LUMMOX BY FANNIE HURST NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS MCMXXIII LUMMOX Copyright, 1923 By Harper & Brothers Printed in the U. S. A. First Edition i-x _BOOKS BY FANNIE HURST_ _Novels_ LUMMOX STAR DUST _Short Stories_ JUST AROUND THE CORNER EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG GASLIGHT SONATAS HUMORESQUE THE VERTICAL CITY LUMMOX LUMMOX Nobody quite knew just what Baltic bloods flowed in sullen and alien rivers through Bertha's veins--or cared, might be added. Bertha, least of all. She was five feet, nine and a half, of flat-breasted bigness and her cheek-bones were pitched like Norn's. Little tents. There must have been a good smattering of Scandinavian and even a wide streak of western Teutonic. Slav, too. Because unaccountably she found herself knowing the Polish national anthem. Recognized it with her heart as it rattled out of a hurdy-gurdy. In her carpetbag, an outlandish one with a steamship stamp on it, were a bit of Bulgarian embroidery, a runic brooch, a concertina with a punctured bellows and an ikon in imitation mosaic. Old world. And yet Bertha had been born in a furiously dark sailors' lodging house in Front Street, where New York harbor smells of spices and city garbage rides by to the dump on barges. One of those frightening emergency births of rusty instruments, midwifery and a sinister room made more terrible by the travail of her coming. Of no particular father (although the China seas could probably have yielded up the secret of his rollicking lane), and of a dead mother. She had died two minutes before Bertha was born. Annie Wennerberg, landlady of the sailors' lodging house, who reared Bertha those first dozen years of her life that were sopping wet with scrub-water and soft-soap, knew. Horrid scuttling rat-like things that Annie Wennerberg knew. Born of a dead mother, Secrets of the grave you'll utter. That couplet could run down Bertha's spinal cord like a mouse. "I don't know any secrets of the grave, Annie." "You do. They're written on your face. You got a look in that wide place between your eyes like the sound of a clump of dirt falling on a coffin. You're as full of secrets as a cow's tail is of burrs." *** Wildly, and with a coherence she could have torn open her throat for, Bertha wanted to tell Annie that her secrets, if any she had, were of life, not death. The knowledges that came to her in chimes from the dark forests within her where the trees could somehow seem to stand with folded arms regarding her and the air to be wisps of old sound. Snacks of melodies out of eastern Europe. Secrets that shimmered. But it seemed to Bertha that her tongue was merely the shallow pan for those few words at her disposal which rattled off it so hollowly. It was so hard to talk. Words. Frail beasts of burden that crashed down to their knees under what she wanted to say.