Dear Kate:
Say, but I am having a good time! And what do you think? I am having my picture painted. Some artist people blew into the cafe the other night, and after I had danced a couple of times they talked to the manager, then they asked me to come over and talk to them. I set down to the table and they were awful nice to me, didn't get fresh, but asked me a lot of questions about myself and where I learned to dance. I told them I could dance ever since I could walk, that I danced as a kid at Coney Island, and Miner's theatre had got in trouble twice with the Children's Society because of me. I laughed and said, "Why, I neverlearnedto dance, I justdanced." The artist man said he wanted to paint my picture. It is a funny idea it seems to me. He wants to paint me in this dirtycabaret with the tables all around me and the bum men setting around and me a dancing in the center with the lights on me. He said he is going to call it "Youth." He said to one of the men that was with him, "Can't you see it, Phillip, can't you see it? That pretty girl the very spirit of youth with her gold hair around her face and her wonderful body swaying to the time of the music and all those bloated beasts looking up at her through the smoke?" I don't see how he is going to paint the picture, but that is his business. Mine is to go to his studio every day at ten o'clock.
Do you remember Will Henderson who used to play in the orchestra in the Grand Opera and who lived next to us when we was at 129? Well, what do you think? He is playing the piano in this joint here. Isn't that a come-down? He got to taking coke and he couldn't be trusted to keep his dates and he lost all his good jobs and now he can only get a place in the joints, but he does play wonderful! And when he is not too dopey, he sets down at the piano and makes musicthat draws the heart right out of you. He won't touch his violin cause it makes him remember, he says. It is a lucky thing for me in a way, as he likes me and he has wrote some music for me to dance by. He wrote a piece for me called "The Poppy," and that artist chap who is painting my picture got me a dress made for the dance, and oh, Kate, it is grand! It is red chiffon, and over it green chiffon like the leaves of the poppy, and I wear red slippers with pale green silk stockings that are so thin I can hardly get them on, and he had my hair all fluffed out and piled on top of my head, where it made a "golden halo," whatever that is. Him and Will explained to me about the dance. It seems that opium is made out of the flower, and they wanted me to show by dancing all the beautiful dreams that come with opium, and then the sleep afterward. I have known a lot of people who hit the pipe, and I don't know as they have ever had many beautiful dreams, but anyway the dance is awful pretty. The artist gave a party the other night, and hadme come and do it. All the lights in the room was turned off and a greenish light was thrown on me and I danced fast at first and then I went slower and slower until at the last I dropped down on the stage and the lights went out and I run away in the dark. Everybody was crazy about it, and one of the big restaurants on Broadway is going to have me give the dance every night at midnight. Do you see, Kate, I told you if I got a chance I would get away from Seventh Avenue. I begun at 14th Street, and I am working up. I am up to 42nd and one of these days, I tell you, I am going to be dancing at the Winter Garden. I don't see why I shouldn't, I can dance as well as any girl in New York City, and now that Jim and your gang ain't around to queer me, there ain't no reason why I shouldn't be in the best places in town. I have had to stick to a lot of bum joints just because the managers of decent places didn't want to have a person who was mixed up with the crowd that I was in, around their place.
I am really having an awful good time. I get home about three in the morning and I sleep until about nine. I make my breakfast in my room yet, cause I like my own coffee, and then Jim Kelly who is my dancing partner now, comes up and we practise steps or else Will Henderson and Jim and me go over to Mamie Callahan's who has got a piano, and we work at some new thing. I don't have to be at the cafe till night and most every afternoon, I go around to some of the other places or to the shows to see what the other girls are dancing. I thought I would take some lessons from some of the swell teachers, but Lord, I can dance as well as any of them so what is the use of me spending my money.
I bought a swell new suit yesterday, and I sure do look some going up the avenue and, hearme, it is Fifth Avenue instead of Seventh. Oh, there is some class to your sister, Kate, and when I get on the new lid that the milliner made me, well—I should worry.
I went up to a party the other night at Rose Fisher's. I couldn't blow in until after work, but even as late as it was, I won $4.90 at penny ante, and it tickled me most to death. I have been trying to learn a new game called bridge that the girls are crazy about. I guess it is not in my line cause it is a thinking part. I can't remember what cards are out or what is trumps or what is anything else, and set sort of making over my old clothes or thinking up new steps when we are playing, and you can't do that with bridge. I lost a lot of money the other afternoon, and what is worse, Katie Regan was my partner and she took it hard and gave me an awful call-down. I got sore and felt like slapping her face, but I guess she is right. Don't play a game with other people's money unless you attend to business.
Do you remember that fat old brewer that use to come hanging around you? Well, he blew in while I was dancing the other night, and claimed to be a long lost friend. Hecome down every night for about a week, and then tried that old gag of putting some money for me in a wheat deal or some such thing where it was tails I win and heads you lose. I told him I was on to that chorus trick, and wasn't at all crazy about it. You see, whether he won or lost he would have handed me over three or four hundred dollars and kinda felt he owned me body and soul. I simply laughed at him, and said with a voice of a Wall Street broker, "Man, I am making so much money that it is quite impossible to find investments for my income, so I am planting it around the yard in tin cans." I even offered to make him a loan if business was bad. He went away in a huff, and I got a call-down from the manager because the brewer owns the bar the same as he does all the other saloons around our district, and the saloon-keeper is only in on a percentage. If the temperance people would only go after the brewer and the distiller, instead of the poor devil of a saloon-keeper, they might dosomething worth while, cause there ain't one bar in twenty in New York that is owned by the man who keeps it.
Well, good-bye, I am going to dinner in a place in 39th Street where they say they have an awful pretty dancer. I am saving up my money, Kate, so when you come out, you will have enough to live on for awhile until you find out what you want to do. Now don't worry, and don't write me any more letters like that last one. Everything is fine and dandy. Billy is all right, and I am as happy as a clam and getting fat. I have put on two pounds in three months. I weigh 118 now, which is a lot for me, and if I keep on like this I will look like Taft one of these days.
I am coming down to see you next week, and I have got something for you. Oh, Kate, I am fond of you and I get just crazy to see you.
Yours,Nan.
Dear Kate:
I have been working again. Mrs. Smith got at me about the dancing, not that she thinks the dancing is bad, but she don't like the places where I dance nor the people I have to be with, and she is dead sore at the rooming house where I live. She don't like the girls I float around with, and that hang around my room. I can't understand it, because they are all right, and I have known them kind of girls all my life. She came up to see me one afternoon, and there was half a dozen in the room, and the smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife, and she cried after they left, and said a lot of rot about me being too good to throw my life away with them sort of people. She talked and she talked to me, and I thought I would try to work again, not but what dancing ain'twork and there ain't nothing wrong with it either, but there is a hard crowd down at Kelley's, and sometimes it kinda makes me sick. She talked to me a lot about Billy, and said it will make a great difference in his life if he can look back to his folks as being respectable. I myself don't see why he should be any prouder of his aunt being a servant than he would be if she was a dancing girl, and I get thirty per for dancing, and only six little bucks for housework. I stayed awake two nights thinking about it, wondering if I was getting tough and didn't know it, cause things that I don't think nothing about at all, Mrs. Smith thinks awful, and she says that the longer you live in that kind of life and with people who have no "ideals"—whatever them is, one is just bound to go down. I don't want to go down, and I don't want to get so I will think crookedness is right, and that decent people are wrong, so I just piped it out to myself as I lay awake at night that I would give the honest work job another chance.
I answered an "ad" in the paper. I got a place up on West End Avenue. I stayed there two months, then I had bad luck again. I liked the place real well, and the people liked me, and I suppose I would have been there yet, if I hadn't of cut my hand, because, take it from me, Kate I am a dandy housekeeper and I like it too. I can't imagine nothing nicer than having a little home of your own and taking care of it yourself. It even give me a little thrill to walk into some body else's kitchen and see it all clean and nice, the dishes and the glasses shining, and the pretty white cloth on the table, and a bird singing in a cage before the window, and know that all looked so home-like cause I made it so. If somebody else's kitchen can make me feel that way, if I had one of my own, I suppose I'd just naturally bust. The woman I worked for was one of those sort of no-good women who ain't bad or who ain't good, who is justnothing. She didn't do a thing around the house, didn't even take care of her own clothes. She read a little in themorning, then went down town every afternoon of her life, either to the theatres or to the restaurants or shopping. Then at night as often as she could, she made her poor husband put on his dress clothes and go somewhere with her. They use to scrap a lot about it, as he was tired and generally wanted to put on a pair of old slippers and set and smoke and read. Sometimes I use to wonder what she done to earn her board, as she wasn't as much of a help as a wife of a crook generally is. Even you, Kate, used to pass the leather on when Jim pinched one, which was doing your share in buying your meal ticket. She was dippy on the dancing, and women used to come in the afternoon and dance with the victrola. I didn't let her know that I danced at first.
One night I was a cutting bread and the knife slipped and cut my hand between my thumb and first finger. The woman was awful nice about it, and kept me on for two weeks. It didn't seem to get no better and the doctor thinks I poisoned it. I didn't havethe nerve to stay there without doing something, so one day when she and some of her friends were dancing like a lump of cheese, I told her I would learn her the dance if she wanted me to, and—gee, didn't those females work me after that! They didn't care nothing about the housework. It could go hang, but morning, night and noon I was a holding some fat lady or some tall lady or some short one from breaking her neck, as she tried to do the Castle Glide or the Maxixe. I must say my boss was generous, she was perfectly willing to loan me to all her friends and they grabbed after me like a cat after a mouse, cause they was getting five-dollar lessons for nothing. I stayed two weeks and I lost six pounds and my hand didn't heal none and I didn't see where I was doing any better being a private dancing teacher for a lot of fool women who really think no better than a lot of the girls I had to go with, but who only know how to say it better. Here I was working harder for six a week and at the same kind of work, than I would be if I was dancing atthirty, so I told the woman I must go. I spent all my money with the doctor and I didn't know what to do, as I didn't want to go back to my room. Mrs. Smith was awful nice and told me to come with her. I did and I am there now. My hand is a little better but I still can't do much work and have to keep it tied up. I can't wash dishes, nor do nothing where it will get wet.
Billy has learned his letters and he knows a lot of stories, especially Bible stories out of a book that is full of pictures. He is awful funny. He was showing me the book the other day, and he come to an old man with long whiskers and I said, "Who is that old guy, Billy?" and he looked at me so shocked and said, "Why, aunt Nannie, where have you been? That is Moses," and he told me all about him and the Israelites which is another name for Jews. I said if he has got anything to do with Jews, I orter know something about them, cause there ain't much else in New York, yet they ain't much in my line, as I just naturally hit the Irish.
Do you remember Rosie O'Grady who got married about three years ago? Well, she is only twenty years old now. She has got a kid and supporting it herself. That fellow she married was a coke fiend, and she fired him, and she is doing real well. Her brother is a driver at McCreey's, and between them they hire a little flat down on 20th Street and her mother takes care of the baby and they are real happy. I went down to see her the other night. A lot of women live there who scrub offices or go out washing or do any kind of day work they can get. Most every one of them support a drunken husband. One woman next door to Rosie has both her husband and her brother on her hands, and her brother has been full for three months and that poor woman goes out washing to give these good-for-nothing men their food. I'd let their stomachs grow to their back bone before I'd feed them. You see an awful lot of drink down around Eighth Avenue, and it seems like it is done by the men that most need the money. Yet I suppose when they are out onthe wagon all day in the cold and the wet, that a saloon looks awful nice and warm and the free lunch tastes mighty good. They can't afford to go to the restaurants, even cheap ones, so they go to the saloon and drink that rotten whiskey that drives them crazy. That is one thing I never saw no fun in, and I must say for you, Kate, that with all the rotten crowd you run with, you didn't take to booze nor dope. If you hadn't just naturally not known the difference between what belonged to you and what belonged to the other man, you might have been a pretty respectable member of society. I tell you I am watching Billy mighty close to see that he don't have too small fingers. By the looks of him now, the way he is growing, his hands are going to be like hams, and if he ever got them in another man's pocket, he would never get them out again.
I can't send you no money. I tell you I am absolutely flat strapped. I hocked my two rings and I even sold my dancing slippers. I ain't paid Mrs. Smith for Billy'sboard in most a month, and I know they need the money. Cheer up, old girl, you only have a short time now. I keep a trying to think what you can do when you come out, but I don't seem to light on nothing you would like. Anyway, you know I am thinking of you.
Yours,Nan.
Dear Kate:
I am worried to death. I don't know what to do and my hand don't seem to get well. I haven't got a cent to my name, I owe Mrs. Smith six weeks' board money for Billy, and I have been eating off her for three weeks. She can't afford to feed me, and every mouthfull I take chokes me. I know they are hard up, cause I caught her crying the other day. Her husband is awful nice, but he ain't got much sense and his business in life is teaching not trying to raise vegetables. She says she won't hear me going back to dancing, but I don't see what else I can do. My hand don't affect my feet. I was over town the other day and saw my old dancing partner, Fred Keeney. He said we can get a job at the Cafe Boulevard and I am crazy to try it. Yet if I could work, I would cut the wholething out, cause Mrs. Smith is right when she says that dancing ain't bad, just the bum crowd you have got to go with. And I am up against it more than most of the girls, cause nearly all of them have homes, but everybody seems to know or finds out mighty sudden that I am your sister, and it ain't up to me then to go in for the heavy respectable. Gee, Kate you have got a reputation! You must have had a lot of newspaper advertising. Nobody ever says I am Nan Lane, they just say I am Kate Lane's sister. Then they look at me as if I was going to take a bite out of them. That is why it is more comfortable for me to keep with the old crowd, cause they don't throw a fit every time your name is mentioned.
Oh, I am sure distracted. I've walked the floor nights till I wore a path in the carpet. What with my hand aching and me wondering what in the world I ought to do, I can't sleep. I go out in the afternoon and lie down in the woods and if I knew something to pray to, I would sure get right down on my kneesand ask it to tell me which way to turn. I have been in Mrs. Smith's room twice when they have what they call family worship. It didn't seem to do me much good but I bowed my head as I saw them do. Why, if they wanted to stand on their heads and meow like cats, I would bark an accompaniment cause I like them so.
Mrs. Smith cries every time I speak of the dancing, but I can't live on charity for the rest of my life and I am pestered to death for money. When I was coming out of Kelley's the other day, I saw father and of course, he give me a touch. He never shows up unless he wants something. Oh, I hate him, Kate. When I saw his shifty old eyes I just turned sick. Every time I see him I think of the kicks and the cuffs we kids got whenever he come round, which, thank goodness, wasn't often. Do you remember how happy we was when we went down to court and heard him get that seven years' stretch? That was the finest present the judge could give us, and when we got back to the room I rememberwe just hugged each other and danced round and round and made up a song with the chorus, "Pa's got seven years, we ain't glad, oh, no." You gave a party that night, and we almost got pulled for being so noisy. I wonder what mother was like. What kind of a woman she could have been to have seen anything in him. You must be something like her, cause you stick to Jim and you know what I think ofhim. I suppose being married to a man does something to a woman because I know a lot of nice women that stick to good-for-nothing bums because they are married to them. As for me, I don't suppose I ever will be married cause none of the crowd I know now formineand I don't have much chance to meet the Henry Van Dykes or the John T. Wanamakers.
Well this ain't telling me what to do. WhatwillI do? I am near crazy. Well—I can always go to bed, good night.
Nan.
Dear Kate:
Well, I am back at the old work and it is all right. I have been dancing in the best restaurants in New York, and what do you think, Kate, I am going to dance at the Winter Garden. The manager there saw my poppy dance the other night, and he is giving me a dance. I can still come back and dance at twelve o'clock in the restaurant. Fred Kelly, my dancing partner, is crazy glad. Will Henderson nearly cried. He said, "You have got your chance, Nan, you have got your chance." I offered to give him part of my salary because if he had not thought out all the pretty dances, him and the artist chap, I never could have piped them out myself. But he won't take a cent. He is dead square, and not a half bad fellow, and I have been trying to get him to take the cure. Ioffered to pay all expenses if he would go up to that dope cure joint at White Plains, and sometimes he says he will, then again says he won't. You can't trust a person who takes dope. Sometimes he shows up every night and plays just beautiful, then again we don't see him for ten days. Fred Kelly is so tickled at this chance to work in the good places, that he has braced up and seems a different fellow. He used to drink a lot and one time when he was tanked up, he had to throw me from one arm to the other in the dance, and he let me fall and hurt my back so bad, I could hardly move for a week. It gave me an awful scare and I had a good heart to heart talk with him. I told him he either had to cut out the booze or cut out working with me, cause you can't do the two things and do both well. Oh, I am glad that I have left the joints and I am proud of myself. I have worked awful hard and something inside of me has always said I would win out, and itiswinning out, because there ain't no bigger thing in my line than dancing at the WinterGarden. They are going to advertise me, Kate, and they call me Nancy Lane. Sounds kinda pretty, doesn't it? I got some of the nicest clothes you ever saw. My new dancing slippers is made to order, and I got some pretty things for my hair, though I think it looks better without anything in it, as it is hard to match the color.
Mrs. Smith and the children came over the other afternoon to see the toys. I bought the kids some things, then we went to a place and had ice cream sodas and sundaes until I bet two babies went to sleep that night with a stomach-ache.
Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you. I got a funny present. Do you remember Jenny who was sick about a year ago, and whose mother come from Iowa or Kansas or somewhere to get her? Well, I got a package the other day about the size of a house and when I opened it there was a bed quilt in it made of little pieces of colored calico set around with white pieces. Jenny's mother wrote me a beautiful letter saying she made it herselffor me out of pieces of cloth she had saved from her family's dresses. I put it on the bed, and gee, it was the funniest looking thing you ever saw. It didn't seem to belong to 28th Street anymore than the old lady did. It was funny to watch the girls when they come into the room. Them who had been born on the sidewalks like me whooped when they saw it, and made a lot of fun of it, but the girls who had come from the country looked at it different and a sort of change come over their faces. One girl who is in the chorus at the Columbia, set down by the bed and run her hand up and down the cover and then put her head on it and cried, and Mary Crosby who comes somewhere from Pennsylvania and has only been in the quarter about three months, looked at it straight for about five minutes without speaking and then turned and left the room. I followed her out into the hall and said, "What is the matter, Mary?" And she said in a queer choked way, "Good-bye, Nan, me for that little room down in old P-a. I'vegot enough." And I'll be darned if she didn't go home.
It was nice to see you, Kate, and you are looking real well. You have got the only soft snap there, but I can trust you for getting anything that is laying around easy. I am off to work, going to try a new dance on to-night.
Nan.
Dear Kate:
I opened your trunk and got out the clothes you wrote about. I give the grey dress to Mary, and the coat to Mrs. Keenan. There are a lot of things that you won't be able to use when you come out. Hadn't I better give them to some one? It seems a shame to have them laying there no use to any body.
I had a dandy day yesterday. Mildred Carter met me in a shop and we spent the whole day together. You know she is married. Married some swell man and lives in a fine place on Riverside Drive. She is just as pretty as ever. No wonder she was in all the Broadway shows. She hasn't a bit of sense, but her tiny figure has the most perfect curves, and her face and eyes arejust like a wondering child. She makes me think of Billy. She has a baby two years old, and if it wasn't for him, she would go back to the stage. She is awful lonesome up in her fine home, and she misses the lights and the fun and the pretty dresses. She is crazy over the clothes the girls are wearing in the new Field show, and I think she misses the suppers after the shows when a lot of the girls used to go with the Johnnies and sort of joy ride. There wasn't nothing wrong with the parties, but her mother-in-law thinks it is awful to even mention them. A pretty girl like Mildred could have four suppers a night if she wanted to, because lots of men like to take a show girl out. They wear pretty clothes and attract attention and are funny, have lots of up-to-date slang, know all the new songs, and don't expect a man to be clever. All that they want of him is to pay the supper. And they are perfectly willing to pay for it if you don't expect them to talk of art or the uplifting of the drama. Just look pretty and sayfool things and whistle popular songs and say things that don't make their head ache to answer. I tell Mrs. Smith who, like so many women, think it is always wrong to go to supper, that it is done by heaps of girls who are on the level.
I am kind of sorry for Mildred. She is pretty but nothing but a little butterfly, and Tom's folks don't like her, and make little dabs at her about being in the chorus, and they are trying to educate her. Read to her from a man named Emerson and Tennyson and a lot of high brows that put a kink in her brain that lasts for days. And they think the theatre is all wrong except things by Ibsen and Shakespeare and a man named Shaw, and of course Mildred thinks, and so do I, that a funny show where the comedian makes a monkey of himself and the girls change their dresses twenty times, and do stunts under the spot light is a lot decenter than those nasty shows where people turn their feelings inside out, especially their private feelings that ought not be talked aboutin public. She is bound to go back and I had a long talk with her. I told her that his folks might take the baby away from her, and she nearly went crazy. She turned on me like a cat, and said, "What do you mean?" I said that they would like her and Tom to separate and they would take the baby. She could not speak for a minute then she blazed at me:
"Take my baby, take Tommy? But he is mine. He is my baby. No one can take him away from me. I couldn't live without him." I saw that was the only way to get her switched off from going back, cause she met some stage manager the other day who offered her a job, so I rubbed it in; I don't know whether I am right, but it worked with her all right. After a while she sat down and talked sense, and I am sorry for her. She said sort of pitiful, "Tom is in newspaper work, and I am alone nights and I lay there alone a longing for something to be going on. I hate the dark and the being alone. Why I never used to be alone. Hispeople don't look at my side of the question at all. They are not fair to me. I had no idea when I married Tom that his people would not like me. Every one always liked me. I had my picture in all the shop windows and people always jollying and making me laugh.
"His people make me old. All the sun goes out of the room as soon as one of them come into it. To have dinner with them is awful. I am afraid to move at the table or ask for more bread. Every one is so polite and so quiet. You can't laugh and if you should happen to put your elbow on the table, it would be a tragedy. And I have lived that life two years, and Tom blames me and looks hurt cause sometimes I want the old life. And, Nan, I see you are with him and think I am wrong. But remember I am only calling for my own. I can't help longing for it. I think it is my right to laugh and to be gaymyway. I have tried to make myself over in Tom's way, but I can't. God did not make me a New Englandwoman. All I want is the lights and the music and the laughter. I want to snuggle down in a big chair and have somebody make me laugh, laugh, laugh, and never be told it is bad form to laugh too loud. Everything I do is bad form, and oh, Nan, I don't want to do anything wrong, I just want to live."
Poor little devil, I am sorry for her, but she must stay where she is. I am going to get hold of Tom some day and tell him to side step so much family and take Mildred out more and give her a good timeherway.
But we had had an awful good time until we got to talking about the baby, when she got scared and hurried home to see if anything had happened to him. We had lunch together at Bustanoby's, and went to that swell Castle Garden for tea. She treated cause it cost $2.50 per and that was too rich for my blood. I danced with her and she looked awful cunning, and I learnt her some new steps, altho' I never dance with women, as I don't think it looks nice. Oneof the dancers who runs the place came over and asked me to dance with him, and everybody stopped to watch us. Gee, I wish I could get a place in one of them swell places, but I will, you just watch me do it. I had on a pretty new dress and a hat that is a dream, and silk stockings and new patent Colonials and I feltsome. Ain't it funny how everybody is dancing, I wonder how long it will last. I must get in before everyone gets over the bug. It sure can't last forever. Seems awful funny to see a lot of old men and grannies fluffing around a room, when they ought to be home rubbing their backs with Omega Oil. One old lady, sure she was sixty, danced with the professional at Bustanoby's, and he told me she had a table there every day, and about three nights a week, and dances till closing time. I heard her tell some friends, "I told John that if he didn't want to learn he could stay home and go to bed,Iam going to dance," and she is sure a dame of her word.
What do you think? Fred Kelly, mydancing partner, is engaged to an awful nice girl. She is crazy over him, but she is making an awful mistake. His legs are all right, but his head was just put on his neck to finish it off. There is nothing in it, and if this dancing craze goes out, he will have to run a sizzor's grinding machine to earn a living, as he couldn't even play a thinkin' part.
I went out to see Billy last Sunday and we went to church. I felt awful jay as I didn't know what to do, but I watched Mrs. Smith and done everything she done and got through all right. The kids looked so nice in their little Sunday clothes, and Billy was so good. I didn't think much of the sermon, as it didn't seem to hit anything, but I am glad the Smiths take Billy every Sunday. It may do him good, and it can't hurt him, yet it seems to me that if the preacher talked a little more about how to get help and how to peg along every day, that it would do people more good than to talk about some old guy—he called him Isaih—who has been dead a long time. When Billy gets a littlebigger, I would like him to sing in church. He would look lovely in a long white night dress, and his eyes and hair would show up wonderful. I asked the Smiths about it, and they said that they would get both Paul and Billy in the choir if I wanted them to. I would like it, but still I am kinda scared that it might put ideas of the stage in his head and no theatre for our Billy. I want him to be a working man of some kind. A man that builds things, or invents, or writes. I want him to do something andbesomething, not just amuse a lot of fool people who can't amuse themselves. When you come home we will pipe up something great for that son of yours, and we will stick to it andmakehim be something. There is a chance for every one in this nice big fat world of ours, and Billy will come out on top some way, or his aunt Nan will know the reason why.
Lots of love,Nan.
Dear Kate:
I am having the best time of any girl in the whole world. Oh, Kate, I do love to dance, cause dancing is just a saying the nice-thoughts inside of you with your body instead of your lips. And I think when you get better thoughts you do better work. I know mine is different somehow, cause even old, fat Casey who never throws you a decent word if he can help it, said I'd do. When I used to dance in the joints around 14th Street and over on Eighth Avenue I danced just the things I knew then, which was cafes filled with cigarette smoke, booze on the tables and puffy, bad faced men staring at me. My dancing was not good, just making my feet go, but now I think about other things and I dance the buds coming out onthe pussey willows, the dog wood blossoms and the ripples of the lake when the moon shines on it. I hear the crickets and the katey-dids and the little peepers from the pond, and instead of hard-faced girls puffing cigarette smoke into men's faces, I see Billy with his curls hanging round his laughing face as he runs up the long road to meet me when I come from the station. My body seems to have grown softer with my feelings and it bends more easy and I believe I have even changed my face. I don't feel that all the world is against me and that I have to fight my way through it, cause I know I am loved and trusted and there is always some one waiting for me at the gate. Why, Kate, it changes your whole life to know there is some one caring for you who won't try to do you the first chance they get, and if it makes such a difference in your feelings, it is bound to make a difference in your actions, and that is the reason when I dance, I sway and bend and turn as light as if I was a fairy one reads about in story books. It ain't dancing,it ain't work. It is just a telling all the world I'm happy.
Dancing in these better places is not bad for a girl cause the management don't make you talk to no one and won't let the men get fresh. Of course I get a lot of notes and bids to dinner, but I don't mind them cause I have had them all my life. The only difference now, the spelling is good in these and they are supposed to come from gentlemen. Yet I tear them up just as easy as I did the other kind. Mrs. Smith is always scared about me. I showed her a mash note once and she sure threw a fit, but I tell her she don't need to worry about me, I know how to take care of myself all right, as I have been doing it all my life. I seen too much crookedness and I have seen that it don't pay. I never knew a girl yet that went the limit but landed hard some day on the pavement. Even you was straight, Kate, your only trouble is that your hands are too small, and when you married Jim and he showed you how easy they went in other people'spockets, you kinda took to it natural. I suppose that is because of father who is a born dip and it had to come out again in some of the family. I wonder if lots of people ain't crooked cause they don't know no better. I have been thinking a lot lately about education. Mr. Smith was a teacher in a boy's school in England, and he talks sometimes about the right kind of learning, and I sit by and listen trying to hear all I can that will help Billy. Mr. Smith says that if a boy has got the right kind of education, he will just naturally choose the right things in life. He don't believe because Billy's father and his grandfather are dips that that is any reason that Billy should be one. He says, give him the right kind of schooling and teachers that will understand him or show him what kind of books to read and tell him the great things that have been done by other men, and that he can do it if he tries, that it will make him ambitious and he will naturally choose the right kind of a life instead of the wrong kind. He will go with theright kind of people, instead of the wrong kind.
He wants to make Paul an electrical engineer, but first he wants him to go to college and get a lot of book-learning, so when he is by himself he will be willing to sit by the fire and read some book he loves instead of chasing down the Great White Way to find amusement. He says a man must know something besides his business or when he ain't working he won't know what to do with himself. Them is the men, he says, that fill the night restaurants and sets in the front row at the Burlesques. He believes that if men were educated in the way they orter be, there would not be no crookedness. That the upper story men and the dips and the safe blowers most always ain't got no education, and they are crooked because they don't know nothing different. He says ignorance makes a man not able to tell right from wrong. I told him I knew lots of dips who were clever, and he said, "Yes, that is so, but if they had been able to train that clevernessin the right way when they was young, they would not be dips now. They would use their brains in building up some business that was on the square. They ain't never had the right chance, so they can't be blamed." That is so, part of it, Kate. Lots of people I know, feel it in their bones that crookedness don't pay, but they don't know nothing else, cause they got in wrong at the start. Now if it is all true that he says and education will make a man on the level, then me for education. Billy is going to have it if I have to pour it down him with a spoon. Billy is going to have just as good a chance as Paul. I am getting to be such a tight wad that I am losing all my friends. I won't buy a drink for no one, and I even shove the girls sweet Caporals instead of Melachrino's when they come up to my room. Why, I squeeze a nickle till it hollers, and I wear out three dollars of shoe leather chasing up the street to find an eating joint where they will fill me up for a quarter. Any way, Kate, your son is going to have a lot of letterswrit after his name, if his aunt Nan don't get the cholly hoss in her legs, and lose her thirty bucks per week that she is making now.
Good-bye, Kate, I am coming to see you soon, and I will bring you some pictures of the kid that we took when he went in swimming. He can float on his back and Mr. Smith nearly scares a lung out of me learning him to dive. I am thinking of you always.
Nan.
Dear Kate:
I went down to Miner's the other night and saw Mable Lee. I was in her dressing room with her most two hours. She is a near star now, and don't she put on airs! She has a dressing room of her own, and any mere chorus girl that puts her nose in her door gets a lady-like call-down that you can hear to 42nd Street. She forgot that she ever worked at Coney with us, and rustled beer between acts, and that ain't the only thing that has happened to her memory. She says she is only twenty one, and she was twenty one when we were playing together at the Casino and I was doing a kid act. That was ten years ago. I must say it for her, she gets it over because she has got new red hair and when she gets her face fixed up and her long ear rings on, which is aboutall she wears in this new act, she looks about sixteen.
I danced the other night at a party. There was a lot of swell folks there, women with low neck dresses and real diamonds. Gee, if Anthony Comstock had come in he'd a got busy when he piped off some of the clothes. They acted as if they were trying to be tough, set around and smoked and acted like street girls dressed up. Funny, ain't it, street girls try to act like real ladies, and real ladies try to act like street girls. I suppose everybody wishes sometimes they could be what they ain't, and so they play at the other thing. I wondered as I looked at them if they had homes or babies, and if they ever set in front of the fire and talked of things like Mr. and Mrs. Smith does.
Sometimes Mr. Smith reads at night from a Bible and he read the other night something written by a Jewish gentleman named Moses. I heard it all one evening when Iwas dancing. It just come back to me like a soft voice:
"As an eagle that stirreth up her nest, that fluttereth over her young. He spread abroad his wings, he took them, he bare them on his pinions."
Now, ain't that pretty? I thought after I went to bed about the big bird that broke up her nest, as Mr. Smith told to me, and pushed her babies out so as they could learn to fly, and then went under them with her wings all stretched out wide to catch them if they fell. That is just like a mother, ain't it? They want their children to go in the world and learn, yet they would put out their bodies if they could for them to fall on when things went wrong. I suppose it is because children are so helpless and their mothers must care for them and keep them from everything that is hard and so it brings out all the love and sweetness in a woman's heart and makes her give her life for her own. Anyway, I heard it a humming in my heartalong with the music, and I didn't dance my dance at all, I just danced old Moses, and I will never see a kike again with the same eyes.
I got another new dress. Gee, it is like pulling teeth to spend the money. Will Henderson made up another dance for me, and I had to have the clothes to go with it. He is a wonder, Kate, a sure wonder! Even when he is half full of dope he sets down to that old piano and makes it talk. Some times he sets for half an hour with his head in his hands, and then he raises up and has a funny look in his eyes and plays such music that all the crowd stops laughing and listens to him. I can dance anything he plays, cause he makes the music talk to me. Sometimes it is country fields and flowers and birds and running brooks, and then it changes to dull wet nights beneath the street lamps with sad eyed girls and bad-faced men and hungry eager people all looking for something they have missed, and they go into cabarets like this I dance in, filled with smoke and laughsthat only come from lips not from the heart—and I whirl and dance until I am mad from dizziness. And then the music quiets down again and sadness comes and you know the searchers have not found what they were looking for, and they, wander out into the dim grey light of morning and disappear like mist upon the lake.
Oh, Kate, I love to dance! I hope I will never grow old, I want to die a dancing.
Yours,Nan.
Dear Kate:
I have not time to write much, but I am so glad I must tell some one, and I know you will be glad with me. I am going to dance at the Winter Garden at last. We are going to have our try out, and if we take, we will sign a contract like real professionals. I can't talk it to you, I can't say all I am feeling, but if you was here I would dance it to you.
Yours,Nan.
Dear Kate:
Just as I was a getting ready to go up to the Winter Garden for our try out, I got a letter from Mrs. Smith saying that Billy had the diptheria. She said, "don't come," that she would let me know all the time how he was. Fred come to take me up and I told him I was not going, that I was going to Billy, and he almost went crazy. He said, "Why, Nan, don't you see you will lose your chance if you don't show up now, they will never give it to you again." I said, "I don't care, I am going to Billy." He nearly cried. He said, "Nan, you have been working two years trying to get on Broadway, and if they had told you six months ago that you had a chance to go on at the Garden, you would a said they were liars or you would a died for joy. And now you throw it all over fora kid." I said, I didn't care, I was a going to Billy. He talked and he talked and then he went down and phoned for Will Henderson who come over and talked to me. They made me feel that I was doing them a rotten trick, cause Will wrote the music and was going to have his name on the program, and he said that if I didn't show up, he would lose the biggest chance he ever had, to get back decent again. So I gave in if they would promise to get me to the train as soon as our turn was over.
Well, we went and the dance sure did go. I came back eight times and I never saw anybody so tickled in his life as Will to think that he can have his name on a program again. He says he will go out to that dope joint in White Plains to-morrow, cause he believes he still has got a chance of making good. It does put heart into you when you are down and out to feel that perhaps there is something still ahead of you if you will only buck up.
After my turn the manager came into thedressing room and offered us season's work. I think it was the happiest minit of my life. I have worked for it ever since I was a kid and I just seemed to know that some day I would be on top. Why, think of it, Kate, I am going to have my name, Nancy Lane, on a program of the biggest dancing place in America, and I will be dancing along side of girls from Europe and real actresses. I felt all choked up and I was dead scared that fat manager would see how tickled I was. I am going to do three dances, and talk about wages—no, it is salary now—say, when I die I will leave a Foundation fund for poor dancers who have caught rheumatism in their lower limbs. I'll bet you to-morrow that everybody from 14th Street to 42nd Street will be trying to give me a touch. That is a sure sign you are getting along well in the world, when your friends try to borrow money off you, but Hetty Green will be a willful waster compared to me, cause I am going to plant it all in the saving's bank for you and Billy.
Good-bye, old lady, I am off for New Jersey. Even when I was a dancing and the people was a giving me a hand, I was a wondering how Billy was, and every once in a while his face would come before me and nearly shut out the lights.
Your happyNan.
Dear Kate:
We are out of quarantine. I sent you word twice that Billy was all right, and he is getting well, but poor little Paul died. When I got out here that Monday night, the doctor was in the house and told me that if I come in he would have to put me in quarantine and I couldn't leave. It kinda paralyzed me for a minit, cause I thought of that fat Garden contract, and how all my chances would be gone because you can't talk to theatre managers about kids or diptheria, as that don't fill the house. Then I thought of Will and Fred and how it would knock Fred out of a job and I kinda got sick and set down quick. I asked the doctor how Billy was, and he said they was both pretty sick, then I said, "To Hell with contracts," and I took off my hat and I'm here.
Oh, it has been awful, Kate. Did you ever see a sick baby, when he couldn't tell what was the matter with him and lay just fighting for his breath and you not able to help him, just a standing by with helpless hands, promising God that if your kid ain't took this time you will sure do something for Him if you ever get a chance? Billy was much worse than Paul for a time, and I was scared when I seen him lyin' on the pillow with his face all red with fever, and he didn't seem to know me. The doctor put a tube in their throats and it worked all right with Billy, but it was no good for Paul, and he died just at daylight, Wednesday morning. Oh, Kate, my heart just broke for his mother. She didn't cry nor nothing, and when they got her away from the baby she come in my room where Billy was and she looked down at him for a long time and then—she cursed him. It would a made your blood run cold to hear her talk. She said in a low,hatevoice, "You, a child of the streets, a baby nobody wants, you are left and my baby istaken. You,—you will grow up to be a professional thief like your father. They say your mother is in prison, and yet God leaves you. There ain't no God! I tell you it is all a lie, there ain't no God!" I was a setting in a chair at the foot of the bed and she turned and looked at me as if she didn't know me. Then all at once she dropped on her knees at my feet and put her face in my lap and said, "Oh, Nannie, why didn't God take me too? How can I live the to-morrows." And Oh, Kate, if you have never seen a mother when her only baby is lying in the next room white and cold, you ain't never seen real sorrow. She set on the floor at my feet nearly an hour then she wanted me to go in and help her dress little Paul. We put on the new suit I bought him for his birthday, and he looked just as if he was asleep.
They buried him in a little grave yard on the hillside, and Mrs. Smith can see it from her bed room, which I think is bad for her. She acts queer and won't come in the roomwhere Billy is, and I never speak his name to her. He is getting along all right now, but it turns me cold to think what might have happened.
I will send you word as often as I can, so don't be worried.
Nan.
Dear Kate:
I am staying to-night at Lake Rest and it seems like home. I am a setting in front of a fire of logs in a great big fire-place, and the flicker of the fire and the ticking of the clock seem a sort of music to me. Oh, Kate, it is wonderful here now! It is a little cold and the hills around the Lake instead of being green, are all scarlet and brown. The maple trees look as if they had put on their dancing dresses and the beach turns to gold when the sun strikes it. The bitter-sweet has little yellow berries which burst open and show the red centres, and the sumac is all rouged standing stiff and straight as if waiting for the calcium to be turned on it. The brown of the oak trees seem only made to show off the green of the pines and hemlock and spruce, and the brakes that was so greena month ago, are now all crisping up and dying along with the golden rod and the purple astors. The ground is covered with a thick brown carpet of oak leaves that rustle when you walk through them, as if the fairies Mrs. Smith reads about, was trying to speak to you.
It rained yesterday when I come, sort of an unhappy rain that made little ripples on the water and the Lake was covered with grey shadows that said as plain as they could. "There is something deep and wonderful below me here that I am covering up with my veil of mystery." I was disappointed that I couldn't see the moon, but he broke out of the clouds a while ago and touched their edges with silver. I am sure it ain't the same sun and moon shining here that shines on city streets. This morning I woke up early and from the ground to the sky there was nothing but a sea of color. It looked as if the world was on fire over there beyond the hills. It waved and rippled a great crimson thing without a shadow, and then it changedto colors which I have never seen before and I felt I was looking into a world of beauty that drawed the heart right out of me. The sky above grew bluer and lighter with only here and there a cloud till it was lost in a great cup that closed down over the earth like a cap of silver.
Oh, Kate, I love it here, I wish I never had to go back. After I have had a night here with the quiet and the peace that seems to be everywhere, the restaurants, and the smoke and the people make me sick. But after a couple of nights I slide back into it again, and like it, I suppose because I have never knowed anything else. But I believe that if I had a home like this I would never go to the city and rush around with the women with tired faces and loud voices that seem to be trying to hurry to finish something before they die. I sometimes set and listen to women who seem to be so busy doing nothing, and when I hear them say, "I am rushed to death" or "I haven't time to do a thing," I wonder what would happen ifthey didn't do it. What is the difference anyway? If they died to-morrow they wouldn't care it wasn't done, and if they don't die, they will have time to do it, if it is the thing to be done.
I am tired of it all. Mrs. Smith says I have been working too hard and I am blue because I am tired. Anyway I want to get way down in a big easy chair and watch the fire and hear the wind in the trees and once in a while, hear the acorns as they drop on the roof. That is all the music I want. I never want to hear an orchestra, and I am sure that some day I will put my foot through the big drum that keeps time for the dancing. I wish you liked the country, Kate, and we could get a little place and have a pig and some chickens and a duck and I wouldn't never have to see a pavement or a street light.
I am thinking of you, Kate, though I am awful tired.
Nan.
Dear Kate:
I know you will be dead sore at me, but I could not do nothing else and perhaps some day you will understand why I done it. Anyway, I have given Billy his chance. He has got just as good a show as any boy of growing up and being a good man, and he won't ever need to know that there are such things as thieves and prisons. He'll learn to think of Mrs. Smith as mother and he won't ever know that his real mother was in the stir. He will think of his aunt Nan, as a little red headed girl who loved him and brought him toys, and he won't never have bitterness or wickedness come into his life through us. He is going away.
I will tell you all about it, so as you can get the worst of your madness off before you come out, cause I know when you readthis you will want to kill me, and perhaps you will, but I don't care, I have done the only thing I knew to do for Billy.
After Mrs. Smith's baby died, she wouldn't look at Billy for a long time. Then she got to holding him and rocking him to sleep at night, and after a while she couldn't let him out of her sight. I was awful glad, cause I thought perhaps she would be always glad to have him, and then one day I heard them talk about going to Australia. Mrs. Smith didn't like the house since Paul was gone. She stops and listens as if she expects to hear him round the corner, and she don't want to go in his room, and she acts queer. Mr. Smith thinks that if she got away where everything was different, she would forget sooner, or if she didn't forget she wouldn't remember with so much pain.
His brother wrote from Australia and asked them to come there a long time ago. He is in the sheep business and doing very well. They talked it over and talked it over, and now they have decided to go. It mostkilled me, cause this is the only home I ever knew, and I didn't know what would become of Billy. I felt I couldn't take him back to the room. I said to Mrs. Smith one day that it kinda kicked my feet from under me to think of Billy losing his home and the mother and things he has had for two years. She looked at me a long time and then she said, "Nan, Billy don't need to lose his home." I said, "What do you mean?" "I will take him with me," she said. It took my breath away for a minit to think of losing Billy, as he is all I got, and I guess she saw it in my face cause she said quickly, "You can come too." I did not say nothing for a long time. I thought that this was my chance, I would get away from the old crowd, get away from all the things I hate and yet seemed kinda drawed to. I could leave this life that may be will take me down and down, and Billy and I could commence over again in a new country. Then I thought of you, Kate, and how you are coming out soon, and if both Billy and me was gone, you would have nothingto hold to, and I know you, and I know you would go straight to Hell. There would be no half way place for you, you would keep on sliding. And, Kate, I couldn't leave you. Billy can get on without me, he won't never know no difference, but you would be all alone, and it's hard enough to try to be decent when once you've been in stir—even with friends to help you, and when you come out, Kate, I am going to be waiting for you at the gate, and you are going to make a fight and win out and live decent.
I thought of all this when I sat there looking at Mrs. Smith and then I said, "No, I can't go, but you can take Billy." She said, "Nannie, I won't take a baby unless I can adopt him and make him really mine. I don't want any father and mother to come and take him when I have grown to love him." I said nothing cause I knew neither you or Jim would give him up unless you saw something in it for yourselves, and these people are poor people and could not afford to pay you nothing. Then Mrs. Smithmoved over close to me and took my hand and said, "Nan, I am going to say something that perhaps will hurt your feelings. Won't you give Billy to me?" I said, "Why, I would love to, but I can't, he ain't my Billy." Then Mrs. Smith said, "Now, don't be angry at me, I have never said anything, but I have never believed that story about Billy being your sister's baby. Isn't he your little boy?" At first I didn't understand her, and then it all come over me what she meant. She thought I had lied to her, thought I had made up that story about you being Billy's mother. At first I was mad, not because she thought Billy was mine, cause that don't make no difference one way or another, but I hated to think she thought I had lied to her. She saw I was hurt and she held my hand a little tighter and said, "Remember, child, I don't blame you, and I don't think none the less of you. I have loved you for two years and I will love you always, but if you want me to take Billy, I must take him as his mother." Then she got up and kissed me and said,"Don't answer me to-night, think it over and tell me to-morrow morning." They left me alone that evening and I sat before the fire till midnight, and when I went up to my room I stood by the window and looked over the lake till the sun come up. And then it all come to me. I would give Billy his chance. In a few months you were coming out, in a year Jim would be out. You may settle down and be straight, but Jim—never. Billy would grow up with crooks, would live around in little cheap rooms, getting no education, playing on the streets nights, knowing nothing but dirt all his life and quite likely spend most of his time after he grew up in prison, all through no fault of his, but just because he didn't have a chance. If he could go with Mrs. Smith he could live in a great big out-of-doors country, where people have clean thoughts and live clean lives, and instead of eating out of the garbage pails of life, he could eat in a clean dining room with a white cloth on the table.
I went down in the morning and I did notsay nothing until after breakfast, then I said to Mrs. Smith, "Yes, you are right, I lied to you. Billy is my baby." She come over and kissed me and said, "I knew it, dear, and I will always like to think of you as his mother." I said to her quick so she would not know how bad I felt, "What must I do to give you Billy?" And she said, "We will go to the lawyer's and he will make out the papers." So we went and I swore that I was his mother and that his father was dead, and I give Billy to Mrs. Smith and when he come back he was her little boy. Oh, Kate, I can't write more, my heart is nearly broke.
Nan.