Chapter X: Part 10

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.

There was a young man stretched out on the couch in the hallway just outside the cloakroom. He was dreadful. Bla. His mouth was a mere roving rhomboid in the fleshiness of his face and his eyes silly pools. One of the girls held his head on her lap and played with his hair. Slick clumps of polished hair. She had a startled lovely face, shaped like a heart. A cigarette hung between her lips and she talked through it. Once she reached into the young man's waistcoat pocket and drew out a silver flask about the size and flatness of a hand and tilted it to her lips. A stream oozed sidewise and down along her neck. The young man lifted that four-sided mouth of his and kissed the trickle.

You held yourself tight against the nausea of that.

Bertha, standing and looking at them with the deep blue channels of her eyes, a silent sort of peasant tower.

"Who's your friend, the Woolworth Building, _Chérie_!"

"That's not the Woolworth Building, Jerry my only, that's Grant's Tomb. Can't you tell by the dome?"

"I'll dance with you for that."

"Then make haste, Lochinvar. I'm growing awfully wobbly on my toddle toddle-toddlers."

The wild horse of a night plunged on. The figures of the trampled-down girls. The cloakroom was strewn with them. They were on the sofas and some as limp as dolls propped up against chairs. Bare arms and silk legs strewn at the haphazard angles of sawdust dolls. You stepped among the debris of them.

The maniacal laughter of the jazz. You began to feel a little mad with it yourself. Your brain was one of those Coney Island devices for noise. Raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z. The terrible sting of fumes against your eyeballs. The rising simoon of the heat. The flung bare, beautiful necks there--about--everywhere--and the wise impudent lips. You stepped among the slim forms and propped them up and straightened out the sawdust legs and ordered the tossed loveliness of chiffon down over the legs. Raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z. It helped as you pushed through the fumes, to try and swing out on the short quick beats of the brain, far away from what the hands did.

Somewhere, you tried to think--raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z--somewhere, Lake Como's twilights are deep purple. Slow purple like the widening wine stain on a tablecloth. Raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z. To lean out into that thought. It was like opening a window. Slow twilights. The standing forests with folded arms. To lean out--raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z.

One girl asleep in a chair with neatly closed but fumy lips had to be picked up as if she were a little bag of sachet, crammed into her wrap and handed bodily to one of the young men with the irreverent eyes. He left a dollar bill on the counter that separated the cloakroom from the corridor. That was the beginning. Until dawn the coins and a few more dollar bills showered there. There was a china saucer for catching them in one of the dressing table drawers. Bertha did not know that.

At four o'clock the jazz sort of reared itself up on its hind legs, neighed enormously, and stopped like a great fantastic, fabled horse, frozen there on his dancing haunches with horror at his bray.

The strange silence began to pour. It pressed on the eardrums. It sang. A ringing silence as full of shuddering little atoms as a brass gong after a beating. You tiptoed through it, picking up oddments of a glove, a ribbon, a comb. The exhausted air was full of fog. There were three thickness of brocade across the window and the sash was hard to budge.

Finally, with all the strength of her, Bertha jerked it open. A wet cool dawn blew in. You scooped your hands into it and laved it over your face. Cool dawn that had traveled over wide and brooding silences. You fell on your knees beside the open window and drank it in as it pinkened.

It was time to go, but there was still one coat left on the rack. A lovely one of pink silver and silver fox. The money made quite a wad in Bertha's petticoat pocket. It was pleasant while you waited, to walk about the room to the friendly hit-hit. It made the rising day seem kindly. The little ducts in her mouth were running. The hit-hit meant tripe stew for breakfast.

Bertha standing there in the ruins of that cluttered bejazzed night, her silhouette against the new day....

A vacuum cleaner started to whine on a lower floor. The coat of pink silver began to tarnish against the day. Voices. The girl with the heart-shaped face and one of the young men with the patent leather hair and the irreverent eyes. There had been so many of them. Hundreds of them passing and repassing that door. You wanted to laugh at the identical procession of them. A shirt front for a shirt front. An eye for an eye. A silhouette for a silhouette. Hundreds of the lean-faced young men. They had passed and they had passed until there was only the one left. He was leaning up against the door frame in an easy and insolent hypotenuse with his hands plunged into his pockets and crawling about in there, and his easy face none too steady, with the mouth off on its rhomboid every so often.

"_Chérie_, I adore you."

"Jerry, you darling villain."

"Get your wraps. I'll run down and get mine. Here's a dollar for the Woolworth Tower."

"Grant's Tomb, darling."

"Hurry along, there's a girl."

"But Jerry--I----"

"Darling, haven't my two hours of eloquence upon the subject convinced you that no one will ever know?"

"But the family--Jerry, and Father is so--so----"

"Will you leave all that to me, _Chérie_? Do you trust me enough? You'll be home tucked in your little bed by the time your maid comes in to draw your curtains. I want you, _Chérie_, with me--to-night--my rooms--for an hour only----"

"Jerry."

"I'll be back with my coat ... wait, sit here, darling...."

"Oh, Jerry----"

"No, no--no nonsense--say to me, 'Yes, Jerry darling.' Say it pretty, so I can kiss it off your lips."

"Yes--Jerry darling----"

The wrap of pink silver. She slid into it like a star into a cloud. It was hard to tear your eyes off the pale, frightened beauty of her. Somehow you wanted to keep her. Close. Close to your bigness. To make her listen if she would, to the calmness, to the great calm tick of your heart. Your eyes, you could not take them off. You stood there drawing on her wrap for her. But your eyes. You could not tear them off. Bertha, standing there big and pale and tranquil against the daylight.

"You! Let go, please. What are you looking at?"

"I--why, miss----"

"You think I'm drunk. I'm not."

"No."

"I won't be looked at like that. You hear me? I won't."

She began to cry. Tipsy little tears that ran down to the point of her heart-shaped face.

"You! I won't be looked at like that. I hate it. I won't have it. I want to go home."

"Go----"

"Tell him--the young man--tell him when he comes that I've gone. Tell him I left the message. I've gone home. I--you--I hate you for staring like that. I won't have it. I want to go home...."

She gathered the shimmer of wrap all about her and ran down the right-hand curve of the staircase. You could follow the shimmer of her through the mirror. The shimmer--the whine of the vacuum cleaner.

The empty cloakroom, it was the color of cloyed grease. Presently he came.

"Where----"

"She's gone----"

"Gone where----"

"Gone----"

"Hell," he said and started toward the right staircase.

"No. No. Wait. She'll be back in yoost a minute. Wait here, she said."

"Oh." He sat down a little unsteadily.

She closed the window so that the heat crowded up again. Tiptoe. Her movements about the room had a slow sedative rhythm. Tiptoe. There was a corsage of double Parma violets kicked under a table and dying into the heat. She picked it up and placed it on the table at his elbow. Slow tease of perfume. His eyelids began to wave like an old green frog's. Finally, he slumped over sidewise. Asleep.

Bertha, tiptoeing out, with her lips lifted back off her shining square teeth.

It was sun-up when she came out into the street. Even the city can be sweet with morning. She strode through the tender light, the bold, reassuring hit-hit against her leg. There was a certain Quick Lunch Room on Lexington Avenue. Tripe stew. The juices along the sides of her tongue were running.

***

The half-days were humiliating. They were the crumbs from the agencies. Almost invariably they fell to the frieze of the charwomen. One day for the first time one of these part-time allotments fell to Bertha. Fell like a clod of fear. She took it and went out with her shoulders round, and the slip of paper clutched in her dread smitten fingers.

It was as if you had passed a milestone. An old stump of a milestone all worn down and shaped like the last tooth of one of the scrubwomen.

The morning's work was in an automobile showroom on Fifty-ninth Street near Columbus Circle. Polishing brass railings and the mirrors nailed to the floor underneath the motor cars to reflect their lowermost perfections. A soft morning of mousy little rubbings along smooth surfaces. At two o'clock the workaday was finished. A sun-drenched spring day swam over the Park and along the streets that were running with new thaw. Women wore bright hats and overshoes. What snow remained had great gaps in it that widened, and everywhere little rivulets were hurrying toward the gutters. It was pleasant just to stroll.

At Carnegie Hall on Fifty-seventh Street the motor cars were dense and the bright hats were bobbing. Traffic ran toward the great building in spokes. Up from the subways. Down from the elevated trains. Along the side streets. Out from the motors. Concert crowds. Bertha knew. Madam Gerbhardt had once given her the tickets to the Ukrainian Chorus.

The crowd hit into you from all sides. You began to elbow. The broad steps were crammed and everyone's face was uplifted. Two policemen swung benign clubs. This was a kid-glove crowd with a scent and a rustle to it. Once the swirl tightened so that no one could move, but everybody swayed. The well-bred little squeals of the women. The firm, well-clad arms of the men forging ahead for them. Slamming of motor doors. Slow pouring upward of the crowd on the steps. The eager, fluty voices of the women....

The swirl held Bertha like a vise. The women, ever so slightly, and kindly enough, veered a little from the contact with her worn old reefer. It was horrible in the spring light. Like a scab. You had to hold yourself away from it by breathing in. Bertha could do that until it almost seemed a mere box, with herself quite slimly and fastidiously down its center.

Something curious happened. A child caught down in the jam had his face crushed up softly against the reefer. His mother slid in a quick hand between his cheek and the contact.

"Daddy," she said, "see if you cannot lift Junior over on your side. Don't touch, Junior. Ugh, darling, not nice. Come over on this side with Daddy--don't touch lady's coat."

She was as snug as a plover and as plump. Sweet fleshed. Something eupeptic about her. Something about her....

"Go over to Daddy and Brother Ben." she said and veered. The veering women.

The father lifted the child. His smile was very white in a brown face. Liver spotted eyes....

"Come, Junior Boy," he said, "away from there. Here, Mother, you come too. Away."

It was the Musliners. The firm pat tight little group of them. You watched them edge up the steps with the crowd.

***

It was the spring made you hate that reefer. So with simulated unconsciousness you looked over the heads of the veering women as you tried to force your way through. And over the heads of the veering women you saw a picture. A lithograph pasted on to a panel beside the entrance. It stood out like the spot cast by a sun glass. It riveted the eye. Willy-nilly the crowds jammed around. Bertha with her big hands and wrists hanging bare in a huddle in front and her gaze sucked up against the lithograph in the panel.

The spot that stood out as if cast by a sun glass was a head. It leaned out over one shoulder and then everything was black, like a silence, until farther down over the keyboard of a piano were two hands. You wanted to cry. Such ineffably tender hands. Why--why the white hands at your heart! There they were. And that head leaning over one shoulder out of that background of silence. That luminous, tawny-looking head with the long tender cheeks and the eyes that looked tranced with the music of the chimes goldily. Who? The name ran in script across the corner. Charvet.

Ah, Charvet. That evening at dinner. Madam Gerbhardt. Moon-haunted. To be moon-haunted was to live with an opal mist about the heart....

It was so hard to move. The eyes held so. They held, with that feeling of suction....

"Move on."

There was still something of the sixteen dollars in that petticoat pocket. Friendly little wad. It burned. It made your body glow suddenly like a hot coin. An excoriating kind of heat that made your lips feel cracked and your eyes glossy.

The crowd bent up the steps. There was a long line before the box office. It moved up inch by inch, and Bertha, suddenly a part of it, moved too. The wad was tied into a handkerchief and it had to be bitten open with the teeth.

"Ticket please."

"Admission only."

"What?"

"Standing room only. One dollar."

"Yah...."

You slid in through a baize door. The auditorium was dim and enormous and the waiting silence all arched up like a cat's back. The stage was so far--off somewhere beyond the intervening sea of all the soft breathings. You could see a little, if you tiptoed to peer between the heads. The piano. A curve of black. The white hands. The ineffably tender hands. Heart flutters that had flown out there. Someone rammed in ahead, pressing you there against the wall.

***

The shelving slipping beach. The white keys ran down it with the purr of surf. You could feel the floor of sand moving out subtly from under your feet. The floor that led under the sea.

***

Bertha standing pinioned there to the wall with her hands caught up and crowded to her breast by the crush of the standees and her throat flexed outward and beating. It was like bleeding. As if the melodies of her heart were arteries and that running of the keys out there the precious bleeding of them. It was like that. Oh, it was....

The tears came out in a dew along your eyes.

It stepped down the keys in heartbeats. You could scarcely keep back. You knew that cry. It had lain in your heart for so long. There it was on the outside of yourself, strewn along the keys. You were free of the hurt of it--where it had lodged like a knife in the plushy case of your heart.

The bleeding out of all the little inner turmoils. The dammed-up ecstasies. The music of the chimes goldily. The glad releases. The rilling beauty. The white hands at your heart. Just by tilting yourself up tiptoe you could see them flown out there above the keys. The white flutterings. To be pinioned there against the wall all of that afternoon with your hands caught up against your breast and the arteries of your heart uncocked and flowing....

The applause beat itself out and then began all over again. It died down and then, on the momentum of a few little scattered claps, rose again. The crowd loosened and moved down the aisle, blackening and jamming around the platform. The cramming against the wall eased up. You could hurry, too, if you wanted.

But is was enough, just to remain there against the wall with the eyes closed and the throat flexing. She could no more have moved--down there--those white hands--the white hands at her heart--down there--fluttering. She could no more have moved....

It was enough to be standing back there against the wall weak and glad.

It did not matter that her eyes somehow could not open to see the face of Felix Charvet down there beyond the opal mist, the face with the chimes tranced so goldily in the eyes and the long, choir-boy cheeks that were lit with their first faint down.

It did not matter, now that she felt so glad and weak and bled free of those lovely torments that were without dimension ... it did not matter that she was never to know that Felix Charvet was Felix--son of Rollo.

***

It was frightening to see the houses board up and the exodus of the families set in. Summer. Truck loads of perilously piled trunks. Nonplussed cats mewling at sealed doors. Handbills collecting on stoops in little snow drifts.

The agencies began to crowd.

The room in Desbrosses Street was as black and as narrow as a flue and all day it drew in the heat and all night long breathed it out. There was a window, but it opened upon a brick wall that you could touch without leaning. The darkness seemed to embalm the heat. Dreadful furry thickness like the fuzz on the tongue of a fever patient.

Sometimes at night, Bertha dragged herself to the sill and crouched on the floor with her cheek to it. The wall breathed like a flank. If you looked straight up there was a bit of sky about the size of a quill. On certain nights a star wandered into it. It made Bertha laugh to see it. Like a wise eye to a keyhole. Until she fell asleep Bertha gazed, eye to eye.

But this very slit of a room was the reason why it was frightening to see the houses board up. Its rental was a dollar a week and with the exodus to the country even part time work with the families, scarcer and scarcer.

Once she did jump a week and the agent who collected each Saturday into a dirty canvas bag with a drawstring showed a tooth at her. A sort of fang and the more terrifying because she had thought his gums were empty.

One day an innkeeper engaging a staff for his back street little hostelry in Asbury Park debated between Bertha and a great green Swedish girl who spoke no English, but whose lips hung down like ripe plums.

For the life of him he could not decide. Bertha sitting back in the frieze kept saying something that was her little prayer.

"Please make him," she kept saying--"please make him."

The bald spot on his head was all crimson and beaten from the sun. It must have taken a good warm sun through clean salted air to do that. Asbury Park. Please make him. Please make him.

"You're too old," he said finally and turned to lay his hand on the Swedish girl's hip.

_You're too old. You're too old. You're too old_. The phrase was so sly. It ran after you like a shadow. It would never let you be.

But that same day there came along a week of half-days at Coronation Point Inn. Airing rooms preparatory to the opening of the season. Prying closed windows from their winter stripping. Swabbing floors and unswathing the wrapped bedsteads which were hung slightly from the floor, against winter dampness.

Oh, but it was pleasant. Coronation Point stood on a terrace and overlooked a curve of bay. You took a subway to the end of the line and then a surface car and then you walked fifteen minutes through sun-shot leafage that speckled the road and made it dance. Chipmunks made precious noises scuttling over leaves. Orioles the color of the batting of an eye flashed through. Tit-a-weet of cock robin. And smells. The damp lush ones of sun making moist places steam and the green ones of stems when they are snapped in two and bleed. The green smells came from a little tramp stream of new water without even a bed for itself which ran through the grasses. It had a trill. It made the morning a hurrying loveliness. Quick, delicate, tumbling thing--sometimes on the homeward walk, Bertha took off her shoes and stockings, stooped for a handful of skirt and waded in against its tiny tide. The toes bit down and the mud squnched up....

Where the woods left off, the highway and hot little wooden houses took up. Then it was hot! Trudging along toward the surface car, motors tore along that macadam road, so that it was best to walk on the little rim of cinders at the edge. That was the worst of the half-day at Coronation Point. The half pay and the walk back to the surface car through the blazing noon.

Sometimes in front of the occasional frame houses there were wooden planks. They eased the feet of the burn from the macadam and before a shanty that had been rigged up as a gasoline station, an old overturned chassis, rotting there through sun and storm, was at least a resting place.

A hot, bald-faced little shanty-town squatting there on the bare clay stretch beyond the surface cars. You could see the tracks shining in the distance like forceps and on clear days the minarets of the city. Children and hens wallowed themselves out dust-baths in the patches of yard before these houses. The women were slattern. But sometimes there were neat corrugated truck gardens. Ruffles of lettuce. Lattice work of peas. Ridged potato patches like the roof of a mouth. Tough, good-smelling gardens. Just to trudge past them could set the knife blades of hunger to slashing in Bertha.

There was a bake shop farther along. A dilapidated little packing case of a building, with a brood of dirty children wallowing in the back yard and a weedy truck garden that had somehow been eked out of the clay.

MEYERBOGEN'S BAKERY. LUNCH ROOM.
CROTON'S ICE CREAM SOLD HERE.

Its breath was so sweet. The fragrance of hot bread. You could smell it as you came along the road. It teased at Bertha's faintness. It made the noonday road turn into a garter snake that rippled. The swimming, buzzing bread-scented haze. One day, because it was unendurable to wait for the three o'clock tripe stew in the city, which must serve as lunch and dinner, she turned in.

A mat of flies clung to the screen door and buzzed off as she opened it. There was a table near the door with a mustard pot on it. The bread and rolls on the counter were covered with pink netting. The proprietor served. He was enormous. A white apron girded his middle. His white cap was awry on his curly head. You saw him through a fog of flour. Great fellow, most of the objects in the shop shook as he walked. The T of chandelier that hung down in the show window of tilted loaves of bread. The coffee mugs on the shelf. A stack of saucers.

"Veenie sandwiches, five zents. Baked beans, five zents. Gorned beef hash vid boached egg, fiveteen."

"Beans."

"Coffee?"

"Yah...."

The noonday buzzed with the flies and the broken little shouts of the children. It was hard not to doze as she waited. Once her head did fall forward.

"It's a hot day," said Meyerbogen the baker, and set down a brown dish of the beans with a pale cube of pork on top.

"Yah."

Suddenly it was hard to eat. Even while her nostrils flared with the need of the strong hot food the heat was full of disks, spinning little juggler's plates and the shouts of the children were so far away--so far----

"Here--quick! You going to vaint? No. Don't. Here--drink----"

"I--where----"

"It's all right. You god a liddle stroke from the zun. Here, sit while I fan you."

The noonday drone swam back again. It was good to feel it, hot and buzzing and full of the shouts of the children.

"I'm all right," she said, and shook herself like a spaniel, and looked up at Meyerbogen with the blue channels of her eyes.

"You're all right, sure, now," he said and went off on his waddle about the business of unstacking buns from a wooden tray which a helper had just brought up from a basement.

But the lunch. For the life of her the beans would not go down or the cup of the light tan coffee. That was terrible. To feel all warm again and free of the chill of cold sweat and back safely once more in the drone of the noon and the lunch spread out on the clean wooden top of the table, untasted. Waste. The half days made one calculate so. Inevitably the slashing blades of hunger that cut through and through the great organism of Bertha would begin to champ again, a little later and the day's food allotment was already spent down to the last penny. Slowly and against a restricted throat she began to swallow the coffee.

Presently Meyerbogen sat down on the chair opposite.

"It's a heat," he said and the fog of the flour rose up off him.

"Yah."

He was like a great milk-fed baby. Pink polished cheeks. Tight, spring-tight curls and fat hands with dimples. And the enormous girth of him! He swayed back from himself for all the world like a tenor drinking in breath for Pagliacci's sob. And, ridiculously enough, he was almost dainty.

His big white throat was soft, and when he laughed he shook from head to toe, and the cloud of flour exuded as if someone were beating him with a baby's cornstarch bag.

"You lost your abbidite?"

"Yah--a little----"

"Take your time----"

"The heat----"

"Yah--yah---the heat--my woman--she died on me in heat like this." He looked off toward the roadway and screwed up his face. There was something about him actually of a baby about to cry.

"Yah----"

"Meningitis," he said--"down two days----"

"Oh--oh----"

"A good woman. Never down with child more than three days--and then in two days--meningitis--gone----"

"Oh--oh----"

"Five of them needing her. From two years old to ten."

"The children?"

"Yah--we had it neat like a pin here once. Now look!--I had a good woman----"

"Oh."

His great baby face was still screwed and resolutely out toward the road.

"Zummer," he said cryptically, "is zummer. It's good but not too much----"

Foolishly you could have cried for him. Big baby.

"Some zinnamon buns? Just hot from the ofen."

"No."

He waddled out on the porch and began carrying a sack of flour around the side entrance. You could hear him wheeze and the white haze was everywhere. Gradually it was pleasant to be eating. The coarse, strong food--the steam of it was appetizing, and after the first forkfuls appetite came back.

Clank. Clank. One of the children wandered in. Oh, how your heart leaped back, wounded. He had a poor little leg in a brace that clanked. A fat baby, too, only it was as if the father resembled the child and not the child the father. A dirty baby. A not nice baby. Eggy. With a smeared and too-large little girl's dress hung on him and horrid, dirt-ground underthings. He was lugging something. A man's ground down and discarded shoe that he must have found in the roadway.

"Shoe," he said and held it out toward Bertha.

"Ugh, dirty," she said, and made a grimace.

"Dirty," he said, and made an identical grimace with his already dirt-grimaced face, and took the shoe by thumb and forefinger and threw it out of the door.

That was adorable and made you want to pinch the dirty little cheek.

"Lady?"

She lifted him up and sat him rather gingerly on the knee of her neat skirt. The brace bit through and down into her flesh. It was heavier than the child. Cruel. Sickening.

"Baby."

"Lady."

Meyerbogen came in. There were lines of perspiration running down his face.

"Chimmie," he said, "go back out in the yard. Get down off the missis. Here's a zinnamon bun."

"It's all right."

"He's dirty. I can't ged help in the gountry."

"Yah--dirty."

"I'm dirty," said Jimmie, and looked up at her with his clear eyes shining in their smeary sockets. The brace cut in.

"I'll wash him."

"Ach--blease--"

"Where is the----"

"Ach, no, but you ain't so good yourself with zunstroke----"

"I'm all right. Where?"

"Back there."

"Come, Chimmie."

Clank. Clank.

Incredible disorder of that room behind the shop. The fantastic confusion of a chair sitting crazily on a carpet sofa. A red hen had wandered in through a hole in the screen door. The dishes of what seemed many a breakfast were stacked on the table and half covered with the flung-up edges of the red tablecloth. Flies. There were swiss curtains at the windows, but they had dried on their poles into strings. A pet tortoise hung halfway up one. Boys' caps and flung off aprons and half a basket of new dug potatoes. A broken high chair. Dumped-out coffee grounds. Sack of grass seed. A child's slate hung on the wall with this chirography in the nonsense hand of boyhood.

It made the disorder suddenly not so terrible. It made you want to laugh.

Poor little Jimmie. He was so dirty. The smudge ran deep down into his pores and he cried at the rubbing. The brace was hard to lift off. Meyerbogen knew the device and did that, and the welts on the plump curving leg were so deep that you kissed them.

"He can ged all right. The doctor says he needs to be shown two hours every day how to walk so he don't throw his little leg out. I don't ged the time."

You kissed them again, the red fiery welts.

"I can ged all right." That was his way. The little mimic!

There were no towels and Meyerbogen ran downstairs into the basement where the baking ovens were, for some flour sacks, but while he was gone, Bertha found a clean bed sheet and rolled Jimmie into it.

He came out as round and as plump as a mushroom.

"O-o-o-o-o."

"O-o-o-o-o."

Patty-pat-pat up and down the bare back.

The children came trooping in. Three of them in dirty little steps. Oscar and Petey and Essie. Meyerbogens all. Dumpy. Thick. Sturdy. The girl had two beautiful brown braids that she could sit on. Oscar and Pete were just shaved, like little convicts.

"We gotta house-girl. We gotta house-girl."

"Shut up. It's only a gustomer gifing us help."

"I'll stay. I do day work."

"Ach, if you knew how I need help. I'll pay good."

There was a clean dress found for Jimmie. Almost immediately he fell asleep and the chair was lifted down off the carpet couch so that Bertha could stretch him out there. The children drifted off. You could hear the pleasant treble of them all through the somnolent afternoon. Thin, high incessant talk of children. Meyerbogen was downstairs baking. Once he called up for one of the large tin trays from the shop. Bertha carried it down. It was clean and full of the sweet hot breath down there in the basement, and one of the two helpers kept stoking the roaring ovens. Meyerbogen, leaning back from himself, enormous and flour-dusted and pink in the face. He lunged at the dough with a rolling pin; flattened it to a mat, flopped over the mat, lunged. The smell was strong. Full of life. Firm sweet bread. It was the realest smell of all. Almost with dimension. Bread.

"It's no blace down here in this heat for you. Go right back. You had a touch from the zun."

It was hard to know where to begin. The four tiny bedrooms up under the hot eaves were wrathy-looking with confusion. The tossed children's beds. What had once been neat enough carpets had rents in them where children's feet had skated. More of the once dainty curtains had sagged on their rods. The room where the boys slept was filled with the bulk of an elaborately contrived aeroplane. You had to climb around it to get at the window to open it. There was not enough fresh bed-linen but finally Bertha found a chest of it tucked away in a small slanting garret over the back porch.

A neat, old-world trunk full of coarse, carefully laundered linens, some with cotton crochet. Homely, strong things that the wife of Meyerbogen must have hemmed, crocheted, laundered, and packed away. They made all the tumbled-looking beds in that house seem suddenly cool, as if the mother of the Meyerbogens had laid a placid hand suddenly on the hot tossed brow of her household.

And Meyerbogen's room, with the great solemn walnut bed and the wardrobe that just grazed the ceiling. The wife of Meyerbogen had given life four times on that ugly brown bed. She must have been a strong woman. An odor still hung over the room. The green and milky sweetness of cows' breath when they lick their calves. Something had happened to the mirror over the dresser. It had come unscrewed and stood with its face to a corner. There was a chair rigged up beside the bed with a bit of looking-glass as jagged as lightning propped up against it and a razor and a shaving mug stiff with old suds beside it.

Great baby of a Meyerbogen. It must have made him red to bursting to stoop to shave. Bertha found out the trouble with the mirror against the wall. Its screws were threadbare. It was not easy to stand on a chair and unhinge the top ruffle of mill-work that made the wardrobe just graze the ceiling, and take out its screws and lean it against the wall and drag back the mirror for mounting on the dresser. It was a man's job, and a great pox of sweat broke out as she hoisted and screwed. It was astonishing, though, how it seemed to quiet the room of its state of confusion. That adjusted mirror and the made bed. There was little hope to do more in that afternoon than to untie the strings of swiss curtains from someone's attempt to get them up out of the way, and pin up one of the neat "splashers" that came out of the trunk behind the washstand. It was especially designed for there. An oblong of white crash with a little girl and a little boy embroidered in red and underneath in scrolled red script, "Good Morning."

It made the room begin to shine.

At long intervals the screen door to the shop slammed and the bell tittered. You could hear Meyerbogen lumbering up the cellar stairs. The house shuddered. Or sometimes one of the children ran around from the side yard across the wooden porch, slamming the kitchen screen sharply.

By late afternoon the beds were at least fresh and made and the dishes washed and a clean red cloth laid out on the table. Four hours of hoisting, scrubbing, straightening, that had scarcely made their dent. The red hen still clucked among the stove cinders and would not remain shooed out. And Jimmie. Constantly in and out through the hole in the screening he was lurid again with dirt. The crusty dirt of damp little hands and clay and unsavory objects about the yard.

"Chimmie, you bane all dirty!"

"Chimmie bane all dirty." Clank. Clank.

There was something about that little way of repeating your phrases. You held him very closely. The brace made him so heavy.

Meyerbogen was generous.

"Here is three dollars! You done a big day's work in a few hours."

"Oh, no----."

"Oh yes. Could you, blease, come to-morrow all day?"

"I got morning work promised at Coronation Point."

"To-morrow afternoon, then. Part time like to-day?"

"Yah----."

"Dot's good. You can stay for zupper now, if you want."

"Oh no--no----."

The shy inexplicability of that. She wanted to stay for supper. She wanted to putter over the stove with Essie. There was a great dish-pan of greens with the dirt from the garden still brown against their roots on the sink, and a ham end. Chimmie's low little body down there about her knees. The boys tussling out in the dust. It was pleasant there in that room with the new red tablecloth. The late sun slanted in through the screen and one step down led right out into the weed-ridden kitchen garden with the thin leafage of the peas stuck on sticks against the pinkening sky.

"You live in the city, not?"

"Yah."

"It's a long way."

"Yah."

"I bay carfare."

"Yah."

"You won't dissaboint--to-morrow?"

"No."