Part 7

--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 I froze 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: little gabled 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.

* * * * *

--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 her forth. 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. “Tell me, 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 that it 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 scab Blood 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 world was 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 N _FURS_

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 into _shapes_. Shapes that were insult 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!

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 soul said You must! Or haven’t I paid enough?... Can’t we know _any_ thing, 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 a mudhole, 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 the rigid 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

Oysters Broiled chicken with asparagus, sweet potatoes, peas ice-cream and cake and coffee.

“I’m so happy!” she said, her eyes flooding out upon the face of Fanny. “I am so glad we have met at last!”

--She asks me no question of myself. Not that she fears lest I ask questions of her. She wants that. Your eyes and your lips so finely cut, so frozen in their revolt ... how long ago was that?... ask: I should ask of yourself. I cannot. Let me sit here, Clara, quiet. The food, O the good food! Let me sit here in your eyes. I cannot give you that which my asking of you would mean. I cannot. There is a little openness between us ... our separate years. In it I breathe. If you cover it with your coming close, I shall choke.

“We are going to a show,” said Clara. “Which show shall it be?”

“I have seen no play for so long! How should I know?”

“I’ll choose.”

She called the waiter. “Bring me an evening paper.”

--So strong and sure of herself! I am weak beside you.... Am I better than you?

At last Fanny’s eyes could open, could meet the glow of her friend’s.

“I am glad we ran into each other.... I am glad to see you.”

Clara was pale.--She is very understanding.... No ... not to-night shall I be better than you, strange girl crowned in your defeat. I know what you have done. I am glad to be willing to be weak beside you.

Once again Clara smiled. “Here’s a good one. Music ... you need music and dancing.”

--I live in music and dance....

“O I am so happy! I have missed you, Fanny. I did not know until there you were gone.... I did not know....” She stopped. Fanny’s eyes were turned inward.--Don’t, don’t! they said.--The space between us is what I breathe. There was silence.

Fanny was weak. She had walked level through the dark. Now for some time she felt that she was mounting. Felt this as one would who tramped in blackness by the strain upon herself. She could not touch the essence of her thoughts, gazing at Clara. They both had left a common world which they had never shared, years since. What in the sheer uncommonness of their separate careers was it they felt they shared? It was very strange to Fanny. They had no mutual subject. They sat across the table from each other, mostly in silence. What there had been to speak of ... Christopher Johns, the Office ... was dead in them both, was no subject. Yet now they shared a silence, they shared a pregnancy.--I am at ease, here, weary, full of food.... I am going to listen to music. Mounting, I am at rest!

They sat in the first row of the Balcony. Fanny knew these two young women ... one not so young!... sharp in the motley welter of the crowd. They were swathed together in one sharpness by the anarchic auras of the other men and women. Fanny saw herself: small, pallid, worn in her black skirt and her dun waist, close to this girl who had sold her defeat for the clear rose-colored smartness of her suit, for the diamond pin under her lovely throat, for the sleek health of her hair. But her eyes, she felt her eyes greater than ever, wandering in the hunger of her face ... the eyes of Clara were great and were her own.