by Edna Ferber
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 tiptoed 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 still
ness 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 highsounding 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 schoolboys.
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: