_In Which Mary Writes of the Workaday World, and in Which Roger Writes
of the Dreams of a Boy._
_In the Tower Rooms--June._
I have been working in the office for a week, and it has been the
hardest week of my life. But please don't think that I have any
regrets--it is only that the world has been so lovely outside, and that
I have been shut in.
I am beginning to understand that the woman in the home has a freedom
which she doesn't sufficiently value. She can run down-town in the
morning; or slip out in the afternoon, or put off until to-morrow
something which should have been done to-day. But men can't run out or
slip away or put off--no matter if the sun is shining, or the birds
singing, or the wind calling, or the open road leading to adventure.
Yet there are compensations, and I am trying to see them. I am trying
to live up to my theories. And I am sustained by the thought that at
last I am a wage-earner--independent of any one--capable of buying my
own bread and butter, though all masculine help should fail!
Aunt Isabelle is a dear, and so is Susan Jenks. And that's another
thing to think about. What will the wage-earning part of the world do,
when there are no home-keepers left? If it were not for Aunt Isabelle
and Susan, there wouldn't be any one to trail after me with cushions
for my tired back, and cold things for me to drink on hot days, and hot
things to drink on cool days.
I begin to perceive faintly the masculine point of view. If I were a
man I should want a wife for just that--to toast my slippers before the
fire as they do in the old-fashioned stories, to have my dinner piping
hot, and to smooth the wrinkles out of my forehead.
That's why I'm not sure that I should make a comfortable sort of wife.
I can't quite see myself toasting the slippers. But I can see
Constance toasting them, or Leila--but Grace and I--you see, after all,
there are home women and the other kind, and I fancy that I'm the other
kind.
This, you'll understand, is a philosophy founded on the vast experience
of a week in the workaday world--I'll let you know later of any further
modification of my theories.
Well, the house seems empty with just the three of us, and Pittiwitz.
I miss Constance beyond words, and the beautiful baby. Constance
wanted to name her for me, but Gordon insisted that she should be
called after Constance, so they compromised on Mary-Constance, such a
long name for such a mite.
We all went to New York to see them off. By "all," I mean our
crowd--Aunt Frances and Grace, Leila and the General--oh, poor little
Leila--Delilah and Colin Quale, Aunt Isabelle and I, Susan Jenks with
the baby in her arms until the very last minute--and Porter Bigelow.
At the boat Leila went all to pieces. I could never have believed that
our gay little Leila would have taken anything so hard--and it was
pitiful to see Barry. But I can't talk about that--I can't think about
it.
Porter was dear to Leila. He treated her as if she were his own little
sister, and it was lovely. He took her right away from the General,
when the ship was leaving the dock.
"Brace up, little girl," he said; "he'll be back before you know it."
He literally carried her to a taxi and put her in, and then began such
a day. We did all of the delightful things that one can do in New York
on a summer day, beginning with breakfast at a charming inn on Long
Island, and ending with a roof garden at night. And that night Leila
was so tired that she went to sleep all in a minute, like a child, and
forgot to grieve.
Since we came back to Washington, Porter has kept it up, not letting
Leila miss Barry any more than possible, and playing big brother to
perfection.
It is queer how we misjudge people. If any one had told me that Porter
could be so sweet and tender to anybody, I wouldn't have believed it.
But perhaps Leila brings out that side of him. Now I am independent,
and aggressive, and I make Porter furious, and most of the time we
fight.
As I said, the house seems empty--but I am not in it much now. If I
had not had my work, I think I should have gone crazy. That's why men
don't get silly and hysterical and morbid like women--they are saved by
the day's work. I simply have to forget my troubles while I transcribe
my notes on the typewriter.
Of course you know what life in the Departments is without my telling
you. But to me it isn't monotonous or machine-like. I am awfully
interested in the people. Of course my immediate work is with the nice
old Chief. I'm glad he is old, and gray-haired. It makes me feel
comfortable and chaperoned. Do you know that I believe the reason that
most girls hate to go out to work is because of the loss of protection.
You see we home girls are always in the care of somebody. I've been
more than usually independent, but there has always been some one to
play propriety in the background. When I was a tiny tot there was my
nurse. Later at kindergarten I was sent home in a 'bus with all the
other babies, and with a nice teacher to see that we arrived safely.
Then there was mother and father and Barry and Constance, some of them
wherever I went--and finally, Aunt Isabella.
But in the office, I am not Mary Ballard, Daughter of the Home. I am
Mary Ballard, Independent Wage-Earner--stenographer at a thousand a
year. There's nobody to stand between me and the people I meet. No
one to say, "Here is my daughter, a woman of refinement and breeding;
behind her I stand ready to hold you accountable for everything you may
do to offend her." In the wage-earning world a woman must stand for
what she is--and she must set the pace. So, in the office I find that
I must have other manners than those in my home. I can't meet men as
frankly and freely. I can't laugh with them and talk with them as I
would over a cup of tea at my own little table. If you and I had met,
for example, in the office, I should have put up a barrier of formality
between us, and I should have said, "Good-morning" when I met you and
"Good-night" when I left you, and it would have taken us months to know
as much about each other as you and I knew after a week in the same
house.
I suppose if I live here for years and years, that I shall grow to look
upon my gray-haired chief as a sort of official grandfather, and my
fellow-clerks will be brothers and sisters by adoption, but that will
take time.
I wonder if I shall work for "years and years"? I am not sure that I
should like it. And there you have the woman of it. A man knows that
his toiling is for life; unless he grows rich and takes to golf. But a
woman never looks ahead and says, "This thing I must do until I die."
She always has a sense of possible release.
I am not at all sure that I am a logical person. In one breath I am
telling you that I like my work; and in the next I am saying that I
shouldn't care to do it all my life. But at least there's this for it,
that just now it is a heavenly diversion from the worries which would
otherwise have weighed.
What did you do about lunches? Mine are as yet an unsolved problem. I
like my luncheon nicely set forth on my own mahogany, with the little
scalloped linen doilies that we've always used. And I want my own tea
and bread and butter and marmalade, and Susan's hot little made-overs.
But here I am expected to rush out with the rest, and feast on
impossible soups and stews and sandwiches in a restaurant across the
way. The only alternative is to bring my lunch in a box, and eat it on
my desk. And then I lose the breath of fresh air which I need more
than the food.
Oh, these June days! Are they hot with you? Here they are heavenly.
When the windows are open, the sweet warm air blows up from the river
and across the White Lot, and we get a whiff of roses from the gardens
back of the President's house; and when I reach home at night, the
fragrance of the roses in our own garden meets me long before I can see
the house. We have wonderful roses this year, and the hundred-leaved
bush back of the bench by the fountain is like a rosy cloud. I made a
crown of them the other day, and put them on the head of the little
bronze boy, and I took a picture which I am sending. Somehow the boy
of the fountain has always seemed to me to be alive, and to have in him
some human quality, like a faun or a dryad.
Last night I sat very late in the garden, and I thought of what you
said to me that night when you tried to tell me about your life. Do
you remember what you said--that when I came into it, it seemed to you
that the garden bloomed? Well, I came across this the other day, in a
volume of Ruskin which father gave me, and which somehow I've never
cared to read--but now it seems quite wonderful:
"You have heard it said that flowers flourish rightly only in the
garden of some one who loves them. I know you would like that to be
true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your
flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them; if you could bid
the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, 'Come
thou south wind and breathe upon my garden that the spices of it may
flow forth.' This you would think a great thing. And do you not think
it a greater thing that all this you can do for fairer flowers than
these--flowers that have eyes like yours and thoughts like yours, and
lives like yours; which, once saved, you save forever.
"Will you not go down among them--far among the moorlands and the
rocks--far in the darkness of the terrible streets; these feeble
florets are lying with all their fresh leaves torn and their stems
broken--will you never go down to them, not set them in order in their
little fragrant beds, nor fence them in their shuddering from the
fierce wind?"
There's a lot more of it--but perhaps you know it. I think I have
always done nice little churchly things, and charitable things, but I
haven't thought as much, perhaps, about my fellow man and woman as I
might. We come to things slowly here in Washington. We are
conservative, and we have no great industrial problems, no strikes and
unions and things like that. Grace says that there is plenty here to
reform, but the squalor doesn't stick right out before your eyes as it
does in some of the dreadful tenements in the bigger cities. So we
forget--and I have forgotten. Until your letter came about that boy in
the pines.
Everything that you tell me about him is like a fairy tale. I can shut
my eyes and see you two in that circle of young pines. I can hear your
voice ringing in the stillness. You don't tell me of yourself, but I
know this, that in that boy you've found an audience--and he is doing
things for you while you are doing them for him. You are living once
more, aren't you?
And the little sad children. I was so glad to pick out the books with
the bright pictures. Weren't the Cinderella illustrations dear? With
all the gowns as pink as they could be and the grass as green as green,
and the sky as blue as blue. And the yellow frogs in "The frog he
would a wooing go," and the Walter Crane illustrations for the little
book of songs.
You must make them sing "Oh, What Have You Got for Dinner, Mrs. Bond?"
and "Oranges and Lemons" and "Lavender's blue, Diddle-Diddle."
Do you know what Aunt Isabelle is making for the little girls? She is
so interested. Such rosy little aprons of pink and white checked
gingham--with wide strings to tie behind. And my contribution is pink
hair ribbons. Now won't your garden bloom?
You must tell me how their little garden plots come on. Surely that
was an inspiration. I told Porter about them the other night, and he
said, "For Heaven's sake, who ever heard of beginning with gardens in
the education of ignorant children?"
But you and I begin and end with gardens, don't we? Were the seeds all
right, and did the bulbs come up? Aunt Isabelle almost cried over your
description of the joy on the little faces when the crocuses they had
planted appeared.
I am eager to hear more of them, and of you. Oh, yes, and of Cousin
Patty. I simply love her.
There's so much more to say, but I mustn't. I must go to bed, and be
fresh for my work in the morning.
Ever sincerely,
MARY BALLARD.
_Among the Pines._
I shall have to begin at the last of your letter, and work toward the
beginning, for it is of my sad children that I must speak
first--although my pen is eager to talk about you, and what your letter
has meant to me.
The sad children are no longer sad. Against the sand-hills they are
like rose petals blown by the wind. Their pink aprons tied in the back
with great bows, and the pink ribbons have transformed them, so that,
except for their blank eyes, they might be any other little girls in
the world.
I have taught them several of the pretty songs; you should hear their
piping voices--and with their picture books and their gardens, they are
very busy and happy indeed.
Their mother is positively illumined by the change her young folks.
Never in her life has she seen any country but this one of charred
pines and sand. I find her bending over the Cinderella book, liking
it, and liking the children's little gardens.
"We ain't never had no flower garden," she confided to me. "Jim he
ain't had time, and I ain't had time, and I ain't never had no luck
nohow."
But the boy still means the most to me. And you have found the reason.
It isn't what I am doing for him, it is what he is doing for me. If
you could see his eyes! They are a boy's eyes now, not those of a
little wild animal. He is beginning to read the simple books you sent.
We began with "Mother Goose," and I gave him first "The King of France
and Forty Thousand Men." The "Oranges and Lemons" song carried on the
Dick Whittington atmosphere which he had liked in my poem, with its
bells of Old Bailey and Shoreditch. He'll know his London before I get
through with him.
But we've struck even a deeper note. One Sunday I was moved to take
out with me your father's old Bible. There's a rose between its
leaves, kept for a talisman against the blue devils which sometimes get
me in their grip. Well, I took the old Bible out to our little
amphitheater in the pines, and read, what do you think? Not the Old
Testament stories.
I read the Beatitudes, and my boy listened, and when I had finished, he
asked, "What is blessed? And who said that?"
I told him, and brought back to myself in the telling the vision of
myself as a boy. Oh, how far I have drifted from the dreams of that
boy! And if it had not been for you I should never have turned back.
And now this boy in the pines, and the boy who was I are learning
together, step by step. I am trying to forget the years between. I am
trying to take up life where it was before I was overthrown. I can't
quite get hold of things yet as a man, for when I try, I feel a man's
bitterness. But the boy believes, and I have shut the man in me away,
until the boy grows up.
Does this sound fantastic? To whom else would I dare write such a
thing, but to you? But you will understand. I feel that I need make
no apology.
Coming now to you and your work. I can bring no optimism to bear, I
suppose I should say that it is well. But there is in me too much of
the primitive masculine for that. When a man cares for a woman he
inevitably wants to shield her. But what would you? Shall a man let
the thing which he would cherish be buffeted by the winds?
I don't like to think of you in an office, with all your pretty woman
instincts curbed to meet the stern formality of such a life. I don't
like to think that any chief, however fatherly, shall dictate to you
not only letters but rules of conduct. I don't like to think of you as
hustled by a crowd at lunch time. I don't like to think of the great
stone walls which shut you in. I don't want your wings clipped for
such a cage.
And there is this I must say, that all men do not need wives to toast
their slippers or to serve their meals piping hot, or even to smooth
the wrinkles, although I confess that there's an appeal in this last.
Some of us need wives for inspiration, for spiritual and mental uplift,
for the word of cheer when our hearts are weary--for the strength which
believes in our strength--one doesn't exactly think of Juliet as
toasting slippers, or of Rosalind, or of Portia, yet such women never
for one moment failed their lovers.
My Cousin Patty says that work will do you good, and we have great
arguments. I have told her of you, not everything, because there are
some things which are sacred. But I have told her that life for me,
since I have known you, has taken on new meanings.
She glories in your independence and wants to know you. Some day, it
is written, I am sure, that you two shall meet. In some things you are
much alike--in others utterly different, with the differences made by
heredity and environment.
My little Cousin Patty is the composite of three generations. Amid her
sweets and spices, she is as domestic as her grandmother, but her mind
sweeps on to the future of women in a way which makes me gasp.
Politics are the breath of her life. She comes of a long line of
statesmen, and having no father or brother or husband to uphold the
family traditions of Democracy, she upholds them herself. She is
intensely interested just now in the party nominations. A split among
the Republicans gives her hope of the election of the Democratic
candidate. She's such a feminine little creature with her soft voice
and appealing manner, with her big white aprons covering her up, and
curling wisps of black hair falling over her little ears, that the
contrasts in her life are almost funny. In our evenings over the
little white boxes, we mix questions of State Rights and Free Trade
with our bridal decorations, and it seems to me that I shall never
again go to a wedding without a vision of my little Cousin Patty among
her orange blossoms, laying down the law on current politics.
The negro question in Cousin Patty's mind is that of the Southerner of
the better class. It isn't these descendants of old families who hate
the negro. Such gentlefolk do not, of course, want equality, but they
want fair treatment for the weaker race. Find me a white man who raves
with rabid prejudice against the black, and I will show you one whose
grandfather belonged not to the planter but to the cracker class, or a
Northerner grafting on Southern Stock. Even in slave times there was
rancor between the black man and what he called "po' white trash" and
it still continues.
The picture of the little bronze boy with his crown of roses lies on my
desk. I should like much to sit with you on the bench beneath the
hundred-leaved bush. What things I should have to say to you! Things
which I dare not write, lest you never let me write again.
You glean the best from everything. That you should take my little
talk about gardens, and fit it to what Ruskin has said, is a gracious
act. You speak of that night in the garden. Do you remember that you
wore a scarlet wrap of thin silk? I could think of nothing as you came
toward me, but of some glorious flower of almost supernatural bloom.
All about you the garden was dying. But you were Life--Life as it
springs up afresh from a world that is dead.
I know how empty the old house seems to you, without Barry, without
Constance, without the beautiful baby whom I have never seen. To me it
can never seem empty with you in it. Is the saying of such things
forbidden? Please believe that I don't mean to force them on you, but
I write as I think.
By this post Cousin Patty is sending a box of her famous cake, for you
and Aunt Isabelle. There's enough for an army, so I shall think of you
as dispensing tea in the garden, with your friends about you--lucky
friends--and with the little bronze boy looking on and laughing.
To Mary of the Garden, then, this letter goes with all good wishes.
ROGER POOLE.