I had gone wondering how I should see him at last, and what we should
say to each other. It never once occurred to me that we might not meet
again, or that when we did meet it would mean merely the casual renewing
of a casual occasion. As for me everything moved from the time when I
had met John Ember, so everything moved toward the time when I should
see him again. I pictured meeting him on the street, at Mrs. Carney's
house, about the university. I pictured him walking into a class room to
give one of the afternoon lectures--older, his hair a little grayed, and
yet so wonderfully the same as when he had spoken to me there on the
country road. And I could imagine that if I said my name to him he would
have to stop and hunt through his mind for any remembrance of that
breakfast and that walk which were, so far, the principal things that
had ever happened to me.
Then I used to dream that he did remember.
"Mr. Ember, I'm Cosma Wakely. You won't remember--but I just wanted to
say 'thank you' for what you did."
And: "Remember. My dear child, I've been looking for you ever since. Sit
down--I want to talk with you."
Once I saw his picture in a magazine, looking so grave and serious, and
I liked to know that there was that Katytown morning, and that I knew
him in a way that none of the rest did; that I'd been with him on that
lonely, early road and had heard him talk to me--no matter how stupid
I'd acted--and that we'd sat together over breakfast in the yard of the
Dew Drop Inn. Just in that I had one of the joys of a woman who loves a
great man, and understands him as all those who sit and look up to him
can never understand him. I felt as if something of me belonged to John
Ember.
And when I did see him, it was as if he had never been away.
I had been twice to see Lena, and found her in the stale-smelling rooms
of her aunt, each time at work upon some tawdry finery of her own. One
day I thought about begging her to go with me to a gallery that I had
found where hung a picture which it seemed to me must speak to her.
She went readily enough--she was always eager to go somewhere in a
pathetic hope that some new excitement, adventure, would await her. We
walked to the gallery, through the gay absorbed crowd on the avenue; and
as we moved among them, the chattering gaiety with which we had left her
aunt's, fell from her, the lines deepened about her mouth, and finally
she fell silent.
Almost no one was in the little gallery. I led her to the central bench,
and we sat down facing the picture that I had brought her to see: A
woman in a muslin gown holding a child. I guessed how the Madonnas, in
their exquisite absorption and in radiance and in crimson and blue would
have for her little to say, as a woman to a woman. But this girl, in
the simple line and tone of every day, with a baby in her arms, seemed
to me to hold a great fact, and to offer it.
Lena looked at her, and her face did not change. I waited, without
saying anything, feeling certain that whatever I said she was in a mood
to contradict. So she spoke first.
"It looks grand," she said, "till you think of the work of washin' and
ironin' the baby's clothes. And her own. You can bet I shan't keep it in
white."
"Look at the baby's hand," I said, "around her one finger."
It was at that moment that the owner of the little gallery came in, with
a possible patron. They stood near us, looking at a landscape by the
artist of the Madonna.
" ... a wise restraint," he was saying. "Restraint is easy enough--it is
like closing one's mouth all the time. The thing is to close it wisely!
It is not so much the things that he elects not to include in the
composition as it is his particular fashion of omission--without
self-consciousness, with no pride of choice. I should say that of all
the young artists now working in America, he comes the closest to giving
place to the modern movements, seeing them as contributions but not
often as ultimates--"
"I'm goin'," said Lena.
I followed her. On the sidewalk, she tossed her head and laughed
unpleasantly.
"No such talk as that guy was giving in mine," she said. "He feels
smart--that's what ails him. Cossy, I hate folks like that. I hate 'em
when they pretend to know so much...."
"What if they do know, Lena?" I said.
"Then I don't want to be with 'em," she answered. "That's easy, ain't
it? Sometimes I almost hate you. Ain't they some store where they's a
basket of trimmin' remnants we could look at?"
I took her to a shop, and she walked among the shining stuffs,
forgetting me. She loved the gowns on the models. She felt contempt for
no one who was dressed more beautifully than she--only for those who
"knew more" than she. I thought how surely beauty and not knowledge is
the primal teacher, universally welcomed. Beauty is power.
But the remnant basket did not please her, and we stepped into the
street to seek another shop. And standing beside a motor door, close to
the way we passed, were Mrs. Carney and John Ember.
It was only for a moment, then the door shut upon them and they drove
away. But I had seen him as I had dreamed him, a little older, but
always in that brown, incomparable youth. He was bending his head to
listen--that was the way I always thought of him. He was giving some
unsmiling assent. He was here, and no longer across the world. I stood
still, staring after the car.
"Gee, that was a swell blue coat," said Lena. "I don't blame you for
standing stock-still. I bet I could copy that.... Come on!"
I went with her. But I hardly heard her stream of comment and bitter
chatter. And yet it was not all of John Ember that I was thinking, nor
was I filled only with my singing consciousness that he was back. I was
seeing again Mrs. Carney's face as she had turned to speak to him;
glowing, relaxed, open like a flower.
Presently I was aware that Lena was not beside me. I looked and she was
before the window of a shop. I crossed to her, and then I saw what she
was looking at--no array of cheap blouses, price-marked, or of flaming
plumes. She stood before the window of a children's outfitting shop.
I said nothing, nor did she. She looked, and I waited. The white things
were exquisite and, I felt, remote. They were so dainty that I feared
they would alienate her, because they were so much beyond her. But to my
surprise, she turned to me:
"Could--could we go in here," she asked, "even if we didn't buy
anything?"
We went in. Within the atmosphere was still more compact of delicate
fabric and fashioning and color. An assured young woman came forward.
"Leave us look at some of your baby things," said Lena.
We looked. I shall never forget Lena's hands, ungloved, covered with
rings and cheap blue and red stones, as those hands moved in and about
the heaped-up fineness of the little garments. Of some of the things she
did not know the names. The pink and blue crocheted sacks and socks
brought her back to them again and again.
"I used to could crochet," she said at length.
But it was before a small white under-skirt that she made her real way
of contact. She fingered the white simple trimming, and her look flew to
mine.
"My God," she said, "that's 'three-and-five.' I can do that like
lightning."
"Get some thread," I said, "and make some...."
She had made nothing yet. She had told me that. Now she lifted and
touched for a moment among the heaped-up things that they brought her.
"I've got five dollars," she said, "that I was savin' to get me a swell
hat, when I go back. I might--"
I said nothing. It seemed to me that a great thing was happening and
that Lena must do it alone. After a little I priced the dimities and
muslins in her hearing.
"If you want to, Lena," I said, "you could come back to the flat and
Mrs. Bingy would help you to make the things...."
"Would five dollars get the cloth for two dresses and two skirts and
some crochet wool? Some pink wool?" asked Lena.
So she bought these things, with the five dollars that hung about her
neck in a little bag. As we went out the door, she saw a bassinet, all
fine whiteness and flowered blue and lace edging.
"It's a clothes basket!" she cried excitedly. "Don't you see it is?
What's the matter with me making one like that?" She turned to me,
laughing as boisterously as I had heard her laugh in the Katytown
post-office when more traveling men than usual were sitting outside the
door of the Katytown Commercial House. "Land," she said, "when I get
back home, I bet I'll have everything but the baby!"
I sat beside her in the street-car, and she tried to make a hole in the
paper of her parcel to see again the color of the wool she had bought
for the little sack. There was thread, too, for the "three-and-five."
Lena's eyes were bright and eager. She said little on the way home, and
she made no objection to going with me to the flat. When we unrolled the
parcel on Mrs. Bingy's dining-room table, and I saw Lena stooping and
planning, I thought of the picture that we had left in the little
gallery. There was a look in Lena's eyes that I had never seen there
before. I heard Mrs. Bingy and her chattering happily over the patterns,
and I thought that beauty has many ways of power.
Then, the next day, I had a telegram from Mrs. Carney.
"Come to see me to-day," she said. "Important."
I hurried to her, dreaming, as I had dreamed all night, of whom I might
find with her. But she was alone, and in some happy excitement that was
beautifully becoming to her, who was usually so grave and absent.
"Cosma," she said, "what would you say to leaving the university before
you have your degree?"
I knew that very well. "I would say," I said, "that I don't care two
cents about the degree, if I can get the right position without it."
"I hoped you would say that!" she cried. "Then listen: John Ember has
asked me to find a secretary for him. Will you go and try for the
place?"