From there it was to go easy backwards. Two careful summers abroad ought to make a good linguist and courier; four ocean trips as nurse and companion ought to command very favorable acquaintance and esteem. I just hugged myself as I thought of those voyages.
It was easy to see that I must do the lowest grade things first, pile up such experiences quickly and under other names, and go on to the larger ones. I should have to cut loose from home altogether, that was clear. I could go to a distant city, have a settled address, and write such letters as I chose — meanwhile doing things.
Very well! I had a nice talk with Grandpa, earnest and innocent as you please. I told him how happy Mother was, that she had evidently inherited from him a real talent for large management, and that I felt sure it would make another woman of her — even if Father came back. I told him that I had enjoyed getting it started ever so much, but that I realized my limitations and wanted very much to learn more.
“Don’t you think a girl ought to have some real knowledge of business?” I asked him. “No matter what happens to her? Now I wish you’d help me in this, Grandpa; I want to get a position in a business office. Not here where anybody’d know me, but in a Western city. I want to board and work by myself for a while — I think it will do me good. Won’t you make believe I’m a boy, Grandpa, and help get me a place, with some firm you know about, perhaps? I’d like to take the first with your knowledge and advice.”
Grandpa was not so old-fashioned but that he could see the sense of this idea; and he liked my appealing to him in that way.
I wanted to do this because it would be the easiest way to straighten it out with Mother. Once clean gone, she’d have to get used to it, that’s all.
Grandpa hemmed and hawed a good deal, but he came around. He had a good opinion of my abilities, you see, and a great respect for business training.
I rather hated to start in with even this much assistance, but I knew I could have done it half a dozen ways — if I’d had to.
But this seemed wise to begin with, and Grandpa himself wrote to Mother of my laudable desire to enlarge my experience, and that he thought it was a good thing.
He had an old friend in a big firm in Chicago, and they gave me a trial, a cheap little chance at only ten dollars a week, as a typist and stenographer.
“You can’t live on that, child,” said Grandpa. “Here, you must take some money with you for an emergency. And be sure you keep me posted as to how you get on.” He made me take fifty dollars. “That’s enough to come back with,” he said. And I told him I should return it out of my savings.
Oh! Oh! How splendid I felt when I set out for Chicago, all by myself, just twenty-one that very week! I don’t suppose Prosper Le Gai was any gayer than I was that day.
I went to one of those young-woman homes at first — that was for experience. And I got it. While sampling, I went to one after another, all I could get into, in Chicago, and learned and learned and learned.
One notebook is about those “Homes.” I got acquainted with the young women there, lots of them, and that was especially useful. All I’d found out with my school friends was corroborated here.
It is so easy to make friends that I perfectly marvel at the stupidity of those who don’t. Sympathy, kindness, patience, interest, and service, if possible — but even without service the others do it. You have to keep yourself in the background, of course, but I was an adept at that. Not that I was unselfish, or that horrid bottomless gulf they call “selfless,” no indeed! I was brimful and running over with plans and purposes all my own, but they included friends — depended on them. One may have a large and lively Self and yet keep it in decent restraint while other people let theirs play about.
At the office I learned some things, and gained what I wanted — speed and precision in my work, and some knowledge of business habits and manners. At the end of a month I changed. My five years was all too short to waste much time on these preliminaries.
Then things began to move. I kept my house address at the cheapest of the Homes, and started in on a career of industry of the most varied character.
Plain of dress and quiet of manner, with my serious face and steady eyes, I got jobs without much difficulty. There were times when I didn’t, times when I stood in line for hours, waited about doorways, was briefly interviewed, and superciliously turned down by employers; learned, by practical experience, what it is to be out of work.
I was healthy, I was courageous, I had no one dependent on me. I had my enormous plans to keep me interested, and I had always my secret hoard in its little oil-silk bag. But at that it was hard enough.
For those others who had nothing but what they earned, who often had other mouths to feed, who had neither health nor high purpose to keep them going, nor any reserve fun at all, it was just purgatory. I’ve got a notebook about that.
I joined Unions, and was discharged for it. I went to Settlement Clubs and Classes and learned a lot. Then it seemed a good chance to start in on the child question, and after helping a bit, gratuitiously, in the Settlement Nursery, I got a regular place in one.
That was meat and drink to me. I had always liked babies, but not... well, not to lose my heart entirely to just one. This roomful appealed to me very much. The head nurse was an extremely capable one, and taught me a great deal. I put in a month in this kind of nursery work, and then thought I’d increase my experience in that line.
By the good offices of the Settlement people I got a sort of assistant nursemaid place in a rich family, and had all I wanted of that in two weeks. But I made the acquaintance of a very good lady’s maid there, who became cheerfully confidential and told me about her various places, mistresses, and duties.
I answered advertisements and got a maid’s place, at low wages, stating that I had worked in other lines before; and then I began to learn new things, very fast.
Why do not people realize that you cannot know life if you stay always on one level? Why, the average woman knows only her own kind of people. She may travel around the world, and never learn as much as she would in traveling up and down a bit in her own city.
I had been associating with office women, shop women, factory women, and nurse women. Now I did not associate, in the ordinary sense, with rich women, but I had to learn about them — I couldn’t help it.
With my hair depressingly low and plain, with the regulation dress of my “class,” and with the manners of the same, which I studied and practised with joy, I don’t believe Mother would have known me at the first look.
As to make-up, I began to find out about that even as a lady’s maid, and was ready to try for the position with an actor.
I wrote nice letters home. The address changed now and then, and I told chatty stories of my various boardinghouses, and people I met. Also I wrote much of their affairs, only Mother would sometimes protest. “You don’t tell us enough about yourself, Benigna. Are you still in the same place, or have you changed again? I do wish you would come back.”
Grandpa was much annoyed that I should change about, but I wrote him nice letters too.
“You see, dear Grandfather,” I’d tell him, just as fully and courteously as if it was necessary, “I am not doing this because I have to, but to gain knowledge of life first-hand. It is hard for a woman to get this. After marriage I should have no chance for such attempts — now is my time to learn.” And things like that.
I wrote so serenely about the conditions I saw about me and the needs of the women who worked, that they got a sort of impression all the time that I was like a Settlement Worker, living arbitrarily in certain conditions, and studying them. Well I was, in a way, but I was practising just the same.
Long before that first year was up I had some practical inside knowledge of nine trades, and a week-to-week trial of a dozen more. I had been a waitress in a cheap restaurant, a chambermaid in a hotel, a salesperson, a cap-maker, a necktie maker, a skirt worker, a box-maker, a typist and stenographer, and a nurse — besi
des a lot of mere investigating experiments.
Next was the job with the actor.
This took a little time, but I worked it. I helped a tired property woman for nothing; I was willing to lend a hand while I waited to see this one or that one, put a little advertisement in the paper, well worded. “Wages moderate,” it said at the end, and I got a place presently.
This was a new kind of life altogether. I had prepared myself as if for imprisonment at hard labor. My theory is that a large part of the complaints people make are due to a lack of preparation. They complain of what they surely ought to have expected, which is foolish. I made up my mind to loss of sleep, to a bad-tempered, tired out, excitable, capricious mistress, and to dear knows what of possible risks among the unprincipled and adventurous.
And I found out right then and there what I half knew before — that people are just people, wherever you find them.
As for “improper advances,” I met more of that risk as a lady’s maid in “the first families” than I did from “the profession.”
My mistress was a sweet, weary little woman, supporting a large family of relatives who disapproved of her, and carrying a broken heart well hidden. She was a good actor, too; knew her work well, and from her and the others I was thrown with, I picked up all I wanted to know.
I had no stage ambitions. The acting I meant to do was in a far larger theater and among more exciting scenes. The same old simple tactics of self-restraint and interest in other people, with an unofficious helpfulness, made friends as always, and I started another notebook on this field of study.
I didn’t tell the folks at home about this job at all. They had not had definite news of my form of employment since I was in the Settlement nursery. They did not know that I was nursemaid as Mary Harrison, and lady’s maid as Ella Meade. It was good practice to change names, takes a lot of active memorizing. I tried it in these simple easy positions, where you are called by name all the time — it might come in handy later on.
And it was not lying either. It is perfectly legal to change your name as often as you want to. Anybody can. I simply took that name for the time being, because I wanted it.
The theater time was immensely interesting. My actor got quite attached to me — said I rested her. I suppose an unemotional restrained temperament is a rest to the other kind.
I had a chance to watch them all, to see how they wore their costumes and changed them, and I helped the makeup man now and then a little, and made friends with him, got him to show me how he did it. He was quite an artist in his line, but it wasn’t exactly the line I wanted. The young men had to take old man parts of course, and did, but when the young women had to act old ones they hated it, and tried not to.
I joked with him about it, said he couldn’t make a woman look really old; I dared him to try. He said he could make me look ninety — but that I’d never forgive him.
“Oh, ninety!” I said. “That’s just caricature. But could you make me look thirty, forty, fifty?”
He looked at me narrowly, sizing up my present age. As far as I could I was trying to seem near thirty, but he knew better.
“You’re nothing but a kid,” he said, “but I can make you look thirty, forty, and fifty — and take your picture into the bargain.”
There was a slow rehearsal going on, and I was waiting for my mistress, so I said “Go ahead!”
He had a little camera of his own, and snapped me on the spot — a particular spot; then he sat me down and did my face awhile, and snapped it, putting me in the same place. “Look while it’s there,” he said. “Old age is coming upon you.”
I looked carefully, noting what he had done. I was a quiet, resourceful woman, all of thirty.
Next he turned me into forty, with a few lines and shadows, a “sadder and wiser” sort of face; and then fifty — unmistakably fifty, explaining as he did it the particular wrinkles and saggy places that made the trick.
“Are you scared yet?” he demanded. “Will you be really old?”
“Go ahead!” I ordered gleefully. “This is a great experience.” And he put on the years, and took photographs of them, until even I was horrified at the crone he turned out at last.
“Of course you’d have to dress for it,” he said, with all an artist’s enthusiasm. “George! You’re the first woman I’ve ever seen that would stand for it.”
I begged to take the film and have some developed at once, but had to confess to him that I was so unfortunate as to spoil it. That I had the prints made first, enlarged and clear, he did not know.
He was a pleasant man, but became a little too friendly after that, as well as a shade suspicious — said I was a “queer girl.”
Anyway, it was time to change again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In considering all the things that happened in these first stirring years of my life, and examining the separate bits of biography I was always preparing — I have pieced together some of them in this account — I see how absurd it is for novelists to try to “end” a story. There is no end to anybody’s story, until they are dead, and some people think that is only the beginning.
What I have put together here was written, some of it, when I was very young indeed, when even I admitted I was young. But when I really left home and things began to happen, that is where these close-filled little books pile up. I can, if I want to, make quite a shelf filled full with volumes about My Adventures.
There were those of the first year — good reading too, some of them — fine, fresh, young adventures.
Then there was being called home — that would be a good place to “end” this batch, if I had stayed there. Then there were the things that happened at home, and after I left again, and that Christmas — I guess that’ll do. Because that, if it was not an end, was at least a new beginning, a beginning with a most radical change in it.
Things had not stood still at home on account of my absence. It did me good, though not in a gratifying way, to see how well they got on without me. I had put so much effort and earnest thought into getting matters arranged for Mother and Peggy, that I was awfully afraid at first that the clock would stop if I weren’t looking. But it did not. I suppose if the things you plant are suitable to the soil and the weather they will grow, whether or no.
That boarder business suited Mother even better than I hoped it would. It was not only that she liked it, but that it strengthened her. I’d really never thought of that side of it much, I was so used to dear Mother’s being downtrodden and discouraged.
After all, it wasn’t so much Father as an outside force that kept Mother down, it was mostly her ideas of duty. She thought she had to submit and obey and all that; she was bound by her own notions.
There’s a lot of philosophy there, I can see. And then there was habit. If you are always being hectored and looked down on, and never have a chance to do anything worthwhile, it does get on your nerves — makes you think you’re no good.
And now everything was different. Mother had room to exercise her faculties: that strengthened her. She found she was really earning money. This grew very slowly into her realization. At first she was very timid and frightened by Mrs. Gale’s gloomy prognostications. But I could feel the change coming over her, showing in all her letters — the increase of assurance, of hope, of courage.
Then I wrote Peggy and Robert to let up a little on their careful saving of profits, to let Mother feel the business grow under her hand. Soon she began to plan little improvements, to add to the comfort and pleasure of the place, to buy new things. It was just beautiful to me to see her whole outlook widen and brighten and grow firmer, as it were.
Another great help was the society of friends. Dear Mother was very sociable always, but little enough society we ever had when Father was home. He was especially disagreeable to the kind of people she liked best; quite naturally, I suppose, he knew they didn’t like him.
But the kind, thoughtful, pleasant women she had about her now, the reliable, ch
eery, big men, and those boys who simply adored her — well, it worked like a charm.
Best of all was Mary Allen Windsor. That woman is one of the wisest and best I’ve ever known. She was everything to Mother, and it wasn’t a one-sided affair either, for she needed just the kind of loving homeyness that Mother gave her. It was her strong, sound philosophy and the high religious feeling she put into it that had so much effect on Mother’s mental attitude, far more than I knew anything about, being away from home.
They sent for me — Peggy did, that is — for two reasons. One was Miss Windsor’s illness; she had pneumonia, a long serious affair, and Mother simply would nurse her, business or no business.
Peggy felt the need of help, naturally, and then she had another reason.
I came of course — was glad of an excuse at times. I’d been doing some very disagreeable work — very — and to go back to where there were clean sheets and a bathroom, to say nothing of nice people, was a comfort.
It seemed strange to have sickness in the house. Everybody went on tiptoe. We kept the dining room doors shut and were as quiet as we could be behind them, and all the evening doings were transferred to the Gale house.
It was fortunate for us that it wasn’t anything catching; nobody had to leave. But it did need somebody to take hold and help run things, for Mother was heart and soul in that sickroom.
At first I didn’t notice anything funny about Peggy, but pretty soon I did. She blew hot and cold at once. She was awfully affectionate when I came, then sort of froze over, and then “melted into tears” at a minute’s notice. When I asked her what was the matter, she said, “Oh, nothing,” or that she was worried about Mother, or Miss Windsor, or anything that sounded likely. But I knew better. The reason wasn’t very far to seek.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 100
