Part 18

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.