Herma Read online

  He opened, and a thin, pale, but determined-looking youth came in. They examined each other for some time in silence.

  “I’m Fred Hite.”

  Violet nodded abstractly, as though it were a thing he knew perfectly well but didn’t wish to be impolite by saying so. Fred began unbuttoning his trousers.

  “Bin to Cantamar I expect.”

  Fred said nothing. He went on taking off his clothes, except for the shirt which he left unbuttoned. Dr. Violet gazed at him with a detached curiosity, as though he were something displayed in a medical theater. He seemed not surprised by what he saw, not even particularly interested, just observant. “Each individual is jus a lil bit different,” he said after a while. “Come over here by the sink.”

  Without bothering to take off his coat, he first dipped Fred’s manhood into a searing basin of permanganate. Then, grinning maliciously and taking up some kind of medieval torture instrument, he injected some other fluid, perhaps sulphuric acid, far up into the thing.

  “That ought to do it. Although,” he said, “you might have to have another treatment in a week or so.” He seemed to reflect, and then he said, “You got a beauty there all right.” It was not clear whether he referred to the afflicted member or to its malady. He told him, “I used to get quite a bit a pussy when I was your age. My experience is you don’t necessarily have to pay em. And furthermore,” he went on, “you sometimes get more when you don’t pay em than when you do. And then too,” he said, thinking further, “you’re not so likely to get something nasty like this. Although that sometimes happens too.”

  Except for his name, Fred had not said a word from the time he entered the office. Now, his teeth clenched, he gritted, “Spare me your reminiscences. Is that all?”

  Violet gazed again at the now-empurpled genitals. “Usually,” he repeated, “you get more when you don’t pay em than when you do. But even when you pay em, you’ve got to watch out. The thing is, don’t let em work on your sentiments. They’re good at that. If you let em,” he continued, “they’ll turn you into a lil baby. That’s what they really like, lil babies. And they try to turn all men into em if they can. But,” he concluded, “if you keep up a good line, and let em know who’s in charge, you can get an awful lot a pussy for free.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Fred, still suffering the agonies of the damned. He put his trousers on; even this was painful.

  “That will be one dollar seventy-five.”

  “I thought it was two dollars.”

  “No, for office it’s one seventy-five.”

  Fred gave him a dollar and three quarters, put on his hat, and headed for the door.

  “Don’t let em work on your sentiments,” Violet reminded him.

  Fred slammed the door without answering. His footsteps could be heard rapidly descending the stairs to the street. Violet stood for a while as the buzz of a vast and grayish world played over by his only too keen consciousness. Going to the desk, he poured a half inch of colorless fluid from a phial into a not very clean glass and drank it off. Then he settled into the chair again with his book. This time he turned to a chapter explaining, with photographs, how to identify badly burned cadavers by their teeth.

  15.

  The dollar seventy-five in Fred’s pocket had come from the chiffonier drawer, where he had earlier found Madame Modjeska’s gold piece, rather than from any income of his own. By this time Herma was singing at weddings and other social events, and earned a dollar here and two dollars there—“a real professional,” as Mrs. Opdike said. It wasn’t long before she had saved twenty-five dollars, planning, rather vaguely, to buy herself a party gown with it, or to use it on a shopping expedition with Mama to Los Angeles. But Fred found the money in the chiffonier drawer, and spent it on a bicycle.

  It wasn’t just an ordinary bicycle. It was a Paramount Custom Racer, with a spring-mounted frame and a Parson saddle so small that it was hardly larger than a glove. The handlebars were underslung, so that you rode the thing as though you were bent over looking for something on the ground, and the grips were wrapped with tape. The actual price was twenty-three fifty, but Fred also bought a French racing cap and a pair of gloves with the fingers cut out. The Paramount came from Vico’s Cycle Works, on Spurgeon just around the corner from Main. There were two bicycle shops in town, and Vico’s dealt exclusively in specialty and custom machines. Vico himself, a morose and fiery Italian who had once been a racing cyclist, explained to him how to take care of and adjust the Paramount.

  The front sprocket, attached to the pedal crank, was large. It drove the chain which, at the rear end, transmitted the driving force to a lightweight planetary transmission, with drums and bands for shifting. This gearshift mechanism was temperamental, even though it was an elegant piece of design. The bands had to be just so tight, and you could only get them right by trial and error. Then too, the rear wheel alignment was not done simply by loosening the axle and sliding the wheel in and out of the work, as on other bicycles. The chain tension was critical for proper operation of the planetary shift. So the whole affair—rear wheel, sprocket, and shift-box—was aligned longitudinally by an arrangement of shims so that it could be adjusted to a tolerance of five-thousandths of an inch. Fred was provided with a feeler gauge, a collection of wrenches, and a small can of oil. Vico shook his hand. He put on his racing cap with its violet and white squares, turned up the visor, and rode away.

  Fred’s attachment to his machine was immediate, intimate, and powerful. It gave him mobility, and an exhilarating sense of speed, but this was far from all. There was something to it of the mystique of the mechanical, a thing which he had a feeling for, and understood instinctively, from the beginning. He meditated on the matter as he raced down the back roads of Orange County, shoulders bent low and rear end high, with the dirt flying by underneath in his frame of vision. The power and fascination of the bicycle, he eventually concluded, came not from its speed or lightness, or any of its qualities taken singly, but from a complex and interworking mélange of qualities that made it, in the end, more than the sum of its parts and elevated what was only a mere machine into the realm of mystery. These qualities were as follows:

  1. No other machine is divided into sexes. It fits intimately into the human body, as though designed for it.

  2. It stays up by magic. One might dream, of riding a bicycle and staying upright, but it seems impossible in real life.

  3. The sprocket goes round, and the rear wheel goes round, but they are not partners in the task but master and slave. The rear wheel, the slave, is compelled to go round because it is fastened by a chain to the sprocket, its master. The rear wheel goes round much faster than the sprocket, which is only showing the rear wheel how to do it. The sprocket (the master) can stop whenever it likes, but the rear wheel has to go on turning.

  4. As for the front wheel, it only chooses the direction the bicycle is to go, not the speed. The front wheel applies no force. It is a kind of free agent, an artist. If it should turn too sharply, the whole thing will fall down. But if it doesn’t turn a little now and then, the whole thing will fall down anyway.

  5. It is strenuous and yet restful. You run while you are sitting down, and yet you go ten times as fast with the bicycle as you would without it.

  These reasons were not mechanically exact, perhaps. That is, they didn’t really describe the bicycle in terms of the laws of physics. They were akin to the reasons one gives for being in love with a certain person and not another. They meant nothing in the end, but they accounted in Fred’s own mind for the attachment he felt for his machine. Soon he was spending most of his afternoons on the bicycle, which he hid in the thick shrubbery of the backyard on Ross Street when it was not being used. From there he pitched it over the fence into the alley, and he was on his way. His thigh muscles ached at first, then grew stronger, then ached again, and finally hardened until he was driving the Paramount faster and faster and yet feeling no fatigue.

  After a few weeks
he had explored the whole county on the long roads through the citrus groves, most of them unpaved. In one of his favorite routes he pedaled the three miles up Main to Chapman Avenue, then east on Chapman through the small town of Orange, and on into the foothills to the County Park, a sylvan grove of live oaks with a creek running through it. This route continued on to Santiago Canyon, on a narrow road that was hardly more than a trail through the hills. The Paramount with its spring suspension flew easily over the stones and potholes. Coming out of the hills at El Toro with its prim white-painted schoolhouse, he raced back through the orange groves and into town again along Santa Clara Avenue—as it was called, although at this time it was really only a cow path full of ruts.

  Or, alternatively, he might ride in a half an hour or less to the beach. This route started down Main Street, angled off to the right on Maple for a while, then continued on past the sugar factory and Angel Town along a dirt road that came out onto the coast at Newport. Here he would park the bike to walk out on McFadden Wharf and watch the schooners unloading lumber from Oregon and taking on lemons and bags of sugar so that (one could imagine) the lumberjacks in Oregon could drink lemonade. The beach route came back through Fairhaven—a land boom that had gone bust, and now consisted only of six dusty houses and a collection of unpaved streets—and so into town along Main again.

  A third route took him ten miles or so to Anaheim, another small town even sleepier and more dusty than Santa Ana, since it had not had the good luck to be made a county seat. This town had been founded a half-century before by German settlers, who gave it its rather naive and homespun name. There was a Lutheran church and an odor of Apfel-küchen, and men in collarless shirts looked at Fred dourly. Anaheim had its own S. P. station, which looked something like a Hansel and Gretel house in a storybook, with gingerbread trim and an arbor with an ancient grapevine growing over it to shade the waiting passengers.

  Here, on one memorable occasion, Fred found the 3:22 from Los Angeles just pulling out on its way to San Diego and raced it a little way out of the station; for a mile or so the tracks ran parallel to the road. Through the glass windows he could see the passengers looking out at him, in idle curiosity, or some perhaps in admiration. He was conscious of the audience as he bent low over the handlebars. For a while he was able to accelerate faster than the heavy train; he passed it up and left the locomotive far in the rear. But as it gathered speed, it quickly began to eat up the distance that separated them.

  Glancing around, Fred saw that it was only a hundred yards behind. Ahead was the place where the road turned and crossed the tracks diagonally. He bent over and pedaled with every ounce of his strength. By this time the Paramount was doing perhaps twenty miles an hour. The iron monster behind him was capable of sixty or more. He felt a keen excitement, enhanced by the very real sense of peril. His heart pounded and the blood shot through his veins like wine. Live dangerously, as some German philosopher had advised! The Paramount flew like a shot across the tracks and an instant later the train, still gathering speed, thundered over the crossing, missing him only by a few feet. The white faces of the passengers watching him fled past and were gone.

  The locomotive, drawing the cars after it, racketed away down the lane between the orange groves. Fred stopped, putting down a foot, and looked after it. With his interest in all forms of machinery he felt a considerable admiration for the train as a technological accomplishment. Through his ingenuity, man was no longer at the whim of a horse or the wind. He trapped the wind and put it into the boiler of his machine, paved the road with iron bars, and it darted over the countryside, carrying with ease not only crowds of people but the heaviest loads, from barrels of flour to elephants. As the newspapers were fond of pointing out, it ushered in a new age of prosperity, carrying citrus fruit from Santa Ana to Weehawken and Baltimore and bringing back manufactured goods from the East, thus improving the standard of living of the local ranchers and eventually himself and his family.

  But what was a train to a bicycle! For one thing, it was not capable of staying upright on two wheels—that magic permitted only to the one vehicle fitted intimately to the human form. But far more important, in Fred’s estimation, was the fact that the train, for all its power and prepotence, was condemned to follow along meekly wherever the tracks led it. It could be switched from one track to another, if the men who controlled it chose, but once on the track it was locked helplessly to the rails by the grooves in its own wheels. Like the rear wheel of the bicycle, it was a slave. Whereas the bicycle itself, guided by its owner, was free to go wherever his will or whim led him—effortlessly, at lightning speed, and with an intense sensation of pleasure exceeded only by one other thing. With two feet on the ground he was only mortal. The Paramount enforked, he became a god—if not to others, at least in his own mind. And that was all that mattered.

  But that was before he found out about aeroplanes.

  16.

  Fred was an avid reader; Herma was not. When he was not riding his bicycle he spent a good deal of time in the Santa Ana Public Library, a small Spanish-style building with a tiled roof, on Sycamore at the corner of Fifth. Inside it was cool and quiet; usually there were not very many patrons in the daytime. There he sat, one spring afternoon, lost to the world and poring over a recent issue of The Scientific Gentleman. An aeroplane, the insight struck him with the force of a revelation, was only a bicycle redivivus—the Apotheosis of the bicycle. The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. An aeroplane was only a bicycle with a set of canvas sails sticking out of it on either side, a gas engine such as could be found in any garage, and a whirling screw to propel it through the air instead of pedals. It was even driven by a bicycle chain. He studied the article more carefully, going back over it to read it again from the first.

  Our correspondent has informed us of the successful test on December 17, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, of the flying machine constructed by the two young Dayton inventors Wilbur and Orville Wright. Four flights were accomplished in a single morning, against a twenty-one mile wind, starting from level with engine power alone. The average speed through the air was thirty-one miles an hour, and the longest period of remaining free of contact with the ground was fifty-nine seconds.

  The machine is driven by a special four-cylinder gas engine envisioned and constructed by the Wrights themselves. The cylinders are four inches in diameter and the piston travel is four inches. The propulsion mixture is ignited by means of a magneto, and the rotating motion of the engine is transmitted to counter-rotating air-screws through a chain and sprocket arrangement. The operator controls the machine in prone position. Extending rearward from the center of the car is a double rudder of canvas stretched upon a frame of wood. A forward elevator-vane is provided for guidance, and the machine is tilted to effect turns, in the manner of a bicycle, by an arrangement of cables which warps the airplanes. Our correspondent has been able to provide the photograph below showing the machine rising from its monorail.

  In the manner of a bicycle. A machine which does things possible only in fantasy, a machine which is controlled by lying down and gripping the crucial parts with the body, a machine in which the force of imprisoned fire makes effort unnecessary, and a machine which finally rises effortlessly from the ground and mounts into the air, exactly as in a dream. Fred became aware of moisture in his palms; he was getting the magazine damp. There was a film of sweat on his upper lip, too. He looked around to see if anybody had noticed. The room was empty except for the librarian Miss Elmira Cliff, a spinster with a bun who was pasting cardboard pockets in books. Leaving the magazine open on the table, he got up and went out in a kind of trance.

  Outside the sun was shining brightly. After the cool shade of the reading room it made him blink; the mundane reality of the small dusty town pressed down upon him and drove away, almost, the fabulous memory of the picture in the magazine. Feeling a little odd, he mounted his bicycle, but when he put it in second gear it slipped. He got off patiently, propped it again
st a tree, took his wrenches and his feeler gauge out of the tool kit hanging behind the tiny saddle, and spent a conscientious ten minutes adjusting the bands. Then, leaving the tools on the grass, he rode around in a circle to test it. Shifting into all gears, he found them properly adjusted. He went back to pick up his tools and put them away in the tool kit, then he rode off at high speed down Main Street in the direction of the beach.

  He passed the Yellow Dog, swerving around and cutting in ahead of it easily, and sped on past the sugar factory and the flower-spangled houses of Angel Town. His legs drove like pistons. He didn’t slow at Newport, or at East Newport where he made a spectacular curve around a wagon that was backing up to unload some barrels at McFadden’s Wharf, and he kept on going past the Pavilion. In only a little over a half an hour after he had left the library he braked to a stop before the Great Pacific Traveling Exposition, with its sagging blue and gray tents and its signs in gaudy colors.

  He leaned the bicycle against the Kotton Kandy booth and locked it. Then he went in. Pulling down the visor of his violet and white racing cap and sticking his thumbs in his back pockets, he strolled around through the gaudy booths and concessions as though he were wandering at random. There was only one thing he had come to see, and he knew what it was. But the Exposition was laid out in a confusing pattern of circles and crisscrossing lanes, and it was easy to get lost. It was impossible to get a view of the whole thing at one time, and the concessions resembled one another so that you might look at the same thing twice and realize only after you had been standing there for some time that you were repeating yourself.