He leaned down to kiss her at that. "Gee!"
She was standing, her shoulder to him and head thrown back against his chest. She looked up to stroke his cheek, her face foreshortened.
"I'm all black and blue pinching myself, Jimmie."
"Me too."
"Every night when I get home from working here in the flat I say to myself in the looking-glass, I say, 'Gertie Slayback, what if you're only dreamin'?'"
"Me too."
"I say to myself, 'Are you sure that darling flat up there, with the new pink-and-white wall-paper and the furniture arriving every day, is going to be yours in a few days when you're Mrs. Jimmie Batch?'"
"Mrs. Jimmie Batch—say, that's immense."
"I keep saying it to myself every night, 'One day less.' Last night it was two days. To-night it'll be—one day, Jimmie, till I'm—her."
She closed her eyes and let her hand linger up to his cheek, head still back against him, so that, inclining his head, he could rest his lips in the ash-blond fluff of her hair.
"Talk about can't wait! If to-morrow was any farther off they'd have to sweep out a padded cell for me."
She turned to rumple the smooth light thatch of his hair. "Bad boy! Can't wait! And here we are getting married all of a sudden, just like that. Up to the time of this draft business, Jimmie Batch, 'pretty soon' was the only date I could ever get out of you, and now here you are crying over one day's wait. Bad honey boy!"
He reached back for the pink newspaper so habitually protruding from his hip-pocket. "You ought to see the way they're neck-breaking for the marriage-license bureaus since the draft. First thing we know the whole shebang of the boys will be claiming exemption of sole support of wife."
"It's a good thing we made up our minds quick, Jimmie. They'll be getting wise. If too many get exemption from the army by marrying right away, it'll be a give-away."
"I'd like to know who can lay his hands on the exemption of a little wife to support."
"Oh, Jimmie, it—it sounds so funny. Being supported! Me that always did the supporting, not only to me, but to my mother and great-grandmother up to the day they died."
"I'm the greatest little supporter you ever seen."
"Me getting up mornings to stay at home in my own darling little flat, and no basement or time-clock. Nothing but a busy little hubby to eat him nice, smelly, bacon breakfast and grab him nice morning newspaper, kiss him wifie, and run downtown to support her. Jimmie, every morning for your breakfast I'm going to fry——"
"You bet your life he's going to support her, and he's going to pay back that forty dollars of his girl's that went into his wedding duds, that hundred and ninety of his girl's savings that went into furniture——"
"We got to meet our instalments every month first, Jimmie. That's what we want—no debts and every little darling piece of furniture paid up."
"We—I'm going to pay it, too."
"And my Jimmie is going to work to get himself promoted and quit being a sorehead at his steady hours and all."
"I know more about selling, honey, than the whole bunch of dubs in that store put together if they'd give me a chance to prove it."
She laid her palm to his lips.
"Shh-h-h! You don't nothing of the kind. It's not conceit, it's work is going to get my boy his raise."
"If they'd listen to me, that department would——"
"Sh-h-h! J. G. Hoffheimer don't have to get pointers from Jimmie Batch how to run his department store."
"There you go again. What's J. G. Hoffheimer got that I ain't? Luck and a few dollars in his pocket that, if I had in mine, would——"
"It was his own grit put those dollars there, Jimmie. Just put it out of your head that it's luck makes a self-made man."
"Self-made! You mean things just broke right for him. That's two-thirds of this self-made business."
"You mean he buckled right down to brass tacks, and that's what my boy is going to do."
"The trouble with this world is it takes money to make money. Get your first few dollars, I always say, no matter how, and then when you're on your feet scratch your conscience if it itches. That's why I said in the beginning, if we had took that hundred and ninety furniture money and staked it on——"
"Jimmie, please—please! You wouldn't want to take a girl's savings of years and years to gamble on a sporty cigar proposition with a card-room in the rear. You wouldn't, Jimmie. You ain't that kind of fellow. Tell me you wouldn't, Jimmie."
He turned away to dive into the barrel. "Naw," he said. "I wouldn't."
The sun had receded, leaving a sudden sullen gray; the little square room, littered with an upheaval of excelsior,sheet-shrouded furniture, and the paper-hanger's paraphernalia and inimitable smells, darkening and seeming to chill.
"We got to quit now, Jimmie. It's getting dark and the gas ain't turned on in the meter yet."
He rose up out of the barrel, holding out at arm's-length what might have been a tinsmith's version of a porcupine.
"What in— What's this thing that scratched me?"
She danced to take it. "It's a grater, a darling grater for horseradish and nutmeg and cocoanut. I'm going to fix you a cocoanut cake for our honeymoon supper to-morrow night, honey-bee. Essie Wohlgemuth over in the cake-demonstrating department is going to bring me the recipe. Cocoanut cake! And I'm going to fry us a little steak in this darling little skillet. Ain't it the cutest!"
"Cute she calls a tin skillet."
"Look what's pasted on it. 'Little Housewife's Skillet. The Kitchen Fairy.' That's what I'm going to be, Jimmie, the kitchen fairy. Give me that. It's a rolling-pin. All my life I've wanted a rolling-pin. Look honey, a little string to hang it up by. I'm going to hang everything up in rows. It's going to look like Tiffany's kitchen, all shiny. Give me, honey; that's an egg-beater. Look at it whiz. And this—this is a pan for war bread. I'm going to make us war bread to help the soldiers."
"You're a little soldier yourself," he said.
"That's what I would be if I was a man, a soldier all in brass buttons."
"There's a bunch of the fellows going," said Mr. Batch, standing at the window, looking out over roofs, dilly-dallying up and down on his heels and breaking into a low, contemplative whistle.
She was at his shoulder, peering over it. "You wouldn't be afraid, would you, Jimmie?"
"You bet your life I wouldn't."
She was tiptoes now, her arms creeping up to him. "Onlymy boy's got a wife—a brand-new wifie to support, ain't he?"
"That's what he has," said Mr. Batch, stroking her forearm, but still gazing through and beyond whatever roofs he was seeing.
"Jimmie!"
"Huh?"
"Look! We got a view of the Hudson River from our flat, just like we lived on Riverside Drive."
"All the Hudson River I can see is fifteen smokestacks and somebody's wash-line out."
"It ain't so. We got a grand view. Look! Stand on tiptoe, Jimmie, like me. There, between that water-tank on that black roof over there and them two chimneys. See? Watch my finger. A little stream of something over there that moves."
"No, I don't see."
"Look, honey-bee, close! See that little streak?"
"All right, then, if you see it I see it."
"To think we got a river view from our flat! It's like living in the country. I'll peek out at it all day long. God! honey, I just never will be over the happiness of being done with basements."
"It was swell of old Higgins to give us this half-Saturday. It shows where you stood with the management, Gert—this and a five-dollar gold piece. Lord knows they wouldn't pony up that way if it was me getting married by myself."
"It's because my boy ain't shown them down there yet the best that's in him. You just watch his little safety-first wife see to it that from now on he keeps up her record of never in seven years pushing the time-clock even one minute late, and that he keeps his stock shelves O. K. and shows his department he's a comer-on."
"With that bunch of boobs a fellow's got a swell chance to get anywheres."
"It's getting late, Jimmie. It don't look nice for us tostay here so late alone, not till—to-morrow. Ruby and Essie and Charley are going to meet us in the minister's back parlor at ten sharp in the morning. We can be back here by noon and get the place cleared up enough to give 'em a little lunch, just a fun lunch without fixings."
"I hope the old guy don't waste no time splicing us. It's one of the things a fellow likes to have over with."
"Jimmie! Why, it's the most beautiful thing in the world, like a garden of lilies or—or something, a marriage ceremony is! You got the ring safe, honey-bee, and the license?"
"Pinned in my pocket where you put 'em, Flirty Gertie."
"Flirty Gertie! Now you'll begin teasing me with that all our life—the way I didn't slap your face that night when I should have. I just couldn't have, honey. Goes to show we were just cut and dried for each other, don't it? Me, a girl that never in her life let a fellow even bat his eyes at her without an introduction. But that night when you winked, honey—something inside of me just winked back."
"My girl!"
"You mean it, boy? You ain't sorry about nothing, Jimmie?"
"Sorry? Well, I guess not!"
"You seen the way—she—May—you seen for yourself what she was, when we seen her walking, that next night after Ceiner's, nearly staggering, up Sixth Avenue with Budge Evans."
"I never took no stock in her, honey. I was just letting her like me."
She sat back on the box edge, regarding him, her face so soft and wont to smile that she could not keep its composure.
"Get me my hat and coat, honey. We'll walk down. Got the key?"
They skirmished in the gloom, moving through slit-like aisles of furniture and packing-box.
"Ouch!"
"Oh, the running water is hot, Jimmie, just like the ad. said! We got red-hot running water in our flat. Close the front windows, honey. We don't want it to rain in on our new green sofa. Not till it's paid for, anyways."
"Hurry."
"I'm ready."
They met at the door, kissing on the inside and the outside of it; at the head of the fourth and the third and the second balustrade down.
"We'll always make 'em little love landings, Jimmie, so we can't ever get tired climbing them."
"Yep."
Outside there was still a pink glow in a clean sky. The first flush of spring in the air had died, leaving chill. They walked briskly, arm in arm, down the asphalt incline of sidewalk leading from their apartment-house, a new street of canned homes built on a hillside—the sepulchral abode of the city's trapped whose only escape is down the fire-escape, and then only when the alternative is death. At the base of the hill there flows, in constant hubbub, a great up-and-down artery of street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation. Housewives with perambulators and oilcloth shopping bags. Children on roller-skates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unboarded all summer, and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak and mess of rutabaga.
Then there is the soap-box provender, too, sure of a crowd, offering creed, propaganda, patent medicine, and politics. It is the pulpit of the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soap-box. From it the voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost always a raucous one. Luther and Sophocles and even a Citizen of Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a temple ofwisdom. What more fitting acropolis for freedom of speech than the great out-of-doors!
Turning from the incline of cross-street into this petty Bagdad of the petty wise, the voice of the street corner lifted itself above the inarticulate din of the thoroughfare. A youth, thewed like an ox, surmounted on a stack of three self-provided canned-goods boxes, his in-at-the-waist silhouette thrown out against a sky that was almost ready to break out in stars; a crowd tightening about him.
"It's a soldier-boy talkin', Gert."
"If it ain't!" They tiptoed at the fringe of the circle, heads back.
"Look, Gert, he's a lieutenant; he's got a shoulder-bar. And those four down there holding the flag are just privates. You can always tell a lieutenant by the bar."
"Uh-huh."
"Say, them boys do stack up some for Uncle Sam."
"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie!"
"I'm here to tell you that them boys stack up some."
A banner stiffened out in the breeze, Mr. Batch reading: "Enlist before you are drafted. Last chance to beat the draft. Prove your patriotism. Enlist now! Your country calls!"
"Come on," said Mr. Batch.
"Wait. I want to hear what he's saying."
" ... there's not a man here before me can afford to shirk his duty to his country. The slacker can't get along without his country, but his country can very easily get along without him."
Cheers.
"The poor exemption boobs are already running for doctors' certificates and marriage licenses, but even if they get by with it—and it is ninety-nine to one they won't—they can't run away from their own degradation and shame."
"Come on, Jimmie."
"Wait."
"Men of America, for every one of you who tries to dodge his duty to his country there is a yellow streak somewhere underneath the hide of you. Women of America, every one of you that helps to foster the spirit of cowardice in your particular man or men is helping to make a coward. It's the cowards and the quitters and the slackers and dodgers that need this war more than the patriotic ones who are willing to buckle on and go!
"Don't be a buttonhole patriot! A government that is good enough to live under is good enough to fight under!"
Cheers.
"If there is any reason on earth that has manifested itself for this devastating and terrible war it is that it has been a maker of men.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I am back from four months in the trenches with the French army, and I've come home, now that my own country is at war, to give her every ounce of energy I've got to offer. As soon as a hole in my side is healed up I'm going back to those trenches, and I want to say to you that them four months of mine face to face with life and with death have done more for me than all my twenty-four civilian years put together."
Cheers.
"I'll be a different man, if I live to come back home after this war and take up my work again as a draftsman. Why, I've seen weaklings and self-confessed failures and even ninnies go into them trenches and come out—oh yes, plenty of them do come out—men. Men that have got close enough down to the facts of things to feel new realizations of what life means come over them. Men that have gotten back their pep, their ambitions, their unselfishness. That's what war can do for your men, you women who are helping them to foster the spirit of holding back, of cheating their government. That's what war can do for your men. Make of them the kind of men who some day can face their children without havingto hang their heads. Men who can answer for their part in making the world a safe place for democracy."
An hour they stood there, the air quieting but chilling, and lavishly sown stars cropping out. Street lights had come out, too, throwing up in ever darker relief the figure above the heads of the crowd. His voice had coarsened and taken on a raw edge, but every gesture was flung from the socket, and from where they had forced themselves into the tight circle Gertie Slayback, her mouth fallen open and her head still back, could see the sinews of him ripple under khaki and the diaphragm lift for voice.
There was a shift of speakers then, this time a private, still too rangy, but his looseness of frame seeming already to conform to the exigency of uniform.
"Come on, Jimmie. I—I'm cold."
They worked out into the freedom of the sidewalk, and for ten minutes, down blocks of petty shops already lighted, walked in a silence that grew apace.
He was suddenly conscious that she was crying, quietly, her handkerchief wadded against her mouth. He strode on with a scowl and his head bent.
"Let's sit down in this little park, Jimmie. I'm tired."
They rested on a bench on one of those small triangles of breathing-space which the city ekes out now and then; mill ends of land parcels.
He took immediately to roving the toe of his shoe in and out among the gravel. She stole out her hand to his arm.
"Well, Jimmie?" Her voice was in the gauze of a whisper that hardly left her throat.
"Well, what?" he said, still toeing.
"There—there's a lot of things we never thought about, Jimmie."
"Aw!"
"Eh, Jimmie?"
"You meanyounever thought about."
"What do you mean?"
"I know what I mean alrighty."
"I—I was the one that suggested it, Jimmie, but—but you fell in. I—I just couldn't bear to think of it, Jimmie—your going and all. I suggested it, but—you fell in."
"Say, when a fellow's shoved he falls. I never gave a thought to sneaking an exemption until it was put in my head. I'd smash the fellow in the face that calls me coward, I will."
"You could have knocked me down with a feather, Jimmie, looking at it his way, all of a sudden."
"You couldn't me. Don't think I was ever strong for the whole business. I mean the exemption part. I wasn't going to say nothing. What's the use, seeing the way you had your heart set on—on things? But the whole business, if you want to know it, went against my grain. I'll smash the fellow in the face that calls me a coward."
"I know, Jimmie; you—you're right. It was me suggested hurrying things like this. Sneakin'! Oh, God! ain't I the messer-up!"
"Lay easy, girl. I'm going to see it through. I guess there's been fellows before me and will be after me who have done worse. I'm going to see it through. All I got to say is I'll smash up the fellow calls me coward. Come on, forget it. Let's go."
She was close to him, her cheek crinkled against his with the frank kind of social unconsciousness the park bench seems to engender.
"Come on, Gert. I got a hunger on."
"'Shh-h-h, Jimmie! Let me think. I'm thinking."
"Too much thinking killed a cat. Come on."
"Jimmie!"
"Huh?"
"Jimmie—would you—had you ever thought about being a soldier?"
"Sure. I came in an ace of going into the army that time after—after that little Central Street trouble of mine. I've got a book in my trunk this minute on military tactics. Wouldn't surprise me a bit to see me land in the army some day."
"It's a fine thing, Jimmie, for a fellow—the army."
"Yeh, good for what ails him."
She drew him back, pulling at his shoulder so that finally he faced her. "Jimmie!"
"Huh?"
"I got an idea."
"Shoot."
"You remember once, honey-bee, how I put it to you that night at Ceiner's how, if it was for your good, no sacrifice was too much to make."
"Forget it."
"You didn't believe it."
"Aw, say now, what's the use digging up ancient history?"
"You'd be right, Jimmie, not to believe it. I haven't lived up to what I said."
"Oh Lord, honey! What's eating you now? Come to the point."
She would not meet his eyes, turning her head from him to hide lips that would quiver. "Honey, it—it ain't coming off—that's all. Not now—anyways."
"What ain't?"
"Us."
"Who?"
"You know what I mean, Jimmie. It's like everything the soldier boy on the corner just said. I—I saw you getting red clear behind your ears over it. I—I was, too, Jimmie. It's like that soldier boy was put there on that corner just to show me, before it was too late, how wrong I been in every one of my ways. Us women who are helping to foster slackers.That's what we're making of them—slackers for life. And here I been thinking it was your good I had in mind, when all along it's been mine. That's what it's been, mine!"
"Aw, now, Gert——"
"You got to go, Jimmie. You got to go, because you want to go and—because I want you to go."
"Where?"
"To war."
He took hold of her two arms because they were trembling. "Aw, now, Gert, I didn't say anything complaining. I——"
"You did, Jimmie, you did, and—and I never was so glad over you that you did complain. I just never was so glad. I want you to go, Jimmie. I want you to go and get a man made out of you. They'll make a better job out of you than ever I can. I want you to get the yellow streak washed out. I want you to get to be all the things he said you would. For every line he was talking up there, I could see my boy coming home to me some day better than anything I could make out of him, babying him the way I can't help doing. I could see you, honey-bee, coming back to me with the kind of lift to your head a fellow has when he's been fighting to make the world a safe place for dem—for whatever it was he said. I want you to go, Jimmie. I want you to beat the draft, too. Nothing on earth can make me not want you to go."
"Why, Gert—you're kiddin'!"
"Honey, you want to go, don't you? You want to square up those shoulders and put on khaki, don't you? Tell me you want to go!"
"Why—why, yes, Gert, if——"
"Oh, you're going, Jimmie! You're going!"
"Why, girl—you're crazy! Our flat! Our furniture—our——"
"What's a flat? What's furniture? What's anything? There's not a firm in business wouldn't take back a boy'sfurniture—a boy's everything—that's going out to fight for—for dem-o-cracy! What's a flat? What's anything?"
He let drop his head to hide his eyes.
Do you know it is said that on the Desert of Sahara, the slope of Sorrento, and the marble of Fifth Avenue the sun can shine whitest? There is an iridescence to its glittering on bleached sand, blue bay, and Carrara façade that is sheer light distilled to its utmost.
On one such day when, standing on the high slope of Fifth Avenue where it rises toward the Park, and looking down on it, surging to and fro, it was as if, so manifest the brilliancy, every head wore a tin helmet, parrying sunlight at a thousand angles of refraction.
Parade-day, all this glittering midstream is swept to the clean sheen of a strip of moiré, this splendid desolation blocked on each side by crowds half the density of the sidewalk.
On one of these sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire of war.
There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national consciousness. A gauntlet down, and it surges up. One ripple of a flag defended can goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to give a soldier!
To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling hysteria, or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers, receding in that great impersonal wave of olive drab.
And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout.And the ecstasy of such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is in the pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams break, excoriating.
For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave of men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and call of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for still another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk crowds.
From the middle of his line, she could see, sometimes, the tail of Jimmie Batch's glance roving for her, but to all purports his eye was solely for his own replica in front of him, and at such times, when he marched, his back had a little additional straightness that was almost swayback.
Nor was Gertie Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance over which she seemed to have no control.
"'By, Jimmie. So long! Jimmie! You-hoo!"
Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.
"You-hoo! Jimmie! So long, Jimmie!"
At Fourteenth Street, and to the solemn stroke of one from a tower, she broke off suddenly without even a second look back, dodging under the very arms of the crowd as she ran out from it.
She was one and three-quarter minutes late when she punched the time-clock beside the Complaints and Adjustment Desk in the Bargain-Basement.
"I find myself at twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I would be." So Miss Hurst, in a sketch written for theAmerican Magazine(March, 1919), sums up the story of a remarkable literary career.
Fannie Hurst was born in St. Louis, October 19, 1889. She attended the public schools, and began to write—with the firm intention of becoming an author—before she was out of grammar school. "At fourteen," she tells us in the article just referred to, "the one pigeon-hole of my little girl's desk was already stuffed with packets of rejected verse which had been furtively written, furtively mailed, and still more furtively received back again by heading off the postman a block before he reached our door." To this dream of authorship—the secret of which was carefully guarded from her family—she sacrificed her play and even her study hours. The first shock to her family came on St. Valentine's Day. There was to be a party that night, her first real party. A new dress was ready for the occasion, and a boy escort was to call for her in a cab. It happened that Valentine's day fell on Saturday, and Saturday was her time for writing. That day she turned from poetry to fiction, and was just in the middle of her first story when it came time to get ready for the party. She did not get ready. The escort arrived, cab and all; the family protested, but all to no purpose. She finished the story, mailed it, three weeks later received it back, and began her second story. All through her high school days she mailed a manuscript every Saturday, and they always came back.
After high school she entered Washington University, St. Louis, graduating in1909.And still she kept writing. Toone journal alone she sent during those four years, thirty-four short stories. And they all came back—all but one. Just before graduation she sold her first article, a little sketch first written as a daily theme, which was published in a local weekly, and brought her three dollars. This was the total result of eight years' literary effort. So quite naturally she determined to go on.
She announced to her family that she was going to New York City to become a writer. There was a stormy discussion in the Hurst family, but it ended in her going away, with a bundle of manuscripts in her trunk, to brave the big city alone. She found a tiny furnished room and set forth to besiege the editors' offices. One evening she returned, to find the house being raided, a patrol wagon at the curb, and the lodgers being hustled into it. She crossed the street and walked on, and never saw her bag or baggage again. By the help of the Young Women's Christian Association she found another room, in different surroundings, and set out again to make the round of the editorial offices.
Then followed months and months of "writing, rewriting, rejections, and re-rejections." From home came letters now beseeching, now commanding her to return, and at length cutting off her allowance. So she returned her rented typewriter and applied at a theatrical agency. She secured a small part in a Broadway company, and then came her first acceptance of a story, with an actual check for thirty dollars. She left the stage and rented another typewriter,—but it was six months before she sold another story.
In all this time she dipped deeply into the great stream of the city's life. To quote her own account:
For a month I lived with an Armenian family on West Broadway, in a room over a tobacconist's shop. I apprenticed myself as a sales-girl in New York's most gigantic department store. Four and one-quarter yards of ribbon at seven and a half cents a yard proved my Waterloo, and my resignation at the end of one weekwas not entirely voluntary. I served as waitress in one of New York's most gigantic chain of white-tiled lunch rooms. I stitched boys' pants in a Polish sweatshop, and lived for two days in New York's most rococo hotel. I took a graduate course in Anglo Saxon at Columbia University, and one in lamp-shade making at Wanamaker's: wormed into a Broadway musical show as wardrobe girl, and went out on a self-appointed newspaper assignment to interview the mother of the richest baby in the world.
For a month I lived with an Armenian family on West Broadway, in a room over a tobacconist's shop. I apprenticed myself as a sales-girl in New York's most gigantic department store. Four and one-quarter yards of ribbon at seven and a half cents a yard proved my Waterloo, and my resignation at the end of one weekwas not entirely voluntary. I served as waitress in one of New York's most gigantic chain of white-tiled lunch rooms. I stitched boys' pants in a Polish sweatshop, and lived for two days in New York's most rococo hotel. I took a graduate course in Anglo Saxon at Columbia University, and one in lamp-shade making at Wanamaker's: wormed into a Broadway musical show as wardrobe girl, and went out on a self-appointed newspaper assignment to interview the mother of the richest baby in the world.
All these experiences yielded rich material for stories, but no one would print them. Her money was gone; so was a diamond ring that had been a Commencement present; it seemed as if there was nothing left but to give up the struggle and go back home. Then, just as she had struck bottom, an editor actually told her she could write, and followed up his remark by buying three stories. Since that time she has never had a story rejected, and her checks have gone up from two figures into four. And so, at the end of a long fight, as she says, "I find myself at twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I would be. And best of all, what popular success I am enjoying has come not from pandering to popular demand or editorial policy, but from pandering to my own inner convictions, which are like little soul-tapers, lighting the way."
All her work has been in the form of the short story. Her first book,Just Around the Corner, published in 1914, is a collection of stories dealing with the life of working girls in a city.Every Soul Hath Its Songis a similar collection; the title suggests the author's outlook upon life. Some one has said that in looking at a puddle of water, you may see either the mud at the bottom or the sky reflected on its surface. Miss Hurst sees the reflection of the sky. TheBoston Transcriptsaid of this book: "Here at last is a story writer who is bent on listening to the voices of America and interpreting them."Gaslight Sonatas, from which "Bitter-Sweet" is taken, showed an advance over her earlier work. Two of the stories from this volume were selected by Mr. O'Brien for his volume,Best Short Stories, for 1916 and 1917.Humoresque, her latest work, continues her studies of city types, drawn from New York and St. Louis. The stories show her insight into character and her graphic descriptive power. Miss Hurst is also the author of two plays,The Land of the FreeandThe Good Provider.
The men of the woods are not as the men of the cities. The great open spaces where men battle with the primeval forest set their mark upon their inhabitants, not only in physique but in character. The lumberman,—rough, frank, independent, humorous, equally ready for a fight or a frolic, has been portrayed at full length by Stewart Edward White inThe Blazed TrailandThe Riverman.In the following sketch, taken from hisBlazed Trail Stories,he shows the lumberman at work and at play.
I first met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled to the brim with people. The permanent population, dressed in the stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted gingham wives or sweethearts; a dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a city smartness; but the great multitude was composed of the men of the woods. I sat, chair-tilted by the hotel, watching them pass. Their heavy woollen shirts crossed by the broad suspenders, the red of their sashes or leather shine of their belts, their short kersey trousers "stagged" off to leave a gap between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork boots"—all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all without exception wrinkled at the corners with a suggestion of dry humor. In my half-conscious scrutiny I probably stared harder than I knew, for all at once a laughing pair of blue eyes suddenly met mine full, and an ironical voice drawled,
"Say, bub, you look as interested as a man killing snakes. Am I your long-lost friend?"
The tone of the voice matched accurately the attitude of theman, and that was quite non-committal. He stood cheerfully ready to meet the emergency. If I sought trouble, it was here to my hand; or if I needed help he was willing to offer it.
"I guess you are," I replied, "if you can tell me what all this outfit's headed for."
He thrust back his hat and ran his hand through a mop of closely cropped light curls.
"Birling match," he explained briefly. "Come on."
I joined him, and together we followed the crowd to the river, where we roosted like cormorants on adjacent piles overlooking a patch of clear water among filled booms.
"Drive just over," my new friend informed me. "Rear come down last night. Fourther July celebration. This little town will scratch fer th' tall timber along about midnight when the boys goes in to take her apart."
A half-dozen men with peavies rolled a white-pine log of about a foot and a half in diameter into the clear water, where it lay rocking back and forth, three or four feet from the boom piles. Suddenly a man ran the length of the boom, leaped easily into the air, and landed with both feet square on one end of the floating log. That end disappeared in an ankle-deep swirl of white foam, the other rose suddenly, the whole timber, projected forward by the shock, drove headlong to the middle of the little pond. And the man, his arms folded, his knees just bent in the graceful nervous attitude of the circus-rider, stood upright like a statue of bronze.
A roar approved this feat.
"That's Dickey Darrell," said my informant, "Roaring Dick. He's hellandrepeat. Watch him."
The man on the log was small, with clean beautiful haunches and shoulders, but with hanging baboon arms. Perhaps his most striking feature was a mop of reddish-brown hair that overshadowed a little triangular white face accented by two reddish-brown quadrilaterals that served as eyebrows and a pair of inscrutable chipmunk eyes.
For a moment he poised erect in the great calm of the public performer. Then slowly he began to revolve the log under his feet. The lofty gaze, the folded arms, the straight supple waist budged not by a hair's breadth; only the feet stepped forward, at first deliberately, then faster and faster, until the rolling log threw a blue spray a foot into the air. Then suddenlyslap! slap!the heavy caulks stamped a reversal. The log came instantaneously to rest, quivering exactly like some animal that had been spurred through its paces.
"Magnificent!" I cried.
"Hell, that's nothing!" my companion repressed me, "anybody can birl a log. Watch this."
Roaring Dick for the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility. Then he turned a somersault.
This was the real thing. My friend uttered a wild yell of applause which was lost in a general roar.
A long pike-pole shot out, bit the end of the timber, and towed it to the boom pile. Another man stepped on the log with Darrell. They stood facing each other, bent-kneed, alert. Suddenly with one accord they commenced to birl the log from left to right. The pace grew hot. Like squirrels treading a cage their feet twinkled. Then it became apparent that Darrell's opponent was gradually being forced from the top of the log. He could not keep up. Little by little, still moving desperately, he dropped back to the slant, then at last to the edge, and so off into the river with a mighty splash.
"Clean birled!" commented my friend.
One after another a half-dozen rivermen tackled the imperturbable Dick, but none of them possessed the agility to stay on top in the pace he set them. One boy of eighteen seemed for a moment to hold his own, and managed at least to keep out of the water even when Darrell had apparently reached his maximum speed. But that expert merely threw hisentire weight into two reversing stamps of his feet, and the young fellow dove forward as abruptly as though he had been shied over a horse's head.
The crowd was by now getting uproarious and impatient of volunteer effort to humble Darrell's challenge. It wanted the best, and at once. It began, with increasing insistence, to shout a name.
"Jimmy Powers!" it vociferated, "Jimmy Powers!"
And then by shamefaced bashfulness, by profane protest, by muttered and comprehensive curses I knew that my companion on the other pile was indicated.
A dozen men near at hand began to shout. "Here he is!" they cried. "Come on, Jimmy." "Don't be a high banker." "Hang his hide on the fence."
Jimmy, still red and swearing, suffered himself to be pulled from his elevation and disappeared in the throng. A moment later I caught his head and shoulders pushing toward the boom piles, and so in a moment he stepped warily aboard to face his antagonist.
This was evidently no question to be determined by the simplicity of force or the simplicity of a child's trick. The two men stood half-crouched, face to face, watching each other narrowly, but making no move. To me they seemed like two wrestlers sparring for an opening. Slowly the log revolved one way; then slowly the other. It was a mere courtesy of salute. All at once Dick birled three rapid strokes from left to right as though about to roll the log, leaped into the air and landed square with both feet on the other slant of the timber. Jimmy Powers felt the jar, and acknowledged it by a spasmodic jerk with which he counterbalanced Darrell's weight. But he was not thrown.
As though this daring and hazardous manœuvre had opened the combat, both men sprang to life. Sometimes the log rolled one way, sometimes the other, sometimes it jerked from side to side like a crazy thing, but always with the rapidity of light,always in a smother of spray and foam. The decidedspat, spat, spatof the reversing blows from the caulked boots sounded like picket firing. I could not make out the different leads, feints, parries, and counters of this strange method of boxing, nor could I distinguish to whose initiative the various evolutions of that log could be ascribed. But I retain still a vivid mental picture of two men nearly motionless above the waist, nearly vibrant below it, dominating the insane gyrations of a stick of pine.
The crowd was appreciative and partisan—for Jimmy Powers. It howled wildly, and rose thereby to even higher excitement. Then it forgot its manners utterly and groaned when it made out that a sudden splash represented its favorite, while the indomitable Darrell still trod the quarter-deck as champion birler for the year.
I must confess I was as sorry as anybody. I climbed down from my cormorant roost, and picked my way between the alleys of aromatic piled lumber in order to avoid the press, and cursed the little gods heartily for undue partiality in the wrong direction. In this manner I happened on Jimmy Powers himself seated dripping on a board and examining his bare foot.
"I'm sorry," said I behind him. "How did he do it?"
He whirled, and I could see that his laughing boyish face had become suddenly grim and stern, and that his eyes were shot with blood.
"Oh, it's you, is it?" he growled disparagingly. "Well, that's how he did it."
He held out his foot. Across the instep and at the base of the toes ran two rows of tiny round punctures from which the blood was oozing. I looked very inquiring.
"He corked me!" Jimmy Powers explained. "Jammed his spikes into me! Stepped on my foot and tripped me, the——" Jimmy Powers certainly could swear.
"Why didn't you make a kick?" I cried.
"That ain't how I do it," he muttered, pulling on his heavy woollen sock.
"But no," I insisted, my indignation mounting. "It's an outrage! That crowd was with you. All you had to do was tosaysomething——"
He cut me short. "And give myself away as a damn fool—sure Mike. I ought to know Dickey Darrell by this time, and I ought to be big enough to take care of myself." He stamped his foot into his driver's shoe and took me by the arm, his good humor apparently restored. "No, don't lose any hair, bub; I'll get even with Roaring Dick."
That night, having by the advice of the proprietor moved my bureau and trunk against the bedroom door, I lay wide awake listening to the taking of the town apart. At each especially vicious crash I wondered if that might be Jimmy Powers getting even with Roaring Dick.
The following year, but earlier in the season, I again visited my little lumber town. In striking contrast to the life of that other midsummer day were the deserted streets. The landlord knew me, and after I had washed and eaten approached me with a suggestion.
"You got all day in front of you," said he; "why don't you take a horse and buggy and make a visit to the big jam? Everybody's up there more or less."
In response to my inquiry, he replied:
"They've jammed at the upper bend, jammed bad. The crew's been picking at her for near a week now, and last night Darrell was down to see about some more dynamite. It's worth seein'. The breast of her is near thirty feet high, and lots of water in the river."
"Darrell?" said I, catching at the name.
"Yes. He's rear boss this year. Do you think you'd like to take a look at her?"
"I think I should," I assented.
The horse and I jogged slowly along a deep sand road,through wastes of pine stumps and belts of hardwood beautiful with the early spring, until finally we arrived at a clearing in which stood two huge tents, a mammoth kettle slung over a fire of logs, and drying racks about the timbers of another fire. A fat cook in the inevitable battered derby hat, two bare-armed cookees, and a chore "boy" of seventy-odd summers were the only human beings in sight. One of the cookees agreed to keep an eye on my horse. I picked my way down a well-worn trail toward the regularclank, clank, clickof the peavies.
I emerged finally to a plateau elevated some fifty or sixty feet above the river. A half-dozen spectators were already gathered. Among them I could not but notice a tall, spare, broad-shouldered young fellow dressed in a quiet business suit, somewhat wrinkled, whose square, strong, clean-cut face and muscular hands were tanned by the weather to a dark umber-brown. In another moment I looked down on the jam.
The breast, as my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this wonderfulchevaux de frisefoamed the current of the river, irresistible to any force less mighty than the statics of such a mass.
A crew of forty or fifty men were at work. They clamped their peavies to the reluctant timbers, heaved, pushed, slid, and rolled them one by one into the current, where they were caught and borne away. They had been doing this for a week. As yet their efforts had made but slight impression on the bulk of the jam, but some time, with patience, they would reach the key-logs. Then the tangle would melt like sugar in the freshet, and these imperturbable workers would have to escape suddenly over the plunging logs to shore.
My eye ranged over the men, and finally rested on DickeyDarrell. He was standing on the slanting end of an upheaved log dominating the scene. His little triangular face with the accents of the quadrilateral eyebrows was pale with the blaze of his energy, and his chipmunk eyes seemed to flame with a dynamic vehemence that caused those on whom they fell to jump as though they had been touched with a hot poker. I had heard more of Dickey Darrell since my last visit, and was glad of the chance to observe Morrison & Daly's best "driver" at work.
The jam seemed on the very edge of breaking. After half an hour's strained expectation it seemed still on the very edge of breaking. So I sat down on a stump. Then for the first time I noticed another acquaintance, handling his peavie near the very person of the rear boss.
"Hullo," said I to myself, "that's funny. I wonder if Jimmy Powers got even; and if so, why he is working so amicably and so near Roaring Dick."
At noon the men came ashore for dinner. I paid a quarter into the cook's private exchequer and so was fed. After the meal I approached my acquaintance of the year before.
"Hello, Powers," I greeted him, "I suppose you don't remember me?"
"Sure," he responded heartily. "Ain't you a little early this year?"
"No," I disclaimed, "this is a better sight than a birling match."
I offered him a cigar, which he immediately substituted for his corn-cob pipe. We sat at the root of a tree.
"It'll be a great sight when that jam pulls," said I.
"You bet," he replied, "but she's a teaser. Even old Tim Shearer would have a picnic to make out just where the key-logs are. We've started her three times, but she's plugged tight every trip. Likely to pull almost any time."
We discussed various topics. Finally I ventured:
"I see your old friend Darrell is rear boss."
"Yes," said Jimmy Powers, dryly.
"By the way, did you fellows ever square up on that birling match?"
"No," said Jimmy Powers; then after an instant, "Not yet."
I glanced at him to recognize the square set to the jaw that had impressed me so formidably the year before. And again his face relaxed almost quizzically as he caught sight of mine.
"Bub," said he, getting to his feet, "those little marks are on my foot yet. And just you tie into one idea: Dickey Darrel's got it coming." His face darkened with a swift anger. "God damn his soul!" he said, deliberately. It was no mere profanity. It was an imprecation, and in its very deliberation I glimpsed the flare of an undying hate.
About three o'clock that afternoon Jimmy's prediction was fulfilled. Without the slightest warning the jam "pulled." Usually certain premonitorycracks, certain sinkings down, groanings forward, grumblings, shruggings, and sullen, reluctant shiftings of the logs give opportunity for the men to assure their safety. This jam, after inexplicably hanging fire for a week, as inexplicably started like a sprinter almost into its full gait. The first few tiers toppled smash into the current, raising a waterspout like that made by a dynamite explosion; the mass behind plunged forward blindly, rising and falling as the integral logs were up-ended, turned over, thrust one side, or forced bodily into the air by the mighty power playing jack-straws with them.
The rivermen, though caught unaware, reached either bank. They held their peavies across their bodies as balancing-poles, and zig-zagged ashore with a calmness and lack of haste that were in reality only an indication of the keenness with which they fore-estimated each chance. Long experience with the ways of saw-logs brought them out. They knew the correlation of these many forces just as the expert billiard-playerknows instinctively the various angles of incident and reflection between his cue-ball and its mark. Consequently they avoided the centers of eruption, paused on the spots steadied for the moment, dodged moving logs, trod those not yet under way, and so arrived on solid ground. The jam itself started with every indication of meaning business, gained momentum for a hundred feet, and then plugged to a standstill. The "break" was abortive.
Now we all had leisure to notice two things. First, the movement had not been of the whole jam, as we had at first supposed, but only of a block or section of it twenty rods or so in extent. Thus between the part that had moved and the greater bulk that had not stirred lay a hundred feet of open water in which floated a number of loose logs. The second fact was, that Dickey Darrell had fallen into that open stretch of water and was in the act of swimming toward one of the floating logs. That much we were given time to appreciate thoroughly. Then the other section of the jam rumbled and began to break. Roaring Dick was caught between two gigantic millstones moving to crush him out of sight.
An active figure darted down the tail of the first section, out over the floating logs, seized Darrell by the coat-collar, and so burdened began desperately to scale the very face of the breaking jam.
Never was a more magnificent rescue. The logs were rolling, falling, diving against the laden man. He climbed as over a treadmill, a treadmill whose speed was constantly increasing. And when he finally gained the top, it was as the gap closed splintering beneath him and the man he had saved.
It is not in the woodsman to be demonstrative at any time, but here was work demanding attention. Without a pause for breath or congratulation they turned to the necessity of the moment. The jam, the whole jam, was moving at last. Jimmy Powers ran ashore for his peavie. Roaring Dick, like a demon incarnate, threw himself into the work. Forty men attackedthe jam in a dozen places, encouraging the movement, twisting aside the timbers that threatened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic forces into the channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle the logs swept by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the curbed freshet. Men were everywhere, taking chances, like cowboys before the stampeded herd. And so, out of sight around the lower bend swept the front of the jam in a swirl of glory, the rivermen riding the great boom back of the creature they subdued, until at last, with the slackening current, the logs floated by free, cannoning with hollow sound one against the other. A half-dozen watchers, leaning statuesquely on the shafts of their peavies, watched the ordered ranks pass by.
One by one the spectators departed. At last only myself and the brown-faced young man remained. He sat on a stump, staring with sightless eyes into vacancy. I did not disturb his thoughts.
The sun dipped. A cool breeze of evening sucked up the river. Over near the cook-camp a big fire commenced to crackle by the drying frames. At dusk the rivermen straggled in from the down-river trail.
The brown-faced young man arose and went to meet them. I saw him return in close conversation with Jimmy Powers. Before they reached us he had turned away with a gesture of farewell.
Jimmy Powers stood looking after him long after his form had disappeared, and indeed even after the sound of his wheels had died toward town. As I approached, the riverman turned to me a face from which the reckless, contained self-reliance of the woods-worker had faded. It was wide-eyed with an almost awe-stricken wonder and adoration.
"Do you know who that is?" he asked me in a hushed voice. "That's Thorpe, Harry Thorpe. And do you know what he said to me just now,me? He told me he wanted me to work in Camp One next winter, Thorpe's One. And hetold me I was the first man he ever hired straight into One."
His breath caught with something like a sob.
I had heard of the man and of his methods. I knew he had made it a practice of recruiting for his prize camp only from the employees of his other camps, that, as Jimmy said, he never "hired straight into One." I had heard, too, of his reputation among his own and other woodsmen. But this was the first time I had ever come into personal contact with his influence. It impressed me the more in that I had come to know Jimmy Powers and his kind.
"You deserve it, every bit," said I. "I'm not going to call you a hero, because that would make you tired. What you did this afternoon showed nerve. It was a brave act. But it was a better act because your rescued your enemy, because you forgot everything but your common humanity when danger——"
I broke off. Jimmy was again looking at me with his ironically quizzical grin.
"Bub," said he, "if you're going to hang any stars of Bethlehem on my Christmas tree, just call a halt right here. I didn't rescue that scalawag because I had any Christian sentiments, nary bit. I was just naturally savin' him for the birling match next Fourther July."
There are some authors whom we think of as bookmen; there are others whom we think of as men first, and as writers secondarily. Lowell, for example was a bookman; Roosevelt was a man of action who wrote books. Stewart Edward White, far more of a literary artist than Roosevelt, gives like him the impression of a man who has done things, of one who lives a full life, and produces books as a sort of by-product: very valuable, but not the chief end of existence.
Mr. White was born in a small town near Grand Rapids, Michigan, March 12, 1873. His parents had their own ideas about bringing up children. Instead of sending him to school they sent for a teacher to instruct him, they encouraged him to read, they took him traveling, not only to cities but to the silent places, the great forests, and to the lumber camps. He spent four years in California, and became a good horseman, making many trips in the saddle to the picturesque old ranches. When finally, he entered high school, at sixteen, he went in with boys of his own age, and graduated at eighteen, president of his class. And what he was most proud of was that he won and still holds, the five-mile running record of his school. He was intensely interested in birds at this time, and spent all his spare hours in the woods, studying bird-life. The result was a series of articles on birds, published in various scientific journals,—papers whose columns are not usually open to high school contributors.
Then came a college course at the University of Michigan, with vacations spent in cruising about the Great Lakes in a twenty-eight-foot cutter sloop. After graduation he worked for a time in a packing house, then hearing of the discovery ofgold in the Black Hills, he set off with the other gold-diggers. He did not find a mine, but the experience gave him a background for two later novels,The Claim Jumpers, andThe Westerners.
He went east for a year of graduate study at Columbia University. Like many other students, he found a friend in Professor Brander Matthews, who encouraged him to write of some of his western experiences. He sold a few short stories to magazines, and his first novel,The Claim Jumperswas accepted by Appleton's.The Westerners, his next book, brought him $500 for the serial rights, and with its publication he definitely determined upon making authorship his calling. But it was not authorship in a study.The Blazed Trailwas written in a lumber camp in midwinter. He got up at four o'clock, wrote until eight, then put on his snowshoes and went out for a day's work. When the story was finished he gave it to the foreman of the camp to read. The man began it after supper, and when White got up next morning at four, he found him still reading, so he felt that the book would succeed.
Another year he made a trip to the Hudson Bay country, and on his return wroteConjurer's House. This was dramatized by George Broadhurst, and was very successful on the stage. With Thomas Fogarty, the artist, he made a long canoe trip, and the resulting book,The Forest, was illustrated by Mr. Fogarty. A camping trip in the Sierra Mountains of California was followed by the writing ofThe Mountains. His next book,The Mystery, was written jointly by Mr. White and Samuel Hopkins Adams. When it was finished they not only divided the proceeds but divided the characters for future stories, White taking Handy Solomon, whom he used again inArizona Nights, and Darrow, who appeared inThe Sign at Six.
Then without warning, Mr. White went to Africa. His explanation was simple:
I went because I wanted to. About once in so often the wheels get rusty and I have to get up and do something real or else blowup. Africa seemed to me a pretty real thing. Let me add that I did not go for material. I never go anywhere for material; if I did I should not get it. That attitude of mine would give me merely externals, which are not worth writing about. I go places merely because for one reason or another they attract me. Then if it happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical faculty alert, but whole-heartedly and because, for the time being, it is his life.
I went because I wanted to. About once in so often the wheels get rusty and I have to get up and do something real or else blowup. Africa seemed to me a pretty real thing. Let me add that I did not go for material. I never go anywhere for material; if I did I should not get it. That attitude of mine would give me merely externals, which are not worth writing about. I go places merely because for one reason or another they attract me. Then if it happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical faculty alert, but whole-heartedly and because, for the time being, it is his life.
Naturally he found that he had something to write about on his return.The Land of Footprints,African Camp Fires,Simba, andThe Leopard Womanwere books that grew out of his African trip. Mr. White next planned to write a series of three novels dealing with the romantic history of the state of California. The first of these books,Gold, describes the mad rush of the Forty-Niners on the first discovery of gold in California.The Gray Dawn, the second of the series, tells of the days of the Vigilantes, when the wild life of the mining camps slowly settled down to law and order. The coming of the World War was a fresh challenge to his adventurous spirit, and he saw service in France as a major in the U. S. Field Artillery.
From this sketch it is apparent that Mr. White's books have all grown out of his experience, in the sense that the background is one that he has known. This explains the strong feeling of reality that we experience as we read his stories.