A Daughter of the Morning

CHAPTER XII

I drop five years – so much in the living, so little in the retrospect!

Upon that time I entered with one thought: The university. At the school I had always been ahead of my class, a meager enough accomplishment there. I had browsed through the books of the third- and fourth-year girls, glad that I found so little that I could not have mastered then. Now, at Mrs. Carney's suggestion and with her help, I took some tutoring; and, what with overwork and summer sessions and entering "special" once more, I made the university, and, toward the close of my fifth year, was nearing my graduation. A part of my expenses I had paid myself. And how did I do that? By making lace for Mrs. Keddie Bingy!

Life is so wonderful that it makes you afraid, and it makes you glad, and it makes you sure.

In the first year after I left Miss Spot and Miss Manners, I read in one of the papers that John Ember had gone to China on an expedition which was to spend two years in the interior. I wouldn't have believed that the purpose could have dropped so completely out of everything – school, town, life, I myself, became something different. Until then I had not realized how much I had been living in the thought that I was somewhere near him; that any day I might see him in the street, in the cars, anywhere. It was hard to get used to knowing that somebody coming down at the far end of the street could not possibly be he; that no list of names in the paper could have his name.

But just as, that first morning, I knew that he wouldn't want me to give up and cry, so now I knew that I had to go ahead anyway, and do the best I could. It was what he would have wanted. And I had only just begun to make myself different. I had only just shown myself how much there was, really, to be different about.

It was wanting to see him so much that made me take out my book again, after a long lapse, and read it over. The first pages were just as I wrote them, on the wrapping-paper that came around the boys' overalls. Then there were the sheets of manila paper that I had bought at the drug store near the first little room that Mrs. Bingy and I took – I remember how I had got up early and walked to the factory one morning to save the nickel for the paper. Then a few pages that I had made at the school on empty theme books; and some more on the Massys' guest paper, gray with lavender lining and a Paris maker's name. Now I went on writing my book with a typewriter that I was learning to use, since a man on Mrs. Bingy's floor let me borrow his machine when he went out in the mornings. My whole history was in those different kinds of paper in my book.

Those typewritten pages are of interest chiefly to myself. They are like the thirty pages that I threw away because they told only about my going from one factory to another. Only now the typewritten pages were not about events at all, but about the things that went on in me. And those I can sum up in a few words: For the important thing is that in those pages I was recording my growing understanding of something which Rose, out of her sordid living, had done so much to teach me: that my life was not important just because it was the life of Cosma Wakely alone, but it was important in proportion as it saw itself a part of the life about it – the life of school, of working women and men, of all men and women, of all beings. I began to wonder not so much how I could make my own individual "success," whatever that means, as how I could take my place in the task that we're all doing together – and of finding out what that task is.

That, in short, is what those years meant to me. The incidents do not so much matter. Nobody gets this understanding in the way that any one else gets it. It is the individual quest, the individual revelation. Experience, education, love, the mere wear and tear of living, all go toward this understanding. Most of all, love. I think that for me the university and the entire faculty were only auxiliary lights to the light that shone on me, over seas and lands, from the interior of China!

Of all the wonder learned by loving, no wonder is more exquisite than the magic by which one absent becomes a living presence. This man had so established himself before me that it seemed to me I knew his judgments. The simplicity of this new friend of mine, the mental honesty of that one, the accuracy of a third who made me careful of my facts – these John Ember would approve. I always knew. The self-centering or pretense of others; I knew how he would smile at these, shrug at them, but never despise them, because of his tender understanding of all life. Everybody with whom I was thrown who was less developed than I, I understood because I had been Cossy Wakely. Every one who was more developed, I tried passionately to understand. These, and books, plays, music, "society's" attempt to amuse itself, Rose and the factory, the whole panorama of my life passed every day before the still tribunal of this one man, who knew nothing about them.

The two years' absence of the expedition to China lengthened to three years, and it was well toward the close of the fourth year when Mrs. Carney told me he might be turning home. But the summer and autumn passed, and I heard nothing more. January came, and I was within a few months of graduation.

Then something happened which abruptly tied up the present to my old life.

I came home from class one afternoon to Mrs. Bingy's flat and found on the table a letter for me. It was from Luke, in Katytown.

"Dear Cossy [the letter said], I hate to ask you to do something, but you're the only one. Lena's gone… She left this letter for me. I send it so you'll know. And she's gone. It says she's in the city. I ain't got the money to go there with. Cossy, could you find her? I thought maybe you could find her. She's got some folks there and I think maybe she'll go there. It's an awful thing. I hate to ask you but you are the only one please answer.

The address which he sent me was far uptown, and it took me over to a row of tenements near the East River. It was dark when I left the subway station. And when I found the street at last it smelled worse than the Katytown alleys in summer.

In the doorway of what I thought was the number I was looking for, a man and a woman were standing. I asked if this was the address I wanted, and the woman answered that it was.

"Isn't it Lena?" I said.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"It's Cossy," I answered.

"Yes, I know. What do you want?" she asked again.

I told her that I would wait up-stairs for her, and then the man went away, and she came with me. We climbed the stairs and went along a hall to a parlor that smelled of damp upholstery. She lighted a high central gas-jet that flared without a burner.

She had always been pretty, and she was that now, though her face had lines made by scowling. Her neck and shoulders and breast were almost uncovered, because her waist was so thin and so low-cut. Her little arms were bare from above the elbow, and her little features looked still smaller under a bright irregular turban with a feather like a long sword.

"Luke asked me to find you," I said. "He said he didn't have the money to come himself."

"Poor Luke," said Lena unexpectedly. "He's got the worst of it. But I can't help it."

"You've just come up for a little while, though, haven't you?" I asked her. "And then you're going back?"

She shrugged, and all the bones and cords of her neck and chest stood out. The shadow of her feather kept running over her face, like a knife blade.

"What's the use of your talking like the preacher?" she said. "You got out yourself."

"Yes," I said, "but – "

"You knew before and I didn't know till after," she added. "That's all. I couldn't stand it, either."

I sat still, wondering what to say.

"We moved in there with his mother and father," Lena said. "His father was good to me; but he was sick and just one more to take care of. His mother – well, I know it was hard for her, but she was bound I should do everything her way. She was a grand good housekeeper – and I ain't. I hate it. She got the rheumatism and sat in her chair all day and told me how. I tell you I couldn't stand it – "

Her voice got shrill, and I thought she was going to cry. But she just threw back her head and looked at me.

"And now in seven months," she said, "something else. That was the last straw. I says now I'd never get out. I've come up here for the last good time I may ever have. If Luke won't take me back, he needn't. I don't care what becomes of me anyway."

"Oh, Lena," I said.

"Don't you go giving yourself airs," she said. "You got away. We've heard about your school and your smartness. But supposin' you hadn't. Do you think you'd have stayed in Luke's mother's kitchen slavin'?"

"No, Lena," I said. "I honestly don't think I would."

The gas without any burner flickered over the big-figured carpets and chairs and table cover, the mussy paper flowers and the rusty gas stove and the crayon portraits. I almost felt as if I were there in Lena's place.

"I s'pose, though, you're goin' to tell me to go back," she said. "Well, best spare your breath."

It came to me what I had to do, just as simply as things almost always come.

"I'm not going to tell you any such thing," I said. "I wondered if you wouldn't come down and stay with Mrs. Bingy and me while you're here. We've got an extra cot."

She tossed her head. "You're laughing at me," she said.

"No," I said, "I want you. So would Mrs. Bingy."

When she understood, something seemed to go out of her. She shrank down in the chair, and that look of hers went away from her.

"I'd love to," she said. "Oh, Cossy – I thought when I got here things'd be different. But I've been here four days, and I ain't really had any fun here either!"

I told her to get her things ready, and when she went to tell her mother's aunt, with whom she was staying, her aunt came in and made us both have some supper first. The table was in the kitchen, and the aunt was cooking flap-jacks over the stove. Her husband was a tunnel man, and so was his son. There were two girls younger than Lena; one of them was ticket-seller in a motion-picture house, and one of them was "at home."

"Don't you work?" I said to her.

"Hessie's going to be married," said her mother, proud and final.

"Believe me, she'd better get a job instead," said Lena – and I saw the girl who was ticket-seller turn a puzzled face to her, but the bride-to-be laughed. I was glad that I was going to take Lena away from them. Whatever is to be learned by women, it seems to me that they should never have for teacher a bitter woman, however wise.

Lena had felt a good deal – I could see that; but she knew nothing. To her, her own case was just one isolated case, and due to her bad luck. She had no idea that she was working at a problem, any more than Mrs. Bingy and I had when we left Katytown. Or any more than her mother's aunt, who was thick and flabby and bothered about too much saleratus in the flap-jacks. I thought of the difference between Lena and Rose. They'd got something so different out of a hard life. Rose felt hers for all women; but Lena felt hers for just Lena.

When we got back to the flat, Mrs. Bingy had the gas log burning and she was working at her lace. The child was awake, and playing about. Lena stood in the passage door and looked. We had some plain dark rugs and a few pieces of willow furniture that we had bought on the instalment plan. I had made some flowered paper shades for the lights. Mrs. Carney had given me one lovely colored print. I had my school-books and some library books on the shelves. And we had a red couch cover Mrs. Bingy had bought – "shut her eyes and bought," she said.

"Oh, ain't it nice?" Lena said.

"Luck sakes," said Mrs. Bingy. "If it ain't Lena-Curtsey-that-was. Well, if here ain't the whole neighborhood!"

I followed Lena into my little bedroom that night.

"Lena," I said, "does Luke know what you told me?"

She shook her head.

"Wouldn't you better write and tell him?" I asked. "And tell him just why you want to get away for a while?"

"He'd think I was crazy," she answered. "They'd talk it over. His ma'd say I was a wicked woman – and I donno but what I am. But I will be crazy if I stay stuck there in that kitchen all those months – "

She began to cry. I understood that the best thing to do was to let her stay here quietly with us and give her whatever little pleasure we could.

She let me write to Luke and tell him that she was going to visit us for a while. I told her I would take her to a school play the next night, and we looked over her things to decide what she was to wear.

"Lord, Cossy," she said, "it's been months since I've went to bed thinking I was going to have any fun the next day."

Afterward I found Mrs. Bingy sitting with her head on her hand.

"I wonder," she said, "if I done it."

"What, Mrs. Bingy?" I asked.

"When any woman in Katytown leaves her husband, I'll always think that if I hadn't gone, maybe – "

"Mrs. Bingy," I said, "suppose you had stayed. Either he'd have murdered you and the baby, too, maybe, or else you might have had another child or two – with a drunken brute for a father. If you've helped anybody like you to get away, you be glad!"

"I don't know what to make of you sometimes, Cossy," she said. "Sometimes what you say sounds so nice I bet it's wicked."

She took the child, gathered him up with a long sweep of her arm and tossed him, with one arm, on her shoulder. She was huge and brown, as she used to be; but now her life had rounded out her gauntness, and she looked fed and rested and peaceful. To see her in the little sitting-room of the flat, busy and happy and cheerful, was like seeing her soul with another body, or her body with another soul, or both. I never got over the wonder of it.

The school play gave Lena nothing of what she pathetically called "fun." And when she went with me to the factory dances, she turned up her nose at the men, not one of whom was, she said, a "dresser." She told me that she hated to be with anybody who knew more than she did. In a fortnight she went back to Luke's aunt to stay, I suspected, as long as her small money held out at the motion-picture shows.

CHAPTER XIII

It was just before Lena left us that Mrs. Carney telephoned one day for me to come to her house to dinner on the following night. "He's back!" I said to myself as I hung up the receiver; for by now Mrs. Carney had guessed something of John Ember's place in my life, though we had never spoken of it. But he was not back, now, any more than he had been all the other times that I had leaped at the hope, in these three years. It was some one else who had come back.

Mr. Arthur Carney was in Europe that year, and I went there that night without thinking that there was such a person as he in the world, so long had I forgotten his existence. But Mrs. Carney told me that she had had, the day before, a telegram to say that he had landed in New York and would be at home by the end of the week. While we were waiting for dinner to be announced, he unexpectedly appeared in her drawing-room. And he said to her, before all those people:

"You see, my dear, I've come to surprise you. I've come to see how well you amuse yourself while I am away."

He said that he would go in to dinner with us just as he was. He was welcomed by everybody, and, of course, Mrs. Carney introduced him to me. She could have had no better answer to what he had just said to her.

"May I present my husband, Miss Wakely?" she said. "Arthur, she was once at the factory. You may remember – "

He had grown stouter, and his face was pink, and his head was pink through his light hair. He carried a glass and stared at me through it, and then he dropped his glass and said:

"My word, you know. Then we've met before, we two."