Dawn OHara, The Girl Who Laughed | Page 5

I sat staring after
him like a little simpleton, puzzled, bewildered, stunned. That had been
the beginning of it all.
He had what we Irish call "a way wid him." I wonder now why I did
not go mad with the joy, and the pain, and the uncertainty of it all.
Never was a girl so dazzled, so humbled, so worshiped, so neglected,
so courted. He was a creature of a thousand moods to torture one. What
guise would he wear to-day? Would he be gay, or dour, or sullen, or
teasing or passionate, or cold, or tender or scintillating? I know that my
hands were always cold, and my cheeks were always hot, those days.
He wrote like a modern Demosthenes, with all political New York to
quiver under his philippics. The managing editor used to send him out
on wonderful assignments, and they used to hold the paper for his stuff
when it was late. Sometimes he would be gone for days at a time, and
when he returned the men would look at him with a sort of admiring
awe. And the city editor would glance up from beneath his green
eye-shade and call out:
"Say, Orme, for a man who has just wired in about a million dollars'
worth of stuff seems to me you don't look very crisp and jaunty."
"Haven't slept for a week," Peter Orme would growl, and then he would
brush past the men who were crowded around him, and turn in my
direction. And the old hot-and-cold, happy, frightened, laughing,
sobbing sensation would have me by the throat again.
Well, we were married. Love cast a glamour over his very vices. His
love of drink? A weakness which I would transform into strength. His
white hot flashes of uncontrollable temper? Surely they would die
down at my cool, tender touch. His fits of abstraction and irritability?

Mere evidences of the genius within. Oh, my worshiping soul was
always alert with an excuse.
And so we were married. He had quite tired of me in less than a year,
and the hand that had always shaken a little shook a great deal now, and
the fits of abstraction and temper could be counted upon to appear
oftener than any other moods. I used to laugh, sometimes, when I was
alone, at the bitter humor of it all. It was like a Duchess novel come to
life.
His work began to show slipshod in spots. They talked to him about it
and he laughed at them. Then, one day, he left them in the ditch on the
big story of the McManus indictment, and the whole town scooped him,
and the managing editor told him that he must go. His lapses had
become too frequent. They would have to replace him with a man not
so brilliant, perhaps, but more reliable.
I daren't think of his face as it looked when he came home to the little
apartment and told me. The smoldering eyes were flaming now. His
lips were flecked with a sort of foam. I stared at him in horror. He
strode over to me, clasped his fingers about my throat and shook me as
a dog shakes a mouse.
"Why don't you cry, eh?" he snarled. Why don't you cry!"
And then I did cry out at what I saw in his eyes. I wrenched myself free,
fled to my room, and locked the door and stood against it with my hand
pressed over my heart until I heard the outer door slam and the echo of
his footsteps die away.
Divorce! That was my only salvation. No, that would be cowardly now.
I would wait until he was on his feet again, and then I would demand
my old free life back once more. This existence that was dragging me
into the gutter--this was not life! Life was a glorious, beautiful thing,
and I would have it yet. I laid my plans, feverishly, and waited. He did
not come back that night, or the next, or the next, or the next. In
desperation I went to see the men at the office. No, they had not seen
him. Was there anything that they could do? they asked. I smiled, and

thanked them, and said, oh, Peter was so absent-minded! No doubt he
had misdirected his letters, or something of the sort. And then I went
back to the flat to resume the horrible waiting.
One week later he turned up at the old office which had cast him off.
He sat down at his former desk and began to write, breathlessly, as he
used to in the days when all the big stories fell to him. One of the men
reporters strolled up to him and touched him on the shoulder,