to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a
flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned
into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable
row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw
if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were,
for the great primordial mire of war.
There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national
consciousness. A gauntlet down, and it surges up. One ripple of a flag
defended can goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to
give a soldier!
To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were
women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling
hysteria, or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers,
receding in that great impersonal wave of olive drab.
And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout. And the ecstasy
of such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is
in the pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams
break, excoriating.
For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave
of men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and
call of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for
still another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk
crowds.
From the middle of his line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of
Jimmie Batch's glance roving for her, but to all purports his eye was
solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he
marched, his back had a little additional straightness that was almost
swayback.
Nor was Gertie Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to
laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance
over which she seemed to have no control.
"'By, Jimmie. So long! Jimmie! You-hoo!"
Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.
"You-hoo! Jimmie! So long, Jimmie!"
At Fourteenth Street, and to the solemn stroke of one from a tower, she
broke off suddenly without even a second look back, dodging under the
very arms of the crowd as she ran out from it.
She was one and three-quarter minutes late when she punched the
time-clock beside the Complaints and Adjustment Desk in the
Bargain-Basement.
FANNIE HURST
"I find myself at twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I
would be." So Miss Hurst, in a sketch written for the _American
Magazine_ (March, 1919), sums up the story of a remarkable literary
career.
Fannie Hurst was born in St. Louis, October 19, 1889. She attended the
public schools, and began to write--with the firm intention of becoming
an author--before she was out of grammar school. "At fourteen," she
tells us in the article just referred to, "the one pigeon-hole of my
little girl's desk was already stuffed with packets of rejected verse
which had been furtively written, furtively mailed, and still more
furtively received back again by heading off the postman a block before
he reached our door." To this dream of authorship--the secret of which
was carefully guarded from her family--she sacrificed her play and even
her study hours. The first shock to her family came on St. Valentine's
Day. There was to be a party that night, her first real party. A new
dress was ready for the occasion, and a boy escort was to call for her
in a cab. It happened that Valentine's day fell on Saturday, and
Saturday was her time for writing. That day she turned from poetry to
fiction, and was just in the middle of her first story when it came time
to get ready for the party. She did not get ready. The escort arrived,
cab and all; the family protested, but all to no purpose. She finished
the story, mailed it, three weeks later received it back, and began her
second story. All through her high school days she mailed a manuscript
every Saturday, and they always came back.
After high school she entered Washington University, St. Louis,
graduating in 1909. And still she kept writing. To one journal alone
she sent during those four years, thirty-four short stories. And they
all came back--all but one. Just before graduation she sold her first
article, a little sketch first written as a daily theme, which was
published in a local weekly, and brought her three dollars. This was the
total result of eight years' literary effort. So quite naturally she
determined to go on.
She announced to her family that she was going to New York City to
become a writer. There was a stormy discussion in the Hurst family, but
it ended in her going away, with a bundle of manuscripts in her trunk,
to brave the big city alone. She found a tiny furnished room and set
forth to besiege the editors' offices. One evening she returned, to find
the house being raided, a patrol wagon at the curb, and the lodgers
being hustled into it. She crossed the street and walked on, and never
saw her bag or baggage again. By the help of the Young Women's Christian
Association she found another room, in different surroundings, and set
out again to make the round of the editorial offices.
Then followed months and months of "writing, rewriting, rejections, and
re-rejections." From home came letters now beseeching, now commanding
her to return, and at length cutting off her allowance. So she returned
her rented typewriter and applied at a theatrical agency. She secured a
small part in a Broadway company, and then came her first acceptance of
a story, with an actual check for thirty dollars. She left the stage and
rented another typewriter,--but it was six months before she sold
another story.
In all this time she dipped deeply into the great stream of the city's
life. To quote her own account:
For a month I lived with an Armenian family on West Broadway, in a
room over a tobacconist's shop. I apprenticed myself as a
sales-girl in New York's most gigantic department store. Four and
one-quarter yards of ribbon at seven and a half cents a yard proved
my Waterloo, and my resignation at the end of one week was not
entirely voluntary. I served as waitress in one of New York's most
gigantic chain of white-tiled lunch rooms. I stitched boys' pants
in a Polish sweatshop, and lived for two days in New York's most
rococo hotel. I took a graduate course in Anglo Saxon at Columbia
University, and one in lamp-shade making at Wanamaker's: wormed
into a Broadway musical show as wardrobe girl, and went out on a
self-appointed newspaper assignment to interview the mother of the
richest baby in the world.
All these experiences yielded rich material for stories, but no one
would print them. Her money was gone; so was a diamond ring that had
been a Commencement present; it seemed as if there was nothing left but
to give up the struggle and go back home. Then, just as she had struck
bottom, an editor actually told her she could write, and followed up his
remark by buying three stories. Since that time she has never had a
story rejected, and her checks have gone up from two figures into four.
And so, at the end of a long fight, as she says, "I find myself at
twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I would be. And best
of all, what popular success I am enjoying has come not from pandering
to popular demand or editorial policy, but from pandering to my own
inner convictions, which are like little soul-tapers, lighting the way."
All her work has been in the form of the short story. Her first book,
_Just Around the Corner_, published in 1914, is a collection of stories
dealing with the life of working girls in a city. _Every Soul Hath Its
Song_ is a similar collection; the title suggests the author's outlook
upon life. Some one has said that in looking at a puddle of water, you
may see either the mud at the bottom or the sky reflected on its
surface. Miss Hurst sees the reflection of the sky. The _Boston
Transcript_ said of this book: "Here at last is a story writer who is
bent on listening to the voices of America and interpreting them."
_Gaslight Sonatas_, from which "Bitter-Sweet" is taken, showed an
advance over her earlier work. Two of the stories from this volume were
selected by Mr. O'Brien for his volume, _Best Short Stories_, for 1916
and 1917. _Humoresque_, her latest work, continues her studies of city
types, drawn from New York and St. Louis. The stories show her insight
into character and her graphic descriptive power. Miss Hurst is also the
author of two plays, _The Land of the Free_ and _The Good Provider_.
IN THE LUMBER COUNTRY
_The men of the woods are not as the men of the cities. The great open
spaces where men battle with the primeval forest set their mark upon
their inhabitants, not only in physique but in character. The
lumberman,--rough, frank, independent, humorous, equally ready for a
fight or a frolic, has been portrayed at full length by Stewart Edward
White in_ THE BLAZED TRAIL _and_ THE RIVERMAN. _In the following sketch,
taken from his_ BLAZED TRAIL STORIES, _he shows the lumberman at work
and at play._
THE RIVERMAN
BY
STEWART EDWARD WHITE
I first met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The
sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled
to the brim with people. The permanent population, dressed in the
stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted gingham wives or sweethearts; a
dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a city
smartness; but the great multitude was composed of the men of the woods.
I sat, chair-tilted by the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy
woollen shirts crossed by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes
or leather shine of their belts, their short kersey trousers "stagged"
off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork
boots"--all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most
interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little
round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those
eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were
steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous
blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all
without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry
humor. In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I
knew, for all at once a laughing pair of blue eyes suddenly met mine
full, and an ironical voice drawled,
"Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your
long-lost friend?"
The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of the man, and
that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the
emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed
help he was willing to offer it.
"I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this outfit's
headed for."
He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped
light curls.
"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."
I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river, where we
roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear
water among filled booms.
"Drive just over," my new friend informed me. "Rear come down last
night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th'
tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her
apart."
A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot
and a half in diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back
and forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran
the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both
feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an
ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole
timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of
the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in
the graceful nervous attitude of the circus-rider, stood upright like a
statue of bronze.
A roar approved this feat.
"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant, "Roaring Dick. He's hell
_and_ repeat. Watch him."
The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and
shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking
feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little
triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that
served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.
For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer.
Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze,
the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's
breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then
faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blue spray a foot into
the air. Then suddenly _slap! slap!_ the heavy caulks stamped a
reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, quivering exactly like
some animal that had been spurred through its paces.
"Magnificent!" I cried.
"Hell, that's nothing!" my companion repressed me, "anybody can birl a
log. Watch this."
Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance
of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility.
Then he turned a somersault.
This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of applause which
was lost in a general roar.
A long pike-pole shot out, bit the end of the timber, and towed it to
the boom pile. Another man stepped on the log with Darrell. They stood
facing each other, bent-kneed, alert. Suddenly with one accord they
commenced to birl the log from left to right. The pace grew hot. Like
squirrels treading a cage their feet twinkled. Then it became apparent
that Darrell's opponent was gradually being forced from the top of the
log. He could not keep up. Little by little, still moving desperately,
he dropped back to the slant, then at last to the edge, and so off into
the river with a mighty splash.
"Clean birled!" commented my friend.
One after another a half-dozen rivermen tackled the imperturbable Dick,
but none of them possessed the agility to stay on top in the pace he set
them. One boy of eighteen seemed for a moment to hold his own, and
managed at least to keep out of the water even when Darrell had
apparently reached his maximum speed. But that expert merely threw his
entire weight into two reversing stamps of his feet, and the young
fellow dove forward as abruptly as though he had been shied over a
horse's head.
The crowd was by now getting uproarious and impatient of volunteer
effort to humble Darrell's challenge. It wanted the best, and at once.
It began, with increasing insistence, to shout a name.
"Jimmy Powers!" it vociferated, "Jimmy Powers!"
And then by shamefaced bashfulness, by profane protest, by muttered and
comprehensive curses I knew that my companion on the other pile was
indicated.
A dozen men near at hand began to shout. "Here he is!" they cried. "Come
on, Jimmy." "Don't be a high banker." "Hang his hide on the fence."
Jimmy, still red and swearing, suffered himself to be pulled from his
elevation and disappeared in the throng. A moment later I caught his
head and shoulders pushing toward the boom piles, and so in a moment he
stepped warily aboard to face his antagonist.
This was evidently no question to be determined by the simplicity of
force or the simplicity of a child's trick. The two men stood
half-crouched, face to face, watching each other narrowly, but making no
move. To me they seemed like two wrestlers sparring for an opening.
Slowly the log revolved one way; then slowly the other. It was a mere
courtesy of salute. All at once Dick birled three rapid strokes from
left to right as though about to roll the log, leaped into the air and
landed square with both feet on the other slant of the timber. Jimmy
Powers felt the jar, and acknowledged it by a spasmodic jerk with which
he counterbalanced Darrell's weight. But he was not thrown.
As though this daring and hazardous manoeuvre had opened the combat,
both men sprang to life. Sometimes the log rolled one way, sometimes the
other, sometimes it jerked from side to side like a crazy thing, but
always with the rapidity of light, always in a smother of spray and
foam. The decided _spat, spat, spat_ of the reversing blows from the
caulked boots sounded like picket firing. I could not make out the
different leads, feints, parries, and counters of this strange method of
boxing, nor could I distinguish to whose initiative the various
evolutions of that log could be ascribed. But I retain still a vivid
mental picture of two men nearly motionless above the waist, nearly
vibrant below it, dominating the insane gyrations of a stick of pine.
The crowd was appreciative and partisan--for Jimmy Powers. It howled
wildly, and rose thereby to even higher excitement. Then it forgot its
manners utterly and groaned when it made out that a sudden splash
represented its favorite, while the indomitable Darrell still trod the
quarter-deck as champion birler for the year.
I must confess I was as sorry as anybody. I climbed down from my
cormorant roost, and picked my way between the alleys of aromatic piled
lumber in order to avoid the press, and cursed the little gods heartily
for undue partiality in the wrong direction. In this manner I happened
on Jimmy Powers himself seated dripping on a board and examining his
bare foot.
"I'm sorry," said I behind him. "How did he do it?"
He whirled, and I could see that his laughing boyish face had become
suddenly grim and stern, and that his eyes were shot with blood.
"Oh, it's you, is it?" he growled disparagingly. "Well, that's how he
did it."
He held out his foot. Across the instep and at the base of the toes ran
two rows of tiny round punctures from which the blood was oozing. I
looked very inquiring.
"He corked me!" Jimmy Powers explained. "Jammed his spikes into me!
Stepped on my foot and tripped me, the----" Jimmy Powers certainly could
swear.
"Why didn't you make a kick?" I cried.
"That ain't how I do it," he muttered, pulling on his heavy woollen
sock.
"But no," I insisted, my indignation mounting. "It's an outrage! That
crowd was with you. All you had to do was to _say_ something----"
He cut me short. "And give myself away as a damn fool--sure Mike. I
ought to know Dickey Darrell by this time, and I ought to be big enough
to take care of myself." He stamped his foot into his driver's shoe and
took me by the arm, his good humor apparently restored. "No, don't lose
any hair, bub; I'll get even with Roaring Dick."
That night, having by the advice of the proprietor moved my bureau and
trunk against the bedroom door, I lay wide awake listening to the taking
of the town apart. At each especially vicious crash I wondered if that
might be Jimmy Powers getting even with Roaring Dick.
The following year, but earlier in the season, I again visited my little
lumber town. In striking contrast to the life of that other midsummer
day were the deserted streets. The landlord knew me, and after I had
washed and eaten approached me with a suggestion.
"You got all day in front of you," said he; "why don't you take a horse
and buggy and make a visit to the big jam? Everybody's up there more or
less."
In response to my inquiry, he replied:
"They've jammed at the upper bend, jammed bad. The crew's been picking
at her for near a week now, and last night Darrell was down to see about
some more dynamite. It's worth seein'. The breast of her is near thirty
feet high, and lots of water in the river."
"Darrell?" said I, catching at the name.
"Yes. He's rear boss this year. Do you think you'd like to take a look
at her?"
"I think I should," I assented.
The horse and I jogged slowly along a deep sand road, through wastes of
pine stumps and belts of hardwood beautiful with the early spring, until
finally we arrived at a clearing in which stood two huge tents, a
mammoth kettle slung over a fire of logs, and drying racks about the
timbers of another fire. A fat cook in the inevitable battered derby
hat, two bare-armed cookees, and a chore "boy" of seventy-odd summers
were the only human beings in sight. One of the cookees agreed to keep
an eye on my horse. I picked my way down a well-worn trail toward the
regular _clank, clank, click_ of the peavies.
I emerged finally to a plateau elevated some fifty or sixty feet above
the river. A half-dozen spectators were already gathered. Among them I
could not but notice a tall, spare, broad-shouldered young fellow
dressed in a quiet business suit, somewhat wrinkled, whose square,
strong, clean-cut face and muscular hands were tanned by the weather to
a dark umber-brown. In another moment I looked down on the jam.
The breast, as my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the
height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of
it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently
inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed
me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this
wonderful _chevaux de frise_ foamed the current of the river,
irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics of such a mass.
A crew of forty or fifty men were at work. They clamped their peavies to
the reluctant timbers, heaved, pushed, slid, and rolled them one by one
into the current, where they were caught and borne away. They had been
doing this for a week. As yet their efforts had made but slight
impression on the bulk of the jam, but some time, with patience, they
would reach the key-logs. Then the tangle would melt like sugar in the
freshet, and these imperturbable workers would have to escape suddenly
over the plunging logs to shore.
My eye ranged over the men, and finally rested on Dickey Darrell. He
was standing on the slanting end of an upheaved log dominating the
scene. His little triangular face with the accents of the quadrilateral
eyebrows was pale with the blaze of his energy, and his chipmunk eyes
seemed to flame with a dynamic vehemence that caused those on whom they
fell to jump as though they had been touched with a hot poker. I had
heard more of Dickey Darrell since my last visit, and was glad of the
chance to observe Morrison & Daly's best "driver" at work.
The jam seemed on the very edge of breaking. After half an hour's
strained expectation it seemed still on the very edge of breaking. So I
sat down on a stump. Then for the first time I noticed another
acquaintance, handling his peavie near the very person of the rear boss.
"Hullo," said I to myself, "that's funny. I wonder if Jimmy Powers got
even; and if so, why he is working so amicably and so near Roaring
Dick."
At noon the men came ashore for dinner. I paid a quarter into the cook's
private exchequer and so was fed. After the meal I approached my
acquaintance of the year before.
"Hello, Powers," I greeted him, "I suppose you don't remember me?"
"Sure," he responded heartily. "Ain't you a little early this year?"
"No," I disclaimed, "this is a better sight than a birling match."
I offered him a cigar, which he immediately substituted for his corn-cob
pipe. We sat at the root of a tree.
"It'll be a great sight when that jam pulls," said I.
"You bet," he replied, "but she's a teaser. Even old Tim Shearer would
have a picnic to make out just where the key-logs are. We've started her
three times, but she's plugged tight every trip. Likely to pull almost
any time."
We discussed various topics. Finally I ventured:
"I see your old friend Darrell is rear boss."
"Yes," said Jimmy Powers, dryly.
"By the way, did you fellows ever square up on that birling match?"
"No," said Jimmy Powers; then after an instant, "Not yet."
I glanced at him to recognize the square set to the jaw that had
impressed me so formidably the year before. And again his face relaxed
almost quizzically as he caught sight of mine.
"Bub," said he, getting to his feet, "those little marks are on my foot
yet. And just you tie into one idea: Dickey Darrel's got it coming." His
face darkened with a swift anger. "God damn his soul!" he said,
deliberately. It was no mere profanity. It was an imprecation, and in
its very deliberation I glimpsed the flare of an undying hate.