She bit her lips.--Tell me. Tell me!
“For fifteen years I’ve been married to two women.”
She looked up.
“Only one of them legal, of course. But married to both of them just
the same. I have had scores of girls during that time under my care. I
know something of woman.”
--About me? about me, kind man, what do you know?
He answered her silence. “You I do not know. You are a mystery to me,
Fanny. But you’re true and whole ... that I know ... like the whole
earth.”
He had called her Fanny!
“My wife’s name is Sylvia. She’s pretty and prim and worships her
figure. You can imagine what she thinks of mine! She’s always been
afraid because of her waistline to have a baby. But before Sylvia came
along, there was Sadie. The first love of my youth. She was thirty then.
Now she’s fifty. Fat and sentimental, good old maternal Sadie. She’d
love to have children. But how can she? She’s so respectable ... she’s
so ill-placed in a hard world. She’s been true to me, has Sadie. Sadie
envies Sylvia her marriage license ... the chance she has to have a
brood of kiddies. Sylvia despises Sadie, is above jealousy (Sadie’s a
part of the landscape) and tells herself in her heart what a far better
kept-lady she’d have made, what better times she’d have had ... _she’d_
not have been true to me!... if only she were free and immoral like that
fat old foolish thing.”
“Why do you tell me all this terrible farce?”
“I want you to know that I know women.”
“How should I know it from that?”
“These misplaced women love me ... they’re my fate.”
“All of your fate?”
“Not all.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Johns, why you should assume my interest in all
this....”
He got up. “Fanny, there’s more between us than that.”
“What do you want?” She was frightened.
“I want you to see me, as I see you. Not understand me. Understanding’s
rot. I don’t understand you. What in hell _do_ we understand? What
counts is seeing. Touching. What we see and touch is part of us.” She
stirred.--My words! “You’re part of me ... you ... because I see you
there, attached to me like a hand. That’s what I want.”
“You’re a fool. You had better try to understand a little. You don’t
know a thing about me.”
“I don’t want to, then. It’s good you called me a fool. That’s the
beginning of warmth, and warmth is the beginning of wisdom. Pretty soon
you’ll have to blind yourself in order not to see me. You’ll see me,
alright. You don’t want to blind yourself?” He went on: “Never another
word shall I say about my two appendages ... my simpering Sylvia and my
grandiose Sadie. But you’ll touch it all. You’ll see what that life is
... you’ll look at me: you’ll see what a lot’s left over....”
Fanny got up from her chair. She stood blazing. Sudden she laughed and
sat down. He came to her and lifted her in his arms. His big body
covered her. He kissed her eyes and her brow, her ears and her hair.
“Aren’t you ashamed,” she murmured. “Aren’t you ashamed!”
He placed her back in her chair. They breathed hard. Silence.
She looked at this looming man. He was brutal, she felt him gentle. He
was abrupt, she felt him slow like a child. He was big, she felt he
needed arms to cradle.
“Leave me alone!” sudden she cried. “I am a lost creature. Don’t pick me
up. Leave me.”
He knelt by her chair.
“I have a husband who has kicked me out. I have a child I’m not good
enough to touch.”
His hands curled. “Fanny, you lie.”
“I had a love affair. Do you hear me? I committed adultery. Get out!
Even Christ don’t forgive that. Do you see that Church over there?” She
jumped away from him and went to the window. “My husband’s a good man.
If he came to New York, that’s likely where he’d stop ... in that Parish
house. If he passed me in the street, he’d turn his face.”
The room was between them. They, facing each other, held. Fanny’s voice
changed. It had been harsh and high. It was low.
“What do you want? Can’t you see that I’m dead? What do you want? Aren’t
there plenty of women for the rest of your life? Why me? Let me die.”
He stood still.
“What can I give you? Haven’t I tried to give to my husband ... to
Edith? They’ve taken all. I’ve failed. There’s something the matter with
me.”
He stood. They were silent.
Her voice was quiet. “I don’t resist you. Do you hear? I don’t deserve
to. I am dead. I am nothing. You don’t want that. I don’t resist you.
You’ll take your hat and you’ll go....”
He held his silence, and she prayed in it. She saw the world all One:
and of it, like a throbbing heart, like a high radiant head, she saw
that there was God. But she said again:
“There’s something the matter with me.”
Johns came to her: he stood above her, holding her two hands.
“Come beside me, Fanny.”
The tears ran silent down her cheeks.--What does it mean?
“Come beside me. O close. Lie close with me, Fanny.”
She felt his arms lifting her like a leaf in a warm wind ... laying her
down. She felt his hands and his mouth that fell like a warm rain on her
parching flesh. She shut her eyes.
* * * * *
... So that day they had walked with Autumn burning all about them.
Silently. She, walking through the years with feet at last aware: he,
mute unconscious, reckless of pasts, praying that as she walked beside
him ... this strange deep lovely creature who had become his life ...
she should not walk away.
The day was done. They sat in their room at the Inn, with Night.
They felt the Night. It was clear and brittle like a violin: it gave
forth notes, sharp, penetrable, woody: it wove its voices into silken
strands. It was a dark and glowing violin. The room in which they sat
was still of the past of the Inn which had been a Mansion. The ceiling
came low: the beds were canopied: chairs, lowboy, brass hearthpieces,
rag rug over the black softwood floor, drew into a tight repressed
luxuriance, into a single mood, strong, curbed, sufficient, that was New
England: ancient New England pregnant of bursting strengths.
Here they sat, thrust close upon each other by the Night and by the
moodpent room.
He wanted to take her hand, he did not dare. His eyes searched her
retiscence.
“It was a great day, Fanny. We must have walked twenty miles.”
She saw the miles ... miles of trees flaring against their false
defeat.--‘We move skyward! Come, Winter, strip us ... still do we move
skyward!’ She saw the miles: hours of her small feet beating immortal
earth.
“Jonathan,” she spoke at last, “I am going to leave you.”
He hid his face in his hands.
“I have been drugged into peace. Now you want to drug me into
happiness.”
“Put it that way if you will.”
“It cannot be.”
What could he say?
“I do not know,” she whispered, “why it is. It must be, Dear. Let us not
argue. Let us not rend the beauty of our parting with inquisitive
words--words that can only claw a truth. Let us be peaceful here for the
days that remain. Let us accept what neither of us knows ... like our
births, Dear, like our deaths: just so deep. It must be.”
He took away his hands from his face.
“I shant argue, Fanny. When I first saw you and loved you, I said: ‘She
may come: that is possible. She will go: that is sure.’ I knew. What
right have I to argue? You have blessed me with life. If now I must pay,
so be it. Which part is the blessing--I don’t know Fanny: my having you,
or the long years I shall walk alone if you leave me, and fill with my
word: ‘I have had her.’”
“You have given me Peace. You have given me what I must give up.”
“I will not argue. I cannot give up hope. Wont you speak to me, Fanny?”
“What can I say?”
“What are you?”
She was still.
... “Why did you come to me? Why did you let me love you? Why did you
not resist? Where do you come from, Fanny? where are you going?”
Her eyes came very slowly from within her world, came to this gentle
clumsy lover of hers, rested upon him. He was there, broken into deep
shadow, sudden light by the sharp flicker of the open fire.
“None of us could answer any of your questions. Why should I be able
to?”
“You more than most of us.”
“When I came to New York, my coming meant one thing. Without that
meaning my coming to New York, my leaving my home and my child were
simple horror. All my life was a hideous jest unless my coming to New
York meant one meaning.”
“What was that meaning?”
“When I know, I won’t be any longer where you are.”
He bowed his head: a jet of flame touched his brow livid like a gash
above his grey-shadowed face.
“When I came to New York I fought against that meaning. For all that I
had given up, for all the saying to myself _You are dead, You are a
sacrifice_ and knowing it, there was in me a self that wanted to live,
wanted the good things I had given up. That is why you found me as you
did. Resist you? I hungered for you, Dear. You meant, for a while, a
Home, Love, a child,--you are such a child, such a dear good child--you
meant all I had lost. You took from my coming to New York its meaning.
You were a substitute, see? for what I had lost. And that makes it all a
hideous jest, all my life. I did not come to seek an exchange, to build
on the same charred ground where my life was burned away. That I know.
But O I could not resist you. You forgive me, Jonathan? I was so sick,
so weak. My arms needed so to hold my child, they were so empty. You
were a lie, but O you were good. Forgive me, Jonathan. I knew all along.
I needed to drug myself to be peaceful in my peace with you. The City
... work ... our flat ... they drugged me. Stealing some of your linen
to mend it, nursing your cold just for a couple of days, taking the
problem of your life and suffering by it, trying to help solve it ... O
it was drunkenness, it was ecstacy, Dear, it was wrong. I couldn’t stay
drugged. So it was wrong for you. Unfair, perhaps. Have I hurt you? Have
I ... O God ... have I returned evil for evil after all? I have been
hurt. And in the anger and the pain, I have understood why the world
injures the world. I have understood how from evil received, from injury
done, comes the irresistible impulse to return evil, to injure. I did
not want that. I have done it! Yes. I have hurt you. Good tender man ...
victim already of two selfish women. I have come with the poison of my
wounds, and poisoned you.”
He shook his head. “No, Fanny. You have healed me.”
“If you knew how you said that ... how weak your voice was. You were
strong, bursting, bubbling.”
“Whatever happens ... I am free of those two....”
“But now you are so still. Almost, you are thin.... Yes, I have done
this. I have done this. I will continue to do this, poison others with
the poison of my wound, so long as I seek to be healed. Do you see?
That is what makes the world endlessly hurt the world. It seeks to be
healed. Do you see? Each human soul, wounded by another soul, seeks a
soul to be healed. And the wound is passed along, endlessly, endlessly.
O the vicious circle. And I am in it. God thrust me from home, God drew
me as a stone is drawn to the earth ... away and out of the Circle. And
I came back and entered it again. O I will try again: I was weak. I was
not aware. I will know better. _I must not seek to be healed._ That is
what I have learned. Can you see that, Dear? That is the deadly poison,
that is the curse of passing on the poison ... that is the endless
circle of a poisoned world. We seek to be well. We crave peace. We crave
love. Even I. I came to you with my bloody soul. ‘Heal me!’ I said. And
now you are bloody, too. And I no less bleeding. Do you understand just
a little, Jonathan? why the peace you gave me, the care and the
tenderness you placed into my empty arms ... why all that has been
wrong? The hideous joke, this happiness you offered: the cruel wrong,
this happiness I seek?
“ ...Yes ... my arms are still empty.” She held them forth as she spoke
... toward him. “They still hunger. O will they never stop aching to
hold? aching to be full? My breast is still a woman’s.... But I shall
try better now. Do you hear me, God, wherever you are? I was tired. I
was broken beyond knowing. I slipped back from falling. I couldn’t go on
falling upward upon you. Not then. I shall try again. Another chance,
God, will you?... Yes, you will. There is no other way that you can
do.... Dear, do you understand?”
His face was before her, crumpled, like a child’s ... lost in the Dark
where she had left him, weeping and yet afraid to cry....
* * * * *
Fanny walked up the street into the Winter sun. It was morning. The sun
stood low in the street’s square gap: its heatless dazzle was in her
eyes as she walked. She walked with sight blurred by the sun among the
men and women walking like her to work. They were the substance of their
shadows, long and black upon the sung-glazed City. They swam like
wraiths, remnants of warm houses, warm sleep, in the inhuman brilliance
of the sun.
Fanny thought: “When I came, what was it that led me to Christopher
Johns?”
The comfort of that place, was it curse or splendor lying in her mind?
What had it been to Clara? Is Clara there? She had learned quick that
there was no place like it. She was unskilled. The one skill she had ...
the human one of knowing girls, of managing them well, of a clear head
for practical affairs ... who again as she stepped wearying into offices
for work would read it in her?
The crowds beat on: the day was going to dim. As the sun went high,
these atoms of shadow hording against sun would win. For a day. Till the
next morning. Fanny felt that her feet were dark and that they walked on
brightness.
--Only my feet. Because they are so tired. I am not black, I am white.
In this surge of shadow, Fanny felt wanly white. Her head was dizzy,
unpropped by the warm crowds hording against cold sun.
--And yet I am so small. How changed and grown from the white girl?...
The door to the loft factory stood a steel barrier to the day. Within:
musty heat air full of the stale traceries of wistful hands sewing at
steel machines. She went in....
* * * * *
Above the whirr of Fanny’s work there was a voice speaking. Under the
blanket of Fanny’s sleep there was a voice speaking. Across her words in
meeting men and women, across the words of men and women meeting her,
there was a voice speaking. It was one, and it was Fanny.
She knew at times. At times she did not hear it. She would emerge from
the thick inattention ... sleep or fever or work or even fun ... and she
would know it had spoken. It ran through the heavy years that were now
hers like a thin Light moving along the bottom of a Sea that had no sun,
moon, star....
--Girl. Perfect girl! I am not tall, but my body is tight. And my mind
is taller than all these minds about me. It reaches higher than yours,
slow brother, yours, Annie, yours, Delia. It is faster too. It moves
very fast, it can skip ahead of your thoughts, it can turn about and
wait and squat there grinning, till your thoughts catch up. And it is
white and clean. I am fearless. I think that is purity ... don’t you,
Jesus up there? You weren’t afraid and that is why you were pure. My
mind is white and sound like my body leaping, skipping where it wills,
over low stones, over low mud. What have I to fear? I am I....
--I walk the street under magnolia blooms between the proud old
houses.... That’s Fanny Dirk: queer girl! I am simply myself. When Annie
begins to squint at me I know what she’s thinking about, I know what’s
troubled her last night. I can feel sorry for you, Annie. My figure is
rather roundish, but the men are just where I want them. I have eyes and
lips and a mind to spit them on. This mouse-blue frock is lovely even
so, as I walk dangling my parasol through the sun-splotched magnolia
way. This cream-dim ruching at my neck shows the olive note of my skin.
And _that_ means there is blood flowing very close.... And the white
stockings are sharp between the bias skirt and the black slippers.... I
walk fearless. I’ll do what I will.... I am surrounded by children.
--This dingy stair ... the factory girls ... you are a factory woman!...
O for them true: this horror for them is true. For me? this horror is a
tale. It is the words of a song. There is a music ... music. For you and
for you and for you, grey shadows dripping from the sun through the
encaverned stairs, it is true Horror. It should not be: for it is. For
me, it is well.... Fanny Dirk with blue prim frock and the olive throb
of my throat ... for it is something else.
--My room, so small, is the casing of my body. Shouldn’t it fit? It must
fit to keep me whole. Those gloves that were so much too big, how I
froze in them last Winter: how the Winter came in to my fingers as I
walked, till I had money to buy another pair. Bargain-counter gloves ...
the right size-mark ... that girl with eyes like panthers who dared not
take them back, that man with eyes like dead fish, who would not! If my
room is too big the world will come in like Winter to those gloves: and
freeze me and burn me. Dear bare tight room! So much holier and tighter
than the one of the Church: that was so big Jonathan could come in. Lies
... drugs ... came in. Here no one. You are my skin. No one dare touch
my skin....
Her eyes went up and down about her room: her eyes stood upon its cot,
upon its whitewashed walls, upon the paintless table, like the eyes of
Fanny Dirk standing within her mirror.
--I do look well in black. My face is white and colors on me need just
that touch of plumpness I have lost. Black eats away the hollow of my
memory of plumpness. My breasts droop: the curve of my thigh is not so
lovely now. Black covers me, I used to be gay almost like naked in the
blue and the rose. Black wears. My body does not wear. I am wearing out.
I don’t know what I’d do without you, mirror! Your brightness is the
only laughter in the room. Sometimes your laugh is a mocking. Never
mind. I find when I look in your laughter, even if it is a mocking, that
I find myself. She laughed aloud.--See what I do when I see myself?
Well, friend ... why such a crusty room to case the body of Fanny?...
There were soft casings once: little gabled house, garden so brave
above the dull black earth, Harry, Edith ... you were all softness Edith
my child! Soft hands upon my arms, soft lips upon my mouth biting me
with such savage softness. Edith? O my soft love whom I held all about
me ... who held me all. You are gone. This hard sharp room that holds me
like an iron glove--now I have you alone ... and the mirror that is
laughter.
* * * * *
--I shut my face in my hands and you are about me, my Baby. Only you.
Your hands and your hair and your little mouth. Edith, Edith ... what
are you now?... The room is truer. Naked, harsh, cruel ... room of
emptiness, crushing my flesh ... you will make all of me hard, all of me
callous from being cased by a hard whitewashed room: a room with an iron
bed. You are truer!
* * * * *
--I shut my eyes in my hands and you are about me, my Baby. I am a baby
with you. Our flesh is one: our hands are one like petals entwined in a
flower. We are a flower together. We spring from the black earth. We
have had our blooming. The earth is there, we are gone. In the black
earth under the snows, there is a seed of us, my darling. I am the seed
of us, Edith!... of our softness, of the bright bloom of our twined
petals the hard seed. I am lain away in the earth. The earth blooms only
in us.
--Flint-hard room buried beneath the City,
You case me, I shall burst you yet!
Buried within you, tight sealed room,
Buried within me, within your bitter coldness....
The folded memory of a flower.
* * * * *
--Cracks in the leaping ramparts of New York. And I look down in them. I
am a girl with short black hair and hands that are strong. I peer down
on my knees at the fissures of New York. I kick my slippered feet behind
me, peering down. My legs are solid in their white silk stockings and
when I toss my slippers Jack and Harry see my legs to the knees: good
legs: their eyes are bright, looking, they swallow thick.... I look down
into the heart-beat of the City.
--I am not hungry. Look at me, Fan, look at me huddling to-night around
an oil stove and a lamp, both on the floor and myself on the floor.
Black dress, grey frayed coat ... my hair is down to keep my throat
warm. The wind is a solid wall of ice against my window: a Devil sucks
it back, it plunges again ... solid steel wall ... and splinters of it
cut through the glass and the bricks, cut to my shoulders huddled over
the oil stove and the lamp.
--They smell. Hot smell that gets cold beyond my shoulders. There in the
corner, where the bed is, where the washstand, is the smell of the oil
stove and the lamp, but cold. Here it is hot. I could singe my
eyebrows.... It is the style to singe one’s eyebrows ... or cut them or
something. How do they do it, those sharp pencil-lines over eyes? The
smell is cold by the mirror ... I stay huddled. But do you think all the
ladies with red cheeks and penciled brows and eye fire-dried ... are
they walking Broadway to-night?... have got so by huddling like me too
close over a stove and a lamp?
--In the rest of the house it is quiet and asleep. The wall of ice
plunges against my room. My room alone. I am not hungry. To-morrow I
have a job so I cannot be hungry. Lamp and stove, tell me, are you
burning my cheeks red too?... are you going to singe my eyebrows? are
you going to sear my eyes?
--New York! New York! why am I here, frozen and empty in your leaping
arms, peering into your bowels? Women with burnt faces walk your
streets. Women wander like dreams denied through your pent streets.
There are in New York men and women who worship God. Christians only,
Jews only. Worshipers, only of God. Are you New York, you worshipers of
God? Have you made this? Has your God let you make this?
(--I am at the threshold of long thoughts, like caverns warmed with
earth. I shall think now, and be no longer cold nor hear the wind like a
steel sea on my shoulder.)
--On Broadway there are women with burnt souls, and there are Jews. New
York is full of Jews. What does that mean? Spirit of a Jew quenched the
white-stockinged girl: bore her to womanhood. Word of a Jew thrust her
forth. Hand of a Jew guided me to this Cold seeking warmth ... led me
to this City where there are Jews in swarms, in sultry pools, in
tumults!
She was still. The wind was a steel broom sweeping the ice of the world
against her huddling over a lamp and a stove. The frail room held. She
heard no wind, she saw no room. She sat swaying within an aureole of
smutted heat grey-faced, over the black mass of her dress: and her hair
knotted against her throat.
“Tell me,” she whispered aloud, “who has understood? Harry was wrong, he
did not understand you, Christ. He misused your words. You have forgiven
him. But who ... who understands? You were a Jew, and we alone who are
not Jews worship and quote you, Jesus. Why is that? You were a Jew? The
Jews saw God ... they only during those angry ages before Christ had the
Grace to choose God. Why do they leave you, Christ, you and your words
in silence? Are they so close to you they do not hear you? Are they so
close to you that they are you?”
Her hands clasped above her face. “But we are better! sweeter!”
--Do we not understand! Are we children, Lord? Are we children playing
with the fire of Thy Word? Who is grown among men? She thought of Leon.
--Your lips knew not Christ nor Love.... Yet who beside you has known
me, who beside you has healed me?
“Tell me!” her voice was high in the stark cold room. She rose up on her
knees, and her arms and her words were higher than her face. “Tell me,
God! How dare you discriminate against us! You have no chosen children.
We all are your Chosen ... we who choose you.... Lord, I want to know.
Do you hear? I choose to know. Not what my breasts want ... let them
starve. You shall not turn from me now. Look at me, Lord.”
Her hands drooped. Her face fell like a flower suddenly burned. She lay
crumpled upon the floor within the City. “Will you just look at me,
Lord? What have I? I shall not die. Yet what life have I? Think of my
past ... think of the girl I was ... the girl bright and brave: think of
the mother I was! Here I am. My life is sold--for this! I must know. Do
you hear me when I cry so within myself? else--what is this? I must
know! This horror of hurt ... from Fanny, the Fanny of my friends, of my
beloved, my child--now this here, this dirt! And it is true. Dirt is
true. What else? Have I sinned? What act of ignorance have I sinned in?
What is this sense of holiness that will not leave? Which is it, God? I
must know: I have sinned or I am holy?”
Her mouth was full of tears ... good tears, for they were warm. She was
aware of her feet, down there, cold ... lumps that denied herself for
she was living warm.
She lay on the iron bed. She slept.
* * * * *