Evening Star Newspaper, April 6, 1930, Page 106

“a 16 .y WO = g Ao TITT CTIAIMAY CT AT TITACTTIRT Ay - ~ P e e THE SUND.\Y_‘ST.»\R, WASHINGTON, D. C, APRIL 6, 1930. Peter the Great—A New Story by Fannie Hurst First-Run Fiction, an Exclusive Feature of The Star’s Magazine, by the Highest-Paid Writer of Short Stories in the World— Another of Her - Stories Will /Ippea; in This Magazine Next Sunday. HE thing that broke Peter Tarbell’s spirit was a ringing blow across the right cheek administered to him, within full view of a crowded back- stage, by an extravaganza queen then in the full glory of her monarchistic geign. As doorkeeper and general guardian of the eonstant runnel of traffic of one sort or another through the small office that led to the wings of the theater, Peter constituted a one-headed Cerebrus who stood guard against claimants for the attention of the high-handed musical comedy despot of the moment, Hilda Taypay. A riot of colorful nanghtiness, temperamental outbursts, generosities, tempers, affabilities and nonsense of a brand that had captivated Broad- way, to'be in her troupe or associated in any vuflmhermfi\ethflterwuwbevlcmn of her despotisms as well as receipient of her repentant favors. Those who played with her, however, feared her more than they loved her, and it could not be said, even in the indulgent mood of widest charity, that Hilda was kind to the fser people about her. Impressed by great- ness, she was capable of paying constant homage to those whose professional rank tow- ered above hers. Little people she despised because, apparently, to be able to express her contempt emphasized her sense of power. THUS it happened that on a Spring morning, i* during a rehearsal, Peter, admitting to the * -wings a young man he had been instructed by the great Taypay never to deny admission, found himself suddenly the public victim of her great wrath. “How dare you,” she screamed at Peter, hurl- incldlstnflwhichshehldbeenummcms dance number at him—“how dare you admit that swine to my presence! I never want to see him again!” And there, in the full view of the assembled company, swung out an arm, full width, and let her hand bang resoundingly against the young doorkeeper’s cheek. It was one of those events that can come to a sleeper during nightmare, It was public humiliation of a sort that can cause the throat to close and the eyes to flash into blindness. Fhere, in the presence of at least 60 people, many of the stage hands his personal friends, a woman, without the slightest just provocation, had slapped him in the face. For tant hi Peter Tarbell, then 30, well salaried, ambi- tious, eager for a@ivancement, turned, without a woid, 6n his heel and walked out, while to the strain of the interrupted melody exiravaganza’s darling, prancing distaff in hand, resumed re- hearsal ‘of the dance number she had been There were $50 for a half month's pay due Peter, which he never claimed. There were personal objects—books, papers, small baggage— lying about the office which he never returned to collect. The one idea was to get away, securely, permanently, quickly, from the scene of his humiliation, to forget, if possible, the fiendish onslaught against his dignity and his pedce of mind. TflE theater and everything pertaining to it |+ became thema to the quiet-faced, un- obtrusive young man, who from that day, for many a year to come, was to carry the sting from a woman's hand across his face and heart, and whose fingers throughout the years were to itch to throttle the white neck of Hilda Taypay. 1t is, of course, difficult to hypothecate what would have been the destiny of Peter Tarbell had he remained in the atmosphere of the theéater. It is, however, fair to assume he had be'gnmthenywhlgherpoduon.dncehls -3¢ had been steady from callboy to general gnanager of affairs of rear stage. % Be that as it may, from the day Peter walked out, his destiny fell along lesser lines. At 40 he was superintendent of a huge apartment thouse on the residential upper west side of New York. Eleven men worked under him, elec- tricians, janitors, elevator boys and furnace- room men, but in reality, Peter’s position, while the. salary was practically that of the stage- door regime, was little above that of a man- eging Janitor. His jobs were chiefly menial :ehores. Locks to be repaired .on apartment @oors; foyers and elevators to be kept in show Btate, vacant apartments to be shown to pr.s- pective tenants and altercations of one sort or gnother to be adjusted between his helguayy v . There were compensations, of course. He It was the stinging blow of a woman’s hand that was to be remembered a life- time by Peter Tarbell. had married, meanwhile, a quiet, enormously strong and quite personable girl who'had been employed as house maid in one of the apart- ments of the building in which he was em- ployed. ‘There were no children. Peter would have liked it, had there been. With the strange pride of the frustrated, strong Tessa would never admit her disappointment. At 50, Tessa, with one of those quick cor- rosive changes which can sometimes attack the strong, began to succumb to a cruel form of rheumatism which knotted her joints so that within a period of two years she became practically bed-ridden. It was terrible to be forced to behold the slow disintegration of the magnificent body that had been Tessa's, and with the physical, there began slowly and surely to sink into desuetude the mental. A com- panionable, sweet-natured and helpful woman Congquest Mm,tbedheaseaonchflyregm by most people and so seriously consid- ered by physicians, has at last met its match, A treatment of recent origin which is com- ing into general practice makes of the disease only a slight indisposition, or perhaps elimi- nates it entirely. ' : The seriousness of measles lies in its pre- disposition to bronchial pneumonia, which in the past has been one of the two most potent sources of death among children. So wide- spread has been the contagion of measles it is believed that comparatively few grow to ma- turity without having had the disease. Medical science has long known that when measles has broken out there is set up within the blood of the victim a foe of the disease germ known as the anti-body. With the prog- ress of the disease the number of anti-bodies has increased and they soon overcome the germs of the disease while convalescence sets in. It is dyring this battle between the anti- bodies and the germs that the introduction of the complication of a cold brings on the bron- chial pneumonia, with frequent fatal results. Two doctors working simultaneously but in different parts of the world hit upon the idea of aiding the fight on the disease by intro- ducing anti-bodies into the veins of the vic- tims of measles in order to give a sort of running start in the fight against the germs. The two, a Dr. Nicolle at the Pasteur. Institute in Algiers, and Dr. Degkwitz in Munich began their experiments by drawing small quantities of blood from convalescent patients soon after the fever had subsided and injected it into the veins of new victims. Their experiments won immediate success and they continued their work until they hit upon what they be- lieved to be the ideal circumstances under which to administer the serum. With the ‘publication of their findings other doctors took up the study to see what improve- ment might be made in the treatment of the disease. Among these were Dr. William H. Park of the Department of Health in New York City. With the assistance of Dr. Abra- ham Zingher he administered the serum to 41 children. To 20 were given 8 cubic centi- meters of blood each and none of them, al- though they had been exposed to the disease, developed it. The remainder received 4 cubic centimeters and 3 of them developed mild attacks. At the hygienic laboratory of the United States Public Health Service in this city it was said that there are two sources of serum,’ one being the blood of convalescents just. re- covering from the disease and the other the began to slump into a querulous, bed-ridden invalid, half frantic most of the time with pain; intolerant of it all of the time, OOR Peter! The spectacle of Tessa, slip- ping into her invalidism was one which he could only watch with a sense of helpless despair. More and more, her predicament be- came a drain upon his time and energies. At 55, he had lost the position of superin- tepdent over the large upper West Side apart- ment house, and on smaller pay, and in quar- ters much more cramped, was presiding over the tawdry destines of a six-story tenement house on the lower East Side. This time his living quarters were two rooms below the level of the sidewalk, and his monthly stipend less of Measles blood of adults who in childhood had had the disease and who, medically speaking, are still convalescents, even though the convalescence is of 20 or 30 years’ standing. The blood of the child just recovering is much more potent in anti-bodies and is likely to forestall an attack of the measles, but the immunity lasts but a short time, as little as a month, frequently. In the case of the adult serum a child exposed to the disease is very likely to contract it any way, but in a very mild form which is free of the pneumonia complications, One of the advantages of the adult serum lies in the fact that the child by suffering a mild attack builds up its own anti-bodies, thus bringing about a permanent immunity and provides a source in later life of serum for future children. The question of convenience also enters into the adult treatment. In the case of the im- mediate convalescent serum, it has been found through tests that blood drawn from a child 15 days after the fever has ended is best, but it is not always easy to find this ideal situation when the serum might be wanted. With the adult serum, however, it is very unlikely, if not actually non-existent, that neither of the parents of a child has had the disease. If either has had it, a few drops of the blood drawn from the vein of either arm, just above the elbow, will serve, and if both parents have had measles, either will serve. Therein lies the advantage which the very contagious nature of measles has given in the fight against the disease. This new treatment, while not widespread as yet, is gradually taking its place in regular practice, and at least two physicians in this city are using it. It gives promise of placing measles along with diphtheria, diabetes, typhoid fever, smallpox, malaria and other common diseases which have fallen before man's grow- ing knowledge of human ailments and their treatment. Production of Mints IT takes 35,000 acres just to provide the flavor- ings of part of the ¢chewing gum and candy consumed in this country annually. The flavorings in question are the essential oils of peppermint and spearmint. In the case of the spearmint, all the product goes into the manufacture vf gum, but ‘peppermint also finds 1t way into candy and s a flavoring for tooth- paste. than half of what it had been in the larger building. And yet in some ways life was easier. The little apartment he shared with the now completely bed-ridden Tessa, meant fewer hours to devote to the chores of keeping the household moving. And yet, there was about the environment of this house something so depressing that it seemed to Peter, struggling always with the problem of keeping afloat the sinking spirits of Tessa, as if the rows of days were simply too drab to face. It was not alone his own plight, but day after day there marched before his troubled eyes the woes of the poverty-stricken, the lame, the halt, the blind, who dwelt around them. Evictions, for reasons of poverty or sicke ness, were not unusual in the house where he acted in the capacity of janitor-of-all-work. Usually this unsavory task fell to him. It was a grim, bitter job, this business of be- ing janitor to the powerty-stricken families of the building. Sickness lurked under the roof, crime, grime and sometimes even hunger. One old woman, as a matter of fact, had been found dead in her rear apartment of a simple com- plaint easily diagnosed. Hunger. Little wonder Tessa, who had always been sensitive to pain of others, lay there not only drenched in her own misery, but seeming to feel, with the antennae of her intuition, the poverty that lay everywhere around her. Babies cried in the tenements at night. Late unsteady footsteps lurched upstairs. Women cried out. Prom time to time there sped in horror through the dank and narrow house news of a child run over by a truck; the wage- earning head of a household falling from a scaffolding; the son of a household turning gangster and facing the death house— L!AN mean years, filled with terror of one sort or another, but through it all, Peter and Tessa clinging fast to the murky nest of the two rear rooms they called home and as time moved on, Peter becoming more and more obsessed with the fear of losing his job, through having to give more and more time to the task of tending Tessa. The night that he found a ruin of a woman propped up against the door as he was about to enter his apartment, proved a memorable one. She was a gin-fogged creature, with deep ruts of suffering and dissipation down the still white flesh of her face. A wreck of a woman, with a strange suggestion of splendor left to her. It was while he was picking her up to carry her out to the curb and turn her over to the mercies of the corner policeman, that recogni= tion came to Peter. Recognition, and a flash of anger so blinding that it seemed to him for a moment that here, now nothing could pre- vent his digging talons into the throat of the creature before him. Pent up in him, all through the years, were passions about to be released. Here in his arms, a derelict, a rem= nant, a skeleton of comic opera, was the ob- ject of his lifetime of hatred. Somehow again, once more, it did not work out that way. Peter’s talons did not sink in to blemish that last remnant of the beauty of Hilda’s throat. He has given her roof, and in her befogged way, she knows that a janitor, whom' at heart she despises for being a menial, has come to her succor. 2 There are two women for Péter to tend now. The helpless Tessa, and the curious tempera= mental derelict whom they have taken into their home. Sometimes she sings and creates the furor of cracked melody and pitiful dance in the little tenement they all share ‘together, Sometimes she rises in wrath, and strikes the old janitor whose humble lot she shares, (Copyright, 1930.) ~s o ” n)‘ §