Chapter VIII: Part 8

"I suppose I may as well reconcile myself to a neurotic family of girls. Bertha, when Miss Ermangarde is finished having you hold her hand, I wish you would hasten downstairs. That girl Helga, for some reason, becomes a perfect moron when you are not about. If you need anything, Ermangarde, you can ring," said Mrs. Oessetrich, and bounced out, slamming the door.

But at two o'clock that morning, with Bertha still holding her hand, Ermangarde drifted off into such a gale of sobbing that Doctor Ehrenfest, the family physician, was finally called and the aroused household scurried through hallways in kimonos and soft slippers. Lights were blazing on all floors and Mrs. Oessetrich in a padded house gown, and her head in a fury of crimpers, was pale as china.

"Come now." said Dr. Ehrenfest, who had assisted the three Misses Oessetrich into the world, "we must get to the bottom of what is troubling this child. Love affair? Out with it, Ermie, you can't fool your Uncle Ehrenfest."

But the squirt of morphia into Ermangarde's left arm was already carrying her off down strange rivers, her closed lids quivering and her cheeks, down which the tears had stormed, lashed and blanched-looking. Paula, at the head of Ermangarde's bed, kept her head averted because she was crying.

A silent, eerie little group. Bertha, crouched there beside the bed, because Ermangarde's fingers were tight as wire around her wrist and would not let go. Paula with her queer-looking, blue-flame eyes. Mathilde Oessetrich, china-white and a little frightened, standing there at the footboard and gazing down on to the bed. The professional-looking face of the doctor beginning to pucker wisely.

"Mathilde, have you been up to your old tricks of taking captaincy of another daughter's soul?"

A long sob forced itself through Paula's clenched lips.

"Nonsense, I suppose it's her appendicitis pain again."

"No, the child's case doesn't diagnose that readily. This appendix seems to be up under her heart or in her brain. We can't cut to find this pain. We have to probe."

"That is mid-victorian. Girls don't do it any more. Swooning off at love affairs. Pish."

"Ah, now we are getting at it. Then there _is_----"

"Oh, Ehrenfest, you're an old granny. Always have been. Suppose there is. It just isn't done--it isn't nice--prostrating herself in this fashion. Dramatics, I call it."

"The child hasn't prostrated herself, Mathilde. She is in a state of nervous collapse. We must get at the source of this thing, and see what's to be done before she comes out from under the influence."

Paula turned her eyes upon her parent.

"Tell him, Mother."

"Tell him? Tell him what? This is abominable. Having my children talk to me and of me as if I were a criminal."

"Tell him, Mother."

"Tell him that the only normal strong and capable member of this family is myself?"

"Tell him about Dudley."

"Well, then, Ehrey, I suppose I am to confess to you, like a culprit parent, that Dudley Wells is the occasion of Ermangarde's brain storm."

"The author?"

"I thought the incident was closed and forgotten when he suddenly ceased coming here about a month ago. That is the sum total of it, so far as I know. But if that is the cause of Ermangarde's brain storm, I beg to be excused. I am going back to bed."

"Mother--that isn't the sum total----"

"It is a blessing I have a sense of humor to fall back upon. If ever a woman has tried to rear her daughters into self-sufficient, independent women, capable of swinging the great fortunes which will ultimately come into their hands, I have. I brought a great fortune into my marriage and, if I do say it I have managed and enlarged it with the clearsightedness of an entire corporation. I have tried to rear my girls toward that ideal of self-sufficiency. I have tried to inoculate them with a realization of their own social and economic integrity. I have----"

"But, my dear Mathilde, nature is----"

"Bah! Nature is a trickster. Let the weak succumb. If my girls must marry, let them use the same judgment and discrimination about it that I expect them to use in the management of affairs not so vital to their well-being. Nature tricks the weak. Gray matter, not passion, rules the strong. You've something of a sense of humor yourself, Ehrenfest. It should afford you a real laugh. Me of all women! Even Olga, I hear, is having herself psychoanalyzed in quest of her particular sex complex. Ermangarde here in hysterics because of a poet who wears a size fifteen collar, and Paula bemoaning her girlhood away because the man she fancied herself in love with had the good judgment to take himself down to Porto Rico and----"

"You drove him!"

"Ermangarde! 'Tilda! Not that old argument now, please!"

"But she did, Ehrey! She did! She drove him down there just as surely as if she had pursued him every inch of the way. Ridiculed him down there. Harrison wasn't made for that swampy coffee country.... It was like sending him to his death ... a subtle, terrible way of doing it."

"Paula, you don't know what you are saying----"

"I know I don't, Ehrey. I'm sorry, Mother. I guess I--I am queer, Mother, just as you say I am. So queer that--that sometimes it frightens me--frightens me so that I cannot stand by now and see my little sister--Ermangarde--clutching on so to those illusions you are snatching from her. Olga is trying to fight her way clear. I don't matter any more. But Ermie! Mother, don't try to standardize us all according to your ideas of strength and efficiency. We are more like my father must have been."

"That's what I'm struggling to save you from, if you only had the good sense to know it."

"We are not the strong, fearless captains of women that you want us to be. Not even Olga! Let us be what we are, Mother. Don't break us all with your will."

"'Tilda, these are stern words for your daughter to have to use."

"It's Ermie, Ehrey, that gives me the courage to use them. She won't talk about it, not even to me, but Mother has driven Dudley away, too. He hasn't been here for weeks. Mother, hasn't it meant anything to you, Ermie's face, those weeks while Dudley was coming? Her new prettiness, Mother?--you--why--why that girl there--Bertha--that servant sitting there holding Ermie's hand has been more to her these weeks--kinder--more understanding. Mother, Ermie's stubborn. She's been going about with Ewald ever since Dudley left. Don't drive her to things like that--or worse. Ewald isn't the man for her to be spending her time with. Mother, change your attitude to Dudley. Bring him back. You be the one to take the initiative. Oh Mother, give her what she wants. What is the result of what's happened? Our Ermie, sneaking around with Spencer Ewald, a married man twice her age. Mother--make things right."

"Mathilde, Paula is right. There is a time for everything. The time has come for you to give in to Ermangarde."

"Sentimental nonsense!"

"You've a sick child there, Mathilde."

"Well, where is he? What has become of him? Who frightened him off? In my day it took more than a foolish old irate parent to----"

Ermangarde stirred there on the bed then, and began to cry through her tightly closed lids.

"Ermangarde, look up, child, it is your old hobgoblin, Ehrey."

"Ermie, see, dear. It's Paula. Open your eyes. See, dear, we're all here. Everything is all right. Mother is as anxious as any of us for Dudley to come back--aren't you, Mother? Aren't you, Mother?"

"Yes."

"See, and everything is going to be happy and lovely, dear. Ermie, you don't have to talk, dear. Just whisper to us where to reach Dudley. Mother and all of us want it that way. Let go of Bertha's hand, dear. See, here is Mother's instead. Tell us, dear, where we can reach Dudley...."

For answer, with two great blisters of tears forcing their way out of her closed eyes, Ermangarde reached under her pillow for a little wad of envelope concealed there and, burying her head under the bolster so that her sobs were muffled, handed the bit of paper up to Paula:

"_Ermangarde_," it read, "_your little notes make it so hard. I have not seen you in all these weeks, well because, and I should, I must tell you, one night something inside of me just curled up and died._

"_It seems too dreadful, for me, who dwells down where the hem of your skirt touches, to have to be the one to write these words. But somehow I must find the strength to be brutal with the truth. Something, little Ermangarde, killed the perfect thing that was forming between us. Something too subtle and too cruel for me to analyse, but toward the end, dear girl, I never put my foot into your home without a dreadful crushing sense of the imminence of the death that was taking place in my heart._

"_Forces too enormous and too infinitesimal for us to cope with were at work. The shortcomings were all mine, but alas! there they were. It makes this letter a bitterer task for me to be obliged to close it on a note of my own happiness. I was married yesterday to Rosemary. You remember the night we met her at the play. And that is just what she is. Rosemary. A lovely sprig of it, and she has turned life into a garden. We are sailing to-morrow for the Madeiras. Ermangarde, try to remember me kindly, as I shall always remember you, beautifully._

"_Dudley Wells._"

After the three of them had read this, standing there shoulder to shoulder and their breathing beating down on to the page, Paula turned suddenly upon her mother, the blue flames, thin as breath, leaping along her eyes.

"I hate you, Mathilde Oessetrich. I hate you. I hate you." And cramming her handkerchief up against the terrifying words, ran choking from the room.

***

And yet the very next morning Ermangarde was up and about as usual. There was something diamond-like in her brightness. Hard. Showy. She was even rude to Paula.

"Don't try to baby me, Paula. I'm all right, I won't stay in bed! Do keep out of my affairs, dear. I know what I'm about. I'm quite well. Don't interfere."

So Paula went back to weaving her hours of music along the keys and Ermangarde to the routine of her French and her drawing and her fencing and her singing lessons. And if once in a while she skipped a luncheon or a dinner for which there was no particular accounting, Mrs. Oessetrich held thin-lipped peace. There was that dry, diamond hardness to Ermangarde.

Every Saturday, Madam Lina Gerbhardt, Mrs. Oessetrich's lifelong friend, an enormous contralto who wore stencilled scarves and had taught Calvé, came to the house to give Ermangarde her singing lesson, and then remained for lunch. Ermangarde had a clear little mountain stream of a voice. Lovely in its middle register and with a thin fluty upper range to which she had climbed on years of Madam Gerbhardt's careful _arpeggios_. It was pleasant, during these lessons, to dust softly about the hall that led to the music room.

"Do--me--fah--doh--fah--sol--me--doh--ahh-h-hhhhh--"

Madam Gerbhardt's voice ran underneath Ermangarde's, booming it.

"Doh--me--fah--doh----"

Light-colored Tosti bubbles. Flying banners of Bizet. Richard Strauss.

Bertha liked these lessons. Once Madam Gerbhardt thrust two tickets into Bertha's hands. "Here, girl, there is a Ukrainian chorus singing at Carnegie Hall to-night. You should enjoy that. Go, if Mrs. Oessetrich can spare you."

Bertha went and took Helga. The seats were very far back and the faces of the chorus dim as dreams. The drony silence while you waited. The yellow slits of light. The Slav songs that were full of heart beat and the Slav songs that were full of despair. The love of a harlot. The death of a Moujik. Cossacks who chant at dusk. It was as if the heart were embers and the chorus were sitting in its glow. Love and life and the taste of the red lips of harlots and the running of rivers that are made of tears. There was one. It sang of the Volga. The Volga! Boatmen whose thighs were sweating and whose eyes were bulging from the drag. The pulling boatmen along the shore....

"Come," said Helga when the intermission came. "Let's run along. These Polish wops give me the blues."

There was nothing to do but go. Helga could be so querulous. But up under the roof, all of the night rocked softly, like a river. The Volga. The Volga. Rushing of tears along with the tide and where men sang of joy in a key that was minor....

***

One lovely spring Saturday when the breakfast room, where the family lunched, was wide open to the languid drift of spring, Madam Gerbhardt, who had been popping salted almonds into her mouth, chopping them sharply and then popping more, spoke out suddenly, just as Bertha was passing her the fillet of sole:

"Well, I see where Rollo Farley died."

"No!"

"Yes, didn't you read it in the _Times_ this morning? It seems he spoke at the Poetry Society night before last, complained of feeling ill when he arrived home, took a sleeping powder before he went to bed, and never woke up. Oh!"

"Bertha, you clumsy!"

"It's all right, no harm done."

"Bertha, do be careful. She didn't ruin your sleeve with the fish sauce, did she? Bertha, Helga should be serving anyhow. I cannot understand why you insist upon carrying half of that careless girl's work for her--so Rollo Farley is dead."

"Rollo--Farley----"

"A greatly overestimated man. A one-book author."

"Yes, Mother, but what a book! I think that _The Cathedral Under the Sea_ belongs to the esoteric group of really great poems."

"Pish. Free verse. Free-and-easy-verse. I hate faddism. The forms that were good enough for Goethe and Wordsworth and----"

"Have you read _The Cathedral Under the Sea_, Mother?"

"No, but I know what the entire movement stands for. You belong to the violent reactionaries if you permit two lines to rhyme. A couplet is about as out of date as an antimacassar."

"You speak precisely with the authority of one who knows nothing about the subject."

"At least, Ermangarde, I am not a reactionary in the way I permit my daughters to address me."

"But, Mother, you must admit that at least I speak with the authority of having read the book. _The Cathedral Under the Sea_ is a great impressionistic poem, not the mere dithyrambic prose that the free verse writers are dabbling in. Its metrical devices are as cunning as Masefield's effects of the rolling of the sea."

"Now, when you speak of Masefield----"

"Exactly, Mother, it is because you can appreciate Masefield, that I won't have you condemning Rollo Farley before you have read _The Cathedral Under the Sea_."

"Ermangarde is right, 'Tilda. Farley accepts technique without being tied to it."

"Of course he does. He does precisely what your Masefield does. He does what he pleases with his rhyme scheme between his first and his sixth or seventh lines but those lines hold the internal ones firmly together. Farley is not an anarchist. He's merely a Progressive. He dares to liberate form and language."

"Pish, you've read that somewhere."

"I've felt it, you mean. Besides I'm not bothered about form. Much of the beauty of _The Cathedral Under the Sea_ lies in its formlessness--the formlessness of life. You understand, don't you, Madam?"

Madam, who had a pudgy, a square, an emotional hand, placed it to the left of her stencilled scarf and closed her eyes.

"Indeed I do. Any work of art, regardless of its form or formlessness, is great when it makes you feel that its creator has dipped into your very heart for his sensation."

"Precisely."

"That turbulent, inarticulate creature in _The Cathedral Under the Sea_! I can see her sitting there, beautiful-eyed and barefoot, in the forest part of the poem. You remember? Listening. I suppose to the music of the spheres. Hearing it, full of it, and yet silent with it. That is how I feel about so much that is beautiful and fragile in life. Full of it, bursting with it, and yet with no power to express it."

"Oh Madam, you _do_ understand!"

"That is what I meant, Ermangarde, in our lesson this very morning. Lift the tones, or they will sink back into the pools of silence and remain unsung. Can't you understand, Mathilde, why we--why that one beautiful thing, even though he never wrote a line that amounted to a hill of beans afterward, can perpetuate the name of Rollo Farley?"

"I must read it for myself," said Mrs. Oessetrich. "I am always prejudiced in advance by a book which has created the furor that this one did. I've never been able to abide his wife. She was a Neidringhaus. Ethan's daughter. One of those Botticelli creatures who is all effect and little else. And how she has capitalized the success of _The Cathedral Under the Sea_! I actually think she sometimes believes that she wrote it herself. Her proprietary air. They were wretchedly unhappy together, you know. Services from the old house in Gramercy Park, I suppose?"

"Yes, Thursday afternoon."

"Well, I'm not going. I might have put myself out while his mother lived. Lucretia Farley was at least harmless and not an attitudinizing Mona Lisa. Bertha, get Circle 345 for me on the telephone. I'll be half an hour late for my bridge lesson at this rate. Paula, for heaven's sake, stop staring. You are getting the habit. If it is one thing I can't abide, it is light blue eyes that stare ..."

"_The Cathedral Under the Sea_," said Paula. "I was just trying to think: Where--The Cathedral Under the Sea--I--know--her--from--somewhere----"

How curious, turning the corner, just as the bier, slanting, was being carried down the steps. The violet blanket, starlit with anemones, slid a little. Its fragrance stole out softly over the fringe of onlookers. They formed the aisle, these onlookers. The bier passed between them, across the sidewalk and into the hearse. The blanket kept breathing out fragrance. You wanted to faint into it. Sweet. Wistful. Tired. It rode on shoulders and rolled a little, that hoisted caravan of Rollo, and the sidewalk was a desert and the blanket a purple sky with stars and the end of the desert was Rollo's eternity.

Something rather sickening happened then and brought you back into the fringe of the onlookers. The bier was tilted into the hearse. It ran forward a little as if on casters, and two doors with silver handles closed and pinched your heart. The doors closing that way. Like shutting a dear book that had a filigree lock on it and turning the tiny key. The doors closing. The last line of a sonnet.

You stood in the fringe that made the aisle through which the bier passed across the sidewalk, with a place nicked out of your heart.

And then the hearse moved up and a carriage slid into its place, and down the steps, through the sweet breath the violets had left, came the mourners. Mr. Farley. It hurt somehow to look. The years had shrunk him up. He seemed shorter, and all the bombastic pink flesh hung now in pale little oysters of empty skin, and his legs, that had used to be fat and strutty, wavered now, and kept wanting to knock at the knees. It was horrible to see him feel three times with the toe of his shoe before he ventured the step.

With Veronica it was different. Her foot came down coolly and slimly just where she pointed it, and through the mesh of her veil you could see the pale ellipse of her face. Dim. But the features in order. The neatly closed lips. Careful curtains of hair. A griefless face. Dry and oval. Ascetic even of tears.

It made one proud. So burstingly proud to stand there on the fringe of the onlookers, rich with the grief that the face of Veronica was as barren of as a crag. To stand there rich and brimming with the precious sorrow of a love! Poor Veronica, who had no grief.

Gradually the carriages were filled. There were the explorer and the broker and the ex-ambassador and Beebe, only without his portfolio, who had interrupted the family at luncheon that day and caused the nesselrode pudding to go out untasted.

The women whispered and made little sounds like the glass icicles of a chandelier. The ushers brushed their white gloved hands together. It was all very cool and very tearless, and the carriages began to move off without more ado.

It was easy in the city to keep pace with them. There were long halts for traffic and the horses, never out of walk, lifted their hoofs with almost a rhythmic leisure. Clip. Clop. The wheels, slow hoops. Unflecked drivers' whips. Wide sun-washed streets, drowsy with spring afternoon, and the narrow black procession winding out along them. Bertha followed from the sidewalk. It was easy, block after block, but then up over the shoulder of an asphalt hill, the green flush of the country set in and the sidewalks left off and now you had to follow more quickly along the stiff frozen dirt road, but just the same you wound along behind, sweetly and deeply into the quiet. Clip. Clop.

The caravan of Rollo rolling rapidly now, out toward the sun's edge, and Bertha with her gift of grief hurrying after it. She could feel her shoulders spangled with perspiration. They had been so deeply white to him, like the flesh of the magnolia. He had trolled four of his fingers along her whiteness. They had melted against her throat and down into her heart. White tapering roads, in the dark forest along which she ran calling.

The first minarets of the cemetery came up over the next hill. Pale moonrises against afternoon sky. A white battalion of a city, there at attention in the spring afternoon. The winding grind of the gravel roads, and the creeping sweetness of the earth. You could almost taste it. How they ground and squeaked, those wheels, and the horses made great splashes of gravel, and the sentinel city stood unbowing as Rollo rode in.

The little pop-ups of anemones. There was a turned-over clump of them beside the grave, standing there on their heads waiting to be patted down into turf again.

There was a yew tree grew beside an urn. Quiet of that! It made the day seem to pause.

The group tightened up around the grave. Closed solidarity of those backs again. But down on the lovely slant of hill the yew grew beside the urn and it was pleasant to wait there in the freckled shade. It ran along Bertha and mottled her into the background. It made her the color of a sparrow in a tree.

The white and listening marbles. The hill might have been a tripod and the faint throbbing of the burial service a slow rhythmic incense stealing down among the headstones.

A poet was dead.

***

Long after the carriages had crunched down along the drive again, and the hearse, lighter now, and looking silly with haste had turned cityward, Bertha stole up to the hill. The sun was gone, and in between the serried ranks of the white battalions the light was the color of sabre steel. The stars, too, had that steely aloofness of a spring day turned suddenly dead cold. They were the very early stars, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter, who love in their seasons, to edge the day.

***

The anemones were back in place. They had been patted there with the broad side of a spade. They looked broken-necked and dying. But the mound itself was raw and brown and its breath came up at you like a sigh. There was a pillow of roses at the head. An empty bed. Rollo was gone. You could sit and weep now, unashamedly.

Rollo must know by now. Everything.

***

Strange Paula. Sometimes now, she did not leave her room for a week. She played a great deal, for hours, in the whispering fashion up alone in her room. Beethoven. Brahms. More Beethoven. And sewed too. Pink wispy things that grew into a pile and then were folded away in trunks between tissue paper.

"Nutty" was Helga's frequent and succinct comment. Her eyes could seem to water at the evidences of pale finery strewn about Paula's fourth floor room. She fingered the stuffs as if they were flesh, and once Bertha walked in on her posing before Paula's dressing mirror, a web of a nightgown, with two lace butterflies poised on the shoulder straps, held up before her.

"Why shouldn't I? She's just my age. The Lord gave me the same kind of flesh. I love it, too. Anyway, she's nutty."

"You mustn't touch anything of hers!"

"Why not? She's no better than me. She thinks what I out and did. What do you think is in the mind of a girl who sits here day after day making flimsies like these, when she isn't even going to be married? She is no better with her mind than I am with my body. Only she is protected from doing what nobody gave a tinker's dam whether I done or not. This poor little nut thinks she's making a trousseau."

"Why not? Maybe she is."

"Why not? Eddie the chauffeur told me why not. There's no man. He passed out. He wasn't much of a go-getter and old Napoleon sent him down to the coffee plantations and he ate a few fever germs. It's a phony trousseau for a spooky groom. Old Napoleon knows. She comes up when the stuff gets too cluttery and packs it away herself in the trunks. Haven't you ever seen Miss Paula stare when she does it? That kid's queer. She sits up here staring at what she's missed. Sewing for what she's missed and trying to play on the piano what she's missed. Only she's protected from going out after what she's missed. That's the only difference between her being good and me bad."

"Helga, put it down. Someone is coming. Mrs. Oessetrich."

"Bertha, Miss Olga has just telephoned from her Settlement House. It is Commencement day for the girls in her Vocational Guidance Classes. Those nice girls are being graduated into full-fledged milliners. She wants the two silver punch bowls. The big car is up for repairs and Eddie has Miss Ermangarde out in the sedan. I'll have to send you down with them in a taxi."

"Yah----."

"I do believe you are up here doing Helga's sweeping for her! What are you made of? Cast iron? Helga, you shameless girl, you, letting Bertha carry your share of the work in this fashion month after month. Get down the two silver punch bowls, Bertha. Never mind, Helga, I'll put away those pink things of Miss Paula's. The idea, Bertha up here doing your sweeping for you. Doing the work for two. What is that girl made of? Sometimes, I wonder...."

***

The Vocational Guidance House on Christie Street had no trade entrance. Only a neat front door, painted red. It stood open, and it was all that Bertha could do to wedge in sidewise with the outlandish bulge of her punch bowls.

The door to the left of the bare hallway was also open. What had once been two parlors of a private residence were thrown into one. It made a sort of small lecture hall, with a platform at one end and rows of camp chairs facing it. An American flag covered one wall and there were white Swiss window curtains and geraniums in bright blue pots and over the platform the usual engraved, "Opening of the First Continental Congress" and "Franklin before the House of Lords."

Odor of embalmed philanthropy.

There were three rows of girls seated on the platform. Latin-looking faces beneath smooth, tamed hair and their young bodies seeming to flicker under the prisons of the neat blue skirts and white shirtwaists.

Blazing absence of blazing neckerchiefs and of blazing skirts. Doused Carmens.

An audience with firm, dry, Anglo-Saxon lips sat along the camp chairs and stared up at them. The safe, trained little Carmens who used toothbrushes and knew now, with an Anglo-Saxon finality, that a rose between the lips was not a rose at all, but lechery. Olga Oessetrich was speaking from the platform.

It was easy to hear through the open doorway. Olga's voice was so clear. As clear as her face with the hair worn smoothly away from it. As clear as her hands, white square hands that came out boldly from the mannish cuffs.

It was pleasant just to stand there and peer over the great protruding armful of bowls. Olga, who when she came to the house, only sat about with her long indolent legs crossed and watched the smoke of her cigarette with her eyes like slits, here now, eager, and talking down into those careful-lipped faces with a fine young fervor.

Every so often a little patter of hand-clapping broke through and then she stood and waited, her arms folded across her flat boyish bosom and her glance sure as a shot down into her audience.

And then the girls with the Latin faces and the bodies like the quiver of flame began to pass one by one for the tubes of white paper that were bound with red ribbon. Olga handing them, one to each, from the pyramid of them upon the table. Each girl as she passed stood for a moment in the little area of Olga's words, flushed, and then sat down to applause. Slim sapling girls with smooth hair and stiff cuffs like Olga's. Oh, how you wanted to think it was fine ... all the doused Carmens....

Suddenly Bertha moved forward, so that her head protruded in. Olga's voice and the face of one of the thin sapling girls were so clear....

"... this young woman need feel no embarrassment as I dwell upon these facts of her early childhood. She is a glory to our institution, and those of you who have endowed us so generously in the past may well look upon this girl with a kind of pride that will inspire you to endow us still more generously in the future.

"Some gracious maternal scheme of things threw her into our midst at the age of fourteen. She has developed from the pinched little undersized waif she then was into a young woman who is prepared to take up her place in the world with dignity and self-respect.

"Chita Migulchi, I have the honor to award you the first honorable mention in your class and a diploma which registers you at our industrial bureau as a graduate milliner of the Christie Street Vocational Guidance School for Girls."

Chita! Chita! You wanted to cry, your throat was so warm and full. Little Chita with the Jocko eyes, but her face smooth now and the lovely pallor of nun's veiling. The well-brushed sheen of her hair. It was hard not to cry with the warmness and fullness. It pressed up against the eyeballs and made them dim. You kept pushing open the door ... Chita....

That made a draught and someone wanted the door closed. It swung to with a little nick. It left you standing in the hall, which had grown very dark, hugging those preposterous punch-bowls and groping your way toward the basement kitchen.

***

There was something about Ermangarde's smile that glinted. She did it with her lips closed and with the merest lifting of their corners. It was a cold ray of a smile, that made you think of pale-flanked little fish swimming snugly under ice. Her open laugh never came through any more. She smiled constantly, but with her lips in their rigid icicle. You were conscious of the warm white young teeth behind them, but they never lit up her inscrutability. Sometimes her mother regarded her with small, bright, cockatoo eyes.

"Ermangarde, you are pale. A good tonic is what you need. Liver, probably."

"Oh no, Mother."

"Nothing to be ashamed of. We all have them."

"Don't worry about mine, Mother."

"Your father used to say that, too. But I found it more expedient to worry about his liver than about the execrable bad temper that could result from its moodiness."

"Your panacea for all mortal ills, Mother, the liver its limitations."

"Of course. Meaning that yours is the immortal ill. I am not so sure that my despised little liver pill is not best sort of cure for lovesickness too. Puppy-lovesickness."

"Mother!"

"Great pouting girl like you. Why, you should be on your knees for thankfulness that you found the fellow out in time. You have been jilted, only you haven't the sound judgment to know it. And here you are, eating out your heart because----'

"Mother, if you discuss it, I'll leave the house--I can't stand it----"

"I am no more eager to discuss it than you are. But you are sallow and you are enigmatic and you are dull. The few hours a day that you spend at home are depressing for the entire household, and, while we are on the subject, you have been seen here and there with Ewald. You are meeting him in public places. Now it must stop. He's a married man and was coming to this house with his wife, Helene Craig, when you were in rompers. It's disgusting and vulgar, and if it continues I shall call him up at his club and forbid him...."

The little icicle smile of Ermangarde's was out.

"Don't forbid any more, Mother. I wouldn't, really."

"You're a sour, enigmatic girl," repeated Mrs. Oessetrich. "The world is yours. You have youth, wealth, and position, but instead of taking advantage of your great opportunities, you sit on the edge of them and mourn for the loss of something that you never owned."

"You mean for the loss of something that you never permitted me to own, Mother."

"Oh, how weary I am of the exactions of my faultfinding daughters. I must be younger than they, in spirit at least, because they all treat me in a fashion that makes me feel juvenile and incorrigible. Family ties and the vulgar wranglings of the household! I wish I were like the cook in my kitchen, free to----"

"You couldn't be like--her, Mother."

"What?"

"Oh--nothing."

***

The war years plunged in. The city turned the sallow green of khaki. Regiments poured through the streets. Flashing impersonal rows of animated scissors. Farm boys with callouses deep in their hands, marching off, to war on farm boys they had never seen. Great oxygen tanks of patriotism, generated in a hurry, gushed out volatile and inflammable from coast to coast. The phrase "Safe for Democracy" began to jiggle like electric signs before bewildered eyes. Dizzy with its euphony, men fell into regimental step. Thousands and thousands of scissors of them. The whole thing began to swing into a horrible motion like the slow acceleration of a voodoo dance.

Envoys crossed word-swords and all the little men began to run, and the red threads of high-sounding idealisms and patriotism to come out in eyeballs. The inflamed voodoo dance around the cauldron brewed on the table of paternal governments began to grow....

That was the way the men went off to war, riveted with that paternal eye and inflamed with the generated oxygen, the generated phrases, and the generated idealism.

Sometimes they passed the house. Regiments of them. They were so young. Lean flanked. Time and time again Bertha drew down the sashes against their passing. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. It was a horrible rhythm. The willy-nilly young men, steaming up hate.

Olga was in khaki, too. It gave her the sleek flatness of a fowl. Where the expensive tweeds had been clumsy, the khaki lay slick. Slanting shoulders, neat at the armholes and a pat little hat. It made her busy and important, all the hating. She drove a small khaki-colored ambulance around town. Everywhere. She was very earnest.

The world safe for democracy. The little women without sons began to bustle so. The sudden splendidness of making the world safe for democracy. It made you as important as you were in your own home, on general cleaning day. Sweaters to be sorted. Chocolates to be stacked in boxes and addressed for overseas. Sandwiches to be cut for canteens. Chest protectors to be stitched in the name of democracy.

Olga ran her ambulance with her lips straight and her eyes probing ahead and stern. The zeal of the women. Democracy. Sandwiches to be cut. Chocolates to be stacked. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.

There was a portrait of Beethoven hung in the dining room.

"Take it down, Bertha," said Olga.

Paula cried, as Bertha, steadied on a ladder by Olga, unhooked it from its moulding.

"That's absurd, Olga. What has Beethoven to do with this horrible fighting?"

"War is war."

"Exactly. War is only war. A matter of nations. Art transcends war. Art is the language of God and war is the barking of men. Beethoven is bigger than war. Next year there may be a new war and we may be in league with the very nation we are hating now. Wars change. Beethoven is eternal."

"Easy there, Bertha. Let me hoist. There!"

"Olga--don't----"

"Paula, don't be absurd! How can I ask those boys who are going overseas to walk into my mother's house with that picture hanging on the wall? Have you no patriotism?"

"No. Not that kind."

"You talk like a pacifist!"

"Perhaps--I am."

"Paula!"

"If it means loathing war sufficiently to bear the unpleasant brunt of being branded a coward, I suppose I am a pacifist. Yes, I am a pacifist! I loathe all this blind rushing pell-mell into a struggle arranged by the mighty minority and paid for with the lives of young men who are drugged on trumped-up ideals. I loathe war which destroys the internationalism of art for the puny nationalism of men. The maimed bodies aren't the worst. That's the easy way to hate war. The safe way. I--hate it just as much for the maimed souls that stay at home--to whom the noise of military brass bands is louder than the music of Beethoven."

"Paula, you are merely stupid and sentimental, but just the same those are dangerous, disloyal utterances. You're not well. Go upstairs to your music. I expect some service men here this afternoon for tea and dancing in the drawing-room. Don't make me ashamed to bring them into this house. Bertha, take that picture upstairs into the storeroom."

"Olga!"

"Paula, I know you're not well. But please, dear, never talk like that, even among ourselves. Do you realize that what you said, even though it may be partially true, makes you a traitor? A traitor to your country. Paula--look at me--a traitor----"

The word bit in like a little asp. All the way up to the storeroom, slanting the picture along the narrow stairways, it stung across Bertha's silence.

Paula, who loved Beethoven and wept his lyricism softly along the keys. Paula, who loved Beethoven more than she could hate anything or anybody. Paula a traitor?

***

Barney, the private night watchman, liked Helga. You knew it by her new slanting and birdwise look. For a long time there had been something shy about her. New silences. She was sweeter about the dull evenings tucked up there under the slant of roof. Sometimes she sewed and smiled or, if Paula was playing, let her head fall back against the chair and her mouth drop open softly. On warm nights, she stole out on the rear stoop for whispering moments with Barney as he passed on his rounds, and on snowy nights, the kitchen range was kept banked a little more than usual. But even after she had gone upstairs for the bit of sewing or to lie back lulled to the weaving of Paula's music, she always slid forward a bit on her chair to the knocking of the night stick. One. Two. Three. Slid forward with the lifted, eager look. Then Bertha knew. The silences were so telltale. Helga, who could suddenly sit neat-lipped and rather inscrutable all evening, and then wear the little smile to bed. It was hard not to tremble for that smile. You trembled more for it than for the garrulous bitterness.

Only once in a while there was a flash in the pan of the old Helga.

In winter she had to snatch her visits with Barney, whispering with him in the kitchen, the ugly gray dish cloth drying across the pan and the great blob of brown soap still soft and smelling from riding greasy water.

"Having to sit company with a fellow like Barney in somebody's kitchen! There never was a girl didn't want a place where she could punch up a few sofa pillows and turn on a pink lamp. A self-respecting man like Barney, and me with no place to entertain him but next to the kitchen sink. A real honest-to-goodness man like him."

Barney was like that. Honest to goodness. A scrub of rough red Irish hair. Enormous hands that fiddled with his hat. Bright blue eyes with wrinkled lids that he batted for all he was worth, and when he laughed his entire face focused in toward the center, until it looked like a shirred rosette.

And Barney could make Helga laugh. Jerky, immature laughter and one night, when she had her head thrown back in merriment at one of his slow overgrown antics, he put out a shy big hand and touched her softly on the neck where it arched.

"You're like a little bird, there," he said.

She was broody after that and Bertha found her crying the next morning, because Mrs. Oessetrich had her at cleaning some high and difficult pantry shelves that aggravated the chronic pain she had in her side, and Bertha did them for her and later that same day she cried because she broke a porcelain bowl and Bertha took that brunt for her and that evening, upstairs in the pocket of the fourth floor back room, she broke out.

"Barney--likes--me."

"Yah----"

"What do you think he says to me the other night, Bertha, and touched me here--soft on my neck. 'You're like a little bird there'--I likta died, I wish I hadda----."

"Helga----."

"He's got an old woman. His mother. Eighty-eight. Keeps house for him. I know what's in the back of his head same as if I could see in. He don't come out and say it, but he keeps hinting. Wants to take me there. Wants his old woman to see me before she passes on. The way he said that one thing to me. 'You're like a little bird there.' I likta died. I wish I hadda----"

"No--no----"

"Yes! I could land Barney. He's just waiting until his old woman passes on. I could land him, but I wouldn't! A man like Barney to happen to me. Got him hook and bait. And what do I do? Unhook him and throw him back into the pond. That's being white, ain't it, Bertha?

"Yes--Helga----"

***

The boys kept marching. You had to stop at street corners to let them tramp past. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.

You scrubbed floors to that rhythm. You breathed in your sleep to it. And the boys with the wide clean faces and the calloused hands stalked and stalked, made drunk with the sudden ecstasy of being a foe. It made the leap in the dark a thing of glory ... that spat of shot ... across the eyes....

Every week Olga held canteen in her mother's gold and brocade drawing-room. Rugs were dragged back. Furniture stacked, planks spread from chair-back to chair-back and then piled with pyramids of sandwiches and mounds of salad stuck all over with small American flags. There was a victrola for dancing.

Helga could carve charming sandwiches. Little hearts and spades and diamond-shaped ones made in layers. The boys gobbled them at one mouthful. But sometimes, when the pain in her side was gnawing from the hours of slicing and buttering and stacking, she made plain, square, ragged ones and Olga was cross.

Olga! Life spun for her those war months and for the little group of drab-clad girls who came to help on canteen days. The eager, hating girls. It was thrilling to hate! Thrilling to feed these wide-faced, clean-faced boys the catnip. It made them heroic and gay and debonair and careless, and full of a very fine fervor for fighting that foe unknown and that foe unseen. It made the fine, high-sounding war phrases shine.

It was easier somehow to hate, and to want to fight, with all of the machinery for making the world safe for democracy so busily in motion. The making of the gas masks. The measuring of the chest expansion. The cutting of the sandwiches. The wearing of the puttees.

If you were a farm hand with those hands still callous from the plow, and every night had slept in the socks and under-drawers that you worked in by day, and all your youth had flung forkfuls of fertilizer out over fields and spat in ditches while you dug them, oh it was stirring and exciting suddenly to be fed the heart-shaped sandwiches, one to a bite, and to be danced with by all the Olgas, whose hands were white caresses and whose eyes adored. It made you long for a thousand thousand foes and a thousand thousand hates.

Busy days for Olga and the thousands of eager girls in the service, who were wearing becoming khaki and beating the tom-tom of the war dance.

Sixteen months of it and on the seventeenth Olga, her eyes high with strange new fires, sailed on a transport.

It was all very simple. She bounced in one day with a jangle of the keys to her studio, while Mrs. Oessetrich and Paula were at lunch. A solemn little meal. Mrs. Oessetrich, with the editorial page of the morning _Times_ propped up against her tumbler, and eating, in her pecksniffy fashion, short quick forkfuls of an _omelette soufflé_. Paula, whose blue eyes were so languid, almost a little stagnant now, as if something in them had jammed and could not seem to flow on.

"Well, 'Tilda, I've popped in for good-bys. We're sailing sometime between now and midnight."

Mrs. Oessetrich swallowed her portion of omelet, and brushed her mouth with her napkin as a man would. Two ways.

"Well, that's that," she said, and pushed back from the table.

"That's that, Mrs. Oessetrich," repeated Olga, and smiled at her with the eyes with the bonfires in them and whipped a cigarette out of a soft pack of them in her khaki pocket and drew up a chair beside the table and crossed her long legs and drew a puff of smoke.

"Have some lunch?"

"No thanks, Mother."

"Umph."

"Say, Mother, I think you're immense." Olga's eyes were round when she said that, with cockatoo rims to them exactly like Mrs. Oessetrich's. They made her very much her mother's daughter.

"I suppose you feared a sloppy mess. Well don't worry, if I have tears to shed I won't prepare to shed them now."

"I'll write often."

"I suppose this is where I should break in with the usual instructions from moron mothers to moron offspring. 'Keep your feet dry.'"

"Don't you love it, Paula? Isn't she great?"

"And there is no use crossing a submarine until you come to it."

"Here's the key to the studio, 'Tilda. You won't mind, dear, keeping the lease for me. It's only a hundred a month."

"I hate waste."

"I know, dear, but it's such a mess, subletting."

"Very well. Give me the keys."

"Where's Ermangarde?"

"Out."

"Oh."

"Take good care of yourself, Paula. Now--now--please--no waterworks!"

"You know--my sentiments--Olga----."

"Yes, and the true pacifist drops his lamb's clothing in time of war."

"Not the true one. The weak one. He drops it because it is so much easier to fight than not to fight----"

"You're sick, darling. Take care of her, 'Tilda. Good-by, Helga. See that you don't elope with Barney before I get back and don't be a sly one and shove off all your chores on to Bertha. We know your system."

Mrs. Oessetrich stood up very straight, as if there were a rod up her back, and her eyes were sharp and darting and as dry as shoe buttons.

"Hurry, girl."

"Good-by, Bertha, you old Rock of Gibraltar. It helps somehow, knowing you're here--on the job. You--whoever you are--so long--old Bertha."

"Good-by--Miss Olga."

"Well, Mathilde, Paula--old dears--tell Ermie good-by and to cut out the Ewald nonsense. It's disgusting. My bags are out in the taxi. The meter will click me out of house and home. So long, dears. Everybody. You know the address. American Expeditionary Forces. Paris--S'long...."

It was very silent, and for every mouthful of tea poor Paula swallowed a great vein came out in her neck. Her omelet and editorial finished, Mrs. Oessetrich rose and following her custom, carried the few crumbs in her lap into the conservatory to shake them into the aquarium.

"Order the car for three, Bertha."

But it was almost five when Mrs. Oessetrich emerged finally from her room. Eddie started up from a doze at the wheel as she swept out.

"Where, Madam?"

"Oh--why--just drive."

Her eyes were very shiny and the cockatoo rims quite pink. And Bertha had to run out after her with her handkerchief, which she had forgotten.

***

Ermangarde had not returned by nine that evening, but a messenger brought a letter. Bertha carried it into Mrs. Oessetrich, who was sitting alone in the drawing-room, tapping her foot. The high chandelier flooded the room through crystal. Once in a while a prism clicked.

"For me?"

"Yah--a letter."

"_Dear Mother_," it read, "_by the time you receive this note Ewald and I will be on a steamer bound for somewhere sunny. There is nothing to feel concerned about. We are very happy and are going into this thing with our eyes open._

"_Ermangarde._"

The old, the terrible, the shoe button eyes of Mrs. Oessetrich. When she raised them to Bertha, they lay shattered in her head, broken there as if they had been drilled through and had cracked in a thousand directions.

"Bertha--Bertha--lend me your strength--Bertha--you--where----"

She fainted out stiffly, like a doll. To revive her, you held her very closely and very warmly to your heart, until its beating seemed to beat into her.

The house stood in a great silent yawn. You found yourself tiptoeing through the halls, and the front shades had not been raised, except for general cleaning, in months. Paula played a great deal, but in the whispering fashion, so that if you took your pan of potatoes up to the top of the back stairs and sat there in the gloom to peel them, and to listen, half the time all you heard was the little sing to the silence.

Mrs. Oessetrich drove Olga's little fawn-colored ambulance now. She wore the khaki-colored uniform, too, only where Olga had looked jaunty, she looked stocky. Her waist curved in so and the jacket strained at the armholes. The natty little service hat, too, sat up too high on her head. You suspected some sort of an elastic-band attachment so that if she attempted to remove it, pop, it would snap back like a vaudeville comedian's.

She drove like one possessed. Meeting transports. Carrying supplies. Skiddering across the city at all hours on all missions. The von Schlegels still came to occasional dinners and Madam Gerbhardt rather forlornly, with Ermangarde absent, for Saturday luncheon.

Mrs. Oessetrich dined in uniform. Sometimes a summons came and she rushed off during the meal. There was never a moment of the day that found her passive. She tore ahead of the hours as if they were wolves and their breathing was on her neck, and all day long the relentless jangle jangle of her at the telephone. It ran along your nerves. It pricked you into a frenzy. Jangle. Jangle.

"_Hello, Bertha. I'm at a pier in Hoboken. Tell Helga I want the pair of Sevres urns in the drawing-room washed in warm suds and polished. And don't let me discover that you have done it for her. If--if that letter--or cable--if anything that looks like a message from Miss Ermangarde should come, you can reach me in the next hour at the Service Station--no, never mind, I'll call up again._"

But that letter or cablegram never came.

More and more the lean, quick, waiting look of a bird came out in Mrs. Oessetrich and more and more, Paula, who drifted, almost it seemed without footsteps, down to her meals and then back again to her piano and the soft silent sewing of the pink things, came to have the look of sleeping with her eyes wide open, and more and more frequently her mother shot out at her with the "Paula, wake up. Don't stare that way. It makes you look positively silly."