Part 17

"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.