Part 6

"Grand." A word as lonesome as a mountain and she wanted to tell him warmly about the lovely, green-lace grove of his and of the Slav song that ran along her throat wanting out, just as her feet running over the warm earth in their bluchers wanted out. "Grand." She could have bitten her tongue for some of its blood to flow into and warm what she wanted to say, but all that she had was "grand" and so she stood saying it and smiling at him with the lips which she hated because they were mutes.

"You're a good girl, Bertha," he said, looking at her with eyes that were hurt as if they had spikes through them, "you don't run off and shirk the job like Julie. Here."

He handed her a silver dollar. She took it and should have gone on trundling her ice cream freezer down the hillside toward the van, but somehow she didn't. She stood there, looking and wetting at her lips.

"Well?" he said. He was half seated on a tree stump, one leg dangling, and chewing and chewing the blade of grass along his front teeth.

Her gaze kept darting from him to down the little snake of trail and her throat kept tightening. She knew. He had worked very hard over this day. Her day. It lay now in a ruin around him, as he sat there chewing the grass blade his brown lips twisted as if it were bitter. In the tree hollow the organ grinder slept in his tight little coil. Bertha trundling the ice cream freezer down the hill. Otherwise no one left back. Not even Julie and the driver. Little bells of laughter through the trees. Bertha somehow didn't matter. For the life of him he could not keep his eyes, as if they were wounded in his head, from rolling a little toward that trail.

"I'll bring you a candied apple," she said.

She wanted him to be surly. It would have been easier then, for her not to be sorry, but he smiled and nodded no, and all she could think of to say through the ache in her throat was:

"There is an ice cream rooster left over and some Burgundy. You would like a nice cool glass of Burgundy?"

"No, Bertha," he said, "thank you, now you run along and clear up and don't you bother about me." But his eyes were traveling down the trail with hers, and finally he rose and came over to her, looking up at her from his squatness and with the brownish whites to his eyes very prominent.

"She's very young, Bertha," he said. "We must help her."

"I--want to--"

"Help her, Bertha. Never let her do anything that will make her unhappy. She is too young to see clearly ahead--you are a home-body--watch over her, Bertha--mother her."

Mother, That was a word that could twist her and make her want to bite at the cove of her arm, and yet, standing there on the hillside, hurting with this man's pain, it was as if something within her were spreading to cover a huddler. Actually, Bertha was two months younger than Mrs. Musliner, but so strangely older in the locked-up lore of the dim procession that peopled her silences!

Back in that procession, a young fledgling who walked in beauty and whose Sonatas had not yet been born, but whose melodies were to wind down through the centuries, had pursued a girl with flax-colored braids like Bertha's, across a plushy field in south of Hungary, capturing her finally and kissing her. At first she beat him off and then, because his lips were rich and his young head defiant, like a child's, it was she who held him. Broodily and close to her heart in the harvest moonlight ... at dawn he was still singing softly to a great-great-grandmother of Bertha, troubled wisps of melodies that were not quite born to him yet--precious, groping old songs that were locked now in the heart of Bertha. Old Bertha, who was two months younger than Mrs. Musliner.

***

The sunlight bowed back out of the grove and the couples and groups came back tiredly and happily and hungrily out of the dusk. The driver built a bonfire and the Young Fellow unpacked the marshmallows and Bertha, with the water singing over her hands, washed the potatoes for roasting at the spring, and a full moon as dainty as an apricot came up between two trees.

Firelight on faces. Eager mouths with the teeth showing, hovering over just the right brownness of marshmallow. Low laughter. The grove crowding up around the circle of light. Mrs. Musliner, with her face in her palms and the reflected firelight leaping and falling in her eyes which had crybaby rims around them. The smell of darkness and the bleed of sap. Leaves, curling and burning to death with gestures of human pain. Over by the spring it was so dark that it seemed to Bertha that the evening was some great black cow standing there beside her panting softly, so that she could feel its sides breathe. Sweet-smelling darkness with a give to it like a cow's flank. The earth beside the spring was all wet with clear water and leaning over to rinse potatoes, she could feel the little sucks, greedily at her feet.

Warm, pulling, sucking earth that had teased her all day and over which her feet wanted to leap, free!

And then Bertha sat down, slyly, on a moss-tinged jut of rock, and picked up her skirts, and down came her great balbriggan stockings, wide-ribbed and the color of clay, and out sprang her legs. White urns in the gloom. The rip open of buttons. Little yawns of her empty shoes standing there on a dirt ledge. Squnch, into the slow pour of the good black mud that closed up around her ankles like a strong and hungry mouth.

Squnch. Squnch. Squirm of the pouring soil up between her churning, spatulate toes. She could feel it with the very pit of her. Warm. Black. Close. Her mysterious friend, the soil, whispering to her with those tight eager lips--it was difficult not to throw out her arms and shout--tear open her bulk of blouse where it cluttered her breast and shout--the curling, winding, whispering, kissing soil hugging her with its eager lips--she wanted to run--to run back barefoot along the plushy fields.

The organ grinder, dazed with good food and drink, began suddenly to grind out, in rapid spill from his hurdy gurdy, a folk song out of Ukrainia.

High cheek bones and velvet bodices that laced up in front. Red cotton skirts that twirled. Men in high boots and tight red sashes and fine mustachios that scratched! Sweat in hovels. Long low rafters, candlelight-scarred. Quivering hips. Waving mugs. Low of bulls and slow, hot smell of steaming dung heaps. Sweat and love and courage of solitary childbirth on wide moors. Strength of splayed Slav lips! Yeow, the ring of rafters! Yeow, the splayed Slav lips! Bertha with her arms outspread and a yeow that landed her squat on her heels out on a spot of turf that was stained with the firelight!

"Hurra! Look! Who is this? The cook! That's the girl. Give us a dance. Native heath, by Jove. Look at your Swede, Muzz, spinning a goulash fandangle. Bravo, go to it--Yuiop-- I say!"

***

Spinning tarantellas with broad white toe for pivot. Swaying hip rhythm, eyes slits, like wise smiling old buttonholes. Hands broad on haunches and little bulge of bacchanalian belly--Yeow--squat heels deep in turf, arms flung wade and half wrenched from sockets! Leg out from under. Yeow--up again on toe pivot--spin--spin--laughter over wild moors--sweat in hovels--hot male hands on square-hipped girls--scratch of mustachios against laughing, square-teethed women--crones with the soil ground into their wrinkles. Sing, peasant, sing, and swing the grinning scythe! Sing of the strong fertilizing soil and the dung heaps that steam and the crones that are wise with old lore and the women who love, and who bear, and who weep, and the wide-legged men with the necks like tree boles. Sing--Yeow--of meat and of soil and of strength and of love--sing Yeow! Yeow! Yeow!

The hurdy-gurdy suddenly silent--Bertha with her arms flung wide and half wrenched from their sockets. Toes in the soil. Hair down. Her bosom where the waist had fallen open gleaming and high.

***

Going home through the languid night it was Bertha who sat next to the driver, his knee slyly digging up against hers which she flung angrily back.

"Big girl. Good girl." He kept saying over and over again under his breath without moving his lips.

She felt the tail of his glance slide over her bosom where the waist had fallen open and she clutched it closed and kept edging toward Julie, who was sullen.

"Before I'd dance for pennies, like a dago's monkey. What's the idea, giving a free show without an invite? I know my place, I do. They'd have showed you yours, if they wasn't all boozy as boiled owls. Listen to them now. I'm a self-respecting girl. I know my place. I don't dance for pennies. That dance was a give-away. You musta been born in a cow house where they dance all night and then grab up their pails and start to milking. That's old country dancing. I'm American. I know my place."

"What did I--do--Julie?"

"What did you do? Say, was it as bad as that? You musta had some inside information on the Burgundy. Made a holy show of yourself, that's what you did."

All the way home, edging away from the driver's horrid knee, the question kept spinning inside her brain, "What did I do? What? What?"

She felt so empty. As if all the strength had run out through her fingers and toes. A flask that had been drained of wine, that for years and years had been beating against its sides.

***

One evening in a winter that roared with blizzard, and snowstorms like plunging white buffaloes leaped before city traffic, there were dinner covers for eight at the Musliners, but no guests. Automobile wheels ground futilely in the hub-high ruts. Surface cars, shaggy with storm, stalled in their tracks. The streets slept standing, like horses.

In spite of Bertha skimming each new grease film off of the foods, dinner began to cloy, the entrée of creamed mushrooms darkening, the patty cases sagging as they waited.

With fever spots in her cheeks, Mrs. Musliner, in a bower of the tulle that her dress formed around her, kept rattling at the telephone, her urgent forefinger frantically up and down at it, but the wires were under the storm and only snow-hush came through.

"Central--you must answer--it's urgent--you must--hello--"

In his dinner clothes and very brown above the white of his shirt front, Mr. Musliner chided her in a little good-humored way he had.

"Well, little Snow White, it looks for once as if you must have dinner all alone with your old hubby."

Her smile up at him could be like a crucifixion--as if a tourniquet twisting in the very ganglia of her were forcing her lips to part.

"Central," she implored, working the hook up and down, "please--won't you answer?"

Through the little glass pane in the pantry door, Bertha could see him, bumbling about the rose tulle of her in the slow hitting fashion of a brown bee, his hand, wanting to touch her but constantly withdrawing, did pause at her throat where it flowed palely down into her bodice. It stiffened at his approach and a rib of vein came out.

Julie, peeping too, sniggered. He had a curiously sensitive blush. It came up, redly, as if he had heard.

"Central--can't you hear--you must answer."

He walked over to the buffet and shot out a swallow of seltzer.

"Afraid it looks like a quiet evening--alone, Little One," he said, with his words etched on his laugh like a design against thin glass.

She hung up the receiver, with the one vein still out on her pretty throat, and drew up her chair beside the lace, the flower- and the candle-spread table.

"Of course, Ben, it's just disappointing, that's all. Horrid old storm." She made a little _moue_ and he looked at her adoring it, and then started for the vacant place beside her.

"Oh," she said and leaped backward--"I--they may come yet."

"How stupid--of course--they may--come yet," he said and took his accustomed place, remotely opposite, but his eyes, with their liver-spotted whites, eager for her through the little jungle of fern and pink roses of the center piece.

In the kitchen Bertha began to ladle out the bouillon. It made a clear little pouring noise. Like a thin cry.

***

A square of light from a window across the areaway could work its way into Bertha's room in a luminous plaster. Long after the electric bulb, dangling by a wire over her cot, was snapped out she liked to lie regarding the reflected glow.

A patch of warmth against solitude. A cave with a lit mouth. It was pleasant to walk through it and down into the aisles of doze....

That night, the glow sprang sharply across the snow-packed areaway and long after she had crawled into her cot, she lay at this fantastic entrance into her sleep, dallying.

Little wisps of smoke rose off the embers of the day. Half consciousnesses. Six of the eight medallions of the salmon _mousse_ were left over. That ridge of fear in a vein out across Mrs. Musliner's throat. The Farleys would have relished the salmon _mousse_ creamed the next day. Not the Musliners. Sufficient unto the day the salmon thereof. The grapes he had brought her were wadded in cotton and in the upper section of the refrigerator. Would the salmon _mousse_ taint them of fishiness? Snow. A wide, wide wilderness of it with humpbacks walking hidden under it and pushing it up into mountains. Drip. Hollow, pleasant rhythm, through the doze that made it difficult to awaken. Drip. Drip. Drip. That must be the ice pan flooding. It was so hard to awaken. Drip. Drip. Drip. Doors. The brown door that was Musliner and it led inward to a dwelling place of light. Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then in a crash through the light fabric of this doze, a pink little cyclone.

It was hard for Bertha to cross the hair line from her dim sleep to her dim reality.

"Who is it?" she cried. "What?" And sat up in the gilt darkness, two enormous braids of her tan hair hitting against the wall like rope.

It was Mrs. Musliner, in a nightgown made pinker by the flicker of her body through it, shuddering there on the floor behind the refuge of the door she had slammed and locked.

"Mrs. Musliner!"

"Bertha, hide me. Keep me here with you. Alone. Bertha, let me stay here with you."

She was trembling so that her nightgown went rippling along her limbs and her teeth and her lips were fanned dry with moans. And Bertha, Norse in her hulk, and in the great flannel undersuit and petticoat, stooping over the torn little huddle there on the floor.

"Mrs. Musliner--little baby--what is it?'

"Keep me, Bertha. Hold me tight. You will keep me, won't you, Bertha?"

"Baby. Little mine. You'll catch cold. You have bad dreams. This is no place for you."

"Let me stay. You're so quiet, Bertha. Let me stay here with you. It calms me. What are you hearing all the time while you work? What do you know? Bertha, tell me--what makes you so still--what do you know that I don't know--help me to know it too--help me be quiet like you--that dance--I remember--you know things that are beautiful and terrible--and yet you are quiet--help me, Bertha--I know so little--only that I am a bad, bad girl--and afraid--Bertha--afraid--"

"You poor little one--you bane walking in your sleep?"

"No. No. I'm not asleep. I'm not dreaming. I'm afraid, Bertha--keep me here with you. Hold me--don't let go--don't let him--get me--Bertha--"

She was like a child in a storm flung there against the rock of Bertha, crying there and clinging there and shuddering there.

"You little thing--you yoost shivering--you bane sick--I go and call Mr. Mus--"

She was a flash then, out of Bertha's arms, halfway across the room, her gown a quick ripple of silk about her body, and her arms out toward the window with a gesture of destination.

"Don't open that door! If you call him, I'll jump. I can't stand it if you open that door. I'll jump out!"

"Mrs. Musliner. Baby. Wait! I won't open it. You bane sick. I keep care of you. So. So. Here, in my bed--yoost shivering--yoost shivering--"

She carried her bodily, a curving petal, toward the cot.

"Don't let him get me, Bertha."

"Poor little baby. Here please, if you don't mind--on my cot--you bane chilled."

It was still warm there from the sag of Bertha's body. A nest of coarse bedding that grated through Mrs. Musliner's film of gown.

"Let me go get you soft blankets. Mine bane stiff like a board."

"No. No. Don't leave me, Bertha. I like it hard. I want it stiff--like a board. Like a cross. Like you. To hurt with the hardness and not have it matter. Don't leave me, Bertha, stay with me close. You understand, Bertha. He mustn't come near--I couldn't stand it. He's so brown. A brown dog scratching at my door. Scratching. Scratching--night after night--all these months. I can't endure it. To-night--I--it seemed to me--he had a key! I thought I heard him fumbling out there with one but--he wouldn't do that--would he, Bertha--he wouldn't do that?"

"No. No."

"But he kept turning the knob--and scratching--that terrible scratching--and then--something--that sound in the lock--like a key--hold me, Bertha."

"Oh, Mrs. Musliner--don't be afraid--"

"I am, Bertha. I am. You understand. He mustn't come--I can't stand it. Ever since we're married--I have managed so--never to be alone--never to be alone. I shouldn't ever have done it. They forced me. My father--family--money--he's so brown, Bertha--so terribly brown--brown lips--so good and so brown and so terrible. Help me, Bertha. You understand. You somehow--you--you cook--you understand."

Bertha did. Dumbly. Mutely. And in a way that wound like a cry around her heart.

"Poor Mrs. Musliner," she wanted to say, frightened by the wetted lips and inexorable eyes of the cyclorama, even when they only shone at her through the little pink jungle. Hers not to reason why. Nature's big impervious scheme for her had no concern with the shrinking of her flesh beyond that she must beget flesh.

"He bane good man."

"I know it, Bertha--that's what makes it so hard. Bertha--I want to go away--there's someone--Bertha, come closer--there's someone--"

"The Young Fellow," said Bertha, and looked at her and made deeper the cradle of her arms about her--"Oh, Mrs. Musliner--yoost open the brown door."

"I can't, Bertha. I've tried and I can't."

"Yoost lay and get quiet."

"You're so deep and still, Bertha. Like snow. I never noticed--before----"

"Shh-h-h, you little one. Don't shiver so. Let me go, yoost over there to the cupboard to get you my coat, it bane hard here----"

"I want it hard--Bertha--hard and cold--I'm bad--and it's cool and clean and meek to lay myself on wood--like you, Bertha--you're so meek--why are you so meek, Bertha?"

"I--I do not know."

"Hold me. You're so still. Hold me. I never noticed how deep and still you are. Ah, it's good. Hold me, Bertha."

She began to tremble softly into tears, the hard little rod of her body relaxing.

"I'm no good, Bertha. Why don't I die?'

"You bane very good, Little Mrs."

"He's good. I'm bad. He's so good to me, Bertha, I can't bear it. I can't bear him. His lips. Help me, Bertha."

Bertha, help her. Why, she wanted to. Bertha, who could pull webby stuffs out of drainpipes to the sound of chimes goldily, how she wanted to tell her of those inner secret solaces that rest in the lovely grail of the spirit! Yet all the words that would come were:

"He bane good--open the brown door--"

"Listen! There he comes. Down the hall. Don't let him in, Bertha. I couldn't stand it. Don't. I'll jump out the window first. Don't let him in. Don't let him in."

All the rigidity was back and she clung in a tense hammock, her knees braced up against Bertha, her arms up and locked about her neck. "Save me, Bertha. Save me."

To the convulsive rigidity of the small figure in her arms, Mr. Musliner's voice as gray and as flat as a moor came through the door:

"Erna."

She clung tighter, stifling her sobs against the hurting silence of Bertha.

"Erna. Go back to your room."

Frantic little sob-racked whispers. "Tell him, Bertha--I can't ever--can't, can't ever----"

"She's yoost a little nervous, Mr. Musliner. Maybe if you would please go away for a while--maybe a little later she--will come----"

"Never. Bertha, tell him for me--can't--can't ever--not to be angry--but--can't----"

"She says in yoost a little while, Mr. Musliner--if you will please go away, in a little while I will bring her back."

"No. No. No. I didn't say it, Ben--I can't--can't----"

"Take Mrs. Musliner back to her room, Bertha, and stay with her there--all night. I am going to my room now and inside of ten minutes I shall expect to hear her go into hers--and lock the door."

His footsteps went off into the same thin silence as his coldly thin voice, Mrs. Musliner shuddering down into a state of silence that was more like a faint.

"Come--Mrs. Musliner."

"No. No. No."

"He bane good----"

"I know it, Bertha, but so brown--so terribly, terribly brown----."

To find the words to whisper to her of the little vibratory paths that cut through the brown clay of externals...

"Yoost so the heart is not brown...."

"I know, Bertha, but I can't find my way there. It's so dark--I've tried."

"Come, little Mrs., I'll take you...."

"You can't. Nobody can."

"I can--little Mrs.----"

They sat still, crouched in the gold-powdered darkness, heartbeat to heartbeat. The sobs died down. Tears cooled and chapped little pathways along her cheeks. Bertha spread-kneed in her flannels, and the heavy gray petticoat. Barefoot.

"Oh Bertha--Bertha--so quiet--here with you. Hold me closer."

The Laocoön of them wound arm in arm there on the side of the cot. Colder. Later. Stiller.

"Mrs. Musliner----"

"Let me rest, Bertha, here with you--I feel so still. Stiller than I have ever been."

"It is already the ten minutes----"

"I--can't----"

"Come----"

"How----"

"With me."

She was like someone very quiet with a lovely kind of fatigue. Swoony. No remonstrance to the blanket thrown three cornered across her shoulders and the little journey, half propped against Bertha, through the chilled tile and linoleum of the kitchen.

At Mr. Musliner's door Bertha put up her hand and knocked suddenly.

"Oh God--no--not there--" cried Mrs. Musliner, and reared back.

"This is the way--little Mrs."

"No--no!"

"Yes."

"Oh God," cried Mrs. Musliner again, but suddenly she stood silent and waiting.

After a second Mr. Musliner opened the door. He was in a dressing gown that roped around his waist and his face seemed to look out brownly from behind the white mist of his pallor.

"Ben I--I----"

"She wants to come in, Mr. Musliner----"

"Ben--I--please. You. Me. My dear. Ben--may I open--the door--and come in? May I--Ben?" she said, and stepped with a little rush over the sill.

The door closing on them sent a little sigh of air out over Bertha and left her standing in the river of the narrow hall's darkness.

***