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.
LUKE."
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.