Chapter VII: Part 7

"I know! You! You done it! You gave him that damned concertina! That was the beginning. He never played before then. That got him started. He couldn't leave off that damned thing. They kept making him play it for company. Had him down standing on the dinner table one night at a party, showing him off on that old accordion. Then they got him a new one, but he wouldn't leave off with the old. The one that you sent him. That's what got him started to fumbling out tunes all day on the piano. That dirty concertina. Yours! You lost me my job, sending it to him, and now you owe me my living for starting it all with your old concertina!"

"Willie!"

"You! God damn you." He lunged and struck her on the right cheek bone with a loud cracking sound and then, as the other cheek swung around from the impact, struck her again on the left, shambled downstairs and went out.

A little scarlet tear of blood began to trickle down toward the corner of her mouth. The taste of it was sickish, and the flesh began to flame up around her eyes. Waving purple flags.

She stood with her lips fallen apart in what might have been a smile. "You started it all with that damn concertina." Ecstasy of that! It made it easy not to faint through the waving purple and to walk over through the muslin curtains and there, from behind the overturned wagon-top marked in a red star and "R.H. Stacy and Company," to drag out the old carpetbag and pack it with unfumbling hands.

***

The rain had ceased. A warmish night was left that was soft as an oyster and felt clammy to the cheek. The street lights went down in corkscrews into the sidewalks, and when you glanced up the heavens were all moving with the hurry of low clouds. And yet the murkiness parted like a curtain. Bertha's feet were so swift and her face thrust ahead like a blade cutting. A lovely, draped kind of a night, through which she could pass to the swish of her own tingling blood. Street cars clanged angrily and almost touched her as she darted. The carpetbag hit softly.

The balls of her feet were part of this business of being glad. She felt big and silly, jiggling along on them. It was hard to keep the lip down firmly over the teeth. It kept quivering to smile. Sometimes the street ran in darts of color because of the bonfires underneath her eyes. Bonfires of exultant flame.

The petty shops and the soiled look of poverty began to peter out. The tenement badges of fire escape and clothes line, of prowling cats and strewn gutters, left off suddenly after Lexington Avenue, and by the hair line of a bisecting street, the respectable brownstone march began. Blocks of solemn, riveted, stare after stare. The monotony of the desert, captive in city streets.

In the well-to-do aridity of one of these crosstown blocks, as she worked her way zigzag toward boarding a car for Front Street, a pair of women walking ahead turned in at one of the ornate stoops. A street lamp burned before it and its reflection ran up along the wet steps in yellow shafts. In this light the quick, avian face of one of the women spun around upon Bertha and she grasped her companion by the coat sleeve.

"I tell you, there is a good girl leaving a situation. I know the look of them. Neat as a pin. There is no harm asking."

The second face was hung on delicately. Like a pear.

"Tilda, how can you? It's not only an insulting thing to do, but in a city like New York it isn't safe. Come, dear."

"I've picked up some of the best servants I ever had that way. That is how I found Aggie one Saturday morning, right off the cornet of Madison and Fifty-first Street. She reminds me something of Aggie, too. New York or no New York, I know a good servant when I see one. Say, you--girl----"

"Tilda!"

"Say, you! Come here, please."

"Me?"

"Yes. I merely wish to ask, you don't mind, I'm sure, if you are leaving a situation, or if you happen to know of a good cook or housemaid, who does want a place?"

"Tilda!"

"Paula, if you don't like it I wish you would go into the house. I know what I am doing. My daughter thinks it shocking because I stop you in this fashion. You don't mind, do you?"

"No."

"Then do you wish a place?"

"Yah----."

"There, didn't I tell you! Thank goodness, I am sufficiently strong-minded to follow my own intuition and ask for what I want in this world when I see it. Are you a cook?"

"Tilda dear, if you must have this out, at least take her into the house and don't air the transaction to the entire neighborhood."

"Don't mind my daughter. You know how young people are about doing anything a little off the beaten trail. Come into the house. I want to talk to you. Never mind the servant's entrance, although that's what I like. A girl who instinctively knows her place. Come up the front steps with me. I'll talk to you in the front hall."

The front hall was cold, with a wainscoting of white marble and there was the duenna touch of the black lace of iron grill work across the door. A cold stately lady of a hall. An alabaster Mercury lunged off the newel post and thrust up a lighted electric torch. A Baluchistan rug swayed a little under the feet in a springy turf.

"That's right, Paula, you go upstairs. I can talk much more freely with you away."

"You always did have and always will have your own way of doing things, dear," she said and disappeared around a charming curve of balustrade.

Her mother had the nervous intimacy about her of being always about to pluck a thread off of someone's collar or to moisten her handkerchief with her tongue and rub off a streak of soot from some nose.

She sat Bertha down with a pluck at her collar, on the lower-most step, plopping herself opposite on a Spanish marble bench.

"Don't mind my children. They get provoked at me because I insist upon doing things my own way. I said to my daughter as we passed you at the corner, 'There is a good strong girl for someone. There is something about her. I can tell a good girl when I see one.' Ordinarily I keep a laundress four days a week, a cook, a housemaid, a second girl, and a chauffeur, but since Aggie, the excellent cook who was with me for years, was obliged to leave, I haven't succeeded in engaging a staff that satisfies me. But that's one thing about me, when my staff is incomplete, I can pitch in and take a hand myself. Are you a good cook?"

"I bane good, plain cook."

"Of course. There never was one who wasn't a good, plain cook, to hear her tell it. Well, we are four in family, although one of my children is away most of the time. I have three young lady daughters and I am perfectly free to say that the girl who gets a place with us is fortunate. I am extremely active about the house, and I expect my servants to treat me with the same consideration that I give them. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yah."

"References?"

"Yah--I----"

"Don't take them out. If they contain anything bad you wouldn't show them to me, and if they are good I can find it all out quickly enough for myself. You're not a gadabout, are you? I always contend that a girl's chief interests should lie between her kitchen and her room, just as a business man's lie between his office and his home. Simple pleasures now and then if she will, but I give my girls nice dry rooms and I expect them to appreciate them enough to avail themselves. Now I am willing to give you a trial if you are willing to try us. I pay forty dollars and expect my money's worth. Yes?"

"Why--yah----"

"You see, I do not even ask you why you are leaving a position at this hour of the night. I depend solely upon my own judgments. I like your looks. What are you? German? Scandinavian? Pole? No? Well, it doesn't matter, you seem to be a little of everything. That isn't a black eye you are getting, is it? Well, that doesn't matter, either. I hope you haven't any kind of vermin or any bad habits. But if you have I will find them out quickly enough for myself. You look spick and span enough to suit me. I have my breakfast at eight-thirty. Downstairs. I'll come up and awake you at six. This way, please, and I'll show you up the rear stairs to your room. Don't bump your head on that slanting ceiling. I take one sliced orange, two three-minute eggs, two strips of crisp bacon, two level tablespoons of coffee to the cup, three slices of dry toast for breakfast. My girls have coffee and toast in their rooms. I have no waitress or second girl at present, but help from the agency comes in by the day. Nuisance. Don't bump your head on that slanting ceiling. Have you a friend--your type of girl, who wants an excellent position as waitress? I would be willing to engage her at once."

"Yah--maybe----"

"Here you are. I don't say my servants' quarters are palatial, but this much I can say for them. They are dry."

"I have a friend, maybe. Helga. Not right away but maybe some day."

"That is good, but first we shall see how we get along. Put your things down there. As my grandfather used to say of his stables, good dry floors, fresh water trough, add a little fodder to that, and no man or beast could ask more! No, don't look around for an alarm clock, if that's what you're after. I am the alarm clock in this family. There is your bed. Lie on it."

Such was Bertha's initiation into the house of Mathilda Oessetrich.

***

It was the tempo as much as anything else that tired you so. The household ran. Upstairs. Downstairs. From room to room. And even from kitchen to dining room, when there was no waitress, and usually there was none. Bertha ran, too, slapping her way breathlessly through the swinging doors, dishing up the foods with her tongue caught between her teeth and her spoons flashing.

The reason was that Mathilde Oessetrich ran. She was heavy, but she ran upstairs like some one playing an arpeggio scale. She brushed her thin electric hair in a series of such rapid strokes that it stood off her head in spikes. She drained her coffee cup in three firm gulps, and with one gesture plunged into her gloves down to their very finger tips.

There was no way to live under the roof with Mathilde Oessetrich and not feel this shimmer of her haste. Her second daughter, Ermangarde, was nervous with it. Olga, who attended a school for social research and wore her hair short in the days when it was referred to as "docked," lived away from the strain of it in a studio in East Seventeenth Street.

Paula was meekest under it, probably because it had defeated her first. But even Paula, who at twenty-five had the pale silk hair of a baby and a pear-shaped face that dipped down over a swan-like neck after the fashion of Fra Lippo Lippi's ladies, had her retreat from it. The large, fourth-floor-front room adjoining Bertha's little cubicle. There was a grand piano in there. For hours, sometimes for days at a time, Paula would disappear into this retreat, the incense of her tender, lovely, ruminating music stealing out through the crack under the door. She played Schubert like a heart-ache and sang his tender lieder under her breath. Her playing beat softly against the wall of Bertha's cubicle. Schubert. The dithyrambic brilliancy of Liszt. Chopin, that could seem to make out of that lathed and plastered wall between Bertha and Paula at her piano, a fan bowing softly in the darkness. Sometimes Paula could seem, at her piano, a little mad. The glints, that were like steel spears, a vertical one in each of her eyes, must have made her play that way. D'Indy. "Eye of newt and toe of frog ... like a hell-broth boil and bubble." And Debussy--lanterns the shape of gargoyles, swung on poles, nosing among the stars.... The sweet forest where Goland discovers Mesilande....

Waving tonal wall, between Bertha huddled there on her bed and Paula, with the vertical spears in her eyes.

There was a day's end for you. Evening after evening of Paula on her side of the wall. The wall that could sway like a lantern, or bow like a fan....

It made the days themselves easier. You ran all morning, chiefly because Mrs. Oessetrich ran behind you. Calling you off of one half-completed task to begin another and creating in the great square kitchen an uproar of slamming doors, rattling tins, and the thin high clatter of her constant voice.

"_Get me the brown sugar, Bertha. I am going to make some of my panocha for the suffrage bazaar. What's that? Never let me see a spot of rust on the aluminum pots. That's one thing I am particular about. That girl does not eat enough to keep a bird alive. Here you, little delivery boy, never walk into anyone's kitchen in muddy boots. That's a certain sign of a slovenly character. If Miss Olga comes this afternoon, Bertha, while I am out, tell her that I expect her to be here for eight o'clock dinner ta-night when her Aunt Mary and her godfather Oessetrich are here. My brother-in-law likes his sauce to leg-of-lamb very minty. I won't have her ignore the family in this fashion. She is already sufficiently out of favor with her godfather as it is, on account of her extreme ideas. Oh dear, not that way. You must beat egg whites as if you meant it. Elbow grease! Oh dear, run up in the library, Bertha, and see if I left my glasses on the desk. Is that Miss Ermangarde going out? Run up and bring me that small bag on my dressing table. I want her to exchange those tan walking gloves at Alberts. Quick. And, Bertha, tell Eddie I want the sedan here in an hour and that Miss Olga will use the big car this afternoon to take some of the girls from her vocational guidance class out for a drive. I don't know how a boy who thinks as slowly as Eddie does, can make a successful chauffeur. Hand me the telephone book, first, Bertha, I want to look up that caterer on Madison and Fifty-second--her godfather Oessetrich likes pistachio._"

The afternoons were easier. In the sedan with the haggled Eddie at the wheel she shopped and visited, matched up samples of silk, sought out seamstresses, interviewed at the employment agencies, sat on hospital and suffrage boards, stormed in upon Olga's aloofness in the Seventeenth Street studio, and about every hour found out a telephone to jangle up the silence she had left behind her.

"_Hello--Bertha, that you? I forgot to lock the linen closet. Do it. If Madam Gerbhardt calls up, tell her I have an extra seat for her for 'William Tell' to-night. 'Bye._"

An hour later:

"_Hello, Bertha, that you? Anybody call? Who? Miss Ermangarde? She what? Won't be home until six. Well? If she calls again, Bertha, tell her that I do not want her spending her afternoons down in that Greenwich Village atmosphere and that I expect her to come directly home from her drawing lesson. Fix caper sauce with the fish. 'Bye._"

That was how the days flew before her. Shooed like a flapping flock of tormented hens.

Sometimes Ermangarde exploded into little crying rages that made her very flushed and appealing. She was nineteen, thickly built, but with a square kind of Teutonic prettiness. Thin, badly arranged hair, but her gray eyes made extremely peculiar and intent by a fringe of thick black lashes. Under stress the pupils swam out into fine black areas.

"Mother, Mother, Mother," she cried one Sunday evening, jumping up from the tea table just as Bertha was trying to pass the lemon and the waffles in two directions at the same time. "Don't direct Bertha to pass fifty things at once. It's not humanly possible to bend six ways, even to your will. Don't! Don't!"

"Hear, hear." said Olga from where she sat cross-kneed and a bit back from the table, waving her cigarette in its long meerschaum holder and watching the smoke from under almost closed eyes. She had the same Oessetrich squareness, enhanced by the Hans Memling medieval look to her hair, the good gray eyes, the skin inclined to be muddy, and she wore tweeds, thick, expensive, and unbecoming, and a stiff white shirtwaist with cuffs which made the expression of her hands broad and masculine. The nails were unmanicured, but clean and square, as if they had been pared with a knife.

"Oh, it's all very well for you, Olga. You live away from the strain of trying to keep up with Mother. I notice it became too much for you! The pretext of your nearness to the School of Philanthropy doesn't deceive anybody. Stop driving us, Mother. Stop expecting the rest of us to keep up with you. Stop, dearest, stop!"

Mrs. Oessetrich popped one of the little German _simpfkuchen_ which graced these Sunday evening tea times whole into her mouth and washed it down with a generous gulp of strong black coffee. She was crisp and entirely unassailed.

"Sit down and finish your meal. Eat some of those stewed apples. They are good for you. And, Bertha, always see to it that Miss Ermangarde has her bottle of tonic on her breakfast tray. Sit down, Ermangarde, you are getting pimply."

At that, of course, an entirely crushed Ermangarde left the table, crying bitterly down into her hands, Paula, whose long pale face was always thrust forward like a flower eager for dew, turning after her.

"Mother, how could you? What a horrible kind of ridicule, and you know what a nervous state she is in!"

"Exactly. Self-pity is at the bottom of most neurasthenia."

"Oh--oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?"

"Nonsense," said Olga, reaching forward to knock off her cigarette ash and leaning back to watch the smoke. "Napoleon was very clever in the way she handled that case of nerves."

"Yes, Olga, it is easy enough for you to encourage Mother in her high-handedness, and call her Napoleon, now that you have up and cleared out. You forget that you used to be the nervous wreck of the household before you up and took the bull by the horns. It is a simple enough matter for you to drop in once a week from Seventeenth Street and view the situation with amused tolerance. But you know Mother as well as we do. You know that no one in this household is entitled to a will of her own except Mother."

"My dear Paula, you talk as if will power were a gift, like music or painting. Will power can be developed like muscle."

"Oh no. Your will power, Mother, isn't normal any more than a giant's muscle is normal. Yours is crushing. You--you've crushed me with it. Crushed me with it as surely as if you had steam rolled me. You crushed me with it the day you let--Harrison walk out of this room----"

"Now, Paula----"

"You did. You did!"

There was something so stricken about Paula. She was as white as a handkerchief left lying beside waters that were being dragged.

"Paula," said Olga, who had risen, white too, "if you want to make me physically ill, then go into that all over again."

"I'm sorry, Olga."

"You poor weak child of mine. Is it possible you don't see yet that what I did for you was----"

"I'm sorry, Mother. Please. No more. I--only that question of will power coming up. I--I know so cruelly what--oh, what is the use of deceiving ourselves? Mother, this young fellow Wells who is coming here to see Ermie--you're not interfering there already?"

"The idea! As if one could even take him seriously."

"For heaven's sake, Paula, stop dramatizing an incident. The bare fact of the matter is that Ermangarde indulges in a nervous chill because the mater asks a big husky girl to pass the lemon and the waffles at the same time. You--Bertha--your shoulders are pretty broad, aren't they? I've an idea that you understand General Napoleon pretty well."

"Yah, Miss Olga."

"Bertha is a good girl. A bit slow but a good listener. There is an old German saying my father used to be fond of. It translates something like this. 'He was strange with the wisdom of his ear to the ground.' That reminds me of Bertha. Bring in some hot waffles, please."

Paula's pale face, with the brow shaped like the upper bulge of a pear and the thinning but pretty hair drawn so tiredly from it, was still quivering and there was a beating vein in her temple.

"Olga, while you are here, won't you talk to Mother about this servant situation? It is impossible for one girl to carry the work of this household with only the wretched assistance of day help."

"Well, Paula, Mother hasn't been able to keep help in the twenty-five years I've known her. What is the idea of unearthing the family skeleton at this time?"

"Shh-h-h, Bertha doesn't need to hear this discussion. I remind myself of the English government. I let my children talk revolution from their soap boxes to their heart's content and in the din of their mere words I sit back and run my sane and conservative household."

"Paula is right, 'Tilda, either you ought to give up the house entirely and go to a hotel like the Savoy or the Plaza, or learn to curb your personality sufficiently to make it endurable here for the average servant."

"Bertha is a jewel, but she is the only one we ever had who could sort of seem to rise superior to Mother's domination."

"What is she, anyway? A Pole or a Swede? Sort of a Sacred Cow from the look of her."

"She'd have to be, to be able to endure it here."

"Nonsense, she is a great serene peasant girl with that slow kind of strength that makes an invaluable servant. She is one in a million. I'll wager she is the only servant in New York in cotton stockings to-day."

"I tell you, Olga, 'Tilda is so strong herself she doesn't realize it, but it isn't fair to expect this household to run along with one servant."

"One servant. What is the matter with you? I do the work of five."

"Exactly. That is what makes a driving machine out of you. The average servant won't and doesn't have to stand being driven. There is another side to the servant question, you know. Silk stockings! Isn't it sufficient that they have to wash our pots and pans for us--carry slops--are we to begrudge them even the silk stockings of life!"

"Hear. Hear."

"The average servant, Mother, won't----"

"Oh, tush, tush, with the average servant. The average servant doesn't interest me. I am not an average person."

"But Mother, we are average girls! Can't you see the cruel sapping thing that life in this house has come to mean? Father--frankly ran away from it----"

"There is neither taste nor justice in that remark."

"Olga has left."

"School of Philanthropy----"

"I find what retreat I can--since--since--Harrison----"

"Paula!"

"And now--little Ermangarde! Don't blame her for running down to what you call the 'Isms' of Greenwich Village, Mother. Don't blame any of us for--retreating. You're a general, Mother--Olga's right--a Napoleon--we're only----"

"I am what is best for you all, only you don't know it. Thank God, though, my skin is thick."

"But to get back to the subject, Mother. It is unendurable that a home, I mean a house, like this must be run without servants, because of your tyrannies."

"What is the matter with you? Hasn't Bertha been promising us a house girl for sometime past? That Helga, a friend of hers."

"Why, we need at least five servants, Mother. We cannot even keep a butler. You know that yourself, Olga. You know how you used to storm every time a butler or a parlor maid left. Well, Mother hasn't had but one servant in this big barn of a house all the months and months that Bertha has been here...."

"You can't change a leopard's spots, Paula."

"Well, you girls must confess that this dreadful leopard mother of yours is always willing to go on the dissecting table, for her family to further discuss the immutability of those spots."

"Your spots are too like Mother's, Olga. That's why you've--escaped, I guess."

"Nonsense. My rights are merely the inalienable rights of the eldest."

"Then, in heaven's name, what are just the inalienable rights of being just a daughter? A Terrible Meek--like me."

"Submission, my darling, is the terrible lot of the meek."

"Or disaster...."

"Oh, God," chanted Olga, extending her legs and yawning with a crackle of mannish shirtwaist, "deliver us from the evil of those who have our welfare at heart."

"He has delivered you," said Paula and regarded her sister with eyes that were a little humorous and enormously tired.

"Come, come," cried Mrs. Oessetrich jumping up, "something tells me there is a hiss behind all this patter. I have tickets for Professor Hartwisch of Brooklyn Institute on Bismarck the Man and Myth."

"But, Mother, I loathe Hartwisch."

"Nonsense. Bertha, run upstairs and help Miss Paula with her wraps and tell Miss Ermangarde that my masseuse will be here at eight o'clock to give her a treatment for those pains in her shoulders. If Mr. Taggart telephones while I am gone, tell him I will be in his office at nine o'clock to-morrow morning on the matter of those mortgages. Hurry, Paula, Hartwisch begins at eight. Bertha, oh Bertha--dear me, what dull ears--Bertha, bring me down my moleskin cape. She's a good listener, but I have come to the conclusion that she only hears what she wants to hear."

"That's why you have been able to hold on to her all this time, Tilda."

Mrs. Oessetrich cast quick, bird-like, and adoring eyes upon her eldest.

"You're impertinent, darling," she said.

***

Yes, that was the secret. To inure oneself to Mathilda Oessetrich until she was like a great old tower bell ringing out over a moor that had not even a parish to summon.

Ding. Dong. The words beat up against Bertha so dimly. For years she was to move through the tinny clatter of them, _ding, dong,_ around her head in a flock of dissonances.

Butlers and parlor maids simply would not remain. Agencies were indefatigable and newspaper advertisements brought scant response. It was as if some invisible symbol of a chalk mark were against the Oessetrich portals. But there were always the fugitive day helpers, and in a way Bertha preferred it so. It left her the sovereignty of the servants' quarters, and the lovely evenings that Paula wove along the keys. These evenings made the days seem merely like briary little paths down which one must run to meet them. Cool dim gardens of Paula's music. Schumann. Schubert. Brahms. Mozart. Paula played Mozart as if the keys were little wounds that bled. Lyric exaltation--morose mysticism of Richard Strauss. Salome. Electra. Monstrous flowers of fancy. Conflagration of discord. Fiery particles. Boiling darkness. Then again, so tenderly that it was hard to bear, lacy loveliness of Chopin. Beethoven. Appassionata Sonata.

Booming names that Bertha had never even heard. Deathless masters of the deathless tonal torrents. Deathless masters--but one of them had strolled with the girl with the flax-colored braids like Bertha's, across the plushy meadow and at dawn had lain singing to her the troubled wisps of melody that were not quite born. The wisps of old sound....

***

Dudley Wells was the wavy-looking young man who was coming to visit Ermangarde, wavy because his clothes seemed always too large for his nervously slender body. He seemed to shrink from contact with them, so that his trousers ran in little ripples along his legs and air currents got somehow up under the back of his coat and flapped it mildly.

He wrote poetry that looked on the page like the first footsteps abroad in a snowstorm and edited a slender sporadic magazine that was printed on arty deckle-edge, butcher's paper.

_The Whisk Broom_
Published Every Once in a While.

The two collections of his poetry which Ermangarde kept jealously on her own desk were thin, too, ascetically bound in cardboard, and with the verse stepping in a stark sort of straggle down the page. One of them had its back broken from frequent opening to the same page; a strange page, with words gleaming as if a lapidary had tossed them willy nilly.

There was a copy of _The Cathedral Under the Sea_ on that desk, too. It lay there so casually, sometimes open and face downward. It could throb through the dust cloth. The slender volumes, one titled "Lanterns" and the other "Sal Atticum," were very thumbed and even wept upon.

Ermangarde and her titillating secret! Dainty little hours of sipping into these books like a bird on the brink of a pool, but she would thrust them beneath a cushion if Bertha came in to dust, or she heard her mother's footsteps, and on the evenings that Wells came to sit stiffly beside her, on the pale brocaded couch in the enormously gold and brocaded drawing-room, the pink would come out in her face hours beforehand, quite effacing the muddiness.

Mrs. Oessetrich trod the delicate lay of the land between Ermangarde and the none too intrepid Wells, with spiked and characteristic boots.

Ermangarde, a frightened child at the frailty of the lovely thing that was newly hers, cried, and tried to stave her off.

"Mother, if you would only leave us be! Don't come tramping into the drawing-room on us that way, vivisecting him with your lorgnettes and calling him 'young man.' He's too sensitive. The things you say, 'Tilda, they make the room shiver, as if--as if a truck were rushing through. It's not so much what you actually say, but the way you say it, dear. So matter-of-factly. I--we--he isn't interested in your Ethical Membership Drive or your Single Tax theories. At least, dear, not when you tramp in on us--that way. So terribly matter-of-fact that somehow--oh, I can't analyze it--but it makes us feel ridiculous--futile--just sitting there. Mother, won't you please not make us feel so----"

"So what? Pish. I hate mooning. It's servant-girly and park-benchy."

"Mother!"

"Never did it in my life. That's one thing I can say for your sister Olga. Faults aplenty, but a matter-of-fact head on her shoulders."

"But----"

"Marry, if you must, when the proper man comes along. Nature is sly and catches most of us in the end, but don't piddle! Don't waste time on that absurd game of falling in love with love!"

"Mother----"

"I hate puppy love. It nauseates me."

"Dudley and I----"

"Dudley. Is that his name? His name _would_ be Dudley."

"It is too bad to have to inform you, dear, that you are speaking of one of the foremost poets of the younger school."

"What school? Kindergarten?"

"Oh, Mother, you are the cruelest woman I ever knew. You've a way of making everything seem absurd. You--you could make Confucius seem ridiculous."

"He is."

"If you must know it, Dudley is the only human being I have ever known who--who--has shown me the way out of the hard crust of myself into--into--beauty--I--if I have the courage to use a sheer word like 'beauty' before you."

"You use the word 'beauty' like the child you are."

"You don't know any kind of beauty, Mother, except the beauty you can see with your mind. You're all mental."

"Thank God."

"You have never felt the sweep and surge of----"

"You are so callow that it is positively embarrassing to have to see it happening."

"I----"

"Very well, let your pale-faced poet with adenoids sweep you and surge you and see where it will land you----"

"Mother!"

"You say he edits the _Dust Broom_."

"The _Whisk Broom_, Mother, you know it isn't the _Dust Broom_."

"I beg your pardon, the _Whisk Broom_, of course. Well, you let one of those ninety-pound fangle-dangle poets around Greenwich Village do your sweeping and surging with his whisk broom and----."

"Mother, I know it is impossible to get the better of an argument with you. Only don't ridicule us, dear. Dudley is so--so sensitive. Don't make us feel silly and immature and drifting just because you are so sure and level-headed and both your feet so firmly planted on the ground. Let Dudley become more accustomed to us, Mother. I--Mother, you see, Dudley, he's nothing but a boy, dear, a sensitive boy--too sensitive to withstand your blasting kind of ridicule--if you could be a little understanding with him--with us, dear--Mother--don't drive off Dudley!"

"Well, if an old woman like me can drive off a suitor----"

"You can, Mother. Don't make me hark back to--to Paula and Harrison again--but if it happened with a big, hale fellow like Harrison--why--why everything about Dudley, Mother, is too sensitive not to wither under your methods. Even his feelings for me. They would be the first to go. Not because he wanted it that way--but they would wither, dear. He will start by dreading you and then dreading me because I am your--'Tilda dear--can't I make you see just a little, the delicate fiber of a boy like Dudley?"

"I understand too much as it is."

"No. You can't. You don't. That's what frightens me so. You can't. Why even Bertha--that great, white peasant girl out there in your kitchen--why there--there is something about her comes nearer to understanding the frail, delicate, tremendous little trifles about life--than you, Mother--really."

"My two feet are on the ground."

"So terribly on the ground."

"Get out and interest yourself in things that matter. Suffrage. Social work, like your sister. What about that course in economics that I even agreed to take with you at Columbia?"

"I loathe economics...."

"Well, you expect your share of a big fortune some day, don't you? If you do, learn how to take care of it first. Learn the history of coffee before you inherit your coffee plantations, learn----"

"Coffee doesn't interest me, Mother, any more than----"

"It doesn't? Well then, trust that Whisk Broom fellow to take care of you in the manner to which you have been accustomed. If you two young people are really serious, stop mooning and go off and get married and start on your own."

"Mother, you know we can't do that for a little while, anyway. Dudley isn't a money maker. He wouldn't be himself if he were. Mother, you--you've so much. So enormously much. That is one of the sublime uses of money. To make it easy and possible for genius like Dudley's to grow and expand. Mother--if you would!"

"Would what?"

"Would--I--somehow, I--we girls--not one of us, Mother, has worked out her life very happily, yet. Olga is only insulating herself with her bizarre way of living. Poor--poor Paula--and----"

"Paula!"

"Oh I'm not saying that Harrison was the man for her in the worldly sense of the word any more than--than perhaps Dudley is for me---but since--but since it happened that way with Paula--I--sometimes I fear for Paula, Mother. Her eyes. They can look so big and glassy after she's been locked up there for days and days playing to herself. I--Mother, we are none of us happy girls. Wouldn't it be almost like a symbol of the turning of the tide for all of us if Dudley and I--well--it--Dudley's proud, Mother. We would have to do it so delicately. As if he were granting us the privilege. And that's what it is--isn't it--to make the creation of beauty possible? I--if Dudley had me--Mother--he doesn't quite realize me yet, but he would. He would. If Dudley had me--and leisure--if we could make him feel that in permitting us to give, it is he, not us, who would be conferring favor----"

"Oh I see," said Mrs. Oessetrich, her laughter like a burst string of dropping beads, "my dear, clever second-born, the idea being to prevail upon our whisk broom poet to overlook the crassness of the offer and agree to live upon the bounty of a mother-in-law, whose only excuse for being is that she apologetically may keep the poetic hearth-fire burning."

"No--no----"

"Surely, my offspring, a plan to warm any parent's heart! Do esoteric poets accept anything so crass in payment as coin of the realm, or is there a more subtle way to cast gold-dust before the whisk-broom suitor?"

Ermangarde let her head roll back as if she had been wounded.

"That's the trouble with mooning," said Mrs. Oessetrich. "It makes fools of the best of us," and went out, sidestepping Bertha, who was on her knees waxing the floor.

The woolen little polishing-pad made a soft, hurrying, whispering noise and the floor began to gleam in pools and you walked on your knees and squatted under the piano and stole in between the legs of chairs.

Suddenly Ermangarde, left in a heap on the couch, thrust out her hand, and Bertha, her own smelling of floor oil, took it and held it there until the black wing of a December twilight came in through the brocade window curtains and Ermangarde slept in such a tense little ball, that in order to unhook her fingers, Bertha had finally to lift them off one by one, like burrs.

***

In the center of Bertha's brow the hair ran down in a peak. One spring that peak began to whiten. Ashes of roses. It was curious and a little bit sickening, seeing the white push its way through the yellow. The dainty hoar of a first frost and yet, with the immemorial gesture of women, Bertha sat before her bit of mirror plucking the new white hairs and spreading them sadly along the back of her hand. It was many a day before the new pale tinge came really to be noticeable, but the lovely jonquil braids that she could wind three times around her head were Bertha's vanity and she wept at their passing.

Something new, too, and subtle, was letting down in Bertha. The slowing of the engine. New tirednesses. Strange flushed lassitudes. The plunge of her arm from the socket was no longer straight as the drive of a piston. It broke at the elbow. It was still easy enough to drag heavy objects with the hoist of a man, or tear at the entrails of fowls with the old fiery clutch, but sometimes in the eternal upstairs and downstairs the knees had a sense of giving way. An absurd, empty, tickled feeling, as if they had each gone off into little faints. There was nothing to do but wait then, holding on to the balustrade until the strength flowed back into them.

The old lunge that could drive a keg halfway up a hillside; that fling of the wrist that could squeeze a mop dry at one turn--something had gone with the imperceptible, the pussy-foot years. Jonquils. That plunging bison sense of excess strength.

And the din, the din of Mrs. Oessetrich. Sometimes the clatter of it made Bertha want to cry. That was because she tired more easily. The years were at her, but she called it neck-ache and bought a bottle of liniment.

It was impossible to spend the every-other-Thursday-afternoon-off, indoors. Mathilde Oessetrich was at you like a woodpecker.

"Bertha, since you are not going out this afternoon, I wish you would help me take an invoice of the flat-silver for the insurance company." Or: "Bertha, how can you sit there doing nothing even if it is your day off? Boil up some suds and wash the crystal chandelier in the drawing-room. And be careful, those pendants are the finest cut-crystal."

There was no lock on her door and the imminence of these invasions made her sit stiffly away from the back of her chair, fearing them. So willy, nilly, on her every-other-Thursday afternoon, Bertha went out.

There was no place much to go except that Thurn's Department Store on Fourteenth Street had a sheet music department, where they crashed out the popular selections of the day on an upright piano. There was always a little swirl of excitement around it and sometimes, if you lingered on the edge, through the din and the clatter something sweet came through.

And then one day, Mrs. Oessetrich sent her down to Arrow-maker's department store to match some curtain net. That was a place to know! You could walk all of every-other-Thursday afternoon in a tropics of satin brocades and little wisps of fugitive perfume, and at three o'clock an organ played out into the din and made it throb like a heart. Then you could walk upstairs, the great stairs that were as vain as the arch to the neck of a swan, and across an aerial bridge that led from a Doge's palace into the dim Persia of the Oriental room, where the rugs burned in strange, flameless fables across the floor and squatting gods sat drowsy with centuries. Sometimes the doors to the auditorium were open and no one cared if you slipped in and sat down while the melody smoked out of the organ pipes....

But then, gradually, Helga began to commandeer these afternoons. She waited for Bertha in a drug store on Madison Avenue. Sometimes they went to a motion picture theater or, if the weather was fine, walked in Central Park. Strangely enough, for Helga, who was loquacious, there was very little talk. So little that often they walked the wind-swept rectangle of the reservoir in silence, their faces thrust ahead for the slap of the gale and Helga's pretty fur scarf standing out stiffly behind. Hand in hand. Helga liked to worm her palm up into Bertha's as a child would, and then she had to take running little steps to keep up. Bertha's strides were so long. Sometimes, keeping up with her, Helga's breath began to come in gasps and tears of effort popped out in her eyes. Tears that she seemed to like to flagellate herself with, because she had to hurry with three steps to Bertha's calm, unconscious one, until the blur before her eyes and the pain in her side made the neat cinder path around the water a morass, through which she began to stagger. Then they would sit, still hand in hand, on a bench and watch the day wind down into dusk. No talk, chiefly because when Helga began and her lips started to shudder at what she had to say, she had not the strength, and had a constant, a neurotic fear of fainting out in public places; and so they sat silent or coaxed the squirrels or watched the children tear past on roller skates and sometimes Bertha had little drony bits to say of the Oessetrichs.

"Oessetrichs. Oessetrichs. I know why you are always rubbing it into me that there's a good opening for a second girl, there. I know!"

"I was yoost mentioning it, Helga."

"Ah no, you wasn't 'yoost mentioning it.' You're one of those workers in the dark. It's not what you say. God knows where you got the capacity for saying what you don't say. Well, lay off--don't you worry about me."

"I--won't----"

"Well don't! Save it for the second girl at the Oessetrichs if they are ever able to get one that's fool enough to stay."

But one Thursday evening long after, Helga sagged down so when they came to their parting of the ways at the Madison Avenue drug store, that Bertha had stiffly to hold her up by the arms for fear she was going to fall.

"Helga?"

"You got me, Bertha. I--can't go--back--there. McMurtry--the mouths--I can't go back. Take me, Bertha--do they still need me--second girl----"

"I bane promising Mrs. Oessetrich I would get her a second girl. You."

"I--I--never thought you would get me."

"Come, Helga."

And so the Oessetrichs acquired a second girl.

***

That was a winter to be remembered. Sometimes at night if Bertha so much as threw herself across the bed for an instant before mustering up the energy to undress, there she lay all night, prone, her heavy shoes riveted to her feet and her clothing lumped clumsily between her and complete rest.

To find the time and the strength somehow, so that it would seem as if Helga herself had done it, to scour the pantry sinks. They were of German silver and Mrs. Oessetrich was inordinately proud of them. To beat the rugs for Helga's general cleaning day and keep for her the enormous drawing-room pier glasses and the crystal chandeliers and the bathroom fixtures glitteringly bright. To scurry upstairs with the fire logs when Helga sank down crying with them on the cellar stairs, and pile them outside the library door, so that all there was left for Helga was to trip in and stack them in little pyramids beside the copper scuttle.

It sapped you, not only the work of that, but the strain of that, and then all the old querulousness was back in Helga. As the pretty sheen to her hair dulled and the tips of her fingers began to spread and the nails to break, her eyes sort of dimmed, as if two little lamps had been hurried out of them and evenings up in the room she shared with Bertha, the din of her talk beat down the sound of Paula's playing and the wall was never a fan bowing, but of ochre and green wallpaper, with one flap of it hanging down and showing the naked plaster.

"Well, now you have me here, what are you going to do with me?"

"No, Helga, I--didn't----"

"Oh yes you did. You had your heart set on getting me here two years before I give it a thought. Old Napoleon told me so herself. The first night you was working here you promised to get her your friend Helga for second girl. You got me here, you know you did!"

"Yes--Helga----"

"'Yes, Helga.' Well, I'm being a good girl. I'm back lugging the wood to toast somebody else's toes and eating off the kitchen table what's left off the dining room table. I'm back. I'm the servant problem again. The problem without a chance. You have a thick hide, you don't feel like I do."

"I feel----."

"Why, we ain't even got organization. The hodcarriers got that much. We can't tell the truth about the kitchen side of the door, because we ain't got the voice of organization. What's the answer? The women who hire us call us an ungrateful lot and who is there to answer back? Me? I got a fat chance getting listened to, ain't I? Ungrateful! Ungrateful for what? That's what I want to know...."

"Helga, shh-h-h--Miss Paula----"

"There's nobody to get up and explain for us. The men don't know. They get all their information from their women. That gives us a helluva chance, don't it? And who is to dispute it all? We can't. We ain't got the voice or the language. Nobody writes pieces or prints articles about us from our side of the fence. We're not interesting. Who wants to see a show about a servant? Who hears anything about us except from what the women who hire us have to say about us? God help a woman whose reputation depends entirely on what another woman has to say about her. Well, it's that way with the servant problem--every other kind of labor gets a hearing. We don't. The public is satisfied to take the word of the women who hire us. It's easier. Leave it to the public to take the easiest way!"

"Yah...."

"What kind of an angle on us do you think Mrs. Farley or Mrs. Oessetrich give when they get up and spout about the servant problem at one of their finger-roll-and-chicken-salad club meetings?"

"Helga, shh-h-h----"

"Yes, I said it. What do they know about us, except that we are fourteen-hour-a-day machines that mustn't balk or break down, or we get ungrateful? Ungrateful for what? Oh, God, tell me what? Ungrateful because my life is chained to a sink. What's Ermangarde Oessetrich done to make her so much better than I am that I got to make her bed and pick up her silk nightgown after her? What's she done that makes her the waited on and me the waiter on? Oh, you got me back. But deep down in my heart I know it ain't worth being good for. I'm like a kid sleeping on the floor. I can't fall outta bed because there is no place to fall. See? That's me. I lose if I win. There's a helluva lot of fun in a game like that. I lose if I win."

Words. Words. Words. They beat about the little room in imprisoned flutterings. Evenings of them. Weeks of them. Eternities of them. Sometimes Helga fell asleep almost in the midst of what she was saying, and had to be undressed and tucked in between the scrawny covers.

She loved that moment of bed. The evening was like a nest to her, into which she crawled drowsy with the sense of her safety. Sometimes she sighed out and closed her eyes and snuggled her palm very deeply up into Bertha's.

"I'm safe here with you, Bertha--never let anybody--get me. I'll work. I'll pick up her nightgown and clean her shoes--my side--that's what kills me--but keep me safe--Bertha--McMurtry--keep me safe, Bertha----"

Then it was easiest to get her to sleep. She was like a child. Relaxed.

***

About once a month the von Schlegels came to dine. He was president of the Turnverein National Bank and also had enormous coffee plantation holdings. She wore a diamond necklace entirely concealed by the fold of fat at her neck. Hans von Schlegel was one day to die at his desk of a stroke. He was already purpling.

One evening at a dinner to the von Schlegels, Ermangarde, who wore a light blue taffeta dress sown in pearl passementerie and her hair in two little round mats of braid over each ear, burst suddenly, and apparently apropos of nothing, into such a fit of weeping that between them, Paula and Bertha had literally to carry her upstairs.

The meal proceeded stiffly through, and Mrs. Oessetrich did not leave the table. For an hour she and von Schlegel computed compound interest, with Mrs. von Schlegel nodding and breathing down on her bosom so loudly that the lace swayed. But after dessert she went upstairs, holding her heavy green satin gown up about her as she bent over Ermangarde, all her folderols of bead and bugle trimmings dangling. The Oessetrichs dressed like that. Sharp hard colors. Laid-on trimmings. Zouave jackets of spangled net. Appliqués. Not even the girls dressed wisely. Olga, to be sure, had her somewhat mannish, modish manner, but her tweeds were thick and her expensive felt hats had a dowdy droop. Mrs. Oessetrich loved parrot green. It covered her like a shellac, and her chapped-looking arms and bosom rose out of it and made her as brilliant-looking as a cockatoo.

"What is this? Don't you feel well, Ermangarde? Bertha, go downstairs and send Helga into the drawing-room with the coffee and liqueurs."

By this time, Ermangarde, her storm of crying over, and lying wanly in the crumple of blue taffeta dress, opened her salt-bitten eyes.

"No, Bertha, don't you go. Stay here. I'm sorry, Mother, I must have been a little hysterical. I didn't mean to...."

"Does anything hurt you? Are you ill? No? Well then, bathe your eyes and come downstairs. The von Schlegels want a little bridge."

Paula, who had been sitting at her sister's head, looked up at this, her eyes the curious blue of flame burning along the top of cognac. Thin flame through which you could see the clear empty bottoms.

"Why, Mother! Ermangarde can't go downstairs any more this evening. She's had another nervous chill."

"Nonsense. A lovesick chill. A little self-control is the best kind of treatment. It makes it extremely awkward----"

"I'll go down, Mother, in Ermie's place."

"Very well. I suppose it will appear no more peculiar to have Ermangarde up here in a love trance, than it would be if you were to remain upstairs mooning with your music."

"Mother, I----"