His library had not many books, not many pictures, and no curtains at
all. The nine o'clock sun fell across the dull rugs, and some blue and
green jars on a shelf shone out as if they were saying something. I
waited for him at the hour of the appointment that Mrs. Carney had made
for me. And for me some of the magic and the terror of the time were in
that she had not told him who I was. When his little Japanese had gone
to call him, I sat there in a happiness which made me over, which made
the whole world seem like another place. I heard his step in the
passage, and I wondered if I was going to be able to speak at all. I
rather thought not, until the very moment that I tried.
He came toward me, bowing slightly, and motioning me to my chair. I
looked at him, with a leaping expectation in my heart, and, I am
afraid, in my eyes. His own eyes met mine levelly, courteously, and
without a sign of recognition.
"Now, let us see," he said briskly, and sat down before me. "About how
much experience have you had?"
"I have never been anybody's secretary, if that is what you mean," I
said, when I could.
"It is not in the least what I mean," he returned. "If you happen not to
have been anybody's secretary, I am glad of it. I meant, 'What can you
do?'"
"I can typewrite," I managed to tell him. "And almost always I can
spell."
"That's good," he said, "though far from essential. Now what else?"
I thought for a moment. "I can keep still," I said. "I don't believe
there's anything else I can do."
"That makes an admirable beginning," he observed gravely. "Do--do you
take down all instructions? In notes?"
"I can, if you like," I said. "But I can never read my own notes."
"You don't do shorthand?" he cried.
For the first time, as I shook my head, it occurred to me that I might
not meet his requirements.
"Well, now," he was saying, "that is good news. I was afraid you might
come with a ruled note-book," he explained. "The flap kind."
"No," I said, "I begin at both ends of those. And then I never can find
the notes."
"Precisely," he said. "Now about your head. Is it likely to ache every
few minutes?"
"Only when I read the map in an automobile," I answered.
"Fortunately," he assured me, "there will be little of that in my
requirements. Now the honest truth: Can you work hard? Can you work like
a demon if you have to?"
"Yes. Unless it has figures in it," I said.
"It hasn't," he said. "Or at least, when it has, I shall have to do
those myself, for my sins. But I warn you, there's some pretty stiff
work ahead. It's a labor survey of China. And I want somebody to do ten
hours a day most of the time, showing how like dogs the Chinese workmen
are treated."
Ten hours a day with him! I sat silent, trying to take in the magnitude
of my joy.
"It's too much?" he hazarded.
"Oh!" I cried. "No. Why no!" He looked up inquiringly. "See the women in
this town," I added, "who work ten hours a day and more."
"We're going to get along extremely well, then," he said, "if you don't
mind my damned irritability--I beg your pardon. I'm shockingly
irritable--but," he paused, leaning forward, still grave, "let me tell
you, confidentially, now, that I always know it, underneath. You can't
mind what I say too awfully, you know, if I put you in possession of
that fact to start with. Can you?"
"I shan't mind," I said.
"Well, you will, you know," he warned me, "but that at least ought to
help. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to go to work now? This
moment?"
"Yes, it would," I said, trying hard not to say it too joyfully.
"What?" he exclaimed. "Really? Without breaking an engagement? Or
telephoning anybody? This is wonderful. Oh, by the way. Let me see your
hand when you write."
He brought me a pad and pen and ink.
"Write anything," he said. "Write."
I wrote. He watched me absorbedly and drew a sigh that might have been
relief.
"That's all right, too," he told me. "I had a young woman here helping
me once who wrapped her fingers round the pen when she wrote, in a
fashion that drove me mad. I used to go out and dig in the garden till
my secretary had gone home, and then come in and get down to work
myself."
I put away my hat, and merely to shut the door on the closet that held
umbrellas and raincoats was an intimacy that gave me joy. I had starved
for him, thirsted for him, and two days ago had not known that he was
not in China still; yet here was this magic, as life knows so well to
manufacture magic.
"I'm afraid I don't remember," he said, "what Mrs. Carney told me your
name is?"
While we talked, it had been gradually fastening itself in my mind that
it would have been remarkable if he had recognized me. A country girl,
in a starched white dress, with her hair about her face, acting like a
common creature on the Katytown road, and later, to his understanding
working in a New York factory, could have no connection with a woman of
twenty-six, in well-fitting clothes, who came to him six years after, as
his secretary. I told him my last name, and he said it over as if it had
been Smith.
In a corner of the library, by the window overlooking the little garden,
he set me to sorting an incredible heap of notes, made illegibly on
paper of varying sizes, unnumbered, but every sheet scrupulously dated.
These covered two years and a half, and their arrangement was anything
but chronological.
"Note-books have their uses," he admitted, surveying that hopeless
pile. "But not the flap kind," he added hastily.
I set to work, and as I touched the papers which had been with him all
those days when I had seen the sun off for China, it seemed to me that I
must tell somebody: "It's true then! Excepting for the misery in the
world, you can be perfectly happy!" I had always doubted it. You do
doubt it, until you have a moment of perfect happiness for your own. And
this was the first one that I had ever known. He was at some proofs, and
he promptly forgot my existence. After all these years, after the few
rare glimpses of him which had been food for me and a kind of life, here
I was where by lifting my eyes I could see him, where countless times a
day I could hear him speak. Better than all this, and infinitely dearer,
I was, however humbly, to help him in his work. I, Cosma Wakely, who, on
a day, had tried to flirt with him.
I went at the notes fearfully. What if I could not understand them?
There were gods, I knew, whose written word is all but measureless to
man, I own that his notes were far from clear. Perhaps it was just
because I so much wanted it that I understood them. Moreover, I found,
to my intense delight, that I some way _felt_ what he was writing. This
I can not explain, but every one who loves some one will know how this
is.
In half an hour he wheeled suddenly in his chair at the table. I caught,
before he spoke, his look of almost boyish ruefulness.
"Miss Wakely," he said, "I beg your pardon like anything. What salary do
you have?"
I felt my face turn crimson. This had occurred to me no more than it had
to him.
When it was settled, he rose and came toward the corner where I worked,
and stood looking down at me. For a moment I was certain that now he
knew me.
"Miss Wakely," he said very gently, "may I ask you one thing more? Do
you wear black sateen aprons?"
"I loathe all aprons," I said.
"And paper sleeve-shields, too?" he inquired earnestly. "Held by big
rubber bands?"
"Paper sleeve-shields held by big rubber bands," I said, "I loathe even
more than black sateen aprons."
"Well," he said, "do you know, there was one young woman once--" and he
went back to his task obliviously.
At one o'clock I found a little tea-shop in the neighborhood, where food
was scandalously high, after the manner of unassimilated tea-shops. I
remember the clean little room, with a rose on my table and shelves of
jelly over my head.
"How much better that is than some books," I said to the pink waitress,
because I had to speak to somebody, so that I could smile. The world is
not yet adjusted with that simplicity which permits one to sit in public
places alone and, very happily, to smile. And this, I realized, was what
I had been doing.
I was obliged to walk twice the transverse length of the blocks cut by
the little studio street, before it was time to go back. As I was
returning the second time, I came face to face with Mr. Ember carrying a
paper sack.
"Torchido," he explained, "lectures in a young ladies' seminary just at
noon. It is not convenient for me. But I mind nothing so much as the
fact that he will not let me have dried herrings. They--they offend
Torchido. They do not offend me. So I go out and buy herrings of my own
and hide them in the bookcase. But he nearly always smells them out."
I wanted to say: "You can't buy anywhere such good ones as we used to
have in Katytown." Instead, I said something in disparagement of
Torchido's taste, and reflected on the immeasurable power of dried
herrings in one human being's appeal to another.
I went back to work in my corner, and he ate herrings and buns,
unabashed, at his library table. When I saw Torchido coming along the
garden wall, I said: "Torchido--he's coming!" and Mr. Ember swept the
remains of his lunch into the sack and dropped it into one of the
glorious green-blue jars.
Torchido came in for orders, took them, stood for a moment plainly
sniffing the air, pointedly opened a far window, and respectfully
retreated. Whereat the first faint smile that I had seen met my look,
when the door had closed.
It was a heavenly day. It seemed to me that some heritage of my young
girlhood had, after all, not quite escaped in all that sordid time, but
had waited for me, let me catch it up and, now, enjoy it as I never
could have enjoyed it then.
I walked home that night, in remembrance of that first miserable walk
away from that studio, and because I like to be happy in the exact
places where I have been miserable. I wanted to be alone for a little
while, too, to think out what had happened. And all the way home that
night, and all the evening when I did no work, the thing which kept
recurring to me was the magic of a universe in which herrings and the
absence of black sateen aprons permit immortal beings to draw a little
nearer to each other.
The days were all happy. That combination of fellowship and its humor,
together with a complete impersonality which yet exquisitely takes
account of all human personality and variously values it, was something
which I had never before known in any man. I had not, in fact, known
that it was in the world. It is exceedingly rare--yet. Most women die
without knowing that it does occasionally exist. But it presages the
thing which lies somewhere there, beyond the border of the present,
beside which the spectacle of romantic love _without it_ will be as
absurd as chivalry itself.
I used to think, in those first days, how gloriously democratic love
would make us--if we would let it. I understood history now--from the
time of the first man and woman! Not a cave man, not a shepherd on the
hills, not a knight in a tournament, but that I understood the woman who
had loved him. It was astonishing, to have, all of a sudden, not only
the Eloises and Helens clear to me--they have been clear to many--but
also every little obscure woman who has ever watched for a man to come
home. And it wasn't only that. It was that I understood so much better
the woman of now. Women in cars and in busses, shoppers, shop-women,
artists, waitresses, char-women, "great" ladies--none of them could
deceive me any more. No snobbery, no hauteur, no superiority, no
simplicity could ever trap me into any belief that they and I were
different. If they loved men, then I know them through and through.
"Mrs. Bingy," I said to her one night, "did you ever love Mr. Bingy
much?"
She was re-setting the pins in her pillow and she looked over at me with
careful attention.
"Well," she said, "they was a good many of us to home, you know; and I
didn't have much to do with; and I really married Keddie to get a home.
But of course, afterward I got fond of him. And then to think of us
now!"
"But you really didn't love him when you married him?"
"No," she said. "It's a terrible thing to own up to."
And there again was the whole naked problem, as I had seen it for her,
for Lena, for my mother, for all the women of Katytown, for Mrs.
Carney, for Rose.... What was the matter? When love was in the world for
us all, when at some time every one of us shared it--what was the reason
that it came to this? Or--as I had seen almost as often--to the model
"happy" home, which often bred selfishness and oblivion?
Yet in those days I confess that I thought far less about these things
than I did of the simple joy of being in that workroom where he was.
There was a day of rain early in June--of rain so intense and compelling
that when lunchtime came I left in the midst of it, while Mr. Ember was
out of the room, so that he should not be constrained to ask me to stay.
When I came back he scolded me.
"You didn't use good sense!" he said. "Why didn't you?"
"I used all I had," I replied with meekness.
"If that was all you had, you'd lose your job," he grumbled. "Never go
out from here again in such a rain as that. Do you hear?"
Torchido not yet having returned from his lecture, Mr. Ember built up a
cedar fire in the fireplace and made me dry my feet.
"I am going to make you a cup of tea," he said, "from some--"
"Don't tell me," I said, "that it's from the same kind that the emperor
uses?"
"It is not," he replied. "This is another form of the same
advertisement. This is some which was picked four hundred years ago."
"Oh," I said, "I dislike tea more than I can tell you. But I should like
to drink a cup of that."
The stuff was horrible. It was not strong, but it had an unnameable
puckering quality. I tasted it, and waited.
"Do you like it?" he asked eagerly.
"It is," I said, "the worst tea I have ever tasted in my whole life. I
feel as if I had been shirred."
He burst into laughter.
"So I think," he said, "but lovely ladies drink it down and pretend to
like it, just because I tell 'em what it is. I'm glad you hate it."
He held the tin over the coals.
"Shall I burn it?" he asked. "To the tune of 'What horrid humbugs lovely
ladies are'?"
"Oh, no," I said, "give it to some old lady who will think it is just
tea."
He nodded. "You have made the economically correct adjustment," he said.
"And that is a good deal of a trick."
One morning when I went in, I found him sitting at his table pressing
the tips of his fingers to his closed eyes.
"Good morning, Miss Wakely," he said. "These two tools of mine are
rusting out. It's a nuisance just now, with the proof coming."
I said: "Couldn't I read it to you?"
"Frankly, I'm afraid not;" he answered. "I belong to the half of mankind
who can not be read to. I _think_ that I couldn't bear it. But you may
try."
He sat in a deep chair, with his back to the light, and I before him,
with a little table for the proof. I read to him, doing my best to keep
my mind on what I was reading. His bigness, his gentleness, his
abstraction, his humor were like a constant speaking presence, even when
he was silent.
When I had read for ten minutes, he interrupted me.
"It's wonderful," he said. "You can do it. I'm trying to get at the
reason. You don't over-emphasize. And yet your voice is so flexible that
you aren't monotonous. And you don't plunge at every sentence, and come
down hard on the first word, and taper off to nothing. If it keeps up,
this is going to make me a terrible grafter, because I can't begin to
pay you for what this will be worth to me."
"I'll stay as long as I can stand it!" I told him, trying to keep the
happiness out of my eyes and my voice at the same time.
In a little while, the joyous sensation of what I was doing gave way to
the interest in the reading itself. His book, I found, was a serious
study of work in its relation to human growth. From the Hebraic
conception of work as a curse to the present-day conception of work as
conscious cooperation in creation, in evolution, he was coming down the
line, visiting all nations, entering all industries.
It was curious that, in those first days there never once passed between
us any word of the great human problems in which we were both so
excludingly interested. I understood that doubtless he had accustomed
himself to saying very little about them, save when he knew that he
would meet understanding. I had been at work for him more than a month
before we ever talked at all, save the casual give-and-take of the day,
and in occasional interludes, like the interludes of herrings and tea.
One morning we were copying some Chinese reports giving the total wages
earned by men in seventy-year periods, and some totals to indicate their
standards of living. Suddenly he said:
"Considering our civilization, and our culture and
enlightenment-business, our own figures, proportionately to what we
might make them with our resources, are blacker than the ex-empire's."
"You can't tell it in totals, though," I said. "You can't indicate in
figures what is lost by low wages, any more than you can measure great
works of genius by efficiency charts."
"You care about these things?" he asked.
"More than anything else," I answered.
After that, he talked to me sometimes about his work.
"I wish," he said once, "that I knew more about the working women. I'd
like to get some of this off before a group of working women, and see
how they'd take it."
"I could plan that for you," I said, "if you really mean it."
He looked at me curiously. "You are a remarkable little person," he
observed. "Are there, then, things that you can't do?"
I went to see Rose back in the same factory, a little more worn, a
little less hopeful, but still at her work among the girls. She welcomed
the suggestion that he come to speak. He came for the next week's
meeting.
"Rose," I said, "don't say anything to Mr. Ember about me."
Before that night came round, something happened. One morning, when Mr.
Ember was going through his mail, he read one letter through twice.
"This one," he said, "I must take time to answer. My lecture bureau has
gone into bankruptcy."
"Well," I said, "what of that? You don't need a bureau."
"It's not that," he said; "I own stock in it."
At noon he went out. When he came in his face was clear, and he went
back to his proof. As I was leaving that night he spoke abruptly:
"Miss Wakely," he said, "I am sorry to have to tell you something--I am
indeed. After this week I must not have you any more."
For this I was utterly unprepared. I looked up at him with all the
terror and despair which filled me. "I'm not doing your work well?" I
tried to say. But--"You're doing my work," he answered, "as I never
hoped to have it done. It isn't that. It isn't only that this failure
leaves me with very little money. There's thirty thousand dollars owing
to lecture and Chautauqua people, and the company hasn't a cent."
"You mean," I said, "that you will help pay this thirty thousand?"
"There's no one else," he answered. "I'm the only stockholder who has
anything at all. And the rest have families."
"Can they compel you to do this?" I asked. It is amazing how the brute
instincts reappear in areas new; to experience. I was civilized enough
in some things, and yet instinctively I asked: "Can they compel you?"
He merely stood smiling down at me. "Most of the speakers are
twenty-dollar-a-night men," he said. "They can't lose it, you see."
"I beg your pardon," I said, and went out to the street in a kind of
glory. So he was like this!
That Saturday night he handed me my pay, with, "Good-by, Miss Wakely. I
can't thank you--I really can't, you know."
"Good-by, Mr. Ember," I replied cheerfully, and went.
On Monday morning, when he came into the workroom with his letters I
sat there oiling the typewriter.
He stared at me. "Miss Wakely," he said in distress, "I must have
muddled it awfully. I wasn't clear--"
"Yes," I said, "you were clear. But I thought I'd enjoy keeping on with
the proof. May I have a clean cloth for the machine?"
He came over to the typewriter table, and stood looking down at me. I
dared not look up, because I was worried about my eyes and what they
might have to say. Then he put out his hand, and I gave him mine.
"I'm afraid I'll get typewriter oil on you," I said, "and it's smelly."
He went on with the letters without another word. There were two great
envelopes of proof. He never could have got through them alone.
The night that he spoke to the girls, I went over early and slipped in
the back seat. The hall was filled; I was glad of that. And as soon as
he began speaking I saw that he knew how to talk to them. He was just
talking to them about the fundamental of human growth, and how the
whole industrial struggle was nothing but the assertion of the right of
the workers to growth. He showed this struggle as but one phase of
something as wide as life.
"You want a better life, don't you?" he said. "You want to enjoy more,
and know more and be more. And the people who can individually get these
things by your toil you are set against.... But what are you working
for? Food and clothes and a little fun? And your own children? I say
that those of you who are working just for these things for yourselves
are almost as bad as those who work for their own luxury.... What then?
What are we working for? Why, to make the world where _all of us_ can
have a better life, and enjoy more, and know more, and be more. And
we've got to do this together. And those of us who are not trying to
raise the standard for _all of us_, whether employers or employees, are
all outlaws together."
It was wonderful to see how he faced that audience of tired men and
women, and kindled them into human beings. It was wonderful to see the
hope and then the belief and then the courage come quickening in their
eyes, in their faces, in their applause. Afterward they went forward
like one person to meet him, to take his hand. While they were with him,
they became one person. It was almost as if they became, before his
eyes, what he was there to tell them that they could go toward.
I had meant to slip out of the hall afterward. The last thing that I had
meant to do was to walk down the aisle and put out my hand. Yet when he
had finished, that was what I did.
"You liked it?" he said to me.
"I know it!" I told him.
"Ah, that's it," he answered. "Wait," he added.
So I waited until they had all spoken with him, and I wondered how any
one could watch them and not understand them. One girl, new in the
factory, came to him:
"Now you have showed me where I belong in my little life," she said to
him in broken English. "Before, I felt as if I had been born and then
somebody had walked away and left me there. Now I see where I am, after
all."
Afterward, Rose came to me, and her face was new. "If only we could keep
them where they are now," she said. "But when they get hungry once, they
forget it all."
Mr. Ember and I went down to the street. "Don't you want to walk home?"
he said to me. And when we had left the push-carts and the noise, he
turned to me in the still street:
"Now tell me?" he said. "How do you know those girls so well?"
I answered in genuine surprise. It seemed to me he must know.
"You!" he exclaimed. "Worked in a factory? At what? And when?"
I told him some of the things that I had done. He listened, and had no
idea in the world that it was he who began it all for me. He smiled with
me at my year with Miss Manners and Miss Spot. "And now what?" he asked.
"Now I'm secretary to you," I reminded him.
"You are not," he said, "you're an unpaid slave, being exploited for
all you're worth, and you ought to be on strike this minute. Seriously,"
he added, "I can't go on this way. Don't you see that I can't allow it?"
"I beg your pardon," I said--and indeed I had hardly heard what he had
been saying, for I was thinking: Here--walking along the street with
me--John Ember, John Ember, _John Ember_!
"I'm saying," he observed, "that I discharge you from to-night."
"Look here, Mr. Ember," I said, "you can't discharge me--don't you
understand! I've made up my mind to stay with you."
"Oh!" he exclaimed. "So you've made up your mind?"
"You mustn't be so selfish," I explained it. "You must think a little of
me. Here you are, doing a big, fine work, work that interests me more
than anything in the world. I've no other chance to help on, except
through you and Rose. Why do you want to drive me out?"
"But, my child," he said, "if you don't mind the practicality of the
question, what are you living on?"
"Oh, that!" I said. "I pay my way by making Mrs. Bingy's lace."
He was silent for a moment. "You really want to?" he asked. "It isn't
pity?"
"I really want to," I told him. "That's why I'm going to!"
He drew a deep breath. "Then that's settled," he said; "I own up to you.
I didn't know how on earth I was going to get on without you!"