Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  They sat down and waited for their Würstel and hot potato salad to come. Fred stared across the table at her, his glance locked about a foot below her face. He was feeling a little numb. He was like a man who had found a chest of gold on the sidewalk and was, first of all, afraid that somebody would steal it from him, and second, trying to cast about for a way of opening it. With difficulty he removed his eyes from the persimmon bodice.

  “You said that—Mr. Larkin—”

  “He died in the most inconsiderate way imaginable. I take it you have never been called upon to unclasp yourself from a corpse.”

  “H’mm,” said Fred. “Then he …”

  “He was tenacious, the old goat. Even after having passed on, he was determined to let nothing escape from his grasp that he felt belonged to him.”

  “It can’t have been pleasant for you.”

  “No, and that was only the start. He had hardly emitted his dying gasp when the house was full of lawyers. It was amazing. They seemed to spring out of the walls, and they began taking inventory of everything before the undertakers had the old man out of the house. I was ordered to vacate the premises forthwith.”

  “Vacate the premises?”

  “My contention that I was Mr. Larkin’s niece was laughed out of hand. I was escorted to the station with only the clothes on my back.”

  Fred murmured, “It’s a beautiful gown.”

  “You don’t seem to be able to keep your mind on the subject. I’m up here, just a little higher than where you’re looking. The point is that I have been cast off like an old shoe, and I have no place to lay my head except Mrs. Morbihan’s rooming house.”

  She still, however, gave the impression that she was acting a part rather than taking this personal disaster seriously. There was a little tragic arch of wrinkles in her forehead, but it was a mock stage despair. There was even a little smile on her lips. She rattled on blithely in her actressy voice. “So you see me, victim of a cruel fate, a homeless child tossed about aimlessly on life’s waters.”

  The waiter arrived with their plates and two steins of beer. Ernestine drew a long sip from the stein, leaving a rim of foam on her lips which she delicately removed with the napkin. Then she attacked the potato salad. Fred left his lunch untouched.

  “Then what are your plans?”

  “I have no choice other than to resume my career on the stage or—something else. At the worst, it seems that bought embraces still fetch a good price. This is not the most pleasant way to earn one’s living, but it is hardly worse than being incessantly chased through a drafty mansion by a senile saturnalian.”

  “Ernestine, don’t be ridiculous. If I can help with a little something—” He stuck his hand into his empty pocket.

  “Oh, I’m not quite reduced to that yet,” she said pleasantly. She raised a hand with a large diamond ring on it and touched a brooch in the middle of her bodice. It had a ruby in the center and was set with tiny diamonds around the edge. “I managed to make off with a bauble or two when the lawyers were looking the other way. So for the present, instead of applying to a bordello, I can merely pay a visit to Uncle once in a while.”

  “And after that?”

  “It’s in the lap of the gods, dear Fred. All fortune hangs by a fragile thread. And when it is cut, poof.” She held the napkin a foot in the air and let it drop onto the table.

  Fred could not account for the fact that he had not noticed the brooch before. He had been looking straight at it. Apparently it was a phenomenon of parallel vision: the left eye looked at what was on the left, the right to the right, and neither noticed what was in the middle.

  “Perhaps there might be something for you at the Larkin Theater.”

  She gazed at him oddly. Then she said, “Perhaps.”

  She had finished her lunch, wiping up the plate with a piece of bread which she also ate. Fred had only dabbled at the potato salad.

  “And now I’ll be on my way.” She got up, setting down the money for the meal and the tip. “Thank you for the lunch.”

  “Ernestine, for God’s sake. Isn’t there some place where we can discuss this more … privately?”

  She observed the direction of his glance. Then she looked back at him and made her fixed little smile. “Unfortunately my rooming house is presided over by an ogress of rigidly puritanical views. She has arms like an Irish policeman, and she has already pitched more than one swain out into the street. Not mine, of course,” she hastened to add.

  Fred stuck his hand into his pocket again. It was an unconscious reflex. He pretended that he had only meant to put both hands into his pockets, in a casual way. Saturday, he remembered, was Herma’s payday. “Are you free on Sunday?”

  “Free to some,” she said playfully. “For others, it’s negotiable.”

  “You don’t seem to be taking all this very seriously.”

  “It’s only the problems of the world that are serious, dear Fred,” she told him. “Our solutions to them are always a little ludicrous.”

  By way of Kearney Street they made their way back to Market. Here they parted, she turning to give him a final “ta-ta” sign with her fingers from twenty yards away. He watched her disappear across the traffic of Market and down Third Street. From the rear the persimmon-colored gown was a symmetrical hourglass, the lower half of which formed a callipygian structure of perfect proportions. This view was also nice. There were those, he knew, who were connoisseurs of such, but it didn’t happen to be his specialty.

  He got back to the Larkin a little after two. When he took his key at the desk the clerk stared at him significantly.

  “Sheeny wants to see you.”

  “What about?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In his office.”

  Fred wound his way around the desk and into a small cubicle with no windows to it except a transom over the door. A light bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling. The Sheeny was sitting with his feet on the desk, shuffling through a pile of papers. He hardly looked up.

  “I have unfortunate news for you, my dear gentleman. Mr. Larkin, your benefactor, has passed on to his reward. The circumstances are touching. He was found in his favorite armchair with an open Bible in his hands, with his finger on the Twenty-third Psalm.”

  “Yes, I’ve already heard.”

  “Dear, dear, dear. You don’t seem very crushed by the news. I’m afraid it’s quite serious for you. You may vacate your rooms at your earliest convenience, or start paying for them, whichever you prefer. It’s a matter of indifference to me.”

  “And the theater?”

  “Ah. Miss Herma’s position in the repertory is also terminated, I am afraid. Dear dear dear.”

  “We’ll see what Mr. Speidermann says about that.”

  “Mr. Speidermann,” said the Sheeny, exploring a nostril thoughtfully with his little finger, “will also be looking for a new job, as well as new lodgings.”

  “But everyone in town is singing Kiss Me Again.”

  “Yes, that’s just the point, my dear Mr. Hite. Everyone in town already knows it, so there is no more reason for them to come to the Larkin.”

  “But the house is sold out for two more weeks.”

  “Exactly. I see you are well up on the affairs of the theater. You have a sharp head for business and you will go far. The point is, I have here a telegram from the executor of Mr. Larkin’s estate, instructing me to put both hotel and theater immediately onto a businesslike footing. From the point of view of the hotel, this means no more free rooms. From the point of view of the theater, this means that in two weeks’ time the opera company will be replaced by a vaudeville straight from the Orpheum Theater in New York. There will be the Tumbling Torricellis, a Scotch comedian, a dog act, and a family of Swiss bell-ringers.”

  “What a blow for the arts.”

  The Sheeny removed the little finger, examined it, and put it in the other nostril. “What will you, Mr. Hite? It’s what the pu
blic wants. Sic transit gloria, and so on, if you will see my point, my dear gentleman. So that, as I say, it will be necessary for you to vacate your rooms, with separate entrances but connecting bath, in two weeks’ time at the very latest.”

  “I imagine all of this must have saddened you terribly.”

  “Dear, dear, dear, it’s a melancholy turn of events for us all. That our benefactor and friend, Mr. Larkin, should have been taken from us so suddenly. I won’t conceal that I have sometimes been exacerbated by Miss Herma’s—artistic temperament. She demands a great deal for herself. But I am not a man without a heart. I cast about in my mind in search of something for this talented young lady to do, at least on a temporary basis. And I think of the following. There is in the vaudeville company a certain Count Proxissimo, who throws knives, and requires an assistant. The only requirements are that the lady be pretty, and also that she be able to smile under all circumstances. The lady assistant wears silver trousers. Miss Herma will like that. The assistant wears trousers because some of the knives go between.”

  “I don’t think she’d be interested.”

  “It pays twenty dollars a week. Of course,” the Sheeny went on, examining the finger a second time to see if there were any news on it, “the rate for your present suite of rooms is two hundred dollars, so you could hardly go on living in them, even if Miss Herma does decide in favor of becoming the Count’s assistant.”

  “We’ll move to the Palace.”

  “Ah, you young people,” sighed the Sheeny. “Full of ambition and blind hope.” He seemed to fall into reflection about his own youth, when he was a shoe-shine boy in Smyrna and dreamed of coming to America and becoming a hotel manager.

  10.

  On Sunday morning Fred dressed with care, in a pair of corduroy knickers, boots, and a whipcord jacket and cap he had bought the day before, after he came into possession of Herma’s pay envelope. The goggles, presumably, Kinney would supply as he had before. Putting on the cap, he gazed at his pale and intent face in the mirror. There was an astuteness to it, a foxlike keenness and confidence, that more than counterbalanced its soft youth and girlish quality. The Sheeny was right. He would go far. He would have to go far in the next two weeks or everything would fall down like a house of cards.

  Then he noticed a scrap of paper in the mirror, with something written on it in the usual spidery hand. “Fred, you’re crazy. We can’t spend so much on aeroplanes.”

  He pulled it off, crumpled it, and threw it into the wastebasket. Then, going into Herma’s room and rummaging around until he found another scrap of paper, he scrawled on it, “You sing, I’ll spend the money.” Sticking this into the mirror, he found the keys and went out, carefully locking the doors of both rooms.

  Since there was still a good deal of Saturday’s pay left, he engaged a horse-cab to take himself and Ernestine out to the Presidio. When they got to the field they found it covered with other cabs, private buggies, and motorcars. More than a thousand people had gathered, the ladies in white dresses and the men for the most part in black suits and derbies. On the road along the field there were posters on the telegraph poles.

  GRAND AIR SHOW

  Sunday April 8th

  Farman, Blériot, Wright, Curtiss and

  Voisin Aeroplanes

  Admission $1.

  Free Demonstration Flight to

  holder of Winning Ticket

  See the Famous French Aeronaut Louis

  Paulhan at the Controls of his Farman

  Aeroplane Races

  Grand Sweepstakes $1000 Prize

  Presidio Meadows, at Noon

  Transportation by E Car or

  Geary Avenue Omnibus

  Pushing through the crowd, Fred searched for the participants’ entrance, but there didn’t seem to be any provision for one. In the end he had to buy tickets for himself and Ernestine. He peeled two dollars off the lump of bills in his pocket. There were still quite a few of them left. A good-sized grandstand had been erected in the field near the hangar. The tickets for the seats were another two dollars, and he paid this too. Here he installed Ernestine with her parasol. She was wearing the same persimmon-colored gown she had on the morning he met her on Market Street, along with a matching Eugenie cap; perhaps it was the only gown she had. At any rate it was just as spectacular as it had been before. The parasol was white silk printed with red roses.

  “You’ll be all right here?”

  “Just fine. My brave aviator! I had no notion you were such a hero.”

  Unfortunately everything Ernestine said had a faint flavor of irony. Furthermore, her brightly-colored dress and spectacular figure were already attracting attention from the crowd, and as might be expected the unattached males far outnumbered the ladies. He bent over her in an effort to kiss her cheek, but she parried and offered her hand instead. Still, in returning the hand to her, he managed to brush his own against the Incomparable Bosom. She colored lightly, then laughed. “Only the brave deserve the fair,” she told him. He left, turning once to see her make her “ta-ta” sign with her white manicured hand.

  There were a dozen or more aeroplanes on the field. He identified several Farmans, a new Wright Flyer, and a Roe triplane. The June Bug had not yet been brought out of the hangar. Fred went in. Inside the hangar, in addition to the June Bug, was Paulhan’s Farman and a Blériot monoplane to be flown by the Frenchman Lecornu. Kinney was checking the magneto of the Curtiss and changing the plugs.

  He turned and glanced at Fred, saying nothing. When he had finished tightening the last plug he said, “Let’s have a talk in the office.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Nope. Everything’s just fine. Bug’s in great shape.” He stuck the wrench into the rear pocket of his overalls and picked his way through the other machines in the hangar, with Fred following him. “Magneto puts out a spark like a bolt of lightning. I changed the pitch on the airscrew so it goes to about fourteen hundred now. But you don’t want to run it that fast for more than a few minutes, or it’ll throw the rods out like a monkey spittin’ nuts.”

  He led the way into the tiny office, which smelled of grease and had more engine parts in it than papers. “We’ll let you have the Bug for thirty, same as last time, Mr. Hite, even though you’ll be in the air more’n an hour mostly likely.”

  “I thought this was a promotion stunt for the Curtiss.”

  “That’s right. But it’s a private entry. Companies ain’t allowed to enter the sweepstakes. Then the entry fee for the race is fifty, and the insurance is another fifty.”

  “Insurance?”

  “Mr. Curtiss don’t want nobody racin’ without insurance. He ain’t got but two June Bugs, this one and one on the East Coast.”

  Fred took the bundle of bills out of his rear pocket and peeled off the money. Herma’s two hundred and seventy-five dollars was melting like an iceberg in summer. He had spent over a hundred on clothes. Renting the cab for the day was five dollars, and then there were the tickets.

  Observing the much-thinned bundle going back into Fred’s pocket, Kinney said, “Course all you got to do is win that thousand-dollar sweepstakes. Then you won’t have no problems.”

  “Sure,” said Fred. “What about Paulhan?”

  “In that Farman?” Kinney had a mechanic’s contempt for any machine other than his own. “Molasses in January. Got that water-cooled Voisin engine. Weighs a ton.”

  Fred wasn’t so sure. He went out to look at the Farman in the hangar. It was a solidly built machine. There were four landing wheels mounted in a transverse line under the wing, with auxiliary skids to keep you from ground-looping. The pusher airscrew was keyed directly to the shaft, as on the Curtiss. Sensing someone behind and at his elbow, he turned. He found himself being inspected by a small, quiet Frenchman, with gray eyes and a little smile.

  “Belle machine, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Are you Paulhan?”

  “Oui.”

  “Heavy engine.”

&nb
sp; Paulhan had no reply to make to this. He seemed amused at something or other about Fred. He went on looking at him for some time with the quiet little smile.

  The machines were wheeled out into the sunlight. After a good deal of delay—the whole thing was badly managed and everything went behind schedule—a long, lanky flyer from Illinois took off in a Voisin and did some “aerial acrobatics,” which consisted of a few rolls and wing-overs, followed by a long dive ending only a few feet from the ground, which produced a great gasp from the crowd. He glided down onto the grass with both hands held in the air, staring woodenly at the grandstand, to show that the thing would land itself.

  Then it was the turn of a certain Mrs. Baker, who had drawn the lucky number for the free flight. She was strapped into the Roe triplane, behind the engine and ahead of the pilot, and flown around the pasture two or three times. She got out intrepidly, saying “Land’s sakes” for her only comment. Following this, a gas-balloon race took off and dwindled away into three small silver balls, far off in the distance over Angel Island.

  The sweepstakes was announced. The crowd—several hundred in the grandstand and a thousand or more standing in the grass on either side—grew silent except for a little murmur.

  The five machines were lined up in the pasture. After a certain amount of foot-stamping and delay, the flyers got in and were strapped into place. In addition to Fred and Paulhan, there was Lecornu in his Blériot, similar to the Voisin but a more powerful machine, its single wing held up by a stubby mast with bracing wires extending to the wing tips. The others were the lanky middle-westerner in the Roe triplane, and a stocky young eastern amateur named Matsen in the Wright Flyer, which had a special monorail laid out in the grass for its takeoff. Matsen, in place of a helmet, wore his cap turned backwards, and disdained goggles. The rest of them were in proper flying rig.

  The five mechanics strove to get the engines going. The Curtiss started on the first pull after contact, as did the Blériot. The Farman required another couple of pulls, while Paulhan waited patiently. There was a deafening din, and the air around the five machines filled with blue smoke. After a moment or two the Roe, powered by a four-cylinder Alouette, caught, faltered, and broke into a steady roar. The Wright was last; the sweating mechanic swung at the left-hand screw a dozen times until the bicycle chains rattled into motion and began spinning.