Part 8

The music was far away.... “This is a tale of far away, a world I have left and forgotten.” The curtain rose. The actors were clad in costumes of 1840. White Pierrot danced through the glitter of ladies in prim bonnets, gleaming bared breasts, hooped skirts. Rhymed words, words of love and fidelity and perfection chimed with the pelt of taffetas and brocade, of powdered hands flirting fans: and white Pierrot with eyes lost in the paint of a gay world, seeking love and perfection.

--People do not dream this way. I was not alive then. This is a costume comedy with pretty airs. Romantic ... means false, in time and in place. Fanny struggled now against a world falsely remembered.--This is not true, not yours. Pierrot was in love with a fine lady who tinkled at a clavichord ... gowned in sheer black with her white shoulders bare. Her flirting shoulders and her painted lips took his round love: his deep was lost in her shadow: Pierrot was lost. He left her broken: and another man with words of love sharp like hooks to catch her flesh caught in her shoulders (they had not turned for Pierrot), turned her round, won her.

... A sad play with laughing music ... little streams of water running up the dark side of a mountain. Impossible ... unreal. Fanny saw the breaking audience. It rose and splintered in the new light house. Men and women suddenly distinct like the jewels in their hair, like the hard smiles, hard lines of face against the new blare of the lighted house. No. The play was real. Laughter went twinkling up the steep of mountains. Laughter flowed up hill. That was the way of laughter.--You men and women falling away downhill, have you never laughed? Upward! upward! Fanny pressed Clara’s arm.

They stood in the night. The breast of Fanny flowed with her hurt and her life: her heart was liquid at last: her hurt and her life, pressed so long against the urge of Clara, melted and flowed. She took the hands of her friend. She pressed them. She knew what was to be....

They walked through the broken throng of men and women parting, waiting: through the bright weave of carriage calls, whispers, farewells: through the new freshet of the City’s stream spreading in blue and green and gold, soon lost. They walked in silence. They were putting off a moment of decision. The Elevated Structure stood like a sentence. Fanny’s arm that had held Clara’s dropped to her side. A train, jingling with lights, drew past....

--It goes and goes, it comes to the window where I work, to the window where I stand this instant at a table. I tear and rip ... I work in the thick shadows of dead life. I look at the train that passes. It is there!

Fanny held out her hand.... A little man, square black beard, small red lips, sharp greedy eyes, stood with his hairy hands upon her shoulders. Mr. Rachmann!--She sought the hand of her friend.

Clara’s lips sharpened.

“Where do you live?” she spoke. “I want to see you soon.”

Fanny shook her head. Mr. Rachmann went. The lips of Clara parted, they were wet.

“I do not understand.”

“Look at me, Clara.”

“You won’t let me see you?”

“O do understand! Can you see me? Can we see each other, Dear?”

Clara’s face broke.

“You can’t do this. You can’t. You don’t know what you mean. Let me come. I am all alone. O don’t judge me, Fanny!”

“You know I don’t judge you.”

“Let me see you ... once.”

They were rigid in struggle.

“Clara, I am afraid to see you.”

... Still....

“I am going a way that is terrible and unknown. It does not get easier. There is no getting used to it. Each moment, there is yearning to turn ... get out ... fall away....”

The girl straightened. “You think I do not understand,” came her clearer voice. “But I do. More than you, perhaps.... You need not give me your address.”

Fanny was warm and broken against the clearness of Clara.--What does this mean? Why do I reject her? She was still.

“Good-by,” said Clara.

--You need me. You need me? Say that you need me, girl.

The hand of each held more than the hand of the other.

“It’s all right....” A moment Clara smiled. Then her eyes looked within, they met the eyes of Fanny deeply in a far space where they were not apart.

“Good-by.”

--There is love in you. Love, love. What wisdom? You are not saying, Good-by. You are saying, Love!

Fanny was still. And alone.

* * * * *

Without turning she walked. Swift walking. She was aware of herself walking swift beneath the Elevated trains, and of not moving at all. She did not like this shadowy way with lights upon the sides of it like little creatures burning to get in. It was full of noise and heaviness and booming steel. A side street ... quieter, cold ... swung to her face. Southward again. But now an Avenue all open to the stars.

The tall buildings rose melting into mist. Stars flickered faint over the stillness of their pointed thrusts. They rose from stone, rigid, equal: a stone City lay before her and the houses stood one stuff with the hard death beneath her feet. Men and women, like house, like street, passed on: wrapped in stone muffledness. They were muffled in dim rigor. They were masked.

The City was masked. Corner of wall soaring, clusters of passers-by, the buzz of motors pulling with rubbered gait through the damp asphalt ... were features of a Mask. She felt its stillness, its stifled comfort: underneath, a heated flesh she could not touch.

Her feet, beating the street, beat with her eyes and soul against the Mask of a world. It was unrolling. Sharp stone towers swathed in blue mist, private mansions mansard-roofed, façade of church, flourish of store with its show-windows alight like gems set in the pallor of the night ... masked, hid away. She was unmoving while the dominant procession pressed before her. And the men and women, sparse, impervious, aloof, were details of the pageant that defiled. Yet it seemed to Fanny she beheld an act deeply ceremonial, religious. The high masked world ... human and stone ... became a chant, lifted in stilled ecstasy unto some god....

Her room was outside all this. The gas jet she lit stood on the whitewashed wall, made it orange, made shadow of bureau and chair stand stiff like marionettes ... stiffly agile ... upon the orange glare. She was shut in: the pageant and the hymn to a lost god were far away. Yet now in the room it was to her as if she stood at a window. She looked out secure upon the song and pageant of the world....

--I am very quiet. A terrible thing has come to me. I have met Clara, the one person in the world who knows of me and cares ... and I have sent her away. A terrible thing has taken place. I am quiet.

She was afraid of thinking ... afraid of how clear she saw. She took off her clothes, she turned out the light. She lifted wide the little window that lifted her eyes above a jagged finger of roof to the sky. Lavendar-blue it was, washed in pale streakings of eternal fire. She lay stretched-out in her bed: warm, with eyes so wide she could feel the night pour in to them.... Manifold Night! Night of the straining of flame through space, Night of the march of stone masks above the softness of men. Night----

A question stood sharp up:--“Why did I want to turn round, walking downtown? Why did I not turn round? What was the thought always there as I walked--as of a face and a will watching----“

Fanny smiled. “You wish she had followed you. She didn’t! Never fear. She is not that sort ... strong unsentimental Clara.”

Fanny saw Clara naked in a wide soft bed. Very sharp she saw her: the small clear breasts, the fluted strain of the thighs, the tender cushion of her belly. A man-form, vague, bore down upon her belly. Fanny could see no more. She feared to sense that if she dared see more she might see Johns! She saw a desecration as if the talons and beak of a great bird tore at the thighs of Clara ... strips of the flesh of herself. She could not bear it. Her palms clutched over her eyes and ears. She turned writhing upon her stomach. She was still.

--Poor Harry!...

“No,” she said aloud. “You wanted her to follow and she did not. She respects you too much. Can’t you respect yourself? What you said to Clara was true ... the long and terrible Way that you must go. Cannot you say to yourself what you said to Clara?” Once more Fanny lay in her bed straight-stretched and her eyes open: once more the light poured in upon her eyes.

Her head was light. It lifted her like a balloon above the City. She was afloat above the brittle stone. The world was black and was suffused by fires. The light was the Black breathing.

“It is true,” said her mouth. “I am falling upward. I have nothing to do with this. I am falling upward.”

Her words lifted upon the Night that poured in her eyes. She saw her words. She saw herself. She drank her words and herself.

--I hope it is not Johns who is keeping Clara. No. It is not he. Clara would not ... even if he would ... after what was. Why do I care? I am not done with Clara!... But I did right. I must say No and No ... endlessly No to all the world’s questions. That is saying Yes--to what? How strange it is, this Being in me that flies. I am the wings of myself.

She was very light. She was afloat in an impenetrable Dark which yet she pierced for she was suffusion of light. She lay there, eyes and mouth wide open, limp palms at her sides, and heard the cadence of her breath.

--I am not unhappy, she thought. Then her eyes closed....

She was in a station of the Subway. Clara was beside her. Crowds surged in four great streams. She lost Clara. She was afraid. Streams dark and turgid beneath the crust of the earth were men and women. She saw ten thousand hats and gloves and skirts in sharp detail. She saw beneath the pandemonium of colored cloths, straw, feathers, leather ... each one sheerly alone ... a single Skin. She felt the Skin grey-white. The straws and silks and collars pricked the Skin: and the Skin hurt. She wanted to be naked of these vari-colors. They hurt. The crowds flowed on. Upon the faces of the men and women were smiles: the faces were not naked, they were covered with smiles. Upon the feet of the men and women were shoes. Shoes and smiles pricked in hard waves on the grey-white Skin.

She was aware of this steel cavern under the crust of the earth where four streams ploughed and mangled upon each other. On the steel were casings of cement. It was rough. It cut against the quick of her nails. It pricked the steel that held the edge of the earth.

She was aware of this all one, in a great hurt, as she lay asleep with her skin against the rough stuff of her blanket.

Upon the Subway cave was the stone street. Upon the stone street were the buildings. In the cave, in the street, in the buildings, flowed the people. They were a black blood flowing everywhere. Here they were thickest. They caught the rigid Subway cave: it rocked. The street was rocked with the rocking hole below. The towering houses swung and dipped in a steep measure, over the streets, over the plunging Subway throng, under the Sky. A mighty rhythm ran with the black blood through the stone world. It danced. The Subway rolled and bounced. Buildings bent down, jerked high, circled their points in a great Dance under a sky that was still.

Fanny watched the dancing world as if it were close to her: as if it were upon her like her heaving breast.

“I am the Dancer,” she cried.

She danced. She was still, she was in bed. But she danced. In the veer of houses, in the see-saw of streets, Fanny danced. Over her head she was aware of a sky steadfast.

Fanny danced faster. Towers of stone leaped up now, leaving the streets. Towers of stone soared like rockets against the still stars and came back. Gutters twirled: crowds wove into pythonic knots. The skies caught Dance, like fire. The stars moved very finely; they did not swing far from their orbits: rather they tremored, they shone in vibrance, they sang like high notes very fast ... and the sky swung long, swung so slow like a tide through the warp of trilling stars that it was hard to know that the sky moved. In the clothes of the dancing Subway throng there were bugs: they danced. In the roofs of the street, there were stars: they danced. Fanny saw the bugs dancing, and the dancing stars.

“I am the Dancer,” she cried. She danced through the Night....

* * * * *

She opened her eyes at last to a day pale wornout. She lay in her bed, under the haggard morning as under a wet sheet. She was unable to move.

“I am sick,” she said aloud. Then again she slept.

When she awoke it was still day. Sharp stillness. She heard the blood beat in her temples. Her body was blanched, it was dead. Her head lay hot and swollen above an inert body.

She shut her eyes. The day swathed her head in myriad light shawls. One by one the shawls withdrew, they were gone. She opened her eyes against black Nothingness. It raced into her eyes, it won her swollen head. But her body it could not touch. Her body like a knife-thrust lay, white and still, within the belly of night.

--I must get up. She tried to get up and could not. She lay in her warm water. Her body prevailed. The water was cold. It was dry. Her head scolded against her stricken body. Her body endured like a bar of steel. It was solid death in a melted world that was dying.

There were days and there were nights. There were nights and there were days. The world winked open, the world winked shut. Rain dribbled into her window: sunbeams deflected lay like gold dust against it. Below, in the houses, feet fell; voices rose, fell; shadows of human will writhed up the twisted stairs to her white room: no substance followed. She was alone: her blanched dead body and her boiling head. Beneath her a great Void in which the sounds of doors and feet and words, the rumble of a cart, angled about like little balls of celluloid in a great hollow caldron.

Day night day ... the world winked dimmer. Fanny’s form lay like a wave-washed beam on the edge of the sea. Color was long since washed. The water sucked at the meat and the juice of the wood. It was porous light, it was rotten before the ceaseless suck of the water of the sea. Her head was lower. It no longer boiled above her body.

Then Fanny shut her eyes: and her eyes were all of her head that was not like her body ... dim and porous and sucked.

“Is this what all was for?” said her eyes. “Have I gone through all this--all this--to die like a cat in a barn?”

She knew she was not to die.

“I am going to die. My life has been nonsense ... and now I am going to die.”

She knew she was not to die.

Her eyes were still. There was a great Pain clenching her breast and her bowels. No pain had been before.

“How long have I been lying here? How many days ... is it weeks?... I have not eaten? Will nobody come?”

Her body was Pain. Her body was coming alive, so it was Pain.

“Will no one come? Will you let me die like a cat? I am thirsty ... I am sick! I cannot move. I danced too much. I am paralyzed with Dancing. Don’t let me die.”

Her body was coming alive, so that it cried.

“Edith ... Edith, save me! Harry--won’t you nurse me? I have nursed you so often. Water! My child! O Mother ... Clara I did not mean----“

Her body was coming alive, so that it was afraid. It screamed, it lied, it abused: it wanted the water of life.

“It is too late. I am alone. Something was wrong with you, Fanny. You seemed good and sound enough. But something was wrong with you, Fanny.... Look at you now: you Fanny Dirk, you bright Fanny ... mother and wife ... you now.”

She knew she was not to die. She knew there was nothing wrong.

“Does God send clean creatures to a death like this? Death in a stinking room where no one comes to see what is the matter after days and days. Starving to death alone, in New York.... O how rotten you must have been!”

She knew she was not rotten.

“Is there nothing left? No one single thing? Mother, I can’t find you. Edith, I can’t see you. Harry--Edith--all gone. Is there nothing left? Yes: one thing left.”

Fanny lifted her shoulders faintly from the bed with straining elbows. Her heavy head fell backward: her eyes swung dizzy toward the ceiling.

“God! you aren’t much for me. But I believe in you. Do you hear? Even now. I am not rotten, God. I have not done wrong, God. You must hear me, for I believe in you, somehow, my Father. This is all right. This is not just--this is not unjust. It is part of the world. I am leaving the world. But I have been a part. I believe that, God. I have been a part and you need all parts. You have needed me, God?”

There were tears in her eyes ... cool good tears. “Say you have needed me, God, for a part in your ... something. Whatever it is. You’ve done with me, now. But you’ve used me. Haven’t you used me, God? You’re casting me in the ash-heap I know. Can’t you say at least ‘Thank you’ before I am gone?”

Fanny sank back upon her pillow. Tears made cool stains down the hot parch of her cheeks. Her eyes roved through the opaque bright room, breaking against the cruel harshness of familiar objects. Her hands against each other on her breast tremored and fell apart. Her mouth moved.--Is this the end?

She knew there was no end.

A great Peace came. Her body was soft and enfolded. Warm waters held her close, washed her of anguish, washed her of doubt and of weakness, washed her at last of self. Fanny was perfect in sleep like a child in its mother. There was a smile on her mouth....

* * * * *

Long hours the room with its still freight moved through the world. Unbroken, like a seed, buried and hard in the earth. At dusk the door opened slowly. Clara stepped into the room.

The prostrate friend in the stiff iron bed, black hair matted over the hot white face, the walls, very still, very cold, shutting this beaten flesh into their death ... struck Clara in the door.

Her hands clutched her throat. She knelt beside the bed. Her hands and cheeks took in the heavy breath, the burning brow, voluptuously. “Thank God,” she murmured. Then the luxury of sense and of articulation went. Clara was action.

Ten minutes later, a physician stood with her at the bedside.

* * * * *

Fanny opened her eyes to a world softened and new. A warm world, she accepted like a child, without wonder. Over the gas-jet was a shade of green. The walls cast a kind dimness. On the deep windowsill a brazier burned. Bottles stood sheer from the shadow, blue and black and brown ... warm emanations of a good will they seemed in their suggestion that being ill she was nursed, being weak fortified. They stood beneath the tender steam of the brazier like good words.

The room was warm. It had warm breath. It was alive and gentle wrapping her about like fond extensions of these quiet, these brand-new sheets.... Magic! all good ... all so more natural than that hard seed of the past she had dwelt in, been imprisoned in: long walls, rigid, shutting her up, lifting her softness hard above the City’s hardness. Fanny drew out her hands from the warm covers. Fingers touched, tried each other: fingers pressed in the moist flesh of her palms ... lean hands yet new. The room was a caress.

Through the moving door came a figure very high: figure slim and athrob beneath a drawn green gown, under black hair let loose upon its shoulders.

Clara pressed sheer through the caressing room. Clara! Magic and wonderlessness, most magical of all. Clara! with her hair let down, in a green wrap. Her loom was the substance of the warming air: her being sheer over the bed was the mouth that had uttered all these transforming words: the blue alcohol flame, the bottles, medicine, milk, the soothing walls about the fended light, _herself_, newest word of all, that lay in a clean bed ... the truest and the sweetest word of all this mouth that was Clara.

“Dear, dear,” came Clara’s voice. “You are awake and you are better.”

She sat beside her. She gave her broth. Fanny was soothed, in a oneness swallowing the hot broth: she was one with Clara.... Dimmed gas, bowed throat of her friend and agile hands holding the cup and the spoon were one, articulately, with her own heavy eyes and the lips she felt as she opened them and swallowed. There was her will, there were the features of her will. What touched her eyes and her skin, her ears and her taste was a symphonic unity which she could love, as she lay swathed within it, as a child loves its own body....

* * * * *

Clara slept in a big armchair which had appeared in the room’s transforming. Each day came the Doctor. He had a little ruddy VanDyck beard and eyes that twinkled. He had soothing hands. He was a part of Clara ... hence of Fanny. When he left, there was his soothing wake in the soft brown air of the room.

“You are silent,” she said to him, “like a canoe.”

“Well, we’ll paddle you back to shore and health,” he smiled. She saw the eyes of Clara beam excitement.

“You have not spoken,” Clara said, “you have not spoken before!”

--I love my silence. Fanny lay back in her new thick pillows. I am going to be silent.

“Soon we can bring you away from this dreadful place. Can’t we, Doctor?”

He nodded.

--I shall keep my silence as long as I can.

Fanny looked with warm eyes at the glass of milk which Clara held for her.--I could hold it now. But I won’t. She did not speak.

And Clara spoke little. Words about her comfort, words about her food, words of endearing reproof when Fanny woke too early or did not finish her toast.

But already Clara was no longer herself. Fanny saw her long dark face, haggard now and pale with heavy eyes. She saw the hand that feeding trembled a bit.

“You are not a mother. Yet I am your child. Just a little longer. For you are not a mother. I am a mother.”

Her eyes shone happy with an unuttered promise: “I shall be a mother to you. You shall see.” But Fanny dared not speak. For she knew when her words came, there would come from within her, deeper within her, her words’ denial.

Clara’s strong hands, tense like a cord, soothed her gown, clutched her shoulders, lifted her so that she could drink.

“To-morrow, dear, to-morrow we bundle you into a cab. At last! Away from this dreadful place.”

“Where?”

“To my place,” said Clara.

--I shall not speak ... yet awhile. For I am afraid of the word that will come when I speak.

The girl knelt down at the bed. Her head lay on Fanny’s breast. Her hands went wistful searching to upon her eyes, upon her mouth. Her eyes were shut and her lips moist upon the gown of Fanny....

_FIVE_

CLARA

Fanny sat in sun that was caressed and tamed by high blue curtains. She shadowed a mirror in her hand ... it gave her eyes her face ... with a sharp shoulder.--They used not to be sharp!... Wrist tiring with its tiny burden, arm taut and thin in the blue housegown Clara made her wear welded the silver glass with its sheer image to her face. Her eye, seeking its own secret, worked unaware through the medium of parched hand, spent wrist, peaked shoulder. No glamor was between her eye and its reflection.

Her face was overlaid with shadows: subtly, terribly it was increased beyond its natural buoyance as if sudden in that Night she had danced through all of life had made invasion of her large eyes, of her delicate nose, of her mouth quick like a young leaf, and forced its burden on them. She had brought from her home the face of a girl: she looked at a face branded her own and the world’s.

About this weighted face the room she sat in: cushioned, satined, a room of crude caresses. She alone was salient peering into this image of herself. She alone had mass and had dimension: and all of it upon her little features, drawing them, deforming them, making them ugly. Making them herself.

--I must face this! I have become a person.