Gale Zona
A Daughter of the Morning
CHAPTER XIV
I had gone wondering how I should see him at last, and what we should say to each other. It never once occurred to me that we might not meet again, or that when we did meet it would mean merely the casual renewing of a casual occasion. As for me everything moved from the time when I had met John Ember, so everything moved toward the time when I should see him again. I pictured meeting him on the street, at Mrs. Carney's house, about the university. I pictured him walking into a class room to give one of the afternoon lectures – older, his hair a little grayed, and yet so wonderfully the same as when he had spoken to me there on the country road. And I could imagine that if I said my name to him he would have to stop and hunt through his mind for any remembrance of that breakfast and that walk which were, so far, the principal things that had ever happened to me.
Then I used to dream that he did remember.
"Mr. Ember, I'm Cosma Wakely. You won't remember – but I just wanted to say 'thank you' for what you did."
And: "Remember. My dear child, I've been looking for you ever since. Sit down – I want to talk with you."
Once I saw his picture in a magazine, looking so grave and serious, and I liked to know that there was that Katytown morning, and that I knew him in a way that none of the rest did; that I'd been with him on that lonely, early road and had heard him talk to me – no matter how stupid I'd acted – and that we'd sat together over breakfast in the yard of the Dew Drop Inn. Just in that I had one of the joys of a woman who loves a great man, and understands him as all those who sit and look up to him can never understand him. I felt as if something of me belonged to John Ember.
And when I did see him, it was as if he had never been away.
I had been twice to see Lena, and found her in the stale-smelling rooms of her aunt, each time at work upon some tawdry finery of her own. One day I thought about begging her to go with me to a gallery that I had found where hung a picture which it seemed to me must speak to her.
She went readily enough – she was always eager to go somewhere in a pathetic hope that some new excitement, adventure, would await her. We walked to the gallery, through the gay absorbed crowd on the avenue; and as we moved among them, the chattering gaiety with which we had left her aunt's, fell from her, the lines deepened about her mouth, and finally she fell silent.
Almost no one was in the little gallery. I led her to the central bench, and we sat down facing the picture that I had brought her to see: A woman in a muslin gown holding a child. I guessed how the Madonnas, in their exquisite absorption and in radiance and in crimson and blue would have for her little to say, as a woman to a woman. But this girl, in the simple line and tone of every day, with a baby in her arms, seemed to me to hold a great fact, and to offer it.
Lena looked at her, and her face did not change. I waited, without saying anything, feeling certain that whatever I said she was in a mood to contradict. So she spoke first.
"It looks grand," she said, "till you think of the work of washin' and ironin' the baby's clothes. And her own. You can bet I shan't keep it in white."
"Look at the baby's hand," I said, "around her one finger."
It was at that moment that the owner of the little gallery came in, with a possible patron. They stood near us, looking at a landscape by the artist of the Madonna.
" … a wise restraint," he was saying. "Restraint is easy enough – it is like closing one's mouth all the time. The thing is to close it wisely! It is not so much the things that he elects not to include in the composition as it is his particular fashion of omission – without self-consciousness, with no pride of choice. I should say that of all the young artists now working in America, he comes the closest to giving place to the modern movements, seeing them as contributions but not often as ultimates – "
"I'm goin'," said Lena.
I followed her. On the sidewalk, she tossed her head and laughed unpleasantly.
"No such talk as that guy was giving in mine," she said. "He feels smart – that's what ails him. Cossy, I hate folks like that. I hate 'em when they pretend to know so much…"
"What if they do know, Lena?" I said.
"Then I don't want to be with 'em," she answered. "That's easy, ain't it? Sometimes I almost hate you. Ain't they some store where they's a basket of trimmin' remnants we could look at?"
I took her to a shop, and she walked among the shining stuffs, forgetting me. She loved the gowns on the models. She felt contempt for no one who was dressed more beautifully than she – only for those who "knew more" than she. I thought how surely beauty and not knowledge is the primal teacher, universally welcomed. Beauty is power.
But the remnant basket did not please her, and we stepped into the street to seek another shop. And standing beside a motor door, close to the way we passed, were Mrs. Carney and John Ember.
It was only for a moment, then the door shut upon them and they drove away. But I had seen him as I had dreamed him, a little older, but always in that brown, incomparable youth. He was bending his head to listen – that was the way I always thought of him. He was giving some unsmiling assent. He was here, and no longer across the world. I stood still, staring after the car.
"Gee, that was a swell blue coat," said Lena. "I don't blame you for standing stock-still. I bet I could copy that… Come on!"
I went with her. But I hardly heard her stream of comment and bitter chatter. And yet it was not all of John Ember that I was thinking, nor was I filled only with my singing consciousness that he was back. I was seeing again Mrs. Carney's face as she had turned to speak to him; glowing, relaxed, open like a flower.
Presently I was aware that Lena was not beside me. I looked and she was before the window of a shop. I crossed to her, and then I saw what she was looking at – no array of cheap blouses, price-marked, or of flaming plumes. She stood before the window of a children's outfitting shop.
I said nothing, nor did she. She looked, and I waited. The white things were exquisite and, I felt, remote. They were so dainty that I feared they would alienate her, because they were so much beyond her. But to my surprise, she turned to me:
"Could – could we go in here," she asked, "even if we didn't buy anything?"
We went in. Within the atmosphere was still more compact of delicate fabric and fashioning and color. An assured young woman came forward.
"Leave us look at some of your baby things," said Lena.
We looked. I shall never forget Lena's hands, ungloved, covered with rings and cheap blue and red stones, as those hands moved in and about the heaped-up fineness of the little garments. Of some of the things she did not know the names. The pink and blue crocheted sacks and socks brought her back to them again and again.
"I used to could crochet," she said at length.
But it was before a small white under-skirt that she made her real way of contact. She fingered the white simple trimming, and her look flew to mine.
"My God," she said, "that's 'three-and-five.' I can do that like lightning."
"Get some thread," I said, "and make some…"
She had made nothing yet. She had told me that. Now she lifted and touched for a moment among the heaped-up things that they brought her.
"I've got five dollars," she said, "that I was savin' to get me a swell hat, when I go back. I might – "
I said nothing. It seemed to me that a great thing was happening and that Lena must do it alone. After a little I priced the dimities and muslins in her hearing.
"If you want to, Lena," I said, "you could come back to the flat and Mrs. Bingy would help you to make the things…"
"Would five dollars get the cloth for two dresses and two skirts and some crochet wool? Some pink wool?" asked Lena.
So she bought these things, with the five dollars that hung about her neck in a little bag. As we went out the door, she saw a bassinet, all fine whiteness and flowered blue and lace edging.
"It's a clothes basket!" she cried excitedly. "Don't you see it is? What's the matter with me making one like that?" She turned to me, laughing as boisterously as I had heard her laugh in the Katytown post-office when more traveling men than usual were sitting outside the door of the Katytown Commercial House. "Land," she said, "when I get back home, I bet I'll have everything but the baby!"
I sat beside her in the street-car, and she tried to make a hole in the paper of her parcel to see again the color of the wool she had bought for the little sack. There was thread, too, for the "three-and-five." Lena's eyes were bright and eager. She said little on the way home, and she made no objection to going with me to the flat. When we unrolled the parcel on Mrs. Bingy's dining-room table, and I saw Lena stooping and planning, I thought of the picture that we had left in the little gallery. There was a look in Lena's eyes that I had never seen there before. I heard Mrs. Bingy and her chattering happily over the patterns, and I thought that beauty has many ways of power.
Then, the next day, I had a telegram from Mrs. Carney.
"Come to see me to-day," she said. "Important."
I hurried to her, dreaming, as I had dreamed all night, of whom I might find with her. But she was alone, and in some happy excitement that was beautifully becoming to her, who was usually so grave and absent.
"Cosma," she said, "what would you say to leaving the university before you have your degree?"
I knew that very well. "I would say," I said, "that I don't care two cents about the degree, if I can get the right position without it."
"I hoped you would say that!" she cried. "Then listen: John Ember has asked me to find a secretary for him. Will you go and try for the place?"
CHAPTER XV
His library had not many books, not many pictures, and no curtains at all. The nine o'clock sun fell across the dull rugs, and some blue and green jars on a shelf shone out as if they were saying something. I waited for him at the hour of the appointment that Mrs. Carney had made for me. And for me some of the magic and the terror of the time were in that she had not told him who I was. When his little Japanese had gone to call him, I sat there in a happiness which made me over, which made the whole world seem like another place. I heard his step in the passage, and I wondered if I was going to be able to speak at all. I rather thought not, until the very moment that I tried.
He came toward me, bowing slightly, and motioning me to my chair. I looked at him, with a leaping expectation in my heart, and, I am afraid, in my eyes. His own eyes met mine levelly, courteously, and without a sign of recognition.
"Now, let us see," he said briskly, and sat down before me. "About how much experience have you had?"
"I have never been anybody's secretary, if that is what you mean," I said, when I could.
"It is not in the least what I mean," he returned. "If you happen not to have been anybody's secretary, I am glad of it. I meant, 'What can you do?'"
"I can typewrite," I managed to tell him. "And almost always I can spell."
"That's good," he said, "though far from essential. Now what else?"
I thought for a moment. "I can keep still," I said. "I don't believe there's anything else I can do."
"That makes an admirable beginning," he observed gravely. "Do – do you take down all instructions? In notes?"
"I can, if you like," I said. "But I can never read my own notes."
"You don't do shorthand?" he cried.
For the first time, as I shook my head, it occurred to me that I might not meet his requirements.
"Well, now," he was saying, "that is good news. I was afraid you might come with a ruled note-book," he explained. "The flap kind."
"No," I said, "I begin at both ends of those. And then I never can find the notes."
"Precisely," he said. "Now about your head. Is it likely to ache every few minutes?"
"Only when I read the map in an automobile," I answered.
"Fortunately," he assured me, "there will be little of that in my requirements. Now the honest truth: Can you work hard? Can you work like a demon if you have to?"
"Yes. Unless it has figures in it," I said.
"It hasn't," he said. "Or at least, when it has, I shall have to do those myself, for my sins. But I warn you, there's some pretty stiff work ahead. It's a labor survey of China. And I want somebody to do ten hours a day most of the time, showing how like dogs the Chinese workmen are treated."
Ten hours a day with him! I sat silent, trying to take in the magnitude of my joy.
"It's too much?" he hazarded.
"Oh!" I cried. "No. Why no!" He looked up inquiringly. "See the women in this town," I added, "who work ten hours a day and more."
"We're going to get along extremely well, then," he said, "if you don't mind my damned irritability – I beg your pardon. I'm shockingly irritable – but," he paused, leaning forward, still grave, "let me tell you, confidentially, now, that I always know it, underneath. You can't mind what I say too awfully, you know, if I put you in possession of that fact to start with. Can you?"
"I shan't mind," I said.
"Well, you will, you know," he warned me, "but that at least ought to help. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to go to work now? This moment?"
"Yes, it would," I said, trying hard not to say it too joyfully.
"What?" he exclaimed. "Really? Without breaking an engagement? Or telephoning anybody? This is wonderful. Oh, by the way. Let me see your hand when you write."
He brought me a pad and pen and ink.
"Write anything," he said. "Write."
I wrote. He watched me absorbedly and drew a sigh that might have been relief.
"That's all right, too," he told me. "I had a young woman here helping me once who wrapped her fingers round the pen when she wrote, in a fashion that drove me mad. I used to go out and dig in the garden till my secretary had gone home, and then come in and get down to work myself."
I put away my hat, and merely to shut the door on the closet that held umbrellas and raincoats was an intimacy that gave me joy. I had starved for him, thirsted for him, and two days ago had not known that he was not in China still; yet here was this magic, as life knows so well to manufacture magic.
"I'm afraid I don't remember," he said, "what Mrs. Carney told me your name is?"
While we talked, it had been gradually fastening itself in my mind that it would have been remarkable if he had recognized me. A country girl, in a starched white dress, with her hair about her face, acting like a common creature on the Katytown road, and later, to his understanding working in a New York factory, could have no connection with a woman of twenty-six, in well-fitting clothes, who came to him six years after, as his secretary. I told him my last name, and he said it over as if it had been Smith.
In a corner of the library, by the window overlooking the little garden, he set me to sorting an incredible heap of notes, made illegibly on paper of varying sizes, unnumbered, but every sheet scrupulously dated. These covered two years and a half, and their arrangement was anything but chronological.
"Note-books have their uses," he admitted, surveying that hopeless pile. "But not the flap kind," he added hastily.
I set to work, and as I touched the papers which had been with him all those days when I had seen the sun off for China, it seemed to me that I must tell somebody: "It's true then! Excepting for the misery in the world, you can be perfectly happy!" I had always doubted it. You do doubt it, until you have a moment of perfect happiness for your own. And this was the first one that I had ever known. He was at some proofs, and he promptly forgot my existence. After all these years, after the few rare glimpses of him which had been food for me and a kind of life, here I was where by lifting my eyes I could see him, where countless times a day I could hear him speak. Better than all this, and infinitely dearer, I was, however humbly, to help him in his work. I, Cosma Wakely, who, on a day, had tried to flirt with him.
I went at the notes fearfully. What if I could not understand them? There were gods, I knew, whose written word is all but measureless to man, I own that his notes were far from clear. Perhaps it was just because I so much wanted it that I understood them. Moreover, I found, to my intense delight, that I some way felt what he was writing. This I can not explain, but every one who loves some one will know how this is.
In half an hour he wheeled suddenly in his chair at the table. I caught, before he spoke, his look of almost boyish ruefulness.
"Miss Wakely," he said, "I beg your pardon like anything. What salary do you have?"
I felt my face turn crimson. This had occurred to me no more than it had to him.
When it was settled, he rose and came toward the corner where I worked, and stood looking down at me. For a moment I was certain that now he knew me.
"Miss Wakely," he said very gently, "may I ask you one thing more? Do you wear black sateen aprons?"
"I loathe all aprons," I said.
"And paper sleeve-shields, too?" he inquired earnestly. "Held by big rubber bands?"
"Paper sleeve-shields held by big rubber bands," I said, "I loathe even more than black sateen aprons."
"Well," he said, "do you know, there was one young woman once – " and he went back to his task obliviously.
At one o'clock I found a little tea-shop in the neighborhood, where food was scandalously high, after the manner of unassimilated tea-shops. I remember the clean little room, with a rose on my table and shelves of jelly over my head.
"How much better that is than some books," I said to the pink waitress, because I had to speak to somebody, so that I could smile. The world is not yet adjusted with that simplicity which permits one to sit in public places alone and, very happily, to smile. And this, I realized, was what I had been doing.
I was obliged to walk twice the transverse length of the blocks cut by the little studio street, before it was time to go back. As I was returning the second time, I came face to face with Mr. Ember carrying a paper sack.
"Torchido," he explained, "lectures in a young ladies' seminary just at noon. It is not convenient for me. But I mind nothing so much as the fact that he will not let me have dried herrings. They – they offend Torchido. They do not offend me. So I go out and buy herrings of my own and hide them in the bookcase. But he nearly always smells them out."
I wanted to say: "You can't buy anywhere such good ones as we used to have in Katytown." Instead, I said something in disparagement of Torchido's taste, and reflected on the immeasurable power of dried herrings in one human being's appeal to another.
I went back to work in my corner, and he ate herrings and buns, unabashed, at his library table. When I saw Torchido coming along the garden wall, I said: "Torchido – he's coming!" and Mr. Ember swept the remains of his lunch into the sack and dropped it into one of the glorious green-blue jars.
Torchido came in for orders, took them, stood for a moment plainly sniffing the air, pointedly opened a far window, and respectfully retreated. Whereat the first faint smile that I had seen met my look, when the door had closed.
It was a heavenly day. It seemed to me that some heritage of my young girlhood had, after all, not quite escaped in all that sordid time, but had waited for me, let me catch it up and, now, enjoy it as I never could have enjoyed it then.
I walked home that night, in remembrance of that first miserable walk away from that studio, and because I like to be happy in the exact places where I have been miserable. I wanted to be alone for a little while, too, to think out what had happened. And all the way home that night, and all the evening when I did no work, the thing which kept recurring to me was the magic of a universe in which herrings and the absence of black sateen aprons permit immortal beings to draw a little nearer to each other.
The days were all happy. That combination of fellowship and its humor, together with a complete impersonality which yet exquisitely takes account of all human personality and variously values it, was something which I had never before known in any man. I had not, in fact, known that it was in the world. It is exceedingly rare – yet. Most women die without knowing that it does occasionally exist. But it presages the thing which lies somewhere there, beyond the border of the present, beside which the spectacle of romantic love without it will be as absurd as chivalry itself.
I used to think, in those first days, how gloriously democratic love would make us – if we would let it. I understood history now – from the time of the first man and woman! Not a cave man, not a shepherd on the hills, not a knight in a tournament, but that I understood the woman who had loved him. It was astonishing, to have, all of a sudden, not only the Eloises and Helens clear to me – they have been clear to many – but also every little obscure woman who has ever watched for a man to come home. And it wasn't only that. It was that I understood so much better the woman of now. Women in cars and in busses, shoppers, shop-women, artists, waitresses, char-women, "great" ladies – none of them could deceive me any more. No snobbery, no hauteur, no superiority, no simplicity could ever trap me into any belief that they and I were different. If they loved men, then I know them through and through.
"Mrs. Bingy," I said to her one night, "did you ever love Mr. Bingy much?"
She was re-setting the pins in her pillow and she looked over at me with careful attention.
"Well," she said, "they was a good many of us to home, you know; and I didn't have much to do with; and I really married Keddie to get a home. But of course, afterward I got fond of him. And then to think of us now!"
"But you really didn't love him when you married him?"
"No," she said. "It's a terrible thing to own up to."
And there again was the whole naked problem, as I had seen it for her, for Lena, for my mother, for all the women of Katytown, for Mrs. Carney, for Rose… What was the matter? When love was in the world for us all, when at some time every one of us shared it – what was the reason that it came to this? Or – as I had seen almost as often – to the model "happy" home, which often bred selfishness and oblivion?
Yet in those days I confess that I thought far less about these things than I did of the simple joy of being in that workroom where he was.
There was a day of rain early in June – of rain so intense and compelling that when lunchtime came I left in the midst of it, while Mr. Ember was out of the room, so that he should not be constrained to ask me to stay. When I came back he scolded me.
"You didn't use good sense!" he said. "Why didn't you?"
"I used all I had," I replied with meekness.
"If that was all you had, you'd lose your job," he grumbled. "Never go out from here again in such a rain as that. Do you hear?"
Torchido not yet having returned from his lecture, Mr. Ember built up a cedar fire in the fireplace and made me dry my feet.
"I am going to make you a cup of tea," he said, "from some – "
"Don't tell me," I said, "that it's from the same kind that the emperor uses?"
"It is not," he replied. "This is another form of the same advertisement. This is some which was picked four hundred years ago."
"Oh," I said, "I dislike tea more than I can tell you. But I should like to drink a cup of that."
The stuff was horrible. It was not strong, but it had an unnameable puckering quality. I tasted it, and waited.
"Do you like it?" he asked eagerly.
"It is," I said, "the worst tea I have ever tasted in my whole life. I feel as if I had been shirred."
He burst into laughter.
"So I think," he said, "but lovely ladies drink it down and pretend to like it, just because I tell 'em what it is. I'm glad you hate it."
He held the tin over the coals.
"Shall I burn it?" he asked. "To the tune of 'What horrid humbugs lovely ladies are'?"
"Oh, no," I said, "give it to some old lady who will think it is just tea."
He nodded. "You have made the economically correct adjustment," he said. "And that is a good deal of a trick."
One morning when I went in, I found him sitting at his table pressing the tips of his fingers to his closed eyes.
"Good morning, Miss Wakely," he said. "These two tools of mine are rusting out. It's a nuisance just now, with the proof coming."
I said: "Couldn't I read it to you?"
"Frankly, I'm afraid not;" he answered. "I belong to the half of mankind who can not be read to. I think that I couldn't bear it. But you may try."
He sat in a deep chair, with his back to the light, and I before him, with a little table for the proof. I read to him, doing my best to keep my mind on what I was reading. His bigness, his gentleness, his abstraction, his humor were like a constant speaking presence, even when he was silent.
When I had read for ten minutes, he interrupted me.
"It's wonderful," he said. "You can do it. I'm trying to get at the reason. You don't over-emphasize. And yet your voice is so flexible that you aren't monotonous. And you don't plunge at every sentence, and come down hard on the first word, and taper off to nothing. If it keeps up, this is going to make me a terrible grafter, because I can't begin to pay you for what this will be worth to me."
"I'll stay as long as I can stand it!" I told him, trying to keep the happiness out of my eyes and my voice at the same time.
In a little while, the joyous sensation of what I was doing gave way to the interest in the reading itself. His book, I found, was a serious study of work in its relation to human growth. From the Hebraic conception of work as a curse to the present-day conception of work as conscious cooperation in creation, in evolution, he was coming down the line, visiting all nations, entering all industries.
It was curious that, in those first days there never once passed between us any word of the great human problems in which we were both so excludingly interested. I understood that doubtless he had accustomed himself to saying very little about them, save when he knew that he would meet understanding. I had been at work for him more than a month before we ever talked at all, save the casual give-and-take of the day, and in occasional interludes, like the interludes of herrings and tea.
One morning we were copying some Chinese reports giving the total wages earned by men in seventy-year periods, and some totals to indicate their standards of living. Suddenly he said:
"Considering our civilization, and our culture and enlightenment-business, our own figures, proportionately to what we might make them with our resources, are blacker than the ex-empire's."
"You can't tell it in totals, though," I said. "You can't indicate in figures what is lost by low wages, any more than you can measure great works of genius by efficiency charts."
"You care about these things?" he asked.
"More than anything else," I answered.
After that, he talked to me sometimes about his work.
"I wish," he said once, "that I knew more about the working women. I'd like to get some of this off before a group of working women, and see how they'd take it."
"I could plan that for you," I said, "if you really mean it."
He looked at me curiously. "You are a remarkable little person," he observed. "Are there, then, things that you can't do?"
I went to see Rose back in the same factory, a little more worn, a little less hopeful, but still at her work among the girls. She welcomed the suggestion that he come to speak. He came for the next week's meeting.
"Rose," I said, "don't say anything to Mr. Ember about me."
Before that night came round, something happened. One morning, when Mr. Ember was going through his mail, he read one letter through twice.
"This one," he said, "I must take time to answer. My lecture bureau has gone into bankruptcy."
"Well," I said, "what of that? You don't need a bureau."
"It's not that," he said; "I own stock in it."
At noon he went out. When he came in his face was clear, and he went back to his proof. As I was leaving that night he spoke abruptly:
"Miss Wakely," he said, "I am sorry to have to tell you something – I am indeed. After this week I must not have you any more."
For this I was utterly unprepared. I looked up at him with all the terror and despair which filled me. "I'm not doing your work well?" I tried to say. But – "You're doing my work," he answered, "as I never hoped to have it done. It isn't that. It isn't only that this failure leaves me with very little money. There's thirty thousand dollars owing to lecture and Chautauqua people, and the company hasn't a cent."
"You mean," I said, "that you will help pay this thirty thousand?"
"There's no one else," he answered. "I'm the only stockholder who has anything at all. And the rest have families."
"Can they compel you to do this?" I asked. It is amazing how the brute instincts reappear in areas new; to experience. I was civilized enough in some things, and yet instinctively I asked: "Can they compel you?"
He merely stood smiling down at me. "Most of the speakers are twenty-dollar-a-night men," he said. "They can't lose it, you see."
"I beg your pardon," I said, and went out to the street in a kind of glory. So he was like this!
That Saturday night he handed me my pay, with, "Good-by, Miss Wakely. I can't thank you – I really can't, you know."
"Good-by, Mr. Ember," I replied cheerfully, and went.
On Monday morning, when he came into the workroom with his letters I sat there oiling the typewriter.
He stared at me. "Miss Wakely," he said in distress, "I must have muddled it awfully. I wasn't clear – "
"Yes," I said, "you were clear. But I thought I'd enjoy keeping on with the proof. May I have a clean cloth for the machine?"
He came over to the typewriter table, and stood looking down at me. I dared not look up, because I was worried about my eyes and what they might have to say. Then he put out his hand, and I gave him mine.
