Dawn O'Hara: The Girl Who Laughed, Page 4

  CHAPTER IV. DAWN DEVELOPS A HEIMWEH

  It's hard trying to develop into a real Writer Lady in the bosom ofone's family, especially when the family refuses to take one seriously.Seven years of newspaper grind have taught me the fallacy of trying towrite by the inspiration method. But there is such a thing as a train ofthought, and mine is constantly being derailed, and wrecked and pitchedabout.

  Scarcely am I settled in my cubby-hole, typewriter before me, theworking plan of a story buzzing about in my brain, when I hear my namecalled in muffled tones, as though the speaker were laboring with amouthful of hairpins. I pay no attention. I have just given my heroinea pair of calm gray eyes, shaded with black lashes and hair to match. Avoice floats down from the upstairs regions.

  "Dawn! Oh, Dawn! Just run and rescue the cucumbers out of the top of theice-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 thecucumbers.

  Back at my typewriter once more. Shall I make my heroine petiteor grande? I decide that stateliness and Gibsonesque height shouldaccompany the calm gray eyes. I rattle away happily, the plot unfoldingitself 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 cleaningthe bathroom, so take a little squint at the roast now and then, willyou? See that it doesn't burn, and that there's plenty of gravy. Oh, andDawn--tell the milkman we want an extra half-pint of cream to-day. Thetickets are on the kitchen shelf, back of the clock. I'll be back in anhour."

  "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 theycome to you for something to eat, don't let them have any cookies beforedinner. If they're really hungry they'll eat bread and butter."

  I promise, dreamily, my last typewritten sentence still running throughmy 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 filledwith 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 himtwo yards high, and endow him with a pair of clothing-advertisementshoulders.

  There assails my nostrils a fearful smell of scorching. The roast! Awild rush into the kitchen. I fling open the oven door. The roast ismahogany-colored, and gravyless. It takes fifteen minutes of the mostdesperate 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 astick; she moves like an Indian lady outside a cigar shop. The hero isa milk-and-water sissy, without a vital spark in him. What's the use oftrying to write, anyway? Nobody wants my stuff. Good for nothing exceptdubbing 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 isdisappearing 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 leftyouse yer milk on top of the ice-box on the back porch. Thought like thehired girl was upstairs an' I could git the tickets to-morra."

  I explain about the cream, adding that it is wanted for short-cake. Theexplanation does not seem to cheer him. He appears to be a very gloomyand reserved milkman. I fancy that he is in the habit of indulging in alittle airy persiflage with Frieda o' mornings, and he finds me a poorsubstitute for her red-cheeked comeliness.

  The milk safely stowed away in the ice-box, I have another look at theroast. I am dipping up spoonfuls of brown gravy and pouring them overthe surface of the roast in approved basting style, when there is arush, a scramble, and two hard bodies precipitate themselves upon mylegs so suddenly that for a moment my head pitches forward into theoven. I withdraw my head from the oven, hastily. The basting spoon isimmersed in the bottom of the pan. I turn, indignant. The Spalpeens lookup at me with innocent eyes.

  "You little divils, what do you mean by shoving your old aunt into theoven! It's cannibals you are!"

  The idea pleases them. They release my legs and execute a savage wardance around me. The Spalpeens are firm in the belief that I was broughtto their home for their sole amusement, and they refuse to take meseriously. The Spalpeens themselves are two of the finest examplesof real humor that ever were perpetrated upon parents. Sheila is thefirst-born. Norah decided that she should be an Irish beauty, andbestowed upon her a name that reeks of the bogs. Whereupon Sheila, atthe age of six, is as flaxen-haired and blue-eyed and stolid a littleGerman madchen as ever fooled her parents, and she is a femininereproduction of her German Dad. Two years later came a sturdy boy, andthey 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 waituntil dinner for sustenance we should find but their lifeless forms.

  "Well then, Auntie will get a nice piece of bread and butter for each ofyou."

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

  "Cooky!" echoes Sheila, pounding on the kitchen table with the rescuedbasting 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, wrigglingher soft little fingers in my hand.

  "But Mother never lets you have cookies before dinner," I retortseverely. "She knows they are bad for you."

  "Pooh, she does too! She always says, 'No, not a cooky!' And then we begand screech, and then she says, 'Oh, for pity's sake, Frieda, give 'ema cooky and send 'em out. One cooky can't kill 'em.'" Sheila's imitationis delicious.

  Hans catches the word screech and takes it as his cue. He begins aseries of ear-piercing wails. Sheila surveys him with pride and thentakes the wail up in a minor key. Their teamwork is marvelous. I flyto the cooky jar and extract two round and sugary confections. I thrustthem into the pink, eager palms. The wails cease. Solemnly they placeone cooky atop the other, measuring the circlets with grave eyes.

  "Mine's a weeny bit bigger'n yours this time," decides Sheila, and holdsher cooky heroically while Hans takes a just and lawful bite out of hissister'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 makesix false starts, bite all my best finger-nails, screw my hair into awilderness of cork-screws and give it up. No doubt a real Lady Writercould write on, unruffled and unhearing, while the iceman squashed thecucumbers, and the roast burned to a frazzle, and the Spalpeens perishedof hunger. Possessed of the real spark of genius, trivialities likemilkmen and cucumbers could not dim its glow. Perhaps all successfulLady Writers with real live sparks have cooks and scullery maids, andneed not worry about basting, and gravy, and milkmen.

  This book writing is all very well for those who have a large faith inthe future and an equally large bank account. But my future will have tobe hand-carved, and my bank account has always been an all too small payenvelope at the end of each week. It will be months before the bookis shaped and finished. And my pocketbook is empty. Last week Max sentmoney 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 resolutionsto forsake newspaperdom forever were slipping away, one by one.

  "I have heard of the fascination of the newspaper office," he said, inhis understanding way. "I believe you have a heimweh for it, not?"

  "Heimweh! That's the word," I had agreed. "After you have been anewspaper writer for seven years--and love
d it--you will be a newspaperwriter, at heart and by instinct at least, until you die. There's nogetting away from it. It's in the blood. Newspaper men have been knownto inherit fortunes, to enter politics, to write books and becomefamous, to degenerate into press agents and become infamous, to blossominto personages, to sink into nonentities, but their news-nose remaineda part of them, and the inky, smoky, stuffy smell of a newspaper officewas ever sweet in their nostrils."

  But, "Not yet," Von Gerhard had said, "It unless you want to have againthis 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 bein the midst of things. I miss the sensation of having my fingers at thepulse of the big old world. I'm lonely for the noise and the rush andthe hard work; for a glimpse of the busy local room just before presstime, when the lights are swimming in a smoky haze, and the big pressesdownstairs are thundering their warning to hurry, and the men arebreezing in from their runs with the grist of news that will be groundfiner and finer as it passes through the mill of copy-readers' andeditors' hands. I want to be there in the thick of the confusion thatis, after all, so orderly. I want to be there when the telephone bellsare zinging, and the typewriters are snapping, and the messenger boysare 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 greatarms, hair bristling wildly above his green eye-shade, is swearinggently and smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting each fresh one atthe dying glow of the last. I would give a year of my life to hear himsay:

  "I don't mind tellin' you, Beatrice Fairfax, that that was a darn goodstory you got on the Millhaupt divorce. The other fellows haven't a wordthat isn't re-hash."

  All of which is most unwomanly; for is not marriage woman's highestaim, and home her true sphere? Haven't I tried both? I ought to know. Imerely have been miscast in this life's drama. My part should have beenthat 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, isa shadow forever blotting out the sunny places in my path. I was meantto be an old maid, like the terrible old Kitty O'Hara. Not one of thetatting-and-tea kind, but an impressive, bustling old girl, with adouble chin. The sharp-tongued Kitty O'Hara used to say that being anold maid was a great deal like death by drowning--a really delightfulsensation when you ceased struggling.

  Norah has pleaded with me to be more like other women of my age, andfor her sake I've tried. She has led me about to bridge parties and teafights, and I have tried to act as though I were enjoying it all, but Iknew that I wasn't getting on a bit. I have come to the conclusion thatone year of newspapering counts for two years of ordinary, existence,and that while I'm twenty-eight in the family Bible I'm fully fortyinside. When one day may bring under one's pen a priest, a pauper,a prostitute, a philanthropist, each with a story to tell, and eachrequiring to be bullied, or cajoled, or bribed, or threatened, ortricked into telling it; then the end of that day's work finds onelooking out at the world with eyes that are very tired and as old as theworld 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 haveslipped by. There is an autumn tang in the air. The breeze has a touchthat is sharp.

  Winter in a little northern town! I should go mad. But winter in thecity! The streets at dusk on a frosty evening; the shop windows arrangedby artist hands for the beauty-loving eyes of women; the rows of lightslike jewels strung on an invisible chain; the glitter of brassand enamel as the endless procession of motors flashes past; thesmartly-gowned women; the keen-eyed, nervous men; the shrill note of thecrossing policeman's whistle; every smoke-grimed wall and pillar takingon a mysterious shadowy beauty in the purple dusk, every unsightly blotobscured by the kindly night. But best of all, the fascination ofthe People I'd Like to Know. They pop up now and then in the shiftingcrowds, and are gone the next moment, leaving behind them a vagueregret. Sometimes I call them the People I'd Like to Know and sometimesI 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 theminstantly as belonging to my beloved circle of unknown friends.

  Once it was a girl opposite me in a car--a girl with a wide, humorousmouth, 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 stickingout of his coat pocket. He was standing at a book counter readingDickens like a schoolboy and laughing in all the right places, Iknow, because I peaked over his shoulder to see. Another time it wasa sprightly little, grizzled old woman, staring into a dazzling shopwindow in which was displayed a wonderful collection of fashionablyimpossible hats and gowns. She was dressed all in rusty black, was thelittle old lady, and she had a quaint cast in her left eye that gaveher the oddest, most sporting look. The cast was working overtime asshe gazed at the gowns, and the ridiculous old sprigs on her rusty blackbonnet trembled with her silent mirth. She looked like one of thoseclever, epigrammatic, dowdy old duchesses that one reads about inEnglish novels. I'm sure she had cardamon seeds in her shabby bag, anda carriage with a crest on it waiting for her just around the corner. Iached to slip my hand through her arm and ask her what she thought ofit all. I know that her reply would have been exquisitely witty andaudacious, and I did so long to hear her say it.

  No doubt some good angel tugs at my common sense, restraining me fromdoing these things that I am tempted to do. Of course it would bemadness for a woman to address unknown red-headed men with the look ofan engineer about them and a book of Dickens in their hands; or perkyold 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 inno time if I were to say:

  "Mister Red-headed Man, I'm so glad your heart is young enough forDickens. I love him too--enough to read him standing at a book counterin a busy shop. And do you know, I like the squareness of your jaw, andthe way your eyes crinkle up when you laugh; and as for your being anengineer--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 overto her, and put my hand on her arm and spoken, thus:

  "Girl with the wide, humorous mouth, and the tragic eyes, and the holein your shoe, I think you must be an awfully good sort. I'll wager youpaint, 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 arestumbling over a rather stony bit of Life's road just now. And fromthe look in your eyes, girl, I'm afraid the stones have cut and bruisedrather cruelly. But when I look at your smiling, humorous mouth I knowthat you are trying to laugh at the hurts. I think that this morning,when you inked your shoe for the dozenth time, you hesitated betweentears and laughter, and the laugh won, thank God! Please keep righton laughing, and don't you dare stop for a minute! Because pretty soonyou'll come to a smooth easy place, and then won't you be glad that youdidn'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 Iknow and like can compare with the fascination of those People I'd Liketo Know, and Know I Would Like.

  Here at home with Norah there are no faces in the crowds. There are nocrowds. When you turn the corner at Main street you are quite sure thatyou will see the same people in the same places. You know that MamieHayes will be flapping her duster just outside the door of the jewelrystore where she clerks. She gazes up and down Main street as she flapsthe cloth, her bright eyes keeping a sharp watch for stray travelingmen that may chance to be passing. You know that there will be the samelounging 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 onthe subject of county politics to a group of red-fa
ced, badly dressed,prosperous looking farmers and townsmen, and as he talks the circleof 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 publiclibrary reference room, facing the big front window, you will see OldMan Randall. His white hair forms a halo above his pitiful drink-marredface. He was to have been a great lawyer, was Old Man Randall. But onthe road to fame he met Drink, and she grasped his arm, and led him downby-ways, and into crooked lanes, and finally into ditches, and he neverarrived at his goal. There in that library window nook it is cool insummer, and warm in winter. So he sits and dreams, holding an openvolume, unread, on his knees. Some times he writes, hunched up in hiscorner, feverishly scribbling at ridiculous plays, short stories, andnovels which later he will insist on reading to the tittering schoolboysand girls who come into the library to do their courting and referencework. Presently, when it grows dusk, Old Man Randall will put away hisbook, throw his coat over his shoulders, sleeves dangling, flowing whitelocks sweeping the frayed velvet collar. He will march out with hissoldierly tread, humming a bit of a tune, down the street and intoVandermeister's saloon, where he will beg a drink and a lunch, and someman will give it to him for the sake of what Old Man Randall might havebeen.

  All these things you know. And knowing them, what is left for theimagination? How can one dream dreams about people when one knowshow much they pay their hired girl, and what they have for dinner onWednesdays?