A Daughter of the Morning
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"You don't think it would be very long, do you?" I says. "On account of Mis' Bingy and my rent."
"I wish I could promise something more," says the big gray man, looking back on his desk papers. "I'm sorry. Good morning."
I didn't think till afterward that he'd never even troubled to ask me what I could do.
Then the little young man that had been setting loose in his chair, sat up loose, and spoke loose, too.
"I say," he said, "if she's a friend of Ember's, I might give her a card to the factory."
"I shouldn't trouble if I were you, Arthur," says the big gray man, sharp; which I didn't think was very nice of him.
But the little young man, tipping his cigar so's the smoke would keep out of his eyes, and squinting back from it, took out a card and scrawled on it and tossed it across the table toward me.
"You might try that," he says. And shook himself, loose again, and strolled out the door. He walked loose, too.
I thanked him and put the card away, and went down in the elevator. It was the same elevator, it turned out, that the little young man had taken, but of course he didn't notice me. When I got down I asked the man at the door how to get to the address of the factory that was written on the card. He said it was about two miles, and told me with his thumb which way. While I was trying to make out which way he meant, I stood for a minute in the street doorway. And there was the little young man again.
"Do you know how to get to the factory?" he asked.
"Yes. On my two feet," I says back, and started.
"You don't mean to say you're going to walk all that way?" he says, following me a step or two.
"No," I says, "I don't mean to say it, as I know of."
"Look here," he says, "my car is here at the side door. I'm on my way over to the factory now. Can't I give you a lift?"
I thought for a minute. I was awful tired. If I walked all that way and then home, I'd have to spend ten cents for lunch that would be enough for Mis' Bingy and me both at night. The little young man was a friend of Mr. Carney's, that was a friend of Mr. Ember's…
"We'll be there in ten minutes," he says.
"Much obliged," I says, and went with him.
He had a nice little shiny two-seated car that he engineered himself. When we was headed down the avenue he says:
"My name is Arthur Carney. I'm Mr. Carney's nephew."
I remembered about the awful things I'd said to Mr. Ember, so I answered just as nice as I knew how: "I'm Cosma Wakely."
"Do you live here in town?" he ask' me.
"No," I says. "I just come from Katytown last night. Yes, I do live here now – I forgot."
"Really," he says.
The car went so quick and smooth and even I could have sung because I was in it. I'd never been in an automobile before.
"Oh," I says, "ain't this just grand?"
He looked over at me – he had a real white face and gold glasses and not much of any hair showed. His clothes and his gloves was like new, and some white cuffs peeked out.
"I think so," he says. "I'm glad you do."
"I meant the car," I says; and then I was afraid I'd made another mistake, like I had with Mr. Ember, and that the car was what the little young man had meant, too.
But he was looking at me and laughing.
"You're awfully sure what you mean, aren't you?" he says. "Are you always that sure?"
I kept thinking that he was Mr. Carney's nephew, and that Mr. Carney was Mr. Ember's friend. I wanted to answer him like I knew Mr. Ember would like. I'd answered him saucy when he first spoke to me, but that was part because I was embarrassed. So I didn't say anything at all. I didn't care whether he thought I was a country girl and a stick or not. I wanted to act nice.
"What made you run away from me yesterday?" he says.
"Yesterday?" I ask' him.
"At Gordon's studio," he says. "You don't mean to say you've forgotten that I spoke to you when you stood in the doorway? And you ran away."
I ask' him, before I meant to, "Was Mr. Ember there?"
"Ember? No," he says; "he's never here. He works off in God-forsaken spots. How are you going to like the city?"
I looked down the shiny crowded street. All to once I saw it different. Before that I'd been thinking he might be in every crowd.
"It's awful lonesome here," I says.
The policeman at the corner held up his hand, and we had to sit still and wait. The little young man leaned on the wheel.
"I hope you'll let me keep you from getting too lonesome," he says.
I turned round on him. In another minute I'd have given him the thing I always tried to say back, smart and quick. "When I'm that lonesome, I'll go traveling back home again," was what come in my head. Instead of that, all at once I wondered what the woman in the pinkish dress and hat in the studio would have said. And I said what she did say:
"I beg your pardon?"
He laughed. "All right," he said, and started the car. "I do go pretty fast. But, by jove, you know, you bowl a fellow over."
I didn't say anything. I was thinking. Here was a man that had been with all those people yesterday, the people that were the way I wanted to be. He had always been with them. He had money, I thought – his clothes and his cuffs, and then the car, looked as if he had. Probably he knew the same things, almost, that Mr. Ember knew. He ought to be able to help me.
"Mr. Carney," I says, "have you been to see Europe, and Asia – and volcanoes?"
"Have I what?" says he.
"Oh," I says, "traveled. Well, I guess you have seen all the things and places there are to see, haven't you?"
"I've done a turn or two," he says. "Why? Are you interested in travel?"
"Oh, yes," I says; "but – of course – "
"Do you want to travel?" he says, turning to look at me.
"Why," I says; "but I mean – "
He stopped the car for the policeman at the next corner.
"Because," he says, leaning on the wheel again, "if you want to travel, you shall travel."
It was almost what Mr. Ember had said. I was so thankful that now I knew enough to answer nice, and not the awful way I had done to Mr. Ember.
"I hope so," I says. "I do want to."
I thought he was waiting for me to look round at him; but there was a little dog in the automobile next to us, and I was watching that.
"When?" he says. "When?"
I says, "The gentleman blew his whistle."
He laughed, and started the car, and I went on with what I'd been wanting to say.
"I was thinking," I says, "you've probably seen a whole lots of folks, like I mean about. Well, I wanted to ask you: How do folks get different? I mean, when they've started in being like me?"
"What do you mean, child?" he says.
"Get different," I says. "Get like those women there yesterday."
"There wasn't a woman in the room yesterday who could hold a candle to you, and you know it," he says. "Ever since yesterday I've been cursing myself that I didn't follow you. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw you come into that office this morning. Why in the world would you want to be different?"
I wanted to say, "Because I want something more than that in mine!" But I didn't. I spoke just regular.
"No," I says, "I mean true. I mean, learn things. Not school things, but how to do. How do you start out? I mean, if it's me?"
He kept looking at me, in between guiding his car.
"So that's it!" he says. "And you want me to tell you?"
"Yes!" I says. "More than anything else." He turned his car into a side street, and run it slow. We was almost to the factory, I judged. I could see smoke and big walls.
"You can have whatever schooling or training there is in this town that you want – or anywhere else," he says to me, "if you just say the word."
It was just the way Mr. Ember had spoken, and Mr. Ember had meant that I mustn't think there was nothing else for me only just what I'd got, if I was willing to work for something more. So I see the little young man must think as he did.
"It's nice to think so," I says.
"Do you mean it?" says he.
"Why, of course," I says. "Is this the factory?"
"You insist on trying for a job?" he says.
"Why, yes," I says. "Don't you think I can get one?"
"Sure you can get one," he says, "if I say the word."
I wondered how he done what he done. It wasn't five minutes that I waited in the stuffy dirty room by the gate into the factory yard, before a man come and told me to go up to the next floor.
When I crossed the yard the little young man come out of a door and he says to me:
"Good-by, and good luck to you." And he adds low, "I'll be waiting for you at six o'clock at the door we came in."
"Oh," I says, "don't you do that, Mr. Carney! Mr. Ember wouldn't want me to trouble the other Mr. Carney or you either, not that much."
He scowled. "This isn't exactly on his account, you know."
And when he went off he didn't take off his hat to me, like Mr. Ember had done, and like I thought city men always done.
I kept thinking all that over while they started me in to work, punching holes in a card. I thought about it so hard that when night came I asked the forewoman if I could walk to the car with her. I thought I could take the street-car, now I had a job. She was a big red woman. "That don't work with me, you'll find," she says, and went past me. I guess she didn't understand what I said. So I went out with some of the other girls, and it just happened that I got out another door than the one I went in, and on to the street-car.
I bought a can of peas and four rolls and five cents butter, to celebrate.
"Mis' Bingy," I says, when I went in, "scratch a match, and start the cook stove up there on the wall! I've got a job for three dollars a week, from eight till six. Didn't I tell you everything'd be easy?"
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.