a world cutting in, sharp and strange world of impossible impacts,
which somehow had been away. She lifted her stiff weight from bed, she
had slept in her clothes. She remembered the warm world wrapping sudden
about her in the night bringing her sleep. She looked at the cold lamp,
at the rust-stained bluish stove on the floor.--Where is it?... She took
off her clothes, knowing that she must bathe in cold water. Her body
thirsted. There was another world ... an imperious imagining ... to blot
the real within her. World, world, world! The voice in her was small.--I
lose myself. I go forth breaking against cold and stone. She was athirst
for water.
The bite of the water on her flesh was good ... it made the world she
must face realler. It bit under her arms and over her throat, it drew
like a knife between her legs. It made her fingers wool....
--I am a sunny girl getting ready to ride with Harry. Warm good feeling
... riding and laughing! The pear blossoms are out!... A dismal room
with its grey bulged walls and its patched pipings. About the bathtub in
which lay her naked flesh, a stained and rusted bathtub, the floor was
matted with cold oilcloth, colorless with many feet. Now under her gay
ones!
--Come!... a dim hall, reeking with night-shadows still, plethoric as if
it had swallowed too much darkness, quenched the white shoulders of
Fanny Dirk. “I hold you,” it seemed to say. “I am this dingy house and I
am putting you out.”
She shut the door behind her. The street. She took it in, bravely
forcing herself to know that it was new: she had never seen it. There
was a clarity about her. The world was a delirium carved, a frenzy
frozen and sculpted. Only within her was dimness of soft flesh.
The street was empty. Piles of snow, color of drowned rats, lay in the
gutters. A cat moved gaunt. The two rows of houses stood even, scraping
the sky. They were damp-soiled scabs ... brown red ... they held their
secrets as dry blood holds a wound. They hated the grey wideness which
they scraped at above them, clutching with pitiful flourish of eave and
chimney at a buried sun.
Fanny walked. Her feet struck the pavement. She felt how she touched the
street. A thing deep terrible living her feet touched as she walked. It
gave to her footfall, it did not rise in response.
--Tear off the scab
Blood would gush!
“I had better buy rolls.” She pressed her one nickel in her palm. She
would have money that night.
A woman with long waist broken to the show of underwear swabbed the
floor of the Bakeshop. Her arms were naked like the pole of her
swab-cloth. All she was long articulated bone, swathed in moist grey.
Her face, swinging above her work, smiled on Fanny.
Fanny sat at a dark table in the smell of dough, seeing the long face
suddenly widen bright: seeing eyes in a woman, tender through the
greased shadow of sawdust floor and a counter heavy with bread.
“I’ll have just a nickel’s worth of rolls.”
The woman came back: she placed before Fanny fried eggs, coffee, butter
and bread. “Why haven’t ye been in, of late, silly?”
--_She understands!_ The understanding of the woman stopped Fanny’s
words. She was not hurt by this sharp tenderness like green in the crass
mass of the morning.
She ate.--I must eat slow. She could not eat slowly. Something within
her beyond her devoured the food.
She could not say Thank you, standing to go. She could not give her
nickel burning in her palm. The woman swabbed her feet.
“Ye’re in the way,” she mock-scolded. Fanny was glad.
Street!--Why does no thing stay as it was? So I can catch up?
She breathed heavily. Her head was light, save in the very back under
the coiled hair which tipped downward pulling up at her chin. She felt
her stomach. Her knees were light. She felt her feet.--I could laugh! I
am striped in heaviness and lightness. Laugh then!
The two walls of the street fell forward: in the air above the gutter
they crashed in silence together and disappeared. The City was a maze of
twisting streams.... Two men passed. They were arm in arm. They were
sleek and full in the black coats shaped to their bodies. Their cheeks
and their eyes were sleek and full of themselves. About the round head
of each there was an Aura. Thick troubled, it beat outward like an
emprisoned gas. A gaseous colorless world it was about the head of
each, that veered against the other, drew in, thrust out, hostile.
Impenetrable two men passed, arm in arm.
* * * * *
... A woman passed her. Her eyes were red spots in the soot of her face.
The loose wide flesh of her feet at each step hurt. Her hands fell like
the heads of slaughtered hens. Behind her, attached to the grey shawl
that covered her head, a Wake like a scarf dragged dimly dark. It
wavered from side to side: it was a disconsolate flutter forever behind
her. A little boy crossed the street at her back: the scarf lifted, it
avoided his bright eyes: it sagged down toward an ashcan, skimming the
filth....
* * * * *
... Fanny stopped on the curb to let a wagon pass. Huge horses drew it.
They were black with white-stroked withers, hair gathered thick above
their pounding hoofs. A thin man perched above them; behind him, the
iron cart heaped high with tawney dirt. He was imprisoned, this pallid
man, between the soil and the horses. His hands held reins. From his
white eyes two little Streams of red rose, curled, flecked at the
horses’ steaming flanks, receded, thrust in the dirt behind, moved
circling fitful about the soil and the horses. The roll of the wheels,
the clank of the great hoofs, the cart’s metallic strain were a tissue
of hostile voices hunting the still red search that streamed from his
white eyes.
* * * * *
--There are no ones and one. You get in my way! You don’t exist!... She
saw how this world was a manifold of veins, carrying blood, building
flesh of life and house.
--I flow. I too am livid, flowing through You.
She saw that the walls of the streets were once more in their places.
She saw that men’s and women’s heads were once more shut: ... the
beating angry solitary worlds, black, red, grey ... spherical,
streamer-like ... were sealed once more in skulls of men and women.
Fanny’s new place of work was in the shop of a fur-dresser.
She sat at a long table. She looked above her plying hands at the
stooped forms of women across from her: looking above their plying hands
at her. Between their shoulders, the window ... gold letters of the Sign
standing upon it.
A. R A C H M A N N
_FURS_
They were in a room like a foul mouth that spoke to the world gold
words, dropped this amenity upon the sweep of Elevated structure just
abreast the window. Trains passed. Banners of cluttered stationary lives
made gay in passing ... sweep of black particles in the gay flourish of
passing. _Passing!_ As Fanny worked, the smooth flat tracks of the
Elevated trains stood like a way beyond the world. One entered heavy and
thick into the train ... one was swept gay!
Fanny worked.
Skins ... dead dusty skins to be ripped and sponged and fitted into
_shapes_. Shapes that were insult to the skins. Her hands raped life.
In the filth and shadow of the shop, she felt the mutter of creatures
defiled and effaced into dead forms by hands that were not even bloody.
--Furry skins live.
Boney hands defile you.
I am a woman and you are under me!
She felt that they of the shop were very strong, were great ... marring
the wistful lives of creatures with warm furs: running thread and needle
through them, pressing cloth and water against them. She felt that she
dwindled each moment of this work which made her so superior and strong
against live creatures. She defiled herself ... she worked to live a
desecration upon life.
And then (this work was familiar, she had held this kind of job before)
the life of the furs, the life of the girls, the life of her hands died.
Fanny knew again her eyes and her black hair and the wondrous world
dancing forever within the wall of her brow.
--Beating ... beating ... ache. I can pay for that dear woman’s
breakfast. O I can never pay for what she did for me. I don’t have to.
The woman was good. Good is what you need not pay for. Sun ... women
doing good ... love ... sudden discoveries of You in a paid world. I am
glad. I have not lost sight of Goodness. God? Does one have to pay for
You, God? Or have I destroyed You, paying too much? Should I have
refused to pay, when the sick voice of my soul said You must! Or
haven’t I paid enough?... Can’t we know _any_ thing, Lord?
She was aware of her hands beneath her, of the scissors, of the extended
furry deaths against the filthy table.--We’re paying. We’re paying? For
what?... Well, we’re paying.
She was strong.--I can keep this up forever. Perhaps I shall never die?
There was a starkness in her breast, as of a thought suddenly crystal,
suddenly shaped of herself, crowding her organs.
--Shall I never die? Am I eternal, seeking ... seeking? Am I in Hell? Is
Hell true after all, and am I in it? This is not Heaven!
She had the sense of an eternity in her hands paying, in her brow’s
ache, paying.--Souls in Hell ... feel like this?
There lay Time beyond the lettered window. She looked on a neat little
world of Time: Time ran upon steel tracks, Time carried mites of human
life rigidly down a tiny way. The trains, the houses, the streets, the
wisps of sunny cloud through the roof’s gap ... all was a pasty
toy-world: make-believe: the world of Time and Space. She gazed on it in
passionate condescension within her sooty workroom, hands paying, brow
in search paying....
Outside. The day above the Town was lovely with Spring’s intimation.
Soiled snow-piles melted in brackish streams. The gutters lay
mud-splashed. Men and women moved drab, undifferentiate through the damp
brownness of pavement. But like a wave of butterflies above a mudhole,
Spring fluttered hesitant, diaphanous, young.
Fanny held her face up against downy wings.--My shoes are torn. She felt
the down pull of her torn shoes under the wings of the Spring. She knew
that because she felt such heaviness of feet, no one like her prized
this afternoon.
She began to walk. She stopped.--_You! It is you!_ The form, sudden and
sheer in its familiar individuation--Clara Lonergan--stood before her
still, with warm hands clasping her cold ones.
“You, Fanny!”
“Clara!”
The face of the dark girl: “Nearly four years I have longed to find
you.”
Fanny’s eyes: “Nearly four years....”
Clara could not speak. “You, you,” she kept repeating, “ ...you....” She
focussed her eyes and saw her. She was still.
Fanny felt:--She knows how I am. This girl has always loved me.
“Come, we’re going to dinner. We’re going to spend the evening. O
Fanny!”
Fanny knew that if her eyes could pierce within the daze of this meeting
... under the Spring, in the snow-stained street ... she would see Clara
trimly, quietly dressed--richly. Clara hale and hard and shut.
--This girl has loved me!
They did not speak, walking. Blue night, a swathing of cottoney blue
mist, crept from the skies, curled the miasmic streets, bundled the
rigid Town in its soft glamor. Lights made little rents. Fanny moved
beside the hard thrust of this girl....--She has loved me!... through
the blue warm-ness.
They entered the subway, they rode, they came up. They stepped from a
bright street into a bright long room--facetted in white round cloths
and mirrors. The two chairs held them across the white space of their
table.
“Shall I order?” said Clara. “I’ll order. Her eyes, deep and many
colored like a pansy’s black, felt the lean blade of Fanny’s poverty:
caressed it, bled against it. She ordered
Oysters
Broiled chicken with asparagus, sweet potatoes, peas
ice-cream and cake
and coffee.
“I’m so happy!” she said, her eyes flooding out upon the face of Fanny.
“I am so glad we have met at last!”
--She asks me no question of myself. Not that she fears lest I ask
questions of her. She wants that. Your eyes and your lips so finely cut,
so frozen in their revolt ... how long ago was that?... ask: I should
ask of yourself. I cannot. Let me sit here, Clara, quiet. The food, O
the good food! Let me sit here in your eyes. I cannot give you that
which my asking of you would mean. I cannot. There is a little openness
between us ... our separate years. In it I breathe. If you cover it with
your coming close, I shall choke.
“We are going to a show,” said Clara. “Which show shall it be?”
“I have seen no play for so long! How should I know?”
“I’ll choose.”
She called the waiter. “Bring me an evening paper.”
--So strong and sure of herself! I am weak beside you.... Am I better
than you?
At last Fanny’s eyes could open, could meet the glow of her friend’s.
“I am glad we ran into each other.... I am glad to see you.”
Clara was pale.--She is very understanding.... No ... not to-night shall
I be better than you, strange girl crowned in your defeat. I know what
you have done. I am glad to be willing to be weak beside you.
Once again Clara smiled. “Here’s a good one. Music ... you need music
and dancing.”
--I live in music and dance....
“O I am so happy! I have missed you, Fanny. I did not know until there
you were gone.... I did not know....” She stopped. Fanny’s eyes were
turned inward.--Don’t, don’t! they said.--The space between us is what I
breathe. There was silence.
Fanny was weak. She had walked level through the dark. Now for some time
she felt that she was mounting. Felt this as one would who tramped in
blackness by the strain upon herself. She could not touch the essence of
her thoughts, gazing at Clara. They both had left a common world which
they had never shared, years since. What in the sheer uncommonness of
their separate careers was it they felt they shared? It was very strange
to Fanny. They had no mutual subject. They sat across the table from
each other, mostly in silence. What there had been to speak of ...
Christopher Johns, the Office ... was dead in them both, was no subject.
Yet now they shared a silence, they shared a pregnancy.--I am at ease,
here, weary, full of food.... I am going to listen to music. Mounting, I
am at rest!
They sat in the first row of the Balcony. Fanny knew these two young
women ... one not so young!... sharp in the motley welter of the crowd.
They were swathed together in one sharpness by the anarchic auras of the
other men and women. Fanny saw herself: small, pallid, worn in her black
skirt and her dun waist, close to this girl who had sold her defeat for
the clear rose-colored smartness of her suit, for the diamond pin under
her lovely throat, for the sleek health of her hair. But her eyes, she
felt her eyes greater than ever, wandering in the hunger of her face ...
the eyes of Clara were great and were her own.
The music was far away.... “This is a tale of far away, a world I have
left and forgotten.” The curtain rose. The actors were clad in costumes
of 1840. White Pierrot danced through the glitter of ladies in prim
bonnets, gleaming bared breasts, hooped skirts. Rhymed words, words of
love and fidelity and perfection chimed with the pelt of taffetas and
brocade, of powdered hands flirting fans: and white Pierrot with eyes
lost in the paint of a gay world, seeking love and perfection.
--People do not dream this way. I was not alive then. This is a costume
comedy with pretty airs. Romantic ... means false, in time and in place.
Fanny struggled now against a world falsely remembered.--This is not
true, not yours. Pierrot was in love with a fine lady who tinkled at a
clavichord ... gowned in sheer black with her white shoulders bare. Her
flirting shoulders and her painted lips took his round love: his deep
was lost in her shadow: Pierrot was lost. He left her broken: and
another man with words of love sharp like hooks to catch her flesh
caught in her shoulders (they had not turned for Pierrot), turned her
round, won her.
... A sad play with laughing music ... little streams of water running
up the dark side of a mountain. Impossible ... unreal. Fanny saw the
breaking audience. It rose and splintered in the new light house. Men
and women suddenly distinct like the jewels in their hair, like the hard
smiles, hard lines of face against the new blare of the lighted house.
No. The play was real. Laughter went twinkling up the steep of
mountains. Laughter flowed up hill. That was the way of laughter.--You
men and women falling away downhill, have you never laughed? Upward!
upward! Fanny pressed Clara’s arm.
They stood in the night. The breast of Fanny flowed with her hurt and
her life: her heart was liquid at last: her hurt and her life, pressed
so long against the urge of Clara, melted and flowed. She took the
hands of her friend. She pressed them. She knew what was to be....
They walked through the broken throng of men and women parting, waiting:
through the bright weave of carriage calls, whispers, farewells: through
the new freshet of the City’s stream spreading in blue and green and
gold, soon lost. They walked in silence. They were putting off a moment
of decision. The Elevated Structure stood like a sentence. Fanny’s arm
that had held Clara’s dropped to her side. A train, jingling with
lights, drew past....
--It goes and goes, it comes to the window where I work, to the window
where I stand this instant at a table. I tear and rip ... I work in the
thick shadows of dead life. I look at the train that passes. It is
there!
Fanny held out her hand.... A little man, square black beard, small red
lips, sharp greedy eyes, stood with his hairy hands upon her shoulders.
Mr. Rachmann!--She sought the hand of her friend.
Clara’s lips sharpened.
“Where do you live?” she spoke. “I want to see you soon.”
Fanny shook her head. Mr. Rachmann went. The lips of Clara parted, they
were wet.
“I do not understand.”
“Look at me, Clara.”
“You won’t let me see you?”
“O do understand! Can you see me? Can we see each other, Dear?”
Clara’s face broke.
“You can’t do this. You can’t. You don’t know what you mean. Let me
come. I am all alone. O don’t judge me, Fanny!”
“You know I don’t judge you.”
“Let me see you ... once.”
They were rigid in struggle.
“Clara, I am afraid to see you.”
... Still....
“I am going a way that is terrible and unknown. It does not get easier.
There is no getting used to it. Each moment, there is yearning to turn
... get out ... fall away....”
The girl straightened. “You think I do not understand,” came her clearer
voice. “But I do. More than you, perhaps.... You need not give me your
address.”
Fanny was warm and broken against the clearness of Clara.--What does
this mean? Why do I reject her? She was still.
“Good-by,” said Clara.
--You need me. You need me? Say that you need me, girl.
The hand of each held more than the hand of the other.
“It’s all right....” A moment Clara smiled. Then her eyes looked within,
they met the eyes of Fanny deeply in a far space where they were not
apart.
“Good-by.”
--There is love in you. Love, love. What wisdom? You are not saying,
Good-by. You are saying, Love!
Fanny was still. And alone.
* * * * *
Without turning she walked. Swift walking. She was aware of herself
walking swift beneath the Elevated trains, and of not moving at all. She
did not like this shadowy way with lights upon the sides of it like
little creatures burning to get in. It was full of noise and heaviness
and booming steel. A side street ... quieter, cold ... swung to her
face. Southward again. But now an Avenue all open to the stars.
The tall buildings rose melting into mist. Stars flickered faint over
the stillness of their pointed thrusts. They rose from stone, rigid,
equal: a stone City lay before her and the houses stood one stuff with
the hard death beneath her feet. Men and women, like house, like street,
passed on: wrapped in stone muffledness. They were muffled in dim rigor.
They were masked.
The City was masked. Corner of wall soaring, clusters of passers-by, the
buzz of motors pulling with rubbered gait through the damp asphalt ...
were features of a Mask. She felt its stillness, its stifled comfort:
underneath, a heated flesh she could not touch.
Her feet, beating the street, beat with her eyes and soul against the
Mask of a world. It was unrolling. Sharp stone towers swathed in blue
mist, private mansions mansard-roofed, façade of church, flourish of
store with its show-windows alight like gems set in the pallor of the
night ... masked, hid away. She was unmoving while the dominant
procession pressed before her. And the men and women, sparse,
impervious, aloof, were details of the pageant that defiled. Yet it
seemed to Fanny she beheld an act deeply ceremonial, religious. The high
masked world ... human and stone ... became a chant, lifted in stilled
ecstasy unto some god....
Her room was outside all this. The gas jet she lit stood on the
whitewashed wall, made it orange, made shadow of bureau and chair stand
stiff like marionettes ... stiffly agile ... upon the orange glare. She
was shut in: the pageant and the hymn to a lost god were far away. Yet
now in the room it was to her as if she stood at a window. She looked
out secure upon the song and pageant of the world....
--I am very quiet. A terrible thing has come to me. I have met Clara,
the one person in the world who knows of me and cares ... and I have
sent her away. A terrible thing has taken place. I am quiet.
She was afraid of thinking ... afraid of how clear she saw. She took off
her clothes, she turned out the light. She lifted wide the little window
that lifted her eyes above a jagged finger of roof to the sky.
Lavendar-blue it was, washed in pale streakings of eternal fire. She lay
stretched-out in her bed: warm, with eyes so wide she could feel the
night pour in to them.... Manifold Night! Night of the straining of
flame through space, Night of the march of stone masks above the
softness of men. Night----
A question stood sharp up:--“Why did I want to turn round, walking
downtown? Why did I not turn round? What was the thought always there as
I walked--as of a face and a will watching----“
Fanny smiled. “You wish she had followed you. She didn’t! Never fear.
She is not that sort ... strong unsentimental Clara.”
Fanny saw Clara naked in a wide soft bed. Very sharp she saw her: the
small clear breasts, the fluted strain of the thighs, the tender cushion
of her belly. A man-form, vague, bore down upon her belly. Fanny could
see no more. She feared to sense that if she dared see more she might
see Johns! She saw a desecration as if the talons and beak of a great
bird tore at the thighs of Clara ... strips of the flesh of herself. She
could not bear it. Her palms clutched over her eyes and ears. She turned
writhing upon her stomach. She was still.
--Poor Harry!...
“No,” she said aloud. “You wanted her to follow and she did not. She
respects you too much. Can’t you respect yourself? What you said to
Clara was true ... the long and terrible Way that you must go. Cannot
you say to yourself what you said to Clara?” Once more Fanny lay in her
bed straight-stretched and her eyes open: once more the light poured in
upon her eyes.
Her head was light. It lifted her like a balloon above the City. She was
afloat above the brittle stone. The world was black and was suffused by
fires. The light was the Black breathing.
“It is true,” said her mouth. “I am falling upward. I have nothing to do
with this. I am falling upward.”
Her words lifted upon the Night that poured in her eyes. She saw her
words. She saw herself. She drank her words and herself.
--I hope it is not Johns who is keeping Clara. No. It is not he. Clara
would not ... even if he would ... after what was. Why do I care? I am
not done with Clara!... But I did right. I must say No and No ...
endlessly No to all the world’s questions. That is saying Yes--to what?
How strange it is, this Being in me that flies. I am the wings of
myself.
She was very light. She was afloat in an impenetrable Dark which yet she
pierced for she was suffusion of light. She lay there, eyes and mouth
wide open, limp palms at her sides, and heard the cadence of her breath.
--I am not unhappy, she thought. Then her eyes closed....