Short Stories

II

The story of Rosalind’s six years in Chicago is the story of thousands of unmarried women who work in offices in the city.  Necessity had not driven her to work nor kept her at her task and she did not think of herself as a worker, one who would always be a worker.  For a time after she came out of the stenographic school she drifted from office to office, acquiring always more skill, but with no particular interest in what she was doing.  It was a way to put in the long days.  Her father, who in addition to the coal and lumber yards owned three farms, sent her a hundred dollars a month.  The money her work brought was spent for clothes so that she dressed better than the women she worked with.

Of one thing she was quite sure.  She did not want to return to Willow Springs to live with her father and mother, and after a time she knew she could not continue living with her brother and his wife.  For the first time she began seeing the city that spread itself out before her eyes.  When she walked at the noon hour along Michigan Boulevard or went into a restaurant or in the evening went home in the street car she saw men and women together.  It was the same when on Sunday afternoons in the summer she walked in the park or by the lake.  On a street car she saw a small round-faced woman put her hand into the hand of her male companion.  Before she did it she looked cautiously about.  She wanted to assure herself of something.  To the other women in the car, to Rosalind and the others the act said something.  It was as though the woman’s voice had said aloud, “He is mine.  Do not draw too close to him.”

There was no doubt that Rosalind was awakening out of the Willow Springs torpor in which she had lived out her young womanhood.  The city had at least done that for her.  The city was wide.  It flung itself out.  One had but to let his feet go thump, thump upon the pavements to get into strange streets, see always new faces.

On Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday one did not work.  In the summer it was a time to go to places—­to the park, to walk among the strange colorful crowds in Halsted Street, with a half dozen young people from the office, to spend a day on the sand dunes at the foot of Lake Michigan.  One got excited and was hungry, hungry, always hungry—­ for companionship.  That was it.  One wanted to possess something—­a man —­to take him along on jaunts, be sure of him, yes—­own him.

She read books—­always written by men or by manlike women.  There was an essential mistake in the viewpoint of life set forth in the books.  The mistake was always being made.  In Rosalind’s time it grew more pronounced.  Someone had got hold of a key with which the door to the secret chamber of life could be unlocked.  Others took the key and rushed in.  The secret chamber of life was filled with a noisy vulgar crowd.  All the books that dealt with life at all dealt with it through the lips of the crowd that had newly come into the sacred place.  The writer had hold of the key.  It was his time to be heard.  “Sex,” he cried.  “It is by understanding sex I will untangle the mystery.”

It was all very well and sometimes interesting but one grew tired of the subject.

She lay abed in her room at her brother’s house on a Sunday night in the summer.  During the afternoon she had gone for a walk and on a street on the Northwest Side had come upon a religious procession.  The Virgin was being carried through the streets.  The houses were decorated and women leaned out at the windows of houses.  Old priests dressed in white gowns waddled along.  Strong young men carried the platform on which the Virgin rested.  The procession stopped.  Someone started a chant in a loud clear voice.  Other voices took it up.  Children ran about gathering in money.  All the time there was a loud hum of ordinary conversation going on.  Women shouted across the street to other women.  Young girls walked on the sidewalks and laughed softly as the young men in white, clustered about the Virgin, turned to stare at them.  On every street corner merchants sold candies, nuts, cool drinks—­

In her bed at night Rosalind put down the book she had been reading.  “The worship of the Virgin is a form of sex expression,” she read.

“Well what of it?  If it be true what does it matter?”

She got out of bed and took off her nightgown.  She was herself a virgin.  What did that matter?  She turned herself slowly about, looking at her strong young woman’s body.  It was a thing in which sex lived.  It was a thing upon which sex in others might express itself.  What did it matter?

There was her brother sleeping with his wife in another room near at hand.  In Willow Springs, Iowa, her father was at just this moment pumping a pail of water at the well by the kitchen door.  In a moment he would carry it into the kitchen to set it on the box by the kitchen sink.

Rosalind’s cheeks were flushed.  She made an odd and lovely figure standing nude before the glass in her room there in Chicago.  She was so much alive and yet not alive.  Her eyes shone with excitement.  She continued to turn slowly round and round twisting her head to look at her naked back.  “Perhaps I am learning to think,” she decided.  There was some sort of essential mistake in people’s conception of life.  There was something she knew and it was of as much importance as the things the wise men knew and put into books.  She also had found out something about life.  Her body was still the body of what was called a virgin.  What of it?  “If the sex impulse within it had been gratified in what way would my problem be solved?  I am lonely now.  It is evident that after that had happened I would still be lonely.”