Dawn O'Hara the Girl Who Laughed

by Edna Ferber

  “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.

  CHAPTER VII

  BLACKIE’S PHILOSOPHY

  I did not write Norah about Von Gerhard. After all, I told myself, there was nothing to write. And so I was the first to break the solemn pact that we had made.

  “You will write everything, won’t you, Dawn dear?” Norah had pleaded, with tears, in her pretty eyes. “Promise me. We’ve been nearer to each other in these last few months than we have been since we were girls. And I’ve loved it so. Please don’t do as you did during those miserable years in New York, when you were fighting your troubles alone and we knew nothing of it. You wrote only the happy things. Promise me you’ll write the unhappy ones too—though the saints forbid that there should be any to write! And Dawn, don’t you dare to forget your heavy underwear in November. Those lake breezes!—Well, some one has to tell you, and I can’t leave those to Von Gerhard. He has promised to act as monitor over your health.”

  And so I promised. I crammed my letters with descriptions of the Knapf household. I assured her that I was putting on so much weight that the skirts which formerly hung about me in limp, dejected folds now refused to meet in the back, and all the hooks and eyes were making faces at each other. My cheeks, I told her, looked as if I were wearing plumpers, and I was beginning to waddle and puff as I walked.

  Norah made frantic answer:

  “For mercy’s sake child, be careful or you’ll be FAT!”

  To which I replied: “Don’t care if I am. Rather be hunky and healthy than skinny and sick. Have tried both.”

  It is impossible to avoid becoming round-cheeked when one is working on a paper that allows one to shut one’s desk and amble comfortably home for dinner at least five days in the week. Everybody is at least plump in this comfortable, gemutlich town, where everybody placidly locks his shop or office and goes home at noon to dine heavily on soup and meat and vegetables and pudding, washed down by the inevitable beer and followed by forty winks on the dining room sofa with the German Zeitung spread comfortably over the head as protection against the flies.

  There is a fascination about the bright little city. There is about it something quaint and foreign, as though a cross-section of the old world had been dumped bodily into the lap of Wisconsin. It does not seem at all strange to hear German spoken everywhere—in the streets, in the shops, in the theaters, in the street cars. One day I chanced upon a sign hung above the doorway of a little German bakery over on the north side. There were Hornchen and Kaffeekuchen in the windows, and a brood of flaxen-hai
red and sticky children in the back of the shop. I stopped, open-mouthed, to stare at the worn sign tacked over the door.

  “Hier wird Englisch gesprochen,” it announced.

  I blinked. Then I read it again. I shut my eyes, and opened them again suddenly. The fat German letters spoke their message as before—“English spoken here.”

  On reaching the office I told Norberg, the city editor, about my find. He was not impressed. Norberg never is impressed. He is the most soul-satisfying and theatrical city editor that I have ever met. He is fat, and unbelievably nimble, and keen-eyed, and untiring. He says, “Hell!” when things go wrong; he smokes innumerable cigarettes, inhaling the fumes and sending out the thin wraith of smoke with little explosive sounds between tongue and lips; he wears blue shirts, and no collar to speak of, and his trousers are kept in place only by a miracle and an inefficient looking leather belt.

  When he refused to see the story in the little German bakery sign I began to argue.

  “But man alive, this is America! I think I know a story when I see it. Suppose you were traveling in Germany, and should come across a sign over a shop, saying: `Hier wird Deutsch gesprochen.’ Wouldn’t you think you were dreaming?”

  Norberg waved an explanatory hand. “This isn’t America. This is Milwaukee. After you’ve lived here a year or so you’ll understand what I mean. If we should run a story of that sign, with a two-column cut, Milwaukee wouldn’t even see the joke.”

  But it was not necessary that I live in Milwaukee a year or so in order to understand its peculiarities, for I had a personal conductor and efficient guide in the new friend that had come into my life with the first day of my work on the Post. Surely no woman ever had a stronger friend than little “Blackie” Griffith, sporting editor of the Milwaukee Post. We became friends, not step by step, but in one gigantic leap such as sometimes triumphs over the gap between acquaintance and liking.

  I never shall forget my first glimpse of him. He strolled into the city room from his little domicile across the hall. A shabby, disreputable, out-at-elbows office coat was worn over his ultra-smart street clothes, and he was puffing at a freakish little pipe in the shape of a miniature automobile. He eyed me a moment from the doorway, a fantastic, elfin little figure. I thought that I had never seen so strange and so ugly a face as that of this little brown Welshman with his lank, black hair and his deep-set, uncanny black eyes. Suddenly he trotted over to me with a quick little step. In the doorway he had looked forty. Now a smile illumined the many lines of his dark countenance, and in some miraculous way he looked twenty.

  “Are you the New York importation?” he, asked, his great black eyes searching my face.

  “I’m what’s left of it,” I replied, meekly.

  “I understand you’ve been in for repairs. Must of met up with somethin’ on the road. They say the goin’ is full of bumps in N’ York.”

  “Bumps!” I laughed, “it’s uphill every bit of the road, and yet you’ve got to go full speed to get anywhere. But I’m running easily again, thank you.”

  He waved away a cloud of pipe-smoke, and knowingly squinted through the haze. “We don’t speed up much here. And they ain’t no hill climbin’ t’ speak of. But say, if you ever should hit a nasty place on the route, toot your siren for me and I’ll come. I’m a regular little human garage when it comes to patchin’ up those aggravatin’ screws that need oilin’. And, say, don’t let Norberg bully you. My name’s Blackie. I’m goin’ t’ like you. Come on over t’ my sanctum once in a while and I’ll show you my scrapbook and let you play with the office revolver.”

  And so it happened that I had not been in Milwaukee a month before Blackie and I were friends.

  Norah was horrified. My letters were full of him. I told her that she might get a more complete mental picture of him if she knew that he wore the pinkest shirts, and the purplest neckties, and the blackest and whitest of black-and-white checked vests that ever aroused the envy of an office boy, and beneath them all, the gentlest of hearts. And therefore one loves him. There is a sort of spell about the illiterate little slangy, brown Welshman. He is the presiding genius of the place. The office boys adore him. The Old Man takes his advice in selecting a new motor car; the managing editor arranges his lunch hour to suit Blackie’s and they go off to the Press club together, arm in arm. It is Blackie who lends a sympathetic ear to the society editor’s tale of woe. He hires and fires the office boys; boldly he criticizes the news editor’s makeup; he receives delegations of tan-coated, red-faced prizefighting-looking persons; he gently explains to the photographer why that last batch of cuts make their subjects look as if afflicted with the German measles; he arbitrates any row that the newspaper may have with such dignitaries as the mayor or the chief of police; he manages boxing shows; he skims about in a smart little roadster; he edits the best sporting page in the city; and at four o’clock of an afternoon he likes to send around the corner for a chunk of devil’s food cake with butter filling from the Woman’s Exchange. Blackie never went to school to speak of. He doesn’t know was from were. But he can “see” a story quicker, and farther and clearer than any newspaper man I ever knew—excepting Peter Orme.

  There is a legend about to the effect that one day the managing editor, who is Scotch and without a sense of humor, ordered that Blackie should henceforth be addressed by his surname of Griffith, as being a more dignified appellation for the use of fellow reporters, hangers-on, copy kids, office boys and others about the big building.

  The day after the order was issued the managing editor summoned a freckled youth and thrust a sheaf of galley proofs into his hand.

  “Take those to Mr. Griffith,” he ordered without looking up.

  “T’ who?”

  “To Mr. Griffith,” said the managing editor, laboriously, and scowling a bit.

  The boy took three unwilling steps toward the door. Then he turned a puzzled face toward the managing editor.

  “Say, honest, I ain’t never heard of dat guy. He must be a new one. W’ere’ll I find him?”

  “Oh, damn! Take those proofs to Blackie!” roared the managing editor. And thus ended Blackie’s enforced flight into the realms of dignity.

  All these things, and more, I wrote to the scandalized Norah. I informed her that he wore more diamond rings and scarf pins and watch fobs than a railroad conductor, and that his checked top-coat shrieked to Heaven.

  There came back a letter in which every third word was underlined, and which ended by asking what the morals of such a man could be.

  Then I tried to make Blackie more real to Norah who, in all her sheltered life, had never come in contact with a man like this.

  “ … As for his morals—or what you would consider his morals, Sis—they probably are a deep crimson; but I’ll swear there is no yellow streak. I never have heard anything more pathetic than his story. Blackie sold papers on a down-town corner when he was a baby six years old. Then he got a job as office boy here, and he used to sharpen pencils, and run errands, and carry copy. After office hours he took care of some horses in an alley barn near by, and after that work was done he was employed about the pressroom of one of the old German newspaper offices. Sometimes he would be too weary to crawl home after working half the night, and so he would fall asleep, a worn, tragic little figure, on a pile of old papers and sacks in a warm corner near the presses. He was the head of a household, and every penny counted. And all the time he was watching things, and learning. Nothing escaped those keen black eyes. He used to help the photographer when there was a pile of plates to develop, and presently he knew more about photography than the man himself. So they made him staff photographer. In some marvelous way he knew more ball players, and fighters and horsemen than the sporting editor. He had a nose for news that was nothing short of wonderful. He never went out of the office without coming back with a story. They used to use him in the sporting department when a rush was on. Then he became one of the sporting staff; then assistant sporting editor; then spo
rting editor. He knows this paper from the basement up. He could operate a linotype or act as managing editor with equal ease.

  “No, I’m afraid that Blackie hasn’t had much time for morals. But, Norah dear, I wish that you could hear him when he talks about his mother. He may follow doubtful paths, and associate with questionable people, and wear restless clothes, but I wouldn’t exchange his friendship for that of a dozen of your ordinary so-called good men. All these years of work and suffering have made an old man of little Blackie, although he is young in years. But they haven’t spoiled his heart any. He is able to distinguish between sham and truth because he has been obliged to do it ever since he was a child selling papers on the corner. But he still clings to the office that gave him his start, although he makes more money in a single week outside the office than his salary would amount to in half a year. He says that this is a job that does not interfere with his work.”

  Such is Blackie. Surely the oddest friend a woman ever had. He possesses a genius for friendship, and a wonderful understanding of suffering, born of those years of hardship and privation. Each learned the other’s story, bit by bit, in a series of confidences exchanged during that peaceful, beatific period that follows just after the last edition has gone down. Blackie’s little cubbyhole of an office is always blue with smoke, and cluttered with a thousand odds and ends—photographs, souvenirs, boxing-gloves, a litter of pipes and tobacco, a wardrobe of dust-covered discarded coats and hats, and Blackie in the midst of it all, sunk in the depths of his swivel chair, and looking like an amiable brown gnome, or a cheerful little joss-house god come to life. There is in him an uncanny wisdom which only the streets can teach. He is one of those born newspaper men who could not live out of sight of the ticker-tape, and the copy-hook and the proof-sheet.

  “Y’ see, girl, it’s like this here,” Blackie explained one day. “W’re all workin’ for some good reason. A few of us are workin’ for the glory of it, and most of us are workin’ t’ eat, and lots of us are pluggin’ an’ savin’ in the hopes that some day we’ll have money enough to get back at some people we know; but there is some few workin’ for the pure love of the work—and I guess I’m one of them fools. Y’ see, I started in at this game when I was such a little runt that now it’s a ingrowing habit, though it is comfortin’ t’ know you got a place where you c’n always come in out of the rain, and where you c’n have your mail sent.”