Part 2
She began to cry inwardly. There was a little heart in her throat that beat up against her silence. It was terrible to be dumb. She could have shrieked, "I am all locked! You hear! Prairies are flowing in me and oceans and I am under them. Locked!" Words! Words! To be able to pour some of her jeweled sands on to the sensitive plate of him. She could feel the sands want to run into words and the words thunder into wisdom.
"You are so white, Bertha. To think that I never noticed. Deeply white, like the flesh of a magnolia." She felt her shoulder gleam and pushed it back into her sleeve.
"Bertha--don't----"
"Go away----"
Then he began shyly at her fingers, lifting them one by one.
"Strong Bertha."
Strong Bertha indeed. Their heaviness sickened her. She wanted to distract him from their roughness to which the green chiffon always clung, and to tell him how the lanes of his slender fingers led through the forest, but what she said was, "Get out. I can bite."
"Then bite, Bertha." The dance of excitement along his whisper! It set her to trembling. "Your beautiful strength! Give some to me, White Bertha."
"Mrs. Farley will not have goings-on. Helga will hear. I will call Mrs. Far-r-ley--"
She gargled the name a little. He looked at her with her face flattened by darkness into a mere lily pad and her nearness flowed over him.
"You--who are you? I know! You are the poem of the woman whose feet are rooted in the secrets out of the soil. You are--you are a----"
"Yes? Yes?"
"You are a--a tower of silence that is buried under some sea. I want to write you into great oxen words."
Her splayed lips tried, but were dumb. There was something she so terribly wanted to say to that. A heart hurt. To tell it would be like giving him a jewel.
"Bertha, you are like a tree when you tremble, caught in a windshake. Don't be afraid. Come to me--Bertha--close--."
Something had gone over to him. A wraith out of a door. The jeweled sands were pouring....
"Bertha----"
"No--no--Mrs. Far-r-ley----"
She came down into his arms that had the sudden strength to hold her. His lips were on her throat, listening.
***
The days were as days always had been. Entrails of fowls to be torn out. Mud carried in on grocery boys' heels. "Lawk, spinach boiled down so!" Pots. Pans. The grease clogging the drain and sucking the hands. To be ordered:
Bay leaves. Prepared flour. Dry mustard. Kitchen Bouquet. Silver polish. Pickled walnuts. Caraway seeds. Bottled capers. Powdered sugar. Tarragon vinegar.
Just time, fluted into days and nights.
Rollo had not come again. That was part of the preciousness. The once. The beauty of that hurt more than the pain. Her yearning was proud of his not coming.
Trust Rollo to pause a little this side of satiety, teased, but with the flavor high on his palate. Asceticism of keeping a little lean with self-inflicted hungers.
She had dusted the terra cotta Chloe three of Helga's Thursdays out and he had not glanced up. He could pass her on the stairs without seeing, and did. One night, at dinner to ten, wine had warmed him again, and he came out into the kitchen.
Bertha was tilting an enormous copper pot to drain it of grease, two fowl shining in it on a device that resembled a spit.
He regarded her through the slippery vapors, her pallor not unlike the nakedness of the fowl.
_The Cathedral Under the Sea_. He had written it--weeks ago--that dawn! Hours and hours that he could scarcely account for. The shaggy manuscript of it in a red portfolio up in the third left drawer of his desk. A secret palpitating saga that stalked through forests of iambic and hexameter with the sullen tonnage of a boar. Jove--up in the third left drawer--must re-write and show it to Beebe.
He went out into the yard for a magnolia. They were asleep on the tree like birds with tucked heads. Her heart waited. Disks of poured-off grease riding on the sink water. Her fork stabbing the softening haunches that were already running juices. The big silence standing stock still. Hope.
He came in with a bud in his hand that was like a live star. It gave a little movement forward of a sleepy petal, opening. She wanted that star for her darkness. Rollo! Like a hoop the silent calling of his name rolling through the lanes his fingers made in her heart and yet, when he passed on through the swinging door, there was that yearning of hers, glad to be again denied.
Baste! Baste! Feeding back into the fowls their own drippings. Celery to be sharpened at the roots like pencils. A fleck of baking soda in the peas to bring out the green. Finger rolls warming their toes at the edge of the oven and Mr. Farley's slice of gluten toast. Fancy! To be full of the invisible tears of the hurt of beauty all the while she was toasting old Mr. Farley's slice of diabetic bread. Hurting gladness.
It was not easy to be glad. Yet Helga was full of gladnesses that you could almost touch. Dimension and bulge to them, like the calf of the leg. The easy gladness of Thursday out. "He says to me and I says to him." Coney Island. "That night watchman's a helluva fresh guy, but I like him." Swedish Barbecues at Concordia Hall.
Gladnesses that were as easy as spinach. How to capture them the way Helga did? They ran away from Bertha like little mercury balls.
Once on a Sunday she had gone to a clambake at Knuts Grove, with the plumber's assistant who came to mend a water pipe. He had pressed her hips like the ice man, and made her run panting among the trees and beer kegs. Great big girls with Hogarth expanses of bosom had sat in rope swings and propelled with their legs until the flounces flew back and shouts went up to the accompaniment of forefingers scraping forefingers. "Shame--Oh Shame!" The plumber's assistant pushed Bertha. High. Higher. Balbriggan legs above laughter. "Let 'er go, Gallagher. Whoops--see! Oh--Oh--that gal's all there!" Stabs at the pit of her. Helga's gladnesses these. "High! Higher! It's raining in London! Yah--oh Baby!" Eyes and wet grins all blurry with beer fumes.
Let the old cat die! The wooden seat tilting and her skirts higher and her screams full of panic. "I'll yump--let me out--yah--yah"--slapping right and left and her stocking and shin torn from the jump--"Yah--you--lunks--you got lice. Dirty--dirty--youse--dirty--"
She ran then, climbing over fences to find the street car line.
Gladness in the round. What were they compared to the hurting gladness of Rollo, passing through the kitchen with a breathing star in his hand? Baste! Baste! Celery to be sharpened. Baste! Then came the dishing up and the riding of the platters through the swinging doors on Helga's palm.
Later, much later, with her dish pan turned and the ice card out, she could see through the crack in the door, the two tables of euchre, and Rollo and the girl with the dark portières of low hair, left out.
An omission as graceful as the rest between the chords of a prelude. They were by a fire on a couch that fattened up around them. The star of a magnolia in her hair, as if it had simply whitened there. Rollo, nearing her, as he would do it, without seeming to stir. Fine fettled, both of them, his ears laid back as if to the wind; her nostrils, little pinks.
Puffs of talk. Silences made loud by heart beats. Her neck back from the imperceptible nearness of his breathing. Withholding her young body like an arched bow; his, trembling for the arrow.
They were so young. Crocus tips.
And Bertha, from behind the swinging doors, pinioned to their moment, her heart trying to pull away from the spike through it.
She in there, who had so little to give and gave that little cannily. The lovely frugality of thin lips. Bertha back there with her riches, would have been willing to transfer them from her splayed lips to the thin ones that he in turn might kiss those riches off----
"Oh, Rollo--Rollo----"
He was feeling for the hair with the magnolia out in it like a star, but she would tauten back, and finally, on the flip of a despair, he went out and she remained thrust forward a little to the firelight, her smile flickering.
In the room beyond the portièred arch, the euchre tables were shifting. Middle-aged laughter. Silk _froufrous_. The firelight waiting for Rollo.
After a while he came back. There was a red portfolio under his arm. She reached out, but he withheld it and opening the shaggy pages began to read.
Slow oxen words plowing up secrets of the soil. Gleaming submarine words. Words out of jeweled sands. Heavy words that thundered into wisdom. The strange wisdom of the silence that stood stock still. The hexameter of the wide, white feet that the earth sucked unto herself in fond little marshes, as they ran through the forests surrounding the Cathedral Under the Sea. The song that was locked in a heart and hurt there. Rhythm. The fandango of sound. The saga of the silence of Bertha--there behind the swinging doors, hearing herself bleed into words. The brook of the frozen tears thawing upon Rollo's lips. The flamingoes flying----
The oval face was full of tears and so close to Rollo's that suddenly, over the red portfolio, he had it dry with his kisses, her body curving back and his curving over it. The flame of winding arms----
***
It was late when Bertha went upstairs.
She had polished and twisted twenty-four crystal wine goblets into nothingness. It was so with her pain. She wanted sullenly to twist it for twisting her. But it curved away. Nothingness.
It was good to set out the milk bottles. Six in a row. They were so there. Quarts. Bulge. Dimension.
***
The magnolia was quite naked. All autumn a circuit of excitement had been running through the house, ever since a Mr. Beebe, with a portfolio had interrupted the family at dinner and the mould of pistachio ice cream had come out uncut and steeped in its own melt. Day by day the plates coming out from the dining room were more and more nibbled and nervous-looking. The electric door bell with its batteries in the kitchen kept tittering. In the front hall the silver plate for visiting cards was high with them.
There were oatmeal cookies to be baked in daily batches now because Mrs. Farley, in the gray and jet gown designed for the Daughters of Confederacy annual luncheon, poured tea every afternoon out of a gold service that her grandmother had tilted in the same solemn drawing-room.
Half a dozen of Helga's Thursdays out had been commandeered.
"Fortheluvvaga, you'd think he was making his debutte. Little Lord Fauntlerollo has written something and it's a helluva sensation. One of those fresh newspapers guys slipped me something just now for slipping him up to the study. Fortheluvvaga, I could have tipped them off to that long ago. I've been emptying that trash basket of his writings for three years now."
"To write, Helga, is to make words into pack mules to carry fine thoughts on to paper--if I had the pack mules----"
"Pack mules! Ain't you enough of a pack mule yourself without wishing for some? Fortheluvvaga, a pack mule wishing for pack mules."
"Pack mules--that wouldn't fall down on their knees----"
"I knew a guy from Missouri once, sold mules. Spondoolaks! That baby carried four collars in his pocket to a dance and won his lady a manicure set every time he took 'er to a contest. Little Lord Fauntlerollo! Say, gimme a baby with liver and lights to him."
Rollo had written something. The white hands at Bertha's heart set up a fluttering. To write something was not to sprawl prepared flour and bay leaves on the order list. It was to paint into words and on to paper the submerged forests of the heart. Like transfer pictures that you wetted and rubbed.
***
More pleasant irregularities. Carriages at the curb and the family barouche at the most untoward of hours. Mr. and Mrs. Farley still rode out, with a conservatism that even then was beginning to be conspicuous, in an ink pot of a coupé drawn by two fat bays. Floundering, gasoline-gagged traffic banes.
Rollo, upstairs, smoking too many cigarettes and flinging out oaths to the visitors' cards that were slid under his locked study door. Old Mr. Farley, who came home to luncheon, cutting out newspaper clippings with his fork and reddening under what seemed more than his daily allotment of old port. The telephone a screaming cockatoo that had to be throttled a score of times a day.
"_No, Mr. Rollo Farley cannot be disturbed to come to the telephone. No, it appeared in four editions of_ New Poetry. _Impossible to get a copy off the stands any more. Date of book publication December tenth._"
December tenth. A little knob of a day to stick out of the flatnesses. Bertha's hopelessness wound around it like a baby's finger. December tenth. She scoured a whole morningful of pots that day. Harsh bristles against stove black. Scoured because she was happy and was happy because she scoured. She was put away, one might say, like a Christmas-tree-ball. Wadded. Waiting.
***
It came. A black gusty December tenth of soot on the window sills, cold door knobs, and when she dumped her scrub water out over the porch rail, her bare forearms reddened and steamed. Winter. The magnolia as if a trumped-up bride made out of a poker had been stripped again down to the poker. She thought of it in bud, constantly.
The scrub water blew inward as she threw it, lashing her skirts to her legs. Time for flannels. She must shop new ones for herself at the Sailors' Supply Store down in Front Street, her first Thursday out. She liked them man-size with great ribbings at the wrists and ankles. They kept out soppy water.
She chose of their grossness as naturally as she spat.
December tenth was on a Thursday and Helga as usual was after her. "Fortheluvvaga, Bertha, have a heart. Gimme your Thursday and I'll do as much for you. I need stockings. Look at my heel hanging out. There's a fella down on Fourteenth Street selling them at the curb for twenty-nine cents. Gimme your Thursday, Bertha, you don't do nothing with yours nohow but sit and look at it. Aw Berth. I gotta cold on my chest. How is it they never seem to think the help's rooms needs heat same as the rest? I need a woolen shirt."
"Yah--Yah--you don't buy warm shirts, you buy thin stockings--all of you--nothing on the inside of you, so you hang yourselves with things on the outside.
"Inside! I got a floatin' kidney that's killin' me. I wish you had my backache for a day."
"That's an ache a plaster can reach."
"Yah, try to lay in bed one morning huggin' a plaster in this house and see where it gets you. Bein' sick by the clock. Hospital or get up. My idea of heaven is being sick and taking my time about it. Aw, Bertha, if you knew how my kidney's hurtin' and I need that shirt, gimme your Thursday----"
"Yah--yah--always the same. Graft. You got a nerve."
"Aw Berth...!"
"Yah."
So Bertha's Thursday out bequeathed to Helga and Bertha at dusting the study. Rollo's. She could stir the down on the back of his neck with her breathing as she rubbed at a chair. Shining ridges of book backs to be dusted. In waves. Thoughts that had found their way out and into the fragrant prison of morocco. Jeweled sands poured on to paper. Fleck. Fleck. Mahogany full of pools and one edge of a table into which Rollo's profile sank--the nostrils, with a little rabbit-like quiver to them, perpetually upside down. Slow-fingered firelight, like a neat little girl on a stool, tatting. The rug was full of colors that were faint as her wisps of old sound. The dust cloth, an old silk waist of Mrs. Farley's, clung to the rough nap of her fingers and it hurt her like noise. A room to be quiet in. A warm kind of a quiet, like a wool shawl over the shoulders. The pencil whispering and Rollo's hand across his brow like an eye shade.
"Ah me----."
Now, so! To lift that little pad under Rollo's elbow without an oath from him. There! Lawky, lawk. The rocking horse blotter had a crystal knob. To reach that now, and to polish it. Done! The stack of books at his right, half unwrapped. The flare of brown paper to be removed without a creak. So! Two little stacks of slender books, rough-leaved and in tawny jackets.
THE CATHEDRAL UNDER THE SEA
BY
ROLLO FARLEY
The Cathedral-Under-the-Sea-by-Rollo-Farley-the-Cathedral-Under-the-Sea.
Why, to fleck at them with her dust cloth was like touching a bit of tremor. Her tremor. That figure of a woman on the tawny jacket. Sullen and at a sea-edge, with the sand sucking tight and eager about her ankles and the sky like a silence. Jagged leaves which she opened shyly and with a stealth that trembled.
Wide margins and little islands of printed words. Slow, pulling words. Arches of rhythm. The naves of her silences. The submerged grandeurs she had laid to his ear with the roaring shell of her heart. She had led him down the shelves of these pages, one night, her friends the soil and the sea-bottoms giving under their feet and sucking up softly about their ankles.
_The Cathedral Under the Sea!_
***
Lawk, she had dropped the book, face downward, so that the leaves doubled up and the ink pot tottered and she barely had time to save the spill and Rollo was savage.
"Damnation, Helga, leave off your puttering and clear out."
She had risen with the crumpled book to her like a hurt bird and the blood so furious in her face that it stung his eyes to hers.
"Oh, it's you. Of course. Thursday. Run along, there's a girl."
There were a few bank notes on the table, weighted down with loose change. His hand traveled toward them and then jerked back again, his attitude listening; his eyes toward their left corners listening; his dry pen quivering slightly as it, too, hung listening.
Those little book stacks on his desk that her eyes could not veer off from. Something of him--and of her--there. Herself on the outside of herself. The broken wing of a book in her arms. Their book. And yet he sat with his eyes in their corners, waiting for her to go.
"Rollo," cried out her silence, "I am the Cathedral Under the Sea. Don't you know me?" But all she said was:
"It bane all pencil shavings under your feet. If I could sweep them..."
At that his fingers where they propped up the pen relaxed to the page, his eyes sliding from their corners of unease.
"Not now, there's a girl." This time he reached for one of the bills under the loose change, handing it back to her over one shoulder.
Poor Bertha. An insistent sense of sickness that had been rising in her of late when she bent over to baste a fowl or scour a floor, came over her now, almost languidly. A dizzying kind of clutch, as if a pair of tiny hands were swinging on her heart beat.
"No," she said, standing back from the flutter of the bill.
His eyes flew to their corners again.
"Leave me then. I am busy."
Standing there directly behind him, she forced him to look and her eyes were crucified.
"I want this."
The crumbled bird of a book. The bent page. The little islands of jeweled words margined in silence. The beauty of the silence of the Cathedral Under the Sea. Her silence.
"I want this."
And then when he did not answer and with his look impaled upon hers, she went out, dizzily, carrying the book, her broom, a floor brush, and a bottle of furniture oil.
***
Guests would be in to tea and there were oatmeal cookies to be made, but she dragged herself up to her room that was trapped under the two slants of roof. It was good to be up there on her bed. Suddenly and again that new and fantastic craving irrelevantly had hold of her. That sense of bud; that desire to behold the leisurely beauty of a bud opening. The backyard magnolia was stark now. But to see it bloom! Petals to bow back ceremoniously from calyx. A gesture so fine that it took place between the battings of an eye. Often and more often now, that sense of bud opening. Once in her sleep the soft movement of a petal against the very walls of herself.
A tulip twirling. That was her dizziness. She sat up to shake it off. Oatmeal cookies to be made....
And then in a flash, seated there on the bed edge, in her silence, she knew! Knew it dumbly. That tulip twirling had a heart and in that heart a child. Not his alone, like the book. Theirs!
And her veins were torrents washing and carrying to the bud the wisps of old sound and the whisperings of her friends, the soils, and the messages of the chimes, goldily, and the kiss of a poet....
After a while she dragged herself downstairs. Mrs. Farley was ringing. There were those oatmeal cookies to be made.
***
Marching days of rising in the iced dawn, when the air that came up from the lower halls was frozen from open windows, while the family lay deep under fluffy blankets.
Bertha slept with her windows closed, so that her room embalmed the cold. It ran up her body in great flashes of gooseflesh as she dressed. Once a week she bathed in a tin tub the shape of a kidney. She carried the water in eight pitcherfuls from a bathroom two floors below. The tin tub wobbled as she stood shivering in it, the bottom denting in and out noisily.
Helga in the adjoining cubicle did not bother. She was a frail girl with cheek spots of red and at night she fell into bed, often in her underclothing and stockings, for the additional warmth and for the additional five minutes of sleep it gave her in the morning, because then she had only to slip into her black sateen and white organdie bows.
And for days at a time her bed went unmade. Once, on exploration bent, Mrs. Farley found it so, plucking very gingerly at the unaired cotton coverlet. Helga was summoned, and the house-man with a squirt-can of disinfectant, and scavengers were found nesting in the slats and Helga, with her nose very red from pinching it to keep back tears, standing furiously sullen.
"Disgusting. Filthy. Shame, Helga, upon any self-respecting girl. Dear, oh dear, not fit for a pig. What's that little greasy rag on the bed? 'Sore toe.' Ugh, what horrid things can happen to the servant class! Sore toes somehow don't happen to one's friends--ugh----"