Behold this dreamer!

Front matter

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I A Good, Hard-Working Woman.11

II The Man Upstairs . . •..20

CHAPTER ONE Clara Turner was getting a sick headache

In a woman of Clara’s temperament, a sick headache may be the prelude to unimaginable disaster. The throbbing pain at her temples, the tired ache in her back and thighs, the goading necessity of household drudgery which cannot be left undone, the consuming poison of fatigue, may impel her finally to a step of decision.

Both sides of the family were agreed that Clara was a good Christian woman. Even Charley’s mother admired her patience. When she was raising Charley, she often remarked, she never could stand him the way Clara stood him. The wonder was that Clara retained so much cheerfulness. She had not been raised to housework. Before marriage, her life had been quite different.

But to-day Clara was getting a sick headache. It was Wednesday, which was ironing day. In the kitchen, .Clara had laid out her ironing board, wrapped around with discarded bed-sheets, between the table and the back of an unpainted old chair. Over the board she was bent, moving a black iron forward and backward, in a jerky rhythm of fomenting dis¬ content. She muttered to herself as she pressed the hot bottom of the iron against the starched fronts of Charley’s shirts. On the gas stove, two other irons were heating above the humming circles of blue and yellow flames.

The atmosphere was humid and warm. Clara’s waist had worked free from the confinement of her skirt, now to bulge blowzily and without dignity behind her. In unkempt spin¬ dles her hair protruded. Her cheeks were a dark, wet yellow, and globules of perspiration gleamed above her eyes and on the exposed skin of her chest.

Her brows were drawn together in a hurt jumble; in her eyes lay a haunted and wounded glitter; a fire like the slowly flaming fuse of a cracker that will presently go off.

With the black iron lifted in her hand, she paused in her labor. There was a moment of irresolution; then came a decision.

She put the iron on the back of the stove, banging it down heavily against the grilled tracework, thick with grease. She sucked her teeth against her lips vindictively, as she turned out the gas under the heating irons. She muttered words that were like a malediction, as her nervous fingers thrust back the edges of her waist within her skirt. Carelessly, and with a thoughtless fury, she jabbed back the truant strands of her hair.

Without a hat, she left the house. Hurrying down the white marble steps, she rushed around the block to a corner drug store, where there was a telephone booth.

“Give me St. Paul 87542” she bade the operator.

A woman’s voice, loftily cool and efficient, replied.

“I want to speak to Mr. Strieker,” demanded Clara per¬ emptorily.

“This is Mr. Strieker’s secretary. Who is it wants to speak with him, please?”

“His daughter.”

“Mrs. Turner or Miss Cissie?”

“Mrs. Turner.”

“Oh! Just a minute, Mrs. Turner, and I’ll see if he can be disturbed!”

A man’s round, bushy voice, rotund with importance, came a moment later and shouted:

“Helloa, Clara! What’s the matter?”

“Pop, can you come over to the house to-night?”

“I don’t know. What for?”

“I want to have a talk with you, pop. I’ve just got to have a talk with you!”

“Why—what about?”

“About Charley.”

“There’s got to be something done with Charley. He can’t go on the way he is. I just can’t stand this kind of life any longer. I just can’t, pop!”

“Well! Look here, Clara. You know I don’t believe in meddling. You went your own way when you married him. I told you then, you know-”

“Don’t throw that up to me. Something’s got to be done.”

“But what can I do? I’ve given him a job in this plant. k What else can I do?”

“Come over to the house to-night, pop!”

“Well, you know your Cousin Elsie is visiting us for a few days. I’ll have to bring your mom, and her, and Cissie with me. I’d have to do that.”

“Well, we can send them out for a walk in Lafayette Square,” decided Clara, desperately firm. “I’ve just got to do something!”

“All right, Clara. We’ll all get there about seven o’clock. How are you feeling?”

“I’ve got a sick headache,” replied Clara dully, and hung up the receiver.

Charley Turner, Clara’s husband, was a clerk in the ac¬ counting Department of the Atlass Brush Manufacturing Company, of which his father-in-law, John Strieker, was the owner.

At the time that his wife and his father-in-law were con¬ versing over the telephone, Charley should have been making out bills.

Instead, he was balancing a window-pole on the edge of his chin, juggling two oranges meanwhile with his hands.

Clara and Charley Turner, with all their relatives, lived in a certain Eastern city that is shaped as an oyster. It is a city without fancy; an oyster without its pearl. “Wake up!” it cries to the populace.

To keep awake is a passion of its people. Every man must be wide awake. Every shoulder must be lifted against the wheel, excepting only the overseers. Their duty it is to cry “Wake up,” and to keep on crying “Wake up,” and to urge on the shoulders that are lifted against the wheel.

Flung from its crosses, steeples and towers are new ban¬ ners; the flaunting banderoles of aroused and awakened progress. Of old, the city had among its dwellers wise men who wished to dream. But all the wise men have been buried now, and all the dreamers have been awakened to the plans and program of the Indian Club.

It is a city of organized alarm clocks. Everybody belongs to something, the purpose of which is to arouse somebody. It is not respectable not to belong to something. One must first be a member in good standing of a recognized church, and, after that, a Rotarian, if possible. If not possible, then there are neighborhood improvement associations, welfare organizations, ten thousand four hundred and two of them, all determined to see that the city is kept wide awake.

Red-blooded, two-fisted, meat-eating, God-fearing he-men and she-women pay their taxes. Their fealty is to God, State, and Institution. After that, they are virulently patriotic toward their native city. They love it with a most surprising and practical intensity. Not for the things which the dead wise men cherished it do they kindle, but for new things which they can see and understand.

They are indifferent to the red cenotaph of its ancient shot tower, but they pay a strange reverence to a yellow and ghastly minaret, raised in the chief market place, because perched upon its peak is an immense blue and white patent medicine bottle, revolving day and night, its thousands of electric bulbs visible in the darkness, far out of the harbor, into the careless bay, even beyond the gray and green sentinel post of Fort Carroll.

Its dreamers are buried obscurely. It is better to forget them, for some of them drank too much. In the blatant public square, at its proudest street crossings, however, they have fixed a proper monument. In marble and bronze it bleats the virtues of a fellow who was for a few years presi¬ dent of a jerk-water railroad upstate.

The art gallery is open a few hours a day, a very few days a year. But its harbor is wide open every moment to the heavily laden ships from everywhere.

It is an old place, this town, with traditions wrought in the exquisite textures of courage and faith. But now it has lost its ancient virtue; it has rouged its cheeks, hennaed its tresses, touched its lashes with mascara, and taken to flirting on street corners.

In brief, it is an American Eastern city—old enough to know better, but young enough to pawn its mortal soul.

The company gathered in the parlor of Charley and Clara Turner’s house, that sultry night in July, fanned themselves with dried palm leaves, given away as premiums in a popular tea and coffee shop. Thousands like them were at the same hour sitting in their own parlors, cooling themselves with identical fans, distributed by the same shop. The Turners and the Strickers were typical families. Nearly all of them had been born within the oysterish outline of the city, except old John Strieker himself, who had come into the world in Talbott County.

Most of them had never crossed the boundaries of the city. It is not a traveler’s town. They prided themselves, all of them, on being like everyone else. “Typical” was a word of praise, used with unctuous pride at the annual banquets of the Old Town Merchants and Manufacturers Association.

On this muggy night, typical families all over the city were engaged in typical relaxation. Thousands of relatives were visiting thousands of other relatives, sitting in the front parlors, just as the Turners and Strickers were sitting in the front parlor of Charley and Clara. Others were down on an excursion. Across the patient green waters of the Bay, the steamer Louise was grinding its way back to the Light Street Wharf. Straw hat factory girls and cotton duck mill hands were dancing and mooning upon its worn decks, not bothering to remember that their grandfathers and grandmothers had danced under the same moon, over the same waters, and on the same smelly old boat.

In Druid Hill Park, the Town Band was playing the Beautiful Blue Danube , to a wide encircling audience on benches and the grass—an audience of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad clerks, Gardiner Dairy truck drivers, Johns Hop¬ kins Hospital nurses, and hungry college professors. At Bay Shore, Riverview, and other summer resorts, there was eating, dancing, flirting; angry old women, giggling young¬ sters, boisterous and pimply young men.

The wheels were not revolving, for it was night. The sore shoulders were at rest. The people were trying to forget. The voices of the overseers were silenced until the morrow, when, like Muezzins from a tower in Asia, they would howl to the mob:

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up? 9

All day long the bare flesh of blistered shoulders had been lifted against the hard steel of the wheel’s rims. The factory looms had whizzed and groaned and roared. The hearts of the toilers had sickened with the monotony of the work and the continual call of the overseers.

When the last whistle was blown, the toilers had poured out of the gates and hurried home. They lived among stretches, vast, interminable, monotonous, of tiny red and yellow brick houses. The bricks were all penciled out meticulously in white mortar, made utterly distinct, so that the front walls of the houses were like giant checker boards. Before each house was a set of white marble steps, quarried from Ellicott City. Each window had its lace curtains, its brazen urn from Eisenberg’s, and its jaded, wilted fern.

It was a miracle how a man could tell his own house from the hundred thousand others just like it.

Charley Turner rented just such a house, up in the north¬ western part of the city, once a respectable neighborhood, but now blackened and degraded by an invasion of negroes.

In these later times it had become a nondescript neighbor¬ hood of intermingling negroes, poor whites, and proud old families too lazy to move out. It was not far from Penn¬ sylvania Avenue, the long, dark highway of “colored” shops and eating places, but it was also near to Lafayette Square and to Harlem Park, with its mild, sunken grasses, flower beds and limping little fountain. Among miles of moldering old houses lived Clara and Charley; mansions of a sturdier period, falling apart; among dark alleys, where savage black faces gleamed under the street lamps; a region of rolling whites of watchful eyes, the secret click of juggled dice, the angry flash of razor steel, and the shrill billingsgate of wenches quarreling over sticky brats.

People wondered how long Charley and Clara were going to live up that way. They reckoned rent was just as cheap down in the Southwestern part of the city, or over by Clifton

Park. They knew Charley didn’t make much. He had lost every job he ever got, until he married Clara Strieker. Then Clara’s father gave him a job with the Atlass Brush Com¬ pany. They all knew that old John Strieker kept Charley on only because it would be too expensive to fire him; the old man would have to support Clara and Charley both.

Her disgust of the “nigger street” on which she lived was one of the irritations which helped Clara’s sick headache along. When the time arrived to expect the visit of her folks, she was still undecided just what, or how much, she would tell her father about Charley. What she really wanted was an outlet, and then consolation.

She was that kind of woman. Consolation helped her, in¬ variably. She warmed and grew strong under pity. She pitied herself and liked others to pity her. In this she felt an exalted righteousness, for she knew perfectly well how deserving of pity she was, with a husband like Charley.

Clara was short, with rather a dingy figure. Her face was not without intelligence, of a shrewd order, and before mar¬ riage she had been as pretty as the best of the young shoppers on Charles and Lexington Streets. Like most girls who ate the fresh vegetables from the Eastern Shore, and the fishes, crabs and oysters from the salt water of the Bay, she had a fresh, vital bloom. Her eyes were brightly green, and for¬ merly her cheeks were glowing with the cerise tints of good health; her lips, too; and her hair was incorrigibly wavy, in spite of the damp mists which rose from the grumbling waters of the Patapsco.

Marriage and hard work had struck her with contemptuous hands. Every morning she cleaned house; its rooms were immaculate; she performed its sweepings and dustings and scrubbings with the passionate devotion of a temple virgin. To be a good housewife was one of the typical virtues of the town. Especially did she keep the front marble steps clean;

she scrubbed them as if the water in her galvanized iron bucket were lustral, and blessed with the benediction of a priest. With the bucket and a scrub brush, she appeared “out front” as soon as Charley was off to work, before the breakfast dishes were washed. She got down on her knees twice a day and scrubbed those steps, so that the white marble glistened like snow. It was necessary to clean them twice, because the hucksters, insurance collectors, mail man and others who called dirtied them with their careless feet.

She did her own family wash. She cooked all her meals. Of her, it was said that she was typical; a good wife, hard¬ working, industrious, clean, loyal, Christian.

Chapter Two

They were all there—Clara’s mother, and Clara’s father, and Clara’s sister, and Clara’s brother, and Clara’s Cousin Elsie.

Also, Charley’s mother was there; Charley’s mother, who was a widow, and lived on Pitcher Street; she had dropped in most inopportunely.

Clara and Charley’s mother never got on.

It was dark in the front parlor. On summer evenings it was the custom to sit in the dark and converse. The green posted oil lamp on the corner of the alley outside gave a feeble yellow glare through the open, unscreened window.

Most families sat out on the white marble front steps, often dragging out rocking chairs from the parlor, and spreading themselves over the sidewalk. Many of the families on the block where Charley and Clara lived were doing so now, and there was considerable interchange of visits. Up and down the streets an irregular procession passed; women on their way to the movies, or enjoying the less costly relaxation of “taking a walk around the block.” Some of them carried pitchers and glass bowls in their hands; they were on their way to a bakery up the street a few “squares,” where ice cream was sold at thirty-five cents a quart.

From the open window of a house across the street came the strains of a phonograph; a record of Homer Rodeheaver, singing “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” In another house, a group of old men and women were gathered around an ancient Estey cottage organ, singing in cracked voices a camp-meeting tune. Blacks were bawling curses in the dirty alley behind the houses, obscenely making threats. A police¬ man strode by, lifting his straw helmet to wipe away the perspiration from his forehead.

“Ain’t this hot weather just awful?”

“Yes, Clara, it is,” assented Elsie Strieker, Clara’s younger cousin. “I was just saying to Uncle John on the way over, how hot it was. It’s just awful. I sure will be glad when I get down to Cape May. I’m going down with some girl friends for a two weeks’ stay, the first of next month. Oh, boy!”

Elsie was a typical salesgirl, who worked in Rickard’s, in the millinery department. She was dressed with rather a dash.

“I believe Bob Morton is going to be down there at the same time,” she finished, with a self-conscious giggle. “He’s our floor manager, you know. Oh, boy!”

“I bet you’re stuck on him!” said Cissie Strieker. She was Clara’s younger sister. She regarded herself as a typical flapper; she made no secret of the fact that she thought divorce a good thing; she was in the third year of the Eastern Female High School, and she might go to Goucher. She read Zippy Stories in secret, and knew all about the Decameron.

“I think pop’s going to take us all up to Pen Mar, for a month,” she announced with a superior air. “We all like the mountains so much more than the seashore. It’s just a bit more exclusive and—and—well, intimate, you know.”

“It depends a lot on the figure you’ve got,” said Elsie, with another giggle. “Oh, boy!”

A deep silence suddenly drenched the room. Every one else considered that Elsie had made a wrong remark; it was out of place for a young girl to say such a thing.

Old Mrs. Turner, Charley’s mother, who hadn’t understood the joke, saved the situation by remarking:

“It’s nice up in Pen Mar. I was there myself once. It was about twenty or thirty years ago. Charley was only a little fellow in skirts. We all went on an excursion; I think the fare was seventy-two cents round trip. Lord, it was certainly a hot day!”

Mrs. Turner often talked about that famous trip of hers to Pen Mar. It had been the one adventure in her life. She had never been anywhere else in particular. Washington was only forty miles away, but she had never been there. She had always been poor. Her husband had been employed in a glass factory at Locust Point. All her adventures were spiritual; she had the most amazing religious experiences, and got up and bared them boldly at Wednesday night prayer meeting in First Baptist Church. She was always dreaming that Jesus Christ came into her bedroom, as a bridegroom.

“And praise God!” she would cry, “my lamp was lighted and I was wide awake! For I knew not at what hour the Son of Man would appear!”

Mrs. Turner regarded Sheldon’s “In His Steps,” or “What Would Jesus Do?” as the literary epic of the age. For young girls she recommended “A World of Girls” by Meade. She believed in the Apostles’ Creed; she believed in the Holy Bible; she believed in the Baptist Church; and she believed that whom God had joined together, no man might put asunder.

“Yes, Pen Mar’s all right, and Cape May’s all right, but there are lots of places that are better,” said another voice from the dark shadows of the room; a very precise and selfassured voice. It was Henry Strieker speaking, the brother of Clara and Cissie. He was a thoroughly godly young man, although he did squint out of his west eye. Some day he would inherit the Atlass Brush Company. He was a member of the Baraca Bible Class, Junior, in the First Baptist Church, and was his father’s right hand man in business.

“You folks haven’t traveled much,” he pursued, musingly. “It’s a great world, you must remember.”

“I guess you think you’ve seen the world,” sneered Elsie, who secretly admired her cousin.

“I’ve been to Philadelphia!” exploded Henry indignantly.

Elsie subsided.

“Travel broadens the mind,” remarked John Strieker pon¬ derously.

It was right that John Strieker should speak ponderously, for he was a ponderous man, physically, mentally and in public importance. He was a typical old-line business man of the city, thoroughly awake. Straight back to old General John Strieker he traced his ancestry.

Every typical citizen knew that General John Strieker com¬ manded the valiant American forces at the celebrated battle of North Point. Hardly any one outside of the city knows that there was a battle of North Point, but every typical citizen inside the town knows it from infancy. Before the marble court house there is a slender shaft of gray which is known as the Battle Monument. It is a favorite allusion of orators, and a severe consecration in the public schoolrooms.

John Strieker was a direct descendant of the illustrious old General. Moreover, there was a street named after the family; John Strieker never quite got over it when the niggers captured it and made it their very own.

But ancestry was not the only claim John Strieker raised to importance. He was ponderously important in his own right. He was a self-made man, and he had made a good job of it, if he did say so who shouldn’t.

John was a very large man, with a round grizzly head, and drooping ruddy cheeks, mottled and splotched with liver secrets. But his attitude was jovial and boisterous. His paunch helped out his jesting attitude. He was a man who made an artistic combination of being at once jovial and ponderously important; a benignant brush manufacturer, with a large balance in the bank, who laughed loudly at his own jokes, and always said a few wise words as he passed by.

A critical eye might have observed a rapacious slant to his jowl. But few critical eyes looked at John Strieker. He owned a big business; he was the sole proprietor of the largest brush factory in the eastern part of the state. His daughter Clara was boastful of the fact that she had never bought a brush since she was married; her father gave her the pick of the factory. He was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotarians, the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, the Mystic Shrine, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, the Travelers and Merchants Association, the Builders’ Exchange, and was a leading light in the First Baptist Church. Frequently he was appointed an honorary pall-bearer at the funeral of a well known business man.

He was a typical citizen of the better class.

It was John Strieker’s inner hope that the day would come when he would be written up in The American Magazine . Being a self-made man; started without a nickel, and now look at him; he believed implicitly in the equality of oppor¬ tunity, and the current optimistic doctrines of success for young men. He talked in quotation marks, italics, capital letters and exclamation points.

His humor, which was noisy and often, came from the comic papers. All the jokes that he could understand, he memorized and later got them off at delicate moments when he fancied a joke would help matters. He had invested in all the courses in “Pelmanism,” “Will Power” and “The Mas¬ ter Key” and practiced them all.

He was one of the minor heroes of the city, but down in Talbott County, where he came from, he was a legendary god.

John’s wife was sitting beside him as he delivered the ponderous sentiment that travel broadens the mind. She was a silent and adoring woman, but with odd moments of un¬ explained bitterness.

“Do you think travel is necessary for success?” asked Elsie innocently.

“No,” replied John judiciously. “I do not. A man should not stare up the steps of success. He should step up the stairs of success!”

“Oh, boy!” said Elsie admiringly.

A fluttering hum of admiration murmured from one to another.

“Gee, pop, that’s a good one!” exclaimed Henry admir¬ ingly. Early in life Henry had discovered the golden prin¬ ciple of success. It was simply to admire what father said. “Is that an original?”

“That is an original,” confessed John modestly. He did not remember that he had come across it on an advertising calendar. He memorized epigrammatic banalities whenever he could understand them, and then forgot their origin. He had a way of enunciating them that stamped them as strictly Strieker. It was a phrase of which he was proud; his brushes bore as their trade-mark, “Strickly Strieker!”

“The whole question of success,” he continued, with a note of magniloquence in his tones, “is answered in ourselves. We must try to be true to ourselves—and do something in this world. Wise men try to do something. Fools try to do somebody /”

“Oh, boy!” murmured Elsie.

“Was that an original?” gasped Henry.

“That, too,” confessed Mr. Strieker, “was an original.”

Inspired by these comments, and by the manifest impres¬ sion made upon the others, John continued:

“We have only to be patient, and work hard, and keep wide awake! That is the ticket! Patience, industry—and keeping wide awake!”

“I don’t know about that,” cut in Clara, bitter and crisp.

“God knows I’ve been patient, and there ain’t anybody can’t say I don’t work hard, and I’m awake from morn till night, and what do I get out of it, I’d like to know? I’d like some¬ body to tell me that. I feel like a donkey on a treadmill. He works hard and he’s patient, and he keeps awake. He’s a jackass and so am I, I guess.”

Her father felt obscurely offended. He was dealing in pleasing quotations, merely, and he resented such a personal and unnecessary contradiction. But he contented himself with a bushy clearing of his throat, a pounding of his fist on the arm of his chair, and the remark:

“A lazy man is as useless as a corpse —and he takes up more room!”

Before Henry had the opportunity to inquire if that were an original, they all heard a most peculiar sound.

Rodeheaver’s record had been locked up for the night, the negro babies were asleep in their greasy cradles, and the chatter of the front-step family groups was now subdued. A hush was creeping slowly upon the neighborhood, when a long-drawn, piercing wail came from the upper regions of the house.

“What on earth is that?” demanded Mr. Strieker. His wife had jumped at the eerie sound; the others were flutter¬ ing inquiringly.

“That’s Charley!” announced Clara, in a tone that added, “Now you can see what I put up with!”

“Charley!” repeated Mr. Strieker incredulously. “How is it possible for Charley to make a noise like that?”

“Oh-h-h, his latest crazy fit!” declared Clara waspishly. “Nobody will ever understand what I put up with from that man. No one ever will know, I guess.”

Ct But how can he make a noise like that?” insisted John.

“It’s a thing that looks like a potato,” explained Clara.

“Looks like a what, Clara?”

“A potato!”

“A potato?”

“A potato!”

“But how can anything look like a potato?”

“Well, it does, that’s all. It’s made out of wood. He stole a dollar bill out of my pocketbook for it!”

“A dollar bill for a wooden potato?”

“Yes!”

“Well, Clara, I don’t-”

“I forget what he calls it,” cried Clara, as if the last vestige of her patience were carried away on the streaking strains of wailing music that came filtering down the stairs.

“He says it’s music.”

“Well, I must say, Charley has peculiar ways sometimes,” remarked Mr. Strieker searching through his pockets for a toothpick.

“Sometimes?”

Clara’s voice was belligerent, with the beat and throb of her sick headache.

“I wish to the Lord it was only sometimes. It’s all the time, let me tell you. Day in, day out, from morn to night, it’s always something with Charley. Charley ain’t like any¬ body else!”

An embarrassed silence settled over the company. They all hoped Clara would go on and tell them more of her domestic difficulties. But they didn’t want to say anything.

“Henry,” said John, after the pause had risen to a very shriek of silence, “I think the girls would like some soda water. Suppose you all take a walk around to Lafayette Square, and step in at the drug store on your way back. Here’s fifty cents! Have a good time.”

There were grumblings, but they went.

Left in the dark parlor together, plying their fans, were Clara, her father and mother, and old Mrs. Turner.

“Well, Clara,” said Mr. Strieker, after the voices of the younger ones had departed with them up the street, “you said you had something you wanted to talk with me about. What was it, daughter?”

“Him, of course,” remarked Clara tartly. “Who else?”

“What’s the matter with Charley?” asked Mr. Strieker.

“What ain’t the matter with him?” demanded Clara. “That’s what I want to know. He’s acting mighty queer, I want to tell you!”

“He is?”

“Yes, he is!”

“Charley’s a good boy, if he is queer,” inserted old Mrs. Turner dutifully.