He looked again at their white movement. The toes wiggling now under
his words. Luscious feet that listened to the soil and stole its
secrets. A sublime kind of capillarity. Bertha feeling for
closeness to life with her feet.
Thick white feet, yet begetting in Rollo thoughts too fragile to hold
in even the facets of a poet's brain. Thoughts as fragile as the
throat of the nightingale that sang outside the emperor's window.
Actually for the first time in the six years, Rollo looked at Bertha
with his attention. Splay mouthed. High cheeked. Muscular toed. A
soaking kind of peasantry that flowed into him and made him want to
write it out again in a meter that was like the clump of wooden shoes.
And then he looked at her waist, where because she had sweated, it
lay open. Hillocks of white breast. Flesh flowing like cream into
them. Strength and length of femur under cotton skirts. Crouching,
submerged, and silent strength.
"Bertha," he said, and touched her lightly on the throat with his
poet's fingers. How she beat there. It ran up his arm in an
ecstasy. "Why Bertha, how you beat--underneath the whiteness."
"I--I----"
"Rollo," called his mother from the euchre table, "your deal, dear.
We're waiting."
"Coming, Mother."
She hated the going sound of his steps, each new faintness of them a
stab.
But her dark forest was full of chimes. Words darted through the
branches with the brilliancy of flamingoes on wing. "Pagan."
"Appassionata." Brooks of the frozen tears of her loneliness began
to flow. She was bursting of music and the sound of the jeweled
words and she wanted to run after him and help him somehow into the
largo of the charmed forest of her heart.
But he was already back at the euchre table and opposite the slim
head that looked as an egg would feel if it came whole out of your
mouth.
Out on the porch it was still again, except for the brook of the
frozen tears.
***
It was very late. Pain in the back of her legs as if the muscles
were screwing. After Rollo's return to the table there had been an
extra round of euchre and extra wines. Three sizes of goblets to be
polished. Mrs. Farley wanted them soaped, bathed, breathed on, and
then shined into nothingness.
Even with the screwing pains, Bertha liked doing them this way in the
stilly part of the night, with the family upstairs and going to and
fro to bed. The warm suds squeaking off. The soft hiss of the
towel. Crystal frozen out of thin laughter. A trayful of the
polite, chittering things. With one stroke she could break them back
into laughter.
Milk bottles to be placed in a row on the kitchen porch and the ice
card to be turned. So.
The shine of magnolias that were no whiter than her feet. Rollo
Farley had touched her; trolled four of his fingers along her
whiteness. They had melted against her throat and down into her
heart. White tapering roads, his fingers, in the dark forest along
which she ran, calling....
Then up the back stairs to her room. It hurt her to climb them. On
the third landing she sat down and let down her balbriggan stocking
to rub at the calf of her leg. It was good, that leg, something that
she could feel in the round. It had dimension. Flesh. Muscle.
Bulge. And when it hurt she could lay her hands to it.
She undressed in the dark, sitting on the bed edge with the door open
for the warmed air of the halls. It was very simple. Waist.
Corsets. Chemise. Smelling strongly clean of laundry soap. Twenty
times a day she washed her arms up to the elbows with the great brown
cakes.
As she sat with her waist half off and the knoll of her first
shoulder shining through, Rollo Farley came to her door. His face
was like a lamp. And hers. Two dim rounds of light, wigwagging.
They lit the fog with the faintness of flame chewing along low wicks.
"I can see you, Bertha, because you are whiter than the darkness is
black."
Her heart shied back and leaped.
"Go away," she said with her lips, but she wanted to turn on her
forest like a music box for him. Wanted her flamingoes to fly, the
sands of the jeweled word-particles to sparkle. He took her hands
and she was ashamed. They were so heavy and lye-bitten and there
were such white ones at her heart that she wanted to give him. Like
his. Pale whispers.
"You don't want me to go away, White Bertha. Why--feel--you have a
little heart in your throat. How it beats."
She began to cry inwardly. There was a little heart in her throat
that beat up against her silence. It was terrible to be dumb. She
could have shrieked, "I am all locked! You hear! Prairies are
flowing in me and oceans and I am under them. Locked!" Words!
Words! To be able to pour some of her jeweled sands on to the
sensitive plate of him. She could feel the sands want to run into
words and the words thunder into wisdom.
"You are so white, Bertha. To think that I never noticed. Deeply
white, like the flesh of a magnolia." She felt her shoulder gleam
and pushed it back into her sleeve.
"Bertha--don't----"
"Go away----"
Then he began shyly at her fingers, lifting them one by one.
"Strong Bertha."
Strong Bertha indeed. Their heaviness sickened her. She wanted to
distract him from their roughness to which the green chiffon always
clung, and to tell him how the lanes of his slender fingers led
through the forest, but what she said was, "Get out. I can bite."
"Then bite, Bertha." The dance of excitement along his whisper! It
set her to trembling. "Your beautiful strength! Give some to me,
White Bertha."
"Mrs. Farley will not have goings-on. Helga will hear. I will call
Mrs. Far-r-ley--"
She gargled the name a little. He looked at her with her face
flattened by darkness into a mere lily pad and her nearness flowed
over him.
"You--who are you? I know! You are the poem of the woman whose feet
are rooted in the secrets out of the soil. You are--you are a----"
"Yes? Yes?"
"You are a--a tower of silence that is buried under some sea. I want
to write you into great oxen words."
Her splayed lips tried, but were dumb. There was something she so
terribly wanted to say to that. A heart hurt. To tell it would be
like giving him a jewel.
"Bertha, you are like a tree when you tremble, caught in a windshake.
Don't be afraid. Come to me--Bertha--close--."
Something had gone over to him. A wraith out of a door. The jeweled
sands were pouring....
"Bertha----"
"No--no--Mrs. Far-r-ley----"
She came down into his arms that had the sudden strength to hold her.
His lips were on her throat, listening.
***
The days were as days always had been. Entrails of fowls to be torn
out. Mud carried in on grocery boys' heels. "Lawk, spinach boiled
down so!" Pots. Pans. The grease clogging the drain and sucking
the hands. To be ordered:
Bay leaves.
Prepared flour.
Dry mustard.
Kitchen Bouquet.
Silver polish.
Pickled walnuts.
Caraway seeds.
Bottled capers.
Powdered sugar.
Tarragon vinegar.
Just time, fluted into days and nights.
Rollo had not come again. That was part of the preciousness. The
once. The beauty of that hurt more than the pain. Her yearning was
proud of his not coming.
Trust Rollo to pause a little this side of satiety, teased, but with
the flavor high on his palate. Asceticism of keeping a little lean
with self-inflicted hungers.
She had dusted the terra cotta Chloe three of Helga's Thursdays out
and he had not glanced up. He could pass her on the stairs without
seeing, and did. One night, at dinner to ten, wine had warmed him
again, and he came out into the kitchen.
Bertha was tilting an enormous copper pot to drain it of grease, two
fowl shining in it on a device that resembled a spit.
He regarded her through the slippery vapors, her pallor not unlike
the nakedness of the fowl.
_The Cathedral Under the Sea_. He had written it--weeks ago--that
dawn! Hours and hours that he could scarcely account for. The
shaggy manuscript of it in a red portfolio up in the third left
drawer of his desk. A secret palpitating saga that stalked through
forests of iambic and hexameter with the sullen tonnage of a boar.
Jove--up in the third left drawer--must re-write and show it to Beebe.
He went out into the yard for a magnolia. They were asleep on the
tree like birds with tucked heads. Her heart waited. Disks of
poured-off grease riding on the sink water. Her fork stabbing the
softening haunches that were already running juices. The big silence
standing stock still. Hope.
He came in with a bud in his hand that was like a live star. It gave
a little movement forward of a sleepy petal, opening. She wanted
that star for her darkness. Rollo! Like a hoop the silent calling
of his name rolling through the lanes his fingers made in her heart
and yet, when he passed on through the swinging door, there was that
yearning of hers, glad to be again denied.
Baste! Baste! Feeding back into the fowls their own drippings.
Celery to be sharpened at the roots like pencils. A fleck of baking
soda in the peas to bring out the green. Finger rolls warming their
toes at the edge of the oven and Mr. Farley's slice of gluten toast.
Fancy! To be full of the invisible tears of the hurt of beauty all
the while she was toasting old Mr. Farley's slice of diabetic bread.
Hurting gladness.
It was not easy to be glad. Yet Helga was full of gladnesses that
you could almost touch. Dimension and bulge to them, like the calf
of the leg. The easy gladness of Thursday out. "He says to me and I
says to him." Coney Island. "That night watchman's a helluva fresh
guy, but I like him." Swedish Barbecues at Concordia Hall.
Gladnesses that were as easy as spinach. How to capture them the way
Helga did? They ran away from Bertha like little mercury balls.
Once on a Sunday she had gone to a clambake at Knuts Grove, with the
plumber's assistant who came to mend a water pipe. He had pressed
her hips like the ice man, and made her run panting among the trees
and beer kegs. Great big girls with Hogarth expanses of bosom had
sat in rope swings and propelled with their legs until the flounces
flew back and shouts went up to the accompaniment of forefingers
scraping forefingers. "Shame--Oh Shame!" The plumber's assistant
pushed Bertha. High. Higher. Balbriggan legs above laughter. "Let
'er go, Gallagher. Whoops--see! Oh--Oh--that gal's all there!"
Stabs at the pit of her. Helga's gladnesses these. "High! Higher!
It's raining in London! Yah--oh Baby!" Eyes and wet grins all
blurry with beer fumes.
Let the old cat die! The wooden seat tilting and her skirts higher
and her screams full of panic. "I'll yump--let me
out--yah--yah"--slapping right and left and her stocking and shin
torn from the jump--"Yah--you--lunks--you got lice.
Dirty--dirty--youse--dirty--"
She ran then, climbing over fences to find the street car line.
Gladness in the round. What were they compared to the hurting
gladness of Rollo, passing through the kitchen with a breathing star
in his hand? Baste! Baste! Celery to be sharpened. Baste! Then
came the dishing up and the riding of the platters through the
swinging doors on Helga's palm.
Later, much later, with her dish pan turned and the ice card out, she
could see through the crack in the door, the two tables of euchre,
and Rollo and the girl with the dark portières of low hair, left out.
An omission as graceful as the rest between the chords of a prelude.
They were by a fire on a couch that fattened up around them. The
star of a magnolia in her hair, as if it had simply whitened there.
Rollo, nearing her, as he would do it, without seeming to stir. Fine
fettled, both of them, his ears laid back as if to the wind; her
nostrils, little pinks.
Puffs of talk. Silences made loud by heart beats. Her neck back
from the imperceptible nearness of his breathing. Withholding her
young body like an arched bow; his, trembling for the arrow.
They were so young. Crocus tips.
And Bertha, from behind the swinging doors, pinioned to their moment,
her heart trying to pull away from the spike through it.
She in there, who had so little to give and gave that little cannily.
The lovely frugality of thin lips. Bertha back there with her
riches, would have been willing to transfer them from her splayed
lips to the thin ones that he in turn might kiss those riches off----
"Oh, Rollo--Rollo----"
He was feeling for the hair with the magnolia out in it like a star,
but she would tauten back, and finally, on the flip of a despair, he
went out and she remained thrust forward a little to the firelight,
her smile flickering.
In the room beyond the portièred arch, the euchre tables were
shifting. Middle-aged laughter. Silk _froufrous_. The firelight
waiting for Rollo.
After a while he came back. There was a red portfolio under his arm.
She reached out, but he withheld it and opening the shaggy pages
began to read.
Slow oxen words plowing up secrets of the soil. Gleaming submarine
words. Words out of jeweled sands. Heavy words that thundered into
wisdom. The strange wisdom of the silence that stood stock still.
The hexameter of the wide, white feet that the earth sucked unto
herself in fond little marshes, as they ran through the forests
surrounding the Cathedral Under the Sea. The song that was locked in
a heart and hurt there. Rhythm. The fandango of sound. The saga of
the silence of Bertha--there behind the swinging doors, hearing
herself bleed into words. The brook of the frozen tears thawing upon
Rollo's lips. The flamingoes flying----
The oval face was full of tears and so close to Rollo's that
suddenly, over the red portfolio, he had it dry with his kisses, her
body curving back and his curving over it. The flame of winding
arms----
***
It was late when Bertha went upstairs.
She had polished and twisted twenty-four crystal wine goblets into
nothingness. It was so with her pain. She wanted sullenly to twist
it for twisting her. But it curved away. Nothingness.
It was good to set out the milk bottles. Six in a row. They were so
there. Quarts. Bulge. Dimension.
***
The magnolia was quite naked. All autumn a circuit of excitement had
been running through the house, ever since a Mr. Beebe, with a
portfolio had interrupted the family at dinner and the mould of
pistachio ice cream had come out uncut and steeped in its own melt.
Day by day the plates coming out from the dining room were more and
more nibbled and nervous-looking. The electric door bell with its
batteries in the kitchen kept tittering. In the front hall the
silver plate for visiting cards was high with them.
There were oatmeal cookies to be baked in daily batches now because
Mrs. Farley, in the gray and jet gown designed for the Daughters of
Confederacy annual luncheon, poured tea every afternoon out of a gold
service that her grandmother had tilted in the same solemn
drawing-room.
Half a dozen of Helga's Thursdays out had been commandeered.
"Fortheluvvaga, you'd think he was making his debutte. Little Lord
Fauntlerollo has written something and it's a helluva sensation. One
of those fresh newspapers guys slipped me something just now for
slipping him up to the study. Fortheluvvaga, I could have tipped
them off to that long ago. I've been emptying that trash basket of
his writings for three years now."
"To write, Helga, is to make words into pack mules to carry fine
thoughts on to paper--if I had the pack mules----"
"Pack mules! Ain't you enough of a pack mule yourself without
wishing for some? Fortheluvvaga, a pack mule wishing for pack mules."
"Pack mules--that wouldn't fall down on their knees----"
"I knew a guy from Missouri once, sold mules. Spondoolaks! That
baby carried four collars in his pocket to a dance and won his lady a
manicure set every time he took 'er to a contest. Little Lord
Fauntlerollo! Say, gimme a baby with liver and lights to him."
Rollo had written something. The white hands at Bertha's heart set
up a fluttering. To write something was not to sprawl prepared flour
and bay leaves on the order list. It was to paint into words and on
to paper the submerged forests of the heart. Like transfer pictures
that you wetted and rubbed.
***
More pleasant irregularities. Carriages at the curb and the family
barouche at the most untoward of hours. Mr. and Mrs. Farley still
rode out, with a conservatism that even then was beginning to be
conspicuous, in an ink pot of a coupé drawn by two fat bays.
Floundering, gasoline-gagged traffic banes.
Rollo, upstairs, smoking too many cigarettes and flinging out oaths
to the visitors' cards that were slid under his locked study door.
Old Mr. Farley, who came home to luncheon, cutting out newspaper
clippings with his fork and reddening under what seemed more than his
daily allotment of old port. The telephone a screaming cockatoo that
had to be throttled a score of times a day.
"_No, Mr. Rollo Farley cannot be disturbed to come to the telephone.
No, it appeared in four editions of_ New Poetry. _Impossible to get
a copy off the stands any more. Date of book publication December
tenth._"
December tenth. A little knob of a day to stick out of the
flatnesses. Bertha's hopelessness wound around it like a baby's
finger. December tenth. She scoured a whole morningful of pots that
day. Harsh bristles against stove black. Scoured because she was
happy and was happy because she scoured. She was put away, one might
say, like a Christmas-tree-ball. Wadded. Waiting.
***
It came. A black gusty December tenth of soot on the window sills,
cold door knobs, and when she dumped her scrub water out over the
porch rail, her bare forearms reddened and steamed. Winter. The
magnolia as if a trumped-up bride made out of a poker had been
stripped again down to the poker. She thought of it in bud,
constantly.
The scrub water blew inward as she threw it, lashing her skirts to
her legs. Time for flannels. She must shop new ones for herself at
the Sailors' Supply Store down in Front Street, her first Thursday
out. She liked them man-size with great ribbings at the wrists and
ankles. They kept out soppy water.
She chose of their grossness as naturally as she spat.
December tenth was on a Thursday and Helga as usual was after her.
"Fortheluvvaga, Bertha, have a heart. Gimme your Thursday and I'll
do as much for you. I need stockings. Look at my heel hanging out.
There's a fella down on Fourteenth Street selling them at the curb
for twenty-nine cents. Gimme your Thursday, Bertha, you don't do
nothing with yours nohow but sit and look at it. Aw Berth. I gotta
cold on my chest. How is it they never seem to think the help's
rooms needs heat same as the rest? I need a woolen shirt."
"Yah--Yah--you don't buy warm shirts, you buy thin stockings--all of
you--nothing on the inside of you, so you hang yourselves with things
on the outside.
"Inside! I got a floatin' kidney that's killin' me. I wish you had
my backache for a day."
"That's an ache a plaster can reach."
"Yah, try to lay in bed one morning huggin' a plaster in this house
and see where it gets you. Bein' sick by the clock. Hospital or get
up. My idea of heaven is being sick and taking my time about it.
Aw, Bertha, if you knew how my kidney's hurtin' and I need that
shirt, gimme your Thursday----"
"Yah--yah--always the same. Graft. You got a nerve."
"Aw Berth...!"
"Yah."
So Bertha's Thursday out bequeathed to Helga and Bertha at dusting
the study. Rollo's. She could stir the down on the back of his neck
with her breathing as she rubbed at a chair. Shining ridges of book
backs to be dusted. In waves. Thoughts that had found their way out
and into the fragrant prison of morocco. Jeweled sands poured on to
paper. Fleck. Fleck. Mahogany full of pools and one edge of a
table into which Rollo's profile sank--the nostrils, with a little
rabbit-like quiver to them, perpetually upside down. Slow-fingered
firelight, like a neat little girl on a stool, tatting. The rug was
full of colors that were faint as her wisps of old sound. The dust
cloth, an old silk waist of Mrs. Farley's, clung to the rough nap of
her fingers and it hurt her like noise. A room to be quiet in. A
warm kind of a quiet, like a wool shawl over the shoulders. The
pencil whispering and Rollo's hand across his brow like an eye shade.
"Ah me----."
Now, so! To lift that little pad under Rollo's elbow without an oath
from him. There! Lawky, lawk. The rocking horse blotter had a
crystal knob. To reach that now, and to polish it. Done! The stack
of books at his right, half unwrapped. The flare of brown paper to
be removed without a creak. So! Two little stacks of slender books,
rough-leaved and in tawny jackets.