Part 20

"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."

"The moon-haunted fashion in which he played at yesterday's concert! He must have the heart of a woman, the brain of a poet, and the valor of a man. Ah, Charvet--there is a new master for you. Charvet."

"Ah, Charvet"--you tiptoed out with the platters. "Ah, Charvet." To be moon-haunted was to live with an opal mist about one's heart. Bertha knew....

***

Go. Go. Go. Mrs. Oessetrich started out early as usual, but in the excellent quality, badly fitting tweed now instead of the khaki, and in the place of the fawn-colored ambulance, Eddie was out at the curb again, usually with the small sedan.

Difficult as it was to keep the tall house from swooning into its silence, somehow she partially accomplished it with the bang-bangings of her comings and goings. The telephone. The telephone.

"_Bertha, if Madam Gerbhardt calls, tell her I will be glad to use those tickets for the Vatican Choir at Carnegie Hall to-night. Tell the carpenter when he comes, to meet me at Miss Olga's studio, I want him to build those flower boxes before she gets back. It's beginning to rain. Have those three trunks in the storeroom, with red stars on them, dragged out into the hallway by the time I get home and I'll spend this wet afternoon unpacking some things for Miss Paula. Dr. Ehrenfest call up? Any mail? Nothing from Hill's End? Paris? Miss Ermangarde? Look at the postmarks. No cables--Paris--Miss Ermangarde?--sure? Oh--well----_"

There never were.

"_Well, I'll be home by two. If the awning man comes tell him to wait._"

Hammer. Hammer. Hammer. Mrs. Oessetrich fighting the house's silence. Awnings went up as early as April. Gay orange ones with blue scallops. The old-fashioned little dressing room adjoining Ermangarde's bedroom, with the built-in wardrobe and the stationary washstand, was torn out and a shining rink of a bathroom installed. Hammer. Hammer. The rippling, striped awnings and then one day the entire house front lit up with new window shades. Festooned silk ones that shirred up with the soft rush of a laugh. The piano in Paula's room had been tuned and stood open. Smiling. Waiting. But Paula never came. The door always stood open, too. But you never looked in. Somehow the smile of that piano could seem more like a grin.

Then this happened.

Those three trunks with the red stars on had been dragged into the hallway that faced Paula's room, before it turned off into the ell that led to Bertha's door.

All afternoon, while a slanting rain flew at the roof, Mrs. Oessetrich puttered up there among Paula's things. Bertha, waxing the newly installed hardwood floor in Paula's room could glance out into the hallway and see her stooped there with her dry shattered eyes roving among the dry things. Paula's little things. Paula loved little things. There was a whole trayful of the kind of trinkets that amused her. Jade elephants. Nubs of chrysoprose and malachite. Carved intaglios. Cat's eye trifles and chalcedony. Rock-crystal hens. A silver filigree shrine the size of a thimble and wrought with amazing detail. There was a Christus with the ewe lamb, hand carved out of the yellow eye of a topaz. Green jasper amulet. A little girl's pocket-book, red lined and fashioned out of two shells with Niagara Falls written across it. Shoes. The soles a little thinned in the delicate way that Paula would wear them down. Letters. A tray of them sorted in stacks. The curious rain-tapped silence and Mathilde Oessetrich with her eyes that still had the look of the cracked shoe buttons.

Paula's tray of letters. There was something so faint and pale about them. They seemed to rise up in the vapor of a sigh.

After the waxing of the floor there were potatoes to peel and the great red eye of a roast for dinner required larding to make the juices run.

You picked your way down the back stairs, carefully, to save the squeaks.

The afternoon drew in the silence like a poultice.

The red roast when you larded it with the stripes of suet swelled up around your finger clammily, and with the heart gone from the meat, out came your finger from the hole with a sucky little pop. The house felt like that. It flowed around you so coldly, with the heart gone out of it, and the pop of the rain drops--pop--pop----

Finally Mrs. Oessetrich came down into the kitchen. Her skin was all dry, like a fowl's, and it was beginning to wattle at the neck. She was much thinner. It made everything about her lower. Her waistline and the sags underneath her eyes.

"Bertha." she said, and sat down on the edge of a chair, "has anyone had access to the storeroom besides you?"

"No."

"You have always followed my instructions and permitted none of the day help in there?"

"Yah----"

"Sure? Think carefully."

"Yah----"

"Well, something has happened. Bear in mind that these questions I am about to ask are disagreeable ones, but they must be asked."

"What?"

"Bertha, there has been a systematic rifling of things going on in the storeroom. Trunks have been pried open. Articles are missing. There is a leak in my household."

"A--what----"

"A thief."

"You mean----"

"I mean that articles of Miss Paula's that I have been putting away from time to time in trunks, during the period that she has not been--so--well--have been stolen. Two of the trunks have been pried open with hairpins and articles of more or less value are missing."

"You mean----"

"I mean nothing until I have gone further into this matter. You are still a trusted servant. Now come upstairs with me."

The sickening process of that. Bertha, to whom things were so trivial, suddenly quivering before their omnipotence.

Paula's trunk had been looted. All the neat little stacks of her lovely handiwork were in swirls of confusion on the trays. A pasteboard box had been gouged at one end and its contents dragged out. A hairpin had got itself twisted about the lock and a hurried hand had left it there.

"You can see for yourself, Bertha, someone from the inside has been at work. Can you think of any explanation for these rifled trunks?"

"I--no----"

"This amounts to more than petty thievery. There were beautiful silk garments here. Some of them imported and some of them beautifully made by Miss Paula herself of the sheerest materials."

"Yah ..."

"I was going to take some of them to her at the san--hospital, She will be shocked when she comes home and learns what has happened. Her things. Paula loved things. Why, there were three white crepe gowns on this tray that I remember distinctly packing away. Beauties, with yards and yards of real Valenciennes that her godmother had especially made for her in Valenciennes."

"White _crêpe de chine_--real Valenciennes."

"Just see! Oh. Oh. This box torn open and a rose quartz brooch that was very precious to her--Harrison's--a gift to her from a dear friend--stolen. Who has dared?"

You just stood and felt your nails dig up into your palms, and your lips were so heavy. You kept trying to move them, but they would not lift.

"I intend to get to the bottom of this--regardless."

"Mrs. Oessetrich----"

"Why Bertha, you are crimson! Bertha?"

"I--you see--yoost remembered---yoost thought----"

"Just thought what?"

"Answer me."

"I--don't--know----"

"Bertha!"

"It isn't possible. Not you. The most trusted servant I ever had!"

"But Mrs. Oessetrich, I----"

"So this is the mystery of you."

"I----"

"You strange white creature, you. This is the meaning----"

"I didn't know--"

"You thief! I never in my wildest dreams would have suspected you. Who knows what systematic process of stealing has been going on all these years under my very eyes."

"No--no--no!"

"Paula. My daughter Paula who trusted you. Who loved you."

"Please----"

"Thief! I shall call in detectives."

"No--no--please--I didn't know----"

"I too trusted you. I respected you. Oh, I cannot believe my senses."

"Mrs. Oessetrich, I only----"

"What nonsense has been talked in this household about you. Miss Olga who always insisted that you had the soul of a poet trapped in the body of a peasant. The soul of a thief!"

Dumb Bertha standing there with her lips all shirred in like an old woman's and her eyes down. It was horrible keeping her eyes down. It made her face a bonfire around them.

"Come upstairs into your room with me. I intend to go to the bottom of this."

The ignominy of that. Standing there with her arms huddled up and her eyes seeming to suck back into her head like raisins into dough.

The opening and closing of drawers. Each dragging time the wood seemed to run against the grain of her flesh and leave her shivering there with a sense of splinters plunging horridly into her. Jagged little needles.

Open. Shut. Open. Shut.

"What's that, in there?"

"Yoost my aprons."

"And that heavy thick stuff?"

"Yoost my nightgowns."

"Umph. You were clever enough to dispose of what you took, I see. Why come to think of it, I've seen you carting packages out of the house. I remember stopping you in the passageway one day. You were furtive then. I realize it now. What's this?"

"Yoost music, Mrs. Oessetrich. Please--don't touch. Yoost some old sheets of music I had before I came here."

"Humph. Loot from somewhere else, I suppose."

"Oh--oh----"

"Ugh, what a task! To think that I should ever have to resort to such degrading methods with you. Well, I see that you are clever enough to keep your clothes closet bare as a bone. Let's see, now. Oh, get up on that chair and open up those two cupboard doors above the closet. I intend to go to the bottom of this."

"Mrs. Oessetrich--those little doors I have never once opened since I am here."

"Hand me that chair. I don't believe in half-way methods."

Your lips, they were so heavy they would not lift.

To reach the pair of small doors Mrs. Oessetrich had to strain tiptoe on the chair.

"Please Mrs. Oessetrich, if you would just let me say----"

"Oh. Oh. Oh."

The little chills ran off you like sand down a dune. Cold goosefleshing chills. The small cupboard doors jerked open with a spill of things. To stand indicted before the stern irrefutable law of ownership. The indubitable right of Mrs. Oessetrich to her things. The colossal rights of ownership. Those rights had been outraged. It brought out in Mrs. Oessetrich's face the lean look of wolf.

The webby lovelinesses of Paula's. Chiffon with its pollen-like power to cling to a woman's flesh. Articles that had been jammed up there quickly. To stand there and gaze was to turn the eyes into blisters. The cream lace boudoir cap of Mrs. Oessetrich's, for which there had been a topsy-turvy search one Saturday morning, tucked up there behind one of Paula's little fluted silk negligees. The blue fox scarf that Ermangarde had been finally forced to decide she had left in a taxicab. A gold and vermilion batik scarf of Olga's. Stacks of unworn white gloves, Paula's narrow size. More of the filmy things. Peach-colored gowns with the rills of Valenciennes. Things. The scalding wrath of Mrs. Oessetrich over her silk rag-a-tags. Her inalienable right to them.

To stand branded with the puniness of desire for them. To stand there blanched to the very color of her teeth before Mrs. Oessetrich, whose face had begun to narrow until the nose sharpened like the blade of a knife. The shame ... you could scarcely breathe....

"So! These fur-lined bedroom slippers of mine that I haven't even missed. Silk stockings. Bath salts. Sachet. You stupid, luxury-loving girl. You of all people! A great coarse peasant girl who seemed utterly impervious to creature things. But you have not taken all this for the sake of the things themselves. You have carted it out of the house. You are in league with someone. With whom?"

"No. No."

"Miss Ermangarde's French batiste blouse! More sachet! My silver shoe buckles. Why--why this is a case for the police."

"Mrs. Oessetrich, you would not----"

"Up here alone is stored several hundred dollars' worth of my possessions. What quantities you must have carted away without my knowing it. Come here, you. Stand there and look me in the eye. How long has this been going on?"

"I--don't--know----"

"You don't know. Well, I advise you to find out and be pretty quick about it. Maybe the police can help you to remember. This string of lapis lazuli and carnelian beads. Do you realize that it in itself is worth several hundred dollars?"

"Dollars..."

"Yes, dollars and don't dare let on that you did not know the value of them."

"Dollars. Let me pay in dollars. Mrs. Oessetrich. I'll give it back in dollars."

It was impossible to fumble down into the petticoat pocket quickly enough. The fingers were so numb and did not seem separate.

"See, Mrs. Oessetrich, if only you will please be so kind. Dollars. More than two hundred. I will pay for the things with dollars."

"Stolen money, too, I suppose. Thank goodness, my vaults have been safe from you."

"No. No. Saved money."

"Money cannot buy exemption from punishment for crime."

"Mrs. Oessetrich, here, if you will please to take it--my Liberty Bond----"