CHAPTER XII
I drop five years—so much in the living, so little in the retrospect!
Upon that time I entered with one thought: The university. At the school I had always been ahead of my class, a meager enough accomplishment there. I had browsed through the books of the third- and fourth-year girls, glad that I found so little that I could not have mastered then. Now, at Mrs. Carney's suggestion and with her help, I took some tutoring; and, what with overwork and summer sessions and entering "special" once more, I made the university, and, toward the close of my fifth year, was nearing my graduation. A part of my expenses I had paid myself. And how did I do that? By making lace for Mrs. Keddie Bingy!
Life is so wonderful that it makes you afraid, and it makes you glad, and it makes you sure.
In the first year after I left Miss Spot and Miss Manners, I read in one of the papers that John Ember had gone to China on an expedition which was to spend two years in the interior. I wouldn't have believed that the purpose could have dropped so completely out of everything—school, town, life, I myself, became something different. Until then I had not realized how much I had been living in the thought that I was somewhere near him; that any day I might see him in the street, in the cars, anywhere. It was hard to get used to knowing that somebody coming down at the far end of the street could not possibly be he; that no list of names in the paper could have his name.
But just as, that first morning, I knew that he wouldn't want me to give up and cry, so now I knew that I had to go ahead anyway, and do the best I could. It was what he would have wanted. And I had only just begun to make myself different. I had only just shown myself how much there was, really, to be different about.
It was wanting to see him so much that made me take out my book again, after a long lapse, and read it over. The first pages were just as I wrote them, on the wrapping-paper that came around the boys' overalls. Then there were the sheets of manila paper that I had bought at the drug store near the first little room that Mrs. Bingy and I took—I remember how I had got up early and walked to the factory one morning to save the nickel for the paper. Then a few pages that I had made at the school on empty theme books; and some more on the Massys' guest paper, gray with lavender lining and a Paris maker's name. Now I went on writing my book with a typewriter that I was learning to use, since a man on Mrs. Bingy's floor let me borrow his machine when he went out in the mornings. My whole history was in those different kinds of paper in my book.
Those typewritten pages are of interest chiefly to myself. They are like the thirty pages that I threw away because they told only about my going from one factory to another. Only now the typewritten pages were not about events at all, but about the things that went on in me. And those I can sum up in a few words: For the important thing is that in those pages I was recording my growing understanding of something which Rose, out of her sordid living, had done so much to teach me: that my life was not important just because it was the life of Cosma Wakely alone, but it was important in proportion as it saw itself a part of the life about it—the life of school, of working women and men, of all men and women, of all beings. I began to wonder not so much how I could make my own individual "success," whatever that means, as how I could take my place in the task that we're all doing together—and of finding out what that task is.
That, in short, is what those years meant to me. The incidents do not so much matter. Nobody gets this understanding in the way that any one else gets it. It is the individual quest, the individual revelation. Experience, education, love, the mere wear and tear of living, all go toward this understanding. Most of all, love. I think that for me the university and the entire faculty were only auxiliary lights to the light that shone on me, over seas and lands, from the interior of China!
Of all the wonder learned by loving, no wonder is more exquisite than the magic by which one absent becomes a living presence. This man had so established himself before me that it seemed to me I knew his judgments. The simplicity of this new friend of mine, the mental honesty of that one, the accuracy of a third who made me careful of my facts—these John Ember would approve. I always knew. The self-centering or pretense of others; I knew how he would smile at these, shrug at them, but never despise them, because of his tender understanding of all life. Everybody with whom I was thrown who was less developed than I, I understood because I had been Cossy Wakely. Every one who was more developed, I tried passionately to understand. These, and books, plays, music, "society's" attempt to amuse itself, Rose and the factory, the whole panorama of my life passed every day before the still tribunal of this one man, who knew nothing about them.