Fanny told herself, before she went to bed Saturday night, that she
hoped it would rain Sunday morning from seven to twelve. But when
Princess woke her at seven-thirty, as per instructions left in penciled
scrawl on the kitchen table, she turned to the window at once, and was
glad, somehow, to find it sun-flooded. Princess, if you're mystified,
was royal in name only--a biscuit-tinted lady, with a very black and
no-account husband whose habits made it necessary for Princess to let
herself into Fanny's four-room flat at seven every morning, and let
herself out at eight every evening. She had an incredibly soft and
musical voice, had Princess, and a cooking hand. She kept Fanny mended,
fed and comfortable, and her only cross was that Fanny's taste in
blouses (ultimately her property) ran to the severe and tailored.
“Mawnin', Miss Fanny. There's a gep'mun waitin' to see yo'.”
Fanny choked on a yawn. “A what!”
“Gep'mun. Says yo-all goin' picnickin'. He's in the settin' room,
a-lookin' at yo' pictchah papahs. Will Ah fry yo' up a li'l chicken to
pack along? San'wiches ain't no eatin' fo' Sunday.”
Fanny flung back her covers, swung around to the side of the bed, and
stood up, all, seemingly, in one sweeping movement. “Do you mean to tell
me he's in there, now?”
From the sitting room. “I think I ought to tell you I can hear
everything you're saying. Say. Fanny, those sketches of yours
are----Why, Gee Whiz! I didn't know you did that kind of thing. This one
here, with that girl's face in the crowd----”
“For heaven's sake!” Fanny demanded, “what are you doing here at
seven-thirty? And I don't allow people to look at those sketches. You
said eight-thirty.”
“I was afraid you'd change your mind, or something. Besides, it's
now twenty-two minutes to eight. And will you tell the lady that's a
wonderful idea about the chicken? Only she'd better start now.”
Goaded by time bulletins shouted through the closed door, Fanny found
herself tubbed, clothed, and ready for breakfast by eight-ten. When
she opened the door Clarence was standing in the center of her little
sitting room, waiting, a sheaf of loose sketches in his hand.
“Say, look here! These are the real thing. Why, they're great! They get
you. This old geezer with the beard, selling fish and looking like one
of the Disciples. And this. What the devil are you doing in a mail order
house, or whatever it is? Tell me that! When you can draw like this!”
“Good morning,” said Fanny, calmly. “And I'll tell you nothing before
breakfast. The one thing that interests me this moment is hot coffee.
Will you have some breakfast? Oh, well, a second one won't hurt you.
You must have got up at three, or thereabouts.” She went toward the tiny
kitchen. “Never mind, Princess. I'll wait on myself. You go on with that
chicken.”
Princess was the kind of person who can fry a chicken, wrap it in
cool, crisp lettuce leaves, box it, cut sandwiches, and come out of the
process with an unruffled temper and an immaculate kitchen. Thanks to
her, Fanny and Heyl found themselves on the eight fifty-three train,
bound for the dunes.
Clarence swung his rucksack up to the bundle rack. He took off his cap,
and stuffed it into his pocket. He was grinning like a schoolboy. Fanny
turned from the window and smiled at what she saw in his face. At that
he gave an absurd little bounce in his place, like an overgrown child,
and reached over and patted her hand.
“I've dreamed of this for years.”
“You're just fourteen, going on fifteen,” Fanny reproved him.
“I know it. And it's great! Won't you be, too? Forget you're a fair
financier, or whatever they call it. Forget you earn more in a month
than I do in six. Relax. Unbend. Loosen up. Don't assume that hardshell
air with me. Just remember that I knew you when the frill of your
panties showed below your skirt.”
“Clarence Heyl!”
But he was leaning past her, and pointing out of the window. “See that
curtain of smoke off there? That's the South Chicago, and the Hammond
and Gary steel mills. Wait till you see those smokestacks against the
sky, and the iron scaffoldings that look like giant lacework, and the
slag heaps, and the coal piles, and those huge, grim tanks. Gad! It's
awful and beautiful. Like the things Pennell does.” “I came out here on
the street car one day,” said Fanny, quietly. “One Sunday.”
“You did!” He stared at her.
“It was hot, and they were all spilling out into the street. You know,
the women in wrappers, just blobs of flesh trying to get cool. And the
young girls in their pink silk dresses and white shoes, and the boys on
the street corners, calling to them. Babies all over the sidewalks and
streets, and the men who weren't in the mills--you know how they look in
their Sunday shirtsleeves, with their flat faces, and high cheekbones,
and their great brown hands with the broken nails. Hunkies. Well, at
five the motor cars began whizzing by from the country roads back
to Chicago. You have to go back that way. Just then the five o'clock
whistles blew and the day shift came off. There was a great army of
them, clumping down the road the way they do. Their shoulders were
slack, and their lunch pails dangled, empty, and they were wet and
reeking with sweat. The motor cars were full of wild phlox and daisies
and spiderwort.”
Clarence was still turned sideways, looking at her. “Get a picture of
it?”
“Yes. I tried, at least.”
“Is that the way you usually spend your Sundays?”
“Well, I--I like snooping about.”
“M-m,” mused Clarence. Then, “How's business, Fanny?”
“Business?” You could almost feel her mind jerk back. “Oh, let's not
talk about business on Sunday.”
“I thought so,” said Clarence, enigmatically. “Now listen to me, Fanny.”
“I'll listen,” interrupted she, “if you'll talk about yourself. I
want to know what you're doing, and why you're going to New York. What
business can a naturalist have in New York, anyway?”
“I didn't intend to be a naturalist. You can tell that by looking at me.
But you can't have your very nose rubbed up against trees, and rocks,
and mountains, and snow for years and years without learning something
about 'em. There were whole weeks when I hadn't anything to chum with
but a timber-line pine and an odd assortment of mountain peaks. We just
had to get acquainted.”
“But you're going back, aren't you? Don't they talk about the spell of
the mountains, or some such thing?” “They do. And they're right. And
I've got to have them six months in the year, at least. But I'm going
to try spending the other six in the bosom of the human race. Not only
that, I'm going to write about it. Writing's my job, really. At least,
it's the thing I like best.”
“Nature?”
“Human nature. I went out to Colorado just a lonesome little kid with
a bum lung. The lung's all right, but I never did quite get over the
other. Two years ago, in the mountains, I met Carl Lasker, who owns
the New York Star. It's said to be the greatest morning paper in the
country. Lasker's a genius. And he fries the best bacon I ever tasted.
I took him on a four-weeks' horseback trip through the mountains. We got
pretty well acquainted. At the end of it he offered me a job. You see,
I'd never seen a chorus girl, or the Woolworth building, or a cabaret,
or a broiled lobster, or a subway. But I was interested and curious
about all of them. And Lasker said, `A man who can humanize a rock, or
a tree, or a chipmunk ought to be able to make even those things seem
human. You've got what they call the fresh viewpoint. New York's full of
people with a scum over their eyes, but a lot of them came to New York
from Winnebago, or towns just like it, and you'd be surprised at the
number of them who still get their home town paper. One day, when I
came into Lee Kohl's office, with stars, and leading men, and all that
waiting outside to see him, he was sitting with his feet on the desk
reading the Sheffield, Illinois, Gazette.' You see, the thing he thinks
I can do is to give them a picture of New York as they used to see it,
before they got color blind. A column or so a day, about anything that
hits me. How does that strike you as a job for a naturalist?”
“It's a job for a human naturalist. I think you'll cover it.”
If you know the dunes, which you probably don't, you know why they did
not get off at Millers, with the crowd, but rode on until they were
free of the Sunday picnickers. Then they got off, and walked across the
tracks, past saloons, and a few huddled houses, hideous in yellow paint,
and on, and on down a road that seemed endless. A stretch of cinders,
then dust, a rather stiff little hill, a great length of yellow sand
and--the lake! We say, the lake! like that, with an exclamation point
after it, because it wasn't at all the Lake Michigan that Chicagoans
know. This vast blue glory bore no relation to the sullen, gray, turbid
thing that the city calls the lake. It was all the blues of which you've
ever heard, and every passing cloud gave it a new shade. Sapphire. No,
cobalt. No, that's too cold. Mediterranean. Turquoise. And the sand in
golden contrast. Miles of sand along the beach, and back of that the
dunes. Now, any dictionary or Scotchman will tell you that a dune is
a hill of loose sand. But these dunes are done in American fashion,
lavishly. Mountains of sand, as far as the eye can see, and on the top
of them, incredibly, great pine trees that clutch at their perilous,
shifting foothold with frantic root-toes. And behind that, still more
incredibly, the woods, filled with wild flowers, with strange growths
found nowhere else in the whole land, with trees, and vines, and brush,
and always the pungent scent of the pines. And there you have the
dunes--blue lake, golden sand-hills, green forest, in one.
Fanny and Clarence stood there on the sand, in silence, two ridiculously
diminutive figures in that great wilderness of beauty. I wish I could
get to you, somehow, the clear sparkle of it, the brilliance of it, and
yet the peace of it. They stood there a long while, those two, without
speaking. Then Fanny shut her eyes, and I think her lower lip trembled
just a little. And Clarence patted her hand just twice.
“I thank you,” he said, “in the name of that much-abused lady known as
Nature.”
Said Fanny, “I want to scramble up to the top of one of those dunes--the
high one--and just sit there.”
And that is what they did. A poor enough Sunday, I suppose, in the minds
of those of you who spend yours golfing at the club, or motoring along
grease-soaked roads that lead to a shore dinner and a ukulele band. But
it turned Fanny Brandeis back a dozen years or more, so that she was
again the little girl whose heart had ached at sight of the pale rose
and, orange of the Wisconsin winter sunsets. She forgot all about
layettes, and obstetrical outfits, and flannel bands, and safety pins;
her mind was a blank in the matter of bootees, and catalogues, and our
No. 29E8347, and those hungry bins that always yawned for more. She
forgot about Michael Fenger, and Theodore, and the new furs. They
scrambled up dunes, digging into the treacherous sand with heels, toes,
and the side of the foot, and clutching at fickle roots with frantic
fingers. Forward a step, and back two--that's dune climbing. A
back-breaking business, unless you're young and strong, as were these
two. They explored the woods, and Heyl had a fascinating way of talking
about stones and shrubs and trees as if they were endowed with human
qualities--as indeed they were for him. They found a hill-slope carpeted
with dwarf huckleberry plants, still bearing tiny clusters of the
blue-black fruit. Fanny's heart was pounding, her lungs ached, her
cheeks were scarlet, her eyes shining. Heyl, steel-muscled, took the
hills like a chamois. Once they crossed hands atop a dune and literally
skated down it, right, left, right, left, shrieking with laughter, and
ending in a heap at the bottom. “In the name of all that's idiotic!”
shouted Heyl. “Silk stockings! What in thunder made you wear silk
stockings! At the sand dunes! Gosh!”
They ate their dinner in olympic splendor, atop a dune. Heyl produced
unexpected things from the rucksack--things that ranged all the way from
milk chocolate to literature, and from grape juice to cigarettes.
They ate ravenously, but at Heyl's thrifty suggestion they saved a few
sandwiches for the late afternoon. It was he, too, who made a little
bonfire of papers, crusts, and bones, as is the cleanly habit of your
true woodsman. Then they stretched out, full length, in the noon sun, on
the warm, clean sand.
“What's your best price on one-sixth doz. flannel vests?” inquired Heyl.
And, “Oh, shut up!” said Fanny, elegantly. Heyl laughed as one who hugs
a secret.
“We'll work our way down the beach,” he announced, “toward Millers.
There'll be northern lights to-night; did you know that? Want to stay
and see them?”
“Do I want to! I won't go home till I have.”
These were the things they did on that holiday; childish, happy, tiring
things, such as people do who love the outdoors.
The charm of Clarence Heyl--for he had charm--is difficult to transmit.
His lovableness and appeal lay in his simplicity. It was not so much
what he said as in what he didn't say. He was staring unwinkingly now at
the sunset that had suddenly burst upon them. His were the eyes of one
accustomed to the silent distances.
“Takes your breath away, rather, doesn't it? All that color?” said
Fanny, her face toward the blaze.
“Almost too obvious for my taste. I like 'em a little more subdued,
myself.” They were atop a dune, and he stretched himself flat on the
sand, still keeping his bright brown eyes on lake and sky. Then he sat
up, excitedly. “Heh, try that! Lie flat. It softens the whole thing.
Like this. Now look at it. The lake's like molten copper flowing in.
And you can see that silly sun going down in jerks, like a balloon on a
string.”
They lay there, silent, while the scarlet became orange, the orange
faded to rose, the rose to pale pink, to salmon, to mauve, to gray.
The first pale star came out, and the brazen lights of Gary, far to the
north, defied it. Fanny sat up with a sigh and a little shiver.
“Fasten up that sweater around your throat,” said Heyl. “Got a pin?”
They munched their sandwiches, rather soggy by now, and drank the last
of the grape juice. “We'll have a bite of hot supper in town, at a
restaurant that doesn't mind Sunday trampers. Come on, Fan. We'll start
down the beach until the northern lights begin to show.”
“It's been the most accommodating day,” murmured Fanny. “Sunshine,
sunset, northern lights, everything. If we were to demand a rainbow and
an eclipse they'd turn those on, too.”
They started to walk down the beach in the twilight, keeping close to
the water's edge where the sand was moist and firm. It was hard going.
They plunged along arm in arm, in silence. Now and again they stopped,
with one accord, and looked out over the great gray expanse that lay
before them, and then up at the hills and the pines etched in black
against the sky. Nothing competitive here, Fanny thought, and took a
deep breath. She thought of to-morrow's work, with day after to-morrow's
biting and snapping at its heels.
Clarence seemed to sense her thoughts. “Doesn't this make you feel you
want to get away from those damned bins that you're forever feeding?
I watched those boys for a minute, the other day, outside your office.
Jove!”
Fanny dug a heel into the sand, savagely. “Some days I feel that I've
got to walk out of the office, and down the street, without a hat, and
on, and on, walking and walking, and running now and then, till I come
to the horizon. That's how I feel, some days.”
“Then some day, Fanny, that feeling will get too strong for you, and
you'll do it. Now listen to me. Tuck this away in your subconscious
mind, and leave it there until you need it. When that time comes get on
a train for Denver. From Denver take another to Estes Park. That's the
Rocky Mountains, and they're your destination, because that's where
the horizon lives and has its being. When you get there ask for Heyl's
place. They'll just hand you from one to the other, gently, until you
get there. I may be there, but more likely I shan't. The key's in the
mail box, tied to a string. You'll find a fire already laid, in the
fireplace, with fat pine knots that will blaze up at the touch of a
match. My books are there, along the walls. The bedding's in the cedar
chest, and the lamps are filled. There's tinned stuff in the pantry. And
the mountains are there, girl, to make you clean and whole again. And
the pines that are nature's prophylactic brushes. And the sky. And
peace. That sounds like a railway folder, but it's true. I know.” They
trudged along in silence for a little while. “Got that?”
“M-m,” replied Fanny, disinterestedly, without looking at him.
Heyl's jaw set. You could see the muscles show white for an instant.
Then he said: “It has been a wonderful day, Fanny, but you haven't told
me a thing about yourself. I'd like to know about your work. I'd like to
know what you're doing; what your plan is. You looked so darned
definite up there in that office. Whom do you play with? And who's this
Fenger--wasn't that the name?--who saw that you looked tired?”
“All right, Clancy. I'll tell you all about it,” Fanny agreed, briskly.
“All right--who!”
“Well, I can't call you Clarence. It doesn't fit. So just for the rest
of the day let's make it Clancy, even if you do look like one of the
minor Hebrew prophets, minus the beard.”
And so she began to tell him of her work and her aims. I think that she
had been craving just this chance to talk. That which she told him was,
unconsciously, a confession. She told him of Theodore and his marriage;
of her mother's death; of her coming to Haynes-Cooper, and the changes
she had brought about there. She showed him the infinite possibilities
for advancement there. Slosson she tossed aside. Then, rather haltingly,
she told him of Fenger, of his business genius, his magnetic qualities,
of his career. She even sketched a deft word-picture of the limp and
irritating Mrs. Fenger.
“Is this Fenger in love with you?” asked Heyl, startlingly.
Fanny recoiled at the idea with a primness that did credit to Winnebago.
“Clancy! Please! He's married.”
“Now don't sneak, Fanny. And don't talk like an ingenue. So far, you've
outlined a life-plan that makes Becky Sharp look like a cooing dove. So
just answer this straight, will you?”
“Why, I suppose I attract him, as any man of his sort, with a wife like
that, would be attracted to a healthily alert woman, whose ideas match
his. And I wish you wouldn't talk to me like that. It hurts.”
“I'm glad of that. I was afraid you'd passed that stage. Well now, how
about those sketches of yours? I suppose you know that they're as
good, in a crude, effective sort of way, as anything that's being done
to-day.”
“Oh, nonsense!” But then she stopped, suddenly, and put both hands on
his arm, and looked up at him, her face radiant in the gray twilight.
“Do you really think they're good!”
“You bet they're good. There isn't a newspaper in the country that
couldn't use that kind of stuff. And there aren't three people in the
country who can do it. It isn't a case of being able to draw. It's being
able to see life in a peculiar light, and to throw that light so that
others get the glow. Those sketches I saw this morning are life, served
up raw. That's your gift, Fanny. Why the devil don't you use it!”
But Fanny had got herself in hand again. “It isn't a gift,” she said,
lightly. “It's just a little knack that amuses me. There's no money in
it. Besides, it's too late now. One's got to do a thing superlatively,
nowadays, to be recognized. I don't draw superlatively, but I do handle
infants' wear better than any woman I know. In two more years I'll be
getting ten thousand a year at Haynes-Cooper. In five years----”
“Then what?”
Fanny's hands became fists, gripping the power she craved. “Then I shall
have arrived. I shall be able to see the great and beautiful things of
this world, and mingle with the people who possess them.”
“When you might be making them yourself, you little fool. Don't glare at
me like that. I tell you that those pictures are the real expression
of you. That's why you turn to them as relief from the shop grind. You
can't help doing them. They're you.”
“I can stop if I want to. They amuse me, that's all.”
“You can't stop. It's in your blood. It's the Jew in you.”
“The----Here, I'll show you. I won't do another sketch for a year. I'll
prove to you that my ancestors' religion doesn't influence my work, or
my play.”
“Dear, you can't prove that, because the contrary has been proven long
ago. You yourself proved it when you did that sketch of the old fish
vender in the Ghetto. The one with the beard. It took a thousand years
of suffering and persecution and faith to stamp that look on his face,
and it took a thousand years to breed in you the genius to see it, and
put it down on paper. Fan, did you ever read Fishberg's book?”
“No,” said Fanny, low-voiced.
“Sometime, when you can snatch a moment from the fascinations of the
mail order catalogue, read it. Fishberg says--I wish I could remember
his exact words--`It isn't the body that marks the Jew. It's his Soul.
The type is not anthropological, or physical; it's social or psychic. It
isn't the complexion, the nose, the lips, the head. It's his Soul which
betrays his faith. Centuries of Ghetto confinement, ostracism, ceaseless
suffering, have produced a psychic type. The thing that is stamped on
the Soul seeps through the veins and works its way magically to the
face----'”
“But I don't want to talk about souls! Please! You're spoiling a
wonderful day.”
“And you're spoiling a wonderful life. I don't object to this driving
ambition in you. I don't say that you're wrong in wanting to make a
place for yourself in the world. But don't expect me to stand by and let
you trample over your own immortal soul to get there. Your head is busy
enough on this infants' wear job, but how about the rest of you--how
about You? What do you suppose all those years of work, and suppression,
and self-denial, and beauty-hunger there in Winnebago were meant for!
Not to develop the mail order business. They were given you so that you
might recognize hunger, and suppression, and self-denial in others. The
light in the face of that girl in the crowd pouring out of the plant.
What's that but the reflection of the light in you! I tell you, Fanny,
we Jews have got a money-grubbing, loud-talking, diamond-studded,
get-there-at-any-price reputation, and perhaps we deserve it. But every
now and then, out of the mass of us, one lifts his head and stands
erect, and the great white light is in his face. And that person has
suffered, for suffering breeds genius. It expands the soul just as
over-prosperity shrivels it. You see it all the way from Lew Fields to
Sarah Bernhardt; from Mendelssohn to Irving Berlin; from Mischa Elman
to Charlie Chaplin. You were a person set apart in Winnebago. Instead of
thanking your God for that, you set out to be something you aren't. No,
it's worse than that. You're trying not to be what you are. And it's
going to do for you.”
“Stop!” cried Fanny. “My head's whirling. It sounds like something out
of `Alice in Wonderland.'”
“And you,” retorted Heyl, “sound like some one who's afraid to talk or
think about herself. You're suppressing the thing that is you. You're
cutting yourself off from your own people--a dramatic, impulsive,
emotional people. By doing those things you're killing the goose that
lays the golden egg. What's that old copy-book line? `To thine own self
be true,' and the rest of it.”
“Yes; like Theodore, for example,” sneered Fanny.
At which unpleasant point Nature kindly supplied a diversion. Across
the black sky there shot two luminous shafts of lights. Northern lights,
pale sisters of the chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still
weirdly beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned. The
ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like celestial
searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each shaft, there burst a
cluster of slender, pin-point lines, like aigrettes set in a band of
silver. Then these slowly wavered, faded, combined to form a third and
fourth slender shaft of light. It was like the radiance one sees in the
old pictures of the Holy Family. Together Fanny and Heyl watched it in
silence until the last pale glimmer faded and was gone, and only the
brazen lights of Gary, far, far down the beach, cast a fiery glow
against the sky.
They sighed, simultaneously. Then they laughed, each at the other.
“Curtain,” said Fanny. They raced for the station, despite the sand.
Their car was filled with pudgy babies lying limp in parental arms;
with lunch baskets exuding the sickly scent of bananas; with disheveled
vandals whose moist palms grasped bunches of wilted wild flowers. Past
the belching chimneys of Gary, through South Chicago, the back yard of a
metropolis, past Jackson Park that breathed coolly upon them, and so to
the city again. They looked at it with the shock that comes to eyes
that have rested for hours on long stretches of sand and sky and water.
Monday, that had seemed so far away, became an actuality of to-morrow.
Tired as they were, they stopped at one of those frank little
restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were
full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely
tempting, and of baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup. These flanked
by ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of golden grape-fruit.
Coffee and hot roast beef sandwiches, of course, in a place like that.
“And,” added Fanny, “one of those baked apples. Just to prove they can't
be as good as they look.”
They weren't, but she was too hungry to care. Not too hungry, though, to
note with quick eye all that the little restaurant held of interest, nor
too sleepy to respond to the friendly waitress who, seeing their dusty
boots, and the sprig of sumac stuck in Fanny's coat, said, “My, it
must have been swell in the country today!” as her flapping napkin
precipitated crumbs into their laps.
“It was,” said Fanny, and smiled up at the girl with her generous,
flashing smile. “Here's a bit of it I brought back for you.” And she
stuck the scarlet sumac sprig into the belt of the white apron.
They finished the day incongruously by taking a taxi home, Fanny yawning
luxuriously all the way. “Do you know,” she said, as they parted, “we've
talked about everything from souls to infants' wear. We're talked out.
It's a mercy you're going to New York. There won't be a next time.”
“Young woman,” said Heyl, forcefully, “there will. That young devil
in the red tam isn't dead. She's alive. And kicking. There's a kick in
every one of those Chicago sketches in your portfolio upstairs. You said
she wouldn't fight anybody's battles to-day. You little idiot, she's
fighting one in each of those pictures, from the one showing that girl's
face in the crowd, to the old chap with the fish-stall. She'll never die
that one. Because she's the spirit. It's the other one who's dead--and
she doesn't know it. But some day she'll find herself buried. And I want
to be there to shovel on the dirt.”