—Who is right,Jesus or God?
—Who is right,Jesus or God?
—Who is right,Jesus or God?
—What do I know of Jesus, what does Harry know? There is a meaning that is God’s in the words of Christ, and I can’t find it out. Who knows it? Leon? It seemed to her that Leon knew. A Jew. He uses neither Love nor Christ ... the unlovely and unChristian Jews. We did not meet in Washington. Yet we had a talk. It seems to me I know what Leon said to me in Washington. What Harry said at home? That is real—yet it seems more like a shadow. Harry? You must not hate Harry. Hard. You dare not. What is there terrible in hate? Others hate ... good healthy people hate. Why can’t you? Why, when hate comes for Harry, do you sicken ... something in you rips, fades, bleeds away? I am pulled out from myself as if my heart from my body. It is easier to hate than tolove. You cannot. One hate? O I love this world of little people dragging through pain, mired in it, sinking in pain. O I love you! We are close. Let me hate Harry! You dare not. What has he done? He turned good. He quoted Scripture ... here am I. Edith, Edith—your father killed me quoting the words of Christ. O this is not it. There is something beyond. I am exiled. Did God give me exile? I could have stayed and fought.... Not Harry, God gave me exile. Will you hate God? If Harry because you thought he gave you exile, why not hate God? Why not? Why cannot I hate God? He made the Morass of pain in which the world so pitifully struggles, so pitifully dies! Hate God! Not Harry. You too ... who knows what agony you have lived, what sickly visions you have had, lifting you up. Poor Harry ... if one understands you, Boy.... I understand you, miserable Boy.... Fool! I can’t hate you. God? Hate God?... not if you understand him also.
—There was a tree, I see a tree standing upon a mountain side above a quiet lake. And the tree’s roots break out. The tree falls into the water. Downward it groans, crashing and crushing. But in the water does it not lie still? No, it rots. Why does it fall, why does it rot so still when it has fallen? Why does the Hand of God draw it down ... God who has made it grow ... down against its growing, down against a thousand sprouts and seedlings?
—I am falling, Fanny. Are you rotten also? Where are you going? O if you pull me down,Lord, I must go. You do not think that I am bad. You know. God, you know everything, you must see my girlhood ... how I pushed up, eager, straight, sunward. You must see my wifehood. You must see my motherhood. I fall. But I have not lost you, God. O it hurts!... Fall, fall.... Why are you nearer, Father, when I fall?
She pressed her fingers hard against her brow.—Little brain, is God in there? Her eyes with a new salience touched the objects in her room ... the blue burlap on her couch, the chair, the Bible, the wall of the still Church, the swift sun vaulting away above the vaulting roofs. She bound her fingers hard about her brow:—All of you ... all ... I hold you.... There is no air ... there are no spaces. I touch everything that my eyes see, everything that my mind holds.... God?
Fanny sank to her knees on the floor. She felt her face free and bright above her body. Her face prayed, and her body:
“God ... go ahead. If I can stand it, Go ahead. There you are down below. I see you. You draw me like a tree, crashing down, crashing down.” She held her Bible high, let it go, it fell. “God ... go ahead.”
She got up, seated herself once more: and began to darn some stockings.
She worked long. At times:—I am hungry. Better go out and eat, came to her faintly dizzy head. She could not. The room was ripe and round, holding her firm.
A knock.
“Come in.”
—Why am I not surprised?Christopher Johns stepped into the room, shut the door.
She gazed at him silent.
“You don’t mind?” he asked. “I was in the neighborhood. Thought I’d look in. The lady downstairs ... what a dear old lady!... said you were out: I could knock if I wanted to be sure.”
“Sit down.”
He took off his coat and laid it on the couch. It crowded nearly the whole couch. He sat down.
“I’m glad I found you in. This is a nice room,” he said. “Do they give you enough heat now winter’s coming?”
She went on darning.
“More heat than I’m used to at home.”
“Where is your home?”
“I have no home.”
“You look so home-like there,” after a pause he went on, laborious, determined. “Darning your stockings ... in your dark-blue wrapper.”
“All sorts of women darn stockings ... and wear wrappers.” She did not look at him. She was framed in the knowledge that he looked at her.
She saw his hand go through his thick brown hair. She felt it.
“I’ve been married fifteen years,” he said. “I know what I feel in you.”
She bit her lips.—Tell me. Tell me!
“For fifteen years I’ve been married to two women.”
She looked up.
“Only one of them legal, of course. But married to both of them just the same. I have had scores of girls during that time under my care. I know something of woman.”
—About me? about me, kind man, what do you know?
He answered her silence. “You I do not know. You are a mystery to me, Fanny. But you’re true and whole ... that I know ... like the whole earth.”
He had called her Fanny!
“My wife’s name is Sylvia. She’s pretty and prim and worships her figure. You can imagine what she thinks of mine! She’s always been afraid because of her waistline to have a baby. But before Sylvia came along, there was Sadie. The first love of my youth. She was thirty then. Now she’s fifty. Fat and sentimental, good old maternal Sadie. She’d love to have children. But how can she? She’s so respectable ... she’s so ill-placed in a hard world. She’s been true to me, has Sadie. Sadie envies Sylvia her marriage license ... the chance she has to have a brood of kiddies. Sylvia despises Sadie, is above jealousy (Sadie’s a part of the landscape) and tells herself in her heart what a far better kept-lady she’d have made, what better times she’d have had ...she’dnot have been true to me!... if only she were free and immoral like that fat old foolish thing.”
“Why do you tell me all this terrible farce?”
“I want you to know that I know women.”
“How should I know it from that?”
“These misplaced women love me ... they’re my fate.”
“All of your fate?”
“Not all.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Johns, why you should assume my interest in all this....”
He got up. “Fanny, there’s more between us than that.”
“What do you want?” She was frightened.
“I want you to see me, as I see you. Not understand me. Understanding’s rot. I don’t understand you. What in helldowe understand? What counts is seeing. Touching. What we see and touch is part of us.” She stirred.—My words! “You’re part of me ... you ... because I see you there, attached to me like a hand. That’s what I want.”
“You’re a fool. You had better try to understand a little. You don’t know a thing about me.”
“I don’t want to, then. It’s good you called me a fool. That’s the beginning of warmth, and warmth is the beginning of wisdom. Pretty soon you’ll have to blind yourself in order not to see me. You’ll see me, alright. You don’t want to blind yourself?” He went on: “Never another word shall I say about my two appendages ... my simpering Sylvia and my grandiose Sadie. But you’ll touch it all. You’ll see what that life is ... you’ll look at me: you’ll see what a lot’s left over....”
Fanny got up from her chair. She stood blazing. Sudden she laughed and sat down. He came to her and lifted her in his arms. His big bodycovered her. He kissed her eyes and her brow, her ears and her hair.
“Aren’t you ashamed,” she murmured. “Aren’t you ashamed!”
He placed her back in her chair. They breathed hard. Silence.
She looked at this looming man. He was brutal, she felt him gentle. He was abrupt, she felt him slow like a child. He was big, she felt he needed arms to cradle.
“Leave me alone!” sudden she cried. “I am a lost creature. Don’t pick me up. Leave me.”
He knelt by her chair.
“I have a husband who has kicked me out. I have a child I’m not good enough to touch.”
His hands curled. “Fanny, you lie.”
“I had a love affair. Do you hear me? I committed adultery. Get out! Even Christ don’t forgive that. Do you see that Church over there?” She jumped away from him and went to the window. “My husband’s a good man. If he came to New York, that’s likely where he’d stop ... in that Parish house. If he passed me in the street, he’d turn his face.”
The room was between them. They, facing each other, held. Fanny’s voice changed. It had been harsh and high. It was low.
“What do you want? Can’t you see that I’m dead? What do you want? Aren’t there plenty of women for the rest of your life? Why me? Let me die.”
He stood still.
“What can I give you? Haven’t I tried to give to my husband ... to Edith? They’ve taken all. I’ve failed. There’s something the matter with me.”
He stood. They were silent.
Her voice was quiet. “I don’t resist you. Do you hear? I don’t deserve to. I am dead. I am nothing. You don’t want that. I don’t resist you. You’ll take your hat and you’ll go....”
He held his silence, and she prayed in it. She saw the world all One: and of it, like a throbbing heart, like a high radiant head, she saw that there was God. But she said again:
“There’s something the matter with me.”
Johns came to her: he stood above her, holding her two hands.
“Come beside me, Fanny.”
The tears ran silent down her cheeks.—What does it mean?
“Come beside me. O close. Lie close with me, Fanny.”
She felt his arms lifting her like a leaf in a warm wind ... laying her down. She felt his hands and his mouth that fell like a warm rain on her parching flesh. She shut her eyes.
* * *
... So that day they had walked with Autumn burning all about them. Silently. She, walking through the years with feet at last aware: he, mute unconscious, reckless of pasts, praying that as she walked beside him ... this strange deep lovely creature who had become his life ... she should not walk away.
The day was done. They sat in their room at the Inn, with Night.
They felt the Night. It was clear and brittle like a violin: it gave forth notes, sharp, penetrable, woody: it wove its voices into silken strands. It was a dark and glowing violin. The room in which they sat was still of the past of the Inn which had been a Mansion. The ceiling came low: the beds were canopied: chairs, lowboy, brass hearthpieces, rag rug over the black softwood floor, drew into a tight repressed luxuriance, into a single mood, strong, curbed, sufficient, that was New England: ancient New England pregnant of bursting strengths.
Here they sat, thrust close upon each other by the Night and by the moodpent room.
He wanted to take her hand, he did not dare. His eyes searched her retiscence.
“It was a great day, Fanny. We must have walked twenty miles.”
She saw the miles ... miles of trees flaring against their false defeat.—‘We move skyward! Come, Winter, strip us ... still do we move skyward!’ She saw the miles: hours of her small feet beating immortal earth.
“Jonathan,” she spoke at last, “I am going to leave you.”
He hid his face in his hands.
“I have been drugged into peace. Now you want to drug me into happiness.”
“Put it that way if you will.”
“It cannot be.”
What could he say?
“I do not know,” she whispered, “why it is. It must be, Dear. Let us not argue. Let us not rend the beauty of our parting with inquisitive words—words that can only claw a truth. Let us be peaceful here for the days that remain. Let us accept what neither of us knows ... like our births, Dear, like our deaths: just so deep. It must be.”
He took away his hands from his face.
“I shant argue, Fanny. When I first saw you and loved you, I said: ‘She may come: that is possible. She will go: that is sure.’ I knew. What right have I to argue? You have blessed me with life. If now I must pay, so be it. Which part is the blessing—I don’t know Fanny: my having you, or the long years I shall walk alone if you leave me, and fill with my word: ‘I have had her.’”
“You have given me Peace. You have given me what I must give up.”
“I will not argue. I cannot give up hope. Wont you speak to me, Fanny?”
“What can I say?”
“What are you?”
She was still.
... “Why did you come to me? Why did you let me love you? Why did you not resist? Where do you come from, Fanny? where are you going?”
Her eyes came very slowly from within her world, came to this gentle clumsy lover of hers, rested upon him. He was there, broken into deep shadow, sudden light by the sharp flicker of the open fire.
“None of us could answer any of your questions. Why should I be able to?”
“You more than most of us.”
“When I came to New York, my coming meant one thing. Without that meaning my coming to New York, my leaving my home and my child were simple horror. All my life was a hideous jest unless my coming to New York meant one meaning.”
“What was that meaning?”
“When I know, I won’t be any longer where you are.”
He bowed his head: a jet of flame touched his brow livid like a gash above his grey-shadowed face.
“When I came to New York I fought against that meaning. For all that I had given up, for all the saying to myselfYou are dead, You are a sacrificeand knowing it, there was in me a self that wanted to live, wanted the good things I had given up. That is why you found me as you did. Resist you? I hungered for you, Dear. You meant, for a while, a Home, Love, a child,—you are such a child, such a dear good child—you meant all I had lost. You took from my coming to New York its meaning. You were a substitute, see? for what I had lost. And that makes it all a hideous jest, all my life. I did not come to seek an exchange, to build on the same charred ground where my life was burned away. That I know. But O I could not resist you. You forgive me, Jonathan? I was so sick, so weak. My arms needed so to hold my child, they were so empty.You were a lie, but O you were good. Forgive me, Jonathan. I knew all along. I needed to drug myself to be peaceful in my peace with you. The City ... work ... our flat ... they drugged me. Stealing some of your linen to mend it, nursing your cold just for a couple of days, taking the problem of your life and suffering by it, trying to help solve it ... O it was drunkenness, it was ecstacy, Dear, it was wrong. I couldn’t stay drugged. So it was wrong for you. Unfair, perhaps. Have I hurt you? Have I ... O God ... have I returned evil for evil after all? I have been hurt. And in the anger and the pain, I have understood why the world injures the world. I have understood how from evil received, from injury done, comes the irresistible impulse to return evil, to injure. I did not want that. I have done it! Yes. I have hurt you. Good tender man ... victim already of two selfish women. I have come with the poison of my wounds, and poisoned you.”
He shook his head. “No, Fanny. You have healed me.”
“If you knew how you said that ... how weak your voice was. You were strong, bursting, bubbling.”
“Whatever happens ... I am free of those two....”
“But now you are so still. Almost, you are thin.... Yes, I have done this. I have done this. I will continue to do this, poison others with the poison of my wound, so long as I seek to be healed. Doyou see? That is what makes the world endlessly hurt the world. It seeks to be healed. Do you see? Each human soul, wounded by another soul, seeks a soul to be healed. And the wound is passed along, endlessly, endlessly. O the vicious circle. And I am in it. God thrust me from home, God drew me as a stone is drawn to the earth ... away and out of the Circle. And I came back and entered it again. O I will try again: I was weak. I was not aware. I will know better.I must not seek to be healed.That is what I have learned. Can you see that, Dear? That is the deadly poison, that is the curse of passing on the poison ... that is the endless circle of a poisoned world. We seek to be well. We crave peace. We crave love. Even I. I came to you with my bloody soul. ‘Heal me!’ I said. And now you are bloody, too. And I no less bleeding. Do you understand just a little, Jonathan? why the peace you gave me, the care and the tenderness you placed into my empty arms ... why all that has been wrong? The hideous joke, this happiness you offered: the cruel wrong, this happiness I seek?
“ ...Yes ... my arms are still empty.” She held them forth as she spoke ... toward him. “They still hunger. O will they never stop aching to hold? aching to be full? My breast is still a woman’s.... But I shall try better now. Do you hear me, God, wherever you are? I was tired. I was broken beyond knowing. I slipped back from falling. I couldn’t go on falling upward upon you. Not then. I shall try again. Another chance, God, will you?... Yes, you will. Thereis no other way that you can do.... Dear, do you understand?”
His face was before her, crumpled, like a child’s ... lost in the Dark where she had left him, weeping and yet afraid to cry....
* * *
Fanny walked up the street into the Winter sun. It was morning. The sun stood low in the street’s square gap: its heatless dazzle was in her eyes as she walked. She walked with sight blurred by the sun among the men and women walking like her to work. They were the substance of their shadows, long and black upon the sung-glazed City. They swam like wraiths, remnants of warm houses, warm sleep, in the inhuman brilliance of the sun.
Fanny thought: “When I came, what was it that led me to Christopher Johns?”
The comfort of that place, was it curse or splendor lying in her mind? What had it been to Clara? Is Clara there? She had learned quick that there was no place like it. She was unskilled. The one skill she had ... the human one of knowing girls, of managing them well, of a clear head for practical affairs ... who again as she stepped wearying into offices for work would read it in her?
The crowds beat on: the day was going to dim. As the sun went high, these atoms of shadow hording against sun would win. For a day. Till the next morning. Fanny felt that her feet were dark and that they walked on brightness.
—Only my feet. Because they are so tired. I am not black, I am white. In this surge of shadow, Fanny felt wanly white. Her head wasdizzy, unpropped by the warm crowds hording against cold sun.
—And yet I am so small. How changed and grown from the white girl?... The door to the loft factory stood a steel barrier to the day. Within: musty heat air full of the stale traceries of wistful hands sewing at steel machines. She went in....
Above the whirr of Fanny’s work there was a voice speaking. Under the blanket of Fanny’s sleep there was a voice speaking. Across her words in meeting men and women, across the words of men and women meeting her, there was a voice speaking. It was one, and it was Fanny.
She knew at times. At times she did not hear it. She would emerge from the thick inattention ... sleep or fever or work or even fun ... and she would know it had spoken. It ran through the heavy years that were now hers like a thin Light moving along the bottom of a Sea that had no sun, moon, star....
—Girl. Perfect girl! I am not tall, but my body is tight. And my mind is taller than all these minds about me. It reaches higher than yours, slow brother, yours, Annie, yours, Delia. It is faster too. It moves very fast, it can skip ahead of your thoughts, it can turn about and wait and squat there grinning, till your thoughts catch up. And it is white and clean. I am fearless. I think that is purity ... don’t you, Jesus up there? You weren’t afraid and that is why you were pure.My mind is white and sound like my body leaping, skipping where it wills, over low stones, over low mud. What have I to fear? I am I....
—I walk the street under magnolia blooms between the proud old houses.... That’s Fanny Dirk: queer girl! I am simply myself. When Annie begins to squint at me I know what she’s thinking about, I know what’s troubled her last night. I can feel sorry for you, Annie. My figure is rather roundish, but the men are just where I want them. I have eyes and lips and a mind to spit them on. This mouse-blue frock is lovely even so, as I walk dangling my parasol through the sun-splotched magnolia way. This cream-dim ruching at my neck shows the olive note of my skin. Andthatmeans there is blood flowing very close.... And the white stockings are sharp between the bias skirt and the black slippers.... I walk fearless. I’ll do what I will.... I am surrounded by children.
—This dingy stair ... the factory girls ... you are a factory woman!... O for them true: this horror for them is true. For me? this horror is a tale. It is the words of a song. There is a music ... music. For you and for you and for you, grey shadows dripping from the sun through the encaverned stairs, it is true Horror. It should not be: for it is. For me, it is well.... Fanny Dirk with blue prim frock and the olive throb of my throat ... for it is something else.
—My room, so small, is the casing of my body. Shouldn’t it fit? It must fit to keep me whole. Those gloves that were so much too big, how Ifroze in them last Winter: how the Winter came in to my fingers as I walked, till I had money to buy another pair. Bargain-counter gloves ... the right size-mark ... that girl with eyes like panthers who dared not take them back, that man with eyes like dead fish, who would not! If my room is too big the world will come in like Winter to those gloves: and freeze me and burn me. Dear bare tight room! So much holier and tighter than the one of the Church: that was so big Jonathan could come in. Lies ... drugs ... came in. Here no one. You are my skin. No one dare touch my skin....
Her eyes went up and down about her room: her eyes stood upon its cot, upon its whitewashed walls, upon the paintless table, like the eyes of Fanny Dirk standing within her mirror.
—I do look well in black. My face is white and colors on me need just that touch of plumpness I have lost. Black eats away the hollow of my memory of plumpness. My breasts droop: the curve of my thigh is not so lovely now. Black covers me, I used to be gay almost like naked in the blue and the rose. Black wears. My body does not wear. I am wearing out. I don’t know what I’d do without you, mirror! Your brightness is the only laughter in the room. Sometimes your laugh is a mocking. Never mind. I find when I look in your laughter, even if it is a mocking, that I find myself. She laughed aloud.—See what I do when I see myself? Well, friend ... why such a crusty room to case the body of Fanny?... There were soft casings once: littlegabled house, garden so brave above the dull black earth, Harry, Edith ... you were all softness Edith my child! Soft hands upon my arms, soft lips upon my mouth biting me with such savage softness. Edith? O my soft love whom I held all about me ... who held me all. You are gone. This hard sharp room that holds me like an iron glove—now I have you alone ... and the mirror that is laughter.
* * *
—I shut my face in my hands and you are about me, my Baby. Only you. Your hands and your hair and your little mouth. Edith, Edith ... what are you now?... The room is truer. Naked, harsh, cruel ... room of emptiness, crushing my flesh ... you will make all of me hard, all of me callous from being cased by a hard whitewashed room: a room with an iron bed. You are truer!
* * *
—I shut my eyes in my hands and you are about me, my Baby. I am a baby with you. Our flesh is one: our hands are one like petals entwined in a flower. We are a flower together. We spring from the black earth. We have had our blooming. The earth is there, we are gone. In the black earth under the snows, there is a seed of us, my darling. I am the seed of us, Edith!... of our softness, of the bright bloom of our twined petals the hard seed. I am lain away in the earth. The earth blooms only in us.
—Flint-hard room buried beneath the City,You case me, I shall burst you yet!Buried within you, tight sealed room,Buried within me, within your bitter coldness....The folded memory of a flower.
—Flint-hard room buried beneath the City,You case me, I shall burst you yet!Buried within you, tight sealed room,Buried within me, within your bitter coldness....The folded memory of a flower.
—Flint-hard room buried beneath the City,You case me, I shall burst you yet!Buried within you, tight sealed room,Buried within me, within your bitter coldness....The folded memory of a flower.
* * *
—Cracks in the leaping ramparts of New York. And I look down in them. I am a girl with short black hair and hands that are strong. I peer down on my knees at the fissures of New York. I kick my slippered feet behind me, peering down. My legs are solid in their white silk stockings and when I toss my slippers Jack and Harry see my legs to the knees: good legs: their eyes are bright, looking, they swallow thick.... I look down into the heart-beat of the City.
—I am not hungry. Look at me, Fan, look at me huddling to-night around an oil stove and a lamp, both on the floor and myself on the floor. Black dress, grey frayed coat ... my hair is down to keep my throat warm. The wind is a solid wall of ice against my window: a Devil sucks it back, it plunges again ... solid steel wall ... and splinters of it cut through the glass and the bricks, cut to my shoulders huddled over the oil stove and the lamp.
—They smell. Hot smell that gets cold beyond my shoulders. There in the corner, where the bed is, where the washstand, is the smell of the oil stove and the lamp, but cold. Here it is hot. I could singe my eyebrows.... It is the style to singe one’s eyebrows ... or cut them or something. How do they do it, those sharp pencil-lines over eyes? The smell is cold by the mirror ... I stay huddled. But do you think all the ladies with red cheeks and penciled brows and eye fire-dried ... are they walking Broadway to-night?... have got so by huddling like me too close over a stove and a lamp?
—In the rest of the house it is quiet and asleep. The wall of ice plunges against my room. My room alone. I am not hungry. To-morrow I have a job so I cannot be hungry. Lamp and stove, tell me, are you burning my cheeks red too?... are you going to singe my eyebrows? are you going to sear my eyes?
—New York! New York! why am I here, frozen and empty in your leaping arms, peering into your bowels? Women with burnt faces walk your streets. Women wander like dreams denied through your pent streets. There are in New York men and women who worship God. Christians only, Jews only. Worshipers, only of God. Are you New York, you worshipers of God? Have you made this? Has your God let you make this?
(—I am at the threshold of long thoughts, like caverns warmed with earth. I shall think now, and be no longer cold nor hear the wind like a steel sea on my shoulder.)
—On Broadway there are women with burnt souls, and there are Jews. New York is full of Jews. What does that mean? Spirit of a Jew quenched the white-stockinged girl: bore her to womanhood. Word of a Jew thrust herforth. Hand of a Jew guided me to this Cold seeking warmth ... led me to this City where there are Jews in swarms, in sultry pools, in tumults!
She was still. The wind was a steel broom sweeping the ice of the world against her huddling over a lamp and a stove. The frail room held. She heard no wind, she saw no room. She sat swaying within an aureole of smutted heat grey-faced, over the black mass of her dress: and her hair knotted against her throat.
“Tell me,” she whispered aloud, “who has understood? Harry was wrong, he did not understand you, Christ. He misused your words. You have forgiven him. But who ... who understands? You were a Jew, and we alone who are not Jews worship and quote you, Jesus. Why is that? You were a Jew? The Jews saw God ... they only during those angry ages before Christ had the Grace to choose God. Why do they leave you, Christ, you and your words in silence? Are they so close to you they do not hear you? Are they so close to you that they are you?”
Her hands clasped above her face. “But we are better! sweeter!”
—Do we not understand! Are we children, Lord? Are we children playing with the fire of Thy Word? Who is grown among men? She thought of Leon.
—Your lips knew not Christ nor Love.... Yet who beside you has known me, who beside you has healed me?
“Tell me!” her voice was high in the stark cold room. She rose up on her knees, and her arms and her words were higher than her face. “Tellme, God! How dare you discriminate against us! You have no chosen children. We all are your Chosen ... we who choose you.... Lord, I want to know. Do you hear? I choose to know. Not what my breasts want ... let them starve. You shall not turn from me now. Look at me, Lord.”
Her hands drooped. Her face fell like a flower suddenly burned. She lay crumpled upon the floor within the City. “Will you just look at me, Lord? What have I? I shall not die. Yet what life have I? Think of my past ... think of the girl I was ... the girl bright and brave: think of the mother I was! Here I am. My life is sold—for this! I must know. Do you hear me when I cry so within myself? else—what is this? I must know! This horror of hurt ... from Fanny, the Fanny of my friends, of my beloved, my child—now this here, this dirt! And it is true. Dirt is true. What else? Have I sinned? What act of ignorance have I sinned in? What is this sense of holiness that will not leave? Which is it, God? I must know: I have sinned or I am holy?”
Her mouth was full of tears ... good tears, for they were warm. She was aware of her feet, down there, cold ... lumps that denied herself for she was living warm.
She lay on the iron bed. She slept.
From heavy sleep Fanny awoke exhausted. Her eyes opening were broken by a world cutting in, sharp and strange world of impossible impacts,which somehow had been away. She lifted her stiff weight from bed, she had slept in her clothes. She remembered the warm world wrapping sudden about her in the night bringing her sleep. She looked at the cold lamp, at the rust-stained bluish stove on the floor.—Where is it?... She took off her clothes, knowing that she must bathe in cold water. Her body thirsted. There was another world ... an imperious imagining ... to blot the real within her. World, world, world! The voice in her was small.—I lose myself. I go forth breaking against cold and stone. She was athirst for water.
The bite of the water on her flesh was good ... it made the world she must face realler. It bit under her arms and over her throat, it drew like a knife between her legs. It made her fingers wool....
—I am a sunny girl getting ready to ride with Harry. Warm good feeling ... riding and laughing! The pear blossoms are out!... A dismal room with its grey bulged walls and its patched pipings. About the bathtub in which lay her naked flesh, a stained and rusted bathtub, the floor was matted with cold oilcloth, colorless with many feet. Now under her gay ones!
—Come!... a dim hall, reeking with night-shadows still, plethoric as if it had swallowed too much darkness, quenched the white shoulders of Fanny Dirk. “I hold you,” it seemed to say. “I am this dingy house and I am putting you out.”
She shut the door behind her. The street. She took it in, bravely forcing herself to know thatit was new: she had never seen it. There was a clarity about her. The world was a delirium carved, a frenzy frozen and sculpted. Only within her was dimness of soft flesh.
The street was empty. Piles of snow, color of drowned rats, lay in the gutters. A cat moved gaunt. The two rows of houses stood even, scraping the sky. They were damp-soiled scabs ... brown red ... they held their secrets as dry blood holds a wound. They hated the grey wideness which they scraped at above them, clutching with pitiful flourish of eave and chimney at a buried sun.
Fanny walked. Her feet struck the pavement. She felt how she touched the street. A thing deep terrible living her feet touched as she walked. It gave to her footfall, it did not rise in response.
—Tear off the scabBlood would gush!
—Tear off the scabBlood would gush!
—Tear off the scabBlood would gush!
“I had better buy rolls.” She pressed her one nickel in her palm. She would have money that night.
A woman with long waist broken to the show of underwear swabbed the floor of the Bakeshop. Her arms were naked like the pole of her swab-cloth. All she was long articulated bone, swathed in moist grey. Her face, swinging above her work, smiled on Fanny.
Fanny sat at a dark table in the smell of dough, seeing the long face suddenly widen bright: seeing eyes in a woman, tender through the greased shadow of sawdust floor and a counter heavy with bread.
“I’ll have just a nickel’s worth of rolls.”
The woman came back: she placed before Fanny fried eggs, coffee, butter and bread. “Why haven’t ye been in, of late, silly?”
—She understands!The understanding of the woman stopped Fanny’s words. She was not hurt by this sharp tenderness like green in the crass mass of the morning.
She ate.—I must eat slow. She could not eat slowly. Something within her beyond her devoured the food.
She could not say Thank you, standing to go. She could not give her nickel burning in her palm. The woman swabbed her feet.
“Ye’re in the way,” she mock-scolded. Fanny was glad.
Street!—Why does no thing stay as it was? So I can catch up?
She breathed heavily. Her head was light, save in the very back under the coiled hair which tipped downward pulling up at her chin. She felt her stomach. Her knees were light. She felt her feet.—I could laugh! I am striped in heaviness and lightness. Laugh then!
The two walls of the street fell forward: in the air above the gutter they crashed in silence together and disappeared. The City was a maze of twisting streams.... Two men passed. They were arm in arm. They were sleek and full in the black coats shaped to their bodies. Their cheeks and their eyes were sleek and full of themselves. About the round head of each there was an Aura. Thick troubled, it beat outward like an emprisoned gas. A gaseous colorless world it was about the head of each, that veered against the other, drew in, thrust out, hostile. Impenetrable two men passed, arm in arm.
* * *
... A woman passed her. Her eyes were red spots in the soot of her face. The loose wide flesh of her feet at each step hurt. Her hands fell like the heads of slaughtered hens. Behind her, attached to the grey shawl that covered her head, a Wake like a scarf dragged dimly dark. It wavered from side to side: it was a disconsolate flutter forever behind her. A little boy crossed the street at her back: the scarf lifted, it avoided his bright eyes: it sagged down toward an ashcan, skimming the filth....
* * *
... Fanny stopped on the curb to let a wagon pass. Huge horses drew it. They were black with white-stroked withers, hair gathered thick above their pounding hoofs. A thin man perched above them; behind him, the iron cart heaped high with tawney dirt. He was imprisoned, this pallid man, between the soil and the horses. His hands held reins. From his white eyes two little Streams of red rose, curled, flecked at the horses’ steaming flanks, receded, thrust in the dirt behind, moved circling fitful about the soil and the horses. The roll of the wheels, the clank of the great hoofs, the cart’s metallic strain were a tissue of hostile voices hunting the still red search that streamed from his white eyes.
* * *
—There are no ones and one. You get in my way! You don’t exist!... She saw how this worldwas a manifold of veins, carrying blood, building flesh of life and house.
—I flow. I too am livid, flowing through You.
She saw that the walls of the streets were once more in their places. She saw that men’s and women’s heads were once more shut: ... the beating angry solitary worlds, black, red, grey ... spherical, streamer-like ... were sealed once more in skulls of men and women.
Fanny’s new place of work was in the shop of a fur-dresser.
She sat at a long table. She looked above her plying hands at the stooped forms of women across from her: looking above their plying hands at her. Between their shoulders, the window ... gold letters of the Sign standing upon it.
A. R A C H M A N NFURS
They were in a room like a foul mouth that spoke to the world gold words, dropped this amenity upon the sweep of Elevated structure just abreast the window. Trains passed. Banners of cluttered stationary lives made gay in passing ... sweep of black particles in the gay flourish of passing.Passing!As Fanny worked, the smooth flat tracks of the Elevated trains stood like a way beyond the world. One entered heavy and thick into the train ... one was swept gay!
Fanny worked.
Skins ... dead dusty skins to be ripped and sponged and fitted intoshapes. Shapes that wereinsult to the skins. Her hands raped life. In the filth and shadow of the shop, she felt the mutter of creatures defiled and effaced into dead forms by hands that were not even bloody.
—Furry skins live.Boney hands defile you.I am a woman and you are under me!
—Furry skins live.Boney hands defile you.I am a woman and you are under me!
—Furry skins live.Boney hands defile you.I am a woman and you are under me!
She felt that they of the shop were very strong, were great ... marring the wistful lives of creatures with warm furs: running thread and needle through them, pressing cloth and water against them. She felt that she dwindled each moment of this work which made her so superior and strong against live creatures. She defiled herself ... she worked to live a desecration upon life.
And then (this work was familiar, she had held this kind of job before) the life of the furs, the life of the girls, the life of her hands died. Fanny knew again her eyes and her black hair and the wondrous world dancing forever within the wall of her brow.
—Beating ... beating ... ache. I can pay for that dear woman’s breakfast. O I can never pay for what she did for me. I don’t have to. The woman was good. Good is what you need not pay for. Sun ... women doing good ... love ... sudden discoveries of You in a paid world. I am glad. I have not lost sight of Goodness. God? Does one have to pay for You, God? Or have I destroyed You, paying too much? Should I have refused to pay, when the sick voice of my soulsaid You must! Or haven’t I paid enough?... Can’t we knowanything, Lord?
She was aware of her hands beneath her, of the scissors, of the extended furry deaths against the filthy table.—We’re paying. We’re paying? For what?... Well, we’re paying.
She was strong.—I can keep this up forever. Perhaps I shall never die?
There was a starkness in her breast, as of a thought suddenly crystal, suddenly shaped of herself, crowding her organs.
—Shall I never die? Am I eternal, seeking ... seeking? Am I in Hell? Is Hell true after all, and am I in it? This is not Heaven!
She had the sense of an eternity in her hands paying, in her brow’s ache, paying.—Souls in Hell ... feel like this?
There lay Time beyond the lettered window. She looked on a neat little world of Time: Time ran upon steel tracks, Time carried mites of human life rigidly down a tiny way. The trains, the houses, the streets, the wisps of sunny cloud through the roof’s gap ... all was a pasty toy-world: make-believe: the world of Time and Space. She gazed on it in passionate condescension within her sooty workroom, hands paying, brow in search paying....
Outside. The day above the Town was lovely with Spring’s intimation. Soiled snow-piles melted in brackish streams. The gutters lay mud-splashed. Men and women moved drab, undifferentiate through the damp brownness of pavement. But like a wave of butterflies above amudhole, Spring fluttered hesitant, diaphanous, young.
Fanny held her face up against downy wings.—My shoes are torn. She felt the down pull of her torn shoes under the wings of the Spring. She knew that because she felt such heaviness of feet, no one like her prized this afternoon.
She began to walk. She stopped.—You! It is you!The form, sudden and sheer in its familiar individuation—Clara Lonergan—stood before her still, with warm hands clasping her cold ones.
“You, Fanny!”
“Clara!”
The face of the dark girl: “Nearly four years I have longed to find you.”
Fanny’s eyes: “Nearly four years....”
Clara could not speak. “You, you,” she kept repeating, “ ...you....” She focussed her eyes and saw her. She was still.
Fanny felt:—She knows how I am. This girl has always loved me.
“Come, we’re going to dinner. We’re going to spend the evening. O Fanny!”
Fanny knew that if her eyes could pierce within the daze of this meeting ... under the Spring, in the snow-stained street ... she would see Clara trimly, quietly dressed—richly. Clara hale and hard and shut.
—This girl has loved me!
They did not speak, walking. Blue night, a swathing of cottoney blue mist, crept from the skies, curled the miasmic streets, bundled therigid Town in its soft glamor. Lights made little rents. Fanny moved beside the hard thrust of this girl....—She has loved me!... through the blue warm-ness.
They entered the subway, they rode, they came up. They stepped from a bright street into a bright long room—facetted in white round cloths and mirrors. The two chairs held them across the white space of their table.
“Shall I order?” said Clara. “I’ll order. Her eyes, deep and many colored like a pansy’s black, felt the lean blade of Fanny’s poverty: caressed it, bled against it. She ordered