Part 6

Spinning tarantellas with broad white toe for pivot. Swaying hip rhythm, eyes slits, like wise smiling old buttonholes. Hands broad on haunches and little bulge of bacchanalian belly--Yeow--squat heels deep in turf, arms flung wade and half wrenched from sockets! Leg out from under. Yeow--up again on toe pivot--spin--spin--laughter over wild moors--sweat in hovels--hot male hands on square-hipped girls--scratch of mustachios against laughing, square-teethed women--crones with the soil ground into their wrinkles. Sing, peasant, sing, and swing the grinning scythe! Sing of the strong fertilizing soil and the dung heaps that steam and the crones that are wise with old lore and the women who love, and who bear, and who weep, and the wide-legged men with the necks like tree boles. Sing--Yeow--of meat and of soil and of strength and of love--sing Yeow! Yeow! Yeow!

The hurdy-gurdy suddenly silent--Bertha with her arms flung wide and half wrenched from their sockets. Toes in the soil. Hair down. Her bosom where the waist had fallen open gleaming and high.

***

Going home through the languid night it was Bertha who sat next to the driver, his knee slyly digging up against hers which she flung angrily back.

"Big girl. Good girl." He kept saying over and over again under his breath without moving his lips.

She felt the tail of his glance slide over her bosom where the waist had fallen open and she clutched it closed and kept edging toward Julie, who was sullen.

"Before I'd dance for pennies, like a dago's monkey. What's the idea, giving a free show without an invite? I know my place, I do. They'd have showed you yours, if they wasn't all boozy as boiled owls. Listen to them now. I'm a self-respecting girl. I know my place. I don't dance for pennies. That dance was a give-away. You musta been born in a cow house where they dance all night and then grab up their pails and start to milking. That's old country dancing. I'm American. I know my place."

"What did I--do--Julie?"

"What did you do? Say, was it as bad as that? You musta had some inside information on the Burgundy. Made a holy show of yourself, that's what you did."

All the way home, edging away from the driver's horrid knee, the question kept spinning inside her brain, "What did I do? What? What?"

She felt so empty. As if all the strength had run out through her fingers and toes. A flask that had been drained of wine, that for years and years had been beating against its sides.

***

One evening in a winter that roared with blizzard, and snowstorms like plunging white buffaloes leaped before city traffic, there were dinner covers for eight at the Musliners, but no guests. Automobile wheels ground futilely in the hub-high ruts. Surface cars, shaggy with storm, stalled in their tracks. The streets slept standing, like horses.

In spite of Bertha skimming each new grease film off of the foods, dinner began to cloy, the entrée of creamed mushrooms darkening, the patty cases sagging as they waited.

With fever spots in her cheeks, Mrs. Musliner, in a bower of the tulle that her dress formed around her, kept rattling at the telephone, her urgent forefinger frantically up and down at it, but the wires were under the storm and only snow-hush came through.

"Central--you must answer--it's urgent--you must--hello--"

In his dinner clothes and very brown above the white of his shirt front, Mr. Musliner chided her in a little good-humored way he had.

"Well, little Snow White, it looks for once as if you must have dinner all alone with your old hubby."

Her smile up at him could be like a crucifixion--as if a tourniquet twisting in the very ganglia of her were forcing her lips to part.

"Central," she implored, working the hook up and down, "please--won't you answer?"

Through the little glass pane in the pantry door, Bertha could see him, bumbling about the rose tulle of her in the slow hitting fashion of a brown bee, his hand, wanting to touch her but constantly withdrawing, did pause at her throat where it flowed palely down into her bodice. It stiffened at his approach and a rib of vein came out.

Julie, peeping too, sniggered. He had a curiously sensitive blush. It came up, redly, as if he had heard.

"Central--can't you hear--you must answer."

He walked over to the buffet and shot out a swallow of seltzer.

"Afraid it looks like a quiet evening--alone, Little One," he said, with his words etched on his laugh like a design against thin glass.

She hung up the receiver, with the one vein still out on her pretty throat, and drew up her chair beside the lace, the flower- and the candle-spread table.

"Of course, Ben, it's just disappointing, that's all. Horrid old storm." She made a little _moue_ and he looked at her adoring it, and then started for the vacant place beside her.

"Oh," she said and leaped backward--"I--they may come yet."

"How stupid--of course--they may--come yet," he said and took his accustomed place, remotely opposite, but his eyes, with their liver-spotted whites, eager for her through the little jungle of fern and pink roses of the center piece.

In the kitchen Bertha began to ladle out the bouillon. It made a clear little pouring noise. Like a thin cry.

***

A square of light from a window across the areaway could work its way into Bertha's room in a luminous plaster. Long after the electric bulb, dangling by a wire over her cot, was snapped out she liked to lie regarding the reflected glow.

A patch of warmth against solitude. A cave with a lit mouth. It was pleasant to walk through it and down into the aisles of doze....

That night, the glow sprang sharply across the snow-packed areaway and long after she had crawled into her cot, she lay at this fantastic entrance into her sleep, dallying.

Little wisps of smoke rose off the embers of the day. Half consciousnesses. Six of the eight medallions of the salmon _mousse_ were left over. That ridge of fear in a vein out across Mrs. Musliner's throat. The Farleys would have relished the salmon _mousse_ creamed the next day. Not the Musliners. Sufficient unto the day the salmon thereof. The grapes he had brought her were wadded in cotton and in the upper section of the refrigerator. Would the salmon _mousse_ taint them of fishiness? Snow. A wide, wide wilderness of it with humpbacks walking hidden under it and pushing it up into mountains. Drip. Hollow, pleasant rhythm, through the doze that made it difficult to awaken. Drip. Drip. Drip. That must be the ice pan flooding. It was so hard to awaken. Drip. Drip. Drip. Doors. The brown door that was Musliner and it led inward to a dwelling place of light. Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then in a crash through the light fabric of this doze, a pink little cyclone.

It was hard for Bertha to cross the hair line from her dim sleep to her dim reality.

"Who is it?" she cried. "What?" And sat up in the gilt darkness, two enormous braids of her tan hair hitting against the wall like rope.

It was Mrs. Musliner, in a nightgown made pinker by the flicker of her body through it, shuddering there on the floor behind the refuge of the door she had slammed and locked.

"Mrs. Musliner!"

"Bertha, hide me. Keep me here with you. Alone. Bertha, let me stay here with you."

She was trembling so that her nightgown went rippling along her limbs and her teeth and her lips were fanned dry with moans. And Bertha, Norse in her hulk, and in the great flannel undersuit and petticoat, stooping over the torn little huddle there on the floor.

"Mrs. Musliner--little baby--what is it?'

"Keep me, Bertha. Hold me tight. You will keep me, won't you, Bertha?"

"Baby. Little mine. You'll catch cold. You have bad dreams. This is no place for you."

"Let me stay. You're so quiet, Bertha. Let me stay here with you. It calms me. What are you hearing all the time while you work? What do you know? Bertha, tell me--what makes you so still--what do you know that I don't know--help me to know it too--help me be quiet like you--that dance--I remember--you know things that are beautiful and terrible--and yet you are quiet--help me, Bertha--I know so little--only that I am a bad, bad girl--and afraid--Bertha--afraid--"

"You poor little one--you bane walking in your sleep?"

"No. No. I'm not asleep. I'm not dreaming. I'm afraid, Bertha--keep me here with you. Hold me--don't let go--don't let him--get me--Bertha--"

She was like a child in a storm flung there against the rock of Bertha, crying there and clinging there and shuddering there.

"You little thing--you yoost shivering--you bane sick--I go and call Mr. Mus--"

She was a flash then, out of Bertha's arms, halfway across the room, her gown a quick ripple of silk about her body, and her arms out toward the window with a gesture of destination.

"Don't open that door! If you call him, I'll jump. I can't stand it if you open that door. I'll jump out!"

"Mrs. Musliner. Baby. Wait! I won't open it. You bane sick. I keep care of you. So. So. Here, in my bed--yoost shivering--yoost shivering--"

She carried her bodily, a curving petal, toward the cot.

"Don't let him get me, Bertha."

"Poor little baby. Here please, if you don't mind--on my cot--you bane chilled."

It was still warm there from the sag of Bertha's body. A nest of coarse bedding that grated through Mrs. Musliner's film of gown.

"Let me go get you soft blankets. Mine bane stiff like a board."

"No. No. Don't leave me, Bertha. I like it hard. I want it stiff--like a board. Like a cross. Like you. To hurt with the hardness and not have it matter. Don't leave me, Bertha, stay with me close. You understand, Bertha. He mustn't come near--I couldn't stand it. He's so brown. A brown dog scratching at my door. Scratching. Scratching--night after night--all these months. I can't endure it. To-night--I--it seemed to me--he had a key! I thought I heard him fumbling out there with one but--he wouldn't do that--would he, Bertha--he wouldn't do that?"

"No. No."

"But he kept turning the knob--and scratching--that terrible scratching--and then--something--that sound in the lock--like a key--hold me, Bertha."

"Oh, Mrs. Musliner--don't be afraid--"

"I am, Bertha. I am. You understand. He mustn't come--I can't stand it. Ever since we're married--I have managed so--never to be alone--never to be alone. I shouldn't ever have done it. They forced me. My father--family--money--he's so brown, Bertha--so terribly brown--brown lips--so good and so brown and so terrible. Help me, Bertha. You understand. You somehow--you--you cook--you understand."

Bertha did. Dumbly. Mutely. And in a way that wound like a cry around her heart.

"Poor Mrs. Musliner," she wanted to say, frightened by the wetted lips and inexorable eyes of the cyclorama, even when they only shone at her through the little pink jungle. Hers not to reason why. Nature's big impervious scheme for her had no concern with the shrinking of her flesh beyond that she must beget flesh.

"He bane good man."

"I know it, Bertha--that's what makes it so hard. Bertha--I want to go away--there's someone--Bertha, come closer--there's someone--"

"The Young Fellow," said Bertha, and looked at her and made deeper the cradle of her arms about her--"Oh, Mrs. Musliner--yoost open the brown door."

"I can't, Bertha. I've tried and I can't."

"Yoost lay and get quiet."

"You're so deep and still, Bertha. Like snow. I never noticed--before----"

"Shh-h-h, you little one. Don't shiver so. Let me go, yoost over there to the cupboard to get you my coat, it bane hard here----"

"I want it hard--Bertha--hard and cold--I'm bad--and it's cool and clean and meek to lay myself on wood--like you, Bertha--you're so meek--why are you so meek, Bertha?"

"I--I do not know."

"Hold me. You're so still. Hold me. I never noticed how deep and still you are. Ah, it's good. Hold me, Bertha."

She began to tremble softly into tears, the hard little rod of her body relaxing.

"I'm no good, Bertha. Why don't I die?'

"You bane very good, Little Mrs."

"He's good. I'm bad. He's so good to me, Bertha, I can't bear it. I can't bear him. His lips. Help me, Bertha."

Bertha, help her. Why, she wanted to. Bertha, who could pull webby stuffs out of drainpipes to the sound of chimes goldily, how she wanted to tell her of those inner secret solaces that rest in the lovely grail of the spirit! Yet all the words that would come were:

"He bane good--open the brown door--"

"Listen! There he comes. Down the hall. Don't let him in, Bertha. I couldn't stand it. Don't. I'll jump out the window first. Don't let him in. Don't let him in."

All the rigidity was back and she clung in a tense hammock, her knees braced up against Bertha, her arms up and locked about her neck. "Save me, Bertha. Save me."

To the convulsive rigidity of the small figure in her arms, Mr. Musliner's voice as gray and as flat as a moor came through the door:

"Erna."

She clung tighter, stifling her sobs against the hurting silence of Bertha.

"Erna. Go back to your room."

Frantic little sob-racked whispers. "Tell him, Bertha--I can't ever--can't, can't ever----"

"She's yoost a little nervous, Mr. Musliner. Maybe if you would please go away for a while--maybe a little later she--will come----"

"Never. Bertha, tell him for me--can't--can't ever--not to be angry--but--can't----"

"She says in yoost a little while, Mr. Musliner--if you will please go away, in a little while I will bring her back."

"No. No. No. I didn't say it, Ben--I can't--can't----"

"Take Mrs. Musliner back to her room, Bertha, and stay with her there--all night. I am going to my room now and inside of ten minutes I shall expect to hear her go into hers--and lock the door."

His footsteps went off into the same thin silence as his coldly thin voice, Mrs. Musliner shuddering down into a state of silence that was more like a faint.

"Come--Mrs. Musliner."

"No. No. No."

"He bane good----"

"I know it, Bertha, but so brown--so terribly, terribly brown----."

To find the words to whisper to her of the little vibratory paths that cut through the brown clay of externals...

"Yoost so the heart is not brown...."

"I know, Bertha, but I can't find my way there. It's so dark--I've tried."

"Come, little Mrs., I'll take you...."

"You can't. Nobody can."

"I can--little Mrs.----"

They sat still, crouched in the gold-powdered darkness, heartbeat to heartbeat. The sobs died down. Tears cooled and chapped little pathways along her cheeks. Bertha spread-kneed in her flannels, and the heavy gray petticoat. Barefoot.

"Oh Bertha--Bertha--so quiet--here with you. Hold me closer."

The Laocoön of them wound arm in arm there on the side of the cot. Colder. Later. Stiller.

"Mrs. Musliner----"

"Let me rest, Bertha, here with you--I feel so still. Stiller than I have ever been."

"It is already the ten minutes----"

"I--can't----"

"Come----"

"How----"

"With me."

She was like someone very quiet with a lovely kind of fatigue. Swoony. No remonstrance to the blanket thrown three cornered across her shoulders and the little journey, half propped against Bertha, through the chilled tile and linoleum of the kitchen.

At Mr. Musliner's door Bertha put up her hand and knocked suddenly.

"Oh God--no--not there--" cried Mrs. Musliner, and reared back.

"This is the way--little Mrs."

"No--no!"

"Yes."

"Oh God," cried Mrs. Musliner again, but suddenly she stood silent and waiting.

After a second Mr. Musliner opened the door. He was in a dressing gown that roped around his waist and his face seemed to look out brownly from behind the white mist of his pallor.

"Ben I--I----"

"She wants to come in, Mr. Musliner----"

"Ben--I--please. You. Me. My dear. Ben--may I open--the door--and come in? May I--Ben?" she said, and stepped with a little rush over the sill.

The door closing on them sent a little sigh of air out over Bertha and left her standing in the river of the narrow hall's darkness.

***

Snow smother, as if the morning had taken a deep breath and could not let go. Almost the odor of Sunday, because not even the milk carts were able to be abroad and, opening the dumb-waiter a spiral of snow flew up like a jack-in-the-box and hit Bertha a good morning.

A white hearse of a day. Ice tesselated.

There were no breakfast rolls on the dumb-waiter and before Julie and Lulu came down to clutter up the silence with talk, she began to mix biscuit, squatting with the bowl caught between her knees, her fingers webbing up with dough.

Presently, early even for him, and cautiously, before the arrival of Lulu and Julie, Mr. Musliner came in. She wanted somehow not to have to look at him, and could feel the ox-blood color of her flush as she bent low over her mixing.

His shoes were brown with tan uppers and she could almost see in them a new firm planting on the ground as he stood there before her.

Pride of the male.

"Bertha." he said, and clearing his throat slid his hand down into his right pocket.

She wanted to help him and his scorching discomfort, but her eyes were glued as if by the dough and would not lift.

"Bertha--I--Mrs. Musliner is very much better this morning."

"Yah--so."

"A little nervousness last night--you understand. Over tired. Bad dreams--quite recovered this morning."

"Yah--yah--so--"

"... closing up the place here and taking a trip to Europe for the change--nervous--needs a rest."

"Yah--yah--so? What?"

"... might be easier if you would leave here immediately--before she has occasion to see you again. You understand--nervous condition--"

"Yah--yah--so--"

"Extra month's wages--references--good girl--but after what has happened, embarrassing for all--you understand--going to Europe anyhow--good girl--go now, before Mrs. Musliner awakens--good girl--extra month's wages--"

"Yah--yah--so--"

***

The day might have been a spark struck off clashing steel, so coldly blue it met Bertha.

Almost immediately her fingers began to ache around the handle of her carpetbag and she could feel the wire-stemmed rose on her hat thridding with still-cold.

It was like being awakened out of a warm dream. For a moment she could not place where she was. What next? Which way? Nothing to suggest traffic. A white nun of a day standing impasse to the march of the city.

An early bird of a boy, a demon with the joy of the storm, flung a snowball at her, missing her so closely that she could taste the whizz.

"Hello, Square-Head! Square-Head!" And then as the thin air passed it along and along after her as she hurried: "Hello, Sq-q-uare Head--Sq-q-quare Head."

The wind had a long whizz to it. Zeouw! It raced around corners, so that it struck her broadsides and jerked her breath away. It rose up under her hat and set it on end like a plate on a juggler's brow. It sent up spiral snow ghosts in front of her and blew flurries of them into her mouth. It caught at her skirts and tore up under, chapping her knees. It tweaked her ears until the lobes were red and swollen and shiny. Zeouw! The Inverness cape went up over her head like an inside out umbrella and her skirts blew forward and the outline of her big legs sprang out. A gilt boot over a cobbler's shop blew down and grazed her by an inch. She was winded and twisted and the carpetbag hooked into burningly cold fingers when she finally staggered into a drug store. There was a pot-bellied stove with an iron fence around it. Her flesh began to sing. She cupped her hands against the warm, sheet-iron fence. All ten of her fingers, little bells ringing. Tears of cold, that the wind had lashed to her cheeks, started to thaw and run down. She began to fumble for her handkerchief with the ten bells of fingers that would not stop ringing.

The chemist, holding a measuring glass to the light and dripping into it a colorless liquid from a large bottle, glanced up and shrugged softly in his seersucker coat.

"Worst blizzard in ten years."

"Yah," she said, with her mouth full of the chattering dice of her teeth.

"Where you going? You won't get a train out of this town to-day. Worst tie-up in ten years."

"No. No. I got to go down to Front Street."

"Front Street? Docks, huh? You have as much chance getting down to Front Street as a duck has of swimming through snowdrifts."

"I got to go," she said.

He looked at her over his glasses. He had a Yankee face with a kick-up of beard.

"Where are you going, back to the old country?"

"Back? I've never been."

"Aint's you a Finn or something? You look as foreign to me as a samovar. Got some foreign streaks in you, I'll wager."

"Many--but I don't know--all mixed--."

"Melting pot--eh? Well, it's a bad morning to have going anywhere on your mind. Worst in ten years."

"I'm yoost changing places."

"Oh--housework?"

"Cook mostly."

"Whose firing a good, hefty girl like you on such a morning?"

"Not fired. I got references."

"Say, I have a customer over on Fifty-eighth Street needs a cook--worst way! Small family. Good wages. I'm putting up these aromatic spirits now for the old woman. You might take it over for me and size up the place. Want the address--good folks?"

"If you will please be so good--."

He ran his tongue over a label, smacking it on to the bottle. "No slip-ups on the way over. I'm taking a chance on you. My delivery boy wouldn't miss the chance of staying away for a snowstorm like this if he lived upstairs. Here's the name and address--."

She took the slip with her thick numbed fingers.

"Wall-en-stein--."

"Just around the corner. Tell them I sent you. He's the owner of the Sample Shoe Store on Thirty-fourth Street."

She felt it incumbent upon her to purchase something, her eyes roving along the shiny convex surface of a glass case. Rows of scented toilet soaps shaped like the bodies of birds and made to cut softly into the water. Perfumes. Bottle after bottle, the fragrance throttled down with white membranous hoods. Sponges with gaping thirsty little mouths. Things. Things that were sweet to the flesh. Bertha had never owned of them.

"I'll have that," she said and pointed down into the case. It did not matter.

"You don't want to buy anything," he said, and reached in for a cake of the soap, slipping it into her hand. "I don't want you to take something just to be polite. Have that on me. You're a nice girl. They'll be lucky to get you. Wish I could afford you for the wife. Don't forget the package."

She picked up her bag.

"Want to leave it here--in case--"

"Oh no," she said, "I don't mind," and curving her sore fingers again about the handle, went out.

The wind met her with a swoop and a yell, standing her hat again up on end. She bent into it, baring her teeth with the effort. The elliptical shaped bar of soap was in her palm. It had pleasant dimension. The smooth little blob of soap, shaped as an egg would feel if it came whole out of your mouth.

***

The Wallensteins, where Bertha was to remain several years, lived on the fifth floor. There were two middle-aged men in uniform in the lower foyer, and pressed leatherette walls with grape-and-leaf design embossed into them. What was really a small black onyx fountain in the center of the lower hall was kept filled with artificial daisies, and odds and ends belonging to the elevator men were surreptitiously tucked under the cotton moss.