"I suppose I may as well reconcile myself to a neurotic family of

girls. Bertha, when Miss Ermangarde is finished having you hold her

hand, I wish you would hasten downstairs. That girl Helga, for some

reason, becomes a perfect moron when you are not about. If you need

anything, Ermangarde, you can ring," said Mrs. Oessetrich, and

bounced out, slamming the door.

But at two o'clock that morning, with Bertha still holding her hand,

Ermangarde drifted off into such a gale of sobbing that Doctor

Ehrenfest, the family physician, was finally called and the aroused

household scurried through hallways in kimonos and soft slippers.

Lights were blazing on all floors and Mrs. Oessetrich in a padded

house gown, and her head in a fury of crimpers, was pale as china.

"Come now." said Dr. Ehrenfest, who had assisted the three Misses

Oessetrich into the world, "we must get to the bottom of what is

troubling this child. Love affair? Out with it, Ermie, you can't

fool your Uncle Ehrenfest."

But the squirt of morphia into Ermangarde's left arm was already

carrying her off down strange rivers, her closed lids quivering and

her cheeks, down which the tears had stormed, lashed and

blanched-looking. Paula, at the head of Ermangarde's bed, kept her

head averted because she was crying.

A silent, eerie little group. Bertha, crouched there beside the bed,

because Ermangarde's fingers were tight as wire around her wrist and

would not let go. Paula with her queer-looking, blue-flame eyes.

Mathilde Oessetrich, china-white and a little frightened, standing

there at the footboard and gazing down on to the bed. The

professional-looking face of the doctor beginning to pucker wisely.

"Mathilde, have you been up to your old tricks of taking captaincy of

another daughter's soul?"

A long sob forced itself through Paula's clenched lips.

"Nonsense, I suppose it's her appendicitis pain again."

"No, the child's case doesn't diagnose that readily. This appendix

seems to be up under her heart or in her brain. We can't cut to find

this pain. We have to probe."

"That is mid-victorian. Girls don't do it any more. Swooning off at

love affairs. Pish."

"Ah, now we are getting at it. Then there _is_----"

"Oh, Ehrenfest, you're an old granny. Always have been. Suppose

there is. It just isn't done--it isn't nice--prostrating herself in

this fashion. Dramatics, I call it."

"The child hasn't prostrated herself, Mathilde. She is in a state of

nervous collapse. We must get at the source of this thing, and see

what's to be done before she comes out from under the influence."

Paula turned her eyes upon her parent.

"Tell him, Mother."

"Tell him? Tell him what? This is abominable. Having my children

talk to me and of me as if I were a criminal."

"Tell him, Mother."

"Tell him that the only normal strong and capable member of this

family is myself?"

"Tell him about Dudley."

"Well, then, Ehrey, I suppose I am to confess to you, like a culprit

parent, that Dudley Wells is the occasion of Ermangarde's brain

storm."

"The author?"

"I thought the incident was closed and forgotten when he suddenly

ceased coming here about a month ago. That is the sum total of it,

so far as I know. But if that is the cause of Ermangarde's brain

storm, I beg to be excused. I am going back to bed."

"Mother--that isn't the sum total----"

"It is a blessing I have a sense of humor to fall back upon. If ever

a woman has tried to rear her daughters into self-sufficient,

independent women, capable of swinging the great fortunes which will

ultimately come into their hands, I have. I brought a great fortune

into my marriage and, if I do say it I have managed and enlarged it

with the clearsightedness of an entire corporation. I have tried to

rear my girls toward that ideal of self-sufficiency. I have tried to

inoculate them with a realization of their own social and economic

integrity. I have----"

"But, my dear Mathilde, nature is----"

"Bah! Nature is a trickster. Let the weak succumb. If my girls

must marry, let them use the same judgment and discrimination about

it that I expect them to use in the management of affairs not so

vital to their well-being. Nature tricks the weak. Gray matter, not

passion, rules the strong. You've something of a sense of humor

yourself, Ehrenfest. It should afford you a real laugh. Me of all

women! Even Olga, I hear, is having herself psychoanalyzed in quest

of her particular sex complex. Ermangarde here in hysterics because

of a poet who wears a size fifteen collar, and Paula bemoaning her

girlhood away because the man she fancied herself in love with had

the good judgment to take himself down to Porto Rico and----"

"You drove him!"

"Ermangarde! 'Tilda! Not that old argument now, please!"

"But she did, Ehrey! She did! She drove him down there just as

surely as if she had pursued him every inch of the way. Ridiculed

him down there. Harrison wasn't made for that swampy coffee

country.... It was like sending him to his death ... a subtle,

terrible way of doing it."

"Paula, you don't know what you are saying----"

"I know I don't, Ehrey. I'm sorry, Mother. I guess I--I am queer,

Mother, just as you say I am. So queer that--that sometimes it

frightens me--frightens me so that I cannot stand by now and see my

little sister--Ermangarde--clutching on so to those illusions you are

snatching from her. Olga is trying to fight her way clear. I don't

matter any more. But Ermie! Mother, don't try to standardize us all

according to your ideas of strength and efficiency. We are more like

my father must have been."

"That's what I'm struggling to save you from, if you only had the

good sense to know it."

"We are not the strong, fearless captains of women that you want us

to be. Not even Olga! Let us be what we are, Mother. Don't break

us all with your will."

"'Tilda, these are stern words for your daughter to have to use."

"It's Ermie, Ehrey, that gives me the courage to use them. She won't

talk about it, not even to me, but Mother has driven Dudley away,

too. He hasn't been here for weeks. Mother, hasn't it meant

anything to you, Ermie's face, those weeks while Dudley was coming?

Her new prettiness, Mother?--you--why--why that girl

there--Bertha--that servant sitting there holding Ermie's hand has

been more to her these weeks--kinder--more understanding. Mother,

Ermie's stubborn. She's been going about with Ewald ever since

Dudley left. Don't drive her to things like that--or worse. Ewald

isn't the man for her to be spending her time with. Mother, change

your attitude to Dudley. Bring him back. You be the one to take the

initiative. Oh Mother, give her what she wants. What is the result

of what's happened? Our Ermie, sneaking around with Spencer Ewald, a

married man twice her age. Mother--make things right."

"Mathilde, Paula is right. There is a time for everything. The time

has come for you to give in to Ermangarde."

"Sentimental nonsense!"

"You've a sick child there, Mathilde."

"Well, where is he? What has become of him? Who frightened him off?

In my day it took more than a foolish old irate parent to----"

Ermangarde stirred there on the bed then, and began to cry through

her tightly closed lids.

"Ermangarde, look up, child, it is your old hobgoblin, Ehrey."

"Ermie, see, dear. It's Paula. Open your eyes. See, dear, we're

all here. Everything is all right. Mother is as anxious as any of

us for Dudley to come back--aren't you, Mother? Aren't you, Mother?"

"Yes."

"See, and everything is going to be happy and lovely, dear. Ermie,

you don't have to talk, dear. Just whisper to us where to reach

Dudley. Mother and all of us want it that way. Let go of Bertha's

hand, dear. See, here is Mother's instead. Tell us, dear, where we

can reach Dudley...."

For answer, with two great blisters of tears forcing their way out of

her closed eyes, Ermangarde reached under her pillow for a little wad

of envelope concealed there and, burying her head under the bolster

so that her sobs were muffled, handed the bit of paper up to Paula:

"_Ermangarde_," it read, "_your little notes make it so hard. I have

not seen you in all these weeks, well because, and I should, I must

tell you, one night something inside of me just curled up and died._

"_It seems too dreadful, for me, who dwells down where the hem of

your skirt touches, to have to be the one to write these words. But

somehow I must find the strength to be brutal with the truth.

Something, little Ermangarde, killed the perfect thing that was

forming between us. Something too subtle and too cruel for me to

analyse, but toward the end, dear girl, I never put my foot into your

home without a dreadful crushing sense of the imminence of the death

that was taking place in my heart._

"_Forces too enormous and too infinitesimal for us to cope with were

at work. The shortcomings were all mine, but alas! there they were.

It makes this letter a bitterer task for me to be obliged to close it

on a note of my own happiness. I was married yesterday to Rosemary.

You remember the night we met her at the play. And that is just what

she is. Rosemary. A lovely sprig of it, and she has turned life

into a garden. We are sailing to-morrow for the Madeiras.

Ermangarde, try to remember me kindly, as I shall always remember

you, beautifully._

"_Dudley Wells._"

After the three of them had read this, standing there shoulder to

shoulder and their breathing beating down on to the page, Paula

turned suddenly upon her mother, the blue flames, thin as breath,

leaping along her eyes.

"I hate you, Mathilde Oessetrich. I hate you. I hate you." And

cramming her handkerchief up against the terrifying words, ran

choking from the room.

***

And yet the very next morning Ermangarde was up and about as usual.

There was something diamond-like in her brightness. Hard. Showy.

She was even rude to Paula.

"Don't try to baby me, Paula. I'm all right, I won't stay in bed!

Do keep out of my affairs, dear. I know what I'm about. I'm quite

well. Don't interfere."

So Paula went back to weaving her hours of music along the keys and

Ermangarde to the routine of her French and her drawing and her

fencing and her singing lessons. And if once in a while she skipped

a luncheon or a dinner for which there was no particular accounting,

Mrs. Oessetrich held thin-lipped peace. There was that dry, diamond

hardness to Ermangarde.

Every Saturday, Madam Lina Gerbhardt, Mrs. Oessetrich's lifelong

friend, an enormous contralto who wore stencilled scarves and had

taught Calvé, came to the house to give Ermangarde her singing

lesson, and then remained for lunch. Ermangarde had a clear little

mountain stream of a voice. Lovely in its middle register and with a

thin fluty upper range to which she had climbed on years of Madam

Gerbhardt's careful _arpeggios_. It was pleasant, during these

lessons, to dust softly about the hall that led to the music room.

"Do--me--fah--doh--fah--sol--me--doh--ahh-h-hhhhh--"

Madam Gerbhardt's voice ran underneath Ermangarde's, booming it.

"Doh--me--fah--doh----"

Light-colored Tosti bubbles. Flying banners of Bizet. Richard

Strauss.

Bertha liked these lessons. Once Madam Gerbhardt thrust two tickets

into Bertha's hands. "Here, girl, there is a Ukrainian chorus

singing at Carnegie Hall to-night. You should enjoy that. Go, if

Mrs. Oessetrich can spare you."

Bertha went and took Helga. The seats were very far back and the

faces of the chorus dim as dreams. The drony silence while you

waited. The yellow slits of light. The Slav songs that were full of

heart beat and the Slav songs that were full of despair. The love of

a harlot. The death of a Moujik. Cossacks who chant at dusk. It

was as if the heart were embers and the chorus were sitting in its

glow. Love and life and the taste of the red lips of harlots and the

running of rivers that are made of tears. There was one. It sang of

the Volga. The Volga! Boatmen whose thighs were sweating and whose

eyes were bulging from the drag. The pulling boatmen along the

shore....

"Come," said Helga when the intermission came. "Let's run along.

These Polish wops give me the blues."

There was nothing to do but go. Helga could be so querulous. But up

under the roof, all of the night rocked softly, like a river. The

Volga. The Volga. Rushing of tears along with the tide and where

men sang of joy in a key that was minor....

***

One lovely spring Saturday when the breakfast room, where the family

lunched, was wide open to the languid drift of spring, Madam

Gerbhardt, who had been popping salted almonds into her mouth,

chopping them sharply and then popping more, spoke out suddenly, just

as Bertha was passing her the fillet of sole:

"Well, I see where Rollo Farley died."

"No!"

"Yes, didn't you read it in the _Times_ this morning? It seems he

spoke at the Poetry Society night before last, complained of feeling

ill when he arrived home, took a sleeping powder before he went to

bed, and never woke up. Oh!"

"Bertha, you clumsy!"

"It's all right, no harm done."

"Bertha, do be careful. She didn't ruin your sleeve with the fish

sauce, did she? Bertha, Helga should be serving anyhow. I cannot

understand why you insist upon carrying half of that careless girl's

work for her--so Rollo Farley is dead."

"Rollo--Farley----"

"A greatly overestimated man. A one-book author."

"Yes, Mother, but what a book! I think that _The Cathedral Under the

Sea_ belongs to the esoteric group of really great poems."

"Pish. Free verse. Free-and-easy-verse. I hate faddism. The forms

that were good enough for Goethe and Wordsworth and----"

"Have you read _The Cathedral Under the Sea_, Mother?"

"No, but I know what the entire movement stands for. You belong to

the violent reactionaries if you permit two lines to rhyme. A

couplet is about as out of date as an antimacassar."

"You speak precisely with the authority of one who knows nothing

about the subject."

"At least, Ermangarde, I am not a reactionary in the way I permit my

daughters to address me."

"But, Mother, you must admit that at least I speak with the authority

of having read the book. _The Cathedral Under the Sea_ is a great

impressionistic poem, not the mere dithyrambic prose that the free

verse writers are dabbling in. Its metrical devices are as cunning

as Masefield's effects of the rolling of the sea."

"Now, when you speak of Masefield----"

"Exactly, Mother, it is because you can appreciate Masefield, that I

won't have you condemning Rollo Farley before you have read _The

Cathedral Under the Sea_."

"Ermangarde is right, 'Tilda. Farley accepts technique without being

tied to it."

"Of course he does. He does precisely what your Masefield does. He

does what he pleases with his rhyme scheme between his first and his

sixth or seventh lines but those lines hold the internal ones firmly

together. Farley is not an anarchist. He's merely a Progressive.

He dares to liberate form and language."

"Pish, you've read that somewhere."

"I've felt it, you mean. Besides I'm not bothered about form. Much

of the beauty of _The Cathedral Under the Sea_ lies in its

formlessness--the formlessness of life. You understand, don't you,

Madam?"

Madam, who had a pudgy, a square, an emotional hand, placed it to the

left of her stencilled scarf and closed her eyes.

"Indeed I do. Any work of art, regardless of its form or

formlessness, is great when it makes you feel that its creator has

dipped into your very heart for his sensation."

"Precisely."

"That turbulent, inarticulate creature in _The Cathedral Under the

Sea_! I can see her sitting there, beautiful-eyed and barefoot, in

the forest part of the poem. You remember? Listening. I suppose to

the music of the spheres. Hearing it, full of it, and yet silent

with it. That is how I feel about so much that is beautiful and

fragile in life. Full of it, bursting with it, and yet with no power

to express it."

"Oh Madam, you _do_ understand!"

"That is what I meant, Ermangarde, in our lesson this very morning.

Lift the tones, or they will sink back into the pools of silence and

remain unsung. Can't you understand, Mathilde, why we--why that one

beautiful thing, even though he never wrote a line that amounted to a

hill of beans afterward, can perpetuate the name of Rollo Farley?"

"I must read it for myself," said Mrs. Oessetrich. "I am always

prejudiced in advance by a book which has created the furor that this

one did. I've never been able to abide his wife. She was a

Neidringhaus. Ethan's daughter. One of those Botticelli creatures

who is all effect and little else. And how she has capitalized the

success of _The Cathedral Under the Sea_! I actually think she

sometimes believes that she wrote it herself. Her proprietary air.

They were wretchedly unhappy together, you know. Services from the

old house in Gramercy Park, I suppose?"

"Yes, Thursday afternoon."

"Well, I'm not going. I might have put myself out while his mother

lived. Lucretia Farley was at least harmless and not an

attitudinizing Mona Lisa. Bertha, get Circle 345 for me on the

telephone. I'll be half an hour late for my bridge lesson at this

rate. Paula, for heaven's sake, stop staring. You are getting the

habit. If it is one thing I can't abide, it is light blue eyes that

stare ..."

"_The Cathedral Under the Sea_," said Paula. "I was just trying to

think: Where--The Cathedral Under the

Sea--I--know--her--from--somewhere----"

How curious, turning the corner, just as the bier, slanting, was

being carried down the steps. The violet blanket, starlit with

anemones, slid a little. Its fragrance stole out softly over the

fringe of onlookers. They formed the aisle, these onlookers. The

bier passed between them, across the sidewalk and into the hearse.

The blanket kept breathing out fragrance. You wanted to faint into

it. Sweet. Wistful. Tired. It rode on shoulders and rolled a

little, that hoisted caravan of Rollo, and the sidewalk was a desert

and the blanket a purple sky with stars and the end of the desert was

Rollo's eternity.

Something rather sickening happened then and brought you back into

the fringe of the onlookers. The bier was tilted into the hearse.

It ran forward a little as if on casters, and two doors with silver

handles closed and pinched your heart. The doors closing that way.

Like shutting a dear book that had a filigree lock on it and turning

the tiny key. The doors closing. The last line of a sonnet.

You stood in the fringe that made the aisle through which the bier

passed across the sidewalk, with a place nicked out of your heart.

And then the hearse moved up and a carriage slid into its place, and

down the steps, through the sweet breath the violets had left, came

the mourners. Mr. Farley. It hurt somehow to look. The years had

shrunk him up. He seemed shorter, and all the bombastic pink flesh

hung now in pale little oysters of empty skin, and his legs, that had

used to be fat and strutty, wavered now, and kept wanting to knock at

the knees. It was horrible to see him feel three times with the toe

of his shoe before he ventured the step.

With Veronica it was different. Her foot came down coolly and slimly

just where she pointed it, and through the mesh of her veil you could

see the pale ellipse of her face. Dim. But the features in order.

The neatly closed lips. Careful curtains of hair. A griefless face.

Dry and oval. Ascetic even of tears.

It made one proud. So burstingly proud to stand there on the fringe

of the onlookers, rich with the grief that the face of Veronica was

as barren of as a crag. To stand there rich and brimming with the

precious sorrow of a love! Poor Veronica, who had no grief.

Gradually the carriages were filled. There were the explorer and the

broker and the ex-ambassador and Beebe, only without his portfolio,

who had interrupted the family at luncheon that day and caused the

nesselrode pudding to go out untasted.

The women whispered and made little sounds like the glass icicles of

a chandelier. The ushers brushed their white gloved hands together.

It was all very cool and very tearless, and the carriages began to

move off without more ado.

It was easy in the city to keep pace with them. There were long

halts for traffic and the horses, never out of walk, lifted their

hoofs with almost a rhythmic leisure. Clip. Clop. The wheels, slow

hoops. Unflecked drivers' whips. Wide sun-washed streets, drowsy

with spring afternoon, and the narrow black procession winding out

along them. Bertha followed from the sidewalk. It was easy, block

after block, but then up over the shoulder of an asphalt hill, the

green flush of the country set in and the sidewalks left off and now

you had to follow more quickly along the stiff frozen dirt road, but

just the same you wound along behind, sweetly and deeply into the

quiet. Clip. Clop.

The caravan of Rollo rolling rapidly now, out toward the sun's edge,

and Bertha with her gift of grief hurrying after it. She could feel

her shoulders spangled with perspiration. They had been so deeply

white to him, like the flesh of the magnolia. He had trolled four of

his fingers along her whiteness. They had melted against her throat

and down into her heart. White tapering roads, in the dark forest

along which she ran calling.

The first minarets of the cemetery came up over the next hill. Pale

moonrises against afternoon sky. A white battalion of a city, there

at attention in the spring afternoon. The winding grind of the

gravel roads, and the creeping sweetness of the earth. You could

almost taste it. How they ground and squeaked, those wheels, and the

horses made great splashes of gravel, and the sentinel city stood

unbowing as Rollo rode in.

The little pop-ups of anemones. There was a turned-over clump of

them beside the grave, standing there on their heads waiting to be

patted down into turf again.

There was a yew tree grew beside an urn. Quiet of that! It made the

day seem to pause.

The group tightened up around the grave. Closed solidarity of those

backs again. But down on the lovely slant of hill the yew grew

beside the urn and it was pleasant to wait there in the freckled

shade. It ran along Bertha and mottled her into the background. It

made her the color of a sparrow in a tree.

The white and listening marbles. The hill might have been a tripod

and the faint throbbing of the burial service a slow rhythmic incense

stealing down among the headstones.

A poet was dead.

***

Long after the carriages had crunched down along the drive again, and

the hearse, lighter now, and looking silly with haste had turned

cityward, Bertha stole up to the hill. The sun was gone, and in

between the serried ranks of the white battalions the light was the

color of sabre steel. The stars, too, had that steely aloofness of a

spring day turned suddenly dead cold. They were the very early

stars, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter, who love in their seasons, to edge

the day.

***

The anemones were back in place. They had been patted there with the

broad side of a spade. They looked broken-necked and dying. But the

mound itself was raw and brown and its breath came up at you like a

sigh. There was a pillow of roses at the head. An empty bed. Rollo

was gone. You could sit and weep now, unashamedly.

Rollo must know by now. Everything.

***

Strange Paula. Sometimes now, she did not leave her room for a week.

She played a great deal, for hours, in the whispering fashion up

alone in her room. Beethoven. Brahms. More Beethoven. And sewed

too. Pink wispy things that grew into a pile and then were folded

away in trunks between tissue paper.

"Nutty" was Helga's frequent and succinct comment. Her eyes could

seem to water at the evidences of pale finery strewn about Paula's

fourth floor room. She fingered the stuffs as if they were flesh,

and once Bertha walked in on her posing before Paula's dressing

mirror, a web of a nightgown, with two lace butterflies poised on the

shoulder straps, held up before her.

"Why shouldn't I? She's just my age. The Lord gave me the same kind

of flesh. I love it, too. Anyway, she's nutty."

"You mustn't touch anything of hers!"

"Why not? She's no better than me. She thinks what I out and did.

What do you think is in the mind of a girl who sits here day after

day making flimsies like these, when she isn't even going to be

married? She is no better with her mind than I am with my body.

Only she is protected from doing what nobody gave a tinker's dam

whether I done or not. This poor little nut thinks she's making a

trousseau."

"Why not? Maybe she is."

"Why not? Eddie the chauffeur told me why not. There's no man. He

passed out. He wasn't much of a go-getter and old Napoleon sent him

down to the coffee plantations and he ate a few fever germs. It's a

phony trousseau for a spooky groom. Old Napoleon knows. She comes

up when the stuff gets too cluttery and packs it away herself in the

trunks. Haven't you ever seen Miss Paula stare when she does it?

That kid's queer. She sits up here staring at what she's missed.

Sewing for what she's missed and trying to play on the piano what

she's missed. Only she's protected from going out after what she's

missed. That's the only difference between her being good and me

bad."

"Helga, put it down. Someone is coming. Mrs. Oessetrich."

"Bertha, Miss Olga has just telephoned from her Settlement House. It

is Commencement day for the girls in her Vocational Guidance Classes.

Those nice girls are being graduated into full-fledged milliners.

She wants the two silver punch bowls. The big car is up for repairs

and Eddie has Miss Ermangarde out in the sedan. I'll have to send

you down with them in a taxi."

"Yah----."

"I do believe you are up here doing Helga's sweeping for her! What

are you made of? Cast iron? Helga, you shameless girl, you, letting

Bertha carry your share of the work in this fashion month after

month. Get down the two silver punch bowls, Bertha. Never mind,

Helga, I'll put away those pink things of Miss Paula's. The idea,

Bertha up here doing your sweeping for you. Doing the work for two.

What is that girl made of? Sometimes, I wonder...."

***

The Vocational Guidance House on Christie Street had no trade

entrance. Only a neat front door, painted red. It stood open, and

it was all that Bertha could do to wedge in sidewise with the

outlandish bulge of her punch bowls.

The door to the left of the bare hallway was also open. What had

once been two parlors of a private residence were thrown into one.

It made a sort of small lecture hall, with a platform at one end and

rows of camp chairs facing it. An American flag covered one wall and

there were white Swiss window curtains and geraniums in bright blue

pots and over the platform the usual engraved, "Opening of the First

Continental Congress" and "Franklin before the House of Lords."

Odor of embalmed philanthropy.

There were three rows of girls seated on the platform. Latin-looking

faces beneath smooth, tamed hair and their young bodies seeming to

flicker under the prisons of the neat blue skirts and white

shirtwaists.

Blazing absence of blazing neckerchiefs and of blazing skirts.

Doused Carmens.

An audience with firm, dry, Anglo-Saxon lips sat along the camp

chairs and stared up at them. The safe, trained little Carmens who

used toothbrushes and knew now, with an Anglo-Saxon finality, that a

rose between the lips was not a rose at all, but lechery. Olga

Oessetrich was speaking from the platform.

It was easy to hear through the open doorway. Olga's voice was so

clear. As clear as her face with the hair worn smoothly away from

it. As clear as her hands, white square hands that came out boldly

from the mannish cuffs.

It was pleasant just to stand there and peer over the great

protruding armful of bowls. Olga, who when she came to the house,

only sat about with her long indolent legs crossed and watched the

smoke of her cigarette with her eyes like slits, here now, eager, and

talking down into those careful-lipped faces with a fine young fervor.

Every so often a little patter of hand-clapping broke through and

then she stood and waited, her arms folded across her flat boyish

bosom and her glance sure as a shot down into her audience.

And then the girls with the Latin faces and the bodies like the

quiver of flame began to pass one by one for the tubes of white paper

that were bound with red ribbon. Olga handing them, one to each,

from the pyramid of them upon the table. Each girl as she passed

stood for a moment in the little area of Olga's words, flushed, and

then sat down to applause. Slim sapling girls with smooth hair and

stiff cuffs like Olga's. Oh, how you wanted to think it was fine ...

all the doused Carmens....

Suddenly Bertha moved forward, so that her head protruded in. Olga's

voice and the face of one of the thin sapling girls were so clear....

"... this young woman need feel no embarrassment as I dwell upon

these facts of her early childhood. She is a glory to our

institution, and those of you who have endowed us so generously in

the past may well look upon this girl with a kind of pride that will

inspire you to endow us still more generously in the future.

"Some gracious maternal scheme of things threw her into our midst at

the age of fourteen. She has developed from the pinched little

undersized waif she then was into a young woman who is prepared to

take up her place in the world with dignity and self-respect.

"Chita Migulchi, I have the honor to award you the first honorable

mention in your class and a diploma which registers you at our

industrial bureau as a graduate milliner of the Christie Street

Vocational Guidance School for Girls."

Chita! Chita! You wanted to cry, your throat was so warm and full.

Little Chita with the Jocko eyes, but her face smooth now and the

lovely pallor of nun's veiling. The well-brushed sheen of her hair.

It was hard not to cry with the warmness and fullness. It pressed up

against the eyeballs and made them dim. You kept pushing open the

door ... Chita....

That made a draught and someone wanted the door closed. It swung to

with a little nick. It left you standing in the hall, which had

grown very dark, hugging those preposterous punch-bowls and groping

your way toward the basement kitchen.

***

There was something about Ermangarde's smile that glinted. She did

it with her lips closed and with the merest lifting of their corners.

It was a cold ray of a smile, that made you think of pale-flanked

little fish swimming snugly under ice. Her open laugh never came

through any more. She smiled constantly, but with her lips in their

rigid icicle. You were conscious of the warm white young teeth

behind them, but they never lit up her inscrutability. Sometimes her

mother regarded her with small, bright, cockatoo eyes.

"Ermangarde, you are pale. A good tonic is what you need. Liver,

probably."

"Oh no, Mother."

"Nothing to be ashamed of. We all have them."

"Don't worry about mine, Mother."

"Your father used to say that, too. But I found it more expedient to

worry about his liver than about the execrable bad temper that could

result from its moodiness."

"Your panacea for all mortal ills, Mother, the liver its limitations."

"Of course. Meaning that yours is the immortal ill. I am not so

sure that my despised little liver pill is not best sort of cure for

lovesickness too. Puppy-lovesickness."

"Mother!"

"Great pouting girl like you. Why, you should be on your knees for

thankfulness that you found the fellow out in time. You have been

jilted, only you haven't the sound judgment to know it. And here you

are, eating out your heart because----'

"Mother, if you discuss it, I'll leave the house--I can't stand

it----"

"I am no more eager to discuss it than you are. But you are sallow

and you are enigmatic and you are dull. The few hours a day that you

spend at home are depressing for the entire household, and, while we

are on the subject, you have been seen here and there with Ewald.

You are meeting him in public places. Now it must stop. He's a

married man and was coming to this house with his wife, Helene Craig,

when you were in rompers. It's disgusting and vulgar, and if it

continues I shall call him up at his club and forbid him...."

The little icicle smile of Ermangarde's was out.

"Don't forbid any more, Mother. I wouldn't, really."

"You're a sour, enigmatic girl," repeated Mrs. Oessetrich. "The

world is yours. You have youth, wealth, and position, but instead of

taking advantage of your great opportunities, you sit on the edge of

them and mourn for the loss of something that you never owned."

"You mean for the loss of something that you never permitted me to

own, Mother."

"Oh, how weary I am of the exactions of my faultfinding daughters. I

must be younger than they, in spirit at least, because they all treat

me in a fashion that makes me feel juvenile and incorrigible. Family

ties and the vulgar wranglings of the household! I wish I were like

the cook in my kitchen, free to----"

"You couldn't be like--her, Mother."

"What?"

"Oh--nothing."

***

The war years plunged in. The city turned the sallow green of khaki.

Regiments poured through the streets. Flashing impersonal rows of

animated scissors. Farm boys with callouses deep in their hands,

marching off, to war on farm boys they had never seen. Great oxygen

tanks of patriotism, generated in a hurry, gushed out volatile and

inflammable from coast to coast. The phrase "Safe for Democracy"

began to jiggle like electric signs before bewildered eyes. Dizzy

with its euphony, men fell into regimental step. Thousands and

thousands of scissors of them. The whole thing began to swing into a

horrible motion like the slow acceleration of a voodoo dance.

Envoys crossed word-swords and all the little men began to run, and

the red threads of high-sounding idealisms and patriotism to come out

in eyeballs. The inflamed voodoo dance around the cauldron brewed on

the table of paternal governments began to grow....

That was the way the men went off to war, riveted with that paternal

eye and inflamed with the generated oxygen, the generated phrases,

and the generated idealism.

Sometimes they passed the house. Regiments of them. They were so

young. Lean flanked. Time and time again Bertha drew down the

sashes against their passing. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. It

was a horrible rhythm. The willy-nilly young men, steaming up hate.

Olga was in khaki, too. It gave her the sleek flatness of a fowl.

Where the expensive tweeds had been clumsy, the khaki lay slick.

Slanting shoulders, neat at the armholes and a pat little hat. It

made her busy and important, all the hating. She drove a small

khaki-colored ambulance around town. Everywhere. She was very

earnest.

The world safe for democracy. The little women without sons began to

bustle so. The sudden splendidness of making the world safe for

democracy. It made you as important as you were in your own home, on

general cleaning day. Sweaters to be sorted. Chocolates to be

stacked in boxes and addressed for overseas. Sandwiches to be cut

for canteens. Chest protectors to be stitched in the name of

democracy.

Olga ran her ambulance with her lips straight and her eyes probing

ahead and stern. The zeal of the women. Democracy. Sandwiches to

be cut. Chocolates to be stacked. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.

There was a portrait of Beethoven hung in the dining room.

"Take it down, Bertha," said Olga.

Paula cried, as Bertha, steadied on a ladder by Olga, unhooked it

from its moulding.

"That's absurd, Olga. What has Beethoven to do with this horrible

fighting?"

"War is war."

"Exactly. War is only war. A matter of nations. Art transcends

war. Art is the language of God and war is the barking of men.

Beethoven is bigger than war. Next year there may be a new war and

we may be in league with the very nation we are hating now. Wars

change. Beethoven is eternal."

"Easy there, Bertha. Let me hoist. There!"

"Olga--don't----"

"Paula, don't be absurd! How can I ask those boys who are going

overseas to walk into my mother's house with that picture hanging on

the wall? Have you no patriotism?"

"No. Not that kind."

"You talk like a pacifist!"

"Perhaps--I am."

"Paula!"

"If it means loathing war sufficiently to bear the unpleasant brunt

of being branded a coward, I suppose I am a pacifist. Yes, I am a

pacifist! I loathe all this blind rushing pell-mell into a struggle

arranged by the mighty minority and paid for with the lives of young

men who are drugged on trumped-up ideals. I loathe war which

destroys the internationalism of art for the puny nationalism of men.

The maimed bodies aren't the worst. That's the easy way to hate war.

The safe way. I--hate it just as much for the maimed souls that stay

at home--to whom the noise of military brass bands is louder than the

music of Beethoven."

"Paula, you are merely stupid and sentimental, but just the same

those are dangerous, disloyal utterances. You're not well. Go

upstairs to your music. I expect some service men here this

afternoon for tea and dancing in the drawing-room. Don't make me

ashamed to bring them into this house. Bertha, take that picture

upstairs into the storeroom."

"Olga!"

"Paula, I know you're not well. But please, dear, never talk like

that, even among ourselves. Do you realize that what you said, even

though it may be partially true, makes you a traitor? A traitor to

your country. Paula--look at me--a traitor----"

The word bit in like a little asp. All the way up to the storeroom,

slanting the picture along the narrow stairways, it stung across

Bertha's silence.

Paula, who loved Beethoven and wept his lyricism softly along the

keys. Paula, who loved Beethoven more than she could hate anything

or anybody. Paula a traitor?

***

Barney, the private night watchman, liked Helga. You knew it by her

new slanting and birdwise look. For a long time there had been

something shy about her. New silences. She was sweeter about the

dull evenings tucked up there under the slant of roof. Sometimes she

sewed and smiled or, if Paula was playing, let her head fall back

against the chair and her mouth drop open softly. On warm nights,

she stole out on the rear stoop for whispering moments with Barney as

he passed on his rounds, and on snowy nights, the kitchen range was

kept banked a little more than usual. But even after she had gone

upstairs for the bit of sewing or to lie back lulled to the weaving

of Paula's music, she always slid forward a bit on her chair to the

knocking of the night stick. One. Two. Three. Slid forward with

the lifted, eager look. Then Bertha knew. The silences were so

telltale. Helga, who could suddenly sit neat-lipped and rather

inscrutable all evening, and then wear the little smile to bed. It

was hard not to tremble for that smile. You trembled more for it

than for the garrulous bitterness.

Only once in a while there was a flash in the pan of the old Helga.

In winter she had to snatch her visits with Barney, whispering with

him in the kitchen, the ugly gray dish cloth drying across the pan

and the great blob of brown soap still soft and smelling from riding

greasy water.

"Having to sit company with a fellow like Barney in somebody's

kitchen! There never was a girl didn't want a place where she could

punch up a few sofa pillows and turn on a pink lamp. A

self-respecting man like Barney, and me with no place to entertain

him but next to the kitchen sink. A real honest-to-goodness man like

him."

Barney was like that. Honest to goodness. A scrub of rough red

Irish hair. Enormous hands that fiddled with his hat. Bright blue

eyes with wrinkled lids that he batted for all he was worth, and when

he laughed his entire face focused in toward the center, until it

looked like a shirred rosette.

And Barney could make Helga laugh. Jerky, immature laughter and one

night, when she had her head thrown back in merriment at one of his

slow overgrown antics, he put out a shy big hand and touched her

softly on the neck where it arched.

"You're like a little bird, there," he said.

She was broody after that and Bertha found her crying the next

morning, because Mrs. Oessetrich had her at cleaning some high and

difficult pantry shelves that aggravated the chronic pain she had in

her side, and Bertha did them for her and later that same day she

cried because she broke a porcelain bowl and Bertha took that brunt

for her and that evening, upstairs in the pocket of the fourth floor

back room, she broke out.

"Barney--likes--me."

"Yah----"

"What do you think he says to me the other night, Bertha, and touched

me here--soft on my neck. 'You're like a little bird there'--I likta

died, I wish I hadda----."

"Helga----."

"He's got an old woman. His mother. Eighty-eight. Keeps house for

him. I know what's in the back of his head same as if I could see

in. He don't come out and say it, but he keeps hinting. Wants to

take me there. Wants his old woman to see me before she passes on.

The way he said that one thing to me. 'You're like a little bird

there.' I likta died. I wish I hadda----"

"No--no----"

"Yes! I could land Barney. He's just waiting until his old woman

passes on. I could land him, but I wouldn't! A man like Barney to

happen to me. Got him hook and bait. And what do I do? Unhook him

and throw him back into the pond. That's being white, ain't it,

Bertha?

"Yes--Helga----"

***

The boys kept marching. You had to stop at street corners to let

them tramp past. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.

You scrubbed floors to that rhythm. You breathed in your sleep to

it. And the boys with the wide clean faces and the calloused hands

stalked and stalked, made drunk with the sudden ecstasy of being a

foe. It made the leap in the dark a thing of glory ... that spat of

shot ... across the eyes....

Every week Olga held canteen in her mother's gold and brocade

drawing-room. Rugs were dragged back. Furniture stacked, planks

spread from chair-back to chair-back and then piled with pyramids of

sandwiches and mounds of salad stuck all over with small American

flags. There was a victrola for dancing.

Helga could carve charming sandwiches. Little hearts and spades and

diamond-shaped ones made in layers. The boys gobbled them at one

mouthful. But sometimes, when the pain in her side was gnawing from

the hours of slicing and buttering and stacking, she made plain,

square, ragged ones and Olga was cross.

Olga! Life spun for her those war months and for the little group of

drab-clad girls who came to help on canteen days. The eager, hating

girls. It was thrilling to hate! Thrilling to feed these

wide-faced, clean-faced boys the catnip. It made them heroic and gay

and debonair and careless, and full of a very fine fervor for

fighting that foe unknown and that foe unseen. It made the fine,

high-sounding war phrases shine.

It was easier somehow to hate, and to want to fight, with all of the

machinery for making the world safe for democracy so busily in

motion. The making of the gas masks. The measuring of the chest

expansion. The cutting of the sandwiches. The wearing of the

puttees.

If you were a farm hand with those hands still callous from the plow,

and every night had slept in the socks and under-drawers that you

worked in by day, and all your youth had flung forkfuls of fertilizer

out over fields and spat in ditches while you dug them, oh it was

stirring and exciting suddenly to be fed the heart-shaped sandwiches,

one to a bite, and to be danced with by all the Olgas, whose hands

were white caresses and whose eyes adored. It made you long for a

thousand thousand foes and a thousand thousand hates.

Busy days for Olga and the thousands of eager girls in the service,

who were wearing becoming khaki and beating the tom-tom of the war

dance.

Sixteen months of it and on the seventeenth Olga, her eyes high with

strange new fires, sailed on a transport.

It was all very simple. She bounced in one day with a jangle of the

keys to her studio, while Mrs. Oessetrich and Paula were at lunch. A

solemn little meal. Mrs. Oessetrich, with the editorial page of the

morning _Times_ propped up against her tumbler, and eating, in her

pecksniffy fashion, short quick forkfuls of an _omelette soufflé_.

Paula, whose blue eyes were so languid, almost a little stagnant now,

as if something in them had jammed and could not seem to flow on.

"Well, 'Tilda, I've popped in for good-bys. We're sailing sometime

between now and midnight."

Mrs. Oessetrich swallowed her portion of omelet, and brushed her

mouth with her napkin as a man would. Two ways.

"Well, that's that," she said, and pushed back from the table.

"That's that, Mrs. Oessetrich," repeated Olga, and smiled at her with

the eyes with the bonfires in them and whipped a cigarette out of a

soft pack of them in her khaki pocket and drew up a chair beside the

table and crossed her long legs and drew a puff of smoke.

"Have some lunch?"

"No thanks, Mother."

"Umph."

"Say, Mother, I think you're immense." Olga's eyes were round when

she said that, with cockatoo rims to them exactly like Mrs.

Oessetrich's. They made her very much her mother's daughter.

"I suppose you feared a sloppy mess. Well don't worry, if I have

tears to shed I won't prepare to shed them now."

"I'll write often."

"I suppose this is where I should break in with the usual

instructions from moron mothers to moron offspring. 'Keep your feet

dry.'"

"Don't you love it, Paula? Isn't she great?"

"And there is no use crossing a submarine until you come to it."

"Here's the key to the studio, 'Tilda. You won't mind, dear, keeping

the lease for me. It's only a hundred a month."

"I hate waste."

"I know, dear, but it's such a mess, subletting."

"Very well. Give me the keys."

"Where's Ermangarde?"

"Out."

"Oh."

"Take good care of yourself, Paula. Now--now--please--no waterworks!"

"You know--my sentiments--Olga----."

"Yes, and the true pacifist drops his lamb's clothing in time of war."

"Not the true one. The weak one. He drops it because it is so much

easier to fight than not to fight----"

"You're sick, darling. Take care of her, 'Tilda. Good-by, Helga.

See that you don't elope with Barney before I get back and don't be a

sly one and shove off all your chores on to Bertha. We know your

system."

Mrs. Oessetrich stood up very straight, as if there were a rod up her

back, and her eyes were sharp and darting and as dry as shoe buttons.

"Hurry, girl."

"Good-by, Bertha, you old Rock of Gibraltar. It helps somehow,

knowing you're here--on the job. You--whoever you are--so long--old

Bertha."

"Good-by--Miss Olga."

"Well, Mathilde, Paula--old dears--tell Ermie good-by and to cut out

the Ewald nonsense. It's disgusting. My bags are out in the taxi.

The meter will click me out of house and home. So long, dears.

Everybody. You know the address. American Expeditionary Forces.

Paris--S'long...."

It was very silent, and for every mouthful of tea poor Paula

swallowed a great vein came out in her neck. Her omelet and

editorial finished, Mrs. Oessetrich rose and following her custom,

carried the few crumbs in her lap into the conservatory to shake them

into the aquarium.

"Order the car for three, Bertha."

But it was almost five when Mrs. Oessetrich emerged finally from her

room. Eddie started up from a doze at the wheel as she swept out.

"Where, Madam?"

"Oh--why--just drive."

Her eyes were very shiny and the cockatoo rims quite pink. And

Bertha had to run out after her with her handkerchief, which she had

forgotten.

***

Ermangarde had not returned by nine that evening, but a messenger

brought a letter. Bertha carried it into Mrs. Oessetrich, who was

sitting alone in the drawing-room, tapping her foot. The high

chandelier flooded the room through crystal. Once in a while a prism

clicked.

"For me?"

"Yah--a letter."

"_Dear Mother_," it read, "_by the time you receive this note Ewald

and I will be on a steamer bound for somewhere sunny. There is

nothing to feel concerned about. We are very happy and are going

into this thing with our eyes open._

"_Ermangarde._"

The old, the terrible, the shoe button eyes of Mrs. Oessetrich. When

she raised them to Bertha, they lay shattered in her head, broken

there as if they had been drilled through and had cracked in a

thousand directions.

"Bertha--Bertha--lend me your strength--Bertha--you--where----"

She fainted out stiffly, like a doll. To revive her, you held her

very closely and very warmly to your heart, until its beating seemed

to beat into her.

The house stood in a great silent yawn. You found yourself tiptoeing

through the halls, and the front shades had not been raised, except

for general cleaning, in months. Paula played a great deal, but in

the whispering fashion, so that if you took your pan of potatoes up

to the top of the back stairs and sat there in the gloom to peel

them, and to listen, half the time all you heard was the little sing

to the silence.

Mrs. Oessetrich drove Olga's little fawn-colored ambulance now. She

wore the khaki-colored uniform, too, only where Olga had looked

jaunty, she looked stocky. Her waist curved in so and the jacket

strained at the armholes. The natty little service hat, too, sat up

too high on her head. You suspected some sort of an elastic-band

attachment so that if she attempted to remove it, pop, it would snap

back like a vaudeville comedian's.

She drove like one possessed. Meeting transports. Carrying

supplies. Skiddering across the city at all hours on all missions.

The von Schlegels still came to occasional dinners and Madam

Gerbhardt rather forlornly, with Ermangarde absent, for Saturday

luncheon.

Mrs. Oessetrich dined in uniform. Sometimes a summons came and she

rushed off during the meal. There was never a moment of the day that

found her passive. She tore ahead of the hours as if they were

wolves and their breathing was on her neck, and all day long the

relentless jangle jangle of her at the telephone. It ran along your

nerves. It pricked you into a frenzy. Jangle. Jangle.

"_Hello, Bertha. I'm at a pier in Hoboken. Tell Helga I want the

pair of Sevres urns in the drawing-room washed in warm suds and

polished. And don't let me discover that you have done it for her.

If--if that letter--or cable--if anything that looks like a message

from Miss Ermangarde should come, you can reach me in the next hour

at the Service Station--no, never mind, I'll call up again._"

But that letter or cablegram never came.

More and more the lean, quick, waiting look of a bird came out in

Mrs. Oessetrich and more and more, Paula, who drifted, almost it

seemed without footsteps, down to her meals and then back again to

her piano and the soft silent sewing of the pink things, came to have

the look of sleeping with her eyes wide open, and more and more

frequently her mother shot out at her with the "Paula, wake up.

Don't stare that way. It makes you look positively silly."

Then one day Bertha stumbled across her in the musty store-room,

seated on the floor beside the Beethoven picture, twaddling over it.

Poor Paula, her eyes had the tranced look and she was whispering to

it, a little sillily.

***

The way that Helga happened to break one of the beautiful Sevres urns

the day she was put to rinsing them was because in the very act of

lifting it from its pedestal, she fell screaming and twisting with

the pain in her side. There seemed to be no way to unlock her of the

rigid convulsion there on the floor. Paula came creeping down to her

cries and could only stand horrified. Helga writhing on the floor

and beating off Bertha. Finally, there was nothing left to do but

call in the nearest doctor. At five o'clock Helga was bundled off to

a public hospital in an ambulance. At six she was successfully

operated upon for appendicitis.

It was strange being up there alone again in the room under the

rafters. The silence flowed back and all the little sounds and sings

and noises stole out of their corners and seemed to sit about like

tame mice on their haunches.

***

Helga lay in a ward, but there was a screen around her cot and a

bride had sent her altar flowers to be distributed in the hospital,

and there was a fan of white hyacinth on a table, and the afternoon

that Mrs. Oessetrich and Paula came, they brought the inevitable and

innocuous jar of calves' foot jelly, and that glowed like a drug

store urn on the snowlit window sill.

The pretty Helga. Two days after the operation her cheeks began to

pinken and the nurse brushed and braided her brown hair over each

shoulder and out came the frail, fine, small-boned look.

She loved the warm, clean cot and the smell of hyacinth even through

the iodoform and the luxury of waking only to coddle over again

cozily on her good side, and when Bertha came to see her and remained

all of Thursday afternoon, she had the proprietary air of the

convalescent.

"See that good-looking fellow in glasses? He's my doctor. I'd give

a dime to know if he's married. Say, look around the screen at that

little blonde one three cots down. The one with the green circles

under her eyes. That kid--poor kid--what does she do? Getting over

an appendix and spry as I am. Nothing to get well for. Cries out

some fellow's name all through the ether. What does she do? Last

night while the nurse wasn't looking, climbs out barefoot on that

little balcony, gives herself a snow bath and swallows a pneumonia

bug or two. Dyin'. Say, it's a great life. See that ell over

there. Maternity ward. Kid born there fresh every hour. Ought to

see. Ever see a maternity ward?"

"Me--yah----"

"The interne, he's a little gone on me if anybody should ask you. He

lugged one over to-day for me to see. Three hours old. Ever see a

little hard-boiled beet of a kid three hours old?"

"Yah----"

"I want a white one. White as my hands. Look at them, Bertha.

Three days in bed and that snow out there on the balcony has nothing

on them for whiteness. You don't mind yours that way, do you,

Bertha?"

"How?"

"Horny."

"Horny?"

"You're like one of those war tanks, you are. Pushing right on over

the barbed wire fences without letting them even scratch you. That's

because you're all on the inside of yourself. Like your body was

just an ulster."

"Don't roll so, Helga. The wound...."

"That ain't the worst. I got what they call on the soap box speeches

in Union Square, a social sore. And they bring me calves' foot jelly

for it. There's a laugh for you, old tombstone! I got a social sore

and they bring me calves' foot jelly for it...."

But the following Sunday when Bertha arrived she was a very subdued

Helga.

"He's coming at four."

"Who?"

"Barney. I didn't ask him, Bertha. Didn't even know he knew I was

here. I got a postal. You must have told him."

"He kept asking."

"I wouldn't have sent for him. If his old woman was to pass on

to-morrow and--and he wanted me, I'd never do it to him--that's

something, ain't it, Bertha? I want him. I could have him. He

would never find out. He wouldn't understand if I tried to tell him.

To him fire don't cleanse--it only scars after you've been through

it."

"Yah. Barney is not a wise man. He is yoost a--good man----"

"That just about says it."

"Yah----"

"What are you staring at?"

"I--why you, Helga. You're pretty."

"This nightgown. So coarse! I'm a fright in it. They give them to

you like that in the wards. Ugh--and him coming at four.

Bertha--would you----"

"What?"

"It's a long trip back to the house, but up in our room, there's a

box of some of my little things. I keep it hid. There's no telling

when a girl's room can get pried into. There's a little box of my

things up on top of the wardrobe. You can reach up and feel for it

if you get on a chair. He's--coming at four."

"But Helga, I thought----"

"I want to deck myself out, so anyways he'll know what he's

missing--I hate him seeing me like this. All he's ever seen of me is

around ugly kitchen things, in ugly kitchen duds. Bertha--if I could

just have those few things to deck myself out in when Barney comes.

As long as he's going to lose me, he might as well think I'm worth

losing. Will you go--Bertha--will you----?"

"Yah----"

The package was behind the wooden frill of the wardrobe. Reaching

for it was a difficult tiptoe process that made the chair wobble, and

a shower of old dust came down on the shoulders of Bertha's reefer.

Hurrying down the steep rear staircase, Mrs. Oessetrich popped out a

sudden head.

"That you, Bertha?"

"Yah----"

"I thought you were gone for the afternoon."

"I came back for a minute."

"Did you go to see Helga?"

"Yah----"

"How is she?"

"Better."

"Do you think she will be well in time to be back for the dinner to

my Ambulance Corps? It's a great nuisance getting help from the

agencies."

"Yah--maybe----"

"You are going out again?"

"Yah--I----"

"Of course, it's your afternoon, but the von Schlegels are coming to

tea and it would help if you would stay in and----"

"I cannot--to-day----."

"Oh very well. I dislike asking favors as much as I dislike being

denied them. What's that you are carrying?"

"A box."

"That is rather self-evident, but what is in it?"

"Some--oh--I don't know."

"Bertha, I have never known you to be impertinent."

"Mrs. Oessetrich, I am not."

"Very well. If you prefer not to tell me I suppose that technically

it is none of my affair. But even with a trusted servant I cannot

seem to get over my aversion to seeing packages carted out of my

house. Of course with you it's different, but just the same I

dislike it. Hurry along, then."

For some reason, taking that long crosstown walk back to the Tenth

Avenue Hospital, Bertha's cheeks and eyeballs and the hand that

clutched the box began to burn.

***

Helga's eyes were too bright. She threw herself about the cot while

she waited and when Bertha returned, she was all thumbs at the

package and when the knot would not untie, she lay back against the

pillow and began to cry.

"I'm too weak. Help me, Bertha. I give myself the cotton-flannel

horrors in this hospital sack. Fortheluvvaga don't stand gaping.

It's only silk and it won't bite."

"Helga!"

"Helga what? Helga what?"

There was nothing to do then but to lift out the filmy white crepe

gown with the rill of French Valenciennes, and slide it on to Helga.

She came up out of it like a flower, her neck and arms suddenly

lovely under the shy mesh of the lace. There was another gown just

as sheer in the box and oddments and ends of ribbon and trinkety bits

of jewelry, and the nurse helped, too, and tied a bandeau of ribbon

on Helga's hair and fluffed up the pillows and finally there was

something very doll-like about her as she lay back tiredly.

"Dig down in the corner of the box there, Bertha, right-hand corner,

there's a little rose quartz pin will look sweet on this lace. If

there's one thing I love it's rose quartz, it's the color of a girl's

cheeks."

"Oh, Helga--Helga----"

"'Oh Helga, Helga' what? I know what you're thinking. Well you're

wrong. Maybe this stuff of mine dates back to--well, you know the

days it dates back to--and maybe you don't. And what if what you are

thinking is right? Well, what if it is? McMurty----"

"I--don't know--what I'm thinking, Helga."

"I want him to see me once, the color of something lovely instead of

something reeking of brown soap. Give me that rose quartz. It's the

color of a girl's cheeks and that's the color Barney's entitled to."

Barney came. He was shy about coming around the cot-side of the

screen and stood outside twirling his hat until the nurse, who had

directed him, had to come all the way down the ward again and steer

him in, and even then he could not be brought to approach the cot,

advancing one step and retreating two, his great figure in bulky

civilian clothing, exhaling the cold snow smell of outdoors. The red

of his face ran up under the red of his hair and mustache. He jutted

it out fiercely and then sucked it in again.

"Look, Bertha, he's scared of me."

Persiflage and poor Barney. It fuddled him and made him blink.

"Look, Bertha, he's afraid I'm a doll in a box."

"It's snowing for proper," he said. "Just came up now in a flurry."

He had a voice that shook things when he spoke. The spoon in the

medicine glass trembled. Helga laughed at it and cried right into

the laugh and licked off a tear with the little pink adder of her

tongue.

"Howdy--Barney."

"You _do_ look like a doll in the box--laying there."

"I'll be going," said Bertha.

"Don't you be going," he said, "We'll be wanting you," and sat down

in the creaky edge of a chair there beside the cot and drew off his

leather mitts and unwound his muffler and blew on his hands. And

blew and blew.

"You're better, ain't you, Helga?"

She raised her bare arm in a half wreath over her head.

"Lots you care."

He blew and he blew.

"I couldn't come before, Helga. I been in trouble. Sit down,

Bertha, we'll be needing you. My old woman died, Helga. Dead and

buried this day week."

"I better be going," said Bertha.

"Wait, you, Big One. You know how to help...."

"What?"

He leaned over to touch Helga shyly, where her throat throbbed.

"I want to carry her off from here. Home. There's bedside weddings.

I've read of a many of them. To-morrow, Bertha, we'll do the

fixings. Helga?"

Helga lay so white and still. You could almost see the heart of her

seem to stir the rill of the Valenciennes. And her eyes were closed

and the brown braids lay in ropes against her pallor.

"Helga?"

"I better be going," said Bertha.

Outside it was snowing in sudden loose flakes that spat you roundly

on the cheek. It snowed up in merry little geysers. Slantwise and

down your neck. The whole street blew forward like the frilled

petticoat of a frantic lady. Your hat. Your heart. Your breathing.

The wind lashed at them so and froze the tears to your cheeks....

***

Something had happened. The screen stood huddled closely about the

cot. A white interne came out with a tank. Oxygen. An electric

bulb on a flexible stand was bent away from the bed, so that its

light flowed down into a pool on the floor. There was a cruel

rasping noise against the grain of the silence. It made you cold all

over like the jerking back of a hangnail against the direction of the

flesh. You stood outside the screen and listened and trembled. The

noise was Helga, breathing.

There was something on the chair. It rose and fell. It was Barney's

back as he sat by the cot side, all curved forward with his great

empty hands between his knees and his eyes like empty cups.

The pink was gone from Helga's face. It was as if some one had held

up a transparent finger before a candle and then blown out the flame.

The laxness of the hand. It hung down like a lily on a broken stalk.

After a time the dead old eyes of Barney swung toward the drift of

hand. But without seeing. He only looked. Crowded hurting corner,

filled with the little gale of Helga's breathing. The curve of

Barney. That twisted neck of the lamp and the bulb that glared to

the floor.

"What is it?" said Bertha.

"Pneumonia," said the nurse, and put Helga's hand back under the

coverlet as you would a flower or a letter.

"Oh--Helga."

"She was coming along so nicely. She must have become delirious

suddenly during the night. The second case of the kind in this ward

in one week. They found her out there in that little balcony

standing in the snow. Just in her flimsy nightdress. Barefoot. She

must have been very sly about it. The night nurse had scarcely

turned her back. I've never had a patient do it on me. Let me touch

wood. Of course, they all say that I'm not only careful, I'm

fanatical. It's double pneumonia. Of course some do rally,

but--poor child--you're her nearest relative--or friend----."

"Me? Yes, I guess."

"You can stay and wait if you want."

"Yah--please."

"Has she ever been a mental case?"

"How?"

"A nervous history, I mean."

"Why I--dunno."

"It must have been sudden insanity or hysteria caused her to find her

way out to that balcony. Second case in one week. I always say ward

patients should be kept in ignorance of such accidents. Dangers of

auto-suggestion."

"Oh, Helga--Helga----"

The white rose leaves of Helga's eyelids. One of them seemed to

Bertha to crinkle at one corner.

Barney beat his big hands loosely together as they hung between his

knees. His big hands. His empty hands.

She seemed to know with her smile that he was there. It lit once

toward him and she tried to reach out her hand, but it just drifted

along the bedside and hung loose, and he kissed it and put it back

under the coverlet as if it were a small dead bird.

"Oh God," cried Barney in his voice that seemed to have the mustache

growing right on it. "There's no meaning to your wisdom. That talk

is bunk."

"Yes, there is--meaning--somewhere----"

"To you maybe, Big One, but not to me...."

"Maybe."

At dawn Helga began to slip away. She tried to keep the little

thread of the smile on her lips but such a foolish sniveling thing

was happening.

The years were like water surging her backward.

It was at Mrs. Farley's and she was coming down one cold morning,

adjusting the criss-cross straps to her apron and tasting her lips as

if they were bitter.

"Fortheluvvaga" was the last thing Helga said before she died.

"Warmed-over oatmeal again. This oleo is strong enough to walk.

Give me a snack of little Lord Fauntrollo's sweet butter--Bertha----"

***

The boys kept marching. Barney, who was forty, came to say good-by.

It was odd to see him. Barney, who was forever bringing all the

stray cats on his beat to the back-door for the leavings. Sometimes

there were three or four of them standing around him, with hopeful

vertical tails and meouwing up into his face. His brick-red, open

fireplace of a face. Barney, all bristling now with new phrases

which he wore as cockily as his puttees. "To hell with the Kaiser.

Dirty Huns."

To hate was not so different from to love. Barney had discovered

that. Only it was difficult to steam up the hate. Tramp. Tramp.

Tramp-tramp-tramp. It was strange to see him with his fine square

back and the curving seams, walking off down the street after the

good-by. His shoulders were very ferocious looking and pedestrians

made little respectful detours to pass him. Barney, fine and fighty

and hating enough to be patriotic.

***

Even Bertha bought a Liberty Bond. When Mrs. Oessetrich was not

driving the ambulance she stood on the steps of the Treasury Building

or the Public Library and sold Liberty Bonds and collected Red Cross

funds. A stretcher was laid along the sidewalk. The money rained

down on it. Give. Give. More stretchers for more maimed bodies.

And the frightening part of it was that you gave. Gave because the

piece of cheesecloth bunting snapping in the breeze made your eyes

hot and your heart hot. Bertha gave. It was hard for her to pass

one of the stretcher things and not drop a coin. The terrible

futility of those marching little scissors-like men. You knew it

deep down in your heart and hated the hating.

Bertha could sometimes sit upstairs in her room, big and bitter and

inarticulate with it. Paula, who never played any more, since the

Beethoven. Olga, gorging the little scissors men with the aniseed

cakes of stultification. Barney, who was tender to kittens, marching

away with the places for cartridges corrugated along his belt. Mrs.

Oessetrich baiting in the public square. And yet the bunting. It

made your tonsils tighten. So hating the hate, Bertha gave. Dropped

the twenty-five cent pieces on to the stretchers, that there might be

more stretchers, and bought a one-hundred-dollar Liberty Bond.

Bertha with her Liberty Bond. It was engraved on tough beautiful

paper and scrolled like a bank note. Sometimes she sat and looked at

it with her lips a little finicky and folded back from her white

square teeth. A wise old Chinese smile. Even the delirious, banging

day of the Armistice the smile persisted. The faces of all the

little hurrying, scurrying people were so merely guzzled. So merely

victorious. An oppressor had been laid. But somehow you trembled.

Old hates for new....

***

There was no evading it. Paula's queerness. For two weeks there had

been no way to induce her to leave the fourth-floor room. She clung

to it like a bit of ash blonde moss. It seemed to embarrass Mrs.

Oessetrich, this timid, this astonishing, this not quite rational

tenacity of Paula's. She hated even Bertha's knowing it and what

went on between mother and daughter usually happened behind closed

doors. Paula sat on her little sewing-chair and just faced her

parent when she coaxed and cajoled and threatened, and would not be

pried out. It was dreadful for Mrs. Oessetrich. Placed her rather

in the position of luring a wild bird out of ambush with crumbs.

Once she even tried to force her, but Paula's teeth went together

with a click and her fingers clenched down around the seat of the

chair, and frail little Paula, who looked as if Fra Lippo Lippi had

painted her; frail Paula who loved Chopin and the miniature melodies

of Mozart, there was no budging her. Not so much as an inch. She

gritted her teeth and sat. Just sat.

Bertha used to tiptoe in with her meals. She would eat for Bertha.

But sometimes it took an hour. Spoonful by spoonful of the broths

that were tilted up against her teeth, and then the slow difficult

gulps of muffin or of shredded meat. They were the hardest. She had

a way of looking at Bertha over the top of the spoon. Those eyes

would hang in Bertha's darkness. Disks of hot blue light.

Something of a sequence was taking place in Paula's aching brain.

That was the plain fact that was so embarrassing to her mother.

First the trousseau things. Then the yards of maline veiling which

she would pin to her hair and let trail off behind. Mrs. Oessetrich

burned the veil one night in the furnace so that the house smelled

with it.

And now Paula's sewings for the hours and hours in the little chair

were all doll size. Baby things. It made the red fly up into Mrs.

Oessetrich's face, and behind the carefully locked door, she went

into long, low-voiced pleading conferences with Paula.

But it was no use. The piano remained closed and day after day Paula

sat and sewed the small things.

Dr. Ehrenfest came. She only laughed at him, her large blue eyes

seeming almost to cover her face and at the slightest approach in her

direction, her hands locking down over the sides of the chair.

Down in the drawing-room, over the tea things that Bertha was

spreading, Dr. Ehrenfest kept stroking his slim point of beard.

"Well, 'Tilda, let us face our facts."

"I have never been the one to dodge them, Ehrey."

"I think the only thing to do right now is to call in Lauer on this

case."

"Dr. Emil Lauer the--the----."

"Yes. The neurologist."

"Then Paula is----."

"It may be only a temporary neurosis. But right now, Lauer is our

man. He has that splendid place out at Hill's End. It may be just

what Paula needs."

"You mean----"

"His sanitarium. I consider it one of the best in the country."

"Don't mince words with me, Ehrey. Dr. Lauer's place is a private

asylum."

"I can't see that calling a spade a bludgeon helps matters."

"I hate minced facts. I can swallow my dose undiluted."

"Well, then, I want a psychopathist like Lauer in on Paula's case."

"All right. All right. I'll have another lump, Bertha. All right."

But her face seemed to shrink, the cheeks to recede, leaving the

frontal part with its avian thrust even more leanly forward.

"I've seen it coming. 'Tilda, since----"

"Since Harrison, of course, you mean."

"You cannot suppress every normal instinct in a high-strung girl like

Paula and expect----"

"Harrison was not the man for her. He proved it by what happened

subsequently."

"What happened subsequently might not have occurred if----"

"Suppressed desires, Freudian pish. Paula has been indulged in every

possible manner except in the case of Harrison Gage."

"She pleaded to go to Europe that next winter, if I remember."

"Well, she studied music at home, didn't she? The best that money

could buy was hers."

"What is this seems to be on her mind about Beethoven or Mozart or

one of them? She cried to me a little up there just now about

Beethoven."

"I don't know, I'm sure. There was some discussion a few days before

Olga sailed about that print of Beethoven that used to hang in the

dining room. That must in some way be fuddled in the poor child's

brain. Olga wanted it down. It seems silly now, but during the war

in some devilish way, it sounded rational enough, and there was an

argument. Olga felt rather firmly about it. Finally Bertha carted

it up to the storeroom. That's all there was to it. Up to that time

Paula had been working on the Sonata Appassionata. It seemed to

upset her. Bertha, get down that print of Beethoven that you carried

up to the storeroom that day and hang it back in the dining room."

"I--please excuse--I hung it back there yesterday."

"Presumptuous! The kind of thing I very much dislike. It merely

happened to be all right in this case. Don't let it happen again.

Bring Dr. Ehrenfest some fresh muffins."

"There's a strange woman."

"A priceless servant and yet sometimes--so strange--so

strange--that--that----"

"What?"

"I--don't--know----"

***

You stood in the pantry and shivered and put your hands up over your

ears. Your teeth were on edge and the entire surface of your body

hurt.

They were taking Paula. Dr. Ehrenfest and Dr. Lauer, and a nurse in

a cap like a charlotte russe case. Little Paula, whose bones were

squab-like and who was the faint color of ashes of roses. Her

strength terrified you. She did not want to go and you knew as you

stood hurting all over the surface of you, that she was biting and

kicking. Then you stole out to help, but you were trembling so and

somehow you did not want Paula to know that you knew.

The strength of Paula. She would not be carried. And so she sat and

crouched, with her terrified hands flaming white at the knuckles and

twisted around the rungs of the banisters, and her eyes the lovely

troubled Ophelia eyes. The blazing, blazing, flame-blue disks.

You cried with your heart. It was not to be borne. The carrying of

Paula kicking and screaming down those flights. The streamers of her

sobs. The streamers....

"Paula," cried Bertha and ran up the steps toward her cowering at the

banisters there.

"Bertha, Bertha," sobbed Paula, and uncurled her fingers, "they're

taking me down off the wall. They're taking me up to the

storeroom----"

"No, no, Miss Paula, they're taking you to make you well."

"You knew, Bertha. You used to sit on the steps and listen. They

took him away from us, Bertha--you remember--I cried. Olga--the

feeding of the men. The mad little men who hated Beethoven. They

took him away from us, Bertha----"

"No, no, Miss Paula, he's downstairs in the dining room where he used

to be."

"Where?"

"Come, Miss Paula, with Bertha."

"Where?"

"To a house in the country where you are going to get well."

"They took--him away--from us. You used to peel the potatoes. I

could hear them fall in the pan. You listened----"

"Come, Miss Paula."

She went down the stairs and out of the house like a child then.

"Good-by, Bertha--they took him away from us--but I knew--you

knew----"

"Good-by, Miss Paula."

She sat up as stiffly in the car as a doll, with blue Ophelia eyes,

and let them seat themselves in a sort of dreadful battalion around

her.

"We knew--we knew----" she said to Bertha, who was left standing on

the sidewalk.

Upstairs in her bedroom Mrs. Oessetrich sat rocking herself. Rocking

herself in a straight chair.

***

The house was like a tomb. It stood all day, listening. Upstairs,

downstairs, and the old pulling pains at the backs of Bertha's legs.

It was difficult without a second girl. They came and to the trip

hammer of Mrs. Oessetrich's tongue they left. Insolently, most of

them, and usually in the midst of a half-swept room or with windows

flung high and the curtains pinned away for thorough cleaning. It

was not much better with the day-help. They never came back the

second time.

But after the Armistice, the agencies began to feed them out again.

Sullen men who did outdoor work and washed windows in their old army

coats.

"Two dollars and sixty cents a day! What's the world coming to?

Don't have that dirty-looking fellow in the old tan coat come here

any more. I dislike his manner. There is something so bolsheviki

about him."

The old tan coat was a doughboy's, grimy beyond recognition. He was

one of the scissors men and had been stoked up on sandwiches from

hands as fair as Olga's. The bolsheviki look was the two dollars and

sixty cents a day recompense for a badly gassed lung.

Laundry work had gone up, too. "It is ruinous. Three dollars and

ten cents. Why, a family could live on that in the old days."

But not in the new. The new purged days since the war.

"Give her my Venetian point tablecloth to launder, Bertha. Tell her

to be sure and use tepid water and a warm iron. It cost two hundred

and fifty dollars before the war. It has to be done scallop by

scallop."

Three dollars and ten cents a day to iron Mrs. Oessetrich's two

hundred and fifty dollar Venetian point tablecloth. Scallop by

scallop. Somehow if you looked at it that way--three dollars and ten

cents for the eight hours of standing on the granatoid floor of the

laundry was not so very high. Scallop by scallop....

Bertha's wages had been raised to fifty dollars. The bulge in her

petticoat pocket was growing again. Helga's funeral had depleted it

for a while. Helga, who loved to be snug and warm, would have hated

to lie in an untufted casket.

But with the raise to fifty dollars, the little hit-hit began again.

It followed her all around the house. The stilly house. The

listening house. The waiting, brooding, silenced house.

You looked forward to Monday nights because of the recreation of all

the crystal chandeliers set blazing then and out came the solid gold

plate that was kept wadded in cotton in the safe in Mrs. Oessetrich's

boudoir.

Monday night was opera night. The Oessetrichs had subscribed for the

same first tier box for fifteen years. The Oessetrich little girls

had grown up to those seats, so to speak, until gradually their feet

had reached the floor and their heads shot up over the backs. Paula

had kept the programs. They were in a stack up in the room. The

lower ones all yellow.

Usually now the von Schlegels and Madam Gerbhardt or Godfather and

Aunt Mary Oessetrich came to dine on Monday nights and then went on

to the opera.

Mrs. Oessetrich in her shining expanse of hard colored satin. The

beautiful diamond necklace, mounted very clumsily on red gold. The

bugle and passementerie and crystal trimmings. The heavy

incrustations of bead embroidery. She glittered and she clinked.

You wanted to ring her as you would a bell.

Small but complicated dinners with a helper in the kitchen and Bertha

in her role of waitress, boxed into a black sateen uniform that

spanned her between the shoulders, and the white organdie turnover

collar that seemed to jut out her cheek bones and give the wide area

between that startling clarity of a nun's.

One evening there was to be a new opera. Madam Gerbhardt had the

score. She sang snatches of it at dinner, and before the wraps were

brought, she sat down at the concert grand piano in the drawing-room

and played off pages of it. Coq D'Or. Tickling golden nonsense.

Oh, but you wanted to strut and stick yourself out in front like a

fat king and hold off the gold platter with the excavated mound of

pistachio pudding and rollic with it as if you had stepped down off a

playing card. Fat, mad king.

Coq D'Or. You wanted Madam Gerbhardt to sit there in her

upholstered-looking blue velvet with the cut steel buttons down it,

and play them all out over the piano. All the lively little Coq D'Or

people who resided in the foolish heart of the opera. The kings and

queens and the jacks and the jokers off the playing cards. The

little streets down which they swarmed over cobblestones and the

houses with waving crooked sides like the bend of a concertina.

Crazy houses with a jester's cap on the peak, and a bell hanging down

over one window. You could see them as you strutted out with the

pistachio pudding. Purple sky like a bruise. And all the ladies had

long thin necks with hooks in them, like swans'. They were the

queens of the playing cards. And all the kings had little bellies

and strutted. Coq D'Or. It made you merry and it made you foolish

and it made you see the new-fangled bewilderment of a sky the color

of a bruise. Hoodlum music that ran the wrong way off the keys, like

the Chinaman in the subway who read up and down off his newspaper.

Tra-la-la-la-la--lalala. Lawk, you had almost stumbled with the

solid gold platter of the pistachio.

"Bertha, bring the wraps."

Yah--yah--the silly queen.

"Bertha, see if the car is at the door."

Yah--yah--the silly queen with the hook in her neck like the plumbing

underneath the stationary washstand. Coq D'Or--pouring golden

nonsense....

And the talk. You learned if you listened as you passed around the

platters, charmed glittering names. Marguerite. Ophelia. La

Navarraise. Sappho. Santuzza. Thais. Heifetz. Tosca. Caruso.

Sembrich. Friedheim. Pederewski. von Buelow. Hoffman. Elman.

Wieniawski. Ysaye. Charvet. Charvet.

One evening at dinner Madam Gerbhardt said something about this

charmed and glittering name, that hung in the memory like a Christmas

tree ball.

"Charvet is only a boy. They say, by the way, he is American.

Without a doubt he is one of the foremost pianist composers of the

day. Have you heard him this season, 'Tilda?"

"No."