gave herself her scene fully, voluptuously ... starving ... while the
long buildings passed her in a squad of uniformed dull giants.
He is up from a wide desk. He says no word, looking deep in her eyes.
One instant doubt as to the full free independence of her coming. Doubt
goes before the intelligence of her eyes. He took her hands, very
lightly, released them.
“I am going North. I am on my way North.”
“How can I help you?”
“You have helped me all you can.”
“He came back ... you told him?”
She nodded.
“He did not understand?”
“How could we expect he should understand? Would I? Do I?... if this all
was not mine ...?”
“It is good, Fanny Luve. Go ahead.”
His face sudden is like a field under a sky of longing: a sun came
down; his face glows in tender fear: it shadows to resolution.
“You must go North. We can’t understand. I can see, you are going
right.”
“How can you see that, Leon?”
“No day since I left have you been far from me. You come into my
thinking, my dreaming, into my sudden flying visions. You measure
yourself always with them, with the best of them, Fanny. You measure
full with them.”
“What you have said I could have said.”
His eyes came very near. They filled with tears of her. He looked away.
“But I am vague. O Leon, so blind!”
“You are no longer afraid of being blind. You are ready.”
“_Leon, what am I going to be?_”
“We are no longer prophets ... save in our lives. Live, Fanny.”
“Leon, I could fight.... I could win her, I could save her.”
“No, Fanny ... you are going to live.”
“I ... and Edith?”
“_You_....”
She walked with mouth tear-brimmed and open out of her fancied words.
She saw about her with relentless eyes, felt with relentless feet, this
hard pavement, these hard houses, hard white sky. Out of the deep scene
came now upon her, as her mouth shut, clearer and more solid than the
stone city his last words:
“You, Fanny ... not Edith, _you_ ... are to live.”
Clear feet carried body erect through the stone city. Mother worlds in
blood poured from her, leaving white feet, white body, while the soul of
Fanny swooned in a ruthless knowledge.
_FOUR_
PAVEMENT OVER EARTH
A man and a woman walked this day with Autumn burning all about them.
The sun lay in thin cloud. The trees burst.
“I have found out, Fanny,” he said.
She was so shorter than he and her steps swifter than his long lurches.
She felt him from his broad brown halfshoes upward ... big fleshly man,
somehow lithe, somehow gentle like song above his crude-rhythming feet.
And his hairy great hands she felt--as when they were on her body like a
little child’s, so helpless yearning, so imperious.
“I knew I should find out if I gave myself the space to: that’s why I
brought you up here. We came yesterday. This morning I know ... that I
have known since the day you came into the Office asking for a job.”
She laughed.--I can laugh!
“O I see your thought: ‘That’s the conventional phrase.’”
“ ...from Christopher Johns!”
“Maybe he’s been so durn unconventional these forty years because he
hadn’t found himself. Maybe he feels, now he can look at last straight
at you and himself and understand, it’d be good to be conventional: like
rolling in warm blankets which the hard days’ work has paid for.”
She felt the dissonance of her feet striking the rutted road beside his.
“There must have been a frost last night.”
“Look at that maple! It’s a blazing red, because there was a frost.”
She looked. He was keeping step.
“I mean it, Fanny. It’s nearly two years since I’ve known you ... nearly
two years you’ve worked for me ... one year we’re--well--lovers though I
fear the word for the rare wonder you have given me--why, why? But now
it is a blossom of knowing, a whole Spring of knowing, woman! There has
been Sylvia _Frau_, there has been Sadie. I chuck ’em both, and when it
is done we marry.”
“Jonathan! I want you to walk quiet ... miles and miles beside me quiet,
today all day--do you understand? I am listening for something.”
She knew he would, clutching his stick behind him in two fists.
Two years ... they tramped ... two years....
--You are Fanny Dirk, Mrs. Luve.... I’ll keep that name! And you have
gotten tired already, tired of what if you look and face it you will
find all bundled and labelled in two years. Labelled to know, Bundled
... to throw out! That’s clear, though the facing, the training of my
eyes and the opening of my mind to hold what I face, is going to be
hard.... Here is an autumn day and a dear man trudging so you are alone
with it. Day of glory, day of flame, day of death. The leaves are
singing for they are going to fall. The trees are singing for they are
going to sleep. The world is a maze of trumpeting insects, loomed with
flutters of dry grass, trill of seed, for soon comes snow stillness. O
Fanny, once you were Springtime! I hear a man talk blossom and I feel
September. The bundles ... the labels ... two years inventoried! Aren’t
you a business woman, Fanny, earning two thousand a year? A year ... two
years. Each year has a Spring and a Fall. A third year might green if
you burn away like these trees.
“It is simply,” she whispered to herself, and the man watched her mouth:
“do I want to green like these trees?... When will I learn to think?”
She knew already what was to be.
She struggled only, she gave this full free day in the air only, to know
Why. Did not the world have reasons? She had suffered losing two lives
that grew within her flesh. She had asked Why, and in the questioning
been rent away so even these agonies were dim: they were worlds dead
like dim moons in the dawn of her adventure. And that adventure was Why!
--Why shall I say No very soon ... so very soon? Why am I going to leave
the warm of this dear man, the ease, the goodness of it all--why am I
going to push him back into new Emptiness?
She saw him that first day: his arms thrust out, nervous arms, haggard
hands, hair wet ... _business man_! this big bumping child, bumping in
Emptiness? Dear ... so good (she could see that at once as of a horse
and a dog all in one, and his life a currycomb brushing wrong, a bone
marrowless): now, back he goes into worse Emptiness. Why?
--Tell me trees....
I am not tired, I am rested.
In the arms of this man, with my face turned away, I have rested.
I can bear what you tell me....
I am hard like you.
... That afternoon, the ninth of beating about on pavement until
pavement tumored upward through her legs, her bowels, her blood,
stiffened her brain ... that afternoon she had felt strong again
sudden.--So this is Business? this soft flesh in the hard City?
“Mr. Johns, you must let me have that place,” she told him very calmly.
The next day she hung her coat on the costumer in the corner away from
the open window. A grey wall rose beyond eyes, shrill greenish white
electric bulbs blazed, shutting them all together, papers typewriter
woman and desks and murmur beyond: she found she wished to smile.
Solid New York! Solid New York relieved her burden of no base. She had
visited New York before: she felt the City deep, having in that past
surface of her life beheld its surface. She sensed an analogue. She too
had not changed but had gone down below her surface to a turmoiled
depth. Within still deeper was there not a quiet, as now she sensed the
Quiet of the City under its torrential streets and its human million
midges of fire through stone? Thus New York welcomed her: it was a place
where people dwelt and had dwelt long, so she could feel it was a place
where people dwelt. Her Southern City, ... almost as old, was dead where
old, was raw and unaccustomed where it was new ... its industrial heart
of smoke, its outskirts of prim bungalows. Here was a City _one_: the
place she knew for such as she to come to.
--Such as I?
Loving New York so sudden above the agony of her intimate deprivals, she
said: “We are something in common, you and I.” She and the wide solid
City that untouched her frail and bloody inwardness ... lifting her up
to a light where she could seek what this thing meant, this I.
In the Office was Clara Lonergan.
When she spoke to persons, particularly when she spoke to Clara, Fanny
lost her quiet City: New York became a pullulent pile, a heaving surface
above a boil of blood. So Fanny did not seek out persons, she feared
that City.--Do I not need to seek myself? She feared the self that was
like it. But Clara, she knew at once, she was not to avoid.
She saw in a glance that she was supposed to remove her hat. She took a
seat demurely, her heart compressed and moving up and down as she
breathed fragilely. She felt how all within her was fragile and was
surrounded by a solid world. Miss Lonergan smiled:
“I guess Mr. Johns will see about you pretty soon,” and went into his
Office. Her smile alone of the outside world also was fragile.
So Fanny sat demurely. Beyond her was a long dark room filling with
girls. She heard their footfalls in the hall: at times through the wired
glass of the door she caught faces ... face sallow hungry, face angrily
uplifted toward sun and laughter by the means of rouge, face resigned in
sweet debility.... That one will marry. As feet cadenced the hard cement
Fanny’s heart fluttered. The door swung; voices angled against the feet
and the door, escaping in this brief interim of home and work in
allusive herd-calls: Fanny felt thrust away. Each voice and footfall
thrust her. She struggled to be back.
--I am of you, now, she argued to herself. A little older than most. O
in life so older!... But I am one of you now.
The door opening from the private Office called her sharp up. Miss
Lonergan came in, seated herself with fingers already rustling at her
pad. Mr. Johns loomed before her.
“Good morning. Good morning.”
He stood with his feet apart and his toes turned out. Fanny observed how
his knees flexed inward, how his legs aburst in their drab trowsers
flexed and gave her mind the same thought as his ruffled hands and hair:
made her smile.
“Well now,” he was saying, “you two said anything yet to each other? get
acquainted yet? no explanations?” He turned from the one woman to the
other. “You’ll be friends. O all of us’ll be friends. What could be more
companionable after all than to engage in the business of soft drinks
... making Delight Drinks for the thirsty people....”
Miss Lonergan struck a key of her machine. _Click_, she smiled.--I can’t
wait for your nonsense. _Click clicket click...._
“You see,” went on Mr. Johns, “the people get hot and what cools em off
is ice. But they wont pay for ice. Not much! Ice is ice ... nameless. We
don’t furnish ice. They pay for our lovely game of names,” he handed
Fanny a list. “So we send the names in the liquid forms, to the candy
men and the soda men: and _they_ put in the ice: and the ice cools the
people: and the people pay us.”
He flourished clumsily. His face glowed open about his clear blue eyes.
“Will you come, Mrs. Luve?” His head serious now thrust back. “I want to
show you the girls you are here to take care of.”
* * * * *
“Why I live on Twenty-First Street. That’s right near.”
“Let’s walk,” said Clara.
New York was open letting the calm day in. An afternoon of May ... made
of the scent of far young grass, the swayings of far trees, the slopings
of far hills ... lay above the streets where Fanny and Clara walked:
came down, feathery certain into the open City, into their eyes and
limbs. They walked languorous through a sleepy city lying like a
brittle-kneed woman under the loved day. The City glowed with half
responses ... new. The angle of a street falling away from the straight
street where they walked was a gesture of pleasaunce. Above the clotted
people the dim houses leaned gently together, making a haze of memory
above the urgence of people. The streets turned angles leisurely: a
Square beyond them was an invitation like a hand open or a mouth
relaxed, the swerve of the Elevated train on the near Bowery was a
stroke that caressed.
“You are from the South, I can hear that. Have you been here long?”
“About a month,” said Fanny.
“I was born here. I wonder what it’s like, coming to New York.”
“New York is easy to come to.”
“Do people come here happy?”
Fanny did not want to look at Clara. The day was lazy and round, falling
into night. “Why do you ask that?” she said.
“O I don’t know.... I was just wondering--why do they come to New York.”
“Why did your parents come?”
“My father’s family was starving in Wicklow. Pa was a boy and no use at
home ploughing more fields for a grabbing landlord. So he came. He
wasn’t happy coming. Mother I don’t remember very well, she came from a
place near Pressberg in Bohemia. She was so lovely always ... tall and
so sweet ... and always so tired. I guess they were all just tired--her
whole family came--they couldn’t keep still. I’ve been tired that way.
I’d keep moving and moving. I’d say to myself; Now Clara if you’ll just
try and stop and _sit down_ you’ll be better. I couldnt. Something like
that I’ve felt in all the foreigners ... Czechs and Dagos and Bohunks
... I have ever seen. Something in ’em I guess got too tired to hold on,
to stay on, they had to move ... and there’s America all ready, a chute
like in the cowpens I’ve seen over in Brooklyn ready to swallow ’em up
as they come tumblin’. Heaven knows where those foreigners get their
idea of us.”
She was taller than Fanny, slimmer.--She cant be more than eighteen.
Fanny’s heart went out, clamorous, sudden ... stopped against a strength
and a maturity she felt. With her heart’s warmth she saw this girl.
Saw sharp against the day’s languor the long face, clear dark, with
narrowing thrust chin from the full mouth, cheeks high and delicate,
brow faintly curving and sheer beneath the black hair. Saw in the soft
fabric of her waist nervous elbows thrusting outward always as she
walked, against air, against world. Saw the whole taut tender body in a
world less clear, ever less fair than her dark freshness. Saw at last as
they stopped: “Well I go here. See you to-morrow” ... eyes very black
very large, dry and within themselves like windows of some hidden world
having no faith in the sun.
--I have lost what you have not yet begun to make. Yet my hand is softer
than yours! Fanny knew it was a thing which must change: that her hand
was softer. She walked the swirling Spring-drunk dusty streets with
thoughts of this girl and her hand.
* * * * *
She had a room which she had come to love. It was upstairs in the back
of an old red brick house: it was oblong, square-buttressed by its
honest doors painted white, its two wide windows and its low grey
ceiling. She had spent eight dollars to remove the acid-red carnations
blotching a sea of green bars on the walls ... (“I want you to scrape
first, not paper over it”) ... then clad her room in a dull buff. The
walls were bare. The landlady grumblingly took out the wide iron bed,
leaving her a couch. The carved oak table, the bastard Empire chairs
were distributed to the rest of the lodgers and replaced by plain ones
from the storeroom. She took off her hat, let down her hair, put
slippers on her feet and drew a chair to the wind. The day was more
darkly textured but still clear. An ailanthus flaunting half naked
through its tinselly leaves thrust above fence and tesselate brick walls
between her and the grey rear of a Church. Beside the Church, a small
house receded, built of the same dim sooty stone. On Sundays, the sun
vaulted the cluttered roofs at just about the time that a hymn,
many-voiced, shone through the corner of the stained-glass window which
she could glimpse on the protruding side. There was a little grass plot.
It was littered with dust and ash bits, fluffs of drifting textile: but
now sod pushed bravely up in a dim green. On the high fence at the side
away from the Church, among clusters like sunrays of iron spikes,
clothes-lines were drawn. A servant was busy taking in the wash.
The girl’s arms reached up, loosed clothes-pins, dropped her armsfull in
a basket. The girl’s arms reached up.... Fanny lost herself in the dull
catatony. She was tired. She held her eyes beyond her. Dimly behind she
felt a world she did not wish to turn to: world where there were
wash-lines and a girl her own.... Industrious, this girl. A young man
stepped from the kitchen door of the house. The girl’s arms, full of
tableclothes, suspended against her breast. He spoke to her, she nodded:
disposed her burden. She was bent before him, he leaned down and kissed
her. He stepped back, his arms and hands and shoulders, his feet and
hips throwing out little splintery signals of his panic. He wore the
cloth of the Church. Then the girl straightened, lifted her hands to her
broad hips and smiled. The little curate’s splintering commotion melted.
He kissed her again. They went together into the kitchen.
Fanny sat very still. She felt that the muscles of her throat and legs
and chest were tense, holding her still.
--What is the matter?
The world dim behind her eyes bellied out ... swallowed the cool grey
scene before her of a backyard, a flirting servant and a Church. A
Church! Fanny swung around in her chair. She was circled now by a world
no longer dim. She asked no question. Like one dropped sudden into a
sea, she swam.
She swam to get out. Not yet ... some day ... she must swim in the other
direction, away from shore, away from shore ... swim, swim till she
sank. But something within her told her she was not ready. This dullness
upon her mind, this fog fending her heart that was there since the
month she was gone: let it be there longer. Was it beginning to part?
--Why am I here? I am afraid to ask why I am here. Solid New York, bear
me up! Longer, your cold surface, lift me, hold me!
She swam to get out. She was up from her chair. Humming a tune she did
not hear or know of, she lighted the gas: she clasped her short thick
hair and thrust it atop her head. The gas danced hard on her eyes and
her black hair. She lighted her little stove: she put water to boil: she
was very busy swimming to get out.
And when she had drunk two coddled eggs and eaten an orange, she took
the blue cover from her couch, folded it carefully away, threw wide her
windows: and with the light of the downtown heavens falling in sprays
and fluffs of murmurous gold against her sombre carpet, she lay down.
Soon she slept.
* * * * *
Work gripped her. Mr. Johns was delighted with her way of work.
“Dont kill yourself, Mrs. Luve.”
She smiled wistfully. “I shant die.”
He looked at her warmly. “You say that as if you knew.”
“I know.”
“Perhaps you don’t know the deadliness of New York.”
“I’m not ready yet,” she announced half to herself.
“You’re a bad example,” he caressed her with bluff words, “of Southern
indolence.”
“I’m a New Yorker,” she said and went back to her girls.
Always she knew this could not last. Yet always life came easier, easier
... in its harsh brusque work, in its biting flavor of intercourse with
Mr. Johns, with Clara.
Each night as she lay down to sleep, the question stood before her: Why?
A question like a single point of steel piercing so many lives, piercing
so many loves, all bleeding-spitted upon it. But she slept quick. She
slept heavy. In her sleep, if it was parted at all, merely the Question
again, rising up, up, out of sight like an infinite steel point: she was
impaled on it: but bloodless already. She lay there quiet, impaled. She
had no responsibility since she was bloodless already. And in the
morning, when she awoke there was work.
She entered the Office a breath of wistful quiet, a cloud of gentle
moisture moving upon a sultry day. All who were there unthinking were
glad, when she entered the Office.
Clara found herself glad when she was with her. In the cooling dusk of
summer they walked homeward: at times they dined together: quiet words
went from each to each, no depths articulate and yet there was a peace.
Fanny looked at her friend as they ate in silence.
--Know everything! There is naught in me I do not wish you to know. But
know it silent. She would have been happy to be of help to Clara.
Summer was a full time in the Sales Office of _Delight Drinks Inc._ Even
so there came pause. Slack hours lounged in the hot rooms. Rooms,
writhed in the dry green blare of the electric lights, burning like
sores against the summer’s sultry and drab dampness, came to a halt,
jolted against their usual flow, stood glazed and ominous upon the dark
grain of Time.
As in a crowded car suddenly broken from its speed the passengers
congest, fall huddled upon each other, so Fanny’s girls piled heavy
moist against the soul of Fanny. She sat at her desk with her hands laid
before her. The girls at long tables opened the envelopes of orders,
marked blanks and sheets, sorted by geographical location, placed in
trays. The girls yawned together ... sudden the girls were One, with
moist throat running down in dusty waist, with bare arm brushing sweat
from brow, with body crowded lush in a narrow skirt, under narrow table,
into narrow shoes. They were a body breathing and sweating in a smoulder
of will to lie out naked near a lapping sea under cool winds ... cool
lips. She loved the girls.
--O if I could show you how I understand!
--Why do I understand?
Here with these girls, her life could come and she face it. Question no
longer. Her life was a way, here, tender and passionate and simple,
leading into the hearts of a dozen girls.
--I am all open. You do not come in.
I am all open. I come into you.
“It’s a hot afternoon, girls.”
“Gee ... yes!”
“What do you say to a round of lemonade?”
Surface of scared wills against a whirling world. But here all was quiet
and sweet, and all was in herself. She could look at each girl, see a
face already bitten and shrunk by the acids of life. But she looked in
herself, and each hurt, each struggle was a throb within her ... they
were healed.
“Good! You, Daisie, you know that Italian’s on the corner? Let’s collect
five cents each--only those who want it though! You go out, dear, and
bring up a pitcher ... two pitchers.” As Daisie bustled by, she slipped
a quarter holding the little calloused hand just long enough to give two
messages: “Buy some cookies or something with that” and her heart’s
fullness.
--What do I understand? now she asked herself as the room waited,
spinning in expectancy, released in laughter and jest and stretching of
arms from Time.
--There is something beautiful ... in the understanding? in what? O life
how you hurt! O life, how when one holds you warm and athrob in one’s
heart, you are good, hurting!
The lemonade came: giggles and smacking lips softened the blare of the
lights. “One can live,” Fanny murmured sipping her sweet drink, ...
“without questions.” The room went its way up Time’s black tunnel. The
girls’ congestion broke. They were one and one and one. They were many
girls, now, some sweet, some bitter, some bright, some dull, some brave,
some ugly and broken. They were many girls at work: they opened
envelopes, marked blanks and sheets, sorted and marked ... they droned
in many minds about little shut circles of thought, each shut from the
other circles: circles spun about their many heads, colliding,
rebounding, spinning away alone....
--One can live without asking questions. Not you. One can live spinning
and droning. Not you. One can weave a steel sheet between one’s heart
and one’s mind. Not you. Lord, I shall think. I promise, Lord.... I
shall remember that I have suffered and died, that I am here, to
think.... Lord, just a little longer.
* * * * *
Fanny walked home alone, avoiding Clara. In the dim afternoon the City
was solid. Houses were made of stone and brick and were held up in their
vast weights by pavements.
Pavements solid strong, hold me up also.
You hold these crowds, you hold these walls.
Solid City, do not let me fall.
Fanny walked tense through the slack afternoon, helping to hold herself.
Her trip from the South was there. She runs swift, relaxed, through the
world. She falls through the world in a train, falls upward. She falls
upward upon God. _Hold me, City._
In her room, the Church. Her fists clenched.
“I am going to move,” she muttered, her breath was angry. She hated ...
she hated. “Damn that Church! it blots out most of the sun.”
Down she went, deliberate, to the kitchen. Old Mrs. Deemis bent
rhythmically over a padded board ironing towels.
“Hot, eh? Mrs. Luve.”
“Yes.”
“Anything I kin do for you, dearie?” the woman filled the pause. Her
gray hair fell in wet patches over her wide bland forehead. “Never you
hesitate if there’s anything I kin do for ye, now.”