On the night before they sailed for France, long after she had gone to
bed Ethel came out in her wrapper into the warm dark living-room. There
was something she had forgotten to do, and she wanted to get it off her
mind. She switched on the light by the doorway, and looked about her
smiling, but with a little shiver, too.
The ghost was gone--or nearly so. Already the room had been stripped
bare. Only Ethel's desk was left, and a chair or two and the long,
heavy table with a lamp at either end. Amy's picture was still on the
table, but it lay now on its back and looked up at the ceiling as though
it knew it must soon depart. Tomorrow the movers would finish their
work. Soon somebody else's things would be here, and somebody else's
life would pour in and fill the room and make it new. Somebody else.
What kind of a woman? Another Amy, or Fanny Carr, or Sally Crothers or
Mrs. Grewe? What a funny, complicated town. On her return a year from
now, Ethel had already decided to take a small house near Washington
Square. How long would that experiment last! Doubtless in the years
ahead she would try other homes, one after the other. "Why do we move
so in New York!" She thought of that plan of her husband's for the
future city street, with long rows on either hand of huge apartment
buildings with receding terraces, numberless hanging gardens looking
into the street below. And she wondered whether the city would ever be
anything like that? "In New York all things are possible." . . .
"However." Ethel went to her desk and rummaged for paper, pen and ink.
Then she took out of a cubby-hole a bulky letter and read it through.
It was the "round-robin" come again on its annual journey over the land.
It had been in a lonely mining camp, on a cattle ranch, in a mill town
and in cities large and small. There were many kinds of handwriting
here, and widely different stories of the growth, the swift unfolding,
of the lives of a new generation of women. "Girls like me." She read it
through.
Then she took up her pen and began to write swiftly:
"I have been here for over three years--but it was hard to write before,
because everything was far from clear." She stopped and frowned. "How
much shall I tell them?" An eagerness to be frank and tell all was
mingled with that feeling of Anglo-Saxon reticence which had been bred
in Ethel's soul back in the town in Ohio. "Besides, I haven't time,"
she thought.
"I feel," she wrote, "as though I were just out of danger--barely out.
In danger, I mean, of nervously dashing about after nothing until I got
wrinkled and old at forty--nerves in shreds. I might have done that. I
have met a nerve specialist lately--and the stories he has told me about
women in this town!
"However! I want to make myself clear. Am I a high-brow? Not at all.
I want good clothes--I love to shop--and I propose to go on shopping.
If you do not, let me tell you, my dears, that the men in New York are
like all the rest--and you would soon be leading a very lonely
existence! And I don't want that, I want bushels of friends--and some
of them men--decidedly! I want to dance and dine about--but I don't
want to be religious about it! Nor frantic and get myself into a state!
"Well, but I did start out like that. When I came here to live--" She
hesitated. "No, I'd better scratch that out."
"Thank Heaven I got married," she wrote, "and fell in love with my
husband." Again she stopped with a quick frown. "And I had a baby. And
I began to find something real." Another pause, a long one.
"I had quite a struggle after that. I was all hemmed in--" she stopped
again--"by the city I found when I first arrived. But I huffed and I
puffed and I hunted about--and at last I discovered our New York--the
town we girls used to dream about at home in all those talks we had!
Oh, I don't mean I have found it yet--but I've felt it, though, and had
one good look. I dined with some people. How silly that sounds. But
never mind--the point is not me, but the fact that this city is really
and truly crammed full of the things we girls used to get so excited
about--Art, you know, and Music of course, and people who make these
things their God. The town opens up if you look at it right--and you
find Movements--Politics--you hear people talk--you see suffrage
parades--I marched in one not long ago feeling like Joan of Arc! And
you find men, too, who are doing things. Big schemes for skyscrapers
and homes! I mean that our New York is here!"
Again there came a pause in the writing. Her eyes looked excited. She
smiled and frowned. Now to finish it off!
"What I want of it all I am not yet sure--for me personally, I mean.
But there is my husband, to begin with, and his work that I can help
grow--and his old friends. And they are not all. I keep hearing of new
ones I must meet--and they are mixed in with all those things I have
discovered in the town. A few of these people were born here--but most
have come from all over the country. Sometimes I shut my eyes and
ask--'Where are you now, all over the land, you others who are to come
to New York and be friends of mine and of my children?'
"I want children--more than one. How many I am not quite sure. That's
another point--you decide these things." She frowned and scratched this
sentence out. "And children grow--and the idea of bringing them up
makes me feel very young and humble, too. But in that we are all in the
same boat--for the whole country, I suppose, is a good deal the same.
What a queer and puzzling, gorgeous age we are just beginning--all of
us! I wonder what I shall make of it? What shall I be like ten years
from now? How much shall I mean to my husband--and to other men and
women? But most of all to women--for we are coming together so! I
wonder what we shall make of it all? I wonder how much we women who
march--march on and on to everything--are really going to mean in the
world!
"Oh, how solemn! Good-night, my dears! A kiss to every one of you!"
She folded her letter with the rest, and then she quickly squeezed them
all into a large envelope, which she addressed to Miss Barbara Wells,
Bismarck, North Dakota. Ethel's eyes were very bright. She sniffed a
little and smiled at herself. "Oh, don't be a baby! It's all over now,
you know--I mean it's just beginning!"
She stopped for a moment by the table, with the letter in her hand, and
looked down at Amy's picture. "That is all any one needs to know."
Her look was pitying, tender, but a little curious, too.
"I wonder what you were like at my age! I wonder what you went through,
poor dear? . . . But it's over now--all over. All we don't like
will fade away, and you'll grow so beautiful again. Susette will love
her mother. . . . But she won't be just like you, my dear."
Ethel went slowly out of the room. At the doorway she switched off the
light, and the bare, empty room was left in the dark. The photograph
was invisible now. On the street below, a motor stopped; and there was
a murmur of voices, a laugh. Tomorrow somebody else would be here.
THE END