Rosalind at work in Walter Sayers' office was from the beginning
something different, apart from the young woman from Iowa who had been
drifting from office to office, moving from rooming house to rooming
house on Chicago's North Side, striving feebly to find out something
about life by reading books, going to the theatre and walking alone in
the streets. In the new place her life at once began to have point and
purpose, but at the same time the perplexity that was later to send her
running to Willow Springs and to the presence of her mother began to
grow in her.
Walter Sayers' office was a rather large room on the third floor of the
factory whose walls went straight up from the river's edge. In the
morning Rosalind arrived at eight and went into the office and closed
the door. In a large room across a narrow hallway and shut off from her
retreat by two thick, clouded-glass partitions was the company's
general office. It contained the desks of salesmen, several clerks, a
bookkeeper and two stenographers. Rosalind avoided becoming acquainted
with these people. She was in a mood to be alone, to spend as many
hours as possible alone with her own thoughts.
She got to the office at eight and her employer did not arrive until
nine-thirty or ten. For an hour or two in the morning and in the late
afternoon she had the place to herself. Immediately she shut the door
into the hallway and was alone she felt at home. Even in her father's
house it had never been so. She took off her wraps and walked about the
room touching things, putting things to rights. During the night a
negro woman had scrubbed the floor and wiped the dust off her
employer's desk but she got a cloth and wiped the desk again. Then she
opened the letters that had come in and after reading arranged them in
little piles. She wanted to spend a part of her wages for flowers and
imagined clusters of flowers arranged in small hanging baskets along
the grey walls. "I'll do that later, perhaps," she thought.
The walls of the room enclosed her. "What makes me so happy here?" she
asked herself. As for her employer--she felt she scarcely knew him. He
was a shy man, rather small--
She went to a window and stood looking out. Near the factory a bridge
crossed the river and over it went a stream of heavily loaded wagons
and motor trucks. The sky was grey with smoke. In the afternoon, after
her employer had gone for the day, she would stand again by the window.
As she stood thus she faced westward and in the afternoon saw the sun
fall down the sky. It was glorious to be there alone during the late
hours of the afternoon. What a tremendous thing this city in which she
had come to live! For some reason after she went to work for Walter
Sayers the city seemed, like the room in which she worked, to have
accepted her, taken her into itself. In the late afternoon the rays of
the departing sun fell across great banks of clouds. The whole city
seemed to reach upwards. It left the ground and ascended into the air.
There was an illusion produced. Stark grim factory chimneys, that all
day were stiff cold formal things sticking up into the air and belching
forth black smoke, were now slender upreaching pencils of light and
wavering color. The tall chimneys detached themselves from the
buildings and sprang into the air. The factory in which Rosalind stood
had such a chimney. It also was leaping upward. She felt herself being
lifted, an odd floating sensation was achieved. With what a stately
tread the day went away, over the city! The city, like the factory
chimneys yearned after it, hungered for it.
In the morning gulls came in from Lake Michigan to feed on the sewage
floating in the river below. The river was the color of chrysoprase.
The gulls floated above it as sometimes in the evening the whole city
seemed to float before her eyes. They were graceful, living, free
things. They were triumphant. The getting of food, even the eating of
sewage was done thus gracefully, beautifully. The gulls turned and
twisted in the air. They wheeled and floated and then fell downward to
the river in a long curve, just touching, caressing the surface of the
water and then rising again.
Rosalind raised herself on her toes. At her back beyond the two glass
partitions were other men and women, but there, in that room, she was
alone. She belonged there. What an odd feeling she had. She also
belonged to her employer, Walter Sayers. She scarcely knew the man and
yet she belonged to him. She threw her arms above her head, trying
awkwardly to imitate some movement of the birds.
Her awkwardness shamed her a little and she turned and walked about the
room. "I'm twenty-five years old and it's a little late to begin trying
to be a bird, to be graceful," she thought. She resented the slow
stupid heavy movements of her father and mother, the movements she had
imitated as a child. "Why was I not taught to be graceful and beautiful
in mind and body, why in the place I came from did no one think it
worth while to try to be graceful and beautiful?" she whispered to
herself.
How conscious of her own body Rosalind was becoming! She walked across
the room, trying to go lightly and gracefully. In the office beyond the
glass partitions someone spoke suddenly and she was startled. She
laughed foolishly. For a long time after she went to work in the office
of Walter Sayers she thought the desire in herself to be physically
more graceful and beautiful and to rise also out of the mental
stupidity and sloth of her young womanhood was due to the fact that the
factory windows faced the river and the western sky, and that in the
morning she saw the gulls feeding and in the afternoon the sun going
down through the smoke clouds in a riot of colors.
V
On the August evening as Rosalind sat on the porch before her father's
house in Willow Springs, Walter Sayers came home from the factory by
the river and to his wife's suburban garden. When the family had dined
he came out to walk in the paths with the two children, boys, but they
soon tired of his silence and went to join their mother. The young
negro came along a path by the kitchen door and joined the party.
Walter went to sit on a garden seat that was concealed behind bushes.
He lighted a cigarette but did not smoke. The smoke curled quietly up
through his fingers as it burned itself out.
Closing his eyes Walter sat perfectly still and tried not to think. The
soft evening shadows began presently to close down and around him. For
a long time he sat thus motionless, like a carved figure placed on the
garden bench. He rested. He lived and did not live. The intense body,
usually so active and alert, had become a passive thing. It was thrown
aside, on to the bench, under the bush, to sit there, waiting to be
reinhabited.
This hanging suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness was a
thing that did not happen often. There was something to be settled
between himself and a woman and the woman had gone away. His whole plan
of life had been disturbed. Now he wanted to rest. The details of his
life were forgotten. As for the woman he did not think of her, did not
want to think of her. It was ridiculous that he needed her so much. He
wondered if he had ever felt that way about Cora, his wife. Perhaps he
had. Now she was near him, but a few yards away. It was almost dark but
she with the negro remained at work, digging in the ground--somewhere
near--caressing the soil, making things grow.
When his mind was undisturbed by thoughts and lay like a lake in the
hills on a quiet summer evening little thoughts did come. "I want you
as a lover--far away. Keep yourself far away." The words trailed
through his mind as the smoke from the cigarette trailed slowly upwards
through his fingers. Did the words refer to Rosalind Wescott? She had
been gone from him three days. Did he hope she would never come back or
did the words refer to his wife?
His wife's voice spoke sharply. One of the children in playing about,
had stepped on a plant. "If you are not careful I shall have to make
you stay out of the garden altogether." She raised her voice and
called, "Marian!" A maid came from the house and took the children
away. They went along the path toward the house protesting. Then they
ran back to kiss their mother. There was a struggle and then
acceptance. The kiss was acceptance of their fate--to obey. "O,
Walter," the mother's voice called, but the man on the bench did not
answer. Tree toads began to cry. "The kiss is acceptance. Any physical
contact with another is acceptance," he reflected.
The little voices within Walter Sayers were talking away at a great
rate. Suddenly he wanted to sing. He had been told that his voice was
small, not of much account, that he would never be a singer. It was
quite true no doubt but here, in the garden on the quiet summer night,
was a place and a time for a small voice. It would be like the voice
within himself that whispered sometimes when he was quiet, relaxed. One
evening when he had been with the woman, Rosalind, when he had taken
her into the country in his car, he had suddenly felt as he did now.
They sat together in the car that he had run into a field. For a long
time they had remained silent. Some cattle came and stood nearby, their
figures soft in the night. Suddenly he had felt like a new man in a new
world and had begun to sing. He sang one song over and over, then sat
in silence for a time and after that drove out of the field and through
a gate into the road. He took the woman back to her place in the city.
In the quiet of the garden on the summer evening he opened his lips to
sing the same song. He would sing with the tree toad hidden away in the
fork of a tree somewhere. He would lift his voice up from the earth, up
into the branches, of trees, away from the ground in which people were
digging, his wife and the young negro.
The song did not come. His wife began speaking and the sound of her
voice took away the desire to sing. Why had she not, like the other
woman, remained silent?
He began playing a game. Sometimes, when he was alone the thing
happened to him that had now happened. His body became like a tree or a
plant. Life ran through it unobstructed. He had dreamed of being a
singer but at such a moment he wanted also to be a dancer. That would
have been sweetest of all things--to sway like the tops of young trees
when a wind blew, to give himself as grey weeds in a sunburned field
gave themself to the influence of passing shadows, changing color
constantly, becoming every moment something new, to live in life and in
death too, always to live, to be unafraid of life, to let it flow
through his body, to let the blood flow through his body, not to
struggle, to offer no resistance, to dance.
Walter Sayers' children had gone into the house with the nurse girl
Marian. It had become too dark for his wife to dig in the garden. It
was August and the fruitful time of the year for farms and gardens had
come, but his wife had forgotten fruitfulness. She was making plans for
another year. She came along the garden path followed by the negro. "We
will set out strawberry plants there," she was saying. The soft voice
of the young negro murmured his assent. It was evident the young man
lived in her conception of the garden. His mind sought out her desire
and gave itself.
The children Walter Sayers had brought into life through the body of
his wife Cora had gone into the house and to bed. They bound him to
life, to his wife, to the garden where he sat, to the office by the
riverside in the city.
They were not his children. Suddenly he knew that quite clearly. His
own children were quite different things. "Men have children just as
women do. The children come out of their bodies. They play about," he
thought. It seemed to him that children, born of his fancy, were at
that very moment playing about the bench where he sat. Living things
that dwelt within him and that had at the same time the power to depart
out of him were now running along paths, swinging from the branches of
trees, dancing in the soft light.
His mind sought out the figure of Rosalind Wescott. She had gone away,
to her own people in Iowa. There had been a note at the office saying
she might be gone for several days. Between himself and Rosalind the
conventional relationship of employer and employee had long since been
swept quite away. It needed something in a man he did not possess to
maintain that relationship with either men or women.
At the moment he wanted to forget Rosalind. In her there was a struggle
going on. The two people had wanted to be lovers and he had fought
against that. They had talked about it. "Well," he said, "it will not
work out. We will bring unnecessary unhappiness upon ourselves."
He had been honest enough in fighting off the intensification of their
relationship. "If she were here now, in this garden with me, it
wouldn't matter. We could be lovers and then forget about being
lovers," he told himself.
His wife came along the path and stopped nearby. She continued talking
in a low voice, making plans for another year of gardening. The negro
stood near her, his figure making a dark wavering mass against the
foliage of a low growing bush. His wife wore a white dress. He could
see her figure quite plainly. In the uncertain light it looked girlish
and young. She put her hand up and took hold of the body of a young
tree. The hand became detached from her body. The pressure of her
leaning body made the young tree sway a little. The white hand moved
slowly back and forth in space.
Rosalind Wescott had gone home to tell her mother of her love. In her
note she had said nothing of that but Walter Sayers knew that was the
object of her visit to the Iowa town. It was on odd sort of thing to
try to do--to tell people of love, to try to explain it to others.
The night was a thing apart from Walter Sayers, the male being sitting
in silence in the garden. Only the children of his fancy understood it.
The night was a living thing. It advanced upon him, enfolded him.
"Night is the sweet little brother of Death," he thought.
His wife stood very near. Her voice was soft and low and the voice of
the negro when he answered her comments on the future of the garden was
soft and low. There was music in the negro's voice, perhaps a dance in
it. Walter remembered about him.
The young negro had been in trouble before he came to the Sayers. He
had been an ambitious young black and had listened to the voices of
people, to the voices that filled the air of America, rang through the
houses of America. He had wanted to get on in life and had tried to
educate himself. The black had wanted to be a lawyer.
How far away he had got from his own people, from the blacks of the
African forests! He had wanted to be a lawyer in a city in America.
What a notion!
Well he had got into trouble. He had managed to get through college and
had opened a law office. Then one evening he went out to walk and
chance led him into a street where a woman, a white woman, had been
murdered an hour before. The body of the woman was found and then he
was found walking in the street. Mrs. Sayers' brother, a lawyer, had
saved him from being punished as a murderer and after the trial, and
the young negro's acquittal, had induced his sister to take him as
gardener. His chances as a professional man in the city were no good.
"He has had a terrible experience and has just escaped by a fluke" the
brother had said. Cora Sayers had taken the young man. She had bound
him to herself, to her garden.
It was evident the two people were bound together. One cannot bind
another without being bound. His wife had no more to say to the negro
who went away along the path that led to the kitchen door. He had a
room in a little house at the foot of the garden. In the room he had
books and a piano. Sometimes in the evening he sang. He was going now
to his place. By educating himself he had cut himself off from his own
people.
Cora Sayers went into the house and Walter sat alone. After a time the
young negro came silently down the path. He stopped by the tree where a
moment before the white woman had stood talking to him. He put his hand
on the trunk of the young tree where her hand had been and then went
softly away. His feet made no sound on the garden path.
An hour passed. In his little house at the foot of the garden the negro
began to sing softly. He did that sometimes in the middle of the night.
What a life he had led too! He had come away from his black people,
from the warm brown girls with the golden colors playing through the
blue black of their skins and had worked his way through a Northern
college, had accepted the patronage of impertinent people who wanted to
uplift the black race, had listened to them, had bound himself to them,
had tried to follow the way of life they had suggested.
Now he was in the little house at the foot of the Sayers' garden.
Walter remembered little things his wife had told him about the man.
The experience in the court room had frightened him horribly and he did
not want to go off the Sayers' place. Education, books had done
something to him. He could not go back to his own people. In Chicago,
for the most part, the blacks lived crowded into a few streets on the
South Side. "I want to be a slave," he had said to Cora Sayers. "You
may pay me money if it makes you feel better but I shall have no use
for it. I want to be your slave. I would be happy if I knew I would
never have to go off your place."
The black sang a low voiced song. It ran like a little wind on the
surface of a pond. It had no words. He had remembered the song from his
father who had got it from his father. In the South, in Alabama and
Mississippi the blacks sang it when they rolled cotton bales onto the
steamers in the rivers. They had got it from other rollers of cotton
bales long since dead. Long before there were any cotton bales to roll
black men in boats on rivers in Africa had sung it. Young blacks in
boats floated down rivers and came to a town they intended to attack at
dawn. There was bravado in singing the song then. It was addressed to
the women in the town to be attacked and contained both a caress and a
threat. "In the morning your husbands and brothers and sweethearts we
shall kill. Then we shall come into your town to you. We shall hold you
close. We shall make you forget. With our hot love and our strength we
shall make you forget." That was the old significance of the song.
Walter Sayers remembered many things. On other nights when the negro
sang and when he lay in his room upstairs in the house, his wife came
to him. There were two beds in their room. She sat upright in her bed.
"Do you hear, Walter?" she asked. She came to sit on his bed, sometimes
she crept into his arms. In the African villages long ago when the song
floated up from the river men arose and prepared for battle. The song
was a defiance, a taunt. That was all gone now. The young negro's house
was at the foot of the garden and Walter with his wife lay upstairs in
the larger house situated on high ground. It was a sad song, filled
with race sadness. There was something in the ground that wanted to
grow, buried deep in the ground. Cora Sayers understood that. It
touched something instinctive in her. Her hand went out and touched,
caressed her husband's face, his body. The song made her want to hold
him tight, possess him.
The night was advancing and it grew a little cold in the garden. The
negro stopped singing. Walter Sayers arose and went along the path
toward the house but did not enter. Instead he went through a gate into
the road and along the suburban streets until he got into the open
country. There was no moon but the stars shone brightly. For a time he
hurried along looking back as though afraid of being followed, but when
he got out into a broad flat meadow he went more slowly. For an hour he
walked and then stopped and sat on a tuft of dry grass. For some reason
he knew he could not return to his house in the suburb that night. In
the morning he would go to the office and wait there until Rosalind
came. Then? He did not know what he would do then. "I shall have to
make up some story. In the morning I shall have to telephone Cora and
make up some silly story," he thought. It was an absurd thing that he,
a grown man, could not spend a night abroad, in the fields without the
necessity of explanations. The thought irritated him and he arose and
walked again. Under the stars in the soft night and on the wide flat
plains the irritation soon went away and he began to sing softly, but
the song he sang was not the one he had repeated over and over on that
other night when he sat with Rosalind in the car and the cattle came.
It was the song the negro sang, the river song of the young black
warriors that slavery had softened and colored with sadness. On the
lips of Walter Sayers the song had lost much of its sadness. He walked
almost gaily along and in the song that flowed from his lips there was
a taunt, a kind of challenge.