ROLLO FARLEY

The

Cathedral-Under-the-Sea-by-Rollo-Farley-the-Cathedral-Under-the-Sea.

Why, to fleck at them with her dust cloth was like touching a bit of

tremor. Her tremor. That figure of a woman on the tawny jacket.

Sullen and at a sea-edge, with the sand sucking tight and eager about

her ankles and the sky like a silence. Jagged leaves which she

opened shyly and with a stealth that trembled.

Wide margins and little islands of printed words. Slow, pulling

words. Arches of rhythm. The naves of her silences. The submerged

grandeurs she had laid to his ear with the roaring shell of her

heart. She had led him down the shelves of these pages, one night,

her friends the soil and the sea-bottoms giving under their feet and

sucking up softly about their ankles.

_The Cathedral Under the Sea!_

***

Lawk, she had dropped the book, face downward, so that the leaves

doubled up and the ink pot tottered and she barely had time to save

the spill and Rollo was savage.

"Damnation, Helga, leave off your puttering and clear out."

She had risen with the crumpled book to her like a hurt bird and the

blood so furious in her face that it stung his eyes to hers.

"Oh, it's you. Of course. Thursday. Run along, there's a girl."

There were a few bank notes on the table, weighted down with loose

change. His hand traveled toward them and then jerked back again,

his attitude listening; his eyes toward their left corners listening;

his dry pen quivering slightly as it, too, hung listening.

Those little book stacks on his desk that her eyes could not veer off

from. Something of him--and of her--there. Herself on the outside

of herself. The broken wing of a book in her arms. Their book. And

yet he sat with his eyes in their corners, waiting for her to go.

"Rollo," cried out her silence, "I am the Cathedral Under the Sea.

Don't you know me?" But all she said was:

"It bane all pencil shavings under your feet. If I could sweep

them..."

At that his fingers where they propped up the pen relaxed to the

page, his eyes sliding from their corners of unease.

"Not now, there's a girl." This time he reached for one of the bills

under the loose change, handing it back to her over one shoulder.

Poor Bertha. An insistent sense of sickness that had been rising in

her of late when she bent over to baste a fowl or scour a floor, came

over her now, almost languidly. A dizzying kind of clutch, as if a

pair of tiny hands were swinging on her heart beat.

"No," she said, standing back from the flutter of the bill.

His eyes flew to their corners again.

"Leave me then. I am busy."

Standing there directly behind him, she forced him to look and her

eyes were crucified.

"I want this."

The crumbled bird of a book. The bent page. The little islands of

jeweled words margined in silence. The beauty of the silence of the

Cathedral Under the Sea. Her silence.

"I want this."

And then when he did not answer and with his look impaled upon hers,

she went out, dizzily, carrying the book, her broom, a floor brush,

and a bottle of furniture oil.

***

Guests would be in to tea and there were oatmeal cookies to be made,

but she dragged herself up to her room that was trapped under the two

slants of roof. It was good to be up there on her bed. Suddenly and

again that new and fantastic craving irrelevantly had hold of her.

That sense of bud; that desire to behold the leisurely beauty of a

bud opening. The backyard magnolia was stark now. But to see it

bloom! Petals to bow back ceremoniously from calyx. A gesture so

fine that it took place between the battings of an eye. Often and

more often now, that sense of bud opening. Once in her sleep the

soft movement of a petal against the very walls of herself.

A tulip twirling. That was her dizziness. She sat up to shake it

off. Oatmeal cookies to be made....

And then in a flash, seated there on the bed edge, in her silence,

she knew! Knew it dumbly. That tulip twirling had a heart and in

that heart a child. Not his alone, like the book. Theirs!

And her veins were torrents washing and carrying to the bud the wisps

of old sound and the whisperings of her friends, the soils, and the

messages of the chimes, goldily, and the kiss of a poet....

After a while she dragged herself downstairs. Mrs. Farley was

ringing. There were those oatmeal cookies to be made.

***

Marching days of rising in the iced dawn, when the air that came up

from the lower halls was frozen from open windows, while the family

lay deep under fluffy blankets.

Bertha slept with her windows closed, so that her room embalmed the

cold. It ran up her body in great flashes of gooseflesh as she

dressed. Once a week she bathed in a tin tub the shape of a kidney.

She carried the water in eight pitcherfuls from a bathroom two floors

below. The tin tub wobbled as she stood shivering in it, the bottom

denting in and out noisily.

Helga in the adjoining cubicle did not bother. She was a frail girl

with cheek spots of red and at night she fell into bed, often in her

underclothing and stockings, for the additional warmth and for the

additional five minutes of sleep it gave her in the morning, because

then she had only to slip into her black sateen and white organdie

bows.

And for days at a time her bed went unmade. Once, on exploration

bent, Mrs. Farley found it so, plucking very gingerly at the unaired

cotton coverlet. Helga was summoned, and the house-man with a

squirt-can of disinfectant, and scavengers were found nesting in the

slats and Helga, with her nose very red from pinching it to keep back

tears, standing furiously sullen.

"Disgusting. Filthy. Shame, Helga, upon any self-respecting girl.

Dear, oh dear, not fit for a pig. What's that little greasy rag on

the bed? 'Sore toe.' Ugh, what horrid things can happen to the

servant class! Sore toes somehow don't happen to one's

friends--ugh----"

And Bertha, standing at the foot of the stairs listening with one

hand to her cheek, ached in her throat for Helga. She was so young

and there was something so old about the days of dirty chores. They

were like old witches and presently Helga would turn into one of them.

"I wish to God, Mrs. Farley, you knew how it feels to limp around

picking up after you on one of them sore toes!"

Bertha knew, but meekly. Foot torture. The body tiredness at the

end of a seventeen-hour day from stoking the coal range at six A.M.

to placing the two shining apples and a silver pitcher of water

beside the Farley black walnut bedstead at eleven P.M.

And Helga, who waited on table and answered door bells and washed up

bathroom floors and emptied trash baskets and helped the laundress

with the fluted pieces and sat up in the blue bedroom with the

women's wraps during dinners and evening receptions and loved so to

dance with the edge of her strength, knew too, but defiantly.

And that defiance created a servant problem.

Helga, who was shuddering now with tears, could not keep down her

voice.

"You give us dirty holes to live in and expect us to keep 'em pink

and perfumed like your boudoir. Some of the fine folks that come

here to dinner oughtta get a look up here ... they wouldn't have such

a good appetite."

"Helga, you vulgar, horrid girl. I won't be talked to so!"

"Yes, you will. I'm a working girl, but I got my spirit. There's

nothing right about the way the world's run nohow. Those that got

the drudgery to do get the hard beds to sleep on. Those whose bones

are rested from easy living get the soft beds--where's the right of

it, I ask you?"

"Helga, you rude girl, if you don't hush, I'll call my husband."

"Call him. If the men knew the way women treat women in this servant

game, maybe it would help us to get decent living conditions."

"Why, I never had a girl speak to me like this in my life. Every

waitress I ever had in my employ left me only to marry."

"Yah, what's the use changing? Doing one's dirty work is about the

same as doing the next one's."

"Helga!"

"You want us to keep clean, don't you? Like you. Well then, give us

decent rooms and enough time to keep ourselves clean in. Take some

of the show away from the front of the house and give your servants

rooms that are fit to live in."

"My servants' quarters are as good as any."

"Yes, and that's no good. I got a floatin' kidney I have, and I

won't lug bathin' water up two flights of stairs in six pitchers full

for nobody, not even myself. Yes, a floatin' kidney, in case it

ain't polite to have it in your society. Floatin' kidneys don't

happen to your friends. Well, let 'em lug heavy platters like I do

with their right side. Let 'em lug six pitchers of water--No siree,

I won't take cold for nobody, bathing myself in a cast-off old foot

tub that ain't as good as your poodle dog's, and the furnace heat not

even piped up to the fourth story."

"That's no excuse, we take cold showers."

"Yah, because your blood's so sluggish from doin' nothin' that you

got to do somethin' to get it goin'. We don't need to get our blood

to circulating. The rich folks like you keep it circulating for us."

"No self-respecting girl would sleep on----."

"You want me to keep a pretty bed, don't you? Well then, gimme a

decent one to lay on. You drag up here after all day and half the

night on your feet and see if it matters to you if you get into a bed

that's made or unmade. Nobody's got any pink satin covers turned

back for me. We're in luck up here if there's enough servants' linen

to give us a change once a month. When do you expect me to have time

to keep my room like a sachet bag, Mrs. Farley? The eighth day in

the week?"

"Look at Bertha, you rude girl. Immaculate. That proves how

slovenly and ungrateful----."

"Bertha! Aw, she ain't human. She's a dray horse that's so used to

pullin' she can't feel the harness. Bertha! The more work you pile

on her the less time it gives her to sit waiting for time to pass.

She's like a tomb, sitting hard on somethin' to hold it down. Hit

her on the bean and she'll sit there gazing at the stars and not feel

the hurt. I'm human. Bertha's a--hunk."

And Bertha standing at the foot of the back stairs holding her cheek

in a gesture of compassion, heard.

Helga did not leave. Later, Mrs. Farley, who dreaded the employment

agencies, was willing to be placated and Helga, shivering before the

prospect of a luggage laden pilgrimage through the icy streets,

shoved her hand trunk which she had started to pack, back under the

bed, her sobs still jerking in her throat.

***

A hunk. To be a hunk was to live deeply put away from the sadnesses

and the gladnesses in the round. To be a hunk was to carry a heart

the wonder of whose secret passageways made everything on the

outside, like Coney Island or quinsy sore throat, or Mrs. Farley or

twenty-nine-cent silk stockings, seem not to matter much.

Not to be a hunk was also to crave a great deal for the things on the

outside to matter much. To want so terribly, as Helga could, that

extra Thursday out or dancing slippers with red heels. To be able to

want dancing slippers with red heels, that was not to be a hunk!

All that day of the quarrel, while she washed down the kitchen

woodwork, prepared a clear broth and aspic for Rollo's luncheon, and

cleaned Helga's silver for her while she unpacked her things, she

rolled the word slowly over in her mind. A hunk.

To be a hunk was to carry the secret of the life fluttering at her

walls, without much discomfort. Somewhere, way back in the waste

lands of her consciousness, women had borne child by scarcely more

than pausing beside the plow. Bertha would bear that way, too.

Peasantly.

And so the marching days and the marching weeks and presently the

marching months and Bertha at lugging her bath water the two flights

up, eight times. Heaving coal buckets from the cellar to the kitchen

range. Four turkeys to be prepared for family dinner at Christmas,

her clutch fiery from tearing entrails. At New Year's a baby lamb

was sent from a Vermont Farley, and she drew it and quartered it and

hid a bit of its wool away up in the drawer with the chiffon opera

coat.

She made baby moccasins out of it without any great tenderness. The

pattern troubled her and her underlip hung down with the effort of

turning the tiny corners. But when they were finished one midnight,

and patted out on her knee, a decision, began slowly to harden.

Rollo must know.

Winter was on its last lap. April soon and Rollo must know of the

gift she was bearing. A fluttering of heart-beat at that.

Irrevocably her time was nearing. April soon.

For two months he had been away. Winter flew at his chest and the

first fury of a sleet storm had driven him to Florida. He was home

again now and the city snow packed into corners was getting porous,

and the family at a very private home dinner had enjoyed its first

mess of spring onions daubed in salt and Mrs. Farley, a bantam with

delight at Rollo's return, was constantly now, and unnecessarily, in

and out of the kitchen to sip of his soups, and upon one occasion

tiptoed out in black lace and aigrettes in her hair, to assure

herself that the tenderest portion of mushroom-under-glass was for

him.

Something slow and something vague was trembling in Bertha at each

sight of Mrs. Farley these days. She dropped pans at the mere

passing of her across the floor of the room above the kitchen, and on

the night that she swept in from her guests in the black lace and

aigrettes, startled, Bertha scalded her forearm in boiling duck

grease.

"Bertha, you clumsy girl! See that Mr. Rollo has this large portion

of the mushrooms. Dip your arm in flour and send the sauterne in

with the fish course."

A secret and booming multiplicity of fears. That tight circle of

faces in there around the dinner table. A closed circle through

which Helga and a hired butler slid in the alien hands of service.

Mr. Farley's face, as out of a Fifth Avenue club window, smugly.

Dowagers sitting broadly and fat with security. The polite face of

an explorer who had once killed his desert comrade for a water

flagon. A lean face impaled on two collar points and engraved in the

steel of the stock exchange. Another face soldered tightly into that

circle of the icy beauty of frugal lips, skin too white for the blood

to shadow, and hair drawn down like portières. Rollo's face with the

singing look of choir boy in it; poignancy of young down on his long

cheeks, lightening of his nervous nostrils.

Fear in Bertha as if the circle could somehow close in and throttle

her. It could make her tremble now, the solidarity of those

alternating black backs and white shoulders.

And then, with spring so perilously near, fear became puny in the

face of imminence.

One evening, long after the family was quiet and the kitchen range

cold, she sat and began to wait. There could be no more putting off.

Rollo must know.

A rare evening of the family early to bed, Helga at the Second Avenue

Dance, Hippodrome--Ladies Free, Rollo dining out. Bertha in the cold

and tidy kitchen, waiting. The octagon-faced wall clock with the

great separate ticks. The first generation of motor cars bleating

their way dimly through the jam of city traffic, out into which she

so seldom ventured. Tick. Tock.

About midnight she began to listen for the creak of wheels against

the curb. Rollo would come home in a hansom.

At one o'clock he arrived and she was already in the front hall when

his key began to twist in the lock.

Rollo must know, but it was as if she were bound and gagged to the

mast of a fast moving craft and could not find the power to cry out

to him when he passed--

"I bane waiting," she said on the top of the little noises he made

entering.

He could take on the blue white of china under fatigue, and his lips

were mauve.

"What the hell----"

She thought at first he was fuddled with wine, and then that it was

the start of seeing her there under the dim hall light. It was a

little of both. Wine went at Rollo with a rush. It befogged him,

but politely. It gave him a caution of movement and a manner. He

felt for the hatrack first, to be sure it was going to be where he

intended hanging his overcoat. He was grandiose, and his evening

shirt full of soft pools from the hall light. Very like a choir boy

with tears in his eyes and very, very careful. He hung up his high

hat so carefully that he caressed it. Not even the hansom driver had

glanced at him twice.

He looked at Bertha as he had always done--since, through a haze of

amazement and a little of the wryness of self-disgust.

He was conscious of a thickened-up fatty look to the center of her

face. He has seen it in moon-hoar and in the plushy darkness of

under an eave. A piggy little swollenness came out in this light,

and her hips curved out with a flatulence that berated him for having

been unfastidious. A great white cow. Uddery. Incredible. He must

have been drunk. Damnably.

Gad, what a mouth, like a catfish gagging on the hook. And yet there

had been a phosphorescence to her body whiteness up there under the

slanting roof. That moment of her in his arms, when suddenly they

were strong enough to hold her. The sullen booming of her

heartbeats, like some faint ocean rolling and tossing over its

treasures. Majestic dissonances. Aspidal choir of voices too remote

to be heard, except with the touch of her flesh singing against his.

_The Cathedral Under the Sea?_ To be sure, he had written it in the

frenzy of that dawn with the lay of that great latent body of hers

still along his.... That crouch of strength behind her silence....

But, ugh, great husky Swede! He must have been drunk--damnably.

"Bertha," he said, on the unwinding of his muffler and so casually

that his words were like so many careful little tin coins dropping,

"isn't it rather late for you to be about?"

The plating on his voice was something against which she suddenly

wanted to hurl herself, smashing through it to those depths of his

being to which she had the right now.

"I bane waiting--for you," she cried, and ran toward the stairs at

him as he placed his foot on the first step. "If you will please

come up--to me, I will tell you something only for you. Please----"

He stood caught, as it were, in the motion of mounting the stairs,

his hand softly white on the curve of banister between them. She

could have crushed her lips to it and kissed her secret down against

it, but she held herself trembling.

"If you will please, Mr. Farley--Rollo--come up to me--please----"

The lymphatic look of cow in her face. The string of gray wool scarf

harsh against her neck. He hated the thought of her chapped hands

unwinding it and catching on the wool with their briary surfaces.

Her buttoned-up waist, concealing her whiteness where he had seen it

one grape-colored night flow down into creamy hillocks of bosom,

spanning her now, too tightly across the bust. How idiotically,

nastily drunk he must have been.

"Mr. Rollo--come----"

"Shame," he said. "A great girl like you. You must be mad. Go to

bed."

She was choking and nailed to the mast of her inarticulateness, he

passed, and as he passed her, with his white hand riding up the

balustrade, she came down on it with her lips, arresting him so that

he jerked it back and shook it from him furiously as if a caterpillar

had crawled there.

"Mr. Rollo--you should know it. I am carrying ... your..."

"For God's sake," he cried, as if he could never have done shaking

his hand of her lip prints, "don't you ever do that again or you'll

have to go. Don't ever come near me. Bah. Here"--and from his

pocket tossed her down a bill and while she stood watching it flutter

he ran upstairs lightly. Then the sound of the key turning in his

door. Lightly.

And suddenly it seemed to her that the silence within her was red

banners and that she must scream them and tear them to shreds and she

ran up the stairs after him, a flight of heavy thumps that ended in a

stumble and, with her fists raised for a frenzied battering against

his closed door, she crumbled up suddenly of black vertigo, into a

heap there on the hall floor.

There was the bill he had fluttered at her, screwed somehow into her

palm and with the remnant of her rage and her strength she began to

tear at it with her teeth, worrying it like a terrier and spitting it

out in shreds.

***

Dawn found her waiting for it, crouched on her bed edge, where she

had sat five hours with her backache the shape of the stoop of her

spine. The dawns were still very cold. They could come creeping

across the house tops and lie wanly against her eyelids long before

Helga's alarm clock ripped open another day.

There were some shreds of bank note on the floor. She picked them up

and crammed them through the little hole in the pasteboard box that

served her as hair receiver. Her light yellow hair was falling out

in strands now, which she twined around her finger and poked away.

A flower stripping itself to divert the sap to the bud.

Three million dawns creeping over the sills of the vertical city.

Bertha's a lonely iced one that she watched come up like an enemy. A

thin dawn that magnified sound. The milkman crashing down four white

quarts in exchange for the four empty ones. Her heartbeats galloping

against her eardrums.

Rollo must know. Rollo must know.

It was hard to move, because she was stiff from the hours of sitting

in a curve away from the slant of ceiling, but at six o'clock she

must be downstairs to start the range and the servants' breakfast.

At seven, the three morning papers to be taken from the stoop. One

for Mr. Farley beside his breakfast plate in the morning room. One

on Mrs. Farley's breakfast tray beside her hothouse rose. One for

Rollo who did not breakfast at all, softly, outside his room door.

But this morning, his not to be delivered tiptoe as usual. To-day he

must know. A whole string of quick rappings, too low to be heard by

Mrs. Farley across the hall, but if need be, a rattling of the door

knob, and then through the first slit of the door opening, her toe

for a wedge, and in.

Oh, God, Rollo must know. Rollo must know.

What if Helga should notice? When Helga tittered it was like a mouse

running up your leg. And Mrs. Farley. She began to cry with the

sense of her growing hulk and fear. Cymbals of it crashing through

her! Fear of Mrs. Farley and yet she came bearing gifts in the flesh

of her flesh.

The tears lay to her cheeks and chapped there. She poured water into

her bowl, plunging handfuls against her face and drying on her gray

flannel petticoat. There were not always towels. After a while it

was half after five and she could venture down, softly to save the

creaks.

It was easier, somehow, waiting in the kitchen. Kindlier. But a

chill smote her when she took in the milk bottles so that she sat

down suddenly. The horridness of these mornings. The full-throated

kind of sickness that could turn her whiteness sea-green.

But only for an instant. There were the coals to be hauled up from

the cellar and the fire to be laid. The coffee mill locked in the

vise of her knees and set whirring at top speed. Bacon to be

parboiled and the servants' mess of warmed-over oatmeal softening its

crust in the double boiler. The ice pan to be heaved sink high and

emptied. Slops. Nibbled down asparagus ends smelling sourly down

into last night's casaba melon rinds.

At half past six Helga came down adjusting the criss-crosses of

organdie apron strips and tasting her lips as if they were bitter.

She was swollen and her lids granulated with sleep, and she coughed

with a certain pride in the depths of its croupiness.

She started her day tired. Bone tired. She could almost have gone

to sleep standing there, croupily coughing.

"You've got a cold, Helga. Shame. Running to the dance halls and

the gin parlors all night."

"What'll I do? Entertain the fellas in the drawing-room? She won't

even give 'em kitchen room. Helluva chance for a fella with insides

to him to want to cuddle a girl in the wintry breezes of Gramercy

Park. The gate to that's even locked against us. Where does a girl

get off, I'd like to know. It's either the gin parlors with them or

sneaking them up to bed with her."

"Here's your breakfast. It'll warm you."

"Fortheluvvaga, warmed-over oatmeal again. I can't swallow the

stuff. I wishtaga I could poke it down her throat, lumps and all,

and learn her that the Lord didn't line her stomach no different than

mine."

He lined stomachs and made the magnolia to bloom and He sat on a

throne drenched with Light. Sometimes it seemed to Bertha that a

little drench of the Light was on her.

Oh Lord. Lord. Rollo. Help me. Rollo must know. Help me to make

Rollo know.

"Fortheluvva. This oleo is strong enough to walk. Gimme a snack of

little Lord Fauntrollo's sweet butter, Bertha. This stuff don't

slide down me no easier than it would down him. Here Berth--where

you goin'?"

But it was striking seven and down the length of hallway Bertha was

already opening the front door. Grayness of Gramercy Park. Trees in

bare black and rheumatic twists. Fourth Avenue's lean, tall office

buildings already breathing down in packs upon the little square of

Park, wolfish to invade.

The morning papers in little huddle against the storm door. Three.

She carried Rollo's upstairs. It was very still outside his door.

It was as if, almost, the very door were saturated with a night of

his breathings. She could hurt it by twisting the knob. If she

rapped the panels might give a little under her knuckles, like flesh.

It was hard bracing herself for the string of quick low rappings, her

toe set for the wedge in the opening....

Imperative raps. Rollo must know. But her arm was too limp and the

tears kept running down into her mouth and splotched right down on to

his morning paper.

Rollo's paper. She wiped them off with her elbow. They had

spattered a picture. A woman's photograph looking up at her from the

first page of the morning paper. Long low portières of hair and a

head shaped as an egg would feel if it came whole out of your mouth.

"_Miss Veronica Stedman Neidringhouse, one of the past season's most

popular debutantes, whose engagement to H. Rollo Farley, the poet,

and only son of Mr. and Mrs. H. Freilinger Farley of Cramercy Park,

is announced. The wedding will be one of the events of early

summer._"

Suddenly the big silence standing stock still again. It was so hard

to feel, except dimly, and all the little tumults and the little

hopes and even the fears, were back now in their branches chirruping

in a sleepy sort of dusk. A dusk that was stunned. A dusk in which

a pain had died. It was good to be without pain and back in the dim

quiet.

The newspaper now to be folded squarely over the tear splotches and

left leaning so that when Rollo opened his door presently it would

fall toward. It was merely a chore again. Part of the day's mute

doing of mute things.

The oatmeal was scorching and her nostrils flared. It was

instinctive for her to start to rush down, which she did, catching

herself back by the balustrade.

Rollo must not know.

The morning was a grave and that moment outside his door a flower

upon it. Everything was so simple because it was so quiet. She

loved that, because it was the kind through which the chimes, if they

would, might come through, goldily again.

***

Upstairs it was still cold, and when she stooped to drag out her

outlandish carpetbag from under the bed, her breath was illuminated.

There was not much to pack. A suit of the man-size underwear to be

folded over bulkily. A pair of black buttoned shoes with scalloped

tops. The green chiffon coat and the oddments of crystal stars.

Balbriggan stockings.

Some sheet music that had come down to the kitchen from time to time

included with the colored supplement of the Sunday paper. It was

pleasant to ride with the eye along the ups and downs of the frozen

rhythm. Her piece of Bulgarian embroidery. The concertina. A large

greenish glass marble she had found once in a rubbish heap, a

beautiful spiral of candy stripe down its center. Quite a wad of

saved wages sewed into the pocket of a red flannel petticoat. Her

bit of tremor, _The Cathedral Under the Sea_.

Poor Bertha, her face could look out so cleanly and whitely and as

uncluttered as a nun's from the little three-cornered shawl she wore

sometimes against neuralgia when she sat out on the bit of back

porch. But in her slab of hat, with its trumped-up rose on a wire

stem, it became broader than long in a comedy squat.

Then her cloak. A discarded black Inverness cape of Mr. Farley's,

that she had bought back from the dealer who came semiannually, as he

was going out the kitchen way. A black broadcloth that boxed her in

squarely, the shoulders horizontal and two inches wider than her own.

There was a look of steerage about Bertha, who had never tasted the

sea except from Front Street. A bit of Old World flotsam flung into

New World jetsam and drifting along into fantastic amalgam.

On the other hand, Helga, who had actually come over in a ship little

larger than a trawl, bareheaded, shawled, and with a bundle of

strange foods wrapped in a Swedish newspaper, now wore high heels,

half-silk stockings, and a small hat so American that it completely

obliterated one eye.

There were no old sounds coming through to trouble Helga and hurt of

their imprisonment. Her heart was not a harp for them. Indeed, it

was good not to be a hunk.

Helga had learned to bunny-hug in the Hippodrome Dance Hall down on

Second Avenue, Ladies Free. Brilliantly lit egress from the long

hours and the bearing down kidney pains. Pomaded men whose hands

sweated through her shirtwaist danced there. She had gone to an

hotel with one of them, sneaking in and up the Farley back stairs at

five one morning with her shoes in her hand. He was a masseur in a

Broadway hotel. A Swedish girl she knew had forced one to marry her

that way. Frightening him with lies about a baby. Helga would go

with her masseur again. Maybe if she were lucky she would "get

caught." If not--if not, if one was clever like some, one could

frighten a man into marriage. Helga was tired; bone tired and wanted

a home. Oh yes, Helga had assimilated.

Her door was open as Bertha went out with her bag. Her bed unmade,

the sheets still in the writhe of her tangled sleep. The halls were

lighter now, the newspaper still leaning against Rollo's closed door.

Mrs. Farley by means of a pink enamel bell that hung over her bed was

ringing for her morning cup of hot water. Helga would pour it and

carry it up on a silver tray. Now was Bertha's time while Helga was

pouring.

It was rather strange going out through the front door and facing the

Park from the eminence of the stoop. She was accustomed to emerge

from the side entrance on a level with the sod.

It was six years and a half since she had changed places. Old dreads

came flowing back. The Hungarian with short thick stumps for fingers

who made her sign papers. Questions to be answered. Talk. New ways

for old. You sat like a piece of cattle in a little fenced-off pen

in the Intelligence Office. Waiting. Sometimes while you were being

inspected, very closely, needles came out all over you and stung.

Once a man had said laughingly to his wife, "Look at her teeth, too."

That same woman had taken her directly from the Intelligence Office

to her home. A handsome woman in a Persian lamb coat and lorgnettes,

and the apartment on Broadway and Fifty-third Street was fine and new

with a drawing-room hung in mulberry and light green. Apple orchards

in June. But the servant's room was in the basement and half the

floor covered with water that had backed from a drain. A kitten lay

drowned in it. At midnight, without having undressed, Bertha took

silent departure, traveling by elevated train down to the Front

Street rooming house where her foster mother and a Danish sailor sat

in a back room stewing in gin.

Old dreads. The lugging of the carpetbag into strange rear

entrances. Strange pots and pans and palates. A family of rich

Greeks on Madison Avenue had been kind, but the seasoning and the

swim of olive oil sickened her. New waitresses to be encountered.

They were a sniggering lot, often with filthy habits, such as drying

the tumblers on the hand-towel, or sneaking up a bit of French pastry

from the pantry to let it mould and draw vermin on a clothes closet

shelf. One of them had once stolen Bertha's purse with her month's

wages in it.

The thumbed-up old references to be dug up. And again drearily:

"Every other Thursday out, you understand? Things fumigated. Grown

daughter--no men in kitchen."

It was as if she had stepped out of the house into a swarm of these

stinging recollections.

The postman was coming up the stoop as she went down, and she had

almost to run and turn quickly to the east against Helga's imminent

answering to his ring.

It was dirty with old snow on Third avenue, but there was the smell

of melt in the air, and underneath the elevated structure the street

ran with mud the color and consistency of a chocolate sauce.

The city, shuddering in its perpetual nervous chill of trucks over

cobblestones, and elevated railroads, could always befuddle her.

To-day it spun around her like a plate on a juggler's stick. Blurs

of it.

Knut's Intelligence Office was on Second Avenue and First Street.

She turned toward it. But no--not now--dizzy--where--what now?

It was suddenly easier to walk four blocks and board a bobtailed

southbound car. A little sign swung over the motorman. Front Street.

***

Annie Wennerberg. For twenty-eight years she had lived near bilge

water in a street that wound back from the harbor as crookedly as a

sailor's stagger. She neither knew the sea nor loved it, but its

stench, with the salt tang strangely out of it, was in the hallways

of her lodging house and she tasted it in the beard of stokers who

kissed her when they were drunk enough. Drunk enough, because this

side of bestiality even stokers were fastidious of her soot-filled

pores and furious pockings. Tripe. There was that kind of

sponginess to the cheek of Annie Wennerberg.

But to men glutted with sea and half daft with the stare of sky,

there was land cheer in Annie's basement dining room, with the red

bows wrapped around the throats of the two china vases on a shelf and

where one could stew in gin slowly and warmly. Sailors could find

letters waiting for them there, too, on the hall rack. Sometimes

they were months, even years old, grimy with waiting and fantastic

with foreign stamps.

On those brief and intermittent occasions when she was out of work,

Bertha slept on a carpet-covered sofa in the basement kitchen.

Curious rather sinister nights of great clod-boots walking none too

evenly through the black uncarpeted halls. Sailor badinage in the

dining room..

One night, a ship's dishwasher off a big twin-screw trans-atlantic,

sleeping with five sailors in a second-story room set up such a

howling of delirium tremens that an ambulance, clanging into the lane

of Front Street, had borne him off finally, biting and wrestling with

two internes, a policeman, and Bertha.

Front Street, rancid with sea sculch. Sailors with red threads in

their eyeballs two hours after they had come ashore. The women in

dreadful finery who preyed upon them. Men of all yellows. Malay.

East Indian. Chinese. Javanese. Cooks. Stokers. Mates.

Stowaways.

It was fantastic down on Front Street, but not to Bertha who had

grown up in it. Annie, who breathed great gin-smelling bubbles when

she slept. Public schools where the cross-breeding of white skin and

slant eyes was frequent, and little boys and little girls knew

horrible lurking things. At eight, Bertha had worn a hat pin under

her waist against the bestiality of lodgers.

So when Bertha turned her face once more toward Front Street, she

knew why. Annie charged her fifteen cents the night on the

carpet-covered sofa. And no talk. Annie never cared enough to ask

questions. Besides, year by year now her hearing was failing and she

was usually pretty sleepy. Gin-soaked.

When Bertha arrived with her carpetbag, Annie was in the sort of

combination kitchen and keg-room, sucking up coffee out of a tin cup,

a bottle by.

"I bane outtava yob," said Bertha and showed her carpetbag under the

sofa.

"Fired?" asked Annie, who had not heard her.

"Quit."

"There's coffee," said Annie, who charged her five cents a cup and

rose out of the huddle of herself, to remove a lot of dirty-looking

rags from the sofa. A small exotic breed of South American monkey

leaped out of them and skittered across the floor, making a noise

like a boy running a stick along a picket fence.

An old Australian stoker off a fruit steamer who owned Annie, owned

him, too. In the act of picking off the rags and cleaning the sofa

of some of its debris, Annie suddenly began to limp, her hand back in

a plaster over the small of her back.

"There's ten cots to be made up this morning, Berthy. Three

freighters came in last night and they're sleeping all over

themselves upstairs. I'm breaking in two of the twinges, Berthy, and

ten cots to be made ... and the hallways, with me crippled up my

back, rotting of dirt."

Sly old Annie. There were chores to be had out of Bertha, gratis,

and she knew it. The last time between jobs, she had scrubbed three

flights of stairs, the roaches scurrying over her hands. Bertha did

not mind. It was easier than to sit and look at the furtive silence

of Annie's house. She did not drink and the men knew she would jab

them with hatpins.

"Hunky Dory," they called her, and "Milksop" and "Wench," and

occasionally when an uninitiated one sprang out on her from a dark

corner and with wet lips, she stabbed in deep and ruthlessly.

So usually in these intervals, she would work for Annie. Dirty

chores, with her skirts pinned back, her feet bare, and her great

white arms plunged to the elbow in dirty waters.

But not this time. "No, I bane going out," she said, stooping to

unclutch the hand of the little monkey from the hem of her skirt and

tossing him a small potato from a mound of them in the sink, "I got

to go."

Annie began to sop bread in her coffee, chewing it along her empty

gums. In her bloaty, befogged way she hated Bertha. Always had.

She had cuffed her constantly as a child and the burr of an old

couplet still clung:

Born of a dead mother

Secrets of the grave you'll utter.

Great silent clod of a Bertha, it was as if she were spreading her

skirts not to reveal the bones of eternities of dead men's

thoughts--lying bleaching on the fields of her silence.

"Slut," said Annie without glancing up from her cup. Annie's

toad-like words, sometimes they jumped out in her sleep.

Strange that they had never more than jounced off Bertha, although

all of her formative days had been lived in a hailstorm of them. Her

body was like a white fog, surrounding the imperviousness of her.

That, too, was why she could scrape drain holes to a sense of goldy

rhythm. That was why she could go out now, with a word like "slut"

hurled impenetrably at her back.

The sun was shining outside, and the air from the hay and feed store

next door, full of warm fertilizing smells.

She stood irresolute at the door watching the little dribbly life of

the street. A suit of men's jumpers dangling on a pole before the

Sailors' Supply Store flopped like a man on a gibbet. A marine came

out of a lean house and turned recklessly left. A few moments later

one of the women of dreadful finery came out of the same house and

turned cautiously right. A pair of handsome dray horses were led

from a stable down a wooden incline to the street and stood there

being harnessed. There were hoots from tugs and long-drawn whistles

that seemed to leave a trail of smoke across the morning.

After a while Bertha began to walk. Without destination. At Battery

Park where the city bows to the sea, she sat down on a bench. How it

beat, that ocean, even in the trapped harbor, over its treasures.

Bertha beating, too, over hers.

The day wore on. There were children shrilling up and down the

curves of granatoid walks and clumps of shawled women and bearded men

all very much concerned and fiery with foreign languages. A pier

house kept disgorging little emigrant tribes from Ellis Island, their

skins sun and wind beaten, and lugging, most of them, carpetbags.

Like Bertha's. The tired yield of tired countries.

At five o'clock it grew chilly and because her legs were growing numb

Bertha began to walk again, stopping at a caravan on wheels with a

short ladder leading up to it, to eat two sausage sandwiches, washing

them down with the East Side's favorite soft drink of celery tonic.

The streets were lighted by then and she began to walk again, on and

on. Poor streets made kindly by the glow from petty shops.

Bertha, who expected nothing, had lost nothing, and yet, in the

impotence of her dumb, hurting misery, she could have battered down

closed doors for relief, jabbed at her arms and body with jagged

stones, bitten down into her tongue, which she did and it bled.

It helped somehow to hurry along gaunt and boxed into her cape. To

hurry and to hurry--alone, in her silence spangled with tears.

It was long past midnight when she finally rounded again into Front

Street. There were drunks about, but no one molested her. On the

contrary, they reeled rather away. Her face, fatty white, like jade,

was so square, so riveted in its pain.

The hall was dead dark, a fitting lurchway for inflamed seamen.

There was a seam of light beneath the dining-room door and a silence

all corduroyed with snores. Annie and a Lithuanian sailor were

asleep in their chairs, two bottles between them, her head and tongue

lolling and he sleeping down into his beard. Sots. It was like

looking in on a nightmare. Annie with her empty gums and breathing

her bubbles.

It was dark in the kitchen, but without even benefit of the gas jet

which was hard to reach, or the candle in a bottle on the sink,

Bertha dragged the table across the door, barricading it and then

piled it with an additional chair. The monkey leaped off the couch

chittering, as fully dressed she lay down on it, spreading the

Inverness cape for coverlet. He was a nervous little thing and sat

huddling in a corner looking through the darkness at her with lit

eyes. Amber tunnels.

"Yockie," she whispered, glad for those two phosphorescent disks in

her darkness, "Yockie, yump up here." Finally he did, curling up in

the crook of her elbow for warmth.

She lay with him that way all night, until her arms went numb and her

fingers began to lose their sense of separateness.

But Jocko had ceased trembling and was asleep and to move would have

been to awaken him.

***

Weeks of sitting six hours a day, in the railed pens of this and that

employment agency, the wad of savings in her petticoat-pocket

flattening. Long hours of women hesitating sometimes very long over

her and then passing on.

One rather elderly matron in sealskin could not seem to get by her.

"You appear such a strong, clean European sort of girl. I'm sure

you'll do very nicely. No. No. I can't seem to quite decide.

I--well I don't know. I'll think it over."

A woman from Lexington Avenue dickered between Bertha and a Lettish

girl at great length, finally deciding in favor of the latter.

A housekeeper engaging a new staff of servants for a Fifth Avenue

menage hired her in one breath and changed her mind in the next.

Behind the fatted mask of her imperturbability, a fear smote Bertha.

The sisterhood's long nose of intuition was beginning to quiver at

the flanges.

Then one night down in Front Street, Annie, brewing herself a stew of

lamb neck and regarding Bertha, began to squint up slyly, a word that

was horrible hopping off her lips. Then Bertha knew for certain.

After all, it was to be expected. March had already turned the

corner. The eyes of the appraising women, focusing slightly, were

beginning to suspect. And now Annie, soaked old hex, but wise in

this from being a woman, dropping that hop-toad word.

"You bane one yourself," said Bertha back at her this time, trembling

in her boxed cape, turning and walking out of the house. Walking and

wanting again in her unassailed strength the relief of hurling down

doors and hacking at herself with stones for the relief of pain.

Rollo, help. Lord, drenched in Light, help.

Then again hours and hours of sitting in Battery Park watching the

harbor waves, like lips, running out to the horizon to tell sky.

Sky. The statue of Liberty pointing to it. Steamers hooting to it.

Street cars crawling under it. Grass pointing toward it. A swimming

sense of infinitude that drowned her finally into a state of quiet,

and her pain went out like a match.

One day in a Delancy Street employment agency she obtained a job.

Charwoman. Night work in one of those lower Broadway office

buildings that house by day a vertical city of four thousand

honeycombed, bumbling souls.

The woman with the drooping busts and machine stitched wig who

conducted the intelligence office, had been sly about it.

"Say, for who sees you at night, you don't got to worry. In such a

deserted office building like the Equitable, such a strong,

healthy-looking girl like you should keep such a job until the last

day."

Silent, tiled corridors, lavatories, elevators, and fire-proof stairs

to be swabbed. Nights fitful with these mopping char-women weaving

their long strokes through the long, long corridors. A battalion of

witches of Endor. Women with old pools of eyes that were gathering

scum. Crooked backs. Empty gums.

At nine o'clock they met with pails and mops, an army of the silent

dead flitting through corridors and gathering up the footsteps that

men leave after them. Ghouls preying upon the death of a day. At

dawn they faded out again. Grayly. Gray into gray.

To Bertha, mopping, mopping through these corridors of the night, it

was as if her scrub water, as it blackened, became alive with

vibrations. Nervous floors still beating with men's anxious

hastenings hither and thither. Whither? Squnching her mop in the

bucket, the water crowded up thirstily around her wrists, like a

mouth.

And then it was pleasant walking home before the city got its

stranglehold on the day. There was a graveyard in lovely and

impregnable tranquillity around Trinity Church, its silence louder

than the typhoon of men that raged about it all day. Sometimes

Bertha sat down against a headstone. Between two deaths. The little

death before life that she was carrying. The tired death after life

beneath the slabs.

Presently the death that Bertha had under her heart would be born

into life. The little life of a little death. And under the slabs

the death of a life. Life of death. Death of life. A cycle of

perceptions twirling slowly in her consciousness. Not thoughts, just

a slow kind of dizziness.

She dozed a great deal. Against the headstones. In parks. On the

carpet-sofa in Annie's kitchen. Waiting. It was good to be working

nights and rid of the fear of the sailor-infested darkness of Front

Street. Days, with Annie bickering about, no matter how gin-soaked,

there was more security to lying stretched out on the carpet sofa

under the Inverness cape, Jocko trembling to her for warmth.

One night, swabbing up a tenth floor corridor of the Equitable

Building, a pain smote at Bertha that caused her to cry out and

clutch at herself, as if someone were trying to shove her off the top

of a skyscraper. A leap of forked lightning that went through her

like a jagged grin of steel....

Twenty minutes later in the ambulance on her way to city hospital,

her baby was born. Painlessly. So without labor that the internes

joked and told about it at experience clinics.

A son. The music of the chimes goldily tranced in his eyes. Tranced

there, like the candy strip down the glass marble in her carpetbag.

***

When Bertha's boy was two and one half weeks old she signed him away,

sprawlingly, as she would write, "prepared flour" and trying, with

her left fingers about right wrist, to keep her hand to the dotted

line.

A lawyer with a brief case on the desk beside her sucked up with a

blotter the symbol of her deed. Ellen Dike Bixby. John Kendall

Bixby, Detroit, Michigan, added their respective signatures. A nurse

from Bertha's ward stood by and signed as witness. The champ of a

seal. More blotting.

"There," said the lawyer passing around the folded documents and

beginning to buckle up his brief case. "That's that."

He was like a clamp on a coffin lid and Bertha wanted to cry out

against him, but she only stood very still holding her document.

"Well, my girl, what you have done is very sensible. You are not in

a position to provide properly for the boy and you are placing him in

the hands of two very splendid and trustworthy people, who by legal

adoption have just now become his parents. You are a very fortunate

girl. Mr. and Mrs. Bixby can give him the refinements and the

opportunities of a beautiful home and the best of educational

advantages. So my girl, instead of feeling unhappy, you should

regard yourself as the object of congratulations."

Her throat hurt from holding down moans. There were little red glass

mulberries on Mrs. Bixby's hat. Such a pretty hat and her face was

plumpish and fresh, and her hand constantly in sympathy on Bertha's.

"We will be father and mother to him, dear. He will never know the

difference. You see this--to-day is the fifth anniversary of our--of

our little one being taken from us. That's why your little

one--ours--his beauty is so like--like--our--little boy's--was--"

"Go. Go," cried the moans in Bertha's throat, caught there like a

log jam, "Go. Go."

Mr. Bixby had short clipped hair and carried a well-brushed derby hat

and wore a tiny Masonic emblem on his lapel.

"Good-by," he said, and "Thank you and God bless you."

"Umph," said the lawyer and followed them out.

Then the moans came. Terribly. Once a dog, run over by a truck in

Front Street, had moaned like that. The unwetted sobbings of one who

does not know how to cry.

The little nurse who was left alone with her was kind and soothed her

with chirruping noises, and poured some spirits of ammonia into a

glass of water, which Bertha drank at a gulp and then smarted with

tears. But she could not stop moaning and shivering, and kept

sitting and clinging to her corner like a dumb animal that had been

hurt.

Finally a young interne was sent for and he came in and gave her

something brown and bitter, and although she had been discharged from

the ward that day, between him and the nurse they led her back,

chattering and shivering and shuddering, little streaks of foam out

along her lips.

The nurse was very young and the interne, too, and Bertha's kind of

story was very old, and so they did the properly sedative things, but

their eyes kept curving around the dull reality of their charge for

the wonder of one another.

All night in her bed in the ward Bertha lay shivering and huddling

like the dumb thing that had been hurt. Then they washed a little

spot on her arm with cotton and jabbed a needle in. There was no

pain but after a time she lay back....

Wonder of Bertha. The hems of her skirts were sour with bilge water

and she had been forced to hold her right wrist with her left fingers

in order to sprawl her name half legibly on the dotted line ... but

The Cathedral Under the Sea was of her and yet not hers. And

now--her son, choir-faced, with the wisps of old music that were so

lovely to her, tranced in his eyes--was of her and yet not hers--of

her and yet not hers--.

***

Days with the old flow to them.

Odds and ends of jobs. For months she resumed the night work in the

Equitable Building, but the crones were all sly-eyed when she

returned and her finger tips began to split painfully. Besides, the

days at Annie's were becoming not only intolerable but impossible for

sleep, with Jocko chittering and skithering from keg to chair and

Annie in a hunch beside the table and mumbling constantly into her

cup.

When she had saved ten dollars she started in at the agencies again.

The rows of mornings in the rows of chairs. At Raussman's

Intelligence Office on Fourth Avenue, they began to favor Bertha,

handing her out addresses and placing her in a conspicuous chair near

the railing. She changed places so frequently and the more she

shifted about, of course, the more she yielded in commissions. On

again. Off again.

At kitchen work in a Broadway lunch room, they put her at washing

dishes, but the first hour she was dismissed by the proprietor who

followed her to the door with his toes fairly lapping her heels.

"Washin' the dishes in two waters. You're a fine square-head, you

are. Who do you think I'm in business for? The public's health or

mine--you get the hell out of here--"

It was all a part of the day. Her broad back without a quiver to it.

Like Annie's words, they jounced off and fell at her feet like dead

leaves, through which she walked, as if in the forests of her inner

tranquillity.

At another of these eating places the kitchens were small and

Bertha's bulk so dominant that she created a sort of pixie

psychology. Waitresses, by contrast made gay and delightfully aware

of their slim flanks, slid under her arms, giggling. One little one

stood behind Bertha and called, "Find me." She was like some huge

impervious Golem, all the pixies running up her knees and arms to

play and pinch and poke in her eyeballs.

After a week she left.

Then she began to hold out for domestic service, sitting stiffly

averted against demands for restaurant help or char work.

The elder daughter in a private family of six took her home one day

in an automobile, to a rococo brownstone front in West Fifty-third

Street. There was brook trout _au meunière_ for the family luncheon

that noon, but the canned salmon, which she had been obliged to

pinken up with soda for the servants' meal, poisoned the crew of

them, and Bertha, wretched from her own illness, was the first to

pack up her bag and depart.

In a cream-colored renaissance home of stone lace and gargoyles in

East Sixty-first Street the bed she was forced to share with the

waitress was a three-quarter one and the waitress herself a large

south of Ireland girl, with a scrofula running up her leg that was

frightening.

Secret places of the household, these, that were never aired along

with servants' bedding or the servant problem.

Two old gentlewomen with frail hands and cameo brooches and a house

in Nineteenth Street that breathed dampness like a cave, asked all

their questions simultaneously and engaged her in a breathless duet.

It had been a large household once and there were rooms with

workbaskets left open with the bit of colored embroidery half out of

it, just as a beloved daughter had left it when her last illness

tapped her on the shoulder; a half-written letter on a desk that a

brother's death had interrupted. A home full of the reminders of the

casualness of life. It was more like a half-way house. Some one had

paused there to do a bit of colored embroidery. A child dancing

through the interval between its birth in the south chamber and its

death there, had left a muslin doll on the floor with its arm stuck

grotesquely up. It was like walking between the slabs of Trinity.

Grotesque stick-ups where there had been a life.

One night up in her room next to where the winter potatoes were

stored, a thought smote Bertha that sent her bounding up from her cot

and barefoot over the splintery floor to the window. Sure enough,

there through the leaded pane, the spire to the Farley house in

Gramercy Park was plainly visible. Pointing! There was no window

shade, so she pinned her flannel petticoat across the glass. But all

night through the flannel and her closed lids, the spire kept

pointing. Pointing.

At dawn she laid the fires for the old ladies and left.

Raussman's again. Two weeks of sitting there through the sullen

mornings of inspection. There were only coins left in her petticoat

pocket, that rattled softly when she moved. Bertha hated hunger.

She could sleep on the carpet sofa at Annie's and poke through drain

pipes without much nausea, but hunger slashed through her bulk like

the blades of a great machine. Foregoing the morning cup of

five-cent coffee at Annie's was an economy, but it made the day wavy.

It rose up on all sides of her and sometimes towards noon she dozed

with its motion and old man Raussman had to yank at her cape.

"Wake up. We ain't got no calls for sleeping beauties."

But one day he handed out a Riverside Drive address to her on a dirty

slip of paper. "Musliner. Two in family. Cook."

Mr. Musliner, a two-weeks-old bridegroom, interviewed her in the

kitchen and engaged her without parley.

***

It was pleasant at the Musliners. A bride had furnished it. Creamy

light of new woodwork and pale paneled walls. An oval drawing-room

in the fragile mood of Fragonard. Dining room in marquetry and the

panel above the mantelpiece another bow to Fragonard. A pair of

solid gold Adam urns. Grapes in December. Crystal chandeliers

tittering with light.

An entire corridor of little nonsense bedrooms in a hush of rose

taffetas and Canet beds _bouffant_ with _point d'esprit_. Mrs.

Musliner's was a shell that curved her to it as if she were a pearl.

She awoke that way, a lovely pink one in its heart, with the laces

creaming about her. Mr. Musliner's, next to, but not adjoining hers,

was in the same mood _mousse_, except with certain sterner

concessions. No frothings. His bed cover was a pale gold brocade

with a large diamond-shaped monogram in the center. Chiffonier

mirror adjusted to his shaving line. An old-fashioned leather collar

box, which sometimes crept out of a top drawer of certain of his

cherished bachelor possessions, along with a smelly old pipe that

violated the pale brocade scarf.

Mrs. Musliner would tuck them out of sight, her lips shuddering

slightly as if her teeth were on edge. They could lift back like

that frequently on those very rare occasions when she permitted

herself to be alone. They were very, very rare. Always guests.

Luncheon. Tea. Dinner guests in candle-and-flower-lit circle around

lace over pink. Week-end guests, who nested in the little frilled

rooms off the corridors and, night after night, some girl friend or

other to share the lovely lace mist of Mrs. Musliner's bed.

Even Bertha's room, directly off the kitchen and facing a court

darkly, could look sunny with the strip of new chintz on her

washstand and a blue cotton bed cover with fringe. The housemaid and

the waitress, sisters, had their room at the top of the apartment

house.

It was warm in Bertha's room and she liked to sit in it evenings,

barefoot and wide-kneed in the dark, with the door leading to the

kitchen left open, its fine white porcelain refrigerator like a dim

smile across the silence.

But a dim unvibrant sort of silence now, as if she were seated in the

vacuum of a closed bell. All the little jeweled sands had run away.

Sometimes she looked at them in the little islands of words that were

margined so wide; fingering the leaves of her hurt bird of a book,

which she kept wrapped away in the green chiffon cloak.

And the wisps of old sound. She had seen them, too, but not in the

book. Tranced in her baby's eyes like the candy stripe down the

center of the crystal.

To the pain of that empty cove of her arm where the small head had

lain she had done horrid, unmentionable things. Sunk her teeth into

the yearning flesh of it, leaving an inflamed crescent the shape of

her bite. Rubbed one bare foot up and down against the other leg

until the skin came off like erased blotting paper. Prayed to an

inchoate God which she scarcely knew, except as a curse word upon

Annie's lips. A hurt, beautiful word that could smoke in her heart.

But now the silences had come back. Not the old singing ones that

had been vibrant as a black cat's arched flank. The merer silence of

the inside of a bell.

And in this silence she was like a wound healing, the little line of

the scar shirring up.

The Musliners were kind.

He did the ordering and was more frequently in the kitchen than she,

who danced in only upon the gay occasion of candy pullings and every

so often for the excited unwrapping of belated and excelsior-bound

wedding gifts.

Shortly after he left in the morning, deliveries began. Great T-bone

beefsteaks. Braces of wild fowl packed in hampers. Grapes in

December wadded in cotton. Foreign-looking tins of caviar. Marron

glace. Chinese ginger. And especially for Mrs. Musliner, who loved

littlenesses, plover eggs and palm-sized squabs with bones like

toothpicks.

Once, that first winter of their marriage he brought her home, all

cotton-wrapped in an enormous carton, an entire miniature farmyard

made out of marzipan for the centerpiece that night at her birthday

dinner.

She was like a child and bit off the head of a lamb with a squeak of

delight. He tried to kiss her there at the unwrapping of it, because

in her pink pearl kind of loveliness she was a phantom of delight to

him. But she had a way of evading his wetted lips and their

background of brown face, with a steely strength that the moment

could seem to lend her.

Once when there had been only one week-end house guest and he had

gone to his room, Bertha had seen Musliner softly knocking at his

wife's door. Almost scratching like a dog.

"Erna." he whispered in the caressing way his brown lips had of

saying her name, "Erna." As if the word were a puff of down.

"Dearest. Please?" It was very quiet in the hall and her closed door

like a tongue out at him.

Something like an ache for Musliner smote Bertha. He was so kind.

Often in the fruit hampers was a bag of sweets tucked away for the

servants and on Bertha's every other Thursday out, a dollar bill was

left lying for her on the kitchen table. He was sensitive, too, in a

way that hurt Bertha dimly. Once when she had inadvertently stumbled

upon him, seated alone in the dining room with his head in his hands,

he had jumped up redly, giving her a random order with a brusqueness

not his....

He would have jumped redly, too, had he seen Bertha seeing him as he

knocked and tried the door softly.

"Erna--dear. You asleep? It's Ben. Please. Dear? I want to come

in."

Finally he went back to his room, closing the door.

Bertha somehow, knew.

Doors. The long corridors of her silence were all nicked up with the

sounds of them, closing.

One day, when May like a shy pink parasol was beginning to open wide

and wider over the city, a lovely thing happened to Bertha.

The Musliners gave a picnic. Thirty guests climbed gleefully into a

moving van especially upholstered in gay cretonnes for the occasion

and rode fifteen miles up the Hudson to a grove, recently acquired by

Mr. Musliner as an anniversary gift to his wife.

There were hampers of food and freezers of cream and cases of drinks

and dozens of lemons and all the flimsy paper napkin and wooden plate

paraphernalia dear to picnickers. Hundreds of sandwiches. Pails of

salad. Cakes of every turn known to Bertha's hand. For two days

Bertha and Julie the waitress and Lulu the housemaid buttered and

sliced and wrapped in oiled paper and packed.

A set of white enameled picnic dishes arrived which Mrs. Musliner

rejected as "spoiling the fun." Apples were dipped into syrup and

impaled upon sticks. Boxes of marshmallows for toasting. Potatoes

for roasting. Hammocks were packed into the van and an old

upholstered couch upon which Mrs. Musliner reclined, once they had

reached the open road, her guests in mock homage about her.

Bertha and Julie rode in front with the driver. How they chattered!

Julie was a dark, nervous girl. Rather pretty in her waitress

uniform, but sagged and run-down-looking in street clothes. She had

been married once and upon the slightest provocation would display a

scar across her neck to indicate where a jealous husband had

attempted to cut her throat. When the driver saw it he tried to kiss

her there and she lurched against Bertha and Bertha lurched against

the side of the van and the open road rang with laughter. Julie's.

The driver's. And the rising merriment of the group behind.

Bertha's laughter, too.

The day was so soft. Warmth ran up her legs. The driver reached

around Julie's shoulder to pinch her and she reached across Julie's

lap to slap him--plump in the stomach, so that he simulated pain,

while really he was doubled up with guffawing.

From inside the van someone spied an organ grinder toiling up the

road.

"An organ grinder! Come on in. Hey--you--stop. Come on in. Mucha

mon! Comma to picnic. Mucha mon. See. Play for the queen on the

dais. Come up--in."

And so the lifted, bewildered Italian dragged merrily into the van

and the horse flecked onward with a whip that flashed into an S.

The river ran ahead to show them the road. Bertha had never seen a

river. This one was quick and gay and on its way somewhere. Not

full of lips like the harbor.

On its way to the grove. On its way to the grove.

"Looka," cried Julie, "all them rusty tin cans down by the water.

Some tin can sports musta passed this way."

"Oh. Oh. Oh." Julie holding both her sides with laughter and the

driver letting his lines slide to lean over and hold them for her,

too.

"Look at that Bo over there in the field," he cried, cracking the S

with his whip, "that ain't a nose on him--somebody fired a ripe

tomater and it stuck."

"Oh la, la! Ripe tomater. Ain't he bloody? A ripe tomater. Go

tell that to your rich uncle if his laughs don't come easy."

"Well, Square-head, it's your looka now. Looka now. Looka there.

Looka quick, and tell us what you see--"

"He says, 'Looka quick, Bertha.' Come outta your trance and look!

Whadda you see? Look about you. Looka here. Looka there."

"Looka, looka," cried Bertha half daft with the lush smell of grass

and of warmth, "looka those clouds--white--white clouds--little

children up there--see--falling outta bed--"

"Oh Lord, that's a good one! Giddy ap, you gol-darn plugs

you--little children falling outta bed.

Oh lud, it's great to be crazy,

It's great to be crazy,

Oh lud, it's great, oh it's great to be nuts.

And then Julie taking up the refrain.

"Oh lud, it's great, oh it's great, to be nuts.

***

The Grove ran out in a point to the river and would not let it pass,

so the water went around it with a soft hiss. One tree grew almost

horizontal and laughed down at it.

Little Mrs. Musliner, with her blouse open at the throat and

whortleberry leaves in her hair, jumped astride it and beat it as if

it had been a horse.

"Giddy-app--my trusty steed--swim me across the Hellespont!"

Bertha, tilting the salt water out of the ice cream freezer, stood

almost waiting for the plunge and the sound of foam and the arrowhead

line of the water parting before the tree stump whose leaves were a

flowing mane.

A Young Fellow who dined frequently at the house snatched up a fruit

knife from one of the hampers, clamped the blade between his teeth,

and flew on the tree trunk behind her, balancing her against the

shock with his hands on her light young hips, and the guests stood

back and cheered.

"If I was little Musliner, I'd wipe up the floor with that young

customer," said Julie, who was squeezing lemons.

"What?" said Bertha.

"Aw--you--hunky--you don't know you're on earth unless somebody

stages an earthquake under you."

Suddenly Musliner came running down the turf, straddling the tree

trunk, too, his little legs waving and too short even to dangle

loosely.

"We're off," he shouted and dug with his knees into the spongy bark.

"Three's a crowd," sang somebody. "Who has the grace to stay home

from the Hellespont?"

"Why I have," cried the Young Fellow, bounding off, and the red

scorching through his fine tan.

"Now," cried Mr. Musliner, wriggling forward with his short fat

knees, his hands coming down on the curve of his wife's slim young

hips--"Now--we're off--alone!"

But suddenly Mrs. Musliner was tired. She climbed down jerking back

from his touch. The wind and the May had gone out of her face.

"Come on," she said, "let us eat."

***

The meal was already spread on long wooden planks set up on wooden

braces, but someone found a natural table of dog violets set out

beside a little orchestra of waterfall and with great ado and much

merriment the feast was moved up the hillside.

Under her breath Julie bitterly demurred. The climb was rocky and

the running back and forth, from the hampers in the van to the remote

spot on the knoll, twisted her ankles and strained her back and once,

scaling the top, she fell and barked her shin and passed sandwiches

over gay shoulders with her eyelids stung with the heat of the

held-back tears.

But Bertha! With one heft of her arm she carried a case of wine,

running with it lightly over the knoll. The dance up and the dance

down. Ice cream freezers to be rolled up hill. She shoved aside the

assistance of the driver and spun them in an ecstasy along the dark,

damp flesh of earth. Rocks bit in through her shoes and she wanted

to kick them off, so that her freed toes might bite them back.

Rivers of strength seemed pressing at the dam of her body. She

wanted the knoll to be a mountain that she might stagger, slip, and

sweat up its flank, and the hampers to be kegs with the weight to

bend her double.

The old Slav song of the women far behind her, who had worn the runic

brooch, was so close to her consciousness that she wanted to sing it

as she mounted the hill. The muted old concertina in her carpetbag,

from dear knows what ancestral squatter in a peasant hut---she could

have played it then; squeezed some of the locked-up ecstasies through

it. She wanted to run. Feet were not mute--they tasted the sap of

earth and bounded back vibrant with it as if they had drunk wine.

The hillside. It cut her. It skinned her shoes and on the inside

her toes curled, pushed against her stockings, and wanted out.

The wine ran in little pools. The Young Fellow, with his fingers for

Pan's pipes, did an oafish dance around the table that was spread

with wood violets. Someone tossed a great platter of the sandwiches

high up and let them rain down again, splattering and scattering.

Mrs. Musliner sucked at a candied apple and shot out her little red

bib of a tongue at everybody, but longest and reddest to the Young

Fellow, who touched the top of it with his forefinger and then

pressed that forefinger behind his ear.

The sun, hot and high and prodigal, made great stains of light and

shade. After a while groups and pairs began to shy off. One dark

youth in eyeglasses stretched himself solemnly down the length of the

table of dog violets, an empty wine bottle very tight in his clutch,

and almost immediately fell asleep. Mrs. Musliner, side-stepping him

gingerly, stuck a lilac spray upright between his teeth, so that it

waved there to the tipsy wind of his breath. Then she and the Young

Fellow squealing delight at this danced off down a footpath that

turned suddenly and wiggled teasingly through some underbrush.

Even Julie and the driver had gone off and the organ-grinder lay

asleep in a tree hollow with his body all up in a coil.

It was pleasant tiptoeing over the violets and wadding all the paper

napkins up in a ball, and poking them out of sight in a hamper and

stacking the wooden plates and scattering the crumbs and running up

and down the knoll and clearing the forest back into its woodland

quiet, so that the tinkle of the waterfall came through again and,

except for those caught under the sleeping figure with the lilac

spray waving in his breath, all the little violets lifted themselves

up again as if after a storm.

Once, rolling an empty freezer down a steeper side of the knoll, she

came upon Musliner, seated at the head of the trail that wiggled so

naughtily off through some underbrush, and chewing a blade of grass.

"Well, Bertha, we seem to be the sole survivers of the party."

"Oh, Mr. Musliner, it's grand."

"Grand." A word as lonesome as a mountain and she wanted to tell him

warmly about the lovely, green-lace grove of his and of the Slav song

that ran along her throat wanting out, just as her feet running over

the warm earth in their bluchers wanted out. "Grand." She could

have bitten her tongue for some of its blood to flow into and warm

what she wanted to say, but all that she had was "grand" and so she

stood saying it and smiling at him with the lips which she hated

because they were mutes.

"You're a good girl, Bertha," he said, looking at her with eyes that

were hurt as if they had spikes through them, "you don't run off and

shirk the job like Julie. Here."

He handed her a silver dollar. She took it and should have gone on

trundling her ice cream freezer down the hillside toward the van, but

somehow she didn't. She stood there, looking and wetting at her lips.

"Well?" he said. He was half seated on a tree stump, one leg

dangling, and chewing and chewing the blade of grass along his front

teeth.

Her gaze kept darting from him to down the little snake of trail and

her throat kept tightening. She knew. He had worked very hard over

this day. Her day. It lay now in a ruin around him, as he sat there

chewing the grass blade his brown lips twisted as if it were bitter.

In the tree hollow the organ grinder slept in his tight little coil.

Bertha trundling the ice cream freezer down the hill. Otherwise no

one left back. Not even Julie and the driver. Little bells of

laughter through the trees. Bertha somehow didn't matter. For the

life of him he could not keep his eyes, as if they were wounded in

his head, from rolling a little toward that trail.

"I'll bring you a candied apple," she said.

She wanted him to be surly. It would have been easier then, for her

not to be sorry, but he smiled and nodded no, and all she could think

of to say through the ache in her throat was:

"There is an ice cream rooster left over and some Burgundy. You

would like a nice cool glass of Burgundy?"

"No, Bertha," he said, "thank you, now you run along and clear up and

don't you bother about me." But his eyes were traveling down the

trail with hers, and finally he rose and came over to her, looking up

at her from his squatness and with the brownish whites to his eyes

very prominent.

"She's very young, Bertha," he said. "We must help her."

"I--want to--"

"Help her, Bertha. Never let her do anything that will make her

unhappy. She is too young to see clearly ahead--you are a

home-body--watch over her, Bertha--mother her."

Mother, That was a word that could twist her and make her want to

bite at the cove of her arm, and yet, standing there on the hillside,

hurting with this man's pain, it was as if something within her were

spreading to cover a huddler. Actually, Bertha was two months

younger than Mrs. Musliner, but so strangely older in the locked-up

lore of the dim procession that peopled her silences!

Back in that procession, a young fledgling who walked in beauty and

whose Sonatas had not yet been born, but whose melodies were to wind

down through the centuries, had pursued a girl with flax-colored

braids like Bertha's, across a plushy field in south of Hungary,

capturing her finally and kissing her. At first she beat him off and

then, because his lips were rich and his young head defiant, like a

child's, it was she who held him. Broodily and close to her heart in

the harvest moonlight ... at dawn he was still singing softly to a

great-great-grandmother of Bertha, troubled wisps of melodies that

were not quite born to him yet--precious, groping old songs that were

locked now in the heart of Bertha. Old Bertha, who was two months

younger than Mrs. Musliner.

***

The sunlight bowed back out of the grove and the couples and groups

came back tiredly and happily and hungrily out of the dusk. The

driver built a bonfire and the Young Fellow unpacked the marshmallows

and Bertha, with the water singing over her hands, washed the

potatoes for roasting at the spring, and a full moon as dainty as an

apricot came up between two trees.

Firelight on faces. Eager mouths with the teeth showing, hovering

over just the right brownness of marshmallow. Low laughter. The

grove crowding up around the circle of light. Mrs. Musliner, with

her face in her palms and the reflected firelight leaping and falling

in her eyes which had crybaby rims around them. The smell of

darkness and the bleed of sap. Leaves, curling and burning to death

with gestures of human pain. Over by the spring it was so dark that

it seemed to Bertha that the evening was some great black cow

standing there beside her panting softly, so that she could feel its

sides breathe. Sweet-smelling darkness with a give to it like a

cow's flank. The earth beside the spring was all wet with clear

water and leaning over to rinse potatoes, she could feel the little

sucks, greedily at her feet.

Warm, pulling, sucking earth that had teased her all day and over

which her feet wanted to leap, free!

And then Bertha sat down, slyly, on a moss-tinged jut of rock, and

picked up her skirts, and down came her great balbriggan stockings,

wide-ribbed and the color of clay, and out sprang her legs. White

urns in the gloom. The rip open of buttons. Little yawns of her

empty shoes standing there on a dirt ledge. Squnch, into the slow

pour of the good black mud that closed up around her ankles like a

strong and hungry mouth.

Squnch. Squnch. Squirm of the pouring soil up between her churning,

spatulate toes. She could feel it with the very pit of her. Warm.

Black. Close. Her mysterious friend, the soil, whispering to her

with those tight eager lips--it was difficult not to throw out her

arms and shout--tear open her bulk of blouse where it cluttered her

breast and shout--the curling, winding, whispering, kissing soil

hugging her with its eager lips--she wanted to run--to run back

barefoot along the plushy fields.

The organ grinder, dazed with good food and drink, began suddenly to

grind out, in rapid spill from his hurdy gurdy, a folk song out of

Ukrainia.

High cheek bones and velvet bodices that laced up in front. Red

cotton skirts that twirled. Men in high boots and tight red sashes

and fine mustachios that scratched! Sweat in hovels. Long low

rafters, candlelight-scarred. Quivering hips. Waving mugs. Low of

bulls and slow, hot smell of steaming dung heaps. Sweat and love and

courage of solitary childbirth on wide moors. Strength of splayed

Slav lips! Yeow, the ring of rafters! Yeow, the splayed Slav lips!

Bertha with her arms outspread and a yeow that landed her squat on

her heels out on a spot of turf that was stained with the firelight!

"Hurra! Look! Who is this? The cook! That's the girl. Give us a

dance. Native heath, by Jove. Look at your Swede, Muzz, spinning a

goulash fandangle. Bravo, go to it--Yuiop-- I say!"

***

Spinning tarantellas with broad white toe for pivot. Swaying hip

rhythm, eyes slits, like wise smiling old buttonholes. Hands broad

on haunches and little bulge of bacchanalian belly--Yeow--squat heels

deep in turf, arms flung wade and half wrenched from sockets! Leg

out from under. Yeow--up again on toe pivot--spin--spin--laughter

over wild moors--sweat in hovels--hot male hands on square-hipped

girls--scratch of mustachios against laughing, square-teethed

women--crones with the soil ground into their wrinkles. Sing,

peasant, sing, and swing the grinning scythe! Sing of the strong

fertilizing soil and the dung heaps that steam and the crones that

are wise with old lore and the women who love, and who bear, and who

weep, and the wide-legged men with the necks like tree boles.

Sing--Yeow--of meat and of soil and of strength and of love--sing

Yeow! Yeow! Yeow!

The hurdy-gurdy suddenly silent--Bertha with her arms flung wide and

half wrenched from their sockets. Toes in the soil. Hair down. Her

bosom where the waist had fallen open gleaming and high.

***

Going home through the languid night it was Bertha who sat next to

the driver, his knee slyly digging up against hers which she flung

angrily back.

"Big girl. Good girl." He kept saying over and over again under his

breath without moving his lips.

She felt the tail of his glance slide over her bosom where the waist

had fallen open and she clutched it closed and kept edging toward

Julie, who was sullen.

"Before I'd dance for pennies, like a dago's monkey. What's the

idea, giving a free show without an invite? I know my place, I do.

They'd have showed you yours, if they wasn't all boozy as boiled

owls. Listen to them now. I'm a self-respecting girl. I know my

place. I don't dance for pennies. That dance was a give-away. You

musta been born in a cow house where they dance all night and then

grab up their pails and start to milking. That's old country

dancing. I'm American. I know my place."

"What did I--do--Julie?"

"What did you do? Say, was it as bad as that? You musta had some

inside information on the Burgundy. Made a holy show of yourself,

that's what you did."

All the way home, edging away from the driver's horrid knee, the

question kept spinning inside her brain, "What did I do? What?

What?"

She felt so empty. As if all the strength had run out through her

fingers and toes. A flask that had been drained of wine, that for

years and years had been beating against its sides.

***

One evening in a winter that roared with blizzard, and snowstorms

like plunging white buffaloes leaped before city traffic, there were

dinner covers for eight at the Musliners, but no guests. Automobile

wheels ground futilely in the hub-high ruts. Surface cars, shaggy

with storm, stalled in their tracks. The streets slept standing,

like horses.

In spite of Bertha skimming each new grease film off of the foods,

dinner began to cloy, the entrée of creamed mushrooms darkening, the

patty cases sagging as they waited.

With fever spots in her cheeks, Mrs. Musliner, in a bower of the

tulle that her dress formed around her, kept rattling at the

telephone, her urgent forefinger frantically up and down at it, but

the wires were under the storm and only snow-hush came through.

"Central--you must answer--it's urgent--you must--hello--"

In his dinner clothes and very brown above the white of his shirt

front, Mr. Musliner chided her in a little good-humored way he had.

"Well, little Snow White, it looks for once as if you must have

dinner all alone with your old hubby."

Her smile up at him could be like a crucifixion--as if a tourniquet

twisting in the very ganglia of her were forcing her lips to part.

"Central," she implored, working the hook up and down, "please--won't

you answer?"

Through the little glass pane in the pantry door, Bertha could see

him, bumbling about the rose tulle of her in the slow hitting fashion

of a brown bee, his hand, wanting to touch her but constantly

withdrawing, did pause at her throat where it flowed palely down into

her bodice. It stiffened at his approach and a rib of vein came out.

Julie, peeping too, sniggered. He had a curiously sensitive blush.

It came up, redly, as if he had heard.

"Central--can't you hear--you must answer."

He walked over to the buffet and shot out a swallow of seltzer.

"Afraid it looks like a quiet evening--alone, Little One," he said,

with his words etched on his laugh like a design against thin glass.

She hung up the receiver, with the one vein still out on her pretty

throat, and drew up her chair beside the lace, the flower- and the

candle-spread table.

"Of course, Ben, it's just disappointing, that's all. Horrid old

storm." She made a little _moue_ and he looked at her adoring it,

and then started for the vacant place beside her.

"Oh," she said and leaped backward--"I--they may come yet."

"How stupid--of course--they may--come yet," he said and took his

accustomed place, remotely opposite, but his eyes, with their

liver-spotted whites, eager for her through the little jungle of fern

and pink roses of the center piece.

In the kitchen Bertha began to ladle out the bouillon. It made a

clear little pouring noise. Like a thin cry.

***

A square of light from a window across the areaway could work its way

into Bertha's room in a luminous plaster. Long after the electric

bulb, dangling by a wire over her cot, was snapped out she liked to

lie regarding the reflected glow.

A patch of warmth against solitude. A cave with a lit mouth. It was

pleasant to walk through it and down into the aisles of doze....

That night, the glow sprang sharply across the snow-packed areaway

and long after she had crawled into her cot, she lay at this

fantastic entrance into her sleep, dallying.

Little wisps of smoke rose off the embers of the day. Half

consciousnesses. Six of the eight medallions of the salmon _mousse_

were left over. That ridge of fear in a vein out across Mrs.

Musliner's throat. The Farleys would have relished the salmon

_mousse_ creamed the next day. Not the Musliners. Sufficient unto

the day the salmon thereof. The grapes he had brought her were

wadded in cotton and in the upper section of the refrigerator. Would

the salmon _mousse_ taint them of fishiness? Snow. A wide, wide

wilderness of it with humpbacks walking hidden under it and pushing

it up into mountains. Drip. Hollow, pleasant rhythm, through the

doze that made it difficult to awaken. Drip. Drip. Drip. That

must be the ice pan flooding. It was so hard to awaken. Drip.

Drip. Drip. Doors. The brown door that was Musliner and it led

inward to a dwelling place of light. Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then in a crash through the light fabric of this doze, a pink

little cyclone.

It was hard for Bertha to cross the hair line from her dim sleep to

her dim reality.

"Who is it?" she cried. "What?" And sat up in the gilt darkness,

two enormous braids of her tan hair hitting against the wall like

rope.

It was Mrs. Musliner, in a nightgown made pinker by the flicker of

her body through it, shuddering there on the floor behind the refuge

of the door she had slammed and locked.

"Mrs. Musliner!"

"Bertha, hide me. Keep me here with you. Alone. Bertha, let me

stay here with you."

She was trembling so that her nightgown went rippling along her limbs

and her teeth and her lips were fanned dry with moans. And Bertha,

Norse in her hulk, and in the great flannel undersuit and petticoat,

stooping over the torn little huddle there on the floor.

"Mrs. Musliner--little baby--what is it?'

"Keep me, Bertha. Hold me tight. You will keep me, won't you,

Bertha?"

"Baby. Little mine. You'll catch cold. You have bad dreams. This

is no place for you."

"Let me stay. You're so quiet, Bertha. Let me stay here with you.

It calms me. What are you hearing all the time while you work? What

do you know? Bertha, tell me--what makes you so still--what do you

know that I don't know--help me to know it too--help me be quiet like

you--that dance--I remember--you know things that are beautiful and

terrible--and yet you are quiet--help me, Bertha--I know so

little--only that I am a bad, bad girl--and afraid--Bertha--afraid--"

"You poor little one--you bane walking in your sleep?"

"No. No. I'm not asleep. I'm not dreaming. I'm afraid,

Bertha--keep me here with you. Hold me--don't let go--don't let

him--get me--Bertha--"

She was like a child in a storm flung there against the rock of

Bertha, crying there and clinging there and shuddering there.

"You little thing--you yoost shivering--you bane sick--I go and call

Mr. Mus--"

She was a flash then, out of Bertha's arms, halfway across the room,

her gown a quick ripple of silk about her body, and her arms out

toward the window with a gesture of destination.

"Don't open that door! If you call him, I'll jump. I can't stand it

if you open that door. I'll jump out!"

"Mrs. Musliner. Baby. Wait! I won't open it. You bane sick. I

keep care of you. So. So. Here, in my bed--yoost shivering--yoost

shivering--"

She carried her bodily, a curving petal, toward the cot.

"Don't let him get me, Bertha."

"Poor little baby. Here please, if you don't mind--on my cot--you

bane chilled."

It was still warm there from the sag of Bertha's body. A nest of

coarse bedding that grated through Mrs. Musliner's film of gown.

"Let me go get you soft blankets. Mine bane stiff like a board."

"No. No. Don't leave me, Bertha. I like it hard. I want it

stiff--like a board. Like a cross. Like you. To hurt with the

hardness and not have it matter. Don't leave me, Bertha, stay with

me close. You understand, Bertha. He mustn't come near--I couldn't

stand it. He's so brown. A brown dog scratching at my door.

Scratching. Scratching--night after night--all these months. I

can't endure it. To-night--I--it seemed to me--he had a key! I

thought I heard him fumbling out there with one but--he wouldn't do

that--would he, Bertha--he wouldn't do that?"

"No. No."

"But he kept turning the knob--and scratching--that terrible

scratching--and then--something--that sound in the lock--like a

key--hold me, Bertha."

"Oh, Mrs. Musliner--don't be afraid--"

"I am, Bertha. I am. You understand. He mustn't come--I can't

stand it. Ever since we're married--I have managed so--never to be

alone--never to be alone. I shouldn't ever have done it. They

forced me. My father--family--money--he's so brown, Bertha--so

terribly brown--brown lips--so good and so brown and so terrible.

Help me, Bertha. You understand. You somehow--you--you cook--you

understand."

Bertha did. Dumbly. Mutely. And in a way that wound like a cry

around her heart.

"Poor Mrs. Musliner," she wanted to say, frightened by the wetted

lips and inexorable eyes of the cyclorama, even when they only shone

at her through the little pink jungle. Hers not to reason why.

Nature's big impervious scheme for her had no concern with the

shrinking of her flesh beyond that she must beget flesh.

"He bane good man."

"I know it, Bertha--that's what makes it so hard. Bertha--I want to

go away--there's someone--Bertha, come closer--there's someone--"

"The Young Fellow," said Bertha, and looked at her and made deeper

the cradle of her arms about her--"Oh, Mrs. Musliner--yoost open the

brown door."

"I can't, Bertha. I've tried and I can't."

"Yoost lay and get quiet."

"You're so deep and still, Bertha. Like snow. I never

noticed--before----"

"Shh-h-h, you little one. Don't shiver so. Let me go, yoost over

there to the cupboard to get you my coat, it bane hard here----"

"I want it hard--Bertha--hard and cold--I'm bad--and it's cool and

clean and meek to lay myself on wood--like you, Bertha--you're so

meek--why are you so meek, Bertha?"

"I--I do not know."

"Hold me. You're so still. Hold me. I never noticed how deep and

still you are. Ah, it's good. Hold me, Bertha."

She began to tremble softly into tears, the hard little rod of her

body relaxing.

"I'm no good, Bertha. Why don't I die?'

"You bane very good, Little Mrs."

"He's good. I'm bad. He's so good to me, Bertha, I can't bear it.

I can't bear him. His lips. Help me, Bertha."

Bertha, help her. Why, she wanted to. Bertha, who could pull webby

stuffs out of drainpipes to the sound of chimes goldily, how she

wanted to tell her of those inner secret solaces that rest in the

lovely grail of the spirit! Yet all the words that would come were:

"He bane good--open the brown door--"

"Listen! There he comes. Down the hall. Don't let him in, Bertha.

I couldn't stand it. Don't. I'll jump out the window first. Don't

let him in. Don't let him in."

All the rigidity was back and she clung in a tense hammock, her knees

braced up against Bertha, her arms up and locked about her neck.

"Save me, Bertha. Save me."

To the convulsive rigidity of the small figure in her arms, Mr.

Musliner's voice as gray and as flat as a moor came through the door:

"Erna."

She clung tighter, stifling her sobs against the hurting silence of

Bertha.

"Erna. Go back to your room."

Frantic little sob-racked whispers. "Tell him, Bertha--I can't

ever--can't, can't ever----"

"She's yoost a little nervous, Mr. Musliner. Maybe if you would

please go away for a while--maybe a little later she--will come----"

"Never. Bertha, tell him for me--can't--can't ever--not to be

angry--but--can't----"

"She says in yoost a little while, Mr. Musliner--if you will please

go away, in a little while I will bring her back."

"No. No. No. I didn't say it, Ben--I can't--can't----"

"Take Mrs. Musliner back to her room, Bertha, and stay with her

there--all night. I am going to my room now and inside of ten

minutes I shall expect to hear her go into hers--and lock the door."

His footsteps went off into the same thin silence as his coldly thin

voice, Mrs. Musliner shuddering down into a state of silence that was

more like a faint.

"Come--Mrs. Musliner."

"No. No. No."

"He bane good----"

"I know it, Bertha, but so brown--so terribly, terribly brown----."

To find the words to whisper to her of the little vibratory paths

that cut through the brown clay of externals...

"Yoost so the heart is not brown...."

"I know, Bertha, but I can't find my way there. It's so dark--I've

tried."

"Come, little Mrs., I'll take you...."

"You can't. Nobody can."

"I can--little Mrs.----"

They sat still, crouched in the gold-powdered darkness, heartbeat to

heartbeat. The sobs died down. Tears cooled and chapped little

pathways along her cheeks. Bertha spread-kneed in her flannels, and

the heavy gray petticoat. Barefoot.

"Oh Bertha--Bertha--so quiet--here with you. Hold me closer."

The Laocoön of them wound arm in arm there on the side of the cot.

Colder. Later. Stiller.

"Mrs. Musliner----"

"Let me rest, Bertha, here with you--I feel so still. Stiller than I

have ever been."

"It is already the ten minutes----"

"I--can't----"

"Come----"

"How----"

"With me."

She was like someone very quiet with a lovely kind of fatigue.

Swoony. No remonstrance to the blanket thrown three cornered across

her shoulders and the little journey, half propped against Bertha,

through the chilled tile and linoleum of the kitchen.

At Mr. Musliner's door Bertha put up her hand and knocked suddenly.

"Oh God--no--not there--" cried Mrs. Musliner, and reared back.

"This is the way--little Mrs."

"No--no!"

"Yes."

"Oh God," cried Mrs. Musliner again, but suddenly she stood silent

and waiting.

After a second Mr. Musliner opened the door. He was in a dressing

gown that roped around his waist and his face seemed to look out

brownly from behind the white mist of his pallor.

"Ben I--I----"

"She wants to come in, Mr. Musliner----"

"Ben--I--please. You. Me. My dear. Ben--may I open--the door--and

come in? May I--Ben?" she said, and stepped with a little rush over

the sill.

The door closing on them sent a little sigh of air out over Bertha

and left her standing in the river of the narrow hall's darkness.

***

Snow smother, as if the morning had taken a deep breath and could not

let go. Almost the odor of Sunday, because not even the milk carts

were able to be abroad and, opening the dumb-waiter a spiral of snow

flew up like a jack-in-the-box and hit Bertha a good morning.

A white hearse of a day. Ice tesselated.

There were no breakfast rolls on the dumb-waiter and before Julie and

Lulu came down to clutter up the silence with talk, she began to mix

biscuit, squatting with the bowl caught between her knees, her

fingers webbing up with dough.

Presently, early even for him, and cautiously, before the arrival of

Lulu and Julie, Mr. Musliner came in. She wanted somehow not to have

to look at him, and could feel the ox-blood color of her flush as she

bent low over her mixing.

His shoes were brown with tan uppers and she could almost see in them

a new firm planting on the ground as he stood there before her.

Pride of the male.

"Bertha." he said, and clearing his throat slid his hand down into

his right pocket.

She wanted to help him and his scorching discomfort, but her eyes

were glued as if by the dough and would not lift.

"Bertha--I--Mrs. Musliner is very much better this morning."

"Yah--so."

"A little nervousness last night--you understand. Over tired. Bad

dreams--quite recovered this morning."

"Yah--yah--so--"

"... closing up the place here and taking a trip to Europe for the

change--nervous--needs a rest."

"Yah--yah--so? What?"

"... might be easier if you would leave here immediately--before she

has occasion to see you again. You understand--nervous condition--"

"Yah--yah--so--"

"Extra month's wages--references--good girl--but after what has

happened, embarrassing for all--you understand--going to Europe

anyhow--good girl--go now, before Mrs. Musliner awakens--good

girl--extra month's wages--"

"Yah--yah--so--"

***

The day might have been a spark struck off clashing steel, so coldly

blue it met Bertha.

Almost immediately her fingers began to ache around the handle of her

carpetbag and she could feel the wire-stemmed rose on her hat

thridding with still-cold.

It was like being awakened out of a warm dream. For a moment she

could not place where she was. What next? Which way? Nothing to

suggest traffic. A white nun of a day standing impasse to the march

of the city.