§ 8
There was a certain madness in Una's grief. Her agony was a big, simple, uncontrollable emotion, like the fanaticism of a crusader-alarming, it was, not to be reckoned with, and beautiful as a storm. Yet it was no more morbid than the little fits of rage with which a school-teacher relieves her cramped spirit. For the first time she had the excuse to exercise her full power of emotion.
Una evoked an image of her mother as one who had been altogether good, understanding, clever, and unfortunate. She regretted every moment she had spent away from her-remembered with scorn that she had planned to go to the theater the preceding Saturday, instead of sanctifying the time in the Nirvana of the beloved's presence; repented with writhing agony having spoken harshly about neglected household duties.
She even contrived to find it a virtue in her mother that she had so often forgotten the daily tasks-her mind had been too fine for such things.... Una retraced their life. But she remembered everything only as one remembers under the sway of music.
"If I could just have another hour, just one hour with her, and feel her hands on my eyes again-"
On the night before the funeral she refused to let even Mrs. Sessions stay with her. She did not want to share her mother's shadowy presence with any one.
She lay on the floor beside the bed where her mother was stately in death. It was her last chance to talk to her:
"Mother ... Mother ... Don't you hear me? It's Una calling. Can't you answer me this one last time? Oh, mother, think, mother dear, I can't ever hear your voice again if you don't speak to me now.... Don't you remember how we went home to Panama, our last vacation? Don't you remember how happy we were down at the lake? Little mother, you haven't forgotten, have you? Even if you don't answer, you know I'm watching by you, don't you? See, I'm kissing your hand. Oh, you did want me to sleep near you again, this last night-Oh, my God! oh, my God! the last night I shall ever spend with her, the very last, last night."
All night long the thin voice came from the little white-clad figure so insignificant in the dimness, now lying motionless on the comforter she had spread beside the bed, and talking in a tone of ordinary conversation that was uncanny in this room of invisible whisperers; now leaping up to kiss the dead hand in a panic, lest it should already be gone.
The funeral filled the house with intruders. The drive to the cemetery was irritating. She wanted to leap out of the carriage. At first she concentrated on the cushion beside her till she thought of nothing in the world but the faded bottle-green upholstery, and a ridiculous drift of dust in the tufting. But some one was talking to her. (It was awkward Mr. Sessions, for shrewd Mrs. Sessions had the genius to keep still.) He kept stammering the most absurd platitudes about how happy her mother must be in a heaven regarding which he did not seem to have very recent or definite knowledge. She was annoyed, not comforted. She wanted to break away, to find her mother's presence again in that sacred place where she had so recently lived and spoken.
Yet, when Una returned to the flat, something was gone. She tried to concentrate on thought about immortality. She found that she had absolutely no facts upon which to base her thought. The hundreds of good, sound, orthodox sermons she had heard gave her nothing but vague pictures of an eternal church supper somewhere in the clouds-nothing, blankly and terribly nothing, that answered her bewildered wonder as to what had become of the spirit which had been there and now was gone.
In the midst of her mingling of longing and doubt she realized that she was hungry, and she rather regretted having refused Mrs. Sessions's invitation to dinner. She moved slowly about the kitchen.
The rheumatic old canary hobbled along the floor of his cage and tried to sing. At that Una wept, "She never will hear poor Dickie sing again."
Instantly she remembered-as clearly as though she were actually listening to the voice and words-that her mother had burst out, "Drat that bird, it does seem as if every time I try to take a nap he just tries to wake me up." Una laughed grimly. Hastily she reproved herself, "Oh, but mother didn't mean-"
But in memory of that healthily vexed voice, it seemed less wicked to take notice of food, and after a reasonable dinner she put on her kimono and bedroom slippers, carefully arranged the pillows on the couch, and lay among them, meditating on her future.
For half an hour she was afire with an eager thought: "Why can't I really make a success of business, now that I can entirely devote myself to it? There's women-in real estate, and lawyers and magazine editors-some of them make ten thousand a year."
So Una Golden ceased to live a small-town life in New York; so she became a genuine part of the world of offices; took thought and tried to conquer this new way of city-dwelling.
"Maybe I can find out if there's anything in life-now-besides working for T. W. till I'm scrapped like an old machine," she pondered. "How I hate letters about two-family houses in Flatbush!"
She dug her knuckles into her forehead in the effort to visualize the problem of the hopeless women in industry.
She was an Average Young Woman on a Job; she thought in terms of money and offices; yet she was one with all the men and women, young and old, who were creating a new age. She was nothing in herself, yet as the molecule of water belongs to the ocean, so Una Golden humbly belonged to the leaven who, however confusedly, were beginning to demand, "Why, since we have machinery, science, courage, need we go on tolerating war and poverty and caste and uncouthness, and all that sheer clumsiness?"
Part II. THE OFFICE
CHAPTER IX
The effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble. But mostly it is a sterile nobility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living; witness the mother of a son killed in war who urges her son's comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the other side.
Grief is a paralyzing poison. It broke down Una's resistance to the cares of the office. Hers was no wholesome labor in which she could find sacred forgetfulness. It was the round of unessentials which all office-women know so desperately well. She bruised herself by shrinking from those hourly insults to her intelligence; and outside the office her most absorbing comfort was in the luxury of mourning-passion in black, even to the black-edged face-veil.... Though she was human enough to realize that with her fair hair she looked rather well in mourning, and shrewd enough to get it on credit at excellent terms.
She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could. But in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city.
Sometimes she rushed down to the Sessionses' flat, but the good people bored her with their assumption that she was panting to know all the news from Panama. She had drifted so far away from the town that the sixth assertion that "it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to marry that worthless Clark boy" aroused no interest in her. She was still more bored by their phonograph, on which they played over and over the same twenty records. She would make quick, unconvincing excuses about having to hurry away. Their slippered stupidity was a desecration of her mother's memory.
Her half-hysterical fear of the city's power was increased by her daily encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic lunch-rooms, and, most of all, the experience of the Subway.
Amazing, incredible, the Subway, and the fact that human beings could become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily. There was a heroic side to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an hour beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people-marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison-as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una entered the day's business life.