Fanny Herself

E >> Edna Ferber >> Fanny Herself

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She began to run. A mistake, that, when one is following a
mountain trail, at best an elusive thing. In five minutes
she had lost the trail. She stopped, and scolded herself
sternly, and looked about her. She saw the faint trail line
again, or thought she saw it, and made toward it, and found
it to be no trail at all. She knew that she must be not
more than an hour's walk from Timberline Cabin, and Albert
Edward, and his biscuits and tea. Why be frightened? It
was absurd. But she was frightened, horribly, harrowingly.
The great, grim rock masses seemed to be shaking with silent
laughter. She began to run again. She was very cold, and a
piercing wind had sprung up. She kept on walking, doggedly,
reasoning with herself quite calmly, and proud of her
calmness. Which proves how terrified she really was. Then
the snow came, not slowly, not gradually, but a blanket of
it, as it does come in the mountains, shutting off
everything. And suddenly Fanny's terror vanished. She felt
quite free from weariness. She was alive and tingling to
her fingertips. The psychology of fear is a fascinating
thing. Fanny had reached the second stage. She was
quite taken out of herself. She forgot her stone-
bruised feet. She was no longer conscious of cold. She ran
now, fleetly, lightly, the ground seeming to spur her on.
She had given up the trail completely now. She told herself
that if she ran on, down, down, down, she must come to the
valley sometime. Unless she was turned about, and headed in
the direction of one of those hideous chasms. She stopped a
moment, peering through the snow curtain, but she could see
nothing. She ran on lightly, laughing a little. Then her
feet met a projection, she stumbled, and fell flat over a
slab of wood that jutted out of the ground. She lay there a
moment, dazed. Then she sat up, and bent down to look at
this thing that had tripped her. Probably a tree trunk.
Then she must be near timberline. She bent closer. It was
a rough wooden slab. Closer still. There were words carved
on it. She lay flat and managed to make them out painfully.

"Here lies Sarah Cannon. Lay to rest, and died alone, April
26, 1893."

Fanny had heard the story of Sarah Cannon, a stern spinster
who had achieved the climb to the Peak, and who had met with
mishap on the down trail. Her guide had left her to go for
help. When the relief party returned, hours later, they had
found her dead.

Fanny sprang up, filled with a furious energy. She felt
strangely light and clear-headed. She ran on, stopped, ran
again. Now she was making little short runs here and there.
It was snowing furiously, vindictively. It seemed to her
that she had been running for hours. It probably was
minutes. Suddenly she sank down, got to her feet again,
stumbled on perhaps a dozen paces, and sank down again. It
was as though her knees had turned liquid. She lay there,
with her eyes shut.

"I'm just resting," she told herself. "In a minute I'll go
on. In a minute. After I've rested."

"Hallo-o-o-o!" from somewhere on the other side of the snow
blanket. "Hallo-o-o-o!"
Fanny sat up, helloing shrilly, hysterically. She got to
her feet, staggeringly. And Clarence Heyl walked toward
her.

"You ought to be spanked for this," he said.

Fanny began to cry weakly. She felt no curiosity as to his
being there. She wasn't at all sure that he actually was
there, for that matter. At that thought she dug a frantic
hand into his arm. He seemed to understand, for he said,
"It's all right. I'm real enough. Can you walk?"

"Yes." But she tried it and found she could not. She
decided she was too tired to care. "I stumbled over a
thing--a horrible thing--a gravestone. And I must have hurt
my leg. I didn't know----"

She leaned against him, a dead weight. "Tell you what,"
said Heyl, cheerfully. "You wait here. I'll go on down to
Timberline Cabin for help, and come back."

"You couldn't manage it--alone? If I tried? If I tried to
walk?"

"Oh, impossible." His tone was brisk. "Now you sit right
down here." She sank down obediently. She felt a little
sorry for herself, and glad, too, and queer, and not at all
cold. She looked up at him dumbly. He was smiling. "All
right?"

She nodded. He turned abruptly. The snow hid him from
sight at once.

"Here lies Sarah Cannon. Lay to rest and died alone, April
26, 1893."

She sank down, and pillowed her head on her arms. She knew
that this was the end. She was very drowsy, and not at all
sad. Happy, if anything.

"You didn't really think I'd leave you, did you, Fan?"

She opened her eyes. Heyl was there. He reached down, and
lifted her lightly to her feet. "Timberline Cabin's
not a hundred yards away. I just did it to try you."

She had spirit enough left to say, "Beast."

Then he swung her up, and carried her down the trail. He
carried her, not in his arms, as they do it in books and in
the movies. He could not have gone a hundred feet that way.
He carried her over his shoulder, like a sack of meal, by
one arm and one leg, I regret to say. Any boy scout knows
that trick, and will tell you what I mean. It is the most
effectual carrying method known, though unromantic.

And so they came to Timberline Cabin, and Albert Edward
Cobbins was in the doorway. Heyl put her down gently on the
bench that ran alongside the table. The hospitable table
that bore two smoking cups of tea. Fanny's lips were
cracked, and the skin was peeled from her nose, and her hair
was straggling and her eyes red-rimmed. She drank the tea
in great gulps. And then she went into the tiny bunkroom,
and tumbled into one of the shelf-bunks, and slept.

When she awoke she sat up in terror, and bumped her head
against the bunk above, and called, "Clancy!"

"Yep!" from the next room. He came to the door. The acrid
smell of their pipes was incense in her nostrils. "Rested?"

"What time is it?"

"Seven o'clock. Dinner time. Ham and eggs."

She got up stiffly, and bathed her roughened face, and
produced a powder pad (they carry them in the face of
danger, death, and dissolution) and dusted it over her scaly
nose. She did her hair--her vigorous, abundant hair that
shone in the lamplight, pulled down her blouse, surveyed her
torn shoes ruefully, donned the khaki skirt that Albert
Edward had magically produced from somewhere to take the
place of her breeches. She dusted her shoes with a bit of
rag, regarded herself steadily in the wavering mirror, and
went in.

The two men were talking quietly. Albert Edward was moving
deftly from stove to table. They both looked up as she came
in, and she looked at Heyl. Their eyes held.

Albert Edward was as sporting a gentleman as the late dear
king whose name he bore. He went out to tend Heyl's horse,
he said. It was little he knew of horses, and he rather
feared them, as does a sailing man. But he went,
nevertheless.

Heyl still looked at Fanny, and Fanny at him.

"It's absurd," said Fanny. "It's the kind of thing that
doesn't happen."

"It's simple enough, really," he answered. "I saw Ella
Monahan in Chicago, and she told me all she knew, and
something of what she had guessed. I waited a few days and
came back. I had to." He smiled. "A pretty job you've
made of trying to be selfish."

At that she smiled, too, pitifully enough, for her lower lip
trembled. She caught it between her teeth in a last sharp
effort at self-control. "Don't!" she quavered. And then,
in a panic, her two hands came up in a vain effort to hide
the tears. She sank down on the rough bench by the table,
and the proud head came down on her arms so that there was a
little clatter and tinkle among the supper things spread on
the table. Then quiet.

Clarence Heyl stared. He stared, helplessly, as does a man
who has never, in all his life, been called upon to comfort
a woman in tears. Then instinct came to his rescue. He
made her side of the table in two strides (your favorite
film star couldn't have done it better), put his two hands
on her shoulders and neatly shifted the bowed head from the
cold, hard surface of the table top to the warm, rough,
tobacco-scented comfort of his coat. It rested there quite
naturally. Just as naturally Fanny's arm crept up, and
about his neck. So they remained for a moment, until he
bent so that his lips touched her hair. Her head came
up at that, sharply, so that it bumped his chin. They both
laughed, looking into each other's eyes, but at what they
saw there they stopped laughing and were serious.

"Dear," said Heyl. "Dearest." The lids drooped over
Fanny's eyes. "Look at me," said Heyl. So she tried to
lift them again, bravely, and could not. At that he bent
his head and kissed Fanny Brandeis in the way a woman wants
to be kissed for the first time by the man she loves. It
hurt her lips, that kiss, and her teeth, and the back of her
neck, and it left her breathless, and set things whirling.
When she opened her eyes (they shut them at such times) he
kissed her again, very tenderly, this time, and lightly, and
reassuringly. She returned that kiss, and, strangely
enough, it was the one that stayed in her memory long, long
after the other had faded.

"Oh, Clancy, I've made such a mess of it all. Such a
miserable mess. The little girl in the red tam was worth
ten of me. I don't see how you can--care for me."

"You're the most wonderful woman in the world," said Heyl,
"and the most beautiful and splendid."

He must have meant it, for he was looking down at her as he
said it, and we know that the skin had been peeled off her
nose by the mountain winds and sun, that her lips were
cracked and her cheeks rough, and that she was red-eyed and
worn-looking. And she must have believed him, for she
brought his cheek down to hers with such a sigh of content,
though she said, "But are we at all suited to each other?"

"Probably not," Heyl answered, briskly. "That's why we're
going to be so terrifically happy. Some day I'll be passing
the Singer building, and I'll glance up at it and think how
pitiful it would look next to Long's Peak. And then I'll be
off, probably, to these mountains "

"Or some day," Fanny returned, "we'll be up here, and I'll
remember, suddenly, how Fifth Avenue looks on a bright
afternoon between four and five. And I'll be off, probably,
to the Grand Central station."

And then began one of those beautiful and foolish
conversations which all lovers have whose love has been a
sure and steady growth. Thus: "When did you first begin to
care," etc. And, "That day we spent at the dunes, and you
said so and so, did you mean this and that?"

Albert Edward Cobbins announced his approach by terrific
stampings and scufflings, ostensibly for the purpose of
ridding his boots of snow. He entered looking casual, and
very nipped.

"You're here for the night," he said. "A regular blizzard.
The greatest piece of luck I've had in a month." He busied
himself with the ham and eggs and the teapot. "Hungry?"

"Not a bit," said Fanny and Heyl, together.

"H'm," said Albert Edward, and broke six eggs into the
frying pan just the same.

After supper they aided Albert Edward in the process of
washing up. When everything was tidy he lighted his most
malignant pipe and told them seafaring yarns not necessarily
true. Then he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and fell
asleep there by the fire, effacing himself as effectually as
one of three people can in a single room. They talked; low-
toned murmurings that they seemed to find exquisitely
meaningful or witty, by turn. Fanny, rubbing a forefinger
(his) along her weather-roughened nose, would say, "At least
you've seen me at my worst."

Or he, mock serious: "I think I ought to tell you that I'm
the kind of man who throws wet towels into the laundry
hamper."

But there was no mirth in Fanny's voice when she said,
"Dear, do you think Lasker will give me that job? You
know he said, `When you want a job, come back.' Do you
think he meant it?"

"Lasker always means it."

"But," fearfully, and shyly, too, "you don't think I may
have lost my drawing hand and my seeing eye, do you? As
punishment?"

"I do not. I think you've just found them, for keeps.
There wasn't a woman cartoonist in the country--or man,
either, for that matter--could touch you two years ago. In
two more I'll be just Fanny Brandeis' husband, that's all."

They laughed together at that, so that Albert Edward Cobbins
awoke with a start and tried to look as if he had not been
asleep, and failing, smiled benignly and drowsily upon them.

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