'd been to me. That was it.
I put on my best dress and my best shoes and my other hat; and when I met Miss Massy in the parlor I see right off that I was dressed up too much. She had on a sweater and a little cap. I always noticed that about me – I dressed up when I'd ought not to, and times when I didn't everybody else was always dressed up.
Her brother came in, and I hadn't sensed before how good-looking he was. If ever he had come to Katytown, Lena Curtsy would have met him before he got half-way from the depot to the post-office.
Up to then, this was my most wonderful school-day. But it wasn't the ride. It was because they were both being to me the way they were.
We stopped at a little road-house for tea. I hated tea, and when they asked me to have tea, I said so. I said I'd select pop. Going back, it was the surprise of my school life that far when Antoinette Massy asked me if I would go home with her at the end of the week.
"Oh," I says, "I can't! I can't!"
"Do come," she says; "my brother will run us down. You can take your work with you."
"Oh," I says, "it isn't that. I guess you don't understand" – I thought I ought to tell her just the truth – "I can't act the way you're used to, I'm afraid," I said. "I'm learning – but I had a lot to know."
She laughed, and made me go. I wondered why. But I couldn't help going. I thought of all the mistakes I'd make – but then, I'd learn something, too. "Just be yourself," Miss Antoinette said. And I said, "Myself buttered a whole slice of bread and bit it for a week before I noticed that the rest didn't." And when she said, "Yourself did not. You got that from other people in the first place," I asked her, "Then, what is myself?" And she says, "That's what we're at school to find out!"
It was in a big house on the Hudson that the Massys lived. I saw some glass houses for flowers. When the door was opened I saw a lot more flowers and a stained glass window and a big hall fire.
"Oh!" I says. "Can farm-houses be like that?"
"What does she mean?" says Mrs. Massy, and shook hands with me. I wanted to laugh when I looked at her. She was little and thick everywhere, and she had on a good many things, and she looked so anxious! It didn't seem as if there was enough things in all the world to make anybody look so anxious about them.
Dinner was at half past seven. In Katytown supper is all over by half past six, and at half past seven the post-office is shut. I had a little light cloth dress, and I put that on; and then I just set down and looked around my room. There was a big bed with a kind of a flowered umbrella over it with lace hanging down; and a little low dressing table, all white and glass, and my own bath showed through the open door. And looking around that room and remembering how the house was, I thought:
"Oh, if Mother could have had things fixed up a little, maybe she could have been different herself. Maybe then she'd have been Mother instead of 'Ma' from the beginning."
In the drawing-room were Mrs. Massy and Mr. Gerald, her looking like a little, fat, bright-colored ball, and him like a man on some stage – better than any man I'd seen in the Katytown opera-house attractions, even. The dining-room was lovely, and the table was like a long wide puzzle. I watched Miss Antoinette, and I done like her, word for word, food for food, tool for tool. They talked more about nothing than anybody I'd ever heard. Mrs. Massy would take the most innocent little remark, and worry it like a terrier, and run off with the pieces, making a new remark of each one. She had things enough around her neck to choke her if they'd all got to going. There were two guests, enormous women with lovely velvet belts for waists. They talked in bursts and gushes and up on their high tiptoes – I can't explain it. It was like another language, all irregular. I just kept still, and ate, and one or two things I couldn't comprehend I didn't take any of. Everything would have been all right if only one of the guests hadn't thought of something funny to tell.
"Elwell sounded the horn right in the midst of a group of factory girls to-night," she said. "We were in a tearing hurry and we didn't see them. And one of them stood still, right in the road, and she said, 'You go round me.' Why, she might have been killed! and then we should have been arrested. Elwell had all he could do to swing the car."
All of a sudden come to me the picture of those girls – the girls I knew, tracking home at night, dog-tired, dead-tired, from ten hours on their feet and going home to what they was going home to. I saw 'em with my heart – Rose and all the rest that I knew and that I didn't know. And the table I was to, and the lights and the glass, blurred off. Something in my head did something. I had just sense enough not to say anything, for I knew I couldn't say enough, or say it right so's I could make it mean anything. But I shoved back my chair, and I walked out the door.
In the hall I ran. I got the front door open, and I got out on the porch. I wanted to be away from there. What right did I have to be there, anyhow? And while I stood there with the wind biting down on me, all of a sudden it wasn't only Rose and Nettie and the girls I saw, but it was Mother, too – Mother when I'd used to call her "Ma."
Mr. Gerald was by me in a minute.
"Miss Cosma," he said, "what is it?"
He took my arm – in that wonderful, taking-care way that is so dear in a man, when it is – and he drew me back into the vestibule.
"If she speaks like that about those girls again," I said, "I'll throw my glass of water at her."
I hated him for what he said. What he said was:
"By jove! You are magnificent!"
It took all the strength out of me. "None of you see it," I said. "I don't know what I'm here for. I don't belong here. I belong out there in the road with those girls that the car plowed through."
"I don't know about that," he said. "Why don't you stay here and teach me something about them? I don't even know what you mean."
He put me in a chair by the fire, and they sent me some coffee there. I heard him explaining that I felt a little faint. I wanted to yell, "It's a lie." I knew, then, that I was a savage – all the pretty little smooth things they used to cover up with, I wanted to rip up and throw at all of them.
"I hate it here," I thought. "I hate the factory. I hate home. I hate Luke…"
That was nearly everything that I knew; and I hated them all. Was it me that everything was wrong with, I wondered? I was looking down at Mr. Gerald's hands that had moved so dainty and used-to-things all the while he was eating. That made me think of Mr. Ember's hands when he was eating that morning at Joe's. These folks all did things like Mr. Ember. And I'd got to stay there till I knew how to do them, too. But from that minute I began to wonder why folks that can do things so dainty don't always live up to it in other ways, like it seemed to me he did. And then I got to thinking about his patience with me, so by the time the rest came in from the dining-room I was all still again.
When the guests had gone I was standing by some long curtains when Miss Antoinette walked over to me. "You lovely thing," she said. "By that rose curtain you are stunning. Stand still, dear. Gerald, look."
But I didn't think much about him; and my eyes brimmed up.
"You called me 'dear,'" I says. "You're about the first one."
She put her arm around me, and then it come out. Her brother had one wing of the ground floor all to himself. It was a studio. He painted. And he wanted to paint me. There was only one thing I thought about.
"I'll be glad to do that," I says, "if you'll both teach me some of the things you see I don't know – talking, eating, everything."
The way they hesitated was so nice for my feelings it was like having my first lesson then.
I went down there the whole spring. And there, and to the school, little by little I learned things. I knew it – I could almost feel it. I didn't always know what I'd learned, but I knew that it was changing me. I don't know any better feeling. It's more fun than making a garden. It's more fun than watching puppies grow. It was almost as much fun as writing my book. And back of it all was the great big sense, shining and shining, that I was getting more the way I wanted to be, that I had to be, if ever I was to see him again. John Ember was in my life all the time, like somebody saying something.
Pretty soon Miss Antoinette's maid put my hair up a different way. And Miss Antoinette had a nice gown of hers altered for me. I'll never forget the night I first put on that lace dress. We'd motored out as usual, on a Friday in May, when I'd been going there most three months. They were going to have a few people for dinner. I'd had a peep at the table, that looked like a banquet, and I thought: "Not a thing on it, Cosma Wakely, that you don't know how to use right. Wouldn't Katytown stick out its eyes?" And when Miss Antoinette's maid put the dress on me, I most jumped. I wouldn't have believed it was me.
I remember I come out of my room, loving the way the lace felt all around me. The hall was lighted bright down-stairs, and, beyond, some folks were just coming into the vestibule, in lovely colored cloaks. And all of a sudden I thought:
"Oh – living is something different from what I always thought! And I must be one of the ones that's intended to know about it!"
It was a wonderful, grand feeling; and it was surprising what confidence it gave me. At the foot of the stairs, one of the maids knocked against me with a big branched candlestick she was carrying.
"You should be more careful!" I says to her, sharp. And I couldn't help feeling like a great lady when she apologized, scared.
In the drawing-room the first person I walked into was Mr. Gerald. I'd been seeing him almost every week – usually he and Miss Antoinette drove me down on Friday nights. But I'd never seen him quite like this.
"By jove! By jove!" he said, and bowed over my hand just the way I'd seen him do to other women. "Oh, Cosma!"
He'd never called me that before. I liked his saying it, and saying it that way. When I went to meet the rest, and knew he was watching me and that he liked the way I looked – instead of being embarrassed I thought it was fun.
And when it was Mr. Gerald that took me down, and we all went into that beautiful room, and to the dinner table that I wasn't afraid of – I can't explain it, but everything I'd ever done before seemed a long way off and I didn't want to bother remembering.
It was a happy two hours. After a while I began to want to say little things, and I found I could say them so nobody looked surprised, or glanced at anybody else after I had spoken. That was a wonderful thing, when I first noticed that they didn't glance at each other when I said anything. I saw I could say the truth right out, if I only laughed about it a little bit, and they'd call it "quaint," and laugh too, instead of thinking I was "bad form." There was quite an old man on my right, and I liked that. I always got along better with them than the middle ones that wanted to talk about themselves.
Just as soon as the men came up-stairs, Mr. Gerald came where I was. He wanted me to go down the rooms to see a "Chartron." I thought it was some kind of furniture; but when I got there it was a picture of Miss Antoinette, and we sat down with our backs to it.
"How are you?" Mr. Gerald said – his voice was kind of like he kept boxes of them and opened one special for you. "Tell me about yourself."
"I feel," I said, "as if I'd been sitting on the edge of things all my life, and I'd just jumped over in. It's a pity you never were born again. You can't tell how it feels."
"Yes, I was," he said, "I've been born again."
"Well, didn't it make you want to forget everything that had happened to you before?" I said.
"It does," said Mr. Gerald; "and I have. You know, don't you, that I count time now from the day I met you?"
"Great guns!" I said.
It took me off my feet so that I didn't remember to say "My word," like they'd told me. I sat and stared at him.
He laughed at me. "You wonder!" he said. "They'll never spoil you, after all. Cosma, – couldn't you? Couldn't you?"
"Why, Mr. Gerald," I says, "I'd as soon think of loving the president."
"Don't bother about him," he says. "Love me."
Some more folks came in then to see the Chartron, and I never saw him any more that night till they were leaving. Then he told me Miss Antoinette was going back on Sunday, but he'd run me in town on Monday morning, if I'd go. I said I'd go.
It was raining that Monday morning, and everything smelled sort of old-fashioned and nice, and the rain beat in our faces.
"Cosma," he said, "don't keep me waiting."
"Why not?" I said. I can see just the way the road went stretching in front of us. I looked at it, and I thought why not, why not… I'd been saved from Katytown. I'd been saved from Luke, from Mr. Carney, from the factory. I'd been given my school, and now this chance. Why not?
"Because I love you so much that it isn't fair to me," he said.
And he thought he was answering what I had said, but instead he was really answering what I had thought.
"You like your new life, don't you?" he said. "Why not have it all the time, then? And if you love me, even a little, I can make you happy – I know I can."
"And could I make you happy?" I said.
"Gad!" said Mr. Gerald.
The road was empty in the soft beating rain. With the slow and perfectly sure way he did everything he ran the car to the curb and turned to me.
"Cosma," he said.
I looked at him. Just a word of mine, and my whole life would be settled, to be lived with him, and with all that I began to suspect I was meant to have. I kept looking at him. I felt a good deal the way I had felt when I looked at a long-distance telephone and knew, with a word, I could talk a thousand miles. And I didn't feel much more.
He took me in his arms and drew my wet face close to his, that was warm, as his lips were warm.
"I want you for my wife," he said.
It seemed so wonderful that he should love me that I thought mostly about that, and not about whether I loved him at all. I sat still and said:
"I don't see how you can love me. There's so much I've got to learn yet, before I'm like the ones you know."
"You're adorable," he said; "you're glorious. I love you. I want you with me always… Cosma! Say maybe. Say just that!"
So then I did the thing so many girls had done before me and will do after me:
"Well, then," I said, "maybe."
He frightened me, he was so glad. I felt left out. I wished that I was glad like that.
But it was surprising how much more confidence I had in myself after I knew that a man like Mr. Gerald loved me.
"That's because," I said to me, "women have counted only when men have loved them."
And I thought that had ought to be different.
