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Title: Rahab

Author: Waldo David Frank

Release date: May 10, 2024 [eBook #73590]

Language: English

Original publication: NYC: Boni & Liveright, 1922

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAHAB ***





                         [Illustration: RAHAB]




                         BOOKS by WALDO FRANK


                 _The Unwelcome Man_
                 _The Dark Mother_
                 _Rahab_
                 _City Block_ (in preparation)

                 _Our America_
                 _The Art of The Vieux Colombier_
                 _Virgin Spain_ (in preparation)




                                 RAHAB

                                 _By_

                              WALDO FRANK

                            [Illustration]

                          BONI AND LIVERIGHT
                          PUBLISHERS NEW YORK




                                _RAHAB_

                          COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
                        BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

               _Printed in the United States of America_




                                 _To_

                                _Magic_




                                ERRATA


     Page 57, second line from top, “stook” should read “stood.”

     Page 113, eighth line from top, reading “the cigarette smoke,
     closed them, sat down,” should be eliminated entirely, and the line
     should read “deliberate they beat against her hips”

     Page 147, twelfth line from top, “shadow” should read “shallow”




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

_One_

BRASS GAS CHANDELIER                                                  13

_Two_

RIVER GARDEN                                                          21

_Three_

WHITE SKY                                                             69

_Four_

PAVEMENT OVER EARTH                                                   81

_Five_

CLARA                                                                167

_Six_

PAVEMENT BROKEN                                                      203

_Seven_

EARTH                                                                245


     “_Be consoled: thou wouldst not seek
    me if thou hadst not found me._ ...”
                               _PASCAL_





_ONE_

BRASS GAS CHANDELIER


The door opened against the drawn chain, grating against it.

In the grey strip a woman’s face, very grey, very unexpectant, suddenly
was bright.

It measured a man, young, standing at ease. The chain clicked free. “O
it’s you, Mr. Samson.” The door opened wide, shut them in.

The hall was a long shadow beyond the glow of them standing. He was
quiet waiting, not sheer against her: his shaggy coat poured the
street’s coldness. She was a dim thing about eyes.

“I’m so glad it’s you, Mr. Samson.”

She walked noiseless through shadow, she took no space from it, she was
infinitesimal within a mood. He followed.

“I was taking it right easy ... reading.”

In the gaslight she turned and fronted him. She took his coat. He was a
fair boy, gentle, somewhat plump. He sat down, she stood.

--I have been in this room before, I have seen this woman before. It is
not the sort of room, she is not the sort of woman I want to see for I
am here for neither.... Why strangely now this sense of her reality upon
me?

It was her room, there they were after all, the woman in her room
touching upon him.--Let me see in this silence the woman in her room.

Her quiet words did not obtrude upon a silence whose margin he caught as
it waved. He saw her a battered creature. He saw her absurdity of
painted cheeks, two imitation flowers stuck in the ruts of a road. He
sat in a room whose dinginess enarmed him. He sat in the misery of this
woman. He sat deep.

“Still so cold out?” Over her head a chandelier ... brass gas, hideous
brutal under the flecked ceiling. His feet glowed with renewing warmth.
In his eye beneath his shoes a carpet of acid green.

--We sit.... She sits in a cloud of dinginess. Sharp spirit veiled in a
cloudy flesh. Now: centers of glow, thrown from the woman, solid like
her spirit. He was aware of loveliness.

Under the blow of the chandelier a delicate Pembroke table ... book and
a glass of whisky.

--Under my arms, pressing against my back, a high arched Windsor chair.

In the break of her hip, standing, a Hepple--white desk.

--We have no furniture like this at home!

She spoke. He peered into the form of her words. His eyes took the gloss
of the subtle table, it was one with her words’ accent. Futile words ...
grammatical, well-ordered. A subtle table, and beyond a virulent huge
sideboard. A faint quaint accent in her pointless words curling like
heat of hidden flame above the table, against the sideboard: whispers in
how she spoke, like these glowing poems in wood, of a day distant from
his New York where there had been leisure and when from the dung of
human misery America grew flowers.

A quiet pain in the table and her words ... a distant pain. He did not
put his immediate question.

She felt his pause; in it drew up her chair. She sat he thought with
grace athwart him at the table. The whisky glass was gone, he had not
noticed her hide it. The book was there with her hand. Black little
book. _Bible!_ He felt her feeling him feel her. Now she was silent.

They were silent upon each other. Heavily.

His brow twitched.--Let me see her! She was cold and helpless. He
understood he could not understand. She seemed a chaste woman with burnt
eyes. She drew him.

Words to pull him aloof: “I am afraid we don’t read that book ... half
enough.... I don’t I mean,” he blushed. “Do we, Mrs. Luve?”

--Wrong. Wrong! A delicate line left ... he felt _left_ ... under her
folded thin lip. Lip folded away.

“It’s a rattling good book.”

“O but _you_ do.”

“I?”

“_You_ read it enough.... You’re a Jew.”

“I’m a Jew,” he repeated. Above her and the table the flourishes and
bulgings of the chandelier ... brass gas ... were lewd. “I’m a Jew. If
there’s any soul in me worth speaking of, it’s in that book.” She leaned
forward upon the table with elbows drawn tight back. “Yet I can’t read a
word of it, except in English.... I’m ashamed of that.”

She laughed embarrassed. He was understanding deeper he could not
understand. She was up swiftly. She took the Bible, opened a door in
the sideboard. Glint of glasses, plush, odor of liquors. She placed the
Bible within them.

“I suppose,” a smile to her face, the first: as sudden again her face
was grey,” ...you came for Thelma?”

“Why ... yes.”--Of course for that I came, for that only I come ever to
your dirty flat.... She has delicate fingers.... How else did I come at
first? Dirty? There was a silence fringing his questions, veiling them,
making them false. In the silence the presence of strangeness.

“I am afraid I may not be able to get her ... right away.”

Her fingers curled up. He felt how they had drooped from the hard square
palms like shoots frozen in a cold Spring.

“There’s just a chance. If you’ll ... excuse me I’ll phone.”

The door shut him in.

He sat quiet because he wanted to get up, hunt for something. Bible? He
walked up and down because he wanted to stay, hoped she would find
Thelma.

He needed Thelma to-night.... He knew this.

--I do not feel it now. For only a sharp need brought him to this flat
he despised. Where alone Thelma would meet him.--I am here again. I must
need Thelma. Mrs. Luve was back.

“I’m sorry. Thelma’s gone to a Show, with some friends. There’s just a
chance ... later ... she might possibly go after eleven to the Garden
Cafe. I could phone there, then.” Mrs. Luve stood in the door, her face
was bright, she smiled again it was grey. “You----“

He shook his head, not getting up. She did not stir also. Her face was
bright. Her mouth trembled. He said: “Have you any beer, Mrs. Luve? We
might have a drink?”

He could not help seeing her, seeing her more and more. Frail slain
fingers resting upon a table warmer than her hand. She all a sapling
broken in frost ... standing seasons dead.

--What is there here to see? He pulled a bill from his pocket. As his
hand went toward hers, a hot wind stopped it. He felt them both cold.
Under her eyes he saw a shadow like a whip’s mark.

He put his money away.

She left the room.

She returned, she carried a silver platter. Upon it a bottle of wine.
Two slim glasses.

It was long silence now, with them less heavy against it. Silence full
with its own mood, its own blood, strong to live.

The wine stood erect on the subtle table. Mrs. Luve leaned and poured of
it, a drop first in her glass, then his glass full, then her glass full.
Her bare arm pouring red wine came from a dim kimona.

... In the face of a worn woman black eyes burning: eyes blazing against
the face, leaping from face and woman: eyes touching the red of the
wine.

    He felt:--I am disappearing.
      There is a silence like light
      Upon us.
      Moving like light a silence
      Upon words.
      There will be words moving in light:
      There will be lighted words....




_TWO_

RIVER GARDEN


Spring ... a Southern city in song. A city drifting fading into the wide
arms of earth, into trees, fields running under grass, into trees, into
high thrusts of earth, into trees, trees. The city a raised shadow upon
earth. Against earth’s sweep through the Precinct of suns and stars,
apart from sun and stars--blotch of hard houses leaning back upon the
dead days of their makers--whole city leaning back, falling away from
the wide freedom of sun, earth, stars, twirling together locked. And
they two ... man and girl ... clasped in the steadfast spin of life--sun
stars earth dust--that swung away from the city.

Fanny Dirk was on her back. Under: grass, roots thrusting up in
erection, spilling in bud. Over: he. Under and over: One. She was viced
in One: Grass, hair, fingers, twigs broken to leaf, lips and earth hot
against her.... One. She was surrounded by One. She was beyond
distinctions. She was One. She was in ecstasy....

Then they walked to their horses on the distant road.

A house, coddling itself warm, despite bright elms, in its shadows of
men, cast a grey finger up from the Town to the young man’s mind. His
house ... running no longer away from the immobile dance of earth and
sun ... reached up now, arrogant, clambered with its long harsh shadows
into the mind and mood of his mother’s and father’s son.

“Fanny!”

--Harry, Harry.... O you ... you my life!

“Fanny, now we must get married.”

--Hush! I hate you. How can you speak so now?

“Why are you silent, Fanny? I’m a gentleman, little girl. Don’t think I
respect you less, because you love me.... I love you ... we....”

--No respect, then!

“ ...will be married. You are not less the lady.”

--Stop, stop, stop!

“Secretly, of course. Till I am done with College. Not so long, Honey.
You can wait? We’ll have a real wedding, then.”

--Can’t you stop? What are you killing? What are you killing? Can’t we
stop?

Fanny Dirk became the wife of Harry Howland Luve.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Luve held her slender glass in frail spent fingers. She sipped. Her
hot eyes swept above frail flesh, spun glass.

--I want you to see me! I want you to see me!

Mr. Samson nodded.--What else can I do?

--Can you see this? I was as fresh and ruddy as a maple blossom!...

She was hard, she was intact. Her husband took her to a little house on
the best street: three squares away was the Luve Mansion which one day
should be his. “This is our home. It’s small dear. But so are you small.
We’ll live here till our love bursts it.”

He was tall and thin, yet he gave the air of softness. His big black
eyes being soft, his delicate hair that lay thinning on the transparent
tinge of his brow gave his sapling body the air of holding a softness.
He had small dimpled hands tapering to fingers with which to hold her
who was hard and intact.

“O I love it!”

She did not love the hard Luve Mansion, her own home had been prim and
small, her hardness needed tender and small things of the world.

“O I love it, Harry! I’m glad it’s no larger. O--what a kitchen! Can’t I
do for you right snug in that gem of a kitchen.”

“No, sweet, not that. Mammy Sue comes along. I can’t say No to Mammy. I
can’t begin now saying No ... when I’m married. She’s been waiting’,
fixin’ for that. She’s been totin’ me from a baby just for that. You’ll
surrender, Honey! She loves you for making me surrender ... to her.”

“And I bake such biscuits.”

“You may ... when Mammy’s not looking.”

She made him sit down. “You’re so high!” She clapped her hands. Sharp,
she kissed his hair, his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Sharp kisses. Each
finger tip she kissed. “O--O you!” She opened his waistcoat, she opened
one button of his shirt. A sharp kiss on his chest. She leaped away,
clapped her hands.

“I’ll manage Mammy.”

“Whom couldn’t you manage?”

--You.... I leap gaily clapping my hands, my Love. I leap on Pain, on
the shadow of Doubt I leap. What can I do with you?

She was on her knees: her arms embraced his legs, her cheek was hot
against his cold shoes.

--Under the Pain is there sunlight for dancing? Under the doubt is there
a solid world?

“She loves me,” said to himself Harry Howland Luve. “Blessed
sweet!”--Well, I’ve married her. She’s married to a Luve. She’s leaping,
dancing on a joy I can understand.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Luve and Mr. Samson talked of small matters pleasantly.

--He sits there sweetly, chatting of small matters. O it is good. O it
is cool water. Bless you! He leaves me alone, he does not touch me. I am
myself. We move marvelously into myself. He is content there, merely
talking, with me a woman, of small matters.

--I have a mind, good mind for others. You shall have the benefit of
that whenever you need it. I’ll find out whenever ... good good Boy!...

--I am alone. That is the blessing of talking with you here on cool
small matters. You do not touch me as the world does when I am alone
with no one. O you heal me: will you at least, after these years, these
years, such years, be my healer? Not touching! The heal and the health
and the miracle of that. Not touched, at last. The years full of bloody
bubbles, each year a bubble of my blood unhealed. I shall not tell you
of myself. You will feel....

--For thanks of God ... your God.... I embrace you, Boy. When one has a
God one can have cool small matters. Let us talk on, for your God’s
sake, of your cool small matters.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Why do you drink? O Harry ... why, why now?”

“You are not always there. At College you were not there, Fanny. Drink
was. One took what was to take.”

“But now....”

“Drink was there first. O I don’t know. When I am drunk I am wrapped in
warm smooth clinging stuffs--like entrails--like insides of a great warm
creature. When I drink I am wrapped in a woman.... Let me creep into
you, Beloved. Farther, nearer. O you are so _whole_. Won’t you let me
creep away inside of you?”

“Harry I am all open to you. Come.”

“No dear. O my love! No, dear, I can’t. God damn you. You entice me ...
impossibly. There you are--you are a woman, _there_. I can’t touch you
... you’re _there_. I am here. Touch you? Break you. I’d smash you into
this air if I could. Damn you! Damn you. Why shouldn’t I have another
drink? _It_ goes inside of me ... all of it ... serves me ... warms me.
It’s mine, that. Going inside of me, same as me going inside of it.
Inside of you ... impossibilities. God damn your sure solid eyes. Let me
get out.”

She lifted his head from her lap. “Go then.”

He rose uneasy to his feet. He wiped straying silk hairs from his
swimming eyes. He turned: stumbled: sank. He sobbed.

She placed him on his back on the floor: cradled his head in her hands.

“Let me get out! Let me get out!” he shouted, motionless.

“Sh-sh. You can go.”

“Fanny, Fanny,” he whispered, “hold me ... hold me still.” His body
swung on the floor, the floor careened about his eyes. Her arms,
cradling him, swaying his head, were alone moveless.

She dragged him to bed. He was a helpless drunken child. She undressed
him. Her hands, touching his naked body, brought to his face a veil of
ease. Her hands ceased. He raised his naked flesh from the hot covers.

“Give me a drink!”

“No.”

His eyes swung back from the wall of her response. But his arms surged
forward, they caught her. He dragged her against his naked flesh....

       *       *       *       *       *

She, little woman, sat in her rocking chair on the porch, looked up at
the flood of sun and tried to find the world.

--Up the sun that is warm and good, up the sun that blinds me
Struggling, not overwhelmed, I send my eyes....

She was clad in a pink dress whose dainty softness brought clear the
silvery atunement of her body. There was naught slack in her. Her bare
arms were a gentling, a subtle rounding of her bones: a haze of dark
hair on them: hands rose intact and long from the fine wrists like
flower from stem. The little breasts stood in the pink tulle, alert,
infinitely one with the awareness of her eyes and wrists ... like the
antennæ of a bug holding the world upon their frailty.

She sat challenging sun: not wilting: waiting her husband.

--Every day now he drinks. He gambles. He loves me. What have I to do
with cards and liquor?

       *       *       *       *       *

She, larger woman, sat deeper in her chair: lost now in a swathing gown
of gray that rose like a wave to her white neck. Her shoulders and her
chest; bare, were still planturous in their running variance of plane
and mood: strong seeking chin, throat swelling as if with graceful
words, chest rising downward from the aloof virginity of her neck to the
slow fulness of her heavying breasts. Fanny was pregnant. She sat there
... taut limpid body ... in the sun, eyes unwilted, about her child like
a sunny song hiding an omen. She sat there gradually giving way ... her
taut and limpid sun-shape giving way ... to the dark press of a swollen
larva tangled inside her blood, pressing, kicking, sucking weight to
rend.

Harry Luve was gone three days, without a word ... plenty of signs. She
knew.

--He has gone. I shall see him again. O yes. Long after I have looked in
my child’s eyes. Thank God for that! I shall look long, years perhaps?
long and deep in my baby’s eyes in order to understand how I must see
him again.

His going down was simple like all of Harry Luve ... simple like a very
plaintive song. She sat between the high sun and the low wail of her
husband: balanced about a child.

How sustain the light madnesses of College? except in drink and
gambling. How nourish the child in him he was? save with the rolling
bloods of liquor, the swift tossings, cradlings, plungings of luck at
cards. At the end of deep immersement in a helpless joy forever Birth
which was an end: the Birth here at last Disgrace, as the Birth once
air. Too much money lost, too much folly of a night in his cups. A woman
half dead, half naked, bent across a table, a mirror smashed, ten
thousand dollars debt. A birth that! Harry slipped down into it as
doubtless he had slipped from his mother’s womb ... whimpering,
blinking, inarticulate--nostalgic. He was gone.

But his father had Honor to groom. The debt was paid, the woman was
salvaged and sent off. No word in the papers.

“He will find out he’s safe ... turn up, sobered ... my Dear. Never
worry,” his father assured her.

“And I ...?”

“You are his wife, Frances. You must wait.”

She got up.

“Will you move my chair, Colonel Luve ... over there?”

She walked, clear slender neck and legs with her child so full before
her her walk seemed to say: “My child comes first.”

Her husband’s parent shook his head.

“What can you do, my daughter? You must wait....”

She sank in her new-placed chair.

“ ...in the sun.”

--She is pregnant, Colonel Luve explained away the inconsequent words.

Fanny waited.

       *       *       *       *       *

“I know your name.... I knew it always ... now you will let me?--_Samson
Brenner._”

“You say my name as if it meant something.”

“Perhaps it does. Perhaps it does. Go on.”

“I sometimes wonder why I am studying Law. Writing poems is more fun ...
and you know? seems _realler_!”

“Yet you distrust writing poems....”

“--bad poems.”

“Bad because you distrust doing anything for fun?”

“You know, I think you’re right!”

He smiled like a child, pleased but a bit scared when he finds true what
he had sought in make-believe. His brow wrinkled. He turned away from
the brass glare of the light.

“That light is horrid,” she said.

“--all substitutes for the sun,” he said.

“That is so.”

“Yet what a wonder what a glory,” his body stiffened, “that we should
have a substitute at all!”

“Why glory, Samson Brenner, if the substitute is false?... Wait.”

Mrs. Luve came back. She placed two candles between them on the Pembroke
table.

“Shut out the gas,” she said.

There was blackness, heavy, hot, clasping them both. Two jets of liquid
glow tongued from the mellow wood, made the wood lift and gleam like a
sun’s ray through moving cloud: cast wreathings subtle, evanescent, out
against the blackness.

They were quiet. The candles ... two fingers rose, touched them across
the table, joined them, hushed them.

“May I say something to you?”

“What, Mrs. Luve?”

“You have a tongue that speaks truth, you have a tongue that lies.”

“Haven’t we all?”

“You must not have a tongue that lies: for you have a tongue that is
true.”

“Haven’t we all ...?”

“You must not----“

   --He does not see himself.
      He moves through a black Hole
      Bright--pouring brightness.
      Where is a Sun whereby a Sun may see?

   --I have ten fingers ... ten to weave a Web
      To catch at God.
      Too frail--too fine ... yet you slip through?

       *       *       *       *       *

Fanny looked out from her back sun-parlor upon trees.

Beside a high grey wall rose the thick life of a magnolia; beech and
cherry and dogwood sang their light swift presences, a lawn was fresh
like dew.

“Trees,” she murmured....--They have waited the Winter. It is Spring,
they prepare to give a whole new life--blossom and seed. That is why it
is Spring. Each year ... at their feet the dead leaves sink and rot.
They push forth new ones. Each year.... They cannot help themselves.

She could go no farther.--Helpless bravery.... Upstairs in her cradle
Edith slept. Harry was gone, voiceless, eight months. She was imprisoned
in her man’s absence, in her child’s presence.

She had a dream. Harry jumped on his black horse, stood over her in his
stirrups. He ribboned the black flanks red with his spurs. The horse
leaped: as he flew away he leaned to her and cut deep her breast with
his crop.... She awoke thinking of Edith. Her child was the red salute
of Harry’s going: the scar of it. She loved her child.

She had a dream. A tall man with a baby’s face lay crowding in her arms.
She could kiss his baby’s face, but he had tall legs, they spun and
twirled about her. They struck a lamp which fell, the house was in
flame. All of the town rushed into her house: she saw his father and
mother, her mother who was dead and brother ... all of the city came
into her sitting among flame holding a baby face. They stood there,
pointing, poising, sneering at her. “What is she going to do? She sat
rigid holding her baby face. What a fool, she sits there nursing a dead
child with fire all about her!” She was helpless.

Now, sitting, watching the brave helpless trees she could go no farther.
She had a child whom she loved and who was the wound of another love
upon her.

--Trees do not think, they are brave helplessly. Why am I not brave?
Trees lift into air. I am buried.

She was buried. Her friends and her relations, seeing her Mrs. Luve,
buried her daily. Her child, seeing her mother, buried her daily. Her
husband, a distant stroke in a far world, ploughing, ploughing like
steel ... heaping the soil of his ploughings forever upon her, buried.

--Trees do not think. I try to think. Thinking is bad for Winter.
Thinking is bad for Spring. Thinking chills Spring. Thinking calls sap
to Winter which Winter kills. Yet I must think ... for I am motionless.
To think is to move when one is motionless. Trees move forever. Leaf and
trunk move upward, circle out: seed moves downward, inward. Trees swing
forever so they are thoughtless. But I am a broken curve, a splintered
part of a Circle I cannot see.... My thought’s a finger feeling from the
line of my brokenness for a Roundness beyond me.

--What am I going to do? How am I going to think?

She was the wife of Harry Howland Luve. Pretty clever astounding Fanny
Dirk: here’s a riddle for your independence, which we ... your Town ...
have had to swallow ever since you were a child bossing your
schoolmates, snubbing the smart young men, running through the
gray-mossed tangles of our thoughts and ways like an April wind through
a sleepy August. You have shocked us, angered us, made us love and
accept you. You caught the best match of Town ... here is a riddle for
you, smartie Fanny Dirk!

He will come back: she was very quick to find her own way, her own words
for it: yet who of us dare say she was not always the lady? Mrs. Harry
Luve. He will come back. Nothing for her after all but to sit and wait
him....

She had a dream. Her bed was a vast blackness.--It is white, I have no
eyes so my bed is black. It was soft and rich, it was comfortable. She
lay within it, folded, lost, and it was white vast comfort all about
her. A Hand from a sharp wrist thrust down, clasped her throat ...
pressed. She was pressed deeper within the bed: as the Hand pressed down
her throat was deep beneath her body, deep beneath her head: her mind
and her blood rushed down from her head and body to her swollen throat
that a white Hand pressed. The bed unfolded lip within lip as had her
body when Harry loved her: now her body cut deep into the bed ...
enfolded it was lost in the bed’s blind comfort.... She saw the Hand
that pressed her down by the throat. Upon one finger was the ring of
Harry: upon another finger was the wedding ring she had worn secret for
a year, and was the diamond ring set in platinum which he had given her
later. The Hand was colorless like the shell of a departed locust. The
wrist above it was long and red and moist. The Hand, pinning her throat,
was dry, her throat was dry. She lay there cased in her hot bed ...
frozen: under a Hand that pinned her.

She got up. She went to her child and held her in her arms. Edith slept.
She held her close against her breast. She stiffened her arms in order
to be still. Within, a voice shrieked: “Wake, wake!” It touched the air
through her hardened nipples. It touched her child. Edith awoke. She
placed her back in her crib.

“Sleep, daughter ... always sleep.”

Saying these words, she felt her gums were hard; it was her gums, it was
her teeth that said them. Her lips were still! She kissed her daughter.

--Lips had better kiss.

The child, who had lain wide-eyed silent, fell asleep....

Fanny stood beside her bed. It loomed like a white sucking mouth--white
lips. She pulled a quilt away, sank to the floor. With knees high
huddled in her arms, near her chin, and the quilt lightly touching her
bare toes, her knees, her mouth, she slept on the floor. The world’s
blackness, the ghost-grained night of her sleep was not the world, not
her sleep ... was the bed above her. Blackness was spun white threads
come to rest: each thread beside the other, each thread of white not
touching any other. She lay escaped from her Bed in undulant hardness,
she flowed ... at last at rest ... like a red worm through water....

       *       *       *       *       *

--At this Party too, they aren’t going to let me be gay!

All they would not let her. They smiled on her and carefully patterned
their talk. They had eyes forever wiping against her thoughts. They must
have hated her, had she been gay and forgetful of her loss. They did not
want to hate her. They preserved her low and broken where they did not
need to hate her. “Dear poor Fanny--so brave!” Their words and their
ways announced: “We try to be gay with you, we try to make you gay.”
They would not let her be gay. They hoisted their talk uphill against
the evident pull of their sole interest in her, of their solemn
compassion for her. They would not let her forget. “We are being gay, we
are trying to cheer you up. We are talking with you of indifferent
matters.” So....

Fanny waited ... here too. In these bright congestions of men and women
was there not surely somewhere a color that went with her own, a tone
that could make her vibrate? She waited in stiff rigor, not knowing she
waited.... Gowns and shoes ... words put on like gowns and shoes over
different flesh. She smelt at times under satin and starch warm flesh
that needed air. She sat and let herself be talked to, be sympathized
with, be gloated over.--If only you’d shout you are glad! Healthy that,
naked.... O no. She was stiff as in death.

A tall man, dark....--Newcomer, strange ... moved up to her and spoke.
Words not spawned or swerved by her own story: words she needed not to
hear since they were fending away a world that would not let her be gay.
In a new separateness Fanny felt herself....

Felt herself laughing.

Found her feet, after his quiet resolute own, pattering out to a
seclusive alcove.

She saw him.--I don’t size you up. I don’t care! You release my feet and
my laughter. You are big strong ... black ... what are you?

       *       *       *       *       *

He came to her home.

Her ears did not count, yet her ears did for they had given her a label
to stick on him so he could pass through her door.... Leon
Dannenberg--attorney from Washington--Government lawyer--on short
business here. He passed through. More than her eyes saw that he was
very strong with hands full of ease. She leaned back in her rocker: her
toes jutted forward: they twinkled against his black strength.

They chatted, she had no ears, she had voice. She was gay.

When he left her: “You are unhappy, Mrs. Luve,” he said. “I think you
are the unhappiest woman I have known. You must be strong, then ...
too.”

She took his hand and liked how her hand was lost in his hand that was
full of ease.

“You let me be gay.”

“I’m coming whenever this Case ... and these Conferences ... let me.”

       *       *       *       *       *

“I have respect for you,” he said. He took her in his arms and kissed
her....

He said: “We are strangers ... we are strangers who respect each other.”

“Help me,” he said.

“Help you?”

“Help me to bring you to yourself. You are stunned. Ill things come over
you and you are stunned, you cannot make yourself clean.... I want you
naked. Help me. Naked against me naked. You will be at last yourself ...
inviolate. Help me!”

He undressed her. She helped him to undress her. She lay in his arms:
lost sweetly like a tree in a warm wind.

       *       *       *       *       *

“You make me feel that I have roots,” she told him.

She found that she had been buried in a corrodent silence. She was
lifted forth. She had words.

“You are strong,” he said, “and you have been a fool.”

Holding her in his arms, he was to her a sunrise ... cool ... cutting
mists and a dim sleep. She lay in him like a warm creature in a gentle
sun, sucking sun ... all open.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Soon I must go ... back to Washington ... my home.”

“You have a home?”

“Why do you doubt it?”

“You are so strong away from home.”

“You are a glory, Frances Luve. You are a spirit like a tree, standing
alone on a single rock in a marshland.”

“That is what you think of my people?”

“That is what I think of your people.”

“But have you a home?”

“The Western World,” he smiled with a fine bitterness that hurt her. “I
am a Jew, you know.”

“Yes ... I know,” she hushed.

“The first Jew you have ever known?”

“The first....”

“Do you know me, Fanny?”

“Will I ever know?... You are going away.”

“That is right, also.”

“Yes.” She looked at him. She sat high above his prone strong body;
looked at him. “Yes, it is right. I look at you. You are beautiful. You
are clean. You are wilful and straight. You have black curling hair like
a savage dance all over the white tenderness of your body. You have eyes
that look forever. Yet I do not love you. I love my husband. He is weak
and dirty. Until you came I said: ‘He is weak and dirty, I hate him.’
You came with your clear strength. You took me naked. I took you naked.
Because I have taken you clean and strong I know that it is he whom I
love.”

He held her hand.

“There is God,” he said, “May he bless you.”

“What does that mean ... if He blesses?”

“The Jews in three thousand bloody years have not found out.”

“I tell you I do not love you: I tell you and you bless me.”

“I reverence you, Fanny. You are clear like water. Love is a word I have
not won the use of.”

“What have you done to me!”

“You are water, Frances. You were muddied and thick. You can look down,
now, through the clearness of yourself, to the dirt base of
yourself....”

“ ...to Harry!”

“See him clear, through your own clean-ness.”

“You are strong. O how strong you are, you man who have won for yourself
a power in the world that hates you. Your people have been beaten
bloody: always, always. Beaten bloody by their God ... beaten bloody by
the world to which they gave their God. They are a bent dark people. Yet
you have won for yourself a body fair to see. Never shall I forget your
lovely body. Yet I do not love you. I love a man who had all and who
cast it away: who was fair as you were never and who has dirtied
himself.”

“He only deserves your love.”

“Why that?”

“ ...if you care for him.” He took her hand again. “Since you care to
care for him....”

“Good-by,” he said.

She said: “The word Love is never in your mouth.”

“Good-by,” he said.

She said: “I will do what you want.... I would do always what you want.
I do not love you: but I bow to you. I kiss your feet. You are holy....
Why are you holy?”

“I have moved you only as a wind that passes.”

“You are putting me aside,” she said.

“No. I touch your branches. I spread them. I take seed of you with me to
the fallow meadows. I do not stir your roots.”

“They feel sunshine for you have spread me open.”

“I do not stir your roots--because I have respect for the word Love.”

“Good-bye, then, Leon. I shall find out what this great truth is ...
this truth I know, the first truth I have ever known ... that you are
holy.”

“Good-by,” he said. Then he went.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Luve looked through the golden flame of an old table, of two
candles, burning within the blackness of her room. There ... not of the
mellow flame, not of the dark ... a young man speaking of small matters.
Where the flame touched him he glowed; where the night touched him his
body withdrew harsh into shadow. What is this encaverned boy, talking of
small matters?

--He is plump: he is a boy: he has no strength of his own. He is very
strong and he is very old. Blond hair curls from bland brow. They are
Jews ... _he_ was straight like steel, hard, sure. So gentle. Sureness
alone is gentle in a fumbling world.... _Are you hard also?_”

--You do not know, but I have seen your parents. If I said so would you
flush? would your heart rush back in panic, hide in your flesh I have
touched by seeing your parents? She counted me change so soberly ...
correct, correct ... ‘If I make a mistake against you I will lose by and
by: if I make a mistake against me I lose now.’ The greed of justice in
your mother counting me change. That time when the clerks were all busy
and I in a hurry, your father came out smiling, sold me--what was
it?--sausage and cheese? So simple, so condescending he was. You are the
child of such parents. They have saved: they have saved in justice of
greed, in justice of condescension: and of this saving of their greed
and arrogance, you buy your College books, you buy your poetry books,
you buy your hours here. Aren’t you ashamed? No he is not ashamed. He is
right. Sausages and dollars saved are slime, are lies. You are true,
Samson Brenner. You are older than your stinking parents.

She filled his glass with wine.

He sipped. His eyes were hot amber in an iron vat. He asked no question,
he sipped.

“Do you want to hear the poem?” he said.

--I hear it already. “Repeat it.”

He did not question her words, he did not question her wine. He took
them. His head bent forward. He held his face in his hands ... soft
hands. He spoke his poem through soft hands. The poem was a stiff, an
alien thing: but her words she had not spoken in the glow of his face
were his and came back to her, a poem.

--I become myself. I become untouched. Speak on, Boy. Make me
untouched!... He has young eyes--the shadows that rim them are marked by
thousand years....

       *       *       *       *       *

The world was a sunny field and the young mother walked in it and was
herself. Each thing was itself, stood clear up in the sunny field of the
world. Black ant over a tuft of grass held the sun in its blackness.
Grass threw sparkle of sun against a blue sky dazed with sunniness.--I
too walking and carrying the sun. I am very sharply myself, like an ant,
like a leaf, throwing with them the sun in a vast gold shower upward
into the sky....

Leon was gone: there would be no word of any sort further between them.

Fanny had a way of sitting on her porch and pinching the flesh of her
bared arm. Solid! She loved her solidness--I am real! She was sunny with
feeling her flesh and her soul real.

--Harry is coming back. O I know! I must be ready, I must be _real_.

She was real. Her thoughts, her feelings, her pain were petal and stamen
and pistil of the full flower of her realness. Sitting now, different,
in her little house where she had been abandoned ... above the pry and
the impudent concern of those about her, above the hurt and the insult
of Harry’s going ... facing the sacrament of his return--how? beaten,
broken?--fully as she had faced no truth in all her life.

... With her child in arms she could pinch bravely and find real....

--I can kiss you now--Baby! little sister!--we wait together for him who
is coming back.

--Coming at last. For the first time coming. There was a holy man. He
released us, stripped us naked to ourselves. And because of a holy man,
we can wait real now, sure, intact, so gently wait and so long, for a
man who is coming.

--We need not ask who he is. He is ours. He will find us and love us,
won’t he, little sister?... and leave us no more.

--Like you! O my blessed baby--like you whom I was strong enough to
bear, not strong enough till now to look upon--like you he is ours.

   --O the black night into which you were
      born, my child.
      O the long pain you stood upon: it rose like
        a flame from my womb you stood upon
... up, up throughout you, to your eyes
        and fingers.
      O the black night of fiery pain you were,
        with your sucking mouth upon my naked
        flesh....

      We dawn together, Love, into a sleep where
        with eyes open
      Cooly we walk toward Day.

Fanny held her child and again she looked unwilted into sun. It was to
her as if she gazed on a bright field, and there above flowers, under a
sky, stood a woman sheer with a child in her arms. Her feet in grass
were cool. Her hair in sky was cool. She was sheer, cool ... unburned
by the fires of birth. She was born ... washed clean of the bloods of
birth and born. Very cool, very sheer. So Fanny saw herself.

... Saw certain things making her sunny field of the world--as the light
of her vision lay clarified in context of green thrusts running, forms
sprayed and ashift over earth.

She had long talks holding her child in her arms....

“I must be more to him when he comes back than I was ever! I can be
more!

“I accept you, Harry. I have no pride, I am humble. I challenge drink,
gaming, women. I am ashamed no longer. I shall beat them. I shall crowd
them out. I shall be for you what they lied seeming they could be for
you. You will find me everywhere, meet me nowhere. No obstruction. You
will find me risen in a great pride, in a great strength, now that my
pride is gone and I have lain, prostrate naked, sucking the strength of
a stranger.”

--O stranger! not a thought more for you. Not a thought. That is as you
will. Harry, he made me love you.

She went into her room, stripped her clothes from her shoulders. She
looked in a glass at her nakedness, feeling under her eyes her shoulders
gleam like cool flames upward.

It was strange: her shoulders were untouched, her breasts had not
fallen.--I am whole! Come, Harry, take me.

There had been a wind, there had been a bath for her naked shoulders.
She was naked, flushed by a swift wind ... gone ... cleansed by a
running water ... run away.--I am whole, I am born. Will you come,
Harry, so you can see the woman who has been born?

She stood long, looking at her naked self. She was clad in a bloom. She
was a hard young world in its first Spring. She found that she was
laughing. She pressed her laughing fingers into her firm breasts.

“I am good,” she said, very sober. She caught up her child. Cheek upon
hers she swayed, very still, very sober. “O we are good. Good, we two!
Won’t you hurry, Man?” ...

“Now I see you. Clear! Never has any woman seen her love as I see you. I
am a woman born. Edith dear, look at your Mother. You are a child
born.... I am a woman born. I am rarer than you! I am very rare. I see
you clear, you little sucking flesh. Sweet, sweet! I see him clear;
wistful yearnful boy, with a soul all wrinkled and athrob like your
forehead, Sweet, when you were born ... a soul open and empty and greedy
like your mouth, when you were born.

“ ...Come, suck me, you two dear ones!”

--Do I see my love clear? If I do, I see a fading.... “I abdicate that
sight, my dear Beloved. My hands must not shake, when you come back to
me shaking.”

--What is love? what is a field?... a running of sweet grass over earth,
grass leaping away from the earth in which it lives.... My love is you
and you ... that is seeing enough!

--Love is the field and woodlands of the world.

She was a little woman waiting for her husband....

       *       *       *       *       *

Strange news came to her world of Harry Howland Luve ... thrilled it,
made it talk.... “Blood will tell.” ... “After the wild oats the sturdier
planting....” “God has his way....” “From one drunkenness to another.”
Fanny took to herself the news and felt it true. The path of her man
came clear in her white mind.

--I feel him, all the way he has crawled livid red from my hands. He
turns, full flow, to my breast! She saw his path like a writing.

The Reverend Doctor Poole brought her his gift of comfort wrapped in
complacence.

She made him sit down, he chose the stiffest chair.--I must subdue
myself, she felt. He was brittle, little. She held back the flood of
herself. But it was easy since his sharp small eyes not knowing she was
a flood, brought her help.

“Your husband, my Dear, has found Christ.

“It happened in New York. Never mind, my child, where ... and who shall
ever say How? He has found Christ and like Him he has risen. More, my
daughter. Like Him, he is walking the ways of men bringing God’s word.
Who has found Christ _truly_, in every respect must act like Him. I am
very gratified ... very grateful. I have come to you, my daughter, ...
you have neglected our Church, never mind, Dear, the strayed sheep is
the dearest to the Lord and to the humblest Pastor ... to pray with you
Thanksgiving and rejoicing. Your husband will be here soon. You know
from his dear father what he’s doing?... He goes from College to College
telling young men how he slipped down the pleasant path to Hell--and at
its gate found Christ.... I have had word from colleagues in Princeton,
Yale, Williams ... elsewhere. His effect on the student bodies is
amazing, electrifying. A true evangel. He is eloquent, simple ... rather
his message is, that speaks through his lips. The students learn how he
... as they do ... played a little, drank a little, smoked--all the
little innocent indulgences ... and what horror happened. They flock up,
after his visit, and sign the pledge of Purity, join fellowship in
Christ. He has received invitations from dozens of Christian
institutions to come with his message, to help save our Christian youth.
He has found a true work, indeed.... And you, daughter, have been worthy
of him ... waiting. Prepare yourself now for the return of your
Bridegroom.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Face clawed close by myriad tiny fears and horrors. Hot eyes. Feet
stumbling. As Harry’s body lurched forward, his feet stumbled faster to
support it. Hands dead white leaves, dry, crackling at his sides.... A
saloon swings open, his head bowed above thin shoulders twitches in,
away from the crash of an impending train above on its swinging iron
rail. Wave of acrid beer, soiled flesh, wet clothes. Above it, his head
a moment is still.... Sober. Harry steps up to the bar, with sharp feet
and hands marshalling sudden to his head against the lazy swing of his
body within the fetid wave. He grasps a glass of whiskey, carries it
untouched before him to a corner. Bodies huddled like hulks of beef or
pork, covered with rags. He floats above them, finds a seat, bowing to a
naked wooden table. Invitation. Glass elbows on the naked table. Head on
the table? No!--One gulp to swing my body free with my sharp head ... to
soberness.... So....--_What am I?_ ...

Harry Howland Luve gazed on his world. A man snoring near him blew a
spray of blood from his mashed nose. A man, beside a barrel, let his
fingers trail like grey worms through the sawdust ... a red tongue broke
through the muck of his mouth, licked the grey worms of his hands, he
slept again. At the bar, careening like ships on a wave of the world,
heads dipped into huge glasses, swung against mirrors, broke thudding
upon a window upon a wall that was a grin of hardness.--What am I? Harry
Howland Luve laboriously counted his fingers....--One two three four ...
one two three four ... one two: my God! where is my fifth finger? “I
lack a finger! I lack a finger!” Body with head feet hands was one ... a
toss, a catapult from the stinking Harp House into a darkness clear,
biting, without, beneath the surge of the “L.” He flew. “I lack a
finger.” He stopped. “What else do I lack?” Again a train. He was
caught. He could not move.--It is coming over! He was clamped; the
train’s murmur rose to a beat, a roar, a crash. Iron and wood and steam
shrieked and stampeded, mountained on his head. He was clamped. He was a
silence of horror under a mountain of noise, crushing against the
eggshell of his skull.... It passed....--I am alive. He walked quiet
now, looking on the pavement tracks for his lost finger.

“You have lost something?” A black form rose from the street like smoke
on a clear night. “Yes ... I have lost ... have lost....” “Perhaps,”
said the smokey man, “I can help you to find. Come along, Brother.” He
clasped his arm. The smokey man of God, the white seeker of color moved
down the cavern of Chatham Square where the high houses dimmed away like
stalactytes and the “L” thrust its lance into the belly of a world too
weary to cry, too worn to bleed. Before him Harry Luve held his white
dry hand. “My finger,” he muttered. “Yes,” said the man of God. “I see
... your pointing finger....”

He sat in a quiet room. Coffee and a sandwich rolled in his raw stomach.
“That tastes good, eh?” said the man of smoke. “Hot, eh? Whiskey makes
you shiver, I’ll bet.” Luve held his hands together and began to cry.
“Heat is the best thing in the world. Good heat is God. False heat is
the Devil ... and makes you shiver,” he said. “Another cup of coffee?”

“My finger ... my finger!” “Brace up, man. You’re a gentleman. You were.
I can see that. See clear, and you’re whole....” “How can I see clear
when I lack ... I lack--” ... “Hush--listen.”

There was a sound like a soft white quiet on a red wound. Music.

“Bow your head, Brother.... Listen.”

The quiet crept upon his body. Tucked in his toes, moistened his hands,
lay on his mouth. The quiet was warm. Was music. Harry shut his eyes.
The wave of the world, booze and streaking men, fell away. He was in a
flatness downy with gentle grass above a gentle river. His feet hurt, he
was glad, hurting was living. A warm cloud muffled his head: through his
eyes and mouth, through the warm cloud came words:

     “Our Father which art in Heaven ... thy Kingdom ... give us this
     day our daily ... not into temptation ... for thine is the Kingdom
... halleluja, Blesst!... the glory for ever and ever ... seek and
     ye shall find ... seek seek and and ye ye ... unto you opened ...
     unto you, opened ... Blood of the Lamb, red blood, ... there is a
     quiet house, all white, where it is warm this bitter Winter night
... all warm a quiet house ... and arms holding me to a redness,
     passion, that is allowed. Allowed ... hallowed ... hallowed ...
     allowed. Christ smiles on it, his blood is red and holy.... Fanny’s
     red, I have seen her red blood. Since I have married her, holy ...
     red and holy ... knock and it shall be ... opened ... red warm,
     dear ... all white is the blood of the Christ....”

The smokey man was speaking: “Miracle is not dead.”

Harry Luve rolled around upon his face. The music was still. A new
quiet, also warm, wrapped him about. He rolled and rolled in a warm
water. “The quiet is ever’ where.”

His eyes gleamed against a blackness suddenly calm and dun, a wall. He
looked at a wall in a lighted room. He saw a man beside him clad in
black. A hand touched his. Harry was thankful how that hand touched his.

“I have seen,” he said, “ ... O I have seen--“

The hand clasped his. “What, brother, have you seen?”

Harry wrenched away his hands, placed them like fenders before him.

“Let me--let me--!” he stopped. He swayed caught: he flew caught in a
chord that sped with the bright room through a roaring darkness. Roar!
He was dizzy. He tried to cry. He saw his hands speeding before his eyes
like two birds through cavernous space. He stopped from breath ... one
two three four FIVE ... he counted his flying fingers. A tiny spring
sang over his eyes, sang fraying ready to break. He wanted to cry ...
five five!... a little woman flew before his hands like a white bird in
the blackness. Naked. One red spot in her naked body where he had made
red once ... Fanny!... warm ... allowed. _Hallowed allowed hallowed
allowed._ The red spot was a painted house home ... could be about
him.... Blessed are they that mourn ... blessed are they that mourn.
Blessed are the poor in spirit ... comforted ... Kingdom of Heaven lead
us not ... rejoice exceeding glad ... into temptation----

    “--_Warm and sweet is the blood of the Lamb
      That washes us sinners white.
      Sinners sinners
      Black and quivering sinners we
      And the blood of the Lamb it warms us
      It washes us sinners white._”

... The hand of the man in black touched his again. Smokey ... flame.
Warmness, red warmness, white from hallowedness. The tiny spring burst.
His eyes burst out into myriad diamond stars. A sluice opened. He was
all wet. His soul poured ... a pent torrent ... out: speechless
whiteness.

“Something--say something, Brother! What wrestles in you? What chokes
you? What do you see?”

“Christ!” gasped Harry Rowland Luve: then he slept.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Luve leaned back in her chair, took the brimming words of Samson
Brenner.

They poured from him, free, full, into the dark pool of her eyes. They
poured bright, candid: in the dark pool they fell dark.

--You talk of your fears and your pains: you talk of your loves and your
dreams. You are a Jew, you are true. Why is the word Christ never in
your mouth?

--O there is reason, deep! What is the pain of nearness--you pampered
Jew, you Jew-boy, plump about sorrow--that blots the word Christ from
your mouth?

“Mrs. Luve, I forget myself. I talk. I lose myself, there sudden I am. I
do not know myself, but I say ‘that is me!’”--Pampered boy. “I talk and
talk. God knows of what and why. Mrs. Luve, do I bore you?”

“You move along a path that is mine. Go on. I have no earthly thing to
do but hear you.”

“You are grave!”

“Not so grave as you.”

“But I laugh. I must tell you ... the first time I really heard
laughter....”

--You move upon my life like a broken sun ashift through cloud at
evening after a black day.... You in the flame of my candles, you in
the black of my room.... What is this word Christ you know too deep to
utter?”

       *       *       *       *       *

Fanny standing moved her hand from the gathered flowers on the table ...
cherry and pear buds high, bowls of anemone, violets ... to her lips.

“He is coming!” She stood.

The door thrust forward--and was away from between them. Clad in white
she held firm against the sight of him; tall and dark with pale hands
and face, he rose from her still eyes like a column of smoke.

“Harry!” Then she held out her arms.

He shut the door. He knelt.

“Get up, husband.”

He kissed her hands.

She lifted his head in her two palms, lifted him up. His lips were on
hers.

They were thin, sweet, laden now with little gasps of air warmed sweet
in sweet lungs: no smells of liquor and smoke like a hot corrugation
scraping her sense.

He broke from her and sat in a chair. His breath was sudden, he had run
a race. One hand lay palpitant against a knee: breathless, afraid, a
being out of its element. She thought of a sea. He was fished up dry
from a sea.

“Harry,” she spoke low. She knelt at his feet: she looked up: she could
smile now.

“Get up, wife.”

“No ... let me. Let me always.”

His dry hands, tremulous, waved about her hair: seeking, afraid: they
were moths now, fluttering upon a light: so his eyes. His face was pale
and hurt turned down upon her smiling. Fluttering search collapsed. He
hid his face in his hands.

“Do not cry now.” She felt shut out by his hiding hands.

“I do not cry. Instead, I pray.”

He looked at her. All of him was dry. From his words he seemed to have
won bravery. She felt shut out in his looking.

His eyes were braver: his hands. They moved forward upon her shadowing
face: they sought a thing, found it. They carried her mouth upon his,
differently, upward. He stood, she under him. Her flesh touched his
flesh.

Tall white flesh, scabbarded in black ... and in prayer. Lips washed
clean of liquor, scrubbed lips, thin ... very thin. Hands corroded in
cleanliness against the nape of her neck. Odorless, fireless.... Fanny
flung her arms about him.... Shoulders pointed forward, thrusting away a
world. She clasped him close.

“Harry--Harry,” she cried. “O I am so glad you are----” she stopped. She
lay swaying in his arms, clasping him tighter, tighter. A faint moan
rose from her parted lips as her arms clasped tighter....

They sat and looked at each other.

“You have loved me, Fanny.”

“Yes ... yes.”

“You are my wife.”

She could say no word. She could feel no thing to turn into a word. She
was a wisp of cloud: beneath her a weathercock stood still. Harry
moveless pinned like a weathercock upon a bloody spike ... under a sky
with one wisp of cloud.

From a fringed green horizon, memory like a wind moved up to her.

--I love him. I serve him. I have dedicated my new free strength to
that. I have sworn how I was wanting, how I failed. Life now together!

“You know about me,” he said.

“I know you have come back, and I love you ... love you.”

“I must tell you all ... all the sin. You are my wife.”

“Tell me now, only that you are mine.”

“I am yours: for you are my wife since in my sinning you have loved me,
Fanny. God rewards me. You were there, awaiting my conversion.”

“We are wedded at last. Do not use words I cannot understand.”

“You must hear all my sins....”

Why did she feel:--He is satisfied with his words?

“I know my sins. God has put upon me, as my way of being cleansed, to
speak my sins. As they come forth from my mouth, they cleanse--God has
made a miracle in that they cleanse. I am washed clean, speaking them.
Already scores of boys, young men, hearing them, are clean. All their
horror, each detail of my sins, is a hand washing clean.”

Why did she feel:--Speaking, he moves away?

--I am jealous of your sins. What are sins?

“Tell me at once, then, Harry. Then we can bury them. Then we can start
to build. Then you can come and hold me.”

“I was away more than two years....”

--He has come back to hold me.... I will hold him so he understands he
has come back to hold me.... O to be held!... He has never held me. We
were too wise, we fools, to hold each other. In a plunging world ... O
my God how the world veers and plunges ... what fools not to hold each
other.

He spoke, he was very eloquent and sure, dwelling again with his sins.
He was warm in them. When he looked out from his hot sins to his wife,
his eyes were colder.

--Hold me. Hold me! Let me hold you. Come plant your hand in my heart.
He spoke, dwelling warm in his sins.

--Damn your sins!

He ended. He came to her and knelt once more. Not feeling him, she let
him.

“Fanny, my dearest, my wife, my wife ... do you forgive me?”

Not feeling him there, she was very quiet.

“I do not feel, my love, that there is anything to forgive.”

She looked straight, a little to the side of his white face. She was
still.

“We were young,” then she said.--I must speak. “And did not know. All
that is past, but is good ... all ... since now we know.”

“I have sinned deeply. Forgive me.”

“You wandered loosely, because I held you loose: because you did not
hold me. Now we clasp each other close. It is not a sin to have been a
child.”

“Bless you. Bless you.”

“I have learned----“

“You have been always wonderful.”

“No, Harry. I have learned. I have changed.”

“You.... You have not needed to change.”

She looked at him. “Two years you left me alone: and before that two
years you left me alone while I was forced to live with a drunkard. Do
you think these years did nothing to me?”

“You suffered.”

“And what might come of suffering!”

“Fanny, my Christian wife, you were strong, you were not harmed by
suffering. You remained pure. You have been not changed, dear:
tempered.”

“O Harry, I am afraid ... so afraid of your words.”

“You are a Christian, dear, and do not know it. That is why you are
frightened by my words.”

“You never saw me, Harry.”

“Yes, dear, always. Under a mist, but always. The mist lifted. Darling,
I must tell you: that frightful immortal night ... you and Christ.... I
saw you both at once together.”

“You never saw me. You do not know how I have changed.”

“You love me?”

“O my darling!”

“You suffered, waiting....”

She put his hands together: helpless she beat her hands against his
hands clasped hard.

“You did not give up ... waiting, suffering?”

“I knew you would come back. I saw you, always, coming. Now I know
that.”

“Then you have not changed. For you do love me, then.”

“Harry, love to survive must change.”

“Dear, dear ... you were right. I have told my sins. Each one. You have
them all. You must remember them all. Let me hold you now, in silence.”

“But Harry, perhaps I too have the need of telling.”

“You have no sin.”

“No Harry, I have no sin. But there are other tidings.”

“Hush, dearest. Hold me----“

“Listen!”

He looked at her. Impatience bit his lip, puckered his eyes slightly.

“ ...Have you thought ever, Harry, of what I did, these years of waiting?
of what I was? Harry, look at me clear. Have you ever tried to see me?”

“My Christian wife!”

--Patience, patience!... “Harry, this coming home must be beautiful, it
must not be hideous. Give it your share of light, Harry. You must to
save it, to make it. Look at me.”

He puckered his brow: he suffered, looking at her beauty he would ...
now he had confessed his sins ... have preferred to kiss.--All of you,
hidden under your white prim dress! “It is so long since I have kissed
you.”

“Harry, your word sin, does it cover up from your eyes what you and I
have done? Am I right, dearest, to fear your word sin?”

--I want to kiss you. You are my wife and have forgiven me. I’m done
with vices. I have the right, by God! to kiss your mouth and....

“Your going away killed me, Harry. I was near dead before you went. Your
going away killed me.”

“Forgive me, I say.”

“Never! if you use that word. Forgiveness, sin ... they are words,
Harry, that cover up. You killed me; you did not sin. You struggled for
life and killed me. That is all. I struggled for life, after your
struggle had killed me. Can you imagine how I needed, alone here in the
house with Edith whom you have never seen, to struggle against the death
in which your going buried me?”

“Edith----!”

“She is asleep. Have you thought, Harry?”

He stood up. “What can I do or say? Yes I have thought. It is that agony
I brought to you which I call my sin: it is my heartache for it, my
rushing back to you with hands imploring, that cries ‘Forgiveness.’ You
stop me.”

“Harry you did not sin, because you needed life. Always that comes
first; our need of life. I did not give you life. I don’t know why, but
I did not give you life. You went elsewhere, fumbled. Now I feel strong.
I feel now, Love, that I can give you life. We can now, from our new
strength, at last give life to each other. If I did not know this, I
would never have seen you again.

“But Harry ... please, please understand! I understand your wandering,
your hurting, almost your killing of yourself and of me ... in order to
find breath. Understand mine!”

“What do you mean, Fanny?”

“I am human also. I am not ... I do not want to be that perfect
emptiness you call your Christian wife. O my beloved, I am all warm for
you, I am all living for you, because I too have struggled and have
wandered ... in order to find breath.”

“What do you mean?”

She stood close to him. “Look at me close, my love.”

“What do you mean?” Very slowly, his pale white hands with their blue
veins curled up like leaves in autumn, drying, drying: fists.

“Do you feel how I love you? Do you feel ... O you must ... how my love
now, that was a little stupid girlish thing, has bloomed: how it is full
of blood, full of sustaining sweetness? Do you not feel, Harry, how you
have come back to a love that will feed you, that will lift you up until
the end of years?”

“Yes ... I feel that. What do you mean?”

“That love is over the despair and death of our past years as a tree is
over the ground.”

“Fanny ... I....”

“ ...rooted in it. I was under the ground. That shows I loved you.
Always, always. If I had not loved you, I should not have been so
deep-buried under the ground. I was dead. That shows I loved you. I am
all open in the air, high to you. That shows I love you. Love for you
has never stopped, it has grown.”

“What do you mean ...?”

“There was a thing that helped me to push up from my despair, from my
death under the ground where you had buried me, Harry. There was a
man....”

Harry Luve stepped forward and viced her wrists: “A man--!”

“Harry dearest, you must let _me_ now, _me_ now tell you all about it.”

He stopped her. “One thing only.... This man--” His voice broke. He
dropped her wrists. His face was an ashen mist. “For God’s sake, Fanny!
You didn’t ... you didn’t, Fanny--“

His eyes saw her. Saw her face. Her face nodded.

His hands covered his face. He flinched away. He saw her not. He went
back, back ... the wall caught him. He crumpled to the floor. He lay
under his white hands. Lay long....

At last:

“Harry, Harry ... it was because I loved you. O the hurt! See, I have
killed you too. Because I loved you.... I too needed to live, for you
had killed me. Do not judge yet. Let me tell you, let me help us
understand. I heard you ... your horrors, your orgies, your hells. O
Harry, this was not so ... this was clean somehow ... leading to birth,
to you. It was, since I am here now, loving you ... ready to give you
all, all of a life I have at last won to give you. O my boy....”

With each word she crept closer, sank nearer beside him. She knelt
beside him. She sought his hands, his eyes ... his eyes. He saw her face
hands eyes kneeling beside him who was crumpled beyond her.... He saw
not her face, not her hands. He saw white thighs, white, wide, very
soft, very penetrable ... hers ... darkly penetrable; they were the
stuff of his flesh, they were the stuff of his brain and they were
pierced by someone!... He saw rootflesh of a man ... _not he!_ piercing
the stuff of his brain.

He got up. Her face was still low where his face had been. Her face was
near his feet. His feet touched her face.

“Our Lord has spoken,” he said, “and I throw no stone.”

She was very still, her face low above his feet. Listening with a firm
stillness her body was hard and she held her face above his feet.

“Our Lord has spoken further!--‘_But I say unto you, that whosoever
shall put away his wife saving for the cause of fornication causeth her
to commit adultery._’ So has said our Lord.”

She was moveless.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Rise up.”

“Let me here, dearest, try to tell you all. Try to tell you what I know
now I must: how I was helpless, how I was poisoned dead ... how I was
lifted up.”

“Get up.”

“O Harry, Harry ... I have killed you, too.”

“Get up, I say.”

She lifted her face, furrowed with tears, to his.

“I did not choose, Beloved, the Way I was saved....”

“Do you put that on God? or on Christ who has spoken against you?”

“When has He spoken against me?” Fanny Luve stood silently before him.

“He has spoken against you ... even He. He has said: Cast no stone. No
stone shall be cast by me. He has said: Put her away....”

Her hands clenched under his mouth.

“--and I put you away.”

“You put me away!”

“I put you away.... Not for myself. I must travel. It is my mission to
travel from College to College. I must be away much from my home,
bringing where I can to my brothers the Word ... the Word of our Lord
who puts you away. I put you away ... for the sake of my child.”

“Whom you have never seen!”

“Whom you shall never see--“




_THREE_

WHITE SKY


Fanny Dirk Luve stood on the Bridge where she could see the river up and
down.

--I know what I am going to do. I know. Not die. Not going to see--What
can I--? Since she knew, “Why! Why!” she said aloud.

She searched the world trying to find the anguish--I am not going to
die!... of what she was to do.--Why not? But she knew that.... Not die.
Not see her child.... She saw the river.

The river came to her from trees. The city, a raised shadow near her
eyes, pulled her eyelids down away from there beyond, where she lay once
on her back. She lies on her back. Under: grass, roots thrusting in
erection, spilling in bud. Over: he.... From these trees came the river
... from this past ... flowing like the dimension that was time upon her
standing on the Bridge. Time and the river were one. It swept upon her
from the past of trees, past of sweet love, thrust against her, surging
resistless; it was going to overwhelm her. Where? Time and the river
flung in a stroke eternally sure against her standing dry in
anguish--love an edged steel--on the Bridge. She turned. It turned her.
Time and the river sweeping from rootage and trees struck her now in the
back. She saw where it flowed.

It flowed into flat land. A rugose strewing of rust and yard and factory
was the flat land. The city in the heights fell down from its proud
mansions--through dawdling soiled cottages, through clustered
shanties--fell to the flat land of rust and coal. Slow brackish river
here, turmoiled ... full. It swirled in oil, it recoiled from the harsh
thrusts of the makings of men--of junkyards. River and time stole
through this newness of noise and filth away, in a filmy scarf of
smoke-bitten locusts, beyond the eyes of Fanny. She felt in her back the
subtle thrust of a beginning world of high-banked trees free in the air:
how it fell, grew, now hurling through noise, dirt, misery--making,
struggle to make!--to beyond her eyes that lay so wistfully against the
dying locusts, unable to fall farther.

And at her side the city fell along. From its secluded shadow--warmed
mansions fell with her along into a rising clatter of smoke, a foam of
steel, huddling men moving.... Mist.

Black-purple mist ... red rust ... the shriek of wheels crunching
resistless against and upon steel lines thrust resistless also.

Fanny left the Bridge....

       *       *       *       *       *

In one hand of Fanny was a valise. Her other hand was a fist.

Her mouth asking for a ticket shut fast. Her hand counting change shut
fast. She sat in a train, shut.

The moving train worked at her, stole up in her, swayed, shook, pried
her open. Her feet in the opening rhythm of the train. Her legs. Her
loins. Warm loins. Breasts, not so frozen, melting. Her head, erect on
her frozen breast, now plunged in their melting. She sat in a train,
open.... She lay in a hot bath of her melted pain and life, flowing
within it, open.

She had no sense of a world of objects--fragments to beat against her.
She was all melted hot. She had a sense of the whole world ... whole
worlds ... all ... falling. The train fell sure, it was sure of itself
in its fall. It fell with the world it held so sure, so steadfast; it
was a blessing so. She had the sense of the whole world falling in a
stark cadence upward upon God. Tears, battle ecstacy of loss ... a
falling somehow upward upon God.

Her hands gripped the plush arms, shrill sharp against the quick of her
nails. The world was her world again, and was a delirious tangle of
broken objects hurling against her eyes. She was bruised and aghast in
the rain of broken objects of her world. But that which she had sensed
in the melt of worlds remained. All fell upward ... let her pray!--can I
dare?... fell upward upon God.

--I am falling away. Grappling, crying, she saw at last how real was
this falling away from the whole warm world of her sorrows and joys and
wants.--_Edith, Harry; myself, O Edith my heart!_ It is true. _Can I
fall upward?_ ...

The fast train seemed to be running over her life. It ran over an earth
full of flying fragments. Over houses, fence snapping, cows dipped
sudden into trees, pool flaring skyward, cloud-full, caught in the
porch of a house, road ribboning a tobacco-field, shaken straight, road
stiff like a rod flashing away beneath her.--This is Virginia, this is
I. The fast train running over her life smoothed it clear....

She could have remained and fought him for her child, she could not. She
could have remained and won him ... repulsive ... she could not. She
moved upon a track that was there she sensed before her moving upon it.
But Edith! What sort of a life is this, moving away from Edith? The pain
of her deprival was a thousand pains, gray: a thousand gray birds
circling her in mist.--I am suffering, suffering. Can I stand this? The
mists cleared. She saw her Pain clear ... one Pain ... one moment. Pain.
She saw that it was not a thousand pains, weeping in gray wings mistily
about her. She saw that it was Life.

Life solid and salient.

--_What is this terror? What have I to do with this terror?_

_You are within it!_

... Like this Virginia, an unbroken sweep, broken alone by the unwonted
stress of the dimension of moving. One can face solid. One has two eyes
and a mind for facing solid.... She loved her daughter.--I love you,
love you! More things she loved. Not Harry perhaps, O yes ... the warm
dreams she had born in Harry. The house around Edith. Clean beds, linen
her own, the kitchen where she came each day and the apron she tied
about her hips and the hips too she loved which arms must circle she was
sure of. Edith’s. Home, daughter, man ... why were they all destroyed?

   --But they have never been.
      What have they been?... pool of my blood of dream.
      Stagnant and dead: pool of my clotted blood.
      My dream’s blood flows!

It was true. Bleeding to death? Bleeding to birth? She did not know. But
flowing.

“God, let me think!” The words came aloud.--God, let me think! now
silent....--Edith? Yes, Edith was flowing alive. But Edith was not
herself, not _her_ blood flowing. Edith’s blood flowing. Let it flow for
Edith.

Fanny sat shaken in a mother’s storm. Help for her child. Could her
child flow first alone? Where was the mother to help her? Father? Fanny
sat trembling. She saw him, as he oldens in the cant moulds of his
ideals. Harry, pious, weak, stale ... leading the life of her child.
What did she have of her father?--If she is like her father let her rot!
But now would she not surely be like him? She alone could save her child
from that. _She alone could, who could not._ ... The train ran.... Fanny
saw the Town, it would be the world of her child growing, of her child
learning to live in the world. World of such women! Edith’s blue eyes,
open beneath the dimpled softness of her brows, behold a world of such
women ... the only world! Stiff brittle creatures, floating upon the
viscid surface of a stream they have no weight to pierce. And their
Laws: “Have no weight, have no thrust that might pierce the viscid
surface of our stream.” World of such men! Liars, builders of lies, men
taught to pray to Christ and to cheat their fellows, to cheat their
women and wear them ... trim them then wear them ... taught to ignore
half of the aching world that was black.--Let me go back to Edith! O let
me go back!... The train ran smooth.--You may not.

Fanny faced the dead of her heart. She felt the world of her child
clear, how it stank, how it swarmed like an evil stinking weed sucking
the soil of God. She saw the blue eyes of her girl. They stood upon a
body, white and clear like a flower: and all about, the Weed, swarming
and purulent with its harsh roots sucking soil, with its hot leaves
stealing sun.--What can I do? She faced she could do nothing. Yet
reasonably something. Fight ... pursuade. There was reason with the cry
of her mangled heart that there was much she could do. _Turn back._ The
train, racing, swept her eyes upon a world lying folded in myriad skies,
a world solid, a world one with space and stars ... space solid joined
her to the stars as her white body joined her eyes to her limbs. One.
And Edith within it, flowing her way. Ruthlessly hers....--Let her blood
flow for her.

Fanny facing the dead of her heart faced the life of failure. She knew
at last she could live.

The train swam into a strewing of neat flat houses, cut across asphalt.
A marble Dome in sun rose above smoke of roofs. Washington!... Leon’s
home.--I must change here. Every hour New York trains every ... get
there by day, though.

Fanny walked through a city incredibly neat.--Very fine. Government
world. Fine and dead. It has not started to grow, it has not started to
be. It is easy and fine, like a nonexistence.

Her feet were heavy as if she were walking in space.

“When, God,” she said aloud, “do I begin to think?”

       *       *       *       *       *

She stood halted by a building. She knew which building it was.---- He
is inside! Of course perhaps he is inside no longer. It was a gray pile
rising in numberless piddling columns to the white of the sky. It was
cold. She looked at it. “I am not going in.”

He was perfect in her. Why should she go in to take from him perfection?
She was afraid for his perfection.--How can he be this holy man in this
grave? The Government Building stood like an insolent lackey fending her
off. It glared at her and was very insecure and stupid within its
ruffles of marble. It strutted its turrets before her like a vain proud
bird.--He is perfect. He is done. He is no more. He is buried here. She
felt a great need to see him.

She knew she must not. “I must seek you,” she whispered against the
mounting marble, “differently.”

She walked and knew that Leon Dannenberg who was in each of her steps,
in each of her pangs, in each leap forward of her blood was forever
beyond her eyes.--Here you are, holy man. Where am I? There you are.

She walked away. A vast openness was upon her flank, it ached sweetly as
if her blood poured through it. An open longing lay upon her flesh as if
she walked away from him who had given her birth.--You are behind. Not
so far behind as Edith. Nearer, holy man. Farther ahead.

But as she walked the inept city, a scene came and it filled her. She
gave herself her scene fully, voluptuously ... starving ... while the
long buildings passed her in a squad of uniformed dull giants.

He is up from a wide desk. He says no word, looking deep in her eyes.
One instant doubt as to the full free independence of her coming. Doubt
goes before the intelligence of her eyes. He took her hands, very
lightly, released them.

“I am going North. I am on my way North.”

“How can I help you?”

“You have helped me all you can.”

“He came back ... you told him?”

She nodded.

“He did not understand?”

“How could we expect he should understand? Would I? Do I?... if this all
was not mine ...?”

“It is good, Fanny Luve. Go ahead.”

His face sudden is like a field under a sky of longing: a sun came
down; his face glows in tender fear: it shadows to resolution.

“You must go North. We can’t understand. I can see, you are going
right.”

“How can you see that, Leon?”

“No day since I left have you been far from me. You come into my
thinking, my dreaming, into my sudden flying visions. You measure
yourself always with them, with the best of them, Fanny. You measure
full with them.”

“What you have said I could have said.”

His eyes came very near. They filled with tears of her. He looked away.

“But I am vague. O Leon, so blind!”

“You are no longer afraid of being blind. You are ready.”

“_Leon, what am I going to be?_”

“We are no longer prophets ... save in our lives. Live, Fanny.”

“Leon, I could fight.... I could win her, I could save her.”

“No, Fanny ... you are going to live.”

“I ... and Edith?”

“_You_....”

She walked with mouth tear-brimmed and open out of her fancied words.
She saw about her with relentless eyes, felt with relentless feet, this
hard pavement, these hard houses, hard white sky. Out of the deep scene
came now upon her, as her mouth shut, clearer and more solid than the
stone city his last words:

“You, Fanny ... not Edith, _you_ ... are to live.”

Clear feet carried body erect through the stone city. Mother worlds in
blood poured from her, leaving white feet, white body, while the soul of
Fanny swooned in a ruthless knowledge.




_FOUR_

PAVEMENT OVER EARTH


A man and a woman walked this day with Autumn burning all about them.
The sun lay in thin cloud. The trees burst.

“I have found out, Fanny,” he said.

She was so shorter than he and her steps swifter than his long lurches.
She felt him from his broad brown halfshoes upward ... big fleshly man,
somehow lithe, somehow gentle like song above his crude-rhythming feet.
And his hairy great hands she felt--as when they were on her body like a
little child’s, so helpless yearning, so imperious.

“I knew I should find out if I gave myself the space to: that’s why I
brought you up here. We came yesterday. This morning I know ... that I
have known since the day you came into the Office asking for a job.”

She laughed.--I can laugh!

“O I see your thought: ‘That’s the conventional phrase.’”

“ ...from Christopher Johns!”

“Maybe he’s been so durn unconventional these forty years because he
hadn’t found himself. Maybe he feels, now he can look at last straight
at you and himself and understand, it’d be good to be conventional: like
rolling in warm blankets which the hard days’ work has paid for.”

She felt the dissonance of her feet striking the rutted road beside his.

“There must have been a frost last night.”

“Look at that maple! It’s a blazing red, because there was a frost.”

She looked. He was keeping step.

“I mean it, Fanny. It’s nearly two years since I’ve known you ... nearly
two years you’ve worked for me ... one year we’re--well--lovers though I
fear the word for the rare wonder you have given me--why, why? But now
it is a blossom of knowing, a whole Spring of knowing, woman! There has
been Sylvia _Frau_, there has been Sadie. I chuck ’em both, and when it
is done we marry.”

“Jonathan! I want you to walk quiet ... miles and miles beside me quiet,
today all day--do you understand? I am listening for something.”

She knew he would, clutching his stick behind him in two fists.

Two years ... they tramped ... two years....

--You are Fanny Dirk, Mrs. Luve.... I’ll keep that name! And you have
gotten tired already, tired of what if you look and face it you will
find all bundled and labelled in two years. Labelled to know, Bundled
... to throw out! That’s clear, though the facing, the training of my
eyes and the opening of my mind to hold what I face, is going to be
hard.... Here is an autumn day and a dear man trudging so you are alone
with it. Day of glory, day of flame, day of death. The leaves are
singing for they are going to fall. The trees are singing for they are
going to sleep. The world is a maze of trumpeting insects, loomed with
flutters of dry grass, trill of seed, for soon comes snow stillness. O
Fanny, once you were Springtime! I hear a man talk blossom and I feel
September. The bundles ... the labels ... two years inventoried! Aren’t
you a business woman, Fanny, earning two thousand a year? A year ... two
years. Each year has a Spring and a Fall. A third year might green if
you burn away like these trees.

“It is simply,” she whispered to herself, and the man watched her mouth:
“do I want to green like these trees?... When will I learn to think?”

She knew already what was to be.

She struggled only, she gave this full free day in the air only, to know
Why. Did not the world have reasons? She had suffered losing two lives
that grew within her flesh. She had asked Why, and in the questioning
been rent away so even these agonies were dim: they were worlds dead
like dim moons in the dawn of her adventure. And that adventure was Why!

--Why shall I say No very soon ... so very soon? Why am I going to leave
the warm of this dear man, the ease, the goodness of it all--why am I
going to push him back into new Emptiness?

She saw him that first day: his arms thrust out, nervous arms, haggard
hands, hair wet ... _business man_! this big bumping child, bumping in
Emptiness? Dear ... so good (she could see that at once as of a horse
and a dog all in one, and his life a currycomb brushing wrong, a bone
marrowless): now, back he goes into worse Emptiness. Why?

   --Tell me trees....
      I am not tired, I am rested.

      In the arms of this man, with my face turned away, I have rested.
      I can bear what you tell me....
      I am hard like you.

... That afternoon, the ninth of beating about on pavement until
pavement tumored upward through her legs, her bowels, her blood,
stiffened her brain ... that afternoon she had felt strong again
sudden.--So this is Business? this soft flesh in the hard City?

“Mr. Johns, you must let me have that place,” she told him very calmly.

The next day she hung her coat on the costumer in the corner away from
the open window. A grey wall rose beyond eyes, shrill greenish white
electric bulbs blazed, shutting them all together, papers typewriter
woman and desks and murmur beyond: she found she wished to smile.

Solid New York! Solid New York relieved her burden of no base. She had
visited New York before: she felt the City deep, having in that past
surface of her life beheld its surface. She sensed an analogue. She too
had not changed but had gone down below her surface to a turmoiled
depth. Within still deeper was there not a quiet, as now she sensed the
Quiet of the City under its torrential streets and its human million
midges of fire through stone? Thus New York welcomed her: it was a place
where people dwelt and had dwelt long, so she could feel it was a place
where people dwelt. Her Southern City, ... almost as old, was dead where
old, was raw and unaccustomed where it was new ... its industrial heart
of smoke, its outskirts of prim bungalows. Here was a City _one_: the
place she knew for such as she to come to.

--Such as I?

Loving New York so sudden above the agony of her intimate deprivals, she
said: “We are something in common, you and I.” She and the wide solid
City that untouched her frail and bloody inwardness ... lifting her up
to a light where she could seek what this thing meant, this I.

In the Office was Clara Lonergan.

When she spoke to persons, particularly when she spoke to Clara, Fanny
lost her quiet City: New York became a pullulent pile, a heaving surface
above a boil of blood. So Fanny did not seek out persons, she feared
that City.--Do I not need to seek myself? She feared the self that was
like it. But Clara, she knew at once, she was not to avoid.

She saw in a glance that she was supposed to remove her hat. She took a
seat demurely, her heart compressed and moving up and down as she
breathed fragilely. She felt how all within her was fragile and was
surrounded by a solid world. Miss Lonergan smiled:

“I guess Mr. Johns will see about you pretty soon,” and went into his
Office. Her smile alone of the outside world also was fragile.

So Fanny sat demurely. Beyond her was a long dark room filling with
girls. She heard their footfalls in the hall: at times through the wired
glass of the door she caught faces ... face sallow hungry, face angrily
uplifted toward sun and laughter by the means of rouge, face resigned in
sweet debility.... That one will marry. As feet cadenced the hard cement
Fanny’s heart fluttered. The door swung; voices angled against the feet
and the door, escaping in this brief interim of home and work in
allusive herd-calls: Fanny felt thrust away. Each voice and footfall
thrust her. She struggled to be back.

--I am of you, now, she argued to herself. A little older than most. O
in life so older!... But I am one of you now.

The door opening from the private Office called her sharp up. Miss
Lonergan came in, seated herself with fingers already rustling at her
pad. Mr. Johns loomed before her.

“Good morning. Good morning.”

He stood with his feet apart and his toes turned out. Fanny observed how
his knees flexed inward, how his legs aburst in their drab trowsers
flexed and gave her mind the same thought as his ruffled hands and hair:
made her smile.

“Well now,” he was saying, “you two said anything yet to each other? get
acquainted yet? no explanations?” He turned from the one woman to the
other. “You’ll be friends. O all of us’ll be friends. What could be more
companionable after all than to engage in the business of soft drinks
... making Delight Drinks for the thirsty people....”

Miss Lonergan struck a key of her machine. _Click_, she smiled.--I can’t
wait for your nonsense. _Click clicket click...._

“You see,” went on Mr. Johns, “the people get hot and what cools em off
is ice. But they wont pay for ice. Not much! Ice is ice ... nameless. We
don’t furnish ice. They pay for our lovely game of names,” he handed
Fanny a list. “So we send the names in the liquid forms, to the candy
men and the soda men: and _they_ put in the ice: and the ice cools the
people: and the people pay us.”

He flourished clumsily. His face glowed open about his clear blue eyes.
“Will you come, Mrs. Luve?” His head serious now thrust back. “I want to
show you the girls you are here to take care of.”

       *       *       *       *       *

“Why I live on Twenty-First Street. That’s right near.”

“Let’s walk,” said Clara.

New York was open letting the calm day in. An afternoon of May ... made
of the scent of far young grass, the swayings of far trees, the slopings
of far hills ... lay above the streets where Fanny and Clara walked:
came down, feathery certain into the open City, into their eyes and
limbs. They walked languorous through a sleepy city lying like a
brittle-kneed woman under the loved day. The City glowed with half
responses ... new. The angle of a street falling away from the straight
street where they walked was a gesture of pleasaunce. Above the clotted
people the dim houses leaned gently together, making a haze of memory
above the urgence of people. The streets turned angles leisurely: a
Square beyond them was an invitation like a hand open or a mouth
relaxed, the swerve of the Elevated train on the near Bowery was a
stroke that caressed.

“You are from the South, I can hear that. Have you been here long?”

“About a month,” said Fanny.

“I was born here. I wonder what it’s like, coming to New York.”

“New York is easy to come to.”

“Do people come here happy?”

Fanny did not want to look at Clara. The day was lazy and round, falling
into night. “Why do you ask that?” she said.

“O I don’t know.... I was just wondering--why do they come to New York.”

“Why did your parents come?”

“My father’s family was starving in Wicklow. Pa was a boy and no use at
home ploughing more fields for a grabbing landlord. So he came. He
wasn’t happy coming. Mother I don’t remember very well, she came from a
place near Pressberg in Bohemia. She was so lovely always ... tall and
so sweet ... and always so tired. I guess they were all just tired--her
whole family came--they couldn’t keep still. I’ve been tired that way.
I’d keep moving and moving. I’d say to myself; Now Clara if you’ll just
try and stop and _sit down_ you’ll be better. I couldnt. Something like
that I’ve felt in all the foreigners ... Czechs and Dagos and Bohunks
... I have ever seen. Something in ’em I guess got too tired to hold on,
to stay on, they had to move ... and there’s America all ready, a chute
like in the cowpens I’ve seen over in Brooklyn ready to swallow ’em up
as they come tumblin’. Heaven knows where those foreigners get their
idea of us.”

She was taller than Fanny, slimmer.--She cant be more than eighteen.
Fanny’s heart went out, clamorous, sudden ... stopped against a strength
and a maturity she felt. With her heart’s warmth she saw this girl.

Saw sharp against the day’s languor the long face, clear dark, with
narrowing thrust chin from the full mouth, cheeks high and delicate,
brow faintly curving and sheer beneath the black hair. Saw in the soft
fabric of her waist nervous elbows thrusting outward always as she
walked, against air, against world. Saw the whole taut tender body in a
world less clear, ever less fair than her dark freshness. Saw at last as
they stopped: “Well I go here. See you to-morrow” ... eyes very black
very large, dry and within themselves like windows of some hidden world
having no faith in the sun.

--I have lost what you have not yet begun to make. Yet my hand is softer
than yours! Fanny knew it was a thing which must change: that her hand
was softer. She walked the swirling Spring-drunk dusty streets with
thoughts of this girl and her hand.

       *       *       *       *       *

She had a room which she had come to love. It was upstairs in the back
of an old red brick house: it was oblong, square-buttressed by its
honest doors painted white, its two wide windows and its low grey
ceiling. She had spent eight dollars to remove the acid-red carnations
blotching a sea of green bars on the walls ... (“I want you to scrape
first, not paper over it”) ... then clad her room in a dull buff. The
walls were bare. The landlady grumblingly took out the wide iron bed,
leaving her a couch. The carved oak table, the bastard Empire chairs
were distributed to the rest of the lodgers and replaced by plain ones
from the storeroom. She took off her hat, let down her hair, put
slippers on her feet and drew a chair to the wind. The day was more
darkly textured but still clear. An ailanthus flaunting half naked
through its tinselly leaves thrust above fence and tesselate brick walls
between her and the grey rear of a Church. Beside the Church, a small
house receded, built of the same dim sooty stone. On Sundays, the sun
vaulted the cluttered roofs at just about the time that a hymn,
many-voiced, shone through the corner of the stained-glass window which
she could glimpse on the protruding side. There was a little grass plot.
It was littered with dust and ash bits, fluffs of drifting textile: but
now sod pushed bravely up in a dim green. On the high fence at the side
away from the Church, among clusters like sunrays of iron spikes,
clothes-lines were drawn. A servant was busy taking in the wash.

The girl’s arms reached up, loosed clothes-pins, dropped her armsfull in
a basket. The girl’s arms reached up.... Fanny lost herself in the dull
catatony. She was tired. She held her eyes beyond her. Dimly behind she
felt a world she did not wish to turn to: world where there were
wash-lines and a girl her own.... Industrious, this girl. A young man
stepped from the kitchen door of the house. The girl’s arms, full of
tableclothes, suspended against her breast. He spoke to her, she nodded:
disposed her burden. She was bent before him, he leaned down and kissed
her. He stepped back, his arms and hands and shoulders, his feet and
hips throwing out little splintery signals of his panic. He wore the
cloth of the Church. Then the girl straightened, lifted her hands to her
broad hips and smiled. The little curate’s splintering commotion melted.
He kissed her again. They went together into the kitchen.

Fanny sat very still. She felt that the muscles of her throat and legs
and chest were tense, holding her still.

--What is the matter?

The world dim behind her eyes bellied out ... swallowed the cool grey
scene before her of a backyard, a flirting servant and a Church. A
Church! Fanny swung around in her chair. She was circled now by a world
no longer dim. She asked no question. Like one dropped sudden into a
sea, she swam.

She swam to get out. Not yet ... some day ... she must swim in the other
direction, away from shore, away from shore ... swim, swim till she
sank. But something within her told her she was not ready. This dullness
upon her mind, this fog fending her heart that was there since the
month she was gone: let it be there longer. Was it beginning to part?

--Why am I here? I am afraid to ask why I am here. Solid New York, bear
me up! Longer, your cold surface, lift me, hold me!

She swam to get out. She was up from her chair. Humming a tune she did
not hear or know of, she lighted the gas: she clasped her short thick
hair and thrust it atop her head. The gas danced hard on her eyes and
her black hair. She lighted her little stove: she put water to boil: she
was very busy swimming to get out.

And when she had drunk two coddled eggs and eaten an orange, she took
the blue cover from her couch, folded it carefully away, threw wide her
windows: and with the light of the downtown heavens falling in sprays
and fluffs of murmurous gold against her sombre carpet, she lay down.
Soon she slept.

       *       *       *       *       *

Work gripped her. Mr. Johns was delighted with her way of work.

“Dont kill yourself, Mrs. Luve.”

She smiled wistfully. “I shant die.”

He looked at her warmly. “You say that as if you knew.”

“I know.”

“Perhaps you don’t know the deadliness of New York.”

“I’m not ready yet,” she announced half to herself.

“You’re a bad example,” he caressed her with bluff words, “of Southern
indolence.”

“I’m a New Yorker,” she said and went back to her girls.

Always she knew this could not last. Yet always life came easier, easier
... in its harsh brusque work, in its biting flavor of intercourse with
Mr. Johns, with Clara.

Each night as she lay down to sleep, the question stood before her: Why?
A question like a single point of steel piercing so many lives, piercing
so many loves, all bleeding-spitted upon it. But she slept quick. She
slept heavy. In her sleep, if it was parted at all, merely the Question
again, rising up, up, out of sight like an infinite steel point: she was
impaled on it: but bloodless already. She lay there quiet, impaled. She
had no responsibility since she was bloodless already. And in the
morning, when she awoke there was work.

She entered the Office a breath of wistful quiet, a cloud of gentle
moisture moving upon a sultry day. All who were there unthinking were
glad, when she entered the Office.

Clara found herself glad when she was with her. In the cooling dusk of
summer they walked homeward: at times they dined together: quiet words
went from each to each, no depths articulate and yet there was a peace.

Fanny looked at her friend as they ate in silence.

--Know everything! There is naught in me I do not wish you to know. But
know it silent. She would have been happy to be of help to Clara.

Summer was a full time in the Sales Office of _Delight Drinks Inc._ Even
so there came pause. Slack hours lounged in the hot rooms. Rooms,
writhed in the dry green blare of the electric lights, burning like
sores against the summer’s sultry and drab dampness, came to a halt,
jolted against their usual flow, stood glazed and ominous upon the dark
grain of Time.

As in a crowded car suddenly broken from its speed the passengers
congest, fall huddled upon each other, so Fanny’s girls piled heavy
moist against the soul of Fanny. She sat at her desk with her hands laid
before her. The girls at long tables opened the envelopes of orders,
marked blanks and sheets, sorted by geographical location, placed in
trays. The girls yawned together ... sudden the girls were One, with
moist throat running down in dusty waist, with bare arm brushing sweat
from brow, with body crowded lush in a narrow skirt, under narrow table,
into narrow shoes. They were a body breathing and sweating in a smoulder
of will to lie out naked near a lapping sea under cool winds ... cool
lips. She loved the girls.