VON GERHARD SPEAKS
Of Von Gerhard I had not had a glimpse since that evening of my
hysterical outburst. On Christmas day there had come a box of roses so
huge that I could not find vases enough to hold its contents, although
I pressed into service everything from Mason jars from the kitchen to
hand-painted atrocities from the parlor. After I had given posies to
Frau Nirlanger, and fastened a rose in Frau Knapf’s hard knob of hair,
where it bobbed in ludicrous discomfort, I still had enough to fill the
washbowl. My room looked like a grand opera star’s boudoir when she is
expecting the newspaper reporters. I reveled in the glowing fragrance
of the blossoms and felt very eastern and luxurious and popular. It had
been a busy, happy, work-filled week, in which I had had to snatch odd
moments for the selecting of certain wonderful toys for the Spalpeens.
There had been dolls and doll-clothes and a marvelous miniature kitchen
for the practical and stolid Sheila, and ingenious bits of mechanism
that did unbelievable things when wound up, for the clever, imaginative
Hans. I was not to have the joy of seeing their wide-eyed delight, but
I knew that there would follow certain laboriously scrawled letters,
filled with topsy-turvy capitals and crazily leaning words of thanks to
the doting old auntie who had been such good fun the summer before.
Boarding-house Christmases had become an old story. I had learned to
accept them, even to those obscure and foreign parts of turkey which
are seen only on boarding-house plates, and which would be recognized
nowhere else as belonging to that stately bird.
Christmas at Knapf’s had been a happy surprise; a day of hearty good
cheer and kindness. There had even been a Christmas tree, hung with
stodgy German angels and Pfeffernuesse and pink-frosted cakes. I found
myself the bewildered recipient of gifts from everyone—from the Knapfs,
and the aborigines and even from one of the crushed-looking wives. The
aborigine whom they called Fritz had presented me with a huge and
imposing Lebkuchen, reposing in a box with frilled border, ornamented
with quaint little red-and-green German figures in sugar, and labeled
Nurnberg in stout letters, for it had come all the way from that
kuchen-famous city. The Lebkuchen I placed on my mantel shelf as
befitted so magnificent a work of art. It was quite too elaborate and
imposing to be sent the way of ordinary food, although it had a certain
tantalizingly spicy scent that tempted one to break off a corner here
and there.
On the afternoon of Christmas day I sat down to thank Dr. von Gerhard
for the flowers as prettily as might be. Also I asked his pardon, a
thing not hard to do with the perfume of his roses filling the room.
“For you,” I wrote, “who are so wise in the ways of those tricky things
called nerves, must know that it was only a mild hysteria that made me
say those most unladylike things. I have written Norah all about it.
She has replied, advising me to stick to the good-fellow role but not
to dress the part. So when next you see me I shall be a perfectly safe
and sane comrade in petticoats. And I promise you—no more outbursts.”
So it happened that on the afternoon of New Year’s day Von Gerhard and
I gravely wished one another many happy and impossible things for the
coming year, looking fairly and squarely into each other’s eyes as we
did so.
“So,” said Von Gerhard, as one who is satisfied. “The nerfs are steady
to-day. What do you say to a brisk walk along the lake shore to put us
in a New Year frame of mind, and then a supper down-town somewhere,
with a toast to Max and Norah?”
“You’ve saved my life! Sit down here in the parlor and gaze at the
crepe-paper oranges while I powder my nose and get into some street
clothes. I have such a story to tell you! It has made me quite
contented with my lot.”
The story was that of the Nirlangers; and as we struggled against a
brisk lake breeze I told it, and partly because of the breeze, and
partly because of the story, there were tears in my eyes when I had
finished. Von Gerhard stared at me, aghast.
“But you are—crying!” he marveled, watching a tear slide down my nose.
“I’m not,” I retorted. “Anyway I know it. I think I may blubber if I
choose to, mayn’t I, as well as other women?”
“Blubber?” repeated Von Gerhard, he of the careful and cautious
English. “But most certainly, if you wish. I had thought that newspaper
women did not indulge in the luxury of tears.”
“They don’t—often. Haven’t the time. If a woman reporter were to burst
into tears every time she saw something to weep over she’d be going
about with a red nose and puffy eyelids half the time. Scarcely a day
passes that does not bring her face to face with human suffering in
some form. Not only must she see these things, but she must write of
them so that those who read can also see them. And just because she
does not wail and tear her hair and faint she popularly is supposed to
be a flinty, cigarette-smoking creature who rampages up and down the
land, seeking whom she may rend with her pen and gazing, dry-eyed, upon
scenes of horrid bloodshed.”
“And yet the little domestic tragedy of the Nirlangers can bring tears
to your eyes?”
“Oh, that was quite different. The case of the Nirlangers had nothing
to do with Dawn O’Hara, newspaper reporter. It was just plain Dawn
O’Hara, woman, who witnessed that little tragedy. Mein Himmel! Are all
German husbands like that?”
“Not all. I have a very good friend named Max—”
“O, Max! Max is an angel husband. Fancy Max and Norah waxing tragic on
the subject of a gown! Now you—”
“I? Come, you are sworn to good-fellowship. As one comrade to another,
tell me, what sort of husband do you think I should make, eh? The
boorish Nirlanger sort, or the charming Max variety. Come, tell me—you
who always have seemed so—so damnably able to take care of yourself.”
His eyes were twinkling in the maddening way they had.
I looked out across the lake to where a line of white-caps was piling
up formidably only to break in futile wrath against the solid wall of
the shore. And there came over me an equally futile wrath; that savage,
unreasoning instinct in women which prompts them to hurt those whom
they love.
“Oh, you!” I began, with Von Gerhard’s amused eyes laughing down upon
me. “I should say that you would be more in the Nirlanger style, in
your large, immovable, Germansure way. Not that you would stoop to
wrangle about money or gowns, but that you would control those things.
Your wife will be a placid, blond, rather plump German Fraulein, of
excellent family and no imagination. Men of your type always select
negative wives. Twenty years ago she would have run to bring you your
Zeitung and your slippers. She would be that kind, if
Zeitung-and-slipper husbands still were in existence. You will be fond
of her, in a patronizing sort of way, and she will never know the
difference between that and being loved, not having a great deal of
imagination, as I have said before. And you will go on becoming more
and more famous, and she will grow plumper and more placid, and less
and less understanding of what those komisch medical journals have to
say so often about her husband who is always discovering things. And
you will live happily ever after—”
A hand gripped my shoulder. I looked up, startled, into two blue eyes
blazing down into mine. Von Gerhard’s face was a painful red. I think
that the hand on my shoulder even shook me a little, there on that
bleak and deserted lake drive. I tried to wrench my shoulder free with
a jerk.
“You are hurting me!” I cried.
A quiver of pain passed over the face that I had thought so calmly
unemotional. “You talk of hurts! You, who set out deliberately and
maliciously to make me suffer! How dare you then talk to me like this!
You stab with a hundred knives—you, who know how I—”
“I’m sorry,” I put in, contritely. “Please don’t be so dreadful about
it. After all, you asked me, didn’t you? Perhaps I’ve hurt your vanity.
There, I didn’t mean that, either. Oh, dear, let’s talk about something
impersonal. We get along wretchedly of late.”
The angry red ebbed away from Von Gerhard’s face. The blaze of wrath in
his eyes gave way to a deeper, brighter light that held me fascinated,
and there came to his lips a smile of rare sweetness. The hand that had
grasped my shoulder slipped down, down, until it met my hand and
gripped it.
“Na, ’s ist schon recht, Kindchen. Those that we most care for we would
hurt always. When I have told you of my love for you, although already
you know it, then you will tell me. Hush! Do not deny this thing. There
shall be no more lies between us. There shall be only the truth, and no
more about plump, blonde German wives who run with Zeitung and
slippers. After all, it is no secret. Three months ago I told Norah. It
was not news to her. But she trusted me.”
I felt my face to be as white and as tense as his own. “Norah—knows!”
“It is better to speak these things. Then there need be no shifting of
the eyes, no evasive words, no tricks, no subterfuge.”
We had faced about and were retracing our steps, past the rows of
peculiarly home-like houses that line Milwaukee’s magnificent lake
shore. Windows were hung with holiday scarlet and holly, and here and
there a face was visible at a window, looking out at the man and woman
walking swiftly along the wind-swept heights that rose far above the
lake.
A wretched revolt seized me as I gazed at the substantial comfort of
those normal, happy homes.
“Why did you tell me! What good can that do? At least we were
make-believe friends before. Suppose I were to tell you that I care,
then what.”
“I do not ask you to tell me,” Von Gerhard replied, quietly.
“You need not. You know. You knew long, long ago. You know I love the
big quietness of you, and your sureness, and the German way you have of
twisting your sentences about, and the steady grip of your great firm
hands, and the rareness of your laugh, and the simplicity of you. Why I
love the very cleanliness of your ruddy skin, and the way your hair
grows away from your forehead, and your walk, and your voice and—Oh,
what is the use of it all?”
“Just this, Dawn. The light of day sweetens all things. We have dragged
this thing out into the sunlight, where, if it grows, it will grow
sanely and healthily. It was but an ugly, distorted, unsightly thing,
sending out pale unhealthy shoots in the dark, unwholesome cellars of
our inner consciences. Norah’s knowing was the cleanest, sweetest thing
about it.”
“How wonderfully you understand her, and how right you are! Her knowing
seems to make it as it should be, doesn’t it? I am braver already, for
the knowledge of it. It shall make no difference between us?”
“There is no difference, Dawn,” said he.
“No. It is only in the story-books that they sigh, and groan and utter
silly nonsense. We are not like that. Perhaps, after a bit, you will
meet some one you care for greatly—not plump, or blond, or German,
perhaps, but still—”
“Doch you are flippant?”
“I must say those things to keep the tears back. You would not have me
wailing here in the street. Tell me just one thing, and there shall be
no more fluttering breaths and languishing looks. Tell me, when did you
begin to care?”
We had reached Knapfs’ door-step. The short winter day was already
drawing to its close. In the half-light Von Gerhard’s eyes glowed
luminous.
“Since the day I first met you at Norah’s,” he said, simply.
I stared at him, aghast, my ever-present sense of humor struggling to
the surface. “Not—not on that day when you came into the room where I
sat in the chair by the window, with a flowered quilt humped about my
shoulders! And a fever-sore twisting my mouth! And my complexion the
color of cheese, and my hair plastered back from my forehead, and my
eyes like boiled onions!”
“Thank God for your gift of laughter,” Von Gerhard said, and took my
hand in his for one brief moment before he turned and walked away.
Quite prosaically I opened the big front door at Knapfs’ to find Herr
Knapf standing in the hallway with his:
“Nabben’, Frau Orme.”
And there was the sane and soothing scent of Wienerschnitzel and
spluttering things in the air. And I ran upstairs to my room and turned
on all the lights and looked at the starry-eyed creature in the mirror.
Then I took the biggest, newest photograph of Norah from the mantel and
looked at her for a long, long minute, while she looked back at me in
her brave true way.
“Thank you, dear,” I said to her. “Thank you. Would you think me stagey
and silly if I were to kiss you, just once, on your beautiful trusting
eyes?”
A telephone bell tinkled downstairs and Herr Knapf stationed himself at
the foot of the stairs and roared my name.
When I had picked up the receiver: “This is Ernst,” said the voice at
the other end of the wire. “I have just remembered that I had asked you
down-town for supper.”
“I would rather thank God fasting,” I replied, very softly, and hung
the receiver on its hook.