Part 14

"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.