Part 12

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Ah me--Chita----.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRAVELOGUE

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

Quiver of hills....

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

To ride in a slim sailboat....

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

"Willy, what are you making?"

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

"Huh? Tell me, Willy."

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

"What is it, Willy?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What'll it play? A tune?"

She could not keep her fingers from fluttering over it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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