Short Stories

IV

Rosalind at work in Walter Sayers’ office was from the beginning something different, apart from the young woman from Iowa who had been drifting from office to office, moving from rooming house to rooming house on Chicago’s North Side, striving feebly to find out something about life by reading books, going to the theatre and walking alone in the streets.  In the new place her life at once began to have point and purpose, but at the same time the perplexity that was later to send her running to Willow Springs and to the presence of her mother began to grow in her.

Walter Sayers’ office was a rather large room on the third floor of the factory whose walls went straight up from the river’s edge.  In the morning Rosalind arrived at eight and went into the office and closed the door.  In a large room across a narrow hallway and shut off from her retreat by two thick, clouded-glass partitions was the company’s general office.  It contained the desks of salesmen, several clerks, a bookkeeper and two stenographers.  Rosalind avoided becoming acquainted with these people.  She was in a mood to be alone, to spend as many hours as possible alone with her own thoughts.

She got to the office at eight and her employer did not arrive until nine-thirty or ten.  For an hour or two in the morning and in the late afternoon she had the place to herself.  Immediately she shut the door into the hallway and was alone she felt at home.  Even in her father’s house it had never been so.  She took off her wraps and walked about the room touching things, putting things to rights.  During the night a negro woman had scrubbed the floor and wiped the dust off her employer’s desk but she got a cloth and wiped the desk again.  Then she opened the letters that had come in and after reading arranged them in little piles.  She wanted to spend a part of her wages for flowers and imagined clusters of flowers arranged in small hanging baskets along the grey walls.  “I’ll do that later, perhaps,” she thought.

The walls of the room enclosed her.  “What makes me so happy here?” she asked herself.  As for her employer—­she felt she scarcely knew him.  He was a shy man, rather small—­

She went to a window and stood looking out.  Near the factory a bridge crossed the river and over it went a stream of heavily loaded wagons and motor trucks.  The sky was grey with smoke.  In the afternoon, after her employer had gone for the day, she would stand again by the window.  As she stood thus she faced westward and in the afternoon saw the sun fall down the sky.  It was glorious to be there alone during the late hours of the afternoon.  What a tremendous thing this city in which she had come to live!  For some reason after she went to work for Walter Sayers the city seemed, like the room in which she worked, to have accepted her, taken her into itself.  In the late afternoon the rays of the departing sun fell across great banks of clouds.  The whole city seemed to reach upwards.  It left the ground and ascended into the air.  There was an illusion produced.  Stark grim factory chimneys, that all day were stiff cold formal things sticking up into the air and belching forth black smoke, were now slender upreaching pencils of light and wavering color.  The tall chimneys detached themselves from the buildings and sprang into the air.  The factory in which Rosalind stood had such a chimney.  It also was leaping upward.  She felt herself being lifted, an odd floating sensation was achieved.  With what a stately tread the day went away, over the city!  The city, like the factory chimneys yearned after it, hungered for it.

In the morning gulls came in from Lake Michigan to feed on the sewage floating in the river below.  The river was the color of chrysoprase.  The gulls floated above it as sometimes in the evening the whole city seemed to float before her eyes.  They were graceful, living, free things.  They were triumphant.  The getting of food, even the eating of sewage was done thus gracefully, beautifully.  The gulls turned and twisted in the air.  They wheeled and floated and then fell downward to the river in a long curve, just touching, caressing the surface of the water and then rising again.

Rosalind raised herself on her toes.  At her back beyond the two glass partitions were other men and women, but there, in that room, she was alone.  She belonged there.  What an odd feeling she had.  She also belonged to her employer, Walter Sayers.  She scarcely knew the man and yet she belonged to him.  She threw her arms above her head, trying awkwardly to imitate some movement of the birds.

Her awkwardness shamed her a little and she turned and walked about the room.  “I’m twenty-five years old and it’s a little late to begin trying to be a bird, to be graceful,” she thought.  She resented the slow stupid heavy movements of her father and mother, the movements she had imitated as a child.  “Why was I not taught to be graceful and beautiful in mind and body, why in the place I came from did no one think it worth while to try to be graceful and beautiful?” she whispered to herself.

How conscious of her own body Rosalind was becoming!  She walked across the room, trying to go lightly and gracefully.  In the office beyond the glass partitions someone spoke suddenly and she was startled.  She laughed foolishly.  For a long time after she went to work in the office of Walter Sayers she thought the desire in herself to be physically more graceful and beautiful and to rise also out of the mental stupidity and sloth of her young womanhood was due to the fact that the factory windows faced the river and the western sky, and that in the morning she saw the gulls feeding and in the afternoon the sun going down through the smoke clouds in a riot of colors.