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DAWN O'HARA

THE GIRL WHO LAUGHED

by EDNA FERBER

TO MY DEAR MOTHER

WHO FREQUENTLY INTERRUPTS

AND TO

MY SISTER FANNIE

WHO SAYS "SH-SH-SH!" OUTSIDE MY DOOR

CONTENTS

I THE SMASH-UP

II MOSTLY EGGS

III GOOD As NEW

IV DAWN DEVELOPS A HEIMWEH

V THE ABSURD BECOMES SERIOUS

VI STEEPED IN GERMAN

VII BLACKIE'S PHILOSOPHY

VIII KAFFEE AND KAFFEEKUCHEN

IX THE LADY FROM VIENNA

X A TRAGEDY OF GOWNS

XI VON GERHARD SPEAKS

XII BENNIE THE CONSOLER

XIII THE TEST

XIV BENNIE AND THE CHARMING OLD MAID

XV FAREWELL TO KNAPFS'

XVI JUNE MOONLIGHT, AND A NEW BOARDING HOUSE

XVII THE SHADOW OF TERROR

XVIII PETER ORME

XIX A TURN OF THE WHEEL

XX BLACKIE'S VACATION COMES

XXI HAPPINESS

DAWN O'HARA

CHAPTER I

THE SMASH-UP

There are a number of things that are pleasanter than

being sick in a New York boarding-house when one's

nearest dearest is a married sister up in far-away

Michigan.

Some one must have been very kind, for there were

doctors, and a blue-and-white striped nurse, and bottles

and things. There was even a vase of perky carnations--

scarlet ones. I discovered that they had a trick of

nodding their heads, saucily. The discovery did not

appear to surprise me.

"Howdy-do!" said I aloud to the fattest and reddest

carnation that overtopped all the rest. "How in the

world did you get in here?"

The striped nurse (I hadn't noticed her before) rose

from some corner and came swiftly over to my bedside,

taking my wrist between her fingers.

"I'm very well, thank you," she said, smiling, "and

I came in at the door, of course."

"I wasn't talking to you," I snapped, crossly, "I was

speaking to the carnations; particularly to that elderly

one at the top--the fat one who keeps bowing and wagging

his head at me."

"Oh, yes," answered the striped nurse, politely, "of

course. That one is very lively, isn't he? But suppose

we take them out for a little while now."

She picked up the vase and carried it into the

corridor, and the carnations nodded their heads more

vigorously than ever over her shoulder.

I heard her call softly to some one. The some one

answered with a sharp little cry that sounded like,

"Conscious!"

The next moment my own sister Norah came quietly into

the room, and knelt at the side of my bed and took me in

her arms. It did not seem at all surprising that she

should be there, patting me with reassuring little love

pats, murmuring over me with her lips against my check,

calling me a hundred half-forgotten pet names that I had

not heard for years. But then, nothing seemed to

surprise me that surprising day. Not even the sight of

a great, red-haired, red-faced, scrubbed looking man who

strolled into the room just as Norah was in the midst of

denouncing newspapers in general, and my newspaper in

particular, and calling the city editor a slave-driver and

a beast. The big, red-haired man stood regarding us tolerantly.

"Better, eh?" said he, not as one who asks a

question, but as though in confirmation of a thought.

Then he too took my wrist between his fingers. His touch

was very firm and cool. After that he pulled down my

eyelids and said, "H'm." Then he patted my cheek smartly

once or twice. "You'll do," he pronounced. He picked up

a sheet of paper from the table and looked it over,

keen-eyed. There followed a clinking of bottles and

glasses, a few low-spoken words to the nurse, and then,

as she left the room the big red-haired man seated

himself heavily in the chair near the bedside and rested

his great hands on his fat knees. He stared down at me

in much the same way that a huge mastiff looks at a

terrier. Finally his glance rested on my limp left hand.

"Married, h'm?"

For a moment the word would not come. I could hear

Norah catch her breath quickly. Then--"Yes," answered I.

"Husband living?" I could see suspicion dawning in

his cold gray eye.

Again the catch in Norah's throat and a little half

warning, half supplicating gesture. And again, "Yes,"

said I.

The dawn of suspicion burst into full glow.

"Where is he?" growled the red-haired doctor. "At a

time like this?"

I shut my eyes for a moment, too sick at heart to

resent his manner. I could feel, more than see, that Sis

was signaling him frantically. I moistened my lips and

answered him, bitterly.

"He is in the Starkweather Hospital for the insane."

When the red-haired man spoke again the growl was

quite gone from his voice.

"And your home is--where?"

"Nowhere," I replied meekly, from my pillow. But at

that Sis put her hand out quickly, as though she had been

struck, and said:

"My home is her home."

"Well then, take her there," he ordered, frowning,

"and keep her there as long as you can. Newspaper

reporting, h'm? In New York? That's a devil of a job

for a woman. And a husband who . . . Well, you'll have

to take a six months' course in loafing, young woman.

And at the end of that time, if you are still determined

to work, can't you pick out something easier--like taking

in scrubbing, for instance?"

I managed a feeble smile, wishing that he would go

away quickly, so that I might sleep. He seemed to divine

my thoughts, for he disappeared into the corridor, taking

Norah with him. Their voices, low-pitched and carefully

guarded, could be heard as they conversed outside my

door.

Norah was telling him the whole miserable business.

I wished, savagely, that she would let me tell it, if it

must be told. How could she paint the fascination of the

man who was my husband? She had never known the charm of

him as I had known it in those few brief months before

our marriage. She had never felt the caress of his

voice, or the magnetism of his strange, smoldering eyes

glowing across the smoke-dimmed city room as I had felt

them fixed on me. No one had ever known what he had

meant to the girl of twenty, with her brain full of

unspoken dreams--dreams which were all to become glorious

realities in that wonder-place, New York.

How he had fired my country-girl imagination! He had

been the most brilliant writer on the big, brilliant

sheet--and the most dissolute. How my heart had pounded

on that first lonely day when this Wonder-Being looked up

from his desk, saw me, and strolled over to where I sat

before my typewriter! He smiled down at me, companionably.

I'm quite sure that my mouth must have been wide open with

surprise. He had been smoking a cigarette an

expensive-looking, gold-tipped one. Now he removed it

from between his lips with that hand that always shook a

little, and dropped it to the floor, crushing it lightly

with the toe of his boot. He threw back his handsome

head and sent out the last mouthful of smoke in a thin,

lazy spiral. I remember thinking what a pity it was that

he should have crushed that costly-looking cigarette,

just for me.

"My name's Orme," he said, gravely. "Peter Orme.

And if yours isn't Shaughnessy or Burke at least, then

I'm no judge of what black hair and gray eyes stand for."

"Then you're not," retorted I, laughing up at him,

"for it happens to be O'Hara--Dawn O'Hara, if ye plaze."

He picked up a trifle that lay on my desk--a pencil,

perhaps, or a bit of paper--and toyed with it, absently,

as though I had not spoken. I thought he had not heard,

and I was conscious of feeling a bit embarrassed, and

very young. Suddenly he raised his smoldering eyes to

mine, and I saw that they had taken on a deeper glow.

His white, even teeth showed in a half smile.

"Dawn O'Hara," said he, slowly, and the name had

never sounded in the least like music before, "Dawn

O'Hara. It sounds like a rose--a pink blush rose that is

deeper pink at its heart, and very sweet."

He picked up the trifle with which he had been toying

and eyed it intently for a moment, as though his whole

mind were absorbed in it. Then he put it down, turned,

and walked slowly away. I sat staring after him like a

little simpleton, puzzled, bewildered, stunned. That had

been the beginning of it all.

He had what we Irish call "a way wid him." I wonder

now why I did not go mad with the joy, and the pain, and

the uncertainty of it all. Never was a girl so dazzled,

so humbled, so worshiped, so neglected, so courted. He

was a creature of a thousand moods to torture one. What

guise would he wear to-day? Would he be gay, or dour, or

sullen, or teasing or passionate, or cold, or tender or

scintillating? I know that my hands were always cold,

and my cheeks were always hot, those days.

He wrote like a modern Demosthenes, with

all political New York to quiver under his philippics.

The managing editor used to send him out on wonderful

assignments, and they used to hold the paper for his

stuff when it was late. Sometimes he would be gone for

days at a time, and when he returned the men would look

at him with a sort of admiring awe. And the city editor

would glance up from beneath his green eye-shade and call

out:

"Say, Orme, for a man who has just wired in about a

million dollars' worth of stuff seems to me you don't

look very crisp and jaunty."

"Haven't slept for a week," Peter Orme would growl,

and then he would brush past the men who were crowded

around him, and turn in my direction. And the old

hot-and-cold, happy, frightened, laughing, sobbing

sensation would have me by the throat again.

Well, we were married. Love cast a glamour over his

very vices. His love of drink? A weakness which I would

transform into strength. His white hot flashes of

uncontrollable temper? Surely they would die down at my

cool, tender touch. His fits of abstraction and

irritability? Mere evidences of the genius within. Oh,

my worshiping soul was always alert with an excuse.

And so we were married. He had quite tired

of me in less than a year, and the hand that had always

shaken a little shook a great deal now, and the fits of

abstraction and temper could be counted upon to appear

oftener than any other moods. I used to laugh,

sometimes, when I was alone, at the bitter humor of it

all. It was like a Duchess novel come to life.

His work began to show slipshod in spots. They

talked to him about it and he laughed at them. Then, one

day, he left them in the ditch on the big story of the

McManus indictment, and the whole town scooped him, and

the managing editor told him that he must go. His lapses

had become too frequent. They would have to replace him

with a man not so brilliant, perhaps, but more reliable.

I daren't think of his face as it looked when he came

home to the little apartment and told me. The smoldering

eyes were flaming now. His lips were flecked with a sort

of foam. I stared at him in horror. He strode over to

me, clasped his fingers about my throat and shook me as

a dog shakes a mouse.

"Why don't you cry, eh?" he snarled. Why don't you

cry!"

And then I did cry out at what I saw in his eyes. I

wrenched myself free, fled to my room, and locked the

door and stood against it with my hand pressed over my

heart until I heard the outer door slam and the echo of

his footsteps die away.

Divorce! That was my only salvation. No, that would

be cowardly now. I would wait until he was on his feet

again, and then I would demand my old free life back once

more. This existence that was dragging me into the

gutter--this was not life! Life was a glorious,

beautiful thing, and I would have it yet. I laid my

plans, feverishly, and waited. He did not come back that

night, or the next, or the next, or the next. In

desperation I went to see the men at the office. No,

they had not seen him. Was there anything that they

could do? they asked. I smiled, and thanked them, and

said, oh, Peter was so absent-minded! No doubt he had

misdirected his letters, or something of the sort. And

then I went back to the flat to resume the horrible

waiting.

One week later he turned up at the old office which

had cast him off. He sat down at his former desk and

began to write, breathlessly, as he used to in the days

when all the big stories fell to him. One of the men

reporters strolled up to him and touched him on the

shoulder, man-fashion. Peter Orme raised his head and

stared at him, and the man sprang back in terror.

The smoldering eyes had burned down to an ash.

Peter Orme was quite bereft of all reason. They took him

away that night, and I kept telling myself that it wasn't

true; that it was all a nasty dream, and I would wake up

pretty soon, and laugh about it, and tell it at the

breakfast table.

Well, one does not seek a divorce from a husband who

is insane. The busy men on the great paper were very

kind. They would take me back on the staff. Did I think

that I still could write those amusing little human

interest stories? Funny ones, you know, with a punch in

'em.

Oh, plenty of good stories left in me yet, I assured

them. They must remember that I was only twenty-one,

after all, and at twenty-one one does not lose the sense

of humor.

And so I went back to my old desk, and wrote bright,

chatty letters home to Norah, and ground out very funny

stories with a punch in 'em, that the husband in the

insane asylum might be kept in comforts. With both hands

I hung on like grim death to that saving sense of humor,

resolved to make something of that miserable mess which

was my life--to make something of it yet. And now--

At this point in my musings there was an end

of the low-voiced conversation in the hall. Sis tiptoed

in and looked her disapproval at finding me sleepless.

"Dawn, old girlie, this will never do. Shut your

eyes now, like a good child, and go to sleep. Guess what

that great brute of a doctor said! I may take you home

with me next week! Dawn dear, you will come, won't you?

You must! This is killing you. Don't make me go away

leaving you here. I couldn't stand it."

She leaned over my pillow and closed my eyelids

gently with her sweet, cool fingers. "You are coming

home with me, and you shall sleep and eat, and sleep and

eat, until you are as lively as the Widow Malone, ohone,

and twice as fat. Home, Dawnie dear, where we'll forget

all about New York. Home, with me."

I reached up uncertainly, and brought her hand down

to my lips and a great peace descended upon my sick soul.

"Home--with you," I said, like a child, and fell asleep.

CHAPTER II

MOSTLY EGGS

Oh, but it was clean, and sweet, and wonderfully

still, that rose-and-white room at Norah's! No street

cars to tear at one's nerves with grinding brakes and

clanging bells; no tramping of restless feet on the

concrete all through the long, noisy hours; no shrieking

midnight joy-riders; not one of the hundred sounds which

make night hideous in the city. What bliss to lie there,

hour after hour, in a delicious half-waking,

half-sleeping, wholly exquisite stupor, only rousing

myself to swallow egg-nogg No. 426, and then to flop back

again on the big, cool pillow!

New York, with its lights, its clangor, its millions,

was only a far-away, jumbled nightmare. The office, with

its clacking typewriters, its insistent, nerve-racking

telephone bells, its systematic rush, its smoke-dimmed

city room, was but an ugly part of the dream.

Back to that inferno of haste and scramble and

clatter? Never! Never! I resolved, drowsily. And

dropped off to sleep again.

And the sheets. Oh, those sheets of Norah's! Why,

they were white, instead of gray! And they actually

smelled of flowers. For that matter, there were rosebuds

on the silken coverlet. It took me a week to get chummy

with that rosebud-and-down quilt. I had to explain

carefully to Norah that after a half-dozen years of

sleeping under doubtful boarding-house blankets one does

not so soon get rid of a shuddering disgust for coverings

which are haunted by the ghosts of a hundred unknown

sleepers. Those years had taught me to draw up the sheet

with scrupulous care, to turn it down, and smooth it

over, so that no contaminating and woolly blanket should

touch my skin. The habit stuck even after Norah had

tucked me in between her fragrant sheets. Automatically

my hands groped about, arranging the old protecting

barrier.

"What's the matter, Fuss-fuss?" inquired Norah,

looking on. "That down quilt won't bite you; what an old

maid you are!"

"Don't like blankets next to my face," I elucidated,

sleepily, "never can tell who slept under 'em last--"

You cat!" exclaimed Norah, making a little rush at

me. "If you weren't supposed to be ill I'd

shake you! Comparing my darling rosebud quilt to your

miserable gray blankets! Just for that I'll make you eat

an extra pair of eggs."

There never was a sister like Norah. But then, who

ever heard of a brother-in-law like Max? No woman--not

even a frazzled-out newspaper woman--could receive the

love and care that they gave me, and fail to flourish

under it. They had been Dad and Mother to me since the

day when Norah had tucked me under her arm and carried me

away from New York. Sis was an angel; a comforting,

twentieth-century angel, with white apron strings for

wings, and a tempting tray in her hands in place of the

hymn books and palm leaves that the picture-book angels

carry. She coaxed the inevitable eggs and beef into more

tempting forms than Mrs. Rorer ever guessed at. She

could disguise those two plain, nourishing articles of

diet so effectually that neither hen nor cow would have

suspected either of having once been part of her anatomy.

Once I ate halfway through a melting, fluffy,

peach-bedecked plate of something before I discovered

that it was only another egg in disguise.

"Feel like eating a great big dinner to-day, Kidlet?

"Norah would ask in the morning as she stood at my bedside

(with a glass of egg-something in her hand, of course).

"Eat!"--horror and disgust shuddering through my

voice--"Eat! Ugh! Don't s-s-speak of it to me. And for

pity's sake tell Frieda to shut the kitchen door when you

go down, will you? I can smell something like ugh!--like

pot roast, with gravy!" And I would turn my face to the

wall.

Three hours later I would hear Sis coming softly up

the stairs, accompanied by a tinkling of china and glass.

I would face her, all protest.

"Didn't I tell you, Sis, that I couldn't eat a

mouthful? Not a mouthf--um-m-m-m! How perfectly

scrumptious that looks! What's that affair in the

lettuce leaf? Oh, can't I begin on that divine-looking

pinky stuff in the tall glass? H'm? Oh, please!"

"I thought--" Norah would begin; and then she would

snigger softly.

"Oh, well, that was hours ago," I would explain,

loftily. "Perhaps I could manage a bite or two now."

Whereupon I would demolish everything except the

china and doilies.

It was at this point on the road to recovery, just

halfway between illness and health, that Norah and Max

brought the great and unsmiling Von Gerhard on the scene.

It appeared that even New York was respectfully aware of

Von Gerhard, the nerve specialist, in spite of the fact

that he lived in Milwaukee. The idea of bringing him up

to look at me occurred to Max quite suddenly. I think it

was on the evening that I burst into tears when Max

entered the room wearing a squeaky shoe. The Weeping

Walrus was a self-contained and tranquil creature

compared to me at that time. The sight of a fly on the

wall was enough to make me burst into a passion of sobs.

"I know the boy to steady those shaky nerves of

yours, Dawn," said Max, after I had made a shamefaced

apology for my hysterical weeping, "I'm going to have Von

Gerhard up here to look at you. He can run up Sunday,

eh, Norah?"

"Who's Von Gerhard?" I inquired, out of the depths of

my ignorance. "Anyway, I won't have him. I'll bet he

wears a Vandyke and spectacles."

"Von Gerhard!" exclaimed Norah, indignantly. "You

ought to be thankful to have him look at you, even if he

wears goggles and a flowing beard. Why, even that

red-haired New York doctor of yours cringed and looked

impressed when I told him that Von Gerhard was

a friend of my husband's, and that they had been comrades

at Heidelberg. I must have mentioned him dozens of times

in my letters."

"Never."

"Queer," commented Max, "he runs up here every now

and then to spend a quiet Sunday with Norah and me and

the Spalpeens. Says it rests him. The kids swarm all

over him, and tear him limb from limb. It doesn't look

restful, but he says it's great. I think he came here

from Berlin just after you left for New York, Dawn.

Milwaukee fits him as if it had been made for him."

"But you're not going to drag this wonderful being up

here just for me!" I protested, aghast.

Max pointed an accusing finger at me from the

doorway. "Aren't you what the bromides call a bundle of

nerves? And isn't Von Gerhard's specialty untying just

those knots? I'll write to him to-night."

And he did. And Von Gerhard came. The Spalpeens

watched for him, their noses flattened against the

window-pane, for it was raining. As he came up the path

they burst out of the door to meet him. From my bedroom

window I saw him come prancing up the walk like a boy,

with the two children clinging to his coat-tails, all

three quite unmindful of the rain, and yelling like

Comanches.

Ten minutes later he had donned his professional

dignity, entered my room, and beheld me in all my limp

and pea-green beauty. I noted approvingly that he had to

stoop a bit as he entered the low doorway, and that the

Vandyke of my prophecy was missing.

He took my hand in his own steady, reassuring clasp.

Then he began to talk. Half an hour sped away while we

discussed New York--books--music--theatres--everything

and anything but Dawn O'Hara. I learned later that as we

chatted he was getting his story, bit by bit, from every

twitch of the eyelids, from every gesture of the hands

that had grown too thin to wear the hateful ring; from

every motion of the lips; from the color of my nails;

from each convulsive muscle; from every shadow, and

wrinkle and curve and line of my face.

Suddenly he asked: "Are you making the proper effort

to get well? You try to conquer those jumping nerfs,

yes?"

I glared at him. "Try! I do everything. I'd eat

woolly worms if I thought they might benefit me. If ever

a girl has minded her big sister and her doctor, that

girl is I. I've eaten everything from pate de foie gras

to raw beef, and I've drunk everything from blood to

champagne."

"Eggs? " queried Von Gerhard, as though making a

happy suggestion.

"Eggs!" I snorted. "Eggs! Thousands of 'em! Eggs

hard and soft boiled, poached and fried, scrambled and

shirred, eggs in beer and egg-noggs, egg lemonades and

egg orangeades, eggs in wine and eggs in milk, and eggs

au naturel. I've lapped up iron-and-wine, and whole

rivers of milk, and I've devoured rare porterhouse and

roast beef day after day for weeks. So! Eggs!"

"Mein Himmel!" ejaculated he, fervently, "And you

still live!" A suspicion of a smile dawned in his eyes.

I wondered if he ever laughed. I would experiment.

"Don't breathe it to a soul," I whispered,

tragically, "but eggs, and eggs alone, are turning my

love for my sister into bitterest hate. She stalks me

the whole day long, forcing egg mixtures down my

unwilling throat. She bullies me. I daren't put out my

hand suddenly without knocking over liquid refreshment in

some form, but certainly with an egg lurking in its

depths. I am so expert that I can tell an egg orangeade

from an egg lemonade at a distance of twenty yards, with

my left hand tied behind me,and one eye shut, and my feet

in a sack."

"You can laugh, eh? Well, that iss good," commented

the grave and unsmiling one.

"Sure," answered I, made more flippant by his

solemnity. "Surely I can laugh. For what else was my

father Irish? Dad used to say that a sense of humor was

like a shillaly--an iligent thing to have around handy,

especially when the joke's on you."

The ghost of a twinkle appeared again in the corners

of the German blue eyes. Some fiend of rudeness seized

me.

"Laugh!" I commanded.

Dr. Ernst von Gerhard stiffened. "Pardon?" inquired

he, as one who is sure that he has misunderstood.

"Laugh!" I snapped again. "I'll dare you to do it.

I'll double dare you! You dassen't!"

But he did. After a moment's bewildered surprise he

threw back his handsome blond head and gave vent to a

great, deep infectious roar of mirth that brought the

Spalpeens tumbling up the stairs in defiance of their

mother's strict instructions.

After that we got along beautifully. He

turned out to be quite human, beneath the outer crust of

reserve. He continued his examination only after bribing

the Spalpeens shamefully, so that even their rapacious

demands were satisfied, and they trotted off contentedly.

There followed a process which reduced me to a

giggling heap but which Von Gerhard carried out

ceremoniously. It consisted of certain raps at my knees,

and shins, and elbows, and fingers, and certain commands

to--"look at my finger! Look at the wall! Look at my

finger! Look at the wall!"

"So!" said Von Gerhard at last, in a tone of

finality. I sank my battered frame into the nearest

chair. "This--this newspaper work--it must cease." He

dismissed it with a wave of the hand.

"Certainly," I said, with elaborate sarcasm. "How

should you advise me to earn my living in the future?

In the stories they paint dinner cards, don't

they? or bake angel cakes?"

"Are you then never serious?" asked Von Gerhard, in

disapproval.

"Never," said I. "An old, worn-out, worked-out

newspaper reporter, with a husband in the mad-house,

can't afford to be serious for a minute, because if she

were she'd go mad, too, with the hopelessness of it all."

And I buried my face in my hands.

The room was very still for a moment. Then the great

Von Gerhard came over, and took my hands gently from my

face. "I--I do beg your pardon," he said. He looked

strangely boyish and uncomfortable as he said it. "I was

thinking only of your good. We do that, sometimes,

forgetting that circumstances may make our wishes

impossible of execution. So. You will forgive me?"

"Forgive you? Yes,indeed," I assured him. And we shook

hands, gravely. "But that doesn't help matters much,

after all, does it?"

"Yes, it helps. For now we understand one another,

is it not so? You say you can only write for a living.

Then why not write here at home? Surely these years of

newspaper work have given you a great knowledge of human

nature. Then too, there is your gift of humor. Surely

that is a combination which should make your work

acceptable to the magazines. Never in my life have I

seen so many magazines as here in the United States. But

hundreds! Thousands!"

"Me!" I exploded--"A real writer lady! No more

interviews with actresses! No more slushy Sunday

specials! No more teary tales! Oh, my!

When may I begin? To-morrow? You know I brought my

typewriter with me. I've almost forgotten where the

letters are on the keyboard."

"Wait, wait; not so fast! In a month or two,

perhaps. But first must come other things outdoor

things. Also housework."

"Housework!" I echoed, feebly.

"Naturlich. A little dusting, a little scrubbing,

a little sweeping, a little cooking. The finest kind of

indoor exercise. Later you may write a little--but very

little. Run and play out of doors with the children.

When I see you again you will have roses in your cheeks

like the German girls, yes?"

"Yes," I echoed, meekly, "I wonder how Frieda will

like my elephantine efforts at assisting with the

housework. If she gives notice, Norah will be lost to

you."

But Frieda did not give notice. After I had helped

her clean the kitchen and the pantry I noticed an

expression of deepest pity overspreading her lumpy

features. The expression became almost one of agony as

she watched me roll out some noodles for soup, and delve

into the sticky mysteries of a new kind of cake.

Max says that for a poor working girl who

hasn't had time to cultivate the domestic graces, my

cakes are a distinct triumph. Sis sniffs at that, and

mutters something about cups of raisins and nuts and

citron hiding a multitude of batter sins. She never

allows the Spalpeens to eat my cakes, and on my baking

days they are usually sent from the table howling. Norah

declares, severely, that she is going to hide the Green

Cook Book. The Green Cook Book is a German one. Norah

bought it in deference to Max's love of German cookery.

It is called Aunt Julchen's cook book, and the author,

between hints as to flour and butter, gets delightfully

chummy with her pupil. Her cakes are proud, rich cakes.

She orders grandly:

"Now throw in the yolks of twelve eggs; one-fourth of

a pound of almonds; two pounds of raisins; a pound of

citron; a pound of orange-peel."

As if that were not enough, there follow minor

instructions as to trifles like ounces of walnut meats,

pounds of confectioner's sugar, and pints of very rich

cream. When cold, to be frosted with an icing made up of

more eggs, more nuts, more cream, more everything.

The children have appointed themselves official

lickers and scrapers of the spoons and icing pans, also

official guides on their auntie's walks. They regard

their Aunt Dawn as a quite ridiculous but altogether

delightful old thing.

And Norah--bless her! looks up when I come in from a

romp with the Spalpeens and says: "Your cheeks are pink!

Actually! And you're losing a puff there at the back of

your ear, and your hat's on crooked. Oh, you are

beginning to look your old self, Dawn dear!"

At which doubtful compliment I retort, recklessly:

"Pooh! What's a puff more or less, in a worthy cause?

And if you think my cheeks are pink now, just wait until

your mighty Von Gerhard comes again. By that time they

shall be so red and bursting that Frieda's, on wash day,

will look anemic by comparison. Say, Norah, how red are

German red cheeks, anyway?"

CHAPTER III

GOOD AS NEW

So Spring danced away, and Summer sauntered in. My

pillows looked less and less tempting. The wine of the

northern air imparted a cocky assurance. One

blue-and-gold day followed the other, and I spent hours

together out of doors in the sunshine, lying full length

on the warm, sweet ground, to the horror of the entire

neighborhood. To be sure, I was sufficiently discreet to

choose the lawn at the rear of the house. There I drank

in the atmosphere, as per doctor's instructions, while

the genial sun warmed the watery blood in my veins and

burned the skin off the end of my nose.

All my life I had envied the loungers in the parks--

those silent, inert figures that lie under the trees all

the long summer day, their shabby hats over their faces,

their hands clasped above their heads, legs sprawled in

uncouth comfort, while the sun dapples down between the

leaves and, like a good fairy godmother, touches their

frayed and wrinkled garments with flickering

figures of golden splendor, while they sleep. They

always seemed so blissfully care-free and at ease--those

sprawling men figures--and I, to whom such simple joys

were forbidden, being a woman, had envied them.

Now I was reveling in that very joy, stretched prone

upon the ground, blinking sleepily up at the sun and the

cobalt sky, feeling my very hair grow, and health

returning in warm, electric waves. I even dared to cross

one leg over the other and to swing the pendant member

with nonchalant air, first taking a cautious survey of

the neighboring back windows to see if any one peeked.

Doubtless they did, behind those ruffled curtains, but I

grew splendidly indifferent.

Even the crawling things--and there were myriads of

them--added to the enjoyment of my ease. With my ear so

close to the ground the grass seemed fairly to buzz with

them. Everywhere there were crazily busy ants, and I,

patently a sluggard and therefore one of those for whom

the ancient warning was intended, considered them lazily.

How they plunged about, weaving in and out, rushing here

and there, helter-skelter, like bargain-hunting women

darting wildly from counter to counter!

"O, foolish, foolish anties!" I chided them, "stop

wearing yourselves out this way. Don't you know that the

game isn't worth the candle, and that you'll give

yourselves nervous jim-jams and then you'll have to go

home to be patched up? Look at me! I'm a horrible

example."

But they only bustled on, heedless of my advice, and

showed their contempt by crawling over me as I lay there

like a lady Gulliver.

Oh, I played what they call a heavy thinking part.

It was not only the ants that came in for lectures. I

preached sternly to myself.

"Well, Dawn old girl, you've made a beautiful mess of

it. A smashed-up wreck at twenty-eight! And what have

you to show for it? Nothing! You're a useless pulp,

like a lemon that has been squeezed dry. Von Gerhard was

right. There must be no more newspaper work for you, me

girl. Not if you can keep away from the fascination of

it, which I don't think you can."

Then I would fall to thinking of those years of

newspapering--of the thrills of them, and the ills of

them. It had been exhilarating, and educating, but

scarcely remunerative. Mother had never approved. Dad

had chuckled and said that it was a curse descended upon

me from the terrible old Kitty O'Hara, the only old maid

in the history of the O'Haras, and famed in her

day for a caustic tongue and a venomed pen. Dad and

Mother--what a pair of children they had been! The very

dissimilarity of their natures had been a bond between

them. Dad, light-hearted, whimsical, care-free,

improvident; Mother, gravely sweet, anxious-browed,

trying to teach economy to the handsome Irish husband

who, descendant of a long and royal line of spendthrift

ancestors, would have none of it.

It was Dad who had insisted that they name me Dawn.

Dawn O'Hara! His sense of humor must have been sleeping.

"You were such a rosy, pinky, soft baby thing," Mother

had once told me, "that you looked just like the first

flush of light at sunrise. That is why your father

insisted on calling you Dawn."

Poor Dad! How could he know that at twenty-eight I

would be a yellow wreck of a newspaper reporter--with a

wrinkle between my eyes. If he could see me now he would

say:

"Sure, you look like the dawn yet, me girl but a

Pittsburgh dawn."

At that, Mother, if she were here, would pat my check

where the hollow place is, and murmur: "Never mind,

Dawnie dearie, Mother thinks you are beautiful just the

same." Of such blessed stuff are mothers made.

At this stage of the memory game I would bury my face

in the warm grass and thank my God for having taken

Mother before Peter Orme came into my life. And then I

would fall asleep there on the soft, sweet grass, with my

head snuggled in my arms, and the ants wriggling,

unchided, into my ears.

On the last of these sylvan occasions I awoke, not

with a graceful start, like the story-book ladies, but

with a grunt. Sis was digging me in the ribs with her

toe. I looked up to see her standing over me, a foaming

tumbler of something in her hand. I felt that it was

eggy and eyed it disgustedly.

"Get up," said she, "you lazy scribbler, and drink

this."

I sat up, eyeing her severely and picking grass and

ants out of my hair.

"D' you mean to tell me that you woke me out of that

babe-like slumber to make me drink that goo? What is it,

anyway? I'll bet it's another egg-nogg."

"Egg-nogg it is; and swallow it right away, because

there are guests to see you."

I emerged from the first dip into the yellow mixture

and fixed on her as stern and terrible a look at any one

can whose mouth is encircled by a mustache of yellow

foam.

"Guests!" I roared, "not for me! Don't you dare to

say that they came to see me!"

"Did too," insists Norah, with firmness, "they came

especially to see you. Asked for you, right from the

jump."

I finished the egg-nogg in four gulps, returned the

empty tumbler with an air of decision, and sank upon the

grass.

"Tell 'em I rave. Tell 'em that I'm unconscious, and

that for weeks I have recognized no one, not even my dear

sister. Say that in my present nerve-shattered condition

I--"

"That wouldn't satisfy them," Norah calmly.

interrupts, "they know you're crazy because they saw you

out here from their second story back windows. That's

why they came. So you may as well get up and face them.

I promised them I'd bring you in. You can't go on

forever refusing to see people, and you know the Whalens

are--"

"Whalens!" I gasped. "How many of them? Not--not

the entire fiendish three?"

"All three. I left them champing with impatience."

The Whalens live just around the corner. The Whalens

are omniscient. They have a system of news gathering

which would make the efforts of a New York daily appear

antiquated. They know that Jenny Laffin feeds the family

on soup meat and oat-meal when Mr. Laffin is on the road;

they know that Mrs. Pearson only shakes out her rugs once

in four weeks; they can tell you the number of times a

week that Sam Dempster comes home drunk; they know that

the Merkles never have cream with their coffee because

little Lizzie Merkle goes to the creamery every day with

just one pail and three cents; they gloat over the knowledge

that Professor Grimes, who is a married man, is sweet on

Gertie Ashe, who teaches second reader in his school;

they can tell you where Mrs. Black got her seal coat, and

her husband only earning two thousand a year; they know

who is going to run for mayor, and how long poor Angela

Sims has to live, and what Guy Donnelly said to Min when

he asked her to marry him.

The three Whalens--mother and daughters--hunt in a

group. They send meaning glances to one another across

the room, and at parties they get together and exchange

bulletins in a corner. On passing the Whalen house one

is uncomfortably aware of shadowy forms lurking in the

windows, and of parlor curtains that are agitated for no

apparent cause.

Therefore it was with a groan that I rose and

prepared to follow Norah into the house. Something in my

eye caused her to turn at the very door. "Don't you dare!"

she hissed; then, banishing the warning scowl from her face,

and assuming a near-smile, she entered the room and I

followed miserably at her heels.

The Whalens rose and came forward effusively; Mrs.

Whalen, plump, dark, voluble; Sally, lean, swarthy,

vindictive; Flossie, pudgy, powdered, over-dressed. They

eyed me hungrily. I felt that they were searching my

features for signs of incipient insanity.

"Dear, DEAR girl!" bubbled the billowy Flossie,

kissing the end of my nose and fastening her eye on my

ringless left hand.

Sally contented herself with a limp and fishy

handshake. She and I were sworn enemies in our

school-girl days, and a baleful gleam still lurked in

Sally's eye. Mrs. Whalen bestowed on me a motherly hug

that enveloped me in an atmosphere of liquid face-wash,

strong perfumery and fried lard. Mrs. Whalen is a famous

cook. Said she:

"We've been thinking of calling ever since you were

brought home, but dear me! you've been looking so poorly

I just said to the girls, wait till the poor thing feels

more like seeing her old friends. Tell me, how are you

feeling now?"

The three sat forward in their chairs in attitudes of

tense waiting.

I resolved that if err I must it should be on the

side of safety. I turned to sister Norah.

"How am I feeling anyway, Norah?" I guardedly

inquired.

Norah's face was a study. "Why Dawn dear," she said,

sugar-sweet, "no doubt you know better than I. But I'm

sure that you are wonderfully improved--almost your old

self, in fact. Don't you think she looks splendid, Mrs.

Whalen?"

The three Whalens tore their gaze from my blank

countenance to exchange a series of meaning looks.

"I suppose," purred Mrs. Whalen, " that your awful

trouble was the real cause of your--a-a-a-sickness,

worrying about it and grieving as you must have."

She pronounces it with a capital T, and I know she

means Peter. I hate her for it.

"Trouble!" I chirped. "Trouble never troubles me.

I just worked too hard, that's all, and acquired an awful

`tired.' All work and no play makes Jill a nervous

wreck, you know."

At that the elephantine Flossie wagged a playful

finger at me. "Oh, now, you can't make us believe that,

just because we're from the country! We know all about

you gay New Yorkers, with your Bohemian ways and your

midnight studio suppers, and your cigarettes, and

cocktails and high jinks!"

Memory painted a swift mental picture of Dawn O'Hara

as she used to tumble into bed after a whirlwind day at

the office, too dog-tired to give her hair even one half

of the prescribed one hundred strokes of the brush. But

in turn I shook a reproving forefinger at Flossie.

"You've been reading some naughty society novel! One

of those millionaire-divorce-actress-automobile novels.

Dear, dear! Shall I, ever forget the first New York

actress I ever met; or what she said!"

I felt, more than saw, a warning movement from Sis.

But the three Whalens had hitched forward in their

chairs.

"What did she say?" gurgled Flossie. "Was it

something real reezk?"

"Well, it was at a late supper--a studio supper given

in her honor," I confessed.

"Yes-s-s-s " hissed the Whalens.

"And this actress--she was one of those musical

comedy actresses, you know; I remember her part called

for a good deal of kicking about in a short Dutch

costume--came in rather late, after the performance. She

was wearing a regal-looking fur-edged evening wrap, and

she still wore all her make-up"--out of the corner of my

eye I saw Sis sink back with an air of resignation--"and

she threw open the door and said--

"Yes-s-s-s! " hissed the Whalens again, wetting their

lips.

"--said: `Folks, I just had a wire from mother, up

in Maine. The boy has the croup. I'm scared green. I

hate to spoil the party, but don't ask me to stay. I

want to go home to the flat and blubber. I didn't even

stop to take my make-up off. My God! If anything should

happen to the boy!--Well, have a good time without me.

Jim's waiting outside.'" A silence.

Then--"Who was Jim?" asked Flossie, hopefully.

"Jim was her husband, of course. He was in the same

company."

Another silence.

"Is that all?" demanded Sally from the corner in

which she had been glowering.

"All! You unnatural girl! Isn't one husband

enough?"

Mrs. Whalen smiled an uncertain, wavering smile.

There passed among the three a series of cabalistic

signs. They rose simultaneously.

"How quaint you are!" exclaimed Mrs. Whalen, "and so

amusing! Come girls, we mustn't tire Miss--ah--Mrs.--

er--"with another meaning look at my bare left hand.

"My husband's name is still Orme," I prompted, quite,

quite pleasantly.

"Oh, certainly. I'm so forgetful. And one reads

such queer things in the newspapers nowa-days. Divorces,

and separations, and soul-mates and things." There was

a note of gentle insinuation in her voice.

Norah stepped firmly into the fray. "Yes, doesn't

one? What a comfort it must be to you to know that your

dear girls are safe at home with you, and no doubt will

be secure, for years to come, from the buffeting winds of

matrimony."

There was a tinge of purple in Mrs. Whalen's face as

she moved toward the door, gathering her brood about her.

"Now that dear Dawn is almost normal again I shall send

my little girlies over real often. She must find it very

dull here after her--ah--life in New York."

"Not at all," I said, hurriedly, "not at all. You

see I'm--I'm writing a book. My entire day is occupied."

"A book!" screeched the three. "How interesting! What

is it? When will it be published?"

I avoided Norah's baleful eye as I answered their

questions and performed the final adieux.

As the door closed, Norah and I faced each other,

glaring.

"Hussies!" hissed Norah. Whereupon it struck us

funny and we fell, a shrieking heap, into the nearest

chair. Finally Sis dabbed at her eyes with her

handkerchief, drew a long breath, and asked, with

elaborate sarcasm, why I hadn't made it a play instead of

a book, while I was about it.

"But I mean it," I declared. "I've had enough of

loafing. Max must unpack my typewriter to-night. I'm

homesick for a look at the keys. And to-morrow I'm to be

installed in the cubbyhole off the dining-room and I defy

any one to enter it on peril of their lives. If you

value the lives of your offspring, warn them away from

that door. Von Gerhard said that there was writing in my

system, and by the Great Horn Spoon and the Beard of the

Prophet, I'll have it out! Besides, I need the money.

Norah dear, how does one set about writing a book? It

seems like such a large order."

CHAPTER IV

DAWN DEVELOPS A HEIMWEH

It's hard trying to develop into a real Writer Lady in

the bosom of one's family, especially when the family

refuses to take one seriously. Seven years of newspaper

grind have taught me the fallacy of trying to write by

the inspiration method. But there is such a thing as a

train of thought, and mine is constantly being derailed,

and wrecked and pitched about.

Scarcely am I settled in my cubby-hole, typewriter

before me, the working plan of a story buzzing about in

my brain, when I hear my name called in muffled tones, as

though the speaker were laboring with a mouthful of

hairpins. I pay no attention. I have just given my

heroine a pair of calm gray eyes, shaded with black

lashes and hair to match. A voice floats down from the

upstairs regions.

"Dawn! Oh, Dawn! Just run and rescue the cucumbers

out of the top of the ice-box, will you? The iceman's

coming, and he'll squash 'em."

A parting jab at my heroine's hair and eyes, and I'm

off to save the cucumbers.

Back at my typewriter once more. Shall I make my

heroine petite or grande? I decide that stateliness

and Gibsonesque height should accompany the calm gray

eyes. I rattle away happily, the plot unfolding itself

in some mysterious way. Sis opens the door a little and

peers in. She is dressed for the street.

"Dawn dear, I'm going to the dressmaker's. Frieda's

upstairs cleaning the bathroom, so take a little squint

at the roast now and then, will you? See that it doesn't

burn, and that there's plenty of gravy. Oh, and Dawn--

tell the milkman we want an extra half-pint of cream

to-day. The tickets are on the kitchen shelf, back of

the clock. I'll be back in an hour."

"Mhmph," I reply.

Sis shuts the door, but opens it again almost

immediately.

"Don't let the Infants bother you. But if Frieda's

upstairs and they come to you for something to eat, don't

let them have any cookies before dinner. If they're

really hungry they'll eat bread and butter."

I promise, dreamily, my last typewritten sentence

still running through my head. The gravy seems to have

got into the heroine's calm gray eyes. What heroine

could remain calm-eyed when her creator's mind is filled

with roast beef? A half-hour elapses before I get back

on the track. Then appears the hero--a tall blond youth,

fair to behold. I make him two yards high, and endow him

with a pair of clothing-advertisement shoulders.

There assails my nostrils a fearful smell of

scorching. The roast! A wild rush into the kitchen. I

fling open the oven door. The roast is mahogany-colored,

and gravyless. It takes fifteen minutes of the most

desperate first-aid-to-the-injured measures before the

roast is revived.

Back to the writing. It has lost its charm. The

gray-eyed heroine is a stick; she moves like an Indian

lady outside a cigar shop. The hero is a milk-and-water

sissy, without a vital spark in him. What's the use of

trying to write, anyway? Nobody wants my stuff. Good

for nothing except dubbing on a newspaper!

Rap! Rap! Rappity-rap-rap! Bing! Milk!

I dash into the kitchen. No milk! No milkman! I

fly to the door. He is disappearing around the corner of

the house.

"Hi! Mr. Milkman! Say, Mr. Milkman!" with frantic

beckonings.

He turns. He lifts up his voice. "The screen door

was locked so I left youse yer milk on top of

the ice-box on the back porch. Thought like the hired

girl was upstairs an' I could git the tickets to-morra."

I explain about the cream, adding that it is wanted

for short-cake. The explanation does not seem to cheer

him. He appears to be a very gloomy and reserved

milkman. I fancy that he is in the habit of indulging in

a little airy persiflage with Frieda o' mornings, and he

finds me a poor substitute for her red-cheeked

comeliness.

The milk safely stowed away in the ice-box, I have

another look at the roast. I am dipping up spoonfuls of

brown gravy and pouring them over the surface of the

roast in approved basting style, when there is a rush, a

scramble, and two hard bodies precipitate themselves upon

my legs so suddenly that for a moment my head pitches

forward into the oven. I withdraw my head from the oven,

hastily. The basting spoon is immersed in the bottom of

the pan. I turn, indignant. The Spalpeens look up at me

with innocent eyes.

"You little divils, what do you mean by shoving your

old aunt into the oven! It's cannibals you are!"

The idea pleases them. They release my legs

and execute a savage war dance around me. The Spalpeens

are firm in the belief that I was brought to their home

for their sole amusement, and they refuse to take me

seriously. The Spalpeens themselves are two of the

finest examples of real humor that ever were perpetrated

upon parents. Sheila is the first-born. Norah decided

that she should be an Irish beauty, and bestowed upon her

a name that reeks of the bogs. Whereupon Sheila, at the

age of six, is as flaxen-haired and blue-eyed and stolid

a little German madchen as ever fooled her parents, and

she is a feminine reproduction of her German Dad. Two

years later came a sturdy boy, and they named him Hans,

in a flaunt of defiance. Hans is black-haired, gray-eyed

and Irish as Killarny.

"We're awful hungry," announces Sheila.

"Can't you wait until dinner time? Such a grand

dinner!"

Sheila and Hans roll their eyes to convey to me that,

were they to wait until dinner for sustenance we should

find but their lifeless forms.

"Well then, Auntie will get a nice piece of bread and

butter for each of you."

"Don't want bread an' butty!" shrieks Hans. "Want

tooky!"

"Cooky!" echoes Sheila, pounding on the kitchen table

with the rescued basting spoon.

"You can't have cookies before dinner. They're bad

for your insides."

"Can too," disputes Hans. "Fwieda dives us tookies.

Want tooky!" wailingly.

"Please, ple-e-e-ease, Auntie Dawnie dearie,"

wheedles Sheila, wriggling her soft little fingers in my

hand.

"But Mother never lets you have cookies before

dinner," I retort severely. "She knows they are bad for

you."

"Pooh, she does too! She always says, `No, not a

cooky!' And then we beg and screech, and then she says,

`Oh, for pity's sake, Frieda, give 'em a cooky and send

'em out. One cooky can't kill 'em.'" Sheila's imitation

is delicious.

Hans catches the word screech and takes it as his

cue. He begins a series of ear-piercing wails. Sheila

surveys him with pride and then takes the wail up in a

minor key. Their teamwork is marvelous. I fly to the

cooky jar and extract two round and sugary confections.

I thrust them into the pink, eager palms. The wails

cease. Solemnly they place one cooky atop the other,

measuring the circlets with grave eyes.

"Mine's a weeny bit bigger'n yours this time,"

decides Sheila, and holds her cooky heroically while Hans

takes a just and lawful bite out of his sister's larger

share.

"The blessed little angels! " I say to myself,

melting. "The dear, unselfish little sweeties!" and give

each of them another cooky.

Back to my typewriter. But the words flatly refuse

to come now. I make six false starts, bite all my best

finger-nails, screw my hair into a wilderness of

cork-screws and give it up. No doubt a real Lady Writer

could write on, unruffled and unhearing, while the iceman

squashed the cucumbers, and the roast burned to a

frazzle, and the Spalpeens perished of hunger. Possessed

of the real spark of genius, trivialities like milkmen

and cucumbers could not dim its glow. Perhaps all

successful Lady Writers with real live sparks have cooks

and scullery maids, and need not worry about basting, and

gravy, and milkmen.

This book writing is all very well for those who have

a large faith in the future and an equally large bank

account. But my future will have to be hand-carved, and

my bank account has always been an all too small pay

envelope at the end of each week. It will be months

before the book is shaped and finished. And my

pocketbook is empty. Last week Max sent money for the

care of Peter. He and Norah think that I do not know.

Von Gerhard was here in August. I told him

that all my firm resolutions to forsake newspaperdom

forever were slipping away, one by one.

"I have heard of the fascination of the newspaper

office," he said, in his understanding way. "I believe

you have a heimweh for it, not?"

"Heimweh! That's the word," I had agreed. "After

you have been a newspaper writer for seven years--and

loved it--you will be a newspaper writer, at heart and by

instinct at least, until you die. There's no getting

away from it. It's in the blood. Newspaper men have

been known to inherit fortunes, to enter politics, to

write books and become famous, to degenerate into press

agents and become infamous, to blossom into personages,

to sink into nonentities, but their news-nose remained a

part of them, and the inky, smoky, stuffy smell of a

newspaper office was ever sweet in their nostrils."

But, "Not yet," Von Gerhard had said, "It unless you

want to have again this miserable business of the sick

nerfs. Wait yet a few months."

And so I have waited, saying nothing to Norah and

Max. But I want to be in the midst of things. I miss

the sensation of having my fingers at the pulse of the

big old world. I'm lonely for the noise and the rush and

the hard work; for a glimpse of the busy local room just

before press time, when the lights are swimming in a smoky

haze, and the big presses downstairs are thundering their

warning to hurry, and the men are breezing in from their

runs with the grist of news that will be ground finer and

finer as it passes through the mill of copy-readers' and

editors' hands. I want to be there in the thick of the

confusion that is, after all, so orderly. I want to be

there when the telephone bells are zinging, and the

typewriters are snapping, and the messenger boys are

shuffling in and out, and the office kids are scuffling

in a corner, and the big city editor, collar off, sleeves

rolled up from his great arms, hair bristling wildly

above his green eye-shade, is swearing gently and smoking

cigarette after cigarette, lighting each fresh one at the

dying glow of the last. I would give a year of my life

to hear him say:

"I don't mind tellin' you, Beatrice Fairfax, that

that was a darn good story you got on the Millhaupt

divorce. The other fellows haven't a word that isn't

re-hash."

All of which is most unwomanly; for is not marriage

woman's highest aim, and home her true sphere? Haven't

I tried both? I ought to know. I merely have been

miscast in this life's drama. My part should have been

that of one who makes her way alone. Peter, with his thin,

cruel lips, and his shaking hands, and his haggard face

and his smoldering eyes, is a shadow forever blotting out

the sunny places in my path. I was meant to be an old

maid, like the terrible old Kitty O'Hara. Not one of the

tatting-and-tea kind, but an impressive, bustling old

girl, with a double chin. The sharp-tongued Kitty O'Hara

used to say that being an old maid was a great deal like

death by drowning--a really delightful sensation when you

ceased struggling.

Norah has pleaded with me to be more like other women

of my age, and for her sake I've tried. She has led me

about to bridge parties and tea fights, and I have tried

to act as though I were enjoying it all, but I knew that

I wasn't getting on a bit. I have come to the conclusion

that one year of newspapering counts for two years of

ordinary, existence, and that while I'm twenty-eight in

the family Bible I'm fully forty inside. When one day

may bring under one's pen a priest, a pauper, a

prostitute, a philanthropist, each with a story to tell,

and each requiring to be bullied, or cajoled, or bribed,

or threatened, or tricked into telling it; then the end

of that day's work finds one looking out at the world

with eyes that are very tired and as old as the world

itself.

I'm spoiled for sewing bees and church sociables and

afternoon bridges. A hunger for the city is upon me.

The long, lazy summer days have slipped by. There is an

autumn tang in the air. The breeze has a touch that is

sharp.

Winter in a little northern town! I should go mad.

But winter in the city! The streets at dusk on a frosty

evening; the shop windows arranged by artist hands for

the beauty-loving eyes of women; the rows of lights like

jewels strung on an invisible chain; the glitter of brass

and enamel as the endless procession of motors flashes

past; the smartly-gowned women; the keen-eyed, nervous

men; the shrill note of the crossing policeman's whistle;

every smoke-grimed wall and pillar taking on a mysterious

shadowy beauty in the purple dusk, every unsightly blot

obscured by the kindly night. But best of all, the

fascination of the People I'd Like to Know. They pop up

now and then in the shifting crowds, and are gone the

next moment, leaving behind them a vague regret.

Sometimes I call them the People I'd Like to Know and

sometimes I call them the People I Know I'd Like, but it

means much the same. Their faces flash by in the crowd,

and are gone, but I recognize them instantly as belonging

to my beloved circle of unknown friends.

Once it was a girl opposite me in a car--a girl with

a wide, humorous mouth, and tragic eyes, and a hole in

her shoe. Once it was a big, homely, red-headed giant of

a man with an engineering magazine sticking out of his

coat pocket. He was standing at a book counter reading

Dickens like a schoolboy and laughing in all the right

places, I know, because I peaked over his shoulder to

see. Another time it was a sprightly little, grizzled

old woman, staring into a dazzling shop window in which

was displayed a wonderful collection of fashionably

impossible hats and gowns. She was dressed all in rusty

black, was the little old lady, and she had a quaint cast

in her left eye that gave her the oddest, most sporting

look. The cast was working overtime as she gazed at the

gowns, and the ridiculous old sprigs on her rusty black

bonnet trembled with her silent mirth. She looked like

one of those clever, epigrammatic, dowdy old duchesses

that one reads about in English novels. I'm sure she had

cardamon seeds in her shabby bag, and a carriage with a

crest on it waiting for her just around the corner. I

ached to slip my hand through her arm and ask her what

she thought of it all. I know that her reply would have

been exquisitely witty and audacious, and I did so long

to hear her say it.

No doubt some good angel tugs at my common sense,

restraining me from doing these things that I am tempted

to do. Of course it would be madness for a woman to

address unknown red-headed men with the look of an

engineer about them and a book of Dickens in their hands;

or perky old women with nutcracker faces; or girls with

wide humorous mouths. Oh, it couldn't be done, I

suppose. They would clap me in a padded cell in no time

if I were to say:

"Mister Red-headed Man, I'm so glad your heart is

young enough for Dickens. I love him too--enough to read

him standing at a book counter in a busy shop. And do

you know, I like the squareness of your jaw, and the way

your eyes crinkle up when you laugh; and as for your

being an engineer--why one of the very first men I ever

loved was the engineer in `Soldiers of Fortune.'"

I wonder what the girl in the car would have said if

I had crossed over to her, and put my hand on her arm and

spoken, thus:

"Girl with the wide, humorous mouth, and the tragic

eyes, and the hole in your shoe, I think you must be an

awfully good sort. I'll wager you paint, or write, or act,

or do something clever like that for a living. But from

that hole in your shoe which you have inked so carefully,

although it persists in showing white at the seams, I

fancy you are stumbling over a rather stony bit of Life's

road just now. And from the look in your eyes, girl, I'm

afraid the stones have cut and bruised rather cruelly.

But when I look at your smiling, humorous mouth I know

that you are trying to laugh at the hurts. I think that

this morning, when you inked your shoe for the dozenth

time, you hesitated between tears and laughter, and the

laugh won, thank God! Please keep right on laughing, and

don't you dare stop for a minute! Because pretty soon

you'll come to a smooth easy place, and then won't you be

glad that you didn't give up to lie down by the roadside,

weary of your hurts?"

Oh, it would never do. Never. And yet no charm

possessed by the people I know and like can compare with

the fascination of those People I'd Like to Know, and

Know I Would Like.

Here at home with Norah there are no faces in the

crowds. There are no crowds. When you turn the corner

at Main street you are quite sure that you will see the

same people in the same places. You know that Mamie

Hayes will be flapping her duster just outside the door

of the jewelry store where she clerks. She gazes up and

down Main street as she flaps the cloth, her bright eyes

keeping a sharp watch for stray traveling men that may

chance to be passing. You know that there will be the

same lounging group of white-faced, vacant-eyed youths

outside the pool-room. Dr. Briggs's patient runabout

will be standing at his office doorway. Outside his

butcher shop Assemblyman Schenck will be holding forth on

the subject of county politics to a group of red-faced,

badly dressed, prosperous looking farmers and townsmen,

and as he talks the circle of brown tobacco juice which

surrounds the group closes in upon them, nearer and

nearer. And there, in a roomy chair in a corner of the

public library reference room, facing the big front

window, you will see Old Man Randall. His white hair

forms a halo above his pitiful drink-marred face. He was

to have been a great lawyer, was Old Man Randall. But on

the road to fame he met Drink, and she grasped his arm,

and led him down by-ways, and into crooked lanes, and

finally into ditches, and he never arrived at his goal.

There in that library window nook it is cool in summer,

and warm in winter. So he sits and dreams, holding an

open volume, unread, on his knees. Some times he writes,

hunched up in his corner, feverishly scribbling at

ridiculous plays, short stories, and novels

which later he will insist on reading to the tittering

schoolboys and girls who come into the library to do

their courting and reference work. Presently, when it

grows dusk, Old Man Randall will put away his book, throw

his coat over his shoulders, sleeves dangling, flowing

white locks sweeping the frayed velvet collar. He will

march out with his soldierly tread, humming a bit of a

tune, down the street and into Vandermeister's saloon,

where he will beg a drink and a lunch, and some man will

give it to him for the sake of what Old Man Randall might

have been.

All these things you know. And knowing them, what is

left for the imagination? How can one dream dreams about

people when one knows how much they pay their hired girl,

and what they have for dinner on Wednesdays?

CHAPTER V

THE ABSURD BECOMES SERIOUS

I can understand the emotions of a broken-down war horse

that is hitched to a vegetable wagon. I am going to

Milwaukee to work! It is a thing to make the gods hold

their sides and roll down from their mountain peaks with

laughter. After New York--Milwaukee!

Of course Von Gerhard is to blame. But I think even

he sees the humor of it. It happened in this way, on a

day when I was indulging in a particularly

greenery-yallery fit of gloom. Norah rushed into my

room. I think I was mooning over some old papers, or

letters, or ribbons, or some such truck in the charming,

knife-turning way that women have when they are blue.

"Out wid yez!" cried Norah. "On with your hat and

coat! I've just had a wire from Ernst von Gerhard. He's

coming, and you look like an under-done dill pickle. You

aren't half as blooming as when he was here in August,

and this is October. Get out and walk until your cheeks

are so red that Von Gerhard will refuse to believe that

this fiery-faced puffing, bouncing creature is the green

and limp thing that huddled in a chair a few months ago.

Out ye go!"

And out I went. Hatless, I strode countrywards,

leaving paved streets and concrete walks far behind.

There were drifts of fallen leaves all about, and I

scuffled through them drearily, trying to feel gloomy,

and old, and useless, and failing because of the tang in

the air, and the red-and-gold wonder of the frost-kissed

leaves, and the regular pump-pump of good red blood that

was coursing through my body as per Norah's request.

In a field at the edge of the town, just where city

and country begin to have a bowing acquaintance, the

college boys were at football practice. Their scarlet

sweaters made gay patches of color against the dull

gray-brown of the autumn grass.

"Seven-eighteen-two-four!" called a voice. There

followed a scuffle, a creaking of leather on leather, a

thud. I watched them, a bit enviously, walking backwards

until a twist in the road hid them from view. That same

twist transformed my path into a real country road--

a brown, dusty, monotonous Michigan country road that

went severely about its business, never once stopping to

flirt with the blushing autumn woodland at its left, or

to dally with the dimpling ravine at its right.

"Now if that were an English country road," thought

I, "a sociably inclined, happy-go-lucky, out-for-pleasure

English country road, one might expect something of it.

On an English country road this would be the

psychological moment for the appearance of a blond god,

in gray tweed. What a delightful time of it Richard Le

Gallienne's hero had on his quest! He could not stroll

down the most innocent looking lane, he might not loiter

along the most out-of-the-way path, he never ambled over

the barest piece of country road, that he did not come

face to face with some witty and lovely woman creature,

also in search of things unconventional, and able to

quote charming lines from Chaucer to him."

Ah, but that was England, and this is America. I

realize it sadly as I step out of the road to allow a

yellow milk wagon to rattle past. The red letters on the

yellow milk cart inform the reader that it is the

property of August Schimmelpfennig, of Hickory Grove.

The Schimmelpfennig eye may be seen staring down upon me

from the bit of glass in the rear as the cart rattles

ahead, doubtless being suspicious of hatless

young women wandering along country roads at dusk, alone.

There was that in the staring eye to which I took

exception. It wore an expression which made me feel sure

that the mouth below it was all a-grin, if I could but

have seen it. It was bad enough to be stared at by the

fishy Schimmelpfennig eye, but to be grinned at by the

Schimmelpfennig mouth!--I resented it. In order to show

my resentment I turned my back on the Schimmelpfennig

cart and pretended to look up the road which I had just

traveled.

I pretended to look up the road, and then I did look

in earnest. No wonder the Schimmelpfennig eye and mouth

had worn the leering expression. The blond god in gray

tweed was swinging along toward me! I knew that he was

blond because he wore no hat and the last rays of the

October sun were making a little halo effect about his

head. I knew that his-gray clothes were tweed because

every well regulated hero on a country road wears tweed.

It's almost a religion with them. He was not near enough

to make a glance at his features possible. I turned

around and continued my walk. The yellow cart, with its

impudent Schimmelpfennig leer, was disappearing in a

cloud of dust. Shades of the "Duchess" and Bertha M. Clay!

How does one greet a blond god in gray tweed on a country

road, when one has him!

The blond god solved the problem for me.

"Hi!" he called. I did not turn. There was a

moment's silence. Then there came a shrill, insistent

whistle, of the kind that is made by placing four fingers

between the teeth. It is a favorite with the gallery

gods. I would not have believed that gray tweed gods

stooped to it.

"Hi!" called the voice again, very near now.

"Lieber Gott! Never have I seen so proud a young woman!"

I whirled about to face Von Gerhard; a strangely

boyish and unprofessional looking Von Gerhard.

"Young man," I said severely, "have you been

a-follerin' of me?"

"For miles," groaned he, as we shook hands. You walk

like a grenadier. I am sent by the charming Norah to

tell you that you are to come home to mix the salad

dressing, for there is company for supper. I am the

company."

I was still a bit dazed. "But how did you know which

road to take? And when--"

"Wunderbar, nicht wahr?" laughed Von Gerhard. "But

really quite simple. I come in on an earlier train than

I had expected, chat a moment with sister Norah, inquire

after the health of my patient, and am told that she is

running away from a horde of blue devils!--quote your

charming sister--that have swarmed about her all day. What

direction did her flight take? I ask. Sister Norah shrugs

her shoulders and presumes that it is the road which shows

the reddest and yellowest autumn colors. That road will

be your road. So!"

"Pooh! How simple! That is the second`disappointment

you have given me to-day."

"But how is that possible? The first has not had

time to happen."

"The first was yourself," I replied, rudely.

"I had been longing for an adventure. And when I saw

you 'way up the road, such an unusual figure for our

Michigan country roads, I forgot that I was a

disappointed old grass widder with a history, and I grew

young again, and my heart jumped up into my throat, and

I sez to mesilf, sez I: `Enter the hero!' And it was

only you."

Von Gerhard stared a moment, a curious look on his

face. Then he laughed one of those rare laughs of his,

and I joined him because I was strangely young, light,

and happy to be alive.

"You walk and enjoy walking, yes?" asked Von Gerhard,

scanning my face. "Your cheeks they are like--well, as

unlike the cheeks of the German girls as Diana's are

unlike a dairy maid's. And the nerfs? They no longer

jump, eh?"

"Oh, they jump, but not with weariness. They jump to

get into action again. From a life of too much

excitement I have gone to the other extreme. I shall be

dead of ennui in another six months."

"Ennui?" mused he, "and you are--how is it?--

twenty-eight years, yes? H'm!"

There was a world of exasperation in the last

exclamation.

"I am a thousand years old," it made me exclaim, "a

million!"

"I will prove to you that you are sixteen," declared

Von Gerhard, calmly.

We had come to a fork in the road. At the right the

narrower road ran between two rows of great maples that

made an arch of golden splendor. The frost had kissed

them into a gorgeous radiance.

"Sunshine Avenue," announced Von Gerhard. "It

beckons us away from home, and supper and salad dressing

and duty, but who knows what we shall find at the end of

it!"

"Let's explore," I suggested. "It is splendidly

golden enough to be enchanted."

We entered the yellow canopied pathway.

"Let us pretend this is Germany, yes?" pleaded Von

Gerhard. "This golden pathway will end in a neat little

glass-roofed restaurant, with tables and chairs outside,

and comfortable German papas and mammas and pig-tailed

children sitting at the tables, drinking coffee or beer.

There will be stout waiters, and a red-faced host. And

we will seat ourselves at one of the tables, and I will

wave my hand, and one of the stout waiters will come

flying. `Will you have coffee, _Fraulein_, or beer?' It

sounds prosaic, but it is very, very good, as you will

see. Pathways in Germany always end in coffee and Kuchen

and waiters in white aprons."

But, "Oh, no!" I exclaimed, for his mood was

infectious. "This is France. Please! The golden

pathway will end in a picturesque little French farm,

with a dairy. And in the doorway of the farmhouse there

will be a red-skirted peasant woman, with a white cap!

and a baby on her arm! and sabots! Oh, surely she will

wear sabots!"

"Most certainly she will wear sabots," Von Gerhard

said, heatedly, "and blue knitted stockings. And the

baby's name is Mimi!

We had taken hands and were skipping down the pathway

now, like two excited children.

"Let's run," I suggested. And run we did, like two

mad creatures, until we rounded a gentle curve and

brought up, panting, within a foot of a decrepit rail

fence. The rail fence enclosed a stubbly, lumpy field.

The field was inhabited by an inquiring cow. Von Gerhard

and I stood quite still, hand in hand, gazing at the cow.

Then we turned slowly and looked at each other.

"This pathway of glorified maples ends in a cow," I

said, solemnly. At which we both shrieked with mirth,

leaning on the decrepit fence and mopping our eyes with

our handkerchiefs.

"Did I not say you were sixteen?" taunted Von

Gerhard. We were getting surprisingly well acquainted.

"Such a scolding as we shall get! It will be quite

dark before we are home. Norah will be tearing her

hair."

It was a true prophecy. As we stampeded up the steps

the door was flung open, disclosing a tragic figure.

"Such a steak!" wailed Norah, " and it has been done

for hours and hours, and now it looks like a piece of fried

ear. Where have you two driveling idiots been? And

mushrooms too."

"She means that the ruined steak was further enhanced

by mushrooms," I explained in response to Von Gerhard's

bewildered look. We marched into the house, trying not

to appear like sneak thieves. Max, pipe in mouth,

surveyed us blandly.

"Fine color you've got, Dawn," he remarked.

"There is such a thing as overdoing this health

business," snapped Norah, with a great deal of acidity

for her. "I didn't tell you to make them purple, you

know."

Max turned to Von Gerhard. "Now what does she mean

by that do you suppose, eh Ernst?"

"Softly, brother, softly!" whispered Von Gerhard.

"When women exchange remarks that apparently are simple,

and yet that you, a man, cannot understand, then know

there is a woman's war going on, and step softly, and

hold your peace. Aber ruhig!"

Calm was restored with the appearance of the steak,

which was found to have survived the period of waiting,

and to be incredibly juicy and tender. Presently we

were all settled once more in the great beamed living

room, Sis at the piano, the two men smoking their

after-dinner cigars with that idiotic expression of

contentment which always adorns the masculine face on

such occasions.

I looked at them--at those three who had done so much

for my happiness and well being, and something within me

said: "Now! Speak now!" Norah was playing very softly,

so that the Spalpeens upstairs might not be disturbed.

I took a long breath and made the plunge.

"Norah, if you'll continue the slow music, I'll be

much obliged. `The time has come, the Walrus said, to

talk of many things.'"

"Don't be absurd," said Norah, over her shoulder, and

went on playing.

"I never was more serious in my life, good folkses

all. I've got to be. This butterfly existence has gone

on long enough. Norah, and Max, and Mr. Doctor Man, I am

going away."

Norah's hands crashed down on the piano keys with a

jangling discord. She swung about to face me.

"Not New York again, Dawn! Not New York!"

"I am afraid so," I answered.

Max--bless his great, brotherly heart-- rose and came

over to me and put a hand on my shoulder.

"Don't you like it here, girlie? Want to be hauled

home on a shutter again, do you? You know that as long

as we have a home, you have one. We need you here."

But I shook my head. From his chair at the other

side of the room I could feel Von Gerhard's gaze fixed

upon us. He had said nothing.

"Need me! No one needs me. Don't worry; I'm not

going to become maudlin about it. But I don't belong

here, and you know, it. I have my work to do. Norah is

the best sister that a woman ever had. And Max, you're

an angel brother-in-law. But how can I stay on here and

keep my self-respect?" I took Max's big hand in mine and

gathered courage from it.

"But you have been working," wailed Norah, "every

morning. And I thought the book was coming on

beautifully. And I'm sure it will be a wonderful book,

Dawn dear. You are so clever."

"Oh, the book--it is too uncertain. Perhaps it will

go, but perhaps it won't. And then--what? It will be

months before the book is properly polished off. And

then I may peddle it around for more months. No; I can't

afford to trifle with uncertainties. Every newspaper man

or woman writes a book. It's like having the measles.

There is not a newspaper man living who does not believe,

in his heart, that if he could only take a month or two

away from the telegraph desk or the police run, he could

write the book of the year, not to speak of the great

American Play. Why, just look at me! I've only been

writing`seriously for a few weeks, and already the best

magazines in the country are refusing my manuscripts daily."

"Don't joke," said Norah, coming over to me, "I can't

stand it."

"Why not? Much better than weeping, isn't it? And

anyway, I'm no subject for tears any more. Dr. von

Gerhard will tell you how well and strong I am. Won't

you, Herr Doktor?"

Well," said Von Gerhard, in his careful, deliberate

English, "since you ask me, I should say that you might

last about one year, in New York."

"There! What did I tell you!" cried Norah.

"What utter blither!" I scoffed, turning to glare at

Von Gerhard.

"Gently," warned Max. "Such disrespect to the man

who pulled you back from the edge of the yawning grave

only six months ago!"

"Yawning fiddlesticks!" snapped I, elegantly. "There

was nothing wrong with me except that I wanted to be

fussed over. And I have been. And I've loved it. But

it must stop now." I rose and walked over to the table

and faced Von Gerhard, sitting there in the depths of a

great chair. "You do not seem to realize that I am not

free to come and go, and work and play, and laugh and

live like other women. There is my living to make. And

there is--Peter Orme. Do you think that I could stay on

here like this? Oh, I know that Max is not a poor man.

But he is not a rich man, either. And there are the

children to be educated, and besides, Max married Norah

O'Hara, not the whole O'Hara tribe. I want to go to

work. I am not a free woman, but when I am working, I

forget, and am almost, happy. I tell you I must be well

again! I will be well! I am well!"

At the end of which dramatic period I spoiled the

whole effect by bowing my head on the table and giving

way to a fit of weeping such as I had not had since the

days of my illness.

"Looks like it," said Max, at which I decided to

laugh, and the situation was saved.

It was then that Von Gerhard proposed the thing that

set us staring at him in amused wonder. He came over and

stood looking down at us, his hands outspread upon the

big library table, his body bent forward in an attitude

of eager intentness. I remember thinking what wonderful

hands they were, true indexes of the man's character;

broad, white, surgeonly hands; the fingers almost square

at the tips. They were hands as different from those

slender, nervous, unsteady, womanly hands of Peter Orme

as any hands could be, I thought. They were hands made

for work that called for delicate strength, if such a

paradox could be; hands to cling to; to gain courage

from; hands that spelled power and reserve. I looked at

them, fascinated, as I often had done before, and thought

that I never had seen such SANE hands.

"You have done me the honor to include me in this

little family conclave," began Ernst von Gerhard. "I am

going to take advantage of your trust. I shall give you

some advice--a thing I usually keep for unpleasant

professional occasions. Do not go back to New York."

"But I know New York. And New York --the newspaper

part of it--knows me. Where else can I go?"

"You have your book to finish. You could never

finish it there, is it not so?"

I'm afraid I shrugged my shoulders. It was all so

much harder than I had expected. What did they want me

to do? I asked myself, bitterly.

Von Gerhard went on. "Why not go where the newspaper

work will not be so nerve-racking? where you still might

find time for this other work that is dear to you, and

that may bring its reward in time." He reached out and

took my hand, into his great, steady clasp. "Come to the

happy, healthy, German town called Milwaukee, yes? Ach,

you may laugh. But newspaper work is newspaper work the

world over, because men and women are just men and women

the world over. But there you could live sanely, and

work not too hard, and there would be spare hours for the

book that is near your heart. And I--I will speak of you

to Norberg, of the Post. And on Sundays, if you are

good, I may take you along the marvelous lake drives in

my little red runabout, yes? Aber wunderbar, those

drives are! So."

Then--"Milwaukee!" shrieked Max and Norah and I,

together. "After New York--Milwaukee!"

"Laugh," said Von Gerhard, quite composedly. "I give

you until to-morrow morning to stop laughing. At the end

of that time it will not seem quite so amusing. No joke

is so funny after one has contemplated it for twelve

hours."

The voice of Norah, the temptress, sounded close to

my ear. "Dawn dear, just think how many million miles

nearer you would be to Max, and me, and home."

"Oh, you have all gone mad! The thing is impossible.

I shan't go back to a country sheet in my old age. I

suppose that in two more years I shall be editing a

mothers' column on an agricultural weekly."

"Norberg would be delighted to get you," mused Von

Gerhard, "and it would be day work instead of night

work."

"And you would send me a weekly bulletin on Dawn's

health, wouldn't you, Ernst?" pleaded Norah. "And you'd

teach her to drink beer and she shall grow so fat that

the Spalpeens won't know their auntie."

At last--"How much do they pay?" I asked, in

desperation. And the thing that had appeared so absurd

at first began to take on the shape of reality.

Von Gerhard did speak to Norberg of the Post. And

I am to go to Milwaukee next week. The skeleton of the

book manuscript is stowed safely away in the bottom of my

trunk and Norah has filled in the remaining space with

sundry flannels, and hot water bags and medicine flasks,

so that I feel like a schoolgirl on her way to

boarding-school, instead of like a seasoned old newspaper

woman with a capital PAST and a shaky future. I wish

that I were chummier with the Irish saints. I need them

now.

CHAPTER VI

STEEPED IN GERMAN

I am living at a little private hotel just across from

the court house square with its scarlet geraniums and its

pretty fountain. The house is filled with German civil

engineers, mechanical engineers, and Herr Professors from

the German academy. On Sunday mornings we have

Pfannkuchen with currant jelly, and the Herr Professors

come down to breakfast in fearful flappy German slippers.

I'm the only creature in the place that isn't just over

from Germany. Even the dog is a dachshund. It is so

unbelievable that every day or two I go down to Wisconsin

Street and gaze at the stars and stripes floating from

the government building, in order to convince myself that

this is America. It needs only a Kaiser or so, and a bit

of Unter den Linden to be quite complete.

The little private hotel is kept by Herr and Frau

Knapf. After one has seen them, one quite understands why

the place is steeped in a German atmosphere up to its

eyebrows.

I never would have found it myself. It was Doctor

von Gerhard who had suggested Knapf's, and who had paved

the way for my coming here.

"You will find it quite unlike anything you have ever

tried before," he warned me. "Very German it is, and

very, very clean, and most inexpensive. Also I think you

will find material there--how is it you call it?--copy,

yes? Well, there should be copy in plenty; and types!

But you shall see."

From the moment I rang the Knapf doorbell I saw. The

dapper, cheerful Herr Knapf, wearing a disappointed

Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, opened the door. I scarcely had

begun to make my wishes known when he interrupted with a

large wave of the hand, and an elaborate German bow.

"Ach yes! You would be the lady of whom the Herr

Doktor has spoken. Gewiss! Frau Orme, not? But so a

young lady I did not expect to see. A room we have saved

for you--aber wunderhubsch! It makes me much pleasure to

show. Folgen Sie mir, bitte."

"You--you speak English?" I faltered, with visions of

my evenings spent in expressing myself in the sign language.

"Englisch? But yes. Here in Milwaukee it gives aber

mostly German. And then too, I have been only twenty

years in this country. And always in Milwaukee. Here is

it gemutlich--and mostly it gives German."

I tried not to look frightened, and followed him up

to the "but wonderfully beautiful" room. To my joy I

found it high-ceilinged, airy, and huge, with a great

vault of a clothes closet bristling with hooks, and

boasting an unbelievable number of shelves. My trunk was

swallowed up in it. Never in all my boarding-house

experience have I seen such a room, or such a closet.

The closet must have been built for a bride's trousseau

in the days of hoop-skirts and scuttle bonnets. There

was a separate and distinct hook for each and every one

of my most obscure garments. I tried to spread them out.

I used two hooks to every petticoat, and three for my

kimono, and when I had finished there were rows of hooks

to spare. Tiers of shelves yawned for hat-boxes which I

possessed not. Bluebeard's wives could have held a

family reunion in that closet and invited all of

Solomon's spouses. Finally, in desperation, I gathered

all my poor garments together and hung them in a sociable

bunch on the hooks nearest the door. How I should have

loved to have shown that closet to a select circle of New

York boarding-house landladies!

After wrestling in vain with the forest of hooks, I

turned my attention to my room. I yanked a towel thing

off the center table and replaced it with a scarf that

Peter had picked up in the Orient. I set up my

typewriter in a corner near a window and dug a gay

cushion or two and a chafing-dish out of my trunk. I

distributed photographs of Norah and Max and the

Spalpeens separately, in couples, and in groups. Then I

bounced up and down in a huge yellow brocade chair and

found it unbelievably soft and comfortable. Of course,

I reflected, after the big veranda, and the apple tree at

Norah's, and the leather-cushioned comfort of her

library, and the charming tones of her Oriental rugs and

hangings--

"Oh, stop your carping, Dawn!" I told myself. "You

can't expect charming tones, and Oriental do-dads and

apple trees in a German boarding-house. Anyhow there's

running water in the room. For general utility purposes

that's better than a pink prayer rug."

There was a time when I thought that it was the

luxuries that made life worth living. That was in

the old Bohemian days.

"Necessities!" I used to laugh, "Pooh! Who cares

about the necessities! What if the dishpan does leak?

It is the luxuries that count."

Bohemia and luxuries! Half a dozen lean

boarding-house years have steered me safely past that.

After such a course in common sense you don't stand back

and examine the pictures of a pink Moses in a nest of

purple bullrushes, or complain because the bureau does

not harmonize with the wall paper. Neither do you

criticize the blue and saffron roses that form the rug

pattern. 'Deedy not! Instead you warily punch the

mattress to see if it is rock-stuffed, and you snoop into

the clothes closet; you inquire the distance to the

nearest bath room, and whether the payments are weekly or

monthly, and if there is a baby in the room next door.

Oh, there's nothing like living in a boarding-house for

cultivating the materialistic side.

But I was to find that here at Knapf's things were

quite different. Not only was Ernst von Gerhard right in

saying that it was "very German, and very, very clean;"

he recognized good copy when he saw it. Types! I never

dreamed that such faces existed outside of the old German

woodcuts that one sees illustrating time-yellowed books.

I had thought myself hardened to strange

boarding-house dining rooms, with their batteries of

cold, critical women's eyes. I had learned to walk

unruffled in the face of the most carping, suspicious and

the fishiest of these batteries. Therefore on my first

day at Knapf's I went down to dinner in the evening,

quite composed and secure in the knowledge that my collar

was clean and that there was no flaw to find in the fit

of my skirt in the back.

As I opened the door of my room I heard sounds as of

a violent altercation in progress downstairs. I leaned

over the balusters and listened. The sounds rose and

fell and swelled and boomed. They were German sounds

that started in the throat, gutturally, and spluttered

their way up. They were sounds such as I had not heard

since the night I was sent to cover a Socialist meeting

in New York. I tip-toed down the stairs, although I

might have fallen down and landed with a thud without

having been heard. The din came from the direction of

the dining room. Well, come what might, I would not

falter. After all, it could not be worse than that awful

time when I had helped cover the teamsters' strike. I

peered into the dining room.

The thunder of conversation went on as before. But

there was no bloodshed. Nothing but men and women

sitting at small tables, eating and talking. When I say

eating and talking I do not mean that those acts were

carried on separately. Not at all. The eating and the

talking went on simultaneously, neither interrupting the

other. A fork full of food and a mouthful of

ten-syllabled German words met, wrestled, and passed one

another, unscathed. I stood in the doorway, fascinated,

until Herr Knapf spied me, took a nimble skip in my

direction, twisted the discouraged mustaches into

temporary sprightliness, and waved me toward a table in

the center of the room.

Then a frightful thing happened. When I think of it

now I turn cold. The battery was not that of women's

eyes, but of men's. And conversation ceased! The uproar

and the booming of vowels was hushed. The silence was

appalling. I looked up in horror to find that what

seemed to be millions of staring blue eyes were fixed on

me. The stillness was so thick that you could cut it

with a knife. Such men! Immediately I dubbed them the

aborigines, and prayed that I might find adjectives with

which to describe their foreheads.

It appeared that the aborigines were especially

favored in that they were all placed at one long, untidy

table at the head of the room. The rest of us sat at

small tables. Later I learned that they were all

engineers. At meals they discuss engineering problems in

the most awe-inspiring German. After supper they smoke

impossible German pipes and dozens of cigarettes. They

have bulging, knobby foreheads and bristling pompadours,

and some of the rawest of them wear wild-looking beards,

and thick spectacles, and cravats and trousers that Lew

Fields never even dreamed of. They are all graduates of

high-sounding foreign universities and are horribly

learned and brilliant, but they are the worst mannered

lot I ever saw.

In the silence that followed my entrance a

red-cheeked maid approached me and asked what I would

have for supper. Supper? I asked. Was not dinner served

in the evening? The aborigines nudged each other and

sniggered like fiendish little school-boys.

The red-cheeked maid looked at me pityingly. Dinner

was served in the middle of the day, naturlich. For

supper there was Wienerschnitzel, and kalter Aufschnitt,

also Kartoffel Salat, and fresh Kaffeekuchen.

The room hung breathless on my decision. I wrestled

with a horrible desire to shriek and run. Instead I

managed to mumble an order. The aborigines turned to one

another inquiringly.

"Was hat sie gesagt?" they asked. "What did she

say?" Whereupon they fell to discussing my hair and

teeth and eyes and complexion in German as crammed with

adjectives as was the rye bread over which I was choking

with caraway. The entire table watched me with

wide-eyed, unabashed interest while I ate, and I advanced

by quick stages from red-faced confusion to purple mirth.

It appeared that my presence was the ground for a heavy

German joke in connection with the youngest of the

aborigines. He was a very plump and greasy looking

aborigine with a doll-like rosiness of cheek and a scared

and bristling pompadour and very small pig-eyes. The

other aborigines clapped him on the back and roared:

"Ai Fritz! Jetzt brauchst du nicht zu weinen! Deine

Lena war aber nicht so huebsch, eh? "

Later I learned that Fritz was the newest arrival and

that since coming to this country he had been rather low

in spirits in consequence of a certain flaxen-haired Lena

whom he had left behind in the fatherland.

An examination of the dining room and its other

occupants served to keep my mind off the hateful long

table. The dining room was a double one, the floor

carpetless and clean. There was a little platform at one

end with hardy-looking plants in pots near the windows.

The wall was ornamented with very German pictures of very

plump, bare-armed German girls being chucked under the

chin by very dashing, mustachioed German lieutenants. It

was all very bare, and strange and foreign to my eyes,

and yet there was something bright and comfortable about

it. I felt that I was going to like it, aborigines and

all. The men drink beer with their supper and read the

Staats-Zeitung and the Germania and foreign papers

that I never heard of. It is uncanny, in these United

States. But it is going to be bully for my German.

After my first letter home Norah wrote frantically,

demanding to know if I was the only woman in the house.

I calmed her fears by assuring her that, while the men

were interesting and ugly with the fascinating ugliness

of a bulldog, the women were crushed looking and

uninteresting and wore hopeless hats. I have

written Norah and Max reams about this household, from

the aborigines to Minna, who tidies my room and serves my

meals, and admires my clothes. Minna is related to Frau

Knapf, whom I have never seen. Minna is inordinately

fond of dress, and her remarks anent my own garments are

apt to be a trifle disconcerting, especially when she

intersperses her recital of dinner dishes with admiring

adjectives directed at my blouse or hat. Thus:

"Wir haben roast beef, und spareribs mit Sauerkraut,

und schicken--ach, wie schon, Frau Orme! Aber ganz

prachtvoll!" Her eyes and hands are raised toward

heaven.

"What's prachtful? " I ask, startled. "The

chicken?"

"Nein; your waist. Selbst gemacht?"

I am even becoming hardened to the manners of the

aborigines. It used to fuss me to death to meet one of

them in the halls. They always stopped short, brought

heels together with a click, bent stiffly from the waist,

and thundered: "Nabben', Fraulein!"

I have learned to take the salutation quite calmly,

and even the wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed

aborigine cannot startle me. Nonchalantly I reply,

"Nabben'," and wish that Norah could but see me in the

act.

When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed

a little and shrugged his shoulders and said:

"Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and

so unmarried. In Germany a married woman brushes her

hair quite smoothly back, and pins it in a hard knob.

And she knows nothing of such bewildering collars and

fluffy frilled things in the front of the blouse. How do

you call them--jabots?"

Von Gerhard has not behaved at all nicely. I did not

see him until two weeks after my arrival in Milwaukee,

although he telephoned twice to ask if there was anything

that he could do to make me comfortable.

"Yes," I had answered the last time that I heard his

voice over the telephone. "It would be a whole heap of

comfort to me just to see you. You are the nearest thing

to Norah that there is in this whole German town, and

goodness knows you're far from Irish."

He came. The weather had turned suddenly cold and he

was wearing a fur-lined coat with a collar of fur. He

looked most amazingly handsome and blond and splendidly

healthy. The clasp of his hands was just as big and sure

as ever.

"You have no idea how glad I am to see

you," I told him. "If you had, you would have been here

days ago. Aren't you rather ill-mannered and neglectful,

considering that you are responsible for my being here?"

"I did not know whether you, a married woman, would

care to have me here," he said, in his composed way. "In

a place like this people are not always kind enough to

take the trouble to understand. And I would not have

them raise their eyebrows at you, not for--"

"Married!" I laughed, some imp of willfulness seizing

me, "I'm not married. What mockery to say that I am

married simply because I must write madam before my name!

I am not married, and I shall talk to whom I please."

And then Von Gerhard did a surprising thing. He took

two great steps over to my chair, and grasped my hands

and pulled me to my feet. I stared up at him like a

silly creature. His face was suffused with a dull red,

and his eyes were unbelievably blue and bright. He had

my hands in his great grip, but his voice was very quiet

and contained.

"You are married," he said. "Never forget that for

a moment. You are bound, hard and fast and tight. And

you are for no man. You are married as much as though

that poor creature in the mad house were here working for

you, instead of the case being reversed as it is. So."

"What do you mean!" I cried, wrenching myself away

indignantly. "What right have you to talk to me like

this? You know what my life has been, and how I have

tried to smile with my lips and stay young in my heart!

I thought you understood. Norah thought so too, and

Max--"

"I do understand. I understand so well that I would

not have you talk as you did a moment ago. And I said

what I said not so much for your sake, as for mine. For

see, I too must remember that you write madam before your

name. And sometimes it is hard for me to remember."

"Oh," I said, like a simpleton, and stood staring

after him as he quietly gathered up his hat and gloves

and left me standing there.

CHAPTER VII

BLACKIE'S PHILOSOPHY

I did not write Norah about Von Gerhard. After all, I

told myself, there was nothing to write. And so I was

the first to break the solemn pact that we had made.

"You will write everything, won't you, Dawn dear?"

Norah had pleaded, with tears, in her pretty eyes.

"Promise me. We've been nearer to each other in these

last few months than we have been since we were girls.

And I've loved it so. Please don't do as you did during

those miserable years in New York, when you were fighting

your troubles alone and we knew nothing of it. You wrote

only the happy things. Promise me you'll write the

unhappy ones too--though the saints forbid that there

should be any to write! And Dawn, don't you dare to

forget your heavy underwear in November. Those lake

breezes!--Well, some one has to tell you, and I can't

leave those to Von Gerhard. He has promised to act as

monitor over your health."

And so I promised. I crammed my letters with

descriptions of the Knapf household. I assured her that

I was putting on so much weight that the skirts which

formerly hung about me in limp, dejected folds now

refused to meet in the back, and all the hooks and eyes

were making faces at each other. My cheeks, I told her,

looked as if I were wearing plumpers, and I was beginning

to waddle and puff as I walked.

Norah made frantic answer:

"For mercy's sake child, be careful or you'll be

FAT!"

To which I replied: "Don't care if I am. Rather be

hunky and healthy than skinny and sick. Have tried

both."

It is impossible to avoid becoming round-cheeked when

one is working on a paper that allows one to shut one's

desk and amble comfortably home for dinner at least five

days in the week. Everybody is at least plump in this

comfortable, gemutlich town, where everybody placidly

locks his shop or office and goes home at noon to dine

heavily on soup and meat and vegetables and pudding,

washed down by the inevitable beer and followed by forty

winks on the dining room sofa with the German Zeitung

spread comfortably over the head as protection against

the flies.

There is a fascination about the bright little city.

There is about it something quaint and foreign, as though

a cross-section of the old world had been dumped bodily

into the lap of Wisconsin. It does not seem at all

strange to hear German spoken everywhere--in the streets,

in the shops, in the theaters, in the street cars. One

day I chanced upon a sign hung above the doorway of a

little German bakery over on the north side. There were

Hornchen and Kaffeekuchen in the windows, and a brood of

flaxen-haired and sticky children in the back of the

shop. I stopped, open-mouthed, to stare at the worn sign

tacked over the door.

"Hier wird Englisch gesprochen," it announced.

I blinked. Then I read it again. I shut my eyes,

and opened them again suddenly. The fat German letters

spoke their message as before--"English spoken here."

On reaching the office I told Norberg, the city

editor, about my find. He was not impressed. Norberg

never is impressed. He is the most soul-satisfying and

theatrical city editor that I have ever met. He is fat,

and unbelievably nimble, and keen-eyed, and untiring. He

says, "Hell!" when things go wrong; he smokes innumerable

cigarettes, inhaling the fumes and sending out the thin

wraith of smoke with little explosive sounds between

tongue and lips; he wears blue shirts, and no collar to

speak of, and his trousers are kept in place only by a

miracle and an inefficient looking leather belt.

When he refused to see the story in the little German

bakery sign I began to argue.

"But man alive, this is America! I think I know a

story when I see it. Suppose you were traveling in

Germany, and should come across a sign over a shop,

saying: `Hier wird Deutsch gesprochen.' Wouldn't you

think you were dreaming?"

Norberg waved an explanatory hand. "This isn't

America. This is Milwaukee. After you've lived here a

year or so you'll understand what I mean. If we should

run a story of that sign, with a two-column cut,

Milwaukee wouldn't even see the joke."

But it was not necessary that I live in Milwaukee a

year or so in order to understand its peculiarities, for

I had a personal conductor and efficient guide in the new

friend that had come into my life with the first day of

my work on the Post. Surely no woman ever had a stronger

friend than little "Blackie" Griffith, sporting editor of

the Milwaukee Post. We became friends, not step by

step, but in one gigantic leap such as sometimes triumphs

over the gap between acquaintanc