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_ I am living at a little private hotel just across from
the court house square with its scarlet geraniums and its
pretty fountain. The house is filled with German civil
engineers, mechanical engineers, and Herr Professors from
the German academy. On Sunday mornings we have
Pfannkuchen with currant jelly, and the Herr Professors
come down to breakfast in fearful flappy German slippers.
I'm the only creature in the place that isn't just over
from Germany. Even the dog is a dachshund. It is so
unbelievable that every day or two I go down to Wisconsin
Street and gaze at the stars and stripes floating from
the government building, in order to convince myself that
this is America. It needs only a Kaiser or so, and a bit
of Unter den Linden to be quite complete.
The little private hotel is kept by Herr and Frau
Knapf. After one has seen them, one quite understands why
the place is steeped in a German atmosphere up to its
eyebrows.
I never would have found it myself. It was Doctor
von Gerhard who had suggested Knapf's, and who had paved
the way for my coming here.
"You will find it quite unlike anything you have ever
tried before," he warned me. "Very German it is, and
very, very clean, and most inexpensive. Also I think you
will find material there--how is it you call it?--copy,
yes? Well, there should be copy in plenty; and types!
But you shall see."
From the moment I rang the Knapf doorbell I saw. The
dapper, cheerful Herr Knapf, wearing a disappointed
Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, opened the door. I scarcely had
begun to make my wishes known when he interrupted with a
large wave of the hand, and an elaborate German bow.
"Ach yes! You would be the lady of whom the Herr
Doktor has spoken. Gewiss! Frau Orme, not? But so a
young lady I did not expect to see. A room we have saved
for you--aber wunderhubsch! It makes me much pleasure to
show. Folgen Sie mir, bitte."
"You--you speak English?" I faltered, with visions of
my evenings spent in expressing myself in the sign language.
"Englisch? But yes. Here in Milwaukee it gives aber
mostly German. And then too, I have been only twenty
years in this country. And always in Milwaukee. Here is
it gemutlich--and mostly it gives German."
I tried not to look frightened, and followed him up
to the "but wonderfully beautiful" room. To my joy I
found it high-ceilinged, airy, and huge, with a great
vault of a clothes closet bristling with hooks, and
boasting an unbelievable number of shelves. My trunk was
swallowed up in it. Never in all my boarding-house
experience have I seen such a room, or such a closet.
The closet must have been built for a bride's trousseau
in the days of hoop-skirts and scuttle bonnets. There
was a separate and distinct hook for each and every one
of my most obscure garments. I tried to spread them out.
I used two hooks to every petticoat, and three for my
kimono, and when I had finished there were rows of hooks
to spare. Tiers of shelves yawned for hat-boxes which I
possessed not. Bluebeard's wives could have held a
family reunion in that closet and invited all of
Solomon's spouses. Finally, in desperation, I gathered
all my poor garments together and hung them in a sociable
bunch on the hooks nearest the door. How I should have
loved to have shown that closet to a select circle of New
York boarding-house landladies!
After wrestling in vain with the forest of hooks, I
turned my attention to my room. I yanked a towel thing
off the center table and replaced it with a scarf that
Peter had picked up in the Orient. I set up my
typewriter in a corner near a window and dug a gay
cushion or two and a chafing-dish out of my trunk. I
distributed photographs of Norah and Max and the
Spalpeens separately, in couples, and in groups. Then I
bounced up and down in a huge yellow brocade chair and
found it unbelievably soft and comfortable. Of course,
I reflected, after the big veranda, and the apple tree at
Norah's, and the leather-cushioned comfort of her
library, and the charming tones of her Oriental rugs and
hangings--
"Oh, stop your carping, Dawn!" I told myself. "You
can't expect charming tones, and Oriental do-dads and
apple trees in a German boarding-house. Anyhow there's
running water in the room. For general utility purposes
that's better than a pink prayer rug."
There was a time when I thought that it was the
luxuries that made life worth living. That was in
the old Bohemian days.
"Necessities!" I used to laugh, "Pooh! Who cares
about the necessities! What if the dishpan does leak?
It is the luxuries that count."
Bohemia and luxuries! Half a dozen lean
boarding-house years have steered me safely past that.
After such a course in common sense you don't stand back
and examine the pictures of a pink Moses in a nest of
purple bullrushes, or complain because the bureau does
not harmonize with the wall paper. Neither do you
criticize the blue and saffron roses that form the rug
pattern. 'Deedy not! Instead you warily punch the
mattress to see if it is rock-stuffed, and you snoop into
the clothes closet; you inquire the distance to the
nearest bath room, and whether the payments are weekly or
monthly, and if there is a baby in the room next door.
Oh, there's nothing like living in a boarding-house for
cultivating the materialistic side.
But I was to find that here at Knapf's things were
quite different. Not only was Ernst von Gerhard right in
saying that it was "very German, and very, very clean;"
he recognized good copy when he saw it. Types! I never
dreamed that such faces existed outside of the old German
woodcuts that one sees illustrating time-yellowed books.
I had thought myself hardened to strange
boarding-house dining rooms, with their batteries of
cold, critical women's eyes. I had learned to walk
unruffled in the face of the most carping, suspicious and
the fishiest of these batteries. Therefore on my first
day at Knapf's I went down to dinner in the evening,
quite composed and secure in the knowledge that my collar
was clean and that there was no flaw to find in the fit
of my skirt in the back.
As I opened the door of my room I heard sounds as of
a violent altercation in progress downstairs. I leaned
over the balusters and listened. The sounds rose and
fell and swelled and boomed. They were German sounds
that started in the throat, gutturally, and spluttered
their way up. They were sounds such as I had not heard
since the night I was sent to cover a Socialist meeting
in New York. I tip-toed down the stairs, although I
might have fallen down and landed with a thud without
having been heard. The din came from the direction of
the dining room. Well, come what might, I would not
falter. After all, it could not be worse than that awful
time when I had helped cover the teamsters' strike. I
peered into the dining room.
The thunder of conversation went on as before. But
there was no bloodshed. Nothing but men and women
sitting at small tables, eating and talking. When I say
eating and talking I do not mean that those acts were
carried on separately. Not at all. The eating and the
talking went on simultaneously, neither interrupting the
other. A fork full of food and a mouthful of
ten-syllabled German words met, wrestled, and passed one
another, unscathed. I stood in the doorway, fascinated,
until Herr Knapf spied me, took a nimble skip in my
direction, twisted the discouraged mustaches into
temporary sprightliness, and waved me toward a table in
the center of the room.
Then a frightful thing happened. When I think of it
now I turn cold. The battery was not that of women's
eyes, but of men's. And conversation ceased! The uproar
and the booming of vowels was hushed. The silence was
appalling. I looked up in horror to find that what
seemed to be millions of staring blue eyes were fixed on
me. The stillness was so thick that you could cut it
with a knife. Such men! Immediately I dubbed them the
aborigines, and prayed that I might find adjectives with
which to describe their foreheads.
It appeared that the aborigines were especially
favored in that they were all placed at one long, untidy
table at the head of the room. The rest of us sat at
small tables. Later I learned that they were all
engineers. At meals they discuss engineering problems in
the most awe-inspiring German. After supper they smoke
impossible German pipes and dozens of cigarettes. They
have bulging, knobby foreheads and bristling pompadours,
and some of the rawest of them wear wild-looking beards,
and thick spectacles, and cravats and trousers that Lew
Fields never even dreamed of. They are all graduates of
high-sounding foreign universities and are horribly
learned and brilliant, but they are the worst mannered
lot I ever saw.
In the silence that followed my entrance a
red-cheeked maid approached me and asked what I would
have for supper. Supper? I asked. Was not dinner served
in the evening? The aborigines nudged each other and
sniggered like fiendish little school-boys.
The red-cheeked maid looked at me pityingly. Dinner
was served in the middle of the day, naturlich. For
supper there was Wienerschnitzel, and kalter Aufschnitt,
also Kartoffel Salat, and fresh Kaffeekuchen.
The room hung breathless on my decision. I wrestled
with a horrible desire to shriek and run. Instead I
managed to mumble an order. The aborigines turned to one
another inquiringly.
"Was hat sie gesagt?" they asked. "What did she
say?" Whereupon they fell to discussing my hair and
teeth and eyes and complexion in German as crammed with
adjectives as was the rye bread over which I was choking
with caraway. The entire table watched me with
wide-eyed, unabashed interest while I ate, and I advanced
by quick stages from red-faced confusion to purple mirth.
It appeared that my presence was the ground for a heavy
German joke in connection with the youngest of the
aborigines. He was a very plump and greasy looking
aborigine with a doll-like rosiness of cheek and a scared
and bristling pompadour and very small pig-eyes. The
other aborigines clapped him on the back and roared:
"Ai Fritz! Jetzt brauchst du nicht zu weinen! Deine
Lena war aber nicht so huebsch, eh? "
Later I learned that Fritz was the newest arrival and
that since coming to this country he had been rather low
in spirits in consequence of a certain flaxen-haired Lena
whom he had left behind in the fatherland.
An examination of the dining room and its other
occupants served to keep my mind off the hateful long
table. The dining room was a double one, the floor
carpetless and clean. There was a little platform at one
end with hardy-looking plants in pots near the windows.
The wall was ornamented with very German pictures of very
plump, bare-armed German girls being chucked under the
chin by very dashing, mustachioed German lieutenants. It
was all very bare, and strange and foreign to my eyes,
and yet there was something bright and comfortable about
it. I felt that I was going to like it, aborigines and
all. The men drink beer with their supper and read the
Staats-Zeitung and the Germania and foreign papers
that I never heard of. It is uncanny, in these United
States. But it is going to be bully for my German.
After my first letter home Norah wrote frantically,
demanding to know if I was the only woman in the house.
I calmed her fears by assuring her that, while the men
were interesting and ugly with the fascinating ugliness
of a bulldog, the women were crushed looking and
uninteresting and wore hopeless hats. I have
written Norah and Max reams about this household, from
the aborigines to Minna, who tidies my room and serves my
meals, and admires my clothes. Minna is related to Frau
Knapf, whom I have never seen. Minna is inordinately
fond of dress, and her remarks anent my own garments are
apt to be a trifle disconcerting, especially when she
intersperses her recital of dinner dishes with admiring
adjectives directed at my blouse or hat. Thus:
"Wir haben roast beef, und spareribs mit Sauerkraut,
und schicken--ach, wie schon, Frau Orme! Aber ganz
prachtvoll!" Her eyes and hands are raised toward
heaven.
"What's prachtful? " I ask, startled. "The
chicken?"
"Nein; your waist. Selbst gemacht?"
I am even becoming hardened to the manners of the
aborigines. It used to fuss me to death to meet one of
them in the halls. They always stopped short, brought
heels together with a click, bent stiffly from the waist,
and thundered: "Nabben', Fraulein!"
I have learned to take the salutation quite calmly,
and even the wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed
aborigine cannot startle me. Nonchalantly I reply,
"Nabben'," and wish that Norah could but see me in the
act.
When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed
a little and shrugged his shoulders and said:
"Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and
so unmarried. In Germany a married woman brushes her
hair quite smoothly back, and pins it in a hard knob.
And she knows nothing of such bewildering collars and
fluffy frilled things in the front of the blouse. How do
you call them--jabots?"
Von Gerhard has not behaved at all nicely. I did not
see him until two weeks after my arrival in Milwaukee,
although he telephoned twice to ask if there was anything
that he could do to make me comfortable.
"Yes," I had answered the last time that I heard his
voice over the telephone. "It would be a whole heap of
comfort to me just to see you. You are the nearest thing
to Norah that there is in this whole German town, and
goodness knows you're far from Irish."
He came. The weather had turned suddenly cold and he
was wearing a fur-lined coat with a collar of fur. He
looked most amazingly handsome and blond and splendidly
healthy. The clasp of his hands was just as big and sure
as ever.
"You have no idea how glad I am to see
you," I told him. "If you had, you would have been here
days ago. Aren't you rather ill-mannered and neglectful,
considering that you are responsible for my being here?"
"I did not know whether you, a married woman, would
care to have me here," he said, in his composed way. "In
a place like this people are not always kind enough to
take the trouble to understand. And I would not have
them raise their eyebrows at you, not for--"
"Married!" I laughed, some imp of willfulness seizing
me, "I'm not married. What mockery to say that I am
married simply because I must write madam before my name!
I am not married, and I shall talk to whom I please."
And then Von Gerhard did a surprising thing. He took
two great steps over to my chair, and grasped my hands
and pulled me to my feet. I stared up at him like a
silly creature. His face was suffused with a dull red,
and his eyes were unbelievably blue and bright. He had
my hands in his great grip, but his voice was very quiet
and contained.
"You are married," he said. "Never forget that for
a moment. You are bound, hard and fast and tight. And
you are for no man. You are married as much as though
that poor creature in the mad house were here working for
you, instead of the case being reversed as it is. So."
"What do you mean!" I cried, wrenching myself away
indignantly. "What right have you to talk to me like
this? You know what my life has been, and how I have
tried to smile with my lips and stay young in my heart!
I thought you understood. Norah thought so too, and
Max--"
"I do understand. I understand so well that I would
not have you talk as you did a moment ago. And I said
what I said not so much for your sake, as for mine. For
see, I too must remember that you write madam before your
name. And sometimes it is hard for me to remember."
"Oh," I said, like a simpleton, and stood staring
after him as he quietly gathered up his hat and gloves
and left me standing there. _
Read next: CHAPTER VII - BLACKIE'S PHILOSOPHY
Read previous: CHAPTER V - THE ABSURD BECOMES SERIOUS
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