DAWN DEVELOPS A HEIMWEH
It’s hard trying to develop into a real Writer Lady in the bosom of
one’s family, especially when the family refuses to take one seriously.
Seven years of newspaper grind have taught me the fallacy of trying to
write by the inspiration method. But there is such a thing as a train
of thought, and mine is constantly being derailed, and wrecked and
pitched about.
Scarcely am I settled in my cubby-hole, typewriter before me, the
working plan of a story buzzing about in my brain, when I hear my name
called in muffled tones, as though the speaker were laboring with a
mouthful of hairpins. I pay no attention. I have just given my heroine
a pair of calm gray eyes, shaded with black lashes and hair to match. A
voice floats down from the upstairs regions.
“Dawn! Oh, Dawn! Just run and rescue the cucumbers out of the top of
the ice-box, will you? The iceman’s coming, and he’ll squash ’em.”
A parting jab at my heroine’s hair and eyes, and I’m off to save the
cucumbers.
Back at my typewriter once more. Shall I make my heroine petite or
grande? I decide that stateliness and Gibsonesque height should
accompany the calm gray eyes. I rattle away happily, the plot unfolding
itself in some mysterious way. Sis opens the door a little and peers
in. She is dressed for the street.
“Dawn dear, I’m going to the dressmaker’s. Frieda’s upstairs cleaning
the bathroom, so take a little squint at the roast now and then, will
you? See that it doesn’t burn, and that there’s plenty of gravy. Oh,
and Dawn—tell the milkman we want an extra half-pint of cream to-day.
The tickets are on the kitchen shelf, back of the clock. I’ll be back
in an hour.”
“Mhmph,” I reply.
Sis shuts the door, but opens it again almost immediately.
“Don’t let the Infants bother you. But if Frieda’s upstairs and they
come to you for something to eat, don’t let them have any cookies
before dinner. If they’re really hungry they’ll eat bread and butter.”
I promise, dreamily, my last typewritten sentence still running through
my head. The gravy seems to have got into the heroine’s calm gray eyes.
What heroine could remain calm-eyed when her creator’s mind is filled
with roast beef? A half-hour elapses before I get back on the track.
Then appears the hero—a tall blond youth, fair to behold. I make him
two yards high, and endow him with a pair of clothing-advertisement
shoulders.
There assails my nostrils a fearful smell of scorching. The roast! A
wild rush into the kitchen. I fling open the oven door. The roast is
mahogany-colored, and gravyless. It takes fifteen minutes of the most
desperate first-aid-to-the-injured measures before the roast is
revived.
Back to the writing. It has lost its charm. The gray-eyed heroine is a
stick; she moves like an Indian lady outside a cigar shop. The hero is
a milk-and-water sissy, without a vital spark in him. What’s the use of
trying to write, anyway? Nobody wants my stuff. Good for nothing except
dubbing on a newspaper!
Rap! Rap! Rappity-rap-rap! Bing! Milk!
I dash into the kitchen. No milk! No milkman! I fly to the door. He is
disappearing around the corner of the house.
“Hi! Mr. Milkman! Say, Mr. Milkman!” with frantic beckonings.
He turns. He lifts up his voice. “The screen door was locked so I left
youse yer milk on top of the ice-box on the back porch. Thought like
the hired girl was upstairs an’ I could git the tickets to-morra.”
I explain about the cream, adding that it is wanted for short-cake. The
explanation does not seem to cheer him. He appears to be a very gloomy
and reserved milkman. I fancy that he is in the habit of indulging in a
little airy persiflage with Frieda o’ mornings, and he finds me a poor
substitute for her red-cheeked comeliness.
The milk safely stowed away in the ice-box, I have another look at the
roast. I am dipping up spoonfuls of brown gravy and pouring them over
the surface of the roast in approved basting style, when there is a
rush, a scramble, and two hard bodies precipitate themselves upon my
legs so suddenly that for a moment my head pitches forward into the
oven. I withdraw my head from the oven, hastily. The basting spoon is
immersed in the bottom of the pan. I turn, indignant. The Spalpeens
look up at me with innocent eyes.
“You little divils, what do you mean by shoving your old aunt into the
oven! It’s cannibals you are!”
The idea pleases them. They release my legs and execute a savage war
dance around me. The Spalpeens are firm in the belief that I was
brought to their home for their sole amusement, and they refuse to take
me seriously. The Spalpeens themselves are two of the finest examples
of real humor that ever were perpetrated upon parents. Sheila is the
first-born. Norah decided that she should be an Irish beauty, and
bestowed upon her a name that reeks of the bogs. Whereupon Sheila, at
the age of six, is as flaxen-haired and blue-eyed and stolid a little
German madchen as ever fooled her parents, and she is a feminine
reproduction of her German Dad. Two years later came a sturdy boy, and
they named him Hans, in a flaunt of defiance. Hans is black-haired,
gray-eyed and Irish as Killarny.
“We’re awful hungry,” announces Sheila.
“Can’t you wait until dinner time? Such a grand dinner!”
Sheila and Hans roll their eyes to convey to me that, were they to wait
until dinner for sustenance we should find but their lifeless forms.
“Well then, Auntie will get a nice piece of bread and butter for each
of you.”
“Don’t want bread an’ butty!” shrieks Hans. “Want tooky!”
“Cooky!” echoes Sheila, pounding on the kitchen table with the rescued
basting spoon.
“You can’t have cookies before dinner. They’re bad for your insides.”
“Can too,” disputes Hans. “Fwieda dives us tookies. Want tooky!”
wailingly.
“Please, ple-e-e-ease, Auntie Dawnie dearie,” wheedles Sheila,
wriggling her soft little fingers in my hand.
“But Mother never lets you have cookies before dinner,” I retort
severely. “She knows they are bad for you.”
“Pooh, she does too! She always says, ‘No, not a cooky!’ And then we
beg and screech, and then she says, ‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Frieda, give
’em a cooky and send ’em out. One cooky can’t kill ’em.’” Sheila’s
imitation is delicious.
Hans catches the word screech and takes it as his cue. He begins a
series of ear-piercing wails. Sheila surveys him with pride and then
takes the wail up in a minor key. Their teamwork is marvelous. I fly to
the cooky jar and extract two round and sugary confections. I thrust
them into the pink, eager palms. The wails cease. Solemnly they place
one cooky atop the other, measuring the circlets with grave eyes.
“Mine’s a weeny bit bigger’n yours this time,” decides Sheila, and
holds her cooky heroically while Hans takes a just and lawful bite out
of his sister’s larger share.
“The blessed little angels!” I say to myself, melting. “The dear,
unselfish little sweeties!” and give each of them another cooky.
Back to my typewriter. But the words flatly refuse to come now. I make
six false starts, bite all my best finger-nails, screw my hair into a
wilderness of cork-screws and give it up. No doubt a real Lady Writer
could write on, unruffled and unhearing, while the iceman squashed the
cucumbers, and the roast burned to a frazzle, and the Spalpeens
perished of hunger. Possessed of the real spark of genius, trivialities
like milkmen and cucumbers could not dim its glow. Perhaps all
successful Lady Writers with real live sparks have cooks and scullery
maids, and need not worry about basting, and gravy, and milkmen.
This book writing is all very well for those who have a large faith in
the future and an equally large bank account. But my future will have
to be hand-carved, and my bank account has always been an all too small
pay envelope at the end of each week. It will be months before the book
is shaped and finished. And my pocketbook is empty. Last week Max sent
money for the care of Peter. He and Norah think that I do not know.
Von Gerhard was here in August. I told him that all my firm resolutions
to forsake newspaperdom forever were slipping away, one by one.
“I have heard of the fascination of the newspaper office,” he said, in
his understanding way. “I believe you have a heimweh for it, not?”
“Heimweh! That’s the word,” I had agreed. “After you have been a
newspaper writer for seven years—and loved it—you will be a newspaper
writer, at heart and by instinct at least, until you die. There’s no
getting away from it. It’s in the blood. Newspaper men have been known
to inherit fortunes, to enter politics, to write books and become
famous, to degenerate into press agents and become infamous, to blossom
into personages, to sink into nonentities, but their news-nose remained
a part of them, and the inky, smoky, stuffy smell of a newspaper office
was ever sweet in their nostrils.”
But, “Not yet,” Von Gerhard had said, “It unless you want to have again
this miserable business of the sick nerfs. Wait yet a few months.”
And so I have waited, saying nothing to Norah and Max. But I want to be
in the midst of things. I miss the sensation of having my fingers at
the pulse of the big old world. I’m lonely for the noise and the rush
and the hard work; for a glimpse of the busy local room just before
press time, when the lights are swimming in a smoky haze, and the big
presses downstairs are thundering their warning to hurry, and the men
are breezing in from their runs with the grist of news that will be
ground finer and finer as it passes through the mill of copy-readers’
and editors’ hands. I want to be there in the thick of the confusion
that is, after all, so orderly. I want to be there when the telephone
bells are zinging, and the typewriters are snapping, and the messenger
boys are shuffling in and out, and the office kids are scuffling in a
corner, and the big city editor, collar off, sleeves rolled up from his
great arms, hair bristling wildly above his green eye-shade, is
swearing gently and smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting each
fresh one at the dying glow of the last. I would give a year of my life
to hear him say:
“I don’t mind tellin’ you, Beatrice Fairfax, that that was a darn good
story you got on the Millhaupt divorce. The other fellows haven’t a
word that isn’t re-hash.”
All of which is most unwomanly; for is not marriage woman’s highest
aim, and home her true sphere? Haven’t I tried both? I ought to know. I
merely have been miscast in this life’s drama. My part should have been
that of one who makes her way alone. Peter, with his thin, cruel lips,
and his shaking hands, and his haggard face and his smoldering eyes, is
a shadow forever blotting out the sunny places in my path. I was meant
to be an old maid, like the terrible old Kitty O’Hara. Not one of the
tatting-and-tea kind, but an impressive, bustling old girl, with a
double chin. The sharp-tongued Kitty O’Hara used to say that being an
old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful
sensation when you ceased struggling.
Norah has pleaded with me to be more like other women of my age, and
for her sake I’ve tried. She has led me about to bridge parties and tea
fights, and I have tried to act as though I were enjoying it all, but I
knew that I wasn’t getting on a bit. I have come to the conclusion that
one year of newspapering counts for two years of ordinary existence,
and that while I’m twenty-eight in the family Bible I’m fully forty
inside. When one day may bring under one’s pen a priest, a pauper, a
prostitute, a philanthropist, each with a story to tell, and each
requiring to be bullied, or cajoled, or bribed, or threatened, or
tricked into telling it; then the end of that day’s work finds one
looking out at the world with eyes that are very tired and as old as
the world itself.
I’m spoiled for sewing bees and church sociables and afternoon bridges.
A hunger for the city is upon me. The long, lazy summer days have
slipped by. There is an autumn tang in the air. The breeze has a touch
that is sharp.
Winter in a little northern town! I should go mad. But winter in the
city! The streets at dusk on a frosty evening; the shop windows
arranged by artist hands for the beauty-loving eyes of women; the rows
of lights like jewels strung on an invisible chain; the glitter of
brass and enamel as the endless procession of motors flashes past; the
smartly-gowned women; the keen-eyed, nervous men; the shrill note of
the crossing policeman’s whistle; every smoke-grimed wall and pillar
taking on a mysterious shadowy beauty in the purple dusk, every
unsightly blot obscured by the kindly night. But best of all, the
fascination of the People I’d Like to Know. They pop up now and then in
the shifting crowds, and are gone the next moment, leaving behind them
a vague regret. Sometimes I call them the People I’d Like to Know and
sometimes I call them the People I Know I’d Like, but it means much the
same. Their faces flash by in the crowd, and are gone, but I recognize
them instantly as belonging to my beloved circle of unknown friends.
Once it was a girl opposite me in a car—a girl with a wide, humorous
mouth, and tragic eyes, and a hole in her shoe. Once it was a big,
homely, red-headed giant of a man with an engineering magazine sticking
out of his coat pocket. He was standing at a book counter reading
Dickens like a schoolboy and laughing in all the right places, I know,
because I peaked over his shoulder to see. Another time it was a
sprightly little, grizzled old woman, staring into a dazzling shop
window in which was displayed a wonderful collection of fashionably
impossible hats and gowns. She was dressed all in rusty black, was the
little old lady, and she had a quaint cast in her left eye that gave
her the oddest, most sporting look. The cast was working overtime as
she gazed at the gowns, and the ridiculous old sprigs on her rusty
black bonnet trembled with her silent mirth. She looked like one of
those clever, epigrammatic, dowdy old duchesses that one reads about in
English novels. I’m sure she had cardamon seeds in her shabby bag, and
a carriage with a crest on it waiting for her just around the corner. I
ached to slip my hand through her arm and ask her what she thought of
it all. I know that her reply would have been exquisitely witty and
audacious, and I did so long to hear her say it.
No doubt some good angel tugs at my common sense, restraining me from
doing these things that I am tempted to do. Of course it would be
madness for a woman to address unknown red-headed men with the look of
an engineer about them and a book of Dickens in their hands; or perky
old women with nutcracker faces; or girls with wide humorous mouths.
Oh, it couldn’t be done, I suppose. They would clap me in a padded cell
in no time if I were to say:
“Mister Red-headed Man, I’m so glad your heart is young enough for
Dickens. I love him too—enough to read him standing at a book counter
in a busy shop. And do you know, I like the squareness of your jaw, and
the way your eyes crinkle up when you laugh; and as for your being an
engineer—why one of the very first men I ever loved was the engineer in
‘Soldiers of Fortune.’”
I wonder what the girl in the car would have said if I had crossed over
to her, and put my hand on her arm and spoken, thus:
“Girl with the wide, humorous mouth, and the tragic eyes, and the hole
in your shoe, I think you must be an awfully good sort. I’ll wager you
paint, or write, or act, or do something clever like that for a living.
But from that hole in your shoe which you have inked so carefully,
although it persists in showing white at the seams, I fancy you are
stumbling over a rather stony bit of Life’s road just now. And from the
look in your eyes, girl, I’m afraid the stones have cut and bruised
rather cruelly. But when I look at your smiling, humorous mouth I know
that you are trying to laugh at the hurts. I think that this morning,
when you inked your shoe for the dozenth time, you hesitated between
tears and laughter, and the laugh won, thank God! Please keep right on
laughing, and don’t you dare stop for a minute! Because pretty soon
you’ll come to a smooth easy place, and then won’t you be glad that you
didn’t give up to lie down by the roadside, weary of your hurts?”
Oh, it would never do. Never. And yet no charm possessed by the people
I know and like can compare with the fascination of those People I’d
Like to Know, and Know I Would Like.
Here at home with Norah there are no faces in the crowds. There are no
crowds. When you turn the corner at Main street you are quite sure that
you will see the same people in the same places. You know that Mamie
Hayes will be flapping her duster just outside the door of the jewelry
store where she clerks. She gazes up and down Main street as she flaps
the cloth, her bright eyes keeping a sharp watch for stray traveling
men that may chance to be passing. You know that there will be the same
lounging group of white-faced, vacant-eyed youths outside the
pool-room. Dr. Briggs’s patient runabout will be standing at his office
doorway. Outside his butcher shop Assemblyman Schenck will be holding
forth on the subject of county politics to a group of red-faced, badly
dressed, prosperous looking farmers and townsmen, and as he talks the
circle of brown tobacco juice which surrounds the group closes in upon
them, nearer and nearer. And there, in a roomy chair in a corner of the
public library reference room, facing the big front window, you will
see Old Man Randall. His white hair forms a halo above his pitiful
drink-marred face. He was to have been a great lawyer, was Old Man
Randall. But on the road to fame he met Drink, and she grasped his arm,
and led him down by-ways, and into crooked lanes, and finally into
ditches, and he never arrived at his goal. There in that library window
nook it is cool in summer, and warm in winter. So he sits and dreams,
holding an open volume, unread, on his knees. Sometimes he writes,
hunched up in his corner, feverishly scribbling at ridiculous plays,
short stories, and novels which later he will insist on reading to the
tittering schoolboys and girls who come into the library to do their
courting and reference work. Presently, when it grows dusk, Old Man
Randall will put away his book, throw his coat over his shoulders,
sleeves dangling, flowing white locks sweeping the frayed velvet
collar. He will march out with his soldierly tread, humming a bit of a
tune, down the street and into Vandermeister’s saloon, where he will
beg a drink and a lunch, and some man will give it to him for the sake
of what Old Man Randall might have been.
All these things you know. And knowing them, what is left for the
imagination? How can one dream dreams about people when one knows how
much they pay their hired girl, and what they have for dinner on
Wednesdays?