Dawn O'Hara: The Girl Who Laughed Read online

  CHAPTER VI. STEEPED IN GERMAN

  I am living at a little private hotel just across from the court housesquare with its scarlet geraniums and its pretty fountain. The houseis filled with German civil engineers, mechanical engineers, andHerr Professors from the German academy. On Sunday mornings we havePfannkuchen with currant jelly, and the Herr Professors come down tobreakfast in fearful flappy German slippers. I'm the only creaturein the place that isn't just over from Germany. Even the dog is adachshund. It is so unbelievable that every day or two I go down toWisconsin Street and gaze at the stars and stripes floating from thegovernment 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 quitecomplete.

  The little private hotel is kept by Herr and Frau Knapf. After one hasseen them, one quite understands why the place is steeped in a Germanatmosphere up to its eyebrows.

  I never would have found it myself. It was Doctor von Gerhard who hadsuggested 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 mostinexpensive. Also I think you will find material there--how is it youcall 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, cheerfulHerr Knapf, wearing a disappointed Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, opened thedoor. I scarcely had begun to make my wishes known when he interruptedwith 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. Aroom we have saved for you--aber wunderhubsch! It makes me much pleasureto show. Folgen Sie mir, bitte."

  "You--you speak English?" I faltered, with visions of my evenings spentin expressing myself in the sign language.

  "Englisch? But yes. Here in Milwaukee it gives aber mostly German. Andthen too, I have been only twenty years in this country. And always inMilwaukee. Here is it gemutlich--and mostly it gives German."

  I tried not to look frightened, and followed him up to the "butwonderfully 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 swallowedup in it. Never in all my boarding-house experience have I seen such aroom, or such a closet. The closet must have been built for a bride'strousseau in the days of hoop-skirts and scuttle bonnets. There was aseparate and distinct hook for each and every one of my most obscuregarments. I tried to spread them out. I used two hooks to everypetticoat, and three for my kimono, and when I had finished there wererows of hooks to spare. Tiers of shelves yawned for hat-boxes which Ipossessed not. Bluebeard's wives could have held a family reunionin that closet and invited all of Solomon's spouses. Finally, indesperation, I gathered all my poor garments together and hung them in asociable bunch on the hooks nearest the door. How I should have lovedto have shown that closet to a select circle of New York boarding-houselandladies!

  After wrestling in vain with the forest of hooks, I turned my attentionto my room. I yanked a towel thing off the center table and replacedit with a scarf that Peter had picked up in the Orient. I set up mytypewriter in a corner near a window and dug a gay cushion or two and achafing-dish out of my trunk. I distributed photographs of Norah and Maxand the Spalpeens separately, in couples, and in groups. Then I bouncedup and down in a huge yellow brocade chair and found it unbelievablysoft and comfortable. Of course, I reflected, after the big veranda,and the apple tree at Norah's, and the leather-cushioned comfort of herlibrary, and the charming tones of her Oriental rugs and hangings--

  "Oh, stop your carping, Dawn!" I told myself. "You can't expect charmingtones, and Oriental do-dads and apple trees in a German boarding-house.Anyhow there's running water in the room. For general utility purposesthat's better than a pink prayer rug."

  There was a time when I thought that it was the luxuries that made lifeworth 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 havesteered me safely past that. After such a course in common sense youdon't stand back and examine the pictures of a pink Moses in a nest ofpurple bullrushes, or complain because the bureau does not harmonizewith the wall paper. Neither do you criticize the blue and saffron rosesthat form the rug pattern. 'Deedy not! Instead you warily punch themattress to see if it is rock-stuffed, and you snoop into the clothescloset; you inquire the distance to the nearest bath room, and whetherthe payments are weekly or monthly, and if there is a baby in the roomnext door. Oh, there's nothing like living in a boarding-house forcultivating the materialistic side.

  But I was to find that here at Knapf's things were quite different. Notonly 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! Inever dreamed that such faces existed outside of the old German woodcutsthat 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 learnedto walk unruffled in the face of the most carping, suspicious and thefishiest of these batteries. Therefore on my first day at Knapf's Iwent down to dinner in the evening, quite composed and secure in theknowledge that my collar was clean and that there was no flaw to find inthe fit of my skirt in the back.

  As I opened the door of my room I heard sounds as of a violentaltercation in progress downstairs. I leaned over the balusters andlistened. The sounds rose and fell and swelled and boomed. They wereGerman sounds that started in the throat, gutturally, and splutteredtheir way up. They were sounds such as I had not heard since the nightI was sent to cover a Socialist meeting in New York. I tip-toed down thestairs, although I might have fallen down and landed with a thud withouthaving been heard. The din came from the direction of the dining room.Well, come what might, I would not falter. After all, it could notbe 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 nobloodshed. Nothing but men and women sitting at small tables, eatingand talking. When I say eating and talking I do not mean that those actswere carried on separately. Not at all. The eating and the talking wenton simultaneously, neither interrupting the other. A fork full of foodand a mouthful of ten-syllabled German words met, wrestled, and passedone another, unscathed. I stood in the doorway, fascinated, untilHerr Knapf spied me, took a nimble skip in my direction, twisted thediscouraged mustaches into temporary sprightliness, and waved me towarda 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 conversationceased! The uproar and the booming of vowels was hushed. The silence wasappalling. I looked up in horror to find that what seemed to be millionsof staring blue eyes were fixed on me. The stillness was so thick thatyou could cut it with a knife. Such men! Immediately I dubbed themthe aborigines, and prayed that I might find adjectives with which todescribe their foreheads.

  It appeared that the aborigines were especially favored in that theywere 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 wereall engineers. At meals they discuss engineering problems in the mostawe-inspiring German. After supper they smoke impossible German pipesand dozens of cigarettes. They have bulging, knobby foreheads andbristling pompadours, and some of the rawest of them wear wild-lookingbeards, and thick spectacles, and cravats and trousers that Lew Fieldsnever even dreamed of. They are all graduates of high-sounding foreignuniversities and are horribly learned and brilliant, but they are theworst mannered lot I e
ver saw.

  In the silence that followed my entrance a red-cheeked maid approachedme and asked what I would have for supper. Supper? I asked. Was notdinner served in the evening? The aborigines nudged each other andsniggered like fiendish little school-boys.

  The red-cheeked maid looked at me pityingly. Dinner was served in themiddle of the day, naturlich. For supper there was Wienerschnitzel, andkalter Aufschnitt, also Kartoffel Salat, and fresh Kaffeekuchen.

  The room hung breathless on my decision. I wrestled with a horribledesire to shriek and run. Instead I managed to mumble an order. Theaborigines turned to one another inquiringly.

  "Was hat sie gesagt?" they asked. "What did she say?" Whereupon theyfell to discussing my hair and teeth and eyes and complexion in Germanas crammed with adjectives as was the rye bread over which I was chokingwith caraway. The entire table watched me with wide-eyed, unabashedinterest while I ate, and I advanced by quick stages from red-facedconfusion to purple mirth. It appeared that my presence was theground for a heavy German joke in connection with the youngest of theaborigines. He was a very plump and greasy looking aborigine with adoll-like rosiness of cheek and a scared and bristling pompadour andvery small pig-eyes. The other aborigines clapped him on the back androared:

  "Ai Fritz! Jetzt brauchst du nicht zu weinen! Deine Lena war aber nichtso huebsch, eh?"

  Later I learned that Fritz was the newest arrival and that since comingto this country he had been rather low in spirits in consequence of acertain flaxen-haired Lena whom he had left behind in the fatherland.

  An examination of the dining room and its other occupants served to keepmy mind off the hateful long table. The dining room was a double one,the floor carpetless and clean. There was a little platform at oneend with hardy-looking plants in pots near the windows. The wall wasornamented with very German pictures of very plump, bare-armed Germangirls being chucked under the chin by very dashing, mustachioed Germanlieutenants. It was all very bare, and strange and foreign to my eyes,and yet there was something bright and comfortable about it. I feltthat I was going to like it, aborigines and all. The men drink beer withtheir supper and read the Staats-Zeitung and the Germania and foreignpapers that I never heard of. It is uncanny, in these United States. Butit is going to be bully for my German.

  After my first letter home Norah wrote frantically, demanding to knowif I was the only woman in the house. I calmed her fears by assuringher that, while the men were interesting and ugly with the fascinatingugliness of a bulldog, the women were crushed looking and uninterestingand wore hopeless hats. I have written Norah and Max reams about thishousehold, from the aborigines to Minna, who tidies my room and servesmy meals, and admires my clothes. Minna is related to Frau Knapf, whomI have never seen. Minna is inordinately fond of dress, and her remarksanent my own garments are apt to be a trifle disconcerting, especiallywhen she intersperses her recital of dinner dishes with admiringadjectives 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 areraised 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 tofuss me to death to meet one of them in the halls. They always stoppedshort, 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 thewildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed aborigine cannot startle me.Nonchalantly I reply, "Nabben'," and wish that Norah could but see me inthe act.

  When I told Ernst von Gerhard about them, he laughed a little andshrugged his shoulders and said:

  "Na, you should not look so young, and so pretty, and so unmarried. InGermany a married woman brushes her hair quite smoothly back, and pinsit in a hard knob. And she knows nothing of such bewildering collarsand fluffy frilled things in the front of the blouse. How do you callthem--jabots?"

  Von Gerhard has not behaved at all nicely. I did not see him until twoweeks after my arrival in Milwaukee, although he telephoned twice to askif there was anything that he could do to make me comfortable.

  "Yes," I had answered the last time that I heard his voice over thetelephone. "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 Germantown, and goodness knows you're far from Irish."

  He came. The weather had turned suddenly cold and he was wearing afur-lined coat with a collar of fur. He looked most amazingly handsomeand blond and splendidly healthy. The clasp of his hands was just as bigand 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 andneglectful, considering that you are responsible for my being here?"

  "I did not know whether you, a married woman, would care to have mehere," he said, in his composed way. "In a place like this people arenot always kind enough to take the trouble to understand. And I wouldnot have them raise their eyebrows at you, not for--"

  "Married!" I laughed, some imp of willfulness seizing me, "I'm notmarried. What mockery to say that I am married simply because I mustwrite madam before my name! I am not married, and I shall talk to whom Iplease."

  And then Von Gerhard did a surprising thing. He took two great stepsover to my chair, and grasped my hands and pulled me to my feet. Istared up at him like a silly creature. His face was suffused with adull red, and his eyes were unbelievably blue and bright. He had myhands in his great grip, but his voice was very quiet and contained.

  "You are married," he said. "Never forget that for a moment. You arebound, hard and fast and tight. And you are for no man. You are marriedas much as though that poor creature in the mad house were here workingfor you, instead of the case being reversed as it is. So."

  "What do you mean!" I cried, wrenching myself away indignantly. "Whatright 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! Ithought you understood. Norah thought so too, and Max--"

  "I do understand. I understand so well that I would not have you talk asyou 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 beforeyour name. And sometimes it is hard for me to remember."

  "Oh," I said, like a simpleton, and stood staring after him as hequietly gathered up his hat and gloves and left me standing there.