The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rahab
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Title: Rahab
Author: Waldo David Frank
Release date: May 10, 2024 [eBook #73590]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: Boni & Liveright, 1922
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAHAB ***
[Illustration: RAHAB]
BOOKS by WALDO FRANK
_The Unwelcome Man_
_The Dark Mother_
_Rahab_
_City Block_ (in preparation)
_Our America_
_The Art of The Vieux Colombier_
_Virgin Spain_ (in preparation)
RAHAB
_By_
WALDO FRANK
[Illustration]
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
_RAHAB_
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
_Printed in the United States of America_
_To_
_Magic_
ERRATA
Page 57, second line from top, “stook” should read “stood.”
Page 113, eighth line from top, reading “the cigarette smoke,
closed them, sat down,” should be eliminated entirely, and the line
should read “deliberate they beat against her hips”
Page 147, twelfth line from top, “shadow” should read “shallow”
CONTENTS
PAGE
_One_
BRASS GAS CHANDELIER 13
_Two_
RIVER GARDEN 21
_Three_
WHITE SKY 69
_Four_
PAVEMENT OVER EARTH 81
_Five_
CLARA 167
_Six_
PAVEMENT BROKEN 203
_Seven_
EARTH 245
“_Be consoled: thou wouldst not seek
me if thou hadst not found me._ ...”
_PASCAL_
_ONE_
BRASS GAS CHANDELIER
The door opened against the drawn chain, grating against it.
In the grey strip a woman’s face, very grey, very unexpectant, suddenly
was bright.
It measured a man, young, standing at ease. The chain clicked free. “O
it’s you, Mr. Samson.” The door opened wide, shut them in.
The hall was a long shadow beyond the glow of them standing. He was
quiet waiting, not sheer against her: his shaggy coat poured the
street’s coldness. She was a dim thing about eyes.
“I’m so glad it’s you, Mr. Samson.”
She walked noiseless through shadow, she took no space from it, she was
infinitesimal within a mood. He followed.
“I was taking it right easy ... reading.”
In the gaslight she turned and fronted him. She took his coat. He was a
fair boy, gentle, somewhat plump. He sat down, she stood.
--I have been in this room before, I have seen this woman before. It is
not the sort of room, she is not the sort of woman I want to see for I
am here for neither.... Why strangely now this sense of her reality upon
me?
It was her room, there they were after all, the woman in her room
touching upon him.--Let me see in this silence the woman in her room.
Her quiet words did not obtrude upon a silence whose margin he caught as
it waved. He saw her a battered creature. He saw her absurdity of
painted cheeks, two imitation flowers stuck in the ruts of a road. He
sat in a room whose dinginess enarmed him. He sat in the misery of this
woman. He sat deep.
“Still so cold out?” Over her head a chandelier ... brass gas, hideous
brutal under the flecked ceiling. His feet glowed with renewing warmth.
In his eye beneath his shoes a carpet of acid green.
--We sit.... She sits in a cloud of dinginess. Sharp spirit veiled in a
cloudy flesh. Now: centers of glow, thrown from the woman, solid like
her spirit. He was aware of loveliness.
Under the blow of the chandelier a delicate Pembroke table ... book and
a glass of whisky.
--Under my arms, pressing against my back, a high arched Windsor chair.
In the break of her hip, standing, a Hepple--white desk.
--We have no furniture like this at home!
She spoke. He peered into the form of her words. His eyes took the gloss
of the subtle table, it was one with her words’ accent. Futile words ...
grammatical, well-ordered. A subtle table, and beyond a virulent huge
sideboard. A faint quaint accent in her pointless words curling like
heat of hidden flame above the table, against the sideboard: whispers in
how she spoke, like these glowing poems in wood, of a day distant from
his New York where there had been leisure and when from the dung of
human misery America grew flowers.
A quiet pain in the table and her words ... a distant pain. He did not
put his immediate question.
She felt his pause; in it drew up her chair. She sat he thought with
grace athwart him at the table. The whisky glass was gone, he had not
noticed her hide it. The book was there with her hand. Black little
book. _Bible!_ He felt her feeling him feel her. Now she was silent.
They were silent upon each other. Heavily.
His brow twitched.--Let me see her! She was cold and helpless. He
understood he could not understand. She seemed a chaste woman with burnt
eyes. She drew him.
Words to pull him aloof: “I am afraid we don’t read that book ... half
enough.... I don’t I mean,” he blushed. “Do we, Mrs. Luve?”
--Wrong. Wrong! A delicate line left ... he felt _left_ ... under her
folded thin lip. Lip folded away.
“It’s a rattling good book.”
“O but _you_ do.”
“I?”
“_You_ read it enough.... You’re a Jew.”
“I’m a Jew,” he repeated. Above her and the table the flourishes and
bulgings of the chandelier ... brass gas ... were lewd. “I’m a Jew. If
there’s any soul in me worth speaking of, it’s in that book.” She leaned
forward upon the table with elbows drawn tight back. “Yet I can’t read a
word of it, except in English.... I’m ashamed of that.”
She laughed embarrassed. He was understanding deeper he could not
understand. She was up swiftly. She took the Bible, opened a door in
the sideboard. Glint of glasses, plush, odor of liquors. She placed the
Bible within them.
“I suppose,” a smile to her face, the first: as sudden again her face
was grey,” ...you came for Thelma?”
“Why ... yes.”--Of course for that I came, for that only I come ever to
your dirty flat.... She has delicate fingers.... How else did I come at
first? Dirty? There was a silence fringing his questions, veiling them,
making them false. In the silence the presence of strangeness.
“I am afraid I may not be able to get her ... right away.”
Her fingers curled up. He felt how they had drooped from the hard square
palms like shoots frozen in a cold Spring.
“There’s just a chance. If you’ll ... excuse me I’ll phone.”
The door shut him in.
He sat quiet because he wanted to get up, hunt for something. Bible? He
walked up and down because he wanted to stay, hoped she would find
Thelma.
He needed Thelma to-night.... He knew this.
--I do not feel it now. For only a sharp need brought him to this flat
he despised. Where alone Thelma would meet him.--I am here again. I must
need Thelma. Mrs. Luve was back.
“I’m sorry. Thelma’s gone to a Show, with some friends. There’s just a
chance ... later ... she might possibly go after eleven to the Garden
Cafe. I could phone there, then.” Mrs. Luve stood in the door, her face
was bright, she smiled again it was grey. “You----“
He shook his head, not getting up. She did not stir also. Her face was
bright. Her mouth trembled. He said: “Have you any beer, Mrs. Luve? We
might have a drink?”
He could not help seeing her, seeing her more and more. Frail slain
fingers resting upon a table warmer than her hand. She all a sapling
broken in frost ... standing seasons dead.
--What is there here to see? He pulled a bill from his pocket. As his
hand went toward hers, a hot wind stopped it. He felt them both cold.
Under her eyes he saw a shadow like a whip’s mark.
He put his money away.
She left the room.
She returned, she carried a silver platter. Upon it a bottle of wine.
Two slim glasses.
It was long silence now, with them less heavy against it. Silence full
with its own mood, its own blood, strong to live.
The wine stood erect on the subtle table. Mrs. Luve leaned and poured of
it, a drop first in her glass, then his glass full, then her glass full.
Her bare arm pouring red wine came from a dim kimona.
... In the face of a worn woman black eyes burning: eyes blazing against
the face, leaping from face and woman: eyes touching the red of the
wine.
He felt:--I am disappearing.
There is a silence like light
Upon us.
Moving like light a silence
Upon words.
There will be words moving in light:
There will be lighted words....
_TWO_
RIVER GARDEN
Spring ... a Southern city in song. A city drifting fading into the wide
arms of earth, into trees, fields running under grass, into trees, into
high thrusts of earth, into trees, trees. The city a raised shadow upon
earth. Against earth’s sweep through the Precinct of suns and stars,
apart from sun and stars--blotch of hard houses leaning back upon the
dead days of their makers--whole city leaning back, falling away from
the wide freedom of sun, earth, stars, twirling together locked. And
they two ... man and girl ... clasped in the steadfast spin of life--sun
stars earth dust--that swung away from the city.
Fanny Dirk was on her back. Under: grass, roots thrusting up in
erection, spilling in bud. Over: he. Under and over: One. She was viced
in One: Grass, hair, fingers, twigs broken to leaf, lips and earth hot
against her.... One. She was surrounded by One. She was beyond
distinctions. She was One. She was in ecstasy....
Then they walked to their horses on the distant road.
A house, coddling itself warm, despite bright elms, in its shadows of
men, cast a grey finger up from the Town to the young man’s mind. His
house ... running no longer away from the immobile dance of earth and
sun ... reached up now, arrogant, clambered with its long harsh shadows
into the mind and mood of his mother’s and father’s son.
“Fanny!”
--Harry, Harry.... O you ... you my life!
“Fanny, now we must get married.”
--Hush! I hate you. How can you speak so now?
“Why are you silent, Fanny? I’m a gentleman, little girl. Don’t think I
respect you less, because you love me.... I love you ... we....”
--No respect, then!
“ ...will be married. You are not less the lady.”
--Stop, stop, stop!
“Secretly, of course. Till I am done with College. Not so long, Honey.
You can wait? We’ll have a real wedding, then.”
--Can’t you stop? What are you killing? What are you killing? Can’t we
stop?
Fanny Dirk became the wife of Harry Howland Luve.
* * * * *
Mrs. Luve held her slender glass in frail spent fingers. She sipped. Her
hot eyes swept above frail flesh, spun glass.
--I want you to see me! I want you to see me!
Mr. Samson nodded.--What else can I do?
--Can you see this? I was as fresh and ruddy as a maple blossom!...
She was hard, she was intact. Her husband took her to a little house on
the best street: three squares away was the Luve Mansion which one day
should be his. “This is our home. It’s small dear. But so are you small.
We’ll live here till our love bursts it.”
He was tall and thin, yet he gave the air of softness. His big black
eyes being soft, his delicate hair that lay thinning on the transparent
tinge of his brow gave his sapling body the air of holding a softness.
He had small dimpled hands tapering to fingers with which to hold her
who was hard and intact.
“O I love it!”
She did not love the hard Luve Mansion, her own home had been prim and
small, her hardness needed tender and small things of the world.
“O I love it, Harry! I’m glad it’s no larger. O--what a kitchen! Can’t I
do for you right snug in that gem of a kitchen.”
“No, sweet, not that. Mammy Sue comes along. I can’t say No to Mammy. I
can’t begin now saying No ... when I’m married. She’s been waiting’,
fixin’ for that. She’s been totin’ me from a baby just for that. You’ll
surrender, Honey! She loves you for making me surrender ... to her.”
“And I bake such biscuits.”
“You may ... when Mammy’s not looking.”
She made him sit down. “You’re so high!” She clapped her hands. Sharp,
she kissed his hair, his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Sharp kisses. Each
finger tip she kissed. “O--O you!” She opened his waistcoat, she opened
one button of his shirt. A sharp kiss on his chest. She leaped away,
clapped her hands.
“I’ll manage Mammy.”
“Whom couldn’t you manage?”
--You.... I leap gaily clapping my hands, my Love. I leap on Pain, on
the shadow of Doubt I leap. What can I do with you?
She was on her knees: her arms embraced his legs, her cheek was hot
against his cold shoes.
--Under the Pain is there sunlight for dancing? Under the doubt is there
a solid world?
“She loves me,” said to himself Harry Howland Luve. “Blessed
sweet!”--Well, I’ve married her. She’s married to a Luve. She’s leaping,
dancing on a joy I can understand.
* * * * *
Mrs. Luve and Mr. Samson talked of small matters pleasantly.
--He sits there sweetly, chatting of small matters. O it is good. O it
is cool water. Bless you! He leaves me alone, he does not touch me. I am
myself. We move marvelously into myself. He is content there, merely
talking, with me a woman, of small matters.
--I have a mind, good mind for others. You shall have the benefit of
that whenever you need it. I’ll find out whenever ... good good Boy!...
--I am alone. That is the blessing of talking with you here on cool
small matters. You do not touch me as the world does when I am alone
with no one. O you heal me: will you at least, after these years, these
years, such years, be my healer? Not touching! The heal and the health
and the miracle of that. Not touched, at last. The years full of bloody
bubbles, each year a bubble of my blood unhealed. I shall not tell you
of myself. You will feel....
--For thanks of God ... your God.... I embrace you, Boy. When one has a
God one can have cool small matters. Let us talk on, for your God’s
sake, of your cool small matters.
* * * * *
“Why do you drink? O Harry ... why, why now?”
“You are not always there. At College you were not there, Fanny. Drink
was. One took what was to take.”
“But now....”
“Drink was there first. O I don’t know. When I am drunk I am wrapped in
warm smooth clinging stuffs--like entrails--like insides of a great warm
creature. When I drink I am wrapped in a woman.... Let me creep into
you, Beloved. Farther, nearer. O you are so _whole_. Won’t you let me
creep away inside of you?”
“Harry I am all open to you. Come.”
“No dear. O my love! No, dear, I can’t. God damn you. You entice me ...
impossibly. There you are--you are a woman, _there_. I can’t touch you
... you’re _there_. I am here. Touch you? Break you. I’d smash you into
this air if I could. Damn you! Damn you. Why shouldn’t I have another
drink? _It_ goes inside of me ... all of it ... serves me ... warms me.
It’s mine, that. Going inside of me, same as me going inside of it.
Inside of you ... impossibilities. God damn your sure solid eyes. Let me
get out.”
She lifted his head from her lap. “Go then.”
He rose uneasy to his feet. He wiped straying silk hairs from his
swimming eyes. He turned: stumbled: sank. He sobbed.
She placed him on his back on the floor: cradled his head in her hands.
“Let me get out! Let me get out!” he shouted, motionless.
“Sh-sh. You can go.”
“Fanny, Fanny,” he whispered, “hold me ... hold me still.” His body
swung on the floor, the floor careened about his eyes. Her arms,
cradling him, swaying his head, were alone moveless.
She dragged him to bed. He was a helpless drunken child. She undressed
him. Her hands, touching his naked body, brought to his face a veil of
ease. Her hands ceased. He raised his naked flesh from the hot covers.
“Give me a drink!”
“No.”
His eyes swung back from the wall of her response. But his arms surged
forward, they caught her. He dragged her against his naked flesh....
* * * * *
She, little woman, sat in her rocking chair on the porch, looked up at
the flood of sun and tried to find the world.
--Up the sun that is warm and good, up the sun that blinds me
Struggling, not overwhelmed, I send my eyes....
She was clad in a pink dress whose dainty softness brought clear the
silvery atunement of her body. There was naught slack in her. Her bare
arms were a gentling, a subtle rounding of her bones: a haze of dark
hair on them: hands rose intact and long from the fine wrists like
flower from stem. The little breasts stood in the pink tulle, alert,
infinitely one with the awareness of her eyes and wrists ... like the
antennæ of a bug holding the world upon their frailty.
She sat challenging sun: not wilting: waiting her husband.
--Every day now he drinks. He gambles. He loves me. What have I to do
with cards and liquor?
* * * * *
She, larger woman, sat deeper in her chair: lost now in a swathing gown
of gray that rose like a wave to her white neck. Her shoulders and her
chest; bare, were still planturous in their running variance of plane
and mood: strong seeking chin, throat swelling as if with graceful
words, chest rising downward from the aloof virginity of her neck to the
slow fulness of her heavying breasts. Fanny was pregnant. She sat there
... taut limpid body ... in the sun, eyes unwilted, about her child like
a sunny song hiding an omen. She sat there gradually giving way ... her
taut and limpid sun-shape giving way ... to the dark press of a swollen
larva tangled inside her blood, pressing, kicking, sucking weight to
rend.
Harry Luve was gone three days, without a word ... plenty of signs. She
knew.
--He has gone. I shall see him again. O yes. Long after I have looked in
my child’s eyes. Thank God for that! I shall look long, years perhaps?
long and deep in my baby’s eyes in order to understand how I must see
him again.
His going down was simple like all of Harry Luve ... simple like a very
plaintive song. She sat between the high sun and the low wail of her
husband: balanced about a child.
How sustain the light madnesses of College? except in drink and
gambling. How nourish the child in him he was? save with the rolling
bloods of liquor, the swift tossings, cradlings, plungings of luck at
cards. At the end of deep immersement in a helpless joy forever Birth
which was an end: the Birth here at last Disgrace, as the Birth once
air. Too much money lost, too much folly of a night in his cups. A woman
half dead, half naked, bent across a table, a mirror smashed, ten
thousand dollars debt. A birth that! Harry slipped down into it as
doubtless he had slipped from his mother’s womb ... whimpering,
blinking, inarticulate--nostalgic. He was gone.
But his father had Honor to groom. The debt was paid, the woman was
salvaged and sent off. No word in the papers.
“He will find out he’s safe ... turn up, sobered ... my Dear. Never
worry,” his father assured her.
“And I ...?”
“You are his wife, Frances. You must wait.”
She got up.
“Will you move my chair, Colonel Luve ... over there?”
She walked, clear slender neck and legs with her child so full before
her her walk seemed to say: “My child comes first.”
Her husband’s parent shook his head.
“What can you do, my daughter? You must wait....”
She sank in her new-placed chair.
“ ...in the sun.”
--She is pregnant, Colonel Luve explained away the inconsequent words.
Fanny waited.
* * * * *
“I know your name.... I knew it always ... now you will let me?--_Samson
Brenner._”
“You say my name as if it meant something.”
“Perhaps it does. Perhaps it does. Go on.”
“I sometimes wonder why I am studying Law. Writing poems is more fun ...
and you know? seems _realler_!”
“Yet you distrust writing poems....”
“--bad poems.”
“Bad because you distrust doing anything for fun?”
“You know, I think you’re right!”
He smiled like a child, pleased but a bit scared when he finds true what
he had sought in make-believe. His brow wrinkled. He turned away from
the brass glare of the light.
“That light is horrid,” she said.
“--all substitutes for the sun,” he said.
“That is so.”
“Yet what a wonder what a glory,” his body stiffened, “that we should
have a substitute at all!”
“Why glory, Samson Brenner, if the substitute is false?... Wait.”
Mrs. Luve came back. She placed two candles between them on the Pembroke
table.
“Shut out the gas,” she said.
There was blackness, heavy, hot, clasping them both. Two jets of liquid
glow tongued from the mellow wood, made the wood lift and gleam like a
sun’s ray through moving cloud: cast wreathings subtle, evanescent, out
against the blackness.
They were quiet. The candles ... two fingers rose, touched them across
the table, joined them, hushed them.
“May I say something to you?”
“What, Mrs. Luve?”
“You have a tongue that speaks truth, you have a tongue that lies.”
“Haven’t we all?”
“You must not have a tongue that lies: for you have a tongue that is
true.”
“Haven’t we all ...?”
“You must not----“
--He does not see himself.
He moves through a black Hole
Bright--pouring brightness.
Where is a Sun whereby a Sun may see?
--I have ten fingers ... ten to weave a Web
To catch at God.
Too frail--too fine ... yet you slip through?
* * * * *
Fanny looked out from her back sun-parlor upon trees.
Beside a high grey wall rose the thick life of a magnolia; beech and
cherry and dogwood sang their light swift presences, a lawn was fresh
like dew.
“Trees,” she murmured....--They have waited the Winter. It is Spring,
they prepare to give a whole new life--blossom and seed. That is why it
is Spring. Each year ... at their feet the dead leaves sink and rot.
They push forth new ones. Each year.... They cannot help themselves.
She could go no farther.--Helpless bravery.... Upstairs in her cradle
Edith slept. Harry was gone, voiceless, eight months. She was imprisoned
in her man’s absence, in her child’s presence.
She had a dream. Harry jumped on his black horse, stood over her in his
stirrups. He ribboned the black flanks red with his spurs. The horse
leaped: as he flew away he leaned to her and cut deep her breast with
his crop.... She awoke thinking of Edith. Her child was the red salute
of Harry’s going: the scar of it. She loved her child.
She had a dream. A tall man with a baby’s face lay crowding in her arms.
She could kiss his baby’s face, but he had tall legs, they spun and
twirled about her. They struck a lamp which fell, the house was in
flame. All of the town rushed into her house: she saw his father and
mother, her mother who was dead and brother ... all of the city came
into her sitting among flame holding a baby face. They stood there,
pointing, poising, sneering at her. “What is she going to do? She sat
rigid holding her baby face. What a fool, she sits there nursing a dead
child with fire all about her!” She was helpless.
Now, sitting, watching the brave helpless trees she could go no farther.
She had a child whom she loved and who was the wound of another love
upon her.
--Trees do not think, they are brave helplessly. Why am I not brave?
Trees lift into air. I am buried.
She was buried. Her friends and her relations, seeing her Mrs. Luve,
buried her daily. Her child, seeing her mother, buried her daily. Her
husband, a distant stroke in a far world, ploughing, ploughing like
steel ... heaping the soil of his ploughings forever upon her, buried.
--Trees do not think. I try to think. Thinking is bad for Winter.
Thinking is bad for Spring. Thinking chills Spring. Thinking calls sap
to Winter which Winter kills. Yet I must think ... for I am motionless.
To think is to move when one is motionless. Trees move forever. Leaf and
trunk move upward, circle out: seed moves downward, inward. Trees swing
forever so they are thoughtless. But I am a broken curve, a splintered
part of a Circle I cannot see.... My thought’s a finger feeling from the
line of my brokenness for a Roundness beyond me.
--What am I going to do? How am I going to think?
She was the wife of Harry Howland Luve. Pretty clever astounding Fanny
Dirk: here’s a riddle for your independence, which we ... your Town ...
have had to swallow ever since you were a child bossing your
schoolmates, snubbing the smart young men, running through the
gray-mossed tangles of our thoughts and ways like an April wind through
a sleepy August. You have shocked us, angered us, made us love and
accept you. You caught the best match of Town ... here is a riddle for
you, smartie Fanny Dirk!
He will come back: she was very quick to find her own way, her own words
for it: yet who of us dare say she was not always the lady? Mrs. Harry
Luve. He will come back. Nothing for her after all but to sit and wait
him....
She had a dream. Her bed was a vast blackness.--It is white, I have no
eyes so my bed is black. It was soft and rich, it was comfortable. She
lay within it, folded, lost, and it was white vast comfort all about
her. A Hand from a sharp wrist thrust down, clasped her throat ...
pressed. She was pressed deeper within the bed: as the Hand pressed down
her throat was deep beneath her body, deep beneath her head: her mind
and her blood rushed down from her head and body to her swollen throat
that a white Hand pressed. The bed unfolded lip within lip as had her
body when Harry loved her: now her body cut deep into the bed ...
enfolded it was lost in the bed’s blind comfort.... She saw the Hand
that pressed her down by the throat. Upon one finger was the ring of
Harry: upon another finger was the wedding ring she had worn secret for
a year, and was the diamond ring set in platinum which he had given her
later. The Hand was colorless like the shell of a departed locust. The
wrist above it was long and red and moist. The Hand, pinning her throat,
was dry, her throat was dry. She lay there cased in her hot bed ...
frozen: under a Hand that pinned her.
She got up. She went to her child and held her in her arms. Edith slept.
She held her close against her breast. She stiffened her arms in order
to be still. Within, a voice shrieked: “Wake, wake!” It touched the air
through her hardened nipples. It touched her child. Edith awoke. She
placed her back in her crib.
“Sleep, daughter ... always sleep.”
Saying these words, she felt her gums were hard; it was her gums, it was
her teeth that said them. Her lips were still! She kissed her daughter.
--Lips had better kiss.
The child, who had lain wide-eyed silent, fell asleep....
Fanny stood beside her bed. It loomed like a white sucking mouth--white
lips. She pulled a quilt away, sank to the floor. With knees high
huddled in her arms, near her chin, and the quilt lightly touching her
bare toes, her knees, her mouth, she slept on the floor. The world’s
blackness, the ghost-grained night of her sleep was not the world, not
her sleep ... was the bed above her. Blackness was spun white threads
come to rest: each thread beside the other, each thread of white not
touching any other. She lay escaped from her Bed in undulant hardness,
she flowed ... at last at rest ... like a red worm through water....
* * * * *
--At this Party too, they aren’t going to let me be gay!
All they would not let her. They smiled on her and carefully patterned
their talk. They had eyes forever wiping against her thoughts. They must
have hated her, had she been gay and forgetful of her loss. They did not
want to hate her. They preserved her low and broken where they did not
need to hate her. “Dear poor Fanny--so brave!” Their words and their
ways announced: “We try to be gay with you, we try to make you gay.”
They would not let her be gay. They hoisted their talk uphill against
the evident pull of their sole interest in her, of their solemn
compassion for her. They would not let her forget. “We are being gay, we
are trying to cheer you up. We are talking with you of indifferent
matters.” So....
Fanny waited ... here too. In these bright congestions of men and women
was there not surely somewhere a color that went with her own, a tone
that could make her vibrate? She waited in stiff rigor, not knowing she
waited.... Gowns and shoes ... words put on like gowns and shoes over
different flesh. She smelt at times under satin and starch warm flesh
that needed air. She sat and let herself be talked to, be sympathized
with, be gloated over.--If only you’d shout you are glad! Healthy that,
naked.... O no. She was stiff as in death.
A tall man, dark....--Newcomer, strange ... moved up to her and spoke.
Words not spawned or swerved by her own story: words she needed not to
hear since they were fending away a world that would not let her be gay.
In a new separateness Fanny felt herself....
Felt herself laughing.
Found her feet, after his quiet resolute own, pattering out to a
seclusive alcove.
She saw him.--I don’t size you up. I don’t care! You release my feet and
my laughter. You are big strong ... black ... what are you?
* * * * *
He came to her home.
Her ears did not count, yet her ears did for they had given her a label
to stick on him so he could pass through her door.... Leon
Dannenberg--attorney from Washington--Government lawyer--on short
business here. He passed through. More than her eyes saw that he was
very strong with hands full of ease. She leaned back in her rocker: her
toes jutted forward: they twinkled against his black strength.
They chatted, she had no ears, she had voice. She was gay.
When he left her: “You are unhappy, Mrs. Luve,” he said. “I think you
are the unhappiest woman I have known. You must be strong, then ...
too.”
She took his hand and liked how her hand was lost in his hand that was
full of ease.
“You let me be gay.”
“I’m coming whenever this Case ... and these Conferences ... let me.”
* * * * *
“I have respect for you,” he said. He took her in his arms and kissed
her....
He said: “We are strangers ... we are strangers who respect each other.”
“Help me,” he said.
“Help you?”
“Help me to bring you to yourself. You are stunned. Ill things come over
you and you are stunned, you cannot make yourself clean.... I want you
naked. Help me. Naked against me naked. You will be at last yourself ...
inviolate. Help me!”
He undressed her. She helped him to undress her. She lay in his arms:
lost sweetly like a tree in a warm wind.
* * * * *
“You make me feel that I have roots,” she told him.
She found that she had been buried in a corrodent silence. She was
lifted forth. She had words.
“You are strong,” he said, “and you have been a fool.”
Holding her in his arms, he was to her a sunrise ... cool ... cutting
mists and a dim sleep. She lay in him like a warm creature in a gentle
sun, sucking sun ... all open.
* * * * *
“Soon I must go ... back to Washington ... my home.”
“You have a home?”
“Why do you doubt it?”
“You are so strong away from home.”
“You are a glory, Frances Luve. You are a spirit like a tree, standing
alone on a single rock in a marshland.”
“That is what you think of my people?”
“That is what I think of your people.”
“But have you a home?”
“The Western World,” he smiled with a fine bitterness that hurt her. “I
am a Jew, you know.”
“Yes ... I know,” she hushed.
“The first Jew you have ever known?”
“The first....”
“Do you know me, Fanny?”
“Will I ever know?... You are going away.”
“That is right, also.”
“Yes.” She looked at him. She sat high above his prone strong body;
looked at him. “Yes, it is right. I look at you. You are beautiful. You
are clean. You are wilful and straight. You have black curling hair like
a savage dance all over the white tenderness of your body. You have eyes
that look forever. Yet I do not love you. I love my husband. He is weak
and dirty. Until you came I said: ‘He is weak and dirty, I hate him.’
You came with your clear strength. You took me naked. I took you naked.
Because I have taken you clean and strong I know that it is he whom I
love.”
He held her hand.
“There is God,” he said, “May he bless you.”
“What does that mean ... if He blesses?”
“The Jews in three thousand bloody years have not found out.”
“I tell you I do not love you: I tell you and you bless me.”
“I reverence you, Fanny. You are clear like water. Love is a word I have
not won the use of.”
“What have you done to me!”
“You are water, Frances. You were muddied and thick. You can look down,
now, through the clearness of yourself, to the dirt base of
yourself....”
“ ...to Harry!”
“See him clear, through your own clean-ness.”
“You are strong. O how strong you are, you man who have won for yourself
a power in the world that hates you. Your people have been beaten
bloody: always, always. Beaten bloody by their God ... beaten bloody by
the world to which they gave their God. They are a bent dark people. Yet
you have won for yourself a body fair to see. Never shall I forget your
lovely body. Yet I do not love you. I love a man who had all and who
cast it away: who was fair as you were never and who has dirtied
himself.”
“He only deserves your love.”
“Why that?”
“ ...if you care for him.” He took her hand again. “Since you care to
care for him....”
“Good-by,” he said.
She said: “The word Love is never in your mouth.”
“Good-by,” he said.
She said: “I will do what you want.... I would do always what you want.
I do not love you: but I bow to you. I kiss your feet. You are holy....
Why are you holy?”
“I have moved you only as a wind that passes.”
“You are putting me aside,” she said.
“No. I touch your branches. I spread them. I take seed of you with me to
the fallow meadows. I do not stir your roots.”
“They feel sunshine for you have spread me open.”
“I do not stir your roots--because I have respect for the word Love.”
“Good-bye, then, Leon. I shall find out what this great truth is ...
this truth I know, the first truth I have ever known ... that you are
holy.”
“Good-by,” he said. Then he went.
* * * * *
Mrs. Luve looked through the golden flame of an old table, of two
candles, burning within the blackness of her room. There ... not of the
mellow flame, not of the dark ... a young man speaking of small matters.
Where the flame touched him he glowed; where the night touched him his
body withdrew harsh into shadow. What is this encaverned boy, talking of
small matters?
--He is plump: he is a boy: he has no strength of his own. He is very
strong and he is very old. Blond hair curls from bland brow. They are
Jews ... _he_ was straight like steel, hard, sure. So gentle. Sureness
alone is gentle in a fumbling world.... _Are you hard also?_”
--You do not know, but I have seen your parents. If I said so would you
flush? would your heart rush back in panic, hide in your flesh I have
touched by seeing your parents? She counted me change so soberly ...
correct, correct ... ‘If I make a mistake against you I will lose by and
by: if I make a mistake against me I lose now.’ The greed of justice in
your mother counting me change. That time when the clerks were all busy
and I in a hurry, your father came out smiling, sold me--what was
it?--sausage and cheese? So simple, so condescending he was. You are the
child of such parents. They have saved: they have saved in justice of
greed, in justice of condescension: and of this saving of their greed
and arrogance, you buy your College books, you buy your poetry books,
you buy your hours here. Aren’t you ashamed? No he is not ashamed. He is
right. Sausages and dollars saved are slime, are lies. You are true,
Samson Brenner. You are older than your stinking parents.
She filled his glass with wine.
He sipped. His eyes were hot amber in an iron vat. He asked no question,
he sipped.
“Do you want to hear the poem?” he said.
--I hear it already. “Repeat it.”
He did not question her words, he did not question her wine. He took
them. His head bent forward. He held his face in his hands ... soft
hands. He spoke his poem through soft hands. The poem was a stiff, an
alien thing: but her words she had not spoken in the glow of his face
were his and came back to her, a poem.
--I become myself. I become untouched. Speak on, Boy. Make me
untouched!... He has young eyes--the shadows that rim them are marked by
thousand years....
* * * * *
The world was a sunny field and the young mother walked in it and was
herself. Each thing was itself, stood clear up in the sunny field of the
world. Black ant over a tuft of grass held the sun in its blackness.
Grass threw sparkle of sun against a blue sky dazed with sunniness.--I
too walking and carrying the sun. I am very sharply myself, like an ant,
like a leaf, throwing with them the sun in a vast gold shower upward
into the sky....
Leon was gone: there would be no word of any sort further between them.
Fanny had a way of sitting on her porch and pinching the flesh of her
bared arm. Solid! She loved her solidness--I am real! She was sunny with
feeling her flesh and her soul real.
--Harry is coming back. O I know! I must be ready, I must be _real_.
She was real. Her thoughts, her feelings, her pain were petal and stamen
and pistil of the full flower of her realness. Sitting now, different,
in her little house where she had been abandoned ... above the pry and
the impudent concern of those about her, above the hurt and the insult
of Harry’s going ... facing the sacrament of his return--how? beaten,
broken?--fully as she had faced no truth in all her life.
... With her child in arms she could pinch bravely and find real....
--I can kiss you now--Baby! little sister!--we wait together for him who
is coming back.
--Coming at last. For the first time coming. There was a holy man. He
released us, stripped us naked to ourselves. And because of a holy man,
we can wait real now, sure, intact, so gently wait and so long, for a
man who is coming.
--We need not ask who he is. He is ours. He will find us and love us,
won’t he, little sister?... and leave us no more.
--Like you! O my blessed baby--like you whom I was strong enough to
bear, not strong enough till now to look upon--like you he is ours.
--O the black night into which you were
born, my child.
O the long pain you stood upon: it rose like
a flame from my womb you stood upon
... up, up throughout you, to your eyes
and fingers.
O the black night of fiery pain you were,
with your sucking mouth upon my naked
flesh....
We dawn together, Love, into a sleep where
with eyes open
Cooly we walk toward Day.
Fanny held her child and again she looked unwilted into sun. It was to
her as if she gazed on a bright field, and there above flowers, under a
sky, stood a woman sheer with a child in her arms. Her feet in grass
were cool. Her hair in sky was cool. She was sheer, cool ... unburned
by the fires of birth. She was born ... washed clean of the bloods of
birth and born. Very cool, very sheer. So Fanny saw herself.
... Saw certain things making her sunny field of the world--as the light
of her vision lay clarified in context of green thrusts running, forms
sprayed and ashift over earth.
She had long talks holding her child in her arms....
“I must be more to him when he comes back than I was ever! I can be
more!
“I accept you, Harry. I have no pride, I am humble. I challenge drink,
gaming, women. I am ashamed no longer. I shall beat them. I shall crowd
them out. I shall be for you what they lied seeming they could be for
you. You will find me everywhere, meet me nowhere. No obstruction. You
will find me risen in a great pride, in a great strength, now that my
pride is gone and I have lain, prostrate naked, sucking the strength of
a stranger.”
--O stranger! not a thought more for you. Not a thought. That is as you
will. Harry, he made me love you.
She went into her room, stripped her clothes from her shoulders. She
looked in a glass at her nakedness, feeling under her eyes her shoulders
gleam like cool flames upward.
It was strange: her shoulders were untouched, her breasts had not
fallen.--I am whole! Come, Harry, take me.
There had been a wind, there had been a bath for her naked shoulders.
She was naked, flushed by a swift wind ... gone ... cleansed by a
running water ... run away.--I am whole, I am born. Will you come,
Harry, so you can see the woman who has been born?
She stood long, looking at her naked self. She was clad in a bloom. She
was a hard young world in its first Spring. She found that she was
laughing. She pressed her laughing fingers into her firm breasts.
“I am good,” she said, very sober. She caught up her child. Cheek upon
hers she swayed, very still, very sober. “O we are good. Good, we two!
Won’t you hurry, Man?” ...
“Now I see you. Clear! Never has any woman seen her love as I see you. I
am a woman born. Edith dear, look at your Mother. You are a child
born.... I am a woman born. I am rarer than you! I am very rare. I see
you clear, you little sucking flesh. Sweet, sweet! I see him clear;
wistful yearnful boy, with a soul all wrinkled and athrob like your
forehead, Sweet, when you were born ... a soul open and empty and greedy
like your mouth, when you were born.
“ ...Come, suck me, you two dear ones!”
--Do I see my love clear? If I do, I see a fading.... “I abdicate that
sight, my dear Beloved. My hands must not shake, when you come back to
me shaking.”
--What is love? what is a field?... a running of sweet grass over earth,
grass leaping away from the earth in which it lives.... My love is you
and you ... that is seeing enough!
--Love is the field and woodlands of the world.
She was a little woman waiting for her husband....
* * * * *
Strange news came to her world of Harry Howland Luve ... thrilled it,
made it talk.... “Blood will tell.” ... “After the wild oats the sturdier
planting....” “God has his way....” “From one drunkenness to another.”
Fanny took to herself the news and felt it true. The path of her man
came clear in her white mind.
--I feel him, all the way he has crawled livid red from my hands. He
turns, full flow, to my breast! She saw his path like a writing.
The Reverend Doctor Poole brought her his gift of comfort wrapped in
complacence.
She made him sit down, he chose the stiffest chair.--I must subdue
myself, she felt. He was brittle, little. She held back the flood of
herself. But it was easy since his sharp small eyes not knowing she was
a flood, brought her help.
“Your husband, my Dear, has found Christ.
“It happened in New York. Never mind, my child, where ... and who shall
ever say How? He has found Christ and like Him he has risen. More, my
daughter. Like Him, he is walking the ways of men bringing God’s word.
Who has found Christ _truly_, in every respect must act like Him. I am
very gratified ... very grateful. I have come to you, my daughter, ...
you have neglected our Church, never mind, Dear, the strayed sheep is
the dearest to the Lord and to the humblest Pastor ... to pray with you
Thanksgiving and rejoicing. Your husband will be here soon. You know
from his dear father what he’s doing?... He goes from College to College
telling young men how he slipped down the pleasant path to Hell--and at
its gate found Christ.... I have had word from colleagues in Princeton,
Yale, Williams ... elsewhere. His effect on the student bodies is
amazing, electrifying. A true evangel. He is eloquent, simple ... rather
his message is, that speaks through his lips. The students learn how he
... as they do ... played a little, drank a little, smoked--all the
little innocent indulgences ... and what horror happened. They flock up,
after his visit, and sign the pledge of Purity, join fellowship in
Christ. He has received invitations from dozens of Christian
institutions to come with his message, to help save our Christian youth.
He has found a true work, indeed.... And you, daughter, have been worthy
of him ... waiting. Prepare yourself now for the return of your
Bridegroom.”
* * * * *
Face clawed close by myriad tiny fears and horrors. Hot eyes. Feet
stumbling. As Harry’s body lurched forward, his feet stumbled faster to
support it. Hands dead white leaves, dry, crackling at his sides.... A
saloon swings open, his head bowed above thin shoulders twitches in,
away from the crash of an impending train above on its swinging iron
rail. Wave of acrid beer, soiled flesh, wet clothes. Above it, his head
a moment is still.... Sober. Harry steps up to the bar, with sharp feet
and hands marshalling sudden to his head against the lazy swing of his
body within the fetid wave. He grasps a glass of whiskey, carries it
untouched before him to a corner. Bodies huddled like hulks of beef or
pork, covered with rags. He floats above them, finds a seat, bowing to a
naked wooden table. Invitation. Glass elbows on the naked table. Head on
the table? No!--One gulp to swing my body free with my sharp head ... to
soberness.... So....--_What am I?_ ...
Harry Howland Luve gazed on his world. A man snoring near him blew a
spray of blood from his mashed nose. A man, beside a barrel, let his
fingers trail like grey worms through the sawdust ... a red tongue broke
through the muck of his mouth, licked the grey worms of his hands, he
slept again. At the bar, careening like ships on a wave of the world,
heads dipped into huge glasses, swung against mirrors, broke thudding
upon a window upon a wall that was a grin of hardness.--What am I? Harry
Howland Luve laboriously counted his fingers....--One two three four ...
one two three four ... one two: my God! where is my fifth finger? “I
lack a finger! I lack a finger!” Body with head feet hands was one ... a
toss, a catapult from the stinking Harp House into a darkness clear,
biting, without, beneath the surge of the “L.” He flew. “I lack a
finger.” He stopped. “What else do I lack?” Again a train. He was
caught. He could not move.--It is coming over! He was clamped; the
train’s murmur rose to a beat, a roar, a crash. Iron and wood and steam
shrieked and stampeded, mountained on his head. He was clamped. He was a
silence of horror under a mountain of noise, crushing against the
eggshell of his skull.... It passed....--I am alive. He walked quiet
now, looking on the pavement tracks for his lost finger.
“You have lost something?” A black form rose from the street like smoke
on a clear night. “Yes ... I have lost ... have lost....” “Perhaps,”
said the smokey man, “I can help you to find. Come along, Brother.” He
clasped his arm. The smokey man of God, the white seeker of color moved
down the cavern of Chatham Square where the high houses dimmed away like
stalactytes and the “L” thrust its lance into the belly of a world too
weary to cry, too worn to bleed. Before him Harry Luve held his white
dry hand. “My finger,” he muttered. “Yes,” said the man of God. “I see
... your pointing finger....”
He sat in a quiet room. Coffee and a sandwich rolled in his raw stomach.
“That tastes good, eh?” said the man of smoke. “Hot, eh? Whiskey makes
you shiver, I’ll bet.” Luve held his hands together and began to cry.
“Heat is the best thing in the world. Good heat is God. False heat is
the Devil ... and makes you shiver,” he said. “Another cup of coffee?”
“My finger ... my finger!” “Brace up, man. You’re a gentleman. You were.
I can see that. See clear, and you’re whole....” “How can I see clear
when I lack ... I lack--” ... “Hush--listen.”
There was a sound like a soft white quiet on a red wound. Music.
“Bow your head, Brother.... Listen.”
The quiet crept upon his body. Tucked in his toes, moistened his hands,
lay on his mouth. The quiet was warm. Was music. Harry shut his eyes.
The wave of the world, booze and streaking men, fell away. He was in a
flatness downy with gentle grass above a gentle river. His feet hurt, he
was glad, hurting was living. A warm cloud muffled his head: through his
eyes and mouth, through the warm cloud came words:
“Our Father which art in Heaven ... thy Kingdom ... give us this
day our daily ... not into temptation ... for thine is the Kingdom
... halleluja, Blesst!... the glory for ever and ever ... seek and
ye shall find ... seek seek and and ye ye ... unto you opened ...
unto you, opened ... Blood of the Lamb, red blood, ... there is a
quiet house, all white, where it is warm this bitter Winter night
... all warm a quiet house ... and arms holding me to a redness,
passion, that is allowed. Allowed ... hallowed ... hallowed ...
allowed. Christ smiles on it, his blood is red and holy.... Fanny’s
red, I have seen her red blood. Since I have married her, holy ...
red and holy ... knock and it shall be ... opened ... red warm,
dear ... all white is the blood of the Christ....”
The smokey man was speaking: “Miracle is not dead.”
Harry Luve rolled around upon his face. The music was still. A new
quiet, also warm, wrapped him about. He rolled and rolled in a warm
water. “The quiet is ever’ where.”
His eyes gleamed against a blackness suddenly calm and dun, a wall. He
looked at a wall in a lighted room. He saw a man beside him clad in
black. A hand touched his. Harry was thankful how that hand touched his.
“I have seen,” he said, “ ... O I have seen--“
The hand clasped his. “What, brother, have you seen?”
Harry wrenched away his hands, placed them like fenders before him.
“Let me--let me--!” he stopped. He swayed caught: he flew caught in a
chord that sped with the bright room through a roaring darkness. Roar!
He was dizzy. He tried to cry. He saw his hands speeding before his eyes
like two birds through cavernous space. He stopped from breath ... one
two three four FIVE ... he counted his flying fingers. A tiny spring
sang over his eyes, sang fraying ready to break. He wanted to cry ...
five five!... a little woman flew before his hands like a white bird in
the blackness. Naked. One red spot in her naked body where he had made
red once ... Fanny!... warm ... allowed. _Hallowed allowed hallowed
allowed._ The red spot was a painted house home ... could be about
him.... Blessed are they that mourn ... blessed are they that mourn.
Blessed are the poor in spirit ... comforted ... Kingdom of Heaven lead
us not ... rejoice exceeding glad ... into temptation----
“--_Warm and sweet is the blood of the Lamb
That washes us sinners white.
Sinners sinners
Black and quivering sinners we
And the blood of the Lamb it warms us
It washes us sinners white._”
... The hand of the man in black touched his again. Smokey ... flame.
Warmness, red warmness, white from hallowedness. The tiny spring burst.
His eyes burst out into myriad diamond stars. A sluice opened. He was
all wet. His soul poured ... a pent torrent ... out: speechless
whiteness.
“Something--say something, Brother! What wrestles in you? What chokes
you? What do you see?”
“Christ!” gasped Harry Rowland Luve: then he slept.
* * * * *
Mrs. Luve leaned back in her chair, took the brimming words of Samson
Brenner.
They poured from him, free, full, into the dark pool of her eyes. They
poured bright, candid: in the dark pool they fell dark.
--You talk of your fears and your pains: you talk of your loves and your
dreams. You are a Jew, you are true. Why is the word Christ never in
your mouth?
--O there is reason, deep! What is the pain of nearness--you pampered
Jew, you Jew-boy, plump about sorrow--that blots the word Christ from
your mouth?
“Mrs. Luve, I forget myself. I talk. I lose myself, there sudden I am. I
do not know myself, but I say ‘that is me!’”--Pampered boy. “I talk and
talk. God knows of what and why. Mrs. Luve, do I bore you?”
“You move along a path that is mine. Go on. I have no earthly thing to
do but hear you.”
“You are grave!”
“Not so grave as you.”
“But I laugh. I must tell you ... the first time I really heard
laughter....”
--You move upon my life like a broken sun ashift through cloud at
evening after a black day.... You in the flame of my candles, you in
the black of my room.... What is this word Christ you know too deep to
utter?”
* * * * *
Fanny standing moved her hand from the gathered flowers on the table ...
cherry and pear buds high, bowls of anemone, violets ... to her lips.
“He is coming!” She stood.
The door thrust forward--and was away from between them. Clad in white
she held firm against the sight of him; tall and dark with pale hands
and face, he rose from her still eyes like a column of smoke.
“Harry!” Then she held out her arms.
He shut the door. He knelt.
“Get up, husband.”
He kissed her hands.
She lifted his head in her two palms, lifted him up. His lips were on
hers.
They were thin, sweet, laden now with little gasps of air warmed sweet
in sweet lungs: no smells of liquor and smoke like a hot corrugation
scraping her sense.
He broke from her and sat in a chair. His breath was sudden, he had run
a race. One hand lay palpitant against a knee: breathless, afraid, a
being out of its element. She thought of a sea. He was fished up dry
from a sea.
“Harry,” she spoke low. She knelt at his feet: she looked up: she could
smile now.
“Get up, wife.”
“No ... let me. Let me always.”
His dry hands, tremulous, waved about her hair: seeking, afraid: they
were moths now, fluttering upon a light: so his eyes. His face was pale
and hurt turned down upon her smiling. Fluttering search collapsed. He
hid his face in his hands.
“Do not cry now.” She felt shut out by his hiding hands.
“I do not cry. Instead, I pray.”
He looked at her. All of him was dry. From his words he seemed to have
won bravery. She felt shut out in his looking.
His eyes were braver: his hands. They moved forward upon her shadowing
face: they sought a thing, found it. They carried her mouth upon his,
differently, upward. He stood, she under him. Her flesh touched his
flesh.
Tall white flesh, scabbarded in black ... and in prayer. Lips washed
clean of liquor, scrubbed lips, thin ... very thin. Hands corroded in
cleanliness against the nape of her neck. Odorless, fireless.... Fanny
flung her arms about him.... Shoulders pointed forward, thrusting away a
world. She clasped him close.
“Harry--Harry,” she cried. “O I am so glad you are----” she stopped. She
lay swaying in his arms, clasping him tighter, tighter. A faint moan
rose from her parted lips as her arms clasped tighter....
They sat and looked at each other.
“You have loved me, Fanny.”
“Yes ... yes.”
“You are my wife.”
She could say no word. She could feel no thing to turn into a word. She
was a wisp of cloud: beneath her a weathercock stood still. Harry
moveless pinned like a weathercock upon a bloody spike ... under a sky
with one wisp of cloud.
From a fringed green horizon, memory like a wind moved up to her.
--I love him. I serve him. I have dedicated my new free strength to
that. I have sworn how I was wanting, how I failed. Life now together!
“You know about me,” he said.
“I know you have come back, and I love you ... love you.”
“I must tell you all ... all the sin. You are my wife.”
“Tell me now, only that you are mine.”
“I am yours: for you are my wife since in my sinning you have loved me,
Fanny. God rewards me. You were there, awaiting my conversion.”
“We are wedded at last. Do not use words I cannot understand.”
“You must hear all my sins....”
Why did she feel:--He is satisfied with his words?
“I know my sins. God has put upon me, as my way of being cleansed, to
speak my sins. As they come forth from my mouth, they cleanse--God has
made a miracle in that they cleanse. I am washed clean, speaking them.
Already scores of boys, young men, hearing them, are clean. All their
horror, each detail of my sins, is a hand washing clean.”
Why did she feel:--Speaking, he moves away?
--I am jealous of your sins. What are sins?
“Tell me at once, then, Harry. Then we can bury them. Then we can start
to build. Then you can come and hold me.”
“I was away more than two years....”
--He has come back to hold me.... I will hold him so he understands he
has come back to hold me.... O to be held!... He has never held me. We
were too wise, we fools, to hold each other. In a plunging world ... O
my God how the world veers and plunges ... what fools not to hold each
other.
He spoke, he was very eloquent and sure, dwelling again with his sins.
He was warm in them. When he looked out from his hot sins to his wife,
his eyes were colder.
--Hold me. Hold me! Let me hold you. Come plant your hand in my heart.
He spoke, dwelling warm in his sins.
--Damn your sins!
He ended. He came to her and knelt once more. Not feeling him, she let
him.
“Fanny, my dearest, my wife, my wife ... do you forgive me?”
Not feeling him there, she was very quiet.
“I do not feel, my love, that there is anything to forgive.”
She looked straight, a little to the side of his white face. She was
still.
“We were young,” then she said.--I must speak. “And did not know. All
that is past, but is good ... all ... since now we know.”
“I have sinned deeply. Forgive me.”
“You wandered loosely, because I held you loose: because you did not
hold me. Now we clasp each other close. It is not a sin to have been a
child.”
“Bless you. Bless you.”
“I have learned----“
“You have been always wonderful.”
“No, Harry. I have learned. I have changed.”
“You.... You have not needed to change.”
She looked at him. “Two years you left me alone: and before that two
years you left me alone while I was forced to live with a drunkard. Do
you think these years did nothing to me?”
“You suffered.”
“And what might come of suffering!”
“Fanny, my Christian wife, you were strong, you were not harmed by
suffering. You remained pure. You have been not changed, dear:
tempered.”
“O Harry, I am afraid ... so afraid of your words.”
“You are a Christian, dear, and do not know it. That is why you are
frightened by my words.”
“You never saw me, Harry.”
“Yes, dear, always. Under a mist, but always. The mist lifted. Darling,
I must tell you: that frightful immortal night ... you and Christ.... I
saw you both at once together.”
“You never saw me. You do not know how I have changed.”
“You love me?”
“O my darling!”
“You suffered, waiting....”
She put his hands together: helpless she beat her hands against his
hands clasped hard.
“You did not give up ... waiting, suffering?”
“I knew you would come back. I saw you, always, coming. Now I know
that.”
“Then you have not changed. For you do love me, then.”
“Harry, love to survive must change.”
“Dear, dear ... you were right. I have told my sins. Each one. You have
them all. You must remember them all. Let me hold you now, in silence.”
“But Harry, perhaps I too have the need of telling.”
“You have no sin.”
“No Harry, I have no sin. But there are other tidings.”
“Hush, dearest. Hold me----“
“Listen!”
He looked at her. Impatience bit his lip, puckered his eyes slightly.
“ ...Have you thought ever, Harry, of what I did, these years of waiting?
of what I was? Harry, look at me clear. Have you ever tried to see me?”
“My Christian wife!”
--Patience, patience!... “Harry, this coming home must be beautiful, it
must not be hideous. Give it your share of light, Harry. You must to
save it, to make it. Look at me.”
He puckered his brow: he suffered, looking at her beauty he would ...
now he had confessed his sins ... have preferred to kiss.--All of you,
hidden under your white prim dress! “It is so long since I have kissed
you.”
“Harry, your word sin, does it cover up from your eyes what you and I
have done? Am I right, dearest, to fear your word sin?”
--I want to kiss you. You are my wife and have forgiven me. I’m done
with vices. I have the right, by God! to kiss your mouth and....
“Your going away killed me, Harry. I was near dead before you went. Your
going away killed me.”
“Forgive me, I say.”
“Never! if you use that word. Forgiveness, sin ... they are words,
Harry, that cover up. You killed me; you did not sin. You struggled for
life and killed me. That is all. I struggled for life, after your
struggle had killed me. Can you imagine how I needed, alone here in the
house with Edith whom you have never seen, to struggle against the death
in which your going buried me?”
“Edith----!”
“She is asleep. Have you thought, Harry?”
He stood up. “What can I do or say? Yes I have thought. It is that agony
I brought to you which I call my sin: it is my heartache for it, my
rushing back to you with hands imploring, that cries ‘Forgiveness.’ You
stop me.”
“Harry you did not sin, because you needed life. Always that comes
first; our need of life. I did not give you life. I don’t know why, but
I did not give you life. You went elsewhere, fumbled. Now I feel strong.
I feel now, Love, that I can give you life. We can now, from our new
strength, at last give life to each other. If I did not know this, I
would never have seen you again.
“But Harry ... please, please understand! I understand your wandering,
your hurting, almost your killing of yourself and of me ... in order to
find breath. Understand mine!”
“What do you mean, Fanny?”
“I am human also. I am not ... I do not want to be that perfect
emptiness you call your Christian wife. O my beloved, I am all warm for
you, I am all living for you, because I too have struggled and have
wandered ... in order to find breath.”
“What do you mean?”
She stood close to him. “Look at me close, my love.”
“What do you mean?” Very slowly, his pale white hands with their blue
veins curled up like leaves in autumn, drying, drying: fists.
“Do you feel how I love you? Do you feel ... O you must ... how my love
now, that was a little stupid girlish thing, has bloomed: how it is full
of blood, full of sustaining sweetness? Do you not feel, Harry, how you
have come back to a love that will feed you, that will lift you up until
the end of years?”
“Yes ... I feel that. What do you mean?”
“That love is over the despair and death of our past years as a tree is
over the ground.”
“Fanny ... I....”
“ ...rooted in it. I was under the ground. That shows I loved you.
Always, always. If I had not loved you, I should not have been so
deep-buried under the ground. I was dead. That shows I loved you. I am
all open in the air, high to you. That shows I love you. Love for you
has never stopped, it has grown.”
“What do you mean ...?”
“There was a thing that helped me to push up from my despair, from my
death under the ground where you had buried me, Harry. There was a
man....”
Harry Luve stepped forward and viced her wrists: “A man--!”
“Harry dearest, you must let _me_ now, _me_ now tell you all about it.”
He stopped her. “One thing only.... This man--” His voice broke. He
dropped her wrists. His face was an ashen mist. “For God’s sake, Fanny!
You didn’t ... you didn’t, Fanny--“
His eyes saw her. Saw her face. Her face nodded.
His hands covered his face. He flinched away. He saw her not. He went
back, back ... the wall caught him. He crumpled to the floor. He lay
under his white hands. Lay long....
At last:
“Harry, Harry ... it was because I loved you. O the hurt! See, I have
killed you too. Because I loved you.... I too needed to live, for you
had killed me. Do not judge yet. Let me tell you, let me help us
understand. I heard you ... your horrors, your orgies, your hells. O
Harry, this was not so ... this was clean somehow ... leading to birth,
to you. It was, since I am here now, loving you ... ready to give you
all, all of a life I have at last won to give you. O my boy....”
With each word she crept closer, sank nearer beside him. She knelt
beside him. She sought his hands, his eyes ... his eyes. He saw her face
hands eyes kneeling beside him who was crumpled beyond her.... He saw
not her face, not her hands. He saw white thighs, white, wide, very
soft, very penetrable ... hers ... darkly penetrable; they were the
stuff of his flesh, they were the stuff of his brain and they were
pierced by someone!... He saw rootflesh of a man ... _not he!_ piercing
the stuff of his brain.
He got up. Her face was still low where his face had been. Her face was
near his feet. His feet touched her face.
“Our Lord has spoken,” he said, “and I throw no stone.”
She was very still, her face low above his feet. Listening with a firm
stillness her body was hard and she held her face above his feet.
“Our Lord has spoken further!--‘_But I say unto you, that whosoever
shall put away his wife saving for the cause of fornication causeth her
to commit adultery._’ So has said our Lord.”
She was moveless.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Rise up.”
“Let me here, dearest, try to tell you all. Try to tell you what I know
now I must: how I was helpless, how I was poisoned dead ... how I was
lifted up.”
“Get up.”
“O Harry, Harry ... I have killed you, too.”
“Get up, I say.”
She lifted her face, furrowed with tears, to his.
“I did not choose, Beloved, the Way I was saved....”
“Do you put that on God? or on Christ who has spoken against you?”
“When has He spoken against me?” Fanny Luve stood silently before him.
“He has spoken against you ... even He. He has said: Cast no stone. No
stone shall be cast by me. He has said: Put her away....”
Her hands clenched under his mouth.
“--and I put you away.”
“You put me away!”
“I put you away.... Not for myself. I must travel. It is my mission to
travel from College to College. I must be away much from my home,
bringing where I can to my brothers the Word ... the Word of our Lord
who puts you away. I put you away ... for the sake of my child.”
“Whom you have never seen!”
“Whom you shall never see--“
_THREE_
WHITE SKY
Fanny Dirk Luve stood on the Bridge where she could see the river up and
down.
--I know what I am going to do. I know. Not die. Not going to see--What
can I--? Since she knew, “Why! Why!” she said aloud.
She searched the world trying to find the anguish--I am not going to
die!... of what she was to do.--Why not? But she knew that.... Not die.
Not see her child.... She saw the river.
The river came to her from trees. The city, a raised shadow near her
eyes, pulled her eyelids down away from there beyond, where she lay once
on her back. She lies on her back. Under: grass, roots thrusting in
erection, spilling in bud. Over: he.... From these trees came the river
... from this past ... flowing like the dimension that was time upon her
standing on the Bridge. Time and the river were one. It swept upon her
from the past of trees, past of sweet love, thrust against her, surging
resistless; it was going to overwhelm her. Where? Time and the river
flung in a stroke eternally sure against her standing dry in
anguish--love an edged steel--on the Bridge. She turned. It turned her.
Time and the river sweeping from rootage and trees struck her now in the
back. She saw where it flowed.
It flowed into flat land. A rugose strewing of rust and yard and factory
was the flat land. The city in the heights fell down from its proud
mansions--through dawdling soiled cottages, through clustered
shanties--fell to the flat land of rust and coal. Slow brackish river
here, turmoiled ... full. It swirled in oil, it recoiled from the harsh
thrusts of the makings of men--of junkyards. River and time stole
through this newness of noise and filth away, in a filmy scarf of
smoke-bitten locusts, beyond the eyes of Fanny. She felt in her back the
subtle thrust of a beginning world of high-banked trees free in the air:
how it fell, grew, now hurling through noise, dirt, misery--making,
struggle to make!--to beyond her eyes that lay so wistfully against the
dying locusts, unable to fall farther.
And at her side the city fell along. From its secluded shadow--warmed
mansions fell with her along into a rising clatter of smoke, a foam of
steel, huddling men moving.... Mist.
Black-purple mist ... red rust ... the shriek of wheels crunching
resistless against and upon steel lines thrust resistless also.
Fanny left the Bridge....
* * * * *
In one hand of Fanny was a valise. Her other hand was a fist.
Her mouth asking for a ticket shut fast. Her hand counting change shut
fast. She sat in a train, shut.
The moving train worked at her, stole up in her, swayed, shook, pried
her open. Her feet in the opening rhythm of the train. Her legs. Her
loins. Warm loins. Breasts, not so frozen, melting. Her head, erect on
her frozen breast, now plunged in their melting. She sat in a train,
open.... She lay in a hot bath of her melted pain and life, flowing
within it, open.
She had no sense of a world of objects--fragments to beat against her.
She was all melted hot. She had a sense of the whole world ... whole
worlds ... all ... falling. The train fell sure, it was sure of itself
in its fall. It fell with the world it held so sure, so steadfast; it
was a blessing so. She had the sense of the whole world falling in a
stark cadence upward upon God. Tears, battle ecstacy of loss ... a
falling somehow upward upon God.
Her hands gripped the plush arms, shrill sharp against the quick of her
nails. The world was her world again, and was a delirious tangle of
broken objects hurling against her eyes. She was bruised and aghast in
the rain of broken objects of her world. But that which she had sensed
in the melt of worlds remained. All fell upward ... let her pray!--can I
dare?... fell upward upon God.
--I am falling away. Grappling, crying, she saw at last how real was
this falling away from the whole warm world of her sorrows and joys and
wants.--_Edith, Harry; myself, O Edith my heart!_ It is true. _Can I
fall upward?_ ...
The fast train seemed to be running over her life. It ran over an earth
full of flying fragments. Over houses, fence snapping, cows dipped
sudden into trees, pool flaring skyward, cloud-full, caught in the
porch of a house, road ribboning a tobacco-field, shaken straight, road
stiff like a rod flashing away beneath her.--This is Virginia, this is
I. The fast train running over her life smoothed it clear....
She could have remained and fought him for her child, she could not. She
could have remained and won him ... repulsive ... she could not. She
moved upon a track that was there she sensed before her moving upon it.
But Edith! What sort of a life is this, moving away from Edith? The pain
of her deprival was a thousand pains, gray: a thousand gray birds
circling her in mist.--I am suffering, suffering. Can I stand this? The
mists cleared. She saw her Pain clear ... one Pain ... one moment. Pain.
She saw that it was not a thousand pains, weeping in gray wings mistily
about her. She saw that it was Life.
Life solid and salient.
--_What is this terror? What have I to do with this terror?_
_You are within it!_
... Like this Virginia, an unbroken sweep, broken alone by the unwonted
stress of the dimension of moving. One can face solid. One has two eyes
and a mind for facing solid.... She loved her daughter.--I love you,
love you! More things she loved. Not Harry perhaps, O yes ... the warm
dreams she had born in Harry. The house around Edith. Clean beds, linen
her own, the kitchen where she came each day and the apron she tied
about her hips and the hips too she loved which arms must circle she was
sure of. Edith’s. Home, daughter, man ... why were they all destroyed?
--But they have never been.
What have they been?... pool of my blood of dream.
Stagnant and dead: pool of my clotted blood.
My dream’s blood flows!
It was true. Bleeding to death? Bleeding to birth? She did not know. But
flowing.
“God, let me think!” The words came aloud.--God, let me think! now
silent....--Edith? Yes, Edith was flowing alive. But Edith was not
herself, not _her_ blood flowing. Edith’s blood flowing. Let it flow for
Edith.
Fanny sat shaken in a mother’s storm. Help for her child. Could her
child flow first alone? Where was the mother to help her? Father? Fanny
sat trembling. She saw him, as he oldens in the cant moulds of his
ideals. Harry, pious, weak, stale ... leading the life of her child.
What did she have of her father?--If she is like her father let her rot!
But now would she not surely be like him? She alone could save her child
from that. _She alone could, who could not._ ... The train ran.... Fanny
saw the Town, it would be the world of her child growing, of her child
learning to live in the world. World of such women! Edith’s blue eyes,
open beneath the dimpled softness of her brows, behold a world of such
women ... the only world! Stiff brittle creatures, floating upon the
viscid surface of a stream they have no weight to pierce. And their
Laws: “Have no weight, have no thrust that might pierce the viscid
surface of our stream.” World of such men! Liars, builders of lies, men
taught to pray to Christ and to cheat their fellows, to cheat their
women and wear them ... trim them then wear them ... taught to ignore
half of the aching world that was black.--Let me go back to Edith! O let
me go back!... The train ran smooth.--You may not.
Fanny faced the dead of her heart. She felt the world of her child
clear, how it stank, how it swarmed like an evil stinking weed sucking
the soil of God. She saw the blue eyes of her girl. They stood upon a
body, white and clear like a flower: and all about, the Weed, swarming
and purulent with its harsh roots sucking soil, with its hot leaves
stealing sun.--What can I do? She faced she could do nothing. Yet
reasonably something. Fight ... pursuade. There was reason with the cry
of her mangled heart that there was much she could do. _Turn back._ The
train, racing, swept her eyes upon a world lying folded in myriad skies,
a world solid, a world one with space and stars ... space solid joined
her to the stars as her white body joined her eyes to her limbs. One.
And Edith within it, flowing her way. Ruthlessly hers....--Let her blood
flow for her.
Fanny facing the dead of her heart faced the life of failure. She knew
at last she could live.
The train swam into a strewing of neat flat houses, cut across asphalt.
A marble Dome in sun rose above smoke of roofs. Washington!... Leon’s
home.--I must change here. Every hour New York trains every ... get
there by day, though.
Fanny walked through a city incredibly neat.--Very fine. Government
world. Fine and dead. It has not started to grow, it has not started to
be. It is easy and fine, like a nonexistence.
Her feet were heavy as if she were walking in space.
“When, God,” she said aloud, “do I begin to think?”
* * * * *
She stood halted by a building. She knew which building it was.---- He
is inside! Of course perhaps he is inside no longer. It was a gray pile
rising in numberless piddling columns to the white of the sky. It was
cold. She looked at it. “I am not going in.”
He was perfect in her. Why should she go in to take from him perfection?
She was afraid for his perfection.--How can he be this holy man in this
grave? The Government Building stood like an insolent lackey fending her
off. It glared at her and was very insecure and stupid within its
ruffles of marble. It strutted its turrets before her like a vain proud
bird.--He is perfect. He is done. He is no more. He is buried here. She
felt a great need to see him.
She knew she must not. “I must seek you,” she whispered against the
mounting marble, “differently.”
She walked and knew that Leon Dannenberg who was in each of her steps,
in each of her pangs, in each leap forward of her blood was forever
beyond her eyes.--Here you are, holy man. Where am I? There you are.
She walked away. A vast openness was upon her flank, it ached sweetly as
if her blood poured through it. An open longing lay upon her flesh as if
she walked away from him who had given her birth.--You are behind. Not
so far behind as Edith. Nearer, holy man. Farther ahead.
But as she walked the inept city, a scene came and it filled her. She
gave herself her scene fully, voluptuously ... starving ... while the
long buildings passed her in a squad of uniformed dull giants.
He is up from a wide desk. He says no word, looking deep in her eyes.
One instant doubt as to the full free independence of her coming. Doubt
goes before the intelligence of her eyes. He took her hands, very
lightly, released them.
“I am going North. I am on my way North.”
“How can I help you?”
“You have helped me all you can.”
“He came back ... you told him?”
She nodded.
“He did not understand?”
“How could we expect he should understand? Would I? Do I?... if this all
was not mine ...?”
“It is good, Fanny Luve. Go ahead.”
His face sudden is like a field under a sky of longing: a sun came
down; his face glows in tender fear: it shadows to resolution.
“You must go North. We can’t understand. I can see, you are going
right.”
“How can you see that, Leon?”
“No day since I left have you been far from me. You come into my
thinking, my dreaming, into my sudden flying visions. You measure
yourself always with them, with the best of them, Fanny. You measure
full with them.”
“What you have said I could have said.”
His eyes came very near. They filled with tears of her. He looked away.
“But I am vague. O Leon, so blind!”
“You are no longer afraid of being blind. You are ready.”
“_Leon, what am I going to be?_”
“We are no longer prophets ... save in our lives. Live, Fanny.”
“Leon, I could fight.... I could win her, I could save her.”
“No, Fanny ... you are going to live.”
“I ... and Edith?”
“_You_....”
She walked with mouth tear-brimmed and open out of her fancied words.
She saw about her with relentless eyes, felt with relentless feet, this
hard pavement, these hard houses, hard white sky. Out of the deep scene
came now upon her, as her mouth shut, clearer and more solid than the
stone city his last words:
“You, Fanny ... not Edith, _you_ ... are to live.”
Clear feet carried body erect through the stone city. Mother worlds in
blood poured from her, leaving white feet, white body, while the soul of
Fanny swooned in a ruthless knowledge.
_FOUR_
PAVEMENT OVER EARTH
A man and a woman walked this day with Autumn burning all about them.
The sun lay in thin cloud. The trees burst.
“I have found out, Fanny,” he said.
She was so shorter than he and her steps swifter than his long lurches.
She felt him from his broad brown halfshoes upward ... big fleshly man,
somehow lithe, somehow gentle like song above his crude-rhythming feet.
And his hairy great hands she felt--as when they were on her body like a
little child’s, so helpless yearning, so imperious.
“I knew I should find out if I gave myself the space to: that’s why I
brought you up here. We came yesterday. This morning I know ... that I
have known since the day you came into the Office asking for a job.”
She laughed.--I can laugh!
“O I see your thought: ‘That’s the conventional phrase.’”
“ ...from Christopher Johns!”
“Maybe he’s been so durn unconventional these forty years because he
hadn’t found himself. Maybe he feels, now he can look at last straight
at you and himself and understand, it’d be good to be conventional: like
rolling in warm blankets which the hard days’ work has paid for.”
She felt the dissonance of her feet striking the rutted road beside his.
“There must have been a frost last night.”
“Look at that maple! It’s a blazing red, because there was a frost.”
She looked. He was keeping step.
“I mean it, Fanny. It’s nearly two years since I’ve known you ... nearly
two years you’ve worked for me ... one year we’re--well--lovers though I
fear the word for the rare wonder you have given me--why, why? But now
it is a blossom of knowing, a whole Spring of knowing, woman! There has
been Sylvia _Frau_, there has been Sadie. I chuck ’em both, and when it
is done we marry.”
“Jonathan! I want you to walk quiet ... miles and miles beside me quiet,
today all day--do you understand? I am listening for something.”
She knew he would, clutching his stick behind him in two fists.
Two years ... they tramped ... two years....
--You are Fanny Dirk, Mrs. Luve.... I’ll keep that name! And you have
gotten tired already, tired of what if you look and face it you will
find all bundled and labelled in two years. Labelled to know, Bundled
... to throw out! That’s clear, though the facing, the training of my
eyes and the opening of my mind to hold what I face, is going to be
hard.... Here is an autumn day and a dear man trudging so you are alone
with it. Day of glory, day of flame, day of death. The leaves are
singing for they are going to fall. The trees are singing for they are
going to sleep. The world is a maze of trumpeting insects, loomed with
flutters of dry grass, trill of seed, for soon comes snow stillness. O
Fanny, once you were Springtime! I hear a man talk blossom and I feel
September. The bundles ... the labels ... two years inventoried! Aren’t
you a business woman, Fanny, earning two thousand a year? A year ... two
years. Each year has a Spring and a Fall. A third year might green if
you burn away like these trees.
“It is simply,” she whispered to herself, and the man watched her mouth:
“do I want to green like these trees?... When will I learn to think?”
She knew already what was to be.
She struggled only, she gave this full free day in the air only, to know
Why. Did not the world have reasons? She had suffered losing two lives
that grew within her flesh. She had asked Why, and in the questioning
been rent away so even these agonies were dim: they were worlds dead
like dim moons in the dawn of her adventure. And that adventure was Why!
--Why shall I say No very soon ... so very soon? Why am I going to leave
the warm of this dear man, the ease, the goodness of it all--why am I
going to push him back into new Emptiness?
She saw him that first day: his arms thrust out, nervous arms, haggard
hands, hair wet ... _business man_! this big bumping child, bumping in
Emptiness? Dear ... so good (she could see that at once as of a horse
and a dog all in one, and his life a currycomb brushing wrong, a bone
marrowless): now, back he goes into worse Emptiness. Why?
--Tell me trees....
I am not tired, I am rested.
In the arms of this man, with my face turned away, I have rested.
I can bear what you tell me....
I am hard like you.
... That afternoon, the ninth of beating about on pavement until
pavement tumored upward through her legs, her bowels, her blood,
stiffened her brain ... that afternoon she had felt strong again
sudden.--So this is Business? this soft flesh in the hard City?
“Mr. Johns, you must let me have that place,” she told him very calmly.
The next day she hung her coat on the costumer in the corner away from
the open window. A grey wall rose beyond eyes, shrill greenish white
electric bulbs blazed, shutting them all together, papers typewriter
woman and desks and murmur beyond: she found she wished to smile.
Solid New York! Solid New York relieved her burden of no base. She had
visited New York before: she felt the City deep, having in that past
surface of her life beheld its surface. She sensed an analogue. She too
had not changed but had gone down below her surface to a turmoiled
depth. Within still deeper was there not a quiet, as now she sensed the
Quiet of the City under its torrential streets and its human million
midges of fire through stone? Thus New York welcomed her: it was a place
where people dwelt and had dwelt long, so she could feel it was a place
where people dwelt. Her Southern City, ... almost as old, was dead where
old, was raw and unaccustomed where it was new ... its industrial heart
of smoke, its outskirts of prim bungalows. Here was a City _one_: the
place she knew for such as she to come to.
--Such as I?
Loving New York so sudden above the agony of her intimate deprivals, she
said: “We are something in common, you and I.” She and the wide solid
City that untouched her frail and bloody inwardness ... lifting her up
to a light where she could seek what this thing meant, this I.
In the Office was Clara Lonergan.
When she spoke to persons, particularly when she spoke to Clara, Fanny
lost her quiet City: New York became a pullulent pile, a heaving surface
above a boil of blood. So Fanny did not seek out persons, she feared
that City.--Do I not need to seek myself? She feared the self that was
like it. But Clara, she knew at once, she was not to avoid.
She saw in a glance that she was supposed to remove her hat. She took a
seat demurely, her heart compressed and moving up and down as she
breathed fragilely. She felt how all within her was fragile and was
surrounded by a solid world. Miss Lonergan smiled:
“I guess Mr. Johns will see about you pretty soon,” and went into his
Office. Her smile alone of the outside world also was fragile.
So Fanny sat demurely. Beyond her was a long dark room filling with
girls. She heard their footfalls in the hall: at times through the wired
glass of the door she caught faces ... face sallow hungry, face angrily
uplifted toward sun and laughter by the means of rouge, face resigned in
sweet debility.... That one will marry. As feet cadenced the hard cement
Fanny’s heart fluttered. The door swung; voices angled against the feet
and the door, escaping in this brief interim of home and work in
allusive herd-calls: Fanny felt thrust away. Each voice and footfall
thrust her. She struggled to be back.
--I am of you, now, she argued to herself. A little older than most. O
in life so older!... But I am one of you now.
The door opening from the private Office called her sharp up. Miss
Lonergan came in, seated herself with fingers already rustling at her
pad. Mr. Johns loomed before her.
“Good morning. Good morning.”
He stood with his feet apart and his toes turned out. Fanny observed how
his knees flexed inward, how his legs aburst in their drab trowsers
flexed and gave her mind the same thought as his ruffled hands and hair:
made her smile.
“Well now,” he was saying, “you two said anything yet to each other? get
acquainted yet? no explanations?” He turned from the one woman to the
other. “You’ll be friends. O all of us’ll be friends. What could be more
companionable after all than to engage in the business of soft drinks
... making Delight Drinks for the thirsty people....”
Miss Lonergan struck a key of her machine. _Click_, she smiled.--I can’t
wait for your nonsense. _Click clicket click...._
“You see,” went on Mr. Johns, “the people get hot and what cools em off
is ice. But they wont pay for ice. Not much! Ice is ice ... nameless. We
don’t furnish ice. They pay for our lovely game of names,” he handed
Fanny a list. “So we send the names in the liquid forms, to the candy
men and the soda men: and _they_ put in the ice: and the ice cools the
people: and the people pay us.”
He flourished clumsily. His face glowed open about his clear blue eyes.
“Will you come, Mrs. Luve?” His head serious now thrust back. “I want to
show you the girls you are here to take care of.”
* * * * *
“Why I live on Twenty-First Street. That’s right near.”
“Let’s walk,” said Clara.
New York was open letting the calm day in. An afternoon of May ... made
of the scent of far young grass, the swayings of far trees, the slopings
of far hills ... lay above the streets where Fanny and Clara walked:
came down, feathery certain into the open City, into their eyes and
limbs. They walked languorous through a sleepy city lying like a
brittle-kneed woman under the loved day. The City glowed with half
responses ... new. The angle of a street falling away from the straight
street where they walked was a gesture of pleasaunce. Above the clotted
people the dim houses leaned gently together, making a haze of memory
above the urgence of people. The streets turned angles leisurely: a
Square beyond them was an invitation like a hand open or a mouth
relaxed, the swerve of the Elevated train on the near Bowery was a
stroke that caressed.
“You are from the South, I can hear that. Have you been here long?”
“About a month,” said Fanny.
“I was born here. I wonder what it’s like, coming to New York.”
“New York is easy to come to.”
“Do people come here happy?”
Fanny did not want to look at Clara. The day was lazy and round, falling
into night. “Why do you ask that?” she said.
“O I don’t know.... I was just wondering--why do they come to New York.”
“Why did your parents come?”
“My father’s family was starving in Wicklow. Pa was a boy and no use at
home ploughing more fields for a grabbing landlord. So he came. He
wasn’t happy coming. Mother I don’t remember very well, she came from a
place near Pressberg in Bohemia. She was so lovely always ... tall and
so sweet ... and always so tired. I guess they were all just tired--her
whole family came--they couldn’t keep still. I’ve been tired that way.
I’d keep moving and moving. I’d say to myself; Now Clara if you’ll just
try and stop and _sit down_ you’ll be better. I couldnt. Something like
that I’ve felt in all the foreigners ... Czechs and Dagos and Bohunks
... I have ever seen. Something in ’em I guess got too tired to hold on,
to stay on, they had to move ... and there’s America all ready, a chute
like in the cowpens I’ve seen over in Brooklyn ready to swallow ’em up
as they come tumblin’. Heaven knows where those foreigners get their
idea of us.”
She was taller than Fanny, slimmer.--She cant be more than eighteen.
Fanny’s heart went out, clamorous, sudden ... stopped against a strength
and a maturity she felt. With her heart’s warmth she saw this girl.
Saw sharp against the day’s languor the long face, clear dark, with
narrowing thrust chin from the full mouth, cheeks high and delicate,
brow faintly curving and sheer beneath the black hair. Saw in the soft
fabric of her waist nervous elbows thrusting outward always as she
walked, against air, against world. Saw the whole taut tender body in a
world less clear, ever less fair than her dark freshness. Saw at last as
they stopped: “Well I go here. See you to-morrow” ... eyes very black
very large, dry and within themselves like windows of some hidden world
having no faith in the sun.
--I have lost what you have not yet begun to make. Yet my hand is softer
than yours! Fanny knew it was a thing which must change: that her hand
was softer. She walked the swirling Spring-drunk dusty streets with
thoughts of this girl and her hand.
* * * * *
She had a room which she had come to love. It was upstairs in the back
of an old red brick house: it was oblong, square-buttressed by its
honest doors painted white, its two wide windows and its low grey
ceiling. She had spent eight dollars to remove the acid-red carnations
blotching a sea of green bars on the walls ... (“I want you to scrape
first, not paper over it”) ... then clad her room in a dull buff. The
walls were bare. The landlady grumblingly took out the wide iron bed,
leaving her a couch. The carved oak table, the bastard Empire chairs
were distributed to the rest of the lodgers and replaced by plain ones
from the storeroom. She took off her hat, let down her hair, put
slippers on her feet and drew a chair to the wind. The day was more
darkly textured but still clear. An ailanthus flaunting half naked
through its tinselly leaves thrust above fence and tesselate brick walls
between her and the grey rear of a Church. Beside the Church, a small
house receded, built of the same dim sooty stone. On Sundays, the sun
vaulted the cluttered roofs at just about the time that a hymn,
many-voiced, shone through the corner of the stained-glass window which
she could glimpse on the protruding side. There was a little grass plot.
It was littered with dust and ash bits, fluffs of drifting textile: but
now sod pushed bravely up in a dim green. On the high fence at the side
away from the Church, among clusters like sunrays of iron spikes,
clothes-lines were drawn. A servant was busy taking in the wash.
The girl’s arms reached up, loosed clothes-pins, dropped her armsfull in
a basket. The girl’s arms reached up.... Fanny lost herself in the dull
catatony. She was tired. She held her eyes beyond her. Dimly behind she
felt a world she did not wish to turn to: world where there were
wash-lines and a girl her own.... Industrious, this girl. A young man
stepped from the kitchen door of the house. The girl’s arms, full of
tableclothes, suspended against her breast. He spoke to her, she nodded:
disposed her burden. She was bent before him, he leaned down and kissed
her. He stepped back, his arms and hands and shoulders, his feet and
hips throwing out little splintery signals of his panic. He wore the
cloth of the Church. Then the girl straightened, lifted her hands to her
broad hips and smiled. The little curate’s splintering commotion melted.
He kissed her again. They went together into the kitchen.
Fanny sat very still. She felt that the muscles of her throat and legs
and chest were tense, holding her still.
--What is the matter?
The world dim behind her eyes bellied out ... swallowed the cool grey
scene before her of a backyard, a flirting servant and a Church. A
Church! Fanny swung around in her chair. She was circled now by a world
no longer dim. She asked no question. Like one dropped sudden into a
sea, she swam.
She swam to get out. Not yet ... some day ... she must swim in the other
direction, away from shore, away from shore ... swim, swim till she
sank. But something within her told her she was not ready. This dullness
upon her mind, this fog fending her heart that was there since the
month she was gone: let it be there longer. Was it beginning to part?
--Why am I here? I am afraid to ask why I am here. Solid New York, bear
me up! Longer, your cold surface, lift me, hold me!
She swam to get out. She was up from her chair. Humming a tune she did
not hear or know of, she lighted the gas: she clasped her short thick
hair and thrust it atop her head. The gas danced hard on her eyes and
her black hair. She lighted her little stove: she put water to boil: she
was very busy swimming to get out.
And when she had drunk two coddled eggs and eaten an orange, she took
the blue cover from her couch, folded it carefully away, threw wide her
windows: and with the light of the downtown heavens falling in sprays
and fluffs of murmurous gold against her sombre carpet, she lay down.
Soon she slept.
* * * * *
Work gripped her. Mr. Johns was delighted with her way of work.
“Dont kill yourself, Mrs. Luve.”
She smiled wistfully. “I shant die.”
He looked at her warmly. “You say that as if you knew.”
“I know.”
“Perhaps you don’t know the deadliness of New York.”
“I’m not ready yet,” she announced half to herself.
“You’re a bad example,” he caressed her with bluff words, “of Southern
indolence.”
“I’m a New Yorker,” she said and went back to her girls.
Always she knew this could not last. Yet always life came easier, easier
... in its harsh brusque work, in its biting flavor of intercourse with
Mr. Johns, with Clara.
Each night as she lay down to sleep, the question stood before her: Why?
A question like a single point of steel piercing so many lives, piercing
so many loves, all bleeding-spitted upon it. But she slept quick. She
slept heavy. In her sleep, if it was parted at all, merely the Question
again, rising up, up, out of sight like an infinite steel point: she was
impaled on it: but bloodless already. She lay there quiet, impaled. She
had no responsibility since she was bloodless already. And in the
morning, when she awoke there was work.
She entered the Office a breath of wistful quiet, a cloud of gentle
moisture moving upon a sultry day. All who were there unthinking were
glad, when she entered the Office.
Clara found herself glad when she was with her. In the cooling dusk of
summer they walked homeward: at times they dined together: quiet words
went from each to each, no depths articulate and yet there was a peace.
Fanny looked at her friend as they ate in silence.
--Know everything! There is naught in me I do not wish you to know. But
know it silent. She would have been happy to be of help to Clara.
Summer was a full time in the Sales Office of _Delight Drinks Inc._ Even
so there came pause. Slack hours lounged in the hot rooms. Rooms,
writhed in the dry green blare of the electric lights, burning like
sores against the summer’s sultry and drab dampness, came to a halt,
jolted against their usual flow, stood glazed and ominous upon the dark
grain of Time.
As in a crowded car suddenly broken from its speed the passengers
congest, fall huddled upon each other, so Fanny’s girls piled heavy
moist against the soul of Fanny. She sat at her desk with her hands laid
before her. The girls at long tables opened the envelopes of orders,
marked blanks and sheets, sorted by geographical location, placed in
trays. The girls yawned together ... sudden the girls were One, with
moist throat running down in dusty waist, with bare arm brushing sweat
from brow, with body crowded lush in a narrow skirt, under narrow table,
into narrow shoes. They were a body breathing and sweating in a smoulder
of will to lie out naked near a lapping sea under cool winds ... cool
lips. She loved the girls.
--O if I could show you how I understand!
--Why do I understand?
Here with these girls, her life could come and she face it. Question no
longer. Her life was a way, here, tender and passionate and simple,
leading into the hearts of a dozen girls.
--I am all open. You do not come in.
I am all open. I come into you.
“It’s a hot afternoon, girls.”
“Gee ... yes!”
“What do you say to a round of lemonade?”
Surface of scared wills against a whirling world. But here all was quiet
and sweet, and all was in herself. She could look at each girl, see a
face already bitten and shrunk by the acids of life. But she looked in
herself, and each hurt, each struggle was a throb within her ... they
were healed.
“Good! You, Daisie, you know that Italian’s on the corner? Let’s collect
five cents each--only those who want it though! You go out, dear, and
bring up a pitcher ... two pitchers.” As Daisie bustled by, she slipped
a quarter holding the little calloused hand just long enough to give two
messages: “Buy some cookies or something with that” and her heart’s
fullness.
--What do I understand? now she asked herself as the room waited,
spinning in expectancy, released in laughter and jest and stretching of
arms from Time.
--There is something beautiful ... in the understanding? in what? O life
how you hurt! O life, how when one holds you warm and athrob in one’s
heart, you are good, hurting!
The lemonade came: giggles and smacking lips softened the blare of the
lights. “One can live,” Fanny murmured sipping her sweet drink, ...
“without questions.” The room went its way up Time’s black tunnel. The
girls’ congestion broke. They were one and one and one. They were many
girls, now, some sweet, some bitter, some bright, some dull, some brave,
some ugly and broken. They were many girls at work: they opened
envelopes, marked blanks and sheets, sorted and marked ... they droned
in many minds about little shut circles of thought, each shut from the
other circles: circles spun about their many heads, colliding,
rebounding, spinning away alone....
--One can live without asking questions. Not you. One can live spinning
and droning. Not you. One can weave a steel sheet between one’s heart
and one’s mind. Not you. Lord, I shall think. I promise, Lord.... I
shall remember that I have suffered and died, that I am here, to
think.... Lord, just a little longer.
* * * * *
Fanny walked home alone, avoiding Clara. In the dim afternoon the City
was solid. Houses were made of stone and brick and were held up in their
vast weights by pavements.
Pavements solid strong, hold me up also.
You hold these crowds, you hold these walls.
Solid City, do not let me fall.
Fanny walked tense through the slack afternoon, helping to hold herself.
Her trip from the South was there. She runs swift, relaxed, through the
world. She falls through the world in a train, falls upward. She falls
upward upon God. _Hold me, City._
In her room, the Church. Her fists clenched.
“I am going to move,” she muttered, her breath was angry. She hated ...
she hated. “Damn that Church! it blots out most of the sun.”
Down she went, deliberate, to the kitchen. Old Mrs. Deemis bent
rhythmically over a padded board ironing towels.
“Hot, eh? Mrs. Luve.”
“Yes.”
“Anything I kin do for you, dearie?” the woman filled the pause. Her
gray hair fell in wet patches over her wide bland forehead. “Never you
hesitate if there’s anything I kin do for ye, now.”
Fanny, quailing before her sudden resolve to give notice, sat in a
chair.
“You couldn’t remove that Church for me, could you, Mrs. Deemis?”
Mrs. Deemis stamped the steaming iron with elbows right-angled to the
board.
“Now, will you believes me, Mrs. Luve, I wisht I could!”
Fanny tried to laugh.--Haven’t I been joking?
“You mean Saint--acrost the way there, don’t you? They own this house,
and they’re the meanest landlords ... the downright stingiest, meanest
landlords, now, you ever seen. I been here twenty years. On the first of
the month, it’s the rent quick, you bet. But if it’s the roof that
leaks, or the plumbin’ that stinks--O any year’ll do for fixin’ that.”
“This is Church property,” murmured Fanny.
“Yes ... _this_....” Mrs. Deemis flourished the dismal kitchen with its
seeping walls, its crumbling plaster ceiling, its ooze rotted floor,
into the eyes of Fanny.
“How can I live on Church property,” Fanny thought aloud.
“Why!... Mrs. Luve!” Mrs. Deemis doubted her ears. “What’d ye say? Beg
pardon?”
“They’re rotten landlords?”
“Well now ... of course.... I dont say they’re no _worse_....”
“The Church takes the sun from my window, Mrs. Deemis. I love the sun.”
“Why you aint never there? You work. What do ye need the sun for?...
Dont blame the Church for that, my dear. You must be fair. If ’twasnt
the Church wouldn’t it be one of these here ... now ... factories or
office-buildings?”
“---- taking the sun,” murmured Fanny and saw the once more ploughing
arms of the old lady.
“You aint thinkin’ of leaving, Mrs. Luve? Cause ... that’s a fine room
... kin rent----“
“Why no.” Fanny got up. “No, I shant move. I love my room. But if you
could be so obliging as to remove that Church....” She laughed with her
eyes gleaming differently from laughter.
Upstairs she lowered the shades. She undressed. Naked, she saw in the
glass that she still wore her hat. Her brow ached. She let fall her
hair, letting her cold hands run through its electric dusk. Ungowned in
her sheet she lay through the thick night with hands clasping her arms
beneath her breasts. She lay dreamless, moving very fast. When she awoke
it was late and she knew she had gone far. There were red furrows deep
in the flesh of her arms.
The night following ... sudden she emerged from the hot fog that held
her. She is in the Church. Naked she stands before a stately mirror
whose gold-tooled pediment crowned the blaze of her black hair and eyes.
She struck her breasts with a firm fist. “You are cast out, you are
vomited by Love.” She stands there burning in cold shame. Her mouth is
open, and from it, like a white water, runs a moan. “What does it mean?
Christ, what does it mean? Why was I hurt so? Why was I so given a high
thought, high dream? I have been hurt. O Christ how it hurts so to be
hurt without a meaning. Why?”
--_This is a Church!_ She knew that Christ was coming. He was a man whom
she knew. She could not see him, standing there beyond her: but each
nerve of her lay in the impact of his presence.--He sees me! It was
right that he should look upon her naked and shamed.--It is good, it is
good. He looks on me and that is good. He looks on me because my hurt is
an unmeaning hurt....
Her half-opened eyes, her half-shut hands, her outstretched knees and
her thighs touched the warm smoothness of her bedclothes.--I am so
tired! It was good in bed. She slept.
She walked downtown in the young summer morning. The air had a coolness
like lilacs after rain. A man passed. Coming closer, sheer, the sight of
the man tugged on the cheek and on the neck of Fanny. A man old and
bent. Grey beard tangled from a face long furrowed: the eyes were blue
and gentle and the brow was untouched.... His beard was a grey prayer.
His face was his life. Above his life was his brow like a dawn above
storm. “He was a Jew,” she whispered to herself. Then she remembered her
dreaming and her moan.
* * * * *
... Something within her said: “There is no hurry.” Much within her
said: “You have no life, you are broken. Why alive? You are broken and
flayed by life. Life without what you have lost is a mere agony dying
down, a slow starving, a slow suffocation.” But something within her
said: “There is no hurry.”
Something within her stirred to say: “Even your hurt has a soul. Even
the insult lying in your heart has a soul.” Then her hands worked
faster. She had eyes then for her girls toiling in their mute slavery,
that brought out love, like a cool mist rising from a morning sun, into
the dismal workroom.
At times, eating her meat and enjoying it, laughing alone at a show, she
found in herself assurance ... mad and blind howsoever ... like a babe’s
lying within a womb.
She asked herself doubtingly: “You have been unhappier having, than now
when you are empty. Perhaps I am dead!”
Each thought and pain, pushing forth from her, could not leave the mist
of her strange slumber. So that she could not be unhappy. For
unhappiness is the departure of ourselves from ourselves, the adventure
beyond us of our hearts and eyes. Fanny was caught in her pregnant
slumber. Her consciousness was like a maze of creatures crawling about a
Sphere who cannot leave its surface: who cannot conceive of aught within
or without its surface: creatures of two dimensions spanning a Globe
about and about ... and yet unable to know it.
* * * * *
It had been hot, this day: now late, sultry clouds pressed like steel on
the pulsant City. Dust rose in a great wind. The Office seemed to plunge
through a sea of dust and steel cloud.
The others were gone: in the suddenly dark room, Fanny worked alone with
Mr. Johns. He examined her books, leaning over her, just above her
shoulder, breathing palpably there in the dark room.
A gust of wind from the gray window scattered a pile of papers, Johns’
hand came flat on the table.
“It’s going to rain,” he said.
“Yes.”
He strode to the window and shut it.
“That wont be too hot? All these papers will blow, I’m afraid.”
“It’s cooler, already.”
It was not cooler. The shut window made the dark room plunge and stifle.
Fanny felt ill. Her hands ran over the sharp cool sheets of paper. The
nerves of the palms of her hands were shrill.
“Is that all, Mr. Johns?”
“There’s the whole South yet! We’d better see how they’re drinking down
in the South.”
“O yes....”
“You wouldn’t forget the South?”
A picture bright like a knife ... this her house, the garden, Edith in
her blue bassinette ... cut her and filled the room.
--Get away! get away!
“Now--first, Virginia--“
“Yes.”--Get away! O my baby! O Harry! How could you? Couldn’t you
understand? Yet? Where are you Edith?... “This was at Flora’s
table.”--Get away!
She talked. Her words were dim, she could not see her words. She went on
talking ... strong hands gripped her arms near her shoulders, turned
her. A long heavy face--red and kind--thrust bewilderment upon her eyes
that could not see her words.
“Mrs. Luve!”
--Your face is different: heavier, solider ... could it hurt so?
“Mrs. Luve!”
--Your hair is not silky. Silk cuts. Silk cuts.
“Mrs. Luve! what is the matter?”
He placed her in a chair. The window flew open. Steel cool night flooded
in. The room righted.
“Excuse me, Mr. Johns.... I--I reckon I--I was faint a bit. Let’s go
on.”
“There’s no hurry.”
--He’s looking at me. And I can’t see my words. I am talking. I must
talk. Do my words stand between me and him? O they must.... Silk only
cuts.... She stopped.
Her heart was weary.--If you must see, you big good man, then see. I can
fend no more. I let go. She covered her face one moment with her hands.
No tears. Her head lifted, eyes blazing.
“Well,” she said, “have you seen enough? Have you had enough! Coward!”
A heavy hand lay gently upon hers. Gentle hand outstretched from a long
arm.... O how long! and there, vastly beyond as in a dream, this man:
solid red good.
“Quiet,” his hand spoke to her. The other hand. “Quiet.” Fanny jumped
up.
She saw him there, and that he was frightened.
--He is frightened by me, he is frightened about me! He cares because he
sees me in pain. He is worried about me. Impossible, impossible. Right
this!
Fanny’s scream knifed through the grayness. Then she was clear. She
stood there, seeing him in the dark room, clear.
He saw her clarity: his brow clouded.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought you were sick: you seemed
hysterical, Mrs. Luve. I meant only to quiet you.”
“Your hand you mean? It was good. Thank you for your hand, sir. It took
one scream from me. Thank you.”
She breathed very fast. She was headclear now, as if in a storm which
had passed all fibre, all flesh had been stripped from her taut nerves.
She was a framework of nerves.
“Thank you,” she said again. “One less scream. Do you know what that
means? One less scream!”
He came to her and clasped her arm.
“Scream again.”
She looked at him full. “Wait,” she panted. He held her. She leaned back
feeling his hands strained by her weight to eat into her arms.
“Wait!” There was a liquid fullness in her voice. “Perhaps I can laugh
instead. Laugh--“
“No. Don’t laugh, I tell you. Don’t lie, for God’s sake. Scream.”
There was a silence. The silence was all fresh and new like a dawn.
Gently she pressed from him. She sat by the table at the room’s far
side. She buried her face in her hands on the cluttered table. She
wept....
She wept long. She stayed still motionless there, with her face buried
among papers after she had wept. The world came back:--The dusk of the
spent day. The long cool wake of the spent heat-storm. The little
office, pitching no longer ... spent ... atop the cluttered City. And
this man, stranger she had worked for now many months, who was solid and
could help ... this man so good that he had made her scream.
With a felt slowness she lifted her head, turned her face.
--He is there! He has not moved. He stands there silent, held by the
sight of me ... while I wept.
She smiled at him.
“Do you feel better now?”
She nodded.
“Sure?”
She nodded. He brought her coat and hat. An orange feather tufted from
the straw. His long vein-straggled hand ran over the feather. She looked
at it. The feather was not ruffled.
“Thank you,” she said very soft.
His face was rounder with a smile. She saw his jagged teeth and his soft
twining lips. She saw the dimple in his chin and his long
neck.--Ostrich! She was alert, serious as he helped her. She felt him
... good ... with her back ... all about her ... as he helped her.
--He is sure! While I wept, he was there, not moving!
The hand she held out to his seemed small to her, pretty....
* * * * *
There was a knock on Fanny’s door.
“It’s me, Mrs. Luve.”
“O Mrs. Deemis. Come in....”
She was almost dressed. The old lady gave a glance that was like a
draught of drink at the whole room ... her room, changed so often into
new mystery of him or her who hired it. She lived familiarly in mystery.
It warmed her. She had no man, her children were gone: she had a family
of mystery. She did not know but on these she subsisted.
“There was a phone call for you ... early ... your office. A Mr.
Johns--he didn’t give no other name--he said as how if you wasn’t
feeling well this morning you should knock off. It’d be alright. Are you
sick, dearie?”
“No.” Restless before her mirror.--What should I do here, workless?
“Yesterday afternoon a little.... The New York heat, I reckon.”
“I guess so. Well,” the old lady opened the door, “Take the chance when
it’s offered. Eh?” She was a silent woman for she was full of her
mysteries. She left. Fanny went on dressing.
* * * * *
But there came a morning in the clear coolness of autumn. Fanny’s eyes
opened from sleep. Her body stretched on its back ... the warm thin bed
... her body less plump already measuring the bed ... the bed measuring
the wall, soft cream ... the room ... windows behind their white mesh
curtains thresholding, flaring, shouting out into the world, all new and
terrible again in its old Pain ... came to her. Different! She lay. She
could lie, eyes open, and the windows flared and led out, and there was
the Pain of the congested world: yet she lay warm, stretched in her bed,
and could bear it.
--It’s Sunday. O how good! It was long, back in the age that was
separate by the Abyss, since she had lain awake in a sweet bed.--Why?
--There’s been a hairy monster sitting on my face!
The hair in my eyes, the fat and the stink and the bag
Glued on my mouth!...
Here was a clear gold morning, full of sun ... a morning mad to
drink....--_He squats there yet!_ Gold mornings made to drink, clear
cool drinkable days. I’ll drink you yet, I’ll drink you yet. Sun-veined
air, wine of the sun, I’ll have you!
--Find out the monster’s name: pull him, tweak him.
Find out his name and he’ll squeal away like a pig.
--O he is there. But I have sipped a morning.
She got out of bed ... dimness before her eyes and brow like a curtain
before fire. The curtain became mist. She knew so yet it must be ... the
mist quenched and quenched. _Not all the fire! Never all the fire!_ In
this way she got out of bed.
* * * * *
In her nightgown she stood by the open window, letting the cold air race
through her. She looked at the Church, she did not feel the cold air
save that there was sun in it. The Church did not race. It stayed there
immovable. It was fixed somewhere under the spinning of her world ...
where the Pain was also. Half naked by the open window and the Church,
she took her Bible and opened it. She felt the Church a dull base on
which the Bible was written: from which it leaped, it leaped in
syllables of sun.
“When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
Shouted for joy....”
She turned the pages. She saw:
“For I say unto you,
Whosoever shall put away his wife saving for the cause
Of fornication causeth her
To commit adultery.”
She shut the book. She looked at the Church. She looked at the Church,
the morning stars sang through her flimsy nightgown. But she was not
cold. She wondered.
She went back into bed, holding the Bible. Two fingers marked the two
places she had read. Her eyes narrowed.--I am beginning to think! Once
more she jumped up. She turned the curtains back so that the windows
were bare. She went again to her bed. She could see the Church now from
her pillow. She pressed the little black book against her breasts.
“Where,” she said aloud, “in which of the two places does it touch me?”
She pressed the Bible against her left breast and against her right
breast. She liked the feel of the hard book against her.... “What sucks
me?” she whispered.” ... that which has cast me out, or the other that
draws, that welcomes?” She lifted her two hands high above her face.
“Yes” she cried, “the other that calls me good!” Her hands fell in her
bosom.--_I am beginning to think._ Do words in sunlight leap from a
page and leave it? She turned her head, gazed at the wall of the Church
so heavy and fixed against the sun-dazzled window. The organ rose. A
hymn, many-voiced, twined with the organ, pealed slanting upwards toward
her through the window.--It leaves the Church. Comes to me. I hear it as
no one ... don’t I know?... as none of them sticking in their varnished
pews. _I_ hear alone. Out of a Church. She took the Bible again and read
the words of Jesus.
She read them calmly. She looked away seeing the terrible words. Pain,
agony of shame and of deprival, rending of doubt parted once more the
golden haze she had lived in for a moment.--I am sinking back! She was
afraid.--I am sinking. There it was all ... Harry, her search to hold,
to find him: the lancing anguish of her revelation: Leon, Edith, the
ecstacy of Good ... and the cool-lipped stranger so close pointing a
finger, thrusting her out with a finger.
Fanny rocked in her bed, rocked motionless, dizzy with rocking
thoughts.--Go away, go away, she moaned.--Why, why must I ask Why? I
cannot bear it.
There was a knock on her door. She was very still. Knock, knock.
“What is it?”
“May I come in?... It’s Clara Lonergan....”
“O you.... Yes. Come in.”
The girl smiled: “It’s such a bully morning.”
“I am glad you came.”
“I had no idea you’d be so lazy. I thought you might come for a walk.”
“The day came into the room. I have both day and bed.”
Clara brought a chair to the bed and sat down. She saw the Bible.
“And Church too, I see.” Her lips curled but her eyes were really
smiling.
“Don’t you approve of Church?”
“No,” said Clara, “I hate it. _My_ Church at any rate. Pa said it was
the Priests that made Mother willing to die.”
“Well ... what have Church and Bible to do with each other?”
Clara laughed. “O come on! Let’s walk. It’s cold in here.” She drew her
boa across her throat. “Shall I close the window?”
“Don’t you dare!” cried Fanny. She jumped out of bed. She was
exhilerated. Her nightgown fell to the floor.
Clara was up. “You’ll catch your death of cold....”
“No, no,” said Fanny. She stood there naked. Her arms were lifted above
her. “I’m not cold. There are stars and sun in this room ... they are
racing through me.”
“You’re mad, dear,” said Clara. She was close. She placed her hands on
the naked woman’s shoulders. Their eyes met. Clara’s eyes and face went
down. Very lightly she touched her lips upon the throat of Fanny.
“Dress.... Hurry.” Clara went back to her chair; half-turned away she
fingered the fallen Bible. There was a new warm glow between them in
the room.
Fanny dressed silent, fast.
“Why do you want to move about?” She seated herself in her wrapper
before Clara on the bed. “I don’t feel like walking. I’ll close the
windows. I’ll make the bed in a jiffy. You stay.”
“Go and make yourself some coffee. I’ll fix the couch.”
“I’ll make coffee for two.”
“Alright.”
They sat at last, quiet in the clear sunlit room, and smiled at each
other. Sleep and the night were gone, with the bed turned couch.
“Now it’s my sitting room,” laughed Fanny.
“You’ve been used to more than that.”
“Please don’t!” Then Fanny was sorry. “No I don’t mean that. I don’t
mean to hide myself from you, Clara. Only, it hurts.”
“You don’t have to talk ... with me. I’m not that sort. I’m not the sort
of girl who measures a friendship by the number of secrets chattered
about.”
“I know.”
“I feel we’re friends, you and I. That’s enough.”
“That’s enough. But O, Clara, if I knew a single thing in all the world,
I’d tell you. I don’t know anything. Perhaps you know more than I.”
“I know some things,” said Clara.
“I feel you know some things,” Fanny looked at her friend’s long taut
hands. They reached for her bag, opened it, took out a box of
cigarettes. She offered it, open, to Fanny. “Go ahead.” They both
smoked.
“I know that a smoke tastes good,” said Clara. “I know that in the
mornings a cup of coffee tastes good. I know I’m young and that the
world won’t give me a thing ... not a thing!... unless I fight, unless I
cheat.”
“What has it to give?”
“Just things that taste good....”
“Then ...?”
“Then let’s die.”
“Why do you say Cheat, Clara? Why don’t you say Pay?”
“To pay comes high.”
“To cheat comes low.” She looked at Clara long. “I don’t believe you,
Clara. There’s no cheat in you.”
“Then you don’t know me.”
“You said that we knew each other.”
“Well, look at me!” She stood. “I am lovely. Look.” Her hands
caressingly followed her words. “My hair is black and soft. My mouth is
warm. This is a good white throat, I know.... And my body is good--O so
good and clean, and so swelling-slender like a lily. My body deserves
something, that is sure.” She sat down. She blushed. “So does yours,”
she went on. “I’ve seen you. So does yours.”
Fanny’s hands clasped swaying. “If you could see, O girl, if you could
see what has been done upon my body!”
She looked away with her hands still swaying ... The Church! She did
not know where to look. She hid her eyes in her hands.
Clara got up. She lifted the face of her friend and held it between her
palms.
“I can see much, Fanny. Don’t say a word. I can see much.”
Her hands slipped down. They were fists. Slow, deliberate, they beat
against her hips.
Soon she left....
* * * * *
Fanny Dirk opened the windows wide, let out the cigarette smoke, closed
them, sat down.
--Who is right,
Jesus or God?
--What do I know of Jesus, what does Harry know? There is a meaning that
is God’s in the words of Christ, and I can’t find it out. Who knows it?
Leon? It seemed to her that Leon knew. A Jew. He uses neither Love nor
Christ ... the unlovely and unChristian Jews. We did not meet in
Washington. Yet we had a talk. It seems to me I know what Leon said to
me in Washington. What Harry said at home? That is real--yet it seems
more like a shadow. Harry? You must not hate Harry. Hard. You dare not.
What is there terrible in hate? Others hate ... good healthy people
hate. Why can’t you? Why, when hate comes for Harry, do you sicken ...
something in you rips, fades, bleeds away? I am pulled out from myself
as if my heart from my body. It is easier to hate than to love. You
cannot. One hate? O I love this world of little people dragging through
pain, mired in it, sinking in pain. O I love you! We are close. Let me
hate Harry! You dare not. What has he done? He turned good. He quoted
Scripture ... here am I. Edith, Edith--your father killed me quoting the
words of Christ. O this is not it. There is something beyond. I am
exiled. Did God give me exile? I could have stayed and fought.... Not
Harry, God gave me exile. Will you hate God? If Harry because you
thought he gave you exile, why not hate God? Why not? Why cannot I hate
God? He made the Morass of pain in which the world so pitifully
struggles, so pitifully dies! Hate God! Not Harry. You too ... who knows
what agony you have lived, what sickly visions you have had, lifting you
up. Poor Harry ... if one understands you, Boy.... I understand you,
miserable Boy.... Fool! I can’t hate you. God? Hate God?... not if you
understand him also.
--There was a tree, I see a tree standing upon a mountain side above a
quiet lake. And the tree’s roots break out. The tree falls into the
water. Downward it groans, crashing and crushing. But in the water does
it not lie still? No, it rots. Why does it fall, why does it rot so
still when it has fallen? Why does the Hand of God draw it down ... God
who has made it grow ... down against its growing, down against a
thousand sprouts and seedlings?
--I am falling, Fanny. Are you rotten also? Where are you going? O if
you pull me down, Lord, I must go. You do not think that I am bad. You
know. God, you know everything, you must see my girlhood ... how I
pushed up, eager, straight, sunward. You must see my wifehood. You must
see my motherhood. I fall. But I have not lost you, God. O it hurts!...
Fall, fall.... Why are you nearer, Father, when I fall?
She pressed her fingers hard against her brow.--Little brain, is God in
there? Her eyes with a new salience touched the objects in her room ...
the blue burlap on her couch, the chair, the Bible, the wall of the
still Church, the swift sun vaulting away above the vaulting roofs. She
bound her fingers hard about her brow:--All of you ... all ... I hold
you.... There is no air ... there are no spaces. I touch everything that
my eyes see, everything that my mind holds.... God?
Fanny sank to her knees on the floor. She felt her face free and bright
above her body. Her face prayed, and her body:
“God ... go ahead. If I can stand it, Go ahead. There you are down
below. I see you. You draw me like a tree, crashing down, crashing
down.” She held her Bible high, let it go, it fell. “God ... go ahead.”
She got up, seated herself once more: and began to darn some stockings.
She worked long. At times:--I am hungry. Better go out and eat, came to
her faintly dizzy head. She could not. The room was ripe and round,
holding her firm.
A knock.
“Come in.”
--_Why am I not surprised?_ Christopher Johns stepped into the room,
shut the door.
She gazed at him silent.
“You don’t mind?” he asked. “I was in the neighborhood. Thought I’d look
in. The lady downstairs ... what a dear old lady!... said you were out:
I could knock if I wanted to be sure.”
“Sit down.”
He took off his coat and laid it on the couch. It crowded nearly the
whole couch. He sat down.
“I’m glad I found you in. This is a nice room,” he said. “Do they give
you enough heat now winter’s coming?”
She went on darning.
“More heat than I’m used to at home.”
“Where is your home?”
“I have no home.”
“You look so home-like there,” after a pause he went on, laborious,
determined. “Darning your stockings ... in your dark-blue wrapper.”
“All sorts of women darn stockings ... and wear wrappers.” She did not
look at him. She was framed in the knowledge that he looked at her.
She saw his hand go through his thick brown hair. She felt it.
“I’ve been married fifteen years,” he said. “I know what I feel in you.”
She bit her lips.--Tell me. Tell me!
“For fifteen years I’ve been married to two women.”
She looked up.
“Only one of them legal, of course. But married to both of them just
the same. I have had scores of girls during that time under my care. I
know something of woman.”
--About me? about me, kind man, what do you know?
He answered her silence. “You I do not know. You are a mystery to me,
Fanny. But you’re true and whole ... that I know ... like the whole
earth.”
He had called her Fanny!
“My wife’s name is Sylvia. She’s pretty and prim and worships her
figure. You can imagine what she thinks of mine! She’s always been
afraid because of her waistline to have a baby. But before Sylvia came
along, there was Sadie. The first love of my youth. She was thirty then.
Now she’s fifty. Fat and sentimental, good old maternal Sadie. She’d
love to have children. But how can she? She’s so respectable ... she’s
so ill-placed in a hard world. She’s been true to me, has Sadie. Sadie
envies Sylvia her marriage license ... the chance she has to have a
brood of kiddies. Sylvia despises Sadie, is above jealousy (Sadie’s a
part of the landscape) and tells herself in her heart what a far better
kept-lady she’d have made, what better times she’d have had ... _she’d_
not have been true to me!... if only she were free and immoral like that
fat old foolish thing.”
“Why do you tell me all this terrible farce?”
“I want you to know that I know women.”
“How should I know it from that?”
“These misplaced women love me ... they’re my fate.”
“All of your fate?”
“Not all.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Johns, why you should assume my interest in all
this....”
He got up. “Fanny, there’s more between us than that.”
“What do you want?” She was frightened.
“I want you to see me, as I see you. Not understand me. Understanding’s
rot. I don’t understand you. What in hell _do_ we understand? What
counts is seeing. Touching. What we see and touch is part of us.” She
stirred.--My words! “You’re part of me ... you ... because I see you
there, attached to me like a hand. That’s what I want.”
“You’re a fool. You had better try to understand a little. You don’t
know a thing about me.”
“I don’t want to, then. It’s good you called me a fool. That’s the
beginning of warmth, and warmth is the beginning of wisdom. Pretty soon
you’ll have to blind yourself in order not to see me. You’ll see me,
alright. You don’t want to blind yourself?” He went on: “Never another
word shall I say about my two appendages ... my simpering Sylvia and my
grandiose Sadie. But you’ll touch it all. You’ll see what that life is
... you’ll look at me: you’ll see what a lot’s left over....”
Fanny got up from her chair. She stood blazing. Sudden she laughed and
sat down. He came to her and lifted her in his arms. His big body
covered her. He kissed her eyes and her brow, her ears and her hair.
“Aren’t you ashamed,” she murmured. “Aren’t you ashamed!”
He placed her back in her chair. They breathed hard. Silence.
She looked at this looming man. He was brutal, she felt him gentle. He
was abrupt, she felt him slow like a child. He was big, she felt he
needed arms to cradle.
“Leave me alone!” sudden she cried. “I am a lost creature. Don’t pick me
up. Leave me.”
He knelt by her chair.
“I have a husband who has kicked me out. I have a child I’m not good
enough to touch.”
His hands curled. “Fanny, you lie.”
“I had a love affair. Do you hear me? I committed adultery. Get out!
Even Christ don’t forgive that. Do you see that Church over there?” She
jumped away from him and went to the window. “My husband’s a good man.
If he came to New York, that’s likely where he’d stop ... in that Parish
house. If he passed me in the street, he’d turn his face.”
The room was between them. They, facing each other, held. Fanny’s voice
changed. It had been harsh and high. It was low.
“What do you want? Can’t you see that I’m dead? What do you want? Aren’t
there plenty of women for the rest of your life? Why me? Let me die.”
He stood still.
“What can I give you? Haven’t I tried to give to my husband ... to
Edith? They’ve taken all. I’ve failed. There’s something the matter with
me.”
He stood. They were silent.
Her voice was quiet. “I don’t resist you. Do you hear? I don’t deserve
to. I am dead. I am nothing. You don’t want that. I don’t resist you.
You’ll take your hat and you’ll go....”
He held his silence, and she prayed in it. She saw the world all One:
and of it, like a throbbing heart, like a high radiant head, she saw
that there was God. But she said again:
“There’s something the matter with me.”
Johns came to her: he stood above her, holding her two hands.
“Come beside me, Fanny.”
The tears ran silent down her cheeks.--What does it mean?
“Come beside me. O close. Lie close with me, Fanny.”
She felt his arms lifting her like a leaf in a warm wind ... laying her
down. She felt his hands and his mouth that fell like a warm rain on her
parching flesh. She shut her eyes.
* * * * *
... So that day they had walked with Autumn burning all about them.
Silently. She, walking through the years with feet at last aware: he,
mute unconscious, reckless of pasts, praying that as she walked beside
him ... this strange deep lovely creature who had become his life ...
she should not walk away.
The day was done. They sat in their room at the Inn, with Night.
They felt the Night. It was clear and brittle like a violin: it gave
forth notes, sharp, penetrable, woody: it wove its voices into silken
strands. It was a dark and glowing violin. The room in which they sat
was still of the past of the Inn which had been a Mansion. The ceiling
came low: the beds were canopied: chairs, lowboy, brass hearthpieces,
rag rug over the black softwood floor, drew into a tight repressed
luxuriance, into a single mood, strong, curbed, sufficient, that was New
England: ancient New England pregnant of bursting strengths.
Here they sat, thrust close upon each other by the Night and by the
moodpent room.
He wanted to take her hand, he did not dare. His eyes searched her
retiscence.
“It was a great day, Fanny. We must have walked twenty miles.”
She saw the miles ... miles of trees flaring against their false
defeat.--‘We move skyward! Come, Winter, strip us ... still do we move
skyward!’ She saw the miles: hours of her small feet beating immortal
earth.
“Jonathan,” she spoke at last, “I am going to leave you.”
He hid his face in his hands.
“I have been drugged into peace. Now you want to drug me into
happiness.”
“Put it that way if you will.”
“It cannot be.”
What could he say?
“I do not know,” she whispered, “why it is. It must be, Dear. Let us not
argue. Let us not rend the beauty of our parting with inquisitive
words--words that can only claw a truth. Let us be peaceful here for the
days that remain. Let us accept what neither of us knows ... like our
births, Dear, like our deaths: just so deep. It must be.”
He took away his hands from his face.
“I shant argue, Fanny. When I first saw you and loved you, I said: ‘She
may come: that is possible. She will go: that is sure.’ I knew. What
right have I to argue? You have blessed me with life. If now I must pay,
so be it. Which part is the blessing--I don’t know Fanny: my having you,
or the long years I shall walk alone if you leave me, and fill with my
word: ‘I have had her.’”
“You have given me Peace. You have given me what I must give up.”
“I will not argue. I cannot give up hope. Wont you speak to me, Fanny?”
“What can I say?”
“What are you?”
She was still.
... “Why did you come to me? Why did you let me love you? Why did you
not resist? Where do you come from, Fanny? where are you going?”
Her eyes came very slowly from within her world, came to this gentle
clumsy lover of hers, rested upon him. He was there, broken into deep
shadow, sudden light by the sharp flicker of the open fire.
“None of us could answer any of your questions. Why should I be able
to?”
“You more than most of us.”
“When I came to New York, my coming meant one thing. Without that
meaning my coming to New York, my leaving my home and my child were
simple horror. All my life was a hideous jest unless my coming to New
York meant one meaning.”
“What was that meaning?”
“When I know, I won’t be any longer where you are.”
He bowed his head: a jet of flame touched his brow livid like a gash
above his grey-shadowed face.
“When I came to New York I fought against that meaning. For all that I
had given up, for all the saying to myself _You are dead, You are a
sacrifice_ and knowing it, there was in me a self that wanted to live,
wanted the good things I had given up. That is why you found me as you
did. Resist you? I hungered for you, Dear. You meant, for a while, a
Home, Love, a child,--you are such a child, such a dear good child--you
meant all I had lost. You took from my coming to New York its meaning.
You were a substitute, see? for what I had lost. And that makes it all a
hideous jest, all my life. I did not come to seek an exchange, to build
on the same charred ground where my life was burned away. That I know.
But O I could not resist you. You forgive me, Jonathan? I was so sick,
so weak. My arms needed so to hold my child, they were so empty. You
were a lie, but O you were good. Forgive me, Jonathan. I knew all along.
I needed to drug myself to be peaceful in my peace with you. The City
... work ... our flat ... they drugged me. Stealing some of your linen
to mend it, nursing your cold just for a couple of days, taking the
problem of your life and suffering by it, trying to help solve it ... O
it was drunkenness, it was ecstacy, Dear, it was wrong. I couldn’t stay
drugged. So it was wrong for you. Unfair, perhaps. Have I hurt you? Have
I ... O God ... have I returned evil for evil after all? I have been
hurt. And in the anger and the pain, I have understood why the world
injures the world. I have understood how from evil received, from injury
done, comes the irresistible impulse to return evil, to injure. I did
not want that. I have done it! Yes. I have hurt you. Good tender man ...
victim already of two selfish women. I have come with the poison of my
wounds, and poisoned you.”
He shook his head. “No, Fanny. You have healed me.”
“If you knew how you said that ... how weak your voice was. You were
strong, bursting, bubbling.”
“Whatever happens ... I am free of those two....”
“But now you are so still. Almost, you are thin.... Yes, I have done
this. I have done this. I will continue to do this, poison others with
the poison of my wound, so long as I seek to be healed. Do you see?
That is what makes the world endlessly hurt the world. It seeks to be
healed. Do you see? Each human soul, wounded by another soul, seeks a
soul to be healed. And the wound is passed along, endlessly, endlessly.
O the vicious circle. And I am in it. God thrust me from home, God drew
me as a stone is drawn to the earth ... away and out of the Circle. And
I came back and entered it again. O I will try again: I was weak. I was
not aware. I will know better. _I must not seek to be healed._ That is
what I have learned. Can you see that, Dear? That is the deadly poison,
that is the curse of passing on the poison ... that is the endless
circle of a poisoned world. We seek to be well. We crave peace. We crave
love. Even I. I came to you with my bloody soul. ‘Heal me!’ I said. And
now you are bloody, too. And I no less bleeding. Do you understand just
a little, Jonathan? why the peace you gave me, the care and the
tenderness you placed into my empty arms ... why all that has been
wrong? The hideous joke, this happiness you offered: the cruel wrong,
this happiness I seek?
“ ...Yes ... my arms are still empty.” She held them forth as she spoke
... toward him. “They still hunger. O will they never stop aching to
hold? aching to be full? My breast is still a woman’s.... But I shall
try better now. Do you hear me, God, wherever you are? I was tired. I
was broken beyond knowing. I slipped back from falling. I couldn’t go on
falling upward upon you. Not then. I shall try again. Another chance,
God, will you?... Yes, you will. There is no other way that you can
do.... Dear, do you understand?”
His face was before her, crumpled, like a child’s ... lost in the Dark
where she had left him, weeping and yet afraid to cry....
* * * * *
Fanny walked up the street into the Winter sun. It was morning. The sun
stood low in the street’s square gap: its heatless dazzle was in her
eyes as she walked. She walked with sight blurred by the sun among the
men and women walking like her to work. They were the substance of their
shadows, long and black upon the sung-glazed City. They swam like
wraiths, remnants of warm houses, warm sleep, in the inhuman brilliance
of the sun.
Fanny thought: “When I came, what was it that led me to Christopher
Johns?”
The comfort of that place, was it curse or splendor lying in her mind?
What had it been to Clara? Is Clara there? She had learned quick that
there was no place like it. She was unskilled. The one skill she had ...
the human one of knowing girls, of managing them well, of a clear head
for practical affairs ... who again as she stepped wearying into offices
for work would read it in her?
The crowds beat on: the day was going to dim. As the sun went high,
these atoms of shadow hording against sun would win. For a day. Till the
next morning. Fanny felt that her feet were dark and that they walked on
brightness.
--Only my feet. Because they are so tired. I am not black, I am white.
In this surge of shadow, Fanny felt wanly white. Her head was dizzy,
unpropped by the warm crowds hording against cold sun.
--And yet I am so small. How changed and grown from the white girl?...
The door to the loft factory stood a steel barrier to the day. Within:
musty heat air full of the stale traceries of wistful hands sewing at
steel machines. She went in....
* * * * *
Above the whirr of Fanny’s work there was a voice speaking. Under the
blanket of Fanny’s sleep there was a voice speaking. Across her words in
meeting men and women, across the words of men and women meeting her,
there was a voice speaking. It was one, and it was Fanny.
She knew at times. At times she did not hear it. She would emerge from
the thick inattention ... sleep or fever or work or even fun ... and she
would know it had spoken. It ran through the heavy years that were now
hers like a thin Light moving along the bottom of a Sea that had no sun,
moon, star....
--Girl. Perfect girl! I am not tall, but my body is tight. And my mind
is taller than all these minds about me. It reaches higher than yours,
slow brother, yours, Annie, yours, Delia. It is faster too. It moves
very fast, it can skip ahead of your thoughts, it can turn about and
wait and squat there grinning, till your thoughts catch up. And it is
white and clean. I am fearless. I think that is purity ... don’t you,
Jesus up there? You weren’t afraid and that is why you were pure. My
mind is white and sound like my body leaping, skipping where it wills,
over low stones, over low mud. What have I to fear? I am I....
--I walk the street under magnolia blooms between the proud old
houses.... That’s Fanny Dirk: queer girl! I am simply myself. When Annie
begins to squint at me I know what she’s thinking about, I know what’s
troubled her last night. I can feel sorry for you, Annie. My figure is
rather roundish, but the men are just where I want them. I have eyes and
lips and a mind to spit them on. This mouse-blue frock is lovely even
so, as I walk dangling my parasol through the sun-splotched magnolia
way. This cream-dim ruching at my neck shows the olive note of my skin.
And _that_ means there is blood flowing very close.... And the white
stockings are sharp between the bias skirt and the black slippers.... I
walk fearless. I’ll do what I will.... I am surrounded by children.
--This dingy stair ... the factory girls ... you are a factory woman!...
O for them true: this horror for them is true. For me? this horror is a
tale. It is the words of a song. There is a music ... music. For you and
for you and for you, grey shadows dripping from the sun through the
encaverned stairs, it is true Horror. It should not be: for it is. For
me, it is well.... Fanny Dirk with blue prim frock and the olive throb
of my throat ... for it is something else.
--My room, so small, is the casing of my body. Shouldn’t it fit? It must
fit to keep me whole. Those gloves that were so much too big, how I
froze in them last Winter: how the Winter came in to my fingers as I
walked, till I had money to buy another pair. Bargain-counter gloves ...
the right size-mark ... that girl with eyes like panthers who dared not
take them back, that man with eyes like dead fish, who would not! If my
room is too big the world will come in like Winter to those gloves: and
freeze me and burn me. Dear bare tight room! So much holier and tighter
than the one of the Church: that was so big Jonathan could come in. Lies
... drugs ... came in. Here no one. You are my skin. No one dare touch
my skin....
Her eyes went up and down about her room: her eyes stood upon its cot,
upon its whitewashed walls, upon the paintless table, like the eyes of
Fanny Dirk standing within her mirror.
--I do look well in black. My face is white and colors on me need just
that touch of plumpness I have lost. Black eats away the hollow of my
memory of plumpness. My breasts droop: the curve of my thigh is not so
lovely now. Black covers me, I used to be gay almost like naked in the
blue and the rose. Black wears. My body does not wear. I am wearing out.
I don’t know what I’d do without you, mirror! Your brightness is the
only laughter in the room. Sometimes your laugh is a mocking. Never
mind. I find when I look in your laughter, even if it is a mocking, that
I find myself. She laughed aloud.--See what I do when I see myself?
Well, friend ... why such a crusty room to case the body of Fanny?...
There were soft casings once: little gabled house, garden so brave
above the dull black earth, Harry, Edith ... you were all softness Edith
my child! Soft hands upon my arms, soft lips upon my mouth biting me
with such savage softness. Edith? O my soft love whom I held all about
me ... who held me all. You are gone. This hard sharp room that holds me
like an iron glove--now I have you alone ... and the mirror that is
laughter.
* * * * *
--I shut my face in my hands and you are about me, my Baby. Only you.
Your hands and your hair and your little mouth. Edith, Edith ... what
are you now?... The room is truer. Naked, harsh, cruel ... room of
emptiness, crushing my flesh ... you will make all of me hard, all of me
callous from being cased by a hard whitewashed room: a room with an iron
bed. You are truer!
* * * * *
--I shut my eyes in my hands and you are about me, my Baby. I am a baby
with you. Our flesh is one: our hands are one like petals entwined in a
flower. We are a flower together. We spring from the black earth. We
have had our blooming. The earth is there, we are gone. In the black
earth under the snows, there is a seed of us, my darling. I am the seed
of us, Edith!... of our softness, of the bright bloom of our twined
petals the hard seed. I am lain away in the earth. The earth blooms only
in us.
--Flint-hard room buried beneath the City,
You case me, I shall burst you yet!
Buried within you, tight sealed room,
Buried within me, within your bitter coldness....
The folded memory of a flower.
* * * * *
--Cracks in the leaping ramparts of New York. And I look down in them. I
am a girl with short black hair and hands that are strong. I peer down
on my knees at the fissures of New York. I kick my slippered feet behind
me, peering down. My legs are solid in their white silk stockings and
when I toss my slippers Jack and Harry see my legs to the knees: good
legs: their eyes are bright, looking, they swallow thick.... I look down
into the heart-beat of the City.
--I am not hungry. Look at me, Fan, look at me huddling to-night around
an oil stove and a lamp, both on the floor and myself on the floor.
Black dress, grey frayed coat ... my hair is down to keep my throat
warm. The wind is a solid wall of ice against my window: a Devil sucks
it back, it plunges again ... solid steel wall ... and splinters of it
cut through the glass and the bricks, cut to my shoulders huddled over
the oil stove and the lamp.
--They smell. Hot smell that gets cold beyond my shoulders. There in the
corner, where the bed is, where the washstand, is the smell of the oil
stove and the lamp, but cold. Here it is hot. I could singe my
eyebrows.... It is the style to singe one’s eyebrows ... or cut them or
something. How do they do it, those sharp pencil-lines over eyes? The
smell is cold by the mirror ... I stay huddled. But do you think all the
ladies with red cheeks and penciled brows and eye fire-dried ... are
they walking Broadway to-night?... have got so by huddling like me too
close over a stove and a lamp?
--In the rest of the house it is quiet and asleep. The wall of ice
plunges against my room. My room alone. I am not hungry. To-morrow I
have a job so I cannot be hungry. Lamp and stove, tell me, are you
burning my cheeks red too?... are you going to singe my eyebrows? are
you going to sear my eyes?
--New York! New York! why am I here, frozen and empty in your leaping
arms, peering into your bowels? Women with burnt faces walk your
streets. Women wander like dreams denied through your pent streets.
There are in New York men and women who worship God. Christians only,
Jews only. Worshipers, only of God. Are you New York, you worshipers of
God? Have you made this? Has your God let you make this?
(--I am at the threshold of long thoughts, like caverns warmed with
earth. I shall think now, and be no longer cold nor hear the wind like a
steel sea on my shoulder.)
--On Broadway there are women with burnt souls, and there are Jews. New
York is full of Jews. What does that mean? Spirit of a Jew quenched the
white-stockinged girl: bore her to womanhood. Word of a Jew thrust her
forth. Hand of a Jew guided me to this Cold seeking warmth ... led me
to this City where there are Jews in swarms, in sultry pools, in
tumults!
She was still. The wind was a steel broom sweeping the ice of the world
against her huddling over a lamp and a stove. The frail room held. She
heard no wind, she saw no room. She sat swaying within an aureole of
smutted heat grey-faced, over the black mass of her dress: and her hair
knotted against her throat.
“Tell me,” she whispered aloud, “who has understood? Harry was wrong, he
did not understand you, Christ. He misused your words. You have forgiven
him. But who ... who understands? You were a Jew, and we alone who are
not Jews worship and quote you, Jesus. Why is that? You were a Jew? The
Jews saw God ... they only during those angry ages before Christ had the
Grace to choose God. Why do they leave you, Christ, you and your words
in silence? Are they so close to you they do not hear you? Are they so
close to you that they are you?”
Her hands clasped above her face. “But we are better! sweeter!”
--Do we not understand! Are we children, Lord? Are we children playing
with the fire of Thy Word? Who is grown among men? She thought of Leon.
--Your lips knew not Christ nor Love.... Yet who beside you has known
me, who beside you has healed me?
“Tell me!” her voice was high in the stark cold room. She rose up on her
knees, and her arms and her words were higher than her face. “Tell me,
God! How dare you discriminate against us! You have no chosen children.
We all are your Chosen ... we who choose you.... Lord, I want to know.
Do you hear? I choose to know. Not what my breasts want ... let them
starve. You shall not turn from me now. Look at me, Lord.”
Her hands drooped. Her face fell like a flower suddenly burned. She lay
crumpled upon the floor within the City. “Will you just look at me,
Lord? What have I? I shall not die. Yet what life have I? Think of my
past ... think of the girl I was ... the girl bright and brave: think of
the mother I was! Here I am. My life is sold--for this! I must know. Do
you hear me when I cry so within myself? else--what is this? I must
know! This horror of hurt ... from Fanny, the Fanny of my friends, of my
beloved, my child--now this here, this dirt! And it is true. Dirt is
true. What else? Have I sinned? What act of ignorance have I sinned in?
What is this sense of holiness that will not leave? Which is it, God? I
must know: I have sinned or I am holy?”
Her mouth was full of tears ... good tears, for they were warm. She was
aware of her feet, down there, cold ... lumps that denied herself for
she was living warm.
She lay on the iron bed. She slept.
* * * * *
From heavy sleep Fanny awoke exhausted. Her eyes opening were broken by
a world cutting in, sharp and strange world of impossible impacts,
which somehow had been away. She lifted her stiff weight from bed, she
had slept in her clothes. She remembered the warm world wrapping sudden
about her in the night bringing her sleep. She looked at the cold lamp,
at the rust-stained bluish stove on the floor.--Where is it?... She took
off her clothes, knowing that she must bathe in cold water. Her body
thirsted. There was another world ... an imperious imagining ... to blot
the real within her. World, world, world! The voice in her was small.--I
lose myself. I go forth breaking against cold and stone. She was athirst
for water.
The bite of the water on her flesh was good ... it made the world she
must face realler. It bit under her arms and over her throat, it drew
like a knife between her legs. It made her fingers wool....
--I am a sunny girl getting ready to ride with Harry. Warm good feeling
... riding and laughing! The pear blossoms are out!... A dismal room
with its grey bulged walls and its patched pipings. About the bathtub in
which lay her naked flesh, a stained and rusted bathtub, the floor was
matted with cold oilcloth, colorless with many feet. Now under her gay
ones!
--Come!... a dim hall, reeking with night-shadows still, plethoric as if
it had swallowed too much darkness, quenched the white shoulders of
Fanny Dirk. “I hold you,” it seemed to say. “I am this dingy house and I
am putting you out.”
She shut the door behind her. The street. She took it in, bravely
forcing herself to know that it was new: she had never seen it. There
was a clarity about her. The world was a delirium carved, a frenzy
frozen and sculpted. Only within her was dimness of soft flesh.
The street was empty. Piles of snow, color of drowned rats, lay in the
gutters. A cat moved gaunt. The two rows of houses stood even, scraping
the sky. They were damp-soiled scabs ... brown red ... they held their
secrets as dry blood holds a wound. They hated the grey wideness which
they scraped at above them, clutching with pitiful flourish of eave and
chimney at a buried sun.
Fanny walked. Her feet struck the pavement. She felt how she touched the
street. A thing deep terrible living her feet touched as she walked. It
gave to her footfall, it did not rise in response.
--Tear off the scab
Blood would gush!
“I had better buy rolls.” She pressed her one nickel in her palm. She
would have money that night.
A woman with long waist broken to the show of underwear swabbed the
floor of the Bakeshop. Her arms were naked like the pole of her
swab-cloth. All she was long articulated bone, swathed in moist grey.
Her face, swinging above her work, smiled on Fanny.
Fanny sat at a dark table in the smell of dough, seeing the long face
suddenly widen bright: seeing eyes in a woman, tender through the
greased shadow of sawdust floor and a counter heavy with bread.
“I’ll have just a nickel’s worth of rolls.”
The woman came back: she placed before Fanny fried eggs, coffee, butter
and bread. “Why haven’t ye been in, of late, silly?”
--_She understands!_ The understanding of the woman stopped Fanny’s
words. She was not hurt by this sharp tenderness like green in the crass
mass of the morning.
She ate.--I must eat slow. She could not eat slowly. Something within
her beyond her devoured the food.
She could not say Thank you, standing to go. She could not give her
nickel burning in her palm. The woman swabbed her feet.
“Ye’re in the way,” she mock-scolded. Fanny was glad.
Street!--Why does no thing stay as it was? So I can catch up?
She breathed heavily. Her head was light, save in the very back under
the coiled hair which tipped downward pulling up at her chin. She felt
her stomach. Her knees were light. She felt her feet.--I could laugh! I
am striped in heaviness and lightness. Laugh then!
The two walls of the street fell forward: in the air above the gutter
they crashed in silence together and disappeared. The City was a maze of
twisting streams.... Two men passed. They were arm in arm. They were
sleek and full in the black coats shaped to their bodies. Their cheeks
and their eyes were sleek and full of themselves. About the round head
of each there was an Aura. Thick troubled, it beat outward like an
emprisoned gas. A gaseous colorless world it was about the head of
each, that veered against the other, drew in, thrust out, hostile.
Impenetrable two men passed, arm in arm.
* * * * *
... A woman passed her. Her eyes were red spots in the soot of her face.
The loose wide flesh of her feet at each step hurt. Her hands fell like
the heads of slaughtered hens. Behind her, attached to the grey shawl
that covered her head, a Wake like a scarf dragged dimly dark. It
wavered from side to side: it was a disconsolate flutter forever behind
her. A little boy crossed the street at her back: the scarf lifted, it
avoided his bright eyes: it sagged down toward an ashcan, skimming the
filth....
* * * * *
... Fanny stopped on the curb to let a wagon pass. Huge horses drew it.
They were black with white-stroked withers, hair gathered thick above
their pounding hoofs. A thin man perched above them; behind him, the
iron cart heaped high with tawney dirt. He was imprisoned, this pallid
man, between the soil and the horses. His hands held reins. From his
white eyes two little Streams of red rose, curled, flecked at the
horses’ steaming flanks, receded, thrust in the dirt behind, moved
circling fitful about the soil and the horses. The roll of the wheels,
the clank of the great hoofs, the cart’s metallic strain were a tissue
of hostile voices hunting the still red search that streamed from his
white eyes.
* * * * *
--There are no ones and one. You get in my way! You don’t exist!... She
saw how this world was a manifold of veins, carrying blood, building
flesh of life and house.
--I flow. I too am livid, flowing through You.
She saw that the walls of the streets were once more in their places.
She saw that men’s and women’s heads were once more shut: ... the
beating angry solitary worlds, black, red, grey ... spherical,
streamer-like ... were sealed once more in skulls of men and women.
Fanny’s new place of work was in the shop of a fur-dresser.
She sat at a long table. She looked above her plying hands at the
stooped forms of women across from her: looking above their plying hands
at her. Between their shoulders, the window ... gold letters of the Sign
standing upon it.
A. R A C H M A N N
_FURS_
They were in a room like a foul mouth that spoke to the world gold
words, dropped this amenity upon the sweep of Elevated structure just
abreast the window. Trains passed. Banners of cluttered stationary lives
made gay in passing ... sweep of black particles in the gay flourish of
passing. _Passing!_ As Fanny worked, the smooth flat tracks of the
Elevated trains stood like a way beyond the world. One entered heavy and
thick into the train ... one was swept gay!
Fanny worked.
Skins ... dead dusty skins to be ripped and sponged and fitted into
_shapes_. Shapes that were insult to the skins. Her hands raped life.
In the filth and shadow of the shop, she felt the mutter of creatures
defiled and effaced into dead forms by hands that were not even bloody.
--Furry skins live.
Boney hands defile you.
I am a woman and you are under me!
She felt that they of the shop were very strong, were great ... marring
the wistful lives of creatures with warm furs: running thread and needle
through them, pressing cloth and water against them. She felt that she
dwindled each moment of this work which made her so superior and strong
against live creatures. She defiled herself ... she worked to live a
desecration upon life.
And then (this work was familiar, she had held this kind of job before)
the life of the furs, the life of the girls, the life of her hands died.
Fanny knew again her eyes and her black hair and the wondrous world
dancing forever within the wall of her brow.
--Beating ... beating ... ache. I can pay for that dear woman’s
breakfast. O I can never pay for what she did for me. I don’t have to.
The woman was good. Good is what you need not pay for. Sun ... women
doing good ... love ... sudden discoveries of You in a paid world. I am
glad. I have not lost sight of Goodness. God? Does one have to pay for
You, God? Or have I destroyed You, paying too much? Should I have
refused to pay, when the sick voice of my soul said You must! Or
haven’t I paid enough?... Can’t we know _any_ thing, Lord?
She was aware of her hands beneath her, of the scissors, of the extended
furry deaths against the filthy table.--We’re paying. We’re paying? For
what?... Well, we’re paying.
She was strong.--I can keep this up forever. Perhaps I shall never die?
There was a starkness in her breast, as of a thought suddenly crystal,
suddenly shaped of herself, crowding her organs.
--Shall I never die? Am I eternal, seeking ... seeking? Am I in Hell? Is
Hell true after all, and am I in it? This is not Heaven!
She had the sense of an eternity in her hands paying, in her brow’s
ache, paying.--Souls in Hell ... feel like this?
There lay Time beyond the lettered window. She looked on a neat little
world of Time: Time ran upon steel tracks, Time carried mites of human
life rigidly down a tiny way. The trains, the houses, the streets, the
wisps of sunny cloud through the roof’s gap ... all was a pasty
toy-world: make-believe: the world of Time and Space. She gazed on it in
passionate condescension within her sooty workroom, hands paying, brow
in search paying....
Outside. The day above the Town was lovely with Spring’s intimation.
Soiled snow-piles melted in brackish streams. The gutters lay
mud-splashed. Men and women moved drab, undifferentiate through the damp
brownness of pavement. But like a wave of butterflies above a mudhole,
Spring fluttered hesitant, diaphanous, young.
Fanny held her face up against downy wings.--My shoes are torn. She felt
the down pull of her torn shoes under the wings of the Spring. She knew
that because she felt such heaviness of feet, no one like her prized
this afternoon.
She began to walk. She stopped.--_You! It is you!_ The form, sudden and
sheer in its familiar individuation--Clara Lonergan--stood before her
still, with warm hands clasping her cold ones.
“You, Fanny!”
“Clara!”
The face of the dark girl: “Nearly four years I have longed to find
you.”
Fanny’s eyes: “Nearly four years....”
Clara could not speak. “You, you,” she kept repeating, “ ...you....” She
focussed her eyes and saw her. She was still.
Fanny felt:--She knows how I am. This girl has always loved me.
“Come, we’re going to dinner. We’re going to spend the evening. O
Fanny!”
Fanny knew that if her eyes could pierce within the daze of this meeting
... under the Spring, in the snow-stained street ... she would see Clara
trimly, quietly dressed--richly. Clara hale and hard and shut.
--This girl has loved me!
They did not speak, walking. Blue night, a swathing of cottoney blue
mist, crept from the skies, curled the miasmic streets, bundled the
rigid Town in its soft glamor. Lights made little rents. Fanny moved
beside the hard thrust of this girl....--She has loved me!... through
the blue warm-ness.
They entered the subway, they rode, they came up. They stepped from a
bright street into a bright long room--facetted in white round cloths
and mirrors. The two chairs held them across the white space of their
table.
“Shall I order?” said Clara. “I’ll order. Her eyes, deep and many
colored like a pansy’s black, felt the lean blade of Fanny’s poverty:
caressed it, bled against it. She ordered
Oysters
Broiled chicken with asparagus, sweet potatoes, peas
ice-cream and cake
and coffee.
“I’m so happy!” she said, her eyes flooding out upon the face of Fanny.
“I am so glad we have met at last!”
--She asks me no question of myself. Not that she fears lest I ask
questions of her. She wants that. Your eyes and your lips so finely cut,
so frozen in their revolt ... how long ago was that?... ask: I should
ask of yourself. I cannot. Let me sit here, Clara, quiet. The food, O
the good food! Let me sit here in your eyes. I cannot give you that
which my asking of you would mean. I cannot. There is a little openness
between us ... our separate years. In it I breathe. If you cover it with
your coming close, I shall choke.
“We are going to a show,” said Clara. “Which show shall it be?”
“I have seen no play for so long! How should I know?”
“I’ll choose.”
She called the waiter. “Bring me an evening paper.”
--So strong and sure of herself! I am weak beside you.... Am I better
than you?
At last Fanny’s eyes could open, could meet the glow of her friend’s.
“I am glad we ran into each other.... I am glad to see you.”
Clara was pale.--She is very understanding.... No ... not to-night shall
I be better than you, strange girl crowned in your defeat. I know what
you have done. I am glad to be willing to be weak beside you.
Once again Clara smiled. “Here’s a good one. Music ... you need music
and dancing.”
--I live in music and dance....
“O I am so happy! I have missed you, Fanny. I did not know until there
you were gone.... I did not know....” She stopped. Fanny’s eyes were
turned inward.--Don’t, don’t! they said.--The space between us is what I
breathe. There was silence.
Fanny was weak. She had walked level through the dark. Now for some time
she felt that she was mounting. Felt this as one would who tramped in
blackness by the strain upon herself. She could not touch the essence of
her thoughts, gazing at Clara. They both had left a common world which
they had never shared, years since. What in the sheer uncommonness of
their separate careers was it they felt they shared? It was very strange
to Fanny. They had no mutual subject. They sat across the table from
each other, mostly in silence. What there had been to speak of ...
Christopher Johns, the Office ... was dead in them both, was no subject.
Yet now they shared a silence, they shared a pregnancy.--I am at ease,
here, weary, full of food.... I am going to listen to music. Mounting, I
am at rest!
They sat in the first row of the Balcony. Fanny knew these two young
women ... one not so young!... sharp in the motley welter of the crowd.
They were swathed together in one sharpness by the anarchic auras of the
other men and women. Fanny saw herself: small, pallid, worn in her black
skirt and her dun waist, close to this girl who had sold her defeat for
the clear rose-colored smartness of her suit, for the diamond pin under
her lovely throat, for the sleek health of her hair. But her eyes, she
felt her eyes greater than ever, wandering in the hunger of her face ...
the eyes of Clara were great and were her own.
The music was far away.... “This is a tale of far away, a world I have
left and forgotten.” The curtain rose. The actors were clad in costumes
of 1840. White Pierrot danced through the glitter of ladies in prim
bonnets, gleaming bared breasts, hooped skirts. Rhymed words, words of
love and fidelity and perfection chimed with the pelt of taffetas and
brocade, of powdered hands flirting fans: and white Pierrot with eyes
lost in the paint of a gay world, seeking love and perfection.
--People do not dream this way. I was not alive then. This is a costume
comedy with pretty airs. Romantic ... means false, in time and in place.
Fanny struggled now against a world falsely remembered.--This is not
true, not yours. Pierrot was in love with a fine lady who tinkled at a
clavichord ... gowned in sheer black with her white shoulders bare. Her
flirting shoulders and her painted lips took his round love: his deep
was lost in her shadow: Pierrot was lost. He left her broken: and
another man with words of love sharp like hooks to catch her flesh
caught in her shoulders (they had not turned for Pierrot), turned her
round, won her.
... A sad play with laughing music ... little streams of water running
up the dark side of a mountain. Impossible ... unreal. Fanny saw the
breaking audience. It rose and splintered in the new light house. Men
and women suddenly distinct like the jewels in their hair, like the hard
smiles, hard lines of face against the new blare of the lighted house.
No. The play was real. Laughter went twinkling up the steep of
mountains. Laughter flowed up hill. That was the way of laughter.--You
men and women falling away downhill, have you never laughed? Upward!
upward! Fanny pressed Clara’s arm.
They stood in the night. The breast of Fanny flowed with her hurt and
her life: her heart was liquid at last: her hurt and her life, pressed
so long against the urge of Clara, melted and flowed. She took the
hands of her friend. She pressed them. She knew what was to be....
They walked through the broken throng of men and women parting, waiting:
through the bright weave of carriage calls, whispers, farewells: through
the new freshet of the City’s stream spreading in blue and green and
gold, soon lost. They walked in silence. They were putting off a moment
of decision. The Elevated Structure stood like a sentence. Fanny’s arm
that had held Clara’s dropped to her side. A train, jingling with
lights, drew past....
--It goes and goes, it comes to the window where I work, to the window
where I stand this instant at a table. I tear and rip ... I work in the
thick shadows of dead life. I look at the train that passes. It is
there!
Fanny held out her hand.... A little man, square black beard, small red
lips, sharp greedy eyes, stood with his hairy hands upon her shoulders.
Mr. Rachmann!--She sought the hand of her friend.
Clara’s lips sharpened.
“Where do you live?” she spoke. “I want to see you soon.”
Fanny shook her head. Mr. Rachmann went. The lips of Clara parted, they
were wet.
“I do not understand.”
“Look at me, Clara.”
“You won’t let me see you?”
“O do understand! Can you see me? Can we see each other, Dear?”
Clara’s face broke.
“You can’t do this. You can’t. You don’t know what you mean. Let me
come. I am all alone. O don’t judge me, Fanny!”
“You know I don’t judge you.”
“Let me see you ... once.”
They were rigid in struggle.
“Clara, I am afraid to see you.”
... Still....
“I am going a way that is terrible and unknown. It does not get easier.
There is no getting used to it. Each moment, there is yearning to turn
... get out ... fall away....”
The girl straightened. “You think I do not understand,” came her clearer
voice. “But I do. More than you, perhaps.... You need not give me your
address.”
Fanny was warm and broken against the clearness of Clara.--What does
this mean? Why do I reject her? She was still.
“Good-by,” said Clara.
--You need me. You need me? Say that you need me, girl.
The hand of each held more than the hand of the other.
“It’s all right....” A moment Clara smiled. Then her eyes looked within,
they met the eyes of Fanny deeply in a far space where they were not
apart.
“Good-by.”
--There is love in you. Love, love. What wisdom? You are not saying,
Good-by. You are saying, Love!
Fanny was still. And alone.
* * * * *
Without turning she walked. Swift walking. She was aware of herself
walking swift beneath the Elevated trains, and of not moving at all. She
did not like this shadowy way with lights upon the sides of it like
little creatures burning to get in. It was full of noise and heaviness
and booming steel. A side street ... quieter, cold ... swung to her
face. Southward again. But now an Avenue all open to the stars.
The tall buildings rose melting into mist. Stars flickered faint over
the stillness of their pointed thrusts. They rose from stone, rigid,
equal: a stone City lay before her and the houses stood one stuff with
the hard death beneath her feet. Men and women, like house, like street,
passed on: wrapped in stone muffledness. They were muffled in dim rigor.
They were masked.
The City was masked. Corner of wall soaring, clusters of passers-by, the
buzz of motors pulling with rubbered gait through the damp asphalt ...
were features of a Mask. She felt its stillness, its stifled comfort:
underneath, a heated flesh she could not touch.
Her feet, beating the street, beat with her eyes and soul against the
Mask of a world. It was unrolling. Sharp stone towers swathed in blue
mist, private mansions mansard-roofed, façade of church, flourish of
store with its show-windows alight like gems set in the pallor of the
night ... masked, hid away. She was unmoving while the dominant
procession pressed before her. And the men and women, sparse,
impervious, aloof, were details of the pageant that defiled. Yet it
seemed to Fanny she beheld an act deeply ceremonial, religious. The high
masked world ... human and stone ... became a chant, lifted in stilled
ecstasy unto some god....
Her room was outside all this. The gas jet she lit stood on the
whitewashed wall, made it orange, made shadow of bureau and chair stand
stiff like marionettes ... stiffly agile ... upon the orange glare. She
was shut in: the pageant and the hymn to a lost god were far away. Yet
now in the room it was to her as if she stood at a window. She looked
out secure upon the song and pageant of the world....
--I am very quiet. A terrible thing has come to me. I have met Clara,
the one person in the world who knows of me and cares ... and I have
sent her away. A terrible thing has taken place. I am quiet.
She was afraid of thinking ... afraid of how clear she saw. She took off
her clothes, she turned out the light. She lifted wide the little window
that lifted her eyes above a jagged finger of roof to the sky.
Lavendar-blue it was, washed in pale streakings of eternal fire. She lay
stretched-out in her bed: warm, with eyes so wide she could feel the
night pour in to them.... Manifold Night! Night of the straining of
flame through space, Night of the march of stone masks above the
softness of men. Night----
A question stood sharp up:--“Why did I want to turn round, walking
downtown? Why did I not turn round? What was the thought always there as
I walked--as of a face and a will watching----“
Fanny smiled. “You wish she had followed you. She didn’t! Never fear.
She is not that sort ... strong unsentimental Clara.”
Fanny saw Clara naked in a wide soft bed. Very sharp she saw her: the
small clear breasts, the fluted strain of the thighs, the tender cushion
of her belly. A man-form, vague, bore down upon her belly. Fanny could
see no more. She feared to sense that if she dared see more she might
see Johns! She saw a desecration as if the talons and beak of a great
bird tore at the thighs of Clara ... strips of the flesh of herself. She
could not bear it. Her palms clutched over her eyes and ears. She turned
writhing upon her stomach. She was still.
--Poor Harry!...
“No,” she said aloud. “You wanted her to follow and she did not. She
respects you too much. Can’t you respect yourself? What you said to
Clara was true ... the long and terrible Way that you must go. Cannot
you say to yourself what you said to Clara?” Once more Fanny lay in her
bed straight-stretched and her eyes open: once more the light poured in
upon her eyes.
Her head was light. It lifted her like a balloon above the City. She was
afloat above the brittle stone. The world was black and was suffused by
fires. The light was the Black breathing.
“It is true,” said her mouth. “I am falling upward. I have nothing to do
with this. I am falling upward.”
Her words lifted upon the Night that poured in her eyes. She saw her
words. She saw herself. She drank her words and herself.
--I hope it is not Johns who is keeping Clara. No. It is not he. Clara
would not ... even if he would ... after what was. Why do I care? I am
not done with Clara!... But I did right. I must say No and No ...
endlessly No to all the world’s questions. That is saying Yes--to what?
How strange it is, this Being in me that flies. I am the wings of
myself.
She was very light. She was afloat in an impenetrable Dark which yet she
pierced for she was suffusion of light. She lay there, eyes and mouth
wide open, limp palms at her sides, and heard the cadence of her breath.
--I am not unhappy, she thought. Then her eyes closed....
She was in a station of the Subway. Clara was beside her. Crowds surged
in four great streams. She lost Clara. She was afraid. Streams dark and
turgid beneath the crust of the earth were men and women. She saw ten
thousand hats and gloves and skirts in sharp detail. She saw beneath the
pandemonium of colored cloths, straw, feathers, leather ... each one
sheerly alone ... a single Skin. She felt the Skin grey-white. The
straws and silks and collars pricked the Skin: and the Skin hurt. She
wanted to be naked of these vari-colors. They hurt. The crowds flowed
on. Upon the faces of the men and women were smiles: the faces were not
naked, they were covered with smiles. Upon the feet of the men and women
were shoes. Shoes and smiles pricked in hard waves on the grey-white
Skin.
She was aware of this steel cavern under the crust of the earth where
four streams ploughed and mangled upon each other. On the steel were
casings of cement. It was rough. It cut against the quick of her nails.
It pricked the steel that held the edge of the earth.
She was aware of this all one, in a great hurt, as she lay asleep with
her skin against the rough stuff of her blanket.
Upon the Subway cave was the stone street. Upon the stone street were
the buildings. In the cave, in the street, in the buildings, flowed the
people. They were a black blood flowing everywhere. Here they were
thickest. They caught the rigid Subway cave: it rocked. The street was
rocked with the rocking hole below. The towering houses swung and dipped
in a steep measure, over the streets, over the plunging Subway throng,
under the Sky. A mighty rhythm ran with the black blood through the
stone world. It danced. The Subway rolled and bounced. Buildings bent
down, jerked high, circled their points in a great Dance under a sky
that was still.
Fanny watched the dancing world as if it were close to her: as if it
were upon her like her heaving breast.
“I am the Dancer,” she cried.
She danced. She was still, she was in bed. But she danced. In the veer
of houses, in the see-saw of streets, Fanny danced. Over her head she
was aware of a sky steadfast.
Fanny danced faster. Towers of stone leaped up now, leaving the streets.
Towers of stone soared like rockets against the still stars and came
back. Gutters twirled: crowds wove into pythonic knots. The skies caught
Dance, like fire. The stars moved very finely; they did not swing far
from their orbits: rather they tremored, they shone in vibrance, they
sang like high notes very fast ... and the sky swung long, swung so slow
like a tide through the warp of trilling stars that it was hard to know
that the sky moved. In the clothes of the dancing Subway throng there
were bugs: they danced. In the roofs of the street, there were stars:
they danced. Fanny saw the bugs dancing, and the dancing stars.
“I am the Dancer,” she cried. She danced through the Night....
* * * * *
She opened her eyes at last to a day pale wornout. She lay in her bed,
under the haggard morning as under a wet sheet. She was unable to move.
“I am sick,” she said aloud. Then again she slept.
When she awoke it was still day. Sharp stillness. She heard the blood
beat in her temples. Her body was blanched, it was dead. Her head lay
hot and swollen above an inert body.
She shut her eyes. The day swathed her head in myriad light shawls. One
by one the shawls withdrew, they were gone. She opened her eyes against
black Nothingness. It raced into her eyes, it won her swollen head. But
her body it could not touch. Her body like a knife-thrust lay, white and
still, within the belly of night.
--I must get up. She tried to get up and could not. She lay in her warm
water. Her body prevailed. The water was cold. It was dry. Her head
scolded against her stricken body. Her body endured like a bar of steel.
It was solid death in a melted world that was dying.
There were days and there were nights. There were nights and there were
days. The world winked open, the world winked shut. Rain dribbled into
her window: sunbeams deflected lay like gold dust against it. Below, in
the houses, feet fell; voices rose, fell; shadows of human will writhed
up the twisted stairs to her white room: no substance followed. She was
alone: her blanched dead body and her boiling head. Beneath her a great
Void in which the sounds of doors and feet and words, the rumble of a
cart, angled about like little balls of celluloid in a great hollow
caldron.
Day night day ... the world winked dimmer. Fanny’s form lay like a
wave-washed beam on the edge of the sea. Color was long since washed.
The water sucked at the meat and the juice of the wood. It was porous
light, it was rotten before the ceaseless suck of the water of the sea.
Her head was lower. It no longer boiled above her body.
Then Fanny shut her eyes: and her eyes were all of her head that was not
like her body ... dim and porous and sucked.
“Is this what all was for?” said her eyes. “Have I gone through all
this--all this--to die like a cat in a barn?”
She knew she was not to die.
“I am going to die. My life has been nonsense ... and now I am going to
die.”
She knew she was not to die.
Her eyes were still. There was a great Pain clenching her breast and her
bowels. No pain had been before.
“How long have I been lying here? How many days ... is it weeks?... I
have not eaten? Will nobody come?”
Her body was Pain. Her body was coming alive, so it was Pain.
“Will no one come? Will you let me die like a cat? I am thirsty ... I am
sick! I cannot move. I danced too much. I am paralyzed with Dancing.
Don’t let me die.”
Her body was coming alive, so that it cried.
“Edith ... Edith, save me! Harry--won’t you nurse me? I have nursed you
so often. Water! My child! O Mother ... Clara I did not mean----“
Her body was coming alive, so that it was afraid. It screamed, it lied,
it abused: it wanted the water of life.
“It is too late. I am alone. Something was wrong with you, Fanny. You
seemed good and sound enough. But something was wrong with you,
Fanny.... Look at you now: you Fanny Dirk, you bright Fanny ... mother
and wife ... you now.”
She knew she was not to die. She knew there was nothing wrong.
“Does God send clean creatures to a death like this? Death in a stinking
room where no one comes to see what is the matter after days and days.
Starving to death alone, in New York.... O how rotten you must have
been!”
She knew she was not rotten.
“Is there nothing left? No one single thing? Mother, I can’t find you.
Edith, I can’t see you. Harry--Edith--all gone. Is there nothing left?
Yes: one thing left.”
Fanny lifted her shoulders faintly from the bed with straining elbows.
Her heavy head fell backward: her eyes swung dizzy toward the ceiling.
“God! you aren’t much for me. But I believe in you. Do you hear? Even
now. I am not rotten, God. I have not done wrong, God. You must hear me,
for I believe in you, somehow, my Father. This is all right. This is not
just--this is not unjust. It is part of the world. I am leaving the
world. But I have been a part. I believe that, God. I have been a part
and you need all parts. You have needed me, God?”
There were tears in her eyes ... cool good tears. “Say you have needed
me, God, for a part in your ... something. Whatever it is. You’ve done
with me, now. But you’ve used me. Haven’t you used me, God? You’re
casting me in the ash-heap I know. Can’t you say at least ‘Thank you’
before I am gone?”
Fanny sank back upon her pillow. Tears made cool stains down the hot
parch of her cheeks. Her eyes roved through the opaque bright room,
breaking against the cruel harshness of familiar objects. Her hands
against each other on her breast tremored and fell apart. Her mouth
moved.--Is this the end?
She knew there was no end.
A great Peace came. Her body was soft and enfolded. Warm waters held her
close, washed her of anguish, washed her of doubt and of weakness,
washed her at last of self. Fanny was perfect in sleep like a child in
its mother. There was a smile on her mouth....
* * * * *
Long hours the room with its still freight moved through the world.
Unbroken, like a seed, buried and hard in the earth. At dusk the door
opened slowly. Clara stepped into the room.
The prostrate friend in the stiff iron bed, black hair matted over the
hot white face, the walls, very still, very cold, shutting this beaten
flesh into their death ... struck Clara in the door.
Her hands clutched her throat. She knelt beside the bed. Her hands and
cheeks took in the heavy breath, the burning brow, voluptuously. “Thank
God,” she murmured. Then the luxury of sense and of articulation went.
Clara was action.
Ten minutes later, a physician stood with her at the bedside.
* * * * *
Fanny opened her eyes to a world softened and new. A warm world, she
accepted like a child, without wonder. Over the gas-jet was a shade of
green. The walls cast a kind dimness. On the deep windowsill a brazier
burned. Bottles stood sheer from the shadow, blue and black and brown
... warm emanations of a good will they seemed in their suggestion that
being ill she was nursed, being weak fortified. They stood beneath the
tender steam of the brazier like good words.
The room was warm. It had warm breath. It was alive and gentle wrapping
her about like fond extensions of these quiet, these brand-new
sheets.... Magic! all good ... all so more natural than that hard seed
of the past she had dwelt in, been imprisoned in: long walls, rigid,
shutting her up, lifting her softness hard above the City’s hardness.
Fanny drew out her hands from the warm covers. Fingers touched, tried
each other: fingers pressed in the moist flesh of her palms ... lean
hands yet new. The room was a caress.
Through the moving door came a figure very high: figure slim and athrob
beneath a drawn green gown, under black hair let loose upon its
shoulders.
Clara pressed sheer through the caressing room. Clara! Magic and
wonderlessness, most magical of all. Clara! with her hair let down, in a
green wrap. Her loom was the substance of the warming air: her being
sheer over the bed was the mouth that had uttered all these transforming
words: the blue alcohol flame, the bottles, medicine, milk, the soothing
walls about the fended light, _herself_, newest word of all, that lay in
a clean bed ... the truest and the sweetest word of all this mouth that
was Clara.
“Dear, dear,” came Clara’s voice. “You are awake and you are better.”
She sat beside her. She gave her broth. Fanny was soothed, in a oneness
swallowing the hot broth: she was one with Clara.... Dimmed gas, bowed
throat of her friend and agile hands holding the cup and the spoon were
one, articulately, with her own heavy eyes and the lips she felt as she
opened them and swallowed. There was her will, there were the features
of her will. What touched her eyes and her skin, her ears and her taste
was a symphonic unity which she could love, as she lay swathed within
it, as a child loves its own body....
* * * * *
Clara slept in a big armchair which had appeared in the room’s
transforming. Each day came the Doctor. He had a little ruddy VanDyck
beard and eyes that twinkled. He had soothing hands. He was a part of
Clara ... hence of Fanny. When he left, there was his soothing wake in
the soft brown air of the room.
“You are silent,” she said to him, “like a canoe.”
“Well, we’ll paddle you back to shore and health,” he smiled. She saw
the eyes of Clara beam excitement.
“You have not spoken,” Clara said, “you have not spoken before!”
--I love my silence. Fanny lay back in her new thick pillows. I am going
to be silent.
“Soon we can bring you away from this dreadful place. Can’t we, Doctor?”
He nodded.
--I shall keep my silence as long as I can.
Fanny looked with warm eyes at the glass of milk which Clara held for
her.--I could hold it now. But I won’t. She did not speak.
And Clara spoke little. Words about her comfort, words about her food,
words of endearing reproof when Fanny woke too early or did not finish
her toast.
But already Clara was no longer herself. Fanny saw her long dark face,
haggard now and pale with heavy eyes. She saw the hand that feeding
trembled a bit.
“You are not a mother. Yet I am your child. Just a little longer. For
you are not a mother. I am a mother.”
Her eyes shone happy with an unuttered promise: “I shall be a mother to
you. You shall see.” But Fanny dared not speak. For she knew when her
words came, there would come from within her, deeper within her, her
words’ denial.
Clara’s strong hands, tense like a cord, soothed her gown, clutched her
shoulders, lifted her so that she could drink.
“To-morrow, dear, to-morrow we bundle you into a cab. At last! Away from
this dreadful place.”
“Where?”
“To my place,” said Clara.
--I shall not speak ... yet awhile. For I am afraid of the word that
will come when I speak.
The girl knelt down at the bed. Her head lay on Fanny’s breast. Her
hands went wistful searching to upon her eyes, upon her mouth. Her eyes
were shut and her lips moist upon the gown of Fanny....
_FIVE_
CLARA
Fanny sat in sun that was caressed and tamed by high blue curtains. She
shadowed a mirror in her hand ... it gave her eyes her face ... with a
sharp shoulder.--They used not to be sharp!... Wrist tiring with its
tiny burden, arm taut and thin in the blue housegown Clara made her wear
welded the silver glass with its sheer image to her face. Her eye,
seeking its own secret, worked unaware through the medium of parched
hand, spent wrist, peaked shoulder. No glamor was between her eye and
its reflection.
Her face was overlaid with shadows: subtly, terribly it was increased
beyond its natural buoyance as if sudden in that Night she had danced
through all of life had made invasion of her large eyes, of her delicate
nose, of her mouth quick like a young leaf, and forced its burden on
them. She had brought from her home the face of a girl: she looked at a
face branded her own and the world’s.
About this weighted face the room she sat in: cushioned, satined, a room
of crude caresses. She alone was salient peering into this image of
herself. She alone had mass and had dimension: and all of it upon her
little features, drawing them, deforming them, making them ugly. Making
them herself.
--I must face this! I have become a person.
She felt herself as a sharp weight set in softness. So she was upheld:
but she was free. There was a bar between herself....--I am true!...
and these warm falsehoods Clara had set her in.
--Saved me by them! I know that. You are all Lies about me, yet me who
am true you have saved. Without you what could Clara’s naked love have
done? Without you wouldn’t she be dead as I was? Your milk, your covers,
your warmth ... lies: O my still bed, O sun that falls about the grey of
my shoulders like a lawn of Spring upon an autumn earth--bless you, for
there is quiet in you yet, and it has let me think.
... When I am at last all in thought, I am in the way of the end. To end
is to be healed. I understand that. Life is a wound that only life can
heal.
--I might have died without beginning! You, lies, saved me. What does
that mean?
She lay back in her chair and the mirror fell to her lap.--I have lost
so much hair ... black, lovely ... don’t think of that, that is not
thinking! All you must fall as the hair fell. Fanny’s eyes closed. She
slept.
* * * * *
She came to waking with her head forward and her hand upheld, watching
her face in the glass. Clara was in the door.
--Did my looking at her asleep ... how she has grown old!... make her
raise the glass like that to her shut eyes? Then they opened. Clara was
afraid of the displacement her thoughts might make: she moved in her
room and sent out words in it as if the air were tight with some
subtle, feeling substance easily overflowed.
“How are you, dearie?... Been sleeping?”
She laid a bunch of violets in Fanny’s lap.
Fanny smiled, her eyes and her hands clasping the flowers thanked her.
“I’m so much better. Where have you been?”
“Just shopping.”
Fanny had asked no such question before. Clara sensed beneath it the
significant stir of her friend’s mind once more into the outer world.
The outer world! What was going to be when Fanny once took note of her
own world? She could not talk, for she was afraid. She drew a chair
beside her in the sun, and held her hand and was still.
“You are looking better. I have a broiler for you. _Now_ you must begin
to _eat_.”
Her stress stroked a wish: Fanny should eat long, must lose herself for
a long time in eating.
“I have been thinking,” Fanny said. “The sun’s so good, I’d like to walk
in it.”
“Dearie, it’s cold and raw out.”
“I know it is.”
“It’s only good in a warm room ... like this.”
“I know.”
Fanny’s hand clasped over Clara’s, silencing her. They sat in silence.
With gazes long and almost parallel they thought of the sun that was
good only in a warm room.
“My room,” thought Clara.
“Whose room?” thought Fanny....
“Clara tell me, ... you were not shopping. Why can’t you tell me where
you were?”
“Dear, when you’re well--“
“I am well now. A little weak, but well. Didn’t you say yourself--“
“I’ve been with him.”
“You needn’t hide it. Don’t you think I know?”
“Yes, Fan. But it’s all so untrue, since you are here.”
“He must be good, never to come around.”
“He knows all about you ... and he won’t come--until I tell him it’s
alright. He _has_ been good. He has left me alone. Well--he knows if he
didn’t--“
“Tell him to come,” said Fanny.
Clara jumped up. She was afraid and uncertain. She knew not why she was
so. “I must see about dinner.” She tossed off her hat and was gone.
* * * * *
It was a little flat. The dining room, the living room, the bed room,
were compact and warm in dull brown, rose, blue. They were retiscent
rooms, stiff proper little places furnished as with sedate conventions.
Naught of vice, naught of abandon about them: they had no strength but
they were full of ease. Like married old ladies, they were at rest on
something very sure. Fanny did not understand them. But in her fever she
had taken and used them as a babe its nurse.
Fanny and Clara ate, almost in silence. Fanny’s half chicken ... she
made her friend take the other half ... was a luscious problem. She must
eat it fast ... before it got cold or spoiled ... it held her like a
spell in its succulent evanescent glow. It lay in the white plate the
color of sunstone.
“Since I have been here,” she said, “no one has come to your place. No
one. You’ve broken up your whole life because of me. Dear Clara ...
that’s a hard thing for me to know.”
“I’ve had no time for my friends. I’ve had too anxious, too wonderful a
time, nursing you, Dear.”
“I was very sick?” Fanny smiled. “When I looked in the glass today I
knew that. I’m an old woman, Clara.”
The girl shook her head. “Don’t talk that way!” Her eyes were full on
Fanny with a joy that was not denial. She did not mind. “You are not
old,” she said. “But you’re mature ... somehow I suppose, next to all
us, you must seem old to yourself. You are ripe, Fanny. You are
glorious.” Her face glowed with the hard repressiveness against her
feeling which was her only show of feeling.
“Come, now ... to bed.”
She helped her to undress, diffident but sure: the gestures of a nurse
swathed in a mist of sentiment of a bridegroom. She smoothed the covers:
she placed a hand on Fanny’s brow pressing her head within the pillow,
folding the soft quilt at her chin. She did not kiss her other than so,
with her hands. But once, in those gigantic days of the shadow of the
Church, of the shadow of what else that had come and was to come! had
Clara’s lips touched Fanny.
* * * * *
Fanny lay in Clara’s bed ... for a month Clara had slept beside her in a
cot. And Clara, by the low table lamp that drooped above her shoulder
shedding a bloom upon her neck, read aloud a story....
Words were like pebbles against an iron wall. They rang upon a sudden
sense in Fanny of the bed she was in. Bed large and deep with hangings
of lavender, bed all about her like strong arms of a mother she had
never known yet hers!... Clara sharp within it ... sharp breasts, sharp
thigh, sharp tenderness of stomach: and the vague black manform
looming!... this bed about her. Its arms were warm and were hostile.
There was care in them, mother’s care, and yet they had no sense in
their great balm of what she was they shielded. Fanny lay ... the words
of Clara reading against her were futile ... in the arms of an alien
creature who had given her birth. Being of shame, being of denial of
herself, and yet she was its thing. Fanny knew the ineffable rightness
of her lying there, of her healing there: of this monstrous mother. From
this she must suck life, from this which was of alien flesh and spirit
she must build herself. Strange angry mother ... her own!... holding her
life and lifting her above it.
Words of Clara were little clangors, shells of sound far off. Fanny lay
... Clara’s bed! Clara’s bed and his!... enswooned in great arms
muffling her and feeding. Very white....
She saw black earth, earth breaking against rock. In a crevice of stone
through loam, through rotted brush and last year’s leaves she saw a
root, swollen and livid-red, thrust a small green shoot: upon it pendant
a cupped bud like a pearl. She saw in a Spring of sweeping clouds above
a steaming earth, a blood-root blossom....
The clouds were gone, there was mist. There was earth lost in feathery
warm mist. There were bursts of trees budding ... the feathery mist ...
the blood-root.
* * * * *
Waking she saw this room.
Clara’s cot empty. With covers thrown back it held in its sheets the
impress of her body. Shades drawn. A purblind light soiled from its
passage through the grey-brick airshaft lay on the blue and lavender
like smut. A gilded radiator buzzed and spat....
Fanny heard Clara in the kitchen getting her breakfast. The negress maid
did not appear before eleven: and this morning Clara was going to New
Jersey to see a married sister who was very ill.
She stood in the doorway. The sooty shade of the room lay in her face,
filling the folds of resolution under eyes, beside her mouth, with a
harsh darkness.
--She is not well. She is not happy! Clara looks herself.
--And the room--it is itself.
Fanny felt salience in the ugly morning ... for the first time felt
salience about her.
--It’ll go. You’ll put up the shade. You’ll cover up these beds ...
sheets speak. Some of the sunlight from across the way will filter in.
Sun lies sometimes. These true shadows for seeing where I am will go.
Fanny could not smile.
“You’re still half asleep,” said Clara. “Want to sleep some more? Lucy
could get you breakfast later on.”
“No. I’m awake. You bring in the little table. Let’s breakfast
together.”
“In here?” Clara’s smile softened the shadows in her face.
“Yes. Right here. Do!” ...
She felt she must face this room, this heavy stifled room, this weighty
fact of where she was and with what. She must eat this room with her
breakfast....
It was hard to swallow. Her throat was dry and was full. Above her the
chandelier came down in a tawdry twist of gilt from the dim ceiling. The
gilt flaked, and she saw black iron.
“Does it taste good?” asked Clara.
She looked at Clara.--God, how dare I pity her! You are good. What you
have, you have given me.... “Yes, Dear, it tastes good. You made it. It
tastes of your hands.”
They ate ... the breakfast, the room.
“Give me your hand!” Fanny clasped it across the table. A bit of toast
it held fell in the sudden sally and the butter smeared the palm. Fanny
opened the palm, she held it full against her mouth. She kissed the
grease and the flesh.
“I am eating you,” she spoke.
Clara’s eyes were frightened. So she laughed.
“You dear!... Could you eat some more toast?”
--How do I know what I eat?
God, you insult us.
If we must feed on dirt
Why give us love of the Clean?
Why give us fear of the dirt
If we must feed on dirt?
Since we must eat and eat
Why give us knowledge?...
What do I eat?
If I must feed on You
God, why do I forget?
* * * * *
The whole day alone, she promised to herself. Lucy in the other rooms
would intervene a little: nothing was perfect. Yet Fanny felt that this
was good. She was at ease in her armchair. Soon the sun would sweep into
her place. And Lucy had the musical quiet of her folk, she really did
not interfere more than a cat might ... a useful cat who would bring her
her lunch on the portable table and her drops every three hours. Lucy
had a soothing grain, almost like sunlight ... a sort of saffron
practicable sunlight.
“Ev’thing a’right now, Mis’ Fanny?”
“Yes, Lucy. Thank you.”
The girl swayed on her little haunches, holding her hands across her
breast.
“It’s gone to be a fine day. That’ll mak’ you fine, Mis’ Fanny, right
soon again.”
“I wish I was as fine as you.”
“Aw Mis’ Fanny!” Her hands beat out in protest ... glad gaunt hands
stripped by their work of flesh, and yet the music of them lived in
their bone and their gesture. Lucy went off, her soft shoes patting like
the cushioned feet of a tamed panther.
The door closed to the kitchen; Fanny was alone. Lucy would seek her den
and fill it with steam and suds, wrap a red rag around her head and fall
to work with an occasional cry like a wild beast musing: lost in a sort
of virginal ecstacy which Fanny loved, of work and dreaming.
--She’s diligent! If she were German, wouldn’t I say: No one but a
German could be so thorough? And she’s a negress. White blood yes ...
but it dilutes, that’s all, the mellow flow of her life. O you superior
Lucy! Yet she’s colored.
Fanny thought of the ugly prejudices which still lay rooted in her mind.
She could praise Lucy if she patronized her too. Take away the
condescension and at once she looked into a pool, misted by childhood
fears and girlish passion, of black distrust.
--No use thinking of all that. I believe I had a mind: it might have
amounted to something, too. A woman’s mind at work ... as a woman’s mind
... not as a lawyer’s or a doctor’s ... like some men’s minds: what’d
the world have said to that? Well, it’s too late. My mind is a wreck
also. It keeps on going, like an engine, broken and off its track,
ploughing the earth and itself. Going ... and going. Who knows though?
Perhaps it is not off its track. Perhaps my way is not a two-rail track
over a flat plain land. There are other dimensions.
--O I must have faith! That is the terrible thing ... how in my weakness
my faith went also. Faith and strength seem to go together. That’s a
good sign, is it not? Proves faith is not born of weakness. My faith
takes _power_. It’s hard work. Come back!
--There is nothing else. It is inevitable. Like a tree that grows. And
has its seasons. What does it know about them? ‘Now I burst into
blossoms ... now I am in leaves ... now I am stark and cold.’ I am
ashamed. Weak failure! Rescued by Clara, living on Clara, in a flat some
man gave Clara. Shame!... Well, it is Winter. Didn’t Leon know that it
all meant something?... Did he foresee a thing like this? What would he
say?... Harry was wrong. O I am sure of that. I am the answer to Harry.
What did he know of Scripture ... of Jesus? We have taken Christ and his
name. What have we done with him? What more than the Jews who refused
him? Are they Christ, themselves?... Why do I think so tenderly of Jews?
--Leon? One man.... If Edith were his, not Harry’s, would she love me?
You are nine years old, my beloved. I can see you. I can see you so
clear because I see you naked. What clothes have you on today, going to
school?... Mrs. Parker’s School. That wouldn’t change. Motherless child,
you have a mother. Can’t you feel ... O you must _feel_ your mother!...
--Suppose she could see her mother! No ... not with your young eyes. How
could they understand? Fanny shrank in her chair....--Thank God, I am
hidden away.... But my name? Let it stand. Some day perhaps, since she
is my own, she may have eyes that can see me....
--No. Never! That is all past.
She knew that this was past. She knew there was in her still living,
that which could not bear that it was: a part of her that held the
memory and hope of her child close to her breast, sucking yet giving
her warmth.
--My little girl! As you grow, you become smaller beside me. For I grow
so much faster. My little girl! Will you catch up with your mother?
The mother saw her naked. She was willowy supple, tender like a flower.
Her flesh was cream and crisp, it was like the meat of a fresh peach.
The mother saw her clothed. She stands in a blue gingham frock, almost
hidden away by a blue and white checked apron. But the black stockings
were there and the tight sleeves and the loved white neck. A dark braid
fell across her shoulder, tied with a stiff blue bow.--Her hair is not
dark! Mine ... mine is black. Smile at me. _Where is her face?_
Fanny was troubled: she saw her child again. She wore an apple green
mulle dress very clear and clean as it hung straight from her shoulders.
The loved white neck! pulsant with breath of her child. She curtsies.
There was a flounce at the hem: and at the end of the puffed sleeves was
a ruffle. Edith’s bare arms! She wore white stockings, little canvas
pumps.--She is thin!--_And her hair? and her face?_
Fanny shut her eyes and her hands waved with pain before them. She knew
these dresses were her own! She saw her child in her own girlish
frocks.... And her hair? It was golden ... but it would get dark.--As
dark as mine?
--Does she have my frocks and my hair? Through Fanny’s mind passed
dresses she had worn: for romping and for dancing, for lessons and for
parties.--I have forgotten not a single one. Are Edith’s really the
same?
She was moved. She moved against her emotion.--I do not see her! _Your_
dresses--not her _face_! Has she the same frocks? Fanny knew this could
not be.... She knew there still lived within her that which needed to
play with the sweet fancy that it was.
“But no,” she murmured. “In no way be like me! Edith ... to save you
from that ... come, look at your Mother!”
With her daughter’s eyes, Fanny beheld herself.--I am not hateful. She
was a little woman, breaking and bewildered with flood of a world within
her heart. She was a little woman tortured in the uses of a Hand that
would not leave her alone.
--But I don’t see an end.... _There is no end._ I do not see a
growth.... _There is no growing._ ... Let me rest here quiet. I am still
weak. Too weak to assemble my thoughts. What if the room is Clara’s ...
Clara’s lover’s (is there at least love here?) What do these things
mean, beside the truth that I am quiet?
The sun sent a sudden shaft under the cornice of the opposite house. It
lay in a cold glare, gradually milding, on her.
So Fanny gave up thinking.--Why am I so hungry, having done nothing?
Lucy cleared the table ... folded it.
“O it was good, child!”
“Thank you, Mis’ Fanny.”
“No, Lucy: leave the table. Bring me the cards.”
“Yes, Mis’ Fanny.”
Fanny played _Canfield_. And even this was beyond her. She was amazed to
find that she had placed a red Jack under a red Queen: over there was a
black Three under a Five! “I am skipping chances and making horrible
mistakes.”
She shook her head. “How dull I am!” She was helpless against
it.--Stupider than Lucy. Duller than the stupidest person in the world.
She smiled. She knew that the reason was that she was filling with a
Light.
--When I was pregnant with Edith, sometimes I was like this.
She fell back in her chair, and shut her eyes.--What is it this time?
She slept....
The bell awoke her. Her nerves jangled bright and disparate like the
three tones of the electric bell. Lucy appeared.
“Why Mis’ Fanny ... it’s some frien’s o’ Miss Clara--“
Fanny’s words were swift action. “Did you send them away?”
“No ’m, I didn’t yet. Ah--Ah tole ’em ter wait. Should Ah--?”
“Let them come in. Tell them Miss Clara’s friend is here and will be
glad to receive them.”
Lucy stood suspended in the unheard-of formal words of this lady whose
value she sensed. By her face, she understood. She went out.
Fanny’s awareness was sheer above the drowse of her chair. Her eyes
commanded her face: they were suddenly young.
* * * * *
The door opened. Two women ... Lucy shut them in, and they were three
together.
One was a girl, short in her coat of black velours, all black except the
gleaming face under black eyes, black toque: all round and yet her eyes
watched Fanny sharply. Hostilely. Beside her a tall lank woman, very
blonde, rose like the embodiment of the strange stroke in the round
girl’s eyes.
They stood, Fanny got up.
“You must come in. Clara’s away for the day. But I’ve been so eager to
meet Clara’s friends.”
The taller one nodded.
--What does she recognize, that she nods, in my words?
“My name is Sennister--Susan Sennister. This is Miss Liebovitz.”
Fanny took a hand, white in its feel beneath the long glove, and took a
hand small like a child’s, warm and ruddy: gloveless.
“Do sit down.”
Miss Sennister looked at her companion. “Guess we got time, Tessie?”
“Sure we have,” she smiled. “We really came to have a glimpse of you.”
Her smile was rounder.
“I’m glad,” said Fanny. She looked at Susan Sennister, to make her also
smile. It would help matters. Miss Sennister smiled. But the smile did
not help. It hurt.
“I have been sick.... Probably you know. And Clara’s been an angel.”
“She is an angel,” said the tall woman, as if Fanny had not meant it.
“O ... she’s a good thing,” said Tessie Liebovitz. Her black eyes lay on
Fanny’s.--There is no misunderstanding! They were soft. “We love Clara,”
she said. “We say yes ... just automatically ... to Clara’s friends.”
“Thank you,” Fanny looked sternly at Susan Sennister. “That’s a
beginning at least.” She wanted to smile. This woman was so very stiff.
She must be very stern.--How can I tell? What are they?... She went on:
“I say Yes to the friends of Clara--but with all my heart.”
“Have you been here long?” asked Tessie.
“Very long!”
“We heard her speak of you, before she brought you here,” said Susan.
Then she settled back in her chair. Something within her was released.
She pulled off her gloves. Her shoulders slackened. “That don’t prove
anything, of course.” Her smile was different ... sweeter in its hurt.
“Clara’s like all of us. We are good pals. We have a lot of secrets ...
trade secrets we chew over. That gives us an air of being close. But a
real confidence ...? Not us!”
“O I don’t know,” said Tessie.
“That’s just it--you don’t.”
There was a pause. Fanny was in the sun ... feeling herself within it
strangely, unfairly warmed against these two. She wanted to warm them.
“Won’t one of you take this chair? The sun’s so good.”
“We’ve had more of it than you,” said Susan Sennister. “Stay where you
are.”
There was another pause filled now with three smiles that were
unstrained.
Fanny’s head was light.--My! I am weak. There was a dim strip weighing
above her eyes, on her brow. Beyond, in back of her head, she was light.
So that her head seemed tilted toward her eyes. She saw these women.--I
can be comfortable with them! They are strong: they could comfort her.
Tessie Liebovitz chatted. Her own lips moved. She said nothing. But they
were moist....
Then she saw: Long black earth. A man was standing still. He had gnarled
hands, all else of him was young. He had clear-grey eyes, he had bronzed
hair and beard. His cheeks were hardened by hot winds, but his lips that
were free of the beard were soft and red against the showing of white
skin.
She saw him clear upon the long black earth.--_He is Jesus!_
Many people passed him. She did not see them. But she saw the eyes and
hands of Jesus go forth quietly to each.... They passed. The eyes and
the hands of Jesus came back to themselves. The earth was harder and
harder. The earth passed by him. Villages and cities passed. Altars were
shut against his hands. Priests were shut against his eyes. The houses
of the great passed him shut. And the earth grew blacker....
The earth was very black. A tree, blasted by lightning, thrust its ruin
against a purple sky. The earth was very black. And Christ stood on it
underneath the sky, and far from the solitary tree that twisted leafless
over the horizon. Christ raised his arms, but his eyes looked down upon
the barren earth. He was changed. He was twisted like the tree. He was
shaped like the tree. Like it he was broken and bent from stanchioning
purple sky above a barren earth. But he was white. And his beard was
red. He had no hands, he had lost his hands even as the tree its leaves.
His feet were buried underneath the ground.
A woman was before him. In a scarlet robe, against her breast, she held
a boy.
“Lord,” she said, “this is my child. He drives me each day into the
Marketplace with paint on my lips.”
“Why do you call me ‘Lord’?”
“Are you not Lord of us all?”
The black earth bloomed. Jesus was gay, he was a clear young man. With
his two hands he touched the shrouded hair of the woman and it streamed
like chrysoprase.
“Your child has blessed you,” he said.
She parted her robe, it was green also: it fell away and she was naked
before Jesus. Her belly was silken smooth, her breasts thrust up like
buds in a new Spring: she had born no child and she had known no man.
Before Christ her body was sweet like a lily at dawn.
Fanny pressed her brow with her two hands, and saw the quiet women. They
had stopped talking. They looked at her deep, and their voices had
lagged away.
“O ... you will have tea!”
“Thank you, No. I’m afraid--we tire you. We’d better go. You’re not too
strong yet.” Susan Sennister got up.
Fanny was warm in their understanding, and was ashamed. “O don’t go! You
make me feel--I’m a bad substitute for Clara. Please!”
Susan sat stiffly, then she relaxed.
“You know,” she said, “it seems to me I’ve seen you before.”
“And I’ve seen you!”
“When was that?”
“O ages,” said Fanny.--Am I mad? “Before we were born? And you too,
Tessie Liebovitz. You were singing.”
“No,” said the girl, serious. “I was playing the violin.”
“Your fingers were singing, then.”
“They were too small,” said Tessie.
“Too small to sing?”
“Too small to sing ... too small to sing,” the girl whispered rapt. “So
I work--my body, see? It works for my fingers that were too small to
play.”
“What was I doing?” Susan leaned forward.
“Your hands are frightful. One of them clasping, clutching ... one of
them thrusting away.” Fanny’s hands were before her in a frantic
dumb-play.
Susan laughed. “How right you are!”
“I am a fool,” cried Fanny.--Am I mad? I do not seem to mind. They seem
to understand--_something_. Am I a fool?
“She is wonderful,” said Tessie.
“Clara told us--“
“What?”
Susan got up. She held Fanny’s face gently in her hands. She kissed her
brow. “--that we would love you.”
Lucy came in with tea.
“Clara saved my life.”
“She’s a good thing,” said Tessie....
They drank their tea in silence. No hand trembled.
Susan and Tessie got up.
“You must not get up!”
They came close to Fanny. Her eyes were almost parallel with Tessie’s
red mouth which had spoken. She looked up at the straight lips of Susan.
On Susan’s neck she saw a birthmark, black like a footprint. Against it,
all she was white.
“We’re going to come again--“
“When you’re better--“
“I _am_ better,” Fanny smiled.
Tessie said: “You are a woman.”
* * * * *
Clara was there, and she still vibrant from it all.
“You had visitors,” Fanny said. “Miss Sennister and Miss Liebovitz.”
Clara studied the face of her friend.--What have they left upon her?
within her? She saw the face of Fanny glow: it was aquiver and alive,
her face, as not for a long time.
“I gave them tea. That was right, was it not? The little girl’s a dear.”
“Yes.”
“When she left, she threw her arms around me and kissed me.”
“You had a good time together?”
“Yes. And you, Dear? Your sister?”
“She is worse. But she won’t die. Not that sort of thing. Just pine away
and eat up her husband’s money and nag her children.”
“There’s nothing to do, I suppose?”
“Of course not. You liked Tessie? Not Susan.”
“I did not understand her?”
“Do you think you understood Tessie?” Clara was eager. She did not
challenge. She wished to be assured.
“I think so.... All except those hands--“
“Hands!”
“That is: that is what I understood the best: they’re the key, so little
and so terrible. You see, I know that. Only, I haven’t used the key.”
She smiled in the amazed eyes of Clara.
“Fanny, you sometimes frighten me.” Clara took her hand and held it long
and looked at it. Then she squeezed it and smiled also.
“You don’t mean to say: this very first time she told you her _story_!”
“No. Why did you think so, Clara?”
“What you said about her hands.”
“Who couldn’t see that? They are so small and tortured--plump perverse
hands. She had no gloves. Her hands, Clara--her hands have--“
Fanny stopped. She could not go on.
“Yes?”
“Well,” she whispered half to herself, “ ...something ruins all of us, I
suppose.”
She was blanched as if she had walked leisuredly upon a strange
outlandish road, forgetful it was so: and sudden there was a precipice
below her feet. Mind held back her almost plunging body with the
plunge’s horror. She recoiled.
“I know what you were going to say,” Clara’s voice was hard, “her hands
it was, that _ruined_ her....”
“Clara!”
“We are ruined, for you. I know it. You are right. We are bad women ...
ruined....”
“Clara!”
Fanny jumped up. She faced her friend. She sought her eyes, sad and
rebellious, and held them.
“Clara, you have saved me, you are sound. It is I who am broken. When
one is broken, Clara, one does not always quickly understand. One lacks
words. One falls back, Clara, on words that for today are lies.”
She clasped the wrists of her friend. They stood tense, against each
other: so. In a taut silence.
“We are all ruined,” came Clara’s voice. “But you still love.”
“Then none of us are ruined.”
Clara’s head tossed in anger. “No sentiment!”
“There are no ruins I tell you,” Fanny met her.
* * * * *
Fanny lay quiet in bed. She was relaxed at last. The vibrance of these
many hours had run out into a Space beyond her, where the sharp thrusts
through her nerves lay lost in a pool of glow.
She lay in this glow in bed: Clara beside her, responsive to her
friend’s new peace but unaware of its synthesis of warring parts meeting
beyond her.
“Should I read?” she asked.
“Tell me about your friends.”
“They are friends of mine.” Clara raised her head as if her words were a
challenge. Fanny lay still, with her eyes shut, waiting.
“There’s Tess. Poor Dear,” at last.... “Her story’s not hard to tell.
That’s why I was wondering how you knew. Didn’t she hint? Well, I don’t
wonder after all, Dear. _You_ are so wonderful O I am glad to have you
here. I want to keep you forever. If only I could.... Well: Tessie was
born in some mudhole South--Carolina, I think. Her Pa kept a general
store ... does still I suppose. He’s a Jew, you know. Tess says he never
was no good as a business man. But a dear! He’d sit in his room back of
the store, holding some old Bible in his hand ... or a prayer-book ...
and sing it out, half-aloud, with his head and his shoulders swayin’,
keepin’ time. Tessie says that is what Music meant to her.... When the
poor old man learned she was musical, Tess says, he fell on his knees. I
can just see him, his thin old knees half worn through the black pants,
creaking and cracking on the dirty floor. And he thanked the Lord who,
if he _had_ taken away his wife, had given him a daughter who loved
music. There were other children, but they simply didn’t count. He
didn’t have more than enough to keep ’em all in food, but Tess got a
violin. And soon the Dame that taught violin, piano, French and artistic
sewing in the Town told the old man Tessie knew more than she did about
music. She was a wonder, she said. She ought to study in a big City and
go in for concerts.
“Well ... the old man got down on his shakey knees again: and this time
he didn’t pray: he swore he’d get the cash to send Tess to Richmond or
New York, if he had to starve for it ... even if he had to sell--O I
forgot. The old man had one proud possession. He was a poor old ignorant
man, but one of his ancestors had been Wise and a Rabbi. He kept a
mouldy store and kept it badly: but this Thing he still had from the
wise old Rabbi ... and it shone in their home like the sun. Tessie gives
it a name I can’t remember ... but I can see it. A sort of breast-plate
it was ... a breast-plate of some holy Priest of their religion: square
and in gold. And set in it, in four rows of three each, were oblong
gems. Each was different--camelian and ruby and lapis and topaz and
jasper and amethyst and agate: I don’t remember them all. On each was
carved a holy word in ancient Hebrew. Well, there was the mouldy store
and this thing of glory shinin’ in it. But there was the daughter who
could make Music. So she could make it right, the old man sold his
treasure. He was religious. Keeping that Relic was part of his religion
... but giving it up was also part of his religion. Tessie got a first
class violin ... they cost like fury, you know. And then everything went
well. I don’t know the particulars. Some big guy from New York who was
down in Charleston gave her a hearing and next year Tess bought a new
dress and a bag and took the train to New York. Her Dad had even
mortgaged the store. But there was Tess gettin’ ready to earn thousands
in New York ... while the rest of the Liebovitz clan in mudhole, South
Carolina, lived on water and hope.”
Fanny lay still, with her eyes shut. In the pause:
“Then it happened,” she murmured.
“Yes,”
--As always.
Lord, why is it always?
Why do you break the soil
In which you plant the seed?
“--the old master, Tessie says she loved him, waved his hands and pulled
his beard. ‘You have talent, Fraulein. O you have genius. You are music!
But those hands. What are we going to do about that hand?’ They were too
small, Fan. You saw ’em. They were too small. You got to do all sorts of
stunts on a fiddle before you go in for concerts. And her fingers simply
were too short. Not too short for playin’ in an orchestra or somethin’
... but for a concert, where you stand up all by yourself.... Well,
Tessie hadn’t come to New York and put the Liebovitz clan on bread and
water and made the old man sell part of his religion for another part,
just to play fiddle in a restaurant. She went to a doctor or something
of the sort who told her he could stretch her fingers. He stretched ’em
alright--“
Fanny raised herself on her arms from the pillow, her eyes still shut.
“--till something tore.”
“Till something broke.”
“It was all over.”
“I know the rest,” said Fanny. She sank back in her pillow. Both of them
were quiet....
Each was conscious of the other’s breathing. The room was heavy.
Clara stirred. “Shall I open a window?” she asked.
“What about the other?” Fanny held her.
“O I can’t say much about Sennister. I have known her for a long time
... nearly four years I think. She just is: she has no tale of woe.”
“You are good friends?”
“Yes. I have learned a lot from Susan. She is wise. She has a brain,
I’ll tell you. She thinks a lot ... and reads.”
“What does she read?”
“O books you’ve never heard of. But I don’t think she gets her ideas
from them. They’re _hers_, you bet.”
“Tessie, I guess, has learned a lot from her also.”
“She’s our Sunday school teacher,” Clara smiled.
“I see.”
“She has a religion. She believes--shall I tell you what she says?”
“Why not?”
“She says: ‘I believe in the power of Hate,
I believe in the truth of Sin.
I believe in the failure of Truth.’”
Fanny was silent.
“One day she made us learn all that by heart. Don’t take it too serious,
Fan dear. She’d had a drop too much. She was jolly. So were we all....
It’s a joke, of course....”
“Clara, you know it’s no joke. You know it’s a religion.”
“I suppose so. It don’t fit in very well, though, does it? with the
religion of the Bible.”
“There are so many religions of the Bible. Perhaps it fits in right
well.”
Clara’s nervous laugh: “You and Susan’ll get on well together. You are
both philosophers. But you’re both _good_--though you’re better, Dear,
and deeper. I know that. Susan talks awful bad. But you know, Dear, what
she says _has_ something to do with Christianity. Sort of twisted like.
But it _has_. You wait and see. When you know her. Susan ... she’s like
a saint....”
--Christ, you must loose your buried feet and your arms without hands!
Christ, you must not be twisted like that tree!
Christ, you must not be rooted like a tree!
Walk the earth, brother.
Fanny’s eyes shut once more. She saw the white neck of Susan Sennister:
on its side the little birthmark like the print of a black foot ...
clear because her neck was white. She heard her voice: the resonant low
voice of one who speaks often with herself. She saw the black eyes of
Tessie upon her: the full lips, redder than rouge, the crowded
high-pressed brow, the child-hands....
Clara sat still.--She will go to sleep now.
* * * * *
Fire in Clara’s eyes. The desperate embrace together of her life and of
her love for Fanny rose lucent in them. She said:
“Well, if you want to meet my friends, you shall meet them. I’ll give a
party to celebrate your being here, and your getting well--and the hope
that you’ll stay on.”
“That’ll be fun!”
“Then there’ll be more than just me to do the hoping.”
“You’re a dear.”
Fanny saw a party of eighteen years ago. She met Harry there. They
walked the verandah ... walked back and forth three dances.
The espagnols are open. The music flutters through into the purple night
like cherry-colored ribbons.
“Let’s go on the lawn,” he said. “Let’s dance on the lawn.”
“We can dance here.”
“No. Let’s dance on the lawn.”
“Then we won’t dance.”
But at last she yielded. He clasped her waist. He sprang with her
through the elastic night. The grass was moving crystal sea under their
silent feet.
Her breath bounded against his. “You see?” he panted. “You must always
do as I say....” And even then, even then she sensed in his words what
she willed, not he.--_Was it so later?_ His going down, the agony ...
what _she_ willed?
“O I’m so anxious to know whom all I’m going to meet.”
Clara shook her head. “Such folk as you have never met.”
“I hope so! I want to meet new sorts. I want to find a new world. I am
sure it will be better. It’s yours, Dear.”
“They’re all I have.”
“Don’t you dare apologize! Don’t you dare spoil it. I feel as if I could
be happy again. Whomever it’s with--I’ll be happy with them.”
“They’re a strange lot,” Clara laughed.
“Who?”
“Well, there’s a Judge: there’s a Gambler: there’s an Officer of Police:
there’s a queer guy who ought to be a poet----“
“O how exciting! Do the Policeman and the Gambler get on?”
“They’re side-kicks----“
“Side-kicks?”
“Partners.”
“My! what a lot I’m going to learn,” she murmured.
“That’s what brought Tessie and Susan together. Her man’s a police
Leftenant. Tessie’s is Abraham Mangel----“
“And Clara, yours----“
“That’s a secret, Dear. You call him Mr. Mark.... O I can tell you.
Tellin’ you a secret’s like burying it. Don’t you let on. He’s really a
Judge, Dear. Right in New York! Think of that. He’s so good.... Shall I
tell you his right name? Sure never to let on? Judge Mark Pfennig.”
“Judge ... Mark ... Pfennig,” she repeated slowly.
“He’s a Jew,” Clara said groping. She won courage from the soft distance
in Fanny’s eyes, inquiring, pondering. “Like most of ’em. They’re the
best, Fan. Really.”
“Why are they the best?”
“They’re the wisest ... and the gentlest. They’re hardest and softest.
Wait till you see Abe Mangel with Tess. He treats her like a father.
Like a sentimental father. Those old puffy eyes of his with little
ridges of flesh beneath ’em--just like her Dad in Carolina, I bet. Only
_wise_.”
“You say he’s a _gambler_?”
“Well, not really. Never plays. Not he! He owns a big joint, that’s
all.”
“And ... Susan’s----“
“Silly! Gambling’s against the Law. You know that, don’t you? Well, what
does that mean? Any respectable Gambler who wants to make a ‘go’ must
have a side partner on the Force.”
“O--I see.”
“You’ll see, all right. But you don’t now. You’re shocked. When one’s
shocked one don’t see. I found that out. Bein’ shocked is the same as
bein’ blind.... Fanny: do you really want to meet them?”
Fanny pondered: her head low, her eyes fallen upon her lacing and
unlacing fingers. Tessie and Susan and Clara....--She has saved me ...
for what?... were in her pondering eyes. She saw Clara always.--What do
I see of Clara? what know? And what of Tessie, Susan? She saw them
often, they came often now. They sat there, quiet, proper, eyes
veiled.... Hurt eyes. Fanny thought of Stride the Kentucky colt whom she
had gentled when she was a girl. They were good friends. Stride knew
her, knew that she would not hurt her, knew that she cared for her
wisely. Stride knew, standing there aquiver while she came toward her
bringing a handful of oats, that oats were good. Yet beneath the knowing
in Stride’s eyes at times a deeper world looked out on Fanny: a world of
strangeness, of the expectancy of harm. So now....--They love me. That
first time showed. Even Susan in her secret way. Yet they are so still!
so far! I do not touch them.
Never had she touched Stride. Never. Now?
Sudden the thought came:--There is a part of them, a whole dimension I
can not see! She wanted to see it....--Their men?
--Sisters! why do I call you so? I want to touch you. That I may know
perhaps why we are sisters?
Fanny’s hands went up, and her head. Brightly: “Yes! Give the party. Do!
Ask everyone....”
There was something Clara, standing there, wondering for her answer,
understood. She took Fanny’s hands and clasped them close in her own.
She kissed them.
_SIX_
PAVEMENT BROKEN
At last the bell rang the door opened, Clara’s man came in. Clara got up
and they shook hands. Fanny was aware in the long strain of waiting that
her power to feel was gone.--I shall understand nothing.
“This is my friend, Mark. Fanny, Mr. Mark.”
He was long and moist and breathless. He laid on the sofa carefully a
bundle of bottles of wine. His broad black frock coat was worn to a
gloss. His skin seemed also, though his hands were white, dark and
glossed like his coat. His coat was a uniform and so was his skin. He
was behind them.
--I shall understand nothing!
Mr. Mark sat down, his legs were short and his knees pointed beneath the
mound of his belly. They chatted ... all three ... she too.
“Well, dear,” his breath was short and thick, “expecting the crowd?”
“O no. Just Tessie and Susan, and Abe Mangel and Jim of course. My
friend wants to meet my friends.”
Fanny began to see him under the cloud of himself: ... the grey sharp
face, larded in fat, the shiny eyes set deep, the lips rounded and red
and soft-thrust forward from a chin too long and grey-blue with its
undertone of beard. His nose twitched, conspicuous, large-pored, under a
brow that was smooth and white like a card.
“It’s good of you, Madame. We’re not such a bad lot.”
“O ... I could know that,” Fanny laughed, “from just knowing Clara.”
“That good we’re not ... not as good as Clara. But we do our best.”
Clara laughed. He sighed, and his little eyes, hard like the shoe-button
eyes of a rag doll, rolled up.
In this opening of mood, Fanny looked at the room ... hard gas-jets,
brash lambrequins, plush.... Room she had lived in ... the floor was
blood-red beneath a shrill blue carpet. Details ... details. It meant
nothing. It formed no word.
The door opened again, again. Susan Sennister stood there bleak and
tense like a caustic refrain to the long heavy man at her side: he was
spiritually galvanized, he moved for all his power as if he were lined
with metal ... Lieutenant Statt. Tessie ensconced in a big chair with
her feet trilling, mocked him. A man, soft, short, slow, with unctious
hands and voice, watched her effrontery with eyes afraid in his heavy
mournful face.--That is Abe Mangel.
--But I have learned something in all these years? She stopped the rush
of her amazement.--Be still. Just wait.
They were not bothered by her. Their knowing each other wove a glutinous
web through the room, and she held in it: her stirring could not have
torn it, she was tight. It was a gross warm knowing: no subtle
brain-fabric ... bowel-strong and sure. Fanny felt her shoulders pressed
together, her head high and sheer, in this viscous tissue of their
being together.
Mr. Mark cleared a lamp and a pile of magazines from the table. Lucy
came in, brought glasses which she placed. Mr. Mark with ceremonial
noise uncorked three bottles of red wine and stood them beside the
glasses. The talk was slow and thick: the wine diluting it, freeing it,
making it run faster....
“You don’t drink?” Mr. Mark stood over Fanny. She smiled up, full of the
incongruous sense of smiling not at a man but at some official
structure....
“I’m afraid--my Doctor----“
“Mrs. Luve is not quite well yet, you know, Mark,” said Clara.
All eyes turned upon Fanny: Mr. Mark’s wilfully considerate, Tessie’s
hurt and afraid blazing a partnership she had no mind of, Susan’s in a
twinging message that was somehow sweet, Mangel’s soft because they were
always soft.
Fanny felt the hard stare of Statt ... empty like a stone.
“O well--do give me a glass.”
She sipped.
“It’s good stuff,” said Tessie.
Susan, warmed, looked at Jim Statt and her warmth turned on him.
“Of course, that stiff’s too good to touch liquor! And he’s as healthy
as a brickbat. All his virtue allows is pullin’ joints!”
Statt shrugged his shoulders. Then he smiled broadly, as if suddenly
aware that Susan had flattered him. Mangel, holding his glass aloft,
smacked his lips.... The eyes were gone from Fanny. They did not come
back.
She drank her wine. She was relieved and brightened. She thought of a
field: it expands as the cloud barring the sun sails by.... The eyes
were gone.
She thought of her own place with these strange thick people. Who were
they?--a Judge, a Police Lieutenant, a Gambling-house proprietor, three
prostitutes, herself! She did not know who they were.
Mr. Mark argued with pointing forefinger:
“Of course we do good! Would the people feel secure if we didn’t have
courts and judges?”
“You do no good. None of us knows how to do good, I tell you,” said Abe
Mangel. “We are all in the Dark. I can argue as good as you. Couldn’t I
say: I am a public benefactor? What do I live on? The luxury and the
vice of the weak and the damn-fools. That’s what I trim. That’s what I
get rid of. Ain’t it better to live on that than on the hard workers and
the good folk? now I ask you! O bosh! I don’t make no such delusions for
myself. We don’t know--none of us--how to do good.”
Statt sat stiffly in his chair. He listened, but as one might listen to
the wind.... The philosophic argument wore down. Mangel and Mark were
unable to support it. They drank wine and turned to their women....
Tessie sat on Abe Mangel’s lap: sideways and still with her feet
tossing. He caressed her neck with a soft and meaty hand.
“Well, dearie--well, dearie, are you happier?” he crooned.
Susan and Jim Statt were close together on the sofa, looking before
them, saying no word to each other. And the large Mr. Mark, his manners
like his sumptuous prim coat, chatted with Clara, and Fanny, listening,
added an easy word.
At a late hour they got up said good-by, and were gone.
* * * * *
Fanny saw them again and again. She had little talks with each of them,
alone. She found she was fond of them all.
“It’s good to come here, Clara,” Statt stalked in. “I told Susan to
come, too.... Here, Broaddus, up here.” The door stayed open. A young
big patrolman in uniform (Statt wore plain clothes always) mounted the
stair, puffing. He deposited a case in the hall.
“Champagne ... and good,” said Statt.
The patrolman, red faced, soft with blue eyes somewhat dimmed, went
down.
“Brought them for you,” Statt turned to Fanny ... “set you up.... From
Diggens.”
“Diggens!” Clara exclaimed. “You’ve pulled Diggens!”
“Yes....”
“What did she do?” asked Fanny.
“Slow on payment. See? And always tryin’ to bargain for a lower price.
Yesterday I get mad. Sort of lost my temper. Perhaps I was wrong. Old
Dig was a right sort of bitch. Well--too late now. She’s pinched. Here’s
good wine, at least.”
He kicked the case with heavy boots. He was big and sure. Fanny and
Clara stood beneath his imperturbable mass.
--How can I thank him? He’s a brute. He’s a monster! Fanny spoke to him:
“Don’t kick that case, Lieutenant Jim.”
“Why? Afraid I’ll break the bottles?”
“No.... Afraid they’ll break you.”
“Break _me_!”
“Hm ... hm, Lieutenant Jim. You’re so brittle.--O ever so much brittler
than bottles.”
He looked at her in a pause that ended with a chuckle.
“O you don’t say!” The skin of his face was rough: his features were too
big. He seemed carved--crudely--by a dull-souled sculptor.
“You’re a brittle child,” said Fanny.--Why do I speak so?
“And you?”
“I’m a child too. You and I are the children here. Yes we are! We two
must look out!”
“Not Mark?... not Clara?... not Mangel?”
“O Mangel is old! and so is Tessie! and so is Clara. You are a stupid,
stubborn child, I tell you. Look out. Me too. We mustn’t hurt each
other.... And you’d better stop breaking the Law.”
“My dear sister child, you don’t seem to understand. I don’t _break_ the
Law.”
Fanny wavered.--Why do I speak so?
“Don’t you know, you come from the South, don’t you?... that gambling
and prostitution are illegal in New York? I am an Officer of the New
York Police. I am the head of what is known in the papers as the Strong
Arm Squad. I raid Houses of gambling and prostitution.”
“All----“
“Those that don’t do their duty.”
“How can an illegal house do its duty?”
“By supporting the Police, of course--the way we must be supported. I
have needs----“
Statt’s face was serious and serene. He stretched out a long leg....
“Needs----” and kicked the case of wine. “You don’t savvy much, little
stupid woman from Dixie.”
She watched him close.
“Aren’t you afraid, Jim Statt?”
He drew in his leg and crossed it over the other.
“I’m an Officer of Police. I’m a Roman Catholic. What have I got to
fear?” ...
Tessie came in, tossing off her hat. Tessie hated hats and gloves.
“--Hasn’t Abe been here? O hello Statt.”
“He’s nursing a hurt,” he answered her. “I’ve raised his price.”
The little girl glowered over the big man.
“You look out,” she muttered. “Don’t hurt Abe Mangel too much.”
“No?... why not?” sneered Jim Statt.
“He’ll turn good----“
Fanny took a magazine and went into the corner of the room beside the
curtains. She tried to read. She did not see the page. What did this
mean? _He’ll turn good!_ Was that what Jews did when they were hurt too
much! Was that when they saw God?...--Harry and I blinded by a blow that
_you_ see God by? Fanny sat brooding over the blank page of her book ...
brooding of the Bible, brooding over the words of Jesus Christ: hearing
the sneers of Statt, the swift shrill scold of Tessie, the warm weary
murmur of Clara.
--O it is good I am here!
Learning ... learning....
She saw no thing. She understood no thing. But she was at ease as an
infant, also perhaps not knowing, who sucks and who swallows.--Why is
Statt also a child?
Abe Mangel was there. He bowed to the group near the door and came
beside Fanny. She held out both her hands and smiled at him.
“Sit down!”
Old man with the heavy face of the Jew!--Your eyes are dark wells, your
brow is dry and rumpled like an old bit of parchment. Your nose and your
lips droop wearily, old man!
“You are tired, Mr. Mangel.”
“O it’s nothing. Tessie’ll cheer me up, a little....”
“Mr. Mangel--may I ask you a question?”
He looked at Fanny with compassion.--You are young too? you too ask
questions?... “Why of course, Fanny. Go on.”
“Why do I like you, Mr. Mangel?”
“O--that! You’ll hav’ to answer that yourself. Such woman foolishness,
liking _me_! how can a man explain?”
“You are a bad man, aren’t you?”
“Very bad. I ain’t no better than a _crook_. Only richer. My wife
dresses better.” His eyes twinkled.
“Well, I can’t help it. I like you.”
He smiled at her with his weary slow-twinkling eyes. She saw his hands
... gnarled yet fat, ugly yet expressive.
“And I like you, Fanny Luve. What’s the difference why you like me?
Don’t ask no foolish questions about a good thing. Take it.”
“But are you glad I like you?”
“I should say so! That sort of foolishness ... that’s all that makes
life liveable, I say! That sort of foolishness--you know what it
is?--it’s Trut’.”
“You think.”
“O no. I am too tired to think. When I was young, I thought. I was
clever. I was full of dreams. I thought--I thought ... instead of
learning to make money. When it was too late, I had to stop thinking of
anything except how to make money, because earlier I hadn’t thought of
_that_ at all. It don’t pay to be a thinker. You end up by being a
gambler.”
“All thinkers----?”
“I should imagine so,” said Mangel. He brooded. Stiffly he got up. “Look
here! What sort of nonsense are you making me say? Fanny Luve, I’m a
stupid old feller. I don’t know nothing. Thirty years ago I was a stupid
young feller. I’m sure. I guess I never knew how to think.”
She held up her face to him.
“I don’t know how to think, either. I am stupid too.”
Abe Mangel shook his head.
“You’re funny. You make me feel we don’t know how to think ... and we
don’t know how to be good.... We men and women.”
He smiled with his old eyes. But his brow was frowning. He walked away
to Tessie.
* * * * *
FANNY:---- You are there!
The world is dark, there is no light in the world.
The world is close, I feel you there about me.
You stir, you crouch, you are still.
You do not know that I am here, knowing you.
You lift your voices, they give no sound:
Shrieking they are still.
--Only the dark world
Holding you and me....
No word, no hand-touch, no signal of the eye
Binds us: only
A dark world.
--Yet we are close!
Could one be closer in the Sun,
Loving in the lap of the Spring?
Harry and I, were we so close?
Edith and I ... you in the grip of my bowels,
you in the suck of my blood and my heavy breasts.
Were we so close?
--A dark world holds us
Strange from each other, groping with blank eyes,
With blank mouths....
Closely.
CLARA:---- You are not well yet, you are not ready to leave me.
What is the matter with you?
Why are you still here?
O I am glad you are here! You are balm, you are pressing
sharpness on my ache ...
I do not understand.
--You are good friends with Mark, and with Susan and Tessie.
Also they already feel how right that you are here with us.
And Mangel feels it. Statt feels nothing. Statt does
not count.
Is it because you are not well, not complete, that you stay?
Is it because we must heal you, must complete you,
that you stay?
Then you will go?--when you have taken from us ... what?
You give?... You give--to me how deeply, to us
all how deeply!
What can we give to you? How can we heal and complete you?
--Is it our hurt that you would take from us?
Is it our broken-ness that will complete you?
MANGEL:---- Tessie should be my daughter.
Then the Fear of God would keep her flesh away.
You have shown me, Luve woman, that Tessie is my daughter.
--I am made of filth. If I could stop hating myself!
I am a dirty Jew ... I hate Statt.
... He makes me feel--this....
But who is he?
His body is straighter because he has no soul.
(There are times when I would love to kiss his body.)
--My soul is beautiful. My soul says to me:
You are a dirty Jew!...
What is the use? One picks the smut from one’s nose,
But one’s nose smells on, the smut comes back,
What is the use of having a beautiful soul?
No one tells Statt that he is a dirty Dutchman.
--You, little girl, with the apple breasts and the hips hard
and sweet like an apple,
You are my soul and you are far away.
You should be my daughter.
Then I should not have to hold you naked....
She is my daughter! O if I could say that, say: Father!
Not:--a whore and a dirty Jew that keeps her.
TESSIE:---- Music is a dancing wall
Between me and the mad man world.
Wall danced away.
Stiff man world holds me and pierces me.
You, Abe, at least have hands soft-speaking.
--Fanny Luve ... what is the name of your kid?
SUSAN:---- I ask myself no question.
O horror, O torrent of horror
If I asked a question.
--The mountainside
Is steep, is snow.
I mount, I mount.
I am erect: my shoulders and my feet
Freeze sharp.
--O the horror, O the torrent, O the flood
Down-pouring ...
If I asked a question.
MARK:---- Well, what difference does it make?
At least half my life is good.
I’m a good Judge, I’m a good husband and father.
Who in New York can say as much for himself?
... They looked on Fanny naturally, without color of her ... seeing her
within the way of their looking on themselves: so that they came not to
ask who she was who was there.
* * * * *
“Well, all right then ... if you ask me: you’re right. Mangel gets my
goat. I can’t go him. He’s nothin’ but a damn gambler. Why does he put
on airs?”
“I never saw him put on airs,” said Fanny.
They stood. Her face, upturned to James Statt’s gray one, glowed in a
strange way.
“He’s so humble----“
“Is that putting on airs, Jim?”
Statt stirred in discomfort.
“You’re right,” she went on. “It’s the worst sort of putting on airs.”
“There, you see? The damn little weasel! I’ll stand none of his
nonsense!”
“He don’t give you any, Jim.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“I know that you hate him because he’s just himself.”
“Jew!”
“He’s cringing and a coward. But even so, he makes us feel small, don’t
he, Jim?”
“Us small? Are you crazy? Us small?”
“Surely. Even when he is ever so mean and humble, he is asserting to our
souls ... to all in us that feels and understands ... that he is one of
those high up ... who have made us feel and understand.”
“Fanny, you’re crazy. I’ll kill the little beggar!”
“You won’t dispose of him that way, you silly boy. It’s not _he_....”
“God damn him.”
“Jim, you have no mind and you have no heart. You don’t learn at all,
Jim. Why instead of swearing at Abe Mangel don’t you see him straight?
God hasn’t damned him. God’s damned us perhaps ... by spreading him and
the likes of him all over the world: or blessed us. I don’t know, Jim.
But _he’s_ not damned.”
“O look here, Fanny. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Even Susan
don’t, either, half the time. None of us. But we like you fine just the
same. Now, it ain’t because Mangel’s a Jew that I can’t go him. You’re
wrong there, Fanny. I know lots of Jews. Lots of my pals is Jews. Mark
Pfennig’s one, for instance. All the gamblers ... half the gunmen ...
the best of the bulls ... the sharpest of the lawyers....”
“But Mangel’s different----?”
“Yes! His doddering old big-nosed face bowing into the room. His softy
grey hands weaving inside each other. His flat feet that don’t make a
squeak.”
“Is he square?”
“O he’s square, all right.... So far. He’s shrewd. He can be hard and
smart, believe me! It ain’t that, Fanny.”
“A lot you know what it is? It’s because he’s a Jew, I tell you.”
“It ain’t. I got lots of friends----“
“Jim, I don’t think anybody can be a Jew, just because his name happens
to be Cohn or Levy.”
“Fanny ... you’re crazy!”
* * * * *
One twilight Fanny had them clear....
More and more they came to Clara’s flat. Evening ‘parties’ were
frequent. Afternoons, Tessie and Susan often called for Fanny, and took
her for a walk or to a show. It was Spring. The City lay beneath the
Sun’s lubricity. The dirt in the hard streets was fecund. The sparrows
and the robins daubed the warming world with their swift flashes of
life. It was Spring. And Fanny moved, somnambulant, through a strange
ease spread for her by hands forever less strange.
--You ... and you ... and you: now I see you clear.
These men and women were no accident. They had words now she understood.
They had wills now--here was the wonder of her life--that touched her
own. Not Harry’s will had touched hers. Not her child’s, to eat her’s
up. Not Christopher Johns’. And Leon’s ... Leon’s will had stood beyond
her, over the ken of her horizons.
These wills touched hers!--these wills of women disgraced, of men
criminal and broken, outlawed and dissolute.
--I have two hands, and upon each of them five fingers. My sickness, the
harsh four years since Jonathan, have wasted my flesh. Yet it is somehow
sweet. My hair is not the verdant hedge it was, it is a little stringy,
a little limp. But still black. My eyes have fire at times. I am
thirty-five ... and I am real, Fanny Luve!
They felt that she felt them clear. Clara above all. The women above
all. Her feeling them clear at last was a bridge to them. Their will,
long champing on the brink of their division, moved on her own.
Already they had spoken of details of their dream to Mark Pfennig, to
Statt, to Mangel.
“We will take a House. And you will take care of us, Fanny!”
“And make us behave.”
“And make the men behave.”
“And bring God with you?” whispered Clara low....
They sat at her feet that evening after the magic dusk of a hard city
melting to Spring: they were in Clara’s bedroom.
From her chair, Fanny touched them: her fingers in their hair: her skirt
fringing their arms and their faces.
“It’s all arranged, Fanny dear.”
They were below her, seated on the floor ... Clara and Tessie and Susan.
Their will surged over her head.
She was flooded with their will. Slowly her hands stroked hair and
cheek. Their will stormed her head ... surged torrentful about her.
Her eyes lay quietly upon the faces of her friends. And her hands slow.
And their will a tempest.
Slowly, Fanny nodded.
Her left hand closed tight on the hand of Clara. Her right hand upon
Tessie’s upbrushed hair contracted until the scalp of Tessie hurt. She
nodded slowly....
* * * * *
The street is quiet. The House stands braced in a wall of higher houses
dusty and grimed about their stifled worlds. It is of four stories. Its
mellow red brick glows with at least half a hundred years. White net
curtains angle the square windows. The stoop has an iron rail that peels
as Judge Mark mounts, his heaving mass buttressed by a soft white hand
upon it.
He upholds his right palm with its rust stains to Fanny.
“I wish you’d have that rail off. Every time I come here I’ve got to
wash before I can even sit down.”
Susan laughs. Tessie is humming, and her eyes slide away with her
balancing tune. Clara does not care.
“I won’t change it,” says Fanny. “I love that old rail. It’s pretty.
Besides, if it wasn’t there some night you’d fall over into the
airy-way.”
“Put another in its place.”
“Well, I won’t. And I won’t have the bricks painted either.”
“Yes, but you went and did the windows--“
“She did them herself,” says Clara.
“Don’t you think the blue goes nice with the red? It was fun.”
... An old house in which lived an old couple and a little maid dressed
all in black, with an apron like a robin-white-breast. A big house:
these two old persons: one young. She brought her lovers to her
fourth-floor precincts. Creaking stair ... creaking bannister ... a
mutter: the hard sweet adventure that became no lighter and no less
sweet. Her masters listened for the clandestine footprints groping,
mounting: for the swifter descent as if the man had left a burden above.
They loved the love affairs of their pretty little maid. She made them
young, she added zest to their evenings of Patience....--“We won’t need
you any longer, Zoe. We’re going to bed. Good-night, dear....” their
knowing her wickedness spiced their prim demeanor, brought them delight
in the prim way of their maid. The old lady died. A month: then again
the furtive mounting steps. The old man could not bear it. In his
muffled reception of the loveplay overhead he learned how he missed his
wife: how in the license of their maid now many years, he and his dried
spouse had stolen fruit to themselves. In the gap between the guessed
fulness above and the empty bed beside him, his nerves gave out. He
withered and he died....
The paint of the windowsills and the Dutch net curtains are Fanny’s.
Little else. The house has the plethoric gloom of its mahogany
false-Empire chairs, its red brocades, its striped and flowered walls.
The beds are new and all alike: bright brass, cheap, furnished with soft
mattresses.
In the basement is the dining-room and the kitchen. Upon the first floor
a sitting room and two partitioned cardrooms. On the second floor, Susan
and Tessie each has her bedroom. Above, Clara has hers, and the back
room is reserved for whatever friend be granted it for the night. On the
top floor in back is the room of Lucy the maid and a storeroom: in the
front, the home of Fanny, a room to sleep in, a room to stay in alone:
for it is understood that no one enter. Here then she faced her life.
--My name is Frances. Frances Dirk. Frances Luve. Luve.... Fourteen
years ago there was Harry. Nine years ago he went and there was Edith.
Six years ... near seven ... a man came back in a black suit with white
sharp lips, quoting the words of Jesus. Harry, that. Just a less
Christian Harry ... whipping me out with the words of a Jew. And Edith
has kept on growing. I see you! I feel you!
--This is my Home. Do you see it, Leon? This is my _home_, I tell you.
For this I came North. For this, in the talk we never had, you told me I
did right. Leon does not know. Edith will never know. Whores and
gamblers and corrupted officers of the Law ... God knows. God is
interested. He must be. It must mean something....
She thought of her failures in New York. The House became a reality upon
her ... a sort of scarlet flower upon her black tree of failures.--I
have a will. I have a soul. I shall not let them die. What she possessed
of strength she forced herself to give, now, wholly to the House.--It
must mean something!
She studied her men and women. All of them. All of them, despite their
falsity of life, held a grain of loveliness. Perhaps because this grain
had been so stubborn to live, their life in the world was false? She did
not know.--But it shall grow! The House shall mean something!
She made herself comfortable. There was plenty of money. She went to old
shops, glowing in walls of dusty woodcuts, classic figures
steel-engraved; shops that were a litter of ripe yesterdays crippled out
of shape, beyond words, still mellow. Here, piece by piece, leisuredly,
she picked together things for her room:--pictures, a Pembroke table, a
Hepplewhite desk, a set of slender American Windsor chairs. She picked
up three graceful glass goblets, three candlesticks of pewter. She made
her room lovely. She watched her language. She kept her language pure.
She watched the furrows in her cheeks and the grayness. The great
illness and the years before it were gone, but they had taken her bloom
and her hair’s wave. She used paint ... judiciously at first. But here,
her taste failed, unnourished in the tasteless world about her, and by
the world of her own past where they did not paint at all: so that she
came to use paint badly.
She was past thirty-five. She was a little stooped, a little brittle,
broken. All of her body had gone from curve to angle. Man moved her not
at all. She thought of the body of man without memory, without desire.
She bought a Bible. She bought a copy, bound in crumbling black Levant,
of a certain Pascal’s _Thoughts_ she had found once, browsing. It was
Englished from the French. She liked him, whoever he was. He knew life.
Yet he seemed young.
As her face grew sallow and the roundness of her cheeks sagged long, as
her hair became hard and her knees went stiff, all of this resilience of
fire drew to the eyes of Fanny. They were larger, blacker. They were hot
wells of thought, sealed fountains of vision that leaped at times upward
through the gray earth slumber of men.
And her hands had fingers sensitized like filaments of seed. They
seemed, as her eyes saw, to spin with their faint tremor of response a
woman’s clasp about the reach of her seeing.
--Harry said Jesus said---- But perhaps I can understand. From Harry’s
standpoint it was the ugly word and the ugly thing. That’s it! That’s
what Jesus meant. You, Boy ... you broke me and when you had broken me
you came back and what you had done to me made me a horror to yourself.
Poor Harry, I forgive you. For I understand. Like a child, you could not
bear to see your own bad act. You meant to thrust out that ... not the
beauty that was borne of it despite you. Who can thrust out beauty?
Jesus didn’t preach. Jesus described the state of children like
yourself. I guess his people were children like yourself. Some folk have
grown up since then. And you, who quote Jesus, haven’t. That’s funny,
too. And all’s forgivable. Even you, down there, respectable and holy
... bringing up Edith to be a child like yourself.
--But I love her. What can I do? Lord, I’m beginning to think! so that
my love for my child does not burn me, twist me into despair? You down
there ... my Darling, ... not knowing your mother, judging her with the
child judgments of your father ... God! but I must be strong. Despair is
childish too. My love, it is a torrent within me. Love, anger, need ...
turn it away from your hurts. Turn it away from yourself ... which it
can only break against and wreck. Turn it where it can flow. Edith,
shall I succeed in daring to think of you _here_?...
--Why is it poison to me when I judge?... You, Jim Statt, you are a
callous monster. You’ve a soul as black as hell. If I judge you I am
poisoned.... You, Susan, you’re twisted. You hold a man in your arms to
feel him die there ... all that is really he. That’s your love: hate.
That’s your passion: death. If I judge you, I am poisoned.... And you,
sweet Tessie, you’re hardest of all. With your sensitive soft soul and
your unbalanced eyes: with your wanton small hands that turned you from
an artist into this. If I despise you, Tessie, I am poisoned.
--Clara, thee I love. My dark white mate! My boy! If I make plans for
thee, dearest, if I dream to help thee, I am poisoned.
--What is happening to me? I am no good. I am no better. Is it better
not to hate? not to despise, not to plan? Better or worse, I have no
choice. If I judge I am poisoned....
--Our world unfolds beyond itself,
It is a yearning, it is a leaping toward God.
--I see Him!
When the trees break out,
When the trees heave up,
--I see Him!
When men dance like little trees full of Springtime,
There you are, God. Here.... I am unafraid.
You cannot kill me, for I am part of your Spring.
* * * * *
In the warm smoke shadow of the room the chandelier thrust its gas
tongues weakly. Beneath it on the table stood bottles of whiskey and gin
and syphon water. Night. The backyards swathed silence: the shut of a
window, the call of a cat were in the Night like little breaks in a
close textured weave.
A slight man with heavy sparse-haired head on thin shoulders, frail
chest, spoke in a singing voice. His English was good, the Irish brogue
was thick.
“It’s this way--it’s this way. We sit here night after night and we have
a good time. What is it we do really? We destroy ourselves, and that
means we hurt less. We drug ourselves down to these parts of life which
are happy.”
“Man is not happy?”
“Man,” Daniel Scome went on, “is caught between the fulness of the brute
and the fulness of manhood. That’s where we are. We’re half way. And
we’re weary and comfortless. Where we are we suffer. We cannot rest. We
cannot forget. Because we are half way. We must go on, to a new
happiness: or we must go back.”
“That’s what we do,” said Mangel. “We go back....”
A voice came from the shadow: “We got laws and governments ... we got
arts and War, so we can go back comfortably. Yes.”
“We’re corrupted. Adam and Eve have damned us,” spoke the thrust, sure
of itself, of Statt. “We don’t slump back. We’re naturally brutes.”
“I don’t believe you!” cried Mangel.
“Of course you don’t. You ain’t a Christian.”
“Nor you!” said Daniel Scome. “If we were naturally brutes, God would
not bother about us.”
“Nor we about God,” said Fanny.
“It comes to the same thing. We are half way, I tell you. We got to push
on ... or we got to fall back.”
Tessie sighed. “I am tired. I don’t want to do anything.”
“And I am tired too,” Susan chimed in. “So I don’t do anything. I don’t
climb. I don’t fall. I’d like to see anyone of you budge me!”
“But you climb,” said Fanny softly: Susan did not hear. “You are all
cold with climbing....”
In the corner beside Statt, shadowed, sat a tall spare creature with a
knot of hair on a high fanatical brow, and eyes that burned blue in the
dark.
“Sing then!” said he. His name was Loyden. If he had another name, no
one there knew it. “If you’re tired, sing. If you want to go up, sing.
If you want to fall back, sing!”
“Boy, you are crazy,” said Mangel.
LOYDEN: I didn’t say I wasn’t. You aren’t logical. I said, _sing_! That
has nothing to do with crazy or not crazy.
FANNY: But if we want to be sane--
SCOME: We want to be too many things. Loyden’s right. We want the
truth--and we’re afraid of being mad. There we are caught, again, half
way--half way between what is really One.
LOYDEN: We’re not caught when we sing ... not when we dance--
STATT: You old scarecrow, what are you preaching about? Who ever heard
your voice? Who ever saw you shake a leg?
LOYDEN: I have forgotten how to--without the Music.
TESSIE: Don’t talk about music! You get on my nerves.
LOYDEN: You see? It gets on her nerves. The weakling. Music oozed out of
her, died down to her hands. And when they got twisted, it went away.
SCOME: We don’t know how to dance. That’s why we’re here, drinking and
loving women.
SUSAN: You don’t love us!
CLARA: (muttering) Only a woman can love a woman.
LOYDEN: We don’t know how to dance. Dance for us, Judge Mark.
MARK: Shut up!
LOYDEN: (With a rising inflection to his voice) Dance for us, Mangel.
MANGEL: I could read the Bible? Be still!
LOYDEN: The Western world is dying!
... There is a hush. And Loyden’s voice that was shrill moves down to a
low monotone swaying within the heavy fumes and shadows of the room like
a bird planing....
LOYDEN: Death creeps up. Death creeps down. The eyes are dead already.
Who of the Western World can see? The feet and the legs are dead
already. Where is there Dance, where is there Music among us? Among the
Black men, among the Yellow men, among the Red men, yes. They still have
living limbs. They still have living eyes. We stiffen with Death. Death
creeps up, Death creeps down ... into the heart of the dying Western
World.
... There was a pause. The eyes of all gazed into the shadow where a
long thin head, wild-haired, wild-throated, cast out words upon them.
The eyes of all turned: Fanny was out of her chair. She moved to the
bottle-littered table under the gas. The yellow light lay heavy on her
hair, made her face glow pallid about her eyes that were dark within
themselves.
“I will dance for you,” she said.
She lifted her hands. They were little and very white upon her emaciate
arms.
“Look up!”
But her eyes did not look up. They were dark and lost within themselves.
“I will dance for you. Look up!” So she stood, with her hands high,
moveless.
The Night rolled slowly: lifting the room with a faint jerking onward.
They felt the rhythm of the moving room, sailing upon the Night. Their
heads swayed and their eyes, upturned, stirred faintly, carried by the
slow-voyaging room.
The arms of Fanny were rigid over her head. But she swayed along. The
pulse in her throat swayed with it. Each thing of matter, each thing of
thought in the room swayed on ... except the rigid arms of Fanny....
Stopped!... For the room was there.
They looked upon the miracle of their being still in the room. Chairs,
lights, bottles, persons ... all was still in the room.
They got out of their chairs. They sank to their knees on the floor.
“No!” shouted Fanny.
They were afraid.
“You cannot dance on your knees! Get up! Can’t you see?”
They saw her above them: dancing. They saw the floor beneath them:
dancing.... The walls! They clasped with terror for the pitching floor.
They clawed and clasped. They found each other. They were glad. They
subsided. Flesh pressed against flesh. Teeth knocked against teeth.
Brows beat upon carpet....
In the corner, infinitely far from her, for he, like her arms, had not
moved with the room, sat Loyden.
“What did I tell you, Luve? The Western World is dying.”
* * * * *
Still the candles burned on the mellow table: Samson Brenner and Mrs.
Luve looked on each other’s faces above the flames. Rising and rising,
the candle flames came lower. Lower at last than the faces of the woman
and boy, and of the high wine glasses.
She said: “Steadily more and more, I came to think about your People.
They were all about me. They were all sorts. I wanted something of them.
But they knew nothing. They knew nothing of themselves. Where was the
difference between them and us? They had the same women, they had the
same money, they played the same miserable games for both. Why did I
want something of them?...
“The Truth!... Perhaps because of Leon ... perhaps because of the
ministry of Harry; because I knew of my own weakness--I wanted of them
the Truth.
“There were six years of the House.”
“And then--?” the boy’s voice was hoarse. He felt the sordid room and
the sordid flat. He had forgot the sordid reason of his coming. He felt
the sharp incongruence of the wine he had drunk and of the slender
glasses, and of the candles that rose and that burned, rising, lower, at
the table. “What was the end?”
“The struggle between Jim Statt and Mangel grew. It grew bitter. There
was no reason for it. Statt persecuted Abe ... pinched him and tortured
him: above all humiliated him. Until what Tessie had foreseen came
true.”
“What was that?”
“Mangel the dirty Jew--O he was that!--Mangel turned good.”
* * * * *
Clara is sick.
“I find nothing serious,” says the Doctor. “A bad bronchial cough, a
chest none too strong but unaffected. Somewhat run-down--and nervous.”
Fanny knew better--and worse.
Clara stays in bed. The House moves on. But with six years done, Fanny
can see a difference: and in no fact more clearly than that Clara is
sick.
--She is wearing out! _She_ who is not thirty. The House is wearing out.
I?
She brought her friend to her own room on the Fourth floor, where it was
quieter, where they could be better together. The Fourth floor was a
hush over the hard accent of the House.
“I am happy here,” smiled Clara. “It’s great fun being sick--and having
you nurse me in your own dear place.”
Mark came little: came less. Nobody cared. Clara and Fanny thought
nothing of that. But Clara got no better. There she was weak ... no
worse ... but also no better.
“The House wears away,” thought Fanny ... and tried not to think of
that. “What does that matter?” But the House went on.
Fanny shopped and ruled and entertained. There was the hush above that
grew: there was the wonted accent of their world below, wearing,
wearing....
“I am afraid perhaps, I’m just lazy,” Clara said. “Doc don’t think I’m
sick. I’d better get up--“
“You’re tired, dear.”
“To-morrow I get up!”
“No.... Clara, when you get up, you’ll go back to your room downstairs.
I love you, here, Clara.”
Clara’s heavy eyelids shut with a soft gesture of retiscence. The light
in the room was dimmed. The wood was old and mellow all about them.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
Laughter and a volley of words pushed up.
“Who’s that?”
“Mildred Dozen is here. And Thelma----“
“They’re wild animals, aren’t they?”
“Yes. But Thelma’s stayed wild. Mildred’s a wild animal tamed....”
Clara pondered. “They fit down there.”
“You mean: we fit up here?”
Clara’s eyes large on her friend: “We fit together....”
Fanny sat beside her on the bed and took her hand. So they stayed. Fanny
saw two lines running close ... red lines ...: they bellied out, wide,
wide to hold the House: they ran in close once more. They were less
red--dimmer.
Laughter and words below volleyed up to them ... anonymous, sharp.
“Tell me,” said Clara, “don’t you think--“
“What dear?”
“That we fit together?”
Fanny bent over the white face of her friend. Suddenly, she kissed her
lips. She laughed.
“You’ll get better now.”
“Fanny,” the words came low. “Do I want to get better?”
* * * * *
It was afternoon, and Fanny serving tea.
She gave a cup to Jack Baruch: rich-bodied boy with thin long wrists and
gold-curled hair, vague eyes, and a cupid’s Bow for a mouth.
She gave a cup to Foxie Wesser--master of Jack: a fellow angular and
small with sharp nose, sharp eyes.
She gave a cup to Thelma Clark and to Mildred.
“I like tea,” said Jack.
“Why shouldn’t you?” asked Fanny. It struck her sudden how quietly these
two young men were dressed in their excellent store clothes.
“Well, it’s funny to like _tea_. Luve, you’re a wonder, makin’ us come
here and have a good time, drinking _tea_.”
Thelma’s laughter: “Only boneheads need booze. I’m tryin’ and tryin’ to
like tea. Ever since I been comin’ here, I been tryin’. But I can’t
just. I’m a bonehead.”
“Wisht I had your wits,” said Mildred. She was blonde, doll-petite. Her
lips curled lecherous in her narrow face.
“What d’ya mean? _I_ have wits?” Thelma’s laughter. “I’m a damn fool.
Ask Jack. That’s why I love him.”
She turned her face--honest face with square chin and high clear
cheekbones--to the pretty boy she loved. It was plain she loved him.
--My friends! These boys, these girls. Jack Baruch who picks pockets.
Wesser who handles men like Baruch and the gunmen for Mangel and for
Statt--Wesser who was the Diplomat of pool-rooms, with his sharp smooth
chin and his excellent English, and his intelligent calm. These girls--
Thelma got up. She kissed Jack, she kissed Fanny. She paid no attention
to the other two.
“Me for my afternoon’s walk. Good-by.”
“You’re sensible, dear,” said Fanny: the lithe full body moved half in a
prance away.
Wesser was still.--Where is the calm of Wesser? Wesser was troubled. The
absence of Thelma who meant laughter and noise seemed to make him
uncovered. He picked at his trousers. He smoked his cigar with a harsh
swiftness ... he who was so smooth. Jack was jolly. He who had brought
into the too hard sureness of the House a bloom of adolescent
melancholy, laughed now loudly.
Jim Statt came in.
“Well, Wesser ... spoken to Fanny?”
“No,” he looked furtively away.
Statt grunted and sat.
“A’right then. I might ’a’ known you’d flinch. Well, _I_ won’t.”
“Right-O,” Wesser’s eyes flashed. He muttered: “Your affair after
all....”
“Have some tea, Jim?” Fanny held a cup.
“Thank you.... Have you seen _The World_?”
“Now look here, Jim ... you know I never read the papers.”
“Of course not. You read up-to-date stuff like the Bible. I know you.
But here you’ve been chewing with Wesser and Jack for an hour ... and
he’s not told you a thing.”
“Lieutenant, I’ve been drinking tea. Shop ... and tea ... don’t rhyme.”
“Hell ... well Fanny, things are bad. Mangel was raided last night.”
Fanny gripped her chair. Sudden, she saw Clara upstairs in bed ... white
... in the House wearing, wearing.
“I didn’t have a damn thing to do with it, Fan,” Jim went on. “I know
appearances are against me. I ain’t had no love for Abe Mangel. But I
didn’t do it--“
“Well, you can fix that up--“
“If you’d read the papers like a modern citizen, you’d know better.
Mangel knows I didn’t do it. Mangel’s gone crazy. He’s had his own place
raided!”
“What!”
“And he’s an appointment for to-morrow morning with the District
Attorney to peach on the whole damn System.”
Fanny was still. She took the paper that Statt handed her. She did not
read it.
“He’ll go,” she murmured.
“He’s in earnest.”
“He’ll go. You’ve made him into this, Jim. He’ll go.”
“Unless we stop him.”
“You can’t.”
“Yes we can, Fanny. We can--and we got to-night to do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Abe’s coming here to-night ... to talk to you.”
“Yes?”
“He goes out of that door--feet first.”
Fanny stood up.
“You mean--you dare to mean--“
Statt stood also. Mildred and Baruch and Wesser sat.
“Now look here, Fanny ... don’t be a damn fool too. Cards on the table.
Wesser has the program all arranged. There’s no other way for any of us.
Too late. The three boys are ready with the guns. Pfennig and Susan are
off. They won’t be back till the coast is clear. So is the cook. And
there ain’t any danger. You know the sureness of the House. If it’s done
here, it’s done. And if it’s _not_ done here,--why it will be, earlier,
somewhere else. Almost as safe. But your House goes to Hell. Do you get
me?... Either here ... or out you go, the bunch of you.”
“Mark?”
Jim Statt smiled. “Have you seen Pfennig? Has he been here of late to
see Clara, while she’s so sick? I guess not. And you won’t see him
either. He got wind o’ this comin’ ... the wise old owl ... before it
came. He is safe--outside.”
“Tessie?”
“She’s gone with Pfennig. It’s been brewing for a long time, ever since
Clara sort of dimmed. Everybody was wise, my dear Fanny, except you. You
see too many ghosts.”
She saw the House, very real, clattering, crashing--
“You’re threatening me, Jim.”
“Fanny, not if you don’t act foolish. It’s too late, even if we could
seal him up. You got the House here with Clara sick in it. Sick as hell.
Tessie’s gone. Susan’s ready. It’s the best place to do a necessary job.
That’s all, girl! Do you want to get smashed? Right away--turned
out--and Clara too, right out of bed?”
Fanny stood calm a moment. Then she sat down.
“Get out of here, Statt,” she said, trying to calm her voice. “Get out
of here. Quick!”
“Hold her!” cried Statt. Fanny leaped toward the back. Jack Baruch
caught her.
“Jack--let go!”
“She won’t do it. I see that,” said Statt. “She’ll phone to Mangel.”
“Jack--let go!”
“I can’t, Fanny. I’m sorry.”
“Bind her to that chair.”
Statt watched the operation. “Now, bind the chair.” The rope ate tight
and inevitable in her flesh.
“My men’ll come at ten ... and pull you ... and release you. Mangel
pipes at the same hour. It’ll be at the Dominion Cafe--if you want to
know, dear. And as to you ... don’t forget: we have your story and
you’ve got a daughter.” Fanny for a moment fainted in the burn of horror
and shame that flooded her eyes. “Come now,” she heard him again as he
turned to the others. “Out of this.”
They went before him docilely: not daring to look back.
But Statt looked back. He came back.
“You’ve always been crazy, Fanny Luve,” he said. “And now, doin’ this
... and for a dirty Jew ... for a Jew you don’t give a damn for ... for
a Jew you can’t save.” He looked at her.
She lay strained in her bonds. But her mind was free. And her face, free
looking at him, was calm.
Statt came forward a little more.
“Why are you crazy, Fanny Luve?”
He stooped to his knee: he kissed the hand of Fanny. Then he tramped
out.
* * * * *
There was a smile on the face of Mrs. Luve. Her eyes saw happenings far
away as if all happenings far away were happenings to smile on.
“For six hours I lay bound. I called and cried for Clara who was in bed
upstairs. Just three flights up. She did not hear me.... She had heard
too many other calls, I guess, since she lay there, to understand that
this call was for her.” Mrs. Luve smiled. “No bell rang all that time,
and I stopped calling....
“It seemed to me though, that I could hear the shot that got old Abe in
the heart, as he stepped out into the street through the cafe’s swinging
door.... Very soon after that, the police. Clara and I were thrown into
the street. Clara died in the Hospital of pneumonia. That is all.”
_SEVEN_
EARTH
* * * * *
One of the candles between the woman and the boy had burned faster than
the other. It guttered, went out. She saw the death of Clara.... The
long gray room full of the streaking stains of the white sick. Clara’s
black hair and the wan sheet and the bars of the iron bed. Clara’s
clasping arms, moist, shutting out life.--Let me die with you!... The
fading eyes of Clara.
“You forgive me? forgive me? I should not have brought you in, O Fanny.
I am glad to pay for that, I was mad! But there were six years.... I
have loved you. Now, you, what are you going to do?”
“You forgive me, Clara? What becomes of any of us? I have loved you
also.”
... “I murdered her. For what?... White Clara for a dirty Jew! Mangel is
dead at any rate ... just dead in another place....”
“I was not sorry. Clara was dead. My friend! My world was gone. I did
not feel sorrow. Walking the streets, the innumerable streets my soul
was as upon a journey through numberless bodies and states of myself.
Numberless moments. And yet my soul was One. It was unchanged. It moved
through the broken sea of my Disaster, it knew it was One....
“It is One now. Here I am.... Four years I have been here. Susan and
Tessie I never saw again. Thelma came back. Dear Thelma. She has helped
me. You know how. She saved ... I can’t guess by what means ... part of
my furniture from the crash of the House. She is loyal like an animal.
You do well, Samson Brenner, caring even in the way you care, for
Thelma....
“Four years I have been here--“
Samson got up. Through the gloom of the heavy room he groped to the
sideboard. He found another candle. He brought it back to the table. He
lighted it with the other that was low, and set it alongside.
“I have a daughter,” she said, “nearly as big as you.”
--I want to speak! What can I say to this woman? It is hard, it will be
braver to keep silent: not to break this stillness in which her will so
strangely works--toward what? For her sake, I am still.
“I am a failure. Look at me, Boy. Look at me. Look at Fanny Dirk. There
is light enough to look.”
He looked at her. But he saw only her eyes that were very strong and
clear.
“You have talked with me long,” she said. “Be quiet with me now.”
They faced each other over the mellow table. It broadened, it narrowed:
they were far and close. There was a wave in the room, making the table
and the two flames and their own forms curve and refract, as if their
eyes caught this reality of them together through some substance quick
like flowing water.
“Be still,” she whispered.
The clock gave a stroke: “Half ... past ... eleven.”
--He stays!
--He has listened to my words. He has heard my will.
Carnally he came.
That is swept away.
My will has cleaned him unto me. He stays.
She watched him. Blond warm boy, with eyes tender and virgin: afraid of
the brusque world. Boy with heart beating a measure beyond the reach of
your eyes!
--Shall I learn now?
What Leon promised? what the dolorous years
Failed to fulfill?
Shall I learn now from you?...
He has stayed and been kind. Soon he will go away,
Forgetting Thelma. Will you leave me knowledge?
--O I do not understand ...
Why I have wanted, why I have wanted ...
Why I have fallen and fallen, looking for God!
You, Boy, won’t you go away
And leave me Knowledge?...
Her hands were upon the table. His hands were near her hands upon the
table. Their eyes joined. He rested upon the yearning of her eyes. His
mind was empty.
--Go away. Yes. Before I have lost!
Go, before your staying slays me, Boy.
Go--leave me Knowledge!
He did not stir. His eyes lay within her own as in a womb, resting
omnipotent, knowing no act. She held him.
--Go. Reveal to me!
The bell rang.
--Go!
The bell rang.
The bell drove an iron finger between his eyes and her own. His eyes
stirred. The bell rang.
--Go! By the will of God, go!
Leave me what my life has bled away
To find at the Bottom ...
The bell rang. His eyes were quickened, for his senses knew not her but
that the bell rang.
Fanny got up. He was fixed.... She felt a stirring under her heart.
“Hush, Edith my child,” she murmured, getting up.
Her body was stiff and leaden. But she felt with all her body how his
eyes were quickened. Her own eyes turned her about.
Fanny moved with her eyes. His eyes, stirring to life beyond her, were
within her womb like a child unborn.... “Hush Edith!”
She moved through the tunnelling hall, a shadow darker than it, about
eyes that were wells of fire. She had put back the chain upon the door.
Groping she loosed it. Thelma burst in....
Thelma Clark was there: exhilerant, laughing, savage.
“O you dear ... waiting all this time for _me_.” She swayed. “In the
dark! Waiting, you sillies, with a candle between you. What’s the
matter with the gas?”
The room flared bright.
--Give me your eyes. Not to her! Let me hold your eyes.
Thelma flung herself on Samson’s lap. She kissed him.
Fanny saw his eyes draw in, swerve to another orbit, flame away.... The
line of Thelma’s thigh lashed in blue silk, the crumple of her little
breasts bursting within the lowcut waist ... there, there.
The eyes of Samson died from the eyes of Fanny.
He stood. He touched Thelma’s lips with his hand.
“Come.”
They were gone....
* * * * *
Fanny heard the door shut. She was alone. She sat down where she had sat
before at the table. She arose. She shut out the gas. A peal of Thelma’s
laughter pierced the door. The room clapped close about the fainting
flame of the one candle.
Fanny sat down where she had sat before. Beyond her rigid gaze was an
empty place. Beyond the empty place was the Night. Within her gaze was
the Night. Her eyes held nothing.
“And a Jew,” she murmured “a Jew was to bring me Light.”
She faced the Emptiness about her. She met it. Emptiness? The little
candle stilly laid it whole, perfect, before her. Behind her a shut
door. About her Emptiness.
“--and God?”
Sudden her eyes were hard. “Think of him,” she spoke. Her mouth full of
tears made her voice liquid. “Think of him. Think of him, Fanny. No one
else!... Your Light-bearer, your Prophet, your Voice in the
Wilderness--there he is, out there, in the arms of Thelma.... Fanny,
dare to think.”
She was still. She was a little woman huddled in the Dark with hard
eyes, daring to think.
Daring to see!
Her mouth tremored. Her hands reached open before her. They clasped. She
drew her hands in upon her breasts: and as they pressed, her eyes blazed
with anguish as if she held flame to her flesh. She pressed ... she
pressed. Her face broke.... Then, from the wreckage of her features
there was born a smile making them clear and sharp, making them fair and
high. A Light shone in them.
_1916-1921_
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
stook still=> stood still {pg 57}
football thrust her=> footfall thrust her {pg 86}
Take the chancet=> Take the chance {pg}106
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