Chapter VI: Part 6

"I give him one--to-day."

"What?"

His eyes looked sly and almost at once that frightened her.

"What--Willy----?"

They disappeared as if dough had crowded up around two raisins.

"Willy--one what?"

"One of my chocolates!"

She rose up sudden and threatening as an apparition, her two arms towering as if they would crash down upon him, and he cowed in his chair with his mouth fallen open.

"You gave him from those----"

"Yeh----"

"He ate----"

"Naw--we put it in the fire. It melted up. Get away. You!"

She came down from the great towering gesture of her wrath, which he interpreted not at all, and her fingers unclenched and the blood went back into her face. She shook him then, by the scroff of his coat until his head bobbed loosely.

"Don't you ever--don't you ever again--give him those ten cent cones."

"Stingy-gut, Slk-k-k-k-k--I only gave one----"

"Never. You hear, Willy. It bane bad for the boy. You--you'll get fired. Make him sick. I'll bring you chocolates for him. Not your kind. Chocolates for him----"

"Yeh, we're fire horses."

Chocolates for him! She could not sleep that night. Her feet kept plunging off the end of the seat and sometimes she sat up in the leather-smelling darkness because she breathed too fast and felt crowded.

She bought a dollar box the next day. A red paper affair with a dog and a boy on the cover. Stale bonbons that had lain in the incandescent glare of a Third Avenue window for weeks.

The boy never received them. Bertha did not know, but he had been in Asheville, North Carolina, for three weeks with his foster parents. Willy ate the chocolates beside the glow of his furnace, popping them whole into his mouth.

***

Willy had slacked. Shamefully. He no longer paid the rent for the room, eight dollars a month. Bertha did. The first time she did it because he wanted a tool chest for seven dollars and eighty-five cents in a First Avenue show window. After that he never paid anything. Bertha didn't demur. It was too precious, coming home in the evening to Willy who that very day might have been galloping like a fire horse for the boy.

Tools. They grew in a pile. His complete earnings, forty dollars a month, went into them. He liked to sit and polish them. Test the ductility of saws, run his plane around the floor for the curl of the shavings. There were boxes of nails in assorted sizes. Screws. Gimlets of every graduated variety. He could bore with them for an entire evening into a bit of plank or the flank of the old delivery wagon top. Bore and bore with a little mousy sound. He liked that best. Slk-k-k-k-k! He never made anything. Only bored and sawed and piddled.

Sometimes Bertha sewed. Made the muslin portières. Patched his denim house-jacket.

Usually she was so tired evenings that to the sound of the mousy borings she fell asleep behind her portières. Day-work was draining. It was like undergoing the dreadful preliminaries of a new job each morning.

"You can put your shoes there under the sink and there's a chair down in the basement where you can hang your hat and coat. You don't go stocking-footed, do you? Gracious, that agency is getting the limit for day-help. Here's a pail and a mop. You can scrub this whole courtyard in a morning, if you're spry. My former girl did it before she got consumption. If that drain there backs water on you, ram your arm down."

Day after day of it. Day-jobs where the residuum of dirty work was apt to lie waiting and accumulated. Wet, sloppy, puddled days. Cold, gaunt houses about to be occupied. Public buildings with rooms full of the stench of neglect. Once, at a fishmonger's, scales clung to her arms. Shining fish scales that hung to the flesh like burrs and would not wash off. She scrubbed at the faucet, and suddenly panic of them, the wet, slimy things, seized her and she screamed. The fishmonger, enormous and stained and with a mallet for pounding down codfish steaks in his hand, came and plucked off a few of them for her and laughed, and then, because her arm was white and firm, kissed her with wet, fish-smelling lips. She struck him with his own mallet by jerking back his arm until he hit himself in the head, and in his rage he struck back and she went home discharged and with a blue welt coming out above her cheek bone.

Cold dirty days. Then hot days, equally dirty.

That way the months swung around and, through the poor silly eyes of Willy, she beheld the boy grow older.

And as the eyes of Willy became sillier, and the face around them more and more horridly doughy, Bertha, who hated him, was glad. As he receded more and more into childishness, he played with the mind and the heart of an innocent. Sometimes, on spring evenings, after his supper, he joined the street boys at baseball or swapped some of his shiny screws for chinies. Bertha, sitting up behind the window curtain, would watch him. Carefully. He was kind to children.

He had come to hate her in a sly and secret kind of way. He was cunning enough to know she paid the rent and bought the meat for stews and that, by grace of her, the stack of his shining tools grew high, but there festered in him, day by day, the desire to torture her.

The same impulse, doubtless, that led him to delight in tearing off the wings of flies. Or perhaps dimly she was to him the badge of his impotence, and so he smouldered against her and hated. He had never been a man, and yet the pangs of impotence made him more horrible than he might have been with desire.

He liked to grimace at her with every torturous twist of feature he could connive. To awaken her by hanging over her couch with his face all drooly and loose of feature like an idiot's, and his hands drooping loosely from the wrists so that they swept her face.

The horror of this made her wild. She would tremble for an entire day from the start of waking up to this loose, drooling face of Willy's. He was devilish at these little abuses. One day he brought the window sharply on her hands as she leaned over the sill, so that it made her finger nails blue. He never failed to scratch down deeply into her palms if he had occasion to take anything from her, and one evening he wanted to hand her the red hot poker and when she saw the ruse and held the hand behind her, he brought it down on her shoulder so that it singed her waist and the flesh.

But he was kind to children.

There was only about one way to deal with him. To slap him. Usually, with his ears boxed, he could be trusted to trot over to his tools and begin to plane or bore. Sometimes the cartwright's child next door would come to play. Together they would set up the racket of carpentry. Particularly with the plane, improvising mustachios and fierce whiskers out of the shavings. Sometimes he carried a handful of the shavings to the boy.

The mystery of the will to live. Not a morning but what Bertha knew the terrible reluctance of awakening to reality. She came up out of sleep with a struggle, fighting off another day; turning her back to it and lying there sick with its imminence as the muslin portières began to lighten. To come out of sleep so enamored of it that to feel the lids lift back from the eyes was torture. To die a little every night and yet fear the beauty of death more than the starkness of life. Sometimes when Bertha came up out of sleep, fighting and sobbing against the awakening and the grimacing face of Willy hung over her terrible with reality, the impulse to throttle herself back to sleep seemed too strong to withstand. And yet that wink of dawn against the muslin. The tiny vibratory messages of life that were waiting to run across the floor when her bare feet would swing down to it. Ah, that will to live.

The little runs of life at her from all directions. The cartwright in his shop next door was already striking sparks off an iron bar. She could hear the deep-throated sledge hammer. The mystery of the will to live. The mystery of the cartwright's arm, that could make the iron boom. And so morning after morning she rose, and wrapped the gunny sack she wore for an apron into its wad of newspaper, and trotted off to the agency that seldom failed to have a day's assignment awaiting her.

Days of rub-a-dub-dub. As if the floor of the universe were an enormous penny to be scoured and polished, and the emblem on the coin was the face of the boy.

***

Almost three weeks of the November of that year were so sleet riddled that the city seemed merely glimpsed through bead portières. Horses danced on their haunches and smote sparks. Shrubbery was embalmed under ice, and urban trees stood like fountains whose ornamental waters had frozen as they curved.

That year the Inverness cape fell literally to pieces like "the one hoss shay." An uncompromising death. The weave simply would not hold the thread and the patches fell off in scales. She bought a reefer at the Sailors' Supply Store. It buttoned about her warmly enough, but it reached only to her hips and the cold got through to her legs and, worse than that, the sleeves were too short and too tight and the armholes cut her. There were always red rims on her flesh where she had strained through the harsh prison of this reefer, and at the very first wearing a seam at the shoulder opened in a grin.

Chita's reefer had been like this one, only smaller. It was hard to disassociate reefers from Chita. Sometimes, buttoning it up, it was almost as if Chita's eyes popped through the buttonholes with a wink. A row of Chita's hard, bright, suffering little eyes down the front of her jacket.

Ah me--Chita----.

***

Lashing its tail, November plunged on. It was pitch dark at six in the morning and sometimes after their breakfast of tripe-stew and strong coffee she had literally to take Willy by the wrist and lead him to his corner. He cried when it was cold, like a child, and would run along the sidewalks wringing his hands as if they would fall off, and crying and whimpering with the pain.

Bertha hated him for this. Once he came home with a red welt across his neck where the boy had stropped him soundly as he came in crying one day with the cold.

Bertha knew why, exultantly. He hated what she hated. Sniveling, mewling Willy.

The agency opened at seven. First come, first served. For almost a week the water froze everywhere in the pipes and there was no work. One of these days she was put at swabbing out the lobbies and lavatories of a theater, where the water was hot and plentiful and plunged out from the faucets in great clouds of steam.

She had never been in a theater. This one was on Broadway near Twenty-seventh Street, and its lobby was already bombastic with the sunrise of the cinema. Promises in lithograph. Empyrean ecstasies in three colors, of girl-cheek to boy-cheek. That swoop of the senses to a woman's figure with her dilated eyes upside down, as she hurtled head first off a trestle. A circus for the emotions here, the human heart their trapeze.

All the forenoon she swabbed the tiled floors, worming with her rag in between the feet of the little groups that stood before these posters of escape. Snow-caked shoes. The feet of the city. Gay feet, old feet, young feet, tired feet. The square little feet of children and the bulbous feet that had grown lopsided with the journey. Skulking feet with soft soles and eager feet with kicked toes. Little girls' feet with tassels and the feet of a crone wrapped in gunny sacks. Derelict boats. In, out, among those feet all forenoon. The feet of the seekers after surcease from reality.

After noon an attendant with a festoon of gold braid across his breast, threw open one of the baize green doors. The feet began to turn into the theater. Eager pushing feet with little runs to them.

After a while Bertha was sent inside, too. There were lavatories to be swabbed.

It was dark there and flesh smelling and slanting. To Bertha, as if she were walking down an incline into the drown of phantom plush. She floundered and her pail made a ringing noise and that brought her up suddenly, behind the curtain of a box....

Square gem of light mounted on facets of darkness. A green field flowing gently toward her, and a child with a handful of flowers plucked up out of that field turning to smile at her with lips that the darkness sped up against hers, pucker and all. Silence that began to throb like the felon that sometimes attacked her third finger. It was the organ rumbling up into a prelude. A chord came through like a wave breaking. She slid in. The music of the chimes goldily--

Then the lettering. It was difficult to follow, because she picked out the words so slowly, mouthing their bathos aloud. Glitter of jeweled sands that sped across and ran away.

TRAVELOGUE

"Within Easy View Of Vesuvius, Sorrento Lies
Dreaming In The Sun. Note Donkeys In Distance."

Quiver of hills....

"In Capri The Italian Takes His Best Girl Out
Riding In A Sail Boat. Better Than The Subway,
Isn't It?"

To ride in a slim sailboat....

"Sunset in Venice."
"Lake Como's Twilights Are Deep Purple."

***

There on the outside of herself, a twilight the color of her silence. Grays--with the purple bleeding in. She cried out at its passing----

"Shh-h-h-h----

Mountains next. And after them a magnified view of a rosebud opening. An intrusion almost, to behold this slim thing bowing with life. Once petals like that had kissed the very sides of her being. She began to cry....

Next, a love story. A shoddy sop to reality. A man and a maid worrying at their emotions like terriers. Scurrying little field mouse motions that live on chaff.

And yet to Bertha and the rows and rows like her sitting there in the darkness, it was as if they had been kissed on a bunched-up mouth by love in a brown velveteen smoking jacket and prettified eyes. Stinging vicarious sweetness....

Lights. The pale froufrou of shifting audience. Of course--lavatory floors to be swabbed. The water scurried in little pools before her brush.

All the way home, while the sleet flew at and bit her, she kept smiling. "Lake Como's Twilights Are Deep Purple." Herself on the outside of herself.

At one corner, a taxicab skidded within an inch of pinning her to the curb. Oaths. A blur of faces, fatty looking with curiosity. A policeman brushing the water and ice off the flank of her reefer. The taxicab driver had a zigzag of cut on his face from flying glass. Red through the glassy fog and he sopped it against his bare hand, great fellow, and was sick.

She stalked on, big, boxed and smiling, the bulk of her displacing the dance of the storm.

"Lake Como's Twilights Are Deep Purple." To think of that! The deep winey purple of her forests.

***

Banners. Banners. Banners. Streamers of them from roofs and poles. Little licking tongues of flame curling out. The ripple and snap of them was a pleasant dazzle. Even the cartwright had a two-penny flag in his window and a photograph of Roosevelt pasted flat against the pane.

That was the occasion. The return of Roosevelt from African adventure. The city fluttered, knife edges of stone softened into waves by the dance of pennants; the street a fluted alley of them.

Willy, vociferous as ever over his tripe stew, was wild to be off.

"The parade will pass the house. Me and the boy--you watch--we'll be in the window!"

"Willy--he'll be in the window?"

"Sure. We got broncho caps. I made them. Slk-k-k-k--Roosevelt--he shoots lions. We'll be watching for him in broncho caps."

He was sly, he was excited, and he jumped up and down again, until he choked on his coffee and was horrid and she left him there.

It was delicate June in the streets. Pink and blue sky and awnings with stripes. The bazaar of the city in spring. Bertha was due for her weekly day's work in a rooming house in West Fortieth Street near Eighth Avenue. Her feet were so loth. Again and again she dragged them toward Eighth Avenue, only to turn back and eastward toward Madison. In two years, with the exception of those days when the water pipes were frozen, she had not failed a day's assignment.

Flags kept snapping. The air was May wine. The city ran of excitement. Quickened steps. Pennants. A great man was coming home. The boy at the window. There would be a boy at the window to greet him.

The window! Her feet kept trying to walk on resolutely. Seventh Avenue. Eighth Avenue. Finally, it was no use. She turned back and began to run a little, with the quickened city. Clumps of people hurrying and dragging children by the hand. Curbs and balconies and wagon-tops began to blacken and one truck filled with chairs rattled by, to shouts and squawking horns.

It was hard not to run. Madison Avenue! The jammed curbs. They were three deep. And the sidewalk was a little groove between walls of buildings and of human flesh. The blazing balconies. The fluttering windows! A window of the house was black. She could not look. She stood on the opposite curb, and with the tail of her eyes she knew that a window of the house was black! But she could not look. For the life of her, the life of her, she could not look.

Blare! A curve of music through the sunlight. Brass. Bright. Screaming. The street a metal strip. A major domo came over the top of the hill. Everything ran toward him. The fluttering. The sway of the crowds. The blowing hair from the heads out of windows. The shouts.

She stood wedged, her elbows pinned to her hips. The window. She could not, could not look, but the tail of her eye kept tattling. There were heads and halves of bodies out of it. Flutterings. One head was very bright. It caught the light in pools, like the silver ball of the major domo. She fainted a little standing up there. Just let go, and the crowd sustained her of its denseness.

The pulse of the living wall that held her--it sang against her--it wakened her--she leaned out--the major domo was stalking past. Roosevelt then, standing up in a motor car and flashing and bowing, with the light on his spectacles and his teeth and his cheek bones. _There_ was a man who felt the little vibratory messages run in and flashed them out again, broadcast! He was like a magnet with them and the nap of the crowd rose up to his passing! Cheers! He stood as he rode, always smiling, and always with the light on his spectacles and his teeth and his cheek bones.

Smiling! Bowing! Bowing to the window! Bowing to the window! Her eyes would not lift, but the tail of her glance kept knowing. The Colonel bowing to the window. The Colonel and that very bright head that caught the light in pools.

The crowd began to loosen. A disintegrating snowbank. It was frightening to feel the support withdraw. The Colonel had passed. It was easier to move. She was going to look. She had found the strength to look. It was hard to breathe and to swing her heavy burning eyes just a little upward--there!

But the heads were withdrawn and someone was jerking down a shade. The window stared over at her blandly. A slap in the face.

***

All the little flutterings had run out of the street. The asphalt flowed in a stiff river up to the peak, over which the major domo had come up shining. The houses, the brown, proper, hateful houses that could look so closed, had bowed back into themselves. She kicked in the impotence of her despair, against the stone trim of one of them, stubbing her shoes and her toes. It was hard for her to cry. The sobs came through her throat slowly and inflamed it. But for blocks she walked weeping them, dryly.

Her boy shining up there in the window. Her boy upon whose face she had not dared to look.

***

Willy was building something. The small mousy noises of his boring seemed suddenly to have destination. Sometimes an hour or two after she had fallen asleep on her wagon seat behind the curtain, Bertha would wake up to the sound of hammering. For the first time Something was taking shape under his tinkerings.

"Willy, what are you making?"

"Slk-k-k-k-k!"

"Huh? Tell me, Willy."

"Slk-k-k-k-k--wouldn't you like to know?"

"What is it, Willy?"

"Puddintame, ask me again and I'll tell you the same."

One evening, however, the object took shape as he puttered at it. A box with hinges and a little padlock and various little compartments inside for irregular shaped objects. That same evening as Bertha rinsed off the dishes and ranged them in their poor array above the faucet, he painted it a bright green and with a surprising ingenuity for him, finished off with a large yellow polka dot on the lid. This dot seemed to punctuate the finality of his achievement. He could not keep his hands off the box there drying beside the stove, touching it every few moments for the assurance of drying paint, going through the ludicrous pantomime of carrying it before him like a page. In the bit of broken mirror above the faucet Bertha watched him. Silly Willy.

Suddenly he came up behind her, making the boring sound between his tongue and cheek that went in through the back of her ear like a gimlet.

"Slk-k-k-k--a tool box! I made it. Slk-k-k-k. It's for him. To-morrow is his birthday. I made it."

Birthday. The birthday of the boy! The clang of an ambulance through the mauve of a dawn. The incredible warm little bulb of a head in the crook of her arm. The music of the chimes tranced goldily there on the outside of her. The birthday of the boy. To-morrow! Why, it must be--yes--the hurrying, hurrying years!

She put on her pancake of a hat with a new and skiddering rose she had fashioned from a bit of ribbon. There were forty-five cents in her small black pad of a purse.

It was spring again. The lovely quality to it of a petal to the cheek. Somewhere through that night as it traveled, buds had dozed into it, cozily. Even the city could not entirely dissipate that smell of garden. Faces on stoops, dim lily pads lifted to the warmth. The thin high clink of water running along gutters. Children with dry noses. The open doors of shops and the musk smells of winter pouring out of them. The delicate mist with the lavender in it smeared with the soft gold of lighted show windows. Show windows! The blocks and blocks of them. They were beginning to blink out as Bertha roved them. Flimsy painted toys, with the glue bleeding out of the jointures and forming scabs. Stale candies in glass jars and powdered with city grime. Sticks of wood. Lumps of glucose. The abominable makeshifts of poverty.

Up and down a score of city blocks, not a toy, for ten times the forty cents in her pad of purse, worthy of the birthday of the boy.

The curve of lavender in the evening; that rill of beauty clinking in the gutters. Something as tender as these for the birthday of the boy! She could have cried, and did on the homeward turn.

Willy was asleep. There was a darkish mound of him on his cot, and a white night flowed in and filled the room with light the pallor of a bridal veil. That dreadful room, and its green box with the yellow polka dot drying by the stove. Willy face downward and clutched into his pillow, with his silly heels up. And yet it could be the color of moon, that dreadful room. Clear and cool and strewn with bridal veil. There was a gift for you! To capture that color of moon into a balloon that might burst with a pop in the heart of the boy.

She sat behind the muslin curtain, her mouth moving for the words that could bring this frail thought out without shattering it into the blunt grunting things she could say.

She began to undress, the white of her body climbing up out of the muslin underthings. Great ox-like pallor. The slow rhythm of her arms rising and falling. The two enormous and clankless chains of her hair. The whisper of sliding into the boxy whiteness of the coarse, clean nightgown. It stood off from her like a little bathhouse, her calm, spatulate feet moving about under it.

The birthday of the boy! She sat on the edge of her carpetbag, wrapped in the gray blanket that presently she would spread along the leather wagon seat and roll herself into. The unbleached muslin portières on their crazy draw string of twine blew in as if they were animate and wanted to nudge her. They towered and were alive in the white darkness and seemed to breathe back at her. The tears in her heart, like the clink of the clear water in the gutter.

The birthday of the boy! Even Willy could bear him gifts. The pad of black purse lay on the carpet bag beside her. Hateful symbol of the shopkeeper's hand crawling down into the glass jars for the glucose lumps! That was the limit of her purchasing power for the birthday of the boy! The glucose lumps or the painted gimcracks.

She slid down finally with her cheek to the carpetbag. It had a give to it that was friendly. Its nap cut softly up into her flesh. The tears rolled down and made a smell of must, as when she scrubbed too near a rug. A familiar smell that she dozed into, and cried into through the doze. It was still the lightish night when she awoke. There was a red triangle on her wet cheek where a sharp edge had cut up through the carpetbag. She awoke to the small pain of it, pressed there by the sharp edge of the concertina in her carpetbag. The outlandish one with the steamship stamp upon it. Old World.

She fell at the straps of her bag. The concertina! It bulged up at her there from a background of the lovely ocean of Mrs. Farley's cast-off evening cloak. Silver ends to it and a silver label engraved in a Russian phrase:

The little grin of white keys. The waffled sides. They were broken at the creases, but there were some little fugitive notes. She knew them. They ran upward as the keys sank down in a little delighted crescendo. La-dee-da-dee! La-dee-da-dee! She made a cave of her body over the pretty bleat. It ran up. It ran down. And then there was a way to skip in the middle that made it seem like a mournful dawn in a valley and another way to skip at the end that made it seem very glad. Four beautiful tender little ways to play it.

She fell to polishing the silver label, breathing on it and rubbing it with an edge of the green chiffon. It was a lovely chore, polishing, dusting down into the tiny crannies with a broom-straw wrapped in a bit of tissue paper, and every once in a while, down, deep, under the cave of her body, greedily away from the ears of Willy--La-dee-da-dee!

A spring day came up over the roofs. She dressed in its early chill, her fingers bungling as she buttoned with too much haste.

She came out from behind her muslin portières bearing her gift shyly.

"It bane for the boy--his birthday," she said, and placed the concertina on the table beside the plate of hominy she had fried and dished up for him. "My gift."

"Say, say, a little old accordion! That's a good 'un--where'd you dig that little old accordion up? Say now--Slk-k-k-k--won't he like that!"

"It bane from me--Willy--he won't know it but--it bane from me----"

"What'll it play? A tune?"

She could not keep her fingers from fluttering over it.

"Don't be rough with it, Willy."

He broke the sinuous fluted case, his head cocked and his eyes in their corners.

"La--dee--da--dee----

"Say--won't he like that! Me and the boy--we'll give a concert down in the furnace room--slk-k-k-k."

He could scarcely wait to strut off, the green box and the concertina crowded under one arm and tipping him lopsided.

He started off, his little pot belly leading and Bertha after him, until at the corner, under the elevated, their ways parted.

"It bane from me, Willy--he won't know it--but it bane from me."

"Slk-k-k-k----"

It was Saturday, Bertha's day for the kindergarten floors of St. Rose's Parochial School on Ninth Avenue.

The water ran in wide pools and her arm went in big swoops after it. There was a rhythm to each stroke.

La-dee-da-dee. La-dee-da-dee.

***

The house in West Fortieth Street near Eighth Avenue was tall and thin, and small grill work balconies, mere pretenses, swelled out slightly from the two first-floor windows.

They were fairly neat windows, with a hideous _jardinière_ containing cotton palms in each. Day by day they stood there revealing, between the tiresome lace curtains, the brown and yellows of the bulbous _jardinières_. The three upper stories were all closely drawn, dark green shades blotting out the look of dwelling and leaving something tall and thin, blind and a little sinister.

Every Wednesday morning when she arrived, Bertha was given a pail and brush and put to washing down the hallways and the four flights of stairs. A curious odor of lysol and scented soap drifted about in the stale silence of these corridors, a nub of gaslight burning at each landing. Sometimes in swabbing the woodwork, a flare of the dirty scrub water ran under the padded stair-carpet. Then the musty stench arose.

There was something mysterious about these halls. Occasional women in kimonos scurried from room to room and laughter and voices sometimes beat against the closed doors. But for the most part they stood black and silent and orderly. Sometimes there were big footsteps ground into the carpets and broken bits of glass, women's elaborate garters, and evidences of unsavory revelry strewn about the stairs, but Bertha's day was invariably long and black and narrow. The four floors of airless hallways to be swept; woodwork to be washed down; banisters to be rubbed with furniture oil, and the four red gas globes with warts blown into them to be unscrewed, rinsed in warm water, and readjusted.

Mrs. McMurtry, who walked without sound, supervised all this. She was very prim and very slight, and her lips had the thin, unkissed look of triumphant asceticism. A man's hand could have spanned the width of her shoulders. She wore keys at her belt, a black alpaca waist with a standing collar without ruche, so that there was a red rim around her neck, and when she paid Bertha her two dollars and ten cents every Wednesday evening, her thin dry fingers high-stepped gingerly away from too close contact with the currency. She was about forty and had let that forty come, grayly.

One Wednesday morning someone in the third-floor-back must have been very ill. There was a sweetish, etheric odor in the house, and Mrs. McMurtry hurried back and forth with ice packs and blankets. A narrow black doctor with a narrow black bag oozed up through the halls. A group of the kimono-clad women gathered at the end of the hall, bleating like frightened quail. One of them had left her door open. The room was papered in light red, the drawn shades were green, and four of the jets on a very ornate center chandelier were burning. An imitation tapestry of nude Leda and her swan hung over the mantel. A man was seated on the side of the wide bed, bending to lace his shoes. Mrs. McMurtry, passing with a bowl of cracked ice, leaned in to close that door hurriedly. Then she shooed away the girls. They scattered like doves off of crumbs. One of them, trailing the edge of her light sateen kimono in the pool of Bertha's scrub water so that it slapped against her bare legs, glanced down with a kick and an oath.

It was Helga.

***

Helga was so thin! And pretty. A delicate, convalescent kind of prettiness, as if she had been ill a long while, and her hands had whitened and her skin softened and her eye sockets were like enormous pans with a jewel in them. This soft-handed Helga whose wrists used to crack open from chapping and bleed until she cried!

"Helga!"

"Fortheluvvaga! So help me--it's the lump! Bertha!"

Pretty, pretty Helga, with her brown hair frizzed and her face full of pink light from the sateen kimono. Bertha on her knees, with her hands dripping the sloppy water, could only sit back on her heels and stare her fill.

"Helga, you remember me?"

"You're the square head from Farley's. You're the quitter walked off one breakfast time and left us cold. If it ain't old Berth!"

She began to cry, for all the world like a convalescent too weak to know quite why.

"It's old Berth--still scrubbing."

"You're so pretty, Helga--that way."

"And you're so white, Berth. Still like a white old tomb, you, sittin' on the world, listening to it."

"You don't work no more, Helga? You're so fine. Helga--Helga--you ain't----"

"Yes--I am! Oh I work all right, I work! Come in my room."

"Mrs. McMurtry won't like that!"

"The hell Mrs. McMurtry won't. I don't owe her nothing. She does all the owing there is around here. I don't owe her nothing. Not even an apology."

Helga's room was papered in light green and there was an atrocity of a great green satin bow, sprawled like a spider, pinned on the lace curtains. The shades were drawn against the relenting spring sunshine and the gas jets sang. A brass bed and a base burner and a carpet with an enormous floral wreath crowded up the room. Between the windows was a full-length repetition of the tapestry of the nude Leda and her Swan.

It was somehow a horrible room, the kind Willy was fond of looking at through the lenses in the Fourteenth Street nickelodeons. You half expected girls in corsets and ruffled panties to be sitting about smoking cigarettes.

"Helga! Helga!"

"Why not? Whose got the right to stop me, I'd like to know? I've slung my last pot for the privilege of keeping the slanting roof of somebody's garret over my head."

"This place----?"

"Yah--yah--what do you think? A convent? Don't look so holy or you'll sprout a halo. Sit down. Oh, I know all your Sunday school gab. You're afraid to touch me. Your scrub water has made you clean and I'm unclean. I know--the line of talk. You're clean with slops and me I--I'm dirty with stinkin' perfume--you don't need to touch me----"

"Why Helga--Helga--come here--kiss--me----"

Suddenly Helga began to cry again, the tears of physical weakness.

"I know what I'm doing. Pretty damn well. Where did I get off? Nobody's ever yet answered me why I had to get up at six, every tooth in my head rattling of cold and my back aching from a lumpy cot, so that four hours later a thin-lipped icicle that never done nothing for this world except get herself born into it right, could step out of her soft bed into a warm bath and then to her hot breakfast that three of us had been three hours bustling around in the cold dark getting ready for her. Not much!"

"How long, Helga, since you quit the Farleys?"

"I couldn't stand the young one! Rollo's wife. There's the one finished me. I stuck it out two years after she came. There was a hell-cat for you. The kind of a house-devil that wakes up with her eyes glued shut and can't straighten herself out into a presentable creature until along about noon when the society stuff starts to begin. I know 'em--the smooth-faced kind with the smooth-parted hair and the pecan-shaped faces. There was a woman could subscribe to a charity ball with one hand and pinch an orphan with another. She led me a merry hell for two years I won't soon forget. And Rollo--that poor piece of white meat! He can thank God he made himself famous writing a book before she copped him. He'll never write another. He's married to one that takes all and gives nothing. She couldn't inspire a man to write an entry in the butcher book."

"Why did you quit, Helga?"

"One month she had the old woman dock me for a little old terra cotta statue I knocked off of Rollo's desk, dusting it. She said Rollo had written his greatest poem in front of that little terra cotta on his desk and that no money could repay it, but she was for learning me a lesson. I learned her one. There was ten coming to dinner that night and me on second-floor duty. Well, that dinner party had to slide out of its fur coats and powder its noses alone that night. I quit!"

"And this?"

"I got to thinking, that's all. All back doors and slop cans for some--front doors and canopies for others--no reason--just happening that way. God couldn't mean it like that. And what if He did? He was God. I'm me! Little! Weak. I get so tired, Bertha. Nobody gets so tired as I do. My floatin' kidney. I love to sleep so. It's a sickness. I can't pull out of it. I ain't strong, Bertha. I couldn't--I--I ain't strong and white and all on the inside of me like you! Lye water hurts my hands! Slops stink. It eats my heart to have to peek through the swinging doors at the good things of life being gobbled by others that ain't earned 'em as much as we have. That's why I'm here. I thought maybe--God--I thought maybe----"

"Maybe--what?"

"Maybe some of the easiness--was coming to me. There--there was a fellow--you remember--while you was at Farley's--Joe Dike, the little plumber that always used to kid you about sitting and listening to the oleander tree grow. Joe liked me. I never made no bones, Bertha. I wanted kids. A two-by-four of my own somewheres and kids. That's all I ever asked out of it. Joe, he strung me along a while after you left and then--he quit. It used to go against his grain not even to be allowed to sit in the kitchen. He had self-respect Joe did. He didn't like courting in alleyways and elevated trains. I--didn't have nowheres except to sneak him--up. That's where I lost my chance, Bertha. Joe liked me while I was straight and used to talk marrying, but when he seen me up there in that dirty hole--living like a rat--he--I--aw--after him--I didn't--care--that's all. I don't care now!"

"I care, Helga."

"You! Lots anybody cares for me. But I fooled 'em. I fooled 'em--I--got a place--now--I--got a place now--to invite 'em in!"

Suddenly Helga, whose prettiness was drawn back from her face as if someone were pulling her by the hair, fell forward in a pink sateen huddle against Bertha.

"And now the worst of it is, I hate them, Bertha. Some day I'll kill one. Their mouths. Their ugly wet mouths. McMurtry sends me the slobbiest ones. She hates me, because she knows I hate her. They begin coming as early as six--mouths all loose and wet that slide around in their faces like something alive crawling over them! I'll kill one some day! Help me, Bertha. Where can I turn to? Where, oh God, where?"

Then Mrs. McMurtry came in. A neat little, black little engine without a puff.

"What's this?"

"I spilt a bottle of medicine and she wiped it up for me."

"Go back to your work, Bertha."

Out in the hallways the twilight was like smoke. It wound and it thickened and it flowed around the little nubs of light. The waiting webby water in Bertha's pail lapped on to her wrists as she plunged them into the pail again. Clung there.

At six o'clock Mrs. McMurtry paid her off. The two one dollar bills again and the ten cent piece.

"Next Wednesday, Bertha."

"Next Wednesday, Mrs. McMurtry."

Going downstairs she crowded up against the wall to let someone pass. He had a wet mouth. Like a live thing crawling across his face.

***

Sometimes in summer, Willie went away with the family to a square house by the sea. Bertha knew it well from the picture post card view of it that he kept tacked up over the table. The edge of the vast smooth lawn was walled into a fortress, against which the sea plunged in a fury of spray. A row of imported poplar trees, straight as young boys, bisected this sleek lawn into an Italian garden on one side and a cleared area of playground for the boy on the other. There was a swing with an awning; a small wooden chute-the-chutes, carefully railed, and by scanning with the eye almost touching the card, tiny croquet hoops and pegs could be discerned against the turf, which undulated along, supple as a caterpillar, until the sea brought it up, sheerly.

There was something terrifying about that rebuffed surf, as It showed up on the post card, bending back with spray. Terrifying thought of the boy bounding down that springy sod with the wind in his face and the thwarted sea full of its licking tongues.

Often at night Bertha awoke trembling with that fear. It helped somehow to have Willie there with him--and yet--just silly Willie--and the leaping, grinding, gnashing sea running up to the feet of the boy.

So the summers could be long, even cruel, except that it was pleasant to have the muslin portières drawn back and never to feel the skulking putterings of Willie, or to waken to the grimace which he loved to hang over her pillow. The room could be very hot. It seemed to pant at night, as if the long scorching trail of the day had left it exhausted. Warm breath stole out of its walls. The leather wagon seat was hot to the touch.

One August evening she dragged the old thing to the window and lay on it there, where she could lift her face to the sill every little while in the hope of a fugitive passing breeze. It was horrible. Babies cried and died in that welter. The bare, tossing little limbs were sprawled on the stoops and fire escapes. She could rest her chin upon the sill and look out on the litter of them and on the mothers whose arms were filled with the hot, sick droop of prostrated children. The tired senile infants in the thick of their battle with the tenements. The secret exultancy of Bertha. An exultancy that could burn in her like wine.

Puling, mewling sons of the mothers whose arms were rich with them. Bertha's were empty. So empty that sometimes, for the relief of tangible pain, she would wrap them around her body until the hands clasped in back, for the ache of the pulling sockets. Those mothers out there who thought that their arms were rich with the mewling and puny sons. Bertha's were empty, but her son was in a white square house by the sea, where the nights blew in life-giving with salt, and a green lawn flowed all about him, growing and shimmering so that his swift boy's feet might beat it down. Tormented exultancy of Bertha!

Sometimes Helga came. She was only half a Helga now, so slim, and the indoor pallor made her very lovely. Until she spoke she was delicate as an old perfume and then her voice came out of this frailty with all of its old husky quality. The same berating Helga who could box an iceman's ears or shrill down Mrs. Farley over the strewn mass of her slovenly bed.

Her slippers. They were so pretty. Slim with tall heels and buckles of bronze beads across the instep. Twinkling feet. And a pleated silk dress with a skirt that opened out in a fan. And there was money in her purse. You could see the green of the bills through the gilt mesh. More than once her impulse had been to leave some of these bills with Bertha.

"I suppose if I was to give you a ten spot, you would sprout a sanitary halo and tear up the dirty stuff."

"I got enough. Day work is good."

"Yeh,--you got enough. Smoked fish and a horse blanket. Oh, I know. Even you are too good for prostitute money."

"Even--me----"

They seldom lit the gas. It cost, and besides in the heat it was unbearable. Sometimes, with the silk dress spread around her in a great flower, Helga sat on the floor with her cheek against the sill, her dry feverish face thrust up for a breath of air. Bertha, barefoot, upright on the soap box that served as the room's second chair, and a bit back from the window, the dark silence thick and luxurious to her as sealskin.

"Fortheluvvaga, why don't you say something? You give me the jimjams. I'd sooner have you say what's on your mind than sit there like you was sitting up on top of the world brooding over it. Whadda you keep looking at me like that for? You ought to set yourself in a gilt frame with some candles burning up to yourself. It's my funeral--not yours----"

"And mine--Helga--to see it go bad--with--you----"

"I'm nothing to you----"

"Nothing--and everything."

"Huh?"

"Nothing."

"Bertha--who are you----?"

"Yoost--me."

"Well, whoever you are, I won't be saved, if that's what's on your mind. I know the slick ways of the savers. Words. Words. Words from the teeth out never saved anybody. I know them. I hate a professional thin-lipped saver like I hate the ripple in a snake--I know what I'm doing, I do. Saved for what? Saved for going back to scrubbing somebody's pots and pans in somebody's kitchen? That's a helluva life, ain't it, to want to be saved for? You or any of the professional savers got a swell chance to save me from that."

"That--don't matter----"

"Yeh--yeh--I know! I know! Dishwater don't need to soak through to the soul. I know the line of talk. Well, it soaks through me! Makes me sick with the meaning of living. If there's got to be pot slingers for ladies who breakfast in pink silk boudoirs, then all of us on the kitchen side of the door ought to have been made with machinery inside instead of hearts and souls."

"Somebody has got to----"

"Well, that don't make it no easier to be one of the pot-slinging somebodies. If you've got a heart and a soul, then you're going to ask questions about what made you one of the somebodies on the kitchen side of the door, instead of on the pink silk side, and if you ask questions it's a helluva lot of satisfaction you get. Somebody's got to sling the pots. That's about all the answer anybody has been able to give me yet. Oh, it's all right about being too deep down inside yourself to mind the scum on your hands. Maybe you can pull a dead rat out of its hole like you was picking a lily, I've seen you do it, but I'm one of the human ones. I'm glad I done what I done. I'd do it all over again."

"Helga----"

"I've nothing to be saved for. I've worked in the kitchens of the good ones and the bad ones and it don't make it any easier. Going around the alley way for someone whose heart is made no different than your heart and whose soul wasn't made in a special heaven. Yeh--I'd do it all over again--and I hate 'em, I tell you--hate them--I hate them--their wet slippery mouths----"

She fell down into the huddle then of the accordion-pleated silk skirt, racked with the sobs she had not the strength for, and she had to be cooed and soothed out of what seemed almost delirium. Cooed and soothed as if she had been a child. Bertha's.

***

It was raining in a soft, fast whisper. The first September gusts fanned sprays of it through the open window. A tin spout dribbled. It was an evening for placing a growing plant on the window sill. The gusts came stronger and full of rain. Finally the window had to be lowered and then the fine fizz went after the pane. An evening with a sense of hurry to it. Pedestrians hurrying with slant umbrellas. The waiter from Tom's Eating Place across the way, hurrying into the Crescent Billiard Parlors with a covered tray. And how the soft rain did hurry. It had a melody. Bertha dried her cup and plate to it. Sleet--te--tee! Sleettee--tee! Sleeeeeee!

The twilight was a little mouse, and the rain full of tiny scuttling feet. The old cup and the plate with a V chopped out, shone in a pale, jagged grin when she set them on the shelf. It was hard to light the gas because the matches were damp, There!

Someone was coming up the stairs. In clumps. It was Willie, home from the three months of country. There was the rocking-chair derby, with a little rill of water dripping from the gutter of the brim, and a large newspaper bundle of his belongings throwing him a little lopsided.

"Slk-k-k-k," he said, and stood in the doorway.

She flew at him and took his wet hat and shook it and dragged the soap box for him up to the stove, so that he sat down in an immediate exudation of steam.

"Willie--the boy---you bane home again!"

He was sullen and held her off with his elbow.

"Don't shove. Don't shove."

"I won't--the boy?"

"Don't shove----"

She poured him a cup of the still warm coffee and he drank it gulping and sighing and staring, with the rims of his eyes stretched and contemplating the red doorway to the stove. There was something irate and dozy about him, like a man who has been jerked out of a nap.

"Willie--you--the boy?"

He began to swing what was left of the coffee around in the cup. He made a game of it. Swinging and swirling and then he threw it down his throat at a gulp.

"Ah"--he said--"Hell."

A dart of fear shot through her.

"Willie--the boy--quick--the boy--my boy?"

She had him by the scruff of his neck, so that he came up loosely like a sack of potatoes.

"Scat you! Crazy!"

"Willie----"

"Aw let up. I'm out of a job," he said, and sat looking groggily into the door of the stove.

"Then the boy--all right----?"

"Whadda you mean--all right?--All wrong!"

"Willie----"

"All wrong for me. They're takin' him to Europe to-morrow. For two years--maybe five. Leaves me flat of a job. All of us. There's a dirty trick to play on the staff. Not even opening the town house this year."

"Europe--the boy----"

"Yeh--all of a sudden the staff of us, except the old woman that learns him his books, gets notice. Could knock us down. Taking him to Europe to study the piano. Beat that! The boy's a great one for piddling on the piano. Nobuddy notices it much and then all of a sudden--Europe. And where does that leave us? Out of a job. And where do we get off because they're taking him to learn the bloomin' old piano? That's what a fella gets. Stays after hours to play with the boy and in the end it's the boy that costs him his job."

"The--boy--plays--the--piano?"

"Naw, he plays the scissors grinder, in case you didn't hear me the first time I said it. Piano. You get me? Piano."

Suddenly Willie leaped up, the grimace he loved to hang over her couch on his face. The vicious, drooly, half-wit mask.