The forbidden man

Chapter I

FRANK Snow felt mighty much alone, not only in New York City, but in the whole round world, as he elbowed his way along 149th Street at Third Avenue. A matinee crowd was pouring out from the Bronx Opera House, where a depressing play was holding forth this week. Frank listlessly looked the crowd over, and saw there were at least ninety women to one man—and that play was for men particularly.

Women could never mind their own business; they must try to find out a lot of things that weren’t good for them. Mother Eve all over again, renewing herself and her original blunder in her daughters. What a deal of mischief the female of the species had done God’s grand old planet! Yes, it was a great, grand old world, in spite of women and war and shell shock and wounds and theatres. Theatres! he felt ice melt between his shoulder blades and 1 ooze down his spine. Theatres! Frank wouldn't attend even a picture show. And there was nobody to tell him he’d have enjoyed life more if he did. Who cared really whether he enjoyed life or not; whether he lived or died or got a fit?

He was an ex-soldier, now an ex-patient from a soldiers’ hospital; fresh down came he from the heights of the Pennsylvania mountains. The war had disappointed him. He entered the conflict to die and survived half dead. What price glory? Glory? Halleluiah! what did it all amount to? The Lord knows he’d won enough honors and even a medal, but that medal wouldn’t purchase a pair of socks. Too, he was acquainted with some others who had medals, got only God knew why.

He’d met them all: the heroes who stayed home and fought in their minds and told the world how it should be done. The writers, some with military titles that didn’t gee with their round unmilitary shoulders and rounder paunch; who swirled in swivel-chairs, and wore costly rugs to threads with their restless, nervous, carpet-slippered heels, while they pounded out reams of shameless propaganda, whether in novels or in just barefaced pleas for patriotism. Those writers didn’t lose, whether their country gained.-~They became parlor benefactors, somebodies to be gabbled about between sessions of bridge; even lecturers to hold fat, overfed women in awe for an hour. And last but not least, their propaganda plots whirled and blinded one in the flickering tintypes, where you paid your money at the box office with war tax. And the crazy women who dared everything, even decency; even love, if a soldier didn’t watch his harassed step.

Yes, the worst horrors of the war were inflicted by those that didn’t fight at all.

Now after fighting right up to the Armistice, Frank Snow was having a new fight with the begrudging Veterans’ Bureau about compensation. That band of doctors made him feel like forty thieves. From the oldest to the youngest, those physicians quacked at him and flapped contemptuous wings, as milk-fed drakes would at a sick game rooster. Any good that might eventually accrue to him was gone already from that possible or impossible financial success. He smiled grimly as he thought that perhaps that Wingless Victory was minus pinions because the sly moths of peace ate up her plumage.

A THK FORBIDDEN MAN

If he could only garner enough energy to accomplish a man’s day’s work, he wouldn’t bother the Vets’. Bureau much; but he wasn’t quite sure of his nerves, after that sizzling shrapnel wound and the worse sizzling trench fever, and that shell shock which might creep back and make him a madman again. If only he didn’t do anybody any harm, should a paroxysm return!

What matter about himself? Life had cheated him to his two eyes at every turn. It was that intense disgust with living that made him battle like a reckless Indian with Uncle Sam’s 76th Field Artillery. Frank wasn't afraid of death. He was more afraid of life; almost wanted to run away from it. All because in his boyish innocence he’d plucked the fruit of love and was poisoned by it.

He was out of uniform now; forever, he hoped. Yet even in his mufti the ladies smirked at him; the flappers ogling brazenly. You see Frank Snow was a man who didn’t sense to the full his own good looks and splendid upstanding physique, which the army training had perfected and which even the hospital internment hadn’t spoiled. He had a schoolboy face with a bit of an Irish twist in his smile, though all the tragedy of No Man’s Land was buried in the depths of his large fine eyes. Nature herself was merciful enough to his face and figure; he didn’t at all seem his twenty-five or twentysix years.

Last week he’d hung bitterly over the open grave of his buddy, Barney Kennedy, one of the whitest kids that ever slipped into khaki. Ugh, the girl that poor Barney’d married and who, he fancied, loved him! There was a disappointment. The light that lies in woman’s eyes —and lies and lies; also the tongue between her rosy lips. Even a lot of that eye light was purchased for a price in the drug stores. With the art of make-up gone to its newest outlandish extreme, who knew what a woman really looked like when she appeared as the daughter of Mother Nature and not as the foster child of Dame Fashion?

Frank himself would have taken his oath that Vera was all right, when she wasn’t at all. No wonder Barney went headlong down into the trench her penciled eyes dug for him.

It was the uniform, not the boy in it, that trapped her fickle attention. In plain clothes, that too modern beauty found her soldier husband unattractive and boring; and when he was in the position of a crippled feller who needed a friend-wife, Vera played deserter. Nevertheless, half of Barney’s compensation slid monthly into her vanity bag, whence it came out in chunks for the beauty doctors who made a better job out of her than the medical doctors did out of Barney. Oh, hang it! as if men outside of novels wanted their wives always dolled up! Husbands desired a woman, not a kewpie, with bovine orbs, circus poster mouth and cheeks that would infuriate a gentleman cow. Charms might strike a man’s vision and knock the eye out of his common sense, but merit won his heart.

Really Vera didn’t need Barney’s money and shouldn’t have claimed it. It was worse than stealing pennies from a dead man’s eyes, that taking money out of a dying man’s too willing fingers. Oh, Barney, you big-hearted young fool! God rest you! A poor wife she was, though such a gorgeous war bride. Mayhap—F rank honestly nosed this out for himself—it was her dream to be converted into a war widow with lots of insurance to spend on clinging black draperies. Her ash-blond beauty would pair off well with weeds. God forgive her and all like her that preyed on unwary soldier boys, homesick, heartsick, weary, worn; yearning for a woman’s tenderness; just a mad crowd of overgrown kiddies!

Barney had felt bitterness, not toward her so much as toward life in general. That was the real reason he didn’t recover; he didn’t care enough to get well and fight the future. Peace had its victims no less than war. War blasted a man to rags and God took him. Peace might shoot a man’s soul to bits, and he’d go to hell.

But before Barney went west in the hospital, Vera herself was taken out of a world whose corners she brightened with her flashy, artificial-looking hair and no less artificial smile. A swift and pitiless attack of pneumonia, the outcome of a shamelessly sheer frock, a moonlight night and dance, where she was addressed as “Miss,” laid her in her unhallowed grave in a week. Vera was less heroic at the grand finale than Barney. His last earthly action was to clutch out blindly, grip the chaplain’s hand and kiss the consecrated fingers. Death chilled Barney’s lips in that instant. She passed into the eternal shadows, screaming: “I won’t die! I will not! I don’t want to! I’m—afraid!’” And when her mama, faultessly coiffured, reasoned with her to be calm and make a swan-like end of it, the dying girl’s last motion was to slap her parent across the mouth, and knock down mama’s beautiful hair.

Vera mulcted Barney in life and in death. Her mama sent him to his own bed of misery the bill for the funeral, about which sad solemnity he knew nothing till it was all over: one thousand dollars! Barney sent the money at once, for he’d been saving a long, long time. It wasn’t a month later that Barney curled his own battered big body up into a pretzel of agony and gasped out his splendid soul.

Frank Snow had been the chief mourner at that funeral over in Brooklyn this week, but Vera’s mama wasn’t present in the cortege. How could she be there, the dear dyed old blonde, when her grief and gregariousness had driven her to Florida for the winter, where this evening she was scattering some of the dead soldier’s hoardings? Barney had been more unlucky than that poetic soldier of the Legion who was born at Bingen on the Rhine. While there was no lack of woman’s nursing in Barney’s illness, there was a conspicuous dearth of woman’s tears over his coffin.

The earth, pale with snow, shuddered and seemed sick under the black scowl of the sky which was growing blacker. The lights up and down Third Avenue and 149th Street looked like ineffectual pills to disperse this plague of darkness. Frank, the ex-soldier, drew in out of the rain under the Elevated, and stood away from the crowd, just as he felt away from everybody. Vera certainly didn’t love Barney, though how Barney had loved her! Oh, well, God would make it all up to him—and to her too! They were both very wise today!

Yet somehow Frank knew that all women weren't like Vera; no, they were not. His own mother died at the moment of his birth, and never saw the face of her son, but he guessed _ what mothers were when he saw the old women reclaiming their shattered soldier boys. Oh, that lad who sobbed: “Mom, if I could only die! I’m an oyster; no arms, no legs now!” And the deathless maternal love that pillowed the despairing head on her bosom: “You’re my baby just the same. You need me now as you did when first you were born.”

And that little German girl who nursed the soldiers at the Pennsylvania hospital, Teenie Cope, was as different from Vera in character as she was in looks, and really Teenie in her own way was as pretty as Vera, though she hadn’t as much “class.” Teenie would never crave that style for herself; she had too much good sense.

Thinking now of Teenie, Frank’s thoughts sped back to the soldiers’ hospital with its fifty patients up there on the mountain-top. There was something more or less wrong with every one of those inmates, of course. No, there had been one perfectly healthy individual among them there in khaki, but he was never a soldier. A government spy, a sort of contemptible stool-pigeon, a wolf in the uniform of a sheep

(or a goat?), a snooping detective, who re-— ported to Washington the disgruntled mutterings of the unlucky hero sufferers. Fortu- _ nately for himself those war wildcats didn’t | have that hireling’s measurements, or he’d have measured his length in the mud, and wondered what manner of shell struck him. The fellows found out about him only after his departure.

Thanks to Teenie Cope, the sneak left. He fell in love with her, or anyhow he said he did. He must have been sorely smitten, for he incautiously lowered his mask and revealed to her his identity and standing in life, and his real purpose at the sanitarium. She was devoted to the soldiers and their sufferings, was wearing herself to a ragged thread in their service. She marked in the diary of her mind each sorrowing day and numbered every secret tear of the boys, all the while taking temperatures and measuring pulses. Then she reported to the doctors. She dropped a hint in public about the hero who carried a diary. He saw his day was done, and while the night was filled with the music of the radio, he folded his darling diary into his bosom, and like an Arab, silently stole away.

Chapter II

Some of the soldiers were tormented from the effects of gas, others were plagued with shell shock, but nearly all of them could help themselves. Frank Snow couldn’t. After they got the shrapnel wound in his side healed and the trench fever out of him, he developed paralysis, and to the doctors his case was as mysterious as the whole war was to numbers of the fighters.

Teenie Cope made Frank Snow her very special charge. She did more than she was able for all the disease-chained young war dogs. When one came barking at her out of the woods as if the devil and all his imps were at the heels of that shell shock victim, ‘Teenie smiled calmly on the temporary lunatic. She wished she could write—but Teenie wasn’t a good speller and of punctuation she didn’t know a darn—but how she yearned, that little American fraulein, to bless the purblind world with her impressions at first hand of the glorious after-fruits of war and victory! 12

And little semi-pagan Teenie, Frank found out, became a Catholic—for his sake. The doctors all despaired of Frank’s recovery, but Teenie didn’t. She meant to save him—for herself, it was soon evident. She knew he was a Catholic from his scapular and rosary, though those sacramentals weren't an infallible guide. A young Hebrew wore a tiny crucifix continuously about his neck. She invested in a rosary and scapular, and to do the thing completely, for Teenie wasn’t one for half-measures, she also secured a few medals; then a catechism, and off she went after the chaplain.

Barney Kennedy warned her candidly that Frank was “a hard-boiled Pape who wouldn’t even eat frogs on Friday because they tasted like chicken,” and if ever she changed her name to Mrs. Snow, ’twould only be by a priest and in a church with candles and holy water; none of that squire or rectory parlor business in Frank’s matrimonial objective. Anyhow Teenie liked candles and altars and beautiful vestments—and she sort of thought they went with a handsome young man like Frank Snow, whose boyish beauty even this long illness didn’t obliterate. Once up on his sturdy legs again, he’d be a prince charming.

Then weary little Teenie grumbled as the time dragged on, like a snake with a broken back. She grumbled a bit at God. Since everybody else was forgetting the soldiers so fast, why should He follow suit? Wasn’t she herself going to Mass often and often during the week when she could spare the time, and since one good turn deserves another, God might go out of His way a little and give poor Frank, her adored Pape, at least pep enough to make him walk again? It broke her kind girl-matron little heart to push the wheel-chair hither and yon, and it was hard to entertain the man she loved, and who certainly didn’t know a thing about her love.

How could he know? But she wanted him to know. He sat listening to her as if the two parts of his brain were in battle, one heeding her, the other repeating the horrors of the Argonne. If there was any human salvation for Frank Snow, surely it would be Teenie. A nurse who didn’t feel so keenly in his regard would simply do what she must, then leave the stultified young man to his own devices. That most likely would result in Frank getting worse and finally being found dead in his chair.

But Frank, bad as his physical condition was, would say his prayers, and often Teenie pushed his rosary into his poor white fingers that were feeling along the lap of his bathrobe like the fingers of the blind. After a while Frank was known as “the bimbo who said his prayers,” and the other nurses “razzled” Teenie about her “big-footed St. Aloysius.’’ Since Teenie’s own feet were like two flitting mice, F’rank’s No. 10’s were all the more attractive in her sight, and she was ready to lay her heart right down under those twin mighty soles.

“Never you mind,” argued Teenie with her friends, ““you’ll see. God hears his prayers Just the same.”

“God must be purty dern clever then,” jeered a callous second lieutenant, “for Frank don’t know what he’s saying hisself.”

“Oh, don’t he?” and she’d turn to Frank: “Say the Hail Mary, like a good boy, won't you?” And Frank’s haunting, dreamy, heavy voice would repeat the Angelical Salutation. “Ha!” cried Teenie, “do you hear that, old doubting Thomas?”

“Sing the Marseillaise,’’ mocked the soldier; “go ahead, Frank; you remember the tune; give it to us.”

“Let him just try to sing that blame tune,”

threatened an ex-corporal, reaching for a big boot. “Let him warble one bar, and I'll wallop him out of his comer. Every time I hear that haunting melody, I think it’s going to rain. Oh, boys, recall our sweet old hikes in them showers. Rain, rain to the tune of the Marseillaise. Rain in our coffee, rain in our soup, rain down the gutter of our spine. I think all’s wrong wit’ most of us we’ve got water on the brain or the kneecap. No wonder the poor old king and sweet Mrs. Dew Berry rushed to the guillotine. I’d meet any ax gladly wit’ my neck if the band was playing the sweet Marseillaise. Say, Frank, snap out of it and sing us It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo’.”

“Ha!” Teenie was jubilant, “he won't sing! he won’t sing! But you just tell him to pray once’t.”

“Frank,” and the lieutenant simulated Teenie’s coaxing tones, “Aloysius, give us all your blessing; get up on your pins and inwoke the Holy Spurt down on us.”

But Frank never moved, nor did he make a sign. It was always Teenie’s victory, but the soldiers and even the doctors drew lots of fun out of the serious little German nurse and her praying St. Aloysius.

An old moving picture came to the place, Leah Kleshna, a crook story. Ethel Clayton was the yellow-haired, undersized heroine. Teenie the nurse closely resembled Ethel the picture star, so the boys for days teased her by calling her “Leah” and even “Lena.” She pretended to get furious, which only added to their delight in bawling, “Leah! Leah! Lena! Lay-na!” They were so like children, easily amused. In the underworld story the two seasoned men were trying to break open some sort of infernal machine or maybe pick a lock. Leah Kleshna watched their futile efforts with twinkling eyes, then calmly plucked a hairpin from behind her ear, and in a couple of minutes had the machine in pieces. Woman's mighty mite!

A thunder storm came up, and the shell shock victims were mumbling, hysterical and weeping. Teenie had wheeled Frank down the lane to a little cottage, and they were sitting on the porch, his lank hands too listless to hold the arbutus she’d piled in his lap. She was busy sewing. She did that and talked at the same time; talked, talked to a man who rarely paid attention. If only—only she could find just the right thing for Frank! The doctors couldn’t;

they'd given him up as a hopeless wreck. God alone with a bolt of information from the blue sky would be his helper. Well, if Frank Snow did die, Teenie would be able to console herself with the thought she’d done what she could; more than any of the other nurses would have done.

But she was very young, so was Frank, and life is a dreary proposition with only buried love and the thought of duty fulfilled. And why, argued Teenie, should the good die young, and the bad wilt at eighty with their boots on?

The riot in the heavens drew Frank’s wandering attention. The rain pelting in his face he heeded little. It was so soft and warm, like tears of the passionate, feminine sky with its capricious moods, that the careful little nurse knew the wet wouldn’t hurt him. Up there was the answer to her daily prayer, for she often said the rosary and had Frank join with her. Somewhere behind all the smashing terror and flashing threat, a Divine Providence kept His information to Himself. Why couldn’t He tell her in a streak of inspiration; tell her what the baffled doctors wanted to know?

She began to wax resentful. Perhaps it was her nerves, for she was overworking, and anyhow she was scared stiff by thunder and lightning. She wouldn’t be here on the porch now if she could have reached the hospital in time.

She cast an anguished look at the blank face by her side, and in a sudden paroxysm of disgust at fate, hurled her scissors down the steps. The point hit a nail, a spark flew. Then all she remembered was a detonation that seemed to split her eardrums, ripped the three steps into splinters, dug the little rosebush out by the roots, and sent the wheel-chair and its adored incumbent rolling down the garden. She never could tell afterwards how long she lay in the grass, but the rain cascading in a sudden Niagara, floated her back to consciousness. She started up and screamed.

Dear God, where was Frank? The chair? She fled down the sloping garden. The chair was smashed up against the fence, her patient, her man who said his prayers gone. Like an insane, shell-shocked thing herself, the little German girl, disdaining the raging storm and the hissing lightnings, tore her way through the pines, the trees and bushes clawing her dress to flitters. She lost her cap but didn’t know it. She was wet to the bone and didn’t care; her feet squelching in her water-filled shoes.

Then she lifted her unbelieving eyes to see the object of her search talking to an astonished doctor, and swinging wide his big arms as if to embrace the woman who worshipped him. Frank, when she came up with tears and rain running down her happy cheeks, looked at her with the gaze of a stranger! He disliked her yellow hair at once, he remembered that now. He’d hate yellow-haired women forever! Poor Teenie, as if she could help her flaxen braids, and she’d have dyed if he asked her, or shaved her head like a convict and worn a wig.

“The lightning hit you,’ she explained, smiling timidly into his face, and noting the blood purling back under his waxy skin. “It was just the shock you needed.”

“But where?” asked Frank. “I don’t feel any bad effects; I feel born all over again. Where did the lightning hit me?”

“Oh, on the back porch,” was Teenie’s confused explanation. She was ready now for a good shower of delicious tears. “My old scissors did it.”

So it was Teenie who'd saved him from the grave that yawned at his feet and into which he’d been slipping, and which had swallowed Barney Kennedy because Vera never cared. And now he didn’t even value 'Teenie’s friendship just because she had yellow hair. Vera Kennedy’s bob was almost that same hue, and so was the hair of that other woman—that beautiful, blemished angel from the pits of the damned.

The hospital made holiday that evening. Leah Kleshna’s hairpin and Teenie’s scissors furnished the piéce de resistance for conversation. The movie which hadn’t yet been returned was repeated to cheers.

“Ain’t it orful what women do do!’ commented the second lieutenant, putting a caressing finger on the boil that was blossoming on the back of his neck. “They even prowoke the heavens to strike em sober.”

“Deliler took the starch out of Samson wit’ her scissors, but at ’at, she ain’t got nuthin on Teenie Cope,” added the ex-corporal. “She even got old Jupitar Toe-Nails to shoot barrage at her objective.”

Then Frank was able to walk about the mountains with Teenie, even go to Mass with her, and after awhile he saw! He still, even tonight in this cold drizzle in New York’s Bronx, remembered the robin trapezing on the branch when ‘Teenie’s secret became his too. How could he tell her that he’d never love or marry her; no, not in a thousand years? How could he let her know that even if he did love her, marriage was not for him—now? He had laughed at death dozens of times, but he didn’t want to face the death that might creep into her gentle pale-blue eyes. Of course, he’d learned a lot from the other soldiers, besides what he got from Teenie’s own faltering lips when she couldn’t control herself another moment, and how much Barney Kennedy had told him about the devotion of ‘Teenie.

“She was your walking shadow, Frank, when you yourself hadn’t a foot to put under you. She’s a real woman.”

“They all look real, Barney, till you find ’°em out. All the real women are dead.”

So one morning when Teenie had her day off and was gone into town to shop, Frank Snow left the hospital; never to return, he trusted. And ‘Teenie would not see him again ever. It was the only thing for him to do, and he’d done it. But Teenie Cope had shown him that all women, even blondes, were not alike, and certainly most women couldn’t be like

‘Vera who so far as she was able had blasted the life of Barney Kennedy. Of the war and the woman, she had far more to do with that grave in Brooklyn where tonight waved a dirty wet flag.

Chapter III

So Frank Snow hesitated lonely there in the chilly rain, homeless, loveless, wondering whether he’d run down to College Avenue to devotions this evening at St. Rita’s Church. He preferred to meet women in a pew; there they wouldn’t wink at a man.

Two big trucks rumbled by that looked like gigantic potato bugs with their round backs. How many just like them he’d counted on the dreary way into Coblenz! The snow-shoveler going home for his supper, wore odd _ boots. Just such boots had Frank’s hungry eyes descried on that long, hog-awful hike into the land of Wilhelm and Big Bertha. A boyish form was lying by the road, the arms flung over the face, the legs outstretched. Oh, the hundreds of twisted victims he’d seen like that! Barney Kennedy gave Frank his elbow in the ribs and advised in his war gong of a voice:

“Pipe that guy’s pins. About the same size as yours. I see that your feet are bleeding, my 24 son, and you certainly feel it. Your soles are gone, and so is that guy. He won’t mind about cold feet—now. Maybe he’s got a reserved seat on red-hot bricks by this.”

So Frank fell out of line, and was tugging the boots off the prostrate soldier when he suffered an indignant kick in the neck.

“Say, can’t a guy have no nap wit’out being robbed of his duds? What d’ye want to do; treat me corns? What’s eating you? I ain't dead—yet.”’

And in a minute more the recumbent hero was sleeping the sleep of exhaustion again.

Just as surprising as when that soldier spoke who’d been voted speechless, now out of the rolling fog popped a quite small girl into Frank’s ken. She came tripping daintily along 149th Street. She wore no rubbers and her dress was poor. Even he could observe that much, though he wasn’t very close to her. As she started to cross the avenue, she raised a decrepit umbrella. It owned a roof as bad as some of the dugouts in France. A naked steel shot embarrassingly forth and the wretched dome wouldn’t work. It half opened, and as she pushed at the clasp with the umbrella _ tented over her head, the cheap covering tore.

AS 73-Y

Frank eying her, understood why some girls took respectable umbrellas by mistake.

Just then a hilarious high-powered auto with a highly charged chauffeur came dashing past the traffic cop, and before Frank’s eyes could quite take it in, the girl was swept under the wheels and dragged away. Her miserable umbrella flew near his feet and her rosary, which she’d evidently had in her palm, struck Frank in the face. He caught the beads on the fly. He understood in a flash. The war made him a quick thinker before it stopped his thinking altogether. 'The driver was a hit-and-run type, every day growing more common.

Frank was still athletic in spite of Mars and doctors and confinement and shell shock and a few other afflictions. He did a flying leap and jumped on the running board, ripped open the door before the excited driver could demur and shot on the brake. The mob that hurriedly massed fore and aft prevented further progress of the chauffeur who saw he was trapped and settled back with a grunt to face the music. New York City is always on the rush as if it hadn’t time to stop for its own funeral, but New York wouldn’t miss an accident for the world. It’s like the small boy and the fires and the snorting hose-wagon which never pall on him. Accidents are the free shows in New York, and the victim is the one that pays the tax.