A Daughter of the Morning

"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.

"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!"