A Daughter of the Morning

He kept looking at me, and smiling a little.

"Tell me," he says, "do you live about here?"

"Me? Right here. I'm the original Maud Muller," I says.

"And what do you do besides rake hay?" he says.

I couldn't think what else Maud Muller done. I hadn't read it since Fifth Reader. So I says:

"Well, she don't often get a chance to talk with traveling gentlemen."

"That's good," he says, "but – I wouldn't have thought it."

I see he meant because I done it so easy and ready, so I give him as good as he sent.

"Wouldn't you?" I says. "Well, I s'pose you get a chance to flirt with strange girls every town you strike."

He looked at me again, not smiling now, but just awfully interested. I see I was interesting him down to the ground. Lena Curtsy couldn't have done it better.

"Flirt," he says over. "What do you mean by 'flirt'?"

I laughed at him. "You're a pretty one to ask that," I says, "with them eyes."

"Oh," he says serious, "then you like my eyes?"

"I never said so," I gave him. "Do you like mine?"

"Let me look at them," he said.

We stopped in the road, and I looked him square in the eye. I can look anybody in the eye. I looked at him straight, till he laughed and moved on. He seemed to be thinking about something.

"I think I like you best when you sing," he said. "Won't you sing something else?"

"Sure," I says, and wheeled around in the road, and kind of skipped backward. And I sung:

"Oh, oh, oh, oh! Pull down the blinds!When they hear the organ play-ingThey won't know what we are say-ing.Pull down the blinds!"

I'd heard it to the motion-picture show the week before. I was thankful he could see I was up on the nice late tunes.

"I wonder," says the man, "if you can tell me something. I wonder if you can tell me what made you pick out this song to sing to me, and what made you sing that other song when you were alone?"

All at once the morning come back. Ever since I met him I'd forgot the morning and the sun, and the way I'd felt when I started out alone. I'd just been thinking about myself, and about how I could make him think I was cute and up-to-date. Now it was just as if the country road opened up again, and there I was on it, opposite the Dew Drop Inn, just being me. I looked up at him.

"Honest," I says, "I don't know. I guess it was because I wanted you to think I was fun."

He looked at me for a minute, straight and deep.

"By Jove!" he says, and I didn't know what ailed him. "Have you had breakfast?" he ask', short.

"No," I says.

"You come in here with me and get some," he says, like an order.

He led the way into the yard of the Dew Drop Inn. There's a grape arbor there, and some bare hard dirt, and two or three tables. Nobody was there, only the boy, sweeping the dirt with a broom. We sat down at the table in the arbor. It was pleasant to be there. A house wren was singing his head off somewhere near. A woman come out and sloshed water on the stone at the back door and begun scrubbing. A clock in the bar struck six.

Joe Burkey, that keeps the Inn, come out and nodded to me.

"Joe," I says, "did Keddie Bingy come back here?"

Joe wiped his hands on the cloth on his arm, and then brushed his mustache with it, and then wiped off the table with it.

"I don't know nothin' about K. Bingy," says Joe. "I t'run him out o' my place last night, neck and crop, for bein' drunk and disorderly. I ain't seen him since."

I looked up at Joe's little eyes. They looked like the eyes of the wolf in the picture in our dining-room. Joe's got a fat chin, and a fat smile, but his eyes don't match them.

"You coward and you brute," I says to him, "where did Keddie Bingy get drunk and disorderly?"

Joe begun to sputter and to step around in new places. The man I was with brought his hand down on the table.

"Never mind that," he says, "what you've to do is bring some breakfast. What will you have for your breakfast, mademoiselle?" he says to me.

"Why," I says, "some salt pork and some baking powder biscuit for me, and some fried potatoes and a piece of some kind of pie. What kind have you got?"

"Apple and raisin," says Joe, sulky. But the man I was with he says:

"Suppose you let me order our breakfast. Will you?"

"Suit yourself, I'm sure," says I. "I ain't used to the best."

The man thought a minute.

"Back there a little way," he says, "I crossed something that looked like a trout stream. Is it a trout stream?"

"Sure," says Joe and I together.

"How long," says the man, "would it take that boy there to bring in a small catch?"

"My!" I says, "he can do that quicker'n a cat can lick his eye. Can't he, Joe?"

"Very well," says the man. "We will have brook trout for breakfast. Make a lemon butter for them, please, and use good butter. With that bring us some toast, very thin, very brown and very hot, with more good butter. Have you some orange marmalade?"

"Sure," says Joe, "but it costs thirty cents a jar; I open the whole – "

"Some orange marmalade," says the man. "And coffee – I wonder what that good woman there would say to letting me make the coffee?"

"Her? She'll do whatever I tell her," says Joe. "But we charge extra when guests got to make their own coffee."

"And now," says the man, getting through with that, "what can you bring us while we wait? Some peaches?"

"The orchard," says Joe, "is rotten wid peaches."

"Good," says the man. "Now we understand each other. If mademoiselle will excuse me, we will set the coffee on its way."

I set and waited, thinking how funny it was for a man to make the coffee. All Pa ever done in his life to help about the cooking was to clean the fish.

I went and played with a kitten, so's not to have to talk to Joe. I didn't know what I might say to him. When I come back the table was laid with a nice clean cloth and napkins that were ironed good and dishes with little flowers on. When the woman come out to the well, I ask' her if I could pick some phlox for the table. She laughed and said yes, if I wanted to. So I got some, all pink. I was just bringing it when the man come back.

"Stand there, just for a minute," he says.

I done like he told me, by the door of the arbor. I thought he was going to say something nice, and I hoped I'd think of something smart and sassy to say back to him. But all he says was just:

"Thank you. Now, come and sit down, please."

We fixed the flowers. Then Joe brought a basket of beautiful peaches, and we took what we wanted. The man took one, and sat touching it with the tips of his fingers, and he looked over at me with a nice smile.

"And now, my child," he says, "tell me your name."

I always hate to tell folks my name. In the village they've always made fun of it.

"What do you want to bother with that for?" I says. "Ain't I good enough without a tag?"

He spoke almost sharp. "I want you to tell me your name," he says.

So I told him. "Cosma Wakely," I says.

He looked funny. "Really?" he says. "Cosma?"

"But everybody calls me 'Cossy,'" I says quick. "I know what a funny name it is. My grandmother named me. She was queer."

"Cossy!" he says over. "Why, Cosma is perfect."

"You're kiddin' me," I says. "Don't you think I don't know it."

He didn't say he wasn't.

"Ain't you going to tell me your name?" I says. "Not that I s'pose you'll tell me the right one. They never do."

"My name," he says, "is John Ember."

"On the square?" I asked him.

"Yes," he says. He was a funny man. He didn't have a bit of come-back. He took you just plain. He reminded me of the way I acted with Luke. But usually I could jolly like the dickens.

"You travel, I guess," I says. "What do you travel for?"

He laughed. "If I understand you," he said, "you are asking me what my line is?"

I nodded. I'd just put the pit in my mouth, so I couldn't guess something sassy, like pickles.

"I have no line," he says. "It's an area."

"Huh?" I says – on account of the pit.

"I travel," says he, "for the human race. But they don't know it."

"Sure," I says, when I had it swallowed, "you got to sell to everybody, I know that. But what do you sell 'em?"

He shook his head.

"I don't sell it," he says. "They won't buy it. I shall always be a philanthropist. The commodity," says he, "is books."

"Oh!" I says. "A book agent! I'd have taken you for a regular salesman."

"I tell you I don't sell 'em," he says. "Nobody will buy. I just write 'em."

I put down my other peach and looked at him.

"An author?" I says. "You?"

"Thank you," says he, "for believing me. Nobody else will. Now don't let's talk about that. Do you mind telling me something about yourself?"

"Oh," I says, "I've got a book all made out of wrapping paper. It ain't wrote yet, it's in the bottom drawer. But I'm going to write one."

"Good!" he says. "Tell me about that, too."

I don't know what made me, except the surprise of finding that he was what he was, instead of a traveling man. But the first thing I knew I was telling him about me; how I'd stopped school when I was fourteen, and had worked out for a little while in town; and then when the boys got the job in the blast furnace, I came home to help Ma. I told him how the only place I'd ever been, besides the village, was to the city, twice. Only two things I didn't tell him at first – about what home was like, and about Luke. But he got them both out of me. Because I wound up what I was telling him with something I thought was the thing to say. Lena Curtsy always said it.

"I've just been living at home for four years now," I said. "I s'pose it's the place for a girl."

I remember how calm and slow he was when he answered.

"Why no," he says. "Your home is about the last place in the world a girl of your age ought to be."

"What do you know about my home?" I asked him quick.

"I don't mean your home," he says. "I mean any home, if it's your parents' home. If you can't be in school, why aren't you out by this time doing some useful work of your own?"

"Work," I says. "I do work. I work like a dog."

"I don't mean doing your family's work," he said. "I mean doing your own work. Of course you're not going to tell me you're happy?"

"No," I says, "I ain't happy. I hate my work. I hate the kind of a home I live in. It's Bedlam, the whole time. I'm going to get married to get out of it."

"So you are going to be married," he says. "What's the man like – do you mind telling me that?"

I told him about Luke, just the way he is. While I talked he was eating his peaches. I'd been through with mine quite a while now, so I noticed him eat his. He done it kind of with the tips of his fingers. I liked to watch him. He sort of broke the peach. The juice didn't run down. I remembered how I must have et mine, and I felt ashamed.

Before I was all through about Luke, Joe come in with the trout, and some thin, crispy potatoes on the platter, and the toast and the marmalade; and Mr. Ember went to see about the coffee. He brought it out himself, and poured it himself – and it smelled like something I'd never smelled before. And now, when he begun to eat, I watched him. I broke my toast, like he done. I used my fork on the trout, like him, and I noticed he took his spoon out of his cup, and I done that, too, though I'd got so I could drink from a cup without a handle and hold the spoon with my finger, like the boys done. I kept tasting the coffee, too, instead of drinking it off at once, even when it was hot, like I'd learned the trick of. I didn't know but his way just happened to be his way, but I wanted to make sure. Anyway, I never smack my lips, and Luke and the boys do that.

"Now," he said, "while we enjoy this very excellent breakfast, will you do me the honor to let me tell you a little something about me?"

I don't see what honor that would be, and I said so. And then he told me things.

I'm sorry that I can't put them down. It was wonderful. It was just like a story the teacher tells you when you're little and not too old for stories. It turned out he'd been to Europe and to Asia. He'd done things that I never knew there was such things. But he didn't talk about him, he just talked about the things and the places. I forgot to eat. It seemed so funny that I, Cossy Wakely, should be listening to somebody that had done them things. He said something about a volcano.

"A volcano!" I says. "Do they have them now? I thought that was only when the geography was."

"But the geography is, you know," he says. "It is now."

"Did that big flat book all mean now?" I says. "I thought it meant long ago. I had a picture of the Ark and the flood and the Temple, and when the stars fell – "

"Oh, the fools!" he says to himself; but I didn't know who he meant, and I was pretty sure he must mean me.

All the while we were having breakfast, he talked with me. When it was over, and he'd paid the bill – I tried my best to see how much it was, so as to tell Lena Curtsy, but I couldn't – he turned around to me and he says:

"The grass is not wet this morning. It's high summer. Will you walk with me up to the top of that hill over there in the field? I want to show you the whole world."

"Sure," I says. "But you can't see much past Twiney's pasture from that little runt of a hill."

We climbed the fence. He put his hand on a post and vaulted the wire as good as the boys could have done. When he turned to help me, I was just doing the same thing. Then it come over me that maybe an author wouldn't think that was ladylike.

"I always do them that way," I says, kind of to explain.

"Is there any other way?" says he.

"No!" says I, and we both laughed. It was nice to laugh with him, and it was the first time we'd done it together.

The field was soft and shiny. There was pretty cobwebs. Everything looked new and glossy.

"Great guns!" I says. "Ain't it nice out here?"

"That's exactly what I've been thinking," says he.

We went along still for a little ways. It come to me that maybe, if I could only say some of the things that moved around on the outside of my head, he might like them. But I couldn't get them together enough.

"It makes you want to think nice thoughts," I says, by and by.

"Doesn't it?" he says, with his quick, straight look. "And when it does, then you do."

"I don't know enough," I says. "I wisht I did."

I'll never, never forget when we come to the top of the little hill. He stood there with nothing but the sky, blue as fury, behind him.

"Now look," he says. "There's New York, over there."

"You can't see New York from here!" I says. "Not with no specs that was ever invented."

He went right on. "Down there," he says, "are St. Louis and Cincinnati and New Orleans. Across there is Chicago. And away on there are two days of desert – two days, by express train! – and then mountains and a green coast, and San Francisco and the Pacific. And then all the things we talked about this morning: Japan and India and the Alps and London and Rome and the Nile."

I wondered what on earth he was driving at.

"Which do you want to do," says he, "go there, and try to find these places? You won't find them, you know. But at least, you'll know they're in the world. Or live down there in a little farm-house like that one and slave for Luke?"

"But I can't even try to find them places," I says. "How could I?"

"Maybe not," he says. "Maybe not. I don't say you could. All I mean is this, Why not think of your life as if you have really been born, and not as if you were waiting to be born?"

"Oh," I says, "don't you s'pose I've thought of that? But I can't get away."

"Yes, you can," he says, looking at me, earnest. "Yes, you can. If you just say the word."

I was as tall as he was, and I looked right at him, with all the strength I had.

"Do you think," I says, "that because I'm from the country I ain't on to all such talk as that? Do you think I don't know what them kind of hold-outs means? We ain't such fools as you think we are, not since Hattie Duffy thought she was going to Paris, and ended in the bottom of a pond. They's only one way any of us ever gets to see any of them things, and don't you think we're fooled unless we want to be. No, sir. We ain't that fresh."

He scared me the way he whirled round at me.

"You miserable little creature!" he said. "What are you talking about?"

"Well," I says, "don't you ever think I – "

Then he done a funny thing. He drew a deep breath, and took his hat off and looked up at the sky and off over the fields.

"After all," he said, "thank God this is the way you are beginning to take it! When a country girl can protect herself like that, it is growing safe for her to be born. Listen to me, child," he says.

He had me puzzled for fair by then. I just listened.

"Just now," he says, "I called you a miserable little creature. That was because you quite naturally mistook me for one of the wretched hunters whom women have been trying to evade since the beginning. Well, I was wrong to call you that. Instead, I applaud your magnificent ability to take care of yourself. I applaud even more in the incident – but I won't bother you with that."

I kept trying to see what he meant.

"Now you must," he said, "try to understand me. What I meant to say to you was that with the whole world to choose from, you are, in my opinion, quite wrong to settle down here to your farm and your Luke and the drudgery you say you loathe, without ever giving yourself a chance to choose at all. Perhaps you would come back and settle here because you wanted to… I hope you would do that, under somewhat different conditions. But don't settle here because you're trapped and can't get out."

"But I can't get out – " I was beginning, but he went on:

"I know perfectly well that a great part of the world would think that I ought not to be talking to you like that. They would say that you are 'safe' here. That you and Luke would have a quiet, contented life. But I care nothing at all for such safety. I think that unreasonable contentment leads to various kinds of damnation. If you were an ordinary girl I should not be talking to you like this. I should not have the courage – yet; not while life treats women as it treats them now. But in spite of your vulgarity, you are a remarkable woman."

"In spite of what?" I says.

"I mean it," he says, "and you must let me tell you, because you seem to be, in all but one thing, a fine straightforward creature. But in the way you treat men, you are vulgar, you know. Not hopelessly, just deplorably. Now tell me the truth. Why did you pretend to flirt with me? For that isn't your natural manner. You put it on. Why did you do that?"

I could tell him that well enough.

"Why," I says, "I guess it was the same as the singing. I wanted you to know I wasn't a stick. I wanted you to think I was lively and fun. It's the way the girls do. I can't do it as good as they do, I know that."

"Promise me," he says, "that if ever you do get out, you'll be the fine and straightforward one – not the other one."

"I shan't get out," I says. "I can't get out."

"'I can't get out,'" he says over. "'I can't get out.' It's a great mistake. If you feel it in you to get out, then you'll get out. That's the answer."

"I do," I says. "I always have. I wake up in the mornings…"

I'll never know what it was that come over me. But all of a sudden, the me that laid awake nights and thought, and the me that had come out in the sun that morning was the only me I had, and it could talk.

"Oh," I says, "don't you think I'm the way I seemed back there on the road. I'm different; but I'm the only one that knows that. I like nice things. I'd like to act nice. I'd like to be the way I could be. But there ain't enough of me to be that way. And I don't know what to do."

He took both my hands.

"And I don't know what you're to do," he said. "That is the part you must find for yourself. It's like dying – yet a while, till they get us going."

We stood still for a minute. And then I saw what I hadn't seen before – what a grand face he had. He wasn't like the handsome men on calendars or on cigar boxes, or on the signs. He was like somebody else I hadn't ever seen before. His face wasn't young at all, but it looked glad, and that made it seem young.

"I wish you wouldn't ever go way," I says.

"I ought to be miles from here at this moment," he says. "Now see here … I want to give you these."

He took two cards out of his pocket, and wrote on them.

"This one is mine," he says. "If you do come to the city, you are surely to let me know that you are there. And if you take this other card to this address here, this gentleman may be able to give you work. Now good-by. I'm going to cut through the meadow, and I suppose you'll be going back."

He put out his hand.

"Don't go," I says. "Don't go. I shan't ever find anybody to talk to again."

"That's part of your job, you know," he says. "Remember you have a job. Good-by, child."

He went off down the slope. At the foot of it he stopped.

"Cosma!" he shouts, "don't ever let them call you anything else, you know!"

"I won't," I says. "Honest, I won't, Mr. Ember."

I watched him just as far as I could see him. On the road he turned and waved his hand. When he was out of sight I started to go back home. But when I see things again, I'll never forget the lonesomeness. Things was like a sucked-out sack. I laid down in the grass – I haven't cried since the last time Pa whipped me, six years ago, but I thought I was going to cry now. Then I happened to think that was the way I'd have done before I met him; but it wasn't the way I must do now. Instead, I got up on to my feet and I started for home on the run. It was like something was starting somewheres, and I had to hurry.

CHAPTER III

Mother was scrubbing the well-house.

"Cossy Wakely," she says, "where you been?"

"Walking," I says.

"Walking!" says she; "with all I got to do. I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself. My land, what you got on your best clothes for?"

"Mother," I says, "you call me 'Cosma' after this, will you?"

She stared at me. "Such airs," she says. "And callin' me 'Mother.' Who you been with? What you rigged out like that for?"

"I didn't dress up for anybody," I says, "only because I wanted to."

"Such a young one as you've turned out," says she. "What's to become of you I don't know. Wait till your Pa comes in – I'll tell him."

"Mother," I says, "I'm twenty years old. You call me 'Cosma,' and let me call you 'Mother.' And don't feel you have to scold me all the time."

"I'll quit scolding you fast enough," she says, "when you quit deserving it. Go and get out of them togs, the dishes are waiting for you."

I went in the house. Mis' Bingy was not there, up-stairs or down. I went back to the door and asked about her.

"Why, she's gone home," says Mother. "You didn't s'pose she was going to live here, did you?"

"Home?" I says. "Where that man is?"

"We can't all pick out our homes," she says, scrubbing the boards.

Pa heard her. He was just coming in from the barn with the swill buckets to fill.

"That's you," he says, "finding fault with the hands that feeds you. Where'd you be, I'd like to know, if it wasn't for this home and me? In the poorhouse."

Mother straightened up on her knees by the well.

"Mean to say I don't pay my keep?" she says.

For a minute she seemed young and somebody, like when she was asleep.

"Not when you dish up such pickings as you done this morning," says Pa.

She screamed out something at him, and I ran across the yard toward Mis' Bingy's. They were going on so hard they forgot about me.

The grove was still. I wished he could have seen it. As soon as I got in it, I forgot about home, and the time before come back on me, like some of me singing. That was it – some of me singing. But I see right off the grove was different. It was almost as if he had been in it, and had showed me things about it. I begun looking out at it the way I thought he'd be looking at it. There seemed to be more of the grove than I thought there was. Then I thought how he'd never be there in it, and how I'd prob'ly never see him again, and something in me hurt, and I didn't want to go on. What was the use?.. What was the use?.. What was the use?..