She Never Knew the Meaning of the Word

Our Own "True Story", Wrought of Twisted Hopes and Written in Blood and Tears, of a Woman Who Loved and Dared, and Dared to Love Again

Editor's Note: Mr. Bernarr Macfadden, in his refined and scholarly magazines. True Story, True Romances, Confessions, etc., has laid a puissant finger upon the heartstrings of life. Thousands of wronged young girls have helped him to lay the human heart bare before the multitude. But even Mr. Macfadden has never published a true story more moving, more utter in its stark appeal than the narrative which follows. We should like to publish the author's name, but for several reasons, all kindly, generous and humane, we think it best that her identity be not at the present disclosed.

THERE are men ; yes, and women too, who will scoff at my story; call me wanton, waif, the plaything of men's baser moods. For such as they I have nothing but pity. Too well I know that, coming from a bit of driftwood like I, this story will seem just another lost chord from one more broken lute. Yet, in the hope that it may prove an inspiration to some unfortunate soul, hesitating, as I did, at the crossroads that lead, on the one hand to the abode of tinselled glory, on the other to a chaster goal, I, Maisie, will, I must, write this chronicle, and to those who jeer at it I will only say, with Cardinal Mercier, "There, but for the grace of God, go they."

My father was a manufacturer of emblematic jewelry; my mother an Alsatian girl, and these two wild strains mingled in me to produce who knows what deviltry, what fierce unrest? Often, as a child, playing in my father's workshop, I would filch one of his coarser files, and, creeping into the sunny fields, I would file away and file away at the daisies and the black-eyed Susans until their poor torn leaves trembled like the despairing hands of an unsmocked nun. Then I would laugh and chew neatly on my file, singing a quiet dirge as the wild Gypsy blood leapt in my veins, and little birds flew in and out of their horrid little nests, shuddering and falling dead as they saw me. But, although the possessor of a black heart, I yet retained somewhere the divine spark—"that little bit of good" which, we are told, dwells in a corner of every woman's soul, and in spite of myself, I was still a good girl, nay, an innocent girl, when, at the age of fourteen, 1 moved with my parents to Rosebud, Montana, the little Western town where I was, for the first time, to play a woman's part in life.

IT was there, at the Glass-Benders' Ball that I first met my Boy Blue. Proud Maisie, in my elk's tooth earrings (which Father had loaned me from his stock) I was standing in the doorway, allowing the summer breeze to fan my heated brow, when, out of the moonlight, like some pagan creature, came my Boy Blue to me. (Boy Blue is not his real name. I shall withhold that, since he is now a respected physician in Rosebud, Montana.) He was bigboned and curving, but with the eyes of a dreamer, and his close-cropped hair curled from his temples in a thousand glittering ringlets.

Love caught me in its web of steel.

"Will you dance, Goldilocks?" he asked, bowing from the hips.

"God made me a butterfly!" I cried as we dashed into the moonlit night.

Alas! It was not until we returned, half an hour later, from our romantic and Wonderful stroll that I found—how shall 1 ever write the terrible words?—I found that I was a mother.

When I had discovered this, I felt blue. Then heartache piled upon heartache, for I reached home to find that my aged parents had died from the shame of my late hours, and the little home was now in my keeping. But what was Rosebud, Montana, to one who had sipped from a headier cup? I wanted life, love, the joys and dangers of the metropolis, the flattery and adulation that is beautiful woman's due! So, after Christmas, I sold our little home for one hundred dollars and, with little Gloria, I fared forth to New York, to—as the old altruism has it—"start all over again".

I soon found lodgings of a kind, and then began the soul-searing search for work. What did I, a country girl, know of the city and its ways? I was not wanted in its fine homes, and would not stoop to charity. "Just one more unfortunate", lost in the soil and moil of the city's life, I struggled bravely on. Men leered at me as I passed them in the street, my lovely face tensed with anxiety, the graceful curves of my rounded form glimmering fitfully through the murky night. But upon them 1 turned a deaf car. I was determined, for Gloria's sake, to lead a blameless life, cost what it might. And virtue was its own reward, for at last I found a haven in The Cauliflower Ear, a gentleman's eating and dancing joint on the upper West Side—although what awaited me there was horror far greater than any I had yet dreaded or conceived.

Old Clootie, the proprietor, looked me over. "I take it you're a woman of spirit," he said, "there's your act." He pointed to a covered basket, and, what was my revulsion, upon peering inside, to spy two huge pythons coiled loathesomcly side by side! I, the belle of Rosebud, Montana, to frivol with these hideous creatures, to stroke their mottled scales, invite their foul caresses, in short, to be a snake-charmer! No, no, a thousand times no!

Yet it was that, or starve.

"I'll do it," I told old Clootie, gritting my teeth. And, that night, all but fainting before the merry crew of roisterers who frequented the place, I watched, through a haze of fear and dread, Topsy and Eva (as Old Clootie had named the pythons) shuffle toward me, their glistening bodies rising and falling sinuously, their slitted eyes afire with hate. They wrapped me in their loathesomc embrace, swept round me in hideous fondness, their forked tongues spitting flame. 1 screamed, and staggered against a table where a tall, handsome man was sitting alone. He sprang to his feet and caughtmeas I fell.

"My wonder-girl! My snake-woman!" he cried.

It was Norman Upspringer, lightheavyweight champion of Jersey City, and the idol of the ring.

"WAIT! I have something to tell you," I murmured when Old Clootie, a rude fellow but with a heart of gold, had left us alone in the little room behind the bar. Norman raised a deprecating hand. "I know," he said, "you feel ill at case with me because you are a snake-charmer. Never refer to it, little girl. Big men like I marry where we good and choose, and I guess I know when I have found my woman. Madam," he swept off his hat and bowed, "will you do me the honor to become my wife?"

I hesitated, in an agony. How could I tell him now of that worse than snake who had frittered away my girlhood back in Rosebud, Montana? "Norman—" I began, but he caught me in his arms, and my senses reeled.

We were married that night, and the lie on my lips was sealed and sanctified in a lovers' kiss.

But, alas! I had forgotten Gloria, sweet product of my weaker hours, now at home and playing' happily with my elk's tooth earrings, sole remnant of our former affluence! Norman looked at her in surprise. "Who is this?" he inquired. "A neighbor's child," I lied lightly, crowding her behind a door. And although Norman often spoke of it as strange that no one called for the child in the days that followed, soon he grew to love her for herself, and in his man's way, he would spend hours with her, a-playing of bean-bag and Farmer in the Dell. And, as she grew older, and the baby hands took on new strength, Norman began teaching her the rudiments of boxing. How often I remember returning home in the afternoon to hear Gloria's little voice raised in the sound of weeping above my husband's reproving tones. "I WILL hit in the clinches! I will!

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I will!" she would storm, stamping her baby foot. And once, on opening the door, I was dealt a rough blow in the face by Norman, who nevertheless apologised, explaining that it was only meant for Gloria.

I soon found that I thus had a great deal of time to myself, (my husband qnd daughter boxing the hours away together, the naughty rogues) and oh! how true is the old adage, "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do!" Within six months, love had its way again, and, on the pretext of staying with an aunt in Passaic, N. J., I had met and married the Dooberville Dandy, a cutthroat and a wag, but my mate from the moment we met. Somehow, I felt that this marriage was wrong, but I loved him, and is not love, like beauty, its own excuse for being?

Then began my double life. By times the wife of a proud and respected fighter and citizen, by times the soul-mate of the city's most dreaded gangster. And soon the strain began to tell. I shrank from Gloria's little voice saying, "Out again tonight, Mama?"—from the wounded look of Norman Upspringer, like a hurt dog—from the whole sorry business. I grew^ thin and pale. Life was a mundane hell.

Naturally, under these circumstances, my disposition, never of the best, did not improve, and, one night, in one of Broadway's gilded cafes, the Dandy and I had words.

"You—!" he roared, towering over me where I lay on the floor amid a mass of broken bottles.

"Hold!" then cried a strange voice, and, looking up, I beheld a dark man in double-breasted evening clothes.

It was, although I knew it not, Don Caballos y Los Verencias di Monticellisto, soon to prove a new influence in my life.

I HAVE ever been a girl of simple tastes, and I must confess that the Don overwhelmed me at first with his lavish gifts. Pearls and posies he gave me; thousands of them; but when I took the pearls with tears of wholesome gratitude, his conversation soon became less respectful, and I then realized that he was not a good man. Like a flash I spurned his gifts, and only jeered when he attempted to rewoo" me with them. "Never!" I cried, "am I a creature to be bought and sold in the open mart?" And so he slunk away, only to return, again and again, until his leering face and rude remarks became a part of my dreams, haunting me day and night.

The crisis came one evening when the Don had taken me to supper in his tastefully furnished apartment in the Fifties. What elegance! What affluence! Four pink-and-white Cupids, life-size, were suspended from the corners of a ceiling richly wrought in marble and onyx, and from their pouting lips swung gayly-colored streamers of twisted ribbon which in turn supported an immense chandelier of sparkling brilliants. Tall bronzecolumns held great urns banked with velvet flowers and giving off, from concealed burners, incense of a heady nature. Proud cockatoos strutted over the floor, which was carpeted with three thicknesses of bearskin, and a Great Dane slumbered on the hearth before a roaring fire. I laughed giddily, feeding my hat to the flames. This was Life!

"And now," said the Don, when we had supped, "about the other little matter—" Up I leapt, and round and round the room we raced, I on winged feet, the Don panting in hot pursuit. "You little devil," he muttered, but I had reached the door, which, in his excitement, he had forgotten to lock. "Never!" I cried, pausing for an instant upon the threshold, "once and for all, I will not wash those supperdishes!"

Down the stairs I fled, the Don close on my heels, as we sprang like elves, into adjoining taxis. Then started the wild race through deserted streets, I in my Yellow taxi swinging madly from side to side, the Don's Luxor not twenty feet behind. At one point, so giddy was our course, I was catapulted through the window into a huge snowbank, and it was only by swiping a ride on the rear of the Don's taxi that I' was able to regain my own.

But yet a greater horror awaited me at the corner of Forty-Eighth Street, for it was there that a silent form attached itself miraculously to my running-board and a bullet-shaped head appeared in the window.

I screamed. "Quiet, sister," hissed a hard voice, "the bulls is after me. D'you want to sperl me last chance of a get-away?"

Is it any wonder that I swooned? I, a home-loving girl, fleeing from one dastard and harboring another on my running-board. I knew no more until, in the chill dawn, we stopped in front of my home (the Norman Upspringer one) that I had so innocently left but a few short hours before.

(Girls! Women! Have I touched you? Is my heartbreak all in vain? Oh, profit, profit by my example, so that I may point some day to perhaps just one of you, and say to the Recording Angel, "There Sir, is my Redeeming Act!")

As we reached my home the bullethead swung off the running-board and made as if to flee. I grasped him by the arm. It was the Dooberville Dandy!

He turned on me. "My woman!" he cried. At that moment, the door of our little nest flashed open, and Norman Upspringer, light-heavyweight champion of Jersey City, and my husband in the bargain, came hurtling down the steps and sprawled unconscious at my feet. He was shortly followed by little Gloria, who stood at the top, a stern frown wrinkling her childish brow. "I guess that'll hold him," remarked my little daughter, rolling down her sleeves. Then, spying me, she ran down the steps, her baby face puckered in a sob. "Mama!" she wailed, "Daddy is a bad man. He hit me, Mama, in the c-clinches!" She broke into passionate weeping, and, spurning Norman with my foot, I folded her to my heart.

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"You evil creature," then snarled the Dooberville Dandy, "so you were married before!" He made a pass at me, but I stepped aside, and little Gloria, stifling her sobs, stepped in. At that moment the Don's taxi came to a furious stop at the cuVb. I covered my eyes with my hand.

Five minutes later, when I dared to look again, the scene was holocaust. There, in the gutter, lay the Dooberville Dandy, caked with mud, while little Gloria knelt beside the hydrant holding the Don's head kindly under its cooling flow.

"My little daughter! You have saved the day!" I cried. I folded her to my heart, and was on the verge of womanish tears when a gleaming motor-car drew up to the curb, and a gentleman in a fur-collared overcoat stepped out. Lines of suffering marked his face, but I saw the lovelight in his eyes. Instinctively I liked and trusted him.

"My little girl," he murmured, taking my face tenderly between his hands, "I always knew you would come out all right"

It was my Boy Blue.

Well, that is my story. I am now a proud and happy woman. Little Gloria is growing bigger and bonnier every day, and soon, who knows, there will be the patter of other little feet, the ring of childish laughter once again throughout our richly furnished home. For there's so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, is there not somewhere waiting for me the joy and happiness of—What Every Woman Knows?