Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  When all the clothes were off he went back to the mirror. For some time he gazed intently at the image in the grayish splotched glass. It was just like everybody else’s all right. He felt pleased with himself. It was even superior to the average, according to the girl at Cantamar, who told him that length didn’t matter but the diameter and what she called “hard here and soft there” were the important factors. Right now it was soft everywhere, and looked very much like those of the men swimming at the quarry, and a good deal more impressive than Boy Sampson’s in his opinion. Of course, that had been many years ago. Fred stood before the mirror for some time, conscious of the simple and functional beauty of this new thing he had acquired, but not in any egotistical way. He was simply satisfied, with it and with himself.

  But of course he couldn’t go around like this for the rest of his life. Even Papa and Mama, as dense as they were—innocent, it would be better to say—would eventually notice. He began concentrating again, gathering all the force of his will at that place at the center of his body. In, in, he strained with every nerve. Five minutes or so he stood, pulling upward and inward with all his will, while the thing tickled and crawled slightly as though in protest. He wasn’t quite sure whether what he was attempting would work or not. But at last it succeeded.

  When it went up and in, it made a sucking sound like water going down a drain, not a very pleasant sound to tell the truth. It was very quiet in the house. From downstairs, now and then, there was a faint sound of pots and pans as Mama prepared dinner. The square mirror, in silence, reflected back its silver-gray and slightly sinister image. Herma stood before it for a little while longer examining herself. She was exactly as always. Then she noticed a piece of paper stuck into the frame of the mirror. On it was scrawled in blocky letters, “Clean up your chiffonier drawer.” She pulled this out, crumpled it angrily, and threw it into the wastebasket. Then she went to the closet, took down a white dress with eyelets, found a clean pair of drawers and some stockings in the chiffonier, and dressed. She put on her shoes by first standing in them and then wiggling until the heels went into place. A final check in the mirror. Was that a smudge by the side of her mouth? No, only a shadow. She went down to her supper only a little late. Neither Mama nor Papa paid any attention to her. Papa didn’t look up from his soup.

  The next day, while Mama was lying down, Fred went to Procter’s for the brown-paper package and brought it home. By suppertime Papa’s clothes were put away in their place in the closet. No one noticed this either, since Papa only wore the suit on Sunday, and it was still only Thursday.

  13.

  Herma dug around in the top drawer of the chiffonier to see if Fred had left her any of Madame Modjeska’s Double Eagle at all. Oh, what a peacock! Almost twenty dollars for clothes! Not to mention a quarter for the other filth. After searching for some time she found another quarter and some odd coins. These she put into her small reticule along with a handkerchief. From the drawer also she took a strawberry-colored ribbon for her hair, not very clean as a matter of fact, and tied it while she looked at herself in the mirror. Above the white dress she saw a pale and thin face with watchful eyes, a mouth that looked as though it were listening, with faint irony, rather than preparing to say anything. She looked like a young lady in a story and not a child at all. The dress was cut so that one hardly noticed her thin and rather boyish figure. She hummed to herself:

  “Sì. Mi chiamano Mimì,

  ma il mio nome è Lucia.”

  With her hair so. short it was hard to make the ribbon stay in place; she gave it a firm tug as though she were a sailor tying a knot. Then, taking her white parasol with the strawberry ribbon around the edge, she went out.

  The place she was going was not entirely respectable. It wasn’t on Fourth Street with the other shops but a few doors around the corner on Main, near the place where you took the Yellow Dog. First came a tumbledown shack where an old man sharpened knives, and a Chinese laundry. Then there was a vacant lot, and beyond it was the Electric Theater, which had a two-story false front on it, as though it were trying to pretend that it was a real building on Fourth Street. The front was painted in odd colors—pale pink with a tinge of violet, a chrome yellow on the green side, and a purple that was almost black. The doorway was a kind of large elaborate portal. In the center of it was a square column of mirrors not more than six inches on a side. From a hole in this column, enclosed by a kind of velvet sock, an arm emerged and took your nickel, and passed out a ticket in return. But this was only an optical illusion; if you looked more closely you could see that the column was only half a column and set into a whole arrangement of mirrors, behind which the person attached to the arm was concealed. This piece of magic in itself, Herma felt, was almost worth the nickel.

  The theater was smaller inside than it seemed from the street; it was a narrow windowless room hardly larger than the parlor of Herma’s house. A large goggled machine with wires coming out of it stood at the rear. In front of the machine and filling the rest of the room were rows of chairs of all different kinds; no two were alike. At the other end of the room was suspended what appeared to be an ordinary bed sheet, although it was more probably a square of canvas. Herma took a seat. There was only one other customer, an old woman Herma had never seen before, with a wisp of gray hair sticking out and a cat on her knees. Very probably she was a witch. There was something witching about the whole place, and perhaps she belonged to it in some way as a permanent fixture.

  Herma had taken a chair almost in the last row, so that she could not only see the show on the white screen but could watch the operator of the projecting machine as he worked. He was a serious young man with a mustache that was just starting to grow. He wore a white shirt and necktie, and he had put on black velvet sleeve-protectors to keep his shirt from being soiled by the machine. His arm, Herma saw, was the same one that had come out of the mirror column outside to take her nickel. The projectionist seemed unaware of her presence and went on adjusting his machine as though he were alone in the room.

  He fastened on a large reel of film and threaded it through the goggle. The arc lamp was separate from the rest of the machine, like a hurricane lamp except that it had two black wires coming out of it. He started up the lamp, filling the room with a white glare, and then inserted it into the projector. There was a kind of clucking noise. At first a square of blank light appeared on the screen. Some spots, blotches, and letters of the alphabet flashed by, and then there appeared on the screen the black and white image of a horse, tossing its head and agitating its feet in an exact simulacrum of galloping. This went on for some time. Another horse appeared, this one drawing a buggy the wheels of which really went around, although for some reason backward.

  There were more images, some of moving people, or faces talking. Herma sat in delight, not moving a muscle, hypnotized by these dancing shadows that were somehow more real and more vivid than life. The ghostly white figures against the black background seemed to exude a pale fire around their edges. And that was not all. The projectionist, once he had set his machine in motion with the arc light sputtering, was free to do other effects. As the horse galloped across the screen, for example, he knocked together a pair of coconut shells to simulate the clopping of hooves. Two lovers appeared on a marble balcony in the moonlight, and he dexterously lowered the needle onto a Victrola at his elbow. The saccharine strains of Schumann’s Traümerei, only slightly scratchy, filled the room. But the needle was removed when a droll, pale, serious man, with a lock of hair falling over his brow, appeared at the head of a stairway and started to go down it. In absolute silence he set his foot into a scrub pail on the landing. It was a pregnant moment. The pale man took another step. As he fell down the stairs with marvelous violence, the projectionist thrust back his foot and kicked over a row of bowling pins on the shelf behind him. Herma turned to glance at him; he was just as serious as the man falling down the stairs. In spite of his gravity, and his conscientious attention to his task,
he was remarkably dexterous. He could clack together coconut shells, adjust the arc lamp, and twist the lens of his machine for a finer focus all at once, without losing his air of modest but competent aplomb.

  Now came a young woman in a flowing dress running slowly through a field of flowers, and the projectionist, reaching behind him, seized an atomizer and sprayed something into the air. A soft vernal perfume filled the theater, while the young woman reached her lover, who sprang from his horse into the flowers and embraced her. The projectionist had other atomizers for coffee (while breakfast was served in a boardinghouse), for a salty smell like seaweed (a ghostly schooner with silver sails crept out to sea), and a heady aroma of wine (some peasants, barefoot and the women holding up their skirts, climbed into an enormous wooden tub and began treading around on the grapes). There were no bad smells, Herma noticed. All the odors were pleasant ones. There was a scene in which a wisp of a man in baggy pants got Limburger cheese on the bottom of his shoe, and looked around to see where the smell was coming from. But the projectionist didn’t have a perfume for this, and probably he valued his own dignity, and that of his theater, too highly to do so.

  The winy odor gradually dissipated in the darkness. The Victrola needle descended again and there was Madame Schumann-Heink, singing the same lieder that Herma had memorized from her own Edison phonograph. The full-busted Diva faded spottily from view, and then reappeared as Brünnhilde in the climax of Götterdämmerung—singing the soprano role even though she was a contralto, perhaps because the Victrola ran a little too fast and made everything sound higher. The set was magnificent, even though it could be seen only indistinctly in the mass of shimmering black and white shapes. The vassals placed Siegfried’s body on the pyre. Brünnhilde applied the torch, and the flames shot up. “O Wotan, hear me,” she intoned through the horn of the Victrola. “On him, the hero who wrought your will, you laid the curse which fell upon him! Yet he must betray me, that all I might comprehend! Rest then, god!” The flames consumed the screen, while the orchestra thundered its apotheosis. To the strains of the Valhalla theme the light gradually faded.

  The projectionist removed the arc light from the machine and set it on the table. A white illumination as bright as daylight filled the room. The spectacle was over. There was a wet sound like someone slapping two fish together. It was the old woman with the cat on her knees, clapping.

  Herma got up and moved toward the exit. The projectionist was still at his place, making some adjustment to his machine. Even though he was intent on what he was doing, he glanced up as she passed. Their eyes met for an instant.

  Herma paused. “Do you have many other operas? I’m fond of operas.”

  The young man hardly smiled at all. He was very serious. “Not at present. I’m expecting some from Los Angeles.” After a moment in which he seemed to hesitate, he inquired, “Which do you prefer?”

  “I’m fond of Puccini. Also Mozart.”

  “Next week I may have La Bohème. And also The Marriage of Figaro.”

  “The whole operas?”

  “Oh no,” he apologized. “Just the better-known arias. The reels we have at present last only for twenty minutes.”

  “Perhaps they’ll invent a machine that will show a whole opera.”

  “Perhaps. In any case I can change the reels quickly. You’d hardly notice unless you turned around to watch me.” Here he stopped, and seemed on the brink of a question. “If you could come back next week …”

  “I’d love to.”

  She smiled; he remained serious. He seemed on the point of saying something else, but evidently changed his mind. He stood with one hand on his machine watching her as she went out the exit.

  In the dazzling sunlight outside Herma paused. Everything was exactly as before. The peasants treading grapes, the man falling down the stairs, and the Götterdämmerung had all dissolved into the air; they were only shadows, in fact, even though they were shadows ingeniously and magically charged with electricity. She turned back to look at the theater once more. She was only a few steps from the mirrored column, the velvet stocking of which now began to stir and agitate as though something was working its way through it. A hand appeared with outstretched fingers, then the arm in its sleeve-protector. Herma allowed a pleased smile to creep over her face, since the owner of the arm was behind the mirror and couldn’t see her. She took the hand and shook it. The fingers didn’t insist; they released hers after only a second. The arm disappeared back into the column. Herma walked back up Main Street and turned the corner onto Fourth.

  It was still only four o’clock. Papa came home from the Blade office only at seven, and supper would be at seven-thirty. She had a quarter and a nickel left in her reticule. She went into Q. R. Smith’s Palace of Drugs and seated herself on the high wire stool in front of the marble counter. The boy, who was polishing the marble with a damp rag, stopped and looked at her questioningly.

  “I would like,” she said, “a scoop of lemon vanilla, in a goblet, with a strawberry on top and apricot glaze.”

  The boy adjusted his cap and turned to the row of frosted tubs behind him. “Lemon vanilla?”

  “That’s right.”

  He inserted the scoop of ice cream deftly into the goblet, set it on the counter, and took out the jar of apricot glaze, thrusting a spoon into it.

  “No,” said Herma. “First the strawberry.”

  “First the strawberry?”

  “The strawberry first.”

  He took out the strawberry in his fingers.

  “Point upward,” she instructed him.

  “With a glance at her he set the strawberry onto the dome of ice cream point upward, then poured the thin translucent varnish-like glaze over it until it covered everything. He added a spoon and a paper napkin.

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s all. Thank you very much.”

  Forgetting to mop the counter, he watched her as she ate it. This Herma did in a leisurely but systematic fashion. At first she only brushed the spoon lightly around the edges of the ice cream, barely touching the amber glaze that clung to it. When she had gone around the goblet several times in this way she dug in more deeply, crushing one side of the dome so that the strawberry tipped and slid toward the spoon. Still she was skillful and righted the strawberry again by digging a hole on the other side. The mixture in the goblet gradually turned to a pale luminous substance as soft as honey. In the middle was the strawberry, exactly the same color as the ribbon in her hair. Herma was careful to stretch out the climax as long as possible. At the last moment, with a confident gesture, she descended on the strawberry and devoured it. Then she scooped out the last of the melted ice cream and licked the spoon.

  The boy was still watching her. “Say, that looks good,” he said.

  14.

  Dr. Violet got his chloral and other medications that were necessary to him from Q. R. Smith’s in wholesale lots, under the allegation that he passed them along to the various patients under his treatment. He was thoroughly familiar with pharmaceutics and had made a special study of calmants, soporifics, and stimulant tonics. Chloral, a clear and limpid fluid discovered by Liebig in 1831, was to be particularly recommended as a valuable agent inducing sleep and quieting stages of excitement. However, if taken regularly it induced melancholy in the patient, along with enfeeblement of the will, muscular lassitude, and inability to secure the sleep it promised, making necessary a progressive increase in the dose. Ten grains a day was said to be a prudent limit.

  Dr. Violet had gone far beyond this point. He took sixty grains a day, an enormous dose, so that in the summer he sweated chloral from every pore. And he did not restrict himself to this single pharmaceutical, otherwise his good friend Q. R. Smith might have become suspicious. Dr. Violet had learned to vary his diet. A grain of digitalis now and then did no harm, and if necessary he injected a little caffeine into himself, which produced on the nerves the effect of an electric battery. In this way addiction to any one medici
ne was unlikely, and he only became addicted to them all in a general way, which was perhaps less harmful, or at least a less pointed and immediate problem for him to think about. Not that he spent a great deal of his time thinking; even though he had possessed, in his youth, a powerful intellect. At times he was so full of chloral, veronal, bromide, opium, paregoric, laudanum, and morphine that he could scarcely focus his eyes on the phial to see what he was taking next, and had to stick himself with pins in order to avoid slipping away altogether—and permanently—into the shadows. “For,” as he told himself, “just as morphine is an antidote for pain, so pain is an antidote for morphine.”

  Yet even under these conditions he retained a keen intelligence and awareness of what he was about, so that he seldom made a mistake in a diagnosis or a course of treatment. If a certain number of his patients died, well so did everybody’s. Man was mortal, his stay on earth was short, nasty, and brutal, and he was born to suffer as the sparks fly upwards. In Dr. Violet’s own opinion he was far too conscious most of the time; unnecessarily so. There was very little to be aware of in this part of the world anyhow, and most of the time he lay under the burden of an excruciating and crushing boredom. It was a cruel stroke of fate that had condemned him to live out his life in this sun-kissed backside of the world, where everybody went to bed at nine o’clock and the chief entertainment was singing hymns on Sunday. There weren’t even any interesting diseases. In such a one-horse town what could you expect? Nobody had enough money to get sick, and besides they were all as healthy as oxen. Violet had missed his destiny. He was born out of time in an alien land, condemned to wrest cornflowers out of a soil that should have provided him with orchids. In the Paris or Vienna of the epoch—or better yet in some place like Shanghai—he might have fitted in and flourished, giving full rein to his talent for the most exquisite and refined forms of decadence. One could imagine him, in such a stimulating milieu, another Wilde or Sade—an oriental Caligula—a necrophile of genius like Poe. As it was he took chloral, examined schoolgirls, and read medical books. He took down a dusty and battered volume of pathology and opened it to the chapter on tumors. There were illustrations in color, which was entertaining. He had examined them for only a little while when there was a knock on the door.