Part 3

And Bertha, standing at the foot of the stairs listening with one hand to her cheek, ached in her throat for Helga. She was so young and there was something so old about the days of dirty chores. They were like old witches and presently Helga would turn into one of them.

"I wish to God, Mrs. Farley, you knew how it feels to limp around picking up after you on one of them sore toes!"

Bertha knew, but meekly. Foot torture. The body tiredness at the end of a seventeen-hour day from stoking the coal range at six A.M. to placing the two shining apples and a silver pitcher of water beside the Farley black walnut bedstead at eleven P.M.

And Helga, who waited on table and answered door bells and washed up bathroom floors and emptied trash baskets and helped the laundress with the fluted pieces and sat up in the blue bedroom with the women's wraps during dinners and evening receptions and loved so to dance with the edge of her strength, knew too, but defiantly.

And that defiance created a servant problem.

Helga, who was shuddering now with tears, could not keep down her voice.

"You give us dirty holes to live in and expect us to keep 'em pink and perfumed like your boudoir. Some of the fine folks that come here to dinner oughtta get a look up here ... they wouldn't have such a good appetite."

"Helga, you vulgar, horrid girl. I won't be talked to so!"

"Yes, you will. I'm a working girl, but I got my spirit. There's nothing right about the way the world's run nohow. Those that got the drudgery to do get the hard beds to sleep on. Those whose bones are rested from easy living get the soft beds--where's the right of it, I ask you?"

"Helga, you rude girl, if you don't hush, I'll call my husband."

"Call him. If the men knew the way women treat women in this servant game, maybe it would help us to get decent living conditions."

"Why, I never had a girl speak to me like this in my life. Every waitress I ever had in my employ left me only to marry."

"Yah, what's the use changing? Doing one's dirty work is about the same as doing the next one's."

"Helga!"

"You want us to keep clean, don't you? Like you. Well then, give us decent rooms and enough time to keep ourselves clean in. Take some of the show away from the front of the house and give your servants rooms that are fit to live in."

"My servants' quarters are as good as any."

"Yes, and that's no good. I got a floatin' kidney I have, and I won't lug bathin' water up two flights of stairs in six pitchers full for nobody, not even myself. Yes, a floatin' kidney, in case it ain't polite to have it in your society. Floatin' kidneys don't happen to your friends. Well, let 'em lug heavy platters like I do with their right side. Let 'em lug six pitchers of water--No siree, I won't take cold for nobody, bathing myself in a cast-off old foot tub that ain't as good as your poodle dog's, and the furnace heat not even piped up to the fourth story."

"That's no excuse, we take cold showers."

"Yah, because your blood's so sluggish from doin' nothin' that you got to do somethin' to get it goin'. We don't need to get our blood to circulating. The rich folks like you keep it circulating for us."

"No self-respecting girl would sleep on----."

"You want me to keep a pretty bed, don't you? Well then, gimme a decent one to lay on. You drag up here after all day and half the night on your feet and see if it matters to you if you get into a bed that's made or unmade. Nobody's got any pink satin covers turned back for me. We're in luck up here if there's enough servants' linen to give us a change once a month. When do you expect me to have time to keep my room like a sachet bag, Mrs. Farley? The eighth day in the week?"

"Look at Bertha, you rude girl. Immaculate. That proves how slovenly and ungrateful----."

"Bertha! Aw, she ain't human. She's a dray horse that's so used to pullin' she can't feel the harness. Bertha! The more work you pile on her the less time it gives her to sit waiting for time to pass. She's like a tomb, sitting hard on somethin' to hold it down. Hit her on the bean and she'll sit there gazing at the stars and not feel the hurt. I'm human. Bertha's a--hunk."

And Bertha standing at the foot of the back stairs holding her cheek in a gesture of compassion, heard.

Helga did not leave. Later, Mrs. Farley, who dreaded the employment agencies, was willing to be placated and Helga, shivering before the prospect of a luggage laden pilgrimage through the icy streets, shoved her hand trunk which she had started to pack, back under the bed, her sobs still jerking in her throat.

***

A hunk. To be a hunk was to live deeply put away from the sadnesses and the gladnesses in the round. To be a hunk was to carry a heart the wonder of whose secret passageways made everything on the outside, like Coney Island or quinsy sore throat, or Mrs. Farley or twenty-nine-cent silk stockings, seem not to matter much.

Not to be a hunk was also to crave a great deal for the things on the outside to matter much. To want so terribly, as Helga could, that extra Thursday out or dancing slippers with red heels. To be able to want dancing slippers with red heels, that was not to be a hunk!

All that day of the quarrel, while she washed down the kitchen woodwork, prepared a clear broth and aspic for Rollo's luncheon, and cleaned Helga's silver for her while she unpacked her things, she rolled the word slowly over in her mind. A hunk.

To be a hunk was to carry the secret of the life fluttering at her walls, without much discomfort. Somewhere, way back in the waste lands of her consciousness, women had borne child by scarcely more than pausing beside the plow. Bertha would bear that way, too. Peasantly.

And so the marching days and the marching weeks and presently the marching months and Bertha at lugging her bath water the two flights up, eight times. Heaving coal buckets from the cellar to the kitchen range. Four turkeys to be prepared for family dinner at Christmas, her clutch fiery from tearing entrails. At New Year's a baby lamb was sent from a Vermont Farley, and she drew it and quartered it and hid a bit of its wool away up in the drawer with the chiffon opera coat.

She made baby moccasins out of it without any great tenderness. The pattern troubled her and her underlip hung down with the effort of turning the tiny corners. But when they were finished one midnight, and patted out on her knee, a decision, began slowly to harden.

Rollo must know.

Winter was on its last lap. April soon and Rollo must know of the gift she was bearing. A fluttering of heart-beat at that. Irrevocably her time was nearing. April soon.

For two months he had been away. Winter flew at his chest and the first fury of a sleet storm had driven him to Florida. He was home again now and the city snow packed into corners was getting porous, and the family at a very private home dinner had enjoyed its first mess of spring onions daubed in salt and Mrs. Farley, a bantam with delight at Rollo's return, was constantly now, and unnecessarily, in and out of the kitchen to sip of his soups, and upon one occasion tiptoed out in black lace and aigrettes in her hair, to assure herself that the tenderest portion of mushroom-under-glass was for him.

Something slow and something vague was trembling in Bertha at each sight of Mrs. Farley these days. She dropped pans at the mere passing of her across the floor of the room above the kitchen, and on the night that she swept in from her guests in the black lace and aigrettes, startled, Bertha scalded her forearm in boiling duck grease.

"Bertha, you clumsy girl! See that Mr. Rollo has this large portion of the mushrooms. Dip your arm in flour and send the sauterne in with the fish course."

A secret and booming multiplicity of fears. That tight circle of faces in there around the dinner table. A closed circle through which Helga and a hired butler slid in the alien hands of service. Mr. Farley's face, as out of a Fifth Avenue club window, smugly. Dowagers sitting broadly and fat with security. The polite face of an explorer who had once killed his desert comrade for a water flagon. A lean face impaled on two collar points and engraved in the steel of the stock exchange. Another face soldered tightly into that circle of the icy beauty of frugal lips, skin too white for the blood to shadow, and hair drawn down like portières. Rollo's face with the singing look of choir boy in it; poignancy of young down on his long cheeks, lightening of his nervous nostrils.

Fear in Bertha as if the circle could somehow close in and throttle her. It could make her tremble now, the solidarity of those alternating black backs and white shoulders.

And then, with spring so perilously near, fear became puny in the face of imminence.

One evening, long after the family was quiet and the kitchen range cold, she sat and began to wait. There could be no more putting off. Rollo must know.

A rare evening of the family early to bed, Helga at the Second Avenue Dance, Hippodrome--Ladies Free, Rollo dining out. Bertha in the cold and tidy kitchen, waiting. The octagon-faced wall clock with the great separate ticks. The first generation of motor cars bleating their way dimly through the jam of city traffic, out into which she so seldom ventured. Tick. Tock.

About midnight she began to listen for the creak of wheels against the curb. Rollo would come home in a hansom.

At one o'clock he arrived and she was already in the front hall when his key began to twist in the lock.

Rollo must know, but it was as if she were bound and gagged to the mast of a fast moving craft and could not find the power to cry out to him when he passed--

"I bane waiting," she said on the top of the little noises he made entering.

He could take on the blue white of china under fatigue, and his lips were mauve.

"What the hell----"

She thought at first he was fuddled with wine, and then that it was the start of seeing her there under the dim hall light. It was a little of both. Wine went at Rollo with a rush. It befogged him, but politely. It gave him a caution of movement and a manner. He felt for the hatrack first, to be sure it was going to be where he intended hanging his overcoat. He was grandiose, and his evening shirt full of soft pools from the hall light. Very like a choir boy with tears in his eyes and very, very careful. He hung up his high hat so carefully that he caressed it. Not even the hansom driver had glanced at him twice.

He looked at Bertha as he had always done--since, through a haze of amazement and a little of the wryness of self-disgust.

He was conscious of a thickened-up fatty look to the center of her face. He has seen it in moon-hoar and in the plushy darkness of under an eave. A piggy little swollenness came out in this light, and her hips curved out with a flatulence that berated him for having been unfastidious. A great white cow. Uddery. Incredible. He must have been drunk. Damnably.

Gad, what a mouth, like a catfish gagging on the hook. And yet there had been a phosphorescence to her body whiteness up there under the slanting roof. That moment of her in his arms, when suddenly they were strong enough to hold her. The sullen booming of her heartbeats, like some faint ocean rolling and tossing over its treasures. Majestic dissonances. Aspidal choir of voices too remote to be heard, except with the touch of her flesh singing against his.

_The Cathedral Under the Sea?_ To be sure, he had written it in the frenzy of that dawn with the lay of that great latent body of hers still along his.... That crouch of strength behind her silence.... But, ugh, great husky Swede! He must have been drunk--damnably.

"Bertha," he said, on the unwinding of his muffler and so casually that his words were like so many careful little tin coins dropping, "isn't it rather late for you to be about?"

The plating on his voice was something against which she suddenly wanted to hurl herself, smashing through it to those depths of his being to which she had the right now.

"I bane waiting--for you," she cried, and ran toward the stairs at him as he placed his foot on the first step. "If you will please come up--to me, I will tell you something only for you. Please----"

He stood caught, as it were, in the motion of mounting the stairs, his hand softly white on the curve of banister between them. She could have crushed her lips to it and kissed her secret down against it, but she held herself trembling.

"If you will please, Mr. Farley--Rollo--come up to me--please----"

The lymphatic look of cow in her face. The string of gray wool scarf harsh against her neck. He hated the thought of her chapped hands unwinding it and catching on the wool with their briary surfaces. Her buttoned-up waist, concealing her whiteness where he had seen it one grape-colored night flow down into creamy hillocks of bosom, spanning her now, too tightly across the bust. How idiotically, nastily drunk he must have been.

"Mr. Rollo--come----"

"Shame," he said. "A great girl like you. You must be mad. Go to bed."

She was choking and nailed to the mast of her inarticulateness, he passed, and as he passed her, with his white hand riding up the balustrade, she came down on it with her lips, arresting him so that he jerked it back and shook it from him furiously as if a caterpillar had crawled there.

"Mr. Rollo--you should know it. I am carrying ... your..."

"For God's sake," he cried, as if he could never have done shaking his hand of her lip prints, "don't you ever do that again or you'll have to go. Don't ever come near me. Bah. Here"--and from his pocket tossed her down a bill and while she stood watching it flutter he ran upstairs lightly. Then the sound of the key turning in his door. Lightly.

And suddenly it seemed to her that the silence within her was red banners and that she must scream them and tear them to shreds and she ran up the stairs after him, a flight of heavy thumps that ended in a stumble and, with her fists raised for a frenzied battering against his closed door, she crumbled up suddenly of black vertigo, into a heap there on the hall floor.

There was the bill he had fluttered at her, screwed somehow into her palm and with the remnant of her rage and her strength she began to tear at it with her teeth, worrying it like a terrier and spitting it out in shreds.

***

Dawn found her waiting for it, crouched on her bed edge, where she had sat five hours with her backache the shape of the stoop of her spine. The dawns were still very cold. They could come creeping across the house tops and lie wanly against her eyelids long before Helga's alarm clock ripped open another day.

There were some shreds of bank note on the floor. She picked them up and crammed them through the little hole in the pasteboard box that served her as hair receiver. Her light yellow hair was falling out in strands now, which she twined around her finger and poked away.

A flower stripping itself to divert the sap to the bud.

Three million dawns creeping over the sills of the vertical city. Bertha's a lonely iced one that she watched come up like an enemy. A thin dawn that magnified sound. The milkman crashing down four white quarts in exchange for the four empty ones. Her heartbeats galloping against her eardrums.

Rollo must know. Rollo must know.

It was hard to move, because she was stiff from the hours of sitting in a curve away from the slant of ceiling, but at six o'clock she must be downstairs to start the range and the servants' breakfast. At seven, the three morning papers to be taken from the stoop. One for Mr. Farley beside his breakfast plate in the morning room. One on Mrs. Farley's breakfast tray beside her hothouse rose. One for Rollo who did not breakfast at all, softly, outside his room door. But this morning, his not to be delivered tiptoe as usual. To-day he must know. A whole string of quick rappings, too low to be heard by Mrs. Farley across the hall, but if need be, a rattling of the door knob, and then through the first slit of the door opening, her toe for a wedge, and in.

Oh, God, Rollo must know. Rollo must know.

What if Helga should notice? When Helga tittered it was like a mouse running up your leg. And Mrs. Farley. She began to cry with the sense of her growing hulk and fear. Cymbals of it crashing through her! Fear of Mrs. Farley and yet she came bearing gifts in the flesh of her flesh.

The tears lay to her cheeks and chapped there. She poured water into her bowl, plunging handfuls against her face and drying on her gray flannel petticoat. There were not always towels. After a while it was half after five and she could venture down, softly to save the creaks.

It was easier, somehow, waiting in the kitchen. Kindlier. But a chill smote her when she took in the milk bottles so that she sat down suddenly. The horridness of these mornings. The full-throated kind of sickness that could turn her whiteness sea-green.

But only for an instant. There were the coals to be hauled up from the cellar and the fire to be laid. The coffee mill locked in the vise of her knees and set whirring at top speed. Bacon to be parboiled and the servants' mess of warmed-over oatmeal softening its crust in the double boiler. The ice pan to be heaved sink high and emptied. Slops. Nibbled down asparagus ends smelling sourly down into last night's casaba melon rinds.

At half past six Helga came down adjusting the criss-crosses of organdie apron strips and tasting her lips as if they were bitter. She was swollen and her lids granulated with sleep, and she coughed with a certain pride in the depths of its croupiness.

She started her day tired. Bone tired. She could almost have gone to sleep standing there, croupily coughing.

"You've got a cold, Helga. Shame. Running to the dance halls and the gin parlors all night."

"What'll I do? Entertain the fellas in the drawing-room? She won't even give 'em kitchen room. Helluva chance for a fella with insides to him to want to cuddle a girl in the wintry breezes of Gramercy Park. The gate to that's even locked against us. Where does a girl get off, I'd like to know. It's either the gin parlors with them or sneaking them up to bed with her."

"Here's your breakfast. It'll warm you."

"Fortheluvvaga, warmed-over oatmeal again. I can't swallow the stuff. I wishtaga I could poke it down her throat, lumps and all, and learn her that the Lord didn't line her stomach no different than mine."

He lined stomachs and made the magnolia to bloom and He sat on a throne drenched with Light. Sometimes it seemed to Bertha that a little drench of the Light was on her.

Oh Lord. Lord. Rollo. Help me. Rollo must know. Help me to make Rollo know.

"Fortheluvva. This oleo is strong enough to walk. Gimme a snack of little Lord Fauntrollo's sweet butter, Bertha. This stuff don't slide down me no easier than it would down him. Here Berth--where you goin'?"

But it was striking seven and down the length of hallway Bertha was already opening the front door. Grayness of Gramercy Park. Trees in bare black and rheumatic twists. Fourth Avenue's lean, tall office buildings already breathing down in packs upon the little square of Park, wolfish to invade.

The morning papers in little huddle against the storm door. Three.

She carried Rollo's upstairs. It was very still outside his door. It was as if, almost, the very door were saturated with a night of his breathings. She could hurt it by twisting the knob. If she rapped the panels might give a little under her knuckles, like flesh.

It was hard bracing herself for the string of quick low rappings, her toe set for the wedge in the opening....

Imperative raps. Rollo must know. But her arm was too limp and the tears kept running down into her mouth and splotched right down on to his morning paper.

Rollo's paper. She wiped them off with her elbow. They had spattered a picture. A woman's photograph looking up at her from the first page of the morning paper. Long low portières of hair and a head shaped as an egg would feel if it came whole out of your mouth.

"_Miss Veronica Stedman Neidringhouse, one of the past season's most popular debutantes, whose engagement to H. Rollo Farley, the poet, and only son of Mr. and Mrs. H. Freilinger Farley of Cramercy Park, is announced. The wedding will be one of the events of early summer._"

Suddenly the big silence standing stock still again. It was so hard to feel, except dimly, and all the little tumults and the little hopes and even the fears, were back now in their branches chirruping in a sleepy sort of dusk. A dusk that was stunned. A dusk in which a pain had died. It was good to be without pain and back in the dim quiet.

The newspaper now to be folded squarely over the tear splotches and left leaning so that when Rollo opened his door presently it would fall toward. It was merely a chore again. Part of the day's mute doing of mute things.

The oatmeal was scorching and her nostrils flared. It was instinctive for her to start to rush down, which she did, catching herself back by the balustrade.

Rollo must not know.

The morning was a grave and that moment outside his door a flower upon it. Everything was so simple because it was so quiet. She loved that, because it was the kind through which the chimes, if they would, might come through, goldily again.

***