Part 5

"Good-by," he said, and "Thank you and God bless you."

"Umph," said the lawyer and followed them out.

Then the moans came. Terribly. Once a dog, run over by a truck in Front Street, had moaned like that. The unwetted sobbings of one who does not know how to cry.

The little nurse who was left alone with her was kind and soothed her with chirruping noises, and poured some spirits of ammonia into a glass of water, which Bertha drank at a gulp and then smarted with tears. But she could not stop moaning and shivering, and kept sitting and clinging to her corner like a dumb animal that had been hurt.

Finally a young interne was sent for and he came in and gave her something brown and bitter, and although she had been discharged from the ward that day, between him and the nurse they led her back, chattering and shivering and shuddering, little streaks of foam out along her lips.

The nurse was very young and the interne, too, and Bertha's kind of story was very old, and so they did the properly sedative things, but their eyes kept curving around the dull reality of their charge for the wonder of one another.

All night in her bed in the ward Bertha lay shivering and huddling like the dumb thing that had been hurt. Then they washed a little spot on her arm with cotton and jabbed a needle in. There was no pain but after a time she lay back....

Wonder of Bertha. The hems of her skirts were sour with bilge water and she had been forced to hold her right wrist with her left fingers in order to sprawl her name half legibly on the dotted line ... but The Cathedral Under the Sea was of her and yet not hers. And now--her son, choir-faced, with the wisps of old music that were so lovely to her, tranced in his eyes--was of her and yet not hers--of her and yet not hers--.

***

Days with the old flow to them.

Odds and ends of jobs. For months she resumed the night work in the Equitable Building, but the crones were all sly-eyed when she returned and her finger tips began to split painfully. Besides, the days at Annie's were becoming not only intolerable but impossible for sleep, with Jocko chittering and skithering from keg to chair and Annie in a hunch beside the table and mumbling constantly into her cup.

When she had saved ten dollars she started in at the agencies again. The rows of mornings in the rows of chairs. At Raussman's Intelligence Office on Fourth Avenue, they began to favor Bertha, handing her out addresses and placing her in a conspicuous chair near the railing. She changed places so frequently and the more she shifted about, of course, the more she yielded in commissions. On again. Off again.

At kitchen work in a Broadway lunch room, they put her at washing dishes, but the first hour she was dismissed by the proprietor who followed her to the door with his toes fairly lapping her heels.

"Washin' the dishes in two waters. You're a fine square-head, you are. Who do you think I'm in business for? The public's health or mine--you get the hell out of here--"

It was all a part of the day. Her broad back without a quiver to it. Like Annie's words, they jounced off and fell at her feet like dead leaves, through which she walked, as if in the forests of her inner tranquillity.

At another of these eating places the kitchens were small and Bertha's bulk so dominant that she created a sort of pixie psychology. Waitresses, by contrast made gay and delightfully aware of their slim flanks, slid under her arms, giggling. One little one stood behind Bertha and called, "Find me." She was like some huge impervious Golem, all the pixies running up her knees and arms to play and pinch and poke in her eyeballs.

After a week she left.

Then she began to hold out for domestic service, sitting stiffly averted against demands for restaurant help or char work.

The elder daughter in a private family of six took her home one day in an automobile, to a rococo brownstone front in West Fifty-third Street. There was brook trout _au meunière_ for the family luncheon that noon, but the canned salmon, which she had been obliged to pinken up with soda for the servants' meal, poisoned the crew of them, and Bertha, wretched from her own illness, was the first to pack up her bag and depart.

In a cream-colored renaissance home of stone lace and gargoyles in East Sixty-first Street the bed she was forced to share with the waitress was a three-quarter one and the waitress herself a large south of Ireland girl, with a scrofula running up her leg that was frightening.

Secret places of the household, these, that were never aired along with servants' bedding or the servant problem.

Two old gentlewomen with frail hands and cameo brooches and a house in Nineteenth Street that breathed dampness like a cave, asked all their questions simultaneously and engaged her in a breathless duet. It had been a large household once and there were rooms with workbaskets left open with the bit of colored embroidery half out of it, just as a beloved daughter had left it when her last illness tapped her on the shoulder; a half-written letter on a desk that a brother's death had interrupted. A home full of the reminders of the casualness of life. It was more like a half-way house. Some one had paused there to do a bit of colored embroidery. A child dancing through the interval between its birth in the south chamber and its death there, had left a muslin doll on the floor with its arm stuck grotesquely up. It was like walking between the slabs of Trinity. Grotesque stick-ups where there had been a life.

One night up in her room next to where the winter potatoes were stored, a thought smote Bertha that sent her bounding up from her cot and barefoot over the splintery floor to the window. Sure enough, there through the leaded pane, the spire to the Farley house in Gramercy Park was plainly visible. Pointing! There was no window shade, so she pinned her flannel petticoat across the glass. But all night through the flannel and her closed lids, the spire kept pointing. Pointing.

At dawn she laid the fires for the old ladies and left.

Raussman's again. Two weeks of sitting there through the sullen mornings of inspection. There were only coins left in her petticoat pocket, that rattled softly when she moved. Bertha hated hunger. She could sleep on the carpet sofa at Annie's and poke through drain pipes without much nausea, but hunger slashed through her bulk like the blades of a great machine. Foregoing the morning cup of five-cent coffee at Annie's was an economy, but it made the day wavy. It rose up on all sides of her and sometimes towards noon she dozed with its motion and old man Raussman had to yank at her cape.

"Wake up. We ain't got no calls for sleeping beauties."

But one day he handed out a Riverside Drive address to her on a dirty slip of paper. "Musliner. Two in family. Cook."

Mr. Musliner, a two-weeks-old bridegroom, interviewed her in the kitchen and engaged her without parley.

***

It was pleasant at the Musliners. A bride had furnished it. Creamy light of new woodwork and pale paneled walls. An oval drawing-room in the fragile mood of Fragonard. Dining room in marquetry and the panel above the mantelpiece another bow to Fragonard. A pair of solid gold Adam urns. Grapes in December. Crystal chandeliers tittering with light.

An entire corridor of little nonsense bedrooms in a hush of rose taffetas and Canet beds _bouffant_ with _point d'esprit_. Mrs. Musliner's was a shell that curved her to it as if she were a pearl. She awoke that way, a lovely pink one in its heart, with the laces creaming about her. Mr. Musliner's, next to, but not adjoining hers, was in the same mood _mousse_, except with certain sterner concessions. No frothings. His bed cover was a pale gold brocade with a large diamond-shaped monogram in the center. Chiffonier mirror adjusted to his shaving line. An old-fashioned leather collar box, which sometimes crept out of a top drawer of certain of his cherished bachelor possessions, along with a smelly old pipe that violated the pale brocade scarf.

Mrs. Musliner would tuck them out of sight, her lips shuddering slightly as if her teeth were on edge. They could lift back like that frequently on those very rare occasions when she permitted herself to be alone. They were very, very rare. Always guests. Luncheon. Tea. Dinner guests in candle-and-flower-lit circle around lace over pink. Week-end guests, who nested in the little frilled rooms off the corridors and, night after night, some girl friend or other to share the lovely lace mist of Mrs. Musliner's bed.

Even Bertha's room, directly off the kitchen and facing a court darkly, could look sunny with the strip of new chintz on her washstand and a blue cotton bed cover with fringe. The housemaid and the waitress, sisters, had their room at the top of the apartment house.

It was warm in Bertha's room and she liked to sit in it evenings, barefoot and wide-kneed in the dark, with the door leading to the kitchen left open, its fine white porcelain refrigerator like a dim smile across the silence.

But a dim unvibrant sort of silence now, as if she were seated in the vacuum of a closed bell. All the little jeweled sands had run away. Sometimes she looked at them in the little islands of words that were margined so wide; fingering the leaves of her hurt bird of a book, which she kept wrapped away in the green chiffon cloak.

And the wisps of old sound. She had seen them, too, but not in the book. Tranced in her baby's eyes like the candy stripe down the center of the crystal.

To the pain of that empty cove of her arm where the small head had lain she had done horrid, unmentionable things. Sunk her teeth into the yearning flesh of it, leaving an inflamed crescent the shape of her bite. Rubbed one bare foot up and down against the other leg until the skin came off like erased blotting paper. Prayed to an inchoate God which she scarcely knew, except as a curse word upon Annie's lips. A hurt, beautiful word that could smoke in her heart.

But now the silences had come back. Not the old singing ones that had been vibrant as a black cat's arched flank. The merer silence of the inside of a bell.

And in this silence she was like a wound healing, the little line of the scar shirring up.

The Musliners were kind.

He did the ordering and was more frequently in the kitchen than she, who danced in only upon the gay occasion of candy pullings and every so often for the excited unwrapping of belated and excelsior-bound wedding gifts.

Shortly after he left in the morning, deliveries began. Great T-bone beefsteaks. Braces of wild fowl packed in hampers. Grapes in December wadded in cotton. Foreign-looking tins of caviar. Marron glace. Chinese ginger. And especially for Mrs. Musliner, who loved littlenesses, plover eggs and palm-sized squabs with bones like toothpicks.

Once, that first winter of their marriage he brought her home, all cotton-wrapped in an enormous carton, an entire miniature farmyard made out of marzipan for the centerpiece that night at her birthday dinner.

She was like a child and bit off the head of a lamb with a squeak of delight. He tried to kiss her there at the unwrapping of it, because in her pink pearl kind of loveliness she was a phantom of delight to him. But she had a way of evading his wetted lips and their background of brown face, with a steely strength that the moment could seem to lend her.

Once when there had been only one week-end house guest and he had gone to his room, Bertha had seen Musliner softly knocking at his wife's door. Almost scratching like a dog.

"Erna." he whispered in the caressing way his brown lips had of saying her name, "Erna." As if the word were a puff of down. "Dearest. Please?" It was very quiet in the hall and her closed door like a tongue out at him.

Something like an ache for Musliner smote Bertha. He was so kind. Often in the fruit hampers was a bag of sweets tucked away for the servants and on Bertha's every other Thursday out, a dollar bill was left lying for her on the kitchen table. He was sensitive, too, in a way that hurt Bertha dimly. Once when she had inadvertently stumbled upon him, seated alone in the dining room with his head in his hands, he had jumped up redly, giving her a random order with a brusqueness not his....

He would have jumped redly, too, had he seen Bertha seeing him as he knocked and tried the door softly.

"Erna--dear. You asleep? It's Ben. Please. Dear? I want to come in."

Finally he went back to his room, closing the door.

Bertha somehow, knew.

Doors. The long corridors of her silence were all nicked up with the sounds of them, closing.

One day, when May like a shy pink parasol was beginning to open wide and wider over the city, a lovely thing happened to Bertha.

The Musliners gave a picnic. Thirty guests climbed gleefully into a moving van especially upholstered in gay cretonnes for the occasion and rode fifteen miles up the Hudson to a grove, recently acquired by Mr. Musliner as an anniversary gift to his wife.

There were hampers of food and freezers of cream and cases of drinks and dozens of lemons and all the flimsy paper napkin and wooden plate paraphernalia dear to picnickers. Hundreds of sandwiches. Pails of salad. Cakes of every turn known to Bertha's hand. For two days Bertha and Julie the waitress and Lulu the housemaid buttered and sliced and wrapped in oiled paper and packed.

A set of white enameled picnic dishes arrived which Mrs. Musliner rejected as "spoiling the fun." Apples were dipped into syrup and impaled upon sticks. Boxes of marshmallows for toasting. Potatoes for roasting. Hammocks were packed into the van and an old upholstered couch upon which Mrs. Musliner reclined, once they had reached the open road, her guests in mock homage about her.

Bertha and Julie rode in front with the driver. How they chattered! Julie was a dark, nervous girl. Rather pretty in her waitress uniform, but sagged and run-down-looking in street clothes. She had been married once and upon the slightest provocation would display a scar across her neck to indicate where a jealous husband had attempted to cut her throat. When the driver saw it he tried to kiss her there and she lurched against Bertha and Bertha lurched against the side of the van and the open road rang with laughter. Julie's. The driver's. And the rising merriment of the group behind. Bertha's laughter, too.

The day was so soft. Warmth ran up her legs. The driver reached around Julie's shoulder to pinch her and she reached across Julie's lap to slap him--plump in the stomach, so that he simulated pain, while really he was doubled up with guffawing.

From inside the van someone spied an organ grinder toiling up the road.

"An organ grinder! Come on in. Hey--you--stop. Come on in. Mucha mon! Comma to picnic. Mucha mon. See. Play for the queen on the dais. Come up--in."

And so the lifted, bewildered Italian dragged merrily into the van and the horse flecked onward with a whip that flashed into an S.

The river ran ahead to show them the road. Bertha had never seen a river. This one was quick and gay and on its way somewhere. Not full of lips like the harbor.

On its way to the grove. On its way to the grove.

"Looka," cried Julie, "all them rusty tin cans down by the water. Some tin can sports musta passed this way."

"Oh. Oh. Oh." Julie holding both her sides with laughter and the driver letting his lines slide to lean over and hold them for her, too.

"Look at that Bo over there in the field," he cried, cracking the S with his whip, "that ain't a nose on him--somebody fired a ripe tomater and it stuck."

"Oh la, la! Ripe tomater. Ain't he bloody? A ripe tomater. Go tell that to your rich uncle if his laughs don't come easy."

"Well, Square-head, it's your looka now. Looka now. Looka there. Looka quick, and tell us what you see--"

"He says, 'Looka quick, Bertha.' Come outta your trance and look! Whadda you see? Look about you. Looka here. Looka there."

"Looka, looka," cried Bertha half daft with the lush smell of grass and of warmth, "looka those clouds--white--white clouds--little children up there--see--falling outta bed--"

"Oh Lord, that's a good one! Giddy ap, you gol-darn plugs you--little children falling outta bed.

Oh lud, it's great to be crazy, It's great to be crazy, Oh lud, it's great, oh it's great to be nuts.

And then Julie taking up the refrain.

"Oh lud, it's great, oh it's great, to be nuts.

***

The Grove ran out in a point to the river and would not let it pass, so the water went around it with a soft hiss. One tree grew almost horizontal and laughed down at it.

Little Mrs. Musliner, with her blouse open at the throat and whortleberry leaves in her hair, jumped astride it and beat it as if it had been a horse.

"Giddy-app--my trusty steed--swim me across the Hellespont!"

Bertha, tilting the salt water out of the ice cream freezer, stood almost waiting for the plunge and the sound of foam and the arrowhead line of the water parting before the tree stump whose leaves were a flowing mane.

A Young Fellow who dined frequently at the house snatched up a fruit knife from one of the hampers, clamped the blade between his teeth, and flew on the tree trunk behind her, balancing her against the shock with his hands on her light young hips, and the guests stood back and cheered.

"If I was little Musliner, I'd wipe up the floor with that young customer," said Julie, who was squeezing lemons.

"What?" said Bertha.

"Aw--you--hunky--you don't know you're on earth unless somebody stages an earthquake under you."

Suddenly Musliner came running down the turf, straddling the tree trunk, too, his little legs waving and too short even to dangle loosely.

"We're off," he shouted and dug with his knees into the spongy bark.

"Three's a crowd," sang somebody. "Who has the grace to stay home from the Hellespont?"

"Why I have," cried the Young Fellow, bounding off, and the red scorching through his fine tan.

"Now," cried Mr. Musliner, wriggling forward with his short fat knees, his hands coming down on the curve of his wife's slim young hips--"Now--we're off--alone!"

But suddenly Mrs. Musliner was tired. She climbed down jerking back from his touch. The wind and the May had gone out of her face.

"Come on," she said, "let us eat."

***

The meal was already spread on long wooden planks set up on wooden braces, but someone found a natural table of dog violets set out beside a little orchestra of waterfall and with great ado and much merriment the feast was moved up the hillside.

Under her breath Julie bitterly demurred. The climb was rocky and the running back and forth, from the hampers in the van to the remote spot on the knoll, twisted her ankles and strained her back and once, scaling the top, she fell and barked her shin and passed sandwiches over gay shoulders with her eyelids stung with the heat of the held-back tears.

But Bertha! With one heft of her arm she carried a case of wine, running with it lightly over the knoll. The dance up and the dance down. Ice cream freezers to be rolled up hill. She shoved aside the assistance of the driver and spun them in an ecstasy along the dark, damp flesh of earth. Rocks bit in through her shoes and she wanted to kick them off, so that her freed toes might bite them back. Rivers of strength seemed pressing at the dam of her body. She wanted the knoll to be a mountain that she might stagger, slip, and sweat up its flank, and the hampers to be kegs with the weight to bend her double.

The old Slav song of the women far behind her, who had worn the runic brooch, was so close to her consciousness that she wanted to sing it as she mounted the hill. The muted old concertina in her carpetbag, from dear knows what ancestral squatter in a peasant hut---she could have played it then; squeezed some of the locked-up ecstasies through it. She wanted to run. Feet were not mute--they tasted the sap of earth and bounded back vibrant with it as if they had drunk wine. The hillside. It cut her. It skinned her shoes and on the inside her toes curled, pushed against her stockings, and wanted out.

The wine ran in little pools. The Young Fellow, with his fingers for Pan's pipes, did an oafish dance around the table that was spread with wood violets. Someone tossed a great platter of the sandwiches high up and let them rain down again, splattering and scattering. Mrs. Musliner sucked at a candied apple and shot out her little red bib of a tongue at everybody, but longest and reddest to the Young Fellow, who touched the top of it with his forefinger and then pressed that forefinger behind his ear.

The sun, hot and high and prodigal, made great stains of light and shade. After a while groups and pairs began to shy off. One dark youth in eyeglasses stretched himself solemnly down the length of the table of dog violets, an empty wine bottle very tight in his clutch, and almost immediately fell asleep. Mrs. Musliner, side-stepping him gingerly, stuck a lilac spray upright between his teeth, so that it waved there to the tipsy wind of his breath. Then she and the Young Fellow squealing delight at this danced off down a footpath that turned suddenly and wiggled teasingly through some underbrush.

Even Julie and the driver had gone off and the organ-grinder lay asleep in a tree hollow with his body all up in a coil.

It was pleasant tiptoeing over the violets and wadding all the paper napkins up in a ball, and poking them out of sight in a hamper and stacking the wooden plates and scattering the crumbs and running up and down the knoll and clearing the forest back into its woodland quiet, so that the tinkle of the waterfall came through again and, except for those caught under the sleeping figure with the lilac spray waving in his breath, all the little violets lifted themselves up again as if after a storm.

Once, rolling an empty freezer down a steeper side of the knoll, she came upon Musliner, seated at the head of the trail that wiggled so naughtily off through some underbrush, and chewing a blade of grass.

"Well, Bertha, we seem to be the sole survivers of the party."

"Oh, Mr. Musliner, it's grand."