"Well, sometimes he goes on a long drunk, for weeks at a time. It
depends on who is with him. If he can get any one to drink with him,
he'll keep on and on, once he's started. Once a prize-fighter just got
a hold of him and punched him into sensibility, and he didn't touch
a drop for a year afterward. He can, if he tries, sober up in a few
hours. He goes months without touching a thing, and then all of a
sudden he reverts."
Hermann then told me that Fred had once been jilted by a girl in
Milwaukee, and that had started him to drinking.
As the bus took us through the yards, I thought how terrible and sad
it was for a man who was in such a condition to be left to his own
devices. It was just as if one left a helpless baby to mind himself, or
threw a poor sick person out upon the street, expecting him to be cured
without treatment. What was drink but a disease, anyhow? And I said to
myself that I wished I were a prize-fighter. Fred had been good to me.
I come of a race, on my mother's side, which does not easily forget
kindnesses, and somehow I could think of nothing save how Fred had
treated me that first day, and had given me a chance when no one else
would.
So when I stepped from the bus, and Fred came lurching toward me, I
simply had not the heart to break away from him. All the girls were
watching us, and some of the men tried to draw Fred aside by the arm.
He became wildly excited, and said he could "lick any son of a gun in
the Union Stock-Yards."
One of the men told me to "beat it" while they took care of Fred; but
Fred did look so helpless and so inexpressibly childish as he cried
out his defiance, and as I was mortally afraid that they might get
fighting among themselves, and, anyhow, though drunk, he was not
offensive, I said:
"I'll take him home. I'm not afraid of him."
Some of them laughed, and some protested; but I didn't care anything
about any of them except Fred, and I helped him on an open car that
went near our house.
I took him to our rooms, and there Lolly tried to sober him by making
him black coffee, and Hermann, who came, too,--he had kept right up
with Fred and me,--said he'd take care of Fred while Lolly and I got
our dinner. We took our meals out.
When we got back,--it was about eight then,--there was Fred sitting
on the door-step. Hermann was trying to drag him to his feet, but he
wouldn't move, and he kept saying: "Nora's going to take care of me.
S-she's m' stenographer, you know."
Hermann explained that our landlady had ordered them out, as Fred had
begun to sing after we went. Hermann wanted Lolly and me to go into
the house, and he said he'd take care of Fred, even if he had to "land
him in a cell" to do it. He said that in such a nasty way that poor
Fred began to cry that he hadn't a friend in the world, and that made
me feel so badly that I told him that I was his friend, and that I'd
take good care that Hermann didn't put him in a cell. Then I had an
inspiration.
I suggested that we all take a long street-car ride and that the open
air might clear his head, and if it didn't, we could get off at some
park and walk around. Fred exclaimed that walking was the one thing
that always "woke" him up.
Lolly said:
"Not for me!" and went into the house.
So Hermann and I, with Fred between us, made for the nearest car. I
got in first, then Fred, and then as Hermann was getting on, Fred
seized his hat and threw it out into the road. A wind caught it, and
Hermann had to chase after it. While he was doing this, Fred pulled the
bell-rope, and the car started.
We rode to the end of the line, Fred behaving very well. Here we got
off, and we went into the park. I asked Fred how he was feeling, and he
said "tip-top," and that he would be all right after walking about a
bit.
We _walked_!
At first Fred was garrulous in a wandering sort of way, and he tried to
tell me about the girl who had jilted him. He said he had never liked a
girl since except me, and then he pulled himself up abruptly and said:
"But don't think I'm stuck on you, because I ain't. I got stuck on one
girl in my life, and that was enough for me."
"Of course you're not," I said soothingly, "and I'm not stuck on you,
either. We're just good pals, aren't we?"
"Best ever," said Fred, drowsily.
Then for a long time--my! it seemed hours and hours--we just tramped
about the park. Curiously enough, I didn't feel a bit tired; but by and
by I could tell by the way he walked that Fred was just about ready to
drop from exhaustion. He had been up drinking all the previous night
and all the day. So presently I found a bench under a big tree, and I
tried to make him sit down; but nothing would do but that he must lie
down at full length on the bench, with his head on my lap. He dropped
off almost immediately into a sound sleep or stupor, breathing heavily
and noisily.
I don't know how long we were there. I grew numb with the weight of
his heavy head upon my knee. A policeman came along and asked me what
we were doing. I told him truthfully that Fred had been drinking, and
was now asleep, and I asked him, please not to wake him. He called Fred
my "man," and said we could stay there. We did stay there. Nothing I
believe could have awakened Fred. As for me, well, I made up my mind
that I was "in for it." I thought of trying to go to sleep with my head
against the back of the seat, but it was too low. So I had to sit up
straight.
It was a still, warm night in September, with scarcely a breeze
stirring. I could see the giant branches of the trees on all sides of
us. They shot up like ghostly sentinels. Even the whispering leaves
seemed scarcely to stir.
I saw the stars in a wide silver sky, staring and winking down upon us
all through that long night. I looked up at them, and thought of my
father, and I thought of that great ancestor of mine who had been an
astronomer, and had given to the world some of its chief knowledge of
the heavens above us. It would be strange, I whimsically thought, if
somewhere up there among the stars, he was peering down at me now on
this microscopic earth; for it was microscopic in the great scheme of
the universe, my father had once said.
To sit up all night long in a quiet, beautiful park, under a
star-spotted sky, with a drunken man asleep on your lap, after all,
that is not the worst of fates. _I_ know, because I have done it, and I
tell you there have been less happy nights than that in my life.
As we rush along in the whirligig of life, we girls who must work so
hard for our daily bread, we get so little time in which to _think_.
For one cannot think save disjointedly, while working. Now I had a
long chance for all my thoughts, and they came crowding upon me. I
thought of my little brothers and sisters, and I wistfully longed that
I might see them again while they were still little. I thought of my
sister Marion, whom I had left in Boston. Had she fared as well as I?
She had written me two or three times, and her letters were cheerful
enough, but just as I told her in my letters nothing of my struggles,
so she told me nothing of hers. Yet I read between the lines, and I
_knew_--it made my heart ache, that knowledge--that Marion was having
an even more grim combat with Fate than I; I was better equipped than
she to earn a living. For one's mere physical beauty is, after all,
a poor and dangerous asset. And Marion was earning her living by her
beauty. She was a professional model, getting fifty cents an hour.
I thought of other sisters, one of whom had passed through a tragic
experience, and another--the eldest, a girl with more real talent
than I--who had been a pitiful invalid all her days. She is dead
now, that dear big sister of mine, and a monument marks her grave in
commemoration of work she did for my mother's country.
It seemed as if our heritage had been all struggle. None of us had
yet attained what the world calls success. We were all straining and
leaping up frantically at the stars of our ancestor; but they still
stared aloofly at us, like the impenetrable Sphinx.
It seemed a great pity that I was not, after all, to be the savior of
the family, and that my dreams of the fame and fortune that not alone
should lift me up, but all my people, were built upon a substance as
shifting as sand and as shadowy as mist. For, if what Mr. Hamilton had
said was true, there was, alas! no hope in me. Perhaps I was doomed to
be the wife of a man like the fat, blond clerk at the yards, or even of
Fred. To think now of Mr. Hamilton as a possible husband was to do so
with a cynical jeer at my own past ingenuousness. Since that visit of
his, I had been awakened, as it were, to the clear knowledge that this
man could never be to me what I had so fondly dreamed. Well!
I don't know when the stars began to fade. They just seemed to wink
out one by one in the sky, and it grew gray and haggard, as it does
just before the dawn. Even in the dark the birds began to call to one
another, and when the first pale streak from the slowly rising sun
crept stealthily out of the east, these winged little creatures dropped
to earth in search of food, and a small, soft, inquiring-eyed squirrel
jumped right in the path before me, and stood with uplifted tail and
pricked-up head, as if to question my presence there.
Perhaps it was the whistling chatter of the birds that awoke Fred. He
said I called to him, but he was mistaken.
He was lying on his back, his head upturned on my lap, and suddenly
he opened his eyes and stared up at me. Then slowly he sat up, and
he leaned forward on the bench and covered his face with his hands.
I thought he was crying, but presently he said to me in a low, husky
voice:
"How long have we been here?" and I said:
"All night, Fred."
"Nora Ascough, you're a dead-game sport!" he answered.