Chapter II: Part 2

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

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

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

Rollo must know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What the hell----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Rollo must know. Rollo must know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rollo must not know.

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

***

Upstairs it was still cold, and when she stooped to drag out her outlandish carpetbag from under the bed, her breath was illuminated. There was not much to pack. A suit of the man-size underwear to be folded over bulkily. A pair of black buttoned shoes with scalloped tops. The green chiffon coat and the oddments of crystal stars. Balbriggan stockings.

Some sheet music that had come down to the kitchen from time to time included with the colored supplement of the Sunday paper. It was pleasant to ride with the eye along the ups and downs of the frozen rhythm. Her piece of Bulgarian embroidery. The concertina. A large greenish glass marble she had found once in a rubbish heap, a beautiful spiral of candy stripe down its center. Quite a wad of saved wages sewed into the pocket of a red flannel petticoat. Her bit of tremor, _The Cathedral Under the Sea_.

Poor Bertha, her face could look out so cleanly and whitely and as uncluttered as a nun's from the little three-cornered shawl she wore sometimes against neuralgia when she sat out on the bit of back porch. But in her slab of hat, with its trumped-up rose on a wire stem, it became broader than long in a comedy squat.

Then her cloak. A discarded black Inverness cape of Mr. Farley's, that she had bought back from the dealer who came semiannually, as he was going out the kitchen way. A black broadcloth that boxed her in squarely, the shoulders horizontal and two inches wider than her own.

There was a look of steerage about Bertha, who had never tasted the sea except from Front Street. A bit of Old World flotsam flung into New World jetsam and drifting along into fantastic amalgam.

On the other hand, Helga, who had actually come over in a ship little larger than a trawl, bareheaded, shawled, and with a bundle of strange foods wrapped in a Swedish newspaper, now wore high heels, half-silk stockings, and a small hat so American that it completely obliterated one eye.

There were no old sounds coming through to trouble Helga and hurt of their imprisonment. Her heart was not a harp for them. Indeed, it was good not to be a hunk.

Helga had learned to bunny-hug in the Hippodrome Dance Hall down on Second Avenue, Ladies Free. Brilliantly lit egress from the long hours and the bearing down kidney pains. Pomaded men whose hands sweated through her shirtwaist danced there. She had gone to an hotel with one of them, sneaking in and up the Farley back stairs at five one morning with her shoes in her hand. He was a masseur in a Broadway hotel. A Swedish girl she knew had forced one to marry her that way. Frightening him with lies about a baby. Helga would go with her masseur again. Maybe if she were lucky she would "get caught." If not--if not, if one was clever like some, one could frighten a man into marriage. Helga was tired; bone tired and wanted a home. Oh yes, Helga had assimilated.

Her door was open as Bertha went out with her bag. Her bed unmade, the sheets still in the writhe of her tangled sleep. The halls were lighter now, the newspaper still leaning against Rollo's closed door. Mrs. Farley by means of a pink enamel bell that hung over her bed was ringing for her morning cup of hot water. Helga would pour it and carry it up on a silver tray. Now was Bertha's time while Helga was pouring.

It was rather strange going out through the front door and facing the Park from the eminence of the stoop. She was accustomed to emerge from the side entrance on a level with the sod.

It was six years and a half since she had changed places. Old dreads came flowing back. The Hungarian with short thick stumps for fingers who made her sign papers. Questions to be answered. Talk. New ways for old. You sat like a piece of cattle in a little fenced-off pen in the Intelligence Office. Waiting. Sometimes while you were being inspected, very closely, needles came out all over you and stung. Once a man had said laughingly to his wife, "Look at her teeth, too." That same woman had taken her directly from the Intelligence Office to her home. A handsome woman in a Persian lamb coat and lorgnettes, and the apartment on Broadway and Fifty-third Street was fine and new with a drawing-room hung in mulberry and light green. Apple orchards in June. But the servant's room was in the basement and half the floor covered with water that had backed from a drain. A kitten lay drowned in it. At midnight, without having undressed, Bertha took silent departure, traveling by elevated train down to the Front Street rooming house where her foster mother and a Danish sailor sat in a back room stewing in gin.

Old dreads. The lugging of the carpetbag into strange rear entrances. Strange pots and pans and palates. A family of rich Greeks on Madison Avenue had been kind, but the seasoning and the swim of olive oil sickened her. New waitresses to be encountered. They were a sniggering lot, often with filthy habits, such as drying the tumblers on the hand-towel, or sneaking up a bit of French pastry from the pantry to let it mould and draw vermin on a clothes closet shelf. One of them had once stolen Bertha's purse with her month's wages in it.

The thumbed-up old references to be dug up. And again drearily: "Every other Thursday out, you understand? Things fumigated. Grown daughter--no men in kitchen."

It was as if she had stepped out of the house into a swarm of these stinging recollections.

The postman was coming up the stoop as she went down, and she had almost to run and turn quickly to the east against Helga's imminent answering to his ring.

It was dirty with old snow on Third avenue, but there was the smell of melt in the air, and underneath the elevated structure the street ran with mud the color and consistency of a chocolate sauce.

The city, shuddering in its perpetual nervous chill of trucks over cobblestones, and elevated railroads, could always befuddle her. To-day it spun around her like a plate on a juggler's stick. Blurs of it.

Knut's Intelligence Office was on Second Avenue and First Street. She turned toward it. But no--not now--dizzy--where--what now?

It was suddenly easier to walk four blocks and board a bobtailed southbound car. A little sign swung over the motorman. Front Street.

***

Annie Wennerberg. For twenty-eight years she had lived near bilge water in a street that wound back from the harbor as crookedly as a sailor's stagger. She neither knew the sea nor loved it, but its stench, with the salt tang strangely out of it, was in the hallways of her lodging house and she tasted it in the beard of stokers who kissed her when they were drunk enough. Drunk enough, because this side of bestiality even stokers were fastidious of her soot-filled pores and furious pockings. Tripe. There was that kind of sponginess to the cheek of Annie Wennerberg.

But to men glutted with sea and half daft with the stare of sky, there was land cheer in Annie's basement dining room, with the red bows wrapped around the throats of the two china vases on a shelf and where one could stew in gin slowly and warmly. Sailors could find letters waiting for them there, too, on the hall rack. Sometimes they were months, even years old, grimy with waiting and fantastic with foreign stamps.

On those brief and intermittent occasions when she was out of work, Bertha slept on a carpet-covered sofa in the basement kitchen. Curious rather sinister nights of great clod-boots walking none too evenly through the black uncarpeted halls. Sailor badinage in the dining room..

One night, a ship's dishwasher off a big twin-screw trans-atlantic, sleeping with five sailors in a second-story room set up such a howling of delirium tremens that an ambulance, clanging into the lane of Front Street, had borne him off finally, biting and wrestling with two internes, a policeman, and Bertha.

Front Street, rancid with sea sculch. Sailors with red threads in their eyeballs two hours after they had come ashore. The women in dreadful finery who preyed upon them. Men of all yellows. Malay. East Indian. Chinese. Javanese. Cooks. Stokers. Mates. Stowaways.

It was fantastic down on Front Street, but not to Bertha who had grown up in it. Annie, who breathed great gin-smelling bubbles when she slept. Public schools where the cross-breeding of white skin and slant eyes was frequent, and little boys and little girls knew horrible lurking things. At eight, Bertha had worn a hat pin under her waist against the bestiality of lodgers.

So when Bertha turned her face once more toward Front Street, she knew why. Annie charged her fifteen cents the night on the carpet-covered sofa. And no talk. Annie never cared enough to ask questions. Besides, year by year now her hearing was failing and she was usually pretty sleepy. Gin-soaked.

When Bertha arrived with her carpetbag, Annie was in the sort of combination kitchen and keg-room, sucking up coffee out of a tin cup, a bottle by.

"I bane outtava yob," said Bertha and showed her carpetbag under the sofa.

"Fired?" asked Annie, who had not heard her.

"Quit."

"There's coffee," said Annie, who charged her five cents a cup and rose out of the huddle of herself, to remove a lot of dirty-looking rags from the sofa. A small exotic breed of South American monkey leaped out of them and skittered across the floor, making a noise like a boy running a stick along a picket fence.

An old Australian stoker off a fruit steamer who owned Annie, owned him, too. In the act of picking off the rags and cleaning the sofa of some of its debris, Annie suddenly began to limp, her hand back in a plaster over the small of her back.

"There's ten cots to be made up this morning, Berthy. Three freighters came in last night and they're sleeping all over themselves upstairs. I'm breaking in two of the twinges, Berthy, and ten cots to be made ... and the hallways, with me crippled up my back, rotting of dirt."

Sly old Annie. There were chores to be had out of Bertha, gratis, and she knew it. The last time between jobs, she had scrubbed three flights of stairs, the roaches scurrying over her hands. Bertha did not mind. It was easier than to sit and look at the furtive silence of Annie's house. She did not drink and the men knew she would jab them with hatpins.

"Hunky Dory," they called her, and "Milksop" and "Wench," and occasionally when an uninitiated one sprang out on her from a dark corner and with wet lips, she stabbed in deep and ruthlessly.

So usually in these intervals, she would work for Annie. Dirty chores, with her skirts pinned back, her feet bare, and her great white arms plunged to the elbow in dirty waters.

But not this time. "No, I bane going out," she said, stooping to unclutch the hand of the little monkey from the hem of her skirt and tossing him a small potato from a mound of them in the sink, "I got to go."

Annie began to sop bread in her coffee, chewing it along her empty gums. In her bloaty, befogged way she hated Bertha. Always had. She had cuffed her constantly as a child and the burr of an old couplet still clung:

Born of a dead mother
Secrets of the grave you'll utter.

Great silent clod of a Bertha, it was as if she were spreading her skirts not to reveal the bones of eternities of dead men's thoughts--lying bleaching on the fields of her silence.

"Slut," said Annie without glancing up from her cup. Annie's toad-like words, sometimes they jumped out in her sleep.

Strange that they had never more than jounced off Bertha, although all of her formative days had been lived in a hailstorm of them. Her body was like a white fog, surrounding the imperviousness of her. That, too, was why she could scrape drain holes to a sense of goldy rhythm. That was why she could go out now, with a word like "slut" hurled impenetrably at her back.

The sun was shining outside, and the air from the hay and feed store next door, full of warm fertilizing smells.

She stood irresolute at the door watching the little dribbly life of the street. A suit of men's jumpers dangling on a pole before the Sailors' Supply Store flopped like a man on a gibbet. A marine came out of a lean house and turned recklessly left. A few moments later one of the women of dreadful finery came out of the same house and turned cautiously right. A pair of handsome dray horses were led from a stable down a wooden incline to the street and stood there being harnessed. There were hoots from tugs and long-drawn whistles that seemed to leave a trail of smoke across the morning.

After a while Bertha began to walk. Without destination. At Battery Park where the city bows to the sea, she sat down on a bench. How it beat, that ocean, even in the trapped harbor, over its treasures. Bertha beating, too, over hers.

The day wore on. There were children shrilling up and down the curves of granatoid walks and clumps of shawled women and bearded men all very much concerned and fiery with foreign languages. A pier house kept disgorging little emigrant tribes from Ellis Island, their skins sun and wind beaten, and lugging, most of them, carpetbags. Like Bertha's. The tired yield of tired countries.

At five o'clock it grew chilly and because her legs were growing numb Bertha began to walk again, stopping at a caravan on wheels with a short ladder leading up to it, to eat two sausage sandwiches, washing them down with the East Side's favorite soft drink of celery tonic. The streets were lighted by then and she began to walk again, on and on. Poor streets made kindly by the glow from petty shops.

Bertha, who expected nothing, had lost nothing, and yet, in the impotence of her dumb, hurting misery, she could have battered down closed doors for relief, jabbed at her arms and body with jagged stones, bitten down into her tongue, which she did and it bled.

It helped somehow to hurry along gaunt and boxed into her cape. To hurry and to hurry--alone, in her silence spangled with tears.

It was long past midnight when she finally rounded again into Front Street. There were drunks about, but no one molested her. On the contrary, they reeled rather away. Her face, fatty white, like jade, was so square, so riveted in its pain.

The hall was dead dark, a fitting lurchway for inflamed seamen. There was a seam of light beneath the dining-room door and a silence all corduroyed with snores. Annie and a Lithuanian sailor were asleep in their chairs, two bottles between them, her head and tongue lolling and he sleeping down into his beard. Sots. It was like looking in on a nightmare. Annie with her empty gums and breathing her bubbles.

It was dark in the kitchen, but without even benefit of the gas jet which was hard to reach, or the candle in a bottle on the sink, Bertha dragged the table across the door, barricading it and then piled it with an additional chair. The monkey leaped off the couch chittering, as fully dressed she lay down on it, spreading the Inverness cape for coverlet. He was a nervous little thing and sat huddling in a corner looking through the darkness at her with lit eyes. Amber tunnels.

"Yockie," she whispered, glad for those two phosphorescent disks in her darkness, "Yockie, yump up here." Finally he did, curling up in the crook of her elbow for warmth.

She lay with him that way all night, until her arms went numb and her fingers began to lose their sense of separateness.

But Jocko had ceased trembling and was asleep and to move would have been to awaken him.

***

Weeks of sitting six hours a day, in the railed pens of this and that employment agency, the wad of savings in her petticoat-pocket flattening. Long hours of women hesitating sometimes very long over her and then passing on.

One rather elderly matron in sealskin could not seem to get by her.

"You appear such a strong, clean European sort of girl. I'm sure you'll do very nicely. No. No. I can't seem to quite decide. I--well I don't know. I'll think it over."

A woman from Lexington Avenue dickered between Bertha and a Lettish girl at great length, finally deciding in favor of the latter.

A housekeeper engaging a new staff of servants for a Fifth Avenue menage hired her in one breath and changed her mind in the next.

Behind the fatted mask of her imperturbability, a fear smote Bertha. The sisterhood's long nose of intuition was beginning to quiver at the flanges.

Then one night down in Front Street, Annie, brewing herself a stew of lamb neck and regarding Bertha, began to squint up slyly, a word that was horrible hopping off her lips. Then Bertha knew for certain. After all, it was to be expected. March had already turned the corner. The eyes of the appraising women, focusing slightly, were beginning to suspect. And now Annie, soaked old hex, but wise in this from being a woman, dropping that hop-toad word.

"You bane one yourself," said Bertha back at her this time, trembling in her boxed cape, turning and walking out of the house. Walking and wanting again in her unassailed strength the relief of hurling down doors and hacking at herself with stones for the relief of pain. Rollo, help. Lord, drenched in Light, help.

Then again hours and hours of sitting in Battery Park watching the harbor waves, like lips, running out to the horizon to tell sky. Sky. The statue of Liberty pointing to it. Steamers hooting to it. Street cars crawling under it. Grass pointing toward it. A swimming sense of infinitude that drowned her finally into a state of quiet, and her pain went out like a match.

One day in a Delancy Street employment agency she obtained a job. Charwoman. Night work in one of those lower Broadway office buildings that house by day a vertical city of four thousand honeycombed, bumbling souls.

The woman with the drooping busts and machine stitched wig who conducted the intelligence office, had been sly about it.

"Say, for who sees you at night, you don't got to worry. In such a deserted office building like the Equitable, such a strong, healthy-looking girl like you should keep such a job until the last day."

Silent, tiled corridors, lavatories, elevators, and fire-proof stairs to be swabbed. Nights fitful with these mopping char-women weaving their long strokes through the long, long corridors. A battalion of witches of Endor. Women with old pools of eyes that were gathering scum. Crooked backs. Empty gums.

At nine o'clock they met with pails and mops, an army of the silent dead flitting through corridors and gathering up the footsteps that men leave after them. Ghouls preying upon the death of a day. At dawn they faded out again. Grayly. Gray into gray.

To Bertha, mopping, mopping through these corridors of the night, it was as if her scrub water, as it blackened, became alive with vibrations. Nervous floors still beating with men's anxious hastenings hither and thither. Whither? Squnching her mop in the bucket, the water crowded up thirstily around her wrists, like a mouth.

And then it was pleasant walking home before the city got its stranglehold on the day. There was a graveyard in lovely and impregnable tranquillity around Trinity Church, its silence louder than the typhoon of men that raged about it all day. Sometimes Bertha sat down against a headstone. Between two deaths. The little death before life that she was carrying. The tired death after life beneath the slabs.

Presently the death that Bertha had under her heart would be born into life. The little life of a little death. And under the slabs the death of a life. Life of death. Death of life. A cycle of perceptions twirling slowly in her consciousness. Not thoughts, just a slow kind of dizziness.

She dozed a great deal. Against the headstones. In parks. On the carpet-sofa in Annie's kitchen. Waiting. It was good to be working nights and rid of the fear of the sailor-infested darkness of Front Street. Days, with Annie bickering about, no matter how gin-soaked, there was more security to lying stretched out on the carpet sofa under the Inverness cape, Jocko trembling to her for warmth.

One night, swabbing up a tenth floor corridor of the Equitable Building, a pain smote at Bertha that caused her to cry out and clutch at herself, as if someone were trying to shove her off the top of a skyscraper. A leap of forked lightning that went through her like a jagged grin of steel....

Twenty minutes later in the ambulance on her way to city hospital, her baby was born. Painlessly. So without labor that the internes joked and told about it at experience clinics.

A son. The music of the chimes goldily tranced in his eyes. Tranced there, like the candy strip down the glass marble in her carpetbag.

***

When Bertha's boy was two and one half weeks old she signed him away, sprawlingly, as she would write, "prepared flour" and trying, with her left fingers about right wrist, to keep her hand to the dotted line.

A lawyer with a brief case on the desk beside her sucked up with a blotter the symbol of her deed. Ellen Dike Bixby. John Kendall Bixby, Detroit, Michigan, added their respective signatures. A nurse from Bertha's ward stood by and signed as witness. The champ of a seal. More blotting.

"There," said the lawyer passing around the folded documents and beginning to buckle up his brief case. "That's that."

He was like a clamp on a coffin lid and Bertha wanted to cry out against him, but she only stood very still holding her document.

"Well, my girl, what you have done is very sensible. You are not in a position to provide properly for the boy and you are placing him in the hands of two very splendid and trustworthy people, who by legal adoption have just now become his parents. You are a very fortunate girl. Mr. and Mrs. Bixby can give him the refinements and the opportunities of a beautiful home and the best of educational advantages. So my girl, instead of feeling unhappy, you should regard yourself as the object of congratulations."

Her throat hurt from holding down moans. There were little red glass mulberries on Mrs. Bixby's hat. Such a pretty hat and her face was plumpish and fresh, and her hand constantly in sympathy on Bertha's.

"We will be father and mother to him, dear. He will never know the difference. You see this--to-day is the fifth anniversary of our--of our little one being taken from us. That's why your little one--ours--his beauty is so like--like--our--little boy's--was--"

"Go. Go," cried the moans in Bertha's throat, caught there like a log jam, "Go. Go."

Mr. Bixby had short clipped hair and carried a well-brushed derby hat and wore a tiny Masonic emblem on his lapel.

"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.