Part 1

LUMMOX

BY

FANNIE HURST

NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS MCMXXIII

LUMMOX

Copyright, 1923 By Harper & Brothers Printed in the U. S. A.

First Edition i-x

_BOOKS BY FANNIE HURST_

_Novels_ LUMMOX STAR DUST

_Short Stories_ JUST AROUND THE CORNER EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG GASLIGHT SONATAS HUMORESQUE THE VERTICAL CITY

LUMMOX

LUMMOX

Nobody quite knew just what Baltic bloods flowed in sullen and alien rivers through Bertha's veins--or cared, might be added. Bertha, least of all.

She was five feet, nine and a half, of flat-breasted bigness and her cheek-bones were pitched like Norn's. Little tents. There must have been a good smattering of Scandinavian and even a wide streak of western Teutonic. Slav, too. Because unaccountably she found herself knowing the Polish national anthem. Recognized it with her heart as it rattled out of a hurdy-gurdy.

In her carpetbag, an outlandish one with a steamship stamp on it, were a bit of Bulgarian embroidery, a runic brooch, a concertina with a punctured bellows and an ikon in imitation mosaic. Old world.

And yet Bertha had been born in a furiously dark sailors' lodging house in Front Street, where New York harbor smells of spices and city garbage rides by to the dump on barges. One of those frightening emergency births of rusty instruments, midwifery and a sinister room made more terrible by the travail of her coming. Of no particular father (although the China seas could probably have yielded up the secret of his rollicking lane), and of a dead mother.

She had died two minutes before Bertha was born. Annie Wennerberg, landlady of the sailors' lodging house, who reared Bertha those first dozen years of her life that were sopping wet with scrub-water and soft-soap, knew. Horrid scuttling rat-like things that Annie Wennerberg knew.

Born of a dead mother, Secrets of the grave you'll utter.

That couplet could run down Bertha's spinal cord like a mouse.

"I don't know any secrets of the grave, Annie."

"You do. They're written on your face. You got a look in that wide place between your eyes like the sound of a clump of dirt falling on a coffin. You're as full of secrets as a cow's tail is of burrs."

***

Wildly, and with a coherence she could have torn open her throat for, Bertha wanted to tell Annie that her secrets, if any she had, were of life, not death. The knowledges that came to her in chimes from the dark forests within her where the trees could somehow seem to stand with folded arms regarding her and the air to be wisps of old sound. Snacks of melodies out of eastern Europe. Secrets that shimmered. But it seemed to Bertha that her tongue was merely the shallow pan for those few words at her disposal which rattled off it so hollowly.

It was so hard to talk. Words. Frail beasts of burden that crashed down to their knees under what she wanted to say.

How to convey to Annie Wennerberg that her mother had not dragged her down to the clayey secrets of the grave but had endowed her with lovely, bosky, dell-like secrets of life. Those were the meanings of the wide silence of space between her eyes.

"I don't know nothing about the grave, Annie--"

"You do. For two minutes you was in the grave with your dead mother--yah--yah--

Born of a dead mother, Secrets of the grave you'll utter."

Bertha wondered. But not unduly. She thought so dimly, almost as if she had breathed on a mirror and reflection could not come through. For that matter she even felt dimly.

"Sometimes," she once said to Annie Wennerberg, "I feel like my skin was a thick piece of flannel, between the inside of me and the outside."

Annie's retort was a single vile word. They jumped off her lips constantly, like hop-toads.

But somewhere in Bertha's mists were ecstasies. She would sit on the stairs at night, and huddle over to the banister for the passing of a drunken sailor, scarcely conscious that his enormous clod of a mud-caked shoe was almost in her face.

She slept on a cot that crawled with vermin, with the beauty of repose on that face of hers which was said to look like the sound of a clump of dirt on a coffin.

***

Once, way back before she had gone to the Farleys, she had worked out "by the day" as the saying goes. Odd jobs. Cleaning an old rooming-house for new occupancy on very East Seventeenth Street. Corners to be scraped out with a knife. Scrub water that became livid. Stench. Two men had sickened at the job and quit. Yet Bertha, with her lips held very tightly it is true, scraped and scraped, until actually, standing there at the sink, poking webby stuff through the drain hole, chimes came through to her from the dark forest. The forest that was Baltic and western Teutonic.

Yet sometimes, because of these great inner reaches of her, even the chimes arrived to her dimly. Muted melodies. Wanting-to-be-born thoughts. Bertha's prisoners.

She liked, after her day's work was done, to sit with them. Little bells in lovely headache against her brow. Words.

"Lyric" was a beautiful word. Rollo Farley had used it to a young girl at dinner, who had listened to him with the nape of her neck stretched and her lips scarlet. It had come through to Bertha peering from behind the pantry door. "Lyric," a golden word shaped like a harp.

She liked to say it and feel it race delicately around her lips as if it were a high-strung little roulette ball in its bowl.

Sometimes she spat like a peasant, of slow reflection.

There was a sliver of kitchen porch and a pad of backyard with a magnolia tree in it, behind the Farley house in Gramercy Park. She had seen that magnolia heavy with bud six beautiful times. She had cooked for the Farleys six years.

In spring, after the great dish pan with the gray cloth drying over it was turned to the wall and the linoleum smelling wetly from her mop, Bertha would sit out there on the sliver of porch waiting the interim between dinner and light refreshments of sandwiches and fresh fruit to be sent into the drawing room at eleven. Would sit barefoot. They were strong feet, still warm and damp from shoes. Great pale spuds with muscular toes that could spread separately like a wine presser's, and were full of a predatory power to clutch.

She could almost breathe in with her feet. She liked to feel their bareness pat at the old cheek of earth. All the big-footed and barefooted women out of her Baltic and Teutonic hinterlands rebelled against Bertha's shoes. They gave her bunions. Bulbs that projected off her foot like a nose, giving the shoe, after one day's wearing, the profile of a mean old man. So she padded around the kitchen barefoot, when Mrs. Farley's invasions, or Helga's the housemaid, were unlikely. There was a wininess in their bare contacts. Breathers. Suckers in of the little vibratory messages that run across floors. Toes. The prehensile curving of toes around the branches of the dark forest....

Once Mrs. Farley, sweeping through the swinging door into the kitchen, found her on her knees before the oven basting a Thanksgiving turkey, the soles of her bare feet upright and staring out from under her cotton skirts like lantern-jawed faces.

"Bertha, don't ever let me find you barefoot in the kitchen again. It's disgusting."

"Yah'm."

Submission was so easy. Shoes. They were part of the day and the day was like a garment fashioned by the employment agency; the lady of the house; and for the last six years by Mrs. Farley.

There is not much of Mrs. Farley in this telling. She paid Bertha twenty dollars a month (it was the day of the cable-car and there was some talk of a Louisiana Purchase Exposition to be held in St. Louis), clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth when she told about it and said, "What's the world coming to?"

She was kind enough in a fusty way, wore invariable black velvet neck bands, saved twine, and gave every other Monday afternoon to the Tenement Hygienic Committee of the Human Welfare League.

Helga, whose back always ached and who kept twenty rooms swept and dusted, was expected to sit up for Mrs. Farley until after theater for the single process of massaging the wattles underneath the band of black velvet.

Bertha scrubbed and cooked from the servants' breakfast hour at six-thirty to family dinner at eight P.M. and often until eleven, when there were the sandwiches and light refreshments to be prepared.

Helga spat on the Human Welfare League pamphlets and gritted her teeth at them.

Mrs. Farley was also on the letterhead of an organization called The Circle for Housing Relief.

Bertha's room cowed under the roof of the finely austere house in Gramercy Park beneath a slant ceiling that was like a threatening slap. No heat unless she left the door open and the warm breath of downstairs came up. A bed with a short fourth leg and a spring that sagged like a hammock to the considerable heft of Bertha's body. A bureau rigged up out of a discarded desk of Rollo Farley's and a pitcher and bowl on a soap box. For six years Bertha slept up there with that slanting ceiling on her chest. But usually she was so very tired that her sleep was like a death and the slant a clod of earth on the grave of another day.

Bertha was a good cook. "A good plain cook," Mrs. Farley apologized in her invitations to the more informal of her dinner parties. But she could do curlicues in icing. Bone squab. Work with such esoteric ingredients as marron glace, pickled walnuts, and capers, illuminate carrots into rosettes, and stir a fish sauce with just the tricky rightness of the tartar touch. Rollo Farley had a frail digestion. Bertha had learned to broil and coddle for him and knew just the turn of his chop.

"She's a great unresponsive hunky sort of girl," Mrs. Farley would recite of her. "Swede, I imagine, or perhaps one of those blonde Poles. But she's a good plain cook and knows Rollo's diet. Good as one can do nowadays. Does not run about either, as so many of them do. Too lazy I suppose. Justs sits and daydreams. But anything is preferable to changing and having to start on the rounds of the employment agencies."

Bertha had an equal horror of employment agencies. Shambles of sullen stock awaiting inspection. The lorgnette fusillade. The bitter shameless questionings, like an apple corer plunging down into the heart.

"What is that on your face? I hope it isn't a rash. Do you expect every Thursday out? You bathe regularly, of course? You understand that my cook always helps with the housework on the maid's day out. I've a half-grown daughter and cannot permit my help to entertain men in the kitchen. Newspapers are full of such dreadful things. Would you mind having your things fumigated before you bring them to the house? Can't be too careful...."

So Bertha stayed on at the Farleys, and when she had been there six years Mrs. Farley gave her a cast-off opera cloak of sea-green chiffon. It was rather funny in a way. Bertha of strong sweat and hands that could entrail fowl at one tear, in sea-green chiffon. She never tried it on, it would have embarrassed her, but the green seemed to fill her attic room like sea. Beautiful sea, that instead of rolling and hurting like a prisoner in her heart, was here on the outside where she could touch it. The delicate fabric clung to the roughness of her hands. In its way that chiffon was like the Polish national anthem which she could hear so poignantly with her heart, or like the word "Lyric" which she could feel with her teeth when she repeated it softly to herself.

After that she began to watch through the swinging door of the pantry, the fabrics on the backs of women at dinner. Satin, Velvet that was like a silence. Once she found a bit of torn-off spangled trimming and put it in the drawer with her ocean. Stars. She had only to jerk open that drawer and they lay there, lit and waiting.

One night at a formal dinner to sixteen, there was an ex-ambassador, and she had two helpers from the employment agency, and so could sit at the crack in the swinging door between courses. Candlelight bending and bowing into crystal and silver. Calla lilies. Mrs. Farley's harp, a curve of gold beside the buffet. Little hissing pools of wine. Mrs. Farley's back was half bare, and it sloped down into a valley at the spine. An old sunken back. Not nice. Nathan Farley's bald head and face were very red, so that his white mustache seen from the crack in the swinging door was almost like a frothing at the mouth. His kiss might leave suds.

Locked up gargoyles of thoughts in Bertha for which she had no words, except those feeble ones which fell to their knees like the frail beasts of burden.

There was a very long and slender-necked girl at the table with cool lips and a head the lovely shape of an egg, the hair revealing the face like reluctantly parted portières. To Bertha, who felt but could not say it, the lovely ellipsity of that head was like putting an egg whole into your mouth and then feeling it slowly come out.

Rollo Farley was talking to her. Bertha had prepared an aspic jelly for him, skilfully camouflaged to resemble the fish course that was going its rounds on an enormous silver platter flaming with carrot rosettes. Fish disagreed. He slid his fork into the aspic, carefully anticipating the deception, but constantly face to face with the lovely oval creature.

Rollo was about Bertha's age. But his flesh much tenderer. The quality of breast-of-fowl. Fuzz of down on the back of his neck. Nervous hands as if the fingers were dripping from them like icicles. He wrote with them, using a softly whispering pencil all through the forenoon and sometimes long after the household slept. Once Bertha, dusting his small, book-lined study on Helga's day out, read from one of the sheets on his desk. Short lines leaving much of the paper white. Lines that rocked softly like a boat with a lateen sail. Rhythm. "Love. Rove." "Pagan. Raven." "Lyre. Desire."

Flash. Flash. Flash. A plunging opal horse and a jade terrific lion and a lapis lazuli centaur, riding round and round again into alternate view on the merry-go-round.

She had dusted the wide-margined paper with the click of flame color through the words. As if you opened and closed your eyes very rapidly. Had dusted it dispassionately enough, but her throat felt all rigid. Tight enough for tears....

She was dispassionate now through the crack in the door. Except that the down on the back of Rollo's neck was so--so young. Heart hurting.

***

At ten o'clock the great dish pan was turned, the helpers gone, Helga whispering at the service entrance with the night watchman, and Bertha who had sweated, out on the back porch, barefooted and cooling in the spring.

A night the color of a frosted grape. The hoar of an invisible moon. The magnolia. Big silences standing still in Bertha. Silences that to be told at all must be told silently....

The iceman had caught her that morning unawares, slapping his hand down on her square hips. It was the first time a man had touched her.

"Hello, Bertha, got the Yonnie Yump Ups this morning?"

"Go away, you nervy!"

"Say 'Yonnie Yump Up.'"

"Yah--you--get--out--"

Bertha could not say J. It melted in her throat. She didn't know the reason, but she looked the reason, Swedishly. The great broad face. Pitched-tent cheek bones. The square teeth and flaring lips. The nose with the flanges spread like the fat haunches of a squatting idol. Eyes like globes of clear water against blue sky, but occasional darts through. Goldfish flanks. Braids of yellow hair strapped around her head in bandeaux.

In her body bigness lay beauty. Godiva's gleam. Light breasts, the way the Greeks loved them, without sag. Long white line of femur. Hip rhythm. The touch of the iceman's hands, hours old; hunky hands that she had rejected, still lay on those hips, as if clay had hardened there.

It was pleasant to sit on the sliver of porch with the feel of hands through the cotton stuff and on to her flesh.

After a while Rollo Farley came out on the porch. He was dizzy. Wine. Heat. And his mother had warned him against the croquilles. The air was like a lady with a slow fan. Little stirs of it. Cool. The smell of magnolia. Almost immediately the little beads on his forehead went out like lights and his wrists dried.

"Hello, Bertha," he said.

She sat with her knees very wide apart in an enormous cradle and her hands hanging in it.

"Hul," she said.

He leaned against the wall with his hand back between him and the brick. Little noises under the silence. His shirt front, champing at a pearl stud. He slid his hand into his pocket. She could hear his nearness.

"Good God, what starlight," he said finally, looking up through the moon hoar and doing a sort of calisthenics with his arms until the cuffs shot.

She sat.

He said strange, beautiful things sometimes. Words. She treasured them as a lapidary his stones. Occasionally he addressed her as she dusted his books on Helga's day out, much as he might have a newel post or the terra cotta Chloe on his desk.

"Sonnet" was another dear word. He had used it to himself more than once as she tiptoed. A word to lay away in the heart. "Good God, what starlight." Anyone might have said that--and yet--

"Bertha," he said finally, addressing her as if she were his cigarette smoke, "keep close to life. Don't let them find your nerves--or your soul."

"... or her soul!" Bertha whose being was a callous spot through which the soul could not quite hurt through.

"Your problems are husky ones, Bertha. To-morrow's menu. It will warm the stomach, but it leaves the heart alone. Keep close to life, Bertha. Cabbages are beautiful and only a little tougher fibred than roses."

Vaporings. He was twenty-five and a poet.

Close to life. What was that? Close to life. Her toes dug down against the floor as if they would translate it for her.

He looked down at their white movement.

"Why, Bertha," he said, "your feet are like two big white magnolias off our tree."

She loved that, but she wiggled her toes and said, "They hurt."

He looked again at their white movement. The toes wiggling now under his words. Luscious feet that listened to the soil and stole its secrets. A sublime kind of capillarity. Bertha feeling for closeness to life with her feet.

Thick white feet, yet begetting in Rollo thoughts too fragile to hold in even the facets of a poet's brain. Thoughts as fragile as the throat of the nightingale that sang outside the emperor's window.

Actually for the first time in the six years, Rollo looked at Bertha with his attention. Splay mouthed. High cheeked. Muscular toed. A soaking kind of peasantry that flowed into him and made him want to write it out again in a meter that was like the clump of wooden shoes.

And then he looked at her waist, where because she had sweated, it lay open. Hillocks of white breast. Flesh flowing like cream into them. Strength and length of femur under cotton skirts. Crouching, submerged, and silent strength.

"Bertha," he said, and touched her lightly on the throat with his poet's fingers. How she beat there. It ran up his arm in an ecstasy. "Why Bertha, how you beat--underneath the whiteness."

"I--I----"

"Rollo," called his mother from the euchre table, "your deal, dear. We're waiting."

"Coming, Mother."

She hated the going sound of his steps, each new faintness of them a stab.

But her dark forest was full of chimes. Words darted through the branches with the brilliancy of flamingoes on wing. "Pagan." "Appassionata." Brooks of the frozen tears of her loneliness began to flow. She was bursting of music and the sound of the jeweled words and she wanted to run after him and help him somehow into the largo of the charmed forest of her heart.

But he was already back at the euchre table and opposite the slim head that looked as an egg would feel if it came whole out of your mouth.

Out on the porch it was still again, except for the brook of the frozen tears.

***

It was very late. Pain in the back of her legs as if the muscles were screwing. After Rollo's return to the table there had been an extra round of euchre and extra wines. Three sizes of goblets to be polished. Mrs. Farley wanted them soaped, bathed, breathed on, and then shined into nothingness.

Even with the screwing pains, Bertha liked doing them this way in the stilly part of the night, with the family upstairs and going to and fro to bed. The warm suds squeaking off. The soft hiss of the towel. Crystal frozen out of thin laughter. A trayful of the polite, chittering things. With one stroke she could break them back into laughter.

Milk bottles to be placed in a row on the kitchen porch and the ice card to be turned. So.

The shine of magnolias that were no whiter than her feet. Rollo Farley had touched her; trolled four of his fingers along her whiteness. They had melted against her throat and down into her heart. White tapering roads, his fingers, in the dark forest along which she ran, calling....

Then up the back stairs to her room. It hurt her to climb them. On the third landing she sat down and let down her balbriggan stocking to rub at the calf of her leg. It was good, that leg, something that she could feel in the round. It had dimension. Flesh. Muscle. Bulge. And when it hurt she could lay her hands to it.

She undressed in the dark, sitting on the bed edge with the door open for the warmed air of the halls. It was very simple. Waist. Corsets. Chemise. Smelling strongly clean of laundry soap. Twenty times a day she washed her arms up to the elbows with the great brown cakes.

As she sat with her waist half off and the knoll of her first shoulder shining through, Rollo Farley came to her door. His face was like a lamp. And hers. Two dim rounds of light, wigwagging. They lit the fog with the faintness of flame chewing along low wicks.

"I can see you, Bertha, because you are whiter than the darkness is black."

Her heart shied back and leaped.

"Go away," she said with her lips, but she wanted to turn on her forest like a music box for him. Wanted her flamingoes to fly, the sands of the jeweled word-particles to sparkle. He took her hands and she was ashamed. They were so heavy and lye-bitten and there were such white ones at her heart that she wanted to give him. Like his. Pale whispers.

"You don't want me to go away, White Bertha. Why--feel--you have a little heart in your throat. How it beats."