LUMMOX

Nobody quite knew just what Baltic bloods flowed in sullen and alien rivers through Bertha's veins—or cared, might be added. Bertha, least of all.

She was five feet, nine and a half, of flat-breasted bigness and her cheek-bones were pitched like Norn's. Little tents. There must have been a good smattering of Scandinavian and even a wide streak of western Teutonic. Slav, too. Because unaccountably she found herself knowing the Polish national anthem. Recognized it with her heart as it rattled out of a hurdy-gurdy.

In her carpetbag, an outlandish one with a steamship stamp on it, were a bit of Bulgarian embroidery, a runic brooch, a concertina with a punctured bellows and an ikon in imitation mosaic. Old world.

And yet Bertha had been born in a furiously dark sailors' lodging house in Front Street, where New York harbor smells of spices and city garbage rides by to the dump on barges. One of those frightening emergency births of rusty instruments, midwifery and a sinister room made more terrible by the travail of her coming. Of no particular father (although the China seas could probably have yielded up the secret of his rollicking lane), and of a dead mother.

She had died two minutes before Bertha was born. Annie Wennerberg, landlady of the sailors' lodging house, who reared Bertha those first dozen years of her life that were sopping wet with scrub-water and soft-soap, knew. Horrid scuttling rat-like things that Annie Wennerberg knew.

Born of a dead mother,
Secrets of the grave you'll utter.

That couplet could run down Bertha's spinal cord like a mouse.

"I don't know any secrets of the grave, Annie."

"You do. They're written on your face. You got a look in that wide place between your eyes like the sound of a clump of dirt falling on a coffin. You're as full of secrets as a cow's tail is of burrs."

***

Wildly, and with a coherence she could have torn open her throat for, Bertha wanted to tell Annie that her secrets, if any she had, were of life, not death. The knowledges that came to her in chimes from the dark forests within her where the trees could somehow seem to stand with folded arms regarding her and the air to be wisps of old sound. Snacks of melodies out of eastern Europe. Secrets that shimmered. But it seemed to Bertha that her tongue was merely the shallow pan for those few words at her disposal which rattled off it so hollowly.

It was so hard to talk. Words. Frail beasts of burden that crashed down to their knees under what she wanted to say.

How to convey to Annie Wennerberg that her mother had not dragged her down to the clayey secrets of the grave but had endowed her with lovely, bosky, dell-like secrets of life. Those were the meanings of the wide silence of space between her eyes.

"I don't know nothing about the grave, Annie—"

"You do. For two minutes you was in the grave with your dead mother—yah—yah—

Born of a dead mother,
Secrets of the grave you'll utter."

Bertha wondered. But not unduly. She thought so dimly, almost as if she had breathed on a mirror and reflection could not come through. For that matter she even felt dimly.

"Sometimes," she once said to Annie Wennerberg, "I feel like my skin was a thick piece of flannel, between the inside of me and the outside."

Annie's retort was a single vile word. They jumped off her lips constantly, like hop-toads.

But somewhere in Bertha's mists were ecstasies. She would sit on the stairs at night, and huddle over to the banister for the passing of a drunken sailor, scarcely conscious that his enormous clod of a mud-caked shoe was almost in her face.

She slept on a cot that crawled with vermin, with the beauty of repose on that face of hers which was said to look like the sound of a clump of dirt on a coffin.

***

Once, way back before she had gone to the Farleys, she had worked out "by the day" as the saying goes. Odd jobs. Cleaning an old rooming-house for new occupancy on very East Seventeenth Street. Corners to be scraped out with a knife. Scrub water that became livid. Stench. Two men had sickened at the job and quit. Yet Bertha, with her lips held very tightly it is true, scraped and scraped, until actually, standing there at the sink, poking webby stuff through the drain hole, chimes came through to her from the dark forest. The forest that was Baltic and western Teutonic.

Yet sometimes, because of these great inner reaches of her, even the chimes arrived to her dimly. Muted melodies. Wanting-to-be-born thoughts. Bertha's prisoners.

She liked, after her day's work was done, to sit with them. Little bells in lovely headache against her brow. Words.

"Lyric" was a beautiful word. Rollo Farley had used it to a young girl at dinner, who had listened to him with the nape of her neck stretched and her lips scarlet. It had come through to Bertha peering from behind the pantry door. "Lyric," a golden word shaped like a harp.

She liked to say it and feel it race delicately around her lips as if it were a high-strung little roulette ball in its bowl.

Sometimes she spat like a peasant, of slow reflection.

There was a sliver of kitchen porch and a pad of backyard with a magnolia tree in it, behind the Farley house in Gramercy Park. She had seen that magnolia heavy with bud six beautiful times. She had cooked for the Farleys six years.

In spring, after the great dish pan with the gray cloth drying over it was turned to the wall and the linoleum smelling wetly from her mop, Bertha would sit out there on the sliver of porch waiting the interim between dinner and light refreshments of sandwiches and fresh fruit to be sent into the drawing room at eleven. Would sit barefoot. They were strong feet, still warm and damp from shoes. Great pale spuds with muscular toes that could spread separately like a wine presser's, and were full of a predatory power to clutch.

She could almost breathe in with her feet. She liked to feel their bareness pat at the old cheek of earth. All the big-footed and barefooted women out of her Baltic and Teutonic hinterlands rebelled against Bertha's shoes. They gave her bunions. Bulbs that projected off her foot like a nose, giving the shoe, after one day's wearing, the profile of a mean old man. So she padded around the kitchen barefoot, when Mrs. Farley's invasions, or Helga's the housemaid, were unlikely. There was a wininess in their bare contacts. Breathers. Suckers in of the little vibratory messages that run across floors. Toes. The prehensile curving of toes around the branches of the dark forest....

Once Mrs. Farley, sweeping through the swinging door into the kitchen, found her on her knees before the oven basting a Thanksgiving turkey, the soles of her bare feet upright and staring out from under her cotton skirts like lantern-jawed faces.

"Bertha, don't ever let me find you barefoot in the kitchen again. It's disgusting."

"Yah'm."

Submission was so easy. Shoes. They were part of the day and the day was like a garment fashioned by the employment agency; the lady of the house; and for the last six years by Mrs. Farley.

There is not much of Mrs. Farley in this telling. She paid Bertha twenty dollars a month (it was the day of the cable-car and there was some talk of a Louisiana Purchase Exposition to be held in St. Louis), clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth when she told about it and said, "What's the world coming to?"

She was kind enough in a fusty way, wore invariable black velvet neck bands, saved twine, and gave every other Monday afternoon to the Tenement Hygienic Committee of the Human Welfare League.

Helga, whose back always ached and who kept twenty rooms swept and dusted, was expected to sit up for Mrs. Farley until after theater for the single process of massaging the wattles underneath the band of black velvet.

Bertha scrubbed and cooked from the servants' breakfast hour at six-thirty to family dinner at eight P.M. and often until eleven, when there were the sandwiches and light refreshments to be prepared.

Helga spat on the Human Welfare League pamphlets and gritted her teeth at them.

Mrs. Farley was also on the letterhead of an organization called The Circle for Housing Relief.

Bertha's room cowed under the roof of the finely austere house in Gramercy Park beneath a slant ceiling that was like a threatening slap. No heat unless she left the door open and the warm breath of downstairs came up. A bed with a short fourth leg and a spring that sagged like a hammock to the considerable heft of Bertha's body. A bureau rigged up out of a discarded desk of Rollo Farley's and a pitcher and bowl on a soap box. For six years Bertha slept up there with that slanting ceiling on her chest. But usually she was so very tired that her sleep was like a death and the slant a clod of earth on the grave of another day.

Bertha was a good cook. "A good plain cook," Mrs. Farley apologized in her invitations to the more informal of her dinner parties. But she could do curlicues in icing. Bone squab. Work with such esoteric ingredients as marron glace, pickled walnuts, and capers, illuminate carrots into rosettes, and stir a fish sauce with just the tricky rightness of the tartar touch. Rollo Farley had a frail digestion. Bertha had learned to broil and coddle for him and knew just the turn of his chop.

"She's a great unresponsive hunky sort of girl," Mrs. Farley would recite of her. "Swede, I imagine, or perhaps one of those blonde Poles. But she's a good plain cook and knows Rollo's diet. Good as one can do nowadays. Does not run about either, as so many of them do. Too lazy I suppose. Justs sits and daydreams. But anything is preferable to changing and having to start on the rounds of the employment agencies."

Bertha had an equal horror of employment agencies. Shambles of sullen stock awaiting inspection. The lorgnette fusillade. The bitter shameless questionings, like an apple corer plunging down into the heart.

"What is that on your face? I hope it isn't a rash. Do you expect every Thursday out? You bathe regularly, of course? You understand that my cook always helps with the housework on the maid's day out. I've a half-grown daughter and cannot permit my help to entertain men in the kitchen. Newspapers are full of such dreadful things. Would you mind having your things fumigated before you bring them to the house? Can't be too careful...."

So Bertha stayed on at the Farleys, and when she had been there six years Mrs. Farley gave her a cast-off opera cloak of sea-green chiffon. It was rather funny in a way. Bertha of strong sweat and hands that could entrail fowl at one tear, in sea-green chiffon. She never tried it on, it would have embarrassed her, but the green seemed to fill her attic room like sea. Beautiful sea, that instead of rolling and hurting like a prisoner in her heart, was here on the outside where she could touch it. The delicate fabric clung to the roughness of her hands. In its way that chiffon was like the Polish national anthem which she could hear so poignantly with her heart, or like the word "Lyric" which she could feel with her teeth when she repeated it softly to herself.

After that she began to watch through the swinging door of the pantry, the fabrics on the backs of women at dinner. Satin, Velvet that was like a silence. Once she found a bit of torn-off spangled trimming and put it in the drawer with her ocean. Stars. She had only to jerk open that drawer and they lay there, lit and waiting.

One night at a formal dinner to sixteen, there was an ex-ambassador, and she had two helpers from the employment agency, and so could sit at the crack in the swinging door between courses. Candlelight bending and bowing into crystal and silver. Calla lilies. Mrs. Farley's harp, a curve of gold beside the buffet. Little hissing pools of wine. Mrs. Farley's back was half bare, and it sloped down into a valley at the spine. An old sunken back. Not nice. Nathan Farley's bald head and face were very red, so that his white mustache seen from the crack in the swinging door was almost like a frothing at the mouth. His kiss might leave suds.

Locked up gargoyles of thoughts in Bertha for which she had no words, except those feeble ones which fell to their knees like the frail beasts of burden.

There was a very long and slender-necked girl at the table with cool lips and a head the lovely shape of an egg, the hair revealing the face like reluctantly parted portières. To Bertha, who felt but could not say it, the lovely ellipsity of that head was like putting an egg whole into your mouth and then feeling it slowly come out.

Rollo Farley was talking to her. Bertha had prepared an aspic jelly for him, skilfully camouflaged to resemble the fish course that was going its rounds on an enormous silver platter flaming with carrot rosettes. Fish disagreed. He slid his fork into the aspic, carefully anticipating the deception, but constantly face to face with the lovely oval creature.

Rollo was about Bertha's age. But his flesh much tenderer. The quality of breast-of-fowl. Fuzz of down on the back of his neck. Nervous hands as if the fingers were dripping from them like icicles. He wrote with them, using a softly whispering pencil all through the forenoon and sometimes long after the household slept. Once Bertha, dusting his small, book-lined study on Helga's day out, read from one of the sheets on his desk. Short lines leaving much of the paper white. Lines that rocked softly like a boat with a lateen sail. Rhythm. "Love. Rove." "Pagan. Raven." "Lyre. Desire."

Flash. Flash. Flash. A plunging opal horse and a jade terrific lion and a lapis lazuli centaur, riding round and round again into alternate view on the merry-go-round.

She had dusted the wide-margined paper with the click of flame color through the words. As if you opened and closed your eyes very rapidly. Had dusted it dispassionately enough, but her throat felt all rigid. Tight enough for tears....

She was dispassionate now through the crack in the door. Except that the down on the back of Rollo's neck was so—so young. Heart hurting.

***

At ten o'clock the great dish pan was turned, the helpers gone, Helga whispering at the service entrance with the night watchman, and Bertha who had sweated, out on the back porch, barefooted and cooling in the spring.

A night the color of a frosted grape. The hoar of an invisible moon. The magnolia. Big silences standing still in Bertha. Silences that to be told at all must be told silently....

The iceman had caught her that morning unawares, slapping his hand down on her square hips. It was the first time a man had touched her.

"Hello, Bertha, got the Yonnie Yump Ups this morning?"

"Go away, you nervy!"

"Say 'Yonnie Yump Up.'"

"Yah—you—get—out—"

Bertha could not say J. It melted in her throat. She didn't know the reason, but she looked the reason, Swedishly. The great broad face. Pitched-tent cheek bones. The square teeth and flaring lips. The nose with the flanges spread like the fat haunches of a squatting idol. Eyes like globes of clear water against blue sky, but occasional darts through. Goldfish flanks. Braids of yellow hair strapped around her head in bandeaux.

In her body bigness lay beauty. Godiva's gleam. Light breasts, the way the Greeks loved them, without sag. Long white line of femur. Hip rhythm. The touch of the iceman's hands, hours old; hunky hands that she had rejected, still lay on those hips, as if clay had hardened there.

It was pleasant to sit on the sliver of porch with the feel of hands through the cotton stuff and on to her flesh.

After a while Rollo Farley came out on the porch. He was dizzy. Wine. Heat. And his mother had warned him against the croquilles. The air was like a lady with a slow fan. Little stirs of it. Cool. The smell of magnolia. Almost immediately the little beads on his forehead went out like lights and his wrists dried.

"Hello, Bertha," he said.

She sat with her knees very wide apart in an enormous cradle and her hands hanging in it.

"Hul," she said.

He leaned against the wall with his hand back between him and the brick. Little noises under the silence. His shirt front, champing at a pearl stud. He slid his hand into his pocket. She could hear his nearness.

"Good God, what starlight," he said finally, looking up through the moon hoar and doing a sort of calisthenics with his arms until the cuffs shot.

She sat.

He said strange, beautiful things sometimes. Words. She treasured them as a lapidary his stones. Occasionally he addressed her as she dusted his books on Helga's day out, much as he might have a newel post or the terra cotta Chloe on his desk.

"Sonnet" was another dear word. He had used it to himself more than once as she tiptoed. A word to lay away in the heart. "Good God, what starlight." Anyone might have said that—and yet—

"Bertha," he said finally, addressing her as if she were his cigarette smoke, "keep close to life. Don't let them find your nerves—or your soul."

"... or her soul!" Bertha whose being was a callous spot through which the soul could not quite hurt through.

"Your problems are husky ones, Bertha. To-morrow's menu. It will warm the stomach, but it leaves the heart alone. Keep close to life, Bertha. Cabbages are beautiful and only a little tougher fibred than roses."

Vaporings. He was twenty-five and a poet.

Close to life. What was that? Close to life. Her toes dug down against the floor as if they would translate it for her.

He looked down at their white movement.

"Why, Bertha," he said, "your feet are like two big white magnolias off our tree."

She loved that, but she wiggled her toes and said, "They hurt."

He looked again at their white movement. The toes wiggling now under his words. Luscious feet that listened to the soil and stole its secrets. A sublime kind of capillarity. Bertha feeling for closeness to life with her feet.

Thick white feet, yet begetting in Rollo thoughts too fragile to hold in even the facets of a poet's brain. Thoughts as fragile as the throat of the nightingale that sang outside the emperor's window.

Actually for the first time in the six years, Rollo looked at Bertha with his attention. Splay mouthed. High cheeked. Muscular toed. A soaking kind of peasantry that flowed into him and made him want to write it out again in a meter that was like the clump of wooden shoes.

And then he looked at her waist, where because she had sweated, it lay open. Hillocks of white breast. Flesh flowing like cream into them. Strength and length of femur under cotton skirts. Crouching, submerged, and silent strength.

"Bertha," he said, and touched her lightly on the throat with his poet's fingers. How she beat there. It ran up his arm in an ecstasy. "Why Bertha, how you beat—underneath the whiteness."

"I—I——"

"Rollo," called his mother from the euchre table, "your deal, dear. We're waiting."

"Coming, Mother."

She hated the going sound of his steps, each new faintness of them a stab.

But her dark forest was full of chimes. Words darted through the branches with the brilliancy of flamingoes on wing. "Pagan." "Appassionata." Brooks of the frozen tears of her loneliness began to flow. She was bursting of music and the sound of the jeweled words and she wanted to run after him and help him somehow into the largo of the charmed forest of her heart.

But he was already back at the euchre table and opposite the slim head that looked as an egg would feel if it came whole out of your mouth.

Out on the porch it was still again, except for the brook of the frozen tears.

***

It was very late. Pain in the back of her legs as if the muscles were screwing. After Rollo's return to the table there had been an extra round of euchre and extra wines. Three sizes of goblets to be polished. Mrs. Farley wanted them soaped, bathed, breathed on, and then shined into nothingness.

Even with the screwing pains, Bertha liked doing them this way in the stilly part of the night, with the family upstairs and going to and fro to bed. The warm suds squeaking off. The soft hiss of the towel. Crystal frozen out of thin laughter. A trayful of the polite, chittering things. With one stroke she could break them back into laughter.

Milk bottles to be placed in a row on the kitchen porch and the ice card to be turned. So.

The shine of magnolias that were no whiter than her feet. Rollo Farley had touched her; trolled four of his fingers along her whiteness. They had melted against her throat and down into her heart. White tapering roads, his fingers, in the dark forest along which she ran, calling....

Then up the back stairs to her room. It hurt her to climb them. On the third landing she sat down and let down her balbriggan stocking to rub at the calf of her leg. It was good, that leg, something that she could feel in the round. It had dimension. Flesh. Muscle. Bulge. And when it hurt she could lay her hands to it.

She undressed in the dark, sitting on the bed edge with the door open for the warmed air of the halls. It was very simple. Waist. Corsets. Chemise. Smelling strongly clean of laundry soap. Twenty times a day she washed her arms up to the elbows with the great brown cakes.

As she sat with her waist half off and the knoll of her first shoulder shining through, Rollo Farley came to her door. His face was like a lamp. And hers. Two dim rounds of light, wigwagging. They lit the fog with the faintness of flame chewing along low wicks.

"I can see you, Bertha, because you are whiter than the darkness is black."

Her heart shied back and leaped.

"Go away," she said with her lips, but she wanted to turn on her forest like a music box for him. Wanted her flamingoes to fly, the sands of the jeweled word-particles to sparkle. He took her hands and she was ashamed. They were so heavy and lye-bitten and there were such white ones at her heart that she wanted to give him. Like his. Pale whispers.

"You don't want me to go away, White Bertha. Why—feel—you have a little heart in your throat. How it beats."

She began to cry inwardly. There was a little heart in her throat that beat up against her silence. It was terrible to be dumb. She could have shrieked, "I am all locked! You hear! Prairies are flowing in me and oceans and I am under them. Locked!" Words! Words! To be able to pour some of her jeweled sands on to the sensitive plate of him. She could feel the sands want to run into words and the words thunder into wisdom.

"You are so white, Bertha. To think that I never noticed. Deeply white, like the flesh of a magnolia." She felt her shoulder gleam and pushed it back into her sleeve.

"Bertha—don't——"

"Go away——"

Then he began shyly at her fingers, lifting them one by one.

"Strong Bertha."

Strong Bertha indeed. Their heaviness sickened her. She wanted to distract him from their roughness to which the green chiffon always clung, and to tell him how the lanes of his slender fingers led through the forest, but what she said was, "Get out. I can bite."

"Then bite, Bertha." The dance of excitement along his whisper! It set her to trembling. "Your beautiful strength! Give some to me, White Bertha."

"Mrs. Farley will not have goings-on. Helga will hear. I will call Mrs. Far-r-ley—"

She gargled the name a little. He looked at her with her face flattened by darkness into a mere lily pad and her nearness flowed over him.

"You—who are you? I know! You are the poem of the woman whose feet are rooted in the secrets out of the soil. You are—you are a——"

"Yes? Yes?"

"You are a—a tower of silence that is buried under some sea. I want to write you into great oxen words."

Her splayed lips tried, but were dumb. There was something she so terribly wanted to say to that. A heart hurt. To tell it would be like giving him a jewel.

"Bertha, you are like a tree when you tremble, caught in a windshake. Don't be afraid. Come to me—Bertha—close—."

Something had gone over to him. A wraith out of a door. The jeweled sands were pouring....

"Bertha——"

"No—no—Mrs. Far-r-ley——"

She came down into his arms that had the sudden strength to hold her. His lips were on her throat, listening.

***

The days were as days always had been. Entrails of fowls to be torn out. Mud carried in on grocery boys' heels. "Lawk, spinach boiled down so!" Pots. Pans. The grease clogging the drain and sucking the hands. To be ordered:

Bay leaves.
Prepared flour.
Dry mustard.
Kitchen Bouquet.
Silver polish.
Pickled walnuts.
Caraway seeds.
Bottled capers.
Powdered sugar.
Tarragon vinegar.

Just time, fluted into days and nights.

Rollo had not come again. That was part of the preciousness. The once. The beauty of that hurt more than the pain. Her yearning was proud of his not coming.

Trust Rollo to pause a little this side of satiety, teased, but with the flavor high on his palate. Asceticism of keeping a little lean with self-inflicted hungers.

She had dusted the terra cotta Chloe three of Helga's Thursdays out and he had not glanced up. He could pass her on the stairs without seeing, and did. One night, at dinner to ten, wine had warmed him again, and he came out into the kitchen.

Bertha was tilting an enormous copper pot to drain it of grease, two fowl shining in it on a device that resembled a spit.

He regarded her through the slippery vapors, her pallor not unlike the nakedness of the fowl.

The Cathedral Under the Sea. He had written it—weeks ago—that dawn! Hours and hours that he could scarcely account for. The shaggy manuscript of it in a red portfolio up in the third left drawer of his desk. A secret palpitating saga that stalked through forests of iambic and hexameter with the sullen tonnage of a boar. Jove—up in the third left drawer—must re-write and show it to Beebe.

He went out into the yard for a magnolia. They were asleep on the tree like birds with tucked heads. Her heart waited. Disks of poured-off grease riding on the sink water. Her fork stabbing the softening haunches that were already running juices. The big silence standing stock still. Hope.

He came in with a bud in his hand that was like a live star. It gave a little movement forward of a sleepy petal, opening. She wanted that star for her darkness. Rollo! Like a hoop the silent calling of his name rolling through the lanes his fingers made in her heart and yet, when he passed on through the swinging door, there was that yearning of hers, glad to be again denied.

Baste! Baste! Feeding back into the fowls their own drippings. Celery to be sharpened at the roots like pencils. A fleck of baking soda in the peas to bring out the green. Finger rolls warming their toes at the edge of the oven and Mr. Farley's slice of gluten toast. Fancy! To be full of the invisible tears of the hurt of beauty all the while she was toasting old Mr. Farley's slice of diabetic bread. Hurting gladness.

It was not easy to be glad. Yet Helga was full of gladnesses that you could almost touch. Dimension and bulge to them, like the calf of the leg. The easy gladness of Thursday out. "He says to me and I says to him." Coney Island. "That night watchman's a helluva fresh guy, but I like him." Swedish Barbecues at Concordia Hall.

Gladnesses that were as easy as spinach. How to capture them the way Helga did? They ran away from Bertha like little mercury balls.

Once on a Sunday she had gone to a clambake at Knuts Grove, with the plumber's assistant who came to mend a water pipe. He had pressed her hips like the ice man, and made her run panting among the trees and beer kegs. Great big girls with Hogarth expanses of bosom had sat in rope swings and propelled with their legs until the flounces flew back and shouts went up to the accompaniment of forefingers scraping forefingers. "Shame—Oh Shame!" The plumber's assistant pushed Bertha. High. Higher. Balbriggan legs above laughter. "Let 'er go, Gallagher. Whoops—see! Oh—Oh—that gal's all there!" Stabs at the pit of her. Helga's gladnesses these. "High! Higher! It's raining in London! Yah—oh Baby!" Eyes and wet grins all blurry with beer fumes.

Let the old cat die! The wooden seat tilting and her skirts higher and her screams full of panic. "I'll yump—let me out—yah—yah"—slapping right and left and her stocking and shin torn from the jump—"Yah—you—lunks—you got lice. Dirty—dirty—youse—dirty—"

She ran then, climbing over fences to find the street car line.

Gladness in the round. What were they compared to the hurting gladness of Rollo, passing through the kitchen with a breathing star in his hand? Baste! Baste! Celery to be sharpened. Baste! Then came the dishing up and the riding of the platters through the swinging doors on Helga's palm.

Later, much later, with her dish pan turned and the ice card out, she could see through the crack in the door, the two tables of euchre, and Rollo and the girl with the dark portières of low hair, left out.

An omission as graceful as the rest between the chords of a prelude. They were by a fire on a couch that fattened up around them. The star of a magnolia in her hair, as if it had simply whitened there. Rollo, nearing her, as he would do it, without seeming to stir. Fine fettled, both of them, his ears laid back as if to the wind; her nostrils, little pinks.

Puffs of talk. Silences made loud by heart beats. Her neck back from the imperceptible nearness of his breathing. Withholding her young body like an arched bow; his, trembling for the arrow.

They were so young. Crocus tips.

And Bertha, from behind the swinging doors, pinioned to their moment, her heart trying to pull away from the spike through it.

She in there, who had so little to give and gave that little cannily. The lovely frugality of thin lips. Bertha back there with her riches, would have been willing to transfer them from her splayed lips to the thin ones that he in turn might kiss those riches off——

"Oh, Rollo—Rollo——"

He was feeling for the hair with the magnolia out in it like a star, but she would tauten back, and finally, on the flip of a despair, he went out and she remained thrust forward a little to the firelight, her smile flickering.

In the room beyond the portièred arch, the euchre tables were shifting. Middle-aged laughter. Silk froufrous. The firelight waiting for Rollo.

After a while he came back. There was a red portfolio under his arm. She reached out, but he withheld it and opening the shaggy pages began to read.

Slow oxen words plowing up secrets of the soil. Gleaming submarine words. Words out of jeweled sands. Heavy words that thundered into wisdom. The strange wisdom of the silence that stood stock still. The hexameter of the wide, white feet that the earth sucked unto herself in fond little marshes, as they ran through the forests surrounding the Cathedral Under the Sea. The song that was locked in a heart and hurt there. Rhythm. The fandango of sound. The saga of the silence of Bertha—there behind the swinging doors, hearing herself bleed into words. The brook of the frozen tears thawing upon Rollo's lips. The flamingoes flying——

The oval face was full of tears and so close to Rollo's that suddenly, over the red portfolio, he had it dry with his kisses, her body curving back and his curving over it. The flame of winding arms——

***

It was late when Bertha went upstairs.

She had polished and twisted twenty-four crystal wine goblets into nothingness. It was so with her pain. She wanted sullenly to twist it for twisting her. But it curved away. Nothingness.

It was good to set out the milk bottles. Six in a row. They were so there. Quarts. Bulge. Dimension.

***

The magnolia was quite naked. All autumn a circuit of excitement had been running through the house, ever since a Mr. Beebe, with a portfolio had interrupted the family at dinner and the mould of pistachio ice cream had come out uncut and steeped in its own melt. Day by day the plates coming out from the dining room were more and more nibbled and nervous-looking. The electric door bell with its batteries in the kitchen kept tittering. In the front hall the silver plate for visiting cards was high with them.

There were oatmeal cookies to be baked in daily batches now because Mrs. Farley, in the gray and jet gown designed for the Daughters of Confederacy annual luncheon, poured tea every afternoon out of a gold service that her grandmother had tilted in the same solemn drawing-room.

Half a dozen of Helga's Thursdays out had been commandeered.

"Fortheluvvaga, you'd think he was making his debutte. Little Lord Fauntlerollo has written something and it's a helluva sensation. One of those fresh newspapers guys slipped me something just now for slipping him up to the study. Fortheluvvaga, I could have tipped them off to that long ago. I've been emptying that trash basket of his writings for three years now."

"To write, Helga, is to make words into pack mules to carry fine thoughts on to paper—if I had the pack mules——"

"Pack mules! Ain't you enough of a pack mule yourself without wishing for some? Fortheluvvaga, a pack mule wishing for pack mules."

"Pack mules—that wouldn't fall down on their knees——"

"I knew a guy from Missouri once, sold mules. Spondoolaks! That baby carried four collars in his pocket to a dance and won his lady a manicure set every time he took 'er to a contest. Little Lord Fauntlerollo! Say, gimme a baby with liver and lights to him."

Rollo had written something. The white hands at Bertha's heart set up a fluttering. To write something was not to sprawl prepared flour and bay leaves on the order list. It was to paint into words and on to paper the submerged forests of the heart. Like transfer pictures that you wetted and rubbed.

***

More pleasant irregularities. Carriages at the curb and the family barouche at the most untoward of hours. Mr. and Mrs. Farley still rode out, with a conservatism that even then was beginning to be conspicuous, in an ink pot of a coupé drawn by two fat bays. Floundering, gasoline-gagged traffic banes.

Rollo, upstairs, smoking too many cigarettes and flinging out oaths to the visitors' cards that were slid under his locked study door. Old Mr. Farley, who came home to luncheon, cutting out newspaper clippings with his fork and reddening under what seemed more than his daily allotment of old port. The telephone a screaming cockatoo that had to be throttled a score of times a day.

"No, Mr. Rollo Farley cannot be disturbed to come to the telephone. No, it appeared in four editions of New Poetry. Impossible to get a copy off the stands any more. Date of book publication December tenth."

December tenth. A little knob of a day to stick out of the flatnesses. Bertha's hopelessness wound around it like a baby's finger. December tenth. She scoured a whole morningful of pots that day. Harsh bristles against stove black. Scoured because she was happy and was happy because she scoured. She was put away, one might say, like a Christmas-tree-ball. Wadded. Waiting.

***

It came. A black gusty December tenth of soot on the window sills, cold door knobs, and when she dumped her scrub water out over the porch rail, her bare forearms reddened and steamed. Winter. The magnolia as if a trumped-up bride made out of a poker had been stripped again down to the poker. She thought of it in bud, constantly.

The scrub water blew inward as she threw it, lashing her skirts to her legs. Time for flannels. She must shop new ones for herself at the Sailors' Supply Store down in Front Street, her first Thursday out. She liked them man-size with great ribbings at the wrists and ankles. They kept out soppy water.

She chose of their grossness as naturally as she spat.

December tenth was on a Thursday and Helga as usual was after her. "Fortheluvvaga, Bertha, have a heart. Gimme your Thursday and I'll do as much for you. I need stockings. Look at my heel hanging out. There's a fella down on Fourteenth Street selling them at the curb for twenty-nine cents. Gimme your Thursday, Bertha, you don't do nothing with yours nohow but sit and look at it. Aw Berth. I gotta cold on my chest. How is it they never seem to think the help's rooms needs heat same as the rest? I need a woolen shirt."

"Yah—Yah—you don't buy warm shirts, you buy thin stockings—all of you—nothing on the inside of you, so you hang yourselves with things on the outside.

"Inside! I got a floatin' kidney that's killin' me. I wish you had my backache for a day."

"That's an ache a plaster can reach."

"Yah, try to lay in bed one morning huggin' a plaster in this house and see where it gets you. Bein' sick by the clock. Hospital or get up. My idea of heaven is being sick and taking my time about it. Aw, Bertha, if you knew how my kidney's hurtin' and I need that shirt, gimme your Thursday——"

"Yah—yah—always the same. Graft. You got a nerve."

"Aw Berth...!"

"Yah."

So Bertha's Thursday out bequeathed to Helga and Bertha at dusting the study. Rollo's. She could stir the down on the back of his neck with her breathing as she rubbed at a chair. Shining ridges of book backs to be dusted. In waves. Thoughts that had found their way out and into the fragrant prison of morocco. Jeweled sands poured on to paper. Fleck. Fleck. Mahogany full of pools and one edge of a table into which Rollo's profile sank—the nostrils, with a little rabbit-like quiver to them, perpetually upside down. Slow-fingered firelight, like a neat little girl on a stool, tatting. The rug was full of colors that were faint as her wisps of old sound. The dust cloth, an old silk waist of Mrs. Farley's, clung to the rough nap of her fingers and it hurt her like noise. A room to be quiet in. A warm kind of a quiet, like a wool shawl over the shoulders. The pencil whispering and Rollo's hand across his brow like an eye shade.

"Ah me——."

Now, so! To lift that little pad under Rollo's elbow without an oath from him. There! Lawky, lawk. The rocking horse blotter had a crystal knob. To reach that now, and to polish it. Done! The stack of books at his right, half unwrapped. The flare of brown paper to be removed without a creak. So! Two little stacks of slender books, rough-leaved and in tawny jackets.

THE CATHEDRAL UNDER THE SEA

BY

ROLLO FARLEY

The Cathedral-Under-the-Sea-by-Rollo-Farley-the-Cathedral-Under-the-Sea.

Why, to fleck at them with her dust cloth was like touching a bit of tremor. Her tremor. That figure of a woman on the tawny jacket. Sullen and at a sea-edge, with the sand sucking tight and eager about her ankles and the sky like a silence. Jagged leaves which she opened shyly and with a stealth that trembled.

Wide margins and little islands of printed words. Slow, pulling words. Arches of rhythm. The naves of her silences. The submerged grandeurs she had laid to his ear with the roaring shell of her heart. She had led him down the shelves of these pages, one night, her friends the soil and the sea-bottoms giving under their feet and sucking up softly about their ankles.

The Cathedral Under the Sea!

***

Lawk, she had dropped the book, face downward, so that the leaves doubled up and the ink pot tottered and she barely had time to save the spill and Rollo was savage.

"Damnation, Helga, leave off your puttering and clear out."

She had risen with the crumpled book to her like a hurt bird and the blood so furious in her face that it stung his eyes to hers.

"Oh, it's you. Of course. Thursday. Run along, there's a girl."

There were a few bank notes on the table, weighted down with loose change. His hand traveled toward them and then jerked back again, his attitude listening; his eyes toward their left corners listening; his dry pen quivering slightly as it, too, hung listening.

Those little book stacks on his desk that her eyes could not veer off from. Something of him—and of her—there. Herself on the outside of herself. The broken wing of a book in her arms. Their book. And yet he sat with his eyes in their corners, waiting for her to go.

"Rollo," cried out her silence, "I am the Cathedral Under the Sea. Don't you know me?" But all she said was:

"It bane all pencil shavings under your feet. If I could sweep them..."

At that his fingers where they propped up the pen relaxed to the page, his eyes sliding from their corners of unease.

"Not now, there's a girl." This time he reached for one of the bills under the loose change, handing it back to her over one shoulder.

Poor Bertha. An insistent sense of sickness that had been rising in her of late when she bent over to baste a fowl or scour a floor, came over her now, almost languidly. A dizzying kind of clutch, as if a pair of tiny hands were swinging on her heart beat.

"No," she said, standing back from the flutter of the bill.

His eyes flew to their corners again.

"Leave me then. I am busy."

Standing there directly behind him, she forced him to look and her eyes were crucified.

"I want this."

The crumbled bird of a book. The bent page. The little islands of jeweled words margined in silence. The beauty of the silence of the Cathedral Under the Sea. Her silence.

"I want this."

And then when he did not answer and with his look impaled upon hers, she went out, dizzily, carrying the book, her broom, a floor brush, and a bottle of furniture oil.

***

Guests would be in to tea and there were oatmeal cookies to be made, but she dragged herself up to her room that was trapped under the two slants of roof. It was good to be up there on her bed. Suddenly and again that new and fantastic craving irrelevantly had hold of her. That sense of bud; that desire to behold the leisurely beauty of a bud opening. The backyard magnolia was stark now. But to see it bloom! Petals to bow back ceremoniously from calyx. A gesture so fine that it took place between the battings of an eye. Often and more often now, that sense of bud opening. Once in her sleep the soft movement of a petal against the very walls of herself.

A tulip twirling. That was her dizziness. She sat up to shake it off. Oatmeal cookies to be made....

And then in a flash, seated there on the bed edge, in her silence, she knew! Knew it dumbly. That tulip twirling had a heart and in that heart a child. Not his alone, like the book. Theirs!

And her veins were torrents washing and carrying to the bud the wisps of old sound and the whisperings of her friends, the soils, and the messages of the chimes, goldily, and the kiss of a poet....

After a while she dragged herself downstairs. Mrs. Farley was ringing. There were those oatmeal cookies to be made.

***

Marching days of rising in the iced dawn, when the air that came up from the lower halls was frozen from open windows, while the family lay deep under fluffy blankets.

Bertha slept with her windows closed, so that her room embalmed the cold. It ran up her body in great flashes of gooseflesh as she dressed. Once a week she bathed in a tin tub the shape of a kidney. She carried the water in eight pitcherfuls from a bathroom two floors below. The tin tub wobbled as she stood shivering in it, the bottom denting in and out noisily.

Helga in the adjoining cubicle did not bother. She was a frail girl with cheek spots of red and at night she fell into bed, often in her underclothing and stockings, for the additional warmth and for the additional five minutes of sleep it gave her in the morning, because then she had only to slip into her black sateen and white organdie bows.

And for days at a time her bed went unmade. Once, on exploration bent, Mrs. Farley found it so, plucking very gingerly at the unaired cotton coverlet. Helga was summoned, and the house-man with a squirt-can of disinfectant, and scavengers were found nesting in the slats and Helga, with her nose very red from pinching it to keep back tears, standing furiously sullen.

"Disgusting. Filthy. Shame, Helga, upon any self-respecting girl. Dear, oh dear, not fit for a pig. What's that little greasy rag on the bed? 'Sore toe.' Ugh, what horrid things can happen to the servant class! Sore toes somehow don't happen to one's friends—ugh——"

And Bertha, standing at the foot of the stairs listening with one hand to her cheek, ached in her throat for Helga. She was so young and there was something so old about the days of dirty chores. They were like old witches and presently Helga would turn into one of them.

"I wish to God, Mrs. Farley, you knew how it feels to limp around picking up after you on one of them sore toes!"

Bertha knew, but meekly. Foot torture. The body tiredness at the end of a seventeen-hour day from stoking the coal range at six A.M. to placing the two shining apples and a silver pitcher of water beside the Farley black walnut bedstead at eleven P.M.

And Helga, who waited on table and answered door bells and washed up bathroom floors and emptied trash baskets and helped the laundress with the fluted pieces and sat up in the blue bedroom with the women's wraps during dinners and evening receptions and loved so to dance with the edge of her strength, knew too, but defiantly.

And that defiance created a servant problem.

Helga, who was shuddering now with tears, could not keep down her voice.

"You give us dirty holes to live in and expect us to keep 'em pink and perfumed like your boudoir. Some of the fine folks that come here to dinner oughtta get a look up here ... they wouldn't have such a good appetite."

"Helga, you vulgar, horrid girl. I won't be talked to so!"

"Yes, you will. I'm a working girl, but I got my spirit. There's nothing right about the way the world's run nohow. Those that got the drudgery to do get the hard beds to sleep on. Those whose bones are rested from easy living get the soft beds—where's the right of it, I ask you?"

"Helga, you rude girl, if you don't hush, I'll call my husband."

"Call him. If the men knew the way women treat women in this servant game, maybe it would help us to get decent living conditions."

"Why, I never had a girl speak to me like this in my life. Every waitress I ever had in my employ left me only to marry."

"Yah, what's the use changing? Doing one's dirty work is about the same as doing the next one's."

"Helga!"

"You want us to keep clean, don't you? Like you. Well then, give us decent rooms and enough time to keep ourselves clean in. Take some of the show away from the front of the house and give your servants rooms that are fit to live in."

"My servants' quarters are as good as any."

"Yes, and that's no good. I got a floatin' kidney I have, and I won't lug bathin' water up two flights of stairs in six pitchers full for nobody, not even myself. Yes, a floatin' kidney, in case it ain't polite to have it in your society. Floatin' kidneys don't happen to your friends. Well, let 'em lug heavy platters like I do with their right side. Let 'em lug six pitchers of water—No siree, I won't take cold for nobody, bathing myself in a cast-off old foot tub that ain't as good as your poodle dog's, and the furnace heat not even piped up to the fourth story."

"That's no excuse, we take cold showers."

"Yah, because your blood's so sluggish from doin' nothin' that you got to do somethin' to get it goin'. We don't need to get our blood to circulating. The rich folks like you keep it circulating for us."

"No self-respecting girl would sleep on——."

"You want me to keep a pretty bed, don't you? Well then, gimme a decent one to lay on. You drag up here after all day and half the night on your feet and see if it matters to you if you get into a bed that's made or unmade. Nobody's got any pink satin covers turned back for me. We're in luck up here if there's enough servants' linen to give us a change once a month. When do you expect me to have time to keep my room like a sachet bag, Mrs. Farley? The eighth day in the week?"

"Look at Bertha, you rude girl. Immaculate. That proves how slovenly and ungrateful——."

"Bertha! Aw, she ain't human. She's a dray horse that's so used to pullin' she can't feel the harness. Bertha! The more work you pile on her the less time it gives her to sit waiting for time to pass. She's like a tomb, sitting hard on somethin' to hold it down. Hit her on the bean and she'll sit there gazing at the stars and not feel the hurt. I'm human. Bertha's a—hunk."

And Bertha standing at the foot of the back stairs holding her cheek in a gesture of compassion, heard.

Helga did not leave. Later, Mrs. Farley, who dreaded the employment agencies, was willing to be placated and Helga, shivering before the prospect of a luggage laden pilgrimage through the icy streets, shoved her hand trunk which she had started to pack, back under the bed, her sobs still jerking in her throat.

***

A hunk. To be a hunk was to live deeply put away from the sadnesses and the gladnesses in the round. To be a hunk was to carry a heart the wonder of whose secret passageways made everything on the outside, like Coney Island or quinsy sore throat, or Mrs. Farley or twenty-nine-cent silk stockings, seem not to matter much.

Not to be a hunk was also to crave a great deal for the things on the outside to matter much. To want so terribly, as Helga could, that extra Thursday out or dancing slippers with red heels. To be able to want dancing slippers with red heels, that was not to be a hunk!

All that day of the quarrel, while she washed down the kitchen woodwork, prepared a clear broth and aspic for Rollo's luncheon, and cleaned Helga's silver for her while she unpacked her things, she rolled the word slowly over in her mind. A hunk.

To be a hunk was to carry the secret of the life fluttering at her walls, without much discomfort. Somewhere, way back in the waste lands of her consciousness, women had borne child by scarcely more than pausing beside the plow. Bertha would bear that way, too. Peasantly.

And so the marching days and the marching weeks and presently the marching months and Bertha at lugging her bath water the two flights up, eight times. Heaving coal buckets from the cellar to the kitchen range. Four turkeys to be prepared for family dinner at Christmas, her clutch fiery from tearing entrails. At New Year's a baby lamb was sent from a Vermont Farley, and she drew it and quartered it and hid a bit of its wool away up in the drawer with the chiffon opera coat.

She made baby moccasins out of it without any great tenderness. The pattern troubled her and her underlip hung down with the effort of turning the tiny corners. But when they were finished one midnight, and patted out on her knee, a decision, began slowly to harden.

Rollo must know.

Winter was on its last lap. April soon and Rollo must know of the gift she was bearing. A fluttering of heart-beat at that. Irrevocably her time was nearing. April soon.

For two months he had been away. Winter flew at his chest and the first fury of a sleet storm had driven him to Florida. He was home again now and the city snow packed into corners was getting porous, and the family at a very private home dinner had enjoyed its first mess of spring onions daubed in salt and Mrs. Farley, a bantam with delight at Rollo's return, was constantly now, and unnecessarily, in and out of the kitchen to sip of his soups, and upon one occasion tiptoed out in black lace and aigrettes in her hair, to assure herself that the tenderest portion of mushroom-under-glass was for him.

Something slow and something vague was trembling in Bertha at each sight of Mrs. Farley these days. She dropped pans at the mere passing of her across the floor of the room above the kitchen, and on the night that she swept in from her guests in the black lace and aigrettes, startled, Bertha scalded her forearm in boiling duck grease.

"Bertha, you clumsy girl! See that Mr. Rollo has this large portion of the mushrooms. Dip your arm in flour and send the sauterne in with the fish course."

A secret and booming multiplicity of fears. That tight circle of faces in there around the dinner table. A closed circle through which Helga and a hired butler slid in the alien hands of service. Mr. Farley's face, as out of a Fifth Avenue club window, smugly. Dowagers sitting broadly and fat with security. The polite face of an explorer who had once killed his desert comrade for a water flagon. A lean face impaled on two collar points and engraved in the steel of the stock exchange. Another face soldered tightly into that circle of the icy beauty of frugal lips, skin too white for the blood to shadow, and hair drawn down like portières. Rollo's face with the singing look of choir boy in it; poignancy of young down on his long cheeks, lightening of his nervous nostrils.

Fear in Bertha as if the circle could somehow close in and throttle her. It could make her tremble now, the solidarity of those alternating black backs and white shoulders.

And then, with spring so perilously near, fear became puny in the face of imminence.

One evening, long after the family was quiet and the kitchen range cold, she sat and began to wait. There could be no more putting off. Rollo must know.

A rare evening of the family early to bed, Helga at the Second Avenue Dance, Hippodrome—Ladies Free, Rollo dining out. Bertha in the cold and tidy kitchen, waiting. The octagon-faced wall clock with the great separate ticks. The first generation of motor cars bleating their way dimly through the jam of city traffic, out into which she so seldom ventured. Tick. Tock.

About midnight she began to listen for the creak of wheels against the curb. Rollo would come home in a hansom.

At one o'clock he arrived and she was already in the front hall when his key began to twist in the lock.

Rollo must know, but it was as if she were bound and gagged to the mast of a fast moving craft and could not find the power to cry out to him when he passed—

"I bane waiting," she said on the top of the little noises he made entering.

He could take on the blue white of china under fatigue, and his lips were mauve.

"What the hell——"

She thought at first he was fuddled with wine, and then that it was the start of seeing her there under the dim hall light. It was a little of both. Wine went at Rollo with a rush. It befogged him, but politely. It gave him a caution of movement and a manner. He felt for the hatrack first, to be sure it was going to be where he intended hanging his overcoat. He was grandiose, and his evening shirt full of soft pools from the hall light. Very like a choir boy with tears in his eyes and very, very careful. He hung up his high hat so carefully that he caressed it. Not even the hansom driver had glanced at him twice.

He looked at Bertha as he had always done—since, through a haze of amazement and a little of the wryness of self-disgust.

He was conscious of a thickened-up fatty look to the center of her face. He has seen it in moon-hoar and in the plushy darkness of under an eave. A piggy little swollenness came out in this light, and her hips curved out with a flatulence that berated him for having been unfastidious. A great white cow. Uddery. Incredible. He must have been drunk. Damnably.

Gad, what a mouth, like a catfish gagging on the hook. And yet there had been a phosphorescence to her body whiteness up there under the slanting roof. That moment of her in his arms, when suddenly they were strong enough to hold her. The sullen booming of her heartbeats, like some faint ocean rolling and tossing over its treasures. Majestic dissonances. Aspidal choir of voices too remote to be heard, except with the touch of her flesh singing against his.

The Cathedral Under the Sea? To be sure, he had written it in the frenzy of that dawn with the lay of that great latent body of hers still along his.... That crouch of strength behind her silence.... But, ugh, great husky Swede! He must have been drunk—damnably.

"Bertha," he said, on the unwinding of his muffler and so casually that his words were like so many careful little tin coins dropping, "isn't it rather late for you to be about?"

The plating on his voice was something against which she suddenly wanted to hurl herself, smashing through it to those depths of his being to which she had the right now.

"I bane waiting—for you," she cried, and ran toward the stairs at him as he placed his foot on the first step. "If you will please come up—to me, I will tell you something only for you. Please——"

He stood caught, as it were, in the motion of mounting the stairs, his hand softly white on the curve of banister between them. She could have crushed her lips to it and kissed her secret down against it, but she held herself trembling.

"If you will please, Mr. Farley—Rollo—come up to me—please——"

The lymphatic look of cow in her face. The string of gray wool scarf harsh against her neck. He hated the thought of her chapped hands unwinding it and catching on the wool with their briary surfaces. Her buttoned-up waist, concealing her whiteness where he had seen it one grape-colored night flow down into creamy hillocks of bosom, spanning her now, too tightly across the bust. How idiotically, nastily drunk he must have been.

"Mr. Rollo—come——"

"Shame," he said. "A great girl like you. You must be mad. Go to bed."

She was choking and nailed to the mast of her inarticulateness, he passed, and as he passed her, with his white hand riding up the balustrade, she came down on it with her lips, arresting him so that he jerked it back and shook it from him furiously as if a caterpillar had crawled there.

"Mr. Rollo—you should know it. I am carrying ... your..."

"For God's sake," he cried, as if he could never have done shaking his hand of her lip prints, "don't you ever do that again or you'll have to go. Don't ever come near me. Bah. Here"—and from his pocket tossed her down a bill and while she stood watching it flutter he ran upstairs lightly. Then the sound of the key turning in his door. Lightly.

And suddenly it seemed to her that the silence within her was red banners and that she must scream them and tear them to shreds and she ran up the stairs after him, a flight of heavy thumps that ended in a stumble and, with her fists raised for a frenzied battering against his closed door, she crumbled up suddenly of black vertigo, into a heap there on the hall floor.

There was the bill he had fluttered at her, screwed somehow into her palm and with the remnant of her rage and her strength she began to tear at it with her teeth, worrying it like a terrier and spitting it out in shreds.

***

Dawn found her waiting for it, crouched on her bed edge, where she had sat five hours with her backache the shape of the stoop of her spine. The dawns were still very cold. They could come creeping across the house tops and lie wanly against her eyelids long before Helga's alarm clock ripped open another day.

There were some shreds of bank note on the floor. She picked them up and crammed them through the little hole in the pasteboard box that served her as hair receiver. Her light yellow hair was falling out in strands now, which she twined around her finger and poked away.

A flower stripping itself to divert the sap to the bud.

Three million dawns creeping over the sills of the vertical city. Bertha's a lonely iced one that she watched come up like an enemy. A thin dawn that magnified sound. The milkman crashing down four white quarts in exchange for the four empty ones. Her heartbeats galloping against her eardrums.

Rollo must know. Rollo must know.

It was hard to move, because she was stiff from the hours of sitting in a curve away from the slant of ceiling, but at six o'clock she must be downstairs to start the range and the servants' breakfast. At seven, the three morning papers to be taken from the stoop. One for Mr. Farley beside his breakfast plate in the morning room. One on Mrs. Farley's breakfast tray beside her hothouse rose. One for Rollo who did not breakfast at all, softly, outside his room door. But this morning, his not to be delivered tiptoe as usual. To-day he must know. A whole string of quick rappings, too low to be heard by Mrs. Farley across the hall, but if need be, a rattling of the door knob, and then through the first slit of the door opening, her toe for a wedge, and in.

Oh, God, Rollo must know. Rollo must know.

What if Helga should notice? When Helga tittered it was like a mouse running up your leg. And Mrs. Farley. She began to cry with the sense of her growing hulk and fear. Cymbals of it crashing through her! Fear of Mrs. Farley and yet she came bearing gifts in the flesh of her flesh.

The tears lay to her cheeks and chapped there. She poured water into her bowl, plunging handfuls against her face and drying on her gray flannel petticoat. There were not always towels. After a while it was half after five and she could venture down, softly to save the creaks.

It was easier, somehow, waiting in the kitchen. Kindlier. But a chill smote her when she took in the milk bottles so that she sat down suddenly. The horridness of these mornings. The full-throated kind of sickness that could turn her whiteness sea-green.

But only for an instant. There were the coals to be hauled up from the cellar and the fire to be laid. The coffee mill locked in the vise of her knees and set whirring at top speed. Bacon to be parboiled and the servants' mess of warmed-over oatmeal softening its crust in the double boiler. The ice pan to be heaved sink high and emptied. Slops. Nibbled down asparagus ends smelling sourly down into last night's casaba melon rinds.

At half past six Helga came down adjusting the criss-crosses of organdie apron strips and tasting her lips as if they were bitter. She was swollen and her lids granulated with sleep, and she coughed with a certain pride in the depths of its croupiness.

She started her day tired. Bone tired. She could almost have gone to sleep standing there, croupily coughing.

"You've got a cold, Helga. Shame. Running to the dance halls and the gin parlors all night."

"What'll I do? Entertain the fellas in the drawing-room? She won't even give 'em kitchen room. Helluva chance for a fella with insides to him to want to cuddle a girl in the wintry breezes of Gramercy Park. The gate to that's even locked against us. Where does a girl get off, I'd like to know. It's either the gin parlors with them or sneaking them up to bed with her."

"Here's your breakfast. It'll warm you."

"Fortheluvvaga, warmed-over oatmeal again. I can't swallow the stuff. I wishtaga I could poke it down her throat, lumps and all, and learn her that the Lord didn't line her stomach no different than mine."

He lined stomachs and made the magnolia to bloom and He sat on a throne drenched with Light. Sometimes it seemed to Bertha that a little drench of the Light was on her.

Oh Lord. Lord. Rollo. Help me. Rollo must know. Help me to make Rollo know.