Twenty years ago we Americans were not so advanced and my dread was not of the six weeks of isolation, for I can always find diversion and I had the companionship of my future mother-in-law, with whom I was entirely congenial and in whose approval I basked. No, larger almost than happiness was the day of abhorrent publicity which I knew that I could not avoid. Reflecting, however, that since I could not escape it, and that there was no need of living it every day before it arrived, I determined to enjoy my enforced stay and learn as much as I could about the Western corner of my country.
After consultation with a lawyer, who made a specialty of such business and performed it with astonishing suavity and ease, I took his advice and settled myself comfortably in the biggest hotel in town, where nobody would expect me to be, and then cast about to find out how I could learn about Nevada. My eyes at that moment fell upon a card under the glass top of the bureau in my bedroom. It announced Madame Kolak, who was prepared to take pounds from any human frame by the most modern methods. Ah, I thought, and why not from my frame? Here was something to show results, even if I could not work at my novel then in progress. I was sixteen pounds above my college weight, and I would take all those pounds from my bones. I called upon the telephone for Madame Kolak and heard a large husky voice reply. Yes, she would come, that day at twelve. Sixteen pounds in six weeks? Yes, if I would help with diet and exercise. I would, and so the bargain was made.
At twelve o’clock I heard a heavy knock upon the door. I opened it and fell back, stupefied. The largest woman I had ever seen stood there in the doorway, not only tall but broad. That is, she was fat, very fat. Her big square face wore no make-up, her hair was drawn straight back and she loomed like a snow-covered mountain in her white uniform.
“Come in,” I said faintly.
She came in, very businesslike, and snatched off an untrimmed battered straw hat. “Lay down,” she said in the husky telephone voice. “If it hurts, tell me.”
I lay down on the bed, and pulling up her sleeves she proceeded to batter the flesh from my resisting skeleton. The method is familiar and doubtless has improved in the years since, for I see many women far slimmer than I was able to stay. What I remember is not the process nor even the hateful dieting, for Madame Kolak put me at once upon a vegetable soup of her own recipe, making me promise to eat nothing whatever except five large cups a day of the watery stew. She told me afterwards that she would not have been so severe except that she supposed of course I would cheat as her ladies “most always did.” I never thought of cheating, having been reared to severe honesty when my word was given, and so I starved myself heroically — too thoroughly, alas, as I was afterwards to discover, for during the next year I had to combat a protein deficiency which all but wrecked me for a while, and undid most of our combined efforts, she coming twice a day to pound, and I exercising rigorously between her hours and swallowing the abominable soup.
What I remember clearly now is the incomparable character, Madame Kolak. She was the very embodiment of the American West. She had always lived there, she dabbled in gold mines, she had ridden — in the days when she could still hoist herself on a horse — all through the desert, and she loved it. Sometimes when she was pounding away and both of us were dripping with sweat, she of effort and I of endurance, she would close her eyes and say something like this—
“You know what I saw once? I was ridin’ home from a gold mine. It was night but there was a moon, shinin’ soft-like. And ahead of me was a little lake, maybe not more than a big pool. An’ you know what I see? Nine white horses, drinkin’ at the pool, and with ’em a coal-black stallion. Wild horses—”
She smiled, her eyes closed, and we both gazed at those horses drinking from a pool in the moonlight, nine white horses and a coal-black stallion.
“Do you mind,” she said one day, while she screwed a pound from my right hip, “if I call my new mine The Good Earth? It might bring me luck.”
She had not, I surmised, much luck with her mines except for endless excitement and outdoor pleasure. And in those exacerbating days she shared with me, she explained the countryside and the city as well, she described the nature of rattlesnakes, she named the wild flowers, and she told me, bit by bit, the history of the region through the drama of her own life. It was she who whetted me to the point of wandering about the streets of the fabulous derelict, Virginia City, so that, undernourished though I was, I became familiar not only with its present, but with its incredible past.
Twice a day she weighed me, I would not have dared to show less than the prescribed loss. She granted me a reward about halfway through, when I dreaded going on and yet could not bear to give up.
“When you get down to the bottom,” she said, “I’m goin’ to take you around to the fancy gamblin’ places. We’ll dress up and I’ll bring my husband dressed up and we’ll go to all the swell joints.”
And so we did on the last memorable night, when, my evening gown hanging on my emaciated frame, I waited, for Madame and her husband. They telephoned from the lobby and I went down and there she stood, immense and handsome as the Rock of Gibraltar in a long black satin gown of indeterminate style but massively décolleté and with plenty of shining stones. With her was a trim neat man, rather small, whom I recognized from her descriptions. He was Mr. Kolak. We had a wonderful evening. She urged me to eat all I wanted and was pleased when I wanted very little, my stomach having been properly shrunk. We went to half a dozen places and she, not at all shrunken, ate everywhere and very generously and recommended the wines, and the waiters all knew her and called her “the Duchess.” She did, as a matter of fact, look like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, only a good-natured one and much broader. I went to bed exhausted, although she was fresh as ever, and prepared for the next day, which was the dreadful one when the news would break, and the man would arrive.
And then how maddening it was when he did arrive to have him stare at me with unappreciative eyes, although a very pretty white silk suit had been fitted to my thin figure only the week before, taken in, as Madame said proudly, “inches,” and how many I have mercifully forgotten! I had kept the whole process from him to be a delightful surprise, and now he looked peevish. “This is not what I bargained for,” he said or something like that, and then stubbornly, “I liked you the way you were.”
“I’ll be that way again, doubtless,” I said gloomily.
Then we laughed. It was a glorious day, the greatest day of our lives, a day, to be sure, which we had both tried to prevent for several years, under the conviction that divorce was horrible, which it had been, and that furthermore nothing was more unfortunate for a publisher than marrying an author and vice versa, thus mixing business with everyday life — and this, thanks be, has been proved not true.
I have heard marriage argued from two contrary points of view, the one that it is wiser for opposites to marry, the other that there should be common interests, hobbies and vacations. My life has proved, for me, at least, the latter point of view. Observing the similar marriages of others, I add this caution — that cooperation and not competition must be the watchword.