Front matter (continued 3)

"God! Who said anything about your God. Matzoth is what I said, and I say it again. Matzoth house. Two stoves. Two sets of dishes. Matzoth crumbs all over the house so I have to be ashamed to have company at my own table for matzoth. Matzoth. He likes 'em too—dips 'em in coffee. Once a matzoth dunker always a matzoth dunker. Can't change a leopard's spots. Matzoth is what I said. You hear! Matzoth house!"

"Julius, my husband! Wally, my son! I can't keep it shut up in me no more. I can't live here no more. To have to see, with every hour I live, everything what is sacred to me and to mine, made little. Papa, where are you up there—let me come to you. I'm alone—down here, and I'm afraid to leave Wally—alone—with no God—help me, Julius—help——"

May swung heavily into her chair.

"Well," she said, flopping the omelette which was cold by now to her plate and jabbing into it with her fork, "here is where I am let in for another pleasant lunch hour. It's a wonder I don't croak of kosher indigestion."

"I can't hear that word no more so abused! It's like salt in a sore. Oh—oh—oh—if not for my son, I would right away pack my things—why did he pull me up away from my people down there—these ways ain't my ways—those are my people—he should let me go back."

"Well, no insin-uations, but you can take it from me if he didn't always have you nagging him over to your ways, I could make him a darn sight happier than he's ever been in his life before. He'd be a live one, that son of yours—if he dared."

"That just goes to show! A woman with her thoughts on her home and her husband's interests and—and children—don't got time for such shennanigan talk like her husband should be a—a live one."

"You're going to ram that children talk down my throat once too often. I'll have children when I get good and ready to have children and not before."

"A woman shouldn't put her time for it, before God's time for it."

"If—if you weren't his mother and—old—I'd drive you out of the house for less than that."

"Why don't you? It would make it easier than I should walk out from my son's house on my own——"

"Well then—I do! You can't stay here day after day to devil the life and soul out of me. I won't stand it. I—now—you—go—!"

"God, papa—God—Wally—no—no—it ain't possible I should live to see it—out from my own son's home——"

"Yes—yes—out of your own son's home—driven out by the devil in you—yes—yes——"

"Oh, Mrs. Wally—she bane old—oh—oh—oh, Mrs. Wally——"

"And you! Square Head, you! Lummox! There's something about you gives me the jimjams. For all I know you're one of those still ones that run deep. How do I know you're not taking sides with the old woman and running to my husband with lies! Go—the two of you—the quicker the better—go—go—go—"

It was then, because the words in her throat were a mere strangle and her hands were curved and spread out like claws, that May ran screaming to the clothes-closet, dragging down the garments in their avalanche of fury down about her and gasping, choking, spluttering:

"She devil! Matzoth God! She devil!"

***

Toward dusk Bertha began to try to feed the old woman soup out of a spoon that clicked against the square, porcelain teeth that were twenty years too young for the gums.

"Can't swallow. Leave me alone, Berthie. I'm an old woman put out from my own son's house. Where shall I go, Berthie? No. No. I won't go. Nobody can drive me out from my son who needs me and who has lost his God."

Forcing the spoon against the glassy teeth a sense of the race indomitability of this old woman smote Bertha. Exactly as she had recognized the Polish national anthem with her heart, so Bertha knew this. There was no suppressing the mother of Wallenstein. Oppress her, yes, but the light of the children of Israel was like a camp fire in her eyes and would not be ground out.

It was bitter to stay, and the lips of the mother of Wallenstein were twisted with that bitterness.

"The reason, Berthie, why nothing is so wonderful in a woman's life as to have children, is because even to suffer for them—to suffer for them is a blessing."

"To suffer—for—them——"

"But I don't wish it to no woman she should have such a knife in her heart like mine. Death is not the only way to lose a child. You should thank God, Berthie, you don't know what it is to give up a son of your own heart's blood——"

"Not know what it is——"

The brook of the frozen tears, she could feel them thawing and rushing up against her throat. Bertha who so seldom cried. She tried to hold them back, tensing her tonsils into a dam against them.

"Take the soup away—Berthie—I can't take it—you're spilling it on the sheet——"

How they pained, the pressing gorging tears. She was blind with them, and when she swallowed them down with her great strength, they ran back upon themselves and filled her with hurting torrents.

"Don't cry, Mrs. Wallenstein," she said finally, the words coming out evenly over her own inner hemorrhage of tears.

"Two babies I lost to death, Berthie—but not even such suffering was so bad as to lose a child to life."

"To—give—a—child—to—life, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"Hold me, Berthie, close—and say that over to me—over and over again—to give—and not to lose—him——."

"To—give—a—child—to—life. To—give—a—child—to—life. To—give——."

The old woman slept and finally there was dinner to be prepared and it was Bertha's day for scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees.

It was good, the great harsh drags across the splintery boards, pools of soapy water smearing before the brush, her shoulders sweating. Good, good, to sprawl for that reach under the sink, with her great legs thrown out like those of a swimming frog's, and her heart through the soft pad of breasts, beating down close where the tremors were. The little vibratory tremors....

Great soapy circles. Pain that had dimension—pain the shape of her arm sockets. Singing knees and the pleasant relief of lifting one from the floor so that the sensation died down like suds.

Zeouw! Zeouw! This way and that, the water running a little after the brush, and the smell that was almost a green one, coming up between the boards. Water under her brush. She ground it in and in and in, back into the soil from whence at some time or another it had come and from whence it would come again.

At seven Wallenstein would come. There was dinner to be prepared. A round of roast the shape of a cord of kindling wood. Gristle ran through it. She cut it out as if it had been a nerve. A nasty hurting thing. It was good to be able to slither it out and throw it away in the tin pail under the sink.

Onions to peel. Tears. Light tears that seemed to leap from the outside and lay against the eyes. Not the inner pushing ones that tore the throat in their frenzy to get past. The smart ran up to her nostrils. Good. Good. She could rub her nose, thick, white and squatting and lawk, the smart was gone. Easy pain. The pull of her arm sockets. Easy pain. But to be able to tear open her throat—somehow—and get in at the torment there—the buried secret torments that had not dimension....

Wallenstein would be home any minute now. Bertha had a sly little procedure before dinner. It was to draw together two of the most comfortable chairs in the living room, chummily, as if two women had been sewing and gossiping there during the long quiet of an afternoon. And Wallenstein liked the little first-hand attentions that May, in prime mood, would give him. His slippers with the toes out, standing waiting. A glass of orange juice on the table beside their bed.

The look of strain and of drain would run out of his face when he walked in on evidences of what might indicate that a day of rare tranquillity had rolled over the household. He was quick at these perceptions. An overturned hassock might mean that May's toe had been stubbed in rage, or the sweetish thickness of an incense stick, burning up into garlic fumes, warn of conflict before he had even fitted his key into the lock.

Bertha was particularly careful about the two chairs. She dragged them together and they squealed on their casters. They met his eye directly he entered. May was stretched asleep on the sitting room couch, her cheeks still wet and her lips, always with the sensuous look of just having been kissed very hard, slightly, rather appealingly, apart. One of her hands trailed to the floor and there was a pale scatter of freckles on her arm, great isolated ones, so large and far apart that Wallenstein could run his lips up it as if it were a flute, kissing them one by one.

But when he finally did turn his key in the lock, it was as if May, deeply simulating sleep, had been merely lying on the edge of it waiting, so quickly she pounced at him, the castle of her yellow puffs down over one ear and her right eye dragged upward from lying on it.

"May! My dear——"

"Yah, 'dear'—you'd better 'dear' me—leaving me shut up here day after day with a lunatic. Well, you don't need to go no further to hear her side of the story with her lies, lies, lies! You can hear it right here from me. Either that old woman gets out of this house—here—now—to-night—or I go! As God is my witness—I'm through!"

All the little wrinkles came running into his face like sand over paper and he tried to take her in his arms.

"Oh no, you don't! Not this time. A few smooth words can't make up for the all-day hell of living in this house. That old woman goes or I go! I couldn't stand another day of it. You've been a long time choosing, but you've got to chose now! I've tried. I've bit my tongue in two trying. But I'm done."

"Why, May," he said in the sedative tone that must have worn a little rut along his vocal cords from the repetition of it. "I know that Ma's not easy, and there's not a day that I don't think of my girl at home under conditions that aren't just right for her, but she's old, May, and she means well and—and good God, May, a man's mother is a man's mother, little eccentricities and all."

"No—no—we ain't going to argue any more, not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks. I've been over it all till I'm as crazy loony as she is. You got to decide. This time it's me or her. One of us gets out!"

His nose was like a blade, the nostrils sort of drawn in by the sharpness of his breath, and he stood under the hall light, growing paler and paler as the fatigue lines deepened.

"May! you've never been like this! Has anything unusual happened? My mother—how—where is she?"

"Oh no! Nothing unusual. Just the usual. That's the devil of it! Just the usual, but the camel's back broke to-day. There's no argument. There's just for you to decide which of us gets out." Her body was bent backward in a curve and her head dangling, as if it were a pale lantern weighing down the bamboo pole of her body.

He looked at her and at the shine of her flesh up at him through the lace of her bodice and the old familiar trembling seized him, but he dug with his nails into his palms and his words were all crowded behind his teeth.

"Well then by God—you go!"

It was as if he had stabbed her in the up-thrust of bosom she could always dazzle him with, because she threw out her arms and stood like a great open fan, with the finery of her sleeve drapes falling to the floor.

"Me!"

"You," he said, "yes—yes—you——"

"You don't mean that—Wally."

"I do," he said, still with the jam of words behind his teeth.

For the first time her body sort of unwound itself of its tight theatricalism and she looked at him with her mouth shaped to cry out, but it only quivered.

"If anybody goes out of this house, it's not going to be my mother. Get that! I may be low—but not that low. She stays here!"

"You heard what I got to say," she said.

"Yes, I heard," he said, and looked at her steadily and without the flicker of a muscle. "I heard."

There was a pause that was full of their breathing and then with a lightning gesture she darted out for his hand, but he was too quick for her.

"Wally!"

"No," he said, holding it behind him, "no, none of that."

She darted again and he looked at her coldly and smiled, holding himself on a little oblique that eluded her.

"That don't go this time, May. I'm at the end of my rope here. You have been called upon to make certain sacrifices. I know that. And I don't say they have always been easy ones. But that's part of this game of marriage. Learning to take the hurdles. You haven't taken yours. There's no argument here. Between two women, one of them young and able to take care of herself, and the other seventy years old and—my mother—well, if it's a case of one of them having to go, it's not going to be my mother! This is one of those deadlocks in marriage where there is no solution. A woman either gives in or she—don't. You don't!"

With his body thrust back from her, the words in her mouth were meal, and she knew it and suddenly, with a sinuosity that was rare with her, she had her arms about his knees and her cheek to him and her sobs coming, so that even through the fabric of suiting her warm breath reached him.

"Wally!"

He wrenched himself, but the vise of her arms was relentless, and so with his head held up and his body still tense he stood taut, feeling the tremor of her and finally the wet of her tears—warm—warm—against his knee.

"Get up," he said, with his head back and his body away from her.

"Wally—Wally—for God's sake don't—don't throw me off for her—Wally——."

"Off! Good God, what's a man to do—murder an old woman to get her out of the way of a young one—God—God—what mess have I let myself into! God—God—May—don't——."

"Wally"—her hands were up now against his waistcoat, so that the shape of them burned through, and his face, which he kept averted, was reddening, a slow red that ran down into his collar.

"You can't get me that—way—any—more——" he said, and caught her two hands by the wrists and flung her backward, but she was too quick for him again, and, as if from the momentum of the shove, she was back again, with her arms about his neck, and her lips which were shining with tears, straight and pat against his.

"No—No—May—none of that—no—I say—oh——"

Suddenly it was quiet, and when he lifted his head she was crouched in a cradle his arms made for her and the tears were running heavily down his cheeks.

"I'm tired," he said, crying frankly and daubing his eyes with the back of her hand, "—dog tired" and sank down on a chair in the hallway and she dragged up a stool, an outlandish one on the four curved horns of a bull, and her arms were about his knees again and her shining lips always close enough for him to feel the breath.

"You love me, Wally—I love you—what's the use—you can't give me up——"

He beat his knees.

"God. God. Was ever a man in my plight? I can't give you up. Well, where does that get me? I can't give her up, and the two of you together are making my home a hell. I'm cursed with you and I'm cursed without you. God, God, was ever a man in such hell? I'll be the one to get out—by God—I'll end it—I'll be the one to get out——"

"Wally—Wally, that won't solve anything. That will bust it up for all three. I've got a way out for us. Wally, it's the old woman. I tell you she—she's got to go!"

"And, by God, I tell you, no! My mother doesn't pine out her days alone in a rooming house——"

"No—no, Wally, you don't understand. Why I—you think I'd let her pine out her days in a rooming house? The old woman's sick, Wally. Her mind's sick. The old woman needs a hospital—a fine sunny big hospital where they can take care of her——"

"My mother's not sick—she's—she's old—she's orthodox and she believes so strong it makes her eccentric—she's not sick—-."

"She is, Wally. Any doctor would say so. You don't see her all day in the house like I do. You're making me live with a lunatic, Wally."

"You—take that back!"

"You don't know it. But I do. She sits all day talking to herself. I'm afraid of her. I wouldn't ask you to throw her out, Wally. I'm telling you she's got screws loose. She can get violent any time and then you will have trouble. There's institutions. Fine sunny clean ones. She ought to be committed. It's the only way, Wally—-to save her—and to save us. You want us to go to hell over a—a loon? Lots of people go crazy on religion—the old woman, Wally—has screws loose—it's against the law not to give her medical treatment—there's plenty places, Wally—fine clean places where they don't even know they're in that kind of a place where she can live in peace and we can stay here in peace. Wally, are you going to throw me over for a poor old woman that's lost her mind? I tell you she's crazy, Wally. What'll you have out of it if I get out and leave you here with a loon? You got to support me. No man can get away without doing his duty to me. You got her and you got me any way you look at it. If one of us got to go, the poor crazy old lady ought to be the one. Get her in a—an—asy—a—hospital, Wally—and that'll leave us here—in our home—together. Wally—poor, tired Wally—home alone—here with his May."

His head fell down against the little cove of her shoulder and he could feel her warm kisses through his hair, and finally when he looked up with the stricken eyes of a St. Bernard dog, the tears ran down over his words.

"I can't give you up, May. My poor mother—she's sick—she needs the best of care—best—institution—she's sick—and she's got—to—go——"

***

Tears. Tears. The dining room looked crazy through the blur of them, and setting out the salt cellars and the vinegar cruet Bertha could scarcely find the table. It waved up at her, Tilted. Ran in little ripples that the tears made. Tears. Tears, The old woman——

She ran down the hall. It shot off in a little ell and on the slant of wall was the door. The door that was between the old woman and the knowing. The bitter knowing that must presently creep toward it and under it like a terrible tide. She crashed through the door and stood trembling in the center of the room.

The night light was burning and the old woman flew up in her vast walnut bed with a cry.

"Wally—who? Ach, Berthie, how you frightened me. I must have been dreaming. My Wally. My Julius—Berthie—it ain't nice you should rush in so on me. You've made me a pain—here. What is it, Berthie—nothing ain't wrong—Wally—home yet? Nothing ain't wrong?"

"Why—no—Mrs. Wallenstein—nothing—I yoost looked in a minute—maybe you want something?"

"No—I—Berthie—you shouldn't rush in so—a pain here—from the fright you gave me—such a pain—my heart—ach no—Berthie—I can't lay down—it's a knife in me—you frightened me so—my heart——"

Her face was so little, and back in the frill of her cap a pointed sort of receding look had set in, and she writhed up from the support of Bertha's arm, against the pain of lying back on the pillows.

"My drops—quick, Berthie—my drops. I—you shouldn't have frightened me—quick—my drops from the doctor."

There they stood, the little colorless phial of them on the table beside the bed. Five of them. Bertha knew how—drop-drop-drop-drop-drop—into a tumbler.

"Berthie—please——"

"No, Mrs. Wallenstein—no—yoost—lay still—— No, not any drops this time—sleep—sh-h-h—no drops—sleep."

"I—my drops—pain—I—I'm so tired, Berthie—hold me—you frightened me so—I was dreaming—my boy—she didn't get him—away from me—she tried, Berthie—I dreamed—but she didn't—he wouldn't—my boy—he stuck to his mama—she's old—she's in the way—but he stuck—why don't you give me my drops, Berthie? I—he stuck by his mama, Berthie——"

"Yes, Mrs. Wallenstein—he stuck——"

"I—I was never so tired—my drops—you should give me my drops—dark—Berthie—yes, Julius—tired—he stuck—my boy—to his mama—didn't he, Berthie?"

"Yes, Mrs. Wallenstein—yes——"

"—tired—my—drops. Wally—oh—God—ouch—oh—oh—ah——"

A sudden lurch forward in Bertha's arms, so that her torso rounded up and left an arch of space between it and the bed.

It was hard to unbend it, because the body had stiffened, and with her cheek to Mrs. Wallenstein's heart, Bertha pressed, pressed gently until the little attitude of convulsion had straightened. It was so quiet there with her cheek to Mrs. Wallenstein's dead heart.

***

A doctor folded the brittle hands. Little gulls skimming the old breast. The preliminaries of death were set in motion. A soul had been set free and mortals were solemn. Almost immediately the shades somehow were down and there was a new odor. The odor of death.

May had gone out like a flame. Her face seemed suddenly very small between the two enormous blobs of pearl earrings, and she had pinned up the flowing sleeves so that she had the plucked, necky look of a fine bird that had lost its feathers, revealing the long pores of dingy flesh.

"Poor Wally. Poor Wally."

He looked at her through tear-scalded eyes that did not see her at all.

"My mother—my poor little mother—gone without a word——"

"Lots of them go that way, Wally. My old woman died in her sleep——"

"God—God, what her poor little life must have been here alone in this room—nights. Mama forgive me. Mama, forgive me."

"She was a good sleeper, Wally. I used to hear her snoring and always tiptoe by the door. I was always careful not to wake her."

May, craven with death.

He looked at her with his eyes full up with misery, and kept repeating over and over again his phrases—"Mama forgive me. Poor little life. I knew what you suffered, mama. There wasn't an hour of the day or night it wasn't over me. I did it. I did it. Mama, mama forgive—why did you leave me——?"

"Wally, you've got your May. Poor, poor Wally, don't cry—ain't you got your May?"

He kissed her wildly, his wet lips smearing over her cheeks and the twisted, crazy look in his eyes.

"Help me—help me to bear my remorse. I used to snap her off. I never had patience with her. We left her alone when we went to the country—alone here—she might have died like a dog—she did die alone—like a dog—alone——"

"No, Wally. No. Bertha was with her!"

"Bertha! Then why didn't she give my mother her drops? She let her die like a dog. That's what the doctor asked—why didn't the person in whose arms she died, give her the drops? Murderer—where is she—get out—where is she—I want her to get out!"

And Bertha, carrying down through the gloom of the hallway the seven branch candlestick for the foot of old lady Wallenstein's bed, stood hearing, her face picked out in light above the pointing flames. A white face, floating in shadow and shining out of the darkness that poured around it.

A clear, prophetic face above the seven lights.

It was then, gazing upon her, that Wally turned on his wife and struck her three times on the very cheek that his lips had smeared. "Mama," he screamed, "forgive me," and smoking hot off his lips came words that had long since lain dead like dried roseleaves in his memory.

Then he turned around on May.

"You go," he said, with his fingers curling inward to form little cages, "go—go—while God gives me strength not to kill you. My mama—my God—my darling, heartbroken mama—you made me a traitor to her—you—you—you! Go—go—or so help me God—if ever I see you again—God strike me dead if I don't kill you."

"Wally—for God's sake—don't—don't! Let me loose. I'll go, Wally. Leave me go, Wally—for God's sake. You hurt! I'll go—Wally."

After a while it was quiet in the house. There was still the little frangipani scent of May in her room, where she had fussed about in the hysteria of packing. It followed her trail along the hallway as she backed down it in terror, her little valise, with a twist of lace caught in the fastening, held out before her. Then the hall door—and out.

Quiet. With the light from the seven candles burning against the transom and out palely into the hall, and Wally silent in there hour after hour, cramped up against the bedside of his dead.

At midnight the first Mourner sprang up. One of the Old Testament women off the stoop in Division Street, and from behind the closed door, when she slid in beside Wally, her cry went down like a rapier into the heart of the silence. A cry that stuck there to the hilt.

Toward morning when the Mourner dozed in a rocker at the foot of the old woman's bed, Wally, who had never moved from his crouch at the headboard, sprang up suddenly, his hair torn down over his face, but his eyes clear.

"Bertha," he called, and ran out to the hallway and into her room. "Bertha—you—you knew! Bertha—you cook! Bertha—Bertha—come—back—Bertha—I see it now—Bertha——"

At that moment, in a dawn that ran thinly along the edge of the roofs, Bertha with her carpetbag hooked to her fingers was walking. East. A wettish wind, the wind before the dawn, blew her all forward. Her skirts. Some strands of her paling yellow hair and the terribly dilapidated old rose on her hat.

There were no pedestrians. Not even milk carts yet. Only Bertha, walking before the wind.

***

Annie Wennerberg was on her back. Tied in a knot there on a cot of a rheumatism that made bulbs of her knuckles, and swelled up her legs as if they had been great goatskin water bags.

It was horrid, coming out of the clear morning, to walk in on her, tucked way back in the lurking room she shared with the Australian sailor when he was in port.

An iron shutter from the warehouse next door blocked the window, so that it was dark and the jet of gas burned in there all day and kept the smells warm. A sickening, stinking room, with Annie knotted into it as fast to its walls as a fungus.

And Annie in all her knots of pain, looked fat—a swollen fat that was the color of the goatskin water bags.

There were several pillows in their dingy tickings stacked behind Annie's back, and a gray blanket wrapped around her legs that were as lifeless looking as an old bundle. Jocko slept up against them.

A child of about fourteen, with a three-cornered face and a three-cornered shawl spanning her little shoulders that were held in as if from the shivers, was spreading a thick paste along a bit of cloth. Antiphlogistine.

Bertha knew. The poultices like those she had made for Annie when she herself was a child! And the cry that met Bertha as she entered. She knew that, too. A whinny.

"I'm sick as a dog—lying here nine weeks come next Monday. My joints won't untie. Nobody to do a turn. You're a lunk or you'd look in on a body year in and year out. Me that raised you and fed you when your tongue might have been hanging out for want of a home. Clean me up—Bertha. There's eight cots upstairs walking away with themselves, and only this brat doing the work of 'em. There's a fruit freighter of boys in to-morrow—clean me up—Bertha."

And so that morning, with her carpetbag and coat on a chair in the kitchen, Bertha moved Annie out of the hot, unaired nest of her blanket, rubbed her with a liniment the doctor from the clinic had left, combed out the gray dribble of hair, and got her back somehow into the knot that was easiest for her to lie in. Poor Annie cried out at Bertha lifting her ever so gently from her huddle, and the little girl's shoulders shivered narrower together, and Jocko let himself be dragged along with the blanket sooner than uncurl out of his warmth. Annie wanted gin terribly and screamed for it. Its acid was what was burning in her joints, but at noon she finally fell asleep, shuddering and groaning. That afternoon, on her hands and knees, Bertha washed down two of the dirty flights of stairs, did the unmentionable chores of slops and bedding, turned over a drunken sailor on his cot, and washed open his grit-bound eyes.

For eleven months, while Annie slowly untwisted and the swelling went down, Bertha scrubbed these floors, tended the twenty cots, and helped countless drunken sailors to bed by pulling off their heavy shoes and piling them, like great lolling sacks of potatoes, underneath the thin gray blankets, sometimes hoisting them upstairs by the armpits, with an occasional boost of her knee from the rear.

One boy died up there one night of delirium tremens. No one could get hold of his arms to twist them behind him. Bertha did finally, squatting on his head as if he were a fallen horse, while a sailor sat on his feet and still another on his middle. He was a Scandinavian with a thin blond beard and a neck as lovely as a woman's. With his wrists tied together he lay back in Bertha's arms. She held him across her lap, he kicking and plunging his shoulders this way and that. It was horrible to feel his great body fling back against her knees and the strange foreign words flying on flecks of foam from his lips. She began to croon to him one of the Polish melodies that she knew somehow with her heart. He turned his eyes to her, and watching the little beating movement her throat made as she sat singing there in the dirty gas light, began to grow quiet. She unloosed his hands. Finally, when the ambulance came he was asleep, with his cheek to her heart and one arm about her neck, like a child. Dead.

Months of these fantastic, sailor-infested nights. Night after night of brawl after brawl. The slapping of hands against the walls of the narrow hallways from the lurching this way and that. Little yellow seamen with eyes that could seem to hang in the darkness of those halls long after they had passed through it. Slant gashes. The squawks and cries of men bestial in their sleep or dreaming of thirst and typhoon, mutiny and sudden death.

The lowing of steamers. Enormous cries, as if a strange breed of sea cattle were swimming in with the tide.

Wide, impersonal nights that the sense of the nearness of the sea could make seem vast and booming. And all these little men of every clime groping in its enormous darkness, dreaming their puny bestial dreams into it, cowing away from the stars, most of them, on their bellies up there on Annie's cots, their lids granulated and their breathing sour.

***

Chita, the little slavey, came every day. She was one of fourteen children in a Minetta Lane tenement and she was as wiry as Jocko and as quick upstairs and down. She never ran her errands but rode her way, curled up in a little cocoon on the back of a truck and dodging the driver's each crack of the whip. She could sidestep a blow from Annie with one beautiful curve of her little body, and once she ran up Bertha's great flank, for all the world like Jocko, and turned a double somersault down off her shoulder.

In winter her hands bled from chapping and her little nose was horrid and her eyes grew into great disks as her face became smaller under the pinch of cold.

Bertha bought her a reefer and mittens at the Sailors' Supply Store and hemmed her two muslin handkerchiefs, which she bunched into dirty little wads, and immediately lost.

She was as incessant as a buzz. Quick, capering, noiseless on her feet. Never actually ill, but always with the head colds and her little arms so skinny that it hurt to see them strain to lift a pail.

This was little Chita who came, as that slow damp winter wore on, to live in the big, dim shadow of Bertha. She was fourteen and Bertha, who knew what the sailors could say in their bestial dreams, kept her close.

It was not a cold year, only sullen and penetrating and full of soot. Bertha and Chita were covered with it. It blew in on the plumes of smoke off the harbor tugs. The furnace belched it out at them. Chita's little face was like a feeble light behind her mask of this soot and, looking in a straight line down her own nose, Bertha could see the black marks, smeared along the flesh.

Sometimes the sailors sent Chita out for stogies or tobacco or beer. She was greedy of the pennies and foreign coins they threw, sometimes sucking them up under her tongue all day and holding her mouth grim and tight when Bertha tried to pry in a finger to force them out.

A long winter that, more like a cloudy November dusk. Annie knotted into her bed and looking out through the door of her room, which she always kept open, upon the two of them moving so tirelessly upstairs and down, at slops, scrubbing until the wet stench rose, and when a fruit steamer or a freighter came in, running with the gray blankets and the pillows.

Chita feared Annie and the vituperative words. She seemed to shrink and the disks of her eyes to become larger. Annie's hands were too crippled to strike her, but all the same she would quiver back, her arm dodging up before her eyes, and the great bony bulbs of her knees clicking together.

But in the shadow of Bertha it was safe. There she could play around with Jocko, herself so curiously like Jocko, cheating on the job outrageously. They would start, she and Bertha, at the opposite ends of a floor, scrubbing toward the center, only Chita never arrived. She liked to sit in a huddle and rock herself, arms locked about her ankles and chitter—chitter questions at the great crawling hulk of Bertha as she came scrubbing toward her on all fours, her arm plunging from the socket and sweeping its great circle of dirty suds.

Darting, steely little questions that she threw like knives in mumblety-peg, landing them straight up.

"Bertha, b'Jesus— Whozee? Huh?"

"Jesus? He was a man, Chita."

"A man nawthin'! He's God."

"He bane a perfect man."

"Bloke, you! God wusn't a man. God, he had curls and a white dress."

"Yah—He—was drenched in Light—that was his white dress."

"Bloke, you! Light ain't no white dress. Silk is. That's you!" said Chita and slid out with her palm a splash of greasy water from her scrub pail upon Bertha—"that's you—drenched in slop."

Bertha boxed her then, roundly against the ear, so that the little imp, strung on her wires of legs, jumped and dangled.

"You bane a—a bad rowdy—brat—."

"Bertha—drenched in—slop—."

She looked down to fleck off some webby stuff that had clung to her gray woolen skirt.

"Slop cannot drench—like Light!"

"What light?"

"His!"

"Aw you—square head—there ain't no light."

"Aw you—curly head, there ain't unless you see it."

Sometimes Bertha kissed her, right down into the riot of short curls that rose off her head like the suds of a shampoo.

But Chita was nervous and vicious from being afraid. Once she bit Bertha on the lips until they bled.

"Bloke, you fooled me—diden you? Bloke you! I thought you wuz gonna hit."

Chita had black and blue marks on her arms and down her lean little legs. Usually when she came to work in the morning she could display new ones. Not without pride.

"Me mudder give me this one. Me old man. Me brud! Look at 'em and make a snoot, Bertha."

The sight of these blue and green bruises, burning there so sullenly along the tan little limbs of Chita, could cause Bertha's lips to fold back in a quivering ejaculation of sickness. That was a "snoot."

"I don't know any snoots, Chita."

"There, bloke you—you're doing one now—a snoot like there was somebody sticking a knife and fork in you and then cutting you up in little bittsa pieces——"

Chita was fond of the torturous phrase. She liked to devise them. Her father's favorite threat to her was, "I'll brekka your leg."

"Bertha, what if somebody 'ud cut off Annie Wennerberg's head and cook it with cabbage."

"Chita, you think only bad thoughts."

"Me brud stuck a pin in my wrist once, all the way in."

"Poor Chita."

"If I was a jackknife I'd cut all bad people's eyes out——"

"Poor Chita—it bane terrible bad for you with your people——"

"I'd slit a Chinaman if I had a butcher knife."

"Chita!"

"Looka, he gimme this—me old man—he pinched—look—make a snoot now—look—ouch—don't touch."

It was a savage-looking black and blue mark on her shoulder, and one day it began to fester and Chita, a little stoic for pain, started whimpering and reaching up her lower lip to suck in the tears.

Squatting in their puddles, as they scrubbed toward one another down one of the pitch-black upper halls, Bertha, who had grown bold in words with this child, began to piece out a story to soothe her.

"Don't cry, Chita."

"Hurts. Hurts."

"Poor little Chita your tears are falling right in the scrub-bucket——"

"I hurt so, Bertha——"

"Sh-h, don't cry, Chita. Once upon a time, there was a good little girl like you——"

"Me?"

"Yah. She cried too, little Chita, because her wounds they hurt."

"Pinches, like mine."

"Yah, pinches."

"An' bloody sores—I got bloody sores, too——"

"And bloody sores——"

"And she lived by the ocean——"

"The Cunard piers?"

"No—no—out somewhere—old countree—a gray ocean—with rocks——"

"Old countree. Naples is old countree——"

"It was lonely by the ocean. Sometimes she cried much."

"No mudder—no brud?"

"Nobody. Only wind that tore her and rain that wet her and snow that froze her."

"No bread? No spagett'?"

"Sometimes a fisherman out of a boat on the sea brought her fish——"

"A beau——"

"N-no—yoost—a man."

"Did he like 'er?"

"She—could—clean—fish——"

"Ugh!"

"But that was yoost ugly to her hands and she did not mind."

"Phew!"

"She used to cry—sometimes because it was so beautiful—the rocks and the sea—or so lonely—the sky and the rocks and the sea—so big—like she felt inside of-herself—big——"

"Big as—New York?"

"Yah—she used to cry—right out of her heart—into the waves—yoost like you cry into the bucket—and whadda you think?"

"What?"

"Her tears got folded up in the water of the waves and one day a little girl way off in New York——"

"Me?"

"Yah—took a drink of water and whadda you think was in the drink of water?"

"A bug!"

"The tears—the beautiful tears that the lonely girl in old countree had cried because the sea was so lonely and the sky and the rocks and the sea—so big and—and heart-breaking and——"

"She drank 'em—the same tears——"

"Yah—and whadda you think?"

"What?"

"When she drank 'em—the little girl off in New York——"

"Me?"

"Yah—they began to boil inside of her——"

"How——"

"Just boil—and swell—like waves—and she was all full—of the sky and rocks and the sea and the heart-break and whadda you think?"

"What? She busted!"

"She began to sing, Chit—the tears inside they were hurting—and she began to sing—all the beauty of the sea and the sky and the rocks and the—loneliness and the heart beauty—wasn't that grand, Chita—and from all over the people came to hear her—the most beautiful singing in the world all filled with the tears that were shed by the sea——"

"Was that me——"

"Yah—I guess so and——"

"And the girl in the old countree?"

"Oh she—I dunno—she——"

"Didn't her beau——"

"Yah—her beau—the fisherman, I guess, came one day in the fishing boat——"

"And was she glad?"

"Yah—all her tears—the beautiful tears—were gone and she went with him then——"

"To clean—the fish?"

"To—clean—the fish."

"I'd rather be me—with all the people in the world coming to hear me—than cleaning fish——"

"I dunno—Chita—I dunno——."

The upper hall was full of the black twilight and Chita in her puddle had scarcely scrubbed her way forward at all. It was Bertha who had come scouring down the hallway toward her. They met on all fours there at one end of the gloom. Chita with her little bright eyes shining in amber tunnels like Jocko's. The hulk of Bertha.

"Kiss me, Bertha."

"Oh Chita. Chita."

***

Something hateful happened. On Dearborn Street near Front was a pretty brick house, conspicuous for its undilapidated shutters and polished doorplate. Bertha passed it upon those rare occasions when she walked out. It was next to a meat stall, where she went to buy lamb-neck for stew. Annie's favorite dish. A small meticulous house with something of the narrow-shouldered air of a lady missionary. The little white ruching of front steps. The pious precisions. The exactitude of window shades like eyelids discreetly lowered for prayer. That polished doorplate! It has a habit of moving along sedately before Bertha's eyes to the meat stall and back again.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Society for the prevention of cruelty to children.

Chita's tan, taut little body with the blue spots running up her leg. There was even one on her tiny, lovely breast. A lurid, frightening purple. And Chita's eyelids were peculiarly red at the rims and her feet inflamed looking, probably merely because she loved so to dance, but her toes were all curled under, in a prehensile fashion.

Bertha liked to rub them warm, until the blood circulated, and to anoint the bruises with the many different liniments she was lavish at buying. And the reefer! To unbutton it from its warm fastenings when Chita arrived in the morning and to button it up snugly in double-breasted fashion when Chita went home at night! Sometimes as it hung on its peg all day Bertha would button it there, and then unfasten it again. Chita's little reefer. Chita.

So resolutely, she kept her head away from that small polished sign. But even so, it was screwed to her eyes. "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children." She scrubbed floors through it, she stirred stew of veal through it. She saw Chita through it. She shook open a gray blanket to make up a sailor's cot, and there it stared up at her. Society-for-the-Pre-vention-of-Cruelty-to-Children.

Then the something hateful happened.

There were three freighters in and the men were sleeping two on a cot, and floor pallets were to be made up, and all morning Bertha had been hoisting mattresses up the narrow stairway, even Annie, who could walk a little now, hobbling as far as the foot of the steps with an armful of pillows. Chita was like Jocko and Jocko like Chita. They scampered over banisters. Slid downstairs and rode up on Bertha's shoulder. Only with Annie about, one had to be very spry, and by noon Chita had made sixteen cots and filled all the wash pitchers. Usually Bertha filled these for her, but Annie's eyes seemed to have the power of turning the corner of the upper halls, so Chita lugged and tugged alone and her breath came very short, and the red rims around her eyes seemed almost wet with blood.

The men began to swagger in on sea legs. Rum. The smell of it ticklingly through the hallways. Annie back in the keg room now, whacking her knees with the best of them.

"Chita—you bane tired, poor baby. You can rest now. I will do it for you."

"They hurt," said Chita and rubbing her arms began to cry. She never cried to Annie.

Bertha rubbed them, the little bony fragile things, and blew on them with her strong, hot breath. The room was in appalling disorder, the sprawling cots, the mounds of mattresses, the dirty waters of yesterday gathering scum in bowls. Thirty cots to be made and already the seamen, lurching as if the world were a deck beneath them, were sprawling in, loony with land.

One came in on her tussling with her man's task of getting mattresses laid, a Scandinavian whom she knew by the name of Tor. He was one of the troublesome ones, and he swung his arms around her waist, and she shoved him from her with a force that sent him backward, down on one of the half unfurled mattresses, and almost immediately he was asleep and she dragged him to a corner, and there he lay for twenty-two hours, like a dog, snoring.

And then suddenly, while she was dragging these mattresses into place, Bertha missed Chita. Chita who danced so nimbly in her shadow all day and ran up her shoulder like Jocko.

"Chita," she cried, and j'erked the pillows this way and that as if she might have been a kitten, hiding. "Chita!"

There should have been nothing frightening about Chita bounding off that way. But suddenly the silence seemed to have a little pulse to it. It beat in Bertha's throat. And so she ran about the long ward-like room, peering under pillows and mattresses for all the world as if she were looking for the kitten.

"Chita!"

In the hallways was the hot pulsing silence too, except down in the keg room there was laughter; crazy, skating laughter.

"Chita!"

There was a closet at the end of the hall, almost as large as a room and with a skylight. It was filled with such miscellaneous old refuse as a broken chair, leaky pails, the Australian sailor's lambswool jacket, bottles, brooms, and a rusty gas stove.

Somehow, the door to this closet seemed to blow out at Bertha like a woman's skirt. She opened it. There were Chita and a young Italian sailor off a fruit ship. He had a face like a carved almond. Narrow. Slit. White. And his fingers were quick and caressing over Chita's little body, as if she had been a harp, and there she lay back in his arms, her eyes, usually as quick as Jocko's, suddenly like fresh and flowing waters that had been dammed. Stagnant and a little heavy with mud. Chita lying back there, drugged-looking and with her agile young limbs tranced. Chita—Chita lying back there with her stagnant-looking eyes and her dancing limbs that were suddenly full of a dreadful kind of languor.

The sailor oozed away. Literally. Because under Bertha's very eyes, he was gone, leaving Chita on the chair like a doll that had been cast there, along with other broken things.

"Chita——"

She began to whimper and dodge back.

"Diden do nawthin'——"

"Come here—to Bertha——"

"You can't hit me—you're not me mudder."

"Bertha won't hit you, Baby. Chita—come—to me——"

But Chita was still afraid, and it was almost like luring Jocko, to unlock her tight fingers from the chair arm, and draw her out of her tight crouch in the corner.

"I diden do nawthin'—lemme alone."

"Chita—little Chita."

It was dead in the old closet. Stale smelling. For an hour Bertha held Chita there, in her big, man-sized arms. Close. Pressing her little boniness against her breast, while the beat of her heart pounded through.

Below the men were swaggering in now, outlandish with their packs and bags of luggage, and downstairs Annie's voice, shouting for Bertha and shouting for Chita, kept screaming out oaths between greetings.

"Bertha—was I almost being bad——"

"Yes, Chita. Terribly. Terribly bad."

"I won't no more, Bertha. My Bertha. You're cryin'——"

"For you, Chita."

"No, Bertha, I'm gonna be good—Bertha—what's that on your insides? A heart—it's ticking—like a clock."

"For you, Chita."

"Tick—Bertha—for me——"

She fell asleep, and finally Annie's oaths died down in the hullabaloo of arrivals, and the great empty barracks of a room with the unmade cots and the half-furled mattresses stood waiting, and the skylight over the closet turned taupe, and down in the keg room the shoutings rose and somebody must have overturned a tray of glasses because a crash splintered the silence and, under cover of it, Bertha shook Chita gently awake and buttoned her into her reefer. It was dusk and she walked home with her down to the mouth of a filthy street on the lower West Side.

"Good night, Bertha—my—Bertha——"

"Good night—Chita—mine——"

She watched her scamper down the street, nimble once more as Jocko, and up into the black mouth of a tenement.

The way back was through a district of torchlit pushcarts and the flicker of pale wastrel faces. There was a waving light before the meat stall. The meticulous little house with the narrow shoulders of a lady missionary stood out of the glare. Neatly. The shutters were closed, but there was a fan of lit transom above the door.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Ringing the bell above that small sign, a tear meandered down to the corner of Bertha's lips.

***

It was noon of the next day when they came to take Chita. She was washing the iron grating of a ground-floor window, the grotesque bulbs of her knees rubbing and shivering as she reached.

Bertha lifted back her wisp of furiously sooty little panties to show the purple smears. A cranberry of a little man rubbed his chin and said "M-m-m-m" and a young woman in an alpine hat opened her notebook.

"Chita—these bane good people here—to help you."

Suddenly the little monkey-like focus of Chita's gaze seemed to slide right down the bridge of her nose and up to Bertha!

"Cops!" she cried and sprang back.

"No, Chita—good people——"

"Cops! You dirty snitch. You got the cops on me—the plain closes bulls—you dirty bloke—I diden do nawthin—he was a dago sailor and he gimme a dime—that's all—you dirty square head—snitch—the lord hates a snitch—me brud'—he'll knock the stuffin's out of you—snitch you—dirty square head snitch—I'll sick me brud' on you——"

They carried Chita struggling between them into the little enclosed wagonette at the curb. A light tan omnibus with curtains at the window of the rear door.

"Chita," cried Bertha, and stood there with the tears raining down her cheeks, "Chita—mine——"

"Bloke—you—dirty—snitch—bloke!"

Against the little window of the rear door of the omnibus, her simian little furious face with the Jocko eyes and the twitchings of rage grimaced back at her.

"Bloke—dirty snitch—square-head—hate yuh—lunk——"

Chita who had loved so to listen to the tick of Bertha's heart. Chita. After a while the face became a blur.

Chita——

The window gratings were only half washed. The pail was still there.

"Chita," cried Bertha and plunged in her brush. "Oh God—my Chita—gone——"

Rub-a-dub-dub. Scrub-a-dub-dub.

***

Annie paid Bertha twenty dollars a month, when she paid it. Usually during these bedridden weeks of Annie's, there was a household deficit which Bertha dug down into the pocket of her gray flannel petticoat to meet.

The wad with the rubber band about it, which had a friendly way of hitting against Bertha's leg when she walked, was very light now.

At the Wallensteins' it had fattened out into quite a roll of soft dirty bills. Her wants were so meager. The Sailors' Supply Store filled them mostly, and a sliver of a shop on the Bowery where the kind of flannel waists she wore, flopped on hangers outside the door.

But invariably in the end, one way or another, Annie wormed away these little savings, so that her intervals of unemployment had a frightening way of draining her petticoat pocket. Frightening, because somehow that wad, hitting against her when she walked, meant a pad between her and she knew what! The women one passed at night with dragging hems and twitching faces. The crones picking out of refuse boxes and asleep in doorways. The girls in dreadful finery soliciting along the wharves.

That hit-hit against her leg. It could seem as if someone were walking in step with her.

Then one day the wad petered out into a mere handful of change, left from a dollar bill with which she had purchased a bottle of sarsaparilla for Jocko, who loved to drink it out of the bottle and rub his little belly.

A shudder went down her back. Ninety-five cents in silver. The hit gone from against her leg. The women one passed at night with the dragging hems....

***

There was new management at Raussman's. An unctuous Bohemian with a pimply face sorted out the human stock. All the young girls sat in the front row with their big red hands like beef-steaks on their laps. The older women were placed against the wall. They seemed to sit hugging themselves underneath their jackets and sighed a great deal. Some of cold, because the gin fires had gone out. Some of fatigue, and some of an unutterable hopelessness that pulled down their eyelids like window shades. There was considerable traffic among the young girls in the front row. The alert Bohemian was kept busy between the telephone, the passing out of slips, and the arrival of clients.

The assorted display in the front row was in a constant state of change, as if someone kept plucking bonbons from a box and almost immediately the little fluted container would be replaced with another.

The row against the wall did not change much. The faces were grimmer and the slow frieze of them would sit sometimes uninterrupted throughout the day.

Bertha found herself in this back row of the waiting faces, most of them flecked with fear. Not Bertha's. Hers was so big and so pale. Like a light. It burned roundly and patiently through the greasy twilit days at Raussman's. But after several of the futile ones of waiting, there were just twenty-five cents left in the petticoat pocket.

Then she began to buy newspapers and pore over them. It was November and the parks were old and gray-looking and newspapers ballooned up in the wind unless you sat on one end and nailed the other to the bench with your palm.

HELP WANTED, FEMALE

Columns of it, yet the dread of going the rounds. The women aggrieved with the servant problem, who asked abashing intimate questions, and weighed out the weekly consignment of second-grade butter and eggs for the help. The women aggrieved with the servant problem, who provided kennels for sleeping and railed at high wages for the fourteen-hour day. The dread of starting those rounds. Help Wanted, Female.

The park benches were strewn with discarded newspapers, turned almost invariably to the classified advertisement page. Sometimes a little oblong had been torn out with a hair pin or penknife. One day in City Hall Park, poring over one of these left overs, this one burned up at Bertha from its little enclosure:

Wanted: Practical nurse to assist governess in care of five-year-old boy. Must be well trained and efficient. References. Apply W. Bixby, 3450 Madison Avenue.

It was a rowdy of a day. Whistling, prankish winds that flew up under capes and rushed newspapers along the curving walks of the park. A pecksniffy little gale that filled the air with dust and paper. Pedestrians hustled before it and the benches were pretty well swept, except for one or two hunches of men asleep under their hats and the hoppings of sparrows aiming for empty peanut hulls. And Bertha. She sat forward, her torso a little oblique as if someone had placed a broken urn there on a slant, and the look that she had lifted up from that newspaper insertion, pinioned to her face.

The city ran past her. Dived into subway hoods. Clamored over cobbles. Honked, whizzed, banged. Park Row had just spewed out a red-hot edition and the newsboys' howls ran high.

It was strange to be there in the midst of life when the heart was as dreary as a moor. Wasteland down which she could see herself stalking, brooding and terrible with the tears that were dry and sobs that were silent. She began to walk. It was very far. The city blocks streamed behind, one after another. They were so full of life. But the moor gathering around her heart, it encompassed her.

The house on Madison Avenue was as handsome and portly as a park statue of a gentleman in a frock coat. It had an air and a gracious, portentous dignity, as if any moment the double oak doors might swing back and someone important and lovely sweep down the fine curve of stone steps. Candlelight would gleam on old silver in such a house and the kettles in such a house would be of polished copper that swelled what they reflected. Fine, drum shaped kettles, that would draw the juices out of fowl.

The curtains were frilled net and did an elaborate crisscross in the center of the long windows, and then drew back to reveal the shoulder of a chair or the dim loveliness of marble statuary. A child in such a house could, if he wanted, peer out of that little open place between the curtains. He would probably leave five fingerprints against the pane. Spudgy little fingerprints that would polish off with a dry cloth. But there were no fingerprints against the panes. They were very shiny. Peer as she would with the corners of her eyes as she passed the house, up the block, down the block, there were no fingerprints against the panes.

It was easy to pass and repass. That is, if one kept shoulders bent into the wind as if with destination. There was a constant trickle of pedestrians along the fine wide avenue. One swung back and forth with the little tides. No stopping to stare, of course. Just that tail of the eye, ready!

It was a block of portly houses. Of great wide windows and curving stoops and motor cars at the curb. There were several ways of not passing up and down too often. Walking on the opposite side. Appearing to stand at a corner for the traffic to pass. Strolling around the block and loitering a little along the way.

Not even the smudge of a sprawled little palm against the window pane. How precious had there been!

Once a young woman entered the trade entrance. She had a click to her broad heels and there was a gleam of starched white under her long blue cape. The door was opened to her only the fraction of an inch and closed again, gently. She went away on heels not so clicking. Bertha, passing, could have touched her.

Almost immediately after, a big heavy-busted woman, with hair on her chin and also in white uniform that crackled under her cloak, rang the bell. Bertha knew her! A Mrs. Mahaffy! She had once tended the senile grandfather in a private house on Lexington Avenue where Bertha had cooked for a month. "Hateful Mahaffy" the waitress had called her. She was always fussing around the kitchen with trays, mostly her own, and had let the old man fall in his bath one morning, for which she was dismissed. Her arms were pock-marked too. The waitress had stumbled across a little nest of hypodermic needles under her mattress after she left.

Hateful Mahaffy!

Passive Bertha with her slow, white face. A sudden, a new, an aggressive rage laid hold of her. A frenzy that made her want to tear and strip and choke. She started after the largely undulating figure of Mrs. Mahaffy, but the one inch of door had already been opened and closed to her, so that they met on the sidewalk.

"Save yourself the trouble," said Mrs. Mahaffy, "the place is already filled."

She had a horrid kind of voice for a woman. It seemed to want to boom because she had hair on her chin. Then she recognized Bertha.

"Wasn't we in a place together once? Lexington Avenue."

"Yah——"

"Well, you're in wrong here. Practical nurse is wanted. Big automobile moguls from Detroit. Just moved here. New-rich. Give me the new-rich every time. They got proper respect for their servants, and not too much for themselves. Well, stung here, but they're engaging a new staff in that big brown house over on the corner. Want to come with me?"

"No," said Bertha. "No."

"Well, you always was good company for yourself," said Mrs. Mahaffy and stalked off on a diagonal across the street.

Hateful Mahaffy, who, they said of her, pinched children, and had let the old man slip and break his hip. To think that hateful Mahaffy, with the boom of voice, might have gained custody over the child within that house.

Or someone like her might already have been hired! Or someone worse! Fear flashed through her. Flash after flash of it. Then again the swelling anger. Mrs. Mahaffy. She pinched children. She started across the street, striking into her solemn golem trot, her lower lip pursed out.

Mrs. Mahaffy had disappeared. She hurried a block after her, her stiff Inverness cape blowing out from her, and her face thrust out ahead.

Mrs. Mahaffy. What had she to do with it? Do with it? Why, there was a child over there in that house—five years old—who made it unbearable that any child should be pinched.

She hurried. Mrs. Mahaffy had disappeared. After a while she began to cry. Slow ashamed tears. The house looked soft through the blur of them. Almost as if you could poke in a dimple through the wall with your finger, as you could in the cheek of a child.

A man in shirt sleeves and a black apron came out of the service entrance and began to polish the brass doorbell. He was shaved to the skull, and his neck was fat, and he danced up and down from the knees as he rubbed. A gay feather duster stuck up from his rear hip pocket. He whistled. She could not tear her eyes from him. His jouncing legs and the little jelly-dance of the fat along his neck! Perhaps as recently as an hour ago—ten minutes ago—five—he had passed the five-year-old child in a hallway. That gay little duster might have flecked a chair that he had sat upon.

The excitement of that! It ran like a fever through her. She stood and looked at him. Just stood there in front of the house and watched him rubbing the bell. After a while he turned, because the irises of her eyes must by this time have been like hot disks on his back. He had a face of loose fat and the jowls fell in pleats like a spaniel's. A soft face that you could mash up softly with your hand like pie dough. Ugh.

She began to walk and he followed her by swinging his head around to glance over the other shoulder.

Perhaps so recently as an hour ago—ten minutes—five—he had passed the five-year-old in a hallway——

He winked.

Slowly and with the horrid sensation that she could softly mash up his face into pie dough, Bertha winked back.

"Fine day for a walk," he said, and sucked back his words and made a noise like a kiss.

"Yah," she said and lifted her lips back off her square white teeth to make a smile.

He was chewing something and he spat, quid and all, on to the stoop of the house adjoining.

"Big 'un, ain't you?"

"Me? I dunno——"

"Ticklish? Slk-k-k-k-k," he said, and made a sound between his tongue and his cheek. Nasty. Frightening.

"Naw."

His face was shaved, but the day's stubble of beard was out, and when he rubbed it you could hear the bristles scrape.

"Good time?"

"What?"

He bunched up his mouth again with the little hissing, kissing sound. Someone lowered a window with a slam. He flecked open his polishing rag and began to rub at the bell again.

"Wait for me a few minutes down at the drug store on Thirty-ninth. I'm off at five. Big 'un, heh?"

She moved off. That face of old dough—ugh!

It was horrible waiting. It grew dusk and she shivered and her tongue thickened and her distaste kept welling. But her feet stood rooted, sullen, there. Waiting. The ruby urn in the drug store window lit up and threw a stain on the sidewalk. He came, looking stuffed into his coat, and his derby hat sat high on his head like a rocking chair. He was short. She had not noted how short. Why, she could have almost leaned an elbow on his head and rested her cheek comfortably upon her palm.

Silly Willy.

Idiotically enough, that transpired to be his name. Willy. She was never to utter it without the aftermath of a little chime in her brain. Silly.

His soft mouth slid around so in his face. It was a little sunken because his molar teeth were gone. Slk-k-k-k-k! He was always making that noise between his tongue and his cheek and making a boring gesture with his forefinger, Slk-k-k-k-k. He met her that way.

"Slk-k-k-k-k, you're a husky one."

"You bane a little one," she said with elephantine coquetry.

"I'm little," he said, "but oh my," and beat himself upon the chest.

"You bane short and I bane long, heh?"

"That's me! Little but oh my—is what they used to label me in Winnipeg."

"Oh, that bane a big fine place."

"Winnipeg! She's a dream. There's a little city with a gizzard. I was born there. My boss comes from Detroit. You know him? Ever been in a Bixby Six? That's him. Every third time you bat your eye a Bixby car runs past you."

"You bane house-man?"

"Yeh, but I don't live in. I got a room. Good time?"

"It bane a big fine house. It's a fine big family?"

"Big family! There's him and her—fine as silk—and a kid—the little devil is five——"

"You—know—him——?"

"Little devil—let me so much as be washin' the window of his nursery and he gets me down on all-fours for a ride on me back."

"Your—back——"

"To-day, if anybody be askin' you—I can feel his little heels in my shins yet——."

"You!"

"Slk-k-k-k-k! I live over there—near First Avenue. I got a room."

"He rode you—to-day——"

"He's a card—kicked my shins——"

"Will he ride you to-morrow——?"

"Mebbe."

"You like me?"

He threw up a killing glance from under his rocking-chair derby and poked her under the cape with his forefinger. "Slk-k-k-k-k."

They turned down a crosstown street that ran toward First Avenue.

***

Willy's room was over a garage where a great mercantile establishment kept its regiment of trucks. It was large, with one end filled with traces; the body of an old horse-drawn delivery wagon and some old leather harnesses that smelled.

The front part of the room had a bed and a chair and a table and a small stove the shape of a snow man. Bertha hung some muslin portières up one day. That cut the room in two and shut off the wagon top, with a red star and R.H. Stacy and Company painted across it. This seemed to move the chair, the table, the bed, and the stove into a cozier propinquity. Otherwise, it was rather an awful room. It stood there cold and mean and bare all day, scarcely more than a kennel, waiting for the occupants who called it home, to creep back into it at night.

Willy usually came first. It was a straight cut cross town, from the house on Madison Avenue. Bertha's hours were more irregular. Her work took her far and wide.

Once, during Christmas holidays, an agency on East Twenty-third Street which kept her constantly supplied with day-work sent her, along with a staff, to clean a schoolhouse on East One Hundred and Ninety-second Street. It was ten o'clock before she climbed to the room.

Willy was asleep on the bed with his shoes on and his derby hat over his face. There was no fire and no supper. Willy could cook. He had always lived off like this in a room with a bed and a stove. But with the advent of Bertha an atavism cropped out in him. The stove might be laid, but unless she struck the match, there was no fire. It was easier to be cold and hungry and lie on the bed with his derby over his face, waiting.

"You're a lunk," Bertha cried one night and hit him across the soles of his shoes with a poker, as he lay stretched and waiting on top of the bed.

"Then get out," he said, and turned over and dozed off until the fire began to crackle in the round little belly of the stove and the strong smell of tripe stew to wind through the room.

He was vicious, but in the small ways that a terrier can be vicious. Yappy. Snappy. But the crack of a whip could curl his legs under him and make him slink. He had the mind of a child. Colored picture cards amused. He could not drink, and what he chewed was tobacco substitute, and his pockets were filled with bits of bright glass and twine and pencil stubs and old screws. Even his vices were not man size. He was sly and he was a thief, but he stole only pennies and doll's eyes and no one in the Bixby household could call a pen-knife or scratch-pad his own. He was constantly filching the smaller coins from Bertha's pocketbook. Coppers. She could feel his hand steal under the leather cushion that was her pillow and would lie there in the darkness with her eyes wide open, looking at the dim white smear his teeth made across the darkness when he laid them bare in his effort at stealth.

Silly Willy. He was not even a man. That made it less horrible, even while it made it more horrible. She slept on the other side of the muslin curtain, on the long leather seat of the old delivery wagon. It made quite a couch. Only her feet dangled off, and she could crowd them in if she drew up her knees. It was almost private, except that he liked to peer through to see the gleam of her hair. Unbound it fell in a slow cascade of heavy, solemn, taffy-looking yellow.

"Get out! Sca-at!"

He didn't always, and had to be pushed out like a hateful boy. She despised him and was never free of the feeling that his face was boneless and made of dough, and that by the pressure of her palm against it something terrifying and feature-less would be left there before her.

And yet when Bertha came home from work with her pulpous brown butcher's package, and her arms stinging from lye water and the sockets aching, sometimes she could not run up the stairs fast enough, skinning her shins and stumbling in her haste.

Willy would be there. Silly Willy. And he could show her the very spot along his back where the boy had straddled, riding him horseback and kicking into his shins. Once he had come home with the skin on his arm torn. The boy had flecked him too hard with a whip. Bertha washed it and kissed it. Kissed that wound on the hairless arm of Silly Willy.

It was easy to make him talk. A sack of little cone-shaped chocolate drops would accomplish it, or a new screw driver, or a roll of adhesive plaster. Any little tinkery thing. And because he was sly, he would only answer Slk-k-k-k-k to her questions until she produced the bribe. It never bothered him to know the why of her trembling interest in the boy. He just was silly and would talk for a cone-shaped chocolate drop.

Sometimes at the Bixby house, instead of his emptying ashes or washing windows or polishing brass, they would detain him in the nursery on a rainy day to play those straddling floor games that the starchy nurse could not manage. Silly Willy could amble on all fours for hours. He would buckle on a leather harness that had bells, shake himself and roar, and the boy, straddling his back, would kick with his heels and shout.

Silly Willy was good at these games. He played them sincerely and with the mind of a child.

Sometimes the boy stole down to the furnace rooms, where Willy kept fires banked, and looked with solemn pools of eyes into the red maw of the boiler. He had rather a frail, choir-boy face with long cheeks and very straight yellow bangs which came down to his brows. He could stare into the fire until the black irises almost crowded out the blue in his eyes and his cheeks began to redden. He liked fire. It fascinated him. Infuriated him. He would contemplate it, then catch up a broom and ride hobby-horse astride it like one possessed. Usually Willy followed, more feebly, on a second broomstick.

His nurse or his mother usually precipitated this and Willy on his springy knees would wabble back to the fire, to feed it, to sit in its red stain, and to chuckle.

Sometimes in good outdoor weather or with the family away, there would be no sign of the boy for days, for weeks. That was dull for Willie. He liked to play. But Willie was sly.

For a bag of the chocolate drops or a screw or a ball of twine, he would invent the day's encounter with the boy. Nothing very ingenious. Willy's imagination was a feeble affair. Just a sort of refurbishings of oft told tales.

Bertha did not mind. No sooner had they sat down with their dish of dinner steaming up between them, than her hand made its insidious curve down toward her pocket.

And then without any particular preamble Willy would begin: "He's a devil for fire. He is. Gets his owl eyes full of it from staring and then goes crazy with it. He's a fire horse. So am I. We're a team of fire horses."

"Willy—that's a dangerous play!"

"Dangerous! You got to straddle your horse tight. That's all. Hold 'im in—is what I tells him—hold 'im in and you're all right."

"Is he strong enough to hold 'im in?"

"Naw. That's where I come in. Slk-k-k-k! I rein him up!"

"Willy—tell me again—what does he look like—the little boy?"

"Didn't I tell you—again and again and again——"

"Yoost once—more, Willy."

"Is it chocolates? Gimme."

"What does he look like?"

"He's a boy—he is, with eyes and hair——"

"Yellow, Willy? His hair bane yellow—like mine?"

"It's yellow all right."

"He's a big boy, Willy?"

"I showed you on the wall—he bane that high."

"That was last week—he bane bigger now?"

"Aw—not quick—like that—gimme what you've got. Chocolate?"

She handed him the sack of cones, for his dessert.

One evening over the strong smell of their kidney stew he screwed up his eyes at her!

"I give him one—to-day."

"What?"

His eyes looked sly and almost at once that frightened her.

"What—Willy——?"

They disappeared as if dough had crowded up around two raisins.

"Willy—one what?"

"One of my chocolates!"

She rose up sudden and threatening as an apparition, her two arms towering as if they would crash down upon him, and he cowed in his chair with his mouth fallen open.

"You gave him from those——"

"Yeh——"

"He ate——"

"Naw—we put it in the fire. It melted up. Get away. You!"

She came down from the great towering gesture of her wrath, which he interpreted not at all, and her fingers unclenched and the blood went back into her face. She shook him then, by the scroff of his coat until his head bobbed loosely.

"Don't you ever—don't you ever again—give him those ten cent cones."

"Stingy-gut, Slk-k-k-k-k—I only gave one——"

"Never. You hear, Willy. It bane bad for the boy. You—you'll get fired. Make him sick. I'll bring you chocolates for him. Not your kind. Chocolates for him——"

"Yeh, we're fire horses."

Chocolates for him! She could not sleep that night. Her feet kept plunging off the end of the seat and sometimes she sat up in the leather-smelling darkness because she breathed too fast and felt crowded.

She bought a dollar box the next day. A red paper affair with a dog and a boy on the cover. Stale bonbons that had lain in the incandescent glare of a Third Avenue window for weeks.

The boy never received them. Bertha did not know, but he had been in Asheville, North Carolina, for three weeks with his foster parents. Willy ate the chocolates beside the glow of his furnace, popping them whole into his mouth.

***

Willy had slacked. Shamefully. He no longer paid the rent for the room, eight dollars a month. Bertha did. The first time she did it because he wanted a tool chest for seven dollars and eighty-five cents in a First Avenue show window. After that he never paid anything. Bertha didn't demur. It was too precious, coming home in the evening to Willy who that very day might have been galloping like a fire horse for the boy.

Tools. They grew in a pile. His complete earnings, forty dollars a month, went into them. He liked to sit and polish them. Test the ductility of saws, run his plane around the floor for the curl of the shavings. There were boxes of nails in assorted sizes. Screws. Gimlets of every graduated variety. He could bore with them for an entire evening into a bit of plank or the flank of the old delivery wagon top. Bore and bore with a little mousy sound. He liked that best. Slk-k-k-k-k! He never made anything. Only bored and sawed and piddled.

Sometimes Bertha sewed. Made the muslin portières. Patched his denim house-jacket.

Usually she was so tired evenings that to the sound of the mousy borings she fell asleep behind her portières. Day-work was draining. It was like undergoing the dreadful preliminaries of a new job each morning.

"You can put your shoes there under the sink and there's a chair down in the basement where you can hang your hat and coat. You don't go stocking-footed, do you? Gracious, that agency is getting the limit for day-help. Here's a pail and a mop. You can scrub this whole courtyard in a morning, if you're spry. My former girl did it before she got consumption. If that drain there backs water on you, ram your arm down."

Day after day of it. Day-jobs where the residuum of dirty work was apt to lie waiting and accumulated. Wet, sloppy, puddled days. Cold, gaunt houses about to be occupied. Public buildings with rooms full of the stench of neglect. Once, at a fishmonger's, scales clung to her arms. Shining fish scales that hung to the flesh like burrs and would not wash off. She scrubbed at the faucet, and suddenly panic of them, the wet, slimy things, seized her and she screamed. The fishmonger, enormous and stained and with a mallet for pounding down codfish steaks in his hand, came and plucked off a few of them for her and laughed, and then, because her arm was white and firm, kissed her with wet, fish-smelling lips. She struck him with his own mallet by jerking back his arm until he hit himself in the head, and in his rage he struck back and she went home discharged and with a blue welt coming out above her cheek bone.

Cold dirty days. Then hot days, equally dirty.

That way the months swung around and, through the poor silly eyes of Willy, she beheld the boy grow older.

And as the eyes of Willy became sillier, and the face around them more and more horridly doughy, Bertha, who hated him, was glad. As he receded more and more into childishness, he played with the mind and the heart of an innocent. Sometimes, on spring evenings, after his supper, he joined the street boys at baseball or swapped some of his shiny screws for chinies. Bertha, sitting up behind the window curtain, would watch him. Carefully. He was kind to children.

He had come to hate her in a sly and secret kind of way. He was cunning enough to know she paid the rent and bought the meat for stews and that, by grace of her, the stack of his shining tools grew high, but there festered in him, day by day, the desire to torture her.

The same impulse, doubtless, that led him to delight in tearing off the wings of flies. Or perhaps dimly she was to him the badge of his impotence, and so he smouldered against her and hated. He had never been a man, and yet the pangs of impotence made him more horrible than he might have been with desire.

He liked to grimace at her with every torturous twist of feature he could connive. To awaken her by hanging over her couch with his face all drooly and loose of feature like an idiot's, and his hands drooping loosely from the wrists so that they swept her face.

The horror of this made her wild. She would tremble for an entire day from the start of waking up to this loose, drooling face of Willy's. He was devilish at these little abuses. One day he brought the window sharply on her hands as she leaned over the sill, so that it made her finger nails blue. He never failed to scratch down deeply into her palms if he had occasion to take anything from her, and one evening he wanted to hand her the red hot poker and when she saw the ruse and held the hand behind her, he brought it down on her shoulder so that it singed her waist and the flesh.

But he was kind to children.

There was only about one way to deal with him. To slap him. Usually, with his ears boxed, he could be trusted to trot over to his tools and begin to plane or bore. Sometimes the cartwright's child next door would come to play. Together they would set up the racket of carpentry. Particularly with the plane, improvising mustachios and fierce whiskers out of the shavings. Sometimes he carried a handful of the shavings to the boy.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Ah me—Chita——.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRAVELOGUE

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

Quiver of hills....

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

To ride in a slim sailboat....

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

***

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

"Shh-h-h-h——

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

"Willy—he'll be in the window?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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