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Dawn O\'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed

E >> Edna Ferber >> Dawn O\'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed



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DAWN O'HARA
THE GIRL WHO LAUGHED

by EDNA FERBER




TO MY DEAR MOTHER
WHO FREQUENTLY INTERRUPTS
AND TO
MY SISTER FANNIE
WHO SAYS "SH-SH-SH!" OUTSIDE MY DOOR




CONTENTS


I THE SMASH-UP
II MOSTLY EGGS
III GOOD As NEW
IV DAWN DEVELOPS A HEIMWEH
V THE ABSURD BECOMES SERIOUS
VI STEEPED IN GERMAN
VII BLACKIE'S PHILOSOPHY
VIII KAFFEE AND KAFFEEKUCHEN
IX THE LADY FROM VIENNA
X A TRAGEDY OF GOWNS
XI VON GERHARD SPEAKS
XII BENNIE THE CONSOLER
XIII THE TEST
XIV BENNIE AND THE CHARMING OLD MAID
XV FAREWELL TO KNAPFS'
XVI JUNE MOONLIGHT, AND A NEW BOARDING HOUSE
XVII THE SHADOW OF TERROR
XVIII PETER ORME
XIX A TURN OF THE WHEEL
XX BLACKIE'S VACATION COMES
XXI HAPPINESS




DAWN O'HARA




CHAPTER I


THE SMASH-UP


There are a number of things that are pleasanter than
being sick in a New York boarding-house when one's
nearest dearest is a married sister up in far-away
Michigan.

Some one must have been very kind, for there were
doctors, and a blue-and-white striped nurse, and bottles
and things. There was even a vase of perky carnations--
scarlet ones. I discovered that they had a trick of
nodding their heads, saucily. The discovery did not
appear to surprise me.

"Howdy-do!" said I aloud to the fattest and reddest
carnation that overtopped all the rest. "How in the
world did you get in here?"

The striped nurse (I hadn't noticed her before) rose
from some corner and came swiftly over to my bedside,
taking my wrist between her fingers.

"I'm very well, thank you," she said, smiling, "and
I came in at the door, of course."

"I wasn't talking to you," I snapped, crossly, "I was
speaking to the carnations; particularly to that elderly
one at the top--the fat one who keeps bowing and wagging
his head at me."

"Oh, yes," answered the striped nurse, politely, "of
course. That one is very lively, isn't he? But suppose
we take them out for a little while now."

She picked up the vase and carried it into the
corridor, and the carnations nodded their heads more
vigorously than ever over her shoulder.

I heard her call softly to some one. The some one
answered with a sharp little cry that sounded like,
"Conscious!"

The next moment my own sister Norah came quietly into
the room, and knelt at the side of my bed and took me in
her arms. It did not seem at all surprising that she
should be there, patting me with reassuring little love
pats, murmuring over me with her lips against my check,
calling me a hundred half-forgotten pet names that I had
not heard for years. But then, nothing seemed to
surprise me that surprising day. Not even the sight of
a great, red-haired, red-faced, scrubbed looking man who
strolled into the room just as Norah was in the midst of
denouncing newspapers in general, and my newspaper in
particular, and calling the city editor a slave-driver and
a beast. The big, red-haired man stood regarding us tolerantly.

"Better, eh?" said he, not as one who asks a
question, but as though in confirmation of a thought.
Then he too took my wrist between his fingers. His touch
was very firm and cool. After that he pulled down my
eyelids and said, "H'm." Then he patted my cheek smartly
once or twice. "You'll do," he pronounced. He picked up
a sheet of paper from the table and looked it over,
keen-eyed. There followed a clinking of bottles and
glasses, a few low-spoken words to the nurse, and then,
as she left the room the big red-haired man seated
himself heavily in the chair near the bedside and rested
his great hands on his fat knees. He stared down at me
in much the same way that a huge mastiff looks at a
terrier. Finally his glance rested on my limp left hand.

"Married, h'm?"

For a moment the word would not come. I could hear
Norah catch her breath quickly. Then--"Yes," answered I.

"Husband living?" I could see suspicion dawning in
his cold gray eye.

Again the catch in Norah's throat and a little half
warning, half supplicating gesture. And again, "Yes,"
said I.

The dawn of suspicion burst into full glow.

"Where is he?" growled the red-haired doctor. "At a
time like this?"

I shut my eyes for a moment, too sick at heart to
resent his manner. I could feel, more than see, that Sis
was signaling him frantically. I moistened my lips and
answered him, bitterly.

"He is in the Starkweather Hospital for the insane."

When the red-haired man spoke again the growl was
quite gone from his voice.

"And your home is--where?"

"Nowhere," I replied meekly, from my pillow. But at
that Sis put her hand out quickly, as though she had been
struck, and said:

"My home is her home."

"Well then, take her there," he ordered, frowning,
"and keep her there as long as you can. Newspaper
reporting, h'm? In New York? That's a devil of a job
for a woman. And a husband who . . . Well, you'll have
to take a six months' course in loafing, young woman.
And at the end of that time, if you are still determined
to work, can't you pick out something easier--like taking
in scrubbing, for instance?"

I managed a feeble smile, wishing that he would go
away quickly, so that I might sleep. He seemed to divine
my thoughts, for he disappeared into the corridor, taking
Norah with him. Their voices, low-pitched and carefully
guarded, could be heard as they conversed outside my
door.

Norah was telling him the whole miserable business.
I wished, savagely, that she would let me tell it, if it
must be told. How could she paint the fascination of the
man who was my husband? She had never known the charm of
him as I had known it in those few brief months before
our marriage. She had never felt the caress of his
voice, or the magnetism of his strange, smoldering eyes
glowing across the smoke-dimmed city room as I had felt
them fixed on me. No one had ever known what he had
meant to the girl of twenty, with her brain full of
unspoken dreams--dreams which were all to become glorious
realities in that wonder-place, New York.

How he had fired my country-girl imagination! He had
been the most brilliant writer on the big, brilliant
sheet--and the most dissolute. How my heart had pounded
on that first lonely day when this Wonder-Being looked up
from his desk, saw me, and strolled over to where I sat
before my typewriter! He smiled down at me, companionably.
I'm quite sure that my mouth must have been wide open with
surprise. He had been smoking a cigarette an
expensive-looking, gold-tipped one. Now he removed it
from between his lips with that hand that always shook a
little, and dropped it to the floor, crushing it lightly
with the toe of his boot. He threw back his handsome
head and sent out the last mouthful of smoke in a thin,
lazy spiral. I remember thinking what a pity it was that
he should have crushed that costly-looking cigarette,
just for me.

"My name's Orme," he said, gravely. "Peter Orme.
And if yours isn't Shaughnessy or Burke at least, then
I'm no judge of what black hair and gray eyes stand for."

"Then you're not," retorted I, laughing up at him,
"for it happens to be O'Hara--Dawn O'Hara, if ye plaze."

He picked up a trifle that lay on my desk--a pencil,
perhaps, or a bit of paper--and toyed with it, absently,
as though I had not spoken. I thought he had not heard,
and I was conscious of feeling a bit embarrassed, and
very young. Suddenly he raised his smoldering eyes to
mine, and I saw that they had taken on a deeper glow.
His white, even teeth showed in a half smile.

"Dawn O'Hara," said he, slowly, and the name had
never sounded in the least like music before, "Dawn
O'Hara. It sounds like a rose--a pink blush rose that is
deeper pink at its heart, and very sweet."

He picked up the trifle with which he had been toying
and eyed it intently for a moment, as though his whole
mind were absorbed in it. Then he put it down, turned,
and walked slowly away. I sat staring after him like a
little simpleton, puzzled, bewildered, stunned. That had
been the beginning of it all.

He had what we Irish call "a way wid him." I wonder
now why I did not go mad with the joy, and the pain, and
the uncertainty of it all. Never was a girl so dazzled,
so humbled, so worshiped, so neglected, so courted. He
was a creature of a thousand moods to torture one. What
guise would he wear to-day? Would he be gay, or dour, or
sullen, or teasing or passionate, or cold, or tender or
scintillating? I know that my hands were always cold,
and my cheeks were always hot, those days.

He wrote like a modern Demosthenes, with
all political New York to quiver under his philippics.
The managing editor used to send him out on wonderful
assignments, and they used to hold the paper for his
stuff when it was late. Sometimes he would be gone for
days at a time, and when he returned the men would look
at him with a sort of admiring awe. And the city editor
would glance up from beneath his green eye-shade and call
out:

"Say, Orme, for a man who has just wired in about a
million dollars' worth of stuff seems to me you don't
look very crisp and jaunty."

"Haven't slept for a week," Peter Orme would growl,
and then he would brush past the men who were crowded
around him, and turn in my direction. And the old
hot-and-cold, happy, frightened, laughing, sobbing
sensation would have me by the throat again.

Well, we were married. Love cast a glamour over his
very vices. His love of drink? A weakness which I would
transform into strength. His white hot flashes of
uncontrollable temper? Surely they would die down at my
cool, tender touch. His fits of abstraction and
irritability? Mere evidences of the genius within. Oh,
my worshiping soul was always alert with an excuse.

And so we were married. He had quite tired
of me in less than a year, and the hand that had always
shaken a little shook a great deal now, and the fits of
abstraction and temper could be counted upon to appear
oftener than any other moods. I used to laugh,
sometimes, when I was alone, at the bitter humor of it
all. It was like a Duchess novel come to life.

His work began to show slipshod in spots. They
talked to him about it and he laughed at them. Then, one
day, he left them in the ditch on the big story of the
McManus indictment, and the whole town scooped him, and
the managing editor told him that he must go. His lapses
had become too frequent. They would have to replace him
with a man not so brilliant, perhaps, but more reliable.

I daren't think of his face as it looked when he came
home to the little apartment and told me. The smoldering
eyes were flaming now. His lips were flecked with a sort
of foam. I stared at him in horror. He strode over to
me, clasped his fingers about my throat and shook me as
a dog shakes a mouse.

"Why don't you cry, eh?" he snarled. Why don't you
cry!"

And then I did cry out at what I saw in his eyes. I
wrenched myself free, fled to my room, and locked the
door and stood against it with my hand pressed over my
heart until I heard the outer door slam and the echo of
his footsteps die away.

Divorce! That was my only salvation. No, that would
be cowardly now. I would wait until he was on his feet
again, and then I would demand my old free life back once
more. This existence that was dragging me into the
gutter--this was not life! Life was a glorious,
beautiful thing, and I would have it yet. I laid my
plans, feverishly, and waited. He did not come back that
night, or the next, or the next, or the next. In
desperation I went to see the men at the office. No,
they had not seen him. Was there anything that they
could do? they asked. I smiled, and thanked them, and
said, oh, Peter was so absent-minded! No doubt he had
misdirected his letters, or something of the sort. And
then I went back to the flat to resume the horrible
waiting.

One week later he turned up at the old office which
had cast him off. He sat down at his former desk and
began to write, breathlessly, as he used to in the days
when all the big stories fell to him. One of the men
reporters strolled up to him and touched him on the
shoulder, man-fashion. Peter Orme raised his head and
stared at him, and the man sprang back in terror.
The smoldering eyes had burned down to an ash.
Peter Orme was quite bereft of all reason. They took him
away that night, and I kept telling myself that it wasn't
true; that it was all a nasty dream, and I would wake up
pretty soon, and laugh about it, and tell it at the
breakfast table.

Well, one does not seek a divorce from a husband who
is insane. The busy men on the great paper were very
kind. They would take me back on the staff. Did I think
that I still could write those amusing little human
interest stories? Funny ones, you know, with a punch in
'em.

Oh, plenty of good stories left in me yet, I assured
them. They must remember that I was only twenty-one,
after all, and at twenty-one one does not lose the sense
of humor.

And so I went back to my old desk, and wrote bright,
chatty letters home to Norah, and ground out very funny
stories with a punch in 'em, that the husband in the
insane asylum might be kept in comforts. With both hands
I hung on like grim death to that saving sense of humor,
resolved to make something of that miserable mess which
was my life--to make something of it yet. And now--

At this point in my musings there was an end
of the low-voiced conversation in the hall. Sis tiptoed
in and looked her disapproval at finding me sleepless.

"Dawn, old girlie, this will never do. Shut your
eyes now, like a good child, and go to sleep. Guess what
that great brute of a doctor said! I may take you home
with me next week! Dawn dear, you will come, won't you?
You must! This is killing you. Don't make me go away
leaving you here. I couldn't stand it."

She leaned over my pillow and closed my eyelids
gently with her sweet, cool fingers. "You are coming
home with me, and you shall sleep and eat, and sleep and
eat, until you are as lively as the Widow Malone, ohone,
and twice as fat. Home, Dawnie dear, where we'll forget
all about New York. Home, with me."

I reached up uncertainly, and brought her hand down
to my lips and a great peace descended upon my sick soul.
"Home--with you," I said, like a child, and fell asleep.




CHAPTER II


MOSTLY EGGS


Oh, but it was clean, and sweet, and wonderfully
still, that rose-and-white room at Norah's! No street
cars to tear at one's nerves with grinding brakes and
clanging bells; no tramping of restless feet on the
concrete all through the long, noisy hours; no shrieking
midnight joy-riders; not one of the hundred sounds which
make night hideous in the city. What bliss to lie there,
hour after hour, in a delicious half-waking,
half-sleeping, wholly exquisite stupor, only rousing
myself to swallow egg-nogg No. 426, and then to flop back
again on the big, cool pillow!

New York, with its lights, its clangor, its millions,
was only a far-away, jumbled nightmare. The office, with
its clacking typewriters, its insistent, nerve-racking
telephone bells, its systematic rush, its smoke-dimmed
city room, was but an ugly part of the dream.

Back to that inferno of haste and scramble and
clatter? Never! Never! I resolved, drowsily. And
dropped off to sleep again.

And the sheets. Oh, those sheets of Norah's! Why,
they were white, instead of gray! And they actually
smelled of flowers. For that matter, there were rosebuds
on the silken coverlet. It took me a week to get chummy
with that rosebud-and-down quilt. I had to explain
carefully to Norah that after a half-dozen years of
sleeping under doubtful boarding-house blankets one does
not so soon get rid of a shuddering disgust for coverings
which are haunted by the ghosts of a hundred unknown
sleepers. Those years had taught me to draw up the sheet
with scrupulous care, to turn it down, and smooth it
over, so that no contaminating and woolly blanket should
touch my skin. The habit stuck even after Norah had
tucked me in between her fragrant sheets. Automatically
my hands groped about, arranging the old protecting
barrier.

"What's the matter, Fuss-fuss?" inquired Norah,
looking on. "That down quilt won't bite you; what an old
maid you are!"

"Don't like blankets next to my face," I elucidated,
sleepily, "never can tell who slept under 'em last--"

You cat!" exclaimed Norah, making a little rush at
me. "If you weren't supposed to be ill I'd
shake you! Comparing my darling rosebud quilt to your
miserable gray blankets! Just for that I'll make you eat
an extra pair of eggs."

There never was a sister like Norah. But then, who
ever heard of a brother-in-law like Max? No woman--not
even a frazzled-out newspaper woman--could receive the
love and care that they gave me, and fail to flourish
under it. They had been Dad and Mother to me since the
day when Norah had tucked me under her arm and carried me
away from New York. Sis was an angel; a comforting,
twentieth-century angel, with white apron strings for
wings, and a tempting tray in her hands in place of the
hymn books and palm leaves that the picture-book angels
carry. She coaxed the inevitable eggs and beef into more
tempting forms than Mrs. Rorer ever guessed at. She
could disguise those two plain, nourishing articles of
diet so effectually that neither hen nor cow would have
suspected either of having once been part of her anatomy.
Once I ate halfway through a melting, fluffy,
peach-bedecked plate of something before I discovered
that it was only another egg in disguise.

"Feel like eating a great big dinner to-day, Kidlet?
"Norah would ask in the morning as she stood at my bedside
(with a glass of egg-something in her hand, of course).

"Eat!"--horror and disgust shuddering through my
voice--"Eat! Ugh! Don't s-s-speak of it to me. And for
pity's sake tell Frieda to shut the kitchen door when you
go down, will you? I can smell something like ugh!--like
pot roast, with gravy!" And I would turn my face to the
wall.

Three hours later I would hear Sis coming softly up
the stairs, accompanied by a tinkling of china and glass.
I would face her, all protest.

"Didn't I tell you, Sis, that I couldn't eat a
mouthful? Not a mouthf--um-m-m-m! How perfectly
scrumptious that looks! What's that affair in the
lettuce leaf? Oh, can't I begin on that divine-looking
pinky stuff in the tall glass? H'm? Oh, please!"

"I thought--" Norah would begin; and then she would
snigger softly.

"Oh, well, that was hours ago," I would explain,
loftily. "Perhaps I could manage a bite or two now."

Whereupon I would demolish everything except the
china and doilies.

It was at this point on the road to recovery, just
halfway between illness and health, that Norah and Max
brought the great and unsmiling Von Gerhard on the scene.
It appeared that even New York was respectfully aware of
Von Gerhard, the nerve specialist, in spite of the fact
that he lived in Milwaukee. The idea of bringing him up
to look at me occurred to Max quite suddenly. I think it
was on the evening that I burst into tears when Max
entered the room wearing a squeaky shoe. The Weeping
Walrus was a self-contained and tranquil creature
compared to me at that time. The sight of a fly on the
wall was enough to make me burst into a passion of sobs.

"I know the boy to steady those shaky nerves of
yours, Dawn," said Max, after I had made a shamefaced
apology for my hysterical weeping, "I'm going to have Von
Gerhard up here to look at you. He can run up Sunday,
eh, Norah?"

"Who's Von Gerhard?" I inquired, out of the depths of
my ignorance. "Anyway, I won't have him. I'll bet he
wears a Vandyke and spectacles."

"Von Gerhard!" exclaimed Norah, indignantly. "You
ought to be thankful to have him look at you, even if he
wears goggles and a flowing beard. Why, even that
red-haired New York doctor of yours cringed and looked
impressed when I told him that Von Gerhard was
a friend of my husband's, and that they had been comrades
at Heidelberg. I must have mentioned him dozens of times
in my letters."

"Never."

"Queer," commented Max, "he runs up here every now
and then to spend a quiet Sunday with Norah and me and
the Spalpeens. Says it rests him. The kids swarm all
over him, and tear him limb from limb. It doesn't look
restful, but he says it's great. I think he came here
from Berlin just after you left for New York, Dawn.
Milwaukee fits him as if it had been made for him."

"But you're not going to drag this wonderful being up
here just for me!" I protested, aghast.

Max pointed an accusing finger at me from the
doorway. "Aren't you what the bromides call a bundle of
nerves? And isn't Von Gerhard's specialty untying just
those knots? I'll write to him to-night."

And he did. And Von Gerhard came. The Spalpeens
watched for him, their noses flattened against the
window-pane, for it was raining. As he came up the path
they burst out of the door to meet him. From my bedroom
window I saw him come prancing up the walk like a boy,
with the two children clinging to his coat-tails, all
three quite unmindful of the rain, and yelling like
Comanches.


Ten minutes later he had donned his professional
dignity, entered my room, and beheld me in all my limp
and pea-green beauty. I noted approvingly that he had to
stoop a bit as he entered the low doorway, and that the
Vandyke of my prophecy was missing.

He took my hand in his own steady, reassuring clasp.
Then he began to talk. Half an hour sped away while we
discussed New York--books--music--theatres--everything
and anything but Dawn O'Hara. I learned later that as we
chatted he was getting his story, bit by bit, from every
twitch of the eyelids, from every gesture of the hands
that had grown too thin to wear the hateful ring; from
every motion of the lips; from the color of my nails;
from each convulsive muscle; from every shadow, and
wrinkle and curve and line of my face.

Suddenly he asked: "Are you making the proper effort
to get well? You try to conquer those jumping nerfs,
yes?"

I glared at him. "Try! I do everything. I'd eat
woolly worms if I thought they might benefit me. If ever
a girl has minded her big sister and her doctor, that
girl is I. I've eaten everything from pate de foie gras
to raw beef, and I've drunk everything from blood to
champagne."

"Eggs? " queried Von Gerhard, as though making a
happy suggestion.

"Eggs!" I snorted. "Eggs! Thousands of 'em! Eggs
hard and soft boiled, poached and fried, scrambled and
shirred, eggs in beer and egg-noggs, egg lemonades and
egg orangeades, eggs in wine and eggs in milk, and eggs
au naturel. I've lapped up iron-and-wine, and whole
rivers of milk, and I've devoured rare porterhouse and
roast beef day after day for weeks. So! Eggs!"

"Mein Himmel!" ejaculated he, fervently, "And you
still live!" A suspicion of a smile dawned in his eyes.
I wondered if he ever laughed. I would experiment.

"Don't breathe it to a soul," I whispered,
tragically, "but eggs, and eggs alone, are turning my
love for my sister into bitterest hate. She stalks me
the whole day long, forcing egg mixtures down my
unwilling throat. She bullies me. I daren't put out my
hand suddenly without knocking over liquid refreshment in
some form, but certainly with an egg lurking in its
depths. I am so expert that I can tell an egg orangeade
from an egg lemonade at a distance of twenty yards, with
my left hand tied behind me,and one eye shut, and my feet
in a sack."

"You can laugh, eh? Well, that iss good," commented
the grave and unsmiling one.

"Sure," answered I, made more flippant by his
solemnity. "Surely I can laugh. For what else was my
father Irish? Dad used to say that a sense of humor was
like a shillaly--an iligent thing to have around handy,
especially when the joke's on you."

The ghost of a twinkle appeared again in the corners
of the German blue eyes. Some fiend of rudeness seized
me.

"Laugh!" I commanded.

Dr. Ernst von Gerhard stiffened. "Pardon?" inquired
he, as one who is sure that he has misunderstood.

"Laugh!" I snapped again. "I'll dare you to do it.
I'll double dare you! You dassen't!"

But he did. After a moment's bewildered surprise he
threw back his handsome blond head and gave vent to a
great, deep infectious roar of mirth that brought the
Spalpeens tumbling up the stairs in defiance of their
mother's strict instructions.

After that we got along beautifully. He
turned out to be quite human, beneath the outer crust of
reserve. He continued his examination only after bribing
the Spalpeens shamefully, so that even their rapacious
demands were satisfied, and they trotted off contentedly.

There followed a process which reduced me to a
giggling heap but which Von Gerhard carried out
ceremoniously. It consisted of certain raps at my knees,
and shins, and elbows, and fingers, and certain commands
to--"look at my finger! Look at the wall! Look at my
finger! Look at the wall!"

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