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!"
"Don't, Gerald," I said.
He stared at me. "I say--you aren't taking to heart that miserable
hundred dollars! Cosma dearest! Oh, I'm mad about you ... this June, ...
this June--"
"Please, please, Gerald," I said. "Don't you see? Those girls there
to-day. They're your sort and your people's sort. I'm not that...."
He set himself to explain something to me. I could see it in his sudden
attitude. "Look here, Cosma," he said; "don't you understand the joy it
would be for a man to have a hand in training the girl he wants to have
for his wife?" At that, I looked at him with attention. "Let me be," he
went on, "your teacher, lover, husband. Gad, think what it will be to
have the shaping of the woman you will make! Can't you understand a man
being mad about that?"
I answered him very carefully. "A man, maybe. But not the woman."
"What?" said Gerald blankly.
"I'll make myself," I said. "And then maybe I'll pick out a man who has
made himself. And if we love each other, we'll marry."
"But," he said, "the sweetness of having you fit, day after day, into
the dream that I have of what you are going to be--"
So then I told him. "Gerald," I said, "I wasn't meant to live your life.
I've got to find my job in the world--whatever that is. I've got to get
away from you--from you all--from everybody, Gerald!"
"Good heavens!" he said. "Cosma, you're tired--you're nervous--"
I looked at him quite calmly. "If," I said, "when I state some
conviction of mine, any man ever tells me again that I'm nervous, I'll
tell him he's--he's _drunk_. There's just as much sense in it."
I gave him both my hands. "Gerald," I said, "you dear man, your life
isn't my life. I don't want it to be my life. That's all."
Afterward, when I went up-stairs, with that peculiar, heavy lonesomeness
that comes from the withdrawal of this particular interest in this
particular way, I wondered if the life I was planning was made up of
such withdrawals, such hurts, such vacancies.
And then I remembered the way I had felt when I walked home from the
meeting that Sunday night; and it seemed to me there are ways of
happiness in the world beside which one can hardly count some of the
ways of pleasure that one calls happiness now.
In my room that night I found a parcel. It was roughly wrapped in paper
that had been used before. From it fell a white scarf and a paper.
"DEAR COSSY (the letter was written in pencil) I am going to send
you this whether you get the prize or whether you don't. If you
didn't get it, I guess you need the present worse. It's the nubia I
wore on my wedding trip. I sha'n't want it any more. I enclose one
dollar and your Pa sends one dollar to get you something with for
yourself. With love,
"MA.
"P. S. My one dollar is egg money, so it's my own it ain't from him
I raised them."
Suddenly, as I read, there came over me the first real longing that I
had ever had in my life for Katytown, and for home.
One more incident belonged to Savage Prize Oration Day.
Neither Miss Manners nor Miss Spot said anything to me about my oration.
But in commencement week Mrs. Carney came in to see me.
"Cosma," she said, "I have a letter here which I must show you."
I read the letter. It said:
"Dear Mrs. Carney:
"After due consideration we deem it advisable to inform you that in
our judgment the spirit and attitude of Cosma Wakely are not in
conformity with the spirit of our school.
"We have ever striven to maintain here an attitude of sweetness and
light, and to exclude everything of a nature disturbing to young
ladies of immature mind. Cosma is not only opinionated, but her
knowledge and experience are out of harmony with the knowledge and
experience of our clientèle. We have regretfully concluded to
suggest to you, therefore, that she be entered elsewhere to
complete her course.
"Thanking you, my dear Mrs. Carney, we beg to remain,
"Respectfully yours,
"MATILDA MANNERS,
"EMILY SPOT."