I didn't know anything to write about, only just me. It come to me that
I ought to tell about me. But nothing worth writing had ever happened
to me till just that morning. So I started in, and wrote near all
night--down to the part where we got to the city. The gas smelled bad. I
always remember that night. Before I knew it, it was getting light in
the window. Then I put up the paper and crawled over back of Mis' Bingy
and the baby, and went to sleep. And when I went to sleep, and when I
woke up in the morning, the same thing was in my head right along--that
mebbe I could get to be enough different so's I could see him again,
some day. Because I knew I wasn't never going to let him see me again
while I was the way I was now. But I wondered how to get different.
"Mis' Bingy," I says next morning, "how do folks get different?"
"Hard work and trouble, mostly," she says.
"I don't mean backward," I says. "I mean frontward."
She shook her head. "I donno," she says. "I used to think about that,
some."
We had the rest of the beans and bread, and then I started out. After
she got the baby dressed, Mis' Bingy was going out to set in the green
place where we'd been yesterday.
"I could work," she says, "if it wasn't for the baby. She's lots of
work, too. But that don't earn us nothing."
She was always making lace, and she'd brought along a lot she made--the
bottom drawer of the washstand was full of it. Making that, and tending
the baby, kep' her occupied; but, as she said, it didn't earn us
anything.
I had the other card that Mr. Ember had given me, and that morning I
started out to find the man. John Carney, the name was, and it was a
long ways to walk. It was in a big office building. And when I got to
the right door, a smart young guy behind a fence says, What did I want
to see Mr. Carney about, and wouldn't one of the men in the office do? I
just give him Mr. Ember's card to take in, and when he'd gone I felt
glad; because if it had been the day before, when I hadn't seen that
room full of folks nor heard the woman in the pinkish dress speak like
she done, I bet I'd of said to that young guy: "You go and chase
yourself to the pasture and quit your fresh lip." Just like Lena Curtsy
would have said.
I had to wait quite a while till they sent for me. And when I went in
the office, long and like a parlor in a picture, I stood in front of a
big gray man whose shoulders were the principal part. And there was a
little young man there, sitting loose in a big easy chair, looking at a
newspaper. I noticed the little young man particular, because he didn't
look like anything, and he acted like so much. He didn't belong in the
office. He just happened.
"What can I do for you, madam?" says the big gray man, with Mr. Ember's
card in his hand. "Mr. Carney is absent in Europe."
"Oh," I says, "then I don't know. Mr. Ember thought Mr. Carney'd maybe
help me to get a job."
The little young man spoke up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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