CHAPTER II. MOSTLY EGGS
CHAPTER III. GOOD AS NEW
CHAPTER IV. DAWN DEVELOPS A HEIMWEH
CHAPTER V. THE ABSURD BECOMES SERIOUS
CHAPTER VI. STEEPED IN GERMAN
CHAPTER VII. BLACKIE’S PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER VIII. KAFFEE AND KAFFEEKUCHEN
CHAPTER IX. THE LADY FROM VIENNA
CHAPTER X. A TRAGEDY OF GOWNS
CHAPTER XI. VON GERHARD SPEAKS
CHAPTER XII. BENNIE THE CONSOLER
CHAPTER XIII. THE TEST
CHAPTER XIV. BENNIE AND THE CHARMING OLD MAID
CHAPTER XV. FAREWELL TO KNAPFS
CHAPTER XVI. JUNE MOONLIGHT, AND A NEW BOARDINGHOUSE
CHAPTER XVII. THE SHADOW OF TERROR
CHAPTER XVIII. PETER ORME
CHAPTER XIX. A TURN OF THE WHEEL
CHAPTER XX. BLACKIE’S VACATION COMES
CHAPTER XXI. HAPPINESS
DAWN O’HARA
CHAPTER I.
THE SMASH-UP
There are a number of things that are pleasanter than being sick in a
New York boarding-house when one’s nearest dearest is a married sister
up in far-away Michigan.
Some one must have been very kind, for there were doctors, and a
blue-and-white striped nurse, and bottles and things. There was even a
vase of perky carnations—scarlet ones. I discovered that they had a
trick of nodding their heads, saucily. The discovery did not appear to
surprise me.
“Howdy-do!” said I aloud to the fattest and reddest carnation that
overtopped all the rest. “How in the world did you get in here?”
The striped nurse (I hadn’t noticed her before) rose from some corner
and came swiftly over to my bedside, taking my wrist between her
fingers.
“I’m very well, thank you,” she said, smiling, “and I came in at the
door, of course.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I snapped, crossly, “I was speaking to the
carnations; particularly to that elderly one at the top—the fat one who
keeps bowing and wagging his head at me.”
“Oh, yes,” answered the striped nurse, politely, “of course. That one
is very lively, isn’t he? But suppose we take them out for a little
while now.”
She picked up the vase and carried it into the corridor, and the
carnations nodded their heads more vigorously than ever over her
shoulder.
I heard her call softly to some one. The some one answered with a sharp
little cry that sounded like, “Conscious!”
The next moment my own sister Norah came quietly into the room, and
knelt at the side of my bed and took me in her arms. It did not seem at
all surprising that she should be there, patting me with reassuring
little love pats, murmuring over me with her lips against my cheek,
calling me a hundred half-forgotten pet names that I had not heard for
years. But then, nothing seemed to surprise me that surprising day. Not
even the sight of a great, red-haired, red-faced, scrubbed looking man
who strolled into the room just as Norah was in the midst of denouncing
newspapers in general, and my newspaper in particular, and calling the
city editor a slave-driver and a beast. The big, red-haired man stood
regarding us tolerantly.
“Better, eh?” said he, not as one who asks a question, but as though in
confirmation of a thought. Then he too took my wrist between his
fingers. His touch was very firm and cool. After that he pulled down my
eyelids and said, “H’m.” Then he patted my cheek smartly once or twice.
“You’ll do,” he pronounced. He picked up a sheet of paper from the
table and looked it over, keen-eyed. There followed a clinking of
bottles and glasses, a few low-spoken words to the nurse, and then, as
she left the room the big red-haired man seated himself heavily in the
chair near the bedside and rested his great hands on his fat knees. He
stared down at me in much the same way that a huge mastiff looks at a
terrier. Finally his glance rested on my limp left hand.
“Married, h’m?”
For a moment the word would not come. I could hear Norah catch her
breath quickly. Then—“Yes,” answered I.
“Husband living?” I could see suspicion dawning in his cold gray eye.
Again the catch in Norah’s throat and a little half warning, half
supplicating gesture. And again, “Yes,” said I.
The dawn of suspicion burst into full glow.
“Where is he?” growled the red-haired doctor. “At a time like this?”
I shut my eyes for a moment, too sick at heart to resent his manner. I
could feel, more than see, that Sis was signaling him frantically. I
moistened my lips and answered him, bitterly.
“He is in the Starkweather Hospital for the insane.”
When the red-haired man spoke again the growl was quite gone from his
voice.
“And your home is—where?”
“Nowhere,” I replied meekly, from my pillow. But at that Sis put her
hand out quickly, as though she had been struck, and said:
“My home is her home.”
“Well then, take her there,” he ordered, frowning, “and keep her there
as long as you can. Newspaper reporting, h’m? In New York? That’s a
devil of a job for a woman. And a husband who... Well, you’ll have to
take a six months’ course in loafing, young woman. And at the end of
that time, if you are still determined to work, can’t you pick out
something easier—like taking in scrubbing, for instance?”
I managed a feeble smile, wishing that he would go away quickly, so
that I might sleep. He seemed to divine my thoughts, for he disappeared
into the corridor, taking Norah with him. Their voices, low-pitched and
carefully guarded, could be heard as they conversed outside my door.
Norah was telling him the whole miserable business. I wished, savagely,
that she would let me tell it, if it must be told. How could she paint
the fascination of the man who was my husband? She had never known the
charm of him as I had known it in those few brief months before our
marriage. She had never felt the caress of his voice, or the magnetism
of his strange, smoldering eyes glowing across the smoke-dimmed city
room as I had felt them fixed on me. No one had ever known what he had
meant to the girl of twenty, with her brain full of unspoken
dreams—dreams which were all to become glorious realities in that
wonder-place, New York.
How he had fired my country-girl imagination! He had been the most
brilliant writer on the big, brilliant sheet—and the most dissolute.
How my heart had pounded on that first lonely day when this
Wonder-Being looked up from his desk, saw me, and strolled over to
where I sat before my typewriter! He smiled down at me, companionably.
I’m quite sure that my mouth must have been wide open with surprise. He
had been smoking a cigarette—an expensive-looking, gold-tipped one. Now
he removed it from between his lips with that hand that always shook a
little, and dropped it to the floor, crushing it lightly with the toe
of his boot. He threw back his handsome head and sent out the last
mouthful of smoke in a thin, lazy spiral. I remember thinking what a
pity it was that he should have crushed that costly-looking cigarette,
just for me.
“My name’s Orme,” he said, gravely. “Peter Orme. And if yours isn’t
Shaughnessy or Burke at least, then I’m no judge of what black hair and
gray eyes stand for.”
“Then you’re not,” retorted I, laughing up at him, “for it happens to
be O’Hara—Dawn O’Hara, if ye plaze.”
He picked up a trifle that lay on my desk—a pencil, perhaps, or a bit
of paper—and toyed with it, absently, as though I had not spoken. I
thought he had not heard, and I was conscious of feeling a bit
embarrassed, and very young. Suddenly he raised his smoldering eyes to
mine, and I saw that they had taken on a deeper glow. His white, even
teeth showed in a half smile.
“Dawn O’Hara,” said he, slowly, and the name had never sounded in the
least like music before, “Dawn O’Hara. It sounds like a rose—a pink
blush rose that is deeper pink at its heart, and very sweet.”
He picked up the trifle with which he had been toying and eyed it
intently for a moment, as though his whole mind were absorbed in it.
Then he put it down, turned, and walked slowly away. I sat staring
after him like a little simpleton, puzzled, bewildered, stunned. That
had been the beginning of it all.
He had what we Irish call “a way wid him.” I wonder now why I did not
go mad with the joy, and the pain, and the uncertainty of it all. Never
was a girl so dazzled, so humbled, so worshiped, so neglected, so
courted. He was a creature of a thousand moods to torture one. What
guise would he wear to-day? Would he be gay, or dour, or sullen, or
teasing or passionate, or cold, or tender or scintillating? I know that
my hands were always cold, and my cheeks were always hot, those days.
He wrote like a modern Demosthenes, with all political New York to
quiver under his philippics. The managing editor used to send him out
on wonderful assignments, and they used to hold the paper for his stuff
when it was late. Sometimes he would be gone for days at a time, and
when he returned the men would look at him with a sort of admiring awe.
And the city editor would glance up from beneath his green eye-shade
and call out:
“Say, Orme, for a man who has just wired in about a million dollars’
worth of stuff seems to me you don’t look very crisp and jaunty.”
“Haven’t slept for a week,” Peter Orme would growl, and then he would
brush past the men who were crowded around him, and turn in my
direction. And the old hot-and-cold, happy, frightened, laughing,
sobbing sensation would have me by the throat again.
Well, we were married. Love cast a glamour over his very vices. His
love of drink? A weakness which I would transform into strength. His
white hot flashes of uncontrollable temper? Surely they would die down
at my cool, tender touch. His fits of abstraction and irritability?
Mere evidences of the genius within. Oh, my worshiping soul was always
alert with an excuse.
And so we were married. He had quite tired of me in less than a year,
and the hand that had always shaken a little shook a great deal now,
and the fits of abstraction and temper could be counted upon to appear
oftener than any other moods. I used to laugh, sometimes, when I was
alone, at the bitter humor of it all. It was like a Duchess novel come
to life.
His work began to show slipshod in spots. They talked to him about it
and he laughed at them. Then, one day, he left them in the ditch on the
big story of the McManus indictment, and the whole town scooped him,
and the managing editor told him that he must go. His lapses had become
too frequent. They would have to replace him with a man not so
brilliant, perhaps, but more reliable.
I daren’t think of his face as it looked when he came home to the
little apartment and told me. The smoldering eyes were flaming now. His
lips were flecked with a sort of foam. I stared at him in horror. He
strode over to me, clasped his fingers about my throat and shook me as
a dog shakes a mouse.
“Why don’t you cry, eh?” he snarled. “Why don’t you cry!”
And then I did cry out at what I saw in his eyes. I wrenched myself
free, fled to my room, and locked the door and stood against it with my
hand pressed over my heart until I heard the outer door slam and the
echo of his footsteps die away.
Divorce! That was my only salvation. No, that would be cowardly now. I
would wait until he was on his feet again, and then I would demand my
old free life back once more. This existence that was dragging me into
the gutter—this was not life! Life was a glorious, beautiful thing, and
I would have it yet. I laid my plans, feverishly, and waited. He did
not come back that night, or the next, or the next, or the next. In
desperation I went to see the men at the office. No, they had not seen
him. Was there anything that they could do? they asked. I smiled, and
thanked them, and said, oh, Peter was so absent-minded! No doubt he had
misdirected his letters, or something of the sort. And then I went back
to the flat to resume the horrible waiting.
One week later he turned up at the old office which had cast him off.
He sat down at his former desk and began to write, breathlessly, as he
used to in the days when all the big stories fell to him. One of the
men reporters strolled up to him and touched him on the shoulder,
man-fashion. Peter Orme raised his head and stared at him, and the man
sprang back in terror. The smoldering eyes had burned down to an ash.
Peter Orme was quite bereft of all reason. They took him away that
night, and I kept telling myself that it wasn’t true; that it was all a
nasty dream, and I would wake up pretty soon, and laugh about it, and
tell it at the breakfast table.
Well, one does not seek a divorce from a husband who is insane. The
busy men on the great paper were very kind. They would take me back on
the staff. Did I think that I still could write those amusing little
human interest stories? Funny ones, you know, with a punch in ’em.
Oh, plenty of good stories left in me yet, I assured them. They must
remember that I was only twenty-one, after all, and at twenty-one one
does not lose the sense of humor.
And so I went back to my old desk, and wrote bright, chatty letters
home to Norah, and ground out very funny stories with a punch in ’em,
that the husband in the insane asylum might be kept in comforts. With
both hands I hung on like grim death to that saving sense of humor,
resolved to make something of that miserable mess which was my life—to
make something of it yet. And now—
At this point in my musings there was an end of the low-voiced
conversation in the hall. Sis tiptoed in and looked her disapproval at
finding me sleepless.
“Dawn, old girlie, this will never do. Shut your eyes now, like a good
child, and go to sleep. Guess what that great brute of a doctor said! I
may take you home with me next week! Dawn dear, you will come, won’t
you? You must! This is killing you. Don’t make me go away leaving you
here. I couldn’t stand it.”
She leaned over my pillow and closed my eyelids gently with her sweet,
cool fingers. “You are coming home with me, and you shall sleep and
eat, and sleep and eat, until you are as lively as the Widow Malone,
ohone, and twice as fat. Home, Dawnie dear, where we’ll forget all
about New York. Home, with me.”
I reached up uncertainly, and brought her hand down to my lips and a
great peace descended upon my sick soul. “Home—with you,” I said, like
a child, and fell asleep.