in four great streams. She lost Clara. She was afraid. Streams dark and
turgid beneath the crust of the earth were men and women. She saw ten
thousand hats and gloves and skirts in sharp detail. She saw beneath the
pandemonium of colored cloths, straw, feathers, leather ... each one
sheerly alone ... a single Skin. She felt the Skin grey-white. The
straws and silks and collars pricked the Skin: and the Skin hurt. She
wanted to be naked of these vari-colors. They hurt. The crowds flowed
on. Upon the faces of the men and women were smiles: the faces were not
naked, they were covered with smiles. Upon the feet of the men and women
were shoes. Shoes and smiles pricked in hard waves on the grey-white
Skin.
She was aware of this steel cavern under the crust of the earth where
four streams ploughed and mangled upon each other. On the steel were
casings of cement. It was rough. It cut against the quick of her nails.
It pricked the steel that held the edge of the earth.
She was aware of this all one, in a great hurt, as she lay asleep with
her skin against the rough stuff of her blanket.
Upon the Subway cave was the stone street. Upon the stone street were
the buildings. In the cave, in the street, in the buildings, flowed the
people. They were a black blood flowing everywhere. Here they were
thickest. They caught the rigid Subway cave: it rocked. The street was
rocked with the rocking hole below. The towering houses swung and dipped
in a steep measure, over the streets, over the plunging Subway throng,
under the Sky. A mighty rhythm ran with the black blood through the
stone world. It danced. The Subway rolled and bounced. Buildings bent
down, jerked high, circled their points in a great Dance under a sky
that was still.
Fanny watched the dancing world as if it were close to her: as if it
were upon her like her heaving breast.
“I am the Dancer,” she cried.
She danced. She was still, she was in bed. But she danced. In the veer
of houses, in the see-saw of streets, Fanny danced. Over her head she
was aware of a sky steadfast.
Fanny danced faster. Towers of stone leaped up now, leaving the streets.
Towers of stone soared like rockets against the still stars and came
back. Gutters twirled: crowds wove into pythonic knots. The skies caught
Dance, like fire. The stars moved very finely; they did not swing far
from their orbits: rather they tremored, they shone in vibrance, they
sang like high notes very fast ... and the sky swung long, swung so slow
like a tide through the warp of trilling stars that it was hard to know
that the sky moved. In the clothes of the dancing Subway throng there
were bugs: they danced. In the roofs of the street, there were stars:
they danced. Fanny saw the bugs dancing, and the dancing stars.
“I am the Dancer,” she cried. She danced through the Night....
* * * * *
She opened her eyes at last to a day pale wornout. She lay in her bed,
under the haggard morning as under a wet sheet. She was unable to move.
“I am sick,” she said aloud. Then again she slept.
When she awoke it was still day. Sharp stillness. She heard the blood
beat in her temples. Her body was blanched, it was dead. Her head lay
hot and swollen above an inert body.
She shut her eyes. The day swathed her head in myriad light shawls. One
by one the shawls withdrew, they were gone. She opened her eyes against
black Nothingness. It raced into her eyes, it won her swollen head. But
her body it could not touch. Her body like a knife-thrust lay, white and
still, within the belly of night.
--I must get up. She tried to get up and could not. She lay in her warm
water. Her body prevailed. The water was cold. It was dry. Her head
scolded against her stricken body. Her body endured like a bar of steel.
It was solid death in a melted world that was dying.
There were days and there were nights. There were nights and there were
days. The world winked open, the world winked shut. Rain dribbled into
her window: sunbeams deflected lay like gold dust against it. Below, in
the houses, feet fell; voices rose, fell; shadows of human will writhed
up the twisted stairs to her white room: no substance followed. She was
alone: her blanched dead body and her boiling head. Beneath her a great
Void in which the sounds of doors and feet and words, the rumble of a
cart, angled about like little balls of celluloid in a great hollow
caldron.
Day night day ... the world winked dimmer. Fanny’s form lay like a
wave-washed beam on the edge of the sea. Color was long since washed.
The water sucked at the meat and the juice of the wood. It was porous
light, it was rotten before the ceaseless suck of the water of the sea.
Her head was lower. It no longer boiled above her body.
Then Fanny shut her eyes: and her eyes were all of her head that was not
like her body ... dim and porous and sucked.
“Is this what all was for?” said her eyes. “Have I gone through all
this--all this--to die like a cat in a barn?”
She knew she was not to die.
“I am going to die. My life has been nonsense ... and now I am going to
die.”
She knew she was not to die.
Her eyes were still. There was a great Pain clenching her breast and her
bowels. No pain had been before.
“How long have I been lying here? How many days ... is it weeks?... I
have not eaten? Will nobody come?”
Her body was Pain. Her body was coming alive, so it was Pain.
“Will no one come? Will you let me die like a cat? I am thirsty ... I am
sick! I cannot move. I danced too much. I am paralyzed with Dancing.
Don’t let me die.”
Her body was coming alive, so that it cried.
“Edith ... Edith, save me! Harry--won’t you nurse me? I have nursed you
so often. Water! My child! O Mother ... Clara I did not mean----“
Her body was coming alive, so that it was afraid. It screamed, it lied,
it abused: it wanted the water of life.
“It is too late. I am alone. Something was wrong with you, Fanny. You
seemed good and sound enough. But something was wrong with you,
Fanny.... Look at you now: you Fanny Dirk, you bright Fanny ... mother
and wife ... you now.”
She knew she was not to die. She knew there was nothing wrong.
“Does God send clean creatures to a death like this? Death in a stinking
room where no one comes to see what is the matter after days and days.
Starving to death alone, in New York.... O how rotten you must have
been!”
She knew she was not rotten.
“Is there nothing left? No one single thing? Mother, I can’t find you.
Edith, I can’t see you. Harry--Edith--all gone. Is there nothing left?
Yes: one thing left.”
Fanny lifted her shoulders faintly from the bed with straining elbows.
Her heavy head fell backward: her eyes swung dizzy toward the ceiling.
“God! you aren’t much for me. But I believe in you. Do you hear? Even
now. I am not rotten, God. I have not done wrong, God. You must hear me,
for I believe in you, somehow, my Father. This is all right. This is not
just--this is not unjust. It is part of the world. I am leaving the
world. But I have been a part. I believe that, God. I have been a part
and you need all parts. You have needed me, God?”
There were tears in her eyes ... cool good tears. “Say you have needed
me, God, for a part in your ... something. Whatever it is. You’ve done
with me, now. But you’ve used me. Haven’t you used me, God? You’re
casting me in the ash-heap I know. Can’t you say at least ‘Thank you’
before I am gone?”
Fanny sank back upon her pillow. Tears made cool stains down the hot
parch of her cheeks. Her eyes roved through the opaque bright room,
breaking against the cruel harshness of familiar objects. Her hands
against each other on her breast tremored and fell apart. Her mouth
moved.--Is this the end?
She knew there was no end.
A great Peace came. Her body was soft and enfolded. Warm waters held her
close, washed her of anguish, washed her of doubt and of weakness,
washed her at last of self. Fanny was perfect in sleep like a child in
its mother. There was a smile on her mouth....
* * * * *
Long hours the room with its still freight moved through the world.
Unbroken, like a seed, buried and hard in the earth. At dusk the door
opened slowly. Clara stepped into the room.
The prostrate friend in the stiff iron bed, black hair matted over the
hot white face, the walls, very still, very cold, shutting this beaten
flesh into their death ... struck Clara in the door.
Her hands clutched her throat. She knelt beside the bed. Her hands and
cheeks took in the heavy breath, the burning brow, voluptuously. “Thank
God,” she murmured. Then the luxury of sense and of articulation went.
Clara was action.
Ten minutes later, a physician stood with her at the bedside.
* * * * *
Fanny opened her eyes to a world softened and new. A warm world, she
accepted like a child, without wonder. Over the gas-jet was a shade of
green. The walls cast a kind dimness. On the deep windowsill a brazier
burned. Bottles stood sheer from the shadow, blue and black and brown
... warm emanations of a good will they seemed in their suggestion that
being ill she was nursed, being weak fortified. They stood beneath the
tender steam of the brazier like good words.
The room was warm. It had warm breath. It was alive and gentle wrapping
her about like fond extensions of these quiet, these brand-new
sheets.... Magic! all good ... all so more natural than that hard seed
of the past she had dwelt in, been imprisoned in: long walls, rigid,
shutting her up, lifting her softness hard above the City’s hardness.
Fanny drew out her hands from the warm covers. Fingers touched, tried
each other: fingers pressed in the moist flesh of her palms ... lean
hands yet new. The room was a caress.
Through the moving door came a figure very high: figure slim and athrob
beneath a drawn green gown, under black hair let loose upon its
shoulders.
Clara pressed sheer through the caressing room. Clara! Magic and
wonderlessness, most magical of all. Clara! with her hair let down, in a
green wrap. Her loom was the substance of the warming air: her being
sheer over the bed was the mouth that had uttered all these transforming
words: the blue alcohol flame, the bottles, medicine, milk, the soothing
walls about the fended light, _herself_, newest word of all, that lay in
a clean bed ... the truest and the sweetest word of all this mouth that
was Clara.
“Dear, dear,” came Clara’s voice. “You are awake and you are better.”
She sat beside her. She gave her broth. Fanny was soothed, in a oneness
swallowing the hot broth: she was one with Clara.... Dimmed gas, bowed
throat of her friend and agile hands holding the cup and the spoon were
one, articulately, with her own heavy eyes and the lips she felt as she
opened them and swallowed. There was her will, there were the features
of her will. What touched her eyes and her skin, her ears and her taste
was a symphonic unity which she could love, as she lay swathed within
it, as a child loves its own body....
* * * * *
Clara slept in a big armchair which had appeared in the room’s
transforming. Each day came the Doctor. He had a little ruddy VanDyck
beard and eyes that twinkled. He had soothing hands. He was a part of
Clara ... hence of Fanny. When he left, there was his soothing wake in
the soft brown air of the room.
“You are silent,” she said to him, “like a canoe.”
“Well, we’ll paddle you back to shore and health,” he smiled. She saw
the eyes of Clara beam excitement.
“You have not spoken,” Clara said, “you have not spoken before!”
--I love my silence. Fanny lay back in her new thick pillows. I am going
to be silent.
“Soon we can bring you away from this dreadful place. Can’t we, Doctor?”
He nodded.
--I shall keep my silence as long as I can.
Fanny looked with warm eyes at the glass of milk which Clara held for
her.--I could hold it now. But I won’t. She did not speak.
And Clara spoke little. Words about her comfort, words about her food,
words of endearing reproof when Fanny woke too early or did not finish
her toast.
But already Clara was no longer herself. Fanny saw her long dark face,
haggard now and pale with heavy eyes. She saw the hand that feeding
trembled a bit.
“You are not a mother. Yet I am your child. Just a little longer. For
you are not a mother. I am a mother.”
Her eyes shone happy with an unuttered promise: “I shall be a mother to
you. You shall see.” But Fanny dared not speak. For she knew when her
words came, there would come from within her, deeper within her, her
words’ denial.
Clara’s strong hands, tense like a cord, soothed her gown, clutched her
shoulders, lifted her so that she could drink.
“To-morrow, dear, to-morrow we bundle you into a cab. At last! Away from
this dreadful place.”
“Where?”
“To my place,” said Clara.
--I shall not speak ... yet awhile. For I am afraid of the word that
will come when I speak.
The girl knelt down at the bed. Her head lay on Fanny’s breast. Her
hands went wistful searching to upon her eyes, upon her mouth. Her eyes
were shut and her lips moist upon the gown of Fanny....
_FIVE_
CLARA
Fanny sat in sun that was caressed and tamed by high blue curtains. She
shadowed a mirror in her hand ... it gave her eyes her face ... with a
sharp shoulder.--They used not to be sharp!... Wrist tiring with its
tiny burden, arm taut and thin in the blue housegown Clara made her wear
welded the silver glass with its sheer image to her face. Her eye,
seeking its own secret, worked unaware through the medium of parched
hand, spent wrist, peaked shoulder. No glamor was between her eye and
its reflection.
Her face was overlaid with shadows: subtly, terribly it was increased
beyond its natural buoyance as if sudden in that Night she had danced
through all of life had made invasion of her large eyes, of her delicate
nose, of her mouth quick like a young leaf, and forced its burden on
them. She had brought from her home the face of a girl: she looked at a
face branded her own and the world’s.
About this weighted face the room she sat in: cushioned, satined, a room
of crude caresses. She alone was salient peering into this image of
herself. She alone had mass and had dimension: and all of it upon her
little features, drawing them, deforming them, making them ugly. Making
them herself.
--I must face this! I have become a person.
She felt herself as a sharp weight set in softness. So she was upheld:
but she was free. There was a bar between herself....--I am true!...
and these warm falsehoods Clara had set her in.
--Saved me by them! I know that. You are all Lies about me, yet me who
am true you have saved. Without you what could Clara’s naked love have
done? Without you wouldn’t she be dead as I was? Your milk, your covers,
your warmth ... lies: O my still bed, O sun that falls about the grey of
my shoulders like a lawn of Spring upon an autumn earth--bless you, for
there is quiet in you yet, and it has let me think.
... When I am at last all in thought, I am in the way of the end. To end
is to be healed. I understand that. Life is a wound that only life can
heal.
--I might have died without beginning! You, lies, saved me. What does
that mean?
She lay back in her chair and the mirror fell to her lap.--I have lost
so much hair ... black, lovely ... don’t think of that, that is not
thinking! All you must fall as the hair fell. Fanny’s eyes closed. She
slept.
* * * * *
She came to waking with her head forward and her hand upheld, watching
her face in the glass. Clara was in the door.
--Did my looking at her asleep ... how she has grown old!... make her
raise the glass like that to her shut eyes? Then they opened. Clara was
afraid of the displacement her thoughts might make: she moved in her
room and sent out words in it as if the air were tight with some
subtle, feeling substance easily overflowed.
“How are you, dearie?... Been sleeping?”
She laid a bunch of violets in Fanny’s lap.
Fanny smiled, her eyes and her hands clasping the flowers thanked her.
“I’m so much better. Where have you been?”
“Just shopping.”
Fanny had asked no such question before. Clara sensed beneath it the
significant stir of her friend’s mind once more into the outer world.
The outer world! What was going to be when Fanny once took note of her
own world? She could not talk, for she was afraid. She drew a chair
beside her in the sun, and held her hand and was still.
“You are looking better. I have a broiler for you. _Now_ you must begin
to _eat_.”
Her stress stroked a wish: Fanny should eat long, must lose herself for
a long time in eating.
“I have been thinking,” Fanny said. “The sun’s so good, I’d like to walk
in it.”
“Dearie, it’s cold and raw out.”
“I know it is.”
“It’s only good in a warm room ... like this.”
“I know.”
Fanny’s hand clasped over Clara’s, silencing her. They sat in silence.
With gazes long and almost parallel they thought of the sun that was
good only in a warm room.
“My room,” thought Clara.
“Whose room?” thought Fanny....
“Clara tell me, ... you were not shopping. Why can’t you tell me where
you were?”
“Dear, when you’re well--“
“I am well now. A little weak, but well. Didn’t you say yourself--“
“I’ve been with him.”
“You needn’t hide it. Don’t you think I know?”
“Yes, Fan. But it’s all so untrue, since you are here.”
“He must be good, never to come around.”
“He knows all about you ... and he won’t come--until I tell him it’s
alright. He _has_ been good. He has left me alone. Well--he knows if he
didn’t--“
“Tell him to come,” said Fanny.
Clara jumped up. She was afraid and uncertain. She knew not why she was
so. “I must see about dinner.” She tossed off her hat and was gone.
* * * * *
It was a little flat. The dining room, the living room, the bed room,
were compact and warm in dull brown, rose, blue. They were retiscent
rooms, stiff proper little places furnished as with sedate conventions.
Naught of vice, naught of abandon about them: they had no strength but
they were full of ease. Like married old ladies, they were at rest on
something very sure. Fanny did not understand them. But in her fever she
had taken and used them as a babe its nurse.
Fanny and Clara ate, almost in silence. Fanny’s half chicken ... she
made her friend take the other half ... was a luscious problem. She must
eat it fast ... before it got cold or spoiled ... it held her like a
spell in its succulent evanescent glow. It lay in the white plate the
color of sunstone.
“Since I have been here,” she said, “no one has come to your place. No
one. You’ve broken up your whole life because of me. Dear Clara ...
that’s a hard thing for me to know.”
“I’ve had no time for my friends. I’ve had too anxious, too wonderful a
time, nursing you, Dear.”
“I was very sick?” Fanny smiled. “When I looked in the glass today I
knew that. I’m an old woman, Clara.”
The girl shook her head. “Don’t talk that way!” Her eyes were full on
Fanny with a joy that was not denial. She did not mind. “You are not
old,” she said. “But you’re mature ... somehow I suppose, next to all
us, you must seem old to yourself. You are ripe, Fanny. You are
glorious.” Her face glowed with the hard repressiveness against her
feeling which was her only show of feeling.
“Come, now ... to bed.”
She helped her to undress, diffident but sure: the gestures of a nurse
swathed in a mist of sentiment of a bridegroom. She smoothed the covers:
she placed a hand on Fanny’s brow pressing her head within the pillow,
folding the soft quilt at her chin. She did not kiss her other than so,
with her hands. But once, in those gigantic days of the shadow of the
Church, of the shadow of what else that had come and was to come! had
Clara’s lips touched Fanny.
* * * * *
Fanny lay in Clara’s bed ... for a month Clara had slept beside her in a
cot. And Clara, by the low table lamp that drooped above her shoulder
shedding a bloom upon her neck, read aloud a story....
Words were like pebbles against an iron wall. They rang upon a sudden
sense in Fanny of the bed she was in. Bed large and deep with hangings
of lavender, bed all about her like strong arms of a mother she had
never known yet hers!... Clara sharp within it ... sharp breasts, sharp
thigh, sharp tenderness of stomach: and the vague black manform
looming!... this bed about her. Its arms were warm and were hostile.
There was care in them, mother’s care, and yet they had no sense in
their great balm of what she was they shielded. Fanny lay ... the words
of Clara reading against her were futile ... in the arms of an alien
creature who had given her birth. Being of shame, being of denial of
herself, and yet she was its thing. Fanny knew the ineffable rightness
of her lying there, of her healing there: of this monstrous mother. From
this she must suck life, from this which was of alien flesh and spirit
she must build herself. Strange angry mother ... her own!... holding her
life and lifting her above it.
Words of Clara were little clangors, shells of sound far off. Fanny lay
... Clara’s bed! Clara’s bed and his!... enswooned in great arms
muffling her and feeding. Very white....
She saw black earth, earth breaking against rock. In a crevice of stone
through loam, through rotted brush and last year’s leaves she saw a
root, swollen and livid-red, thrust a small green shoot: upon it pendant
a cupped bud like a pearl. She saw in a Spring of sweeping clouds above
a steaming earth, a blood-root blossom....
The clouds were gone, there was mist. There was earth lost in feathery
warm mist. There were bursts of trees budding ... the feathery mist ...
the blood-root.
* * * * *
Waking she saw this room.
Clara’s cot empty. With covers thrown back it held in its sheets the
impress of her body. Shades drawn. A purblind light soiled from its
passage through the grey-brick airshaft lay on the blue and lavender
like smut. A gilded radiator buzzed and spat....
Fanny heard Clara in the kitchen getting her breakfast. The negress maid
did not appear before eleven: and this morning Clara was going to New
Jersey to see a married sister who was very ill.
She stood in the doorway. The sooty shade of the room lay in her face,
filling the folds of resolution under eyes, beside her mouth, with a
harsh darkness.
--She is not well. She is not happy! Clara looks herself.
--And the room--it is itself.
Fanny felt salience in the ugly morning ... for the first time felt
salience about her.
--It’ll go. You’ll put up the shade. You’ll cover up these beds ...
sheets speak. Some of the sunlight from across the way will filter in.
Sun lies sometimes. These true shadows for seeing where I am will go.
Fanny could not smile.
“You’re still half asleep,” said Clara. “Want to sleep some more? Lucy
could get you breakfast later on.”
“No. I’m awake. You bring in the little table. Let’s breakfast
together.”
“In here?” Clara’s smile softened the shadows in her face.
“Yes. Right here. Do!” ...
She felt she must face this room, this heavy stifled room, this weighty
fact of where she was and with what. She must eat this room with her
breakfast....
It was hard to swallow. Her throat was dry and was full. Above her the
chandelier came down in a tawdry twist of gilt from the dim ceiling. The
gilt flaked, and she saw black iron.
“Does it taste good?” asked Clara.
She looked at Clara.--God, how dare I pity her! You are good. What you
have, you have given me.... “Yes, Dear, it tastes good. You made it. It
tastes of your hands.”
They ate ... the breakfast, the room.
“Give me your hand!” Fanny clasped it across the table. A bit of toast
it held fell in the sudden sally and the butter smeared the palm. Fanny
opened the palm, she held it full against her mouth. She kissed the
grease and the flesh.
“I am eating you,” she spoke.
Clara’s eyes were frightened. So she laughed.
“You dear!... Could you eat some more toast?”
--How do I know what I eat?
God, you insult us.
If we must feed on dirt
Why give us love of the Clean?
Why give us fear of the dirt
If we must feed on dirt?
Since we must eat and eat
Why give us knowledge?...
What do I eat?
If I must feed on You
God, why do I forget?
* * * * *
The whole day alone, she promised to herself. Lucy in the other rooms
would intervene a little: nothing was perfect. Yet Fanny felt that this
was good. She was at ease in her armchair. Soon the sun would sweep into
her place. And Lucy had the musical quiet of her folk, she really did
not interfere more than a cat might ... a useful cat who would bring her
her lunch on the portable table and her drops every three hours. Lucy
had a soothing grain, almost like sunlight ... a sort of saffron
practicable sunlight.
“Ev’thing a’right now, Mis’ Fanny?”
“Yes, Lucy. Thank you.”
The girl swayed on her little haunches, holding her hands across her
breast.
“It’s gone to be a fine day. That’ll mak’ you fine, Mis’ Fanny, right
soon again.”
“I wish I was as fine as you.”
“Aw Mis’ Fanny!” Her hands beat out in protest ... glad gaunt hands
stripped by their work of flesh, and yet the music of them lived in
their bone and their gesture. Lucy went off, her soft shoes patting like
the cushioned feet of a tamed panther.
The door closed to the kitchen; Fanny was alone. Lucy would seek her den
and fill it with steam and suds, wrap a red rag around her head and fall
to work with an occasional cry like a wild beast musing: lost in a sort
of virginal ecstacy which Fanny loved, of work and dreaming.