Part 21

"You must accept your punishment like anyone else. Our penal system is to protect society from such as you."

"Take what I got."

"Why should I? You are a thief. I do not know why I even listen to you."

"You do--because----"

"Because I am a foolish, sentimental woman, my children to the contrary notwithstanding."

"Please----"

"I am a weakling for permitting you to prevail upon me. You swear to me that you are in league with no one."

"Oh, I do. I do."

"What was it that I saw you carrying out of the house that day I stopped you----"

"----for Helga--at the hospital----"

"I don't seem able to deal with you as you deserve. There is something about you--what is it?"

"Let me pay, Mrs. Oessetrich--see--money, and my bond."

"Put what you have down there on the table."

"Here it is."

"I shall take it and give it to the Red Cross: It is your restitution. You should be made to pay a harder one. Now you leave my house. Get out your valise or whatever you call the bag that you brought your things in. Open it and let me see what is in it. More loot, no doubt."

"No, Mrs. Oessetrich, there is nothing but----"

"Open it, I said."

"There."

"What is that green chiffon? Where did you get that old-fashioned thing?"

"It's mine! Someone gave it to me."

"Ugh, fuzzy old evening wrap. Well, you didn't get that here. Now pack your things. What is this? A book. _The Cathedral Under_----"

"No. No. Don't touch that book. It is mine."

"What are you doing with that volume of Rollo Farley in your bag? You must have stolen that from Miss Ermangarde's desk. Why that book is almost her bible. How dared you!"

"No! No! No! I tell you, no! Mine! Don't you! That book, Mrs. Oessetrich--is mine."

"I am convinced now that you are vicious. Don't you dare hold my arm that way. Put down that book or I shall telephone this minute for the police."

"Put it down! How dare you ransack even our books. Give me that book. You are not fit to touch it. You! _The Cathedral Under the Sea_!"

"You don't know----"

"I know that if you do not put it down immediately I shall call the police."

"Please----"

"Immediately, or I'll----"

"There."

"Now pack your things. I'll be waiting for you down in the kitchen. You cannot leave this house without I take a final look into your belongings. I am actually ill from this outrageous scene. Now pack. Remember, just that pile of thick ugly things on the table there. I'll be waiting ... come down the rear stairs...."

It was hard with all her fingers swollen thumbs, to cram the things into the bag and the chills seemed to run down off her spine just like sand. The stiff, unwieldy sailor's union suits. When they were folded over once, they rose up solemnly in the bottom of the bag and had to be weighted down with shoes. The striped, clean-smelling flannel petticoat. The cake of hard brown soap. The bit of Bulgarian embroidery. The green of Mrs. Farley's evening wrap. It crowded over the top. Ocean green. To close your eyes a moment and feel that spread of ocean green. The tears ran down and suddenly they too were ocean. Things. Things. Things. Mrs. Oessetrich's things. Helga's. Olga's. Ermangarde's. The green thought of ocean flowed over and wiped them out and left the old stark uncluttered silence. And to sit in that silence the second before you pinned on your disk of a hat was to gather back strength.

The silence that still seemed full of the mewlings of Mrs. Oessetrich over the things. Things. Helga who had loved them and had never felt the green thought of ocean flow over and obliterate them.

The book was not a thing. It was a dear hurt heart lying forbidden there on the table. It throbbed, when you held it up against your cheek. It grew warm with the tears, the hot searing tears of degradation that flowed out finally into that calm wide sense of ocean.

"Bertha--you--up there, why are you so long? Hurry down here the rear way and see to it that you pack only what strictly belongs to you."

The book belonged. It belonged as warmly and as closely as heartbeat. To leave it lying there on that table would be to leave a heart. Then Bertha grew sly. So sly that the carpetbag closed without even a click of a hasp over the volume of _The Cathedral Under the Sea_.

To tiptoe down the front flight of stairs, the bag in one hand, carefully away from the banisters, and her little purse of loose change in the other, was like walking on cushions. The carpet rose so roundly to the step. There was not so much as a creak and even though the dreadful chills were running off her spine again, just the lifting of the front door by the handle as it swung in, saved the little squeal of its hinges and with Mrs. Oessetrich's voice rising again from the rear of the house, the door closed again, noiselessly, with Bertha on its outer side.

***

Annie was gone. It was a shock to come upon the house standing eyeless there, with iron shutters across the windows and the front stoop removed. A produce company used it for a warehouse. A crane jutted out of one of the second story windows that had been converted into a sliding door.

Change. The city swirling and sucking in the days had sucked in Annie and the lodging house with the sour halls. It felt strange coming down to face the warehouse with the crane hanging out. It had some hay clinging to it as if it had not quite licked its chops. There had stood Annie's lodging house, lean as a witch.

Quicksands. You could imagine the building, story by story disappearing to the subtle suction, until only the dirty roof remained and Jocko with a stiff, terrorized tail. And Annie. She would have gone down last with her hands waving and protesting. They would be the very last above the sands, Annie's hands, with the fingers that were the shape of potatoes. Annie's strangling hands--even Annie--love of life....

Front Street banged along. Down toward Bowling Green the produce firms stood banked up in front with the boxed vegetables and fruits. Frozen smells with the green coming softly through the mild February day. Bang. Bang. Trucks over cobblestones. One of them stood backed to the curb while a negro with a red cave for a mouth flung crates of fruit, the yellow light of the oranges showing through, across the sidewalk to another negro who caught them on the fly. Bang. Bang. Trucks over cobblestones. Sh-h-h. Sh-h-h. Trucks over quicksands.

At Bowling Green the fan of the sea came in. The carpetbag, even though she shifted hands as she lugged it, began to cut. There was a bench close to the railing.

When you sat down and leaned over, you stared right down into the face of the harbor. To sit down there with a sigh, your back to the city and your eyes to the sea, rested you and made that terrifying day seem to recede.

The silly, terrifying day of the carnelian beads.

The puny little day on the edge of the ocean. Presently it would pass out with the tide. As Annie's day had passed out, the day of the carnelian beads and the cream lace boudoir cap would roll into that immensity out there clothed in fog. The beauty, through the fog, of that immensity!

She kept dreaming into it. Even that night when she finally found a bed, up three flights in a cubby-hole of a filthy tenement on Desbrosses Street, she kept dreaming into it. That pyramid of immensity out there that was built out of days.

A certain phrase began to run along the weeks.

She's too old. She's too old. She's too old.

At first it gripped her breath and made her heart shy back in a hot sort of flush. She's too old. She could read the phrase on the lips of clients as they discussed her at the desk with the Bohemian who conducted the employment office. Sometimes when she applied at homes with the slip from the agency, they told her point blank.

"No. No. We don't want a middle-aged woman. Tell them at the agency to send us a young girl. You're too old."

"But----"

"I know. You look like a strong, honest woman, but you're too old."

After a while the phrase began to rock. To have a cadence. It even lulled. It made it suddenly easy to sit in the back row of the office and wait until the younger girls were accounted for. It was like sitting out of the crowd in a shady spot and watching the troubled barterers in a market place. They hurried so and cared so and their eyes were all crowded with self. While you sat back against the wall and waited, you could imagine those faces all in one. The faces of the barterers. The faces of those who could be eager over the carnelian beads. A long, lean, composite face, with a nose like a scimitar and the eyes that were full of self, so close together that they almost seemed one.

You sat in the back row along with the charwomen, because you were old with your hair and your skin and your bones and the zest in your arms.

Clients with the eyes full of self that were so close together that they almost seemed one, did not know that to be young with your heart was to be a garden surrounded by the high gray walls of the flesh.

They saw only the high gray wall of the flesh, the tired shoulders, and the white wing in the hair.

There was no evading it. Bertha was getting older with her skin and her hair and the zest in her arms. Day work tired her terribly, because it was mostly scrubbing. Sometimes when she returned to the cubby-hole in Desbrosses Street the entire surface of her body gave off a singing sensation.

It was a mean room without a place to wash, but there was a public sink in the hallway of each of the tenement floors. Sometimes Bertha did a furtive thing. The tin basin in her room was so small. You could only slap the face with water. Often when the halls were quiet of the squalling of children and the black skull of a house seemed to sleep, Bertha, in her bare feet, stole out softly to the sink and slipped down her chemise.

If she bent down double under the faucet the cool water poured over her back. She could feel the smoothness of her flesh with the evenness of the flow. At first it sent a delicious shudder through her right up into her throat, and then it flowed so clean and so pure and so cool. It was like being as still as a mountain with a rill running down it. The water slid off her white back and around up under the warmth of her breasts. It dripped down into the sink with green little forest noises. They helped the ache, these furtive rinses, and sometimes when her feet were great swollen pads, she let the water pour over them too. It was easier then not to lie awake of tiredness.

The fact was to be faced that even day work was no longer easily obtainable. Sometimes the janitors and the superintendents of buildings passed her by for the next. "She's too old."

Without the little hitting friendliness of her savings in her petticoat pocket, that was a little terrifying. The room in Desbrosses Street was a dollar a week and there were strict fire laws against cooking in the rickety old building over gas jets or alcohol lamps. The quick lunch rooms, even the meanest of them, made heavy inroads on the day's pay. At best they were dreadful, fume-fogged places, where the fried foods clung to the cold plates on rims of grease and the coffee was the color and consistency of clay-bank. Often it seemed to Bertha that it simply would not go down. The warm slush of it in her mouth. To close the eyes and gulp until the tears sprang, accomplished it. It was easier to bear than the knife-pangs of hunger which could come slashing down on Bertha. They cut her in two. Bertha dreaded hunger. It made her shamble when she walked. It lifted the top off her head. It cut.

Sometimes, that rather terrifying year, even though you were the first to report at the agency, there was only work three days in the week. To be a little hungry was not so bad if you stayed in the room on your cot. That was what Bertha did on the idle days. Stretched out there, the hunger gnawed up and down her great body like a rat and would not let her sleep. But it was easier lying there. The top stayed on your head.

There was the peasant of her for you. Strong hot foods. Meats. Sour rye bread with a tight and heavy mesh. Pea soup so thick that it poured from the pot in clumps. Without them the pull died in her legs and the lunge from her arm sockets. The concocted foods of the lunch room, the gray-looking stews, and custards with the ooze of water on top were pallid on her tongue.

All that winter, while on three days' earnings she must live for seven, and the reefer jacket grew horrible of the patches that the fabric could no longer hold, the blades kept slashing. The hunger blades.

Sometimes in washing down a corridor the floor began to wave, or walking home or standing in the crush of a street car, you could never foretell just when, that dreadful top-of-your-head feeling; that lightness that would make you want to sway--loose-kneed--down--down. And then that little singing sensation, like a kettle boiling, that you felt against your windpipe. The nervousness of that. It was not easy to feel light-headed and cold and pursued by that little singing irritation in your throat, and still plunge a high power arm into the pail and fling out a wide and soapy fan of wet.

Bertha suffered that winter after a fantastic fashion. The days seemed etched on glass. Thin cold flat days. Like the window pane when you awoke in the morning with the wild mountain scenery frozen to it. The unreality of those days. One after another after another, as if you could put your fist through and crash them.

The idle days stretched on the cot with that incessant little sensation of the boiling tea kettle along your throat. Sometimes the hours became a little crazy with tilting walls and sagging ceiling. Sometimes it was like lying on the under side of a wave. The perversity of a bare spot on the wall where the plaster had crumbled and a lath or two grinned through! Sometimes it became the amber tunnels of Jocko's eyes, through which you ran along lovely opalescent floors calling--calling--and all the motes in the amber were faces. The faces of boys frozen into the translucence. The face of the boy in the window that she had not looked upon. The faces of boys. Boys. She did not glance at them as she ran calling, but there was one face among the many down in the beautiful drown of the amber--a dear, dear one. She did not look. She couldn't. Couldn't. But the streamer of her hair with the wing of white in it, drifted past his face as she ran calling--calling--Rollo--no, not Rollo. Rollo was out there on the hill. Rollo was dead. That was not the name. Willie had known the name of the boy. Silly Willy who had felt the dig of his heels into his haunches. Felix! That was the name. It snapped like a little coin purse when you said it. Felix. Of course! Felix, son of Rollo.

***

A windfall came along. In one night she earned sixteen dollars. It happened this way.

On a Saturday morning at the agency the front row emptied itself before eleven and the younger girls, many of them on tall heels, went out jauntily, a little impudently, with their slips of paper. So the back row came out suddenly in its horrific sort of frieze. The frieze of the scrubwomen. Old women with sucked-in faces like the swirl of water down a drain hole. Women with white jade faces. Women with veiny noses and cheek venules and lips that the muscles would not hold into place. Women with eyes about as lifeless as gelatin. Women with dead breasts.

Bertha stood out. Just as surely as an old horse sags to sway-back, Bertha's shoulders were down, for good, but her eyes were blue with water and sky. Mediterranean bays.

That is why, because her gaze seemed to project her in full relief out from the frieze, and the front row was already emptied, Bertha was selected. Delsher's had sent down for a cloakroom attendant for a ball that evening.

"Here you! You're too old for that kinda job, but I can't give 'em what I ain't got. Report there at nine to-night and ask for Gerard, the steward."

_You're too old. You're too old. You're too old._

Delsher's was in Fifty-eighth Street near Fifth Avenue. An awning jutted out over the sidewalk and the little striped cave was all lit with electric bulbs. A puff of hot scented breath came out even at the service entrance. Flesh. Warm, scented, excited flesh. That odor always hung over Delsher's. From ball to ball to ball. The unfastidious fact is that Delsher's smelled like a jungle. Young, excited, breathing flanks.

There were cloakrooms on each floor. Passing along, you could see the ballroom. The enchanted lake of floor, sly with wax. The jungle bowed back from it with a gesture of palms with enormous fronds and the crystal hanging moss of the side lights, and the tree stripes of great gilt pillars. Mirrors caught at the effect and tattled it on. Sometimes you could see the same tapestry and gold chair repeated six stately times.

Bertha's allotted cloakroom was gray. The dressing tables had gold pointed roofs and there were long aisles formed by the coat racks. It was very simple. You exchanged a brass tag for a dazzle of field-of-ermine or of cloth-of-gold.

The shrill, young-fleshed beauty of the old-eyed girls as they began to arrive. They stepped out of the splendid surf of the wraps, breastless as boys, and with wise scarlet threads for lips. The insolence of them with their bobbed, flaring heads that made their necks look slender and nervous. The fine fettle of young horses with docked tails and pink lightening of nostrils.

It was bewildering. The young herd of them rushing in. The perfumed dust. You saw them through the astonishing fog of cigarette smoke and face powder and fur and chiffon. The brocades had a way of clinging to Bertha's hands. They almost had to be ripped away from the flesh. Cutting, nasty sensation. The little splitting sounds of the satins along the roughened fingers. Then there were the corsets. They stepped out of them. Tiny, boneless, pink satin urns. A half animate feeling as you laid them away, still warm from the ripple of ribs and the excited breathing.

The heat rose in waves and the powder began to taste in a soft scented mud that lay along the tongue and back into the throat. The walls had a little sway to them as the wraps mounted and mounted. The brass checks. You could scarcely hand them out fast enough. Slashing bareness of shoulders. Slim things with V's of nakedness down to the waistline in back. More and more of the discarded, pink, slim little corsets and more and more of the confluent planes of torsos gliding under chiffons. That odor of jungle. The excited released flanks.

You leaped! It was the first crash of flesh-shuddering music. The naked undulating V's. A contortion ran along the cloakroom, as if everyone had moved on little running muscles and yet not advanced. You shivered almost, ecstatically at that. Eyelids. The white flash of them lowering. Sudden slitted eyes. Insouciance of the docked heads. A tree shake through the cloakroom. Only it did not begin at the heart. It lay to the flesh. The shivering, shimmying flesh....

That gelatinous room. It nauseated. It seemed to be moving away on the running muscles and yet not moving at all. It made you a little sick, the motionless motion. There was nothing to clutch. The insidious horridness of it. The slitted eyes. The wise red threads for mouths. The ripple of torsos.

You sat down in the emptied cloakroom finally. You remembered the lancinating pains in the ambulance. Mothers of men, was it for this? You seemed to remember again--you seemed to remember--sweat and love and solitary childbirth on wide moors. Swing of the grinning scythes and the women who toil and who bear and who weep, and the wide-legged men with the necks like tree boles. Peril of solitary childbirth on wide moors. Mothers of men--was it for this....

The crashing and the jazzing never ceased. Where one band left off another took up. Syncopated wilderness of a night. The saxophones screamed into the jungle. Corsages died into the heat and cloyed it up. The strange new breastless girls with the docked heads and the naked V's for backs swarmed past the door with the men whose shirt fronts had gone a little awry and whose irreverent eyes slid toward the V of back and the willful rippling of the torsos under chiffon.

It was not easy to keep awake. The velvets and the furs of the wraps crowded up the heat so and the tongue was all slippery with the fine scented powder. That maniac, the saxophone! The smoke began to sting Bertha's eyes. She commenced to doze in the miasma. They started to drift in again. Some of them a little drunk. One with a broken shoulder strap and the mark of teeth on the knowing little knoll of her shoulder.

You were tempted, sewing the strap across that tender bit of flesh, to spank it. The petted peacock flesh of the new generation squalling its emancipation in naked backs and tipsy eyes and wriggle of insinuating torso.

The tipsy eyes. The cloakroom began to crowd up with them. The new eyes of the new youth. They were clear enough, but brilliant with the hard shine of blades. The cutting, slashing blades of mowing machines. The mowed-down little gardens that sometimes bloom in young girls' eyes. Bold, unveiled, inquisitive eyes, these. Impudent eyes, without illusion, without fear, but without the mist of wonder.

It was strange, the young men with the awry shirt fronts who passed the door, looked into the new eyes of new youth without illusion, too, and without reverence and without the mist of wonder. The new eyes of the new youth. New eyes but old lusts. The mowed-down wastes of the garden. The star flowers that sometimes bloom in women's eyes and make them madonna-like. They were mowed down by the impudent steel blades. Cool, clear, matter-of-fact eyes as real as Pittsburgh.

The burning raging hours. There was no end. Crash. The gale of jazz that shook the torsos. Crash. The rumble of jungle. The odor of jungle.