CHAPTER IX
One day toward spring I went down to see Mrs. Bingy. She had three women in her room every day, making the lace. She had regular customers from the shops. When I went in she was in a good black dress and was sitting holding the baby, that was beginning now to talk.
"Oh, Cossy," she says, "look what I got," and pointed to some papers.
"Katytown papers," I said. "I don't suppose there's a soul there outside the family that I care whether I ever see again or not."
"Why, Cossy," she said, "there's Lena – "
"Lena Curtsy!" I said. "Good heavens! Mrs. Bingy, I wish you wouldn't call me 'Cossy.'"
"I always do forget the Cosma," she said humbly; "I'll try to remember better. But Lena Curtsy – Cossy, she's married to Luke."
"Good for them," I said; "and I suppose they had a charivari that woke the cemetery. That's Katytown."
"They've gone to housekeeping to Luke's father's," said Mrs. Bingy. "Don't you want to read about it, Cossy – Cosma?"
I took the paper. "Mrs. Bingy," I said, "I came down to show you my new dress."
"It's a beauty," she said. "I noticed it first thing when I see you. It must be all-silk." She examined it with careful fingers. "I made this of mine myself," she added, proud.
"Do you know anything about Keddie?" I asked her.
She begun to cry. "That's all that's the matter," she says. "The first money I earned I sent him enough to go and take the cure. The letter come back to me, marked that they couldn't find him. So I took the baby and run down to Katytown, and, sure enough, the house was rented to strangers and not a stick of furniture left in it. He'd sold it all off and went West. And me with the money to give him the cure, when it's too late. I ought," she says, "never to have left him."
"Mrs. Bingy," I says, "do you honestly believe that?"
"No," says she, "I don't. But it's a terrible thing to own up to. I saw your Ma in Katytown."
"Oh!" I says. "How is she? She don't write. She just wrote once and put in a dollar chicken money."
"They think you'll be back yet," Mrs. Bingy says. "Your Pa says, 'Her place is here to home with her Ma. Her Ma's getting along in years now, and she needs her to home, and she'd ought to come back.'"
"Why don't the boys come back?" I says.
"Oh, they're working," Mrs. Bingy says, surprised.
"So am I," I says. "Mrs. Bingy! Do you think I ought to go back?"
She leaned forward and spoke it behind her hand.
"No," she says, "I don't. But it's a terrible thing to own up to."
I went back to the school that Monday morning, wondering why it seems hard to own up to so many things that's true. If they're true, the least you can do is to own up to them, ain't it?
It was some time before this that I'd made up my mind to try for the Savage Prize. The Savage Prize was open to the whole school, and it was for the best oration given at a contest the week before commencement. I was pretty good at what I called speaking pieces, and what they called "vocational expression." And I had some things in my head that I wanted to write about. I'd decided to write on "Growing," and I meant by that just getting different from what you were, that my head was so full of. I had a good deal to say, beginning with that white god that I knew all about now. But Rose Everly didn't know. And I wondered why.
One day the principal called me in her office.
"Miss Spot has showed me the rough draft of your oration," she said. "It is admirable, Cosma. But I should not emphasize unduly the painful fact that there are many to whom growth is denied. Dwell on the inspiring features of the subject. Let it bring out chiefly sweetness and light."
"But – " I says.
"That will do, Cosma. Thank you," said the principal.
While I was working on the Savage Prize oration, trying to make it "all sweetness and light," Antoinette sent me a note, in history class.
"Jolly larks!" she said, "Friday. Dinner at the Dudleys' studio. Opera in the Dudleys' box. Our house for Sunday. Look your best. Baddy Dudley is back – You remember about him?"
Mr. Gerald had been promising to take us to the Dudleys' studio. Mr. Dudley's brother, "Baddy," spending that winter in Italy, had had a kodak picture of Antoinette and me and had sent me messages through Gerald.
On the night of the party I was dressing in my room at the school when a maid came up with a message. A girl was down-stairs to see me. My lace gown and a white cloak that Antoinette had loaned me were spread on the bed. I was just finishing my hair and tying in it a gold rose of Antoinette's when my visitor came in. It was Rose Everly.
I'll never forget how Rose looked. She had on a little tight brown jacket and a woolen cap. Her skirt was wet and her boots were muddy. She stood winking in the light, and panting a little.
"My!" she said, "you live high up, don't you?" Then she stood staring at me. "Cosma," she said, "how beautiful!"
She dropped into a chair. In that first thing she said she had been the old Rose. Then she got still and shy, and sat openly looking at my clothes. She was not more than twenty-one, and the factory life had not told on her too much. Yet some of the life seemed to have gone out of her. She talked as if not all of her was there. She sat quietly and she looked as if she were resting all over. But her eyes were bright and interested as she looked at my dress.
I said, "People have been good to me, Rose. They gave me these."
"You're different, too," she said, looking hard at me. "You talk different, too. Oh, dear. I bet you won't do it!"
"Tell me what it is," I said, and put the lace dress over my head.
"It's the first meeting since the fire," Rose said. "I wanted you there."
I asked her what fire, and her eyes got big.
"Didn't you know," she said, "about the fire in our factory? Didn't you know the doors were locked again, and five of us burned alive?"
I hadn't known. That seemed to me so awful. There I was, fed and clothed and not worrying about rent, and here this thing had happened, and I nor none of us hadn't even heard of it. Miss Manners and Miss Spot didn't like us to read the newspapers too much.
"It broke out in the pressroom," Rose said. "That girl that was feeding your old press – they never even found her."
"Oh, Rose," I said. "Rose, Rose!" And when I could I asked her what it was that she had come wanting me to do.
She made a little tired motion. "It ain't only the fire," she said. "Things have got worse with us. We've got three times the fines. Since they've stopped locking the doors, they make us be searched every night, and the new forewoman – she's fierce. And we can't get the girls interested. They say it ain't no use to try. We want to try to have one more meeting to show 'em there is some use. And we thought, mebbe – we knew you could make 'em see, Cosma. If you'd come and talk to 'em."
"When would it be?" I asked her.
"They've called the meeting for to-morrow night," she told me.
"To-morrow!" I said. "Oh, Rose – no, then I can't. I'm going out of town to-night, for two days, up the Hudson…"
I stopped. She got up and came to fasten my sash for me.
"I thought mebbe you couldn't," she said; "but it was worth trying."
"Have it next week," I said. "Have the meeting then."
But they had postponed once – some one, Rose said, had "peached" to the forewoman. For to-morrow night the men had loaned them a hall. She bent to my sash. I could see her in my glass. I was ashamed.
She told me what had come to the girls – marriage, promotion, disgrace. Two of them had disappeared.
"I'm so sorry," I kept on saying. Then the maid came to tell me the motor was there. I put on my cloak with the fur and the bright lining. It had made me feel magnificent and happy. With Rose there, I felt all different.
She slipped away and went out in the dark. The light was on in the limousine. Mr. Gerald came running up the steps for me. Antoinette was there already. I went down and got in. There was nothing else to do.
The drive curved back around the dormitory, and so to the street again. As we came out on the roadway, we passed Rose, walking.
I thought: "She's walking till the street-car comes." But I knew it was far more likely that she was walking all the way to her room.
At the Dudleys' studio I forgot Rose for a little while. It was a great dark room with bright colors and dim lamps. Mrs. Dudley had on a dress of leopard skins, with a pointed crown on her head. There were twenty or more there, and among them "Baddy" Dudley. From the minute I came in the room he came and sat beside me. He was big and ugly, but there was something about him that made you forget all the other men in the room.
It was a wonderful dinner. When coffee came, the lights flashed up, a curtain was lifted, and Mrs. Dudley danced. The lights rose and fell as she danced, and with them the music. Every one broke into a low humming with the music. Then she sank down, and the lights went out, and we sat in the dark until she came back to dance again. "I shall never be happy," said Mr. Dudley as we sat so, "until I see you dance, in a costume which I shall design for you."
"Will you dance with me?" I asked him. That was the most fun – that I could think of things to say, just the way Lena Curtsy used to – only now they were never the kind that made anybody look shocked.
"Make the appointment in the Fiji Islands or in Fez," he said; "and there I will be."
Mr. Gerald came and sat down beside me.
"Oh, very well, Massy – to the knife," says Mr. Dudley.
It was half after nine when we left for the opera. The second act had begun, which seemed to me a wicked waste of tickets. But even then Mr. Gerald had no intention of listening. He sat beside me and talked.
"Cosma," he said, "I'm about ten times as miserable as usual to-night. Can't you say something."
I said, "Tell me: Is that what they call a minor? Because I want those for my heaven."
"I want you for my heaven," Mr. Gerald observed. "Dear, I'm terribly in earnest. Don't make me run a race with that bally ass."
"Don't race," I said. "Listen."
"I am listening," said Gerald, "to hear what you will say."
All at once it flashed over me: Cosma Wakely, from a farm near Katytown! Here I was, loving my new life and longing to keep it up.
"You're right where you belong," he went on, "looking just as you look now. But you do need me, you know, to complete the picture."
It was true. I did belong where I was. By a miracle I had got there. Why was I hesitating to stay? If it had been Lena Curtsy, or Rose, I couldn't imagine them feeling as if all this belonged to them. It was true. There must be these distinctions. Why should I not accept what had come? And then help the girls – help Father and Mother. Think of the good I could do as Gerald's wife…
The music died, just like something alive. The curtain went down. And in the midst of all the applause, and the silly bowing on the stage, and the chatter in the box, I looked in the box next to ours. And there sat John Ember.
CHAPTER X
He was sitting very near me, leaning his arm on the velvet rail which divided the boxes. He was looking at the stage. Two young girls and a very beautiful woman, beautifully dressed, were with him. Save for his formal dress, he looked exactly as he looked when I had said good-by to him in Twiney's pasture.
I was terrified for fear he should turn and look at me. I longed, as I had never longed for anything, to have him turn and look. I shrank back lest I should find that I must speak to him. I was wild with the wish to lean and speak his name. What if he had forgotten? Not until I caught the lift of his brow as he turned, the line of his chin, the touch of his hand, already familiar, to his forehead, did I know how well I had remembered. And then, abruptly, I was shot through with a sweetness and a pride: The time had come! I could meet him as I had dreamed of meeting him, speak to him as I had hoped sometime to speak to him, as some one a little within his world…
"The bally trouble with opera – " Gerald was beginning.
"Please, please!" I said. "You talked right through that act, Gerald. Let me sit still now!"
Mr. Ember, his face turned somewhat toward the house, was talking to the woman beside him.
" … the new day," he said. "Such a place as this gives one hope. For all the folly of it, some do care. Here is music – a good deal segregated, in a place apart, for folk to come and participate. And they come – by jove, you know, they come!"
The woman said something which I did not hear.
"Not as pure an example as a symphony concert," he said, "no. There they demand nothing – no accessories, no deception, no laughter – even no story! That is music, pure and undefiled, and, it seems to me, really socialized. There participation is complete, with no interventions. I tell you we're coming on! Any day now, the drama may do the same thing!"
He listened to the woman again, and nodded, without looking at her. That made me think of a new wonder – of what it would be to have him understand one like that.
"Ah, yes," he said, "there's the heartbreak. God knows how long it will be before these things will be for more than the few. This whole thing," – his arm went out toward the house – "and us with it, are sitting on the chests of the rest of them. And that isn't so bad, bad as it is. The worst is that we don't even know it."
"But what is one to do?" she cried – her voice was so eager that I caught some of what she said. "What can one do?"
"Find your corner and dig like a devil," he said. "I suppose I should say go at it like a god. Only we don't seem to know how to do that – yet."
He sat silent for a minute, looking over the house.
"We don't even half know that the other fellow is here," he said. "The isolation in audiences is frightful. Look at us now – we don't even guess we're all on the same job." He laughed. "We need to unionize!"
Some one else came to their box and joined them. He rose, moved away, talked with them all. Then he came to his place again, very near me, and sat silent while the others talked. I could see his head against the velvet stage curtain, and his fine clear profile. But now it was as if I were looking at him down a measureless distance.
I looked down at my yellow dress and my yellow slippers, at my hands that were manicured under my long gloves. I thought of the things they had taught me, about moving and speaking and eating. I thought how proud I was that I had made myself different. And to-night, when I first saw him in that box, it was as if I had come running to him, like a little child with a few bangles – and I had thought I could meet him now, almost like an equal.
And I saw now that the girl who had sat there outside the Katytown inn and had eaten her peaches, and had tried to flirt with him, wasn't much farther away from him – not much farther away – than I was, there in the opera box in my yellow dress, with a year of school behind me. And my only chance to help in all this that he understood and lived was to go with Rose; and I had let that slip, so that I could come here and show off how well I looked, with my words – and my hair – done different.
The place where he lived every day of his life was a place that I had never gone in or guessed or dreamed could be. He was living for some other reason than I had ever found out about. And I had thought that I was almost ready to see him now!
As far as I could, I drew back toward the partition, out of his possible sight. But I heard the last act as I had never heard music before – because I heard it as he was hearing it, as we all over the house might have been listening to it. I listened with him. And all the anguish and striving in the world were in the music and the music's way of trying to make this clear. It said it so plain that I wondered all of us didn't stand up in our places and "go at it like gods."
Before the curtain, and in the high moment of the act, they came for us. Mrs. Dudley liked to go down and give her carriage number early, especially when a supper was on. So we went, and I left him there. I saw him last against the crude setting of a prison, with the music remembering back to what it had been saying long before.
CHAPTER XI
There is nothing more wonderful in the world than the minute when all that you have always been seeing begins to look like something else. It happened to me when I sat down at our table at the Ritz-Carlton, a table which had been reserved for us and was set with orchids and had four waiters, like moons.
I sat between Gerald and Mr. Baddy Dudley.
I looked up at Gerald, and I thought, "You're very kind. I owe you a great deal. But is this the way you are? Were you like this all the time?"
Then I looked up at Mr. Baddy Dudley. I wanted to say to him: "Ugh! You're all locked up in your body, and you can't drop it away. Why didn't you tell me?"
Across the table was Mrs. Dudley, in flesh-pink and pearls. I thought of her dancing, in the leopard skin and the pointed crown; and it seemed to me that she was dead, a long time ago, and here she was, and she didn't dream it herself.
Here and there were the others; they seemed to fill the table with their high voices and their tip-top speech and their strong, big white shoulders. They were so kind – but I wondered if otherwise they had ever been born at all, and what made them think that they had?
Of them all, Antoinette was the best, because she was just sketched – yet. She could rub herself out and do it nearly all over again; and something about her looked anxious and hopeful, and as if it was waiting to see if that wasn't what she would do.
Then I tried to look myself in the face. And it seemed to me as if I didn't find any of me there at all.
I ate what they brought me; I answered what they said to me. But all the time they were all as far off as the other tables of folk, and the waiters, whom I didn't know at all. And all the while I looked around the big white room, and up at the oval of the ceiling, and – "This whole thing, and us with it, is sitting on the chests of the rest of them," I thought. I wondered about Rose. If she walked, she must have got home about the time I got to the opera. Rose! She was real, and she was awake. She had come all that way to get me to help her to wake the rest. Was that what he meant by digging like a devil?
When we left the hotel, toward two o'clock, there was nothing to do but to motor on with the rest. When we reached the Massys', the time was already still, because it expected morning. The Dudleys and Mr. Baddy Dudley had come up with us. When at last I got the window open in my room, I was in time to see a little lift of gray in the sky beyond the line of trees on the terrace.
"The new day," I said. "The new day. Cosma Wakely, have you got enough backbone in you to stand up to it?"
It was surprising how little backbone it took the next afternoon. What I had to do was what I wanted to do. All the forenoon, no one was stirring. It was eleven before coffee came to our rooms. I had heard Mr. Dudley calling a dog somewhere about, so I had kept to my room for fear of meeting him. At one o'clock there were guests for luncheon. When they started back to town I told Antoinette that I wanted to go with them. I meant to get to Rose's meeting.
"Nonsense!" she said. "Have you forgotten dinner? And the dancing?"
I said that I was worried about my examinations, and that I wanted to get back. When I first came to the Massys' I would have told them the truth.
The long ride down was like a still hand laid on something beating. I liked being alone as much as once I had dreaded it.
We had been late in setting off. It was almost six o'clock when I reached the school. When I had eaten and dressed and was on my way to the hall, it was already long past the time that Rose had named for the meeting.
All the girls were in their seats. There were only Rose and one or two more on the platform. The hall was low and smoky. The girls were nervous about the doors, and questioned everybody that came in. The girl at the door began to question me when I went in, but Rose saw me.
"Let her come in," she called out. "She's our next speaker!"
And when I heard the ring in her voice, and saw her face and felt her hand close on mine, and knew how glad she was that I had come, I was happy. Happier than I had ever once been at the Massys'.
I went right up on the platform. And my head and my heart had never been so full of things to say. And the girls listened.
Did you ever face a roomful of girls who work in a factory? Any factory? But especially in a factory where, instead of treating them like one side of the business, the owners treat them like necessary evils? You wouldn't ever have supposed that the heads of the Carney factory were dependent the least bit on the girls who did the work for them. You'd have thought that it was just money and machinery and the buildings that did the work, and that the girls were being let work for a kindness. I never could understand it. When the business needed more money, the owners gave it to it. When the machinery needed oil or repairs or new parts, it got them. When the buildings had to have improvements, they got them. But when the girls needed more light or air or wages or shorter hours or a cleaner place to be, or better safety, they just got laughed at and rowed at and told to learn their places, or not told anything at all. And more girls come, younger, fresher, that didn't need things.
"If I was only my machine," I had heard Rose say that night, "I'd have plenty of oil and wool and the right shuttles. But I'm nothing but the operator, and the machine has the best care. And if there comes a fire —the machinery is insured. But we ain't."
I have not much remembrance of what I said to the girls that night. There must have been a hundred of them in the hall. And I know that as I stood there, looking into their faces, knowing them as I knew them, with their striving for a life like other folks, there – suddenly ringed round them – I saw the double tier of boxes of the night before, and I heard his voice:
" … This whole place here, and we with them, are on the chests of the others."
I had no bitterness. But I had the extreme of consciousness that I had ever reached – not of myself, but of all of us, and of the need of helping on our common growth. They were to stand together, inviolably together, for the fostering of that growth, I told them. An injury to one was an injury to them all – because they were together. And the employers of whom they made their demands were no enemies, but victims, too, who must be helped to see, by us who happen to have had the good fortune to be able to see the need first.
I remember how I ended. I heard myself saying it as if it were some one else speaking:
"I'm with you. You must let me plan with you. But I can't plan with a few of you, when the rest don't care. I want you all."
When the evening was over, and I had found those I knew and met those whom I didn't know, and had set down my name with the list that grew before the door, made up of those who were willing "not to fight, but to help," I stood for a minute in the lower hallway with Rose.
"Oh, Cosma," she said, "I've got to tell you something. I done you dead wrong. I thought last night that you'd gone over – that you didn't care any more."
"I didn't," I said. "It had got me – the thing that gets folks."
Next day I rehearsed my oration for the Savage Prize contest. When I'd finished, Miss Spot told me that I needn't practise it any more before her – just to say it over in my room through the three days until the contest was to take place.
"You deliver it as well as I could myself, Cosma," she said.
So I walked back to my room, tore up my oration, and set to work to write another. My head and my heart were full of what that other was to be. I had been beating and pricking with it all night long after the meeting.
Savage Prize Day was a great day at the school. We were given engraved invitations to send out. I sent mine to Mrs. Bingy and Rose and the girls in the factory. I knew they couldn't come; but I knew, too, they'd like getting something engraved. Only it happened that not only Mrs. Bingy came – Rose and the girls came, too. Handed to them with their pay envelope had been the notice to quit. Somebody had told the superintendent about that meeting. Six of the leaders were let out. I saw them all sitting there when I got up on the platform. And they gave me strength, there in all that lot of well-dressed, soft-voiced folks. They were dear people, too. Only they were dear, different. And they didn't understand anything whatever about life, the way Mrs. Bingy and Rose and I did. And that wasn't those folks' fault either. But they seemed to take credit for it.
Antoinette had an oration. Hers was on "Our Boat Is Launched; But Where's the Shore?" It told about how to do. It said everybody should be successful with hard work. It said that industry is the best policy and bound to win. It said that America is the land where all who will only work hard enough may have any position they like. It said that everything is possible. Everybody enjoyed Antoinette's oration. She had some lovely roses and violets, and all her relatives sat looking so pleased. Her father had promised her a diamond pendant, if she got the prize.
There was another on "Evolution." She said we should be patient and not hurry things, because short-cuts wasn't evolution. I wondered what made her take it for granted God is so slow. But I liked the way her bracelets tinkled when she raised her arm, and I think she did, too.
Then it was my turn. I hadn't said anything to Miss Spot about changing my oration. I thought if I could do it once to please them, I could do it again. I worked hard on mine, because the prize was a hundred dollars; and if Mrs. Carney wouldn't take it, I wanted it for Rose and the girls. I thought Miss Spot would be pleased to think I did it without any rehearsing. I imagined how she would tell visitors about it, during ice-cream.
I didn't keep a copy of it, but some of it was like this:
I decided to write about "Growing," because I think that growing is the most important thing in the world. I believe that this is what we are for. But some ways to grow aren't so important as others.
For example, I was born on a farm near a little town. At first my body grew, but not my mind. Only through district school. Then it stopped and waited for something to happen – going away, getting married, et cetera. Soon I met somebody who showed me that my mind must keep on growing.
It seems queer, but nobody had ever said anything to me about growing. All that they said to me was about "behaving." And especially about doing as I was told.
Then I came to the city and I worked in a factory. Right away I found out that there the last thing they thought about was anybody growing. They thought chiefly about hurrying. Not a word was ever said about growing. And yet, I suppose, all the time that was our chief business.
One day I went to the Museum, and I saw a large white statue of Apollo Belvedere. The other people there seemed to know about him. I didn't know about him, or any of the rest of the things; and I went outside and cried. How was I to get to know, when nobody ever said anything to me about him? Or about any of the things I didn't know. I wasn't with people who knew things I didn't know. Or who knew anything about growing.
Then I came to this school. I've been here and I've learned a great deal. Countries and capitals and what is shipped and how high the mountains are, and how to act and speak and eat. I know that you have to have all these. But I am writing about some education that shows you how to be on account of what life is. And about how to arrange education so that every one can have it, and not some of us girls have it, and some of us not have anything but the machines…
I hadn't meant to say much about this. But all of a sudden, – while I stood there speaking to that dressed-up roomful, with all the girls down in front soft and white, and taken care of and promised diamond pendants, it come over me – the difference between them and Rose and the girls there on the back seats. And before I knew I was going to, I began to get outside my oration as I planned it, and to talk about those girls, and about where did their chance come in… And I finished by begging these girls here, that had every chance to grow, to do something for the other girls that didn't have a chance to grow and never would have a chance.
"I don't know why you have it and why they don't," I said. "Maybe when we grow up and get out in the world we'll understand that better. But it can't be right the way it is. And can't we help them?"
Some clapped their hands when I was done. There was another oration on "Success," and one on "Opportunity," and then came the judges' decision.
It was a big disappointment. I thought the other orations were so wishy-washy, it didn't seem possible mine could have been any more so. But it must have been, because only one of the judges voted for me. He said something about "not so much subject matter as originality of thought." The other two judges voted for Antoinette. That night, by special delivery, she got her diamond pendant.
Rose wrote a note on the back of her program. "Oh, Cosma, this is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to the girls. I never knew anybody else ever heard about us or cared about us. We'll never forget."
When I got back to the dormitory, somebody was waiting for me in the reception-room, and it was Gerald. He drew me over to a window, talking all the way.
"Cosma," he said, "by jove, I never heard anything like that. I say – how did you ever get them to let you do it?.. They'd never seen it? Rich —rich! You sweet dove of an anarchist, you – "
"Don't Gerald," I said.
"Ripping," said he, "simply ripping! I never saw anything so beautiful as you before all that raft. You looked like the well-known angels, Cosma. And you ought to see my portrait of you now! You dear!"