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DAWN O’HARA THE GIRL WHO LAUGHED
by EDNA FERBER
TO MY DEAR MOTHER WHO FREQUENTLY INTERRUPTS AND TO MY SISTER FANNIE WHO SAYS “SH-SH-SH!” OUTSIDE MY DOOR
CONTENTS
I THE SMASHUP II MOSTLY EGGS III GOOD As NEW IV DAWN DEVELOPS A HEIMWEH V THE ABSURD BECOMES SERIOUS VI STEEPED IN GERMAN VII BLACKIE’S PHILOSOPHY VIII KAFFEE AND KAFFEEKUCHEN IX THE LADY FROM VIENNA X A TRAGEDY OF GOWNS XI VON GERHARD SPEAKS XII BENNIE THE CONSOLER XIII THE TEST XIV BENNIE AND THE CHARMING OLD MAID XV FAREWELL TO KNAPFS’ XVI JUNE MOONLIGHT, AND A NEW BOARDING HOUSE XVII THE SHADOW OF TERROR XVIII PETER ORME XIX A TURN OF THE WHEEL XX BLACKIE’S VACATION COMES XXI HAPPINESS
DAWN O’HARA
CHAPTER I
THE SMASHUP
There are a number of things that are pleasanter than being sick in a New York boarding-house when one’s nearest dearest is a married sister up in far-away Michigan.
Some one must have been very kind, for there were doctors, and a blue-and-white striped nurse, and bottles and things. There was even a vase of perky carnations— scarlet ones. I discovered that they had a trick of nodding their heads, saucily. The discovery did not appear to surprise me.
“Howdy-do!” said I aloud to the fattest and reddest carnation that overtopped all the rest. “How in the world did you get in here?”
The striped nurse (I hadn’t noticed her before) rose from some corner and came swiftly over to my bedside, taking my wrist between her fingers.
“I’m very well, thank you,” she said, smiling, “and I came in at the door, of course.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I snapped, crossly, “I was speaking to the carnations; particularly to that elderly one at the top—the fat one who keeps bowing and wagging his head at me.”
“Oh, yes,” answered the striped nurse, politely, “of course. That one is very lively, isn’t he? But suppose we take them out for a little while now.”
She picked up the vase and carried it into the corridor, and the carnations nodded their heads more vigorously than ever over her shoulder.
I heard her call softly to some one. The some one answered with a sharp little cry that sounded like, “Conscious!”
The next moment my own sister Norah came quietly into the room, and knelt at the side of my bed and took me in her arms. It did not seem at all surprising that she should be there, patting me with reassuring little love pats, murmuring over me with her lips against my check, calling me a hundred half-forgotten pet names that I had not heard for years. But then, nothing seemed to surprise me that surprising day. Not even the sight of a great, red-haired, red-faced, scrubbed looking man who strolled into the room just as Norah was in the midst of denouncing newspapers in general, and my newspaper in particular, and calling the city editor a slave-driver and a beast. The big, red-haired man stood regarding us tolerantly.
“Better, eh?” said he, not as one who asks a question, but as though in confirmation of a thought. Then he too took my wrist between his fingers. His touch was very firm and cool. After that he pulled down my eyelids and said, “H’m.” Then he patted my cheek smartly once or twice. “You’ll do,” he pronounced. He picked up a sheet of paper from the table and looked it over, keen-eyed. There followed a clinking of bottles and glasses, a few low-spoken words to the nurse, and then, as she left the room the big red-haired man seated himself heavily in the chair near the bedside and rested his great hands on his fat knees. He stared down at me in much the same way that a huge mastiff looks at a terrier. Finally his glance rested on my limp left hand.
“Married, h’m?”
For a moment the word would not come. I could hear Norah catch her breath quickly. Then—“Yes,” answered I.
“Husband living?” I could see suspicion dawning in his cold gray eye.
Again the catch in Norah’s throat and a little half warning, half supplicating gesture. And again, “Yes,” said I.
The dawn of suspicion burst into full glow.
“Where is he?” growled the red-haired doctor. “At a time like this?”
I shut my eyes for a moment, too sick at heart to resent his manner. I could feel, more than see, that Sis was signaling him frantically. I moistened my lips and answered him, bitterly.
“He is in the Starkweather Hospital for the insane.”
When the red-haired man spoke again the growl was quite gone from his voice.
“And your home is—where?”
“Nowhere,” I replied meekly, from my pillow. But at that Sis put her hand out quickly, as though she had been struck, and said:
“My home is her home.”
“Well then, take her there,” he ordered, frowning, “and keep her there as long as you can. Newspaper reporting, h’m? In New York? That’s a devil of a job for a woman. And a husband who … Well, you’ll have to take a six months’ course in loafing, young woman. And at the end of that time, if you are still determined to work, can’t you pick out something easier—like taking in scrubbing, for instance?”
I managed a feeble smile, wishing that he would go away quickly, so that I might sleep. He seemed to divine my thoughts, for he disappeared into the corridor, taking Norah with him. Their voices, low-pitched and carefully guarded, could be heard as they conversed outside my door.
Norah was telling him the whole miserable business. I wished, savagely, that she would let me tell it, if it must be told. How could she paint the fascination of the man who was my husband? She had never known the charm of him as I had known it in those few brief months before our marriage. She had never felt the caress of his voice, or
